An Afterword for THE BOOK OF DAVID Part One: "Inception and Autobiography"

Esteemed Reader, if ever there was a strange book to promote from a site traditionally devoted to middle grade fiction, it's The Book of David. But this is my site (I can barely be bothered to manage one website, let alone a second), so we're doing this thing:) 

As much as I love writing stories targeted to a younger audience, I also love extremely gory fiction with gratuitous profanity, and life's too short to worry what other people might think about the disparity between my loves. I am who I am, I love what I love, and as seemingly anti-middle-grade as it is to have published this bonkers book that's likely to offend a whole lot of people, I'm as proud of The Book of David as I am of Banneker Bones and the Giant Robot Bees.

All that being said, although we're not going to discuss sex or violence in this post (just lost half its readership, I'm sure), and I'm not going to swear, I am going to discuss a story that contains all of those things and more. It also contains my only character (to date) who happens to be a middle grade writer. For that reason, I think some Esteemed Readers who enjoy this blog might also enjoy The Book of David, if you can get past all the swearing... and the sex... and the violence.. and the blasphemy.

The Book of David, which I will from this paragraph forward mostly refer to as BOD to save space, has a warning on its first page and in its book description for a reason. This book is not appropriate for younger readers. I wouldn't let my kid read it and I would never give a copy to your child. Should they obtain a copy elsewhere, this is me giving parents a heads up to use extreme discretion.

Don't write me an angry email or yell at me at a signing. Pay attention to your kids and what they're reading, dude.

Also, this is an afterword, to be read after you've read the book. Why you'd want to read this before and spoil the surprises of the story I've worked so hard to craft for you, I don't know. You can do whatever you like, but if I get a vote, I vote you read the book first. 

There are other non-spoiler aspects of BOD I've discussed elsewhere that I won't be discussing in depth here. So if you want to know my thoughts on UFOs, or why there are so many gosh darn cuss words in the book, or you just want me to admit I want to be Stephen King when I grow up, here are some posts related to BOD in which I discuss those things:

          An Open Letter to Stephen King

          Author, Year Two

          Author, Year Three

          On Using Naughty Words in Fiction

          On Conspiracy Theories and Flying Saucers

          Funeral for a Friend (in which I discuss my failed novel)

          On the Destructive Desire for Fame (And Ben Affleck)


For this afterword, I'm specifically going to discuss some of my experiences writing BOD and some of the personal autobiographical elements that inevitably make their way into every work of fiction (or at least, they do in mine). I'm also going to share with you some insights, including some photos from my son's nursery readers might enjoy seeing (those are in Part Two). I wonder about the wisdom of sharing too much as I think some things are better left to the reader's imagination. 

So let me preface everything by saying: regardless of the author's thoughts on his story, the reader's experience is her own.

If you thought the best theme song for BOD should've been "Black Hole Sun" by Soundgarden, I disagree, but that's a great song and it's your call. Over the year and a half it took me to write all five chapters of BOD, 200+ songs found their way into my writing playlist, many of them mentioned in the book. Favorites were "Power" by Kanye West, "Handlebars" by Flobots, "Reckoner" by Radiohead, "You Die or I do" by Hans Zimmer, "Imagine" as sung by Scott Bakula (naturally), "My Body is a Cage" as sung by Peter Gabriel, "When You See Those Flying Saucers" as sung by The Charles River Valley Boys, and "Soul on Fire" by Third Day. And just what sort of Hoosier would I be if I wrote an Indiana story without listening to John Cougar Melencamp's little ditty about "Jack and Diane?"

But in my mind the song that will forever be mentally linked to BOD is "A Blessing" by Max Richter. I've read that writing is a form of self hypnosis and I don't doubt it. I find it useful to have a theme song of sorts to begin each writing session to put me in "the mood" of the story. The somber, beautiful, hopeful, yet heartbreaking sounds of Richter's strings brought to my mind the sort of slow motion tragedy I intended to write. I didn't want to write just satire or horror, though I'll count myself lucky to have accomplished either; I wanted to move the reader the way Max Richter moved me. I can't imagine Miriam Walters wailing in the street outside her haunted house or David Walters finally telling his father, "I only ever wanted you to love me," without thinking of "A Blessing."

Right off the bat, it's a bit of a spoiler for me to tell you that of the many writers and works I drew upon to influence the creation of BOD, the foremost works my book is consciously modeled after are The Shining and, perhaps less immediately apparent, Stranger in a Strange Land. A great debt is also owed to the comedy of Bill Hicks, who I think would've got on well with Sexy Jesus, multiple articles published at Cracked.com, Hugh Howey's Wayfinding series, Vince Gilligan, as I've jokingly, but half-seriously thought of this story as "Breaking God," and the research and lectures of Richard Dolan, my favorite UFO historian, who was kind enough to email some words of support during the writing of BOD that meant quite a lot to me.

There are two quotes from Robert Heinlein about Stranger in a Strange Land that I kept in mind while crafting my own novel. When facing pressures to tone down the more controversial aspects of his masterpiece, he said, “If I cut out religion and sex, I am very much afraid that I will end with a nonalcoholic martini." As to the reaction of certain readers to his work, he said,  “I was not giving answers. I was trying to shake the reader loose from some preconceptions and induce him to think for himself, along new and fresh lines. In consequence, each reader gets something different out of that book because he himself supplies the answers. It is an invitation to think, not to believe.” 

That pretty well covers it and I cannot improve upon Heinlein, so when it comes to my own novel, I'll just say, "what he said."

I can't always tell you where the ideas for my stories come from, but with BOD, I can: I was actively looking for an idea. I wanted to write a serial novel (it's a bucket list item I can now check off), I wanted it to be a horror story for adults, and I wanted it to be something I thought older fans of All Together Now would enjoy. Having recently become parents, Mrs. Ninja and I were house shopping to leave apartment life and the last of our extended adolescence behind. So a haunted house story seemed a natural choice and another bucket list item to be checked off.

I was debating whether or not there was anything new to be done with a haunted house I hadn't read multiple versions of already. I'd just about decided there was not when an only just barely original idea occurred to me: what if at the end of The Shining, Jack Torrance carried a Bible instead of a croquet mallet and instead of talking to ghosts to help him find Danny and Wendy, he had a whole church congregation saying, "right this way, brother, they're over here."

That idea made me laugh hysterically as the best ideas so often do (you can't fake love), and then immediately terrified me. "Don't you dare write that, Kent," I told myself. "You already ticked off enough religious folks with the zombie stories. Why would a nice Middle Grade Ninja like yourself want to upset your mother with such an offensive and outrageous tale destined to result in angry one-star reviews and emails and a general wishing of ill will upon you? Don't you dare write that story! Write something nice."

