with Mike Bond
We are delighted to welcome novelist Mike Bond to Omnimystery News today.
Mike's latest thriller is Saving Paradise (Mandevilla Press; December 2012 trade paperback and ebook formats), and we recently had the opportunity to talk to him about it.
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Omnimystery News: Into what literary genre would you place your books?
Photo provided courtesy of
Mike Bond
Mike Bond: I call what I do Guerrilla Lit: I modify the thriller or mystery genre to increase awareness, to reveal a wrong, to speak for those who cannot. I try to recreate the actual experience of being there; for instance, in Saving Paradise the Hawaiian crime and political corruption underworld, in Night of the Dead from my own experiences in Latin American civil wars, in The Last Savanna from hunting elephant poachers in East Africa, in Holy War from the Battle of Beirut.
My goal is to recreate the joys, fears, horrors and dreams of actual people living in dangerous times, so that the reader can be there too. Some reviewers call me a thriller writer, but I write for far deeper reasons than entertainment. I write to try to understand life, and to convey what I've learned.
Long ago we sat round our cave fires and told each other stories — what each of us had learned that day about where the antelope herds were and if dangerous animals were near, sharing information that would keep us and the clan alive. Books do that now — a symbiosis of reader and writer, a sharing that gives us all perhaps clues on living the best life we can.
OMN: Tell us something about your book that isn't mentioned in the publisher's synopsis.
MB: Saving Paradise has not only been a hit with reviewers but has also had a political impact in Hawaii. It uncovers Hawaii's seamy side — the nation's worst political/corporate corruption, wholesale environmental destruction, the continuing difficulties of native Hawaiians, overdevelopment and other problems. Specifically, it has helped to kill one of the worst planned environmental crimes in Hawaiian history — Big Wind and the Undersea Cable. This mammoth project would have destroyed parts of four islands with wind turbines linked to an undersea cable through the Hawaiian National Whale Sanctuary.
Although it is well known that industrial wind projects don't lower greenhouse gases or fossil fuel use, and that they have enormous environmental, social, and economic impacts, international wind developers and Hawaiian politicians schemed to create this War of the Worlds monster that Saving Paradise, by exposing many of the links in the development process, helped to kill.
OMN: You mentioned you used your own experiences in Latin American civil wars in Night of the Dead. Do your other books also include any personal experience?
MB: A lot of my personal experience is in my books, in war, in the wilderness, the mountains, in dangerous situations alone in far-off places. I write about places I know, and real events. As mentioned earlier, my goal is to put the reader where I am, in the real experience, the real danger, the real civil war, the real corporate ripoff of our way of life.
OMN: How do you go about creating the storylines for your books?
MB: For me, writing is like real life. Something begins — a new experience, a new place or person — but you don't know where it's going. You just keep writing the truth. It evolves on its own, based on your experience. When I'm a ways into a book I sometimes will outline the next chapter, maybe two, but often don't stick to it.
I don't do bios of characters. Like people you meet, you know little about them at first, then with each meeting you learn more. With characters based on real historical people (Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King, etc.), I stick primarily to what they've said in the media or what I remember them saying in private.
Someone asked me recently at a book signing what led me to start a book, to set down the first sentence, the first paragraph. It was a good question, one I'd never heard before. After a moment's thought, I answered, "Gin." Saving Paradise came out of my head one night after dinner, after a few gin and tonics, and this mad guy inside me, Pono Hawkins, just insisted on coming out. He was a fighter, a drinker, a lover of women, a surfer and a combat vet. But it was gin that accelerated his jumping out into the world.
OMN: Describe your writing environment for us.
MB: I can write almost anywhere, in a tent on a mountain at 40 below, on a desert beach, in a Paris taxi. Two wonderful places to write were an 8-day train trip across Siberia and a 2-week freighter trip to New Zealand. I like French cafés (who doesn't). I wrote the entire first draft of my first novel, Fire Like the Sun, in the Trieste Café in San Francisco. Back then it was a true Italian café, they were my friends and I spent two hours every morning there before going to work.
OMN: What is the best advice you've received as an author?
MB: The best advice I've ever received was from a creative writing teacher my first year of college. He had had one novel published, and was considered a demi-god. I took the course because I thought it would be easier than a standard lit class. After looking at a couple of my stories he advised me kindly to find some other pursuit.
Which I did for a while, wandering the world in and out of trouble. But what brought me back to writing was the search for meaning, to understand life, and to do so it's not a bad idea to find out what others have learned.
But he was right: anyone who wants to write (or does write) is nuts.
My advice to aspiring authors is to write like hell, never give up. Make your work based on the world, on real problems and inspirations, but learn about them first. Everyone's tired of hearing about someone's psychological miseries, bad relationships, and similar stuff. So write about the world.
And write because it's a great way to learn about and understand the world, to learn about yourself. If you get published someday, all the better.
OMN: What types of research do you do for your books?
