R.W. Krpoun's Blog, page 31

Travel

People come around selling tickets for prizes to benefit this or that school activity or person in need; it’s like a tax for showing up to work. It really sucks because I don’t have kids so I cannot retaliate in kind.

But the option came up for a round-trip plane ticket to anywhere in the world. I didn’t win, but thinking about my first instinct would be to see if I could sell it or cash it in.

There are places I wouldn’t mind visiting if it wasn’t for politics. For instance, I would like to see the Great Pyramids, but with the situation there so unsettled I am not really interested.

I have travelled extensively around Europe, and while I wouldn’t mind going back again, the thought of sixteen hours on a plane one-way is a solid deterrent. Ditto for going to former Iron Curtain nations.

For these reasons I am interested in virtual life systems, because having tried them I see tremendous opportunities to get a good look at historic spots without the hassles of actual travel, dealing with the Third World, encountering the French, or spending far too much time on an airplane eyeballing people who look like terrorists (but who are probably just mass murderers on vacation).

Some might call me a hermit, but my response is that no one travels hundreds of miles to seek wisdom from an extrovert.

 

A bit of raw material

Here’s the opening couple pages of a project with the working title of ‘doors’. Very rough draft of an unfinished project.

**********************************************

The back door has been on Budapest so long I was beginning to think it was stuck; it didn’t help that I really don’t like Budapest. The front door has opened onto Detroit for some years now, and given the shape the city is in I don’t expect it to change any time soon. I don’t care much for Detroit, either, but at least its not Budapest. In my line of work you take your comfort where you can.

Gezer came through the front door on a Wednesday evening just as I was thinking of getting something to eat, and he was far from a welcome sight. The Geez plays both sides of the street and if anyone had ever trusted him they were dust long ago. Still, men such as the Geez can be useful from time to time, which explained why he was still around. It doesn’t explain why he was around in the first place so that he could be still around now, but no one has ever really explained anything to me.

He was swaddled in an oversized pea coat with a thick dark watch cap pulled down low on his hairless scalp so that all that could be seen between the dark wool of the cap and the raised coat collar were two dark, beady and slightly slanted eyes, and a falcon’s beak of a nose. He had his hands stuffed into his pockets and taken overall he appeared to be a self-propelled pile of cloth.

If he had hostile intent he would have played merry hell trying to get across the threshold, but at my age you don’t count on things working the way they are supposed to work, which is why I have reached the age I am. I laid a stainless steel .41 Magnum Ruger Blackhawk on the counter alongside the catalogue I had been perusing, and Gezer shuffled to a stop.

“Talk, that’s all,” he muttered into his collar. The Geez claims to have ridden with the Mongols when they hit Burma under Kublai Khan, but if he did I bet it was in the horsemens’ wake, buying slaves and scrounging for overlooked loot. In any case he had a vague lisping accent that make it sound like he was whispering even when he was talking to you from across the room.

“I’m all up to snuff on social encounters.” I didn’t take my hand from the revolver’s butt. I broke in on wheelguns at an early age, back before John Browning and others made self-loading pistols all the rage and the chemists in their long white coats did away with black powder in favor of compounds that generated little smoke and delivered many times the foot-pounds of energy, but old habits die hard. Much like some old men.

“Business,” he snuffled. Gezer always sounds like he’s getting over a head cold.

And that was how it began.

***

You get the shop when you enter the trade, as it were. Small, nondescript, with living quarters upstairs, each some variant of the junk shops that have existed since Hannibal was a corporal. It is home, base, and camouflage-no one pays any attention to such places. Mine hadn’t changed much since I got it; the lighting went electric, albeit staying twenty years or more behind the times, and the stock on the shelves updated on the roughly the same schedule.

