The Sixth Floor

By Mark W. Danielson

For those old enough to remember, November 22, 1963 and The Sixth Floor will forever stir emotion. On this day, from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was struck down by two bullets fired by Depository employee Lee Harvey Oswald. Kennedy had just finished parading through downtown Dallas in his Lincoln convertible after landing at Love Field. Less than four hours later, Air Force One was flying our new Commander-in-Chief to Washington DC. To this date, Kennedy’s assassination remains one of the world's greatest murder mysteries.

With Jackie Kennedy at his side, Vice President Johnson took the Presidential Oath aboard Air Force One; Jackie still wearing her blood-stained pink suit. Concerned over the potential international turmoil, there was an urgent need for President Johnson to return to Washington DC, but he refused to leave without Jackie and her husband’s body. Once Kennedy’s casket was on board, the Presidential Boeing 707 took flight.

The Warren Commission’s report of the Kennedy assassination is still one of the most controversial documents ever to be released. Some of its findings are so implausible, even fiction writers wouldn’t use them. Take, for example, the “magic bullet” reportedly found on the hospital floor after it fell from a gurney. This near perfectly shaped bullet, positively linked to the rifle found on the sixth floor and Oswald, supposedly pierced Kennedy’s neck, and then continued through Governor John Connally’s back, ribs, and wrist, fracturing several bones. Now, I’m not saying this didn’t happen; only that I don’t believe it. I base this on my observation that every bullet I’ve ever fired has been distorted after hitting a solid object. Bone certainly qualifies as solid.

Back in Dealey Plaza, law enforcement officers converged on the Depository after hearing the shots. They briefly detained Oswald, but released him once he proved he was an employee. This decision led to the murder of Dallas police officer J. D. Tippit who was questioning Oswald. A witness to this slaying used Tippit’s police car radio to describe Oswald as the killer. Further tips led to Oswald’s arrest in a movie theater.

Oswald, a disgruntled former Marine sniper who had spent time in Cuba, lived in Russia, and taken a Russian wife, denied any involvement in the killings, but before the truth could be determined, the unthinkable happened. While Oswald was being transported on live television through the tunnel beneath the police department, nightclub owner Jack Ruby stepped out of the crowd and shot Oswald point blank. But how did Ruby get there, and how did he get so close? Did Oswald recognize Ruby, as some have claimed? The only certainty is Jack Ruby successfully silenced Oswald, and later died in prison of cancer. Both he and Oswald took their secrets to the grave.

Jack Ruby’s involvement in the Kennedy assassination is as puzzling as Oswald’s. Ruby was known to have connections with “The Mob”, he and Oswald both spent time in Louisiana, the Organized Crime bosses hated John Kennedy, and yet any Mob connection was dismissed by the Warren Commission.

There has always been speculation about a second gunman shooting from the grassy knoll. Footage of Kennedy’s head movement supports this theory, and yet there is no confirmation that a second gunman existed. Many re-enactments have occurred, including on the Mythbusters television show, but no one has ever provided conclusive evidence that disclaims the Warren Commission’s finding that Oswald acted alone. Today, an X on the street marks the spot where Kennedy was shot. From The Sixth Floor Museum, this X provides a clear view of Oswald’s vantage. But how likely is it for one man firing a blot-action rifle to squeeze off four shots that would hit a moving target? Even our best marksmen using their military sniper weapons would have a difficult time replicating this task.

Many books have been written on the Kennedy assassination, but rather than provide answers, they stimulate more questions. Sad memories flow from visitors to The Sixth Floor Museum as images flash back to the day when live news reporting came of age. Who could have imagined that in a 48 hour period, two assassinations would occur on live TV? From the Dallas parade to “John-John Kennedy’s” salute as his father’s horse-drawn casket was paraded through Washington DC, the world’s eyes were glued to its television sets.

Forty seven years has failed to dim memories or answer the many disturbing questions. Perhaps President Johnson said it best when he remarked that he never doubted that Oswald fired the fatal bullet, but he also never believed he acted alone. There is no question that we will never know the truth about what really happened on that fateful day in Dallas.

Common Writing Flaws

By Chester Campbell

I'm in the midst of reading manuscripts for a mystery writing competition. I thought it might be instructive to mention a few of the most common shortcomings I've found. Overall, the writing has been quite competent, but most entries could use the sure hand of a skilled editor. I took on the job with some trepidation. When reading for pleasure, I (like most readers, I suspect) tend to ignore minor miscues if the story is interesting. With this task, I have been forced to adopt a more critical stance.

