RESEARCHING A NOVEL IN THE ANALOG AGE

Wow. Has it really been almost three years since we posted a blog? I hope you might cut us a little slack since we’ve spent that time crafting the 500-page, 187,000-word novel Straight Up. This sequel, and its predecessor On the Rocks are both now available through Amazon Kindle. Of course, if you’re reading this, then you already know that.

Now that Straight Up is complete, and even though we have started work on the concluding third book in the trilogy No Chaser, we are still in our “good-idea-ooh-ooh-better-yet” phase of laying down the outline and there should be some more free time post a blog or two.

First, a confession (looking around conspiratorially): Straight Up is a slightly better novel. Oh, I’m not bashing On the Rocks. They’re both terrific. My observation is more along the lines of saying that Godfather II is slightly better than The Godfather. Yeah, I said it. Fight me. There are a few reasons for Straight Up taking my top slot. Firstly, 30 years of life experience has simply made Doug and I better writers. On the Rocks was originally written around 1990. When we revised it in 2018 there was a good amount of tweaking, but the book offered today remains mostly unchanged, warts and all.

Another big factor was our ability to do research. Allow an old man to lecture you on what it was like to research an adventure novel in the analog age. I used a Brother word processor that stored my work on 3.5-inch floppy discs. Doug used an early Tandy PC that he got from RadioShack. It stored work on 5.5-inch floppy discs. We used WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS. That was all cutting edge back then and the World Wide Web we know today simply didn’t exist.

We set our story in Seattle and the Puget Sound area. A good call as we both lived there at the time. This meant we simply toured the areas we would use in the book. Gasworks Park, The Ballard Locks, the Capitol Hill neighborhood. You can see images of this research in our website’s gallery. The more fanciful concepts, such as a mothballed aircraft carrier re-purposed as a floating speakeasy required a ferryboat ride to the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard in Bremerton. This allowed us to observe and photograph such ships. Oh, of course we weren’t allowed on that base, but the photos we snapped from a distance helped us get a sense of scale and detail. Looking back, we must have come across as commie spies. We were lucky not to have been arrested. We drove as far as Vancouver in Canada, where a very nice air taxi company allowed us tour around and climb inside a working Grumman Goose. Sitting in the pilot’s seat helped me immensely. Again, there are pictures in the gallery. While in Vancouver we were able to get up close to a docked Canadian warship and get photos of the close point Bofors air defense machine guns and other features we could work into our book. On the way back when we were stopped at Customs, the guy asked if we had anything to declare. I leaned over from the passenger seat and said (with a Russian accent) “Well, were not from the KGB anyway.” The guy smirked and sent us on our way, but Doug chewed me out all the way to Bellingham. “What if they’d have confiscated our cameras? Seaplanes, Navy destroyers, aircraft carriers? We’d be in prison for espionage!”

But I digress.

Sitka, Alaska proved to be a little trickier. Neither of us had the money to travel there. To research that city, we had to go to (wait for it) a public library. Encyclopedias, travel magazines and even (again, wait for it) the Sitka telephone book helped us a lot. I even wrote to the Sitka Chamber of Commerce and the good people there sent us a Care package full of street maps, newspapers and all the travel brochures you typically find in a motel lobby.

Originally On the Rocks took place 30 in the future. What would that future look like? Ours was gleaned from the glossy paper pages of Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, and Omni magazines. The Navy’s advances in stealth tech were featured more than once in these periodicals. The hydrofoil Sea Shadow was already in operation (though never commissioned), but the Zumwalt-class destroyers weren’t even on the drawing board yet, so we used a mix of fact and fiction in describing Romanov’s fleet. Guns & Ammo magazine helped us sound knowledgeable about the various weapons our characters used. We also spent an afternoon at a gun range in Mountlake Terrace, where we rented some 9mm handguns and fired off a box of ammo so we could experience the heft of the pistol, feel the kick, and to an extent, hear the sound through our ear protection. We even managed to hit the target a few times.

So, as you can see, On the Rocks might come off a little more fanciful than its sequel Straight Up. But researching a book was more challenging back then. It was a different age. A veritable Stone Age. An Analog Age.

Oh, and we ate Mastodon burgers for lunch.