Faith: Facing Fearful Odds
Holding The Bridge
Outlaws and Fellow Fiction Fiends!
Surprise, I’m back in less than a month! It’s release day, so I felt it appropriate to have something ready and remind everyone that I’m now officially a professional editor! Huge thanks to
and Three Ravens Publishing for trusting me to go over all these stories and work with the authors to make sure they were all they could be.
It Came From The Trailer Park: Double Wide Volume 1 is live! Go get it!
That’s it for writing!
It’s also Memorial Day.
A day that sometimes it’s almost impossible to know what to say. Happy Memorial Day sounds insane. A day for the Fallen who made the greatest sacrifice. A day we sit at graves and pour a few shots out for young men and women who never got to grow old. Right now my brother is probably on the road for a four hour trip to toast absent friends standing at a headstone.
It’s not a happy day, but I hope for all the Vets out there toasting the warrior that was next to them, for the children missing a parent, and the spouses walking without their other half, it is a day full of smiles and laughter. That the memory of the Fallen, from antiquity to yesterday is something that brings light. that the reflection brings solace and healing.
So no, Not Happy Memorial Day, but I do hope that Memorial Day is a happy day, as happy as it can be. I hope that when you keep them alive, when you rememeber the name, it’s with as much mirth as sadness.
I also want to talk about something that warrriors often show in spades.
I Want to talk about Style, and about Faith
This will be a multipart series. I’ll have a related entry some time down the road, but after my last rant I felt it was important to keep going on addressing Who I Am.
I had another short talk with Friendo 2.0, and I think we are OK, though I’m not really sure, honestly. I stand by what I said, and I never intended anything as a condemnation. I gave the rant because multiple people were asking me about my integrity, about the company I keep, and I wanted to set the record straight on what my personal priorities were. If anyone had the same question, it is now written out in detail. Friendo 2.0 gave me some more details and reasoning. I appreciate it, they are fantastic, I’ll talk with them more on a later date.
If I feel like there’s a public concern, a rumor or some kind of issue that my peers and readers may have, I’m going to address it publicly. I figured between the direct questions and repeated allusions to the mystery crowd that didn’t like what I was doing, I needed to let everyone know. That’s my Style. Not to name names, not be to messy or call anyone out, but to see the dysfunction and address it. That’s my style. That’s always going to be my style, and if it doesn’t jive with you, I understand. I hope I’ll see you at another campfire, down that dusty road.
That Style comes from Worldview, from Habit, from Rearing, and from Faith.
It’s a big part of my worldview to communicate openly about issues. To be mostly an open book. To show my scars like tattoos. I believe it’s authentic. That it tells you exactly what you are buying when you sit at the fireside with me. If I am genuine about the good things, I have to be genuine about the issues to. The faster we get real about our faults, the faster we address them. I have Faith. Faith that when I talk about these things, that I’m shining my flashlight and my signal flare to others like me. To good people, or at least my kind of good people. So I’m going to talk about Faith.
Also, for anyone worried… No I will not be asking you if you have a moment for our Lord and Savior.
Though I do reserve the right to cover it in passing. I’m going to be talking about Faith in a human capacity. Not about the divine, but about the deep seeded belief in oneself and in the capability of those around you. I have seen men and women lead a Faithless life. It is a nightmare existence. So now is a time I can both hand out accolades and address this.
“If a man hasn’t found something he will die for, he isn’t fit to live”- Martin Luther King Jr.
To take on any hard task, a person has to have Faith. A confidence that even though a great obstacle lays before them they are going to be able to find a way or make one. There are tons of now cliche quotes about this. Motivation I could spew about it, but the fact remains that there has to be a solid belief in oneself to climb Mt. Everest.
Success is not built on faith alone. Skill, preparation, and an entire list of other building blocks let humans conquer the difficult, but Faith is on the necessary list. When other’s have crashed and burned or perished on the hardest of trails, Only the suicidal, the desperate, and the faithful set down that road. Most of the first two end up another corpse on the way to the summit.
The issue with Faith is that so many people think it includes the absence of Doubt. That’s plain bullshit.
