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The Talent Array of a Novel’s “Good Guys”

May 11, 2020
2 min

The Talent Array of a Novel’s “Good Guys”

Television dramas like NCIS often feature ensemble casts. That is, a half dozen or so individuals “star” in the series, rather than just one or two. This enables the writers to tap an array of skills from the various major characters: one may specialize in computer analysis, another in networking with other agencies, another in hand to hand fighting. My Rebecca novels are like that. They feature a group of protagonists – Rebecca, her family, several close colleagues – whose a

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Walker Buckalew

Apr 27, 2020
2 min

Decisions, Decisions

I am about one-third of the way through the fifth novel in my Rebecca Series. How do I know? Two ways. One, of course, the word count on my laptop shows about 33,000 words, and the other four Rebecca novels have ranged from 90,000 to 115,000. The second way is the nature of the decisions I keep making, almost on a daily basis. For example, at this point in the story there is no single individual identified by name as Rebecca’s (and Jack McGriff’s) prime adversary. For my adul

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Walker Buckalew

Apr 13, 2020
2 min

Who Done It? When Do We Find Out?

Books, movies, television… the creators of suspenseful stories take widely differing approaches to letting us, the readers and viewers, know “who done it.” For example, the late Peter Falk played a detective in the American TV drama titled Columbo, a series that ran for three decades, starting around 1970. The formula in those shows called for an elaborately planned murder, carried out in plain view for the TV audience, at the start of each 90-minute episode. In the remaining

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Walker Buckalew

Mar 23, 2020
3 min

School or War: Which is Worse?

I know that question sounds ridiculous. But hear me out. I’m reading a new book titled Becoming C. S. Lewis, by Dr. Harry Lee Poe (Crossway, 2019). As you can guess from the title, this is yet another biography of the great 20th century author of more than 30 highly regarded books, books of all different kinds: scholarly, children’s fiction, adult fiction, and more. And C. S. Lewis also wrote his own story, Surprised by Joy. This new book, Becoming C. S. Lewis, is different f

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Walker Buckalew

Mar 2, 2020
3 min

C. S. Lewis and Science Fiction

By most people in the world, C. S. Lewis is best known for his Narnia stories for children. But he wrote many kinds of books. His Ransom Trilogy – also known as the Interplanetary Trilogy or the Space Trilogy – was written for adults, and is sometimes, even today, catalogued by book sellers under “science fiction,” rather than “religious fiction” or “Christian fiction.” That’s always seemed odd to me, but that’s how it is. The titles in the Ransom Trilogy are: Out of the Sile

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Walker Buckalew

Feb 11, 2020
3 min

Juggling Time

Time gets “juggled” in two ways in my novels. First, the action usually takes place on more than one continent, separated by the Atlantic Ocean and five – sometimes even more – time zones. And second, there is a disconnect between the time-settings of the Rebecca Series for adult readers, and the time settings for the young adult books (which feature Joanna and Samuel, Rebecca’s teenage twins). Regarding the first: Rebecca is English. She and her family live in London or in c

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Walker Buckalew

Jan 27, 2020
2 min

Wounds

Almost every major character, good or bad, gets wounded or, in a few cases, actually killed, at some point in my stories, both in the adult and in the young-adult novels. There are several reasons for that. First, I think that, if an author is going to write action stories about good versus evil, there is going to have to be violence at some point, or there is simply no realism in the story. Think for a moment about today’s world. Violence is everywhere, much of it deadly. If

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Walker Buckalew

Jan 13, 2020
3 min

Underground and Underwater

A lot of things – good and bad – can happen below the surface of the ground or of the water. In the novel I’m working on now, a labyrinth of tunnels under the city of Washington, DC will provide many opportunities for good or bad things to take place. In other novels, I have already used underground and underwater settings at some length. To mention a few examples: “The Lodge,” Rebecca and Luke’s childhood home in England and still home for their parents, has a complete unde

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Walker Buckalew

Jan 6, 2020
2 min

Malinois, Shepherds, and Borders

Three breeds of highly intelligent dogs appear in my fourth novel for adults, which is titled Choose You This Day. Since many readers are not as familiar with the Belgian Malinois (“mal-in-wa”) as with the German Shepherd or Border Collie, let me say a few words about them. Originally bred for sheep herding – like the Border Collie – Malinois quickly expanded their repertoire. They were an attractive choice, in particular, to law enforcement and military personnel, rather tha

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Walker Buckalew

Dec 9, 2019
3 min

Dialects and Intelligibility

“Th’ bg! Th’ bg! Dt’r Stf’d’s bg! H’r sh’s w’r unt’d! Th’ w’r unt’d!” What? What dialect is that? What language is that? Well, it’s English, but before I translate, let me explain that this quotation is not dialect. That’s a person trying to talk despite having been beaten so severely that his face, lips, and tongue are painfully swollen. In contrast… this is dialect: “You listen here t’ me, Mr. Big Shot Navy Hero… you and Jaakov, here, might need t’ go t’ bed and get some re

