New Novel Progress: The deep element.

I'm making fine progress on writing the new novel and nearly back to on-schedule. This week wraps up the draft of Chapter 12 and the actual mission is underway. I have several good choices of excerpts from the writing so far that I'll post here, but I wanted to get the names of the main characters all out for you in one place so you can see the (yeah, slightly confusing) reveal of their operational names.

In Dean Conway's operational work-up, he started by referencing the mission tasking slots by number. As personnel were assigned to them, their names in each tier of their identities appears. Here's a list:

1 slot: HUMINT specialist.
Intermediate identity name: Joe Geigel.
Operational cover: Carlos "Charlie" Duarte.

2 slot: the Operational Analyst and Trained Observer.
called "Amy's Husband" when referenced in his base identity.
Intermediate identity name: Gary Keith.
Operational cover: Alan Drake.

3 slot: Support specialist.
Intermediate identity name: Diana Mickiewicz.
Operational cover: Anna Holmgren.

4 slot: Communications specialist.
Intermediate identity name: Max Faustino.
Operational cover: Mateus "Matty" Santos Oliveira.


and, for your reading pleasure, an excerpt from Chapter 6, after all four were under their operational covers and in Europe prior to routing to the operations area:

Oliveira and Drake spent some time together after the pub drink and there was a similar get-to-know-you between Charlie Duarte and Anna Holmgren in Copenhagen. Away from anyone who might overhear, those were the first times that they could begin to coordinate the few elements of the mission package that they possessed. Baby steps toward having the real OpPlan ready to go when they were on the ground in Bissau. Drake decided he could work with Matty and kind of liked the guy, even though he was prone to overemphasizing things that probably weren’t important. Oliveira thought Alan Drake was some sort of escapee from a movie about rednecks, but that he sure seemed to know his stuff about operational activities. The knew-his-shit part settled well with Oliveira. Fortunately for all of them, it was also true.

Enjoy!

Sunday Fun Day, come on Monday.

Time for some pure old fashioned fun, Lyrics Edition.

While Terri Nunn famously asked "What do you all like to do...?", and laughed the second best bedroom laugh ever, when introducing the song Sex (I'm a...) in live sets with Berlin in the early 80's...

... another band asked the broader version of a similar question when they recorded:


What do you want from life?


The band was The Tubes, the song was recorded first in 1975, and I heard them live twice right around 1980. The lyrics are a thing of their time, but still speak to me after all these years.

like this part: "To try and be happy while you do the nasty things you must?"

The complete lyrics are on the YouTube page linked above, listed below the VoD.

If you don't know The Tubes, here is a Wiki article that covers their career.

So...

What do -you- want from life?

I've been ionized, but I'm okay now.

Time for an update on things and another 80's callback!

Writing on the new novel has progressed. I'm midway into Chapter 11 and things are starting to get a bit faster paced... in the writing and in the story.

The new novel is set in 1984, with the main events happening during the summer. Something else came along in real life during that summer that remains a favorite of mine: a little movie about Buckaroo Banzai and the Hong Kong Cavaliers.

If you know about this glorious, confused, and amazing movie, great! If you've forgotten this or never saw it, by all means hunt up a copy on DVD and learn why Tommy had to be the one who gave her his jacket. Enjoy!

A Writer's Device: My vocabulary...

Trying to write and making good progress on that. Words are always just words to me, but I've had to field a few of the challenges with how I choose and show the words I want, in the way I want. Here are some of them, and then an observation:

Foreign Language words: Looks like I will be going with italics and the authentic spellings in the language of the word, and then explaining the meaning in English as the paragraph continues. Too many things were ending up in quotation marks that weren't dialogue. This is better.

Thesaurus Fishing: Sometimes I found I was repeating the same word every time it was a close fit to what the sentence needed. That could get boring to read in a hurry, so when I caught that happening, it was off to the Thesaurus for a synonym. Not shy about doing that, even with my extremely large vocabulary in English. As said elsewhere, don't go for biggest or most grandiloquent word. Simply get some variety out in the text.

Watch your TLA's: The old MilSpeak problem of acronyms and alpha-number mixed designations for things showed up in a couple of places. When they do, you have got to stop and spell them out once. Those are a bigger problem in techno-thrillers than the style of espionage thriller I write, but they still happen. Oh, to demonstrate in this very blog post, "TLA" isn't some secret mission codename; it means "Three Letter Acronym", the most common of the military and government short-hand notations.

and an observation:

With Chapter 10 of the new novel underway, but a sense of being late anyway, this is a rough summary of my non-writing vocabulary right now...

this art sourced from here. apparently a t-shirt design.

