Honor, p.1
Honor, page 1
HONOR
Issue #1 (Spring 2023)
Thrill Ride - the Magazine
EDITED BY M. L. BUCHMAN
Contents
Why a Magazine
Honor
Windfall
E. Chris Ambrose
Fallen Sky
M. L. Buchman
Striker’s Stand
Arleigh Jacobs
Major Rat
Ed Teja
A Bloody Fang in the London Fog
Kim May
The Jerusalem Plot
Laura Ware
Honor Among Thieves
Leah R. Cutter
Your Lantern Is Warm
Jesse Bethea
Honor
Blaze Ward
The Asset
David Bruns
A Few Days to Kill
Terrence McCauley
T Is For Titus…
C. Dan Castro
About the Editor
Your Next Great Read
Read Even More!
Why a Magazine
M. L. BUCHMAN
Yep! It’s that obligatory opening moment of a new magazine launch where the editor wonders quite how they temporarily lost their mind and somehow had the thought:
Hey! Launching a magazine sounds like a GREAT idea!
Reasons it actually was a good idea:
I love short stories. Since reading my first Isaac Asimov collection when I was perhaps ten years old, I’ve loved short stories. It took me a long time to be convinced that I could write them, but I read them at every chance: Asimov, Clark, Hugo and Nebula collections, The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Best-of annuals in so many genres, the list goes on. And once I decided I could write them, I wrote and published 135 stories to date which have been published in magazines, anthologies, and one every month for free to my fans for eight consecutive years without missing once.
Mystery and science fiction magazines abound. Romance magazines are relatively rare, though I’ve been in those as well. Romance more than compensates with hundreds of multi-author collections.
But dedicated thriller and action-adventure magazines? Nope. Even anthologies in these genres are rare.
And that got me to thinking (which is not always a good thing).
Why?
I’ve written a lot of romance short fiction because that’s where my career began. Not my writing: that started in fantasy, science fiction, and a few earlier thrillers. But my first big sale ended up totaling thirteen military romantic suspense novels that became the core of a forty-two book / seventy-story universe.
During those years, I always said that writing a true romance, not just a meet-cute but a full and satisfying romance, in a short story had to be the hardest thing there was to do.
Nope! There are ways to do this that I’ve learned, mostly the hard way, over the years.
Thrillers though…man! To build high stakes, tension, and character, then layer on an edge-of-seat story with a high climax and an exciting ending, in so few pages—that’s tough!
The Magazine
This project began over four years ago.
After studying the short-story craft of some of today’s best thriller writers, I tried my own hand at it. I wrote a couple handfuls of stories that I’d call thriller or at least action-adventure. Let’s be kind and say that I threw out maybe…twice as many as I finished successfully (okay, maybe three times). And so many failed starts that I hate to think about it. (My story in Issue #1 Honor had at least five complete discards before I got past the first page—not only the writing, but five whole story ideas, in the trash.)
Yes, part of being an editor is a desire to bring stories to life. Finding voices and nurturing them. Discovering new styles that flatten you to the ground in wonder.
But the far bigger part, at least as an editor who is also a writer, is the chance to learn. That’s part of the reason I launched this magazine. In editing the forty-seven stories in this first year of Thrill Ride – the Magazine, I received a master class that can’t be paid for. I hope that I returned even a small portion of that education to the authors as I worked with them to hone their tales.
I’ve worked behind the scenes on multiple magazines and dozens of collections, but to have the editor’s pen (keyboard) in my own hand (lap) was a whole new experience. It took me back to my early days working at the University of Washington Commercial Fiction Certificate Program thirty years ago (yes, I’m a certified fiction writer [grin]). The day I graduated from the program, the professor recruited me to be a teacher’s assistant, leading multiple critique groups per week for the next several years (the TA often mere inches ahead of the students).
The professor had three rules then that have stood me in good stead as an editor ever since:
Are there any technical bumps? (grammar, subject matter expertise, etc.)
Are there any story bumps? (repeated phrases, concepts, something that knocked me out of the story)
Can I ask a question that suggests anything to enhance the story? (nothing else, especially nothing negative is allowed). As an editor rather than a TA, I will now make direct suggestions when I think the author has a great story but missed a way to really bring it to life, but the above are good rules in all other circumstances.
With only a few trivial exceptions, the stories submitted to Thrill Ride – the Magazine had no issues with #1 or #2. I was blessed with a wealth of professional grade manuscripts.
Which, just as an editorial aside, kinda sucks.
When an editor receives a large number of submissions, the first thing they look for is what can be rejected (typically for reason #1 or #2)—the faster the better. An editor doesn’t read to accept, at least not on the first pass through the pile, they read to reject and clear away any chaff. Format and spelling errors? Gone. Poor grammar? Gone. Weak craft at any level? Chuck it. Lame character? Unclear story? No setting? Thumbs down, feed it to the lions (or at least the bottom of the parakeet cage).
