Canadian Front
by Michael J. Lalonde
Season 2 Ep. 10
The Canadian Military Thriller
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Inside This Episode
Michael J. Lalonde spent 23 years as a Canadian Army intelligence officer before writing The Quiet War: Canadian Front, a modern military thriller built around Canada’s tier one special forces unit, JTF Two.
In this episode we get into how he built a story where the heroes are winning every engagement and losing the war without knowing it, why the villain targets Canada before the United States, what the “every day is selection” culture of special forces does to the people inside it, and where realism and story collide and why story has to win.
Michael Lalonde’s book Canadian Front: https://books2read.com/u/3kJk2N
Follow Michael Lalonde online: https://www.michaeljlalonde.com/
Join the After Show on Patreon and get early access to episodes, bonus after-show segments with guests, and my free novella Cognitive Breach. You’ll also be able to support the show and help me keep bringing on great thriller authors: https://patreon.com/markpjnadon
Mark’s Thrillers: Psychological tech thrillers from your host, including The Treatment Room: https://mybook.to/marksthrillers
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Author Bio
Michael J. Lalonde is a former officer in the Canadian Armed Forces and a former politician with a passion for history and international affairs. He holds an MA in History from the University of Waterloo and an MA in International Affairs from Carleton University, credentials that bring depth and authenticity to his writing.
Inspired by a lifelong love of storytelling sparked by reading Red Storm Rising by Tom Clancy, Michael crafts gripping military and political thrillers that blend intricate plots, realistic action, and compelling characters. His work draws heavily on decades of real-world experience, offering readers a unique glimpse into the complexities of global conflict and espionage.
When not writing, he can be found exploring shipwrecks in the Saint Lawrence River as an avid scuba diver or delving into new creative projects.
Transcript
TPP Season 2, Episode 10 with Michael J. Lalonde
Michael: the Canadian military, up against this threat. They have no idea who he is. They don’t even know that he’s there. They don’t know he’s the bad guy. They don’t know that they’re fighting him, right? But they are fighting something and they’re winning their battles. They are winning every single battle and losing the war in the process.
Mark: Hello and welcome to the Thriller Pitch Podcast, the director’s cut of the thriller book world. I’m your host, Mark Nadon, and joining me today is Michael Lalonde, author of the Military Thriller, the Quiet War, and I have your book with me here. I’m putting on camera. Thank you for sending me that. Welcome to the show, Michael.
Thanks for being here.
Michael: Thank you for having me.
Mark: I am very excited to talk about this book and for readers who think a military thrillers may not be for them, this one really gets into character, which is what I loved about this book is that we get to know these warriors before we’re sent directly into combat, and I love that about it because it gave me a reason to care about what’s happening in this battle, and I’ve found a lot of military thrillers don’t do that. So that was really good. Before we go into all that, let’s do the pitch itch.
Michael: Yeah. So, uh, basically, uh, it’s a, it’s a Canadian military thriller. It’s the first of its kind and it’s, uh, book one of a wider series. So the Quiet War is actually the name of the series. And the name of the, the first novel is Canadian Front and I say it’s the first of its kind not because nobody’s written Canadian military fiction before there is actually one author one more author in Canada also located in Ottawa by the name of Ra Flanagan, who wrote the Kuck at War series, which is Canadian military fiction, uh, but a speculative fiction in a near future sort of scenario.
So it’s a little bit different, um, whereas mine is, you know, current real world, modern day stuff. And so I tie this story as closely as I possibly can to what actually exists in the world around us. It is fiction, it’s not nonfiction. But I don’t just make things up and say, well, we, we already have, you know, 200, uh, F 30 fives to play with.
We don’t, right? So if it’s not a capability that we have, then it’s not in the book sort of thing. I’m working with what’s real. I spent 23 years, uh, in the Army as a military intelligence officer. So I had a lot of background and experience, um, in military operations and the planning that goes into them and, and all that wonderful stuff.
And so I, I took that experience along with, you know, a, a, a creative imagination to say, well, what kinds of missions could we do if we had to? And how can I wrap these up in a story that would be fun to read and, and be engaging? And then, you know, so as I, I got through that process then, then I was left with that problem. Well. How can I justify the fact that we have a Canadian military thriller, not an American one, or a British one, where, you know, because in the real world, those two countries are maybe not the British anymore, but certainly the Americans, are engaged in this kind of stuff all the time, right? And, and people might think, well, you know, we don’t do that stuff and so why would there even be a book about that? And that’s not true. We do engage in military operations. The big difference between us and the Americans is that our our politicians will not take public accountability for these types of things. So they really like, uh, clandestine operations and, and they like relying on special operations forces and things that you’ve never heard about.
So again, everything in the book is fiction, but I base that on what kind of operations can we run if the political will existed and if the threats were dire, what would that look like? And so, uh, the first book introduces us to JTF two, which is Canada’s, um, tier one special operations forces. And, uh, so to put that into comparative parlance, that puts us right on par with Delta Force, SAS and SEAL Team six or Dev group. And so it’s a tier, it’s, it’s every bit a, a, a tier one group. It’s done, uh, joint operations with both the SAS, and Delta and, SEAL Team six. Uh, so that’s the type of caliber that they operate as. Uh, they don’t get the, uh, the accolades that they deserve, uh, or the, or the recognition. A lot of Canadians don’t even know that, that this unit exists, but it does, and they are some of the very best in the world.
And so I took, I introduced this unit, and then I create a problem that they, that they basically have to solve. And in this one, we set the stage for the series. I introduced the antagonist, which is, uh, basically, he’s not a terrorist, he’s something far more advanced. He’s brought together a cabal of global conspirators, so Russia, China, Iran, all the typical, you know, bad guy countries. And, and he masterminds a plan to take down the west. And his argument let’s start with Canada. Everybody, of course is, you know, all the other guys, the bad guys of the council, if you will, are wanting to go out for the us ’cause that’s just, you know, that’s just the default, right? And, but my main bad guy says, well, why would we do that?
Right? Like, these guys are already tearing themselves apart. Why would we go and give them a common enemy to unite around by attacking them directly, which is exactly what happened with nine 11. Let’s not do that. Let’s go and take apart the western alliance brick by brick, and we’ll move against the US last, not first the easy target canada shall be the first target. So we get caught in the story with our pants down. And as you can imagine, Canadian politicians have to grapple with this and in the first book, you don’t really get a sense for the political dynamic because it’s just a short book, right? And it’s very much on the military side. But in book two, all the political dynamics come into play.
All those frustrating elements that Canadians understand, innately because we pay attention to, to that stuff, we’ll be very much front and center in our face, uh, as, as the threat to Canada increases and becomes more complex. Uh, and, and it sort of evolves from there, right?
So that was the, that’s the idea. And so what we have in the first book is an opening move against Canada. It’s, it’s just the opener and you don’t really get a sense for what this is, until the end, right? And then you’re like, oh, oh, wow. Okay, that’s not good. And then the book ends, right? And, and then when book two starts off, we’ve got the next plank, right?
And, and so this guy, the idea behind our main bad guy is he understands Canada. So it’s a different kind of country, right? So chief, of Paramount for Canadians, and I, I find this frustrating, but it’s a reality, is that our self-esteem is the most important aspect. We have to have our symbols and our national pride, and they have to be differentiated from the Americans.
And if we don’t have that, we, we don’t really feel like we’re Canadians. We don’t feel like we’re special. And so one of those icons, of course, is our healthcare system. We love to brag about that. We love to talk about how it’s the greatest thing. It has its problems, of course. And then we, you know, we, what’s our favorite thing to do is to compare that vis-a-vis the Americans, right?
So we, we have free healthcare. They don’t, they have to pay. Everybody’s kind of familiar with that dynamic. So ultimately the bad guy starts by taking out a major plank of Canada’s national self-esteem. Just destroys it, overwhelms it, and, and brings it crashing down. And it’s done in a very realistic way, uh, in a way that we’ve seen happen already before, uh, with, with COVID, except it’s not gonna be COVID.
