O.C. Author’s ‘Point’ Is Well-Taken

Maurice Medland of Yorba Linda spent 30 years in the corporate world, holding executive positions at Fluor Corp., PacifiCare Health Systems and Travelers Health Network.

Then, at age 54, he chucked it all to follow his dream: to write a novel.

“People thought I was nuts,” Medland recalls.

That was six years ago.

“Point of Honor” (Kensington; $21.95)--Medland’s first book--hit bookstores earlier this month.

As the author, now 60, says of his midlife career move: “It looks like it’s working out.”

Kirkus Reviews calls Medland’s suspense thriller “first rate . . . impressively detailed . . . gripping.” A bound galley sent to Times Arts Editor Emeritus Charles Champlin elicited equally glowing praise: “Tautly thrilling . . . a first-rate job of exciting and suspenseful storytelling.”

“Point of Honor” opens with Navy Lt. Daniel Blake leading a boarding party onto an abandoned freighter off the coast of Peru. Blake and the seven men and one woman under his command discover 30 tons of cocaine in the cargo hold, $350 million in cash--and a dozen corpses with their tongues cut out.

It turns out that the vicious killer is still on board. When a typhoon hits and an explosion aboard their destroyer cuts them off from their own ship, Blake and company are trapped aboard the freighter. And racing toward the scene is a strike force ordered by Jorge Cordoba, a Harvard-trained business genius who masterminded a plot to turn a Colombian drug cartel into an international power. Everything Cordoba has worked for is contingent on recovering the freighter.

To promote “Point of Honor,” Medland’s publisher is running a national advertising campaign. Medland, meanwhile, is making his first round of Southland book signings. Among those who have hosted him is Ed Thomas, owner of Book Carnival in Orange, who sold 91 copies of the book the day Medland was in the store.

Thomas, who reads an average of three new books a week, considers “Point of Honor” one of the best first novels he’s ever read.

“I mentioned that book to everybody,” he says. “My customers who have read it loved it too, and they tell somebody else. It’s strictly a word-of-mouth type thing. He wrote an incredibly exciting, suspenseful book.”

Not bad for a guy whose previous writing efforts were restricted to turning out Securities and Exchange Commission financial reports, shareholder reports and company earnings press releases.

During that time, Medland recalls, “people would occasionally say, ‘You’re a good writer.’ So I assumed I could write fiction. I was in for a shock. I spent the four years it took to write the book in learning the craft of writing fiction.”

*

The road to becoming an author began one evening in 1991 in the kitchen of Medland’s home in Yorba Linda.

At the time, Medland was a financial executive with Travelers Health Network. The company was in the process of consolidating Medland’s office in Brea into its main office in Dallas. Medland, however, had no desire to leave California.

Then Karen, his wife of 32 years, asked what Medland now calls “the magic question.”

“What would you do if money didn’t have anything to do with it?” she said.

“That’s easy,” he replied. “I’d write a novel.”

As Medland recalls, “I began to tell her a story that had been percolating in the back of my mind for several years. What I wanted to do is get this guy--an engineering officer--trapped aboard an abandoned freighter and just get him into all sorts of trouble and see how he copes with it.”

Drawing on savings and relying on his wife’s income as an accountant, Medland began writing full time. He turned out about 200 manuscript pages in eight months.

“I didn’t think it was very good,” he concedes, “but I didn’t know why.”

To find out, he enrolled in an extension class in creative writing at UC Irvine taught by novelist Gordon McAlpine. Medland says the 10-week class, which included classroom critiques, was invaluable.

“I began to learn all the things that I had done wrong,” Medland says. “I began to learn things like point of view and how to structure a novel really like a three-act play.”

McAlpine, who also teaches in the masters of fine arts program in creative writing at Chapman University in Orange, says he gets a lot of older writing students in his extension classes.

“I think maybe at least half of the enrollment of classes I’ve had at UCI have been people 20 years into a career, and they bring experience and seriousness,” he says.

McAlpine says the fact that Medland actually completed the novel he was working on--and went on to have it published--is unusual.

“It’s a lot easier to begin a novel than to complete it,” McAlpine says. “A lot of students will begin a novel enthusiastically and then realize--about page 80--one of two things: They’ve either told their story already, or they haven’t actually begun it yet. It’s at that point that most aspiring writers give up.”

But, he adds, “There is a small percentage that can manage to look at those pages and decide that they were valuable as part of the process and still have the courage to go and begin again. Clearly, that’s what Maurice had.”

After completing McAlpine’s class, Medland acknowledges, “I really got into high gear.”

His confidence was later bolstered after attending a writers conference at San Diego State. One of the guest speakers, a senior editor at Avon Books, had agreed to read the first chapter of any of the participants’ novels.

On the last day of the conference, the editor handed back Medland’s chapter. Attached was a business card with a note: “I’d like to see more.”

Although the editor told him to send the full manuscript, Medland says he didn’t have a completed manuscript yet. Besides, he says, “I wanted to get an agent. I think you’re at a real disadvantage if you send your manuscript directly to a publisher. As a first-time writer, an agent can get a much better deal for you, and that certainly is what happened.”

In spending four years writing his 400-page manuscript, Medland says, “there were lots of starts and stops.”

Medland, who enlisted in the Navy at 17 in 1954 and spent two and a half years at sea, drew creative inspiration for his book from his son, Steve, a graduate of the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy at Kings Point, N.Y.

“It’s a key point that the protagonist is a Kings Point graduate,” he says. “No one else would be able to do what he did: get this derelict freighter underway and maneuver it through a typhoon in order to save the ship.”

Medland’s son helped with the research for the book.

“The freighter on which a very large part of the story takes place was a 50-year-old freighter,” Medland says. His son dug into the archives and resurrected the blueprints with all the specifications for the obsolete freighter. “That was invaluable,” he says.

*

Looking back on his decision to quit his job and begin writing his first novel, Medland says: “I got a lot of funny looks when I made that decision. The reverse is true today. Everybody’s saying, ‘Wow, you did that right. You made it out of the nutty corporate world.’ ”

Medland has begun work on his next book, a suspense thriller dealing with nuclear terrorists.

Now that he’s an author, Medland says, people tend to think he has a life of ease.

“I get that a lot. It’s, ‘You don’t really work: You’re a writer.’ They have no idea how hard it is.”