I'm glad I found this website

When I was a little kid I used to draw pictures on a roll of butcher paper in the living room while my parents listened to the war news on the radio and worriedly discussed developments. My uncle George was fighting the Japanese in some hot, foul Pacific jungle after a hitch in the gray and freezing Aleutians helping to dislodge them from the foothold they had there. The pictures I drew showed soldiers, bullets spitting from their gun barrels, and planes in aerial combat. These memories are nearly seventy years old now, which I guess you could say is how long I have been interested in World War II. After a career as a journalist, where circumstance forces you to learn a little bit about a lot of things (just enough to feign a bogus authority), I took an early retirement determined to learn about something in depth for a change. That something, I decided after we moved from San Francisco to Montana, was World War II. I had some vague idea of writing a book of some kind. I read dozens and then scores of histories, autobiographies, biographies and memoirs, and burrowed into original sources like the Churchill’s war papers assembled in massive tomes with thousands of pages by the indefatigable Martin Gilbert. The years passed as I nearly drowned in a deepening pool of research.
I had some earlier success as a novelist – my Top Dog satirical fantasy about a Wall Street shark turned into a canine in a Tolkinesque world was a bestseller – so I felt more comfortable working in fiction than so-called factual narrative related in an Olympian manner. Sometimes, to reformulate the maxim, you can arrive at the truth of a matter while the historian is still getting his boots on. More years passed as I wrote a novel about the events leading up to the attack on Pearl Harbor. I was amazed by how many people knew it was coming, including an English airplane mechanic in Southeast Asia who wrote a slim volume about it a half century after the event. A Japanese engineer who had helped rig aircraft for shallow-running torpedoes got drunk and spilled the beans. The mechanic, who was able to work out the timing of the attack in his head, passed on what he knew to two English intelligence agents. Navy commanders in Pearl Harbor, already being denied vital information by the White House, were not told of this -- if even it was passed on by MI6. Like FDR, the English had an interest in getting the U.S. in the war by any means necessary before it was too late. But you can’t write a novel that is a dry summary of facts about a subject; nobody would buy it. The trick is to create characters interesting enough to carry a story. I hope that is what I have done with The Great Liars, which will be published toward the end of the year. In the changed world of publishing, the author must not only create the work but must also market it like the Fuller Brush man who used to go door to door way back when I was drawing on butcher paper. So I am making a forced march through the internet, finding all of these websites that sprang up while I was turning the pages of books. Among such kindred spirits, people who believe World War II was among the most important events in history, I hope to find readers. In the meantime, I'm enjoying the facinating stories I'm finding here.

 

That's quite an introdction post indeed! Welcome to this fine forum. I wish you luck with your stories and hope many will read them .

 

Welcome Aboard!

A published author is always welcome. Perhaps you could post an excerpt of your work here in our Quill and Ink forum, I am sure it would be welcome as well!

 

Welcome to the forums!

 

Hello and welcome to the forum

Lesley

 

G'day Jerry!...glad to have you aboard...

 

welcome !

 

Welcome to the Forum, Jerry. Happy to have you aboard!