How Stories About Mary Influenced The Awakening Series

Collyridians supposedly offered fresh-baked bread to Mary.

Last week I wrote about the inspiration for the fringe religious order that plagues my main character, Tara, throughout The Awakening Series.

Research and reading into traditional and controversial beliefs about the Virgin Mary also influenced The Awakening, though Tara's journey diverges widely from Mary's.

(For one thing, Tara's not religious, and the series is not a religious series. Also, so far as I know, there are no stories about an apocalyptic cult threatening Mary, which would have turned that part of the New Testament into a thriller, probably not the goal of its authors.)

Pure And Perfect?

In the Catholic Church in particular, Mary is viewed as "pure," "perfect," and "immaculate" because she's seen, paradoxically, as both a mother and a virgin. As a child, I assumed those beliefs stemmed from the New Testament, but there's relatively little there about Mary.

There was a lot to explore on those themes.

What if a young woman didn't see sex that way and had abstained for other reasons and found herself pregnant? What if she rejected people who tried to see her as "pure" and believed she'd give birth to a messiah?

Mother of God?

The Catholic Church granted Mary the title “Mother of God” about 430 years after Jesus was born.

The Church believed she deserved the title because she'd given birth to the human Jesus, whom the Church came to believe also was God.

This belief played into the next doctrine, that of Perpetual Virginity.

Perpetual Virgin?

Later, under a doctrine known as Perpetual Virginity, the Catholic Church decided that Mary not only was a virgin when she gave birth to Jesus, but she remained a virgin throughout her entire life.

This doctrine surprised me when I learned about it. The logical reason for those who see Jesus as God to believe Mary was a virgin before Jesus' birth was to show that his "father" was not human but divine. (A point Tara's mentor, a former nun and professor makes.)

But this doctrine makes a clear equation between sex and being impure--and equates perfection for a woman with abstaining from sex.

Contrary Views

Not all early Christians believed Mary was a virgin when Jesus was born, however, let alone that she remained one forever.

The Ebionites, a Jewish-Christian sect that believed in a non-divine messiah, believed that Jesus was conceived the usual way, through sexual intercourse. Later, they changed position to say that Jesus was conceived through the Holy Spirit, but still believed that after the birth of Jesus, Joseph and Mary engaged in sexual relations and had many children.

Excommunication

The Catholic Church rejected both views.

The Church declared heretical any belief that Mary had sexual intercourse ever, including after Jesus was born. (A heresy is a belief at odds with what Catholics must believe to be considered Catholics. Heretics are barred from the Church.)

The early Church felt so strongly about Mary remaining a virgin forever that it labeled those who held the belief that she had sexual intercourse after the birth of Jesus “Antidicomarianites”—opponents of Mary.

Collyridians, another group the Church declared heretics, went too far the other direction from the Church's standpoint. They worshipped her as divine. Most of what's known about them comes from a Bishop who denounced them. The group, mostly women, offered bread to Mary. 

(I borrowed from this lore when I envisioned a former chapel where Tara seeks sanctuary in Books 2 and 3, The Unbelievers and The Conflagration. The table in the main room features baskets of homemade bread.) 

Tara's Allies

From what I could tell, the early Church viewed these two groups as opposites--one group that saw Mary as, perhaps, too human in that she had sexual intercourse, and the other that saw her as divine. I found that intriguing, as it suggested a lot about how that religion saw women.

I also found these groups intriguing because, as with the two Andrews of Crete I wrote about last week, there was little information out there. That gave me a lot of room to take poetic license with how and whether to fit them into my story.

In case you haven't yet read the series, I won't go into detail on what role the Antidicomarianites and Collyridians play, other than to say that references to them did make life more challenging for Shiromi Arserio, the producer/narrator of the audiobook editions.

I hope you'll stop back next Wednesday for more on The Awakening Series. You can get bonus materials for The Awakening Series, including deleted scenes, here.

What's Real And What's Not: Creating The Brotherhood of Andrew (Antagonist For The Awakening Series)

When I started The Awakening Series I had two “What Ifs” in mind:

• What if a (non-religious) young woman today claimed she was pregnant but had never had sex? 
• What if a traditional religious group became convinced she would give birth to a messiah, but then learned the young woman's child would be a girl?

While each of the four books in The Awakening Series features a specific individual character as the antagonist, the real antagonist for the entire series is that religious group, the Brotherhood of Andrew of Crete.

The fourth and final book, The Illumination.

The Brotherhood needed to be traditional and Christian Order so its members would believe in the story of the Virgin Mary and would be shocked at the idea of a potential female messiah.

But I didn't want the Order to be part of an actual, specific branch of Christianity. 

