Author: Paul Mark Tag

Publisher: iUniverse

ISBN:978-1-6632-2226-8

Bookpleasures.com welcomesas our guest, Paul Mark Tag. Paul received multiple degrees in the field of Meteorology from Pennsylvania State University. He worked for the Naval Research Laboratory as a research scientist for over thirty years before leaving his job to write fiction full time.

In 2002, Tag started his first novel, a thriller entitled Category 5, which took advantage of his knowledge of meteorology and weather modification. Prophecy and White Thaw: The Helheim Conspiracy completed the trilogy.

After penning How Much Do You Love Me? that explored the travesty of the Japanese Internment, Tag returned to the excitement of writing thrillers.

Retribution Times Two is the sequel to the trilogy and continues the original character set.

Tag lives with his wife, Becky, in Monterey, California

Good day Paul and thanks for taking part in our interview.

Norm: What do you consider to be your greatest success (or successes) so far in your writing career?


Paul: As an aside, Norm, I’m reminded that this Bookpleasures interview is my second with you. In 2007, you interviewed me after I had completed the first two thrillers in my trilogy. I thank you for this repeat opportunity. I really appreciate it.

Greatest success? I’ll set the bar low. I’d say that my greatest success has been—to my surprise—my learned ability to fashion together a string of words, sentences, and paragraphs interesting enough to hold a reader’s attention.

In my previous career as a research scientist, I wrote many papers and journal articles. I can say, without fear of contradiction, that no one would ever have argued that anything I had written was a page-turner. Fiction requires a different mindset.

Norm: What do you think most characterizes your writing?

Paul: As a card-carrying Virgo, I have been cursed since birth. Typical for those of the Virgo sign who must deal daily with the need to be neat and organized, I think that trait manifests itself in my writing.

There is usually a lot of detail that I painstakingly go over...and over...and over again to make sure that all is correct.

My approach coincides with a favorite quote of mine. I don’t remember who said it, and I apologize to that writer. He or she said, “I’m not much of a writer, but I’m one hell of a rewriter.”

For me, getting that first draft down is the most challenging step in the process. Once done, though, I really enjoy searching for the slightest error or miscalculation.

Norm: What did you find most useful in learning to write? What was least useful or most destructive?

Paul: I had the good fortune to have Arline Chase as a mentor during my first years of writing fiction, back when I wrote short stories exclusively.

In addition to studying books on writing fiction, Arline taught me most of what I know. In terms of switching from technical writing to fiction, the biggest change for me was to avoid the passive voice.

Beyond the passive voice, there is one rule that Arline left emblazoned on my brain. That was the need to foreshadow. She emphasized that foreshadowing can be sneaky (in fact, that is the best kind), but it has to be there. “You need to play fair with the reader,” she kept telling me.

What I, the writer, am striving for is that pivotal moment when the reader slaps him or herself on the forehead and shouts: “Of course! Of course! Why didn’t I see that one coming?”

In How Much Do You Love Me? there is a secret that isn’t revealed until the book’s end. All of the clues are there for the reader to diagnose the mystery, but you have to pay attention.

Least useful or most destructive? That’s a tough one. I guess the one concept that we’d be better off not having invented is Writer’s Block.

Even suggesting that there is such a thing does a disservice to the budding author. I don’t think I’ve ever run into this problem.

That doesn’t mean that I haven’t been stymied at the get-go by the overall concept or idea behind the book. For me, that process can take months or more. But that problem occurs well before any writing takes place.

Norm: Do you write more by logic or intuition, or some combination of the two? Please summarize your writing process. 

Paul: Here is my take on that question. In the early 2000s, I had the opportunity to attend a couple of writing conferences. I still remember this one session where there was a clear line drawn between two philosophies.

On one side stood the “outliners.” They swore that the only way to write a book was to outline the story, beginning to end. That outline could be dozens of pages long, they’d say!

On the other side, staring down their opponents were the “make it up as you go” folks. Their common refrain: “Are you out of your mind? If you outline the whole story, you have eliminated all opportunity for innovation as the story develops.”

Not to be outdone, the outliners come back with their own retort: “Yeah? How much time do you waste rewriting sections that you had to toss in the trash because one of your brilliant ideas did not work out?”

To be sure, both approaches can work. A new author needs to learn what is best for him or her. I can imagine a combination of the two techniques working for many.

