TPP Episode 25 with Westley Smith

Mark: [00:00:00] Coming up on the Thriller Pitch podcast.

Westley: Stories are my fuel. They’re my therapy. They’re my outlet. You know, it’s just, that’s what I do and that has got me through so many hardships in my life.

Mark: What makes a great thriller tick, and what does it take to write one? Welcome to the Thriller Pitch Podcast, where bestselling award-winning and emerging thriller authors share the craft research and real world experiences that power today’s most gripping stories. I’m your host, Mark P.J. Nadon.

Whether you’re writing thrillers or can’t get enough of reading them, this show takes you inside the minds of the authors, behind the twist, characters and moments that keep us turning the page.

Before we get started, I wanna say thank you to everyone who’s been listening since the show launched this summer. Your support, the messages, the enthusiasm has kept the show alive and it really means the world to me. This episode wraps up the [00:01:00] podcast for 2025.

This week I’m joined by Wesley Smith, author of They Came At Night. We talk about blending psychological thriller in action building characters shaped by trauma and why some stories aren’t written for research, but from lived experience. Wesley shares how personal loss and resilience inform this novel, why dark fiction can be a form of survival and what he hopes readers carry with them after the final page.

If you’re interested in stories that explore trauma, endurance, and what people are capable of, when everything is on the line, this is the conversation you want to hear.

Wesley, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for being here

Westley: Thank you for having me.

Mark: I’m excited to talk about they came at night, which is your latest book that we are here to talk about.

Westley: Yes.

Mark: So let’s, let’s hear the pitch. Let’s get into it.

Westley: they came at night as about a traumatically injured woman who sequesters herself at a place [00:02:00] called the Compound. And then she decides she wants to rejoin society, and when she does, she’s going to a retreat with her family and she’s trying to rekindle her life with her family. And what, what she had lost in this traumatic ex because of this traumatic experience.

And they go to this small little town and this town’s kinda weird. The house they’re gonna be staying at, it’s kinda has these weird little things about the house. She starts noticing all this stuff going on around her. And things go from bad to really bad, very fast.

Mark: Yeah. Thank you. So where did this idea come from?

Westley: The idea actually came from a true crime story called The Watcher, which happened a few years ago. There is actually a, there’s a Netflix movie about it, I believe now, but that was the case where this, the, this couple had bought this house [00:03:00] and this, this, someone kept sending him a note saying, I’m watching your house.

And they just kept, they don’t know who ever was doing this. So that’s kind of where the idea percolated from. And then it just kind of grew from there because I knew I couldn’t, I, I knew when that would, when that happened, I couldn’t rate that story because somebody else was gonna be on it who had much bigger clout than me to be able to do that.

So I was like, no, I gotta tweak that idea. But that’s, that’s actually where it came from.

Mark: And how did it grow from there?

Westley: It just. always wanted to do kind of a home invasion type story, but I wanted to put a twist on it and not do like just a home invasion story. I wanted to twist that, that screw a little bit. So that’s kind of where I was kind of looking at it from and not having a protagonist, your normal protagonist in those kind of stories

Mark: are, do you consider yourself a plotter or a pants? Do you, you [00:04:00] write it as you went or did you outline the whole thing and then build

Westley: I, I do a little bit of both. Um, I like to have kind of my character back stories down. Because I find when I’m writing, if I don’t have that, I have, I start to have problems with the plot. The plot is usually, I’m usually pretty good with, ’cause I know what I want to do in the plot, but like when the backstory start to come in and needs to be interwoven, that’s where I start to struggle.

And if I have all that figured out upfront, I’m pretty good to go. So I do both. I do a little plotting, little, little work on the upfront, but I’d leave, I always like to leave myself a little wiggle room so I can, you know, do some fun stuff and not have to be so locked into the the plotting of it.

Mark: Yeah. So how long does it take you? How long did it take you to write they came at night.

Westley: Two months.

Mark: Oh wow. That’s a good, that’s a short time.

Westley: I started in June of 2023, and I was done by September. I’m sorry. I started in July of 2023 and was done in [00:05:00] September of 2023.

Mark: And what’s the process like for you from there?

Westley: From there, it’s like extensive editing. When I’m writing, I usually do 3000 words a day. Now with they came at night, I was, I put myself on a deadline because we were going on vacation in September and I wanted that book done before I went to on vacation, so I didn’t think about it. So I was up to like 10,000 words a day to, if not more than that, just pounding that book out.

After that, I usually give it about a month, month or so break because I need to walk away and just let everything’s settled down, calm, you know, get away from it so I can come back and read it and with fresh eyes. And then I start my editing process and I’m a pretty vigorous rewriter and editor. So I’m, I’m pretty critical of myself.

So I start, I start chopping stuff and taking it out. And then after I get to a point where I’m comfortable with it, where or when I read it, I don’t see the errors. [00:06:00] there. I just don’t see ’em. So then I send it to my editor and then she reads it and then gets back to me, and then this process starts all over again for another round.

Mark: And then after that, you’re going to publication

Westley: I usually, yes, I usually take it around to, to publishers to see if anybody’s interested. I had already pre-sold, they came at night to my publisher who I did worked on. They came at, or I’m sorry, in the pale late with, so they already wanted it, so I had already pre-sold that one to them. So I was already, I was already good with this one.

Mark: Nice. So at its core, what would you say this story is about? When I read it, and I’ll do my best not to give any spoilers, there’s. It almo, it starts almost like a domestic thriller with kind of that, you know, the, I know something’s coming vibes, and then it turns hard. So what, at its core, what, what would you say is this genre that you feel it is, and how did you go about nailing

Westley: I would [00:07:00] say it’s psychological thriller action hybrid,

Mark: Okay.

Westley: because I don’t, I, I did definitely wanted to blend two, two genres together. I love movies and books like that that do that really, really well. And that was something I really wanted to do with this one. And, I knew if I could pull off the first half, the second half of the book ’cause it’s, it’s, it right in the middle of the book’s the book changes it, it’s psychological thriller for the first half of the book and then action, suspense, whatever you wanna call it for the second half. ’cause it completely changes because tone and, you know, just the way everything happens. So it was just so I wanted to just capture, capture that kind of feeling and really dig into this just a different way to tell a psychological thriller. ‘Cause you know, I, I, I, I read those and I was just like, I was kind of bored with reading the same kind of psychological thriller. So I really wanted just to do [00:08:00] something completely different. So that’s what I set out to do.

Mark: Did you see it happening the way it did from beginning to end? Or did you have the domestic, or not domestic, the psychological side kind of mapped out and then it turned? Or did you just have that whole thing from beginning to end in your

Westley: Now I had it, it was always the, the, the whole thing was in my mind, the whole way. The only thing I didn’t have down while I was writing, and I never even had it in my, in my outline of the book was what the reason actually was. The whole, the whole story in a nutshell and why it was happening. I never, I never settled on that until the very end.

Mark: Okay, so it’s kind of like you, you’ve discovered the

Westley: Yeah, I had a couple different ideas in mind of where I wanted it to go, but I didn’t settle on any of those right ways. In fact, I left, the ending kind of opened when I did my first, my first draft. ’cause I was like, nah, I don’t know if I want to go that way. And then, you know, I, I just didn’t, I didn’t [00:09:00] settle on it.

And then, you know, I finally did settle on something so.

Mark: To you, what makes it go that way? Is it, is it like the characters, you just feel this is the situation that characters are in? Or is it the environment coming together? Like how did you know when you wanted to make that final decision? Is this is the way I want it to end.

Westley: True life happened. The how, how it, where it actually went. I, ’cause I don’t wanna spoil it for people who haven’t read it. But real events in the real world is what actually convinced me to go with the ending that I have.

Mark: Yeah, I guess without going to a spoiler, we can’t

Westley: Yeah. Yeah.

Mark: Okay. That’s fair. And when readers put this book down, what are you hoping they’re gonna feel?

Westley: I really hope they walk away with the feeling that the main character really loved her family and was willing to do what she had to do for them, especially her niece. know, ’cause my, the [00:10:00] book is dedicated to my aunt, who I was very close to. And, and in the story, it’s, it’s an aunt and niece relationship.

I had an aunt and nephew relationship, but my aunt was very, I was very close to my aunt, so I wanted that kind of relationship in my, in the book. And I wanted to show that an aunt can be just as, just as much of a mother figure to someone as their mother actually can be. So I, I, that’s, that’s what I want people to take away from it more than anything. And that trauma, trauma, how, and, and how trauma affects not only the person that it happened to, but those around you.

Mark: Which was well done. Which was well done in the

Westley: Thank.

Mark: I was gonna ask about that dedication, because at the beginning I, I noticed it to your end. What is the support structure for you in your writing when you’re putting a book like this together in the background?

Westley: My [00:11:00] wife is always very supportive of my writing. I talk stuff out with her sometimes, if I, if I’m particularly stuck on something, I’ll be like, I need to run something by you. I need to talk this out. ’cause it’s just like you get stuck in the wheels, get spinning up here and you can’t get off that hamster wheel to try to figure it out.

And, you know, I’ll talk to her about it. I talk to my editor Kristen, a lot about problems that I’m having, especially when I’m in the editing part of it. She’s very good at helping me figure out, figure out problems that I’m having with the story. Yeah, just basically that, you know, I do a lot of walking.

For like any, every, every hour I work on my writing, I go out and walk for 10 minutes. And that actually really helps me work out stuff. ‘Cause I’m, I’m big into believing physicality equals really good creativity. So I like to do a lot of physical stuff with, but with my creativity. So going out and walking or chopping wood or something is really, really gets my, thoughts going.

Mark: Okay, so you’re a physical, your physical break, [00:12:00] it’s not a break. It’s not a mental break. You’re actually getting, by being physical, you’re getting more active in almost a creative way in the backgrounds.

Westley: yeah. I can’t just sit at, I have trouble sitting in the same spot for hours at a time. ’cause before I was riding full time, I worked in factories and you know, I slung steel for eight to 10 hours a day. So I’m used to moving all day. For me to sit here for 10 to 12 hours a day is extremely hard.

And my back started bothering me and stuff like that. And when I was doing it and I’m like, I can’t, I can’t keep this up. So I got up and started walking and moving around, and then I just noticed the change in me and I was like, oh, that’s the ticket. I gotta get up and do something. So I just started doing that and that, that’s been a lifesaver.

More or less, you know.

Mark: Is that time based for you where you’ll write for an hour and then. On, almost on a timer, or is it just a feeling, oh, I’ve, I’ve done so much now I’m going at it.

Westley: No, no, I don’t usually use a timer. I [00:13:00] just, you know, I have the clock in the side of the computer here. I just, I watch that. I’ll look down every once in a while and be like, okay, it’s about time. ’cause you know, the time gets off and, you know, I’ll get into writing and be like, oh, I miss my miss my hour.

I don’t, I’m not that strict on it. But like I try to get up and do it every hour or so.

Mark: Nice. I have found sometimes when I, when I stop, so when I get to the, to the page, so to speak, and I start writing, sometimes it’s 15, 20 minutes before I can really get into writing ’cause my head has to get back

Westley: Mm-hmm.

Mark: And then once I’m into it, if I step out, like for that physical activity, my brain just goes completely somewhere else and I sit back down. I have to try and find that space again. So that’s really interesting that you’re able to process while you’re doing the physical and then come right back to the

Westley: Yeah, because when I walk away, it’s usually the, that’s my point. To think, to stop, to stop the actual writing and actually think about how I wanna continue or where I want to fix stuff or, you know, it’s, it just gives my brain that moment [00:14:00] to pause and, and actually think, ’cause I gotta, I gotta focus on something else.

I gotta focus on walking, you know, I gotta focus on whatever I’m doing. And then that is like. I can, I can finally think, because I’m not typing and thinking of the, the actual words that I need to put on page to the pros and, you know, how good did this sound? How bad does that sound? I’m not thinking about that at that point.

Mark: In writing this book, what would you say was the most difficult part of that journey from from initial thought to publication?

Westley: Probably for me, just trying to get it done on my personal deadline,

Mark: Okay.

Westley: You know, just 10,000 words a day was a lot of words, and I was tired after those days. That was probably, you know, and that was my own, that was my own doing. But I, I just really did not want this book hanging over me going on vacation. ’cause I would’ve thought about it all vacation and my wife would, wouldn’t have liked that. So I was like, nope. Getting that out of the way.

Mark: do [00:15:00] Future books that you are writing. Do you give yourself more time to give yourself more breathing space, or are you still able to output that kind of words in order to get that and book out it?

Westley: I could, if, if I want to. I, I honestly could. I don’t do that all the time. That is an unsustainable, way of writing in my opinion. I’ll burn out doing that kind of work every day, and I, I don’t. I don’t know if like every day, every day I do try to sit down at the computer and write 3000 words.

That’s my daily goal to get 3000 out. Monday through Friday I take the weekends off ’cause I like to think about stuff. But most of the time I hit that goal and then I’ll walk away. If I go over that, I’m even, I’m happy, you know, I always try to have the first draft of a book done in about three months. So depending on what size it is if it’s getting a little on the longer end, you know, it might take a little bit longer, but most of the time I try to [00:16:00] keep it to about three months so I can have this book done in that point so I can have it at least ready to go out to wherever it’s going within eight months or so.

Mark: Do you find pressure from day to day if you don’t hit 3000, like you get 2,500 ’cause you’re just not having a great day, or you get interrupted by something. Do you feel pressure the next day to do 3,500 or do you stick to 3000 a day and hope for the three month deadline?

Westley: No, not, not really. I’ve dealt with a lot of things that are unexpected in my life and I don’t, things happen, you know, it’s just things happen. And I think to put that kind of unneeded pressure on you is, is, now I will say if I had a deadline, like a, or strict deadline for a publication, I would probably put the extra work in and it wouldn’t be a problem.

But when I’m just, when I’m working on a new book that has no publisher yet, or I am just still, you know, in the early stages of it, no, I [00:17:00] won’t do that. I do have the weekends off, and if I want to come back, I can catch up on the weekends. That’s why I write Monday through Friday.

But most of the times I’m gonna write over 3001 of those days. So I’ll catch up anyways. It’s going, it’s bound to happen, you know like if I only did 2,500 on Monday, I’m definitely doing 5,000 on Wednesday or something. It’s gonna happen ’cause I can’t help myself. So that’s why I don’t worry about it too much.

But, you know, I try to get to that 3000 majority of the time it’s kinda like working out you, you can’t hit the gym every day, but you want to hit the gym the majority of your days out of the month. It’s kind of how I look at it.

Mark: Yeah. Yeah. That’s a really healthy approach. I like that. Let’s talk about research a little bit. What research went into this book from the trauma to. Well, I don’t know how much we can talk about the second half of the book as it [00:18:00] materializes, but I guess let’s talk in general about research and how much went into it.

Westley: So the trauma aspect, I, I get asked this question a lot. How did you research the trauma aspect of the book and the trauma aspect. I didn’t do any research. That’s just lived experience. Now my trauma is completely different from Sandra’s trauma, which I won’t go into. I won’t go into Sandra’s trauma, but my trauma, I’ll go into it a little bit of, I lost my dad when I was 12. I helped him through a lot of medical issues. He had diabetes, he lost his legs, he had gangrene. I was running IVs at 12, catheters at 12, insulin shots. And then my mom got sick in 98 or 90, 97. She fell ill, I took care of her at 18 and then had to shut her off of a ventilator.

At 18, I was still in high school, so I deal with a lot of trauma from all these lived experiences, and I just kind of brought all that into [00:19:00] Sandra and just how, how I felt people viewed me. You know, after, after I went through this experience, I was a different person than what I was before the experience, especially after shutting my mom off a ventilator. So people viewed me differently. I viewed the world differently. And it was just this, this something that I wanted to share with people and how trauma does affect affect yourself and affect those around you. And how, how it, not only it hurts you personally, but it hurts other people too. And how they want, they want you to be the same person you were before this, but you’re not the same person you are you are a changed person. And that’s really what I wanted to write about and talk about. And again, going back to your earlier question, that was what really excited me about this book. Not everything that happened in the book, but talking about Sandra’s trauma and how everybody around her just views her now.

Mark: I imagine that’s quite [00:20:00] therapeutic to get out onto the page as well, even when it’s fictionalized from someone else’s

Westley: Yes. Yeah.

Mark: I from a character. ’cause I have found that too. Yeah.

Westley: Yeah. It, it was a, you know, a long time coming of just things I have dealt with over the years, and it was like, I need to get this off me and let it be lived, you know, in a, in through a character, which is mostly how I deal with everything through, through writing.

Mark: Wow. I’m glad you have that outlet. That is a lot to take on for a young person in high school now. And all good for you for, for finding writing in books and, and having

Westley: Thank you. Yeah, it’s been my lifesaver, stories just in general, you know, whether it’s coming from books, movies, comic books, audio books. I don’t, whatever stories are my fuel. They’re my, they’re, they’re my therapy. They’re my outlet. You know, it’s just, that’s what I do and that has got me through so many hardships in my [00:21:00] life.

Mark: That’s awesome. I want to talk about characters a little bit, and I’m curious with Janice, which is the mother who comes on the scene and is almost our first antagonist, was she meant to be almost the villain of the story until we meet the villains of the story.

Westley: yes, she is absolutely meant to be the villain of the story. Yeah, I don’t wanna say too much that I’ll get myself in trouble.

Mark: Okay, because I found her quite a difficult character to, to almost process in what she was saying. And it was just like eating me up and I’m like, oh, how could you say that? And then her poor daughter

Westley: Yeah.

Mark: just trying to cope with it. I mean, she had her reasons, I suppose in the end. Like, well, we discover her reasons for sort of, but I still, did you try to build empathy into that situation? Because I could almost feel that we were trying to understand her mom, but at the same time I [00:22:00] couldn’t feel like what she had done was the right thing.

Westley: No, I did not try to build em empathy in for her because I wanted you to hate her. As much as you could. No, I didn’t. I didn’t want her to redeem herself at all. Because I know people like her and that’s why I didn’t, I did not want there, there is a little redemption arc for her, and it’s really, it’s really subtle.

But it does happen but I didn’t want it to be, I didn’t want it to be like this. Oh, everything’s great now. We, we, we talked, we’re, we’re happy. ’cause that’s, that’s not real life And that most of the, most of the time that’s not how things are resolved, you know? And I, I didn’t want to do that. I wanted her to be what she was just as nasty as she was,

Mark: Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Oh, that’s fair. She was. Did you at any point, adjust the [00:23:00] trauma that Sandra had been through, given the trauma that she eventually went through? When you’re looking at this, almost like a scale of trauma, because halfway through, like you mentioned, halfway through the book, things get really dark and she still uses her original trauma for processing what she’s going through then but at the same time, what she’s going through at that moment is so much

Westley: Mm-hmm.

Mark: or it seems like it, even though we don’t, you know, have a exact play by

Westley: Yeah. Y Yes and no. I knew she could only have so much trauma in what happened to her originally. Like, you know, I couldn’t go too far with it because if I went too far, I felt she wouldn’t have ever come back because she’s on the verge of coming. You know, she’s, she’s like, when she goes to, she goes with her family she’s, she’s still on that, she’s still walking that tightrope of where she’s at in life. And I, I had to keep her there [00:24:00] for as long as I could before, when the event happens and things get really bad, she needed to have a complete collapse at that point. So I wanted her right on that tight rope the whole time until then, because when everything goes down, she almost becomes animalistic.

There’s the scene in the kitchen where she’s eating and she’s not tasting anything. She’s just eating for fuel. And I was like, she, when I was writing it, I’m like, she’s an animal. She is, she’s, she. That’s all she is now. And I had to, I took her even further and my editor is like, you have to pull this back a little bit you have to pull it back because she’s too far gone. And, you know, like I, I was losing her humanity and like that that’s still in there she almost still loses it as the second part is going on there’s a couple quotes in there where she’s, she’s, she doesn’t care about anybody else.

And it’s only about the niece. And that’s her mission. That’s what she’s gonna do. And there’s nothing else. And my editor was on my butt about that. She’s like, you’ve got [00:25:00] to back this up. She is, she’s completely the void of humanity. And so I was like, okay. So it was just a little bit of a tweaking there.

Mark: And the compound she visits where she gets a lot of that care after her trauma. Is that based on anything

Westley: It is not. No, it is not. It was, it’s all a fictional place. I didn’t go and do any research on compounds or anything like that because I wanted it unique to this story. So it’s all just completely made up. There is no, there is no place like this that I’m, that I’m aware of. Yeah.

Mark: Okay.

Westley: Because I, like I said, I wanted it completely unique to this story, and so I did, I didn’t do much research.

Mark: Okay. I got a question from you from Joel Ecky, who was the last guest on the show. Technically, he’s the next guest on the show, but because I was sick and we ended up postponing this, he was, I had talked to him two days ago, even though you’re up at this episode, comes up first, but I, anyway, it all got kind of mixed up in the order.

[00:26:00] So his question for you. Is, has getting older helped you become a better writer?

Westley: Yes. Yes just lived experiences has helped me become a better writer. Yeah, because I, most of my stuff is set in, pretty real circumstances. The, this book gets a little, a little a little farfetched at times, but it’s, it’s supposed to be. But like my, my previous two books in the Pale Light especially, is about a cancer patient someone who’s dying of cancer trying to solve a murder. So that was a really heavy book to write about.

Mark: Mm-hmm.

Westley: So I, I would, a lot of people say, when they ask me about they came at night, was, was how was this to write? And I said, oh, it was great. I had a lot of fun. They’re like, you had a lot of fun with this. I was like, my last book was about a person dying of cancer who was trying to solve a murder. Yes. This was fun in comparison to talking about dying of cancer. [00:27:00] Yeah. This was fun.

