Ask the Author: Bernie MacKinnon
Answered Questions (6)
Bernie MacKinnon
Thanks Patti--The single biggest surprise concerned received wisdom--in intelligence, in official projections--and how resistant it is to facts. In the case of Jubal Early's Raid, on which the novel is based, the U.S. War Department under Edwin Stanton remained smugly obdurate until the 11th hour, when Early's considerable Confederate force was barreling toward Washington. Only then did it spring clumsily into action. It made me think of President Kennedy in the wake of the Bay of Pigs debacle, when he lamented his reliance on "experts"--"How could I have been so stupid?" But it also made me think of the Cuban Missile Crisis a year and a half later, when Kennedy's battle-scarred antennae told him to circumvent the experts and trust his own instincts, which helped lead us away from nuclear catastrophe. Received wisdom is very hard to overcome, but a certain hard-won insight can get the job done. Another (related) surprise: how a historical event that seemed random at the time can seem almost divinely scripted in retrospect.
Bernie MacKinnon
I'm in touch with The Booksellers at Laurelwood here in Memphis and hoping to do a reading in January. When it is firmed up I will announce it to the rafters for sure.
Bernie MacKinnon
So much is required of an author now to promote a book that, between said challenge and my regular job (I'm a security guard at a church-afilliated children's center), I haven't yet been able to focus on writing a new book. But I have extensive notes for a sequel to "Lucifer's Drum" and also a present-day suspense novel.
Bernie MacKinnon
Jot down your ideas and observations and keep them in a safe place. Look at them from time to time. A pattern will form and, eventually, ignite into a story idea.
Also: spend your precious days working only on those stories that truly grip you.
Also: spend your precious days working only on those stories that truly grip you.
Bernie MacKinnon
The best thing--those rare moments when you perceive fictional events and people coming to life beneath your hands, taking on three dimensions, moving along as if by themselves.
Bernie MacKinnon
When I was 13 I got a Civil War board game called "Battle Cry" for Christmas. It came with a booklet that gave a good, concise overview of the war, and it was in there that I first read about Jubal Early's 1864 raid on Washington, D.C. Over the years the story kept coming back to me. Then I realized that if any historical event ever lent itself naturally to a novel of suspense, it was this one. The idea for "Lucifer's Drum" finally took root one day when I was looking through an old church cemetery in my home town of Yarmouth, Maine. My imagination wanted to go live in the 19th Century for a while and to take on the monumental subject of the Civil War.
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