rlfj: Blog

Important note: For those of you who have purchased a copy of my stories, I appreciate the purchases, as does my wife, who is spending the money!

Well, the guessing is over. Grim is becoming a police officer. Interestingly, at least to me, is how some people are unhappy about this. Cops are bad, cops are evil, cops are [fill in the blank.] Sorry, I disagree. As the saying went when I was a kid, if you don’t like the cops, next time you get robbed, call a hippie. (That probably dates me; I turn 70 in November.)

Several readers have been wishing that Grim goes into politics or law. They are looking for Grim to become a larger-than-life national leader of some sort and solve all sorts of problems facing the country. Sorry, this is a story about a young man trying to figure out his life and find his place in the world, something that all of us have to do at some point.

I need to do a major shout-out to one of my editors. I couldn’t have written Book 3 without the assistance of grynslvr2, a veteran police officer in Texas. Yeah, I know Texas is not Georgia, but as you will learn in Book 3, that isn’t all that important. I repeat, I couldn’t have written this without his constant advice and editing. Any errors are mine and mine alone.

Several readers with military experience sympathized with Grim’s issues finding work. Many of the support jobs in the Army translate to civilian life – medics can become EMTs, Army truck drivers can become civilian truck drivers, electronics technicians can do the same outside of the Army, etc. Combat jobs have a considerably different skill set and do not translate well to civilian life. More than a few readers commented on the limited number of jobs available for an Eleven Bravo.

Several readers did comment that there are considerable educational benefits for post-9/11 veterans, which is quite true, and I mention a number of them. I probably won’t go into that too much more in this story, but it will pop up much later, in the sequels.

Grim has a problem, in that one of the reasons he joined the Army, to figure out what he wanted to do after high school, turned out to be a bust. While many veterans can translate their military service to a civilian career, not all can. My son used his experience as an electrician’s mate on a nuclear carrier to easily move into electrical engineering and computer engineering jobs as a civilian. On the other hand, a nephew who served in Iraq discovered there weren’t a lot of civilian equivalent jobs for a gun bunny in a Marine artillery unit. More on this in the next few chapters.

One reader asked why I wrote the story as several books. During the writing process there are several natural breaks that occur in plot lines. In this case, it was getting out of school and then getting out of the Army. Each section is relatively easy to delineate and write about. By breaking it into sections or books, I can begin publishing even though I don’t have the whole thing written yet.