🏰 Author Interview Featuring Paula Omokhomion, Author of 'Shape of the Sun'

Paula Omokhomion is a Master of Public Policy student at the UC Riverside School of Public Policy, though she’s fairly certain that won’t be forever. She holds a B.S. in Public Health Nutrition from UNC Chapel Hill, where she also minored in Creative Writing (Fiction) and graduated with highest honors for her 120-page thesis novella, New Age Taffeta.

Paula developed her skills and love for writing fiction in a very, very interesting Nigerian boarding school, where the lack of television meant she had to invent entertainment for everyone else. She loves reading manhwa, watching Indian TV dramas, listening to music, and writing short stories.When not doing any of those or in the classroom handling R code, she’s refining her LinkedIn or taking Instagram selfies.
She lives in California with her family, including her two fellow triplets, and is currently dreaming of a future PhD in public health—and maybe another novel.

Visit her website or connect with her on Facebook and Instagram.

 

 

🏰Welcome to Book Bloggin’ Princess, Paula. I’d like to know more about you  as a person first. When did you start writing? What was your first published  piece? 

Thank you for having me. I started writing when I was about 13, I believe. It was a book I wrote in boarding school, and it had like two dedicated readers. The one after that, Aurora, was really my debut as it had over 100 readers as a draft; it was also my first published piece at 14. 

🏰As a published author, what has been the most pivotal point of your career?

I think it was actually knowing I could write in ways that moved people. So, Aurora was written in boarding school, and literally 100+ students were reading it at once, emoting a lot over it, and that was fascinating that I could bring those expressions on people’s faces and questions on how I did it. Then, Shape of the Sun had almost 5k readers commenting on it as a draft on Wattpad, and that was really enriching to see as an author. So, I think these little things are pivotal to me. 

🏰If you could go anywhere to write your next book, where would that be and why?

I think I would go to a town in Europe with stone buildings and roads. I’m thinking Nice, France, or Albert Camus’ hometown, since I have been there before. I am revising Aurora, and it has a lot of historical elements that envisioning such beautiful, aged places can help with the writing. But I think it's more pressing to go to New York or some other large, fast city and see how service workers live. Hint: I am making notes for a new book, and I’ll say that lead is a service worker in a fast city, at least for now. 

🏰If you had 4 extra hours of extra time today, what would you do?

I think responding to emails and revising Aurora. If this question were to move further this year, it would be something academically inclined, since I am still very much a student.

🏰Why was writing Shape of the Sun so important to you?

In many ways more than one, this is actually my second full-length work after high school. I was worried that being in college and not having the feedback I had in HS would stunt or cripple my writing, but I was able to do this as a busy junior in college and navigate online support, which was cool.  

🏰Any final words?

Shape of the Sun really is the book of reckoning. You have characters that are incredibly self-aware yet consciously unreliable, as well as a storyline that doesn’t shy from heavy material and says it as it is - romance, family saga, inheritance drama, and all. 

🏰 Author Interview Featuring Jörg H. Trauboth, Author of 'The Death of the Kremlin Czar'

Jörg H. Trauboth, born in 1943 near Berlin, logged over two thousand flight hours as a Weapon Systems Officer Instructor in the Luftwaffe, flying PHANTOM F-4F / RF-4E and TORNADO fighter jets, and over 3000 hours in light aircraft. At the age of fifty, he left the service with the rank of Colonel in the General Staff. He received training as a Special Risk Consultant from the English Control Risk Group and served as Managing Director Germany, dealing with extortion and kidnapping cases in South America and Eastern Europe. Shortly thereafter, he founded his own consulting firm, quickly establishing an outstanding international reputation. Trauboth protected his clients with a 24-hour task force during product extortions, product recalls, kidnappings, and image crises. He was the first President of the European Crisis Management Academy in Vienna and President of the American Yankee Association.

He is known as a respected expert in the media on security-related topics. He volunteers as an emergency counselor and is a member of the Crisis Intervention Team (KIT Bonn) of the German Foreign Office. He is a private pilot, married, with two sons and three grandchildren.

