with Taylor Stevens
We are delighted to welcome novelist Taylor Stevens to Omnimystery News today.
Taylor's fourth thriller to feature informationist Vanessa Michael Munroe is The Catch (Crown: July 2014 hardcover, audio and ebook formats) and we recently had the opportunity to catch up with her to talk about the series.
— ♦ —
Omnimystery News: Your main character, Vanessa Michael Munroe, is a deadly, brilliant woman who hunts information for a living. As a chameleon, she's able to assimilate into multiple roles and convincingly pass as either male or female. What is it about this type of character that appeals to you as a writer?
Photo provided courtesy of Taylor Stevens; photo credit Alyssa Skyes
Taylor Stevens: I wish I could say I was smart enough to have deliberately made Munroe the way she is, but it was more of an accidental thing and the appeal came a whole lot later. When I started writing, I had no idea what I was doing — had never taken a writing course and had hardly read but maybe 30 novels at that point in my life, nearly all of them suspense or thrillers. I had no plot, no characters, not even a storyline; I simply wanted to use fiction to bring the paranoia and sequestration of Equatorial Guinea (a speck on the map off the west coast of Africa, where I'd lived for a little over two years) to life for readers who'd probably never visit. But in order to showcase that difficult political, physical, and cultural environment, I needed people who could handle the terrain in a way that made sense, and so it was drawing upon the harsh realities of that real life environment that brought the fictional character of Vanessa Michael Munroe to life. Readers responded to her with such enthusiasm that the first book has since turned into a series.
OMN: Give us a summary of The Catch in a tweet.
TS: Munroe's desire to lay low is thwarted by a lying boss, an aging hijacked ship, illegal weapons, and a captain that everyone seems to want.
OMN: Your books seem to blend elements of spy thrillers, mystery novels, and detective stories. How would you categorize them?
TS: That's such a difficult question because, as far as I know, there's no category for high-adventure character studies, which is how I see them. They're labeled as thrillers and, with a non-testosterone version of Jason Bourne/ Jack Reacher at the helm mixing it up in high body-count chases and fights, that totally makes sense. They definitely do appeal to readers who enjoy a rough and tumble read, with the added bonus that they thread deeper than the bullets and blood plots propelling them, into the real-world politics, cultures, sights, and smells of foreign countries — many in the developing world.
OMN: Each book in this series is set in a different international location, some of which are quite remote. Do you take liberties with your settings, or do you try to be true to its geography and/or local environment?
TS: The settings are integral to the plotlines and the locations sometimes become as much of a character as the characters themselves, so accuracy is really important. But, that can also be a double-edged sword and there's always a juggle to find ways to integrate the tactile and cultural elements without bogging things down or going off on explanatory tangents that slow the story momentum. There are times, for the sake of simplicity and storytelling license that I'll put buildings where they don't actually exist, or describe specific settings that are amalgamations of several settings, but in terms of the overall environment — cultural, political, and real-world functioning — I try to be as accurate as possible.
OMN: How do you go about fact-checking the plot points of your books, and what was your most challenging topic to research?
TS: The most challenging research so far has been the maritime industry, which was utilized in The Catch, because the world at sea has its own language and hierarchy and culture, all of which is so easy to get wrong without real life experience and for that I needed an expert to guide me. For many of the other locations and settings I've either lived in them or travelled to them, but there are always little details that escape the in-person research that still need to be clarified — honestly, I don't know how international thriller writers plied their craft in the days before the Internet.
OMN: What is the best advice you've received as an author? And what advice might you give to aspiring writers?
TS: The late Michael Palmer, who I was fortunate to count as a friend, had two pieces of advice that he gave to everyone and which he recommended sticking up in front of your work space: "This is hard," and "Be fearless." I don't think it gets much better than that.
OMN: What kinds of questions or feedback do you receive from readers, and what types of reader response do you most enjoy?
TS: Oh, the questions, feedback, and responses are all over the map, but since interacting with fans and readers is my desert to the vegetables and hard work of writing, I enjoy it all! I'm on Facebook most days but I don't post much. The best of everything comes through email from the cool kids who find me, which is a mailing list that I treat like hanging out with friends. I email fairly frequently — like blogging to an inbox — all about the writing process, the publishing industry, and personal experiences that have gotten me to where I am. These inevitably result in daily email exchanges, lots of laughs, and friendships as my readers get to know me as a person and I get to know them, too. I'm not able to answer every single email I receive, but I do read each and every one, and I respond as often as I can.
OMN: Have any specific authors or books influenced how and what you write today?
TS: I have a running quip that Robert Ludlum changed my life. I say it tongue in cheek, but it's actually so true it's scary. I stumbled into writing fiction quite by accident. I'd been born and raised in a very strict, isolated, and controlled religious environment in which my education stopped completely when I was 12 years old and the rest of my adolescence was spent as child labor. We weren't allowed to watch TV, or listen to music from the outside, and were also forbidden from reading fiction. When I was finally free of that and able to make my own choices, not only did I have no reference as to what authors to read, I was too poor to go to bookstores to buy books. I stumbled onto a Robert Ludlum book at a garage sale and bought it for .50 because I recognized the title from a movie by the same name. I wasn't expecting much, but I was so overwhelmed and taken by the complexity of the story that after that, any time I found another book at a garage sale with Ludlum's name on it, I'd buy it. Which was how I discovered Jason Bourne, and I fell hard in love with that character. It was in the middle of one of the Bourne novels that I was overcome with a wish — a want — I wanted so badly to find a way to let others feel what I felt in reading these books — to do this thing that Ludlum had done to me. That wish was immediately followed by a flash of realization that I'd lived in far more exotic places than Ludlum was writing about, and that then turned into an ah-ha moment, a split-second decision: I'm going to write a book. And I did. And it changed my life.
— ♦ —
Born in New York State, and into the Children of God, raised in communes across the globe and denied an education beyond sixth grade, Stevens was in her twenties when she broke free to follow hope and a vague idea of what possibilities lay beyond. She now lives in Texas, and is at work on the next Munroe novel.
For more information about the author, please visit her website at TaylorStevensBooks.com or find her on Facebook and Twitter.
— ♦ —
The Catch
Taylor Stevens
A Vanessa Michael Munroe Thriller
The adrenaline-fueled work has left her with blood on her hands and a soul stained with guilt. Having borne the burden of one death too many, Munroe has fled to Djibouti, Africa. There, where her only responsibility is greasing the wheels of commerce for a small maritime security company, she finds stillness — until her boss pressures her to join his team as an armed transit guard on a ship bound for Kenya.
Days into the voyage, Munroe discovers the security contract is merely cover for a gunrunning operation of which she wants no part. The ship is invaded off the Somali coast and in a moment of impulse while fighting her way out, she drags the unconscious captain with her. But nothing about the hijacking is what it seems.
The pirates were never after the ship; they'd come for the captain. In chasing him, they make their one mistake: targeting Munroe raises the killer's instinct she's tried so hard to bury. Wounded and on the run, Vanessa Michael Munroe will use the life of her catch as bait and bartering chip to manipulate every player with a stake in the ship's outcome, and find a way to wash her conscience clean.
Mac
