“Dean Koontz: The Secret of Selling 500 Million Books”

Dean Koontz interviewed by Clay Stafford

Dean Koontz is and always has been an incredibly prolific writer. He’s also an excellent writer, which explains why he’s had such phenomenal success. When I heard he and I were going to get to chat exclusively for Killer Nashville Magazine, I wanted to talk to him about how one man can author over one hundred and forty books, a gazillion short stories, have sixteen movies made from his books, and sell over five hundred million copies of his books in at least thirty-eight languages. It's no small feat, but surprisingly, one that Dean thinks we are all capable of. “So, Dean, how long should a wannabe writer give their career before they expect decent results?”

“Well, it varies for everybody. But six months is ridiculous. Yeah, it’s not going to be that fast unless you’re one of the very lucky ones who comes out, delivers a manuscript, and publishers want it. But you also have to keep in mind some key things. Publishers don’t always know what the public wants. In fact, you could argue that half the time, they have no idea. A perfect example of this is Harry Potter, which every publisher in New York turned down, and it went to this little Canadian Scholastic thing and became the biggest thing of its generation. So, you just don’t know. But you could struggle for a long time trying to break through, especially for doing anything a little bit different. And everybody says, ‘Well, this is different. Nobody wants something like this.’ And there are all those kinds of stories, so I can’t put a time frame on it. But I would say a minimum of a few years.”

“I usually tell everyone—people who come to Killer Nashville, groups I speak to—four years. Give it four years. Is that reasonable?”

“I think that's reasonable. If it isn’t working in four years, I wouldn’t rule it out altogether, but you’d better find a day job.”

“I was looking at your Facebook page, and it said on some of your books you would work fifty hours a week for x-amount of time, seventy hours a week for x-amount of time. How many hours a week do you actually work?”

“These days, I put in about sixty hours a week. And I’m seventy-eight.”

“Holy cow, you don’t look anywhere near seventy-eight.”

He shakes his head. “There’s no retiring in this. I love what I do, so I’ll keep doing it until I fall dead on the keyboard. There were years when I put in eighty-hour weeks. Now, that sounds grueling. Sixty hours these days probably sounds grueling to most people or to many people. But the fact is, I love what I do, and it’s fun. And if it’s fun, that doesn't mean it’s not hard work and it doesn’t take time, because it’s both fun and hard work, but because it is, the sixty hours fly by. I never feel like I’m in drudgery. So, it varies for everybody. But that’s the time that I put in. When people say, ‘Wow! You’ve written all these books; you must dash them off quickly.’ No, it’s exactly the opposite. But I just put a lot of hours in every week, and it’s that consistency week after week after week. I don’t take off a month for Bermuda. I don't like to travel, so that wouldn't come up anyway. When you do that, it’s kind of astonishing how much work piles up.”

“How is your work schedule divided? I assume you write every single day?”

“Pretty much. I will certainly write six days a week. I get up at 5:00. I used to be a night guy, but after I got married, I became a day guy because my wife is a day person. I’m up at 5:00, take the dog for a walk, feed the dog, shower, and am at my desk by 6:30, and I write straight through to dinner. I never eat lunch because eating lunch makes me foggy, and so I’m looking at ten hours a day, six days a week, and when it’s toward the last third of a book, it goes to seven days a week because the momentum is such that I don’t want to lose it. It usually takes me five months to six months to produce a novel that’s one hundred thousand words.”

“Does this include your editing, any kind of research you do, and all that? Is it in that time period?”

“Yeah, I have a weird way of writing; though, I’ve learned that certain other writers have it. I don’t write a first draft and go back. I polish a page twenty to thirty times, sometimes ten, but I don’t move on from that page until I feel it’s as perfect as I can make it. Then I go to the next page. And I sort of say, I build a book like coral reefs are built, all these little dead skeletons piling on top of each other, and at the end of a chapter, I go print it out because you see things printed out you don’t see on the screen. I do a couple of passes of each chapter that way and then move on. In the end, it’s had so many drafts before anyone else sees it that I generally never have to do much of anything else. I’ll always get editorial suggestions. I think since I started working this way, which was in the early days, my editorial suggestions take me never a lot more than a week, sometimes a couple of days. But when editors make good suggestions, you want to do it because the book does not say ‘By Dean Koontz with wonderful suggestions by…’ You get all the credit, so you might as well take any wonderful suggestion.”

“You get all the blame, too.”

“Yes, you do, although I refuse to accept it.”

“Do you work from an outline, then? Or do you just stream of consciousness?”

“I worked from outline for many years, but things were not succeeding, and so I finally said, you know, one of the problems is that I do an outline, the publisher sees it, says ‘Good. We’ll give you a contract,’ then I go and write the book and deliver it, and it’s not the same book. It’s very similar, but there are all kinds of things, I think, that became better in the writing, and publishers say, ‘Well, this isn’t quite the book we bought,’ and I became very frustrated with that. I also began to think, ‘This is not organic. I am deciding the entire novel before I start it.’ Writing from an outline might work and does for many writers, but I realized it didn’t work for me because I wasn’t getting an organic story. The characters weren’t as rich as I wanted because they were sort of set at the beginning. So, I started writing the first book I did without an outline called Strangers, which was over two hundred fifty thousand words. It was a long novel and had about twelve main characters. It was a big storyline, and I found that it all fell together perfectly well. It took me eleven months of sixty- to seventy-hour weeks, but the book came together, and that was my first hardcover bestseller. I’ve never used an outline since. I just begin with a premise, a character or two, and follow it all. It’s all about character, anyway. If the book is good, character is what drives it.”

“Is that the secret of it all? Putting in the time? Free-flowing thought? Characters?”

“I think there are several. It’s just willing to put in the time and think about what you’re doing, recognizing that characters are more important than anything else. If the characters work, the book will work. If the characters don’t, you may still be able to sell the book, but you’re not looking at long-term reader involvement. Readers like to fall in love with the characters. That doesn’t mean the characters all have to be wonderful angelic figures. They also like to fall in love with the villains, which means getting all those characters to be rich and different. I get asked often, ‘You have so many eccentric characters. The Odd Thomas books are filled with almost nothing else. How do you make them relatable?’ And I say, ‘Well, first, you need to realize every single human being on the planet is eccentric. You are as well.”

“Me?” I laugh. “You’re the first to point that out.”

He joins in. “It’s just a matter of recognizing that. And then, when you start looking for the characters’ eccentricities—which the character will start to express to you—you have to write them with respect and compassion. You don’t make fun of them, even if they are amusing, and you treat them as you would people: by the Golden Rule. And if you do, audiences fall in love with them, and they stay with you to see who you will write about next. And that’s about the best thing I can say. Don’t write a novel where the guy’s a CIA agent, and that’s it. Who is he? What is he other than that? And I never write about CIA agents, but I see there’s a tendency in that kind of fiction to just put the character out there. That’s who he is. Well, that isn’t who he is. He’s something, all of us are, something much more than our job.”

“What advice do you give to new writers who want to become the next Dean Koontz?”

“First of all, you can’t be me because I’m learning to clone myself, so I plan to be around for a long time. But, you know, everybody works a different way, so I’m always hesitant to give ironclad advice. But what I do say to many young writers who write to me, and they’ve got writer's block, is that I’ve never had it, but I know what it is. It’s always the same thing. It’s self-doubt. You get into a story. You start doubting that you can do this, that this works, that that works. It’s all self-doubt. I have more self-doubt than any writer I’ve ever known, and that’s why I came up with this thing of perfecting every page until I move to the next. Then, the self-doubt goes away because the page flows, and when I get to the next page, self-doubt returns. So, I will do it all again. When I’m done, the book works. Now, if that won’t work for everybody, I think it could work for most writers if they get used to it, and there are certain benefits to it. You do not have to write multiple drafts after you’ve written one. What happens with a lot of writers is they write that first draft—especially when they’re young or new—and now they have something, and they’re very reluctant to think, ‘Oh, this needs a lot of work’ because they’re looking at it as, ‘Oh, I have a novel-length manuscript.’ Well, that’s only the first part of the journey. And I just don’t want to get to that point and feel tempted to say, ‘This is good enough,’ because it almost never will be that way.”

“No,” I say, “it never will.”

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Clay Stafford is a bestselling writer, filmmaker, and founder of Killer Nashville International Writers’ Conference. https://claystafford.com/

Dean Koontz is the author of many #1 bestsellers. His books have sold over five hundred million copies in thirty-eight languages, and The Times (of London) has called him a “literary juggler.” He lives in Southern California with his wife Gerda, their golden retriever, Elsa, and the enduring spirits of their goldens Trixie and Anna. https://www.deankoontz.com/

“Bruce Robert Coffin: Using Your Life to Write a Police Procedural”

Bruce Robert Coffin interviewed by Clay Stafford

Bruce Robert Coffin has been coming to Killer Nashville International Writers’ Conference every year since its early days, so it’s only fitting that we feature this incredibly talented writer as our cover story. To give a little backstory, Bruce wanted to be a writer, but after going to college and not necessarily receiving the encouragement or success he had hoped for, he chose a career in law enforcement. Little did he realize he was laying the foundation for the outstanding writing career that was to follow. I had a chance to speak with Bruce from his home in Maine. “Bruce, when you were a police officer, a detective, did you even think about writing again, or did you miss writing as you went through your regular job?”

“There’s nothing fun about writing in police work or detective work. Everything is bare bones. There’s not much room for adjectives or that type of stuff. It’s just the facts, ma’am. That’s what they expect out of you. So, everything is boilerplate. It’s very boring. You’re taking statements all the time. You’re writing. If there was one similar thing, and it certainly didn’t occur to me that there would ever be a time that I would write fiction again, but it did teach me to write cohesively. Everything that we did had to make sense. You know, you do one thing before you do the next. Building timelines for putting a case together, doing interviews with witnesses, and then figuring out how they all fit together, and making a cohesive story or narrative out of that to explain to a judge, a jury, or a prosecutor. As far as story building was concerned, I think that might have been something I was learning at that point because that’s exactly how a real case gets made. I wasn’t thinking about it in terms of writing later, but I think it’s something that helped me because I think my brain works that way now. I know how cases will work, I know how cases are solved, and I know why cases stall out. I think all those things really allow me to better describe what real police work is like in my fictional novels.”

“When you retired from detective work and started writing again, how much of the police work transferred over, and how much was fiction from your head?”

“I made a deal with myself when I started that I wouldn’t write anything based on a real case. I had had enough of true crime. I had seen what the real-life cases had done to people: the survivors, the victims, the families, and I didn’t want to do anything that would cause people pain by fictionalizing something that had been part of their lives. I made a deal with myself that I would write as realistically as possible, but I would never base any books on an actual case I had worked on. And I’ve so far, knock on wood, been able to stand by that. I think the only exception would be if it were something that had a reason. Maybe the family came to me and asked me to do that or something like that. There had to be a reason for it, though. And so, when I started writing, I could draw from a well of a million experiences, things that we tamp down deep inside, and you don’t think about how that affects who I am and how I see the world. And I think in my mind, I imagined I would be making up stuff, and that would be it. There’s nothing but my imagination. There would be nothing personal about what I was writing, and it would just be fun. And like everything you delve into that you don’t actually know, I had no idea I would be diving into the real stuff, like dipping the ladle into that emotional well and pulling out chunks of things from my past. There were scenes that I wrote that emotionally moved me as I was writing them. And it’s because what I’m writing is based on something that happened in real life. And I’m crafting it to fit into the narrative of the story I’m writing. But the goal of me doing that is really to evoke emotion from the reader, which I think is the most important thing any of us can do. You want the reader to feel something. You want them to be lost in your story. And I really didn’t think that was going to happen. But it’s amazing what I dredged up and continued to dredge up as I write these fictional police procedural stories.”

“Some of the writers I talk with view writing as therapy. Did you find it cathartic coming from your previous life?”

“I did. I think that was another shock. I didn’t think any catharsis was involved in what I was doing. But like I say, when you start delving back into things that you thought you had either forgotten about or thought were long past, it really allowed me to deal with things. It allowed me to deal with things I wasn’t happy about when I left the job. The things that I wish I could unsee or un-experience. As a writer, I was able to pull from those. I think you and I have talked about this in the past. I honestly think the best writing comes from adversity. Anything difficult that the writers have gone through in life translates well to the page. And I think that’s one of those things where, if you can insert those moments into your characters’ lives, your reader can’t help but identify with them. So, I just had the luxury of having the life we all have, the ups and downs, the highs and lows, the death and the love, and all those things we have to experience. But added to that, I had thirty years of a crazy front-row seat to the world as a law enforcement officer. So, using all of that, I think, has made my stories much more realistic and maybe more entertaining because it gives the reader a glimpse inside what that world is really like.”

“So, you have this front-row seat. And then we readers read that, and we want to write that. But we haven’t had that experience. Is it even possible for us to get to that point that we could write something like that?”

“It is. And I tell people that all the time. I say you have to channel your experiences differently, I think. Like I said, we all have experiences, things that are heart-wrenching, or things that are horrifying, or whatever it is in our lives. They just don’t happen with as great a frequency as they would happen for a police officer. And we all know what it’s like to be frustrated working for a business, being part of a dysfunctional family, or whatever it is. Everybody has something. And so, I tell people to use that. Use that in your stories and try to imagine. You know, you can learn the procedure. You might not have those real-world experiences, but you can learn the procedure, especially from reading other writers who do it well. But use your own experiences. Insert that in there. You know, one of the things that I think is the easiest for people to think about is how hard it is to try and hold down a job. Like, you go to work, and you may see the most horrific murder happen, and you’re dealing with the angst that the family or witness is suffering, and you’re carrying that with you. Then you come home and try to deal with a real-world where other people don’t see that stuff. Like your spouse is worried that the dishwasher is leaking water under the kitchen floor, and that’s the worst thing that’s happened all day, right? That the house is stressed out because of that. And it’s hard to come home. It’s almost like you have to lead a split personality. It’s hard to come home and show the empathy that your spouse needs for that particular tragedy when you’re carrying all those other tragedies from the day. And you won’t share those with them because you don’t want that darkness in your house. I tell people to try to envision what that would be like and then pull from their own life the adversity they’ve experienced or seen and use that to make the story and the characters real. You can steal the procedure from good books. Get to know your local law enforcement officer, somebody who’s actually squared away and will share that information with you. Don’t get it from television necessarily. Some of TV writing is laziness. Some of it’s because they have a very short time constraint to try and get the story told. So, they take huge liberties with reality. But if you can take that stuff and try to put yourself in the shoes of the detective and use your own experiences, you can bring a detective to life.”

“You think anybody can do it?”

“I do. I do think that you have to pull from the right parts of your life. And again, as I say, if you spend enough time with somebody who’s done the job and get them to tell you, it’s not just what we do. It’s how we feel. And the feeling, I think, is what’s missing from those stories many times. If you want to tell a real gritty police detective story, you have to have feeling in that. That’s the one thing we all pretend we don’t have. You know, we keep the stone face. We go to work, do our thing, and pretend to be the counselor or the person doing the interrogation. But at the end of the day, we’re still just human beings. And we’re absorbing all these things like everybody else does. So yeah, you have to see that. Get to hear that from somebody for real, and you’ll know what will make your detective tick.”

