Marc Liebman's Blog, page 51

Web Site Upgrade and Expansion

I’ve been thinking about it for months and now, I’m finally getting around to upgrading my web site. It is one part expansion and one part upgrade so it is not a full overhaul.

Upgrade first. The site is now approaching its fourth birthday and the world of websites, that makes it almost ancient.  That doesn’t mean it has to be thrown out because it is old, but it does need a refresh.  People who visit my site say they find it full of interesting stuff. Visitors usually visit more than one page.  And, I still like it but recognize that changes are needed.

It was originally designed to support more than one book and now there are four in print with a fifth coming.  So, I’m planning to add content and other tweaks. One of which is to have 15 – 30 second videos about each novel so that visitors can see/hear me talk about the book. Hopefully, when I get done, there will be at least one per book and possibly a few more.

Expansion second. One of the decisions I made last year as a way to build my brand was to become a professional speaker. I’ve been doing talks for free on a variety of subjects, but thought the time had come to get paid.

To do this, I needed a “speaker’s” site to go along with the “author’s” site. I’d already created the talking points to use in helping “sell” myself. For each topic, there’s info about what the audience will learn, a summary of the content and why the information is important. There will be links to vignettes from each speech so the visitor can see and hear portions of the content.

The calendar will be new.  Right now it is hidden under one of the tabs. Hopefully, it will be easier to find. The new calendar will be different than the list that is currently there and it will support both the speaker and author sites. The plan is to make it easier for visitors to see where I’m speaking and doing book signings.

While “my” web mistress is working on the site itself, I’m going to start recording the vignettes.  We should be finished with the “construction” part by the first week in February and by then, I should have most of the vignettes recorded and uploaded.

When it is done, when you go to www.marcliebman.com, you’ll have a choice – author or speaker. Click on either and it will take you to the appropriate site.

I won’t get into the technology that goes along with this because, quite frankly, I don’t understand it all. As long as it all works, that’s all I care about.

So, as they say in the TV and radio biz, stay tuned.

Marc Liebman

January 2017

More Work Than Play in Retirement

Continue writing Manpads…. Register for conventions… Find new channels for distributing my books… Schedule speaking engagements… Prepare new material… Give a speech… Write a column…. These are all the tasks I’ve been doing in the past couple of weeks.    And, it looks like a full time job, it is. I thought I could do it a couple hours a day, but au contraire, it is not to be. It really is work and to get it all done, it would take 10 hours a day… That sounds like a full time job to me.

For example, last week, I gave speech to a local Rotary Club and then on Wednesday, I flew to Ontario, CA. That and the hour long drive in light traffic to the hotel took most of the day. I got there a few hours before a scheduled dinner with the sponsor who invited me to speak. Then, the next day, I spent an hour and a half in front of a group followed by a dash, again in light traffic – thankfully – to Los Angeles International Airport.

It was just like a business trip – out, sleep in a hotel, go to a meeting, fly home. The trip took the better part of two days and 18months ago, I’d have considered it routine. Now it’s a chore. I got some writing time on the airplane and did some work in the hotel in the afternoon and in the a.m. before my speech.

Admittedly, I’d decided to spend more time working on the promotional side of writing than creating, so all this work is the by-product. I think why I am mentally pushing back is that it is feels like a full time job.

Since I didn’t want to work full time anymore, so I retired. Now I’m back working at something I really want to do – not for a company, not for the government, but for me… So, I am rationalizing it as my third career!

Marc Liebman

January 2017

An interesting name…

This blog entry was posted on 1/15/2017.  It was accidentally deleted while we’re in the process of updating the website.

It is really easy to get bogged down while doing research for a passage in a manuscript. The internet can take you down rat holes that while interesting are really irrelevant to the story line. You can literally spend hours reading interesting stuff.

That happened to me about a month ago. The scene I was writing at the time is an interview by one of the main American characters by German officers because he may be assigned as a liaison officer to the new Luftwaffe. This passage takes place in 1958 when the Bundeswehr – the new armed forces of West Germany – were just being formed. The government brought back many World War 2 aces including the top three of all time – Erich Hartman (353 kills), Gerhard Barkhorn (301 kills) and Günther Rall (275 kills).

The first fighter-bomber squadron in the new Luftwaffe was Jagdbombergeschwader 31 (Fighter-Bomber Squadron 31) and it is named after the father of air combat, World War I ace Oswald Boelcke. After the first round of interviews, Lenny Almer, the American is at the officer’s club to have lunch with Rall and Steinhoff. He is told about the pictures on the walls of the headquarters building. On one side, there are the German aces who are now members of the Luftwaffe. On the other, photos of selected German aces who earned Germany’s top decoration in World War I, the Pour La Mérite, one of whom was Wilhelm Frankl, 20 victories.

