Tim Knox's Blog, page 2

Elaine Neil Orr

Elaine Neil Orr is a trans-Atlantic writer of fiction, memoir, and poetry. Themes of home, country, and spiritual longing run through her writing.

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Meg Gardiner

Meg Gardiner graduated from Stanford University and Stanford Law School and practiced law in Los Angeles before becoming a prolific author of bestselling thriller novels.

The post appeared first on Interviewing Authors.

Stacey Campbell: Listen To Your Heart, Follow Your Dreams, and Say, “Arrgh!”

At the age of seven, Stacey Campbell was told by a teacher that she would never be the writer that she had hoped to be because she has a learning disability called Dyslexia.

Today, Stacey will tell you that having Dyslexia was an inspiring challenge that, although a life long struggle, has made her a more creative and determined person; and perhaps a better author.

For forty years, Stacey put her dreams of becoming a writer aside deciding to listen to what others said and not her heart. But after having children of her own, she found that she could no longer look them in the eyes and tell them they could be whatever they wanted to be in life if she didn’t do the same.

Now Stacey cannot stop writing and loves to help children pursue their own dreams. She is the author of the Young Adult books Hush, A Lakeview Novel SERIES and Whisper, A Lakeview novel.

This fall Stacey’s Middle Grade pirate book Arrgh will be released, followed by the third book in the Lakeview Novel Series, Scream.

Stacey will also release of her first picture book, Sock Monster, which will be on shelves Spring 2015 and is currently starting work on Silence, the fourth book in the Lakeview Novel Series.

Stacey Campbell Interview

Scroll down for a complete transcript of the interview or click the Play button below to listen to the interview now. And don’t forget to leave a comment to let us know what you thought of this interview!

Books by Stacy Campbell

Stacey Campbell Transcript

Tim Knox: Stacey Campbell is my guest today. Stacey is the author of the young adult books Hush, Whisper and Silence. That is a series called The Lakeview Novel series. She’s also the author of middle grade children’s book – I love this one — the pirate book, Arrgh! She’s also working on a picture book called Sock Monster. Now Stacey concentrates her talents on the young adult and middle grade market and I think, I don’t want to be all Dr. Phil here, but I think it’s because at the age of seven Stacey had a teacher tell her that she could never be a writer because she was dyslexic.

Then many, many years later she was at a restaurant and a reporter who was working on a series for the newspaper asked the adult Stacey what would you like to be when you grow up? Without thinking, without hesitating, Stacey said a writer. She went home that night, thought about it and started writing the next day and has not looked back.

This was a really fun interview to do, a lot of laughter here. Stacey and I just kind of got giddy on some things but there’s also a lot of great information, a lot of fantastic advice especially if you are dyslexic and you don’t think you can write a book. You need to listen to Stacey Campbell. If you are looking to write in the young adult genre, the middle grade genre, great advice there too. She talks about writing to the audience, respecting the audience and how to be successful in that genre. So let’s get started – a lot of laughter here, a lot of great advice. Stacey Campbell on today’s Interviewing Authors.

Stacey, welcome to the program.

Stacey Campbell: Hi, Tim. I’m happy to be here.

Tim Knox: Happy to have you here. We had so much fun on the pre-call. We should have just been recording that. You and I are both dog lovers. You do have a pet turtle named Todd, which I’m not going to say that’s an odd name for a turtle but it certainly is creative.

Stacey Campbell: Well our middle daughter, I grew up in a house without pets and our middle daughter really wanted a turtle and she loved Fox & a Hound and I believe that the hound’s name is Todd.

Tim Knox: That’s true, yes.

Stacey Campbell: We ended up with Todd the turtle. We’ve had him for like 10 years and he’s half the size of a basketball and he really just walks around the house and on a cold morning you’ll find him snuggled with the dogs. He’s figured out how to get downstairs by sucking in on his legs and arms and pushing and rocking. Every once in a while you hear thud, thud, thud and you have to check to make sure that Todd didn’t land on his back.

Tim Knox: Here comes Todd.

Stacey Campbell: If you have painted toes occasionally he thinks they’re strawberries and he tries to bite you which can really interrupt a good writing bit.

Tim Knox: I have a lot of dogs and they’re always licking and coming around but I’ve never had a turtle snap at my toes. I feel like I’m missing out.

Stacey Campbell: It’s a bit of a lost world on you.

Tim Knox: I appreciate you taking the time away from the menagerie to be on the show today. Before we get started let’s talk a little about your background.

Stacey Campbell: Okay as I kind of talked to you about before we started this whole business of the interview, I am a dyslexic writer and really kind of came into writing by looking at my own children and thinking that I can’t tell them they can be whatever they want to be when they grow up if I didn’t do the same. I think I always wanted to be a writer but in 3rd grade my teacher told me that would never be possible and I did the dumb thing of believing her.

So it wasn’t until the kids were born and really there was a street interviewer and he came to our table. We were eating outside. He was interviewing people for the local paper. The question was what do you want to be when you grow up? He put the microphone in my eldest daughter’s general direction and she said, “I want to be a princess.” She was probably six at the time. My middle daughter said, “I want to be a teacher.” Then our youngest looked at me and she goes, “I want to be a monster!”

Tim Knox: Did you say, “Sweetheart, you are”?

Stacey Campbell: Then he asked me and I just refused to answer. This was about the kids. I got home and started talking to my husband and he said, “You know what, honey, you got to just sit down and do it. You just got to write.” And that’s when I started.

Tim Knox: I find that so interesting because at the age of like seven you said a teacher told you that you could never be a writer because of your dyslexia. Things have progressed and I think we understand it a little better but to be seven years old and kind of have your dream squashed there had to affect you for many years until you finally went hey screw this; I can be a writer.

Stacey Campbell: Well it affected me until I turned 40. How’s that? It really did. I look at the schools and the teachers and dyslexia is so much more accepted these days and really if you look at fellow dyslexics you have everyone from Richard Branson with Virgin Atlantic to I believe I read somewhere Oprah’s dyslexic, Walt Disney, Einstein.

My personal belief kind of analyzing how I became a writer would be I couldn’t read so I had to make up stories and thus I was fundamentally a storyteller. People with dyslexia are fundamentally I imagine, I believe because we’re forced to do things a little differently.

Tim Knox: That’s one thing I was going to ask you about. Just because she said you couldn’t write, that didn’t stop your imagination, did it?

Stacey Campbell: Oh no, I have a very overactive imagination.

Tim Knox: Well you have a turtle named Todd. We have this. So between the time you were seven and the time you did start writing, you were creating stories and characters in your head. Talk about that.

Stacey Campbell: Oh my gosh I truly… one of your questions that you gave us to look over before doing the interview was do you think there’s such a thing as writer’s block? Immediately I said no because life is full of plotlines and literally everywhere I look there’s a plotline. If I’m hiking, you’re looking at different sceneries and different moss groves and you think, oh okay, this looks like a fairy meadow and you could have a whole plotline happening by this babbling brook. You go into a city and you kind of watch a coffee stand from across the street and that’s another plotline. So I mean really my imagination never stops. I’ve actually trained myself to write in the dark so I don’t wake my husband up at 2 AM when I start thinking of another thing.

Tim Knox: That’s hilarious. You need to put him on the couch when you’re creating.

Stacey Campbell: Poor guy. He’s stuck with me for 24 years. Obviously he’s patient.

Tim Knox: Your imagination then took off and you say something very interesting there. I talk to a lot of writers. In fact, Rachel Thompson and I were talking about this the other day. We sit at restaurants and we look at the people and we make up stories about them. I think a lot of authors do that. Do you do that?

Stacey Campbell: I totally do that. Have you ever played the game where you’re just sitting in a restaurant and not necessarily you don’t have anything to talk to with the other person about but you’re sitting there and you’re like, “Oh let’s make up their conversations. I think they’re doing this right now. I bet he just said that. Oh do you think that’s a first date?”

Tim Knox: My wife and I do that and she’s always like, “Would you shut up? They’re not deaf.” According to my wife I lack the ability to whisper. So I’m sitting there going, “Hey look at that guy.”

Stacey Campbell: It’s so true. I just recently started wearing eyeglasses and I still think that they’re sunglasses so I’ll get caught staring at people thinking I wish I had my sunglasses on because then they wouldn’t know I’m making up plotlines.

Tim Knox: Well that is the worst to be making up a story about a guy and then you catch his eye and you’re like oh he is a serial killer. Let’s talk a little about your work. You’re quite the accomplished writer and you work mostly in the young adult and the kid genre, right?

Stacey Campbell: I do. As I told you before my kids really inspired my writing and my first published work is a book called Hush. The idea was thought about during a dinner conversation, because I’m one of those weird moms that makes everyone sit down every night. Our middle daughter has red hair and she asked where the red hair came from. My husband said, “Oh it’s the Tudor side of the family.” My eldest who was 12 at the time said, “Ah, does that mean I can be a princess?” She definitely has a princess thing. We kind of laughed at her and said, “Well honey, several hundred people are going to have to die first,” and she said, “But it could happen. There could be a family reunion and everyone could die.” We thought, oh my God, that’s a great plotline.

So when she went off to boarding school… we live in San Juan so we’re very limited on our schools. There are islands off the coast of Washington state. So when she went off to boarding school I started writing as a way to stay in touch because she wasn’t in our everyday life. I guess she was via texting and Skype and always wanting cash to go do things but I sent her chapters and she’d send them back and she actually ended up writing a lot of the text scenes. That book is Hush and it’s the story of an unknown princess who is discovered by an undercover student journalist and then hunted down by terrorists on a campus of her elite boarding school.

So the second book in the series, Whisper, I used my middle daughter’s name, Lee, and she’s the main character in that one. I focused it. It was my first jaunt at paranormal and I focused it on the real ghost stories on this hundred year old campus. It was really fun to dive into that and research paranormal. Then the middle grade pirate book I have coming out this fall is very loosely based on stories my dad used to make you when we sailed around Vancouver Island in the summers.

Tim Knox: That’s the book, Arrgh! I just love that sound.

Stacey Campbell: Say it without gripping your fist and moving it across your chest.

Tim Knox: What’s funny is when I was doing my research on you I looked at your website and I looked at that and went, “arggh,” and I’m like oh I made the noise. That’s very cool.

Stacey Campbell: We came up with the title… one night we had done a cooking school in Healdsburg, California. We were with good friends and a second bottle of wine and all of a sudden they said, “Well why not arggh”? It stuck and my publisher just laughed. She has twin boys and the boys went crazy over it and now the book is called Arrgh!

Tim Knox: I think it’s really funny you named a kids book based on a drunken dinner but the irony is there. One thing I do find interesting, and I don’t mean to go all Dr. Phil on you but because at a young age you were told you can’t write and now you’re so prolific writing children’s stories – do you think these are stories you would have told or written if you had started at a much younger age?

Stacey Campbell: I don’t know. If I had started at a younger age, had I believed in myself at a younger age I might have tried… I have a couple adult books in my mind that have been kicking around for a long time so I might have tried to go into some different genres. I think because of the situation I really did gravitate towards this YA genre but also for another reason, which is the format. It tends to be a shorter chapter book, which is a huge bonus for a reader like myself who’s often distracted, a little easier format so I really do write for readers like myself who want action, something happening, a short chapter format so you have that feeling of accomplishment.

I guess that goes into am I a reader? Am I not a reader? I was not a reader. I could barely read by grade 5 but now I cannot stop. Someone who says I’m not a reader just has to relook at genre and format because there is no such thing as a bad reader. There is just a reader who hasn’t found their niche.

Tim Knox: How did you eventually overcome the dyslexia or do you still deal with it on a daily basis?

Stacey Campbell: Tim, I can out spell any Spellcheck program.

Tim Knox: I know you have issues with time zones but words are good.

Stacey Campbell: I have lots of issues. Dyslexia, I still deal with it every day. There’s little words that just I can’t spell worth beans. Defiantly – for some reason that word every time. I spell it so poorly that my Spellchecker, and I’m off Word and Apple, neither will catch it. But I’m very blessed because my husband’s a very good speller and my children are very good spellers and oftentimes dyslexia is passed down but my kids have seemed to luck out.

Actually I wouldn’t say luck out because I do believe that dyslexia is a blessing. But I can text them. I actually had one teacher text back and say, “Blakely’s in the middle of a class right now and this is how you spell the word.”

Tim Knox: Well you know, my Autocorrect on my phone makes me sound like an idiot.

Stacey Campbell: Have you seen those Facebook posts – 20 worst?

Tim Knox: I think I started most of those. Let’s talk a little about your process. When you finally decided that you were able to write and you got the idea, you wrote the book and the first book was Hush, right?

Stacey Campbell: No, Hush was my first public work.

Tim Knox: What’s the first thing that you wrote that you thought might be good enough to be published?

Stacey Campbell: That’s a little bit of a double question. Being who I am I still can’t believe I have something out there that’s good enough to be published. Every time I look at my name on a book it just sends kind of chills up my spine because I did it. Not only did I do it but I showed my children that they could do anything that they wanted. That was so important to me. I really second guess it every time something’s published. I’m like is that really me?

Tim Knox: Somebody’s playing an evil prank on me.

Stacey Campbell: It is. I remember getting my first copy of Hush and I’m holding it and my hands are shaking and I actually like pet the cover. Oh my gosh, it’s so soft. I was so thrilled. My first book that I wrote, because I really did start the day after that interview and just kind of sat down and looked at the keyboard and wrote my first page. The red marks, it was ridiculous. I started writing actually the first copy of Arrgh! and it was called Christopher and the Attack Mouse and then it was called Shanghai and it had a bunch of different working names. But I started that and I wrote it without an outline, which I think is a mistake but that’s another subject. It took me four years to write and it was an 80,000 word book.

I hired an outside editor to take a look at it and then I sent it in and I thought I was going to be the next J.K. Rowling. This was a great book and I got nothing but rejection letters.

Tim Knox: How did you deal with those?

Stacey Campbell: They suck.

Tim Knox: I personally paper my master bath with them.

Stacey Campbell: That’s a great idea.

Tim Knox: And I have a very large master bath.

Stacey Campbell: You might have to move into the hall and into the closet.

Tim Knox: I think what I need to do is find a better use for them in the bath is what I need to do. Here’s what I think about your rejection letter.

Stacey Campbell: I think you just take rejection with a grain of salt. It’s like everything in life. There’s ups and downs. I didn’t give up and that’s I think what I was most proud of because it was so disheartening but it was right around that time that Blakely, our eldest, who’s oh so the main character in Hush. But Blakely, our eldest, went to boarding school and I immediately started writing Hush and I left we’ll call it Shanghai because that was the longest working title; I left Shanghai on the counter for a long time. I had written the first two books in the Lakeview Series, Hush and Whisper, before I even went back.

Because my publisher with her twin boys said she’d really love to see something written for boys, something that was an adventure novel and really would attract boys who might struggle with reading or who might be avid readers but something fun that was good for both sexes because I think we’re a little heavy on girl literature sometimes.

So my publisher really said let me take a look at that. I said okay, give me two months. I did a very intensive rewrite. I chopped it from 80,000 words down to 40,000 and completely reworked the plotline, everything in it and by the time I finished writing the last page during the rewrite I had tears streaming down my face and I thought oh my gosh, I am so thankful that things turned out this way because honestly the first draft was kind of crap.

Everything happens for a reason and going back to how do you handle rejection – writing is a beautiful vocation but it’s a very hard career. Rejection, critics, everyone thinks they’re a critic nowadays. It all goes hand in hand but for every rejection there is a plus. It might not be at that particular second but good does come from absolutely everything. I read somewhere that J.K. Rowling had something like 50 rejections before the first Harry Potter was brought up. If she can get rejection letters I’m okay with it.

Tim Knox: Yeah good enough for her, good enough for you. Let’s go back a little bit and talk about how you eventually did get published. After you were getting the rejections, did you get an agent or did you go to a publisher directly? What did you do?

Stacey Campbell: I was so disheartened after everything with Shanghai and threw myself into Hush. I guess I should actually start calling Shanghai Arrgh!, which is going to be the published title but it does make me laugh every time I say it. But I was so disheartened with that whole process that I dove into Hush. I wrote Hush with an outline and it was just a brief outline but it kept me focused and I knew where I’d start the next day. Outlines don’t have to be outlines or in-depth but they are fabulous for keeping a writer focused.

I threw myself into that. I finished writing the first draft, I shouldn’t even say first draft because as you know, Tim, being a writer the first draft anyone sees is really like your seventh draft. I wrote that complete story in six months and it just lived in me and I think you could tell because the love was there between me and the characters and the plotline and everything was clicking.

I had just finished Hush and within a week seriously I saw a good girlfriend down at the grocery store. So our town’s quite small. We have two lights that start flashing at six, which is a really good example. So the grocery store can usually take someone about an hour to get milk because you run into everyone. So I was down there and I ran into my good friend and she works, she does editing for a publishing company out of Seattle. She said, “Give it to me, Stacey. I would love to take a look at it.” I gave her it and she liked it so much she gave it to her publisher and the publisher met the next week at lunch or over lunch we met and she said, “I want this. I want this project. I think this is great.”

The process with them to get it to the shelves was probably another eight to nine months of rewrites and going back and forth. When Hush came out she kind of looked at me and she goes, “I want rights to the whole series. I think this is great.” Then she again encouraged me to get Arrgh! and I am so excited for this middle grade pirate book. It’s illustrated and just that whole process of working with an illustrator is so energizing. It’s so much fun to see these characters come to life and work with illustrators and editorial staff.

So I think back to your question on agents. I think they have real validity if you’re going for one of the big five but if you can get into a smaller publishing house, I know for me it’s a better fit. I didn’t want to have to travel or do much with the three teenage girls and I always call my husband my biggest child because he’s the neediest. It just worked and she’s a fabulous person with a fabulous team behind her and really the whole experience has been incredibly positive. I think if I were to come out with a book in a different series or something I might shop around because it would be fun to say I’m with Penguin or something but at this point in my writing career I am so happy and so blessed for lack of another word for being part of this Green Darner team. Really it couldn’t be a better situation so everything does happen for a reason.

Tim Knox: It does. One thing that I think is so interesting is you labored over the first book for I think you said four years and then when that did not gain traction you were passionate and inspired and you knocked out Hush over the course of six months or so. I think that speaks a lot to exactly what you said. Things happen for a reason but the books get published for a reason.

Stacey Campbell: Exactly. That’s so true. Everything happens, you know, for a reason as we’re saying and now we’re being repetitive.

Tim Knox: But it’s such a great cliché.

Stacey Campbell: It really is. I always call the first draft my writing MBA or our Master’s in Writing because when you spend that much time researching and really I had to teach myself how to write and in the process teach myself how to be a reader because unless I read… I read every pirate book I think made – Treasure Island, everything and then you have to start reading books on pirate talk and believe me there are enough websites out there on how to speak like a pirate as well.

Tim Knox: Do you think pirates ever really said, “Arrgh”?

Stacey Campbell: No.

Tim Knox: It’s just a marketing term, isn’t it? But you can’t hear the word arrgh without going, “Arrgh!” It’s the only word like that in the whole language ever. Arrgh.

Stacey Campbell: My husband actually interestingly enough, we met sailing. I was about 60 feet up the rig of a sailboat fixing a halyard and he asked me out and I figured anyone who could ask me out when I was in a harness was probably a pretty good guy. Our background has always been sailing and so we knew the terms, we knew everything. I had actually been onboard several square riggers and just wanted to get it right. We were lucky enough to go sailing down the Caribbean and I spent a ton of time down in museums and in Antigua there’s some great museums and history on what the islands were like at the time. That just inspired that story even more to make it correct.

Tim Knox: That’s one thing that I find really interesting is the amount of research you put into a children’s book. I think you do that because you respect the reader.

Stacey Campbell: Kids are so much smarter than we give them credit for. They blow me away and I guess it’s that that I want to write for because they’re just unbelievable. Their knowledge and their depth, I mean tell me an eight year old who can’t out-pirate talk me because they’re amazing and they know everything. You get into research. You have to make it correct for them because you’re right, it is about respecting your audience and respecting your reader.

Tim Knox: I’ve talked to others that write for this genre, the young adult, and they say the same exact thing. Kids are so smart. I would never, ever disrespect them and dumb down the prose just because they’re kids.

Stacey Campbell: And they’re the first to call you on it too.

Tim Knox: They are. They’re really honest, aren’t they?

Stacey Campbell: They’re brutally honest but it’s kind of fun because when you’re looking into their little eyes and they’re saying, “Well Mrs. Campbell, you’re wrong,” you’re going yeah, maybe I am.

Tim Knox: It’s horrible to go to a book reading with a bunch of 12 year olds who are not happy with you.

Stacey Campbell: I’ll take a room full of kids any day. They just inspire me every second. I’ll usually go into a classroom and one of the first things I’ll say is, “Does anyone here have a learning disability? Does anyone have a hard time spelling or reading?” You’ll always get those few timid hands and I shook my hand right up and said, “Well I do too,” and all of a sudden their faces become big and happy and they’re kind of reassured I guess by seeing an adult who can admit it as well and seeing what that adult can do. If you have that room full of kids, how can you not want to be more for them?

Tim Knox: Right, exactly. Let’s talk a little about character development because you said in Hush, in that series, you kind of based them on your daughters. When you’re creating a character like that how much is based on people that you actually know and how much is based on your own imagination?

Stacey Campbell: I believe it was Stephen King who once said, “90% of all fiction is just non-fiction with a twist,” and that’s very, very true. For my characters, actually for all characters I think you know them a little. The main character in Hush is this teenage girl named Blakely but her character is actually probably a combination of about 10 people. I think if I wrote her just as my daughter my daughter might wound me.

You take all these aspects from all these people and you mix them. When I’m writing characters I have a form that I fill out. Really I go right into not only their physical attributes but what do they think of themselves? What are their life goals? What sports do they play? What music do they like? What does their room look like? All of those things help you build what you write and hopefully someone believable enough with faults just like the rest of us, with faults that make the reader connect with them.

Tim Knox: So you really do deep background on these characters.

Stacey Campbell: I do. I like to know them. They’re part real and they’re part my imagination but if you don’t know your character then you can’t write your character.

Tim Knox: I’ve had a lot of fiction authors, especially ones that are writing in the mystery and thriller genre, talk about how their characters actually take over the story sometimes. I know I was talking to Diana Gabaldon, who did the Outlander Series, and she said at some point she actually has to reel the characters in and go, “What are you doing? Why are you doing this?” Do you have that same experience? When you’re writing do the characters sometimes just take over?

Stacey Campbell: Oh yeah, hands down and they’ll wake you up in the middle of the night or you’ll see them on the street and you have to look at the back and that’s part of that great thing called rewrites, which I actually do enjoy because you refine it and you bring it in. Sometimes my office will kind of I guess look like a recycling center because I’ll have Stickies. Each character will have a different colored Sticky and it’s to remind you, oh okay, here’s where that character is and they lead their own lives which kind of go with the plotline and sub-plotlines and you have to reign them all in so that… basically I’m babbling.

You have to reign them all in so that they don’t overtake the story. But yeah, my characters will wake me up in the middle of the night and all of a sudden I’ll be like, “Oh that’s how I can write that. That’s how that’s going to work out.”

Tim Knox: They whisper in your ear in the middle of the night.

Stacey Campbell: They really do.

Tim Knox: That’s hilarious and you’re like just don’t wake up my husband.

Stacey Campbell: Where’s the pad? I can feel the pen. I can write.

Tim Knox: Let’s talk a little about the marketing side of writing. As you know, writing the book is actually just a little bitty piece of the puzzle. It’s actually the marketing and the getting it out there and I think a lot of new authors are under the misconception, and I was the same way, that once I write the book agents are going to line up, publishers are going to line up. All I have to do is cash the check. In reality when it comes to your work you have to be an entrepreneur and you have to be a marketer. Talk about how you market your work.

Stacey Campbell: Don’t you wish it could be that way?

Tim Knox: You know, it’s so disappointing that it’s not.

Stacey Campbell: No one warns you. You sit down at your keyboard and all you want to do is create but you’re right. You have to market every day. You have to get out there and you have to interact and it’s overwhelming. I wish someone warned me. I guess in the beginning I marketed locally through libraries and schools. I got out there for book signings. Never discredit your local bookstore owner. They have a wealth of knowledge. Always make friends with them. When you go do book signings, always bring in fresh baked cookies.

Tim Knox: That’s a great tip.

Stacey Campbell: Really make friends with people in the business and that’s probably the start. Besides establishing a website and establishing your online presence… I kind of thought the online thing at first… I established my website and then I started blogging and thought no one’s going to want to read my blog. Now I have some fun with it. I try to keep them really short but you’ll get fans who will actually interact with you and it’s fabulous. Facebook, every parent has to be on Facebook because your kids are and we are at the heart of it big old snoops.

Tim Knox: What about Twitter? I think that’s where you and I first crossed paths. How have you found it as far as marketing your work?

Stacey Campbell: I fought Twitter and now I’ve got to say that I really enjoy it. I’ve met people like you and people from all over the world. I’ll try and get on at least once a day and really kind of interact with someone or comment and have some kind of conversation. It’s fun. I think there’s a lot of validity to it.

So Facebook, I actually quite enjoy posting pictures. My Facebook fan page is Author Stacey R. Campbell and I’ll stick little pictures. Like recently I’ve been putting pictures of the Lakeview Campus, which is the campus that Hush is set at and Whisper’s set at. I’ll post little inspirational things for writers. That’s really fun. Then Pinterest is all visual. What writer is not going to love Pinterest? You post I guess visuals of what you imagine your characters look like and what do you want to write and your inspiration as well as, you know, recipes and how you wish your house looked.

