Kimberly A. Cook

Military Romance Author

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Watch Out For Santa And Rudolph!

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by Kimberly A. Cook                         (Twitter@ WarriorTales)

Heading into the holiday weekend I wanted to put my favorite Claymation Christmas video up today. While the Prep & Landing Elves are making final preparations to deploy Santa for Christmas eve, the California Raisins are also going to be out there, courtesy of The Temptations.

http://youtu.be/Gs–phzj2TQ

With all this air activity going on around the world, the men and women of the U.S. and Canadian militaries staff the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD). They have a busy job managing the air space, keeping it clear, coordinated and safe. If you want to follow their expert tracking of Santa, check out http://www.noradsanta.org/en/index.html They started their countdown on Dec. 2 to make sure all tracking systems are operational.

I took a tour of NORAD while stationed at Fort Carson, Colorado with the Army. One of things I remember is how thorough their military police were in scanning my entire body with the metal detector. Twice. Guess they were just being very careful. Right.

Happy Holidays and a very happy quirky Friday!

Are Creatives Born Or Made?

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By Kimberly A. Cook               (Twitter@ WarriorTales)

Creativity fascinates me.  Since I think of myself as a creative with imagination, the biggest challenge I have is explaining the “process” to other folks. The classic, “where do you get your ideas?” question stumps or terrorizes many a writer.

My answer is where don’t I get ideas? If I keep my eyes and ears open, I’m flooded with input. I consider myself a writing pirate; always looking for writing adventures and seeing buried story treasure everywhere.

Not to get clinical, but I believe creativity is rooted in being a lifelong learner and having the curiosity of a cat. While past public school system curriculum may have taught to primarily left brains, I always knew I was a right brain creative type.   I conformed to get through school, but kept my right brain engaged. Luckily I had many teachers who helped me keep it alive.

A big challenge for creatives is to not lose the sense of wonder and awe we experience on this planet and reinforce our childlike love of play. Before I could read I made up stories to match the pictures in my books. Then movies were my imagination made real in front of my eyes.  Everything from how I decorate my home to my wardrobe are influenced. There are no limits on my brain’s need to explore and make up worlds. 

We are all creatives; some of us might be a bit out of practice or not think of ourselves that way. I know great cooks who make me swoon with the amazing food they produce and wood workers who can make a piece of furniture look so gorgeous I have to caress it. When my plumber or accountant help me out of a jam, they are using their creative right brain in an area I am lacking. Double ditto for all the tech hijinks my IT elf fixes.  

At one conference an ad agency creative director said the hardest part of his job was trying to explain to the company executives who hired their firm how they came up with an ad campaign. You really can’t make a schematic diagram for the creative process – it happens. Like finding buried treasure off the coast of Florida or in your own backyard, you must exercise your creativity muscle – the brain. Music helps me create. I play a special set of creativity music cds when I’m writing; if we only use 10 percent of our brain, I think the music is for the 90 percent of my grey matter responsible for my imagination. Don’t want it to get bored.   

Who can imagine how The Glass Duo in the video began learning the ancient art of the glass harp? How did the first glass harp player start back in Mozart’s day? Think about what you are passionate about and love to do – from writing to travel to your chosen profession – you might realize you’re a creative pirate too!

The Perfect Holiday Gift!

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by Kimberly A. Cook                       (Twitter@ WarriorTales)

What do you get the woman who has everything? A gift certificate to drive a tank! I’ve always wanted to go through the Army’s M1A1 tank driving course where they swim in mud, but this would be a great option until I can make that happen. So in my holiday shopping public service announcement mode, go check out how you can drive a tank.

While I served in the Fourth Infantry Division MECHANIZED (capitalized because it means tanks!), I once rode in an APC (Armored Personnel Carrier) coming back in from downrange and got to ride in a big tank being delivered at Fort Carson, Colorado, but I never got to drive. Add a big red bow and we are good to go! Happy Quirky Friday!   

What’s In An Author’s Name?

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by Kimberly A. Cook                      (Twitter@ WarriorTales)

When I first started my writing business back in the dark ages, 1997, I tried to get the domain for my name. Taken. Seems my name is quite common and a photographer in Denver already had the domain.  Curses.  So I named my business Warrior Tales and went about my business life.

About five years ago at the Willamette Writer’s Conference, a speaker suggested aspiring writers keep checking for their name domain. So ten years after the fact I checked and it was available. I snapped it up so fast my URL registrar www.dynadot.com almost caught fire.  So www.kimberlyacook.com was mine. Joy in Whoville!

Space Shuttle Atlantis - Photo by NASA

But how did I settle on using my name in its current configuration? Simple. I went to Amazon.com and checked to see how many Kim Cook authors there were. Plenty. That was my byline with the newspaper, but too many folks thought it was a great name for little girls. How about Kimberly Cook? Still a ton. Kimberly A. Cook took the numbers down to a manageable few. That is the exhaustive marketing research I did to figure out what form of my name to use for my first book and career. 

Flash forward to establishing my blog. Since my company name is now considered an “aged domain,” which means its been online so long it holds first place in Google searches. Who knew I’d be rewarded for staying on course like the ol’ tortoise I am. I decided to use my name as the blog domain to increase my author awareness, I write fiction in addition to non-fiction, and I still need to separate myself  from the gigantic “kim cook pack.”

According to Google, a ton of Kimberly Cooks are high-powered divorce attorneys across the nation, except for me.  When one query told me there were 3,350 Kimberly Cooks on Facebook, I knew I needed to build up my name marketing strategy.  Started my blog this past Fall using WordPress and I redirect my name domain to my blog. Truth in advertising: Okay, I did that after three months of trying to get the blog imported to my web site and having numerous nervous breakdowns. I will be hiring tech elves to figure that out. It would’ve been easier for me to launch the space shuttle. If it was still flying…..

