Times of Trouble, a new Christian fiction novel

Times of Trouble is my sixth novel, which will I will upload to Smashwords, B&N, and Createspace sometime in the next few days. It’s a Christian speculative fiction thriller. I’m aiming for the group of Christian readers who read the Left Behind series back in the late 90’s, and I’m hoping they’ll enjoy reading this novel.

What it’s about:

In the near future, the U.S. government has turned into a tyranny as the government agencies known as the EPA and TSA grow with ever more power, taking away the liberty many Americans had known for over two hundred years. They’re joined by a government agency, the Health Administration, which was put together in the mid-2010’s to regulate healthcare.

Told in first person point of view, Brian Atwood, our main character, is a field agent for the FBI in Omaha. His work involves mostly cyber terrorism and actual cases of potential real world terrorism. Eventually, his wife gives birth to their third child, who has Down’s Syndrome, which does not please the Health Administration because there are rules and regulations set-up in cases like these to prevent “genetic freaks” as they like to call them, from sucking up a lot of Health Admin money. Because the Atwoods are born again Christians, they never considered aborting the baby, so now the Health people have to take him away to deal with the problem later.

Meanwhile, the Secret Service decides to recruit Brian to be the personal agent of POTUS due to his great work involving a case that dealt with terrorism that would’ve involved Offutt Air Force Base. Brian’s faith is tested every day as he deals with a man that has no morals from what Brian can see, and is tested even more when his wife finds out that she’s dying from a fast growing form of breast cancer. Trouble in the rest of the world occurs as Iran attempts to nuke Israel, which fails spectacularly, so Israel takes care of the problem. This brings condemnation from everyone, including the US, which takes the side of Iran.

When the re-election of POTUS doesn’t turn out the way he wanted it, he and his people declare the election nullified because of supposed “irregularities” with the ballots. POTUS claims that the new President-elect may take the seat sometime in the middle of next year, if everything looks to be sorted out. POTUS purges his staff of what he considers unloyal people, including Brian. At the same time, he loses his wife, but regains the son he thought he had lost.

Brian moves back to his family home in Nebraska, where we follow what happens as the country slowly falls apart. Events play out as Brian and his family sees the End Times approach.

Stay tuned for news on when it can be purchased.

The story behind “Out of Time”

This was posted two years ago when I published Out of Time, and I thought I’d re-post it, and share it with everyone, since I’m in the process of publishing a more updated version to Createspace, with a new cover. Next after this will be Don’t Mess With Earth

So, you’re probably wondering how I came up with the story of Out of Time.

I started out with thinking the whole US government-alien UFO landing conspiracy theories would make a good story. Then, I saw the movie Titanic in 1997 and thought it would be cool if I could include it, so it turned into a time travel story. My villain, at first, was a guy who turned traitor, and sold technology secrets to a terrorist organization. I had him hijack the timeship, but he thought he was going to 1941 to help Japan attack Pearl Harbor, instead he ends up in Roswell 1947. I didn’t think this character worked too well as the main antagonist, so I created a bigger bad guy, who pulled the strings from 50 years further in the future.

This antagonist ends up going back in time himself, and impersonates J. Edgar Hoover. I have Hoover stay in control of the FBI because he knows where all the bodies are buried and what skeletons all the politicians have in their closets since he is from the future. He uses his knowledge to try and stop the time travelers, by sending teams of his own to where Hawking and the others are supposed to be. Eventually, it’s discovered that this Hoover had a hand in trying to assassinate JFK. At the end, you find out just why Hoover is determined to stop Hawking.

Other chapters deal with Anne Frank and the time travelers attempt to keep her from dying in the Concentration Camp she ends up in. I have my time travelers visit JFK because I was into the whole conspiracy about there being more than one shooter in Dallas that November day. I still think there is more to the whole assassination of the President than the government will ever let us know, but then again, maybe it was Oswald by himself who did it.

I have my time travelers even attempt to fix Apollo 13 and the Challenger shuttle. The only problem is, that when they return to their present, they discover changes they never imagined. I have them debate about whether they should fix the mistakes or just leave it alone. The message here being, should time travel ever be attempted and what about the grandfather paradox?

I’m really into American history, so that’s why I chose certain times in US history to start with. One of these days, when I’m a much better novelist, I will add more chapters or just add more to the chapters that are in the novella already, because I think it needs more meat to the story. Of course, I could just write a bunch of sequels, I don’t know yet. I just know that my next novel won’t take me ten plus years to finish, because I just nitpicked this one to death, and decided to publish it because I was just tired of looking at it and messing with it. From the various people who have read it so far, who knew how I wrote in high school, have been pleasently surprised by how well the story flows and how interesting it is. Hopefully, that translates into a lot of people wanting to buy a copy.

I’m currently working on another novel that I once submitted to the Writer’s of the Future contest as a short story. Stay tuned for that, once I have it completely written, I will post what that novel is about.