ChristiTutionalist Politics | Christian Perspectives on Constitutional Issues

CTP (S3EOctSpecial6 BAWks:1-4) Edgework: Writing Crime, Tech, and Trust

• Joseph M. Lenard | Christian Activist & Author in Politics • Season 3

Share episode

"GIVE FEEDBACK (no-reply-text (2-way comm: https://JosephMLenard.us/contact))"

CTP (S3EOctSpecial6 BAWks:1-4) Edgework: Writing Crime, Tech, and Trust 
[BOOKS / AUTHORS Weeks - Week 1 sub-episode 4 (Thu. 20251016)]
Two veteran technologists turned co-authors unpack how they built the Enigma Heirs trilogy, from real-world research and composite villains to an AI ally named SIKABOD and a workflow that keeps one seamless voice. We swap tools, backup rituals, and the “literary ping-pong” that powers their chapters without losing control of versions.
• origins of the Enigma Heirs trilogy and Enigma Jewels
• the three half-brothers’ crime dynasties and stakes
• moving from tech manuals to fiction for durability and freedom
• composite characters drawn from real encounters and travel
• research practices to ground technology and plausibility
• collaborative process using outlines, spreadsheets, and daily passes
• ensuring a single narrative voice through iterative editing
• acronym humor and the AI SIKABOD as a series mainstay
• backup strategies, version control, and naming conventions
• tool talk, file transfers, and email spam mishaps
• links to the series site (http://EnigmaSeries.com) 
• future guest invites 


Support the show

JLenardDetroit SUBSCRIBE-
Author, Blogger, Podcaster

SPEAKER_01:

Hello everyone. Welcome to Books Authors Weeks. October of 2025. I had Health Weeks in February 2025. I had a Music Weeks, three of those in the month of March 2025. So here we are, October. I have a lot of fellow authors I have the chance to have discussions with. So Books Authors Weeks, October 25. Without further ado, let's head into a discussion with a fellow author. Welcome to Institutionalist Politics Podcast, aka C T P. I am your host, Joseph M. Leonard, and that's L-E-N-A-R-D. C T P is your no must, no fuss, just me, you, and occasional guest type podcast. Really appreciate you tuning in. Welcome to another episode of Christitutionalists. For those viewing on behind the scenes, you see, yes, I'm wearing my the book of Kennedy, my latest book shirt. I'm not going to go into the whys and wherefores that the Kindle cover, the soft copy cover, and the hard copy cover all look different than this. Joining me are a couple of authors. Those behind the scenes can see I've got a couple of guests rather than one here. So have to break the normal interview routine. So let's start for those on the 25 plus audio only platforms that may be listening. We'll go around the room with an introduction to this question. Where were you born and raised? And where are you now? Right. I like to joke, cue the who song. Who are you? Who, right? Ladies first, rocks.

SPEAKER_02:

So I'm out of Dallas, Texas. I actually moved to Texas from California, which is quite a mental shift for me, but I've loved it. And I'm now considered by Charles, who is a native Texan, I'm naturalized. So I can almost behave everything Texan.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, and and for the audio and the transcript, that's Rox Berkey B-U-R-K-E-Y. That will, of course, be on the bottom screen in the edited final video version. But for those listening and the benefits of the transcript, that's how you spell her name. Also, with me, another of the duo, a writing duo. I'm so happy to have a writing duo as opposed to just yet another single author. It opens up some wonderful new different questions. Charles Brakefield, welcome.

SPEAKER_00:

Joseph, I have to admire your level of energy. Yes, uh, I'm the co-author with uh the fabulous uh Roxburgy. I'm Charles Brakefield, I'm an Air Force brat. I was born in Austin, Texas, so I have you know, I got to uh claim the uh that particular title of being a naturalized Texan, but uh because you're uh you when your dad says, hey, moving, we moved picked up and moved every two years. I didn't realize people didn't live out of a box until I was 13, okay?

