Robert W. Walker Talks About Annie's War

Welcome to Murderous Musings, Rob. Tell us about your intriguing new Civil War novel, Annie's War.

I have for years wished to go back to pick up some manuscripts that I had written in the early to late 80s, among them Annie's War - Love Amid the Ruins.  The ruins refers to the failed attempt of the infamous John Brown who is arguably the first home-grown terrorist in America, whose raid on a US Armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia in 1859 precipitated the Civil War along with a number of other incidents and pressures of the day. I began my writing career as a historical fiction author with a Huckleberry Finn-like novel written while a high school student. I got into crime novels and horror novels as a way to make a living at writing. At the time that I wrote ANNIE'S WAR and a number of YA historical coming of age novels, there was little to no interest in historical fiction.

Previous to returning to Annie's War and dusting off the manuscript some 20 years later, I had done the same with my Children of Salem - Love Amid the Witch Trials. With the success of rebuilding that manuscript, I was emboldened then to rebuild Annie's War with the skills and learning I had arrived at these many years later after writing well over fifty other novels from thrillers to urban fantasy.

 One of my favorite subjects has always been the Civil War and all the issues leading up to the greatest conflict ever on American soil. I wanted to tell the old John Brown story through the eyes of his 17-year-old daughter who has fallen in love with her father's 1st in command, John Henry Kagi. I love to explore relationships and character, and how characters interact. I write character-driven novels, and Annie has the greatest spirit. She is a fighter, full of spunk and vinegar and at the same time an extremely engaging character. She has to fight for every step of the way through a plot dictated by an historical timeline.

The novel is not 'just' an historical novel as I worked extremely hard to layer it; eighteen men that Annie keeps house for are going into a situation that might likely see them all killed, and among them is the father of her unborn child. This is a tragedy in the making unless Annie can win her small corner of this war. Things are further complicated when a Pinkerton agent on his first job is on a mission to assassinate Annie's father, but spending days and nights with Annie, he falls in love with her, and the boy meets girl tale plays out against the backdrop of gunfire and lynch mobs.

I had great fun, a ball really, writing Annie's War anew, and not a bit of dust remains on the story. The reviews thus far have been glowing, and I feel it may well be my best work ever.

You can learn more about Robert Walkter on Twitter, DorothyL,  Facebook at Robert W. Walker (Rob) and Facebook at Titanic 2012 - Curse of RMS Titanic, as well as:  http://www.robertwalkerbooks.com/

A Note From Pat Browning

No, that's not Pat Browning. That's Robert W. Walker and his dog, Pongo.

I turned my usual Saturday space over to multi-published author ROBERT R.WALKER for his advice on the dread synopsis. It is Part 1 of his post on the synopsis and the outline, which are two completely different things.

Today, Sunday, we go to Part 2, with Rob’s “bullet outline” for his upcoming book, DEAD ON, to be published in July by Five Star.

AND HERE'S A TIP: On Rob’s web site (www.robertwalkerbooks.com) you can download DEAD ON for free. The book itself, together with these two posts, make up a mini-writing course. You can literally follow the book from the “brag sheet” to the outline to the finished product.

DEAD ON is a thriller, and may be a tad graphic in a place or two for the squeamish. Don’t be misled by the cozy photo of Rob and his dog. Behind Rob’s angelic mug lies a devilish imagination!

A happy holiday to all, and great success with your writing --

----- Pat Browning

Part 2 - The Outline

Part 2 – The OUTLINE
By Robert W. Walker

The outline is for many far, far harder and more grueling to create than either the book itself or the synopsis and for good reason or reasons. While many authors outline and do so BEFORE the novel is written, many find such a task so off-putting as to lead to putting the entire effort of writing said book aside—often for good.

I make no judgments on those who routinely outline a novel before ever writing a word. I salute such people who have found a comfort zone with this process, but for me and many another author to outline a novel before writing at least several chapters and often at least those crucial first 100 pages, … well … it is just as awful as torture.

I can’t speak to how others organize a novel via an outline before getting the book underway except to say that for most of these “artists” they have struggled with many elements they wish to see in the story in their minds and with notes and perhaps even 3 by 5 cards (which I detest), and sometimes these cards are character cards, plot note cards, setting note cards, dialogue moment cards, thematic cards—to keep track of various threads one “plans” on using in the story.