There were two reasons that this is significant. First, they wanted to commemorate the recipients who distinguished themselves during the war. Second, Frankl was Jewish.

That revelation led me to another research thread, i.e. were there other Jewish aces in the Imperial German Flying Corps? There were more than I thought. I came across a list of all the German pilots and aircrew members, known in those days as observers. In the list, one name caught my eye – E. Liebmann.

Hmmmm. My father’s father, Michael Liebmann came from Germany as a young man. Right after World War I, he dropped the second ‘n.’ I wonder if they were related. There’s not a lot available on E. Liebmann except in a book called “Jewish Fliers in the World War.” I’m trying to find an English translation of the book.

Stay tuned.

Marc Liebman

December 2016

Finally!!!

This blog entry was originally published on 1/7/2017.  It was accidentally deleted while the site is being upgraded.

That was the best word to describe my emotions on the last day of 2016. I finally finished the first draft of the manuscript with the working title Retribution.

As I slogged on toward the end, I realized that if I followed my original outline, the novel was going to be as long as Mitchner’s Hawaii or Clavell’s Taipan. So what should I do?

It had to be shortened.   Now, the story is still valid, the characters are still strong and have to deal with both internal and external conflicts and, as the four sub plots wove together tighter and tighter, I could see the “end” was near.

The story and characters took me to a logical point. The bad guys were already in one place, the good guys who wanted to catch the bad guys were hot on their trail, so I had to figure out a way to make it all work out. That meant stopping writing and letting my mind work out the details.

Keep in mind, in Retribution, the good guys are the Mossad and they are hunting the bad guys – Nazis wanted for war crimes. One would think that the hunt would take place in Germany or Austria or Argentina or Brazil, but it doesn’t. They’re in Syria.

That was only one of the loose ends that had to be tied up. There’s an Austrian woman who plays a role as the wife of one of the Nazis. What do I do with her?

The hardest thing to do was figure out what do with the main American character – Lenny Almer – at the end of the book. His conflicts are internal, with his wife and the love hate situation of living in Germany. He’s an Air Force fighter pilot whose dream is to become an ace, i.e. shoot down five enemy airplanes. He gets three in World War II, one in Korea and then, in a dogfight over West Germany with an intruding MiG, it blows up. The Air Force refuses to credit him with a kill. So, my dilemma was to decide whether or not to get him his fifth kill. You’ll have to read Retribution to find out if it happens.

FYI, if you don’t know this, the Mossad and its direct action group called Yidon which is the Israeli version of Seal Team Six or the Delta Force, have specialized in targeted assassinations and kidnapping. There’s a dozen or so that are public, not including the revenge they extracted for the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1976 Olympics in Munich.

Marc Liebman

January 2017

Depressing Reading

This blog entry was originally posted on 12/16/2016.  It was accidentally deleted while working on an upgrade to my website.

Today, I was researching a passage for a manuscript. In the book, the good guys are hunting a former SS officer who is wanted for war crimes. Earlier in the story, the man changed his name before he was captured by the Americans and was ultimately released because he was thought to be just a senior enlisted man in the Wehrmacht.

Later this character escaped from Germany with the help of an organization called Odessa.  Many Germans and others said  that Odessa didn’t exist and was the figment of the great novelist Frederick Forsyth. However, the evidence says otherwise. Odessa was real and was funded by wealthy German industrialists who wanted to help members of the Hitler regime escape prosecution.

This research led me to create a fictional character by the name of Brauner and forced me to create a personal history that would justify an arrest warrant. In the story, Brauner worked for Adolph Eichmann and is the creator of the record keeping system used in the concentration camps.

This led me to look at some of the concentration camp records. I’d always heard that the Nazis kept detailed records of who came and went in the camps but had never spent any time looking at them.

Thanks to the Internet, they were easy to find. The system used by the Nazis was relatively simple.

As each person entered the camp, the Nazi’s had “volunteers” who were camp inmates record the data in five columns:

Column 1 – first and last names. Titles such as doctor, it was noted here.

Column 2 – place and date of birth

Column 3 – home address. If there were too many prisoners to process, the street address was allowed to be left out.

Column 4 – prisoner’s number and category and nationality

Column 5 – date of arrival and from where.

