Happy day of the birth of Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh in the womb of the Immaculate Virgin Mary!

In other words, MERRY CHRISTMAS!

It is the day of Christ's Mass. (Yes, originating with the Catholic church... one more reason, among many, to be grateful for the 2,000 year old rock upon which western civilization was founded.)

For those who don't believe in God, He still loves you. (Also, God exists, whether you believe or not.)

“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life." - John 3:16

God is in everything, and yet nothing can contain him fully, except for one who contained the Word of God...

And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth. - John 1:14

The Word of God, the Only-Begotten Son

God could have come into this world in flesh without any use of man, His creation. He made Adam and Eve and could as well have formed his own body with a thought. However, He is the God of perfect virtue and chose the most humble of forms through the most perfect of His creations by making Mary and preparing her throughout her life to be the perfect ark of the new covenant. 

The Word of God was given flesh in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary when the Holy Spirit came upon her and sparked that conception into being. God chose to join with His creation in the most humble and meek way He could... as a baby. That is the first lesson of being holy. The other is that He created and molded the perfect parents so that He could demonstrate perfect obedience, even as they showed deference to Him as God made flesh. Imagine the honor and the light in His presence that would inspire perfect virtue. Mary and Joseph are far beyond in virtue and meekness what any other people could be. They were in the presence of God and knew it. They weren't ordinary people.

I can hardly conceive of what they must have felt but come close every time I accept the Eucharist worthily (in reverence and contrition and without grave sin) in Holy Communion.

God created all the heavens and the earth and everything in them by speaking it (His Word) into being. He can do whatever He wants.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it. - John 1:1-5

ID 143887715 © Wideonet | Dreamstime.com

The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us...

Mary and Joseph went to Bethlehem for Joseph to complete the census ordered by the Roman emperor of that time. God chose Joseph and guided his life for this, not only because of his line to David and the promise of an eternal throne (there could have been many others) but for many other reasons we may never know. (And Joseph was not the father of Jesus but the stepfather by our definition, yet the male line was the recognized line in the culture of the time, and his lineage is recorded in the Bible in Matthew 1:1-17.)

One thing we do know is that God does nothing without meaning. Take the name of the city of Bethlehem. The old Hebrew name bêth lehem, meaning "house of bread", has survived till the present day. In its Arabic form, however, bêt lahm, it means "house of meat". (Catholic Encyclopedia) Jesus is the Bread of Life, made available to us in the Holy Eucharist since his implementing this sacrament in the Passover meal before his passion and death, his last supper.

"I am the bread of life. Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.” - John 6:48-51

His flesh is the bread of life (eternal life, not life on this world). The bread at the mass is made into the body, blood, soul, and divinity of Christ upon the priest saying the words of consecration.

Jesus also came for the purpose of being the final sacrifice to redeem the sins of man, which started in the Garden of Eden. That's a whole other explanation, which you can find online (and which many Protestants, without the guidance of the authority of the 2,000 years of Catholic doctrine and tradition from the apostles carried down through the ages, lack in full understanding, so I invite you to research Catholic sources).

Jesus came to complete the sacrifice, which is why He instituted Communion through the simple form of bread and wine before his passion and death. God gave us Him in this so we could continue to be close to Him to have everlasting life and mold our sinful hearts into his Sacred Heart. It purifies us and prepares us for eternal life... and we go deeper into that in Lent and Easter.

In the Beginning

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. - John 1:1

Then God said [...]  - Genesis 1:3

The Word of God was made flesh and given a unique human identity while still remaining wholly God, and every word Jesus spoke and His every deed are for our benefit--God is speaking directly to us on our level. 

However, not everything was recorded. It couldn't be. Every moment of thirty-three years of life and the events even before could not have been humanly possible to record. This is even noted at the end of the gospel of John, the beloved apostle who cared for Mary after the death of Jesus (because there were no other sons or daughters to care for her, and under Jewish tradition, a blood relative would have been duty-bound to care for their widowed mother):

Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name. - John 20:30-31

 

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I'll add videos as I can find them to help explain more about Christ's Mass:

This first is a new and excellent explanation building on what I wrote above:

Why Islam is Collapsing w/ David Wood (video title)

Brian Holdsworth is a Canadian Catholic apologetics podcaster. David Wood's channel, as he explains in this interview, talks about the faults with Islam.