I submit that for many another “artistic mind” such accounting work is about as torturous as having to do an index for a book—a job for people with another set of brain cells than I possess. I personally believe that many who are wonderful at outlining are also great at keeping their checkbook straight (again something I suck at). I also believe, especially among mystery, suspense, thriller writers who tightly organize a novel this way know the ending and the outcomes and they write to that end (any means to an end).

And there’s nothing wrong with that, but most novels begin with a What IF, a set of circumstances that in chapter one raises 20 questions, far more questions than answers, and the subsequent chapters grow out of what is typically an outrageous and highly dramatic moment seen so clearly in the mind’s eye of the author but he does not have any idea where he will go next until he gets there.

This method I call “Going Where No One Has Gone Before” and this means the story grows and enlarges from the seeds planted in chapter one—organically it has been called. I don’t know the final outcome except a general notion that some will die and some will survive, and it’s nice to know that at least fifty percent and perhaps more authors than that who I have met and talked to about these matters doesn’t know the ending much less the middle and often the next chapter of the work in progress.

Yet the artist who works in this manner, his mind often in a surging fever that looks like a parabola or figure 8 as the author works up to page fifty, rewrites to fifty, goes on to 100, rewrites to 100, goes on, rewrites, goes forth, etc. while not knowing what’s going to happen on the page until it happens—often about who lives and who dies, and absolutely no idea how he will arrive at a satisfactory ending except to GET THERE, knowing that once it is on paper, a product, he can begin to massage and manipulate and make it all work on subsequent rewrites.

In this process rewriting is writing, not to suggest that people who organize better than I and write complete whole outlines are not doing many, many rewrites as well—often to “get the seams” of organized writing out of sight! I see the seas in a Robert Ludlum novel for instance; do you?

Now years ago, I learned that I had to do an Outline for my editor/publisher; that he or she needed it for that all-important editorial and/or marketing and PR or cover art meeting—that outlines and synopsis were used again and again by the person in-house who is trying her level best to present your story in succinct manner to business folks responsible for preparing the complete “package” of your book down to the font they will use on your name—and the size, color and even texture of the title, and how Press Releases will look. If your synopsis is done well, whole sections may go on the back of the actual book!

Now I do outlines but not until I am at least well into the writing first. It may be at the conclusion of Chapter Three or Four or it might be after I complete page 100—at which time I have a far clearer picture of where the story may wind up, where characters might fall or survive, what the ending may look like. The beauty of it is that most editors, once they get the actual pages, seldom to never hold you hostage to your outline, and if they do it is folded in as part of the rewriting process.

This is my method, and it works for me, and I stand by it. In my head, once a story has been told, it can’t help but get old … and if I am doing an extensive outline (or struggling to do so) for a novel I have not yet written a word on, I know I am setting myself up for failure—that my mind and artistic process and imagination demands I outline only after I have literally “lived with” my characters in their time and place on actual pages produced before I can make “predictions” on where the story might go from there. The good news is that if you “think” as I do, you know that it is a viable and a time-honored way to work the novel.

Final word on Outlines is that I got freed up by an editor at Berkley with whom I worked for many years on my Instinct and Edge Series titles, and John used the term when pleading for an outline from me to accompany him into meetings, one he could duplicate for his fellows in New York, that I simply do a “bullet outline.” This is in its simplest terms a paragraph covering plot points for each chapter. I found this approach very helpful and adopted it after I would complete those first 100 pages or at least three chapters to accompany the synopsis and outline in so many efforts to “green light” a project.

