How Much Responsibility Can One Man Shoulder?

Audra Jennings

Publicist

In Terry Brennan’s Empires of Armageddon series, three ancient empires  are rushing toward a collision in the volatile Middle East while an official high in the US State Department is conspiring with a foreign power against the US president. A centuries-old prophecy is unveiled that heralds Christ’s imminent return, and malevolent fallen angels are determined to invalidate biblical prophecy so they can manufacture a different ending to the Bible. The story
which began in Ishmael Covenant picks up right where it left off in the second release, Persian
Betrayal published by Kregel Publications.

Brennan explains. “In this series, our protagonist, Brian Mullaney, is drawn into this conflict against desperate evil forces who want to change the end of the Bible with an earthly battle that has eternal consequences. The spiritual warfare in Persian Betrayal is real, personal, dangerous, and frightening to our characters. And its outcome has eternal ramifications. Not so much different than today.”

One of Brennan’s key inspirations for the series came from the writings of the Vilna Gaon, Rabbi Elijah ben Solomon Zalman, who was the most revered Talmudic scholar of the late eighteenth century. In 2014, his great-great-grandson revealed a prophecy the Vilna Gaon wrote two hundred and twenty years before: “When you hear that the Russians have captured the city of Crimea, you should know that the times of the Messiah have started, that his steps are being heard.” Only months before that, Russian troops had invaded Ukraine and swept through the Crimean Peninsula. Brennan took the idea of the rising empires and the premise of an unexpected treaty between Israel and all its Arab neighbors and ran with it


In the story, Mullaney is wounded yet he is supposed to save the Ishmael Covenant, the treaty promising peace in the Middle East. Despite angelic intervention, Mullaney wants nothing to do with his final assignment. But without him, evil will win the ultimate struggle and humankind will have no hope left.

Brennan shows how Mullaney’s faith is evident throughout the story as he prays urgently and fervently, pleading for God’s help and direction. The spiritual warfare Mullaney faces also has deep biblical roots. “In the Bible, the book of Ephesians references ‘heavenly realms’ five times and refers to the battle ‘against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers . . . against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms,’”

The second prophecy, revealed in Persian Betrayal, is a product of Brennan’s imagination, though rooted in history that dates all the way back to the days of Moses and the battle between the Israelites and their ancient enemies, the Amalekites.

Terry Brennan is the award-winning author of The Sacred Cipher, The Brotherhood Conspiracy, and The Aleppo Code, the three books in The Jerusalem Prophecies series. His latest series is Empires ofArmageddon, which includes Ishmael Covenant and Persian Betrayal.

A Pulitzer Prize is one of the many awards Brennan accumulated during his twenty-two-year newspaper career. The Pottstown (PA) Mercurywon the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing for a two-year series published while he led the team as the newspaper’s editor.

Starting out as a sportswriter in Philadelphia, Brennan became an editor and publisher for newspapers in Pennsylvania, Illinois, and New York and later moved to the corporate staff of Ingersoll Publications (four hundred newspapers in the United States, Ireland, and England) as executive editor of all US newspapers.

In 1996, Brennan transitioned into the nonprofit sector, spending twelve years as vice president of operations for The Bowery Mission and six years as chief administrative officer for Care for the Homeless, both in New York City.

Terry and his wife, Andrea, now live in Danbury, Connecticut.

More on Brennan can be found at www.terrybrennanauthor.com. He is also on Facebook (Terry Brennan) and Twitter (@terrbrennan1).

Structure for ‘Gardeners’

Terry Brennan       @terrbrennan1

Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing

I’ve been told that there are essentially two kinds of authors—architects and gardeners.

Architects plan out everything before they start to build—not only the plot of the story but often the content of every chapter, or long, exhaustive summaries, along with well-defined characters. Gardeners plant a seed (hopefully in good soil); water it, let the sunshine on it for a while and wait to see what grows.

I’ve known architects. One not only wrote extensive histories of her main and secondary characters, but she also searched a website with photos of faces until she found the right look. Then she tacked up the face, the character’s history and the book’s summary above her desk, right where she needed it.

Another architect writer recommended having a conversation with your characters. “So, Joe, tell me about yourself?” And then write it all down. I tried this “character conversation” once. It was interesting. Filled up several pages of notes which I never used.

You see, I’m a gardener. And I never thought I’d change.

For my first novel, I had one idea. I married it to a second idea. And started to write. I had one character who was a clone of me and my history. And then other characters started to show up … often unannounced, certainly without a history. The story in my head had a beginning and an end. The 350 pages in between I made up as I went along. But, when I was asked about the sequel, my reaction was always the same. “What sequel?”

It took me four years to write the sequel I didn’t know existed.

Gardeners run into myriad other problems: recurring and inescapable dead ends; mountains of research that never sees the light of day; and pages of manuscript that are abruptly discarded because they no longer have any relevance or purpose. A lot of wasted time.

But, after The Aleppo Code, book three of the first series, won the Carol Award in 2016, I pitched my publisher for a new three-book series. Again, all I had was one idea. But I had learned a lesson. Even gardeners need a stake or two to keep the tomatoes upright.

And this is what I came up with. An Excel spreadsheet I called Timeline/Outline—one for each book and one for the series. I started by taking one specific idea, detail or scene as it came to me and writing them into individual rows in the spreadsheet. Then I started grouping those rows together into chapters, or sub-sections within a chapter, and putting a Date/Time stamp on each.

