Boys Town National Alumni Association

Stan's latest novel, In the Time of The Feathered Serpent, was released on January 23, 2021 as a free offering on Kindle. It is also available on Amazon.com along with his other novels. I've had the opportunity to read Stan's "In the Time of the Feathered Serpent" and found it hard to put down. It flows with adventure, many twists and turns and raises some very timely and thoughtful questions...it makes you think!

John Mollison, Boys Town Class of 1964
February 1, 2021

I would like to thank those who took the time to read the first installment of my Writers Bio published on the BTNAA web site. I think you will find the second installment just as interesting and perhaps even a little insightful into the mindset of fiction writers. The rollout of my newest novel by the Online Book Club, In the Time of the Feathered Serpent, was a success by any measuring stick. Participants downloaded the Kindle version from Amazon.com exactly 450 times on January 23, which was certainly a surprise to me since only 37 people on the Facebook Event Manager indicated that they planned to attend. Most fiction readers have a long queue of books to read, but those who have read it responded with kind words and praise. I’m very grateful. It was difficult, but fun to write, and the story will hopefully be discussed among those who read it for some time. For most of us, the only legacy we have after dying is the memories that our family and friends have of us, and little else. Perhaps my novels will somehow create fond memories for those who took the time to read them. We’ll see. Thanks especially to John Mollison, 64’, friend, alumnus and one of my readers, who encouraged me to put this writer’s bio together for publication. All my books, hardback and Kindle, can be found on Amazon.com.

Stan Struble, Boys Town Class of 1968

Why I Write (Part II, Cont.)

Stanley Struble

Boys Town Class of 1968

In the writing of the novel, I borrowed much from known events, including the history of Bishop Landa, the bishop of the Yucatan during the Conquest who attempted to burn all books, idols, etc. that belonged to the Indians, trying to completely wipe out their religion. I used the device of a discovered stelae (a big stone monument) with a written inscription at the Smithsonian Institute to create a strong plot and memorable characters, including a professor who’s in every book, a female archaeologist, who also travels to the southern jungles in hopes of discovering the last remaining Mayan books hidden in a cave, and a central, now very famous figure of the rebellion, Subcomandante Marcos.

Caves are central themes in Mayan mythology as they believe their progenitors, Hanaphu and Xabalanque emerged from one after winning a ball game against the Nine Lords of Darkness (Must have been a heck of a game!). Everyone, of course, experiences much hardship in this story, occasional joy, humor, and romance, plane crashes, cock fights, various battles, and near death. It was in this book that I introduced a central and very popular character, Balaam Reyes, also known as the Bone Man, a Mayan shaman who despises white people and is also one of the Zapatista Rebellion’s masterminds.

Storyline of Xibalba: In Search of the Lost Mayan Books...

6^th Century Mexico: The shaman Red Snail flees the ancient Mayan city of Chichen Itza with the last remaining Maya books. He hides them in a cave in the southern Lacandon jungle, then carves a stelae recording the deed. He is captured, tortured, and dies without revealing their location. Five hundred years later archaeologist Karen Dumas deciphers the stelae at the Smithsonian Institute. She travels to San Cristobal de las Casas to meet David Wolf. They began a thrilling, suspenseful journey of deception, intrigue, and romance in a country dominated by drug trafficking, political corruption, and war with the Zapatista guerillas.

Xibalba was actually book number three for me, but the first two were set in different locations: Filth Eater in Mexico City, Sins of the Jaguar in the very arid, northern Sierra Madres, and now Xibalba in the southern jungles – three very different cultures and settings. By this time my work was starting to draw a little attention, in Mexico and the USA. A group of friends in San Cristobal de las Casas en Chiapas, some of whom were involved in the rebellion, decided that I must have Xibalba translated into Spanish, so…in 2008 I attended the Feria de Libros (Spanish language book fair) in Guadalajara, Jalisco hoping to secure a contract in Spanish on the newly written Xibalba. As circumstance would have it, several publishers in Mexico and Spain were interested. I eventually signed with Nowtilus (Nautilus) in Madrid, Spain, and the rough ride was on. The book was published in December of 2009, and subsequently translated into several languages, but Nowtilus and much of the publishing industry experienced financial hardship when the world economy nose-dived into the Great Recession of 2009. I received royalty payments for about 5-6 years, then nothing, not even correspondence until this last year when I was able to renegotiate my contract and recover all publishing rights.

