Machine Gunner # 3 and the Korean Miley Cyrus.

I’m really pissed off. I read an article this morning and it’s really pissing me off. It was about none other than that international butterball, Kim Jong-un of North Korea.

In America, Miley Cyrus does a suggestive, some say near pornographic performance, at the MTV awards and most people yawn or cluck their tongues. In North Korea, a beautiful singer, who sings party line propaganda songs while she’s extolling the joys of working in a state run factory, is machine gunned at the order of this little North Korean meatball in a soldier’s suit. Not figuratively machine gunned, but actually machine gunned! This despicable offspring of a degenerate leader, had this 22-year old girl and 12 members of her orchestra lined up and executed by machine gun fire! Torn apart by hundreds of bullets per second ripping through their bodies.

But WAIT! That wasn’t the half of it. He rounded up all their families. 12 Families! Sons, daughters, moms, dads, grand folk and forced them to WATCH! Let me say that again, he made them witness the murder of their loved ones, by machine gun! And then, operating under the ‘guilt by association’ theory, he had them ALL, every family member, sent to prison for life.

MTV NEWS FLASH: This happened within 200 miles of where your Samsung phone comes from.

Those executed were simple musicians and they did nothing but bring music and joy to the world….machined gunned! This heinous act goes to the basis of what we as authors write about all the time, which is – to have a thriller, we need an antagonist who is willing to do the unthinkable.

Especially in terms of wide scope, political-global thrillers, you need to define your hero by the evil they overcome. That means coming up with evil characters who are willing to do the unthinkable so that by reflection you can create greater heroes to stop them. When envisioning a plot line you try to figure out, what would be the master evil that would be worthy of a master hero?

You feel guilty sometimes sitting there trying to think these things up and then the world comes knocking at your door with even more unthinkable things than an author could imagine. Like this dipshit in Korea. You just want to believe, for just a second, that this is just a book, just a fictional story, an author’s idea of a bad actor as opposed to what it really is, which is a real, living, breathing human atrocity.

But while were on the notion of writing characters, consider for a second the tale of Machine Gunner # 3. The Dear Leader, Kim Jong Un, has ordered a young 22-year old singer and her orchestra to be cut in half by machine gun fire. Okay, no big deal, probably just a normal Thursday in this garden spot on the world’s ass.

However, a machine gun is operated by a soldier and a soldier is part of a chain of command. So here’s this meatball, in an army suit, who orders these men to kill a beautiful girl and 12 other musicians… in front of their families.

As a writing exercise, just think about that third machine gunner from the left, what’s he thinking about? Is what he is about to do done out of total blind devotion to this despicable, overgrown baby, in an Army uniform? Or is it something else? Something that we don’t even see as a free people? So distant that we, who are so far on the other side of the civilized line, can no longer comprehend. Maybe it’s buried so deeply in our history and genetic DNA? The neanderthal ability to be pack animals, where we could be the ‘beta males’ or the beta dogs to the alpha dog?

What is it? How can the third machine gunner be there and not turn his gun on the guys who are about the kill innocent people? How did he grow up? What kind of values were stressed to him that he could kill a daughter in front of her mother and father and all the other family members? And worse, carry out this deed at the capricious whim of this Kim dirt bag, who as far as we can tell, is only in power by accident of birth.

When I zero this all out, it comes down to what I talked about last time which is, “The Collective.” The collective allows for the machine gunner to carry out his duty because it’s all about the party, the central committee, it’s all about the group.

What is desperately needed in North Korea is an individual! A person who says, “No, I’m not going to do that, I’m not gonna machine gun innocent people because you got a hard-on for them or they pissed on your wife’s petunias and you wanna just eradicate them not to hear her nag you about them.”

Last year, Dear Leader, killed a guy with a mortar shell! His command to his loyal troops was, “I want nothing of him, not even his hair, to be left.” So they had the guy stand in a circle where they’ had already zeroed in one mortar shell and they blew him to bits with another mortar round. Sweet right! It’s like the lowest, base form of humanity plumbing the extreme depths of depravity that men can sink to, are brought to the forefront by the anonymity and autonomy of the Collective.