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Clay Stafford is a bestselling writer, filmmaker, and founder of Killer Nashville International Writers’ Conference. https://claystafford.com/

Bruce Robert Coffin is an award-winning novelist and short story writer. A retired detective sergeant, Bruce is the author of the Detective Byron Mysteries, co-author of the Turner and Mosley Files with LynDee Walker, and author of the forthcoming Detective Justice Mysteries. His short fiction has appeared in a dozen anthologies, including Best American Mystery Stories, 2016. http://www.brucerobertcoffin.com/

“A Casual Conversation with Susan Isaacs”

Susan Isaacs interviewed by Clay Stafford

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I had a wonderful opportunity to just chat with bestselling author and mystery legend, Susan Isaacs, as a follow-up to my interview with her for my monthly Writer’s Digest column. It was a wonderful conversation. I needed a break from writing. She needed a break from writing. Like a fly on the wall (and with Susan’s permission), I thought I’d share the highlights of our conversation here with you.

“Susan, I just finished Bad, Bad, Seymore Brown. I loved it. And I now have singer Jim Croce’s earworm in my head.”

“Me, too.” She laughed.

“I love your descriptions in your prose. Right on the mark. Not too much, not too little.”

“Description can be hard.”

“But you do it so well. Any tips?”

“Well, I’ll tell you what I do. Two things. First, I see it in my head. I’m looking at the draft, and I say, ‘Hey, you know, there’s nothing here.’”

I laugh. “So, what do you do?”

“Well in Bad, Bad, Seymore Brown, the character with the problem is a college professor, a really nice woman, who teaches film, and her area of specialization is big Hollywood Studio films. When she was five, her parents were murdered. It was an arson murder, and she was lucky enough to jump out of the window of the house and save herself. So, Corie, who’s my detective, a former FBI agent, is called on, but not through herself, but through her dad, who’s a retired NYPD detective. He was a detective twenty years earlier, interviewing this little girl, April is her name, and they kept up a kind of birthday-card-Christmas-card relationship.”

“And the plot is great.”

“Thanks, but in terms of description, there was nothing there. But there were so many things to work with. So, after I get that structure, I see it in my head, and I begin to type it in.”

“The description?”

“Plot, then description.”

“And you mentioned another thing you do?”

“Research. And you don’t always have to physically go somewhere to do it. I had a great time with this novel. For example, it was during COVID, and nobody was holding a gun to my head and saying ‘Write’ so I had the leisure time to look at real estate in New Brunswick online, and I found the house with pictures that I knew April should live in, and that’s simply it. And I used that house because now April is being threatened, someone is trying to kill her twenty years after her parent’s death. Though the local cops are convinced it had nothing to do with her parents’ murder, but that’s why Corie’s dad and Corie get pulled into it.”

“So basically, when you do description, you get the structure, the bones of your plot, and then you go back and both imagine and research, at your leisure, the details that really set your writing off. What’s the hardest thing for you as a writer?”

“You know, I think there are all sorts of things that are hard for writers. For me, it’s plot. I’ll spend much more time on plot, you know, working it out, both from the detective’s point-of-view and the killer’s point-of-view, just so it seems whole, and it seems that what I write could have happened. For me, I don’t want somebody clapping their palm to their forehead and saying, ‘Oh, please!’ So that’s the hard thing for me.”

“You’ve talked with me about how focused you get when you’re writing.”

“Oh, yes. When you’re writing, you’re really concentrating. We were having work done on the house once and they were trying to do something in the basement, I forget what it was. But there was this jackhammer going, and I was upstairs working. It was when my kids were really young and, you know, I had only a limited amount of time to write every day, and so I was writing and I didn’t even hear the jackhammer until, I don’t know, the dog put her nose or snout on my knee and I stopped writing for a moment and said, ‘What is that?’ and then I heard it.”

“But it took your dog to bring you out of your zone. Not the jackhammer.”

“You get really involved.”

“Sort of transcending into another universe.”

“The story pulls you in. The weird thing is that I have ADD, ADHD, whatever they call it. I know that now, but I didn’t know that then, back when the jackhammer was in the basement. In fact, I didn’t know there was a name for it. I just thought, ‘This is how I am.’ You know, I go from one thing to the next. But people with ADHD can’t use that as an excuse not to write because you hyper-focus.”

“That’s interesting.”

“You don’t hear the jackhammers.”

“So things just flow.”

“Well, it’s always better in your head than on the page,” she says, “as far as writing goes.”

“I’d love to see your stories in your head, then, because your writing is great. As far as plotting, the book moves along at a fast clip. I noticed, distinctly, that your writing style is high with active verbs. Is that intentional or is that something that just comes naturally from you?”

“I think for me it just happens. It’s part of the plotting.”

“Well, it certainly moves the story forward.”

“Yes, I can see it would. But, no, I don’t think ‘let me think of an active verb’. You know,” she laughs, “I don’t think it ever occurred to me to even think of an active verb.”

“That’s funny. We’re all made so differently. I find it fascinating that, after all you’ve published, your Corie Geller novel is going to be part of the first series you’ve ever written. Everything else has been standalones.”

“Yes. I’m already writing the next book. Look, for forty-five years, I did mysteries. I did sagas. I did espionage novels. I did, you know, just regular books about people’s lives. But I never wrote a series because I was afraid I after writing one successful mystery, that I would be stuck, and I’d be writing, you know, my character and compromising positions with, Judith Singer goes Hawaiian in the 25th sequel. I didn’t want that. I wanted to try things out. So now that I’ve long been in my career this long, I thought I would really like to do a series because I want a family, another family.”

“Another family?”

“I mean, I have a great family. I have a husband who’s still practicing law. I have children, I have grandchildren, but I’m ready for another family.”

“And this series is going to be it?”

“It’s not just a one-book deal. I wanted more. So, I made Corie as rich and as complicated and as believable as she could be. It’s one thing to have a housewife detective. It’s another to have someone who lives in the suburbs, but who’s a pro. And she’s helped by her father, who was in the NYPD, who has a different kind of experience.”

“And that gives you a lot to work with. And, in an interesting way, at this stage of your life, another family to explore and live with.” I look at the clock. “Well, I guess we both need to get back to work.”

“This has been great. When you work alone all day, it’s nice to be able to just mouth off to someone.”

We both laughed and we hung up. It was a break in the day. But a good break. I think Susan fed her ADHD a bit with the distraction, but for me, I learned a few things in just the passing conversation. Writers are wonderful. If you haven’t done it today, don’t text, don’t email, but pick up the phone and call a writer friend you know. I hung up the phone with Susan, invigorated, ready to get back to work. As she said, it’s nice to be able to just mouth off to someone. As I would say, it’s nice to talk to someone and remember that, as writers, we are not alone, and we all have so much to learn.

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Clay Stafford is a bestselling writer and filmmaker and founder of Killer Nashville International Writers’ Conference. https://claystafford.com/

Susan Isaacs is the author of fourteen novels, including Bad, Bad Seymour Brown, Takes One to Know One, As Husbands Go, Long Time No See, Any Place I Hang My Hat, and Compromising Positions. A recipient of the Writers for Writers Award and the John Steinbeck Award, Isaacs is a former chairman of the board of Poets & Writers, and a past president of Mystery Writers of America. Her fiction has been translated into thirty languages. She lives on Long Island with her husband. https://www.susanisaacs.com/

Author Amulya Malladi on “Research: Doing It, Loving It, Using It, and Leaving It Out”

Amulya Malladi interviewed by Clay Stafford

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“I’m talking today with international bestselling author Amulya Malladi about her latest book A Death in Denmark. What I think is fascinating is your sense of endurance. This book—research and writing—took you ten years to write.”

She laughs. “You know, it was COVID. We all didn’t have anything better to do. I was working for a Life Sciences Company, a diagnostic company, so I was very busy. But you know, outside of reading papers about COVID, this was the outlet. And so that’s sort of how long it took to get the book done. I had the idea for a long time. I needed a pandemic to convince me that I could write a mystery.”

“Which is interesting because you’d never written a mystery before. Having never worked in that genre, I’m sure there was a learning curve there for you.”

“A lot of research.”

“You love reading mysteries, so you already had a background in the structure of that, but what you’ve written in A Death in Denmark is a highly focused historical work. It’s the attention and knowledge of detail that really made the book jump for me. Unless you’re a history major with emphasis on the Holocaust and carrying all of that information around in your head, you’re going to have to find factual information somewhere. How did you do that?”

“Studies.”

“Studies?”

“You’ll need a lot of the studies that are available. Luckily, my husband’s doing a Ph.D. He has a student I.D., so I could download a lot of studies with it. Otherwise, I’d be paying for it. Also, I work in diagnostic companies. I read a lot of clinical studies. So these are all peer-reviewed papers that are based on historic research, and they are published, so that is a great source, a reference.”

“But what if you don’t have that access?”

“You can go to your library and get access to it as well. If you’re looking for that kind of historic research, this is the place to go.”

“Not the Internet? Or books, maybe?”

“Clinical studies and peer-reviewed papers, peer-reviewed clinical studies, they’re laborious.”

“And we’re talking, for this book, information directly related to the historical accuracy of the Holocaust and Denmark’s involvement in that history?”

“You have to read through a lot to get to it. And it’s not fiction. They’re just throwing the data out there. But it’s a good source, especially for writers because we need to know about two-hundred-percent to write five-percent.”

“The old Hemingway iceberg reference.”

“To feel comfortable writing that five, you need to know so much more. I could write actually a whole other book about everything that I learned at that time. And that is a good place to go. So I recommend going and doing, not just looking at, you know, Wikipedia, and all that good stuff, but actually going and looking at those papers.”

“Documents from that time period and documents covering that time period and the involvement of the various individuals and groups.”

“When you read a paper, you see like fifteen other sources for those papers, and then you can go into those sources and learn more.”

I laugh this time. “For me, research is like a series of rabbit holes that I find myself falling into. How do you know when to stop?”

“The way I was doing it is I research as I write, and I do it constantly. You know, simple things I’m writing, and I’m like, ‘Oh, he has to turn on this street. What street was that again? I can’t remember.’ I have Maps open constantly, and I know Copenhagen, the city, very well. But, you know, I’ll forget the street names. That sometimes takes work. I’m just writing the second book and I wanted Gabriel Præst, my main character and an ex-Copenhagen cop, to go into this café and it turned into a three-hour research session.”

“Okay. Sounds like a rabbit hole to me.”

“You’ve got to pull yourself out of that hole, because, literally, that was one paragraph, and I just spent three hours going into it. And now I know way too much about this café that I didn’t need to know about. Again, to write that five-percent, I needed to know two-hundred percent. I am curious. I like to know this. So suddenly, now I have that café on my list because we’re going to Copenhagen in a few weeks, and I’m like, ‘Oh, we need to go check that out.’”

“So you’re actually doing onsite research, as well?”

“Yes. I use it all. I think as you write you will see, ‘Okay, now I got all the information that I need.’

“And then you write. Research done?”

“No. I was editing and again I was like, ‘Is this really correct? Did I get this information correct? Let me go check again.’”

“Which is why, I guess, your writing rings so true.”

“I think it is healthy for writers to do that, especially if you’re going to write historical fiction or any kind of fiction that requires research. Here’s the important thing. I think with research, you have to kind of find the source always. You know? It’s tempting to just end up in Wikipedia because it’s easy. You get there. But you know, Wikipedia has done a pretty decent job of asking for sources, and I always go into the source. You know you can keep going in and find the truth. I read Exodus while I lived in India. One million years ago, I was a teenager, and I don’t know if you’ve read Leon Uris’s Exodus, but there’s this famous story in that book about the Danish King. When the Germans came, they said, ‘Oh, they’re going to ask the Jews to wear the Star of David,’ and the story goes, based on Exodus, that the king rode the streets with the Star of David. I thought that was an amazing story. That was my first introduction to Denmark, like hundreds of years before I met my husband, and that story stayed with me. And then I find out it’s not a true story. You know? You know, Marie Antoinette never said ‘Let them eat cake.’ And so it was like, ‘Oh.’”

“Washington did not chop down the cherry tree.”

“No, and the apple didn’t fall. I mean, it’s simple things we do that with, right? With Casablanca, it’s like you said, you know, ‘Play it again, Sam.’ And she never said that. She said, ‘Play it.’ And you realize these become part of the story.”

“Secondary sources then, if I get what you’re saying, are suspect.”

“Research helps you figure out, ‘Okay, that never happened.’”

“When you say that you’re writing, and you’re incorporating the research into your writing sometimes you can’t, you’re not in a spot where the research goes into it. So, how do you organize your research that you’re not immediately using?”

“I don’t do that. I’m sure there are people who do that well. I’m sure there are people who are more disciplined than I am. I’m barely able to block my life. I mean, it’s hard enough, so you know if I do some research, I know there are people who take notes. I have notes, but those are the basics. ‘Oh, this guy’s name is this, his wife is this, he’s this old, please don’t say he’s from this street, he’s living on this street…’ Some basics I’ll have, so I can go back and look. But a lot of the times I’m like, ‘What was this guy’s husband doing again?’ I have to go find it. I won’t read the notes in all honesty, even if I make them. So for me, it’s important to go in and look at that point.”

“And this is why you write and research at the same time.”

“And this is why maybe it’s not the best way to do the research. It takes longer, like I said, you spend three hours doing something that is not important, but hey, that was kind of fun for me. I was curious to remember about Dan Turéll’s books, because I hadn’t read them for a while.”

“Some writers don’t like research. You like research. And for historicals, there’s really no way around it, is there?”

“I take my time and I think I really like the research. I have fun doing it.”

“Does it hurt to leave some of the research out?”

“Oh, my God, yes. My editor said, ‘You know, Amulya, we need the World War II stuff more.’ I’m like, ‘Oh, really? Watch me.’ So I spend all this time and I basically wrote the book that my character, the dead politician, writes.”

“This is an integral part of the story, for those who haven’t read the book.”

“I wrote a large part of that book that she is supposed to have written and put it in this book. I put in footnotes.”

“Footnotes?”

“My editor calls me and she’s like, ‘I don’t think we can have footnotes and fiction.’ I’m like, ‘Really?’ And she goes, ‘You know, you can make a list of all of this and put it in the back of the book. We’ll be happy to do that. But you can’t have footnotes.’ I felt so bad taking it out because this was really good stuff. You know, these were important stories.”

“So it does hurt to leave these things out.”

“I did all kinds of research. I read the secret reports, the daily reports that the Germans wrote, because you can find pictures of that. I kind of went in and did all of that to kind of make this as authentic as possible, and then she said, ‘Could you please, like make it part of the book, and not as…’ She’s like ‘People are going to lose interest.’ So yeah, it does hurt. It really didn’t make me happy to do that.”

“You reference real companies, use real restaurants, use real clothing, use real drinks. You use real foods. Do you have some sort of legal counsel that has looked over this to make sure nobody is going to sue you for anything you write? Or how do you protect yourself in your research?”

“When I’m being not-so-nice about something, I am careful. I have not heard anything from legal. Maybe I should ask tomorrow. I think Robert B. Parker said this in an interview once: ‘If I’m going to say something bad about a restaurant, I make the name up.’”

