TPP Episode 21 with Andrew Warren

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mark: I don’t think so. I may

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Andrew: No.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Andrew: I do. Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mark: What vehicle?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How do you do that?

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

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

Mark: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mark: And you blend the

Andrew: But everyone’s,

Mark: environment too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Andrew: Oh, the gray man.

Mark: sorry, gray Man? Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Andrew: Totally like

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

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

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

Mark: Yeah.

Andrew: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

Andrew: how many characters does

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

Andrew: Had a lot of

Mark: Hearing came from. Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Andrew: Right.

Mark: That because I don’t want

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

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

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

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

Andrew: Andrew Warren books.com.

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

Andrew: Yeah. Man.

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

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

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

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

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

Andrew: Let’s do it.

Mark: All right. Thank you.

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

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

TPP Episode 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 19 with Mark Philbin

Mark N: [00:00:00] Hello, mark, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for being here today.

Mark P: Oh, mark. I really appreciate it. Thanks, and thanks for all you’re doing for thriller writers and readers everywhere to get these books out to people and introduce ’em to new authors. It’s a, it’s a great platform and thanks for doing it.

Mark N: You’re welcome. Thank you. I have your book here with me, killed them all. A great read. I’m very excited to talk about this book ’cause there’s so many things I loved about it. So let’s get into it. Let’s start with the pitch before I pitch it for you by talking too much about it.

Mark P: Okay, well, let’s start by imagining a where 12 victims in 12 months would be killed in 12 cities Distance becomes part of the distraction and motive becomes part of the mundane and everything becomes hidden in the noise. But why would you choose to do it that way if you didn’t wanna take credit? Now imagine that there’s this washed up [00:01:00] poker playing mid thirties guy who’s a brainiac, but he is very good at pattern finding, but his aversion to authority has ruined his career, has got him fired from whatever jobs he could get. He’s now worked himself through a marriage and he is to the point where the only way he can survive is to hustle.

College kids at poker games. then comes a knock at the door he doesn’t deserve. And his former Harvard roommate who’s now an FBI agent, brings him this puzzle. It’s early May three men have died under unusual circumstances. Can he find a pattern while he does? Otherwise it would be a very short book, he does. But from there this cooperation and this chance that he has to do to be able to turn it around. so what starts out as a quiet scheme in the background becomes a chase across the United States to stay one step ahead of Hannah and [00:02:00] this FBI task force. And before he can get to the end, he knows he’s gotta be able to take this temporary, he has turn it into teamwork and discover the one thing he needs. And that isn’t just where or who he needs to find out why. So let’s begin because the calendar is ticking.

Mark N: Thank you. That’s a wonderful pitch. Thank you.

Mark P: You’re welcome.

Mark N: Very well done. So let’s start from the beginning. Where did this idea come from?

Mark P: I had been at a Toronto Blue Jay game. It was I could probably look up the day it was the final Tuesday in April because they have dollar hotdog days. So my son and I met our i.

who lives in Toronto. We went to the game because Joey Chestnut, who always wins the hotdog 4th of July hotdog eating contest, he’ll eat 70 in 10 minutes.

He was throwing out the first pitch. I think he’s the greatest living athlete. Can you [00:03:00] imagine eating 70 hotdog in 10 minutes? This guy’s a beast. so I, I got a chance to meet him through radio contacts and we enjoyed the game. And I had watched a Jeffrey Deaver Masterclass podcast video he had done on YouTube because I just finished my second book and I was beginning to plot out my third book, and he said some remarkable things, including why kill one if you can kill 10. And come up with a title that’s just so explosive it jumps out off the shelves because you’re amongst so many others. And make the theme as big as you can make it the motive and the theme behind it. So this was all kind of stuck in my mind throughout the day. On the way back, I’m on the go train from Union Station to Oshawa for an hour.

My son, of course has his earbuds in or he’s sleeping I have an hour to sit there and I probably conceived 50% of the plot just sitting on the train [00:04:00] thinking about, well, one, you know, don’t kill one. But what about 12? What about one a month? what I kept landing on was something thriller authored Linwood Barkley had had talked to, I’d interviewed him a couple of times and he starts all this plotting with what if. What if you woke up and your entire family was gone and for 25 years you never knew why, and that was the beginning of no time for Goodbye. His breakout book wasn’t his first, but his big first breakout book.

Mark N: Okay.

Mark P: wanna do what if. I am always really enthralled with why Wood. So why would somebody put together a plot of 12 people in 12 months, in 12 cities?

Mark N: Mm-hmm.

Mark P: the idea because everybody could follow that. It’s not a difficult thing to believe in. You could follow it throughout. And when people that I know have read the book, they’ve told me I’m at July, I’m at August. You

Mark N: Yeah.

Mark P: becomes how they understand the plot so well. The chapters becoming important.

It’s all about what month you’re [00:05:00] in. So I thought if I could, if I, but why would that have to work? So it was putting together a client and a killer and the victims that would make sense of a plot that had to be done that way. And like I said, probably by the time I stepped off the go train, I was probably 50% of the way there, which, you know, as an author really is the easy 50%.

Mark N: Yeah.

Mark P: rest is the small details and the editing and making sure that, yeah, it’s plausible and it’s realistic, but it’s still thrilling and coming up with all of those details and so that’s where it came from I was very much inspired by Jeffrey Dever bone collector fame on really saying take what you like, but blow it up, make it bigger.

Mark N: Did you consider that an outline when you were doing that, or did, because that was your outline when you were on the training?

Mark P: I did do an outline because that was the end of April. I then went back to Toronto. Thanks. It’s funny you mention that. I went back to Toronto again for the first weekend in June for motive [00:06:00] the thriller and crime writers festival again, Lin Wood Barky was their shared SI got to meet Anthony Horowitz there,

Mark N: Nice.

Mark P: Only a hero of mine. He got my son reading through the Alex Ryder series, so to get a chance to talk to him and thank him on behalf of what he did for my son to be, to become a reader. So I got to meet a lot of really great ones. And as I told them afterwards I went there looking for information left with inspiration

Mark N: Mm-hmm.

Mark P: I took what outline I had that Monday, the day after I got back and I wrote the first draft, appeal them all in seven weeks.

Mark N: Wow.

Mark P: by what I heard. Not to be afraid to write with abandon ’cause you’re just going to clean it up in editing. I always try and write a clean first draft and I still catch myself doing it, but don’t get so lost now in the details that you miss the big joy of what your story is. So I really went with abandoned, hoping to [00:07:00] get it done and edited sort of for the fall of 2023 for the querying season of the fall.

Mark N: Mm-hmm.

Mark P: and ended up hitting it. Got an editor in New York to work with me on cleaning it up in time. But the outline of things like what are the cities, what are the methods of death? who are the victims, you know? So I have these sheets that I went through and then matched them up. probably I spent maybe a month on it. I was mowing my lawn when I came up with one of the key details that links the victims together. And I went, Ooh, that’s an interesting way of going about it, because I know how the book ends.

A little bit of foreshadowing. I thought, oh that’s a good one. So mow the rest along the one back, write that one out. And once I had all of that then, and then I said, and then the inspiration from that writing festival and if you’re a writer, I suggest do the best you can to go to one of those.

You don’t have to go to that one, but one that’s close to you, even if it’s just for a few hours. So very inspiring to[00:08:00]

Mark N: Yeah.

Mark P: Other people’s journeys, especially ones that I think are at the pinnacle or at the top that say you’re never really that far. If you’ve got a book in the marketplace, you’re ahead of 99.9% of anybody who’s ever wanted to write a book, let alone has something available for publishing.

Mark N: Yeah.

Mark P: at it with abandoned, trust your story, trust your voice and if the outline’s good and it’s plausible, you’re probably going to find a place for it in the marketplace.

Mark N: Nice.

Mark P: that, what I did by the time I was ready to go Labor Day of 2023, and I got picked up in April of 2024, released May 6th year of 2025.

Mark N: That’s awesome. Congratulations. That is a very fast turnover in that seven weeks.

Mark P: too. Yeah.

Mark N: Yeah. Yeah. Especially if that’s, is that the first book you’ve ever written through this inspiration?

Mark P: No, I wrote two others that have been shelved. The second book was the first thriller. The first was something I had, ’cause when I was done the morning show, I used to go for a walk before I would go back and record commercial and stuff. Well, the radio station just [00:09:00] happens to be beside Bellville Cemetery. if you’re looking for inspiration and one day, because I’m so brave, a white plastic bag blew out from behind a tree and I think I fainted. I might have screamed. well, ’cause I’m

Mark N: Yeah.

Mark P: about things. ‘Cause you know, when you’re in radio, you’re four hours on the air, 20 hours preparing.

Everything becomes the bit Mr. Jerry Seinfeld says, you’re never truly present. You’re always looking for the next thing to talk about by observing what’s going on. And then I thought, oh, well that would be crazy. That wouldn’t be a ghost. And then I thought, well if that was a ghost, why would a ghost step out behind a tree and want to talk to me?

And that became a book called From Ashes. And that took about a year of outlining. And then in the pandemic 2022, my daughter from Toronto was home with us. And she said, dad, when are you gonna write that book? When are you gonna write that book? So I probably took six months to write the first draft of it and thought I had scaled a mountain when I typed the end because you think, [00:10:00] wow, I wrote a book.

And then the funny thing is, once you’ve done it, once you find you can do it again.

Mark N: Yeah.

Mark P: Was a thriller I’ve always had in my mind, called Give me Death, give me Liberty, or Give me Death. And I really liked that. And I was going to start working on editing and querying that when Kill Them All entered mind and I said, no, I think this is the one I really wanna work on.

This is the one I think that has a better shot. this is the third. I’ve since written two more that are coming out next year. And on this past weekend, I just finished my sixth book. And then I’m gonna go back and give them death a shot. I’m going to give me death. I’m gonna, I’m gonna work on the edits to that. ’cause I think that’s a good one too. And, and I think of a better writer. The work with the editors has made me a better editor.

Mark N: Mm-hmm.

Mark P: so as they say, nothing’s ever shelved, you know, shelved for now.

Mark N: Yeah.

Mark P: but you can always go back and revisit an idea, revisit a novel, revisit a manuscript or an idea, don’t kill your doll, just tuck them away somewhere.

You’re going to use them in another book. If it was a [00:11:00] good idea, maybe it isn’t for that book,

Mark N: Yeah.

Mark P: it, it sure could be somewhere else.

Mark N: That’s an impressive turnover, even from your first novel. ’cause one thing I hear a lot is when authors say, and me included, that it took many years. I think I spent like 10 years on my first book just on and off and life and everything else gets in the way. So that’s, that’s great that you also did, you’ve, I mean, you’ve been quite prolific right from the get go almost from 2020.

Mark P: Lee Child of Jack er fame I bought A-A-B-B-C masterclass of his, and I really enjoyed it too. And one of the things he says is and it’s one thing that I’ve done toxic libraries and you tend to get, the older demographic will come out to a library, which I love. Thank you. And I always tell them, if you’re here as a writer, it’s never too late.

Mark N: Yeah.

Mark P: too old. Because as, you know, Lee Child said, I don’t know. And, and I agree with them. I don’t know if I could have been a writer at 30.

Mark N: Yeah.

Mark P: if I had to wait till I was 59. [00:12:00] I’m 62 now. I don’t know if I had to wait till I was 59, but I know that sped up the process. Yes, I write in my radio and speech writing capacity, and I understand the need for brevity. I understand the need when you’re on the radio. You gotta get in and you gotta get out. So there’s not a lot of wasted language.

Mark N: Mm-hmm.

Mark P: When I talk about a clean first draft, I understand that first page desire, that first chapter desire, and why the last page and last chapter should lead into the next book or should lead them with wanting enough to say what, wow, what else has this guy written or this woman written.

Mark N: Yeah.

Mark P: so I started with that already. I don’t have an aversion to editors. So the process of trying to get a book published, is not unlike being in radio and having somebody do what’s called an air check, where they listen to your show, make suggestions on how to make it better. And, you know here we are in baseball season with the, the js. I think of editors, it’s like a first base coach. They’re not running the [00:13:00] basis, but they can see everything that’s going on. They’re editing other books so they know where your book’s gonna slot in. And you know what, if you can kind of tuck it a little bit more over to this side and lean a little bit more into that theme, that’s gonna steer away from what everybody else is doing right now and

Mark N: Yeah.

Mark P: a book, a chance to shine, an editor can do that.

I know some people are like, oh, nobody’s gonna tell me what to do. And that’s all well and good. But if they’re going to offer from a publisher to get you that editor, I think what a gift to be able to have somebody who has eyes on the full look of the industry to say, this is where your book’s gonna fit, and I think it’s gonna be strong. Or this is a good first effort or all of the things that you can get. And then use those tips moving forward to become a better writer. So, I thank you for the compliment. I was surprised as well when I got accepted in May. It was on the shelves 13 months later. But I think, that might be because of my age that I easier to work with, I think, than I would’ve been when I [00:14:00] was sturdy. Well, I’m sure we’ll get into the book, but somebody asked me how much of Robert, Hannah is you? And I said, all of Robert Hannah’s bad characteristics are me. And the bumper, the hired killer. And that’s not a spoiler alert. The first two words of the

Mark N: Yeah.

Mark P: the bumper. I think at the beginning of the book have my best qualities about, a little bit more about the patients versus the aversion to authority, which when you’re a smart Alec morning guy, you know, you know, like people, you know. So all of these things I had to evolve to become better. Played out on the page, the way it worked out. So, yeah, 59, I think I was probably right. But to your point about being prolific, I’m running out of time Mark, so you know, so many books. If I’ve, if I can sit down now in retirement, it’s just my wife and I now, so I think I can peel off two a year, which I’ve been doing,

Mark N: Nice.

Mark P: been lucky enough that my publisher enjoyed, kill them all.

Enough sales have been good that they jumped on the [00:15:00] next book and then I said, I have the follow up to kill them all. Done. They’re like, Zo, and then said, let’s do, let’s do two in 2026. And so that one will come out as well. So I’m very excited about that. Busy,

Mark N: awesome. Yeah.

Mark P: Yeah.

Mark N: Yeah, as I was reading Robert Hannah, I also was thinking ahead on your behalf, being like, I was thinking, wow, this would actually make a great series. You could write another book. ’cause he’s, he’s such a fun unique character that you could definitely write another book.

So I’m excited for that next book you have coming out. Yeah.

Mark P: you. I, the follow up was really fun to write, and my son and I went hiking in Algonquin Park this summer, and he’s 32 years old, so he doesn’t want to go at dad’s pace, even though I thought I kept up pretty well, but not that good. he’d always be about a hundred feet up, so I would have four hours to myself.

And so I said to him on one of the paths, I said, you go just stay within eyesight in case I fall down. But I’m going to conceive the next Robert Hann book. And so on that four hour, I think I came up with the, the plot for the third [00:16:00] book, which I do wanna have a series of them. And I’ve got. Characters and, and we’ll talk a little bit about it. I don’t think of them as secondary characters because kill them all, every character has agency.

Mark N: Mm-hmm.

Mark P: is affected at the end of the book. Nobody gets away unscathed. And so some of these other characters could have offshoots, of their own books or they get to shine a little bit more with Robert playing a part.

And, I think of the great Michael Conley that way,

Mark N: Yeah.

Mark P: will have Bosch or who will have the Lincoln lawyer.

Mark N: Mm-hmm.