This was sensible advice, so I got back to work on Banneker Bones 2 and Zombies 3. But the thing about a great idea is that it won't leave you alone. Stephen King has said he never writes down his ideas as the good ones fight for a writer's attention, and I've found that to be very true. I was busy buying a house and living my life and the voice in my head that speaks up when my subconscious has worked out a story problem would every so often whisper tantalizing details to me: "the man's name is David and he has special powers because he's maybe/maybe not been appointed to be God's prophet. He believes he's an atheist and he's got a real sensible job, like a banker or something, but you can't fight destiny." And I would say, "No, the man's name is nothing, because I'm not writing that."

"It could end with a shocker like Stranger in a Strange Land--I mean,not exactly like that, but not not like that."
"Lalalala, I'm not listening."
"There's a painting on David's wall that talks to him. Guess Who the painting's of? Just guess. Sexy Jesus."
"That's even more offensive than the original idea! I'm not doing this. I mean that's pretty good, but... what would David even preach about?"
"The End Times, of course. And bankers, because seriously, f**k bankers. And David is himself a banker, so how deliciously ironic, right? Oh, and UFOs since you have to use all that 'research' you've done late at night on YouTube for something."
"Oooh, that's... that's... No, I'm not writing that. But if I did write it, could I call it The Book of David?"
"Absolutely."
"Crap. I can't not write it now. I'll spend the rest of my life wishing I had."

To understand why this idea so captured my imagination, I should share some personal information, beginning with where the title comes from. I was once a smart alec kid trapped in Sunday School who knew enough about the Bible to make my teacher hopeful, but was enough of a thinker to ask all the vexing questions that follow anyone compelling one to take something on faith. 

And sometimes I'd quote Bible verses that didn't, strictly speaking, exist, but which should've. On one such occasion when my teacher called my bluff and asked me to find the verse, I told her it was in "The Book of David." All the other kids laughed and it became a running joke when I spoke up and I laughed as well, but in the back of my mind I thought, "one day you'll see." So the title of my novel itself is its own bucket list item.

I don't write autobiographies. A novel about me playing video games while I listen to audiobooks after a day of spending time with my family would interest no one, not even me. Doubtless, some readers will ascribe qualities of my characters and their situation to me. No offense taken as this is a common experience for most authors and kinda goes with the territory. 

But for the record, I have (to date) never seen a flying saucer or a demonic alien (that I'm aware of), nor lived in a haunted house, nor been addicted to pills or booze or any of the other drugs in this book I had to research to write about, nor French kissed a baby (I once heard about a creep who did and have wondered about him ever since), nor had a conversation with any come-to-life paintings. My marriage is much, much better than the Walters' as is my relationship with my parents, which is much less compelling for a book. I have bumped into a couple situations of high strangeness, but I'm saving some of those for future novels:)

I have struggled with a cigarette addiction (I'm not smoking now unless you've got an extra cigarette) and I did grow up in a small Indiana town. I did buy a house not long ago and switch to part-time work so that my son wouldn't have to go to daycare (I would've never just quit my job without Mrs. Ninja's consent; WTF, Miriam!?!). None of those things is interesting enough on its own to sustain a novel, so I added a whole lotta lies to reveal some metaphorical Truths.

Here is something that is true: my grandmother lived in a house across from the park in the small Indiana town where I grew up and it really did have a white sign with multi-colored lettering on its front that read "Jesus Wants To Give YOU Eternal Life" (I added the exclamation point in the book) and it really was a local landmark. I love my grandmother and I miss her terribly (if there is an afterlife, she's the one I'm presently most looking forward to seeing), but I hated that stupid sign. When the school bus passed her house, not every day, but enough days, someone would mock me for it. That sign is present in many family photos and forever printed across my memory. To the best of my knowledge, the house that the sign was attached to is haunted only by memories, most of them good.

But over the years, the message of that sign, "Jesus Wants To Give YOU Eternal Life," began to seem to me less like an enticing offer and more like a threat.

This same beloved grandmother was once chased by a flying saucer. I believed her when she told me about it and I've never doubted her since. I also had a cousin who saw multiple flying saucers, which really ticked her off as she was a strict science teacher and extremely uncomfortable with the experience she probably would've never admitted to having if she'd been alone. The memory of her annoyance as she tried to tell me facts about the world and I insisted on asking her again about the flying saucers still makes me smile. Over the years, I've collected enough credible UFO stories from various sources that I find staunch non-believers tiresome and silly.

Here is something else that is true, though more difficult to discuss and less likely to be believed: I have, at different times in my life, experienced moments of extreme intuition and Déjà vu. I believe this is a common experience that folks mostly keep to themselves. To be crystal clear, I am not saying I have super powers or even a particularly practical skill. But at different times in my life, I've had flashes of insight that shouldn't have been possible for me to have in reality as I've come to expect it to behave; experiences that have led me to question the nature of existence and refuse outright atheism. Here is an account I wrote about one such experience. Good fiction reveals a truth inside the lie, and you can choose not to believe me on this point, but believe that I believe it, and it is a Truth I wanted to express.

I believe psychic communication is possible as are a whole lot of other wacky scenarios in part because of my own experiences, even though they've been mostly mundane stuff. Sometimes I'll recognize someone's future importance to me the moment I first meet them. When I met Mrs. Ninja, I knew pretty quickly she was the one. I've known when something tragic was coming and something good, but I can't decide what to know or when and I've had plenty of false alarms. I wouldn't pick a stock or place a bet based on my intuition, but when my sixth sense kicks in, I've learned to pay attention, and I've talked to plenty of folks who've had similar experiences. The world is an interesting place and there are odd things in it to be found by those who go looking.

When our realtor showed us the house we would buy, I knew it was the one as soon as we pulled up. I experienced flashes of our living here as though they were already memories (This is the place, welcome home). You can think I'm a crackpot (did I mention I believe in flying saucers?), but I've had similar experiences throughout my entire life and I'm just being honest because I have no doubt there are Esteemed Readers who know exactly what I'm talking about. I have often wondered if this sense of mine wouldn't one day come in handy when at last divine prophecies were revealed to me, because...

Here is one other thing that's true: I occasionally preached as an adolescent, though never at the level of David Walters. After one occasion of my speaking in front of our church, a respected missionary who was a man of great faith and integrity really and truly did pull me aside and told me that God had revealed to him that I, Robert Kent, future author of Pizza Delivery, would one day be a prophet of the Lord.

Honest. That happened.

It wasn't the exact scenario I wrote in my story, because, again, where's the fun in that? If Esteemed Reader wanted real life, they wouldn't be reading fiction. I didn't smack my head on a podium or see any bright lights or aliens. That's all bullcrap I added to show Esteemed Reader a good time. People like stories that are fun and full of conflict.

