[00:00:01.100] – Alan Petersen
Welcome to Meet the Thriller Author, the podcast where I interview the best thriller authors from around the world. I’m your host, Alan Petersen, and this is episode number 205. Today, I have the incredible honor of speaking with not one, but two powerhouse authors in the thriller genre, Jeffrey Deaver and Isabella Maldonado. They’ve teamed up for a thrilling new novel, Fatal Intrusion, which is set to be released on September 1st. We’ll dive deep into their collaboration, the inspiration behind the book, and what makes this story a must read for thriller fans. Before we get to the interview, I want to tell you about my latest psychological thriller, The Basement. It’s been creeping its way up the charts and is now a best seller in both the domestic thriller and the serial killer thriller categories on Amazon. If you’re looking for a gripping edge of your seat read, that will keep you guessing until the very end. You can grab the basement right now for just 99 cents. Go to thrillingreads. Com/basement to buy it today. Perfect for fans of dark, twisty psychological readers, so don’t miss out on this special offer. Now, without further ado, let’s get into today’s interview with Jeffrey Deaver and Isabella Maldonado, The Brilliant Minds Behind Fatal Intrusion.

[00:01:17.590] – Alan Petersen
Jeffrey Dever is an international number one bestselling author. His novels have appeared on bestseller lists around the world. His books are sold in 150 countries and translated into 25 languages. He has served two terms as President of the mystery Writers of America and was recently named a Grandmaster of MWA, whose ranks include Agatha Christie, Ellery Queen, Mary Higgins-Clarke, and Walter Moseley. Wall Street Journal bestselling author Isabella Maldonado wore a gun and badge in real life before returning to crime writing. She’s a graduate of the FBI National Academy in Quantico, and the first Latina to attain a rank of captain in the Fairfax County Police Department just outside of DC. She retired as the Commander of the Special Special Investigations and Forensics Units. She uses her law enforcement background to bring a realistic edge to her writing, which includes the best-selling FBI Special Agent Nina Guerrera series, which has been optioned by Netflix to adapt into a feature film, starring Jennifer López. It’s with great pleasure. I welcome Jeffrey Dever and Isabella Maldonado. Jeffrey and Isabella, it’s an honor to have you both on the podcast. Welcome.

[00:02:25.290] – Jeffrey Deaver
Thank you.

[00:02:26.390] – Isabella Maldonado
Great to be here.

[00:02:27.340] – Alan Petersen
Yeah, so excited. I’m a big fan of both your of my writings. So this is a thrill for me. Fatal Intrusion, your first collaboration. I have to ask, what inspired you to team up on this project? How did the partnership come together? And especially Jeffrey, I know I’ve read other interviews with you. You said that you’re usually a lone wolf in your writing process. How does all this come together?

[00:02:48.960] – Jeffrey Deaver
Well, we’ll both speak about the process, but lone wolf is a nice way to put it. I think that may be in an interviewer’s words or something. I myself have said, I don’t play well with others. And Don’t let Jeffrey out in the sandbox with the other kids because who knows what’s going to happen. And that’s true. I’ve written a number of books and short stories. I did a short story with Jon Sanford a long time ago for a benefit. It was quite fun. But for novels, I try to remain largely in control. But we met a few years ago, and I’ll let Isabella tell the story. She’s more articulate than I. But certainly, it not only has been, I think, a very creatively productive process. I am very happy with fatal intrusion. If I’m happy with the book I’ve written, that means it’s a good book. I’m sorry. I have very high standards, which I feel like sometimes fall shy of. But it was a great process. We did a lot of hard work. Maybe Isabella, you could talk about how we met because it’s a pretty funny story.

[00:03:56.330] – Isabella Maldonado
Yes, we met at the murder and mayhem in Chicago conference back in 2018. We were both speaking there separately, but we met in the green room there. Gillian Flynn was there, too. The three of us all just started joking, and we were ripping about… We came up with this concept about how there would be a baby that could be like a criminal boss, and he would run the world and everything. We just kept joking about it. But I loved Jeff’s sense of humor right the beginning. I mean, anyone that can crack me up, I love it, and I just keep building on it. Then we bumped into each other again at Thriller Fest, and that was when I first signed with my new publisher, and I was at a party there and bumped into him again. Again, we just had such a great time. We just hit it off. At that point, I asked Jeff if he would blurb one of my books, the next one I had coming out, and he said, Sure. That was what gave Jeff the chance to actually read my writing, a full-length novel. It turns out that we write very much alike. My writing has been compared to him many times in the past. When he read my writing, I think that definitely resonated with him about, here’s someone who has a very similar style. And so later, when we thought about collaborating, it made sense.

