This is the last in a series of blogs offering a behind-the-scenes look at Rick’s first novel, Radiance. This blog contains spoilers.
 
I thought I’d end this series on Radiance with a few random memories and reflections.
 
Tristan West is not me. I made West a public relations practitioner, which is what I do for a living. But he’s not intended to be me, or at least I hope not. West sacrifices his ethics for a cushy job, then lives a bitter existence when he’s blamed for some bad press and fired. For much of Radiance, he’s rude, snarky and resentful. I can be any of those things at a given time, I suppose. But I hope I’m not Tristan West as a matter of course. If I am, someone please tell me!
 
T.J. is the only character based on a real person. T.J. Klein is modeled on my daughter, Tobi. Fiery and determined, she’s also tenderhearted and fully invested in her faith. T.J. was the easiest character for me to write because she’s so much like Tobi. The other characters may borrow personality traits from people I know or have encountered in one way or another—yes, Payat and Eucleia are inspired a little bit by Data on Star Trek: The Next Generation—but T.J. is definitely my daughter.
 
The Cathedral owes its existence to a 1980 prog album. One of my favorite records is The Turn of a Friendly Card by The Alan Parsons Project. It’s a concept album about gambling and gambling addiction. There’s even a line in the title tune, “But a pilgrim must follow in search of a shrine/As he enters inside the cathedral.” The Cathedral also showed up in my original short story, “For The Sake of Ten,” that eventually inspired Radiance.
 
The visit to Antok was originally much longer. Before I slashed several thousand words from the manuscript, I felt that if I was going to take the story to another galaxy, I ought to spend some time there. One of my editors balked at this, feeling that the tale took a hard left turn that wasn’t necessary. It took me a few years to realize he was correct.
 
My mother, who hated science fiction, couldn’t stop reading. A voracious reader, Mom nevertheless didn’t understand my interest in SF and didn’t dabble in it. When I gave her a copy of Radiance, she politely congratulated me and, perhaps feeling parental obligation, settled down to read it. A few days later she said to me, “I couldn’t put it down!” She stayed up all night to read it cover to cover and loved it. Now, Mom was a horrible liar, and she knew it, so she invariably spoke the truth. If she said she read it straight through and loved it, you can believe she did. It remains one of the best compliments I ever got for Radiance.
 
There won’t be a sequel. Probably. A lot of print science fiction these days comes in threes. I’m not sure where or when this started, but I blame Star Wars for the trilogy becoming all but required. My experience has been that trilogies that start strong often don’t end that way, and the middle book winds up being useless fluff. That’s not to say all series, be they in threes or more, are a bad thing. But I prefer nice, contained adventures. Radiance was always intended to be one book. That said, I’ve been asked now and then about doing a sequel. I’m not inclined so, but I do have an idea … so who knows?

This is the fourth in a series of blogs offering a behind-the-scenes look at Rick’s first novel, Radiance. This blog contains spoilers.
 
A common theme in many of my stories is how the main character causes his or her own undoing, whether through greed, pride or another of the so-called Seven Deadly Sins. (Fun fact: Though all seven are discouraged in various places in the Bible, they don’t appear under a single list anywhere in Scripture.) In Radiance, I suggest the future implosion of the Christian church results from its own neglect.
 
If you’re a regular visitor to this blog, you know I’m a confessing Christian. What the faith is supposed to stand for is near and dear to my heart. So it would be the easiest thing in the world to write a book in which the virtuous church of the future is threatened by, and is victorious over, an evil outside force. That is indeed part of what happens in Radiance. But even in the earliest drafts of the manuscript—in fact, as far back as the short stories that inspired it—I wanted to call out where I believed the Christian church was falling short and how that might play out over time.
 
It worries me that the church is shifting away from servanthood and embracing the pursuit of power, especially political power. That’s been painfully evident in the politics of the last few decades, and especially in the last several years. Much of Christianity has turned its back on loving God and loving our neighbors, or carrying for the poor and hungry and homeless and imprisoned, and taken on an angry mantle of condemnation—all while playing the martyr, decrying the “loss” of this right or that privilege or a fading tradition.
 
