TPP Season 2, Episode 8 with Mark P.J. Nadon  

TPP Season 2, Episode 4 with Susan Walter

Susan: [00:00:00] the biggest challenge they’re in a enclosed capsule and they’re up in the air and it’s just them, and once I put ’em in the seats and they have seat belts on, like people don’t really move around on a plane, so we have the murder and then I cut into the real time action and everybody’s in a seat. How do you make that interesting?

Mark: Hello and welcome to the Thriller Pitch Podcast, the director’s cut of the thriller book world. Today I’m joined by bestselling author Susan Walter, and we’re getting into her locker room mystery murder at 30,000 feet. And I love this conversation. It was like talking to a friend instead of hosting a podcast.

It’s honestly hard to pick just a few takeaways from this one because it’s filled with such good insights into her process and her mindset. But what really stood out to me was Susan talking about how she built this [00:01:00] enclosed capsule of a thriller she had to navigate the hurdles of a story where the characters are physically stuck in their seats in an airplane. We also get into why she never takes no for an answer, at least not the first time. It was a lesson from her father who was a pilot, and it really helped define her career beyond the mindset we talk about character over pace, why she chose a slow burn build to create deeper stakes for the reader rather than just all action. We even get into her naming convention and she shares how she keeps her characters straight in the reader’s mind.

There’s a lot here, so let’s get into it. Susan, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for being here today.

Susan: Yeah. Thank you for having me.

Mark: I have your book Murder at 30,000 feet. I just put it up on the camera. Thank you so much for sending me a copy. I absolutely love this book. I devoured it in a couple of days. Uh, and we’ll talk about why. I’ll let you pitch it [00:02:00] first, but very, very good book.  I loved it.

Susan: Well, thank you very much. Yes. Murder at 30,000 feet as the title implies, is a locked room mystery on an airplane. So it’s basically many people’s worst nightmare. Get on the plane, you’re going over a body of water. When massive turbulence hits the plane, shakes, the lights go out, and while the lights are out, somebody’s murdered in the lavatory.

So lights go back on. We’re meeting all along the way, the cast of characters, there’s a high school baseball team, there’s a wedding party. There’s a woman from a small town who recently lost a son and might be out for revenge. And there’s a jilted air marshal who, um, may not be paying as close attention as he should have been.

So all of this is happening while they’re over the water. Um, no place to land. [00:03:00] Somebody’s dead and you gotta figure out first who’s dead. ’cause there’s a lot of people on that plane and we don’t know. And then who done it? So, um, I don’t wanna give any spoilers, but things get pretty wild up there. Imagine literally your worst nightmare at 30,000 feet. Yes, that happens and things go off the rails.

Mark: Awesome. Wonderful pitch. Thank you.

Susan: Yeah. Thank you.

Mark: So let’s talk about where the idea came from.

Susan: Ooh. So I’ve been wanting to ride an aviation thriller for a long time. My dad was a pilot and I grew up in planes, so I always felt pretty safe in a plane. ’cause when you’re in a little plane, which is like a Volkswagen bug with a propeller and wings, you bounce around a lot. And it just kind of never seemed like a big deal.

But, um, I kind of had a fascination with flying because of my dad and, you know, listening to him talk on the radio. And it always felt like they were talking in some secret code. It was like [00:04:00] secret spy agent kind of talk. And then as I grew up, I was like, why haven’t I written a murder mystery on a plane?

I mean, I write murder mysteries and planes are fascinating and there are a lot of, uh, plane aviation thrillers that involve a hijacking. And I was like, I don’t really wanna do espionage and hijacking. I feel like it could be simpler, like. Thank Agatha Christie or Ruth Ware more character driven. It’s all about these people and they have connections to each other and someone’s out to get someone and opportunity strikes.

So I thought that would be really fun to do is do this sort of murder on the Orient Express style thriller, but put him in the air.

Mark: So did you have to do research in order to make it as real as you did with the, with the pilot and the talking that they did to each other? Or was that already ingrained because of, of your background?

Susan: Oh Mark. So much research. I grew up [00:05:00] flying with my dad in a little plane and I only heard his side of the conversation and so I, um, that was a long time ago. And commercial aviation is a whole other beast.

So I started, um, listening on YouTube. You can go on YouTube and listen to air traffic controllers talking to pilots and sort of start to, I would take notes on their kind of secret code, like they had little code words and abbreviations and ways they talk about things. So that was like my, my primer. And then I wrote the dialogue as I thought that it would be based on those conversations.

And I sent it to a friend of mine, his name’s Rafael Nario. He flies for JetBlue and he flies the same airplane that I put the murder mystery on.

And I said, look at all my dialogue. He wrote, he rewrote all of it. God bless him. He is like, no, we wouldn’t call it that. And we say, you know, we don’t ever say thousand.

We say, oh, 300 or whatever it is. And um, I’m very grateful to him. He helped with the dialogue and he also helped with some of the technical stuff. So, you [00:06:00] know, I, I didn’t know, for example, like, how does a pilot talk to his flight attendants? Like is there a, is there a phone in the cockpit? Turns out, no, it’s just all in the headset.

And little things like, how do the flight attendants know when a passenger called them? Like, did they, did they get a bell? Is there a panel? All the things. So yeah, it was a lot of research, but I really loved doing it. And now every time I get on a plane, I’m like looking around, I’m like, Ooh, there’s that.

Ooh, there’s that. Ooh, I know how that works. So it’s fun.

Mark: Now when you jump on a plane, are you looking for air marshals?

Susan: I’ve always been looking for air marshals, so turns out sadly, there aren’t as many as there used to be. They cut way back. Although who knows this new administration, nobody knows what’s going on ever anywhere. Um, but yeah, I kind of do. Don’t we all, I mean, don’t you.

Mark: Uh, I don’t fly very much. So no. I guess if I did after reading your book now, if I, if I jumped on a plane, I probably would start [00:07:00] looking around.

Susan: Yeah, I mean, there’s things, you know, that was all internet searches, like how do you find the air marshal? But, um, I don’t know. I made a lot of that up.

Mark: So were there any challenges that presented itself as you were writing this book?

Susan: I would say the biggest challenge as a writer, and you’re a writer, so you know this, like they’re in a enclosed capsule and they’re up in the air and it’s just them, and we’re moving through time and they’re all in seats. Mark. Like, once I put ’em in the seats and they have seat belts on, like people don’t really move around on a plane, so I commit the crime, right?

We have the murder and then I come into the, you know, cut into the real time action and everybody’s in a seat. Like, think about that as somebody who writes. You know, mysteries and thrillers as you do, like, how do you make that interesting? Like, everybody’s in a seat. They’re not really interacting except with the person who’s sitting next to them.

So that was like, you know, I got to that point in the book and I’m like, [00:08:00] oh, now what do I do with them all? So I had to get super creative, and this is the, the, the teaser that I gave you that I don’t wanna spoil it, but I gotta get those people out of them, out of their seats and talking to each other.

And there’s really only one way to do that when you’re on a plane and it’s not, while it’s in the sky.

Mark: Yeah. When readers put down the book, what are you hoping that they’re going to be thinking or feelings? Do you write it with a theme in mind, or is it mostly writing? For feeling like you want, um, you want them to be entertained.

Susan: Oh, thank you for asking that. You know, I feel like a lot of the action thrillers I read are kind of all about the action, but if the action’s not grounded in characters that you care about, then it can be kind of exhausting. So I spend a lot of time in the early chapters really getting to know the characters on the plane.[00:09:00]

And for me it’s more of a character study than necessarily like an action thriller. Um, so that was really important to me. I mentioned that we have a character, Francesca, and she recently lost a son, and she’s grieving, but she’s angry. And you know, I want you to think while you’re getting to know her, like what is she capable of?

Um, and then there’s people who may or may not have been involved in the death of her son and they’re going through their own feelings about that. Should I have done more? Am I partly responsible? Um, are they mad at her? Are she mad at them? You know, in creating this sort of interconnected web of people who deserve to die, people who wanna kill, I, I really had to go deep into backstory and character.

And so even though there is a lot of action, especially in the second half, I’m hoping that the reader will go away having experienced some of [00:10:00] what that is, to feel loss and, and to feel, um, guilt and what it is. All the things that the characters are going through, there’s also a wedding party, right? And so I wanted to kind of capture like the thrill of being in love, but also having insecurities and wanting things to go just right.

But also, um, the groom has some baggage that he doesn’t want to come out. So kind of, I’m hoping that the reader will become invested in the character’s backstories and what they’re going through emotionally, and that will make the action resonate that much more.

Mark: Yeah, I think that you did that very well and it worked very well because that’s what connected me with Francesca, who lost her son. And, and the reason, you know, all the things I’m spoiled the book, but the things behind that, like that connected me instantly. ’cause I have a son, so I’m like,

oh my God, if that happened to me, how would I feel? And then the wedding, like all the things that you interconnected, weaved. Pulled me through the story. [00:11:00] It was actually, and I love character stories, so that’s like also my thing. I’m not, I don’t like act. Well, I would, I don’t, I wouldn’t say I don’t like action thrillers, but characters definitely pulled me through the story, which is why I devoured this book.

And there was a theme that I thought about as I got, as I got into the book, and it was kind of mentioned by one of the characters in the book. There’s the death of her son, and I

don’t want to, and the justification behind that death

Susan: Ah,

Mark: is that, are we, is it okay to hide something in order to protect something else?

Susan: okay. I know what you’re talking about now. So, yes, Francesca is a central character in the book, right? She’s the one who boards the plane. She kind of, she, she’s kind of. In a way, sorry for the term, but she’s kind of already dead, right? She’s dead inside. Her marriage has fallen apart because of the worst tragedy that a mother can imagine or a father can imagine, right?

She lost a son. [00:12:00] She lost a son in a devastating accident, and we don’t know the details of the accident. So that, that’s part of the backstory that unfolds as they’re on the plane, as she’s thinking about it. And then there are other characters on the plane who were either directly or tangentially involved in that accident.

And yes, um, you are correct to identify that there’s a, there’s a end. Do the ends justify the means? Right? So this terrible thing happened to the boy and there’s no undoing that, but outing how it happens, the details of that. Could cause immeasurable damage to a large group of people.

So this secret is being kept, um, for one might say honorable reasons, right?

So if I reveal this truth, if I reveal there’s a character who has the opportunity to reveal what he knows about the accident, he was an [00:13:00] eyewitness. But he has suppressed his knowledge because he thinks that if it gets out a lot more people will get hurt. And I thought that was a really fascinating thing to explore.

And I love characters that are, that are not necessarily, um, so clear cut, good or bad. Like he did a bad thing, he witnessed an accident and he has a moral imperative to go to the police and tell them what he saw. But also he cares about his town and the community. And if he exposes what he knows, man, things could get really bad for a lot of people who maybe, you know, it truly was an accident.

There was no malice. So he grapples with that. And does that make him a good character or a bad character? And, and I love the, I love the central question that pulses through his, uh, sub narrative, which is like, what would you do? [00:14:00] What would you have done? And there are people who judge him harshly, and there are people who will come to understand why he did it.

And maybe think that, yeah, I would’ve done the same thing.

And what a terrible burden to carry, right? Like, I think that makes him largely sympathetic as it as it unravels.

Mark: absolutely. What comes for you first, the characters that you’re building or the plot?

Susan: So what comes to me first is the situation. So I take, I would say not just the situation, but the conflict. So what’s the conflict? So I think about like constructing a novel and the conflict is someone’s gonna die on this plane. We don’t know who did it. And I have to have a myriad of suspects, um, and a myriad of potential victims.

So what happened? And how can I construct this kind [00:15:00] of spider web of interconnected people, um, in which the reader will be truly curious and confounded to know who did what to whom. So I started with that central premise like, and it, it appears in my brain, kind of like a spider web, right? And all these people have to have connections to each other.

And the more you read, the more connections. You discover like, oh, she knew him and he knew her and they were married and like all the things. Right. And, and it makes sense, you know, they’re getting on a plane. I picked San Diego as the origin because it’s not a huge metropolis, but it’s also like there’s one airport that services a lot of small towns around there and it’s not implausible that there’d be groups and they all know each other and groups that interact and, and intertwine.

So I take the situation and then I build out the characters from there. And I try to, I start with the characters each with an inner conflict. So [00:16:00] for example, the character that we did not name who witnessed the accident, you know, I wanted to put somebody in an interesting moral conflict. Should I tell or should I stay silent?

And what would you do? And then I construct the character around, um, like how is he connected and where can I put him? This, you know, um, conglomeration of characters, how can I construct relationships that serve that, moral quandary that I wanna present. And then sometimes the characters, they just come from people I know.

Shh, don’t tell, but I, I do base them on, on people that I know. Um, like somebody, there’s a very brash character named Penelope, and yeah, she’s kind of an amalgamation of people I know and I wanted to kind of write about her, but I, even though she’s brash, I do try to explore like how she came to be that way.

Right. And things have happened to her and she has pain. And [00:17:00] Francesca, obviously, she’s the one who lost a son. I mean, she has pain, but she’s also at the end of her rope, right? With nothing to lose. Like would she murder somebody maybe.

Mark: Yeah, it, what’s your writing process like, especially, well, let’s talk, this is book six for you. So you’ve, you’ve written quite a few books. Has your process changed from book one to book six and then in, in this book, because it’s such a web of, of characters and things happening, do you outline the book first or do you just start writing and then figure it out as you go? How do you do it?

Susan: I love that question because I’ve grappled with that a lot. My very first book is called Good is Dead, and I, it was the beginning of the pandemic and I had been working as a screenwriter and a movie director, and the movie industry just sort of dried up overnight and nobody was shooting, nobody was scouting.

I was supposed to go scout a movie in New Mexico and everything [00:18:00] was put on hold and we had no idea if the movie was ever coming back. So I was like, oh, I’m gonna write a novel ’cause I need to create. And I wrote this book just from my heart, not even thinking that it would ever get published. Um, so that book I wrote in 2020, so like March, April, May, 2020, I just sort of didn’t know where I was going.

I didn’t outline. I just kind of woke up every day and took my characters, made a step forward with them, pause, and then thought, okay, what is the most interesting, impossible, scary, fun, surprising thing I can do next? And literally just took it one step at a time. It’s like, imagine you’re like going through the woods with your flashlight and you can really only see the ground in front of you.

And then like, what’s the scariest thing or the most fascinating thing that could happen next? And that’s how I did it. And then when I was about 80% through the book. I had this [00:19:00] crisis, I was like, oh, well I backed this character into such an impossible corner. I’ll never get her out. I’m gonna throw this book away.

Like, it was very irresponsible to go forward in this way because I just didn’t know. Like, I’m like, there’s, she’s damned if she does, she’s damned if she does it. You’re not gonna root for her to do a, you’re not gonna re root for her to do B. Like I’m done. Okay. I guess I’m not finishing this book, but it kept me company during the pandemic, so I was fine.

And then the situation came to me like the, the resolution of the situation came to me and I wound up introducing like an external complication, right? So like just something. Like it, just imagine like a tornado sweeps through, like, oh, that would get her out of it. Right? So just something kind of crazy.

But it totally worked. And that book became a bestseller. Like I, it sold like hotcakes. People love that. And that was my process, like really not knowing. And then spending that three or four days thinking I was just gonna throw the, the 80 whatever did I have at that point, 60,000 words into the bin? Like, I’m like, well, I can’t finish this book.

There’s [00:20:00] no way to do it. So when I sold that book, I was offered a two book deal. They’re like, yes, we’re buying this book, but we want you to write another one and it’s due in nine months. And I was like, oh, okay, sure, I can do that. I think. And I thought, since I’m on a deadline, I should outline, right?

Because that’s the responsible author thing to do. You should know where you’re going. ’cause I have to turn the book in now. It’s not, there’s no, like, throwing it in the bin is not an option. So I did, I wrote an outline and it seemed to work, and I followed the outline pretty much to the letter. And then maybe two months before the book was due, I gave it to a couple of beta readers, including my husband.

He was the very first, and he read it and I could just tell from his expression like it was trash. He is like, you know, I don’t know what to tell you about this book. I don’t think it works at all. And now I’m like, maybe eight weeks from my deadline. And I was like, okay, screw it. I’m just gonna go back to my original process.

The thing I [00:21:00] did on Good is Dead, which worked for me the first time. And I’m taking one step at a time and I threw away of the 85,000 words. I threw away 75,000 of them. I lopped off. Like I love the setup. I lopped off the like 75,000 words mark like you’ve been there, you know? Um, and I just did it one step at a time.

And the book, it’s called Over Her Dead Body. It’s super twisty. It’s super fun. It’s incredibly honest. ’cause I just came from character. So I took a character and I’m like, instead of like working from an outline where I have to build a bridge for her to get from A to B, ’cause I already decided what B is.

I put her at that situation, at that nexus, I was like, okay, well I thought I wanted her to go do this thing, but that doesn’t feel in character. What would she do and what’s the most interesting thing that she could do? And it was moving in a totally different direction. And I did that. I think I was writing 2000 words a day ’cause I had to, to meet my deadline just in that way, like pushing forward, [00:22:00] pausing.

And so I’ve directed movies, right? And so when you’re a director, you have to do this thing that you don’t necessarily do when you’re writing is you have to put yourself in the vantage point of the audience. So you always have to ask yourself, am I giving the audience? Um, something to root for in this moment.

Am I dangling enough questions for the audience so that they’re gonna stay engaged? Am I revealing just the right amount to keep them engaged, but without giving too much away? So I had that sort of skillset for my directing of, of stepping outside of it and being in the, in the chair of the reader or the audience and saying, how much can I give them to, to hold them, but what do I need to hold back to make them wanna keep reading?

So that’s my process. Now I become the director of my own novels and I take one step at a time. I come from the most honest place I can with the character. What would she do? Who would she call? Um, would she fight back, whatever the question is. And I, and I try to do it honestly and try [00:23:00] to get her into trouble and then pause, step outside and say, okay, what does the audience want her to see?

Does she need a win here or do I need to knock her down a little bit? ’cause we we’re not quite sympathizing with her enough yet. I just go through that chapter by chapter and you know, my books are between what, 60 and 75 chapters. So I do that 60 to 75 times and I’ve done that. Now I’m actually on book nine ’cause we’re always two years ahead.

And that’s a process that still works for me. People are like, publisher says, do you have an outline? I’m like, Nope. Not giving you an outline. I mean, I could give you something, but the book won’t match that and I’m gonna throw it away right after I give it to you. So they stopped asking,

Mark: I love that process. I don’t think I could do it, but I love that process.

Susan: are you an

Mark: more outlining, more so than that

Susan: Yeah. That works for you, man. Did not work for me. I tried. I.

Mark: How do you keep it all in your head with the web that you create? So are you creating notes with characters as you go and you’re creating these scenes, or do, are you just [00:24:00] able to keep it all in your mind?

Susan: Honestly, I think that’s my one special skill that I can hold a book of between 75 and 85,000 words in my head at the same time, like some people can do computer programming, some people, um, are really good at surfing. I can’t do either of those things, but I can’t as I move forward, not in the beginning, like I have no idea where I’m going in the beginning, but as I’m moving through, I’m getting to 50,000, 60,000 words.

I can hold the whole book in my head at once and you know, you start kind of on the edge of the spider web sometimes, and I’m building in multiple directions. I’m building, you know, I’m building up, I’m building down, I’m building toward the middle,

and I can, it’s just, um, how my brain works. I can’t do calculus.

My daughter comes home with her calculus homework and she’s like, mom, can you help me? I’m like, there’s no way. I can’t, I can’t balance an equation. Don’t ask, but I can hold a book of that length. [00:25:00] I mean, I, I got a book recently that was like 700 words, like, I mean, 700 pages, sorry, not 700 words. That’s a, that’s a micro story.

I got a book recently that was 700 pages, a Stephen King book. It’s over there on my coffee table. Like I don’t know how he does that, but mine are like 300, 350 pages that I can hold in my head.

Mark: So you having the ability to hold all these characters in your mind is great. As you’re writing the book, do you think, how do I pass that information on to the readers who like, like for myself, I maybe not so much in my writing, but definitely when I’m reading, if I’m introduced to so many characters at one moment or chapter after chapter, I start to get very confused. What are some things you did in this book to avoid that confusion?

Susan: So I have this, um, little mantra that I constantly recite. Like, are you keeping all the necessary characters alive? Keep them alive. In fact, [00:26:00] sometimes I put a post-it on my monitor that says, keep them alive, right? So if I haven’t heard from a character for a while, I have to make sure to like, make sure you didn’t forget.

That’s my responsibility. Um, and I think. I do that because the characters in my book, they’re, first of all, they’re all connected to each other, right? So I’m not gonna introduce a new character except for maybe in chapters one, two, and three, when you kind of have to introduce characters. But once I get into the narrative, everybody has a relationship to each other.

That’s why it’s a book, right? So I’m not jumping around. I have a rule that if I’m introducing a new character in their sort of point of view and how they’re moving through the world, you had to have met them before and know their relationship to the other characters. So I’m very mindful about making sure, A, that I’m keeping all the characters alive and b, um, that, that you feel the connection to them, to the other characters, right?

You feel the connection to the new character, to the other characters. And they’re [00:27:00] constantly in other characters, inner monologue. They’re never gonna just. Come at you from out of the blue. I’m also really deliberate about naming characters. I do these like cheap party tricks where like sometimes I do couples with the same, they have the same, um, their letter starts with the same name like Jim and Jane or whatever.

So like your brain will connect Jay. Oh, they’re Jay and Jay. They’re a couple. Or in this one I have Billy and Jill. Billy and Jill are gonna get married,

right? And so I made their names rhyme. I mean her name is Jillian, but everyone calls her Jillian now ’cause it’s Billy and Jill, right? You’re not gonna forget who Jill is ’cause she’s marrying Billy and their name’s rhyme.

So I do kind of stupid little tricks like that, but I’m very deliberate. Um, I have one character, Penelope, with a four syllable name like Penelope. You’re gonna remember Penelope, right? It’s the only character with a four syllable name and it’s a very memorable name. So, um, yeah, I do alliterations, I do rhyming, and I try to make [00:28:00] each name distinct.

Like I won’t have in my books. Two characters whose name starts with the same letter unless they’re like sisters or mother and daughter, or like have an intimate connection to each other. I just think it’s not fair to the reader. And I, and I do think your brain clocks stuff like that, so I think it’s easier to remember.

Did you have any trouble remembering who the

Mark: I didn’t know. I also liked. That on a couple of, A couple of ’em had job titles. So it started with when you came back to them, it had their job title as the first

Susan: Oh, that’s right. So there’s a,

Mark: my mind

for a couple of the characters.

Susan: his name is always Coach. Coach Cal. Coach Callahan.

Right. So you’re always know, oh, it’s the coach. Yeah, that like, honestly that seems kind of maybe a little bit cheap. But I do think your reader deserves to have little naming help. Especially if you’re gonna outline, I mean, I have like, what, like 12 characters.

So it’s not fair to ask you to track all those. And I hate that there’s books that I put down that are like New York Times [00:29:00] bestselling. I’m sure they’re wonderful, but if I’m in chapter 10 and I’m like, wait, who is that? And I have no reference point. And especially if I’m reading, I read a lot of books on Kindle, and I can’t flip back through pages easily.

I’m like, forget it. I, I, I, my brain is not, is not programmed to keep track of that many unless I invented them. And then I can remember,

Mark: Did you learn that trick somewhere?

Susan: I think I stole it from screenwriting because movie producers and studio executives are notoriously lazy. And like, if you don’t hit them over the head with obvious naming tricks and like, you can’t do, you can’t be subtle with them. Like you need to be like. In their face about who these characters are, and, and you just assume that they’re overworked and they’re gonna read it quickly.

So yeah, I think I, I got a introduction to how to help studio executives remember your stories and characters, um, from working in the movies for so long.

Mark: Okay, that makes [00:30:00] sense. Was there a character or a moment that you felt particularly attached to in this story? Like when you wrote it, it hit you on an emotional level or a personal level?

Susan: There’s a super difficult situation between the bride, the groom, and the maid of honor and the maid of honor. And the groom used to be a couple and they broke up, but the groom is still in love with his maid of honor. But they had a somewhat troubled past, and I wanted to handle that super sensitively, but also there’s violence.

So that was one that I wanted to be very careful with the maid of honor to make her, I don’t know how to, how to describe it without giving too much away. But I mean, I reveal [00:31:00] it early in the book and you’ll see that, that she had a very good reason for breaking up with that groom. And he’s still in love with her, but he treated her very badly.

And how to handle her feelings about being the maid of honor at her. It’s her best friend’s wedding to her ex-boyfriend and her, the, the bride, you know, it’s her, it’s her wedding weekend. She’s so excited. The maid of Honor character, her name is Angie, is kind of sitting on a bombshell and she wants the bride to know this thing about the groom and what he’s capable of. And I’ll just use the word violence ’cause he is capable of violence, but also she doesn’t wanna ruin the wedding. So that was a very tricky tightrope to walk because again, you know, you asked this question earlier and it’s a great question. Like at what, maybe that is a theme of the book, like [00:32:00] when is silence better or when do you have a duty to tell even though you’re gonna cause more pain?

Mark: Yeah.

Susan: And so Mark, thank you. I just learned something about my book. Thank you so much. Um, it’s kind of about, gosh. Yeah, it is. It’s kind of about what would you do? Again, I love that’s, I feel like that’s really sticky to, to do for a reader is put them in this situation of like, well, what would you do in the past week you found out that the man, your best friend is marrying is potentially kind of dangerous.

And do you tell her and, and ruin her destination wedding? I mean, it’s like her special day and all the things, or do you just hope that he’ll never, you know, that he’ll change or that’s not really who he is, or, you know, you have an obligation to support her. This is what she wants to do. So, yeah, I, I want it to be very careful with her because there are, you know, [00:33:00] kind of feminist issues wrapped up in that.

And do you protect your, your fellow woman? And how do you do that? And that was, that was deliciously complicated.

Mark: Yeah. Do the other books that you’ve written, is that a theme, not that particular theme, but of people going through really hard times as part of the, as part of the conflict.

Susan: I think there’s a sort of a trope, especially in these female driven thrillers where you take a, a woman character, I mean, honestly, Disney invented it, right? Like Disney started with like the, all the Disney characters, they lost their mom, right? So like Belle in Beauty and the Beast lost her mom, Cinderella lost her mom.

I mean, you could go through all the Disney characters and you take this young, and for Disney it’s young women, right? And so it’s appropriate that they lost their mother. I mean, what even like Bambi loses their mother. That’s just the trope in Disney. And [00:34:00] I think for the thrillers, these mystery thrillers written by women targeted toward women in which you have a, now, not a teenager as in Disney, but a grownup female character.

The trope is to put them through some sort of loss in the beginning, right? Or I kill a lot of husbands, like women who were, were married and lost a husband and find themselves, alone for the first time, and having to do things they’ve never had to do by themselves before. And starting the novel with a broken heart and a, and a big loss.

So, yeah, I, I think that that’s kind of a prototype that I lean into and this book is more of an ensemble. But yeah, I mean, you take Francesca, who’s the woman who, she lost a son and she lost a husband. He didn’t die, but the loss of the son was so catastrophic their marriage couldn’t survive it, which is a thing that I researched that that does happen.

They just didn’t know [00:35:00] how to process their feelings and, and drift it apart. So, and I do it kind of with this woman. The bridesmaid, well I should call her the maid of honor more accurately, is that if she tells her best friend that the man she’s marrying is not the man she might think, she think he is, she’s gonna lose her best friend.

Right? So putting women are the strong female characters. Kind of on the edge of something really scary is a trope, sorry for the word, but I do think it’s a trope that I think is really propulsive and also puts the reader, which is my favorite place to put a reader in a what would you do situation?

Mark: Yeah. Awesome. Any, have you had any hair trauma in your, uh, in your life, or was that just a trope of the character to have? I chuckled when she had, at the beginning, Kathy keeps talking about her blue hair, how she dyed her blue hair and she’s very [00:36:00] conscious of it.

Susan: Oh, have I had hair? I mean, I did accidentally. For your podcast listeners, I am blonde and I used to do it myself. And when you tone blonde hair you use blue I put too much blue and I was blue for about three days and, um, I had to go get professional help. yes, I had blue hair very briefly and I didn’t look good with, some people look fantastic with blue hair, but it’s intentional. I did not look so good with blue.

Mark: Okay.

Susan: Actually, she has purple hair. Doesn’t she have purple hair? She has purple

Mark: it purple? Oh, I thought it

Susan: Yeah. Kathy has purple hair, but she’d also gone through a divorce and started her life over and just like radically reinvented her physical presence.

