S. Alexander O'Keefe's Blog

Prodigious amounts of illegal drugs are transported across the USA’s southern border by cartels despite the best efforts of law enforcement. These shipments generate hundreds of millions in cash profits – profits the cartels would like to reinvest in legitimate business ventures on this side of the border. However, converting mountains of illicit cash into clean investible dollars is not a simple matter. The AML (anti-money laundering) laws in this country were designed to thwart this transmutation (a good thing).

My latest novel, PHANTOM MONEY, is about a brilliant lawyer in Los Angeles who is forced to concoct and implement an ingenious money laundering scheme for a ruthless drug cartel. The plot is complicated of necessity. Evading the network of AML laws is not a simple matter. That is particularly true when you’re tasked with laundering $100 million in a very short time frame. The attorney at the center of Phantom Money, Declan Collins, has his work cut for him. Staying alive is job one. Staying out of jail is a close second.

Time is the toll extracted by the vagaries of fate that plague our daily existence – bad weather, lines, traffic jams, and the host of demands imposed upon us by our fellow travelers on the road of life. Since writing is a time-consuming endeavor (I so wish I could write faster), a novelist must do all within his or her power to minimize these daily interventions. Therefore, choices must be made.

If I were a wise man, I might advise a would-be writer to live a simple, inexpensive and isolated life. I would say eschew, at least for a period of time, those pleasures and burdens others would have you embrace. Another wise man or woman, on the other hand, might say the foregoing is a fool’s counsel. After all, how can a writer wax eloquent about life’s thousand-fold pleasures, pains and obscure nuances without first having waded into this turbulent sea? True, but many who embark on the latter journey never return to their literary goals.

So, what is right path for a writer? I have no idea. I only know what I do, and it’s not particularly cerebral. I rise every day committed to spending time on my third novel before I go to work. On a good day, the word count at the bottom of the page ascends and the story progresses. On other days, fate (or a lack of discipline) thwarts my plans, and my characters remain trapped within. Today, thankfully, was a good day. With any luck, tomorrow will be even better.

Most people have no reason, thankfully, to set a trap or ambuscade in the course of their daily affairs. A trial lawyer, in contrast, lays traps all the time as part of his or her trial strategy. Such stratagems are often necessary to extract the truth from a disingenuous or recalcitrant witness, or to counter ruses employed by a wily opposing counsel.

In a perfect world, the testimonial prevaricator you face will not see your well planned ambuscade until it is too late, and the truth will be revealed. Alas, more often than not an adversarial witness, having been duly prepared, will answer your inquiries with endless evasions and half-truths and the matter will devolve into war of attrition. It is a miserable business. However, it does offer a collateral benefit if you are a fiction writer: You will never suffer writer’s block when it comes to conjuring into existence crafty and unscrupulous characters, or schemes equal to their wiles.

Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey are two of my favorite books. As a child, I was mesmerized by the heroic and tragic tales woven together in these great works. As an adult and a history buff, I was intrigued by the possibility that some of these stories could well be true.

The pantheon of characters who have shared my fascination with all things Homeric is impressive. King Xerxes of Persia, Alexander the Great, and the Roman Emperors Caesar, Augustus and Trajan, among others, all made a point of visiting the plains of Troy during their lifetimes. Lord Byron not only visited the site, he later joined the Greek war of independence and died in this struggle.

Elements of Homer’s stories have found their way into a host of iconic works. Virgil’s Aeneid traces the founding of Rome to Aeneas, the son of a Trojan prince fleeing the destruction of his home city. Geoffrey of Monmouth’s “History of the Kings of Britain” continued this sequel, tracing the original British royal line back to Brutus, a descendant of Aeneas. Still others, like Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles, incorporated parts of Homer’s tales into their famous plays.

So, I guess it would be fair to say that although Helen’s beautiful face may have “launched a thousand ships” (Christopher Marlowe, “The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus”), Homer’s stories launched a thousand times that many new stories, tales, poems and movies.

“There is a tide in the affairs of men, which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries.” (“Julius Caesar”, by William Shakespeare). Sage advice, but which is the right “tide” and when is the “flood”? The answer is at the exact place, and at the precise time indicated in your exhaustively researched plan. After all, “he who fails to plan, plans to fail” (Winston Churchill). That being said, once can never forget that “even the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry” (a quote synthesized from the poem “To a Mouse” by Robert Burns). Stated otherwise, “No battle plan survives contact with the enemy” (attributed to Helmut Von Moltke).

