Author Guest Post with Paul Briggs, Locksmith’s War

For Lachlan Smith, learning the secret of the apocalypse was the easy part.

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Author Guest Post

For me, one of the hardest things about writing — something that often stops me in my tracks for days or weeks — is the scenes that are necessary for the story, but that I don’t have a clear vision for. “THIS HAPPENS and then THIS COOL THING HAPPENS and then THIS AWESOME CHASE HAPPENS and then THIS FUNNY CONVERSATION and then THIS EPIC FIGHT… oh wait, this other thing needs to happen too.”

This happened less often when I was writing Altered Seasons: Monsoonrise, simply because the structure of that novel meant that characters would often drop out of the story for months of lives, and even when they were at the center of the action there was no expectation that every important event be covered. If anything, a lot of them were glossed over. But in Locksmith’s War, the action is more or less continuous. Almost nothing is skipped over.

Just finding the right point of view from which to describe these scenes can be hard. If it’s the main character, how does this scene fit in with the rest of his or her character arc? If it’s a side character, am I jumping back and forth between too many different perspectives? Am I at risk of confusing the readers? And if I find this scene tiresome to write, is the reader likely to enjoy it any better.

But if I force myself to start writing the scene anyway, sometimes I come up with a idea that makes it enjoyable to write. Those are moments that I treasure.

About the Book

Locksmith’s War
by Paul Briggs

Published 4 July 2022
Secant Publishing LLC

Genre: YA Science Fiction
Page Count: 320
Add it to your Goodreads TBR!

For Lachlan Smith, learning the secret of the apocalypse was the easy part.

Ever since Locksmith found the portal to the future, he has been wondering who or what was responsible for the empty, uninhabited world he found.

Now he knows—and now he has to fight them.

He thought he had fifteen years in which to prevent the extinction of the human species.

Now, he has only hours.

When the portal is stolen by a cabal of dangerous fanatics, his mother and many of his friends are trapped on the other side. Now the enemy is after him, and the only way to thwart their genocidal plan is to retake the portal and hold it—at both ends.

With very little time left, a handful of allies who don’t trust each other, almost no chance of success and the survival of humanity itself at stake… Locksmith is going to war.

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Excerpt

Then a shot rang out

Then a shot rang out. Chips of wood fell around her.

Crouching lower, Erin could see where the bullet had gone through the door and the opposite wall. A few seconds ago it would have done the same thing, in spite of her torso being in the way.

And it was too late to pretend she was already dead or wounded, so it was time to get out of the way. She fired back through the door — scary how much easier it was to do that when you couldn’t see who you were shooting at — and then ran for the hall.

Erin turned… and froze in place, one foot poised a few inches above the first stair. The stairs were pieces of wood, neither soundproof nor (as she’d just seen) bulletproof. The moment she set foot on them, the guys directly underneath would know exactly where to shoot, and she would have only the vaguest idea of where to shoot back. There was no way she could make it to the top of the stairs alive.

Oh… and Luther was going to run into the same problem coming down the stairs. Or maybe not. If the portal was indestructible, he could use it as a shield — put it facedown on the stairs and sort of surf on it. On second thought, no. If they fired through the stairs and the bullet went through the portal, it might hit Lock. Luther would have to put it on the stairs face up and stand on the edges.

Either way, Erin had no idea how she was supposed to explain to Luther that his survival now depended on his ability to replicate a stunt from a Lord of the Rings movie.

About the Author

In addition to writing books, Paul Briggs has worked as a newspaper editor, court reporter’s assistant, and audio transcriber. In his spare time (when he has any) he sometimes performs in community theater, most recently taking on the roles of Bottom, Petruchio, Macbeth, Rosalind, and Richard III in a Shakespeare compilation. An Eastern Shore native who grew up in Chestertown, Maryland, Paul earned a BA in English from Washington College and a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Maryland – College Park.

He is the author of several short plays, including the award-winning The Worst Super Power Ever and The Picture of Health.  He is also writing the sequel to his 2018 science fiction novel Altered Seasons: Monsoonrise, which vividly imagines the dislocations that follow when the Arctic Sea ice finally melts and the Chesapeake Bay is drowned by the effects of climate change.

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