Mark: Yeah. I have a question from Brian Drake, who was the last guest on the show. We have like a guest asking a question for the

Susan: I love it.

Mark: you prefer to write inside or outside? [00:37:00] So he, he likes to write outside a lot, which is why he asks the question.

Susan: Oh, inside, always inside I try to write outside and first of all, it’s very hard on a monitor to see, I dunno, maybe he’s younger and has eagle eyes, but I, I don’t, there’s too many reflections and then the sun moves and you can’t see. So I tend to write inside and I like it quiet. Some people write to music. I like to write early in the morning, like 5:00 AM five to nine are my golden hours for writing. I like it quiet and I like it inside.

Mark: Okay. He uses a typewriter, actually, which

Susan: Oh my goodness. I love

Mark: yet, but yeah,

Susan: He’s confident in his words. Um, oh my goodness. I changed my words so much. There would be so much paper to be like this mad. I’d be surrounded by paper with

Mark: I couldn’t

Susan: discarded sentences. Yeah.

Mark: I imagine myself with just a case of whiteout constantly,

Susan: my gosh. Wide out.

Mark: white out those [00:38:00] papers.

Susan: Hilarious.

Mark: would you give to someone who just published their first or second book? Either Indie published or, or traditionally published?

Susan: Okay. That’s a great question because I think it’s super important to form a community of writers in whatever way you can because as you move through your career, so I’ve been doing this for five years now. I’m on my. Well, I’m actually writing my ninth book, but my sixth one is Murder at 30,000 feet, which comes out in February.

And I’m just now after five years of doing it, realizing how important my community is because as you are trying to get established, like what we’re doing now, mark, you mean you’re a writer and you’re supporting me through your podcast? And my, my hope is that I will in some way be able to support you.

And when your book comes out this April, is it April? The treatment room is April. That I can return the favor in some way and, and [00:39:00] read your book, and review your book. And you need to grow a community of writers because we become, not only our, our own cheerleaders, but the way that other readers discover your books.

So I’m gonna post about your book. I’m gonna read your book, and I’m gonna say, you know, for fans of these books, as you are doing for me, and five people maybe. We’ll, we’ll read your book because of me. But then that five people becomes, 25 people becomes 250 people. Right? So building a community of writers and supporting those other writers, even if you don’t know them.

Like I have made friends through social media. I, I read a book. I love it. Like, okay, Mary Ika, who has got a, it’s not her coming out like any day now. Absolutely love her books. And I just started reviewing them and posting about them. She follows me on Instagram now, and now she’s reposting, you know, about my books because I genuinely like her books.

[00:40:00] And I think that she might like mine if I like her, she might like mine. I don’t know. Maybe she does, maybe she doesn’t. But just start by supporting the authors that you love by shouting out when you love a book and it takes, I mean it takes months or years. Then pretty soon, this whole sort of organic ecosystem of writer supporting writers, it just lifts us all up to a place where readers are, are discovering writers that they love.

I mean, when is the last time, I don’t know, you read a lot of books, but for anybody who’s listening or watching, like, you open your Libby app or you go into a bookstore and you’re like, Ugh, I don’t know what to read. Well, wouldn’t it be great if you like, okay, you like my books for example? And I’m saying, Mary Kika, do you trust me?

’cause you like my books? Maybe you’ll buy her book. Or vice versa. So start, it’s easy to, to think. We need to ask other people like, Hey, will you read? Can I can, can you talk about my book? What, what I think is more effective? And actually more [00:41:00] sincere is just talk about them, read their books, get on good reads, review their books.

They will eventually notice you and they will in time, if you’re a good fit, say something kind about you and that’s how readers find you. It’s all about, you know, it’s really noisy out there. There’s so many books.

But we trust the authors that we love. So authors supporting authors is everything.

Mark: I absolutely love that answer. Thank you so much for saying that. Yeah. It does mean a lot. Yeah. So if you can pick one thing that you felt led to your success so far, what? What do you think it would be?

Susan: Okay. So I’ll tell you a quick story. When I was 18, my dad told me I needed to get a job, to help like pay for ancillary things that I wanted, like skis. He’s like, I’m not buying you skis. You’re 18. Go get a job. And I was like, okay, that makes sense. I mean, respect. Okay. And I, and he’s like, where do you wanna work?

And there was this comedy club in Harvard [00:42:00] Square, I lived in Cambridge, and I wanted to work at this comedy club called Catcher Rising Star. And so I applied and they didn’t hire me like I called and they’re like, no, the position’s been filled. And I was like, okay. And so my dad asked me at dinner that night, like, so did you apply for that job?

I was like, yeah, I didn’t get it. He’s like, tomorrow you’re going in there with another copy of your resume and you’re gonna ask them. What you can do to position yourself to get that job, the next job opening that happens at that place where you wanna work. And I was like, dad, they already said, no, I’m not going back there like an idiot.

I’m gonna make a fool outta myself. But he made me do it. So I go in there with my resume and I’m like, hi, the manager’s name was Rick. I go, hi Rick. So we talked on the phone yesterday and you said that I wasn’t getting the job and I just wanted to know. And it’s a waitressing job. Okay? It’s not like some like paralegal or job where you actually need, you know, specific business skills, whatever.

Like what I can do to make myself a better candidate next time an opening happens. And he looked at me like, [00:43:00] for real? You want it that bad? Fine. You can have it. I’ll hire you. We can always use an extra waitress in the pool. And I was like, seriously? And I think that was an incredible lesson in just keep asking, like find another way to ask if you ask and you get a no.

Find another way to ask, like, so I’m doing a book tour and a bookstore passed on me ’cause I’m gonna be in an area and I wanted to appear at this bookstore and I thought it would be really great and it fit exactly in my schedule. And they were like, they ignored my publicist. And I, I was like, I’m just gonna ask again.

And I called them up and I was like, Hey, so this is crazy and sorry for the cold call. I know it’s super obnoxious, but I’m gonna be in your area and I have an amazing conversation partner lined up and she raised about your bookstore. And if there’s any way that you would invite me, I would die of happiness.

And I’m just gonna send you my stuff. Give me your email, send you my stuff. You can review it on your own time. And like, I just asked again and they said yes. Sometimes [00:44:00] you just wear people down or they’re just so they’re like, if you really want it that bad, then yes. Right? Like, like you can’t have an ego about it. I have been, I go back after people have said no to me so many times and sometimes it’s still no but. Sometimes it’s, yes. So just like, leave your ego at the door. Ask again, ask again.

Mark: Awesome.

Susan: Ask in a different way. Ask saying, you already said no and, and I respect that you said no, but if it’s not this year, what about next year?

Can I call on you next year? And then they’ll look at their calendar again and they’ll be like, okay, you can have that date for this year. Right? Like, you just never know. Catch people off guard by asking again.

Mark: Yeah. I love that. So where can listeners find your book?

Susan: Oh, well, murder at 30,000 feet is being released, by Blackstone. And it’s gonna be hopefully everywhere. I mean, where, wherever you buy your books. [00:45:00] Barnes and Noble Indie bookstores. We love our indie bookstores. It is also available on Amazon if that’s the way you wanna go. That could be super easy. And my audio book is being narrated by Scott Brick and I don’t know if you know him,

Mark: I do.

Susan: Is unbelievable. So, audible for the audio book. I’m Soci, I haven’t heard anything from it yet. I’m actually gonna go to his recording studio and get some pictures with him ’cause I’m like, fangirling totally. And he invited me ’cause he lives not far from me. So I would say like pretty much anywhere. Just Google it and go to your local bookstore and if they’re not carrying it, request it.

Mark: Yes. Awesome. So, well, thank you so much for being here, for taking the time outta your schedule. I, I really appreciate it. This has been a lot of fun and I’ve learned, I’ve learned a lot. Definitely your naming convention. I’m gonna go back to the treatment room probably and start thinking about my naming convention ’cause I love it. It’s brilliant what you do.

Susan: Thank you so much. You are a great interviewer. I’m so excited to read [00:46:00] your upcoming book and I’m sure we’ll talk more about it, about it in, did you say April?

Mark: April.

Susan: April what?

Mark: April 14th. The book comes out.

Susan: April 14th. That’s my daughter’s birthday. I have two reasons to get excited.

Mark: All right, so we are gonna hit the spoiler section of the show. So for those listeners who do not want to have the book spoiled, they have a couple of questions that will spoil the book. So now’s the time to pause. Go buy the book, read the book, promise. You’ll probably be done in a couple of days, and then, or sooner and then come back and listen to, to the spoiler section. Did you know when you started writing the book that Penelope was the killer? Or did you kind of discover that as you went?

Susan: Oh, should I tell you the truth? Because it’s a really, it’s a really scandalous story. Okay. Yikes. Okay. My publisher’s gonna kill me, but here it goes. I’m not telling anybody else. You’re the only one. Originally, [00:47:00] Penelope was not gonna be the killer. I had a totally different idea that I wrote for my 85,000 words.

I constructed the narrative with, okay, so there’s a character called Marco. He’s a, he’s described as a, as a rockstar.

And he’s sitting in the back, oh, tattooed, rockstar. He’s sitting in the back and I, and I was putting him, he was just I don’t know. I just had this idea that Marco, who, who is sitting in the back and he is like this little unknown guy, was going to emerge and have killed this person for, he’s transporting money.

So it’s unrelated to all the drama in the small town. And it’s just gonna be like a surprise. This guy, he’s actually, he’s actually a drug runner and he, and he killed somebody on the plane and it’s not related to any of that drama. And so we sold the book to Blackstone and she’s like, I love your writing. I love the characters. She’s like, you can’t have this guy Marco [00:48:00] kill, you know, one of the people from Crestwood, the town that’s heavily featured and where a lot of these characters on the plane are from. It’s like, she’s like, that’s just unsatisfying. You need to change who the killer is. So Mark, you know, you can’t just like change the ending of a book.

I had to totally reconceptualize this is where, okay, I told you before about like, I have my flashlight in the woods and I’m taking one step at a time. Okay. It failed me a little bit, I confess, but I also, she was 100% right that it would not have been satisfying. Like, if you’re gonna have a killer and you’re presenting this web, you want somebody in the web. You don’t want somebody like from over here. It’s like, what? No, that’s, that’s cheating.

Mark: yeah. Yeah.

Susan: So I did, it took me, she told me like around Thanksgiving, that she’s like, and, and I needed in like first week of January, just do that little rewrite, that little tweak. She called it a little tweak and I was like, oh my God.

Okay. And I worked every day, like my, my, like every day, even on Christmas, I was up at 5:00 AM [00:49:00] writing for five hours. Whatever I was able to do on that day to reconstruct the narrative, totally reinvented Marco. He’s no longer a bad guy. He’s actually a good guy, right? He, he, he’s, a DEA in the end. And I was like, I didn’t wanna lose him entirely.

I thought there was value to having somebody in the narrative who’s not from the small town where a lot of these characters, how they all know each other.

But, so I didn’t wanna lose him, but I had to repurpose him. So, to answer your question, no, I did not know Penelope was gonna do it. And it was, it was a total, like, it was there the whole time though, right?

Like, because I, I went back as I was reconstructing to say like, who’s it gonna be Chapter, I think it’s chapter seven, Penelope and the air marshal, Carlos Ronaldo meet in the lounge and it’s prickly. And I was like, oh, I was feeling something and I just didn’t know how to pay it off. Like, I didn’t know where I was going.

I got lost with my little flashlight in the woods. I was like, I took a wrong turn. It’s her. [00:50:00] It took quite a bit of doing. As you know, as a writer, that is not an easy task, but we did it and the book is so much better for it. I’m so grateful for my editor for asking me to make that little tweak.

Mark: yeah, yeah. That little tweak. Yeah, yeah, definitely stronger for that. Yeah.

Susan: Yeah.

Mark: So following that question then, the idea of the drugs on the plane and how the plane ends up crashing and the fuel that gets lost, Was that part of your original idea as you were writing it or as you were putting these characters into situations, you thought, I gotta get this plane on the ground, and then the money and the drugs came into the thought process?

Susan: Yes, that, that was always part of the plan. I knew I had to crash the plane. Like I said, you know, I put the characters in this little flying tin can and they’re in seat belts. It’s not like a train. Okay. Agatha Christie did one on a train, but you can move around on a train. You can’t move around on an airplane.

So I knew, and I also, I read a book called The Pilot’s Daughter by Audrey j Cole, which if you like aviation thrillers, it’s a must [00:51:00] read. And she has this such a dramatic, like, I cried, it was so good how she creates this air disaster. And hers is a hostage situation and very different in that way. But I’m like I gotta crash a plane. I, I, that’s to me, like, look, I want it to be a movie.

Mark: Yeah.

Susan: And you gotta have this cinematic moment, like nobody’s gonna do a movie about 132 people in seat belts on a plane. Like, that’s not cinematic. Nobody wants that. So I always knew I was gonna crash the plane and that it would have to do with something bigger than the small town People, like small town people, they might hurt each other, kill each other, do things to each other because of longstanding grudges, but they’re not gonna crash a plane with 131 other people on it.

Like that has to be someone truly evil with high stakes drug cartel, huge ramifications. Like, not only are like they gonna die, but their families are gonna die. You know, when you’re dealing with a cartel, [00:52:00] nobody’s safe. So I had to make the, the stakes much higher in order to do that. So I always knew there would be drug running and cartels and other things.

Mark: Okay. Awesome.

Susan: That’s a great question, by the way.

Mark: Any plans to turn this into a series? Or a book two with Carlos. ’cause he’s offered that FBI job at the end and I liked him. So I’m curious, is there any plans to, to bring him to the FBI? I don’t know if he’s on planes anymore, but he’s got a lot of potential to do something

Susan: Oh, thank you. Not at this moment. I sold two more books to Blackstone. They’re kidnapping thrillers and they’re um, related to each other. So they are I dunno if you ever read The Family Upstairs, and The Family Remains by Lisa Jewel. There’s two of my favorite books. So they’re like two books with the same characters that go together. But you, they are also standalones. I wanted to do that next with the book that I sold after that. So I thought [00:53:00] about bringing Carlos Ronaldo into like a series type environment, but to be honest, like police procedural, FBI, procedural is not really my wheelhouse. I think I do other things better, so unlikely. But thank you. Like if they wanna, if Netflix calls and they’re like, can you write a second one? ’cause we want a season two, I’ll be like, yes. Done. And I’m calling you and you’re gonna help me.

Mark: I was, I was thinking more like, was it die hard? You know how he’s always just in a bad situation, so it’s not like police procedural. He just like, oh, the first book he was on a plane. The second book, this happens, he’s on a train. Why does this keep happening to this guy? You know, like that diehard thing where there’s like, this guy just jumps into the situation.

What?

Susan: you. We’ll do it together.

Mark: Okay. Well this has been great. Thank you so much. If you have a few more minutes we have gone over, I apologize for that. If you have a few more minutes for a quick rapid fire for my Patreon guests, I would really appreciate that.

Susan: Oh sure. You bet.

Mark: Thanks for listening. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you’d like to go a little deeper with [00:54:00] Susan, there’s a short after show available right now on Patreon. It is where I ask Susan rapid fire questions about thrillers that inspired her to write some of her weirdest Google searches, guilty pleasures, and the note she’d leave on your nightstand. You can access it for free. You’ll find the links in the show notes. Thank you. I will see you in two weeks.

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 24 with Karen E. Osborne

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

Karen: And so I whip at my notebook and I write down the way she looked and the way she stood and the way she spoke, because I know that’s what my character looked like or sounded like.

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.

This week I’m joined by Karen E. Osborne, author of Justice for Emerson. We talk about writing dual timelines, how she builds characters by observing real people in their everyday [00:01:00] life, and how some of her personal history, including her husband’s Vietnam experiences helped shape Emerson’s story.

If you’re interested in writing characters who feel fully alive and managing multiple timelines without losing clarity, this is a conversation worth hearings.

Karen, hello. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for being here today.

Karen: Oh, thank you so much for having me. I’m delighted to be here.

Mark: I am pumped to talk about your book, and I have it here for those who are watching the video, justice for Emerson. I love this book and I, I cannot wait to, to dig into it. So

Karen: Thank

Mark: let’s start with the pitch.

Karen: Yeah. So could the murder of a 77-year-old Vietnam vet beloved volunteer be somehow tied to a murder in 1968? [00:02:00] Hmm. So this is a dual timeline murder mystery. Present day. And Aria comes home, comes to work. She runs a not-for-profit. She’s 50 years old, she’s five foot two. She has a real issue about her height.

She comes to work and she finds a beloved volunteer, 77-year-old, cow Emerson murdered in the basement. The murderer sees her and she sees the murderer, and we are off and running. The book one 2025 Best Mystery of the Year by best thrillers.com and, and that’s my pitch.

Mark: Thank you. Congratulations on that award. I saw that. That’s awesome.

Karen: Thank you.

Mark: And well deserved. ’cause this was just so well done in so many ways. So let’s get [00:03:00] into that start. Let’s start with just where the idea came from. How did you form this?

Karen: So all of my books, this is my fifth book, and all of my stories start with characters. So characters talk to me, and then I figure out how their story is gonna evolve. I’m not a plotter. I write, you know, I think and solve as I go. When, when I was about three quarters of the way through Justice for Emerson, my husband, who’s helping me with the research because of all the Vietnam stuff, so he’s a Vietnam vet.

So he was helping me with the, with the, you know, all of the things that were going on in Vietnam. That’s the dual timeline part. And he’s three quarters of the way reading it. And I, and I, ’cause that’s where I was in the writing and he says, Karen, this is so good. I can’t figure out who the murderer is. I said, I know I can’t either.

I keep waiting to, I want the murderer to reveal [00:04:00] himself. Like he said, you don’t know who did it. I said, I don’t. So I start with characters and, and I wanted, you know, the experience, the whole Vietnam experience. And I read the women from Ha by Hannah, Kristin, you know, she wrote about the women in Vietnam.

And so I wanted to do something that honored the black Vietnam vets who, who faced a lot of extra, a lot of extra. And, and then I also, aria just, you know, said this was really her story. So I had to do a, to a dual timeline.

Mark: So when you wrote this, I guess you wrote it then in order, ’cause you didn’t outline it, you would’ve written Emerson’s story and then just switched the next chapter to Aria’s story back and forth. Wow.

Karen: cause I don’t outline, you know, it’s, it’s, I had a, a book that I’m writing [00:05:00] now. I actually had a character yell at me and say, no, I am not a middle class on my way to college person, because this never would’ve happened if that was the case. I am poor Karen, I am poor. And I thought, oh, she’s right.

I had to go back and go back and change it. So, yes, I just, I follow, I mean, I’m, I’m always thinking of the plot, you know, as I’m writing, I’m thinking about what could, what’s gonna happen next? What could happen next? What if this happened next? But I don’t outline all the way. Do you outline, are you an outliner?

Mark: I am in between. So I have a good idea where the story’s going. I have the book blurb. I have an idea of the book cover. ’cause I like to do that as like an inspiration. But I don’t do chapter by chapter ’cause the stories never follow. I’ve tried it and the stories never follow that path.

Karen: I love that you think of your, your book cover first. That is so cool.[00:06:00]

Mark: It’s fun. It brings it all to life for me.

Karen: Yeah,

Mark: So when you were building these characters, like you said, they talk to you. Are you writing, taking notes as they talk to you so you can keep track of them and their story?

Karen: I do with when I was writing my first book. I actually would have to like, pull over in my car and blow on the side of the road and like, oh my goodness. Or I’m sitting on an airplane and I see somebody and I realize that that person looks just like, you know, one of the characters. And so I whip out my notebook and I, I always, I always, always, always have paper with me no matter where I am.

And so I whip at my notebook and I, and I write down the way she looked and the way she stood and the way she spoke, because I know that’s what my character, you know, looked like or sounded like. So yes, always, you know, pieces come to me. Pieces come to [00:07:00] me and I try to keep track. You know, I keep notes about what I said somebody looked like, but they’re, they’re so alive that I rarely get mixed up.

I really forget that this one had a certain color eyes, and now she, you know, I can’t remember what color her eyes were because. You know, they’re, they’re living, breathing people.

Mark: So do you find you go through life in the world through a writer’s lens, where you’re constantly looking at people in situations and asking those what if questions all the time. Just through?

Karen: that terrible? Yes.

Mark: Yeah.

Karen: I mean, every time somebody tells me, tells me anything, they’re telling me something that happened to them in their life. And I’m thinking, oh, you know, like I could use that. Maybe not in the book I’m writing now, but I don’t wanna forget that. And I also sometimes I struggle with humor, you know? ‘Cause you need a little, especially when you’re writing really intense suspense, paint turning stuff. You need a little, you [00:08:00] need those light moments. So when somebody tells me something that really strikes me as amusing, and I think that would work, that would work. And but sometimes I don’t know where it’ll work.

And so I just have to keep it in my notebook until sometime comes around. So yes, beware. Don’t talk to me because I will

Mark: Watch

Karen: watch out.

Mark: When you crafted this story justice for Emerson, do you ask yourself if you’re writing a darker, deeper story, or is that just the way you like to tell your stories?

Karen: No thank you for asking that. That’s such a, that’s, that’s so important to me. So all of my stories have behind them social issues that matter to me. I don’t want the book to be about that in the sense of, you know what, I want you to learn about this. But I, I weave them in. I weave in moments when [00:09:00] somebody will realize what it means to be unhoused.

What it means to be a 13-year-old girl that doesn’t have access to you know, sanitation, you know, um, products, what it means to a, so this one has addiction in it. It has, you know, parents who are not together. It has stepfather. Is that a real father, poverty. I, I just, I try to lift every book I have.

I try to lift social issues that I think are important and weave them through, you know, a suspenseful page turning.

Mark: How do you decide what weaving is versus talking too much about it because, I think you did an excellent job of weaving it in because I noticed them all. I’m reading to notice as well, [00:10:00] but I noticed it all and it was all just very well done. It was just enough to give me an insight, but not overdone. So to pull me from the story.

Karen: Yeah, it’s a balancing act and I have to correct myself sometimes when I’ve gone too far. I, you know, I, I, I realize that when I’m reading, when I’m rereading, you know, I love to rewrite. Matter of fact, you can’t be a successful lawyer, successful author if you’re not like up for rewriting. You know, those beta readers will slam you and tell you what you need to fix.

So I really look, so when I’m doing my rewrites, when. I, I’m constantly asking myself, did I play that too heavy? Is that okay? Is is it the right balance? But the, the characters help with that because Aria, who is 50 years old, she’s the mother of a college age student, a freshman in college, [00:11:00] and she’s a widow at 50, and she cares deeply about the unhoused.

She cares deeply about people who are hungry and marginalized. So as long as I keep her true to her character, while her story is going, it’s easier to get the right balance because, because it’s her life, you know? Yeah.

Mark: I appreciated her also that little romance love story with Jax in the middle of the book because she’s older. But it was so nice that she’s feeling those feelings and finding that love for herself again. And she’s obviously doubtful and been through a lot and am I too old and stuff. But yeah, it was, it was great.

Karen: You know, I have, I had a, somebody bought my book and a link on LinkedIn. He’s a contact on LinkedIn, and so, he sends me a note on LinkedIn. He says, [00:12:00] Karen, I’m just bordering up a bordering a plane. I’m on my way to Atlanta, but I’m just telling you, if you kill Jax, I’m never speaking to you again.

And then the next day he says, okay, I’m leaving Atlanta. And Jax is cool, he’s good. Okay, but oh, what you did to Wally, poor Wally. And he’s giving me this commentary all the way through. So, yeah, I like Jacks a lot. I, I wanted her to, I hoped that she would find her way to him. You know, I mean, he’s, he’s just a good, good guy and she had all these things that he was to this and to that and to this and to that. And you know, it’s not okay, but he’s just a really nice guy.

Mark: Yeah. And speaking of that support for her, at the beginning of your book, you have a dedication to your husband, and I have always found it in all [00:13:00] these conversations I’ve had with authors, that there’s a big support network behind successful authors. And I’m curious how he supported you through this journey. It’s not necessarily just for this book, but the journey of becoming a writer as well.

Karen: You know, so we met when I was 13 and he was 14 years old, and we met at a party. I don’t actually remember the party or meeting him, but he says that he met me at a party and at 14 years old, he decided he was gonna marry me. He told his 15-year-old brother who said, what whatcha talking about?

He said, no, that’s her, that’s her, that’s the one. So he, he has been on my side. We’ve been married for 57 years and he has been on my side for the whole time. And he’s believed in me when I didn’t believe in me, you know, when I would like, is this any good or Will I ever, ever be able to get published or is, is [00:14:00] there just, you know, another book in me.

I don’t think there’s another book in me. He was always, always on my side, he would give me honest feedback, you know, he would, he would tell me if he thought something was off or, but he has read all of my books at least five or six times because he’s one of my paid readers. So he’s been a wonderful a wonderful support and never lets me get discouraged for long, long.

Mark: Yeah, yeah, yeah. We always have that voice in our head.

Karen: Yes.

Mark: So let’s go to research a little bit. When we were you, you had mentioned the, some of the historical facts that you like to put in there. You have Vietnam. What kind of research went into all the book?

Karen: So I, first of all, I lived through Vietnam with Bob, so I knew it from [00:15:00] my wife Lee. You know, perspective. I mean, we, we would, he and his mom and dad would sit and watch the TV and watch the name scrolling to see if, if his plane went down and if his name was, I mean, it was a terrible time. When you, you, that, that’s one of the ways you found out people were dead, you know, on the news.

So, I, I had you know, feelings about the time and, but I had to ask him so many questions, but, and I asked his brother too, ’cause his brother had been in Vietnam. They, they weren’t allowed to be there at the same time. So his brother was there first, and then his brother came home and Bob went next.

But then he doesn’t, no, like, he’s an old guy. He doesn’t remember everything. So I had to, I had to go and, and check and see, like, I asked him questions like. You know, I said in, in Kristen Hannah’s book, the Women, the Dust she said was orange. Do you remember the dust being orange? Were like in, in ua. [00:16:00] Was it orange?

He goes, Karen, I don’t remember that. I said, okay, I’m gonna, I’m gonna go and research and see what color the sand was, or the dust was at UA, Vietnam in 1968, and it turned out it wasn’t orange. So, it was a combination of asking questions, remembering things, researching things. And and I thought I didn’t like research Mark, I I, but until I wrote true Grace, which is my historical novel, I always avoided anything that I had to research.

So my first three books were all contemporary, so I could just draw on my own experiences and stuff. But then I found out research is so fun. You find out like the coolest, coolest things. So that was the other thing. After writing True Grace, which is set in 1924, I wanted this book to have some historical part of it since I, I enjoyed writing [00:17:00] for the first time, historical fiction.

Mark: Were there moments in this book that your husband had mentioned, things that he wanted you to put in because they were more authentic to the experience that he had?

Karen: Hmm. You know, it’s interesting, he never only true Grace. Did he ever, ’cause he knew my grandmother and it was inspired by my grandmother. Did he say, well, how come you’re not putting this in? Or how come you’re not putting that in? But with Justice for Emerson, he was just, you know, he just made sure he read it and said, yeah, that makes sense.

I remember that that’s how it felt. You know, for example, addiction became, people came out heavily addicted. Many people, not everybody. Not Bob, but lots of people came out heavily addicted. And he said to me, you know, it cost a dollar and a quarter to buy a whole bottle of scotch. They made it, the, the, the services, the armed services [00:18:00] made it so easy for these men to purchase and drink alcohol. That alcoholism, you know, when you’re, you’re in a war, you’re scared you’re,

Mark: Yeah.

Karen: You know, and, and it’s dirt cheap to, you know, to grab a, to grab a bottle. So I’m very, very grateful that Bob came back sober and, you know, okay, that he, that he didn’t get caught up. But, but I did want Emerson to experience and overcome

Mark: Mm-hmm.

Karen: He could, it was such, and go there for a while. Right. You weren’t sure that Emerson was gonna make it.

Mark: No. How hard was that for you to write? I was, I mean, Emerson probably impacted me emotionally the most for the roller coaster that he went through from losing his fri [00:19:00] well, sorry, I won’t try not to get spoiler, spoiler From what, what happened in the book to him to like the addiction and the back and forth and everything that he’d lost, and I just felt so bad for him. How do you write that? Like, you must feel terrible as you’re writing it.

Karen: Yeah. You know what I tried to do is not judge. So I wanna make sure that my readers see people as whole human beings and they’re not, they’re not judging.

Mark: Hmm.

Karen: And I did. I do have somebody in my life who went through two people who went through, that journey, that addiction journey. And I loved them both so much and watched their struggle and watched losing ground.

