By John Gilstrap

It will come as no surprise to anyone who has known me for more than a minute or two that I am a social creature. I am a Type-A extrovert all the way–ENTP for you Myers-Briggs afficionados. There’s nothing I enjoy more than a good party. Which is why, beyond the glorious religious reasons, the Christmas season is the highlight of my year. We love to host parties. In fact, when we designed our stone cabin in the woods, we included extra wide hallways specifically for the purpose of accommodating large-scale parties.

This past weekend, on December 7, was the annual big one for local folks, about 70 people in all. It’s our Christmas present to each other, so the whole thing is catered, complete with open bar and valet parking. (The valet parking is necessary because it gets REALLY dark out here, and parking is in a field.) Thanks to my involvement with the local radio station, we’ve gotten to know far more local people in the two and a half years we’ve been West Virginians than we met in our lifetimes outside Washington, from down-the-street neighbors to politicians to judges and prosecutors. Kurt and Annie Muse (subjects and co-author of Six Minutes to Freedom) were able to join us as well.

On December 14th, there’ll be another party for 16 people, for which I’ll do the cooking, though I’m not yet sure what we’ll have. Soft plans are forming for a y’all come open house event on December 22 for the broad spectrum of friends from today and yesteryear–firehouse buds, high school and college friends and old neighbors. If it happens (I guess we really need to decide), that get-together will be the very definition of informal–think pizza, sides and maybe burgers if the weather is nice enough.

Then, on December 27, we’ll host the daylight version of the extended family party that used to be a Christmas evening party before we moved to West Virginia. (Did I mention it gets dark out here at night? Apparently, Washingtonians’ retinal rods and cones don’t function without the assistance of street lights.) Cooking assignments for this party were established decades ago. Barbie brings the apple pie (actually she’s not allowed to cross the threshold without it), Nan brings her cheesy grits, Jim brings cranberry relish, Donna brings sugar cookies (another prerequisite for entry), and I bring the old school green bean casserole that everyone makes fun of but somehow manages to choke down without leaving leftovers.

With all the entertaining, this is my season for extravagant decoration. I’ve been told that my Holiday decorating aesthetic is best described as “hotel lobby.” He who said that was not being entirely complimentary, but he may have had a point. For this one annual slice of time, more is more, right? For one-twelfth of every year, we turn what I think is a fairly staid, conservatively outfitted home into our wonderland. I have regular late-summer nightmares about having missed the holiday decorating season. I hope we do it without tipping into tacky, but if there’s ever a season when you get get away with crossing that line, I think this is it.

Because of a very sad story that happened when I was young, and then was reinforced through many years in the fire service, we don’t put up any real Christmas trees. I don’t even allow any real greens near a fireplace or a candle (it was a VERY sad story when I was young). So, we do artificial trees, the technology for which has seen amazing advances year over year. Remember “more is more?” I confess I have a self control problem, however, when it comes to Christmas trees. We have six of them this year. I already know where I want to put the 7th next year.

Of the six trees, though, only one is the true Christmas tree for the house, and it’s the one in what we call the family room. This is the one that is, quite frankly, the most boring to look at, but it’s the one that I’ll sneak down at night to look at to bring peace to my soul. Here, you’ll find the God-awful (priceless) toilet paper dowel wrapped in crepe paper made by our son in kindergarten in 1989. You’ll find the ornaments bought on every family vacation, and Bernard and Bianca from “The Rescuers Down Under” (1990), who must always be holding hands. Even a few nicotine-stained Shiny-Brite glass ornaments from my youth remain intact. One stocking over the mantle reads “Johnny” and it was handmade by my Mom-Mom when I was an infant. When our son Chris was born in 1986, I transferred the two silver dollars my Uncle Henny gave to me when I was 5 or 6 years old from the toe of my stocking to the toe of his.

