Resourceful Women in the Perseid Collapse series

Posted on March 17, 2015 by admin

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.

Tim 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.

A.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

Russian Space Shotgun

Posted on March 11, 2015 by admin

A recent post on the site War is Boring, details how Soviet and Russian cosmonauts carried a shotgun into space aboard their Soyuz space craft. The gun wasn’t to shoot ETs — although it might have been pressed into service for that if needed — but to protect cosmonauts after they returned to earth. Soviet and Russian space flights don’t “splash down” they “dirt down.” Soyuz capsules land on the vast steppes of Russia, not the ocean. There have been cases when capsules went off course and landed far from their recovery team. The cosmonauts had to take care of themselves until help showed up. And that included defending themselves with the TP-82 pistol.

The TP-82 had two smoothbore barrels that used 12.5×70 mm ammunition, or roughly 40 gauge, and a third lower rifled barrel used5.45×39mm ammunition. You wonder if that was enough stopping power to counter a big, hungry Siberian bear.

Below is a European Space Agency photo of Cosmonauts undergoing survival training.

The Konkoly Interrogation

Posted on February 11, 2015 by admin

Steve Konkoly (seen menacingly at left), the major domo, the grand poobah of the Perseid Collapse series — now a Kindle World on Amazon — throws me the tough questions in an interview on his web site. Using bright lights and threatening me with a snow shovel (okay, he just brought the snow shovel in and placed it by the door, but it still was a masterful act of psychological pressure), Steve was able to extract maximum amount of actionable intelligence. Like this nugget, for example.

“I actually teach people how to navigate across oceans with just a sextant, a watch and a book of sight reduction tables. No electrons, no satellites, no app store — wild thought, huh? And it’s actually so easy to do. Gives you a great feeling of self-reliance — like the first time you changed a tire or unhooked a girl’s bra. A rush of satisfaction — “I can definitely do this!”

Just remember, Konkoly always garners the primo stuff. You can’t hold out, he’ll get it out of you. He’s that good.

You can read the whole interview here.

You can get The Borealis Incident, my contribution to the Perseid Collapse Kindle World here.

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.