And then and they weren’t, you know, Emerson’s age. And it wasn’t Emerson’s story, but I saw that path, [00:20:00] and I wanted to make sure that my readers didn’t judge Judge Emerson, that they, you know, I, or if they did, they did, but not because I wrote it in a way that, that I was judging here. Here’s the story. And so many of the reviews say that they so respected how I, how I handled that without it being, yeah.

Mark: Yeah, it was, it was touching. ’cause it was, I, I was really rooting for a moment and I, I don’t give spoilers, but

Karen: Even though we know he’s dead.

Mark: Yeah, That’s right. Yeah. We know the end result. Yeah,

Karen: opens with Emerson dead in the, in the basement, and so many people said to me, you know, I just put that outta my mind. I was just rooting for him

Mark: yeah,

Karen: the whole, the whole time until we got to the end and like, oh, that’s right. Emon is dead and we’re trying to solve this murder.

Mark: yeah, [00:21:00] yeah. In the back of my mind, I’m thinking, okay, he’s, he’s gonna get to a good place where everything was just great and then he dies tragically, and I can handle that, but I don’t want it to go the other way.

Karen: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I wanted him to get to that good place where he was living a good life, and Aria really cared. Everybody at the Way Station really cared about him.

Mark: Yeah. When readers put down this book, what are you hoping they’re gonna feel, or what are you building toward at the end?

Karen: Yeah. So one of the things that I love that readers have, have said to me is that the plight of the unhoused, even though there was just moments in the book, not whole, you know, heavy duty handling, that it got them thinking differently, thinking differently about and so Bob and I with our church, we [00:22:00] volunteer every week.

We go out and we feed folks. We, we at the church, we pack up the food, hot, hot food, and we bring sandwiches to, for takeaway, and we drive to seven, eight places where they’re living and hiding in a town that’s north of us. And so this is something that matters to me a lot. And, and I hope that when people put down the book they’ll look, you know, ’cause we walk past people sitting on the street wrapped up in cardboard and, and judge or ignore or don’t even see, don’t even notice.

So that was one of the things I was hoping that people would have a, a different thought about that. And then I also wanted them to be happy for Aria, you know, to, there’s a splat for your listeners and viewers. There is a big SP splash of romance in this book.[00:23:00]

But that was my hope that they would have empathy for people who struggle ’cause so many of the unhoused also are struggling with addiction. They’re not all, but that’s one of the things that often comes together and. So I hope that people would, would care a little bit more, see a little bit more, think how they might help a little bit more.

Mark: Yeah. That’s awesome. So the protest that was being staged in the food that they fed, was that like kind of almost your, almost like reliving that moment of your own life then when they went out and gave sandwiches and went a little differently for them than you? I am, I hope, but.

Karen: Yes. And it’s interesting, you know, because back in the Vietnam War, I was a pro peace marcher, you know, with the black armband. And, [00:24:00] and, and you know, I was in high, we were in, I was in college and so we were young and protesting the war that Bob was out fighting. You know, he said, you can’t get arrested, Karen, stop it.

You know, it’s gonna affect, it’s gonna affect my future. So I did wanna capture some, some of that, some of the, the activism,

Mark: Yeah,

Karen: That yeah, that was happening.

Mark: it’s so impressive how many things you packed into this book and managed to do it so well.

Karen: Thank you. Thank you very much.

Mark: listeners definitely pick up and read this book. It is so good. One of the interesting things you did was switching point of view, and I hadn’t seen that. I didn’t think I had seen it very much until recently, where you also switched point of view, but tense, or, sorry, not tense.

First persons third

Karen: First person. Yes. Yes. So that the first time I [00:25:00] always wrote in third person, my first three books. We’re, and then when I wrote True Grace, I decided to write it in first person. And so Grace is telling her story when I did. And, and I’ve often done different points of view, you know, switching back and forth.

When I wrote this one, I thought, you know what? This is, yes, this is Emerson’s story, but this is also Aria’s story. So I wanted her to tell her story. But then the other points of view are, are not in first person. And I like trying new things and learning new things. And so one of the lovely, lovely reviews that Best Thriller did when they gave me the, you know, when they made the award for best mystery was they said, I often find the right, the reviewers, and I often find multiple points of view annoying and dual [00:26:00] timelines never, you know, one timeline doesn’t live up to the other, but not so in this case, Karen Osborne pulled this off seamlessly, so that made me feel very, very good because I was, I was experimenting, I was trying something, something new. ’cause it’s fun.

Mark: It did work very well. I hadn’t seen it very much until recently. There’s been a few authors I’ve seen that, that have gone from first person to third person in different chapters

Karen: Yeah,

Mark: But yeah, you did pull it off very well. I have been confused in the past with, with what was happening and, but the titles, the dates at the beginning, the chapter titles of characters when appropriate really helped with that

Karen: yeah. Like grounding the reader where we are, whose point of view are we in? What year is it?

Mark: yeah.

Karen: Yeah. I

Mark: it’s not enough to just start with a sentence that you think makes perfect sense, but the, the reader is trying to understand

Karen: Who is this? Where [00:27:00] are

Mark: Yeah. Who is this again? What am I doing here? Yeah. And where am I? Yeah.

Karen: and where am I?

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

Karen: Wow. So marketing is a bear. It’s a bear. Writers. I know, I know writers who love the marketing part of it, but to me it’s, you have to make some real decisions about how much time you’re going to spend marketing, the two books that you already wrote, or the one book that you already wrote, and how much time are you gonna spend writing the next book?

And then of course there’s the rest of your life. There’s all the other things, you know, in your life. And, and so I, I think really making some decisions about time and money because [00:28:00] no matter who, like I’m traditionally published with a small press, my cousin is self-published with a hybrid press. I have a good friend who’s published with Simon and Schuster, so one of the, you know, the Big five.

All of us have the same problem because unless you’re a big fish, you know, unless you’re, you know, you’re Connolly or Grisham or the, they don’t spend a lot of time helping you promote. I have a friend who is published by a big house, but she’s rich and so she has a publicist, and so her publicist is just getting her on every podcast, every show, every, you know, and getting her out there. So you really have to make, you have to decide, you know, about your budget, your time budget, your money budget, talk to other writers, figure out what works for you. ’cause what works for you might be different, you know, for what works [00:29:00] for, for them.

And I mean, and you, that, that was the biggest like, aha for me after, especially after the second book, because the first book, I was still working. And so I would, people would invite me to come speak and teach and I’d say, oh, may I bring my books with me? And they’d say, oh, absolutely.

And, you know, we’ll set up a table for you. So they’re paying me to speak, they’re flying me to where I am, and I got to sell my books. Well, the second book, I wasn’t working full-time anymore. And so. Now I had to make real decisions. Like for example, I flew all the way to San Francisco from Florida to speak at a winery.

Now it was a real market. It was such a cool gig. They bought 30 books. They had a wine pairing with the book. This is the wine that goes with it, but 30 books does not cover [00:30:00] airfare, hotel food, rental car.

Mark: no.

Karen: you have to make, just, you have to make decisions, even though it was really a cool gig.

Mark: How do you balance when you’re writing versus when you’re marketing? Do you go hard at writing for a while and then switch like to marketing mode after you’re done writing almost like periodical throughout the year, or are you always kind of trying to do both?

Karen: I’m always trying to do both. You know, my son is a very gifted literary writer. He writes short stories, and he gets into really good magazines, like probably two, three a year. And he’s working full time and he has a family, and he said, mom, just find at least 15 minutes a day when you can write, maybe it’ll end up being three hours, maybe, you know, but if you promise yourself 15 minutes a day, you’ll be so surprised at how well, you know, you’d, [00:31:00] how you could keep, keep going.

I tried the novel writing November Nano Rmo, you know, writing your novel, and I was doing it with my grandson, and he said, Grammy, you are behind. Do the math, you won’t make it. So I know that, that, so 15 minutes seems reasonable. Doing 1600 words a day didn’t. And so I have to find the right, you know, the right blend for me.

Yeah. And, and you do have to get the marketing and don’t you, I mean, I know, I know you know this. Yeah.

Mark: The interesting thing about what you say about 15 minutes is I have found the stress of sometimes sitting down at the keyboard and thinking I need to put out 2000 words today can be a lot. The stress of sitting down and saying 15 minutes is not so bad, and sometimes we, I can spend 10, 15 minutes and almost get nothing, and then the words flow because I’ve [00:32:00] taken the time to get into, into, the world, into the moment, into the people, and then all of a sudden that 15 minutes can turn into two hours.

But the first 15 minutes were not productive. It was the next hour and a half that we’re the most productive. Yeah,

Karen: Yeah, but it’s right. It’s less, it’s less daunting. I’m gonna do 15 minutes. The other thing with the marketing is if the person can sprinkle in, in person, you know, don’t just rely on social media, don’t just rely on podcasts as wonderful as they are. Know I have my own as well and promote authors.

But when you meet readers, there’s no, it’s, it’s like the best, best part of it. And it reminds you why you’re writing and, and it reminds you what this, what a gift this is gift to you. It is that you have the privilege that you’ve, that you’ve been published. So I find that if you just can find ways that that in [00:33:00] person, you know, the local library. A local bookstore go to a fair, you know, a fair, that’s not even a book fair because book fairs you’re competing with, you know, I don’t know, 50 other writers. You go to a, you know, a gr a market, you know, a green market, what is it? Market, you know what I mean? The, the, you know, like a ve you know, the fresh market or whatever it is when you’re going out to, when people are out there selling their vegetables and there are other kinds of vendors and you are the only bookseller, that’s great. ‘Cause people will come up to you, they’ll ask you about your books, you know, and I’ll say, are you a reader? No, no, but my mother is. Which one do you think my mother would like? Well, tell me about your mom. You know, it’s, it just, it, it, it gives you really great, connection meeting, meeting readers. It’s, it’s a beautiful thing.

Mark: that’s a great idea. I’ve never thought of going to a non author event to promote, or non-book event to promote a book, [00:34:00] and I’m gonna have to give that a shot.

Karen: You should I sell, I sell more books in non author events than I do in author events.

Mark: Okay. And do you have a table with a banner and all your books laid out and is

Karen: I have a tent, I have a beautiful tent, and, and then I, you know, have all the books displayed. And I have my square, you know, on my phone so I can do credit cards and I can, and I have my all singles. I can do cash and I have all my bookmarks, you know, that we give away free bookmarks and then I, I make sure I’m standing and not sitting, I see a lot of people just sit behind their table and wait for somebody. I’m standing in front of my table. Hey Mark, how are you? Are you a reader? Can I show you something? So

Mark: Oh, I love that. Okay.

Karen: it’s, it’s all, it’s all good. And if you sell, usually they only cost like [00:35:00] $35 for a table, you know that they charge you to be there. So if you sell two books, you’re at least on your way.

Mark: Yeah. Yeah. And you never know if you’re gonna have a, your next great fan outta super fans, right?

Karen: That’s the other thing that’s so cool is to have, I was at a local event and at least five of the people that came by and bought another book were people who’d read who of my other books. And so they came over and said, oh, you know, I just love this one. And, I’m, I’m thinking about the new one, but I haven’t read this one. And so that’s cool too, to meet people. And, and I always take, pictures so, you know, with the reader holding the books. For social media, I can post it and so people can see that, you know, that somebody likes them.

Mark: yeah, yeah. Are all your books standalones?

Karen: [00:36:00] Yes. I am writing my first sequel ever. ’cause I like trying new

Mark: Mm-hmm.

Karen: So this and that’s, it’s tricky, right? Do you write sequels?

Mark: I did a trilogy that was, that was a lot of work.

Karen: Yes. Oh my goodness. I have to pick your brain later because trying to keep up with, you know, with all of the things and all of the characteristics of the people before and keeping things true to who they were. And, but bringing in new people and it’s, it’s been really, it’s been fun. I’ve been learning a lot and, and I think I’m gonna try it again. I think I’m gonna do a sequel to . To Justice Emerson. I think I’m gonna do an Aria Jacks story.

Mark: Okay. Another thriller.

Karen: Yes. How much trouble can two people keep

Mark: I was just thinking

Karen: you know, [00:37:00] but, but I’m thinking about it, but I, but I gotta get this other one and this one. How much trouble can these two people get into? But here they are once again in trouble. So.

Mark: Where can people find your books?

Karen: So first of all, they’re sold every place you buy books, right? You go, you go to the library. If they’re not on the shelf, just ask for them. You can go to Barnes and Noble, you can go to Amazon. You can go to your independent bookstore. Please do, you know, ask for them. If you don’t see them, chances are you won’t see them, and you should ask for them.

And then, and then you can come to my web website. I’m www.kareneosborne.com. And the e is like, super important because there is a lovely, amazing writer whose name is Karen Osborne, and she got the name first. So I had to add my, you know, she got published before I did. [00:38:00] So I had to add my e She writes mystical and dystopian and I actually interviewed her.

We met.

Mark: Oh wow.

Karen: yeah, she, she saw that I was speaking and it happened to be in a town that she lived in. This is an upstate New York. And this woman walks in and she goes, Hey Karen. E I’m Karen Osborn. She shook my hand. She brought her mother and her daughter. It was so fun. ’cause if you Google Karen Osborne, we both show up.

Mark: Okay. Karen E. Osborn. I’ll link to that in the show notes to make sure I don’t get it

Karen: Thank you. Karen e osborne.com. All my books. Are there links to the places that you can buy them? Are there discussion questions are there. If you’re doing a book club there’s a trailer book, trailer for Justice for Emerson. You can, can watch and then all of my podcasts are there.

Mark: Oh, that’s great. Well, thank you so much. This has been a lot of fun. I’ve, [00:39:00] I’ve loved learning more about this book. I’m excited for the next book that you’re writing. And I have four other books to go back to because I will have to read more of your books. This one was just so good. I have to, I have to read the other ones you’ve written. Thank you for sending that copy is a, a real pleasure to read.

Karen: Thank you so much.

Mark: If you don’t mind sticking around for a, a few extra minutes, we’re gonna get into a rapid fire question for our Patreon members. Thank you.

Thanks for listening and make sure you follow the show so you don’t miss next week’s conversation with Wesley Smith, author of They Came At Night. We talk about blending psychological thriller with action thriller writing from lived trauma, and how he balances outlining with discovery writing to keep tension tight on the page.

If you want the after show with the rapid fire questions, it’s free right now on Patreon, and we include with that some novellas and short stories from guests on the show. The after shows where authors [00:40:00] open up about their writing routines, the scenes they’d least wanna survive, and the strange things they’ve Googled.

Links are in the show notes.

TPP Episode 22 with Melissa F. Miller

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

Melissa: A couple years ago, our family rented a spot in the outer banks of North Carolina. The owner’s husband came and was showing my husband where to set up well, I walked our dog and when I came back, my husband said, oh, the owner grew up in the same very small neighborhood that I grew up in. And when she came over I said, Hey, we grew up in the same neighborhood and her face just went white. And she made it a point to get out of there as fast as she could. And so I’m thinking why would somebody, someone’s hiding from their past? And I said, what would happen if somebody rented an Airbnb and someone from their past showed up and brought danger with them?

​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. [00:01:00] 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 and moments that keep us turning the page.

This week I’m joined by Melissa F. Miller, the powerhouse behind more than 50 novels across legal, medical, and psychological thrillers. We dig into cut off from sky and earth. It’s a story inspired by a real life encounter that sparked the question, what happens when someone from your past suddenly reappears and brings danger with them? Melissa shares how a little known grim tail became the backbone of her. Why she stepped away from legal and medical thrillers for something more intimate and how she balanced three points of view, layered memories, and a book within a book to create a slow burn psychological thriller driven by [00:02:00] resilience, trauma, and self rescue.

If you’re interested in multiple POV structure, subtle tension, writing, emotional stories, or evolving your process after dozens of books, this is a conversation you’ll want to hear.

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

Melissa: Oh, I’m so happy that you’re having me, mark. Thanks.

Mark: I’m very excited to talk about your book Cut Off from Sky and Earth, and the title and the cover and all those good things. But before we get into that, let’s hear that pitch.

Melissa: Okay. Cutoff from sky to earth is the story of a feminist fairytale retelling that becomes a real life nightmare for two women who are trapped in a remote cabin during a storm and they have to face the traumas of their past to survive the danger in their present. And the book is a psychological thriller told from three points of view, and it has [00:03:00] flashbacks and my main character’s an author writing a story, so there’s also her stories woven into my story. So there’s a kind of a lot going on.

Mark: Awesome. So let’s get into what came first. I’m curious if it was made maim the title of your book or the idea for the cabin and the women in the cabin.

Melissa: right? So what came first was the idea I. A couple years ago, our family was, we have an rv and we were doing a trip and we rented a spot, sort of like Airbnb, but it’s for RV spots in the outer banks of North Carolina. And when we got there, the owner’s husband came and was showing my husband where to set up well, I walked our dog and when I came back, my husband said, oh, the owner. Grew up in the same, so I’m from Pittsburgh, but she grew up in the same very small neighborhood that I grew up in. And I said, oh wow, I bet I know her. And when she came over I said, Hey, we grew up in the same neighborhood and her face just went [00:04:00] white. And she just like made it a point to get out of there as fast as she could. And so I’m thinking why would somebody, someone’s hiding from their past? Because you know, a thriller writer, I’m sure you know, like my, that’s where my mind goes. And I said, what would happen if somebody rented an Airbnb and someone from their past showed up and brought danger with them? So that was where the idea came from.

Mark: Awesome. So how did it get mixed with made Moline in the fairytale retelling?

Melissa: Okay, so I decided that my main character was going to be an author dealing with writer’s block. Is that autobiographical maybe? So she went on a retreat, and I have done this a couple times when I really needed to write, I go somewhere where my kids and my dog and my husband aren’t there. So I thought, okay, she’s going to this remote location and so I knew she was a writer, and I thought, wow, if her story somehow thematically was tied to my story, that would be really [00:05:00] kind of interesting. And I knew she was gonna have to rescue herself. So there’s a whole theme of sort of self rescue and resilience and relying on other women in my story. So I thought, okay, well, she could be writing a fairytale retelling.

And then I just looked for fairytales that. So there are different, not tropes, but there’s, there’s one called the Entombed Princess and there are fairytales that fit that sort of, or I’m just gonna call it a trope. So I found, made me lean, which is not a very well known, well, not well known to me fairytale. And I read it and then I read some academic papers about it, and it just completely fit my story. And then it also informed my story because I didn’t originally have my two main characters sort of working together, but they ended up because of the way the fairytale and my story, kind of intertwined. [00:06:00] My, Alex is another one of my viewpoint characters. She took on a bigger role than I had initially thought

Mark: Okay,

Melissa: have.

Mark: So when it comes to the cover and the title, where did those come from? Because when I first saw the cover, which was cut off from Sky and Earth, I was like, huh, that’s an interesting psychological thriller title. Once I read the book, I very much got where it came from and it’s like a brilliant idea.

Where did it come from? How did it come about?

Melissa: so there is actually part of a line in the original fairytale when the princess and her lady in waiting get put in the tower, they are cut off and it’s not exactly cut off from sky and earth, but it’s something similar. And I really, for me, this was very different. I normally write legal thrillers or medical thrillers, and this was a psychological thriller, but also like a little more [00:07:00] literary for me. I wanted it to have a ton of French feel like the hunter or the searcher, if you’re familiar with those books.

Mark: not, no.

Melissa: And so they’re more atmospheric than pulse pounding, I guess.

Mark: Okay. Yeah. Very Dr. Character driven.

Melissa: Yeah. And the cover I really because it it doesn’t deliver sort of a, like a Freedom McFadden experience or it’s not like an Alice Feeney. It, it’s just not that kind of thriller. I didn’t want readers who are expecting sort of really fast paced adrenaline thriller to be disappointed. So I wanted to lean toward a more, I don’t wanna say literary because I’m a genre writer, but. More atmospheric cover. And,

Mark: sense.

Melissa: And so I, you know, the front, I, I [00:08:00] like plenty, but I really like the back because it’s got the tower in the back.

But my designer told me that it didn’t really work with the text on the front, and I trust him so.

Mark: Oh, I haven’t seen the full cover. So seeing that wrapped around. Yeah, it’s a, I mean, it is a beautiful looking cover. Oh, yeah, that

Melissa: Oh, that’s right. You have the ebook. So,

Yeah.

Mark: Yeah. So at its core, what kind of story would you say this is, and what kind of challenge did it present to you as a writer?

Melissa: I think at its core it’s a story about resilience and dealing with your past and not letting it impact your present. So it is a very psychological thriller, more psychological maybe than thriller. Although there’s, my readers are used to a certain kind of story for me. So the challenge was to write what I wanted to write and make it accessible to the people who read my work.

[00:09:00] If that makes sense. So I, I knew I wanted to write about these women, ’cause I, most of all of my series books except for one series have female main characters. I have one series with a Buddhist pathologist who is a man. But usually I’ve got women and I wanted these women to be sort of the natural evolution of those women, but they’re sort of, it’s a little darker, it’s a little more raw.

They both have some trauma in their past, a lot of trauma. And that ultimately, and this is what I always struggle with writing thrillers I want them to feel hopeful and optimistic because I think like hope is a weapon and I really believe that. So I always try for my books to be affirming, which kind of sounds strange for someone who writes thrillers maybe ’cause they can be about justice, but they’re not usually supposed to be about feeling optimistic, I guess. So that was a challenge. And then [00:10:00] also, I do not personally like an un unlikeable narrator or an unreliable narrator, and I do have unreliable narrators because of their own trauma and their forgetfulness and their anxiety but as a reader, when the main character lies to me, I get so mad and I, some people love it,

Mark: Yeah.

Melissa: but I chose to write in a genre where there was a lot of unreliable, narrators, a lot.

Mark: Yeah. Why did you make the switch from having done so many others in the legal and taking a chance to tell this one?

Melissa: So I write all different genres and I have on occasion, like I’ve started a rom-com series when I just needed something lighter and, I needed something darker. I was just in a place where I, was feeling a lot of, of sort of more just, it was a little raw and I’m very much like, there are [00:11:00] mood readers.

Mark: Yeah.

Melissa: I’m a mood writer, so I needed to write something darker and I thought about trying to shoehorn it into one of my existing series, but it just didn’t have the right feeling like it, it was just different.

Mark: Yeah. Okay. And so when readers put down this book, what do you hope they’re still thinking or feeling?

Melissa: That really, really terribly bad things can happen, but they don’t have to define you and that you, like my characters really can sort of, if you’re willing to face reality save yourself or thrive, I guess.

Mark: Yeah, that’s great. So after 40 books. What has changed in your process, if anything, when you started writing this book. [00:12:00] I know for a lot of authors, the first few books are very, can go all over the place because you’re sort of learning what your own process is. 40 books later are you still learning your process or do you have that process kind of pinned down?

Melissa: So I’m still learning and I think I’m actually now up to 50 books. And the last, the, no, no, I mean, that’s, you used what I have on the back, but the last book I wrote that just came out last week, I wrote the whole entire book then scrapped it. That was book 50. So obviously I’m still learning, but every book is different for me.

Some of them are easy to write and some of them take longer and some of them are shorter. But this book that I rewrote is the third book ever. I’ve just start like, stop. I wrote the whole thing and, and scrapped it. The first time I did that was my second book. [00:13:00] Because I had written the first book and I just wrote the book. I didn’t have any expectations. I didn’t have any readers. I was just writing a book and it was really fun. And so that book was easy. It wasn’t the first book I wrote. The first book I wrote we will never talk about, it’s like in a drawer, but the first book I published and then I had expectations for book two. So I thought, oh, I should be a real writer and I should plot this book. I should outline this book. So I did that and I got all the way to the end and it wasn’t the story I wanted to tell. So, I scrapped it. And some books, I completely am a discovery writer and some books I know the end. Some books I know key pieces, but I have never successfully plotted a book like the way you’re supposed to if you’re a plotter. [00:14:00] long answer to the question, my process is always evolving.

Mark: Okay. What was the process like for this book? How long did it take you to write it?

Melissa: Okay? So this book took longer than any book for me, but in part that was because this was my guilty pleasure. My side project, right? I had pre-orders for my series books up that I had to work on, and so sometimes in between books, when I was waiting for edits to get back, I would write part of this book and then I put it down. And so this book probably, might have taken me two years in between projects. And really the only reason it ever got done was that I am. I give my family a book as a gift on Christmas Eve, we, we stole it from Iceland. We celebrate yellow, Buca flat. And my husband said to me, I don’t want a book from the bookstore this Christmas, [00:15:00] last Christmas. I want to read your book. So after I finished my last book last year, I just locked in and finished it. So that book, my last book last year came out. Well, it came out in December, but I started writing this probably in October, November, and it was a perfect time to write a dark book because my mother had just died. She died on Halloween, and so I was in the right place to write my dark book, and I had a looming deadline of Christmas Eve. Otherwise, it still probably wouldn’t be finished. Mark.

Mark: A looming deadline for a first draft, or did you feel pressure to put something together that was better than a first draft?

Melissa: no, it was the first draft. He’s my first reader before he goes outside. So he knows

Mark: Okay. So you

Melissa: he knew what he was

Mark: draft. That’s, that says a lot. Yeah, I find it very hard to trust anyone with the first draft. It’s like no one can see how bad [00:16:00] this first version.

Melissa: No one but him could ever read my first draft. He’s the only one.

Mark: Okay. How many books do you typically write in a year when you’re talking about squeezing in books? Between books?

Melissa: So it depends between four and seven. Usually but this year, this year, it’s only gonna be three. No, well, four. ’cause I didn’t count this one. Four. And part of it is I am, keeps me outta trouble, but I was a lawyer for 15 years and I am really good at writing to deadlines, so I just give myself a lot of deadlines.

Mark: Okay. Still super impressive though, even with those have gotta be crazy deadlines. ’cause with your editor, I mean, editor readers gone, coming back, gone, coming back. Do you always have a project in between projects?

Melissa: [00:17:00] no. I like to, but I don’t like, sometimes I don’t. But also, well, I guess, do you mean am I writing something while it’s with the editor?

Mark: Yeah.

Melissa: Yeah. Yes.

Mark: Okay.

Melissa: But so this was between those things, you know,

Mark: Yeah.

Melissa: dribs and drabs.

Mark: Yeah. I’m just trying to understand how you can put out so many books, like that’s incredible to have to write four to seven books in a year. What does your day look like? Is it like a lawyer day from, well, I guess I don’t really know what a lawyer’s day is. Typical. Depends what kind of lawyer you are, but is it like early morning you’re just writing 5,000 words a day kind of thing?

Melissa: So my lawyer days were sort of like, you know, 18 hour days and they kind of every day was a very long day. So I can, I do have the muscle memory to do those sorts of days. But the thing is, and I really wish that I could be a person who wrote every day and wrote a reasonable number of words every day, [00:18:00] but I’m not, in part because I don’t plot.

So at the beginnings of my books are slow, I might get up, I sometimes get up especially when my kids were little, I would get up before the sun rose and I would start writing, and I would write for several hours, like before anyone else in the house was awake. But now I have two at college and one in high school so I sleep a little later, but I can write, I can write all day long. I don’t until, so particularly in the beginning of the book, I might write two, two or 3000 words a day. Like for me that’s a good day. In the beginning of a book, and then the middle of a book is kind of a slog. But at that point, I am putting in longer hours just to get some momentum. And then the last quarter of my books, I mean, I, I’ve written 13,000 words in a day. Like I just, that I pick up speed, right? And at the end it just all comes out fast. Then I have to put it aside [00:19:00] like, well, my hus I’ll, I’ll spell check it. My husband reads it and then it sits, but while it’s sitting and I’m thinking about it, I’m probably doing edits on another book, right? So there’s always something moving. But also in this process, which I said I don’t have a process, but it normally works out that way. It’s slow in the beginning I have longer days in the end, in the middle, and then the end it’s just like, I just can’t write fast enough to keep up with this story.

Mark: Wow.

Melissa: That’s how it, and I think in part because it’s, I’m learning the story as I go along. And once I get to that end, I know, I didn’t know, I didn’t know who the killer was when I started the book necessarily.

Mark: Yeah. Do you find yourself having to go back and insert more clues during second or third drafts?

Melissa: Not usually. And that’s the part, this is the part of my process that I really kind of love. [00:20:00] And the example I always use is I have a book in my legal thriller series that I wrote during COVI and I did not wanna set it during COVID. So it goes back 20 years and then it’s 19, or it’s 2019, so it’s 19, 10 years, 1999 and 2019. And the flashback in 1999 my main character’s roommate is sick. Like she’s getting sick. And when I’m writing it, I think, oh, well they’re in college. They must have been out partying. And then I was in the middle, and this is a spoiler if anybody reads this book, but I’m writing it, and there was something else that happened with her friend and her roommate, and I didn’t know why it was happening as I wrote it, and then when I got a little further, I’m like, oh, that’s because she’s pregnant and that is really important to this plot. And I did not know that when I wrote it. So I wrote the clue that I needed. But I [00:21:00] didn’t know I needed it and I know how crazy I sound. And that happens a lot. When I go back and I read it I think that is why that happened. In this book, this book, I did go back. I changed the beginning to be from Tristan’s point of view instead of his wife’s. And when I did that, I said something in that scene that made me realize the person I thought was the killer was in fact not the killer.