However, I received great craft and great stories—lots of them. Which meant I couldn’t reject them out of hand. I had to read (for many, many hours) and then make truly tough decisions.
But to then take these already excellent stories, and work with the author on enhancing them, was so much fun! That they were so gracious about accepting as many of my suggestions as they did was a relief.
Thank you for making this so easy (easier) and fun (absolutely!). I’m proud of every one of you.
I have to give a special shout-out to my business-brainstorming buddy Blaze Ward, who appears several times in these pages (not because he’s a buddy but because his stories rocked).
Six years ago we spent a lot of time talking about his first quarterly magazine, Boundary Shock Quarterly (now in its fifth year). We also talked at length about his then-upcoming business book, How to Launch a Magazine for Professional Publishers. At the time I was in the early days of shifting my career from writing military romantic suspense into thrillers. He pushed me hard, “When are you going to launch a thriller magazine?”
I wasn’t ready back then.
In the time since, my Miranda Chase technothrillers have hit Top 50 on Amazon (Top 1 in Thrillers) and received many laudatory reviews including from Publishers Weekly, “Tom Clancy fans open to a strong female heroine will clamor for more.”
So, Blaze, it took me a while until I felt qualified to even try—and then another year to figure out how to make it work—but thanks for the push. If you don’t like what I and the other authors achieved here, blame Blaze!
Welcome to Year One of M. L. Buchman presents: Thrill Ride – the Magazine.
Honor
M. L. BUCHMAN
noun: —a keen sense of ethical conduct: Integrity
—one’s word given as a guarantee of performance
– Merriam-Webster
I’m very amused that I had to go down to definition #8 in the M-W dictionary to find the definition I think of when I consider honor. (They list Chastity / Purity at #7!)
The moment I decided that each issue of Thrill Ride – the Magazine would be themed, I knew the topic of the first issue had to be honor. Honor and I have a long history and I’d like to revisit it briefly.
Honor: a brief history
Set your wayback machine to even before I started writing and being a TA at the University of Washington.
A group of friends gathered for a surprise going-away party for one of our number moving out of the area. As we waited, we naturally fell to talking about why we liked Marshall so much. Someone said words that changed my life: “The thing that’s most amazing about Marshall is his absolute integrity. If he says he’s going to do it, then he absolutely will, sooner and better than promised.”
Wow! What a cool thing to have said about you behind your back. I wanted that, even if I never actually heard it (being done behind my back and all). I did make sure that it was repeated for Marshall that night.
At the time I was a master procrastinator with good intentions and poor follow-through. It was years of hard work later that someone said that compliment to my face. I can’t recall if I wept on their shoulder, but I certainly did when I reached home.
I still work hard to live up to Marshall’s standard. Thanks, wherever you landed, buddy.
This has filtered into my writing at so many levels. It’s how I got started writing military romantic suspense.
I was in a critique group for my second-ever novel (blessedly decades out-of-print). The first hero-warrior scene I read had all of the men in the group howling with laughter. Why? Well, let’s just say that I’m the romantic mush in the family (way more than my practical half-Scottish wife); in fact in almost any group I’m a part of. (Yep, I’m the guy who cries at those commercials. It showed in my early attempts to write convincing men (a bunch of lame…).
Six complete revisions of this character’s first scene later, one of the men in the group said, “Well, at least now he’s male.” Dartan never did became the great leader of the warrior-elite that he aspired to (one of many reasons that book is best forgotten).
That set me on a quest, to learn how to write men as powerful as my women.
I started reading military memoir. Not regular forces, or great leaders, but the military elite: Green Berets, Marines, Special Operations…the ones who didn’t join for a few tours but served in the military as a career; as a life’s choice.
The more I read, the more impressed I became by what drove these men (at the time, they were all men). It wasn’t fighting, shooting, or not having other choices about their life’s path. It wasn’t even about honoring their country, though any of those reasons may have gotten them to join in the first place.
It was about the teams they were in. Those other men became more than family—their lives depended on one another. And they kept serving to protect and honor that team, long past any other reason to stay. Every account’s greatest regret was the day they left the team. It wasn’t some intellectual concept for them, protecting their teammates was a rock-hard core belief in their very makeup. Getting injured wasn’t nearly as upsetting as having another member of your team injured—even if there was no way to prevent it.
Ultimately, I began the first of over forty books and seventy short stories in military romantic suspense with the specific, conscious intent of honoring these men and women. Little did I know that effort would launch my career. A traditional publisher swept up thirteen titles in that series.