So Pinterest and Twitter and Facebook, I think everyone has to pick three or four mediums that they like and stick to it because a lot of times people will include LinkedIn, which I haven’t done and all these other things. You’ve got to choose what you can maintain. When you look at your media presence as an author it’s about interaction and about being with your reader and communicating with them and making it fun. Some people use it too much for sales where it’s probably more productive to use it as a ‘this is who I am and this is what I do’ and the process because you’ll get a lot more interaction by being true to yourself than just posting ‘buy my book’.

Tim Knox: I think that’s such a great point and I hear that a lot from the more successful authors. Don’t use it as much to sell, sell, sell. You use it to build relationships. And what you’re talking about with Pinterest and giving people a look at who you are and your life and this sort of thing, I think that’s how you build your band and you create those relationships with the folks that are going to buy your books.

Stacey Campbell: Exactly. It really is about establishing personal relationships and marketing let’s say 20 years ago before all of this was much different and these authors went on big book tours and they did flyers and things like that. Now we have the opportunity to actually directly speak with our readers and to interact and show them who we are. I know when I read something and I love it I’ll sit there and go on their website and I’ll join their Pinterest board and really interact. It inspires me to do what I do even more.

Tim Knox: Exactly. We’ve got a couple of minutes left. Let’s, if you will, advice to those authors out there who are thinking about entering the young adult market, thinking about writing for kids of all ages. Give us your best advice to these folks.

Stacey Campbell: I think the best advice I can give any author is not to give up. This world is so full of critics and people telling you what you can’t do. You’ve got to just listen to your gut. Write because it’s in your soul. It’s who you are. Don’t write for fame. Don’t write for notoriety or as you said before don’t write to make money because it just doesn’t happen that way.

Tim Knox: If it did I’d be making money.

Stacey Campbell: Yeah, exactly. Young adult is a very saturated market. There are a lot of books and I read recently that every day there’s 500 to 1,000 books that are launched. Really the way you can help another author is to be interactive and get out there. For people who want to write in this genre, keep it fun. Keep it light. Really know your character. Research is critical. I actually sat and I wrote down advice because I was reading those questions and researching yet again because I guess that’s who I am. I would say write every day, even if it’s just two lines in a journal. When I work with classrooms I always tell the kids just write.

You might be worried about your sister or your friend or your brother getting into your journal but a journal doesn’t have to be personal. It could be like, “I can’t believe Janet wore red pants with a blue shirt.” It can be more of, “Gosh, I was really inspired by the sunset.” Just two lines that keep you going and keep you writing. The other thing I always preach to the kids when I’m in classrooms is read. Read everything that you can get your hands on. Find that genre that clicks with you and just get out there. You cannot be a writer unless you are a reader. And don’t give up. Just flat out don’t give up and don’t listen to people who tell you you can’t because if it is in your soul you won’t be true to yourself unless you just do it.

Tim Knox: That’s great advice. You’re on book four of the Lakeview Series?

Stacey Campbell: I am on book four. I’m in the editorial process of book three right now. I just started outlining book four and I actually have a really neat project going on called Sock Monster and it’s my first picture book.

Tim Knox: I saw that on your bio. Tell us about Sock Monster.

Stacey Campbell: Sock Monster is what happens when you don’t pick up your clothes and I’ll leave it at that because it’s very fun. I’m working with a Seattle illustrator who’s just fabulous, Beth Thieme, and just really fun and colorful. It’s just the story of what happens to your clothes when you tell your mom you picked them up but you didn’t.

Tim Knox: That’s wonderful. Stacey Campbell, the author of Hush, Whisper, Silence, the upcoming Sock Monster and my favorite book, Arrgh!

Stacey Campbell: When Arrgh! comes out I’ll send you a copy.

Tim Knox: I would love to have that. It’s going to be about my speed maybe. Stacey, tell folks where they can find more information about you and your work.

Stacey Campbell: First off, Tim. Thank you so much for having me today. This has been a blast. You can find me on my website, StaceyRCampbell.com. My Facebook fan site us Author Stacey R. Campbell. Twitter is @StaceyRCampbell. We have a theme going. I believe Pinterest I’m at Stacey R. Campbell as well. Off the top of my head I can’t remember. That’s awful.

Tim Knox: I’ll go look at it for you. I think to end up, here’s a little riddle for you. What letter of the alphabet is the favorite of pirates?

Stacey Campbell: Arrgh.

Tim Knox: Arrgh. Thank you, Stacey.

Stacey Campbell: Thank you, Tim.

 

The post Stacey Campbell: Listen To Your Heart, Follow Your Dreams, and Say, “Arrgh!” appeared first on Interviewing Authors with Tim Knox, Author, Talk Radio Host, Serial Entrepreneur, Small Business Expert.

Allan Karl: One Man’s Quest For Culture, Cuisine, and Connections

Allan Karl has never been able to sit still. With an insatiable passion for travel, culture, people, and food, he has explored more than 60 countries all over the world, photographing, writing, and blogging about them along the way.

Allan is an author, photographer, professional keynote speaker, committed adventurer, and digital marketing strategist.

In his bestselling book, FORKS: A Quest for Culture, Cuisine, and Connection, Allan brings to life his three-year solo journey around the world on a motorcycle.  The journey — and the book — make for a fascinating tale.

Allan Karl Interview

Scroll down for a complete transcript of the interview or click the Play button below to listen to the interview now. And don’t forget to leave a comment to let us know what you thought of this interview!

Order FORKS by Allan Karl

Allan Karl Transcript

Tim Knox: Hi everyone and welcome in to another edition of Interviewing Authors. Let’s start this show with a question for you:Have you ever thought of just chucking it all and traveling around the world?

That’s exactly what author and photographer Allan Karl did a few years ago. He sold his belongings and started an around the world trek that took him 3 years, through countries in South America and Africa, much of that time spent on a BMW motorcycle.

Allan traveled more than 60,000 miles, through 35 countries, and the result is the amazing book called Forks – A Quest For Culture, Cuisine, and Connection.

Forks is part travelogue, part cook book, part memoir, part commentary; with more than 700 original photos and 40 recipes from around the world.

What made this interview so interesting – other than the obvious – was Allan’s view of the world after taking this trip. At one point he wrecked his motorcycle and broke his leg in the Colombian jungle and could have died if not for the help of the locals.

There were run-ins with unsympathetic border guards and encounters with armed bandits, but at the end of the journey Allan summed it up this way, “Though I set off on this journey alone, I was never alone. It’s easy to connect with people – with humanity – even in the most challenging and dangerous circumstances.”

An amazing story, an incredible journey, and a pretty dang good interview, if I do say so myself.

So here now is my interview with Allan Karl, author of Forks – A Quest For Culture, Cuisine, and Connection, on today’s Interview Authors.

Tim Knox: Allan, welcome to the program.

Allan Karl: Hey Tim, great to be here.

Tim Knox: I’m excited to have you here. You’ve had quite the journey that we’re going to talk about today. Before we get started though if you will, give the audience a little background on you.

Allan Karl: Well my name’s Allan Karl and I am an author, adventurer, a professional inspirational speaker and I have built a business, a couple businesses in digital marketing and branding and brand strategy. My focus today of course is writing and travel.

Tim Knox: How long have you been a writer? Before the book came out, did you do any writing before that?

Allan Karl: You know obviously in the marketing and advertising business I’ve written lots of copy, advertising, sales copy. In addition a lot of times I was writing stories for public relations that would not necessarily be an entire marketing purpose. I’ve always written a journal and on this journey before I even started this book, I was blogging and probably was blogging before people knew what the word was. I think my first blog was in 2001.

Tim Knox: You were one of the early bloggers back when everybody was going what the hell is a blog?

Allan Karl: Yeah, what’s that word?

Tim Knox: The book is called Forks. Tell us about the journey behind the book and then we’ll talk specifics about the book.

Allan Karl: Yeah so the short title’s Forks and then the long title is Forks: A Quest for Culture, Cuisine, and Connection. The book is really chronicles and brings to life my three year journey around the world alone on a motorcycle.

When I first set out on this journey I knew that there would be lessons and there would be stories to share and I thought I’d come back and write a typical travel memoir. However, when I did come back I realized that the real way to bring this story to life was to allow readers to experience the world in many ways how I saw it. That’s through photographs. This book’s got 700 photos in it. And to feel it through the narrative and the stories of connection and sometimes even collision. Then of course to taste it in the flavors of the local food.

So I set about to do what the publishing, traditional publishing industry was unsure could be successful and that it is to bridge genres. Some people might call it a cookbook. Some people may call it a travel log and others may call it a photo essay, photo journalistic style book. It really brings the best of those things in a nice hard cover, a beautiful book – nice to touch and feel.

Tim Knox: Is it only in hardback?

Allan Karl: You don’t know how many times I’ve answered the question, “Is it going to be on Kindle? Is it going to be on the iBook store?” Eventually obviously I do want to do those things but there’s nothing like holding a book. It’s so right off the press right now that you can still smell that fresh ink.

Tim Knox: I love that too and that’s one thing about your book. I think the thing that I first noticed about you, Allan, was the cover of the book, the photography of the book. I want to go a little into that in just a little bit but I think the first question that comes to mind is why on Earth would a sane man get on a motorcycle and spend three years going around the world? What prompted this journey?

Allan Karl: Well you know my dream has always been to travel the world. I’ve always been a traveler and my passions have always been photography, writing and certainly I love motorcycles. One day I woke up and realized that I found myself out of a job. I quit the job from a company that I actually had co-founded. My relationship with my wife of many years had run its course and I was divorced.

I looked at these changes, these forks in my life if you will, as an opportunity to either do what I’ve always done which, be it marketing or a branding strategist and entrepreneur or I could pursue my passions and follow my dream.

So what I did is look at these changes in life as exactly that, an opportunity, and hopped on that motorcycle and three years, 62,000 miles through 35 countries, 5 continents later I found myself back and reliving that journey through about another three years of putting this book together.

Tim Knox: So there was the loss of a job, loss of a marriage and of course I’m sure you’ve been asked this question – was this a midlife crisis of sorts?

Allan Karl: I think it was an extreme route through a midlife crisis.

Tim Knox: I mean I bought a red convertible. You go around the world on a motorcycle for three years.

Allan Karl: Yeah, exactly. Believe me, when I first floated this idea around friends and families most thought I was absolutely crazy. In fact, strongly suggesting that before I go I might want to get my affairs together, maybe update my will.

Tim Knox: That had to be scary for your family. I can just imagine if I told my family I was going to do something like this they would be horrified. What was the response that you got?

Allan Karl: It was, “Are you sure you want to do that? Couldn’t you just get one of those around the world airline tickets? How about a cruise? A motorcycle?” When I shared with them the list of the countries I was going to visit – Columbia, Ethiopia, Syria, Sudan – they were insisting that I would not come back in one piece alive or that I would be ripped and stripped of everything I owned. They were fearful for sure for me.

Tim, in my mind I imagined things a lot different. I imagined a world enhanced by humanity, diversity and culture and that’s really what I set out to see. Regardless there’s bad people everywhere. You can be in California where I live or you can be in Alabama. If you tend to look for what’s wrong with the world or your situation you’ll tend to probably find that. Change your perspective and look for what’s right and you’re going to find that.

I imagine that our neighbors, our worldwide neighbors, these countries I was going to visit were really eager to meet and share and connect with me, together in my utopian mind I really believe this. We would all strive to make the world a better and safer place and as we get so much more connected through internet we’re seeing that happen already.

Tim Knox: And when you explained this to your family did they still go, “you’re crazy”?

Allan Karl: Yes, absolutely. Originally I thought it was going to be a two year trip but I found that at the beginning of the journey that I was going way too fast. I found myself falling into checklist tourism. The concept of a bucket list – let’s just say we did that. Travel should never be about bragging rights or checking things off a list. I did that. I did that.

So really for me I started to slow down and immerse myself in the places I was visiting and that’s where the food really came in. How many people do you know that might end up in a foreign country and they find a restaurant they can order a hamburger at? I don’t want to do that when I’m somewhere. You want to taste the local food and really immerse yourself and connect with people, learn about what makes that country, that person tick.

Tim Knox: So the title, Forks, does it refer to the forks in the road, the forks in life?

Allan Karl: It’s really triple and maybe even four meanings. The book was about forks in the road, forks in life decisions. Make the decision. Choose to do what you want to do, follow your dream, follow your passion. The other of course is the forks on a motorcycle or a bicycle is what keeps the tire straight and guides you, guides you through the turns and the changes and the terrain. Then of course there’s the forks that we eat with and when we sit down and break bread with each other and share and talk and learn about each other over a good meal or good drink.

There’s a fourth one. When I was writing the book I wasn’t necessarily thinking about it but the name of the book just came to me with this rushing, great feeling. Forks, if you’ve ever been to a doctor or play a piano or another instrument, we use tuning forks. That’s kind of how we keep in harmony, keep in tune. When we’re testing if our body is in tune a doctor will take a tuning fork and hit certain parts and ask if you feel that. Are we in tune? Is our body functioning properly?

So I think forks are real important in our lives in many ways so to whoever the reader is, which fork makes most sense to you or do they all?

Tim Knox: Right and which one made the most sense to you now that the journey is over?

Allan Karl: For me it was definitely forks in the road. I had come to the end of a marriage and an end of a job. I really did look at these things as changes. A lot of times when faced with change people tend to look at it with scarcity, as the adage goes, rather than abundance. What am I going to do now? What do we all do? Sometimes we fall into depression, maybe whine and complain about our situation, maybe worst.

For me, seriously as I said before, I thought these changes were not negative; they were positive. It allowed me to follow my dreams and pursue my passions. Part of what I speak about when I do my professional speaking and what my book is about is to be open, open to new experiences. Something might hit you like a 2×4 in the head like it did me. Instead of saying, “ouch,” say, “Wow, what can I do now and how can I leverage this change and learn more about myself and about others?” I really believe that the possibilities are endless when we just change our perspective.

Tim Knox: I agree. The one thing you said that resonates with me because it’s kind of a pun is that last definition of forks, of the tuning forks. I’m sure this three years that you spent did some tuning on your life. You’re probably on a different wavelength than you were three years ago.

Allan Karl: Absolutely. There’s so many lessons learned, whether it’s just the simple notion that we all know and when we experience it, it just rushes up and fills you with that great wonder – the kindness of strangers for example or the kindness of strangers exhibited in ways that those people I met on the road that seemed to have so little compared to Western standards yet are so willing to give you everything they’ve got.

Yet sometimes we as a society, as entrepreneurs, we’re big on security and fear that we might lose something. We tend to hold onto it really tight. I think that those things that we tend to hold onto too tightly, too much are the first things that we need to let go of. That’s when you really start to have this liberty, this freedom and be able to be open to new experiences and to be open. Really it’s about being open.

Tim Knox: Let’s talk a little about the logistics of this. You make up your mind against the advice of everyone you know to go off on this quest. What were the logistics? You had the motorcycle. Did you ship it? How did this all go from the comfort of Allan’s house to being on the road?

Allan Karl: Yeah so I spent about two years planning this trip, researching, reading, learning. When I finally set out I kind of had an idea, a plan of where I would go and the first step of it was to go north to the Arctic Ocean. One of my goals was to go to the ends of the Earth, as far as you could go on a road and drive or ride in my case. To the north that’s the Arctic Ocean, a place called Dead Horse, Alaska where there’s a road called the Dalton Highway and it takes you to the beginning of the infamous Alaskan pipeline.

I did this for two reasons. I certainly wanted to get to the Arctic Ocean, swim in it but my plan was then to go to South America and that would give me this kind of reconnaissance trip to tune my bike to make sure did I forget to pack something? Did I pack too much? Is my bike not really tuned right? Is it out of kilter somewhere? I would have that chance one last time after going to Alaska doing a U-turn, coming back through the Western states. I followed the route of the Rockies coming back and I could go ahead and tweak my load, tweak my bike and tweak me and my mindset.

By the time I crossed into Mexico that’s when it’s sayonara; I’m on the road and the access to those comforts that we have here in the United States, whether it’s as simple as finding a part for my motorcycle or to solace and connection of good friends. I would still have that last chance. I found I packed too much so I had to alleviate stuff and still as I crossed the border and found myself in South America I still had too much stuff.

So the logistics of at least getting myself, my mind in tune but also the bike in tune, the load of what I was carrying and packing in tune, crossed the border. I did have to ship the bike over oceans a couple times. The first time was from Buenos Aires in Argentina to Africa, to Cape Town. That went on an air freight, put it on an airplane and I flew myself to meet up with it.

Then when I was done with the journey I finally shipped the bike back over the Atlantic Ocean north through Baltimore and from Baltimore I rode my bicycle back to California through our own country trying to experience it like I did the rest of the world through the small towns and small back roads of America. I not once went on an interstate or a highway, all through little back roads. Well I went on parkways because I did do the Blue Ridge Parkway and the Natchez Trace Parkway, not far from Alabama.

Tim Knox: I’ve been on it many times.

Allan Karl: Through the Civil War route and partly through Lewis and Clark’s route. This trip for me was about learning not only about myself but about others and history, whether it was the history of Mexico or the history of Bolivia or Africa or our own backyard right here in the United States. There’s so much to learn here and that was my plan. I also put the bike on a train at one point I believe and it’d been on some other smaller ferries and boats for smaller distances but those two were the biggest hops.

Tim Knox: Right. Now talk about some of the countries that you did travel through and talk about the people and the food there. This ended up being, as you said, kind of a travel log, lots of photography but then there’s also the food aspect of it. At what point did you decide to make it to include the food as one of the features?

Allan Karl: Since I know right now we’re just coming off this wonderful World Cup fever here in Brazil. I spent six months in Brazil and there was one night. It was a horrible night riding my motorcycle because I tried to gauge my distances never to ride at night. Unlike the U.S. where we have these great markings, flashing lights, big barrels, cones – when there are obstacles in the road or you’re going through large farms and where livestock is grazing, typically there’s some fences so these animals don’t wander onto the highway.

Once you leave the United States, the safety of great markings and fences for farms and things like that don’t exist. Traveling at night is very risky because you could end up running into a buffalo or you could run into a construction. I mean there was places where bridges were out and there was nothing warning you that there was a bridge out.

This was a really terrible night. The rain was pouring. I couldn’t see. My speed was very slow. When it’s raining your visibility shuts down. You can’t be riding too fast. You’ve got to keep your eyes focused and it’s very tiring. So I found myself riding through night just to get to this next town and when I got there the guest house that I finally found to stay the night, the owner of this guest house looks at me and says, “You look very tired and very hungry. Come with me. You need a beer and some good food.”

We ended up in this non-descript restaurant. It didn’t even have a sign. Grandma back in the kitchen. She opens her refrigerator and pulls out these fresh fish just caught today and cooked me this fish stew simmered in coconut milk and made with fresh herbs and this red palm oil. This was in Bahia, north of Rio, and every time I saw it on the menu I’d always order it because not only did it remind me of Pepe, the gentleman who brought me to this restaurant, but it also reminded me of just the flavors of the coast – coconut milk, coconut palm trees, the red palm oil, waves crashing on the beach. It’s just gorgeous. Brazil is awesome.

By the time I had it for the fourth of fifth time I asked for the recipe and brought that back with me to the U.S. It’s the only recipe during the trip that I really brought with me. one night after being back for several months in the States I invited good friends of mine, Bonnie and Doug, over and I cooked for them this moqueca. I also had recalled a great fresh salad that I had in Syria of all places at a gas station where an owner had invited me for lunch.

I made those two dishes and Bonnie and Doug looked at me as I was telling them stories of my journey. They said your book of stories needs to include these recipes. A light bulb went off and I said, “Wow, you just hit the nail on the head, and photographs because I’m a photographer and these people, these things needed to be shared in those ways.”

I used my camera not only to take nice pictures that would make the pages maybe of a book or in a gallery but I also used the camera as a notepad, sometimes taking pictures of just things I needed to remember. I often ate alone when I wasn’t being hosted in a home and fed the meal but I’d be in a local restaurant certainly conversing with the people that worked there but I would be bored sitting there and I’d take pictures of my food.

As now as it’s become with Instagram and all this stuff becomes very much the thing to do but these recipes, these dishes I’d be reminded years later and I contacted people I met along the way and tried to get the recipes and remember these dishes I had. I went through the process of recreating the journey not only through those photos and writing but through the food.

Tim Knox: Did you have any interest in food before this other than just eating it?

Allan Karl: Yeah, in fact my wife had run a slow food catering business and I was always very into good food, pairing it with good wine, those things. Yeah, I had an interest and I liked to cook.

Tim Knox: At one point you were in Bolivia I think. You broke your leg or you wrecked your bike. Tell us about that.

Allan Karl: Oh yeah. This is where the family and the friends started to say, “I told you so.” The largest salt flat in the world is in Bolivia. It’s in the Altiplano, the high plains of the Andean Mountains. It sits at about 14,000-15,000 feet and it’s about 4,000 square miles which is roughly the size of the state of Delaware or about the size of the entire county of Los Angeles. This was one of those natural phenomenons, places that I’d read about, learned about that I really wanted to get to much like the Arctic Ocean.

On the way to this place you have to leave a city, the highest city in the world, Potosí, Bolivia. It sits about 14,000 feet in the Andes as well. From Potosí it’s about a half day’s drive, maybe some 300 miles on a dirt road. It had rained the night before. After a few hours of traveling on that road I ended up riding through a small settlement, about the only little piece of civilization between Salar de Uyuni and Potosí, Bolivia and which happens to be the place where all the buses stop and the people that are transporting goods back and forth between the two places.

The road was muddy, rutted and just nasty. My bike was slivering and sliding in this red clay mud, almost like a snake I felt like trying to keep the bike from sliding out from under me. All of a sudden the front tire dug into the mud, stopped, my rear tire spun up from under me. My bike fell, I fell on the mud and my bike which weighs about 400 pounds and I’m carrying about 200 pounds of all my earthly belongings. It lands on top of me and crushes my leg.

I needed to find a way out of there and this is where you rely on people again, the locals. It took about 12 hours from the time that I crashed and broke my leg until the time I got back to Potosí, Bolivia and ended up in a hospital there where they… this is the funny part of this. They X-ray it and confirm what I already knew. Yes, my leg is broken in three different places. Then they give me pills for the pain because I was in excruciating pain, especially after being transported in the back of what would be like an old 1970’s Suburban with a bad suspension and all. Every bump in the road I could feel in my leg.

Nonetheless, they give me pills for the pain and it’s the strongest that they’ve got here. It’s like a high dose of Ibuprofen. I think, “Great, here I am in one of the largest cocaine producing countries in the world and all they can give me for pain is Advil? Where’s the justice there?”

Tim Knox: That’s hilarious. That is funny. Were you really in the middle of nowhere when you had this accident? Were there people around at all?

Allan Karl: Yeah it was a little settlement. It was about a small town block of coffee colored adobe buildings. Again, this is almost the halfway point. There’s no cell phone coverage but they did have a radio telephone, like a ship to shore I would imagine out on a boat or something. The only way that phone works is when it’s clear skies. When there’s bad weather and you can imagine in the Andes it’s often bad weather.

They were on the phone calling this ambulance or this truck to come get me and before they could really confirm that the truck would come the connection was lost. That’s where a lot of my time, the 12 hours, I was waiting and really nobody knowing whether or not they got the complete message, whether or not they could come. It was a long time before it came but they did come.

I had to be Med-evac’d to the U.S., have surgery and then months later after rehabilitation and physical therapy I returned to Bolivia where I had a man watching over my motorcycle. That was another thing my friends thought. “Your bike will never be there. Why are you going back? Haven’t you had enough? You busted your leg, dude.” No, I went back not to quit, never to quit, never to give up. My bike was there and I continued the journey.

Tim Knox: That’s incredible. I was going to ask you what was going through your mind as you’re lying there in the middle of this little village in Bolivia going, “what the heck have I done?” Did it occur to you to question this at all or were you just hell bent on keeping on going?

Allan Karl: I was hell bent on keeping this going. I never once thought of quitting, though surprisingly most everybody else did, including the man watching my motorcycle. Probably about two months after I was in the U.S. still getting my leg back, trying to walk without a limp, all those things that we do when we recover from injuries. He writes me an email and asks me if I’d sell the motorcycle since I wasn’t going to come back.

I have to tell you that there was just no way. I was going back. I was going to the very bottom of South America to Tierra del Fuego and I needed to get to Salar de Uyuni. I didn’t even get there. I broke my leg on that road. I said I got to see the Salar. I got to get to the bottom and I got to get to Africa.

Tim Knox: Now what was the impact other than your broken leg? How did your body hold up? You’re not an 18 year old.

Allan Karl: Not at all.

Tim Knox: How old are you?

Allan Karl: During the trip I was in my mid-40s so I’m early 50s now.

Tim Knox: I’m in my 50s and I get stiff going to the bathroom. How do you ride a motorcycle that much and what was the impact on your body?

Allan Karl: Well interestingly I would try to do as much exercise and I didn’t necessarily work out but I would do what I call motorcycle yoga. That is on long stretches I would do stretching moves and twisting your body around as much as you can on a motorcycle. Certainly when I stopped I would always mostly do stretching. I found that worked a lot.

I have to say that in some areas just… the clutch on my motorcycle is very tight. It’s a tough clutch. When I first got back after this broken leg I hadn’t been on a motorcycle for months and in the point leading up to the accident pulling on the clutch, you know, have you ever used those wrist strengtheners?