This is a long interview and the first half is an interesting explanation of what an antisocial personality is and what his life was like with such a defect, if one might call it that. It's given him an interesting perspective on the world. The second half focuses on the issues of Islam. I've watched his channel on occasion and learned a lot.

From Mohammad to Jesus: The Nikki Kingsley Story (video title)

the quiet strength of meekness

This is a great definition of what meekness actually is... strength with self-control.

"Blessed are the meek" is not a command to be harmless. It actually means you're capable of great strength.

Modern people equate "meekness" with weakness, timidity, and lack of backbone. This couldn't be further from the truth.

Standard lexicons on the other hand (e.g.,… pic.twitter.com/HYvBldnGQp

— Trad West (@trad_west_) December 21, 2025

In Starfire Angels: Forgotten Worlds, the characters often refer to L'Ni as having Feri pride, and he does, sort of. He really isn't prideful but meek by this definition. He has nearly perfect control over his emotions and doesn't show things outwardly getting to him, but only nearly perfect. He has his moments, but it takes a lot to get to him. He's also even tempered and modest of speech, never lies or denies the truth; he has most of the virtues that make him a worthy hero. 

He's not brash or a womanizer like many adventure heroes. He's a gentlemen in every sense, and he's been one of my favorite characters. He represents what a real man ought to be in temperament and principles, even recognizing a duty to protect those weaker than him, no matter the cost to himself. Part of that is his natural temperament and part is his training to not think about himself as much as the completion of a mission. He's been a center-point for me as a character in this series. The qualities that made him a good soldier of the enemy make him an even better heroic character fighting for the light. His superiors turned one of their greatest assets into their worst nightmare, and you'll see why in a big way in Book 21.

This post on X is what I've been seeing and hearing about what meekness really is, and it defines L'Ni pretty well.

God bless!

about the notes added in the first book of the Starfire Angels: Forgotten Worlds series

The nice thing about indie/self-publishing is being able to make updates to books and not having to live with errors forever.

Readers of this blog know already that I've been reading through my series for my own personal enjoyment and also for a refresher before writing the last few books. I've also mentioned that I've been fixing little errors... and then made HUGE fixes to Book 1, A NEW BEGINNING, to the point that it added 4,000 words and cleaned up a lot of issues that made me cringe when I really looked deeply into them. As a perfectionist, I couldn't let that remain, so I fixed the book, and a new version has replaced the old.

I've recently been thinking again about something left in a couple of reviews on Goodreads, about a reader having some difficulty getting into the book and another being confused. That was part of the impetus to take a deeper look at it. It was also the reason for adding the update notes in the beginning of the book in 2024 regarding the odd dialogue formats indicating alien languages being written for the audience to understand and what to expect of the series. (Yes, authors do pay attention to reader comments, and I appreciate those, especially if someone wants to send them to me directly, which is why I have my public email address in every book.)

Now, I've added another note to that area as a "2025 update" note, regarding the naming order. To me, being a scifi geek, I've seen plenty of alien names and adapt. However, with more "laypeople" (metaphorically speaking), including kids (since Starfire Angels: Forgotten Worlds is written so that there's nothing inappropriate for tweens), picking up scifi for perhaps the first time or not being as tuned into some of the weirdness of truly immersive fictional alien cultures, I've decided to offer a bit of an explanation on this.

The opening now includes the following notes:

2024 updates

A note about dialogue format:

Because multiple "alien" languages are referenced throughout the series, dialogue needed some sort of indicators. Where the translation is revealed but is meant to be in another language, either [ ] or { } or even | | is used to encapsulate that dialogue. If any of these brackets are used in a book, they indicate different alien languages. In some of the books, all three are used. Where those brackets are, the character is speaking in a language other than Standard.

A note about the series:

This series has been planned as 24-25 books, each being its own complete adventure (beginning-middle-end). However, each book is a chapter of a larger "book" (the series) with growth and changes of characters and cultural/political situations over the course of the series, which will end in a series climax. For best enjoyment of the series arc, it is recommended to read every book in the numbered order.

