Alum proves 'em wrong:
Engineers can write

By Bill Wagnon

Bill Buchanan might want to credit the late Judy-Lynn Del Rey for his newfound success as a fiction writer. Even though what she had to say about his first attempt at writing fiction wasn't exactly flattering, she did at least read his first manuscript and take time to respond, something nearly 50 other publishers failed to do.

Buchanan, a successful engineer with Bell Laboratories in New Hampshire, has long been familiar with the cliche. Sure, engineers aren't supposed to be able to write, but Buchanan had a story to tell; he had a story he believed should be written. So what if it would take him a decade to get it down on paper and several more years to get it published; he was driven to get his story to the public. But having a story to tell and having the ability to put it down on paper so that it holds the attention of readers are two different matters. And one of the nation's most recognized paperback publishers was about to set Buchanan straight about his writing skills.

"I must have mailed out 50 partial manuscripts the first time, but they all came back unread with a form letter," recalls Buchanan, who received his bachelor's and master's degrees in electrical engineering from Mississippi State. "Except for Ms. Del Rey. She was kind enough to ask for more of the story, then read it. I remember her writing back saying something to the effect, 'I really like your ideas, but you should learn to write.'"

With that constructive criticism from the owner of Del Rey Books, engineer Bill Buchanan would soon become engineer/novelist Bill Buchanan.

Following Ms. Del Rey's advice, Buchanan learned to write, resulting in his first work of fiction being released in February 1997. Nearly 300,000 copies of the paperback Virus have been distributed nationwide, and the Meridian native is putting the finishing touches on his second novel, Clear Water.

What if man were at the mercy of machine? What if artificial intelligence grew faster than human intelligence? What if the future of the planet rested in the pulsing heart of a microchip?

"Funny thing is that I thought I could write when I first started the book," says Buchanan. "When I first got the idea for Virus back in 1983, I wasn't part of the fiction reading public and didn't understand the elements of a good story. In fact, if you go back to the original manuscript today it reads more like a bad sermon."

Virus, which was on USA Today's list of top selling books in the country, is the tense story about an unstoppable computer superVirus that worms its way into the United States' strategic defense system causing the country's own antimissile lasers to target commercial jetliners, holding the nation and the world hostage.

Virus is based on the concept of the Strategic Defense Initiative, or Star Wars, a technology first made public in 1983 during the Reagan Administration. And Buchanan, a former captain in the Air Force Electronic Systems Division, is clear regarding his concerns about Star Wars, a program which uses low Earth orbit for military purposes.

"I wanted to increase public awareness about the inherent dangers in such a system," he explains. "Working with control systems, I could understand the complexities of what that orbiting satellite armada is all about. It would be literally impossible to test.

"You don't deploy a missile defense system like that arbitrarily, not if you've got alternatives. But if we get backed into a corner and run out of options, we'd do it. Virus makes one essential point: If we deploy this satellite armada, we'd better do it right because if we don't, people we care about are going to get killed."

When Buchanan's first attempt at writing Virus went mostly ignored, he persisted. To learn to write as Ms. Del Rey had suggested, he spent a great deal of time with books that taught the various approaches to writing. "They may have helped a little, but not very much," he remembers.

After spending several months on a second version of the manuscript, Buchanan eventually put it down again. He wouldn't pick it back up until 1991 when it appeared that work on the SDI program was beginning to make the project more viable, and when he began reading articles from the Persian Gulf War about the U.S. infecting Iraqi computer systems with Viruses.

"Administrations and priorities would change, but the SDI program kept getting renamed and funded," says Buchanan. "It just wouldn't go away. Strategically speaking, low Earth orbit is high ground-its military use is inevitable.

"Not only would Star Wars not go away, but we were making progress toward developing computer Viruses of our own. When you see things like that occurring in real life, it was a good motivation to get started again."

By the third attempt at writing the book, Buchanan was learning how to tell a story. Using wife and Mississippi State education alumna Janet, an avid fiction reader, as his No. 1 critic, Buchanan slowly began to turn his idea into a story that would sell.

"It's a process I learned over time," he says. "It's an amazing and often bizarre experience. You create a story universe, put people in it you care about, and see what happens. These people run around in your head talking nonstop and won't let you sleep. You find yourself getting out of bed in the middle of the night to write down what they're saying just so you can get some rest.

"You experience the story in your imagination, but it seems as real as you and I. Then you write it down so others may experience it too. That's how many authors do it, anyway."

In 1993, Buchanan's manuscript went to the Naval Institute Press, where reviewers would spend two years attesting to its validity and deciding whether to publish it. "The Naval Institute Press wasn't selected arbitrarily," explains Buchanan. "Tom Clancy (best-selling author of Hunt for Red October among others) went there. You learn how other successful authors got started, and follow their lead.

"It turns out they liked the book, but didn't want to publish it because they weren't making much money in fiction at the time. But by the time they'd finished it and given me feedback from their reviewers, it was a much better book."

After the full manuscript was rejected six times, Buchanan finally found an agent in New York in 1995. By February of this year, 350,000 copies of Virus had been printed by Jove Publications, a division of The Berkley Publishing Group.

In all, it took Buchanan 14 years to get his book published. Most would-be writers would have given up, but Buchanan had his motivation.

"I kept coming back to the book because the Strategic Defense Initiative wouldn't go away," he says. "I started this for my children, for their future, and now that they're teenagers, it's even more important to me."

Buchanan continues work on his next novel, Clear Water, another techno-thriller involving submarines. He does most of his writing between 5 a.m. and 7 a.m. in the morning, before heading off to his "day" job with Bell Labs. There, he develops control systems and communication protocols for computer networks.

For now, he's still an engineer whose hobby is writing. But he hasn't given up hopes of one day moving Janet and the girls, Amy and Laura, home to Mississippi to write full time.

"What I'd like to do is not necessarily what I'll get to do," laughs Buchanan. "Someday, I hope to get good enough at this to make a living. My dream is to move back home to Wren, Mississippi, and write on my grandparents' farm. That'd be fun."

And who says engineers can't write?