Battle of Okinawa - started 77 years ago today

On April 1, 1945, the Battle of Okinawa began. You can read this great historical article by the National WWII Museum (New Orleans).

National Vietnam War Veterans Day 2022

Thank you to all the veterans of the Vietnam War.

National Medal of Honor Day - 25 March 2022

Let's honor the courage U.S. servicemen and servicewomen displayed in the face of danger to themselves and others.

Read the fascinating history of the Medal of Honor here. There have been 3,511 recipients. There is a new Medal of Honor Museum opening late 2024 in Arlington, TX. Groundbreaking was fittingly on 25 March 2022.

Here are the three different medals awarded by service. 

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.