Back to that third machine gunner, what type of education, schooling, indoctrination did he receive? What type of “the government is always right,” brain washing occurred?

How many times did his teachers impart the party line that he is nothing but a cog in a wheel? How hard did the collective and all those who benefited from its distribution of labor by subjugating others, have to work on his character to diminish any sense of him as an individual? How did they crush his spirit to get to the point where he could point a machine gun at a person who he watched sing and dance on TV, then have the indifference to pull the trigger?

Even in western executions, if you have a 10 man firing squad, there are nine bullets and one blank, no one knows who drew the blank — so that all soldiers can walk away and say “It wasn’t me.” There’s that plausible deniability to the antithetic action of a human pulling the trigger to kill an unarmed person in cold blood. Of course, we don’t use firing squads to eliminate Bruce Springsteen or Miley Cyrus, but at least you knew that if we did, it would have been after due process, not the whim of a pile of human waste playing soldier.

But Machine Gunner # 3, this guy knows it was him who pulled the trigger, so where does he go? Does he go home that night to his kids? Does he go home to a bare, one-room apartment and to his half a pound of rice that he’s guaranteed by the government that month?

This tragedy and the millions more in history, the thousands inflicted today and the countless more that will be committed tomorrow, are the fruit of the Collective. It fosters complicity by those who do not have individualism, do not have courage enough to stand up to tyranny. The first mission of the collective is the destruction of every model of individualism, individual values and individual rights. It all must be eliminated from their existence, education and culture. They are truly robots pulling the trigger with the same moral imperative as a machine.

When you write a hero you imbue them with the ability to see things clearly, something that the people at large don’t see. The hero has insight or instinct that, when all evidence to the contrary indicates that he or she is wrong, they have a code to follow, a truth, an individual perspective that ultimately prevails. You see this in most every story where heroes or superheroes emerge. They have a sixth sense about right and wrong that guides them through. Even when everyone around them is telling them that they’re wrong or afraid to admit the truth.

Once again, this whole machine gunning happened within 200 miles of where your Samsung Galaxy phone comes from. On one side of the border they’re making hi-tech gadgets and Kia’s because the people there practice a basic from of democracy where the individual rises. On the other side of the border they have a ‘collective.’ A factory that breeds robot-men like Machine Gunner # 3 who could perforate the body of a 22-year old, beautiful singer and go home at night. Odds are, he doesn’t have a cell phone.

It’s all right there on the Korean peninsula, the total height and the total depravity of human existence. It’s astounding.

P.S. Dennis Rodman just made his second trip to North Korea to ‘hang with’ his friend, Kim Jong-un. Rodman has called Kim an “awesome guy.”

Thrillerfest 2013

Last month I attended Thriller Fest, a four day intensive craft and professional convention held in New York City. Thriller writers from the top of the New York Times list to the middle of the Amazon self-published list were all in attendance. There were master classes given by people whose names are legend, top class, A #1, writing aces, who were teaching advanced writing on really specific, detailed aspects and nuances of beat by beat, pulse by pulse thriller writing. It was totally and completely exhilarating and exhausting. The amount of sheer talent, genius, accomplishment and all around camaraderie of having million-book-selling authors in community with us mere mortals was like strapping on a rocket pack and heading into adventure.

I’m certain that here in New York, Con Edison must have registered a temporary brown out as soon as Craft Fest (the part of Thriller Fest that deals with intensive classroom study) ended and thousands of thriller writers turned on their computers all at once to check that their work had somehow conformed to what they had just learned about crafting the ultimate thriller. For myself, to quote Charlie Daniels “Sparks flew from my fingertips” (if Charlie Daniels actually said that). It was a massive baptism into the art practice, business and human side of being an author.

