It took me three days, but I finished the 511 pages of The President is Missing by former President Bill Clinton and author James Patterson almost as quickly as the book itself plays out. This is the first book I’ve read by Patterson. I must say first of all, I’m not a big fan of the Patterson book-mill, however impressive it is to churn out novels like he has done. I like my reading to have some lasting meaning, message or something to gain from it. This book does not have that. It’s just a distraction, a sensational escape from reality with a few philosophical messages thrown in, my guess to assuage the former president, and then a wrap of the story.
All that said, I stuck with the book. I started it on Friday night. I finished it at 0200 hours Monday. So whatever was on those pages, hooked me enough to sit there straight and read, read, read.
The Plot
I won’t give that away, suffice it to say that someone has contacted the president with code words they should not have. Code words only a small circle of people know, and because someone on the outside knows them, that means someone in his inner circle has committed treason and set the country on the brink of a catastrophic collapse from a cyber attack. The president is the only person who can save the country. And so he goes about doing trying to do that.
Reviews on Amazon
There are reviews on Amazon (the three star ones are the ones I tend to focus on since they’re the middle of the road) thought the book was too wordy, that the end speech by the president to the Congress was too inflated, blah, blah, blah. I thought those criticisms were a little too stern once I finally got to the parts that were most critical. In fact, I thought they were misplaced and not all that accurate.
This is not a book that’s going to win any literary awards. It’s not meant to. It’s meant to make Clinton some money, (It has backfired in bringing up the Monica Lewinsky stuff by including the mention of impeachment in it) and it is meant to be another book for Patterson to sit on top of the New York Times Bestseller List for a while. What I thought was funny in a way was that I bought my copy of the book from Barnes and Noble in mid-June and it still bears a “50 Percent Off” red sticker on it. So while it is selling, no one appears to be making the top dollar off it they’d hoped.
Conclusion
The book is worth buying and worth reading. It validates the premise of my first novel draft I have written, The Privacy Patriots, which I need to revise. In that book, the president and the NSA are ready to launch the world’s first quantum computer and China, Russia, Iran and North Korea (I call them CRINK) find out and launch an all out cyber attack on the US. Because when we do get the first quantum computer activated, it’s going to render all the passwords we all have today useless. So after reading The President is Missing, I see it is time to dust off that draft and get it ready for querying.
A quantum computer will take down computer security. What was wrong with The President is Missing is that Clinton and Patterson forget that the whole world and USA is not dependent on Microsoft computers so a virus with a .exe suffix wouldn’t affect Linux-based servers and machines like Macs, and even the host this website is kept on. There would be problems, but not all the world would be affected like they proposed. But the problems would be bad and we’re supposed to suspend reality in reading a book like that and of course, we should all be worried to some degree because at some point, some kind of cyber attack is likely to affect us. Numerous government officials in the US have long-said it’s not a matter of “If,” but a matter of “when,” and when that finally does happen, Lord knows it’s not going to be pretty….
This weekend I finished reading The Captives by Debra Jo Immergut. I enjoyed her book. It made me think a lot about about chance and choice, the two pivotal points that intertwine the two main characters of the book.
The Captives by Debra Jo Immergut is a great read and one that will have you thinking about chance and choices.
Imagine the person you had a crush on in high school, the one who never paid you any attention, but they filled your most every thought and desire. And then years later, you’re working as a prison psychologist and they’re bought in for murder.
Now the first thing that should happen is the shrink should never see the inmate for ethical reasons. But this is fiction. Or maybe it’s a close parallel to reality. The doc wants to find out why the inmate committed the murder. IF the murder was committed by the inmate, after all, that didn’t seem like it could happen in high school.
And of course, the inmate doesn’t remember the doc, but all of a sudden has this guy bending over backwards to help.
There, you have a chance.
The rest of the book are the choices the two make because of the chance situations.
The Passage of Time
Debra Jo has written for years. In fact, she said the other night during a signing at Interabang Books in Dallas that she began writing the book almost 20 years ago and queried it and got nowhere with it. So she put it in the drawer and let it breathe while she had a life. She got married. She had a son. The story itself matured, as did her writing.