I remember the moment of this man telling me of my coming prophecy very clearly. He held my shoulders as he spoke the declaration with all the seriousness of Garrick Ollivander giving Harry Potter his wand. He went back to the mission field quickly after that, so I never got to ask many follow-up questions. But I've never forgotten our conversation and it has weighed on me heavily during different periods of my life. I've both longed for it to be true and been terrified at the possibility that it might be.

One last thing that actually happened: When I was first learning to drive, I was behind the wheel on a trip from Chicago back to small town Indiana and I really did have occasion to slam the brakes while traveling at 65 miles-per-hour. My father was in the passenger side seat, my brother was sleeping in the back, and we all screamed as the family roadster spun around in the center of the highway, cars passing on either side. Did God save us? It certainly felt like it at the time and I haven't come up with a better explanation in all the intervening years. Nor was that the only time I've been bailed out by Something greater than myself.

So am I God's prophet? Dude, I don't know. I hate to say "no" as it's a fun fantasy to indulge in. I will say that my prophetic status strikes me as an extremely dubious proposition. I can think of far more popular blogs than this one and more successful authors far better positioned than me for God to use as His mouthpiece for mankind (one would think He'd pick a filmmaker, or at least a writer with less of a potty mouth).

I can't promise that an angel won't yet come to me to reveal The Truth and command me to share it with the world. But I'm older than Jesus ever was at this point without having had even a single prophetic vision and should I start having them now, I imagine my credibility will be greatly undercut by my having published this fictional account of a man who does have such visions. This was one of the reasons I wrote the book; as an insurance policy:)

Tell you what: though I took most of the predictions David makes from actual doctrines, if some of it starts to come true, we'll know I called it because I was a prophet:)

What's important for our purposes is that I did believe this missionary when I heard him and for a long time after. While growing up, I used to fantasize about one day writing books or making movies (or both), then I'd remind myself that I really needed to be preparing for my coming prophecy.

When I got older and ditched my faith for a time, I laughed bitterly at the memory and concluded that this missionary was either a loon or worse, a liar (smug, young punk atheists are quick to write off large portions of the world as crazy).

Was it the missionary's schtick, I wondered. None of the other kids at my church had been told they would be prophets (I asked), but was it possible this creepy dude went from church to church and occasionally pulled aside the kid he judged most likely to be a sucker? I have a brother and two sisters who have all been missionaries, and two of them have been ministers, so obviously there's something to Proverbs 22:6, which was the key Bible verse that propelled my desire to write BOD.

While we're on the subject of Bible verses, I should mention that none of the verses quoted in BOD are actually replicated in any existing editions of the good book. It turns out Bible translations are copyrighted, which is gross and wrong and one of many terrible things about the modern world and possibly evidence of Satan's work in publishing (joking, mostly). But I don't want to be sued, so every "Bible verse" in BOD is my own translation, worded however I felt best suited the story. I remember my own disappointment in finding Ezekial 25:17 in the King James Bible is nothing like Jules Winnfield thinks it is:)

Esteemed Reader, that brings us to a discussion of the actual writing of BOD and the techniques employed, and as I see that this Afterword is quickly catching up in length to the book,  why don't we save that for next time? We'll be discussing the crafting of the story and the characters in Part Two and I'll show you some pictures of the animals actually painted on the walls of Little Ninja's nursery, if you'd care to join me...

NINJA STUFF: Funeral For A Friend (in which I discuss my failed novel)

It's a somber occasion, Esteemed Reader, so I hope you're wearing a black tie. Today I say goodbye to a book I once loved and still have some feelings for, even if I'm the only one. Actually, my critique partners and Mrs. Ninja also have strong feelings for the book, but not positive ones:)

I have a whole bookcase full of old manuscripts and screenplays, but most of them I promise myself can eventually be developed into better books. And why not? Banneker Bones and the Giant Robot Bees took five years of revision before it was published and Pizza Delivery took 13. I have other stories that aren't ready for a readership yet, but may be revisited, even my 300-page screenplay about Batman. I've got a western that I would totally rework and publish if I could just get myself to change its inappropriate title (won't do it), an erotic horror novella that will never see the light of day, a story about a dying hooker that was good for me to write at the time and that no one should have to read, and some other stories that are actually pretty good that I hope to one day rewrite and make available.

But Straw Houses, my first epic adult horror novel about victims of alien abduction, has been picked over for parts and its ashes have been spread over my other works. All Together Now: A Zombie Story stole part of its ending, Banneker Bones and the Giant Robot Bees stole some of its characters (Grandma Juanita was the only character in Straw Houses I genuinely liked, and I transported her to Banneker's world as an apology for first putting her in such a terrible novel), and now The Book Of David has stolen its best scenes and ideas. In fact, that last book is very much Straw Houses 2.0, and if I've finally written a decent long horror story involving UFO lore, it's only because I first devoted a couple years of my life to learning how NOT to write a long horror story involving UFO lore. 

So what went wrong? Like an athlete watching old games or comedians listening to past routines, I think authors should revisit their own works from time to time to assess their weaknesses and strategize for future victory. So this post will be a useful exercise for me and possibly interesting to you writers out there as well. And if it's not, next week we'll be back to interviews with authors, publishing professionals, and guest posts by the same. Plenty of useful archives for you to read if me mourning my dead book doesn't interest you:)

Here are the issues with Straw Houses as I see now them on this side of seven years past two years' writing and revising and rewriting and revising:

1. I didn't have a plan going in. Every writer has to decide where they sit on the spectrum between diligent, plodding plotter and fly-by-the-seat-of-their-pantser, free-spirited, I-just-write-it-as-it-comes-to-me-man-cause-its-my-art-man dirty hippie:) Through trial and error, I've learned I do better if I know the ending up front (or at least have a good idea what it might be). I leave open the possibility that the characters will change the ending, and they frequently do, but not by much.

With Straw Houses, I had a lot of passion because I was nine years younger, not yet married or a father, and more of a UFO enthusiast. I was evangelical in my suspicions of conspiracy. I've since mellowed and backed off, having learned the hard way that it pays to be cautious with overly-interesting theories:) But in my enthusiasm, I decided to take an interesting situation: a small town Indiana couple, interracial like Betty and Barney Hill, comes to in their car, parked on a country road, with no memory of the five hours that have just passed. Meanwhile, another man in town is menaced by a UFO late at night that appears in his backyard and speaks to him. The two stories converge because the men are coworkers who confess their separate incidents after a UFO appears above the Harrington courthouse and one of them snaps a picture of it that becomes world-famous.

