Author: admin

Midday temperatures are in the 90’s these days in East Tennessee, and people (like me) tend to get lethargic. I suspect that the lethargy extends to one’s reading habits, or, at least, so it would appear with my readers! I would be lying if I said that book sales were going well; they’re not. “Operation Exodus” has been available in e-book and paperback since mid-May, and it hasn’t been exactly flying off the shelves. “Silent Warriors,” in contrast, continues to do well in both print and electronic media. What is really gratifying is how well the audio book version is doing. I suspect that the reason for that is the work that Bill Bird, the book’s narrator, has put into its production. I have attached, below, Bill’s backstory about the audio book production and his methods.

-Gene

Audio Book Draws Inspiration from San Francisco Landmark World War II Submarine Service Production Features the Sound of War

SACRAMENTO, CA: A new audio book about submarine service in the South Pacific during World War II contains audio sound effects that are modeled after clips that were recorded aboard U.S. Fleet submarines during the war, which have been digitized and preserved by the San Francisco Maritime National Park Association. The Association is home to the USS Pampanito, a Baleo Class submarine that served on six patrols during World War II. The Pampanito is a floating museum of wartime history, and is docked at Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco.
Silent Warriors: Submarine Warfare in the Pacific is written by Navy veteran Gene Masters, who uses a fictional ship, the USS Orca and a fictional crew, to recount ten war patrols that took place during the war. Citrus Heights audio book narrator and producer Bill Bird auditioned for the role in November of last year and was selected by Masters over several others who also wanted to narrate the book.
“Auditioning for the narration and production of an audio book is similar to trying out for a play or a role in a movie or TV series,” said Bird. “You submit your best work for an audition script that the author provides and hope the author and publisher like your style.”
Some audio book narrators and producers use sound effects to enhance audio book production efforts and Bird counts himself as a member of that group. Bird says he follows what the author writes. If the author writes about a scene involving the launch of a torpedo, a submarine surfacing or rising, he did his best to recreate actual sounds recorded during the war. Audio clips posted to the Maritime website helped a great deal in the re-creation of submarine service during the war.
“Many of these clips do not offer the kind of quality that today’s audio production efforts demand and had to be re-created in a studio setting,” said Bird. “The torpedo launch sound effect used in the audio book, for example, was created with a metal sink, banging plates, an electric hand mixer and a bubbling fish tank.”
Shipboard calls and commands recorded during and after the war were also painstakingly re-created through the studio process. The specific calls used in the audio book production include General Quarters, Plan of the Day, Relieve the Watch and others, are all based upon audio clips hosted on the Maritime website.
The audio book production effort led to the creation of more than 100 individual effects, some of which are used multiple times throughout the 28-Chapter novel, which runs for nearly 23-hours. Chapters involving Philippine guerilla soldiers traversing a jungle at night with American submarine crews who have landed commando teams or are rescuing downed pilots, utilize a “jungle specific” sound.
Specific locations in C-Bar-C Park in Citrus Heights were used for the final production effort for the creation of jungle-specific effects. Several locations are home to large flocks of birds that are quite noisy in the early morning hours. At night, after the sun has gone down, frogs, crickets and other insects take over. Using his iPhone to record activity during the day and at night, Bird produced the final “jungle sound” using an audio editing program. This effort was recently highlighted in a Citrus Heights Sentinel news report.
“Thankfully, we had a very wet winter, which also created a lot of natural sound opportunities like thunderstorms and rushing water,” said Bird. “There’s a specific location in C-Bar-C Park where a seasonal stream enters into a storm drain, which makes a tremendous racket during a downpour. Once the sound mixing is done, it sounds a lot like the BongaBong River on Mindoro Island in the Philippines.”
An audio clip of the final torpedo launch production has been posted on Bird’s Sound Cloud page and can be accessed at this link. He is also promoting the novel through multiple platforms and is offering promotional codes for a free copy of his audio book. They can be obtained by contacting Bird at tweetaudioproductions@gmail.com.
Bird said he took much longer than normal to produce the book as a tribute to his father, a veteran of World War II who was captured by German forces during the raid at Dieppe, France in August, 1942.
“My father passed when I was just a child,” said Bird. “I never got a chance to thank him for what he did. This is my small way of doing that.”

TWEET AUDIO PRODUCTIONS is an Audio Book and voice production service located in Sacramento, CA.

While I was doing my marketing thing on Linkedin, I managed to set up a connection to the DODReads website, and was asked to do an interview. Following the normal procedure for such things, they sent me via email a series of questions, and I responded in writing. (When I completed the interview, Operation Exodus was still being edited, and it was nowhere near ready for publication. It is not, therefore, mentioned in the interview.)

DODReads is a website founded in 2018 by an active duty Naval Officer.  The impetus for starting the site was a command board that he nearly failed when he fumbled around and could not come up with the answer to a simple question “What are you reading”?  Learning through that experience he decided to chronicle his journey of lifelong learning through DODReads.com

You can read my interview as posted on the DODReads website here.