I got back and I hadn’t been doing any wrist strength. I was so focused on the trip. The first couple of weeks I found myself really cramping and pain in my left wrist, the clutch wrist. I was like why is that? It occurred to me oh it’s that clutch, particularly because the roads right when I returned to Bolivia… Bolivia, only 20% of that country’s roads are paved so they’re dirt and you’re constantly feathering the clutch making sure when you’re driving through sand or really rough terrain. You’re using that clutch a lot.

I would certainly be sore in the butt after a long day. But it was taxing and I would have to stretch because I would feel cramped. Like you said, going to the bathroom. That really worked for me. If I didn’t do that I would be this hunched over guy always on that motorcycle. Particular in bad weather you tend to tense up on a bike and that tension you put through your body can be devastating.

Tim Knox: You mentioned that a lot of this trip you were alone. Did you ever get lonely out there?

Allan Karl: You know, that’s a really good question. I have to say that I was never lonely but I found myself experiencing some amazing things, whether it is the connection of a person, the beauty of some natural place or tasting an incredible meal that I often would say I feel a little bit selfish because I need to share this. I wish there was somebody here. Look at that view. Isn’t this cool? We’re hanging out with this 105 year old guy and he’s introducing us to seven generations of his family and eating this amazing, different food that would be hard to find in the States? Often I thought I do miss that, sharing that.

If I was ever lost, even lonely or hungry I found that if I just opened my eyes, opened my mind and turned around someone was always there.

Tim Knox: Let’s talk a little bit in the time we have left about the photographs that you took. I’ve spent probably way more time than I should have on your website looking at these photographs. These are amazing. Talk about the way that you got folks to pose in these photographs. You’ve got a lot of nature shots here, just incredible. Talk a little about the photography aspect of the book.

Allan Karl: I love photography and I love beautiful nature photography and I love capturing phot-journalistic style photography. What really inspires me is connecting with people. Rather than just doing man on the street quick, flip out the camera and try to catch somebody. A lot of times if you take a picture of somebody in a foreign country and you don’t ask them you might rub them the wrong way. Some people are really offended. Some people get downright angry. I felt that the best way to capture the people was to connect with them, get to know them the best you can in the time that I’ve got.

So those portraits, some of those very natural portraits kept capturing people. I remember one Ethiopian monk that I met at a monastery island and they’re very strict. The Ethiopian Orthodox Christian religion is about praying every day.

We had such a fun time. I got this guy and again he doesn’t speak English and I hardly speak any Amharic, the language the Ethiopians speak. Somehow we connected through sharing. It’s just that powerful gift that when you really find something, whether it’s using sign language, whether it’s walking and pointing and things like that. This monk started smiling and they never smile. That’s what I think is so much fun for me.

I think capturing vistas are fun but all you really need to do to capture a beautiful vista is obviously be in the right place at the right time, make sure the lighting’s right and have a good eye for composition. To capture a person, to me I’d much rather spend that time instead of waiting for the light and hiking miles and miles. It’s like I want to connect with that person so the people shots are my favorite, although I certainly… trust me. I’ll hike and capture a good vista but I’m most proud of those photos of the people and capturing their expression.

Tim Knox: You did such a great job of it. A lot of the pictures of people remind me of the old National Geographic. Remember those layouts they would do? You’ve hit it right on the head here. This is good stuff.

Allan Karl: Yeah, I love it and that’s probably where I got my inspiration and if not maybe my motivation. In the basement growing up my folks had stacks and stacks of those yellow magazine. Nobody would ever throw away a National Geographic.

Tim Knox: Right mine too. It was a sin to throw those away.

Allan Karl: Yeah so I really, really enjoyed that and I’m sure I got that inspiration there. I carried three cameras with me – a point and shoot, a DSLR and actually a video camera. I thought I would get a lot more video footage but that’s another drawback of going alone. Really to do a video in the right away it’s best to have somebody to help there.

Photography is such a passion. I shot over almost 60,000 photographs during my three years. Now not all of those are good of course. There’s a lot of real bad ones. That was such a decision on this book. It’s 280 pages and it’s not 100% photo book because there are great stories in there and then the recipes. I had a hard time choosing the photos to go in. Some of them matches to the stories specifically and some of them were just to give you that sense of being there.

Tim Knox: Two of my favorites… there’s one of you going nose to nose with a camel and there’s another one. It looks like a station wagon that has three or four llamas sitting on top of it going down the road.

Allan Karl: Yes the llamas. I call that the Bolivian llama car. Since this book has come out, it’s probably the most talked about image. If there’s a “famous shot” in my book it is that llama shot. If you look close look in the back of the station wagon. There’s actually five llamas strapped to the top of this old Toyota and then in the back, in the little small cargo area there’s another two or three llamas. They’re coming from the market or going to the market. They use the llamas to make clothing, like the alpaca and llamas to keep shedding them and creating clothing.

That camel, another dream has always been to see the pyramids, the Great Pyramid of Giza. I didn’t want to just go there and take a tour. I had to ride my motorcycle there. I rode my motorcycle within 300, 500 yards of that pyramid. There are these men riding around on camels and this camel came up to me, looked at the motorcycle. It was kind of odd. I don’t know whether or not this camel had ever seen a motorcycle or maybe this camel was slightly envious. He was like, “Why don’t you ride that instead of riding me?”

Tim Knox: Exactly.

Allan Karl: He sat down there and he’s looking at me and I’m like this is just too beautiful. If you can say I connected with this camel and we are just staring each other down. It’s like me or the motorcycle, me or the motorcycle. Of course you could see the pyramids in the background. It’s wonderful.

Tim Knox: It really is a great shot. You also went to some places that I would assume could be quite dangerous. Talk a little bit about going through Syria.

Allan Karl: Syria of course for those of us that have never been to Syria and especially now with the conflict but if rewind back to about four or five years ago when I was there, it’s still… I think one of our presidents famously called it one of the axis of evil. I found that when, well the first thing is people told me that Syria is very bureaucratic as far as getting a visa. You can’t just show up there and get a visa and get access into the country. They’ve got rules just like we have rules for getting passports and things like this.

Their rule is a visitor’s home country has diplomatic relations with Syria it is required that you get your visa in your own country before coming to Syria. Now visa’s don’t last that long. You have to tell them which day you’re going to be in and they usually last for about 90 days, sometimes shorter. There’s no way I could know when I was going to get to Syria so I didn’t have a visa.

Travelers along the way said, “Allan, you’re going to find yourself in a really tough situation. You’re going to be at the border of Jordan in Syria and they’re not going to let you in.” Well for those people who know me know I never take no for an answer and I don’t believe that. I believe everything is possible.

When I got to the Syrian border I learned that my friends, my fellow travelers who had warned me were right. They would not give me a visa. In fact they handed me, the Syrian consulates website and phone number in Washington D.C. and said you have to go there. I proceeded to do what I always do and try to persuade them otherwise. They said, “No, this is the law of the land.”

I’m in Jordan. I took out my tent in my motorcycle, unpacked it, pulled out my sleeping bag and I basically camped right there. I was very odd looking there because it’s a busy border. There’s trucks going through. It’s a major commerce between Syria and Jordan. That’s the shift change for the guards over the 24 hour period I was there. I would try again and again. Finally I managed to convince the Syrian immigration and customs to let me in. I said, “Can we at least call Damascus?” They did it and let me have a visa.

Where it really gets funny and wow is when I drove, rode the motorcycle up to the armed guards who are guarding a big iron gate that needs to be lifted with a big counterweight to let the vehicle through, the guy waves his gun in front of me and says, “No, step aside. The chief inspector wants to see you.” I thought oh no. The guy who gave me the visa’s in trouble. They fired him, stripped him of his rank, whatever.

I get off the bike, sit down, I’m in my motorcycle suit. It’s hot. It’s desert weather. A few minutes later the chief inspector shows up and he’s carrying a tray and on it are three cups of tea. He said, “Mr. Allan before you go we must have shai,” which is the Middle Eastern word, Arabic word for tea. Everybody, there’s always time in the Middle East for tea, for shai.

He says, “We want to hear about your travels, about your country,” and then he continued to share information about his country and drew an outline of the shape of the country on the dirt ground in front of him with a stick and put dots in little places. He said, “You must go here, must go here.”

So I found Syria… that was just the start. What could have been a bad situation was great to the point where the chief inspector wants to be my tour guide. I loved it. In fact it astonishes people because the typical question people will ask me is, “What was your favorite country?” “I had such a great experience in Syria.” Part of that certainly can be having low expectations but part of that is the warmness of the people.

I had my only flat tire in Syria, in Damascus, in the city and this guy who worked at a local business there sees me outside sweating like a you know what and trying to get my tire off and fix my tire. He comes out. He’s dressed in a tie and a white shirt, nice slacks. He’s an executive for this business. He says, “Step aside. I have four motorcycles.” He wouldn’t even let me barely help him but he insisted on helping me get the motorcycle up and replacing that tube. Those stories go on. These people were just so friendly and so eager to learn and be curious about me and my country and my travels.

Tim Knox: Right. Was there ever a time when you… did you ever feel like you were in danger?

Allan Karl: Not once.

Tim Knox: Really, the entire time?

Allan Karl: Never felt in any sense of danger. I’ll qualify that I was in a really tight traffic jam in the high city of La Paz in Bolivia. It’s a very packed, crowded probably dangerous looking place. I was there in the midst of this crazy traffic. There seems to be no rhyme or reason. There’s no lines on the road. There’s no traffic lights and everybody seems to be going their own directions like bumper cars or one of those smashup derbies.

I thought I really need to get out of here. I feared more there that somebody would run into me than I was about somebody doing damage to me intentionally or hurting me or wanting to rip me off.

Tim Knox: Amazing. The book is called Forks: A Quest for Culture, Cuisine, and Connection. Do you have a favorite memory from the trip?

Allan Karl: There are several but one that always sticks out for me is in Columbia I was warned by armed policemen before heading into this one very remote area through the juggle, I was warned by these policemen not to stop. They said it’s about four hours and to just ride straight through. It’s a very twisty mountain road and each bend in the road, the mountains get taller and the cliffs seem to get steeper. It’s just lush, gorgeous jungle.

After two hours I see perhaps the most beautiful waterfall I’ve ever seen in my life and I have to stop even though they told me not to. I hadn’t seen anybody for hours. I stop and before I know it there’s two guys on either side of my motorcycle holding automatic weapons and dressed in jungle fatigues. I’m shaking and just at my wits end. My heart is beating so loud I’m sure they can hear it. My hands are shaking. I’m thinking, “This is the end.”

After some dialogue finally I try to… I say, “La cascada, the waterfall, incredible”, wow incredible.” One of the two guys turns to me and in Spanish says, “So you like waterfalls do you?” I said, “Si, si, si, si.” I’m like shaking. He says there’s another one in the jungle a kilometer away. “Follow us.” I’m thinking is this an offer or an order? Do I even have a choice and if I run are they going to shoot? If I go with them will I ever come out?

Well without belaboring the entire story and I tell this story in my professional talks because it’s just incredible. It takes an hour to go into this jungle. I’ll leave the mystery exactly to what happens in the jungle to readers of the book or those who see me but we finally do come to a waterfall three tiers tumbling in this clearing. We all laugh and take pictures and just connect. It occurred to me in that jungle, first of all, it was a place where we shared this universe feeling of enjoying a beautiful waterfall in a beautiful place but we also shared that powerful gift of connection, human connection.

As I headed to the border eventually, the next country, it occurred to me just what happens when you just trust yourself a bit. I didn’t walk in there totally blind. I had a gut feeling. I listened to my gut, my intuition and it turned out to be right. I came out alive. I truly think that they saw someone curious about nature, curious about their country and had no intention of harm. And I was alone on a motorcycle.

Tim Knox: They’re probably wondering who is this crazy man standing here looking at a waterfall.

Allan Karl: Yeah, in a place where the cartels and the drug runners are using this jungle and the policemen are even warning you to be careful.

Tim Knox: Allan, a great story. It sounds like a great book. I can’t wait to get it myself. Tell the folks where they can find out more about you and also buy the book.

Allan Karl: So the website is ForksTheBook.com. You can read a lot about the book there and there’s links to my other websites, including my speaking and my travel log. The book of course is available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble and your local independent bookstore. They might have to order it but it is available through major distribution. If you order it on my website I will sign the book for sure. It will be a signed copy. Any place you want to get it I would just love to hear from you and let me know what you think about it.

Tim Knox: Very good. Any future trips planned?

Allan Karl: Yes I’m hoping, and one of the reasons I stopped is because even though I was able to convince the Syrians to let me in the country I never could convince the Iranians to let me in so I want to go to Iran on my motorcycle and explore that country and then into Pakistan into the Karakorum Mountains on this wonderful road called the Karakoram Highway, which takes you through the most beautiful scenery in the Himalayas to the Chinese border, to the China border. So that’s next.

Tim Knox: Well on behalf of everyone who knows, loves and respects you, be very careful when you do that. Maybe you could wait a year.

Allan Karl: Let’s see how things shake out. Right now I want to get this book into as many hands and on as many tables as possible. I’ll be focused on that and then we’ll see where this goes.

Tim Knox: Fantastic. Allan Karl, the book is Forks: A Quest for Culture, Cuisine, and Connection. The website is ForksTheBook.com. You can also go to AllanKarl.com. We will put up links. Just go look at the pictures. I think you’ll order the book just based on that and then you get to try the recipes. Allan, this has been a pleasure.

Allan Karl: It’s been outstanding, Tim. This has been a great interview, one of my favorites. Thank you.

 

 

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Angel of Mercy Reviews From Obviously Brilliant Readers

That title was written with tongue firmly planted in cheek (insert your own smiley face here). That said, the best …

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Bob Mayer: A Green Beret’s Guide To Writing Bestsellers

Bob Mayer is the bestselling author of more than 50 books, who has sold over four million copies across a variety of genres. His books have hit the NY Times, Publishers Weekly, Wall Street Journal and numerous other bestseller lists.

Mayer graduated from West Point and served in the Infantry & Special Forces. He commanded recon teams, a Green Beret A-Team and held other positions in Special Operations, where many of his bestselling ideas were formulated.

Mayer’s obsession with mythology and his vast knowledge of the military and Special Forces, mixed with his strong desire to learn from history, is the foundation for his science fiction series Atlantis, Area 51 and Psychic Warrior.

Mayer is a master at blending elements of truth into all of his thrillers such as The Green Beret Series, The Shadow Warrior Series, The Presidential Series as well as his historical fiction, leaving the reader questioning what is real and what isn’t.

Bob Mayer Interview

Scroll down for a complete transcript of the interview or click the Play button below to listen to the interview now. And don’t forget to leave a comment to let us know what you thought of this interview!

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Bob Mayer Transcript

Tim Knox: Hi everyone, welcome in to Interviewing Authors. Bob Mayer is my guest today. Bob is a former West Point grad, Green Beret, Special Forces officer who became a NY Times bestselling author.

His science fiction series Atlantis, Area 51, and Psychic Warrior continue to be bestsellers. He’s 50 books in now, sold over 4,000,000 books so far, and they just keep going on and on.

Great interview with Bob. He is someone who has been around awhile and seen pretty much everything and is not afraid to talk about it.

Some good opinions here, some good advice. So if you’re an author interested in writing the kind of books Bob writes — or just an author in general — there’s a lot of good advice here.

Bob even has his own publishing company now called Cool Gus Publishing and we talk about that, too.

Great interview with Bob Mayer, NY Times bestselling author, former Green Beret; the author of one of my favorite books The Green Beret Survival Guide. If you’re writing any kind of end of the world you need to read this one.

So hang on tight. Here’s Bob Mayer on this edition of Interviewing Authors.

Tim Knox: Bob, welcome to the program.

Bob Mayer: Thanks for having me.

Tim Knox: We have a lot to talk about today. I appreciate your time. Before we get started though if you will, just tell the audience a little bit about you.

Bob Mayer: I’ve been writing for a living for about 25 years now. Before that I was in the military in the Green Berets. I was traditionally published for 20 years with 42 books and I went indie in about 2010. Since then I don’t know how many books I’ve published. I think I’ve got a little over 60 books out now.

Tim Knox: Wow, very prolific and you also started your own publishing company. I want to talk about the Cool Gus Publishing. We both have dogs named Gus so that’s a pretty good basis to start from. Before we go into it though let’s kind of go back. Have you always been a writer even before the Green Berets?

Bob Mayer: No, not really. I was a reader. I know there’s people who say, “I always wanted to be a writer,” but for me it was just reading. I read all the time. In the military they weren’t big on creative writing though sometimes it seemed like that. I ended up writing a lot of standard operating procedures, operation orders, deployment orders. I just started writing fiction when I had the time.

Tim Knox: You were always a reader. What did you like to read?

Bob Mayer: I read everything. I got to the point where… I grew up in the Bronx and I pretty much read everything in the local library and I had to go to the next branch over and the next branch over – a lot of nonfiction actually, pretty much every historical book I could get my hands on. I remember finding The Hobbit and being so excited that there were three more books after it. That was pretty cool. Just pretty much anything and nowadays, for the last 20 years, I pretty much read whatever my wife tells me to read. She’s the most prolific reader I’ve ever met.

Tim Knox: She has you trained.

Bob Mayer: Well she always chooses correctly.

Tim Knox: Very good. At what point did you go into the military? Give us a little background there. Did you go to college? What was your background?

Bob Mayer: Actually that’s when I went to the military. When I was 17 years old I entered the Military Academy at West Point, spent four years there, graduated, went into the infantry then volunteered for the Special Forces. I spent about 8-10 years on active duty and about the same amount of time in the Reserves.

Tim Knox: A lot of your books are about the special ops and Green Berets and the sort of thing. Do you pull from that time in the military? Is there anything real life there to the work or is it just kind of a basis?

Bob Mayer: There’s a lot there that’s real life but, you know, you have to change everything. Real life we always said it was 99% boredom and 1% terror. If you write the 99% boredom the readers would get really bored. One of our favorite sayings was ‘hurry up and wait’ or ‘prepare to prepare’. That sort of stuff doesn’t really make it into a novel but a lot of the missions we did you can just change the location and the reasons for it and a bunch of other things and they made their way into my books.

Tim Knox: How old were you when you did start writing?

Bob Mayer: That’s a good question. How old was I? I guess I was – let’s see, 1989 – 30.

Tim Knox: So the first 30 years of your life you were a voracious reader. You didn’t write much. What made you decide to flip that switch?

Bob Mayer: You know I think I was living in Southeast Asia studying martial arts and you can only do that for about 4-6 hours a day and I think I just got bored. I had the old original 512K Mac with me and I just sat there and said, “I can write a book. Why not?” I think I wrote three before I even did anything with them. Someone read one, the manuscripts and said, “Hey, this is like a real book,” and that got me thinking.

Tim Knox: I love that term – “It’s like a real book,” as opposed to a non-real book. What were those books about?

Bob Mayer: Those were all military thrillers. They started my Dave Riley series which actually I just picked up last year the 9th book in the series. My character’s aged. He’s in retirement now. He’s a little old, knees not so good, a little rough around the edges. I aged him with the timeline in between the books.

Tim Knox: So the first three books were Riley books in a series and then you took a break for him.

Bob Mayer: Oh no I wrote actually six books with Riley then I took a long break and then I wrote a character, Horace Chase in Chasing the Ghost, who sort of was a younger version of Riley on Delta Force Afghanistan, things like that. Then I realized why don’t I hook the two of them up? So I got them together in the low country of South Carolina in Chasing the Lost and I just really like it. I call it the Deadwood of the United States because the law isn’t the greatest down there in the low country. I’m actually working on the 10th book in that series now, Chasing the Sun.

Tim Knox: How was it going back and working with Riley? Did he say, “Hey Bob, where you been?”

Bob Mayer: It was interesting. I got emails from some of the guys I served with and a lot of them are retired now and they kept saying make him a little more beat up, a little more tired, a little crankier, taking a lot more pain killers for the various injuries and wounds he’s received.

Tim Knox: I want to talk a little bit more in a few minutes about your characters because you really do write some really strong characters and they’re not all perfection. They’ve all kind of had a real world slant about them but just going back, when you wrote those first three books and decided it was a real book, how did you figure out what to do with them?

Bob Mayer: I had no clue. I rode my bicycle down to the local Army post and found the writer’s marketplace. It was like 10 years out of date. I did everything wrong. I didn’t know about agents. It took me three years to get published. I was actually in graduate school back in the States when I got “the call”. I picked up an agent in the meanwhile.

It was a steep learning curve and that’s one of the big things I’m really big about. Nowadays with the internet you can do that. Pre-internet teaching writers to be authors was almost unheard of.

Tim Knox: That’s one thing that you do a lot now with your blog and that sort of thing. You’re very much giving back when it comes to teaching authors. So you found an old Writer’s Digest and did you just start querying agents?

Bob Mayer: Yeah I started querying agents in snail mail from South Korea.

Tim Knox: How long did that take?

Bob Mayer: It took forever. People get upset now if something doesn’t happen in a day. We’re talking three months if you heard back at all. A lot of times you just never heard back anything. So it took forever. Sometimes I think we forget what it was like when it was just snail mail and you didn’t know how a book was doing for 18 months.

Tim Knox: Some authors are a little spoiled these days. I just love the fact that you rode your bike down to the library, got a 10 year old Writer’s Digest and queried agents for that amount of time.

Bob Mayer: I didn’t query agents. I queried publishers.

Tim Knox: Oh did you? You went directly to publishers.

Bob Mayer: Directly to publishers and I think Avon requested a full and then another publisher. I just queried everybody. I violated the rules that they say of know who you’re sending to. They called me back and said, “Listen, we don’t do this type of book but we have an agent,” and that’s how I got my first agent.

Tim Knox: So you finally did get an agent through a referral from a publisher. Did he sell those first three books?

Bob Mayer: Yeah.

Tim Knox: What year was that? Do you remember?

Bob Mayer: First book came out in 1991.

Tim Knox: So I guess at that point did you make the conscious decision that hey I’m a writer and this is what I’m going to do from now on?

Bob Mayer: Yeah I did. Of course I lived rather cheaply in a one room unheated apartment for quite a few years. Plus I was still in the Reserves and with my specialty in Special Forces they called me quite often needing my expertise. If I needed extra cash I could serve for active duty.

Tim Knox: So you could just go be a Green Beret for a little while and pocket some money and go back and write. There’s a book in there somewhere if you haven’t already written it. You know that.

Bob Mayer: Oh yeah.

Tim Knox: You have been so prolific. You’ve gotten so many books published over the years and sold a lot of books. You started doing independent self-publish a few years ago. What made you decide to do that?

Bob Mayer: Actually what made me decide to do that was I got the rights back to so many of my books over the years and my wife and I sat there and we could never quite understand why no publishers saw that as valuable. I eventually ended up with the rights to all my books and even during my career I reinvented myself over and over. I worked through I think five of the big six back then. I just never understood why no publisher looked and said, “Oh my gosh, you’ve got the rights to 20 books. If we break you out with this new series we can take your backlist and make you huge.”

Nobody looked at it that way. They all kind of looked like, “Well you had your chance and you failed.” Regardless of the reasons why the books didn’t sell and we won’t get into that with the returns and declining print runs and all that.

So in 2009 I met Jen Talty, my business partner, and she asked me what I was doing with my backlist and I said nothing. She said, “Well have you heard about digital books?” We started out kind of slow. The first year we hardly sold anything but it really wasn’t until I decided the hell with it; I’m going full tilt into this. I pretty much gave up on New York. Things really took off.

Tim Knox: Once you made that decision things really took off for you. You’ve done self-publishing ever since. You also have your own publishing company, right?

Bob Mayer: Yeah I self-publish through my own company called Cool Gus and since we have the expertise we’ve picked up other authors. We stay small because I think you can only really work… we don’t view ourselves as a publisher. We’re more a concierge service for authors where the author comes first. The author makes all their choices. We have an author right now who Amazon Publishing approached him just last week and said we really like one of your books, which Cool Gus published, and we’re okay if he wants to take it there because that’s the best thing for his career.

So I think putting authors first is really critical. The business model has been really skewed towards publishers were more important than authors and that’s not the right way to look at it.

Tim Knox: That’s one thing I was going to ask you because you did have so much experience with so many publishers. The old mentality there was the author really was kind of a… you just turn out the books, we’ll do everything else and take care of it. Things have really changed now with digital publishing. Do you think traditional publishers are ever going to come around?

Bob Mayer: They’re our competition in a way and that’s what nobody wants to talk about. We are competing against each other. It used to be the competition was to get published. Now the competition is discoverability.

What I see happening is the rich are getting richer and the midlist is getting killed and that’s pretty much it. They’re going to give bigger and bigger deals to their top authors because if you look in an airport bookstore it’s a little mind-numbing. It’s the same exact names, nobody new. That’s all they’re putting their money into now to get the best return for their buck but they’re not racking the midlist anymore. They’re not taking chances on new people as much as they could. So I don’t know where it’s going to go with that.

Tim Knox: What are your thoughts on self-publishing as a whole? I think the internet really has kind of leveled the playing field. Anybody can be a self-published author now but you still have to have that talent and the ability to build an audience, don’t you?

Bob Mayer: Well my mantra is always the best marketing is a good book and better marketing is more good books but it’s a lot more complicated than I think a lot of people realize. When we start talking with an author, and we pretty much only work with previously published authors who have backlists. To explain to them what we do takes about 40 minutes because you think oh I just need a cover, format the book, get it edited, formatted, cover, slap it up there. The whole intricacy of indie publishing is much more. Right now everybody’s arguing should you go Kindle Unlimited? Should you go Select? Should you do this? Should you do that?

My business partner just had a phone call today. She was talking with Barnes & Noble about a new venture they’re trying. It’s really complicated. It is publishing. There’s a reason publishers are so big and have so many parts. You kind of need a lot of those parts. Now you can make it small and lean, which we do at Cool Gus, but still you cannot replace that expertise.