The most common problem I've found is getting too carried away with the characters or the settling and failing to move the plot along. Let's face it, a mystery is about a crime and the difficulties it causes, usually including a murder. Character is important, but unless all these well-drawn people get involved in the crime or its solution before too many chapters pass, readers will lose interest. In so-called "literature," characters can go on doing mundane things ad nauseam, but in mysteries something critical has to happen.

In a minority of the manuscripts, the writer needed to loosen up when it came to dialogue. That's one place where reading the lines aloud helps. If it doesn't sound natural, it ain't. Some casual conversations sound more like lectures. Long, carefully constructed sentences instead of several fragments, the way real people talk.

One manuscript began: "It was a dark and stormy night." The second sentence said, "No really, it was a dark and stormy night." It was written as a humorous piece but rambled too much. The rules for the contest said you could send up to fifty pages. This one stopped at sixteen. If the manuscript ended there, it would make a great short story. But this was a novel-writing contest. Oh, well.

Another problem I encountered was overwriting. I got introduced to that subject early in my novel-writing career when I sent a manuscript of more than 600 typed pages to an agent. The agency was interested but said the story was overwritten and needed to be pared considerably. I didn't know what the term meant but quickly learned I was guilty of things like too much description. One of the contest entries is set in a popular European city and sounds too much like a travelogue.

Frequent shifts in point of view can be a show-stopper for a mystery writer. Constant head-hopping leads to confusion. You encounter an important point and wonder "how did he know that?" Then you realize you're wandering around in some other character's mind.

Fortunately, all of these problems are fixable. Unfortunately, most of the writers guilty of them don't realize what they're doing wrong. It's why the advice to let a competent editor critique your manuscript before you send it off is so important. We all make mistakes, and with a little extra effort we can correct them.

Mystery Mania

The Dead Hand

by Ben Small

Are you aware that you almost died the afternoon of September 26, 1983?

Late that evening, Russian time, one of the seven Soviet Union's missile detection satellites reported a massive launch of United States inter-continental ballistic missiles, heading toward Russia. One lone man, Stanislav Petrov, a technician sitting at what stood for a computer terminal monitoring these signals, went frantic. He tried unsuccessfully to contact members of the Politburo, seeking a decision. Petrov knew that if the satellite signals were authentic, the Soviet Union had only twenty to thirty minutes to launch their own strike before their state and their own missiles would be destroyed by nuclear explosions the likes of which mankind had never seen... and might not survive.

Petrov also knew that Soviet technology was unreliable, especially the satellites monitoring nuclear launches. These satellites tended to last only one week, and new ones were launched almost daily to keep something working in space.

Petrov had the capability to push the button, to launch the Soviet Union's missiles. His finger hovered, twitching with nervous energy. Seconds, then minutes ticked by as Petrov sought the advice of co-workers and pondered the weight of his decision. Finally, he decided the satellite signals must be mistaken, or maybe he chickened out. He waited for immanent explosions, for his life to melt in a blast from the sun.

Nothing happened. The satellite warnings were false.

The Dead Hand, by David E. Hoffman, a Washington Post contributing editor, is one of the most powerful and frightening books I've read. It's the untold story of the arms race during the Cold War, a story of mis-perceptions, deceit, distrust and treachery. Hoffman spent years interviewing participants, leaders and scientists, and he obtained access to formerly secret Soviet documents which are both illuminating and chilling, much more so than any work of fiction. For the aging Russian leaders were paranoid about the intentions of the United States. They firmly believed the Americans were just waiting for the right strategic time to destroy the Soviet Union. Their leaders understood that the Soviet Union could not keep up with American technology. While the Americans were advancing computer technology, making smart-chips faster and smaller, the Russians were dealing with circuit boards unsuitable for an Apple IIe. So the Soviets bluffed, puffed their chests and bragged about capabilities they didn't have. Yes, they had nuclear warheads and plenty of enriched uranium, and they had delivery systems. But they had nothing to compare with American Pershing missile systems, and Soviet Command and Control systems and technology were seriously lacking. So the Soviets created a Doomsday device, called it "Perimeter." Perimeter was a semi-automatic system that when triggered, would launch everything the Soviets had.

And the button which would launch Perimeter sat in front of Stanislav Petrov, who watched his missile detection system telling him the Americans had launched.