SPEAKER_01:

Uh that's yeah. I born and raised in the downriver Detroit area, and I've been here my whole life, so yeah, uh you and I are kind of antithetical to each other in that regard. But the reason they are both here today is Enigma Jules book series, is a gripping techno thriller that will keep readers on the edge of their seats, award-winning authors, Breakfield and Berkey Weave, a suspenseful narrative that will leave readers enthralled from the first page to the last. The Da Vinci Code and National Treasure fans will love this fast-paced and action-paced, not packed action-packed novel. That's of course the propaganda that your PR guy, Mickey, that we uh both all know uh sent out. And it I love the Dan Brown books, I love the Dan Brown made movies, I love the National Treasure movies. Full disclosure, I've not read any of these books yet, but they already interest me based on that. So Rox, what was the genesis of these books?

SPEAKER_02:

Great question. Thank you very much, Joseph. So this is actually the third book in the trilogy that we just released.

SPEAKER_01:

Enigma Jewels. Uh yeah. Uh uh, what's the subtitle of Enigma Jewels is the overall series name, right? What's no? Yeah.

SPEAKER_02:

Now Enigma Jewels is this installment in the trilogy Enigma Airs. So Enigma Airs is the next generation of our heroes. So we've been writing for like 12 some odd years. And so it it's kind of something that intrigued us was having stories that relate to three really bad half-brothers who all seem to have their own place in the world.

SPEAKER_01:

Three you can't have three halves. That would be right. The math don't work, but or three separate pairs of half-brothers. Charles. Explain that, Charles.

SPEAKER_00:

Okay, so they're uh they're half-brothers. They're they've got uh the same father, different moms, and his uh his ambition was to have his own crime dynasty. And they took up when he was uh terminated early in uh in his professional crime career, is the uh the backstory. And then each one of them, each one of those brothers has their own uh criminal dynasty. So everything is they're they're related, they they slop money back and forth, they do each other favors, you know, they whack people when they need to, you know, they launder uh money for using cryptocurrency. It's you know, it's uh uh it's a great business model. Unfortunately, it's on the other side of the law, okay.

SPEAKER_01:

Rox, since you're the transplant, I'll ask this of you because again, this is fascinating to me since I write my own books. Uh a collaboration with someone I find would be difficult. So, how did you come across, Charles? How did the two of you come together to become this duo?

SPEAKER_02:

Firstly, we were we were actually co-workers, and so we came together from doing workshops for people, crafting uh you know, nonfiction kinds of white papers and publishing those for people and found we could work well together. And so we set up our LLC to kind of create you know, somewhere around 40 books right now. And so Enigma Airs that trilogy starts with Enigma Tracer, then goes to Enigma Force, thank you, Charles. Enigma and then goes straight to Enigma Jewels. So each one, and so it's on the top left of my screen, each one of those talks about one of the brothers and what happens to them at the end of the book. And the only one left standing is Julian in Enigma Jewels, and he has a fascination with jewels that are buried in the Caribbean from second ships.

SPEAKER_01:

Okay, Charles, let's do the he said she said. Well, we had the she said. What's your version of the tale uh of this marriage of convenience?

SPEAKER_00:

Well, to be to be blunt, we were we we just come off of our second uh tech manual. And if you've ever read tech manuals, they're I've written them. Yeah, yeah. Well, as soon as you're finished with it, the the publisher's like, uh, we have a refresh on it because it's out of date. So, like, you know, I I'm I was I I I got ticked. Okay, I'll full disclosure. I got ticked and stomped off, grabbed, got my marbles up and just left. So I ain't doing this no more. I'm not, you know. But being the consummate saleswoman that she is, approached me a couple of months later and says, take a look at this. What is this? A couple of just a couple of chapters. I I think we can we can take our uh all the technology that we have and know, put it in the background, use fictional characters, and we'll make a great fictional story. I went, I don't know. I I I gotta be, you know, I gotta be romance. Like I need flowers, I need, you know, uh it's just okay, all right, all right, all right, all right. Uh uh and we can kill people and not go to jail. I went sold, okay, yeah, we're there.

SPEAKER_01:

I love that answer. That's no offense, Rox, but that's a much more, I don't know what your word to use here, but from an offer Yeah, there's the word, right? There, a much more intriguing and creative uh answer to that. You want to add anything more though to that, Rox, or is it like he said?