Faith is the trust in yourself, your companions, and in some kind of great power or principle that lets you persevere through the dark nights and the exhaustion. Through the mass investments of sweat, and time, and sometimes blood. Faith shores you up when confidence falters, when The Wizard or The Wall finally comes up and everyone else tapped out, crashed out, or died.
I hope, if you are reading this, it’s no shock when I tell you that writing professionally, hell even writing a novel as a hobby, is a struggle. There’s all the writing skills, nightmarish amounts of practice and mistakes, learning how to generate interest in the work, and finding someone qualified to give you constructive feedback.
The initial investment is heavy on all fronts. Time, money, and effort. It’s so heavy, that even having Faith in yourself as a skilled writer is not enough. Making money is mostly marketing and selling you as a brand. People reading the work is often the last step. By that point, anyone reading the epic you bled into is ALREADY BOUGHT IN.
That fact alone kills of 99% of professionals from continuing to write.
tagged me in a post a few days past, A excerpt of The Professor himself, J.R.R Tolkien, speaking on how a friend allowed him to continue and finish what is widely regarded as one of, if not, the greatest fantasy works of all time.
In case the correlation somehow missed, this is one of the greatest writers in history saying that without a gift one of his friends gave him, he never would have finished one of the top five greatest literary works of all time. That gift was Faith.
When Slater tagged me, he was adding me to his circle of Faith. Because you can give someone Faith. The gift of Faith to another often comes when that trail is most desperate, when you feel that everyone is watching and if you fail now, it is absolutely final. Having a single person, even better a group, that looks at you by magical instinct and says “You can do this.” is a rare thing that often makes the final roll of the dice turn in your favor. If you are strong enough to give the gift of Faith, you will often find it is reciprocated and all the more powerful.
When I saw Slater’s list of those who had given him Faith, and who he gave Faith in return, it reminded me of another famous work.
Lays of Ancient Rome is a famous poem and is often quoted. It’s been used in movies, video games, and other written works.
“Then out spake brave Horatius
The Captain of the Gate:
To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
And the temples of his gods,
And for the tender mother
Who dandled him to rest,
And for the wife who nurses
His baby at her breast,
And for the holy maidens
Who feed the eternal flame,
To save them from false Sextus
That wrought the deed of shame?
Haul down the bridge, Sir Consul,
With all the speed ye may;
I, with two more to help me,
Will hold the foe in play.
In yon strait path a thousand
May well be stopped by three.
Now who will stand on either hand,
And keep the bridge with me?”
Horatius steps forward to make a last stand, the ultimate challenge. Like the Spartans, The Samurai, or the Swiss Guard. He chooses protecting the gate as his last act, the ultimate sacrifice allowing his loved ones to flee.
Our Hero however knows he cannot stand alone, he knows his skill is worthy, but the task is just too much, and so, in the darkest hour he asked for help, for the Faith of not an army, but of just two others.
I have been blessed with Faith. Faith from Slater and
, from The Alpha Mercs, and the WIP writers group, Faith from and the Mirthquake crew. Faith from my family and friends, and so many others I could tag and did tag back in my Jordan Con post. Faith from all of you reading this.For most of us, there will never be a last stand, no invading army. We won’t be climbing Everest or venturing across a barren plain. Our struggles will be our careers, or dreams, or raising our children. That work, though much less storied, still requires Faith. Our Bridge to hold will be metaphorical, but it will still be the challenge of our lives.
So thank you, all of you, for holding the bridge with me.
I hope I can return the gift of Faith, and when you stand the bridge, I hope I’ll be one of the few at your side.
If you find yourself alone on the trail, or even worse surrounded by people who you know would fold and run in the face of your army, who would never hold the bridge with you, then I pray you find those who will. It might be the most important thing you do in your life. Keep your head up, your eyes on the horizon, and keep searching. Have Faith. You can do this.
May We All Find What We Seek,
Jesse James Fain
I always loved that poem, and it always hits differently on the solemn days of remembrance.
Cool concept for an anthology, Jesse.