I’m a writer. I’ve written lots of books, articles, television shows and several movies. This is about that writing, a little behind-the-scenes stuff about my books that you won’t find at Amazon or the book stores. (But nothing too personal.) Writing is a solitary art and there isn’t much meaningful instruction about it. Basically you have to read and write a lot if you want to be a writer. Maybe something you learn here will help you. I’d like to help budding writers.

I started my career as a cub reporter for The Miami News, a great newspaper that eventually went under in the 1980s. In those days, you learned by having hardened rewrite guys yell at you. "What do you mean you don’t know the shooter’s name! Go back and ask! It was frightening. These guys were gods - absolute word magicians who could make sense and drama out of anything. I wanted to be like them. They didn’t tolerate fools or errors. I covered crime, general assignment, whatever the editors sent me to. One day after giving them enough information to write three front page stories, they invited me to lunch. I was accepted. It felt great. Eventually, copying them, I began to be able to write my own stories. The police beat was fun. Floaters, jumpers, poisoners, beaters - I wrote about them all. We were an afternoon daily sold on the streets. You needed a grabber to entice readers as they went out for lunch.

But after awhile you want to write something that allows for a little more thought and analysis. Our little-old-lady religion editor died and I shocked everybody by asking for her job. I’d always liked history and religion and wanted to treat the beat a sweeping subject not little bulletin board items. A year into the job - and to my complete surprise because my editor had goaded me into entering my writing - I was voted the best religions editor in the nation by other religion editors. Believe me, I didn’t have a clue. But I wrote with some passion and I think that’s what tipped it.

Anyway, it gave me a big head and I decided real writers write books. And I started looking for a story that might be my ticket. On the religion beat I’d run into the story of the Shroud of Turin. You might know of it today but back then - in the 1970s - very few outside of Turin, Italy had even heard of it. Basically, it’s a burial cloth believed to have wrapped Jesus. Sure, I know, they’re a dime a dozen. There are at least a thousand holy foreskins in the world and enough splinters from the cross to build the Titanic. But the Shroud is different. It was the scientists who were intrigued with it. To begin with, the photographic-like image of a crucified dead man on it was at least 600 years old. But photography had only been invented 150 years ago. I’m not going to give you the whole story here because it takes a book. But there’s a terrific mystery to the Shroud.

Anyway, as a result of winning that religion writing award, I’d begun stringing for The New York Times. Big deal. Everybody knows the New York Times so I had some credibility. I went to New York - not because of the Times but because that’s where all the good publishers are - and an editor at Macmillan & Co., Bill Griffin, bought the idea. I told him I could maybe solve the mystery. I think he just liked the story. I got a small advance. To me, it was a kings ransom. I quit the News and my first book, Shroud, was published by Macmillan several years later. It was the first modern book on the ancient linen cloth and it did quite well. I had a great time writing it, went all over Europe and America searching for answers and became an expert on the mystery. After good sales and many translations, an updated version was recently republished by Disc-us Books at www.disc-us.com. It’s an electronic version. You may have heard that the Shroud was found to be a fake. Don’t believe it. It’s just as mysterious as it’s always been. But back to the point, I’d published my first book.

I was a book writer!

But after the high comes the low. What are you going to do next? It’s the writer’s dilemma. You need money.

Luckily, the newspapers gave me my next book. There, blaring out from all of them that summer of 1975 was a story about patients being murdered in the Ann Arbor (Michigan) Veterans Hospital. When I read the stories something clicked. I had recently read Gerald Frank’s award-winning Boston Strangler about a city in terror. I saw the Ann Arbor story as a hospital in terror. That’s how I sold it. Over the phone. To Popular Library, a big publisher of paperback originals at the time. After seeing my proposal, they gave me a fairly large advance. I rushed out to Ann Arbor as the investigation got going. Because it was a veterans hospital, the FBI was in charge. Someone had been injecting patients with pavulon, a muscle relaxer. It paralyzed every muscle in the body and all the organs. They couldn’t lift an eyelid and their lungs wouldn’t work. But they could still hear and think. If someone didn’t find them in minutes after an attack, they’d silently suffocate.

Not fun.

When I arrived in Ann Arbor, the killer still had not been caught. I was from Miami and this place was blizzard country. Cold and dark. As I researched, I wondered if the maniac was stalking me. Creepy things happened. But it was a great time too. I lived in Detroit for three months. To be involved in something like that, actually trying to solve it, was exciting. The Mysterious Deaths at Ann Arbor was published the same year as Shroud - just a quirk of publishing schedules and the fact that Mysterious Deaths was rushed out. It was 1977 and with two books suddenly published - a fascinating religious drama and a gruesome, enthralling crime story - I figured I was fat. Visions of a house in France kept me awake.