My shop has a small sales area lined with shelves displaying the junk for sale, with a waist-high barrier that looks like someone cut short an old mahogany bar for the purpose of sectioning off the back quarter of the room. I usually sit behind the bar, most of whose surface doubles as display space, with a couple old wood file cabinets behind me and the back wall covered with shelves filled with the ‘good stuff’, most of which wasn’t.

To my right is an alcove with an old green curtain screening it from the public view, more or less. It contains the stairs leading up to the second floor and down to the cellar, and the back door, which I’m beginning to believe is permanently stuck in Budapest, much to my annoyance. Dealing with Detroit day in and out, I would really appreciate a back door that led to someplace nice. Somebody has to help cover Maui, or Bermuda, or even Vegas. Especially Vegas. But no, I get twenty years of Budapest, a town that never gladdened a heart nor welcomed a stranger.

My shop is dark, dusty, and always looks like it is hours away from complete economic collapse, which suits my purposes nicely. I even do a little business out of it; the comfortable raised swivel chair I was sitting in being one transaction I particularly enjoyed. Say what you want about these modern times, they make good office furniture and better guns.

Sitting in my modern chair behind the dark battered bulk of the truncated length of bar-turned-counter in my dry, dusty shop I studied Gezer. “You are coming to me with business?”

“Yeah.” The little man shuffled in place, clearly nervous.

“That’s new.”

“Just thought you might be interested.”

“Out of the kindness of your heart?”

“Nah, to get paid.” Gezer shrugged, the movement nearly lost in the mass of his coat.

“You know, times like these the word ‘ambush’ comes to mind. Along with ‘damn fool’, and ‘summary execution’.”

He wasn’t impressed. “Look, if you don’t want it, I’ll go.’

I was torn-this wasn’t how things worked. Gezer and a few like him lived in no-man’s-land, selling information to both sides, staying alive out of their usefulness and the distraction of the major players. But if you wanted him or those like him you went looking for them, and they didn’t make it easy. For him to come hawking his goods like a wandering peddler was a significant breach of protocol, and as I had told him it made me wonder if I was being set up. The opposition isn’t all that innovative in its approaches, but on occasion they will surprise you. Sometimes fatally.

“What do you have?”

“I get paid up front,” he reminded me.

“You also never volunteer,” I countered. “Therefore we have entered into a time of radical change, a time where men’s hearts grow turbulent with fear and uncertainly and their hands turn to mindless violence.”

Gezer still wasn’t impressed. “Rules: there are rules.”

“More akin to guidelines, in truth.” That wasn’t entirely true or entirely false, the fact being that the topics in question were rules for me and guidelines for Gezer.

The Geez sneered. “I stay within the line. You want this or not?”

“Cheat me and you will certainly regret the act. Brief regret, I might add.”

He tried to look bold, but didn’t quite pull it off; for him every day was a hand in a high-stakes game, and every day he went all in on the pot. How he had lasted this long under that terrible pressure was a mystery to me. “My word is good.”

“No, it isn’t. No one in the middle can be trusted.” I frowned at the catalogue on the bar in front of me. “What do you want?”

“You got in some flowers.”

That surprised me; not that he knew I had them, but that he wanted them. I was struck by the suspicion that it was the flowers which had drawn him here unasked, drawn him into making an unsolicited deal. “Yeah. Some.”

“That’ll do.”

“Maybe. What do you have?”

“Something good.”

“So you say.” I was inclined to believe him: this was either an opening move in the other side trying to kill me (again), or he was dealing straight. While I wouldn’t put a penny’s worth of faith in Gezer’s moral code I was confident that if he wanted to commit suicide he would find a better way than burning one of us. Or one of them, either, because both sides played for keeps, but my side has much longer memories. In fact, my side was famous for never forgetting a thing.

“We have a deal?”

“So you expect me to buy a pig in a poke?”

He hesitated, and I became convinced that he was here for the flowers. Reading people is not something you learn easily, but I had had a lot of time to work on my skills. “The Dancer is back.”