Mark P: one of the other characters like Rachel Ballard will be included and work with Bos. So then she has a twist and you can do different things with it. I was very conscious of not pigeonholing them into these specific roles. People get promoted at the FBI, people retire at the FBI, new people come into the FBI, so he’s this outsider coming in, but so do other people. And so [00:17:00] you begin to have different dynamics and different plots and I’m excited about it. Very excited about the, follow up to this called Echoes of Death when it comes out.

I really enjoyed exploring the characters a second time based on where I left them, but continued to evolve with them.

Mark N: Hmm.

Mark P: I really enjoyed that process a lot.

Mark N: When you originally created all these characters, how did you make them so distinct? Do you have a profile sheet or, or like an, you know, they say like an interview where you interview your own character to find out as much as you can. X ends up in the book.

Mark P: Well, I, I appreciate it. ’cause I, I don’t think I went that far. There was a movie M Night Shalan movies called The Woman in the Water. I don’t know if you know that one.

Mark N: No.

Mark P: it wasn’t very good. I mean, to me. But the whole idea was that there was this monster and I think it was in the pool of an apartment building. And all of the characters were and they all had a unique. of sense about them. [00:18:00] One guy had a massive arm and his other arm was skinny. Somebody I think had tremendous. And anyway, at the end to save the woman, they all had to use their, like the guy with the one strong arm had to lift everybody. It was sort of like, wow, it’s a good thing all of these characters had their unique, so what I did is I sat down and said, okay, I’m going to need a character whose major thing is he’s gonna be first in the room. He’s the most eager. He’s not trying to upstage anybody. He just loves what he does.

He’s gonna work behind the scenes ’cause this is what he loves to do. Jack Sims. Then I’m going to want a female character who is going to go up because she loves to hunt. This is what What she does like a, boss, but she’s working for the FBI for a, a strong sense. She knows what she’s up against and she’s been preparing for this moment. Rhonda Perez. Then of course I have characters in there who are wasting time and we get rid of them pretty early. [00:19:00] So Robert has this aversion to authority. I talk about, well, the captain at the FBI is not gonna put up with that crap, and he’s gonna become this father figure who’s gonna help mold them into place. And then his best friend has own skills and his wife and so I said, I need characters who bring these sorts of things. So I looked at them from their skillset and what they could bring to the story and those, and that was how I characterized them. and then from there, I, I really just wanted it to work. There were a couple

A couple of, in the book where I would kind of change it or I would morph it. I would take it back and say, I know, and then go back to the beginning and add something to their skillset. I did that very much with Robert’s ex-wife, in the book because of the way the ending originally was in the first draft, which is not the way the book ends, as happens. I’ve learned yeah. books that the ending that you think I, because I wrote it to get to a spot. wrote it to [00:20:00] get, and I don’t know if you’re at the spot yet, ’cause you said you have 60 pages left. I don’t know if you’re at the spot yet. then what happened before and after that? I wasn’t sure what was going to happen because that spot isn’t the ending, but that was the spot where I wanted people to go, wow, okay.

That’s, that’s what this book is all about. The theme, the what, that’s what this book is trying to say. And then I’ll end it somehow. But then I realized now I can’t do that. And I had to go back and kind of change it. And that involved evolving these characters to get to those points.

Mark N: How did you know it was ready when you had done that? Like you had your first draft, you know, you wanted to send it to an editor for publishing, but that’s one of the hardest steps is when you have to decide, is this thing ready? Am I just changing words for the sake of changing words? And I think I’m making it better.

Maybe I’m not. When did you decide like, okay, this thing’s ready to be sent off? I’ve done everything I can.

Mark P: Yeah, that’s a great question because somebody said to me, when does a writer, sorry, when does a painter know that’s the last brush stroke?

Mark N: Mm-hmm.

Mark P: Oh boy. You know, that’s, that’s, that’s so [00:21:00] true. I had worked on it for, you know, the seven weeks and edited, I talked about Lead Child. His way is he’ll, he’ll write 1500 to 2000 words, and then before he begins the next day, he’ll go back and edit the previous day. few words here and there. It doesn’t work as a full edit, but as he says you know, it gets you back into the story, gives you a little bit of time to rework some of the language and then so that when you start, yeah, you’re right back where you were. So, I knew when I was done, it was a pretty good, and I worked on it for a couple of weeks. Then I hired an editor out of New York by the name of Ken Soff. I sent it to him and to what I think is a tremendous amount of money from somebody who didn’t have a lot of money. But I spent more than I wanted to because I knew it was good and I knew I wanted to rush it, which in hindsight, I probably didn’t do.

I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t suggest people do that.

Mark N: Okay, but.

Mark P: at this time, I’m, you know, 60 years old and thinking you only get so many shots. And I think this is a good book. I could have waited another year. I could have [00:22:00] waited four more months, but I really wanted to strike while the iron was hot on it. he read it in about a week and then started working on it. And I got impatient. It was probably the week before Labor Day, I had been working on the pitch package and all that stuff. And I emailed him and said, well, what do you think? ’cause I thought, if it’s garbage, he’ll tell me. And as I said, I put it in the acknowledgements he sent back.

If the ending hangs together, I think you have a winner here. So to hear a New York editor say that. Was not something I was prepared for. It was not something I ever would’ve told anybody he’s going to say. And to this day, I don’t know that it’s a winner, but again, as somebody who reads it, I have to trust him more than I trust myself.

Mark N: Yeah.

Mark P: that gave me a lot of confidence moving forward. And then I bought in, I really bought in. So, I loved your Instagram that you did. Thank you. About the signature,

Mark N: Yeah. Loved it. Yeah.[00:23:00]

Mark P: because yeah, my query letter did a lot of that. And, and the rule state, I should never do that, but I so bought into the characters that the pitch package is a taunt,

Mark N: Yeah.

Mark P: the client.

And the killers are taunting you throughout the book so that, the pitch package is exactly what the book is going to sound like. They say, you know, if you’re writing a romance, you should have a pretty, wistful query letter. If you are doing a horror, it should be a little bit of the edge of your seat. Well, mine is very taunting. Very schemy. And so I got a lot of rejections as I expected, but what I was hoping to find is just that was one or two agents that said, I know what you’re doing here. And I understand that because, and I got a couple that asked four more pages and I’d never gotten it with the other books.

So I sort of knew I was on my way. But ultimately one said, I don’t know, an editor enough, who would want a book like this and fight for it. And somebody else said, not quite there, didn’t like the [00:24:00] ending. And then I got a handful of hybrid, publishers that said yes. So I pay half, they pay

Mark N: Okay.

Mark P: to stay traditional ’cause I knew I wanted to retire and I didn’t wanna spend any more money. Ken got all my money on this book. And then between the Lines Publishing came in, which is an independent publisher, small one out of Roseville, Minnesota, and they’ve been great to work with. And away it went. So all of that was I’ve gotta buy into everything. so it isn’t me. The whole book is the client’s taunting 12, this 12 month scheme and why they would do it. you’re about to find out, and maybe you have some ideas, and because it is, as I tell, as I put in the pitch package, you know, the who is, what you’re gonna get to.

But the why is what’s gonna keep you up at night when you’re done with the book.

Mark N: Yeah.

Mark P: ripped from the headlines today. I was shocked with how the world is evolving and I, a [00:25:00] friend of mine asked me if I was a time traveler when I wrote it two years ago, how’d you know that the world is gonna start feeling this way about the rich? I said, well, it’s always felt this way that they

Mark N: Yeah.

Mark P: the steps and put take matters in their own hands. Couldn’t have guessed that.

Mark N: Yeah,

Mark P: out, this was never meant to be a manual on how to do it. It was always meant to be a warning and it’s just so strange how it’s playing out now in the headlines around the world.

Mark N: yeah, definitely.

Mark P: Mm-hmm.

Mark N: I love that you say you had to really believe in it. ’cause I think that’s very true. How did you go about believing in it? Because there are so many steps along the way that could almost crush a writer when they want to believe in it. You’ve done very well in that you got an editor fairly quickly, or someone picked it up fairly quickly.

But prior to that, like how did you go from, even this book is done to I believe in this book, or was it just the editor and his feedback that just sparked that motivation and then you ran with it?

Mark P: Well, as, as [00:26:00] you know, on page 82 of the book I tip the cap A of the Krista, come right out and

Mark N: Yeah.

Mark P: And, uh, you know, in some of the books that inspired this plot because they sort of run along. And I, and I think because I’m, I was very much grounded in reading those, we all talk about if you want to ever become, a good writer, and I don’t profess to be one, but if you ever want to be one, you have to be a prolific reader. And there were plots that I absolutely loved. There are authors I absolutely love and I, they are must read authors for me. But to be completely honest and not terribly I was growing a little tired these slow burn domestic thrillers. Not that I don’t like them, but there’s a lot. And they were, and I won’t say they all sound the same, ’cause then I sound like my dad when the Beatles came out. Right. But I, I [00:27:00] think the point is, you begin to say, well, no, I know where this is going. I may not be right, but there’s nothing there that can surprise me anymore. and they’re sort of like, oh, I didn’t guess that, but here we are. And it was well written and I liked it, and then I’ll pick up another one. And so I think when I was sitting on the train, which really made me commit is I wanna write something not just totally different ’cause that’s dangerous. ’cause people want what people want.

Mark N: Yeah.

Mark P: the same, only different. So I thought if I can ground it in the love that I had of Agatha Christie’s books Jeffrey Deaver’s books, I sort of had the plot of an Agatha Christie, but the pace of a Jeffrey Dever and then let’s add the geography of a Dan Brown. let’s like have a wide landscape with really tough, thrilling details. But the plotting that aga, the Christie had, I thought I can really chew on that because I love all three [00:28:00] of those. So I got in the mud on those and I sat in it and I wrote it and I believed in it. And I didn’t, didn’t get away from it. When, when people said, nah, don’t know. I don’t think I want to pick this up, or it’s not enough for me, or, no, it didn’t really grab my attention.

And I would think, oh boy, if I, if this one doesn’t grab your attention. But all of these other domestic thrillers that were starting to bore me or start to think were so predictable, you know, why did you grab that? Do I, does everybody have to write like that? And I thought, no, I’m going to, I’m going to stick in because I don’t think I can write those. I really wanted to write these. And so I think that made it easier for me to buy in because I

Okay.

I was doing

Mark N: Yeah.

Mark P: And didn’t want to give that up. And again, is it for everybody? No . Is it gonna be a bestseller? Don’t think so. Again, that wasn’t the point. The point was to say, this is a different book, because I can’t write those with any kind of conviction [00:29:00] because to me it was just like, yeah, I enjoyed it, but I, it’s like the last 10 that I just read. What I really want is something that I can really get my teeth into, and that’s why I wrote this one and believe in it so much.

Mark N: that was, That was very plot driven, would you say you’re more of a plot driven writer, then character, where you build the plot first. What attracted me a lot to this book right from the get go oh, I liked it all. I could preface that by saying I liked it all, but the character of Robert h is, is what got me into it right away.

And I loved when he’s with the FBI and he’s cocky, and then he’s put in his place, which is all very early in the book, so it’s not a spoiler. And, yeah. And I love that about him like I do. I, and then I got right into him, and from there I bought into the plot and the rest of the book.

Mark P: I think, I started with plot. No, you’re right. One of the things that I really wanted to do, which I wasn’t seeing a lot of, and that is character arcs and thrillers and mysteries. So if we go back to [00:30:00] egg and Christie for example, Ms. Marble doesn’t change her. GU wrote doesn’t change. They are those characters and we want those characters and we like it. But I thought I really wanted to have a character arc that would make you want to cheer for him or her cheer for all of them. As I say, none of them are the same character at the end of the book as they were at the beginning.

Mark N: Yeah.

Mark P: it make it more challenging? Yeah, it does. Is Lincoln rhyme just to borrow or, you know, Jack reacher of these, these characters and thrillers, do they change every book?

I don’t think they do. Are the authors bad enough for doing it? No, not at all. But my difference was, is I really wanted to bring somebody to see if you could like him because of what he puts himself through, how he changes at the end, which we’ll see. You’re not quite all the way there and leads itself into the next book for those that survived this one, and you begin to anticipate, oh, as he’s grown, like the Hunger Games, of course, I’ll how you like Cat so much the way they grow throughout it.

And [00:31:00] I wasn’t seeing a lot of that in thrillers. So I think I’m plot driven. I’m very sympathetic to putting the characters in that plot and giving them agency so that they can become stronger people that you would want to cheer for along the way, not just to survive, but to continue to grow, to make mistakes, to suffer with them when they make the mistake and to see how they can grow because of it. That’s real police work. James Patterson talks about that, 60% of the police work, you should be wrong because. what happens. That’s what investigative means. You try this, you get these clues, you check that out. Nope. You go interview these people. Nope, that isn’t right. Oh, but then I found this out.

And so you can’t Sherlock Holmes it where they’re right all the time, but you, you should want to cheer with him when he is wrong. That he doesn’t give up. He wants to learn.

Mark N: Yeah.

Mark P: around him take what information he can give and his, and, and, and I say it a few times in there just for plausibility. Look guys I don’t know what I’m doing, but I see [00:32:00] this and I think it’s this so how would we put that into the investigation? How would you ask or investigate that if I think this is going on? So the way they all try and put the whole thing together. And, and maybe you’re yelling at the pages because of course as a reader, you know far more what’s going on in the plot than any of the characters because you know everything until you don’t.

Mark N: Yeah.

Mark P: and that’s when, and that’s when the twist start. And I was talking at a library about that you have a dog, for example. It’s like when you’re walking with your dog and then you stop and the dog keeps going, well, that’s what I do in the book. And then you kind of stop and go, wait a minute, how did I get here?

Mark N: Yeah.

Mark P: Thought we were, and then you realize, oh, you stopped giving me information I did, and I, let’s let you go with it. And then that’s what, because to me, the best twist are the ones where readers fool themselves know, I don’t have to lie or bury or ignore or, you know, almost become an unreliable narrative.

I’ll just give you all the information and, and [00:33:00] let the characters think they know what’s going on. And then you can go, oh, no, no, no, I, I know where we’re going with this. And that’s like, I wasn’t close at all, or I wasn’t right. Where did I miss that? And you realize, no, I missed that because I assumed that I knew what everything that was going on.

And there’s a point of the book at which that stops, and now you’ve gotta figure it out for yourself.

Mark N: Yeah. How do you want a reader to feel when they’re done? When they finally put this book down, what’s that final feeling you want them to have?

Mark P: As I said, the, when Jeffrey Deaver talked about the biggest theme it could and I don’t wanna give away the theme ’cause I think that it’s a little bit of a spoiler, I think I, without doing that, let’s say this, like the reader to feel like I’ve either given them or challenged them to look at their worldview. That would somebody go to the extent of killing 12 people in 12 months over 12 cities so that they could hide what they’re doing and [00:34:00] not wanna take credit for it. And then when you find out what links the victims. Why they chose to do it that way, why they had to do it that way the things that you discover about the victims along the way, the things that Robert Hann discovers about himself along the way, and how none of the characters are the same based on the explosive ending. it changes the way we look at how we structure society and the way we look at our resources and the way we treat each other. Yeah, it’s pie in the sky. It’s, it’s big. again, it’s not meant to be a mission impossible where it’s like pushes the plausibility and I can’t believe he’s survived the second to go. We’ve figured it all out. Now what? Now that we know what happened and it’s over, what are we gonna do to make sure this doesn’t happen again? It isn’t just, what would I do if I was in that? Robert, Hannah talks about it, for example, when he begin to think of himself. What [00:35:00] if, what if the killer came after me? What does that say about me? And that’s, I think, what I want the reader to begin to see that it’s, a situation born of society and characters, as you mentioned, because it wouldn’t have happened if they weren’t the characters that they were and come away thinking a little bit above the worldview and the way things are.