And then in the next book, he says, now we’re going to go after Canada’s reputation. We’re gonna go after how they feel about themselves, how other people perceive them on the world stage. And then the third plank will be, now I’m gonna destroy you. I’ve set you up, I’ve done all this stuff, and now I’m gonna take that one last piece and and whatnot.
And so, so in this story, you’ve got our, our heroes, the good guys, the Canadian military, up against this threat. They have no idea who he is. They don’t even know that he’s there. They don’t know he’s the bad guy. They don’t know that they’re fighting him, right? But they are fighting something and they’re winning their battles. They are winning every single battle and losing the war in the process, right? Until they’ll eventually get an intelligence coup that tells them, oh my God. And, and now once we start to realize the game that we’re playing, we can start to fight back. And, and then it goes from there.
Mark: yeah. Awesome. So when you’re writing a Canadian military thriller to you, what are moments in this book that separate Canadian special forces from any other special forces other than, I mean, I love seeing Griffin Helicopters in our own weapons and French Canadian foul language, which I loved but what else in this book do you feel like separates our special operations from theirs?
Michael: Not much, to be honest. And, and so, you know, the big takeaway here, and this might sound a little bit disappointing, especially right now in our given political climate and context, but the takeaway is that we have far more in common with our American allies in the special operations military world, than we don’t. Right? We are very, very close, intimately close, and the same can be said with the British and, and to some degree are, uh, the rest of our NATO allies. Um, we, you know, originally JTF two was created in 1993, uh, when the government of Canada decided that. Terrorism was becoming a bit, bit too much of a big deal, um, globally.
And, and it wa was that capability was housed with the RCMP. And so they decided, uh, that they would move that capability from the RCMP to the military, and hence the creation of JTF two. And so they were, you know, in the very beginning, it was like a glorified homemade, you know, SWAT team on steroids, if you will.
But it very quickly evolved from there to become a full military tier one unit. And so in the beginning, we, we took a lot of lessons or, or they rather took a lot of lessons from the SAS and, and the unit was very much modeled after the SAS and it grew from there, today in many respects whereas we were reliant on training from our allies in the beginning, um, now we’re able to provide training to our allies, right?
So if you’re familiar with special operations units, you go through really brutal, very challenging selection phases before you go into train to be a special forces assaulter, which is, you know, a tier one type of guy, which is hell on Earth, right? And it’s very challenging. Once you get through all that, then you get sent to a squadron in your unit and selection starts.
Anew selection is every single day, which means you have to be at your, at your very best every single day.
So I’ve done a lot of research. I’ve had the benefit of some colleagues that have been there and have been able to sort of, you know, read me in and things like that. But, but I couldn’t get more nuance there. So I think, you know, to long story short, I think the biggest difference is that you’re gonna see it’s not in the unit and how it fights and, and the culture of it and, and the weight that these people carry, and how seriously, and how professional, they take the, or how seriously they take their jobs and how professionally they are. The differences you’re gonna see is in the national command elements, right? Uh, how do we authorize a mission? Um, and you know, in our situation, it’s just so ridiculous that I, you know, in book two, I literally create a fic fictitious method to make it work. Because there’s a story of this kind would, is not be believable without that.
And I, I spell that out very clearly, that in real life, this doesn’t exist, guys. But in the book it’s here. And so it’s here to make the story work kind of thing. But that’s where you’re gonna see the differences, right? Because we typically do not have the political will to act.
Now that’s a generalization. There will be some times that we do and, and, and that sort of thing, but overall, that is the big difference. Whereas our allies, not just the Americans, but our allies writ large, do have the political will to act. And so, if you were to talk to, I think any one of our, our guys on the ground, they would be very frustrated to say, you know what?
We, we do do a lot of really good, really cool stuff, and we make a difference every day, but we can do a whole lot more.
Mark: Okay, so a little bit of suspension of belief in the politics and the kind of rules of engagement in Canada being seen as a, as a nation of peacekeeping in your books.
Michael: So well. The idea of this nation of peacekeeping is just a fallacy. First of all, that’s just not true in real life, let alone in fiction or whatever. And I, I, I say this to anybody that brings that up, right? So if we want to go all the way back to the beginning of our history or roughly therein the boar war, 1899 Canada sent an ex expeditionary army unit to help the British fight in the Bo Wars. Then we fought in the First World War, and we were arguably the most effective combat force on the face of the planet in World War I. One Canadian core, in, in the latter year of the war in 1918, I think we had, what, four or five divisions and destroyed 45 to 47 divisions with five. That’s unheard of.
Nobody else has come close to that sort of thing. We’ve won battles where people just couldn’t touch things like Vimy Ridge, of course, we’re all familiar with. What we’re not familiar with is why we invented the modern system of force employment on the battlefield in Vimy Ridge, and a lot of those principles of land combat and, and fire and movement, cam and concealment, all that kind of stuff are still used today because they’re, because they’re so timeless, right?
In the second World War, we played a huge role. We were Britain’s ranking ally for the entirety of the Second World War until the United States came into the war. And as we know, they came in quite late.
Right? We have been involved in almost every single military, uh, every single major conflict in the world, since then up until now, and have fought ferociously in all of those things, right?
That is demonstrably true. It is an undeniable fact, and it is a fact that we don’t talk about, right? Because we like to talk about peacekeeping. Peacekeeping is easy. It’s different. It’s not something the Americans do. That’s the most important thing, as you can tell when I say that, I’m quite bitter when I say that I, ’cause, I, I really, it, it irks me to no end.
That we define ourselves in spite of somebody instead of simply because of who we aspire to be and, and that sort of thing. But that’s a, a whole other conversation. You look at the cases of PTSD that came out of the nineties that we’re just learning about now because of having to standby and watch those atrocities, that’s not a legacy to be proud of. That is not something that we want to be touting and, you know, and, and whatever. Right? In my books, there is no room for that. I’m not even talking about it other than to quickly dismiss the myth. Yes, we’ve done peacekeeping, but, uh, I really think that it’s a disservice to the country and to all of the, the soldiers that have come and gone before us and the ones that, that are currently serving to, to label it that way.
But to answer your question more specifically, the suspension of disbelief, if you will, for the second book is simply, we have a threat that’s gonna basically destroy our country. And we need we’ve started to cue onto this and we need to react and we need to do it quickly. That’s not something the Canadian government would probably do in the real world right? In the real world, we would not act quickly and decisively, we would get our butts kicked horrifically. And after a great tragedy, questions would get asked, fingers would be pointed, blame would be shared, and then there would be commissions of inquiry and, you know, and then eventually we might start, you know, like, you know, doing that.
And I don’t think that that’s particularly fun to read about. And so what I did is created a mechanism, um, that will allow the Canadian military to respond in a very uniquely Canadian way. So it’s, it’s, and, and the book will explain it as I lay it out, but to anybody who’s Canadian, when you’re reading it, you’ll go, okay, yeah, this would probably be the only way we could actually, you know, respond fast enough to a dynamic threat like this is if we had something like this set up and so, uh, so there’s that one little tweak there that just allows the story to keep moving. It allows the ball to keep rolling without falling into, you know, bureaucratic ditches that last years and, you know, whatnot, uh, and stuff. I, I keep that stuff to a minimum ’cause I, I, you know, one of the things with my books that I pride myself on is the realism. Um, and, and I stick to that as much as I possibly can, but like all authors, um, you eventually will come to a fork in the road where you’ve got. Reality and the need of the story.
And when those two things run in conflict, you must go with the need of the story. Otherwise you kill your story and it’s just not a fun read after that. Right. So there, there are some, you know, those, those elements are extremely rare. And so far, the, the only one that I’m aware of so far is that one that’s coming up in, in book two. And it’ll be pretty obvious to anybody that’s, uh, that’s reading it.
Mark: So where did the idea for Book one come from? And I remember I read in the back of the book 250,000 words down
Michael: Yeah.
Mark: to what we have now.