MB: My books are based primarily on first-hand experience. Sometimes I've been in a situation where it was impossible at the time to know what was going on (a battle, a genocidal situation, or even a corrupt political-corporate deal), so later when I'm writing about it I check valid sources for background information (how many people died, what was the total cost, etc.). But most of my facts are up-close and personal.
OMN: Your books are set all around the world. How true are you to the settings?
MB: My books are always set in real places. I describe and situate them exactly as they are. If I talk about a city street in Damascus or a mountain valley in Mongolia, I'm talking about a real place. These real settings are essential to characters in a book because that allows them to be as real as possible also.
OMN: What kinds of books did you read when you were young?
MB: When I was a kid I read only if I couldn't go outside. My first books were the forests and the wilderness, in which I spent every moment I could from the time I was three or four. And in any place that was spooky or dangerous.
Books I read most as a young kid were adventure, wandering books — Swiss Family Robinson, Robinson Crusoe, The Cloister and the Hearth, Anthony Adverse, anything by Mark Twain, Dickens, or Thomas (not Tom) Wolfe. In my teens I drifted into Hemingway, Camus, Malraux, Tolstoy, Zola, Hugo, folks like that. Most of them are still my favorites.
OMN: What do you read now for pleasure?
MB: I read a lot of scientific and medical reporting, and anthropology, archaeology and paleontology. Usually read one or more French papers daily. I read a lot of history as well. For fiction I read mostly French from the Medieval to today. Lately I'm reading everything I can get by Irène Némirovsky, whom I consider to be one of the 20th Century's greatest writers.
OMN: Have any specific authors influenced how and what you write today?
MB: My two biggest influences are probably Camus and Hemingway. The first for how he thinks, the absolute searing honesty of what he has to say about himself and the world. The second for having the balls to go places that scared him, and then write almost perfectly about them. I don't write like Hemingway but I love his sparseness and his understanding of tragedy. "A Clean Well-Lighted Place" is to my mind the finest short story ever written.
OMN: What kinds of films do you enjoy watching?
MB: I watch few films. Hollywood has gone off the deep end these days with insane plots involving unlikely or impossible situations, pandering to either adolescent romantic dreams, wanna-be violence, or weird psychological states. A recent film that should have been good, The Company You Keep (Redford, Christie, et al.) I found disappointing. A look back at the Sixties and the Weathermen, it was so politically correct as to be meaningless, and conveyed none of the rage and sorrow of those days. I knew a few of the Weathermen back then, and feel they were totally misrepresented.
And there's the rub: if the novel (or film) isn't accurate, it impacts our willingness to believe.
OMN: Where might we find you when you're not writing?
MB: My major activity is hiking and mountain climbing, and wandering anywhere on foot in an unknown place. This hunger for danger and the unknown seems to have found its way into all my books.
OMN: What kind of feedback do you get from readers?
MB: What I love most is the chance to exchange ideas on what life is, how it should be lived. As Dona in Night of the Dead says, To live a good life is to do as much good as you can, so how do we find the good? I like it if I can give something back to a reader, an idea, support, concern — all that.
OMN: Create a Top 5 list for us on any topic.
MB: I have two lists. If I could take 5 books to a desert island for a year, they would be:
• The I Ching
• Les Misérables
• War and Peace
• Hemingway's Short Stories
• A Separate Reality
And the five top places to visit:
• Antartica. It, and crossing the straits, give one a sense of vastness and perilousness of this huge continent and its surrounding seas.
• Siberia. A huge part of the world, fascinating and often inaccessible.
• The Andes. Great hiking and climbing without the crowds you get in the Alps or Himalayas.
• Africa. It's being destroyed at an ever-increasing rate. Most of it will be trashed in 20 years. Go while you can.
• France. The most beautiful and interesting place on earth. Wonderful hiking, magnificent open spaces, the world's best food and wine, with all the world's history tied up in it.
OMN: What's next for your?
MB: Most of my backlist is being published in the next few months by Mandevilla Press, including Night of the Dead, Holy War, Tibetan Cross and The Last Savanna. Mandevilla Press is the latest publishing venture of Bob Diforio, (D4EO Literary Agency) and former Publisher and President of New American Library and Dutton/Penguin USA. And I've got two more novels completed, one on the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars and the other on Vietnam and the Sixties. Working on another one now.
Also going to be climbing and hiking in the next few months in the Alps and Himalayas.
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Mike Bond has lived and worked in many dangerous, remote and war-torn regions of the world. His novels depict the innate hunger of the human heart for good, the intense joys of love, the terror and fury of battle, the sinister vagaries of politics and multinational corporations, and the magical beauty of the vanishing natural world. Bond has published hundreds of articles on human rights, the environment, international finance, the energy industry, and women's rights, and appears frequently on TV and radio to discuss these subjects. For more information about the author and his work, visit his website at MikeBondBooks.com.
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Saving Paradise
Mike Bond
A Suspense Thriller
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