Marc Liebman's Blog, page 53

My mythical work day

It has been a year and a month since I officially “retired.” At the time, I thought that being retired would give me all the time in the world to write. WRONG!!!

Life, energy and honey do’s seem to get in the way. So, here’s a typical day in the life of a retired business executive turned author. And, it doesn’t take into consideration the six months we spent being the parents to our four grandchildren.

Somewhere between 0600 and 0630 I get up. Since I don’t have to participate in early morning conference calls, and there are no deliverables or proposals to write or edit, I get up when my bladder tells me to! Once I’m up, I’m up and going back to sleep isn’t an option.

After I wake up the dogs and let them out, now that its hot, its time for the 18 month old Standard Poodle’s walk. If I don’t take him, he lets me know… “Human, don’t you know I need my walk!” We go for roughly 3.5 miles which takes about an hour.

Next up is a work out and by the time I walk over to the gym – it’s a block away – saw away on the elliptical for 50 minutes and do some other exercises, I’m out of the house for about 90 minutes. Or, if I ride my bike for 20 miles, it’s roughly an hour.

Net net, when I come out of the shower, its 0930 and I haven’t written or edited a word. Some days I skip breakfast, others I munch while I check my e-mail and by the time I launch into “writing,” its somewhere around 1000 to 1030. This is assuming of course, there aren’t errands or honey dos to complete.

If I was still working for a living, I’d be horrified that a third of the day was gone and I hadn’t done anything “productive.” Oh, I forgot, I’m retired and I control the pace and the deliverables.

Once I get to my laptop, I start editing or writing. On a good day, I can go four or five hours, usually with a break for a leisurely lunch. After about four or five hours, I need a break. I can do major editing and re-writing longer, but when I’m doing the creative stuff, I burn out after about three or four hours.

If there’s a lot of research involved, I can go longer. Sometimes, as I’ve noted before, it takes me about three or four hours just to research the context and/or environment for a scene. Little details about the temperature and humidity at the time of year or what did the street and buildings look like in 1986 are important facts that provide context. Some times, I study maps with the intensity of a cartographer!

This doesn’t include doing any marketing an promotional work! A year ago, the plan was to work a half-day, every day. So far, it hasn’t worked out that way. Since last December, I’ve done a lot less than I wanted and am struggling to get back into a sustainable rhythm and pace that gives me lots of free time and time to write. Maybe that’s a pipe dream.

Marc Liebman

July 2016

A Plethora of Writing Projects

Here’s a quick run down of the plethora of writing projects I have underway.

Inner Look – the fourth book in the Josh Haman series – is in the editing process, later than I’d like, but poking along, nonetheless.  If I were a betting man, it should come out in September, nine months later than planned under the Penmore imprint. Better late than never.

My second project is a book called Forgotten POWS.  Deeds publishing accepted it late this past spring and at the time I’m writing this blog, it should come out this fall. I’m really excited about this book. More about it in another blog.

The third project is finishing the first draft of a book that has the working title of MANPADS that comes from the acronym for “man portable air defense systems.”  MANPADS are very portable shoulder mounted surface-to-air missiles that were used extensively by the mujahadeen against the Soviets in the 1980s after they invaded Afghanistan. The book takes place during the Obama administration and is the last planned book in the Josh Haman series. As it sits, I am about 60% of the way through the the first draft. In the middle of last fall, I put it aside so I have time to work on Inner Look and Forgotten POWs.   When I pick it back up, I’m not sure.

I also started on the plot outlines for two new books tentatively titled– The Assam Draggin’ and Hannenkam. I’m farther along with Hannekam which gets its name from the ski race course in Austria. The Assam Draggin’ takes place in Afghanistan and so far all I have is a couple of paragraphs about the plot.

The Hannekam downhill race course outside Kitzbuhl, Austria is one of the most difficult on the annual circuit. Its plot weaves a love story between an American racer and his Austrian girl friend with the internal politics of the American ski team and hangovers from Nazi Germany. Three sub-plot elements are:

The U.S. head coach has an affair with one of the womans team’s racers who is under age;
The hero lives in Germany and is forcing his way on the team due to his results; and
The Austrian girl’s father has a dark past as a SS-Standartenfuhrer that he’s keep hidden since the end of WWII.

More about Hannenkam in a later blog.

At the head of the queue is The Kurile Wedge Incident. It is ready to go to market. Next in line is Moscow Airlift on which I am doing a major edit. After I finish going through Moscow Airlift, I want to re-read and edit Flight of the Pawnee. The manuscript needs tweaking to bring it in line with all the books that preceded it. It is a great story, and I’ll send it to a publisher sometime next year.