Michael: So it’s a long story. But, so I, so the idea for the Quiet War had been building for 15 years, right? I’d been thinking about it for a long time. I hadn’t sat down to to write it, but it was just something that was on my mind. I was in the army, so, you know, trying to write about that stuff while serving didn’t make a whole lot of sense, I got into politics right afterwards and stuff.
So there’s always something, right? And, and now I’m a law student and I’m about to graduate hopefully in a couple of months if I don’t screw anything up. And, and, you know, and then suddenly in my second year of law school, I decided, okay, I’m gonna finally sit down and write the damn thing. Don’t ask me why I did that to myself.
I just like to, you know, make my own life harder for some reason. But I did. And so I thought I was gonna have a simple three book series. I was gonna have the Quiet War Book one, which was all about Canada. And then I would have a book two that was about the uk being drawn into the quiet war. And then book three, which would’ve been the US and then a final book to ha to bring ’em all together to topple this great big threat. And, and so that was always the idea all along. And when I finished, you know, most of a book, essentially, I had 250,000 words written, and I hadn’t even gotten into book three or, or the, or, you know, what would have to become book three, right? Because I, I just thought it was all gonna be one book.
And I was like, oh my God, what am I gonna do? Because I’d never written a book before. And I was like, okay. You know, and I had to shave off so much stuff, even from that monstrosity to get it to 250. And, you know, I sent it to, to a professional editor and she was like, yeah, that’s just not gonna work. Right?
This is unwieldy for a first time out. Like it could be done, you know, if you, you know, maybe a little later in, in the author career and stuff. But, uh, she was like, you need to cut this, cut this, cut this. And I was so demoralized. I was like, I don’t wanna cut all these things. And this one particular arc, uh, which was the Belize arc that we see in Book one, was one of those things.
And I was like, no way. I can’t cut that. Right? That’s a key key story to Matt Lyon, who is in fact, the protagonist of the series, right? It’s not Rocky, it’s not Nathan, it’s Matt lyon. And it’s his story, right? And, and, and the Belize story, although he’s not in it, is a big piece of him, right? And so I was like, how the hell do I cut that and then still do this?
And then I had a deadline because I’d put the book up on pre-order on Amazon and I was like, I can’t miss this, or I’m gonna get banned for a year, and so I need to figure this out. And so I decided to take that cut Belize Ark and repurpose it as its own story. So almost like a prelude to the quiet war in a sense. So I took that prologue of the series and I moved it out of the main book. I put it into the front of this new book. I expanded on the story and, and built it up so that it could be its own story. So it, it came out of sort of like a last minute panic. ’cause I was like, oh my God, what am I gonna do? Because there was no way, the main book, the main book was gonna be titled Canadian Front. Uh, there was no way I could have that ready in time. So I was lucky because. The way the story came out, the cover art still very much worked for the story perfectly. And the title still worked. So I was like, okay, I can still meet my deadline, but I’m pushing out a different book than I thought I was pushing out.
And so I took a month and a half, uh, in the fall of 2025 to repurpose just that little section, right? And now the rest of that 250, I’m, I’m working on shrinking and, and reworking the story to make it fit with some of the new things that I brought into the first book. And that will be the, that’s that main book that I had been working on all along, which is, which is now titled Alpha One, which is where we get to see Matt Lyon for the first time, uh, on the page instead of, you know, through, through memories and flashbacks and, and that sort of thing.
And so that was kind of the genesis of it. And, and so,
People say, well, what about, what’s your writing process like? It’s like, so picture, there’s a top of a mountain, right? It’s a really big ass mountain, and I’m on the very top of this thing, and I get an idea and I’m gonna start writing a book. And my first step turns into me falling down the goddamn mountain, right?
And I come crashing into every tree trunk. I’ve slammed into every ditch, come smashing through every river and tumble all the way down the mountain, and somehow smash across the finish line. Lucky to be alive. And what just happen? Oh, okay. I’ve got a book that’s, you know, so I’m a great example of how not to write your first book. It was, uh, it was a mess. Because structurally and strategically from a writing perspective, I had no idea what it was doing. So, so that was, that, that proved quite challenging. And so that the challenge for me moving forward, you know, with these other books is to learn from those mistakes so that I can condense the writing period, make it go a little faster and ha ensure that the books are longer, right?
The first one was only 60,000 words, so it’s fairly short for a novel. Um, the other ones are all gonna hover it around 150,000. So they’re, you know, bigger, but more complicated, which means that I really have to not fall down a mountain while I’m trying to put them together.
Mark: Yeah. What was your writing process like for the Quiet War? I guess I should say the Canadian friend. Sorry. Now I got the quiet war in my mind.
Michael: Yeah, I mean, it’s, it’s the series, right? So you, you have to kinda look at it as I started writing a series and not a book, because I thought that all that is the series to date was actually gonna be Just one book. right? And, and it just, of course I was wrong. But, um, so I didn’t have a, a process ’cause I didn’t know what I was doing.
I’d never written a book before, right. I just had an idea. I had a story and I thought, you know, that it was a great story and I thought that I’d be able to tell it fairly well. And so I just, you know, pulled out my, my, my computer and, and started rattling away. But I, I really didn’t know what I was doing.
And so I was like, maybe I should try to figure this out, right? And, and so I’m, now, I’m on YouTube and I’m, you know, googling or, or doing a YouTube search of people that are, you know, talking about writing process, what you should do and all this other stuff. And,
you know, the, the funny thing about doing that is especially for when, you know, when you’re a male writing military thrillers that usually are historically have been a very male sort of dominated industry in terms of the readership, right? But that’s not normal for book writing and publishing writ large, right? I think what the last stat I saw was 85% of books were written by women for women. Right. And so, so that makes me kind of a little bit of an anomaly. So what I was running into was a lot of outstanding women on YouTube that were authors that would share tips about how to write. And a lot of them were writing romance novels.
And so there I was learning that. And so you can imagine, you know how that affected the initial writing stages for me because I had a lot of that stuff in my mind. Not romance per se, but the things that kind of underpin it and stuff and, and the characterizations and stuff. And I was like, you know, after a while I was like, okay, I, this is take, this has given me something, right. That was valuable, but I feel like I, I need more and something different because I don’t know that all of this will be particularly useful for what I’m trying to do. And so I signed up to a creative writing pro, uh, creative, a creative writing program at the University of Toronto.
And I, I started taking courses, you know, formalized that way while I was writing this book. Uh, and started trying, you know, to fill in the gaps slowly but surely. But the really funny thing was that I had, at that point, I think I had about 10, the first 10% of the main book written. Which is not anything that you have seen, in the first book that’s come out.
And so I sent that to a friend of mine from that same creative writing class. I asked her to read through it, and she’s like, that story’s kind of cool, but she’s like, why are all your characters romancey? Like, like, why do they all feel like, oh, I was like, oh God. Right? I was so embarrassed. And I, I was like, okay.
She’s like, you know, you know, every every male character is an Adonis, you know, and, and every female character, I was like, oh, God, help me. And so I, you know, went back and started fixing that and refining it and stuff. And so all of that is to say like, it was messy, right? I didn’t have a process, but so I don’t outline.
I did write an outline and I never followed it. It wasn’t worth the paper that was written on, like, the outline and the story and the outline was just so awful. And, you know, ’cause it’s like, for me it was a forced process, right? I was like, I don’t really know. I know where it’s gonna start and I know where it’s gonna end, but I don’t know how I’m gonna get there. Right? And so what I ended up doing is I spent a lot of time on characters. And I think that’s reflected in, in what you were saying at the beginning of the show, characterization. So we’re not just seeing a plot, a plot, forward moving story where, where it’s just nothing but action. But there’s people that are perpetuating this action and the insights that they have, what they’re going through or what they’re not going through is all important, right?
And so I built all these characters. Uh, their personalities, their, their world background stories, all of that kind of stuff. I had that all laid out very meticulously. And then, so I’m writing a chapter and I’m like, okay, I know in chapter one, I need this to happen. Right? And so, for example, when we look at Canadian Front, we know that Nathan is meeting Kira in, in this chapter, right?