Mark: Are these the kinds of stories that you plan to tell like you enjoy telling you and you plan to tell these darker psychological where people are really testing their personal limits?

Westley: I love, I love dark stories, not, not horror stories per se, but just really dark, nasty stories. I love getting into why people do things, how people react to situations. I love anti-heroes. That’s like one of my favorite tropes is an anti-hero. I just, I, I love that kind of. That kind of grittiness and just getting into like what makes people do certain things. So all my books are really dark like that. They all have wounded. Traumatized protagonists, you know, that that’s just it, I guess. Kind of like me. That’s what I like. Hey, you know, I, and I like movies like that.

I like books like that. That can do it. Well, you know, I, I love like the Matt Scutter series. ‘Cause he’s, [00:28:00] he’s a recovering alcoholic and I just, I eat that stuff up. I just, I just like that, that, ’cause it’s like there’s personal demons that you’re working through, but yet you’re going to do the right thing and it’s just like, ugh. It’s just that. I just like that.

Mark: yeah. It feels very

Westley: Yeah.

Mark: As you’re, you’re doing all this writing and reading. Is there anything you do to build your, your pro skills as you, as you get older or do you feel that just the reading and this and the act of writing and the editor, I guess

Westley: Yeah. Yeah, pretty much what you just said. The reading, active writing, and the editor. Between those three has been my, the, the best thing that’s, that’s helped me, you know, and I do a lot of rewriting, so like, I might, you know, the first draft, I’ll write it down and it, it’ll be fine. It, it’s serviceable.

But then I go back and I really like to punch it up and give it more than what, what I had originally. And I do that all the time, you know, it’s just like, oh, I can do this better, I can do this better. And it’s just like trying to make it better [00:29:00] without making it wordy.

That’s the thing I try to avoid. ’cause I don’t wanna be too wordy. So I try to, I call myself a, to the point writer. I like to give you just enough, but not so much that it’s becomes just all these words on the page. I, because I don’t like reading stuff like that when it’s really wordy like that.

I just find it really hard to concentrate and I don’t, I don’t care for it, so I just, I, I write to the point and like try to get what I’m trying to say across, in as few as words as possible, but, you know, to make it still enjoyable and well written.

Mark: Do you find in your editing process that you end up cutting like the 10% that a lot of people talk about? Or do you find yourself almost putting things back in?

Westley: It depends. This book they came at night. It’s pretty much how I wrote it from the beginning. There. There’s minor changes. There’s some stuff that I did take out but I had a, the book I have coming out next year. That was almost a page one rewrite [00:30:00] just because of what I did.

And then the editor caught me on it and she’s like, no, no, no, no, no. And I went back and had to almost do a page one rewrite. I had too many characters. I had too many plots going on, too many of all of everything happening at once. And she’s like, you’ve got to take some of this out. So that was almost the page one rewrite. So I’m gonna say it depends on each book.

Mark: Do you find when you’re writing, there’s something, I don’t know if I would wanna say a weakness in the writing, but almost like something that you look for in the rewrite that, you know, you have a habit of like, not doing enough. Like for me, when I write, sometimes my characters spend a lot of time in their heads. So I know when I go through, I have to cut a lot of that internal dialogue because it just starts to bog down. Or I know I don’t, may not describe the scene enough. ’cause like you, I like to think, keep things moving. So I only want, you know, I might say a thing or two and then I’m out. But I, I could use more.

Do you find anything like that with your writing in this book?

Westley: I have a tendency to stop what’s going on To tell you what something looks like [00:31:00] instead of intertwining it with the action.

Mark: Hmm.

Westley: that was just something I learned through the editor. I didn’t know I was doing this, which is, this is a great thing about having really good editors.

Mark: Yeah.

Westley: I didn’t know I was doing this, but she’s like, you, you described this town. I did it in my second book into Pale Light. I have this the town is part of the story, so I wanna describe the town and what it looks like because it’s so integral to the story. But I just stopped the entire story just to tell you what the town looked like, and she’s like, wrap that around the, the story.

And like, I didn’t understand what she, what she meant at first. And like that, you know. And then like as I’m working on the Rera, I’m like, the light bulb goes off. I’m like, oh. Have them doing something so it doesn’t seem like you’re information dumping. Yeah that’s probably my biggest fault is that I’ll end up doing that and I can catch myself now doing it, but I, I couldn’t before having her help.

Mark: Nice. So you actually catch it in your first

Westley: Yeah. [00:32:00] Yeah. And they came at night, Sandra gets outta the car and she sees the town. But I was able to wrap that and I wanted just to get the town, what the town looked like, what she was seeing. I think I did it in one paragraph and kept moving. So you know it, but I got, I did it with her getting out of the car with, all the other things going on and, at the gas station and all that, and had the kids walking up the street. So there was all these other things going on, but I could quickly describe the town.

Mark: Yeah. Nice. What advice would you give to someone who just published their first or second book?

Westley: It is a lot of work. Be prepared for a lot of hard work and self-promotion. No matter, even if you’re traditionally published, independently published, self-published, be prepared to work your butt off because it’s never ending. It’s, it’s a lot of work to, to the, when you’re done writing that, isn’t it, you, you’ve gotta promote, which is, I feel the hardest part of this

Mark: [00:33:00] Yeah. Absolutely. Is there anything you’ve found that has worked best for you so far?

Westley: for promotion.

Mark: Yeah.

Westley: I’ve never went viral or anything like that. I just, I try to be in all, all the groups I can be in, try to post my stuff when people are asking for suggestions. You know, like, Hey, I am looking for a new author, or I would like a new book. I always like to throw my hat into the, into the ring.

Just, you never know. There’s some people who will see that and be like, oh, great, I’ll give this guy a try. That. Works. Sometimes it doesn’t work. It’s all up in the air. You, you can never really tell. I do do a tour with a group called Partners in Crime when I release a book and they always get me out there.

They help get readers and our reviewers and get me booked on podcasts and blog interviews and stuff like that so that it gets my name out there. It gives me a little extra help [00:34:00] that I wouldn’t have the reach for just being a independent author.

Mark: Is that for thrillers mostly? Is that why It’s called

Westley: Partners in crime. Yep.

Mark: they help promote, they help promote thriller

Westley: Other writers, they, they do a little bit of horror, a little. They do, they do just a bunch of different stuff. They’re, they’re really good. Gina’s great. I’ve worked with her all, for all three of my books. And I’ll be working with her for my fourth, so she’s great to work with and they hook you up with all kinds of different things and places and it’s pretty awesome to have that little extra help in your corner to help get you out there and find places that you can promote your work to other readers and stuff that you wouldn’t have a reach to.

Mark: Yeah. Nice. Oh, cool. I’ll have to check them out. Last question. Where can listeners find your books?

Westley: You can find my books on Amazon, at my publisher@watertowerhill.com, Barnes and Noble. All the links to these places are on my website, wesley [00:35:00] smith books.com. If you wanna follow me, I’m on Facebook and Instagram at w Smith Books.

Mark: Great, thank you. I will link all that to the show notes. Thank you for your time. This has been

Westley: Thank you.

Mark: loved learning about this. Thank you for sharing all

Westley: Absolutely. Thank you for having me on.

Mark: If you don’t mind taking a few minutes, we’re gonna jump into the after show for our Patreon members, ask some rapid fire questions. Thank you.

Thanks for listening to the Thriller Pitch Podcast. If you enjoyed this conversation, make sure you’re following the show. The next episode features Joel Nki, author of the Broken Detective. We talk about writing morally complicated protagonists, using place as character, and why some stories are less about redemption and more about understanding who people really are when the pressure doesn’t let up.

If you’d like to go a little deeper, there’s a short after show available right now. It’s where authors answer rapid fire questions. They don’t get asked anywhere [00:36:00] else their favorite thrillers, creative habits, uncomfortable choices, it’s free to listen to and you don’t need to support anything to access that. You’ll find the link in the show notes. Thanks again for being here. Happy New Year. I’ll see you in 2026.

TPP Episode 21 with Andrew Warren

[00:00:00] Coming up on the Thriller Pitch podcast.

Andrew: I envisioned the scene where the white tiger fighting someone. But as he’s fighting this guy and doing these martial arts he’s also calling out these numbers and you’re not really sure what’s going on. Why is he calling G eight and G nine. And then when the scene’s over there’s this reveal that the whole time he is been fighting this other guy, he has also been playing this very complex chess like game with a computer.

​Mark: What makes a great thriller tick, and what does it take to write one? Welcome to the Thriller Pitch Podcast, where bestselling award-winning and emerging thriller authors share the craft research and real world experiences that power today’s most gripping stories. I’m your host, mark p Jay Nadal.

Whether you’re writing thrillers or can’t get enough of reading them, this show takes you inside the minds of the authors, behind the twist. Characters [00:01:00] and moments that keep us turning the page.

This week I’m joined by Andrew Warren, the author behind the Thomas Kane Action thriller series. We dig into how he created the white tiger, a villain who’s both physically dangerous and tactically intelligent. We talk about balancing action with strategy, writing fights that are fast, yet informative, and the challenge of keeping a long running series fresh without repeating yourself.

If you write thrillers or wanna deepen the way you handle action and antagonists, this is a conversation you’ll want to hear.

Andrew, welcome back to the show. Thank you so much for being here.

Andrew: hey man, thank you for having me. It’s always, always a pleasure. Excited to, to be back.

Mark: You are officially the first guest to be a repeat guest, and you were the first guest on the epi on the podcast. So you are hitting all the All the check marks. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Andrew: Alright. You know, that’s actually really funny because some of my readers may know, and some of your viewers may know, like I signed a a with a publisher for my Thomas [00:02:00] Kane book. So they’ve been re-releasing the series and when I first came on, they had just rereleased the first one, and now that I’m back, they’ve, we’ve published the first brand new one. So it’s, that’s sort of interesting that that’s the way the timing worked out. So.

Mark: Yeah. And we are here to talk about it. Have it over the camera. A white tiger. Thank you for the copy. We both have our copies here. Yeah, thank you. I’ve, really enjoyed it. I haven’t been able to finish it as always it’s can be challenging to read a book in a week or less between guests, but I have halfway through or so a big, pretty intense car chase, long car motorcycle, intense chase about halfway through that. I absolutely loved. It was a lot of fun.

Andrew: as long as you’re enjoying the ride, that’s all that

Mark: I am. Thank you. So let’s get into the pitch before I talk too much about your book.

Andrew: Right on. Well, like I said, so we’ve been republishing the original series all leading up to White Tiger, which is the first brand new book in the cane series in a while. So I wanted to do something a little bit different. And so White Tiger is actually kind of a [00:03:00] spiritual sequel to Tokyo Black, the first book in the series.

So in White Tiger Cain has kind of come full circle. He is come in from the cold, he’s working with the CIA and he is working on a mission in South Korea that goes sideways and things go pretty disastrously wrong. So he’s recalled to the United States, but before he can leave the country, he gets a message from a character that we met in Tokyo Black.

And I don’t want to give anything away, but you know, it’s a very sort of vague message. But Kane knows this person well enough to know that this is a, a call for help. So he sort of goes rogue, ignores his orders, and travels to Japan to help this old friend of his, where he becomes embroiled in a much larger conspiracy, dealing with a rival yakus, a clan, which connects back to what was happening to him in South Korea.

Mark: Awesome. So where did this idea come from? And this is book six. So this is a series. Let’s talk about not just where this, like where this idea came from first, but then how you build this entire [00:04:00] series because there’s so much that goes into an action thriller series like this and keeping readers interested and motivated.

Andrew: man, it’s, it’s tricky and I don’t think, I’m gonna say this a lot in this interview, but I don’t think there’s any one answer, there’s no, like, I’m sure if you ask 10 authors, you’re gonna get 10 different ways of approaching it. But for me, the way I kind of looked at it was I always knew I wanted it to be a series.

I didn’t know if readers would take to it, but my intention from book one was that it would be a series, but I, kind of always tried to do two somewhat contradictory things in a way. So when I was writing Tokyo Black when I got to, maybe midway through, I would start to think, okay, what could the next book be about?

How could this series continue? And, Tokyo Black was set all in Japan and another country that I visited and was really fascinated by was China. And it just seemed like a natural fit. Well, okay, maybe at least for the first few books, maybe there’s a focus on East Asia, which isn’t something I thought had been done to death.

There’d been a lot of books set like [00:05:00] in the Middle East, or a lot of books set domestically. And I thought Asia, which was a con, an area that I’ve traveled quite a bit. I was like, maybe that’s kind of, could be sort of my niche.

So that was the first thought so as I was writing Tokyo Black, in the back of my mind. Was like, okay, well if the next book’s in China, what could that be about? And I knew that there was this partner character that had been mentioned. I was like, well, maybe his partner needs help or something like that.

And that idea morphed and changed quite a bit by the time I got to book two. But those were still kind of the basic seeds and you can see it there. However, one thing that I always try to do, no matter what book I’m working on, and I’ll get a quote. I, have you ever seen the movie Gatica?

Mark: I don’t think so. I may

Andrew: It’s a, it’s a, yeah, it’s an older. movie. It’s like from the nineties. It’s a sci-fi movie. The story of it isn’t important, but there’s a line in it where there are these two brothers that always race. They swim out to rock and swim back. And the swim back is really treacherous ’cause it gets very foggy and the water’s rough. And so the one brother who is like [00:06:00] physically superior, but he always loses the race. And he is like, why, how did you always beat me and the other brother’s? Like, I never saved anything for the swim back. He just like all out both ways. And if he lost his energy and drowned, that was that.

And so I feel like when you’re writing, you can’t save anything for the next book. You’ve gotta put all your love and all your ideas and all your attention into the book you’re working on. So don’t hold anything back and be like, oh, this is a good idea. I’ll save it for a later book. Put everything you can into that first book, and then when you get to the next book, you’ll have new ideas and fresh ideas. But obviously something, like a location, I wasn’t gonna suddenly shift Tokyo Black to China so I felt that was fine. I just wrote that down, wrote down a couple things, but that’s kind of the way I do it.

The things that really inspire me for books are usually either locations or characters so for instance, the Red Phoenix that was inspired by the location, I was like, okay, I’ve written about Japan, now I wanna write a book set in China. White Tiger though was very much inspired by the characters.

Both Cannes Allies and the villain, I thought it would be [00:07:00] cool, since this was the first brand new book since we’d started the re-release, I thought it would be interesting to circle back, to book one and maybe revisit some of those characters and see like, how have things changed for them?

How are they the and Kane himself going on this journey of being like a kind of rogue outsider at the beginning to being back in from the cold and working for the agency. And I wanted to see how other characters we had met had changed. So that was part of it. And then also the character of the White Tiger himself came about I was, just researching ideas for a villain, and I came across this condition, the cat’s eye syndrome, where a human being’s eyes can have cat-like pupils. And I just thought that was such a fascinating physical quirk. I’m like, that’s gotta be a, that I gotta use that for a villain.

How could I make this work? And so originally White Tiger wasn’t planned to be the next book. I was, the book that I’m finishing now was going to be the next book, but as soon as that villain came into my head and I just pictured him I couldn’t, I was, [00:08:00] I just was off and running. I couldn’t drop that idea. It was just, I loved it so much. And that’s where White Tiger came from. As a long answer to your question.

Mark: So when you’re building this book six, do you have a wall of everything that’s happened in all of the people or is this in your brain?

Andrew: No.

Mark: How do you keep track of all this? Because I think staying true to this story, like staying true to the characters must get hard over time. The downside to a series to me is that you don’t get to start fresh.

You have these people that have, you’re trying to develop them. You’re trying to give them a story arc every time. That’s how do you keep track of it all?

Andrew: It is tricky and honestly, up until White tiger, I would say most of the cane books, there’s a, kind of background through line, but they are all standalone stories. Even White Tiger, I think is a standalone story. The main plot is wrapped up at the end of each book. So the connecting tissues are little things like there’s only a few characters that go through all the books, so for White Tiger, for example, going back to [00:09:00] those, the characters from Book one, a lot of those characters had not been seen since Tokyo Black? So there wasn’t a ton of stuff to go into, but it is tricky like characters like Rebecca, who are in every book, and how her and Kane’s relationship, where’s it at, what stages it at, how are the pressures that they’re both under affecting them? How to make that both dramatic but also kind of natural and realistic, that is very challenging. And in fact, on the book I’m working on now, I’m sort of looking at that, like how much should Rebecca be involved in this story should I dial her back a little bit? That part is complicated. But for a white tiger, it was actually really fun because the characters you’re spending most of your time with haven’t been seen since book one. So I of had a free canvas, like what would happen to all these people and so I was free to play around and some of them are very similar to last time we saw them, but some of them are very different. That was kind of a blast to come up with the different trajectories that they went off on.

Mark: And someone like Rebecca how are you building her arc throughout all these stories from someone who, ’cause it’s like [00:10:00] she’s a love interest. In the first one we’re kinda like a former love interest. And then now we’re, now they’re, well, I don’t wanna give away my, should this, I guess you could, yeah.

I don’t remember. Hasn’t read the stories. I don’t wanna give it away, but

Andrew: Yeah. They’re together in a book before this, so that’s not new.

Mark: How do you make that Because one of the things about action pillars that, or I guess I think more like James Bond, where he’s a ladies man, right? Whereas Thomas Kane is he is almost conflicted, even in this book where there’s moments where he’s conflicted about that, where he’s oh, I don’t wanna do this.

I’m not into this. And then there’s a moment where he is like, well, I can get into, you know, why not? Yeah.

Andrew: Like he’s, he’s a human being, but he is definitely not a ladies man. And one of the things I kind of tried to do with Kane when I, when I envisioned the character was I definitely did not want like a kind of cookie cutter copy of James Bond. Even though I love Fleming’s writing, Fleming’s writing is a huge influence on me. But that character’s been done and I didn’t want to do that character. And Kain to me, when I imagine someone like Kain, when we first meet Kain, he’s been betrayed. He’s very [00:11:00] bitter. He doesn’t trust anybody. He’s paranoid almost there’s hints that he may even have PTSD from what’s happened to him. That is not a guy in my mind that is going out and hitting on chicks at bars, or like trying to sleep with every woman he meets. It’s almost the opposite. He’s suffering massive guilt. He kind of subconsciously sabotages all his relationships in my opinion, in those early books. So I just tried to approach everything from that lens. So when he would hook up with somebody in an earlier book, it was more like, these are two people who are both damaged in a similar way. It’s not a fun fling. It’s more like, this is the only little bit of solace these two individuals are gonna get for a little while.

And really all he wants, like in those early books is to, to rekindle his relationship with Rebecca and get back to that, you know, that’s kind of what he’s craving. So that was sort of the arc up till then. But I kind of feel like any of these things, you can only keep them going for so long and then you have to introduce a spin or a new element, so the book that I’m working on now, kind of, and I don’t [00:12:00] wanna give it away ’cause it’s new, but it throws a new kind of wrench into, you know, the relationship starts out. They’re former lovers, they’re not together. There’s some bitterness there.

They come around over several books, they’re able to rekindle that relationship. But the, the job and the demands of the job and the two different sides of the jobs that they represent, where Kane’s like out in the world, in the field, and Rebecca is in a more kind of political bureaucratic side of it, that puts stress on the relationship.

And then this new book I’m working on now, there’s a new instant that happens that twists that wrench a little bit and sends things in a new direction. So I don’t, I, I don’t have a like, grand plan of here’s where they’re going to end up. It’s more just what’s believable. You know what? I don’t wanna just like change things for change’s sake, but you also need to kind of keep things developing in an interesting direction.

So I, it’s, I just play it by ear, like book by book.

Mark: And with your characters, how do you avoid repeating personalities when you go from book to book?

Andrew: Oh, wow. Hmm. You mean [00:13:00] like in terms of secondary characters or

Mark: yeah. We know, yeah, we know Cain and Rebecca and they’re, let’s say the villain of a book one versus the villain of a book six, it’s easy to almost fall into what are their motivations and what are like, there’s a lot of villains later. How do you avoid oh, this villain sounds a lot like villain six books ago.

Andrew: I mean some of that, I think some of that just comes from their personality. Everyone’s got their own backstory and that kind of colors their personality. So, for instance, for this book for the White Tiger, I kind of thought, when I looked at the other villains in the past that I’d put in the books, they were all either physical challenges for Kane or intellectual challenges for Kane. They tended to fall into those two groups. And so I was like, what if there was a character that was both? And so when that idea came into my head, I instantly, for whatever reason, this is just one of those writer things.

I hadn’t outlined it. I don’t know where it actually, I do know where it came from. We can get into that later. But I, I envisioned the scene where there’s this guy, the white tiger. ’cause I already had a kind of physical idea of what he looked like, fighting [00:14:00] someone. But as he’s fighting this guy and doing these martial arts and he’s defending himself and blocking, he’s also calling out these numbers and you’re not really sure what’s going on.

And I thought that would be a kind of cool just visual and audio scene. Why is he calling G eight and G nine and all this stuff. And then when the scene’s over. There’s this reveal that the whole time he is been fighting this other guy, he has also been playing this very complex chess like game with a computer. And he’s so intellectually superior, that he’s able to keep this game in his head and play it well also fighting this guy and being a martial arts expert and to me I was like, that is a powerful villain. Once you see that, you’re like, oh man, this guy could actually threaten Kane someone with those physical abilities and those intellectual abilities. And then once you have that idea, their personality derives from that. So, this character, he plays this game called Oggi, and he sees his plots and sees the people around him as pieces in Oggi game, and that’s how he relates to the world, I don’t think there’s an easy answer and sometimes when I’m revising, I [00:15:00] do look at dialogue and say, this sounds too much like a generic villain, or, this sounds like stuff I’ve done before, and I’ll try to change it up or introduce a little more personality into it to make it different.

