Resourceful Women in the Perseid Collapse series

Steve Konkoly’s The Perseid Collapse Kindle World launched in February 2015 with nine novellas. Two of those original Perseid Collapse novellas had female lead characters: The Borealis Incident by Tim Queeney and Deception on Durham Road by A.R. Shaw. In this joint blog post, A.R. Shaw and I talk about those female characters and how they fit in The Perseid Collapse world and the even right here in the real world. 

Screen Shot 2015-02-03 at 11.15.06 PMTim Queeney: Going back even just a few decades, it’s hard to imagine a female deputy commander of a U. S. Air Force Base. Yet today, writing a woman lead character like Lt. Colonel Dana Wright in my Perseid Collapse novella, The Borealis Incident, is not something that requires a great leap of faith from readers. Woman have made huge strides in the military, with female pilots and ship drivers not an unusual occurrence. The biggest issue Dana has to face in Borealis is that the base security officer doesn’t want her driving alone to the missile warning radar site 13 miles across the Greenland tundra from the base itself. Perhaps he’s concerned because Dana is a woman, but maybe he’d be just as uneasy with the practice if the deputy commander was a man.

A.R. Shaw’s Deception on Durham Road also has a female lead, Jamie Michaud. But instead of a military officer, Jaime is a mom working to protect her two daughters. Jamie represents a modern example of a classic American archetype: the pioneer woman and mother. The woman who headed west in the early Nineteenth Century were not reclining on plush seats in the back of their Conestoga wagons, they were busy from sunup to sundown with a wearying variety of domestic duties, plus the need at times to help defend the wagon train. The pioneer woman were smart and tough and Jamie displays plenty of those qualities, too.

Screen Shot 2015-03-16 at 11.43.53 PMA.R. Shaw: I agree with Author, Tim Queeney, twenty five years ago, when I served in the Air Force Reserves, it wasn’t unusual to have women performing important jobs in the military, but as a base commander? No question that’s one position only few have recently obtained. The question now may be, are women capable of such lead roles in society and in fiction?

Of course, I’m biased. I am a woman. I served in the military. I run a household. I’m a mother and a wife. And, I’m my own boss. Those are all acceptable roles in reality but in fiction only recently has it become ‘plausible’ for a woman to command a military base. To be the CEO of large corporations or to become president of the United States. (Actually, that hasn’t happened yet. I’m sure we’re waiting for the right candidate.)

I know some of us are capable of leading the way. Not every man has what it takes and the same goes for woman. In Tim Queeney’s Borealis Incident, the lead role is held by Dana Wright. She’s earned her right to be at the top through hard work and determination. You accept this role as a reader now because it’s happened in reality, it’s plausible.

In my novella, Deception on Durham Road, Jamie is a French teacher by trade and a mother of two teen girls. Nothing unusual there. She’s made mistakes in life by trying to replace the deceased father by an unworthy fellow. What makes her exceptional is her acceptance to overcome abuse and her fight to make it on her own, not only for herself but for her daughters too. She’s not running off for help from a FEMA camp. She’s not begging for food from strangers. She’s taking charge of her life and her responsibilities. This too happens in reality. Her courage is plausible and we see it from time to time, it’s impressive but it’s not the norm. The norm is applying for state aid or to depend on others to help you.

In both of these novellas, you see an inner strength, a will to fight and a steadfast resolve for a lead female character.

Get Deception on Durham Road on Amazon.com

Get The Borealis Incident on Amazon.com

Joining Steve’s World

Screen Shot 2015-02-03 at 11.15.06 PMI’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.

 

 

Perseid Collapse builds strong base for thriller series

Screen Shot 2013-12-31 at 9.50.18 AMWhat happens when you combine an eye for technical detail with a gift for gritty immediacy and a feel for family dynamics? You get The Perseid Collapse, by Steven Konkoly, a meticulously researched, frighteningly real depiction of one family dealing with a deadly disaster.

The Perseid Collapse picks up main character Alex Fletcher and his family a few years after the events of Konkoly’s earlier thriller, The Jakarta Pandemic. Fletcher and family are again hit with a crisis that they must face with little more than their own resources. Luckily for the Fletchers, Alex is an ex-marine who learned his lesson about disaster from his family’s experiences in the Jakarta outbreak. He has invested considerable sweat in planning and stockpiling gear for the next disaster. When his family is struck by terrifying events in the beginning of the book, Fletcher and clan go into full scale operations mode and try to carry out the plan. But as the pre-WWI German strategist Von Moltke famously said, “No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.” Alex and family must improvise and deal with the increasingly chaotic events on the ground as society slides toward anarchy. They find themselves facing split second, life-and-death decisions that ramp up the story to a deadly intensity.

This book reveals Konkoly as a polished writer in ways large and small. One is his knack for presenting a large-scale event with just enough detail to let us know something world-changing is taking place but leaving its origins a captivating mystery. In The Perseid Collapse an object appears to have struck the Earth from space, but we don’t know the full extent of the impact, or why it seems to have devastated so many aspects of modern technology.

Konkoly marries this skill at conjuring large scale uncertainties with the small scale certainties of the smart, experienced and adaptable Alex Fletcher. Fletcher is a one-man force multiplier, his military training and cool skill work to meld his two suburban friends, Ed and Charlie, into an effective action team. Together the three must hurry from Maine to Boston attempting to rescue stranded family members. Fletcher’s encyclopedic knowledge of weaponry and tactical ops serves his family and friends well. He is the rock of the group — the type of guy you’d want alongside you when it all hit the fan. And Konkoly pulls no punches here. He shows us a post-disaster world of troubling moral conundrums. He dares us to keep up when he shows Alex’s grim determination to meet out the ultimate violence when he deems it necessary.

Many thriller writers would be more than happy with hitting just these notes so well. But Konkoly also draws a picture of a real family with stresses and strains dealing with an extraordinary situation. His dialog and details are telling. I hope he continues this thread of the story and develops these characters even more fully. The Perseid Collapse ends with a cliffhanger — we know there is more adversity and adventure to come in the next installment of the series, The Perseid Collapse: Event Horizon. I highly recommend you grab The Perseid Collapse at Amazon.com and jump aboard for the ride!