Putting Yourself in Your Book

By Chester Campbell

I'm not talking about making yourself a character in your book, but consciously or not we usually include a lot of ourselves in our writing. Back in the days when I made a lot of public appearances (a voice problem limits my talking these days), I would talk about my Greg McKenzie mysteries and someone would invariably ask, "Is Greg really you?"

My standard reply was, "He's bigger and bolder and more confrontational than me, but we think a lot alike."

A lot of my characters have no relationship to me, either in size or demeanor or thought processes. But at least one of the key personalities is bound to express my sentiments about the situation. It just comes flowing out of my fingers naturally. I choose to write about subjects that interest me, which means I have feelings that get expressed in one way or another.

There are other ways we put ourselves in our novels. One is to use experiences we've had some place or another. I've done that countless times. In my first post Cold War political thriller, Beware the Jabberwock, I had my two principal characters, Burke Hill and Lori Quinn, ride the Star Ferry across Hong Kong Harbor. I described it as I remembered from my visit to Hong Kong back in 1987 (the story takes place in 1992).

In the second of the thriller trilogy, The Poksu Conspiracy, I had Burke Hill visit Chiangmai, Thailand. I used the Top North Guest House where my wife and I and our son and his wife stayed during our Far East tour. It was more like an early American motel with limited amenities. I also used places we visited such as the Chiangmai Night Bazaar and Wat Prathat Doi Suthep, a Buddhist temple high on a mountain west of the city.

My first Greg McKenzie mystery was based largely on a tour I took of the Holy Land in 1998. Greg and Jill make a similar journey as the book begins, and several of the characters were based on people I met during the trip. One who played a key role was our tour guide in Israel, an American who had lived in Jerusalem for several years. I used a lot of her characteristics but changed her sex for plot reasons.

I think most writers put a lot of themselves in their books in one way or another. Do you find your thoughts, your preferences, your characteristics, your experiences showing up in your prose?

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Time to Write (Rewrite, Revise)

By Chester Campbell

Now that we're still perched up here on the fiscal cliff, at least for the next couple of months, I suppose we should get back to writing. Actually, for the past six months or so I've been involved in rewriting, or revising, as I prefer to call it. When I started my fiction writing career back in 1989 (my non-fiction career started in 1947), I turned out eight novels before getting into print. After having seven series books published, I decided to dig back into that pile of old manuscripts that had graced my office floor lo these many years.

Having been a fan for many years of the Cold War spy story, I was well versed in the three-digit organizations like the OSS, CIA, KGB, and MI6. I had written a spy story back in the sixties that spent six months with an editor at Avon before he gave up trying to sell his contemporaries. So when I turned to novel-writing after retirement, I scouted around for a good spy plot. With peristroica and glasnost in full sway, the Soviet Union was falling apart. I visualized what might happen in the aftermath. The demise of the Cold War would give Congress a great reason to slash military and intelligence spending. I came up with a plot involving rogue elements of both the KGB and CIA intent on keeping things in their favor.

For a protagonist, I had just the man, a former FBI agent I had known back in the late sixties when I served as editor of Nashville Magazine. He had an intriguing tale to tell of how he was left out in the cold by J. Edgar Hoover after failing to infiltrate the Mafia, an operation dreamed up by Hoover and his assistant director, Bill Sullivan. I did a wealth of research and turned out a story several editors liked but didn't buy.

Following the lead of authors like Joe Konrath and Rob Walker, I decided to revise the book, Beware the Jabberwock, and put it up for the Kindle. After lengthy revision, including the elimination of several thousand words, I had it edited and then published as an ebook. Since it is double the length of my series mysteries, I raised the price to $3.99 compared to $2.99 for the others.

Jabberwock was the first book of a thriller trilogy, so I tackled the second book next. I thought I had copies of the original manuscript computer files but couldn't find The Poksu Conspiracy anywhere. Fortunately I had a clean copy of the paper manuscript, which ran around 600 pages. I had recently read where MWA members could get a deal on transferring paper to digital by Blueleaf Book Scanning. I packed up all that paper, shipped it off, and soon had a PDF file ready for editing

With Poksu added to my Kindle inventory, I got to work on Overture to Disaster. This one had an interesting background. It started out the longest of the trilogy. I sent it to the Jay Garon-Brooke Agency and got a five-year contract after cutting a few hundred words. This was the agency that put John Grisham on the map, and it was in the zenith of his popularity, before he sued the agency after Garon's death. Unfortunately, they failed to get me a movie deal...or a publisher.

