FEATURED ARTIST FRIDAY: Seeley James

Pia Sabel plays to win. Until a few weeks ago, she was an international soccer star. But now she’s taken the helm of her billionaire father’s private security company, and she’s playing against a whole new set of opponents – the kind who shoot to kill.On her first day on the job, Pia’s client is assassinated in front of her. There’s no time for training, so Pia must trust her instincts and athletic skills to unravel the complicated maze of money laundering and piracy that will take her from Swiss mansions to the jungles of Cameroon. Her battle-hardened employees suspect she’s just a spoiled rich girl with a mean corner kick. But Pia’s got some unexpected moves of her own. Will they be enough to bring her team through its mission?  1. When and why did you start writing? I first wrote in high school because the assignments bored me. I hand wrote a ribald, profanity-laced, satirical weekly about students and teachers which was passed around the student body. I just about died when I walked into English class one day and saw the latest edition on my teacher’s desk. We had a quiz and while we agonized over our answers, my teacher, a pretty woman with big hair, leaned back and read my paper. I didn’t bother with the quiz, I just waited for her to call me forward to pronounce my death sentence. Instead, after five minutes of silence, she burst out laughing. 2. Why did you choose to write in this genre? For decades I read history, non-fiction, biographies, and other intellectually stimulating but boring crap. Occasionally I would read the NYT’s latest highly recommended literary snoozer. One day my wife insisted I read a thriller. It conjured up childhood memories of reading Treasure Island, Sherlock Holmes, Rudyard Kipling and other FUN books. I began reading mysteries and thrillers non-stop. I love and live the genre.3. Is anyone else in your family musical/artistic/writers? Describe your family members' artistic interests and abilities. My sisters are singers, my grandmother was a music teacher, my son (7th grade) is a standing-invitation trombone player in the local high school’s Varsity Jazz band, and my wife is stone-cold tone deaf. But my father is an architect. Architecture and writing are kindred disciplines -- they require a balance of art and engineering. Without both beauty and foundation, neither house nor novel would stand for long.4. What are your fondest writing memories? The moment I live for as a writer is watching someone read my work. That moment when their eyes light up, they laugh or cry or shiver, when you’ve reached inside them and plucked a nerve ending like a harp string--and you know it. 5. What advice would you give to beginners who are nervous? Preparation diminishes nervousness. Like public speaking, if you know your subject, you’ve studied your audience and your competition, and you’ve practiced with professional editors and honest reviewers, then you are ready and will have no fear.6. What inspires you to write?Bills. 7. Describe your process for writing/completing a novel.I write a chart, like a spreadsheet, with five columns: critical events, intended effects, clues, place, and character; and rows for time in days/hours which later become chapters. Then I start a different chart that outlines the crime: what is the criminal’s goal, what are his plans to achieve that goal? My third step is to decide where/when/why the heroine will cross the criminal’s path, how she will affect his plans, how he will react, and so on. These intersections where their two paths cross go into myoriginal chart as critical events. When I have a rough sketch, I start writing. As I write every five hundred to a thousand words, I go back to the chart of critical events and make adjustments. Once I finish the novel, I check my work against the chart and wonder why the hell I bothered with a chart about a bank robbery in Jacksonville when I ended up with a novel about arsonists in China.8. What is the hardest thing about writing?Reality.[stops writing and reviews last three days’ work] She was wearing a ball gown when they threw her in the Danube. OK, reality check, can you swim in a ball gown?ME: Honey, could you swim the Danube in a ball gown?HONEY: The Danube freezes in winter, you moron.ME:  damn. [deletes three days’ work, starts new chapter: Cairo, July, ball gown]9. What is the most important thing you have learned about yourself through writing?I can write passages that move people.Someday, I hope they move closer to the cash register instead of running away from my book after skimming the first page, but … baby steps. 10. Decribe your ideal place to write.I was a mobile executive in the real world, working from hotel rooms and guest worker spaces and cafés and airplanes. Being comfortable with a laptop and a phone, I carried that into my writing. I like to be somewhere different every few hours. I drop my kids at school and work from the coffee shop down the street, then I move to my back patio or dining room table. Sometimes I’ll go to my neighbor’s until they come home early and I have to sneak out the back door. (Think they notice the missing cookies?) Other days I’ll go to the local park. New place, new view, new ideas.11. How do ideas come to you?I think about them.I have a heroine whom I really admire and I put her in the path of very bad people. They have to be as bad as she is good.I recently started a serialized version (Trench Coats – coming soon) and had bad guys who were politicians hitting her up for ‘campaign donations’ with extortion tactics not unlike the Mafia (this really happened to a friend of mine who owns a very profitable pharmaceutical business). After I’d gotten twelve thousand words down, I realized, politicians are nothing. She couldflip them over in an instant. A voice recorder, a carefully worded conversation that she sends to the press—game over.I need badder bad guys.But I liked these bad guys. They wore suits and were so holy they could beat the Pope in prayer contest.I wracked my walnut-sized brain for a scenario that would cause these guys to go from standard intimidation to pressing the dammit-kill-her-now button. I chewed up ideas for days: they’ve taken campaign donations from Osama bin Laden –oh, right, he’s dead now. Um, they ran a car off a bridge in a drunken stupor and drowned a young staff worker—nah, that would neverhappen. I couldn’t move forward, I had to have a bad-bad guy. Every morning I climb the local mountain for an hour and a half before dawn and use that time to meditate on motivations and characters. One day I finally hit it. It was not a sudden epiphany, but I knew what they were hiding from her and how she would figure it out. When I got home, I wrote four thousand words in onesitting and scratched out five thousand from the existing manuscript. At the moment, I know what they are hiding, and I know how she’ll figure it out, but I don’t have the middle. And the dark overlord who manipulates people like a puppeteer is still just a hulking shadow. But I’ll keep thinking, trying this and tossing it out in favor of that until I am sure that what I have written will entertain people. 12. Who has been the biggest influence on your writing? Why?Lee Child and Zoe Sharp both influence me. I could never write like either of them, but I pull from their work specific admirable effects. From Mr. Child’s work I take the framing of clues. He shows them to you but you don’t connect the dots. Then he has his main character, Jack Reacher, explain them to you. Once he does that, he’s established that he, the author, is in control of this story, you can relax and float downstream.Zoe Sharp taught me that there is an element of humanity that belongs in thrillers. Like many authors, I ignore it in favor of a good chase scene, but reading her work reminds me we can do much more. Sometimes Ms. Sharp is funnier than Janet Evanovich and sometimes she’s deeper than Ian McEwan, but she always touches you without manipulating you. Quite the delicate touch. Those two I admire above all others.13. How would you like to be remembered?This is a question that always strikes me as odd. No matter what you believe (I happen to be a Christian at the moment but my 89-year-old mother is trying to convert me to Buddhism), one shouldn’t be concerned with the earth after one’s left it. If you’re an atheist, why care how others remember you? It’s over. If you’re a believer in one of the heaven-oriented faiths, you’ve gone on to your great reward. Let God worry about the earthlings. I live every day with the hope that I will find a way to have a positive effect on someone’s life—that day. There are plenty of charities that could use a couple hours a week from us. Let’s help our fellow humans while we can. We’re all in this together.Thank you very much for taking the time to answer a few questions here, Mr. James.