First-Draft Terror

Suzanne Chazin was our Guest Blogger a couple weeks ago. When I asked her for one, she sent me two. The other, describing how she starts a new novel, is a howl. Who hasn't suffered this way?

Robert Knightly

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I’m about to start the first draft of a new novel. This instills in me all the self-confidence of two virgins in a MINI Cooper. I’m sweaty and awkward. I don’t have a clue where anything goes. And I’m already questioning whether this was the right vehicle for attempting this in the first place.

I don’t know why first drafts scare me so much. It’s not as if I don’t know by now that I’ll be rewriting it all in a few months anyway. You’d think, with three published novels and a finished fourth manuscript behind me, I’d be like Larry King at the altar: ring in one pocket, attorney on speed dial in the other. I know what’s coming—the revisions, the tossed scenes, the killed characters, the discoveries I won’t make until I’m practically finished with the draft. And yet I will do almost anything to delay the process. This past week alone, I have:

1. Transferred all of my children’s baby pictures to DVD
2. Volunteered to be on the interview committee for the new principal of my daughter’s middle school
3. Filled out my bank’s customer satisfaction survey (probably a first in the history of my bank)
4. Actually listened to the Jehovah’s Witnesses who came to my door.

I’m so desperate I called up GEICO to see if I could save money on my car insurance. (Don’t let the Cockney accent fool you; the lizard is a liar).

I’m really starting to panic.

I’m stalling by researching stuff I will never, ever need to know. The Internet is great for this. I can start off with a simple question about common Honduran surnames for my new mystery series about a Latino detective in suburban New York and end up two hours later reading the history of the Indian ruler Lempira who fought the Spanish and now has the Honduran currency named after him. (Pause to reflect: would the U.S. be in any better shape if our bills were called “Geronimos”?)

My first mystery series, set in the New York City Fire Department, provided loads of fun researching how to start fires and blow up things. There is nothing like watching a video of a room turning into a solid wall of flame in under three minutes to give one an Old Testament appreciation for how fast things can go wrong. Makes that unexplained clunk in my car and the untraceable leak beneath my kitchen sink feel like good Karma by comparison.

Here’s where a well-conceived outline would come in handy. I love outlines. I really do. Wish I could write one. Typically I start out with three pages of notes for the first chapter and by chapter five, I’m down to descriptions like, “someone dies here” and “they have good sex.” (Is there any other kind in fiction?) The truth is, I just don’t know what’s going to happen until it does. I write great outlines for my second drafts. But that’s like waiting for the medical examiner when what you really needed was the doctor. It’s so much more convenient to catch the problem before the patient stops having a pulse.

I know what I have to do. I have to write something awful—something I would only show to my mother when she was alive, and only then, after she’d had a couple of glasses of good red wine. And then I have to believe that it will get much, much better as I lay down more of the story. To build a smooth road, you always have to start with a pile of rocks.

Chinese Fortune-cookie stuff, I know. But it also happens to be true. I had an art teacher at Northwestern University named George Cohen who once instructed every student to paint the “best” painting he or she could create. In the second class, Cohen asked every student to paint the “worst” painting. Then Cohen papered the room with all of our artwork and asked students to vote on the best pieces. About 75 percent of the pieces voted as “best” were the ones we had painted as our “worsts.” (Makes me wonder about my other decisions in life.)

So I will try to be fearless and not worry about what’s “best” and what’s “worst.” I will try to have faith that over time, there will be a road through the wilderness.

Then again, I could always start another blog…

Suzanne Chazin

How I Got my Vocation

When I was 13-years-old and away at a Catholic boarding school among the potato fields on the North Shore of Long Island, I would read (under the covers after lights-out) the novels of Leslie Charteris, detailing the adventures of Simon Templar, a/k/a The Saint, scourge of the Ungodly. Half-a-Century later, I don’t remember the plots but I remember that the Saint’s right hand man was Hoppy Uniatz and that it was okay (not a Mortal Sin) to kill bad men, “the Ungodly,” as the Saint did regularly to those who needed it. As I fell asleep in my top bunk in the dormitory, I remember thinking, I could do that. That’s how I considered “crime” for the first time and set my future course.