The book tree in the library is the newest addition to the collection. It is by far the most self-indulgent (and self-congratulatory) of the decorations, and I won’t even pretend that there was an effort at subtlety. Much of the detail was lost in the formatting to blogger, but in addition to a few regular ornaments, the branches of the tree are decorated with open and closed editions of my various books. The dangling yellow bits are bookmarks I had made for Zero Sum. We used a standard hole punch near the top to make room for a standard ornament hanger. Finally, instead of a tree skirt, we scattered more books around the base of the tree stand. At last, a practical use for all those author’s copies that have been gathering dust in the basement!

One of the great pleasures of designing your home from scratch is that you get to design it to your own lifestyle. This is Joy’s and my fifth house since we’ve been married, and each previous iteration came burdened with a space called a “living room” which went entirely unlived in. So, for our dream home, upon entering the foyer a glance to the right reveals the “tavern.” (Hey, I’m Irish. Gimme a break.)

Next to the back porch during 8 months of the year, the tavern is probably the room we use more than any other, and not just for the bar–though for that, too.

Of course, a tavern Christmas tree must have special ornaments. When I went to the liquor store and told the clerk why I was buying a couple dozen airline-size bottles of a variety of boozes, she really got into it. Wrap some ribbons around the necks and voila! You’ve got a tree bauble, to which we added more than a few used wine corks. For the record, that tiny bottle you see is the only bit of Jägermeister to be found in our house. I am confident that anyone who has ever been among the last to leave a bar will agree that in the history of time, nothing good has ever happened after the Jägermeister came out.

If you’ve read this far, it is entirely reasonable to ask what does any of this have to do with writing? Well, I’ll tell you: This being December 10th, I owe a short story to an anthology by December 15th, and I’ve been having trouble carving out the time to get it done. It seems like deadlines are a constant in my life, and somehow, I always meet them. But Christmas comes but once a year.

Killzone family, this is my last post before we hit our end-of year hiatus, so let me take this opportunity to wish you the very best for this holiday season and the coming year. May every challenge be surmountable! See you on the flip in ’25!

By John Gilstrap

Finally! I no longer have to keep the secret: my nonfiction book, Six Minutes to Freedom, has been set up at Netflix to be a feature film with a projected release in 2026. I’ve known for at least two months now, but I had to wait for the announcement in Variety before I could go public. Jared Rosenberg will write the script and Toby Jaffe will produce. More on them later.

A romantic beginning.

Back in April, Joy and I were in Greece, celebrating her birthday with an al fresco dinner at the base of the Acropolis when my cell phone rang. Normally, a romantic dinner trumps a phone call, but not when the caller I.D. shows your Hollywood agent’s name, and there was no way he could be bringing anything but good news. With no current film projects in the pipeline, there was no conceivable bad news to deliver.

Good news indeed! One of the hottest new screenwriters in Hollywood–Jared Rosenberg, whose film Flight Risk, directed by and starring Mel Gibson and Mark Wahlberg, will be released in January, 2025–loves SixMin and wanted to sign an 18-month shopping agreement to turn it into either a feature or a long form series.

“Great news!” I said. “How much?”

“Well, nothing. It’s a shopping agreement. It gives him exclusive rights to package the property and shop it around and see if there’s interest. Maybe he’ll write a treatment, put together a production team, get actors excited.”

I was confused. “Aren’t you the person who told me that no one gets to do anything with my book without paying for the right? Pay to play?”

“That was before the writers’ strike,” he explained. “All the rules have changed. I think you should do it. This guy’s got horsepower now. He can open doors.”

I still wasn’t ready to leave the world I thought I understood. “How can he sell something he doesn’t yet own?”

“That’s the beauty of the shopping agreement,” my agent explained. With so much of the legwork already accomplished by the shopping entity, the author is in a stronger position than ever before.

Not insignificantly, let’s remember that the book came out in 2006. The opportunity cost of a potential mistake was pretty low.

“Let’s do it!”

Then Comes September . . .

. . . and word that 20th Century is very interested in doing a deal for SixMin. While I was busy not paying attention, Jared Rosenberg had joined forces with producer Toby Jaffe and together had been drumming up excitement for this great movie project. It was time for the agents to go to work.

