Dancing Priest

Author and Novelist Glynn Young

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Dancing King Stories: Trevor Barry, Attorney and Counselor

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Trevor Barry Dancing King

Trevor Barry is a case of a character who wasn’t meant to show up in Dancing King. He was originally destined for the next novel in the series. Somehow, he broke into line.

Trevor and his wife Liz live in the northwestern suburbs of London. They have two children, Jane, 16, and Andrew, 12. Both children attend International Christian School, which is where Jason and Jim, the two adopted sons of Michael and Sarah Kent-Hughes, will also attend.

It’s not through school that Trevor and Michael meet. Born in Yorkshire, Trevor is an attorney, or barrister. He works in chambers with several other barristers on Essex Street in the Temple area of central London, near the Royal Courts of Justice. He handles a variety of legal cases, but his specialty is constitutional law. And Trevor’s hobby is the monarchy – the hobby is so serious that he’s known as something of an expert on the monarchy, its history, its legal standing, and even the various coronations. He’s also an avid amateur cyclist, and he can often be found on weekends on the Northwest London trail (a fictitious biking trail invented for the story).

Essex Street Temple
Essex Street, where Trevor Barry has his chambers.

It’s the hobby that brings Trevor to the attention of Josh Gittings, Michael’s chief of staff, and what gets him hired as a consultant. But it’s his knowledge and understanding of constitutional law that becomes just as valuable to Michael. Michael needs tutoring in constitutional law and the history of the monarchy, and Trevor happens to be able to do cover both.

Gittings meets Trevor at the palace security station and escorts him to his first meeting with Michael. The two are the same age, 41 but it would be difficult to find two more different people. Gittings is the former political shark for the prime minister; Trevor is quiet, something of an introvert, and wondering how someone with Michael’s reputation could have aligned himself with someone like Josh Gittings. Gittings doesn’t wait for Trevor to ask, and he brings it up himself.

Michael is so impressed with Trevor that he asks him to join the Coronation Committee. Afterward, Trevor asks Gittings is his lack of enthusiasm – meaning faith – will hurt him with Michael. And Gittings says Michael is hiring him for what he knows. Michael is intrigued by Trevor’s neutral references to church and faith, but he recognizes that the man knows what he’s talking about.

Dancing KingAt 26, Michael is almost a generation younger than both men. He has come to rely heavily on Gittings, and he will come to rely equally as much on Trevor. Because of the challenges presented by the Archbishop of Canterbury and his political consultant Geoffrey Venneman, Trevor finds himself called repeatedly to the palace, including to help Michael deal with the protestors who have demanded a meeting. Trevor uses his courtroom experience to prepare Michael for what will be an intense discussion with the protestors.

The character of Trevor Barry injected himself in the Dancing Priest stories earlier than planned. The reason was that, in the rewriting and redrafting that went on, I needed an expert on the monarchy earlier than expected. So, I moved him up a book.

Trevor’s role in the Dancing Priest stories will grow and assume a greater importance. While he gives the appearance of a successful attorney, one who becomes connected at the highest levels of British government and society, Trevor has a history, unknown even to his own family. And it will be Michael Kent-Hughes who unexpectedly stumbles into it.

Top photograph by Ryan Holloway via Unsplash. Used with permission. I’m not sure if I would give Trevor Baryr a beard and mustache, but the man’s expression suggests something to me of what Trevor would be about.

Dancing King Stories: Geoffrey Venneman, Villain

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Venneman Dancing King

Every story needs a good villain, or at least someone with villainous tendencies. My first novel, Dancing Priest, didn’t really have a villain, or at least one as a main character. The second in the series, A Light Shining, has an unnamed assassin. The third, Dancing King, has a public relations and political operative named Geoffrey Venneman.

I spent a few decades in corporate communications, working with and for public relations people and often collaborating with outside public relations firms. Contrary to the common perception, most PR people, or at least the vast majority I worked with, were capable, ethical people. They didn’t do anything that might be asked, regardless of whether it was good, bad, or indifferent. They would argue with wrongheaded decisions. They resisted bad advice. They worked hard to stay true to industry ethics codes.

