Just pure action and suspense
For the past week or so, the main sales channel for Death of Secrets has been people in Helena buying copies locally. Which just causes me to say, I live in a great community! My friends and colleagues have really supported this book. It’s because of them that the launch of Life of Secrets will definitely be funded.
Thanks God, for putting such great people around me.
Republicans, if they want to be intellectually honest, must admit that the NSA surveillance state began under Bush.
Democrats, if they want to be intellectually honest, must admit that the NSA surveillance state has grown far out of control under Obama.
I think that’s why the issue plays so odd politically — both sides of the aisle share the blame. Perhaps that’s why everyone claims they agree but nothing seems to get done.
So once Death of Secrets was launched and selling, the next challenge was picking out a manuscript to use next. I originally planned to use my fantasy novel. But then, scrolling through my hard drive filled with 20 years of trying to be a novelist, I happened upon a few incomplete chapters about a character I find absolutely fascinating. They were pretty infested with the old Bowen, but as I read them it became more and more apparent that I could salvage them.
The character is completely new, and not connected to Death of Secrets in any way. But it’s another political novel, and very incomplete. So Mike Vincent, D.W. Tilman, and other characters from Death of Secrets can pretty easily be integrated.
The most interesting possibility there is D.W. Tilman. In Death of Secrets, he’s a man whose political career was destroyed when a Presidential campaign he was working on needed a scapegoat for a scandal.
In Life of Secrets, we need one of the characters to be a Presidential campaign staffer who creates a minor scandal. This should be fun!
I’m committed. I saw that there were no books with this title in the first page of search results on Amazon.com. Shocked — since it seems like such a good title someone else would have used it by now — I went to look at domain names. The .com domain name wasn’t taken either. So I bought it.
That’s it. Done deal. The Sequel/prequel to Death of Secrets will be called Life of Secrets.
I’ve posted a free sample chapter of Death of Secrets here on the blog. Check it out!
Death of Secrets took either seven months or thirteen years to write, depending on how you look at it.
I first wrote the book in 2001. I wrote it in about seven months. And I had no success in finding an agent or a publisher for it. None. So it sat on my hard drive, and every so often I would open the file and tweak the manuscript.
Then, in 2014, I was really feeling like it was a good idea to return to my writing. I opened Death of Secrets and started updating it for the modern age.
For a sequel, I’ve done the same thing. I opened back up a manuscript I had from the old days, and started updating it for the modern age.
The main thing I notice, looking back on my writing from those days, is how much more profane I was. The original manuscripts were laced with language to make a sailor blush. Cleaning that up has been one of the main jobs.
In Death of Secrets, cleaning up some of Kathy’s ethical choices had to be done as well. I remember one particular location in Death of Secrets, where my editing note was simply, “Kathy shouldn’t lie.” Back in the old days, telling a “little white lie” about where she had been was the simplest way for her to solve a problem, so she did it. The new Kathy would invest in the harder way, rather than lie.
All across the Internet, people are protesting today about the electronic surveillance conducted by the National Security Agency. They’re calling it #StopTheNSA. Since my novel is all about the dangers of upcoming technology and mass electronic surveillance, I could hardly pass up the chance to join in.
So, today only, Death of Secrets is free on Amazon in e-book format!
We need a boundary. We need a line where society and the government stop, and “this is my life, butt out!” begins. We don’t all draw that line in the same place. But I think most of us would draw it somewhere before our phone calls. We need to end the era of our government storing data on every phone call we make, and every e-mail we send.
I hope Death of Secrets can help do that. But more, I hope America can do that.
I’m about 37,000 words into my second novel. The plan calls for it to be published in June.
It’s another political suspense thriller. What sets it apart from Death of Secrets is that it will be much more character driven, whereas I would call Death of Secrets plot driven. When writing Death of Secrets, if I needed the characters to take an action, usually the question I asked myself was “what can be thrown in their path that will make that action necessary.”
In the new novel, the question is far more often, “Why would she do that? How would she react to this?”
The novel is to feature characters from Death of Secrets, but mostly in supporting roles. I hope to be introducing a new main character who’s a lot more “action hero” oriented than any so far. The idea of Death of Secrets was to take ordinary everyday people and drop them into the middle of a deadly conspiracy.
The idea of the new novel is to take a highly competent, highly trained individual and put her in the middle of the same kind of deadly conspiracy.
This is not set in stone by any means, but a couple titles I’m kicking around are “Life of Secrets” or “Upper Chambers.”
The great thing about electronic privacy as an issue is that it meets so many of my own political goals.
It’s about defining the boundary where authority lies between an individual and his government. That means, by speaking out about surveillance I get to work for liberty.
It’s an issue where Democrats and Republicans agree. So when I speak about it, it’s a great opportunity to promote mutual respect in American politics. I want to see a different political environment, where people don’t get rich for calling each other names and making fun of each other. I want to see an environment where people prosper and are fulfilled by respectfully advocating for their beliefs.
That’s why my first published novel is about electronic surveillance — or at least one reason.
In the late 18th century, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay wrote a series of letters advocating for ratification of the new U.S. Constitution (the one we now live under). Today known as “The Federalist Papers,” they began their lives as letters to the editor or flyers. The great men who wrote them later served in many high offices of the government they helped to form, up to and including the Presidency.
But when they wrote “The Federalist,” they did it anonymously. The letters were published under the pen name “Publius.”
They were detailed, they were philosophical, they were precise. The articles which appeared under the name Publius made academic, evidence-based, literate arguments. They survive today as one of the great classics of political theory.
Anonymity once served to elevate the American political debate from the mundane to the sublime.
Today, anonymous bloggers and commenters are known mostly for name-calling and profanity.
Whatever has changed about our culture, that turned anonymity from a grace to a curse, is something that we should try to change back.