As the antagonist, the Order would do things that from my main character’s perspective (and probably the reader's perspective) were evil. I didn’t want to associate that with a real religion or suggest any actual religious group was wrong or evil.

That’s why throughout the books, Brotherhood members refer to concepts that come from many different religious traditions. 

I also wanted The Brotherhood to have a saint around which to coalesce because that would make their beliefs more concrete.

My criteria for the saint included:

(1) being devoted to the Virgin Mary so that the saint was logically connected to The Brotherhood’s apparent mission of looking for signs of a new messiah

(2) dying as a martyr, as that foreshadowed danger and raised the stakes of the story

(3) having lived 600-800 years after Jesus Christ was reportedly born so that beliefs about Jesus were in flux and so the saint could not possibly have personally known Jesus or Mary

(4) not being well known so that I could take a lot of dramatic license in creating whatever back story I needed 

I found two saints who met these criteria and who conveniently shared a name – St. Andrew.

Interestingly, both were associated with Crete.

I liked having a saint from that part of the world because I planned to set some of the story in nearby Armenia, a place I’d traveled to and found fascinating because of its history as having become the first country to name Christianity as its official religion.

The martyr Andrew of Crete was executed around 767 A.D. (or C.E. for Common Era, as is more commonly used now in academia) because he defended the honoring of icons – religious images – of Jesus.

He also had a monastery dedicated to him, the Koca Mustafa Pasha Mosque in Istanbul. (That has an interesting history in itself which I’ll write about in a future post.)

While I didn’t find any particular connection between the martyr Andrew of Crete and the Virgin Mary, the other St. Andrew of Crete was known for composing and singing hymns to her. That St. Andrew was ordained a deacon at the Hagia Sophia (a location I also used in the series). In 692 he was made an archbishop on the island of Crete.

I combined these two St. Andrews into Brother Andrew, a saint to whom my fictional Brotherhood of Andrew of Crete is devoted. I added that Brother Andrew had visions about future women like the Virgin Mary and handed down a prophecy about such women and the danger to the world if events surrounding the prophecy went wrong.

Not all of this back story about Brother Andrew ended up in any of the books in the series, but I feel knowing it made my storytelling more layered.

If you’d like to know more about the two St. Andrews, you can check out the websites below.

(Fair warning if you're writing a paper on one of the Andrews and came across this article: Because I was writing fiction, I didn't make sure all my sources were well-researched and documented. I only needed enough to provide a jumping off point for my story.)

PopFlock

Catholic Online 

OCA (Orthodox Church in America)

Catholic News Agency

Bartleby.com

Academic Dictionaries and Encyclopedias

Orthodox Christian

As the story grew and changed with each book, I made tweaks to the structure of The Brotherhood, to who was in charge, and to how much each member knew about its goals. I did that both to keep it a formidable adversary and to leave room for the people within it to grow and change.

If you haven't yet finished (or started) The Awakening Series now's a great time to check it out, as the series is now complete and is available in ebook, audiobook, and paperback editions. Also, as I write this, the ebook editions of Book 1, The Awakening, are all free. 

Or read the entire series in the box set/omnibus edition.

An Illuminating Day -- The First Draft Of The Last Book

My plan for this blog entry was to share with you my thoughts on the 2016 Ghostbusters movie, which I loved. I had notes sketched out on a yellow legal pad (because I really like writing on those). But then this morning I realized I was so close to finishing the first draft of The Illumination, the fourth and final book in my Awakening series. So here I am, typing this at 5:35 p.m. central time. I don't have a cool post, but I do have a first draft. A day ahead of schedule.

 I admit I had a little time left to write a blog post, but instead I went onto ShutterStock and starting saving images of lightning strikes and illuminated cities and silhouettes of young woman I might want to use in a cover. I can't post them because I haven't bought any of them yet, but you can view them here. The photo on the left, which I took, gives the barest hint of what I'm looking for. Not the Sears (now Willis) Tower, as that won't be featured. But a cityscape with sky behind it that looks a bit ominous. Probably including lightning strikes. 

One thing I'm sure I'll struggle with during rewrites is the last line of The Illumination. It's a lot of pressure, writing a closing for a four-book series. The line as it reads now is bad. (No, I won't tell you what it is.) But I'll deal with that, and a host of other challenges, including how to manage so many characters, in the rewrite. While I can't promise a final line that will be amazing--though that's my goal--I can promise it'll be better than what's there now. (No, really won't tell you.)

In the meantime, I'm heading out to see Ghostbusters again to celebrate.

