18 Seconds has sold in 19 countries; I’m going to guess that my readers in China and Poland have little concept of what a “boardwalk” is like on a U.S. coastline, or if I-70 runs east to west or north to south, but they don’t care if they enjoy the genre to begin with and the writer paints enough of reality that they can see their own personal film version of the story in their head.
What are you working on next?
Simon and Schuster has me working on another Sherry Moore project. This one really has been fun, Scott. I’m calling it Lost Girls, although my agent or editor will surely change it. Last Breath was originally called Breath Play, and 18 Seconds was called Recurrence. Anyhow, it leaps from Alaska to Russia to Haiti and in it Sherry will meet a villain of crimes-against-humanity proportion and a strange old man in the jungle who, while calling it something quite different, does very much what Sherry does when she takes a dead person’s hand and taps into that last 18 Seconds of their RAM (or Short Term) Memory.
What is this other book you referred to in the first part of the interview?
I love this book, but probably because it was my first. I call it Rattleman and it is about a young man who suffers Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in the extreme poverty of Appalachia in the mountains of West Virginia where he witnesses his sister’s horrific death at sixteen. It is a book of mountain witches, mountain folklore, Cherokee Indians and a tormented man who walks the mountains in search of rattlesnakes to sell for their skins. I really can’t wait to see this book hit the shelf. I LOVE research, which is constantly pulling me off track when I’m supposed to be writing and I have never enjoyed research as much as that done for this novel.
Where do you see yourself in ten years?
With fifteen books behind me and new technology that will allow me to see my laptop screen while tanning on the beach. I hope people are still asking me if I’ll ever do just one more Sherry Moore novel. I hope to have one historical novel under my belt (French Revolution Era). I hope to have one comedy (I worked in the “luxury” hotel industry post law-enforcement), one horror story, and a handful of stand alone, gritty police stories.
What did you hope I would ask that I didn't ask?
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