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Welcome to Algonkian Author Connect
Novel Writing and Development From Premise to Publication
HASTE IS A WRITER'S SECOND WORST ENEMY, HUBRIS BEING THE FIRST, AND BAD ADVICE IS SECONDS BEHIND THEM BOTH... Welcome to Author Connect. Created and nurtured by Algonkian Writer Events and Programs, this website is dedicated to enabling aspiring authors in all genres to become commercially published. The various and unique forum sites herein provide you with the best and most comprehensive writing, development, and editorial guidance available online. And you might well ask, what gives us the right to make that claim? Our track record for getting writers published for starters. Regardless, what is the best approach for utilizing this website as efficiently as possible? If you are new, best to begin with our "Novel Writing on Edge" (NWOE) forum. Peruse the development and editorial topics arrayed before you, and once done, proceed to the more exclusive NWOE guide partitioned into three major sections.
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The Harvard Murders
If someone had predicted to me that during my sophomore year at Harvard I would be arrested on suspicion of premeditated murder, I would have called him a lunatic. But the lunatic would have been right. I was reminded of those days again recently when an old classmate sent me a copy of a blown-up photograph that he said is now displayed on the wall of the atrium at the JFK presidential library in Cambridge, Massachusetts. That’s me in the middle, holding the McMillan Cup after we won the national intercollegiate sailing championship in June of 1938. As you look at it, Joe Kennedy, Jr., is standing to my left and Jack Kennedy to my right. Jack and I were sophomores; Joe was a senior. Some strange things happened to Jack and me that year. If they hadn’t turned out the way they did, history might look a lot different today. I’ve waited sixty-five years to tell the story. The reason will become evident by the end of this account. *** The future president preferred his own reading choices to what we were assigned in the first English course we took together, which started the following Monday. I had decided to major in English and Jack in government and history. He was taking two history courses, along with government, English, and fine arts, while I registered for two English classes, Music 1, economics, and a history course. The English class opened with the 17th century poets, and the first book we were assigned was John Milton’s Paradise Lost. We both hated it. “I don’t think I can survive this course,” said Jack in his clipped Boston accent when we were walking back across the old Yard between the John Harvard statue and Massachusetts Hall one day. We passed two Radcliffe girls lying on their stomachs in the grass, reading under one of the oak trees. Jack turned to look down at them before adding, “If Paradise Lost is considered one of the greatest works of English literature, I’ll take your Hardy Boys.” It came out Hoddy Boys. We quickly fell into the regular routine of course work, studying, and morning and afternoon sports practices. More than eighty men went out for the soccer team, and I knew it would be a serious challenge to make the starting eleven as a sophomore. It was October 7, 1937 around two weeks after classes began, when the incident took place that led to my meeting Maggie Halloran, one of the waitresses in the Winthrop House dining hall. A few days earlier, someone had pulled off a prank that attracted the notice of all four hundred men living at Winthrop. The practical joker had launched a big balloon filled with helium inside the enormous dining hall, and it was still hovering under the ceiling about forty feet above our heads. It wasn’t a regular balloon. The thing was about four feet long and somehow shaped into the form of a dirigible airship. Like an airship, it had a small wooden gondola dangling under it. The word Hindenburg had been stenciled in red paint along the length of the balloon. *** In May of that year, the real German dirigible Hindenburg had caught fire and exploded while trying to land at Lakehurst, New Jersey. No one was sure if it was an accident or sabotage. Thirty-six people died in the fire, and film footage of the raging inferno made all the newsreels. Now we had this replica of it flying over our heads, and the dining hall manager was scratching his head to figure out how it could be removed from under the ceiling. The second morning after its arrival, I awoke to find Bill Coleman grinning at me like a fox. Bill, Jack, and I, along with Torb MacDonald, were roommates. Bill was blonde and rugged looking, with a prominent nose; we called him Beak. “I’ve got the solution,” he said. “The solution to what?” I muttered. “Bringing down the Hindenburg.” In his right hand he was holding what looked like an ebony-handled dueling pistol from The Count of Monte Cristo. “This is the same model air gun William Powell used to shoot out the Christmas tree bulbs in The Thin Man. I ordered one as soon as I saw the movie, but I’ve never gotten around to using it.” I sat up, and he handed it to me. It only fired BBs but looked lethal. In response to Bill’s tapping on the wall, Jack came in with Torb, both in their bathrobes. When Bill told them his idea, Jack loved it. Grinning, he took the pistol, practiced aiming it, and said, “I’m in.” Torb thought it over and said he’d have to pass. Naturally cautious, he didn’t want to do anything that would