Scary stuff, eh?

Well, it gets worse...

Even more frightening were the biological/chemical weapons systems being designed, developed and made operational by Soviet scientists and military personnel, all in secret and in knowing violation of a treaty with the U.S.

By mandate from Richard Nixon in 1969, the U.S. shut down its biological and chemical weapons system development programs. The theory was that if we had nukes, we didn't need these weapons.

The Russians felt otherwise. And despite signing a treaty with the U.S. in 1972 to not develop or implement such systems, the Soviets immediately undertook a top secret bio/chemical weapons development and implementation program to do just that. The scientists working on these systems were stationed all across the country, in rural outposts mostly, surrounded by forests or wasteland. The developers were kept separate from the implementers, those people who would take the biological and chemical materials and put them into hundreds of missiles or other dispersal systems. Plague, smallpox, nerve gas, weapons-grade anthrax and new forms of viruses and bacteria were developed and installed in missiles, the scientists who developed and implemented them given special food supplies and living arrangements not available to the general Soviet population.

They were rock stars, the Soviet Dream Team.

Every Soviet leader from Andropov through Gorbechev and Yeltsin knew about these programs and lied about them. When Reagan called the Soviet Union "The Evil Empire," he was spot-on, but had no idea just how evil they were. The Russians disguised their bio/chemical factories, claimed they were being used for vaccine production, and when inspections were finally agreed to, the factories to be inspected were made mobile or cleaned up for the inspectors, only to be made fully operational again once the inspectors departed. Tons and tons of these materials were produced, and delivery systems were made operational. Hundreds of missiles were retooled to carry these toxins to every part of the globe, and vaccines were developed to shield those in the Soviet populace deemed worthy of saving.

In April, 1979, weapons-grade anthrax leaked through exhaust systems in the Soviet industrial city of Sverdlovsk. Death came quickly to both cattle and people. At least forty-five people died, hundreds were hospitalized and over forty thousand residents vaccinated. And as fast as the anthrax struck, so did the cover-up. The Soviets claimed, when word of the Ural Mountain disaster leaked out, that contaminated hay from natural anthrax had been fed to cattle, resulting in infections to those who'd eaten the meat.

Yes, Gorbechev and Reagan, who became friendly, agreed to missile reduction programs. But Biopreparat, the Soviet secret biological/chemical weapons programs, continued, unknown to the West.

Most people believe that Reagan's Star Wars program killed the Soviet Union. That's not true. The Soviet response was to be an asymmetrical one: build so many biological/chemical and nuclear missiles, no defensive system could withstand the onslaught. Reagan and the CIA believed the Soviets were developing their own, cheaper laser systems as a defensive mechanism. In fact, Soviet lasers were so weak, they couldn't even reach a missile.

What in fact killed the Soviet Union was falling oil prices, debt and a dropping currency exchange rate. The Russians couldn't keep up. And when the Soviet Union collapsed, the scientists working on their nuclear, biological and chemical weapons systems were left stranded. No food, no money, no way to earn a living.

They began to barter. It's known that over seventeen hundred pounds of nerve gas were sold to Syria. When U.S. scientists were finally let into the Soviet Union to investigate nuclear, biological and chemical weapon plants during the late 1990s and early 2000s, they found many of them unguarded, found boxed up weapons and weapon materials ready to be shipped to addresses in Tehran, Iran. They also found communications from Osama bin Laden, who wanted suitcase and dirty bombs and was willing to pay for them.

The Americans, realizing the scope of the problem, offered jobs to the Soviet scientists, and many of them reside today in the United States. But much of the nuclear, bio/chemical materials they designed and developed have not been found, especially those which were stored or buried in former Soviet states.

As some of these Soviet scientists have stated, and the CIA has agreed, it's just a matter of time before some of these materials find their way into the hands of terrorists.

David Hoffman's The Dead Hand is a book that will keep you up at night and give you nightmares. Deservedly so. And his book also may give you cause to reconsider whether or not we need to secure our borders.

Just Finish The Dang Thang

By Pat Browning

I’ve been sitting on a half-finished manuscript for five years. My excuse: Life happened. So what? Life happens to everyone.


Except for an outline and a storyboard leaning up against my wall I might have lost track of the narrative years ago, but sometimes I get lucky. Just in time to keep my Work-in-Limbo from slipping through my fingers I came across Timothy Hallinan’s 10 Rules For Finishing A Book.

