A Line Through the Desert

With the recent anniversary of the Battle of 73 Easting and General HR McMaster getting the NSA job, we'll be talking about A Line Through the Desert a lot this week.

It took me two years to write A Line Through the Desert. It was difficult, excruciating at times. Nothing I have done since required as much time and effort. I learned how to write during this period of my life and I learned what not to write.

I started with the initial section about Jake just graduating HS and falling in love with his next door neighbor, Patricia. It was the summer of 2003, that section was more or less complete by the end of the summer, though it came in for massive reworking later, and thank god it did. This was my first foray after all. In September of 2004, when I finished my editing of that section is when I knew I could write. It was good.

Anyway, I had to take a 3 month break from writing that fall because I was in grad school and teaching full time. I picked things up again in January of 2004. During this time I wrote the Germany section. Taking place in spring 1990, this section shows Jake as a soldier, a tanker in the elite 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment. This was always the toughest part to write. Garrison duty and Barracks life were completely foreign to me. Fortunately I made contact with an alumni group, a dozen or so gave me intricate details about things in Germany. I mean real minutiae stuff like the cost of a cab ride, what bars did they go to, could the sneak girls into the barracks (could they ever), what were the billets like, etc etc. I even showed a gunnery exercise at the Grafenwher proving ground. Honestly this scene was too technical and boring, but I wanted to prove I could do it, and it does end with news about Iraq invading Kuwait.

The waiting in the desert came next. This was mostly about killing time and was not too hard to write. neither was the next section about the actual Battle of 73 Easting. I just followed the narrative as provided by the Stars and Stripes account of the battle, A Swift Kick, I believe its called. This was 2004, and believe it or not, one still had to do archival research. I got a PDF of the article for 12 bucks after calling the paper.

Now the aftermath section didn't come till 2006 after a book doc took a look at ALTD and convinced me that I ended too abruptly. He was right, that section about Jake coming home and feeling completely alienated makes the book. The love story with Jake and Patricia happens all over again.

Glad I wrote that section too it really brought the entire narrative together. Set the stage for the sequel too.

50,000 words so far. Stay tuned.