So it is something I think you have to be on the lookout for, but I don’t think there’s no one set way to do it, in my opinion. You just try to come up with the most interesting character you can. And then when you’re doing your revising and editorial, just be honest with yourself, is this as unique and interesting as I can make it, or does it feel like I’m kind of settling into a familiar pattern?

Mark: Okay. I wanna take a second. I didn’t know this in our last interview, but you also write in a different genre, right? Science fiction. So you have a whole other thing going on over there.

Andrew: I do. Yeah.

Mark: I’m curious about the differences between the two. When you consider the Thomas Kane series, you consider a spy thriller action thriller, right?

How do you move from that spy thriller, action thriller where we’re always moving very fast? Kane doesn’t spend a lot of time in his head. He is often more [00:16:00] reactive that’s just the genre it’s not like a psychological book where they spend a lot of time like, oh, why is this happening to me?

And stuff. So you write things move fast as the action thriller, but then you go to science fiction and now you have world building and it’s almost, I wouldn’t say it’s opposite, but it’s very different. How do you wear

Andrew: Well, my, well, first of all, my science fiction is, I mean the one commonality I would say with all the things I write is they are all fast-paced, action kinds of books. Those are just, what I enjoy writing and that’s my style. I was thinking about one of the other, you had sent me some questions you might ask, and I was just trying to think, because, a lot of my process is more instinctive.

It’s not like I’ve ever really sat down and be like, here’s how I approach things. And I realized, I think I look at the role of author. So I have an entertainment background and I’ve, I’ve done screenwriting and other kinds of production type stuff. I actually look at the role of an author as closer to a director than a screenwriter because when you’re a screenwriter, the screenplay is really more equivalent to an outline than a finished [00:17:00] product.

And then when you’re a director, you make the movie and the movie is the finished product. So as an author, I look at the books I’m writing, almost like movies I’m directing in my head, and I love fast paced action packed movies, so my sci-fi is much closer to something like Star Wars or Guardians of the galaxy than something like 2001.

In terms of the pacing and the, the action that’s not very different. But what is different is that, whereas I think someone like cain it’s much more grounded. It has to take place in a plausible world, and certain books may stretch that, and other books are more gritty and realistic, and other books get a little bit bigger and more bombastic, but they’re all still taking place in the real world.

So there’s research and trying to make these real locations come to life. Whereas for the science fiction, it’s much more like, that’s where I like, get all my crazy ideas out on the page. Whatever I can think of it, you can, if you can imagine it, you can make it, you can make it make sense in this kind of world.

So that’s sort of my chance to just really cut loose and kind of vent all my just [00:18:00] insane, crazy ideas.

Mark: Do you find yourself like taking one half off to put another hat on when you go between, or they’re just close enough to not have to

Andrew: just different. Not, I know it’s not, it’s not really hard for me to switch because they’re just, like I said, the process is still the same. I’m still directing the movie in my head. It’s just that what I wanna see in a spy thriller movie is different than what I wanna see in a space opera sci-fi movie.

And so there’s just different, just different ideas that can come into play, but I don’t find the process much different between them. Like, and I don’t really have any trouble switching between, so the sci-fi, there’s two sci-fi series I have. One is the Talon series, and that is kind of like a Conan and the Barbarian space is the elevator pitch. And, much like I love Fleming’s writing, I also love Robert e Howard’s Sword and Sorcery Conan writing. And so, that series was sort of a exercise in how could you take these tropes of sword and sorcery, but apply them to a more like space opera, [00:19:00] sci-fi world, and that was just a lot of fun for me to experiment and play around with.

Mark: Okay. So when you go from now you’re setting, when you’re in the Cane series, and I guess we’ll get back to writing this book, how do you go about setting and building, constructing the setting in the world that you have for Cane?

Andrew: It just, there’s, I mean, there’s two, I’d say there’s two like kind of subsets of locations in the world of Cane. There’s the places that I’ve actually traveled to and that I have my own kind of thoughts and impressions of. And then there’s places where I have to depend on research. So for the places that I’ve been to, like a, a big inspiration of White Tiger was my trip to Hokkaido.

I’d been to Japan several times I love Japan. But when I went to Hokkaido in the north, I was like that was a whole different area that I’d never been to. And I was really blown away. Sapporo is probably now my favorite city in Japan.

I really just love that location. And White Tiger was the first book where I actually was able to, sorry, let me back up. So I knew after that [00:20:00] trip that, okay, I gotta set a book here someday, so I kind of, I had photographs, I had ideas, and I filed that away. White Tiger is unique in all the books because it’s the only one where I actually had a chance to, go back to one of these places, like when I knew for a fact that I was gonna write a book there, ’cause so, so I, I signed this deal with Bold Wood and we were going through the RERE releases and I was like, all right, I’m gonna do White Tigers the next book.

And I knew I wanted it set in Al-Qaeda. I’d been there, I had a lot of ideas, I had my own impressions, but we were also about to take another trip to Japan. So I asked my wife, Hey, I know you want to do like new spots, but I’m about to write this book. Would it be cool if we also spent a few days in Hokkaido and went to these places?

And she was totally down with it. So I got to go back and actually look at these locations through the eye of an author about to start a novel. And as soon as we got back, I was gonna start writing. So I was able to do things like go into the Sapporo underground and use my iPhone and measure the corridors. I’m like, okay,

Mark: What vehicle?

Andrew: fit down here? And like, and then, okay, well like a [00:21:00] Mustang can, but, this little cake car could, and so all those spots in the book everything from, I don’t know how well you remember it, but when he is running from the gangsters in the club, he ducks into this little cocktail lounge that’s on this abandoned floor of a building.

That’s a real lounge that my wife and I just stumbled upon. We’re walking through in Japan, because space is so limited, they build up, so a lot of times when you’re looking for something, you’ll be looking for a bar or a restaurant, you can’t find it, but it’s because it’s on the third or fourth floor of a building, like right above you.

And you don’t, you wouldn’t even know it was there unless you already know. We had went to a restaurant in this building and then we’re like, what else is in this building? We just started walking around floor by floor and it’s just very weird. It’s very different than here. ’cause a lot of businesses and offices are closed and the lights are dark.

But then you’ll see this one door and you open it up and there could be anything, like a restaurant or a bar. And in this case it was this very chic kind of jazzy cocktail lounge with this bartender who when he made the cocktails, he would like close his eyes and it was almost like he was doing a ritual and he was really into it.

And so I was like, this is a [00:22:00] cool location. So all those things I was able to find and put in the book, are there, they’re my own experiences. But then sometimes, for instance in Helen Dice, which is the book published right before this one, the second half of that book takes place in Siberia, which of course is not a place that I’ve traveled to, but I just, for whatever reason, I just found it really fascinating.

I would read about it. I saw a documentary about Siberian, I can’t remember if they were hunters or like log like lumberjacks, but they would go, they would lead, they would, there’s like a few towns and when the season for their job comes up, they go into the forest and they build these like cabins or shacks and stay there for the season and then they hunt or cut down timber, whatever they do.

And then they leave when the winter hits and it’s just impossible to survive there. And I was like, oh, what if Kane was, you know, on the run in Siberia and he could stumble across one of these cabins and take shelter there and I just was fascinated with it. So for someplace like that, I just have to do research and you know, I try to find a way to take that research and relate it to [00:23:00] something that I do know.

So for instance you know, I’ve never been to Siberia, but I’m from New Jersey and it gets really fricking cold in New Jersey. And so I’ve been on ski trips and I’ve been in blizzards and so I tried to take that sense of being cold and like that, trying to do all this stuff while you’re freezing and you don’t have proper winter gear and your teeth are chattering and your muscles are seizing up and pick that as something that, okay, I’ve never been to this place, but I can imagine what this must be like. And then I try to bring that detail out in the story, you know? So those are kind of the two ways that I approach building the world.

Mark: Have you ever played music in the background to try bring that to life, like listen to a

Andrew: Oh, I always, yeah, I always, well not a snowstorm per se, but

I always write to music and certainly the music that I choose, I make a playlist for each book. And so obviously of course you can’t like time what track comes up when you’re writing what scene, but I try to pick music that relates.

So for instance, the third book, fire and Forget, which is all set in East Africa. There’s some soundtracks on there from movies that are set in Africa, like out of [00:24:00] Africa is on there. And, blood Diamond is on there. But then I also, I wanted to highlight like the kind of wild savage beauty.

There’s a scene in that book where there escaping this like war Ravage town, which is an awful, terrible place. But then they’re running through this, game reserve and it’s like a kind of unspoiled wild nature, and they’re floating on a raft. And to me like that, I pictured that scene very beautiful in my head.

So I had some music from Avatar on that playlist. And so whenever I picture Cain and, and the, the woman in that story, like on this raft and this river and this natural game preserve in Africa, I always picture the tracks and avatar when the main characters first experiencing the beauty of that planet, and like that world, it’s a very kind of mystical music, you know.

Mark: One of the things I love about your writing is how you can build the place yet, keep the story moving. When Kane, like, let’s say with a, with a photo. So you’ve done your research and you’ve actually been there and you have these pictures, and when you’re doing your [00:25:00] research, Kane walks into a room.

What’s going through your mind in order to keep him moving? Tell us the details that are interesting enough to set place, but not bog us down with the color of everything in the room like an epic fantasy might spend three pages doing it. You’re, we’re always moving. Yet I still feel very grounded in place.

How do you do that?

Andrew: Man, I, and of this also goes back to what you’re asking about the science fiction too, because I do think authors tend to do that more in science fiction. Right? Because your, your thought process is a lot, what I’m describing doesn’t exist so I have to like, describe it in exhausting detail or else they’re not gonna see it. But for both of, for both. I try really hard to, I, again I just don’t think there’s a simple answer, but I think that you have to be, you have to be cognizant of the fact that there is such a thing as too much, right?

You’re not trying to, you’re not writing a technical manual, you’re not trying to describe every facet of what’s there. You’re just [00:26:00] trying to give readers enough for them to build their own impression. Have you ever read Stephen King’s book on

Mark: Yeah.

Andrew: So that example he gives where he’s like, I’m, I am gonna describe like a rabbit on a table with a red tablecloth in a cage. And there’s the number eight on his back.

You can picture that, that’s enough detail for you to imagine that in your head, but he’s like, I didn’t describe like what kind of tablecloth it is and what’s the cage made out of and how, what are the dimensions of the cage? Unless those things are critically important, like if the cage is going to then be used to like wedge open a door and the size of it matters, maybe you want to give a little more info.

So I try to just think like, what’s important, what details would make the place come alive. And then the other thing I always try to do, I don’t always succeed, but I really try to make sure that I’m bringing in multiple senses, you know? So a lot of times I’ll, when I write something, I’ll go back and I’ll be like, oh, all I did was say what it looks like and I’ll try to like tweak it and be like, and it what does it feel like?

Or what does it smell like? Or what does it sound like? And I think a little bit of that can also go a [00:27:00] really long way into bringing something to life without going into exhaustive detail.

Mark: Do you find it easier when you don’t know the place and you’ve done research, or when you do know when you’re looking at this photo? ’cause I could imagine looking at a photo and being like, this is such an awesome room. I need to talk about it, but I can’t.

Andrew: I, well, I think actually when I’ve been there is when I’m more tempted to go, ’cause I feel responsible to really convey, like, ’cause usually nine times outta 10, I’m writing about places that I found interesting. And so I feel this responsibility, like, oh, I gotta like really capture the reality of this place and do it justice. But, I just think you just have to, again, a lot of times I will go back when I’m revising and be like, you know what, I can cut this down a little bit. I went a little bit overboard here and just trying to keep that in mind that there’s a point where there’s diminishing returns. Right. You know, so it’s like if you can get a few details in that are relevant, if you can couch those details in action if, rather than just describing something, if [00:28:00] Kane walks over to something and picks something up like I think that if you’re keeping the description married to the action, like that can help a little bit too. Just look at everything you do critically and ask those questions like, is this too much? Is it not enough? And just try to find a balance. I, It was an interesting experience republishing the original books because they did a new edit on all of ’em.

And so I had to go back and go through everything to approve their edits. And so I had to kinda reread all the books in rapid succession, and I did see my style has evolved. When I first started, I would describe fight scenes extremely intricately, and I still do, but my older ones, I’m like, okay, that’s probably too much detail.

I think I could have made that a little bit more impressionistic, but it’s a balance, right? Because the readers tell me they like that, they like the elaborate fight scenes. But I do think that you can get that across a little bit more efficiently. if I look at a fight scene I right now versus a fight scene in Book one, I do think I’ve evolved a little [00:29:00] bit to where you get the same effect, but with less words in essence. And so that it keeps it moving faster.

Mark: Can you talk about a fight scene for a minute? When you say it’s improved, what does that mean? Is it a difference between like right fist to face, left foot comes up and kicks in the nose and

Andrew: Again, like I looked at these scenes like I’m a director, so I wrote those. My, I write my fight scenes as if I’m directing an action scene. So it’s very blow by blow, and, and to some extent, like I said, I, the reader, my readers have told me they like that, but I do think that, now I, it’s hard to explain, but I feel like if you read one of my fight scenes now, it’s just a little bit more natural.

It flows a little bit more, it’s a little bit easier to envision because I’m dialing back just a little bit of the detail, and letting it be a little bit more impressionistic versus like left fit, pivot, right leg, weight back on heel, but still keeping that sense of because like if you read. Like every author approaches this differently. You might read one book where the author’s like they traded blows on the edge of a waterfall. That’s one [00:30:00] way to do a fight scene. That’s way more general than I would ever get I would definitely get more specific. I might say they traded blows for a few seconds, then came through a right hook knocking the salan off balance.

I, I would put in a little bit more specific detail, but I do think there’s times when if you dial back on the detail a little bit, you can speed it along and just put in the key beats that actually change the outcome, of what you, of what’s happening.

Mark: And you blend the

Andrew: But everyone’s,

Mark: environment too.

Andrew: oh, thanks. Yeah, that’s something I think that’s just something I like from movies, right?

If, like a Jason Bourne movie, I love that scene where he’s fighting the guy and he is using everything in the apartment, like the toaster and the newspaper and a pen. So I feel if you can, if you set up your location properly, then you can pay off all that stuff. When it comes, comes time to use it.

Mark: Yeah. It at its core. What kind of story would you say White Tiger is?

Andrew: White Tiger is a thriller. I mean, its primary purpose is to entertain and excite the [00:31:00] reader in my opinion. But I do try to put in character and themes and I think all that stuff is there. And also, if you like reading about interesting locations, I think you’ll get a lot out of it.

A lot of my readers are people who like to travel or people who wish they could travel. But at the end of the day when I write a book, I always try to remind myself the primary purpose of this book is to entertain the reader. I’m not trying to. Make any, all the thematic stuff is, which I like, is great, but if, if the reader’s not excited, if the reader’s not entertained, if their pulse isn’t racing and they’re dying to see what happens, then I’ve failed.

So that’s what, whenever it’s like, comes into a conflict between well, like, should I spend more time on this idea, or more time on this action scene I’m gonna lean towards the action scenes because that’s what readers are buying the ticket for, to use the movie analogy.

Mark: Okay, so when a reader puts the book down, what are you hoping they’re gonna feel? Is it just they’re sweating and then wipe their brow and like, whew, I gotta go?

Andrew: I’m hoping they’re gonna feel I can’t wait for the next, Caine novel. [00:32:00] You know, like, no, I mean that, but also I think, I, a big part, like I said, because I’m driven by the locations, I always hope that the reader feels like they’ve just taken a really exciting trip. Obviously a kind of a vicarious action kind of thing. You don’t, you wouldn’t want those things to really happen to you, but vicariously you can kind of read through and feel that excitement, but also feel, the sense of beauty and the, the fascination with these places and the different cultures. And I always include, I try to include cultures and the way the people there think, and the way they express themselves. ’cause I find those things fascinating. I try to strike a balance, right? I don’t think you can write wall to wall action because that gets very stale quickly. But I do think that the action, the excitement is the primary thing that keeps people coming to the thriller genre.

Mark: Yeah. Yeah. Especially the action spy thriller. Yeah.

Andrew: Yeah. But within that, there’s plenty of room. I’ve never had a problem in my opinion, like expressing the ideas and themes [00:33:00] that I wanna express while keeping that action, like really fun and exciting and, and propulsive.

Mark: Do you ever find yourself com comparing, ’cause you have like comp titles for all your books with like Trigger Man. Do you ever find yourself asking, am I too close to a Marini trigger man?

Andrew: Oh, the gray man.

Mark: sorry, gray Man? Yeah.

Andrew: No, I, I mean, I, all those things were influences on me. Of course, I loved the Gray Man books too. I haven’t read all of them, but I think that, when I developed a Kain character, I think I developed him to be just different enough.

Are things that in my mind, clearly separate Kain from the Gray Man or from James Bond, or from other characters. And I just try to keep those things in mind. And because of that, I’ve never really felt that, I’ve certainly never copied any of their plots or anything like that I haven’t read enough of them to really do that.

I’ve only read, I’ve read maybe three or four of the, of the Gray Man books and they’re great. Like, I love them. And, and actually I would say that the gray man to me. [00:34:00] Was a great, inspiration for like, ’cause I wanted to write books that were very action packed. And I felt like a lot of the thrillers I’d read were more about the suspense than the action.

And suspense is great, but I had never felt like you could just take one of those books and translate it to an action movie. You’d have to add a lot to make it really exciting visually. But when I read the Gray Man, I’m like, all right, now this is like an action movie in book form.

And I, I really love that. So that was sort of an inspiration to me. But I think we definitely do it in very different ways, you know?

Mark: Okay. So last time I asked you this question, what advice would you give someone who just published their first book? This time I want to focus on, ’cause you talked a little bit about the marketing side and planning ahead. This time. I, if you can answer to the craft side. So what advice would you have regarding someone who just published their first or second book from a craft perspective as in developing more as a writer?

Because the one thing that comes up, especially in the indie world, [00:35:00] is you have all these hats. You have social media, you have marketing, I mean, you still have to do that too. How do you build craft? How do you develop as a writer?

Andrew: I think it goes back to two things which is probably an answer a lot of this is if there’s anything I’m gonna say that I think is universal, this is probably it. Like I said before, I asked 10 different authors, you’ll probably get 10, 10 different answers. I bet you 90% of authors will say this same thing that I’m about to say. You really get better by reading more and writing more. And that’s it. I mean, I just don’t think there’s anything else. And when I say reading, like yeah, you can read a lot of craft books and those can be useful and I certainly do, but I don’t think that’s a replacement for just reading fiction.

If you’re writing fiction, like reading fiction and fiction in your genre fiction out of your genre, the more you read and the more you write. I think that it’s really important, of course, to finish books, but I do think that one of the reasons why Tokyo Black worked when I wrote it was because I had, although I hadn’t finished [00:36:00] any other novels, I had written a lot, I’d probably had like five or six, half finished novels and a bunch of short stories and a bunch of screenplays.

So it’s not like, like Tokyo Black was my first published novel, but it’s not like it’s the first, you know, big chunk of words that I’d written. I’d probably written close to half a million words before I wrote that. And, and still, and then even then, like I was just saying, when I go back and read it now I’m like, oh wow, like my style has changed six books later.

Like I can see the differences. So I think that you just have to keep writing, keep reading, like that’s really how you improve. And, but I also think, a phrase I constantly remind myself of is the perfect is the enemy of the good, right? So, like, if you’ve, if you’ve put your book out, and if it’s, if people like it and you’re getting good reviews, keep reading, keep writing, but don’t, like, it’s a, you don’t need to be perfect.

It’s like you’ll never be perfect. So look at things you might wanna do better, but don’t let it hold you back from just get the next book out and the next boy keep writing. Like, just keep doing it and don’t beat yourself up too much if, for the faults that you see, like you’re [00:37:00] always going to see flaws in your writing, but if overall people are entertained, if that’s, if you’re writing popular fiction and people seem to be entertained, like then you’re doing what you’re meant to be doing, keep going.

Mark: Yeah. Thank you. That’s great advice. I can attest to that with the podcast and even, I read, obviously all thriller, but even in the sub genres of thrillers from the domestic to the action to the supernatural and everything else that I’ve read, it’s been eye-opening as to how all these different authors approach the

Andrew: Totally like

Mark: And plot and speed and all these things even among

Andrew: A huge, a huge, side of my writing actually comes from a non thriller author. His name is Haruki Murakami. He’s a Japanese author and he writes these sort of surreal, I don’t even know how, what you’d call them. They’re sort of, sometimes he gets lumped into the mystery category, but I think that’s like really desperately trying to pigeonhole him. ’cause I, I don’t know that I’d call these books mysteries per se. They’re just very surreal, strange stories. But they’re all set in Japan. ’cause he is a Japanese [00:38:00] author and I’ve read translations of his books and I really loved them. And, and I, when I was writing Tokyo Black, I thought I wonder if there’s a way I could incorporate like some of this element of surrealness, without going overboard and without it diluting kind of the action.

And so that’s why I think in a lot of the Kane books, you’ll, there’ll be, Kane has a lot of dreams and nightmares that sometimes come up. And I think that side of them is me thinking like, oh, I wanna bring in a little bit of this kind of strange off kilter feeling from these other books. Like, that’s where I got that from. So you never know, like what you’ll read that inspires you or triggers new ideas.