It didn’t happen. As I already wrote, Shroud did fairly well. But Mysterious Deaths died a quick death (how’s that for using the same word in different contexts?). One day, Popular Library’s putting the big tout on my book. The next day it’s dumping it. I never knew what happened. Nobody even had the courtesy to tell me. It got good reviews but something went wrong. Like the movies, if it doesn’t catch on quickly, see you later kid. I always thought the University of Michigan, which ran the hospital for its student doctors and pretty much got blamed for the deaths, squelched it. They didn’t want their good name besmirched. I’d heard some things. But I couldn’t prove it. Meanwhile, the advance ran out.

What are you gonna do next?

I always wanted to write a novel. Because of Shroud, I had a little money in the bank. Actually, a good sum of money. I could afford to take a risk. In between books, I’d been writing for Tropic Magazine, the Sunday supplement of The Miami Herald. I’d done a story for Tropic about a psychic who saw crimes. He was a commercial artist. While drawing, he’d occasionally have visions of a murder taking place. He didn’t know who it was but he could see the violence in his mind’s eye. His impulse was to tell the police, but they’d invariably decide that he knew so much that he must be the killer. He was never arrested but often suspected.

Now there’s a novel, I thought. I changed him into a her, gave her a background of coming from Armenia and the Armenian holocaust and wrote Fatal Glimpse, which was published by Leisure and later Tower paperbacks. I got a small advance but I never saw a royalty. First novels usually don’t sell well. I loved the cover they put on the book. It showed a huge human eye with the devil for a pupil. To get a novel published was satisfying, but not very lucrative - at least this first one wasn’t. But no problem. I had another idea. And still a little money left over from Shroud. (Don’t worry. I’m going to lose it soon.)

My wife is a Basque. They are the people of the Pyrennes Mountains which rise at the border of Spain and France. I began to research them and slowly a story emerged. I would tell the saga of the Basques in America. It would start in the 19th Century during the Carlist Wars and end with the descendants of my main character becoming the senator and governor respectively of Nevada and Idaho, a scenario based in fact. In between there would be love and hate, jealousy and revenge, struggle and triumph. I was hyped. The Basques are fascinating people; the oldest race in Europe. The Romans wrote about how tough they were when they (the Romans) first came to Spain. They didn’t want to fight them. All of this was good stuff. My wife and I went to the Basque Country for a month. We were wined and dined. I interviewed many Basques, walked where Hemmingway walked. But what I wrote didn’t sell. Which leads me to a very important point. Writers get a lot of rejection. Don’t worry about it. Put the story away and go to the next. Often times it’ll be resurrected later.

My Basque story has now evolved into a Romeo and Juliet story. It is called Guernica. You remember the famous painting by Picasso? Guernica was bombed by the Germans in the Spanish Civil War. My mother-in-law was there when it happened. My Romeo and Juliet are a German flyer and Basque girl. It is a story of forbidden love based on truth. Someday I’ll finish it, make a million dollars and buy a house in France.

I’m hyped.

Now back to reality.

After my Basque excursion, which included several months research in Nevada and Idaho, I was nearly out of money. I needed a new project and I needed one fast. I’m a World War II buff. I happened to read a story in the New York Times about Japan having an atomic bomb project during the war. I’d never heard that. Was there a story or was it just a footnote? I made inquiries. I was led to a prominent scholar, Derek deSolla Price, a Yale historian of science, who told me there was much to be uncovered. I sold the concept for Japan’s Secret War to a publisher who will go unnamed because it went from them to Morrow, who published it in 1985. I went to Japan. That was great. The country was fascinating. Sword and the chrysanthemum. For a month, I sipped tea and tried to extract information. The story was a sore spot for the Japanese who had only been portrayed as victims of the bomb. Like pulling teeth, the story unfolded. Yes they did have a program. It was much more developed than most people know. They would have used the bomb on us in a Hiroshima minute had it been ready. At the end of the war, the Germans, knowing they had lost, tried to give the Japanese uranium via submarine. Uranium was the major component Japan lacked. That in itself is a fascinating story. Japan’s Secret War was republished with an update in 1995 by Marlowe and Company. I had to learn atomic physics to write it. But I told the story through the scientists and soldiers who lived it. If the Japanese and Germans had not been so suspicious of each other and had cooperated, they might have made the bomb before we did. I remember I worked so hard researching in Japan that I feel ill when I came home. Writing can be physically demanding, especially non-fiction. I work out every day.

