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This transcript was generated with the help of AI and only got a quick once-over from a human. So if you spot a typo or something that doesn’t make sense… let’s just blame the robots. 🤖

[00:00:10.120] – Alan Petersen
Hey, everybody. This is Alan Petersen with Meet the Thriller author. I’m really excited for today’s chat with Eric Rickstad. He is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author behind the Remote series. These books are a mix of high-stake suspense with some fascinating real-life inspired stuff like CIA remote viewing programs, which we’ll get into it during the interview. Eric, thanks so much for joining me.

[00:00:54.200] – Eric Rickstad
Oh, thanks for having me on. I appreciate it.

[00:00:56.480] – Alan Petersen
Before we get into all that good stuff, I’d love to start at the beginning. What inspired you to start writing stories, and how did it eventually lead to thrillers and suspense?

[00:01:09.340] – Eric Rickstad
I’ve always been a big reader since I was able to read. And early on, reading stuff like Encyclopedia Brown or Roald Dahl or a little bit later on Poe. But even third grade or so, I loved reading so much. I wanted to know how it was you could affect someone with words on a page. You can make someone scared, or you can make them cry, or you can make them laugh, or all of those at once. And in fifth grade, I was in a literary lunch where once a week, myself and six others of us with the library would discuss the current book we were reading. We would pick a book. It was like a book club. I just started writing very early on and then I had some success when I was in college publishing short stories in literary magazines and the like. One day, I was writing what I thought was another short story, and I was 40 pages in and not even through the first scene. I was like, I think I’m working on a novel. I’ve always been interested for various reasons in crime and criminality, but also in victimhood and the those who are victimized and what that does to a person.

[00:02:33.940] – Eric Rickstad
So I’ve always had a combination of that thriller, suspense, crime, but also the implications of it and the impact and the aftermath of that. So it distinguishes my work a little bit from others. I’m not interested in just a body count, that type of thing. But that novel ended up getting published. I didn’t even tell anyone I was working on a novel because who isn’t? What do you know I’m working on? No, I’m working on my novel. Oh, of course you are. One thing just led to another, and I kept writing them and getting them published and had some really great success with some of them. It’s just gone from there. Ended up doing what it was I hoped I might do.

[00:03:26.420] – Alan Petersen
Yeah, that’s awesome. You guys started pretty young then, really. That’s pretty amazing.

[00:03:32.700] – Eric Rickstad
Yeah. My mom worked at a hardware store, and so I’d stop in after school and on the weekends and stuff to check in with her. There was always someone telling stories there. It was like a center of town where they’d go in and buy some grass seed and some wrenches and end up staying for a half an hour because they were all telling stories. I was around that oral tradition a lot. My mom was really big into reading as well and film and film noir and Hitchcock and stuff. So that also informs the bent that I have toward the darker crime genres.

[00:04:19.540] – Alan Petersen
I was reading your bio. You live in Vermont, and I know your books are set in Vermont, especially small towns like you’re just mentioning now. I wanted to ask you about that. What is it about that setting that makes such a great background for your books?

[00:04:36.700] – Eric Rickstad
I think at first, naturally, it just came from writing from what was around me and what I knew and stuff. But then there’s especially the Northeast and some in the cat skills and stuff of New York. But New England has that tradition of the Gothic woods and things lurking in the woods and small towns, and they’re very picturesque and an ideal picturesque places to live. But there’s humans there, too. So there’s other things going on. There’s people who mean other people ill and who are pretending to be good citizens. Every once in a while, growing up, you’d find out about so and so that was in trouble for this or that. And I had a friend that ended up, that I grew up with become a violent criminal, and none of us really understood it. And so there’s always that, the David Lynch or the Stephen King, whatever way they approach that, that underbelly of that picturesque small town place where if humans live, Then it’s possible that human crime and violence can take place. And then how that affects the town, not just the individual, but the town. And so it’s right with just material and that brooding, gloomy sense of the woods itself in isolation and things like that.

