Angels Unbound: Uri'el (an a-to-z post)

Uri'el
Yes, this is the same Uri'el who appears in Shadow Spinner (see Chapter 34: Uri'el) and who guards the entrance to the Garden with a flaming sword. Some say the sword is a manifestation of Uri'el, while some hold that the sword is a separate entity. One thing is certain, the sword can guard the entrance without the presence of Uri'el, and Uri'el can always keep watch over the entrance, no matter where he is, because of his thousand eyes.

He is known to be as pitiless as the most heartless of Demons, even Lucifer himself, even though he is an Angel of Repentance. He watches over "thunder and terror."

Perhaps because of his farseeing gaze and despite his pitiless nature, Uri'el was one of The Three who pleaded the case for humanity when God sent the flood to destroy the Nephilim. It was Uri'el who warned Noah and instructed him on the building of the ark.

It was also Uri'el who rescued John the Baptist from the Massacre of the Innocents. He returned the body of Adam (and his son Abel) to the Garden for burial after their deaths. Uri'el, in his aspect of Angel of Repentance, was the one who checked the door posts for the blood of a lamb in Egypt when Azrael (the Archangel of Death) came to take the first borns. Uri'el told him whom to spare.

He has killed many who have tried to enter the Garden, but it is whispered that he has also killed those who have not. The flaming sword was noticeably absent during the mysterious assassination of Sennacherib, king of Assyria.


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Angels Unbound: Temeluchus (an a-to-z post)

Temeluchus
We like to think of Angels as "good" and Demons as "bad," but the truth is that our own, human, perceptions of good and evil come nowhere close to applying to Angels and Demons. For instance, Temeluchus is the Chief Angel of Torment. And he likes it. He likes to cause pain and is known as merciless, the Merciless Angel of Fire. But he has a soft spot for infants and children and considers himself their special caretaker. Therefore, he especially likes to torture those he considers under his care.


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Angels Unbound: Israfil (an a-to-z post)

Israfil
If you thought being covered in eyes was weird (see Dumah), try being covered in mouths. And that's not the weird part, he's also covered in body hair, as in hirsute. I suppose it's a good thing Angels don't need to eat, because he'd always have hair in his food.

At one time, Israfil used his mouths to sing praises to the Father in all the languages of the world. At once. But, now, he only wails and weeps at the suffering in the Pit, both for the Demons and the humans who have earned their places there. His wailing is continuous.

He is the Angel who stands in readiness to blow the trumpet for the Day of Resurrection, the trumpet always poised and ready.


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Angels Unbound: Gadreel (an a-to-z post)

Gadreel
Gadreel is a bit of a paradox. He's the "wall of God," but he's also the Angel who brought the teachings of war to man. I suppose he's a believer in "the best defense is a strong offense."

And that's about all I'm going to tell you about him because to go on would get all spoilery, not just in his story but in the overall story arc that he's in. However, I can tell you some things that aren't about him:

After doing all of my research and deciding on my cast and some loose story arcs, "Gadreel" was the story I wrote first. The story of the seduction of an Angel seemed... well, it just seemed interesting. I mean, why would an Angel be interested in humans at all? As a human, how would you get one to pay the slightest bit of attention to you? I mean, if an ant was trying to flag you down on the sidewalk, what would it need to do to get you to notice it?

Probably a lot more than Na'amah had to do but, then, ants are much smaller, and you're not walking around with the ants pretending to be one. [That's Na'amah on the cover, by the way. Or, at least, someone who evokes Na'amah in my mind.]

There's actually a bit more about this stuff -- stuff about the Fallen and Demons -- in the Author's Note after the story so, if you pick it up, and it's FREE! today, you'll have that, too, but, since I already wrote it there, I'm not going to write it here, too.

Anyway...

Go get "Gadreel"! It's FREE!


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Angels Unbound: Furtur (an a-to-z post)

Furtur
Lucifer might be the Father of Lies, but Furtur is the true Demon of Lies. Having been taken in by Lucifer's original lies and unable to unbelieve them, he is now incapable of telling the truth. That is unless he is trapped in a magical circle of some type. If you can capture him, he reverts to the form he wore before he was warped and, then, he loses the ability to lie. Whereas once he brought love to man, now he brings only lust. He is a bringer of storms and tempests.



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Angels Unbound: Eremiel (an a-to-z post)

Eremiel
After the rebellion of Lucifer, Eremiel was set as the Watcher Over the Abyss or, as the Angels called it, the Pit. He was respected. The Angel of Hope. He was the Angel of Hope because, after the creation of Man, he kept the Demons from the Pit from getting to the souls of the dead waiting for Judgement. He was the Thunder of God and matched Barachiel, the Lightning of God. He was all of those things. Then he met Kasdaye...