For a gardener, the benefit of Excel is that it is very flexible. Spreadsheets are easy to manipulate. You can move a row, or a whole section of rows—along with the date/time stamp—from one place to another; cut-and-paste information from one row into another; or create a whole new chapter within a chapter that’s gotten too long. At different stages of the writing process for the three books of my new empires of armageddon series, I would print out a spreadsheet and mark-up it up with changes I wanted to make. It was much easier to keep track of my progress, plot necessary changes, move large amounts of information, and keep things organized.

I’m still a gardener. But now my garden has rows and order and room to walk—or imagine. It’s a good thing. 

Terry Brennan is the award-winning author of The Jerusalem Prophecies series. His latest release, Ishmael Covenant, is the first in his new Empires of Armageddon series.

A Pulitzer Prize is one of the many awards Brennan accumulated during his twenty-two-year newspaper career. The Pottstown (PA) Mercury won the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing for a two-year series published while he led the team as the newspaper’s editor. In 1996, Brennan transitioned into the nonprofit sector, spending twelve years as vice president of operations for The Bowery Mission and six years as chief administrative officer for Care for the Homeless,  both in New York City.

Terry and his wife, Andrea, now live in Danbury, Connecticut.

More on Brennan can be found at www.terrybrennanauthor.com. He is also on Facebook (Terry Brennan) and Twitter (@terrbrennan1)

Award Winning Writers Show

By Terry Brennan

Certain manuscript issues are constants in conversations with editors and publishers:

·       Avoid Point-Of-View problems;

·       Resist the urge to explain;

·       Show, don’t tell.

In conversations with other authors, show-don’t-tell still leaves many writers frustrated. You want to move the story forward. What’s wrong with having one character say to another, “You know, Joe’s house burned down.” Do we need to be at Joe’s house?

Yes, particularly if Joe is important in the novel.

So, how do we do that? How can we avoid telling the reader something? How can we show them, instead?

An editor told me once, “I love the way you make little stories to show action.” Really? I never realized it. But then I went back through my last book, The Aleppo Code, and found a number of places where the editor was right.

At one point in the book, conflicts erupt simultaneously in locations around the Middle East. An early draft had military officers telling the President about these developments in the White House Situation Room.

As soon as somebody is telling someone else about action, you have a problem.

So I created the action. I introduced, in less than three-quarters of a page:

·       Yhanni Goldsmith, an Israeli Defense Force reservist working as a waiter in Tel Aviv as a wave of rockets walked destruction down the street outside his  seaside restaurant ;

·       Petra, who was driving to her mother’s home near the Lebanese border. It was her mother’s birthday, which is why she braved the crater-lined road, until she came to a crater where her mother’s house should be;

·       Colonel Isadore Stanfill, commander of 100 Israeli tanks near Ghajar, Israel, waiting for his “Go” to race into Lebanon with orders to destroy the Hezbollah rocket batteries.

I also created a pivotal naval battle in the Persian Gulf which ran through several chapters. Not only did the battle take the life of Rear Admiral Chauncey “Chipper” Woods, whose frigate, the USS Ingraham, was shredded by an Iranian missile attack, but the battle also introduced Lieutenant Andrew Stone. Fresh out of Annapolis, newly assigned, Stone was part of an amphibious attack team dispatched from the USS Ponce to lay waste to the Iranian naval base on Larak Island. Stone didn’t survive the attack, either. Tragic, since Stone was the son of the American President.

My favorite “show-don’t-tell” character came at the end of the book – Benji Propolski, overnight security guard for the Shrine of the Book, where the Dead Sea Scrolls are kept in Jerusalem’s Israel Museum. Benji was upset because his wife, Melda, forgot to fix his lunch. So he was distracted when, making his rounds, something astounding happened to the most powerful weapon in the history world.

Other than the naval battle, these scenes were not long. Each moved the story forward. Each introduced an interesting character, found nowhere else in the book. And each occurred in the midst of the action, giving the novel more depth.

In a word, they “showed”.

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A Pulitzer Prize is one of the many awards Terry Brennan accumulated during his 22-year newspaper career. The Pottstown (PA) Mercury won a Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing for a two-year series of editorials published while Brennan was the newspaper’s Editor. Starting out as a sportswriter in Philadelphia, Brennan became an Editor and Publisher for newspapers in Pennsylvania, Illinois, and New York and in 1988 moved to the corporate staff of Ingersoll Publications (400 newspapers in the U.S., Ireland and England) as Executive Editor of all U.S. newspaper titles. In 1996 Brennan transitioned into the nonprofit sector, spending 12 years as VP Operations for The Bowery Mission and six years as Chief Administrative Officer for Care for the Homeless, NYC nonprofits that serve homeless people. Terry and his wife, Andrea, live in the New York City area. Terry’s first novel series, THE JERUSALEM PROPHECIES, was released by Kregel Publications: The Sacred Cipher in July of 2009, The Brotherhood Conspiracy in June of 2013 and The Aleppo Code in October, 2015. The Aleppo Code won the Carol Award as the best Suspense/Thriller of 2015. Website – www.terrybrennanauthor.com Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/terry.brennan.5201

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