Mark: Wow. Did you have to go back and change the end?

Melissa: I hadn’t gotten to the end yet. ‘Cause I, because I wrote this, because I wrote this one, so, choppy, like putting it down, picking it up, I would often, I’d have to go back and remind myself where I was. I don’t normally do that ’cause I’m writing straight through, but since this one took two years, it was one of the times I went back to read the beginning. I thought, no, it needs to start from a different point of view. And then when I did that, I was like, I know who [00:22:00] the killer is now.

Mark: Well off air i’m gonna have to ask you who you, who was the original killer,

Melissa: Okay. Yeah. I’ll tell you when we’re done.

Mark: because I would love to know. How do you keep all these characters in your head between when you have all these stories going on who this person is, as a person.

Melissa: So when I am, when I’m writing my series books, I have an amazing brother who made a wiki for me that has. He’ll, he reads all of my books last. My husband reads ’em all first, and then after everyone who’s been paid to touch them is done. My brother reads ’em and he makes a series bible for me, and so he’ll tell me this person is afraid of this, and this person’s allergic to that. And so in my series books, I can just say she left-handed. And then I go and I search for it. And then when I’m writing a new book, usually I’m just living with the characters. So much that I [00:23:00] remember them, but again, for this one, since I was putting it down, they weren’t in the Wiki yet, so I kept notes. I don’t normally keep like a character sheet while I’m writing, but I did for this.

Mark: Wow, that’s impressive to keep, to keep those in your head. Is your brother available for, for work or,

Melissa: I don’t know. He really likes doing it. I could ask him, but it’s, it’s so helpful because you know, especially my legal thrillers, there are 16 novels and six novellas, and so he’ll read it and he’ll send me a note and he’ll say, did Sasha get a new car? Because she had a passade in book eight.

Mark: Wow. There you go. So have you had to go back and change things because he was, he was able to point things out for you.

Melissa: I’ve never changed anything, but I will tell, I will tell you. This is kind of a funny story. I have a series where I have a podcaster. She’s a true crime podcaster and her name is Maisie. [00:24:00] But my most of my thrillers are in the same universe. So Maisie appears in my legal thrillers and she appears in some of my medical thrillers ’cause she knows those characters. And when Maisie got her own book, I started to write it and I pulled up the Wiki and I said, okay, what color are Maisie’s eyes? And because it was in different series, we didn’t notice that she had green eyes and she had blue eyes and she had violet eyes. And I was like so in Maisie’s first book she started out, she was an on air TV reporter and investigative journalist, and she lost her job and that’s why she started the True Crime Podcast. But she’s starting the opening scene, she’s losing her job and she’s putting in her context. Her producer comes in and he says, wait, I thought your eyes were blue. And she said, color contacts there any there any color I want them to be, but my eyes are really brown. So I rec conned that one because I was like, I can, I can’t [00:25:00] go change all these different books, but

Yeah,

Mark: That’s a great story. How do you keep tension throughout this book? Given the type of story that it was? I mean, you’re, you said you’re a pants, so do you think about pacing in tension as you’re writing it, or is it just playing out as a movie?

Melissa: A little column A, a little column BI think I, I tend to write almost, I think all of my thrillers are multiple point of view. And this one only had three. A lot of times I have more, and so one of the things I always do is I end a chapter from one character’s point of view with an unresolved question, and then go to another character’s point of view. So that, like you wanna know what’s gonna happen, but now you’ve got this other person having an issue and then I leave that. Right. And so then by [00:26:00] following the different characters, you’re always kind of, wait, what’s going on with this other person? I don’t know if I’m explaining this well.

Mark: Yeah.

Melissa: By switching points of view, I try to keep the tension up, but also I write short chapters. And I think that keeps them pacey even when it’s sort of a more slow burn kind of book. And in this book in particular, I had three point of views. I had three people having flashbacks in memories. I had the Made May Lean Fairy tale, and I had Emily’s book that she was writing called The Tower. So I. I didn’t like have a system for when I would put one, but they were all getting woven in, so I felt like they were all moving the story along, but keeping it sort of open questions the whole time.

Mark: Do you think as you’re writing about, here I’m gonna tell a lie or, when Tristan is questioning he knows [00:27:00] he’s lying or hiding things and then we go to her point of view, we know she is, are you thinking about that and their history and how that is gonna carry a reader onto the next chapter as well?

Melissa: Yes. Because, because my role for myself when I started this book was they can lie to each other and they can lie to themselves, but they can’t lie to the reader. And so because the reader knew Tristan was lying and that Emily didn’t know, I knew that that was. I knew that right was going to be on their mind. So then the next scene I thought, well, well, she’s gotta lie, and then Alex has to lie. And so we know everybody’s lying and eventually it’s gonna catch up to them. So I did think about that as I was writing.

Mark: I thought it played out very well. I mean, it was a very good book. This one really kept hold because of that tension where I was always like, oh, when are they gonna find out everybody’s [00:28:00] lying? And when are they gonna find out what did happen all those years ago and who was responsible? And that really held me right to the end. So it was a, it was a really good read. I liked it a

Melissa: Well, I’m glad to hear it ’cause it’s not the kind of book I usually write either. And I just I felt like I just wanted to do it. So I’m glad that, I mean, some of my readers, my readers are funny. Some of them were like, it was so scary. It was so scary. But I finished it ’cause I knew I could trust you. And then I think people who read darker thrillers would be like, hardly any body count, right?

Mark: Yeah. Yeah. Do you find yourself processing trauma in your stories? Kind of as your characters are processing trauma in their stories.

Melissa: Uh,

Mark: You have, you have Emily who is writing a story, but she’s also using the maid Moline story as a way to process her own thoughts, just like, because there’s moments where she pulls from that made million fairytale [00:29:00] to be like, I can do this too. I’m strong too. Do you find when you’re writing it does that process things for you as well?

Melissa: It does. And I think that’s why I hope that it does for my readers because when I’m reading, I process things too. And so this book like I finally finished it because well, Emily has anxiety and so do I, but I finally got on medication and I felt like I could, I could see the difference between living in my anxiety and living with it, and I wanted that for her. So in that way I process that for her. But even my rom-coms, I process emotion through my characters. Definitely. And it’s not like every character, but I have my, Buddhist coroner. He’s very centered and he’s very calm, and sometimes when there’s a lot going on outside, I’ll say, I need to write a Bodhi book right now so [00:30:00] that I can feel centered and calm.

Mark: Oh, I love that. How do you make people care about characters when you’re writing them? You said you don’t write unlikable characters. How do you make sure that they are likable or at least people can relate to them, I guess would be another way of looking at it.

Melissa: Right. I think that I try to make my characters empathetic. You might not like them, but you understand why they’re doing what they’re doing. Because I try to have them be open about it. If I have a character who’s burnt out, like she’s tired and she doesn’t feel like going to work, and like she doesn’t even really wanna make breakfast for her kids. She’s honest and you might be like, that’s not good, but you understand why she’s doing it. And for my antagonists a lot of them are fairly nasty people, like my thrillers usually have a killer and sometimes [00:31:00] psychopath. And in their point of view scenes, I just think why is, is this person like this. what is causing this pain? I don’t even know who said it every, everyone’s the hero of their own story. So if I were telling this story from my killer’s point of view, what would his story be? So I just try to make them understandable. Even if you can’t, like, they might not be huggable, but they’re palatable. I don’t know.

Mark: Do you

Melissa: So much this book.

Mark: Do you sometimes write from the point of view of the killer in a hidden way? Where we don’t know who it is, but they’re feeling or thinking. I don’t, you didn’t in this book,

Melissa: No. I yes, I nor not normally. I often do, and I sometimes a thriller where we know from the very beginning who the bad guy is.

We know, I don’t hide it. [00:32:00] Right? In my, my very first legal thriller, there’s a man who has, is selling the technology to blow up a plane from an app on your phone, and he does a demonstration for buyers.

That’s all on the back cover. That’s not a spoiler. We know who he is from his first time on page, we don’t know who he’s working with. We don’t know what his next move is gonna be. We don’t know how my character’s gonna outsmart him, but we know who he is. And then sometimes I do the thing you talk about, like we don’t know who this person is this killer and like we don’t know, but, and then sometimes I don’t, but this I think is the only thriller that doesn’t have anything from that person’s point of view.

Mark: Do you find it when you’re doing that? It’s like a icky feeling as you’re writing these terrible feelings from their point of view. ’cause you’re trying to justify whatever insanity that they’re performing.[00:33:00]

Melissa: Right. And that’s probably why um, I have sort of, since I’m trying to be empathetic to them, I sort of have some limits. I don’t write any like I wanna say I don’t have any serial killers, but I don’t have any traditional serial killers. They don’t have a Hannibal Lecter character who I’m following around. Right. In detail while he’s killing people. ’cause I couldn’t,

Mark: mm-hmm.

Melissa: I don’t have any sexual assaults or rapes of my characters. Because I don’t wanna write from a rapist point of view. Right. So I don’t necessarily wanna write from, you know sociopath’s point of view either, but I, there, I guess for me there are just limits to what I can write,

Mark: Yeah, That’s fair.

Melissa: Not what I can read so much, but like what I can I, ’cause I don’t wanna embody it,

Mark: Yeah. That makes sense. What advice would you give someone who just published their first or second book,

Melissa: Self-published or [00:34:00] traditionally

Mark: Let’s say self-published.

Melissa: Write the next book. I think although self-publishing has changed so much since I published my first book, which was in 2011 for a really long time I really think just writing in series was the way for a self-published author to build an audience. I mean, I wouldn’t spend a whole lot of energy on promoting my first book. Like you want it, right? You want your first book outta the gate to just take fire. But there’s, it’s a lot of, if particularly if you’re self-publishing, it’s a lot of money. You’ve already spent the money to get a cover and get it edited and get everything in place to then spend a lot of money to promote it particularly now it’s hard ’cause I’m a dinosaur like in 2011 there weren’t all these services, so you couldn’t spend that much money to promote your book. Oh. [00:35:00] Oh wait. I have one more piece of advice. Start a newsletter. Start a newsletter when you write your first book.

Mark: Okay.

Melissa: That would be my advice.

Mark: How did you get people to join the newsletter when you started your book?

Melissa: So I didn’t have a newsletter yet, but I had an email address in the back of my book. And the, I had a reader who I’ll never forget, like his mind is, his name is etched in my mind, and he emailed me just like an email and said, well, when’s the next book in the series? And I thought, there’s no next book. I wrote a book, yay me. And then I thought about it and I said I could write another book. So I started, I think I had at that point i’ve gone through so many mail providers. Let’s just say it was MailChimp. I don’t know what it was. I got on the free plan and I said, put, and then I upped. And this is a thing as a self-published author that you can do, you can update your file. So I updated my file to say if you wanna connect and know when the next book comes out, join my newsletter here. And [00:36:00] I’ll only email you when you have, when I have book news. And I just started collecting names.

Mark: Okay, so, it was like organically they found your book and then when it got to the end, we assume that they want to read more of from you, and then they follow that link and go to

Melissa: Right. And again, it was, it was a, it was a different time, it was a different age. So now I have, I will have a free book. If you sign up for my newsletter, you get a free book. I do that now. I’ll put it on social media, but in the beginning it was just at the end of my book, there was this link and if you wanted to sign up, you could.

Mark: Okay. If you can pick one thing that led to your success so far, what would it be?

Melissa: I think. I was going to say not staying in my lane, but I think I write the book. I don’t write to market. I write the book I wanna write and then find a market for it. And I think because of that I’m able to really, I’m able to love my book and I, I’m sure [00:37:00] people who write to market love their books, but it feels so intimate with the reader, like this story is very personal to me. So I think, I write a very personal story and the readers who it resonates with that resonate with it, they can tell. And there’s sort of a, a mutual understanding there, I guess, that I’m gonna tell a story that might speak to them if they read another one. So I guess my success comes from not always obeying genre convention and not always like I just find the market for it. I don’t think traditional publishers would publish most of my books. Be like, oh, there’s not a market for that.

Mark: Use your same name for all of them, right? You haven’t

Melissa: I do, I haven’t.

Mark: [00:38:00] Mm-hmm. Okay.

Melissa: All my babies. So I didn’t wanna make any of them feel like second class citizens by not, not claiming them.

Mark: But your readership carried through. So the what you’re writing and what, yeah. I think it resonates with people, obviously, if they’re still following you from the different genres.

Melissa: Yeah. I guess my voice is my voice no matter what I’m writing, right? So.

Mark: Yeah, that’s great. So I had a question from Andrew Warren, which technically we already answered. If you’re a blog or a dancer, how do you think it impacts your writing? I think we may have already answered that, but if there’s anything else you want to add.

Melissa: I mean it clearly impacts it on the speed, right? Like slow in the beginning. And I think it also gives me a little more freedom to because the three books that I had to scrap that I tried to plot [00:39:00] well two of them. I tried to plot the last one. It was just I didn’t plot, but I had this idea like what it was gonna be and I stuck to it. And I don’t normally do that. And I think being a discovery writer or a Panther, if you really embrace it and you just go where the story takes you and you listen to your characters. But just, you can’t fight it. Trying to grab the story and bring it back onto the track that I thought it was on never works well. So I just have to follow the story.

Mark: That makes sense. I outline a lot I have the book blurb ahead of time. I have the summary when I’m writing and I know what my book’s gonna be, but often I go right off the rails. I don’t do chapter by chapter or, very much at all in the actual story because I do that all the time. It goes off the rails. And when I’ve tried to stick to a firm outline, it’s the same thing i’m like, I had, I end up either pulling the story where it’s not meant to go or I just give up on the story. ’cause I’m like, this isn’t, isn’t working.

Melissa: Because it’s not the story. It’s not what the story wants to tell you. Yeah. So you [00:40:00] just, yeah. Yeah, resting one, one back on the rails is, I think possibly the worst thing I can do for, it’s clearly, for me, the worst thing I can do.

Mark: yeah. Where can listeners find your book or any of your books?

Melissa: All of my books are available on all of the retail sites. And they are in Cobo Plus, and I sell them direct through my website too, so pretty much can find me everywhere except brick and mortar bookstores except for a couple of indies. But amazon Burns renewable, Cobo, apple Google, melissa miller.com.

Mark: All right, I’ll drop that in the show notes. Thank you so much for your time. This has been great. I love learning about this book. I really enjoyed the book. So thank you for provid me a copy and I will have to read more of your books and get into those medical legal thrillers that you’re writing. So thank you so much. I really appreciate your time. If you don’t mind sticking around for the after show. We will can get [00:41:00] right to those rapid fire questions.

Melissa: All right.

Mark: Thanks for listening, and make sure you follow the show so you don’t miss next week’s episode with Adam Roach. We talk about the Ritualist, the flash fiction story that sparked his debut thriller and how he built smart antagonists, tight timelines in the twist driven plots while writing a series design for long-term escalation.

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 strangest research rabbit holes They’ve fallen into the thriller scenes that stuck with them, and the moments from their own books that they’d least wanna survive.

The lengths in the show notes, ​

TPP Episode 20 with Jo Loveday

Coming up on the Thriller Pitch podcast.

Jo: One of the things that I wanted to explore was how other cultures treat addiction versus Western culture. And in some other cultures, they think of, addiction or even mental health as a spirit coming into someone.

​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 and moments that keep us turning the page.

This week I’m [00:01:00] joined by Joe Loveday, author of Campus of Shadows, a psychological horror thriller about identity addiction, and the moment a mind breaks wide open, we talk about how real world experiences shape this story, the line between psychological collapse and possession, and what it means to write the monster within. Joe, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for being here today.

Jo: Thank you so much for having me, mark. I really appreciate the opportunity to talk books with you.

Mark: I’m glad you took the opportunity, so let’s get right into it. Campus of Shadows is your book. Read it. Really enjoyed, read it and listened to it. Really enjoyed it. So I’m very excited to talk about this one. This was pretty different for some of the books I’ve had lately and how character driven it, it was.

But I’ll let you pitch it first and then we’ll, we’ll dive into it all.

Jo: Okay. The campus of Shadows asks one central terrifying question, when the mind breaks, who [00:02:00] walks in. And it’s a psychological horror thriller where two college roommates, Dave and Zane, become trapped in a man versus self battle that turns into something far darker. Dave is neurodivergent, emotionally immature, and already struggling with his identity.

Zane is a charismatic tornado. He’s a confident chick magnet. Which it seems at first is what Dave wants or thinks he needs. But Zane has his own demons and his obsession with chasing intensity and chaos and chemical escapes slowly drags Dave into addiction. So when Dave’s mind begins to fracture, that vulnerability opens the door to something else, something that’s hungry.

So this book takes the psychological spiral that we talk about in reality [00:03:00] of trauma dependency and emotional collapse, and asks, what if the worst part of yourself wasn’t just a metaphor, but actual potential entry points? What if there really was a force waiting to take over if you’re no longer strong enough to hold on?

And so campus shadows is not true dark academia, it’s more the psychiatric ward version. It’s kind of the nightmare that’s inside the human psyche where the true enemy isn’t a campus or other students or even a roommate. It’s the internal possession that one must fight or that Dave must fight from the inside out and it becomes a psychic battle for the soul.

So Dave has to figure out how to stop this takeover before he disappears forever. [00:04:00] So campus shadows is for readers who, like supernatural thrillers that go past jump scares and into the terror of the mind that you can’t escape from.

Mark: That’s great. Thank you. And I really like the psychological side. I find the psychological side for me far scarier than that spook scare. Like I can play scary video games, I can watch a Stephen King movie where there scary things happen and it doesn’t bother me. But when you have psychological elements and things are really playing out there that really messes with me. So, and you did a great job with this. I’d like to start with where the idea came from. How did you, what sparked it?

Jo: Well, there were a few things. One of the things that I wanted to explore was how other cultures treat addiction versus Western culture. And in some other cultures, they think of, addiction or even mental health [00:05:00] as a spirit coming into someone. And so I was interested in researching I did a lot of research on that.

And some of it is in the story, but have you ever known somebody who drinks too much and they seem to become another person?

Mark: Yeah.

Jo: Like, you know, like they, they just become different. My father-in-law was alcoholic and he would get to a point where he would get this laugh. And it, and we all just kind of knew that it wasn’t him anymore.

And so I thought, well, maybe there is something to this. And that was one of the things that I wanted to research and weave into the story. Then one of the other things is I wanted to bring more awareness to the learning disability decal, QE. Uh, disc. I can’t even say it.

Um, dyscalculia ’cause because I have dyscalculia and it’s sort of the unknown [00:06:00] sister to dyslexia. A lot of people know about dyslexia with reading. Well, dyscalculia is a numbers thing and it’s a problem with maths, which I’ve always had and I didn’t even know all of the attributes until I started to do more research for the book.

When I was young, I always struggled with math. And then when I was in university level math, I got a tutor who said, well, maybe you need to learn your times tables. And I thought, well, you know, that was a long time ago. I know my times tables, so maybe there’s something else going on. And so those were the two of the things that I wanted to bring into the story.

Mark: And there’s some really big emotional moments in this story. Especially early on. ’cause as we get to know Dave, we realize how hard he is on himself. His dad’s hard on him. His brother, is someone he looks up [00:07:00] to, but otherwise sees as perfect and he can’t be like that and there’s a, a scene in the prison where his mother, he’s on the phone with her and his dad’s upset and she says, don’t, I can’t remember exactly what she says, but it’s like, don’t, don’t, be upset.

He has a disability or something like that. And it’s like, it’s all, it was heartbreaking to see, to have that all happen and to just be in that moment with him. How did you create that? Is there a parallel between what you’ve gone through and what David has gone through?

Jo: Well, I’ve. Never been to jail. So, so that’s a good thing. But there are many moments not, not so much with my parents because my parents were supportive, but just I think I’ve been very hard on myself and so if I mess up with something, and I know the reason is because of the math problem or some of the other things that flow [00:08:00] over from that, like, reading out Loud is one of them.

For, for some strange reason, people with dyscalculia have difficulty reading out loud. It’s like the, the words flip like numbers, but not when you’re reading on the page. Within my family I didn’t have those kinds of difficulties, but I am hard on myself with that sometimes.

Mark: How did you feel after writing the book? Did it feel like you told that story.

Jo: Somewhat, somewhat cathartic, but I, my main concern with the book was to see whether or not I actually was able to get across the idea of different alternatives for addiction. Like perhaps we in Western culture are not treating addiction as best we could and if, and could there be other ways to look at it. So that was my main concern to see if I got that [00:09:00] across properly, and hopefully I did.

Mark: Mm-hmm. And what other kinds of research did you have to do for this?

Jo: Well, I read a lot about dyscalculia. I got in touch with people who work in the field, and I actually sent the book to a couple of people who work in the field, want a PhD and others who have the Dyscalculia network and ask them to read the book to see if I got things correct. With some of the other parts and other research.

I did a lot of research a number of years ago in preparing for this just reading about other cultures, reading lots of books, talking and also talking to people from other cultures. So that’s where it came from.

Mark: What about his decline into the drug addiction and things that come, I mean, we know why by the end, but did you have to do research to, ’cause it was really well [00:10:00] done the way he slowly declined throughout the book.

Jo: Well, I’m a nurse by profession and we had to do mental health nursing as well. So we had to study a lot and go on psychiatric wards and things like that. So. I had some exposure in that regard and so I was able to bring that in. And I also read and reread Stephen King’s book The Shining, to see how he had portrayed that madness and the slow decline.

But I would say most of it came from clinical experience in studying from nursing.

Mark: Okay, so do you consider yourself an outliner or a plotter?

Jo: I’m definitely a plotter. I plot and I outline and I am not good at being a cancer. I tried to be a pan when [00:11:00] I, I tried to be a pants when I first started and I sat down. I thought, okay, I am gonna write. Write this book. And I had like a couple of main plot points and it was just a huge mess.

So I found that I really need to outline it. I outline down to every single chapter and what I’m going to do and pretty much with each chapter. And then as I’m going let that flow a little bit, a couple of times I think I overdo it because a couple of times my characters have said, let me do the talking.

But for the most part, I do need to outline. Otherwise I’m just all over the place.

Mark: Do you also build a character? Outline, like you ask and interview questions and then decide who they are based on some of those answers.

Jo: I, I have pages for each character, where I. Go through, not only their physical characteristics, but their flaws, their wants, their needs, their strengths, [00:12:00] and even where they want to work or might work. And all of their family members and I, and family relationships and other relationships. So I do extensive interviews with my characters.

Mark: how long did it take to create this book, even from idea, ’cause that sounds like a lot for outlining. Does the outline process take you a long time and then the writing is shorter because it’s so you already know everybody.

Jo: With this book, it was Revision C, campus of Shadows was the first book that I wrote. And, I worked on it for about 10 years. It was probably eight years and then I put it aside. And, wrote terminal lucidity, but there were many layers of revision. Because I needed to learn the craft of writing. I needed to learn all of the things that have to be woven into plot and characterization. And it, it took a lot of time.

Mark: Can you think of any [00:13:00] things that changed as you learned the craft? Things that you saw from 10 years ago if you looked at that draft and you saw, oh, I didn’t do this very well, and now because you’ve learned you can you under you do better.

Jo: I had no plot in the beginning. I had a theme and I had almost no plot, so I needed to work that out and I needed to learn how particularly the main character moves through the story making decisions and how that each decision creates the next scenario, be it good or bad. So that took a while.

And then how all the different components with all the characters have to come together at each main plot point. There was still a little a learning curve there.

Mark: Okay.

Jo: But I, from what I’m told, that’s average, like I’ve heard that it’s average of three books in 10 years before you get out there and [00:14:00] in the world.

Mark: Yeah, I would agree. I think I, I hear that story a lot with the podcast of writers who the first book took anywhere, it could be anywhere from eight to 10 years or even longer. And myself included, take a really long time with my first book which never amounted to anything. It just kind of sits there now because, same thing, learning the craft and then book two and book three and book four.

Now they get faster and faster and you put out more and more because it’s, once you’ve learned the craft and you’ve learned the process, it gets a lot easier. You had an interesting rule in the book with no contractions. I’m curious where that came from.

Jo: Well, I wanted to be able to differentiate as Dave’s mind became infiltrated by Ivan’s spirit, I wanted the reader to be able to differentiate who was talking because you had Dave’s spoken word, then Dave’s thoughts. Then you have [00:15:00] when Ivan is controlling Dave’s thoughts and you have, when Ivan is controlling everything about Dave.

And his thoughts, his words and the words are Ivan’s coming out of Dave’s mouth? So that was the thing that I came up with that how can I have that differentiation so the reader realizes who it is speaking in this moment.

Mark: Did that come later, or was that early on?

Jo: It was early on ’cause I figured I have to have something in there and I think it helped somewhat for the narrator as well. Because there are lots of different voices for the narrator to portray there.

Mark: Yeah. At its core, what kind of story would you say this is? What challenge did it present to you as a writer?

Jo: At its core, I would say overall it’s a thriller, but that it’s psychological [00:16:00] horror as well, which I was horrified when I found out that I was writing horror, because it’s not really it’s like I think of horror as the blood and guts type things of splatter punk kind of horror and as a nurse, I spent my years working in ICU putting people back together from those kinds of things.

So, but I think that I, in getting into the mental aspects. Of it and how things affect our psyche that’s the psychological horror part of it.

Mark: And what were some of the challenges you faced in writing this book?

Jo: Well, first of all, just learning the craft was, was a big one. But then also just making sure that I portray it so that it seems realistic. Because it’s not easy to get into someone else’s head and create a mental demise [00:17:00] that someone can follow. And the other challenge for me was that doing it from a male point of view, because males think differently from females and they have a different vernacular. So I had to change a lot of my wording in my critique group. They’re saying, no, that sounds too much like a girl. You have to change that up. So, so I, I had to learn that too.

Mark: Okay. I would have to compliment you on that. It was very well done. I was thinking that as I read it too. Not that it was just well done from the, from the idea of, wow, this is really coming to life. Like, I can imagine that gets happening just like this. There was nothing that pulled me out of the story, which can happen sometimes. It was very well done that way.

Jo: so thank you.

Mark: So when a reader finishes the book and puts it down, what are you hoping they’re gonna feel or what they’re gonna be thinking about.

Jo: I hope people [00:18:00] think about the potential of looking at addiction differently, and I hope some people in the addiction community consider that maybe there are other things that we could look at and things that we could do because there is a very high instance of recurrence once, when people go into rehab or I’m trying to think of the term for it, but you know, it, it, they can slip and go back to their old ways and whatever it may be, whether it’s alcohol or drugs. So I hope people think, oh, maybe there are other things that we could look at.

Mark: Have you thought about David after this book? ’cause I don’t want to get spoilers to how it ends, but let’s assume, or let’s pretend we don’t know how it ends inside. Do you think about him now because like of the way it ends, do you think oh, I wonder if he did this or I wonder if he ended up that way?

Jo: [00:19:00] I have actually been too busy to think about that

Mark: Okay. Fair.

Jo: At the after because the launch was about a month ago. So just trying to get the book out, the best that I could, I haven’t really thought about that much. I do have left things open so that it at some time in the future I could talk to Dave again and explore what he’s doing and see if there’s something else we might bring back.

Mark: Okay. Yeah I know I really enjoyed a book when I put it down and, and I’m thinking like that ’cause I was already, as soon as I stopped reading it, I was thinking about, I wonder what happened to him after all this. What’s, where’s the epilogue? Or in this guy, I guess it could be a book too. But I think about that stuff a lot with characters.

I really enjoyed that are, that came to life that much. Did you find when you were writing him that it was difficult to send him in that direction? ‘Cause I can imagine as you’re writing it, you have to almost be frustrated yourself even though [00:20:00] you’re telling his story and you’re the writer frustrated with the decisions he’s making.

’cause sometimes you’re like, oh, why would you do that? Just turn left instead of right. Like why? Why are you doing that? But he keeps doing it. And that’s the dissent that obviously you wanted to have happen and it was necessary for the story. But what was it like writing that? Did you find yourself just like, oh man this is hard to do ’cause I just, I just gotta, like, I’m beating this kid with a stick as the story goes on.