As an example, I will put up the bullet outline for DEAD ON. Anyone wishing to see an outline done on another of my titles, please contact me with a query line to that effect. You can find me at
www.robertwalkerbooks.com or at myspace.com.robertWWalkerbooks
Rob Walker

Rob Walker's Bullet Outline

BULLET OUTLINE for DEAD ON by Robert W. Walker
#
Retired Atlanta Police Detective Marcus Rydell has been doing PI work since he left the force under a cloud some four years previously. After Rydell decides to put off his suicide to help out a child in distress in the apartment overhead, he discovers that the child in need has already “helped” herself by beating her attacker to death with a claw hammer. He does what he can for the preteen named Kim. While at the scene of the killing, Marcus meets Dr. Katrina “Kat” Holley who talks him into meeting her later for drinks at an Atlanta neighborhood bar and grill called O’Dule’s.
#
Scene cuts back to Rydell’s darkened room where he is weighing up suicide against seeing Kat Holley again. He decides to put off the inevitable suicide, shower instead, and to meet Dr. Holley for drinks. Rydell revisits on a surface level the incident, which eventually costs him his badge and standing in the APD. He’d blacked out at a crucial moment during what had started out as a routine domestic dispute that’d escalated into a shootout, leaving his partner and two uniformed cops dead around his inert form.

Neither his personal physician, specialists, nor the departmental shrink can diagnose the cause of his “mysterious” blackout. Now, years later, he still blacks out from time to time, losing a minute here, six there, and the cause remains undetermined. This will continue as an ongoing mystery in itself, and the blackouts could get him and anyone around him killed (again).
#
Cuts to O’Dule’s where he meets she. Dr. Holley is an intern and “too young” for him, Marcus feels. Still, he has his fantasies even at his age—over fifty. Far from being his dream girl, Dr. Holley turns out to be a fraud, as her real name is Mallory, and she is the wife of an officer who’d died in the line of duty during the incident that led to Rydell’s removal from the force. Aside from this, Dr. Mallory, holds a gun on Rydell. He talks her out of killing him and going with her plan B, which is to hire him instead. Hire him to locate, capture, and turn over her husband’s killer.

She wants to take a scalpel to the killer, a fiend named Iden Cantu, who has also slaughtered his own family as well as three cops. After an exhaustive and interesting conversation, the two, PI and intern, strike a bargain which goes against Marcus’s best instincts, as she wants to be with him every step of the way during his investigation.

In the end, they both compromise and Marcus feels he has a case worth living for or dying for. So long as it keeps him from his depression and suicidal tendencies, he’s up for it. They agree that his deceased parents’ woodsy cabin outside the city is the safest place to launch their full-throttle manhunt for Cantu, who has eluded police all these years but who has surfaced. Cantu has sent Mrs. Mallory a series of letters, letters that Marcus is very much interested in examining for clues. He has a heart full of rage and hatred toward this man as does Dr. Mallory. Together they team up for the day when they have justice and closure and revenge.
#
From here, the team of Rydell and Holley continue to have sparks fly between them. She still holds Rydell partially responsible for her young husband’s death. And as with his superiors, IAD, and peers, Rydell is sick and tired of being the scapegoat. So their arguments will be a major factor as the story continues. As will the mystery of his blackouts and the fear of losing time at a crucial moment.

The brain is wired for this growing fear; it feels inevitable, fated. The scars of his past will determine his future, he keeps telling himself. Finally, the active investigation—far from the sort of gutter case, he’d been working—is in a sense keeping him alive. This is another thread that runs through the story—his depression and suicidal tendencies put off for the excitement and “good” of the chase/case. The question is: does the depression have any connection to his mystery disorder?
#
It has been established in the first few chapters that both Holley and Rydell have reason to feel paranoid over Cantu’s perhaps watching them and perhaps coming after them. It is a cat and mouse game, but Rydell might be the cat one day, the mouse the next. Dr. Mallory’s letters certainly suggests that Cantu has come out of hiding and is willing to risk everything to taunt and torment her.

For this reason, they go to the safe house, a cabin in the woods—beautiful place once owned by Rydell’s parents. They open up the place and settle in. Kitchen needs stocking, sleeping arrangements need be made, and as there is an upstairs and a down, they “mark” their territory. A large wraparound porch looks out on the forests and the road leading in on one side, a beautiful lake on the other. It’s an idyllic place, one they trust the killer knows nothing about.

Once settled in, Rydell tears into the letters, searching for any fragment of a clue that might give him the upper hand. After reading the letters and listening to the nesting sounds of Holley inside, Rydell is losing the light on the porch when he hears something in the woods, something coming their way. Is it Cantu? Holley had learned so much about Rydell simply by surfing the web. Could Cantu have known their move to this place even before he did? Rydell is unarmed.