affect his status on the football team. Since it was Bill’s idea, Jack and I agreed he would shoot first. Jack won a coin toss with me for the second spot if Beak missed. Twenty minutes later, the three of us entered the dining hall. Bill had concealed the air pistol inside his waistband under his sweater. At least two hundred men were having breakfast as we went to our regular table and sat down. One of the waitresses came over to pour coffee and orange juice. Looking up at the ceiling, I saw that the Hindenburg was positioned at a point that gave us an unimpeded chance for a clear shot. Still, it was at least forty feet away from our table. Jack said, “Let me introduce the festivities.” Standing up, he tapped his knife against our tin water pitcher enough times so that the room slowly quieted down. When there was almost complete silence, Jack called out, “Gentlemen, do not be alarmed at what is about to happen. We who are about to fire, salute you.” With that, he sat down, and Beak stood up. He removed the pistol from under his sweater, aimed it skyward with both hands, and fired. There was a pinging noise, and the BB hit the ceiling near the balloon with a thin snap. A collective sigh filled the hall, whereupon Jack said, “My turn.” Still sitting, he took the pistol and rested the barrel on my shoulder to steady it before aiming and firing. We heard a sharp crack as it hit the wooden gondola, making it swing back and forth beneath the balloon. A cry of disappointment rose from the men in the hall, and I heard a nearby female voice call out, “I thought you knew how to aim your bullets, Lacey!” The cry had come from the striking young Irish waitress who often served at our table. Jack always made a point of flirting with her, and it was obvious she enjoyed it. Her nickname for him was Lacey, for lace curtain Irish. He called her Shanty. Grinning, Jack handed the pistol to me. “Okay, Buffalo Bill,” he said, giving me a pat on the shoulder. “This could be embarrassing if you miss.” In the distance, I could see the dining hall manager striding across the hall, threading his way between the tables, an apoplectic glower on his face. It struck me that this was something that could get me into trouble, but when I glanced back at the Irish girl, she gave me a wink and a thumbs up. I slowly raised the pistol and fully extended my arm toward the balloon, trying to keep my hand steady as the Hindenburg filled the gun sights. I closed my eyes and pulled the trigger. A loud pop split the silence, and the Hindenburg began rapidly descending to the accompanying sound of rushing air. Cheering burst out as it landed on one of the serving stations and scattered the waitresses standing alongside. Putting the air pistol down on the table, I stood up and gave them all a bow, garnering even more enthusiastic applause. By then, the dining hall manager had reached us. He was furious. “What is the meaning of this?” he demanded, staring down at the pistol as if it were a bazooka. “Have you lost your mind?” Jack stepped between us to block his view and began patting me on the back as Bill moved in behind him to retrieve the pistol and slip it back under his sweater. “Give me your gun,” the manager demanded. But when he looked down, it was no longer there. “I don’t have a gun,” I said. “I’m sorry, but I’m late for class.” I was almost to the doors when the Irish waitress intercepted me. Like the other waitresses, she wore a black dress, black cotton stockings, and a black headband to keep her hair out of the food. She took my hand and held it. Looking up at me, she laughed and said, “That was wizard. My name’s Maggie Halloran.” The words came out with an Irish lilt. “I’m Jimmy Rousmaniere,” I said. She was about my age, maybe a year or two older, with blue-violet eyes and a cherubic face sprinkled with freckles. Her headband couldn’t contain the abundance of auburn hair that framed her face. Over her shoulder, I saw the manager glaring at her. The girl turned and saw him. “No rest for the wicked,” she said. As Maggie began walking back toward the serving station where the carcass of the Hindenburg had met its end, Jack stepped over to me and grinned. “Shanty’s very good, Jimmy. Mark my words.” Heading out into the courtyard, I hoped there wouldn’t be any serious repercussions for the prank. __________________________________ Excerpted from The Harvard Murders by Robert Mrazek. Copyright © 2025 by Robert J. Mrazek. Used with permission of the publisher, Compass Rose Publishing. All rights reserved. View the full article -
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Spies as Storytellers: Crafting Aliases, Inventing People, and Weaving Tales from Information
Up until two years ago, when I heard the word “spy,” I thought of hidden daggers, poison vials, fake identities, and, of course, James Bond and the entourage of Hollywood spy characters that have come in his wake. All of these elements of espionage are, admittedly, exciting. They bring with them the dangerous, edge-of-your seat romance and thrills that I’ve come to expect from pop-culture spy tropes. It wasn’t until I started doing research into World War II espionage for my historical fiction novel, The Librarians of Lisbon, that I realized how limiting (albeit fun) this stereotype of spies is. What often goes overlooked and underappreciated is the extraordinary talent of real-life spies, not as masters of weaponry or stealth, but as masters of words. Spies, by the very nature of their craft, must be tellers of tales. They have aliases, and these