[00:06:25.560] – Alan Petersen
As you mentioned earlier, you mentioned Poe and some of the earlier writers that influenced you. What about when you start thinking a bit now, writing for readers and suspense and horror, which author has influenced you the most as a writer?

[00:06:40.040] – Eric Rickstad
Dennis Lehane was huge. Back around the early 2000s and stuff when he was really rocking a lot of really great, great knowledge. Not that he still isn’t, but that just when he was just before Mackenzie and just before his books were made into movies, I was he was very influential because he has a literary bent. He really takes his time crafting the words and the sentence structure itself and immersing you in the Boston area. I lived in Boston, and I liked how he really took his time and wasn’t afraid to set the stage and immerse you in these places, whereas a lot of crime and thriller. It’s just, Let’s go, let’s go. We don’t have time to linger on a neighborhood in Charleston. Let’s just stick really tight to the action. I liked that, and I enjoyed that a lot, and I like Tanya French and Kate Atkinson and those that are really steeped in location and setting. Every little thing a character does, the car they drive, the clothes they wear, how they speak. I like writers that take the time to do that even in, quote, unquote genre fiction. That just appeals to me as a reader and a writer.

[00:08:16.120] – Alan Petersen
Looking back, like I said, you started publishing short stories a long time ago when you were younger. When you look back at your debut novel, Reep, I’m just curious because you’ve been at it for a while. How has your writing style or process evolved during all those years? Is it pretty much the same or does it keep evolving?

[00:08:36.480] – Eric Rickstad
It has evolved. With different novels, I sometimes use it, have a different voice. My novel, Lilith, was a departure. It was first person. It was present tense. Most of my writing had tended to be third person past tense and multiple points of view. That’s primarily how I still write, although Lilith, I am not who you think I am. We’re both first person throughout the whole with one point of view. I think Lilith was the biggest departure as far as writing style and voice and how much it differed from what I’ve done. But remote, even though those are set across the whole country, and sometimes it’s very suburban or urban areas, I think the emphasis on language and trying to really immerse the reader remains somewhat the same of not being afraid to set up a scene and linger in a scene to develop more than just the plot or suspense and letting some suspense come from a character’s background or their interactions, their personal interactions, and ramping up the tension and suspense in other ways. I think of Dennis Lehane and scenes where they’re just investigating. Mckenzie’s investigating. There’s great undercurrent of violence within the scene that never necessarily takes place as they’re interviewing people in these city areas of some of these neighborhoods, and you breathe a sigh of relief when they’re out of that situation.

[00:10:29.100] – Eric Rickstad
The suspense comes just from that interaction, that it’s possible at any time, that things could go really awry.

[00:10:39.540] – Alan Petersen
Overall, the writing, with a few exceptions, has It remains somewhat the same in establishing the things I like to establish and trying to write as well as I can without letting the writing also get in the way where it’s just about a pretty sentence.

[00:11:00.000] – Eric Rickstad
Or whatever.

[00:11:01.680] – Alan Petersen
Yeah, I don’t know how that one goes. I was wondering, we’re going to go actually to the remote series. It’s very fascinating. Can you tell us about when you first started to get the idea about that and talk a little bit? Did it start out with the CIA Psychic programs? Can you tell us a little bit about how that all came to be?

[00:11:21.460] – Eric Rickstad
Yeah, I’ve always been interested in those CIA programs back in the ’50s and ’60s. They had legitimate funded programs with, Let’s give some of our agents mega doses of LSD and see what happens. That’s not fiction. They did that. The records are there and the things have been released that should demonstrate that. I was watching Wormwood, a documentary about that, and a CIA agent who had died, and his son has since thought that the CIA had something very literally to do with that death. It was intriguing. Then at the same time, they were actually very much involved in investigating and experimenting with the ability to remote view, someone that can supposedly see events that are taking place in real-time from great distances, even halfway around the world. They had a program for about 10 years of exploring that, partly because they believed the Soviet Union at the time was doing the same thing, which they very well may have. That just intrigued me. There were some anecdotal instances in cases where maybe this person really did have an impact on solving this case or catching this person because they said they do it, and it seemed like they proved they could do it.

