Tag Archives: Mark Pacer series

Story and Place and Growth

Most fiction series follow the story of a main character—perhaps through major life changes and/or some type of inner growth. The changes may happen even while the character is solving crimes or experiencing world changing events.

Mark Pacer, main character of the series I’ve chosen to write, changes through relationships and solving problems thrust at him. The countries where his job takes him also exert influence.

Mark is a U.S. Foreign Service officer. Another name for that profession is diplomat, but Mark doesn’t like to be called that. It doesn’t sound like who he is, an Appalachian boy, the first of his poor but proud Southern family to attend college.

They clash sometime, his profession and his upbringing. He is forever a non-belonger.

Nevertheless, he learns from experiences in each place his career takes him: Washington, D.C. for his training, then the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and Egypt (so far).

Through the various cultures and the challenges in each, he explores himself and his country, his family and his inner yearnings.

The world, he begins to understand, is a huge mixture of peoples and cultures. His own upbringing may stand the test of the challenges, but he will be changed, no doubt about it.

Indeed, none of us today lives in a single culture. To understand the times is to understand how the computer/internet age has forever made impossible an understanding based only on one’s country of citizenship.

Writing Journey in Thy Dross to Consume

Mark Pacer, a U.S. diplomat raised in Mocking Bird, Georgia, solves mysteries related to his profession. He is again the main character in Thy Dross to Consume, the fifth novel of the series.

An older American man lies in a coma in a hospital in Cairo, Egypt. Mark, from the U.S. embassy, must find a next of kin to notify. The phone number in the man’s U.S. passport has been disconnected. No one, it seems, in the States or in Egypt knows who he is.

For Mark, suffering his own recent loss, the search for this man’s family becomes a pilgrimage.

That’s the plot in a nutshell: a mystery, changing relationships, and the old question of “why do the innocent suffer.”

Mark constantly struggles to reconcile his upbringing in a dysfunctional Appalachian church with his desire for a genuine faith.

A reviewer of one of my earlier books hit on a dilemma I face in marketing my writing. I’m not what is commonly called a “Christian” or “inspirational” writer.

I’m a Christian who writes.

If I say I’m a “Christian” writer, some take this to mean a certain type of literature. This genre is for Christians, often Christians who desire stories with strong “evangelical” themes. (Though I find the term “evangelical” unhelpful these days. It has become political, not simply related to spreading good news.)

This is not to denigrate those firmly set in the “Christian” market. I don’t write science fiction, but I certainly consider science fiction a legitimate genre.

I’ve decided, I write fiction for Christians, as well as other spiritually attuned, who don’t normally read “Christian” fiction.