A New Genre?

I finished the first draft of the book tentatively called The Assassin a few days ago. It’s going to sit untouched in my laptop for about a month or so and then I’ll start the editing process.

Writing The Assassin became, as I noted in an earlier blog, obsessive and compulsive. Now there’s another one gnawing at my consciousness, wanting to come out and I am going to write it. For me, it will be totally different – its non-fiction. Yikes!!!!

The working title is Gold and Silver Wings and what it is a series of vignettes from three generations of military aviators – my dad, my son and me. Rather than focus on flying in combat, I’m going to write about some of the funnier, more interesting and the human interest side of military aviation. I started writing some of these vignettes on my web site in a section called “Fun and Dumb.” Originally, I was planning to add one story a month and have a list of about sixty.

For some odd reason, my brain kept pushing me to put off writing them and now I know why. There’s a book in there someplace.

The intro is already written in my mind and it is a story my dad told me about when he was eight years old. His father drove out to Roosevelt Field in their three year old Ford Model T in the wee hours of the morning to watch Lindbergh take off on his epic flight. For my Dad, it got him interested in aviation and the rest, as they say, is history.

Organization is, I think, going to be easy if I do it by decades because it, at least at the moment, makes sense. The 30s and 40s will be all about my Dad. In the 50s and 60s, then yours truly makes it into the picture and then by the 70s, my son arrives on the flying scene.

The next step is actually write the table of contents and a few of the stories. Why? To “sell” a novel to either an agent or publisher one has to have a completed manuscript. From what I gather from looking at publisher’s websites on what they want in the way of queries, one needs is a few completed chapters, a table of contents. So, right (write?) now, my plan is to write the intro, the outline and about a dozen stories, probably three or four from my Dad’s life and then three from my and my son’s. Stay tuned.

Marc Liebman

February 2018