[00:13:03.020] – Eric Rickstad
And I just liked that idea. And I’m a skeptic and a cynic of those sorts of things. So I had fun with this character that’s in remote needing to prove to me as the writer, but prove to the reader and his colleague that ends up being put in the FBI, needing to convince this FBI agent, too. Like, well, I’m not buying. I don’t want to work this guy. I’m not buying it, but I have to prove to me that what you say you can do is legitimate, and I’ll start to maybe believe you and work with you.

[00:13:39.860] – Alan Petersen
Yeah, I enjoyed that. It reminded me a lot of X-Files with Mulder and Scully, like that relationship between Lucas Stark and Garnier. It’s cool. I like that, how they played off each other, the trust in there. I know you said that’s important to you, the building the characters and the and all that. How did that all come together for you two as well? How do you keep track of that? Were you thinking about it as you’re writing it, or do you plan that all out?

[00:14:10.920] – Eric Rickstad
I usually don’t plan it out. I did some with this because of it being new material, and I had not written an FBI book because it’s very much an FBI manhunt, cat and mouse, real thriller. There were things that I’d never written about, like the FBI procedure and what they do and what they can do. I spoke with a couple FBI agents who had been with the FBI for 25 or 30 years, a married couple that had been in the FBI together and learned a lot in that regard. But once I start writing, even if I were to outline hard and fast and somehow had put all on page, like this is what happens in each chapter, which I’ve never done. But I know I would depart from that anyway, because once you start writing, it takes on its own life and the characters, and you get better ideas than what you originally had anyway, and more specific ideas because of how things are unfolding. That wouldn’t work now anyway. That’s the fun of… A great appeal to writing itself is the discovery of where things are going. I set the stage with these two characters that were at opposing ends of the spectrum, how to approach a case, force together, and trying to find this person who’s killing families and arranging them in strange tableaus in their houses and went from there, really not knowing exactly how I was going to work my way out of it, which I enjoy, backing myself in corners. I’m trying to find my way out.

[00:16:09.880] – Alan Petersen
A brave writer. Looking good. That was another thing, too. What really drove me when I first started writing the synopsis for your book was that you tackled some of the genre myths of serial killer thriller types. That was important to you. I saw that when I was reading. I read the six, the first one.

[00:16:32.580] – Eric Rickstad
Yeah, great. Thank you.

[00:16:33.960] – Alan Petersen
Yeah. That was cool because it was interesting. I love the Silence of the Lambs and all those type of readers and even the more trope-following ones.

[00:16:45.120] – Eric Rickstad
Right.

[00:16:45.640] – Alan Petersen
Is that something… Were you worried about that? You want to blow up some of those myths that we’ve seen in books and movies, but you want to entertain. Is that something you were thinking? Yeah.

[00:16:55.900] – Eric Rickstad
It was fun to me to… I love Silence of the Lambs, Red Dragon, all of those. A little more recently, Mind Hunter, and I was bummed when they canceled it after two seasons. But I did have fun with this agent, Lucas Stark, who wants nothing to do with a remote viewer or a psychic, as he puts it, or any of that, but also with… He’s at odds, let’s say, professionally with the behavioral sciences and profiling in general, in that it has taken on an iconic pop culture trope, where it’s believed by most that profiling really helps specifically to find and arrest and apprehend people. But really, it’s more of a peripheral help to maybe trying to figure out who this person might be, what their tendencies might be, rather than, Oh, if you can just give us enough information from the profiler, then we’ll just knock on their door and show up. We’ll figure it out without any real police work or investigative work. And so I had fun dismantling some of the myth that is out just in pop culture of the profiler with a capital P and making it more of the Profiler who helps out.

