Weird fact about Hitler's SA brownshirts

I'm reading volume 1 of John Toland's outstanding books on Adolf Hitler. My copies were published in 1976 and are First Editions. The first volume covers the evil man's childhood (born 1889) through October 1938, right after the Munich deception regarding Czechoslovakia. Volume 2 goes from there to the end of the war.

I'm at the point when 1926 is closing out. Hitler is out of Landsberg Prison, which was like a vacation for him to write his unbelievable Mein Kampf. He has decided the Nazi party would no longer use illegal tactics to gain power and his speeches reflect "saving" Germany.

We are all familiar with the Nazis' Brownshirts, led first by Ernst Röhm, and their violent street attacks.

The actual shirts they became known for came about due to . . . simply price. These were shirts intended for German troops in East Africa, but there was a surplus, so they were on sale at wholesale prices! So the Nazis bought them cheap.

No special or superior reason for the brown shirts. Just got a great price on them.

Fiction becomes reality?

In my second book, Behind German Lines, the main story line is about the Nazis building and deploying an Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) weapon. The effects were devastating on equipment and humans. Whether an EMP would actually harm humans was my fiction of the story; we all know electric equipment is ruined by one.

Fast forward to the present. The U.S. Intelligence community says the "Havana Syndrome" you may have heard about could be the result of an EMP. A frightening prospect in the real world.

Science fiction writers often predict the future. I sure wasn't expecting to do that with a WWII novel.

2022 International Holocaust Remembrance Day

Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Please take a moment to remember the victims, and the survivors.

How I plot my Sgt. Dunn Novels - writer's advice

When I decided to write my first novel, Operation Devil's Fire, I knew I had only a vague understanding of plotting. I had been writing short stories for years, but had never tackled a novel. To help myself, I bought a copy of Ken Follet's excellent WWII novel Hornet Flight, read it, then sat down and plotted it using Excel. I entered the name of the point of view (POV) character and a one-sentence description of the chapter. Next, using Excel's formulas, I counted the number of times each character appeared and calculated the percentage of "screen time" they each had. Side note: I have no idea how Mr. Follet writes his books.

For my next step, I bought two books on writing by literary agent Evan Marshall: The Marshall Plan for Novel Writing and the companion workbook The Marshall Plan Workbook.

I read them cover to cover and still have them in my home library. Mr. Marshall laid out a logical approach to plotting, which I converted to Excel using a pattern of appearances by each of my POV characters. I saved the file as ODF Story Plan.xls and used that same naming convention for all of my books. In case you’re wondering, as an IT professional, I used Excel on a daily basis so it was familiar territory for me.

Because my books are thrillers (I call them WWII action thrillers), my chapters tend to get my characters into trouble, then end. The next chapter switches POV, often to the bad guys whose chapter then ends with a new threat that the reader knows about but the main character doesn't. This doesn't occur all the time, but I use when needed. Remember, the writer wants the reader to worry about the characters and wonder how in the world he or she is going to get out this jam.

Using Marshall's general POV pattern, but modifying it for MY story, I ended up with a spreadsheet for Operation Devil’s Fire whose first ten chapter’s POV column looked like this:

Here's how each character's appearances add up as a percent of the total chapters.

My main characters in bold, take up 82% of the total, with the minor characters taking the rest. 

My latest book, Disrupt and Destroy, has the POV characters appearing this often:

Our three favorite main characters in bold make up 91% of the total. Notice the smaller number of POVs (5), but notice how much more Saunders gets than in book one. That started in book three, Brutal Enemy.

Confession: I often plot one POV character’s entire arc at one time. I also often write the books that way.

The key advice I can give you is: if you decide to plot your book in a similar fashion, always remember that the story is the boss. Don't just put a POV chapter in a certain place just because the spreadsheet pattern says to; you have to adjust all the time so the story stays tight, tense, and true.

Help your readers come to love your characters, care about whether they survive, and cheer for them when they do. 

Thanks for stopping by today.

Why I write about WWII

The first World War II book I ever read was Up Periscope by Robb White. It was first published in 1956 and was later made into a great movie starring James Garner. Raise your hand if you know who Garner is. It was a Scholastic Reader book I bought with my allowance in the fifth grade (about 1962). No snickering, please. A couple of years ago, I was able to find a copy on Amazon and I reread it. It was quite fun. 

Other things that I loved were the TV shows Combat! and 12 O'clock High. Occasionally, on Saturday morning, one of the Kansas City stations showed WWII movies, not all of them with John Wayne, but many were. The land battles, especially those with tanks, were exhilarating, the submarine movies tense, the dogfights incredible. I was always awed by the credits scrolling by at the end thanking the Department of the Navy, or the US. Army, etc. Wow! They approved this movie! Finally, let's not forget the Rat Patrol!

On top of all that, there were two fabulous comic books about WWII: Sgt. Rock and Sgt. Fury. A few blocks from my apartment was a used comic book and record shop. Most of my meager weekly allowance was spent there, handed over with glee to the small, dark-haired man behind the counter. If I had to choose between a comic book or a Coke (a real green-glass bottle), the comic book won.

We're all products of our past. So is my writing. My fascination with WWII had its genesis as shown above. As I grew older, the fascination didn't abate, I just changed sources. In high school and college I studied some history and military history. In 1977, at age 25, I first read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer. I own the 1960 version, not the abridged version. I have subsequently read it twice more, all 1,242 pages of a view into utter evil. This is a must-read for anyone wanting to learn more about WWII.