Hallinan has written ten mysteries and thrillers under his own name and several others in disguise. In the 1990s he wrote the critically acclaimed Simeon Grist mysteries about a brainy, overeducated LA private eye. His current series, set in Bangkok, where he has lived six months each year since 1981, features American "rough travel" writer Philip "Poke" Rafferty, who lives in Bangkok with his hand-assembled family: his Thai wife, Rose, a former Patpong bar dancer, and their adopted daughter, Miaow, who was eight years old and living on the sidewalk when she met Poke.

The first three Rafferty books, which have made Ten Best lists everywhere, are A NAIL THROUGH THE HEART, THE FOURTH WATCHER, and BREATHING WATER. The fourth, THE QUEEN OF PATPONG, will be published in August by William Morrow and is available now for pre-sale on Amazon.com.

Before becoming a full-time writer, Hallinan had his own international consulting company, advising Fortune top 100 companies on their television activities.


In the Blog Cabin on his web site, Hallinan writes:


“I’d estimate that 98% of all the novels people begin are never completed. Every person who abandons a book feels that he or she has a good reason, but my experience suggests that most of those books could have been finished – the writer just came up against something he or she couldn’t handle.”


The section of his blog titled “Finish Your Novel” is a great resource for writers. It’s in six parts:
1) Introduction and overview;
2) Getting started;
3) Following the line;
4) Getting out of trouble;
5) Finishing up and some thoughts on publishing;
6) Additional resources.

You can read all of them here. I zeroed in on “The Ten Rules of Finishing” in Part 2. Many, many thanks to Tim Hallinan for his permission to reprint them here.


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Timothy Hallinan’s Ten Rules of Finishing.


Lots of people seem to like rules, especially where writing is concerned. The rules I suggest below are meant to help you write your book, but mostly they're intended to help you finish it. Here they are:


1. Write something you would like to read.
This may be the single most important rule. It amazes me how often students come to my class with plans to write a novel they wouldn’t read if it appeared spontaneously on their pillow one morning. For some reason, many aspiring writers think a novel requires a sort of elevation – of prose style, plot, character – everything. It’s a little like people who are wonderful talkers – direct, clear, and entertaining – but who get tied up in knots when they start to write because writing is “different” than talking.


Generally speaking, we should try to write with the same directness and clarity we use when we talk, and when we write a novel, we should write the kind of book we most like to read.


There are two ingredients here: the type of book you write, and what it’s about. Do you read mysteries? Write a mystery. Do your shelves sag under the weight of romances? Write a romance. And write it about something that fascinates you. If you love horses, get horses into the story. If you’re a science wonk, get some science into it. Do both things – if you love thrillers but don’t like science, you’re probably not going to like (or be able to finish) a thriller about subatomic particle physics.


Remember, once you choose the idea for your book, you are going to have to live with it for a year or more. It had better be something that entertains you. Ideally, it’s also a subject you want to learn more about, because you’re probably going to have to if you’re going to write 80-100,000 words about it.


I write thrillers about Los Angeles and Bangkok because I love thrillers and I love Los Angeles and Bangkok. One more time: You should write the book you would most love to read.


2. Your material needs to be something you care about.
You'll find lots more about this in the material that follows. Novels take a long time to write. They will claim every bit of skill and glibness you possess. They will exhaust your store of funny or heartbreaking stories. They'll ransack your childhood for anecdotes. They'll eat your friends alive and spit them out in (hopefully) fictionalized form.


Sooner or later you'll run out of tricks and pure nervous energy, and when you do, you'll learn (possibly the hard way) that the only material that will get you through this marathon is material you truly care about. You will need to care personally about your characters, about the themes of your story, about what's at stake. If you don't, you're going to run out of gas. You're going to quit.


Choose your idea in the first place because (a) it would make a book you would like to read, and (b) you care about the issues it raises.


3. The enemy is not the badly written page; it is the empty page.
If there’s one rule you should write on a card and tape over your desk, this is it. A bad page does a lot of good things: it advances the story, it gives you a chance to work with your characters, it demands that you write all or part of a scene, it challenges you to describe your setting – on and on and on. (It even makes the stack of pages look a little thicker, which can give you a psychological lift.)


So what if it does some of these things badly? You’ve learned one way not to handle that particular piece of material.


But the great advantage of a badly written page is that it can be rewritten. It can be improved. A blank page is zero. In fact, it’s worse than zero, because it represents territory you’re afraid, unwilling, or too lazy to explore. Avoid exploring this territory long enough, and you’ll abandon your book.