In 2002, Trauboth wrote the now out of print standard work “Crisis Management for Company Threats”.

In 2016 the follow-up work was published with Jörg H. Trauboth as editor in collaboration with five authors: “Crisis Management in Companies and Public Institutions”.

Terror expert J. H. Trauboth presented his debut novel in 2015 with the Germany thriller “Three Brothers”. (Available in English). In 2019 “Operation Jerusalem” followed and in 2020 “Omega”. The trilogy is about the former elite soldier Marc Anderson and his team. With these three self-contained thrillers, Trauboth is rated by many readers as the “German Tom Clancy.” The trilogy is available as a printed edition, eBook and audio book.

His first detective novel, “Jakobs Weg” (German), followed in 2021. The highly explosive topic of “sexual abuse of children” is processed sensitively in a scenario on the Way of Saint James and at the end offers contact options for those seeking help.

In 2022, the novella “Bonjour Saint-Ex” was published (German) in which the passionate pilot Jörg H. Trauboth turns the last flight of the legend Antoine de Saint Exupéry into an exciting literary event.

Readers wanted a sequel to the Marc Anderson series. In 2023, ZarenTod – Das Ende der Präsidenten was published, a highly topical political thriller. The Russian president and new tsar, Ivan Pavlenko, suddenly shows his true face during the war in Ukraine. He wants the old Soviet Union back. The world is on the brink. The influential oligarch, Alexei Sokolov, wants to prevent Ivan’s megalomaniac plans and is planning a fundamental new beginning for Russia. To achieve this, the Russian president must be removed. But the plan goes awry. Ex-elite soldier Marc Anderson intervenes. Will Czar Ivan die? What will become of Europe? The book 8/ 2024 in English „The Death of the Kremlin Czar” is the fourth political thriller in the Marc Anderson series.

Website & Social Media:

Website ➜  https://trauboth-autor.de/english/

Twitter ➜ https://twitter.com/JorgTrauboth

Can you tell us what your book, The Death of the Kremlin Czar, is about? 

The Russian president and self-proclaimed new Czar, Ivan Pavlenko, is revealing his true colors in the Ukraine war—he seeks a direct conflict with

NATO. Russia and the world teeter on the brink of disaster. Influential oligarch Alexei Sokolov, determined to stop Ivan’s megalomaniacal ambitions, envisions a new beginning for Russia. But for his plan to succeed, the Russian president must die. There’s just one problem: Alexei’s lover is Yulia, Ivan’s partner. Sensing betrayal, Ivan grows suspicious. While en route to Moscow, the plane carrying Alexei and Yulia is hijacked. Crisis teams in Berlin, Washington, and Kiev are drawn into the escalating drama. Fighter jets scramble, their pilots prepared to shoot the plane down if necessary. A struggle erupts in the cockpit, leaving the Boeing without a pilot. On board is former elite soldier Marc Anderson, who, together with Alexei, must attempt an emergency landing in Vilnius to save the hundred passengers. But as the clock ticks down, the question looms: will the plane land safely, and will the world finally be free of its aggressor?

Can you tell us a little about your main and supporting characters?

The book is part of the Marc Anderson thriller series. Marc, a former elite soldier in Germany’s Special Forces, now runs his own security consulting firm. Despite being only 39, his legendary missions with the SEALs have earned him a formidable reputation. He isn’t a Rambo type, but a thoughtful and sensitive character, revealing different facets of himself. In this book, he grapples with self-doubt, questioning whether he can fly a plane at all, but ultimately rises to the challenge. I’m sending him on a hero’s journey, inspired by the framework of American mythologist Joseph Campbell.

His wife, Jelke, is a reserved, somewhat fragile woman, but she steps up at a critical moment to help Marc.

Ivan Pavlenko mirrors the current Russian president as we know him from the media: short, power-obsessed, intelligent, ruthless, and deeply insecure. His vulnerability lies in his immense pride, which becomes his Achilles’ heel. Like all dictators, he craves equal footing with global power players but lives in constant fear, making him a paranoid and extremely dangerous individual.