I have finally finished revising the manuscript and am ready for the final edit. It should be turned into an ebook in the next couple of months. All of which means it's time for me to get back to writing something original, like the sixth Greg McKenzie mystery.

Of course I still have a couple of more old manuscripts lying around that need to be revised and put out as ebooks. Seems like there's no end to this.

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Musings of a News Junkie by Chester Campbell

I'm a news junkie. I suppose it comes from my journalistic background. I read the morning paper, not completely, but at least the first section. All too frequently these days there isn't a lot beyond that. I also watch the network news at night (I'm a CBS fan since the days of Edward R. Murrow) and the ten o'clock local news. Sometimes I'll see the early evening news as well.

When I'm in the car alone, chances are I'll turn on WPLN, the local public radio affiliate, which plays classical music during the day. If it's in the afternoon, I'll listen to NPR's All Things Considered. At other times I'll go to WPLN's all-day news station.

My newspaper reading as a kid was mostly confined to the comics. I religiously followed Dick Tracy and Little Orphan Annie. Another favorite was Terry and the Pirates. I began to follow the news in high school and really got into it when the war started (that's World War II, of course). It was my own service in the Army Air Forces that led to my choice of journalism as a career. I had never considered it until a fellow Aviation Cadet who'd put in a year at Yale told me he'd study journalism if he had it to do over again.

I liked the idea. After getting my discharge, I enrolled at the University of Tennessee under the G.I. Bill. I intended to spend two years there, then transfer to a journalism school like Missouri or Wisconsin. But UT started a journalism school and I stayed put. My Class of 1949 was the first to complete the J-school curriculum. I had also taken a sophomore reporting course taught by an editor from The Knoxville Journal, which led to my being hired as a reporter during my junior year.

I spent four years at The Journal, covering most of the beats and doing general assignments, then took a year-and-a-half sabbatical thanks to the North Koreans and Fifth Air Force. I served as an intelligence officer at the headquarters in Seoul and got a ringside seat for the air war. I spent many a night in the Air Control Center listening through earphones as airmen with long sticks pushed symbols around a large map of Korea showing the location of all aircraft, friendly and enemy. Radar had come into its element.

Back in the states, wearing civvies, I moved home to Nashville and joined The Nashville Banner for a five-year stint. Among other things I became the first Education Reporter, attending a six-week seminar at Harvard. I didn't learn any Boston-speak, however. I loved feature stories and wrote about two adventures thanks to my Air Force background. I had remained in the Air National Guard and was intelliigence officer for the 118th Tactical Reconnaissance Wing at the Nashville airport.

In 1956 I got permission to fly a familiarization mission in a B-47 jet bomber at Barksdale Air Force Base in Shreveport, LA. This was a time when the Cold War was heating up, and the big jets were on alert to be loaded with nuclear weapons. Though they didn't talk about it, a section of the field called Bossier Base was obviously the weapons storage area. An alert siren sounded while I was there and large armored vehicles headed for the flight line. It really brought the Cold War home.

About a year later, I was one of the first reporters to fly on the new B-52, which had become (and still is) the Air Force's major heavy bomber. I flew a mission out of Carswell AFB at Austin, TX. Since I had a Top Secret clearance, I was allowed to sit in on the crew briefing. We took off in the afternoon, heading northwest to Denver. From there we continued west to Salt Lake City, turned north up to the Canadian border, and west again to the Pacific Coast. Turning south, we flew most of the length of the coastline and made a bomb run on Los Angeles. It was a target that electronically calculated our accuracy. Bullseye!

After that we flew southeastward back to Texas, landing at Austin around midnight. I asked the pilot what we'd have done if we couldn't land there. "We had enough fuel to get back to California," he said.

Leaving the newspaper, I freelanced articles for national magazines, then started one of my own called Nashville Magazine. Though I didn't deal in the daily news, we covered lots of goings-on around town at a more leisurely pace.

When I took up novel writing after retirement, my news and features background came in handy. I had used a lot of the same techniques I now employ in fiction--cogent quotes, colorful descriptions, a spare style that keeps the story moving. To paraphrase, you can take the old newshound out of the newsroom, but you can't take the newsroom out of the old newshound.

Inspirations That Didn't Pan Out

By Chester Campbell

My colleagues Mark Troy and Ben Small recently wrote about inspiration, so I thought why not (thoughts are usually italicized, aren’t they)? Mark wrote about things that inspired his plots, while Ben wrote about locations and music and such that inspire his muse. I decided to make mine a trip down memory lane, to use an appropriate cliché, and cover works never published.