Holley steps out to announce she’s made a soufflé of some sort, when he slams her to the ground. She takes exception to this, her face in the porch boards when she sees the source of his fears—a stray black German Shepherd has inched its way to the house to beg scraps. She asks Rydell, “What kind of a private eye are you?” They argue until the dog becomes comfortable around them and licks up the soufflé where it lay in the overturned plate.

Rydell curses the dog. Holley gives it a name—Paco. And Paco takes up residence on the porch. Pooch squatters’ rights.
#
Aside from the insights we get on Iden Cantu from the letters, Rydell gets all the information ever gathered on the man via computer, thanks to the one holdout friend in the department at the Atlanta PD, an acerbic younger detective who had “studied” under Rydell when Marcus was at the height of his career, solving cases. The kid is now in his late thirties and his name is Jonathan Thomas, “JT” for short. He gets the information to Rydell in quick time, and Marcus downloads it onto his G-5 Mac that Kat has brought to the cabin.
#
Scenes will shift to Cantu and his doings from time to time. He has plans of his own for Marcus, Dr. Mallory, and some others he feels haven’t suffered enough already. In fact, his diabolical plan has already been put into motion and will make headlines in the morning papers. His master plan is to watch Rydell slowly come apart at the seams as he had after the gun battle that cost him his career. He had allowed the detective who “fainted” to live in order that he live through the disgrace of it all and the torment of living on while everyone with him had died. He had luxuriated in the news that Rydell had to step down from the department.

He had gone into hiding in the Georgia forest. A former Marine, he knows how to survive in any terrain. But he’s lived like a mountain man long enough. Now he is back, and he feels his “calling”—a need to inflict more pain on those listed in the obituary he pulled from his wallet and read daily—the loved ones, those the dead were survived by—like Mallory’s wife. Like the black female cop’s intended. Like Detective Miersky’s family, including the children. The true purpose of his revealing himself through letters to Katrina Holley Mallory—to terrorize her and to challenge Rydell. He’d been bored long enough.

He had not only killed the stockbroker boyfriend of the one cop, but he’d made a spectacle of the body. Authorities would be babbling to one another, baffled, but Rydell and Mallory would know in an instant what was what, the moment they heard it on the tube or read it in the papers.
#
Scene shifts to a crime scene that involves Detective John Thomas and his partner, Jim Hanrahan. The two are in shock, not an easy emotion to drive hardened, seasoned investigators into. But whoever killed Lawrence T. Milton, an Atlanta stockbroker with no known ties to drugs, gangs, or illegal activity of any sort had trussed his body up like a Christmas turkey.

Limbs had been broken. Legs and arms folded in like matchsticks. Neck broken. Head tucked into the torso with the rest. The entire “package” had been left dangling from a Buckhead area high school flagpole where Milton had once been a star basketball player. His body had been set ablaze with an accelerant as a last act of defilement.

Prior to this, prior to the final indignities done the body, the horror of what Milton had endured, at this point, no one knew. Attached to the tether that held the twirling, charred body was a note. Simple hospital tape held the note firmly in place. It reads in blood: So it begins.

A CSI unit comes in after the detectives. Everyone is disturbed to his and her core at the macabre murder. Someone back of the barrier with a zoom lens gets a photo.
#
Rydell and Holley see the news reports on an unidentified body dangling from a flagpole “trussed up like a Christmas turkey” as the reporter says. This strikes a note with them as this same description of murder had been in Cantu’s letters.

He asks Mallory if she knows Milton, indicating the news. Together, they piece the facts into place. Slowly, it dawns on them both that Milton’s extreme “makeover” is a message to them. That he is just the first. That Cantu is behind it, and he is coming for them all—all the survivors of the previous attack. Cantu is like a force of nature and must be stopped.

Marcus Rydell now knows that there are other possible victims here. He thinks of Nora Miersky and her children. He hasn’t seen or spoken with her in years. Stan’s death ought to’ve brought them closer together; instead, it had created a rift that had only evolved into a chasm. He has to warn her, and he has to get her and her kids to a safe place before Cantu gets to them. All of this comes out while he is pacing, and Holley is arguing that Milton could be another Milton, and that it could all be just a coincidence.