And so people reject the Gospel—not because they don’t recognize the love of God, but because so many believers refuse to show it to them.
 
Radiance takes this troubling trend and looks at what it does to the church decades from now. In the book, Christians have given up trying to influence the world. Instead, they turn their backs on it—the polar opposite of what Jesus did. And it nearly costs them everything.
 
In the end, the Christians in Radiance face their failures, repent and begin a new chapter. But it’s a near thing, a very near thing. I’m hoping and praying that the real church, the one of the 2020s, will face its shortcomings far sooner.

This is the third in a series of blogs offering a behind-the-scenes look at Rick’s first novel, Radiance. This blog contains spoilers.
 
In the wee hours of a Saturday morning, February 6, 1971, I lay in bed alongside my snoring father and quietly wept because I wasn’t staring at the moon.
 
Apollo 14 astronauts Alan Shepard and Ed Mitchell had landed their lunar module in the Fra Mauro region early the previous morning. Being a school day, I missed their first moonwalk but hoped to catch their second one live and, for the first time, in color. Unfortunately, that would happen in the middle of the night. I was staying with my dad at his parents’ house, as his brother’s family was visiting—and, regrettably, sleeping in the TV room. But Dad agreed to set his alarm clock for 1 a.m. and take me into the room, where we’d huddle around the television, audio low, to watch the moonwalk. But he slept through the alarm, as well as my attempts to wake him. I cried myself back to sleep. (He apologized profusely the next morning.)
 
Some of my earliest memories involve space exploration, both real (Apollo 7 was the first mission I recall following on the news) and fiction (Lost In Space is the first TV show I remember watching). The moon in particular fascinated me. It still does. I’m quick to look up at it on an early morning run, or aim my small telescope at it and see the lunar mountain peaks catch the rising sun just beyond the terminator.
 
And I still wonder what it was like for those moonwalkers—Shepard and Mitchell, Armstrong and Aldrin, and the other eight men—to amble through the regolith, to see the blackness of space where hung the Earth in vibrant blue, to feel gravity tug at them with one-sixth its strength back home.
 
Radiance gave me the chance to do it in my head, and on the printed page.
 
Granted, most of the tale happens inside Modos, a massive, dome-topped city buried in lunar soil, where dwellers see a holographic blue sky or a faked starry night. But I do take one of the characters out for an unexpected (and nearly deadly) stroll in the lunar dawn. And in doing so, my mind reflected on the color video I eventually saw of Apollo 14’s EVA, along with film of the subsequent moon missions.
 
By the time Radiance saw print, I began to doubt the timing of my story. In 2010, it was hard to imagine we’d have such a strong presence on the moon by the end of the century. But along came the Artemis program, which could have Americans back on the moon as soon as 2028. Modos suddenly doesn’t seem quite so out of reach.
 
If you happen to glance up at the moon and wonder where Modos may reside one day, look at the charcoal, circular area to the upper left of the moon’s center. That’s Mare Imbrium. Check out the map below to see where Modos will be located, with Mount Pico and the Montes Alpes to the northeast and Archimedes to the southeast. Quite the vista Lateinos will have!

This is the second in a series of blogs offering a behind-the-scenes look at Rick’s first novel, Radiance. This blog contains spoilers.
 
Two years, and barely a nibble.
 
For The Sake Of Ten generated a sizable number of preprinted rejection letters, usually including the words like “doesn’t fit with our portfolio” or “not seeking new material at this time” and almost always “good luck.”
 
In the interim I’d published three novelettes through CRC Publications--Anything But Free, Something To Hide, and Casey’s Grudge—so I felt confident I could write a good story. And amongst the rejection letters for Ten were two that included handwritten notes from editors; one listed all the things he enjoyed, calling it “eminently publishable,” and the other strongly encouraged me to keep shopping it around. “This book deserves to be published,” he wrote.
 
While those notes lifted my spirits, the steady stream of stiff-arming left me discouraged. I went through the manuscript a few more times, searching for the One Big Flaw that, once resolved, would make the book saleable. What I found were small things that needed tweaking.
 