Mark N: I love that. Thank you. Well, I’m looking forward to that explosive ending and feeling those feelings. I’m gonna be finishing it tonight, so I’ll let you know.

Mark P: Excellent.

Mark N: Alright, so a couple of quick wrap up questions. What advice would you give someone who just published their first or second book? So they’ve, they’ve gone that step, what advice would you give them?

Mark P: Get into book signings. Now I have a radio background, so I’m not afraid to do public speaking, to sit there and meet people and sign books. My daughter, she mentioned she lived in, she lives in Toronto. she contacted me when the book came out she said, dad, here’s the [00:36:00] contact for Indigo at the Eaton Center. I was like, whoa. So I reached out and they said, sure, we’ll order 15 books and let’s do a book sign. So do them ask and you shall receive. It is amazing if you just ask an indigo near you, a private bookstore near you, the library, just to do a quick talk if you think you can do that stuff in public.

Mark N: Yeah.

Mark P: amazing how many people do wanna meet authors. So I would say get yourself out there. I like social media. I don’t think it’s the be all and end all. Just like, you do this podcast and you’re on all platforms, that’s more important than trying to just get a huge following or buy a huge following

Mark N: Yeah.

Mark P: media. I think there’s still a lot of room for meeting readers. Gives me a chance to steal some names for another book. But then there’s, because there’s nothing like that feedback. As I mentioned, I did a [00:37:00] library talk for 10 people. drove half an hour. a small library, just up on Highway seven down from Ottawa.

Near 10 people were there and I loved it. And one of the people there had read the book from the library, so you know, oh well, and I didn’t get any money off that didn’t care. She loved the book and immediately went looking to see what else I have written. And so, oh, well that was just his first book and then was shocked when she saw that I was going to be coming into the library to do a talk. So the things I said, well, you know, well, what. What did you like, which of which of the murders was your favorite? Because that tells me a little bit about the way this reader liked the book, the way it was plotted. Did you find that one just so shocking? Underhanded would, did you hate that character The moment, like, so you get a chance to get all kinds of feedback on the plot and the characters as you say. And that may not teach you a lot about writing, but the two aspects of writing are writing and story, so maybe you can become a better writer, but the things you get back in [00:38:00] feedback can probably create better stories down. It’s like, okay, they’re really like these kinds of characters. I’ll make sure and really double down on those on the next book.

So yeah, so I would say do book signings and get out there and get a chance to meet people and I think always be writing sometimes, John Grisham was telling the story. I saw it the other week where when a Time For Kill had been picked up many years ago, his first book. He finally got an agent and the next day he called his agent, and the agent said, you are not gonna call me every day. Because they thought, oh, well I thought I, did you sell it yet? Is it gonna be published yet? Look, this is not how this work. So get out there and write another book. ’cause it, it’s gonna make you a better writer when the editing comes along. Kills some time. So yeah, once you’re published, and I have met a wonderful writer that I met at a festival.

It’s her only book and she can’t even conceive of trying to do a second book. And so I thought, good for you. You’re Harper Lee. Until they started dragging out all of her manuscripts, she had only written to Kill a Mockingbird for 60 years until they started dragging out some old [00:39:00] scripts. But, if you can stay busy and work on other projects, I think it just makes you a better writer and

Mark N: Yeah.

Mark P: a lot. yeah, I’d say get out there with it. Be proud of your book. ’cause you know, mark, you know, the figures over time, how many percentage of people who say they’re gonna write a book, the percentage of people who start writing a book, and the percentage of people who finish writing a book, and then the minuscule number who managed to get it, published,

Mark N: Yeah.

Mark P: publishing, which costs a lot of money, and there’s a viable path that takes so much skill because you are everything.

You are designing the cover, you are editing, you are promoting and, even though I have a radio background, I didn’t feel confident I could do that. So I did the traditional route because I wanted the experts and part of it was my age. I don’t have a lot of time left to spend a lot of time and money trying to learn all of that. So I defer to the experts that way and was lucky enough to land a small, wonderful publisher. I don’t know what would’ve happened if that hadn’t happened. We certainly wouldn’t [00:40:00] be talking. And the other three manuscripts I’ve written, I don’t know would’ve happened to them, but there they are.

So I’m, I’m very happy with the way it worked.

Mark N: Yeah, well it’s a deserving book of having caught that.

Mark P: It. Yeah.

Mark N: where can listeners find your book and hear more about you?

Mark P: Well, for the most part, it’s available. As I say, it’s a small publisher, so, if you’re listening in the United States, it’s not on shelves at Barnes and Noble, but you can order it through there. You can order it through Amazon Canada. You can order it through Indigo if you’re here in the qui region.

In Belleville, they told me, they gave me a number. I think I’ve sold 134 copies in my hometown, which about 130 more than I deserve. Part of it was, I did morning show radio here for 25 years, so everybody knew I left to write this darn book. so a lot of people came out to books on it just to say hi and be supportive. The ebook is also available on Amazon. It’s available on Kindle. It’s available on Cobo. And because of my radio [00:41:00] background, if you haven’t guessed, yes, I recorded the audio book. So I went out and bought all of the equipment that I need to create a home studio. That was a wonderful experience because I had to learn and I had to learn reading, part storytelling,

Mark N: Yeah.

Mark P: To learn what the echo and how do you down the sound and is this pit still my daughter in Toronto? Of course, when she would commute, I would record three episodes or three chapters. Then I’d email and she’d listen on the way home. Still too tinny. I think you’re going too fast. That’s a horrible accent. Don’t do accent. So until we got to the end and she said, no, okay, this is a good pace.

Okay, you figured out the technology. Now that sounds really good. And I would put it into the Audible website where they check these sorts of things and they said, no issues. This is perfect. This. So it’s like, okay. Then I went back and redid the whole darn thing again.

Mark N: Wow.

Mark P: that everything could be perfect. [00:42:00] So Audible has, and I’ve sold 49 audio books, that’s been fun as well. But, yeah, so, and all the major outlets online and some selected Indigos across, there’s one left in London, there’s two at Green Hills in Toronto. Some at Eden Center. They, they’ve kept stocking it ’cause it keeps selling there, thank heavens. And and then mostly, mostly online.

Mark N: All right. Well, thank you so much. This has been great. I’ve really enjoyed hearing this story. I have probably another 40 questions prepared for you that we just ran out of time. It’s just, it’s been a great conversation. I really appreciate it. If you don’t mind taking a few more minutes of your time for the after we record this main episode for our Patreon members, I’d really appreciate it.

Mark P: And if you enjoy it, my follow up echos of Death will be out in the summer, but my next is a standalone called with my little eye, a curious widow, a shy prowler, and the wrong Window, coming out in, early spring. So I’ll say first week of April, [00:43:00] give or take. And that is a story that came to me from our retiring police chief who was on the radio show, I was looking for a character to go with my widow, and he gave me the prowler and away this book came.

So it’s funny where you get it when you meet people, you talk to people, you get the craziest ideas for

Mark N: Yeah.

Mark P: and I had a lot of crazy ideas. So look for that. Mark. I greatly appreciate, again, not only your support for me, but for all authors, for writing and for, thrillers, because I know Thriller readers come to this genre as critical readers. We don’t. You can buy a Carly fortune and you wanna be swooned, but many people pick up a thriller saying, well, you better fool me. You better thrill me. You

Mark N: yeah.

Mark P: the goods. So it’s a more challenging genre to write in to become successful in, and certainly to get your name out to. And I am

Mark N: yeah.

Mark P: so grateful that you gave me this opportunity.

Thank you.

Mark N: Oh, I’m happy to. Thank you.

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 17 with T.R. Hendricks

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 their 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 17.

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 TR Hendricks, author of the instructor. A former Marine Hendricks talks about channeling real world training and discipline into his writing, building authenticity into action scenes, and how his journey from 60 rejections to publication became its own story of [00:01:00] perseverance. Tim, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for being here today.

Tim: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me on. Really appreciate

Mark: I have been looking forward to this since I cracked open the book, the instructor. Thank you for the copy. This was a blast from the past, which we’ll get into, but I’ll let you pitch it before I talk too much.

Tim: Sure, sure. Yeah, so the instructor, it’s my debut novel, came out 2023. It’s Derek Harrington. He’s a retired marine force recon warrant officer who is reintegrating into society, getting back onto his feet after 21 years in the Marine Corps. And he’s down on his luck. He’s divorced from his wife. He’s estranged from his son. His father is ailing. The bills are mounting up and his fledgling Wilderness Survival School, which is his own business as an entrepreneur is, is failing. And, he can’t meet the necessities of his life. [00:02:00] In comes a offer that one of his students presents to him at end of his class.

Saying, we have a private group in upstate New York that would like to offer you $20,000 for one month of training provided you remain completely anonymous as to who we are and what we’re doing, and, Derek thinks better of it at first, but ultimately, with all of the challenges that he’s facing, he decides to accept the job at which point he goes upstate begins training this group in their private camp on land out in the middle of the wilderness, to which he suddenly and slowly begins to unravel what he suspects is the plot of a group of domestic terrorists.

Mark: Awesome. Thank you. So, yeah, that was really good. So yeah, [00:03:00] so what sparked the idea for this book?

Tim: So the idea was, it was pretty funny. My friend, his name’s Rob, Rob is, was kind of the, schematic or blueprint type individual that I based Derek off of in terms of like his statistical background. Rob was Marine Force Recon. Rob is a Wilderness Survival instructor and we were working together in a private security firm at the time, and we were just doing some kind of standard water cooler discussions about our veteran tails.

You put two veterans in a room together and we just won’t stop talking. And he told me that when Bear Grills and Les Stroud, survivor Man and and Alone was another big one, and I was coming, all these survivor shows were coming out, not sure Survivor of the Game Show, like survival out in the wilderness, teaching you how to make fires with sticks and stuff like that.

They were [00:04:00] all coming out and he told me he was in the running for getting his own show, but essentially the producers of that particular show wanted him to divulge a lot of his top secret background that he had held while he was in the Marine Corps. Wanted him to divulge stories that he wasn’t legally or ethically willing to do so and so they basically passed on him.

They said that was our whole angle. We were gonna have you telling a story from your military career and mixing it with the survival skill and if you’re not gonna give us the military stuff, then we’ve got no use for him. And that, that pissed me off something, something, something fierce. Because the, I think the actual words that they told him was, without that you’re just a boring house dad from Long Island.

And that really pissed me off when I heard that, ’cause this dude’s anything but boring. So I, I came up with the idea. I was writing short stories at the time. I was making a more of a commitment [00:05:00] towards writing full novel. In fact, I had already written one and queried one, and it had failed spectacularly.

So I was kind of in the mood for something to, pick myself up off the floor from that first go around. And, um, I said, Rob, you know, I write these stories on the side. I, I, you know, I have fun with it. It’s more of a hobby, but I’m trying to break into publishing with a full length book.

I was like, how about I write a short story that we could pass off as like your, based on a true story background, right? And it was all in fun and games, there was nothing serious behind it. Rob said, yeah, go ahead. Have fun. You know, go, go, go write your short story. Never expecting anything of it, was like he wasn’t gonna take it and go out to Hollywood with it and be like, oh, wait, here, no, I’ve got an actual background for you now.

Nothing like that was gonna happen. And what started as a, we, you know, we hashed out a couple ideas, in there and we wanted to do a few things, involving the FBI [00:06:00] and what, you know, kind of a, a counter-terrorist plot might look like. But for the most part, I just took his schematic background, you know, kind of where he was deployed, his skills, his wilderness survival, and I imported that as the character into this plot, into the story.

And it started like, it was gonna be kind of a couple of page narrative just to give him that base on a true story background. And then it turned into like a 10 page short story, and then it just took on its own life. I was a man possessed and I wrote the entire first draft in 90 days.

The first draft was 90,000 words. I wrote it in 90 days. Literally sitting with a laptop. In bed. My, my wife at the time asleep next to me 3:00 AM and I’m clacking away, and so that’s where it all came from. And like I said, no one could have expected that it would be the first book that would actually get published and be my debut and [00:07:00] everything. But that’s kind of how things happen sometimes, you know?

Mark: Yeah. Did he uh, beta read that for you

Tim: He did. Yeah. Yeah, he did. His father did as well. The, it was after the first draft, so it was very early on in the process. But yeah, he, he ghost read it. He’s credited in the book as well. And every once in a while I’ll, I’ll touch base with him on a little anecdotal survival skill.

Then I was like, Hey, if we put Derrick in this situation, what would be something that you could use? And he’ll like, oh yeah, try, the dogwood tree. Yeah, just little things like that, because I did a ton of research. I always do a ton of research on all my books that I write.

But I did a ton of research on the wilderness survival. But if you can actually go to, like someone who’s a practitioner of it, it’s like, yeah, people mistake that all the time. They’re like, oh, you must be a survival expert. Like, no, no, no, no. I’m, I’m well read in the subject, but there’s a difference between making primitive stone tools with your hands and actually [00:08:00] being able to feasibly do that versus just reading about how it’s done. So, you know, you throw me out there like, I’m, I’m gonna be starving like the next guy. That’s, that’s, that’s for sure.

Mark: Yeah. So how much of the book was from your own military background and experience? There were some scenes that were like a blo, like I’ve served in the Canadian reserves in the infantry. So when you were, when there were moments in this book, and I don’t think there’s spoilers, but there are moments where he’s throwing CS gas into a house and everyone’s coming out with snot up their nose and stuff, and I’m just like, oh my God, I remember those moments. They’re terrible. So I’m reading this book and, which was what I loved about it, is that that whole survival thing and in the beginning was very strong for me because,

Tim: Mm-hmm.

Mark: because of all that, I was like, man, I like, I know this guy. I like, I feel like I’ve been there. I know what he’s talking about and exactly what everyone’s going through.

Tim: Sure. I I always say that I break Derrick down into three parts with the, the first part being what we just talked about with all kind of the, the [00:09:00] biographical information from that I based him off of from my buddy. I say all the good stuff about Derek, his being a dedicated father and just a man willing to sacrifice for other people and give you a shirt off his back. All that good stuff I modeled after my father and then all the stuff that Derek does where you’re kind of cringing and you’re like, ah, this, this, that’s, it’s kind of messed up what this guy is doing or what he’s going through. That all came from my personal experience, so some of it is very much, or a lot of it in that guise when you break it down into those kind of buckets that nasty stuff comes directly from my experiences, certainly, and, and the experiences of other individuals that are, that were confident enough to confide in me some of their stories as well, and I never plagiarize those or anything like that. But they’ll talk to me about their experiences and those will kind of shape some [00:10:00] of the things that I put the characters into. ‘Cause again, it’s all just adds to that realism and, and gives you that feel of being there and going through it. The the CS gas scene, I actually based off of the opening first few minutes of the Navy Seals Hell week when they’ll have these guys just, you know, whatever the Navy SEAL class is.

They’re just lying around in a classroom waiting for hell week to begin. They know it’s gonna start that day. They just don’t know what time. And then usually like the door flies open at 3:00 AM and flash bangs and tear gas are thrown into the room and they’re getting screamed at. And they come out and they’re getting hit with a fire hose of freezing water.

And there’s machine guns going off and everything and just meant to be so disorienting and throw them into a complete panic and really kick off Hell week with this, crazy, crazy introduction, trial by fire as it were. But, or you see like [00:11:00] little anecdotal things throughout the story that are just kind of your more mundane, like I was, I wasn’t special forces or special operations. I served five years, on the conventional side of the army. I was a tank officer and then halfway through my career I switched over to military intelligence. So there’s just like a lot of the run of the mill just kind of nonsense that you put up with in the day to day of the military.