The school, St. Anthony’s Juniorate, prepared high-school age boys to enter the Novitiate, the next step to becoming a member of the Friars Minor, an Order of Teaching Brothers founded by St. Francis of Assisi in Italy in 1212. St. Francis loved animals, the poor, Christ and St. Clare, a nun (not necessarily in that order). How I got there, I went to St. Anthony of Padua Grammar School in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, for eight years. I got in early, age 5-1/2, because my grandmother was the Cleaning Lady at the school. (They owed her, they didn’t pay much.) I didn’t meet a Franciscan Brother face-to-face until Fifth Grade; before that, I had lay teachers (middle-aged ladies) and nuns from the Order of St. Joseph. That I never understood: how a bunch of nuns got named after St. Joseph, the stepfather of Jesus sure, but a guy, still and all.

Brother Dismas was our teacher in Class 5-A and the next semester in 5-B. I think he’d fought in the ring before he got his vocation, judging by how he liked to knock us around in his classroom. The dumb guys had it the worst, the more he whacked them the less they could remember about the lesson. Years later, I met one of them, Patrick, in a bar, and as we got to talking about school days, Patrick, more than a little drunk, got off his stool announcing that he was going up to the Brothers’ Residence next to the school to have a word with Dismas. I managed to dissuade Patrick and bought another round. Whether the Brothers’ House was still standing, and if it was, whether Dismas was still in it, I hadn’t a clue, but who knew? Dismas was definitely not in the same class as his namesake, the Good Thief, but it was a long time ago. And I was, at that time, a New York City Patrolman, and as such expected to keep the peace.

Besides, I had good feelings for that time of my life in St Anthony of Padua, Dismas aside. I was a religious kid, even a bit on the scrupulous side. Never missed Mass on Sundays and Holy Days and went to Confession with my class every Friday afternoon (not that I had a choice) in the Lower Church below the Main Altar upstairs. I did my best to examine my conscience, agonizing whether the impure thoughts that assailed me constantly were mortal sins, the decision turning on whether I had “entertained” them or not. Fidgeting on the hard-wood kneeler in a pew just outside the purple-shrouded Confessional in the darkened Church basement as I tried to decide, I’d break out in a sweat under my school uniform and lock eyes on the Station of the Cross affixed to the wall next to the Confessional, depicting Jesus sweating blood as He prays in the Garden of Gethsemane while His enemies hide nearby, waiting to pounce. When my turn came, I’d enter the dim Box, kneel facing Fr. O’Connor, just a silhouette behind a mesh screen—it was always red-faced Fr. O’Connor—and disgorge everything in my head as if I’d eaten a bad clam, just to be on the safe side. Once, driven by fear of eternal damnation, I dared to ask Fr. O’Connor if I was doing it wrong and that was why I was having trouble. It was he who told me, in his thick Galway accent, that I had this scrupulosity and a good thing it was. Never was able to warm to Fr. O’Connor, nor Brother Dismas for that matter, but choosing the Franciscans was the better way to go. Thing is, given my particular mind-set and having been exposed to the regular recruitment pitches of the Brothers during the four years they had me, it was foreordained that I would discover I had “a vocation”. Almost like, I owed Him.

I didn’t last but two years in the Juniorate in Smithtown, L.I. No regrets, though. It was an eye-opener living in the country for a City boy like myself. Maybe you can’t see a clear link from reading ‘Saint’ novels under the covers in Smithtown, L.I., to joining the NYPD (and it’s true I never had occasion to dispatch any bad guys)—but I see it, a dead-on connection down to becoming a criminal trials lawyer and, finally, a mystery author. Writing the novels and stories somehow imposes structure on the whole business whereas, in the event, I just put one foot in front of the other, keeping on.

