Characters defined as Navy SEALs...

I’ve always been fascinated by Navy SEALs. I was in the Navy for 6 years in what’s considered an elite program – Navy Nuclear Power. Child’s play compared with what our SEALs go through. Pure child’s play. Those SEALs are a different breed. Maybe I can say that better – SEALs represent the finest qualities of our humanity. Endurance, focus, commitment, responsibility, heart, courage. They’re the best of the best of the best. All special Ops, for that matter. Maybe I’m partial to SEALs because I was in the Navy.

The antagonist in my novel is sort of a wolf like, paranormal killer. So the idea of a SEAL taking on a paranormal psycho killer – the SEAL would eat him up. No doubt.

Time for a Little Writing Q&A...

Tell us about a favorite character from a book.

My favorite character is Cheslov who is an antagonist… but not necessarily THE antagonist. I struggled at times with dialogue and scene creation for other characters. But for some reason, it just flowed with Cheslov.

My book takes place in 2020. Cheslov is Russian, born around the turn of the century. Around 1900, that is. Somehow he ends up in Tampa in 2020 as hired muscle for the Mayor. How did he survive to 2020 if he was born in 1900?

Something happened in the woods of Rostov.

It’s like that with Cheslov, he’s just naturally creepy. I think Kirkus reviews put it pretty well when they wrote the following in their review of inSyte:

“Woven throughout a story with many finely crafted twists, turns and revelations is the charismatic, mysterious, murderous Cheslov Kirill. As a classic merciless political operator, Kirill is unforgettable and chillingly, complexly rendered, especially for a man who uses a school of sharks off the Florida coast for corpse disposal.”

But he’s also charming, likeable on some level. He is the character everyone who reads my novel seems to talk about. Some are darkly drawn to him. Most found him fascinating in his evilness. But he’s the one people remember. Me too.

When in the day/night do you write? How long per day?

I’m totally a morning guy. I wrote the entire novel between 4:00am and 7:00am. All of it. It was a release from my day job. A way to use my creative side to balance out the technical work I had to do during the day.

I was actually working very hard on a business proposal – a $300m business proposal. I was stressed like you wouldn’t believe. Waking up very early in the am, not able to get back to sleep. Finally I started writing. It was a release, an ability to use my creative side to balance out all of the technical work I was doing for my job. And it just flowed. I developed a pattern of waking up every morning around 4:00am and writing until 7:00. Then starting my day job.

What is the hardest part of writing your books?

Figuring out what to write about. Once you figure it out then the next hardest part is putting together the first draft. After that it’s a piece of cake. Enjoyable to watch your baby grow.

Do you have any suggestions for beginning writers? If so, what are they?

I can only tell you what worked for me. Think of a high concept. For me, that’s the ability to tap into the internet with your mind. So you can surf the internet the way you peruse your own memory today.

Try to remember the lyrics to a song. Might take a few seconds, then you remember. You find that information in your brain, obviously. Sort of a local hard drive, to use computer terms.

Now imagine you’re transparently tapped into the Global internet 24x7. Now try to remember the lyrics to a song. They’re there instantly. Feels like you found them in your brain, just like before. But you didn’t. You found the words on a server in Germany. Doesn’t matter, all transparent to you.

OK – so you have the high concept. Now what? Well, you have to have conflict. For me, I created a moral dilemma between the protagonist, the ‘monster’ Cheslov, and a local politician who thinks he has a direct connect with God.

Next – ratchet up the tension at every opportunity. I made my protagonist an ex-Navy seal so he could pretty much deal with anything. Made Cheslov part wolf, paranormal. Then went into detail explaining how screwed up the politician is, he’s hooked on drugs due to his wife’s death, etc. Keep ratcheting up.

Then create an outline – and write, write, write to fill in the outline. Don’t worry about adjectives or effect or the best dialogue or even grammar/punctuation.

This is all a hell of a lot of work.

But once you have the first draft – read it. And read and read and read. Every time I picked it up and read a chapter, I thought of better ways to describe things. I watched TV at night or listened to the radio during the day or read the paper in the morning and always, constantly, I gained ideas on how to improve my character’s dialogue, how to enhance a scene, how to polish, enrich, entertain, grow, connect.

The initial draft took 3 months to write. Then finishing the novel took another 3 years.

Oh – and don’t let ANYBODY read that initial draft. It will suck, indeed.

