April New Authors Hall of Fame featuring Michael Gear

It’s the month that April Fool’s Day kicks off and what I love about authors and those inducted into the Hall… they don’t fool around with their stories and the expertise that is shared within the words and pages wrapped within their books. I encourage you to visit the Hall’s website, catch up with past Attitudes at Altitude newsletters, and revisit the biographies of past Inductees. The 2021 ones have videos posted as well.

The nominations are in for this year’s Induction… all happening on Saturday, September 16th. Be there. HOLD the date on your calendar. Plan on attending. As we have them, details will be added to the Hall’s website. It’s always fun, and sharing of the Inductees do during the author walk is often a delightful surprise to attendees.

Onward… Don’t miss out on April's Friday Author Happy Hour with Margaret Coel, a 2019 Hall Inductee author who brings the West alive within her bestselling and award-winning series. Each month, one of our Inductees is featured on the second Friday of the month, what they are working on in their writing... and lives.

Dom Testa kicked it off in January—it was a fun hour filled with surprises. Marilyn Van Derbur Atler revealed painful insights along her journey as an author in February. Last month, mega bestselling author Jerry Jenkins opened on his personal authoring walk and so much more—and this month… expect some surprises from what Margaret reveals. Don’t miss it.

It's Hall’s gift to anyone. What a gift for any author... and book lover to be part of! They will have the opportunity to ask the featured author questions. Answers are sometimes surprising.

A separate email will go out with registration information. All sessions will be recorded. Hold the date on your calendar: Friday, April 14th, with Margaret and me.

Register to grab your seat HERE: https://bit.ly/FRIAuthorHappyHour
It’s free...

And... why not get your seat now for the Induction Gala? September 16th is the big night for the 3rd Induction Gala for the Colorado Authors Hall of Fame. We will know in July WHO will be honored... and they will, too! Nominations are closed; the Selection Committee will gather this month and begin the evaluation and selection process.

Get your TICKETS HERE: https://coloradoauthorshalloffame.org/2023-induction-ceremony.html

And this month, 2021 Inductee Michael reveals his insights on Willing Suspension of Disbelief: The Contract and Why Research Matters. He and 2019 Inductee Helen Thorpe are featured authors.

Attitudes at Altitude’s promise to our readers…

We celebrate the outstanding authors inducted into the Colorado Authors’ Hall of Fame in 2019 and 2021. They are the first in the United States to only honor published authors exclusively. The next Induction will be on September 16, 2023. Put the date on your calendar. The venue is the DoubleTree Hilton Denver Tech Center in Greenwood Village.

Each month, past Inductees are featured with their backgrounds and latest books.

One of our past Inductees will offer their sage advice on "how they do it"–whatever "it" is.

You will be the first to hear about Hall Events that are planned. Nominations for 2023 Inductions are OPEN... Who is your favorite author—one that has delivered mega hours of reading enjoyment... one that has made an impact on society or their field? Nominate them in February. Forms are on the Hall’s website.

Who Will Be Inducted in September?

The Colorado Authors' Hall of Fame honors the authors of extraordinary, published works who meet the Hall’s criteria. Members of the public nominate exceptional authors that have impacted them.

A diverse group of Colorado residents—including literary professionals have been recruited to serve on the Selection Committee. It reviews all nomination submissions received by February 28th in-depth, performs additional research if necessary, meets as a group, and selects nominees for induction into the class of the 2023 Colorado Authors' Hall of Fame.

Nominations are now CLOSED. All submissions will be sent to the judges to narrow them down to the final 12. They do not read the books, although many may be aware of some of a nominee’s published work.

Meet the New Hall Inductees in September

Why not grab your ticket now… or host a table with book-lover friends at the Induction Gala? The tables are for 8. The location is the DoubleTree by Hilton Denver Tech in Greenwood Village.