Jo: Well, I had to create those bad decisions, so I wanted to try to create bad decisions that would, that would lead him down that path and make sense, you know, have, have all of that make sense as a step by step demise and then also for him to be able to help himself at the end too.

Mark: Right. Okay. I get that’s the advantage to being an outliner is that I imagine this is how, like you see A to B, you know you have to get to B, and then you have to [00:21:00] figure out how to get him to B as opposed to a pants who will just be going along with it, putting their character through a bunch of crap to see where they get to right.

So I’ll touch on this question anyway, even though you kind of already answered it, but I kind of wanted to touch on it a little bit anyway. Zane was a really interesting character because I wasn’t even sure if he was also descending. I mean, I’m not gonna give this a spoiler as to the ending and stuff, but I wasn’t sure am I supposed to like him? I know he’s sending David in the wrong direction, but he’s just like this fun guy. And I’m curious did you aim for him to be neutral or are we supposed to be almost disliking him and seeing his corruption of David? Because it seems like he’s like a character who’s just he’s doing his thing and David’s following him around who wants to be like him and he’s just being him. Is that a bad guy? I don’t know.

Jo: Well in, in some people to apparent he might be a [00:22:00] bad guy, but to another student he’s a lot of fun. And I wanted to show that dichotomy between the two. How someone can be sometimes be a really good friend and sometimes, you know, be not be so self-serving that you’re getting in trouble because of all of it.

And also that I mean, saying’s a guy in university who’s having fun and he was a lot of fun to write because he goes so crazy. So, I wanted to portray that both sides of him and, carry him along sort of like a foil type character rather than an antagonist.

Mark: If you had the pass on some advice to a writer about how to create characters like this, how would you, ’cause I think this is to me, character is is the root of of all [00:23:00] story. I mean, it’s like plot versus character. Some people like plot driven stories, which is fine. I’m huge on character driven stories ’cause I just love that connection. What advice would you give to someone who was just who struggles with creating that kind of authenticity and making them feel real?

Jo: I think part of that is also just giving into your characters, letting them talk somewhat. But, I studied a lot about characters and types of characters. There’s, I wonder if I have that book here. There’s a thing called 45 Master Characters by a guy named Schmidt. I got it on the bookshelf there.

And that goes into detail about lots of different types of characters and gives examples. And so that was helpful to me in the beginning when I was trying to figure out, okay, how does each character fit into which role? Because they all have to tie [00:24:00] in. And so I would say if somebody’s really struggling with figuring out characters that that can, that can be helpful.

That book

Mark: Okay. 48 characters.

Jo: 45 Master

Mark: oh, I messed

Jo: By Schmidt pretty close.

Mark: Yeah. There might be, there might be three more in there somewhere. Okay. What advice would you give to someone who just published their first or second book?

Jo: Keep writing, just keep going because there are a lot of ups and downs in the business and highs and lows, and so just keep writing and I follow your favorite characters because if you like those characters, then they’re, they’ll be easier for you to write. And you can explore the different things that they bring out and possibly even put them in a series

Mark: Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, good advice. If you can pick [00:25:00] one thing that led to your success so far, what would it be?

Jo: Determination. And sticktoitiveness because there are, there are lots of ups and downs and there was 10 years of learning the craft. And it’s like, oh, is this ever gonna come to anything? Is it are my books ever going to get out there and in the world? And, and with all the layers of revision and revise and you go back to your critique group and they say, no, that’s not working. And you revise again and say, well, what about this? And then you revise again. So yeah, just have to hang in there.

Mark: When did you feel like campus, the shadows was ready after all this time? How did you know that was the moment that it was? Okay. I’m ready to send this up to the world now after all this time.

Jo: Well, I put it away and wrote terminal lucidity. And then when I went back I did a whole, another layer of revision [00:26:00] and at that point I was comfortable with it and felt like there wasn’t really a whole lot more that I could do. And actually at that point I cut out quite a bit of the first half of the book. Not quite several chapters, I guess, just to get to the low point more quickly. Because it was a lot about college life and all the different fun things in college life, but it wasn’t really moving the plot along as fast as it needed to.

Mark: Okay. So I have a question here from mark Philbin. He was my last guest on the show. So we have this pay it forward with the guest question. You’ll get to ask your question to the next guest. He asks, he wants to ask you, what is it about your main character you’re most afraid of, and how does it impact the way you plot your book?

Jo: What am I most afraid of with this character? I guess I was most afraid of not having not portraying [00:27:00] his decline so that it was understood by the reader.

Mark: Okay. And where can listeners find your book?

Jo: Well the books are all on Amazon. It’s on Amazon as an ebook as well as audiobook. And in Canada it’s in Indigo in Winnipeg, it’s in all of the win the Indigo Chapter stores. And I’m not sure about the rest of the country there or the rest of the Indigo stores, but I know that in Winnipeg, it’s in all of those stores. And it’s also on Cobo the audiobook. And the ebook are available on Cobo. And then you can find more about me at, so this is, this is the QR for the audiobook. And then this is, this is me, and you can find me on the socials at Joe Loveday.

Mark: Great. Sounds good. Thank you. I will link to all that in the show notes so people can just click in the show notes and go straight to those spots.

Jo: Okay. Well thank you.

Mark: Well, thank you [00:28:00] so much for your time. This has been great. I have really enjoyed learning more about this book.

Jo: Well, thank you so much, mark. I’ve really enjoyed talking about thriller books with you.

Mark: And if you have an extra minute after the show, we’re just gonna stick around for the after show, the Rapid Fire for our Patreon members.

Jo: Okay. Absolutely.

Mark: Thanks for listening and make sure you’re following the show so you don’t miss next week’s conversation with Andrew Warren. We dig into White Tiger and the challenges of returning to characters from Book one, how he built a villain who is both a physical threat and an intellectual one, including the scene where that villain fights while keeping a chess light game running in his head. If you want the part of the conversation that stays off the main episode, the Patreon After Show has it. The rapid fire questions we ask every guest in a few moments that are sometimes a little too honest. For the full cut, you’ll find the link in the show notes. [00:29:00]

TPP Episode 18 with M.M. Deluca

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 their craft research and real world experiences that power today’s most grouping stories. I’m your host, mark PJ Nado, and this is episode 18.

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 twists, characters, and moments that keep us turning the page. This week I’m joined by mm DeLuca, author of the Divorce Party. We talk about the challenges of juggling multiple points of view, balancing dark humor with psychological suspense, and how Las Vegas became the perfect backdrop for a story of broken friendships, buried secrets, and [00:01:00] reinvention.

Mark: Marjorie, welcome to this show. Thank you so much for being here today.

Marjorie: Hey, it’s great to be here, mark. Really great.

Mark: I’m excited to talk about your book today, the Divorce Party. If you’re looking at the screen, for those who are watching the video, there is the book there. Thank you for sending me a copy.

Marjorie: Oh, you’re welcome. I hope you enjoyed it.

Mark: Yes. Let’s get into, let’s get into it. Pitch me the book.

Marjorie: Okay. The divorce party is definitely a psychological suspense. I think Big Little Lies meets the Hangover with a dose of Lucy Foley’s, the guest list. And here’s the kind of slug line. Four women, one glamorous, raunchy, weekend. A deadly reunion. So 20 years ago, Savannah, Daisy and Zoe were inseparable until one fateful night tore their friendship apart. They haven’t spoken since. Now they’re leading [00:02:00] very different lives. When the women receive a mysterious invitation to the divorce party of the decade hosted by their former college Queen Bee Evie, a tough and manipulative woman, they’re intrigued, annoyed, and just desperate enough to show up.

But as the night spirals from wild to Wicked, it’s clear this isn’t just about Evie celebrating her newfound freedom because as old grudges resurface and dangerous secrets are revealed as they always are in psychological thrillers, it’s clear this isn’t just a celebration, it’s a trap. What begins as a glittering girls’ getaway quickly spirals into a nightmare of lies.

Black male and murder. And when the past comes crashing into the present, the women must decide, can they trust each other to survive? Or was this twisted friendship always due to end in blood and a dead body, [00:03:00] actually a few dead bodies?

Mark: Yes. Thank you for that pitch. So what inspired that story?

Marjorie: Well there I get inspired by various things and the first thing that came to my mind, I knew I wanted to, I had this image of a Vegas, a sort of a luxury Vegas suite , and a dead body lying on a beautiful bed. That was the first image that came to my mind. Also my husband and I, when he was teaching, we used to, in the summer, go to Vegas a lot.

We’d spend a few days there and then sometimes we’d drive off somewhere else. But I just found Vegas a fascinating place. It’s a place where you can really be whoever you wanna be, do whatever you wanna do, because it’s like, it’s not real. It’s a place of illusions, you know, [00:04:00] like where else can you see a fake statue of liberty and a fake Eiffel Tower and a fake Venetian, kind of canal.

It just fascinated me and I knew I had to set a novel in Vegas because I knew it so well that I knew it could be a really interesting and great setting for a girl’s weekend.

Mark: And where did the girls come from? Where did the idea for them and the chaos of that relationship come from?

Marjorie: is kind of interesting when you’re, when you are a writer, sometimes you have a lot of books that you start and you don’t finish for various reasons, and I’m really bad for starting a book and then kind of running out of interest and starting another. So I actually had a couple of characters from other books that I said, Hmm, I didn’t like that book, but I love this character.

So a couple of the characters actually come from other novels. So we’ve got [00:05:00] Daisy, who’s kind of a burned out substitute teacher who thinks she’s missed out on life and not based on me, but some of the things that Daisy does is based on some of my experiences as a teacher. And then we’ve got Savannah, who’s a Vegas showgirl, who was an ex toxicologist.

And then we’ve got, Zoe, who’s a pediatrician who seems to be living the kind of perfect life. And I think Zoe and Daisy were from different books that I started writing and I threw them all together. And they took on a life of their own once they got together they were wicked and basically drove the story.

And then Evie, who’s the kind of queen bee, I don’t know where she came from, but I knew I had to have a leader, one that was sufficiently ruthless and [00:06:00] hard-nosed, to kind of lead the pack. And so they came from various places

Mark: I love that you can take a character from another book that you didn’t even finish and then just pull it into this book. I love that idea of nothing ever has to be a waste, especially ‘

Marjorie: cause they never die.

Mark: to give up on a book.

Marjorie: that, you created that person and there they are kind of hanging around in your laptop in a file. The characters never die.

Mark: So when you create characters, is it an outline of their name and what they look like and who they are and the struggles and all those things? Or is it mostly in your head that you carried them over from the other book?

Marjorie: They’re in my head. But when I do start to develop the characters, I’m a screenwriter as well. I’ve, I’ve written a few scripts, none of which have been produced yet, but they’re, some are getting close. I take a lesson from screenwriters. I do a little bible like where [00:07:00] I actually find a picture of who I think this character looks like, and I create a little biography of them, of all their quirks and habits.

And I really develop them because I need to be able to see them in my head as well as on the page. And I use that to develop the characters. It really helps to have a visual of them.

Mark: Do you find when you’re writing, ’cause this book jumps all over, well, three of the four, do you find that you have to out that sheet and look at it again, just to remind yourself of who this voice is supposed to be before you move on to write that character? Or are you lucky enough to just have them in your head and it works to go from chapter to chapter like you do.

Marjorie: I would say, if you’re talking about the process of writing this book, this was the first time I had I think it’s the, it’s been a long time since I’ve written a multiple point of view novel. And this was a real challenge. And I would say it was, the process [00:08:00] was basically a controlled mess if you can call it that.

 what I do is I use a large notebook. Kind of like this. And, I keep track. Each chapter switches from one character to another, and I keep track of every chapter and what happens to that character so that I can look back and see, well, what happened? What did she do in that chapter?

Otherwise you would definitely lose the thread if you don’t do that. And we’re talking three points of view. It’s a juggling act to do that. And that was quite a major challenge. In the book we’re also talking about timelines too. Not only three points of view, but multiple timelines. So, I didn’t know I’d ever get this one finished, but I did finally.

Mark: yeah, that would’ve been quite a juggle even between who they were when they were younger, when you’re doing those flashbacks versus who they are in the future.

Marjorie: Yeah. [00:09:00] ’cause we look back at them when they’re college girls ’cause all of the characters come from tough backgrounds. Some of them single parent families mostly. And they basically had to claw their way into a pretty a good university. So they all go to University of San Diego, where they really don’t fit in. But, they managed to claw their way in there and survive in various ways. And

Mark: Yeah.

Marjorie: so it was the characters really took over. They were so distinct that once you get halfway through the book and you really get to know them, it becomes easier to keep track.

Mark: Mm-hmm. Yeah. At its core, what kind of story would you say this is, and what challenge did it represent to you as a writer?

Marjorie: When I started this story, it was supposed to be a more lighthearted [00:10:00] story, because I’d just written a string of really dark psychological suspense stories. My last book, the night side was very dark and had sort of a paranormal edge to it. So I wanted to write something more kind of fun and raunchy and I guess fast moving.

But really it is a story about, can you leave your past behind and recreate yourself? Can you really, forget about that past, can you really become someone different or do those secrets and that person that you were always have to haunt you. So there is a kind of, a deeper side to it, but I wanted it to be fun and I wanted to have fun writing it, which I did. And pull myself out of the dark side, which I’d been in for quite a while with my other books.

Mark: Yeah. I love that you said that you use the Hangover as a comparative because of how like goofy and fun the Hangover is, but then [00:11:00] it’s still a pretty serious dark book at, its at the core premise, but there’s still a lot of like fun. Yeah. It’s a great mix of things

Marjorie: I wanted a bit of humor. I, one of my favorite writers is Leanne Morty. I love the way that she has some pretty dark themes in her book, but she still manages to have an undercurrent of humor. And that’s why I really enjoy her books and that’s what I wanted to do with this because even though I’ve written some very serious dark suspense stories, I can’t resist a bit of humor.

And I felt that a couple of the girls were, especially Daisy, I think more humor. There’s sort of a, a dark humor to them and, I really enjoyed that.

Mark: And with this like dark humor and this like the dark kind of psychological side, how do you balance giving them likability as you’re writing it to make sure that the reader’s not disliking all of these characters? Because they do [00:12:00] have, they do have all have hard stories.

Marjorie: Yeah, I know. And I, I was looking at a couple of the reviews and said, I don’t like any of these women, but, I still like the story. I don’t know about, I honestly don’t think about likability that much. I mean, I try to make them more likable. They’re really just trying to survive.

Mark: Mm-hmm.

Marjorie: And certainly Evie, the character, you don’t really get to hear anything from her side.

But there are some serious issues related to her that you would feel sorry for her. I think, but likability, you know what, what do I remember one editor said to me. This character is kind of unlikable. Can’t you get her to even pet a horse or something? There was a scene where she’s with a horse.

Can’t you get her to pet a horse or make her a little bit more likable, that way? Or maybe, you know, save, what is it? Save the cat, have them, uh, pick up [00:13:00] a, a stray animal. I wasn’t thinking about likability. I mean, I like them, but, it’s hard to do that without it seeming fake. And, I hope that I’d made them likable by making them understandable. You know, they’re, they’ve got weaknesses and, that should make them likable.

Mark: Yeah. I think as the story goes on and you start, you start to feel empathy for, ’cause it takes a while to reveal. To get the reveal on like what happened to them and why they are, because that was the setup. So, but as it goes on, you definitely have a sense of empathy for, oh wow, they’ve actually been through these, you know, these terrible things. And even

Marjorie: Threw Helen back.

Mark: their life is almost a result of that fateful day. Like every one of the

Marjorie: Yeah,

Mark: and played, played with each other is like that your life is basically because of that moment and it’s, yeah. it’s amazing that it all comes back to that.

Marjorie: Yeah. I feel, my stories are more character driven than some of the other psychological [00:14:00] thrillers out there. And sometimes people might say, well, that it’s, that makes it more of a slow burn. But I honestly can’t write something that’s simply plot driven. I can’t, I have to really develop the characters. Otherwise, to me, the stories just a string of events.

Mark: Yeah, that’s, it is tough to balance that especially in psychological, I mean, I like this low burn concept of psychological because we need to get to know the characters in order to understand the psychological side.

But even when I’m writing, I do battle that myself because I think about whether or not the pace is going fast enough and it’s like, oh, I need you to, to meet this character. I need you to understand that she’s this way because of this, you know, is now the right time. And it’s always that balance.

Marjorie: Yeah. You do have to balance that. Yeah. And you don’t wanna lose the reader in a kind of big character sketch or something. You want to keep them reading. So it is definitely a balancing act.

Mark: And when people,

Marjorie: my mug. Divorce party mug.[00:15:00]

Mark: okay, well played.

Marjorie: Yeah.

Mark: When readers finish the book, what do you hope they’re thinking about or feeling?

Marjorie: Well, the ending is pretty the ending starts to move quite fast. The, what happens? I, I expect them to kind of sit back and go, holy, whatever. What happened just there?

Mark: Yeah.

Marjorie: it was a bloodbath or something. Yeah, I mean, I hope that they maybe would go back and say, wow, I didn’t see that coming. I think maybe you might have to reread some of it and see where that was all coming from.

The ending was a challenge to write to get it to work. I mean, I hope that readers enjoy the setting and think, wow, that was a fun fast compelling read [00:16:00] that, I met these really different kind of characters and I really enjoyed it.

Mark: Would you say you’re a discovery writer or an outliner?

Marjorie: Oh, you mean like a, a pants or a

Mark: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I recently heard the term discovery writer, ’cause

Marjorie: No, I was wondering what is that a discovery writer?

Mark: I stole it and, no one’s gonna

Marjorie: it like a nicer way of

Mark: the same as a pants? Yeah. It’s just a nice way of saying a pants. Yeah.

Marjorie: Yeah, I think at heart I’m a pants, but I’ve learned to control that urge to start writing before planning, because as I said, I’ve started a lot of books that haven’t been finished simply because I hadn’t mapped it out. And now I’ve written enough scripts and screenplays to understand that you cannot write a [00:17:00] screenplay without mapping out the beats.

And that’s really helped me plan my novels. That being said, I don’t write a really detailed outline. I just have a sort of loose outline. I know the ending. I have to know the ending. And then I keep track in a notebook of what’s happening in each chapter because I think you, if you outline it too much for me, I like to

Discover maybe there are new ways that you could go, and if you kind of hem yourself in too much, you lose that ability to go in another direction. But I think you always need to have the end point in mind because you have to know where you’re going. Otherwise, you’re all over the place.

Mark: Yeah. As few zigzags when you go from A to to Z as you can, I. When you mentioned it was tricky for the ending,

Marjorie: Mm-hmm.

Mark: [00:18:00] did you find that you had to go back and rewrite the setup to get it to work out in the end?

Marjorie: Yes. The way I write I don’t know how to describe it, but I could draw it. I start writing and I get to the middle, and I always, every day when I sit down, I loop back to see what I’ve written and often rewrite that. That’s why in my final draft, often the beginning’s fabulous and the ending’s kind of a bit rough.

So I’m constantly looping back. And so when I get to the middle or a bit further along, and I don’t loop back to the beginning, but I loop back a few chapters because as you said, especially when you’ve got three characters, you have to make sure everything’s fitting into place. Otherwise it doesn’t work.

So when I got to the end wrote what I wanted as the ending and then looked at it and said, well, that doesn’t make sense because this person’s here, that person’s there and there’s absolutely no [00:19:00] reason why this would’ve happened. There has to be a lead up and a justification for a big, kind of epic ending.

It has to make sense. It has to work. You have to prepare the characters for it. So yes, I constantly looping back many times and especially with this book, probably it was one of the books that I had the most trouble with that I had to go back and rewrite and actually move things around a lot.

My other books have been mostly one point of view, one character point of view, but this one was a big challenge.

Mark: Hmm.

Marjorie: I actually started another one that was the same thing, three character point of view, but that one I haven’t finished, yet. But, I’m constantly rewriting and reconfiguring the chapters in the story.

Mark: Do you sit down for a few hours to [00:20:00] do that a couple of chapters might take you, what, 15 minutes to kind of get back into the character or something, and then you carry on from there. Do you just write for two or three hours until you can’t handle writing

Marjorie: I write every morning I’m in my office every morning from probably nine till one. That’s when I do my most of my writing. Then I do a little bit in the evening, sometimes afternoons. I never write, I go out, do stuff. I don’t wanna become like a lump sitting at the desk, you know, I need to go to the gym or go walk a walk for a walk or something.

And besides walking really helps you figure out, if I’ve got a difficult plot twist that I have to manage, I find that going out for a walk really helps figure it out. I was actually reading one of my favorite writers, Lisa Jewel, does that. She said a lot of her writing is done when she’s out walking.

And it’s true. You’ve got something that you, you’re not sure you don’t have a [00:21:00] good idea for. You go out for a walk and ping it suddenly kind of pops into your head.

So I sit down and I write, you have to get serious about it. If you’re gonna. Write multiple books. You have to sit down for prolonged periods of time and not get distracted by social media or, you know, going on the internet,

Mark: Difficult to do these

Marjorie: me sometimes.Yeah.

Mark: Yeah. So you, this is your fifth book, right? Your fifth published book.

Marjorie: It’s, let me think. Yes. Fifth traditionally published book, I published, self-published some books before,

In the, in my earlier days as a writer. So I think this is maybe my 10th book that I’ve written, but I’ve actually got other complete manuscripts that I haven’t sold yet.

Mark: Okay. [00:22:00] And is there anything that you have learned writing this book, either about yourself or about your process that’s unique to this book?

Marjorie: that’s unique to this book. Yes, that I can actually handle multiple points of view and I really like it. The previous books I’d written more from, just one point of view and sometimes when you are writing those kind of books, especially if it’s in the first person, which a couple of my books have been, the Savage Instinct was one, it’s a historical suspense.

It’s very draining to write a book from one point of view in the first person. Because you are almost becoming the character and it really drains you. And by the end of the book you’re like, I’m sick of this person. I wish I could think from somebody else’s point of view. So I found that being able to jump from one character to another was really refreshing and gave me a kind of [00:23:00] reprieve from the other characters.

So I really enjoyed that. But it does present its own set of difficulties, in kind of making sure that they are developed. They’re all unique because you don’t want them all to have the same voice, so you have to really concentrate on that. So that was probably the main thing I found.

Mark: That’s cool. Does that make you wanna write more multiple POV books? Maybe less? Well, I guess there’s three, right? In this one. Does it make you wanna do a two or go back to one?

Marjorie: Not really. No. I’m enjoying sort of multiple points of view. I’m at a bit of a crossroads right now, actually because I could write another one in the vein of the divorce party. But I also really love historical fiction and I loved writing my book, the Savage Instinct, which was [00:24:00] based, I love research and I really enjoyed the research for writing the Savage Instinct.

So I’m kind of wondering which way to go now. I’m kind of at a crossroads, wondering which direction to take. I mean, not that there wasn’t research for the divorce party, there was, but it was a different kind of research researching, the growing trend of divorce parties in Las Vegas and how they have unique cocktails and unique party games and, playlists.

Slogans for invitations was a lot of fun. In fact, it’s a real eyeopener. And actually in the book, I, um, separate each section. I think the first section I’ve got the invitation and I’ve got all these slogans for divorce party in invitations like I do. I did, I’m done the champagne. I got back my last [00:25:00] name.

Then I’ve got playlists, topped by, I Will Survive by Gloria Gainor, which I think. Would be the theme song for this book ’cause it’s about survival. And then the last part is divorce party cocktails, which actually tried out a few. The deadbeat time robber, the Screw, my Ex Driver and all that. So I actually had a lot of fun doing that. It was a different kind of research, not quite so serious

Mark: does that come up in Vegas a lot? Those kinds of parties?

Marjorie: Oh yeah, it’s actually a massive trend along with bachelor and bachelorette parties and weddings. Divorce parties are massive there now. And that’s actually another, as I was reading, about divorce parties, I hadn’t realized how big a trend it was and it sort of confirmed the idea in my mind to go ahead and do that.

Mark: Yeah.

Marjorie: [00:26:00] So

Mark: a lot about divorce parties.

Marjorie: Yes, I know. And the way people are trying to see them as not really the ending of something, but a new beginning apparently, and celebrating the new beginning rather than kind of wallowing in misery about the the ending of a, of a relationship. So I hope, I know, a few of the reviews have said, I’ve just gone through a divorce and this really was interesting to me that, I really enjoyed reading it.

It poke poked me up a bit, got my spirits up. Hopefully their, their experience though wasn’t as deadly as this one. But

Mark: Especially the Endy. Yeah.

Marjorie: yes. Yeah. Not the way to get rid of your ex, but I don’t wanna give anything away.

Mark: Yeah. Yeah. I try not to spoil it, but yeah.

Marjorie: Yeah, yeah.

Mark: What advice would you give someone who just published their [00:27:00] first or second novel?

Marjorie: What advice would I give them and it, it really depends if they’ve published it traditionally or self-published I guess. But the main advice I would give someone is be prepared to do a lot of your own publicity. Unless you’re one of the top I guess one or 2% of writers with big publishers you’re gonna have to do most of the publicity yourself.

You will get some help from the publisher get used to waiting for responses. It’s a long waiting game. And just because you published two novels doesn’t mean the third is guaranteed publication. In fact, the second and third novels are even more difficult because I’d say, publishing houses today definitely look at the sales of the previous books, when they’re trying to decide [00:28:00] whether to publish another one of your books.

Mark: Yeah,

Marjorie: It’s a very difficult landscape now, the publishing industry.

Mark: hearing George Martin talk about how his career, he thought his career was about over and it really was tanking until he released the Game of Thrones, and even that was years later that it took off. That’s kind of blew up his career

Marjorie: Yeah. I mean, don’t give up. You’ve gotta really push on. I mean, I, there have been times when I thought that’s it. I’m never gonna get another book published. And I’ve had agents, I’ve actually had three different agents. And most times I’ve parted amicably with them. In fact, in all times I’ve pod amicably with them.

But just if you have an agent and then suddenly you don’t, and you find yourself that you’re on your own, that’s not the end of things. Writers can sell their own books.

Mark: hmm.

Marjorie: Maybe not with one of the Big four, or I [00:29:00] don’t know how many it is now. Big five, big three or four publishers, you can’t sell to them.

They require you to have an agent. But there are many really good publishing houses out there that will accept submissions from un agented writers. They’re more interested in the quality of the work and they’re very good, publishing houses. So I would say, you can do it yourself. You’ve just gotta be really, persistent and don’t give up and have a really thick skin because you’re gonna get people that give you one star reviews and say, your book is a piece of crap.

You know, and nobody should read it. But then you’re gonna get those readers that send you a email. I just got one last week saying, wow, I just finished your book. What a wild ride that was. I loved it. I’m gonna look at some of your other books and that’s kind of what makes you keep going on.

Mark: Yeah.

Marjorie: so it [00:30:00] is a, a very tough industry out there and you’ve gotta get lots of reviews and lots of sales and have a presence on social media, but that can take a lot of time up

Mark: Yeah.

Marjorie: and nobody really knows what it takes to sell books. I mean, yes, you can do all the Instagram posts you want, but I don’t think anybody can pin down what makes a book sell,

Mark: No.

Marjorie: persistence. I if, if we knew we’d be doing it. And there are plenty of people that would like to sell you.

Mark: be a 1%.

Marjorie: Yeah, well there are plenty of people that would like to sell you. I get lots of emails, mostly scammers, saying , I saw your book and I really think I can take it to the next level.

And would you like to be part of my publicity program? So many of those, I just send them to spam.

Mark: [00:31:00] yeah. What made you shift from self-publishing? You said you started to traditional.

Marjorie: Well, I self-published in the earlier days of self-publishing, so I guess my first book was, came out in 2013. It was a young adult sci-fi trilogy, which actually is still selling today. I, I’m surprised. And I, I tried to sell it to a publisher and it was at the time that Hunger Games had come out and they said, oh, we don’t need any more young adult dystopian books.

So I didn’t have any luck with it, but I self-published it and it actually did really well. And I’d actually, I’ve actually adapted it into a series which got some interest from Netflix at one point. So I still have hopes for that. But it was in the earlier days when it was easier to sell books as a self-published author.

Now the market is so crowded, for self-publishing that I think it’s [00:32:00] much more difficult. But after that one and then I published, a sort of historical kind of epic and then a romantic suspense I was doing, it was taking up too much time trying to publicize it, and it was costing me a lot of money to publicize it.

And I thought, I really want some recognition from my books, from a traditional publisher. And that’s when I decided to send, I had a book called The Savage Instinct, and then another one, which became The Secret Sister. And it was just luck that there used to be a thing on Twitter called Pit Mad. I don’t know whether you’ve ever heard of it.

Mark: no.