Like the hurry up and waits and just, little lingo here and there and how the, the dining facility is set up. You know, just little stuff like that that I think comes through because you can only get it into that level of detail from people who have actually lived it and done it a little bit.

So.

Mark: yeah. I was really, I love that about it, which was a

Tim: Mm.

Mark: fun. Were there scenes where you. After like say the first draft, you had to either back off on the realism because it was almost too shocking for readers or vice versa, where there was some where like, I think this is gonna be worse than what I wrote.[00:12:00]

Tim: Yeah. It’s funny, both my agent and my editor, had to tell me a couple times to tone it down and I was actually of the. Impression when I handed it in, saying like, tone it down I haven’t even gotten started yet. So that’s a peek into how depraved my mind works. You know, like, I’m like, ah, this is nothing.

And they’re like, no, you’re literally ripping teeth out of people’s mouths. Like you, you have to, you have to tone that down. And I was like, okay, fine. Yeah, two instances. Really when Derek is doing kind of the seer training introduction to the class in upstate New York and he starts putting ’em through the ringer a little bit.

That was originally very, very heavy handed in the, in the first draft. And thankfully, this is why I always wanted to go traditional. There was a lot of things wrong with the first draft, but, having people, having those eyes of people that work professionally in the industry every day. That’s what I really wanted.

You know, I wanted that [00:13:00] because they know what works and what doesn’t, and they can look at a manuscript, and even though it might be very well done the first time, they’re gonna take it up to the next level. So they said, everything that you’re doing in this scene is cool, but it’s just, we don’t know, you know that these guys might be the bad guys. You as the author meaning me, but the reader isn’t gonna know at this point. So when he’s doing these things to these guys, it really makes him look like an asshole. And I went, oh, well, yeah, that, that makes a lot of sense. You know, because we haven’t established who’s a good guy, bad guy yet, you know, and so it makes Derek look like the bad guy, essentially.

Working through that kind of thing. And then there was another instance which involved, blood. I love telling the story. A pack of blood thirsty dogs that had been basically trained to ma and to to kill people. And the bad guys are planning on using them at some point. And I have a [00:14:00] scene, I had a scene where a boy in the camp gets attacked by one of these dogs and Derek is the closest.

He jumps in, saves the kid, kills the dog. Right. And both again, my agent, my editor said, you can’t kill a dog. I’m like, what do you mean I can’t kill a dog? I’m like, this isn’t, this isn’t some cutesy, wootsy little thing this is, you know, a blood thirsty dog that is in the process of mauling, of ravaging, like an 11-year-old boy.

Like, yeah, I can kill that dog. They go, can’t kill a dog. Can’t kill a dog. The, the, the whole public will turn against you. And I love dogs, right? I’m, I’m one of those love dogs more than people kind of thing. So like, all right, I, I’ll take your word for it. So I take the whole thing out. Wouldn’t you know it like, I don’t know, maybe a month or two later, I think.

I don’t really know. I don’t know when the movie came out, but John Whit comes out and like within the first 10 minutes there’s a little beagle puppy, the [00:15:00] cutest puppy in the world, getting his head stomped in. And I’m like, whoa, whoa. What, what the hell?

Mark: yeah,

Tim: Like, you can’t kill a dog and then you just set off this, you know, four movie, five movie franchise by killing a dog in the first 10 minutes, you know, so whatever.

It’s fine.

Mark: so you wrote this book in 90 days, which is very impressive. Were there moments where you almost like, were gonna give up on it? I mean, I guess I would assume not. 90 days is so fast.

Tim: I mean, yeah, it was, it was 90 days for the draft. I think it was probably, you know, full year or so of working through it. I don’t know if I ever was in a point when I was drafting and editing where I was like, ah, this isn’t gonna work. The, the story was there, right? It wasn’t, it wasn’t one of those stories that an author writes and then hits a brick wall of 50,000 words or whatever and has to put it away because they just don’t know what they’re doing with it anymore.

I knew that story [00:16:00] beginning to end in my head before I even started putting pen to paper or fingers to keyboard. So I, I, I wasn’t that part of it. I think the giving up part was when I queried it and I was, I went out, I, I had done, I told you about the first book I had done that failed spectacularly.

It failed as a book, but it was a success in that it taught me so much about the industry process of how to get traditionally submitted and land an agent and all that other stuff. So I had this whole kind of system laid out with how I would try, how I would locate agencies and then the agents within those agencies.

And I would, I would put it all into this kind of massive spreadsheet that I kept and then would write down certain things that they were looking for or how they wanted their query letter specifically formatted. And then I would tailor those much like a job search where you might [00:17:00] do tweaking your resume a little bit to each individual job versus just sending one blanket resume out there.

‘Cause there is no one size fits all with the query process. And even with all that, even with that systematic approach, well organized, you know, very diligent in doing it. I’d come home from work, you know, eat dinner. Kids would go to bed and I’d sit there start tailoring, query letters, sending out three, four a night depending on where I was in the research process.

Even with doing that, I think I got up to something around 60 or 65 agents that I had either researched or actually sent a letter out to. And I’d only gotten two responses out of that. And out of the two responses, they both requested falls, which was amazing. But then one of the two agents passed on it after reading the fall.

So I was, back to square one and then it was just my [00:18:00] other agent, Barbara Poel, who, stayed with it and wrote it, and she actually got on the phone after she read it with me. It was the call, every, every writer, aspiring author wants the call when an agent says, Hey, let’s get on the phone and talk about this.

And so we did that and she didn’t sign me right away. She gave me a revise and resubmit where I had to go back and take her notes and revise the manuscript into more of what her vision was looking like. And it was only after I did that, and again, taking that industry knowledge and putting it into the manuscript to make it better and reworking it.

It was only after I was able to do that that she actually signed me and did that. So I never, I never quit on it throughout the process, but had Barbara pass I might’ve shelved it at that point because I had done an exhaustive, querying process and I didn’t really think there was anybody left after that, you know, so it [00:19:00] might’ve been all right, shelve this one, and we’ll come back to it another time, hopefully.

But yeah, I, I never gave up on it as a, as an actual story that I was writing. It’s more of, it was, it was really down to the wire there as to whether or not it was gonna, it was gonna land me representation, which it did. So, thankfully, thankfully it did.

Mark: I love that story of resilience it’s so easy to get like one or two rejections and then just decide it’s never gonna happen

Tim: Sure.

Mark: you’ve, and you sent so many, even before you got the first one back, which is, which is fantastic.

Tim: Yeah. I, I. I don’t recommend this methodology, but coming from the military with a couple of deployments to Iraq under my belt, um, getting a rejection letter really in the grand scheme of my perspective, it really didn’t bother me that much. It was just, okay, you gotta break an omelet to make some, break an omelet.

You need to break some eggs to make an omelet. And that’s, that’s kind of my approach to the whole thing was, well, at the [00:20:00] end of the day, if I get rejected i’m not gonna stop writing stories. I love doing it i’m just gonna keep doing it and keep improving. Hopefully at some point. Like, this is my goal I want to be published, so let’s just rock and roll with it. But yeah, don’t join the military and go overseas and get blown up a couple times to gain the perspective that a rejection letter isn’t the end of the world. Like, just realize that it’s not the end of the world and, and take my word for it, you know, and go and go that

Mark: Yeah. Yeah. I love that.

Tim: Yeah.

Mark: Getting into character a little bit. Derek’s character, when he started off in the book, he’s pretty intense and it’s like he’s battling with some trauma. You can already tell in the way he responds to people. I thought that was, that was. I don’t, I wouldn’t necessarily say risky, but usually when you get introduced to a character, you’re looking for reasons to like them.

And in, in some sense, you gave us reasons not to like Derrick off the bat. Like you have to give him a chance with what he’s going through to understand what he’s going through. How did you, like, how did that all get built [00:21:00] and, and in your mind and when you, when you develop Derrick as a character.

Tim: Well, I, I think it was one because you had, well, one, it was, this book in particular was exceptionally cathartic for me. So a lot of the issues that Derek deals with in terms of reintegration from the military back into civilian life and his issues with post-traumatic stress disorder. Those are a lot of real life if not the actual emotions and outbursts that happen down to actually specific instances that I repurposed.

Because again, I want to write what, you know, that old cliche, right? I wanted to give. The realism of what guys and gals who experience this, what it feels like. And so I use my own experiences to do so. But then when you take it in the course of the story arc, kind of, I can’t waste time making you like Derrick only to [00:22:00] then show you how much crap he’s going through.

Right? Like, like there’s only 90,000 or a hundred thousand words to play with. And so the, the kind of, the, the, the outset was I gotta draw the audience in, draw the reader in with all of his flaws up front. Just you see him just laid out and see this guy who’s really at his wits end and just needs to catch a break.

And it is a risk because like you said, like people might be like, this guy, Derek’s kind of an asshole. I, I don’t, I don’t want to keep reading past this. But what I tried to do was say, it’s not him necessarily that is offputting. It’s the stuff that he’s dealing with, the way he’s reacting to it.

But underneath it all, if you really look at Derrick, especially, you go all the way through the end, underneath it all, he’s really a just a good man who’s trying to be a good man [00:23:00] and because of his circumstances because of the, the kind of the raw deal that life has given him a little bit and all the things that he’s trying to overcome, both outwardly and inwardly and, and tho all those battles that he’s going against.

Yeah. He doesn’t react the best, in, in all of those situations, but his overarching character is that he is a man of integrity. He is a man that’s trying to do the right thing. He’s trying to get back to his son. He’s trying to be a good ex-husband, if not, reigniting and, and reuniting with his ex-wife.

You know, he’s, he wants to do right by his father even though he and his father don’t have a good relationship, you know? So, to, in order to propel the story forward and to all, and to have that as the momentum behind his actions, I really had to kind of start you with it right up front. In the first chapter, he’s [00:24:00] bitching and moaning because he’s dealing with civilians that are like, you know, one guy’s can’t get his fire started right. And you know, a couple people are, a couple guys are on a a bachelor party and a couple other people are like trying to hike the Appalachian Trail and he’s teaching ’em all wilderness survival. I mean, you know, he’s got that very career military mindset of like, I was in charge of whole divisions worth of equipment and millions of dollars and had the ultimate responsibility and now here I am teaching rubbing sticks together to a bunch of guys on their bachelor party, you know, so, and it’s like, man, look how far I’ve fallen. And that’s, that’s a large part of it too, is, is, you know, so you see his, his loss of self. He doesn’t know how to define his own character post-military, which is a huge thing a lot of people go through.

But you see those [00:25:00] negative reactions because he’s in that head space of like, I can’t stand this guy. If, if, if this guy was one of my corporals in Marine Corps, I would’ve bounced his head off the wall already. And people hear that. I’m like, oh my God, this guy’s an idiot. But it’s like, it’s, it’s the truth of it and I wanted that to come through. I wanted that to shine through with, with his character.

Mark: It did. I appreciated how it started. It caught me a little bit off guard ’cause I’m not used to seeing it. But as, as I got to know him and it weirdly wasn’t that long as I got to know him, I really appreciated what he was going through and that you, you led with that. That was, that was really good.

Tim: Great. Great. Go ahead. Thank you.

Mark: And when you crafted Marshall, he’s an interesting character.

Tim: Yeah. Little

Mark: he come from and how did, how did you craft him from, I don’t want to, again, I don’t wanna give a spoilers, but he’s quite the character as the story develops.

Tim: yeah, I love to, I love to cast my characters with Hollywood stars, right? I I, I do if you go on my Instagram, you can scroll back it’s a [00:26:00] while now. It’s like two years ago now. But I did like a whole post of four different iterations of what the cast of the instructor would look like if it was ever made into a movie or a television series.

And I do that. Just one, it’s fun. Two, it’s a good interaction with readers to see who they’re thinking of if anybody, when they’re, when they’re reading the story. But three, it really, it helps me as I’m writing, as a visualization, like seeing these individuals that I’ve picked out in my mind.

You know, oh, Jessica Chastain is playing Sarah and Idriss, Elba is playing Derek, you know, as, as one iteration, one example, and the one who always came through for me, not just from a physical standpoint, but also his, his portrayal of the character was, Stephen Lang as the evil Colonel in Avatar.

Mark: Okay.

Tim: Who I, I just, I absolutely love Steven Lang. You don’t realize the range [00:27:00] this guy has. He was actually in Tombstone as one of the, the, the Cowboys in there. Ah, I forgot the character’s name now, but somebody will, somebody will comment on it at this point, but he was just so, I just had him in mind and I was like, if I put a, you know, red and black checkered flannel on him and just made him kind of a little bit of an older, broken down guy and then from there it just spiraled into, okay, well what kind of background can we give him? And, and what kind of story can we have that makes Marshall turn into the person that he ends up being? And there was another, I, again, I don’t wanna give spoiler either, but there was a specific topic of a certain brand of leadership, let’s put it that way, a certain brand of leadership that I did a deep dive into. It was fascinating ’cause I always found it, a fascinating topic to begin with. But that started to really mold when I started [00:28:00] pulling out those characteristics of individuals that seemed to occur in all of them and their followers.

I’m starting to bleed into the spoiler area, but like, but like, you know, starting to kind of really assemble those characteristics that all those individuals had in common. And then it was taking the backstory that I had for Marshall and merging those all together. And then all of a sudden you have this, this guy that is quite quite diabolical, toward, towards the end of it, you know, when you realize what his actual goal is. And I don’t, I like, like, yeah, his, his actual goal is terrible. But what I really like and hate about Marshall is the bastardization or, or the corruption, if you will, of what he’s using to get these people to that point the way he is toying with these people’s lives, [00:29:00] toying with what they’ve gone through, the horrible things they’ve gone through, and he might seem like a savior to them, but really he’s taking all this and secretly bending it to his own will to enact his own terrible plan.

I found that to be the most like evil of, of him, not, not necessarily his end state, but that he’s just looking at any single person at any given time and thinking, how can I leverage this person from my ultimate end state? And he doesn’t really, he really doesn’t give a shit about anybody despite saying that he does, he’s just got that ultimate goal in, in mind.

So, that, that’s what I really enjoyed writing with him was like, ’cause when you look at that, you’re like, oh wow, this guy’s. This guy’s an evil, SOB, what he’s trying to do and how he’s using people to do it.

Mark: Yeah, and it’s interesting ’cause I wasn’t even sure for the longest time if I was supposed to like him or not. ’cause he almost, he’s almost likable for a while. And then when the switches start, you know, you start catching on to what’s happening. You’re [00:30:00] like, oh wow, that’s messed up. But it all makes sense.

It wasn’t, it wasn’t a removal of character like he was on point the whole time. You just didn’t know it as the reader until the reveals, I guess you could say come up And it was, yeah, it was so fun. Oh. Question from Maria Franklin. So we have the thing where we have an author come on,

Tim: Oh,

Mark: last author asks the next author a question.

Tim: Oh, that’s

Mark: So her question, Maria Franklin, my last guest Ro asked, how much of your real life ends up in your novel?

Tim: Yeah, so we, we covered that a little earlier, with basically a lot of my military experiences. I, I like to tell people when they’re talking about joining the military, I was like, look, 80% of people that join the military have a kind of run of the mill some good, it is like an average experience.

They have some good, some bad, on whole, it’s not, it’s not a terrible experience for them. 10% seem to step in it wherever they go. And it’s just amazing. They just get the best assignments, the best commanders, the best [00:31:00] equipment every, they never have a problem, you know, they they’re in Sicily and then they’re doing an internship in Great Britain and then they get stationed in Hawaii and you’re like, all right guy, whatever.

