MORE ABOUT Saving the President
The Story Begins with Buffett
Saving the President would never have been written if not for Jimmy Buffett.
Jimmy did a benefit concert for our United Way on Saturday, February 10, 2007. Bless him.
Getting ready for the event was, as you would expect, all absorbing. On the next Sunday afternoon, my wife Jeanie allowed me the luxury of recovering by being a couch potato. A Tom Berenger movie named Sniper came on TV, and I watched it. Sniper 2 followed on the same channel. You guessed it. Two more hours.
The next day, out of the depths popped a very cool idea for a movie—at least Jeanie agreed with me that it was. For a day or two I built little ideas onto the big one and then started writing.
Fast. That’s the way I’ve always written. Within three months, the first draft was done.
I’ve learned that what happens after the first draft is the hard and time-consuming work. You’ll have to decide whether my time was worth the trouble.
Thank you, Jimmy Buffett. And thank you Susie Busch Transou, my good friend who arranged for Jimmy to come to town. Sophia Martinez, a central character in the book, is named for Susie’s daughter Sophie. Martinez? Well, my wife’s name was Martin before she married a future writer by the name of Armstrong.
Naming My Characters
One of the most fun aspects of the writing was having a head start when I named the people in the book. In most cases I borrowed from friends and family…just the names, never the physical or personality traits.
Patrick Fox, the President’s Protector, is not built around anyone nor named after anyone. I liked the name. We do learn along the way that his middle name is Dunlap. The associate I’ve worked with at United Way longer than any other is coincidentally named Susan Dunlap.
The President, not too far into the future when my story takes place, is Charles Wilson Langford. People who know me will laugh out loud. Langford is a prominent Tallahassee name, and Lawton is a valued friend, as is the rest of his family. Charles Wilson is my uncle.
Patrick’s closest relationship is with Jessica Ausley. In this case the name borrowing came from friends Jessica Spector and Loranne Ausley.
The last person I’ll mention here is Patrick’s other employer. I backed into this one. First I named the huge corporation ROMAC. I don’t have any particular affiliation to the Tallahassee building supply company with that name—I just like the ring. Once I had ROMAC, I needed its founder’s name to be a Ro something and a Mac or Mc something. The result: Roland McCallon.
No, I don’t appear anywhere in the book, in any way, shape, or form.
Leading Characters
Patrick Fox is working for his third president. He draws on his southern roots, Naval Academy education, and Marine training to protect President Langford. Not many world-class marksmen also have a Ph.D. in Finance, but Fox was chosen for this task exactly because he is extraordinary.
Charles Wilson Langford is in the third year of his first term as President of the United States. He has conceived and announced a plan that promises to change the world’s balance of power. But will he live to fulfill it? For that matter, is he too trusting?
Sophia Martinez is the deputy agent-in-charge of the President’s primary protection team. Until a chance encounter with Patrick on her alma mater’s campus, the University of Virginia, the Secret Service was her life. Everything has changed—for both of them.
Jessica Ausley takes on assignments for President Langford that no one else can. For three years that has meant an all-business relationship with Patrick Fox. He’s not blind to her sensuality, but his life depends on her skill.
Malcolm Johnson runs the Secret Service however he sees fit. Nobody can argue as long as the President stays alive. Johnson watches Sophia Martinez draw close to Patrick and doesn’t like it at all.
Roland McCallon created a multinational industrial empire. He became a close personal friend and advisor to President Langford. His company, ROMAC, has annual earnings of $3 billion…and the clout that goes with it.
Samuel Benningham knows the security business inside out, perhaps too well for Patrick’s own good. Benningham is Director of Corporate Security for ROMAC. Patrick recognizes him as a former All-Pro football star. Now it’s obvious that the man didn’t stop running over people when he retired from the gridiron.
Getting a Clue about Weapons
I was probably a third of the way through the book before I had my most important resource-brainstorm. The book is about a super sniper with a super weapon, and very few people know less about either of those topics than I do.
As I wrote I would just leave big gaps with a note to myself to go back and fill in the technical stuff. What emboldened me at all to even start writing was the concept for the story. What enabled me to think I could pull it off was that the work of the sniper has always interested me. I read most of Stephen Hunter’s books years ago. Plus I’ve watched the occasional movie. The recent one Shooter came out shortly after I started Saving the President, but I’ve been too busy to see it.
Back to my gaps. Out of the clear blue it hit me that my former Board chair at my United Way is in the munitions business. I divulged to him both my story and my lack-of-knowledge quandary.
Like magic he had me hooked up with Ken Johnson. Ken is a former instructor at the Army’s marksmanship school. He is still a world-class shooter, but he might be only second-best in his family, since his wife won the Olympic gold medal in 2000.
Without Ken I doubt I could have finished the book. He taught me everything that makes it sound like I know what I’m talking about. My hare-brained twists and tricks came from my wild mind, not his, so don’t blame him for anything that sounds utterly unrealistic. Give him immense credit for keeping me mostly on track on the technical aspects of the weapon and sniping. Thanks, Ken.
Nobody Knew
I wrote in secret. You can count on one hand the number of people who knew I was writing. As the book reached the ¾-finished stage, I relaxed the secrecy a little bit, since my daily life was occasionally infringed upon by the work.
Nevertheless, even my sister and mom didn’t know about the novel until I was completely done, nor did most of the 25 people with whom I work. Primarily this was out of a sense of self-protection! I didn’t know whether I’d maintain the discipline or enthusiasm to finish. For that matter, could I even write fiction?
Until I had a pretty secure feeling on both of those topics, I was mum.