4. Perfection is not, and never has been, possible.
Go back to the paraphrased Samuel Johnson quotation at the beginning of the “For Openers” page: A novel is a long work in prose with something wrong with it. Your book won’t be perfect. Your chapters won’t be perfect. Your pages, paragraphs, and sentences won’t be perfect.


And you can’t let that stop you. If you’re dissatisfied with something you’ve written, you always have two choices. First, rewrite it right now. Second, let it stand for the moment and keep writing. You can always fix it later.


One thing I’ve learned to do is to begin every writing session by going back over what I wrote in the last three or four days. That gives me a chance to improve it (or toss it and write it over) and it also gets me back into the state of mind I was in on those earlier days. This makes for more consistency in the manuscript. Another good thing about working this way is that you’re already writing by the time you hit the blank page. Starting your session with a blank page is much more difficult, at least for me.


5. Getting it down is more important than getting it right.
This is a variation on the fourth rule. You need to get from point A to point B. Your character is trapped in a cave, and you need to get him or her out. One character needs to tell another something important. Get it on the page, even if you’re not particularly happy with the way it reads. You need to move the story forward; you need to get these characters interacting.


Once you’ve done that, even if you didn’t do it very well, it’s done. You can improve or rewrite it later. Now, at least, you’re in position to write the next bit.


6. Show, don’t tell.
Like a lot of novelists, Raymond Chandler – probably the greatest American writer of detective stories – was hired as a screenwriter. He hated it, but the money was good, so he went on hating it for quite a while. In his letters (I think), he talks about how he learned one important lesson.


He needed to demonstrate that a marriage was in trouble, and he wrote scene after scene – lots of dialog – to make the point. The screenwriter he’d been assigned as a partner was an old-timer, and he offered the following scene: The man and wife get into an elevator, the man keeping his hat on. (Obviously, this was when men still wore hats.) The elevator goes up and the doors reopen, and an attractive young woman gets on. The man removes his hat. When the young woman gets off, a few floors later, he puts his hat back on. Zero dialog, point made.


The best way to tell us something about your characters is to show it to us. For some reason, every time I teach my class I get a student whose novel begins with someone who can’t get out of bed. Generally, they lie there for quite a while, as the writer tells us how they’re feeling and so forth, and it’s pretty deadly.


I challenged one woman to come up with a way to give us a sense of her character’s frame of mind by showing us something the character does. She came to the next meeting with a scene in which the character forces herself out of bed, plods to the kitchen, and tries to make breakfast. Prying apart two frozen pieces of bread, she snaps one of them in half. Trying to break an egg into a pan, she puts her thumb through the shell. Then she picks up the pan, hot fat and all, throws it against the wall, and sits down and cries. Infinitely better, and much more interesting, too.


7. Specific is better.
Our lives are specific. We don’t just get dressed in the morning, we choose a certain color or style. Our day isn’t just Tuesday or Wednesday; it’s hot or cold, cloudy or sunny, wet or dry. Once I was working with a bunch of 12- and 13-year-olds, kids who lived in a gang area. The idea was to try to give them something else to do, something more productive than getting killed. On the first meeting, I asked them to write two paragraphs about their day.


One kid, a bright boy named Eloy, couldn’t get past paragraph one, and paragraph one began and ended with the word “today.” That was it. The word “today,” written once. I asked him whether there hadn’t been something different about today, something specific that made it different it from yesterday or the day before. Eloy thought about it and said that nothing much had happened, “After we found the baby in the Dumpster.”


Now that’s a specific detail. It’s kind of an extreme detail, but it’s a detail. Details bring things to life. And they tell – or show – us things. People don’t just walk, they walk in a certain way that might tell us how they feel, whether they’ve been injured, whether they want to go where they’re going or dread it, whether it’s hot or cold out, whether they’re wearing borrowed shoes because they can’t afford their own, whether the wind’s blowing, and so forth. They bring us into the world you’re creating, into the characters who live in it.


One other good thing about details: Writing them gives you ideas. Once you begin, for example, to tell us what a character looks like, you see that person more clearly. The way he or she combs his or her hair might tell you something about the character’s parents or general neatness and cleanliness, or whether he or she is trying to seem younger or older. There’s no telling where it will take you, but wherever it is, you wouldn’t have gotten there if you hadn’t focused on the details.