Luck lucky for you. You know? It just happens. It happens to some people. And then that last 10%, or the guys and gals that step in it in the other direction where everything is a bust, from beginning to end, everything is a bust. And that’s how I kind of classified my experience, five, five years in and I was like this, this is not what I had in mind at all. And I came out, and then I came out right at the time that the housing bubble burst here, and we had the recession of 2008, 2009. So all the reintegration stuff, it was about 12, 12 months after getting out that happened. So all the reintegration into society.

Now I’m laid off. My wife at the time is pregnant with our first child. Now all the [00:32:00] PTSD is coming out at the same time. So like all of that was fuel for what it eventually would come into. And so, when I was in a place where I could actually access that stuff instead of tamping it all down and but where I could actually use it

it, it became, you know, fuel for the fire that, that I would then pour into the story. So, so very much, a lot of my own personal experience ends up in the novel and even subsequent stories that I’ve written, I’m always kind of putting some sort of angle of myself into the book. Just because I think it, it gives you that accessibility again, that true to life feeling of, oh, I can relate to this guy, or, oh, I remember that movie.

It’s funny that the author used that movie line here to describe that because I remember that, you know, just little things like that, I think are invaluable and kind of [00:33:00] set your own voice as an author.

Mark: Do you ever find yourself almost wanting to defend things that happen in the instructor from, I don’t know, like a review or somebody who has no idea?

Tim: Oh, it was so, it’s so funny you say that. My face lit up when you said that. So, it, it, so, Taylor Moore, who’s a friend, he’s an author. I don’t know if you’ve had him on or not. If you haven’t, you need to have him on. I, he writes this, this awesome series, the Garrett Cole series. Okay. And Taylor is former CIA, right? Smart guy, sharp as a whip. He comes originally, he hails from Texas, I believe. Taylor, if I got that wrong, you know, just correct me if I’m pretty sure he was in Texas. So I asked him to we connected at Thriller Fest in New York City and it was in between books one and two. I asked him to read and blurb the Infiltrator, my sequel, and he said, okay, cool, but I gotta read the instructor first. So he starts reading the instructor, and Taylor calls me, [00:34:00] about, I don’t know, probably the first third of the book he calls me, he goes, yeah, I don’t know if I’m gonna be able to blurb your books. And I went, what?

What’s, what’s the matter? He goes, well, you know. You’re kind of shitting all over Republicans, which I wasn’t. I’m I’m completely like, I, I try to stay completely independent. I don’t like touching politics, at all. But I guess he, he was seeing something that he was reading into it along those lines.

And he is like, and your characters like, I get it there are all these like backwoods yokels, you know, the good old country boys. And, and he’s like, I, I, you know, and then there was a whole angle with some of Marshall’s corruption that I, that I spoke to earlier about. And he didn’t necessarily care for that either.

And I actually talked to Taylor for like an hour on the phone convincing him, no, you have, you have to get through this to the end. And even if you get through it to the end [00:35:00] you need to read my acknowledgements afterwards. ’cause I explained a couple things in the, in the acknowledgements too, of where I was going with this whole story.

And I was like, don’t, don’t take it on face value of the first two, three chapters where I’m just, you know, making a political statement or, or bashing I’m, I’m a city guy ’cause I’m from Long Island. I’m not a city guy. I live in the suburbs, but like. I’m a city guy bashing on, you know, the, the good old boys from the backwoods of Alabama or something like that.

Like, no, I’m like, that’s not, I promise you that’s not the case. And he was very gracious. He’s like, all right man. He’s like, you convinced me. I’ll, I’ll finish the books. And he ended up finishing not only the first book, but the second book gave me a really great blurb. And I was grateful for that.

But yeah, it was, it was like this rush to defense of, of the novel. ’cause I was like, no, please, you gotta read it all the way through. Because otherwise you’re not gonna get the things that I’m doing. You, you see those a lot. You see, I don’t read my reviews anymore. I did when it first, the books first come [00:36:00] out, but every once in a while we put somebody, it’ll say, you did not finish on it.

But I found that those are more and more ludicrous the reasons behind those. So I just stopped paying attention to ’em, you know, it was like, I didn’t read this book, but my wife f, saw the F word on page two and we don’t allow that in our home. So I’m like, okay. I get, you know, just absurd things like, you know, never read the book, but didn’t like the red letters on the cover. One star. I’m like, how do you, how do you, yeah, it is just become so crazy with it. So I don’t even pay attention to that stuff.

Mark: Wow, that’s a new one. I haven’t heard that before. Don’t like the red

Tim: Oh, yeah, there’s a million of ’em. Yeah, I know. Who knows?

Mark: What advice would you give someone who just published their first or second book, either traditional or self-published?

Tim: Yeah. It’s on you. The publishing industry is a grind, [00:37:00] right? It is a machine. That keeps going no matter what day in and day out every week there’s another five, six books coming out in every genre. And unless you are one of, it’s kind of a weird contradiction because unless you are a well-established name, like, I see on your shelf there in the back a Tom Clancy, a ache, you know.

Unless you’re one of those huge names that is a guaranteed sale of millions of copies, you’re not going to get big dollars in terms of marketing and publicity and everything like that. You might have a junior publicist assigned to you if you’re traditionally published, like I was, who just because of the workload that they have

I is maybe gonna book you one event, you know? So if you think that you’re a brand new author and you’re gonna be sent on a global tour where you’re signing and everything, no you’re [00:38:00] not like you need to put your own graphics together. You need to be calling the bookshops. You need to be arranging the tours.

And keep yourself in that, marketing and public publicity space if you want to. Other people are, are content with just having the book out and never setting foot outside their, their apartment or their house ’cause they just want it, they just wanna write and that’s fine.

There’s nothing wrong with that. I wanted the other way of going. But you have to, you know, put your pedal to the metal in terms of that grind early on. Why I say it’s a, a strange contradiction is because, well, how do you become a huge name that sells millions and millions of copies if there there’s never any like early on support so you have to, you have to kind of cultivate that in your own right in order to get to the point where, oh, okay, now you’re a big name.

Now we can put some. Support behind you. So just like anything else in life, I think, you know, [00:39:00] just you have to do the grind and put in the work. It doesn’t stop once you’ve signed that agent contract. It doesn’t stop when you’ve signed your, you’ve sold your first book doesn’t stop when your first book is out.

Like, it’s just, if you really want it, you gotta, you gotta put in the work. You gotta keep going.

Mark: I appreciate you sharing that. ’cause I think there’s a lot of people that don’t realize, they think if they get their first book out that the fans are lining up in the big dollars and it’s

Tim: yeah, yeah. Don’t, don’t quit your job. That’s the,

Mark: yeah, the 1% may have

Tim: one. You’ll get, you get a nice advance, but then you don’t realize it is broken out in three separate installments that’ll be over three years. With, you know, a third of it taken away for taxes, at least here in the States or whatever, taken, taken away for taxes is just and people are like, oh, look at this I could quit my job or I can write full time. Don’t do that. Don’t do that. Don’t,

Mark: So last question. Where [00:40:00] can listeners find your books and find out more about you?

Tim: Sure. So I have my, my own website. It’s tr hendricks author.com. You can go on there. It’s got a bunch about the books and stuff. There’s actually, I had an old WordPress website before my, I launched my professional site for the, for the instructor. Where I would put short stories up and I took all those short stories and I put them onto my author website.

So you can kind of like see the evolution of my writing. ’cause some of ’em were pretty bad, but I, I didn’t, I didn’t edit ’em, I just left them the way they were. So you can, you can see like kind of a, my early on short stories there. Up to the point where a couple of ’em were getting published in literary magazines and then when the book came out.

But then I’m on all these socials for the most part. On Instagram is my, my most prolific one where I do most of the posting. That’s at Reed, R-E-A-D-T-R Hendricks, that is the same address for [00:41:00] threads and the same handle for, TikTok. And then I’m on Twitter. I don’t call it X I call it Twitter still.

It’s capital T, capital R under Hendricks. But to be honest with you I really don’t use that one anymore. Like I’m, I’m on there. If people tag me or whatever, I’ll interact with it. Sometimes I’ll retweet something, but for the most part I’m on Instagram and, and Threads and TikTok is where you’ll find me for those.

And then I was printed under the Tour Forge Imprint, so that’s under McMillan. So you can go to McMillan’s website and McMillan, USA and find the books there as well.

Mark: Awesome. Thank you. I’ll link to a bunch of that in the show notes.

Tim: Great. Thank

Mark: Thank you so much for your time. This has been a lot of fun. Love

Tim: Yeah, it was a blast. It was great. Thanks so much.

Mark: looking forward to getting into the next book ’cause I have to know the continuation after the

Tim: Sure.

Mark: Well done, well played sir.

With that, the finish of the instructor to get me to need to know what [00:42:00] the hell.

Tim: Yeah. Well, if you think that was good, wait till the end of the second

Mark: Oh no. Then you’re gonna, then I’m gonna start bugging you to continue writing books. When’s the next one coming out? I’ll

Tim: yeah, exactly.

Mark: All right. So if you don’t mind sticking around for our after show Rapid Fire, that would be awesome.

Thank you.

Tim: Don’t mind at all. Let’s do it.

Mark: Thanks for listening and follow the show so you don’t miss episode 18 With mm DeLuca, author of the Divorce Party. We dig into writing multiple point of view thrillers, why she set the story in Las Vegas and the real world research that shaped it, plus her honest advice on promotion and publicity. 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. 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 15 with Thomas Stewart

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 am your host, mark p Jay Adell.

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 you’ll be hearing from horror thriller author Thomas Stewart, who wrote his latest novel in just three months.

No outline, no rewrites, every word meaningful from the moment it hit the page. We talked about trusting instinct over planning, writing through lived experiences, and giving even the scariest characters real emotional depth.[00:01:00]

Thanks for listening and make sure you’re following the show so you don’t miss episode 16 with Maria Franklin, author of the Psychological Thriller. I don’t like Mondays.

We talk about how a Monday morning moment on a Trane platform sparked the story, why she outlines just enough to stay flexible, and how she built a 50 reader early feedback team to sharpen each draft. 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, there’s even a free tier with extra content. The links in the show [00:02:00] notes.

Mark: Thomas, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the show.

Thomas: Yes. Thank you. Mark.

Mark: We are gonna get right into it with, Allison’s Tears. Pitch Me your book.

Thomas: Allison’s tears, a horror novel. The circle must be closed. Following her uncle’s gruesome demise a family’s secrets are uncovered when Porsche Derringer and her father are called to their uncle’s old cabin in grin view pines. A routine getaway was all it was to her, but to others, those trapped within the confines of the old cabin it’s much more than that. It’s cold, unforgiving revenge. In the search for answers portia and her girlfriend’s minds, bodies, and even their souls are put to the ultimate test to survive not only the onslaught of the Unquiet [00:03:00] dead but the truth of Portia herself. Some truths can be deadlier than lies,

Mark: That’s great. Thank you. So what sparked the idea for this book?

Thomas: so the answer to that is actually twofold. I had always had an idea in my head about a story or just a scene where a man is struggling to try and scribble out a note or a final testament of some sort. While some impending doom is just slowly creeping up behind them. I’d had this idea but never knew entirely how I wanted to execute it until I saw A call for submissions on Facebook for an anthology surrounding the idea of ghosts. [00:04:00] Just basically an anthology of ghost stories. And so with the original intention of trying to submit to this, I began writing Allison’s tears. And in true Thomas Stewart fashion, what started as a short story became a full length novel rather quickly. This book was written in just a little over three months.

Mark: Wow. That’s great.

Thomas: Yes.

Mark: So what was the process like for, you’ve written more books. This is what your latest book or upcoming book, what’s your process like now? And for this book, do you, are you what they call a pantser where you just kind of have an idea and you go with it? Or do you outline? Okay.

Thomas: no, personally, when it comes to the pantser v Plotter [00:05:00] debate i’m very much a pantser and I believe honestly, it allows for a much nicer flow to a story because I’ve seen where people will talk all about their plotting process. They have all these notebooks, and all I can think is dude. If this were me, I’d be on book two before you’ve written chapter two. Like, come on, get on with it. No, and I also realize it alleviates a lot more frustrations because you’re not so caught up in trying to force a story into a specific mold that you may realize it’s not meant to fit.

Mark: Yeah. And then how is your rewriting process? ’cause the other side of [00:06:00] not planning is little bit more time rewriting. Do you find you spend more time rewriting?

Thomas: No. actually I very seldom, if ever rewrite, that’s actually something I kind of refuse to do. I’m very deliberate in the way I write something. I write it exactly the way I wanted it to sound.

Mark: And you do that on the first attempt? Yeah. Wow. That’s a gift.

Thomas: Well, it’s one of the things about being an aspe, um, Asperger’s syndrome or autism spectrum disorder. We tend to try and be very deliberate and very upfront with what we say are what we communicate. And yes, that translates a lot into my writing.

Mark: Yeah, and you did a good job with it, so I’m impressed that you were able to do that. Wow.

Thomas: Thank you.[00:07:00]

Mark: So Allison’s Tears is a powerful title, especially given what happens in the story, which I don’t want to give spoilers away, but where did that title come from? Did that title come first or was it after you wrote the book, you just thought this is the perfect title for this book?

Thomas: No, actually, normally it is the latter. Normally the title doesn’t come until after at least most of the stories written. This is one of the few though, where this title was just a faceless title, if you will, just lingering in my mind. I’m like, I, I have to have some story out there by the name of Allison’s Tears or Adeline’s Tears, and I went with Allison.

Mark: And what about the book cover? How did that come about?

Thomas: Yes. This is a [00:08:00] product of grim poppy designs or on Facebook, you would know her as Christie Aldridge. She is an absolute wizard when it comes to book cover art, and I found her when I was publishing with Unveiling Nightmares Press last year with my book Skin that screams. That was when I saw firsthand the kind of prowess she had and the kinds of things she could do with book cover art that I couldn’t do myself. ’cause I, when I started, I was making all my own book covers. Some came out better than others. But when she did the cover of that book, that’s when I realized, I was like, oh, okay. This book originally was gonna actually have a different cover. One that was equally as good. That was good. But then literally the [00:09:00] same night I was gonna do a, cover reveal, I found that she had already sold that exact same book covered to someone else on accident. So I just went to her and I was like, Hey, did, did, did you, did you happen to notice that? And she was like, oh, okay. And so I was like, can, can I just swap this? And she’s like, go right ahead. That’s when I found this one. I’m like, okay, you know what? This one is objectively better honestly captures the creep factor in this book because I will say, I’ve said it before on my socials, of all 16 titles, one is easily a candidate for my new favorite child, and quite easily quite possibly the creepiest book, [00:10:00] the actual most objectively creepy book I’ve actually written, like horror wise, it might actually be the scariest one I’ve done so far.

Mark: Yeah. When you’re writing, how do you balance when you’re building the setting? Because in this, you had. Like vast temperature changes, where as a reader you almost didn’t know, is this happening or is this in their mind? And it’s all like impacting them so much and it’s so vivid. How do you build that?

Thomas: Well, so you mentioned temperature changes like when they are suffering extreme cold or extreme heat. And for me, I’m sometimes a little more temperature sensitive than others. so whereas some, may experience like a light brisky temperature, to me it might be damn near Sub-Zero [00:11:00] temperatures. So. I, I guess that’s kind of where some of that stems from that and sometimes at random I get like real bad chills. ‘Cause there have been several times, especially in the past where, some mornings I’ll wake up and like a full, like a cold sweat. But I’ll be shivering like the house’s temperature is at subzero or below.