So many years later, she revised the story and made some changes, queried, and found an agent for the book.
The rest is history.
The Captives
You will enjoy reading The Captives. The writing is good. The tension is steady and there are good twists in the story.
Reading it also reminded me of Ottessa Moshfegh’s Eileen, (BTW Ottessa will be at INTERABANG BOOKS in DALLAS on JULY 21) which I read two weeks ago. It, too, is about a person working in a prison and involves a shrink/educator. But the ending is far different.
Debra Jo is an excellent writer and encourager. We talked about my present plight. I’m querying for my second written of three novels, The Voodoo Hill Explorer Club, and as she signed my book, reminded me that the journey along the path to getting published is key. And even as I write this post, another rejection just came in. But I forge on. I simply must.
You can order your copy of The Captives from Interabang Books, by visiting their store, or of course, via Amazon, but if you’re local in Dallas, I encourage you to visit the store. You’ll love the people there and the atmosphere is wonderful. When I am published, I will be having signings there, as sure as the sun comes up in the east.
The Overstory by Richard Powers has me looking at trees in a whole new light.
This 501-page novel is a wonderful, enchanting, and true work of art.
Move this book out from under the overstory of your “To Be Read” pile as soon as you may.
The roots of my love of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and Yosemite’s trees go deep.
Between my love affair for the woods of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and the Mariposa Grove of Yosemite, (really all the trees of Yosemite) I have long had a thing for trees.
This appreciation expanded when my Great Pyrenees, Maycee, and I returned to the woods of the UP, in 2022.
The roots of this book run even deeper.
The book is divided like a tree, into sections–root, trunk, crown, and seeds.
At first, I wondered where the vignettes were going, then in the trunk I began to smile with glee. Things began to make a lot of sense and the magic of storytelling really began to unfold.
The Overstory by Richard Powers is a beautiful book and one of the best-written works I have ever read.
Without trees, we all die; or maybe not.
The Overstory reminds us that trees are critical to the future of our sustainability. But the author makes this happen without pushing us out the door under the direction to go outside and hug a tree.
Environmentalists rant and rave about how killing the trees is killing the planet.
What Powers writes suggests is that when we do away with what is keeping us alive as humans things will still rejuvenate. Yes, trees and forests; the things that have been around for millions of years, long before us.
Stories
There are inspiring quotes in this book; piercing lines that are true to heart.
“And what do good stories do? … They kill you a little. They turn you into something you weren’t.” pg 412
Amen to that.
This is what reading this book did to me.
At the novel’s end, my heart felt somewhat sickened.
Perhaps this is evidence of the grieving I felt.
Unsettled anger builds from reading what happens to the characters.
The crutch of the argument so-called climate change experts miss about sustainability.
Apologies to you if you are of the ilk who run around with the words “climate change” vomiting from your lips.
I do not buy into the nonsense that human beings are capable of destroying the earth the way “science,” says we are doing. As the late Rush Limbaugh used to say often, “They had to quit calling it ‘global warming‘ because temperatures quit rising.”
Maybe something of an exaggeration, but seldom do I ever buy into the nonsense that spews from the mainstream news agenda and lack of bias in, well, I refuse to call it reporting. But that’s all for another day.
“Noah took all the animals two by two, and loaded them aboard his escape craft for evacuation. But it’s a funny thing: He left the plants to die. He failed to take the one thing he needed to rebuild life on land, and concentrated on saving the freeloaders!” pg 451
Nearly every society worldwide has some version of the great flood in its history.
In 2012, I recruited a team to work with North and South American archaeoastronomers to create an interactive book for the iPad.
One thing the four primary scholars who wrote books discounting the end of times meme all pointed out is that almost every independent society on the planet has an accounting of a great deluge in its history.
Powers is clearly a science guy.
I don’t know how spiritual he is.
Doesn’t matter.