Motivation: Get the right mind-set; dive, but not too deep.

I had it easy in a way when I wrote Remember When. I had something happen that triggered a cascade of motivations to tell that story, and it was one that altered my entire mind-set for a period of time. I had an overarching concept, a character story to tell, and lots of pieces of the story that inspired parts of the fiction to draw upon...

... and then I went into a near Fugue-state for twenty hours.

I surfaced only long enough to deal with human needs in my life, then went back in with a bit more of a conscious plan about what was needed to finish it. About three days total, 16k words told the novella-length story in a really rough first draft.

"Easy", lucky in a way, but also impractical.

Certainly not practical for a larger work. Which is what I'm working on now.

Keys to what I'm doing now:

Planning and writing to plan. Adjusting the plan to story needs as they become apparent.

Do something every day. A paragraph. Frame what will be needed in a later chapter. Something.

Settle my own damn hash. If there are issues, deal with them. I've had some recently, personal. Made them a priority. Had great help, support and in the case that mattered most, acceptance of me.

Know the mind-set. This might be "find your Muse" or "think like a writer" for you. For me, it's all about remembering how I thought then, or there, or in some place and time that's source material for the fiction.

Trigger that mind-set. For me, that's music, or a picture, or a little piece of something physical. For you it might be anything if you are writing about experiences of your own or witnessed... or some key cultural element of the fiction you are imagining. But it has to be something that "gets you there".

Dive. Big caveat here; don't dive too deep. You probably don't have three days to blackout from your real life obligations, and it's not healthy to do even if you could. I'm considering actually limiting blocks of time for mini-dives of two or three hours, as those seem to be manageable so far.

Just get the words down. Dives are all about streaming out the story that is inside you. Re-read later for continuity and to catch dumb mistakes that would make your Editor scream at you. During Dive Time, it's all about words.

And with that, see you on Sunday. I have two slots of time to dive into the new novel these next few days and I intend to use them.

New Novel Progress: The line between fiction and history.

I've been working on the part of the new novel where the operation is coming together, all the undercover operatives and their support elements are in place, and things can get nasty.

Along the way to this point, I've also tied the entirely fictional telling of the story to places, agendas, and especially people that were real or very close facsimiles of real people. That's fine, of course... This Is Fiction is clearly stated and disclaimed. But like the band in Remember When, if the fictional version can be enhanced by naturalistic references to real events, it's all a lot more fun.

Here's an example of a person in real history who lends his name and agenda to the character (or in this case, off-stage character reference) in the story. He had an amazing career for the bad guy side back in the day, was corrupt as hell, and got a bullet in the head from his own team when he was found out. In the story, in 1984, he's pulling some of the strings. A plausible fiction, that.

The real-history Arnaldo Ochoa. That link is a Wikipedia link for ease of access by readers here, but there are a few footnotes and links from that page to source material that anyone interested in more information can look at. Enjoy!

Sunday Serious.

Should be a Fun Day posting. Isn't.

Some folks may know I did a bit of 'blogging for about 5 years to support friends and interested parties in understanding (from my point of view) a lot of International Politics and News stories in a deeper context than such were being reported at the time. Every year, I'd also make a couple of commemorative posts about "my spending a day visiting old friends". Like *this*.

Same thing here. No clever tie-in to my novella's title; no writer's things. Just this:

This year is a lot more meaningful. Let out a lot of memories over the last few months. More to guide me along in the new novel writing. Had to do Musketeer Drinking rather than individual toasts this time. (1 drink for all of them. I made it a big one.)

Ich hatt' einen Kameraden...

Next post here will be back on writing and era things.

A dose of the 80's for you.

What better way to do a filler-post for this 'blog than to see if a couple of pictures couldn't sum up the early 80's media experience, television drama category? Here are a couple iconic portraits of what folks of the era though was -smoking-hot-. Enjoy!

A Writer's Device: Watch out for emergent connections.

This is about how when writing anything much longer than a short story suitable for postcard publication, there is a tendency to write to the plan, rather than just go with the story. That's for a good reason; I've mentioned recently how important it is to remember to finish writing the damn book. But with that warning readdressed, let's look at clever thing that can happen as you work in pieces and especially if you have early parts of the manuscript being edited while you write on ahead. An Emergent Connection (or explanation).

