John B. Cheek

THE FIRE WITHIN largely owes its existence to Michael Shaara’s THE KILLER ANGELS, a stupendously well–written novel of the Battle of Gettysburg. In fact, it is stupendous enough to have won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1975. Its external action is limited to the three days of Gettysburg, with multiple viewpoint characters who live their own individual experiences of the battle in a way that together paints a picture of the whole. It’s remarkably well done. And on a sentence and paragraph level, the prose is impeccable. I reread it periodically just to remind myself prose of that quality exists and that, just possibly, it might not be out of my reach with enough practice. I would say the same of A.B. Guthrie’s THE BIG SKY and Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin series.

So THE FIRE WITHIN is THE KILLER ANGELS writ in fantasy: the story of a single battle, with the action playing out across several viewpoints in a short time to make a unified whole.

It did not begin that way. The story had its germ in a meditation on how a half-orc might get along in a world of humans, if at all. Surely it would be a difficult thing. As a species, we tend to be adverse to differences and xenophobic even to other humans. Imagine how a half-orc would navigate that! The other germ was the idea I might write a series of books just centered around battles, again in the spirit of THE KILLER ANGELS. A fantasy battle, a space battle, a sword and sandals battle, etc.

When those two germs came together, the cooking started. (That’s a weird sentence.) Then I realized I couldn’t tell the story of a large battle coherently without other viewpoints, so along came Earic and Zara.

As Tolkien said of his own work, the tale grew in the telling. I’d originally envisioned THE FIRE WITHIN as half its eventual length, and a far simpler sword and shield tale: i.e., a fun fluffy beach read in the vein of BRAGG FOR HIRE. But it seems no outline survives first contact with the pen. The characters grew, the action grew, the battle grew, everything grew. And the work itself grew in seriousness as I made the happy discovery my prose ability had grown since I wrote BRAGG FOR HIRE. I felt able to execute more complicated things, and to carry the reader to places I couldn’t before with any conviction. And with each draft I got better still, necessitating a new draft because the second half always ended up better than the first. (In the end there were eight formal drafts and truly infinite nigglings in between. Eventually I had to say enough was enough and publish it, giving truth to the adage that art is never truly finished just abandoned.)

What I ended up with was a book I would have wanted to read. So it’s to my taste, and hopefully yours as well. It certainly has its flaws, but I believe it has some really nice, even poignant, scenes, most of which I didn’t originally envision and had no idea were coming. That’s part of the charm of doing this: the characters sometimes do their own thing and create their own moments of joy, wonder, and despair. My work is to make you feel those things along with them. I hope I have.

For those of you wondering what happened to the sequel to BRAGG FOR HIRE, I will tell it currently exists in three written chapters and an outline. It has existed in that form for four years now. Why have I not finished it in that time? Well, several reasons.

The biggest reason, I suppose, is crassly economic. While BRAGG FOR HIRE was fun to write (and gratifyingly well-reviewed by readers), it didn’t exactly pay the light bill. I had hoped it might. In fact, I had thought at the time it was written a cut or two above the average MilSciFi books you see on the Amazon bestseller lists, and I thought it stood a good chance of picking up a following and making some money. I was wrong. Apparently, I did sell many more copies than your average self-published book, but it required advertising to do that, and this expense ate up everything I made and more. Without active advertising, any book will sink rapidly beneath the waves in the vast sea of books published on Amazon every year. So as long I pushed the book with money, it sold okay; but when I left it to sink or swim, it sank. My motivation to write a sequel sank with it.

The second reason is I got stuck on what to do with Atticus as a character. I came to believe that part of why BRAGG FOR HIRE didn’t catch on is there is little to no character development in it. It’s just a straight-up action banger with characters who are who they are, as fun as they might be. That made for a fun story, but there’s not much emotional punch to it; and the Prime Directive of we authors is to make the reader feel something. I didn’t do that. So for the second book I wanted to do something internally with Atticus that brought him closer to the reader. What might that be? Well, that’s the question, isn’t it? Not easy to answer. He’s a self-sufficient guy, somewhat later in life, who’s pretty much made his peace with who he is and what happened to him. So I first came to him after the drama. My bad.

Finally, I think I’m a better writer now. BRAGG FOR HIRE wasn’t my first book, but it was my first (self-)published book. I have a much longer Weird West manuscript that I wrote when I had no idea how to write fiction, and I learned write as I wrote that manuscript. So yeah, it sucks, but it also has the supreme virtue of existing, so I will probably end up doing something with it. But back to my point, I think I’m now a much better writer than I was when I wrote BRAGG FOR HIRE (which I’ve called a proof of the concept I can indeed write a whole novel people will read and like), so the idea of revisiting Atticus and that world holds far less appeal now. I want to do other things. I have other, bigger ideas. One of them was THE FIRE WITHIN. Another is a Civil War historical fiction novel.

So that’s why BRAGG 2 is shelved for the foreseeable future. Now, your next question is why did I write an epic fantasy novel instead of more sci-fi? The short answer is because I wanted to. I have no singular love of sci-fi: I enjoy reading good sci-fi, but I also enjoy reading good other things, too, including fantasy. Tolkien most notably (and Stephen R. Donaldson’s Thomas Covenant series-es, except the last one and don’t get me started on that). I like fantasy, so I wrote a fantasy book; and in what I like to think of as a style that Tolkien would have used had he been more interested in character. Will I ever write another sci-fi book? I don’t know. If I get a good idea that excites me, sure. In the meantime, I’ll write what does excite me. I hope you like it too.

BRAGG FOR HIRE is now available from Amazon in paperback, here. The cover designer did an amazing job:

I’m fond of the first cover of BRAGG FOR HIRE (below). It was a pre-made cover image I found on a designer’s website, and it immediately grabbed me. I like the color palette, and the open-frame buggy that both mirrors the first scene in the scout car and gives the appropriate sense of a journey across a barren wilderness. The guy’s suit also evoked Atticus’s fabric exo-suit. Perfect, right? But, alas, it was ultimately not up to snuff, and people do judge books by their covers, especially while browsing thumbnails on Amazon. Hey, I do it too!

So out with the old, and in with the new! I think the new cover is fabulous. I couldn’t be happier with it.

JBC