Story Plant Authors at Thrillerfest From L-R: Ethan Cross, Tom Avitabile, Jeremy Burns

The human element was brought to full focus as even jaded New York Times best selling authors stood online to get their book signed by Ann Rice, this year’s Thriller Master. I thought I knew a lot about writing before Thriller Fest, I feel good afterwards because it wasn’t so much for me learning, as confirming. I felt I knew the next words that the teachers, again all master thriller writers in their own right, all accomplished authors, all New York Times and Amazon best selling authors, would say. I could complete their sentence – and I did as I was in class.

So I guess it wasn’t so much a convention as a confirmation. What an incredible experience. Of course, they were all writers, no photographers, so the pictures attached are nowhere near professional.

On a side note, I was honored to be on a panel as part of Thriller Fest, again, different than Craft Fest, on a seminar on apocalyptic fiction. Sharing the panel with four distinguished authors, Brian Andrews, Robert Gleason, Ward Larsen, Jon McGoran and Mike Sherer. The panel was moderated by the legendary John Lescroart. It was my moment to add to the collective intelligence. The fun that even discussions of the apocalypse brought was just another indicator that I was in the right place.

One of this year’s class of 2013 debut writers, Kay Kendall, in addressing the morning breakfast said and I’m paraphrasing:

There's no place like home

..spending these last few days here at Thriller Fest, overhearing conversations like “Do I kill him, do I not kill him? Do I just put him in a coma?” And conversations like “Would a knife inserted between the 3rd and 4th vertebrae lead to instant death?”

Her conclusion was she was finally among her own people. Kudos to Kay, that’s exactly the way I felt.

Labor Day- My family holiday

I grew up the son of a Teamster. My Mom and I got two checks. One, we stood in line for down at 250 Church Street at the Welfare Office. The other came in the mail from the Union. My dad’s union benefits were our lifeblood after he died. I was brought up to believe in “Unions and the Brotherhood.” The actual name was the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. We were a ‘local 237’ family. The checks were written to Antonio Avitabile, but the guys at work and around the neighborhood, and in my family called him “Chippo.”

On the second night of my Dad’s wake, about 25 men showed up. They were all mostly Italian and Puerto Rican, short beefy guys with big mitts. They were all in suits and ties. Some were obviously uncomfortable in these rarely worn formal clothes. After paying their respects at the coffin, they approached my Mom and I, who were sitting up front. I don’t know what they said to my mom, but to me they each individually said the same thing, almost as if they had all gotten together to practice it outside before they came in. For the most part it was similar to, “Yer Fadda, was a great man. If it weren’t fer him, I’d of been a bum.”

I was grateful for their paying of respect but totally lost as to what they were talking about. My dad was a truck driver. He drove a stone truck for a Pizatello Stone Works in the Bronx. So I walked up to my uncle Jimmy, who also worked in construction. I asked him what they were talking about.

He led me outside the funeral home into the Bronx night. Then he said the words that you never want to hear at your dad’s funeral; “Your Father didn’t want you to know this while he was alive…”

My heart sank; I steeled myself for what was to come.

Flashback 1960: I was 6 or 7. My dad would come home from work to our 5th floor walk up tenement. He’d be cut, his jacket ripped and splattered with blood. He had been in a fight. For my young cartoon-like understanding of the world, he expressed his condition as the result of having “squashed a bug”. That was code language between my father and me for his squashing a Volkswagen Beetle with his huge truck. He hated those German cars (he was a WWII veteran). And to my Bugs Bunny schooled view of the world, I’d imagine he flattened the Beetle and the guy who drove it came out of it all flat with his arms flailing screaming like Popeye, “Hey… Whad’ya doin? Ya big Galloop!” Then I imagined my dad would jump down from his truck and they’d go at it. The fight would look like a giant fur ball with fist, dirt and # signs flying as they rolled around. And I’d always ask, “Did you beat ‘em up dad?” And he’d say, “Yeah, I beat him up.”

