AUTHOR'S NOTES: INSPIRATION AND ORIGINS OF SHARDS...
If you liked this story enough to finish it, you might be interested in how it began. The inspiration can be boiled down to a few haunting songs, a handful of unforgettable novels by gifted authors, two disturbing films, one statue and the life-changing wisdom of spiritual guru Eckhart Tolle (Grendel's resurrection, transformation and the very existence of the "Absolute" were all influenced by Tolle's uplifting, revolutionary text The New Earth).
At seventeen, I was lifting weights in the garage of my Dad’s house and listening to the song Ironmanby Black Sabbath. I was a junior in High School, and in my English class we were reading a novelization of the epic Beowulf poem that I found absolutely enthralling. The novelization’s author was particularly gifted at gripping images and recognizable but unique characterizations.
A young Ozzie Osbourne chanted from the speakers with that sorrowful sound of his: “Now the time is here, for a man to spread fear. Vengeance from the grave, kills the people he once saved. Nobody wants him. They just turn their heads. Nobody helps him. Now he has his revenge.” That’s what I heard. The actual published lyrics vary a wee bit.
It’s always been my favorite stanza of the song. If you’ve ever read the lyrics you know that like many great songs, it doesn’t tell a coherent story: some dude, some reanimated corpse from the future (maybe) who was turned to steel in a great magnetic field…this guy travels time… for the future of mankind. But somewhere along the line things go terribly wrong and people begin to rot ‘as fast as they can.’ He goes blind, can’t walk, people don’t give a damn about him. So on and so forth.
The image the song builds in your mind (or at least in my mind) was a hero betrayed - rejected by the people who once adored him as a savior. He slaughters them, feeling bitter and alone. That resonated with me deeply at the time, in my self-absorbed teenage-angst, and I began to apply it to my current fascination:Beowulf.
I wondered, on my weight bench: What if Beowulf, who was so universally adored for his courage, was betrayed like the man/robot/corpse in this song? What if everyone who once loved him suddenly rejected him, ignored him, even mocked and humiliated him? ‘Rubbed his face in filth,’ as Kalin says. How would he react? And more importantly, what if he didn’t do the noble, ‘turn the other cheek’ thing, but instead was petty, deeply wounded and impetuous?
At this point you may justifiably be thinking to yourself: Beowulf has absolutely nothing to do with the story I just read. That’s mostly correct. But that’s how SHARDS started. As I began to piece a story together in my mind, over the next year, I abandoned the concept of Beowulf completely (if you know the poem, you know the only speck of Beowulf in SHARDS is the birth name of a single character), but the Ironman lyrics continued to resonate, and the character of Conrad Draco eventually emerged.
As you just read in Shards, Conrad’s story ultimately became interwoven into a much larger conflict, but the lyrics do reflect his character arc to a minor degree, and his moment of humiliation on the Presentational Platform in Part II.
At that time the title for my idea, which I hadn’t written down except for scraps on my Dad’s realtor notepads and napkins, was called ‘Chaos Dawn,’ a reference to my original name for Conrad’s curse, “the Chaos Dream.” As the story developed internally over the years, Conrad’s story became far less ostentatious, and (I hope) far more logical and reasonable (for the medieval fantasy genre, at least). I grew to love him early on, as all writers love to write from the point of view of the insane; someone completely unpredictable, condemned to hallucinations and haunted by visions from the deepest pits of Hell.
I heaped on him my most horrific nightmares - the most disturbing images from my childhood memory banks: a St. Bernard mauling a cat until he eviscerated it; a character on Sesame Street I saw pelted by tomatoes as a child and thought the puppet was bleeding to death; the severed head of John the Baptist I saw in a black and white film as a toddler; a nightmare I had about a little kid with the likeness of Bob’s Big Boyexploding into a shower of blood and charbroiled hamburgers while we rode bikes, side by side; an old western movie about a man who wakes up gasping with this point-of-view shot and as his eyes open, his killer whispers to him: “Do ya know why ya can’t breathe? Cuz somebody just cut your throat.”