By this time, I was several drafts into a second novel, one that takes place on a parallel Earth. That one remains unfinished; I feel it’s too similar to For The Sake Of Ten, although even today I haven’t entirely given up on it. But back then I had enough enthusiasm for it that I decided to put Ten on a shelf for a bit.
 
There it remained for most of the next six years.
 
Every now and then I’d dig it out, do a light edit and send it around to publishers without success. One of the changes I made was the title. For The Sake of Ten described only part of the story, albeit a tremendously important part. But I wanted something broader, something that covered the full context of the tale. And I wanted the title to be a single word. Thus it became Radiance.
 
By 2002 I finally gave up trying to sell the book on my own and started looking for an agent. I’d resisted going the agent route before out of simple intimidation; I had no idea how to find a reputable one. Having finally decided that was the only way Ten would ever be published, I started as we do most things nowadays: with a Google search.
 
Big mistake. HUGE mistake.
 
Yes, I found an agent. Partly to spare you the long, sordid tale, and partly to avoid fully outing my foolishness, suffice it to say I got scammed. The agent charged me for an edit that never got done, then promptly vanished. No response to phone calls, emails or even certified letters over the course of a full year. Later I discovered this individual was being investigated for fraud.
 
Frustrated and heartbroken, I put away the manuscript, doubting it would ever be published.
 
Career-wise, the next few years were extraordinarily stressful, and I rarely gave Radiance a thought. But by 2009 I came to realize that Radiance had a fundamental problem: It was too religious for science fiction publishers, and too science fiction-y for religious publishers. To get the book out there, I’d have to do it myself.
 
I’d explored self-publishing back in the ‘90s, but it proved wildly expensive and lacked a workable means of distribution. But by the end of the ‘00s, tools like print on demand and online book sellers made it doable.
 
Having left Radiance untouched for several years, I dove into the harshest edit yet of the manuscript, slashing at least 12,000 words and an entire chunk of text I realized added nothing meaningful to the story. By early 2010, Radiance was in the hands of a well-known self-publisher. After working through a basic evaluation, the process moved rapidly. By September of that year, Radiance was available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and in a number of bookstores. Over the coming year I saw modest sales in the midst of book signings and speeches.
 
The lessons learned through this two-decade experience were many, some of them hard ones. Had I not made some poor decisions and been discouraged so often, Radiance might have appeared far sooner than it did, perhaps through a traditional publisher. But I happen to believe God does things for a reason and in His timing. In that light, Radiance appeared precisely when it needed to.
 
In coming blogs, I’ll dive deeper into the story and the characters in Radiance.

This is the first in a series of blogs offering a behind-the-scenes look at Rick’s first novel, Radiance. This blog contains spoilers.
 
The story behind my 2010 novel, Radiance, is a long one—more than two decades.
 
First, a quick synopsis of the book. Radiance centers on an out-of-work PR professional living on the moon who is drawn into two extraordinary events: a dark conspiracy led by his former boss, and the search for 10 special individuals by two strangers who are more than they appear. These events ultimately intertwine to decide the fate of humanity—and much more.
 
Radiance is my first novel, but not my first published book. In the mid-1990s I wrote three novelettes for a publisher serving adult literacy and English As A Second Language programs. (I’ll get around to blogging about those at some point, too.) But the road to Radiance began before any of those.
 
Radiance has its roots in two short stories I wrote in the early 1990s. “Go Ye” was a piece I pitched to an international church magazine. In the story, two strange men confront a church’s elders, challenging them to do more to serve the poor, the sick and the suffering. The elders are offended and throw the men out, but the pastor follows them outside—just in time to see them fly off in a spaceship. He realizes they are missionaries sent to Earth because so many human Christians have failed to obey Jesus.
 
The magazine not only rejected the story, but the editor upbraided me for portraying the church in such a negative light. Thirty years later, seeing that many Christians continue to turn their backs on the very people Christ called us to love and minister to, I stand by that portrayal.
 