SPEAKER_02:

No, that's the truth, and that's how we really started going down the path of fiction because we could bend the stories and use live technology, and that's important.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I I'm a former IT guy, so hence, like I said, I I've written technical manuals myself, and yes, indeed, the minute it's done, usually things have changed and you gotta fix them. But uh so in the I forgot where I was gonna go with that, but so so I get right, but fictionalization, that's where I was gonna go with that. Most people, like I've got a book, how to write a book and get it published, hints, tips, and techniques. The old saying, write about what you know, right? Like the old dragnet TV, the names have been changed to protect the right, you fictionalize parts of reality and write about what you know mixed in. Now, obviously, you don't know about killing, but so you're taking the fictionalization for like I don't know terrorism personally myself, though I've got terror strikes coming soon to a city near you, so I can relate in a way, right? I get to kill people in that book, so uh that's kind of a fun thing in a way, right, Charles? It's you can the old saying, like living vicariously through others, you kind of get to break the law through your fictional characters.

SPEAKER_00:

Well, that part of that's true. We brought in some people that we have known actually come across. Yes, one was a uh bank robber, and one was drug drug, an actual drug dealer that had apparently when I talked to the FBI about him. He apparently had uh killed his first wife to be able to get the insurance money to start his drug business. Uh, you know, there's some there's some things that you can't not hear. You just don't you're you're you're you're always it's like, man, I'm I'm gonna I'm gonna remember that story for a long time. So uh yeah, we uh we do get uh some uh creative license to that creative yeah, creative people that uh we've come across. And uh yeah, we do sanitize them just a little bit, but boy, they make great like we get some great characters in our uh and they are our series and our books and backstories and short stories. So uh a lot of us just like you. I mean, we get to talk to new people, uh we get to find out some different you know what were you doing in you know when you were 13 kind of thing. And you get these these uh snippets of like, yeah, I could use that for uh you know a real you know a real murderous character in number 10 or number nine. And uh we yeah, those are the those are the things we get to uh you know people that we've met and and perhaps didn't really work real well with them.

SPEAKER_01:

Maybe we didn't like them, maybe and maybe you were afraid they might murder you.

SPEAKER_00:

Well uh suffice to say we got even with those people.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, Rox, I hear exactly what he's saying, like my terror strikes book. I I was never in the CAA or the FBI or a law and but I know those types of people, I don't out them as sources, but I know things like you know things, learn things that then again we can then all fictionalize to a degree, right, Rox?

SPEAKER_02:

Exactly, and we've been fortunate enough to be able to travel all over the world. So the crazy people that we've met, you know, we either we either slice and dice personalities together to make composite characters, yes, yeah. And and it works, it just works, and everybody says, Oh, this technology can't be real, yeah. Well, it is because we do our research, and that's very important to us, yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

Charles Wright, yeah, composite for those that don't know what a composite character is. If you've ever saw Patriot Day with Mark Wahlberg, he was a composite character, they couldn't put all six people. He was kind of molded into being in the dramatic representation in that movie of the Boston Marathon Bombing Day. The movie would be too long, there'd be too many people, so it's like six people get squished into this one guy to represent thoughts, fictionalizing real drama. And it sounds like you've done a little of that here, right, Charles?

SPEAKER_00:

Probably more than just a little, but uh and and just uh truth be told, we get into some of these book sessions, Rox and I, because when I we uh we script out the uh the uh an outline and start you know taking turns, patting it back and forth using an R our pen pending technique of literary ping pong to be able to write. And then the characters start getting that extra edge to them, and before we know it, it's not uncommon for them to be telling us, no, no, I need to be doing it this way. This is the character that you started. This is what this is what I want to do. Uh it surprises us. I just um yeah, yeah, but it but uh it's not it it it works.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, it's like rocks, it's like Charles anticipated my next question. How does indeed a team, a duo work, right? Uh you you're both kind of throwing things into the outline, and uh, do you write a little bit of something, throw it to him? He he may have written a little of something else, you exchange ideas, uh exchange pages, talk about them, and then make changes from there. So we actually use a spreadsheet to chat trap all of our chat. I've done that before.