What’s clear is this: given what Noah didn’t do, things worked out well regardless.
Trees and other fauna have a power we do not understand. Plants, roaches, and Keith Richards, as they say, will survive us all and adapt to this world despite what we do.
Jumping into the briar patch.
“The year’s clocks are off by a month or two.” pg 452
He dabbles in the climate change, and global warming argument here.
“The best arguments in the world won’t change a person’s mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story.” pg 488
Richard Powers presents some great arguments in this book by telling a masterful story.
The only issue with sharing this book with others.
The problem with spreading this tale is that the book is more than 500 pages.
In the days when a website filled with emoji text and a lack of intellectual proses, few will read something that long.
But for those who do read and keep reading, I promise, you are in for a treat.
Will I ever read The Overstory again?
I loved The Overstory. Someday, I want to read it once more.
UPDATED in June 2023: Now, instead of reading a tome like The Overstory about trees, I’m spending long periods of time in the woods of Upper Michigan. My world is often full of various sorts of maple, pine, and oak trees.
From saplings barely an inch in diameter to ones I cannot wrap my arms all the way around. I’m learning about how to manage the forest of 40 acres my father bought in 1975 for pennies.
There’s also more to a forest than the trees and that’s what I love most. While I am living off-grid, I’m plugged into the living world around me. And it’s more alive than many of the people I know stuck in urban and suburban environments and feeling loathe they cannot stomach for much longer.
Powers’ writing is rich and colorful.
When characters spend 10 months on a platform in a great redwood out west living 20 stories above the forest floor, you feel like you’re doing the same.
His writing is superb.
I highly recommend this book.
I just wonder, if the intent was to move people to action, if it had to be so long.
But as a fellow writer, don’t know where I could or would cut a single thing.
The writing is poetry and the story’s worth telling from beginning to end.
Yesterday I received three rejection letters for my novel, The Voodoo Hill Explorer Club. One of them I took pretty hard. I’d pitched the agent at the recent DFWCon in early June and had really hoped she’d rep me.
In her rejection letter, she said, “This story has all the elements I love—an interesting premise and a well-built world. The writing is solid with a nice voice. A dynamic, interesting protagonist.” She concluded by saying she didn’t feel the love she needed to sell the story.
The two others were more to the point.
The intersection of Voodoo Avenue and Explorer Street, KI Sawyer AFB, Michigan.
“I’m afraid this doesn’t seem like the right project for me, but I’m sure other agents will feel differently.”
“Unfortunately, I’m afraid I’m not the right agent for this project. I wish you much luck in getting THE VOODOO HILL EXPLORER CLUB published.”
I still have several queries out and there are other agents who have asked for pages, so all is not lost.
I am early in the query process. Just a few months in, and in that time, my query has improved.
Because of what the first agent I mentioned taught me at DFWCon, my query letter is now a mere NINE sentences. It’s tighter, to the point. It targets what is important to the structure of the story and I don’t get into the subplots and things that might confuse a slush-pile gatekeeper in New York deciding whether to read more or not. Since DFWCon I’ve also gone through the book and cut 10,000 words. If it was not about four boys in the woods building a treehouse near a Russian spy, it went. Period. My inciting incident is in the first 25 pages. Boom.
I learned these important things from the agent who said my story has the elements she loves.
For that I am grateful and a thank you letter, I send them typed on my 1948 Royal Quiet De Luxe typewriter, will say that. She’s like that high school English teacher we all had. The one who was the hardest on us. In the end, the one who taught us the most, and not just about literature but life itself.
Finding an agent is like asking a pretty girl to dance in middle school. You know so little about her. You’re nervous. You think you know how to dance. You’re worried about your blemishes, if your hair is straight, pants and shirt are fashionable, if she will say “yes.” Whether she will fall in love with you just the same. The odds seem so remote and extreme. On one hand, it seems like the best thing to do is sit on the bleachers and watch the cooler kids dance. But at the same time, you know you can dance. You’ve been watching yourself in the mirror for weeks, months, years. And you’ve gotten better and better and better. It’s time to be under the disco ball at center court with a pretty girl.