Marjorie: It was a pitching thing on, on Twitter when Twitter was Twitter and you basically pitched your book in one line and editors and [00:33:00] agents were watching. It happened maybe two or three times a year, and it was a big deal. So I pitched the Secret Sister on at Pit Mad and I thought, well, I might as well, I’d sent it to a bunch of agents and been turned down.

And so I pitched it and an editor liked it, an editor of a large independent publisher in the uk. And I thought it was a scam, but it turned out she was an editor, a really good editor, and they gave me a two book deal out of that.

Mark: Awesome.

Marjorie: It was purely luck and pitching it at the right place and the right time.

That got me into being traditionally published. The same thing with the Savage Instinct. I sent it to agents didn’t have a lot of luck, and then I entered it for something called the Launchpad, which is a very, very good contest. I [00:34:00] can’t, I really recommend it to people who are trying to get exposure for their books.

The launchpad is primarily for screenwriters, but they run once a year a manuscript contest because film producers are always looking for content. So I entered the manuscript contest and I got shortlisted to the top. I think 25. And I thought that’s it. I’m not gonna get anything out of this. But an editor from a small US publisher contacted me and said, I’m interested in your book.

We’d like to publish it. So there are many different ways to get published other than going through an agent, but you just have to know which are the reputable ones. ’cause there are many scammers out there who’d like to tell you that they can publish your book, but often you’re left sitting there with [00:35:00] $10,000 worth of books that you’ve paid for and now you have to sell ’em.

Mark: Yeah.

Marjorie: so you just have to know which are the right ones to enter contests and that kind of thing. So once the Secret Sister came out and did quite very well, actually. Then it became easier to get books published by publishing houses.

Mark: Oh, good for you. Being persistent in finding those little spots so I have a question from TR Hendricks, who was my last guest. We have like a move the question forward segment.

Marjorie: Oh,

Mark: question for you was, to your knowledge, which matrimonial tradition globally do you think the most peculiar?

Marjorie: matrimonial.

Mark: He heard that your book was the divorce party, so

Marjorie: Oh,

Mark: the question he came up with.

Marjorie: oh my goodness. Peculiar, I wish you’d prepared me for this one.

Mark: Yeah.[00:36:00]

Yeah, that’s no problem. That’s not an easy question.

Marjorie: No it isn’t. I wouldn’t say it’s peculiar, but I went to, a wedding a couple of years ago that was basically a Celtic themed wedding. And, it’s not a peculiar tradition, I thought it was actually a lovely tradition. But they, held a kind of a, they had like a, a braided rope and they each held the bride and groom each held one side of it and sort of wrapped it around this, I don’t know what it was, wrapped it around the table, I think.

I’m not sure what they were doing, but they went round and round wrapping this, braided rope. I guess it was a symbol of their kind of being tied together in mamo or something. I think, I thought that was kind of a charming, tradition. I guess the another tradition, which I find not strange, but a [00:37:00] little kind of outdated, there’s a tradition here where I live in Canada, and I don’t know whether it’s a tradition elsewhere, but at the wedding, the bride is supposed to wear a blue garter, and after the reception, the, the husband takes the garter off her leg.

Like she, it’s she, she puts her leg up on a stool and the husband is supposed to take the gutter off with his teeth, and then all the unmarried men kind of line up. Behind her and the groom flings the garter into the crowd. And I guess the man that catches it is the one that’s gonna get married next. I found, I always found that kind of a really weird and a little bit offensive actually.

I guess it’s the male equivalent of the bride throwing the bouquet.

Mark: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I didn’t know [00:38:00] that was a Canadian tradition.

Marjorie: Yeah. Is it, I don’t know. Is it done somewhere else? I’m not aware that it’s maybe it’s just a Manitoba tradition, but I’ve been to many weddings where that happened. In fact, at my own wedding I was forced to wear the blue garter.

Mark: yeah. Oh no, I definitely knew it was like, we do it here, I’m Canadian as well, so we also, I’ve definitely seen it, but I thought it was just like a almost American thing. Then we just kind of partook in the same thing. I didn’t realize it was more exclusive to Canada. That’s interesting.

Okay, cool. So maybe a bit of a peculiar Canadian tradition we have going on. So last question for the main show, where can listeners find your books?

Marjorie: It’s basically on all the main online sites. Amazon indigo Chapters, Cobo, apple, barn and Noble. If they go to my [00:39:00] website, it shows where to get the book. It’s not actually in bookstores, but you can still get a paperback. This publisher doesn’t put the book in bookstores. I guess they’re more digital first, but you can get a paperback if you want it. So it’s all a major online suppliers.

Mark: I will link that in the show notes. Well, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. This has been a lot of fun learning all about this book and your process. If you don’t mind sticking around for a few minutes, we’re gonna go to the to the after show with the rapid fire for our Patreon members.

Thanks for listening and make sure you’re following the show so you don’t miss episode 19 with Mark Philbin, author of Kill Them All. We talk about the puzzle like structure behind his 12 city murders spree, the mind games that drive his characters and how he builds tension through patterns, logic, and chaos.

Want to go deeper? You can get early access bonus content, and the after show with [00:40:00] rapid fire questions. Plus the chance to ask future guests your own questions. Over on Patreon. The links in the show notes.

TPP Episode 16 with Maria Frankland

Mark: [00:00:00] 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 am your host, mark p Jay Nadal, and this is episode 16.

Whether you’re writing thrillers or can’t get enough of reading them, this show takes you inside the minds of authors, behind the twists, characters, and moments that keep us turning the page. This week I’m joined by Maria Franklin, a psychological thriller author who writes with relentless discipline, sometimes hitting 5,000 words a day, and draws inspiration from everyday moments to create tense, emotionally charged stories.

We talk about balancing speed with depth, finding inspiration in [00:01:00] unexpected places, and how a Monday morning on a train platform sparked her latest novel.

Mark: Maria, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for being here today.

Maria: Thank you for inviting me. It’s great to be here.

Mark: I have your book with me. I don’t like Mondays and it is Monday, but I like this Monday ’cause I get to talk to you, which is great. We’re gonna start right with the pitch. Let’s get into it.

Maria: Right. Okay. So I don’t like Mondays is a claustrophobic psychological thriller, and it’s about a woman who wakes from a coma after being rescued from a train track. She has no clue about how she came to be in the path of a train. And she doesn recognize any of the faces around her hospital bed. The faces that proclaimed to be her husband and her two sons.

In fact, the memory of the last 10 years of her life seems to have been wiped away entirely. All she has to rely [00:02:00] on are what her visitors around her bed are telling her that the problem is she doesn’t know who of them she can rely on. She doesn’t know who of them she can trust, and she feels there’s at least one family member who knows more about what’s happened to her that fateful Monday morning than the letting on. So yeah, that’s, that’s the book in a nutshell.

Mark: Great. Thank you. You said claustrophobic psychological. Can you explain what does that claustrophobic mean in this case?

Maria: Well, a lot of it’s set within so the character’s almost like trapped inside herself because she’s kind of lost who she is. So a lot of it is her thinking to herself. But the story itself is quite claustrophobic in that it’s set in the confines of her hospital room, which just adds to that kind of closed in feeling that she has about her situation.

Mark: Yeah, and what sparked the idea for this book?

Maria: Well, I was just standing bored waiting for a train. [00:03:00] I live in Yorkshire in England, waiting for a train down to, London for a conference one Monday morning, and then it hit me, but the idea hit me, not the train.

Mark: That’s good. You weren’t a victim of the same situation.

Maria: Yeah.

Mark: So how do and what idea hits you? If I, what would happen if I got pushed in front of the train right now? Is that what. How’d that

Maria: It was just such a th throne of people there. It was kind of, you know, everyone was surging forward as the train approached, and I kind of thought it would be so easy for somebody to fall onto that track. You know, everybody’s going over the safety line. Everyone’s like pushing and jostling each other and it’d be so easy ’cause my, my mind is terrible being a psych solo officer. You know, I’m always imagining the worst that people could say when I’m like, you know, if somebody wanted to push somebody in the that train, I could get away with it. There’s that many people here. So the kind, the idea just kind of snowballed from that.

Mark: Okay. [00:04:00] And how does that, how did that snowball work for this book? Do you outline your books or do you just write them from that basic idea that you just talked about?

Maria: I do do some outlining, so all my books start with the kind of the seed of an idea like I’ve just described. And then I’ll get to know my characters a little bit. And then I’ll, I’ll sort of flesh out a very basic outline. So really when I start, I might know the twist. If I’m lucky I might know the ending if I’m lucky.

And I might know some of the pull points I’ll hit along the way. But I’m not one of these who sort of says Right, what’s going to happen in chapter one, or what’s gonna happen in chapter two? It kind of, yeah, I’ve, it’s a very basic outline and I find that more exciting as a writer because I set off not really knowing how things are going to unfold, so it makes it more interesting for me. As, as I, as I write, rather than, you know, having it all mapped out in time for me. ’cause characters, they, they just go off on their own tangents. They do their own thing [00:05:00] anyway. So yeah, I don’t try to box it all in before I start.

Mark: Do you find the editing process more challenging? I guess we could speak specifically to this book with that approach. The, the two sides I hear with kind of jumping into the stories that you would end up editing more later. Some people say they don’t, some do, and then the outline often edits a little bit less because they have such an idea of, where they were going from the beginning.

Maria: Yeah. It’s an interesting question that I think with this being my 22nd book, I’ve outlined, sorry, I’ve honed my process quite a lot of, you know, in previous books. And I kind of, I’ve, I’m very aware of my own writing style and, my own process. So, yes, there is a lot of editing to do, but it’s not horrendous.

So it’s kind of, I do my rough first draft, and then I go back and do my second draft. I go from beginning to end every time, so it’s not like I’m jumping about all over the place, [00:06:00] which I would find very difficult if I was having to shift things about. It’s quite a linear process, which is easy, but easier.

So I’d say I go through about four quite detailed drafts before I’m anywhere near, you know, where I could send it to my first reader. So that usually takes me a couple of months to get to that stage.

Mark: Well, so it’s a couple of moments from the idea to, wow, that’s that’s still very fast. A couple of months to write a whole. Looking, have it ready.

Maria: Well, I usually have the ideas germinating for a while. So at the moment I’ve got about four books that are all, you know, looping around in my head, which will be written over the next year or two. So the do germinate in my mind for a while first. So I wouldn’t say it’s from idea to first reader. It’s from where I’m, where I’ve finished doing my little bit of plotting, to where it’s ready for the first reader. It’s about two months, and then a further couple of months before it’s ready to go out into [00:07:00] the world. But my first book took me six years to write, so luckily I’ve got faster, but it’s, you know, it’s been a real learning process and it’s only sort of the last few books where I’m, I’ve really nailed it down. I sort of, I seem to be getting faster and faster at being able to produce my, my work i’m full-time at, well, so.

Mark: yeah. When you wrote this book, how was your daily process? Do you sit down for three, four hours at a time or do you have like a word count goal every day?

Maria: A bit of both really. So when I’m at first draft stage, it is more of a word count goal. So if I do 5,000 words in a day, I’m really, really delighted with that. So. But I’m, I’m really disciplined. I have to be. ’cause if I don’t write, I don’t earn a living.

Mark: Yeah. Okay.

Maria: At least not, you know, this is my job. So I, I treat it as a job and I’m, I’m at my desk. I wouldn’t say I’m here at nine o’clock every single [00:08:00] morning, bang on, because I’m self-employed so it’s lovely to have flexibility. But I’m, I’m at my desk every morning ’cause that’s when I’m most creative. That’s when I’ve got the most energy. So I tend to write in blocks of about 45 minutes and I set a timer and then I have a break.

I walk away from my desk and I might take the dog out or go make a drink or something. And then I come back and I have another 45 minutes, but I can write about a thousand and words in 45 minutes when I’m first drafting. So that’s only five blocks of that in a day. And I’ve got my 5,000 words. I’m not saying the brilliant words at the first draft stage ’cause I’m really just banging them out.

But once I get to second draft stage, it’s more that I’m trying to spend about four hours. A day then, again with lots of breaks, but you know, it’s a different process when you’re second drafting ’cause it’s, uh, well, you’re not just bashing the words out. You’re not just, you know, getting the story down.

You, you’re actually, that’s when the writing skill really comes in when you’re [00:09:00] doing the second draft. So. Yeah. So I’d say, yeah, my, my, my writing day is earlier in the day I am writing, I’m working on my booking progress no matter what stage it’s at. And then later in the day, like a lot of writers, that’s when I’m doing my business side of things and admin and everything.

So it’s, it’s absolutely full time, but I feel really lucky to be doing this.

Mark: That’s awesome. 5,000 words a day. That’s a new goal for me. Shoot. For, I do not get what?

Maria: I.

Mark: Okay, I’ll try and make up for those words in the weekend. 5,000. That’s impressive. Wow. Well, good for you. Well, 22 books. Has there anything that has changed? I mean, other than the, obviously book one is book one for everybody, but let’s say like between like book five for book 10 and 15 now 22, has any of the process changed for you or have you just honed this in and you’re like, yeah, this works for me this is how I do it.

Maria: Yeah, I’ve, I’ve hone it indefinitely, but I’m still [00:10:00] like a lot of writers as I’m doing, especially my first draft, I’m typing away and I’m thinking, this is rubbish. Who on earth is ever going to want to read? And I’ve still got that same self doubt that I had with my first book every single time. I can’t shake that.

then every time I finish a book, I still wonder if I can do it all over again. But I have very demanding readers, so I’ve got to do it all over again. ’cause I always say, when is your next book? I’ve read everything. Come on. So I’ve kind of, you know, I’m, I’m answerable to them. So I, I don’t think, I think maybe what’s changed I have got more confident.

I do know I can do it now. I, I know I, whereas my first book, it took me six years. I was constantly stopping and starting. I guess what I’ve got what more now I’ve got the time. I’m, I’m full time at this. Whereas before I was fitting it around a day job to start with, and I feel very lucky in that respect.

Mark: That gives hope to a lot of writers out there who [00:11:00] are in that position and myself included, where we’re, we’re working toward getting away from full-time jobs or part-time jobs to be able to do that

Maria: Yeah.

Mark: congratulations on being able to do that.

Maria: Thank you. Thank you.

Mark: Did any of the situations that came up in this book mimic anything from your real life as far as inspiration from the relationships or some of the conflict that happened in this book.

Maria: I guess so. I think with every book I write, there’s little threads of me in them, in especially in the main character and in the relationships. So I make no secret of the fact that I have. A really awful first marriage. So there’s, there’s little threads of that in, in sort of the, the marriage situation that, that’s in this book.

So yeah, there is that. And then, you know, there’s, there’s family conflict have been no stranger to that, like [00:12:00] lots of us. So little bits of that go into it. And my current husband always recognizes little things that he might have said in my characters that I’ve pinched and put into the book. Yeah. So I think, yeah, there, there’s, there’s real life in every single book, thankfully.

Nothing as drastic. Yeah, it, it certainly, you know, it certainly finds its way in the. I can’t think of a particular scene as such that it’s, thankfully I’ve never woke up out of a coma having been hit by,

Mark: Let’s hope not.

Maria: yeah.

Mark: the process from like who gets your book? ’cause you mentioned the sending your book off to your first reader. Is it from, you said, may might be three or four drafts, and then it goes to your first reader. Is that an alpha reader? Essentially? How was that process from, for this book at least from. Now the first draft is done. How does it get to publication and when do you know? When do you think it’s ready for publication?[00:13:00]

Maria: All right. Well, I don’t think a book is ever completely ready. I think we can, we can tinker with, with it, you know, and, and tinker with it some more. But I think when once I get to that stage where I’m just tinkering, I know that it’s kind. Of ready for the next stage then, and the next stage in, in my case is my husband.

I should credit him as well with the facts that I’m able to do this full time. ‘Cause in lockdown I got the, the chance like lots of us did to, to work at this full time. It was like, you know, suddenly I had all this time to go for it. So I used it. When lockdown ended and I could have gone back to work, he said, no, you carry on.

And he worked two jobs to support me until I brought the whole thing into profit. So that belief in me was just absolutely amazing. And I’d. I couldn’t have got to where I’ve got to so fast without him behind me like that. So, you know, I’ve, I really do credit him there and he’s my first [00:14:00] reader as well.

So when I’m at that stage where I feel the books kind of as f as good as I can get it, I pass it to him. And he’s usually read it within a week. And he is giving me feedback and doing comments on, you know, on the Word document. And if he thinks something’s rubbish, he doesn’t mince his words.

He is brutally honest. And he, he’s, he is really good at it. I mean, he’s not, he’s actually a probation officer by, you know, that’s his job. But he’s, he, he does read a lot, so he’s, he, he’s actually really good at this process and I’m incredibly lucky to, to have him. So once I get all this feedback from him, I then implement it.

We both do a proofread and it then goes to a team that I’ve built, up of, of my readers and 50 of them get a copy then for feedback. So they’re kind of my beta readers. Well, the beta readers, ARC readers and street team all, all as one really, this [00:15:00] team of 50 people, they, they, they’re just wonderful.

I dunno what I’d do without them. So, and after that, after those 50 pairs of eyes have all been on the book, that’s when it’s ready to go.

Mark: Cool. Okay.

Maria: Yeah.

Mark: Wow. How did you build that? I’m getting off topic, but I’m curious. How did you get 50 readers?

Maria: Yeah, that it’s been a gradual process, really. So, uh, back in 2019, before I ever published, I started building it and it’s just through my mailing list. I invite people to, you know. I call it Frank Fans, my group on Facebook. And I just invite people through my mailing list once they’ve been on a certain length of time and opened, you know, what they’ve already had and they’re engaging, you know, with me and reading my books.

I say, would you like to come and join my reader group? And, you know, some do, some don’t. Those that do, maybe one in 10 of them become like [00:16:00] really engaged, kind of like super fans and they want to be part of this process and help me with, they’ll look, getting the advanced copies.

And, it’s a really lovely group there actually that I’ve got on Facebook. There’s, there’s about 700 readers in there now. So when I’ve got a new book coming out, I, I, they ought 10, you know, so I say, right, which 50 readers would like a copy. And some of them get taken one every single time. Some of them are new to it.

But yeah, so that it’s just simply recruited through my message recruited. It sounds bad, but yeah. I don’t know if recruited is the right word, but yeah, that’s, that’s how they come to be in my, in my sort of closed group on Facebook. Yeah.

Mark: Wow. Well done. Okay.

Maria: Thank you.

Mark: So we’re gonna jump to talking about characters a little bit. There’s a sense because of the way the book is written that we don’t know who necessarily to like or to dislike, especially as it’s going, it seems like there’s almost always a villain that won’t [00:17:00] give it too many spoilers, but,

Maria: it’s hard, isn’t it?

Mark: yes.

Well, you mentioned claustrophobic, but how did you, like, how did it feel writing this? Knowing, oh, obviously you knew the ending and I do now, but, or I guess you didn’t know it while you were writing it because you didn’t outline it.

Maria: Yeah, I mean this is very much, I can say this, it’s very much a who done it and kind of what happened, kind of a book, and I didn’t know when I started writing what was, what had happened. I just, this is one where I really did set off writing and was surprised as it went on. So I did know, like the, the first twist I already had that in my mind. Obviously I can’t say what that is, so I knew that as I was, as I was beginning. But a lot of it did come as a complete surprise to me as as I was going on through it all. Sorry, just I’ve got away from the question a bit there. I think.

Mark: well, when it comes to characters, when you’re planning, especially for this book, these [00:18:00] characters, are you also just putting it together as you go, you’re figuring out who these people are and then they are doing what they do, or do you plan an arc for them so that you know from beginning to end what their journey is gonna be like, at least for the, some of the major players in the book?

Maria: Yeah. I, yeah, with this book I did, I kind of had a spidergram where I knew who was related to who and how. ’cause it was quite a complex family. But some of those relationships deepened and darkened as, as I started off writing. And some people who are. Weren’t supposed to be such major players in the book, became major players just because the characters evolved as I was writing them. So as I am writing, I tend to walk my dog at the end of the day, and that’s when I chew over the book as I’m walking and I’m constantly posing what if. Set the story and thinking, how could I deepen this? How could I make it more exciting? How can I make it less obvious what’s going to happen? [00:19:00] And I’m constantly posing these what ifs and that helps me evolve the stories I’m writing. So in terms of the characters, I kind of, I have a vague idea what they look like I’m setting off, and a bit of their backstory and a bit of what they’re trying to achieve in the book. What it is they want, they and what’s standing in their way kind of thing. So it’s all, all quite textbook. I don’t, but I don’t get to know them massively. Yeah.

Mark: In Cathy’s character arc, possible spoiler alert, warning to listeners as I ask this question although it’s early in the book, I think when she’s meeting with her physio and kind of finds her mother’s love, so to speak was that intentional as planning that she would go from the moment she woke up where she was sort of disconnected from everybody. Like who are these kids and why are they happy to see me? And kind of not grossed out, but almost like weirded out by this whole situation, which is [00:20:00] understandable ’cause she doesn’t remember them. And even though she doesn’t have her memory back, she finds this like essentially a mother’s love for those children.

Maria: Yeah. Yeah. Yes. I always knew right from the outset that that was going to come back. That, that was planned for. And yeah, Kathy’s character Act was more planned than anybody else’s in the book. I kind of knew how she would start and how she would evolve, and I do think her character transforms from beg the beginning to the end of the book, and that was always intentional. Yeah. I couldn’t have kept those two poor little boys in the situation they were in where the, their mother didn’t recognize.

Mark: I

Maria: Yeah. That was quite hard actually, you know, to, to do that to them.

Mark: Yeah. Yeah. I felt bad for them too. I felt for them while it was going on, so,

Maria: Yeah. Yeah.

Mark: Was there any research that went into the amnesia side of it that might have impacted the book as you were writing it?

Maria: Yes. Sort of the, [00:21:00] certainly the names of, of the condition she had. And you know how quick it can be recovered from and how quickly the memory can come back. So because that memory loss she suffered, that amnesia was all almost made her like an unreliable narrator, which was the device I wanted to use. But yes, it did need some research. And as always, you know, Google is our best friend at times like this. I dunno where I’d be without Google. And like many thriller authors, I’m sure yourself included, my, search history is very questionable.

Mark: Yeah.

Maria: But yeah, so there were, there was certainly research needed into that, but also really dodgy research. What speed could somebody be hit by a train and survive and, you know, and, and stuff like, where Yeah. Where could somebody have a, a, a be hit by a train on their body, you know, and not be killed immediately. And, you know, it’s sort of that trait that research associated with being hit by [00:22:00] a train.

So.

Mark: So nobody showed up at your door during the making of this book. Okay, that’s good

Maria: Not yet. Yeah. Yeah. But you’ll have to vouch for me if anybody ever does.

Mark: If you suddenly disappear. When you’re writing a book like this and people, you’re, as a reader, I was essentially on the edge of my seat, the whole story, because that who done and then this unfolds, and then that twist, and then that unfolds when the book is done. Is there a certain emotion or reaction you’re hoping people walk away with at the end of it all Don’t.

Maria: Oh, that’s a good question. Probably one of gratitude for their own family and their own lives, because no matter how much they, how bad they might think their lot is when they’re being involved with this particular family for 300 pages, they’re going to walk away thinking, oh, well, actually my answer, but after all.

Mark: All right.

Maria: There’s that. But yeah, on a more serious note, I think possibly that no matter how bad a reader might think things are in [00:23:00] their own life, there’s always that hope to be able to turn things around like Cathy did in the story, she really does change everything, for the better. And I think if it, you know, to give that reader, a reader that kind of hope that that’s possible, maybe leave them with that, if that makes sense.

Mark: Maybe don’t try jumping in front of a train to cause amnesia to get that change you’re looking for. But yeah, no, that makes

Maria: yeah, yeah.

Mark: So I have a question from, the author from the last show, ’cause we do a carry it forward kind of question. Thomas Stewart was the last guest on the show, and he asked, do you find that when you’re writing you mirror yourself, but you don’t realize it until you completed the story?

Maria: You mirror yourself.

Mark: So you, I guess you kind of touched on this earlier a little bit.

Maria: yeah, yeah, we did. I wouldn’t say I mirror myself. But like I said, my yeah, before there is, there is threads of me in every single character. So sometimes when people [00:24:00] say, oh, the, the main character was really unlikable, I think, oh, that’s me. That’s partly me. Yeah, because, yeah, there, there are little bits of me in every, especially the main characters and they are usually female main characters as well.

There’s only maybe four of my books where I’ve used a male protagonist, so. Yeah, but even with one of those at, at first, I’ve changed it all now, but before the book was released, I was accused of having the male character just a little bit too sort of feminine. , And it was unrealistic how we might think and be according to feedback I got.

So I had to change that. So there were threads of me, even in the male characters. So, yeah. So yeah, lots, lots of me is mirrored.

Mark: At the end of the story, when you’re done writing it has there been a moment where you didn’t realize that something about this story mirrored you, but you didn’t know it until after the story was [00:25:00] done? No. Shocking. Like a shock, almost like a shocking reveal or like, wow, I processed that trauma without realizing it.

Maria: yeah, I don’t think, not with this one. I don’t think, I think I’ve possibly had that with other books I’ve written. But yeah, not with, not with this one. Yeah. Okay.

Mark: Patreon member question, what gives you the greatest sense of value when you get feedback from readers?

Maria: Oh. I think statements such as your book got me out of a reading slump. Just lovely to hear. As readers, we do sometimes find ourselves in a slump where we haven’t read for ages or we pick up a book and we just can’t get into it. We can’t concentrate, particularly when other things are going on in life.

So when a reader says to me, you’ve got me out of a reading slump, that’s, that’s really nice to hear. Or sometimes I’ll hear, I’ll get emails from readers and they’re in hospital and, you know, that kind [00:26:00] of thing. Life’s really tough, but my book’s, giving them an escape from that. It’s a distraction and the messaging to thank me for keeping them entertained for a few hours.

Or sometimes I get messages saying you’ve kept me awake all night. And that they’re equally nice to hear. So I always apologize for that. But then putting brackets, I’m not sorry, really.

Mark: Sorry, not sorry. Yeah.

Maria: Yeah, I love getting messages from my readers. It’s the, the greatest thing about my job other than, other than the writing.

So, because I’ve, I’m now into my sixth year of doing this full time. A lot of my readers have all, you know, they’ve become friends to be honest, I’ve not really met any of them in person. Hopefully, you know, in the years to come, I can do something about that. But they’re, they’re just fantastic. He’s so supportive and, I obviously wouldn’t be where I am now without them. So I’m always grateful and always happy to hear from them. And I do pride myself in, in, in answering every [00:27:00] single email that I receive. And I try to answer every single social media comment as well but that’s becoming harder and harder, because they’re just, obviously they’re starting to snowball.

Mark: Yeah.

Maria: Yeah.

Mark: Yeah. I understand how powerful that is though. I mean, I’ve been in, in writing slumps like that, and even as a, as a writer in a writing slump, I’ve been you know, just not feeling good about a certain story. Then you get one of those emails that comes in where a reader just says, yeah, I love this book, and, and then suddenly you’re, you’re like, it’s like engine fuel or jet fuel for your writing. Just hearing those positive things. Yeah, it’s really nice.

Maria: Yeah, yeah, it’s a good idea. I have a folder in my email account where they’re really lovely, emails. I get, I file them all. And if I am having a down day, if I’ve had a bad review, all the words are flowing or whatever, I, I have a look at that into, you know, my lovely emails that I or I or I pop into my reader group on Facebook. ’cause they’re always great on that. So, yeah. Yeah. But it’s, it’s the [00:28:00] readers that keep me going.

Mark: that’s a great tip.

Maria: Yeah.

Mark: Yeah. Put them aside and look at them once in a while. Yeah.

Maria: Yeah.

Mark: If you could pick one thing that you felt led to your success so far, what would it be? What worked best to get you where you are now?

Maria: Ooh, probably absolute tenacity. And not having a plan B. So, thi this is kind of all, yeah. All I want to do is, is to be an author. It’s, you know, it’s burned at me since childhood and it was only when I got into my forties that I’ve kind of really gone for it. I think I’m totally unemployable now.

So I couldn’t go about, I’m here to work for a, for a boss now. I love being my own boss and I’ve never worked harder than I do. But I think it’s that tenacity, that absolute drive and determination and really, really wanting it. ’cause I’ve got 24 hours in my day, the same as anybody [00:29:00] else but I’ve chosen to channel. I’ve reached my moment into, you know, developing myself as a writer and improving my craft and learning as much as I can and just, you know, and obviously learning from my mistakes, but most importantly, getting my backside at my desk and writing. And you’ve to be, you know, it takes so much discipline ’cause I have many a day that I just say, oh, God can’t be bothered. I could just have a day off. And I’ve just, I’ve really, once I’ve got into the flow, then I’m fine. I’m aware, but sometimes I just really can’t be bothered. And I think, but yeah, it’s that tenacity and that drive and that’s, I think any writer who wants to make it and get into double figures with the books has to have it, otherwise you don’t get beyond maybe the first couple unless you’ve really got that drive and that determination to make it.

