LT. COMMANDER MOLLIE SANDERS Novel Released on ePub Platforms Same Day as South China Sea in the News

Full disclosure: My husband Mitch Miller and I wrote the screenplay “Lt. Commander Mollie Sanders” several years ago. The screenplay was a quarterfinalist in the 2005 Nicholls Fellowship competition run by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (the org that runs the Oscars).

The screenplay features the now brewing conflict in the South China Sea but it isn’t a new brewing conflict. In fact, an ex-Navy helicopter pilot told me that in the 1990s, when he served, the Navy routinely planned for scenarios in the South China Sea.

More recently my husband and I wrote the prequel screenplay, “Needle in a Haystack,” about Lt. Commander Mollie Sanders assigned as a fighter pilot’s backseater on the aircraft carrier the USS Nimitz and then assigned on temporary duty to the Coast Guard to help with a terrorist threat to the port of Los Angeles.

Inspired by a sudden surge in the popularity of eBooks, I adapted the two screenplays into one novel (adding a middle section in which Lt. Commander Sanders makes an inspection trip to Afghanistan to look into IEDs). Then I hired Chris O’Byrne of www.ebook-editor.com to convert the novel into various eBook formats.

On July 12, the day Chris emailed me the link to the novel’s eBook page on Smashwords, The Wall Street Journal carried this front-page news blurb:

The Joint Chiefs chairman sparred with his Chinese counterpart over U.S. exercises in the South China Sea.

The actual Journal news article, “China and U.S. Spar Over South China Sea” by Jeremy Page reporting from Beijing, began:

Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, sparred publicly with his Chinese counterpart on the issue of the South China Sea after a meeting in which they appeared to have made little progress toward preventing or defusing future confrontations in its disputed waters.

If you don’t yet know about this brewing hotspot, the short answer is OIL, as the South China Sea is expected to contain oil and gas deposits.

The longer answer is that China claims almost the entire South China Sea, while parts are claimed by Taiwan, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia and Brunei.

And, as the Journal’s Jeremy Page reported, “The U.S. has also angered China by claiming a strategic interest in freedom of navigation through its [South China Sea’s] waters, which carry much of the world’s trade.” (Boldface is mine.)

In the second half of the eBook LT. COMMANDER MOLLIE SANDERS, Mollie Sanders becomes the first female assigned to a sub smaller than one of the large Ohio-class boomers. And when the sub carries out a reconnaissance mission to the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea, her life is put in danger.

Get an eBook of this timely novel now for only $2.99 in formats for the Kindle, the Nook, Sony’s Reader, the Kobo, your computer, etc. at http://budurl.com/MollieSandersebooks

(And if you do read the book and like it, please write a review on the ebook’s Amazon page.)