Jonathan Dyer's Blog: The Nick Temple Files, page 9

When I started writing in my late teens and early twenties, I ran into a problem that I assume many aspiring writers encounter. My work sounded like what I had most recently read. The influence of other authors was more than mere influence, and it showed. While imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, it probably isn’t the best avenue for unique expression. The problem had, I think, two main sources: the limitation of my perso...

I completed a collection of short stories in March. Finishing a writing project is always an odd moment. On the one hand, the feeling of accomplishment at that moment approaches the sublime. On the other hand, the writing habit isn’t easily turned off or set aside, particularly after the flurry of activity accompanying final proofing and edits of a complete manuscript. I considered starting a new Nick Temple File. And to the extent ...

I recently completed a collection of short stories. As the preface to the collection explains, “This collection began as half of a cold case murder mystery. After several attempts, and a good deal of research, I concluded I do not possess the tools required to write a credible murder investigation, even a fictional one. But I was unwilling to abandon more than a year’s worth of work. After considering my optio...

About 15 years ago I decided to try my hand at writing a screenplay. I’d already written a couple of books, but the idea of putting together a full-length script intrigued me. I did some online research about the basics, bought a book about formatting, and got to it. I enjoyed the process and I liked the result.

The title of that first screenplay of mine is Keepers of the Flame. It has its origins in a dream I ha...

Berlin’s Fernsehturm, its TV Tower, has become an internationally recognized symbol of a vibrant, modern city. I follow a number of Berlin- and Cold War-oriented sites on Twitter, and hardly a day goes by without someone posting a picture of the tower, often accompanied by text praising its unique and iconic presence above the Berlin skyline. I took the picture of it to the left in 1983, during my second visit t...

The Christmas season is upon us, so it’s time to once again post an original bit of Nick Temple I composed while stationed in Berlin during the early 1980s. I wrote this bit while working in subsystem Echo at the Field Station’s intercept site on Teufelsberg. It’s one of about a dozen similar snippets that constitute the origin of the Nick Temple character.

To the left is a jpeg of A Nick Temple Christmas. I have the ori...

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, my favorite holiday. The origin story of the holiday is rightly suspect, but what I like about it is generally what is not present. There isn’t any weird pretend creature – think North Pole elf or a large candy-hiding rabbit – and the decorations, such as they are, are generally de minimis. No one is forced to buy or accept a gift they either can’t afford or don’t want. If you’re fortunate enou...

On Thursday, November 11th, Kyle F. Andrews, an experienced script analyst, made an offer via Twitter to veterans who have written a script. The offer was this: if you’re a veteran, send him a title, genre, and logline of a script you’ve written. He’d pick three of those submitted, read the scripts, and analyze them, all at no cost to the veterans/screenwriters. He even enlisted two...

Another quick note: I released the paperback version of The Heidelberg Gap, Nick Temple File no. 6 yesterday. It’s now available on Amazon as an eBook and a paperback.

The latest entry in the Nick Temple File series finds Nick in Heidelberg, Germany during the summer of 1968. Just across the border in Czechoslovakia, ordinary Czech citizens are clamoring for freedom. The tension builds as the Soviet Union contemplates a br...

A quick note: I released The Heidelberg Gap, Nick Temple File no. 6 yesterday. It’s currently available on Amazon as an eBook. The paperback will be available in another two weeks, more or less.

Each book in the series has presented its own challenges, and The Heidelberg Gap is no different in that regard. I started writing it in the summer of 2020, during a time of ridiculous uncertainty for all of us. By earlier this year, with less than 1/3 ...