GRINDING OUT OREGON GRINDER

Last October, I wrote a blog about why, as an author, I was switching genres, summing up the reason with the statement “because I want to.”

That’s true.  But there’s also a hidden story behind the reason.  It deals with weather, the framework for three of my five previous novels.  (As many of you may recall, I’m a weather guy who’s also a writer.)

When I began researching the WWII bombing raid against which my newest manuscript, OREGON GRINDER, is set, I thought—happily—there might be a weather connection, that is, a link to my previous efforts.  Thus, the small following of readers I’d developed wouldn’t think I was totally running off the rails if I switched to historical fiction.

The literature I had access to when I started my research, almost twenty years ago, strongly suggested that weather had played a significant role in turning the mission I was writing about into the deadly, screwed-up debacle it became.

But the role of weather turned out to be nonexistent.  The more information I uncovered about the attack, the more I realized that weather had been a non-factor in transforming the raid into a disaster. 

Thank God for the internet and YouTube.  There I found a video by a pilot, the late Robert Sternfels, who had actually flown the mission.  He said the weather factor as described in a popular book about the raid just didn’t happen, that it was made up. 

So you won’t find anything about it in OREGON GRINDER.

Yep, I’d lost my weather connection, but by then I was so thoroughly engrossed in the subject it didn’t matter.

So where do things currently stand?  The manuscript is competed and I’ve launched a search for a new literary agent and/or publisher.  And often that part of the publication business is much more daunting than the actual writing.

I’ll keep you posted.

(PHOTO: This could be Oregon Grinder—the plane, not the manuscript—but it’s not.  It’s Witchcraft, the B-24 bomber I took my “orientation flight” in last October.  Photo courtesy Roger A. Wyatt.)