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A to Z and the Final Change (Change: part 7)

Okay, so it's probably going a little too far to say that the thing I'm about to talk about was the final change of 2015 (there were also art projects and a multitude of smaller things that got passed over as I was writing this series); in fact, it was one of the earlier changes of the year, but it is the final one I'm going to talk about. The final change of 2015, at any rate.

When I started writing, I chose a very specific style of writing, because I was writing with my kids in mind as part of the audience. In fact, they were my primary audience for The House on the Corner, seeing as how I wrote that book for them. After that, because my kids wanted to be able to read what I was writing, I made sure to keep whatever I was working on kid-friendly. Which is not to say that there aren't mature themes, but my current published works (minus one) were written with my children in mind as part of the audience.

[Fun fact:
Shadow Spinner actually has a 1-star review because of all the sex. All the sex? Did I miss something? I don't remember writing any sex in that book. Like I said, my kids were in mind as part of the audience, so I'm pretty sure I didn't include any sex or anything else that would be inappropriate for a normal 12-year-old. I mean, I've read the book in public schools and there have never been any complaints about me reading "sex" to middle schoolers.]

But speaking of sex...
Oh, wait, I'm not there yet.

I've always had some decidedly adult projects in mind when I started writing, many of those being in various planning stages or beginning phases, right now. It's part of how I work. I do try to stay focused on the actual project(s) I'm working on, though. Theoretically, that's supposed to be Brother's Keeper, the sequel to The House on the Corner, but various things keep sidetracking me from getting that finished. In 2015, it was a deliberate change in tone in my writing.

Basically, I decided to write some things that were not kid-friendly, meaning that I decided to work on some projects that would get at least "R" ratings if they were movies. One of those is a collaboration with another author, one of those is the current novel I'm working on (and am very excited about (but more on that later (much))), and the last of those is my A-to-Z project.

The project for A-to-Z actually came to me back in 2014 and is why I didn't do A-to-Z last year: It wasn't ready. It's still not ready, but I'm not willing to wait another year to start this thing off.

What is it, you ask.

Well...

Actually, I'm going to skip the long explanation and let the product, eventually, stand on its own. Let's just say that I wanted a topic that would lend itself to a series of related short stories. After much thinking, I settled on Angels & Demons. The idea was that there would be a free story each day for and Angel and a Demon for that letter of the alphabet but, well, I haven't finished the stories yet. By a lot. So some days there will be free stories and some days there will only be a brief character description. The stories will only be free the day (and the day after) they are released, though, so be aware ahead of time. And this year is just the Angels (with, maybe, one exception).

But what does that have to do with change? Well, these will be the first (very) adult works I will publish. So far, the people who have had a chance to read any of these have pretty much all responded with, "Wow, this isn't like anything you've ever written before." And they are not like any of the work I have currently available. By a lot.

I hope you will stick around and check them out.

Fallacies of the Church (part four) -- The Corollary

The real problem with the idea that God rewards the good (as I talked about last week) is the corollary to that thought: God un-rewards the not good. I don't want to say that God punishes the wicked, but that's certainly what people tend to think. It's rather similar to that whole "angels are beautiful; demons are grotesque" thing. The idea this instills is that it's okay to not help those less fortunate than us; after all, they've done something to deserve it.

It's an attitude more than it is anything else. I mean, it's not something people come right out and say, at least not most of the time, though there have been plenty of people who have. If God "liked" that person, that person would have more money, right? Because God blesses people who go to church and tithe and all of that. People who do those things and are poor must have some (secret) sin in  their lives or God would be blessing them, too. You know, actually, I've heard people say that one out loud. I've heard pastors say that one out loud.

It goes right along with hurricane Katrina being a judgement against the depravity of New Orleans and other such things that have been said about horrible natural disasters.

My favorite, though, is that miscarriages are punishments from God. And, yes, I've heard pastors say that. In fact, one of the pastors I worked for believed that (and expressed that belief freely) which made it very awkward for him when my wife had a miscarriage a year or so before our younger son was born. I could feel the tension of the unasked question from him, "What secret sin are you hiding that God would punish you so?" It was palpable.

Of course, this is the same pastor that told me I needed to check in on one of our church members, a friend of mine, because he was a big tither, and we didn't want to lose his money. Yes, those are the words that he said to me. It's always about the money.

