William Turney Morris: Blog

Well, after 18 years of writing some 4.5 million words, spread over 6 books, containing 181 chapter, 'The Three Signs' has finally been concluded. "But wait, William!" I hear you exclaim. "What becomes of Will, Lori, Megan, and Michelle? Do they all live happily ever after, or is there another disaster in store? How dare you leave us all hanging!" It will be like the angry messages I got at the end of Book One - "You've killed off the main character! How could you!"

But, like a model railroad layout, which is never truly one hundred per cent complete, no story is ever really finished. Do the Guardians have anything more in store for Will? What will happen with the School of Computer Science Engineering, can Will restore its reputation? Have the Roberttones completely ended their career? Will Australia now achieve everything Will and the Guardians hoped for? Will Kaz become State Premier?" There are all these questions yet to be answered.

So, there will be a short epilogue, that will (I hope) answer these, and other, questions. This will be written over the next month or two, and then I will cease writing any more in this series. I first start writing what evolved into this saga in 2006, as an extended short story for a friend in the UK (who, by a fluke of writing, ended up being memorialized in the story as the subject of the music written by Elton John and gifted to Will and the Band). After writing several chapters of what was to become 'Angie', I realized that there was a far more extensive story here. I searched around for a theme, eventually coming up with the concept of 'The Three Signs of Love'. Meanwhile, the story took on a life of its own, minor characters developed into major story lines, various twists and turns crept into the plot. However, the basic span of events, and the concluding scene, remained fairly much fixed in my mind.

I can only hope you've enjoyed reading it at least half as much as I've enjoyed writing it. During the process, I have gone through the death of my original muse, major illness (including open heart surgery, brain surgery, and cancer treatment), the death of both of my parents, my wife (after a long illness), remarriage, job loss, relocation halfway across the USA, and the usual ins and outs of daily life. Some of the things I have experienced ended up in the story (including the scene with Alexa after the pot muffins), some were just wild flights of fancy and my fevered imagination. I make no apologies for the changes I made to Australian political history - if the efforts of the Guardians, through Will, had no impact on events, then what was the point of it all?

There are many people that I would like to thank - Maureen Copley, who gave me the initial inspiration to write, and the encouragement to continue, Lisa Purdon-Ball, who became my muse, the many other writers here on SoL, who while I can't claim to be as good as some of them are, at least inspired me to continue. My (ever-patient) editor, Benton, who reviews my chicken-scratchings, trying to make sense of how I've tortured the English language, spelling and grammar to turn my writings into something readible and understandable. And, finally, you, my loyal readers - I've never really worried about the scores of my stories, number of downloads, or any of those metrics - what is important to me are comments and the words of encouragement, where you tell me how much you enjoy the story, how you hope Will will get through his latest setback, how much my writing brings back memories of Sydney and the Australian music scene of the era.

It has been a great experience for me, a true learning experience, and I think my writing has improved considerably from my first feeble attempts. I'll never reach the heights of those who get awards here, I'll never get to the point where I earn money from my scribblings, but that was never my intention. I have got incredible enjoyment and satisfaction from putting my ideas down on paper (or screen, actually), and the feedback - both positive and negative - was a great bonus.

Thank you, everyone, for sharing the journey with me, Professor Will Morris, Lori Earle, Megan Winters, Michelle Jones, and all of the others - Lisa Davis, Janelle Ward, Jillian Winters, Fiona Shaw....

Running about two weeks behind schedule... my New Year's weekend and the following week I spent in hospital, having my gallbladder removed. Fully recovered now, and writing...

I had feedback from a reader recently, asking about my use of the term 'Elohim' to refer to the Guardians, who have been following and guiding Will's life over the extent of the story. As this is a key part of the background to the series, I felt it was time for me to expand on my thoughts and rationale for this part of the saga.

Let me preface this by stating that I'm not proposing a new religion, or trying to overturn existing articles of faith in existing religions; these are just some random thoughts I've had over the years. As well, a lot of the concepts of 'God' is from a judeo / christian perspective, again, because that's my background, and what I know.