If I may, I’d like to expand on this question through my own experience. Based on what you now know about me, which approach do you think I use? Nine out of ten would say that my Virgo-like nature would dictate that my preferred approach would be to outline. I could easily agree with you, but then we would both be wrong.

Unbelievably, I make it up as I go—and I rarely need to backtrack. How can that be? I’ve thought about this, and I think that I know the answer: I cheat!

Give me starting and ending points, and I am off and running. But here’s where I have to acknowledge that I’m probably closer to the outline method than I care to admit.

My secret is this; it’s akin more to playing chess than writing. After finishing a chapter, in my mind I lay out every possible path for going forward. This occasionally happens while I sleep. By the time I start writing that new chapter, I’ve already decided how it will evolve. As I develop the options for moving forward, my goal is to make sure that the path I choose is exciting (particularly for a thriller), interesting, and rational.

Norm: How did you become involved with the subject or theme of Retribution Times Two?

Paul: Retribution Times Two is a sequel to a trilogy involving two Navy scientists (and several minor characters) who often find themselves called upon to save the world.

We all know the old saying, “You write what you know.” My background in meteorology spawned books one and three (Category 5 and White Thaw: The Helheim Conspiracy), where hurricanes and climate change are the focus.

For Retribution, before I started, I had already decided that this book would be a continuation of the Silverstein/Kipling trilogy.

To provide interest and allow for more offshoots in the story’s development, I added a new protagonist, Dmitri Smirnov, a Russian spy, who teams up with the Americans. Different from the trilogy, I also decided to up the suspense by addressing not one, but two, crises simultaneously facing the U.S. Different from my earlier thrillers, I split up the Silverstein/Kipling team, one for each crisis.

Norm: What were your goals and intentions in this book, and how well do you feel you achieved them? 

Paul: As you know, in the second half of the book, Russia and the U.S. face a nuclear confrontation. My intention throughout the story was to make the reader appreciate that in the end, people are people, and that, ultimately, we all want the same thing. It was fun playing around on both sides of the U.S./Russia fray. I’m hoping that a Russian reader of my story would say that I had played fair.

Ultimately, my goal for my readers is to have a darned good time and enjoy visiting different locales.

For example, all my thrillers cover significant portions of Planet Earth. Although I cannot say that I’ve personally traveled to all locations in my books, I’ve visited most. For example, the first two chapters in Retribution start out in Prague, Czechoslovakia, and Havana, Cuba.

My wife and I have traveled to both cities, and I have imagined the action unfolding there. If you go to my website, you’ll find a Google Earth photo for every chapter location in the book. (I doubt that a non-Virgo would ever go to such trouble.)

Norm: How much of the book is realistic?

Paul: When I’m asked at book signings what a thriller is, I emphasize that it is a fast-paced, world-hanging-by-a-thread type of fiction. But then I make the following distinction: often, the premise of the story is incredible, but plausible. In other words, whatever happens in the book is probably never going to happen in real life, but it makes sense that it could happen.

If you’ll permit me, I’d like to make this point by way of my previous thriller, White Thaw: The Helheim Conspiracy.

There, old school Nazis crate up a nuclear reactor and transport it to Greenland where they plan to use the heat from the reactor to melt a glacier. The resulting fresh (as opposed to salt) water is released to the northern Atlantic Ocean.

By doing so, they intend to disrupt the Gulf Stream, which carries heat from the tropics to the North Atlantic. Doing so would cause an environmental disaster; the mild climates in England and to the east would. change dramatically. This premise is not from my imagination, but from scientists who worry about the effects of melting Greenland ice.

Now, could you do, technically, what is suggested above? Probably not, but it seems plausible. I ran the concept by an acquaintance, Dr. Konrad Steffen, a world famous glaciologist, and he blessed the idea. That made me feel good.

All three of my trilogy books have an incredible, but plausible, premise. For Retribution, that distinction may be a bit blurred. I’ll leave it to those who read my book to decide how incredible the premise really is. I fear that it is not as unrealistic as I would hope.

Norm: What was the time-line between the time you decided to write your book and publication? What were the major events along the way?

Paul: The date on my computer for the first chapter in Retribution is October of 2017.

Prior to that, it took some four to six months working with my primary reader/consultant, Robin Brody, to create the premise for the book.

The date for the last chapter I wrote was August of 2019, which means that it took two months shy of two years to pen the first draft. I then spent about a year refining the manuscript, based primarily on my ten “first-readers” who had never before seen the manuscript.

