This bunch of questions came across Facebook a while back as a way to give readers a little insight into who we are as authors. I decided to put it up here on the blog instead of on my FB.
What is your author name?
Bob Mueller. This should surprise no one.
What is the first book you ever published?
The Sad Girl.
What is your publiversary?
What is your favorite book you’ve written thus far?
I think that would be The Sad Girl, and I’m not exactly sure why. DSB was the first book I completed, the first one I took from concept to completion, but for some reason I like TSG better.
What book took you the longest to write?
So far? Don’t Stop Believing. But I’ve got other projects going.
How long did it take you?
Six years, 10 months, and 18 days. That was just for the first draft though. You’ll note that it took me another five years and change to actually release the book.
What kind of music (If Any) do you listen to while you write?
I listen to whatever I need to to help set the mood. I’ve got a Writing playlist of YouTube videos that’s been a big help. I’ve also got a Pandora playlist of movie soundtracks. I know some writers need absolute quiet or can’t listen to music with lyrics. But I’ve been known to play my Musicals playlist too. I find it’s less about what’s actually playing than it is the background noise. I’ve occasionally used noise generators or crowd noise loops too.
Who is your favorite character from any of your books?
This isn’t one I’ve really thought much about. Danny Cumberland from the Sad Girl series is the person I’ve written the most about. But Jim Unger seems like a cool guy to know. Ditto Bill Reynolds from Don’t Stop Believing.
I like almost all of my protagonist characters. It’s hard to pick a favorite.
What are you currently working on?
Everything.
I’ve got three works in progress right now unless you count my dormant serial, After.
- Ghost of Innocence is a paranormal thriller about a wrongfully-convicted and executed man who’s trying to clear his name.
- The Day The Walls Stopped Talking is another paranormal, about a guy who can talk to walls, until one day he can’t.
- In Plain Sight is the third book in the Sad Girl series. It’s been done and edited and beta-read. I’m just on the fence about a character arc that I put in, then took out, then put back in.
I’ve got a couple of other ideas that I’ve put a few thousand words into as well, but I don’t really count those in the “work in progress” category. Not yet, anyway. Plus there’s my Red Dirt Justice series that I still haven’t done much on, even though I’ve got a few thousand words in a couple of stories for it. I can’t decide if I want to do the regular series that I originally thought of, or turn it into an urban fantasy kind of thing like the movie Bright.
It’s almost like it’s hard for me to focus on a single project. I wonder if I could turn that into some kind of brand identity.
Do you have anything you snack on while you write?
Chocolate in multiple forms, and Diet Dr. Pepper.
What is your favorite quote or line from one of your books?
This was a tough one. Between the three books I’ve finished, there’s about 240,000 words to choose from. I’ve pulled promo quotes from all of my books, but I don’t know that I’ve got any one favorite line.
Are you a self-published or traditional published author?
Yes. (Smile.)
As I wrote DSB, I stayed in touch with a friend who acted as both an alpha and a beta reader. He had an agent at the time and she agreed to take a look at DSB. She turned me down, saying she couldn’t get interested in the characters. That was fine, and enlightening. I determined at that point that I’d go ahead and self-publish, so I released The Sad Girl in 2014.
Then I connected with Rachel Thompson who’d just been hired at Booktrope, a hybrid publisher. They picked up The Sad Girl, rereleasing it in 2016. But then Booktrope folded later that year so now I’m back to self-publishing.
What is your writing inspiration?
I’ll be honest: I wasn’t really sure how to answer this. I don’t know that any one person or thing inspires me to tell stories. I’ve loved hearing and reading stories since I was a kid though. That’s one thing that led me into tabletop RPGs. I’d work up these long involved backstories for my characters (only to see them get wiped out in the first thirty seconds of an encounter). Even when I played computer games like Harpoon or Steel Panthers, it wasn’t enough for me to throw some opposing forces at each other. I had to gin up the political situation that led up to the encounter then think up a few things about the specific encounter.
What genre do you write?
They sound like thrillers in my head. Or suspense. My very first (long-since-trunked) story was mystery-suspense. Then I got into a military TEOTWAWKI story. Don’t Stop Believing is romantic suspense/mystery. But at least two of my current projects are paranormal, and I’m thinking about an urban fantasy story or five. It’s the whole focus-on-a-single-project thing again.
Do you have any writing rituals?
I don’t really, not these days, and I wonder if that’s part of what slows me down.
When I was writing longhand, I’d start the day by transcribing what I wrote the day before. That gave me a good review of where things stood in the story. Then I’d close the computer, pick up the notebook, and get to it. The more I think about it, the more I wonder if maybe I should go back to longhand, at least to get me going again on any of my current projects.
Do you have a specific place or time that you write?
Not really.
In the beginning, back in Ohio, I wrote at my desk. But I also used my PalmPilot with its folding keyboard and wrote at the rec center when the kids were taking classes, or on the boat when my brother and I were sailing the San Juan Islands. I even use that same set-up to write during downtime when I was riding funeral escorts.
Then we hit the road in our RV and my desk turned into a folding table. Or the kitchen table. Or the picnic table outside.
Once we landed in Oklahoma, I started handwriting things. I probably hand-wrote a third of DSB and 80% of TSG. Read more about that here.
These days I mostly write at my desk in the sunroom. I’ve got a smaller laptop that I try to use as my writing machine. The idea there is that switching machines resets my thinking so that I’m not as likely to get lost on Facebook and so forth. It sort-of works.
Do you have any advice for inspiring writers?
Write. Even if you think it’s crap, write. The saying goes that you can’t edit a blank page.
Read. Both in and out of your genre. You need to read your genre to learn what people are buying and reading. You need to read outside your genre to broaden your horizons.
To quote a journalist I met: “Figure out what you suck at. Don’t do that.” That means that you should take an objective look at your skills. If you don’t have a good grip on grammar, then pay for an editor. If you don’t have the graphics processing skills, computer horsepower, and cover knowledge for your genre, then hire a cover designer. One reason self-publishing got such a bad reputation in its infancy was that too many authors thought they could do it all themselves and turned out error-riddled books with poorly-designed covers. Yeah, you can create a cover in the free version of Canva without too much effort. But if you don’t know about fonts in your genre, negative space, and a bunch of other guidelines for book covers, your book will look amateurish and no one will buy it.
What are your writing goals? If any?
I remember a session at a writing conference where we were asked to define success as it pertained to a writing career. Everyone there defined it differently. And you know what? Everyone was right because they defined success for themselves. One writer set a specific sales goal of X books. Another wanted to publish X titles. Still another aimed for certain awards.
There was a guy next to me who had an answer that got everyone’s attention. I don’t remember exactly what it was, but it was the one that made us realize we were all right. I know I wrote it down somewhere, but I’ll be darned if I can remember where. I’d really like to see it again, but I remember thinking that I really liked the way he phrased it.
My goals at this point are to finish the books I’ve started and to write more books.
What authors inspire you and your writing?
I’ve been a huge fan of Clive Cussler, Robert Parker, and Tom Clancy for years. The first few things I tried to write were modeled after both men. I read a lot of TEOTWAWKI stuff in my younger years, and was probably heavily inspired by people like Jerry Ahern, William W. Johnstone, Richard Austin, and Harold Coyle. I read a lot of Star Trek novelizations in my teens as well.
I don’t feel like I read enough right now, and I’ve been trying to work on that, both through free books at Amazon and borrowing from the library.
What will be your next release? If you know and when?
In theory, In Plain Sight should be next. It’s the closest to being done. I just need to decide what the final product will look like, then I can contact my cover designer.
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