A Four Book Series And The Forced Pregnancy Narrative

The Final Print Proof of The Conflagration

Many people have asked why I made The Awakening a four-book series. I asked myself the same question yesterday after I approved the final print proof for The Conflagration, Book 3 in the series, and revised my handwritten outline for Book 4, The Illumination. (You can get The Conflagration now in ebook form if you don't want to wait for the paperback.) It's not that I don't love my main character, Tara Spencer. Despite all the awful events I've put her through, I do. She and her allies and foes are my favorite characters of all those I've written about. But if I had made the series a trilogy, I'd be finished now. I'd miss them all. But I'd be finished. As someone who likes to check off boxes for completed tasks on lists, that appeals to me.

So why write four books? As I talked about in the Author's Note at the end of The Conflagration, originally I envisioned The Awakening as a standalone novel. But as I revised it before publishing, I realized there was much more to Tara's story. I've always been intrigued by world-changing pregnancy narratives, Rosemary's Baby and The Terminator being my favorites. On the one hand, that trope gave us one of our most well known female action heroes in The Terminator. On the other, that narrative seems to say the woman protagonist derives her significance from the fact that she may give birth to a special child, and that it's only acceptable for her be proactive, to fight, if it's to protect her child. That's not the story I felt compelled to tell.

Outline for The Illumination, the fourth (and last) book in The Awakening Series

Tara is a hero not because of the child she might have but because of the values she holds and who she is, so her story goes far beyond having to deal with a pregnancy that was forced upon her. I also wanted to deal with the issue of the forced pregnancy itself. As in, regardless of end goals or motives, what are the ethics of causing a supernatural or mystical pregnancy for a woman who had no part in the plan? As I plotted The Unbelievers (Book 2), I discovered it took me to a natural midpoint both for Tara's personal journey and for the bigger picture of how and why she came to be pregnant and what it means for the world. So -- four books.

My goal is to release Book 4, The Illumination, within a year. If you've enjoyed The Awakening Series to date and would like to be notified of the release of The Illumination, you can join my email list here.

Now Available For Preorder: Book 3 In The Awakening Series

Six months after giving birth to a mysterious child whispered to be the Antichrist, Tara Spencer fights for her life as she searches for her kidnapped baby girl.

While Tara follows leads, she also must struggle to make sense of a shocking prophecy about her own growing power and place in the battle between good and evil.

Denounced by some as a fraud and feared by others, Tara desperately aligns herself with foes who attempted to murder her only days ago. But can she come to terms with what she's learned about herself and control her power in time to save her daughter?

The Conflagration is the third installment in the four-book Awakening series by Lisa M. Lilly, author of The Awakening and The Unbelievers. She lives and practices law in Chicago.

Release date: May 17, 2016 for all ebook editions

Preorder Now:

Kindle

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The Conflagration Is Almost Here

It's almost time for Book 3 of 4 in The Awakening series. I'm finalizing the text now for publication, and you can see the cover above, thanks to graphic designer Carly Neigh. The ebook editions will be released in May. If you'd like to receive a notice of the release date directly, you can join my email list here.

Now, back to work...

How To Peek At Other People's Bookshelves And Win Autographed Books

One my bookshelves with autographed favorite novels.

If you love books the way I do, you probably have book titles that friends recommended to you typed into cryptic notes on your phone or written on scraps of paper you put in your pocket, forget about, and find again in shreds after doing the laundry. When I  make the effort track down a book, though, usually I love it, and I buy or borrow all the author's works. Then I wonder how many other great recommendations I've forgotten. Which is too bad because I depend on suggestions from others to sort through all the wonderful novels out there. I find television shows the same way, which is how I became a steady viewer of Mad Men, The Killing, and, more recently, The Flash.

A couple years ago, a friend from a book group sent me the perfect solution to my book problem. (Thanks, Andrea!) She invited me to join Goodreads.com.

What's On Your Friends' Shelves?

One of my favorite things about Goodreads is I can check out what other people have put on their shelves when I am trying to decide what to read next. I also created separate shelves for types of books I've read or want to read, including Wiscon 2014, which lists books recommended at the conference panels I attended; mystery-and-private-eye, a genre I love, so these are books I've already read and reviewed; and books discussing Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Most of the Buffy books are on my actual shelves, too. I created the virtual shelf to make it easier for other Buffy fans to find them.

Detailed Info On Likes And Dislikes

I find Goodreads reviewers tend to be more specific than readers on other sites about what works and doesn't for them. Once toward the beginning of Doctor Sleep by Stephen King (the sort of sequel to The Shining), I felt less interested than I'd expected. I didn't like the main character much, and I wasn't sure I'd finish given the many hours I was working at the time. But enough people on Goodreads said they'd felt the same at the start but ended liking the book that I continued. It still isn't my favorite Stephen King novel--that's The Dead Zone--but it was worth finishing Doctor Sleep. I've also occasionally bought a book based on a negative Goodreads review because I figured I'd like exactly what the reviewer did not about the novel.

