Category Archives: Short stories

Building a Civilization of Love: A Call to Creative Catholics is out!

“Building a Civilization of Love: A Call to Creative Catholics,” my new book exhorting Catholics to apply their faith to change the culture for the better is now LIVE and available for purchase on Amazon Kindle

“Building a Civilization of Love: A Call to Creative Catholics” is a call to arms, or rather, a call to pens, paintbrushes, and video cameras, for creative Catholics to take up St. Maximilian Maria Kolbe’s call to infiltrate pop culture and help alleviate the ills that pervade contemporary society. St. Maximilian saw back in the 1920s how the use of cinema, radio, and mass-market books was corrupting society. He thought that those same tools could be used as a countercultural force to overcome this corruption. 

 

BuildingaCivilizationofLoveCover81224-4.1 copy.

 

Furthermore, it explains through the example of three critical apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary at Guadalupe, Lourdes, and Fatima how she herself suggested strategies and alternatives to the dehumanizing and increasingly pagan contemporary culture we have today.

“Building a Civilization of Love: A Call to Creative Catholics” concludes by showing how the Catholic Faith can be used to provide a road map out of our current morass and a blueprint to build a more just and fair society constructed according to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Corporal and Spiritual Works of Mercy and other elements of traditional Catholic Social Teachings.

You can keep up to date on developments such as when it becomes available in paperback as well as through other distribution channels by checking its website or ‘liking’ its Facebook Page.

 

NOTE: This book is an expanded and revised version of a previously published book entitled, “The Catholicpunk Manifesto.” The text of that book is mostly contained in Chapters V and VI of this work, as well as the Appendices A through C and E, with parts of it in the Preface and earlier chapters.)

Are you a creative Catholic? ""Building a Civilization of Love: A Call to Creative Catholics," is my new book exhorting Catholics to apply their faith to change the culture for the better!

Know someone who is an alcoholic or addict? "The Sober Catholic Way" helps Catholics by describing the many ways in which their faith can assist in maintaining sobriety, and is a basic handbook on how anyone can live a sober life. . (Thank you!!)

So, what is ‘Catholicpunk’ and what’s a Catholicpunker?

And thus begins a series of posts on who is a Catholicpunker what Catholicpunk is! 

A Catholicpunker is someone who Catholicpunks. Essentially, you are a creative Catholic who believes that there is something seriously wrong with the world and you believe that the Catholic Faith has the answer. After all, Jesus is ‘The Way, the Truth, and the Life,” and He established the Catholic Church to shepherd the world on its way Home to the Lord.

And so you wish to evangelize. Then it hits you: “I can evangelize through my art!” Therefore, you begin to infuse your art with Catholic teachings. It could be easy if you’re a writer of fiction or you make movies and television shows (any type of fiction or filmed stories). Create a world that reflects the doctrines of the Church. There’s the Beatitudes, the Corporal and Spiritual Works of Mercy. There’s an entire economic theory that’s founded on Papal writings: Distributism. There are numerous Catholic political theories: Subsidiarity, Solidarity, Christian Democracy (which incorporates Subsidiarity, Solidarity, and Distributism), and even Catholic Monarchism! Whether you create contemporary dramas or veil your Catholicpunking plans in fantasy or science-fiction, it doesn’t matter. 

But you show via the written word or visual images an alternative to the craziness abounding today. You Catholicpunk. It’s one thing to preach the Gospel by talking about Jesus; it has worked successfully for 2,000 years. But there are additional avenues that the Catholic evangelist can walk down in attempting to convert the world for Jesus. Expressing a Christian culture through art isn’t new, but I think it’s time that we ‘ramp it up’ a lot and engage people that way!

If you engage in other forms of art, I’ll address that in another post soon!

Are you a creative Catholic? ""Building a Civilization of Love: A Call to Creative Catholics," is my new book exhorting Catholics to apply their faith to change the culture for the better!

