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During the Vietnam War, I witnessed the meteoric rise and subsequent unprecedented fall of a democracy movement, a grassroots movement led by the Buddhist monks of Vietnam. Because my signal unit provided communication for CIA, AID, State Department and NSC folks, we signal troopers heard things discussed that did not track with the official news being reported in the press and through official communiqués.

This discordance caused misgivings among many of us. These concerns never disappeared in my case. Over the years, as I stumbled upon more and more oh-by-the-way corrections of misinformation, I began to consider the need for this novel. I hold an advanced degree in engineering and have worked in investment services. I now reside in South Carolina.

 ABOUT THE BOOK:

Diverting The Buddha's cast of characters is very familiar today—a Texas White House, executives in charge of questionable investment driven companies and down in the dumps agencies of national security.

It is the last year of the Fire Horse, democracy is beleaguered, and only the Buddha can help a war weary people.

The novel recreates a short-lived democracy movement, one that for a flashing moment galvanized the world’s attention.

What would you have done after discovering CIA operatives treating a nationwide democracy movement as a form of social cancer? And what would your reaction have been to discovering that the highest echelons in Washington were abetting this effort?

"Diverting The Buddha" places its readers in the eye of such a political storm. It is a political thriller, that helps readers understand that democracy really does matter, not just in the abstract but also in the here and now. The book examines who rigged a South East Asian election in 1966.

http://www.authorsden.com/visit/viewwork.asp?AuthorID=8126

You have a degree in engineering, when did you decide you wanted to write?

I became interested in writing during my first year as an undergraduate, while taking an introductory creative writing course. I believe that course showed me a path upon which I could work through some observed inconsistencies, variances between what we Vietnam vets experienced and the official gospel according to that old spin mister we call history. Since then, I have taken three additional writing classes, each of these helped me to progress a bit, but my writing didn't mature until I was well into the first draft of my novel.

Do you plan everything you write, or just let it flow?

I guess I belong to the let it flow, let it flow, let it flow and then edit the result rigorously school of getting things down on paper. I write quickly and then refine a series of chapters, usually three but sometimes up to five. My style is to put down what bubbles up from my research, experience and from earlier chapters. After the new chapters are in the old WP, I then edit them as a group until they seem cohesive.

Was it difficult to write a novel that was partly based on your own experiences?

It was an adventure that I found enjoyable. I felt like a sleuth who with each new page uncovered more clues that would soon solve a huge mystery, an enigma concerning the meteoric rise and almost immediate downfall of a democracy movement led by an army of Buddhists. In order to write "Diverting The Buddha", I researched the background, history and cultural of Vietnam and also looked into hundreds of accounts concerning the aborted democracy movement of 1966. These efforts took three years to complete. I was lucky to be in Boston at the time and to have easy access to the Boston
Public, MIT, Kennedy and Harvard libraries. These repositories held a vast collection of primary source material on the period.

For me, a big part of my writing adventure lay in discovering how much eyewitness accounts and historic treatments of the events that power my book, standing all by themselves, didn't come close to accounting for what had actually gone on.
Only by pulling together the many mangled accounts about this exciting period and then weaving them into the every day lives of my characters did an accurate accounting of that period come about. Once I started writing, the characters came alive, and in the end the story they told solved the big riddle of why grassroots democracy had failed so badly during that long spring of 66.

How do you handle real-life interruptions?

I'm a morning person. When writing, I get up a 05:00 and work steadily for four hours. I not only write and organize things best in the early morning, but I'm almost never interrupted by: family, friends, or business before nine each morning.

What sort of books do you like to read?

I read a wide variety of books. I'm most interested in books that contain strong characterizations and stories that enhance my understanding of people, cultures, and social settings. I read a lot of mysteries, political thrillers, science fiction, historical fiction and good books by Southern U.S. authors-writers like Pat Conroy, Josephine Humphreys, Allan Gurganus.

Who is your favorite author or has influenced your writing?

My favorite novelist is T. Coraghessan Boyle. I look forward to each new release by him. He develops strong characters and is a master at surprising his readers with cleaver twists and turns of words, phrases and sentence structures. He keeps his readers on their toes and thereby makes each turn of the page an exciting event. He is a master at getting dialect right and keeping dialogue pithy and interesting.

If you could meet any character from a book, who would it be and why?

The character from my book that I would most like to meet is Trinh Thi Hong. She is nineteen, a university student and the only truly heroic character in my book. I modeled her on an archetype the Vietnamese call the warrior woman, a role model that goes back to the earliest days of Vietnamese history, a period which appears to have contained a long procession of women who led resistance movements against outside invaders-mostly the Chinese.

What I like best about Hong is that she could be a model for others who may be living in repressive times and depressing situations. Throughout the book, she is clear about what is going on in her country and remains true to her core convictions. When I started writing my book, I did not think we vets had meet such women over in Vietnam, but now I realize they were all around us, disguised as: bar girls always sending money home for their families to get by on, the struggling wives of disappeared husbands who had been force draft conscripted by one side or the other, war widows struggling to keep their families together, in fact every women who would not cast her lot with the American War's hyper-inflated, ever onward and upward, a go go economy. In the end, as Hong finds herself caught in a web of intrigue, she
does the right thing, chooses the path we all would select, if we were all ideal people, made her selection in spite of and not because of the tragic deaths of the two most important men in her life.

What are you currently working on?

Greatunpublished.com published "Diverting The Buddha" as a POD trade paperback in February of this year. I'm taking one year to try and promote it as best I can-hoping to create a good send off. I have signed with a literary agent who is marketing the book and have been able to obtain several very positive reviews about it. I also have entered it in writing
contests and will have it released in November by an up and coming e-book publisher, Double Dragon Publishing. I do have a second novel blocked out. I will begin researching it this coming March. It is a near future imperfect saga: the second in what I hope will someday be a democracy trilogy.

What have you found to be the best way of promoting your book?

I haven't found one yet; as soon as I do, I'll let you know so you can pass it on.

And finally, what advice would you give to writers starting out?

My only advice is never, ever give away any little piece of the rights to your work, you never know when what is in someone other's hands could be important to you cutting a real deal.

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