After I’m done with it, I’ll probably either finish MANPADS or start on either Hannekam or The Assam Draggin’.  Who knows, maybe something will come up!

Waiting in the wings is a non-fiction project that I’ve decided to put off until I get a couple more of the Josh Haman series into print. Its tentatively titled Gold and Silver Wings and Six Pointed Stars. It’s a family anthology of three generations of military pilots and four generations of officers.

As I look at this list, one word comes into my mind – WHEW!!! I guess I need to get back to work!

Marc Liebman

July 2016

Being a parent again!!!

In my last installment I talked about the call you never want to get. Suddenly having to put one’s life on hold and at age 70 for me and 65 for my wife and be parents again was a shock.

Suddenly we were tossed into a role we played before, but to use an aviation term, we weren’t current. Upon arrival at my son’s house amidst the shock, anger and grief of our daughter-in-law’s suicide, we had to instantly transition from being a fun grand parent to a full time parent responsible for discipline, getting to/from school and after-school activities, homework, cooking, cleaning and the laundry, etc. etc. It wasn’t easy.

Trying to comfort and explain what happened to a 4 year old boy, an 8 year old girl and 9 year old grandson was a challenge. Grief counseling helped, but they only saw the counselor once a week. Temper tantrums that resulted in screams of ‘mommy, mommy…” were heart rendering.

And then there was the laundry. Some days, my wife did six or seven loads. The average was four. Yes, there were seven people – four kids and three adults – and it’s a credit to American engineering that the washer and dryer held up to the abuse. Collecting, sorting, washing, drying, folding all took time. It was much more than I remembered.

Long forgotten parenting skills had to be relearned. Frankly, at age 70, I don’t have the patience to listen to a whinny kid. Being told “no” even when given choices is simply isn’t an acceptable answer.

Child rearing in the 1970s and 80s is a lot different than it is in the year 2016. Many things are the same, but there are differences.

The biggest is the plethora of video games which are a both a blessing and a curse. Yes, they keep kids occupied but many are incredibly violent. The ratings help sort them out but most involve shooting or killing or blowing up something. The games are addictive to young minds and create unrealistic expectations that everything is an instant transaction. They get excited about reaching some esoteric level based on their skill at the game.  Who cares!  What is amazing is how kids who can barely read can intuitively figure out the game. They spend hours with their noses buried in an iPad and fight over who did what to whom in a networked game.  Good grief kids, its a video game!!!

Reading a book? Are you kidding! That’s “boring…”

And then there are meals. My wife was putting on the table food that when we were feeding our kids, wouldn’t have gotten in the house. Everything seemed to need some sort of a coating, usually either barbeque sauce or ranch dressing.

On the “don’t get me started” list of topics, video games are number one closely followed by the eating habits of my grandkids.

At the end of every day, both my wife and I were exhausted. We’d crawl into bed shortly after the kids and by ten p.m., we were asleep. My lovely wife put it best. “There’s a reason God set it up so we would have kids when we were young and had the energy to deal with them… And, if we had them at our age, we’d put them down and forget where we put them.”

How much longer are we going to put our lives on hold? We don’t know. It’s a mixed blessing. On one hand, we’re an integral part of our grandchildren’s lives and that’s important. On the other, we need a life apart. Ultimately, we’ll figure out what the mix is.

Marc Liebman

July 2016

The Call You Never Want to Take

When our kids were teenagers, there was always a gnawing fear in the back of our minds that in the wee hours of the morning we would get a phone call telling us our son or daughter was arrested or worse, seriously injured or worse, killed in a car accident. We survived those years and both our kids have gone on to be healthy, productive adults with careers that will, some day, make them wealthier than their parents.

After our kids graduated from college and as we got older, this fear slid farther and father into the backs of our minds. Imagine our surprise when at 0600 on December 20th, 2015 the phone rang. The date and time is seared into my brain. It was a call that no parent ever wants to take.

At the other of the phone was our son who struggled to tell his mother that his wife and mother of our four grand children – had just committed suicide. Our world was just turned upside down. Everything just changed.

The emotional pain was short lived. Both my wife and I know how to grieve. Burying our parents taught us that painful skill. Our daughter-in-law as gone and was never going to come back. We were more worried about our son and our grandchildren and their well being.

My grief quickly turned anger. How could this woman do this to her children? Her husband? Her extended family? Heinous, reprehensible, vindictive are just some of the words that I used to describe her terrible, inconsiderate act. Seven months later, I’m still mad at her. Every time I look at my son, I can see the pain in his eyes.