Tim Knox: Do you think the authors now have to be more than writers? They have to be business people, marketers; they have to do it all.

Bob Mayer: They have to do it all or they have to work for somebody who’s willing to do that for them. Most of your successful self-publishers work with a handful of people. Belle Andre a couple weeks ago was talking and she said, “I really need a CEO for my company or operating officer, somebody to handle all these details.” It just gets a little bit overwhelming, especially if you have multiple titles out there.

Tim Knox: And especially when you get to where she is. Even a lot of midlisters now that are making a nice living writing and doing this sort of thing. They have to be very entrepreneurial in the whole approach, don’t they?

Bob Mayer: Every author does. Unless you’re getting a seven or eight figure advance from a traditional publisher you’ve got to run a business. Even traditionally published authors have to run a business. You can be the greatest writer in the world. If you don’t know how to run a business it’s going to be a tough way to go.

Tim Knox: Yeah and that seems to be the theme. I’ve interviewed probably 65 or 70 authors and it is a running theme. You’ve got to be an entrepreneur now. The thing that I have seen and I want your take on this is a lot of the, I don’t want to call them old guard but the guys and gals who have been publishing traditionally for years. They’re having a hard time making the switch you did successfully from being traditionally published to doing everything themselves.

Bob Mayer: Yeah I know quite a few traditionally published authors and especially if they’ve been very successful it’s almost an inverse problem in that their publishers took such good care of them that they’re pretty clueless with a lot of the things. I think for some of them besides the issues of their backlist being held hostage, they’re very scared of going indie and that’s one of the reasons why Cool Gus we work with some of the authors who go, “I don’t want to do all of that stuff. You guys do it for us. Just fill me in on what’s going on but you guys take care of all those details because it’s just overwhelming.”

Tim Knox: Right and it’s good that you do that because some of them, they can’t even figure out how to do the Kindle publishing. Granted it’s not easy for anybody but when I talk to someone who’s sold a ton of books and been doing it for 30 or 40 years and they’re lamenting that fact. It really does show me how it really is a different world. They’ve got to learn how to take care of themselves now.

Bob Mayer: That’s just the tip of the iceberg. It sounds simple to self-publish. You can hire a cover artist. You can hire a formatter to upload you onto Kindle. You can hire an editor. But there’s a synergy to it all that’s really hard to explain to people, all the little subtleties to all the different platforms – how they market, how they merchandise. A lot of it is personal contact. We go to Amazon at least once a year. We meet them at conferences because it is a people business and the more you work with these people the more you get filled in on all the things going on.

Tim Knox: Talk a little more about that because that’s another kind of underlying theme is the relationship building that you have to do, not just with people in the industry but with readers and book buyers. I think if the internet has done one thing it has made authors much more accessible to their readers and their fans.

Bob Mayer: I think authors are incredibly accessible now. I think readers don’t even realize how accessible, especially indie authors. I tell people at conferences, I say if you’ve got an author you like email them and say, “If you send me a free Kindle file of your next book I guarantee I’ll post a review for you.” You could probably get a lot of free books because reviews are really, really important these days.

You mentioned book buyers. That doesn’t exist for indie authors, for most of us. It’s all of a sudden the reader and the only people between us is a company like Amazon. The interesting thing at Amazon is they are siloed and one of the things we do at Cool Gus is we try working with as many silos of Amazon that we can because that exponentially increases our chances for merchandising.

Tim Knox: Right and you have to take advantage of every option you can. I love your blog. One of the things you have So You Want to Make a Living Writing: The 13 Harsh Truths. Talk a little about that because I’m sure you’re approached all the time from bright-eyed bushy tailed writers or people that want to write and they think it’s going to be an easy road. It really isn’t.

Bob Mayer: Every road’s different. I think that’s one of the hardest things I try to emphasize. There is no right or wrong. I did follow up to 13 Harsh Truths with 13 Great Truths about how great it is. I think when we go into it we’re very naïve and we think oh I’ll just write the book and the book will stand by itself. There’s so much competition out there, especially nowadays.

There’s a large degree of luck involved which people really have to admit. A lot of your bestselling authors were just in the right place at the right time. There were 50 other books just as good as their book but they worked really hard but they also got a bit lucky. I also believe you can make a living here if you’re willing just to work really, really hard at it, be professional.

One of the things I watch now, the problem with the internet is everybody reacts to everything that’s going on too quickly. Nobody cares. I just wrote a blog today called Nobody Cares What I Feel Like. The only thing I can do is make business decisions and I think that’s one of the hardest things for writers to do is pull their emotions out of it and say, “Okay, I’m running a business. With anything I do I have to ask myself how does this affect my bottom line?”

Tim Knox: Right so you’ve got to be a writer and again… I had one writer sum it up I think best to me. Writing is a business. You are creating a product and you’re selling that product to a customer and you have to approach it like that with the marketing, the relationship building, that sort of thing. It is strictly a business.

Bob Mayer: Yeah I mean even back in traditional publishing I said the minute your book is done and it’s published it’s not your baby anymore. It’s a product. People always say, “What’s your favorite book?” I say it’s the book I’m writing because you have to sever your emotional ties to a book when it’s done. First off of course you’re going to get reviews, especially on Amazon or Barnes & Noble or Goodreads but also it is a product you’re trying to make a living off of.

Tim Knox: Yeah and do you think now with self-publishing, indie publishing, there are a lot more people, authors who may not be making a living but maybe they’re making a nice little side money that they never would have made before?

Bob Mayer: Yeah I think there are but I also think writers lie. I do think we hit a peak and I do think a lot of people’s numbers are down from where they were just a year ago or two years ago and nobody ever wants to blog about that or admit that or talk about it. I think there’s an air of desperation I’m picking up. I’m picking it up in traditional publishing. I don’t think we’d be seeing this huge pushback from these very successful traditional publishing authors if they weren’t a bit afraid. They’re looking at their royalty statements and thinking I’m not doing quite as well as I was two years ago.

Tim Knox: Why do you think that is?

Bob Mayer: There’s more product out there. I mean that’s the bottom line. Jon Fine of Amazon called it a tsunami and I said that’s not the right term because a tsunami recedes. This thing isn’t receding. This is a flood that’s here to stay. Now there may be things coming up that will sort that out a little bit but you’re competing with millions of titles now. Some of these people are really good writers. They’re really good writers who never would have got an agent before or gotten published. They’re making an impact on the marketplace.

Tim Knox: You see that flood only continuing to get higher and higher.

Bob Mayer: Yeah absolutely. The only thing that can stop a writer right now is themselves and there will be a lot of people quitting but for everybody that quits there will be two who think, “Oh I’ve got a great book.”

Tim Knox: Let’s talk a little about your books. You write the Atlantis Series, Area 51, and Psychic Warrior. Tell us a little about those series and how you came up with those and why you like series.

Bob Mayer: Well I remember Susan Wicks hit number one in the New York Times. I asked her how she did it and the first thing she said was series. Series are key. I’ve written a lot of standalone books. I’m just fascinated by myths and legends. Atlantis is the older legend and Area 51’s a modern myth. What I’ve actually done is I’ve got a book at Amazon right now. I do also work with 47North. They’re science fiction and my Nighstalker Series and I’m literally combining four of my series into one storyline. I’m combining Atlantis, Area 51, Nightstalkers and my Cellar Series. All the characters are coming together into one main storyline, which is really kind of cool.

Tim Knox: That is kind of cool. When did you come up with that thought?

Bob Mayer: Well I had combined Cellar into Nightstalkers and 47North was really open for me doing that and then people kept saying they wanted more Atlantis books but I kind of closed out that. But since I have time travel and parallel worlds the possibilities are infinite so into my Area 51, Nightstalker world I rolled the Atlantis concept into it. It actually fell together pretty well and I tried thinking wow I had this great master plan for 20 years, which is what it seems like, but in reality since I was the writer my brain works a certain way so it makes sense that it all pulls together.

Tim Knox: Was it a lot of fun writing that book and bringing everything together like that?

Bob Mayer: Yeah it really was because it really opens things up. The book is out in November, called The Time Patrol and what I’m going to be doing then is I can just play with anything. I’ve got parallel worlds I can go to. I’ve got Amelia Earhart appearing and disappearing as a character throughout the series, characters from other timelines and other series appearing and disappearing. As long as I keep it straight in my head it’s a lot of fun.

Tim Knox: How do you keep all that straight in your head?

Bob Mayer: I just need to start killing characters off.

Tim Knox: That’s one way to do it.

Bob Mayer: Yeah.

Tim Knox: We have to talk about some of the fundamentals because this show is primarily listened to by authors who want to do what you’ve done. They want to write, want to be discovered, want to sell books and that sort of thing. From the fundamental standpoint let’s talk a little about character development. Now that you are bringing all of these characters together and you may kill off some, how close do you get to your characters and when you’re developing how deep into the background do you go?

Bob Mayer: You get pretty close to them. A lot of my main characters are reflections of me in different ways. One thing my wife and I do, we kind of joke that our hobby is… we don’t travel much because we’ve been all over the world but it’s story and character.

One thing we do, which drives some people crazy because they say kill your TV, but we watch a ton of TV. What we do though is we’ll watch a series and then we’ll watch it again. We watch Breaking Bad as it came out, all the seasons, but then the last year we sat down and watched all the previous seasons again and the difference is the second time you watch something whether it’s Breaking Bad, Deadwood, Rome, is you know what the story is so now what you focus on is what did the writers do with these characters? How did they develop the characters?

We watched Weeds. We just discovered it about two months ago and we just watched all seven or eight seasons and we’re really fascinated about that lead character, Nancy Botwin. We try to figure out what her personality disorder is. We did the same thing with Walt in Breaking Bad. What’s his personality disorder? How do the writers keep him consistent?

That’s what I think one of the hardest things for writers to do is to keep a character consistent to their personality instead of adjusting their personality for the plot. You can’t do that. You’ve got to make them do things that occasionally the reader’s going to go, “That’s pretty stupid,” but if they really understand the personality they go, “But that’s what they have to do because that’s who they are.”

Tim Knox: It’s kind of funny because I do the same exact thing and I just did it with Breaking Bad. The Walt that you come to know up to the last episode there and then you go back and start over. The Walt that’s standing in the desert in his tighty whities, when I saw that the first time it never occurred to me where he would ultimately end up.

Bob Mayer: One of the things that struck me was why he wouldn’t take the offers he got to work at Gray Matter but then when we looked at his personality disorder and one of the things in his personality disorder is he cannot stand being offered charity. So that wasn’t even a choice on the writer’s part. If that’s who they pegged Walt as, when they get to the point where someone’s going to offer him healthcare they’re going to go, oh he ain’t going to take it. That’s just who he is. He’s not going to accept it even though it makes sense. Everything would have been fine for him to take that.

My favorite Breaking Bad moment actually is when Marie steals the stupid little spoon at the open house because we went back and looked at that and we said if she hadn’t done that none of the rest of the seasons would have happened because that’s what brought her husband back into the plot line, back into investigating Heisenberg. All of that stemmed around one little action and that’s the things we find amazing.

Tim Knox: Yeah I agree. I mean there are just so many little things going on but do you think the true Walt, was it the Walt in the beginning or the Walt at the end?

Bob Mayer: Yes because a lot of people are in the situation Walt was in at the beginning of that. How many people end up doing what he does? I mean that was in him. It took the circumstances to bring it out and that was the hard part for the writers. They had to give little hints in that early character that he had the potential to become that thing he became.

Tim Knox: Yeah and this is completely off topic but did you find it fascinating that so many people were rooting for Walt? The more evil he got I’m like Walt’s the man.

Bob Mayer: I don’t know. I don’t get that. He lost me when he sent that woman in to check his house when the killers were in it. He didn’t care if she got killed. I’m like this guy is a bad, bad, bad guy. This is a very bad guy. You can root for Jesse to a certain extent but even he had his bad parts.

Tim Knox: Yeah I don’t know anyone who was really without some kind of blame in that entire show. Let’s talk a little about the research that you do for your novels. How deeply do you go there? I know you’ve traveled all over the world and been a lot of places but when you are writing about a location do you try to make it as factual as possible or is it all made up?

Bob Mayer: I try to make it as factual. I call it an area study because in Special Forces we want to get a feel for the place. Like I’ve written about Little Bighorn and never understood that battle until I actually went there. As soon as I got out of the car and looked around I went, “Oh I see what happened to Custer.” I think a feel for the terrain is really, really critical. I mean I’ve parachuted into operational areas in the middle of the night and when the dawn comes and you look around you go, “Oh my God, where the hell are we?” You had no clue what you were really getting into until you’re actually there.

Tim Knox: You have no idea what you’ve landed in until the light comes up.

Bob Mayer: Right.

Tim Knox: Let’s talk a bit about marketing again if you will because that’s such an important aspect of authorship, selling books – being able to market yourself. How much time do you actually spend on social media, doing the blogging? How much of your time is taken up in the marketing side?

Bob Mayer: Less and less because I think you have to do it. I don’t think it’s as effective as people think. It doesn’t really sell books. It can give you reach and it can give you presence but as far as selling books I don’t think that’s necessarily the goal of marketing. It’s sort of to put your footprint out there, your platform out there. When push comes to shove you’ve got to spend more time writing.

What I actually spend a lot of my time on is not necessarily specifically marketing; it’s running a business. Especially since I’m in publishing and checking on the other authors. What are they doing? We outsource some stuff. We do slide shares and book trailers for our authors and things like that.

Tim Knox: Are you enjoying that business, being on that side of it?

Bob Mayer: Well my business partner, Jen Talty, does most of it. I like the control. You talk to a lot of indie authors and they like the fact that our success or failure rests on us. When you’re writing a book you’re not sitting there going oh I hope my agent loves it or I hope my agent can sell it to an editor and I hope the editor can sell it to a publisher and the publisher can sell it to the bookstores. It’s like eight people you have to please before you get to the reader. Now it’s like, okay, I know I can publish this and I’ve got to please the reader. That’s it. What is the reader going to think?

Tim Knox: Is that who you should write with in mind, the reader?

Bob Mayer: Totally. I always write for the reader but now the distance between me and my reader is the internet and that’s really close.

Tim Knox: Do you like that?

Bob Mayer: Yes I like it a lot.

Tim Knox: In the time we have left let’s talk about some general advice. I know you do a lot of teaching and advising at your retreats. Given where we are now in the business, if I come to you and say, “Bob, I’ve written a book. What the heck do I do with it?” What’s some good advice?

Bob Mayer: Write the next book. Really I mean a lot of new authors query us even though we don’t really take queries like that. I always tell them to write their next book. One thing I might do differently I think nowadays is if I had a book I would think about writing maybe four or five shorts in the same world as the book.

With the things I’m doing right now, in the next couple weeks I’m putting together seven short books that are all interconnected non-fiction. All interconnected and we’re going to burst them out in the market like that because we really feel like the more titles, the more they’re connected, the more we can do with them as far as marketing goes.

Tim Knox: I really like that advice and I hear that a lot. Hugh Howey, when I was interviewing him he talked about how his original plan was I’m going to write for 10 years, I’m going to build up a catalog. At some point maybe somebody will find me and discover me and when they do I’ve got a backlist.

Bob Mayer: He was really smart about that and I agree. I would not be where I was if I didn’t bring 42 backlist titles into the picture. If I had been starting out fresh it would have been a whole different ballgame.

Tim Knox: What’s on the horizon for Bob?

Bob Mayer: These seven nonfiction books which are either going to really do well or just tick everybody off. The title is Shit Doesn’t Just Happen. That’s going to be the title of all seven books and it’s about the gift of failure. Each book’s going to cover seven catastrophes, disasters, failures and say why it didn’t have to happen and then say what did we learn from that? There’s going to be seven books with seven catastrophes in each of them.

Tim Knox: Can you give us an example?

Bob Mayer: The first book’s going to have super storm Sandy, the Kegworth airplane crash, the Titanic, Custer at Little Bighorn, the World Trade Center, Touching the Void which is a mountain climbing story and the housing bubble. It’s very quick and to the point where I list the seven cascade events that led up to each event and I say how it happened and I say anywhere here this is a human decision that could have changed these events and kept them from happening.

Tim Knox: Where did you get the idea for that? That’s really such an interesting concept.

Bob Mayer: My wife and I have always been fascinated by that. My wife doesn’t fly and there’s a TV show on National Geographic called Seconds from Disaster and it covers a lot of disasters, a lot of the same ones, but particularly plane crashes. We started noticing a theme in plane crashes that it was never just oh the plane crashed. It was always seven things went wrong and any one of them wouldn’t have crashed a plane but by the time they hit the 7th one the plane crashes and always one of them is human error. If you can fix that one human error the plane won’t crash.

Tim Knox: I find that fascinating. I’ll be your customer number one. I’m always interested in dissecting that sort of thing and seeing exactly what that tipping point where things went dreadfully wrong was. Bob, tell us how we can find more information about you and your books.

Bob Mayer: The easiest way to do that is to go to CoolGus.com. I have an author’s page and links to every platform, including audiobooks which is huge right now. I’ve done 40 audiobooks. And there are other authors there listed on Cool Gus.

Tim Knox: Are you doing your own audiobooks or do you have them narrated?

Bob Mayer: I have them narrated. That’s another thing people don’t understand. You’ve got to be a professional about all this stuff. Things have to be professionally done.

Tim Knox: Do you have to put that ego aside and let somebody else do it?

Bob Mayer: Oh certainly. It’s a talent and it’s a skill.

Tim Knox: Very good. Bob Mayer, this has been a pleasure. We will put up links to Cool Gus and I hope to talk to you again soon. This has been great.

Bob Mayer: I appreciate you talking to me. Thank you.

The post Bob Mayer: A Green Beret’s Guide To Writing Bestsellers appeared first on Interviewing Authors with Tim Knox, Author, Talk Radio Host, Serial Entrepreneur, Small Business Expert.

Meg Gardiner: It All Started With a Horse Named Pearl

Meg Gardiner graduated from Stanford University and Stanford Law School and practiced law in Los Angeles before becoming a prolific author of bestselling thriller novels.

She taught writing at the University of California Santa Barbara. She’s also a former collegiate cross-country runner and a three time Jeopardy! champ.

After living in the United Kingdom for many years, she recently moved back to the United States and now lives in Austin, Texas.

She has received rave reviews from the likes of Stephen King and Lee Child and her novels have won numerous awards and acclaim.

Meg Gardiner Interview

Scroll down for a complete transcript of the interview or click the Play button below to listen to the interview now. And don’t forget to leave a comment to let us know what you thought of this interview!

Books by Meg Gardiner

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Meg Gardiner Transcript

Tim Knox: Meg Gardiner is my guest today. Meg is a bestselling author, 12 books to her credit. She has been writing a book a year for the last 12 years. The most recent, Phantom Instinct, is getting all kinds of great reviews. Her books have won numerous awards, she has legions of fans and she is hilarious – a very funny lady.

I had a great time on the call here talking about things like her first book when she was a kid was called Pearl, A Horse and also about her first romance which was set at the Indy Races. I’ll let her tell that story.

So a great interview with Meg Gardiner. She’s very open and honest about her craft, gives advice freely to other authors and just a really, really nice person. You’re going to enjoy this one. Meg Gardiner on today’s Interviewing Authors.

Tim Knox: Meg, welcome to the program.

Meg Gardiner: Thank you, Tim. It’s great to be here.

Tim Knox: I’m so excited you’re here. We do have a lot to talk about. Before we get started though if you will give the audience a little background on you.

Meg Gardiner: I spent several years practicing law in Los Angeles before I took up teaching at the University of California in Santa Barbara and then gradually escaped from the practice and teaching of law and became a crime novelist, a thriller writer.

Tim Knox: I think you are my 8th or 9th attorney who is now a novelist and each one of them used that phrase – they escaped the law. What is it about being an attorney that you want to get away from and what drives you to become a crime novelist?

Meg Gardiner: I think that I love the law. It’s a fascinating profession and you’re never bored doing it. It only took me a little while to realize that if I was going to argue for a living, which is what lawyers do, that I was going to burn out the candle at both ends in the middle. So once I had three little kids at home I needed to do something else.

I tunneled under the wall and made it to the Promised Land that I had wanted to do since I was five years old, which is to make stuff up for a living. That’s what I’m doing now.

Tim Knox: You sound like the kid in the Striped Pajamas who escaped to write books.

Meg Gardiner: I don’t do well in stripes.

Tim Knox: If you don’t mind let’s start at the beginning. I always like to go back and talk about the journey and how you got to where you are. Of course we are going to talk about all your many books but have you always been a writer? Did you always know that you were a writer?

Meg Gardiner: I am one of those nut balls that since the time I was five years old I loved telling stories. I was one of the kids that when it rained and we had to stay in at recess I loved that because I could take out a piece of paper and draw pictures of ponies and tell stories about them. I always had a dream that I would be able to write stories and tell them to people and they would listen and believe them.

It took a long time and a really winding road to get there but I think when I was… after I had my kids when I was teaching and then my husband’s job was transferred from Santa Barbara to London, I no longer had an immediate job where I needed to go into an office and did not have a teaching post at the time. I was not planning to become qualified as a solicitor or a barrister in the UK and I thought, okay, all this time I’ve said that I wanted to write a novel. It’s time to put up or shut up.

All the kids were out of diapers and at least going to preschool and I had time to myself so that’s when I decided I better give it a go.

Tim Knox: Sure but you started off very early when you were a little kid. Do you remember the first thing that you wrote that you actually showed someone or read to someone?

Meg Gardiner: It was called Pearl, A Horse. I showed it to my mom and my little sister. The farmer treated her mean so she ended up jumping over the fence I think pulling the wagon but she got away in the end.

Tim Knox: So it was called Pearl, A Horse. Was this at all autobiographical? Were you trying to send a subtle message to your mother?

Meg Gardiner: No I may have wished I was a thoroughbred but not at the time, no.

Tim Knox: What kind of motherly review did you get?

Meg Gardiner: Oh I think she probably stuck it up on the fridge and cried with joy.

Tim Knox: Did you have one of those mothers that would save everything you wrote?

Meg Gardiner: Of course and now knowing that my mom still reads my books but maybe even some people I’m not related to is a great joy to me.

Tim Knox: So after the success of the Pearl saga there, did you continue to write as you grew older? Did you write in your teens?

Meg Gardiner: I wrote for the high school newspaper and I’ve always been extremely fortunate with editors, believe it or not. The first editor I ever had was as I was writing for the Dos Pueblos High School account was Lisa Stark, who is now a reporter for ABC News. She’s been their White House correspondent and their science correspondent.

Before I got to tell the big stories about what kind of disastrous food they were really serving in the cafeteria I did think that I would write a novel, a love story, because I was 15 and thought that I knew everything there was to know of course about love. Romance writing was not for me so I abandoned that.

By the time I got to college I was writing short stories and I did not major in English or Creative Writing but I did attempt to get stories published and was really fortunate my senior year. Again this is just serendipity but I ended up taking a creative writing class because I had space for an elective and the teacher was Ron Hansen, who was just a grad student at Stanford at the time.

He’s now a well-known literary novelist. He wrote The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and a bunch of other wonderful books. He was my teacher and it was just eye opening and very exciting just to hear what he had to say. I wrote a short story and at the end of the semester he said try to get it published.

To have somebody validate your potential like that gave me the confidence to send it out, not to the New Yorker or anything but I did get the story published in a small literary magazine from the University of California and the editor there, I didn’t realize who it was for years and years afterwards. It was a guy named Thomas Perry who is also now an extremely well-known crime novelist. I’ve just been very fortunate with the people I’ve run across over the course of my now career.

Tim Knox: Let’s go back a little ways. Did you not write a romance about NASCAR?

Meg Gardiner: It was Indy car and I was trying to glide straight past that. That was my tremendous romance novel. I thought I should write something about romance, which is very exciting, but to add even more pep to it I could set it in the world of auto racing, which is very exciting.

It was about a young woman who goes to Indianapolis and falls in love with a racecar driver and, you know, it’s the love of her life and then he gets into a car and drives it at 200 mph straight into a wall and the car bursts into flames and he dies horribly and the story’s very sad. It was so sad I made myself cry as I was writing it.

She picks herself up and dusts herself off and gets back in the game so she goes back to Indianapolis and meets another racecar driver and falls in love with him and what does he do? He gets in the car and drives at 200 mph straight into a wall and bursts into flames and dies. This went on and on because I didn’t know what else to do.

Tim Knox: How many drivers did she go through?

Meg Gardiner: All of them. I think it was 63 pages and I killed every man in the story and that was the end of the book. So I realized that I wasn’t really meant for either sport writing or romance.

Tim Knox: Why did you choose Indy racing as a setting for this book?

Meg Gardiner: I’m a huge auto racing fan. I love Indy Car racing, Formula One, Nascar and that was back in the day when Wide World of Sports was on and I used to watch that on Saturday afternoons. It caught my attention. I like speed. What can I say?

Tim Knox: That’s hilarious. What did you learn from this book?

Meg Gardiner: That you need my plot. That was my first hint that you do need a plot. You can’t just repeat the same episode over and over. It was perhaps my first clue that writing suspense or mysteries would be a good line for me. In a murder mystery when someone dies the plot advances; it doesn’t come to an end.

I learned that you can make a bunch of sophomore high school girls cry by killing off every man in a story. That was basically it. I learned that an emotional impact is extremely important for an author but you need a little bit more than that.

Tim Knox: Right, right and I think you’ve said there are two things a novel needs – a compelling main character and a big idea.

Meg Gardiner: Yes.