“Circling back, you do onsite research, as well.”

“Oh, yeah. I’ve been to Berlin several times, so I know the streets of Berlin. I know this process. I know what they feel like. It’s easier to write about places you’ve been to, but the details you will forget. Even though I know Copenhagen very well, I still forget the details. ‘What is that place called again? What was that restaurant I used to go to?’ And then I have to go look in Maps, and find, ‘Ah, that’s what it’s called here. How do they spell this again?’ But I think, yes, from a research perspective, if you are wanting to set a whole set of books somewhere, and if you have a chance to go there, go. Unless you’re setting a book in Afghanistan, or you know, Iraq, then don’t go. Because I did set a book partly in Afghanistan and I remember I talked to a friend of mine. She’s a journalist for AP and she said, ‘Oh, you should come to Kabul.’ And I’m like, ‘No, I don’t think so, just tell me what you know so I can learn from that and write it.’ She’s like, ‘You’ll have a great time on it.’ And I said, ‘I will not have a great time. No, not doing that.’ But I think, yes…”

“When it comes to perceived safety, you’re like me, an armchair researcher. Right?”

“Give me a book. Give me a clinical study. Give me a peer-reviewed paper, I’ll be good.”

“What advice do you have for new writers?”

“Edit. Edit all the time. I’ve met writers, especially when they are new, they say things like, ‘Oh, my God! If I edit too much, it takes the essence away. I always say, ‘No, it just takes the garbage away.’ Edit. Edit, until you are so sick of that book. Because, trust me, when the book is finished and you read it, you’ll want to edit it again because you missed a few things. I tell everybody, ‘Edit, edit, edit. And don’t fall in love with anything you write while you’re writing it because you may have to delete it.’ You know, you may write one-hundred pages and realize, I went on the wrong track and now I have to go delete it.”

“And take out the footnotes.”

“Yeah, and take out the footnotes.”

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Clay Stafford is a bestselling writer, filmmaker, literary theorist, and founder of Killer Nashville International Writers’ Conference. https://claystafford.com/

Clay’s book links: https://linktr.ee/claystafford

Amulya Malladi is the bestselling author of eight novels. Her books have been translated into several languages. She won a screenwriting award for her work on Ø (Island), a Danish series that aired on Amazon Prime Global and Studio Canal+. https://www.amulyamalladi.com/

Amulya’s book link: https://linktr.ee/amulyamalladi

Author Chris Grabenstein on “Switching Genres and James Patterson’s Advice on How to Make a Million Dollars”

Chris Grabenstein interviewed by Clay Stafford

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Author Chris Grabenstein grew up outside Chattanooga, Tennessee. So did I. But we didn’t know each other until we met one year at Killer Nashville International Writers’ Conference. We quickly learned we had much in common, including a sense of twelve-year-old-boy humor. Chris was learning his craft and making his way writing for grown-ups when I met him then. Really funny stuff. It was the John Ceepak mystery series with such delightful titles as Whack a Mole, Tilt a Whirl, and Mind Scrambler. I liked him so much and he was such a personable guy, I brought him back several years later as a Guest of Honor at Killer Nashville and he had, not surprisingly, changed audiences on me. He was now a multiple award-winning #1 New York Times bestselling children’s author. We sat down together to talk about co-writing with James Patterson, his transition from writing for adults to middle-grade readers, daily word counts and revising schedule, what’s important for him, his advice for writers, and James Patterson’s advice on how to make a million dollars.

“Chris, you’ve got this great series going for adults, and suddenly you write for kids. What caused you to switch, or were you writing both at the same time?”

“It was actually a major switch. I have like twenty-four nieces and nephews, and at the time they were all under the age of eighteen, and they said, ‘Uncle Chris, can we read your books?’ No, no, there’s a few f-bombs being thrown around, there’s a lot of adult situations. There was an editor who was looking for ghost stories for middle grade readers, kids ages eight to twelve. The third book I wrote had gotten rejected by everybody. It was a ghost story. So my agent said, ‘Well, Chris wrote a ghost story, but it’s not for middle grade readers,’ and the editor said, ‘Well, if the story is any good we can turn it into one.’”

“That’s kind of a novel approach. And certainly serendipitous.”

“Yes. And so he read my third book, which was 110,000 words long, and said, ‘This would be a great book for middle-grade readers. You just have to get rid of the adult situations, the adult language, and cut it down to like fifty-thousand words.’”

“And that’s how you switched from adult to children’s books?”

“My agent said, ‘Do you want to do that?’”

“That’s like cutting sixty-thousand words out.”

“By the time I wrote that third book, I’d already spent a year working on it, so I knew I was going to have to spend another year on it. But my nieces and nephews, they really wanted to read something, so I said, ‘I’m going to do it.’”

“There’s certainly more to it than just cutting words.”

“I always recommend if you’re going to try a new category, get to know it a little bit, read a bunch of books. So I started reading a lot of books for eight-to-twelve-year-olds. I said, ‘Maybe I can do this’ and I put in a couple of fart jokes.”

“There’s got to be more than that.”

Chris laughs. “The kids have got to be in charge of the story. They’ve got to be the one solving whatever the mystery is. Carl Hiaasen wrote for that age group, Hoot, and there’s a great book called Holes by Lois Sachar. I read those, and they helped me get the sense of writing for children in that age group. And as I wrote, I was tapping back into that Mad Magazine twelve-year-old kid that I used to be, and I was having such a blast, too, and I said maybe I should be doing this.”

“So not only were you saving the manuscript, you were having fun.”

“I wrote it. We turned it into that editor who was looking for middle grade books, but his boss no longer was looking for ghost stories.”

“You’re kidding.”

“So it died once again. My wife and I don’t have any kids, but we borrowed two from our friends, Kath and Dave, who had kids who were like nine and ten, and they loved this book. They read the manuscript, you know the draft of it, and they were running around their church going, ‘We read the best book. We read the best book.’”

“Sounds like they were telling God.”

“It turns out a member of their congregation happens to be the head of the children’s department at Harper Collins, and she hears these two kids raving about some new book. My buddy Dave is a fire chief here in New York City, and he’s rather gregarious and not shy. In fact, he was one of the inspirations for Ceepac, the character of Ceepac. He said, ‘Oh, yeah, my buddy Chris wrote the best book. The kids love it more than anything they’ve ever read.’ And so the president of Harper Collins Children interviewed the two kids.”

“What?”

“Yes. She wanted to talk to me about it. My agent then called up one of his friends he knew at Random House who does children’s books and says, ‘You know, Harper Collins is interested in this thing my guy, Chris, wrote,’ and we got an offer from both houses, and Random House had a two-book offer.”

“And that’s how you started writing for kids.”

“That’s how I started writing for kids. Then, Harper Collins, that editor who we weren’t able to work with, liked it so much said, ‘Could you do something for me?’”

“You’re kidding.”

“That’s how my series, Riley Mack and the Other Troublemakers started was with her, and I did four ghost stories for Random House.”

“Ghost stories again. Full circle. So how did you get involved co-writing with James Patterson? You had previously worked in advertising with him. Was that how you had the connection?”

“Not exactly. I went down to teach at his son’s school. And if you’re writing for kids, you want to do a lot of school visits. It helps book sales and also helps you keep in touch with the kids who are going to be in your audience. And so the Palm Beach Day Academy, where James Patterson’s son was going to school, wanted me to come because they had heard that I used improvisational comedy, and their kids at the Palm Beach Day Academy were so success-oriented, they wanted them to loosen up a little bit. So they had me come in and do my improv show, and I think Jack Patterson went home and said to Jim—I call him Jim, because that’s what we called him in advertising—that guy Chris Grabenstein is pretty funny.”

“Interesting.”

“And they just happened to have their book fair the same night that I was there, so they invited me to come. James Patterson was the guest speaker. I sat down in the front row with his wife, Sue, who used to work at J. Walter Thompson, too. I think Jim remembered, ‘Oh, yeah, Chris was a pretty decent guy. He was pretty talented, and he was easy to work with’ because that’s Jim’s criteria.”

“Nice criteria. I use it in my own company. Makes the days go better.”

“It’s like life’s too short. Advertising was such a royal pain and publishing can sometimes be that. He just wanted co-authors who are good at what they did and were not prima donnas, and were not divas, and just did it for fun. We have a good time, and we’ll do the next one. So that’s how I got started writing books for James Patterson. He had me audition on the fifth book in one of his other series, and that went well, and then we did, I Funny, and we did six books in that. While we were working on I Funny the Treasure Hunters thing came up. We did nine books, and we’ve done three dozen books together.”

“How do you find the time? And when you say you wrote these books, we’re talking multiple drafts of each book, not just a first manuscript.”

“It’s that old advertising discipline. People get shocked when I tell them every commercial you saw of mine that made it to air, I probably wrote between one hundred and three hundred scripts that died. Either my social creative director, my creative director, my executive creative director, the marketing people, the account people, the salespeople; somebody killed it. It could have been the president of Miller Brewing Company. Somebody killed it, and you just get used to ‘All right. There’s another idea. There’s another idea,’ and you develop a discipline.”

“And a thick skin.”

“The Brits call it bum glue, where you sit down every day for a prescribed period of time, and you write, and I do that every day. I try to write two-thousand new words every day, and I start the day going over the two-thousand words I wrote the day before, basically to get back into the zone. Doing a little bit light editing on those helps me to say, ‘Okay, I remember where we are. Oh, and this was gonna happen next.’”

“It helps when you have a plan to sit down each day, certainly. I get that.”

“Someone wrote, ‘When you know what’s gonna happen next, that’s when you should stop writing for the day, you should just like, walk away,’ and for me it’s two-thousand words, and I usually start getting a little fatigued at that point.”

“But these are not necessarily words you’re going to keep. Because, as you said, you have great ideas and then not so great. But still, two-thousand words is a lot of words. Is that like the adamant goal? Two thousand every day before I stop?”

“Yes, if I’m in the groove. If I’m traveling, or I’ve got copy editing that needs to be taken care of, or lots of school visits, then I might do one-thousand.”

I laugh. “Showing yourself some grace.”

“Two-thousand words a day goal is when I’m drafting. When I finish my first draft, usually aiming for a page or word count that I will totally overshoot, I begin the real editing. I believe in the Stephen King credo: ‘Second draft equals first draft minus ten-percent.’ I always cut at least ten-percent. The manuscript I am working on now, it’ll be more like twenty-percent, because I really overwrote. I will spend a week or two cutting, editing, revising. Then I show the manuscript to my wife, my first reader. She gives me notes about anything that confused her or took her out of the story. I make more cuts and tweaks. Finally, I send it to my agent and editor. The editorial process will go on for at least two to three more revisions. If the editor sees major work to be done, that could go up to seven or eight back-and-forths, with major structural changes.”

“That’s a lot of drafts. Many beginning writers don’t realize how many drafts you sometimes have to go through.”

“Escape from Mr. Lemoncello’s Library went back and forth seven times and took over two years to complete after I had finished what I thought was my perfect first draft!”

“And that was also your first movie. Any advice you’d like to pass on to us writers?”

“One of the best books I ever read about writing was Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft where he writes about his story, and then in the middle part, he sort of blocks out how you can write, because I never thought I could write. You know, those first adult books for seventy-, eighty-, ninety-thousand words long was really different for me because at the same time I was writing those, I was writing commercials. Commercials are seventy words you’ve got if you talk wall-to-wall in a thirty-second commercial, which you never want to do. You’ve got seventy words to play with, but Stephen King really breaks it down nicely.”

“For the bigger book.”

“He does the analogy of building a house where, if you come every day and put one brick down, make sure it’s level, plumb and square. Come back the next day, put down the brick next to it, make sure it’s level, plumb and square. If you do that consistently for five days. You’ll have one row, you know. Then before long we have a wall. After that you’ll have four walls, and then you’ll figure out how to put a roof on.”

“As an author, what’s most important to you?”

“Two things, I think. Number one, that I’m entertaining my audience because I come from being a performer. I always entertain my audience. The second, that I get to keep doing it. I don’t care so much about the big advances and stuff. I even told one of my agents that, and they went, ‘What?’ I don’t care about that because I have confidence that if the book’s good and people like it, we’ll earn some money down the line. But I just want to be able to keep writing.”

“And that’s the real reason to write, isn’t it? Because you love it for the sake of writing.”

“I will share what James Patterson taught me. We used to have a training program in advertising. I don’t think anybody has the money to do that anymore. And he came in and gave this lecture once to everybody: creative people, account people, media people, research people, all the new hires. We’re all together, like twenty or thirty of us, and we had different lectures every week. So, James Patterson is going to come in now and talk to us about how to be creative. He comes in, and back in those days, he had a big, bushy beard, big old, kind of curly, bushy beard. He came up to the podium. We’re at Madison Avenue, big, you know, office building, just like Mad Men in the conference room, and he says, ‘All right. I’m going to teach you how to make a million dollars a year in advertising. The secret is…’ Before he could say another word, the door flies open, and this knucklehead comes running into the room with a banana cream pie and slams it in James Patterson’s face. And remember he’s got a beard, so he’s got all this cream, and crust, and stuff, and yellow goo just dripping down his beard, and we’re all going, ‘That guy is so fired. He is going to be so fired.’ Jim cleans himself up a little bit. He said, ‘All right. I just showed you how to make a million dollars a year in advertising. Throw a pie in their face, and once you have their attention, say something smart.’”

“Wow.”

“I never forgot that lesson. That’s why all my stories, all my commercials, start with some kind of boom, something that grabs the reader’s attention, and once you have their attention, they’ll stick around for the exposition, and to learn a little bit more. So many mysteries I read start out with, ‘I’m working in this small town, where I run the donut shop. It’s also a dry cleaner, and I’ve been doing it for all these years.’ Have somebody come in and, I don’t know, have a donut explode or something. Get my attention, and if you do that, I’ll stick around for the rest of your story.”

I smile. “And there’s nothing better for a kid than an exploding donut. I can see why the kids love you.”

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Clay Stafford is a bestselling writer, filmmaker, literary theorist, and founder of Killer Nashville International Writers’ Conference. https://claystafford.com/

Clay’s book links:
https://www.amazon.com/Killer-Nashville-Noir-Clay-Stafford/dp/1626818789/ref=sr_1_1?tag=americanbla03-20

Chris Grabenstein is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Mr. Lemoncello, Wonderland, Haunted Mystery, Smartest Kid, and Dog Squad series. He has also co-authored three dozen fast-paced and funny page turners with James Patterson. https://chrisgrabenstein.com/

Chris’s book link:
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/588883/the-smartest-kid-in-the-universe-by-chris-grabenstein/

Killer Nashville Interview with David Baldacci

Clay Stafford Talks with #1 Global Bestselling Author David Baldacci on Developing Characters

I recently had the opportunity to spend some time with David Baldacci, #1 bestselling crime and thriller novelist. We talked about his new novel, Simply Lies, and then other aspects of writing. Baldacci has had major success in writing both series and standalone novels and he shared with me his insight about the key to both these types of storytelling: the characters. Simple enough, but it opened up questions for me. “I get characters must hold a readers’ attention throughout the plot of a novel and carry one book in a series to the next, but how does a writer cultivate a character to be able to do this? When we chatted earlier, you seemed to imply that the process was more spontaneous.”

