an Idaho Story with Military Roots in AFRICOM

All the gods of writing are quick to trot out the old phrase, "..write about what you know..". I agree with that whole heartedly. That's how words about Idaho, Montana, the Salmon River, and telemark skiing, along with daughters and strong women all appear in this series of books. To be clear, in real life I have daughters and have been married to a strong capable woman for 22+ years. Needless to say, but I will anyway, for the daughter and woman parts of these books, research was many times just listening and watching my daughters and wife. Very convenient, no need for the library to do that.

New Grass Growing is the follow up book to River and Ranch. A chunk of the lives of two characters is spent in Africa, where since 2007 there has been an official military presence..wait for it... labelled as AFRICOM. Turns out there's a whole bunch of military entities ending in COM, which you may have guessed is an abbreviation of "Command". I'll leave you the astute reader to guess as to what "AFRI" stands for. It turns out that, in the case of background for my books, art is in fact imitating life.

As you might expect, researching these topics required more than just watching my kids. Hello Google.

Good old Wikipedia has this to say about AFRICOM. Another, recently discovered source is the Black Agenda Report. While I only found this web site this week, it reads well and seems to bear a bit more investigating. Mark Fancher talks about AFRICOM in an article he wrote. Hopefully it is well done, I have not yet read all of it. My apologies in advance if I link to something beyond good taste. Hopefully not though, I found the first few page to be good.

In a 26 day April challenge, that just happens to fit the alphabet, you may have guessed that tomorrow we have the always effervescent letter "B".

River and Ranch Lives On In New Grass Growing!

Discovery is a very enjoyable piece of the writing effort. Discovery happens most commonly in the act of research, at least for me anyway. For example, in my most recent book, New Grass Growing, the Chinese Premier makes an appearance and does something. This was something I wanted to work into the plot and so I did. It's my book after all right? I was googling for the spelling of the current Premier's name, or maybe they have a President. Let's call it general research to support this piece of plot, given that Chinese culture is not on my everyday list. Not only did I discover the correct spelling of his name, I found some history of what he had done. This history included a two week farm stay in Muscatine, Iowa back in 1985. While I did not use that bit, it lent great support to the plot segment in which he is mentioned. Needless to say, this was a great and unexpected discovery.

My favorite type of discovery though, is the unearthing and fleshing out of a character. More than anything I'm calling this a miracle of the human brain. The sheer "amazingness" of creativity and the unknown spring from which it pours when the time and surroundings are right. For every encounter with "writer's block" that one may encounter there is almost always an even more compelling encounter with a blank page that is suddenly filled almost without effort. I stare at this suddenly full page and marvel at it, because this was not what I was thinking of when I started, yet it is what happened when I stopped and took a breath. It's different and better and lends a whole new layer of plot to my effort. Where it came from I do not know, but when it happens I love it. The writer's equivalent of a runner's high.

As River and Ranch matured and took shape, characters emerged and developed themselves over their time in the book. I found my ending for River and Ranch and realized that there was much more unwritten that wanted to come out. So I continued writing. New Grass Growing is one result of that effort. It continues the story of Cale and Dana and their life surrounded by friends and family and the big blue mountain sky that looks down on Salmon, Idaho.