Tim Knox: As long as that big idea’s not Groundhog Day over and over again.

Meg Gardiner: Yes, or Indy Day.

Tim Knox: Talk about that a little bit because that just seems to be something that some writers have a hard time realizing, character and plot.

Meg Gardiner: Today I write thrillers. I write suspense and they’d be classified as commercial fiction, which means that readers love to read a book with a big, strong story. It was my first editor in London who told me that writing great characters will get you a loyal readership but you’ll expand your readership by writing a big compelling story. The secret is to learn how to put those two together. It sounds simple and it only took me decades to really learn that lesson.

Tim Knox: Well you’ve learned it well.

Meg Gardiner: I’m still trying.

Tim Knox: It’s time well spent. Let’s go back. You moved to London, the kids are in school, you start writing. What comes next for you?

Meg Gardiner: Rewriting.

Tim Knox: Good answer. What was the book you wrote?

Meg Gardiner: It was a precursor in a way to the Evan Delaney series, which is the first series I wrote. It was a pseudo-murder mystery. It was about a scam, a sting operation. It featured Evan Delaney and her boyfriend, Jesse Blackburn, and a cast of thousands. I thought it was magnificent because it had all kinds of snappy dialogue and crazy characters and wild things going on but I didn’t know how to listen to the people who were reading it. I said, “This is my great murder mystery,” and someone said, “Yeah but nobody dies.” “But…” “Yeah, you can’t call it a murder mystery if nobody dies.”

I was a complete neophyte. I was just stumbling my way through learning how to create characters. I got about halfway into this story – I’ve told this story before. I got to a scene where I was determined that something dramatic would happen. I had the characters crossing a dark street and a pair of headlights flashes on and a motor revs and comes at them. That was the last thing I wrote in this story because I got to that point and realized I had no idea who was behind the headlights or why on earth they were trying to run down my main characters. It was my big stinking clue that I had no plot.

Tim Knox: It was probably one of those Indy drivers who had escaped.

Meg Gardiner: That’s a good point. He was wreaking revenge one way or another.

Tim Knox: So in that story what was the lesson learned other than always know who’s behind the headlights?

Meg Gardiner: There are such things as starter novels. Some things are better used for instruction and practice and then lovingly put in a drawer and locked up and thrown over a cliff into a quarry where they’ll be covered with rocks and never seen again. I’m very lucky that I did not get that novel published. Looking back it wasn’t all there. It didn’t hold together. It did get me an agent so that was the most positive outcome out of that. The agent said, “What are you working on next?” So I sat down and I wrote another book called China Lake and that’s the one that sold. That was my first published novel.

Tim Knox: You mentioned by this time you had an agent. What was your process for getting that agent? Did you go the usual query route?

Meg Gardiner: Yes and my process was starting out knowing nothing and doing the usual stupid things like writing three chapters and then writing to a bunch of agents saying, “I have this book about XYZ and it’s super exciting and don’t you want to see it?” Most of them of course said no thank you but some said, “Yes, we want to see it. Please send us the completed manuscript,” and I had no idea that they would expect you to have finished the novel before you sent it. Of course I wasn’t anywhere close to completing it.

I was very fortunate to hook up with a well-known agent in London, Giles Gordon, who was an old hand at publishing and was a tremendous guy and a wonderful raconteur and friend. He’s the one who got my book published in the UK and in many other places around the world. It took a while before I was published in the United States but that’s another story.

Tim Knox: So the title of that book was China Lake. What was it about?

Meg Gardiner: It’s about Evan Delaney, who’s a former lawyer very coincidentally from Santa Barbara, California very coincidentally, which is where I grew up. She is caring for her young nephew, Luke, while his father is deployed. He’s a naval fighter pilot and his mother has run off and joined this creepy religious cult.

The story opens as the mother comes back and decides that she wants the kid and if Evan’s not going to turn him over then all these creepy Messianic apocalyptic people who think the end is near and they’re going to come and take him. So it’s about Evan trying to keep Luke from being taken into the clutches of this awful, horrifying group.

Like I said it took a number of years before I was able to get it published in the United States. This is a story for everybody out there who’s still wondering about getting their books in print. After being rejected I think by 14 American publishers or something like that and several years later, it was published by Penguin and it won an Edgar Award. You never know.

Tim Knox: I guess you just have to keep throwing spaghetti against the wall, as they say.

Meg Gardiner: You have to learn which spaghetti is the good stuff to throw though.

Tim Knox: Exactly, not the bad stuff. A few minutes ago you talked about validation when your professor liked your story and encouraged you. Talk a little about that to where you were at that point. You had written China Lake, you had gotten an agent, you had a publisher, won the Edgar. At that point did you feel validated? Did you feel you were truly an author?

Meg Gardiner: I no longer felt like an imposter. When I said I was a writer or an author I felt definitely that was not just making stuff up to pat myself on the back. Yeah, other people had read my books and they agreed that I was an author. I did feel legit at that point.

Tim Knox: It’s always nice to sell a book.

Meg Gardiner: It definitely is.

Tim Knox: Let’s talk a little bit about your process. How many books have you written in the last four, five years?

Meg Gardiner: I’ve been writing a book a year for about 12 years. My 12th novel was just out about six weeks ago, Phantom Instinct.

Tim Knox: And I’m reading it and I’m loving it.

Meg Gardiner: Thank you.

Tim Knox: The first chapter I’m like hell’s breaking loose on the first page. You don’t even give me time to get comfortable.

Meg Gardiner: It’s a thriller. You’re not supposed to let people get comfortable. Put the pedal down.

Tim Knox: Let’s talk a little about that. I think for someone to write a successful thriller you really do have to get going quickly, don’t you? In your book, in Phantom Instinct seriously by the first page all hell is breaking loose. Rather than spend 20 pages doing character development and that sort of thing, you jump right into it. Do you think that’s a formula you like? Do you use it a lot?

Meg Gardiner: I wouldn’t call it a formula precisely. Thrillers are expected to thrill, which means you’re supposed to get readers pulses racing. They tend to have a lot of pace. They tend to have high stakes for the characters, usually meaning survival for the heroine, the hero, perhaps their families, their community in some way.

Actually I don’t think this is any different for a thriller than for almost any other book. You can’t start the story off by introducing us to the characters and the setting one by one. The way to launch any story I think is to show us the characters in action, not necessarily action meaning a car chase, but show us them going about their lives because characters are defined by the choices they make under pressure.

If you put the characters into difficult situations you can call that conflict, you can call it a gunfight, whatever but that’s how you start seeing who these people are, how they respond. Are they so fearful they curl up in a ball? Do they risk themselves? Are they cowardly and jump out the window leaving everybody else behind? Do they risk going in to pull somebody else out? That’s how you learn who the characters are. That’s what a thriller puts very plainly on the page. You want it to be entertaining as well.

Tim Knox: You almost are testing the character of the character.

Meg Gardiner: Exactly, that is the crucible that heats up all the action and it exposes and refines and shows us who the characters are and can also help them to develop into who they’re supposed to be by the end of the story.

Tim Knox: Do you think that’s much more effective letting the circumstances and how the character deals with those circumstances define the character? That’s much more effective than giving a description of the character and just explaining their motivation type thing.

Meg Gardiner: Readers are smart. I trust them not to need me to say, “She hated him. She was doing this because she loathed this guy.” It’s more vivid and much more effective to have a character walk up to somebody and stomp on his foot or slap him in the face. That gets the point across very vividly and I think readers will understand that.

Tim Knox: The actions of the characters are much better than when you just explain the motives outright.

Meg Gardiner: Exactly. It was Kurt Vonnegut I think who said motivation is always very important for your characters. Your characters should always want something, even if it’s just a glass of water. Make sure your characters want something on every page.

Tim Knox: You are really good at developing these very strong, vivid characters. How much backstory do you do on characters? Do you create these characters that have a birthday and a shoe size? How deeply do you go into that process?

Meg Gardiner: I have no idea what size their shoes are or when they were born. They come to life as I’m writing generally, as I start to draft the story. As I start to write them in action I can start to see in my own mind how they walk, hear their voice, see what words come out of their mouth and that’s how they come to life. You put them in action meeting up with other people and seeing how they react to other people and to the world in general. That’s how the story comes to life.

Tim Knox: And it becomes very real to you.

Meg Gardiner: Well yeah, I spend a year with these people. They seem completely real to me. I might not have to set a place for them at the table but they’re completely real in my own mind.

Tim Knox: Do they ever take over the story? I know you said just a minute ago you said you’re waiting to see what comes out of their mouth.

Meg Gardiner: That’s a metaphor for me having to really think about how they sound. I mean I do know plenty of authors who say, “Oh the characters just take over. I can’t control them.” I think maybe you need a little meditation if that’s what’s going on.

Tim Knox: You need to learn to discipline your characters.

Meg Gardiner: Right, exactly.

Tim Knox: Talk a little about plot and storyline. When you start a novel do you know what’s going to happen throughout or do you just start writing?

Meg Gardiner: I have found out that it’s best for me to think for a good time about the plot and to come up with an outline before I start to draft the story because otherwise I end up so far up a creek without even a paddle. All I can see are those headlights off in the distance and the car revving and I’m wondering where the heck I am and how I’m ever going to get out.

I find for me it’s really important to shape the story, at least the beginning, middle and the end – a few major turning points so that I know where the characters start and actually knowing where they end helps you make sure that when you go back and start writing the story you can put in everything that you need to foreshadow and set it up so it’s all a cohesive whole.

Tim Knox: How do you do that when you’re writing a series? When you first started writing this did you know you were going to write a series?

Meg Gardiner: Oh my goodness, no, no way. That was quite a surprise. It was a delightful surprise. I sold China Lake and then the editor came in and she said, “That’s wonderful. Can you write another book featuring these characters?” I said, “Of course I can.” “Great. Please turn it in in a year.” “Of course I can,” then I hung up and ran around like a chicken with my head cut off panicking.

I’d had all the time in the world before then to spend years crafting this story and suddenly I had to become much more disciplined and learn how to write every day whether I felt the muse or not, to sit down and type the words. I found out that that is a great discipline. Once the words are on the page you can always improve them. You can correct them, rewrite them, and cut them if you need to but if it’s all still just in your head there’s nothing to improve upon. So you have to get it down.

I learned how to think out the plot ahead of time so I didn’t spend months going off on a tangent that didn’t prove fruitful and then of course you’ve got to learn how to rewrite in a way that gets down to the deepest issues in the plot.

Once you’ve written a rough draft, and I encourage everybody who’s writing a rough draft to just let it flow, just have the big points of the story in their mind and then just let it all out. Don’t try to be persnickety.

Don’t nitpick yourself or second guess yourself. Just let it go. Write the whole story and then go back and see how you need to revise it.

If you’re always fixing up the first page of that first scene that tends to be all that gets written. Go for it. Learning how to get to the end is very important.

Tim Knox: At what point do you get where you’ve written something and you’re like, okay, this is as good as it is? This is something you’re going to send off to your agent or what have you. How many rewrites do you do? Do you work with an editor? What’s your process there?

Meg Gardiner: I work with my agent and with my editor, going back and forth on proposals for the novel before it’s even submitted and accepted for publication because of course a publisher doesn’t want to have you turn in a completed manuscript only to find out that you’ve written a book that’s about exactly the same topic that another one of their authors has turned in a book one week earlier about.

So they want to know what’s coming. They like the fact that I write thrillers. They don’t want me to suddenly show up on their doorstep with a cookbook or vampire ponies or anything like.

Tim Knox: Pearl, the Vampire Pony. There’s a story there.

Meg Gardiner: Oh let me write that one down. That’s not as bad as I thought.

Tim Knox: Write it down. That’s a gift for you. There you go.

Meg Gardiner: Working with the editor and agent you have to learn how to listen to people who do their jobs well and not necessarily you just bow down to every suggestion they make but if someone has a powerful insight into how you can make your plot better or make the characters more compelling, it’s to your advantage to pay attention and take that to heart as you revise. Learn to listen is a good thing.

Tim Knox: Which is a hard lesson for some authors.

Meg Gardiner: Of course.

Tim Knox: And all people.

Meg Gardiner: Of course. That book that’s in my file cabinet buried at the bottom of the sea, it took me a year to finally accept the fact that nobody liked my first scene because I liked my first scene. I thought it was hysterically funny. I thought it was extremely witty but the agent said, everyone who read it said, “No, this doesn’t work,” but I kept saying, “But, but, but I like it.” I really could have saved myself a lot of grief if I just said, “Okay, I see why you say that and I can write something better.”

If everybody is telling you that this doesn’t work maybe they’re all wrong or maybe you can rethink it and come up with something that’s even stronger.

Tim Knox: Right so the lesson there is listen to others and don’t get so enamored of your own voice that you ignore what the experts are telling you.

Meg Gardiner: Exactly. You have to learn who to listen to. Obviously if it’s trolls on Facebook that are telling you that your books suck then you can ignore what some of them are saying because they’re deliberately trying to provoke you and they don’t know what they’re talking about. If it is an extremely successful editor who you respect then that’s a voice you need to give a lot of weight to.

Tim Knox: You mentioned a minute ago that your editor, your agent came back and said you have a second book and all of a sudden you had to sit down and write. You got more disciplined. Are you still like that? Do you write every day? Do you write at the same time? What’s your schedule now?

Meg Gardiner: I do write every day as soon as I finish that first pot of coffee. I do try to write… when I’m drafting the first draft of a book I try to write 2,000 words a day. 10 years ago if you told me I could do that I would have turned ashen and said, “No way.” That may be like 10 pages or something but I do now know how long it takes me to type a book that’s going to end up being 90,000 to 100,000 words. You have to be able to get those down on the page and leave yourself enough time within the year to spend several months revising and polishing the book so I do need to sit down and just roll it out, just let it unfurl. It’s always the way I can go back and improve it after that.

Tim Knox: Right, do you believe in writer’s block? Is there such a thing?

Meg Gardiner: Oh sure there is. I mean people find themselves stuck and that can be for all kinds of reasons. Again it could be that you’ve written yourself into a corner, that you’ve gotten to a place where there’s nowhere for the story to go in which case you need to back out.

I think a lot of times it’s actually not a block in the sense that you’re so full of ideas that you can’t decide which way to go. I think often it’s the opposite. You’re depleted so you need to take a break and step away from the story and keyboard and go out and do something very different that replenishes you emotionally, spiritually.

Get outside. Go to a movie. Go for a run. Go do something completely different. Take a look at all the people who are out there in the world. Just people watch and see what they’re up to and hopefully that will recharge your batteries enough so that some new ideas will bubble up and you can get back to the keyboard.

Tim Knox: It is really easy to sit in front of a keyboard and just bleed all over it and find yourself dry but that’s not necessarily a block. Maybe you’re just tired. Maybe you need a hug and a drink. That fixes everything, right?

Meg Gardiner: Is that your plan for the evening?

Tim Knox: As soon as we’re off here, a hug and a drink. That’s how I finish off most days. Let’s talk a little about… you’ve been traditionally published. You’re with Dutton now?

Meg Gardiner: I am with Dutton, which is part of Penguin.

Tim Knox: What are your thoughts on this I don’t want to say self-publishing trend; it’s not really a trend so much as kind of a commonplace thing. Just your thoughts on self-publishing versus the traditional route, which seems to be working very well for you.

Meg Gardiner: I think it’s fantastic that we now have the technology that lets authors publish on their own if they need to and they can find an audience. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t be able to do that and I think it’s a great time for readers that we can read in print, hardcover, paperback, on a desktop, on a Kindle, iPad, a Nook. We have all kinds of ways in which to imbibe all the stories that are out there. It’s fantastic.

I did first start to get published before the… you can call it self-publishing now. I don’t think there’s really any stigma there might have been 15, 20 years ago when you had to go to a vanity press to get your book published. I think it’s wonderful if you want to publish directly. The issue is then finding a readership because there’s quite a lot of books out there.

I like being published by my current publisher if you are self-publishing you really have to become a publisher. That’s a lot of work. I mean writing a book is a considerable mental effort. Publishing is a quite different set of skills that you have to do – the book design, good cover art, good editing skills. You need to know how to market it so that people will find out that the book is out there.

So being a publisher is actually a whole other job. It’s another hat to put on and right now I’m happy that I’m not doing that at the moment. Writing is enough for me right now.

Tim Knox: The hat you’re wearing fits very well.

Meg Gardiner: It does, thank you.

Tim Knox: It’s funny. I do talk to a lot of folks who are self-publishing and they say exactly what you’re saying. Writing becomes just a part of the overall business. They have to do everything – the cover design, the publishing, the editing and then more than anything the marketing. That’s one of the themes I continue to hear. Talk a little about, from a marketing standpoint, some of the things that you’re doing. I know you and I met on Twitter and you’re on other social media. How integral is that into your overall marketing plan?

Meg Gardiner: I’m on Twitter. I’m on Facebook. I have a blog. I initially did those because my publisher encouraged me to. Now I do them because they’re a lot of fun. The most important word in social media is ‘social’ and I think that you’re going to be most effective if you are bringing yourself, your own personality to Twitter or to Facebook. It gives readers an insight into you and what goes into your work. It’s an additional way for them to get to know you.

If you’re writing novels or non-fiction the work has to stand on its own. That is the primary way you engage with readers. Social media works to help people perhaps recognize your name. It’s great to be able to interact with readers who read my books but also I’m a reader so it’s wonderful to interact online with others who love books as much as I do.

I don’t know that Twitter or Facebook or blogs are a way to directly sell your books to the public. A lot of people get tired of seeing direct pitches, “Buy my book, buy my book,” on social media. Be yourself. Tweet, Facebook fun stuff. Ask questions. Talk about subjects that people like to talk about and that’s how you get to know the people that are out there.

Tim Knox: It’s a great way to build relationships with readers.

Meg Gardiner: Yes.

Tim Knox: I hear this a lot. The accessibility that social media now gives the reader with the author. I mean if I’m a Meg Gardiner fan, wow, here’s Meg on Twitter. I can actually interact with her. That’s something that didn’t happen 10 years ago.

Meg Gardiner: I tweeted last week about this great cinematic event that we had called Sharknado 2.

Tim Knox: Why weren’t you in that?

Meg Gardiner: I got way too much into that. I had a Sharknado party. We had Sharknado food and then I tweeted as the story unfolded in its fashion. One of my readers put up a poster that said Sharknado 3 and she had Photoshopped a picture from my website of me being chased by sharks. So this is now the new way that we interact with readers.

Tim Knox: They Photoshop you into Sharknado posters.

Meg Gardiner: Yes, they did.

Tim Knox: You should be honored.

Meg Gardiner: I am, I am.

Tim Knox: Sharknado is the equivalent of Bridges of Madison County I think. I’m not quite sure why. Let’s talk a little about your blog. I love the title of your blog. It’s Lying for a Living. Talk about that.

Meg Gardiner: I needed a title for the blog and I needed something catchy and alliteration so I came up with that.

Tim Knox: Does this stem from your attorney days?

Meg Gardiner: No, not at all. Despite what people think lawyers do not just make it all up. They’re required to tell their client’s story in a compelling and truthful fashion. Fiction is where you get to… you have to make it up but it has to be true, if that makes sense.

Tim Knox: Do you enjoy interacting with other authors? I know you offer advice and you’re always writing about things. Do you enjoy the feedback that you get?

Meg Gardiner: Oh sure. Authors, we spend a lot of time just sitting in a quiet room all by ourselves dealing with the people who only exist inside our heads so when they let us out and we can meet up with other authors and talk about this strange thing that we love to do is always a treat. There’s nothing I’d rather do that talk about books and writing and Sharknados.

Tim Knox: You kind of touched on it, the solitary life of a writer. Do you think it’s important that writers actually back away from the keyboard, get out of the chair, go out and interact with people?

Meg Gardiner: Not everybody does. I’ve certainly had success with writers groups and if you can find a good one I thoroughly recommend it. Everybody needs to have someone read your work before you send it out to the world. There’s no way one writer can really spot everything, every point that needs addressing in the draft of a story.

You need to have someone else, even if you read it out loud and have someone else listen to it and say, “Your dialogue sounds stilted or why did you have them drive that motorcycle off the bridge? They could have just stopped and waited for the ferry instead of crashing into the river.” A reader can point out a gigantic, gaping plot hole that you’ve failed to see in your rush to finish the story.

I thoroughly recommend writers groups or a friend who is a first reader. A lot of people get freelance editors before they’re ready to send out their books on submission for the first time or before they’re ready to self-publish it. Definitely you need to have someone else read your stuff before just setting it free.

Tim Knox: You mentioned that you’re a big reader. What do you enjoy reading?

Meg Gardiner: I do read a lot of thrillers. That’s one of the reasons why I started writing thrillers and suspense because I loved reading these books so much – the tension, the twists, the sense of peril to these very vivid characters that I come to care about so much. Elmore Leonard is always my number one and there are a bunch of other number ones as well – James Lee Burke is possibly the best novelist working in the United States today I think. I read Michael Connelly and Sue Grafton, Alafair Burke, Karen Slaughter,Lisa Gardner. You’re spoiled for choice. There’s no way we can ever get through all the books we want to read in one lifetime. Just got to hope we come back.

 

Tim Knox: What are you working on now?

Meg Gardiner: I am working on the next thriller and since it’s my job to leave people in suspense, that’s all I can tell you.

Tim Knox: Well Meg, this has been wonderful. Meg Gardiner, tell the folks where they can find out more about you and your work.

Meg Gardiner: They can check out MegGardiner.com. I am on Twitter, @MegGardiner1, or on Facebook at MegGardinerBooks. I’m around.

Tim Knox: I’m around. I’m here. One side project, I’m going to go back to everyone I’ve interviewed who have that book deep in that drawer that they won’t show anyone and we’re going to do an anthology. So we’re going to be coming back to you at some point.

Meg Gardiner: It will be a horror anthology.

Tim Knox: It will be called Who’s Behind the Headlights?

Meg Gardiner: Right.

Tim Knox: This has been wonderful. We’ll put links to all of your sites, your Facebook, your Twitter and we hope to have you back as soon as the next book is out.

Meg Gardiner: Thanks a million. It’s been a great time.

 

 

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CJ Lyons: From The Emergency Room To The Top of The Bestseller Lists

CJ Lyons is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of twenty-one novels, including the popular Lucy Guardino Series.

CJ has been called a “master within the genre” by Pittsburgh Magazine and her work has been praised as “breathtakingly fast-paced and riveting” by Publishers Weekly.

Her novels have won the International Thriller Writers prestigious Thriller Award, the RT Reviewers’ Choice Award, Golden Gateway, Readers’ Choice Award, the RT Seal of Excellence, and Daphne du Maurier Award for Excellence in Mystery and Suspense.

A story-teller all her life, CJ has always created stories about people discovering the courage to make a difference. This led her to coin the term: Thrillers with Heart.

CJ has taught numerous live and online workshops,as well as given keynote speeches to audiences around the world and was the conference chairperson for the highly successful inaugural ITW ThrillerFest.

CJ Lyons Interview

Scroll down for a complete transcript of the interview or click the Play button below to listen to the interview now. And don’t forget to leave a comment to let us know what you thought of this interview!

Books by CJ Lyons

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CJ Lyons Transcript

Tim Knox: CJ Lyons is my guest today on the program. CJ is a former pediatric ER doctor turned novelist who now has 21 books to her credit, many of them bestsellers on the NY Times and USA Today lists, including the popular Lucy Guardino series which is probably what she’s best-known for at this point.

CJ has been called a master within the genre, her novels have won countless awards, countless fans, lots of readers.

She’s been a storyteller all her life, always creating stories about people discovering the courage to make a difference. This led her to coin the term “thrillers with a heart”.

This was a wonderful interview. CJ was very forthcoming in her advice and her opinions and if you are an author looking to break into this genre, the thrillers, crime novels, or really any genre CJ has a lot to say that you need to hear.

Here now is my interview with CJ Lyons, author of 21 novels, the Lucy Guardino series, on today’s Interviewing Authors.

Tim Knox: CJ, welcome to the program.

CJ Lyons: Hi, it’s great to be here.

Tim Knox: Great having you here. You and I have a whole lot to talk about today. Before we do though if you will, give the audience a little background on CJ Lyons.

CJ Lyons: Well I actually practiced pediatrics and pediatric emergency medicine for 17 years. I’m a native of Pennsylvania and then I left medicine to go on to become a New York Times bestselling thriller author and I have just released my 23rd book.

Tim Knox: Now how does one go from being a pediatrician to being an author?

CJ Lyons: A lot of hard work, a lot of hours. Writing takes more time, more hours spent than I used to spend when I worked at the office but it’s just as fulfilling in its own way. I think a lot of career people want to make that kind of transition. I get asked all the time by doctors and lawyers and nurses and all sorts of professionals but I just feel like they would much rather and be much happier pursuing creative arts instead of their current profession.

I’m the first to admit that the writing life is not for everyone. You have to be very much a self-starter, very disciplined and motivated and you have to kind of understand that it’s not all just sitting around eating Bon Bons and like Castle, playing poker every Thursday night. I wish it was but it’s not like that at all.

Tim Knox: I think that TV show, Castle, is a little misleading as far as being an author. Let’s go back in time if you will to even before you were a pediatrician. Were you always a writer, interested in writing?

CJ Lyons: Yes I was a storyteller from the get go. I spent a lot of time in time out when I was a little kid before I knew how to read or write. Parents and teachers would always comment that I perhaps had trouble telling the difference between truth and lies but in my mind I was just listening to the voices in my head and spinning tales. It’s always been my way of making sense of the world around me and of the chaos that sometimes engulfs us.