And here’s where it got interesting because we’re all repped by different agents, each of whom is jockeying for the best deal for their client. Over the course of the next few days, we received, rejected, tweaked, countered, and tweaked again various dollar values and deal points, as I presume the other players were likewise doing. It felt to me that we were coming very close to a deal we could live with when . . .

Wait! Netflix wants to make the movie! The negotiation chess game just became three dimensional, with three agents negotiating deals with two studios, with no one knowing the details of what the others are asking for/demanding. This was the first time when I really understood the value of good representation.

Now it’s time for me to be a bit coy so as not to step on toes. When the dust finally settled, the production team was happiest with the deal they hammered out with Studio A, while the Studio B terms were far more favorable for me. I won’t say which player was A or B, but it’s rare in the movie business when the author of the source material is in able to negotiate from a position of power. The best terms for the production folks don’t mean much if they don’t own the rights to the story they want to produce.

Stuff happened behind the scenes, and now we’re set up at Netflix. Cool beans. And as far as I can tell, nobody’s feathers got singed during the back-and-forth.

It’s been a very long time since I’ve had a hand to play in Tinseltown. It feels good to be back. And for now–for this brief, shining moment in time–it looks like the movie will actually be made. (Everyone please do me a favor and knock wood now.)

By John Gilstrap

Big Brother breathed on my neck yesterday, and I confess it gave me a serious case of the willies. There’s some movie stuff going on that can can’t discuss in detail yet, but it all looks very promising. Extended email exchanges last week culminated in a 4-person Zoom call yesterday afternoon (for me, morning for the other three) that was essentially an opportunity for us all to get to know each other and share some creative ideas.

I’m old school about timeliness (on time is five minutes too late), so at 12:55 I follow the Zoom link and I wait in the virtual waiting room until our host, Cory, opens the meeting. At the top of the hour, the screen blinks, and there’s the Brady Bunch Zoom screen with my face, plus three others from the production team. As we’re about to say hello, a fifth window opens, announcing itself to be me and saying, “Recording.”

“Whoa,” I said. “What’s that?”

“It says it’s you, so I let it in,” Cory said. “I figured you wanted to record the conversation.”

“I don’t mind if you want to record,” said Josh, the director. “I’ve never done that, but I don’t mind.”

“It’s not me,” I said. “I have no idea where it came from. Can you dump it from the meeting?”

“Maybe it’s the Russians,” Adrian, the producer, joked.

After some more cross-talk, Cory found the dump button, and the intruder was excluded from the call. The meeting went well.

That would be creepy enough. But then, I found this in my email, sent to me by Otter.AI:

During a Zoom call, Cory XXX and others discuss an unexpected recording request, initially thought to be from John. There is concern about the presence of Russian hackers and the privacy implications of the recording. Cory suggests exiting and rejoining the meeting to address these concerns. Despite the unease, they decide to proceed, as there are no significant secrets to protect. Cory then instructs to remove an AI note-taker associated with John from the meeting, indicating a preference for transparency and control over the recording process.

But that’s not all. The email goes on to present a more detailed summary of the part of the discussion it listened to, and then there’s a link to the actual recording.

Has anyone else experienced the uninvited arrival of AI bots in their business lives? At least this one had the decency to announce itself before recording, but when I put on my thriller writer hat, it’s easy to see a world where that won’t be necessary.

The creepiest part of it all isn’t the recording, actually. It’s the narrative summary of the recording that freaks me out. Now I have to figure out how to make sure that Otter.AI doesn’t bother me again.

By John Gilstrap

I spent last week in Nashville, Tennessee, at Bouchercon, the World Mystery Convention, where I got to commune with dozens of writer buddies, many of whom I had not seen since the pandemic. In case you’re not familiar with how these conferences work, the official program is filled with various speeches and panels, where writers pretend to understand this thing we do, and the evenings are spent in the bar, where all real business is conducted. I had a wonderful time.

One of the panels I served on was called “Shoot to Thrill,” where I had the honor to share the stage with Brad Thor, Andrew Child, Marc Cameron, and Boyd Morrison, with the mission of discussing how to write action scenes. I shared that I find the choreography of fight scenes to be some of the most tedious writing I do, and Andrew Child was on the opposite end of the spectrum, professing to enjoy writing those scenes.

