OK, this is the combat background chapter for one of the characters. He will be a geezer (like the author) when the balloon goes up in the Second Revolutionary War, but he will be well experienced.
Meet Marc Kramer, Lieutenant, US Navy...
The news is not good. I seem to have lost my focus, and also the drive that I set myself to in order to bring this book out in time to give pause for thought before the elections next year.
"CW2" was going to be the work that finally summed up the way I felt, and by extension, the way a lot of my righty brethren felt about this nation being frog-marched from it's rightful place as the world's best Constitutional Republic to also-ran status as just another Socialist enclave which fails to heed all the warning signs that socialism is a failed experiment, everywhere it's been tried.
I tried to look into the future, to see just how this process might be reversed, just what it would take to open the eyes of the nation to the treachery that leads them ever leftward. In my heart, I know these things, and I know just how reversing it has to be done.
It turns out that knowing the problem and the solution isn't enough, one must also know the way to organize all of it into a format that will hold the attention of anyone who picks up the book.
I'm a pedant. Look it up. Pedantry is not a cardinal sin, but among the educated elite, it is considered one. Among the elite, when one writes, one is instantly compared to all the world's best and favorite writers. I'm not writing this novel for the elite, who will reject it out of hand because it glorifies the use of force to accomplish an end that is not "blessed" by the elite (see: the Russian Revolution). I'm writing for "everyman", the lowest common denominator, and especially for those readers who have swilled the "Kool-Aid". I want to open their eyes, to show them that the lefties leading them over the edge to socialist Hell are no less tyrants than the evil imams we fight today.
I decided to use Tom Clancy's writing style as a model. Clancy is very good at presenting material through the eyes of the character he portrays for the moment in his complex novels. When you read one of Clancy's early works (the ones he did himself, before he had a "staff"), you can see the action through the eyes of Ryan, for example. You also have the luxury of Clancy's peripheral visions, which bring in all the ancillary action that makes everything so real in his (early) works.
I'm no Tom Clancy, it seems. I do the side-views well enough, and my chapters are properly informative, but something is missing. I thought maybe it was character development, so I worked on that with a new character I introduced over four chapters. I still didn't get it right. My editor, bless her soul, has been very patient with me, and she corrects the worst of my pedant's errors, the tendency to abuse subject-object connections in sentences.
I had a pace going for about 5 or 6 weeks, at least a chapter every three days or so, sometimes two in that time span. The book would need at least 125 of the short, "Clancyesque" chapters, and I'm only about a fifth of the way done. I have bogged down on a very important character, the antagonist in the next (D) political administration. Perhaps it's that I don't know just how an educated human could be as wrong as these leftists and still consider themselves leaders, but I'm not able to portray the attitude of my character, "Madame President" very well. I have deleted a good number of tries.
I'm not giving up, but I have to study up a lot more on the evil that is socialism, and exactly how it got to where the elite consider it the best model of governance. Perhaps my readers will give me some reading suggestions that will provide me with the clues I need here.
In the meanwhile, I'll blog some more, because I still have things that need saying, and blogging forces me to read more, so I become better educated.
At this point, I would like to publicly thank my two tireless assistants, who haven't been paid a dime for all their work. "Edie the Editor" requests to remain anonymous, and so she shall, but my idea and theme guru has been someone you all know and love, Sailor Jim, Captain of the Sloop New Dawn, and my blog-father.
The good thing is that the best time to bring out this novel isn't right now, anyway. It's just before the 2012 election, when we will have seen just what a disaster we have brought upon ourselves by electing a socialist President. I am convinced that's going to happen. My only danger as an author is that giving this socialist President 4 years before trying to tube his or her re-election may actually be considered Sedition by then. There are signs now that the next Democratic Party administration will try to shut down free speech in some important ways, and some of those will be ways that my novel will fit into, so my actual liberty might be at stake for trying to publish it then.
"CW2" (the preliminary title) is a novel that discusses just how a tyrannical President's administration might be brought down, and the nation restored to it's former glory as a Constitutional Republic. The novel gets fairly specific, and gives revolutionary strategy and tactics for accomplishing that goal. It assumes that an armed revolution can be just as well benevolent as violent, so long as the leaders of the revolt stick well to their cause.
I have spent almost four months in this pursuit, and the results aren't satisfying me at all. As well as bing a pedant, I am a realist, so I have faced reality here, and my shortcomings as well. It's not a pretty picture for me.
Just a tease...
This is the dust jacket note:
Download authors_cover_note.doc
As always, you need Word Viewer to read MS Word documents if you don't have MS Office. You can get it here.
