Author Review: John Ringo, Part 3, the Thrillers. (Still, with Free Books.)

Here we go again.



As mentioned, John Ringo has written a LOT in the past decade.  He's only been writing since 1999, but he's been pumping out almost three to four books a year ever since.



However, despite the previous posts, he hasn't written only political-heavy science-fiction and fantasy novels. But, they're all published by Baen, so they're still free for download.



To start with there's this one character of his who's a navy SEAL ....

The Paladin of Shadows (series)

.... This one is odd.

Ghost --- This first book is made of a series of three vignettes, and stars one Mike Harmon, a veteran who is not a very nice person, but he does qualify as a good man. Ringo opens this book with a quote from George Orwell -- We sleep soundly in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to do violence on our behalf.



Mr. Harmon is one such rough person.



“Ghost” is the code name of former Navy SEAL Mike Harmon. Trapped on a far-left college campus, the veteran feels isolated and discriminated against. But when he sees a co-ed being kidnapped, he charges in to save the day, only to find himself in the middle of a terrorist plot that takes him all the way to Syria, where he lands in the middle of a terrorist stronghold, and eighty hostages, all of whom are slated to die.



The second vignette... skim it. Trust me.  It's a thirty thousand word story that's twenty thousand words of bondage porn and deep-sea fishing.



Vignette three finds Harmon in Eastern Europe, and he finds himself hip deep in a plot to nuke Paris.



Kildar—Harmon, still moving through Eastern Europe, finds himself trapped in the middle of a valley during a snowstorm. He buys lodging to hold up in during the winter, but this new home comes with an interesting piece of real estate -- the entire valley.  The home also comes with a title for the owner.  The title is Kildar.



However, Harmon still has a problem.  The Valley is in the middle of a pathway for Chechen terrorists killing everyone in their way. Now, Ghost has to train the locals to stop the invaders, or else everyone is going to die.



Unfortunately for the Chechens, killing is what Ghost does best.



Choosers of the Slain: A US Senator has a problem.  The daughter of a major money donor has been disappeared into the Balkan sex slave trade.  Here's five million dollars, could Harmon and his merry band of mountain warriors do something about the matter?



And when Ghost and company discover that some of the clientele in this sex trade happen to be from Washington D.C. ... well, there's a reason I picked up certain songs from this author.



And, there's a reason that the cover looks like the movie poster for a James Bond film.



Unto the Breach.  After the incident with the slave trade, people in Washington figure that Mike "Ghost" Harmon is a great person to call upon when the situation is both dire, and politically inconvenient.



This time, a scientist has been kidnapped by terrorists.  The problem?  He's an expert in biological warfare.



And that's not even the problem.   The problem is when the terrorists follow Harmon home, back into the valley he has lived in for years. But the local people are warriors by culture, and by blood, and they've been itching for a good fight. And all Hell breaks loose.



Remember when I mentioned where I first heard Dragonforce?  This was the book.





A Deeper Blue.





Biological weapon at Disneyland, with a shootout at the Holy Rodent Empire.



I think that's all you need to know for this one. It was fun.













The Last Centurion. I'm still not sure what to make of this one. To start with, this is a non-Mike Harmon novel.  Technically, it's science fiction, but only because it's set a few years into the future.  The United States has invaded Iran, beaten it, and is still there, even though President "the Bitch" has ordered a half-asses withdrawal. This book was published in 2008, so you can guess who he means.  The world has been hit with a global pandemic, the Earth is in crisis, and American army officer "Bandit Six" is trapped in the middle of Iran, with no support, no help, and the only way out is through the hostile territories of six countries..



This is a heavily political novel.  Ringo WANTS to piss off everyone with SOMETHING in this book—he didn't piss me off, but I'm odd. It's a one-shot, and written in blog format, with all that the genre entails. It was written in early 2008, before Swine Flu, the rise of Obama, and the first 100 pages, you will NOT know what's going on... okay maybe you will, but it took me a few pages to get into this one. He shoots at Fox news, environmentalists, the army, the peaceniks ... pick someone, he shoots at them.

O Little Town of Bethlehem, A Christmas Story.