First, some background assumptions to set the scene. The premise is based upon everyone having a 'soul', that exists after their physical body dies, and the physical body is just a 'transport' mechanism for one's soul, allowing the person to interact with the physical world. It is the 'soul' that contains the essence of what makes a person unique, it consists of their memories, thoughts, beliefs, and mental processes. An analogy, if you want is like a computer - there is the physical hardware, the electronics, the memory chips, processor and so on. When a computer boots up, it loads the operating system into memory, and the processor starts to execute that program. As it goes along, various information is stored in temporary memory locations - what programs are running, variable values, user input and so forth. If one could capture all of that memory - dump the contents to some storage, and then transfer that and reload the memory dump to some compatible hardware, then all of the programs would continue uninterrupted, no user information would be lost. So it is with a human - the body is the 'hardware', and the soul could be considered to be the memory image of the operating system and all executing programs. Once the physical body dies, the soul remains, and contains all the memories and life experiences of that person. According to the Christian faith, once a person's physical body dies, the soul will either go to heaven, where they will share eternity with God, and the souls of those who have already died, or to hell. My thoughts started along the lines of 'The Guardians' about fifteen years ago, where I thought 'what if when a person dies, their soul doesn't go to heaven or hell, but stays on earth as an assistant to God?

The next consideration concerns our definitions of 'Who (or what) is God?' - again, in the sense of the judeo-christian god. We have an image of a powerful (human-like) being, white robes, beard - as depicted in movies. We have a considerable difficulty picturing some being that isn't human, or human-like, as God. Then, try to add the Christian concept of the Trinity - three in one. Most explanations are there are three individuals, all connected, but able to operate individually. Once of the best explanations of the concept I heard was to consider a candle flame, the flame is both light, and heat (particularly if you put your finger in it). The light can't exist with out the heat, and you can't have the heat of the flame without the light. And - my extension - physics tells us that light is both waves and particles - so we have all three aspects of the single candle flame. Of course, heat is just infra-red electromagnetic radiation, but let's not destroy the example by taking it to extremis. However we consider God, we can't get the concept of 'him' being an individual (or of God being a 'him' - or a 'her' - but still a person) our of our mind. Then, there are the three 'omnis' to consider - omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent - all knowing, all powerful, all present. So... how can a single being do all of that? We are so fixated on God being an individual being, because that's all we understand. We are trying to define something that is completely 'non-human' in human terms, and of course, it doesn't work. Over the centuries, there have been many hand-waving explanations for how God can be all of these things, so I will add another.

There a prayer that is part of the Anglican rite where there is the following prayer:

Therefore we praise you, joining our voices with Angels and Archangels and with all the company of heaven, who for ever sing this hymn to proclaim the glory of your Name:

I had always wondered (apart from what is the difference between an Angel and an Archangel) just what do those Angels, and 'the whole company of heaven' do up there when they aren't playing their harps and singing. Now, what if these souls that had not completely ascended into heaven were God's 'agents' on earth, who would provide information back to God? So, what we regard as 'God', being a single (spiritual) being, was, in fact, a multi-souled being, where many of these 'agents' were on earth, specifically charged to do God's work on earth; gathering information, influencing people, making sure things didn't go outrageously wrong? This was where the concept of 'The Guardians' came from, they were able to tap into a power source of the souls of people on earth, like a source of mana, and use that as power to exercise special abilities. This would include being able to fabricate a new (physical body) for themselves, set up a domain where they could reside and meet ('somewhere else'), exert some influence on people, cure diseases, change their physical appearance, and so on. There would be constraints on how much they can directly interfere in the activities of individuals, they couldn't directly 'take out' a potential source of trouble (killing the next Hitler or Pol Pot for example), but work through people to control the way socuety would develop.

When I started writing the 'Three Signs of Love', sometime back in 2005, I hadn't worked out that as a theme. In fact, the story started with what is now Book 5 (Angie); and during Will's developing relationship with Angie, his mind recalled events back when he was at high school, and his relationships with Cathy, Lori and Janelle. After a few months of writing, I got stuck, not able to work out where the story would go to. But, I realized that the 'reminiscing' was worth a full story in itself - which became Book 1 (Cathy), and eventually the next few books. It was around the time that I was finishing Book 2 (Lori), and planning the first part of Book 3 (Janelle), that I hit upon the idea of Jillian, after her death, coming back as one of these Guardians, to keep Will on the straight and narrow. That was when I fleshed out the background of the Guardians, and wrote the greatly expanded Introduction (Book 0); where in the early 1970s, a meeting of the Guardians saw big problems ahead for Australia and its society. As a young teen, I read the Foundation series by Issac Asimov, and the concept of 'psychohistory' where mathematical Hari Seldon could, using mathematics, predict to some degree of accuracy the course of society. What if, I thought, some of the 'Guardians' had the ability to predict the future, and make sure no potential catastrophic events would arise? One such Guardian was Sid Cooper, who is Will's maternal grandfather, who was selected to become a guardian because of his innate ability to read people's personalities and determine how they would react in various situations. With this ability amplified by the Guardians' ability to 'tap into' the mana from living people, he predicted big problems for the Australian society, with a moved to extreme nationalism, and most likely fascism, unless someone could make sure the Australian values of mateship, community and generosity were maintained. At a meeting of the Guardian's council, Sid presented his findings, and recommended that they groom a young Will Morris to be the person to prevent this happening. And thusly, I had the framework for the series developed. Normally, one would do this before starting to write... If you go back to the opening scene in Book 0, there was a meeting of the Senior Guardians, called to discuss Sid's report. I envisaged their meeting place to be somewhat like the Diogenes Club, in some of the Sherlock Holmes stories, which Sherlock's brother, Mycroft was a member of. Imagine some Victorian-era gentlemen's club, where liveried waiters moved around, service members with glasses of sherry or whiskey, while they contemplated the important events of the day.

