1) How do your athletic endeavors influence your writing?
I'm a skier, a scuba diver with a love for exploring shipwrecks, a triathlete, and a fan of the more riskier sports that get the adrenaline going. When adrenaline is flowing through your veins, for me at least, my senses are heightened. The colors are richer, the sounds more acute, you can smell the wind and time seems to slow. Action scenes flow the easiest for me as all I have to do is tap into some memory whether it be jumping off a bridge, a two hundred foot crane or being in the bowels of dark ship 90 feet below the surface with a six foot shark between me and the exit. When Michael St. Pierre is running away from danger, when he is facing his fears those are my memories of the experiences from my life. I have very strong image and sense memory and can translate that into my material. The feeling as your falling through the air with nothing to stop you but a rubber band around your ankle is pretty spectacular and applies to so many thrilling moments in my stories.
2.) Your series character is a master thief. What drew you to this type of character? Were you inspired by other thieves in literature, or do you look elsewhere for inspiration?
Eight out of ten thrillers revolve around a cop, an ex-special forces/military type, a private investigator, attorney, or an academic fish out of water. It was important for my main character to be unique. I have always been a fan of the anti-hero whose deeds came about as moral compromise. It makes the character deeper and far more interesting. There are the rules of society, the rules of man, the rules of God but sometimes, to do the right thing, you have to violate those rules, compromise even your own beliefs. It makes for a richer, more conflicted character who has to not only battle outside forces but the moral compass within himself. Michael St. Pierre is a reformed thief forced back into the world he left behind in order to save those he loves. His greatest skills were as a thief and if he is to succeed he must resurrect not only his former skills but his former self all the while facing the risk of prison, death, and, worst of all, if he fails, the loss of those he loves.
3.) As to your educational background, have you taken any formal writing courses, participated in any writers' conferences or workshops?
I came to writing very late in life. I've never taken an actual writing course, instead, my schooling came from the books I loved to read, the movies I liked to watch. I have always had a good sense of story and a grasp for rhythm and pacing much of it coming from my background as a musician. You need to know when to build up tension, when to release it, and when to breath. All three aspects are key to music and key to a taught thriller. I did participate in one writer's group through NYU where eight authors got together and critiqued each other's work. It was a fun experience and helpful to get varying opinions on my material but ultimately time did not allow me to continue.
4.) What did you learn writing The Thieves of Faith?
As much of the story takes place in Moscow and within the Kremlin, I found a place that most of the western world never knew existed. We all have these cold, dark images of the military parading in Red Square and the iron hand of the USSR, but since the fall of Communism, their hidden mysteries have been gradually exposed. We think of the Kremlin as political yet it contains enormous museums rivaling the Louvre, The Vatican, and The Smithsonian. In an odd dichotomy, you'll find the world's highest concentration of churches within the Kremlin walls, a place where religion was forbidden for seventy five years. And most alluring, it sits atop a labyrinthine system of rooms and tunnels that contain Ivan the Terrible's torture chamber, the lost library of Byzantium, and scores of hidden sanctuaries and vaults. The most amazing fact is much of it has been lost to time and though the Russian government has sought to rediscover these historically documented places, they have yet to reveal their actual locations.
5.) How long did it take to write?
My first novel, The Thieves of Heaven, took me about a year, my current novel, The Thieves of Faith, took about nine months and I just finished The Thieves of Darkness in about six months. I should note that this includes re-writes, research and the obligatory sticking it in a draw to ferment period. I generally write, on average, two thousand words a day, everyday. I usually end up with around nine hundred pages which I then whittle back. It's on the second pass that I approach my story like a chess match: twisting it, shifting characters to make it more suspenseful, and lopping off all of the fat so I have a tight, compelling page turner. My process turns a normal day upside down. I have always been a night owl as that's where my creative juices seem to flow best and life is free of distractions. My first novel was written mostly on the train to and from work and then from 11 till 2 in the morning. Now, without the burden of a commute, I write from 10 pm until around 1 am. And I do my research in the more respectable hours of the day. I do an outline including the major plot points, character points, historical facts, and a very specific ending so I know where I am going. But since so much of my writing flows from the ideas that hit my mind as my fingers fly on the keys, the journey veers from the outline as I discover things about the characters and they end up taking me to some great places via a far different route than I initially intended.
6.) How do you do your research?
I love research and find myself overly absorbed in amazing, rarely heard facts. I have to consciously pull myself back and stay focused otherwise the night can become a bust. I'm a voracious reader of science, medicine, and global mysteries. I love researching the history of the world and the little known stories that float beneath the surface. They are all seeds with the potential for great stories. I am a huge fan of libraries. If they don't have the book, they can probably find it for you. I also access a great deal of research papers which are generally available through colleges and universities. For example, one Ivy League school had a thesis on the Parisian catacombs while MIT had a great paper on lock picking. A good resource that I avail myself of is the consulate system. Once someone within a consulate hears you are writing a book about their country, they are usually happy to put you in touch with their experts and provide you access to various resources. I do find it interesting in this Google reliant world that while you can find some interesting facts buried in the internet, so much of it can prove to be wrong. The word expert is used far too loosely; now, anyone with a PC can proclaim themselves an authority postulating theory's and sighting fictional facts. There should be a warning sign on all internet home pages to students and writers, "Beware, the facts contained within may have no bearing on reality. "
7.) Where did you get the ideas for your novels?
My inspiration comes from all around. I love when we see humanity at its best: the seldom told individual tales of heroism in the war(s) by people who love this country; the firefighter who runs into a burning building to save a child; the man who dives on the subway tracks pulling a little girl to safety under the train platform as the train races by inches from their heads. I love reading about the lost worlds that exist under our noses, the artifacts whose mythic tales have grown legendary, the conflicts that exist when both sides believe with all their heart that God is on their side. My greatest inspiration though is the love for my wife and how far I would go to protect her, it is what helps me to fill my stories with heart, it is what I draw on to give my characters their emotional weight.
As to the plots, I love to find a compelling quest one where the object in question ties thematically to the emotional journey of my characters. I choose world where I know next to nothing so the research is fresh and interesting, worlds that I would like to go and take my readers along with me.
I actually have a file that I call My Everyday New Story File. I force myself to write the basic outline of a new story everyday. I find it very easy to come up with new topics daily; the only problem is I have outlines for hundreds of stories some of which will sadly never see the light of day unless I discover the elixer of life and live to be 500.
8.) When you create a character, how much of that character comes from your personal experience? Are your characters just an extension of your own life and are their experiences from your own life, or are they completely fictional?
Much of the emotional journey of my characters is drawn from personal experience such as the love for my wife, my children, my father, but the action, particularly the crimes, are pure fiction. I do draw upon situations in my youth. I was not a true delinquent but with my brother, cousins, and friends I was involved in some mischief where we usually ended up on the run with hearts pounding and nervous laughter pouring from our mouths. Without going into detail, many of those experiences are hinted at and greatly embellished in my stories. So when you read about Michael St. Pierre climbing up a building, or sneaking into some place he shouldn't be you could probably tie it back to my childhood in one way, shape, or form.
9.) Who are the writers whose work you most admire, and who perhaps have influenced your writing?
I love Ian Fleming, Charles Dickens, William Goldman, Stephen King, Clive Cussler, Robert Ludlam, Steve Berry, and Alistair MacLean. I love screenplays, you can read them quickly, the prose, by virtue of the genre, is tight, the dialogue flows and you can get a full three act story read in less than an hour. I love William Goldman who can convey so much with so few words. I also love Frank Darabont, his adaptations of Stephen King are some of the best reads out there.
