PLAYING ARMY

 

PLAYING ARMY

Nancy Stroer

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GENRE:  UpLit / domestic war

 

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BLURB:

 

It’s 1995 and the Army units of Fort Stewart, Georgia are gearing up to deploy to Bosnia, but Lieutenant Minerva Mills has no intention of going to war-torn eastern Europe. Her father disappeared in Vietnam and, desperate for some kind of connection to him, she’s  determined to go on a long-promised tour to Asia. But the Colonel will only release her on two conditions—that she reform the rag-tag Headquarters Company so they’re ready for the peacekeeping mission, and that she get her weight within Army regs, whichever comes second. Min only has one summer to kick everyone’s butts into shape but the harder she plays Army, the more the soldiers—and her body—rebel. If she can’t even get the other women on her side, much less lose those eight lousy pounds, she’ll never have another chance to stand where her father once stood in Vietnam, feeling what he felt. The Colonel may sweep her along to Bosnia or throw her out of the Army altogether. Can you fake it until you make it? Min is about to find out.

 

 

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Excerpt:

 

I sucked in my gut and forced the top button of my BDU trousers through the hole. Pounds never melted off me like they did in the diet pill commercials. As I wrestled with my body’s ill-fitting container the latrine door opened and two pairs of boots tromped in. Specialist Pettit’s voice floated over the sound of running water. “Not to be mean or anything, but female commanders are the worst. And Lieutenant Mills is the absolute worst. I worked for her for two years in Personnel and she ragged on me the whole time.”

 

Whoa, shit. Enemy inside the wire. I stopped breathing altogether and leaned so close to the stall door my eyes crossed.

 

“Hey, now.” That was Lieutenant Logan, my replacement at my old job. Female soldiers carved their hierarchies along different lines, never straight down the military ranks, and new alliances were being tested. Would Logan stick up for me, officer to officer? “It’s a short-term thing. She won’t be here long.” Instead of reproach, Logan’s voice was edged with mirth. “The colonel needs a body in that chair until a real commander comes in, and now that I’m here, Lieutenant Mills is over strength. She’s the body.”

 

My face grew hot. Real commander? Body? I clamped my lips shut against the urge to burst out of the stall, roaring. I imagined inhaling the entire room then blowing them away with the release of my torso, all tightly packed plastic explosives and buckshot. These two, Logan especially, had no freaking clue.

 

 

INTERVIEW

 

If you could have one paranormal ability, what would it be?

I don’t think I’d want the mind-reading thing – I’d much rather imagine what people are keeping to themselves and not know the ugly truth of it! But I would quite like to be able to talk to the dead, if they’d be so inclined. Think of all the questions we could get answers to, or the stories we could hear that we never got around to asking about when they were alive.

What is one thing your readers would be most surprised to learn about you?

People who know me in the gym, or as my teaching/training self, are always surprised to learn that at heart I am quiet and bookish. Like, 90 percent of my waking hours, if I had my druthers, I’d have my nose in a book. People who know me as my academic self are usually surprised to learn that when it comes to sports and exercise, I can be loud, goofy, argumentative, and physically quite self-confident. I guess I keep my various selves (and friends) pretty compartmentalized!

When writing descriptions of your hero/ine, what feature do you start with?

Ha! With Min, I knew she wasn’t going to be the diminutive beauty that we find in so many heroines. I wanted her to be sturdy! So, actually, I started with her butt!

Are you a plotter or a pantser?

I pants first. I love NaNoWriMo (the National Novel Writing Month challenge, when participants attempt to write 50K words of a new novel) in its purest form. I start the month with not much more than an idea I’ve been kicking around, and a blank page. After the challenge is over I find I have to throw out most of what I wrote, but that’s not the point for me – I’m just writing to see if my idea has legs. Usually well before I hit 50K I know whether a story will work, so when the challenge is over it’s time to throw out the nonsense, keep what’s useful, and get a good outline going.

Did you learn anything  from writing this book? If so, what?

I’m taking classes all the time which teach me so much (pro tip: online classes from Writing the Other are invaluable if you’re writing about people from different backgrounds and marginalities than you). But actual writing teaches us the most, right? So much about how to get a point across clearly at the sentence level, but more than that, how to be consistently interesting over hundreds of pages. How to engage a reader and how, exactly, a storyteller coaxes a reader, or straight up pulls them to the edge of their seat. I’ll always be working on my craft, but I think I’ve learned how to be deliberate about these elements of storytelling as I’ve worked on Playing Army.

 

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AUTHOR Bio and Links:

 

Nancy Stroer grew up in a very big family in a very small house in Athens, Georgia and served in the beer-soaked trenches of post-Cold War Germany. She holds degrees from Cornell and Boston University, and her work has appeared in the Stars and Stripes, Soldiers magazine, Hallaren Lit Mag, Wrath-Bearing Tree, and Things We Carry Still, an anthology of military writing from Middle West Press.

 

She’s a teacher and a trainer, and an adjunct faculty member of the Ellyn Satter Institute, a 503(c) not-for-profit that helps individuals and families develop a more joyful relationship to food and their bodies. Playing Army is her first novel.

 

Social media links:

https://twitter.com/Nancy_Stroer

https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/49311942.Nancy_Stroer https://www.facebook.com/nancy.stroer/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/nancy-stroer-86213089/

 

 

 

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