Those who have been reading the series would recognize how the Guardians have 'tweaked' Will's natural abilities to fit him for this role. One was his ability to sing, but there are others; which have all been hinted at through the series, and I leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine what abilities of his have been 'enhanced' to enable him to fulfill this task.

Now, what was interesting was that about six or seven months ago, I was at Church one Sunday (Grace Episcopal, in Orange Park, Florida, if anyone is interested) and during the Sunday Sermon, the minister (who likes to scatter various bits of Anglican and Christian theology through his sermons) mentioned the 'Elohim', which is a rather ambiguous term, and the precise meaning of the word depends on the context. When used in the singular, it means 'God', but the plural can mean gods or spirits; in some cases the Hebrew word was translated to the Greek work meing 'angels' or 'the judgment of God', and there are parts of the Old Testament that refer to a 'Divine Council', with (a plural) emohim being members of the 'Council'. The way these elohim were described, I saw them as being similar to my concept of the 'Guardians' that I had already put in the stories.

So, I hope that makes sense, and answers questions that people might have had about what was in my mind. You should be aware that there are several people in Will's life who are 'Guardians', obviously Jillian, but also Doctor Margaret Sleigh, and Professor Murray Allen. Knowing that, you should now be able to see how they have influenced Will's life. I'm sure there are questions that people have, including:

1) Did any of the Guardians know about Will's infertiility? No (book 3, chaper 24). They were unaware that his case of mumps in 1971 had led to that.

2) Why did the not cure the infertility? Check the above reference, they were concerned that by revealing their hand too much, it would defeat the purpose.

3) Did Jillian know about his infertility? She had some deep suspicions, almost like feeling he was a kindred spirit, as it were, but had no hard evidence.

4) Was Baba (Alexa's grandmother) working with the Guardians? No, she just has 'the sight', not all that uncommon for people of Roma heritage.

There are probably more questions, send me a message through the site, and I'll try to answer them.

When Will was originally given a talisman from Alexa's grandmother (Baba) that would protect him from being in a plane accident, I had stated that it was dedicated to a Saint of the Eastern Orthodox Church, Saint John of Shanghai and San Francisco, commonly known as 'St. John the Wonderworker'. I really hadn't done sufficient research when I picked that saint, considering that this saint wasn't venerated until 1994, and although portions of his relics are in Serbia, there would have been no recognition of his sainthood and abilities in 1920's Australia. After more research, I chose Saint Naum, know as Naum of Preslav, who lived between 830 and 910, and was active in the area around Bulgaria and Macedonia. So it's quite likely he would feature prominently in a Serbian Orthodox Church. At some stage, I will repost the earlier chapters, correcting the saint's name.

Well, a big day here at the writing desk of William Turney Morris - and no, it's got nothing to do with the mid-term elections. After 1.5 million words and more than 4 years of elapsed time, the final chapter of Book 4 in the 'Three Signs of Love' saga has been posted. By far the longest book - the previous chapters combined were about 1.85 million words, also taking 4 years to complete. The next book is already being written, this is likely to be the final book.

An interesting sideline - when I first started the story, what is to become Book 5 was the actual story, set in 1999 / 2000, involving Y2K and similar work. But there was a considerable bit of reminiscing on the part of the main character, back to parallels in his teenage years. After a while, I started to think that maybe this backstory is worthy of a story in its own right (write?). So the first book in the series was extracted, then part way through that, it grew into a 'universe', and the subsequent books were planned ('plan' in the loosest sense of the word!) and written. Now I am returning to the first chapters of what I wrote - and I can see just how much my writing has improved over the 15 or so years. Of course, I have to modify some of the plot elements so it's consistent with what has already been written.

The last few chapters of 'Lisa' were pretty tough to write, lots of digging into personal events, but it was necessary to advance the plot. And now, back to writing...