Grab your tickets for the Gala Induction September 16 HERE

Margaret Coel is in the Author Happy Hour Hot Seat and is part of the Hall’s 2019 honored Inductees.

She is the New York Times bestselling author of the acclaimed Wind River mystery series, set among the Arapahos on Wyoming’s Wind River Reservation. Discover and follow priest Father John O’Malley and Arapaho attorney Vicky Holden as the latest mystery unravels and is solved.

Margaret has won the Colorado Book Award five times and been honored with the Willa Cather Award for Best Novel of the West.

During this month’s Author Happy Hour, you will hear her voice, how she found it… and how millions of readers and aspiring authors have been impacted. She resides in Boulder, with the Front Range and mountains as her backdrop. "Every day," she shares, "I drink in the West."

So will you after spending an hour with her. Join us for the second Thursday in April with award-winning and bestselling author Margaret Coel.

W. Michael Gear

Being a professional archaeologist and New York Times bestselling author with 60 novels, 2 short stories, and 82 non-fiction articles in print that have been translated into 29 languages is what brings William Michael Gear to the Hall. After earning his BA and MA in physical anthropology at Colorado State University, he transitioned to Wyoming as a field archaeologist. He is the 2020 winner of the Owen Wister Award and an inductee into the Western Writers of America Hall of Fame. Over 17 million copies of his books are in print in 29 languages. His novels have been used as educational tools in grammar schools and high schools and as textbooks in university classes in archaeology, anthropology, and literature courses.

His writing was inspired by historical inaccuracies he encountered while reading historical fiction. Irritated by historical inaccuracies in Western fiction, he swore he could do better. He read a Western novel about a trail drive... the historical inaccuracies of the story bothered him all night. The next morning, he hammered out his first five hundred and fifty page novel. It reads wretchedly—but the historical facts are correct.

His North America’s Forgotten Past series (co-authored with Kathleen O'Neal Gear) has educated millions around the world and is the only series of books written by professional archaeologists that tackles the panorama of extraordinary native cultures that have inhabited North America over the past twenty thousand years. Gear’s educational efforts have been recognized by state and regional library organizations, and the Kansas National Education Association for the Kansas State Reading Circle for middle/junior high school students. He's also won numerous awards from bison organizations, including the Western Bison Association's Founders Award, the Classic Producer's Award from the Dakota Territory Buffalo Association, and the FFA Pride Award for agricultural education.

Michael’s literary work has been honored by literary organizations, educational associations, state and regional library organizations, as well as organizations dedicated to the history and future of bison. His service to other writers is demonstrated by his eight President's Awards from the Western Writers of America and the Emmie Mygatt Award and Arizola Magnanat Awards from Wyoming Writers, Inc. All were for dedicated service to writers who inspired and helped other writers.

Books of note: Dissolution, Lightning Shell and Sun Born

Helen Thorpe

Is the author of three highly acclaimed books: Just Like Us, Soldier Girls, and The Newcomers. Her works of narrative nonfiction have prompted a rich national conversation about difficult but important topics, as she documents in a very human and intimate way the lives of immigrants, refugees, and veterans of foreign conflicts.

A multi-book award winner, including the Colorado Book Award granted by the Colorado Center for the Book, her stories have aired on the radio shows This American Life and Sound Print. The Newcomers was named a finalist for the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award and was a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Just Like Us was adapted for the stage by the Denver Center for the Performing Arts, and Soldier Girls was optioned by HBO and Julia Louis-Dreyfus as a potential miniseries and named a best book of the year by Publishers Weekly.

The very essence of Helen’s life work is to shed light on those who live in the shadow of one of America’s greatest debates in history—immigration. Who gets to live in America? And what happens when we don’t agree?

Books of note: Soldier Girls, Finding Mother Land, and Newcomers

WILLING SUSPENSION OF DISBELIEF: THE CONTRACT
AND WHY RESEARCH MATTERS.