And, for, for those people that have read it, for those that haven’t, I’ll try to keep it fairly bland, but so I know that I know what I want to have happen, but I don’t know how it’s gonna happen, right? And so, so you have these two characters collide. And I know now how Nathan would behave. I know how he would feel.
And the same thing for Kira. And so, as I put them in this scenario, I’m like, okay, well no. If she says that he’s gonna react this way, right? And if he does that and so it starts happening. So I don’t really know what that chapter’s gonna look like until it’s done. And it’s really fun because it’s almost like watching tv, right?
I get, I get front row seats to the story unfolding right before my eyes. It’s, I don’t think the most efficient way to write because it’s very disorganized, right? And so what’s happened is I, you know, I’ve created things in chapter one. Now I need to move on to chapter two to follow that up. But those things that I hadn’t planned on, that popped up because of what I just described well, they need follow-ons, right? So that could be a chapter that I didn’t think I was gonna be having to write, and then I write that and I do the same thing, and then that will create more things. And you can see how I get into these 250,000 word monstrosities pretty quickly if I’m not very careful, right?
And I think, you know, there’s inherent strengths to that, because I’m not bottlenecked, right? Like, I’m not like, okay, well I’ve got this little box on a sheet that says this, so I have to stay within that. But wait a minute, I, now that I’m in it, right, and I’m actually writing, I’m coming up with really cool stuff, at least I think right there and then, well, I hadn’t thought of that when I was writing an outline, maybe, right?
Well, does that mean well too bad, right? Like, no. And so I, I put that in there. But what it does mean is that after you’ve got a draft, there’s a lot of work that goes into it after the draft to scale it down, to trim it down. Shit, I’ve written four books by accident. I gotta split them up. I get, you know, and, and all that kind of stuff.
So that, if you could call it a writing process that has been mine thus far, I think I’ll still keep using it, but I want to try to adapt it in a way that makes it a little bit more wieldy so that the post-production part of, you know, the, all the stuff that comes after the first draft is not as laborious and time consuming. So that I can be a little bit more efficient in, you know, my, my output that way. Otherwise, I’m only ever gonna write a book a year at this rate, so,
Mark: Or four books a year by accident. Yeah.
Michael: well, yeah, but only one will see the light of day,
Mark: Yeah. Yeah. How many, how many drafts do you, do you go through from, I mean, this might be an anomaly in that you just learned with your first book, but how many does, does it go through between, this is my first draft and now
Michael: Yeah. So I was, I actually just answered a question like that on threads and, uh, and, and I’d said, well, this one was just kind of a one draft wonder and it worked out, but that’s not really true in a sense. So if you look at, you know, what I’ve already described, right? So the book that just came out, like a lot of the, the premise of the sort of arc of that story was written in the main novel. It got cut now I have all that. I didn’t copy paste that right. I, I rewrote it all from scratch, expanded upon it and, and made it bigger and put a beginning on it and an end, you know, to make it its own thing. But it was a, it was a shorter book, right? At 60 to 62,000 words. And so the structure of the novel, which I think that’s where a lot of your drafts really come in, you know, as a, as a new author is because you totally mucked up your structure and you have to go fix that and fix it and so on. I didn’t really have to do that. So, because I had already written that bigger, you know, monster and within that monster in a lot of those chapters, it’s not like I have draft one of the whole manuscript and draft two of the whole man, that’s not the case.
But that the prologue, for example, I rewrote that about 20 times, just the prologue, right? The first chapter of the book that you just read, I wrote it and then I went back and I was like, I think I can enrichen this and sort of add to it and make this a little more fun. So I didn’t really change what was there, but I just sort of put more into it. And so that chapter, I nailed it on the second go, right? Some chapters nail it on the first go, right? So it’s, it’s hard to say, you know, like in, I guess in a real sense, I sent my editor a draft and she looked at it. She’s like, okay, yeah, good. There’s only a couple of things we really need to sort out here. So I sorted that out. It took a couple hours worth of work to do that. I sent it back to her. Is that a second draft? I don’t think so, because I haven’t rewritten it. I’ve just tweaked a few tiny little things.
Right? And then now it goes into copy, edit and all that kind of stuff. It comes back to me to look at, I find a few more little dinky errors, typos, or just some sentences where I’m like, what the frick was I trying to say there?
That doesn’t work. And so I, you know, just retweaked the sentence and send it back again. Is that a third draft? I don’t think of it that way because, because the changes are relatively minor at that point.
But there was sending it back and forth as we and then in, into the proofread stage, right?
It’s just like, shit. Okay. There’s yet another typo that we didn’t see. Well, are we on draft five now? Because we fixed one typo. Right. So, so I would say having that understanding it was a one draft sort of project. Alpha one though will not be I am already half of the way through the second draft.
I am rewriting it. I am a much better writer today than I was, what well say about two years ago when I was writing. The core of that story. So even the chapters that are staying as is, are being rewritten from scratch so that it’s, you know, like when George Lucas had his original Star Wars movies in the seventies and eighties, and then later in the nineties, he went and redid them, re remastered them to make them look better.
You know, it’s like I’m doing that now. But I also have to tweak the story to account for the new add-ins that I had put in the first one and stuff. So it very much will be a second draft because by the time I’m done, it will be a, a slightly different story, um, than what it originally started as. And I would imagine, because it’s a bigger book in the structural role, structural edit, now my editor will say, okay, there’s more than just a few tiny things that we need to tweak. So I would assume that would put me into a third draft. And so I, I, I’m anticipating that I would probably be at least five drafts for this.
Mark: So when people are done with this book one, what are you hoping they’re gonna feel or want when they close the
Michael: That’s actually a great question, and maybe what I, what I’ll do is try to turn that around on you by answering it with a question since you’ve read the book. Right? So when, when you’re done reading the book what is going through your mind vis-a-vis Matt Lyon? Because as you know, there’s, there’s a lot put into that book with regards to him, right?
So as a reader, you’re you finish that book, what’s on your mind in here, and we haven’t had this, discuss this discussion before, so I, I have no idea what you’re gonna say, right? So we’re literally making this up as we go,
Mark: Yeah, great question. I about Matt Lyon specifically. I think it’s just curiosity as to what happened to him. I mean, I don’t wanna guess spoilers. We could save that for the very end of the show, but I think there’s a curiosity about, you know, what happened to him and, and what is gonna be his role in this, in this bigger picture.
I think I was curious about Kira as a character, like I don’t know how this plays out, but Nathan and Kira, ’cause they started the story. So for me that was like, I wonder what role they will continue to play, if any, in the bigger story because she has that intelligence officer role and like, is she using him or you know, or who? Who’s using who? And that kind of.
Michael: yeah, yeah. So, so essentially your answer is is exactly what I wanted from a story perspective, right? So, because the main character of the series is Matt Lyon, and because of the nature of the story that I wrote to push out first, he’s not in that book in, in like in his presence, right? But we know about him, we’re introduced to him, and he’s the main character, right? And so the takeaway from a story perspective is what I wanted was. Who is Matt Lyon, right? I wanted to develop a sense of nostalgia for this guy, like a longing for him like, I want to see this dude. We’ve talked about him, we’ve said all these great things.
We’ve seen a couple of, you know, possible avenues for darker things and I didn’t know that Book two was even gonna be book two. I thought book two was book one and whatever, right?
And Matt Lyon’s call sign, and, you know, that’ll be revealed very early in the first book is Alpha One, right? And so by calling it Alpha One, I’m hoping that I’m just playing right into that. And people are gonna be like, okay, yeah, I’m reading this. I want to see who this dude is and you know, what, what the heck is going on?
Matt Lyon in, um, the first book, even though he, he’s not in the book, is portrayed as the master of war, right? And only a true master of war can manage chaos and, and make chaos bend to its will. But even then, the master of war has but a fleeting chance, right? And so the, the whole idea, and I don’t make it painfully obvious, but, but that’s what I’m trying to create, is that I’ve created this really powerful bad guy and there’s really only one dude at the end of the day that’s gonna have all the different little pieces to put the puzzle together to take him down. And, and so that’s kind of how that’s happening. And so you’ll see a very, very much a continuation of that idea into Alpha one. But Alpha one starts. In a way that I think people are not going to anticipate and it’ll punch you in the gut. At first, you’re gonna be like, oh, I don’t really like that. This sucks. Right? And, but it’s real.