SPEAKER_02:

Our characters and the whole bit.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, me alone, one person trying to keep it straight. I've used a spreadsheet. So I can imagine how difficult it is when there's two of you are trying to work. I'm sorry, go on, Rox. I interrupted.

SPEAKER_02:

That's okay. So we combine it into a Word document. Charles will write one chapter he feels passionate about, I'll write one I feel passionate about, and then he forwards it and I kind of smush it together. That would be the technical term.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, it well, yeah. Charles, it's like being an individual author, an editor, of course, then goes through my stuff and makes suggestions. I would imagine you kind of act as each other's editor until a book is done, and then some other final other editor looks for the grammar and the spelling and uh well, maybe change this or that, right? And you all haggle that out then, yes?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, so while uh it's uh it's not uncommon for us to uh, yep, as you as you suggest, edit we're editing as we're going along, okay. This is wrong. This okay, the wrong word choice, okay. But the the important piece for us as dual authors, co-authors, is to make sure that when you finish the book, it reads like it's a single voice. It's not, oh, Charles did this one, Rox did that one. No, if we do that, then it's no good.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, oh yeah, then you're confusing the reader. Yes. If they can tell it's two different people, it's a problem. Yes, Charles?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, so the uh our our first line editor, it's not a common for her to come in and say, Who wrote this? And if I if the if they can't figure out which one of us is, then our success.

SPEAKER_01:

Now, Rox. I uh yeah, Charles mentioned like word choice. Like in my terror strikes coming soon to a city near you book, I engage in some wordplay. Do you do the same? Like in mine, I'll give one example. The editor comes back. Well, why is this word here, right? Well, that's kind of a foreshadow setting up something. Like I in my Naperville chapter go into savior, s a v o yeah, S A V I O R lowercase, as in a worldly savor. You need an EMT to be your savior that day, as opposed to your Lord and Savior, capital S-A-V-I-O-U-R, spelt the religious way. Do you engage in any wordplay like that in your works?

SPEAKER_02:

Sometimes, but we we actually live with VSARS by our side. Just so we don't repeat. You know, we as humans, we tend to use words we're comfortable with, but it gets repetitive if we say the same words over and over and over. And I agree with say savior.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. But an editor, unless if they know your work and what you're getting at, like he he questioned it. Is well, you read the context of the paragraph and it makes sense. But like another word choice somewhere else in the book, Charles, it's like, well, why are you using that word? I would suggest. No, it's gotta be that word because it's kind of a tease, a foreshadow to something else that's coming later. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

Now, one of the things we do, uh, we don't, as Rox has suggested, we don't spend a lot of time on that kind of word manipulation. But we do as a as a way, sort of as a way to poke fun at ourselves because we're technologists. Well, we uh we take acronyms and we make up some of the most unusual. We actually have a full library of acronyms uh we publish on our website, and one that uh will probably resonate with you, uh, since uh you're a technologist uh person, because it's really easy for us technologists to slip into acronym Hell and not uh just kind of blather on and people go, Why? Yeah, yeah. So we have one main character that's throughout all the books, and he's an AI-enhanced supercomputer that uh works on the with the the good guys to help uh solve the uh the the immediate problems that the bad guys are shoving at them. And his name is Sikabod, and it stands for Immersive Collaborative Associative Binary Override of Deterministic Systems. That means nothing in any language except maybe Fortran.

SPEAKER_01:

That's a that's a old computer language for those who don't know. Yeah, I used to code in Fortran.

SPEAKER_00:

Well, I cracked me out to see that you know Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are sending back signals based on their Fortran programming that's that's now out for 30, 40 years. Of like, who remembers that kind of detail? I guess people like you and I, Joe. Yeah, yeah. There it is.

SPEAKER_01:

Uh, you agree with that, Rox. You're too young for Fortran.

SPEAKER_02:

Oh, I wish I could say yes.

SPEAKER_01:

So did you do programming in your day, or were you more the administrat? I was more the administrative side, but I did do some programming.

SPEAKER_02:

Um early on, I did programming, but then I decided I I wasn't gonna be a good programmer. I I really like to get into different weeds than a programmer likes to get into.

SPEAKER_01:

For any fellow IT related people, what languages did you code in back then?

SPEAKER_02:

Oh my gosh. I'm sorry, Joseph.