One of the most interesting questions of the session came from an audience member, who brought up the iconic chase scene from the 1968 movie, Bullitt, starring Steve McQueen and a Ford Mustang. While a bit dated now–in part because I’ve watched it dozens of times–it’s a riveting sequence, featuring great camera work and lots of squealing tires and exciting engine noise. The questioner asked how one would write that sequence for the page and achieve that same level of excitement.

I had never thought about writing in those terms before, but as I thought through my answer, I realized that I had stumbled on the topic of my blog post for this week.

First, to get yourself oriented to the topic, here’s the sequence I’m talking about.

Notice how little storytelling occurs in that chase scene. Lots of adrenaline pumping camera work plus an outstanding sound track, but not much else. This is where writing for the page trumps writing for the screen.

I’m not going to attempt to write the sequence here, but consider all the opportunities for drama if you were to decide to do so:

• What do those aerial hijinks feel like to the driver’s spine?
• What is he thinking as be blasts through stop signs?
• How intent is he on keeping track of pedestrians and other vehicles as he speeds through the streets of San Francisco?
• What are his intentions if he catches up with the fleeing car?
• What do those downshifts feel like?
• How does he keep control when he loses the back end in a turn?
• What does all that burning rubber smell like?

The list goes on and on. The trick in writing an action scene for the page is to bring the reader into the protagonist’s head and body. Every action has a reaction–Newton’s Third Law of Writing. Focus on those reactions because that’s where the humanity of your character resides.

I wrote above that I find it tedious to write action sequences, and the reason is the delicate choreography of the action and the humanity, while still advancing the plot and not breaking the rhythm of the storytelling. After clearing a room and shooting bad guys, Jonathan Grave may change out a magazine before moving to the next room, even though the mag is half-full because, as he says, you never bring old bullets to a new gunfight. (More bullets are always preferred to fewer bullets.) That mag change would be just a few hand motions on the screen, but that sentence on the page provides an opportunity for characterization that advances the storytelling.

What say you, TKZ family? What’s your secret to writing effective action scenes?

By John Gilstrap

It seems that my writing process, if I have one at all, is to stack as many odds against myself as I can. I overcommit to too many real-life projects at the same time, I don’t outline, and I push my writing schedule way too close to deadlines. The net result is to live in a world that is far more stressful than it needs to be.

Somehow, it works. It just doesn’t always feel that way.

Sometimes, when I’m pantsing along without benefit of an outline–pretty much the definition of pantsing (as opposed to plotting, or outlining)–I can find myself in the middle of a plot twist that seemed like a really great idea when I first made the turn, but now that my character is in the middle of great peril, I have no clue how I’m going to get him out of it. Or, perhaps she made a bold courageous choice, and I now have to figure out why she would have done such a self-destructive thing instead of making the safer, more logical choice.

Tick-tock. Deadline’s coming.

The coward’s way out is to go back and change the story to relieve the pain on the story’s pressure pressure point. I resist doing that for several reasons. First of all, I’ve learned over the decades that my imagination takes me to places for a reason. If the choice that got me in trouble seemed like a good idea when I made it, I’ve got to trust that it was, indeed a good idea. If I stay with it long enough, a solution will emerge.

Too many inexperienced writers, I believe, punt early and take the coward’s way out. They find themselves in a creative corner, claim “writer’s block”, and then either abandon the project or start over. Don’t do it, folks. Stay the course.

But if you do go back and undo the troublesome plot twist, beware the ripple effect. If you’ve written for anytime at all, you’ve been there: where a single change to a plot point makes another plot point no longer relevant, and by the time the secondary and tertiary effects are calculated that tiny change has created major headaches.

Another reason I rarely go back and make changes (never say “never,” right?) is purely logistical: I typically don’t have time left in the schedule for long rewrites. Since I’m always screaming, face on fire, to make my deadlines, I’m lucky if I’ve got a week left over after typing The End to do the clean up rewrite. I most definitely don’t have time to rewrite the entire third act. So, damn the torpedoes, my course is set.