Alexei Sokolov, an oligarch and favorite of the Russian president, has grown wealthy under his protection. But since the war in Ukraine, he’s begun to doubt the president’s mental stability and plots to kill him in order to seize power with a small faction. Alexei is clever, well-read, and Western-oriented, though somewhat naive—thinking his affair with Ivan’s partner, Yulia, will go unnoticed.

Yulia, Ivan’s partner and mother of two boys, is an attractive, passionate woman who’s deeply in love with Alexei. She lives with him and her sons in Monaco, having chosen to stay with Alexei despite her fear of Ivan’s retribution. In the surprising climax, Yulia reveals unexpected inner strength.

US President George F. Summerhill is a fictional character who embodies the ideal traits of a sovereign national and world leader. Throughout the Marc Anderson series, he remains the most consistently admirable president.

Kryptos, the CIA director, is an eccentric character with a more supporting role, but crucial to the plot as he aids Alexei. The president relies heavily on Kryptos, knowing that if he fails, the presidency could unravel.

Ukrainian President Bohdan Sapronov is modeled closely after the real-life president—once an actor, now a fierce defender of his nation, completely reliant on Western support.

Similarly, German Chancellor Kai Schuster is portrayed as a weak leader with poor crisis management skills, walking a fine line to avoid provoking the Russian president.

Summary: Most of the characters are thinly veiled versions of real-world figures, with only the names changed. It’s like reading a newspaper, leaving you to wonder why the real story doesn’t end like this fictional one.

How long did it take you to write your book?

I initially spent six months researching and flew my small plane, a Grumman Tiger AA5B, to Kiev, Crimea, Poland, and the Baltic states. Berlin, Moscow, and Washington were already familiar to me from my professional work. Once I started writing, I was completely in the flow, and the book was completed in about four months.

What has been the most pivotal point of your writing life?

At the end of a kidnapping case, where I was advising the family of the kidnapped daughter, I was overwhelmed by the experience and decided to turn the story into a novel. The result was Three Brothers, a book that was so successful it became the start of the Marc Anderson series. And the magic of continuing the story hasn’t stopped since.

What kind of advice would you give up and coming authors?

That depends on your goal. Are you writing for yourself, your family, or the public? I write for the public, always following a plan. It’s important to know the beginning and the end; don’t write without direction, as the risk of losing both yourself and your reader is high. Crafting good literature is an art. Learn to write in a captivating language and master the literary tools to engage your reader from start to finish.

Be meticulous with facts. In today’s Google-driven world, mistakes are never forgotten. Once you’ve finished your book, give it to someone you trust for feedback. Don’t hesitate to use AI to enhance your language and correct mistakes—nothing more.

Remember, when you’re finally satisfied with your work, the real challenge begins:  marketing. Whether you have a publisher, buy services, or handle it on your own, know that doing it all by yourself makes achieving great success more difficult. But don’t be discouraged. No one can take away the fact that you’ve created something truly special. Best of luck! If you have questions, I will be happy to answer: trauboth.autor@gmail.com 

 The Death of the Kremlin Czar is available at Amazon (U.S. edition) and Amazon (German edition).

A Chat with Political Thriller Author Michael Bowen

Name:         Michael Bowen

Book Title:  False Flag in Autumn

Genre:        Political thriller

Publisher:   Farragut Square Publications

Website:      www.michalbowenmysteries.com

Thank you for your time in answering our questions about getting published.  Let’s begin by having you explain to us why you decided to become an author and pen this book?

Mike:   We are now living through the most important American political period in my lifetime – and at 68 years of age, I have lived through Watergate, the aftermath of the Vietnam War, the end of the Cold War, and the economic upheaval accompanying globalization.  It has generated voluminous commentary by smart people – and 98% of that commentary, on both sides, is twaddle.  Something is going on here that the usual ways of analyzing politics can’t seem to get at properly.  I’m a storyteller, and I thought that maybe I could get at what the other approaches are missing by telling a story about it.  After all, fiction is truth liberated from the tyranny of fact.