SPEAKER_01:

Okay, right. It's it's something you've purged from your memory, it's no longer needed, right? Yeah, it wasn't. Yeah, good point, Charles. Right. If it's not backed up, it's gone, right? And as the saying goes, if you got one backup, you got zero backups. Tapes fail, disks fail. That's why you've got to back everything up. Uh, and IT uh PSA for all you laptop and whatever you right, you gotta back up to an external device and disks and the cloud. You've got to be multiple places, or you're done if the crash actually happens. Yes, Charles.

SPEAKER_00:

Exactly. So uh yeah, we uh uh yes, we use the uh belt and suspenders approach to uh taking care of our manuscripts. So uh, you know, she's got them, I've got them, I've got them backed up, she's got them backed up. So we uh you know I keep I keep all my backups in the uh in the safe with the uh where the nerve gas canisters are. So if anybody you know is uh is really really passionate about taking them, good luck with that.

SPEAKER_01:

Rox, have you ever had a situation where something happened, something got lost, and you needed to retrieve something out of backup?

SPEAKER_02:

Oh all you have to have is happen once you know you have to keep it in two places, period, if not more.

SPEAKER_01:

Exactly, exactly. I I generally write my chapters with A through Z extensions, right? Keep different versions of the same chapter, let alone all the books and all the chapters saved various places, because uh right, Charles, you you I like I don't want to do how to write a book and get it published, hints, tips, and techniques. You don't want to delete anything, you want to strike through what you think you're gonna remove because if you want to put it back later, it's still there and you can take the strike-through off for those strike through right is the the the words you put the line through it. We know it on paper in Microsoft Word and most uh writing programs, you can do a virtual strike through, so it it's still there. Have you ever had a case like that, Charles, where ah we're gonna throw this out, but you thought and struck it through, didn't throw it out and recovered it later?

SPEAKER_00:

I'm a digital pack rat, so no, I don't throw anything out. You know, it's uh it gets a different, I get it gets a different version, different date. And yeah, there have been times, even as meticulous as we are both are, version control is a nightmare. And it's like, okay, oh yeah, well, it it's probably you know, you two noodles, you know, you're uh shipping uh file files back and forth. Oh duh, of course, you know. Now, now for single authors, it's the same problem because oh, which version did I send the uh the editor? What version did I get back? And the genre editor gave me some edits, and I oh my god, I've lost like version control is job one when we're writing. I promise you that. You agree?

SPEAKER_02:

We use dates, we don't use like A D C D.

SPEAKER_01:

Okay. Well, I like A through Z, so long as I don't have more than 26 versions of a chapter, I'm okay. But yeah, because dates and time dates isn't good enough either, though, right? Date and time stamps you need, and that takes a lot of characters, yes, Rox?

SPEAKER_02:

Um, you know, you just do it as a short date, right? 9 underscore 25 and 8 o'clock a.m.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. And if we if we're both of us handering handing on the same document, then there's the my letters, uh, my initials, version one or version two, and we you because sometimes we get into that cadence where it's like bouncing back and forth, and we're like, okay, uh, look at this, try this. Uh, we're I think we're on to something here, your turn. Yeah, and so uh version control on a daily basis, yeah, can be challenging. Um, but uh we've uh we've learned to be able to work through it after the uh after 30 books.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, so Rox, I'm hearing indeed a lot of back and forth at the actual written level. How often do you set up like weekly, daily, every other day, Zoom meetings today or telephone calls to have verbal discussions before or only throwing things in writing, Rock?

SPEAKER_02:

Um, so we actually do try to get together pretty frequently when I'm in Dallas. Because I live in Dallas and I live in Austin. But we do do Zoom meetings daily. We also do you know phone calls if we need to or chats if we need to to say, oh, I'm sending this. But most times we only send each other files once a day. Unless we find we've got a gap. And all of a sudden one of us will go, Okay, something happened. We we're missing this, and then we start hunting.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I I can't imagine because uh yeah, electronics, a file transfer might fail and you don't notice, or if it's sent via email, it lands. Oh, how did that one land up in spam? It said, but I found it, right? Type thing, Charles. Has that ever happened to you?

