Joining Steve’s World

Posted on February 3, 2015 by admin

I’m happy to report that my novella, The Borealis Incident has joined Steve Konkoly’s The Perseid Collapse Kindle World today as Steve’s Kindle World (KW) launched on Amazon. Check out all the titles here.

How did this master inveigle me into his world?

The recruitment began innocuously enough. We were outside a parking garage in Portland, Maine. A mild December night, clear sky, quarter moon. My pal Steve and I had just met with some writing friends and were headed for our respective cars when he let slip that he was about to launch a KW for his Perseid Collapse series. I had read his Perseid Collapse books and I knew about Kindle Worlds. Steve had offhandedly dropped a few morsels of intel about his experience writing two contributions to Blake Crouch’s Wayward Pines KW.

I pressed him for details. He stepped deeper into the shadows, dropping his voice to nearly a whisper. Step right in or I would miss it. That’s how I knew I was probably already in his grip.

And so we stood in the shadows of the garage entrance. Two figures partially shrouded, in conspiratorial tones. A passing police car slowly patrolled. A woman approaching the concrete slabs of the garage favored the far side of the entrance, staying clear of us. Some probably avoided the garage entirely at the sight of a skulking pair.

“I have an idea that fits your Perseid Collapse scenario,” I said.

“Oh, really?” Steve said, his voice flat. “Can you write it in a 20,000- to 25,000-word story?”

With the outline of The Borealis Incident sparking and zapping in my head, I said “Yeah. I think I can.”

The Holidays intervened. I wondered if the conversation had ever really taken place.

Then Steve got back to me in a terse email (so telegraphic I almost suspected it was a code). “I’ve given your name to Sean, the acquisitions guy at Kindle Worlds. Expect contact.”

An email arrived from the Amazon mothership on the west coast (there was no one-time pad or numbers station, in fact, the email was in plain text — curious). When would be good to talk? Sean and I worked out the three-hour difference and spoke on the phone (no voice scrambling, no frequency hopping — what was their game?). The date was Jan. 5.

“Steve said you were ready to start, that’s good,” Sean said with no preamble. “Your novella needs to be 25,000 words and we need it by Jan. 30.”

Static crackled across the continental phone line. I considered my next move.

“Steve said it could be 20,000 words,” I said, testing him.

“Nope. 25,000 minimum.”

Everyone has a number. They may deny it, but deep down, they know. This was Sean’s. I sensed he wouldn’t budge.

“Okay. You’ll get your words,” I said.

The line went dead. I was committed.

What if I didn’t deliver on time? Or didn’t meet Sean’s number? An image hit me of a flash mob — Amazon drones, cocky half-smiles, descending on my house like a radio-controlled 82nd Airborne.

So I set to work.

Then I realized: It’s Steve’s world, I just write in it.

Order The Borealis Incident at Amazon.

Here’s Steve’s blog post highlighting The Borealis Incident.

And like The Perseid Collapse Facebook page for more info and for comments from other readers.

U.S. falls behind in spy program name game

Posted on January 28, 2015 by admin

In a piece on Motherboard, Matthew Braga writes of Canadian electronic surveillance program that tracks downloads on file sharing sites. Government snooping is a hot button topic, of course. But the best part of the piece is that some folks in the government spy business have a great knack for cooking up names. The file sharing surveillance program is called Levitation. There’s a similar British program called Mutant Broth. Another is called Atomic Banjo. There’s even one that sounds like an 80’s pop star: EonBlue.

The only American program mentioned in the article is called Rampart. A little stodgy next to the likes of Mutant Broth and EonBlue, don’t you think? The NSA has got to get real with its name game.

Does gender make the scribe?

Posted on December 10, 2014 by admin

Do men or women make better writers? A loaded question. In fact, a question that is almost impossible to answer. The rub here is the word “better.” Clearly, the determination of better is purely subjective. Some folks like character-driven writing, some like plot-driven work. One form is not inherently “better” than the other, it’s a matter of taste and predilection.

Still, the online grammar-checker site Grammarly.com has put together an infographic that attempts to answer this question of whether gender makes the scribe.

-Tim

The straight noise on silencers

Posted on December 4, 2014 by admin

The tech website Ars Technica has a great piece on the devices folks slap onto the end of guns in movies (and, truth be told, in thriller novels!) allowing them to kill their enemies with barely a peep. These devices are typically called silencers, but should be termed suppressors, as they don’t actually render silent the report of a firearm. In fact, even with a suppressor, the bark of gun can be quite loud. A suppressor will lessen the sound somewhat, and allow for the shooter to get by without heavy duty ear protection. But the soft chirp of the suppressor-equipped gun so familiar from the movies is, like most things in Hollywood, largely a fabrication.

The reason we so often see a silenced pistol-equipped character blipping his way past a passel of bad guys is because the concept captures our imagination. There’s something of the superhero about the capability to remove enemies so swiftly and quietly. The idea of an explosive firearm rendered nearly silent is a movie meme that viewers find interesting. And as the greatest film director who ever lensed, Stanley Kubrick, said about making movies, “Accurate is good, but interesting is better.”

Which makes me think super silencers aren’t going away anytime soon in movie land (or thriller novels for that matter!).

Will this robot sub find the Atlas Fracture?

Posted on December 3, 2014 by admin

Scientists from the UK, USA and Australia are using a sonar equipped robot sub to measure Antarctic ice shelves from the underside. Will this little robot swim under the Ross ice shelf and find the Atlas Fracture zone? – that thinned area of localized stress that is the perfect place for terrorists to attack to collapse the entire France-sized ice shelf? Probably not, since the Atlas Fracture zone was cooked up primarily for my novel of the same name. But if they do find a major thin ice fracture zone in Antarctica with this thing, I’ll be psyched to read about it!