Meanwhile, another story was percolating. I liked the setting and many of the characters in Xibalba and I had traveled to a dozen more Mayan ruins during this period. I decided to attempt a series of books set in Chiapas. One day I sat down and started writing Gospel of the Feathered Serpent, a story that connected the apocryphal stories of Jesus, Mary Magdalene, the Holy Grail, and Joseph of Aramithea, from the 1^st Century A.D. after the crucifixion, with the legends and mythology of Quetzalcoatl, the Feathered Serpent of ancient Mexico. Pretty ambitious undertaking in retrospect, but you’re supposed to write what you know, and I had studied this stuff a lot. My purpose in borrowing and merging these themes was to illustrate the basic fundamentals of not just Christianity in its myriad forms, but also the native religions of Mexico and how each has affected the other over time.
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Unfortunately, since Nowtilus, in Madrid, was not answering my correspondence or sending me royalties, I had to find a different publisher. I was subsequently able to do so with Gospel, but the experience was not satisfactory and created some confusion in the publishing industry as to why my books had different publishers. This was not a good thing.

Storyline of Gospel of the Feathered Serpent...

Fear and disbelief grip the Vatican, and the very foundations of Christianity are challenged when a “Holy Man”, an uncorrupted body and seven papyrus manuscripts are discovered in a Mayan burial box beneath a ruined church in Mexico’s Chiapas State. An archaeologist and Muslim friend battle a Papal Inquisitor, a corrupt Mormon official, and the Mayan Indians to possess the miraculous corpse and scrolls, all of them unaware that the greatest treasure of all has been recovered by a Mayan shaman who plans to leave Christianity’s greatest prize in the hands of a renegade Catholic priest.

So…I decide that I am either unlucky or have bad judgement, or that I’m not a good writer. Jury is still out on the latter. I have been able reacquire the legal rights to all my books, which I am presently publishing, including my newly completed In the Time of the Feathered Serpent, under my newly created publishing company, Feathered Serpent Press.

Book number three in the series, In the Time of the Feathered Serpent was published in English and Spanish in May of 2020. The very few who have read this story either like it a lot or are offended by it. Oh well………That was also my intent – to make people think. In the Time of the Feathered Serpent includes most of the central characters of the previous two, as it is a sequel to Gospel of the Feathered Serpent, but adds two very important characters, Pope Lucas from Argentina, the new reformist pope, and his best friend, Sister Angelina, a nun who is also an irritating genius. Sister Angelina was never formally educated, but has read at least 3-5 books weekly over her entire life over a very wide range of subjects. She is a savant who recalls everything she has ever read or heard, much to the chagrin of most of the males in the Vatican. With the encouragement of her friend, the pontiff, she writes and sends essays to him every night on virtually every controversial aspect of Christianity and Catholicism and the role of women in the Church. Sister Angelina writes the pope about primate behavior and anthropology, sexual behavior, the history of Church views on sex, marriage and childbirth, the ignorance of males, and dysfunctional church dogma that has forever placed a burden on women and made them second class citizens in the Church – and does so writing under the pseudonym of Sor Juana, the famous savant nun of 17^th century Mexico who challenged a thousand years of Catholic dogma and the male domination of the Church. Church authorities simply couldn’t deal with Sor Juana’s intelligence nor the themes of her writing and ultimately forced her to join a convent where she could be monitored and controlled, or lose her life – burned at the stake as a witch. Sor Juana is very famous in Latin American and Church history and her writings are one of the key features of this story as Sister Angelina is a very adept, very intelligent female forced to live within societal values and structures put in place by men. It focuses on the patriarchy of societies and religions and the historical repression of women and the consequences thereof.

Since Pope Lucas is a reformist, he has acquired many enemies in the Vatican. Sister Angelina is charged with surreptitiously monitoring incipient discontent and possible cabals in his absence. She must take care of Pope Lucas’ business while he is in Mexico attempting to meet the ‘Holy Man’, the new Feathered Serpent in the jungles of southern Mexico, who also wields a magic cup, while also trying to recover the 1^st Century papyrus scrolls lost in book two of the series, Gospel of the Feathered Serpent.
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