Posted on 02/15/2007 10:31:29 PM PST by Eleutheria5
Since I've been informed that cover art will be forthcoming in two or more weeks, I decided to post some more excerpts to while away the time:
Chapter 3: Turning and Turning Page 46 Cruising along in his F-16, one of the few that still worked, Desmond recognized Cannon Creek Lake, Virginia, from the briefing map, and began his descent. His co-pilot Ron, prepared the missiles for release. At 2,500 feet, the bottom of their downward run, Ron piped up, “Got the control tower at Middlesboro locked in to laser sights,” and pushed the button. Desmond immediately pulled back on the yoke, climbing. “YESSS! A direct hit! Another blow struck for the People!” crowed Ron, as the fire they had lit grew small and far below. A mile up, and Desmond asked matter-of-factly, “Want to make another pass, inflict some extra damage?” Ron scratched his chin in mock deliberation and said, “Mmm, I guess so. The explosion wasn’t quite big enough for a munitions pile. They might have moved it. Let’s make some toothpicks, shall we?” Desmond never liked working with hippies. Ron was at least a competent hippy, but still got on his nerves. Passion in battle to him seemed obscene, taking joy in destruction. He was no longer the boy drug pusher of Brownsville. He had a job to do now, to stop the flyoverfascists from starving the old people and massacring the brothers, and he planned to do it, get it done, and go home to his real work, earning a degree and amounting to something for his family. Consequently, the gung-ho enthusiasm of Ron and his ilk irritated him. Nonetheless, he did his job with mechanical efficiency, circling and coming down low again for another pass. Ron drew a bead on a large hangar, set off in a remote area of the airport, and pushed the button. They pulled up as the big fireball erupted, growing so huge, for a terrible moment Desmond worried it would reach into the sky, snatch their pathetic toy of a fighter jet, and devour it like a piece of popcorn. But the plane gained altitude, and Desmond regained perspective, as the explosion they had caused became the flash of a firefly in the distance below, insignificant to the crystal-clear stars and the moon so close to Desmond and Ron. Feeling himself out of danger, Desmond reveled in the joy of flight, luxuriously arching up to the heavens like a tiger stretching and sharpening his claws. The first time he flew, a recruit fresh out of boot camp who made the grade for pilot school at the UA Air BEN MAXWELL Force, he was terrified, sure he’d crash. But after fifteen successful missions, he had grown to love his time in the air, whenever he wasn’t embroiled in combat with no time to think or feel anything, only act. The radar flashed an incoming missile warning. “A swarm, two klicks and closing at seven o’clock,” Ron droned from the back seat. Desmond waited. This was not the first time he had had one on his tail. He waited for the distance to narrow. “One klick and closing, still at seven o’clock,” Ron droned in his nasal monotone. “Half klick,” and Desmond accelerated. “Three hundred meters at nine o’clock,” Ron recited, trying hard to keep calm as the blips on his screen became visible to the naked eye and turned into three rods of fire, closing fast. Desmond rolled her over for a deep dive, straight at the ground, and the inhuman tormentors dipped down, too, though the abrupt maneuver threw them momentarily to twelve o’clock. Mother Earth came up fast. The dollhouses and trees below grew larger, became real. From two hundred meters up, Desmond could see the lights in the farmhouse beneath them. Pleading “Forgive me,” he pulled back hard on the yoke. Mere meters from the roof, the jet reversed directions and headed straight up. The Virginia farmhouse exploded far behind and below, and its occupants became no more. “YAAAHAAA! WE DID IT! WE DID IT! WE’RE ALIVE!!!!!!” shouted Ron. Desmond was about to snap “Shut the fuck up” at Ron when it hit. Right after the world stopped shaking like a kitten in the jaws of a pit bull, Desmond looked out the windshield and noticed that half his left wing was gone, and trees instead of stars filled his forward field of vision. The forest had turned into a giant, demented top, spinning wildly as it jumped up to greet him.
Paragraphs are reader's friends. ;)
don't forget cliff notes.......
It was a dark and stormy night... ;-)
Having said that, I enjoyed your writing style. You seem to have a real talent. Which makes it even more perplexing that you didn't spend more time (any time?!?) researching what you wrote about. Based on the subject matter of your book, your intended audience is probably going to have some level of interest (if not familiarity) in subjects involving military equipment. They're going to read what you posted here and reach for the next book on the shelf. In all honesty, it wouldn't take a lot of time to fix what you've written, and it would GREATLY add to the credibility of your effort.
I appreciate your gentle rebuke, and must confess my ignorance of fighter jets and such. It will have to be fixed in a second edition, though, because my rewrite chances have been expended and the text is locked. So, too, the "kitten in jaws of pitbull" thing, which made me cringe when I realized I had missed it. So easy to invert the cliche and refresh it "After the world finished worrying at his plane like a pit bull with a fresh kitten in its jaws" would have been better.
Mercifully, this is the only excerpt that involved fighter jets of any kind, and certainly the only one with that overworked phrase.
While the research is bad, there is a lot I liked about this passage, which is why I posted it here and elsewhere. Now that its flaws have been pointed out, I'll find some other excerpt to post.
Thanks for the kind words about the style.
"Paragraphs are reader's friends. ;)"
But cut and pasted text in this instance, for some reason, lost all its paragraph demarkations. The horror. The horror.
