Guardian Angel (45 page)

The new-cover editions came out in December of 2013, marking the end of my first year as a self-published writer, and what I hoped would be the beginning of a better second year in which I could get my books out in front of a larger audience. After all, what are books without readers? The new covers certainly attracted more people who hopefully enjoyed the words too, but even so, this series still remains very much unknown to the world.

As my fellow indie writers often say, it takes a long, long time for an unknown author to get known, and most books only sell a handful of copies, if any. Thus I am grateful for each and every sale, and I am always hoping that readers such as yourself will help spread the word, not just for my books, but for any that you enjoy. (So again, if you haven’t left any reviews yet, please, please take a moment to do so.)

So that’s basically how the series came to be. Let me move on to a few of the characters now. In this, I would be tempted to write a paragraph or two about every single one of them, but that would be far more than “a few,” so here I will limit myself to just the characters that appear in
Wild-born,
starting of course with my narrator, Adrian Howell.

You can easily see that my temperamental protagonist is no superhero, neither in power nor in moral character. Call me a cynic, but even as a child, I never really believed in the idea of an incorruptible hero. And while stories of all genres are replete with antiheroes, as a reader I have always felt that, far too often, we didn’t get to directly see how these characters became flawed in the first place.

I believe that while nature may dictate our predispositions to some extent, nurture is what truly shapes us. Thus in the first book, Adrian is very much the victim, running from powerful, terrifying enemies. But over the years, various encounters with hostile forces rub off on him in all the wrong ways. By the end of the series, Adrian is the hunter. Still well-meaning in his own way, and not without his many regrets, nevertheless Adrian is a ruthless killer with a personal agenda. As much as he is a champion of freedom, he is also, by his own free admission, an agent of chaos. But if you were appalled by Adrian’s lack of moral principles in
Guardian Angel,
at least you know how he lost them.

Next, Cat. To my mind, Catherine Howell, like her brother, is a victim of circumstance and environment. Her life was far more similar to Adrian’s than Adrian would ever admit. She saw her brother kidnapped and tried to save him. She watched a war destroy her family and tried to put an end to it. She wanted nothing more than to bring peace and order to a world of turmoil. I never wanted the
Psionic Pentalogy
to be about a battle between good and evil, but rather a battle between conflicting ideologies. I wanted my readers to consider that perhaps the world really would be better off in the hands of the Angels. Would Cat really have been so terrible a dictator as Adrian imagines?

Alia. Though this was one of the most difficult characters for me to write, it was also one of the most rewarding because, in sharp contrast to Adrian’s disagreeable transformation, Alia’s journey is a process of growth and self-healing. This emotionally unstable introvert with attachment issues is nevertheless one of the most heroic characters in the entire series, and even Terry admits in the end that Alia had always been the tougher of the two. From the very beginning, I had intended Alia to become the future leader of the Guardians, and the
Psionic Pentalogy
is as much Alia’s story as it is Adrian’s.

So, a bit more about Alia’s character.

Adrian’s difficulty in getting Alia to mouth-speak in the first part of the series is actually very loosely based on my own real-life experiences as an English teacher in Japan. Children here, when not confident about their pronunciation, often resort to whispering and mumbling to hide their flaws, thus hampering their improvement and fuelling my frustration as their instructor. Getting kids to speak aloud sometimes really does feel like pulling teeth, and I’m sure they wish as much as I that we could just converse telepathically and avoid the horrible mouth-movement practice altogether. Meanwhile, Alia’s use of silent times to recharge her emotions is, though somewhat exaggerated, how I have always dealt with stress and long weeks. Sometimes I really do spend half a day staring blankly off into space.

Cindy. Someone needed to nurse Adrian through his infancy as a psionic, and to bring Adrian and Alia together. Cindy served that purpose, and though she disappears from view after the third book and only reappears briefly at the end, she is nevertheless Adrian’s driving force throughout his final battle, much as Adrian is Cindy’s driving force during her own. In
The Tower,
Cindy states that she doesn’t miss being a convert because her life “already has meaning.” Though Adrian blames himself for destroying Cindy’s mind, I feel it is important to note that, in the end, Cindy made a choice too.