(By the way, in your final draft you might want to cut some of the details. Too many can slow the story or bore the reader. But the story will be stronger if you wrote the details in the first place.)


8. Be true to your idea and your characters, not your story.
The shortest workable description of practically any novel can be started with the words, “This is the story of a person who . . .” The Wizard of Oz is the story of a young girl who finds herself in a magical land and tries to go home again. David Copperfield is the story of a boy who tries to find out who he really is. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone is the story of a boy who has to learn to live with the fact that he’s a wizard.


All these descriptions begin with the who. Characters are arguably the most important component of a novel. Generally speaking, people read books to read about people. You can have a great plot, a great setting, a terrific plot twist, and a guest appearance by Hannibal Lecter, but if you haven't worked on your characters, your readers won't stay with you.


You need to know who these people are before you begin to write them, and you need to continue learning about them as you continue to write them. And you need to remember one more thing: the reader doesn't know anything you haven't shown or told him or her. It's no good for you to know that Sally, your heroine, has a richly detailed personal story that dictates the way she reacts, if you keep it to yourself. If all you've told us about Sally is that she's short and wears a plaid skirt, that's all we can be expected to know.


Here's a classic case of putting story before character. We've all seen a movie in which a bunch of characters are trapped in a spooky house with a homicidal maniac/vampire/guest appearance by Hannibal Lecter, whatever. At some point they're all gathered in the living room, relatively safe, and some idiot suggest that they each go – ALONE – to their rooms. And everybody says, “Sure, good idea,” and then they all get killed one by one.


Why? Because the screenwriter needed them to be alone, that's why. Think about what that movie could have been about: ten people and how they deal with fear and mortal peril. An act of extreme revenge by the killer. Instead, it's about ten idiots who go to their rooms alone instead of banding together against the danger. Why? Because the writer put the story ahead of the characters.


9. Treat your reader honestly.
I think that when you invite a reader to devote hours of his or her time to your book, you've made a deal. The deal on the reader's end is that he or she will give you a decent chance before throwing your book across the room. The deal on your part is that you'll do your best to keep your reader interested and entertained, and that you'll deal with him or her honestly.


What does that mean? It means that you'll play by the rules. If your book takes place in a world where people can't fly, you won't save your central character's life by having him/her sprout wings and take off. You won't bring in a deus ex machina at the last moment (literally a “god in a machine”) with the power to resolve the situation. You won't have characters do things they would never do in order to move the story along.


You might spend a lot if energy trying to mislead the reader, but you won't lie to her. Some eighty years ago, Agatha Christie wrote a detective novel, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, that kicked up a cloud of dust that still hasn't settled completely. The book is narrated by a Dr. Ferris, an apparently saintly character who (spoiler ahead) is unmasked at the end as the killer. All literary hell broke loose – even a critic as exalted as Edmund Wilson, who normally couldn't be bothered with mysteries, chimed in with an essay called, “Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?”


Did Christie break faith with the reader? I say, yes, although lots of people disagree. I believe she kept too much to herself and that she represented the character of Dr. Ferris dishonestly. I wouldn't have done it. Of course, I haven't sold millions of copies of my books, either, but I don't think she played fair in this book.


Howard Thurston, known professionally as “Thurston the Great,” was one of the most famous magicians of the early 20th century. (And, of course, as a writer, you're a magician, too.) Thurston believed that the key to his success was in his attitude toward his audience. This is what he wrote:


Long experience has taught me that the crux of my fortunes is whether I can radiate good will toward my audience. There is only one way to do it, and that is to feel it. You can fool the eyes and minds of the audience, but you cannot fool their hearts.

Try to maintain that relationship with your reader, and you'll keep his or her trust.


10. It’s only a book.
When you're writing, it's important to remember that your life does not depend on the outcome of the next paragraph or the quality of the next page. There are life-and-death situations, and this isn't one of them. Writing is something you want to take seriously, something you want to do the best you can, but it's not a lung x-ray. You can get up and walk away from it for a while. You can find other ways to put it into perspective, and we'll discuss a bunch of them later on. And – this is important – writing should be fun, at least part of the time.


There's no quicker way to jam yourself hopelessly on a book than to make it the thing your entire life depends on. Don't turn it into a grim, hang-by-the-fingernails activity because if you do, you'll quit. My best advice is always to remember (a) you can always rewrite something and improve it, and (b) it's only a book.
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J.T. Edson

by Jean Henry Mead

Of the hundreds of people I’ve interviewed over the years, J.T. Edson was the most entertaining. The prolific writer of Old West escapist fiction wrote from his home in England. During my interview with him at a Western Writers of America convention in Santa Fe, New Mexico, he complained that his work was considered third rate by some, although he was published by Corgi, a “posh” UK publisher.