Sean A.P. Ryan -- mercenary, madman, and enthusiastic worker of mayhem -- has a rigorous interrogation of an arms dealer in New York.  Information changes hands, and the clock starts ticking down to Christmas Eve.  Bethlehem is about to have a very bad Christmas, unless someone can stop it.



But the terrorists have a bold, creative mastmind behind this plan.  And nobody can stop what he has in mind. 



Thankfully, there are plenty of Nobodies on call.



For the record:  I may have gotten too colorful with the scene breaks -- Scribd can't seem to decide whether or not to show them, so I've tried to fix them. Hopefully, it'll stay fixed.



Enjoy.





O Little Town of Bethlehem

Writing A Pius Man, part 4: Selling yourself.

A Pius Man was done. The time had come. Sell the book to... anyone, really.



For those of you who have never researched how a book goes from the pen of the author to the hands of the reader, a quick sketch of the process.



Agents represent the author. 

Their mission: sell your book to a publisher for the highest possible value. Agents make between 10%-15% of the money the author gets. Which isn't bad work if you're the agent for Stephen King. Having 10% of however many millions of books sold adds up to real money. However, 10% of a ten thousand dollar advance isn't much, and ten thousand isn't a common opening bid for an advance on a book.



Advances are made by the publisher, and tend to be broken up into three parts: signing with the publisher, the arrival of the first draft; prompt delivery of the final draft. The publisher is the one that buys the book from you. That's where the money comes from, that's how the book is distributed.



Editors work for the publisher, and goes over the manuscript with a fine tooth comb. They are generally the people who are the feelers for the book. The agents have to cultivate contacts, pitch the book to editors, convincing them to at least look at it.



Simple, right? The author pitches to an agent. The agent pitches the book to an editor in a publishing company. The editor pitches the book to the company s/he works for. The publisher sells the book to you, the audience. The agent doesn't make money until the author does. The publisher doesn't make money until the books fly off the shelves.



But wait, there's more.







Agents act as a filtering mechanism for editors. If an author comes with his own agent, he has passed the first line of defense. There has to be something marketable about the book, otherwise, a good agent wouldn't be bothered with it. An agent would certainly not touch a first time author's book with a ten foot pole unless it was pretty darn good. Consider it this way—the agent only gets approximately 10% of what the author does, and an unknown author (barring a celebrity) has no selling value by themselves. The book had better be good.



And the editors need the filter. Editors have agents pitching manuscripts at them constantly. There are some stories about editors having a seven course meal for lunch, and with each new course came a new agent, and each agent has multiple books to pitch.



And then, editors have to sort through all of the suggested manuscripts pitched in order to select those that would actually be read. Then an editor has to read all of them. Usually, these are samples of fifty pages and a synopsis, but that's still a lot when you consider their already busy life.



And these editors, after sorting through what projects they think will sell, then have to pitch it up the chain of command.



Welcome to publishing. For any first time author, there are two levels of filtering between you and the top of the food chain.



In my case, after two and a half years of discovering that academic politics and I were not compatible, I started to query agent, publishers, editors, and everyone short of personal secretaries. I would be published by hook or by crook. After three months of querying, I had hooked one.



Enter “Josh.” My first agent. He liked the birth name of the Pope—Joshua Kutjok—and liked the premise. However, the ending to “book one” was a little flat. In the original novel, I wrapped up the henchmen, and let the main villain get away without a confrontation at the end. The only change I made was a one page epilogue after wrapping up the support network.



Josh had a good idea. I had gotten lazy after marking down where the books would separate. I had slapped on something that barely even looked like an end—and did everything but have a “To Be Continued” in great big letters at the end.



So, time to play around.



It was surprisingly easy to rewrite. In a matter of days, I had it all worked out, and succeeded in blowing up parts of Leonardo Da Vinci airport.



Fast forward a year. Stuff happens. Josh is too busy to represent me. No harm, no duck. Time to find another agent. And back to the drawing board on A Pius Man. When in doubt, edit further.



I came to the conclusion that I still had too many people. In the first book, I had Giovanni Figlia, the Secret Service Agent, the Egyptian cop, the Interpol Agent, the crazy mercenary, the sinister priest, the Pope, and two spies. Nine characters already—I already had the opening cast of the Lord of the Rings, and book two had even more to come. Granted, some of them would be dead in short order, but still, character clutter—but I still needed to take out people IN ADDITION to those I had already shot, stabbed, and blown up.