As grandparents, our focus was helping put the pieces back together and helping our grandkids get back to some semblance of a normal life without their mother. We dropped everything and hustled out to California. I cancelled all the book signings I’d set up for the spring as well as attending several association events, stop writing my blog and working on Inner Look which was in production.

When talking to others about what happened, the best way to describe the situation is to simply say, “it sucks.” Those two words say it all.

January and February were spent dealing with the administrivia – changing beneficiaries, dealing with insurance companies and Social Security, and on and on. The idea was to rip the bandaid off once and get all this stuff done. At the same time, we had to get the kids into a rhythm of a semi-normal life.

Seven months after this life changing event, we can see the positive signs. The kids are adjusting, we’re playing a bigger role in their life and a close family is now a lot closer. And one of the indicators that “things” are returning to normal is that I’ve started blogging again! Hopefully, I’ll be able to add one a week.

Marc Liebman

July 2016

Wonders of Wikipedia

Back when I was about ten my parents bought the Encyclopedia Britannica.   For years, they bough the yearly updates and I spent hours poring over the pictures diagrams and words in every volume. For school, it was a great place to start because everything in the volumes was sourced. So, not only did it give you the gist of the topic, it also told you where to look for more information.

Today, encyclopedias, and many reference books and library card catalogs have gone the way of the dinosaurs. Books at the libraries, at least the ones I go to, still use the Dewey Decimal system, but instead of a card catalog, you sit in front of a computer screen. It is faster and easier than looking for a card in a drawer.

The folks reading this who are under the age of 40 are probably thinking what is he talking about. Well, children who grew up using calculators instead of slide rules, that’s what we had before the turn of the century.

Enter the Internet and a new source of info – Wikipedia. To me, it’s the encyclopedia of the Internet. Type the topic into a browser (I love Google) and look for the Wiki site.

Yes, I know people can add stuff in there and there’s material in the site that is, well, not factually correct. However, I go back to my original point about encyclopedias, it is a starting point.

As a military historical fiction novelist, I have three audiences I have to keep happy. One and most important is the reader. Number two are the editors who help me out. They ask questions and fact check. And Number three are the guys with guns and badges.

Even though I am retired and no longer have a clearance, theoretically, I don’t have to run what I write by the Navy. To keep myself out of trouble, I use Wikipedia as a place to start and then go from there. The source files I keep on each book would allow me to say that it is “the public domain.” Call them my “get out of jail free card.”

So yes, Wikipedia is a flawed site, but it is a great place to start.

Marc Liebman

October 2015

Magic of Google

I love Google and Google Maps! Research is one of the time consuming tasks of writing historical fiction. Physically going to each locale in a manuscript is prohibitively expensive to say nothing of time consuming.

And, of course, there’s the minor question of going back in time. Unless one has a time machine, trying to figure out what a location looked like several decades ago is dammed difficult.

Unless, of course, one has access to Google and Google Maps. Once I know the location of the passage, then its time let the Internet work its magic by giving me access to stuff that used to be in a library or not even available at all.

For example, a few weeks ago I wrote a firefight scene in MANPADS. I wanted the action to take place in and around in a small village in the mountains of Kunar Province in Eastern Afghanistan.

First step was finding a location for the mythical village. Using Google maps, I toggled between the traditional ‘maps’ and the ‘earth’ views. Zooming in and out allowed me to examine terrain closely. If you don’t know, the ‘earth’ view puts you in an airplane looking down.

By moving the cursor to ‘move the terrain’, I found a valley for the battle scene. Its in a fictitious village up in the mountains east of a real town called Asmar.

The resolution is in the ‘earth’ view is good enough so I can see individual trees and terrain elements. Next step is “mapping” out the firefight.

Figuring out what happens takes a Tactical Pilotage Chart. There are several sites I can go to and download the right one. Zooming in gives me the terrain features that are under the trees.

To write the passage, I have to figure out how and where do the bad guys come from and what terrain features affect their approach and where the good guys set up their defenses. Often to do this, I resort to the “old fashioned” way, i.e. I print the image from Google and the TPC chart and draw lines on it!

The result are two documents I can use as a reference for both writing the passage as well as for future editing. It is what a CPA would call an “audit” trail.

Scenes in cities follow the same process. I’ll look for locations and then zoom in. Google Maps has a great feature that for some cities, it will give you a street view of the buildings. This makes it easy to figure out how many stories it looks like as well as write a description of the street.

It gets harder when one is writing a scene that took place several decades ago. In older cities like London or Paris, not much has changed over the decades. Often zoning rules force property owners to maintain the same look as the building had when it was originally built. By the way, that’s something else to research!

Google again comes into play because you can enter a location and time period in Google and voilà, one can click on a link and there are many images to browse. While this sounds simple enough to do, in reality, it takes hours.