Mark: So do you find, I guess that’s like a lived experience. Do you find a lot of lived experiences end up in your book like that?

Thomas: I’m not sure I’d say that’s a regular occurrence. But certain things like that, like what you were describing, perhaps.

Mark: When you made, when you crafted Allison as a character, and we’ll try not, try not to go into spoilers, but she’s a character that we fear and we gain sympathy for. How do [00:12:00] you balance that where there’s that? Yeah. The fear and the sympathy where I’m like, I’m terrified, but at the same time, damn, the poor girl.

Thomas: Well, that’s, so to me, I feel like that’s a little bit of just a common trope when it comes to ghost stories.

Mark: Okay.

Thomas: You come to realize that as terrifying or as vengeful as the phantom may be, there’s typically a reason for it. And that, and I just have a knack for Trying to give villains or even just even just monsters or creatures trying to give them some sort of depth. Allison I wanted someone, wanted, I wanted you to be a little more sympathetic for her, even though yes, you will fear her. But she does, she’s [00:13:00] not entirely just a blood, a blood thirsty, psychopath. She’s,

Mark: Yeah.

Thomas: she just wants the ones that responsible for what had happened to her.

Mark: As a panther, does that come to you as you’re writing the story? Was she scary first in your mind and then her backstory came about? Or do you feel like all these characters live in your mind and then you just put them on the page? They’re kind of developed already, just through like the thought process.

Thomas: With the case of Allison venter, very much so. To put it into more perspective with her character, I always tried to imagine something along the lines of I don’t know if you’ve ever played, I don’t know if you play video games very much, but one video game series I’m very much a fan of, especially if you delve into some of [00:14:00] the lore of it, is the Fear Series. First encounter, assault, recon which is basically just, if Call of Duty met the ring.

Mark: okay, that’s a good pitch

Thomas: it’s a horror first person shooter in which the main antagonist is a phantom by the name of Al Alma Wade. And she did have a lot of inspiration in how I wanted to craft Allison Venter.

Mark: Okay.

Thomas: someone who was, whose as a child was absolutely tortured and witnessed and suffered the absolute worst of humanity, such as the cruelty she, she endured at the [00:15:00] hands of an extremist. An extremist religious cult.

Mark: And how did you then balance someone like Joseph who, there’s a scene early on, so I don’t think it’s that much of a spoiler, but he’s almost like, I liked him for a moment when he’s in the boat with her because he’s just sympathetic and very human. And until I find out later his actual story and, and it’s very surprising ’cause you could have gone either way. He could have been a complete jerk, which is why it led him to being who he, we know we find out who he is later. But you chose to have him a little bit more sympathetic with her.

Thomas: You’re talking, you’re talking about Roger? Yes.

Mark: Oh, I thought it was Joseph. Oh, maybe it was Rogers sir. Okay. And they had, I thought it was Joseph. Oh, okay. I got them confused. Okay. Sorry.

Thomas: When it came [00:16:00] to the Dinger family, the three brothers, Roger, Joseph, and Richard. I, of course wanted them to have like that. Normal family life style and their other dealings were what they kept in secret.

Mark: Okay.

Thomas: And you know, again, it is explained why they do. it. This is also inspired by a true. Supposed, Poltergeist, the Hum Mansion, which is a story where a family, would kidnap children, specifically young girls, and they would sacrifice them by drawing and quartering them and using the blood to seal off a supposed portal to the underworld and one one [00:17:00] year it didn’t work. So the father went throughout the house and slew his entire family, and it was said that their spirits as well as the spirits of their many victims would live within the walls. I very much took inspiration from that. When I was coming up with the idea of the Derringer cabin, all of the children’s they were they were basically trying to make sure that the doorway to the other side. Would never open up or never remain opened in which they would have to kidnap and sacrifice young girls.

Mark: Yeah. So I have a question for you from our last [00:18:00] author that was on the show. ’cause we kinda had let one author ask another author a question. This comes from Melissa Rus, and she asked if you’ve ever written a scene that scared you so much, you had to walk away for a while and then come back to it.

Thomas: In this book no, there’s only been one time though where I was writing. It didn’t scare me, but it did hit me because I realized just how much of myself, especially at the time I was putting into it. That was when I was writing my very first novella, my serial killer novella no less by the title of Mortimer. And it was when Mortimer was giving his backstory and I realized there’s a scene in this that. Very much [00:19:00] mirrored a real life situation I, I had to witness. That would be the only time anything close to that has ever happened, because I wrote it and then I had to, I had to stop for a moment.

Mark: How long does it usually take you to finish these, these books? Well, you said three months for Allison’s Tears. Is that fairly typical for you to turn them novel over that quickly?

Thomas: It depends. My very first novel titled to Hunt RAs, I literally finished that and it was almost 60,000 words. I finished that in Almo in just over a month.

Mark: Wow.

Thomas: Other, the second novel, the second full length novel I ever wrote and published I did in about three months, and that was 61,000 words. Sometimes I can crank a novella out in just [00:20:00] a couple of weeks. Other times it’ll be a couple of months. It just depends because I don’t always just dedicate all my time, all my writing time to just one project. Sometimes there’ll be weeks where I devote an entire week to one project. Then the next week it’s another project and so on. Or I might one project one day, another project another day, back to the first object and the next day, and then like a whole new project the next day. It, it. It just depends. Depends.

Mark: Wow. That’s challenging. I’ve had a few projects on the go before and my mind gets scrambled with all the characters and trying to keep their arcs.

Thomas: I’m racking up some new, like unfinished WIPs. And then, funny enough, I was actually going through some of my [00:21:00] old stuff here in my room today, and I stumbled across an old handwritten manuscript that I never finished from, say, back in either late 2020 or very early 2021.

Mark: So you’re gonna jump back into that.

Thomas: The thought has entered my mind. However, as of just a couple days ago, I already have started a brand new project, which again, just like this was supposed to be nothing more than a short story and is, and now my brain’s trying to turn into a goddamn novel.

Mark: That’s not, do you see that as a, a bad problem to have or do you see that as like a gift of, it’s great that you can [00:22:00] turn something small into something that big.

Thomas: I think it is kind of cool. I, I think it helps make for a funny story in of itself. Sometimes though it does depend on whether I’m trying to get. If I was trying to write for a specific project, like an anthology or even a collaborative project, and it was just supposed to be like a short story, like something no bigger than 10 or 12,000 words and now I’ve done turned the damn thing into 30,000 word or better novela or novel, and I’m like, well, shit, now I gotta come up with something completely new

Mark: yeah, yeah, I could. I could see that as a problem. Yeah.

Thomas: Yeah, sometimes, sometimes.[00:23:00]

Mark: I have a Patreon member ask this question, how do you want someone to feel after they read your book? And are you happy if somebody is spooked or do you want them to be terrified after they’re done?

Thomas: When it comes to this book especially, I’m going to basically parrot what William Friedkin said in interviews concerning the film of the Exorcist. This with this book. You’ll get into it. You’ll get out of it. What you go into it with, if you go into this as a story of good, ultimately triumphing over seemingly insurmountable evil, evil or triumphing over ins seemingly insurmountable [00:24:00] odds. Then that’s what you’ll get out of it. You go into this with the sense of gloom and darkness, and that’s all there ever is and will be then that’s what you’ll get out of it with this book will say you will feel a range of emotions. of the reasons this book very quickly became a new favorite child of mine is because of that, and more specifically because I have this thing where if I’m writing a story that story has the [00:25:00] ability to damn near bring me to tears, or in the case of this, actually make my eyes well up with tears when I’m writing it, writing the end of it, or writing parts of it that that cements it. In a special place in my heart. This book Will, this book will get inside of you. I had one of my ARC readers, one of my advanced readers read this book and she blew through it in one night. Then I joined her in a TikTok live, and she was sitting in her car with a glum expression. She looked at me and she said, I just read the end of your book, and I get it. And I’m like, oh. So.

Mark: I [00:26:00] love

Thomas: book will terrify you because again, it is probably the most genuinely terrifying or genuinely creepy book I’ve written of all 16, but you will feel more than just fear reading this, and that was by design.

Mark: Yeah. As we wrap up, what advice would you give someone who has just published their first book? Because you were there many years ago now, but what advice would you give to someone who’s just kind of having published their first book? What do they do?

Thomas: Keep writing any, so I know this wasn’t entirely the question, but any advice I have to anyone who is seeking to be an author or a writer, the only advice [00:27:00] I can ever give you and the only advice I feel like anyone should ever pay attention to when it comes to advice and the craft of writing, it’s three words. That’s right. Even shorter than Stephen King’s, whole book or any of the books that other people have written. However, long of short, no. Three words. JFW, just fucking right. Because what you’ll realize is you’ll soon start developing your own style and what works for you and your stories. Everyone else is gonna try and tell you how, how they did it, and that you should do it like that.

But let’s think about this. You do that, then what makes you special?

Mark: Okay. That’s good advice. Just keep writing. Yeah. Where can listeners find your [00:28:00] book?

Thomas: Allison’s tier is currently available on pre-order on Amazon. It will release on October 31st in ebook and paperback. And if everything goes according to plan audiobook, because yes, I do have an audiobook for this in the works. And the last I heard from my narrator, she had just completed recording of chapter 12.

Mark: That’s great. Congratulations and audio book is a lot to get, produced.

Thomas: Yeah, so it, and it will be releasing on ku at the time, at this time, I also will have potentially copies, paperback copy is going up on my personal web store, [00:29:00] www.corpschildsanctuary.com/shop. I will potentially be having signed paperbacks going up on the store. So there will be that, although I will have to emphasize US shipping only. I cannot ship internationally. I’m sorry, but I can’t.

Mark: That’s understandable. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for taking the time. This has been great. I’ve really enjoyed learning more about Allison’s tears in that process. If you don’t mind sticking around for a few extra minutes, we’re gonna go into the lightning round after the show.

Thomas: Of course.

Mark: Thanks again.

Thanks for listening and make sure you’re following the show so you don’t miss episode 16 with Maria Franklin, author of the Psychological Thriller. I don’t like Mondays.

We talk about how a Monday morning moment on a Trane platform sparked the story, why she outlines just [00:30:00] enough to stay flexible, and how she built a 50 reader early feedback team to sharpen each draft. 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, there’s even a free tier with extra content. The links in the show notes.

TPP Episode 14 Melissa Roos

Mark: Hello and welcome to the Thriller Pitch Podcast, where thriller readers discover new bestselling and award-winning authors. Writers pick up insights, hearing how others build their stories, and authors get to pitch their next release and share the making of it. If you love finding your next read or hearing how your favorite books came together, follow the show and stick around.

I am your host, Mark P.J. Nadon, and this is episode number 14. Today’s guest is Melissa Roos, author of the Romance Thriller, Tennessee Wishes.

Mark: Hello, Melissa. Thank you so much for being here today.

Melissa: Yeah, thanks for having me.

Mark: I am excited to talk about Tennessee wishes. I have the book here with me. Thank you so much for providing a copy. Let’s start with the book pitch.

Melissa: Okay, so my title is Tennessee [00:01:00] Wishes, and it’s a romantic suspense and like a sub genre of mystery romance. And I’ll just go right into the pitch then. Ava Morgan is, she’s a young woman from the Midwest. She has this dream that she wants to be a country singer. And so she decides that she’s just gonna move to Nashville on a whim and she’s determined to make it.

But at the same time, there’s the shadow settling over Nashville. There’s been a crime wave and they’re in the national news. There’s a serial killer on the loose, and she goes anyway. Despite her, the objections of her. And she gets an apartment, she gets a job waiting tables and she’s hoped to have a first chance to perform on their stage.

But she ends up meeting Owen Lane. He’s another rising country star. And despite battling his own demons and being haunted by a tragic past, Owen and Ava make a connection instantaneously. And there’s just this spark that they can’t ignore. So it’s, is it [00:02:00] love at first sight or is it something more dangerous?

But Ava suddenly stops communicating with Owen and he’s left kind of reeling when wondering and doubt comes in and he just doesn’t sure what’s going on. So was there connection fleeting? Was it one sided or is there something more at play there? And so the serial killer has already claimed multiple victims.

And Owen wonders if Ava’s disappearance is more of a coincidence or if she becomes the killer’s next target. And then this is, I would say this book is for readers who love a sweet romance rept in suspense with a mystery that’s woven through it. Tennessee Wishes is perfect for fans who crave that intense page turning tension that will keep you guessing until the end.

Mark: Thank you. And it did I called it a romance thriller for the sake of the podcast, but there are a lot of little subgenres kind of tucked in, and I really liked the short chapters, the quick pace, the changing characters, the serial killer in the [00:03:00] background. That was all a lot of fun to read, especially in then in the back half especially.

It got very fast and very, like I had to, I think I finished the second half of the book in one sitting, because I was just, what’s

Melissa: Oh wow.

Mark: What’s gonna happen next? Until I got to the very end and I was like, okay, now I know. So that was good. What sparked the idea for this?

Melissa: So I have a couple things. There’s a smaller spark there. I have the dandelion theme that runs through there, and I don’t know if you ever did this as a kid, but you know, we’d picked dandelions when they were big and bloom and just make wishes on ’em. And so that was kind of a small spark that I had.

But then the, the bigger spark for the overall story, about two and a half years ago I moved my daughter from college directly to Nashville and we were setting up her apartment, going to Target, getting all the things, and then walking around downtown Nashville, and I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Nashville in the summer, but the streets are full of people, just tourists everywhere. And I just started thinking, [00:04:00] what if something happens to her here? Like she doesn’t know anybody. And then in this amount of people who would even notice. And so it just kind of, the story just kinda grew and bloomed from there.

Mark: And in your acknowledgements, you mentioned your daughter inspired the story, so I imagine that’s what it is. I was curious to know if your daughter was also like a country music singer or if any of the other

Melissa: She’s, no, she’s not a country music singer. She just loves Nashville. She loves the scene, you know, with the, going to listen to the free music and different things like that. But she’s not actually a country singer, so.

Mark: Okay, so when you started writing this book, what was the intention of the theme for the book or the genre because you have, like you mentioned, sweet Romance, you mentioned suspense, mystery. We’re putting thriller in there. What came first, and then how did you weave in the rest?

Melissa: I would say probably the romance I wanted there definitely to be that sweet [00:05:00] romance in the back ’cause I just feel like it ties it all together and then that desperation of there’s a serial killer on the loose and yet, even though it’s just somebody Owen just met, he’s invested enough to wanna see it through even though he has his own tragedies. And I don’t know if that makes sense or, but that’s kind of how, how it went about.

Mark: And when you were in Nashville, were you like already thinking this is a place I wanna set it so I better do some research while I’m here? Or did that all come later?

Melissa: It kind of came later. So I definitely my daughter was a big help with that because like I have different scenes as they walked down Broadway and I had just kind of randomly put in the honky tonks and the bars and stuff and she’s like, oh no, when you walk down the street, this is what you see first. And so she helped me like, you know, this is what you would see, this is where you would go, that kind of thing. So she was a big help with the research for that kind of thing.[00:06:00]

Mark: What other kind of research did you have to do for this?

Melissa: I looked into just kind of how country music singers go and what they do as far as trying to get their time on stage. Also like I have a concrete plant in the book and I just wanted to see if there was one there. There isn’t an abandoned one there, but there is like a concrete silo and so I just thought, well, that was enough to try to kind of pick that ’cause it is fiction. But, I still want that feel, overall feel that this could actually happen in this place. And I want you to see the icons that would be there, like old reds and things like that. So when you think of Nashville, you think of these specific places. And so I wanted that to be ingrained in the story.