Finally, logistics aside, here’s the most important reason not to take the coward’s way out and punt to the rewrite: hubris. old fashioned pride. My characters aren’t cowards, so I can’t be one either. If I put them in a tough situation, I can get them out. And you know what? I always can! Sometimes it takes the application of a little more imaginary explosives, other times it takes an additional character with a few lines of dialogue.

There’s a weird thing that happens in every book, and it always comes about in the third act. I call it the unexpected shortcut. I’ll have planned this elaborate set piece with multiple points of view that’s going to take ages to write, and then out of nowhere, I’ll get smacked with the realization that I’ve provided myself with a much more streamlined, elegant and effective route to the conclusion that I didn’t even know I’d written.

In my most recently completed book, Burned Bridges, the first of the Irene Rivers series, to be released next year, I found myself buried up to my neck in the third act with the action scenes clear in my mind, but I didn’t have a way to reveal to the good guys the secrets that justified killing the bad guys. Once the bad guys died, their secrets would die with them, but I didn’t have a believable motivation for them to confess. I knew there had to be a way.

Then it hit me. I had introduced a character way back in the second chapter whose original purpose was to be a walk-on catalyst for an entirely different scene. All Irene Rivers had to do was place a phone call to this character (no longer just a walk-on, and likely destined to return i future books), and the rest would fall into place.

Whether you’re new to this writing game or wizened and gristly with war stories from the storytelling trenches, you need to remind yourself from time to time that you’ve got this. You know what you’re doing. The story that seemed like a great idea when you first started writing it is no less a good idea just because the telling of it is getting frustrating. It’s supposed to be a little bit hard all the time.

Okay, it’s your turn, TKZ family. How do you hack your way out of plot corners?

By John Gilstrap

For fiction to work–for it to feel right–countless tiny elements have to come together in a manner so seamless that readers are unaware that they are being manipulated. Clues have to be planted and red herrings launched so subtly that they don’t draw attention to themselves. And then there’s pacing–the key to providing all the information the reader needs to know in a way that doesn’t stop the story for a data dump. This can get particularly tricky in the middle of the story, when characters have to reveal details to each other that the reader already knows.

Over the years, I have developed a shortcut technique that I call the “em-dash interruption.” Here’s what it looks like:

Jake strolled into the kitchen, still buttoning his shirt. “Smells good in here. Are we–“

 

“You left the water on all last night,” Angie snapped. “Now the roses are overwatered, and they’re not going–“

 

“I’m sorry. I got the call from Aunt Lucy last night and I guess I–“

 

“You’re always sorry, Jake. I don’t ask you to do a lot around here but every time I do, there’s always something . . .”

 

He knew the speech by heart. How could he not? They’d had it twice a day since–

 

“And it has nothing to do with the baby! I know that’s what you think. I know that’s what everyone thinks!”

I just made this up on the fly so you know as much about what’s actually happening in the scene as I do, but the point I’m trying to make is that you don’t need complete sentences to tell a story–especially when the details of the dialogue are secondary to the mood of the scene. In the example, we don’t really care what Angie is cooking or what is going to happen to the overwatered roses or even what Aunt Lucy wanted to talk about. What’s important is the fact that this couple is in crisis and there’s a way to convey the crisis in a snappy way.

Note, too, that I used the em dash to interrupt narrative as well as dialogue. I do that all the time. Here’s an example from Zero Sum, the Grave book to be released next month:

They weren’t upset that his boy had been killed—no, they didn’t give a shit about that. If it had been the original team of agents, they would have—

            Wait. Why weren’t they the original team of agents? 

Here, we have a character working through a problem in his head, asking questions, testing theories, and the thought process leads the character to have a lightbulb moment (the em-dash interruption of his own thoughts) that leads him to ask a question that is critical to the plot.