fabricated identities come with personalities, family backgrounds, long-lost loves, heartaches and triumphs. Not only does a spy working undercover have to commit to a new narrative with each new mission, they have to live the story they craft. Author Sonia Purnell said of World War II spy Virginia Hall, “She could be four different women in the space of one afternoon, with four different code names.” Hall posed as everything from a reporter to a dairy farmer to accomplish her missions. Aline Griffith, a beautiful former-model recruited by America’s OSS (Office of Strategic Services), posed as a socialite in Madrid in order to gather information on Nazi movements. Marie Christine Chilver (aka Agent Fifi) often posed as a journalist in bars and restaurants in Beaulieu, England, in order to “test” SOE (Special Operations Executive) trainees to see how much personal information they’d divulge to her (It did not bode well for the trainees when they confided too many secrets.). According to Elyse Graham, author of the fascinating Book and Dagger: How Scholars and Librarians Became the Unlikely Spies of World War II, spies weren’t supposed to carry weapons at all. Carrying weapons was too risky, because if a spy was caught, a weapon was an instant incriminator. Words, on the other hand, might serve as a spy’s most valuable alibi. Not only did spies have to craft narratives about their identities, but if captured, they had to spin yarns about their motives and movements as quickly and convincingly as possible. This art of storytelling extended well beyond aliases. During World War II, scholars, academics, and librarians were recruited by America’s OSS and sent to Europe to gather information for the Allies, as well as to preserve and protect rare manuscripts and literary treasures in danger of being confiscated or destroyed by the Nazis (Read Kathy Peiss’s wonderful recounting of this in her book, Information Hunters: When Librarians, Soldiers, and Spies Banded Together in World War II Europe). It was no mistake on the American government’s part to turn to these brilliant minds for espionage work. Because of their attention to detail and their skills with careful reading and meticulous research, these men and women scoured phone directories, artillery manuals, and uncensored and underground newspapers looking for the tiniest kernels of information that might prove useful. These kernels, when brought together, might turn into a story in and of themselves—of troop movements, of names and activities of high-powered Gestapo, of horrific war-time truths about destruction, crimes against humanity, and tragic deaths. Adele Kibre, a scholar in medieval linguistics, proved indispensable to the OSS when, working as an agent in Stockholm, Sweden, she secured thousands of reels of microfiche documenting aerial raids and resistance activities, much of which was censored information by the Germans. She also obtained a copy of Industrie-Compass 1943, an extensive, secret directory of manufacturers and industries in Germany. Each of her acquisitions told a story about the war—each one helped the Allies piece the puzzle together of how Germany and the Axis powers were operating, and how the tide of the war might be turned. World War II Double Agent Garbo, considered to this day to be one of the most talented and successful spies in the history of Britain’s MI5, was arguably also one of MI5’s best storytellers. Born in Spain, Garbo, whose real name was Juan Pujol García, was a veteran of the Spanish Civil War and held a deep-seated disdain for both communism and totalitarianism. He approached the British SOE to offer his services as a spy, but they turned him down repeatedly. Desperate to help the Allies, Garbo planned a drastic move. Relocating from Spain to Lisbon, he contacted a German handler, offering his services, and was recruited by Germany under the codename Alaric. It was at this point, hoping to prove his usefulness to the SOE, that Garbo began weaving an extraordinary web of lies to give him the credibility he needed to become a spy for Britain. With the help of his wife, Araceli, he crafted a fictitious network of twenty-seven spies, all of whom were supposedly reporting on the movements of British troops from within Britian itself. It was all a grand fabrication. Each of these spies had a distinct backstory and personality, all crafted from Garbo’s inventive mind. There was a seaman, a soldier, a courier, an aviator, and many more. They hailed from a variety of countries, including Venezuela, Britain, and India. Garbo’s network was called the spinnennetz, or the “spider’s web.” His storytelling was so convincing that he soon became one of Germany’s most trusted and valued spies. When one of the spinnennetz spies purportedly died, the Germans sent condolences to the fake spy’s widow, and then she soon became a member of Garbo’s spy network herself. What makes Garbo’s feat of deception all the more incredible is that, from early 1941 until April 1942, he crafted these stories in Lisbon, without ever having set foot on British soil. He relied solely on the travel guidebooks and maps he’d secured of Britain and his own imagination. The Germans never suspected a thing. Eventually, his success as a spy for Germany caught the attention of Britain, and at last, he was recruited by MI5 and brought to London to continue his espionage work. Once he arrived in England, his spinnennetz reached a whole new level of credibility. Now, with the help of information from MI5, Garbo’s fake spies were able to