Baldacci shrugs slightly. “I really am much like, let’s see how it goes… Let me just wake this person up at the start of the day and walk them through what I want him to do. Let’s see what he does. Let’s see how this stuff ticks. It’s like you’ve got this blob of clay. You spend a little time with it and then you start chipping some stuff off here. Let’s see how the world that I’ve created for him and I’m putting him or her through is shaping him or her. And then we’ll figure out what sort of personality flaws and interesting personality traits this person might have. It’s always important to put the characters into the world that they’re going to be in for 400 plus pages and see how it works out.”

“So you just let the writing process mold the character itself naturally. But what does that mean in terms of planning?”

“Early on, I did the personality sketches and chapter outlines, but I just realized that none of it really was working for me. I don’t sit down and do character personalities with seventy-seven different ideas of what this character should be because it’s overkill and you’re never going to remember it all. You’re going to keep referring back to this checklist of stuff and you’ll realize that the majority of it you don’t even need or want in this person.”

“So is it more efficient to ditch the outlines and charts?”

“You’re going to get a better feel for this character about how they actually should come across to the reader and what you think they’re going to need in order to get through this novel in a plausible way.”

“Do you have other tactics to build and enhance characters?”

“If I have one main character like Amos Decker or Will Robie, I give them a lot of baggage in their own personal background that I can then exploit later in future books. So if you were to start a book and you really want it to be a series, you have to sort of build up that stuff in that first novel. It can be through backstories of one character or multiple characters that you’re going to exploit in future books. Or it could be something about a physical characteristic, an intellectual characteristic, or the people that the main character will meet on an ongoing basis because of the work that they do, and they can be exploited in the future books and build it in.”

“I’d think a perfect example of this is your character of Amos Decker, who had a blow to the head in a football incident, which caused hyperthymesia, perfect recall, and synesthesia.”

“It changed the way his brain operates so he has a lot of personal demons in every book. What I try to do with Decker is show his brain constantly transforming itself because of the brain trauma so every book he has to deal with something new happening in his own mind and his own personality, which continues to change on him. You can imagine how difficult and frustrating that could be. Plus, I have new elements about how his mind works to come in every novel and I have a lot of personal baggage.”

“So practically speaking, how do you pull all this together, if I were going to sit down and write something right now…”

“Do this judiciously. You don’t want to blow everything up in the first novel. You need to turn the tap on and turn it off. Be thinking about those things and lay Easter eggs throughout a series of books, and they’ll only be resolved in future books. Plant some things and foreshadow some things in earlier books that you can take advantage of in later books.”

“So for you, planning involves more strategic backstories and personality traits than charts, outlines, and lists.”

“You don’t have to do it one way. And what works for someone else may not work for you. During the course of your career, your process actually may change a little bit. You may become more outline oriented or less outline oriented further along you go because there’s no perfect way to do this. You just sort of jump in. You have a little bit of structure about the things you want to accomplish, things you want to write out, things that you might see coming up ahead and then go from there.”

“You really have a fondness for your characters. It comes through.”

“When you create a character, it’s almost like adopting someone into your family. You’re going to spend a lot of time with that person on a very personal basis and you need to make sure that it’s a sort of person you want to hang out with for a while. You have to feel passion and interest about what they’re going to be doing in the novel. The character is the only opportunity you get to connect with the reader on a human level. The plot does not do that for you. The characters do. So, if you write a character who never makes a mistake, you’re going to lose the reader at page 10. If you have a character who gets knocked down and then gets back up and tries to keep going, you’re going to have the readers in your pocket.”

I smile. “Which you certainly do.”

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Clay Stafford is a bestselling writer and filmmaker and founder of Killer Nashville International Writers’ Conference. https://claystafford.com/

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David Baldacci is a global #1 bestselling author with 150 million copies sold worldwide; his newest thriller, SIMPLY LIES, was published April 18, 2023. https://www.davidbaldacci.com/

Killer Nashville Interview with Hank Phillippi Ryan

2022 Guest of Honor

KN: First, we loved Her Perfect Life. What sparked the idea? 

HPR: Oh, thank you! That is the best thing an author can ever hear.

Here’s the beginning of the idea: When I worked in Atlanta, in the 80s, I was anchoring the weekend news. I came home after the late news one night, midnight or even later, and my street was clogged with police cars. As I got closer, I saw that they were focused on my house! And turned out, someone had broken in! The police had already caught the burglar, and told me he confessed to them that he had chosen my house to break into because he knew I was live on television. Isn’t that chilling?

Because he knew where I was, he knew where I wasn’t. That understanding of the deep vulnerability of being a television reporter began to haunt me. What if I had something hidden in my house that I didn’t want anyone to see? What if he had found it? What if he threatened to make it public? And that was the beginning of the story.

And led to the irony in the title.

But, as you can see when you read the book, that’s the theme, but that break-in is not part of the plot.

Her Perfect Life turned out to be about sisters, betrayal, guilt, fame, and revenge. Everyone knows television reporter Lily Atwood, and that may be her biggest problem. She has fame, fortune, and beloved daughter; and her devoted fans have even given her a hashtag: #PerfectLily. But Lily also has one life-changing dark secret—and if anyone finds out, she fears her career and happiness are over. Problem is: how do you keep a secret when you’re always in the spotlight? And when an anonymous source begins to tell Lily secrets about Lily’s own life—she learns the spotlight may be the most dangerous place of all. 

And so incredibly thrilled that it got a starred review from Kirkus, and also a star from Publishers Weekly, which called it “A superlative thriller.” Whew.

KN: Lily sounds a bit like you in some ways, at least. She’s an Emmy winning TV reporter in Boston. Is anything based on real-life experience?

HPR: So funny! Well, yes and no. They say write what you know—and also to write what you fear. I’ve been an investigative television reporter for more than 40 years now, yikes. And I’m still on the air in Boston, of course. But many years ago, when I was just starting as a television reporter, I went to the laundromat. (Very exciting, right? Glamorous.) And a woman came up to me and said ‘Oh, you’re Hank from television!” And she proceeded to tell me about a story she wanted me to do. I listened politely, but I went home and called my mother and whined. “Can you believe it?” I asked. “Someone came up to me in the laundromat! “ And my mother paused, and then she said: “You chose the life in the spotlight. Welcome to the spotlight. And I never want to hear you complain again.” She was completely right, of course, and that has truly stuck with me.

But my family did not choose that spotlight. What if that makes them vulnerable too? So much for the perfect life.

And although in Her Perfect Life Lily has many fans, she also has a lot of enemies. Think about it: every one of those Emmy’s she’s won—just like the ones I’ve won—means there is someone whose secret she’s told. Someone who’d rather she’d have stayed quiet. Every one of those Emmys represents a new enemy, right? Scary.

It’s also a huge responsibility. You can never be wrong! Never make a mistake, never use the wrong word, or call someone the wrong name, or miscalculate, and never be one second late. And you have to do the whole thing with perfect hair and make-up and a hundred thousand people watching. All part of the job.

Personally? I’ve been stalked, followed, yelled at, threatened, had people come to my house, and harass me on the phone. As Lily learns, being in the spotlight can bring antipathy, too.

KN: You’ve just finished your 14th manuscript. How do you tend to come up with story ideas? Do you worry you’ll run out?

HPR: Ha! That’s the toughest of all questions. How do I come up with ideas? I have no idea. I truly don’t. Sometimes it’s one tiny nugget from an investigation I’m working on—my novels are not my news stories made into fiction—but maybe a tiny fact, or a possibility, or a personality, or something that didn’t turn out to be true in real life but would be fascinating in fiction. Maybe it’s simply a passing random moment of “what if?”  I think reporters and storytellers have a sort of ‘blink’ reflex, where we hear something, and in an instant, can say—oh, that’s a great story! So, I have to admit, much of my life is spent remembering to be open to those moments of inspiration.

Am I worried that I will run out of ideas? Daily. And never. I am terrified, I’ll confess, before the beginning of every book that I’ll never have another good idea. I hear about authors who have stashes of them. But I tell myself—I don’t need a stash. I just need one at a time.

KN: The pacing and plot twists are fantastic—how do you write/plan the plot?

HPR: It’s a writerly answer, but my favorite part of writing Her Perfect Life was when I finally figured out how it would all end. And that came very late in the book! I don’t use an outline, so I’m writing along, happily, and the story is emerging --if I am lucky--but there is some point in the book where you have to find the answer! It’s like—setting up a mystery that then I have to solve.

And it was very difficult this time. I walked around and walked around and got to the point where I thought – I can’t do this. I have no idea. And then, at some point, it just appeared to me. And when I figured out the end, I stood up and applauded. You have to picture this, because I was by myself. But I stood up and applauded.

KN: Tell us about yourself. Did you always love mysteries growing up?

HPR: I grew up in really rural Indiana, so rural that you couldn’t see another house from my house. My sister and I used to ride our ponies to the library to get books, and we read up in the hayloft of the barn behind our house. That’s where I fell in love with Nancy Drew, and Sherlock Holmes, and Agatha Christie. (So funny that later in life I won awards named after the fabulous Agatha!)

I think my career as an investigative reporter is a result of my curiosity, and my love of storytelling, and my—if I can say so—desire to stand up for the little guy and change the world. So I was a reporter for more than thirty years before I started writing fiction.

Still, though I always thought about being a writer, even as a little girl, I decided, back then, it might be more fun to be Sherlock Holmes than to write about Sherlock. So being an investigative reporter and a crime fiction author—I got a little of each.

But both those careers are about storytelling, right? And suspense, and secrets. And I do think being a reporter taught me even more about storytelling—so it all works.

I live just outside of Boston now, with my darling husband, in a big Victorian with gardens and huge trees and lots of green.

KN: What are you currently reading? Some best mysteries you've read lately?

HPR: Oh, what a wonderful question! A Line to Kill by Anthony Horowitz—he is the cleverest person ever. All Her Little Secrets—a terrific psychological legal thriller by debut author Wanda Morris. Hannah Morrissey’s debut, Hello Transcriber. And oh, Vera Kurian’s We Were Never Here. Another terrific (and diabolical) debut. One more? Another debut: Amanda Jayatissa’s My Sweet Girl. (Read with the lights on.) And if you ask me two weeks from now, there’ll be more.

KN: Can you tell us about your next book? 

HPR: Ah, well, sure. The fabulous news is that I just sent my first draft to my editor in New York. And it’s always a huge relief to get that crazy first draft on paper and make my deadline. So soon it will be time to edit, and that’s very exciting.

It’s a thriller—and I would say: “Two smart women face off in a high stakes psychological cat-and-mouse game to prove their truth about who is behind a devastating financial scam—but which woman is the cat, and which is the mouse? Money changes everything—that’s what friends are for.”

What’s the title, you ask? It was originally called Her New Best Friend. But that may change. And I’ll let you know! But crossing fingers this will be my best yet.

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Hank Phillippi Ryan is the USA Today bestselling author of 13 psychological thrillers, winning the most prestigious awards in the genre: five Agathas, four Anthonys, and the coveted Mary Higgins Clark Award. She is also on-air investigative reporter for Boston's WHDH-TV, with 37 EMMYs and dozens more journalism honors. Book critics call her “a master of suspense,” “a superb and gifted storyteller”; she’s the only author to have won the Agatha in four categories: Best First, Best Novel, Best Short Story, and Best Non-Fiction. Hank’s 2020 novel is The First to Lie, nominated for both the prestigious Anthony Award for Best Novel and Mary Higgins Clark Award. Her newest book is Her Perfect Life, a chilling psychological standalone about fame, family, and revenge which received starred reviews from Kirkus and Publishers Weekly, which called it "A superlative thriller,” and Mystery Scene called it “A powerhouse of a thriller.” B.A. Paris says, “Shocking, suspenseful… kept me guessing until the end.” and Julie Clark says, “You will read this in one sitting!”

Lee Child Interview by Bryan E. Robinson, Ph.D

Lee Child Interview

by Bryan E. Robinson, Ph.D

As a writer, you probably recognize Lee Child by name unless you've been living under a rock. But you will certainly recognize his billion-dollar brand: Jack Reacher, portrayed by Tom Cruise on the big screen. Child is the author of 24 New York Times bestselling Jack Reacher thrillers with 14 having reached the #1 position and the #1 bestselling complete Jack Reacher story collection, No Middle Name.

All his novels have been optioned for major motion pictures—including Jack Reacher (based on One Shot) and Jack Reacher: Never Go Back. Child’s latest novel is Blue Moon. Foreign rights for the Reacher series have sold in 49 languages and 101 territories. With more than 100 million books sold, the series has commanded over a billion dollars in global sales. In addition to books and movies, there is a Jack Reacher custom coffee blend, songs by Child and Naked Blue from Reacher’s perspective on CD and digital download and now a soon-to-be television series on Amazon. A native of England and a former television director, Lee Child lives in New York City.

I sat down with him to talk about how he balances his billion-dollar business with his personal life and his own self-care. We talked about mindful productivity, wellness and how he describes his “workplace.”

Bryan Robinson: Great to talk to you, Lee. I wanted to begin by asking how you would describe your workplace.

Lee Child: The physical locale doesn’t matter that much. As a writer, your workplace is inside your head in your imagination. You need a certain amount of resources such as a desk, keyboard, Internet and reference books. Inevitably you end up with an office somewhere, and I have one in every one of our houses. That’s where I work.

Robinson: Is there any particular place you prefer to write either inside or outside?

Child: At a desk inside. Although there’s the usual thing with writers when you go for a walk or take a shower, you get the ideas you need. It’s quite a skill in tricking your mind into relaxing and therefore giving you what you need.

Robinson: So how does Lee Child relax?

Child: Mostly reading or music. And TV third. I rarely get too far down the list because normally I’m either reading or listening to music.

Robinson: You’ve done some music with Naked Blue from Baltimore.

Child: Yeah, we have a CD out. It was a weird coincidence. If you put it in a book, nobody would believe it. I was independently a fan of theirs, they were a fan of mine and we found each other out about 15 years ago. I wrote the lyrics, and they wrote the music.

Robinson: Do you sing or play an instrument on the CD?

Child: I don’t. I probably could have, but I felt like it was more respectful to let the professionals do it.

Robinson: I understand that you have a coffee brand.

Child: Yeah, we do. Reacher’s famous for liking his coffee, and that was about the only thing we could merchandise for a guy who owns nothing. We were approached by a coffee roaster, and we did a deal. Jack Reacher coffee is for sale worldwide online.

Robinson: So you got the coffee, the books, the movies, the band and now Jack Reacher will be a TV series on Amazon.

Child: Yes. We switched away from the feature film world to streaming television. We plan to reboot it with Amazon starting pretty soon I hope.

Robinson: Do you know who will play Jack Reacher yet?

Child: We don’t. That’s the next big decision, and obviously it will be a crucial decision in light of the movies. The casting was never thoroughly approved of among the readers in the feature films, so we’re going to be very careful this time.

Robinson: With all the irons in the fire, what would you say are your biggest pressures?