For example, in RENDER HARMLESS, there’s a scene in East Berlin at the Hotel Stadt Berlin that takes place in 1976. The Hotel Stadt Berlin was one of a couple dozen four-star hotels run by the East German government where foreigners were allowed to stay. I’d been there in the sixties with my parents and remembered the bar and restaurant on the top floor from which, one could see into West Berlin.

To be polite, my memories of the hotel are a bit fuzzy. It’s been five decades since my visit! Finding useful images of its interior in 1976 took awhile. In fact, I spent four hours on a Sunday morning searching the Internet. The research boiled down to two paragraphs, probably about a hundred words or so that appear on page 373 of the book!

Net net, without the Internet and the magic of Google’s algorithms, the process of writing these two scenes would have been much different. Or, they may never have been written at all.

Marc Liebman

October 2014

Maintaining Situational Awareness When Writing a Novel

Knowing what is going on around you is the key to staying alive in an airplane or even a car. Not-so-strangely enough, it is also true when writing a manuscript.

In an airplane, you’re constantly aware of the plane’s airspeed, altitude, attitude, position over the ground, weather and other essential items such as how much fuel one has on board vice what is needed to get to the desired destination. And that’s for only the airplane you are flying.

The level of complexity ratchets up if you are in a flight of two flying formation because now one has to maintain a position in space relative to another airplane or helicopter. Add more airplanes of the same or different types and capabilities coordinating a strike or a combat rescue with the bad guys shooting at you and the difficulty of maintaining situational awareness, a.k.a. SA goes up several orders of magnitude. Lose SA and you and others die.

Back in the old days, all one had was radio communications and your brain had to translate that into relative motion and position from your machine.  Writing the many radio calls back and forth that are necessary AND making them understandable to the average reader is a real challenge.   On one hand, you have to give the reader a flavor of what is going on without overwhelming them. And, you have to give enough detail to a reader who’s been in similar situations so that the scene is credible. My preference is to provide more than less, but I know that it can be a bit too much at times.

But I digress… Well, not really, because I’ve found that in writing a novel, maintaining SA on what is happening in the story line is much like flying an airplane or a helicopter.

As one as one writes (and edits) a manuscript, I find myself juggling a character’s background versus what he/she is doing versus others versus others versus the story line. My desire to keep the book in the proper historical context provides both a constraint and another dimension.

More characters make more complexity. Take RENDER HARMLESS for example.   Besides the primary good guys – Josh, Marty, John Osborne – there are the two German investigators – Starkeholz and Grenfel and a member of the Mossad – Lev Mogen. The main antagonist Dieter has his own supporting cast – Grünewald and Krasnovsky – and the list goes on. In some cases, each character has another layer of characters that play bit roles. As each new character is introduced, the degree of difficulty in maintaining manuscript SA increases.

Each character and his/her actions have to be developed in the context of the story and revealed in bits and pieces as the plot unfolds. The hard part is keeping the bits and pieces in a logical chain. Often, I find I have to go back and add in a scene. Or, worse, I’ve written in scenes that are either in conflict with ones earlier or later in the story or are duplicates.

So, writing a novel requires SA. In many ways, it is just like in an airplane flying on instruments where you are juggling a lot of information as one tries to keep it right side up and get to the destination airport. It is literally, even with all the computer driven avionics systems (which can fail) in airplanes today, it still is all in your head.

In a novel, you’re writing and there’s what’s “on paper” and what’s still in your head. The trick is to get it all out without losing the plot, so to speak. Or, in pilot speak, without crashing and burning.

Marc Liebman

September 2015

New Character Development

As I write the first draft of MANPADS, one of the key elements of the story is creating the characters. It’s a chicken and egg situation because the overall plot defines the “boundaries” of the character and the characters make-up and actions make the story interesting. And, you have to make them different and interesting to the reader.

So which do you do first? The short answer is both.  And here’s why.  Throughout the book, I try to let the characters tell the story.

When I come to what I call a roadblock in telling the story, the problem is usually with the character and what he/she believes and does or hasn’t done. Once I settle on behavior and the actions that follow, I go back and tweak prior sections of the manuscript to provide the necessary elements to support what is currently happening. Sometimes the changes are a few words, but more often, it is a passage or two that have to be either created or rewritten. The takeaway is that this is an iterative process that may happen several times during the writing and even the editing of the book.

