The Amazing Teflon Man

22. September 2025 · 1 comment · Categories: Memoir

Another story from the wacky world of military broadcasting – I thought I had written this one out before – maybe I have, but that must have been so long ago, that it’s lost in the archives.

This really happened; the whole story was verified by the then-news director, who I worked for as a station manager some years later, around the time that I decided that I didn’t want to go into broadcast management with AFRTS. It came to me around 1989 or so that every AFRTS station manager I had ever worked for had cracked up in some interesting manner, either mentally, physically or personally. (It was a stressful job, with a great deal of responsibility and very little actual control over anything much – a certain guarantee of killing levels of stress.) I wanted to retire in good health at 20 years with all my original issue of marbles, and eventually did a sideways slide into a related video production field.

Anyway – there was an incident in the late 1970s involving a Russian fighter jet flying a little too low and slow over an American carrier, in a manner presumably meant to be intimidating by buzzing the carrier, and which resulted in some panicky news stories, along the lines of “OMG the Russkies are trying to provoke something!” At this time the Far East Network was headquartered in Tokyo, and at Misawa we rebroadcast their radio feed, with a five-minute long newscast at the top of the hour for most of the day save for when we broke away for our local morning and afternoon shows.  FEN-Tokyo’s radio section boasted a full set of golden-throated trained DINFOS announcers, one of whom was a guy with a deep, resonant speaking voice, and possibly the emptiest skull ever recorded as being possessed by one of that ilk. He would become known far and wide as the Ted Baxter of the Far East Network; an absolute legend in military broadcasting at that time, and not for good reasons.

It came to be that Our Hero was the duty announcer the day that the story of the Russian fighter buzzing the American carrier came over the wires. At that time, we had teletype machines printing out the various stories sourced from AP and UPI. It was a matter of pulling copy off the teletype, arranging the various stories in order – most important first, counting up the lines of text (14 per minute was normal reading speed for us) writing out something to bridge between stories, editing or adding as necessary. Our Hero popped his head around the news directors’ office door, and asked casually, for the correct spelling of “strafed”. The news director, with his mind on other matters, spelled it for him and went back to work. Our Hero went into the on-air studio and waited as the hour-long music program came to an end. The minutes ticked by – top of the hour; time hack, station ID, opened the mike and launched into the first story. The On-Air warning light outside the studio door was red; alerting anyone that the mike was hot, and not to open that door until it went out.

Some minutes into the newscast, the news director was struck by an awful premonition – a feeling of absolute certainty so powerful and urgent that he dashed into the studio – disregarding the On Air light and ripped the news copy out of Our Heros’ very hands. When the news director verified the story to me, some years later, he claimed that he broke into a cold sweat and nearly had a heart attack on the spot. Our Hero had come about two lines from announcing to everyone within radio-hearing that a Russian jet had strafed an American aircraft carrier. Our audience didn’t just include American military personnel and dependents, but a substantial shadow audience … to include diplomatic personnel of all nations who listened to FEN. This would have had serious international repercussions for everyone, up and down the chain of command – and all of this escaped by a whisker by the news directors’ sudden premonition.

Our Hero, though – was completely oblivious. In the aftermath, as he was being yelled at by the news director, the program director, and for all I know, the det commander, he looked at them all in bafflement and asked. “Strafed? Buzzed? What’s the difference?”

Believe it or not, he was around for years in AFRTS, and became a legend, rather like Bigfoot, bouncing back from near-disaster after near disaster, as if he was glazed with Teflon. Nothing every stuck to him, and no one could figure out how he managed to make the rank that he eventually did. The best anyone could come up with was he was the nephew of someone high up in the Pentagon. Very high up. That, or incriminating pictures.

Book Review – Sarah Hoyt’s No Man’s Land

09. September 2025 · Write a comment · Categories: Random Book and Media Musings

If space opera science fiction is to your taste and interest, I had an advance reader copy for Sarah Hoyt’s latest. It is a truth universally acknowledged that just about every writer has a juvenile book hidden away someplace. A tale scribbled in their youth for fun, or because a story, a situation or a character obsessed them. Often it’s a kind of fan-fiction, or as I think of it – a training wheels book. Sometimes the basic concept and perhaps some elements are worth taking out and making something substantial and adult out of them, which is what Sarah Hoyt did with the epic space opera-fantasy No Man’s Land. The genesis of the basic story came about when she was a teenager, read Ursula LeGuin’s Left Hand of Darkness and had serious doubts about how a totally hermaphrodite world would work. The teenage version of this may be the epic story that she spun to amuse and enthrall her fellow high students back in the day. The world of the planet Elly is a complicated one, not least because of being peopled – personed – settled – whatever, by a race of genetically engineered hermaphrodites, who can impregnant and be pregnant. Which does make for exceedingly bizarre familial relationships, as we binary humans understand them. The Ellyians can also teleport, among other interesting and seemingly magical talents. As one can imagine, this leads to a very curious society, complicated by the fact that the spaceship which brought them to the planet also went back in time thousands of years in relation to the civilization which sent them, and others out to the stars. A lot of this is not infodumped upon the reader in one fell swoop, but rather noted in passing, and left to the reader to put together.