From a, you know, non-story perspective, the big takeaway for Canadians first is that we have a, a special forces and intelligence capability. They kick ass. They’re very good at what they do.
They are some of the best in the world. We don’t get to hear about them, but we have every reason to be proud of them and we can stand toe to toe with the best.
Mark: Yeah. Moving into characters a little bit, one of the things that I don’t see explored a lot, but I hear about in the US as far as like the darker, I’m a psychological thriller, mostly writers, so I think about the psychology and we don’t see a lot of sort of the darker side of the military and like things like drug abuse and, and special operations and things, which is kind of a darker story.
I have no idea what happens in JTF, but I don’t know if, I’m curious if you chose not to include that, just to stay away from the PTSD and, and the how, the coping mechanisms, because that’s not the story you’re trying to tell.
Michael: Yeah. So, I didn’t actually choose to stay away from it. I, I, I did the opposite. It’s just that you don’t get to see it yet because it’s coming in alpha one. And so, but with that said, you know. Drug addictions, alcoholism, things like that you do see, you definitely see that in militaries.
There’s no doubt about it. , And it exists in hours two. Does it exist in JTF two? I couldn’t tell you that. I, I honestly don’t know. The handful of, uh, JTF two operators that I’ve interacted with, I just, it, knowing what I know about them, it, it would be very difficult for me to imagine them being that way. But I don’t, you know, it’s not like I’ve known these people for 20 years and stuff, so I don’t know that. But that said, um, what, what we do know is a very real thing is mental health, right? And PTSD and all that kind of stuff, it is in your face, right? One way or the other. It’s hard to get around it. And again, we come back to that theme that I mentioned earlier, which is to say every day is selection all over again. It doesn’t matter that you saved the world from nuclear destruction last week. What can you do for me today? Because if you can’t do your best today, I don’t care how much of a hero you were yesterday, you’re in some trouble, right? And. Now, if you wanna look at a parallel, you look at Delta force in the US right? And, uh, there’s a lot of operators that have talked openly about this. They say the same thing every day of selection. All the tier one units are gonna say that, right? Canadian ones are saying that too, right? And in Delta force, um, it doesn’t happen often, but guys have talked about this, right?
If you’ve been found lacking, right? You show up to work, you’ve got a security card that you gotta use to get through the gate, then another gate into the building, into the team cage, whatever, right? This is, this card is your life. You don’t exist without this little card cause you can’t get into secure environments. And if you’re found lacking, you know, the next day you show up to work, your card doesn’t work. That’s it. You’re done. Goodbye.
Mark: Okay.
Michael: No one’s gonna come and talk to you and worry about your feelings or whatever. It is brutal. When you think about what these men go through and how much they give to get to that point, nobody’s infallible, nobody’s perfect. And anybody can find themselves in a situation like that for any number of reasons, right? And knowing that that’s your fate, think about what that’s like as a motivator.
Well, first, I mean, it’s a very effective motivator, right? You’re going to, you know, do your job and kick ass and take names because you don’t want that to happen to you, right? Like, you lose your whole life, your identity, your brotherhood, everything. So you don’t want that to happen. But at the, so, so it’s a very effective motivator, but it comes at a cost, right. And those costs are significant, and you will see those costs in Alpha One. They are inescapable and it’s tragic, right?
And when I say that, I’m not saying that as an activist who’s trying to say we have to do it differently. Because if you were to ask me, how do we do this instead? I don’t know. I mean, ’cause I understand why you have to have these people at that level, right? I understand it, but I mean, do we really have to break them? We don’t see it, uh, in the first book just because we’re, we’re just not there yet. You see the beginnings of it, right? Rocky is struggling because because of Matt. Right. And the team is too. And is that PTSD? No. It’s understandable. It’s just a normal human reaction to, to, to what’s happening at that time.
But. So what? It doesn’t have to be a formal P-P-T-S-D diagnosis to say, Hey man, there’s something wrong and these people are struggling and, somebody needs to give a shit and, and whatever. And you see a little bit of that. Now the question for me will be after Alpha one, am I gonna keep dragging it with the story everywhere I go? I don’t know yet because, you know, how often do I need to do it?
I can sort of get it out there and it’s, it’s a, it’s a very real and valid part of the story. So it, it’s, and that was always designed that way from day one. And, and so that stays that way even through the revisions. But then it’s like when we get into book three and book four, um, you know, maybe there will be different challenges and different aspects that we, that we look at. Or maybe, you know, that now that the characters have been established in a lot more depth. Do I, do I just go more plot heavy and stuff? So I, I, I don’t have the answers to that, but, um. What I can say is Alpha one will, if you thought that there was a lot of good characterization in this book, you’re gonna see even more of it in alpha one. And unlike this book, like everybody, you know, when you look at the reviews, there’s, it’s a page turn or very fast paced. Can’t put it down. That’s not alpha one. Alpha one’s gonna start slow and heavy, right? Uh, before it gets fast and hard. And a lot of that is because of what we’ve just been talking about, right?
There there are things that, you know, need to get sorted out before you can go down range. Uh, and in popular fiction you will have a retired operator who is all kinds of screwed up in the head for whatever reason. And he doesn’t fix himself ’cause he doesn’t have to. He’s a badass and he’s gonna go take on the world by himself. And he might take things a little too far because of his struggles might freeze up here and there, and at the end he’ll kinda learn a lesson and then move on and then rinse and repeat. That’s not realistic, right?
That’s just not how it goes. Might be a fun read, not at all realistic. And that’s not the style that I’m presenting in the quiet war. There are examples of bad leaders, there are examples of good leaders everywhere. Alpha one’s gonna show you what it is to be a good leader, and not just from one character, but from many characters. And then that’s one of the reasons why, like a guy when, you know, he’s struggling hard, he’s not going down range, right?
And if he’s got integrity, and most of these people do they’re going to stick their hand up and say, I’m not good to go, because then they’re putting everybody else at risk, right? And you can’t really have that either. So I’ve written this chapter a very heavy duty chapter, and it’s like, I don’t write it, I don’t write a thing again for another month, right?
I’m like, I’m done. I, I don’t wanna be an author anymore. And it, like, it literally like, you know, it can take a while before I’m ready to get back in there and stuff. And this book. Has more than one chapter where, where that’s in your face, right? if I’m successful, you might feel the same way when you’re reading it, right? And so then, then that would be an interesting question is did the reader have to put that down and take a break and before picking it back up and, and stuff, because it, you know, it can get pretty depressing, right? But there’s some bright shining stars as much as there are the not so bright parts that basically pull one out of the darkness and stuff.
Mark: Are you gonna put a content warning in your book for the next one with those deep chapters? Or you
Michael: no, uh, c it’s not necessary ’cause, uh, we’re not most of it is not necessary because you’re not gonna be introduced to anything new, uh, in the sense that PTSD is out there, moral injury is out there, right? And pe people know about these things now. In the author’s note i’ll have a blurb on mental health to, to sort of set the stage right. And, and stuff. And so I don’t know if maybe that serves as a trigger warning, but I don’t think it’s necessary. ’cause we’re not, it’s like I don’t tend to go for super graphic details. Right. Uh, because I don’t think it’s necessary, just like if there’s gonna be a romantic scene, right. Like, you know, yeah. Okay. So they hop in the sack, we know that they did their stuff right. But we’re not gonna get front row seats to that sort of action. Right.
Typically in a military thriller that that part is, is is very obviously implied right. And stuff, but, but we’re not writing, we’re not writing explicit sort of material. I’m trying to think of how I can frame it without giving too much of it away because the central problem behind the darkness there is, is not something that gets, you get bits and pieces of it throughout, but you don’t really get the full idea until we’re deep into the story. And uh, for anyone who’s read book one by the time we get to you know, book two in that full reveal, it, you know, it, it’ll hit you hard, I think hits me hard every time I look at it and write it. But maybe I, I don’t know, maybe I’m just a sap, God help me.