After looking through book two (tentatively titled A Pius Legacy), I looked for the person who had the fewest amount of lines. Who could disappear from the book with no problem at all? I found one character who had been mentioned a whopping half a dozen times. Suddenly, upon a review of A Pius Man, this character had a shiny new target on their back.



Rewriting done, it was time to hit the queries again. I went to www.everyonewhoisanyone.com and... I stopped just short of spamming. When there was a fully detailed website for the agents listed, I looked them over, tailored my query letter to their specific tastes, and sent it off. I literally sent out over a hundred query letters in a dense cluster. If there was contact information without any details or specifics, that agent got a standard boilerplate query—the type no one would recommend sending. But I was going to get their attention.



The week before my birthday, 2009, I get a call. An agent wanted my book. He didn't even send me an email, he just called my house directly. We talked for an hour about my book, marketing, tactics of selling it; he understood what I wanted to do with it, and the two sequels, and liked it all.



Within eight months of Josh's busy schedule messing around with my life, I was signed with another agent.



And the then entire publishing industry was slapped with Mjolnir.



Some people—many of them on the New York Times board of editors—blames the publishing industry itself. They never adapted to new technologies. Kindle sideswiped them and they didn't keep up. Random House “expanded like crazy, despite the rising prices of books—both paperbacks and hardcovers,” and supposedly axed ten thousand people in one month of 2008. According to authors at Dragoncon last year, the Star Trek novels have gone through three editors in one year, and the entire department has been downsized; the Star Trek novels contract renewal date is coming up, and as of September, renewal hasn't even been discussed yet.



And, guess what, fiction has been hit especially hard.



Oh, lucky me.

How A Pius Man came to be: Part 3. Writing

Part three: The Creative process—AKA: Writing the darn thing.

During a winter break, I had gone through great pains to finish my thesis. It had been more or less a cultural analysis of Irish Rebel songs, which, like my books, had a lot of property damage, and fighting, with merry and bouncy tunes and boy, were these people having way too much fun.







That made up three credits of a semester where I had only two other classes, and no social life. The paper was mostly finished before the semester had even begun. I was even more finished when I pounded out two term papers before the first month was out.



What part of “no social life” do you not understand?



I started writing A Pius Man in February, 2004. I was finished with it by April. There were a lot of nights where I was up until three in the morning. The story wouldn't get out of my head or leave me alone. For the first time in my life, instead of making it up when I went along, I did an outline. I drew sketches and diagrams.



The sad part is, I kept footnoting the darned thing.



And it all came naturally to me. Two spies would follow the lead of a dead terrorist looking in the Vatican archives, and discover yet another dead researcher from the archives—a crime investigated by Giovanni Figlia. They would have to find Giovanni Figlia and his entourage from the Secret Service and the Egyptian police. And with modern technology, it was easy for the spies to know what the primary investigators were doing. “Sinister looking priest #1” would have to keep up as well, to make certain that nothing inconvenient would be discovered. The Interpol cop from Ireland would have to fly in and confirm that all this was, yes, linked together to Pope Pius XII.



And, thanks to maps on the internet, I can make the bus terminal arriving from the airport be one point on a straight line from the Vatican to the Spanish steps.



Should any of my other books see the light of day, you'll note that I have a pattern of property damage at public places. A gunfight in a science fiction convention; a battle at the Cloisters; a shootout at a Fireworks factory in Long Island; the Muir woods in San Francisco; a hostage situation at a Barnes and Noble bookstore; a chase with MacGyver moments in CostCo. Been there, done that, blown it up.



And for some reason, I couldn't get one image out of my head—an armored SUV going down the Spanish steps.



After that, the characters had to connect the dots, do the research, find a personal connection to the situation, and most of all—what is worth killing over for a secret over sixty years old? No offense to anyone on any side of the “debate,” but if someone proved that Pope Pius XII was a Nazi, or that he was a hero, who would kill for that?