There are two complicated and entwined stories in No Man’s Land – and two main characters carrying the narrative, along with scores of minor but essential characters. The first we meet is Skip, Viscount Webson (whose formal name and title is about half a paragraph long in itself) the very young but official envoy from a galactic empire with very strict rules about its’ various operatives interacting with those societies deemed not quite ready for relations (of any kind, official or un-) with the star-spanning empire. Skip has problems and past trauma of his own. The second main character is Erlen Troz, who also has had sufficient past and present horrific trauma, being on the run from unnamed assassins. Erlen was not just a high official of what passes for a central government on a neo-barbaric world, but also the romantic partner of the late ruler, and quasi-parent of the heir apparent … and what with one thing and another, there is treachery afoot in both their worlds. So, who sent the assassins to kill the former king, murdered an investigator from Skip’s government, is still hunting Erlen, and the new king, and is it the same party as those still trying to kill or disgrace Skip? Who can they trust, and where can they turn for help? It’s a long and episodic adventure, through a very alien but well-fleshed out world. This is a narrative of characters and a society, not so much a close examination of the technologies involved in a futuristic tale. By the end of it, a lot of elements were tied together, things which had developed gradually all through the narrative; not all, of course – life isn’t that tidy. It is a long, long book – the pre-release version which I read came in three parts – but it did engage and held my interest all the way through.

Almost Done!

31. July 2025 · 1 comment · Categories: Random Book and Media Musings

Much to my own surprise, I am all but done with the draft of the next book in the historical YA series – the Kettering Family saga. The sequel to West Towards the Sunset is all but finished, just a post-script chapter to finish, and to assemble some historical notes to wrap up an account of young Jon Ketterings’ experiences in the early days of the California Gold Rush and it will all be ready for beta readers to have a go. (Seriously – anyone with special deep knowledge of the early days of the Gold Rush want to have a go? Send me a comment, and I’ll arrange for a PDF.) My notion for writing a family saga covering over twenty or thirty years of events in the occasionally very wild west while keeping the protagonist as a tween, or young teen came as an inspiration – follow sequential children in the family as they start to take an interest in events and things around them. So this is Jon’s turn – as a lively 9-12 year-old boy, who as it has turned out – is slightly dyslexic, and disinclined to be enthusiastic towards anything resembling formal education. This quality does not present so much of a difficulty for his family in the 1840s as it would in this present day. The Kettering parents just quietly conclude that he is not one meant for scholarship and allow him the space to turn his interests in more practical directions. Which, as this is set in California in 1848-49 offered considerable scope to have him experience in some well-known aspects and some more obscure ones, witness some interesting events and make friends with at least one person who would later become very, very well known. (There will be perhaps three or four more adventures, taking the Kettering family up through the Civil War and slightly afterwards.)

So – that’s the current situation. Wee Jamie, the Wonder Grandson starts preschool next month. I will not nearly be tied as tightly to a 4-year-olds rigid schedule and needs, which will offer a bit more time for writing and other things. August looms up, along with a couple of book events and fairs, and we will be preparing for them. I might even be able to finish off the final Luna City installation (which is half-written out in draft), and start on the Hallmark Holiday Movie style Blue Collar Romance, suggested by my fellow bloggers.

State of the Author – 2025

17. July 2025 · Comments Off on State of the Author – 2025 · Categories: Domestic, Luna City, Random Book and Media Musings

OK – a titch over halfway through the year, and it’s been shaping up very well for me personally, all things considered. I made the last payment on the 30-year mortgage for my personal Patch of Paradise and received all but the last 2,000$ or so of the insurance payout for the accident that destroyed poor little lamented Thing the Versa. (A certain amount held out by the law firm to cover the final invoice on the medical scan which verified that yes, I had some bone damage to go with the simply awesome collection of bruises. Which payment invoice is lagging and lagging … yes, Big Government Medical matters proceed at the stately pace of a drugged Galapagos tortoise.)

These developments ease the necessity for tight budgeting and even allow for some frivolous expenses – a thing which hasn’t happened since the year that I spent in Korea doing outside voice-work. Some of those frivolous expenditures include being able to pay for overnight accommodations for distant-from-home book events. Alas, one of the big local book and music celebrations which I liked participating in was the West Texas Book and Music Festival in Abilene; and it seems that yearly event died the death during the Covidiocy. I can’t find any trace of it left at all in current social media, which was a pity, as I enjoyed getting there at least as much as I like participating. But the Giddings Word Wrangler is still a going concern, and I was invited to this fall. I hope to hear soon about Miss Ruby’s Author Corral in Goliad, too.