Free Autographed Books

Periodically, publishers and authors offer giveaways of books on Goodreads, often autographed ones. (If you list a book on your To Read shelf, sometimes Goodreads will email to let you know a giveaway is happening.) Right now, as part of preparing to publish Book 3 in my Awakening series, I'm offering 10 autographed trade paperback editions of The Unbelievers (The Awakening, Book 2) to readers in the U.S.

For a chance to win, sign up here by February 13, 2016.

Enter today, as the giveaway is only open until February 13, 2016. Watch this space for announcements regarding Book 3 of 4 in The Awakening series, The Conflagration, and/or connect with me on Goodreads. Happy reading!

Five Wonderful Things About Millennials

When I created the main character for my Awakening series, I wasn't thinking about generational issues. I wanted Tara Spencer to be young enough that it was believable she’d never had sex, I wanted her to have a strong reason other than a religious one for choosing to remain a virgin, and I wanted her to discover she was nonetheless pregnant when it would most disrupt her life. So I made her a pre-med student and the oldest of five children, so she understood exactly how much responsibility being a parent involves and avoiding pregnancy mattered a great deal to her educational and career goals. The term “Millennial” wasn’t one I recall being all that aware of. But I made Tara 21, and she's now 22 as I write Book 3, so if she existed in real time, she would be a Millennial.

Awareness of the Millennial generation is more a part of my day-to-day life these days. I teach law students, most of whom fall into the 22 to 28 age range, and, now that I write full time, I read more blogs and listen to podcasts that are produced by or aimed at Millennials. On the other hand, most of the lawyers I work with (I still practice law part-time) are Baby Boomers or older Generation Xers. Their clerks and junior lawyers tend to be Millennials, though, so I’ve heard plenty of complaints about the (lack of) work ethic of twenty-to-thirty-year olds. But as I thought about and further researched the Millennial generation, curious how or if my main character fit within it, I realized how much I like about people in that age range. A few of the main reasons:

They seek advice from adults, particularly their parents. When I was in my twenties, I rejected most of my parents’ advice as irrelevant. They were more than forty years older than me, how could they possibly understand anything I was going through? The older I get, the more I realize how many things my parents were right about, or at least had useful insight regarding. While Millennials get a lot of flack for relying too much on mom and dad (and I personally find it hard to understand how 85% of them could name a parent as their best friend), there is a lot to be said for taking advantage of the knowledge and experience of people who’ve been around a lot longer than you. When I rely on marketing tips from authors more savvy than I or seek input from a lawyer with a couple decades more experience, I don’t call that being too dependent, I call it being smart and efficient. Many Millennials are smart and efficient.

More so than previous generations, Millennials value and respect differences among people. Part of it is that, in the U.S. at least, they are the most ethnically and racially diverse generation to date. They also are the most social both on and off line. They are more likely to know people with different sexual orientations, different religious and philosophical beliefs, and who are part of different racial and ethnic groups. In contrast, I grew up in a part of a middle income suburb that was almost entirely white and non-Hispanic. I never had an African-American classmate until my first year of college or an African-American professor until my fourth year. Religious diversity where I grew up meant some people were Catholic and others were non-Catholic Christians. The first time I saw a synagogue was on a field trip in high school. That was also the first time that I heard anyone say he didn’t believe that Jesus Christ rose from the dead. I love that Millennials are so much less likely to live in worlds where everyone is so similar to them.

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On a related note, and perhaps for the above reason, Millennials as a group care about other people's feelings. If they unintentionally offend someone by using a word or term, they’re less likely than members of previous generations to insist they didn’t mean anything by it and the person offended should just “get over it.” Millennials would rather look for another way to express themselves that won’t offend others. Likewise, people in the Millennial generation are more likely to believe that everyone can get along and to look for ways for that to happen, rather than assuming that people of different genders, races, religious backgrounds, or sexual orientation are so radically unlike that it’s as if they come from different planets. As someone who found the stereotypes about gender in the Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus books frustrating and reductive, I’m happy many Millennials reject that type of thinking. Also, on a personal note, having grown up with a mother who often spoke her mind, to me at least, without a thought for how her comments might sound (most famously, “You couldn’t get your first novel published, why would you waste time writing another?”) but who generally did not intend to make me feel bad, I’m all for everyone taking a few extra minutes to consider the effect of their words.
 