What makes fiction work? Seriously. Parse it down to the fundamental assumption. Doesn’t matter if it’s a novel, a movie, theater, or a story. That actor Tom Hanks can be Forrest Gump, Sam Baldwin, Jimmy Dugan, and John Miller in all those different movies defies rational thought. But with each new movie, we fall effortlessly into the story. Why?

Willing suspension of disbelief: The contract an author makes with a reader that implies: "I will tell you a story, and you will agree to ‘believe’ it." Yes, it’s fiction, but we’re accepting for the moment that these characters did, could, or would do these things.

Unfortunately, there are rules.

It becomes incumbent upon the author to cleverly do everything within his power to follow the rules and maintain that illusion of "believability." How important are they? Consider an alternate history novel like Robert Harris’s FATHERLAND. For the purpose of enjoying the story, we agree to suspend disbelief and accept that Germany won the Second World War. Harris writes so convincingly in his creation that the reader accepts the reality when we know for a fact that Hitler died in a Berlin bunker and the Russian army liberated Auschwitz. How far does our willing suspension of belief take us? I never doubted that the dragons in Game of Thrones were real! Or, after reading CJ Cherryh’s The Pride of Chanur, that the Hani exist. How about you?

In each instance, the author understood the rules that maintain a willing suspension of disbelief. So, what are the rules?

It was a violation of the rules that got me started writing…

Years ago, I was reading a Western novel in which the hero leaves Texas with a herd of steers. Key word: steers. After various adventures, he arrives in the Gallatin Valley in Montana. In the epilog, it’s spring and his steers are having calves! Steers, after all, are neutered male cattle, so having calves is way beyond a miracle. In one sentence, the author—who will remain nameless—destroyed the willing suspension of disbelief. Yeah, one little mistake can destroy your entire novel.

Question: Name an error in a story that violated your willing suspension of disbelief so badly, you just gave up? Is that how you want people to think of your work?

But where do we look for rules?

The novel stands on three legs, with character and plot being the first two. The third leg of the novelist’s tripod: setting! Making a setting believable requires research. The details, like knowing the difference between a steer, a heifer, and a cow, matter.

Example: In the mid-1990s, prehistory was big. At a book festival in Florida, a romance author who had just landed a very lucrative contract to write prehistoric novels for Random House smugly told us, "No one knows anything about prehistoric people, so I can make up anything I want." Um, wrong. The Society for American Archaeology would be shocked to discover that a century of exhaustive research, and all that research had produced, well, nothing!

So, those authors are gone. None of them even qualified as one-book wonders. We’re still here. Why? Our "People" novels have a bibliography and are even used as college-level texts. We do the research to ensure the setting is correct for time and culture. A willing suspension of disbelief depends on it.

You will hear the rule: "Write what you know." We will add: "If you don’t know, LEARN IT!"

If you are too lazy to research and do it well, you will not make it as a novelist. Period.

Research is part of your job; researching well makes your novels more marketable than the next guy’s. That’s how Tom Clancy sold HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER. And yes, editors, when given a choice between competing manuscripts, do know the difference.

Research will take you places you never expected, expand, enrich, and improve your writing.

Prime examples: Lisa Gardner and THE NEIGHBOR. Won the ITW’s best thriller award back in 2010. What she discovered when she started interviewing registered sex offenders for the background to her story took the book in a totally different direction than she anticipated. What would have been a very good novel was turned into a masterpiece.

Walk the ground your characters walk. In PEOPLE OF THE LAKES, we were driving around Hopewellian sites and found Black Skull at Pinson Mounds. The ending of PEOPLE OF THE MOON hammered us during a tour at the Chimney Rock archaeological site.

I knew I needed a bodyguard in ATHENA FACTOR. I took the class and was trained in executive protection. Yeah, I’m qualified. I've got the parchment to prove it. You’ve never lived until you do a J-turn with a Heckler and Koch submachine gun in your lap!