A reporter once asked me if I had ever lied for any company or client I worked for. I could truthfully answer a firm no. Of course, the reporter likely asked the wrong question. I might have had a different answer if he asked me if I had ever been asked to lie for any company or client I worked for.

That’s been my experience. It has also been my experience to know a few PR people, and a few journalists, and it is a very few, who would never have been accused of being ethical. And it is a composite of those people (many of whom are no longer alive) who form the character of Geoffrey Venneman in Dancing King.

Dancing KingVenneman won’t do any and everything his client (in the novel, the Archbishop of Canterbury) asks, but it’s less a matter of ethical concerns and more a matter of what will and won’t work. He’s working for church officials he feels profound disdain for, and he’s working against Michael Kent-Hughes because he hates the monarchy. Mr. Venneman has his own agenda, and he’s ruthless in pursuing it.

I could have just as easily taking his character from national news reports and even reports in my own state of Missouri at the moment. But he was conceived and appeared on my computer screen some years ago, long before current political issues and fights. Instead, he came from a remark here, an action there, a situation somewhere else, a few people who liked to operate in the shadows, and people pulling strings without being seen or identified. I’ve dealt with all kinds of people in my career, including these kinds.

Venneman is polished; he’s an Oxford graduate, after all, and he maintains a polished Oxford accent. He uses people, without any regret for what might happen to them as a result. But he’s resourceful, and he has keen insight and perception – he knows and can appreciate when Michael and his communications man Jay Lanham successfully beat back an attack, including his own.

His plans include falsely interviewing for Michael’s communications job, the one eventually filled by Lanham, and it’s here that he makes a strategic mistake. He thinks he’ll be able to easily charm Michael, because Venneman so easily charms everyone else. And he thinks that happens. What he doesn’t know is that Michael comes away from the interview instinctively appalled; he doesn’t know why, but he reacts badly to Venneman as a person.

In short, Michael recognized the evil at work.

Venneman largely fails in his repeated attacks on Michael, but not every operation ends in failure. And he will have a significant role to play in the next story in the series.

Top photograph: What Geoffrey Venneman might look like, by Drew Hays via Unsplash. Used with permission.

The Story of the Second Chance

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Sunflower Second Chance

I was raised a Missouri Synod Lutheran, courtesy of my mother. I was raised with a strong Protestant work ethic, courtesy of my father (who was himself raised a Southern Baptist). Both of those influences fused me into something of an overachiever, although only for those things where I felt I had a chance to overachieve. Academics were one area. Sports were not.

Until my senior year in college, my life followed that overachiever pattern. Set goals, achieve them, surpass them, and then set new goals. As a college freshman, I set several goals, and kept adding to them.

By the middle of my senior year, I had achieved or overachieved everything. All the positions, honors, accolades, recognitions – I had captured them all, including being the managing editor of the student newspaper for my final semester – the position that ran everything in the paper except the editorial page. I had the power position on the paper, likely as powerful as any student office on the campus.

Nothing was left. Nothing.

I crashed and burned.

I kept working; the work ethic was too strong for that to stop. But I crashed. Everything I had accomplished seemed meaningless. Everything I had done seemed like wasted effort. Meaningless. Chasing after the wind.

What I didn’t know was that I was careening, wildly careening, right into the arms of God.

Through what seemed a strange series of circumstances, I landed one night in a conversation with the director for my college’s Campus Crusade for Christ chapter. I was angry, believing that I had been taken advantage of by this man’s organization, which seemed to preach one thing and practice another.

We talked, possibly for hours. I don’t remember how long. But by the end of our conversation, I found myself in God’s arms. I had become a story – the story of the second chance.

This wasn’t an opportunity to reinvent my life. This was a transformation of my life. In a matter of minutes, I understood that everything had fundamentally changed.

About 11 p.m., I found myself in the newspaper editor’s office. He was working late. He asked me if I was okay. “Has something happened?” he asked. And I nodded. “Everything happened,” I said. “Everything. And I can’t explain it.”