Mark Parnell. From the start, I knew that the God-slayers’ deadly cult religion would play an important role in Adrian’s story, and I didn’t want to let the pentalogy become a one-sided diatribe against religion. I myself am an agnostic like Adrian, but I deeply respect the power of faith and the good (and not-so-good) that it can bring out in people. Mark is there to stand for the better half.

Ralph Henderson. Unlike with Adrian, we don’t get to witness the specific events that made Ralph the unpleasant man he is. Ralph’s story is told almost entirely in the background, through other characters such as Terry, Mr. Baker and the Historian. It wasn’t an easy decision to kill him off in
Lesser Gods,
but I needed a proper conclusion to the battle between the Guardians and Queen Larissa Divine before the story could shift to Adrian and Catherine. Ralph’s end was the end he would have wanted, and perhaps the one he deserved.

Dr. Kellogg. As far as I’m concerned, Adrian and Alia’s surrogate father at the PRC did in fact know that Adrian was lying when he claimed to be whispering fairytales to Alia. He suspected that the research center would be attacked, and when it was, his first priority was to help Alia escape. When Adrian changes his identity at the end of
Guardian Angel,
he adopts the surname Kellogg. For the record, however, “Andy” is neither Dr. Kellogg’s first name nor the name of his deceased son. It’s just another name that begins with an A, which is easier for Adrian to use.

Finally, Major Edward Regis. I already knew when I wrote
Wild-born
that I wanted Adrian to cross paths with this man again when Adrian was both older and less innocent. I knew from the start that Ed Regis would return as companion as opposed to adversary. But why would I let someone like this live and kill off James Turner and Terry Henderson? Would it not have been better to let Ed Regis die the hero’s death like Ralph, perhaps while defending Adrian and Alia? Unfortunately, that would have been too simplistic for me. Ed Regis spends the rest of his days serving Alia and the Guardian Council. I figured that would be enough.

I am very tempted to write a little about Terry and James, but they only appear from the second book, so, moving right along…

Readers familiar with terminology related to psychic abilities may know that “psion,” not “psionic,” is the commonly used singular noun form of one who possesses psionic powers, while “telekinesist” is the correct noun to describe a person who has telekinetic abilities. In the
Psionic Pentalogy
world, however, both “psionic” and “telekinetic” are used as countable nouns in addition to adjectives, much like the word “psychic” is used as both noun and adjective. I consider the choice of these less common forms to be within the bounds of artistic license, and hope that readers will accept them as such. I have seen “psionic” used elsewhere as a countable noun, so I’m not the first to use it this way, and let’s be honest here, “telekinesist” is a real mouthful.

Though a far cry from Adrian’s misadventures in the psionic world, the years I spent writing these books were, for me, an amazing journey in itself. I am a firm believer in authenticity even for a paranormal fantasy, so I ended up doing a fair bit of research.

One simple way that I strove for authenticity was by directly linking the entire story to a period of five actual consecutive calendar years. If you carefully match up the dates and weekdays mentioned throughout the series, you could probably discover exactly which year each story occurs in. In terms of research, this means that whenever I was writing a scene where Adrian looks up at the night sky, any descriptions pertaining to the stars or the phases of the moon were made correct to the calendar. The story takes place in the northern hemisphere, and I always used planetarium software to “look” at the sky as it would have appeared to Adrian. Thus, as much as I might have wanted a full moon in a particular scene because it would have set the stage better, if it was a half moon that night, then a half moon it was. Period. I’m stubborn that way.

I also read up on everything from tattoo removal to the long-term effects of persistent vegetative state. For
Wild-born
, I researched lucid dreaming in a very hands-on way. That was truly fun. There are several how-to guides to be found online, and following them, I did manage to gain awareness inside several of my dreams. I still do from time to time.