Rydell had not been a stranger to Milton altogether. He’d contacted Milton as he had all the survivors of the victims of the infamous incident that had been created not by Marcus Rydell but by Iden Cantu. Milton would have none of it, saying, “You cops make mistakes that no absolution from any quarter can help. So leave me be.”

That had been right after the incident. It had had such an effect on Rydell that he decided then and there he’d go to none of the funerals, that his presence would only make things worse. Instead, he sat in dark rooms after that and grew more and more pensive with each passing day, until he’d begun to have thoughts of suicide. Milton had not moved away, had not changed jobs, had not married or changed his lifestyle. He’d be the easiest of them to locate along with Holley.

Why wasn’t Kat Holley dead? Was Cantu saving her and Rydell for last? Unable to sleep, worried, Rydell takes his boat across the lake to the area airport at Blue Ridge where he takes his Cessna back to Atlanta to be on hand for what remained of the crime scene investigation, to hopefully get some information out of JT. He’s not welcomed with open arms by those processing the scene, but he does learn that the dead man is the Lawrence he feared.

While at the scene, he spots a suspicious man, Cantu, in disguise, and he gives chase only to black out and find himself on a stretcher. He has left without telling Katrina, believing he can return before she awakes. He almost makes it but not quite the next morning.
#
Scene shifts back to the cabin, Holley and the dog. Kat sees things now in the forest she’d never seen before, phantoms not there before. She experiences even more terror when she thinks of how Larry Milton died, and the manner in which he died left no doubt of his suffering, torturous pain. She wondered if he’d given any warnings of a like nature to the black stockbroker, Milton or if it was just to her that he chose to write, and if so, why her and not the others?

Now she hears more sounds in the woods. Each new sound has Paco, her newly acquired dog, alerting, barking. The woods are crawling with sounds now. Her terror is mounting. Then Paco races off the porch and out into the woods after whatever is out there. Rabbits, maybe…maybe squirrels, who knows.

Holley tries to get hold of her fear and paranoia. She goes back inside, toys with her loaded gun and pours a cup of steaming coffee and curses Rydell for having simply left her here all alone. Some shining knight. More like a rusty court jester. Damn him.

She hears Paco’s incessant barking out near the front gate again. She feels exposed on the large open porch. She goes to the window, coffee in one hand, .38 in the other. Under her breath, she dares the bastard Cantu to come near her. But she knows she wants him alive, wounded but alive.

She’d taken lessons now for over a year in how to bring a man down without killing him. The kneecaps. He’d be as helpless as a spineless worm then. He’d still be alive long enough for her to use her scalpel on him, the gold plated one that her father had given her at graduation that day so long ago now.

The last time she’d visited mom and dad at the gravesite, she’d found the first of the letters there on their double headstone, clearly addressed to her, held against the wind by several long strips of blanketing tape, the kind of tape she and every medical professional used every day at the hospital, commonly called Nurse’s tape.

The night before, Rydell wanted to know about how she had received the letters as none had a postmark as none were delivered through the mail. She’d recounted how she’d found each one; each had come to her “hand” delivered.

“You got good reason to be paranoid then,” he’d said.

She stared out at the dog now, trying to determine what lay at Paco’s feet, as he now stood vigilant at the bottom of the porch. He’d obviously caught something, brought it back for her to admire and perhaps make a stew of—inwardly laughing at this notion—and Paco wanted her thanks.

She slipped the gun into the narrow of her back where her jeans held it tight against her spine, and with coffee cooling in her hand, she stepped out onto the porch again. If Cantu is out here, bring it on, she thought. Coming closer to the steps and looking at what the dog dragged in from the bush, she gasped. It was a snake the size of her right arm, dead, half chewed up by Paco who’d obviously not been poisoned by the bites he no doubt suffered.

Then she hears the motorboat engine over the lake, looks up and sees that it’s Rydell. He was about to get a piece of her mind and good.
#
From her point of view, Rydell left Holley unprotected at the lake, and she’d experienced a period or horrible fear. They argue but he’s too fatigued to keep up. He takes a nap and later tells her the horrid details of what he’d seen. How Milton had died. How he had given chase to Cantu.

He again tells her they must locate Nora Miersky and her children, as they too must be targets of the madman. He convinces her he must go to Nashville to convince Nora and her new husband, Carl Schramick, along with the two kids to return to the cabin here, the only safe place they know of until they can sort things out.