That sent a chill down my spine: I had hunted the Dancer twice and both times it had been a very bad business. “That is news. Not worth the flowers, but it’s news. Here in Detroit?”

“Not yet. But that’s not what I got to sell.”

That set the hook, because a heads-up on a deck popping up early was a viable piece of trade. Keeping an eye on the Geez, I leaned down and took a small wood box thickly coated in wax gone orange with age from a shelf under the bar. Setting it on the worn mahogany closer to the front edge than to me, I looked at him expectantly.

He stared at the box for a long moment, standing completely motionless. “It’s true?”

“Yeah, that’s what I have been told. If it’s not, I’ll make it right, you know that.”

He nodded, a single jerky motion. “The Dancer is hunting a girl.”

“The Dancer always hunts.”

“No, the Dancer is hunting a specific girl.”

“OK, now you’re starting to annoy me; go peddle that ‘life essence of the special child’ nonsense to the pagans. The rock-lovers might go for it, but I won’t.”

“Not like that. Not because she is special, but the Dancer is still hunting her. Like a mission.”

“You’re telling me the Dancer is under someone’s orders?”

“Yeah.”

“Pull the other one, it has bells on it.”

“It’s true.”

“It’s nonsense. The Dancer doesn’t take orders any more than a rabid weasel takes orders. It is murder made flesh, not UPS.” That my response rhymed pleased me.

“The Dancer is looking for a girl, and not to kill her, but to find her for somebody else,” Gezer got stubborn.

“The Dancer has no use for anyone other than to kill them,” I shook my head. “It might listen to people in the know, but that is as close as it gets. Even those incidents often end badly for the people involved.”

He didn’t reply.

“Look, if you could give the Dancer orders, why set it to finding someone? The Dancer isn’t a scholar even by the standards of its rather dim tribe.”

“Speed.”

That gave me pause: like any of its kind the Dancer treated distance with a casual indifference. “Fast but not clever.”

“Doesn’t need to be. Just needs to look at a list of people until it finds the right one.”

If it wanted to, the Dancer could do that faster than a corporate headhunter with a Lear jet and an unlimited expense account. It still left a lot of questions unanswered, the chief of them being why the Dancer would want to do something like that.

And it raised a major question as well: if there was someone out there able to give a deck orders, why was Gezer tipping off the opposition? That was not a course of action that was consistent with a lengthy lifespan.

“Keep talking.”

Gezer dragged his right hand out of the coat’s pocket. His hand looked like poor-quality leather that had seen too much sun, with thick, yellow nails. Clutched in his fingers was half a leaflet printed on bold yellow paper, some call to activism intended to be left under windshield wipers or handed out with great sincerity on street corners. On its blank side I could see crabbed handwriting.

“I know where she is.”

My Ambitions

Every writer has their ambitions, the project they dream of writing. Mine are to write a good historical novel, and to write a good alternative history novel of WW2. I had others, but they have been fulfilled.

Fraser’s Flashman series has been a tremendous inspiration for me, and Tim Powers’ works have been a favorite of mine since I discovered him in in early 1980s. Their ability to weave history and fiction together (with tremendous skill) has fascinated me, and I long to test my skills in that tough genre.

Sunstone has been my first effort towards a historical novel, and my favorite project to date. It falls short of the genre, but it was a step in the right direction and gave me considerable experience in the tough business of researching a period setting.

But it is not a historical novel, nor quite an alternative history novel. My ambitions remain unfulfilled, but I comfort myself that I have made progress, and have learned a great deal.

Someday, the Lord willing, I will write one, or perhaps even both, of my dream works. You need goals in life, I believe.

The challenge of blogging

Since I’m not very good at this blogging business, I Googled ‘author blog’ to get an idea on what to blog.

I found many lists. One suggestion was to talk about your last vacation. My last real vacation was nine years ago. Usually I just like to take a week off from work and spend my time writing and playing games on my various platforms. Usually I time these breaks with the acquisition of a new video game.