I am a good writer and I have a solid book and I will get published. I know I will.
I didn’t meet my match yesterday, but there is always today. There is always tomorrow. And I have more books to write. I have two other books already written needing revision.
What I learned yesterday is that I am looking for LOVE. I want to hear a reply that says, “I LOVE YOUR BOOK.” Hedging, doubt, all of that, won’t do. I very much respect and enjoyed the agent who wrote me. I will keep her as a friend. But there wasn’t a spark. There are others to dance with. There must be love or the result will not be good in the end.
And thank goodness, I have other writer friends I have talked with overnight who are in the same boat, beating on against the current….
My current query/pitch:
THE VOODOO HILL EXPLORER CLUB
In 1977, four teen boys, led by KIRK CARSON, build a tree house near the secret hideaway of a Russian spy. The historical commercial fiction work is 88,000 words.
Kirk is fighting his own Cold War among friends, a bully, and himself. He tries to type “I’m trying to change my life,” but instead his typewriter clacks out, “I’m trying to change my lie.” He wishes he could use white out on the whole year.
How Kirk handles the ultimate test of a December blizzard in Upper Michigan and the Russian spy who has been trying to scare them all out of the woods means life or death for his friends.
THE VOODOO HILL EXPLORER CLUB is a nostalgic reminder of an America where kids played outside until their mothers signaled a summer’s day’s end by turning on the porch light.
I have written in journalism and public relations, and for governors and school superintendents for more than 30 years. Since 2014, I’ve been part of Southern Methodist University’s Writer’s Path program.
Revising Using JenManuel.com’s ‘Narrative Space’ As A Guide
I’m Revising my debut novel again, this time using JenManual.com’s Narrative Space tool as a guide and what an eye-opening experience this has been.
Before beginning her The Reimagine Course, which costs $249, I’d done something daring. The manuscript of The Voodoo Hill Explorer Club, then weighing in at 112,000 words, was way too long for a debut novel of any sort. So, I took the first five chapters and set them aside, cutting the book to 72,200 words. Talk about killing your darlings. That’s 39,800 words of darlings.
Some of them are going to come back because I’ve realized I’m not writing a middle grade book, I’m writing something of a nostalgia book—something between To Kill A Mockingbird and The Perks of Being a Wallflower. My book is something adults would more relate to–those who were children of the 1970s, but also I’ve found middle grades do like, so I’m torn at the moment. My next quest is finding an agent who reps Nostalgia….
Regardless, that left me with what was chapter five becoming my new chapter one.
What is Narrative Space?
In its simplest definition, according to Manuel, “Narrative space is how much space on the page the parts of your story occupy. How much space these narrative parts—or moments—take up on the page.”
What she recommends, and I’ve done with my first chapter, is gone through with highlighters in MS Word and the hard copy, and highlighted the narrative spaces or significantly different moments.
JenManuel.com’s Narrative Space Tool helped me see what I needed to add and cut from my first chapter without even looking at the words.
I started with the opening paragraph and highlighted it in green. Then my main character dives right into a first conflict in the book and it is highlighted in red. A few paragraphs later I go into what amounts to a data dump—something I’ve decided I, too, can reduce if not eliminate (in light blue), followed by a paragraph in red, another light blue, back to a red, then a second conflict introducing a new character and a third conflict in purple, the antagonist jumps in highlighted in black, back to red, back in black, more red, to pink, another conflict and a different color, more purple, back to orange, one line in black with the antagonist, two lines in red, another conflict in orange, a little red, then we jump into yellow, more purple, yellow, purple, yellow, purple, yellow, purple and more conflict, a little more black with conflict, and the chapter ends.
Whew! That looks confusing on the surface of it. But it is telling me all sorts of things.
Narrative Space Interpretation
Without even looking at the text, I zoomed out, so I wouldn’t even see the words, here’s what all of this is telling me.