Mark: Yeah.

Andrew: Yeah.

Mark: So if you can pick one thing you felt led to your success so far, what do you think that would be?

Andrew: I mean, success is a relative term, right? I’m not, I’m not buying a yacht on the Riviera anytime soon. Honestly two things, what I just said, reading a lot and writing a lot. I was a huge reader as a kid. I mean, [00:39:00] as long as, as far back as I can remember I was just devouring books I love to read. I read everything I could get my hands on, and I do think that that is a big part of being a writer. Write and reading and then writing a lot but then the other thing I’ll say, and I think some of it is luck. I mean, I do think that. But some of it is luck, in the sense that you never know what’s gonna connect with readers.

You do your best. So we talked about my sci-fi stuff, I love those books, but I’ll be the first to say they’re not as successful as the came books. You know, like for whatever reason, the readers that read them leave really good reviews. They seem to really like them. I think they’re a lot of fun. I think the third talent book, maybe the best thing I’ve ever written, honestly. But they don’t sell, they don’t connect with readers. I think a lot of it just comes down to luck, like what, people just happen to be in the mood for lots of, I mean, it’s, it’s like a cliche, right? Lots of artists and writers don’t become famous until years after they started, and sometimes things they wrote decades ago suddenly explode in popularity randomly. You just never know. But I will say, even when you take luck into [00:40:00] account, the more stuff you write and put out there, the more spins at the wheel you’ve got. If you just write one book, put it out there and it doesn’t become successful, and then you stop. Like you’re, you’re the one cutting off your opportunities at that point.

Mark: Yeah. Okay. Thank you. A question from our previous author that was on the show, ’cause we have like a ask the author a segment that moves forward. Joe Loveday asks, how many characters does it take to write a book?

Andrew: how many characters does

Mark: Yeah. Well this came up because she had her audio book done and because the audio narrator had to try and challenge by knowing all these different voices, that’s where the inspiration for the

Andrew: Had a lot of

Mark: Hearing came from. Yeah.

Andrew: Well, okay. I think maybe my answer might be a cheat. Maybe I think you could, I think you could write a book with only one actual character. Like you could have a person sitting in a room thinking, and I do think you could write a book about that, but their thoughts I think are inevitably going to include other people. you know.

So [00:41:00] are those other people characters. I don’t know I don’t know where the line is, but I do think you could write a book with just one actual physical character but, but of course their, their thoughts and reflections are gonna be intertwined with someone else. Or, I take it back, I think you could write a book like, what’s that movie, Castaway, right?

You could, you could have a guy shipwrecked on an island with no other people, no other characters. And, you could write a story about that. Like just him trying to escape or. Like there’s a, there’s an old, this isn’t quite the same thing, but there’s an old, I think it’s Ray, I think it’s Ray Bradbury’s story about this like planet where the people there only live for a week.

That’s their whole lifespan. They’re born and die in a week. And the whole, the whole story is this guy like, and then a, there’s a crashed spaceship. And I guess if they can get into this spaceship, then they won’t die at the end of the week. Like somehow it changes their biology or whatever.

And so the whole story, I can’t remember if it’s only one person or a couple people, but it’s certainly not a lot of characters. And because their lives are so short, they [00:42:00] don’t really have time to interact with a lot of different people. So it’s mostly this kind of internal journey of this character. A trying to like come to grips with growing up in this rapid accelerated pace. And then B, trying to get to this place where they won’t die. I, I wouldn’t say there’s no other characters, but there’s definitely not a lot so I think it is possible but it’s gonna be a strange book.

Mark: Well, for White Tiger, do you ever stop and ask yourself, do I need another character, or should I bring somebody else in? Like, where’s that? Where do you draw that line for yourself?

Andrew: actually I think I tend to go the opposite. Do I really need another character or can one of the characters I’ve established serve this role? Because I tend to, the characters expand pretty quickly, especially when you’re dealing with books set in foreign countries with lots of foreign names.

It can get confusing for a reader, if they don’t understand. I remember with Tokyo Black, one, the reviews was like, I could, I just couldn’t keep all the Japanese names straight. And too many of them start with K, which is true. There were a lot of K names. So I actually almost as a joke in this book, I did give a character a K name ’cause I’m like, I just remembered that [00:43:00] quote. I’m gonna give this character a K name just for fun for me. But yeah, I think that. I don’t, again it’s not six characters is the perfect amount of character, but I do think you kind of get a sense of, okay, this is starting to get unwieldy not only in the sense of a lot of characters for the audience to remember, but also how many characters can you invest and make them unique and memorable

And when I start to feel like that, that focus is getting just split up too much, that’s when I’ll try to be like, okay, like instead of inventing a new character, how can I have this other character I’ve already created fulfill this role?

Junko in White Tiger was like that originally there were more kind of loyal Yakuza like that were with working with Koichi.

But I just felt like, you know what this is, I’m just splitting up the actions randomly among these different people. I should just make it all this one guy. And that way it’s easier to keep track of and easier for the audience.

Mark: Yeah. And sometimes I think even in this book, you also had like vague references to like the man and stuff, right. To just avoid naming a character where it’s like, this guy’s kind of coming in and out. If I give him a name now I’ve given him agency, so to [00:44:00] speak,

Andrew: Right.

Mark: That because I don’t want

Andrew: The audience is gonna think, oh, I have to remember this guy. When really they’re not, those characters aren’t important,

Mark: Yeah, yeah. So they get those vague, the man, the guy in the suit. I do

Andrew: Yeah. The men in the suit smoking cigarettes,

Mark: Yeah. All right. Well last question for you. Where can listeners find out more about you and your books?

Andrew: Andrew Warren books.com.

Mark: I’ll link. Yeah, I’ll link to that in the show notes so the people can look you up and check out the, check out the books. Well, thank you so much for your time. This has been great. I loved having you on a second time talking a bit more about,

Andrew: Yeah. Man.

Mark: And, you’ve written another great book. So I look forward to the continuing these series. it’s

Andrew: I really appreciate that. Well, yeah, so I’m finished with the rough draft of Book seven and I’m actually in my revisions phase on that now. And that’ll come out early 2026.

Mark: Awesome. Well, we’ll probably have you back on the show again then next year if you wanna be. Yeah.

Andrew: [00:45:00] Anytime, man.

Mark: All right. Well, thank you so much. If you don’t mind sticking around, we’ll, we’ll hit the after show with our rapid fire segment.

Andrew: Let’s do it.

Mark: All right. Thank you.

Thanks for listening and make sure you follow the show so you don’t miss next week’s conversation with Melissa Miller. We talk about cutoff from Sky and Earth, the real life encounter that sparked the story and why she stepped away from her usual legal and medical thrillers to write something more personal.

Melissa also shares how she handles three points of view, builds tension without outlining and keeps emotional weight on the page after more than 50 novels. If you want the after show with the rapid fire questions, it’s free right now on Patreon, that’s where authors open up about their writing rituals, the scene they’d never wanna survive in their own book the weird stuff they Google and a lot more the links in the show notes.

TPP Episode 12 Steve Stratton

Mark: Hello and welcome to the Thriller Pitch Podcast, where thriller readers discover new, bestselling, and award-winning authors and stay for the story behind their story. If you love finding your next read or hearing how your favorite books were written, follow the show and stick around.

I’m your host, Mark P.J. Nadon, and this is episode number 12. Today’s guest is Steve Stratton, author of the Action Spy Thriller Caribbean Harvest.

Steve, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for being here today.

Steve: Yeah, it’s great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Mark: I am very excited to talk about Caribbean Harvest, which is your book four in your current series, I believe, and to dig deep into your experience writing the book. We’ll just get started right with the pitch.

Steve: Sure. So if you could imagine America’s most [00:01:00] relentless drug, Lord El Chapo is getting pressured in Mexico so hard that he decides that he’s gonna check and see if Cuba is a great, good place to grow opium. That’s essentially the backstory of the book. He’s looking to expand his empire, uh, right.

The Sinaloa cartel is multinational. But there’s always other places to go, other places to grow crops. And, he teams up with Cuban intelligence and their Chinese partners, uh, to start working this without the Cuban government knowing. My protagonist, Brigadier General Lance Bear Wolf. He’s Crow native by birth and his wife Ellie Parker end up going to Cuba to try and, uh, drop a dime as the saying goes on El Chapo, they don’t have to arrest him, right? It’s a, it’s a police state. That’s not gonna happen. But if they can get the government to see what he’s doing, they’ll arrest him and put him away, which would be a great win for [00:02:00] America, right? And so they infiltrate Cuba it’s treacherous waters on the infill. It’s burning, uh, sugar cane fields when they get there, and soldiers everywhere. So they’re navigating through this police state while they’re trying to connect up with some CIA resources and eventually take down his plans for Cuba. And there’s a, there’s, uh, elements of the love story there. At one point, Lance has to actually, at multiple points, he’s gotta make decisions about do I chase after El Chapo or do I save my wife, my friend? Things like that. It’s going on. And then, um, the book continues and they well, I should, I don’t wanna say any spoilers, but let’s say, let’s say, you know, there there’ll be another book, right?

Because they, you know, it’s a, it’s a job. Drug cartels are a job that’s never done. So I add, [00:03:00] techno elements of technology that they can use. It’s not a techno thriller, but I add that and I keep it fast paced. And if you like Vince Flynn, Brad thor. Brad Taylor, Mark Greany. I think you’ll like my book.

Mark: Awesome. Thank you. And where did this story idea come from?

Steve: Well, I do a lot of, I do a lot of research, also known as going down the rabbit hole sometimes. And, uh, literally got onto cartels and, and fighting drug cartels been part of my history. And so I’d gone down some rabbit holes about changing environmental, uh, aspects in Cuba. What’s it, what’s it like to, you know, try and grow pot on ground for 30 years and uh, chemicals issues and things like farming issues. And a lot of reports out in the last 10 years of the cartels changing their crops. They’re still [00:04:00] growing pot ’cause it’s still a big seller in the United States. But there was more and more conversion of those plots of land to, uh, poppies and opium because heroin and heroin derivatives had come further down, actually grown further up into the ecosystem of, uh, rich American users, drug users. And so they were saying rapid growth, sort of stagnation with pot and marijuana and growth in heroin use. And so being good businessman El Chapo and the kids now adapt to the demand from the US and so they’re growing more opium. So that was sort of the emphasis of that. And it’s like, wow, Cuba is a cool place. Let’s do this. It’s a, you know, it’s a, the, it’s the, it’s like the East Germany of the Caribbean, right? Back in the day in the Cold War, right? It’s a police state, things like that.

So all elements which make it much [00:05:00] harder for my protagonist, his wife, their small team, and the CIA assets to operate, so it’s, uh, combines that kind of spy thriller and story in there.

Mark: And does this all build off of one, two, and three or your stories when you hit book four? Is this like a story all on its own compared to the 1, 2, 3, like is it like a Jack Reacher where you can jump into any book really at any point and kind of get the idea?

Steve: That’s how, yeah, that’s other than the. The three primary books. The, the third book I wrote, which is probably the first one people should read, is a novella called Warrior, a Warrior’s Path. And it’s Lance from the time his father dies of a heroin overdose on the reservation until he’s really in the middle of the fight as a military member working down in, in Columbia and South America, things like that.

So, yeah, they are, they are standalones, they jump years. So it’s not a, it’s [00:06:00] not totally sequential my stories.

Mark: Okay. And just going into your experience and how that impacted the book… you have military experience as a Green Beret, you have White House experience. How does all that impact the book and the authenticity that you’re able to bring, which other authors not necessarily can, ’cause they don’t know what it’s like to actually be on the ground.

Steve: Yeah, it does help. I have to be careful not to get into giving you an info dump about how it, in, in the middle of August, you know, and, and, uh, or, or, uh, I’m sorry, get the seasons wrong since you’re south of the equator. But it that the jungle really sucks and it’ll, it’ll rot the clothes off you if you’re in the jungle too long. It’s just crazy. So, yeah, having that experience lets me add these little elements of authenticity without dumping on the user. And that, that goes all the way from interactions Lance has, Lance Bear Wolf has with the president to [00:07:00] being out in the field.

Mark: Yeah. Cool. Have you been to Cuba and dealt with, I can know the cartel specific if you’re allowed, if you’re allowed to say anything. Does. Is there any like real life experience from that cartel side and the Cuba side that comes into the book?

Steve: Not, not in Cuba, because I had a, a still have a pretty high clearance and I’m do still doing consulting. So, no, I’m not allowed to go to Cuba at this point. I have some friends that, you know, they’re, they’re, they’re, uh. Yeah, I talked with who had been in Cuba, their security clearance has laps. They’re in commercial business now, that kind of thing.

And so, I, I did a lot of research so that I could portray Cuba, off in, in an authentic way without once again overdoing it. So.

And research being some of those friends that whose clearances have dropped, so they’re allowed to talk essentially and research. What other kinds of research would you get to?

Well, certainly, watching videos, you know, I go to sites that like offer tours of [00:08:00] Cuba. One of the easier ways to get into Cuba, if you’re interested going to Cuba is to team up with a charity, oftentimes a religious charity that will go do work down there and they can put you on a team that’s gonna go do work.

And get you into the country for a week or two, that kind of thing. Like that. So that I, I do everything from, you know, state Department economic research. The CIA has their country books. I just, yeah, I go all out for a couple of weeks to do a lot of research and use, you know, six, six line, six things from all that research.

You know, it’s a very steep funnel down to what you put in the book. So.

Mark: Yeah. Yeah. The thousands of hours you might spend doing the research and then the one line that gets in there that’s very authentic and maybe, you know, you hope people get it, how cool that is, but yeah, you don’t necessarily know. Yeah.

Steve: Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

Mark: Was there any point where you almost gave up on the book as you were running, and this is book [00:09:00] four, so you have a good amount of experience now because generally by book four, you have the good stride. And was there any point where you, you were gonna give up on this?

Steve: No, there was a, there was a spot. I’m like, where, how am I going to, I’m a, I’m a plotter by the way, and I have it pretty well plotted out, but I’ll pants in the middle and change things and Oh yeah, that’s cool. And to do this and do that. And it weaved the story together. And I was like, wow, how are we getting out of that? Let’s see. But no, you’re right. It took me from 1993 to 2019 to write my first book. So I used, I I had all that time back then. Now, now I write, yeah, I’m so I didn’t have any hesitation writing this book. It was a lot of fun. It was more like flow, oh, wait a minute. I need to get up, stretch my legs, go work out.

Tell I had to get away from the computer. I was having that kind of fun writing this book.

Mark: Oh, that’s awesome.

That’s a good feeling to have when you’re, when you’re having that kind of fun. [00:10:00] Was the, was the plotting of it. do you go into like character I saw on your website? So I guess you do go into like heavy character details where you’re like breaking down the individual characters and who they are as as a person and some of their back history and things.

Do you do all that prior to writing the book? Is it that extensive of an outline and a plot before you start writing or is that something as you get the feel, the voice of the story and the character, you build it then?

Steve: Well, yeah, so my characters carry through, it’s, it’s my protagonist, his now wife, Ellie Parker, they carry through, El Chapo, carries through, but that, like, I had to create a, a former Cuban Intelligence colonel that is now doing intelligence for El Chappo. So I had to create a few people, and, and it used to be, my first book, I did two page personality outlines, you know, profiles.

Now I’m more like, like the FBI, I’ve got six pages, 250 questions. If the sun’s here and this is happening, how, how are they [00:11:00] gonna respond? I get that, that deep. So that I get to know them and then I can put them on the page and they, I, sometimes I go back to it. I’m like, wait a minute, did I just say she has green eyes instead of blue eyes or Hazel?

You know? But yeah. So I, I like doing that ’cause I, I like that profile creation is also fun and creating a character, that has some of the traits you want and is needs to grow in other places, things like that. So yeah, that’s always, that’s, that’s a fun part of it by, by this book and the one, the book five that I’m editing, which will be an Ellie Parker focus book, I know the characters pretty well and, and, it’s that, let, that frees me up to do the writing and get the story. Done.

Mark: Okay, so you don’t find it harder. Instead, you find it easier instead of harder when there’s an expectation of who this person is and a story arc each time. It sort of like a character arc each time you write the story.[00:12:00]

Steve: Yeah, I, I wanted to have Lance go from pure revenge in the first book where his parents are killed and he’s thinking, you know, I, I joke that my first book was so easy to write. What’s he thinking? He’s thinking about revenge. And then, then my, then my mentor, I was lucky enough when I first started writing to get a mentorship with Jerry Jenkins, who wrote the Left Behind Christian Service and bakes books about baseball, everything. Jerry, and he’s super good editor and it’s like, well, I, I don’t want him to be perfect. At the end of the book, I’ll have. No growth for him to have in the second, third book. And so, you know, it’s, if you’re writing single books, you can do things a little bit differently than if you wanna write a series.

And my hat, I tip my hat to Brad Thor and Brad Taylor, Mark Greaney, right? They’ve got, you know, Pike Logan, Harth, the gray man, and they’re 13, 14, 16, 20 books in and still trying to make things happen that are [00:13:00] interesting to their character. So,

Mark: I heard a podcast with, Mark Greaney recently and it was funny that he was talking about how his characters never really get older, even though he’s written 13 books, he kind of ignores the question of how old they are. ’cause you can’t have like a 45-year-old operator in the field. But technically if you follow, if you follow the, the age range, they, they’re getting that old.

Steve: Oh yeah. Yeah. By the time I hit 45, I was I was leading the team, not, not kicking the door down, so, yeah. Yeah.

Mark: So sticking with characters, you made an interesting choice of changing not only do you have a lot of characters in this book, and viewpoints, but you changed point of view from third person to first person, first person being, I guess you would say, your main character. Although they, it does share a lot of the book with other characters, with, with Lance as the main character and his being first person voice versus the others that are third person. What made you make that decision?

Steve: It’s uh, Brad Taylor’s fault. [00:14:00] So, so he writes Pike Logan, and the task force, his task force stories that way. And I thought it was in, first time I read it, it was jarring having read third person, you know, and omnipotent. And I can never keep all those different versions of how they explain that straight. But I read that and I’m like, wow, this gives me the ability to really be inside of Lance’s head and, and talk about what he’s thinking and seeing and stuff like that. And so yeah, that’s, that’s where that came about. And I enjoy it. A series on, new series I’m working on now, I started off with the first draft that way and they’re like, yeah, no, go back to third. And it’s like, oh, you know, all the is, becomes was, and you know, you make the changes,

Mark: Yeah,

Steve: And, and it can be a little bit of a mind shift. ’cause I’ll find myself falling back into first person. I’m like, God darn it, I’m gonna either finish that up. But, uh, yeah, so that was, that was the impetus. I mean, like I said, it was [00:15:00] discordant or whatever the term is. It just was, didn’t feel right. Then I just, all of a sudden it was like I broke through reading his books and it was like, oh yeah, I like this. So that’s why I attempted it. And, and the first two books are in third and, the novella and the fourth book are in first person. The next one for Ellie is gonna be in third, just because that’s what I’m writing the other series in so I’m trying to keep my head in my place so I don’t use myself and have a lot of, have to do rewrites.

Mark: Yeah. What did your, assuming your, your book is edited, professionally, do you have, did they come back to you and say, why?

Steve: Well,

Mark: I’ve had, I’ve done that myself. I asked because I’ve done that myself with like, one of my thrillers. I, I wrote like a couple scenes when he was in the machine, essentially. ’cause it’s kind of a tech based anyway, he’s in the machine. I wrote first person, my, my first person. My editor [00:16:00] came back and was like, this is no, there’s almost no reason to do this in first person, stick with third person. So I got that pushback and went to third person for the whole book.

Steve: Yeah, well, I never, I never got any pushback from my editors. What happened was I got a traditional deal. I got my, you know, I got the, I got the advance and I was all excited. And then two years later, my publisher was out of business. So, great guy. He gave me all the rights back one January a couple years ago i’m like, what is KDP? Hello, help. I’m trying to figure out how to make second, second editions of my first two books. Then I did the novella and, and this last book myself. My wife and I are Pratt Media and so, um, I don’t have, you know, I’ve got full control, editorial control and that kind of thing.

But now that I’m writing another series, for War Gate books, uh, that’s where I got, I delivered a first person short story in an anthology [00:17:00] first, and they’re like, nah, everybody else is writing Third, do you mind doing this? I’m like, no, I don’t care. You know, if that’s what you want, you’re paying me to be in the book, you know, to write that kind of thing.

Whatever you want’s good for me. I, you know, I’m not, I’m not well established enough or well known enough to go, no, this is how I write. You know, it’s like. Yeah, what you need, what you’re expecting. So yeah, so I did get pushback based on their readership and, what they were expecting to do with my, my follow on to another series, so, and so I’m, I’m okay to do that. It’s, it’s, I just don’t wanna start writing first person again while I’m in the middle of doing third and have, have those brain cramps along the way.

Mark: So when you wrote this one, did you write all third person point of view and then come back and fill in first, or did you just go back and did you write it like in the order that it was written? I guess.

Steve: Yeah, when I decide when I, if it was a POV of somebody else other than [00:18:00] Lance, it’s gonna be third. And you know, I caught myself a couple times in there mixing it up, and all of a sudden, you know, I had el Chapo or the Cuban, intelligence officer talking in first person, it’s like, okay, but, uh, you know, not, not too bad. I’d say maybe 10% of the time I catch myself before I had enough coffee for my brain to

Mark: Fair.

