PLAYING ARMY
Nancy Stroer
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
GENRE: UpLit / domestic war
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BLURB:
It’s
1995 and the Army units of Fort Stewart, Georgia are gearing up to deploy to
Bosnia, but Lieutenant Minerva Mills has no intention of going to war-torn
eastern Europe. Her father disappeared in Vietnam and, desperate for some kind
of connection to him, she’s determined
to go on a long-promised tour to Asia. But the Colonel will only release her on
two conditions—that she reform the rag-tag Headquarters Company so they’re
ready for the peacekeeping mission, and that she get her weight within Army
regs, whichever comes second. Min only has one summer to kick everyone’s butts
into shape but the harder she plays Army, the more the soldiers—and her
body—rebel. If she can’t even get the other women on her side, much less lose
those eight lousy pounds, she’ll never have another chance to stand where her
father once stood in Vietnam, feeling what he felt. The Colonel may sweep her
along to Bosnia or throw her out of the Army altogether. Can you fake it until
you make it? Min is about to find out.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
EXCERPT
I turned to look, but before I could see, before I could
process what was happening, brakes squealed and treads strained against their
forward trajectory. A tracked vehicle did not turn on a dime when hemmed in by
trees. Washburn had climbed into the passenger side of my Humvee to get on the
radio and his helmet and Reyes’s—awake now and likewise silhouetted against the
brightness—were turned toward an armored personnel carrier that burst from
between the trees straight at them.
Bright lights made a fuzzy arc in the smoke, then the APC
plowed into the vinyl side of the Humvee. There was a sickening crunch, the
sound of armor hitting the thin, metal-framed doors. The Humvee lurched forward
into the back corner of the deuce, pushed by the much larger vehicle. The deuce
moved, too, then halted the Humvee’s momentum.
I froze. It took a full five seconds for the cicadas to
recover, to begin screaming into the night, although an engine fan was still
running somewhere. Those five seconds were so dense I could hear the Brownian
noise of molecules struggling for space. Then someone was screaming in a
language I didn’t know. Maybe Reyes? Screaming in Tagalog? Robinson emerged
from the cab of the deuce and stumbled toward me on the trail but I motioned
her back. “Lay on the horn,” I said. “Fuck light and noise discipline. Turn on
the headlights and don’t stop blasting the horn until somebody turns up.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
GUEST POST
The Way of the Lazy-Ass (slight misappropriation of Bruce
Lee)
The question I’m supposed to be answering is what kind of
writer I am, and immediately my thoughts jump to my personal guiding philosophy
which I call the Way of the Lazy-Ass. I googled “the way of…” and the search
string completed with Bruce Lee’s The Way of the Dragon. So then I scribbled a
few lines about how meandering and pokey my writing process is, if you can call
it that, but also how disciplined. I flick through Twitter first thing, but I’m
doing it at 5 in the morning, pretty much every day of the week. After I check
our bank balances to reassure myself that my writing habit isn’t driving us
into penury, I open a Word document and type something or another, usually from
the list of writing chores I’ve left myself from the day before so I’m not
starting completely cold.
I set myself a word count and give myself permission to
dawdle all day as long as my words, however terrible, are completed at the end
of it. Almost always some good writing is in there among the nonsense. Incidentally,
this is my same approach to gym workouts. I promise myself I can have the worst
workout ever, but I have to go. Usually about twenty minutes into poking along
at whatever I’m doing (I like circuit training, indoor cycling, yoga, and
pickle ball these days. I never have to talk myself into going walking with
friends in the Yorkshire Dales. I almost always have to trick myself into a
weight room workout), I find my juice and can work pretty hard for the rest of
my allotted time.
Because I’m a lazy-ass I rented The Way of the Dragon
instead of buckling down on this blog post, thinking there would be some
interesting parallels between Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris that would help me
write this blog. (Slight spoiler, but also a cliff hanger: the film peaks at
the moment Bruce Lee grabs Chuck Norris’s chest hair in the final fight scene
at the Colisseum!)
I realized a few minutes into the movie that it’s not a good
descriptor for my creative process but I finished it anyway. I’m guessing these
guys worked at their fight craft like hyper-focused monsters. Like those people
who churn out 10K words a day, day after day. But who knows? Maybe one or more
of them were also fun little combinations of discipline and procrastination,
too.
What I know about me is that I am a disciplined, reliable
worker however much of a dawdler I also am, and that “little and often” helps
me overcome the monsters of doubt that live permanently in my head. If I can
sneak up on them, if I can slide 500 words a day under their sensitive noses,
they seem not to notice me creating sizeable piles of words in the corner. This
disables their ability to bring the whole process to a paralyzing stop. I want
to experience joy as a writer. I want to feel happy as often as I can in this
old world. And if I have to come at it slowly and inefficiently in order to
feel good about it, so be it. And the words really do pile up; I’ve surprised
myself at how productive a lazy-ass can be, year after year.
As an example, I paid a company to
set up a virtual blog tour for me exactly a month ago. The first thing they hit
me with was a requirement to write five blog posts (250-750 words each) and ten
mini-interviews (which have turned out to be 500-700 words each, too) before
they could finalize the tour schedule. Book bloggers don’t get paid so of
course I had to write these things myself, but it still sat me back on my heels
a little. I have a full-time job, y’all! I’m a gym rat! With a small but
satisfying social life! I only have about an hour to write in the mornings, and
I spend most of that time procrastinating! But also, I’ve chipped away at these
pieces and I’m more or less done with them now, and it’s more than 10K words in
a month – words I’m pleased with, and happy to represent me in the world. I
watched The Way of the Dragon, but I also told myself I couldn’t go to sleep
until I’d written the first draft of this blog post. And that is what I did.
And that is what kind of writer I am.
AUTHOR Bio and Links:
Nancy Stroer grew up in a very big family in a very small
house in Athens, Georgia and served in the beer-soaked trenches of post-Cold
War Germany. She holds degrees from Cornell and Boston University, and her work
has appeared in the Stars and Stripes, Soldiers magazine, Hallaren Lit Mag,
Wrath-Bearing Tree, and Things We Carry Still, an anthology of military writing
from Middle West Press.
She’s a teacher and a trainer, and an adjunct faculty member
of the Ellyn Satter Institute, a 503(c) not-for-profit that helps individuals
and families develop a more joyful relationship to food and their bodies.
Playing Army is her first novel.
Social media links:
https://twitter.com/Nancy_Stroer
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/49311942.Nancy_Stroer
https://www.facebook.com/nancy.stroer/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/nancy-stroer-86213089/
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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Thank you so much for hosting today!
ReplyDeleteThank you for hosting Playing Army, today! I'd be happy to answer any questions your followers may have about it! Best, Nancy
ReplyDeleteI liked the excerpt.
ReplyDeleteThis sounds like an interesting book.
ReplyDeleteThis sounds like a good story.
ReplyDelete