Ask the Author: John Fenzel
Answered Questions (3)
John Fenzel
I'm currently working on another thriller that is mostly domestically based here in the United States. It deals with lots of compelling contemporary issues behind national headlines at home and abroad. My co-author is Colonel Tom Rendall (USA, Ret.)--also a Special Forces Veteran. We've had a lot of fun working on it over the past months...but still much work remains to be done!
John Fenzel
Ah! The age-old condition commonly referred to as "Writer's Block"! What is it exactly? It's been defined as "the condition of being unable to think of what to write or how to proceed with writing." For writer's it's easy to see writer's block as the enemy--an enemy to be vanquished outright. But I see it differently. I tend to see the "condition" more as a message and an opportunity. "Writer's Block" for me, isn't a "block" at all--it's your own subconscious telling you something isn't quite right, and needs to change or be further developed. When you look at it that way it's more of an opportunity to improve your writing and your story. Authors tend to write as authors--but not as readers. If we look at our writing the way our readers would approach our writing, the path becomes more well-defined and the destination even more compelling. Writer's Block is a terrible thing to waste!
John Fenzel
The idea for THE STERLING FOREST came as I had a sequel for my first novel, THE LAZARUS COVENANT underway. I was walking on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, past one of the Senate office buildings, and I saw a very elderly man--who was walking his two pugs. The question I asked myself at the time was, "I'll be he's had an interesting life, but does anyone know his story?" Several years prior to that encounter, I commanded a 10th Special Forces Group company with six Special Forces A-Teams--and we were the very first U.S. units to deploy to the Baltic States of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. One day, after a meeting at the Lithuanian Ministry of Defense, I turned the corner and encountered a man whose face was entirely concave on one side. I asked my Lithuanian counterpart what had happened to him, and he told me, "The KGB did that to him. He was tortured continuously because he was a member of the resistance." Tons of research and on-site visits to the Baltics, Europe, and Russia followed, but those two initial encounters were the genesis of THE STERLING FOREST.
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