Idea for the conflict

My main antagonist is the Mayor, and all the conflict comes from him and his crazy notion that all of his ideas are God given.

I listened to Rudy Giuliani speak a year after 911. This was in August of 2002, just under a year since 911. Rudy spoke to a crowd of about 5,000 folks. He described the events of that day and it was very emotional, everyone loved the guy, he was held in such admiration.

He told the crowd that every great leader will possess spirituality. And when you have millions of people that you’re serving, there’s a natural temptation to believe that God put you there, there must be a divine intervention. Then the tendency is to think that any gut feeling you have, gut decision, must be God’s decision.

So Rudy talked about how you have to avoid falling into that trap, you have to remain objective and realize you’re only human and they are your decisions.

I found that fascinating because I had never heard a politician talk like that.

I think there are a number of politicians in the US and abroad, recently and not, where pragmatism was nowhere to be found. I wanted to explore that in a novel. Come on, there’s all kinds of room for conflict.

Is my novel super technical?

It’s not technical, it’s credible. Think about Jurassic Park. The mosquitos landed on the dinosaurs then landed on Amber and became fossilized. Now if you can find the amber then you get to the mosquito and have dino DNA. All very credible.

So I tried to make my novel credible like that.

But the techie part is not the part that’s interesting. The social impact is the interesting part, what would this do to an individual and to society to have this ability.

Suddenly everyone has all the answers. To everything. All the time. Think about that.

Idea for my high concept

I remember sitting in a business meeting in the late 90’s. I knew the material pretty well so I didn’t fire up my laptop at the start of the meeting.. Then the customer kept drilling down and asking for facts that I didn’t have memorized. I started writing down his questions and telling him I’d get back to him. After about the 10^th question, I fired up my laptop, searched for the data, and answered his questions.

Afterwards, I thought – man, wouldn’t it be nice if I could tap into my laptop, put a little screen inside my glasses that only I could see. Boy, wouldn’t I look like a genius because no one else would be aware.

Then I thought about the social implications. I thought about meeting some girl in a bar. Cyrano de Bergerac style. Switching from scientific to philosophic to comedic mode. Having software sophisticated enough to give you the next line to anything she says or anything you hear.

How many times have you said, ‘Man, I wish I had said such and such’ after a conversation.

And I’ve always believed it’s inevitable so I finally decided to write a book about it.

What people are saying about my novel, inSyte

· A bold brazen thriller with a serious commentary on the future of information. Equal parts Crichton, Clancy and King. (Kirkus Reviews)

· Some of the scenes were so powerful I could barely catch my breath. (Susan Breen, author of The Fiction Class)

· Fight scenes are horrifying and terrific. (Lisa Reardon, author of Billy Dead)

· Riveting futuristic tale of man’s reliance on technology and what could happen if you allow it to control you. (Heather Powers, Earth’s Book Nook)

Virtual Telepathy - part 4

Think of a hydraulic suit, the kind used in the military. So called exoskeleton suits. An article from Sept 2010 demonstrated the 2^nd generation Exoskeleton (XOS 2) that allows a soldier to easily and repeatedly lift 200 pounds and punch through 3 inches of solid wood. Eventually you get to suit Sigourney Weaver used to battle the queen in 1986’s Aliens.

The you slim it down so that being paralyzed is not something you would necessarily notice.

So man is melded with machine.

And inSyte does the same for the mind. Blindness? A thing of the past. People can see now through a camera smaller than a button in resolution that exceeds natural sight because it includes infrared, a larger spectrum of light becomes visible.

No more need for flashlights for anyone.

These are physical meldings.

Mental – now you have access to everything all the time. You google as easily as you peruse your own memories.

Try to remember the lyrics to a song you used to know. You can’t quite remember so you google it.

Well, now you wouldn’t have to do that manually. Anything you think of, it’s there, in your mind. You’d soon lose the sensation that you were looking on servers. IT would all just become part of your memory.

There would be no more betting on recorded information. I’ll bet you twenty bucks the Beatles first showed up in the US in Feb 1964. Thing of the past.

You wouldn’t leave home with out it. You think you feel naked leaving your home without your cell phone? You would feel downright blind and dumb without inSyte. Flying without your instruments. Weak. Frail. Insubstantial. Incapable. Alone. Afraid.

Within 10 years clock speeds for CPU’s will catch up and surpass the speed of thought. What about within 50 years? 100 years?

Machines taking over?