The most common entry in Column 4 was “J” for Jew followed by second letter such as “P” for Polish or “H” for Dutch. When the prisoner was transferred to or came from another camp, the data recorders noted on a second line where the prisoner came from or where he or she was being sent.

To document the event, the recorders would abbreviations such “Zug M” to note the prisoner came from the Mauthausen concentration camp. The entry “Ü Au” translated to “Überstellt Auschwitz” for transferred to Auschwitz. No second line in the record under the date of arrival, the assumption was that the prisoner stayed at the camp. Most either died of disease, starvation or were murdered either in a gas chamber or a bullet to the head.

I read a couple of pages and they made me mad. I had a knot in my stomach. These were innocent people, most of whom committed no crime. What the Nazis planned to do with the information is unclear. Other than gloat about all the Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, political opponents and others deemed undesirable, the only logical reasons is that with Germanic efficiency and precision, the Nazis under Himmler wanted to document how many “undesirables” they killed.

To Nazis, they were doing the world a favor. To the rest of us, they were nothing but cold-blooded murderers. Unfortunately, not all of the perpetrators were tried and despite their crimes, lived to ripe old age.

That’s sad when you think about.

Marc Liebman

December 2016

Interesting Name

It is really easy to get bogged down while doing research for a passage in a manuscript. The internet can take you down rat holes that while interesting are really irrelevant to the story line. I’ve spent hours reading interesting stuff that I’ll never use.  If nothing else, it’ll help me win at Trivia Pursuit or if I ever get to be on the TV quiz show Jeopardy.

About a month ago, I spent about three hours reading about German World War II aces. The scene I was writing at the time in Retribution is an interview by one of the main American characters by German officers because he may be assigned as a liaison officer to the new Luftwaffe. This passage takes place in 1958 when the Bundeswehr – the new armed forces of West Germany – were just being formed.  To lead the Luftwaffe, the government brought back many World War II aces including the top three of all time – Erich Hartman (353 kills), Gerhard Barkhorn (301 kills) and Günther Rall (275 kills).

I leanred that the first fighter-bomber squadron in the new Luftwaffe was Jagdbombergeschwader 31 (Fighter-Bomber Squadron 31) and it is named after the father of air combat, World War I ace Oswald Boelcke. After the first round of interviews, Lenny Almer, the American is at the officer’s club to have lunch with Rall and Steinhoff. He is told about the pictures on the walls of the headquarters building. On one side, there are the German aces who are now members of the Luftwaffe. On the other, photos of selected German aces who earned Germany’s top decoration in World War I, the Pour La Mérite, one of whom was Wilhelm Frankl, 20 victories.

There were two reasons that this is significant. First, they wanted to commemorate the recipients who distinguished themselves during the two world wars. Second, Frankl was Jewish.

That revelation led me to another research thread, i.e. were there other Jewish aces in the Imperial German Flying Corps? There were more than I thought. I came across a list of all the German pilots and aircrew members, known in those days as observers. In the list, one name caught my eye – E. Liebmann.

Hmmmm. My father’s father, Michael Liebmann came from Germany as a young man. Right after World War I, he dropped the second ‘n.’ I wonder if they were related. There’s not a lot available on E. Liebmann except in a book called “Jewish Fliers in the World War.” I’m trying to find an English translation of the book which has been out of print for years.

Stay tuned.

Marc Liebman

December 2016

Finally!!!!

That was the best word to describe my emotions on the last day of 2016. I finally finished the first draft of the manuscript with the working title Retribution.

As I slogged on toward the end, I realized that it was going to be as long as Mitchner’s Hawaii or Clavell’s Taipan if I let the plot play out as I originally planned. So what should I do?

The story is still valid, the characters are still strong and have to deal with both internal and external conflicts and, as the four sub plots wove together tighter and tighter, I could see the “end” was near.

The story and characters took me to a logical point. The bad guys were already in one place, the good guys who wanted to catch the bad guys were on their trail, so I had to figure out a way to make it all work out. That meant stopping writing and letting my mind work out the details.

FYI, if you don’t know this, the Mossad and its direct action group called Yidon which is the Israeli version of Seal Team Six or the Delta Force, have specialized in targeted assassinations and kidnapping. There’s a dozen or so that are public, not including the revenge they extracted for the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1976 Olympics in Munich.

Keep in mind, in Retribution, the good guys are the Mossad and they are hunting the bad guys – Nazis wanted for war crimes. One would think that the hunt would take place in Germany or Austria or Argentina or Brazil, but it doesn’t. They’re in Syria.