Is this your first book?

Mike:  Nope.  Harper & Row published my first novel, Can’t Miss, in 1987.  I’ve had something like twenty – mostly mysteries, but with political satire mixed in – since then.

With this particular book, how did you publish – traditional, small press, Indie, etc. – and why did you choose this method?

Mike:  I self-published through Farragut Square Publications because I tried every other avenue and hit nothing but dead ends.  The great satirist Evelyn Waugh said that he turned to writing because he had tried every other profession and failed.  That’s how I ended up going to the route I did with False Flag in Autumn.

Can you tell us a little about your publishing journey?  The pros and cons?

Mike:  A prominent small-press mystery publisher bought the story, paid for it in full – and then got cold feet and bailed because it felt its readers had, in its words, “Trump fatigue.”  I’d had books rejected before, but I’d never had a publisher give me its hard-earned money, say “Mike delivered” – direct quote – and then have second thoughts.  Another prominent publisher raved about what a fully developed character Josie Kendal was, but said that it didn’t know how to place political stories.  I got the message and went with Captain David Farragut’s famous line from the Battle of Mobile Bay:  “Damn the torpedoes!  Full speed ahead!”  The greatest part of the experience was hiring an independent editor to help me with the story.  She was tremendous – and because I myself was paying her, I felt that I had to defer to her more readily than I had to editors my publishers were paying.

What lessons do you feel you learned about your particular publishing journey and about the publishing industry as a whole?

Mike: Given the times we live in, I absolutely do not blame established publishers for deciding that they simply don’t need the hassle and aggravation that could well be waiting for them if they turn out a topical political novel.  Publishing is a business, not a hobby, and unless a publisher has a guaranteed bankable author with a string of bestsellers on his resumé, why should it risk a Twitter-storm from the right, or the left, or both, complete with angry demands that bookstores and readers boycott all of that publisher’s titles?  For that matter, why should it risk alienating readers who it thinks want Nancy Drew Goes to Washington instead of a shrewd, manipulative Washington apparatchik who (as Josie Kendal puts it) “can pull out every stop on the organ – and you don’t want to be in church when it happens”?  I’ve learned that politics is toxic right now, and that the intimidation tactics deployed by both sides have worked.

Would you recommend this method of publishing to other authors?

Mike:  It’s like the proverbial question sometimes put to lawyers by college students:  do you think I should go to law school?  The answer is, “Unless you want to be a lawyer so much that nothing I could say could make the slightest difference, the answer is no.”  Unless you think what you have to say is potentially so important that it simply cannot be left unsaid, then the odds are that two years from now you’ll be richer and happier if you don’t resort to self-publication – even under a name as clever as Farragut Square Publications.

What’s the best advice you can give to aspiring authors?

Mike:  Remember every time you sit down at the keyboard that the great accomplishment isn’t getting a book published – it’s telling a story, even if no one but you and your friends in your writing group ever read that story.  If you truly believe in the story you’ve written, then in writing that story you have accomplished something far greater than a hugely successful author who has gone on automatic pilot to turn out one more entry in a franchise that deliberately gives readers something familiar and non-threatening.  At a more practical level, always stop writing in a given session before you want to.  That will make you hungry to go back.  If you stay up until three a.m. and crank out eight chapters, it will be two weeks before you go back to the story.

About False Flag in Autumn:  Why wasn’t there an October surprise before the 2018 midterm elections?  The irrepressible Josie Kendall, introduced in 2016’s Damage Control (“ . . . consistently delightful . . . . Bowen’s ebullient antidote to election season blues” – Kirkus Reviews) finds herself in the middle of that provocative question.  She no sooner answers it than she faces one even more dramatic:  What about 2020, with control of the White House at stake?  Josie will have to decide whether to leave the Beltway cocoon, where the weapons are spin, winks, nudges, and strategic leaks, and venture into a world where the weapons are actual weapons.  Josie knows that you don’t do politics with choir girls, and that to end up on the side of the angels you sometimes have to find angels who play a little dirty.

M.C.: What themes do you explore in False Flag in Autumn?