[00:18:32.180] – Eric Rickstad
And the character, Lucas Stark, makes a point of saying, Well, we always associate two profilers with serial killers. And They help with a lot more than other cases, and the high, very infamous serial killers. But none of them were ever apprehended through profiling at all. His son is Sam, He wanted a bad parking ticket and some other things that played into it. The BTK basically couldn’t resist 20 years later, taunting the police again until they were able to figure out. Ted Bundy, it was because a victim escaped and said, he’s got this weird colored VW that’s a coppery color. He gets pulled over for a bad on that VW, and he’s caught. He’s very much against it, this character, and says, if Ted Bundy had been profiled, he would have been a basement dweller, non-social social, poorly educated, all of these things, and he was anything but. He was this charming, educated, very articulate, sociable person. I had fun with that and dismantling it through this character.

[00:20:06.400] – Alan Petersen
When I was doing my little research before the interview, I saw that Don Winslow called remote mind hunter with a volume turned up. That’s got to be pretty cool. How is it when you get endorsements like that?

[00:20:17.720] – Eric Rickstad
It’s great. I mean, he’s one of the best, and I’ve loved his work for a long time, too. Along with like, Lehane and Savages in particular, I really liked and his whole trilogy that he did. He’s got another one out now of short stories. Yeah, it’s wonderful to get someone of Dawn’s stature and someone I’m a big fan of to say that about my work, for sure.

[00:20:49.300] – Alan Petersen
Yeah, I wanted to ask you about that, too. You mentioned you talked to the FBI agents, and I know that in the knowledgements of your book, you also sought the help of a Vermont state troop A detective friend of yours. Yeah. So curious, how is the research? How much research do you do? And just how do you find these people?

[00:21:10.960] – Eric Rickstad
Yeah. So with the FBI, two people in the FBI who were just helpful beyond. I couldn’t have written it without their help and their generosity and specificity. I had hours long phone conversations with them where I could ask them anything at all about surveillance and tactical gear and legalities and warrants and protocol and what would they do if there was victims that seemed to be connected to a certain crime? What threshold did it have to pass to them being, yes, this is part of our case, even though it’s in a different state. So that was through a friend of a friend who said, Hey, my friend knows these people. And so that was great. And then my friend, who’s the Homicide Detective here in Vermont. And Vermont is a small state, and he basically goes to every single homicide or violent high-level crime anywhere in the state. And I met him, Even though we’re in the same small town, I hadn’t met him until he and I were Little League coaches for the same team. Neither one of us had ever been Little League coaches. And when we signed, I signed up my son, who’s in his daughter’s class, he signed up his daughter, and then you fill out the checkbox, Would you like to volunteer?

[00:22:51.560] – Eric Rickstad
He had checked out, Yes, I’ll volunteer. I checked volunteer thinking, I’ll work at the food truck or I’ll I’ll help keep the dugout organized. Well, we both got ended up the only two volunteers, so we were the coaches. Then when we met cleaning out the shack in the spring, he We got to know each other and discovered we both like deer hunting and stuff. Then he’s like, Oh, what do you do? I’m like, Well, I’m a crime writer. I write about murders. I’m like, What do you do? He’s like, Well, I’m the state’s lead homicide detective. It was really funny. I just hung out with him two days ago here on the other morning. Any question I have, I can ask him anytime. Text him. I’m texting, text them frequently. Hey, what would happen if… And there were certain circumstances in remote where I was pinned down and back myself in the corner. I said, I don’t know if they I could do this legally or what would make sense. And he walks me through it. Sometimes I don’t mind because it is fiction that, well, it probably couldn’t happen in real life, but I’m going to let it go.