That was only one of the loose ends that had to be tied up. There’s an Austrian woman who plays a role as the wife of one of the Nazis. What do I do with her?  That too had to be sorted out.

The hardest thing to do was what do with the main American character – Lenny Almer – at the end of the book. His conflicts are internal, with his wife and the love hate situation of living in Germany. He’s an Air Force fighter pilot whose dream is to become an ace, i.e. shoot down five enemy airplanes. He gets three in World War II, one in Korea and then, in a dogfight over West Germany with an intruding MiG, it blows up. The Air Force refuses to credit him with a kill. So, my dilemma was to decide whether or not to get him his fifth kill. You’ll have to read Retribution to find out if it happens.

Marc Liebman

January 2017

Depressing Reading

Today, I was researching a passage for a manuscript. In the book, the good guys are hunting a former SS officer named Mattias Schopp who is wanted for war crimes. Earlier in the story, Schopp changed his name to Stefan Thaler before he was captured by the Americans and was ultimately released because he was thought to be just a senior enlisted man.

Later Thaler escaped from Germany with the help of an organization called Odessa. While many people say that Odessa didn’t exist and was the figment of the great novelist Frederick Forsyth. However, the evidence says otherwise. Odessa was real and was funded by German industrialists who wanted to help members of the Hitler regime escape prosecution.

What this lead to what did the fictional character named Brauner do that was worth an arrest warrant. In the story, Brauner worked for Adolph Eichmann and is the creator of the record keeping system used in the concentration camps.

This led me to look at some of the records. I’d always heard that the Nazis kept detailed records of who came and went in the camps but had never spent any time looking at them.

Thanks to the Internet, they were easy to find. The system used by the Nazis was relatively simple.

As each person entered the camp, the Nazi’s had “volunteers” who were camp inmates record the data in five columns:

Column 1 – first and last names. Titles such as doctor, it was noted here.

Column 2 – place and date of birth

Column 3 – home address. If there were too many prisoners to process, the street address was allowed to be left out.

Column 4 – prisoner’s number and category and nationality

Column 5 – date of arrival and from where.

The most common entry in Column 4 was “J” for Jew followed by second letter such as “P” for Polish or “H” for Dutch. When the prisoner was transferred to or came from another camp, the data recorders noted on a second line where the prisoner came from or where he or she was being sent.

To document the event, the recorders would abbreviations such “Zug M” to note the prisoner came from the Mauthausen concentration camp. The entry “Ü Au” translated to “Überstellt Auschwitz” for transferred to Auschwitz. No second line in the record under the date of arrival, the assumption was that the prisoner stayed at the camp. Most either died of disease, starvation or were murdered either in a gas chamber or a bullet to the head.

I read a couple of pages and they made me mad. I had a knot in my stomach. These were innocent people, most of whom committed no crime. What the Nazis planned to do with the information is unclear. Other than gloat about all the Jews and gypsies, homosexuals and others that they deemed undesirable, the only logical reasons is that with Germanic efficiency and precision, they wanted to document how many “undesirables” they killed.

To Nazis, they were doing the world a favor. To the rest of us, they were nothing but cold-blooded murderers. Unfortunately, not all of the perpetrators were tried and despite their crimes, lived to ripe old age.

That’s sad when you think about.

Marc Liebman

December 2016

Three Traditionally Un-traditional Women

If you’ve read my first three books, you’ll probably remember three women –Danielle Debenard from Cherubs 2; Natalie Vishinski in Big Mother 40; and in Render Harmless, Rebekah Cohen.

Working backwards, Rebekah is restless. Born in Israel, she came to the United States with her mother who married an American. She doesn’t want a husband whose life represents and lure of adventure. In Josh, she finds a man whose chosen career will give her just that – chance to live outside the United States, not be boring and provide her with a set of unique challenges.

In Render Harmless, the Haman’s are living in Yeovil in southern England. The officer assigned to be his sponsor happens to be the future Duke of Leeds. For a woman who grew up fascinated with the kings and queens of England, becoming friends with a future duke and duchess was something that as a little girl she dreamed about.

Rebekah becomes Josh’s rock and helps pick up the pieces after Natalie’s murder. They’re both kindred souls. Rebekah’s natural father was killed during the 1956 Arab-Israeli war. Josh lost his wife. Both intuitively know the effect of the loss of a loved one on each other.