Shortly after came another short story, “For The Sake Of Ten.” This one is much closer to what later became Radiance. Based on the biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah, “Ten” takes place on an asteroid refueling station where an angel comes looking for 10 righteous people—the number needed to save the asteroid from destruction. As in the Bible tale, the quest fails.
 
“For The Sake Of Ten” is much like Radiance—Canaan, the Cathedral, cyborgs, even the telltale “radiance” all make an appearance. The novel is quite different in other ways, but its strongest beginnings are found here.
 
I shopped “For The Sake Of Ten” around for a while without success. Rather than give up on it, I started thinking about its potential as a novel. Right after New Year’s Day 1993, I decided to give it a shot. With my first PC—complete with a 100MB hard drive and a copy of WordPerfect software—I began investing long hours in writing the novel, mostly on weekends. My day job had become quite stressful by then (and would continue its high-pressure spiral for the next 18 years, but that’s a tale for another day), so I didn’t have the energy for nighttime work. But that creative outlet was lifesaving on Saturdays and Sundays.
 
I finished the first draft at the end of March. I kept the short-story title, For The Sake Of Ten, and would hang onto it for over a decade.
 
I edited and rewrote the draft over and over for months. I also shared it with people I knew would give me honest, critical feedback—both editorially and story-wise. Before year’s end, I had what I thought was a solid novel ready to sell to an eager publisher.
 
Truth is, that’s when my own quest was just beginning.

This is the final blog in a deep-dive series on the stories in Rick’s newest book, Random Precision. The following blog includes spoilers.
 
A few months ago, I underwent surgery for a torn meniscus in my left knee. It was the second time that leg went under the knife; the first time was more than 16 years earlier in a much more extensive operation to rebuild the shattered limb described in “Three Miles.”
 
While this year’s procedure was far less involved, I experienced some of the same emotions described in this story.
 
“Three Miles” is a departure from the rest of Random Precision in that it’s a true-life tale, not fiction. I really experienced that awful accident. Even now, many years later, I relive those moments when I go for a run over that same spot. (To be accurate, as I write this blog I’m still rehabbing from arthroscopic partial meniscectomy, so not a lot of running happening right now.)
 
The themes in this story are many. Trusting in God to work out the bad things to become good things. Living in the moment. The risk of assuming the future will play out as you expect it to. Appreciation for the things you cherish, or should take time to cherish.
 
About a year after the accident, I was interviewed by a reporter at our local paper just before I took part in a community road race. Twelve years later, I hired her for a job with one of my clients. Best hire I ever made—and not just because she wrote about me!
 
*   *   *   *
 
This wraps up the blog series covering Random Precision. But it’s not the last blog I’ll put together. In the weeks ahead, watch for blogs about my Star Trek experiences as well as a look at my first novel, Radiance. I hope you’ve enjoyed this study of Random Precision.

This is the 24th in a deep-dive series on the stories in Rick’s newest book, Random Precision. The following blog includes spoilers.
 
Every short story collection ought to have a Christmas tale, don’t you think? It’s like having a holiday episode of Doctor Who. It just seems right.
 
Thus we get “Sacrificium,” which my wife says is her favorite of all my stories. I also get an annual request for it when volunteer mentoring at a local middle school. And it won a Christmas story contest just a few years ago. Yeah, this one seems to hit the mark. (For the record, “Superhero” is a Christmas story, too, though less obviously so.)
 
When I read this one to middle schoolers, I delight in their reaction when they finally realize who—or rather what—Josh is. Typically they go back to try to find the many hints sprinkled throughout. No single hint gives it away, and even collectively the leap is a big one. But it’s a fun exercise.
 
“Sacrificium” has won a couple of contests over the years. The first time I entered, it didn’t even place. The second time it was the winner. I tweaked it a bit in the interim, tightening the prose, which probably helped.
 
It’s hard to write about this one without being too spoiler-y, so I’ll stop the expose’ there. But it’s worth noting that this one is a unique way to tell not just a Christmas story, but an Easter one, too.

This is the 23rd in a deep-dive series on the stories in Rick’s newest book, Random Precision. The following blog includes spoilers.
 