The story of the second chance didn’t begin and end that night. If I have learned anything about my life, it’s that the second chances keep coming.

Fourteen years after that night, I had a career crash and burn. Same pattern of overachievement; same result. It happened again 10 years after that, and then 11 years after that.

And each time brought an opportunity for a second chance.

I can say this: had not that second crash and burn happened, I would not have written a speech that changed an entire industry.

Had not that third crash and burn happened, I would not have spent nine months as the communications officer for an urban school district in extreme crisis, learning that a lot of people think differently than I do and they all don’t live in nice, comfortable suburbs, and that some of their children attend schools with 110 percent turnover – annually.

Had not that fourth crash and burn happened, I would not have had published three novels and a work of non-fiction. I would not be a weekly columnist on poetry.

Four stories of second chances. And each time, something changed, something was learned, and something was realized.

Something was being grown inside of me.

What was growing, what is growing, is less of me.

Photograph by Lisa Pellegrini via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Dancing King Stories: The King’s Communications Man

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Jay Lanham Dancing King

This is the first in a series of profiles of some of the main characters in the novel Dancing King. Every character has a story, one that is much larger and more detailed than what can be included in the narrative.

In Dancing King, Jay Lanham becomes the communications director for Michael Kent-Hughes and the monarchy. He is all of 29, but he already has considerable communications experience behind him. He was graduated from the University of Northumberland, receiving a communications degree (with honours). He had had internships with The Guardian and The Telegraph and was hired by The Daily Mail right after graduation (from an editorial perspective, The Guardian would be considered on the left side of the political spectrum, The Telegraph slightly more toward the center, and The Daily Mail on the right side of the spectrum).

He worked for The Daily Mail for three years, and he then joined the communications staff of Britrail. He quickly gained a reputation for crisis communications following two train accidents, but what put him on the map in the communications industry was his adroit handling of a threatened strike by rail workers. Lanham didn’t know it at the time, but he effectively countered the plans of the would-be strikers whose unions had hired Geoffrey Venneman of the FBL public affairs firm. Two years younger than Venneman, Lanham had successfully anticipated almost every move by the unions.

After three years with Britrail, he set up his own consultancy, Lanham & Associates, which, as Josh Gittings, Michael’s chief of staff wryly noted, was likely more Lanham than Associates. He shared an office with other creatives in a small Whitechapel office building, and while his firm wasn’t an overnight success, he was managing to grow his client base. Single, he lives in a small flat in the Southwark area of London, about three blocks from the Borough Market and London Bridge Station.

Dancing KingHe applied for the job of palace communications director almost as a lark. While Gittings had been soliciting resumes, he hadn’t talked to Lanham, so the application was what’s called “over the transom.” It arrives at a propitious moment; Michael has interviewed several candidates, including the faux candidate Geoffrey Venneman, and not found anyone to his liking.

With his application, Lanham proposes a communications plan for Michael, based on what’s read about the new king and after reviewing the text and video versions of Michael’s sermons when he served as a priest at St. Anselm’s Church in San Francisco. Michael responds enthusiastically; he asks his wife Sarah to read the application as well, and she responds just as enthusiastically.

During the actual job interview, which begins at breakfast with the family at the palace and continues as Michael brings their adopted sons Jason and Jim to school, Lanham essentially starts doing the job – a large number of reporters are waiting at the school to film scenes of the boys’ arrival and toss questions at the king. Lanham handles the media so well that Michael hires him on the spot.

During the next six months after his hiring, Lanham will discover what it means to be Michael’s communications man. The king will be undertaking a series of sermons in London churches, and Lanham will help plan those communications. At the same time, the king will find himself the target of Geoffrey Venneman, hired by the Archbishop of Canterbury to stop Michael’s plans for the reformation of the church.

While Dancing King is a work of fiction, Lanham’s hiring and his crises experiences during the first six months of Michael’s reign are taken from real life and my own experiences in both corporate and crisis communications.