I’ve used the same technique to introduce a startling moment for the character. Again, making it up on the fly:

Charlie needed to find himself another job, something better suited to his intellect. Security guard money wasn’t bad but goodness gracious, all he did was wander hallways and rattle doorknobs. Same doorknobs every hour, every night, and always locked. They could hire a trained monkey to do this gig. Hell, they could hire a trained–

 

What was that? Something made a noise from behind the

Here, we take a couple dozen words to anchor the reader with a character and then zing ’em with an em-dash interruption to jump the story along.

So, what do you think? Does this make sense? The blog entry is a bit short today, because I figured I covered the topic, and–

Wow!

By John Gilstrap

In the two years leading up to the pandemic, I flogged my social media accounts pretty hard, producing and promoting over 30 videos on writing and then posting them on my YouTube channel. Each new video linked to previous videos, and then I posted promotional links on Facebook and Twitter. I picked up enough subscribers and viewers to monetize the channel, bringing in enough extra scratch to fund a Mickey-D’s drive through every six months or so.

Then Covid hit and brought with it social fractures that left me stunned. We avoid politics on this site, and I don’t want to relitigate all that passed during those awful years, but suffice to say they left me Angry. Notice the capital A. I’ve learned since that friends were worried about me.

The saving grace for me was that we had a dream house to build out in God’s wilderness. All those selections and decisions were exactly the kind distractions I needed to distance myself from the urban insanity that I would soon leave behind and embrace the rural calm that awaited us in West Virginia. Our dreams of Utopia were shaken pretty hard when out son suffered a workplace accident that broke his leg in 10 places, but that crisis also passed–just about the time we got the new puppy.

Oh, I should mention that January of 2020 marked the beginning of my first-ever (and last-ever) contract to write two books per year for two years. With my emotions on edge and my calendar packed, something had to go. Thus, no new videos on the channel in the past two and a half years.

I’d like to start doing them again, but . . . here it comes . . . I don’t have the time.

And that is 100% a lie. I have the same 24 hours in every day that I had when I toiled away at a Big Boy job, zig-zagging across the country making speeches and providing consulting services while running a 7-person department and still writing a book per year. The difference is, back then, my writing hours were from dinnertime till 11pm every night. I rarely if ever watched television. I just worked, whether one job or the other. That was the schedule for 11 books over 11 years.

When it comes to starting the videos again, yes, it’s something I would like to do, but clearly I don’t want it enough to give up unclaimed downtime. Empirical evidence shows that I would rather go to shooting range than make a video, and when that’s done, I’d rather clean the guns. When it’s not so stinkin’ hot, playing Frisbee with Kimber is more important, and so is just hanging out with my bride.

“Where do I find the time?”

If you lurk around any of the writer-oriented sites on Facebook or elsewhere on the internet, you’ve seen the question posed dozens of times: “I have a story in my head that I want to get on paper, but I just don’t have the time. Between my work schedule and the kids and their athletics, I just can’t do it.”

In the words of that great philosopher, Col. Sherman Potter, horse fritters!

The time is there. Heck, the time it took for the complainer to post the complaint (and check back three dozen times to see what the responses were) is time they chose not to dedicate to writing. So is that half hour they spent playing Wordle in the morning and the hours they spent playing video games or watching the baseball game on television.

Time is a constant. It cannot be lost and it cannot be found. It just is. Each of us finds the way to prioritize that which is important to us. For me, family is always the top priority, so back in the days of early books, soccer games and endless concerts and recitals always took precedence over anything book-related, because those things were fleeting and fixed in space. One and done. If you miss it, it’s gone forever. But the book still needed to get done. The four hours of productivity I lost that night could be made up in 30-minute increments over the next writing sessions.

Truth can be harsh, but I think we need to be truthful with ourselves. When you hear a friend complaining that they don’t have time to do a thing, and you sense that they’re truly looking for a solution, ask them what less valuable time suck they are willing to give up to make room for the new thing. Hint: I know many people who never watch television and do very well on only five hours of sleep.

It’s all about choices.

By John Gilstrap

After reading Reavis Wortham’s post on Saturday, I figured it was okay to tell this story.