-Gene

In Operation Exodus, six evangelical missionaries become unwitting pawns in a high stakes gambit by the Iranian government to embarrass a hated sitting president, and ruin his chance of reelection. So that a Soviet-style show trial can be held, the Iranian intelligence service, SAVAC, tasks a brainwashing expert, Colonel Salehrad, with spiriting the missionaries out of Teheran and to a remote location. There he must dupe them into believing, and confessing, that they are CIA spies.  In an all-out effort to locate the prisoners, the national security advisor enlists the help of the Israeli intelligence service, Mossad. The Israelis locate the prisoners in an ancient fortified prison just outside the southeastern Iranian port of Kanarak, a resort city off the Gulf of Oman, famous worldwide as a sport fishing paradise.  The Israelis place an agent in the field, Hamad, to observe and report. Hamad goes to Kanarak posing as a sport fisherman on an off-season vacation. As efforts to resolve the crisis through diplomatic channels go nowhere, and with the General Election only weeks away, the president orders a military rescue operation

Called to lead the rescue operation is Navy SEAL lieutenant Jake Lawlor, grandson of a legendary WWII submarine commander.  Lawlor and his team are fresh back from deployment in Afghanistan, and are now faced with a prisoner extraction operation on foreign soil with no rehearsals, and very little solid intelligence to go on.  To make matters worse, the president keeps goading the Iranians on social media, even to the point of telegraphing his intention to “go in after” the missionaries.

Operation Exodus follows Jake and his SEAL team on the rescue mission, charts their successes, and some unwelcome surprises, as the mission unfolds.  Nothing comes off quite as planned, and Jake discovers, on breeching the prison, that one of the missionaries has already succumbed to the SAVAC colonel’s wiles and has been whisked off into town.  What follows is a rescue mission inside a rescue mission, and enough twists and turns to keep the reader turning pages to find out what happens next.

-Gene

The audiobook version of Silent Warriors is now available from Amazon. You can hear the Narrator’s Introduction here.

The entire narration exceeds nineteen hours, and represents months of work by both the narrator, Bill Bird, and myself. Bill has added scads of what he terms “production elements” to his narration, which only serve to make the story become more alive.

The whole experience or writing and publishing a book has been a new one for me, and I can distinctly remember the feeling of accomplishment I felt when I held the first proof copies in my hands. I never expected that there would be a call to put the book into an audio format, and yet – here it is! For those of you who enjoy listening to a novel while driving, or who have difficulty reading altogether, then this audiobook is for you. You can purchase the audiobook here. Enjoy!

-Gene

One of the fun things you get to do as an author is getting interviewed. Okay, it’s not like sitting down with a TV show host or somebody from 60 Minutes, and being asked questions, or even answering questions over the telephone, but it is something like that. Rather, the interviewer emails you a list of questions, you type out your answers and send them back, and then they are posted on their web page.

One such interview was sent to me by Melina Druga, who runs the Historical Fiction Writers Support Group on Goodreads. Melina has her own website. You can read the interview by going to the link here.

Another such interview was conducted by Tony Eames for a website call NFReads. Now, while the site title “NF” refers to “non-fiction,” apparently that title is interpreted loosely enough to include historic fiction. I took advantage of this interview to plug my next book, Operation Exodus. You can read this interview by going to the link here.

The audio book version of Silent Warriors is still in process, and Bill Bird just finished narrating Chapter 12 for production. Only sixteen more chapters and an Epilogue to go! As for Operation Exodus, the final edits are done, and after some serious proofreading, it’s still on track for release – possibly as early in pre-publication by May 1st. But Escarpment Press has made no promises.

Please remember that I enjoy hearing form you. My email address remains 240boat@gmail.com.

-Gene

Silent Warriors is an historical novel, in the sense that the story is made up – fiction – but it is set in the past, depicts the characteristics of the time period in which it’s set (such as language, customs, and so forth), and may put words in to the mouths of real people, and depict actual events.

And Silent Warriors does all of those things. But that being said, it is still a novel – a work of fiction. And fiction sometimes requires deviations from actual history to achieve a particular dramatic effect. For example, in Orca, Jake Lawlor makes eleven war patrols as her commanding officer. Now no commanding officer in WWII made more than five war patrols as CO – the average was actually 3.2 patrols per CO – and I say as much in the preface to Silent Warriors. (Medal of Honor winner Dick O’Kane made the most war patrols of any WWII naval officer: five as Executive Officer in Wahoo, and five more as CO of Tang.)

And everything that happens aboard Orca and the boats she operated with – with one exception – actually happened aboard a sub in WWII. As to what that one exception was, I’d be happy to hear from anyone who can put their finger on it!

The Silent Warriors audio book is in final production. Bill Bird, who is narrating the book, has done all the final sound edits and is in the process of adding sound effects (he’s using actual recordings from the WWII submarine Pompanito in action.)

My next book, Operation Exodus, is in the editing process at Escarpment Press. The editing is going slower than I had hoped, so if it makes a Spring release, it will be late in the Spring. More later.

-Gene

Like most people, when I read a book I really enjoy, I keep it to myself. It never occurs to me to spread the word.