Well, that night of my dad’s wake, Uncle Jimmy brought that cartoon episode into stark living color, in live action, with all the grit, dirt and blood. He told me that my dad was a union organizer. In those days they go onto a jobsite and try to organize the workers into a union. Of course the management was wholly against this, and they had hired goons who would come down and “break heads” with bats, bottles, bricks, whatever was handy. My dad’s injuries and ripped clothes were the result of battling for, and winning these men a living wage. In fact, the men who came to his funeral that night, were immigrant workers, who were forced to work for 5 dollars a week. Because of the union and guys like my dad, they were able to make a real income. They were able to provide for their families. Many of them were able to send their kids to college and as a result many doctors, lawyers and teachers were created by that battle in trenches of the American labor movement. A noble fight in which my dad, Antonio (Anthony) “Chippo” Avitabile was a soldier, and on that night, the night of his wake, an honored soldier.

Editors note: To top it off, Tom attended and was student council president of Samuel Gompers High in the Bronx. Named after the labor leader and co-founder of the AFofL-CIO

Everyday Heroes: TOM AVITABILE

It’s humbling to be recognized by people of high ideals and great character, as is the case when thriller Author Joe Badal came across some of my work and honored me by mentioning it.

from Everyday Heroes: TOM AVITABILE

“This month, I want to recognize author Tom Avitabile. Tom is a burly, gregarious New Yorker who has never met a stranger and who makes everyone he meets feel welcome. His smile is contagious and his quick wit will keep you in stitches….”

Read Joseph Badal’s full article at josephbadal.wordpress.com.

Calling Anthony …Anthony…Carlos Danger

From the public files of, “It’s Only Fiction `til It Happens…”

The master of intelligent suspense, author Linda Fairstein, was recently on the radio discussing her new book, Death Angel, when she related a story to the show’s host that in her first draft she had created a character that was a New York political type who had gotten mired in a Sexting scandal. Her agent pushed for and succeeded in getting her to remove the character from the manuscript because it was, and I am paraphrasing, “too unbelievable” or some such expression of, ‘far fetched’… it should be noted that Linda Fairstein was chief of the Sex Crimes Unit of the district attorney’s office in Manhattan for more than two decades as well as a brilliant author!

Welcome Anthony Putz:

In case you haven’t heard, here in New York, we got a guy from Brooklyn running for Mayor, Anthony Wiener. He’s a freak of the highest order. His ego knows no limits, matrimonial or legal. He practices a form of “electioneering” that takes all the wrong lessons from our political past and combines them into one very ugly new paradigm. He’s a object lesson of why sometimes technology in the wrong hands, his hands pointing back at himself, doesn’t deliver on the promised utopia it might otherwise had achieved. Continue reading “Calling Anthony …Anthony…Carlos Danger” →

Spy Games – For Real

When I wrote PWNED in 2011, I imagined something pretty outlandish for a premise: That the National Security Agency (or NSA) could spy on a private American citizen and in so doing uncover something that would bury that citizen in bureaucratic red tape until Kingdom come.

Why is that outlandish? Because that’s illegal. Well, it should be, anyway. Put succinctly, the idea of the NSA spying on an American citizen who then ends up in trouble should have been elaborate, well-imagined poppycock.

Enter Edward Snowden, and the whole PRISM debacle, and suddenly my self-published novel about a professional Starcraft 2 gamer doesn’t seem quite so crazy. It almost sounds eerily prescient, though I do wish it weren’t so.

The premise of my book is that Sean, a pro gamer who’s poised to dominate the biggest Starcraft 2 tournament in the world, is a serious threat to Norman, who needs to win the tournament to keep his team, his house, and his dream of quitting his job and gaming full time. Norman writes search string logarithms for the NSA, and uses his position to point the nation’s most powerful snoops right at poor Sean. Sean is a murder mystery author and, as such, has a browser history full of precisely the kind of gory, homicidal research material that makes federal agents twitchy and nervous.