Another suggestion was to spotlight other writers. But screw that-what have they done for me? Mostly they are out-writing me anyway.

What did you do last weekend (be sure to include photos) was another gem. Well, I could post pictures of an office chair and my recliner, because last weekend I wrote about 2400 words of Dream Three, and pushed deeper along the Brotherhood of Steel path in Fallout 4. Exciting, right? Oh, and I chased a raccoon (not Tripod) off my patio for scaring the outside cats. He tried to stare me down, first. The weekend before that I had to respond to the scene of a shooting at 2am, which wasn’t all that interesting as there wasn’t much to it (other than a corpse and some drunks), and at my pay grade I mostly just walk around and look at stuff.

Still, people keep visiting my site, and I feel that I owe them more material.

One of the questions was ‘what is your mission as an author’. I never considered myself as having a mission; I write because I enjoy writing. If I have a mission I would say that it is to have people enjoy my writing. That isn’t much of a mission, but I have no burning desire to convert people to my views. Yes, I write a great deal about weapons and firearms in particular, but that is because I like weapons in general and firearms in particular. Most of my protagonists are military veterans because I am a military veteran and I try to write what I know.

I will try to be a better blogger, but don’t get your hopes too high.

 

Using Current Events

The recent election was a lot of drama that I did my best to avoid; I voted my party, and I’m not dissatisfied with how things turned out, but that is immaterial to my point. We witnessed a piece of history, and a writer would be well advised to watch the events with an abstract eye. There was passion, drama, and personality aplenty in the events, and a good writer ought to have been taking notes, ready to change the names, file off the serial numbers, and draw upon the experience for their own writing.

From my point, I look at the campaign from a zombie writer point of view: what if the battle line between the parties was drawn on government-subsidy for an anti-cancer vaccine? You could tie immigration (more doses) and all the other issues of 2016 to the vaccine.

Naturally the vaccine creates zombies, but wouldn’t it make an interesting premise? Say the GOP represented the anti-vaccine-subsidy faction, so in the turbulent wake of the election Democrat protesters provide free vaccine at rallies. Or the Democrats won, and force the vaccine through testing too fast because they have to meet their core campaign promise.

The key to stealing from recent events, however, is to make sure that you really get the fingerprints off before you publish. I recently read part of an interesting zombie novel, but had to drop it because the author used it to attack Obama (not by name) throughout the book. While I am no supporter of Obama, the attacks were too transparent and distracted from the plot, so I abandoned the effort. Another zombie author used their novel as a medium to repeatedly broadcast their opinion on the importance of naturally-grown food over processed food. There is nothing wrong with a cheap shot or shout-out in your novel, but less is more in this case, in my opinion.

Unless you can turn it to your advantage: what if newly developed organic fertilizer creates the zombie virus? What if Whole Foods was really a long-term terror plot? Never waste an idea.

The world is full of news and history; use it to your advantage.

 

Breaking into the small time

I try not to get too fixated by my book sales, but recently I sold my ten-thousandth book, which qualifies me to be called a successful indie author.

Of course, saying you are a successful indie author is akin to saying you have been the Employee of the Month for a company that went out of business. What I call the fruits of a writing career, Stephen King calls a slow week.

But I have to remind myself that there are herds of writers less fortunate than myself.

And I have to remember that there were ten thousand people out there who risked their hard-earned cash on my books. And that some regretted the purchase.

I don’t know if I’ll ever be more than an indie author, but it is further than I thought I would get, and further than most get, and I am happy to have reached this landmark.

 

Merry Christmas!

And a happy New Year to all.

I’m sorry I haven’t been posting here much, but I have been making amazing headway in Dream 3 after some plot issues.

On the writing front 2016 was a great year, and a modest year; I have written around 180k words, but the problem is that they are spread between three different projects. On the plus side 2017 ought to see several books published.