[00:05:25.550] – Alan Petersen
Oh, yeah. I will say that I got the advanced copy here, and it is a fantastic book. So you guys make a great team. That’s fascinating. So networking and going to these conferences and parties, it actually can pay off sometimes with this great team that you guys formed. The writing process. So how did you guys divide that work? Did you focus on a character or was it more like a fluid collaboration? How did that system work?

[00:05:57.670] – Jeffrey Deaver
Let me jump in first, and then I’ll hand over to Isabella. If you’ve seen me talk. I teach courses in writing. A lot of it’s online. I’m an inveterate outliner. The world is made up of two types of writers, the plotters, that is the outliners like myself, and the pantsers as in seat of the pants. I just feel that it is far easier and far more efficient to plan the book out ahead of time. I frankly think it makes a much better book, especially when you write this book that Isabella and I do, which is, well, it’s a thriller, a suspense thriller, as opposed to a murder mystery. A thriller asks the question, what is going to happen, as opposed to an Agatha Christie murder mystery, which asks the question, what happened in the past? Those are wonderful. I love my twists and turns, and Agatha Christie taught me how to do that. But readers, I like a… Frankly, I’m impatient, and I don’t I have a lot of time to waste getting through, slogging through a lot of prose. I want something to happen constantly. That’s the book I write. You need an outline to do that most efficiently.

[00:07:10.850] – Jeffrey Deaver
My outlines have been inordinately long. There are 150 pages or so. That’s ridiculous for most people. I’m just comfortable doing that. Well, so when we got together, Isabella outlines as well. Together, we went back and forth. Many long phone calls, lots of time on the computer. I’ll let Isabella talk about the technical aspect of how we hooked up. It was very enlightening to me because I had never done that before. But we came with the outline, divided that into initially about 60 chapters, 50 chapters, 60 chapters. We write from third person, close point of view, shifting points of view. Fatal Intrusion is primarily about two protagonists who work together Carmen Sanchez, an agent with the Homeland Security Investigations division of DHS, and Jake Aaron, who’s a quirky penetration tester, former Black Hat hacker, and they get together there. It felt like Isabella to write, initially, maybe more of the scenes from Carmen’s point of view. I wrote more from Jake’s point of view. Then we had the bad guy’s point of view, and we had the third person, other people’s points of view. We We shifted back and forth on that. That’s the general schematic.

[00:08:34.470] – Jeffrey Deaver
I’ll let her continue from there because there’s a lot of stuff that I think will be helpful for potential co-authors out there.

[00:08:43.630] – Isabella Maldonado
The technical aspect of it is after we got our ideas together, I realized that we needed to be able to collaborate in real-time. I did a ton of research trying to figure out what would be a user friendly platform that we could use, that we could both be in the document, editing it simultaneously or separately. It had to be something that we’re both comfortable with already using. I ended up going with Microsoft OneDrive. I have a OneDrive, and I was able to share a link with him, and then we could both get on. I can literally see him, see where he is in the document and see him making changes. As we’re on the phone, we’re going through and talking about it, and his changes end up in one color and mine end up in the other. I can literally see who’s doing what, and he can, too. He can see what I’m doing also. That’s really, really helpful. Then another thing that we did is in the initial part, when we’re first picking, I want to write this scene, I want to write that scene, whatever, those are color-coded. He has one color, I have another.

[00:10:02.320] – Isabella Maldonado
We know we can just keep racing through. The first draft is just wild. Then when we go through, and the other thing is really important, in the first draft, we don’t have any track changes on. But as we start doing future draughts, we turn on track changes, and his are a different color than mine, so I can see what changes he’s made, and he can see what changes I’ve made. This is super important, if anybody ever wants to write with anybody, is that we declared a no ego zone, and we both edit freely each other’s work. I just think that is really amazing because this is a true collaboration. We needed to work that way, and we did.