[00:24:13.080] – Eric Rickstad
If there’s just no work around and I’m in this scenario, another time, he’ll help me with, Well, here’s another thing to consider. And he’s been a great help. Or when we’re picking up our kids at school, we’re hanging out, waiting for him to come out. If I have a question, I’ll ask him. He’s also helped me get a good insight into the real nuts and bolts of being a homicide detective in a smaller region. When he says, I got to go to work after I pick up my daughter, I know what that means. It has been a murder. He’s got to go three hours. For him, with the job, he might have to go three hours north of the Canada border of Vermont in a snowstorm. He’s got to figure out how to get there as quickly as he can, even though you can’t drive fast and find a babysitter and all these very practical things that help me ground a character now. He’s like, I’m more interested. We got to find a babysitter. My wife’s a teacher. She can’t drop her off or pick her up because she’s in a different district. Those are things that I had never really thought about, practically.

[00:25:29.100] – Eric Rickstad
Now, they add that realism to police officers and detectives that I write because it gives it that insight that you can’t really get anywhere else except from someone who does it.

[00:25:45.740] – Alan Petersen
Yeah, that’s the thing. I’ve interviewed a lot of authors who were police officers, detectives, and stuff, and FBI agents. They always say that, that usually in the books, there are always no families that can go anywhere, no problem. Right. I love that part that it makes it a lot more realistic.

[00:26:03.300] – Eric Rickstad
Just to get to-It’s like they’re always balancing and trying to figure out what… They have families, they have kids. For me, it’s helpful to have them have those lives.

[00:26:20.480] – Alan Petersen
I was reading, regarding your writing process, now, let me shift here a little bit. I read that you’d like to do a lot of… When you first get How did you start on a project, like with handwritten notes. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Because now an addition- Most of my novels I’ve written, almost in their entirety, first draft in notebooks with a pencil.

[00:26:45.940] – Eric Rickstad
I like a pencil. I like to be outside as much as possible, so that frees me up to do that. I can work even if it’s just on my back deck or whatever. But sometimes I’ll I’ll write somewhere else. If my son has a practice that I’m watching soccer practice or baseball practice or something, I’ll bring a notebook and jot down some ideas. But I have boxes and boxes and boxes of notebooks of every kind. You can imagine from the last 20 years, and there’s something about the physicality of it that I like, and I like being able to… It’s like With your iPhone, not that you want to, but you can’t slam an iPhone down on someone. You could hang up. When you got hung up on, you were buying it being hanged and then crossed by both people. It was a real… Hitting the delete key and backing up doesn’t have the same feel as scratching something out and Xing it out or drawing an arrow. I’ll circle this paragraph and draw an arrow down here. This is where it really belongs, or just Xing out a whole page because it’s just not working, and I like that.

[00:28:06.980] – Eric Rickstad
The connection helps my thought process, too, my creativity in a way that just writing a first draft wholesale onto my laptop in a Word doc just doesn’t have.

[00:28:24.780] – Alan Petersen
Now I’m curious, how many notebooks is it for a 70, 80, 90,000-word?

[00:28:30.400] – Eric Rickstad
It’s quite a few. It’s probably… If it was just a regular college-ruled composition notebook, it’d probably be four or five of those.

[00:28:45.360] – Alan Petersen
What’s the process then? Once you’re done, do you then type it into your laptop?

[00:28:50.200] – Eric Rickstad
Yeah. Sometimes I’ll get to a certain point and be like, I got to really type some of this in because I’ve never gone where I’ve written all the way through to the end and then said, Now I’ll type it in because it’s a lot of strain to look at it, try to even read my own handwriting, which is horrible. It’s like reading 80,000-word prescription by your doctor. I’ll get four or five chapters and then start typing them in. Then while I am typing them, I’m editing, too. I never have just typed it in verbatim. I can’t help but start to change it and write it in a way that I feel is better or leaving something off that’s in the notebook and just leaving it in the notebook because I don’t think it works now or whatever. But yeah, I usually get so far and then I really got to catch up with myself and spend an afternoon or a day writing in 10,000 words or 20 or whatever it is, and then resuming in the notebooks.

[00:30:10.460] – Alan Petersen
And in that process, when you go digital, is that using Microsoft Word?