The admonition in the foregoing tidbits of wisdom is this: Fate will have a say in the success or failure of your plans, no matter how well laid. In the end, your success may depend upon the most important skill of all: Being able to get up off the floor, no matter how hard your fall. Here are three excellent historical examples of people who exercised this skill and achieved great things:

A. King Alfred of Wessex. In 878, King Alfred of Wessex and his army were forced to hide in the marshes after being defeated by the Danes. Later that year, Alfred emerged from this trial, raised a force and defeated the Danes at the Battle of Edington, thereby regaining all that had been lost.

B. Ulysses S. Grant. In the six years before the outbreak of the Civil War, Ulysses S. Grant was so poor he had to pawn his watch to buy Christmas presents for his children. In 1865, he led the Union Army to victory, and later became President of the United States.

C. Samuel Morse. Most people know Samuel Morse as the inventor of the “Morse Code” used in telegraph communications. However, for most of his life he was a painter, and although he was quite gifted, he often lived on the brink of financial ruin. It was only his late sixties that Morse gained fame and fortune through his commercialization of the telegraph.

Although these historical figures are esteemed for their achievements, their greatest victory was deciding to “get up off the floor” after they had been cast down by fate. This perspective is a part of the tale told in “The Return of Sir Percival”: Never surrender to the vagaries of fate, for yesterday’s failed endeavor could succeed on the morrow.

Enjoy the weekend!

I am writing a scene where a city in Celtic Briton is under siege by the invading Saxons. Since I have never experienced such a horrific event, even in the smallest measure (and surely have no desire to), I am drawing upon my history books and imagination to recreate the scene. Some of the historical events serving as my guides are the siege of Paris by the Vikings in 885, the siege of Acre in 1291, and the siege of Malta in 1565 (I particularly enjoyed Ernle Bradford’s account of the battle for Malta).

Placing yourself on the walls of the city, covered in dust, splattered with blood and gasping for breath, seconds after casting yet another invader back over the wall is a difficult, but necessary thing. Which defender are you? Possibly Kedwyn, the young blacksmith whose leaden arms can barely hold aloft the sword he has only drawn once before in anger.

The man who gave you the sword, your sire, lies at the base of the wall. His lifeless eyes admonish you to avenge his taking as you prepare to engage yet another oncoming wave of screaming warriors. You no longer fear death. His near touch is so familiar it is akin to the flames raging in your forge each day; dangerous, even deadly, but a thing to be endured. There is only one fear that survives within, and it lends inhuman strength to your exhausted body: The fear of the fate that will befall your young wife and son if you and your brethren fail to hold the wall.

So, as the ladders of enemy touch the wall, once more you “[s]tiffen the sinew”, “summon up the blood”, and “lend the eye a terrible aspect”, to quote William Shakespeare (Henry V), and prepare to defend the wall until the end, for good or ill.

 I wish you well.

In the 2002 movie “Time Machine” the Uber Moorlock says to Alexander, the protagonist: “You’re a man haunted by those two most terrible words: What if?” I suspect we all are. Who has not considered what the present would be like had a different path been chosen, or misstep avoided? Although the exercise is futile in the penultimate respect, since the past cannot be undone (except in novels), reflecting upon past choices and consequences is the path to wisdom. Yesterday’s errors do not have to be tomorrow’s.

That being said, obsessing over “What if?”, or more precisely “what could have been”, can lead to a destructive state of mental ennui and, sometimes, tragedy. Being able to accept, endure and overcome the unavoidable caprice of fate is a critical survival trait—possibly the most important of all.

There’s a scene in “The Return of Sir Percival” wherein Sir Percival is struggling with the emotional shock of what has befallen his homeland, and he too is “haunted by those two most terrible words: What if?” Capussa, the knight’s friend and traveling companion, intervenes at this moment and tells a story using three coins he carries with him. The first coin was minted by the people who seized the lands held by his people on the coast of Africa, and built a great city. The second coin was minted by the Carthaginians, the people conquered this great city and made it there own. The last coin was that of the Romans who razed Carthage to the ground.