Know someone who is an alcoholic or addict? "The Sober Catholic Way" helps Catholics by describing the many ways in which their faith can assist in maintaining sobriety, and is a basic handbook on how anyone can live a sober life. . (Thank you!!)

It wants to be a novel, but perhaps later

About a year ago I wrote this post on a short story that decided by way of creative inspiration that: It wants to be a novel.

It was going fairly well, then some things in life got to happening and it was set aside.

And then earlier this year I got a new real-world job, details to be disclosed at some other time.

And then… Something happened at this job that got me to thinking creatively. Someone did something that I thought was odd, and that there JUST HAD to be a story behind it. So I got to thinking about the possible story behind the event, and decided that it had to be explored. Writing about seemed to be the best way and so off I was, on to another story.

I didn’t think about length, at this stage in my life I don’t care too much about such things and am just happy that I’m inspired to get story ideas and the overwhelming desire to write them.

I guess it also means that as I’ve matured as a person (which is about time as I’m over 50) and am taking this maturity into my writing “career,” such things occurring could mean that “writing” is becoming a vocation (something meaningful to do as well as to earn a living from) and not an avocation (something meaningful to do, like volunteering).

Why? Because of the seriousness of it. It’s less and less that I’m an “aspiring” writer and more that I’m an “actual” writer.

This new story has taken possession of me. While not obsessed with it as I have marital and job duties, and so on, I am occupied with it. When not actually writing, I am thinking and plotting.

But, I am writing. And in doing so, I am learning more about the creative process and also about me.

More on the latter in another post (I have to look up a quote. a-HA! “Search is your friend.” I found the quote -actually turns out to be two of them as they’re related – and they deserve their own post).

Are you a creative Catholic? ""Building a Civilization of Love: A Call to Creative Catholics," is my new book exhorting Catholics to apply their faith to change the culture for the better!

Know someone who is an alcoholic or addict? "The Sober Catholic Way" helps Catholics by describing the many ways in which their faith can assist in maintaining sobriety, and is a basic handbook on how anyone can live a sober life. . (Thank you!!)

Flannery O’Connor—Catholic writer

Flannery O’Connor died fifty years ago today. She was, and remains, an American writer of great talent. I say “remains,” because she lives on in her work; she has achieved immortality and her work is alive and vibrant to this day. If you are an American Catholic with writing aspirations, or even writing accomplishments, please become acquainted with her stories if you are not already. You will learn quite a lot about the writing craft and what it means to be a Catholic writer.

Miss O’Connor said, “The Catholic novel is not necessarily about a Christianized or Catholicized world, but one in which the truth as Christians know it has been used as a light to see the world by.”

More on that here: Flannery O’Connor’s Religion and Literature: Dogma and its Implications for Art, by Tami England Flaum.

Her fiction is collected in three volumes, her two novels ‘Wise Blood” and “The Violent Bear It Away.” Her short stories are all collected now in one volume, titled appropriately, “The Complete Stories.” There are several collections of her non-fiction, most notably, “The Habit of Being: The Letters of Flannery O’Connor.”

I have only recently become familiar with her. Despite having the above four books in my library for several years, I only just read “Wise Blood” this past week, and am now happily making my way through her “Complete Stories.” I won’t be doing reviews any time soon, I doubt I’m qualified. 😉

The point of this post is this: if one is a Catholic writer and is interested in building up and developing an authentic American Catholic culture, and follows Pope St. John Paul II’s suggestions that Christian art should infuse contemporary culture with the message of the Gospel, then one should study Miss O’Connor’s writings. She’s a good teacher.

If Catholic writers do participate in culture-building, we must look to what those who have gone before us have done. We learn from them, offer to the body of culture what we can uniquely contribute and in turn hope that our work survives on to enrich another generation. The living body of American Catholicism adds to the wonderful breath of diversity that is global Catholicism, offering people an alternative to the sterile materialistic secular order.

Are you a creative Catholic? ""Building a Civilization of Love: A Call to Creative Catholics," is my new book exhorting Catholics to apply their faith to change the culture for the better!