Mark: Thank you. That’s great. Yeah. Last question. Where can listeners find your [00:30:00] book?

Maria: Well, I don’t, like, Mondays is like all my other books on the, it’s on Amazon and Audible and everything I have is free to read in Kindle Limited, so everything’s exclusive to Amazon. So, yeah, on that or, everything’s listed also on my website, which is maria franklin.co uk. Yeah, and I’m on all the usual places, TikTok and Instagram and Facebook. I love doing my tiktoks.

Mark: All right. Well, thank you so much for being here. I really appreciate you taking the time. This was great. I’m inspired having heard that story and how much work you do and it gets me all Jews stopped to get back, to get back to my next book, so thank you. If you don’t mind sticking around for a few minutes after the interview to get into the after show with our rapid fire questions for Patreon members.

Maria: Okay. Yep, no

All right, thank you.

Mark: Thanks for listening and make sure you’re following the show so you don’t miss episode 17 With [00:31:00] TR Hendricks, author of the Military Thriller, the instructor, we talk about how his experience as a marine shaped the story, what it takes to write authentic action, and how perseverance turned more than 60 submissions into a publishing deal. I wanna go deeper. You can get early access, bonus content, and the after show with rapid fire questions, plus the chance to ask future guests your own.

Over on Patreon links are in the show notes.

TPP Episode 9 Angela Douglas

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 episode nine. Every Tuesday I sit down with a different thriller author, if you love discovering new books and the stories behind them hit follow now so you don’t miss the next episode, including next week’s conversation with Aiden Bailey, author of the Action Thriller Blunt Force.

And if you wanna be part of the show, you can join us on Patreon. Members get to submit guest questions, hear episodes early, read bonus stories from past guests, and even grab my own novella, Cognitive Breach. All for the price of a Starbucks coffee. Links are in the show notes.

Today’s guest is Angela Douglas, an award-winning Canadian author who lives in the Okanagan with her husband and kids. Her debut psychological thriller Every Fall was published by Rising [00:01:00] Action Publishing in January, 2025, and her sophomore novel, the Bone Trail will Follow in June, 2026. When she isn’t working or hanging out with her family, she hides in her studio writing her next book.

Mark: Hello, Angela, thank you so much for being here today. Welcome to the podcast.

Angela: Thanks for having me.

Mark: I’m very excited today to get into your book Every Fall and we’re gonna jump right into the pitch.

Angela: Oh dear. Okay, here we go. So every fall is a book about a husband and wife, newly married, the husband Jake is a beat cop in one of the worst crime riddled cities. In the province and his wife, Bree is a newly minted stay at home mom slash former party girl. Everything is going fine with them living in this crime infested town until crime follows Jake home from work, threatening Bree and her son. So they decide to move further afield to [00:02:00] another town outside of Jake’s jurisdiction, hoping that life will get better. Shortly after moving there Jake experiences a severe trauma and loss at the workplace causing him to spiral with guilt and grief, leaving Bree alone at home in a creepy new house where strange things happen. She has bad dreams and the house makes all kinds of noises and they have a hard time figuring out, is it the house? Are they both collectively losing their minds or have the bad guys found them.

Bree, isolated and struggling must protect her children from the one person she thought would always keep them safe. Every fall will keep you on the edge of your seat.

Mark: I love that. Thank you. Yeah. A really, really good book. I really enjoyed it. Thank you for sending me a copy. This one, you know, I, I give myself a week for every podcast episode to try and read the book. And I was done like three days early on this book because it really was a page turner. I, I needed to know what was happening and we’ll get into the psychological versus the supernatural side of it in a little bit.

But I just wanted to [00:03:00] say I really, really enjoyed the book. So thank you for saying that alone.

Angela: course.

Mark: So let’s get into where did this book idea come from?

Angela: That is an excellent question. I had this idea kicking around in my head for a long time. I am the spouse of a retired police officer, so I have a window into that world, and I’ve also lived in a pretty spooky house, when I had my first child. So I thought, oh wow, how wild would it be if you combined, both types of drama together what these people are going through individually and what can happen when you’re in law enforcement.

Mark: And was there a moment in your life that shaped, a plot point or a scene in the story?

Angela: Not really. Maybe a few creepy dreams. You know, when you’re a new parent, you’re not sleeping at all.

And so, you know, add in a shift, working husband and a baby that doesn’t sleep and, you’re just disoriented. So, probably the dreams I would say.[00:04:00]

Mark: And how long did it take you to write the book? Was he retired when you started this, the book journey, and

Angela: yes, he was. I mean, it started in my head. As you know, most of our stories start in our, our head and our dreams and our sleep and all that kind of stuff. But I actually started writing it in 2019, so almost six years total.

Mark: Wow. And what was that journey like? Was it challenging full of like research or was it a lot of thinking? How did that journey play out?

Angela: It was a long process for a lot of reasons I hadn’t written in a really long time. I was a realtor at the time, and so I was working a lot and I had this idea that I wanted to write. So when I moved to a new city and I had no clients anymore, I had some free time. So I started jotting it down and realized I don’t know what I’m doing.

I’ve written small, short stories I’ve written, you know, articles and, and that sort of thing for any jobs that I’ve had, but I’ve never attempted to write a novel before, so it was very overwhelming and I would never [00:05:00] recommend doing it. The way I did this one, I wrote it all out of order, because I would get excited about an idea or a part of the story or a scene, and then I would jot that out and then I would start writing some of the darker, more traumatic stuff, and then I’d need to take a break.

So it was a lot of stop and go and jumping around. So when I was done the first draft, which I wouldn’t even call it, that, I would say the first whatever, right amount, amount of words, it was all out of order and it was very overwhelming trying to slot it into place. So the first version that I wrote in 2019 is light years away from the final product, but it was pretty cool the first time to ever type the end on a novel length manuscript.

Mark: I bet. Yeah, that’s always a good moment to finish every book. And you have another one coming up right?

Angela: I do. Yeah. The bone trail comes out in June of 2026, and it’s different characters, standalone. It’s a, a locked room mystery slash suspense.[00:06:00]

Mark: Awesome. So would you call yourself a cancer or a plotter or, I guess somewhere in between. ’cause you’re, I mean, what you mentioned with jumping scenes is very unusual. I don’t hear that very often. I can, I can understand it though. ’cause I’ve always wondered if you could do that, if you were super inspired by a scene.

If I could write that scene because it’s like vivid and emotional and, and full of power, especially when you’re thinking about it. ’cause you’re excited about it, but then you gotta go fill in the rest of this stuff. Which, like you said is, is quite a challenge. So with this book and then with your next book, what was that process like?

Obviously Pantsing to start with ’cause you’re just kind of writing scenes and then putting it together. Did you go have to go back and then outline the whole thing?

Angela: So I’ve written four books. The, there’s this one, one coming out, and then I’ve written two more and I’ve learned a lot. So this one took six years. The second took two. And the other ones I would say, you know, about a year, give or take. So I do have a better idea and I’m more of a plotter now because I see the need for it.

Does the book [00:07:00] look anything like the original outline? Almost never. I think that having a you know, a path or maybe even a maze kind of like mapped out so that you know the highlights of what you’re gonna hit is good. And then if the story takes you somewhere else while you’re writing, go with it. I would never go in as blind as I did the first time. But I didn’t know what I didn’t know. And since then I’ve taken lots of, you know, writing courses and I’ve had editor feedback and all of those kinds of things that help shape you in positive and difficult ways. But yeah definitely I would not be pantsing again. The only time that I’ve done that is that if I have one of those scenes really tickle me that I have to write it down. Then I might do that and then slot it in later. But I am always working with some sort of an outline now, because I just, I don’t wanna be that lost ever again.

Mark: Yeah, I kind of did the same thing. Well, I, yeah, I guess I’ve been all over the place, but now I do more outlining. As well [00:08:00] leading up to it. So I have, but then the characters do what they’re gonna do. I

Angela: do what they’re gonna do

Mark: almost every podcast episode I record, we get into that, that little moment where we talk about that characters just do what they’re gonna do. It’s so universal for writers that it, it’s funny that it happens to all of us because we’re character driven, I guess you could say. And we let the characters drive the story rather than writing the plot and let the plot drive the story. Which, I mean some authors do and, and they’re still can be really good books, but. Character stories are some of my favorite stories.

Angela: Me too.

Mark: So it’s called a psychological thriller, but it crosses sub genres. Why the supernatural? Because you could have gone, I mean, if I was gonna list like all the sub-genres you might be in, I, you know, it is psychological, supernatural crime, domestic, like it could kind of fit into a lot of little places.

Angela: I know.

Mark: So what came first in all these ideas? Was it, was it the domestic side, the supernatural. And what made you think. Oh, I should combine these. Or maybe it came at the same time anyway.

Angela: It did it, it came. I never set out to [00:09:00] write something that was so blended that some people love it and other people go, what was that? Because my whole idea was that these, you know, young parents, they’re overtired, they’re both going through their own types of trauma, which come along with symptoms similar to a real haunting. So I thought, wouldn’t it be neat to highlight what it would be like if the house was haunted or not? And these people are suffering and not talking to each other. So it’s very isolating, upsetting, and it could be, I guess, the idea that a real haunting is less difficult than some of the stuff that comes along with these mental health issues was the main reason for me tangling so much up together and what better vessel than to, you know, add some crime and those sorts of other things. I’ve even heard like a touch of horror, maybe just one or two. One or two, a little dark.

Mark: Yeah, And I like that. In your acknowledgements, you mentioned the trauma being the [00:10:00] trauma of what they were going through and being just, or worse than the trauma of whatever the supernatural was. ’cause they weren’t sure what was going on and I certainly felt that through the novel.

When you finished the book, did you go back and have to think about. How you paced both to put more emphasis on one or the other. When I was reading, I think I was more into the domestic side and their relationship and just what the hell Jake was thinking and doing and driving me nuts even though it was true to character.

That side got me probably really like you aimed for harder and then her, you know, PPD and that probably hit me harder than then the supernatural, although I wanted to know the conclusion, of course, you know, like, what was this? And I got that in the end.

Angela: Nope, that’s good. That’s exactly what I had hoped for, was just the story of these two people living relatively normal lives and suffering really common things that maybe weren’t as talked about back when the book took place. And hopefully a little bit more now and then, the, [00:11:00] you know, perspective haunting the maybe. Was it or wasn’t? It was supposed to be sort of a, a side character, but I had varying opinions when I first gave it to beta readers and editors where some people wanted more from some parts and more from others, which I guess is the risk that you take when you write something that’s cross genre.

But in the end, I really saw that those two needed to go together.

So, I’m glad that you were , got more outta that one side. ’cause that was my initial intent even though they’re all, it’s all pretty scary actually.

Mark: Yeah, I know it’s. That’s what made it a page turner is the the cross between the two really is, has helped me turn the page because all of a sudden there was this story in these women and I’m trying to think like, oh, is this gonna have something to do with the ghost? Or is this, you know, about the domestic side or what?

So yeah, it was a lot of fun. I really enjoyed it. And given your husband’s background is now a retired police constable. So you have, as [00:12:00] a constable’s wife, you’ve lived a lot of, probably what your character is going through or what Brie had gone through and how much research went into, into the police side of it. ’cause that felt really, I’ve known a lot of police officers. I’ve wanted to be one for a long time. So I’ve hung out with a lot of police officers in my youth. And, and what you described in the book and what I’ve heard of the stories. ’cause even up north, you know, we have the OPP here that get detached to tiny little northern towns that have it really tough.

Just like in your book, RCMP. So how much research was involved in figuring that angle out? Or was it just, yeah, I know this stuff because I lived it.

Angela: Yeah, I didn’t have to do a ton of research. I wrote it first and then I fact checked for authenticity and had to tweak a few terms. I mean, I read a lot of thrillers too, and of course a lot of the thrillers I read are American, so even some of that was kind of sneaking in. There, even though I’m very familiar with policing up here and I do have a few friends who are still members who are able to look at [00:13:00] that for me.

And then just do, I mean, I have a resource right in my house, which is pretty, uh, pretty handy. Um, yeah.

Mark: And was there research to the ghost and haunting side, like the, I can’t remember the name of the business that they go, well, I don’t wanna give away the story, but let’s, let me keep this to general question research on haunting

Angela: Yeah, so I’ve always been interested in it, like from a little girl. I liked reading spooky stories and I’ve always been interested in the, you know, is there, isn’t there? So I didn’t really need to do a ton of research that wasn’t stuff I’d already kind of cruised by. But the, I do reference a paranormal society and there is one in BC that will come, to, I’m sure there’s several across Canada, but they will come to your house and see if there’s something going on there.

Mark: That’s so interesting.

Angela: Yeah,

Mark: Yeah, I love that. I was wondering, I, I knew I had to ask if that was real or not. ’cause I was like, wow, that sounds like it could be real, but it also sounds like it, it could [00:14:00] be fiction, but wow. I would, so, I mean, I, I’m getting sidetracked a little bit, but what, what do they do? Like this business?

Angela: I don’t know. I didn’t have them come over, but I did.

Mark: Okay. You didn’t check your own house.

Angela: Yeah, I’m sure they do. Probably, you know, a quick look or a once over, I don’t know if it’s like, you know, where you see them spend the night and they’ve got infrared cameras and stuff like that. Um, but if, if I had that happen in the book, then I would’ve definitely had to do some more research and have a call with them to see what they actually do. But they didn’t end up coming to the house, so I was able to leave it there.

Mark: Yeah. No, that’s fair. Yeah, no, I, I pictured like Ghostbusters, like, I don’t know what they had, like these suits on, but yeah, I don’t, of course I want to see Scooby.

How did you know that the story was ready? So once you finished the drafts and as challenging as it was, that may have made it even more challenging to know. Is this book ready? And, and this is traditionally published. So you went to a public or an agent with it, I guess. How did you know it was [00:15:00] ready?

Angela: I didn’t, I had no clue what I was doing. So i, wrote it and rewrote it and rewrote it and I thought, oh my gosh, I dunno what I’m doing. So I hired a freelance editor, which I highly recommend, even though I know, it’s not always affordable, especially if you haven’t, you know, written a book before. But I learned a lot through that process that, you know, you have a lot of good stories, a lot of good information here, but I had to string it along a little bit better. I had to cut out some things that I really liked and I thought were really cool, but didn’t really have much to do with the story. So all of those kinds of things along the way. And then I did another round of edits with the same editor who then said, okay, now this is ready. So I didn’t know. Now I can recognize it in my own writing, if I’m ready or getting close, at least to send it to beta readers or whoever else. But at the time I had no clue how many drafts and, and how many rounds of edits had to go into it before I could even query. And then I was querying agents for quite a long time. Lots and lots and [00:16:00] lots of rejections. Piles and piles and piles and piles. I was getting close, like lots of falls out, lots of really good feedback.

And in the end I didn’t end up getting an agent. I went direct to a publisher. And, even when they called and gave me the offer, I didn’t realize that that was happening on, on the call. I was just like, oh, okay, let’s talk about my book. And then, and then the rest is, the rest is history.

Mark: Wow. Well congratulations for sticking that out. ’cause I know that’s a process rejections and a lot of people just let it go. But the, you know, when you, you take that feedback, you take it to heart, you get better feedback. Did you end up adjusting the story based on that feedback? Was it there any adjustments or it was just…

Angela: With this book, it was really hard because there were so many subplots that all of my feedback was slightly different. People liked different elements of it, so it was difficult to figure out where to go next. Ultimately, I did make some changes that I was okay with. I didn’t quite love. [00:17:00] And then when I got picked up by my publisher as they were doing, ’cause then you do lots more rounds of edits, they actually said, Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if you did this?

And I was like, I did that. I already have it. So I was able to put it back in and and it was a little bit more the way that I initially wanted it to be. So it worked out really well. That doesn’t always happen , but it was nice to be able to put something I liked back in there.

Mark: Are you able to talk about that or is it a spoiler?

Angela: It’s a spoiler.

Mark: Okay. Okay. Maybe we’ll after the show, ’cause I need to know.

Angela: Of course. Of course.

Mark: What went back in. We’ll talk off. Yeah. Okay. So I wanna talk about Jake a little bit. Was he hard to write? Yeah. ‘Cause he’s, I mean, he’s like, I hated him for a long time. So there were moments in this story and I’m sure it’s, but this is, you know, you’re, you’re being true to life, uh, of a lot of these experience. You had to tell this story authentically, which put him and you, I mean, I know you, it ended well. I don’t wanna give spoilers, [00:18:00] but, I, I had a hard time with Jake for a long time throughout the book because of the decisions he was making and, and how he was, treating Brie and stuff.

How did you write that? Like, did you find, were you worried that people were gonna go, i’m, I’m putting this book down because this guy, I just can’t read this guy anymore.

Angela: I think it’s bliss that this was my first book because I didn’t think about any of that. I never even thought what it would feel like to get rejections and get reviews. I just started writing and, I wrote the book, the best way I could in the most authentic way that I thought it could be in that situation. So I took. PTSD and postpartum, and I picked some of the absolute worst case scenarios to give to these people. I think in re in real life, I, I don’t think there are that many Jakes and, and I don’t know if you know people, many people experienced some of the extremes that Brie did, at least privately and then she didn’t get a lot of help ’cause she had a Jake at home.

So I think that [00:19:00] nowadays people talk more and they have more support and they’re not quite as extreme. But I didn’t think about what the impact of the extreme nature of the behavior would’ve done. And I, a lot of my, if you take a little peek at my reviews, you’ll see that there’s a lot of people who are not team Jake.

And I had hoped that there would be a little bit of empathy for him just given that some of the stuff that was happening wasn’t necessarily his fault, but in the end, you know, yeah, it’s not, it’s not great and I have to say, it’s not my husband. So many people, so many people ask, and mine’s lovely and we’re still married.

Mark: That’s good.

Angela: but yeah, there, there are worst case like you do with most fiction, you, you know, you use the extremes for the story.

Mark: Yeah. Well that’s why I ask ’cause absolutely. But I know like when I’m writing, sometimes I’m like, am I taking this character too far? Into almost a villain. And I do write villains, but [00:20:00] villains are easier in a sense because I’m not trying to make them, they’re hard to write because of what they’re doing that’s dark.

But I know they’re a villain and the reader knows they’re a villain. Whereas in Jake’s case, he’s almost, he’s not meant to be. But depending on your history and your, your own trauma, I suppose he very much can be someone you don’t like very much. Which has kind of happened to me. I mean, I’m glad like it, you know, well, I don’t wanna spoil anything, but, uh,

Angela: no, fair, fair enough. And you

Mark: I, I like the book in the end.

Angela: oh good, he was worse in earlier iterations. And somebody asked me if he was the villain. And of course, because I was pretty new to writing a novel, I didn’t think about those things that now I think about intentionally when I’m writing. So he was worse in earlier drafts. Oops.

Mark: Oh wow, okay.

Angela: Yeah.

Mark: It was worse. Well, so who was the most fun to write in that book. I mean, my personal favorite was Tammy,

Angela: Tammy’s my favorite character, hands down, and she is [00:21:00] one of those characters that came out of nowhere. So I just was writing, writing, writing, and I, writing things out of order. And as I was stringing it together, this character popped out and she’s a, you know, a accumulation of a, a pile of different things, but her coming into Bri’s life when she did and her levity was just a lot of fun to play with.

Mark: And I like that. It, it, I found it really balanced the book well because it had gotten so dark that it needed a little light. And Tammy was that perfect light to, to put in there, to, to give like a breath to, to the, the bigger discussion and things that were going on. Yeah. So we are, we are getting close to time.

I’m gonna wrap up with a few questions for those authors that are listening to this show. What advice would you give to someone who just published their first or second book?

Angela: Just publish. Hmm, hmm. Lots of advice. What shall I say? Be kind to yourself is probably the first thing. It is a [00:22:00] rollercoaster of best, absolute best and then surprises. So I don’t wanna say the worst, but just surprises. Like, you know, reading, reading your review, you get these reviews that will bring tears to your eyes that you’ll print off and hang on your wall. Please do that. So take all of the really nice things people say and hang onto that even though if you get 10, five star reviews, it’s the one star that you repeat in your head over and over again when you’re writing. Don’t do that. And then like everyone else says, shut it down. Don’t look at all of the reviews, don’t obsess over them. Better.

Easier said than done because I absolutely did read all of mine and obsess over them, but at some point, shut it down. And also don’t get wrapped up in the publishing, launching marketing aspect, which is extremely hard to say because you need to do that. You need to market your book. You need to be able to pitch your book on the fly. You need to be able to do all of those things to sell your book and to keep going. But most [00:23:00] importantly. Write the next book because if you get bogged down in those things, it can kind of take away a little bit from the magic and the joy of creating. So start working on another book, or even better if you work on that book before the first one comes out, then you have something fun to play with and work on, you know, while you’re having some days that aren’t necessarily the best, but also. Enjoy every minute you will be, you know, I don’t know about you, but I wanted to write since I was seven years old. So I have always pictured myself, you know, signing books and going to launches and, you know, seven years old, it was all, you know, in the bag. And sometimes now I will be sitting in a bookstore going, wow, this, this is pretty cool. I wrote a freaking book. So celebrate your wins. And keep writing. Even if you, you know, even if it’s not great or you’re not in a perfect writing mood, just, just keep, keep going forward. That’s the only way. Forward, forward, forward.[00:24:00]

Mark: Oh, that’s great. Thank you. I really like the print out your five still or the good reviews and put them on your wall not to forget. I love that advice. I haven’t heard that before, but I may just go do that.

Angela: You need a happy pile.

Mark: It does.

Angela: see it.

Mark: Yeah. Yeah, I could see that helping a lot because it does, it is, uh, it can be a tough business. And we do like to, to, to look at the bad reviews and I don’t know why we, we are this way.

Angela: And you fixate and you hear that one word, that one negative word replays in your head. But why? When there’s so many nice things, focus on the nice or try to.

Mark: I love that. Thank you.

Angela: Of course,

Mark: If you could pick one thing that you felt led to your success so far, what would it be?

Angela: Being extremely stubborn. Once I knew that I was going to spend this much time doing something, I was gonna just keep going until it got out there. Whatever way. Who knows if the, you know, the querying [00:25:00] process had gone on for another six months or so. It was close to a year. I think it was 10, 10 months before I got picked up. I was getting close to shelving it, and then I had already started working on another book. So that’s the other thing, if you feel like your first book or whatever number book isn’t gonna get picked up, you have another one cooking. So just keep, keep stuff cooking. So yeah, I don’t, I don’t know if my perspective would’ve been much different, the longer it took or the outcome anyways, but I just had no intention on ever giving up.

So if Every Fall, wasn’t it, the bone trail was gonna be it, and then, you know, the two that are coming after that, you just never know, you know, which one is, is gonna get picked up and, what your, what your path is going to be. Just keep, just keep going.

Mark: Yeah, thank you. And you also never know, like maybe it’s book five that gets picked up, that just hits the market at the right time, but then people still want 4, 3, 2, and one, and they’ve already been written. So you never know

Angela: And then they’re already there waiting for you. That’s the best

Mark: yeah, exactly. Because the hardest part [00:26:00] is getting in the door, I think. And then once you’re, once you’re in the door, in the traditional side of publishing, I’m indie published, but on the traditional side, I imagine it, once you’re in the door, it helps that they’ll listen a little more to what’s your next book idea. And if you have other books there,

Angela: Yeah, I hope so.

Mark: very helpful.

Angela: I’m in the trenches with book three, so we’ll see.

Mark: Yeah. That’s awesome. Congratulations.

Angela: Thank you.

Mark: So where can people find you and get your book and learn more about you?

Angela: My book is for sale anywhere books are sold. So chapters Indigo, Barnes and Noble. Any small indie stores online. If you’re looking for signed copies, there’s quite a few, Indigos in BC in the lower mainland on the island where there’s some sign copies that are still there. It’s also on amazon and, and other places online in ebook, print and audiobook.

Mark: Oh, nice. The audio book. That’s great. All right, well thank you so much. I really appreciate your time. If you don’t mind [00:27:00] hanging out after the show, we got a couple of bonus questions for our newsletter subscribers who get the a few extra questions. Thank you so much for being here. This was a lot of fun.

I love learning more about Every Fall. Listeners you gotta go check it out, get the book, read it. If you like dark psychological, you are gonna enjoy it.

Angela: Great. Thank you for having me.

Mark: Thanks for listening to episode nine. If you enjoyed this conversation, make sure to follow the show so you don’t miss episode 10. When I sit down with Aiden Bailey, author of the action Thriller Blunt Force, and if you’d like to go deeper with early access, bonus content, and the chance to ask future guests your own questions, you can join me on Patreon.

The links are in the show notes.

TPP Episode 5 with Sara Ennis

[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 number five. Today’s episode is brought to you by my novel, the Genesis Project, which is like Inception meets Jack Ryan.

A former operator joins a top secret project designed to help soldiers with PTSD. Side effects may include assassination. If you’re an author and wanna sponsor a future episode, just head to markpjnadon.ca/thrillerpitchpodcast. Links will be in the show notes. Today’s guest is Sarah Ennis, an author known for dark, emotionally layered thrillers that dig deep into the human mind.

Her stories are tense, sometimes horrific, always character driven and unafraid to explore trauma, justice, and survival. But one thing, certain, [00:01:00] the dog never dies.

Mark: Sarah, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for taking time out of your schedule to be here and to chat about your book, the Dollhouse.

Sara: Thank you for inviting me.

I’m always willing to talk about my book.

Mark: So let’s jump right into it. Let’s start with the pitch for the Dollhouse.

Sara: I’ve been told it sort of like Saw meets Flowers in the Attic with some Silence of the Lambs and a little bit of Room. But it’s about a man who’s trying to recreate his past.

Based on a photo album that he has of his family history. And so he keeps abducting people, young people who look like he did as a child, and then he makes them reenact scenes, but he tells the stories differently than what the photos show. So it’s a little bit dark. There are three teenagers in it, but it’s definitely not YA.

And it’s, it was really fun to write. It was my first book, but, um, so it, it got a lot of love and a lot of time and I researched [00:02:00] everything. It was inspired by Shasta and Dylan Groene, who are in Idaho, were abducted in Idaho. And Elizabeth Smart, who is taken out of Utah, I believe. So it was inspired by them, but it’s not at all.

You know, based on their cases. It’s just the bad guys in those cases were interesting to me.

Mark: Okay. So you started with the idea of just having seen those cases and then you thought, yeah. So how did that work? You thought, I’ll, I should write a story like this, and then where did the idea inspire from there?

Sara: No, I’ve always had a really twisted brain, and so since I was a little kid, I’ve retold stories differently than they were actually written, like fairytales. I would change the endings. And so I just started like, so what’s Elizabeth Smart gonna be like when she gets away from this? You know, or, or I don’t know if you’re familiar with the Dylan and Shasta Groene case, but only one of them.

They were seven and eight when they were taken and their family was killed in the process and only Shasta survived. And I, I kind of just wondered what she would be [00:03:00] like as she got older. So it was more me imagining their futures a little bit. Okay. And. I, you know, as, as you do too, as a writer, we have crazy imaginations.

We can make a walk around the block, turn into all sorts of chaos if we let our brains go.

Mark Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, there’s a lot of fun in that.

Sara: Yes, exactly. Although, I don’t know, sometimes our family members might get tired of it, but yeah, it’s fun. It’s nice having that kind of a weird brain that see.

Bodies where there probably aren’t any, but maybe who knows what’s behind closed doors.

Mark: Yeah. Well I have to, I have to commend you on, on the book blurb in that, for this book. I mean, I happen to like dark psychological thrillers as well. I kind of write a little bit of those myself. Yes,

Sara: yes you do. And

Mark: yeah, and when I read this, this back cover blurb, I was like, I have got to read this book.

So it sounded so good. So yeah, I had to jump in and find out what, what’s happening here and Oh, good. And you did a great job just pulling me right in, like right from the, from the first page with, with, [00:04:00] Angel and Bud and, and their, you know, what’s going on with them and

Sara: thank you.

Mark: And it just pulled me right in.

So, yeah, I appreciate it. It’s very good. I haven’t had a chance to finish it yet, but I’m definitely Oh, oh, you have it. Okay. Definitely getting into it.

Sara: You probably have a pretty good twist coming then, so. Okay, good. It’s fun to hear how people respond to that.

Mark: So what was the writing process like for this book?