It's a good set up for a novel. Even now, knowing how it turned out, I still feel the opening was pretty swell. It's got plenty of intrigue and I may yet write at least a short story in which a UFO shows up over the courthouse of a small Indiana town because that is just pure fun. Aside from a few other issues we'll come to, I think the first 100-150 pages of Straw Houses is one of my most gripping openings. Unfortunately, the book went on for another 700 pages and I had no clue what happened next:) I just assumed I'd figure it out as I went. I didn't.


2. The characters weren't likable or, worse, interesting. The main character, Charles Cavanaugh, was a jerk who whined a lot, treated his wife poorly, and didn't have a goal other than to stop being abducted by aliens. That's motivation enough for the protagonist of a short story (Brock Clouser's main motivation in Pizza Delivery is not to get murdered) but not a stupid-long novel.

Charles was a financial consultant at Mitchell and Reynolds Investments because I always thought it was funny that a straight-edge banker be abducted by aliens, which is why David Walters works at the same branch in The Book of David and meets many of the characters from Straw Houses, which is interesting only to me and the handful of other people who read my first attempt:) Charles' wife, Christine, is even worse, and the two of them together were deplorable. They were always fighting.

The couple wasn't fighting because I was ticked at Mrs. Ninja and looking for a place to put it, but because conflict drives stories and I hadn't given the Cavanaughs an actionable conflict, so they turned on each other to keep pages turning:) And, okay, I was contemplating getting married and chose to create a worst-case scenario marriage. Ultimately, the Cavanaughs fought so much I convinced myself and my few readers their relationship was doomed, so there wasn't anything at stake. The other characters were a little better, but not much because...


3. I never established a clear concept or overarching conflict to drive the novel. Whoops:) The number one thing I learned about writing my first long horror story about UFOs is that "realistic" aliens make lousy villains. Fictional aliens to which I can assign a motive and make clear their plan would probably be bang-up antagonists, and I'm sure I'll write about some eventually. But I wanted to incorporate as many details from modern UFO sightings and abductions as possible, and if you've done that research (here's a place to start), you'll notice there is no consensus about where flying saucers come from and what their motives are.

That's fine for an hour-long program of talking heads on the History Channel, but it's not's fine for a long novel. I had the same problem as the film Twister in that my villains weren't worthy villains with a goal that brings them into conflict with the "hero" in a credible way ("You've never seen a tornado miss this house and miss that house and come after you!").

About 300 pages in, after multiple UFO encounters and detailed flashbacks to suppressed memories of alien abduction, my characters began to suspect that the aliens were actually demons. The problem then is the demonic aliens still didn't have a clear plan or motivation other than to mess with our heroes, apparently by convincing one of them that she had alien babies being raised on another planet. Worse, the heroes could now pray the aliens away, which is not an exciting finale to a long novel.

My attempted solution was to hold off revealing that the aliens were demons until the end of the novel after Charles Cavanaugh attempted multiple means of fighting them off. But this just exacerbated the original problem of the villains being without a clear motive, leaving our hero without a real goal until page 750 or so. Even my mother isn't going to read a story like that.


4. I molded the story to serve its theme rather than allowing the theme to emerge from the story. In my mind, Straw Houses was destined to be literature read and studied for ages to come. What a fool I was. Only The Book of David and my other super important and impressive volumes of literature will be studied by future generations:)

About the same time I decided the aliens were demons, which is to say way too far along in the novel to reconsider, I decided they must be the big bad wolf. Oh my God, put on your tweed jacket with the leather patches and light your pipe, I've got myself a metaphor! I had two households being antagonized by a big bad wolf. If I had a third,  he could metaphorically huff and puff and blow two houses down, but then also the third, because in the end don't we all live in Straw Houses (Get it? Get it? I hate you, me from the past).

So I added a third house and a fourth major character about 300 pages in for the soul purpose of later killing him and showing that his metaphorical house wasn't built so good after all. At one point the demonic aliens called him on the phone and were all like, "Are you scared? We know your phone number!!!" And this happened because he wasn't tied into the main plot that was already going.


5. I ended a very long book with a total downer ending. This goes hand in hand with my previous mistake as missteps build on each other to lead a writer way off path.

I've always been suspicious of that third little pig in the brick house. Why's he so happy at the end of the story? Both his brothers got ate up and he's all alone. I mean, he's safe, so long as he never goes outside again. I realize I'm reading too much into an allegory, but I maintain that third pig is not a happy fellow.

So, after 800 some-odd pages of UFOs torturing our three households (or huffing and puffing) one character kills himself, one gets shot by a woman who is herself possessed by an alien demon, one character is killed when she attempts to flee the ritual suicide of a UFO cult, and our main character, Charles Cavanaugh, is left all alone to mourn his dead homies and never be happy again. Here's the actual ending:

     Only Charles remained. He was the smart pig who built his house of brick, the wise man who built his house upon the stone. The rains came down and the winds came up, and the wolf huffed and puffed, but he couldn’t get old Charles’s house down. Charles Cavanaugh was the wise man living on the rock. Charles Cavanaugh was the clever pig in the brick house and he was doing just fine, thank you very much.
     Charles filled his glass to the brim with whiskey and a dash of Sprite. He listened to the roar of the surf outside the kitchen window and the quiet stillness all around him. There were no voices, no other sounds of any kind. There was no one else here, only him.
     Charles raised the glass to his lips and began to drink.

Now, if I were Esteemed Reader, after dutifully acknowledging that I'd clearly just read the next Adventures of Huckleberry Finn penned by a modern master of the craft whose every brilliant sentence allows me to believe in a brighter tomorrow, I might be ticked to have read so much story only for all the characters to die or otherwise be miserable and no resolution to be had for any of them. I know all my critique partners were angry:)

Metaphorically, it's true that every character in the story had demonstrated the weakness that led to their undoing, but that just makes readers want to know about the characters who didn't screw up their lives and my 800-page tome would've been better off including some (even if it messed up the three-little pigs motif, which is really better left to James Patterson).

So, from this experience, I learned that as a rule: downer endings are more acceptable at the end of shorter works. Readers are generally more forgiving if they've invested less time with the doomed protagonist. Better yet is the downer ending that's still somewhat happy for at least one or two major characters. Conversely, a happy ending is better tempered with at least a little darkness.


One mistake I made with Straw Houses that is no longer a mistake was the length. The plot problems would've still been an issue had it been a shorter book, though I might've got away with a narrative poem:)  I like long horror novels and am convinced there is still a market for them. And there's a very good reason some of my most favorite horror novels have been long.

The most astute critique I ever heard of Stephen King came from a fellow Burger King employee many, many years ago when the Ninja was a teenager. We both agreed King's stories were amazing, and by far the scariest, but he remarked, "Doesn't it seem like if you shook hands with that dude at a party, you'd have to chew through your wrist to get away?" I have thought about that criticism ever since every time I reread King's works, but also when I read other long books.