In 1983, I made a big life change. My wife and I and our two children moved from Coconut Grove, Fla., to Los Angeles. I’d done some film writing in Miami and had a friend who had done quite well in Hollywood so at least I knew someone. The money, I was told, was very good there. It is - if you can’t get it. It’s not that easy. But my friend helped me and I wrote some spec scripts. These are showcases of your work. I chose Hill Street Blues which I thought was the best drama on television at the time. It got me into Hill Street to talk to one of the producers but I didn’t get a job. I think I know why. At a crucial moment, he asked me for a story idea. He didn’t actually say, "Give me a story idea." But that’s what I think he was looking for. Well, duh. I didn’t realize it.

See you later Charlie.

But a few weeks later, making some more contacts, I was offered a script assignment from Simon and Simon, a really great detective show. From there, it got easier. They liked my stuff. I became a story editor on several shows. I became a member of the Writers Guild and made some decent money which I banked knowing that just as sure as it was rolling in, it would dry up. Writers have to save their money, is what I always say. And I wish I did it.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

As I tried to make it in Hollywood, I ran into another story which I felt would be a good book. Top Gun. We’ve all seen the movie. Well, I saw the story that inspired the movie. This was well before the movie was made. It was a magazine article. And deep in it was a little paragraph that said something to the effect that Top Gun was started because the US was losing dogfights in the Vietnam War.

Now there’s a story.

Paramount’s movie was a contemporary piece, one that showed Top Gun as it was in the 1980s. But the story I wanted to tell was how Top Gun got started in 1969 - during the Vietnam War, boys - when things were tough! Not peacetime. I made my inquiries and was introduced to a group of men who, over the course of about a year, told me how it had happened. It was a great story; a real victory won in Vietnam that not many people know about. The men who started it were exemplary and courageous and great fighter pilots. I loved researching and writing it. I’d been an air force officer during the Vietnam War. I didn’t fly but I saw those big, beautiful airplanes. The men who started Top Gun were navy flyers. They flew off carriers. It was my first airplane book. I say that flippantly. The truth is it is not about airplanes. It is about the men who flew them and how they rose to a challenge.

Scream of Eagles, published by Wiley, was launched on Good Morning America. It did quite well. It was a main selection of the Military Book Club and Pocket Books bought the paperback rights. It got some terrific reviews. I was proud of it. I still am. Several producers tried to make it into a movie but they couldn’t. Someday someone will. I’m ready with the scenario.

When the television show I was story editor for, The Famous Teddy Z (CBS), was canceled, my agent, Jim Trupin, went to Pocket Books and sold them my idea for another airplane book. In this one, I would find some of the nation’s best fighter pilots and tell their stories. The book evolved into Wings of Fury, which basically picks up after the Vietnam War and tells about certain fighter pilots throughout the 1980s and the Gulf War. I had a great time writing this one too. I went to several fighter bases, like Nellis outside of Las Vegas, and Oceana in Virginia Beach, Va. I was able to profile some really interesting flyers and also chronicle the moment-by-moment story of the air war in the Gulf. One of the great moments for a writer doing non-fiction is when the person you are interviewing tells you something really dramatic and you can visualize it. You know it is going to be a stirring part of the book. I had lots of those moments researching Wings of Fury. It got a couple of book club sales and is still selling.

After Wings, I had a drought. Things got so bad I had to take a second job which I’ve done from time to time. Mostly, I’ve been a salesman. I do well at sales but it’s always just to pay the bills and keep the family together until I’ve got the next writing project. When the Kosovo War started, I had my next ticket. I’d always wanted to do a book about a fighter squadron at war. Lots of story there. And I wanted it to be on a carrier. I’d heard that the navy liked Scream of Eagles. I asked them if I could go on a carrier during the Kosovo festivities. They let me do it. I was lucky to get to spend some time with the VF-41 Black Aces, an F-14 Tomcat squadron, while they fought. Their story is the subject of my next book, Black Aces High, due out fall 2002. It has a lot of pertinence to the War on Terrorism. In fact, the Black Aces led the bombing in Afghanistan. My publisher is Thomas Dunne at St. Martins Press. I interviewed hard and then came back and figured out the story.

Story is all important. If you don’t have a story, you don’t have a book. But there always is a story. You have to figure it out and then tell it clearly and with momentum. If you have momentum, the pages keep getting turned.

Currently, I’m writing the biography of Roy "Butch" Voris, the World War II navy ace who started the famed Blue Angels flight demonstration team. Butch is a great guy and I’m lucky to be writing his exciting and important life story. Imagine flying upside down at 600 miles per hour barely 100 feet from the asphalt. Even breathe too hard and you’re history. Or, similarly, imagine being a young man right out of flight school, taken out to the South Pacific and knowing you’ve got to shoot down experienced Japanese pilots or your carrier will be sunk. Forget the fear and death. You’ve got to stop the hordes. Butch is an example of the Greatest Generation and I hope to do him justice.

In the meantime, I’m looking for my next book.

Email me if you have a good one.