Child: Deadlines always. Not so much the books because it’s the primary function. I’ve never run into too much stress with that, but it’s everything else. It’s the promotion, endless interviews reading books for blurbs. Everyday has 10 things that have to be done. I’m probably a bad subject for this article because I don’t do anything to mitigate pressure. I don’t look after myself in any way. Thinking about it deeply from my point of view, it is a kind of toxic masculinity. To admit weakness or anything like that. It’s unthinkable. I grew up with the catch phrase which was, “I’m not afraid of stress; stress is afraid of me.” It’s not very mindful or certainly any part of this modern wellness thing. I’m aware deep down I’m reacting against my own interests. But it’s part of being a man of my age. You can never admit anything like that.

Robinson: Do you think that works for you? In a way, it sounds like that is a form of resilience because you consciously have that mindset.

Child: Yeah, I very much do. I imagine other people might disagree. It’s both selfish and aggressive in that I won’t be beaten, certainly not by something like stress or overwork.

Robinson: So you do have a mindful approach to this. You have an intentionality about it. Do you feel like your life is pretty balanced?

Child: I find that to be almost a circular question. Part of being masculine in my generation is you just knew that you’d go to college and work really hard the rest of your life. So to what extent is work different from life? In a lot of ways life is work. Therefore, the balance thing is almost an empty question. What else am I supposed to be doing other than work? So in a lot of ways the balance thing is a non-question. You’re going to work so you just get on with it. The idea that you have these other activities that you should be balancing doesn’t really come into it.

Robinson: A lot of people are talking about work/life integration instead of work/life balance. Work is where some people have their significant relationships, friends and social connections. Does that resonate?

Child: Yeah it does. Looking back, I would say you generate almost all your friends and your ongoing relationships through the job. I don’t have any friends who are not from those worlds.

Robinson: You’ve written so many books. Do you still love writing as much as you used to?

Child: That’s part of the fascination of it for me. On the one hand, it’s an absolute joy and pleasure. When you’re making up a story and it’s going well–which it is most of the time–and it’s sometimes unbelievable that you get paid for that. On the other hand, there is the fact that it’s a job and career. At a certain level if you get as far as I’ve been lucky enough to do, you’ve got a lot of people depending on it: publishers, the book trade, agents and lawyers. So it’s a very real career–a real job with multiple people planning their bottom line that year. You got to be 100% aware of that and 100% blind to it so that the joy and fun continue. You don’t want to be sitting there writing aware of the stakes. I think that’s the main trick to me.

Robinson: Of all the contributions you’ve made, what are you most proud of?

Child: I’d have to go to family for that. My daughter, I think, has brought me the most happiness. I’ll be leaving behind a number of books that will quickly go out of print and be forgotten. But I’m also leaving a human being who will endure and carry forward her values into the future which is the thing I’m most proud of.

Robinson: Is there any wisdom you want to share, based on your experience, with mystery writers trying to make it?

Child: That’s a tough one. I’ve been successful in one narrow field, but I think overall if it’s a question of what would I tell my younger self, I think I would say, “Trust your gut a little bit more than I did.” I can pick out a couple of times when I should have done something differently, but because of conventional pressures or advice I didn’t. None of them were particularly fatal or disruptive, but I can see afterward I should have trusted my gut. You know we live in a data-automated age where everything is researched to the nth degree, but there’s still plenty of room for those gut decisions which can be superior to all that. Data is great and research is great but at some point you must make a decision on it. Your subconscious decisions betray an analysis of that information that is made more sophisticated than the conscious mind.

Robinson: Is there anything else you would like to share with the members of Killer Nashville?

Child: Sometimes I wonder where all this wellness stuff came from. I think it is possibly explained that people of our age are going through issues with their elderly parents. You see these decrepit old people and think, “Oh, my God. I don’t want to get like that.” And that spurns this wellness mania amongst the second generation. they’re trying to avoid that fate. But my approach has always been different. I don’t want to get that old in the first place. I’d rather burn out and have fun at a younger age. My attitude to wellness is to avoid it rather than to indulge it.

Robinson: Well, that’s a refreshing approach. You’re saying there are different ways to live fully.

Child: Yes, exactly. My internal motto has always been, “I’ll have more fun in 60 years than you’ll have in 90,” and that’s how I’ve lived. Now I’m over 60 and living on borrowed time.

Robinson: When you’re on vacation, do you work or do you take time off?

Child: I have a writing season where I write every day until the book is done. That’s usually six or seven months of the year. Vacation comes after that, and I never, ever work on vacation. I also never work on a day when I’ve got something else to do because I have a mental block where if I know I’ve got to finish at a particular time, the day is useless because I’m always feeling it’s not worth getting into that now because I’m going to have to stop. It handicaps me. I’m not one of these guys that works on a plane or in the airport. I need to have a completely dedicated day in the office to get anything done of quality.

Robinson: It sounds like you’ve got good boundaries between work and play. When you’re on vacation, you take that time to relax and have fun. One last question. Who are some of your favorite writers?

Child: Oh, too many to mention. All my peers and contemporaries. I like to catch up with what they’re thinking and doing and also a completely random selection. When I was a kid, of course there was no Internet or structure for recommendations, none of these algorithm that if you like this you’ll like that. Every discovery was to some extent random. And I try to replicate that whenever possible. For instance, when I do go on vacation, I forget that I’m in the business and try to look at everything just as a normal consumer, so I will choose books randomly based on how they look, how they feel just to get the filter out of my bubble.

Robinson: I appreciate your taking the time to talk with me, Lee.

Child: It’s a real pleasure.

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Bryan E. Robinson is a licensed psychotherapist and author of two novels and 40 nonfiction books. He applies his experiences to crafting insightful nonfiction self-help books and psychological thrillers. His multi-award winning southern noir murder mystery, Limestone Gumption, won the New Apple Book Medal for best psychological suspense, the Silver IPPY Award for outstanding mystery of the year, the Bronze Foreword Review INDIEFAB Book Award for best mystery, and the 2015 USA Regional Excellence Book Award for best fiction in the Southeast.

His most recent release is Daily Writing Resilience: 365 Meditations and Inspirations for Writers (Llewellyn Worldwide, 2018). He has written for Psychology Today, First for Women, and Natural Health, and his blogs and columns for writers appear in Southern Writer’s Magazine. He is a consulting editor for The Big Thrill, the online magazine for International Thriller Writers. His long-selling book, Chained to the Desk, is now in its 3rd Edition (New York University Press, 1998, 2007, 2014). His books have been translated into thirteen languages, and he has appeared on every major television network: 20/20, Good Morning America, ABC’s World News Tonight, NBC Nightly News, NBC Universal, The CBS Early Show, CNBC’s The Big Idea. He hosted the PBS documentary, Overdoing It: How to Slow Down and Take Care of Yourself.

Killer Nashville Interview with August Norman

1. This is the second novel that follows heroine Caitlin Bergman. How soon into crafting the first book did you know her story would continue?

Even before Caitlin made her debut in Come and Get Me, I’d worked the character into a screenplay and another novel. As an investigative journalist, Caitlin gets to explore the issues I care about, whether that’s battling white supremacists, breaking up a cult, or dating in her 40s. The journalists I know work hard in dangerous places to bring the world basic facts, often for little pay and less respect. Like them, Caitlin is obsessed with getting the true story behind the legends, even at the expense of her own safety. 

2. What are some of the challenges you faced with writing the second book in a series? Were there things that came easier throughout the process?

One wonderful challenge I faced writing “Sins of the Mother” was honoring the expectations of the first book’s readers. With a debut, you get to say, “Here are my characters; this is what they do.” While plotting the second installment, readers from my publishing team to Goodreads followers wanted to know who would come back, how Caitlin would grow, and what horrible junk food she’d eat this time. I made sure to honor that relationship with the reader while taking Caitlin in a new direction.

3. Most of the book is set in Oregon. What drew you to choosing the setting in the Pacific Northwest?

To tell this story, I needed somewhere in America that you could hide a cult within miles of the broader society. I also wanted a setting where the locals feared the end of their traditions because of a liberal shift in ideals, and would be willing to fight to ensure their ways of life. Oregon’s lush forests, rocky coasts, inland plains, tribal lands, federal preserve, and wild-country-feel all bash heads daily with the new Bohemia tech sector billionaire playgrounds of Portland, Silicon Valley, and Seattle. Caitlin is searching for her past in a state that’s dealing with its own growing pains. In “Sins of the Mother,” the area’s small government “Don’t Tread On Me” mentality allows white supremacists to flourish in the same proximity as a reclusive cult. It’s only a matter of time before the two fight for their ideals, no matter the cost. 

4. You recently became a father, and the book definitely focuses on parental themes. Was that coincidental? And are there things you learned about parenthood from writing a book centering so much on that theme?

In the lead-up to my entrance into parentage, I did a lot of soul-searching on what I believe makes a good parent and what constitutes family. Whether related by blood, chosen through adoption, or selected from a pool of friends, I think the closest families are born through love and sacrifice, rather than biology. As unnatural as it may seem, sometimes the best thing a parent can do is realize they don’t have the skills to guide their children through life and leave them with someone more qualified. Having never met her birth mother, raised by a single adoptive father, and now childless in her early forties, Caitlin explores her own family’s tree, ultimately seeing another side of her perceived abandonment and the sacrifices and openness needed to truly love.

5. You have a background in screenwriting. How has that experience helped you with writing novels? Or has it made things more difficult?

Coming up through screenwriting, I hope I can claim a few skills that help me as a novelist. I gravitate toward short, cinematic scenes in my chapters, understanding that readers fill in much of the setting with their own shorthand. I also try to create characters that actors from well-known stars to five-lines-and-under would line up to audition for. Who wouldn’t want to play an aging cult leader, past his prime and looking for a way out? A devout, female lawyer that represents a cult in greater society but becomes her true self in the privacy of their woodland compound? A violent white supremacist hell-bent on saving his daughter from those people? Finally, many authors come to their work with a my-way-or-the-highway sensibility that can leave them stuck when their publishers ask for edits or complete page one rewrites of art that took them years to complete. Screenwriters, subject to deadlines and notes from all levels, have to be able to move fast and adapt, while keeping their original concepts intact. So far, these skills have all helped bring Caitlin Bergman to the page.

6. Your lead character, Caitlin, is definitely a strong female protagonist. Did you face any challenges writing a female character? 

As a straight white male, no one needs me to explain a damned thing about being a strong modern woman — and I keep that in mind with every sentence I type. Caitlin Bergman began as a minor character in an early screenplay but quickly became the lead I wanted to see challenge the injustices of the world. Rather than try to create a strong female protagonist, I wrote Caitlin as the ideal acting role for one of my best friends. Fierce but flawed, strong but not a superhero, sexual but not necessarily sexy, and smarter than anyone I knew, Caitlin is the combination of four women and one man from my life, and someone I would love to hang out with — if she’d deem me worthy. That said, I rely heavily on beta readers to make sure her words and actions ring true. Since my first title, “Come and Get Me,” touched upon the terrible trauma of sexual assault, I asked 20 readers to evaluate the work before it reached my agent’s hands. Of those 20 readers, 15 were women. Of those 15, at least 2 were in their 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, and 70s, as well as people of other ethnic backgrounds and sexual orientations. With justifiable historical and societal reasons, I’ll never satisfy everyone, but I do everything possible to make Caitlin and her friends behave like real people I know and love. 

7. No spoilers, but the book’s plot centers around the fictional Daughters of God cult. What research goes into trying to craft a cult from scratch?

Cults fascinate me — not just the religious ones but any occasion where a group of people choose to believe in something that can either be demonstrably proven false (cough, cough … flat earthers) or where the association requires self-injury, legal compromise or financial ruin. When building my own group, I wanted to concentrate on the people who would stick around, even after their prophesied end of the world had come and gone. To really get into their mentality, I first consulted my own personal therapist, then dove deep into articles, books and documentaries about these hidden societies, many of which found their own starts in my background of Southern California. Sadly, most of us are susceptible to this kind of belief, and far too many have lost their families, fortunes and lives under the leadership of demagogues. 

Killer Nashville Interview with J. A. Konrath

Killer Nashville recently had a chat with author J.A. Konrath regarding his prolific—and eclectic—writing career. A pioneer of the self-publishing model, Konrath has sold over 2 million books worldwide. His latest novel, The List, will be available in trade paperback May 2018. Konrath is a 2018 Killer Nashville Guest of Honor and will be participating in several conference sessions.

Take a moment and enjoy the wit and wisdom of J.A. Konrath.

Clay Stafford

Founder of Killer Nashville 

An Interview with J.A. Konrath
by Liz Gatterer

KN: I read on your website that you received over 500 rejection letters before getting published. How did you handle that and what advice do you have to new authors that are experiencing the same thing?

Joe: I drank. And I recommend that to all authors, new and old.

These days, I don’t advise authors to spend years chasing agents and publishers. A saner approach is to self-publish. As you build an audience, agents and publishers will no doubt find you.

Remember, the end goal is to find readers. Those are the people you need to be chasing. You can do that with good stories. Or with promises of cash. What reader would turn down piles of cash?

Are you giving out piles of cash at this conference? Is Deaver? Is that why he always has people around him?

KN: You are a most prolific and varied author, but you really resonate with whichever audience you are writing for. I read The Globs of Use-A-Lot3 to my six-year-old. He almost peed the bed laughing so hard! But, he got the message. He is now quite tyrannical about recycling in our house and he is most proud of his gaseous eruptions-thanks for that. You write in so many categories and genres–horror, mystery, comedy, instructional, … (blushing slightly) other genres, and even children’s books! How do you switch hats so easily?

Joe: Thanks for the kind words. I’m lucky to be interested in many genres and find all of them fun to write for. Hopefully the fun I’m having translates to the reader.

If you don’t find my books fun, that’s entirely my fault. I apologize. I’ll try harder next time. Would you like a pile of cash?

Besides the children’s picture book, I’ve also published other odd things. Like adult coloring books (The Ultimate Adult Coloring Book of Circles—which is 100 pages of circles), the Stop A Murder series (where you solve puzzles to catch a serial killer, unlocking clues, more story, and videos are you progress), eco-punk science fiction (Timecaster), and very funny erotica (Want It Bad).

And, of course, The List is now available as a mass market paperback, and I haven’t had any mass market paperbacks in years. It’s a technothriller with memorable characters and a lot of fun moments. Everyone should buy two copies; one for personal use, and one for their mother.

KN: You are a full-time writer and full-time professor with a full-time family. That’s a lot of time! How do you balance it all?

Joe: I’m actually five people. Which is expensive when buying shoes.

Were you the one who brought up drinking and money? Because that seems like a good idea. Maybe we can combine the two. Having a beer, while sitting on a pile of cash. Also, people dance for our amusement.

That would be the life, wouldn’t it?

What was the question again?

Oh, balance. I quit teaching, and my kids are grown, so now I just write. It’s a great job, and I highly recommend it.

KN: Throughout all of your stories, comedy plays a big part. Even the scary novels have their funny bits. But writing is serious work. How do you keep your sense of humor through all of it?

Joe: Reading is like giving your limbic system a work-out. It allows us to vicariously experience all emotions; fear, sorrow, joy, excitement, and laughter. Laughter is my favorite. So even when I write dark stuff, I try to find room for humor. It makes things more fun.