I've talked at length about my undying love for Stephen King, but my coworker did have a point. There have been a few Stephen King novels when I've wondered if the editor just didn't feel comfortable asking Mr. King to please not review other writer's books in the middle of the book Constant Reader paid for (get a blog, man). And yet most of King's novels are white-hot reading experiences demanding to be read as quickly as possible that are still popular decades after they were written, despite large word counts. So either Stephen King is just super lucky every book (and no doubt, some luck was involved), or there's a method to his madness.

Many of Stephen King's books thrive on details. They have to. He's asked Constant Reader to suspend their disbelief by quite a lot on numerous occasions.

The Shining has a cast of four major characters in a straightforward horror story that can be boiled down to a few sentences or endless 2-5 minute animated parodies. King took 160,000 words to tell his version and it worked and continues to work. King is a master salesman who convinces Constant Reader that his characters are real people because Constant Reader will know everything that's relevant about them. King convinces Constant Reader that the situation those real characters are in is real as well.

Even if it takes King 444,000 words, Constant Reader will believe there is a killer clown in the sewers capable of transforming into their worst fear and Constant Reader will believe because every detail about that fantasy will add up to an argument convincing enough until the lights come on again.

Straw Houses at its longest draft was 182,000 words. A literary agent literally laughed in my face when I told her. Nobody was going to traditionally publish a novel that long by a debut author, she said, and she was right. That's not the same as saying there aren't readers looking for long horror stories. If they've read King (and what kind of jerk loves horror and doesn't read King?), they know those seemingly mundane details add up, like the passes of a hypnotist's golden watch, to convince the reader the story is real and that they should be terrified.

The compilation of all five volumes of The Book of David is 276,000 words. I knew going in it would be a long story because it asks the reader to suspend their disbelief about a whole lot of stuff, the least of which is that flying saucers and alien abductions are real and a practical concern for everyday people:) But I learned my lesson from previous mistakes and published this very long story as five books, which allows for marketing considerations. 

Because I only get paid for the fifth book if Esteemed Reader made it through the first four, this insured that I would be forced to keep the narrative focused with built in cliffhangers.

I did a few other things differently in writing The Book of David that I knew to do only because I'd first written Straw Houses:

1. I absolutely had a plan going in. I knew what the last chapter would be before I wrote the first one, while keeping the plot flexible enough to allow the characters to dictate their own actions (sometimes). I didn't have a full outline, but I did have a list of planned events to help me determine where each chapter needed to start and stop to get where I wanted to go.


2. I had a clear concept going in: The Walters family has bought a haunted house. From the first line of Chapter One to the last line of Chapter Five, this is a haunted house story. There are aliens and flying saucers, but the reader is told in Chapter One as well as in the book's description that those aliens may actually be demons. There's an alien with demonic horns on the cover. My cards are pretty much on the table from the start. And the aliens are prominently featured without ever bearing the responsibility of being the primary antagonist. This is a haunted house story with aliens in it, not an alien story with a haunted house in it. 

3. Because I knew the ending, I knew some of what the themes were likely to be and allowed them to emerge from the story rather than bending the story to serve the themes. If you read the whole story from start to finish and don't pick up that this is a story in part about addiction and in part about parenting, you won't be bothered because the plot moves right along without your needing to pick the themes up. If you don't think it's thematically relevant that every volume starts with "Do you believe? Do you have faith?" then maybe it isn't. I'm okay with The Book of David being thematically misunderstood so long as Esteemed Reader is entertained and kept in suspense. This is a for fun story, not homework.


4. David and Miriam Walters are both flawed characters, but they're also likeable and they have actionable goals. I know because I used critique partners' and beta readers' feedback to rewrite my characters until I knew they were likeable and I wrote out fact sheets about them to keep them consistent through five volumes of story. I know all kinds of details about them that aren't relevant enough to be in the book. It thrilled my heart when one Esteemed Reader wrote in a review, "The main character David is down to earth and likable which is a good part of what makes this book so enjoyable to read." I couldn't have paid someone to write a better compliment than that, assuring me the book was doing what I wanted it to do.


5. The ending is satisfying, whatever the author's opinion of it does for you:) I didn't write 279,000 words just to tell you the ending on my free blog, but I do feel it's my best ending of all my stories so far published. It makes me smile to think of how I hope Esteemed Reader will feel when they reach it.


There were many other mistakes made in Straw Houses, some of which I'm probably still making because I don't yet know they were mistakes:) But every story I've told since Straw Houses has been better because I wrote that ill-fated novel destined to sit on my shelf of manuscripts that are, sigh, not good enough. Straw Houses taught me the lessons I needed to know to write the manuscripts that are.

That shelf of old manuscripts isn't a graveyard of failed dreams. It's a monument to the heroic efforts made by the stories who went first so future stories could resonate with Esteemed Reader. 

"The Lord has appointed you to a special duty in these last days and given your life a unique purpose. Will you turn away from the myriad temptations of this wicked world and answer His righteous calling?"

The Walters family has just purchased the perfect home if only it weren't located in the small hick town of Harrington, Indiana, and if only it weren't haunted. David Walters is an atheist now, but his minister father taught him from a young age that Satan would one day deceive all mankind by pretending his demons were extraterrestrials. The day the Walters family moves in, they spot a flying saucer outside their new home. Things only get stranger from there. David Walters is about to learn what it means to be truly haunted, forcing him to confront his past, fight for his family, his soul, and his sanity.


WARNING

This horror story is intended for a mature audience. It's filled with adult language, situations, and themes. It's in no way appropriate for the easily offended or younger readers of BANNEKER BONES AND THE GIANT ROBOT BEES.

Book Review: LOOKING FOR JACK KEROUAC by Barbara Shoup

WARNING: This week’s book is actually edgy YA and is filled with adult content. It's absolutely not appropriate for younger readers and adults should view it as the equivalent of an ‘R’ rated movie.

First Paragraph(s): IT WASN’T DUKE WALCZAK’S FAULT that I took off for Florida, like Kathy thought. The truth is, we started getting sideways with each other on our class trip to New York and Washington D.C. nearly a year earlier—which, looking back, is ironic since she was the one dead set on going. 
Not that I wouldn’t have loved to go…anywhere, especially New York, if I could have gone on my own and just wandered, searching for the places I’d read about in books. But I didn’t like hanging out with big groups of kids at home, so why would I want to hang out with them in New York? And, believe me, two days of lockstep sightseeing once we got there didn’t change my mind about that. Not to mention our tour guide talking us senseless, determined to tell us every single thing she knew.