My novels continue to be read, which never ceases to amaze me, and I plan to keep writing to the fullest extent of my modest skills.

So a happy holidays to all you wonderful people who have taken the time to read my work!

Merry Christmas to you and yours!

The nature of violence, or: herbivores and carnivores

As anyone who reads my stories will know, I have an equipment focus in my writing. One of the things I have learned in the military and in law enforcement is that there is no substitute for training or preparation.

One of the greatest rushes you can have, or at least perhaps a certain type of personality can have, is to be in a dark place hunting another Human being. When you are engaged in that sort of activity your senses sharpen, your entire being focuses down to a single crystalline point.

I have hunted my own species all my life, not for sport, but I still enjoy it. ‘Hunt’ is undoubtedly melodramatic, but it serves. As is common for those of my ilk, equipment, training, and a plan are all factors that separate those who succeed and those who do not.

There is a trick question I always asked when I taught in the police academy: what percentage of calls a police officer will respond to that involve a firearm? The answer is 100%, because we bring at least one with us. A third of all police officers killed in the line of duty are shot with a police weapon.

That is a thought to be kept when wrestling with drunks or subduing a violent offender. As Johnny Cash sings, living was mistakes not made. Retention holsters, body armor, back-up pistol, a knife clipped in the off-hand pocket, a short stripped-frame fighting knife no thicker than a nickel clipped just out of sight in the body armor plate pocket. Extra magazines, medical gear, Coast Guard packets of water in a bail bag, an M-4 with two thirty-round magazines in the car, more magazines in the bail bag.

Most will never be used, but better to carry and not need, than to need and not be carrying. Carrying them imparts confidence that you have options. It focuses your thinking, keeps you in a survival mode.

Which brings me by the long route around to my point: when writing about violent deeds, whether the setting is zombie outbreak, fantasy conflicts, or whatever else, the truth is that routine and complacence kills. Be it war, police work, or dealing with zombies, the one who has the next violent encounter on his mind is the one most likely to survive that encounter.

In my years as a police supervisor I have found officers carrying revolvers so filthy that it took two hands to swing the cylinder open, automatics without a round in the chamber, magazines only partially full, carrying only one spare magazine, empty pepper spray canisters, and countless other horror stories.

You can see these officers looking distracted while officer safety alerts are read out, bored during roll-call training on tactics, and disinterested when use of force incidents are reviewed. They believe that today is just a routine day; they’ll handle their calls, make a few traffic stops, and go home on time. We call them herbivores, and they tend to be a slight majority.

The other breed are the ones with all the gear I mention above, who talk about guns and stances, take-down techniques and unarmed techniques. They pay attention during the alerts and training, and challenge points on officer safety. Their weapons are clean, fully loaded, and usually bear modifications and accessories. We call ourselves carnivores, and we go to work expecting confrontations and trouble. We aggressively seek out the criminal element, figuring that you are safer when you personally initiate the contact.

At the monthly range days where officers received practice ammunition it is pretty much a roll-call of carnivores, who traditionally are the best shots in the department. The herbivores, who tend to just squeak by at qualification time, seldom bother to show up.

The difference is so marked that the State of Texas has recently required that an officer not only must qualify with his or her own weapon each year, but also must demonstrate the ability to clean the weapon as well. This is because every year several (herbivore) officers are killed or injured because their weapon jammed or malfunctioned because of a lack of maintenance.

The same applies to groups. In Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq captured documents showed that the enemy studied the natures of US combat sub-units. They tried to avoid the units which were aggressive, professional, and motivated, and to engage those units which were sloppy, liked comforts, and who were less aggressive.

And again back to the point: when describing your characters, decide whether they are a carnivore, ready and willing for the next violent incident, or a herbivore who is just slogging along, doing the job but not living it.

Inspiration

Terry Pratchett once described inspiration as sleeting into the world like solar radiation, and that on occasion the right particle struck the right brain at the right moment and great things happened.