Hmm. I just re-read the above paragraph, and that wasn’t fun at all. Maybe I should add some emojis.

Laughter is my favorite. 😊 Even when I write dark stuff. ☹

Does that make it more fun? If not, you should have a beer.

KN: You are a big proponent of self-publishing and self-promotion. Aside from suggesting that they read your book A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing, is there one thing you think all new authors need to know?

Joe: Don’t write crap.

No reader wants to waste her time with bad books, so do her a favor and don’t write any.

It is difficult for writers to judge the merit of their own writing, even if they’ve written a few dozen novels. We all need some sort of objective feedback. Let your family, friends, peers, editors, and beta readers tell you what isn’t working because then you can fix it. Things are much harder to salvage if you publish something sub-par and get a bunch of well-deserved 1-star reviews. Don’t ever publish anything before it’s the very best you can make it.

You have one goal; make the reader happy. Don’t blow it.

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Many thanks to J.A. Konrath for so graciously taking time to answer our questions and to Vida Enstrand and Lauren Vassallo from Kensington Publishing for facilitating this interview.

An Interview with Novelist Roy Freirich

An Interview with Novelist Roy Freirich

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Imagining the End of Sleep

Have you ever worried about being unable to fall asleep?
I have, and the worry itself began to keep me awake, in a kind of meta, vicious cycle.  

But, why?  What’s so great about sleep?
It’s a question I used to ask, before I knew better. 

I’ve led multiple lives as a writer, and each one gave me the same answer. In recording studios mixing songs, or in my office writing sentences of novels and drafts of screenplays, the longer I worked, the better the results.  Until… diminishing returns set in, and song mixes were merely different and no better than one another, sentences were overbaked, script scenes over-complicated and finicky — all as the work hours intruded on normal sleep hours.  The jury is in: deprivation results in diminished capacity in any area of endeavor. In my case, the stakes are admittedly low—if I write a weak line of song lyric, or a cheesy scene in a movie, we all live to tell. But if I were a surgeon, an airline pilot, a truck driver, a crane operator….?

When did it really hit home for you?
I had a real wake-up about the need for sleep, when I “came to” making a left through a red light across three lanes of oncoming traffic.  Those horns were loud. And that was something called a micro-sleep, from missing just three hours of sleep the night before.

I looked into it, and found that neuroscientists, sleep specialists, and psychologists everywhere understand and agree: Deprivation results in measureable body chemistry changes, which in turn degrade our physical and mental capabilities, and eventually our long-term health.  The science is complex, but beyond dispute.

There will be impairments to motor control, cognition, memory, judgement, and emotional stability.

But aside from the proven science, what does sleep mean to you personally?
For me, sleep is profoundly about a truly vital, beautiful, longing — for escape.

From three things: effort, consequence, and the past.

Most of us, most of the time, are variously trying, are attempting, something.  There’s effort at work, of course, and the ever-present to-do list for home and family, and even effort during time-outs for ourselves, ironically, when we’re following the tricky plot of Westworld, or just trying to fill in that crossword blank, or just trying to relax.  Sleep, when we get there, is finally a true respite from trying, which is lovely to contemplate, and even lovelier to experience deeply and often.

The second escape, from consequence, isn’t so bad either. For the one third of our lives we sleep (or should be asleep), we’re not responsible for what happens in the other two thirds. It’s not our fault! How wonderful to say that and have it be true! 

But escape from consequence has an even deeper benefit for all of us.  It’s escape from the self-editing process. It’s been called RISE, or regression in the service of the ego. In semi-waking states and in dreams, our minds are free to experiment without fear of outcomes. I no longer worry about what will happen to the end of my story if I change this scene, or try this line of lyric instead of the one I’ve settled on.  We let the new idea come and don’t sweat the consequences. I don’t see it as “channeling” or anything quite as grand or special, but as just getting out of our own way.

The third escape, and the one that became a central conceit and drove the drama of the novel:  escape from the past.

Here’s how: in dreams, we defuse the emotions connected to unresolved experiences in our lives.  We’ve all had these moments, from any sort of unfulfilled wishes, desires for a “do-over,” from small regrets to more serious trauma from violence, catastrophe, death.  In dreams, we replay versions of these, variously disguised or symbolized, more safely.

How did that become a novel?
As a novelist (and habitual worrier), this brought me a question: What if we couldn’t dream, because we couldn’t sleep?  How many nights of without dreaming would it take to for the unconscious to find other ways to surface, even in our waking lives?

The novel and the research behind it suggest that after four or five nights we lose the emotional stability that dreams maintain, and our unique preoccupations, desires, misconceptions, and fears could spiral into obsessions, urges, delusions and paranoia. 

So it’s not just about slurred speech and stumbling and impaired judgment, but we’ll each go crazy in our own special way. 

How does that novel dramatize that idea?
In my speculative writer’s mind, I wondered, what if were nine or ten nights without sleep, multiplied by the population of an entire town with no way out? If it sounds dire, it is.

It all begins innocently enough, mid-summer at an idyllic tourist destination like Martha’s Vineyard or Fire Island, with locals complaining about tourists, and tourists complaining about locals, and the heat, the bugs, their mattresses, or the neighbors’ music or outdoor lights.  

After a few days, there’s a run on bug spray, eyemasks, earplugs, Ambien. The sleep-deprived Chief of Police loses control as tempers flare, bar fights erupt, domestic spats turn into abuse. A lonely teenage girl joins a dangerous contest going viral: who can Tweet every fifteen minutes for the most hours?  A few tourists die from (accidental?) sleeping pill overdose, missing persons are reported, boating accidents claim lives, drownings. The desperate, sleepless urgent care doctor starts prescribing a few sleeping pills apiece—but how many does the little mom ‘n’ pop pharmacy have?

Local authorities aren’t immune from impaired judgement and delusions, either, and they cut the island off out of fear the insomnia will spread to the mainland.

 Denied the outlet of dreams, the unconscious finds other, primal ways to surface. Violence flares as a mob decides who to blame, and rioting erupts. 

Will help arrive before the worst happens? 

Desperate for unconsciousness, suicide is finally the only respite for some, as others set the island ablaze, howling in fury and fear.

Anarchy, mayhem, chaos.

The short story?  Dreams keep us sane, and sanity keeps the peace.

Killer Nashville Interview with Dean Koontz

An Interview with Dean Koontz

Killer Nashville sits down with Dean Koontz to discuss his writing process.

KN: You have created some of the best bad-guys: Edgler Vess, Junior Kane, Ticktock, and, Lee Shacket - these are characters that still haunt me.  How do you do it?  How do you build the perfect bad-guy?

DK: Maybe I am one. If I were, I might not know, because really bad guys are superb at self-justification. I’m sure the Cookie Monster thinks of himself as the Cookie Connoisseur, and the Hamburglar believes he’s just redistributing sandwiches in the interest of culinary justice.

Anyway, ordinary criminals are of little interest to me. I’m more intrigued by sociopaths who lack any normal human feelings but convincingly imitate them. Sociopaths exist in every race, every age group, and every economic class; more are men, but there are women among them as well. Scary stories like INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS or John Carpenter’s version of THE THING, in which evil extraterrestrials hide among us in human form, put the hair up on the back of my neck, but human sociopaths are in fact real and therefore far scarier. They are an immensely destructive force in society because not all of them become serial killers like Ted Bundy or predatory Hollywood moguls; others rise to positions of authority in government, business, churches, the arts, everywhere. They’re just a slice of humanity, but they are often so charismatic that they can lead numerous others into darkness.

The difficult challenge is to imagine how such a person thinks. They’re narcissistic almost to the extent of being solipsists, creatures of unrestrained desires, driven not by greed or hatred, but by a lust for absolute power over others, by arrogance and contempt, and by the particular kind of envy that is covetousness. This kind of character is capable of anything other than humility.

At the same time, choosing evil is a choice of fools, because though evil can win in the short term, it never wins in the long term. And because I never want to glamorize evil, I use that foolishness to make my antagonists objects of dark amusement, though they never realize that they’re unintentionally funny.

I think the scariest elements of your stories are those that are rooted in truth.  The nanobots from the Jane Hawk series or the microscopic archæa from your upcoming release, Devoted, for example.  How do you develop truly terrifying purposes from the seemingly benign?

I read a lot of science and technology, not with an eye for story ideas, just out of a general interest in everything from quantum mechanics to molecular biology. My head is a stew pot——or maybe a witch’s cauldron——in which everything cooks 24/7 until some irresistible story idea rises to the top. Whereas a lot of people are charmed by new technology or exciting theories of new social structures, I tend to see the dark side almost at a glace. Elon Musk said, “Creating a neural [brain] lace is the thing that really matters for humanity to achieve symbiosis with machines.” When I heard that, I immediately thought, “Yeah, well if you do that and achieve symbiosis with computers, then your brain can be hacked, and you can be controlled.” And so the Jane Hawk series was born. It’s strange, really, that I see the dark possibilities so easily and quickly, considering that I’m the biggest optimist I know.

KN: For over 50 years you have published multiple books every year.  I thought I had read them all, but after checking your webpage I see I have some catching up to do! How do you sustain such a pace?

DK: How do I sustain that pace? A passion for storytelling, a profound love for the beauty and potential of the English language, and a need to eat well. Besides, having grown up in poverty and on the bottom rung of the social ladder in every way, I was somewhat surprised to discover this talent and amazed that it opened a world of possibilities for me. Talent is a grace; I did nothing to earn it, therefore I feel obliged to explore it and grow it, work on the craft and art, until one day I fall dead into the keyboard. It’s hard work, but it’s also joyful, and it gives my life purpose that, as a child and adolescent, I never expected to find.

KN: There are certain elements I have come to expect from a Dean Koontz novel.  It will be scary; I will have to stop reading at least once to catch my breath; there will be at least one scene that breaks my heart – and there will be an awesome dog.  I know where the dog inspiration comes from – you have been blessed to have so many special dogs in your life.  But what about the terrifying parts and the tragic parts?  Where does that inspiration come from?

DK:I write suspenseful fiction because suspense is arguably the fundamental quality of our lives. Suspense and an irresistible urge to search for cute kitten photos on the internet. I also include comedy in my work, because it’s how we deal with stress and terror and the realization that we’re baton twirlers in a parade of fools. Suspense. . . Well, we never know what’s going to happen to us tomorrow, later today, a minute from now. The best literary novels are also suspense novels woven through with quiet humor.

As far back as I can remember, I feared my own death a lot less than I feared the deaths of those I love. Tragic events are significant threads in the fabric of life; losing someone you love inevitably inspires a terror of eventually being alone in a world that can be hostile in the extreme. Young writers are always counseled to write what they know, and too many of them interpret this to mean they should write navel-gazing novels about the tedium of youthful desire. However, what they know, what we all know, is that the world is strange, the universe is a mystery, evil is real, love is our only hope, and we all die——which is pretty much all the material you need for an infinite number of novels.

KN: Series versus stand-alone books:  Which do you prefer writing?  Do you plan for a series or does the potential develop as you write? Will Devoted become a series?

DK: I prefer standalones. But sometimes a character seizes your imagination and won’t let go. Odd Thomas and Jane Hawk became as real to me as the people next door——though I’ve never known a neighbor as amusing as Odd or as kick-ass as Jane——and I just had to know more about them. I could never write 20 or 30 novels with the same character. Once I know everything about them, once they have allowed me to peel back the last layer of their hearts and minds, staying with them for more books would be all about finances, not art.

Many thanks to Dean Koontz for answering our quetsions and to Beth Parker for co-ordinating this effort.

Killer Nashville Interview with Harriet Tyce

An Interview with Harriet Tyce

Killer Nashville sits down with debut author Harriet Tyce to discuss her new book, Blood Orange.

KN: I believe that it is quite an accomplishment for a debut author to be published by Grand Central.  You are a very talented writer.  

Blood Orange

 is a novel that grabbed me from the prologue and didn’t let go – even after the ending so I completely see why such a prestigious publishing house would want it for their catalog.  But, HOW did you get there?  Here at Killer Nashville we work with new authors and that is always the question – how did she do it?  How did you get your work in front of the right people?

TYCE: Thank you very much! That’s very kind of you to say so and I’m glad it grabbed your attention. I studied for a Masters in Creative Writing – Crime Fiction at the University of East Anglia and through that was able to get the opening of my novel in front of the agents at David Higham Agency when I applied for a scholarship. I didn’t win the scholarship, but I was contacted by Veronique Baxter, one of their agents, some weeks later. She’d liked what she read, and suggested we meet, and after that meeting, offered me representation. This gave me a huge boost to finish the manuscript, and when it was finally done, Veronique submitted it to a number of publishers in the UK. It caught the attention of my UK editor Kate Stephenson, at Wildfire, which is an imprint of Headline, a Hachette publisher. She made a pre-emptive offer for world rights, which I was delighted to receive, and through this Blood Orange is being published jointly by Wildfire and by Grand Central, another Hachette publisher. I’ve been extremely lucky.

KN: “Show-don’t-tell” is a bit of advice that we give our authors.  You excel at this skill.  For example, when Alison managed to stick her hand in “it” outside the nightclub and her inebriated mind thought she could wash off that stink before anyone noticed – I thought that pretty much summed up Alison’s situation better than pages of detailed descriptions ever could. Contaminated by her actions and distractions she really hopes that no one will notice how bad things are until she can clean up the mess. But really she is going to leave a little bit of filth on everyone and everything she touches for quite a while.  This is a two-part question:  How do you do that? And – what was your inspiration? LOL.  On second thought, maybe I don’t want to know the answer to that part…

TYCE: I prefer to read prose which is terse and leaves something to the imagination, and that’s what I try to write. As with every student of creative writing, I started out reading the stories of Raymond Carver, and comparing the Lish edits with the stories as Carver originally wrote, I feel that less is always more. One gesture will convey more than pages of description. At least that’s what I try to do – I’m glad you think I succeeded with it. As far as that scene was concerned, I had in my mind Lady Macbeth trying to scrub off the blood spot, and the dogs refusing to eat the palms of Jezebel’s hands. And when I was a child, I used to go for walks in Edinburgh with my parents, and we would walk under a large bridge on which someone had daubed graffiti with dog fæces.

KN: I am the mother of a 6-year-old, so the scene where young Tilly is missing really spoke to me.  My heart was pounding out of my chest and I almost couldn’t read fast enough to find out what happened.  But that was also the scene where I began to really feel for Alison.  Up until then, I was pretty much in the “yes, you are a terrible mother” camp.  But there she was being a “good” mother playing with her daughter and it still all falls apart.  She wasn’t concentrating on something else, she wasn’t lost on her phone or talking to someone.  This was a situation that could happen to me… easily.  What was your process for developing this scene?

TYCE: I have children myself and while neither of them has ever gone missing for any period of time, even thirty seconds can feel like a lifetime. I walk on the Heath regularly, and watch my children climb the tree I’ve described, and I’ve seen police cars occasionally on patrol, and it came to me organically as a scene. I knew it was a point in the book where a catalyst was necessary to bring the hostility between Carl and Alison entirely to the surface, and given how critical he is throughout of her parenting, it seemed logical to me that he would be bound to blame her entirely for this scare, even though as you point out, it’s something that could have happened to anyone. I actually don’t think Alison is ever a terrible mother – even the night that she doesn’t come home doesn’t put Matilda at any risk, and she always does her best. It’s just not always very good…

KN: Obviously, you are an experienced criminal barrister, so it makes sense that those parts of the story were so believable.  But what about the other parts?  How do you go about researching the gruesome details? And do you ever worry what someone might say if they saw the search history on your computer?