Jeanie tolerated me. Happily, she liked the germ of the book and would give me her own embellishments, several of which I have borrowed and built on. She also was my reader of first resort when I hit a particularly iffy section. Usually those were action sequences. Needless to say, I’ve never put on paper anything that describes a fight or physical conflict or danger. She told me when I was OK or not.
Jeanie knows that I’ve never felt a desire to write a book, so she’s been a little bit quizzical at the sudden obsession. But she generously allowed this other lady, “Ken’s book,” to usurp some of her own time. Thanks, Baby.
Editing
People have called me the “word man” for years. I love the language and especially its proper use. Consequently, I’ve always prided myself on the precision of my own communication, both oral and written. See, that’s a perfect example. Most people use the word “verbal” when they mean “oral.” “Oral” means spoken; “verbal” means something expressed in words which can be either oral or written. So many people misuse the word “verbal” that now Webster’s allows a secondary meaning of “verbal” to mean “oral.”
I’m a diehard proofreader and a taskmaster at editing—my own work or anyone else’s. What I was not worried about was my ability to express my thoughts. Lots of other worries—maintain suspense, develop characters, keep a rapid pace, describe action sequences, communicate a sense of “place.”
When I sent my “finished” manuscript to Frank Reuter, a retired university writing professor, what I feared was that he would tear the story limb from limb on the basis of the fears in the previous paragraph.
Some of that he did, but not much. The shock to my system was his criticism of my actual writing. He revealed massive weaknesses, laziness, and blindness on my part. Like most of us, I wrote like I talk, and many glaring problems resulted.
He must have fixed 500 of these problems. Plus, once I “got it,” I had to re-edit on my own after I learned from him. I probably made as many more changes.
As a reader, you’ll never know how much you owe Frank as you (hopefully) flow effortlessly through the pages. I know how much I owe him!
Cover Design Is an Adventure
Conventional wisdom is that the two most important factors in a prospective buyer selecting a book at the bookstore or off the internet are the title and the cover design. My working title was “The President’s Protector,” but as I neared the completion of the novel and began to focus more on what would cause it to sell, I gravitated toward the words “Saving the President.” I tried to come up with more options but couldn’t. I liked “Saving the President” since it was reminiscent of “Saving Private Ryan.” The verb “saving” was better, I thought, than the noun “protector,” so that was that. The sequel may very well be “Protecting the President” or “Preparing the President.” Not sure yet.
So that left the issue of cover design. Even though I’m not artistic, I wanted to be pretty hands-on about this decision. Jaguar Publishers gave me that freedom.
The crosshairs on the White House was my first idea, and I played around with that in my homemade way. Roger Luke and Nelson Matabhik in my office helped me, and we came up with a decent, if amateur, version of that concept.
I won’t trouble you with the process of how Frank Dietrich of Artistry Visual Communications became my designer. The working relationship couldn’t have been better. He and I agreed early on that the crosshairs concept was a good one and even that it might become sort of a theme for my book covers in the future.
He liked the idea of incorporating the Presidential Seal into the design, but we concluded that the seal couldn’t be actually part of the target. The crosshairs needed to be focused on something literal—the White House or a person or something. Frank went to work.
He came back with several options, all of which were very professional and would have been right at home on any fiction bookrack. I started the practice of asking other people what they thought. I printed out copies of the possibilities and walked around with them. Since other people were the potential purchasers, the cover needed to appeal to them—not to me.
One of the versions which incorporated the White House and a very clever idea of Frank’s to incorporate a silhouette in one of the windows became the consensus choice. From there Frank fine-tuned. He used a closer photo, a larger silhouette, added the two cartridges, shadowed the seal in the upper right, and changed a few colors. He also finished the spine because by that point we knew the exact thickness of the book.
I’d love to hear your comments on the cover, as would Frank. We hope you like it.
The Biggest, and Spookiest, Coincidence
On July 30 I was sitting in my living room thinking (as I often do) about how odd it was that I had written this thing. I’m not amazed any longer that I could do it—I’ve gotten over that. But the fact that I did do it is still difficult to wrap my brain around.
The origin was playing back in my mind: the Jimmy Buffett concert on Saturday night, watching the two sniper movies on Sunday, and then the idea for Saving the President coming into my mind on Monday. The chronology played subconsciously: February 10, February 11, February 12. I had thought about this on many occasions over the last six months.
But this time the February 12 date stuck out. February 12? That’s an important date, I thought. Then it hit me that February 12 and February 22 were president’s birthdays, but I couldn’t remember which was Washington’s and which was Lincoln’s.
Wouldn’t it be weird, I thought, if my idea about presidential assassination (and the man whose job it was to prevent it) just happened to be “born” on the same date as the very president who was the victim of the most famous presidential assassination of all time?!
Three minutes later, my Google search told me that, sure enough, February 12 was the birthdate of Abraham Lincoln. Now, that is a coincidence for you.
A Word about United Way
You’ve probably seen in my bio that I work for United Way in Florida’s capital area. No surprise that Patrick Fox has several encounters with United Way in Saving the President, and in fact becomes (by virtue of his $10,000 gift) a member of the Alexis de Tocqueville Society.
A common misconception is that United Way is a big national entity with local chapters. That was what I thought too until I started working for the United Way of Metropolitan Dallas 15 years ago. Then I learned that there are 1,300 or so separate, self-governing United Way corporations. Basically, if a community wanted one of these community campaign organizations, that community had to start its own and be responsible for its own.
Our United Way of the Big Bend, for example, was chartered in Tallahassee in 1943 and has its own governing board, chooses its own agencies to support, and generally reflects the values of our community’s people. This method of organization means that the money stays local and gets used in the way our citizens desire.
Localness and accountability are exceedingly important, and not enough people are aware of them. Now you are. I encourage you to do the same thing Patrick did—support your local United Way organization. Your community is the beneficiary.