Mark: Was hangman your version of comic relief and kind of taken a breath in
Michael: a little bit. But the comic relief, and you don’t see this, maybe you see it a little bit is Mark Trombley he, you see a bit of it with him, but, he really comes to life in, in Alpha one. He is, he’s quite something. And you know, and, and a lot of it is just, you know, the language thing, right? You know, the, the, the ability to, to to swear, you know, voraciously in both languages and, and stuff, right. And so these are, you know, he’s a, an, he’s a, you know, a senior colonel who starts off as a private, right? He works his way up through the ranks. He, he’s, he’s the first alpha one. He’s the godfather of jtf too, right? Uh, he’s, he’s, he’s a, you know, a gruff dude, and he commissions and he’s very smart, very strategic and, you know, as good of a leader as you’re gonna find. But he is not sensitive to things and doesn’t give to flying Fox the things that come out of his mouth are very you know, authentic, let’s say for him. And, uh, and they’re quite, I think they’re quite funny. And so, and that, I think what makes it work with him is that he’s really not meant to be a jokester, right?
He’s a serious character. He’s a deadly, serious character, but he’s still fucking funny. Uh, just because, and, and I’ve met so many people in the military that were exactly like that for the same reason, right? Like, they were not clowns, but they just were hilarious just because of their, you know, some of their mannerisms and stuff.
So, and Hangman was meant to be, he hangman is representative of a young man in the army who is having a blast doing what he does, right. But he’s also a JTF two operator, so he knows when to shut the shut up and get serious.
And we see that that happens, right? In c certain instances it’s go time and, you know, the clown is gone and it’s, you know, mission focused and whatever.
But this is your, this is your quintessential very young man with energy. And, uh he’s, you know, he, not to say that he’s not disciplined because you don’t get to be there without being disciplined, but he’s creative, right? And he’s, you know, sometimes he gets himself into trouble, but you can count on this guy to deliver at the end of the day, right?
He’ll piss people off too along the way but, uh, he gets the job done. And the original version actually in the jungle sequence, uh, he had even more heroic moments and very different ones than what you would’ve seen in this book. And it was quite something, but I just had to take them out because I had to redo this to make it. A bigger story. Uh, so for example, Seesaw was not part of that operation in the first iteration when it was, when it was part of the larger novel, fast roping through the jungle canopy in the middle of the night, that wasn’t a thing right. In the original version. Uh, and so, so when I brought all that in, then Ma Hangman was busy doing other things, so he wouldn’t be in a position to do some of the other stuff that I had him doing and, and, and whatnot. But yeah he definitely is that, but, and, and, and by design a bit of comic relief. But not only that, but the funny thing was, like I said, with Mark Troley, he was never meant to be comic relief, but he, but it just turns out that way. But you never know what you’re gonna get from him, right?
Because in one chapter, you know, you, you could be pissing yourself laughing, right? And, but in other chapters you’re just you won’t, right. It’ll be, you know, very much down to business. And I think that is very real because like. Soldiers are like anybody. Right. You know, like they goof off.
They, you know, they get bored. They say dumb things, they do dumb shit, and not seriously dumb shit but you know, everybody’s got a softer part of that personality for entertainment’s sake because it’s a rough job. It’s hard, It’s stressful or whatever. And so everybody’s got that, that version, right?
And, but then everybody switches it on when it’s go time too. That’s one thing I would say to people is, um, when you’re reading a guy like Mark Trombley he’s very, he’s very uniquely designed, but in a more broader general sense, it’s a very realistic portrayal of what a guy who spent his entire life in that universe might look like,
Mark: Yeah,
Michael: maybe not on tv, uh, but, but you know, when he is giving an interview, but, uh, in a different kind of setting.
Mark: yeah, yeah. Leading to the final wrap up, what advice would you give someone for the writers that are listening, what advice would you give them if they just published their first or second book?
Michael: Well, I am just there myself, so, you know, uh, I’m not an expert by any means. Um, so if we’re talking advice for people that have now published a book as opposed to in the process of writing it. ’cause I would’ve said for writing, just my biggest piece of advice is don’t be like me, don’t do what I did. But, um, after you’ve published your book, and, and really I think this advice is honestly and frankly too late for after you’ve published your book. ’cause you have to think about this beforehand. I’ll bring you back to the, that old adage, if a tree falls and there’s no one there to hear it, does it make a sound? And you know, people, that, that question’s been around for a long time. And I can tell you when it comes to books if you write a book and no one knows that it’s there, it does not make a fucking sound. No one’s gonna buy it, no one’s gonna read it. And you are not entitled to free advertising. You will not sell your books if all you do is post about your books on social media. And here’s why. So social media does not let content about your books go out there. So case in point, I have 7,300 followers on my Facebook. That’s a lot of followers, right?
If I make a post and it’s just about my book, I’ll be lucky if a hundred people see it. Facebook will not show it even to my own followers.
It just won’t. It will not. I’ll get maybe 10 likes and a couple of comments and that’s it. 7,300 followers, right? And so if, but by contrast. I’ve made a couple of posts on my Facebook page about the Iranian conflict particularly before the war started. And those went viral. They went all over the place.
I had a post that got, like, it was the, the biggest post I’ve ever made, and I never thought it was going to be, but it got like, what? 12,000 likes? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of comments. And oh my God, it just, I couldn’t, I was like, what the hell have I done with this thing? Right? But no one’s gonna buy my book because I expressed an opinion on the Iran situation, right?
Nobody’s gonna like, that ain’t gonna happen. They don’t even know I’m an author. Right? It, it gets shared to the whole Facebook stratosphere now, and, uh, they just see some guy named Mike with an opinion and then, then they’re responding to it, and that’s that, right? But you’re not gonna sell any books because of it. So I’m on these platforms in author communities, and every day I see authors whine and cry all day long. I put my heart and soul into this book. Nobody’s reading it. I shouldn’t have to be performative.
I shouldn’t have to do this, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Well, I’ve got news for you. You want people to read it there how many books are being published every single day, especially in the self-publishing universe, right? If you don’t stand out and people don’t know that you’re there, they’re not gonna know to go buy your book, and they’re not gonna know that you’re there unless you put some money into it.
And it’s a sad reality. I know that a lot of authors don’t have that money. They just don’t and that sucks because if you don’t have a lot of money and you don’t get lucky with some viral post on TikTok or something like that, and there are people that do, but like. There’s like 99% that don’t, right?
So you’re only seeing the ones that do, when you’re on TikTok, you don’t see the fails, you only see the ones that go. So a lot of people are like, why can’t I do that? Well, ’cause most people don’t do that, right?
So, so you need to go into that with your eyes wide open and be prepared to spend. And there are people that will disagree with me there and say, no, I didn’t have to.
And that’s wonderful if you found a way, but just because you found a way doesn’t mean that I can copy you and do it exactly that same way and I’m gonna be successful, right? Because every book is different. The genres are different, the readers are different, where they hang out are different and and that kind of stuff.
So that would be my advice is be, you know, have, have some spending capacity and self-educate on how best to do this because it’s not easy. Like it’s, it’s not straightforward and simple to run an effective Facebook ad. Most of mine were not at first, and I wasted, uh, outrageous amounts of money for no particularly good reason. And I’ve, I think I’ve figured them out now for the most part. Amazon ads are still a mystery for me. I hired a company to do that for me because I just could not figure it out. And they did it. And they did it well and it worked. So my book hit number one bestseller in multiple categories within a week of it being published, right?