Here’s an example from a book that I am currently writing that has the working title MANPADS. In it, there is a rebellious Saudi woman who comes from a well-connected wealthy traditional Saudi family. Back in the 60’s and 70’s in the U.S. she would have been called a “woman’s libber.”   The novel takes place in 2011 and many Saudi families still arrange marriages with the woman playing a very traditional role that doesn’t include a career in the business world.   She goes her off to the U.K. to go to school and find her own way in the business world.

The woman becomes a very successful banker yet her “ostracism” from her family scars her. As she looks at the world, she realizes that her sympathies lie with Al Qaeda. She wants to overturn the very system that has allowed her to become very wealthy. How this conflict manifests itself is part of the story. Since I am only about a quarter way through the manuscript, I’m not sure what will happen to her. I’ve got an ending in mind, but it may not be what finds itself into the final version.

Researching Saudi family life and traditions has been fascinating. It is a lot to absorb and synthesize and net down to a few character traits. The hard part is getting my head inside the head of a Saudi woman to make her both real and believable. Some sections flow really well and come flying off the keyboard. Others, well, they’re a tough slog.

Stay tuned and I’ll tell you more as the manuscript gets written.

Marc Liebman

September 2015

Keeping track of dates and time in a manuscript

How do you keep track of the “timeline” when writing a book? The question came up at a speaking event earlier this year. It wasn’t the first time I’d been asked the question, so here’s the answer.

In the beginning, it was a problem because all my novels take place in many time zones. One approach I tried was keeping everything in Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). That meant every passage had to be converted to local time. The scene would take place at night, but the GMT would be someplace at night. The conversion added confusion words and was a pain in the ass. It led to questions like was it daylight savings times or not.

The solution was simple – keep everything in local time. However, when I am writing a passage or section that takes place on the same day, they are in sequence in how the sun comes up. For example, events taking place in Vietnam or the Philippines come before a scene that takes place in either Europe or the U.S.

Keeping track of the dates in the novel is harder, at least for me, than it seems. The solution again was simple, but it did take some trial an error. On the Internet, I found a site that gives me a year’s calendar on one page along with the major Christian, Jewish and Muslim holidays. I keep a printed copy close for each of the year’s the book takes place at hand as a “master” calendar. As I write, the days on which events are circled. This way I know what days are “used” so to speak so if I need to go back and either reorder some scenes or add one, I know where there are “open” days.

So, wherever I go and have time to write, I have three documents with me. One is the plot outline, another is the ever evolving cast of characters and the master calendar.

It seems so obvious and simple now, but in the beginning it wasn’t.

Marc Liebman

August, 2015

Character Crossroads

Every time I begin to think about a new character, three questions have to be answered:

What’s his or her name ? Names, particularly in a foreign language, have meanings. What’s the translation and does it fit his or her role?
What’s his or her background ? We all have history and as an author, two things are important. Is the character’s background believable and how is it relevant to the story?
What’s his or her role? In other words, how does the new character contribute to the story?

For each manuscript, I spend a lot of time researching names so they fit the character. For example, if the character is of German ancestry and is wishy-washy I wouldn’t give him the last name of Starke, which is strong in German wouldn’t be appropriate.

The most difficult decision is the individual a “good” or “bad” guy or gal?  Next question is how do I build the character in the story.  One option is to lay it out the person’s total background in the beginning of the book. Another approach is to tease it out in different passages. Or, theoretically, one can tell all in the end.

In some cases, a passage about a character becomes a matter of discussion between the writer and the editor. In the Josh Haman series, Josh and Marty are the good guys but there’s a “nasty edge” to them that occasionally comes out. For example, in RENDER HARMLESS, Josh let’s his anger get the better of him and beats up an East German Stasi officer.

Chris Paige, who was editing the manuscript for Fireship, and I went around and around with this passage. She didn’t like showing the dark side of the good guys. Chris wanted Josh “pure.” It stayed in the book because I thought it was an appropriate way for Josh to show his anger at the East Germans who he was pretty sure were protecting the member of Red Hand and Germans in general for the Holocaust.

Back to MANPADS…. As I write the first draft, every few passages new characters have to be added. After a few days of fumbling around, I figured that to get past what was holding e back was that a new character.   To get going again, I rewrote the beginning of the book and created what I think will become and interesting character.

His name is Ra’id Kassab. His first name translates to “leader” and his last, “butcher.” What will come out in the book was that Ra’id was born in the Sudan and came to the U.S. Sudanese with his parents when he was two. He became a citizen when his parents were naturalized. Raid grew up in Dallas, TX, joined the U.S. Army and was honorably discharged. While in the Army, he was a maintenance technician for TOW, Hellfire and Stinger missiles.

So the question is he a going to be a good guy or bad?  Right now, I don’t know. Over the next few months, we’ll both find out!

Marc Liebman

August 2015