Research is also a trap: It can draw you in and suck you right down the rabbit hole with lots of fascinating tidbits that have nothing to do with your story. Discipline is necessary.

As a rule, we only use about 20% of our research in the novel.

How much is too much? Answer: When it gets in the way of the story. For example, in one of her novels, Jean Auel stopped the action cold for five pages to discuss the various types of fat in a mammoth’s carcass. That’s the author showing off.

Art, damn it! Art! Don’t pontificate. Be clever. Integrate your research into the story as part of dialog, action, or introspection. But only use as much as you need to establish setting and, most of all, to advance the plot!

A SEARING WIND: p. 133. You need to know that High Minko means chief. Pearl Hand is Black Shell’s wife. Now, listen to how much you learn about Chicaza society in the following dialog.

KINDS OF RESEARCH

Character research. Write a character bible before you start writing. The more biographical, the better. Who is this guy? Really! The more you know, the better you can write him/her. If he has emotional problems, research them!

Writing about a SEAL? Read SEAL books and take notes. If you find a real one, talk to him, and take notes.

Question: Is it powerful to have your psychopath break down and cry from remorse after he’s caught in the last scene?

They can’t. There are rules governing personality. Get a DSM-5 or abnormal psychology text and learn them. If you are writing about serial killers, get a copy of Dorothy Otnow Lewis’s GUILTY BY REASON OF INSANITY or THE WISDOM OF PSYCOPATHS by Kevin Dutton, or Simon Baron-Cohen’s THE SCIENCE OF EVIL. Study the ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SERIAL KILLERS.

The point of all this is that willing suspension of disbelief extends to your characters as well.

Place Research: In 1955, John Ford could get away with Cheyenne Indians riding through Monument Valley, Arizona...and call it Nebraska! In modern urban American settings, life’s a little easier. If you’ve seen one Wal-Mart, one McDonalds, one Best Buy, and one Kohls they’re pretty much the same everywhere. Key West, the Centrum in Amsterdam, Venice, or the souk in Tunis, however, are unique.

Does getting it right matter?

Most Americans aren’t bothered that LONGMIRE, set in Wyoming, is filmed in Las Vegas, New Mexico. Kathy and I gritted our teeth through half the episode and were constantly drawn out of what should be a really good story.

The takeaway from that is by fudging on the setting or making mistakes, you will lose part of your audience. The question you have to ask is, "What percentage of my readership can I afford to lose by violating willing suspension of disbelief?"

Mine was Dana Fuller Ross and the Wagon’s West series. My willing suspension of disbelief was so violated that I took the book out and shot it.

My advice: If you’re setting a story there, go see it and take notes. Acquire all the travel books you can: EYEWITNESS TRAVEL, FROMMER’S, FODOR’S, LONELY PLANET, etc., and use them! If you can’t go, they are the next best thing to being there.

Pay attention to the sections on local behavior, foods, drinks, money, transportation, police, etc..

You can never have enough maps!

Period Research:

Question: You’re writing a NASA spy thriller set in 1967. After being given rocket guidance data by the Russian spy, your protagonist pulls out his pocket calculator and starts tapping keys. He blinks at the numbers on the readout and cries, "Our Saturn Five can’t make orbit!" Any problem with that?

Answer: First electronic desk-top calculator: 1963, the vacuum-tube Bell Punch "Anita". 1970: first battery-operated pocket, or hand-held calculators sold by TI and Sony. Your protagonist in 67 would have used a slide-rule.

These are called anachronisms. Not so much a problem if you are writing about present day...just don’t mention the model of iPhone your character has. A real problem for any historical piece. Key word: Inception date. The date which a product or design was first made available.

Scene: It’s April, 1945, in the skies over Germany. Messerschmidt's 262 jets drop out of the sun, raking B-17s with cannon fire. Two of the Boeing bombers explode in midair. As the 262’s arc back for another attack, a squadron of American F-80 Shooting Stars roars in behind them, blasting the German aircraft before they can close again on the bombers.