report, many times quite accurately, about British troop and artillery movements. Sometimes the facts were real but had been deemed non-essential by the British and safe enough to pass onto Germany. Other times, Garbo and MI5 made sure some truthful information arrived in Germany’s hands too late to be of any great service to them. Agent Garbo played a vital role in the success of Operation Fortitude and D-Day by spinning yet more stories. Operation Fortitude was, itself, one enormous lie, the purpose of which was to deceive Germany about the magnitude and location of D-Day. Garbo and his network told the Germans of a massive army forming along the coast of south-east Britain, commanded by General Patton himself, complete with tanks, landing crafts, and airplanes. He also led Germany to believe that the Allied invasion would take place in Calais, France, rather than in Normandy. It was all a ruse. The Allied army Gable told of was a “decoy,” made up of inflatables that looked deceptively real from the sky. But Germany fell for the trick, and in the days following the initial D-Day landing on June 6, 1942, thanks to one final message from Garbo, Hitler delayed sending reinforcements from Calais to Normandy. Because of this, the Allies were able to gain the upperhand, and eventually, go on to win the war in Europe. If Garbo had not been so adept at storytelling, what would the outcome of D-Day, or in fact, the war might have been? If Adele Kibre and her team hadn’t sent three thousand reels of microfilm to the United States from Sweden, what vital information about the war might have been left undiscovered? If Virginia Hall had not been such a skilled chameleon at re-writing her own script, how many more people might have lost their lives instead of being rescued by her adroit espionage work? Many spies, as I’ve come to understand through my recent research, are wielders of pen and paper more than cloaks and daggers. Yes, they operate in the shadows. Yes, they face incredible danger. But they do it all while spinning their own spider webs of stories, to ensure their continued survival and that of those they’re trying to protect. The tales they tell just might be their most powerful weapon of all. *** View the full article -
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Ethical Dilemmas in Modern Organ Transplantation and How to Explore Them in Thrillers
More than 100,000 people in the USA are on waiting lists for organ transplants. Each day 17 people die while waiting. Advances in organ procurement and allocation have expanded the donor pool. For example (focusing on heart transplants, since I’m a cardiologist) in early 2020, doctors started to perform transplants using hearts from donors who had sustained circulatory-arrest deaths, instead of brain death. Similar to donors after brain death, post circulatory arrest donors have sustained irreversible neurologic injury. But unlike brain dead donors, circulatory arrest donors don’t yet meet formal brain-death criteria. This change has significantly expanded the donor pool. Today, 30%-50% of all transplants are from circulatory arrest donors. Advances in organ care systems have greatly expanded the viability and the scope of organ transplants. Today we have the “Heart in a Box” technology. Before this technology, the donor’s heart would be on ice in a cooler to preserve it during transport, and doctors had only four hours to get the heart to the recipient, which limited the possibility to provide matching organs across extended distance. If no suitable donor was available in the limited area, the heart would go to waste. Today doctors can revive the donated heart and make it beat again inside the box by perfusing it with warm, oxygenated blood, preserving it for up to 12 hours. Despite the advances, the organ shortage is still a formidable problem. What complicates matters is the fact that for centuries ethical dilemmas have marred most medical advancements. From the sin of performing autopsies in the Middle ages, to the denigration of anesthesia, to the conviction that nothing could be introduced into human blood vessels, which forced a heroic doctor to perform the first heart catheterization on himself using a urinary catheter, many medical innovations endured an uphill battle. It shouldn’t surprise us that organ donation, which often requires the death of a donor, is also facing serious ethical dilemmas stifling life-saving progress and organ availability. The challenge starts with the request for consent to donate. Today, the responsibility to obtain consent from the donor’s family and to evaluate the suitability of potential donors belongs to the Organ Procurement Organization. A doctor with a patient in desperate need of an organ is not allowed to approach a donor or his family directly. I strongly believe that organ donations would increase if the doctor helped the donor’s family to develop a connection with the recipient. An even more controversial issue is that donation is viewed as a purely altruistic act, unburdened by external pressures and without any compensation to the donor or his family. Why should a donor or his family donate organs? From the goodness of their hearts (pun intended.) I’m a strong believer that we should compensate the donor’s family for organ donations. There are different ways to achieve this through hospital fund raising, private insurance, and private pay. What’s wrong with financial compensation, as long as proper patient-donor match and severity of illness remain priorities? After all, nowadays