Social issues still matter when it comes to finances. Many twenty-somethings finished college or graduate school during the recent recession when jobs were particularly scarce. Despite having more limited economic resources, they are concerned with the values of the companies from which they buy products and the employers for whom they work. More than 50% of those in the Millennial generation buy from companies that support causes they care about. Millennials also push their employers to issue more honest public relations materials.

Perhaps related to both their economic circumstances and their social consciousness, Millennials generally value experiences and quality of life more highly than things. One life skill vital to my personal happiness that I learned from my parents, who grew up during the Great Depression, was to thoughtfully consider how I spent both my money and my time and make choices based on what I found important, not on what society in general found most alluring. My mom and dad were among the last to buy a color TV, never owned more than one car at a time, and never bought a grocery that wasn’t reduced for a sale or based on a coupon. Yet they spent money taking trips to Europe, including to sites of religious significance to them, signed up for adult education classes, and donated every month to several charities. Interestingly, Millennials are making similar choices in some ways to those of the Greatest Generation. As noted above, they are more apt than their parents to buy products based on the manufacturer’s and distributor's ethics and values than price. Many also share cars rather than own them outright and prefer smaller living spaces that are more environmentally sound rather than working longer hours to pay high rent. Along the same lines, they prioritize taking trips to other countries over purchasing homes and value their free time more than how much they could earn if they worked their lives away. While this last leads to charges that they are lazy and/or entitled, and no doubt some are (just as some people in every generation could be called that), my guess is they will live longer, healthier, and happier lives than the generations before them did.

So, in all, I’m happy Tara, at least for the moment, is part of the Millennial generation, though, as with any individual, she shares some of the traits of her generation and not others. Please feel free to share your experiences with people of various generations below.

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Lisa M. Lilly is the author of the occult thrillers The Awakening and The Unbelievers, Books 1 and 2 in the Awakening series. A short film of the title story of her collection The Tower Formerly Known as Sears and Two Other Tales of Urban Horror was recently produced under the title Willis Tower. If you'd like to be notified of new releases and read reviews of M.O.S.T. (Mystery, Occult, Suspense, Thriller) books and movies, click here to join her email list and receive free a short horror story, Ninevah, published exclusively to M.O.S.T. subscribers.

Entrepreneur Or Ne're Do Well?

A boyfriend I had in my early twenties was a hard worker but did not like his job. He had no interest in going to college, and he was unimpressed by how long it took most people to build businesses from the ground up, so he looked into various get-rich quick-schemes. He purchased a series of books on how to buy a house with no money down, fix it up and rent it out, then use equity in the first house to help buy another, and so on. The idea was not to earn income through rentals but to sell after a few years and reap a profit due to market appreciation. The system the books described supposedly made people into millionaires. Though I earned barely more than minimum wage myself and wasn't a business or finance major, I enjoyed reading personal finance books (a little odd for a college student, I know), but the ones I read were far less sensational and less expensive, as I got them at the local library. (I've been a fan of libraries all my life, as I wrote in a previous entry.) I had serious questions about the scheme. It's hard to imagine now, but mortgage interest rates then averaged around 13%, and reputable lenders required 20% down in cash. But the author, my boyfriend assured me, was a millionaire, so the system must work. When I found out the books cost over $700 and the author also offered seminars all over the country for an additional thousand or two, I suspected I knew how he'd become a millionaire, and it wasn't by selling houses.

My current favorite writing space/office.

That experience is one reason I had mixed feelings when, about a month ago, I considered updating my profession on Linked In and other social media sites to include the word “entrepreneur.” For so long, for me that word called up images either of the boyfriend who preferred not to work or the salesperson hawking pricey no-fail systems for becoming a millionaire. The people I knew who did well in life worked hard at jobs or professions and saved and invested little by little. As I entered my thirties, my view of entrepreneurs didn't change. A good friend married a man who ran various businesses and was always evading bill collectors and always on the verge of the one big deal that would make him rich. Though eventually it meant losing their house, this entrepreneur refused to take any job unless it paid well over a hundred thousand a year. No such job was ever offered to him. I also discovered that if someone described himself in an online dating profile as an entrepreneur, it quite often meant he was a guy who couldn’t or wouldn't hold a job--one my mother would have called a “ne'er-do-well.” Such men were often charming, but could rarely pay their bills.