[00:10:46.390] – Jeffrey Deaver
We should point out, Alan, that you’ve probably seen there are some writing convos in which an author comes up with an idea and then hands it off to another author. James Patterson is the classic prototype for that. That’s not what this is. I call it 100% 50/50, which doesn’t seem to make sense. A little bit of paradox, but everything from start to finish was a 50/50 project here. It’s true. For instance, I like my twist and turns, but I can get carried away with them. I came up with a twist in this book toward the end. It was like the Halloween movies or Freddy Kruger. He may have been the Halloween guy. I can’t remember. But these horror films where the dead guy is dead. Oh, he’s absolutely dead. We know he’s dead. The bad guy is gone. He shows up in the final reel, of course. I had something like that. Isabella politely said, Well, let’s rethink that. We did. It was unnecessary. It took away from the suspense at the end. I had made some thoughts about her suggestions, and neither of us thought anything of it. Our whole point is to give our readers, who are our gods, the best book we possibly can.

[00:12:15.980] – Jeffrey Deaver
We live for them. That’s one of the things I recognized in Isabella’s writing right away. There are authors who write for themselves, and I say that’s absolutely ridiculous. We get paid to make up stuff, and I’m sorry, I have to add, and we don’t work in Washington, DC. I have to add that. But we make up stuff, and people spend time and money. My gosh, what a wonderful thing that is. We want to make sure we give them the best book we can. That meant we took ourselves out of the equation altogether. We just worked hard to produce a joint book that we know people are going to like.

[00:12:52.500] – Alan Petersen
Isabella is this your first time writing with somebody else?

[00:12:56.000] – Isabella Maldonado
Yes, absolutely. We didn’t know what to expect because neither one of us had ever done it. We just went right into it. And fortunately, everything worked out amazingly well, and we are really happy with it.

[00:13:13.960] – Alan Petersen
I’m just curious, too, from the time that you guys first started talking about this and had the idea and the outline and writing it to publication, what time period are we looking at?

[00:13:24.700] – Jeffrey Deaver
We work pretty quickly. That’s one thing we should add. Now, This is, one, a very important project in our professional lives, but it’s not the only project in our professional lives. I publish a series of books featuring a character named Coltrishaw, and he’s the character on Tracker on that CBS Sunday Night, Primetime show. And naturally, it’s had a little success. And so what’s in my email? Oh, Jeff, when’s the next tracker book going to come out? And so I’m writing those. And then I also write original stories for Amazon. Well, I write short stories for Amazon Original Stories. I love my short stories. I do that at the same time. And Isabella has projects that take up, I think she’s working on a couple of other books at the same time now. And so we managed to fit it in. I would say maybe, what, four months start to finish, or maybe less than that. I don’t remember.

[00:14:21.920] – Isabella Maldonado
Yeah, for the first draft, yes. But we both just… We are big-time editors of our own work, and it also went through the formal editing process from the publisher. But even before we even started with that, we both were editing and editing and editing to make it, again, as Jeff said, I feel the same way. It has to be the best it can be.

[00:14:45.910] – Alan Petersen
Yeah, that’s what I really enjoyed in the book, too, with the characters, because they’re very different to Carmen Sanchez, the homeless security agent, and then to Jake Heron, the cyber guy. How did those two characters came together. Did you work in it together, too, creating them? They’re so different. How do you even think about putting them together?

[00:15:07.930] – Jeffrey Deaver
Well, Isabella, why don’t you talk a little bit about Carmen and your former background? That’s in her wheelhouse, and I can talk about Jake a little bit. But again, of course, we jump back and forth. I wrote scenes from Carmen’s point of view. She wrote scenes from Jake’s point of view. That’s one thing about authors of fiction, especially, frankly, genre writing, which I happen to think is some of the finest writing and has always been some of the finest writing there is, that authors have to step into the shoes and to expand a little bit the hearts and the minds and the souls of their characters, good and bad, of whatever gender, whatever ethnicity. It’s our job to make them credible. Isabella, why don’t you talk a little bit about Carmen and your background?