It did very well and it, I’ve sold over 4,000 copies, uh, as of a couple days ago. The revenue I’ve brought in, yeah, thank you. And so the revenue I’ve brought in has been astronomical to be quite frank, but the amount of money I’ve spent to advertise has been more astronomical. So I’ve spent more on advertising than I’ve received in royalties, right? So I’m still in the hole. Most people are in the hole with Book one, and that’s normal, right?
so so that’s the other thing is don’t be surprised if you’re gonna be in the hole. But if you publish a book and you publish book one, it only has three reviews and you might sell one or two books a month or so, or whatever. Something’s gone terribly wrong. That’s not it is normal because people have no idea what they’re doing. Like they might know how to write a book, but once they put it out there, they dunno what the hell to do with it to get it out there. So it is the norm, but it’s a norm. It’s a normalcy of failure.
And so if you’re in that universe, you have to say something’s not right. It can’t be that your book sucks because no one’s read it yet, so nobody can possibly know that it sucks. Right. So, you know what I mean? Like, like let’s say you sold a bunch of books and you were getting really terrible reviews. They all really hated it. Then you might say, okay, well maybe, maybe I didn’t write a great book but if it’s not even selling right it can’t be because of that. Uh, it just cannot be because there’s no way to know that it’s no good until until people start to read it, right? So that’s the advertising part I think for most authors is, is very difficult you know, I was fortunate enough to be in a situation where I could put money into advertising and I, honest to God, I don’t, had I not spent on advertising, that would not have been a, a bestselling book and it wouldn’t have sold 4,000 copies.
So, so I know that’s like a long-winded answer, but that’s the thing, right? And even if you’re traditionally published, and I’m not so, take what I’m saying with a grain of salt. This comes from research, not from me being an expert. It might sound that way ’cause my opinions are forcefully presented but the bottom line is from what I have learned is that, you’re some. Guy or gal you wrote, you wrote a book, you sent it to an agent. Most of ’em are gonna tell you to get lost. Eventually someone says yes, maybe, you know, and then they take it to a publisher. They’re gonna tell that agent to get lost. And then eventually the agent lands a deal. And now you, bravo, you’re traditionally published, right? But they’re not gonna advertise for you. They’re not gonna spend any money. ’cause ad you know, like, look at the money I spent, like, I spent a lot of damn money, right? So they’re not gonna do that. If they did that for every single author, they would go bankrupt, right? So they’re not gonna do that ’cause most of, most of their new authors fail too, right? Traditionally published authors, right? And I know it, you know what I’m saying, can sound fairly harsh in the way I’m presenting it. And it’s just because I really believe that you gotta know this, and if you don’t know this, you are gonna find out the hard way. And that’s gonna be worse than listening to a jackass like me being direct in a podcast, right?
Mark: the truth. Yeah, yeah, definitely the truth. I have a question for you from, cam Torrance, he was the last author on the show. He wants to know what’s the most important characteristic of the Canadian military that we don’t know about? Other ti militaries around the world, or they don’t know about us.
Michael: The most, so, okay, so the most important characteristic about our military that other people don’t know.
Mark: Yeah.
Michael: I’ll draw back to my experience with NATO here I was in the, the military for a long time, right? And I didn’t have my first experience interacting with NATO personnel from NATO countries until at least halfway through, right? So I’d spent years just being a Canadian, working with us and, and whatever, right?
And I could see everything that goes wrong. Everything that we sucked at, I bitched and winded and complained just like every other soldier does. It’s like every soldier’s God-given right? To complain, right? And, you know, uh, I was no different. Uh, when I became an officer, I, I, I did a lot less of that for obvious reasons.
so when I started working with our NATO allies. I had no concept at the time for just how big of a deal we are within nato. Because when you think about it, in nato, you’ve got the United States, you’ve got the Brits, the French, Germany, and now Poland, you know, to a big extent, right? And these are big budgets, big players and, and that kind of thing.
But, um, then you’ve got all these other NATO countries, right? And, and they’re, they’re tiny, uh, or tiny budgets, even smaller than ours or, or whatever, right? And so when I was working at the NATO school in Ober, ergo, I was, uh, blown away by how far advanced we were as, as the Canadian military, certainly within the realms of intelligence, military intelligence, compared to, uh, our NATO peers who, many of which didn’t even have a milita military intelligence discipline at the time, Germany did not have a military intelligence discipline.
It wasn’t an occupation in the German army, which really surprised me. ’cause they’re a major landmass army. And I don’t know if that’s still the case or not. That may have changed that. So, ’cause we’re talking circa 2012 maybe and, and stuff. And so that was kind of an eyeopener, right? And the other thing that I, you know, that. Is different about us, say from, at least from the American perspective, maybe not everybody else, but is because we’re smaller we can’t afford to train exactly the way everybody else does, right? So if you look at, say an American artillery unit on a Howitzer say a, we’re talking about a towed gun, and maybe we don’t use a lot of those anymore, but in my day we did.
I started off as an artilleryman. Uh, you might have seven positions on a gun, on a Howitzer to operate this giant canon that launches bombs out of it, right? And as an artilleryman in Canada, you would be trained on all seven positions in your, in your basic artillery qualification. That wasn’t the case.
Americans would would say, okay, well you’re gonna be a number three band on the gun and we’re gonna train you that and, and whatever, but there’s enough of them to do that, right? And so, that’s something I think that’s unique. But again, my information might be dated, right? Because I, I’ve now been out since 2017. But the other thing I would say that comes across as a surprise to just about anybody I’ve had experience working with internationally is how decentralized we are. And what I mean by that is that a corporal in the Canadian army has an infinitely. Um, higher level of responsibility, um, vis-a-vis an equivalent rank of another army.
Right. And, uh, and, and equivalent is important because a corporal in the UK army is not a corporal in the Canadian army, right. A corporal in the UK army is much more of a, like a senior NCOA corporal in the Canadian army is a very, it’s like the second rank.
So there’s an example that I cite, like when we had some guys working with the British, or not the British, sorry, the Brazilian army uh, when we were, doing a lot of op peacekeeping operations in Haiti and, you know, they, they were just flabbergasted that we would have, you know, very low ranked ncms managing a vehicle park and where to park vehicles and how to organize them all and stuff, right? Whereas, like, you know, in a, in a very large army, from a different nation, different cultural background, they, they would need a senior captain in that vehicle park. To make those decisions. Nobody else was allowed to make a decision like that, right?
Mark: Sure. Yeah. Thank you. can listeners find your book about you?
Michael: everywhere right now. If they wanna learn more about me, the best place to go is my website. So it’s the easy website to remember. It’s michael j lon.com, and it’ll bring you to my website. It’ll have all about me, all the books that are, you know, either out or coming out very soon and or planned.
So you’ll get to see a lot of the type of stuff that I’ve been talking about here in terms of buying the book. So Amazon, of course, uh, uh, is, is a primary point and it’s available in ebook audiobook. And it’s been professionally produced by a professional narrator paperback and hardcover.
So it’s available in all the additions. If you are inclined to Cobo, then you can get the ebook in the audiobook, on Cobo, in the Canadian sphere. If you want to buy the physical book and not go through Amazon, then you can get it through Indigo’s website. It is not available in Indigo stores.
Mark: So we’re gonna jump into a, a couple of spoiler questions. For those listeners who don’t want to have the book spoiled, go grab the book. Now you know where to get it. You can check the, the show notes for the link and then come back and listen, uh, to the rest of the show. The ending of this book, was this the original way that you wrote it, where Rocky tells Nathan, go find Matt. Essentially the collapse of the Canadian healthcare system is this, the vision in the first, the first way it was written.
Michael: Well, yes, in so far as. When I was writing it, knowing that it was gonna be its own smaller book. Right? But when I, when I was writing that main novel, like I, I discussed, uh, Nathan and Kira didn’t exist. They were created to make this story work, uh, on its own. And, uh, and, and there wouldn’t have been any go find Matt Lyon stuff because, um, chapter one starts with Matt Lyon very much there.
So the reader knows where he is. Alpha team does not know where he is. That was always the case. And they’re upset about that. But in the main book, um, you know, he’s not very far away, basically. Right? , He, so, so I changed that around afterwards. So when I, when I repurposed, uh, the Canadian front to be, the, the Belize arc, Nathan and Kira got brought, got conceived.