Steve: Yeah. But, yeah, so not bad at all. And, and once I’m, once again, when I’m in that flow, it just flows because I know if it’s a Lance, POV. Lance Bear Wolf that’s gonna be first person, everybody else, third, you know, that way I’m not shifting around and going, okay, what did I do here and do there and, ’cause I’ll take, not only will I outline, I’ll take, I love sticky notes.

My wife has a wall, 1600 cookbooks on a wall. And I use those, I use those bookcases to put like on the top, top level bookcase of the [00:19:00] bookcase will be the Lance Bear Wolf, thread down will be Ellie then it’ll be the antagonist and stuff like that. And so if I had to not only figure out the plot and the flow, then having to figure out who’s in first and who’s in third, you know, I, I, I’ve probably exploded my brain, so, yeah, so good question though.

Mark: And how do you go, so this being book four, how do you decide how much information and is this in your outline, how much information to bring readers up to speed? Because we assume that readers are gonna read one to four, but it does happen that people pick up four and we want to give ’em a reminder who knows how long it’s been since they read, you know, the others. How do you, how do you balance an info dump? like little pieces at a time. And is that part of your outline?

Steve: Well, it’s funny, I was just on a panel at Bouchercon on avoiding the info dump, and I, I, I’m a former IT guy, so I call it, I [00:20:00] often call it the data dump, but yeah, what I, what I said there is oftentimes I’ll just write the data dump and then I’ll just cut it up and put it to the side and hold onto it.

And actually, I, it was a data dump on Lance’s, early years that actually became a no, a 40,000 word novella. But, uh, once again, if you’re a, if you’re a new writer out there, one of the best things you could do is find a book that you really like. You like that style of writing, you, you wanna write in that style, not emulate, but write in that style, buy the book and literally tear it into pieces and tear it apart.

Don Bentley mentioned this one time and I’m like, oh yeah. So I got one of Brad Taylor’s books and took it all apart and my wife’s like, you just destroyed this plan. $15 book. I’m like, yeah, but I’m, look at what I’m learning and learn, take it apart and learn from it that way. Uh, and how, how [00:21:00] the, you know, the bestseller folks, men and women organize their books, their flow, their plot lines, things like that.

And so yeah, I. I, I will plot, like I say, I, I will plot, but I will pants and get new ideas in between. I’m lucky that I’ve never considered, when I do an outline, I don’t consider it done until the book is done ’cause it, right. I might have a spark. Usually the spark comes from external. I’ll, I’ll read something else it’ll be like, oh no, I need to do this, that, that, and then it changes a whole, you know, it changes the downstream book in some way. And so, being flexible like that just makes it, I never, I never get upset, distraught. It’s like, eh, okay, we’ll figure this out. Just keep moving forward. And, yeah, that’s, that’s worked for me.

Mark: Did you ever, have you made any big changes in this book as a result of pantsing a section and then realizing, oh, maybe this is what I’d rather have Lance do than what I had planned, and [00:22:00] now the whole like chunk of his story is been shifted.

Steve: Yeah, and, and once again it was, I was I was looking around, I was doing research and so a lot of Caribbean Harvest takes place in Santiago d Cuba, which is at the Southern, and you might call it at the other end of the island from Havana. Right and there’s a big beautiful bay and I’m like, how am I gonna get Lance down in that area and into a safe house?

How are the CIA assets going to get, get ’em there? And I researched and I found out number one, that like Cuba is got a really old power generation system, electrical system, and they actually lease boats, Turkish made boats that actually have generators on ’em and sit ’em in the harbor. I’m like, okay, that’s nice, but I’m not gonna have Lance hide in one of those boats. That doesn’t really help. And then I found out that one of the more profitable businesses, if you can call it profitable, ’cause being a communist state, you know, there’s not really that idea in [00:23:00] theory. That there’s cement, there’s cement plants that make cement. And then there are plants that make the products like our dividers.

We have here in, you know, our highway dividers, things like that, that we have here in America. And I’ve connected a cement plant with a product plant that was at the top of Santiago, Cuba Bay, next to a warehouse. And that warehouse became their warehouse where they were moving things with a narco sub.

So it just, you know, one of those kind of research things. Oh, good. Well, the CIA asset, his, his real life, his real life is owning some concrete plants around Cuba, which gives him the ability to travel, move, right. Take Lance and Ellie covertly to different places. So it, it’s that kind of cascading, do research. A little idea how that, that works for the, the CIA asset kind of idea, and it, it fit right into [00:24:00] the story and yeah, the, as you, you probably notice, I think I’ll, I’ll criticize myself a little bit here. I think my prologue in the book with the purchase of the sub is a, maybe is a little too ambiguous at the start, but you know, people, people get it. Like

Mark: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah. And El Chapo was, it was an interesting that, ’cause I, in my research after I realized that he was, he’s a real person. ’cause I thought, you know, this is fiction. And that is a really interesting thing to do because I mean, I’ll consider whether or not I even want to use a business name because if I say something about the business name that isn’t true or you know, like, do you know, say something wrong about a business name. You’re like, oh. I get the lawsuits or whatever. ’cause you said they, did this or did that. So you choosing to use El Chapo, as a character when he’s actually a real person was very interesting. How did that all play out?[00:25:00]

Steve: Well, it’s worked so well, well, so far and I was always hoping that they would come visit or they would do something that would increase my social marketing awareness,

Mark: That’s a great idea.

Steve: Without me dying in the process, uh, or my family getting hurt. But, yeah, I am, you know, by the time in 2019 that I started to write, write we were on the hunt again. We were trying to put him back into prison, things like that. And then of course, now that he’s in the Florence Supermax prison here in Colorado, Florence, Colorado, you know, I, I joke that I want to go see him, but they won’t let me talk to him. You know, unfortunately, I get, didn’t sign a book, you know?

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: But yeah, the, the the inciting incident for the story of the very first book took place in Mexico, and involved the Sinaloa cartel in my family. So that went a long ways to, you know, my first book I wrote helped me exercise some demons. Excise, [00:26:00] exercise, pushups, demons. Let’s do some.

Excise. I wish I knew the English language. The excise, some demons about the event and things like that. And so I, I’ve carried on with it, you know, the Chapalitos, his sons and other people have, you know, I, in, in the grand scheme of things, I’m a nobody. They, you know, they got bigger fish to fry things that now they got Delta and Seal team six breathing down their neck so that’s exciting.

Mark: Yeah. Yeah. Well, very unique take. That was enjoyable. And when I found out about El Chapo being real, it almost brought the story even more to life. I hope people listen to this podcast and then go and read the book, because when you get the context of everything that’s gone into this and your experience, it even brings the book more to life and then you might just passively reading it.

Steve: No, thank you. Thank you. I will tell folks too that I, the technology I used in the book, my very first book I sat way back in 1998. And so I’ve been able to leapfrog some technology and get [00:27:00] closer to today. But uh, yeah, everything I put in the book is, is technology we used, I have used and or could be used, you know, against, in the fight against the drug cartels. And, and you know, then, then there’s a whole bunch of other things that still having that clearance I can’t talk about. The DOD review board would never let it go out in the book, so, yeah.

Mark: Awesome. So we are going to wrap up with a couple more questions for people listening who are authors, and what advice would you give to someone who just published their first or second book?

Steve: Wow. Number one, keep writing. Number two, you, you, we don’t get a, we don’t get a choice today. We need to be on social media.

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: Try and conquer your fear about talking about your book too much and, you know, those kinds of things. But, really get onto social media. One of the best things I did, and it was [00:28:00] advice from Jeff Wilson of Andrews and Wilson who write The Sons of Valor and a bunch of other great, you know, bestselling series was Create a Community.

Create a tribe, a team, find other like authors in your genre, get into critique groups, those kind of things not only will help you with your craft, but also give you connections to other people maybe who have already, you know, have done indie things that you haven’t or traditionally published and no agents and things like that.

So, networking. Networking. I was pleasantly surprised having been used to it in the civilian side. Networking really plays a, a, a big role. And like I say, we’ll help you with your craft, your social media, your awareness of your books, those kind of things.

Mark: Yeah, absolutely. Community community’s ever more important, especially when you have your own imprint or you’re an indie author. Yeah.

Steve: Absolutely.

Mark: Where can people find your books and, and hear more about you?[00:29:00]

Steve: Sure my books are for sale on Ingram Spark and, via their distributors and Amazon. And my website is www steven S-T-E-V-E-N Stratton, S-T-R-A-T-T-O-N usa.com. I should have made that shorter. Yes.

Mark: I’ll link to it in the show notes, so all you have to do is click.

Steve: Yeah.

Thank you. Thank you so much. Yeah. Yeah. I’m also Stratton books on, on X and Steven Stratton on Facebook and Instagram.

And I’m like, most authors, I’m still trying to figure out Instagram. Have a good friend Tracy Abramson. She’s a pro at it, so I keep stalking her and getting advice and things like that. But, yeah, that’s where you can find me.

Mark: That’s great. Thank you. Thank you so much for taking the time. I really appreciate this. It was just a great conversation, really enjoyed it. And if you don’t mind sticking around for a few questions after the show, for the after show for our Patreon subscribers, just a few more questions there.

Thank you again.

Steve: Thank you [00:30:00] for having me. Appreciate it.

Mark: Thanks for listening to episode 12. If you enjoyed this conversation, make sure to follow the show so you don’t miss episode 13 with Joanna Vander, author of The Spy, thriller Spy Girls. And if you’d like to go deeper with early access bonus content, the after show with rapid fire questions and the chance to ask future guests your own questions, join me on Patreon links are in the show notes.

TPP Episode 10 Aiden Bailey

Aiden: [00:00:00] One of the reasons that I was inspired about setting it there was I was reading about the lava flows and like there’s this point where when they’re, cooling down.

They’re not quite, you won’t fall through them. And, but they’re, they’re warm enough you can stand on. They, they’re cool enough, you can stand on them, but if you stand on them too long, your shoes start to melt. So I had this whole, this chase sequence on other feeling, but I’ve gotta do that. I’ve gotta do something cool like that with Trigger Man. Send him there and put him through the, rigors of rigors of Iceland.​

Mark: Aiden, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for being here today for taking the time outta your schedule.

Aiden: Thanks, mark. Thanks for having me.

Mark: We are today gonna be talking about book six in your Trigger Man series, which is called Blunt Force, and let’s get started with the pitch.

Aiden: Okay, so Blunt Force, the main character is Mark Pearce, code Trigger Man. He’s a [00:01:00] CIA power military operator. He’s in Europe. Uh, there’s been a Panama Paper style release of massive amounts of data and it reveals the location of CIA safe houses across Europe. So the CIA want to shut it down, but also the Russians and the Syrians also want to control the data for their own reasons and are killing anyone who comes into contact with it.

But at the heart of the story, it’s about two siblings who are using the data to right it wrong. And when the Trigger Man finds out about this, he gets his, he gets a second purpose of second wind behind him to, like a more personal mission that he needs to resolve on top of everything else that’s going on. So that’s in the summary.

Mark: Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. That’s great. And where did the idea come from?

Aiden: This is the sixth book in the Trigger Man, and I’ve been wanting to set a story in Europe and I think I’m always on the lookout for ideas and I’ve just been reading about the Panama Papers which is [00:02:00] basically, it was a, it was a firm, a legal firm that had released a whole or a whole lot of their confidential client data had been exposed by some journalists and it showed a whole lot of corruption and trading around the world, but it was like millions and millions of files and I thought this would be a really interesting idea.

In the sense that, you know, back in the Cold War you might sell, steal one or two secrets. Whereas this one was about, you know, thousands and thousands of secrets. So what the Russians wanted for and what the Syrians wanted for, and what the Americans wanted for were all different, but they’re all fighting out the same data.

And it was just this kind of like, once the gene out of the bottle, so to speak, you really can’t put it back. And that was where it kind of came from. And then I’d always wanted to set a story in Iceland. Where a lot of the action happens. So yeah. So it was kind of like, yeah, a whole lot of my ideas came together and, uh, I hadn’t brought the triggerman to Europe, so it [00:03:00] was, well, not in a big way so that was the other reason. So, yeah, I’m trying to get the, you know, go.

Mark: Did you use Iceland as an excuse to, to go there and, and actually check it out for your book?

Aiden: You know, I, I, I would love to go there, but that’s about as far away from Australia where I’m as you can possibly get. It’s quite expensive. I have traveled quite extensively. I, I think I’m up to close up to 30 countries I’ve been to now, but some of the places, you know, send your characters, it’s, you know, they, they’re, they’re not easy to get into. Like I’ve said, one story in Central African Republic, and I don’t think anyone really wants to go there. Uh, but it’s, uh, but yes, I have spent, I have spent time in Europe, but I haven’t got to Iceland. But it’s just this incredible scenery. And

Mark: Yeah.

Aiden: One of the reasons that I was inspired about setting it there was I was reading about the lava flows and like there’s this point where when they’re, cooling down.

They’re not quite, you won’t fall through [00:04:00] them. And, but they’re, they’re warm enough you can stand on. They, they’re cool enough, you can stand on them, but if you stand on them too long, your shoes start to melt. So I had this whole, this chase sequence on other feeling, but I’ve gotta do that. I’ve gotta do something cool like that with Trigger Man.

Send him there and put him through the, rigors of rigors of Iceland.

Mark: Yeah. I love that moment. That was, that was one of the questions I had for you. If the

Aiden: Oh, okay.

Mark: Are real, so that’s great. Now I know

Aiden: Uh,

Mark: real in that scene. That is possible. ’cause it was very interesting reading it.

Aiden: I actually got out of Brian Cox documentary, the, uh, astrophysicist. He was watching something about, the, the, the Earth and how, um, planet’s form, and, and I just went, he was, he was in Iceland, he was actually talking about the Icelandic fields. I thought, yeah, I’ve gotta use this. And then the interesting thing about Iceland is it’s like all these lava fields, but you’ve also got these glaciers and snow fields and, you know, using the combination of two and just this, you’re putting, putting Trigger Man in his [00:05:00] team in this kind of really hostile environment, but it’s also in Europe. So it’s this interesting juxtaposition there. I had, I had a lot of fun running that. Yeah.

Mark: It was a lot of fun reading it ’cause he went through so much. He had, everything was against him. He was being hunted from

Aiden: Good.

Mark: The weather was against him. The earth was, seemed to be falling apart.

Aiden: I, I, yeah, I think with action, it’s, it is, you know, if you make it too easy for the characters, readers get bored. But if you make it, if he’s not, but if he’s not working his way through it, then they, they’re kind of going like, well, he is not that clever. So you’ve gotta find this balance of like, putting him in danger, but also making him a competent agent.

So, uh, but yes, I think that’s probably my favorite action sequence that I’ve written so far across the six books. Yeah, I had a lot of fun writing that.

Mark: Do you find by book six you have to make things harder and harder on the character in order for it to be as, order for your, like your, your [00:06:00] readers to want to continue engaging? Like you feel like you have to, like, okay, in book one, we could do a smaller story. I mean, I haven’t read book one, so I don’t, I

Aiden: Yeah, sure.

Mark: but you know what I mean?

Like if you’re raising the stakes every book.

Aiden: What, when you talk about stakes, I probably put it in three categories. You’ve got the plot, like, you know, what’s at stake of a on a geopolitical level, and this one it’s about, you know, exposing CIA operations because of the exposed CIA houses, CIA safe houses. But then it’s also got the characters, like the characters you’re trying to put them through some kind of arc in, in what they learn and discover about themselves.

But then the other one is the action. And yeah, I feel like it’s interesting when I talk to my publishers and give, throw them ideas about what they always come back to, as they say, as long as there’s lots of action. ’cause that’s what people want. So it is almost every book, I’m kind of going, it, it, you need, I feel like I need at least three good action [00:07:00] sequences.

So starting off with the, the fight sequence in Rhonda in Spain, where it’s that, uh, bridge over a cliff. And then I’ve got the, um, then I’ve got the Iceland chase, and then I had the tain chase in Syria at the end. And I, um, yeah, so it’s a bit of that. There’s a bit of a, so it’s not only the plot and the characters, but it’s also like the timing, the action is also something I think a lot about when I’m writing.

Mark: And what was the research like for this book? Because you had, I was learning all kinds of stuff. You had the Cold War, the Syria, the Ukraine war, the pipeline. I mean, it went on and on. So what, what, like how much research did you have to do and like what kind of things were real and factual? It all read very factual, but I don’t follow closely enough to know, check it. But it, it read very factual.

Aiden: Thanks, to go through the different points. Okay. So when I, I, I, I’d started out as an engineer. I, now, I’m working like corporate [00:08:00] communications, but one of my first jobs is actually on a pipeline in the Outback of Australia. So that’s where some of that experience came from. So, yes, everything with the pigs and, and the oil I, you know, I still work in the oil and gas sector, but I also work in the defense sector. So, you know, I’m, I’ve got all these insights through my work about, uh, how a lot of these, uh, infrastructure projects work. I guess I’m constantly reading, watching geopolitical shows. I’ve traveled, like I said, people travel quite extensively, so I’ve backpacked through Africa and South America and Africa was one of my first trips, and that kind of gave me a big sense of like the difference between what was then called the developed world, the developing world, and the difference in, you know, uh, quality of life and, and, political stability and things like that.

So I think it’s like research is always [00:09:00] on. So a lot of what I’m writing is there, but then as I’m writing it, it’s more the details. I need to stop and go, well, what kind of gun would they have in this part of the world? Or, or, I’m looking on Google Maps to try and get a sense of the terrain that they’re in.

The really interesting thing that happened with this one was while I was writing it, the Assad regime regime got kicked outta Syria, so I had to rewrite the whole ending. Because I had these Syrian agents from the, basically the Assad regime and, and then, and I thought, how can I, how can I, how can I write it in a way that still makes it relevant, even though that regime is gone now?

So, I’ve, I’ve thought I’ve came up with a solution. Hopefully it works, but, um, sorry. Lost my, lost my earpiece there for a second. Um, yeah, so, uh, yeah, it is. I, I guess to summarize, I feel like you, if you are always on research and reading [00:10:00] and you, the ideas will come. It’s just, I find it’s just the detail, like the the minute detail that you need to go and stop and just check something. But that’s a very quick search on the internet.

Mark: Yeah, well it’s helpful when you know, when they say, write what you know, it’s helpful that a lot of that stuff is in your background and in your interests. Because even if you don’t know things, if you’re very interested in it, you can become quite convincing in how much you know when you’re just enjoying the, that learning process as opposed to approaching a book and then having to learn it all because you don’t know anything about it and it just serves the plot you’re not really interested in it.

Aiden: A, another trick I use is, you know, I used to read a lot of National Geographic articles and, and they’d often give you little insights into like what it was like day to day, so you could put this flavor about, uh, what people would actually talk about, what scenes you’d see on the streets. So sometimes it’s a bit of description about where the Trigger Man is and what he’s seeing and feeling [00:11:00] and sensing. I think that also helps to bring, bring a location alive. So I, I do try to do that, uh, as well.

Mark: And how do you decide how much research to include to not bog down the story? ’cause you were talking about three major action scenes, but there’s also, you know, you have information built into all those action scenes. ’cause we’re constantly learning like, how do you know or how do you balance, here’s the background information so you’re aware of what’s going on where he is and I’m not doing too much to bore a reader.

Aiden: Yeah, like when I go back and read some of the classics, like a lot of the Clancy stuff, you can see there’s a lot of exposition about, you know, what’s going on and and, but you can see with modern authors, they started to change that. And I think with exposition to get the story across it is kind of saying enough to tell, to make sure the [00:12:00] readers know what’s going on. But there’s tricks you can use, like, you know, if you want exposition, you can have two people talking, or you can have two people talking on a fast beating train through Japan and one of ’em has got a gun pointed or the other, and then something becomes more interesting.

So it’s about how, where, and how the information is, is relayed. Another trick I use is trying not to introduce too many characters in one scene. So it’s like trying to build them up slowly. So you, you might meet two characters, and then the third one comes in three cha chapters later and then a fourth and so by the time you’ve got a big team of five or six or eight people, how many you are, how many are in that book? You, you’re not ma, you’re not basically forcing the ready to kind of go, well, here’s five people. Remember them all now, you know, you build ’em up slowly. So it’s little, little tricks that I’ve learned along the way about how to do that and, and it’s that Raymond Chandler thing, you know, like if a scene feels [00:13:00] bored, bring someone with a gun and shoot someone, you know? It is, it is you just, you just, it’s, it’s, it’s almost like a rhythm, like you go, yeah, it’s, it’s ticking along. But then now let’s add something else in and let’s just keep trying to escalate, escalate the tension as you go.

Mark: Yeah. I appreciated with, with the book that it started with Pierce and, and it did build the team slowly. ’cause I know in a lot of action thrillers, I have a tough time. Just like you said, when we get

Aiden: Hmm.

Mark: here, meet the team, I guess essentially it’s almost like a flashcard

Aiden: Yeah.

Mark: Every team member. And by the time I’ve read it all, I can’t remember anybody because just so many names and so many details. It was well done. That it was, it was very nice to have that, you know, little character here. And then here’s how they impacted the story or here’s how they impacted Pierce’s life throughout, I imagine throughout the other books, and I’m kind of being brought up to speed.

Aiden: This one is the one where the teams actually come together in a real way in across the six books. So in the first one, Pierce has [00:14:00] kind of almost operating independently, and then I slowly introduced the team over the the last five books. And this is where it all kind of comes together. But I’ve kind of also written myself into a corner where now I’ve got a table of six and each book I’ve gotta try and work out how to bring them all in again each time.