With luck, I think I will have finished Hills of Gold, the sequel to West Towards the Sunset by the end of the year. I have projected this as a YA historical adventure series relating the sequential adventures of the Kettering tweens and teens during pre-Civil War days on the western frontier: California and Nevada mostly, during the various gold and silver rushes there. The second in the series, focusing on Jon Kettering (a small boy in West Towards the Sunset, which focuses on his older sister, Sally), is about two-thirds completed in draft. I also had a glorious inspiration for writing a further adventure concerning a younger sister in the Virginia City, Nevada silver rush. Oh, and Jon Kettering himself becomes a Pony Express rider, during the crisis year that the Pony Express was a going, yet ultimately economically crushing concern.

I also have the long-promised final volume of the contemporary Luna City chronicles about half-done, and several notions to round out the various plot threads/story arcs:  the wedding of Richard and Kate, the eventual disposition of the legendary Mills Treasure, what happened to Joe Vaughn at the end of Volume 11 … all sorts of little things in the Most Perfect Small Town in South Texas. In the Luna City time line we are also coming up on the start of the Covidiocy. Also a couple of real-life people who I based characters on have since passed away … so it just seems like a good place to wind up the story. Not for good, though – I still have half a mind to do another YA series, with Letty, Douglas, Stephen and their other friends as kids in the 1930s. I’m seeing it as sort of an Americanized Emil and the Detectives, with their little group helping Chief McGill and Sgt. Drury solve small rural mysteries. But that has to wait on me finishing the Kettering series, of course.

The Novel Way

26. June 2025 · 1 comment · Categories: Domestic, Random Book and Media Musings

This week I chanced upon watching the movie ‘The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society’, based on the recent bestselling novel. A relative rarity among novel forms of late, Guernsey Literary Etc. took the form of an epistolary novel, a conceit of plot and character-construction through letters from various characters. The movie version is a decent little movie; a relatively faultless evocation of a historical period, filmed mostly in charming rural locations and unscathed by any actor in it feeling a need to loudly bloviate on current social trends and controversies, at least as far as I know about.

Anyway, the epistolary novel isn’t much done these days; the last mega-huge bestseller in that form that I remember reading of my own free will was 1965’s Up The Down Staircase – a chaotic year in the life of an idealistic young schoolteacher on her first year in an interestingly dysfunctional urban school. Dysfunction then meant smoking cigarettes out behind the trash cans and dropping cherry bombs in the boys’ lavatory toilets, which seems rather charmingly retro, in comparison to present-day open riot in the hallways and violent assault in the classroom. Staircase was also made into a movie starring Sandy Dennis.

But the epistolary form was once overwhelmingly popular, especially in the 18th century. What has been accepted as the first-ever novel in English, Samuel Richardson’s Pamela; Or Virtue Rewarded established the form. That novel began as a series of template letters, newly-literate, newly-well-to-do gentlemen and ladies, for the use of, only Richardson wished to incorporate moral lessons in the template letters and so created a narrative and characters to hang the letters upon. Pamela turned out to be so wildly popular on that merit that Richardson followed it with another such, even longer and more operatic: Clarissa Or the History of a Young Lady. This featured a young woman of imperishable virtue and her moral victory over a scheming vile seducer, who was not above kidnapping, drugging and rape of the heroine. This was also made into a miniseries in 1991, with Sean Bean as the vile seducer. He dies in the end, as is his customary habit in most (not all) movies and miniseries episodes in which he appears.

There are advantages to telling a story thusly; it is outright fun for a writer to basically create a character monolog and put on another voice and style, for however long or short – and sometimes very short. I’ve done a partial-epistolary in My Dear Cousin, and incorporated letters from characters in some of my other books. (Truckee, The Adelsverein Trilogy, That Fateful Lightning.) It’s also an excellent means of incorporating a necessary info-dump or inserting a shorter account of what would be a tediously lengthy scene or account of a necessary sequence if done in full narration. There is scope for a modern version, with emails, memos-for-record, messages and blog posts, so the format is not exhausted by any means.

There are some disadvantages to writing a completely epistolary novel; it is all a sequence of monologues, and with a good writer, the character voice of every letter-writing character ought to be distinctive, differentiated from each other on the page. Given that not many scribblers of letters are given to write like a reporter, descriptions and conversations are … often sketchy, and more implied than actually included verbatim. I suspect that totally epistolary novels must be carefully planned and plotted in advance so as to be certain of including every necessary detail. The other disadvantage shows up more clearly in novels like Richardson’s Clarissa, wherein a five-minute long incident or conversation becomes the basis for a pages-long letter describing it in exhaustive detail. A brief sliver of action is measured off in yards, and yards and yards of verbiage which would have taken hours to write, giving one to wonder if these characters really did anything without a ream of paper in one hand, and an inkpot and pen in the other to memorialize the moment, rather like 18th century verbal selfie.
Discuss as you will – what other interesting epistolary or semi-epistolary novels are out there today?

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