He had no literary pretensions and said he wrote for money and didn’t care who knew it. But his tongue had been stuck in his cheek for so long that he was rarely taken seriously. He insisted that writers are "a bunch of bone-idle layabouts who have found a good way of making a living without working.” And that “I have no desire to have lived in the wild West and I've never even been on a horse. I've seen those things and they look highly dangerous at both ends and bloody uncomfortable in the middle.” He laughed uproariously, often in a high-pitched giggle.

He did have his moments of introspection. “I can make more money and do less work writing than any other job I’m capable of doing,” he said. “I’m a damned good dog trainer, but there ain’t a lot of jobs for training dogs to bite people these days. I learned to train them during the army for twelve years.” He served in the British military during “the dirty little bushfire wars in Malaya and Kenya.”

Edson turned out a novel every six to eight weeks, his fastest to finish was eleven days working eighteen hours a day. “I read Nelson Nye and other escapism-adventure authors before starting to write. I also read various classics such as Shane, and to be frank, they left me cold. I far preferred the virile stories which [British] middle-class management snobs refer to as ‘the pulps.’ One of my pet hates is that they regard all western novels as being substandard and unworthy of their superior intellect. “

He believed that he was successful in this country as well as the UK because his roots were from the same working class stock as the majority of his readers. “Unlike practically all my contemporaries and various newcomers to the field, I don’t regard writing westerns as beneath my dignity, and am willing to have my own name, not a pseudonym, on my books.”

Edson first supported his western writing habit by composing the text for British comic books. “They don’t call them comic books, they’re ‘boy’s papers.’ You write and tell the artist what to put in his little panels. It’s a very demanding and interesting style of writing. You must comprise a 3,000-word short story in forty frames while keeping the limitations in mind.”

The burly novelist worked as a postman while writing part time. Edson had gained considerable weight as a cartoonist and decided to walk it off while increasing his western sales. “At fourteen pounds to the stone, I weighed twenty stones, twelve, and my doctor was giving me hints like sending the undertaker round. I didn’t want to work in the first place, so as soon as I gathered enough money to stop working, I did. “ Not working meant writing full time, from 1961 until his death.

No matter what he wrote, it tied into his fictional family, members of the OD Connected Ranch’s outfit. His sergeants Alvin Fog, Ranse Smith, and Mark Scrapton of Company Z, Texas Rangers are the grandsons of his original characters, Dusty Fog, Mark Counter and the Ysabel Kid. Those and related continuing characters allowed him to plug various titles in his books by means of footnotes and other references. He insisted that it was simply good business but many of his peers disapproved.

Although he made many trips across the Atlantic for research, he was more concerned with entertaining his readers than providing them with accurate history. In his Calamity Jane series, he had his heroine tied to a log in a sawmill, which prompted a call from his editor. He quoted her as saying, “John, I wouldn’t have believed that any writer would dare to do this.” To which he replied, “I’ve got another marvelous idea that’s never been done before. The nasty is going to fasten Calamity Jane to the railroad track.”

(Excerpted from my book, Maverick Writers. I'm giving away five copies of the book at my Facebook site, June 10. To be eligible, go to: Maverick Writers and click on the "like" icon at the top of the page)

Nothing Wasted, Nothing Gained

by Beth Terrell

Last week, my agent called me with the news that she was heading to New York for BEA (Book Expo America) and that a publisher who had been considering my manuscript might be interested. "He loves the first 100 pages," she said, "and he loves from page 266 on, but he'd like you to do some work on the pages in between."

Ever been there? Maybe you're there now, knowing your book needs work but not quite sure where to start.

In my case, "some work" turned out to be cutting 12,000 words from the 166 pages in question. This wasn't an easy feat, since I had already trimmed the manuscript as much as I could figure out how to at the time--some 8,000 words. But he was right; the story dragged in the middle. "There's a lot of back and forth in there," I was told. This gave me the clue I needed to start renovating my novel.