As the Numidian explains, each of these great powers, including Rome, was cast down by fate despite the efforts of the many thousands who resisted this eventuality. The moral of Capussa’s story is all you can do each day is your best. If your labors yield the end sought, celebrate your victory. If not, take solace in knowing you could not have done more than you did. I try to remember this lesson whenever I am plagued by the inquiry, “what if?”

If I had a dollar for every time I heard the admonition “follow your heart” – a favorite of graduation speakers – I would be a wealthy man. It’s not bad advice. Who can argue with the proposition that one should pursue his or her heart’s desire in life, instead of accepting the yoke of a wage slave? Alas, the choice is rarely so binary or simple, unless you were born with the proverbial silver spoon in your mouth. For most of us, work is the price of survival. The desires of the heart must wait until our wage-paying toils are done.

Thankfully, technology has conveyed upon today’s writer two invaluable gifts: The computer and the word processing program. I take my computer everywhere and write every time I have a reasonable window of time to do so. Yes, a writer of yore could carry a stack of parchment and a pen (or a quill and inkpot) about the town and do the same. However, he or she could never match the velocity and flexibility factors offered by today’s tech.

When you are wrestling with a four-hundred-page manuscript, the task of moving, replacing and excising text, never an easy burden, is now so much more manageable. Equally important, today’s tech allows a writer to resolve those troubling inklings and queries that strike you in the latter half of the book: “What was her name?”, “Did I already address that seventy-five pages ago?”, and “Am I falling into the trap of repetitive word choice?” (check out how many times Gibbon used the word “insensible” in “The Decline and Fall of The Roman Empire”). Oh, I so wish I had a computer and Word when I was a lad of eighteen, better still, when I was ten (and no, I would not have whiled away the hours playing video games – at least not all of them).

Writing “The Return of Sir Percival: Book I – Guinevere’s Prayer” was a labor of love, but also a formidable and often frustrating task. When I began the endeavor, the characters were already traveling the byroads of my mind, as if my imagination were their domain, instead of mine. They conversed, laughed, fought, suffered, fell in love, and traversed half the world before their fates converged on the isle of Albion.

If I could have just thrown a switch and projected the visions within upon a wall, the creative process would have been so much easier, and Book II would be within days of completion. Alas, that’s not the way of it. The right words must be found and woven together, over and over again, until the written whole bears some resemblance to what is in the mind’s eye.

I suspect the writing process is a walk in the park for some writers. For me, it’s often a Sisyphean endeavor, and even on the good days, it’s difficult. I find the secret to reaching the finish line is to be relentless. There are a thousand distractions seeking to abscond with what little time I have available for writing, and many are more alluring than a keyboard and a blank page, but if I want to write the next story, they have to wait.

(Warning: This post is not about the present-day arguments over this subject matter, but rather the importance of walls in medieval society, and, in my humble estimation, why they will always be necessary.)

When I was eighteen years old, I toured colleges throughout the country, including Columbia University. Although it was some time ago, I distinctly recall the formidable walls and gates surrounding this institution of higher learning. The fortifications within were just as impressive: The door to the dorm room I visited was outfitted with door and floor bolts, and the windows were sheathed in steel grate. The Knights Templar would have approved.

The foregoing is not a criticism. Walls and fortifications have been a constant throughout history and they remain critical today (although they have become a bit more high tech). Why? To thwart invasions, plain and simple. Throughout human existence one constituency or another has sought to take, by force, the wealth of another, and often, the lives of their victims as well. Walls offer at least some measure of protection against this threat.

Although there are many who believe the age of raider/invader/looter-pillager has passed, I respectfully disagree.  The “barbarian”, in one form or another, will always be at the gate or wall seeking entrance by force or stealth. The historical record, both past and present, could not be more clear in this regard. As I write this missive, the siege of Aleppo has ended and the siege of Raqqa is about to begin; Russia has invaded the Crimea and it continues its sub rosa invasion of the eastern region of Ukraine; North Korea and Iran are test firing ballistic missiles in the hope of one day being able to strike the United States; and China is working diligently to block one of the world largest sea borne trade routes.

The barbarians will always come. The only question is whether our walls, and the mailed fists of the knights manning them, will be formidable enough to withstand the siege.