Mark: And what about the policing? Because you have the detective as one of the characters in the book. Did you have to do research for the policing side of things? And it had like a feel of, obviously he was the investigating detective for the serial killer, but it had a feel of [00:07:00] almost a small city. Is that what I mean? I’ve never been to Nashville, so I don’t know what like the policing is like or how it feels there.

Melissa: Yes, so they do have different smaller precincts I guess you would call it. But I also did want my, the southern charm to come through. So that’s why I made the smaller, make it feel a little smaller, even though it is a big city. I just wanted the personal feel for the police.

Mark: Okay. And was there a point where you almost gave up writing the book?

Melissa: Yeah, I would say so. There’s the way I started it in the beginning, I rewrote the beginning like four or five times ’cause it just wasn’t quite working out. ’cause I wanted to focus on the dandelion and I started when she was little and then as in the college. So it just, it just didn’t quite flow. So I felt it was better the way I ended up. But yes, there was several times I just thought this, between these two ideas, they do not connect and it’s not gonna work. But [00:08:00] I think I made it work so.

Mark: Yeah. What kept you going? Why? Why didn’t you just put it down? Like so many writers will write those first few chapters, just like you did find that spot where they almost go blank and then just let it go, and they never come back to it. What made you keep going?

Melissa: I would contribute that to my daughter. She’s like, it’s a good story, and I think the setting is great. So she, I mean, she loved it from the beginning just ’cause she loves Nashville and stuff. And I did think maybe it was kind of a unique story and so I just thought, I, I’m just gonna keep going and get it done and see how it turns out. So yeah, she was a big contributing factor to finishing it.

Mark: And when you’re writing, do you find that you’re like a plotter? And you had, I think you had the outline ahead of time, or you like a call a pantser writing by the seat of your pants.

Melissa: Yeah, no, I’m definitely a pantser. I am not plotter. I’ve tried that once and then I just feel restricted. So no, I usually get the title, and I write the title down, and then I usually [00:09:00] without, maybe not this story I didn’t have the beginning as well as I thought I did but I usually have the beginning and the end, and then the middle is just kind of where the characters lead me.

Mark: And did the characters ever do something, or in this book, did the characters do anything that threw you for a loop and had to make a change, something that you did?

Melissa: Yes ’cause I wasn’t exactly sure who was gonna be the bad guy, so to say. And so, yes, I actually one character filled in that extra little space that I needed. So yes, they do change their mind or lead me in a direction that I wouldn’t normally go.

Mark: And how many drafts do you find you do because you had to go back in this book and redo, or if you had to like set up… once you know the ending, you know who the killer is. If you didn’t know it in the beginning, then you have to try and set it up so that this person now feels like has a vibe for the direction that they need to go. And how was that?

Melissa: I think it depends on my books, [00:10:00] but I would say this one particularly, I, I would say it was five times that I went back through and changed to make it all work. Yep. Other than of little edits here and there too, but five major times.

Mark: And what’s the process like from beginning to end for you, like as a pantser? So the first draft, do you then give it to a beta reader or do you, are you doing it yourself again and then going to an editor and like, what’s that process like?

Melissa: So it’s a hot mess, but, but no, so I write the first draft and then I reread it to see if it makes sense and then I fix whatever I, I feel can be fixed. And I have a couple author friends that I rely on heavily that will give me, you know, a straight answer that this doesn’t work. And so then once that’s done and I rewrite what I need to rewrite, then I do try some beta readers and get some feedback that way.

Mark: Okay. How many beta readers do you have? Have you found, like with this book you’ve had beta readers come back and say conflicting things? And if so, how do you decide what [00:11:00] you’re gonna do?

Melissa: I feel like when somebody comes back, it’s usually the same issue that they’re all talking about. I don’t feel like it’s all over the board. So that’s, which is nice that it’s always the same issue, so it makes it easier to fix. If they were all like, oh, this doesn’t work, and then somebody else said, that doesn’t work, then it would be probably a whole rewrite. But when it’s just an issue here or there, then it, it works out pretty well.

Mark: Okay.

Melissa: when you get the same feedback continuously, then it’s, then you’re like, oh yeah, okay, I need to fix that.

Mark: Yeah. Yeah, for sure. That’s lucky. In my books, I often get a lot of beta readers that point out different things, and then I have to decide which one I’m gonna, which one I’m gonna go with, because they’re, they all say different things. So I try looking for what’s similar between them all. I guess just how you happen to have people that agree on it. That’s kind of what I end up looking at is what do everybody agree on? When you were writing Gunner, did he, who was the dog? For those who have not read it yet, Gunner is their the canine German [00:12:00] Shepherd is in the book, was he part of the book from the very beginning and as a character, or was he added later.

Melissa: No, he was there from the very beginning. I had, I wanted him to be there. And he, so I felt like he would be a good thread to keep the story going and just another link to make the whole thing more interesting. So, and I wanted him to be part of the hero in the end. I feel like dogs can be just as human as an actual human and do just as good as a person can or a character can in the story.

Mark: Yeah. Yeah. He was his own, his own character in the story.

Melissa: Yeah.

Mark: Do they allow dogs in the bars or is it because he was a retired police dog that he was allowed to be in the in there with them?

Melissa: Yeah, I would say most, they wouldn’t just allow any dog in there. It’d have to be like what do you wanna say? A service animal? But you know, it was [00:13:00] fiction, so

Mark: Yeah, yeah. No, that’s

Melissa: I could get him in the door. So

Mark: I haven’t been to Nashville, but if I could bring my dog into a bar, I might go down there and bring my dog so that

Melissa: I do feel like people try to get their dogs in anywhere they can, if, you know, if they’re allowed.

Mark: Well for sure. ’cause it’s nice to have a socialization for the dog and, and to have them with you rather than stuck at home. Yeah. Who is your favorite character to write in this book?

Melissa: I would say Detective Wyatt Lockhart, just because he’s, he’s grumpy and he’s tired and he needs coffee to survive and he has pressure from underneath trying to get his job and yet he has, he’s trying to solve these cases, but yet he still does it with a quiet kind of southern boy charm, you know?

Mark: Yeah, yeah. I liked his grumpy side, especially with his partner that was entertaining. So was Kelly inspired… were you essentially Kelly when you went down to Nashville? ’cause that story is so similar and I [00:14:00] liked her character a lot because she was, I mean, just protective mom trying to do the right thing. Not protective, but a mom trying to do the right thing and and worry about her daughter. Just as you had said you were when you went there.

Melissa: Definitely. I definitely. I mean, I lived that. So yeah, I mean I tried to portray that and I did get a little feedback on that that they thought she was kind of wishy-washy. And I’m like, yeah, but have, I mean, if you have kids, you know, there’s that fine line of you wanna help, you wanna be protective, but yet, I mean this is a 20 something year old, so you don’t wanna step on their toes.

You want them to live their life and have their experiences. So it is that fine line of back and forth, and I hope I portrayed that without her seeming overly, you know, wishy-washy. But that’s the kind of like me personally, that’s the kind of conflict that I go through when you have older adult children how much do you help them, but yet let them live their lives? So I’m hoping that came through.

Mark: Yeah, it did to me. ’cause I know [00:15:00] exactly what you mean in that sense that although she was wishy-washy, that’s pretty much exactly what I think she would’ve done or I would have done also as a parent in that situation, because like you said, you’re trying to do what’s right and then you’re not sure if you are, and then it’s like, oh, maybe I’ll do this. I’m like, oh, I shouldn’t have done that. The back and forth. As a parent, in your own mind. Was there a scene in the book that was hardest to write either creatively or emotionally?

Melissa: I would say creatively with Dorothea just to, ’cause she’s a homeless person and I wanted to portray her as a real person with real emotions. And yet I’ve never been homeless, so I don’t know all of her feelings, but yet I just wanted to make her as human as possible and show that they are, they’re not just people that you pass by on the street. There’s real feelings and emotions and a story there. So that was, she was the hardest probably for me to do.

Mark: [00:16:00] When you’re building characters, do you have an… well, you’re a pantser, so I’m guessing not, but I’ll ask the question anyway. Do you have an outline or maybe as you’re pantsing you create it where you have the character and this is what they look like for points. And some writers usually outliners, have like interviews they do with their characters and other backstory and things.

How do you approach each individual character and how did you approach them in this book in order to make them all feel authentic and different?

Melissa: Well, so I don’t do an outline, but I will think of a character and I will just put down as much information about them, how they look, their feelings, maybe their job description, age, that kind of thing. Just put it all out there as much as I possibly can. Get it down. And now, not to say that doesn’t change a little bit as I go through the story. But again, I’m a pantser, so it does change. It’s not set in stone.

Mark: Okay. A few wrap up questions. One new thing we’re doing is [00:17:00] having an author from our last episode ask a question for the next guest. So my last guest was Joanna, and she as the author of Spy Girl, she wants to know if you met your hero or heroine so I guess we could say Owen or Ava in a coffee shop, what would they say to you?

Melissa: Well, if I met Ava, she would probably say, what’s your dream and are you gonna pursue it?

Mark: Okay. Very nice. And what advice would you give to someone who just published their first or second novel?

Melissa: Well, couple things. Marketing. You just can’t get your presence out there, social media, that kind of thing. The more that people know about you, the better off you are. But as far as writing don’t just stop at that one book. Just keep writing, write the next one. , You’re always growing, always changing so you just wanna keep put the pen to the paper or your fingers to the keyboards, whatever you wanna say, but you just want to keep writing and keep improving and keep going no matter what.

Mark: Yeah. And what marketing [00:18:00] tactics have you found worked well for you so far? You have sweet romance in all the sub genres, which was interesting, and you can almost market it in all the different ways with every piece of marketing you put out there.

Melissa: I would say probably with social media, like Instagram is better for me than others. Just because I like the prettier pictures, like with my book and that kind of same thing, so I do a little bit better on there than I would on TikTok. But just in general, I would say my newsletter, getting people to sign up for my newsletter and having that come out once a month, keeps them interested in knowing what I’m going to do or what I have been doing. And then just, going to author events. Those are my major things.

Mark: What kind of author events have you been to?

Melissa: Recently I just went to the book Fair in Ballet or Maryland, so that was a lot of fun. And then I have a book club in Osburg, Pennsylvania coming up here on next Monday. So that’s fun. So getting to the book clubs and the [00:19:00] author events, it’s a lot of fun. ’cause then you get to meet people and, and I was down at Bethany Beach books and actually a lady there was on vacation and she was from Virginia and she actually came to Maryland to see me too, even though she’s from Virginia. So it was nice to see her in Delaware and Maryland. So, and I’m from Pennsylvania, so it was just kind of nice to see a familiar face in different states.

Mark: Oh, that’s great. A super fan.

Melissa: yeah.

Mark: Where can people find your books and more about you?

Melissa: So I am in a few local shops in Pennsylvania, but mostly online. I would be on Amazon or Barnes and Noble online or Walmart, Shopify, that kind of thing.

Mark: Okay. Great. Well, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate having you on the show, talking about your book. This is great. If you don’t mind sticking around for a few minutes for the after show with our rapid fire session we will get to that.

Melissa: Okay. Sounds great. Thanks for having me.

Mark: Thank you.

Mark: Thank you for listening to episode [00:20:00] 14. If you enjoyed this conversation, make sure to follow the show so you don’t miss episode 15 with Thomas Stewart, author of the Horror Thriller, Allison’s Tears. And if you’d like to go deeper with early access bonus content, the after show with rapid fire questions and the chance to ask future guests your own questions, join me on Patreon where I offer plenty in the free tier category. The link is in the show notes.

TPP Episode 13 Joanna Vander Vlugt

Mark: Hello and welcome to the Thriller Pitch Podcast where thriller readers discover new bestselling and award-winning authors, writers get to pick up insights by hearing how others build their stories, and authors get to pitch their next release and share the making of it. If you love finding your next read or hearing, how your favorite books came together, follow the show and stick around.

I’m your host, Mark P.J. Nadon, and this is episode number 13. Today’s guest is Joanna Vander Vlugt author of the spy thriller Spy Girls. Joanna, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you

Joanna: Thank you, mark. There is a lot of work I know that goes behind producing these, so I really appreciate it.

Mark: I have your book here with me, Spy Girls. Thank you for sending me a copy. I [00:01:00] realized actually as I was thinking about this, I think I’ve had books come from more places in the world than I’ve been able to travel.

I had, yours is another one I’ve always wanted to go to BC I think I was born to go in BC ’cause I like to run distances and stuff in the mountains. But here in Ottawa there’s almost no mountain. You can kind of go to like hills, ski hills, but not really mountains. So I’m envious of your end of the full world.

Joanna: Well, we don’t know how to handle snow when we do get it. Okay.

Mark: Fair. So let’s get into the pitch. Pitch me your book. Spy Girls.

Joanna: Okay, Spy Girls. So my heroine Jade Time, she’s a lawyer, and after her sister’s partner has been kidnapped, she is coerced into finding an elusive double agent. She navigates. Political agendas, and she escapes sticky bombs while trying to outplay a [00:02:00] psychotic Russian assassin as she tries to find this double agent. That’s I made it short.

Mark: Yeah, that is short and sweet, but it does summarize that very well. What happens. So thank you.

Joanna: Well, I, I kept thinking about, uh, some of these pitch fast dating, not fast dating sites, but you know what I mean. When you have 10 minutes and you need to pitch to an editor, like a, an agent, so it’s like, okay, do this in one sentence.

Mark: Very good. So where did the story idea come from?

Joanna: Oh wow. Actually, it, you had another guest on, I was listening and we both had similar story ideas. It was, I wrote her name down here. Is it Ox Devere?

Mark: Yep the Yeah. Devil’s Eye.

Joanna: The Devil’s Eye and, I wrote this in, so I published it in 2024. You know how long it takes to write a book? I started it in 2022, [00:03:00] so it it had, at that time, I ugh, I don’t even, I wanna mention this man’s name. Jeffrey Epstein, the human trafficking that was in the news. And then combined with, we had a criminal matter in British Columbia involving a judge being charged with I can’t remember all the charges, but basically what I can what I can vaguely remember is he was going down to the downtown east side and, um, involved with women Okay. And being abusive. And I I think as writers we also try to, in our, in our fictional world, try to bring about justice. And so then that’s [00:04:00] where those two ideas meshed.

And, uh, we had, you know spy events happening in Canada where different, as soon as I started to dig, I found out about how there was a Cissus agent who was selling secrets and I’m just, you know, so it, it’s almost like a serendipity. All these ideas kind of came together and they meshed into Spy Girls.

Mark: How long did it take from, from these ideas into the novel before you started putting like pen to paper? Was it like months of thinking and trying to put it together in your mind before you put it onto paper?

Joanna: Well, kind of you have dogs and I have dogs. So every morning when I’d be walking those dogs, right, thinking be thinking about this story. And at the time when I started writing it. Yeah, I’d say [00:05:00] at least a year of the I ideas coming together. And I wasn’t a plotter when I wrote Spy Girls. I have since become a bit of a plotter and it was just writing the story and fleshing it out. And I even had a third storyline in there, which my editor said, this is going nowhere. So either you work on this storyline, or we gotta get rid of it, right. So, yeah, it, I’d say a year before and during the writing process, I started to refine the refine, the storyline.

Mark: Did you pants this book? Did you just get down and start? And just start writing the book rather than having all the notes and the characters kind of prebuilt.

Joanna: I have notes but I did not plot it. I was a pantser was I have, which from listening to previous [00:06:00] episodes, I’m not the only pantser who has learned. Okay, you gotta save some time here.

