Charly Young: Blog

Thought I'd drop a note and let folks know what's going with Keeper book 2. I am well into the writing of the sequel to the Keeper. So far, it's been the usual struggle.-Writing, revising, rewriting, revising, swearing to quit and never write another word because the stuff reads like dreck, then back to writing, rewriting, etc. I do promise that I will make sure that the final edit is the best possible. Some of the comments I received made me harken back to freshman English class where Mrs. Lowey enjoyed comparing my writing (unfavorably)to her granddaughter who was a second-grader. I will do better on Book 2.

I had somebody write and ask if I used a real person to model Lachlan Quinn. Oddly enough I did.

In December of 1968, the US Government kindly invited me to join others of my generation at Ft Lewis in Washington State. Most of us, unlike today's volunteer troops, were not happy with the invite. Most of us were cold, (record-breaking snowfall) lonely, and scared. But what you gonna do. You suck it up and drive on. Just like millions of other young men before and since. (Just like the fucking army to train troops for the tropics in the snow and cold.)

Our drill sergeant a career old-time brown-boot guy close to retirement was surprisingly reasonable--not at all what I expected. Hardly any browbeating for example. The food was good even excellent. Mostly the experience is a blur in my mind. A mishmash of half-memories except for one guy.

The Drill Sergeant of Alpha Platoon was a muscular soft-spoken black guy who had two tours in Viet Nam under his belt before he became a Drill Sergeant. He like our Drill Sergeant were no-nonsense guys doing their best to train us up for Viet Nam. (Just like the fucking army to train troops for the tropics in a snowstorm)

Anyway, back to my memory. One day they trucked us over to pugil stick training. Those of you who ever did this know that the damn things are awkward, to say the least. Fighting with them gets tiring pretty damn quickly. I suppose the idea was to train us up to be aggressive just like the hours of bayonet drills were supposed to do. We were mostly all draftees. We got aggressive later in-country, here we put in the motions.

The CO must have caught wind of our attitude so he stopped the training and called on the Drill Sergeants to show us how it was done.

He picked the Alpha Platoon Drill Sergeant and another sergeant to battle it out. The resulting example was night and day different from our pitiful efforts. It was a true battle and the soft-spoken sergeant from alpha turned into what I can only describe as a warrior. He kicked the crap out of the other guy. He didn't do it with any bullshit berserker yelling. He did it methodically using extreme violence.

And when he took off his mask and other protective gear, he didn't look triumphant, just sad and tired as he walked away. For some reason, the difference between both his personas still sticks in my mind.

I've published The Keeper on Bookapy for those folks who wanted to purchase a copy. It's received a final edit and I've made slight alterations to the ending scenes. thanks for your kind support. Also again a shout out of thanks to Mr. Wolf for his editing expertise.

Howdy All,
I thought I'd drop a note and let all who are interested know how I'm coming on Book II of the Lachlan Quinn Keeper series. I've finished the outline finally and I am starting to put words to chapters. I still plan on finishing by late august. The caveat of course is how long it will take my editors to comb through and correct my prose for typos and punctuation-( Honestly, I never met a comma I didn't want to marry and for some reason, I hate articles, the a,an and most of all the the). The embarrassing lesson I learned from posting Keeper is to never again publish anything without a thorough and professional edit.
Keeper will be published on Bookapy hopefully by next week. My editor has the last few chapters in hand. I promise you that the Bookapy copy will be A LOT cleaner. I'd like to give a grateful shout-out of thanks to the readers who took the time to point out my mistakes. I'm also working on a Patreon page and a personal web page.

Thank you all for reading, voting, and commenting on my first book, Keeper. I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. I am in the middle of outlining the next book in the Lachlan Quinn series. I plan to have it ready for release sometime in August. I plan to have Keeper available on Bookapy in the next few weeks for those who wish to purchase it. Thanks again and be safe.