Interactive Storytellers of all eras have known about this idea. I, not having been raised in the ancient and venerable Bulshitar tribe, had to pick it up by game-mastering role playing games. That's a form of group story telling where you *have to* be aware and reactive to how the players perceive the story being told, and what connections and conclusions they reach about parts of it, or your game turns into a muddle of confusion and disappointment. Briefly. Because players don't come back to play in campaigns where what they contribute isn't integrated into the story being told.

How it works is, in short, like this: The main story is being told; hooks and character actions are interwoven as things go on, and suddenly one of the players (the contributors to the telling of the story) makes a connection as to why or how two things the game-master (the creator of the concept of the story, and most of the descriptions being told) suddenly make sense. This is not to say that every time the players connected, something they were correct, or considering all the evidence, or even being plausible. Lots of misconnections happen. As the referee as well as the lead story teller, the GM has to put those to bed to help keep everyone on track with the scenario. BUT...

Sometimes they spot a thing that the GM hadn't considered; that was so obvious and correct that it needs to be included in the story. Good game-masters spot those, the way the ancient story-circle tellers did, and weaves those into the story. An Emergent Connection becomes a later-referenced story element.

It may happen to you, as a writer, that some rereading of earlier chapters while you are writing later ones will reveal an emergent connection. I got lucky recently when my Editor was reading some of the earlier chapters of my new novel, and hit on one such connection.

There is an agent-in-place in the location where the main story mission will happen. That dude has a bit of a "take it easy, but get the work done attitude" as part of his character description. A couple of chapters later, some of the bad guys are talking together about possible threats to their plans. One bad guy dismisses any possible threat from the agent-in-place's actions for racist reasons. "Those lot are lazy and just want to go home and get drunk" and so forth.

My Editor's reaction was along the lines of "that's perfect; the Opposition will underestimate this agent, but he'll still get the job done without drawing any reaction until it's too late."

I knew, from the story concept, they'd disdain to care much about him. This made it clear that they'd actually fail to notice even when he achieved his goals.

Presto! An Emergent Connection. It's a strong enough one that I'll actually be integrating that as a story element in later chapters. The Oppos won't catch on to his having been effective until too late.

So there you go. Something to watch out for, something to pick and choose from, but something that can tighten up the plausibility and interconnectedness of your story. It sure helps mine!

Work Day Cat Picture.

This is a cat picture. With a joke about grammar. English grammar to be precise.

 

picture ruthlessly stolen from the internet. owner unknown.

 

... because I am working. Spent all day yesterday on personal wellness and research for new writing. More on the new novel today. Enjoy!

New Novel Progress: A beer with two schemers.

Rolling on things in Chapter 8 of the new novel, but wanted to keep progress reports coming.

Here's a bit from Chapter 5 that I think you'll find engaging. In Guinea-Bissau, a scene that introduces a discussion of some things that will be "complications" to the operation that our Main Character and his team will be taking on.

There wasn’t too much dust blowing around as the two of them sat at an outside table of the restaurant at the edge of the port district of Bissau City. The roads around there were all paved. Having to drink beer was bad enough, having it seasoned with Terra Cotta in powdered form would have been intolerable. That was only a passing thought for Alphonse Balzac, the French North African that had been identified by the Agency Dude Fuller as a noteworthy foreigner here. Balzac had come to this restaurant with the tables that were too low to be comfortable, for a casual meeting with someone to do business. Drinking beer was almost required when having such a discussion with a staff major of the Cuban presence.

At least Major Jorge Morales was talkative today. Some days, he was too wrapped up in his unhappiness about being in Bissau to do more than grunt, drink and wipe his mustache. He leaned on the table as he spoke, for he, like it, was of average size. Today, with the simple prompting of a topic, he was full of revolutionary vigor and a willingness to claim that that was more important than discussing getting rich on the side.

Enjoy!

A call back to some fun times in the past.

Brief post today, as I'm working on several things. For you all tracking the new novel progress, Chapter 7 is in for editing, and some small reworks have been done to make Ch 4 and 6 better. Some music call backs to the time, and one painful reminder of the Main Character's story in Remember When.

Speaking of call backs, how many of you remember the years when GenCon (the big Roleplaying Game Convention then; huge in the late 80's and early 90's) was still in Milwaukee?

Anyone remember hanging out in The Safe House?

I sure do. Then again, an old friend and I donated a thing or two to their collection, and I still have my "forever" access card to the place.

Here's a picture of the Instructor's T-Shirt from US Army C.I.'s COTA School, class of 1989, of the pattern we donated to The Safe House for their display.

Enjoy! If you go to either the Milwaukee or (new) Chicago locations of The Safe House, drink one for me!