Mark: yeah, that’s right. Yeah. And why in Canada? For, for the plot. I know a lot of, and I’ve been guilty of this myself as I set it in the US a story because I know most market is US for purchasing books, so I try and build it there. But you chose, you chose Canada and I’m just curious as to why.

Joanna: It’s because of of my heroin. I worked in the prosecutor’s office for 13 years and then I worked in the office of the police complaint commissioner for another 10. And you’re always told write what you know. So I wasn’t going to try to learn the American justice system. Like I, I, I know what it’s like to work in a prosecutor’s office. [00:07:00] I have a connection in the prosecutor’s office so she can, because laws change, she can look, she read what I had written and made changes saying, oh the law has changed. It’s not this section number or, you know, this is our new process. We don’t ref refer to judges now as his honor is his honor or his worship anymore. Right. So the last thing I think a writer wants is someone to pick up their book and say she’s got her facts wrong, you know, so that’s why I kept it in Canada. I kept it in a Canadian, with a Canadian criminal justice system. Just ’cause I thought I, this, I, I, yeah, I, I didn’t want a mistake. I, you know, of trying to figure out the American justice system. So that’s, that’s why I kept it in Canada. Yeah.

Mark: And how true to life was the setting throughout the book? That they’re, they’re going through and exploring [00:08:00] like the streets, the boats…

Joanna: yeah, so Victoria, I lived there for 22 years, and that setting is so legitimate because how Jade walks to work in the morning. That is how I walk to work, going over that bridge. Going down the galloping goose. All of that was legitimate. And I’m, I’m serious. That galloping goose, you walk on one way, ’cause you’ve got bikes zipping past.

Right. And when you come, you came home, you walked on another side because you’ve got bikes zipping past. Right. So, and the Chinatown in Victoria is so cool. Fanan Alley, all of that is legitimate. And, um, yeah, that, that’s all very true. You know? Very true. ’cause [00:09:00] that, like I said, that was my neighborhood.

The boat scene, I remember I was kind of, I was kind of doing like latitude and longitude, and I thought, okay, they went out here and you know, and looking at those locations, what would be the latitude and the longitude, right? Just to make, again, thinking about wanting it to be accurate. Right. So when they go out into the ocean area, that there’s a bit of fiction. Okay. Yeah.

Mark: And what about the motorcycle gang? Is that because that’s very unique to your story? They’re used as like a security force. They’re the motorcycles in general. You don’t usually see that or don’t read that a lot, so that was very unique and fun. Where did that come from?

Joanna: I like bikes. I don’t own, I do not. I own a scooter. I don’t own a motorcycle. And during [00:10:00] like I illustrate motorcycles. You know, I’ve, I’ve done commissions and I enjoy illustrating motorbikes. In a few weeks I’m going to actually illustrate a boat. A boat. And what I mean by illustrate is I have it’s marker paper and I use what’s called copic art markers. And that’s how I do the illustrations, like the illustrations in the front of Spy Girls. That’s one of my illustrations. Right. And, it was,

Mark: I’ll just hold that up for views. We’re actually watching this. This is the one here? Yeah.

Joanna: yeah. Yeah. And I remember like, again I think it was T.D. Severin who I was listening to him where he was saying how he had written his book about 30 years ago in the nineties.

Mark: Yeah. And

Joanna: And I had a bit of a similar path where I stopped writing and I was creating these illustrations. So when I came back to writing [00:11:00] and I was thinking about Jade and I was thinking about these characters and I just, I remember looking up once at one of my illustrations and I thought she rides a motorcycle.

You know? ‘Cause there are a lot of women out there who ride bikes who aren’t necessarily in a gang. And I thought, okay, let’s take this up a notch. Right. So that’s where that came

Mark: That was fun.

Joanna: Yeah.

Mark: And you mentioned, you mentioned like the facts and getting the facts right, and you also brought in CSIS in the RCMP, which is Canadian. But you brought in the CIA or ex-CIA. Why, where did that come from to bring in a, a US spy agency?

Joanna: Well what was fun with that is again,, I think of writing and serendipity because I was interviewed, oh, while I was writing Spy Girls and there were two, there were two men [00:12:00] on the interview and I had made, oh, it was this embarrassing joke because the one interviewer didn’t know exactly where I was from. He knew BC, but he didn’t know. Okay. Vancouver Island. And I just, I was joke. I thought, God, don’t try to joke. I thought I was being funny. And I said, yes. I live on Vancouver Island, just kinda lying, laying low. I said, who knows? All I I, I could be a CIA agent, you know, just laying low. Well, what. I didn’t know was the second man on that interview who was interviewing me Joe Goldberg was a resigned CIA action, off, not officer operative. He and I started talking and he had said that If I wanted to, he would review Spy Girls specifically [00:13:00] for when I mentioned about any sort of CIA operations.

Mark: Oh, cool.

Joanna: So, uh, yeah, so after I kind of like took my, you know, put out of my mouth in my comment right. I was very happy and he’s an author too, Joe Goldberg, and, you know. Yeah, it, it, I remember, ’cause I had originally written that, um, the character Jan Hoffman, that he had retired right from the CIA and I remember Joe saying to me, no, we don’t retire, we resign. And I went,

Mark: okay.

Joanna: okay. Noted. Right. So, yeah.

Mark: Oh, that’s very cool.

Joanna: Yeah.

Mark: So we’re gonna jump through a little bit, talk a little bit about characters, and one of the things that struck me in this novel is that you chose to go from third person to first person. First person with, with Jade, which, who’s your main character, and third person with, with pretty much anybody else. Why that [00:14:00] choice? I had never seen that. And I just recently did an interview which hasn’t come out yet with Steve Stratton who also did that, and it was the first time and he shared his inspiration. But I’m curious to know why you chose to switch that point of view. ’cause it’s not something you see very much.

Joanna: Yeah that was a risk. and so your listeners know. I do it in parts. Okay. So I, when I do the big switch into first person with my heroin, that is a, it’s like, it’s a different part of the book. So you open the book and it’s part one and that’s where it’s in third person. Right. And, what I want, what I love doing as a writer is I almost like when the reader is reading, I want to almost give them information ahead of time of the heroine. [00:15:00] So it’s, it’s whether it’s the fores, it’s not even foreshadowing, but when they get to the heroin and she’s starting to investigate and get pulled into the scenario, I want them to be thinking, oh God, when are the paths gonna cross? Going to cross, right? Because you, you kind of know what the bad guy, what his plans are, and I just, want the reader to, when they get into Jade’s head to be wondering, okay, when is she going to, when, when are they going to collide? You know, when, when is the bad guy’s motives and the heroin’s motives going to collide. Okay. And that’s why I did that. And, it was fun for me, and I hope the reader found it fun. You know, it’s, it, it’s definitely a little different. Mm-hmm.

Mark: Well, it wasn’t completely like, there was a little bit of back and forth, but it wasn’t as jarring as happening, [00:16:00] like every chapter or something, which was nice.

I liked it. I didn’t find it. It, oh, I guess because I just read Steve Stratton, who. I, it did jar me with his book, but now that I kind of got a feel for it and then I went to yours, I was like, oh, okay, this is fine.

Joanna: Yeah. And I think as long as you’re fair with the reader, you know, ’cause I thought, okay, I, I don’t want them to be thinking. Okay, where are we now? Who am I now? Who am I reading whose head I’m in? So that’s why in the beginning there is part one and it’s third person, and it’s this one character’s point of view. And then we have part two, and then who the most of it then is in the heroine’s point of view. But I definitely separate it so the reader knows Okay, we’re we’re, we’re in someone else’s head right now. Yeah.

Mark: Was that pre-planned? Did you wanted to do that to set up the character? Yeah. Yeah.

Joanna: Yeah, yeah. And it’s, one reader said to me, she summarized it perfectly. [00:17:00] She said, reading Spy Girls is like watching a, a, snowball. Just get bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. Right? And I thought, yeah, that, that’s, that’s it. Right? Yeah.

Mark: And with Jade, as her, as the story continues, and I’ll try not to give any spoilers, and there are moments where big things happen to her. So things are revealed probably, but like the three quarter of the mark is kind of where I’m referring to from the book. And instead of, ’cause there’s, there’s essentially, there’s two ways you can go about it. You can spend a lot of time in the character’s head, which happens a lot where writers will say, you know, oh, I can’t believe this. Or, you know, this is happening to me, or what do I do now? Or, there’s a lot of that and there’s action where you just, the character’s reactions and, and actions kind of help you understand how they’re processing their trauma and you went with that route, you went, the action route you spent, [00:18:00] to me anyway, you spent less time, she wasn’t in her head so much worried about herself or everything. She was just go, go, go. It was, it was just constantly action, which I also don’t see a whole lot, but I liked it.

Was that, is that your, do you feel like that’s your writing or was that a choice to just spend less time in her head and show that? Oh, she’s, when there’s a moment where she’s like, teach me, teach me where she wants to, self-defense. Like, no, teach it now. I, I need it now. And that’s like you showing that there’s this trauma that she needs to process, but it was through action. It was alive and fun, which was different than her and her brain saying, or her, to the reader in her mind saying, this is terrible. How do I survive this kind of thing.

Joanna: Yeah. But I wanted the urgency. That’s I think that’s the biggest thing. I wanted the urgency and like you said, teach me now because, she’s, there’s a lot at stake for her. And I also like writing action [00:19:00] scenes. It’s, there’s a scene in, in the beginning, involving a judge, and there’s a young, like you, you learn about a young female, and that scene was much harder to write than any of the action scenes. Like there’s an action scene on a boat involving Jade, where she’s just about harmed. And that scene was easier to write than anything involving the judge. And, yeah, and I remember the fights, like s the, without getting anything in away, a fight scene near the end involving Jade and that was, I don’t wanna say fun, right? ’cause it’s a, it gets a bit brutal. Okay. You know, but it’s, it’s basically, you know, you know, you’re sitting there and I’m thinking, okay, if I’m fight, like literally I remember thinking [00:20:00] if I’m fighting for my life, what would I do? Right? So,

Mark: Yeah. Was that the hardest moment to write? That departs with the judge for you? Yeah. Yeah.

Joanna: Yes. And it was, again, it was Ox Devere who you interviewed.

Mark: Yeah. I think that’s how you

Joanna: Yeah. And

Mark: Yeah.

Joanna: yeah, where she had said with some of the scenes she had written, she needed I am, I’ve gotta quota. ’cause it was perfect. A brain bath, you know? And I thought, yeah, I, I get it like that. You ask good questions and it’s, it’s been fun listening to your podcast ’cause you know, I’m, I’m like, Uhhuh Uhhuh. Yeah.

Mark: Was there research you had to do for the villain? Like for how you portrayed the justice and, and what he had done? Like you mentioned, Epstein. [00:21:00] Was there any research behind that and, and things that had happened that kind of came together to make that scene?

Joanna: I don’t believe I did research for that given what we would’ve seen on the news. And yeah, and given some of what I’ve been exposed to when I worked for Crown Council. It’s almost like I hate to say this, but it’s almost like I’m gonna need a brain bath. Like, Ox said, almost like letting your mind going to the worst possible areas of human behavior. Okay.

And I don’t think there is anything a writer can imagine that hasn’t happened in real life. Okay. So I wouldn’t say that there was [00:22:00] research. I could not research that man. Right. I drew upon more of what I’ve been exposed to when I worked at Crown Council.

But having said that, now when I think about it, it was more the judge and looking up articles and reading articles about what this judge had done. Okay, so there there was some research, tiny bit of research.

Mark: Okay. Did that judge also have an accomplice like you had? Was that part of that story or that was, you made that up with the, I mean, I don’t, no spoilers, but yeah. Okay. You made that part up. Okay. Listeners will have to have to read the book to know what I’m talking about there. Okay.

Joanna: Yeah. Yeah.

Mark: Did you ever consider writing, when you started that book, writing his point of view at all? Like the justice’s point of view? Like a moment in time where to almost set up a very dark moment, or you [00:23:00] didn’t want to?

Joanna: Oh God. Not at that time. No. No, it’s, but it’s weird, Mark, because I have just written a short story for an anthology. A call out for an anthology and there’s a very bad character, in that book. And he not in that book, in that story. And he, how he treats people is just so despicable. And I drew upon, let’s just say some, some politicians in our current current world. It’s, it was weird to go down there and I, I, I wonder now if, now the reason why I went that route is because the motivation is different. Okay. With Spy Girls it’s more about my heroine, [00:24:00] you know, getting justice. Whereas in this other short story I had just written, it was trying to.

Show what this despicable character in this short story was doing.

Right. So I guess, yeah, my, my motives were different. Did I answer your question? But

Mark: yeah, yeah. So you probably needed a brain bath after that one as well then. Yeah. Yeah. Because writing villains can be gross like that. Absolutely. And trying to justify their dirty deeds. Couple more questions for you. Go. Moving to kind of a writer focused couple of questions to finish this interview off with. What advice would you give someone who just published their first or second book?

Joanna: Keep writing. Keep writing. Yeah. Uh, there’s a few things I’d say to someone who’s just published. It would be, start your next one. Like So I remember after [00:25:00] I first published the first book, the Unraveling, when I was coming near the end, I had an idea already for the second one, but I told myself, give yourself a month’s break. And actually that’s pretty much what I do. And usually by the end of the month I’m just like, I’m. I’m like, okay, I’m ready. Right. Okay. I wanna do this. So just give yourself a, a month’s break or give yourself a little bit of a break, but be, we’re thinking about the next book. Okay. Definitely writing notes or you know, just keep writing, keep writing. And don’t look at stats. That’s the other big thing I’ve found is don’t look at stats with regards to if you’re going traditional, how many traditional, like how many traditional publishers pick up new authors? Don’t, don’t the, the stats will make you not want to write. I do not look at writing stats.

Mark: That’s fair

Joanna: Yeah. And, what would, I had one more, [00:26:00] which I can’t remember right now, but, yeah, keep writing. Definitely keep writing and and pick whatever path you want. You know, if you self-publish and then decide you wanna try traditional publishing, that’s okay. Like you don’t have to stay on the same path, you know?

Mark: yeah, yeah. There’s a lot of hybrid now that are, that are kind of moving back and forth between the two. That has made it acceptable in this day and age. Yeah. And where can readers find more about your books and purchase your book or find more about you?

Joanna: Well, more about me would be joannavandervlugt.com. That’s my website. And the easiest way is just going on Amazon. That’s the easiest way. Whether you’re an American listener or a Canadian listener, if you go on Amazon, you will see my book. Yeah.

Mark: Okay. Well thank you so much for taking the time to be here today. I really appreciate it. This has been a lot [00:27:00] of fun. If you don’t mind sticking around for the after show, we’re changing it up a little bit, so we’re gonna be doing a rapid fire round for the after show, just, to change it up and have a little bit of fun. Thank you.

Joanna: Well, thank you, Mark. Like I say, I know the work behind work involved behind the scenes.

Mark: Thank you. Thanks for listening to the episode. If you enjoyed this conversation, make sure to follow the show so you don’t miss episode 14 with Melissa Roos, author of the Romance Thriller, Tennessee Wishes. And if you’d like to go deeper with early access bonus content, the after show with rapid fire questions and the chance to ask future guests your own questions, join me on Patreon. We do have some free tier, giving away free things. The link is in the show notes.

TPP Episode 12 Steve Stratton

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Steve: Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

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

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

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

Mark: Oh, that’s awesome.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mark: Yeah,

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

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

Steve: Well,

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mark: Fair.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mark: That’s a great idea.

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

Mark: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mark: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

Steve: Absolutely.

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

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

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

Steve: Yeah.

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

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

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

Thank you again.

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

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