Was it, was it fast, was it messy? Was it like really structured?

Sara: Um, all of the above. I wrote it during COVID ’cause I was bored. I, my day job at was work from home, which was fine. I’m a big time loner. I’m fine to be by myself, not talking to other humans a lot. But I had extra time because even like the nonprofit boards I was on weren’t getting together, so I thought.

I’ve been writing my whole life, but never ever seriously really, I mean, my career has always involved writing so fiction. It was like, well, now it’s time to write that book. So I did, and for that book I hired two different developmental editors who had [00:05:00] very different views on things. So I kind of realized, okay, they’re, they’re not the be all end all, they’re just opinions.

And then I have to make the final choice. I learned a lot about both the writing process and the publishing process from that book. I’m still learning from that. But I am, um, I like to say I’m not a pantser and I’m not a plotter. I know like, i’m going, I’m driving from Iowa to LA and I wanna stop in Vegas.

You know, I know what’s gonna happen at the end. I know where I’m starting. I know a major point in the middle, and I don’t know how I’m gonna get there. I might decide to go through Colorado, or I might decide to drop down and go south. I’ll find out as I go, as long as I hit my middle and my end. That’s pretty much how I write.

Mark: And what kind of research did you have to do for this book?

Sara: For that one. I did a lot of reading about the cases that inspired me, and then I actually lived in Casper, Wyoming, where it set for a year as a kid. So I didn’t have great memories and I thought [00:06:00] that’d be a good place to put this book. The one thing I had to really research was I had to find out, I don’t know if you’re to the part yet.

Has Angel been to a store to the little shop yet? No. Okay, well, so you don’t, okay. There’s a point in there where basically Netflix video, the original videos that you would get in the mail and ship back mm-hmm. That becomes important. So that part, I got to actually talk to the people at Netflix to find out what the process was about a certain thing.

And that was pretty fun. So that was the only research that was not, you know, just me being a loony bird.

Mark: What about the, what about the looney bird research?

Sara: That’s just me trying to figure out how far I can go with things.

Mark: On, you mean like on the psychological elements? Like what, how far can I take?

Sara: Yeah. In some of the, I don’t know how far you’ve gotten, but there’s some parts, like I said, it’s, some people say it’s like the SAW movies. There are some games. That are played that involve power tools and things like that. And so, one of my good friends is a woodworker, and so we spent a lot of time in his [00:07:00] shop trying to figure out how some things would work.

So things like that, which are fun. So, yeah.

Mark: Yeah. That’s crazy.

Sara: Well, it’s fun. I mean, it’s good have those sources.

Mark: It would, yeah. Yeah. Well, ’cause I can imagine it would be a lot of research into and into the psych psychological too, because Yes. I mean, this is. This is book one. So you’re, you know, you’re kind of setting up mm-hmm.

How this is gonna continue. Yes. But like the, that kind of trauma, like what are the effects of that kind of trauma and how are they gonna come out? That would be a, yeah, that would be a lot to look at.

Sara: I actually did. I sort of forgot about this, but I shouldn’t have. I hired a psychologist who specializes in trauma to review it and make sure I had both his story and the kid’s story correct.

Because the kids, some of the kids maybe, um, continue in other books and that doctor became a character in the series.

Mark: Oh, nice.

Sara: So, she’s inspiration for a character in the series. Yeah. So that was pretty cool. I, it was important to me to honor and [00:08:00] respect people who’ve been through bad stuff. I didn’t wanna make fun of it or make it a joke, so.

Yeah. Yeah. Or make stuff up about mental health. You know, I know sometimes in TV and movies people will do something for the plot and I wanted to make sure, of course I have to do it a little bit, but I didn’t wanna do it absolutely over the top. So I did have her check, she reviewed the book and we talked in deep discussion about how certain characters would react to certain things now and in the past and in the future. And that was a big deal for me.

Mark: So is there anything you got in like the earlier drafts, let’s say from the developmental editor or from your psychologist that you kind of got wrong, that you learned and thought, oh wow, that’s, I didn’t think of that and now I have to like adjust the book a little bit?

Sara: Not really. And this may be TMI, I went through some trauma, you know, my younger life. And so I, some of this stuff is kind of based on me without the extreme reactions to what happened? So no, not [00:09:00] really. The one thing I got from the developmental editor that I thought was funny is he did not though there was a man who was in his sixties, but he’s put out a bunch of books and movies and then there was a younger woman who was like 26 or 27 very different views on things. He did not like that I have the Bud swear. And I would not let go because I’m like a young man held captive with his sister and another girl and he’s not big, and the captor is big. He’s gonna fight back with whatever tools he has. And to a teenage boy, swearing and acting tough is the only thing he would have.

And that was one that, she said yes. That was definitely how a kid that age would act. So that was interesting.

Mark: Yeah.

Sara: But he hated it. He was like, nobody’s gonna buy your book because he’s swearing. And I’m like, wait a minute, we’re talking thrillers in 2020, whatever one, they’ll be okay. They’ll be fine with it.

Mark: Yeah. And I thought it was good ’cause he didn’t have like a normal upbringing. Like they’re, no, they’re [00:10:00] already struggling. So he’s getting, his parenting essentially is coming from, well, whatever kind of media and stuff and friends that, that he’s getting. Right. So,

Sara: Very much.

Mark: Swearing would definitely be part of that. Yeah. Especially when that’s, you know, it’s kind of accepted more so now than ever.

Sara: Right. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Mark: Was there ever a point where you almost gave up on the book, on the writing, the first book?

Sara: No, I was obsessed with it. I was driving everybody crazy talking about it. It was all I talked about to my poor friends and family.

I have the bad habit in both writing and life of, I keep going with things far beyond where normal people give up. I’ve had two businesses that have both done, I’ve done that. And all of my books, I just keep going. I don’t know. I don’t, I think because I’m usually, ’cause I know the end, I don’t have that problem of, oh, I don’t know where this is going.

I don’t, I think I’m done with it. Yeah, I just, I think having, knowing the end does help avoid that. Yeah. It might get messy in the middle and I might [00:11:00] get frustrated and screaming and wondering what the heck I’m doing and, and there’s always imposter syndrome about you’re a terrible writer. Why are you doing this?

Blah, blah, blah. Which you may know too. Um, yeah. But no, I’ve never thought about quitting a project once I was in. I would say if I’ve got more than 10,000 words, I’m, I’m good. I’m not, I’m not stopping.

Mark: You’re in. Yeah.

Sara: That Dollhouse is the longest in my books though, because the feedback I got from a lot of reviewers and readers was, this is too long. And the funny thing is they all said you needed an editor. And I’m like, I paid for two editors.

Mark: Yeah.

Sara: But that book was a hundred thousand words. And most of my new thrillers are much shorter though, between 60 and 70. Because the other thing is I like dialogue and I like action. I write books that are more like a movie.

There’s not a whole lot of introspection or a whole lot of pondering the wallpaper. I just that I won’t read it when they’re like that. I skip it. Mm-hmm. And so I don’t write it. So, um. For good or bad. If people are looking for a deep [00:12:00] read, I’m probably not their person.

Mark: Yeah. Yeah. I liked how fast it moved, I mean mm-hmm.

I’m also like, it’s a thriller, right. You’re, you’re right. Looking for it to kind of get going a little bit. Yes. Sure. We have to take a breath at points, but I, yeah.

Sara: Yeah. I,

Mark: I really enjoyed how fast it was and

Sara: Oh, thank you. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Um, have you read, uh, any S.A. Cosby Books?

Mark: No, I have not.

Sara: Oh, well I highly recommend them for one, but they’re crime fiction, but they have a little bit of a literary bent to them in that he likes similes a lot. Okay. I’ve heard he is only allowed to have three similes per page or something like that. ’cause he likes them a lot. But he’s the only author that I know of that I will sit still and listen or read his explorations of the wallpaper because he does it in such a way that it’s still moving the story. So you know, some people can get away with that. Just not me. I’m not that talented.

Mark: Yeah. Yeah. That was CS Crosby, you said?

Sara: S.A. Cosby.

Mark: S.A. Cosby.

Sara: Yeah, he wrote, um, his newest [00:13:00] book is King of Ashes. He’s also got Razor Blade Tears. All the Sins Bleed. I think he’s got five books out now. But if you read what they’re crime fiction and they’re very, very crime fiction. Okay. Yeah. Blacktop Wasteland, I think made me cry harder than any crime book ever has. So, uh, yeah, if you like that kind of stuff, you, and it’s based in the American South, so it’s, you know, it’s, he, he’s Black and his characters are African American and living that life and Okay. It’s a deep dive, but it’s so good.

Mark: Oh, I’ll have to check that out.

Sara: Yeah. Highly recommend. Are you in Canada?

Mark: Yeah, I’m in Ottawa. Yeah.

Sara: Oh, okay. Okay. Yeah. Boot is, I, I’m like, oh, I catch a Canadian accent there.

Mark: Yeah.

Sara: Didn’t realize.

Mark: So what would you, your book is, it’s kind of pumped up as, or from what I gather was like a psychological thriller.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Would you say for readers, is that, is it more, is it like a psy, [00:14:00] a horror psychological thriller? Like would you throw horror in there because.

Sara: Yeah, it’s a little bit, yeah, it’s a little bit psychological horror, which I don’t know if we have that as an official genre yet, but we should. Um, yeah.

Yeah. It’s very much psychological horror. Okay. It’s not crime because it’s not, you know, traditional crime thriller. It’s, it’s definitely psychological. Um, and it’s bordering on horror. One thing I don’t tend to write. I figure our brains like the reader’s brains, and especially for writers, we are much worse when it comes to envisioning something if we’re given just enough information that our brains take over.

I know we make it way worse than the author ever could, so I like to do that to readers. I like to let their brain do the deep dive on the gore and the physical stuff. I just give ’em enough to. To get them there.

Mark: Okay.

Sara: Yeah. So there’s not, there’s not a ton of, there’s a lot of intensity, but there’s not a lot of physical description of blood and guts or anything like that.

Mark: Okay. , Yeah. [00:15:00] Okay. Yeah. So with the characters, how did you come up with, with the characters and let’s say, I mean, I guess Angel, Bud, and Olivia. Yeah. Yeah. So who, like, how did you come up with them? What was like, I know you, the inspiration came from…

Sara: yeah, so Elizabeth Smart was Olivia and Angel and Bud were Shasta and Dylan, although the ages were changed on all of them. I. Basically I just, I envisioned who would be good to be in this. So Angel is very shy and very timid and easily made insecure because of her relationship with her mom. And Olivia is very stoic and very, it is what it is so I’m gonna just, you know, exist and do the best I can. And she’s, she’s a little bit like bossy older sister, even though they’re not by birth related ’cause they’re together for quite like six months or something, I don’t remember now. And she is very mothering in a weird way, but not mothering, but more the attitude of, I know it’s better for you kind of thing sometimes. [00:16:00] So, I don’t know. Uh, this is another one of those weird things. I lived in an orphanage for the year I was in Wyoming, and I was thinking about some of the relationships of the girls that were in the dorm that I was in and how, you know, you can be a year older and then you act like you know everything in the person that’s a year younger than you, you know, there’s just a kid. And it was very much that dynamic. So that applied a little bit in this locked up environment. So I think that helped. And then, the bad guys, the bad guy.

Mark: Yeah. Yeah. So do you, do you build, when you’re building characters, do you just start the story and then the character comes to life for you? Or is there like a, an interview, kind of interview process with the character to get to know them sort of.

Sara: Um, I’m character first, which is interesting, I think to me, that they come to me fully formed. They tell me who they are. I don’t have to, I don’t have to do anything. Even the bad guys, like the bad guy in the Dollhouse, he has a pretty interesting backstory.

And I’d say that’s true of all [00:17:00] my bad guys, except for one in The Hunted. She is just a psychopath. To be a psychopath. Yeah. Yeah. Um, yeah. But, they’re just people in my brain. I just finished and put out the Doll Master, which is the follow up. The, there’s a few books in the series, but The Doll Master is sort of the second half of The Dollhouse, and I thought it was gonna end one way and nope. Nope. It ended a whole different way that surprised the heck outta me, and it was because the character said, this is what happens. You’re not telling me what I’m doing. I don’t care it. Okay. So thanks for that book.

Mark: Yeah. I used to outline a lot and in detail, I think the first book I wrote had like 40. It was like 40,000 words of an outline, which is almost a written book that was, yeah. Just had no detail in it. Wow. But then when I really got into the story of actually writing, the characters came to life. Mm-hmm. And, and then I realized, wait, they’re not gonna do these things. And then I just went with the story in a totally different direction. Yeah.

So by the time the book was done, [00:18:00] I think maybe like 15,000 words were actually useful and…

Sara: wow.

Mark: So now I don’t do these gigantic yeah gigantic outlines anymore. They’re just, just like you. It’s kind of like beginning. I, I usually know the middle and then Yeah, the end. So I have like the three acts sort of Yeah.

Somewhat figured out, but I’m, I’m, I don’t do characters really deep. So I also jump into, allow the story to go wherever it goes. Yeah. Because characters will do what they do and once you get to know them, it’s like, wow, like this person is just so fascinating and this is what they’re gonna do.

Isn’t, and that’s, it’s so fun.

Sara: And they have those little like mannerisms. That they insist on that I don’t, I don’t know. I feel like there’s some part back here in our brains that knows what they’re doing, but like all of a sudden you’ll have a character that does a certain thing or says a certain thing all the time and you’re like, did I consciously do that or did they project that through my fingers onto the screen?

I mean, it’s weird. Yeah, we’re all a little bit nuts, I think, but in a good way. In a nice, safe, good way. Yeah.

Mark: Yeah.

Sara: Better to do this than actually go around killing people. [00:19:00]

Mark: Yeah, that’s fair. Yeah. Yeah.

Sara: Yeah.

Mark: And so what character was the most fun to write?

Sara: Oh, Angel is my favorite, I think because I connect the most with her. There is a, a character in Small Gods, which is fifth I think. Yeah fifth, that she, again, all of my characters are like me, even the bad ones, but she is again, very much like me at my worst. And that was fun to write because I got to let out my bad side, and be bad. Mm-hmm. But I’d say Angel is the one I’m most attached to, I have a character named CB who comes up in The Hunted and she’s kinda like a little bit J-Lo, she’s a badass, five foot, nothing who wears pink but drives a semi. And she’s mouthy and she’s actually from kind of a well bred family in Chicago, but she doesn’t live that life. So, she’s, she’s one of my favorite characters to write [00:20:00] because she just is so mouthy and in your face and sassy and she dresses cute and weird. Um, so that’s fun to write. I like the fact,

Mark: I love that.

Sara: Yeah. Yeah. And then on my cozy side, I have some great characters. Like I have a guy named Marv who runs a convenience store called Pump and Circumstance. And he is always inventing things, and so he’s like Henry Winkler when he is 70 in, you know, in, I don’t know. So, I don’t know. I love characters. Characters are my favorite thing on the planet. If I could just write characters all the time, that’d be great.

Yeah. Who’s your favorite character?

Mark: So who’s, oh, so sorry, I just wanna touch on who is, your other books, are they under the same name, Sara Ennis, or is cozy under

Sara: Well, the cozys, no, the cozys are Sarah Isabelle, because I, I, okay.

Figured the thriller people could wander into the cozys and would be okay, but if the cozy people wandered into a thriller, they would not be okay. So I wanted to put some space between them, but my website is just Call Me Sarah, because [00:21:00] either way it’s me. So that’s the best way to do it. But yeah, I’m, I’m careful.

The thriller people know about the cozys and the cozy people can discover the thrillers, but I don’t want them to accidentally find that they would not do well.

Mark: Yeah, I could imagine that crossover would be tough because yeah, if you like cozy and, and then you go to like your Dollhouse, that’s not, yeah, that’s, so it’s not gonna work.

Even if you wanted to try it, I would almost say, I don’t know. No, no. I do. You might like the writer, but…

Sara: Yeah, I do have people who like both, but they started with the thrillers. Okay. It’s fine to go from dark to light, but it’s not good to start with the light and go to dark, I think. Yeah. Um, because the cozys are funny.

They’re, they’re. Like laugh out loud, funny. They’re completely different than this, so, yeah.

Mark: Yeah. Okay. Uh, yeah, so my favorite character from your book was Bud so far. Oh, well that makes sense. Early on, but, yeah. Yeah.

Sara: But I meant of yours. Do you have, do your, is your your book series or are they [00:22:00] one off? Are they two?

Mark: Oh, I have both. Yeah. Oh, okay. I kind, I, I jump. There’s sub genres of thrillers, so, oh, okay. Yeah. I have a trilogy that’s in a post-apocalyptic setting, and then I have a military thriller and then I have a psychological, so I kind of jump all over the place.

Sara: That we can’t all stick to one. We’re not good at it.

Mark: Yeah. Uh, yeah. Fa favorite characters? That’s a good question. Um, well, I have a, there’s one character. It’s same thing I like, like the spunky fun, confident character. I, so I in my book two, it hasn’t come out, it comes out on Tuesday, actually.

Sara: Oh. Congrats.

Mark: Called, The Chosen it’s book two in the trilogy, and there’s a character in there called Poppy. And, and she, she is just fun because she has that like I’ll take on anything. I don’t, I’m not afraid, like, you know. Yeah. Despite being in a wheelchair, she has found in this post apocalyptic world how to get by and be an impactful, an impactful, yeah. Part of that, their group.

Sara: So, wow. So what inspired that?

Mark: And she was a lot of fun to write.

Sara: Who inspired her? Anybody? [00:23:00] Or you just made her up?

Mark: I think I just made her up. Yeah. I just, she just kind of, it’s kind of, she just popped into my head during that scene. I was like, yeah, you know, they heard the creaking of wheels and then all of a sudden Poppy came.

Sara: Oh, that sounds awesome. It was a lot of fun. Yeah. Okay. So is she in both books or just in the second one?

Mark: She’s not in the first, she’s in the second and the third. Okay.

Sara: Yeah. Okay. Okay. Well now I, I’ve never read, well, you know there’s few, but um, I’ve never really read Postapocalyptic thriller. Is there any humor in it at all or are they very serious humor?

Mark: No, it’s dark. Okay. Well I don’t…

Sara: be dark and funny.

Mark: Yeah. Yeah. I don’t do it. Dexter like Joe Abercrombie. Yeah. Oh yeah. Dexter too. Yeah, yeah,

Sara: yeah. And I do try to make Alfred funny. I wanted Alfred to think he was funny, even if nobody else thought he was funny. So there’s some bad dad jokes in that book.

Okay, well, I might have to check it out and see if I can do purely dark. I’ve never tried that.

Mark: Oh yeah, for sure. I can send you a copy of that. I’d be happy to.

Sara: Well, sending from Canada to the US is ridiculous. Don’t do that. I’ll go find it, [00:24:00] but thank you.

Mark: So we’re gonna, we’re gonna get into a couple wrap up questions. Okay. And these are for authors that are listening. Oh, okay. What advice would you give someone who just published their first or second book? So they’ve kind of gone through that learning curve a little bit and as you know, or well may or may not know, like it can be very challenging. Mm-hmm. To get your book out there, to get it to an audience.

So what? Yes. And to want to write the next one when the first one maybe doesn’t do as well. ’cause everyone thinks, oh, it’s my first book once it’s out there. Yeah. Like it’s gonna go big and I’ll be able to write full time and Yeah. It’s almost never that way.

Sara: No. I would say, and I am dead serious about this, find author friends.

Because not only are they good for when you’re having, I’m gonna quit and go work at Costco Day but they are also really good at advice. Like I’m redoing all my covers now because I paid a bunch of money for my first three covers, think, and I hired somebody who worked at Random House doing their covers and I didn’t know any better.

And we went for cool covers [00:25:00] instead of market covers. And people have for a long time thought that they were fantasy instead of thrillers because they don’t look at all like thrillers. So I spent, you know, $3,000 on covers that I, that did not do me any service. Um, so I don’t, I. I don’t necessarily have a great eye for covers.

And so I have my, my group of thriller writers, we have a little mastermind and they are, they are helping me help the designer redo my covers because I’ll think something’s great and they’ll point out Nope. Why it’s not great. Yeah. And I would never have got it. So have writer friends because they can give you good advice.

They will be honest. You can do things together. Like, on TikTok, we have a shared TikTok account where we, um, do book reviews. Of books, but we also talk about our own books. It’s kind of like that. I think if you know what 20 books is, it’s the, yeah, the rising, rising tide lifts all boats. It’s very much that philosophy.

Yeah. So try to find some thriller [00:26:00] writer friends if you write thrillers or whatever, right. I also have another group on the cozy side that’s equally fantastic. That would be number one. Number two, listen to any Becca Syme podcast you can find, because she will help you keep your head straight. Um, she really will.

Yeah. She’ll, she will remind you this is not an overnight thing for anybody even like some of the people that we think of as overnight successes have got 13 or 14 books out before we hear about them. Yeah. And think that they suddenly are great. Um. Don’t give up. If you really enjoy it, keep doing it. If you, if you would do it anyway, even if you weren’t making money, then it’s worth keep doing.

If you are only doing it for money and you’re not doing well, it might not work. I mean, you might as well, you know, go find another thing that you like that might make you money. ’cause it’s gonna break your heart. Yeah. It’s so hard. It’s hard emotionally, it’s hard financially, it’s. Time-wise, if you have a day job and you’re trying to do that around it, I’m lucky in that I got laid off, so I ended up being able to write [00:27:00] full-time.

But financially that was scary as hell. Yeah. Um, and still is, I’m not, you know, I do have to have side gigs to help, but you have to love it enough. Mm-hmm. That you would do it even if you don’t get great success. Otherwise, you know, you’re just torturing yourself.

Mark: Yeah, yeah. Anyone who thinks that this is, yeah.

A way to make money is, uh, yeah. There’s way easier ways to make your fortune than writing.

Sara: we can get into a whole conversation about Amazon and authors and all the ways that Yeah. I mean, they, people think we get rich ’cause our books are 1499 on Amazon and we get $2 out of that, you know? Yeah. They, yeah. They, the big world doesn’t understand how it works, but No, we do.

Yeah,

Mark: yeah, yeah, yeah,

Sara: yeah. So

Mark: if you could pick one thing that you felt led to your success so far, what would it be like, what worked best for you?

Sara: I lucked out. I had no idea what I was doing when I published the Dollhouse. I went on Instagram and found some people that talked [00:28:00] about thriller books, and I very naively, I didn’t realize this was something that all sorts of people did.

I messaged a few of them and said, Hey, can I send you my book? And I went and made this fancy little package that turned out wasn’t fancy at all compared to what they actually get, but to me it was fancy. I sent it to a couple of people and I just lucked out. They talked about it to their friends and they got their friends to talk about it, and it got past the hump of the cover, not matching, because if people just looked at the cover, they never would’ve picked it up.

And I didn’t know that at that point. So just lucky and trying, you know, being too dumb not to know, to, to know, you know, not to do this or that. You’re not the only one doing this to think I was it, um, just kind of going out and trying stuff, whether you know it’s gonna work or hope it’s gonna work. 20 things that you’d hope are gonna work, aren’t gonna work and maybe one will.

Mark: [00:29:00] Yeah.

Sara: But, um, the other thing I would say is. I’m on TikTok. That’s probably where I spend my most time. But I have noticed that Instagram is great for building awareness. You’re not gonna sell books there, but people will get to know who you are. The times I’ve noticed big spikes in my sales is when somebody unrelated to me goes and talks about my book in one of the reader groups on Facebook.

That’s gold. Mm-hmm. So if you can get somebody there to like your books, um, and talk about it, that’s fantastic. The other thing is there’s a bunch of Stuff Your Kindle days now, have you done any of those? Where you participate and it’s like, the last one I did was 500 authors give away their book for free for a day.

And they have, uh, emails and websites and all the stuff that goes out. And it started in romance. Now it’s in all sorts of genres. I was thinking those aren’t great anymore because on the Stuff Your Kindle Day, me, Sarah Reader goes [00:30:00] and looks at every book in this list and downloads it onto my Kindle for free.

I now have a hundred books on there that I’m probably gonna, you know, and then somebody I know is gonna put a book out. I’m never gonna get to that. Yeah. Maybe, maybe. I’m trying an experiment where I, I’m in a cozy one this next week. So the first book is gonna be free, and I put the other six on a countdown deal.

So because people, that’s the goal, the hope is that if you get one for free, they’ll go read your other books and they’ll pay for them.

Mark: Yeah.

Sara: So people like things on sale. So hopefully when they click on my first book and then see the others in the series are on sale, they’ll buy those. And then if they have more than one of my books on their phone, they might prioritize it.

Oh, okay. I have four books by the Yeah, exactly. Read it. So I’m gonna give that a shot. I have no idea if it’ll work, but it did work for another friend of mine, so we’ll see. We’ll see what happens. Yeah. So again, it’s try whatever you can.

Mark: Yeah, for sure.

Sara: Look for stuff that’s free or at least not money outta your pocket, like a Kindle count [00:31:00] down deal doesn’t cost you anything in cash. ’cause that’s the other thing is everything’s expensive. I don’t think BookBub feature deals work as well as they used to. Have you ever done one of those?

Mark: Yeah, I tried it. It didn’t work very well. Yeah. Oh

Sara: yeah. Yeah. They just don’t pay. They used to, but now they’ve got so many books in every email. You just get lost and they’re too expensive for that. So I think they’re gonna have to change their model. Yeah.

Mark: And they don’t have post apocalyptic, so they’re still Oh, they don’t like, they don’t. Get deep into the genres. So, oh, for me, I think they put my, my first book in in like an action and Oh yeah, I think it was Action Adventure or something and yeah. Yeah, it missed because it didn’t work. It’s not like that audience was not, was not the right audience. So, yeah.

Sara: It’s so hard. That’s the thing, people don’t realize that you’re gonna spend at least as much time trying to get people to know about your book as you do writing your books.

Mark: Yeah. And that’s a lot.

Sara: You really are. You really are. And it’s exhausting. Yeah. ’cause at least the writing is fun. The marketing can be not that fun. Yeah. Especially ’cause you, like I had a book pop off and I have no idea why. I don’t know why. [00:32:00] So I can’t go and go, okay, that worked because I did this and go do that again. No, I have no clue why I did it.

So I’m just like, okay, well thank you. Now what do I do? Yeah. It’s really frustrating. It’s, it’s not the most happy business to be in, but it’s satisfying if you like your stories.

Mark: Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Well, congratulations on the success you’ve had because you’ve, well, thank you. You’ve done well. Thank you.

Thank you. I have so far really enjoyed the Dollhouse, and I will be, well thanks. Getting more into that and I will leave a review. Okay. Those, well, I wanna know what you

Sara: think about the, I can’t wait to hear that part.

Mark: Okay. Uh, so as we wrap up here, what, where can people find your book? And find you on social.

Sara: Um, I’m on Amazon because Amazon owns us under Sarah Ennis. And then I have a website called justcallmesara.com. And then I have instagram, TikTok and Facebook accounts. I have a private reader group on Facebook, but mostly there, I just share inappropriate memes. So it’s not, it’s not okay, you know, [00:33:00] but the people there appreciate it.

Um, so for my, just if you look for Sara Ennis Writes, ’cause there’s also a stripper named Sarah Enni on TikTok. Anyway, um, so Sarah Ennis writes is me. I keep my call. Okay. Which everybody appreciates.

Mark: Okay. Um,

Sara: but yeah, if you just look for Sarah and US Rights anywhere, you’ll find me.

Mark: Okay. That’s great.

Yeah. Well, thank you so much for being here. This has been a, have a wonderful conversation. Really enjoyed learning more. It was

Sara: fun

Mark: and yeah, it was great. So if you don’t mind sticking around for a couple minutes. Yeah. Uh, for some bonus questions. My newsletter subscribers get some, some bonus questions that others don’t get, so, oh, that’s cool.

Sara: You have to

Mark: join the newsletter to jump in on, on those bonus questions. Very

Sara: smart. Very smart. Okay. Yeah.

Mark: So thank you.

Sara: You are welcome. I wanna hear about that once we’re off.

Mark: Thanks for listening to the show. If you enjoyed this episode, you can support the podcast and get early access to future episodes on Patreon. Some guests are also sharing bonus content, like short stories and novellas that are hard to find [00:34:00] elsewhere. And even if you just joined Patreon now, you can still get all those novellas that were posted. And if you’re into mind manipulation and assassination in a military setting, check out the Genesis project.

If you like the show, please follow, rate and share it with another Thriller fan. It really helps make a difference in growing the podcast. I’ll see you in the next episode when I sit down with Lizzie Qnert, author of the Psychological vigilante thriller Power Surge.