TYCE: I think that’s an occupational hazard! My next book will be dealing with divorce, amongst other things, and I’ve had to tell my husband up front that all of my searches about family law and custody battles are for book purposes and not because I’m planning an escape route. It took quite a lot of logistical planning to work out the final scene in Blood Orange, for which I had to do a lot of internet searches that threw up some sites I really would never want to visit. And it’s fair to say I’ve had my share of hangovers, so those parts weren’t too hard to write…

KN: Finally, even though it is perfectly acceptable and usually expected for women to have careers and families, we torture ourselves with guilt when we aren’t always present for

them.  We tend to see other women as having it all together and judging us for being unworthy somehow (whether or not that’s true.)   So, I really liked the way that you included the “forgiving mom” – the one that said that she turned off the notifications in WhatsApp and seemed genuinely friendly to Alison.  What was your inspiration for this?  

TYCE: The UK agent Juliet Mushens made an excellent point some time ago which was that no domestic thrillers would work as real-life situations if the female protagonists had girlfriends. Alison has isolated herself from her friends, and she is paranoid that all of the mothers at school are judging her adversely, but actually, she’s her own harshest critic, so eaten up with guilt that she can’t see what is really happening around her. I felt that it was more realistic to have people being friendly around her – even though she thinks she’s a terrible person, she’s not that bad, and they can see that. I also wanted to make sure she has a potential future after the end of the book – if she can actually get through all the awfulness, there’s a great circle of women out there ready to catch her and give her support moving forward.

Killer Nashville Interview with Sara Blaedel

An Interview with Sara Blaedel

Killer Nashville sits down with best-selling author Sara Blaedel to discuss her latest book, THE DROWNED GIRL.

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KN: Is it more difficult to create a new main character or build upon a character that is well known by your readers?

For me, whether introducing a new character or digging into the evolution of an already existing one, it all falls under the same umbrella.  And, I love to engage in both.  I’m especially excited about character development; it’s always the people who get under the reader’s skin and drive the action, don’t you think?  It is the characters we think about long after we’ve finished reading, who we connect and relate to, and whom we look forward to getting back to in a series.  While it takes a lot of time to construct a new character, making sure they possess layers and flaws and strengths and authentic characteristics, having a character evolve and grow according to their experiences and maturity, as we all do in one way or another, also takes a great deal of focus and commitment to getting it right.

KN: Is Camilla based upon your own experiences and/or observations as a journalist?

While I wouldn’t say any of my characters is based on me or meant to be a stand-in for me, I definitely use what I know, when appropriate, in the building of a character’s life and work.  In this case, absolutely; I was a journalist for years and tapped into that part of my life to support Camilla’s profession, how she approaches her work, and that whole world.  It’s super-fun!

KN: I love the growth in Camilla’s character when she became more of the solution to racism instead of perpetrating stereotypes. Was this based upon something you have experienced on one side or the other?

Again, I come at this in a sort of hybrid fashion, a mix of the real and personally experienced and what I perceive would be the genuine experience of my characters.  I spent a great deal of time developing them from the start- no single figure in any of my books shows up without a history and backstory of their own that I’ve worked on, along with a construction of them from the ground up and inside out.  It is essential, for me, that my characters’ personalities and choices reflect what they’ve been through so far, whom they meet and have relationships with along the way, and what they witness in the world around them.

KN: Was it difficult to publish The Drowned Girl in a different language than it was originally written? What were some of the pitfalls? Why was the original title changed?

This is an excellent question!  For an author, and I am sure I speak for many (if not most) here, any adaptation is always a scary thing.  There is a great deal of reliance and trust required of the translator, who must organically capture the nuances of the plotting, characterizations, description, and timing.  I am always super-obsessed with making sure that happens, and I have a person who carefully studies each one of my translated books to make sure that nothing has been missed or misinterpreted.  It’s amazing how getting one word or phrase even just a little bit off-base can change the tone or direction of storytelling.  The changing of titles is most often left to the publisher of the translation as frequently the original title doesn’t completely work in that specific language.  It is important for storytellers to protect the integrity of their work and their visions, while at the same time trusting the publishers and people they work with, who want to do everything to support the book and make it accessible to their marketplace.  I always try to find that balance between staying very involved and allowing some space to let the experts do their thing.

KN: I felt the setting in a small town where some might not be as willing to accept outsiders made it perfect by creating the tension needed. Racism is a tough topic to conquer, what type of research did you do to bring it to the readers so realistically?

Research plays a massive role in my preparation for writing.  It is a part of the author’s job that I truly love and look forward to.  Of course, this goes back to my days as a journalist, wherein research and accuracy are imperative.  I go deeply, mining into nearly every aspect I write about, from the locations (I go to the sites where my action takes place, and breathe that air and study the people, the geography, the very essence) to the professions (authenticity is crucial), to the history and natives, and everything in between.

I have always been fascinated by the differences between small towns and big cities; I’ve personally lived in both.  I’m intrigued by the familiarity of life in smaller, more contained, more traditional, and more slowly-changing towns, where, typically, everyone knows everyone else, and there is very little anonymity and lots of secrets simmering beneath the surface.  Which means, treasure troves of potential tension and suspense and drama.  A playground for a crime fiction author!!

Killer Nashville Interview with David Baldacci

An Interview with David Baldacci

In this Killer Nashville interview, award-winning author David Baldacci gives us a behind-the-scenes look at how he makes his characters and locations come to life and highlights the differences in writing a stand-alone novel versus a series.

How is the plotting different for a stand-alone novel and the first novel in a series?

With a stand-alone you know you have one shot to get it all out there. With a series, you can hold things back and wait until the time is right in another book. You can build character arcs more methodically. I like to drop little nuggets or Easter eggs in series books that I know will not be resolved in that novel, much as I did in Long Road to Mercy.

Did you plan to write a series or did Atlee Pine develop into someone who needed to tell more about herself after you began writing?

I planned all along to bring Pine back, and thus built her character correspondingly in the novel.

I love the growth of Carol Blum. Much like anyone we know casually, she seemed ordinary until the reader gets to know her. How and why did she become such an important character? 

I was unsure of what Carol’s full role would be when I started, whether a help or hindrance, loyal sidekick or bureaucratic foil to Pine.  But I quickly decided she would be a full-bore character, loyal but independent. Quirky but resourceful. I really liked the idea of an older and younger woman partnering together and supporting the other. You almost never see that, at least in thrillers.

Is it more difficult to create a woman protagonist that is tough, yet shows us glimpses of her feminine side than a male? In general is it easy to get into the character’s head if they are male?

Both genders have sets of challenges. With men, the temptation is to write them as strong but vulnerable and in times of action, indomitable. And that can get sort of formulaic so you have to watch that. But there are so many male characters portrayed that way it doesn’t seem to matter to readers or moviegoers, which I’m not sure is a good thing. I’m obviously not a woman, so writing from another gender’s perspective is challenging. Writing a woman as strong but feminine sounds like a safe compromise, but it can also throw you into cliché land. What I tried my best to do was be true to Pine’s character and not really dwell on the labels readers might throw on her. She is strong and capable and at times bossy or overbearing, but so can we all be, men and women, depending on the situation.  She can be aloof, suspicious of people’s intentions. But then again, so can all of us. I guess I just tried to make her human, with all the advantages and disadvantages that come with that.

The setting of the Grand Canyon intrigued me. The facts about the location as well as the descriptions pull the readers into the scene. How did you choose the setting? Did you travel into the Canyon? Speak with locals?

I traveled to the Grand Canyon last year and found it fascinating. I talked to locals and guides and people who had done the mule rides, raft rides, and hikes. It just really spoke to me as an ideal location for both the sort of story I wanted to tell and also as a geographic location that a character like Pine would be comfortable existing in.

Killer Nashville Interview with Dana Chamblee Carpenter

An Interview with Dana Chamblee Carpenter

Dana Chamblee Carpenter 

is the author of “Book of the Just,” the third novel in The Bohemian Trilogy. Carpenter’s award-winning short fiction has also appeared in

The Arkansas Review, Jersey Devil Press, Maypop, 

and, most recently in the anthologies, “Dead Ends: Stories from the Gothic South,” and “Killer Nashville Noir: Cold Blooded.” She teaches at a university in Nashville, TN where she lives with her husband and two children. Visit her at http://www.danachambleecarpenter.com/.

Q: You give such an intriguing glimpse of history and culture that is often not touched upon. What drew you to write a story in Bohemia during the 13th century and the new amazing places “Book of the Just” takes us?

I don’t tend to start out with a setting in mind—how fun would it be to know your destination ahead of time? I go where the character takes me, and it makes for a much more adventurous journey. When I discovered the connection between Mouse and the infamous medieval codex known as the Devil’s Bible, I knew her story started in the 13thcentury in Bohemia because that’s where and when the codex was written. But once Mouse got me there, I fell in love. I sometimes wonder if, in a different life, I lived in that part of the world. The more I learned about the places and the people and the stories and the culture, the more I felt like I was coming home somehow. Similarly, practical aspects of the story took me to the places in Book of the Just. Parts of Australia are remote and shrouded in ancient mythical truths—just the kind of spot Mouse would go if she needed a place to hide. Likewise, the Book of the Just (a real book like the Devil’s Bible) and my research of ancient Hebrew history took me to the Middle East and parts of Africa. And again, I felt a visceral connection to these places and a deep respect for the people who live there. I love going to these places and I love taking my readers with me. Too often we get anchored in our comfortable spaces and forget how beautifully diverse the world is. I want to make the unfamiliar familiar for myself and my readers so we can appreciate our differences while reveling in the joy of all that makes us human.

Q: How does your career as a teacher influence your writing?

I really don’t think of teaching or writing as a career. Career seems like something you choose. Writing and teaching chose me—sometimes against my will. ☺ I guess that makes them a calling. Whatever we name them, they are both integral parts of who I am, entwined and inseparable. I see teaching as a form of storytelling. Education is about learning to hear the stories around us, to connect to them and empathize with them, to understand them so that we can learn our own stories—in truth and without posturing or judgment. And then, once we’ve listened to or read the stories around us, we must learn to tell those stories and our own. Storytelling is also a form of teaching. The journey of writing and research teaches me so much about humanity and the world and history and science, the known and the unknown. I learn and then I share that with my readers, and then my readers teach me. It’s the same process I go through as a teacher—I learn and share with my students and then my students teach me. I suppose the deep current running through all of it is an insatiable curiosity.

Q: Your writing intricately mixes history, thriller, and a feeling of mysticism and magic. What things do you see influencing these aspects of your writing?

I’ve always been an eclectic reader. I read everything, every genre, including poetry and plays, both “literary” fiction and “commercial.” (I’m not sure what those labels offer us so I’m wary about using them.) I love going to new places and new times, and I love playing with “what ifs.” When I go looking for a common thread in my favorite writers, be it Eudora Welty or Maya Angelou or Neil Gaiman or William Faulkner or Stephen King or Katherine Howe or Naomi Novik or countless others, I see that each of them and the stories I find most compelling reveal a world to me where there is so much more that we don’t understand than what we think we do. That’s the world I want to live in—full of the thrill of discovery and the play of what if. And that’s the world I want to create for my readers, too. The unknown, the mysterious, the magical lives among us in the everyday. We just have to teach ourselves to look for it.

Q: Did the first novel in the series, Bohemian Gospel, winning the Claymore Award influence the rest of the series?

Winning the Claymore opened all the doors for me. So, in that way, yes. I got the chance to prove myself with Bohemian Gospel, which let me move on to write The Devil’s Bible and Book of the Just. But in terms of the story, no, winning didn’t influence what came after Bohemian Gospel. I learned pretty quickly as I was working on The Devil’s Bible, that I needed to shut out reader expectations, marketing issues, publisher wants, etc. If you let that stuff get in your head, the story loses its authenticity. It was even harder to push that all aside when I was working on Book of the Just because it was the end of the trilogy, and I knew that readers would want to see certain things tied up (and tied up in certain ways). But I just needed to get into a quiet space and listen to Mouse and let her finish the story for me.

Q:The Devil's Bible, the second in your series, not only won the Silver Falchion in Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Horror category but also Best Overall novel at this most recent Killer Nashville conference. Can you tell us a little bit about your experience with that? How does it feel to have this success coincide with closing out this literary chapter with Book of the Just in October?

Oh, my goodness, what a night! I didn’t see that coming at all! The overwhelming emotion that settled on me like a blanket, when Clay called out The Devil’s Bible as the winner, was gratitude. I have an incredible family that walks this journey with me and makes sacrifices to give me space and time to chase this dream, and I am beyond thankful for them. But my Killer Nashville family—and I do think of them like family—has also been there for me when I most needed encouragement or kindness or guidance. The award that night came when I was nervously awaiting the release of Book of the Just, wrestling with the insecurities that most writers have, but I also coming off a frustrating summer where everything but my writing was defining me. I came into the conference that year worried I was only playing at being a writer. I felt like a fraud. And then I went to panels and had quiet conversations with friends, met new ones—I was reminded that this tribe of writers was my tribe, where I belonged. Winning the Silver Falchions was the ultimate affirmation. I left Killer Nashville emboldened, but also inspired to take that inclusion and support away with me so I could gift it to other writers. That’s what I’m looking to do with every article I write and event I attend as part of the Book of the Just tour—I want to give what I’ve been given. I want to embolden writers to believe in themselves. 

Killer Nashville Interview with Jeffery Deaver

An Interview with Jeffery Deaver

by Clay Stafford

Jeffery Deaver is one of the best writers on the planet today, as well as being a longtime supporter of Killer Nashville. Not only is he the author of around forty bestselling books (including a James Bond novel and The Bone Collector [made into a movie starring Denzel Washington]), Deaver is also an incredible teacher. This year, he’ll be doing a special writing intensive on Thursday at Killer Nashville covering the nuts and bolts of creating a highly commercial story. It’s a must-go-to class for anyone wanting to take their writing up a few notches. And from what better person to learn than from a man who has sold over 50 million copies of his books in over 150 countries and in over twenty-five languages. With the release of his on-the-edge-of-your-seat new book, “The Cutting Edge”, I talked with Jeff about his writing habits and what he will be teaching this year at Killer Nashville. And if you want to sign up for Jeff’s writing intensive, you can do so here.

CS: Your books are solid and obviously well-researched. Where or how do you do your research? Do you actually go on location? Or do you research through books and the Internet?

JD: Thanks! For geographic locations, I always go to the sites I’m writing about. I once wrote about a river I had been to years before—a raging torrent. It had been dammed by the time I set an exciting scene in my book there. The worst that could  happen was you’d be stuck in the mud. I heard about that from fans! As for the other research, generally I do online and book work. Occasionally I’ll reach out to an expert in the field, but generally that’s not necessary.