[00:15:57.130] – Isabella Maldonado
Well, sure. I have a law enforcement background background. I wore a gun and badge for 22 years. All of the work that I write tends to be from a law enforcement perspective, writing crime fiction, so that works out well. I knew I wanted to have some a law enforcement official. Actually, this is where the brainstorming process went well. Jeff and I worked together, and we thought about it and thought about it, and we’re like, What do we want here? I knew I wanted to be a I knew I wanted her to be Latina. That’s my background. But law enforcement is like, Let’s do something different, something fresh, something that hasn’t been done to death. After doing research, we decided on under the Department of Homeland Security, there is a little known but huge law enforcement branch that they have the Homeland Security Investigations, HSI. Then there’s a National Security Division below that. We thought, Well, let’s have her there. Lots of research involved. I thought that was something really different and exciting that people could look at. Also, we could put her anywhere in the world because that’s global. We could have her do all kinds of different things that most people don’t know about.

[00:17:21.830] – Isabella Maldonado
Jeff and I were talking about what would be another character for her to work with. When we were thinking about it, Jeff came up with this really brilliant idea about intrusions. I’ll let him explain that to you because I think it’s such genius. It’s something that he made up, but yet people are going, Oh, wow, that’s a real thing.

[00:17:43.410] – Jeffrey Deaver
Actually, I was an attorney a long time ago, and I can’t say that I actually ever thought of my cases. I did mostly corporate law, no criminal law, but I did some civil litigation. I I liked tort law best. I wrote my law review article on products liability, a very interesting topic. Of course, it covers everybody. Everybody in the world uses products, and many people have been injured by products. I thought, not only is it an interesting legal conceit, but it also has certain social benefits to protect people and so on. One element of… One way to look at tort law, tort is a civil wrong. It could be defamation, it could be an injury, car crash is a tort, defaming somebody is a tort. One way to look at that is in terms of intrusion. Somebody intrudes into your life. Something intrudes into your life. You can expand that. Of course, this is what I was thinking about, the person who became Jake Heron. You can expand that into government intrusion, corporate intrusion, telemarketing marketers, for instance, talk about intruding. I can’t show you my cell phone right now without scrolling through to find, frankly, a lot of polling questions and so forth.

[00:19:10.120] – Jeffrey Deaver
But frankly, that’s intrusion. I thought, Well, what if this guy got an idea? He’s quirky. He teaches at a school like Cal in the Bay Area. It’s not Cal, it’s not University of California, Berkeley, but it’s like that, private institution. What if The bee in his bonnet is intrusion, and he wants to save people from intrusion. As I mentioned, a black hat hacking background. Well, he was an intruder, but back then, he intruded on the bad guys who were intruding. It’s hypocritical, and we talk about that a little bit in the book. But I thought, Well, this could be a very interesting thing. A guy who doesn’t play by the rules necessarily and who pushes the boundaries a bit to get justice and is a geek in a way, but a cool geek. He was like black clothes. His professional job is called penetration testing, which is a great job. I wish I had the skill, the physical energy at this stage and the guts to do it, because what these people do is they break into… They’re hired by a company or a government organization to break into the company or the entity and test their security. They have a get-out-of-jail free card. When they’re arrested, which they sometimes are, they say, Oh, no, I’m doing it with permission. Anyway, Jake and Carmen have a quite interesting past. I’m hesitating because the book is full of surprises. We must have 20 what? Carmen, excuse me, Isabella. We must have what? 20 or 30 twists in it. Some of them have to do with Carmen and Jake’s background, so I can’t say anything there. But she enlists him for this very difficult case to try to find a nefarious parent serial killer, and the story goes from there.

[00:21:09.380] – Alan Petersen
Isabella, I really like that with the characters. Both characters are great to get to know, and her sister’s involved in this. This is why she gets so involved in it. Carmen does. I know that from your other books, the family, and that dynamic is very important to you. Can you talk to us a little bit about that?

[00:21:29.090] – Isabella Maldonado
It is. I always, all of my books, I do put a lot of family in there, and I also do put some culture in there, too. It varies. Some books are really culturally a lot more in-depth than others, but they all have a family thing. Part of that is to give my characters depth. I think sometimes when we’re watching, especially police on television or in the movies or what have you, or even in books, when we read about them, they seem very one-dimensional. It’s like, Well, okay, when they get off work, what are they doing? What do they do? They just shut down? No, they go home to a family. Having done that many years myself, I know that your personal life is incredibly complicated, and it does tend to bleed into your professional life. I always like to show that.