So I actually wrote my first novel – it was a young adult fantasy – in high school and then in medical school I wrote two science fiction novels. None of those will ever see the light of day, thank God. It’s just always, always been something that I’ve done and I really couldn’t stop, even with a 12 step program. It’s just part of who I am.

Thankfully it’s a very, very good thing for a doctor to understand stories, especially a pediatrician because half of our patients can’t talk to us and can’t tell us what’s going on so you have to learn how to kind of get that narrative flow from the families and fill in the blanks and kind of understand where they’re leading you. I think that really helped me to be a better physician. Of course having 17 years of life in the ER and out in the country, I mean we used to make house calls when I was a community pediatrician. That gave me a ton of stories to draw on. It was a wealth of information for my thrillers so it’s a win/win either way for me.

Tim Knox: Do you think the fact that you were such a creative little kid led you into pediatrics?

CJ Lyons: Yes, yes, that was a big part of it. I had no trouble relating to the kids. In fact I am definitely not a morning person and I used to love getting up in the morning when I had my pediatric rotations but I dreaded having to go to the adult clinics. Here’s the thing about adults and this happens when you’re in pediatrics as well because there’s always adults in kids’ lives and adolescence are like a whole different species to themselves.

With adults everyone lies, everyone complains and no one does what you tell them to do to get better anyway. I really, really did not enjoy working with adults at all as a physician. The kids, oh my gosh, how wonderful it would be just to get a smile out of a kid’s face when you fix their boo boo or be able to give parents some reassurance that everything was going to be okay or to be with them during those awful times when everything’s not okay. It was a real calling for me.

Tim Knox: One thing that I find really interesting that you just said was you really enjoy working with those patients, those little kids who really can’t tell you what’s wrong. You almost have to get in their head and I think that’s part of the creative process when it comes to writing, right?

CJ Lyons: Yes it is. I think the most important thing about a writer building their world… now a lot of people talk about this concept in science fiction and fantasy but I do think it’s applicable to any form of writing. If you really want to build a world that feels realistic and that draws the reader in no matter how outlandish you have the plot to be is if you can put yourself in the shoes of those characters and make the reader feel sympathy even to the most darkest, most heinous character that you can create. I think that’s where the reader starts to feel like the world is real and they’ll go anywhere you take them once you’ve captivated them and made those people come true.

To do that you have to understand human nature, which means a lot of empathy, a lot of understanding and asking yourself why would they do this? What’s their motivation? Why would someone do that? I think that’s why a lot of us writers turn to stories. It does help us make sense of the real world. Crazy things happen and it’s hard to understand why they happen unless you’re able to have that talent of kind of taking a step back and not to trivialize it but to turn it into a story, to turn it into something that our brains can grasp.

Tim Knox: I think that’s another great point. You’re not stepping out in faith. You’ve got to know why this happened, how this happened and how to explain it. That’s just the writer’s brain at work, right?

CJ Lyons: Yeah, in fact that’s where I’ll start every story is with the character and with whatever their central theme or problem’s going to be and that always, always starts off with motivation. So I guess in a way I’m kind of a method writer. I can’t really do a whole lot with characters until I understand why they’re doing what they’re doing and then I can make it hopefully feel very organic to the reader that they get why these characters are like this. To me that’s where every story starts.

Tim Knox: And a great writer can make even the most vile character have a little likability.

CJ Lyons: Well I don’t know if it’s likability. I would at least say that you see the humanity in them. You have some spark of understanding. This is maybe a good realistic example of when I was assigned the child abuse cases in the ER. One of the reasons was I could talk to the families that bring in these kids in a very nonthreatening manner. I actually was able to get confessions of abuse and even homicide from the perpetrators as I was getting my medical history because I was very non-judgmental and I would just listen and let them express it. I could sit there and kind of understand how – not condone it, but understand how someone could snap in the heat of the moment or lack the impulse control or whatever it was.

It was enough empathy that they would talk to me and they would tell me what really happened and I could record that as part of the medical history, which was a huge help to prosecutors down the road. But it also helped me as a doctor because then I could truly understand my patient’s histories and better treat them.

That empathy is different than sympathy. It’s different than condoning but I think if you can understand it the healing process kind of can take place better and it also helps prepare you when bad things happen in your own life.

Tim Knox: And having that empathetic slant I think for writers comes in handy when you are writing these characters.

CJ Lyons: Yeah I think it comes in handy for just about any character but especially bad guys. I tend to avoid getting into the point-of-view of my worst characters often because I truly don’t want the reader to have any empathy for them. I know a lot of thriller writers actually love writing from the point-of-view of the bad guy and I have done that a couple times but I try to save that for the kind of stories where I think having the reader understand the bad guy and have some empathy for his humanity and his flaws becomes important in terms of mirroring the hero’s journey. Every bad guy think they’re the hero of their own story. So I try to really save that. I try not to do that in every book. I save that for those stories where it’s really going to have the highest impact because it’s a pretty powerful technique to get someone to actually have some kind of empathy with a Hannibal Lector type of character.

Tim Knox: And I think there’s the tendency on behalf of some writers to try to almost explain the behavior by going back and looking at what caused them to be that way. To me sometimes that’s just a bit much because in the end they are still who they are.

CJ Lyons: Right. I mean a lot of writers… I mean remember I write crime fiction, suspense thrillers so a lot of my readers, part of their enjoyment comes from solving the puzzle of why characters did what they do. They like a few little tidbits of that. They don’t like to be totally in the dark. I’ve done two books now where I’ve left the readers pretty much totally in the dark as to the motivations of the bad guy and just let them live vicariously through what he actually did. They had motivations like getting paid and things like that but not the deep, dark psychological roots of their dysfunction. I’ve had readers that complained but I’ve had other readers that thought it was very refreshing. Yeah, that’s how it’d be in real life. You wouldn’t have all those answers.

The fact that the main characters, the good guys especially, are wondering about their answers kind of tells you a lot about them. I always try to use any of those kind of techniques as a reflection, as a mirror to get into the deeper aspects of the more impertinent characters which in some books is a bad guy in addition to the good guys but in a lot of my books it’s pretty much the good guys.

Tim Knox: Let’s go back a little bit once again because you said when you were in med school or practicing you wrote a couple novels that will never see the light of day. Can you at least tell us what those were?

CJ Lyons: They were just science fiction space operas. It was just fun. That was primarily what I read during those years. I didn’t turn to my first thriller or crime fiction until I was a pediatric intern at Children’s Hospital in Pittsburgh and one of my fellow interns was murdered. It was a very notorious crime. It made national headlines at the time. We just had a few days off and we had to get right back into the job of taking care of little babies and helping families while also dealing with this strange new world we found ourselves in after Jeff’s murder. That’s when I first wrote my first thriller, which ended up being Borrowed Time. When it was eventually published that actually hit the U.S.A. Today list.

Tim Knox: Was it based on that story or was that really just inspired you to go into that genre?

CJ Lyons: It wasn’t at all based on Jeff’s particular story. It was more based on my emotional chaos of can I still trust myself? Can I trust my judgment? Swept up in this emotional abyss that I found myself in and how do I heal? How do I get myself out of this? It’s a romantic thriller. Kate suddenly finds that she couldn’t trust anything about herself and this police officer has a near death experience and when she wakes up she can predict the death of other people if she touches them. So the other cops thinks she’s crazy. She can’t tell anyone because she’s fearful she’s going to lose her job and her livelihood. She thinks she might be going crazy.

So there’s a whole bunch of trust issues going on as well as kind of the who do we trust and how do we heal ourselves when something cataclysmic happens in our lives. You’ll find that kind of theme in a lot of my thrillers. It’s about moving forward despite grief or fear or just losing everything and kind of that never surrender, never give up attitude that allows ordinary people to become heroes.

Tim Knox: Right. You coined the term ‘thrillers with a heart’. Is that where that comes from?

CJ Lyons: Yeah I call my subgenre thrillers with a heart mainly because when I was first pitching my books to agents and editors it was really hard to describe them because they’re very fast-paced action oriented thrillers and I’ve been complimented on that by many review sources and awards and things like that but at the heart of each one there’s always a relationship. It could be a romantic relationship, a family relationship.

My most popular series, Lucy Gaurdino FBI thrillers, center on basically a Pittsburgh soccer mom who also happens to be a kickass FBI agent. She’s torn between when do you say no to your job when you’re saving kids’ lives and when do you say no to your family? That’s a very universal kind of dilemma that people find themselves in. Her relationships are very healthy. She’s got a very supportive husband. She loves her mom, her daughters. She’s not one of these FBI characters that are kind of the stereotypic recovering alcoholic driven by killers stalking them. I just wanted to see what would a normal mom do if she had this job? How would she react to all these terrible things that is surrounding her in her work and how would that impact her family?

That’s basically a lot of the kind of relationships that my books explore, an emotional heart. That’s why I coined the terms thrillers with heart. If you’re looking for an action packed Jack Reacher type thriller my books are not those. My books do have the action but it all comes with a very hefty helping of some hopefully realistic emotional relationship building in each story.

Tim Knox: That’s one thing that I really like about the Lucy Gaurdino series. She is a soccer mom. She’s just a normal lady. This is her job and this is how she handles it. She’s not going to Kung-Fu bad guys and jump off buildings and this sort of thing. She’s a normal person in a very extraordinary job.

CJ Lyons: What kills me is that sometimes reviewers will condemn Lucy as being a “superhero” and I’ll look and it’s like wait a minute. The only injury that she’s had that she’s gone back to work after, she got some stitches in her back. People are like, “I can’t believe she went back to work. She should have just gone home.” Jack Reacher could get shot three times!

In fact, in the same book I have a junior FBI agent break his arm, which usually you would not go back to work after that, and he shows up back to work and everyone cheers him. No one thinks twice about it. I just found that so ironic that women are held at such a different standard when you portray them in a realistic fashion. If I had been writing something like a Lara Croft Tomb Raider nobody would think twice about her getting back up to chase down the bad guys.

That’s kind of a neat thing about these books. She starts out with just having a wonderful life and slowly that life and her family relationships are kind of poisoned by the toxicity that comes from her job. She has to start making harder and harder decisions about where she’s going to sacrifice in her life – family or job or her own personal well-being. I just find that fascinating so I love writing her.

Tim Knox: When you came up with the idea for the first book did you debate on whether or not to do a male versus female lead?

CJ Lyons: No I had actually talked with a number of FBI agents, both male and female who had done this job, and it was amazing how their coping mechanisms and their stories were very identical. It wasn’t really a question of would one sex handle it differently than the other? No one had really done a realistic female FBI agent at the time and I just thought that was something that needed to be done. It would open up a lot of different kind of conflict for her that a male FBI agent perhaps wouldn’t have been so obvious.

Let’s face it. If a guy’s at work and he misses his daughter’s soccer practice no one’s going to think twice about it but if mom misses it she was the one who was supposed to bring the brownies and the snacks, she’s going to get all sorts of flack. I thought that would just give a little additional kind of social commentary by using a female protagonist.

Tim Knox: Let’s talk a little about how you brought the book to print. When you had the manuscript ready did you submit to agents? What was your process for bringing it to the market?

CJ Lyons: For Snake Skin I actually already had a couple books published by Berkley/Jove at the time so I had an agent. I knew this was something kind of special and different but my editor at Berkley/Jove didn’t actually want more thrillers from me. Her specialty is cozy mysteries and I just can’t write a cozy mystery to save my life. I find them very enjoyable but I’m not clever enough. I don’t have those kind of Sherlock Holmes type of plot ideas. Mine are much more driven by the people and their emotional arch than the crazy puzzle solving. So she wouldn’t have been interested in these books.

My agent and I talked and my agent thought this could go big so she took it out and we actually within 48 hours had a huge foreign sale to Germany. So we thought oh wow, this is great. This series will kind of sell itself. Unfortunately this was the end of 2009 or 2010 and that’s right when the New York City publishing kind of had their financial bubble burst and they started laying off a lot of people. A lot of the editors that loved this book suddenly no longer had a job.

It ended up just not selling to New York because the timing just kind of stunk but that was also when I started self-publishing because my Berkley/Jove books were coming out just once a year and my readers wanted books out faster. So I had several manuscripts that for various reasons, things like editors leaving or other problems, had been through New York City publishers but had never actually been published. They were copy edited and proofread and the whole nine yards so I thought I had the rights to these books so why not use them? Help keep my readers happy and hopefully they’ll remember me when the next traditionally published book comes out.

Well that was a real turning point for me because within a year I was paying the bills with the self-published stuff and within a year and a half I was making more in a month from self-publishing than I was in a year from New York City even though I was still getting really good New York City contracts. So I love this ability to create some synergy and to keep my readers happy by providing them both forms of published novels.

Tim Knox: Are you still doing both forms?

CJ Lyons: Yes I am. Right now it’s mainly my young adult thrillers that are coming out from a New York City publisher and I’m pretty much doing most of the other thrillers on my own. Each book my agent and I discuss and we kind of decide what would be the best plan for this particular book. She’s always chatting me up with editors and publishers so she knows what they’re looking for and what they would like to see from that they really think they could help break out. We kind of make that decision on a book by book basis.

Tim Knox: At what point did you take that leap to take what was I’m sure a very fulfilling career to become a full time writer?

CJ Lyons: I took that leap a little soon. For everyone listening, don’t do what I did, okay? I was a physician. I had cut backs from full time to part time, which for community pediatrics meant going from 70 hours a week working to 40 hours a week. By carving out that extra time I used that time to write. I thought if I really want to do this as a second career then I need to treat it like a career, like a profession and carve out time for it and get serious.

At the same time I started saving my money and cutting down on living expenses in the hopes that someday I would sell and have a couple contracts and be able to make a leap of faith. By the time I had two New York City contracts I decided this is it; I’m going to go ahead and do it. So I moved 1,000 miles away from home. I quit my job. I was unemployed for the first time since I was 15. 90 days before the book was supposed to come out the publisher cancelled it.

Tim Knox: What did you do? How freaked out was that?

CJ Lyons: It was bad. It was very bad because I had already spent at their urging a ton of money. I had set up speaking engagements. You have to understand this book was my dream debut. It was supposed to come out in hardcover. It had been sold at pre-empt so it made pretty good money on it. It had endorsements from 12 New York Times bestselling authors. It had wonderful pre-sales from Barnes & Noble and Borders.

What happened was the pre-sales were based on the book. No one had seen the cover art and when they finally saw the cover art the booksellers were like we can’t sell a hardcover book by an unknown author with this cover art. You need to go back to the drawing board.

Tim Knox: Was this Snake Skin?

CJ Lyons: No this was originally called Blink of an Eye and it ended up being published as Nerves of Steel.

Tim Knox: What was wrong with the cover art in their opinion?

CJ Lyons: It was very bad. My agent and I had problems with it all along. It was shades on shades of vile green, including all the writing on the inside flaps and including Sandra Brown’s cover quote on the outside. You basically got nauseous if you dared to pick up this book and look at it. It was awful. I could totally understand why the booksellers were like that. Unfortunately the publisher couldn’t and they said we’ve got an award winning art department and we stand by them. We’ll just cancel the book with no thought of my career. That wasn’t important.

Tim Knox: So they actually rather than change the cover art they killed the book.

CJ Lyons: Yes.

Tim Knox: That’s incredible to me. That ticks me off on your behalf.

CJ Lyons: That’s the way publishing works.

Tim Knox: Yeah, wow.

CJ Lyons: That was a big lesson for me because here I had left anything. I didn’t have a job. I didn’t have an income. Thank God I had my savings. What I did during that period was I wrote. Thankfully other editors had read some of the advanced review copies for the book that was cancelled and they liked my writing style so a publisher from Penguin Putnam called me up and asked if I’d be willing to create a series just for them, something aimed towards the 18 to 34 year old female audience. So that’s where my Angels of Mercy series spun to life.

To kind of tell you that karma has a sense of humor, the book that I wrote during that terrible time when I didn’t know if I would ever have a career as a writer was Blind Faith and that’s the book that hit #2 in the New York Times bestseller list. I sold a quarter of a million copies in a couple months, won the ITW Thriller Award, won the Reader’s Choice Award.

I self-published the book that was cancelled and that book has actually earned me back tons more money than I ever would have made if I had stuck with the New York City publisher. So it turned out to be a win/win. It just didn’t seem like that at the time. I definitely had to gear up and just drive on through it. Like I said, writing’s always been my way of coping with the outside world so that turned into a very fortuitous thing.

Tim Knox: Do you ever think about if they hadn’t killed that book, do you think you would have written Blind Faith?

CJ Lyons: Honestly no. I probably would not have written Blind Faith. I probably would have been pigeon holed as a midlist medical thriller. They probably never would have let me write anything that wasn’t a medical thriller. I would have probably already been dropped and be wondering why? What happened to my career?

Instead I took that impetus to learn about the business. I was a pediatrician. I didn’t even balance my checkbook. I started reading like Seth Godin’s blog and books like Start with Why and Copyblogger and all these wonderful business blogs to learn. Again, this goes back to the writer. You want to understand the motivations. So it’s like why would they have made this decision? What could I have done differently? How could I have motivated them differently? How could I reach an audience? What was kind of cool was that the key impact of learning all this at the same time that self-publishing became so accessible and easy to do, I was way ahead of the game when it came to starting over as basically the CEO of my own global media empire.

Tim Knox: I hear that a lot from authors that have reached a certain amount of success. You have to treat it like a business because that’s really what it is now.

CJ Lyons: You have to start from day one. Don’t wait. I see so many authors that sign bad contracts because they thought that was the road to success but they didn’t understand how the business worked. So they didn’t understand when they had “great contracts with a great publisher and great contracts” but they’re losing their house or not paying the taxes.

They just don’t understand that the life of a book in New York City from acceptance and being offered a contract to publication can be two to three years. Say you’re given a $100,000 advance and you’re paid three installments. That’s like $33,000 a year before taxes, before your agent takes 15% and if you have a family and a mortgage that’s not a living wage.

Tim Knox: One thing you talked about there… I don’t know if you know Chris Farnsworth. I was interviewing him and he was talking about all the highs and lows of his career and he would have these wonderful things that looked like they’re about to happen and then they wouldn’t happen. He talked about the ability to handle that rollercoaster and I think that’s what you’re saying to. It’s not all wine and roses and unicorns. There’s a lot of unexpected disappointments and other things that you have to deal with as an author.

CJ Lyons: Yeah and I think it’s really important to develop a thick skin because right away with print runs and cover art that you have no control over and then you start getting reviews and sometimes the reviewers are just in a bad mood. They think you’re the personal punching bag or something. Nowadays authors are being asked to take responsibility for all the marketing as well and if you’re unprepared for that, which I totally was and I still am; I actually don’t do a lot of marketing. I think your best marketing is just sitting down and writing the next book keeping your readers happy but a lot of authors are just totally flummoxed by that and it can put them in a tailspin where they have a hard time writing.

Of course if you don’t get the words on the page and you don’t have a next book readers are going to walk away and forget you. It becomes a real catch 22 if you don’t look at it as a business, if you don’t take the time to figure out what kind of schedule works for you or not, how to be disciplined and get the word count done, that kind of thing. You really have to know yourself and a lot of people aren’t comfortable with that kind of reflection on their motives and on what kind of person they really are when it comes around to sitting at home with no one looking over your shoulder making you punch a time clock and getting the work done.

Tim Knox: One thing that I find really interesting, and I’ve been an entrepreneur for 30 years and I’ve done a lot of entrepreneurial teaching. When I started Interviewing Authors I started seeing these parallels between authors and entrepreneurs and the mindset that it’s your business, you’ve got to get in there every day, do the work whether you like it or not and really writing books is the same way. Do you have a set schedule every day? What is your process to write?

CJ Lyons: Again, don’t do what I do but I have no set schedule. I don’t write every day. I don’t have a word count. I don’t keep track of a word count. I’m very undisciplined. I’m also a seat of the pants writer that just as often will write the last scene in the book and go backwards then the first scene and go forward. I think that’s because of all those years I spent in the ER tied to a beeper and a firm schedule. I kind of have this innate discipline or maybe it’s just kind of a competitive nature.

All I need is a deadline, even if it’s a self-imposed deadline. If I have a deadline I will beat it every time. That’s all I need but I know myself and I k now I can do that. I think where some people go wrong is that they listen to what works for other people without examining their own psychology and understanding what motivates them and also not just what the stick is but what’s their carrot. What keeps them going? What makes them get through a bad time or stressful period?

Tim Knox: I think that’s a really good point. You say you know yourself and you know what you’re capable of and you’re very competitive when it comes to deadlines. Really that sort of thing depends on you and how self-disciplined you are and your personality and all of these other things. Did you really the frenetic pace of the ER when you were practicing?

CJ Lyons: Oh yeah, that did not bother me at all. In fact I enjoyed that every day was different and that’s one of the things I enjoy about being a writer. I might have a day where I’m traveling and speaking all day so I get no writing done but it’s still a great day. That kind of spontaneity really appeals to me and I do not do well with structure and with schedules. I rebel against them and that’s when the work doesn’t get done. For me, understanding myself was the key to being able to be more productive.

Tim Knox: You’ve written four different series. You’ve got the Lucy books, the Heart and Drake, Shadow Ops, Angels of Mercy. What attracts you to the series writing?

CJ Lyons: I love taking a character and pushing them further and further with each book. The Lucy books are going very dark and edgy in particular. Heart and Drake is the story of a relationship. It starts with a couple from when they first lay eyes on each other until they actually make a commitment in book three and I’ve had a ton of readers say… she actually proposes to him in book three. “We really want the wedding story.” So I am going to do one more Heart and Drake that’s going to be their wedding disaster. After that, they’ve kind of earned their happily ever after so that will be it for them.

Tim Knox: You’re not going to do a Heart and Drake 10 years down the road where they’ve got four kids and never have time for each other?

CJ Lyons: You know, maybe but I’m always looking for something that’s fresh and different. If I start getting bored then I fear that the readers will as well. Again that’s why I coined the term ‘thrillers with heart’ is because no two of my books are the same, even if you look in the same series. Snake Skin, the first Lucy book, is just a balls to the wall action packed thriller but then Blood Stained, the next book, is very much dark psychological suspense.

Each book is a little different because I get bored. I know that turns some readers off because a lot of readers want to read the same thing over and over just slightly different and I have to be honest with them. I can’t give them that. Like Janet Evanovich is on like book 21. Anyone that loves her stuff will say, “Oh they’re the same but I can’t get enough of them. Just like every M&M is the same but I love them and I can’t get enough of them.” I wish I could do that. That certainly would make life kind of in a way easier for my readers but I’m too ADD. I can’t do it. My poor readers never know what they’re going to get when the next book comes out. I kind of keep them on their toes that way. That’s probably also why I don’t have as big an audience as Janet Evanovich.

Tim Knox: Isn’t that part of the fun though? You may have not as big a singular audience but you have multiple audiences.

CJ Lyons: And honestly most of my core audience is very loyal and I love them for it. They get it and as Seth Godin puts it, they’re my kind of weird. They want to explore the dark secret sides of the human psyche and relationships and how they can fall apart and how you can heal them. They love doing that in the setting of a very high stake thriller and I can give them that. It’s not going to read like the same book every time but they like it. They’re probably ADD too; I don’t know.

So it’s not really about trying to write to please everyone, which I think is kind of a rookie mistake. Writing to please your audience and understanding why they are drawn to your books and what reward they get from spending their time and their money and their attention on reading your books because it really is an investment. Just like a stock market investment, you have to be able to give them that payoff.

Tim Knox: That’s one thing about the internet is really it’s made it much easier for the reader and the writer to build a relationship. You are more accessible now as a writer than you would have been 20 or 30 years ago. I think that kind of helps you build those relationships with those readers who will be faithful to you no matter what.

CJ Lyons: Yeah, the internet has definitely been helpful that way because I am pretty much other than going out for research trips and speaking engagements, I’m a hermit. I don’t go out there and do a lot of book signings or events. I don’t do marketing. I don’t do a lot of Twitter or Facebook so the fact that my readers know they can send me an email and I will get back to them and we have that line of communication. Some of my most devout readers are on my street team. I did go ahead last year and broke down and setup a special Facebook group. That way they can also chat among themselves even if I’m busy writing and I can’t get around to playing social. I’m definitely not the best hostess or marketing person out there. As an extreme introvert it’s not my skill set.

Tim Knox: What are you working on now?

CJ Lyons: Actually right now I’m working on the next Lucy Guardino book called Hard Fall and it should be out in September once we finish the edits. It’s really dark just to warn everyone. It’s very dark. Lucy’s entire life changes with this book. I think readers are going to find it rewarding. Then in October comes the first of my Renegade Justice Series called Fight Dirty and that features everyone’s favorite teenage sociopath, Morgan, who I introduced in the second Lucy book. Then in November my next YA thriller, Watched, comes out. This is a really busy time of year for me.

Tim Knox: It sounds like it. It’s a good thing you have ADD because it’s serving you very well.

CJ Lyons: Yeah actually if you learn how to harness it, you get a ton of stuff done.

Tim Knox: Exactly. CJ Lyons, a wonderfully prolific author. Tell us where we can find more about you and order your books.

CJ Lyons: Well you can learn more about my fiction at CJLyons.net and if you’re a writer and you’re looking for tips on self-publishing or just publishing in general I share everything I learn at my NoRulesJustWrite.com site.

Tim Knox: Very good. We will put links to all of those on our page. CJ, this has been a pleasure. Will you come back and talk to us when the next book is out?

CJ Lyons: Absolutely, as long as I have time I’m happy to do it.

Tim Knox: If we can coax you out of your cave.

CJ Lyons: My hermit cave, yeah.

Tim Knox: CJ, thank you so much.