CS: Your books always have a series of plot twists. Do you have a writing formula that works for you as a storyteller?

JD: For me, this genre is all about the plot and twists (other crime writers prefer character-driven stories). The overall formula is to keep Mickey Spillane’s comment in mind: People don’t read books to get to the middle. I do whatever I can to propel readers through the story. Twists help me do that, as readers know they’ll be surprised. The formula is to create clues in the form of people, events and objects that either 1. serve two purposes, an innocent purpose being the most obvious or 2. are lost in an avalanche of trivia. Rule one with twists: You must never cheat.

CS: You write both novels and short stories. Is one easier to write than the other?

JD: Both should create deep emotional engagement. Novels, of course, are more grunt labor, since you need to create an elaborate world and characters we care about, to achieve that goal. Short stories have as their payoff, solely a twist, and we don’t need to do more than make our characters chess pieces, which might, or might not, be utterly destroyed in the end.

CS: Your stories are intricately woven. Obviously there is an outline. Otherwise the plots wouldn’t be as solid as they are. How extensively do you outline your projects and what does that outline look like?

JD: Oh, yes, I spend 8 months outlining. My book for 2019 has been planned out and the outline is 130 pages or so, single spaced, though that’s with very wide margins, since I take notes in the white space. It has every element of the story including all the clues, characters, notes, cross-references, subplots. A book (any book, even non-thrillers) is about structure as much as fine prose (I’d even say structure is more important than an elegant style). Some authors can achieve this structure by simply sitting down and writing. I can’t. My books are long and complicated, with the subplots weaving in and out with the main plot. An outline is necessary. Also, I’ve found that an outline lets you know early in the game whether a novel or story will work. It’s much easier to throw out a ten or twenty page outline when you’ve decided that it’s a no-go project, rather than creating 200 pages of prose and coming to that unfortunate conclusion.

CS: You’re doing a writing master class at Killer Nashville on Thursday, August 23 this year. Everyone is excited. Can you give us an overview of what we’ll be learning at the session?

JD: The course looks at the dozen or so general principles of writing fiction (such as defining goals, dealing with your publisher, and—yes—outlining), and then in depth analysis of the four elements of fiction: plot, character, dialogue and setting. It’s both helpful and funny. I’m really looking forward to it!

- Clay StaffordFounder of Killer Nashville 

Many thanks to Jeffery Deaver  for so graciously taking time to answer our questions and to

Andy Dodds from Grand Central Publising for facilitating this interview.

Killer Nashville Interview with Sara Blaedel

Sara Blaedel is the author of the #1 international bestselling series featuring Detective Louise Rick.   Recently, Ms. Blaedel took a bit of time out of her busy schedule to answer a few questions for Killer Nashville about The Undertaker's Daughter,  the first novel in her new triology.   Thanks to Bree Goodchild for conducting this interview.

Enjoy…and be inspired!

Clay Stafford

Founder of Killer Nashville 

An Interview with Sara Blaedel
by Bree Goodchild

KN:The reader is taken through the process of being a funeral director as Ilka experiences it; from picking up the body to embalming, reconstruction and makeup to the funeral itself. What kind of research methods did you utilize to create this sense of realism for your character? 

SB: Research is an essential part of my writing process. It always has been, and that only intensifies as the years and titles go by. I place absolute importance on achieving authenticity. Readers are clever and savvy; they know their stuff and aren’t going to buy into anything (in this genre) that doesn’t ring true or feel possible.

As has been the case with all of my books, my research for The Undertaker’s Daughter entailed everything from reading to traveling to becoming an apprentice. When I decided to use the US as the setting for the first time, I studied the various regions until I zeroed in on Racine, Wisconsin, a city which has the nation’s largest number of Danish-Americans and Danish immigrants. I dug into the funeral home industry in the States, comparing and contrasting its laws and regulations and traditions to those in Denmark. I was really struck by how differently this extremely sensitive and reverent work is handled from one country to another. I was fascinated to learn that there are varying laws even from one state to another within the US.

I spent weeks in Racine, living amongst and getting to know the lovely people there and how they navigate. What a wonderful experience- I can’t wait to visit again. I was incredibly fortunate to be able to intern at a funeral home, which proved enlightening, compelling, and so informative.

KN: Ilka seems to miss bits of information and the subtleties of interaction between other characters. What was your thinking behind this dramatic decision? 

SB: I’m so glad you caught this. Ilka is a newcomer to the US; this is her first time visiting the country. A Danish citizen, she’s an outsider when she arrives in Racine, and she’s alone and dealing with a death in the family. Being out of her element in so many ways, she struggles, at first, as anyone would, to keep up and to understand the nuances of another language and culture.

KN: Ilka seems more of an observer than a detective in this book - compared to Louise Rick. What was the creative process behind developing Ilka’s character? 

That’s an interesting question. Ilka is absolutely more of an observer; at least at first. She’s not a detective. When we meet her, she’s leading a quiet and modest life as a school photographer. She is summoned to the States after the death of her long-estranged father, an undertaker, who lived and worked in Racine. Ilka, while trying to tend to her father’s estate, business, and tax issues, takes some time to try to connect with the man she barely remembers. It is while she is living in Racine and laboring in her father’s funeral home that Ilka finds herself needing to search for information and dig for clues. She’s, at most, an amateur sleuth, with no expertise or experience in detective work.

KN: Reading this book, I was surprised when at the end I did not experience the sense of closure between Ilka and her father as expected. Can you talk about what you hoped readers would get out of The Undertaker’s Daughter? 

That’s another fascinating question. The Undertaker’s Daughter is the first in a trilogy, and so, while I had intended to bring to completion many of the storylines in this book, full closure wasn’t part of the plan. Yet.

For me, this series is about familial relationship and the bond between fathers and daughters. It’s about second chances and the many ways in which we can start again. It’s about the ways secrets and lies can devastate, and how love and acceptance, and the truth can be so redeeming.

KN: Do you see this as the beginning of a new thriller series, like Louise Rick, or a stand-alone?

The Undertaker’s Daughter is the first in a trilogy. All three volumes will be set in the States, which is a super exciting first for me.

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Many thanks to Sara Blaedel for so graciously taking time to answer our questions and to Caitlin Mulrooney-Lyski from Grand Central Publishing for facilitating this interview.

Killer Nashville Interview with Alan Bradley

Alan Bradley is the New York Times bestselling author of the award-winning Flavia de Luce mystery series.  His first novel, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie received the Crime Writers' Association Debut Dagger Award,  the Agatha Award, the Barry Award, the Dilys Award, the Arthur Ellis Award, the Macavity Award and the Spotted Owl Award.  Recently, Mr. Bradley took a bit of time out of his busy schedule to answer a few questions for Killer Nashville. The author discusses his protagonist and the unique choices made in creating her, his writing process, and offers advice to those who—like Bradley—began their writing careers a little later in the game. Thanks to Liz Gatterer for conducting this interview.  

Enjoy!

A Killer Nashville Interview with
ALAN BRADLEY

KN:  When I first looked at the press release for The Grave’s a Fine and Private Place and saw that the story was about a 12-year-old girl, I assumed this was a children’s book, or a middle-grade book and was intrigued that was not how it was categorized. Who do you write your books for?

I write my books for people who are interested in the same kind of things I’m interested in. I dote on curiosities and wonder, and I have been accused of possessing a magpie mind. Fortunately, there are vast numbers of readers of all ages who share my enthusiasms.I have heard of a four-year-old girl who insists upon having the books read aloud to her, then acting them out with herself as Flavia, her father as Dogger, and her mother as Mrs. Mullet.

KN:  I must admit, I am a new Flavia fan. I enjoyed The Grave’s a Fine and Private Place so much I have now binge read/listened to the entire series from the beginning. By the way, the narrator, Jayne Entwistle is just fantastic! There is an incredible amount of information in each book. How long does it take to research one of your books? Do you squirrel away factoids for use “at some point” or is it a more focused practice?

Yes, Jayne is incredible. I recently had the opportunity of speaking to her “live” during an internet broadcast. I think we were both in tears of laughter and recognition!

Some of the facts in the Flavia books are titbits I’ve been saving up for years, while others come to light during research. Because I’m a great fan of ancient and outdated reference books, it’s often harder to decide what to leave out than what to put in. In general, it takes about nine months to a year to write each book, a substantial amount of which is research. It’s not always easy to find out, for instance, what the weather was like in England at a certain hour of a certain day in 1952, or whether the 10:32 from Waterloo ran on Sundays in November.

KN: I have read at first you thought this would be a six-book series, and then a ten-book series. Well, The Grave’s a Fine and Private Place is book 9… Is book 10 in the works? Will that be the end of the series? (Please say no) Are there any plans for your next series?

In spite of reports to the contrary, I’m presently working on a tenth book. Beyond that? I don’t know. I’m sure my lovely publishers would be happy to continue, but, as Sherlock once so wisely remarked, “It is a capital mistake to theorize in advance of the facts.”

KN: Although the character of Flavia de Luce has certainly developed over the series, she has not really aged. She was 11 in Book 1: The Sweetness at the Bottomof the Pie and now in Book 9: The Grave’s a Fine and Private Place she is 12. It has been quite a year for the young girl! Is Flavia destined to be a pre-adolescent forever?

Flavia at 18, for instance, would be a completely different person than she is now, and perhaps not half so interesting. At any rate, there’s still much to be told about her present circumstances, and I’ve never been one for rushing things.

KN: As an author that really began to write in earnest after retirement and who published an award-winning novel after 70, what advice or words of encouragement (or words of warning) would you give to others who are just beginning their writing later in the game?

First of all, my heartiest congratulations to anyone who manages to get published at 60 and beyond! At that age, it seems unlikely that you’ll be changed: your life will be, but you won’t.

My best advice would be, as has been said so many times before, never give up. I was once told that real success takes ten years, but in my case, it took fifteen. To summarize: apply bottom to chair, write, and keep writing.

As Philip Van Doren Stern (author of the book that inspired the film “It’s a Wonderful Life”) once said, “The only thing that’s important is the manuscript. All the rest is just bubbles on the horse-piss.

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Many thanks to Alan Bradley for taking time to answer our questions and to Sharon Propson from Random House Publishing for facilitating this interview.

Killer Nashville Interview with Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child

Killer Nashvillle recently spoke with authors Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child on their Pendergast series. With a new book coming out, the pair talks about writing with a partner, how to keep a series and a main character engaging, and the process behind writing the 17th book in the serial. Even in the answers to our questions, we can see how they play off one another. Thanks to Liz Gatterer for conducting this interview.

Enjoy…and be inspired!

Clay Stafford
Founder of Killer Nashville 

An Interview with Preston & Childby Liz Gatterer

KN:  City of Endless Night is the 17th book in the Pendergast series.  How do you plot out such a long-running series?  Do you plan the next book(s) in advance, or are they conceived one at a time? How do you keep the storylines straight?

Doug: We conceive them one story at a time. When we wrote RELIC, we thought it was going to be a one-off and didn’t think that Pendergast would be (or should be) the main character. He took over the books on his own. We didn’t know his first name until four books later. As for keeping the storyline straight, we often find ourselves re-reading our old books and taking notes, to make sure we’re picking up the right threads. Sometimes we even consult our most passionate fans about various arcane details we ourselves have forgotten. I recall once wracking my brains trying to recall what Pendergast thought of Italian opera, and finally consulted a fan who said, “He hates it.”

KN:  The first two novels in the series, Relic and Reliquary were published two years apart–1995 and 1997 respectively.  The third novel, Cabinet of Curiosities, came along 5 years later in 2002 and since then you have averaged a new Pendergast novel every 12.5 months with each novel comprised of an average of 417 pages. Keeping up that pace is amazing–especially when you take into account the research that goes into each book, the fact that you have written over 2 dozen other books (collaboratively and individually), have book tours, speaking engagements and families that I assume like to see you occasionally. How do you manage it? 

Linc: We’re pedaling as fast as we can! Joking aside, it really helps having a writing partner on the case—Doug and I have both written numerous solo novels as well as our joint books, so we know. Also, the fact that we now are so familiar with the Pendergast universe—although not necessarily with Pendergast himself—means that the foundation for new novels is already well in place. But the bottom line is that we love what we do: writing about Pendergast and his various adventures remains always fresh and exciting to us both.

Doug: Linc does the pedaling; I stand behind him and bark out orders like the coxswain of a rowing crew. Seriously, it is great having a writing partner whose taste and intelligence you trust implicitly, and who thinks like you do.

KN:  You excel at blending the natural and supernatural in your books. Which comes first? Is the supernatural a bridge between the events you want to happen, or are the natural events a product of the supernatural? Is there a secret to finding the balance?

Linc: This was perhaps particularly evident in the earliest books of the series, RELIC and RELIQUARY, although it’s been a factor in numerous Pendergast and non-Pendergast books of ours as well. I’ve always been a fan of ghost stories, and when I was an editor at St. Martin’s Press I put together numerous supernatural anthologies. The idea of trying to mix a straight-ahead thriller with potentially supernatural elements (although with a fair amount of science underpinning everything) was more revolutionary when RELIC first appeared than it is today. In fact, at the time our publishers and booksellers weren’t quite sure what genre to classify it as. Ultimately RELIC was called a “techno-thriller,” but I’m not sure even that quite encompasses it.Doug: We have always been attracted by the hints of the supernatural, because it adds a certain mystery and Gothic flavor to the series. Too much mystery has been taken out of the world and we want to put a little bit back in.

KN:  As a fan, I LOVE that in City of Endless Night Pendergast returns to NY and teams up with Detective D’Agosta again.  And (I don’t want to give anything away) the Epilogue really warmed my heart.  However, these events hint at a certain amount of closure for Pendergast which terrifies me a bit (and not in a fun way).  I am almost afraid to ask, but, are these harbingers of an end to the Pendergast series?

Doug: Not at all. We’re quite fond of Pendergast and hope to see him in many books to come, provided he doesn’t get killed along the way. (Nobody is safe in our books.) We plan to launch a new series starring Nora Kelly, in which Pendergast might, from time to time, make a cameo appearance—if he’s still alive by then.

KN: You have been quoted as saying that you try to write thrillers that you yourselves would like to read.  This aligns well with the Killer Nashville mission to help writers write books that we would like to read.  Do you have advice for new authors on how to accomplish this feat?

Linc: I can only speak from my own experience, but with that proviso: I’ve found that writing a book about a subject that I personally find fascinating, either that I know something of already or would like to learn more about, not only makes the research and writing process more enjoyable, but it results in a more compelling and credible story. Readers can tell the difference between a book written from the heart and one written simply in hopes of selling lots of copies. Also, writing a novel can be a difficult and at times even disheartening process—it’s not uncommon to have to rewrite passages or even whole sections of prose along the way, especially when starting out—and writing about a subject of great personal interest can sometimes make that easier.Doug: I couldn’t agree with Linc more. It’s a huge mistake to think you can figure out the formula and write a bestselling book. The “formula” in my opinion is to write about what fascinates you, populate it with characters that you know and love (or hate), and set it in a place you know well.

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Many thanks to Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child for taking time from their book tour for City of Endless Night to answer our questions and to Caitlin Mulrooney-Lyski from Grand Central Publishing for facilitating this interview.