When I was a rascally 20-year-old in the Army, flouting the rules in the fleshpots of Old San Juan and drawing short stints in the ‘brig’, a fellow English Language Instructor once asked me, genuinely concerned: “Don’t you ever think about goals?” I didn’t understand the question then, but would reply now that I was simply living, collecting experiences into a great compost heap of material, á la Jack London and my hero of that day, the Irish playwright Brendan Beehan. It worked out.

Robert Knightly

Oops! I Forgot to Pack my Brain

Shelly Reuben on herself: “I was born in Chicago and live now in Brooklyn and in Chenango County, NY. ‘Julian Solo’, my first novel, was nominated for the Edgar and Prometheus Awards. ‘Origin and Cause’ was nominated for a Falcon Award. I write a newspaper column for The Evening Sun and Huntington News.Net, and short stories for The Forensic Examiner. I have a pet ferret, and my latest book, ‘The Man With the Glass Heart,’ is a fable.”

I met Shelly in 1988 at 401 Broadway, a sturdy old office building just off Canal Street in Lower Manhattan stuffed full of lawyers and sundry other types none of whom you’d recognize by name. I knew Shelly from MWA. She and her husband, Charlie King, a retired Supervising Fire Marshal for the FDNY, operated their Fire Investigations business from an office on the seventh floor. I was a newly-minted lawyer/ex-cop so I’d heard of Charlie King in connection with a fatal fire in a supermarket in Brooklyn where six firemen died. I remembered the cops had arrested a suspect, extracted a confession, and got a conviction at trial. 

Then along came Charlie King who blew up their case by proving the true Origin and Cause of the fire, and got the innocent man freed from prison. Afterward, Charlie had no fans at the Office of the Brooklyn District Attorney or in the NYPD. It never fazed him. When I read Shelly’s arson novels–engrossing, dead-on forensic thrillers–the protagonist’s voice is Charlie’s and I’m back in their seventh-floor office listening to his stories of Fires Past and Good versus Evil.

Bob Knightly

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I met Supervising Fire Marshal Charlie King when I was researching a book about arson. Two years later, we got married and started our own company. I got a few P.I. licenses, learned how to dig out a fire scene, and became a private investigator.

My favorite fictional detective has always been Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, because of his emphasis on the importance of “little gray cells.” My favorite real life detective had always been my husband … for exactly the same reason.

Charlie was the go-to guy for almost every major fire in the country. He taught fire investigation for the Attorney General of the State of New Jersey; he investigated the MOVE fire for the City of Philadelphia; he wrote articles for Fire Engineering Magazine; he contributed the first-ever chapter on evidence preservation for the Fire Chief’s Handbook.

When I recall the hundred of fires I investigated with him, the thing that stands out most emphatically in my mind is the almost physical way Charlie had of mentally processing a fire. In my novel Origin and Cause, attorney Max Bramble describes a videotape of Wylie Nolan (Charlie) investigating a car fire:

“The video footage…would have put an insomniac to sleep. Wylie Nolan standing with his hands in his pockets; Wylie Nolan staring through the window of the driver’s seat; Wylie Nolan staring at the dashboard; Wylie Nolan staring at the trunk; Wylie Nolan staring at the license plate; Wylie Nolan kneeling beside the right rear tire and staring at what was left of the rim.

“…Before and during any cause and origin investigation, Wylie Nolan stares a lot. And he thinks. He observes burn patterns. He notices a patch of unburned gray leather here. He sees a deep scar in the fabric there. Staring. Thinking. Staring. Thinking.”

One time, in the frozen tundra of an incinerated Greek restaurant, I remember huddling in front of the heater inside our car while, for over an hour, Charlie stood in the collapsed kitchen, studying, observing, photographing, and thinking, thinking, thinking.