CJ Lyons: Thank you.

The post CJ Lyons: From The Emergency Room To The Top of The Bestseller Lists appeared first on Interviewing Authors with Tim Knox, Author, Talk Radio Host, Serial Entrepreneur, Small Business Expert.

Chris Farnsworth: Talent, Timing, and Tenacity Make For One Terrific Author

Christopher Farnsworth was born and raised in Idaho, where he worked as an investigative and business reporter for several years, before selling his first script, THE ACADEMY, to MGM.

He is also the writer of the Nathaniel Cade series, about a vampire who works for the President of the United States: Blood Oath; The President’s Vampire; and Red, White, and Blood are all available now from G.P. Putnam’s Sons.

A short novella about Cade, The Burning Men, is available from Amazon.com.

His next book, about the Fountain of Youth, will be released by William Morrow in 2015.

His work has also appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the New York Post, the New Republic, Washington Monthly, and on The Awl. He lives in Los Angeles with his family.

Chris Farnsworth Interview

Scroll down for a complete transcript of the interview or click the Play button below to listen to the interview now. And don’t forget to leave a comment to let us know what you thought of this interview!

Books by Chris Farnsworth

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Chris Farnsworth Transcript

Tim Knox: Chris Farnsworth is my guest today. Chris is a former investigative reporter who moved from Iowa to California and turned from journalism to screenwriting, then to fiction.

He hit pay dirt with the Nathaniel Cade series, about a vampire who works for the President of the United States.

Chris is an extremely humble guy who kept using words like ‘right place right time’ and ‘extremely lucky’ but we know there is more to his success than dumb luck.

Chris’ work attracts the attention of the critics, the readers, and everyone in the industry.

Chris is also open with his advice on what it takes to succeed in the industry, how to grow your fanbase, and how to get started.

Here then is my interview with Chris Farnsworth on this edition of Interviewing Authors.

Tim Knox: Chris, welcome to the program.

Chris Farnsworth: Thanks so much for having me.

Tim Knox: For those in our audience that aren’t familiar with your work, give us a little biography.

Chris Farnsworth: Well basically I’ve gotten really, really lucky. I started out as a reporter on a very small weekly in Boise, Idaho and sort of worked my way up to being a business and investigative reporter. When I was in Orange County I worked at the newspaper there. A friend of mine was a screenwriter and I was trying to write books in my spare time. He said, “Oh you’re in California now. You’ve got to write scripts.”

So I wrote a script basically just to see if I could do it and sort of to my amazement it sold within two weeks. I was just floored and my agents at the time said it never happens this fast. As it turns out they were right. I flailed away for a while being both a reporter and then just a screenwriter. Then the writer’s strike hit, the WGA writer’s strike, so I couldn’t even really fail to sell a script at that point.

So I decided well I’ve got this time and I’ve got this idea that my agents at the time hated. I figured I’d try to write it as a book again. The germ of the idea was in 1867 there was a man who was pardoned by the President of the United States at the time, Andrew Johnson. The man was reportedly accused of being a vampire, of killing two people and draining their blood while he was on a ship.

I was just kind of fascinated by that. I thought what would the President of the United States do with a vampire? Then I thought well what wouldn’t the President of the United States do with a vampire? So it sort of spit-balled into this huge idea of a very special Secret Service agent who protects the United States from all manner of cult threats. That’s how I began the Cade books.

Tim Knox: You know what, I find that so interesting. The one thing that you really talk about is your agent at the time did not think it was a great idea.

Chris Farnsworth: Yeah my agents at the time, my film agents at the time, did not think vampires were any kind of a growing concern.

Tim Knox: And now what do you think they think?

Chris Farnsworth: I think they’ve probably come around.

Tim Knox: Well if you will let’s kind of back up because I always like to start at the beginning. So you’re from Boise and you’re a reporter. Did you move to California specifically to write books or for the newspaper business?

Chris Farnsworth: I moved here specifically for the newspaper business. I started in Boise at a small alternative weekly and then I got a job in Phoenix at the Phoenix New Times where I was doing investigative reporting solely and then I got a job at the Orange County Register where I joined the Business Section and I covered the tech and the .com boom at the time.

Tim Knox: Before that had you always wanted to be a writer? Had you thought about writing books?

Chris Farnsworth: Almost always. There was a brief period where in college where I thought I was going to be a lawyer but sanity prevailed.

Tim Knox: You’re not the first former lawyer to use that phrase.

Chris Farnsworth: There are a lot of really good lawyers out there and I don’t think the legal profession is missing anything for not having me in it.

Tim Knox: So when you were in college, I think you told this story, you wrote something and you submitted it to an agent and they asked for more but then you didn’t hear back?

Chris Farnsworth: Yeah my very first novel I wrote, I wrote as my senior thesis. I sent it off to a bunch of agents in just sort of these incredibly blind, amateurishly queries. One of them, a fairly high powered agent, did get back to me. I spent the entire summer and most of the next year just waiting to hear after I sent the full manuscript and never did. Of course I had these visions of well this changes everything and this is going to be the big break. What am I going to wear to the Nobel Prize ceremony? I don’t know if you even have to show up in person at the Nobel Prize ceremony. It was one of the great lessons in learning not to count your chickens before they hatch.

Tim Knox: I think what you’re describing there a lot of authors, including myself, have been through that. You send it off and you get someone who will just nibble and all of a sudden you’re very positive you’re going to be the next Hemmingway and dating models. The one phrase that you used in an interview that I listened to was, “That was the longest walk to the mailbox every day.”

Chris Farnsworth: Absolutely, yeah, absolutely. It’s actually a really good thing the book did not get published because it’s fairly terrible. It was an undergraduate novel. I was playing with toys I really didn’t fully understand. It was a great exercise but it wasn’t what I would call ‘good’ by any stretch of the imagination. It was called Road Trip and it was about a guy who’s a truck driver and just all the insane things he encounters when he’s out on the road.

Tim Knox: So you finally ended up in California. Your friend said you’re in L.A. so you’ve got to write movie scripts. Tell us a little about that because your first script I think was The Academy. It sold quickly.

Chris Farnsworth: Yeah my agents took it out and within two weeks it had been optioned by MGM. It was about a covert government program that took orphans and turned them into spies. This was before Bourne Identity came out, before Agent Cody Banks but it was sort of a mix of both of those.

Tim Knox: So it was optioned by MGM and they just never did anything with it?

Chris Farnsworth: No we had meetings and then it just got put into turnaround, which is basically Hollywood language for, “Here’s your check; you can go away now.”

Tim Knox: Talk a little about that. As we were just talking about, the range of emotions that an author goes through because some authors try their entire life and never get a meeting at MGM so you’ve got to be very high on this and very expectant and then nothing happens.

Chris Farnsworth: Yeah I think that you’re entire career as a writer can be, or at least my entire career as a writer can be summed you up as learning to manage expectations. There’s always another hurdle that you’re going to have to jump over. There’s always going to be something else that you’re going to have to do and the work never really ends. That’s what makes it both really incredibly gratifying and incredibly frustrating.

I’m never going to tell you that I haven’t been incredibly lucky. That’s where I start from. I’ve gotten opportunities that I never would have dreamed of. I sold my first article to Boise Weekly for something like I’m going to say $30, $40 and in grad school that was a lot of money. That was at least dinner and several beers.

It becomes a series of graduated hurdles you’ve got to jump over. You always think well once I get published then I’ll have really made it. Once I get a screen option I’ll have really made it. Once I finally get my novel published I’ll have really made it. You never really have that feeling. You feel great for a couple of days and then you’re like okay well I better get back to work.

Tim Knox: But you have to be the eternal optimist, don’t you? You’ve got to get back on that horse and write some more.

Chris Farnsworth: Oh yeah, absolutely. You can never give up because there’s always an excuse not to write. The blank screen is the easiest thing in the world to turn away from. Even with deadlines bearing down on me, even after all my really incredible luck, I can still find excuses not to write and I can still find excuses to be discouraged.

Tim Knox: Now did you find that your time as a journalist, did that help you become a novelist?

Chris Farnsworth: Absolutely. I think that the great thing about journalism, about writing for a daily newspaper which barely even exists anymore, or a five times a day posting on a blog or whatever, is that it teaches you the importance of deadlines. It teaches you not to be scared of the blank screen and to get past that fear. The greatest thing for me was having an editor over my shoulder in a noisy, crowded environment saying, “Hey we are a daily paper. You do have to get this done today.”

Tim Knox: The value of deadlines in the newspaper business.

Chris Farnsworth: Yeah it teaches you to produce even when you don’t feel like it and it teaches you not to listen to writer’s block. I’m not one of those writers who says writer’s block doesn’t exist but I do believe that there is a real fear in a lot of writers of writing just something that’s terrible and that can really paralyze you.

Tim Knox: So let’s move ahead a little bit. So you had the idea for Nathaniel Cade. He is a vampire in the service to the President. What year was it that you had that idea?

Chris Farnsworth: I had the idea I guess 2007 right when the Writers Guild of America went on strike.

Tim Knox: So really you were ahead of the vampire curve that we’re riding now.

Chris Farnsworth: Yeah there’s a phrase that some of my friends and I use called ‘sniffing the zeitgeist’. A lot of writers just seem to have the same ideas at the same time and I think the sudden resurgence of interest in vampires was part of that, and same with the zombies. When I was a screenwriter I did a young Greek gods screenplay and I thought I was so far ahead of the curve. I thought no one else would come up with this. The day it went out to the studios we heard back immediately, “Oh yeah, we got five of these today.”

Tim Knox: Let’s talk about that process. You had the idea. How long did it take you to turn that idea into a sellable book or manuscript?

Chris Farnsworth: I wrote it pretty fast. I think the actual writing took about a year with work and other things in between and also my wife got pregnant and we were going to have a baby. We sold one house and bought another but not in that order so there was a lot of stressful stuff going on. It took about a year to actually finish the book.

Tim Knox: Once you had it finished did you submit it to agents? What was your process of getting published?

Chris Farnsworth: I went through the entire blind query process. Having contact in Hollywood is usually not very helpful in getting contacts in the literary world or at least it wasn’t then. It’s changed a lot but there’s still kind of a wall between literary publishing, the New York world and Los Angeles. I didn’t have any contacts. I didn’t have anyone who had an in. I just had to go through the whole blind submission process. Again, there I got very lucky. That’s how I found my agent, Alexandra Machinist, who’s remarkable and brilliant.

Tim Knox: How many agents did you query? Do you remember?

Chris Farnsworth: It had to be at least 100.

Tim Knox: You had had some prior success selling things quickly. How was it dealing with that whole agent querying process?

Chris Farnsworth: It’s never as fast as you like it. Everything takes longer than you think it’s going to. Writing the book’s going to take longer. I think actually I’ve learned that applies to my life in general. Everything takes longer. You should always budget in two weeks more than you think you’re going to need to. But yeah writing the book took longer, the querying and agenting process took longer. I think that Hollywood and my screenwriting experience was actually very helpful in that regard because that’s a lot of waiting around – waiting around to hear from a producer, waiting around to hear from an agent, waiting around to hear from a studio. You’re always waiting for the answer and the answer is usually no. You’ve got that tension between do I really want to know? As long as you don’t hear it could still possibly be a yes.

Tim Knox: No news is good news.

Chris Farnsworth: Exactly.

Tim Knox: So you got the agent. How long did it take him to sell it?

Chris Farnsworth: Her. Alexandra sold it really incredibly fast. We did a little revision on it and then I think within I’m going to say three months or so she landed a really amazing deal for me.

Tim Knox: Was that a series deal?

Chris Farnsworth: Yes.

Tim Knox: And you’re three books in?

Chris Farnsworth: Three books in, yeah.

Tim Knox: How do you like writing the series?

Chris Farnsworth: I like it a lot. Right now I’m actually taking a break from the series because I got a job to do a different book but I liked it a lot. I liked the idea of carrying ideas and characters through and I’m a huge fan of serialized entertainment anyways. I learned to read from comic books which are just one cliffhanger and one continuation after another. I’m a huge fan of TV. That’s where I learned how to tell a story, from watching and reading these incredibly serialized continuous cliffhanger entertainment. For me that’s what I wanted to do in the book anyways. When I set out to write the book I wanted to write something I would want to read.

Tim Knox: So did you start of intending to write a series?

Chris Farnsworth: Yes, I wanted this to be a franchise character.

Tim Knox: Let’s talk a little about character development. Nathaniel Cade is such a unique character. He’s a vampire that works for the President. How much thought did you give Nathaniel? How much backstory did you do on him?

Chris Farnsworth: I had to think about him a lot. There are a lot of vampires and there’s a strong tradition of the “good vampire” in literature or the vampire is anti-hero or the vampire is hero. So I wanted to give him things that set him apart from other characters who obviously were inspirations like Joss Whedon’s Angel or the Twilight characters or the vampires of True Blood. There are a lot of characters out there who have similar DNA and what I wanted to do was make him strong enough to stand in that company on his own right. It’s up to readers I guess to see if I actually succeeded at that but I wanted to give him something that was different and also I wanted him to be frightening. I wanted to get back more to the idea that a vampire is not some late night cable sex god. A vampire is a predator.

Tim Knox: That’s one thing I was going to ask because now all the vampires just seem to be beautiful people.

Chris Farnsworth: Right and at the time I started writing Cade there was just absolutely no downside to being a vampire. You could even go out in the day again but you would just sparkle. I’ve said this many times in many interviews but I never liked vampires. I never did like them. It goes back to being terrified by one on a Scooby Doo cartoon when I was far too young to be watching television.

Tim Knox: I think I remember that one.

Chris Farnsworth: Yeah exactly.

Tim Knox: That was scary.

Chris Farnsworth: A vampire is not a good guy. By nature he’s not a good guy. He feeds off of other people and condemns them to a horrible death. That’s not something a good guy does.

Tim Knox: No matter how good looking he is.

Chris Farnsworth: Exactly.

Tim Knox: How much inspiration did you take from the old vampire, the Bram Stoker vampire?

Chris Farnsworth: I love the book Dracula. I reread it right before I began writing this and I was surprised by how modernist it was, how much Bram Stoker used the current technology, the current science to combat a creature of superstition and how the book when it’s told with letters and journal entries and such how it gives it such great immediacy. Dracula I think is a great character because of all that. He’s filled in in the negative space created by the ways all the other people see them. That way you see he is a really frightening, terrifying, shadowy figure.

Tim Knox: And not someone who can go out in the daylight and just glow.

Chris Farnsworth: Right, right. He could go out in the daylight; his powers were just vastly reduced.

Tim Knox: Right. The lure of the vampires of the old days is there was mostly the evil but there was a sexy side to the vil.

Chris Farnsworth: I think that there’s a lot to be said about the idea that vampires represent our repressed sexuality, that they represent the desires and our fears that come from wanting to depend on other people and yet be independent of them, the idea that we can somehow control our emotions and we can control who we love and that we can control the need that we have to be loved in return and the needs that we have from other people.

Tim Knox: Now along with the vampires these books are really a historic fiction to a degree. Nathaniel Cade’s involved in a lot of things that are going on in the real world. Talk about mixing those two.

Chris Farnsworth: Well for me that was the fun part. I’ve always been a news and political junkie. I was a journalist and I was a history major. For me, this was a chance to go in and write the real secret history of the world as I saw it. I’ve had a lot of experience with conspiracy theories and I’ve read a lot of those books and it’s always so tempting to try to make the world make sense. There’s a very compelling idea that there’s got to be somebody behind it all. There has to be a reason for all of this. Humans are pattern seeking animals. That’s a very human response to the chaos of history as it goes down around us. I just sort of inserted a vampire into every conspiracy theory I could possibly imagine.

Tim Knox: It was Forrest Gump with fangs.

Chris Farnsworth: He’s always been there. He’s involved in the Nixon administration. He’s the reason for the missing space on the Watergate tapes. He’s involved in the Kennedy assassination. If it’s happened in U.S. history since 1867, Cade has seen some part of it.

Tim Knox: How much fun is it writing this character?

Chris Farnsworth: He’s a lot of fun. He’s superhumanly strong, superhumanly fast, much smarter than we are, much meaner and tougher and yet at the same time has this inflexible moral code most of the time. but he is a predator so it’s great to put on that coat for a while and pretend that nothing can hurt you.

Tim Knox: Do you find yourself kind of walking the fence on exactly how far he goes to either side?

Chris Farnsworth: Yeah I think that’s his great burden to carry is that again it shouldn’t be all fun and games. Being a vampire … it shouldn’t be, wow, I really want that. It should be this is a horrible, horrible price to pay. The way he balances that price, instead of going over entirely to the dark side and preying on humans is that he’s been given a mission. He’s never going to get to see happiness or the promised land himself but he is going to protect the meek until they get there.

Tim Knox: This could be completely off topic but what did you think of the Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter movie?

Chris Farnsworth: I know Seth Grahame-Smith, the guy who wrote that, and he did a fantastic job. I think Seth is if anything much more obsessed with the actual history than I am. He went back and he told me about it when he talked. He went back to the journals and he went back to the actual historical records. I used broad strokes. I honestly think Seth could tell you what hour that his vampires would show up in the actual historical record. I think he could tell you what day of the week in terms of what journals that Abraham Lincoln could have… I think he would have found a spot on the day planner where Abraham Lincoln would have written down 10:30 to noon: slay vampires.

Tim Knox: That’s funny. How much research do you do writing all this historical stuff?

Chris Farnsworth: I still do a lot of research. A lot of it’s out on the fringes. Like I said, I read a lot of conspiracy theories. I read a lot of fringe science books and I read a lot of… one great thing is that America has this fantastic tradition of horror writers starting with H.P. Lovecraft. This homebuilt literature of horror that’s been mostly overlooked and mostly ignored by mainstream literature but that has a real American and a real authentic original stamp on it. This is something that America came up with on its own.

Tim Knox: Right and America seems to embrace this sort of thing. Are zombies the new vampires?

Chris Farnsworth: I don’t know what the new vampires are. I think zombies are still the same zombies. You look at The Walking Dead, which is still one of the highest rated television shows on. I think you look at the fact that zombie movies are still number one at the box office. I don’t think people have gotten tired of zombies yet. I think zombies stand or shamble or whatever on their own. They fill a different but very similar need for fear in us.

Tim Knox: What I have seen happen and I think this is probably going to happen at some point here is there’s going to be a mixing. You remember Godzilla meets Frankenstein. Zombies are going to meet vampires at some point and they already have in some shows.

Chris Farnsworth: That’s one thing that I really like about Cade is that he gets to fight everything. He’s fought Frankenstein’s monster soldiers. One of my favorite and actually one of the scariest movies I remember from my childhood was Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, which was just a great. It had all the universal movie monsters and it was a great, entertaining team up of a film. It was really fantastic.

For me that’s the whole point is getting all of these characters together and you see that in Underworld. There’s some comics that are vampires versus zombies. I think you’ll see more of that and even like Justin Cronin’s The Passage or Guillermo del Toro’s The Strain. Those vampires are a lot more like zombies than they really are like the classic opera cape wearing creatures of the night.

Tim Knox: Do you see this with a lot of authors and filmmakers there – now they’re trying new things? You know what I mean? We’ve done this kind of vampire. What can we do differently? The old make them glow and go outside.

Chris Farnsworth: Yeah I think everybody’s always looking for the next big thing, the next big change. That’s why they want to try stuff like The Strain and they want to try stuff like The Passage or why readers want to read about a Secret Service agent who’s also a vampire. People are constantly looking for a novelty and they’re constantly looking for a new way to pour old wine into new bottles.

Tim Knox: Let’s kind of switch gears a little bit and talk about your process. How big is your family now?

Chris Farnsworth: It’s me, my wife and our two daughters – a six year old and a three year old.

Tim Knox: So they take up some of your time. When does daddy write?

Chris Farnsworth: Daddy started going to the office right about the time my first daughter started to walk, which was right around when she was two, and became this daddy seeking missile. I couldn’t write at home.

Tim Knox: I’ve got two daughters. That’s why I’m laughing.

Chris Farnsworth: Yeah. You can’t get anything done at home. You don’t want to. It’s much more fun to hang out with your incredibly cute child. So yeah, there’s an office that’s down the street from my home and I walk to it every weekday. I try to make it as much like a real job as possible. I sit here and I try to type for as long as I can every day.

That’s the other thing I think I learned from being a reporter. You have to show up and you have to do the job and you have to keep typing. It doesn’t matter if you don’t really feel like it. Unless you’re sick or you’ve had a leg removed you’ve got to get in that chair and type.

Tim Knox: One of the trends that I’ve noticed, and I’ve interviewed 50 or 60 authors now. The ones that seem to have achieved real success, they do treat it like a business. It is like going to the office every day. Talk a little about that. You’re very entrepreneurial I think. Talk about treating it as a business.

Chris Farnsworth: I think that it is a business. You have to take it seriously. If you don’t take it seriously nobody else is going to. There is a certain arrogance and I think there is a certain pretentiousness to it. There’s an old story about how Stephen King used to put his desk right in the middle of his living room and he said, “This is where I write. This is where the work gets done and this is what puts a roof over our heads and this is what puts food on the table so this is important and everybody needs to know it’s important.”

As a writer sometimes it’s really hard to stake out that claim. It’s really hard to tell your family and friends, “No I can’t do that. I’m writing. I’m working.” Even if it’s not your day job you still have to treat it like it’s the most important thing at that time and you have to make the space for it. If you don’t take it seriously nobody else will.

Tim Knox: Have you ever had an occasion where you tell your friends, “I’m writing,” and they look at you like, “So?”

Chris Farnsworth: Again I’m very lucky in that most of my friends are either writers or ex-newspaper writers. They’ve all been through it. They’ve all had people look at them like that so fortunately the look I get is more like, “Yeah, who isn’t?”

Tim Knox: Where do you get your inspiration from?

Chris Farnsworth: Mostly from my reading, mostly from the strange stuff I’ve read my whole life, the weird books I found in the library or the comic books I read when I was a kid or the strange tales of Big Foot and the Loch Ness Monster and UFOs and the little quirks in history, the weird little unexplained mysteries that are still out there in historical record that nobody really has a good answer for even though we’d like to have one.

Tim Knox: And when you hear of those little mysteries do you feel compelled to solve them literally?

Chris Farnsworth: Yeah it’s like an antenna going up. I feel like I have to make at least some attempt at an explanation.

Tim Knox: Do you still read comic books?

Chris Farnsworth: Oh yeah, absolutely. I’m still a huge geek.

Tim Knox: Any thoughts on doing a graphic novel?

Chris Farnsworth: I have been trying. I would love to write comics. It’s never been easy to break into it. I would say it’s harder to break into it now. I keep throwing pitches at some of the companies and clearly I need to throw harder.

Tim Knox: Let’s talk a little about your new book. You’ve got a book coming out about The Fountain of Youth. Is that right?

Chris Farnsworth: Yes. This was actually an interesting development. There were these two movie producers, Tom Jacobson and Monty Wills, and they had an idea for a movie. First they wanted to see it as a book. They had the idea but they didn’t have the exact plot. They didn’t have the story. They really didn’t know how it ended. What they did is they hired me to come up with that stuff, to sort of fill in that part and to come up with a structure and a plot and the action.

Then I took that and I pitched it to publishers or rather my agent pitched it to publishers and Alexandra was able to sell it as a proposal. So then I got a deal to actually write the book. Now Monty and Tom, when the book’s published, they’ll take the book back to the studios and actually try to make it into a movie.

Tim Knox: Wow, how weird is it not to be writing a Nathaniel Cade book?

Chris Farnsworth: It was a little weird at first. It’s been a nice break but I completely understand that people are getting impatient to see him again. It’s a fun character and I left the last book on a cliffhanger, which was an incredibly cruel thing to do since I’m not going to be getting back to him anytime soon. I’m just finishing a different book with a new standalone character that I hope will do well.

Tim Knox: How do you think the Nathaniel Cade fans are taking this little hiatus? Do you hear from them?

Chris Farnsworth: So far they’ve been very graceful. I don’t have to deal with anything like George R.R. Martin’s problems. Nobody’s threatened to kill me. It’s incredibly flattering that people out there are so invested in this world that you’ve built that they can’t wait to see what happens in it next.

Tim Knox: I think that’s one thing that has changed with the internet and self-publishing and social media. It’s really made authors more accessible to their fans.

Chris Farnsworth: Overall I think that’s great. Overall I think that the increased accessibility to writers creates more investment in the book and the process and you get to meet people. Not everybody can afford a book tour and not every book gets a tour paid for by the publishers so this is a way to reach out the people who do enjoy your work and I think it removes some of the loneliness that used to be involved in being a reader or a writer.

I think there was a time when you just didn’t know aside from sales numbers if anybody liked the book or what they thought of it. This has had a really huge disintermediating effect and this has been a real way for people to connect with one another. I love hearing from people and I love the feedback and I’m really flattered every time somebody picks up one of my books and the fact that they just gave it a chance.

Tim Knox: Do you spend a lot of time on social media?

Chris Farnsworth: More than I should, yeah.

Tim Knox: You and I met on Twitter.

Chris Farnsworth: Exactly. I love Twitter. Twitter is great. It’s a great addiction that almost looks like writing and can keep you from doing your real work. No I think it’s important to maintain contact and I think it’s important to have a connection with all the people who have invested in me and invested in the books. I’ve been working more and more on trying to shut it down and actually just get the writing done, especially now that I’m close to the end of another book.

Tim Knox: That’s one thing I think you have to be careful of. You can really get caught up in all the other stuff that is not the writing.

Chris Farnsworth: Exactly. Writing is such a lonely and insular process and Twitter is like cracking the window and seeing out into the world and it’s a chance to talk to somebody. That’s very attractive when you’re staring at the blank page.