It's to be a more mature YA novel this week, Esteemed Reader (it's got F-bombs and N-bombs, so be warned), if that works for you. Barbara Shoup has long been on my to-be-read pile as there are only so many Indiana authors publishing young adult  and I like to read stories about my state I didn't write to see how it could be done better:) Next week we'll be chatting about It's A Wonderful Death by fellow Hoosier scribe Sara J. Schmitt. I've seen John Green around town, but haven't been able to ask him one question, let alone seven of them, and Kurt Vonnegut so rudely expired before I started this blog (though I did get to see him read), but otherwise I intend to feature as many Indiana authors as I can. It restores my faith in my state and makes up for the many adult Hoosiers who don't even have the good sense to appear properly ashamed when they tell me they don't read.

Looking for Jack Kerouac starts out in East Chicago, Indiana in 1960s, but naturally, it becomes a book about a road trip. What else can we expect from a book that invokes the author of On the Road and has classic cars on its cover? This is a trip you want to take, Esteemed Reader, and one I'm sorry to have finished so soon. I absolutely loved this book. I loved that it never condescends to its reader or attempts to patch a solution onto a situation for which there isn't one and I love that its honest and eloquent in its execution.

Paul Carpetti is in a period of transition many of us older readers will remember well. He's just graduated high school and now he's faced with the big question: what next? His mother has died just before the start of the novel and his girlfriend has moved to take her place as much as possible. She's got plans for Paul to be her husband and father of 2.5 kids with a home in the suburbs and all the rest of it. Paul simply needs to show up to work at his dead-end job, put his brain on autopilot, and everything will simply fall into place for him.

Naturally, it's time for him to get out of town. His reasons for needing a road adventure are myriad, but number one on his list is the love of a great novel, which makes him my kind of protagonist:

I wanted like Sal wanted, too—I didn’t even know what I wanted. I just wanted. Maybe everything. It was like an ache sometimes, that wanting. I never mentioned it. There wasn’t a single person in my life who’d have understood, even if I had been able to explain it—and I doubted I could. But lost in the pages of On the Road, I felt like…myself. Like the book knew who I was, knew what I wanted, and was speaking back to me somehow.

Actually, it Paul's new friend Duke Walczak I most identified with. He's got a head full of "dangerous" new ideas, the makings of a future alcoholic, and a dream of being a writer. Paul's girlfriend sees Duke for what he is from the start: trouble. The story is a bit hard on old Duke, and to be fair, he's cruising for a bruising, but I felt more of a kinship to Duke as he reminded me of a foolish young Ninja I once knew many years ago:) Duke's the one who learns Jack Kerouac is hiding out in Florida through an obituary listing and his motives in seeking out the great writer are far less altruistic than Paul's, though I personally found them more relatable:

“It’s all there, ready to be made into the Great American Novel,” he said. The main character, Duke himself, was going to be named Jack Bliss, he said—Jack, of course. I was in it, too. Rocco Minetti. 
“Rocco Minetti?” I said. “That’s idiotic. Jesus. Don’t name me that.” 
“Rocco Minetti,” Duke repeated, firmly. “My book. My characters. You’ll like it just fine when you get famous because of it. Like Kerouac’s buddies did.” 
“Yeah, right,” I said. 
“You think that won’t happen? Hey! Put your money on it, man. It’s been ‘mutely and beautifully and purely decided.’ What I’m going to write in those Big Chiefs, starting today, will make Jack Kerouac look like old news.” 
“If you think that, how come you’re so hot to find him?” I asked. 
“To pay homage, man,” he said, indignantly. “To stand before him and, you know, get his blessing to carry the torch.”

The fellas hitchhike their way south, along the way encountering interesting people such as a sexy mermaid (a performer in a tail, not Ariel) in a convertible sports car who likes to party. And there's another girl later in the book, who may or may not be of particular interest to our heroes, and a certain famous writer who may or may not put in an appearance, though it would be spoiling to tell. Given that his name is in the title, it would be sort of weird if Jack Kerouac didn't show up, but maybe it's just a weird book--I'm not going to spoil it:)

One of my favorite of Paul and Duke's many encounters is a trucker named Bud:

“You got a truck, you got a rolling motel room.” He gestured over his shoulder, to a built-in bed between the seat and the back window. 
“You’ll notice, the wife even made me up some nice throw pillows.” He winked. “I’m going to tell you something, boys: In addition to all its other benefits, trucking is the secret to a happy marriage.” 
“How’s that?” Duke asked. 
“Simple,” Bud said. “You’re gone a lot, you see the world. You romance the occasional lady who doesn’t expect anything but a nice steak dinner and a few drinks for a roll in the hay. So you come home and find out the wife’s gone overboard with the Sears Roebuck catalogue? It’s a small price to pay to dodge the nine-to-five grind, coming home to tuna casserole, whiny kids, and mowing the grass every Saturday morning. There’s damn good money in it, too—if you can put together enough to get your own rig.”

What a charming fella that Bud is:) But the boys don't buy it:

But when Bud dropped us at a truck stop a few miles south of Clarksville and pulled into the truckers’ parking lot to sleep, Duke shook his head and laughed. “Poor old Bud. He thinks he’s got it knocked, but he’s just kidding himself. His leash is just longer than most other guys’, that’s all.”

Looking for Jack Kerouac is a fascinating read and worthy of closer examination, which I intend to give it, the way I might re-watch a magic trick in slow motion to catch the magician at work. One of the things I like about Bud is even though I wasn't alive in the sixties, I've met him. I've heard a similar spiel from truckers. But I picked his passage in particular because I believe its an example of Barbara Shoup at work. 

Thematically, marriage is shown again and again throughout the novel as a force of coming unhappiness (better throw up an example), the likes of which I haven't encountered since Revolutionary Road:

I flipped the TV channels for a while, coming up with nothing but moronic shows that only housewives would watch, which reminded me of dinner at Kathy’s house the night before. Mrs. Benson falling all over herself re-filling my plate of meatloaf, making sure I was happy in every possible way in between nagging Mr. Benson to death about chores that, if you listened to her, had to be done ten seconds after dinner was over, or the whole house was going to fall down around us. The sheepish grin Mr. Benson cast my way when she wasn’t looking, as if to say get used to it, buddy, a few years from now this will be you.

Paul's reason for skipping town in the first place is to avoid being herded into marriage. As I read, I couldn't help but notice the absence of any strong female characters except the conniving girlfriend and the overall picture painted of females is not particularly positive until late in the novel. I found myself thinking of how the female writers in my critique group would come after me if I turned in such a manuscript, and here this book was written by not-a-dude:)

But as usual, I was missing the point and was later amused to find myself genuinely challenged by a clever story. After all, the world is presented to us from the limited perspective of one Paul Carpetti. Barbara Shoup may or may not be a marriage enthusiast, but Paul has reason to fear marriage and women. It was a woman who hurt him and he's so very, very angry:

I was done feeling guilty about having a little fun, I decided. Seriously. I was so frigging tired of doing the right thing. Where had it gotten me? Where did it get my mom? Or my dad, for that matter? He was nuts about Mom, he treated her like a queen, and all he got was a broken heart.