Holley agrees but only if she and Paco can board the Cessna with him, but the dog balks at getting into the boat and runs off. They make the trip to Nashville where Nora’s son is auditioning for a talent search. There they convince the family, including the stepfather, Schramick, to return with them to Blue Ridge Lake.
#
The scene shifts to Cantu’s point of view. He is also in search of Nora and the kids to do to them what he’s done to Milton. But he fails to find them at their Marietta, Georgia home. While pretending to be a day laborer, as he has killed a man for his truck, Cantu is frustrated in his efforts and is “spotted” in the neighborhood by an early riser walking her dog.
#
Holley and Marcus arrive in Nashville to locate the traveling Mierskys, but Nora doesn’t want anything to do with Rydell. Holley takes charge, takes the woman aside, gets her to listen. When Nora learns her children’s lives, her own and her husband’s, are at stake, she agrees to Marcus’s plan—that they go back to the large cabin in the woods until they can draw a bead on Cantu and take him out before he can get near her or her children. It takes some doing, and both Holley and Rydell agrue against going to the cops for protection as it wouldn’t be enough.

Back at the homestead on the lake, the “team” assesses the new set of circumstances. Now they have the lives of children in their hands. Rydell even takes the kids out on the lake for fishing, takes them swimming. He is enjoying life again for the first time in years.

Some paragraphs here devoted to how the children revitalize Marcus and his interest in life, in possibilities of future interests and life with someone; he begins to focus outward rather than inward.
#
Cantu already has his plan in place; in fact, his plan was to have all his victims huddle together at the former home of Mr. and Mrs. Rydell, and he has been privy to every move Rydell has made thanks to the microphone he’d implanted in Big, his black shepherd dog.

The mic’s not perfect, having to work from inside the dog’s skin and beneath all that fur, but it’s good enough to learn what Cantu needs in order to mount a full frontal attack. He has an uncanny ability to know what “the enemy” is doing and precisely what they are planning, and this explains it.

What he knows comes clear as the story progresses, but it has all to do with Paco, the “damn” dog. Later…much later…too late in fact, Dr. Kat Holley notices a scar on Paco’s shoulder. On closer examination, she sees the sutures. On closer examination, she sees no reason for the sutures, no scar or swelling, just the recent sutures.

“Open up the sutures, now!” orders Rydell.
“What’re you thinking?”
“That bastard lunatic after us has known our every move since we’ve gotten here or soon after. The dog is bugged.”
#
The final scenes are a “war” and read like a B-horror film as the killer isolates those holed up at the cabin on the lake. Little things at first are no more. Phones are blocked. Electric lines are cut.Cars sabotaged. Boats are cut adrift. Paco aka Big (Cantu’s name for his dog) is being used on both sides now. Ultimately, Paco has to make a choice and he “fails” Cantu.

Mr. Schramick is picked off by Cantu who comes posing as a local cop, using the uniform of a friend of Rydell’s who’d made an earlier visit to the lake home, asking questions. Rydell has come to feel trapped with a dog, children, and women on his hands while he must face a psycho with the skills of a Rambo.
#
Holley gets Nora and the children across the lake, but she returns to be in on the kill. She still wants to slice him up. Earlier, as Rydell armed himself, she had taken a modern day, state of the art, hunting bow, and now she joins in on the hunt, using the bow and arrows.
#
Now it turns into a real manhunt. They’ve left the cabin for this hunt, but they know Cantu is more dangerous out here in the wilds than he is anywhere else. He has the distinct advantage. Through a series of encounters and near misses, Rydell and Holley confront Cantu, whose evil knows no boundaries.

When the final confrontation happens, it is a thing of beauty to see Cantu slip up, be made incapacitated as Holley saves Marcus from certain death, putting two successive arrows through Cantu’s knees—making good her plan to shatter his kneecaps, and to capture the beast alive. She wants to give him a taste of his own medicine.

Kat Holley wants to make good on her desire to torture him to death, but Rydell convinces her that if she went ahead with it, she’d never be the same afterwards, that it would change her and not for the better, that she’d end up sitting in a dark room still controlled by this bastard as she pulled a trigger against herself.