recipients do pay for sperm and egg donation. Why not for organs? Because of the National Organ Transplant Act (NOTA) passed by Congress in1984 to ensure an equitable allocation of donor organs and to (ironically) increase the number of organs available for transplantation. NOTA bans the sale of human organs for transplantation, with violations punishable by up to 5 years in prison and a fine of $50,000. A reason for the ban, is the past experience with the sale of blood, which led to problems with drug addicts selling blood-carrying diseases. But nowadays we have much better way to screen tissues and organs for infections. According to a prominent cardiothoracic surgeon I consulted, if half of the effort spent encouraging people to sign donor cards was spent to make organ donation safer, compensation to donors’ family would greatly increase organ availability. As it has happened in the past with other kind of prohibitions, the black market of organs is flourishing. Compensation for donation would help prevent illegal practices and unsafe transplant tourism. In my novel I weaved into the plot and concretized several of these important advances and the ethical dilemmas they cause. I highlight in action the emotional turmoil faced by families of donors, who are thrust into a position of making a swift and agonizing decision about their relative’s organs. This reflects the tension between honoring the donor’s wishes and the family’s grief, compounded by the time-sensitive nature of organs’ procurement. I delved into cybercrime linked to organ allocation systems, which can be exploited for profit, as concretized by the hospital hacking subplot and the misuse of donors’ data. I challenged the idea that donation should be purely altruistic, since compensation would alleviate illegal practices. A good novel doesn’t openly proselytize. The author’s ideas have to be concretized through the actions of the characters and the events of the plot, so the reader arrives at the writer’s original idea by his own conclusions, after reading the story and may develop a personal opinion about these ethical challenges. There are many more and greater challenges at the horizon for organ donation. Xeno-transplantation is in the process of becoming a reality. Today, gene-editing technology can create genetically-altered pigs which are bred and housed using infection-control measures and isolation in sterile environments, to provide organs, especially hearts. Many object that using pigs and nonhuman primates for xenotransplantation research, or to grow organs, violates established best practices for animal care and welfare. This ethical challenge thrusts us into the discussion about whether animals have rights which supersede humans’ right to preserve and prolong their own life by utilizing nature and non-rational species. I encourage other authors to concretize their views about these new ethical dilemmas through the actions of their characters and the plot’s events, to make people aware of the challenges patients and doctors face on a daily basis to promote life sustaining innovations. View the full article -
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Balancing Technical Jargon with Reader Engagement
As someone who has spent their life in motorsports from the day I left school until I took the plunge and switched careers in 2019, I was constantly being asked when I would write a book about racing. A year ago, I finally decided to include a motor racing theme in book fifteen of my AJ Bailey Adventure series. The result? Polarized. Readers either loved the insight into the sport, or drearily trudged through, or simply skipped the racing parts. So, what had I done wrong? According to one reader: ‘I’d rather stare at a rusty bucket of bolts in the corner of my garage than watch auto racing.’ Okay, I don’t think I was ever going to hook this fellow with anything motor racing related, but I also received other notes and reviews about the level of detail I’d delved into. In both directions; critical and praising. The book, Lighthouse Point, was a passion project for me and a nod to my late father who’d spent his life in racing and shoved my backside in a go-kart when I was ten years old. My goal with the racing storyline, which was set in the glamourous and incredibly dangerous era of Grand Prix racing in 1970, was to put the reader in the driver’s seat and have them experience the tactile and exhilarating feel of being behind the wheel. For those interested in cars, excited to learn, or drawn into following the story of the fictional fledgling independent team I placed amongst the actual racers and storied names of the time, they loved the sensation of being immersed in the action. The balancing act of choosing a level of detail wasn’t new to me. The series is based around a female dive boat operator in the Cayman Islands who seems to always find herself mixed up in trouble of some kind. Most of the books are written in dual timeline, following a storyline in history which ultimately converges and resolves in AJ Bailey’s present day world. Scuba diving itself, even basic recreational diving, has technical details and knowledge which if ignored can seriously injure you or kill you. My series has become very popular in the diving community, so making sure these details are both correct, and not ignored, is critical. But a larger percentage of my readers have never put a regulator in their mouths, and never had to worry about nitrogen narcosis, rapidly expanding bubbles in their blood system, or no-decompression