After Charlie died in 2003, I got my IAAI Certification as a fire investigator, became a court-qualified expert, and took over the company. In response to clients who asked, “Are you as good as Charlie was?” I would always answer, “Nobody was as good as Charlie.”

He had taught me how to investigate a fire, and he set the standards. Yes, I read fire investigation books and manuals and continue to do so. But I learned how to investigate fire scenes in real world settings, populated by victims, cops, firefighters, fire Investigators, insurance adjusters, insurance investigators, attorneys, and arsonists.

With the explosion in civil litigation, the methodologies of investigating, photographing, analyzing, and training fire investigation have become a Big Business. As a consequence, three things have been happening lately, and I don’t like any of them.

One is technology. Two is Testing. Three is teaching. In all three instances, instead of the focus being on using these tools to assist in the brainwork of fire investigation, the focus has been on using tools to the exclusion of brainwork all together.

Starting with technology, one major change is digital photography. I happen to like digital cameras. Particularly because I am a terrible photographer. Fortunately, if I take enough pictures (and I do), I am always able to accurately document the scene. I, of course, am not the only investigator taking pictures at a fire. Increasingly, however, I seem to be the only one who bothers to PRINT them.

Why is this a problem? Two reasons:

One is blind trust in technology – that the photographs saved on CDs and hard drives are going to be there forever, that the disks won’t fail, and that the computers won’t become obsolete. In terms of evidence preservation, to not make Kodak-quality prints of digital photographs is the equivalent of keeping a record of DNA test results, but throwing out the physical evidence. A print picture exists in tangible reality; it can be analyzed without using a machine; and it is durable.

Print photographs can also be arranged sequentially to recreate panoramas of fire scenes, and they can be incorporated with photos taken by other investigators to produce a more detailed panorama of what a room (vehicle or structure) looked like before the scene was altered.

Although digital photographs are helpful when we want to magnify and isolate certain aspects of an image on a computer screen, after they are saved on a CD (and if they are not printed), they are rarely looked at again.

Testing is another change I observe with keen distrust. In an attempt to quantify fire investigation and make it seem more “scientific,” many indicators long held by investigators to point to the origin and cause of a fire are now being treated with scorn. Laboratory tests are being conducted by chemists and engineers on every conceivable surface using every conceivable combination of materials to evaluate 'V’ patterns, flammable liquid burn patterns, drop down fire patterns, and so on.

The problem? These tests do not replicate the real world. A fire being fought during a blizzard in a 200-year-old barn is not the same as a fire being tested on 200-year-old barn board in a lab. Any seasoned firefighter will tell that if you break one window anywhere in a structure, every variable changes. In a lab setting, every variable is controlled, outcomes can be predicted, and tests can be stopped when a desired burn pattern is achieved – often serving to validate the testers’ hypothesis and confirm their findings.

The last change I want to mention is how fire investigation is being taught.

I recently took a course on appliance fires. In order to teach how an accidental fire could start in a stove, instructors erected a cubicle and tried to make the product fail at a designated point. However, when they could not get a fire to start at that location, instead of moving on to a different product, they stuffed paper towels down behind the stove, set them on fire, and said, “this is the way a fire looks when it originates at a faulty connection between a flexible tube and a gas pipe.”

WRONG. This is how a fire looks when it is set in paper towels behind a stove.

This same technique is used to teach vehicle fire investigation. If the instructor wants to show you an engine compartment fire, he will use a torch to ignite, let’s say, a carburetor, and announce, “this is what a carburetor fire looks like.”

WRONG. This what a fire looks like when someone ignites combustibles in the area of the carburetor.

In the name of technology, science, and expediency, instead of becoming more rigorously committed to reality, fire investigation is becoming sloppy. If Hercule Poirot were assessing the situation, he might cry, “Mon Dieu. They rush here. They rush there. But they do not use their little gray cells.”

