Duleigh: Blog

I'm sure you've seen those great strike films from Operation Desert Storm, Operation Just Cause, Operation Deliberate Force, Operation Enduring Freedom, Operation Iraqi Freedom and many others. I'm sure you didn't think of how those bombs got to the release point, just that they were safely tucked away in a bomb bay or hanging happily from a bomb rack until the gun camera could record their final seconds of life, the last thousand feet they plunged, and the remains of the target they obliterated.

Good, because I enjoyed working in anonymity. For 20 years of my life, if you give me an airplane and a trailer load of bombs, me and a few other guys would find something to do with them. It amused us, in a safe, secure, and mostly sane manner to do something nobody else on earth would enjoy doing. Putting bombs on airplanes. I worked mostly B-52s where loading four planes in one day was an impossible task. Three was a good number to reach.

Then I got assigned to Kunsan Air Base, South Korea. Torn from the secure home that the Strategic Air Command had become, I was a bomber kind of guy in a crazy fighter world. And I was not prepared for that kind of crazy. The silliest funniest things that ever happened in my life happened at Kunsan and I loved every minute of it - the airman that was terrified of frogs, the pilot who was sure he nuked Korea, the joy of watching an NFL game on TV without the headache of over-paid announcers (It's really a zen moment!) I knew I had to put these events down on paper or I'd forget them.

Introducing Technical Sergeant Michael "Wedge" Donovan who is sometimes called "Guns" Donovan depending on which John Wayne movie you like. (No, other than rank we're nothing alike) He was recently assigned to Kunsan Air Base and suddenly the adventure of his solitary life began. His flight to the Land of the Morning Calm was delayed due to electrical problems and suddenly Wedge was stuck trying to find his way to a base he's never been to in a land where he's functionally mute and illiterate due to the language barrier.

He somehow arrives to his base which is in the middle of an exercise and he quickly realized they play for real. On Kunsan explosions and gun fire are as real as it can possibly get and for someone whose idea of a military exercise was 12 hour shifts and cold chow hall food, this became a real eye opening for Wedge. On his first encounter with the men and women of Kunsan Air Base, he discovered they were all "Dumb Dead."

Enter Technical Sergeant Roxanne Dawson, a beautiful black girl and self-professed lesbian. She shares a bathroom with Wedge and he commits the unforgivable sin his first day there by using her shampoo. It couldn't be that egregious of a sin, he did con her into going to dinner. Friendship bloomed but soon the big Irish loner found himself locked into the Friend Zone by the cute black lesbian. Should he find peace in this relationship? Should he break it off and make a move on the cute Korean waitress at the NCO club? Or can he melt her heart with his Irish charm?

There's a lot of silly things going on around Wedge and Roxie, and a lot of it actually happened to me. If you meet some familiar faces, that's completely intentional. Kunsan is the crossroads of the Air Force and eventually most people pass through there. In my tour I met several guys I hadn't seen since basic training so I tried to instill that feeling in this story. Hopefully Wedge and Roxie can make it through their tour without becoming dumb dead.

Friend Zoned - A Juvat Romance can be found at Bookapy.com for under $3.00.

Several years ago, my wife and her mother were watching a series of Christmas movies on TV that I really hated. I would love to decorate my house like they decorate houses in those movies. But the plots and the dialogue were just awful. So predictable. Yuck. I would tease them for watching those movies because it was the same thing over and over: a young woman moves from the city to the country where she finds peace in her grandfather's Christmas tree farm. Her boss, who loves her, follows her to the country to talk her back to the city. He alienates everyone in town, an old boyfriend takes interest in her, the kids sing at the pageant, and suddenly the boss realizes the "true meaning of Christmas" (actually he couldn't be further off) and he and the girl find love on Grandpa's Christmas Tree Farm.

Fresh off my GI Bill English Lit degree, I bragged I could write a better Christmas Story than that with one eye tied behind my back. My wife simply said, "Put up or shut up." So I did.

Rule #1 of being a writer is to Write What You Know. After that, the rest of the rules are silly and generally meaningless, but I remember Rule #1 and I began to write a Christmas story in my favorite place on earth, Southern Erie County, New York. Hills, trees, farms, and life-threatening lake effect blizzards by the dozen. Perfect for a Christmas romance/sex romp. And I finished it and put it aside while I worked on other projects.

Four years later, I dug out what was lamely titled "Our Year" and wondered if I should do anything with it. I cut a chunk out of it and released it in a holiday contest and it took second place! I was shocked. I almost threw that story away! The reaction from my beta readers was that they loved the characters and wanted so much more. Andi, our heroine, is a smart, beautiful, sexy young doctor whose ex-husband did her wrong, very wrong. She meets Paul, a quiet, sullen doctor that she met briefly five years previously. They are brought together in a life-threatening blizzard. Both have serious trust issues that they earned in previous battles of the heart and they come to realize that they will not survive this blizzard if they don't come together. Will they open up to each other? Will Andi's twin 5-year-old daughters find the true meaning of "missile toast?"

I try to make my characters real, individual, and likeable. If there's a character that you don't like in my stories, rest assured, you just identified The Bad Guy. A friend suggested I publish my stories, and I've been writing without direction for a couple of years so I took Our Year and polished it, made the blizzard more life threatening, made the characters kind and warm, and I gave my friend the reborn Andi's Dream - A Blizzard in Buffalo

I truly enjoyed writing that book. It's a fun romp through the 'south towns' of Western New York, the land where I grew up. It's a real insight into what it's like to be trapped in a blizzard in Buffalo, and what we do to survive the blast of snow. That and an insight into what it's like to finally find love and security after a pain filled life.

Agent's Note: You can find Andi's Dream - A Blizzard in Buffalo in its inexpensive entirety, at Bookapy. Here's a link to Duleigh's Page where you can find the above, and all of his work to date. Thank you for your consideration, and have a safe and Happy New Year's celebration!

A couple of years ago I was mentoring young writers in a short story event. The idea was to write a complete story in 750 words exactly. It's a tough challenge and I've found that once you try it, you'll come up with several stories. I wrote a series of three stories testing my writing skills. #1 was written in first person, #2 was written in second person, and #3 was written third person perspective. So far none of my readers picked up on that, and beyond that I challenged myself in other ways, #1 was a mature romance, #2 was a lesbian romance, and #3 was a May/December romance, I've never tried any of those and it was a fun challenge.

But #3, Saturday Evening, struck a chord with me. I wanted to explore my characters further, so I started writing, and I told other writers of my plan to expand the story into a full novel. One of my writing friends challenged me to "Go darker than you normally do." So I did. And now I have a murder on my hands, a grieving family, and a scarred veteran seeking revenge.

https://bookapy.com/s/1385/loves-last-kiss

Well, yeah, I'm promoting the Friend Zone, written by my buddy Duleigh. If you've been reading his wildly popular We're a Wonderful Wife series, you'll want to read this one too, because Don and Lanh make an appearance! It's worth checking out. And hey, it's under $3 for the whole thing over on Bookapy, because, why would you want to wait to have the chapters doled out twice a week?

Duleigh's Bookapy Page

If you like Sci-Fi, especially the authentic 1950s type Sci-Fi, you'll see three smaller books there too. And other stuff. Enjoy!

First Love (Book 1) and Mrs. Sergeant Campbell (Book 2) are current in the second and third spots on the Best Sellers list over at Bookapy.com, and now the fourth and final book in the We're a Wonderful Wife series, All Good Things, is available there too!

With the current posting schedule, it will be months before these other books hit SOL, so if you're a fan of romantic novels, check out First Love and the others!