How Lanham is hired is based on an experience I had some years ago, when I was considered for a speechwriting job with a very large defense contractor. The CEO wanted a 20-something, savvy about social media. The recruiter saw that a 50-something candidate knew more about social media than the two 20-somethings being considered. All three of us were given an assignment of writing an article about a speech by the CEO for an employee publication. The other two wrote articles. I wrote the article, and then embedded it in a mocked-up newsletter with other stories, using pictures and charts I found on the company’s web site. As it turned out, none of us got the job (it wasn’t filled), but I did visit corporate HQ as one of the two final candidates.

Lanham handles a series of crises, all orchestrated by Venneman. All of them (including a protest) are based on my own experiences in crises communications, including figuring out who some of the hidden players are. And one section of story, involving one of the most important speeches Michael will make, mirrors almost exactly an experience I had writing a speech for a corporate executive.

Top photograph: An idea of what Jay Lanham might look like. Photo by Ali Morshedlou via Unsplash. Used with permission.

The Gospel According to Stephen King

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The Gospel According to Stephen King

Three or four times a day, I receive email notices of conversations on discussion boards and Facebook groups, usually about Christian fiction. The subjects are all over the place, from a request for help for a software application to a question about Idaho state law governing autopsies.

One recent discussion stream caught my attention, but only after it had been underway for a few days. The question was about the use of the omniscient narrator, and whether it was something a fiction writer could do and not put off an agent or a publisher. (Like a lot of questions about writing, those who know will always say don’t do it – unless you can get away with it.)

As the discussion went along, one participant appealed to Stephen King, citing his book On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. That wasn’t so unusual in and of itself. But as soon as that comment was made, several others added their citations to King’s work. It was clear that King was seen as a significant authority on the subject.

On Writing Stephen KingA few days later, someone posted a short article on a blog about Christian fiction that asked what books on writing would readers recommend – and while there were the standard references to Strunk & White’s Elements of Style and a couple to Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art, there are far, far more to Stephen King’s On Writing. (My own favorite books on writing are John Gardner’s On Moral Fiction and Mario Vargas Llosa’s Letters to a Young Novelist.)

My own knowledge of King is limited mostly to his early works. The first novel of his that read was Salem’s Lot, and then I read Carrie, The Shining and The Stand. Of those I’ve read, I liked The Shining the best, and I still have vivid memories of one of the main characters driving up a mountain (in a big Cadillac, I think) in a fierce Colorado snowstorm.

He’s published a lot of books since then, and On Writing came out in 2000. It’s not exclusively a “how to write” book, but more of a combined personal memoir, writing manual, and how he recovered from serious injuries after being struck by an automobile while walking.

What is it about Stephen King in general and his On Writing in particular that makes him (and it) so appealing to Christian novelists and writers?  And this appeal is broader than only to the writers of Christian horror, suspense and supernatural, a genre that’s developed only in recent years and by many writers who were directly influenced by King.

One is obvious. King is a terrific writer and storyteller. He’s a master of suspense, and even if you’re not interested in writing a suspense novel, there’s much to be learned from how he constructs his novels and stories in general and suspense scenes in particular. In other words, we can appreciate his writing for the same reasons anyone can appreciate his writing.

Second, despite the horror aspects of many of his works, his stories are “clean” – you don’t find gratuitous or obligatory sex thrown into the stories like you find is so much contemporary writing. (Not long ago, I read a buy-in-the-supermarket romance novel to see what it was like, not only were the “adult” scenes written really badly, the entire novel was written badly.) (Several weeks later, it showed up on the New York Times’ paperback bestseller list, so what do I know?)

A third aspect to King’s appeal is how accessible his writing is for Christians, even with all the blood, gore, plague, ghosts, stalkers and vampires (or perhaps because of them). His writing, as varied as it is, hews to the basic story format – setting, conflict, climax and resolution. This is a format, a structure, that is familiar to us from the story of the Bible overall and the story of Christ. One can’t call King a “Christian author” is the sense that the Christian Booksellers Association would use that term, but his stories are structured like “the story” we know and his themes – good vs. evil, redemption, and the darkness within each of us – are the themes we’re intimately familiar with.

They’re the story and the themes of The Book.

Photograph by Carl Cerstrand via Unsplash. Used with permission.