Tom Vetter #grumpyoldgods Meet The Authors GOG Vol. 1 #anthology #mythology
Meet The Author of The New Chief Medical Officer
The New Chief Medical Officer by Tom Vetter: Controlled chaos reigns in the Elysian Fields Retirement facility. The new chief medical officer arrives to take charge; but when retired gods are involved, nothing is ever as easy as it seems at first glance.
hashtag #grumpyoldgods #anthology #mythology
Grumpy Old Gods Volume
About Tom Vetter
Those who can, do. Those who can do no longer, teach – or better still, write! Tom Vetter has done both – living it first and then writing about it. As a naval officer he served more than two decades in submarines and deep submergence vehicles. During his career, Commander Vetter sailed more than 100,000 miles, operated diesel and nuclear submarines during the Vietnam and Cold Wars, piloted the Navy’s bathyscaph TRIESTE II (DSV-1) and commercial submersibles, and found men, equipment, aircraft and shipwrecks on dives venturing deeper than 3 miles. His undersea exploration and search innovations are still used by the U.S. Navy and others.
After several lives’ worth of adventure at sea, Tom retired from the U.S. Navy’s Submarine Force and worked another career in IT and telecommunications, operating a successful IT architecture business for a decade before his wife’s health required a second retirement.
Writing has become his third career. In the past three years, Tom has written a memoir of his undersea adventures and two books of a planned four-book historical fiction series centered on The First Crusade.
Tom lives with his wife in Virginia. And as care-giving duties permit, he writes every day.
You find Tom and read more of his work his Website , Goodreads, or his Amazon Page.
We gave the authors several questions they could answer and this is one of the questions Tom answered for us.
Name three books that influenced you as a writer and tell us about your life when you read them.
Island Boy by Robert R. Harry Sr.Written in 1957, it is ostensibly a book for children about an orphaned Polynesian boy. I read it at age ~8, have not reread it, and remember only a fragment of the story that enabled me to search out and buy another copy online recently, as my original is long gone.
The reason this book matters is that it was the first real book I read, on my own, cover to cover, during a long period of childhood illness. And with it I made the seminal discovery that books hold stories I could access for myself by reading—stories I could play like movies in my imagination. That was the real treasure I gained from this book. It changed me by making me a reader and a book lover, and started the process that made me a writer as well, once I realized I had stories I wanted other story lovers to be able to read.
The Man Called Noon by Louis L’Amour. Richard Crenna starred in a spaghetti western made from this book in 1973, a movie I watched in a submarine wardroom ~1975. The film editing was so poor that I was left confused and outraged by the mess it made of a good story. But the XO had a paperback copy of the book, one from the many westerns our sailors piled in a stern room corner for anyone needing another read. Sailors love L’Amour’s books. I found it a considerably more satisfying tale, and immediately then read every L’Amour book I could get. After all, I was a sailor, too.
In his career L’Amour wrote something like ninety novels—westerns, sea tales and others, and I never failed to enjoy his latest. His western plots were formulaic but well-researched, and he claimed to have personally ridden the area in which each story was set.
It was L’Amour who first led me to think, Yunno, I’d like to write someday. Wonder if I could?
So, if you like my books, you can thank a bad movie about a man called Noon.
The Last Kingdom by Bernard Cornwell. The first novel in Cornwell’s Saxon Chronicles series, this book was both an inspiration and model for my own Siege Master series.
I became addicted to Cornwell thanks to my wife’s love of doing needlework by the flickering light of PBS, and a resultant exposure to his Sharpe’s Rifles tales there. As ever, I searched out his books, bought and read them all, waited impatiently for every new title, and moved to the Saxon Chronicles books as they appeared. Cornwell, too, claims to walk the ground of his stories before he writes them.
When Gabriela’s health demanded that I become her full-time caregiver and I decided I’d try to write, thanks to L’Amour and Cornwell, historical fiction seemed to be a natural choice. L’Amour taught me to use the caregiver’s horse—Google Earth—to ride all the settings of my story, and describe each locale as a viewer there on the ground would. Cornwell taught me to research a story’s relevant historical facts, and with them, craft a timeline as my story’s skeleton. And because his Saxon Chronicles books are set in a similar period and locale as my Siege Master tales, they served as valuable models for both the voice and the format of my own books. That may be why a number of readers compare me with him—which I consider a great honor.
Yogi Berra was right when he said, “You can observe a lot by watching.” I would add, “”You can learn much about writing by reading.”
Releasing March 30th PreOrder Now!
What happens when gods wane, retire, or just decide they need a change of employment?
13 writers took up the challenge and let their imaginations run wild in this anthology that is nearly-always amusing, somewhat insightful, and completely irreverent as we imagine the gods of yore in retirement. Volume 1 Available for PreOrderNow!
13 days of fun as we meet the authors of Grumpy Old Gods Volume 1 releasing March 30th, 2019.
Grumpy Old Gods Anthology Volume 2
Call For Submission
Deadline March 30, 2019.
Submission Guidelines here.
We are adding an author a day to this meet the author series starting March 23-April 4th as a kick off to our launch. Grumpy Old Gods vol. 1 releasing March 30th. So be sure to check back and read about the other authors too. We have all kinds of surprises that show up randomly. Don’t miss them. You can read about the other authors HERE.
Original post on Storm Dance Publications