But a funny thing happened on my way to marketing savvy. I like to do exhaustive research about my online profile to test how things are going; I Google myself, with and without quote marks. When I started the blog my name/blog pages came up on page 4 of the Google pages.  Part of this is due to the fact my name has been on my web site for eons and I’ve Tweeted for more than a year, so I wasn’t in the weeds on the search page ranking. Checked back three months later and I am on page one.

How in the heck did that happen? Great news, but how? First I had added my blog posts to my Amazon.com author page and Amazon is the big online gorilla on the block. But I accidently did something else right. I think.

When I was reading about blogging, one person noted it was a good idea to put your byline on each blog post in case someone shared it. Some folks wanted to know who had written a shared post and couldn’t easily figure it out. Since I always had a byline when writing for the newspaper, figured it was the right thing to do. Here’s the dumb luck part; it didn’t dawn on me that everytime I post my name is right there in my byline being scanned by the Google spiders. Duh? 

 I like to think my experience gives authors hope about social media. If you make a plan and just keep at it, it pays off. The old adage about “just show up.” I Tweet three times a week all at once and I blog twice a week. That’s it! Just like writing, you have to persevere and keep at it. You too could be an aged domain! Woo Hoo! Or maybe fly a new space shuttle. I’ve always loved the movie Space Camp……

When Engineers Get Into The Spiked Eggnog, This Happens

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by Kimberly A. Cook                      (Twitter@ WarriorTales)

The holiday season is here and folks are in the mood to drink spirits and celebrate the seasons, whichever season people choose to celebrate. These lighting engineers must have had great fun working on this project. But, geez Mabel, the lighting bill! These are the kind of displays I like to watch and then retreat to my low-key Christmas of shooting off artillery. Enjoy the show! Happy Quirky Friday! 

Pearl Harbor Remembrance: 70 Years Later

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by Kimberly A. Cook                                    (Twitter@ WarriorTales)

It all started out as a school project. My family was headed on our first vacation to Pearl Harbor, Hawaii in 1974. For a social studies report, I decided to interview my brother-in-law’s Great Uncle John Watson who was at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.  Little did I realize his story would be my first official “war story” to start my military writing career.

I still have the report. Got an A for the resource, documentation and pictures which I took on vacation. But what embedded in my mind after interviewing Uncle Johnny was how grateful he was that I listened to his story. Seemed odd. Why wouldn’t everyone want to hear his story? Here is part of what he told me about being stationed at Pearl Harbor from 1941 to 1948 as a civilian construction electrician working for the Navy. 

“I was there to make magnetic minesweepers out of birdboats,” Watson said. “That was supposed to be my first day off in 13 weeks. I was laying in bed.”

Lonnie says, “Hey, there’s a lot of firing going on, sounds like the big guns.”

“We turned on the radio and the first thing we heard ‘All workmen return to Pearl Harbor immediately, Japs are firing on us.’ Half an hour later I was in Pearl Harbor and went through the main gate when the second wave of Japs were comin through Pearl over from the air field. I don’t think they ever caught up with me though.”

USS California (BB-44) slowly sinking alongside Ford Island as a result of bomb and torpedo damage, 7 December 1941.

“Still they had Marines at the gate,” he said. “We went through the gate a runnin with these Marines yellin, ‘Hurry up, Hurry Up, the planes are comin.’ There they was standin out there tellin us! We had the heavy cruiser San Francisco in the repair basin over there with just enough power aboard for lights. You couldn’t even fire her guns when it started.”

“I was gettin juice on board one of the battle wagons and Ben Cecil got juice on board her. When I got down there maybe an hour later she was firing her guns. She didn’t have any anti-aircraft yet but her one point pom poms were on the dock ready to go on and the rigger swung them on board and they welded them to the deck and were firing within 20 minutes.”

“Manual firing them. I’ll admit there were no stops on them and she practically cut one stack off following them planes around. We were firing right towards Honolulu. I had a lot up in the valley I was ready to build a new house on a 16-inch shell took that lot off the hillside, we found fragments of it. Like I told ya, we fired 16-inch guns at airplanes.”

The San Francisco wasn’t touched and Uncle Johnny proceeded to get power on board the Pennsylvania so she could fire. He saw the Helena take a torpedo in the engine room after it didn’t hit the Ogalala, but turned it upside down and she was full of mines. “Not a one of them went off,” he said. “We had a lot of that kind of thing going on.”

“I had a rating of non-active base so anytime an air raid siren blew my station was the sight tower, I could see everything that happened in the harbor. You could look across the bay and look at them 11 battleships lined up along Ford Island and fire go’in down all over. The old California was over there firing 5-inch 50 broadsides at the planes and she fired them broadsides right up to the time that the water was coming into the casings, she was sinking all the time. She was the one that put the hole right through the stack of the powerhouse.” (See National Archive Collection photo)

Uncle Johnny stayed on station for 39 hours after the bombing before getting released to go rest. They drove blackout and followed the curb until they hit another car head on doing the same thing. The Marines told him to move on since his car could still run. Then the next soldier told them to park it. They walked two miles home. When he got to his place he found Naval housing families in his apartment, evacuated from base housing.

“Boy that was a wild night, nobody knew what to do or who was giving orders, it was the man with the gun you listened to.”

That is just part of the story. To learn more about the new Pearl Harbor Visitor Center and stories from Pearl Harbor, visit http://www.nps.gov/valr/index.htm and http://www.youtube.com/user/WWIIValorNPS

Real history is best learned from those who were there; Uncle Johnny taught me that lesson.