SPEAKER_00:

Oh, I've I've had a stern talking to with my uh my email provider saying if you ever do this again, you're going to be the next villain in our book.

SPEAKER_01:

That sounds good, right? Yeah. Yeah. Gmail already should be a villain in the book.

SPEAKER_02:

I don't know that Microsoft is that far out of that realm. I'm sorry. They're both too controlling.

SPEAKER_01:

Uh I was I said to both of you before we started record, we're so far so good. My macro suck wind slow 11 has not been cooperating well today. I've had several blue screens through the day. So if we freeze, we gotta come back. But the record should be safe in the cloud. So yeah, uh I'm not a macro suck fan either, but it's kind of the operating system that we're stuck with. I'm not necessarily a word fan either. I used to use you both remember Lotus Amy Pro. Oh yeah. Oh, be still my mark. You love that one too, Roxa. Oh, what or word perfect? How about that? I mean yeah, yeah, word perfect. Yep. All right. Well, I'm gonna start to wrap it up. Is there a website? I I like the series. Does the series have its own website?

SPEAKER_02:

It does. It's enigmaseries.com. Series, s-e-r-i-es.com.

SPEAKER_01:

All right, that's great. And that will, of course, be added in post for people to find. Thank you both for your time today. I've got a bazillion other questions. We could go for hours and no one would listen because it'd be too long, man. Right. To be able to talk to a writing duo is a wonderful change for me. So thank you, Rox.

SPEAKER_02:

Thank you very much. It was thank you, Charles.

SPEAKER_00:

All right. Thank you, Charles. Invite us back for another time, and you know, we'll we'll swap some more stories and uh you know we'll uh we'll at least get our our favorite adult beverage and uh yeah we'll uh and we'll uh well if I'm ever if I'm ever in Texas, I have been in Texas.

SPEAKER_01:

I used to work for Kmart HQ, of course Kmart's gone, but and I was in IT, the HQ administration, and we had a warehouse in Corsicana. So I'd been to Texas for computer equipment updates and whatnot in Corsicana. So yeah, been to Dallas briefly and whatnot, but uh never been there a long term. So if I get a chance, I'll look you two up. Please take take care, God bless. Thank you, sir. And smack Mickey upside the head for me the next time you see him. Any particular reason? Any particular reason why?

SPEAKER_00:

No, just for the hell of it.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

Well, we keep inviting him down here to Dallas. He's like, but it it it's in Texas. I I said, yes, that that's that's right, Mickey. Yeah, you he you understand geography, got it. Uh but uh he said I'm Canadian. I went, okay.

SPEAKER_01:

Uh exactly. I was gonna add that note. He's up in Canada, he's not used to that kind of heat.

SPEAKER_00:

Well, I mean, there's two weeks in uh every year where we don't have heat, okay? Yeah, we just haven't come down then.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. All right, take care, God bless. Thank you, Jerry. Thank you for having tuned in for Christitutionalist politics show. If you haven't already, please check out my primary internationally available book, Terror Strikes, coming soon to a city near you. Available anywhere books are sold. If you have locally run bookstores still near you, they can order it for you. And let me remind, over time, the fancy high production items will come. But for now, a starter, it's just you as a very appreciated listener by me, all substance, no flaw, just straight to key discussion point, a show that looks at a variety of topics, mostly politics, through a Christian U.S. constitutional influence. So again, thank you from the bottom of my heart. Take care. God bless. Like and subscribe to Christitutionalist Politics Podcast and share episodes. We need your help. For tuning in to books, there will be several different books, authors, several different authors, books, authors, weeks for October of 2025. And remember, you can check out my books at josephmleonard.us slash shop. And again, Joseph M. Leonard, it looks French. It's not Lennard, it's Leonard without an O. And I have to put the middle initial in there because there is a Joseph Lennard, who is also a Christian author out of South Carolina, so I have to make that distinction. And going in line with books, authors, weeks, I've joked as guests on other shows. I am not he, he is not me, and neither of us will be confused for Shakespeare. And frankly, most writers out there are not going to be confused for Shakespeare. They're not trying to be.

People on this episode

Head Shot

Joseph M Lenard

Host