End result: the book was eight hundred pages long. Two hundred thousand words, when the average novel was only one hundred thousand. And I had brought in EVERY, SINGLE, CHARACTER I had ever written, over a dozen books, excluding the science fiction ones. Because what had started with a simple and straightforward murder turned into an all out war, and I needed every person I could conceive of to support what protagonists I had standing. A very small army of light against a large army of darkness, and I didn't even have Sam Raimi.



From 2004-2007, there were several variations on the story. The first had an additional character. One had a character introduced from the very beginning who was used to bring in most of the history; he didn't disappear, but he was shifted. One version took out about 50% of the story and made it around five hundred pages.



Then there was the easy version. Split it up into three books. One character gets deleted, one gets transferred into book two, several sequences get shifted so that the character moments aren't all in one place or another, and ta da, instant trilogy.



Two major plot points in the story became a matter of what intelligence agencies call “blowback.” When someone fires a gun, gunpowder residue gets on the shooter's clothing, even though the gun is pointed away from the shooter.



In the world of intelligence, blowback means that an operation has come back to bite you on the ass: either an assassination went wrong and the target wants to return the favor; some dictator dislikes you blowing up his favorite weapons research facility and would like to bury you, that sort of thing.



If I used the blowback as the basis for completely different books, then dang, book one is only over a hundred thousand words. Excellent. Fill in details and character in books two and three, not to mention “previously, in A Pius Man” moments that I can use to pad the book.... or keep the audience up to speed. Either way....



And then, after all this was done, it was time for the hardest part of all. I had to sell it.



After all, it was only one book, being marketed to a publishing industry that was swamped with hundreds of manuscripts per day, manned by people who had to slog through this slush of paper.



How hard could it be?




Don't ask.

How A Pius Man Came to be: An essay in five parts

How “A Pius Man” came to be: Part 1

I read a book once....



Anyone who knows me is aware that this isn't new.



However, it was written by an author who I had just gotten into. I was a history major, it was a history book written by someone who taught philosophy and wrote novels on occasion. It was on Pope Pius XII and his history during the holocaust—essentially: what did he do, what did he know, and when did he know it.



The interesting thing is that it was less of a researched book and more like a composite collection of primary documents. The major source was from a book written in the 1960s from an Israeli Diplomat to the Vatican, who had also fought in World War II with the British. The second collection of sources were from contemporary newspapers. Most specifically, the New York Times.



Okay. Interesting book.



Two months later, I started a graduate course called the History of Total War. The term paper was supposed to be about the events of a major conflict.... Hmm, let's work on Pius XII. I read one book, time to work on another.



And it was insane.



The primary material all pointed to one, glaring and obvious conclusion. Everything written from the 1940s-1960s pointed in one direction. Testimony from Jews in the camps, in Rome, in positions of power within the global community, the newspapers, the books by journalists, the books by diplomats in Rome, even statements and documents from the Nazi hierarchy pointed one way and one way only.



Then we hit the 1960s, and everything from the previous twenty years was chucked down the memory hole so fast, you would have thought Rod Serling had put it as a twist to a Twilight Zone episode.



Since then, we've had a “debate.” One side believes that Pope Pius XII either: did nothing about the Holocaust; said nothing about the Holocaust; or was actively responsible for the Holocaust. On the other side, you have folks who think Pius XII was a saint, spoke out against the Holocaust, acted against it, was a grand spymaster. In the middle—and there are few in the middle—refer to him as “cautious and prudent.”



Along the way, I came across authors who were not historians. I've come across people who had used proven forgeries from criminals convicted for the forgeries used as “evidence” in this debate. I've even come across historians who had done jail time for publishing their lies. And I've come across some deliberate liars: for example, one idiot said that “X person should have done Y thing”... but cited articles where it was STATED that X did Y, making the author either brain dead or a liar.



One of the most interesting things about this is why I refer to it as a “debate,” in quotes. One side of this conflict doesn't acknowledge the other. One side will take the opposition's statements and theories, vivisect them with a scalpel, the end result looking like shredded wheat, and the second side acts as though there are no alternate theories, interpretations or evidence.