If you're the sort of reader who needs to be spoon fed, Looking for Jack Kerouac may not be for you. But if you yearn for a more adult story about a young adult coming of age, Barbara Shoup has crafted a rewarding tale I'm glad to have read and am looking forward to rereading. 

I should end my review there as it's really long, but I can't finish without commenting on Shoup's treatment of history. There's a bit of nostalgia for an era gone by--isn't that the fun part of reading a Jack-Kerouac-themed road trip novel? But it's tempered with an unblinking view of that world as it was:

“Y’all do not want to be hitchhiking down through Georgia at night,” he said. “Niggers around here have gone plumb crazy.” 
“I’m not afraid of Negroes,” Duke said, stressing the correct pronunciation. “I’ve got friends back home who are Negroes.” 
“This ain’t the North, son,” Darnell said. “I got nothing against them myself—and it ain’t so much them you got to worry about, anyway. You know what happened to them friendly white boys in Mississippi this summer, don’t you? You want to end up like that?” 
Duke shrugged. But I’d read about shootings and lynchings by the Klan and by the police, too, who were likely to assume that two guys obviously from the North, like Duke and me, had come down to cause trouble, as they saw it.

It would've been perhaps easier to give us the 1960s lite, but less honest. Kudos to Shoup for having the courage to report the facts, including the rebellious ideas that were brewing in the citizenry. Duke has his suspicions that the Gulf of Tonkin was "a big scam to crank things up over there" in Vietnam and he suspects that maybe, just maybe, Oswald had help executing our President. You know I'm a conspiracy nut, Esteemed Reader, and I've told you Duke is the character I liked most. But it's quite something to see those events through the eyes of someone who lived through them and knew his government was lying to him. It shapes a very different view of history than the one we're taught in schools. Thank goodness all of that happened in the distant past and in no way impacts our present life.

In conclusion, Looking for Jack Kerouac is a terrific book to be enjoyed by readers of all ages:) Find your way back here on Thursday to see Barbara Shoup face the 7 Questions, and if you happen to be in Indianapolis around Central Library on Saturday at 2:00pm, stop by to see her, me, and Shannon Alexander, among others. As always, I'll leave you with some of my favorite passages from Looking for Jack Kerouac:

You couldn’t be halfway married any more than you could be halfway dead.

“Yeah, I was scared. So what? Hemingway said courage is being scared and doing the right thing, anyway. Did you know that?” 
“Hemingway blew his brains out,” I said. “What kind of courage is that?”

I walked slowly, weaving a little, stopping to look in the window of a souvenir shop or listen to music drifting out from the other honkey-tonks. The bars were mostly set up like Tootsies, with a band in the front window. Framed by the open doorways, people writhed in the neon light, looking weirdly like the pictures of hell the nuns showed us in grade school to scare us straight.

“Jack Kerouac. The writer. He lives here, in St. Petersburg. Me and my buddy here, we’re looking for him.” 
“Writer. No, I don’t know any writers. G.D. Reds, most of them.”

A guy at a nearby table glanced up from the newspaper he was reading. Disheveled, unshaven, not quite clean, he looked a lot like the guys we’d seen in Morris Park the day before. There were others, too, their heads bent over books or newspapers, their dirty green army surplus duffels at their feet—and it occurred to me that whatever had deposited them in this place, rootless, without purpose, might have seemed like a grand adventure at the start.

STANDARD DISCLAIMER: All reviews here will be written to highlight a book’s positive qualities. It is my policy that if I don’t have something nice to say online, I won’t say anything at all (usually). I’ll leave you to discover the negative qualities of each week’s book on your own. 

NINJA BOOK CLUB: Chapter 7 BAGMAN AND CROUCH

First Paragraph: Harry disentangled himself from Ron and got to his feet. They had arrived on what appeared to be a deserted stretch of misty moor. In front of them was a pair of tired and grumpy-looking wizards, one of whom was holding a large gold watch, the other a thick roll of parchment and a quill. Both were dressed as Muggles, though very inexpertly: The man with the watch wore a tweed suit with thigh-length galoshes; his colleague, a kilt and a poncho.

Hi there, Esteemed Reader. I hope the week is treating you well. I myself am running just a bit ragged as of late. I think it's because I stay up too late reading at night instead of going to bed like a good Ninja and getting the sleep I need to function properly:(

But we're not here to talk about me, we're here for the same reason we meet every Wednesday, to discuss Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. You'd think I'd be sick of this book by now, but I'm finding I love it more than ever. It's hard for me not to fall back into it completely each week rather than setting it aside after reading one measly chapter.

But I've read the book multiple times through, I know what's coming next and how it all ends--with a promise of Harry Potter 5, of course:) The upside of this forced discipline is how much more I'm learning this time through by reading only one chapter and pondering it on it's own, away from the larger story. I'm hoping you're enjoying this post series as well, Esteemed Reader.  As of our 7th week in, I'm thinking we might have to find another book and do this Ninja Book Club thing again.

But we've got plenty of Potter to last a while and this week Harry and the gang have arrived at the Quiditch World Cup! Much of the chapter is devoted to Rowling's continuing the conspiratorial fantasy that wizards exist all around us and are just in hidings and the government knows the real truth! I suspect if I could ever get close enough to J.K. Rowling to have a drink with her without getting tased by security, and I were to ask her 8 questions (the first 7 I'd share here with you, Esteemed Reader), and my eighth question was "do you believe in conspiracy theories," the answer would be "yes!" 

Has J.K. Rowling ever seen a ghost or a UFO? Someone closer to her than I should be asking and telling the rest of us. 

She spends a great deal of time in this chapter paying lip service to the idea that wizards have to dress and act like humans to avoid detection. It's worth noting she mostly plays this for laughs rather than for serious.

On the one hand, if the wizarding world were an actual place and the wizards knew we muggles were dying from and becoming handicapped from injuries their magic could cure or prevent, they're jerks for not speaking up. On the other hand, much of the fun of the Harry Potter books is the notion that there's a magical world overlaying our own and anyone of us could one day get a letter delivered by owl inviting us to join.

Rowling's gift is to again and again focus in on the few fun details that represent the whole. She doesn't have to list every wizard/muggle interaction, just one or two to stand in for the rest:

“You foreign?” said Mr. Roberts as Mr. Weasley returned with the correct notes. 
“Foreign?” repeated Mr. Weasley, puzzled. 
“You’re not the first one who’s had trouble with money,” said Mr. Roberts, scrutinizing Mr. Weasley closely. “I had two try and pay me with great gold coins the size of hubcaps ten minutes ago.” 
“Did you really?” said Mr. Weasley nervously. 