We all grow numb to violence, to some degree, as we get older, but as children, certain traumatizing images, real or fictional, stay with us… both the silly ones and the truly grotesque. And they can be helpful, for all the world's greatest stories juxtapose the sublime with the grotesque. I reveled in torturing Conrad’s waking life with the worst of my imagined fears and disturbing images and barely a fraction of it went into the narrative. Some of it didn’t work just because it would’ve rendered his experience anachronistic.
The supernatural element of the story arose some years later. I started listening to Marilyn Manson’sAntichrist Superstar album a lot and his dark poetry began to speak volumes, in my singular interpretation, about the elusive nature of Anthrough-Genus and The Absolute. He wasn’t singing a single word about Genus, of course, but only serenading us with his cryptic musical show-tunes about the mythical Beelzebub. But the lyrics, especially to Man That You Fear and Dried Up, Tied and Dead to the World, began to form a newfictional deity in my mind, and Muirland Genus was born.
Several hundred Swisher Sweet cigarette-style cigars and several thousand gallons of Coke, beer and cheap scotch later, Chaos Dawn evolved into SHARDS, a much broader story than the original concept. I have Muirland, embittered, lonely and spiteful, to thank, for carrying the story from its beginnings to its conclusion. Which brings me to…
Influences: Phenomenal dialogue writers Stephen King, Scott Turow and James Ellroy helped maintain my focus on keeping conversations realistic: less instances of ‘let’s convey something about our past to the reader, thinly disguised as conversation,’ and more of that back-story being expressed through believable banter. In my experience, there’s nothing that takes you out of the moment more than two characters conversing about something they already know to be true, purely for the sake…of telling you. You can hear the keyboard clicking away in the background…
The character of Calypso/Kendra Chulainne was influenced, especially in the past few years, by the evocative music of Florence and the Machine. In particular, I envisioned Calypso’s jealousy over Meridian vicariously in the song Hurricane Drunk, and the misery of her exile in Blinding. Both are featured in Florence’s album Lungs. Through her music, a riveting portal into the frenzy of the female psyche, I fell deeply in love with both Sharilyn Flagg and Calypso. The more I loved them, the more they directed the course of the story instead of the other way around. They soon became the two strongest and most influential characters in the book. And strangely enough, the more capable and complex they became, the more I wanted to torment them for it.
The futility of retribution is a strong theme throughout the story and two 21st Century Hollywood films in particular were inspiring in that regard: Christopher Nolan’s Memento and Saw III. Specifically, the third installment of the Saw horror movie franchise expressed as poignantly as Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex how seeking vengeance can destroy your entire life; how the inability to forgive and walk away will leave you with less, not more, once your revenge has come to fruition. Leigh Wanall and James Wan are exceptional screenwriters.
It has always been my intention that this novel would be the first of four, 610 page stories (and eventually four films/seasons on TV) based in the same sublime and grotesque Medieval Fantasy universe - one novel for each of the Four Kingdoms - Shards, Menzeneas, Anthenoch and Danyubin. I wrote SHARDS for the most impatient reader (because that's what I am myself); a book where you should be able to open to any paragraph and become immediately enthralled. There is no down time in SHARDS- it hits the ground running, and every word (in homage to the same school of composition that guided James Joyce) was specifically chosen for its dramatic impact. Read on to see what I mean, in what I call the....
"SHARDS 8 PARAGRAPH T.V./MOVIE PITCH":
“Soldiering requires the discipline to do the unthinkable. Politics requires the skill to get someone else to do the unthinkable for you.” - General Heydrich, SS Gestapo Chief of Reich Security (Conspiracy, HBO Films). Through its themes of loyalty and sacrifice, SHARDS reminds us throughout of the futility of revenge, of Ouroboros, our frantic cycle of perpetration and retribution. The snake eats his own tail.
Someone takes the lives of all those most precious to us at once. Most of us would like to believe we’d kill this person in return. But in my research, of the very few people who actually follow through with “eye for an eye” murder, almost all of them had the same two regrets before their own death: 1. It didn’t bring anyone back. 2. The dead never know they’ve been avenged.