I'm sure decades ago there were many actual entrepreneurs--as opposed to people who adopted the label as a cover--I simply didn't do the kind of work that brought me into contact with them. Now I do. As an author who independently publishes my own work and an attorney who runs my own law firm, I keep up with the business world and am on email lists of various entrepreneurs. Today, running a business is probably more common than ever. The Internet empowers many people to work anywhere at any time and to sell products and services all over the world. Yet still there are times I wonder. Some Internet businesses remind me of the house parties my mom went to when I was a kid. Everyone “made money” or got free items attending everyone else’s Tupperware/Pampered Chef/Mary Kay parties. But eventually the circle of friends was exhausted, the round robin ended, and no one was any wealthier, though their kitchens were more organized. (Not an entirely bad thing, but not a basis for a business.)

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Also, while some author/entrepreneurs I'm familiar with offer a lot of helpful information for free on blogs or in reasonably priced books (say, $3.99-$9.99, not $700), I also get offers from “entrepreneurs” who seem to be making a lot of money selling books about how to sell books or, worse, by giving expensive seminars on how to sell books. When I try to trace back to some other type of book, product, or service the author successfully created and sold, I find only vague references to business experiences that sound suspiciously like college internships. Not to say a college intern might not know something I don't. I'm just not willing to pay upwards of $500 to find out.

On the other hand, I've been enjoying running my own businesses for years, and I hope never to have a job again. Soon after I started my law firm, heavy layoffs during a recession underscored the risk of working for just one employer. And I love that the Internet makes it possible for many authors to sell to the public, offering their work for less than a traditional publisher would charge, but earning more than a traditional publisher would pay while doing so. Also important to me is that running my own writing business means choosing the strategy and making the decisions. Or, as entrepreneur and author Joanna Penn puts it, never having to ask permission. If I think something is a good idea--say, writing and publishing a religious conspiracy thriller series without adopting a male pen name--I can go ahead and do it without seeking anyone’s approval. Yes, I take the risk it won’t work, but if that happens, I learn from the experience and try something else rather than, as usually occurs as an employee, being discouraged from innovating again. And if things do work out, I gain the reward.

Most of all, it’s fun to wear different hats throughout a day, week, and year. Nearly every job I’ve had, my main reason for leaving was that I got tired of doing the same thing over and over. Now there is always a new book to write, an innovative marketing approach to learn, an emerging creative outlet to explore. So, in the end, I decided to embrace the term entrepreneur.

What are your thoughts on entrepreneurs? What do you associate with the term? Do you consider yourself an entrepreneur? Please share in the comments below. Also, if you’d like to keep up on my creative and business endeavors, you can join my email list. No pitches to buy $700 books, I promise.

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Lisa M. Lilly is the author of the occult thrillers The Awakening and The Unbelievers, Books 1 and 2 in the Awakening series. A short film of the title story of her collection The Tower Formerly Known as Sears and Two Other Tales of Urban Horror was recently produced under the title Willis Tower. If you'd like to be notified of new releases and read reviews of M.O.S.T. (Mystery, Occult, Suspense, Thriller) books and movies, join her email list and receive free a short horror story, Ninevah, published exclusively to M.O.S.T. subscribers.

Why Write a Thriller Series About A Potential Female Messiah?

People often ask me why, as a non-believer, I'm writing a thriller series that revolves around religion-related concepts. (The Awakening series follows a young woman whose virgin pregnancy might bring the world a female messiah or trigger Armageddon.) First, completely aside from religion, I’ve always been intrigued by world changing or world ending stories. A great example of this type of story is my favorite movie, The Terminator.

The Awakening (Book 1) and The Unbelievers (Book 2).

Second, the role of women in myth and religion fascinates me. I grew up learning about Christianity from the Catholic perspective, and the Catholic religion is filled with contradictions in its view of Mary, believed to be the mother of Jesus. I had friends in other Christian churches who told me Catholicism was wrong or evil because Catholics “worship” Mary. Apparently aware of that critique, the priests at the church my family attended were careful to emphasize that Mary is not a deity in her own right. On the other hand, though it appears nowhere in the Church’s written gospels, Catholics believe that Mary in and of herself is unique among humans. For one, she is believed to be the only human being conceived without Original Sin, which is the actual meaning of the term Immaculate Conception. And for another, she supposedly never died. Instead, her body was “assumed” into heaven. A pretty amazing feat for someone who is not divine. Many Catholics also believe she has special powers to intercede with Jesus/God and see that prayers are answered.

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For all the interest in Mary in the Catholic Church, the Bible coverage of her is limited. If she were real, what was her life like? In her time, far more than now, being unmarried and pregnant did not bode well for a young woman. Yet the Bible says nothing about what she told her parents, relatives, or friends about her situation. The only mention is that Joseph initially intended to reject her, but changed his mind after an angel visited him.