Going back into ancient history, 1948 to be exact, my first mystery novel was inspired by the reading of No Pockets in a Shroud by Horace McCoy. The book told the story of a crusading newspaper reporter fighting crime. I was 22 at the time, a neophyte reporter for The Knoxville Journal at night, a journalism junior at the University of Tennessee during the day. In my spare time I pounded out a mystery on my little Smith-Corona portable about a reporter solving a murder. I later learned McCoy was born near Nashville, my hometown. Dear old Kirkus called No Pockets his worst book. They won’t get the chance to say that about Time Waits for Murder. It rests peacefully in the brittle brown envelope in which it was returned by THE EDITORS at David McKay Co. in Philadelphia.

Following an all-expense-paid vacation in Korea during the early fifties, courtesy of Uncle Sam, where I worked as an Air Force intelligence officer, I shifted my reading preference to Cold War spy stories. Helen Macinnes, John Le Carre, Graham Greene and Len Deighton were my favorites. And my inspiration. In the mid-sixties, while editing Nashville Magazine, a slick paper monthly, I squeezed in time to write a novel dealing with a Russian plot to foil U.S. radars in Iran that monitored the Soviet Union’s airspace. I got the idea from my familiarity with radar, having gone on active duty in 1951 with the 119th Aircraft Control & Warning Squadron of the Tennessee Air National Guard. This manuscript also resides in the historical section of paper piles on my office floor.

After retiring from the Air Force Reserve and from management of a statewide trade association, I turned to writing fulltime (more or less) in 1990. The Cold War was coming to an end with the Soviet Union going down the tubes, and I penned my first spy thriller. Actually, I didn’t pen it. Anything I write by hand is undecipherable a few hours later. I had upgraded my computer and bought a rudimentary word processing program that would only hold a few chapters in a file. The inspiration for the character was an ex-FBI agent I had met during my magazine days. His almost unbelievable experiences provided the protagonist’s background. The story involved a plot to save the Soviet system by killing the American and Russian presidents.

Titled Beware the Jabberwock, that was the first book in a trilogy. Number two came out of my service in Korea and a visit there shortly before my retirement. The plot involved the assassination of North Korean President Kim Il-sung and his son, Kim Jong-il. It would surely have saved us a lot of current trouble if the plot have proven true. My character from the Jabberwock was set up as head of a company that was a CIA spinoff. He made a business trip to South Korea to coordinate the operation.

Book three found ex-KGB agents working to thwart the governments of Russia and its former satellites and re-establish the old Soviet state. The inspiration for that one came from my habit of watching the Independence Day symphony concerts on the Mall behind the U.S. Capitol. As I watched the canon fire during the 1812 Overture, I thought what if somebody used that as a cover to fire nerve gas mortar shells into the crowd? This manuscript got me a contract with John Grisham’s first agent, who he later sued. I didn’t sue but wound up canceling the contract after they let this one and the next two gather dust on the shelf. When they had finally sent it to Tor Forge, the editor liked my writing but said the manuscript was “dated.” If it had been picked up and published when I first submitted it, the book would have come out about the time of the subway nerve gas attack in Japan.

A son and daughter who graduated in computer science and pursued careers in computer programming led to the story of a young programmer working on a voice synthesization program that would mimic a person’s voice enough to fool a voice print analysis. He gets involved with an investment firm I modeled after a famous Depression Era case. It winds up with a chase around Nashville by the bad guys and an attempt to eliminate my hero by funneling carbon monoxide into a sealed-off computer room.

The next book was inspired by stories told by my younger son who served for several years in Army Special Forces. A former Green Beret officer comes across a document that indicates a paramilitary outfit is preparing to bomb critical installations in two weeks. He talks to a former FBI agent who turns up dead. He winds up on the run from both the police and the secretive militia organization.

After that came a story that mirrored a trip I took with a church seniors group to New Orleans. In my version, one of the passengers is a former investment advisor to a Mafia family. He testified against the mob and went into the witness protection program but left it to pursue his own path. After several years, a mob enforcer finds him just before the bus leaves for the Big Easy. There are a lot of complicating factors, but it ends during a hurricane just outside New Orleans. The touring events on the trip are exactly as I experienced them.

I wrote one other manuscript during this period which I won’t go into for personal reasons. Suffice it to say after nine unsuccessful tries, I finally hit the shelves in 2002 with Secret of the Scroll, my first Greg McKenzie mystery. I now have five books out, but I’ve run out of space to talk about them.