Mike:  Integrity, redemption, and the willingness to know yourself – to look in the mirror finally and see something that you’re not particularly comfortable with.

M.C.: Why do you write?

Mike:   God has given me the gift of being able to tell stories that engage the interest and emotions of other people.  To borrow a line from the movie Chariots of Fire, when I use that gift I can feel His pleasure.

M.C.: When do you feel most creative?

Mike:   When I see something – e.g., a computer bag going through the luggage screener at an airport, that could be switched with an identical bag with neither the owner nor anyone else being any the wiser – and realize that no one else looking at exactly the same scene has seen what I just saw.  And when I wonder What if?  What if someone threatens to kill you unless you stop sleeping with his wife, and you’re not sleeping with anyone else’s wife?

M.C.: How picky are you with language?

Mike:    I’m an unapologetic, old-school pedant.  I’ve tried – hard – to check my tendency to correct grammar and diction in conversation, but I still yell corrections at my television screen:  “fewer, not less, to her and me, not to her and I, supine, not prone, espionage, not treason, you semi-literate cretin.”  In a deposition once, an expert witness referred three times to his “mythology.”  I finally said, “I think you mean ‘methodology.’  ‘Mythology’ is what I’d call it if we had a jury here.”  Opposing counsel once told me in a letter that he found one of my statements “incredulous.”  I replied that I thought he meant “incredible.”  He peevishly responded, “Please don’t correct my grammar.”  I wrote back, “I wasn’t correcting your grammar, I was correcting your diction.”

M.C.: When you write, do you sometimes feel as though you are being manipulated from afar?

Mike:   Nope.  The internal logic of plot or character can take me in unanticipated and even surprising directions, but that’s because I haven’t thought things through thoroughly enough before I started to write – not because a muse is playing head-games with me.

M.C.: What is your worst time as a writer?

Mike:     Spotting a typo – or, even worse, a substantive factual error – when I’m reading the printed book and it’s too late to make a correction.

M.C.:   Your best?

Mike:    When I’m reading something I’ve written and I know the story perfectly well, but I want to go on reading even so simply because I’m enjoying the prose and the way the story is playing out.

M.C.:   Is there anything that would stop you from writing?

Mike:   No.  If someone threatened to disclose my most embarrassing secret unless I promised never to write another word, I’d say, “You’re too late.  I’ve already revealed it in at least three stories.”

M.C.:   What’s the happiest moment you’ve lived as an author?

Mike:    When I realized that you could lock a snap-lock on the inside of a room by blocking the latch with an ice cube and then stepping outside and closing the door, so that the lock would snap shut when the ice cube melted; and then verified with a lock I bought and installed expressly for the purpose, and an ice cube and a camera, that the trick would actually work.

M.C.:   Is writing an obsession to you?

Mike:     Absolutely.  If the apocalypse comes before I die, I’ll probably be typing right up until an angel on a green horse gallops up to let me know what my fate is

M.C.:   Are the stories you create connected to you in some way?

Mike:  Sure.  My protagonists have strengths and weaknesses (and good habits and bad habits) that I don’t have, and they tend to lead more interesting lives (especially now that I’ve retired from practicing law), but every emotion, every desire, every conflict of conscience, every resistance to or acquiescence in temptation that I write about is an extrapolation of something that I have felt or experienced or imagined.

M.C.:   Ray Bradbury once said, “You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”  Thoughts?

Mike:    Bradbury has a far more sensitive soul than I do.  I practiced law for thirty-nine years.  What does a lawyer do when he has secured a not guilty verdict for a client he knows perfectly well was as guilty as Judas Iscariot?  I’ll tell you what he does.  He goes home; loosens his tie and unbuttons the top button on his shirt; puts jazz on his CD player; pours two fingers of scotch;  listens to Miles Davis or John Coltrane until he falls asleep; then gets up the next morning and goes back to work.  Reality doesn’t stand a chance

M.C.:  Do you have a website or blog where readers can find out more about you and your work?

Mike:   www.michaelbowenmysteries.com.