Fascinating Authors

Q: What excites you most about your book’s topic? Why did you choose it?

Author: I started this book in late 2003, and at the time I was frustrated, as were many Americans, at the way we’d been railroaded into the Iraq war. The sore point for me was the claim of ‘weapons of mass destruction,’ a low point in Colin Powell’s otherwise stalwart career.

So I wanted to write something politically pointed, but I also wanted something that was fun to read. In the end, the political message took the back seat to the adventure, but I think that’s how it should be. We don’t read books like The Deadfall Project for its political message. We read them to have fun.

Q: How long did the book take you from start to finish?

Author: Five years. Yikes. Yeah, five years.

Q: What aspect of writing the book did you find particularly challenging?

Author: The hardest part was getting the mystery to the right level of, well, mystery. Reading early drafts, some people would say, “This part is too easy to figure out,” while others would call the same part too oblique—that I hadn’t put enough foreshadowing into it. It was hard too judge how much I should spell things out. Too much and some people are bored by it, too little and others are confused.

Maybe the future of electronic books will include the ability to choose different levels of difficulty, like what you now get with video games.

Q: What surprised you the most about the book writing process?

Author: Probably that I didn’t go crazy. That, and how many times I could feel like, ‘I’ve done it, the book is now perfect.’ Only to find myself, just a few weeks later, tearing it all apart again.

Q: Did you have any favorite experiences when writing your book?

Author: Writing a book is like being the boxer in a movie. You take a seemingly endless run of blows and somehow, against all odds, still find the strength to keep going. Except that a writer tends to receive more blows than there’d be time for in a movie. Writing a book is like weathering a storm in a dinghy.

Q: What do you hope your readers will gain from reading your book?

Author: I just hope they enjoy it. I wouldn’t mind if they lose sleep over it, in that “I couldn’t put it down” sort of way. I’d say my goals are on par with that of a roller coaster designer.

Q: What projects are you currently working on?

Author: I’m working on a new book, a murder mystery set in the mountains of North Carolina. It’s a traditional mystery, unlike The Deadfall Project, which is a thriller first and a mystery second.

Q: Did you do any research for your books, or did you write from experience?

Author: I try to get as much material as I can first hand. For The Deadfall Project, that meant a tour across France (and, unfortunately for me, most of the settings of my book are not the ones people would usually choose for their holiday.)

For the stuff I can’t do myself, I find people who have. It’s a time-consuming process, even for fiction. I had to listen to a lot of stories to cull out enough good material. The challenge is to not only find something interesting, but that fits the context of what I’m writing.

I do think going to the source is extremely important. More and more, authors talk about how the internet makes research easy. I find the opposite to be true: the internet has raised people’s access to knowledge, and had changed the way people look at information. They don’t want to a novel crammed full of dumb facts that they could look up for themselves. The internet has raised the bar; we have to dig deeper to come up with interesting material.

Q: How did you come up with your title?

Author: I work on a novel’s title when I start working on a book, and try very hard to nail it before I begin the second draft. A book’s title should be intertwined with the heart of the book. After all, it’s the first thing anyone hears about your book, what they see on the cover every time they pick it up to read, and it’s emblazoned on the top of every other page.  So it’s a major presence.

I’m dodging the question, but only because the title of The Deadfall Project is very important, and telling you why spoils the book’s ending.

Thank you for taking the time to be part of this interview!

To learn more about the book and Author, please visit – http://thedeadfallproject.com/