I’ll admit “Hearsay” isn’t one of my stronger stories. The basic idea is sound, but it suffers from being mercilessly slashed from its original length to fit the word count of a short story contest. Somewhere along the way I lost the longer version.
 
Still, it’s a theme we can relate to, especially those of us a bit longer in the tooth: How do we handle our own perceived obsolescence? Benny Warren is an old newspaper guy who can’t let go of his past life and believes he can’t reinvent himself. So desperate is he for the glories of the past that he makes a deal with the Devil. (Literally? You decide.)
 
I first drafted this shortly before Google Glass arrived (and quickly failed). I'd read an article about the idea of contact lenses connected to the internet that could offer up information to users instantaneously. I decided Benny needed a more permanent solution—hence the magical pill.
 
There’s a secondary theme here, too, about believing everything you read on the internet. There's a lot of that going on right now. Obviously Benny is fed a lie for a purpose, but who is to say the other revelations weren’t equally false? Not once does Benny turn a skeptical eye to what he’s reading. That alone speaks volumes to his state of mind--and therein lies a message for each of us.
 
As I said, not my strongest story. But one we can all learn something from.

This is the 22nd in a deep-dive series on the stories in Rick’s newest book, Random Precision. The following blog includes spoilers.
 
As I noted in the blog about “Three Hours,” “Flash of Life” was a contest winner and an episode of Chronicles long before winding up in a book. But this may come as a surprise to you: I like the TV episode better.
 
“Flash of Life” is based on the old notion that we see our lives “flash” before our eyes at the moment of death. (Or, if you prefer, it gets a hard review in the afterlife.) In this case, Hap Lister isn’t actually experiencing the future moments before it happens, but rather his entire “life” is the review happening at its frightening end.
 
In Chronicles, Hap becomes Hannah, and the story happens in the 1940s after a woman finds the journal of her deceased grandfather, a doctor who observed what happened to Hannah. We filmed the opening and closing scenes at the Gilmore Car Museum near Kalamazoo. Except for those scenes, the episode is filmed in black and white, underscoring its back-in-time setting.
 
Like Hannah, Hap becomes increasingly desperate as he slowly comes to realize what’s happening to him—and that it’s too late to turn his life around. The reciting of Matthew 25 makes that painfully clear to Hap. And to us.
 
If you’re interested in the TV version, it’s still online. Fun fact: The bag carried by the doctor has made two appearances on TV screens. This is the first one. The same bag also appears briefly in “Mind-Sifter,” an episode of Star Trek New Voyages for which I wrote the teleplay. I purchased it at an antique store near my hometown, and I still have it.

This is the 21st in a deep-dive series on the stories in Rick’s newest book, Random Precision. The following blog includes spoilers.
 
A few years ago, a couple of news stories—written with tongue firmly in cheek—suggested that time travelers are among us. Or were, as the case may be. One story claimed that a street scene in a 1920s Charlie Chaplin film shows a woman talking on a cellphone. The other story insisted a man at a 1940s gathering was a time traveler as well, sporting modern-day clothing and sunglasses.
 
Both instances have perfectly logical explanations that don't involve time travel. Still, those were the images that prompted me to write “Gabbatha.”
 
There’s another motivation as well. We like to pretend that we’re enlightened in the 21st century and would never make the poor choices that our ancestors made. Christians, for example, insist they’d be far more faithful to Jesus than his disciples proved to be. Had today’s believers been in Jerusalem then, they would stick up for him, stand beside him, be prepared to suffer with him.
 
“Gabbatha” suggests that isn’t so.
 
Rhys, our time traveler, glimpses a Christ we don’t like to think about: a Messiah who takes on all of our sins and failings. We applaud this in our church services, but we really don’t consider what it must have been like—what it looked like, if we could literally see that ugliness. Rhys sees it, abhors it, and joins in with the deadly chorus.
 
Finding the ancient Greek phrases was more difficult than I’d expected. Google Translate doesn’t do koine. Fortunately, I found a history text that offered phrases I could write around. I thought it brought a little realism to the final product.