[00:22:24.720] – Alan Petersen
That’s something, too. I just wonder about the challenges in that because, yes, it’s got some high tech stuff and the police investigations and then the family, but it’s still like a fast-moving, action-thriller. Is that something that’s discussed or how does that come together?

[00:22:42.630] – Jeffrey Deaver
Well, it is our template for both of our books. We intend our books, and Fatal Intrusion, to be read in one sitting. This is not a, quote, interesting book. Would you ever walk up to your partner and say, Oh, my My dear, that’s an interesting dress or what an interesting suit. No. I mean, you want a Sweaty Palm fascinating, a pedal to the metal, Florida, whatever they say, but a roller coaster. Move, move, move. We’re very contemplating about that. That’s what people want. They want to be taken out of their daily cares. I’m saying nothing more, except these last few years are some times we would like to taken out of and lost in a good story with heroes, good people, and good against evil. That was really our intention. Isabella taught me something to always consider. Now, I instinctively make sure my books move quickly, but why don’t you talk about the springboard? This was a great idea, Isabella. By the way, I’ve stolen it from you. This is the first time I I’m guilty of a theft. I’m telling a former police officer that I’ve stolen something.

[00:24:05.960] – Isabella Maldonado
That’s right. It started during our outlining all the way in the beginning. This is something I also outlined, but mine are much smaller outlines than Jeff’s. But at the end of each chapter, even during the outline, I literally put the word hook and then would express something that we could both think about that would drive drive the reader forward. It doesn’t have to be something super obvious, the old, they’re getting ready to drive off a cliff. It doesn’t need to be that almost cliché. It can just be that you have a question, that there’s a question raised. But sometimes it is something very dramatic, like they open the door and there’s someone facing them with a gun. It can be any hook. It could be a psychological hook, it can be an emotional hook, and it can be an action hook. But whatever it is at the very end, it forms a springboard that it compels the reader to turn the page and find out what happens next. It’s very much done intentionally and at very specific points, really.

[00:25:19.740] – Alan Petersen
I have to say it’s amazing reading the book because especially now, knowing how collaborative it really was between both of you, how your writing styles are so similar because you really can’t tell when you’re reading it. Isabella wrote this, Jeffrey wrote that. That’s just amazing.

[00:25:39.130] – Jeffrey Deaver
In a way, it really was written by both of us, jointly. Now, that seems like a truism, but what I mean is when we went through it, and we probably rewrote and edited 50, 60 times from start to finish, the styles blend together. I would add it, she would add it, and we merged into a homogenized style that reflected both of our individual styles to a large extent. But I think it… Well, for instance, there was a passage. I said, That’s great. I’m really happy you put that in because it’s well written and it moves the story along. She said, Jeff, you wrote that. I literally didn’t remember. It went the other way as well. I simply didn’t remember. I don’t think either of us could have written a book with an author who, say, wrote a more introspective first-person style. The author, Ruth Rendell, wrote murder mysteries, the Inspector Wexford murder mysteries, classic British mystery writing. Then as her alter ego, Barbara Vine She wrote these deep psychological thrillers that didn’t really move very well. I shouldn’t say very well. They did not move very quickly. They were brilliantly written. Style was very different.

[00:27:14.150] – Jeffrey Deaver
But I think Isabelle and I could have written a joint book with Ruth Rendell. We could not have written a book with Barbara Vine because it was just a very different style.

[00:27:26.520] – Alan Petersen
Are there going to be more books with Sanchez and Heron?

[00:27:29.640] – Isabella Maldonado
Absolutely. As a matter of fact, even as we speak, Jeff and I are writing the sequel. It is called The Grief Artist. I like that. It’s already up for pre-order. Oh, wow. Yes. You can at Bookstores or on Amazon, all over, you can already pre-order it. So, yeah, we are busy up to no good writing all kinds of murder and mayhem.