Um, and, and you know, ’cause you gotta, you can’t assume that anyone who’s read the next book knows what’s happened in the previous book. So

Mark: Yeah.

Aiden: Yeah, it’s, uh, maybe the team’s too big. I’m not sure. But anyway, we’ll see how we go. But I’m enjoying writing all of them. Yeah.

Mark: And how do you do the, like your writing process in itself, in itself, is it. Did you do a heavy outline? Especially now for this book with book six? ’cause I’ve like, I’ve written a trilogy and by the time I get to book three, I’m like struggling to remember what I’ve said over 300,000 words. You’ve done that for six books. So are you building an outline for this book by the time you got to book six In order to carry it forward without, [00:15:00] you know, just to keep track of it all.

Aiden: I do. I, I’ve, and with incubator, my publisher, they have these writers’ workshops. So the, the people who run it, some of them are out of the TV industry, so they have, they, they used to have what writers’ workshops. So they basically put you through a grilling session of like, they work you through your plot and go, what’s, how does this happen?

And why does this character know this? And does this make sense? Or should, wouldn’t it been more logical to do this? And it’s really good and so I’ve started, I used to be just a writer as I go, ’cause it’s all in my head. But now I’m doing plots on my publishers and that’s actually re refining it really well and giving me good outline.

So now that when I sit down I just go, right, right, right, right, right. Next round. Right, right. And it’s all there. But that said, over six books, I have these, peace has this secret background that I haven’t revealed yet, but I’ve hinted at it. [00:16:00] It. And even though each book is in standalone, if you read them in order, I’m building up this background of where he is come from and what his secret past is.

And I’m also building up this villainous group in the background that’s gonna come out more and more in the book. So I do have an overall kind of arc where it’s going, even though each book will be individual. So yeah, there’s a lot of checking and cross checking and, you know, I’ve got this timeline of like, how long ago each book was.

In, in character time, even though real world time is, you know, the character time is a lot slower than real world time is, and we, you know how action heroes never age. It’s, anyway, it’s, yes, there’s a lot of juggling, but, I’m, I write in my day job. I, I write, proposals for, uh, engineering projects and I just have to be on all the time, like, so I’ve learned how to write quickly and to pick up information and write it fast. So,

Mark: Cool.

Aiden: And, and then in that, in that [00:17:00] industry, I’m trying to pick up a lot of information very quickly and then turn it into content that a client can understand. So, yeah, I suppose that has helped.

So, yeah, I suppose I just do it naturally now without even thinking about it. But yeah, it took a long time to get there.

Mark: That’s interesting that you say helped rather than hindered. ’cause I would think having that much of a workload on your mind would almost make you come home and be tired. When you wrote the book, you like, was it like every day writing a bit? It sounds like you have a lot on your mind, so it’d be tiring.

Aiden: I try and come home and write for a couple hours every night. But, you know, sometimes you just work gets in the way or something’s on. I write, I try and write on the weekend as well. But I, yeah, I can literally just, I, I guess one trick, another trick that I’ve learned is that, you know, when I’m doing something like going for a walk, riding my bicycle, um, uh, [00:18:00] you know, cleaning, whatever it is, I’m just thinking, thinking through ideas.

So I’m often thinking about the next scene and what’s gonna happen. So that when I actually do have those half an hour, 20 minutes, an hour, whatever, you sit down and write, I just, yes, I can go straight into it. I don’t have to kind of think about it. So I’ve done the thinking beforehand. So again, there’s lots of little tricks that, yeah, I’ve learned over time about being more efficient in the way that I write.

Um, but I’m drawn to it and I, I love writing the Trigger Man. I’ve really got into it. And hopefully this will be my publishers just want me to keep writing it. You know, so hopefully I can keep it going for like 15, 20 books maybe more.

Mark: Yeah. Do you have a plan for that series? Like when you’re talking about revealing certain things, is there a number

Aiden: Yeah,

Mark: All that like you have kind of in mind? If you don’t mind sharing it.

Aiden: Yeah, sure. Um, so I’m working on book eight, sorry, book seven now, which is set in the Mexican drug war and then book eight potentially going to reveal pieces. [00:19:00] Deep background. And then from there I’ve got probably two or three more books planned out in reasonable detail. And then I’ve got this kinda long term plan about where it can go and some of the background elements that come out. So it is kinda like the further into the future you go, the more vague it becomes. But I, I feel like I’ve got enough to keep it going for quite a while.

Mark: Awesome. I look forward to continuing to read them.

Aiden: Thank you.

Mark: I really enjoyed Blunt Force.

Aiden: Oh, thank you. Yeah, I like, I, I just, I really enjoy writing them. I have a lot of fun and, uh, yeah, I’ve been really, I’ve been really happy about how well it’s sold and the reviews I’ve got. So they’ve all been, for the most part, really, really positive. So, yeah, it was

Mark: Yeah.

Aiden: Fantastic.

Mark: Yeah, yeah. Deserved for sure.

Aiden: Thank you.

Mark: So looking at characters for this book, you, there were a lot of viewpoints. [00:20:00] How did you keep track of all that? And when you’re on book six, maybe these, I should ask these individually, but do you, how do you keep track of arcs for the characters? Because in some books there’s the character goes through this journey from beginning to end and they come back changed, so to speak. But then we also have books that are like Jack Reacher as an example, where he doesn’t change very much because it’s a series and we love what we get from Jack Reacher. We don’t need him to go through these big changes in his personality or, know, how do you balance all of that? ’cause it was, it was great, but, and I, I got it all, but I, I was just thinking while I was reading it, like writing all these characters, it’s like, wow, here we are with this person and this person.

And like, and they’re all unique and they all go through so much. It’s like, that’s a lot.

Aiden: Yeah. How do I answer that? I suppose, uh, so Pierce has this background, which, uh, when I came up with the idea, I thought, this is really great. [00:21:00] I don’t know if anyone’s actually done this before. I won’t say what it is ’cause it hasn’t come out yet. But, I thought, but then when I started thinking about the implications of what that background would be, was it kind of started to flesh out why he reacts the way he does and this kind of conflict that he’s got and yeah, a lot of thrillers in this genre that I’ve read, they tell you straight away, you’ve done two tours in Afghanistan and one in Iraq, and he’s the top guy to mark and you, and it is all laid out for you. And I went, no, no, no. I wanna do the complete, the complete different approach. A bit like what Tom Wood did with his Victor, the assassin.

You don’t know anything about him. And I find that really intriguing. You know, like, so who is he? Where’s he come from? And, uh, and I, so there’s a lot. So as he’s, but as I, as I write him he becomes more real and it’s kind of easier to, to write him, if that makes sense. And then I just put him in a different situation, that kind of brings him up, that, uh, that confronts him [00:22:00] with his thoughts and beliefs. So in this one, you mentioned, you know, like I had a whole lot of Cold War references. I mean, his parents were spies in the Cold War, which was revealed in this one.

Mark: Yeah.

Aiden: And, and so then that’s bringing up his emotions about how he feels about that. And then I’ve got the, the two other main characters in there are Rachel Zane, who’s another paramilitary operator like Pierce.

And I’ve got a deep background on her, which has come out some of the earlier books. And then Mackenzie Summerfield, which is the team’s analyst. And she and Pierce have a long history together and they’ve been caught through quite a bit together. And you, and you just kind of go, what can I do with each of them?

You know? And the other thing that, uh, you know, like Jack Richard doesn’t change, but one thing my publisher says is, I think it’s more than 50% of my readers are women. And they, [00:23:00] I think that’s because I do have those character Arc and those, those uh, the depth and the change in the characters. I think that’s, that has helped me get into that market or that de that, um, demographic of the market.

So,

Mark: Yeah, that makes

Aiden: so, yeah.

Mark: And what about tracking all the characters? Do you have like a, a notebook of, of all the different people and their personalities before you start writing? Or,

Aiden: Uh.

Mark: Come to life because you’ve, you know, you’re imagining them as you are doing things like you mentioned.

Aiden: A lot of people have said to me like, you, you can retain a lot of information in your head, and maybe I can. But yeah, because I, I, I do have notes, but there’s a lot of it. I just, it’s there and I can remember back, or if I can’t remember, I can remember which chapter it was in, in the previous book and go back and go right there it was.

Mark: Okay.

Aiden: So yeah, it’s not, I don’t find it that difficult to be honest. It’s, maybe it’s [00:24:00] just something skill that I’m lucky. I, I dunno. But,

Mark: Not, I don’t have the skill. Yeah,

Aiden: But, but you know, it, editing is really hard for me, so, you know, it takes me so everyone’s got something and everyone’s that helps ’em. Something’s got something, holds ’em back, so, yeah.

Yeah.

Mark: And what was it like writing the villains? Do you find getting into the villain head, the villain’s head, difficult to give their perspective, make them seem human, not a caricature of this genre.

Aiden: So I’ve worked in a lot of big companies where, where I would call it like it’s a high density sociopath. And, and you see some of the people who are running companies or projects or things like that, and you go like, why are they making those decisions? And when you start to realize that they just don’t care about other people, [00:25:00] you kind of make sense.

And luckily I’m not in that world anymore, but I just, I started to realize that there’s just these, they’re very, very small part of the world, but they’re the kind of the narcissist and the sociopaths. And the psychopaths that just, they just don’t care about anyone and they’re all about themselves.

And I just like this idea of, blowing ’em over the top. So for example, in, um, uh, book Five Shock Front, that’s about a, um, and former soldier who terms paramilitary and he’s basically like, he’s almost like a cult leader. He, everything he says he believes.

Mark: Yeah.

Aiden: And, and he’s got this island of Komodo dragons, which he feeds anyone. He feeds people to that disappoint him, and they sort over the top and, but you make them really, really bad. And then people go like, they’ve gotta die. They’ve gotta get the justice. And it’s, it’s, it’s, um, yeah, just [00:26:00] so I try and draw real world traits from people like sometimes you can just watch politicians or business leaders on online and, and just some of the things they say and you go like, you know, I could use that because that’s like a super film would say.

But then you give them something like James Bond esque, like a, like a, like a island full of Komodo dragons just to make them that big, crazy. So yeah, they’re, they’re fun. Um, yeah, I just, but it’s, it’s trying to find something that makes each one different. I think there was, ’cause in, in my third book, I had a, an assassin who was also a comic board artist and kept drawing comic illustrations of everything that he’d, done to kill people and just, and, and then suddenly he was like this, he just became more real to me, even though he’s just this crazy killer.

Mark: Yeah, I love that drawing his killings. Well, unfortunately we are running low on time, so I have a few, a few more, couple [00:27:00] more questions for you. And

Aiden: Yep.

Mark: Mostly for those who are authors that are listening to the show. And I’d like to know what advice you would give someone who just publish like book one or book two. So they’re beyond the, I need to find time to write and, you know, they’ve written a book, they’re getting into it. And now what, because this is a, a stage that’s also quite difficult and overwhelming depending on if you’re traditionally published or, well, either way.

Aiden: Yeah. Uh, one, I was originally thinking of self-publishing Trigger Man, but that takes a lot of time and effort to kind of understand how to digitally market your books. Right. So, and I tried self-publishing other books before to varying success. But then I was a group of authors that I’m with and one of ’em was reading it and he said to me, just send it out to some publishers.

[00:28:00] So there’s a lot of digital publishers out there now who are looking for thriller authors, particularly action thriller authors and all the main thing I would suggest is if you’re going to a publisher, check to see how many reviews their books have on Amazon. So if they have five or six, they don’t know how to market it.

But if they’ve got thousands on their books, then they know how to market it. And you know that, don’t write your book to then get it stuck with a publisher that doesn’t know how to promote you and get it out there. I guess that’s the biggest advice I, I would give, you know, do your research on that. But I, I actually, but having a publisher like Incubator, which are fantastic, it allows me just to concentrate on writing the books while they do all the, the marketing.

It’s, and, uh, and it’s a reasonable arrangement, with, how they split the, the, um, profits. So yeah, I, I would, yeah, that’s what, two or three books I would go try and find a hybrid publisher, uh, not a hybrid publisher or a digital publisher.

Mark: Okay,

Aiden: Yeah. [00:29:00] Okay.

Mark: Did Tri was Triggerman, did you submit it for the first time and it was accepted?

Aiden: I think it was the third place I submitted it to. But yeah, Incubator picked it up and they, they’d been mostly doing vigilante justice, like the Jack Reacher or approach to, you know, my guy walks into a town and kills all the bad guys..

Mark: Yeah.

Aiden: But mine’s more along the lines of like a Mark Greaney, Gray Man. You know, he’s, he’s, he’s, he’s with the CIA, he’s traveling around the world. I think I’ve sent him to about eight books. I think I’ve sent him 45 countries already. And yeah, so there was a bit of risk for them there, but it’s been one of the bestsellers. So, uh, yeah, look, it is been life changing for me. It is. It’s doing really well. I, I made a really good choice and I was lucky to get with, with Incubator and I’ve got a great editor, Alice [00:30:00] with Incubator, so she’s been really good at honing the stories and improving them too. So yeah, get a good editor is the other thing I suggest.

Mark: Yeah. Yeah. Well congratulations on that success.

Aiden: Thank you.

Mark: Three times is a low number. That’s really good.

Aiden: But to give you context, I’ve been writing for 30 years and, you know, 30 years I was barely making any money on my writing and it was just a hobby and I was trying multiple genres. And it was only when I got into the Trigger Man that things turned around. So, you know, I’ve spent a lot of time getting there. I think it was, I, when I started writing the Trigger Man, I went, you’ve actually gotta start writing for the market. You know, what does the market actually want? You know, to what are the tropes, what are the, the expectations people having to throw off? Or what do they want from their main character? And once you start to write in, in a market approach, it’s easy.

It’s to sell. Or for publishers to go, yeah, we’re gonna go with this. ’cause that’s that work in the market [00:31:00] zone. Yeah. Trigger Man worked, but every, everything else before that didn’t, so, you know, it’s not always, it’s not always a smooth road. Yeah.

Mark: Okay. Fair. Well, that’s that’s

Aiden: Yeah.

Mark: Congratulations.

Aiden: Yeah.

Mark: So last question. Where can people find your books and learn more about you?

Aiden: Well there’s Blunt Force there, so that’s book six. You can get it on Amazon. It’s exclusive to Amazon, so it’s on the Kindle Unlimited and you can get it in the first three books. You can get in audio, but you can also get it in print as well. So basically Amazon or you can go to my website, which is aidenlbailey.com

That gives you more information. We can find my books.

Mark: Okay, great. Well, thank you so

Aiden: Thank you.

Mark: I really appreciate it. If you don’t mind sticking around for a few extra minutes after the show, I do,

Aiden: Sure. Thanks.

Mark: Bonus questions for the newsletter subscribers that only they get access to.[00:32:00]

Aiden: Definitely. Thanks Mark.

Mark: Thanks again. ​

TPP Episode 3 with Cole Chase

[00:00:00]

Mark: Hello and welcome to the Thriller Pitch Podcast, where you come for the pitch and stay for the story behind the story. I’m your host, Mark P.J. Nadon, and you are listening to episode three, the sponsor for this episode, still me. If you’re an author and you wanna sponsor a future episode, just head to markpjnadon.ca links in the show notes.

In my Novela cognitive breach, Homeland Security captures an AI architect who suspected of terrorism. When standard interrogation fails, they turn to the Genesis Project Technology Captain David Garner enters her dreams, uncovers a deadly conspiracy involving weaponized AI and a growing connection that could compromise everything.

Cognitive breach is a high stake psychological thriller where the truth hides deep in the battlefield of dreams. Today’s guest is Cole Chase, who [00:01:00] studied advanced commercial fiction at the University of Washington under Stephen King’s editor, the one who famously cut 500 pages from the stand. A former cybersecurity analyst certified and NSA Methods.

Cole brings real world tech savvy to his shadow fast action thriller series. A six book saga about a heavy metal band turn heist crew.

Mark: Cole, thank you. Thank you for being here. Welcome to the show.

Cole: Thanks. I’m glad to be here.

Mark: So we’re gonna get right into it today.

If you wanna pitch me your book.

Cole: I’m ready. I’m here to talk to you about Metal Spies. It’s an action thriller that kicks off a whole series, and one way you could wrap your mind around it is to think about the cast of Oceans 11 taking over a mission impossible movie. Quinn Richards is a con man, the son of a con man. He gets with his ex-army buddies and starts a heavy metal band that they call Shadow Fast.

Because he’s a [00:02:00] conman. Pretty soon it evolves into a heist crew because they find out they can travel to different locales, even other countries or states and do little scams and cons undercover as musicians. So even though they pull off these cons, he lives in a mansion he inherited from his father, and he’s not making enough for upkeep on the mansion.

So he keeps trying to get shadow fast into bigger and bigger scores. I. Well, when he tries that instead of getting into the big leagues, he gets played by the big leagues. And some corrupt politicians hire him for a job simply to entrap them. And shadow fast finds themselves blackmailed by these corrupt politicians, so they must obey.

The politicians have figured out is that there is a tech bro billionaire named Brody Bach, and he has been bribed to the tune of nine figures by actors from the states of Russia and China, and they can tell he’s about to launch a [00:03:00] technological attack on the United States, but they don’t know what it is.

So Shadow Fast has to find out what the attack is and when it is, or they face prison for life. So this kicks us off into a story full of car chases, double crosses, international intrigue, lots of set pieces, quirky characters that readers really love. And, it’s for you if you are a fan of action thrillers and especially if you like kind of team-based ones like.

The ones I’ve mentioned. You know, Oceans 11, Mission Impossible, A-Team. The Losers. If you remember the old movie Sneakers from 1992. It’s that kind of vibe. It’s part heist, thriller, part techno, thriller, and all fun. So you can rock out with your glock out in metal spies.

Mark: So what inspired you to write the book?

Cole: I actually got started, well, first of all, I’ve been a fan all my life of the kinds of things I just referred [00:04:00] to, but what really was the impetus is my daughter, she is a very, very good singer down in Hollywood and unusually for a female. She’s a heavy metal singer. So I was raised in a church culture where I wasn’t allowed to listen to heavy metal, and I was pretty much ignorant of it until I was almost 50.

My daughter Sarah was in all these metal bands and she basically just took me to metal school. And so, yeah, but you haven’t heard this and you haven’t heard this. And I, I found it was really fun and, I, I just kinda loved it. So one of the main characters in the series is an idealized and exaggerated version of my own daughter.

So that’s, that’s what the main impetus was.

Mark: That’s awesome. So Cold Hit, which is the one you were nice enough to, to give to me, is that book four in this series? Is that how the series works out?

Cole: Yeah, I, I wound up, there’s six books in the series now and [00:05:00] I released them as trilogies. So book four actually is the first book of the second trilogy.

Okay. You can read it if you haven’t read the first three. Um, but I probably the best experience is if you go start to finish, but works either way

Mark: And you have the history. Yeah. So I’m curious when you, when you’re writing an action thriller, how you balance that intense action with character development to make the audience kind of care about the action. I’ve found in some stories I get into, there’s like lots of action. The characters at risk, you know, might die all of a sudden, but I’m not, I don’t yet care if they do because as a reader I just don’t have a reason to yet.

Cole: Yes. Yeah. So there’s an evolution through the six books, right?

When I wrote the first trilogy, I had learned that the Tom Cruise, Christopher Mcquarrie Mission Impossibles, they would think up a bunch of set pieces [00:06:00] first and then try to string them together with a plot and I actually took that approach in the first trilogy ’cause I had been writing for corporations for years, and I just really wanted to break out and do something a lot more fun than an executive pep talk.

So the, those first three books were a total blast to write. I put the whole thing together and then looked at, said, okay, but what does this mean and what is going on with the characters? And I was actually a little surprised by what the themes turned out to be. As I mentioned that Quinn is the son of a conman, and what you learned through the course of the books is it doesn’t actually set well with him.

He grew up in it, but he doesn’t know if he wants to be a good guy, a bad guy. They try to have their own little shabby code of honor so that they only pick on, as they call it, assholes, rich people or rich assholes. You know? That’s their. So there [00:07:00] is character development and he has an arc figuring out, am I good?

Am I bad? Where do I wanna be? And then in the second trilogy, there’s actually considerable more character work, but it’s dropped in briefly. Like you, you don’t really get big scenes of people pondering the meaning of life or that kind of thing. It kind of arises from the action.

Mark: Yeah. Yeah. I like that you, there was a lot of action.

I enjoyed, really enjoyed that book. And so what scene or moment was the hardest to write? Like creatively or emotionally?

Cole: Well, in the, in the first trilogy, none of it, it was just pure fun. I mentioned it was a nice break from all the corporate writing I’d been doing in the second trilogy the villains are billionaires who made most of their fortune off of privatized prisons, and they run them in a uniquely heartless way, and I wanted to [00:08:00] juxtapose that with scenes of an actual prisoner in one of their prisons and show the difference between how they pitch it to investors and what the real experience of being there is.

And that prison stuff was. Very hard for me to write ’cause as it turns out, I’ve never been to prison. Uh, so I usually, you know, write my books in the order that you read it, but that one, every time I got to one of the prison scenes, I, I didn’t know enough to make it seem real, and I knew what was supposed to happen in the scene, but I just kind of put a pin there and, and move on.

And finally at the end, I had to read several books by prisoners, watched YouTube channels by people who have been in prison and come out and try to straighten out their lives. And then I could go back and write prison action with things that authentically happened and not just some privileged tech worker sitting up here in Seattle guessing what happens in [00:09:00] prison.