Tim Knox: Have all your books been traditionally published?

Chris Farnsworth: Yes I wrote one short story about Cade that I did publish as an eBook and that’s out on Amazon and Nook and Kobo and iTunes.

Tim Knox: Any plans to do anything else self-publishing wise?

Chris Farnsworth: Not right now. There’s a lot of friction and conflict between publishing and self-publishing right now, especially with what’s going on with Amazon. I just want as many people as possible to read my books and I know that my short piece would not have had near the reach it had if people hadn’t already found me through their bookstores. I’ve been really lucky that way. I think that I want as many people as possible to read the books and however that happens I’ll be happy to get it there.

Tim Knox: Any plans or any talks to get the Nathanial Cade books to the movies?

Chris Farnsworth: Yeah it was optioned the day it came out by a guy named Lucas Foster. Lucas is a really smart, really good movie producer. He was the executive producer on Mr. and Mrs. Smith and Law Abiding Citizen and Equilibrium and he’s got a list of credits longer than my arm. He’s really good and he’s really smart and I absolutely trust him to do the right thing by the material. That said, everything takes longer than you think it will. It’s a matter of raising the money and making sure that we have the budget to do the project right.

Tim Knox: That’s one thing I was going to ask. At this point in your career with the experiences you’ve had, are your expectations more tempered now than they were a few years ago?

Chris Farnsworth: Actually no. This is a terrible thing to say but I think the more success you get the more optimistic you get and the more you expect it to keep going that way. I try to remember back when in that first couple of days after selling my script. It changed my life but it doesn’t change everything. You still have to go to work and get up in the morning, go to work and having children I think is actually a really wonderful reminder. They don’t particularly care how many books you’ve sold. They just want to make sure the Cheerios are in the bowl at the right time in the morning.

Tim Knox: Kids will bring you down to Earth quickly.

Chris Farnsworth: Yeah kids are a great reminder.

Tim Knox: Well Chris we’ve got just a couple of minutes left. You’ve already given us a considerable amount of advice but the audience for this show by and large are authors who are looking to do what you’ve done, are looking to breakout, looking to grow. Any final words of wisdom for them?

Chris Farnsworth: This is what I always say so I apologize if it’s a repeat from previous interviews but I do think it’s just that important. Obviously keep doing the work but do the work that you want to do. Never be ashamed of your enthusiasms. Write what you want to read and if you can’t find people who love it then rewrite it until they do love it. It’s so important not to write just the next thing that you think is going to sell or just the next thing that you think somebody else is going to want to see. That’s not going to make a very good book.

Tim Knox: You have to be true to yourself then.

Chris Farnsworth: Yeah, exactly. Be true to yourself.

Tim Knox: Chris Farnsworth, tell folks how they can find out more about your work and your website.

Chris Farnsworth: You can always go to ChrisFarnsworth.com or you can find me on Twitter at @ChrisFarnsworth and then you can also find me on Facebook.

Tim Knox: Very good. We’ll put up links. This has been great. Will you come back and talk some more after the next book?

Chris Farnsworth: Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. It’s been very kind.

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Martha Randolph Carr: Finding Mystery and Suspense in the History of Politics

Martha Randolph Carr is the author of 4 books including The Sitting Sisters, A Place Called Home, The Keeper and The List — the first in her Wallis Jones political thriller series. She is also a direct descendent of Thomas Jefferson.

A professional copywriter and editor, she has written a weekly, nationally-syndicated column on politics and life that has run on such political hotspots as The Moderate Voice.com and Politicus.com.

Her work has run regularly in such venerable publications as The Washington Post,The New York Times, USA Today,  The Wall Street Journal, The Chicago Tribune and Newsweek.

Martha Carr Interview

Scroll down for a complete transcript of the interview or click the Play button below to listen to the interview now. And don’t forget to leave a comment to let us know what you thought of this interview!

Books by Martha Carr

Martha Carr Transcript

Tim Knox: Hi everyone. Martha Carr is my guest today. Martha is the great-great-great-great-niece – I think I got all the greats in there – of Thomas Jefferson. She is also the author of the four books including The List, which is her first in her Wallis Jones political thriller series. Martha works as a professional copywriter, an editor. She’s written nationally syndicated columns on politics and life, and just an all-around wonderful person to interview.

Martha talks a lot about being inspired to write, how she comes up with her ideas. She is a woman who is very, very successful in the political thriller series so it’s a really great interview. I enjoyed talking to Martha. She talks a lot about the process, how she got her first job. This was so interesting. She wanted to be a newspaper reporter so with her baby in the buggy she just walked into the office of the editor and said, “Hey, I’m here to write,” and that’s how it all began.

Now some 27 years later Martha is a very accomplished author as well as a syndicated columnist. So you’re going to enjoy this a lot. You’re going to learn a lot. My interview with Martha Carr on today’s Interviewing Authors.

Tim Knox: Martha, welcome to the program.

Martha Carr: Thank you. I’m glad to here.

Tim Knox: So nice having you here. We’ve already had our pre-call and determined that we may be long lost cousins; that’s nice.

Martha Carr: That is nice and not all that uncommon in the South.

Tim Knox: Exactly right. Before we get started talking about your work let’s get a little biography of you.

Martha Carr: Okay, so my full name is Martha Randolph Carr and on my father’s side I’m the great-great-great-great niece of Thomas Jefferson. I was named for his sister, Martha Carr, and I grew up knowing how I was related for 200 years back. On my mother’s side though, her people are from Louisiana and Arkansas. So it was an interesting combination of chicken farmers and former president of the United States.

Tim Knox: You have quite the diverse background.

Martha Carr: It’s a very healthy kind of humbling reminder.

Tim Knox: Exactly. As we Southerners are – we’ve talked about this – we just travel and pollinate and build families everywhere we go. I think it’s very interesting that you are Jefferson’s… how many nieces removed are you?

Martha Carr: I’m only four and that’s interesting. It should be eight but the men on that side married consistently so late that there are only half the generations between me and Jefferson than there should be. It’s not that long ago in terms of that.

Tim Knox: Well let’s talk a little about your background as a writer because you’ve written four books now. We’re going to talk today about The List, which is your latest and it sounds like something that I definitely have to read. How long have you been a writer? Have you always been a writer even when you were young?

Martha Carr:  Yes, we didn’t have much money when I was a child and when I was five years old my father took us all into the Philadelphia library and I had never been in a library before. It was immense and held a lot of presence and I could not believe that you were allowed to pick out all the books you could carry and read them and bring them back and get more. Considering that we didn’t really have a lot that just seemed amazing to me. A book also showed me that there are so many different ways to be and it made it possible to dream. I just wanted to be able to tell stories as well.

Tim Knox: Do you remember the first thing that you wrote?

Martha Carr: I do because I was a newly… the first thing that I wrote that was published; I was a newly single mother and my son was an infant in a stroller and I walked into the Richmond News Leader business department and I told them I wanted to be a writer, which is ridiculous to think that they would listen but I must have been pretty impressive or persuasive because they gave me something to do. I don’t think they thought I’d come back but I kept coming back and I would read the books they recommended and I would take all of their advice. I just wanted so badly to do it that they grew to want to work with me and suddenly I was like this student and all the reporters and editors became my teachers.

So the first thing I wrote was on how to get the job you’ve always wanted and I don’t think it was that good, however they put it in the center of the newspaper with a color drawing behind it like it was the greatest thing you ever read. It was so sweet and I was surprised no one was fired over it. It was so kind to do to somebody who was trying.

Tim Knox: You didn’t have any prior experience. You just walked in and said, “Hey I want to write something.”

Martha Carr: That’s right and I’m pushing an infant in a stroller.

Tim Knox: So basically they looked at you. Here’s this young lady pushing an infant in a stroller who wants to write something. Let’s give her something just to get her out of here.

Martha Carr: Yes, that’s exactly what they did and they gave me a list of books to read and said to come back when I’ve read them, and I did. I can still see the startled look on the editor’s face because not only had I read it, I had notes in them. Over time they came to understand that I actually meant what I said so they grew to love it as well. They taught me so much.

Tim Knox: Do you happen to still have that first story? Did you cut that out of the paper?

Martha Carr: I do. I have several copies of it, if not just for the huge, color hand-drawing.

Tim Knox: Once you started working there of course you honed your skills. When did you start thinking about writing a book?

Martha Carr: So then after the News Leader I became a stringer for the Washington Post. You go through three sets of editors and they ask you so many questions and from such great angles that you become better and better and better. Because of that experience I decided to take on writing a book. I’ve always been drawn to thrillers.

I just had this idea. They had discovered a serial killer and they were interviewing the neighbors and they were saying to the neighbors, why didn’t you know he was doing these things? They had that deer in the headlights look of yes we knew this about him and we knew that but who would think killer? This is pre-internet so you’re not getting a 24 hour news cycle yet. I just thought what if you did know something and you didn’t say anything? Are you as guilty? So that was the start of this idea of a thriller.

I wrote the book – it’s called Wired – hoping people would just like it and it took off. It was an amazing experience to see something I wrote have more of an effect on people than I thought it would.

Tim Knox: That’s a great story. They always say, “Well he was a quiet young man. We ignored the smell but he was a quiet young man.” What year did you publish Wired?

Martha Carr: It came out in 1993 so it was a while ago.

Tim Knox: Pre-internet almost.

Martha Carr: It was the dawn of the internet. It was the dawn of computers and I had a Dot Matrix printer and I had a Macintosh when they were called that. It had no internal hard drive.

Tim Knox: I remember those. After you wrote the book how did you go about getting it published? Did you get an agent?

Martha Carr: No I didn’t know any better and I mailed it, because you had to mail things, to publisher after publisher until someone said yes. It took a while. I mean I had so many rejection letters. Some of them forgot to put my name on the rejection letter. My initials are M. R. Carr so I got a lot of ‘Mr. Carr’. I just kept going and eventually a small house that no longer exists said yes and then Library Journal gave it just this amazing review and the book took off from there.

Tim Knox: That’s really what got you noticed and got you started.

Martha Carr: That’s right.

Tim Knox: What was the second book?

Martha Carr: The second book was The Sitting Sisters. It was Southern fiction and I was kind of playing around with different genres for a while there just to see if I could and the third book was A Place to Call Home about the reemergence of U.S. orphanages. I lived on orphanages for two years in the states; I didn’t even know they still existed and they do. That was an amazing experience.

Then I finally said that I need to focus. I need to have a singleness of purpose and I really need to start writing what I want and with a message. That’s how this series came about, the Wallis Jones series, and that’s the thrillers I write now.

Tim Knox: That’s one thing I found so interesting about you as I was doing my research. The first three books were in totally different genres. Let’s talk about the Wallis Jones series. Talk about that.

Martha Carr: So The Keeper came out last Sunday. That’s the second book and it was on my late mother’s birthday and she’s the inspiration behind the Jones because her maiden name was Jones. In the first book, The List, you meet Wallis Jones who is a family court attorney in Richmond, Virginia which is where I’m really from. She has a happy marriage and a son who’s 11. She’s from Richmond and she has this entire life mapped out but suddenly people are seeking her out and telling her something is going on and you need to help.

She thinks of these people at first as just being really dramatic but she starts to understand that there is a conspiracy that’s been going on behind her all this time. I took that premise from the idea of old boy networks, which exist and are thriving. That could be called its own type of conspiracy because it’s a group of people that get together and decide what they’re going to do. So I just took that and made it much bigger and I thought what if the idea of Republican and Democrats was only to distract the masses and there was actually two other powers behind them that were making the decisions that crossed all those lines? What if you couldn’t see it and you were just doing your thing all day long and unaware of it?

And if you got the chance to be a part of one side or the other and they promised you the good life, would you have the faith to say no if it cost you too much of your integrity and especially if your children are involved? I watched a lot of parents. They put their children into so many classes that their time is all eaten up and it’s as if they don’t believe the child will be okay. So what if you got offered private school and a line to a corporate job for your child in exchange for a sort of obedience to staying in the track and doing what we want. It’s not openly wrong; it’s just kind of dusting the side. Could you say no?

Tim Knox: It’s almost a, would you sell your soul to the devil?

Martha Carr: Exactly and I didn’t want to go so far that it would be an easy no. I wanted to keep it where you really might struggle with what you would think was right. I also put faith in there because what Wallis gets confronted with is this idea that she’s not going to be able to fix this one and she’s been a doer and a fixer and this isn’t going to solve itself. It’s too large. She’s too enmeshed and she doesn’t know everything and people are dying around her. So she needs to find peace again. How is she going to do that? She starts to inch by inch, through the series, rediscover her faith. She has a husband who by the way the female readers love. I get emails all the time – please don’t kill Norman. She has to come to grips with how do you keep a happy marriage when you find out your spouse knew more than you did. He has his reasons. So I just wanted to explore this idea of is it possible to be happy in the middle of something that’s complicated and dark.

Tim Knox: The List and The Keeper, these are really political thrillers which is different from your original books. What attracted you to this genre, especially the political side of it?

Martha Carr: So I grew up in Alexandria, Virginia outside of D.C. and my very first job in the world was selling tourist books in the White House. I grew up around the idea of politics and negotiation. You get some of this but you don’t get that. After I was a stringer for the Washington Post I became a columnist and I became a political columnist for the Cagle syndicate. My take on things has always been to try to find that middle ground because in my era of growing up in the D.C. area people negotiated more. They weren’t so polarized and the idea of compromise was an honor and people were respected for being able to find that middle place.

I feel the same way as faith as well. Faith should be something we can all talk about without pointing our finger. I wanted to bring those two ideas back, that you can talk about what matters to you and you don’t have to make the other person agree with you first of all. And you can listen with the idea that your mind could be changed without losing your integrity.

Tim Knox: You make a great comparison there. With politics as well as religion there’s the good and the evil, the light and the dark. There’s the followers. They really do parallel each other to a great deal don’t they?

Martha Carr: Right, they absolutely do and those things are moving targets. What I might think is the right thing to do today may not be the right thing to do tomorrow. I’m going to have to keep asking myself those questions and in order to really have a good life I’m going to have to swim out into the deep waters where I’m not always sure of what I’m doing. For me personally, that’s where faith plays a part. I ask myself what am I supposed to be doing right now? Can I just do that and let go of the outcome? That’s what Wallis is learning to do.

Then I did bring into it the idea of lineage because that’s what I grew up with. Wallis discovers she is part of an old family line that is enmeshed in this conspiracy. So she has blood in this fight. She also has a side of her family that’s not exactly like I do. Being a Jefferson descendent was a big deal when I was growing up. Our family reunions are at Monticello. There are plenty of people who feel like there should be something that we live up to and I agree as long as what you’re living up to are the ideals and not just trying to burnish a 250 year old memory.

Tim Knox: And that’s what I was going to ask you was how much of your family’s history did you call on? How much came to play? I’m sure there the mysteries and that sort of thing going back, especially with someone like Jefferson. How much of that came into play?

Martha Carr: A lot of that came into play because Wallis is going to have to ask herself over and over again and then as he grows up in the series, her son, they’re going to have to ask themselves how much do I owe to family and how much do I just need to stand on the ideals of this family and do what’s right even if no one agrees with me? Can I run my own race? Can I be true to my faith? Can I do what I believe is right? That’s not always an easy question at all.

Tim Knox: Right, especially when you have so many players in the game.

Martha Carr: That’s right and it’s a thriller so people are dying, sometimes rather creatively. Then the other element that I wanted to bring in is if you really disagree with somebody can you pause for a moment, turn around and listen again? Don’t march off. Be hurt if you want to but listen. I wanted to keep bringing that element back because I think that’s often missing. People are very polarized.

Then another thing, normally in thrillers these days you see the Catholic Church a lot because they’re big and mysterious. I thought it’d be fun to use the Episcopal Church because I grew up on the grounds of an Episcopal seminary. My late father was an Episcopal minister and they are involved in politics quite frequently. The church, St. Johns that you see lots of U.S. presidents go to happens to be Episcopalian and I just thought it’d be fun to make them an underground. I did it with their blessing and they thought it was fun. So I created an Episcopalian underground that runs through the series and it opens the entire series with Episcopalian bishops trying to do the right thing.

Tim Knox: Interesting. Your characters are very strong, especially Wallis. Is she based any part on you?

Martha Carr: You know you end up writing about yourself whether you want to or not but Wallis started out being based on a friend of mine who is a family court attorney in Richmond. I admired her so much because she was always calm and peaceful even if someone was yelling right in her face. She would just wait patiently and then calmly answer them. Her nickname was The Black Widow, which she did not like because she regularly would route the male lawyers in court.

So I started with my friend Vera who lives in Richmond as the starting point and overtime I find that I work things out. The Keeper, Ned has grown to be a ‘tween. I was a single mother. I have a son, Louie, who’s great but being a single mother of a ‘tween is hard. So a lot of that comes into play in The Keeper.

Tim Knox: Right, now The Keeper is the second book in this series. At what point did you decide that this was going to be a series?

Martha Carr: Right from the beginning I knew I wanted it to be a series. I knew I had a long story to tell and that I wanted to really explore the idea of faith and family and doing the right thing and what’s the cost and I also wanted it to be a moving target. I don’t think it’s like you can put a stamp on it and say this is what’s right; you should do this all the time. Faith means I don’t know and I’m going to do my best.

Tim Knox: This really is an ongoing storyline. Are there life events that have shaped the story going forward?

Martha Carr: Do you mean in the future books?

Tim Knox: Well in what you’ve written so far and what’s to come.

Martha Carr: Absolutely life events have shaped things. I was diagnosed with terminal cancer five years ago and told I had only a year left and that was an absolute truth. For some reason I went into remission and it disappeared and they couldn’t find it and they couldn’t explain it and they studied it at Northwestern. So having to really deal with the idea that this is the end and that I would be meeting God in a much closer way got me to really become centered and it’s never completely left me. So I worry less about what others think about what I’m doing and I try to just ask myself two questions – what do you want to be doing and what’s the next thing you ought to be doing – and mix those two. That’s how I came to do thrillers mixed with politics and faith.

Tim Knox: I find that so interesting because you were literally faced to death and you survived but it changed your outlook.

Martha Carr: Completely changed my outlook. I grew more and more peaceful and I find that’s my reset now.

Tim Knox: That’s so interesting. Do you have any plans to write about that?

Martha Carr: I wrote a lot of columns as it was going on. I wrote about prayer and I wrote about what that was like while it was going on and I don’t have any plans to write about that but I know it’s coming out through the series. Wallis is faced with some very dark and deadly things and instead of running or picking up the gun or whatever a thriller might do, she’s actually trying to use her faith and yet it’s still a fast paced thriller that even Kirkus Reviews liked. So I just think there’s a place for this and so I made a conscious decision.

As you said I did three different genres at first, which is annoying to agents by the way. So when I chose to do the series I made a conscious choice that I was going to have a singleness of purpose. It would be this series and I would take everything that I believe and somehow talk about it in this series. I always pulled my punches on faith before in the national column I wrote and I just decided that I don’t need to do that. Maybe this is what others want to have a conversation about as well so why don’t I just tell the truth as I see it and we’ll see what happens.

Tim Knox: Right. Did you find yourself kind of walking a fine line though? Were there times where you wanted to, as they say, get preachy or did you have to really reel yourself in at times? How was that?

Martha Carr: No I find that if you start with the characters and you write down everything about the characters, including what they like to eat and where they like to go and everything you can about them then you won’t get preachy because you’ll stay true to who they are.

Tim Knox: Good point, good point. What is Wallis’s favorite food?

Martha Carr: Wallis actually, and you find this early in The List, Wallis is not a good cook at all and she married this wonderful guy who cooks. So Wallis’s favorite food is whatever Norman is making.

Tim Knox: That’s why the women don’t want Norman killed off. He’s a perfectly trained househusband.

Martha Carr: He is, yeah, and he thinks and he’s kind and he’s got a job. I think I wrote my ideal man.

Tim Knox: There you go. Where do you see this series going now?

Martha Carr: So the next book in the series is called The Circle and for people who’ve read The List, they’ll know exactly why it’s called The Circle. What I want to investigate in third book is what happens when what many might perceive as the good guys, what happens when they do actually grab the power after hundreds of years? Is it like they thought or does it get tougher than they expected? Do they make the same kinds of decisions that skirt morale to your integrity? Being in power is not as easy as it looks.

Tim Knox: Exactly and what’s the old thing – power corrupts?

Martha Carr: Money corrupts, power corrupts, absolutely.

Tim Knox: Yeah, yeah. Well The Keeper just came out this week. Is that right?

Martha Carr: That’s right. It came out in celebration of my late mother’s birthday. Her name was Lanteen Jones-Carr and she was a feisty woman. She was very proud of all of us so the Jones in the Wallis Jones is in honor of her.

Tim Knox: I think it’s so interesting. I talk to so many authors, myself included, who have written books to honor our mothers. I wrote a book as an 87th birthday present for my mother. I think she’s the only person who’s read it but that’s okay. Before we go let’s talk a little about your process of writing. You not only are a novelist but you also write a column. You’re always busy. When you writing a book what is your process? Do you have a set time that you write every day? Do you have to hit a number of words? What is your process?

Martha Carr: So I start with knowing the ending of the book because in particular with a thriller you have to be the driver. You have to know the destination so everything goes there so that whatever clues you’re dropping, everything gently leads there so the reader doesn’t feel tricked or like they were hit over the head. The beginning I always find the most difficult because I want to pull you in quickly and I want it to make sense so I write three pages a day double spaced and I craft that beginning and I do an outline that has more detail that stays at least three or four chapters ahead of me. I just keep taking notes so that eventually it all weaves together.

Unlike other novels, a thriller has to weave itself together and when you do a political thriller that has a conspiracy you really have to keep track of where people are so that it happens naturally and so that the reader feels like well of course that happened.

Tim Knox: That’s such great advice. You have to predict things that are going to happen two, three books down the road.

Martha Carr: You have to keep in mind, yes. I know exactly how the entire series is going to go and I know the ending. So yes, you do have to keep that in mind. By the way, I have a consultant that I talk to as well. You’ll notice in The List and in The Keeper there’s a lot of really good technical spy jargon and clever, clever things to manipulate the system that are actual that you could do. I wanted to make it so that a reader could feel like I could do that. That comes from some very, very helpful consultants who operate behind the scenes who I knew from the D.C. area who would probably prefer I not mention their names.

Tim Knox: Or they’ll have to kill you and that wouldn’t be good.

Martha Carr: Exactly.

Tim Knox: Last question – I always end with this. Our audience for this show primarily are authors across all genres, all sales levels, but a lot of them are authors who are trying to get that first book out there or just trying to get that first book written. Give us your best advice to these authors. What is it they should do or not do along the way?

Martha Carr: So I found the most helpful thing was to create a small writers group of no more than five people that I respected their work, even if it really wasn’t similar to mine, and we got together once a month and we would send each other the latest chapter and you have to send it at least a week in advance. The rule was you couldn’t talk about whether or not you so-called liked it but whether or not it made sense and it flowed, whether or not you made some leaps of logic. So I created a nourishing environment where I also had accountability because I knew I had to send something to somebody.

Then the other thing is these days you can self-publish so easily and do a good job of it that if you have a book that’s getting excitement from your friends and your writers group really likes, you should keep moving forward. The best advice I can give you, which is exactly what the entire Wallis Jones series is about, is run your own race. In the end you’re the one who’s going to have to be able to ask yourself if you get met with the idea that you only have a year left to live – could I be happy with what I’ve already done? Am I happy? Do I feel like I was at least on the road to where I wanted to go? If you can do that then you’ve got it all.

Tim Knox: Such great advice. What are you working on now? What’s coming up next? Are you working on the next book in the series?

Martha Carr: I’m working on the next book in the series, The Circle, and I’m very excited about it. Each book takes a turn in a different direction so I get the chance to explore a different idea and watch these characters grow. I’m very excited about that. I am pitching a column about the writer’s life, mixing faith into writing so I’m waiting to hear. That might turn into a national column as well. I have a blog at WallisJones.com where I already do talk about the writing life and the series and faith.

Tim Knox: Super. Martha Carr, the author of The List, The Keeper out this week and The Circle soon to come. You mentioned your blog. Tell us what’s your website? Where can we find more information about you and your work?

Martha Carr: Okay you can find more about the series at WallisJonesSeries.com and there is a new blog post every Monday and I talk about faith and how to be calm in the middle of a chaotic life and how that ties to the series and I welcome anybody who wants to comment and write in and we can start a dialogue and put that into the blog as well.

Tim Knox: Very good. That baby that was in that buggy that you pushed into that newspaper office. How old is he now?

Martha Carr: He is 27 years old and I tell him all the time he’s a better writer than I am but he doesn’t listen. Yeah, he’s a great human being. He thinks for himself and he’s very compassionate and balanced. His name is Louie and that turned out alright and he went on a lot of interviews with me when he was small.

Tim Knox: That’s so funny. Martha Carr, this has been wonderful. I’ve enjoyed this immensely. Do keep up posted. Let’s get you back on the next time. When do you think The Circle will be out?

Martha Carr: The Circle should be out at the end of the year.

Tim Knox: Okay, would you come back on and talk about it?

Martha Carr: Absolutely and I thank you Tim for having me on. I greatly appreciate it. This has been really a lot of fun.

Tim Knox: It’s a pleasure. We’ll also put up links to your website and blog and we will talk to you very soon.

Tim Knox: Alright, thank you very much.

 

The post Martha Randolph Carr: Finding Mystery and Suspense in the History of Politics appeared first on Interviewing Authors with Tim Knox, Author, Talk Radio Host, Serial Entrepreneur, Small Business Expert.