H. L. Wegley Interview

Q: Let me start with asking you to tell us a little bit about yourself.
A. My wife and I were both born at the cusp of the Baby Boom and, as such, tend to be more like the WWII generation than the Boomers. When we married, we were two twenty-year-old kids ready to take on the world. The Vietnam war was raging, so instead, we took on the U.S. military, where I became first an Intelligence Analyst, working closely with NSA, then got a B.S. in Meteorology and became a weather officer. After leaving the USAF, I worked as a research scientist at a national lab, then got an M.S in Computer Science and developed computing systems for Boeing until retiring in the Seattle area. I wrote my first novel at the age of 64, after we had been retired for about a year. And, yes, my military and computing experience find their way into many of my stories.

Q: As a child or teenager, did you ever dream of being an author?
A. I don’t think I ever thought of being an author, though I was always writing something—a poem, a short story, or an essay—but I didn’t think about writing novels until four or five years before retiring.

Q: Would you tell us about your current book release Virtuality?
A. Virtuality is a thriller with romance about Vince, a young struggling author, who inherits his brother Paul’s growing high-tech company, Virtuality Incorporated. Virtuality is developing a mysterious product the US Army has classified Top Secret. Before Paul dies, he tells Vince not to sell the company, but to let Jess—the brilliant young woman Vince walked away from seven years earlier—help Vince run Virtuality. Neither Vince nor Jess have security clearances and, for some reason, Paul’s minority partner isn’t anxious for them to be cleared. So what’s being built in the lab remains a mystery. After Vince refuses an offer to sell the company, someone makes multiple attempts to intimidate Vince and Jess and, when that fails, three men try to kill them.
This story serves as a warning that technology is now lurking on the near horizon which so blurs the line between the virtual and the real that it can be used to produce customized, fantasy worlds so life-like and so infused with drug-like, addictive features that people will prefer their fantasy worlds to the real world. And controlling this technology may literally take an act of Congress.

Q: Where did the idea for this story come from?
A. I read an article in an IT journal about video-game addiction. The article explained why virtual worlds are preferred by many young men over the real world. These games came along at a perfectly wrong time, inflicting a perfect storm on American society by meeting deep-seated social needs—meeting them superficially, but that’s not the perception of the addict. I did a bit of research and found that technology exists to take video games and virtual reality to levels never before imagined by directly stimulating the brain and nervous system and thereby exceeding the raw, addictive power of street drugs. With Microsoft and Nintendo nearly in my back yard, I decided to set the story here, near Seattle, using places I know well, places that are beautiful but potentially deadly.
This could have become a dark story, so I leaned hard on the romance thread, the beautiful setting, and worked in a lot of humor. Early reviews say that readers see the subject as serious, but they don’t see Virtuality as a dark story.

Q: Tell us a little about your main character and how you developed him/her.
A. Vince is a writer who thought he’d lost his best friend, Jess, the girl next door throughout their school years, the one he assumed he would one day marry. He’s a brilliant writer, but Vince botches the endings of his stories, because, after apparently losing Jess to his brother Paul, Vince can’t see happiness in his, or anyone else’s, future. But I identify more with the heroine, Jess, because I gave her my personality type, Myers-Briggs INTJ, often called the research scientist. It’s also the rarest type on the planet. INTJs are highly introverted; don’t make friends easily; they can count their close friends on their thumbs. But, if you win an INTJ’s friendship, you’ve got it for life, come what may. That’s Jess—except for the rock-climbing, motorcycle-riding, martial arts side of her that sometimes seems to have a death wish.

Q: Would you share with us what you are working on now?
A. Over the next two weeks, I’ll put the finishing touches on an espionage thriller with romance about a deep-cover KGB plant, Eduard Petrenko, who came to the U.S. in about 1980 to penetrate the DOD but slipped between the cracks after Gorbachev disbanded the KGB. The story is mostly about the man’s daughter, Allie, who is endangered when an SVR assassin comes to repay her father for never doing his job. Of course, the daughter would be viewed as a potential threat to any other deep-cover plants, so she has to die too. And, of course, a handsome young man with a troubled past comes alongside to protect her. But before Allie’s father is supposedly murdered, he gives her a key to a safe deposit box, only to be opened after he dies. The box contains journals detailing his secret life, a life known to no one, not even his wife before she died. This is a dual timeline story. One thread is in the past, as Allie reads her father’s journals, the other in the present. But when the past catches up with the present, the story explodes as all the issues and characters collide.

Q: Where do you escape for some quiet time?
A. My favorite escape within driving distance is the outer Washington State coast, where the Olympic National Park extends down to the beaches. There are rugged, remote beaches where one can relax, rest, and where the creative juices run wild. My writing productivity goes up by an order of magnitude when I’m out there sitting on a driftwood log or laying in the sand with a pencil and notepad in hand. Productivity is even higher on a beach in Maui, but that’s a little beyond driving distance.

Q: What would you be doing if you weren’t writing?
A. I would certainly be more active—maybe playing racquetball again or teaching kids how to develop athletic skills. But somewhere, somehow, I think writing would invade my life.

Q: What one thing have you always wanted to do but couldn’t afford to do?
A. While working at a national lab, I was on a team of scientists who wrote the U.S. and the World Wind Energy Atlases. One area assigned to me was the U.S. Virgin Islands. I studied topo maps, looked at hi-res pictures, and was certain the job would provide at least one trip to the islands. That never happened, so visits to the Virgin Islands, and some other tropical locations in the South Pacific, are still on my bucket list.

Q: I’m an avid gardener and have to ask what kind of flower you would be and why?
A. We called them Easter Seal Lilies, but I think the plant was actually Lily of the Valley. My wife to be and I discovered some growing wild while on a botany field trip. We picked enough for a bouquet and took them to her house. Why are these lilies my favorite? Partially because they remind me of our courting days, but also because it’s impossible to feel down when you’re in a room filled with their fragrance.