Just when Sean looks to spend the next few years either in jail or in court, he flees the country with the help of a hot gamer girl and gives Norman a heart attack when he shows up in South Korea anyway despite Norman’s best efforts.

As tickled as I am to be on this site, where authors who saw the shape of things to come can brag about how they saw it coming, I really do wish my version of an NSA that abuses its power and oversteps its bounds could have remained fiction. Especially since I’m a thriller writer and have done plenty of searches that would certainly raise eyebrows if the NSA decided to start paying close attention to me. Here’s hoping for a future where all this is an unpleasant memory and the NSA leaves curious thriller writers well enough alone.

Remember this if you want to sound impressive at your next dinner party: The NSA was founded in 1952 for the express purpose of collecting and monitoring foreign counterintelligence. All those satellites and baffles and extra-large microphones are supposed to be pointed away from American citizens, ostensibly because it’s the FBI’s job to spy on us. Executive Order 12333 states that the NSA is to collect, “foreign intelligence or counterintelligence” while not “acquiring information concerning the domestic activities of United States persons.” The agency’s activities are supposed to be restricted by the Fourth Amendment (you know that one, it’s the unreasonable searches and seizures one).

Guest Blogger Erika Mitchell

Erika Mitchell showed early promise as a writer, winning the Beverly Cleary writing contest in 1995. The winning stories were printed into a book. Erika’s mother is the only person alive with a copy of that book.

She wrote her first novel (a really horrible chick-lit thing) that she promptly relegated to the back of her hard drive. A couple years later she tried again, this time writing a thriller novel. She had way too much fun writing it, and a couple months later wrote another one.

Erika self-published her first novel, Pwned, in June 2011, and her second novel, Blood Money, was published by Champagne Books in February 2013.

Erika lives in Seattle with her wonderfully geeky husband and their two children. When she isn’t reading and writing she’s been known to indulge in an eclectic range of interests.

I’ll Never Forget Good Ol’ What’s His Name

This morning I had a shocking experience. I am sure very few people like it when they are confronted with their past. The best you could hope for is that, in the past, you didn’t make an idiot out of yourself – yet the potential and possibility remains that you can be incredibly embarrassed over the minor felonies and ‘it seemed funny at the time’ moments of your youth.

Tom Avitabile

And so that was the threat this morning. I have recently been putting together a project in New York that will reinvigorate and relaunch and incredible theatrical/movie experience. It is Tom Avitabile, I’ll Never Forget Good Ol’ What’s His Name, it is a ‘Thank You’ card to both theatre and cinema, for all that I’ve derived from both of those disciplines, from being both a “mere” audience member and also as a practicing professional in both industries.

To that end, I have curated a team of wonderful, dedicated people who have allowed me the privilege of sitting at the head of the table, where I am free to pontificate about my grand vision of breathing new life into what I believe is just a wonderful theatrical/movie experience.

This morning, an article came my way from a 2006 issue of Backstage, which is the Bible of the film production and theater business here in New York. I didn’t read more than the headline before shuffling it over to one of my associates. The question that accompanied his E-mail back to me was, “Tom, do you remember who interviewed you?” And I had no idea what that question meant because I wasn’t interviewed by anybody.

I was shocked to open the article and see myself quoted over three paragraphs, but more importantly, using the exact same words that I used days before at the head of the table. I was lost in the recesses of my hippocampus, trying to spark some sort of memory-kindling :

I don’t do drugs and I forgot this? How can I forget being quoted in an article, being interviewed in an article and having the article run and totally forget about it? Thank God I didn’t say anything stupid!

After all, I spend most of my days bringing characters through situations, and part of what makes a mystery or thriller work is what the protagonist knows and what he remembers. Clearly here, my life was not imitating my art.

We’ve all watched the T.V. shows where Sherlock Holmes, or somebody, gleans a small detail seen only to him. Inevitably, that golden nugget becomes the key to unraveling the fiendish plot of the bad guy.

Ergo: Remembering things is pretty high on the list of heroic attributes.

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