But for Conrad and Eric Draco, being Royal Guardians, the cycle of Ouroboros is far more complicated. In the moment they lose those most precious to them, they also fail at the sole purpose of their existence: to protect the Royal Family. With their identity shattered, they seek their vengeance, each of them willing to sacrifice everything of himself to attain it. That all sounds quite noble, until we realize they are also willing to sacrifice anyone and everyone necessary to achieve their goal. As Calypso (The Shapeshifter) tells Eric in Part III: The Relative and The Absolute, “Your Guardians’ Creed has left you blind to all else. Any atrocity committed in the pursuit of your objective is justified, to your mind. Unlike you, Eric, I’m not trying to prove myself to those who are dead.” Conrad and Eric may be our protagonists, but they are certainly not honorable, outside of their own minds. And in their relentless quest, they leave a wake of chaos and destruction far greater than the initial body count.
Twenty-five years of studying history and a decade of teaching it have taught me a simple truth about humanity – one with very few exceptions: No one does what they believe is wrong unless their hand is forced. They always do what they believe is right. Whether it’s real-world fascists of the mid-20th century tossing babies in the air for target practice (Night, Elie Wiesel) or the Army of Transcendence in SHARDS engaging in a War of Annihilation with a plague that obliterates entire families indiscriminately, both armies feel they are doing the gods’ good work – cleansing the world of undesirables.
Like Martin’s now legendary Song of Ice and Fire series (more commonly known asGame of Thrones) SHARDS has no “good guys” and “bad guys.” As Stephen King once wrote (On Writing), “In real life, no one is the sidekick, the villain, the hooker with the heart of gold. They all believe the story is about them.” Moreover, just as Martin’s 4,777 pages of Song of Ice and Fire cannot be fairly summed up as “a war between kings for the throne,” in these past five paragraphs I’ve offered you less than 1% of the depth and power you’ll find in SHARDS.
Game of Thrones now ranks very highly among the most profitable, most popular and most anticipated television shows on the planet. Martin's HBO series has set the bar so high for true suspense and originality, I often find it difficult to sit through anything else that's new - movies or TV series - for more than ten minutes. Thrones has rendered me so sensitive and dismissive to the Four C's - Cliche, Convenience, Contrivance and Coincidence - which we find in so much "entertainment," that I impatiently roll my eyes and return to Westeros.
SHARDS was inspired throughout by Stephen King, H.P. Lovecraft, Scott Turow, Victor Hugo, Eckhart Tolle and screenwriters like Leigh Wanall, James Wan and Andrew Kevin Walker. In the prologue: The Fusion of Anthrough-Genus, I composed the most agonizing fate for a human being I could fathom. A conception of eternal "life" after death reflecting the penultimate in psychological horror. And I promise you I wrote my novel long before I'd ever heard of the author I now consider a genius - George R. R. Martin. Coincidentally, one quality Martin and I share in our writing is an obsession with European history. If you've seen the man in interviews, you know nearly every character in Thrones is either an allegory or amalgamation of real historical figures.
The adult human race, worldwide, is sending us a clear message: knights, dragons, Minotaurs and Shapeshifters are not just for kids. All the world wants to escape into just the kind of dark, grisly and unpredictable medieval fantasy that Benioff, Martin and Weiss have brought us. A world with no moral compass where we can see a bit of ourselves in every noble and despicable act of every character. But HBO’s flagship masterpiece will be closing its doors soon. Two years, maybe three tops. The SHARDS universe will be next. My brother and I won’t rest until it falls into the rights hands that will make this possible. But why wait? Why not give The Song of Ice and Fire competition now? Something for our rabid, blood-thirsty fans to watch in between seasons.
- Rod R. Surratt 4/7/17 www.authorsurratt.com
"There is no place in the 21st Century for the timid novelist."
- Stephen King (On Writing)
"When you are completely trapped in the movement of thought and its corresponding emotion, stepping out is not possible because you don't even know there IS an outside. You are trapped in your own movie or dream - your own Hell. To "you" it is reality and no other reality is possible. And as far as "you" are concerned, your reaction is the only possible reaction. When you are in the grip of such a mindset, you will see only what you want to see, hear only what you want to hear...and then misinterpret it."
