r/books • u/Robert_Buettner AMA Author • Jun 07 '19
ama I am Robert_Buettner, nationally best-selling author of 9 SF novels and many short stories. My best-known novel is Orphanage. My 10th and latest novel, the historical techno thriller My Enemy’s Enemy, debuted June 4. AMA.
The best place to learn more about me and my writing is www.RobertBuettner.com. You will find little from me on Facebook and Twitter, because I exhaust my meager stock of wit and profundity writing my books and stories. If you love the Science Fiction legend Robert Heinlein, critics say I write like him. If you hate Heinlein, my books are totally not like that guy’s. My Enemy’s Enemy mixes a lot of science and a lot of fiction, about World War II and the Nazi nuclear weapons program, with contemporary terrorism. I am as jolly about getting old as you are, and I own more bicycles than a grownup needs. To paraphrase the late, great Anthony Bourdain, I will be here as long as you keep asking or until the whisky runs out. Ask me anything.
Proof: /img/rttcyek1rf131.jpg
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u/Chtorrr Jun 07 '19
What is a book you think we should read that you don’t hear about very often?
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u/Robert_Buettner Jun 07 '19
Well, any of mine,obviously. Seriously, The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes won the Pulitzer in 1983(?) and it's an amazing mix of physics made readable for those with math anxieties plus the very human stories of the very real people who built the bomb.
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u/Anonymouskern Jun 07 '19
Before writing a story, how detailed is your outline? Or are you more prone to making it up as you go along?
Also how much time do you think a short story should take?
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u/Robert_Buettner Jun 07 '19
That depends. My earlier novels were largely make-it-up-as-I went. I felt like if I knew what was going to happen already, I wouldn't be motivated to write it down. The more times that resulted in painting myself into a corner and being forced to scrap work, the more I saw the wisdom of outlining. That is especially true of a book like My Enemy's Enemy, where the fictional events must slot in with the real historical time line.
A short story should take exactly as long as it takes to tell the story and nothing but the story, and tell it perfectly. That sounds like a weasel answer, but it's true. The Frost Queen, the story I wrote for the recent Larry Correia/Kacey Ezell anthology Noir Fatale, once I saw the idea, fell into place faster than I could type.
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u/florida1129 Jun 07 '19
What inspired slug like aliens for your orphanage series?
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u/GlumWeight Jun 07 '19
How does editing a book with the publisher work? Do you talk to them throughout the process or do the send back a draft with notes?
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u/Robert_Buettner Jun 07 '19
I can only speak to my experiences with two publishers, what began as Time-Warner Aspect and became Hachette Orbit, and Baen Books, which is distributed by Simon & Schuster.
In both cases, after I set out enough of an idea to persuade the publisher to contract for a book or books, I rarely contact my editor unless something comes up that will impact meeting my contract deadline. Such as being stuck for six months. All the editors I've worked with prefer to receive a finished MS as good and polished as I can make it. And that's what I prefer to turn in. Then they send back comments. TW Aspect/Hachette Orbit was, like most NY houses, very formal, and I would get back maybe seven single-spaced pages of suggestions and changes, on the precise schedule called for in the contract.
Baen is more relaxed, both as to schedule and volume of changes.
But overall I've always gotten first rate input that has improved my books.
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u/bbahloo Jun 07 '19
Have been wanting to ask any published author this question:
Thoughts on Grammarly?
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u/Robert_Buettner Jun 07 '19
I haven't used it. But I have found the grammarly-like assist provided with Microsoft Word is helpful but too often wrong. I scrubbed the My Enemy's Enemy manuscript over and over until each and every suggestion and underline had been corrected by me until it disappeared. But the number of errors that remained that were detected by a good professional copy editor surprised me.
One effect of those programs has been to make it harder for agents and editors to detect aspiring authors who really didn't know what they were doing. An agent told me that before spell chek it used to be possible to separate out the chaff within 5 pages or less. She said these days it can take 50 pages.
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u/k_banz Jun 07 '19
I thought your picture was of Adam West at first lol. Anyways, my question is about the general state of cover art. I’m personally drawn to very old books that barely had any pictures and just had titles on them, and when I see flashy cover art it turns me away (I know, judging a book by its cover). How do you choose your books cover art?