Perhaps because I ultimately found I didn’t believe most of the stories I grew up with, I’m intrigued by the reasoning of those who continue to do so, which is the majority of people in the Chicago area where I live. What I found myself asking is how literal people’s beliefs are. Are they convinced that a little over two thousand years ago a woman named Mary actually one day found herself pregnant despite never having had sex? And, if so, how would they react to a young woman who made that same claim today? It’s one thing to believe that in Biblical times Moses parted the Red Sea or Jesus was born of a virgin, but it’s another to believe anyone who claims to perform miracles today.

Along with that “What if” came my other issue with the major monotheistic religions—that God is represented as male. So when I began putting together my plot idea for The Awakening series, I considered not only what opposition and disbelief a pregnant virgin today would face, but how that might change once she revealed her child would be a girl.

I also wanted to explore many potential causes for such an event, as not all the world is Christian. In fact, my protagonist, Tara Spencer, is not herself religious, though her parents are, which adds to her confusion and makes the issue more complex. The event that starts the story could have been caused by some sort of god, an adversary to god (such as Satan as he is traditionally depicted in our culture), a different supernatural being or force altogether, a scheming scientist, evolution…the possibilities are endless. All these causes remain on the table for most of the series, so the answer to the other question often asked of me, which is whether the series is a Christian one, is no.

I chose to go beyond one thriller and into a four-book series in part due to my original thought that the Biblical character of Mary gets short shrift. In the end, her value is mainly as a Mother with a capital M. (Though Catholicism borrowed a lot of goddess lore in its depiction of her, attempting to draw in believers in goddess culture with some success, thus its contradictory stance on Mary.) Likewise, in stories that flip the narrative and portray a supernatural pregnancy that is a danger to the woman or perhaps to the world, such as Rosemary’s Baby (one of my favorite books), the woman’s role also is primarily as a mother/victim/woman in peril. In contrast, I wanted to explore Tara Spencer, my protagonist, as a protagonist. As a person who is a force in the world who has her own goals, powers, and challenges. Her own friends and enemies. In short, her own life. The Awakening series is primarily about Tara as a person, not as a pregnant woman.

All of the above sometimes leaves me at a loss at cocktail parties or in interviews when I’m asked how I categorize The Awakening series. Books 1 and 2 have spent significant time in Amazon’s Top 100 Occult and Horror best seller lists, though I admit the series has as much in common with The Da Vinci Code as Rosemary’s Baby, as one reviewer pointed out. Religious conspiracy series also seems to fit, though it bothers me because it puts the emphasis on the religious order opposing Tara, the Brotherhood of Andrew, rather than on Tara herself. But the people whose eyes light up when I describe the concept often also love books described as religious conspiracy thrillers, including those of Dan Brown and Joanna Penn. I’ve used the term paranormal thriller, but “paranormal” for the last decade or two seems to call up visions of the Twilight series or paranormal romances. Science fiction/fantasy fans often also like the series, though I don’t usually read the genre. (One exception is that I love Dan Simmons' Hyperion series which, perhaps not coincidentally, includes a female messiah-type character.) Recently Amazon added a category “Supernatural Thriller,” and that may be the best fit of The Awakening, The Unbelievers, and the last two books in the series.

The reality is, of course, most of us read in more than one genre. I love horror, suspense, mystery, occult, thrillers, and supernatural books. Further, all of us also tend to sub-specialize in our genre reading. I like horror but not gore. I like mysteries and particularly detective stories but not cozies. Other people love suspense but won’t read anything with any hint of the supernatural. In the end, I suppose that’s why I love reading and writing fiction so much. There are so many great stories, and so many ways to tell them.

If you'd like to read more about M.O.S.T. (Mystery, Occult, Suspense, Thriller) books and movies and receive news of my new releases, click here to join my email list. (If you join today, you'll receive free a short horror story, Ninevah, published exclusively to M.O.S.T. subscribers.)

6 Things I Learned In The Last Year About Writing And Business

During much of the last fourteen years, I worked full-time--and then some--as a lawyer and wrote fiction on the side. Last year, I gradually shifted gears so that now more than half my professional life is devoted to writing and to the business side of writing. Below are a few things I've learned along the way.

Get Out:  Getting outside once a day, no matter what the weather, boosts my mental health. Much as writing all day at an antique desk in my home office sounds appealing when it's ten degrees with a six below windchill (can you tell I live in Chicago?), if I stay inside too much, I start feeling blue. I'm also less creative and less motivated. So if I'm working from home more than a day or two in a row, I make sure I meet someone for lunch, lug my laptop to the local coffeehouse, or at least walk a few blocks to the Container Store to admire the many wondrous things there. Despite the time it takes to layer on a fleece, winter coat, scarf, and double gloves (when it's zero or colder), I feel energized and ready to get back to work when I get home.