- Tolle, The New Earth.
If you liked this story enough to finish it, you might be interested in how it began. The inspiration can be boiled down to a few haunting songs, a handful of unforgettable novels by gifted authors, two disturbing films, one statue and the life-changing wisdom of spiritual guru Eckhart Tolle (Grendel's resurrection, transformation and the very existence of the "Absolute" were all influenced by Tolle's uplifting, revolutionary text The New Earth).
At seventeen, I was lifting weights in the garage of my Dad’s house and listening to the song Ironmanby Black Sabbath. I was a junior in High School, and in my English class we were reading a novelization of the epic Beowulf poem that I found absolutely enthralling. The novelization’s author was particularly gifted at gripping images and recognizable but unique characterizations.
A young Ozzie Osbourne chanted from the speakers with that sorrowful sound of his: “Now the time is here, for a man to spread fear. Vengeance from the grave, kills the people he once saved. Nobody wants him. They just turn their heads. Nobody helps him. Now he has his revenge.” That’s what I heard. The actual published lyrics vary a wee bit.
It’s always been my favorite stanza of the song. If you’ve ever read the lyrics you know that like many great songs, it doesn’t tell a coherent story: some dude, some reanimated corpse from the future (maybe) who was turned to steel in a great magnetic field…this guy travels time… for the future of mankind. But somewhere along the line things go terribly wrong and people begin to rot ‘as fast as they can.’ He goes blind, can’t walk, people don’t give a damn about him. So on and so forth.
The image the song builds in your mind (or at least in my mind) was a hero betrayed - rejected by the people who once adored him as a savior. He slaughters them, feeling bitter and alone. That resonated with me deeply at the time, in my self-absorbed teenage-angst, and I began to apply it to my current fascination:Beowulf.
I wondered, on my weight bench: What if Beowulf, who was so universally adored for his courage, was betrayed like the man/robot/corpse in this song? What if everyone who once loved him suddenly rejected him, ignored him, even mocked and humiliated him? ‘Rubbed his face in filth,’ as Kalin says. How would he react? And more importantly, what if he didn’t do the noble, ‘turn the other cheek’ thing, but instead was petty, deeply wounded and impetuous?
At this point you may justifiably be thinking to yourself: Beowulf has absolutely nothing to do with the story I just read. That’s mostly correct. But that’s how SHARDS started. As I began to piece a story together in my mind, over the next year, I abandoned the concept of Beowulf completely (if you know the poem, you know the only speck of Beowulf in SHARDS is the birth name of a single character), but the Ironman lyrics continued to resonate, and the character of Conrad Draco eventually emerged.
As you just read in Shards, Conrad’s story ultimately became interwoven into a much larger conflict, but the lyrics do reflect his character arc to a minor degree, and his moment of humiliation on the Presentational Platform in Part II.
At that time the title for my idea, which I hadn’t written down except for scraps on my Dad’s realtor notepads and napkins, was called ‘Chaos Dawn,’ a reference to my original name for Conrad’s curse, “the Chaos Dream.” As the story developed internally over the years, Conrad’s story became far less ostentatious, and (I hope) far more logical and reasonable (for the medieval fantasy genre, at least). I grew to love him early on, as all writers love to write from the point of view of the insane; someone completely unpredictable, condemned to hallucinations and haunted by visions from the deepest pits of Hell.
I heaped on him my most horrific nightmares - the most disturbing images from my childhood memory banks: a St. Bernard mauling a cat until he eviscerated it; a character on Sesame Street I saw pelted by tomatoes as a child and thought the puppet was bleeding to death; the severed head of John the Baptist I saw in a black and white film as a toddler; a nightmare I had about a little kid with the likeness of Bob’s Big Boyexploding into a shower of blood and charbroiled hamburgers while we rode bikes, side by side; an old western movie about a man who wakes up gasping with this point-of-view shot and as his eyes open, his killer whispers to him: “Do ya know why ya can’t breathe? Cuz somebody just cut your throat.”
