Villains on Valentine’s: February 14, 2026

Save Yourself. Write a Novel, Part Four

SP4 Tom Kazo after a vicious battle somewhere in Vietnam, 1967

Welcome Back to Adventures in Writing! My fifth post of my new project

Friends, forgive me for not posting with the consistency I intended when I began this project in January. I think it’s because I’m working so hard on my second novel, the sequel to Ride the Tide, published in December. Fiction writing is still new to me and for whatever reason, it’s an extremely emotional process. What my characters experience, I’m right there with them. So I’ve been wrung out like an old rag at the end of each writing session.

That being said, it’s still different from when I was writing my memoir, Tom Kazo and Me: Love, Strength, Miracles. A couple of days ago would have been my 21st wedding anniversary but tragically, Tom lost his battle with cancer in 2006. Twenty years ago, almost. Hard to believe. He finally used up all of his lives. Nine airplane crashes and a kidnapping by drug smugglers in Colombia. Plus other stuff.

I’d been encouraged to write about this extraordinary man by various people over the years, and once I got rolling, the memories of our life together poured out of me.

And I do mean, poured out of me. I could feel them physically leaving my body. When your relationship begins with one partner having been given three months to live, and that person is in a nursing home, well, welcome to soap opera country.

But Tom Kazo was more than a terminal patient in a Veteran’s Affairs nursing home. And we had 15–1/2 miraculous years together. Maybe I wasn’t in all of his turbulent life of many careers, some of them violent, but I was there for a significant part of it. I saved his life more than once, dragged him back through that frangible veil between life and death. He said when he began to regain his senses, “Did I fall?”

Having the strength and skill to tell our story was the most therapeutic treatment I could ever have done for myself. I chose to end it after five years of our adventures. Seemed right.

It was because of Tom that I learned how we are our own worst enemies. I learned a whole ton of things from that guy. He was a universe of contradictions. His spirit is definitely in my novels. Not as one particular character, even though Ride the Tide has a young Green Beret fighting in the war in Vietnam as the core of the story, and that’s a photo of a 20-year-old Tom after a vicious battle at the top of my story.

The anecdotes in Ride the Tide came from Tom’s experiences. Some he told me, some came from his sister, who was there when he returned on crutches, unable to sleep in a bed and eat hot food. They did not know at that time that the herbicide he’d sprayed in the jungle to eliminate the foliage that would hide the Viet Cong was contaminated with Agent Orange and would be a factor in his illness and death.

One day last year I posed a question to myself. What if Tom had gone back to Vietnam for another tour of duty and got himself killed?

That’s what my initial “seed” was for Ride the Tide. Except, what if his body was not found and so he was declared Missing in Action. What if he’d left behind a wife who thus began a life in limbo?

I came of age during Vietnam. My boyfriend narrowly escaped the draft. Literally because his number didn’t come up. More than a turn of phrase, it was a real thing. Little did I know how much of it I’d absorbed, watching Walter Cronkite every night. The first televised war.

So there’s sure a lot of writing advice flying around two of the platforms where I’ve published my essays, Medium and Substack, over the last couple of years. Since I’ve been an editor since 1991, along with an eclectic (nonfiction) writing career that has earned me way more dough than my painting has, I take most of it with a large shaker of salt. “Filling the page” is what I’ve learned to call it over the years. I can spot it a mile away. Well, making a buck from writing is what many people dream of. Can’t blame them for trying.

Research is something I’ve excelled at as well, and so before I decided to write a romance novel, I investigated the field thoroughly. One thing for sure, the story has to have a HEA: Happily Ever After. Sounds good to me. Happiness is scarce these days.

Some years ago, my daughter (a brilliant writer herself) introduced me to “TV Tropes” which has been of great assistance as I puzzled out my plots. If you ever have a few hours to kill, check it out. Talk about rabbit holes…

Anyway, as I have written before, I began my novel by following the methodology of the late, great John Le Carré and over a few weeks scribbled (his verb) 243 pages with a fast pen and looseleaf paper to tell myself the story of Charlie, Jerry, and Brian. Brian’s the Green Beret who’s MIA in ‘Nam. Or is he missing? Charlie, his wife, is positive he was killed in action.

According to most of the writing advice crowd, every good story needs a villain. A bad person who must be defeated so the main characters could show what they’re made of and enjoy the required happy ending they deserve. Believe you me, I thought long and hard about this one. I’m hoping I won’t reveal anything you might construe as a spoiler, because it sure would make me happy if you, dear reader, purchased and read the darn book.