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Walker Buckalew

Jul 5, 2019
3 min

A Real-Life Character

I have already mentioned in an earlier post that the characters in my novels – adult novels and young-adult novels alike – are not based on actual people. I create characters in order to move a story in the direction I think it needs to go. There has been one exception. In my fourth adult novel, Choose You This Day, there is a Dutch woman whom I named Greta van Dijk. Although what happens to Ms. van Dijk in this story is 100% fictional, her history is that of an actual person

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Walker Buckalew

Jun 14, 2019
2 min

Cover Art

You may or may not know that there are artists who specialize in creating book covers. It’s what they do to earn their living. Other artists, although not cover art specialists, let book editors know that they are interested in earning money in that way. For them, cover art income is a way to supplement income from their main creative interests, or to earn tuition money for school, or to supplement a growing family’s burgeoning income needs. My adult novels – the Rebecca Seri

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Walker Buckalew

May 30, 2019
3 min

“I really enjoyed your book”

Occasionally I – like other authors – get thank-you notes from people who have read one of my novels. They sometimes write, “I really enjoyed your book.” Occasionally I – also like other authors – happen to meet someone face-to-face who has read one of my novels. They sometimes say, “I really enjoyed your book.” These words are nice, and certainly the people writing or speaking them intend to say something that the author wants to read or hear. But many of us who write novels

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Walker Buckalew

Apr 2, 2019
2 min

What Do I Read?

Adult readers at my book signings, or students in classrooms, often ask me what I like to read. I’m not sure what other fiction writers read, but I know that I read considerably more non-fiction than fiction. And I think that might even be a good habit for fiction writers. After all, if you are reading well-crafted non-fiction – history, biography, autobiography – you are reading about reality, as each author discovers it, analyzes it, or experiences it. And, as a fiction wri

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Walker Buckalew

Mar 7, 2019
3 min

Site Selection: Studying the Scene

My wife Linda and I were visiting Rome, Italy, when I reached a particular point in my third novel for adults, Such Thy Mercies. I needed to know whether or not my main character, Rebecca – later to become Joanna’s mother in my young-adult stories – could extricate herself from a particular church in that city. I had already advanced far enough in the novel to know that the enemy had set a trap for her, and had led her to believe that she needed to enter the church at noon on

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Walker Buckalew

Feb 26, 2019
2 min

Why England?

I became a Christian when I was 19 years old, while reading C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, and I’ve never stopped reading C. S. Lewis. I carry a number of his books – fiction and non-fiction – in my e-reader when I travel on business. So, when my wife Linda asked me years ago what I might do if I retired “the next day” (knowing that, in fact, I had no interest in retirement), the answer popped right out: “I think I’d try to write the fourth novel in C.S. Lewis’s Ransom tril

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Walker Buckalew

Feb 17, 2019
2 min

Writing in the First Person

“My mother has a scar on her face that goes from here to here. The scar traces a flattened V-shape across her cheek. It starts near her mouth and goes along her right cheek almost all the way to her ear. It was made by a man wielding a perfectly enormous screwdriver, a man who had in mind killing her….” That’s the opening of the first Visioners book. Readers know from the first sentence that the story will be told in first person, through the eyes of Joanna Clark, rather than

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Walker Buckalew

Feb 8, 2019
3 min

Boats and Ships and Weapons

My stories – adult and young-adult – often feature boats or ships at some point. What’s the difference? Well, the easiest way to think about the difference is to realize that a boat can be hoisted onto a ship. The aircraft carrier on which I served as a young naval officer carried eight motor whaleboats. Each of these boats could carry about 60 sailors to and from shore, whenever the carrier was anchored in some port city’s harbor: Hong Kong, Valparaiso, or Acapulco, for exam

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Researching Novels: the Border Collie Lesson

Walker Buckalew

Jan 24, 2019
2 min

Researching Novels: the Border Collie Lesson

Dogs have important roles in my novels, both in the adult and in the young-adult stories. Some of my books have more than one featured dog, but THE featured dog, in every book I write, is a border collie. I selected that breed for my first novel, The Face of the Enemy, because the story is set in England, and because border collies are natives of the sheep-herding areas along the England-Scotland border. And as most of us know, they are also among the most intelligent dogs in

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My Female Characters Tell Me What Happens Next...

Walker Buckalew

Jan 14, 2019
2 min

My Female Characters Tell Me What Happens Next...

Female Lead Characters and Writer’s Block Over the years, when I have been speaking to students in their classrooms, or to adults at book-signing events, I have often been asked why all my novels – adult and young- adult alike – have female main characters. (That’s Rebecca in the adult stories, and her daughter Joanna in the young-adult stories.) My answer has always been that I have found women easier to know than men. Women and girls that I’ve known are more willing than me

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