During that process, Retribution shortened in length from 120,000 to 105,000 words. I removed (hopefully) most excess verbiage, nonrelevant side stories and, most importantly, logic holes.

There was one final step that needed doing; finding a publisher. I had been fortunate to have a traditional publisher for my previous novel, How Much Do You Love Me?

Unfortunately, that publisher had no interest in thrillers. So, starting in July of 2020, I spent three months writing formal query letters to literary agents who were interested in thrillers.

I queried 164 of them. Of that number, roughly 40% replied, all negatively. What I’ve been told by several sources is that publishers these days, particularly the big ones, are looking for sure-fire money-makers and are unwilling to take chances with new authors.

Long story short, I published Retribution with iUniverse. I must say that the experience was a positive one.

They were attentive to my needs, and not only produced a good looking book, but also a cover design that I’m particularly proud of. Retribution came out in print in June of 2021. All told, it took nearly four years from start to finish.

Norm: How did you go about creating the characters of Dr. Victor Mark Silverstein and Dr. Linda Ann Kipling? As a follow up, is there much of you in these characters?

Paul: Those characters came to life in the first book of the trilogy: Category 5. I then continued them in the remainder of the trilogy and in Retribution.

Because “you write what you know,” their general backgrounds and work environments are modeled after my own when I worked for the Naval Research Laboratory in Monterey, California.

Their imagined offices are where I worked. Other than these general details, there is little of me in the characters.

To further answer your question, though, my intent was to create characters who are bigger than life. One who is the epitome of that goal is Dr. Victor Mark Silverstein, my principal protagonist.

Norm: In fiction as well as in non-fiction, writers very often take liberties with their material to tell a good story or make a point. But how much is too much?

Paul: For nonfiction, I understand that movie makers, for example, when they adapt a true story for the screen, often add or modify characters and story lines to produce a more interesting story. I suppose that is acceptable as long as those additions don’t dominate or become the overriding theme.

In fiction, I’m not sure how you define “taking liberties.” From my point of view in writing thrillers, I would say that liberties are taken to excess when the story evolves into another genre: for example, from thriller to fantasy or science fiction. I say that only because I think that the thriller genre should stay true to the axiom, incredible but plausible. Still, who am I to say that doing otherwise is a bad thing?   

Norm: For those interested in exploring the subject or theme of your book, where should they start?

Paul: Retribution is a made-up story about two individuals who swear retribution because of incidents from their past, in which they think they’ve been wronged. In one case, it is the U.S. Civil War.

The second retribution also concerns a war, but more specifically one in which enemy bombing killed my character’s family.

The reactions of my two antagonists fall outside the normal realm of what people do when they’ve been wronged.

In essence, they became vigilantes to create their own retribution. Because civilized society has built-in systems and procedures to impose “justice,” most of us accept our society’s methods and obligations to punish crimes that fall outside human mores.

I’m not an expert on the psychological reaction of humans to tragedy. If anyone is interested, the following article may be a good place to start: Revenge and the people who seek it by Michael Price of the American Psychological Association. Just search for this title on Google.

Norm: Where can our readers find out more about you and Retribution Times Two?

Paul: Probably on my WEBSITE There you will find hundreds of blogs, many relevant to each of my books, but others related to writing fiction in general. For the latter, I also address topics such as book signings, getting published, and so on.

Norm: What is next for Paul Mark Tag?

Paul: If I’m to write another thriller, it all hinges on me and my co-reader developing a killer premise. Once I know the beginning and end to the story, the rest of the process is straightforward.

Norm: As this interview comes to an end, what would you like to say to writers who are reading this interview and wondering if they can keep creating, if they are good enough, if their voices and visions matter enough to share?  

Paul: You have to believe in yourself and keep trying. And if you’re interested in fiction specifically, my advice is to start out by writing short stories.

That’s what I did for five years before I tackled a novel. Short stories are bite-sized, so to speak; if one isn’t working out, you can just toss it. Years ago, a reviewer of one of my short stories encouraged me by saying this: “If you can write as good a short story as this one, you are ready to write a novel.”

And, please, don’t think that it is easy to write a good short story. It isn’t! I’m reminded of a relevant quote from Mark Twain. “I apologize for such a long letter—I didn't have time to write a short one.”

Norm: Thanks once again and good luck with all of your future endeavors

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