I knew nothing about Jim Butcher. I'm glad he was the right read at the right time for you. In my mind I had to compare Harry Dresden and Michael Carpenter to my chief male characters in A Tale of Two Times. From what you’re said, Arron, I can believe that Butcher uses Catholic elements to maintain a dramatic tension in his stories which will appeal to a generally younger reader class than I've crafted. The readers I'm hoping to appeal to are older native agnostics who feel something of the pull of the spiritual, but don’t know what to do about it. So the Catholic element is the major invisible tension of the whole tale (all 980,000 words of it) not an stylistic element within it. My characters have the destiny, arising from an event which is pre Abrahamic, to engage the Ancient Foe under specific rules which call for them (the Clan of Thiuderieks) to treat him as a Friend, which, in fact, is what the god Sunderer calls himself. I know that from the overlap of atheism and agnosticism that many feel that they are being true heroes by suffering the dismal world without God as their duty to truth. The Tale's Chief masculine hero, Ricardo Chavez is meant to resonate with the overtones of that heroism of mental resolve. And, the element of dramatic tension comparable to Butcher's Harry/Michael is the contrast between the rank evil of the humans of the Circle of the Ancient Foe, many who have been with him for eight thousand years, and the more or less virtuous nature of humans of the Clan's War Thing. I can agree that portraying appealing virtue is a literary challenge. I hope that there are readers of the Tale for whom it’s the right read at the right time.
I knew nothing about Jim Butcher. I'm glad he was the right read at the right time for you. In my mind I had to compare Harry Dresden and Michael Carpenter to my chief male characters in A Tale of Two Times. From what you’re said, Arron, I can believe that Butcher uses Catholic elements to maintain a dramatic tension in his stories which will appeal to a generally younger reader class than I've crafted. The readers I'm hoping to appeal to are older native agnostics who feel something of the pull of the spiritual, but don’t know what to do about it. So the Catholic element is the major invisible tension of the whole tale (all 980,000 words of it) not an stylistic element within it. My characters have the destiny, arising from an event which is pre Abrahamic, to engage the Ancient Foe under specific rules which call for them (the Clan of Thiuderieks) to treat him as a Friend, which, in fact, is what the god Sunderer calls himself. I know that from the overlap of atheism and agnosticism that many feel that they are being true heroes by suffering the dismal world without God as their duty to truth. The Tale's Chief masculine hero, Ricardo Chavez is meant to resonate with the overtones of that heroism of mental resolve. And, the element of dramatic tension comparable to Butcher's Harry/Michael is the contrast between the rank evil of the humans of the Circle of the Ancient Foe, many who have been with him for eight thousand years, and the more or less virtuous nature of humans of the Clan's War Thing. I can agree that portraying appealing virtue is a literary challenge. I hope that there are readers of the Tale for whom it’s the right read at the right time.