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u/Orovo Jun 07 '19
What would you recommend, publishing wise, rather gettin published wise, to young aspiring authors?
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Jun 07 '19
On the subject of mixing historical facts and fiction, where do you draw the line for factual accurancy? Would it be okay to change smaller details like the outcome of a skirmish or a real person's biography in order to fit the plot, or do you believe it is better to be accurate and simply fill the gaps with the tale, as it were?
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Jun 07 '19
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u/Robert_Buettner Jun 07 '19
Hmm. I wonder whether you're talking about my first novel, Orphanage, in which we meet Jason Wander as a teen aged infantry enlistee. That choice was easy, because it allowed me to draw on my life experience when I was a young man.
If you're talking about My Enemy's Enemy, there are two interwoven timelines. We do meet protagonists Rachel and Peter at 16 and 19, respectively, in 1928 in Munich. I chose that start point because it allows us to see their reactions as the Nazis come to power in Germany. The other, contemporary, timeline's principal protagonists are Frank, who is in his sixties, and Cass, who is 25.
Relationship advice? Well, I'm still in my first one after fifty years. The angst I remember at 31 was about raising kids and having the wherewithal to feed them. So my advice is to enjoy the moment. The best is yet to come.
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u/Robert_Buettner Jun 07 '19 edited Jun 07 '19
It's gray and raining here as I wait in case some of you out west have questions or comments or want to Ask Me Anything.
If this weekend you can take a moment to listen to a D-Day vet's story, do so while you still can.
In my just-released novel My Enemy's Enemy, Smithsonian fledgling aviation historian Cass Gooding’s boss challenges her to unearth the story behind a World War II aviation relic, before the people who can tell its story die. Cass's quest exposes more than she bargained for: An explosive atomic secret that may still shake the world, and cost a million lives, including her own.
Along those lines, one reason I wrote the book are personal stakes I have in World War II. On August 6, 1945, when the Enola Gay dropped the first Uranium Fission bomb on Hiroshima, my father was a US Army Warrant Officer aboard a troopship in the middle of the Pacific. He was no doubt bound for the invasion of Japan. The operation would have dwarfed the Normandy landings, which until that time were the most massive military undertaking in history. Realistic casualty estimates based on the ferocity of Japanese defense of outlying islands projected that that single operation could double or triple the 400,000 US dead already lost during the entire war to that time. The Japanese dead, civilian and military, would surely have dwarfed American casualties and run into the millions. The two A-bombs killed 130,000 to 230,000 Japanese, and likely more over the ensuing years. But by ending the war they likely saved millions,very probably including my father, so I am able to write this.
A second reason is that my father's brother, my uncle, went in across the beach at Normandy as an infantryman at D plus 12, then fought his way across Europe. He never spoke much about his experience but no doubt suffered for the rest of his life from what we today call PTSD. My Dad didn't talk much about the war either, but I suspect the reason he refused for decades to return to California, his embarkation point, was that he promised himself that if he survived he never would.
I should have talked more to each of them about those times, and about what they meant. If you still can, do.
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u/Jyquentel Jun 07 '19
Thank you for your time! I have personally never heard about you but now I'm interested in reading some of your litterature. As a fan of the genre, I'm wondering how you'd say your own style of writing compares to cyberpunk?
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u/mildmanneredsuperman Jun 07 '19
Hello again sir,
I am not sure whether the whisky ran out or not but here I go.
What do you think about steampunk?
Thanks for your early reply.
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u/Robert_Buettner Jun 07 '19
Steampunk intrigues me, because it is really a kind of alternate history. Also, some of the coolest costumes I see at SF conventions are steampunk.
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u/Inkberrow Jun 07 '19
If you’ve read it, what’s your take on Pynchon’s characterization of Hitler’s attempts to salvage WWII with rockets and nukes in Gravity’s Rainbow?
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u/shawnintheflesh Jun 07 '19
What is your marketing process for your books, and what marketing advice do you have for authors who are trying to make their first book successful?