Three of the first seven titles were declared a “Top 10 Romance of the Year.” Two others hit “Top 5 of the Year” on lists like NPR and Barnes & Noble. (I may have done a little crying when that happened, too. Thanks again, Marshall.)
My first-ever thriller short story is titled “Honor Flight” and was written for a charity anthology that I helped name Origins of Honor. It is now out of print, but not before it slammed onto the USA Today Bestseller list and raised some good money for a veterans’ charity. “Honor Flight” is set in my Miranda Chase series, which is deeply about honor. (I warned you it was a theme for me.)
Years into my military romantic suspense career, before I was getting serious about thrillers, my mentor asked me what theme I’d choose if I were to edit an issue of his Fiction River Magazine. I didn’t even have to think: Honor. (It didn’t happen due to time constraints on my side, but thanks for asking, Dean.)
Honor: present tense
When I listed the prompt for this issue on the magazine’s submission page, I said:
Think outside the box. There’s military honor, political honor (or dishonor), honor among thieves, tribal honor, mafia and Yakuza honor, Boy and Girl Scouts, friendship, honoring promises...
This was definitely the topic that authors stormed. It must have resonated with something inside of them.
The theme of Issue #4 is Betrayal, which is the coin flip of Honor. I did this intentionally to see how the stories would shift.
Curiously, many of the Honor stories could have been transferred to the Betrayal topic, but few of the Betrayal stories could have moved in the reverse.
The Stories
Military honor was a popular topic, as was betrayal of military honor.
I chose three of the opening four stories (avoiding any analysis of my own work), for the conventional military that they represent.
The action-adventure romp of “Windfall” combines Special Operations military thriller (look up the Air Force’s Weather Technicians, to read about these real-life hero meteorologists) with archeology, kick-ass action, and definite honor issues. It was an easy pick to launch the magazine.
“Striker’s Stand” reaches deep into the curious mind of a top military sniper, and “Major Rat” is not what you expect (especially not if you’re a James Clavell fan).
Kim May then takes us on a fascinating adventure to find another culture’s definition of honor; one that threatens to become unmoored in Victorian England in “A Bloody Fang in the London Fog.” Thankfully, she brings us another example of her amazing storytelling in Issue #4.
In a second historical story, the charming “The Jerusalem Plot” asks a simple question: how would a Jewish James Bond operate in the time of Jesus?
We wander briefly back to the current day to the appropriately titled, “Honor Among Thieves.”
We dip one last time back into history, to the American Revolutionary War. There we’re asked why, “Your Lantern Is Warm.”
Snapping back to the present, Blaze Ward creates one of Honor’s more unusual warrior characters, a good companion for Kim May’s were they not separated by a hundred and forty years in his aptly named “Honor.”
“The Asset” delves even more deeply into the meaning of honor in a military environment, specifically the ever-gray area of military intelligence.
“A Few Days to Kill” steps into a world of tomorrow to explore the ideas set forth in “Striker’s Stand”, “Major Rat”, and “Honor”: when is action beyond military rules of engagement justified?
Finally, I closed with “T Is for Titus” because it is unlike anything else that was submitted to the issue. It also touched me deeply. The main character is forced to discover honor inside himself, even when it means putting everything you hold dear at risk—because it’s the only way to protect it.
I’m not being facetious or wry when I state that I’ve been honored to edit this issue. Now to the stories!
Windfall
E. Chris Ambrose
About E. Chris Ambrose
E. Chris Ambrose writes knowledge inspired adventure fiction including the Bone Guard archaeological thrillers, and interactive superhero novel, Skystrike: Wings of Justice for Choice of Games. In the process of researching her books, Chris learned how to hunt with a falcon, clear a building of possible assailants, and pull traction on a broken limb.
Chris's frequent travels have included rock climbing in Colorado, diving on the Great Barrier Reef, horseback riding in Mongolia, searching for tigers in India, and going behind the scenes at the Papal Palace in Avignon. Who know what could happen next? Find out more at www.BoneGuardBooks.com
Why I wrote this story
I first read about the Special Forces Weather Service in Readers’ Digest, of all places, and I was instantly fascinated. These guys are meteorologists on top of their special forces training. They infiltrate the proposed theatre of war before anyone else, to set up equipment that will allow vital weather monitoring for air drops, bombardments and ground movement, especially in areas with little satellite coverage (like the Middle East, at the time of the second Gulf War). I learned more about them as I was researching for my Bone Guard series, but this is the first chance I’ve had to weave them into a story.
Grant Casey, my series protagonist, was partially inspired by a college friend of mine who, after 9/11, left his professional career to join the army…and turned out to have some surprising talents that made him a serious asset to the service. Pretty sure he never learned that stuff at art school. Research, character—adventure! Read on…