So that Yeah, that’s fair. The hardest.

Mark: Yeah, I could see that. Any major rewrites, like did you find the scene or the plot had to change or something had to change. ’cause you just realize that, oh, if they went through this emotionally, they would be this kind of person instead of that.

Cole: Oh, oh. That has happened to me on other projects, not on this one.

So I was a book packager in the nineties, so I’ve been involved with a lot of books besides just the ones I write north of 70 books. So I kind of know how to mark out the territory without major disruption down the line.

Mark: Okay. So if you had to cut a character outta your series, who would you cut and why?

Cole: I kind of did actually when the. When Shadow Fast first starts, there’s only three people in it and then as you read the first series, it’s kind of the origin of the band. [00:10:00] They wind up in total with seven members. And I had one character that I included ’cause I felt like the genre kind of required that character.

And I found in my beta reads that female readers were not responding to this guy well. And I found that as an author, I usually kind of like all my characters, even the bad guys. I understand where they’re coming from and I didn’t even like this character. So in the second series one of my lead characters dies.

It was something I’ve never done before. It was actually kind of fun to do. Readers report, they’re pretty shocked to find out one of ’em never makes it through the second series. So I kind of did what you’re asking about.

Mark: Yeah. So is your daughter a beta reader? Is she as a rock band expert or a metal band expert?

Is she reading the books and, and giving feedback on the metal band stuff?

Cole: She has read some of them. This is not a genre, [00:11:00] that’s her jam. Okay. So a lot of times if I wonder about how something works, I just ask her. But also. I got to tag along with her for a lot of her band stuff. So that’s where, as far as the music stuff and what it looks like from the stage and what you go through, setting up beforehand, all that

i’ve been with her, I’ve been their band’s videographer, so I know that stuff. And you know, for anybody who cares about the heavy metal side of it, you get some insight into it what the gear is and what goes on during the show from the band’s perspective. So that, to me, it was all fun. I’m actually finding that for most thriller readers, they don’t care either way about the heavy metal out of it, but that’s fine.

It’s, it’s not, the main premise is just something that makes it a little distinct.

Mark: It does, it adds a level of realism because when I read it, I remember thinking like, yeah, this feels like authentic, even though I don’t know if it is. It had that feeling that it [00:12:00] was, which not all books do that. Same with the gaming in the beginning of Cold Hit in the gaming scene.

Cole: That was really, I, I don’t know of any other thriller that has a setting. Of an eSports tournament. So I don’t know either. No, that was a blast to write. And I actually got so into inventing the game that the eSports tournament is about, that again, the early readers were like, there’s so much of the, I had to really back off ’cause I was getting too big a kick out of it.

It wasn’t all forwarding the plot. So I trimmed it down as much as I could.

Mark: So how long did it take you to write?

Cole: Good question. So, well, six books. So the second trilogy took me about five months to write because I Wow, I, in some books on cliffhangers, so I didn’t wanna release one and then just leave people stuck for a year wondering what’ll happen and probably not wondering anymore, [00:13:00] just giving up.

So I, I wrote ’em all and then staged them so they could be released three or four weeks apart from each other. I don’t actually know how long it took me to write the first trilogy because I was still a full-time employee during a lot of it. So I just snuck it in on evenings and weekends whenever I could.

So that. That was probably more like a couple of years. So Wow. I like having it as a full-time job now because you can just sink your teeth into it and go, go, go. Yeah. I try to write 2000 words a day, which to some is a lot and to others is not much, but that’s what I can do. So

Mark: I would, yeah, I would be on the side of, that’s a lot myself.

Three books in five months. That’s impressive. That’s a lot of writing.

Cole: Well, it, it adds up to about 180,000 words all told. So, I mean, that’s one of Mark Greaney’s books, if you know him, he writes the, and [00:14:00] those books are about 160,000 and he puts out a couple a year, I think. I, I think that’s the pace that a lot of tra pub authors are going at now, so,

Mark: yeah. Yeah. Fair enough. I guess it depends on the size of the book too. So what kind of other research went into, went into these books.

Cole: Well, so my background is, I always wanted to be a novel writer, so I wound up with a career that went in a million directions. I mean, I’ve, I’ve built yachts, I’ve dispatched buses, I did all kinds of things.

But what really landed as an area for interest for me is around 2000 I got hired by a firewall company, a cybersecurity company, and they addressed their product was for small to medium businesses, and they found that if they had their own tech writers or engineers write the manuals, these small to medium businesses usually have someone [00:15:00] running the network who is just the person who forgot to step backwards when they asked for volunteers, they didn’t mean to have a career as an IT person. They’re just like wearing that hat. ’cause someone has to. So they wanted documentation that read more like a magazine style than a, a technical publication.

So I didn’t actually know anything about cybersecurity, but they really liked my style. So they took it upon themselves to train me. And over a couple of years I actually wound up a certified information system security professional. I got certified by the NSA and certain methodology. So I really knew hacking and the arms race between people defending a network and people trying to sneak onto your network.

So there’s a ton of research that’s already in my background about all the computer stuff. [00:16:00] And one of the things that happens early in Metal Spies is, a fleet of self-driving cars gets hacked and facial recognition software is installed so that it seems like a normal self-driving car fleet, like you might think of Waymo or some that actually exist, except that if, you know, every self-driving car has eight or nine cameras on it and some of ’em have lidar.

I mean, that’s how they know where they are. Mm-hmm. So they’ve been programmed with facial recognition software that if you see this one astrophysicist accelerate at her and basically they’re set up so if they see this one person, they become little murder cars. I love that. And that hack. Was really done at Defcon.

There were people that came and presented on how they could do it. It was in theory, no one was actually murdered, but they showed that it could be done. So all the technological stuff in the books, it comes short of science fiction. It’s things that are really [00:17:00] happening, things that I’ve become aware of from working in big data and cybersecurity for so long.

But that is where most of the research comes from.

Mark: I love that. That’s awesome. So is that is, do your characters also come from your like variety of backgrounds?

Cole: So I’m always trying to kind of freshen things up. So if you think about other ensemble thrillers, like maybe NCIS or so, the hacker, or even Mission Impossible, the hacker’s always this skinny, nerdy white guy with glasses.

But when I worked in big data, some of the smartest people were from all over and one of the guys I worked with was this huge Samoan dude who looks more like Jason Momoa than Simon Ted. And so I made him my hacker in my book. His name is Manny. which is short for Emmanuel, big Samoan dude, and very much inspired by someone [00:18:00] I knew in real life.

And the other characters are, are kind of similar. They’re pastiches of real people I met from my decades in IT.

Mark: To have that experience to draw on. So this, when they say, write what you know, I guess it helps when you’re, you have a, you had a job that cool to, to write what you know and then apply it to action thrillers. I love that.

Cole: Well, thanks. But it, you know, it, it flips the other way too, right? I, I have not been a cop or a soldier. So when it comes to other staples of the genre, like weaponry, like what kind of tactic would you use to clear a building of hostiles? I have to look up all that stuff. Yeah. It’s, it’s the technology stuff where I’m comfortable and I know what I’m doing is feasible and innovative. But car chase, I had to research a car chase just to see, okay, what does, what does a guy do when he really is counting on this car to save [00:19:00] his life? And what, and I was surprised to find out, oh, they turn off the ABS, they turn off the, you know, a, a bunch of stuff.

They want the car as analog as possible. It’s like, oh, okay. You know? That goes in the book. It’s interesting.

Mark: So who is your favorite character to write?

Cole: I have a couple. I certainly liked writing the one inspired by my daughter, but another one I’ve had a lot of fun with is character who winds up being called Night Boy and he’s called Night Boy in part there, there is a real syndrome that is rare but exists. It’s less than 1% of all humans have ever had. It’s called the Holmes-Adie syndrome.. It usually happens mostly to girls, but it does occasionally happen to males. And what it is, is your pupils are not connected properly, and so they just never contract.

Your pupils will always be at the widest [00:20:00] they can possibly be as if you’ve been in a dark room for 20 minutes or something. And it’s kind of a terrible way to live because all daylight is just overwhelming. If you have Holmes-Adie syndrome and you just go out, normally you would be blinded because the sun would burn through your retina and your cones and rods.

So Night Boy has Holmes-Adie syndrome. He has to wear heavy wraparound sunglasses all the time. But the flip side of that is that at night he basically has perpetual organic night vision sight. So he becomes a kind of a scout and a sneak that can do all kinds of things for the band because he can see in the dark and there is a set piece, especially in the second book, Metal Lies that was really fun to write where he has knife fights in the dark, in a industrial market in South Korea. Again, it’s just something I hadn’t seen someone [00:21:00] else do and it was, it was really fun to have a character who has that unique advantage.

Mark: That’s very cool. So in your research, is that something the people with that syndrome, are they able to see better in the dark or was that like a creative liberty you took for

Cole: the book? Oh, no, that’s, that’s true. I mean, you know, probably from your own experience, if you ever go stargazing, or even if you just sit in your own backyard in the dark some night after 20 minutes or so, you are seeing far better than when you first walked out of your lit house.

And yeah. Plopped down, you know, I mean, it, it is a real thing. If your pupils were completely widely exposed than what looks like night to everybody else would look like twilight to you. Mm-hmm. It’s real. Of course the downside is that all somebody has to do is turn around and shine a flashlight in his eyes and he’s completely disabled.

Yeah. So his kryptonite it’s like having a superpower in a way, but it’s, it’s only good for a [00:22:00] very limited circumstances. Yeah.

Mark: Yeah. I love that. So a couple more questions for you as we wrap up here. What advice would you give to someone who just published their first or second book?

Cole: A couple things. What I, I mean, I’m, I’ve been in the publishing industry. I’ve done a lot of things, but as far as this pen name writing my own self-published thrillers, I’m not even quite two years in. And one of the things I was surprised to find is writing the book is the easiest part. You, you have to embrace marketing or nobody will ever find your book.

And it doesn’t matter if you hate marketing and you don’t wanna do it. It’s like saying, you know what? I gave birth to this baby, but I hate feeding babies, so I’m walking away. You’re just gonna kill it. So brace yourself. You’ve gotta figure out how to attract a following and keep them informed of what you’re doing.

And that usually the best thing you can do is start your own email list [00:23:00] because it’s the one thing nobody can turn off with a twist of an algorithm. Yeah. And I, if I can give two pieces of advice, even though I was only asked for one Sure. That next book, almost nobody can make it on one book or two books.

Keep going. Yeah. Because what starts to make money for you if, if you’re drive is to be commercially viable, is read through from one book to the next. So set a long-term goal for yourself and set your life up so that you can do it long-term. Uh, would be my advice.

Mark: That’s great advice. Thank you. And where can readers find your books?

Cole: Right now I’m exclusive to Amazon. They are in Kindle Unlimited, so if you’re a member there, you can read ’em all for free. Otherwise it’s on Amazon, both in ebook paperback, and the first three books are also in Audible.

Mark: Awesome. Thank you. Thank you [00:24:00] so much for joining me today. If you don’t mind sticking around for a couple minutes after the show, we’re just gonna record a couple extra questions for our newsletter subscribers, which is only available to them.

Cole: My pleasure. Thanks for talking with me.

Mark: Thank you.

Mark: Thanks for listening to the show. If you enjoyed this episode, you can support the show and get early access to future episodes on Patreon. Links are in the show notes and some guests are also sharing bonus content on our Patreon, like short stories behind the scenes extras novellas. So head over there, you get to support the show and get a bunch of goodies.

Don’t forget to check out my psychological thriller, cognitive breach if you’re into high stakes, dream invading tech conspiracies. If you like the show, please follow rate, share with a a Fiddler fan.

It really helps i’ll see you in the next episode where I sit down with author Faye Arcand, author of the domestic thriller Inside, Outside.

TPP Episode 1 with Andrew Warren

 [00:00:00]

Mark: Hello and welcome to the Thriller Pitch Podcast where you come for the pitch and stay for the story behind the story. I’m your host, Mark P.J. Nadon, and this is the very first episode of the show. Well Not the first interview I recorded, but the first one I’m releasing because I think it’s a great place to start.

This episode is sponsored by…me. I’m always open to author sponsorships because I wanna spotlight as many great books and pitches as I can. If you’re interested, visit my website, markpjnadon.ca my own book, The Genesis Project follows Blake, a former special forces soldier who’s recruited into a top secret government program using immersive virtual tech to treat post traumatic stress [00:01:00] with a goal of sending soldiers back into combat.

But when participants of the program murder a US Senator and another kills his wife, Blake starts asking questions. The answers don’t add up, and his search for the truth puts his own family in danger. It’s a military psychological thriller available on Amazon, and everywhere, books are sold.

Today’s guest is Andrew Warren, author of the International Bestselling Tokyo Black and the Thomas Caine thriller series. A lifelong fan of spy fiction, thanks to a childhood of viewing Goldfinger, Andrew writes thrillers about lone operatives, navigating the shadows, never sure who to trust. With a background in film and television, his books deliver cinematic action, exotic locations (You may want to visit Japan if it wasn’t on your list already), and heroes walking the razor’s edge between right and wrong.

Andrew, thank [00:02:00] you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast.

Andrew: Thank you for having me, man. I’m excited to, to meet you and chat about the book. Yeah, I’m very excited.

Mark: So let’s just get right into it. Give me the pitch for your book. The CIA

Andrew: betrayed him. Now, he’s their only hope to stop a war. Thomas Caine was the CIA’s deadliest killer until the agency betrayed him and left him for dead in the deserts of Afghanistan. Now he survives off the grid in Thailand’s criminal underworld.

But when a feud with a local gangster lands him in jail, his old CIA Masters return with an offer he can’t refuse. Rot in a hellish Thai prison or accept one last mission In Tokyo, Japan. Forced to hunt the neon lit city for a CIA assets runaway daughter Caine soon crosses paths with a sinister faction of the Yakuza crime syndicate and finds himself drawn into a terror plot that could ignite a devastating war between the US and China.

But Caine knows a double cross when he sees one. [00:03:00] He’s convinced someone in the CIA is manipulating him from behind the scenes. Trust is a luxury Caine can’t afford, and as he seeks redemption for his bloodstained past, he must decide who has earned his loyalty and who deserves his vengeance. Tokyo Black is a high octane, fast-paced, spy thriller, packed with gun battles, car chases, fascinating characters and international intrigue.

If you crave the thrills of a Mission Impossible or James Bond movie in book form, take a trip to Tokyo with betrayed assassin. Thomas Caine in Tokyo Black.

Mark: That’s awesome. I love that. Thank you.

Andrew: Oh, thanks man.

Mark: Very exciting. And it kicked off really strong.

Andrew: I had to turn the marketing brain up to 11 there.

Mark: Yeah, that was really good. And really solid start. I didn’t get to finish the story. Thank you so much for sending me a copy of it, and I didn’t get that. Oh, my pleasure. To quite finish it, but I think I’m far enough into it to ask questions without giving spoilers as we go along. So that’s probably the perfect dive in point

Anyway. So let’s get into what sparked the story. [00:04:00] What, where’d you get the idea from?

Andrew: You know, it’s one of those stories like. It’s like a classic author story where you’ll, you’ll hear and you’ll be like, there’s no way That’s true. That’s just something you made up for interviews. But I swear it’s true.

You know, I had always wanted to write a book for years and years and years. I, like many writers, I had tons of half finished, works on my hard drive and stuff. And, I was working at a job that I. Really didn’t particularly like, just wasn’t a good fit for me. And it wasn’t like a great point in my life.

Like I had gone through a divorce and I didn’t like this job and I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. And, I had been to Japan in the past and really enjoyed it and I really wanted to go back, take another trip there. But for all kinds of reasons, I just couldn’t do it. Like, at that time, like between, work and money and schedule, it just wasn’t gonna work out.

And one night. I just woke up at like three or four in the morning and I just had this like bolt of inspiration that I could write a book set in Japan. That would be sort of a virtual vacation for me. And I’m like, okay, I can’t [00:05:00] go, but I can project myself there mentally. And that’s kind of my escape, from this job I don’t like and all this other stuff.

And it instantly like just started brainstorming and all these things kind of came to me in a flash, like, well, what kind of book would it be? I’m like, well, a spy thriller just seems like a natural fit, and I love spy throwers. I love reading them. And for a location like Tokyo, it seemed like that would work well and.

All these details, like the character’s name and the, the, the title of the book and the basic plot, like I kind of scribbled down these notes and 90% of the book I think came to me like that one night. This flash of inspiration. Of course those were broad strokes, but that’s where it all started. So I started writing it.

In the mornings before work, I would get up an hour early and, and write as many words as I could before I left. And I got, I got pretty far, but I’d say I got maybe like halfway through and then like lost a little bit of steam. And then a couple years later I was working at a job that I really did like, and things were good and I, I had a new, girlfriend and she was in my apartment and she [00:06:00] picked up the manuscript, it was like on my desk and started reading it one day.

And she got really into it and started asking all these questions like, well what, what’s this character really thinking and what’s, what’s gonna happen to this guy? And I was like, I, I don’t know. I have to finish it. And I think that sort of enthusiasm that she had and the fact that she was engaged enough to like ask about it, kind of lit the fire again.

And I worked, I worked, at that time, I worked freelance, so I would have gigs that lasted a certain amount of time and they would end. And I was in a very unique spot where the gig I was on, I knew was ending. And I knew I had another gig two or three months down the road, already booked and lined up.

So I had this gap and I didn’t have to worry about, ’cause the two jobs were booked. And I was like, all right, I’m gonna use that time and I’m gonna finish the book and I’m just gonna pretend that this is my job. And so I would get up at like 9:00 AM write, take lunch. Write. And through that chunk of time, I, I finished the first draft of the book.

And then of course, , it was my first novel, so I had to go through a few more revisions and, and drafts and things. But that was [00:07:00] kind of how it all started.

Mark: Awesome. So from start to finish, you’re looking at like three years or so,

Andrew: probably for the first one. Yes. And most of that isn’t writing.

Most of that is just me procrastinating, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, uh, you know, I think until it’s really, until you finish a book, like it’s kind of hard to know. It’s like, seems like this insurmountable mountain. Yeah. You can’t really see the end of it, and you just, it’s very easy to kind of lose your way or, or get disheartened now that I’ve done it, I if, if I’m having a rough day or if I can’t figure something out, I’m like, all right, just keep working at it, you know, you’ll get it, you know, and I can kind of see the light at the end of the tunnel. But back then, I, I, you know, I, I’d never done it. I didn’t know if I could do it, so it was a, it was like a huge.

Thing like looming over me, but those little like bursts of encouragement would go a long way, and, and keeping me go.

Mark: That’s awesome. Hey, three years is actually pretty good, I think. I think so. It took me like 30, 30 years.

Andrew: Yeah. Like every, I [00:08:00] mean, I mean, I say three years, but like I said, I’ve been trying to write books my whole life. So you could say it was 40 years. It just depends if you wanna look at it. But, I think almost everyone I’ve spoken to, like their first book is like that. It’s a very kind of choppy. Thing broken up over these chunks of time, yeah. And then you do your next one. Now you know you can do it and so you can kind of go through it, start to finish a little bit easier.

Mark: So is Tokyo Black the first book you finished from start to finish?

Andrew: Absolutely. Yeah. First novel I’d written, screenplays, which I also think helped, like that was another, I was a film major in college and so, once I left college, I’d written some screenplays and finishing those. Also, I think kind.

Pushed me further than I had been previously. You know, like I think just completing things is really important as a writer. It really, the more things you finish, the more you kind of learn and the more you improve and the better equipped you are to tackle the next project.

Mark: Yeah, for sure. Yeah. ’cause it took me, I think it took me like 10 years to write my first one, which will never see the light of day.

But more recently it takes me about like four [00:09:00] months. So yeah, exactly. That’s roughly what it takes you as you start doing it. Yeah.

Andrew: And I think, you know, I used to, I used to be really bummed about all those half finished projects, but now when I think about it, I’m like, well, I guess those were the practice I needed, to get to the point where I could finish one.

So, yeah. Yeah, exactly. And this book is traditionally published, right? It is now. I originally self-published it way back in the day, so around the time that I finished it, while I was writing, I really didn’t have know what I was gonna do. I hadn’t really decided like if I was going to, like, I don’t even know if I knew about self-publishing when I started it.

I certainly did before I finished it, but I hadn’t really decided what route I was going to take. And I worked in the entertainment industry and so at that point I had optioned a couple screenplays, which never got made, but I had optioned them and I had optioned some pitches for TV shows and things, none of which ever bore any fruit.

But I’d kind of been through that. Process and it’s a very long, frustrating process in its own way. And there’s lots of gatekeepers and lots of [00:10:00] dead ends and false starts. So by the time I finished the book, I kind of had decided that I didn’t want to go through that process again. You know, like, or at least not for this, I was like, I’m just gonna have this be a thing of my own.

Around that time, Barry Eisler had started self-publishing with Amazon for his rain books. And, he, I, I really liked him. He was one of my favorite authors. And so I was like, I’m gonna do that, and if nobody buys it, that’s fine. Like, I wasn’t really looking at it as a, a moneymaking venture. I was like, I’m just gonna put it out there and it’ll just be for me and that’ll be it.

And so. So I did it, and it did reasonably well. Not phenomenal. I couldn’t quit my job or anything, but it sold and people liked it. So I kept on writing. And the, the second or and third books were, were all pretty successful. And so I would always kind of drop in and out. Like I would work freelance for a little while and then I would stop and focus on writing for a little while and I’d go back and forth.

