Please Welcome Novelist Chuck Van Soye

We are delighted to welcome debut novelist Chuck Van Soye as our guest blogger today.

Chuck's first thriller is the spy novel The China Oil Plot: Operation Ace in the Hole (Outskirts Press, April 2012 trade paperback and ebook editions).

Today Chuck talks to us about how he came to write his book.

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I didn't study to be a writer. After all, I was preparing to be a chemical engineer, and surely wouldn't be doing much writing in that career, I thought. But writing simply caught up and grabbed me when I was least prepared to defend myself.

Photo provided courtesy of
Chuck Van Soye

When my first employer, Sun Oil, imposed an austerity program that limited my career growth, I jumped ship, and landed in the lap of McGraw-Hill, who sought a chemical engineer that could be trained as a writer-editor for Chemical Engineering magazine. After a few years, I fled to Du Pont to become the founding Editor of The Journal of Teflon. Thus, I became hooked on writing, and made my living exclusively on this skill for seven years.

But the grass always looks greener elsewhere, and I went cold turkey on writing to move into the exciting world of industrial raw material sales, using my engineering skills in support of several multimillion-dollar customer accounts.

Four decades later, I retired from my sales engineer and marketing career. Yet, something stirred deep within me. I was still hooked! When I couldn't stand it any longer, I succumbed, and began tapping the keyboard. For awhile, I satisfied my craving by writing short articles for various online contests. Eventually I settled down and wrote my first book, Pondering Life's Imponderables. And then another, Confessions and Misadventures of Charlie the Fisherman. But these books were nonfiction. They weren't really the novel I knew I had buried within me and just had to write.

So, in October 2011, I sat down in front of my computer, and stared at the empty screen. After awhile, I recalled a harrowing personal Army experience involving my Colt .45 sidearm and decided to fictionalize my true-life actions in the character of 2nd Lt. Bret Lee, who eventually became a hero and spy. And Chapter One of The China Oil Plot came into being.

I don't know how other authors write their books. I suspect most plan precisely how the plot plays out well before they put the first word on paper. I had Chapter One, but no more. Not even the faintest idea where to go next.

After reading it aloud to my wife, and getting her encouragement to go on, I pondered for days where the story should go from there, and then started typing. Chapter Two was the result. But again it was a dead end. More pondering and Chapter Three sprang forth. And from then on, the book wrote itself, chapter by chapter.

I have to admit that I owe a lot of my story line to being asleep in bed. Often, during the wee dark hours of the night, under the influence of a sleep state half way between dreaming and dozing, a phrase or sentence or two would wiggle into my thoughts. At other times, an entire scenario would come alive, and I'd have to force myself to arise, stumble to the desk, and jot some notes in the dark so as to thwart morning forgetfulness.

By the time I typed Chapter Twelve, I finally realized the way that the book was heading, and started to really plan ahead. The ultimate end plot leapt into view, and I simply had to get it on paper before the vision disappeared. Voila! Three months and 27 more chapters later, The China Oil Plot existed in manuscript form. I sparred with myself and my wife which of the two best title ideas should be selected, and finally decided on both, with "Operation Ace in the Hole" ending up as a subtitle.

Some of my friends have asked me why most of "The China Oil Plot" activity centers within the country of Venezuela. "Was I born there, or did I visit there for an extended vacation?" they queried.

"No," I would respond to each questioner, "I've never been in Venezuela."

"Well, how could you write a book having almost all the action taking place in Caracas?" was the typical response.

"I spent a lot of time on Google, and in Wikipedia, MapQuest, Ask and dozens of other websites," was my reply. I now confess, I couldn't have written the book without the internet.

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Chuck Van Soye serves as unpaid Director of Marketing for "Trekking the Planet," a nonprofit world expedition underway to make geography come alive for 55,000 children in 850 classrooms in 20 countries. He also continues updating his recidivism/reentry-oriented blog, The-Slammer.org, whenever he can find worthy additions to pen or is able to twist the arm of another guest commentator. When time occasionally permits, he gets out in his boat to do a little fishing.

Chuck, who is now 80, shares his life with his wife of 54 years, two sons and two grandchildren. He lives in Key West, FL.

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About The China Oil Plot: Operation Ace in the Hole:

After 20 years working for the U.S. Army Research Center, Bret Lee, a 44-year-old chemical engineer, retires to look for work in private industry, only to learn that in the tough 2010 economy, he's unable to find a job in his chosen field. But thanks to a quasi-government contact from his past, he's offered a high-paying job with a Venezuelan fertilizer company just outside Caracas. There's only one catch: he has to become a spy.

Bret and his Chinese wife, Chu-Lin, accept the challenge, and both become enmeshed in the military, political, and diplomatic aspects of life within the most dangerous city of the world. With help from the local CIA and guidance from Washington, Lee uncovers an international plot that could throw all of Latin America into turmoil, and that could strangle strategic oil shipments to the U.S.

Life gets even more intense when he finds himself locked up by SEBIN, the intelligence arm of the Venezuelan government. In a high-stakes game of poker, sometimes a player who has an ace card that only he can see, his "ace in the hole," will confidently bet big money that he will be the winner of that hand of the game.

In the 21st century game of international petroleum supply, China puts big money and a lot more on the table to ensure that it will be the ultimate winner in obtaining Venezuela's oil production. But the new American spy also has an "ace in the hole," and his card trumps China's.