Not to sound desperate or anything.

To back up a tad; I grew up with World War Two all around me. My father served as a civilian pilot in the Royal Air Force Ferry Command. When he met Mom in the Piccadilly Club of the Mount Royal Hotel in Montreal, Ferry Command’s unofficial officer’s club, she was having an affair with another pilot. Whose aircraft vanished over the Atlantic Ocean mere weeks before the war ended. Meanwhile, her own brother had been shot down over Germany and served over two years in a Luftstalag.

And after the war, when Dad founded his own airline, he hired many WW2-trained aircrew. All of whom drank copious amounts of alcohol. Strong men who’d seen too much, I know that now. As a child, I didn’t like seeing adults get drunk. The only time Dad could weep for those he’d lost was after consuming a load of rye whiskey. I hated to see my tall, strong father cry, and despised him for it. It hurts to admit that. Now that I’ve brought back his nine-volume memoirs back to the world, I have only compassion, admiration and empathy for my father. Guess I grew up, eh?

So they had Hitler as their villain, along with the Nazis. The “good war” as I heard it called during the Vietnam years. Talk about a freaking oxymoron.

Anyway, after thrashing around in search of A Bad Guy for my story, eventually I realized that War itself was a villain. Not just for what it does to the combatants, but its effect upon those left at home. Sit with that one for a few minutes. Take all the time you need.

Grief, I discovered as I wrote Ride the Tide, is one fierce enemy. Yet as I developed the love story between Charlie (her dad wanted a boy, hence the name) and Jerry, the racetrack outrider, I realized that as an outrider’s job is to catch a runaway racehorse before it harms itself or others, that this skill would help Jerry catch Charlie before her grief ran away with her and destroyed her.

Huh. The things we learn about life and ourselves through the act of writing.

Eventually I gave it up. The search, I mean. No manufactured human could be more villainous than war, especially in Vietnam. You think our country is divided now? Well, kiddies, it was brutally divided over that conflict. So in both Ride the Tide and its sequel, Safe Harbor, I’ve finally been able to express my deepest feelings about what I believe is the most hated and toxic villain I could ever imagine. And I don’t even need to go into gory detail. Just look at Tom’s face in that photo.

I’m not doing a trope, as far as I know. What I’m doing is watching the words pour out of my soul and onto the page, on behalf of those families whose beloveds came home in small metal boxes, or not at all. Or if they did come home, as Tom did, as my father and my uncle did, they were never at peace, not really. Alcohol helped until it didn’t. In Tom’s case, especially.

Another villain is known as survivor’s guilt. I’m addressing that in my second book. Why did a better man die, is what many veterans thought. Why did I come home instead of my buddy? He was the better pilot, the better soldier. Let’s not forget that strong men aren’t supposed to cry, at least not in that generation. Can’t be seen as weak!

Now we’re getting back to being our own worst enemy. As cartoonist Walt Kelly interpreted the famous quote by Commodore Oliver Perry, “we have met the enemy and he is ours,” as “we have met the enemy and he is us.” In Kelly’s case, he was lamenting the environmental destruction he saw around him in 1970, caused by, you guessed it, the human race.

Especially with my dad, who never flew in combat, the survivor’s guilt was heavy duty. Even though, as I learned from his memoirs, there were numerous times I simply would not exist, if Dad had not been able to figure out what the hell his ornery airplane was doing now. He survived crashes but never had to use his parachute. Always brought his aircrew to safety. He delivered all of the classic bombers across the Arctic and then Greenland and over the treacherous North Atlantic, and several types across the South Atlantic. Did you know that bad weather and the inability to forecast it was a major villain in WW2? And probably all the other wars.

Monsters are all around us, more than ever, it seems. Perhaps I could have worked one up. As the second book is almost done and the third beckons (working title: Roll With It) I may just do that. Another of my favorite authors, John D. MacDonald, created some truly scary bad guys.

But what I’ve learned about myself as an author of fiction is that I prefer writing as my own personal escape. Where things may be hard, but good people will prevail. Where lovemaking can be its own healing magic. My very own safe harbor. One I invite you to visit, so you can recharge your batteries and live to fight another day. Or love another day. Up to you.

Link to purchase Ride the Tide as a paperback, a hardcover, and a Kindle ebook. Read it for free if you belong to Kindle Unlimited.