Of course, when the book is a recognized classic, that’s hardly necessary. Nobody I know read Moby Dick because I said “Hey, you ought to check out this book by this Melville fella, it’s got a great story line about this nutty ship captain and a great white whale…” On the other hand, I have recommended some lesser-known classics to my friends – such as Master and Commander, by Patrick O’Brian, and other books in his Jack Aubry series, and have been thanked heartily for those recommendations.

For newbie authors (such as yours truly), such recommendations are vital. By all means, if you really enjoy a book by a new or unknown author, tell your friends about it. But these days, you can go even further – you can go to sites like Amazon (where you probably bought the book to begin with) and write a review. The more good reviews the author receives, the more sites like Amazon will advertise the book.

As of today, Silent Warriors had gotten eight reviews on Amazon. Seven of these are 5-star, and one a 4-star. I believe(or, at least, hope) that all of these were honest reviews. I could use a lot more! I’ve been told, and assume it’s true, that fifty reviews is Amazon’s threshold for advertising a book on its own (of course, you can always pay Amazon to advertise your book).

The bottom line is this: Please, if you enjoy any book of mine, please, please, post a review! And if you do, Thank you.

-Gene

Christmas and New Year’s have come and gone, and Winter has come to Knoxville in full force. While not exactly Minot, North Dakota, and 30 below, it’s stayed below freezing all day and is supposed to go down to the ‘teens tonight. Ever wonder what folks did about a Polar Vortex before central heating and snuggling pets?

The audio book version of Silent Warriors is well under way, and I have just reviewed and forwarded back Chapter 13. Only 15 more chapters and an Epilogue to go! The book’s narrator, Bill Bird, lives in Sacramento, and today, he says, it’s 67 degrees and the Sun is shining. There is that beautiful weather in California, but at least Tennessee has no state income tax!

Silent Warrior sales have picked up nicely, and there are now six reviews posted on Amazon – all of them 5-star! Meanwhile, Operation Exodus remains in the queue at Escarpment Press. No edits as yet. Apparently , however, it’s still on track for a Spring release.

In the interim, I have begun research on a new project, this one again set in WWII, and yet again, about my favorite subject: submarines! More later.

-Gene

Soon 2019 will be upon us, but 2018 has been an interesting year. My fist foray into the world of self publishing (with the indispensable help of Joe Perrone at Escarpment Press) has been an eye-opener. I decided to self publish, not because I thought Silent Warriors was unworthy of the attention of a regular publishing Company, but because I’m rather up in years and frankly didn’t want to expend the time and effort to attract and locate an agent, and then find, and negotiate a deal, with a publisher. Amazon makes self publishing easy and attractive, but, again, it takes time and some expertise. Despite a PhD in Engineering (Civil) I was frankly challenged when it came to the mechanics of it all. But Joe Perrone did all that work for a reasonable fee, and let me get on with what I set out to do to begin with: write!

Well, it turns out, not quite. An author wants people to actually read his work. Sure, there’s the self satisfaction of actually having written something – but, beyond a gut feeling, how do you know if your work is actually worth reading? Okay, so now Silent Warriors is out there, how do you actually get people to read it? In a word: promotion. Joe has been a help here as well, but most of the promoting gig has been up to me. Believe me, it’s learning process! But the word does appear to be getting out, because the book sales have been slow, but steady. A couple of 5-star reviews on Amazon have helped a great deal, and several readers have taken the time to email me and tell me they enjoyed the book. So now I’m asking: if you enjoyed the read, please, please, get back on Amazon and say so!

Thanks! -Gene

My second novel, Operation Exodus, is on schedule for release this coming Spring.  This book, unlike Silent Warriors, is pure fiction, although you might just recognize some of the people the principal players are based upon.  It’s also a lot shorter!

The principal character is the grandson of Silent Warriors’ main character, a Navy Seal Lieutenant named Jacob Joseph Lawlor, Jr.  (You may recall that Orca’s captain was Jacob Julius Lawlor, and Jake and Kate swore they wouldn’t saddle any boy child with Julius as a middle name.)

In Operation Exodus, six Evangelical Christian missionaries set out on a fool’s errand: to convert the people of Iran.  They are quickly arrested in Teheran for their efforts and thrown into jail. The Iranian government, searching for any excuse to disrupt the upcoming American presidential elections, seize on the incident and accuse the missionaries of being CIA spies.  To thwart any rescue attempt, the prisoners are hidden away in a prison in remote Konarak, on the other side of the country.  The immediate American response only serves to muddy up the waters, and, finally, the only way to get the prisoners out of Iran is to send in a Seal extraction team.  What ensues is the interplay of three spy agencies: the CIA, SAVAK, and Mossad, in an effort to first, locate, and second, to gather enough intel to guide Lawlor and his team to their target.  Nothing, of course, ever goes as planned.  Drones, flak vests, guns, and submarines (always submarines!) all are in play.

I think Silent Warrior readers will find Operation Exodus an entertaining, if somewhat different, read.

-Gene