Okay or not? The inception date for the F-80 is January 8, 1944. It saw no combat during the war. So just having the inception date misleads us.

Given the power of the internet, these kinds of errors are unacceptable. Check the dates on all technology, appliances, guns, automobiles, aircraft, and tools.

Manners and customs in time: Social, racial, and sexual roles change.

Question: It’s 1880, in New York. A wealthy banker’s daughter meets a young soldier walking toward her in a chance encounter on Fifth Avenue at 3:00 in the afternoon. How would she greet him?

Answer: Without a formal introduction by family or close friends, she wouldn’t deign to meet his eyes, let alone acknowledge his presence.

How different is modern society? In 18th century North Carolina, women were legal chattels accounted for on the same ledgers as horses and pigs.

Research things:

As thriller writers, we depend on threat, suspense, danger, and anxiety. Our problem is that, like the characters in Science Fiction, our readers are sophisticated and educated. If you screw up, they’ll know and hold it against you. You might get by fudging a fictitious restaurant in Rome. They’ll throw your book away if you give them an M-16 chambered in .30-06.

Or an improper national security procedure, or a lackadaisical Secret Service Officer, or an irresponsible sub skipper. The likes of Vince Flynn, Dave Baldacci, and Joe Finder partially earned their success by painstaking research and getting the nit-picking details right.

Which brings us to guns.

How much does it mean to get the guns right? C.J. Box just shakes his head in disbelief at the amount of mail he gets, and will continue to get as long as the book is in print. His hero, Joe Picket, made sure the safety was on when he holstered his Glock.

Why would anyone care? Safe gun handling, right?

Getting comfortable with the arcane priesthood of guns it’s a tricky minefield full of esoteric and occult knowledge. For example: Why does a Smith & Wesson Model 29, shoot a .44 Remington Magnum cartridge, when the bullet really measures .429? It goes back to the .429 diameter bullet in the 44-40 Winchester, which, for marketing reasons, they called a .44 and not a .429. Let alone the sister cartridge, the 38-40, which has a bullet that actually measures .40, but they called it a 38. What? Yep.

If you haven’t ever shot, go find a range and get instruction. Two absolute resources are the SHOOTER’S BIBLE (new each year) and CARTRIDGES OF THE WORLD. Between them, they contain everything you need to know about makes, models, and calibers.

Finally, how many of you have ever shot anything living?

It’s serious business. Not like the movies. The science of bullet behavior in flesh is called "terminal ballistics." If your characters are going to have gunfights, you’d better know about the kinds of tissue, bone, and neurological damage they will suffer.

Hint: No one shot in the shoulder is going to be sitting up and talking coherently in the next scene, let alone chasing a bad guy. Rather, think a couple hours of surgery minimum, followed by ICU under sedation with tubes and ventilators in the best case. Slab in the morgue at worst.

If you take nothing else from this presentation, remember that not even the best characterization or plot will save you if your facts are wrong. That breaks the rule of willing suspension of disbelief, and your readers will wince at best or drop you at worst.

Support the Hall

The Colorado Authors' Hall of Fame celebrates the accomplishments of living and deceased authors who have been connected to Colorado—their words, wisdom, accomplishments, and the life-changing impact their works create. The result: Their legacy lives on.

The Hall is an all-volunteer-run 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that honors and celebrates authors connected with Colorado by birth, residence, or temporary residency for writing encouragement and support, writing about elements within Colorado, or placing storylines in or about Colorado.

Authors’ words have immense power and impact on changing others’ lives. They solve problems, bring awareness to a topic, and provide hours of pleasurable reading. It’s the power of their words.

Your financial assistance through donations and participation at events supports the bi-annual Induction Gala in odd-numbered years, the Aspiring Author Scholarships, and the general operation to bring these events to the public.

Support the Hall for this year and going forward.