We all grow numb to violence, to some degree, as we get older, but as children, certain traumatizing images, real or fictional, stay with us… both the silly ones and the truly grotesque. And they can be helpful, for all the world's greatest stories juxtapose the sublime with the grotesque. I reveled in torturing Conrad’s waking life with the worst of my imagined fears and disturbing images and barely a fraction of it went into the narrative. Some of it didn’t work just because it would’ve rendered his experience anachronistic.
The supernatural element of the story arose some years later. I started listening to Marilyn Manson’sAntichrist Superstar album a lot and his dark poetry began to speak volumes, in my singular interpretation, about the elusive nature of Anthrough-Genus and The Absolute. He wasn’t singing a single word about Genus, of course, but only serenading us with his cryptic musical show-tunes about the mythical Beelzebub. But the lyrics, especially to Man That You Fear and Dried Up, Tied and Dead to the World, began to form a newfictional deity in my mind, and Muirland Genus was born.
Several hundred Swisher Sweet cigarette-style cigars and several thousand gallons of Coke, beer and cheap scotch later, Chaos Dawn evolved into SHARDS, a much broader story than the original concept. I have Muirland, embittered, lonely and spiteful, to thank, for carrying the story from its beginnings to its conclusion. Which brings me to…
Influences: Phenomenal dialogue writers Stephen King, Scott Turow and James Ellroy helped maintain my focus on keeping conversations realistic: less instances of ‘let’s convey something about our past to the reader, thinly disguised as conversation,’ and more of that back-story being expressed through believable banter. In my experience, there’s nothing that takes you out of the moment more than two characters conversing about something they already know to be true, purely for the sake…of telling you. You can hear the keyboard clicking away in the background…
The character of Calypso/Kendra Chulainne was influenced, especially in the past few years, by the evocative music of Florence and the Machine. In particular, I envisioned Calypso’s jealousy over Meridian vicariously in the song Hurricane Drunk, and the misery of her exile in Blinding. Both are featured in Florence’s album Lungs. Through her music, a riveting portal into the frenzy of the female psyche, I fell deeply in love with both Sharilyn Flagg and Calypso. The more I loved them, the more they directed the course of the story instead of the other way around. They soon became the two strongest and most influential characters in the book. And strangely enough, the more capable and complex they became, the more I wanted to torment them for it.
The futility of retribution is a strong theme throughout the story and two 21st Century Hollywood films in particular were inspiring in that regard: Christopher Nolan’s Memento and Saw III. Specifically, the third installment of the Saw horror movie franchise expressed as poignantly as Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex how seeking vengeance can destroy your entire life; how the inability to forgive and walk away will leave you with less, not more, once your revenge has come to fruition. Leigh Wanall and James Wan are exceptional screenwriters.
It has always been my intention that this novel would be the first of four, 610 page stories (and eventually four films/seasons on TV) based in the same sublime and grotesque Medieval Fantasy universe - one novel for each of the Four Kingdoms - Shards, Menzeneas, Anthenoch and Danyubin. I wrote SHARDS for the most impatient reader (because that's what I am myself); a book where you should be able to open to any paragraph and become immediately enthralled. There is no down time in SHARDS- it hits the ground running, and every word (in homage to the same school of composition that guided James Joyce) was specifically chosen for its dramatic impact. Read on to see what I mean, in what I call the....
"SHARDS 8 PARAGRAPH T.V./MOVIE PITCH":
“Soldiering requires the discipline to do the unthinkable. Politics requires the skill to get someone else to do the unthinkable for you.” - General Heydrich, SS Gestapo Chief of Reich Security (Conspiracy, HBO Films). Through its themes of loyalty and sacrifice, SHARDS reminds us throughout of the futility of revenge, of Ouroboros, our frantic cycle of perpetration and retribution. The snake eats his own tail.
Someone takes the lives of all those most precious to us at once. Most of us would like to believe we’d kill this person in return. But in my research, of the very few people who actually follow through with “eye for an eye” murder, almost all of them had the same two regrets before their own death: 1. It didn’t bring anyone back. 2. The dead never know they’ve been avenged.