[00:30:15.400] – Eric Rickstad
Yeah, just an award doc. By then, so it’s… By the time I have it typed in, it’s the second draft.

[00:30:25.740] – Alan Petersen
I was just thinking about that. So yeah, that’s a great way. So by that time, you’re already ready You’re already on the second draft.

[00:30:31.500] – Eric Rickstad
Yeah, I’m already on the second draft, and I feel it’s closer and tighter. Then I do a lot of draughts. I rewrite and rewrite and rewrite.

[00:30:41.340] – Alan Petersen
How long is the process from the time that you first crack open that notebook till you’re ready to send it off to your editor? How long does that usually take you for a book like Remote to 6?

[00:30:50.820] – Eric Rickstad
It varies. I’d say on average, a year and a half or so. I mean, the book Lilith took me 10 years to write on and off. Reep took me about three. That was my first one. But on average, probably a year and a half to two. Some I’ve written in 10 months because they were just right there for me, and I was off and running the Canan Crimes series, the second book in that. By the time I finished the first one, I knew exact… I just kept writing, basically. That came really quickly because I was right in the wheelhouse for it. Probably a year and a half overall.

[00:31:37.560] – Alan Petersen
The first two remote books are out now. Are you working on a third? What are you working on now? I think it’s a little sneak peek?

[00:31:45.700] – Eric Rickstad
I have another novel that I’ve completed and hopefully be working on more remote. I’m always working on one thing or another, short stories and stuff, too.

[00:31:59.760] – Alan Petersen
Okay, cool. Before I let you go, I always ask my guests because I have aspiring writers that listen to this. Any advice to anyone listening to this that wants to write readers and suspense?

[00:32:12.020] – Eric Rickstad
One of the big things is read really wide and deep. Read not just fiction and not just the fiction you’re writing. Read all over the place, non-conviction, poetry, the cereal box. I was always reading as a kid. It’s like I couldn’t sit and eat breakfast without reading something. And a lot of times it was a cereal box or it was a newspaper link or whatever it was. And I also try to get somewhat of consistency. If you can’t, because I worked for years where I was getting up at 4: 00 in the morning before work and writing for three hours before getting ready for work or I’d write after my wife went to sleep. But if you can get some consistency, and it’s like doing, I think of it as athletics for your mind, where if you want to get in really good shapes, say, or be good at a certain sport, the more you can consistently do it, the better your training. And so even if it’s a half an hour a day, write for a half an hour and try to do it every day or as consistently as you can. If If you can’t do that, that’s just how life is.

[00:33:33.720] – Eric Rickstad
But if you can, try to build a routine because it’s like, if you want to get in shape, you’re probably not going to get in great shape. Well, I can do it Saturday, and I’ll work out for 6 hours on Saturday. It’s just a consistency, and that might work for writing. If it’s all you have, that’s great. If it’s 6 hours on Saturday, go for it. But I think to write as routinely keeps that mind going. A lot of the writing happens when, quote, unquote, you’re not writing, and that’s where the consistency of putting pen to paper or writing in your word deck every day keeps the story going in your head more every day than if you only wrote six hours every other week or something. You have to come back to it.

[00:34:31.220] – Alan Petersen
Yeah, that’s the worst. When you stop for a while and you try to come back to it, it’s just like, oh.

[00:34:35.290] – Eric Rickstad
Yeah, like with anything else. It’s trickier, for sure.

[00:34:41.620] – Alan Petersen
All right, Eric. Well, thank you so much. Where can listeners find you? What’s your website? Or where can they find your info?

[00:34:47.960] – Eric Rickstad
My website is ericrickstad. Com, and then I’m on Twitter now and again, and I’m on Instagram as Eric Rickstad author, and on Twitter, it’s just Eric Rickstad. All right, great.

[00:35:07.340] – Alan Petersen
All right, Eric. Well, thank you so much for joining me today. It was a pleasure talking with you.

[00:35:11.980] – Eric Rickstad
I appreciate you having me on. Thank you.