Where were you on September 11, 2001?

R.E. (Bob) McDermott was in Singapore when the Twin Towers fell. The increased airport security after that was a constant reminder of the new threats we faced. But Bob was thinking about another area of vulnerability: shipping. 

McDermott knows ships. He is a graduate of the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy and has spent more than thirty years in the marine industry. So as he visited ships and shipyards around the world, Bob wondered what a tanker-based terrorist plot would look like. He developed a character, an “ordinary guy thrust in a situation way, way over his head,” and started writing. The story became Deadly Straits, a just-released international conspiracy thriller that is as relevant today as it was when Bob first conceived it.

It took two years of writing full time to finish his first draft. “It was (don’t laugh) 375,000 words,” he remembers. “To that point, I’d never met an adverb I didn’t like.”

Bob discovered Self Editing for Fiction Writers, by Renni Browne and Dave King, and started the arduous revision process. After ten rounds of edits and the support of his “beta readers” of family and friends, he had whittled the manuscript down and started querying agents.

“My querying followed the standard pattern – tons of form rejections with a sprinkling of agents adding detailed and encouraging comments, and just enough partial/full requests to keep hope alive,” Bob says of a process that he found “joyless.”

Then on Christmas Day, 2010, Bob McDermott got a Kindle e-book reader, and his perspective on reading—and publishing—changed. “I still love paper books, but gradually I stopped thinking of eBooks as some lesser, somehow inferior, format…. Indie authors were being noticed in the book world.”

Bob started to follow the blogs of writers like J.A. Konrath, Dean Wesley Smith, Scott Nicholson, Karen McQuestion, and others who had found success publishing electronically and through print on demand channels. Their experiences and advice convinced him to “go indie.”

“But not in haste,” he says. He took Konrath’s well-known advice: “don’t write crap.”Not wanting to fall into the stereotype of self-published books as poorly written, he chose to invest in an editorial “polish” of his manuscript. Since he had used Renni’s book for his self-editing, he contacted The Editorial Department, and was paired with editor Peter Gelfan.

“I got the marked up manuscript back two weeks later. Peter was fast, professional, and thorough. Boy was he thorough! One hundred fifty-three very detailed comments thorough, in addition to an eight page report as to what was working and what wasn’t.” At the core of Peter’s edit was a hard truth: “Bringing this novel up to competitive quality won’t consist of tweaking the existing ms and patching its weaknesses.  It needs to be rethought, re-planned, restructured, and largely rewritten.”

Bob fought discouragement at the idea of re-writing Deadly Straits for the eleventh time. But after a few days of reflection, he realized Peter was right. Bob set out to restructure the story, cutting almost half of his content and adding new plot twists to increase the tension at every turn.

He finished in May, 2011, and Deadly Straits was published as an e-book and a paperback just one month later.

The story of a shipping professional, dragged into an international conspiracy when his best friend is implicated in a terrorist hijacking, has been hailed by endorsers. “With his breathless pacing and punchy prose,” says author L.C. Fiore, “McDermott knots a complicated plot so real it might as well be breaking news. Deadly Straits ravages like a category-five hurricane: unpredictable, merciless, and fierce.”

While Bob is currently focused on marketing and promoting his debut novel, he’s already thinking about a sequel that takes on the modern danger of Somali pirates, and will be based loosely on his personal experience with the MV Biscaglia, which was hijacked in 2008. The crew was held for almost two months.  “It really changes one’s perspective when you know hostages as individuals,” he says.

“Whosoever commands the sea commands the trade of the world, and consequently the world itself.”

-Sir Walter Raleigh