* * * * *

2025 update

A note about naming formats:

I realized that some of the naming conveniences may be a little confusing to those who think personal-name familial-name (aka first-name last-name) format (such as John Smith) is the only order for names. However, when I created the Inari in the first Starfire Angels book, I was entrenched in anime and decided to use the Asian order of familial-name personal-name for them. Some of the fictional cultures influenced by the Inari culture in this series also use that naming order. However, since this is science fiction and touches on a variety of different fictional cultures, the series has names in a few different structures when referencing full names.

Another Book 23 update

Book 23 is very different from all the other books in the course of writing it, but it wasn't unexpected.

I anguish over every lag in a story... and then I pray and... the inspiration comes. It's similar to what happened with writing Book 19.

Often, the books that are hardest to write end up being among my best. My agonizing over turning them into stories that keep the readers' attention from beginning to end pushes me to find the right elements to do that. There's a certain sense of immediacy and question of how each story could be resolved that I work to create, along with answering questions important to the conclusion of the series.

If I'm getting bored, the readers will definitely be bored. That's how I know a certain tension is missing. The problem is figuring out how to increase it.

The ideas on this book have only trickled in a little at a time after a lot of trial and error. It's been one of my most difficult so far, which means I have been scrutinizing every detail to determine what's missing and what works or doesn't work for the story. It's been coming together in a way that's inconvenient, but each piece adds a new satisfaction in its increasing tension for the plot.

Tonight, that piece created an imminent threat of a suspected sleeper agent on a Starfire world, which gave me a whole bunch of ways to increase the dangers to the characters. 😈 The plan is now set up pretty well. This is going to be a lot of fun to write from this point on!

Thanks for reading!

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update 12/21/25: I wrote 1600 word scene today for the end of the book and will write more this evening. That scene will need a little change by the time I write to that point, but it was a scene I couldn't wait to write, especially now that I have the rest of the story planned.

AI Found Something Impossible in the Shroud of Turin — Scientists Are Terrified to Explain (video title)

God is amazing. He created this negative of the transformation of the body of Christ at the resurrection with an intent on the technology we would develop to examine it and confirm it's validity. Only God could foresee that mankind would develop the technology for such examinations, just as He embedded impossible-to-humans symbols and micro-images in the Lady of Guadalupe image on tilma of Juan Diego and simple miracle of the (unpainted) image on the rock of Our Lady of Las Lajas.

God is great!

What You may Not Know About Christmas! (video title)

progress on Book 23

Progress on Book 23 is not the speed of progress I'd like, but I've been juggling a lot of things lately. With a new small business and my regular part-time day job (which pays the bills to start a new small business), along with my daily walking, church, and prayer time, there isn't much left. (And then I took a week off to rewrite/edit Book 1 when I finally saw it through a different lens.)

Book 23 will be a bit of a space western. I had to do it. After a high fantasy in Book 19 and a sort-of ancient Greco-Roman style in a couple of books, I settled on a western-ish setting for this, although with the usual elements of this series making it only somewhat of a western in style. I said early on that this series would have a lot of different story possibilities all rolled into one universe. I wasn't expecting this, but it works.

I'm making my time count for writing. Some days I can write 1,000 words, like today. Some days, I barely eek out a few dozen. Sometimes, I can't even think to write, but this has been the writing cycle for decades. I do what I can when I can, and I had a lot of trouble settling on the opening of this book, which set me back more than anything else. Now that I have the plot figured out, even the difficult days produce something.

I'm between a third and halfway on the first draft of Book 23; and, on the way to church yesterday (early evening mass), I had an idea for how to bring to a head a subplot of this series, a subplot I've been developing with the introduction of Alric. Most of it, you haven't seen yet--Books 21 & 22 get more into that. Having it come to fruition in Book 23 will work out well. When I get to the final battles of the series in Books 24 & 25, that subplot will kick up the emotions more fully.

I also just started reading Book 20 again. I've been reading around a chapter each time I walk on the treadmill, and the timing is always about what I need in relation to what I'm writing or plotting. Once I get through that, I'll start formatting Collection 4 (Books 16-20) for print and ebook editions.

In a perfect world, I'd be finishing up the first draft by now, but that's not happening. That's a good thing, though. When I slow down, I discover new aspects of the overall series, like realizing what needs to be brought out with Alric and the setting in Book 23.

I knew the final books of the series would be difficult. It will delay publishing the next book until February or March, and then writing the series climax begins.

Thanks for reading!

Catholic exorcist explains: "If the demons are never attacking you, that's a bad sign." (video title)