Similarly, Rowling doesn't have to describe the entire wizard campground to us. Just a few of the most interesting details will do for the rest, and this is my favorite passage from the chapter:

A tiny boy no older than two was crouched outside a large pyramid-shaped tent, holding a wand and poking happily at a slug in the grass, which was swelling slowly to the size of a salami. As they drew level with him, his mother came hurrying out of the tent. 
“How many times, Kevin? You don’t — touch — Daddy’s — wand — yecchh!” 
She had trodden on the giant slug, which burst. Her scolding carried after them on the still air, mingling with the little boy’s yells — “You bust slug! You bust slug!” 
A short way farther on, they saw two little witches, barely older than Kevin, who were riding toy broomsticks that rose only high enough for the girls’ toes to skim the dewy grass.

How can you read that passage and not want a toy broomstick? But most of what's happening in Chapter 7 is set up for the rest of the book, and in the case of planting the concept of a magic tent you could conceivably live in for the entire middle stretch of a bloated seventh novel, the series. Much of Rowling's set up revolves around Ludo Bagman and Barty Crouch, and you'll need to know about them for later, but they're boring:)

I'm more interested in the larger plot pieces Rowling plants, such as Ron's love of and Hermione's seeming indifference to Viktor Krum:

“Krum!” said Ron. “Viktor Krum, the Bulgarian Seeker!” 
“He looks really grumpy,” said Hermione, looking around at the many Krums blinking and scowling at them.
“‘Really grumpy’?” Ron raised his eyes to the heavens. “Who cares what he looks like? He’s unbelievable. He’s really young too. Only just eighteen or something. He’s a genius, you wait until tonight, you’ll see.”

We all know Ron and Hermione are meant to be together because if the Harry Potter books teach us anything, it's that you're bound to find your one true love in high school (they seriously need a wizard college to expand their potential pool of romantic candidates). But this is a fun set up the reader's first time through and doubly fun the second time as we know Hermione will later have a thing for Krum and Ron will not care for him one bit then. It's a fun subplot and if you plan to write for teens or tweens, expect to include plenty of similar triangles in your stories:)

This first is an ironic set up. Next, comes the oh-by-the-way set up:

Next they were hailed by Ernie Macmillan, a Hufflepuff fourth year, and a little farther on they saw Cho Chang, a very pretty girl who played Seeker on the Ravenclaw team. She waved and smiled at Harry, who slopped quite a lot of water down his front as he waved back. More to stop Ron from smirking than anything, Harry hurriedly pointed out a large group of teenagers whom he had never seen before.

Oh, by the way, there's a girl who goes to Hogwarts Harry possibly has a crush on. Well, well, well. Isn't that interesting? Will that come up later, you think? Also, yea interracial dating being totally cool and unworthy of comment in the wizarding world despite many of the wizards owning house elves--more on that next week. 

Then there's the keep-the-reader-interested set-up:

“Glad! Don’t know when I’ve had more fun. . . . Still, it’s not as though we haven’t got anything to look forward to, eh, Barty? Eh? Plenty left to organize, eh?” 
Mr. Crouch raised his eyebrows at Bagman. 
“We agreed not to make the announcement until all the details —” 
“Oh details!” said Bagman, waving the word away like a cloud of midges. “They’ve signed, haven’t they? They’ve agreed, haven’t they? I bet you anything these kids’ll know soon enough anyway. I mean, it’s happening at Hogwarts —”

That word Hogwarts demands the reader take notice. Something's coming that going to impact our heroes, and this Bagman and Crouch are a part of it, which is perhaps why they have a whole chapter named after them. 

And look how many uses Rowling found for the Quidditch World Cup! At a glance, having the gang head to an activity away from Hogwarts and the main story seems like a hugely unnecessary diversion in such a long book, but just look how many different uses Rowling finds for this one event--and there's plenty of more set-up coming in Chapter 8. In a way, the Quidictch World Cup is like the baptism scene at the end of The Godfather, except instead of plots being resolved all around, they're being set up. 

My last, favorite of Rowling's set-ups is not the establishment of an international wizard community--though that will pay off later--but something I'll call the subliminal set up because it covers ground the reader's likely read before:

“Omnioculars,” said the saleswizard eagerly. “You can replay action . . . slow everything down . . . and they flash up a play-by-play breakdown if you need it. Bargain — ten Galleons each.” 
“Wish I hadn’t bought this now,” said Ron, gesturing at his dancing shamrock hat and gazing longingly at the Omnioculars. 
“Three pairs,” said Harry firmly to the wizard. 
“No — don’t bother,” said Ron, going red. He was always touchy about the fact that Harry, who had inherited a small fortune from his parents, had much more money than he did.

No matter how Rowling describes them, I will always imagine the Omnioculars as looking exactly like the nightvision goggles in Jurassic Park:) But the reason this is my favorite set up is it's just a gentle reminder. After all, we've seen Ron resent Harry's money before, but we need to be reminded of it here because later Ron's resentment of Harry is going to boil over and the two are going to be in their biggest fight of the series. 

But here, Rowling doesn't show the boys in conflict. Sure, Ron goes red momentarily, but he gets his Omnioculars, they watch the world cup, and the story moves on. Later, though, when the boys are at odds, the reader will remember Ron's reaction to Harry's money here and the conflict will be deeper and more nuanced because Rowling took the time to set up way back in this chapter as well as the other books. 

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire is a book far longer than most of us will ever get away with publishing, but there's hardly a wasted sentence that isn't accomplishing something. Even Rowling's throw-away gags for younger readers deepen characterization:

"I bought this in a Muggle shop,” said the old wizard stubbornly. “Muggles wear them.” 
“Muggle women wear them, Archie, not the men, they wear these,” said the Ministry wizard, and he brandished the pinstriped trousers. 
“I’m not putting them on,” said old Archie in indignation. “I like a healthy breeze ’round my privates, thanks.”
Hermione was overcome with such a strong fit of the giggles at this point that she had to duck out of the queue and only returned when Archie had collected his water and moved away.

Hermione rarely seems more like a tween girl than when she's giggling here. And come on, the first time you read that passage, it had to make you at least smile:) Dick jokes are cheap, perhaps, but they were good enough for Shakespeare and they're good enough for Rowling. What does that tell you about their literary merrit?

And that's where we'll leave it:) Meet me here next week for Chapter 8.

Last Paragraph (s): And then a deep, booming gong sounded somewhere beyond the woods, and at once, green and red lanterns blazed into life in the trees, lighting a path to the field. 
“It’s time!” said Mr. Weasley, looking as excited as any of them. “Come on, let’s go!"