And some of these people are hilarious. Both sides have biases. Cynthia Ozick, for example, is an eighty year old Jew who thought that nuns would kidnap and convert her when she was young, and her opinion hasn't changed much. St. Margherita Marcchione is a Catholic nun. John Cornwell hates his father, his seminary, his country, jumped over the wall of the priesthood in Britain (for which he has my sympathy), and more or less hates Church theology, the entire hierarchy, and possibly every Catholic. James Carroll wants the Catholic church to become the Unitarians. Though there is one lawyer from Missouri with a degree in history—I'm not sure where his bias comes in.



Anyway, by the time I was finished reading both sides, I thought it was fairly clear who was right. Hell, I had enough primary documents to work on that alone. I left motivations alone, because I wasn't going to break out my Ouija board and try to have a séance with a dead pope to ask him what he was feeling or thinking at the time. These are the actual events; to the best of our knowledge, this is what happened, and this is how the people reacted to it AT THE TIME.



For example, Mit Brennender Sorge, a papal encyclical condemning Fascism, released by Pope Pius XI, was unequivocally pointed at the Nazis. How do we know this? Well, check the title. Most encyclicals are written in Latin. This was written in German, not Italian, not Spanish. No one was going to mess with the translation when it hit Germany's borders. It had to be smuggled into the country after it had been banned from the press. When the Hitler Youth beat up parishioners coming out of church, attacked priests, went after Catholic groups, and banned the encyclical all together, one can possibly conclude that the Nazis took it personally.



The average reader is probably looking at the above paragraph and thinking “this guy needed a masters degree for that sort of thing? Duh.” The average reader would be right. No, I wasn't going for high intellectual value. Much of the paper was a plain, simple, narrative telling of events, and many of the conclusions were as “duh” worthy as the above paragraph.



Anyway....



I won't tell you the name of the book that started this whole mess. But after I finished the paper, it was good night and good luck. End of Fall semester.



Then came some of the other books. Novels where the history was so bad, it was painful to read. “What sort of idiot thinks Churchill was a Catholic?”



Or “An entire convent of nuns commit mass murder, and can keep their mouths shut with that secret for sixty years? What?”



And there was The Da Vinci Code. Yes, you know I had to get there. That anyone was getting their history from it was... interesting.



It had been a theory of my family for years that we are better informed by our fiction reading than by our news media.



Tom Clancy had airplanes running into buildings in the early 1990s.



David Hagberg sent his protagonist assassin after Osama bin Laden before anyone considered bombing him.



Dale Brown, in 1990, came up with unmanned aerial drones armed with missiles—twelve years before predator drones armed with Hellfire missiles started wiping out terrorists.



But people were getting their history from fiction? And they were getting it from a man who wanted to be a songwriter when he grew up, took one art history course, and whose major was in literature. Huh.



Did that inspire me on a rampaging crusade? Sadly, no. Didn't care. It was an odd little book, and even ignoring the “history,” I didn't find it entertaining. In fact, I prefer James Rollins as far as historical puzzles go—he gives me some grounding in why he's saying what he's saying. Simply, Dan Brown just wasn't fun for me. My problem, no one else's.



Then I read a completely different novel, also using historical events as a background to the primary action. Premise... nothing new, really. Evil Nazi Catholic church, blah blah, snore. Okay, so what? Big deal.... But, hmm, wait, I know that character's name. It's historical. I know that name too. Hmm....



Skip to the back of the book to read the author's note, which collected the works used to create that novel. I had normally assumed that this author had read one side of the argument, and wrote another evil Catholic church story based on that. But, no, I had read these books. All of them. He had done his homework, and had completely and utterly come to the wrong conclusion, directly contradicting details that both sides agreed on, then saying it was true. I could take it if he had just said “I'm writing fiction, not commenting on a historical debate.” But he took a side and lied about facts that everyone agreed on.



Dominoes fell in my brain. People not only read this crap, they believed this crap. Most readers would have almost no intellectual background to separate the wheat from the chaff (seriously, how many people have history degrees focusing on the religious and cultural activities of Europe in World War II?)



My reaction was somewhere akin to the quote of the eminent physician and research scientist, Doctor Bruce Banner. Hulk smash.



Fine. Simple. Easy. Two could play at this game. If people got their history from entertainment, I would take up the strangest project ever imagined. I would write a thriller that was (a) thrilling, (b) factually accurate about the Catholic Church in the Holocaust.



Now how the HELL was I going to do that?