It’s almost as if, when going to a fire scene, contemporary investigators remember to pack their cameras, their measuring devices, their evidence bags, and their lithium LED flashlights, but in their rush to write reports, initiate lawsuits, and satisfy clients, they forget to pack the most important tools that they have.

Their powers of observation. Their analytical prowess. Their faculty for inductive and deductive reasoning.

Alas!

Their brains.

Copyright © 2013, Shelly Reuben

The Espionage Thriller: Post-War and Post-9/11

Al and I have been friends for two decades; we met in a writer’s group (where else?) along with Theasa Tuohy. Being a newspaper man by profession, Al’s a fast writer and with an imagination that works at warp speed, he already has a back list awaiting publication. 

After serving with the Army overseas, Albert Ashforth worked for two newspapers. He is the author of three books, numerous stories and articles. His espionage thriller, THE RENDITION, was described by a reviewer as "smoothly written, fast-moving and suspenseful." He is a professor at SUNY and lives in New York City. -Robert Knightly

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The espionage novel is a relatively narrow literary genre, and as the world political situation over the last 70 years has gone from bad to worse and back again, the fortunes of the espionage novel have also see-sawed up and down – but with a difference. When the world’s political situation takes a turn for the worse, the situation of espionage novels takes a turn for the better. And vice-versa.

During the 1920’s the State Department established an office responsible for breaking codes and reading messages sent between other nation’s embassies and their capitals. It was our country’s first attempt to establish an intelligence agency. But when Henry L. Stimson, then Secretary of State, learned what the office was doing, he immediately had it closed down and famously said, “Gentlemen don’t read other gentlemen’s mail!”

Espionage novels could hardly be written in a time when national leaders regarded one another as gentlemen. Needless to say, things changed with the arrival on the world stage of Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin, both of whom began throwing their weight around during the 1930’s. It was hardly a coincidence that three early and successful writers of espionage novels, Eric Ambler, Helen MacIness and John Buchan, also emerged around this time.

Before the 1930’s, very few espionage thrillers were written, and it is easy to see why. In order to have spy novels you have to have spies, and the United States didn’t establish the OSS, the precursor of the CIA, until 1944. Something else you need is a tense international situation. You need a foreign government readers really dislike in order to make the gritty, distasteful job of spying acceptable. First Nazi Germany and then Communist Russia filled that bill very nicely. The Cold War provided both spies and a fierce rivalry, and as the United States and Russia competed against each other with every means at hand short of going to war, espionage – the KGB versus the CIA – was the obvious way to try and beat out your rival. The result was that the last six or seven decades have been a truly great time for the writers of international spy thrillers.

Although Ian Fleming’s charismatic James Bond is the best known intelligence agent of the Cold War years, John le Carré’s rather drab George Smiley is the most realistic.

Alex Klear, the hero of my novel, The Rendition, also began his career during the Cold War, and he is closer to Smiley than to Bond. He recalls spending much of his time doing the same gritty, dangerous job that many of our intelligence people stationed in Europe did during those years: recruiting and running spies behind the Iron Curtain. Although governments sanctimoniously maintain that the spies they recruit from the other side are motivated by ideological beliefs, the truth is that most come over because they’ve had their arms twisted – in other words, they’ve been blackmailed. Alex and his partner, Buck, often acting on information supplied by the National Security Agency, did the twisting, first recruiting and then running their agents for as long as they could provide useful information. But Alex, who is fluent in German and knows some Russian, finds he is an anachronism after November 1989, the month in which the Berlin Wall came tumbling down. With Russia no longer an enemy, Alex realizes he is no longer needed, and decides to retire.

Although the world cheered the disappearance of the Wall, which was the perfect symbol of Communist oppression, espionage writers didn’t. One espionage writer, Len Deighton, was forced to make last-minute changes to a novel about Berlin, Spy Sinker, but he wasn’t the only espionage writer caught by surprise by this sudden development. The blunt truth is, when world tensions decline, so do the fortunes of spy novelists. During the 1990’s, with borders now open and old rivals becoming trading partners, there were no jobs for spies and no enemies to justify the betrayals and dirty tricks which are part and parcel of espionage thrillers. During the 1990’s, espionage writers had to find new topics to write about.