Natalie Vishinski was smitten by a dashing young Naval Aviator by the name of Josh Haman. Josh fell head over heels in love with Natalie who was the only daughter of two Russian immigrants. He, unlike other men, instantly accepted the fact that she was an amputee. Natalie steadfastly refused to marry Josh until he came home from his second tour in Vietnam, but throughout Big Mother 40, she gets drawn farther and farther into Josh’s orbit. Well before the end, there was no doubt they would marry.

And then there was Danielle Debenard, the daughter of a French Foreign Legion officer and a Laotian woman. A graduate of the Sorbonne in Paris, she’s left the nest and without saying it, she realizes that her native Laos doesn’t offer her the life she wants. Danielle is trapped between two worlds, the one she grew up in Laos and the one she lived in as a Singapore based translator in the French foreign service.

Danielle’s mother won’t leave the land of her birth even though she knows the civil war will probably kill her. It is her karma.

Danielle’s father, Jacques knows it is time to leave their plantation and move someplace outside war torn South East Asia. Singapore is one choice, France is another. He won’t leave his wife to her fate even though he knows he may die. Several times, Danielle tries to get her mother to leave Laos, even temporarily but she won’t hear of it.

What attracted Josh to Danielle, Natalie and Rebekah was that they were assertive and independent. They’d accept the traditional role as a wife and homemaker. None hesitated to (in Natalies case would have) set aside their career ambitions to be a mother. When the time came, each woman wanted her own career, identity and success. In Danielle’s case, the career came first.

In future books, you’ll learn more about Danielle and Rebekah. Rebekah plays a larger role in the coming novel Inner Look.

Marc Liebman

December 2016

Janet Pulaski – A Most Unusual Woman

Now that Forgotten is out, I thought a blog or two on the women who play major and supporting roles in my books might be interesting. So, I am going to start with Janet Pulaski, one of the principal characters of Forgotten. She is the wife of one of the POWs left behind after the war ended.

As the story unfolds, the reader learns Janet was a member of the Students for a Democratic Society’s (SDS) Action Wing.  Janet never told her husband this tidbit although she made it clear that she opposed the war. For those who don’t remember, SDS was a radical student group that advocated a violent overthrow of the U.S. government. It reached its heyday during the Vietnam War and its aftermath and its leaders were on the FBI’s top list of wanted men and women.

The Action Wing performed acts of sabotage, some of which were successful, most were not.  When compared to those conduced by today’s Islamic terrorists, SDS’s attacks can’t even be considered pinpricks.  Yet, at the time, burning recruiting centers made the news.   While a student at the University of Wisconsin, Janet was an operative in SDS that funded itself through the sale of illegal drugs, primarily marijuana.

Janet’s radical views alienated her from her family and just before her graduation from the University of Wisconsin she was told to move out and not come home until she changed her views. This kind of tough love would be much harder for me as a parent to execute than to discuss. I just can’t imagine telling one of my children to go away and never to come home again. But again, I can see how a child’s radical beliefs or actions or both over time could ruin the relationship and lead me to that position.

She was supposed to find and marry a member of the military and then use that relationship to worm her way into a position where she had access of classified that could be sold as a way of making money for SDS.  Then Janet was supposed to dump him and continue working as spy.  What wasn’t in the plan was falling in love with Randy.  Or, his being shot down and becoming MIA.

Is her husband Randy alive and a POW or is he dead?   So, is or is not Janet a widow?  From a marital perspective, she’s in limbo because her spouse is MIA. Even after the Vietnam POWs come home in 1973, her status doesn’t change.  She has to wait five years before the Pentagon will declare him MIA, presumed dead.

Right after Randy is shot down, SDS, hoping Janet’s revolutionary fervor has not abated, sends her to Cuba to learn how to be an assassin. A natural marksman, she learns that she likes the hunt and the killing. In the beginning, the act of killing turns her on.

Janet was sexually promiscuous and already bi when she married Randy realizes after a torrid affair with another POW wife that she is really a lesbian. Her lucrative career as a contract killer means she can’t go home again and can’t have a “normal” relationship with woman or a man without revealing what she does for a living. In some ways, the novel is about Janet’s search for love and lover and happiness as much as it is about her career as a freelance assassin.

When Randy is rescued tweleve years after he was shot down, Janet realizes that she still holds a candle for her husband. When Randy comes home, she finds out that there are those who prior actions will be exposed by what the six forgotten POWs know. So again, does Janet protect him, or does she stand aside?

To find out what happened, you’ll have to read the book.  All of this makes Janet Pulaski one of the more interesting characters I have created.

Marc Liebman

December 2016