I realized that I'd fallen into the trap of trying to follow my private investigator's progress too realistically. In a real investigation, one interview leads to the next, then to another. Somewhere along the way, an inconsistency is revealed. or a new clue uncovered that leads back to the first person in the chain. Then the detective goes back to confront that person. It's also not unusual for an investigator to ask the same question of several suspects. Subtle differences in their answers may provide illumination or reveal deception. Realistic, yes (at least, I think so), but when I combined all the scenes with the same suspect (as much as possible), it became painfully clear that the result was not realism but repetition that bogged down the plot.

If you've edited a novel before, you know what comes next. The first step was to combine all scenes that could be combined. This involved more than just cutting one scene and slapping it onto the end of another. In one case, Jared (my PI) wants to interview a husband and wife who recently lost a son. He calls the house, and the husband agrees that Jared can come over to talk to them, but believing his wife is in an emotionally vulnerable state, the husband makes sure she isn't home when Jared comes by. In the original version, Jared comes back later to interview the wife while the husband isn't home. I needed to combine the two scenes, but I also needed the husband to want to keep Jared away from the wife. What to do? I finally realized (yes, gentle reader, I'm slow sometimes) that if the wife answered the phone instead of the husband, I could combine the two interviews into a tension-filled scene with the wife trying to be forthcoming and her husband trying to steer her away from painful subjects.

This scene was both challenging and enlightening to write. Often, we think of tension or conflict as arising from two people arguing or fighting. (Think of the traditional romantic formula in which the man and woman seem to despise each other from their first meeting and then spend at least half the book sniping at each other.) But in this scene, two characters who love and want the best for each other have opposing ideas about how that "best" can be achieved.

With each chapter, I asked myself, "What's the key information the reader must get from this chapter?" and "Does this sentence contribute to that?" I ended up with eight fewer chapters than I had when I'd started, and after that, I was able to find some other places to tighten the manuscript. I ended up cutting a few small things that, if a publisher (the one who requested the edits) or another should accept the book, I would make a pitch to put back, but overall, I'm pleased with the results.

When she first gave me my editing assignment, my agent said, "I hate to have you do all this work when another publisher may want it as is."

"If it makes the book better, it won't be wasted," I said. "And if it doesn't make the book better, I'll learn something from it, so it still won't be wasted."

As it turns out, it was both, so whether anything comes of the pitches she's making on my behalf this week, I'm grateful to that publisher for pointing me in a direction that helped me write a better book.

How about you? Care to share a time when you learned something valuable from editing your novel?

The Bone Yard

By Mark W. Danielson

Why are all these airliners in the desert? In a word, they’re being preserved. Aircraft bone yards are a testament to the WWII B-24 bomber, Lady Be Good. You see, on April 4, 1943, the Lady Be Good and 24 other airplanes took off from Soluch Airstrip in Libya to bomb the port at Naples, Italy, but things didn’t go as planned. Strong winds and poor visibility forced the bombers to take off in small groups, and Lady was one of the last to depart. Fatefully, engine problems forced the other two bombers to turn back leaving Lady alone and well behind. Lady attempted to join the bomber group prior to the target, but poor communication and crew inexperience made this impossible. Arriving too late, Lady dumped her bombs into the ocean and attempted to return to base, but somehow during this journey, managed to vanish without a trace.

Fifteen years later, a British oil exploration team spotted aircraft wreckage in the desert and decided to investigate. The markings on the nose revealed it was Lady Be Good. Other than her fuselage breaking apart just behind the wings, the B-24 was in remarkable condition. Her guns fired, her engine oil was good; even her tires had pressure. This revelation prompted the US government to “mothball” its aging aircraft at Davis Monthan Air Force base near Tucson. Since then, aircraft stored at the so-called “Bone Yard” have been used for spare parts, put back into service as drones, and sometimes put back into service as line aircraft.

Many years later, a surplus of commercial airliners led to civilian Bone Yards at Marana Airpark near Phoenix, Mojave, and the former George Air Force Base near Victorville, which is shown in the above photo. Sharp eyes will spot aircraft from a variety of airlines, including FedEx. FedEx has since returned several of these airplanes to service while storing others that are awaiting modification.

Mothballed aircraft have served other purposes as well, such as law enforcement hijacking/hostage training, movie sets, and music video backdrops. If these planes could speak, they would all have tremendous stories. Sadly, most of the bone yard aircraft await their fate of becoming recycled scrap metal.

For mystery writers, what better setting is there to hide a hostage or dump a body than a yard full of ghost planes? A setting like this offers endless opportunities. A visit to your local aviation museum may be enough to inspire a future story.