But with the attack on the World Trade Center things changed yet again. Not since the demise of Hitler and Stalin have espionage writers had such a hated figure as Osama bin Laden. Once again, the end could justify the means, and we could again start opening each other’s mail.

In the years since 9/11, one development in particular has helped make espionage thrillers more popular and more significant. Our government has become tight-lipped. Although the public knows we are fighting a war on terror for which we are spending hundreds of billions, there is very little information about it in the newspapers. Savvy readers are discovering that one of the best sources for finding out what’s going on is the spy thriller, which can take them places even newspaper correspondents can’t go.

For example: Let’s suppose the American ambassador to Afghanistan were to meet with President Karzai to discuss some kind of crisis. If news people are denied access, they can only report that the meeting took place. They can’t make up quotes or write anything they don’t know to be true. The writer of fiction, however, can imagine what the two men might have spoken about and describe a stormy exchange with the president raising his voice and the ambassador storming out of the palace. If the writer has done his job well, he might well have given a roughly accurate representation of what actually happened, and there is nothing to prevent him from connecting the meeting to a subsequent real political development which might involve his hero and heroine. And he could go on from there. The thriller writer is limited only by his imagination and his knowledge of the topic.

And believe me, most thriller writers are experts in the areas they write about.

Since the publication of The Rendition, I have had any number of people ask me, “Say, what is a rendition anyway? Isn’t that when somebody sings a song?”

Well, it used to be, but now the term has an additional meaning, one coined by our intelligence agencies probably because of its lack of either good or evil connotations.

Since 9/11, our government has unleashed a bag of dirty tricks aimed at making life miserable for those who would do us harm. One trick involves kidnapping a terrorist from a foreign country where he might be strolling around openly and enjoying life to the fullest, secure in the belief he is beyond the reach of the American government. A “rendition” takes place when the terrorist, against his will, is snatched off the street or perhaps even grabbed in his home, as one target actually was. In all likelihood, he is transported to a nation friendly to the United States, where he is subjected to “enhanced interrogation,” which means his captors use methods for extracting information that are not permissible in the United States or under the Geneva Convention. Probably the friendly nation passes this information back to us, and we go after more terrorists.

Although Secretary Stimson would be in shock were he to see what’s going on today, we thriller writers are in seventh heaven. In addition to carrying out renditions, our government attacks other nations with drones, hacks into other nations’ computer systems and conducts “black ops.”

When the government doesn’t want to be held responsible for undertaking certain kinds of dirty tricks, it sometimes sanctions a “black” operation, in other words an operation that lacks all traces of government involvement. This is fine as long as things go smoothly, but when they go awry and the government invokes “plausible denial,” it’s nearly always our intelligence officers who find themselves holding the bag. In such cases, they have roughly the same standing with a foreign government that a bounty hunter might have -- in other words, none -- and this is the predicament in which Alex finds himself when the rendition he is involved in goes off the rails.

In the course of the story, Alex bugs a phone, breaks into someone’s home, helps a guy escape jail and of course takes part in a couple of renditions. Although under Secretary Stimson’s definition, he would hardly qualify as a “gentleman,” he makes the grade as a warrior and a survivor.