And uh, you know, as I mapped that story in my mind, I knew that that was gonna be how it would end. Because again, the, because I know that my protagonist is Matt Lyon. The whole purpose, other than writing a good book, was to ensure that you want to read more about matt. Right. Um, and now that’s created a little bit of a problem, right?
Because what do I do with Nathan and Kira? Right? ‘Cause they don’t exist right in, in the new, in in Alpha one. Uh, they do Now I’ve, I’ve, I’ve written them into the story, but, uh, I’m still at a point where I’m trying to decide how big of a role that they play
and, uh, you know, they may play a big role, maybe they won’t, and they’ll get sort of in the story shuffled off so that we, we were setting them up for book three where they’ll become front and center again because it’s a bit more of a British, book, uh, if that makes any sense.
So, so there’s a, you know, so, so there’s a couple of things there, but, but in terms of the ending and the healthcare stuff, yes. Or, or, sorry.
No, uh, and the healthcare thing wasn’t a thing, uh, when I wrote the original book, because I already have a big premise and stuff. And, and so in Alpha one, the, the big inciting incident, and, and this will will be in all the promo material, is that a Canadian ambassador gets kid kidnapped in broad daylight. Right. Well, that’s a, that’s a very. Textbook JTF two operation, right? Like if there ever was one is to go and rescue this woman. And so, so the book opens with that happening, right? Uh, and then it’s like, well, why, why the hell did you know somebody abduct her? This doesn’t make any sense. Like, why would you abduct a Canadian ambassador? And, uh, you know, that’s, that’s more for the book that’s coming up, but the logic that’s built around that is, well, you wouldn’t unless it was part of something much bigger, right? So is it really about her or is it about something bigger?
Right? So that was very much the case. So when I had to repurpose the Belize Ark into being Canadian front for the book that just came out I don’t have a kidnapped ambassador anymore.
Right? And the original intent for that Belize mission was simply to introduce Alpha team. Uh, while we have Matt going through his stuff, we, well it means more to be, to understand Matt if we understand Alpha team too, right? And so that, that was their whole purpose in, in that part or act one of the main story. And so, so their mission to Bel, to Belize was actually to go and it was a kill capture mission to take out Khalid Al Rashid, right? And, uh, that was it. That was the mission. And in I had to repurpose it all to make it more interesting. So now we have Nathan and Kira who are getting the, of the story going, if you will, because reading about JTF two could be exciting, but well, why are we deploying them?
What happened? What’s, what’s going on in the world? We have to have all that context. Otherwise it’s not very interesting, right? So I bring them into being, and then I was like, I could have them killed off, or, you know, that I could keep the mission just the way it was, or I can keep them alive, and then they get kidnapped and let’s rescue them.
And then I decided with the ladder. Uh, and so they, so it starts off as a rescue mission, and then when we see them interacting with the cartel, and that was always gonna be part of the original scheme, then Rocky makes the call to say, okay, well we’re gonna, instead of killing the sky as a secondary objective, now we’re, we’re gonna capture him. So we’re doing a hostage rescue and a capture, which is a big deal, right? That, that, that’s, that’s a, like, you know, that, that’s not, that’s no easy to ask even for the, for the best of them. So, yeah. So some of, some of that was in, some of, uh, was in the original scheme and, and a lot of it was not.
Mark: What about bam, bam, getting his, the, the frag he took and his injuries?
Michael: that’s
Mark: set up? Was that set up for a moment for Rocky as a reader to know that he’s like taking, okay.
Michael: No, no, not really. It was, it, it, it be careful because it’s a, it’s more of a spoiler for alpha one now, but, it’s, it’s more of a reality, right?
You, you’re gonna take casualties, right? And, uh, and to, to, to present that as such, uh, even though JTF two has never lost a guy yet, thankfully it’s still a reality. So, but bam, bam, we don’t really get an idea or a sense of who bam bam is and why he might be important, right? And he is important. We just, you just can’t know that yet. ’cause Alpha one hasn’t happened. And in Alpha one, you’ll see, uh, how he does have, you know, a little bit of a, sort of a backstory that will endear you to him, which will make learning about, you know, his, his difficulties, all the, you know, all the worse, right?
I don’t think that I’m giving away any massive secrets by saying that a bam bam does not die. Because the entire premise for Vanguard Ranger, which is already on my website, and it talks about that, is an old Army ranger going into the hospital while bam, bams in a coma and telling bam, bam, his life story while bam, BAMS in a coma trying to, you know, coax him out of a coma and eventually he will succeed in, in, and whatever. And that’s the, that, that’s very much a side story in the quiet war called Vanguard ranger. So that’s coming later, and you’ll get introduced to the Vanguard Ranger in Alpha One, who is a very small character.
He, he doesn’t play a big role, a very important role, but not a big role in Alpha one. And so, you know, I, and when I created that character, it was just some old washed out ranger that was feeling bad about not being a Ranger anymore and lonely and all that kind of stuff, right? so Jason and Bam bam are coming together, uh, essentially, uh, in Vanguard Ranger. You know, because of, you know, I, I basically foreshadowed a lot in, in terms of by saying, Hey, this is the premise of book three.
This is the premise of that Vanguard Ranger. A lot of authors don’t really do that, but I did that and I put my website. I filled that with stuff so people would realize and know that I’m a serious author, that this isn’t gonna be just a one hit wonder that there are books all along the way and at various stages in development. And so that I made that strategic decision. And so it, to some degree. A little bit of spoiler sort of gets leaked, but I think overall it, it, it kind of works out. So, but bam, bam is important. Not for any of the reasons I just said. Uh, I mean, he is important for that, but you wouldn’t know that because that happens in a later book. He will be important in alpha one, uh, in alpha one. It’s a small thing, but, but, but still, it, it, it makes everything matter more. Right. And it’ll just make what he’s going through it a lot harder, especially for the characters who, who don’t have the benefit of knowing how things are gonna turn out the way, the way I do.
Right.
Mark: yeah, yeah. You’ve certainly set up a series with, even with the, with the answering of the questions that you could tell, how it all links together and how much thought that has gone into all. This is very well done. I’m, I’m looking forward to it.
Michael: Thanks. Yeah. I just have to survive long enough to put all the pieces together and stuff.
Mark: So finally, what’s one question you can ask the next author you’d like to ask the next author who comes on the show and the next author coming up next on two weeks is Brittany Butler. She is a former CIA who wrote the Patriot’s daughter. It’s an espionage.
Michael: oh, wow. So, I mean, I’d have like a million questions I’d want to ask a, a former CIA officer. So, uh none of which she would be able to answer either. Right. Uh, I’m just trying to think like, ’cause I, I would really like to understand how a CI, a officer or anybody, you know, be it, uh, you know, MI six or Mossad or whoever, gets into, you know, a nation that is, you know, denied territory.
For example, you know, Russia, China, not Iran now, but before the war. Right. Like, like how do you get in there and, you know, stay there and do your stuff. And especially now with, you know, the, the, the surveillance state, where, you know, especially China, you know, has got like video cameras on like in every single facet of society.
So they, and they’ve got facial rest recognition, right? So how the hell do you, can you even be a spy
Mark: Yeah.
Michael: And operate in a place like that? ’cause your face is gonna be picked up. Right. And, and to what degree has that, you know, changed things? And I, I would not be surprised if she can’t answer that, uh,
Mark: She may answer it in context to her book. ’cause I’ve, I’ve already started her book and there are, you know, those kinds of things come up. Well if you don’t mind sticking around for a couple more minutes. I know we’ve gone well, well, well over time. I appreciate you not just cutting it
Michael: That always happens. I’m long-winded, but yeah, no, I’ve got some time.
Mark: yeah, I’ve got a couple after, uh, after rapid fire after show questions for you.
Michael: Sure.
Mark: Thank you so much for being here and for taking the time. Michael alone, everyone, the quiet war. Check it out. Thanks for listening, and have a wonderful day.
Michael: And thanks for having me.