I’ve posted before about our beloved dog Kimber, a mix of Cavalier King Charles Spaniel and Boston Terrier called a Caviston. (And yes, it bothers me that it’s not spelled Cavaston, but no one consulted me.) When we first moved to the woodland house in West Virginia, she weighed less than five pounds and I was keenly aware that the entire world posed one big hazard for her. Not only was she prey to most other creatures, her girth was smaller than that of the floor vents which hadn’t yet been covered.

We fenced in about a half acre of the backyard/woods so Kimber could have a place to wander, but for the first, say, nine months of her life, she never wandered without an escort. I was her primary security detail. After a year or so, she’d filled out to about 18 pounds and had outgrown reasonable threats from owls and hawks. Only the largest dogs ever outgrow threats from eagles, but our eagles stay distracted by the Potomac River smorgasbord a few hundred yards away from our place.

Once permitted to wander her fenced domain alone during the day, she turned into quite the squirrel hunter, chasing them great distances until the critters cheated and shot up a tree. I don’t think Kimber ever figured out why she couldn’t follow. She’s an avid deer chaser, too, though I’m not sure of her plan for when she caught one.

As neighbors joined our community, her canine best friends became a German shepherd and a Rottweiler. They let her hang out with them and played without crushing her. Like many small breeds, Kimber always thought she had way more wolf in her than she ever did.

As a human in her life, I of course knew better. Although Kimber aged out of danger from smaller predators, very real danger remained from larger carnivores–coyotes in particular. Even at her top adult weight of 20 pounds, she never went out at night without an armed escort. My rifle of choice: a Rossi Circuit Judge chambered in .45 Long Colt. The coyote gun lives its life staged at the back door all the time, easily accessible when needed. Often carried, only used once. On a snake. That’s a lot of gun for a snake.

Then came last week.

Last week was reasonably cool for a June afternoon, so we left the downstairs door open to allow Kimber to come and go as she pleased to and from the back yard. My office sits on the second floor, overlooking the backyard and the woods beyond. I was doing as I always do while staring down the maw of an approaching deadline, pounding away on the keyboard, playing with my imaginary friends when a cacophony erupted from out beyond my windows.

Growling and barking. My wife screaming at Kimber to come. To stop. I heard other animal sounds.

I knew this was bad.

I bolted from my desk and raced down the stairs, down the hall, and through the family room to the back door, grabbing the rifle on my way out. I still had no idea what was happening, but the noise of it all had not decreased in intensity. If anything, it had gotten louder.

Outside now, I turned the corner and the crisis became clear. Kimber had tangled with a woodchuck (or groundhog, depending on where you live). Normally docile, woodchucks are herbivores and hover near the bottom of Mother Nature’s food chain. When confronted with a carnivore, they survive by running away. But Kimber was faster and she cornered it against a tree.

Best I could tell, Kimber thought it was a game. Her tail was wagging hard enough to dislocate itself at the root as she bounced around, taunting the woodchuck that thought it was fighting for its life. Those critters have wicked incisors and long claws that would tear a little dog apart. Given a clear shot, I was going to kill the woodchuck.

Let’s not forget that my wife was in the mix, too, trying to separate the sparring parties. One thing for sure: I had no safe shot to take.

And then I did.

Woody Woodchuck broke into an open field run and for a good three or four seconds, he was all alone. As I shouldered the rifle, though, my wife yelled, “No, please, don’t!” In that instant of hesitation–my fault, not my wife’s; mine was the only finger on the trigger–Kimber woke up to the chase and re-entered the sight picture, chasing the woodchuck down until it somehow managed to climb under the fence and make its escape.

So, Woody lives on to make another appearance. Maybe he was traumatized enough to stay away from our backyard. I look for him every day. So does Kimber, who is fine, by the way. Not a scratch on her.

But a known danger lives on because of a momentary hesitation. Though Kimber sleeps in our bed at night, she is a country dog and she’s happiest when she’s outside. It’s too late to turn her into an indoor dog, and I wouldn’t want to anyway. So, if you’re a woodchuck or a coyote or a copperhead and you’re reading this, do yourself a favor and hang out at a property down the road. At the very least, stay outside the fence.