Writers know that inspiration is the key element in writing; you can have the grasp of the craft of writing, the discipline to sit down and hammer at the keys, and the willingness to do the leg-work for the material that fleshes out the story. But these are like gunpowder: an inert substance until the spark of inspiration ignites the compound.

Writers should seek out inspiration, as is suited to their genres. In addition, they should seek out inspiration in areas outside their genre as well, because you will never know what will prove to be inspiring, or add context or color to your work. I watch a great number of documentaries on Pivot and YouTube, regardless of whether I agree with the subject matter or not, because you never know where an idea might come.

A couple weeks ago I was playing Xcom 2 on my PC (not a great game-the series has degenerated from the glory that was the early games) when an thought stuck me about a project I had that was languishing on a shelf, stuck as around 30k words. I jotted it down, and later used that inspiration to push that project to 57k words. It has since stalled again, but it is in a much better place, and it won’t take much to get it moving again.

Later that week while playing cards with friends and discussing zombie movies I was struck with a plot device for Dream III.

Writers, seek out inspiration. Creativity need not be a solo effort; drink from the creative wells of others and hope that their ideas will strike sparks against your own creative strata.

A Blast from the Past

So the other day I went to a local range and rented a M1A1 Thompson submachine gun, and ran a hundred rounds through it. For those of you unfamiliar with it, this is the famous ‘tommy gun’ used by US troops in WW2 after 1943, and featured in such films as Band of Brothers and Saving Private Ryan. The version used by gangsters and during the early portion of WW2 were the M1921 and M1928.

I have fired full-auto weapons in the military and as part of my police duties, but never a Thompson, and in fact never a WW2 era automatic weapon. I was struck by the weight: it weighs eleven pounds, and due to it is relatively small size that weight is terribly concentrated.

The second thing that struck me was that while it is obviously very well crafted, its design was not to the standards I was used to. It has two switches, one safe/fire and one full/semi auto; both were steel pegs with a simple quarter-inch steel rod sticking out at a right angle, which I could imagine would catch on everything and dig into one’s side or back. The safe/fire switch was a bit forward on the receiver, making awkward for switching with your thumb without changing your grip on the weapon. The semi/full auto switch could not be thrown except with the off -hand; likewise the magazine release could only be worked from the left side. A left-handed shooter would have been seriously challenged by this weapon.

Reloading was an issue as well; the magazines had a raised double lip on the back which had to be guided into a similar notch in the magazine well. Practice would certainly help, but I do not believe that simple ‘insert and go’ reloading of modern weapons could ever be matched by the Thompson, especially since the left hand was required to detach the empty magazine before inserting another. Reloading under combat conditions would have to be made under cover, in my opinion.

Firing the weapon, on the other hand, was pure joy. The great weight meant there was virtually no felt recoil; firing it on semi I could put a bullet exactly where I wanted it, and rapid-fire on semi was extremely controllable.

Firing on full auto was a cinch; three and six round bursts were very easy to achieve and while the muzzle climb was (like any hand-held full auto weapon) pronounced, the weapon’s weight meant it was controllable; at 25 yards I was able to aim for center mass and drill every round of a burst in a near perfect vertical line.

Beyond 25 yards the .45 ACP round is going to start losing muzzle velocity, although the Thompson’s longer barrel will help a little. But there is no doubt this weapon is for 50 yards or less, even on semi.

The Thompson was designed as a ‘trench broom’ for WW1, a hard-hitting short-ranged weapon with a large magazine capacity (initially a large drum popularized by gangster movies) useful in trenches and bunkers where the ability to drop a foe in his tracks was critical. It was developed too late for WW1, and the drum proved impracticable for military service, but in a close quarter fight such as urban warfare it would make a formidable weapon.

Modern weapons have eclipsed the Thompson with advanced materials and designs that are far more user-friendly, but for a 90-odd year old design the Thompson is still impressive.