Fast forward a few years:

In late 2001, Band of Brothers appeared on TV for the first time. I watched every episode, entranced by the story, but completely enthralled and impressed by the interviews of the men. To hear their own words gave me a deeper insight into soldiers. 

A couple of months before my first short story sale, He Wasn’t Always Old, I knew, instinctively, that I would write about WWII. This was in the fall of 2003. I'd been mulling over ideas and settled on a character who would be in the army. My original plan was to then follow his life throughout the war, then on to the postwar years. The question arose as to who this guy would be, and I chose to make him a sergeant and a member of the new U.S. Army Rangers. 

Once I had that information, the rest came down to building his background, and then creating the story line, also known as the plot. When I'm working on a book, I use Excel to build the plot as opposed to a narrative outline. This works for me. 

Some writers swear they don't plot, and I'll take them at their word, but for me, I have to know where the book is going. This doesn't mean I don't change the plot because I always do; that's the creative part of writing, but without the plot in Excel, I can't keep track of who's where and when, etc.

I wrote the first 125 words of what would become Operation Devil’s Fire on November 11, 2003 (Veteran’s Day). Now, here we are 18 plus years and 15 books later.

It's my goal to provide my readers with several things in each book:

• a fast-paced book with lots of battle action.
• characters you can love (and care what happens to them) and others you can hate and want them to get their just rewards.
• tidbits of facts interwoven within the story.

From the feedback I receive from readers, it seems I'm on target.

Today, I'm working on the 16th Sgt. Dunn novel, which is untitled (as they always are early on, but to which I refer as sd16). I didn't set out to recreate Sgt. Rock and Sgt. Fury. Our Sgt. Dunn is clearly defined in my head and in the books, and while I owe part of my WWII fascination to Sgts. Rock and Fury, Sgt. Dunn is his own man.  

Thanks for stopping by today.

Worst writing advice. Ever: “Write what you know.”

So I'm back to posting here more often with my thoughts on writing and on WWII history.

People with good intentions, even authors, can be heard here and there telling aspiring writers: “Be sure to write what you know.” Writing about what I know would be horribly boring: trust me, I worked in IT. What else do I “know?” Well, let's see, I know baseball, chess, and few other odds and ends. Maybe I even know a lot about things. The problem is, I don't want to write about those. I want to write about World War II. 

“Ah ha,” say the write-what-you-know people. “That's what you know!” 

Yeah, okay, you got me . . . not really. I love World War II history. I have a passion for knowledge on that era of human history and am constantly learning about it (see Passion below).

“You should still write what you know!”

Uh . . . really? No. How about “learn what you write?”

Here’s why I think "write what you know" is the worst advice.

1 - Imagination

Dreaming stuff up is what writers do. You know how you role play, maybe when you're taking something back to the store for a return and you play this little movie in your head about how it will go? I say this then they say that, etc.? Welcome to my world. That's how I write. I spin up a little movie and I watch it and write what I see. I'll grant you it's more complicated than that, but that's the basis for my work. Sometimes when I'm writing a scene, I don't quite know exactly what will happen, so I rely on that movie. I'm often the first reader to be surprised by an event in my own books.

If it weren't for writers' imaginations we wouldn't have stories that take place in space, or the future, or in a country different from our own. Let’s use an example: the late Tom Clancy. He single-handedly created the techno-thriller, although I’m pretty sure he wasn’t calling it that when he was writing it, he was just telling a story he’d like to read. By the way, when he sold The Hunt for Red October, he was still working as an insurance agent. So how did he “know” all that technical stuff? See Research below.

2 - Passion

As I said above, I have that exact thing for WWII history. Other people like aliens, vampires, spies, or maybe a vampire spy  (hmm . . .) , the list goes on. Write what you're passionate about. If you love it, it will come across in your writing and your readers will pick up on it.

3 - Research

Some authors, very successful ones I might add, talk about going to the place they are using as a setting to get a feel for the people and the locale. Paris does not feel like New York or London or well, anywhere. This is a great idea if you've got several thousand bucks available to make the trip. Oh wait, you don't either? Okay, then how about oh, I don't know, the internet? For all of my published books and the one I'm writing today, I use Google Earth to “find” locales. I know exactly where certain events take place on a map and have in many cases used the street view (Google maps) to see what it's like to stand right there looking around in all directions. I can describe a place as if I've actually been there because, in a technological way, I have.

Need to know how many rounds per minute a Thompson .45 caliber submachine gun fires. I did. Google. Answer: around 700 / minute, depending on the version of the weapon. By the way, I also learned that the 30-round box magazine could sometimes fall out! So everyone preferred the 20-round mag instead. What's the service ceiling for a P-51 Mustang fighter? Answer: 41,900 feet. Time to find out these answers? 10 seconds for each question. In the olden days, I'd have needed to go to the library and dig into a book. Time: hours? Although, going back to Tom Clancy, I can imagine him back then sitting at the library, happy and contented as he digs through books and magazines about submarines, helicopters, and sonar.

Yes, in a way I write what I know because I looked it up, have seen a documentary, or I've read a book on it. I read at least one book a month on WWII (non-fiction), sometimes four. I watch WWII documentaries all the time. So to be truthful, I'm really learning what I write (about) instead of the other way around.

So there. My take on that advice.

One last thing. it's nice to find out I’m not alone in my thinking. And yes, I used Google. Google R my friend.

“My wife will tell you I'm practically addicted to the History Channel . . . and I read a lot of history.” ~ Tom Clancy, CNN interview on 22 August 2000

Happy New Year!

Hello, Sgt. Dunn fans!

Happy New Year! May you have happiness, peace, and love.