Know someone who is an alcoholic or addict? "The Sober Catholic Way" helps Catholics by describing the many ways in which their faith can assist in maintaining sobriety, and is a basic handbook on how anyone can live a sober life. . (Thank you!!)

Happy New Year!!! Plus some odds and ends…

Today is the First Sunday of Advent, the beginning of the new Liturgical Year in the Catholic Church. A day of new beginnings and preparing for the Lord’s coming! Also, with the secular New Year a month away, an opportunity to “warm up” for whatever changes in life one has planned com January.

New Years are just a artificial temporal construct, I mean, one day is much like any other along the calendar. Seasonal changes aside, when we actually start marking a new journey about the Sun is arbitrary.

But, it serves a useful psychological purpose. Like new starts and such. For example, my oft-repeated plans to “blog more.” 😛

The short fiction I mentioned in For the first time in about a quarter century… was rejected. I think I got a form-letter rejection email. I will submit it elsewhere, perhaps after reviewing it again. If it gets rejected again (I am unsure as to how many more times I’l try) I may self-publish the piece through Smashwords and Amazon for $.99, even though I said in a comment to that post that I wouldn’t.

The awesome writing website, Writing-World.com! has The Writer’s Year Datebook & Planner for 2014 as well as a submission tracker. They offer free spreadsheet versions to download. Don’t let the word “spreadsheet” be intimidating, it’s easy to write in and to keep to-do lists/journals/notes and keep track of story and article submissions.

Are you a creative Catholic? ""Building a Civilization of Love: A Call to Creative Catholics," is my new book exhorting Catholics to apply their faith to change the culture for the better!

Know someone who is an alcoholic or addict? "The Sober Catholic Way" helps Catholics by describing the many ways in which their faith can assist in maintaining sobriety, and is a basic handbook on how anyone can live a sober life. . (Thank you!!)

For the first time in about a quarter century…

… I may be submitting a short story for publication.

I last did that back in the 1980s, without success. I forget how many stories I submitted, but it was a single digit number.

If this is surprising given all my talk about my writing aspirations, let’s just say that I probably expanded the frontier of reasons for “not having written,” at least successfully.

The last time I actually submitted anything for consideration was a spec script for the TV series, “Star Trek: The Next Generation” in 1991. I am not counting that in my quarter century mark as it wasn’t an original short story of mine (original story idea, yes. But not original to me as Star Trek is someone else’s universe.) The script wasn’t purchased by the Star Trek people, obviously. If so, life would have taken a very different path. But it was rejected and I subsequently became distracted by trying to achieve self-reliance and a decent income with real day jobs while living in Southern California. After 4 years I left, then basically gave up writing for over a decade. I also drank for most of that time. Writers stereotypically are noted for being drinkers. Leave it to me to give up writing and take up drinking, or take up writing while NOT drinking. 😉

Earlier this week I awakened from a nap with a vision and an opening line in my head. I decided to take and run with it, and the result is an 1800ish-word short fiction piece which I think is suitable for the online magazine Daily Science Fiction. I spent a considerable amount of time reading the stories they’ve already published (they’re archived) and I honestly think that “Cold Creations” is a fit, and is comparable in writing quality.

Nevertheless, I am faced with the raw, naked terror of doing this. What if it’s rejected? WHAT IF IT’S PURCHASED?!?!?!?!? At long last, my dream of finally being called a professional writer, and a science-fiction one at that, may be achieved. My heart may not survive the shock of the pent-up decades-long wait. 😉

Daily Science Fiction is a fine online magazine for people who enjoy reading good science-fiction, fantasy and all related subgenres. It’s free to read, either online or email subscription. They also pay well, $.08 a word.

Are you a creative Catholic? ""Building a Civilization of Love: A Call to Creative Catholics," is my new book exhorting Catholics to apply their faith to change the culture for the better!

Know someone who is an alcoholic or addict? "The Sober Catholic Way" helps Catholics by describing the many ways in which their faith can assist in maintaining sobriety, and is a basic handbook on how anyone can live a sober life. . (Thank you!!)