[00:27:57.840] – Jeffrey Deaver
If I knew how to I don’t really have a technical background, but I’ve written about four very detailed cyber readers, going back to my book, The Blue Nowhere, written in 1999, in which there was a hacker involved, and he hacked up through dial-up connections. Now, I don’t know if you or any of your listeners out there are old enough or viewers, listeners are old enough to know what a dial-up was. I will not try to mimic the sound of a modem, but those who’ve heard it, it’s very distinctive. That was my first cyber book, and I’ve written probably three or four, one about data mining, one about an attack on the grid, the power grid, and so forth, and also the blogosphere. I have a bit of a background with regard to that. But if I had the skill to be able to lift this camera off and point it down at another window on my computer, which I wouldn’t do because I’d probably drop it, you would see the book that I was writing, the sequel, The Grief Artist, I was working on until three minutes before I logged on to this. The minute we log off here with four minutes to go get a new cup of coffee, I’m back working on that.

[00:29:17.860] – Jeffrey Deaver
Because you all can pre-order it. Wonderful. Isabel and I have to finish it. That’s our job. So you have your job, we have ours.

[00:29:27.350] – Alan Petersen
A little bit of pressure, huh?

[00:29:29.800] – Jeffrey Deaver
We drive on pressure. That’s the nature of thriller writing.

[00:29:33.590] – Alan Petersen
I wanted to ask about that, Jeffrey, because we’re living right now tech-wise in probably the biggest disruption since the Internet, probably with the AI and all this stuff coming around. What are your thoughts on that in the future for writers and fans of readers? It’s such a hot topic right now.

[00:29:52.620] – Jeffrey Deaver
Sure. Technology is a tool, and I’ve always used a computer. I wrote my first book in the 1980s, and I’ve never written long-hand. I bought the first… Believe it or not, I pulled my money and I got one of the first computers. It was an NEC, Nipon Electronics. It was a CPM operating system. It’s long, long, gone. But it was… Msdos wasn’t even around. Bill Gates hadn’t even gotten his product to market yet. I’ve always sunk whatever money it took into the latest technology. This is a business. It’s a profession. You don’t want a pilot to say, Oh, today we’re going to fly in a biplane. I’m sorry. It just sounds like fun. I told my students in my course, Well, you may want to write by hand, but is that going to give your readers the most… I mean, handwrite with pen and paper. Is that going to give your readers the best artistic experience they can have? And I suspect not. So I’ve always I’ve followed the technology. I think it’s important. The other thing is that my job is to scare the socks off my readers. Always has been. I think technology is such an important part of our life that I use it.

[00:31:15.770] – Jeffrey Deaver
I manipulate the story so that readers will think, Well, there’s something… This computer is misbehaving. I wonder what that means. One premise was, well, that means that somebody has shut off the indicator light that your camera’s on and is watching everything you do. I want people to feel creeped out. Now, with regard to artificial intelligence, I’m not going to do the whole thing, but in my course, I have to teach that. The subject of is AI, is ChatGPT, or Bing, are they going to write our books for us now? I cite a fairly long quotation, which I’m not going to give now, but the gist of it is that large language models, which is what these systems can certainly write fiction. It’s possible, but it tends to lack the emotional depth that’s required for fiction. More importantly, it also represents a bias in fiction because fiction has largely been written in America, at least, by white males. Writers of color are underrepresented in the information that the large language models scrape up. That’s changing, thank goodness, but right now, that’s where it is. Then I pause and I look at my audience and I say, Every single word I just recited to you was written by ChatGPT in response to my question, Can you write fiction?

[00:32:44.210] – Jeffrey Deaver
The end result is that, No, we’re not in any danger at all. I’ve tried it. It doesn’t work just for the fun of it. I’ve even tried editing with ChatGPT, and it doesn’t work very well. I have predictive It’s a text. Certainly spell checks, it can grammar check, but I can’t use ChatGPT. Why? Because I write crime books. It violates the terms of service to refer to a gun. Yeah, I can write Banana instead and then globally search and replace it, but that’s cumbersome. Who needs it anyway? Maybe in 100 years, that’ll be different. But I’m not talking about non-conviction. I think teachers live in utter horror of somehow kids are going to game the system even more than they are right now. I don’t see AI as being much of a threat to the world of crime fiction.

[00:33:39.380] – Alan Petersen
All right, both. This has been fantastic. I always like to finish off with my guests because I do have inspiring writers that listen to this podcast. Any advice for them, especially if they’re consuming co-writing?

[00:33:51.090] – Jeffrey Deaver
Isabel, you want to jump in?