But for Conrad and Eric Draco, being Royal Guardians, the cycle of Ouroboros is far more complicated. In the moment they lose those most precious to them, they also fail at the sole purpose of their existence: to protect the Royal Family. With their identity shattered, they seek their vengeance, each of them willing to sacrifice everything of himself to attain it. That all sounds quite noble, until we realize they are also willing to sacrifice anyone and everyone necessary to achieve their goal. As Calypso (The Shapeshifter) tells Eric in Part III: The Relative and The Absolute, “Your Guardians’ Creed has left you blind to all else. Any atrocity committed in the pursuit of your objective is justified, to your mind. Unlike you, Eric, I’m not trying to prove myself to those who are dead.” Conrad and Eric may be our protagonists, but they are certainly not honorable, outside of their own minds. And in their relentless quest, they leave a wake of chaos and destruction far greater than the initial body count.
Twenty-five years of studying history and a decade of teaching it have taught me a simple truth about humanity – one with very few exceptions: No one does what they believe is wrong unless their hand is forced. They always do what they believe is right. Whether it’s real-world fascists of the mid-20th century tossing babies in the air for target practice (Night, Elie Wiesel) or the Army of Transcendence in SHARDS engaging in a War of Annihilation with a plague that obliterates entire families indiscriminately, both armies feel they are doing the gods’ good work – cleansing the world of undesirables.
Like Martin’s now legendary Song of Ice and Fire series (more commonly known asGame of Thrones) SHARDS has no “good guys” and “bad guys.” As Stephen King once wrote (On Writing), “In real life, no one is the sidekick, the villain, the hooker with the heart of gold. They all believe the story is about them.” Moreover, just as Martin’s 4,777 pages of Song of Ice and Fire cannot be fairly summed up as “a war between kings for the throne,” in these past five paragraphs I’ve offered you less than 1% of the depth and power you’ll find in SHARDS.
Game of Thrones now ranks very highly among the most profitable, most popular and most anticipated television shows on the planet. Martin's HBO series has set the bar so high for true suspense and originality, I often find it difficult to sit through anything else that's new - movies or TV series - for more than ten minutes. Thrones has rendered me so sensitive and dismissive to the Four C's - Cliche, Convenience, Contrivance and Coincidence - which we find in so much "entertainment," that I impatiently roll my eyes and return to Westeros.
SHARDS was inspired throughout by Stephen King, H.P. Lovecraft, Scott Turow, Victor Hugo, Eckhart Tolle and screenwriters like Leigh Wanall, James Wan and Andrew Kevin Walker. In the prologue: The Fusion of Anthrough-Genus, I composed the most agonizing fate for a human being I could fathom. A conception of eternal "life" after death reflecting the penultimate in psychological horror. And I promise you I wrote my novel long before I'd ever heard of the author I now consider a genius - George R. R. Martin. Coincidentally, one quality Martin and I share in our writing is an obsession with European history. If you've seen the man in interviews, you know nearly every character in Thrones is either an allegory or amalgamation of real historical figures.
The adult human race, worldwide, is sending us a clear message: knights, dragons, Minotaurs and Shapeshifters are not just for kids. All the world wants to escape into just the kind of dark, grisly and unpredictable medieval fantasy that Benioff, Martin and Weiss have brought us. A world with no moral compass where we can see a bit of ourselves in every noble and despicable act of every character. But HBO’s flagship masterpiece will be closing its doors soon. Two years, maybe three tops. The SHARDS universe will be next. My brother and I won’t rest until it falls into the rights hands that will make this possible. But why wait? Why not give The Song of Ice and Fire competition now? Something for our rabid, blood-thirsty fans to watch in between seasons.
- Rod R. Surratt 4/7/17 www.authorsurratt.com
"There is no place in the 21st Century for the timid novelist."
- Stephen King (On Writing)
"When you are completely trapped in the movement of thought and its corresponding emotion, stepping out is not possible because you don't even know there IS an outside. You are trapped in your own movie or dream - your own Hell. To "you" it is reality and no other reality is possible. And as far as "you" are concerned, your reaction is the only possible reaction. When you are in the grip of such a mindset, you will see only what you want to see, hear only what you want to hear...and then misinterpret it."
- Tolle, The New Earth.