Albert Ashforth

The Truth about Fiction

I was in the writers group with Theasa Tuohy as she wrote and rewrote and wrote again ‘The Five O’Clock Follies’, her debut novel of the Vietnam War from the viewpoint of a female correspondent with her boots on the ground. The writing is so visceral and detailed that through freelance journalist Angela Martinelli, you stew in the caldron of Saigon — benumbed by the boredom of waiting for the next lead, then dropped into the chaos of the Tet Offensive and the Seige of Khe Sanh. 
Amazingly, Ms. Tuohy did not experience the War first hand: you’d not think that from her narration.
 – Robert Knightly

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This business about truth is confusing. Novels should be truer than life? Heightened reality? I spent my early working life as a daily journalist, and truth was truth and facts were facts. And anyone who strayed from that was soon on the carpet, or more likely out the door. Or should I say, anyone who got caught. So when I began struggling to write my first novel – set in Vietnam, of all places – I did one whale of a lot of research. I didn't have to research the main character's dilemma: She was a journalist in the late 1960s trying to prove to the all-male cast of characters that she could do the work. I'd been there done that, all I had to do was teach myself about Vietnam and the "American" war. And as I got rejection after rejection on my early novelistic attempts, I couldn't grasp the meaning behind the comments.

They all were a variation on the same theme: The setting, the characters were mesmerizing, spellbinding, couldn't-put-it-downable. So why didn't they want to buy my book? Because the story didn't work.

I had a hard row to hoe, to figure out how one makes fiction real, breathing of life, yet … what's that extra magic ingredient? At one point, my novel, published this month as "The Five O'Clock Follies," was called "How the Weather Was." I guess I'm into obscure titles, no one knows what "Follies" means either. That's what the reporters in Saigon called the 5 p.m. daily press briefings held there by the military. The "Weather" title came from Hemingway: "All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened … the people and the places and how the weather was."

That's what I was trying to do: Let the reader get a feel, know what it was like to be under fire one minute and drunk at the Continental Bar the next. How the weather was for an unsung hero with notebook and pen or camera. Someone who wasn't drafted, could go home whenever he or she wanted, but was inexplicably there anyway.

I journeyed to a writers workshop one summer at "Sewanee," the University of the South, because Tim O'Brien (“Going After Cacciato”) was there. I didn't find my answer to what was wrong with my "story," but did get a pink T-shirt with an O'Brien quote printed in black on its back: "Just because it never happened, doesn't mean it isn't true." He later said that he never said that, or was misquoted, or something, but I've still got the T-shirt. And am still trying to puzzle out how to answer the question of what is "true" fiction. I think I've learned the answer in my bones, or typing fingers, perhaps, but still not at all clear how to articulate it.

"Follies" is totally historically accurate. The reporter in me made sure of that – the date of every battle, the number of bullet holes in the fuselage of a C-130 limping back from the siege of Khe Sanh, the view from the window of the Givral Cafe across the street from the Continental Hotel. I still have the creased and crumpled copy of a map of 1968 downtown Saigon. I photocopied it from "Big Story," a 529-page tome published by Yale University Press written on a grant by a former newsman, Peter Braestrup. He basically set out to document that the press had caused the loss of the war for the U.S. by overreacting during the Tet Offensive. I didn't realize until sometime later that I was reading the abridged version. Gad, one can only imagine how detailed the two volumes must have been.

I only point this out as documentation that I very well did my research. I read everything I could get my hands on about the war. Strange thing, no one had written fiction about the press and what their daily lives were like. The fiction was all written by grunts, by GIs. The press detailed their experiences as memoir, or reporting. If nothing else, I have filled a hole, a fictionalized account of those undocumented scribes. When I finally travelled to Vietnam some years later to double check my research, I had a bit of a set-to with a guide. When he pointed out what he said was the Opera House, I blurted out without thinking how rude it sounded: "No, that's not the Opera House, it's the National Assembly building." Fortunately, we'd been touring together for several days, and he knew my mission, and just laughed. "You might be right," he said, "that's probably what it was in 1968. But I'm too young to remember."

One critic, Charlene, said: “I had a hard time believing this was a fictional book, as the writing and detail were so great."

I've heard it said that you can't teach talent, I don't know about that. But it's clear to me that it took a long time for me to learn what makes a news "story" different from "true" fiction. I've since finished a second novel and begun a third. It feels like I've finally grasped the concept.

-Theasa Tuohy