Read all about the Atlas Fracture now!

A view from The Ceres Plague

Posted on September 26, 2014 by admin

One of the more remote towns in America is the tiny village of Gambell, Alaska. Located at the northwestern tip of St. Lawrence Island in Bering Sea, Gambell is only 40 miles from Russia’s Siberian coast. Gambell is also the windswept stage for some of the dramatic events that unfold in The Ceres Plague, the next Perry Helion thriller.

Here is a view of Gambell taken by NOAA photographer Lt. Tim Smith this summer with the Arctic sun riding high in the sky. The town of Gambell is to the right, Siberia along the horizon. Here’s a link to the high res file.

Life imitates thrillers

Posted on August 21, 2014 by admin

It’s not often that the elements of an adventure thriller come true in real life. But reality has just given my thriller The Atlas Fracture a gold star. The book speculates on microbial life found deep under the Antarctic ice. And this microbial life is not the kind you want to bring home to meet the parents.

Now further research on water samples taken from under the ice cap in a feature called Lake Whillans confirms there are all sorts of bugs swimming around. “We found not just that things are alive, but that there’s an active ecosystem,” said lead study author Brent Christner, a microbiologist at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. “If you had to think up what would be the coolest scenario for an ecosystem in Antarctica, you couldn’t make this up.” Well, not to be cheeky to Brent Christner, but actually you could. Check out The Atlas Fracture and the follow-on The Ceres Plague (available soon).

Could one of the microbes found in Lake Whillans be the bug that Dr. Crandee finds in The Atlas Fracture?

Let’s hope not.

Sneak peek at The Ceres Plague cover

Posted on July 16, 2014 by admin

Here is a sneak look at the cover for the next book in the Perry Helion thriller series, The Ceres Plague. Perry discovers that a former Air Force Base in the Bering Sea, supposedly contaminated with toxic waste, isn’t what it seems. You can see all of Ceres in September!

Polar bear protection: shotgun or rifle?

Posted on May 26, 2014 by admin

In addition to my role as reputed kingpin of the Perry Helion thriller series (the next book of which, The Ceres Plague, will be out in September), I am also the editor of Ocean Navigator magazine. Ocean Navigator is for folks who like to go on voyages, either along a coast or across an ocean. As ON editor, I get some interesting requests — like a recent appeal for help in choosing a weapon for protection against polar bears.

One of ON‘s regular writers is Ellen Massey Leonard, who, with her husband Seth, has sailed around the world in a wooden sailboat. The Leonard’s next adventure is a sail through the Northwest Passage aboard their newest boat, Celeste, a 40-foot cold-molded cutter built in British Columbia in 1986.

Turns out the Canadian government — and common sense — requires that voyagers making the Northwest Passage through Arctic Canada carry some sort of firearm for protection against polar bear attack. Should that firearm be a shotgun or a rifle? In Ellen and Seth’s case, the issue was further complicated by the fact that neither of them had ever touched a gun before.

Since Ellen had read my Perry Helion thriller The Atlas Fracture, she asked me if I could help by providing them with some gun training. This seemed like an intriguing task, so I said yes and then brought in my friend Steve Konkoly, a former naval officer and a fellow thriller novelist. With more formal training in firearms, Steve was a natural lead instructor (my role was to assist Steve and toss in an occasional brilliant observation about ballistics or bullet grain or announcing lunch time). We set up a session at the Scarborough Fish and Game Association’s firing range in Scarborough, Maine.

Unfortunately, Seth was not able to attend, so the training and decision process was on Ellen alone. Steve showed her the basic operation of a pump action 12 gauge shotgun and a bolt action, .308 caliber rifle. Then it was time to shoot. Steve fired a few shotgun blasts into the firing range’s sand berm. Following that, Ellen stepped up to take a turn at the trigger. Her first attempt at a shooting stance involved feet close together and her body leaning away from the gun (!). We got this corrected and Ellen was soon blasting sand grains with the best of them.

Next up was the Ruger Scout .308 rifle. Ellen dutifully listened to loading procedure for the three-round magazine, how to work the bolt and line up the target with the ‘scope. Then it was back to Steve to take the first few shots. The explosive report of a .308 is damn impressive.

Ellen was impressed. She only needed to experience the fury of one shot sent down range before she announced, “I’ve made my decision.” It would be a shotgun for her and Seth on their journey. Let’s just hope they never have to use it.

Of course, after lead instructor Steve, I took full advantage of the opportunity and blasted off a few rounds with both the shotgun and the rifle. I managed to pound some sand with the shotgun and put three rounds on target at 100 yards with the rifle.

Perry would be pleased.

New cover arrives!

Posted on May 20, 2014 by admin

The new cover design for The Atlas Fracture has landed. A threatening cloud of smoke, a drill rig beset by howling winds, a deep blue sky and an ominous burst of color on the horizon – they all work to suggest deadly happenings in Antarctica as Perry Helion fights a clever team of terrorists determined to unleash environmental disaster.

Designer Shannon Perry, who works from her home in Virginia, executed this design and she did a fantastic job. If you get a chance, let us know what you think of the new direction by email: tim at timqueeney dot com. And sign up for our mailing list (at top right) for the latest info on Perry and his colleagues at DARPA’s Office of Scenario Projection (OSP).

Tim Queeney

Interesting is better