After arguments and revelations of an emotion nature, Rydell convinces her that they should take Cantu into the authorities and see that he be placed in an asylum for the criminally insane for the rest of his life, else given the death penalty.

She puts one more arrow into Cantu’s crotch before she is totally convinced. At this time JT and other cops from Atlanta and the area converge on them, ending this part of the story.
#
The final scene has Rydell alone now out at the lake house, staring out at the lake at dusk. Nora, her children and Kat Mallory have all returned to their normal, busy lives while he has no life to return to. He studies the marvelously beautiful purple sky, his gun pointed to his head, preparing to check out as is his habit nowadays as boredom has set in.

He puts force on the trigger when he hears someone in distress out on the lake. Screams are wafting across the lake from the deck of a large pleasure craft getting closer and closer. He puts aside his suicide, shoves his gun into the small of his back, and rushes down to his small boat and begins rowing for the larger boat intent on setting things aright.

He imagines his suicide can wait until morning, and he thinks about calling Kat—just to check in on her. Perhaps call Nora after that, chat with the kids. Perhaps call Beverly then in Ohio, chat with his own kids. Then he sees the lake cops closing in on the disturbance on the boat.

He returns to his drink and his chair on the deck where he falls asleep. He is awakened to the sound of a car pulling into the gravel driveway and the barking of a dog. It’s Paco and Holley. She’s kept her promise after all of returning once she finished her residency. They embrace with him hiding the gun.
(End)

Guest Blogger Rob Walker - Part 1

Rob Walker is making the blog rounds, so I snagged him for help on synopses and outlines, two bugaboos for many authors.

Rob teaches, edits, and has written too many books to count, using his name and four pseudonyms – Evan Kingsbury, Glenn Hale, Stephen Robertson and Geoffrey Caine. His work includes three series. His newest crime fiction novel is DEAD ON, to be published this summer.

And heeeeree’s Rob …

“Blurbs, Synopsis, Outline & Selling It

With a Look -- Advice to Publish By”
By Robert W. Walker

Part 1 – The Synopsis

First blurbs – you can accumulate useful buzz even before your book is sold or published if you have worked to create a network, a support group, so to speak, of people you meet at writers/readers events and conferences and/or online.

Once you have established a relationship either at the hotel bar or the online deCafe since you are on Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, Crimespace, Plaxo, Linkdin, blogs and chat rooms, and conferencing, then you have to take that brave, nervy step—you have to ASK. Ask for a read—even a cursory read and comment on your book from folks who will either say yes or no.

Do so with the attitude that you will get some turn downs and you must make NO judgment on “turndowns” (as they feel a lot like a rejection letter) and let that one go, and go on to the next. Try your best to gain 3 to 5 blurbs or at least 2 strong ones from your pool of acquaintances.

Finally, if you are resourceful in this age of information and you locate the author you most admire and contact me…I mean him or her…this person might be finessed into reading maybe your first three chapters with a synopsis and an outline—and you might again never hear from this person, but then again shock, awe, and surprise along with lightning striking happens from time to time.

This then below is an example of blurbs gathered long before the publication of my DEAD ON due out in July from Five Star/Tekno Books. Three blurbs from three extremely busy authors:

“Whip-smart dialogue, vivid characters, and ever-building tension make Dead On a terrifically compelling read.” – Tess Gerritsen, bestselling author of The Keepsake & more.

“What happens in this book shouldn’t happen even to a fictional character. In addition, Walker’s prose cuts like a garrote; he is a master at the top of his game.” —J.A. Konrath, author of Whiskey Sour, Dirty Martini, and Afraid.

“Walker’s a master of fiction, and that’s the holy all of it.” —Ken Bruen, author of The Killing of the Tinkers & more.

Now let’s take up the SinNOPSIS or Synopsis. Why do many authors find this so hard to write? It amounts to a single page, two at the most, so it’s not like writing a 300 page novel. It is less than 500 words and never longer than 700, so it’s no BIG deal, right?

Yet it confounds writers, so we first ask why the mayhem and chaos over this and outlining (which we will get to). Here’s the deal as to why our palms sweat when we are asked to write up this “pitch” for our novel. It is not fiction. It is a kind of brag sheet that walks a tightrope between overwhelming arrogance at one extreme and boring matter-of-fact essay on just the facts, ma’am!