limits. Yup, how do you slide info like that into a story without generating a page-skipper instead of a page-turner? Tricky, right? Now write a lengthy series where these terms and situations will crop up repeatedly, but you can’t guarantee your new readers start with book one. Many will join the series in book sixteen then go back to the beginning if they enjoy the latest release. So, you can’t throw in a term like DCS (decompression sickness) and expect them to know what you’re talking about. The solution I’ve found after clumsily learning through the early novels, is to make sure a technical detail is critical to the story, or necessary for the situation, then find the briefest way possible to describe it. I’m not going to blather on about the intricacies of nitrogen narcosis – a drug-like euphoria caused by a large presence of nitrogen molecules in your system when diving deeper – when AJ is guiding her customers on a shallow reef. The next challenge is to drop the information into the narrative or conversation without sounding like a manual or textbook. Having AJ verbally warn another diver about the dangers before they get in the water is a useful trick. Now you’re setting the reader up to expect and feel the tension as the errant diver becomes disorientated in the wreck at 130 feet down. Timed right, the reader is yelling at the diver not to go farther inside the shipwreck. Or a shed full of chainsaws. Breaking up the information is also a useful technique. Similar to how I try to drip-feed my protagonist’s description over the early chapters. ‘AJ’s shoulder length blond and purple highlighted hair soon dried with the warm tropical air rushing over the bridge as she steered the dive boat towards shore.’ A little later in the chapter, I may have her slip on a long-sleeved sunshirt to protect her colourfully tattooed arms from the sun. The same system can work for technical details which will be important to the story later on. I might describe them filling the tanks with nitrox gas instead of air before leaving the dock, a mix with a higher percentage of oxygen. Now I can reference nitrox and have AJ tell someone: ‘We’re diving nitrox which will extend our ability to stay deeper without going into deco.’ I still have to tell the reader what ‘deco’ means, but at least I don’t have to also stack an info dump on nitrox at the same time. In diving there is specialised equipment involved which presents a similar challenge. Your regular readers already know what a BCD is, but the new prospective fan who grabbed your latest release may has no idea. ‘AJ donned her buoyancy control device, or BCD as they’re commonly called, the vest-like piece of equipment holding her tank.’ Everyone has seen a picture of a scuba diver wearing some sort of jacket with a tank on their back, so now they know it’s a BCD and we can move on to dropping into the turquoise gin-clear water of the Caribbean Sea. A short enough sentence that your regular readers aren’t shouting at their ereader about how they already know this, but enough information to keep from losing the newbie to your stories and scuba diving. A glossary has been a tool used by many in the past, but I prefer not to pause the story to have the reader go look something up. You can hyperlink in an ebook, but it’s still a break in the flow, especially when the information is required during an action sequence or tense moment. Keep it brief, break it up, and make sure it’s critical to the story or required for authenticity. Which leads into my final point. Get it right. Someone who knows what they’re talking about, whether it’s flying a plane, handling a firearm, or scuba diving to the depths, will call you out if your description is inaccurate. Almost every film ever made about motor racing is unwatchable for anyone who has competitively raced cars. They’re filled with technical flaws, often to the point of being ridiculous. No driver ever goes down the long straight at three-quarter throttle, waiting for their rival to pull alongside so they can ‘mash the gas’ to the floor to surge ahead again. Their foot was already on the stop from the first moment traction off the previous corner allowed until the latest braking point for the next corner. Get it right, or you’ll aggravate and lose knowledgeable readers. So, did I include too much nuance and fine detail in Lighthouse Point? Certainly, for some I did, but that was a decision I made going in. As I mentioned, it was a passion project, so I accepted the hits to tell a story and share a love of mine which had dominated my family’s life. I thought of my dad while I wrote every racing scene, and it was my gift to him. I’m proud of the book knowing he would have loved it. But I didn’t hit the ‘please everyone’ balance between detail, technical jargon, and story to make the masses happy. The next book released in the series is titled Spitfire Storm, where the historical timeline follows a female ATA pilot in WWII England. In this story it was easier for me to temper the technical detail as I’m not a pilot and relied heavily on research and advice to accurately portray the aerial scenes. Spitfire Storm has been the most popular release in the series so far, so in hindsight, the valuable lesson I learnt from Lighthouse Point helped me fine tune the balance for future books. *** View the full article -
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Write to Pitch - March 2025
Write to Pitch Assignment Responses and see email Jan 16.docx
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