[00:33:53.220] – Isabella Maldonado
Well, let’s see. Well, okay. I’ll take it back one step just advice in general, and this is something that we hit upon earlier, which is go to conferences and network and join writers groups, the big professional organizations, and work as hard as you can to hone your skills, first and foremost, and be humble about editing. But then when it comes to co-writing, it really is important to find someone, if you want to do it, that you do both like and that you respect, and that you do have a writing style that will mesh. I am dear friends with several writers, but I could not write with them because they’re pantsers or just because as much as I love them, our personalities, as far as working and working and working and working, it wouldn’t happen. That thing is very important. The last thing I would say is just about the no ego zone. It was so nice to find out that someone as incredibly well known and everything as Jeff, and he’s written 50 novels or something, you would think that he would just be, Oh, I don’t need to… I know everything, but he’s not that way at all. He’s extremely Hey, edit my stuff. What do you think of this idea? That thing. That humility is priceless.

[00:35:38.720] – Jeffrey Deaver
My advice, and thank you for that, Isabella. My advice, just a very brief synopsis of my four-hour course. Don’t worry, it won’t go nearly that long. First of all, outline in some form. You have to know where you’re going to go. Joyce Carole said, You can’t write your first sentence until you know what your last sentence is. So you need some roadmap. It It could be three pages, it could be 100 pages, but you need to know where that’s going to go. Write in the style or the genre of the stories that you love. If you’re a sci-fi reader, don’t get the idea that you’re going to write Gumshoe Mickey Spillane readers because that’s where the money is. Write what you enjoy reading because it’s a tough job writing, and you need something to sustain you and enjoy it. Also, you will have learned a lot of the conventions by already reading. You need to rewrite a great deal. No book is ever finished. No book is ever finished. I could take fatal intrusion right now, and I would say, Let me do this. Let me do that. You just have to keep going until there comes the point when it’s time to let it go and move on to another book.

[00:36:55.090] – Jeffrey Deaver
Try to produce frequently. If you write a book that readers like Now you’ve got a responsibility to them to keep getting the product out there. You don’t go into the drug store and look at the shelf and say, Oh, wait, where’s the toothpaste? And the clerk says, Well, Proctor & Gamble was not inspired by the news to make toothpaste, so you’re going to have to wait. That doesn’t work. Then finally, I would say, remember that this business is about rejection. We’ve all been rejected dozens, if not hundreds of times. I certainly have been rejected 100 times or so. It’s a speed bump. It’s not a brick wall. Don’t let it stop you. Take the criticism that you get and run it through your own mind and your own skill level and say, Does this make sense? Is this criticism of why this is being rejected? Does it make sense or does it not? Is it simply a flip of the coin by the editor or agent who looked at it? Then if it does, then maybe integrate that into your work. Most likely it doesn’t. Most likely it’s just that somebody didn’t happen to like this particular thing that you’ve written. Move on. If you write a quality book, or a short story, there’s a market for it out there. Don’t wait and don’t hesitate to keep growing until you find that market.

[00:38:20.360] – Alan Petersen
That’s great. I wanted to ask you, Jeffrey, too, you mentioned your course. Is that something that’s available online?

[00:38:24.690] – Jeffrey Deaver
You’ll find it listed on my website. I usually teach it through. It’s not It’s a tenured professor thing. I do it at libraries. I do it as a benefit, actually, for literacy groups. Then I do it commercially as well if I put it together. It’s not all that expensive, but it’s helpful. There’s no writing involved. It’s not a workshopping. You sit, you listen, you take notes. That’s all there is to it.

[00:38:52.100] – Alan Petersen
All right. Well, that sounds great. All right. Well, thank you so much, September first. By the time this comes out, well, it’s already on Kindle First Reads and everything. And the second book is a pre-order, but I highly recommend it. I really enjoyed this. Thank you both for being on the podcast. I really appreciate it.

[00:39:06.810] – Jeffrey Deaver
Well, thank you, Ralph. Good talking to you.

[00:39:08.430] – Isabella Maldonado
Thank you. It was fun.

[00:39:09.780] – Alan Petersen
Thanks for tuning in to this episode of Meet the Thriller Author. If you enjoyed today’s interview, don’t forget to subscribe, leave a review, and share this podcast with your fellow thriller lovers. And remember, you can get your hands on my latest best seller, The Basement, for just 99 cents at thrillingreads. Com/basement. Stay thrilled, and I’ll see you in the next episode.