IndieReader published a brief interview with me about Warren Lane.

I don’t often write about my day job here, but I have to say, it’s always nice to see a project you worked on having an impact in the real world. Several years ago, an entrepreneur named Phil Reitenour had a scary run-in with an enraged driver . That gave him an idea. What if someone built a mobile app that could stream live audio and video of an unfolding emergency directly to a security monitoring station? Better yet, what if it could stream that data to the nearest police or public safety office? What if it could even show security personnel your movements along a map as the incident unfolded?

Where did the name Warren Lane come from?

Warren Lane is the name of a tiny street in Charlottesville, VA. It’s only a block long. I passed by it one day in 2006 when I was biking to work and the first thing that popped into my head was, “That’s the name of my first book.”

For many years, I told myself that I’d write a novel someday. Now I had the title. Two words down, fifty thousand to go.

In Patricia Highsmith’s first novel, architect Guy Haines meets psychopath Charles Bruno on a train to Texas. Bruno isn’t the kind of lunatic who instantly terrifies people. He just comes off as a little odd at first. In the course of a long conversation on the train, Guy reveals his troubles with his estranged wife, and Bruno discusses his hatred of his father.

Bruno likes to read detective novels, and he mentions, off-hand at first, how it would be the perfect crime if two strangers who met on a train were to exchange murders. Bruno could kill Guy’s wife and Guy could kill Bruno’s father, and no one would ever be able to solve the crimes, because no one knows Guy and Bruno ever met, and neither has a motive to kill someone they don’t know. Guy dismisses the idea and walks away, but Bruno becomes obsessed with it.

Are you a self-published indie author by choice, or are you one of those losers who couldn’t get a book deal?

Yes.

What’s the process like? What happens between conceiving a book and getting it into the marketplace?

You get an idea, and you turn it over in your head for a while. You write a draft, and you think it’s great, so you show it to some friends. Then you think it sucks.

Back in the 1990’s, I wandered into Twice Sold Tales in Seattle, and the clerk asked if she could help me find anything. I wasn’t really looking for anything in particular, so I said, “How about something dark? That I can’t put down.”

She lit up and said, “Oh. Have you read Jim Thompson?”

The Expressman and the Detective, originally published in 1874, describes Allan Pinkerton’s 1859 investigation of a messenger suspected of stealing from the Adams Express Company in Montgomery, Alabama. Nathan Maroney had been an exemplary employee with a strong reputation, and there was no hard evidence against him, but the company’s Vice President suspected him of stealing a package containing $10,000.

After a lengthy investigation turned up nothing, Adams Express gave up and wrote the money off as a loss. A few months later, a package containing $40,000 went missing from the Montgomery station. The express company wrote to Allan Pinkerton of the North-West Police Agency in Chicago and asked him to investigate.

I’ve been getting a lot of feedback about Warren Lane. While the positive feedback provides much-needed encouragement, the negative feedback has been the most useful. There have been three consistent themes to the negative feedback:

1. The story isn’t told from the point of view of a single character that I can get behind and root for.
2. There’s too much dialog.
3. It’s hard to sympathize with the characters because they’re all messed up and they make bad choices.

IndieReader posted a nice review of Warren Lane today. 4.5 stars! Their verdict:

WARREN LANE is a charming comedy of errors, with a good heart and a light touch.

I’m glad they liked it!

After some feedback from Ingrid Emerick at Girl Friday Productions , I rewote the opening chapters of Impala. The book is ready for editing, and my wife, Lindsay put together some sample covers.

This is an old-fashioned thriller/suspense that starts out a little like Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, with a guy who’s not quite sure who is after him or why. I spent a couple of days writing and polishing a query letter for an agent, and that came out well enough to earn me an immediate rejection. I may put this up on Inkshares , which is like Kickstarter for books, but I’m not sure yet whether that will be a good fit. They seem to lean pretty heavily toward Sci-Fi and Fantasy, which this is definitely not.