But the most memorable research I did was in learning to cope with blindness. I spent much of one summer vacation wearing a blindfold and learning to get around my house. I purchased a Braille writer online and taught myself to read and write Grade Two Braille. I visited a Braille library and finger-read the first chapter of
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.
I can still probably sight-read Braille, though it’s unlikely to stay with me since I don’t use it regularly.

Regarding the gadgets that appear in
Lesser Gods,
while talking compasses and Braille watches with lift-up covers are real, Adrian’s head-mounted proximity sensor, to the best of my knowledge, cannot be found in the world today. I consider it a theoretical possibility, however, based on existing “laser ruler” technology.

And speaking of technology, I’m sure some readers were wondering why psionics don’t wear Kevlar body armor which, after all, is a synthetic material and would be the perfect non-metal protection from blasts and bullets.

To this, I will answer here that while the setting for the
Psionic Pentalogy
is based very closely on our modern world (night sky and all), it is nevertheless set in a parallel universe within which, at the turn of the 21st century, the internet is still in its infancy, and certain technologies, including Kevlar, smartphones, projectile Taser guns and advanced, brain-controlled prosthetics have yet to be invented. These omissions (and others) were entirely deliberate: I figured that if other superhero stories set in parallel universes of present day Earth could have hyper-advanced technologies, then the
Psionic Pentalogy
universe could be the opposite, a world from which certain common technologies are absent.

Even so, in the
Psionic Pentalogy,
modern technology has already surpassed the combat capabilities of most paranormal powers. While I enjoy an overpowered superhero story as much as the next guy, for this series, I really wanted to even the playing field between psionics and humans. Thus I did a fair amount of research on military hardware and terminology, studying, among other things, the range, magazine capacity, rate of fire, and accuracy of various pistols and rifles. I have some limited experience with guns from back when I was in the United States, but Japan has a near-blanket ban on all firearms, so most of my research was done online.

Yet despite my research, you will have noticed that Adrian never once specifies what kind of firearms he and his team uses. He always says “pistol” or “automatic rifle,” without ever naming their exact models. Adrian is, of course, fairly well-versed in military tech thanks to his time with Terry, but as far as Adrian is concerned, a gun is a gun. It goes bang and people get hurt. As a writer, I preferred this style too: readers who didn’t know much about guns wouldn’t be bogged down by unnecessary jargon, and readers who did know and cared could insert whatever their personal favorites were for those scenes.

In case you’re wondering, none of the locations mentioned in the
Psionic Pentalogy
are based on actual cities, towns or mountain ranges. That part is fiction. But if you ever find a place just like New Haven, with the park, condominium towers, the river and forest beyond, I’d love to hear about it. As to where the Historian lives, for my money, it’s somewhere east of Europe.

And now a note about the Guardian call signs. This is my personal little jab at superheroes’ secret identities. I, and by extension Adrian, think many comic-book heroes are a bit childish in their names. I parody these worlds of secret supers with call signs like Cookie, Dizzy, and Hansel and Gretel. But each call sign does in fact have a background.

Proton, whose call sign is mentioned just once in
Lesser Gods
(when Alia shouts at him) and later appears as the leader of the Resistance in
Guardian Angel,
is a former science teacher. Does this matter to the story? Of course not, so it’s not mentioned. Just one of many details that never made it into the series due to the first-person-narrative nature of the storytelling.

There was no way for readers to know about Proton’s pre-psionic profession, but I wonder how many people got the joke behind Raider’s call sign. Raider is one of my favorite side characters in the whole series. His Guardian call sign is based on the fact that he is a total
Indiana Jones
freak to the point that he actually named his daughter Marion after the heroine in
Raiders of the Lost Ark
. One of my many joys as a writer is that I can bury little details like this into a plot just for the fun of it.

And so long as we’re on the subject of secret identities, a quick note about my pen name before I finish.