I was long gone from that church when his oldest (perfect (because his family was perfect, as he often pronounced from the pulpit)) daughter had a miscarriage during her first pregnancy, but I often wondered how he took that and whether he accosted his daughter over some secret sin her life.

There are a couple of places you can look in the Bible to see that misfortune or a bad lot in life is not something visited upon people because God is punishing them or just doesn't like them.

The first is Job. God loved Job, and Job loved God. Along came Satan and told God that Job only loved Him because of all the stuff God had given him, so God let Satan take everything away. Job's wife and all of his friends came along and asked Job what horrible thing he'd done to piss off God. Of course, Job had done nothing wrong and had, in fact, done everything right, but, still, they all came in with the assumption that all the bad stuff was Job's fault.

The other is the story of the blind man that Jesus and his disciples passed on the road one day. The disciples asked Jesus whose sin, the man's or one of his parent's, was responsible for the man's blindness. Jesus' response was that no sin was responsible.

No sin was responsible. No one did anything bad. The blind man wasn't a bad person just like Job wasn't a bad person, just like there aren't "bad" people and "good" people. There are just people. Bad things and hard times are not judgements from God. They are just things that are.

If you go to a church that fosters the belief that God punishes people by sending any kind of ruin upon them, you need to get out of that church.

How To Be... a Werewolf

You're probably thinking right about now that the way to become a werewolf is pretty simple. All you need to do is go out and find one and let it bite or scratch you.

That would be incorrect.

Sure, plenty of books and movies depict it that way now, but that has newly been tacked onto the werewolf legend, probably due to its association with vampiric legends due to Dracula. Which is kind of interesting, because Stoker drew on werewolf legends and attached them to the vampire legends. Although it had been believed in Medieval Europe that you had to burn a werewolf corpse to keep it from rising from the dead as a vampire. So if you're looking to one day be a vampire, it appears that being a werewolf is a good start.

But, okay, if you can't become a werewolf from getting bitten, how do you become one? It appears that there are many paths to werewolfdom, and many of them are surprisingly easy to accomplish.

One of the best ways, because you can control it, is to simply wear a belt (or girdle) made of wolf hide. Putting on the belt would cause the transformation to take place, instantly and painlessly. Removing it would revert the wearer to human form. However, some sources said it wasn't quite that simple. Some said the strip of wolf skin, the wolf strap, had to come from the devil. Although you could still control the transformation, because the devil gave it to you, you could never rid yourself of the wolf strap.

Some legends say that you could become any animal at all by drinking rainwater from its footprint. Wereelephant, anyone? Or, you know, maybe find one of those stone dinosaur footprints and drink from that. Weretyrannosaur. One catch, I couldn't find anything that said how long these transformations would last, just that drinking the water would trigger them. I imagine they must wear off; otherwise, no one would have ever known they'd happened to begin with.

Other sources say that you can become a werewolf by sleeping outside in the light of a full summer's moon as long as the light is shining directly on your face. I suppose this must be part of where the full moon part of the transformation legend comes from. The sources implied that transformed human would return to normal at dawn. But these weren't permanent changes; you'd have to do the same thing any time you wanted to become a werewolf.

Still other legends claim that one would need to be cursed by the devil to become a werewolf. Or enter into an allegiance with him. Evidently, there was once a group of sorcerers that craved human flesh, so they entered an agreement with Satan to have wolf forms so that they could fill their craving. They were given straps so that they could control their transformations.

And other sources say that the werewolf has been cursed by God or Angels or, even, saints for committing terrible offenses. I'm not sure what constituted a terrible offense. But, then, still other sources say that werewolves are actually the servants of God in his battle against Satan. They are known as the Hounds of God and go down into Hell to battle demons and witches.

Oh, and some people are just born that way.

There you go. If you want to be a werewolf, you have a lot of options to choose from. Personally, I'd go with the wolf hide belt. Then, again, being a weredinosaur sounds pretty cool, too.

Notes:
1. During the Middle Ages, it was thought that werewolves did not have tails (you know, because people don't have tails), which was how you could tell a real wolf from a werewolf. To keep from being found out, werewolves would run with one of their hind legs extended behind them so that, from a distance, it would look as if they had tails.

2. In his book Fool Moon, Jim Butcher features werewolves. I appreciate that he didn't just go with the modern concept of were-ism being like a contagion. He incorporates many of the various werewolf legends into The Dresden Files, which I find a nice change of pace from most modern renditions.

EDIT:
This post is related to the post, How To Be... a Vampire