And then recently, like at the, around the end of last year, a publisher approached me, Boldwood Books. They’re a UK based publisher, but they also publish in the US and all over the world. [00:11:00] And they were starting a new division focused on thrillers and they had seen the books and were interested in them.

And so we had a bunch of phone calls, talked back and forth, and we struck a deal. So they bought my backlist and now they’re currently republishing it. And I just literally two days ago on my birthday, no less, I turned in the manuscript for the next like brand new book in the series. So they’re republishing the series all leading up to this new novel that’s coming out in November.

Mark: So what, how many have you, how many are they republishing? I think there’s like three out there, right? Is it three? Oh, there’s

Andrew: three now, but there’s going to be five. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Yeah. So the one that I, the new one I turned in will be book six. I’m contracted with them for several books after that. And the original series actually consisted of four novels and two novellas.

And the novellas were written at different points in time, but they actually were two parts of the same story. So we just combined those to [00:12:00] form one book now since we’re republishing everything, and it kind of made more sense to do it that way. Okay. So that’s the fifth book. So, so it’ll, it’ll be, they’re republishing one through five and then book six will be the brand new one in November.

And then there’s a couple more contracted after that that I haven’t even thought through yet. So we’ll get there.

Mark: Yeah. Yeah. Well, hey, if you’re lucky, you’ll just wake up and have that, you know.

Andrew: Yeah, exactly. Hopefully I know that just hopefully

Mark: it just hits you. Yeah. Yeah. And it’s an international bestseller, right? This, Tokyo Black, it was

Andrew: so, you know, Amazon, you can earn those bestseller tags like basically. Their algorithm is constantly changing, but I, I believe the way it used to work, and I think the way it still works, is you have to hit number one in one of your categories and hold it for a certain amount of time.

Amazon’s very secretive about their system. Yeah. I don’t know if anyone knows exactly how long it has to hold it, but Tokyo Black, earned that tag in, in multiple countries and held it for a couple days. So it was a international bestseller. So. [00:13:00]

Mark: Awesome. Congratulations.

Andrew: thank you.

Mark: That’s not easy to do.

Andrew: It was really exciting. I, I was blown away when that happened, so.

Mark: Yeah. So was there a moment in your life that shaped the book, like a feeling or a memory?

Andrew: Well, like I said, creatively, a big part of Tokyo Black specifically was. How much I loved visiting Japan. Like Japan made a huge impact on me when I went there and so much so that if you like, as you read the book and, and you’ve started, so you know, like the character in the book has been to Japan in the past and is coming back.

I did it that way on purpose because that was kind of my headspace and I was like, okay, I think this would be the easiest way for me to get inside this character. ’cause that’s how I feel I was there and I wanna go back. In my research, even just researching the book, I saw how certain things had changed and certain places I’d been were different, or the businesses had changed, or things had been torn down.

And so I wanted to kind of convey that sense of time, you know, [00:14:00] like he’d been there in the past. And then I also wanted to make it kind of an important place for him, where something happened to him that changed the course of his life, and now he’s going back there and his life is changing again, you know?

Mm-hmm. All of those things were kind of feelings that I had, but then taken and fictionalized, and put into a much more exciting, context than, than my life. But that was really where it stemmed from. And, and since writing that book, I’ve been back to Japan, you know, many times. And in fact, the new book that I turned in is also set in Japan, and it’s him going back to help some of the characters that he meets in this book.

And it again, is kind of like a reflection point of all the things that have happened to him since Tokyo Black. Because as you go through the series h is life definitely changes and goes through some ups and downs,

Mark: so. Yeah, that’s probably the best research project of we have in discuss Right.

When you, you travel for research.

Andrew: Yeah. I mean, I’ve been lucky. You know, I, I do tend to, when I travel, I kind of view where I am, like through the lens of, oh, like what would a book here be like, you know, what would I do at this location? [00:15:00] And of course there’s a few books that are set in places that no one would wanna visit.

Like South Sudan in the middle of a Civil War is not a place i I plan to go, or Siberia, is in one of the books. But I, I enjoy the research and I’d say the two things that I, I always try to do with all the books in the series that are most important to me is to, A, make them cinematic.

You know, like, I often call them action movies for the mind. ’cause I, I, there’s all different. Levels of realism and drama in, in spy fiction. And I definitely lean more towards the melodramatic, high octane thriller versus like a realistic John LeCarre kind of thriller, and then the other thing is I really want the locations to come alive because I wrote that first book as a virtual vacation for me.

That’s the experience I want to give the reader. Like, I want them to feel like they’ve gone on a trip to this place. And it’s, and it’s not necessarily about hitting them with a bunch of details, it’s more about, for me, it’s more about capturing the mood kind of, and the vibe and just [00:16:00] giving them that experience, and so those two things I really focus on for each book.

Mark: Awesome. Yeah, I really felt that when, when I was reading the book, I was like, man, oh, I

Andrew: appreciate that man. Yeah,

Mark: yeah. So like to talk about research, how did you do that? Like when I was reading your book and I’m looking at these places and the different, groups that were involved and, and all these names and things, I’m like, wow, that it’s just amazing what’s all in here.

I’m like, what’s happening? Sometimes I have, uh, ’cause my brain is always going a million miles an hour, so I have time, a hard time sometimes keeping track and it’s just like, wow. There’s just so much.

Andrew: Some of it. I mean, like I said, a lot of it were, were things I remembered from my time there. And of course I had pictures.

I went, I immediately went back and dug up all my pictures and, and I jotted down the impressions that I remembered of those places. And then Google, I mean, Google just researching online you can do so much, and, and also, I watched a lot of movies. Like I watched a lot of Yakuza movies and Japanese movies because I kind of wanted to.

Bring a little bit of that vibe to [00:17:00] it. I even played, quite a few video games set in Japan. There’s a video game series called Yakuza, which is all set like in, in, Kabuki-cho, but they, they fictionalize and call it something else. But, so I played those games quite a bit and just anything I could find to pull in.

In fact, I even, I don’t, I’m not sure how far you’ve gotten, but there’s a. A piece of software, like a virtual character that a another person uses to, to mask their identity. And that all that came from. One of the very first things I did was I just googled weird things about Japan. Like that was what I typed in.

’cause I was looking for just odd details. And the first thing I found was this thing called Hatsune Miku, who is a virtual. Performer, like, so essentially this company made this software that if you’re a, a songwriter and you don’t have a singer to perform your songs, you can write the song in this animated character with a, with a digitized voice performs the song that you write.

And this character became so popular that [00:18:00] now. It’s like this huge multimedia empire based around this virtual singer, and she does concerts. And so I like saw this video of this hologram, like she looks like an anime character, but then there’s actual real musicians around her on a stage like performing this concert.

And there’s people in the audience like waving these sticks and I was like that. That’s amazing. So like I worked that in, I, I tweaked it and changed it, but I was like, I gotta work that in, and just finding these things that interested me and just putting them into the book.

Mark: What about like the prison and how this, the CIA functioned and all of that?

Andrew: Oh, well, funny, the reason why I made the character like a betrayed. Assassin and he’s like, kind of on the outside just ’cause I don’t have a ton of experience with the CIA. A you know, a lot of writers in the genre either were in the military or, or, worked in intelligence and I don’t have that background.

So I was like, all right, I’m gonna make this character on the outside so that I don’t have to dive too far, into that world. Like I can just kind of skim the surface of that world. And then from there, I, [00:19:00] I did do research. I reached out to people, online and, and who, who did have backgrounds like that and kind of asked them general questions.

There’s an author named Matt Fulton, who is like a research guru who just does everything about the CIA. So like, I’ll always hit him up like, Hey, do you know, like what this guy’s office would look like? And he’ll be like, oh, and he’ll have like pictures and like videos that he sent. Like he just, he’s just totally immersed in that world.

He runs a podcast too about, spies and actual, like spies and, and intelligence operations. So stuff like that. So I just tried to, I tried to make sure that I wasn’t really. Focusing on the stuff I didn’t know, like I, I tried to focus on the st the world that I knew and the world I was most interested in, which for me was the, the international location and the action and, and the pacing and that kind of thing.

And then the stuff with the CIA, I just tried to be like, okay, what’s like the, what’s the minimum I need to include in the story to make it work? And I’ll, I’ll just try to keep that, a smaller part of the book.

Mark: Yeah. Okay. No, that’s awesome. How did you, how did you find those [00:20:00] people?

Andrew: Some of them, I, I had just read their books.

I, I love reading and especially once I decided to self-publish. Originally I was looking at a lot of authors, who were doing the same thing just to kind of see, okay, well how did they do it? Like, what do their covers look like? What do their blurbs look like? How do they format their books?

It was, it’s, it, the self-publishing world is kind of a big community that you can definitely dive in and meet people and ask help. There’s tons of Facebook groups about it. So that was one way. And then the rest, a lot of times, like if you’re talking to one person, they’ll be like, oh, you should hit up this guy about this particular fact.

Like he’s, he knows a lot about that stuff, and so like you kind of start building this web of contacts.

Mark: cool. So going back to character, how do you balance a character? ’cause you’re writing spy thrillers, which like you said is high octane. It’s moving fast. How do you balance, building like character and, and having people I care about the character versus being all plot driven.

Because I’ve noticed in, in [00:21:00] a lot of high action like books or movies, sometimes you don’t like a James Bond, you don’t really care about the character so much. It’s Right. It’s the high octane, the action that you’re in there for. Yeah. It’s the surroundings. Right.

Andrew: Well, it’s interesting, so bringing up James Bond, I’m a huge James Bond fan, like, I don’t know if you can see, there’s an Italian Goldfinger over my shoulder. And so, but not, I’m not just a fan of the movies, although I love the movies, but I’m also a fan of the books and, Ian Fleming’s writing. And so I would say I. Ian Fleming is probably one of the two or three writers that influenced my style the most.

’cause I read him very early. My dad was also a big Bond fan, and he had all the original books, like on our bookshelf when I was growing up. And as soon as I started liking the movies, I, I was like, oh, there’s books. And I started all the books and I, I’ve read them all, many times. So I absorbed his style, like very young elements of his style.

And I, so when I was planning this. There’s, there’s kind of a theory that Fleming, when he created James Bond, created like [00:22:00] the prototypical, like post World War II British hero, at that time, England’s position in the world was sort of uncertain. The US was on the rise and Europe was on the decline in terms of political impact.

So he created this very. Like prototypical British hero that could kind of, allow the country to live out its fantasies. At that time, like back in the fifties when he wrote those books, like a lot of people didn’t travel the world, people didn’t get to go into a casino. Like most people didn’t have those experiences, and so he was kind of.

Projecting the fantasy of his countrymen at that time and writing books like to satisfy those readers. So I, when I started Tokyo Black, when I was in my outlining and planning phase, I very consciously tried to put myself through the same process. And I was like, okay, like for the United States right now in this point of time, like what do I think is sort of the.

Prototypical type of hero, and to me, I think the US is more, I always think of us as kind of rebellious. We, we formed by breaking away [00:23:00] from another power. And so like maybe this character is kind of fighting against the, the CIA, even though he works with them and he’s a betrayed guy and it’s more about.

He feels a lot of guilt and uncertainty about what he’s doing. ‘Cause we’re a post-Watergate, post Iraq Nation, and we we’re not always sure that we believe in what our government is doing and what the right thing is. And so I just tried to go through a thought process like that in creating this character.

And then in writing the books, I think it’s really important to just make sure that no matter how outlandish and how crazy the action gets. The hero isn’t perfect. You know that he has flaws. And so for Caine, he has a lot of doubts, a lot of introspection. He sometimes thinks about things and is like, I’m not, this is the right thing.

I don’t know if I should be doing this. Is this the right way to go? Or, or, I shouldn’t be doing this. This is crazy. Why am I helping this person? I should cut loose and run. I try to include those thoughts in his thought process. Which I do think comes from Fleming. ’cause if you read the [00:24:00] original Bond books, the character’s a lot more introspective than the character in the movies is, like the character in the movie portrayed most of the time, maybe recently this changed, but most of the time portrayed as just uber confident.

Uber competent can do anything. But in the books he’s a little bit more, he has doubts, and he’s a little bit more of a human character. So I tried to just include little elements of that and kind of what I always compare it to is, so when I was growing up in the eighties. The two big action stars were Stephen Segal and Jean Claude Van Dam.

So my favorite was Van Dam, because if you watch a Segal movie, like he would never take a hit. Like he just goes through wipes the floor. Doesn’t even break a sweat. Whereas Van Dam would kind of get the crap beat outta him and then come back at the end and, and for a finale. So I think audiences root more for the character that has to struggle a little bit or, maybe everything doesn’t always work out or takes some hits, gets hurt a little bit, like to me that that helps bring the audience in a little.

Mark: Yeah, yeah, for sure. So did that come [00:25:00] as you were writing or did that come before, did plan it out?

Andrew: I mean, I, in terms of the thought process I was telling you about the character and what he would be, that came before the writing, but. I just always try to keep that in the back of my mind as I’m writing.

And a lot of it has just become internalized now. Like that’s his character, Caine is a very introspective character. His thoughts are part of the book. He’s sometimes, I, sometimes I portray him almost like he has these, like two sides. There’s this killer’s voice that’s always whispering in the back of his head that he can’t really decide if he should listen to or not.

He is not sure. Is that. Is that the better side of me, or is, or is that the bad side of me? And so those elements are, have just become woven into his character. So I don’t, I don’t necessarily like plot them out, but they’re just kind of there in my head when I’m writing him.

Okay. But the process of what kind of character will this be? Like, that was something I did before I, I wrote it out.

Mark: How much do you do of the outline versus just jumping in?

Andrew: It’s [00:26:00] changed as I’ve gone, so for Tokyo Black. I had a very, very detailed outline. Not, I mean, not as detailed as some, like for instance, I think like James Patterson’s outlines are like 20 pages long.

Like it definitely wasn’t like that. But I did have a scene by scene outline. It was maybe four or five pages, and it was extremely complete. I deviated from it. Quite a bit. I get at one point, I think I always say almost every character other than Caine in the outline died at some point. And I kept changing it, reversing it, and now most of them don’t die, but then as I went through the books, I would say I started to see okay, I’m writing these long outlines, but I’m, I’m. Kind of getting to this point, and then they all diverge quite wildly, so I started loosening up the outlining process a little bit. And I would say now I typically have maybe, maybe like the first act outline to that degree.

And then the rest I just write sort of general descriptions of what [00:27:00] happens, like a few paragraphs for act two, a few paragraphs for Act three. And I try to keep it a little bit looser because I think. For me now, I can get kinda lost in the outline and I kind of feel like it, that’s really putting off the work of the book at this point.

Yeah. So there’s certain things that I know I need to know, like I need to know, like why is the villain doing what they’re doing, and what is the villain’s plot? And if I have those key details filled in, I can feel out the rest of it.

Yeah, that makes sense. What about yourself? Are you, are you more of an outlier or more of a panther or.

Mark: I have also switched. I was pantsing. Mm-hmm. Well, I went back and forth. I went from an outliner, didn’t get very far right. I went to Pantsing and then have come back to outlining. But the same thing I have found when I write the characters or when I’m writing the outline, the characters take over and then when I actually write the book.

Like you said, it just, it goes right off the rails.

Andrew: Yeah.

Mark: So it’s like I didn’t know the character enough to have an outline, and then once I actually know the character well enough, [00:28:00] it, it changes everything

Andrew: as I, but the, the other thing I’ve found is a lot of the times the, you know, so for instance, like I’m on my sixth book writing Caine, so I know him quite well, but sometimes a background character will just.

Becomes something very different, you know, than what you imagine they would be. Mm-hmm. And that takes the story in a whole different direction. I remember on the second book the villain, I, I outlined the villain a certain way. And from the very first scene, he just was something totally different. You know, it just came out completely different.

I was like, oh, wow. Like, where’d this come from? And it, it utterly changed the book, you know, and, and for the better, I think. But like, a lot of times. You just can’t really foresee, the things that are gonna change the plot and change, like how things go. So,

Mark: yeah, no, absolutely. My characters always mess with my stories once I get to know them, it’s a good thing.

I think that’s where the, the best stuff comes from, you know? Yeah. It’s, it’s a lot of fun. I mean, I, I don’t mind it, I don’t mind ditching part of the outline, but that I just put less time into it now. Yeah. With still outlining, because Paning is, is [00:29:00] where. I would you, it’s easy to write like act one and then lose track.

It gets harder. Yeah. It gets where you’re supposed to go because I’m like, okay, you kind of write yourself into a hole. And I know some people are great at that, they don’t mind. But yeah, didn’t work for me. I need a little bit more guidance than did the straight pantsing so.

Andrew: Right on.

Mark: All right, well we’re gonna do some wrap. I can ask questions forever here. But we’re gonna wrap it up a little bit and, if you could give a piece of advice for someone who just published like book one or two, what would it be?  

Andrew: Wow. Okay. I think it’s, it, it’s really, I think it, I think the most important, well, it, it sort of depends like what your focus is.

But like, let’s say, I’ll, I’ll tackle this from the perspective of if you’re looking to make this either, either a full-time gig or like a significant side hustle where you know you want this to be like a business. I think the most important thing is to have a plan, because I talk to a lot of authors who, on [00:30:00] the, who are basically all they’re thinking about is the first book, you know, and getting it out there and, and they’re thinking that that book is gonna be enormously successful.

And the reality is that doesn’t often happen. Even, even the success that I had with my first book, I don’t think would be enough to build a, a career off of, so you have to. Plan, you, you have to like look at that as one brick, but also know you’ve gotta be planning other bricks.

So like, figure out, how can you turn this into a series or, or do you want a series if you wanna do standalones? Like how can you make all the standalones kind of fit together so that you could market them like, like kind of always have that marketing hat ready to put on so that you can build and build and build.

Because what I think what happens to a lot of writers that I talk to is they put out their first book. It doesn’t do like enormously well, like so well that they can, quit their job or something and then they get discouraged. And I, I kind of call that lottery thinking like, they’re like, oh, this book’s my lottery ticket, and it’s gonna [00:31:00] win and then I’m done.

And even for very successful authors, it just doesn’t usually work that way. It’s really more about building a body of work. So. Do you have a writing process? Like, can you, do you have time set aside whether you’re, if you’re working like another job, can you devote, 20 minutes, 30 minutes, an hour a day to writing?

What will the books in this series be like, how can you keep this story going, and what other things can you do? What can marketing can you do, what do the covers in your genre look like? You know, if you’re self-publishing or if you’re. Plan on going traditional route, like what publishers would be a good fit for this material?

You know, I think a lot of authors just don’t think through all those details and they just put out the first book and then get discouraged. So I would say yeah, it’s great if your first book does well, but be planning, like, plan your next book and your book after that, and your book after that and, and look at it more like a business.

And don’t let temporary setbacks discourage you from moving forward.

Mark: That’s awesome. Thank you. Of course. What kind of time do you put into like marketing versus writing?

Andrew: When I was, when I was  [00:32:00] self-publishing, quite a bit. Well, I quite, to me it seems like quite a bit.

I’m sure there’s people who do more, but I would schedule, I would schedule time, basically I do like maybe an hour, two hours a a week. So like an hour on Monday and an hour on Friday, and I would like do like Facebook ads and Amazon ads, and I. Look at the ads, see how they’re doing.

Just make, do all that business stuff. You know, like, do I need to increase my bids? Should I launch more ads? Do I need to look at other platforms? Things like that. Also, I think building my newsletter, do I have a plan? What am I gonna send this this week? Am my newsletter, what am I doing to grow my newsletter?

Like, am I, am I signed up for group promos on book funnel or things like that? I think having a newsletter, actually, back to the question we were talking about before, I apologize. But having a newsletter is also a super important thing that a lot of authors, I think, kind of skip over or don’t realize how big a deal it is.

Because the reason I was able to launch my books as well is I did, is because I kind of plan in advance and had built up a newsletter of readers before the books came out, so I [00:33:00] had an audience already that I could. Blast. Like, Hey, the book one is out now, Hey, book two is out. So, I would say probably two, two to three hours a week I was spending.

Now that I’m with a publisher, I, they’re handling that, so I don’t do it as much, but I do find that that has freed me up to still use that time to pursue other kinds of marketing. So, for instance, talking to you or being on a podcast, that’s a kind of marketing . I would say now I kind of just focus more on marketing my brand versus like an individual book, like me as an author versus selling book one of this series.

Mark: Okay. Yeah. Cool. And where can readers find you? Oh,

Andrew: I’m at Andrew Warren books.com, or of course I’m on Amazon. A lot of readers don’t know this, but on Amazon, if there’s an author that you like, if you, go to their author page, you can follow them. There’s a little button that says Follow.

And then Amazon will, send you emails when they have new books coming out, or when they have books on sale, or if they have a pre-order, like, and that way they’ll, they’ll kind of send it right to you. So yeah, follow me on Amazon. [00:34:00] I’d be, I’d really appreciate it. And visit me at andrewwarrenbooks.com.

Mark: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for being on the show. If you don’t mind sticking around for, a couple of bonus questions at the end for, the newsletter subscribers. I just have a few extra for you. Yeah, happy to do it. All right, well, thank you. Thank you.

Thank you for listening to the show. If you enjoyed this episode, you can support the show and get early access to future episodes on Patreon, links in the show notes. Some guests are also sharing bonus content on our Patreon, like short stories, behind the scenes extras and more, so jump over there to get that content.

If you like the show, please follow, rate or share it with another Thriller fan. It really helps. I’ll see you in the next episode. I’m gonna be sitting down with Jenna Moquin, author of the Psychological Thriller, The Cemetery Spot