Flexibility:  For years (actually, decades), I wrote, submitted manuscripts, and ascended the rejection ladder, graduating from form letters to personal notes to publication of some short stories, poems, and articles. I took a few breaks when my law practice became extremely busy and after my parents' deaths. When I came back and needed to decide what to do with my most recently-completed novel, I read an article in the Wall Street Journal about authors having success with self-publishing. I hesitated because in my mind that wasn't "real" publishing. But the more I researched, the more excited I became. I believe in my work, and rather than spending so much energy and time persuading others to invest in it, I decided to bet on myself. Now my marketing time goes toward reaching readers directly. Likewise, I discovered I need to be flexible about genre. I think of my Awakening series as a thriller series despite occult elements, as it contains relatively little of the type of gore that's common these days in horror. (Though I disagree that gore is required.) Yet the books sell well when listed in Amazon's horror category. When my first fan email came in, it was from readers who love science fiction, a genre in which I hadn't imagined the books directly fit. That's when I realized that, by not reaching sci fi and other genre readers, I was missing entire audience sections.

Amazon helps those who help themselves: The more I do to advertise and promote my books, the more Amazon does to promote them and the more sales rise. This is a great relief. When I started running ads for The Awakening, I rarely recovered the price of the ad. Now ads in smaller publications nearly always pay for themselves, and an ad in a publication with a large subscription base such as BookBub usually earns me much more than it costs within the first day, plus prompts a string of sales for weeks to come. Having a second book in the series adds to this effect. While I'm sure longevity and past sales must be factored into Amazon's algorithms, this also reflects a larger truth in any business. At first, a huge amount of time and effort is spent getting the word out. But if you have a good product, eventually others start selling it for you. Not as a favor but because, if they are customers, they truly love the product and want to share it with others and, if they are vendors, because you are showing you can help make them money.

Consistency matters: There is a great quote that I don't remember word-for-word in Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich. It goes something like "you are what your habits make you, and you can choose your habits." I thought of this as I began devoting more time and effort to writing and publishing. How does it relate? For the majority of authors, writing one book and publishing it on Amazon results in little more than a handful of sales to family and friends. Likewise, writing a blog post or two, occasionally tweeting, and creating a webpage won't sustain a career or a business. It's the effort that's made week after week, month after month, and year after year that has the most effect. Writing in particular is something a lot of people love doing, as is playing sports. That means for authors and athletes (and singers and actors and visual artists), there is a lot of competition. That doesn't mean it's not worth pursuing. It does mean a successful career will likely require effort day after day for years. This is something I keep in mind every time I read an "overnight" success story. Usually further research reveals that the novel the person wrote and sold a hundred thousand copies of was the fifth one that person finished, and the stunning sales record came not because of one ad but after months or years of seeking reviews from book bloggers, attending and speaking at conferences, and finding creative ways to reach readers.

No one owes it to me to be excited about what I'm doing: There are certain things that almost everyone in our culture universally expresses excitement about when women do them--mainly getting married and having children. Beyond that, it varies. For example, some people feel earning an advanced degree is a great accomplishment, others scoff at "professional students." When it comes to writing and particularly an author independently publishing her own work, there will always be people eager to downplay any success, or who view all artistic efforts as too much of a long shot to be worth noting. At first those attitudes surprised and disappointed me. Then I realized that everyone is entitled to her or his own opinion, and I don't need to share it, be concerned about it, or factor it into how I live my life. What's important is doing my best at what I love doing.

Many talented people are generous with their time and information: This is the flip side of the point above. For every person who is dismissive of self-publishing, there are three or four who freely offer information, advice, and support. I've learned tremendous amounts about writing, business, and marketing from blogs and websites created by authors like Nick Stephenson, Joanna Penn, Bob Mayer, and Melissa Foster. I've also joined on-line communities where authors share what they've learned about writing, editing, and marketing. I had this same experience when I started my own law practice after many years of working at a large firm. It reaffirms my faith in human nature and in the value of being kind, professional, and considerate. It is almost always returned tenfold.

Questions or comments on these points or a few to add of your own? Please comment below or email me at lisa@lisalilly.com.
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Lisa M. Lilly is the author of occult thrillers The Awakening and The Unbelievers. Her poems and short fiction have appeared in numerous print and on-line magazines, including Parade of Phantoms, Strong Coffee, and Hair Trigger, and a short film of the title story of her collection The Tower Formerly Known as Sears and Two Other Tales of Urban Horror was recently produced under the title Willis Tower. If you'd like to be notified of new releases, click here to join her email list. The Awakening series is also available on barnesandnoble.com.