2/5/83

... It's been a while, what can I say? I have been working my glutei off on the 3rd...4th...on the SUBMISSION draft of The Hunt for Red October. The MS is now about 560 pages, or roughly 170,000 words.

I never would have believed that I could write anything that long! And I'm not finished yet, still two (2) chapters to go, and a pair of inserts to do. Thus far I have (vicariously): committed a brutal murder; sunk one (1) Alfa-class Russian attack sub with a reactor accident, killing 100± (1 survivor); had a Russian Forger fighter hit a USN Tomcat with a missile; as a result of which a mock attack was staged on the Soviet battlecruiser Kirov, a damned serious one at that; crashed a helicopter with five deaths and one injured survivor; had a shootout in the missile compartment of the defecting Russkie boomer (missile sub--SSBN--in navalese); and other pleasant things... I still have to do away with another Alfa probably by ramming, killing all hands. I want the book to end on a high note.

Writing a novel is murderously hard work--worse than I can say. It does Bad Things to your head. Pick some bad things, this'll do it. The real hell of it is that you can't stop. It's like being on a damned drug. My brain is a wilderness of submarine, aircraft, sensor, radar, sonar, and weapons-system performance figures, characters and subplots. Did I do this--did I tie up that--did I resolve this question--what do I do with him--did I figure the implications of this correctly--is this a reasonable consequence of that...ad infinitum, every hour of the day.

This has really made me respect James Clavell. How he ever kept track of the subplots in Shogun (which take about four readings to figure) beggers my imagination.

... Christmas came and went. ... My delayed Christmas present will be in late March, ... : An Apple-IIe personal computer (128K RAM, 2 Disk Drives, Z-80 CP/M Card, and other stuff including a L/Q printer) for about $4,100, and a good deal of software to go along with it. (WORDSTAR, VISICALC, CHOPLIFTER, SARGON-II, ZORK, FLIGHT SIMULATOR, etc.) ...

I've also been looking at data on the new Apple business machine: Lisa. In a word: DAMN!

If Lisa is what it's cracked up to be, it's not just the new industry standard for a small business machine, it's an honest-to-God revolution. It uses the MC68000 CPU, 32-bit internal and 16-bit external architecture. This will change to 32/32 when memory architecture catches up. On asking a guy I know who knows computers how this compares, say with the IBM System 360 Model 70, he laughed, noting that Lisa is the qualitative equivilent of a $2,000,000 system of the early 1970s...for $10,000--except that Lisa can do more things, more quickly, and more easily. The really interesting thing about it, he then went on, is not the hardware which is nice but merely state-of-the-art, but rather the software and user-control procedures... Anyway, that's a year, probably two years away. For the moment I will reintroduce myself to EDP technology with a small machine.

Which I will use for the next novel, Patriot Games. The central character in Hunt is Jack (John Patrick) Ryan. PG is actually an older project, a pre-quel, if you will, explaining how he became Sir John Ryan, K.G. by interrupting a terrorist assassination attempt in London--while a tourist; Ryan is a graduate of Boston College, Georgetown University, and the Quantico Marine Base. Who the assassins were after, and why they were important enough for the U.S. to waive the law against noble orders (there is precident for this: General Sir George Patton, General Sir Dwight Eisenhower, Admiral Sir Chester Nimitz--little known but true) I hope I haven't already spilled to you. It's pretty good even I do say myself. The two people who've seen Ch 1 of Patriot Games have both responded, "Great!" The thing is, Ryan himself doesn't find out whose lives have been saved until Ch 3. I find that I may have a real talent for action sequences... hope that doesn't sound arrogant, I'm trying to speak clinically; my weak areas are ordinary dialog and expositional narrative.

Future projects include The Penache Procedure, about a USCG cutter involved in stopping drug-smugglers (the cutter is the WMEC Penache) and The Pandora Process involving the explosion of a nuclear device by terrorists--I'm weary of the books in which they fail to fire the bomb; what would happen if the bastards succeeded? --total chaos!

(Oh, "WMEC" designates the Penache as a Medium-Endurance-Cutter, like the Courageous-class, or is it Reliant-class? Anyway, a medium-size cutter, 250-feet or so in length.)

Business is doing nicely, considering economic conditions. Still growing, still profitable for the companies. I have thusfar married both activities without difficulty, and, of course the money-making one comes first. Writers typically die poor, a fate I do not relish. The odds against becoming the next Frederick Forsythe are, of course, somewhere between merely exponential and astronomical-incredible. I'll settle for a book-jacket with my name on it.

Well, I do have work to do. See ya.

[signed] Tom