So it is an entirely different hat the author needs to wear when writing this the “shortest” and “most important” short story s/he will ever write—the story about your story. You have to remove the fictionalist’s hat and slap on the marketeer’s cap, the PR person’s peaked hat, that of the crafty sales person’s slick Fedora.

Indeed this is a grand opportunity to turn the book over in your head (or do it literally with the manuscript and craft/create/imagine and produce what you would most like to see on the back flap or back copy of your soon to be “sold” (if that’s the manuscript status) or soon see light of publication (if that’s the book’s status).

You know the character(s), setting, plot, sound and sense of your book better than any stranger as in a copyeditor who is likely making far more money writing your back copy than you will make on the book! So set yourself up as a Stranger, a Copyeditor with a job to do—to write decent copy on the book.

Sure, some might say the author knows his/her book too well, and so falls into too much detail, but sit down and read twenty or forty or sixty or a hundred models of copy writing on the backsides of books, and after modeling these, decide on what sort of bell you want to ring on the backside of your book.

Setting and characters named in sentence one—establishing time and place and who it is about immediately? Or do you want some moody tonal sentences leading to a last sentence in that paragraph, which hammers home the character(s), setting, time and place?

Here you give the appetizer for the reader who has an opportunity to “sample” the five questions about any novel—Who, What, Where, Why, and sometimes How—the same five questions found in any newspaper story. In short, this “shortest, most important” story fills a needed job, one the novelist can’t deliver on so well as the PR person or writer who can learn the non-fictional elements and art of writing a story about the story.

Now get thee to a newsroom in your head and think News Release, PR, marketing. Put the feather from the pen to your newsman’s cap.

Below is the actual Synopsis for DEAD ON. As you read it, imagine an acquiring editor getting this covering the first three chapters. Will it move an editor to ask for the entire manuscript? Will it get a green light.
*****
Synopsis:
PI Marcus Rydell is out to reclaim his hold on life, as for the moment only suicide offers an escape from his pain. Dr. Kat Holley seeks a fiery revenge on a maniac who has destroyed both their lives. Together, hero and heroine become hunters who come to respect and understand one another, and to share a bond that colors this suspense-thriller filled as it is with bright touches of romance, light banter, and laugh-out-loud humor alongside terror from without and battles within. And as in any good noir thriller, there figures a black dog; this one’s named Paco.

Just when disgraced Atlanta cop-turned-PI Marcus Rydell prepares to eat his gun, a kid in trouble, a call to duty, and a dirty blonde named Kat Holley stop him cold. Kat Holley pulls Marcus from a suicidal depression, and his soon-to-be demolished apartment building—only to make him face a past he cannot come to terms with without her. But not before she leads him on a deadly hunt deep into the blackest forests of the Red Earth State. Near the Georgia–Tennessee border in the breathtaking Blue Ridge Lake countryside, the pair witness a safe paradise become their death trap, as their prey is no ordinary man. They seek to destroy a local legend, a cave-dwelling ex-marine who happens to be a multiple murderer. In fact, their prey is a monster whose instincts and military training have allowed him to survive in the wilderness for four years, eluding the Feds as well as the Atlanta PD.

However, the hunt for the evil torturer and executioner, Iden Cantu, pivots. And now Cantu comes for them, leaving the dead in his wake. In the end, they must duel with this psychotic deviant, who is equipped with night-vision, a high-powered Bushman, and a cruel intent to kill by means of mental and physical pain.
*****
Such a “synopsis” can be used again and again as an oral or written “pitch” for the manuscript. It can do double and triple duty, used each time you present it to an editor in whatever form—written or verbal. In fact, at a pitch—as you leave, you can and should leave a single page synopsis/pitch with that lady from Bantam. It can make a great, delayed impact (so be sure your contact information is on the page as well).

If your synopsis is getting too long and involved, you are getting into fine and wonderful details that belong in the novel; the synopsis is about creating a CAPTION that enraptures and enthralls a reader—like the stuff found on the back of a book is supposed to do. Which leads us into the less than enrapturing and enthralling, often despised-by-its-author OUTLINE, and the difference between outline and synopsis.

(Check back for Part 2/The Outline on Sunday)