If there’s a writing related takeaway to this story, it’s that opportunity is often fleeting, and that hesitation–indecision–keeps doors shut that could otherwise be open. Whether it’s a job opportunity or a creative decision in a story, sometimes making a decision–any decision–is better than stewing about it overnight.

By John Gilstrap

For the 29th time in 29 books in a row, I find myself in the same predicament: roughly a month to go before deadline and woefully behind where I want to be. And not to sound cocky and not to jinx things, I’m confident that somehow, for the 29th time in 29 books in a row, I’m going to pull it all together and cross the line before the buzzer.

The book on the X at the moment is Burned Bridges (Spring/Summer, 2025), the first installment of my new series featuring Irene Rivers, the FBI Director from the Jonathan Grave series. The very existence of the series is a bit of a spoiler for the next Grave book, Zero Sum (August, 2024), but that’s pretty much unavoidable. Because this is the first book in a series, I’m taking my time in building the world in which she lives in West Virginia. It’s bucolic yet corrupt–I write thrillers, after all–but my corrupt players are smart and educated, just like the vast majority of real West Virginians I’ve come to know since we moved here.

Also, the Irene Rivers series will not be Jonathan Grave with a female protagonist. This series will be more subtle. Less explosive. Driven out of Washington by the political implosion she caused, she’s living out in the country now on inherited family land, trying to reconnect with her kids and be as invisible as possible. To give herself a little something to do, she hangs out her shingle as a private investigator.

Last week, as I crossed the 75,000-word mark, I realized that I’d created a problem for myself. I had characters I really liked doing interesting things with snappy dialogue to solve perplexing problems. What I didn’t have was a pervasive sense of menace. No one felt the presence of danger–including the reader, I’m afraid. I had big reveals planned for the third act in the midst of big violence, but I hadn’t given the reader a reason yet to recognize who my bad guys were, let alone dread their presence in a scene. Third act reveals don’t matter if readers aren’t still there to experience them.

Remember, I write thrillers, and one of the chief differences between my genre and mysteries is that it’s fine for the reader to have more perfect knowledge than the protagonist. I realized that instead of saving all the good stuff for the third act, I needed to open up a parallel storyline for my bad guys and transfer some of the violence up front. Right away, the pacing improved, and my bad guys started to feel more real to me. We come to see that much of the bad they do is necessary in their minds to prevent larger problems from being uncovered. Readers might not agree with their methods, but at least they’ll understand their motivations. The additional storyline also grants the impression of time passing between Irene’s scenes as she moves from place to place.

When I teach master classes–as I will be in September at the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers Conference in Denver–I emphasize that a story is an engineered product. The purpose of the product is to take readers on an emotional journey with characters that feel real to them. The writer is the engineer who makes every decision from yes or no on the Oxford comma to paragraph length to the perfect balance of action, description and dialogue. If I do my job right with these latest changes, the casual readers of Burned Bridges will have no idea that certain plot points exist where they do as the result of late-in-the-cycle structural repairs. Instead, they will feel perfectly organic to the story.

When things don’t feel right on a project, never hesitate to pump the brakes and take a hard look at what might be pulling your narrative astray. If you find yourself working too hard to keep revealing secrets to your reader while still having a story that makes sense, consider a structural change that will allow the reader to know the secret and then concentrate instead on keeping the protagonist in the dark. That could be as simple as a POV change.

If you find yourself drowning in the choreography of a love scene or a fight scene, consider having your characters merely close the door or run away.

The engineering of a story depends on the niche you’re hoping to fill. I drive a very nice Jeep Wrangler while my wife drives a very nice BMW X3. We’re both very happy with our vehicles. Mine is louder and bouncier than hers on purpose, not as a mistake in engineering. A young wealthy neighbor drives a Porsche that is essentially a massive engine with wheels attached. Neither of our cars would scratch his itch. (I’ve never sat in his Porsche because I’m afraid someone would post a video of me trying to get out of it.)

Your turn, Zoners. Does this engineering approach resonate with your own approach to writing? If you’re a plotter, do you always avoid late term panic attacks like mine? Pantsers, can you relate?