Most importantly, my antagonist, highlighted in gray, isn’t getting enough time on the page in the opening chapter to make him the goon that he is. There needs to be more about him and less about what’s in light blue to follow.
The light blue, see above. This section needs to be reduced to give more play to what’s highlighted in gray.
The green at the beginning. This section begins the book and nothing else is done with it the whole chapter, but the other sections support what is laid out in the beginning. To provide more impact to this section, I need to come back to it at the chapter’s end. At present, I do not. So, to revise, I need to brush in elements of red, black, purple, and yellow—the most prominent sections of the chapter—the longer sections of narrative space that provide the greatest emotion and experience to my future readers, a sandwich effect if you will.
Conclusion
Pretty cool stuff, eh? Jen Manuel is Canadian, so I threw the “Eh” in for her. This is the only tool from her course I will feature. For me it’s like clouds have been overhead and God has appeared and pushed them aside with his mighty hands, the tool is so amazing. This is such an impactful and different way of seeing my work.
Suffice it to say that Ms. Manuel’s course is money well spent for any writer wanting to hone his/her craft.
I read an essay about honesty in writing in Julia Cameron’s book The Right to Write last week and found the concept profound. You’d think that not be so difficult a thing to do, but I’d wager as writers, so many of us at times have struggled with honesty in our writing–trying to share something beyond our scope. And when we attempt to do so, it shows.
That led me to today’s #amwriting tip–Honesty in Writing.
When I took my dog Maycee out this morning, I was treated to the view in the picture to the right. We all know that branches of trees grow outward and we like to think that they reach for the heavenly light as they mature, like we do as writers, writing day in, day out, honing our craft. Now we’ve all heard the expression getting too far out on the limb. This happens when we write about things we don’t know well. The weight gets to be too much for the leanness of the extension and the branch begins to sag, if not snap off, and the whole thing goes tumbling to the ground. But not so with this one particular branch I saw this morning. It turned back toward the safety of the tree’s crown.
Look at the tree branch, instead of reaching too far out, the branch is bending upward to preserve its strength.
I think it is important and almost cliche to say write what you know. I think it’s better to encourage you as a writer to write from your gut. Have courage to express what’s on your mind.
I’ve always said that when I sit down at my computer, typewriter, or put pen to paper, it’s like I poke a hole in my finger and I bleed out what’s on my mind. It’s that bluntness, that sheer honesty that satisfies me in my writing that has sometimes angered those who have read my writings. But it is also what has made me such a stickler for detail.
My mother has long said I have an “elephant like a memory.”
In recent years I have reconnected with friends whom I lost connection with when I was in middle school in California–because of the Air Force–and found them again because of Facebook 32 years later.
I have reminded them in fine detail of aspects of their lives and they have been astounded. I attribute this now to my writer’s mind, not just because I have a good memory, but because I’ve had the training as a writer to record detail and the daily practice of searching for detail as a writer and putting down the accurate and honest details of events in my mind and on paper.
This of course takes practice, daily practice–another essay of Cameron’s–but more importantly, it requires being honest about what is seen and not seen. It requires discipline and honesty about what is and is not there and recording accurately.
#AmReading
At present I’m on a regular reading diet that comprises a short story every day of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and an essay penned by Ms. Cameron.
Last night I read Fitzgerald’s “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” and Hemingway’s “The Killers.” Cameron’s essay on Practice was wonderful.
I wrote down this wonderful quote from Cameron:
“While our mythology tells us that writing is about the ivory tower, writing itself teaches an interest in life outside the tower.”
I’m purposely doing this because these are renowned writers who are known for their brilliance and most of all, their honesty in writing.
Conclusion
For those of you on Twitter using the hashtag #AmWriting, congratulations. You’re doing something important. You’re using social media to grow your experiences with writing. I encourage you to come back, sign up on the email list and comment. How are you honest in your writing? What are you reading these days? What tools do you use to practice being honest in your writing? How can we all do better?
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That’s quite a mix of authors you might say. I’m about to add John Steinbeck to the mix–