Well, note to self: Bone up on aircraft specs and jargon next time I have a flying scene. Other than that, it was a very energetic, vivid scene...until the pit bull went and bit a kitten.
I'm in the middle of my second novel, which treats of Cuba and the fictional autobio of a grown up Elian-like character, but the old bastard took ill and left his brother in charge, completely wrecking my plans. Now I'm redrafting all sixteen chapters that I had so far, in order to do something with this new state of affairs.
To celebrate the arrival of my cover art, which I then immediately sent back with comment, here's a new excerpt--one for which I did consult with a truck driver:
Chapter 16: Is at Hand
Page 158
The truck screeched to a halt. Bill woke up inside the trailer, where he slept seated on the floor, army fashion, shoulder-to-shoulder with thirty-five assorted Amazons, Occoneechee, Boy Scouts, Queer Americans, black militants and an assortment of other ethnic separatists.
Weapons were stacked alongside the other wall, the better to discourage shoot-outs among members of this strange band. Bill groped his way towards the loading entrance in the back of the trailer, first stepping on a few toes and waking some sleepers on the one side, then toppling the
rifles on the other. At length, he found it, lifted up the door, and climbed down. Still half asleep, he zigzagged his way to the cab.
“My shift? What’s up?” he inquired drowsily as he climbed into the passenger side. Then he looked ahead and exclaimed, “Sheeeyiiiiit,” when he saw the backed-up traffic.
“Union’s in retreat, damn their souls,” explained Fred. “Just got word over the CB from further up the line.”
“Sheeeeyiiiiiiiit!” Bill repeated. “Can’t those assholes do anything right? So what do you propose?”
Fred took the map out and read it carefully. “Gotta take her south and then west. Ain’t nothin’ else to do. We’ll have to turn off 501 for 642, then take 832 due west. Maybe we can start going north again on 29, ’fore we hit Chatham. Long as you’re here, take over. I’m going aft for
some Z’s.”
“You a navy man?” Bill asked.
“What’s it to you?” Fred demanded, suspicious.
“You just said ‘aft,’ like we was on a gawldern boat, is all.”
“What’s it to you?” Fred repeated as he put on the emergency brakes,
climbed down from the driver’s seat, and slammed the door behind him.
Bill shrugged, scooted over and put his foot on the brake, releasing the emergencies and holding her steady.
This was the first time Bill had run at night in a great while. His weekly delivery to Fort Bragg was strictly a there-and-back-again, eight-hour affair. Had he ever been a man with a house, delivering goods to an army base once a week during a civil war? That Bill Wescott seemed like a
separate person he once knew. He would not have recognized him now if someone had introduced him to his old self. But he still had his old habits, favorite expressions, and trucking experiences. The line of cars stretched on forever, a red, glowing snake with no end, never moving,
never tiring. The right lane, ordinarily reserved for northbound traffic, was now the exclusive property of a column of Union troops. The northern horizon was silent. No artillery-fire rumbled up ahead. No airplanes and ’copters flew low to harry the retreating forces. Bill put on the radio. The battle raged somewhere miles away. The news said the rebels were advancing to cut off the capital, and Bill gathered that the retreating forces were looking for a way east and north, so as to support Washington against its would-be besiegers. Must be some sort of rebel formation around Lynchburg, blocking the more direct route. The line
moved a little. Bill released the brake briefly, and the rig lurched forward ten feet. He brought his foot down again, stopping the trailer first and then the cabin. A neat maneuver he had performed thousands of times over
the years, and now had to repeat again and again and again and again and again, until his legs cramped and his feet squirmed inside their boots. No wonder Hampton had been so eager to be relieved. Bill’s head ached, his arms throbbed, and it seemed this would never end, that he would stay
stuck in traffic forever. As the Kingston Trio sang over the radio, “Did he ever return? No, he never returned, and his fate is still unknown…At least ‘poor Charlie’ had someone else do the driving,” Bill chuckled ruefully.
Crawling forward ten feet at a time, trailer brake, cabin brake, idle, accelerate, trailer brake, cabin brake, idle, etc., towards dawn Bill finally made his exit and turned onto it. All the balled-up, excruciating tension and fatigue suddenly flew out the window in one glorious, free-at-last moment, like a flock of geese headed south, as he came off the exit ramp and sped up to seventy, seeing his way clear. He passed another eighteen-wheeler, and made the universal sign of the Teamsters, a clenched fist stuck out the open window, moving up and down. The driver in the other truck honked his greeting, and Bill responded by
joyously leaning on the horn, shouting a rebel yell over the CB, celebrating his hard-won liberty to the open road, to the rose-colored East peeling back the night, and to the rumbling monster that surrounded him, indispensable linchpin of modern life; the big-rig truck. He controlled the T800, full-sized long-haul trailer and all, barreling along now at a base speed of sixty-five miles per hour, feeling the tonnage beneath, around, and behind him vibrate and fight his hold, the rig striving to simply obey the laws of physics and drift down the path of least resistance, to find a concrete highway divider to destroy itself upon. But all its struggles were in vain, because Bill had the wheel, and the monster was his to command. After two hours of uninhibited, unobstructed trucking, he knew the huge Kenworth’s every nuance and quirk. It
became his friend, and slowly turned into an extension of his own will; the poem for which no better words existed than the constant roar of engine and wheels, the world running backwards and behind him, only the cars
and trucks ahead remaining stationary, one with him in their fellowhunger for miles.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.