H. L. Wegley Interview

Q: Let me start with asking you to tell us a little bit about yourself.
A. After 48 years of marriage, my wife and I have accumulated 15 addresses, 3 kids, 7 grandkids, and a few scars from major surgeries. We’re retired now and only a little worse for the wear. My working career did provide a lot of fodder for thrillers, but you can read about that in my bio. We retired in the Seattle area where we’re involved in small-group ministry, through our church. My wife’s hobby is restoring antique trunks and she does beautiful work. My hobby was going to be writing but, somewhere along the way, it developed into a full-time, but fully enjoyable mission, writing inspirational novels.

Q: When did you first realize you wanted to be a writer?
A. Since I was in elementary school, I’ve known writing came easy for me. But, other than at school, I didn’t write regularly until I began working as a research scientist in atmospheric physics. But this was contract research, and the writing was constrained to the problem my sponsor wanted me to solve. Only when I wrote my first novel, in 2010, did I realize how much I wanted to write. When I wrote that first work of fiction, the former fetters were all gone. The only limits were my imagination. Then, writing became a true delight.

Q: What do you write and why this genre?
A. Looking back on the 8 novels I’ve written, all have been either high-action romantic suspense or thrillers with a strong romantic thread. This probably stems from being raised on the action, adventure, and romance of the Zane Grey and Edgar Rice Burroughs stories. My best buddy’s dad had the complete collection of both, and we two boys spent a lot of time reading, discussing what we read, and trading reads.

Q: Do you base your characters on people you know or are they totally made up?
A: I mix and match real and made-up characteristics. So far I’ve created 6 different heroines. I created 4 by borrowing physical or mental/emotional characteristics from my wife. Either I start with a real person and then replace parts of them with fiction, or I make up a person and give them traits from someone I know.

Q: Would you tell us about your current book release Triple Threat?
A: Triple Threat is a thriller with romance about two brilliant, young, computer-science PhD candidates who, while working on their dissertations, detect a three-pronged cyber-terror plot with the potential to kill millions and paralyze the nation. Though they’re pushing the boundaries of knowledge in computer science, Kate Brandt and Joshua West are not stereotypical geeks. As Kate (Christian) pulls Josh (agnostic) into her scheme to upstage the terror plot, their disparate beliefs create so much conflict it threatens their growing relationship. The two argue a lot, when they’re not running for their lives, and before the story ends, the reader will see concise answers to nearly every major objection raised against the Christian faith. Hopefully, reasons readers can share with others in the spirit of 1 Peter 3:15.
This story is set in the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia, including Whistler.

Q: Where did the idea for this story come from?
A. I needed a story to close out the 4-book Pure Genius Series. The subject of cyber-attacks and cyber-terrorism is constantly in the news. That was an easy pick for the subject matter. Using Whistler, BC as part of the setting came about while my wife and I spent a week in Whistler Village. The Peak-to-Peak gondola ride, the longest stretch of unsupported cable in the world, fascinated me. Then I read that this gondola ride, which has thriller written all over it, had never been used in a movie or a book. That was going to change. My heroine came from the 15-year-old girl, Katie, who nearly stole the show as a minor character in my previous novel, Moon over Maalaea Bay. When my editor suggested we close out the series with an all-grown-up Katie on center stage, Triple Threat was born. The terrorist-threat research got a little spooky at times, especially when I ventured onto a few terrorists’ web sites. Some are pretty graphic, while others are calm, collected but deadly in intent.

Q: Tell us a little about your main character and how you developed him/her.
A: As I mentioned, 15-year-old Katie appeared in my two previous novels in this series. She has been growing in a loving family and in her walk with the Lord for almost 6 years when this story begins. I love characters that blow away stereotypes, so that’s what I did with my 21-year-old geek heroine, PhD candidate, Katie Brandt. She’s been blessed with the 3 B’s, beauty (tall, slender, long blonde hair), brains (IQ of 180), and brawn (shortstop on UW national champion softball team, clocked at 90 MPH throwing a baseball). Despite all she has going for her, Katie spent many years in the foster care system and feels she must constantly prove herself worthy of love. When she follows in her adoptive mom’s footsteps, researching algorithms for Internet forensics, big-data analysis, and cyber-security applications for her doctor’s dissertation, Katie has so much confidence in her abilities that she tries to match wits with terrorists who are plotting a scheme that dwarfs 9-11. Katie’s attempt to uncover the plot takes her into adventures, danger, and a romance, she could never have imagined.

Q: Would you share with us what you are working on now?
A. I recently finished the first draft of a political thriller. As I was writing it, pieces of my carefully planned plot kept making headlines in the news. At first, that was discouraging, and I feared the odds of my story being published were just about nil. But now that the story’s done, I believe these real-world coincidences will serve to make the story somewhat controversial. That can be a good thing or a very bad one. Regardless, I still believe in this story, because it contains a lot more than the politics. An unlikely childhood friendship prepares my two main characters for roles that could save a dying nation, if they truly believe they were born for such a time as theirs. It isn’t a retelling of Esther’s story but, in hindsight, I see some parallels.

Q: What are some ways that readers of your books can help you as an author?
A. This isn’t just for me, but for all relatively new and unknown authors—if you read a book and enjoyed it at all, please review and rate it. Even a 2-sentence review is greatly appreciated. This is just my opinion, but I would rather have a 3-star review with a few good comments inside it, than no review at all.

Q: What one thing about writing do you wish other non-writers would understand?
A. While we (writers) are working on a novel, which is most of the time, we carry around whole stories in our heads, as well as the people who live in those stories. Caught between 2 worlds, we’re going to behave a little strange at times. What does that mean? Well, sometimes we’ll bore you with talk about that other world and the people who inhabit it. Sometimes we’ll snap at you, apparently, for no good reason. Here’s a typical scenario. The author sits at their laptop, staring out the window, hands not even on the keyboard. You walk in and ask, “How’s it going?” He/she bites your head off. You don’t understand why. It’s because you just generated a total reboot of his/her brain, destroying the scene in the writer’s mind—the scene they were almost ready to type when “How’s it going” became ctrl-alt-del. I’m getting snippy just thinking about it. ?

Q: Tell me three things about yourself that would surprise your readers.
A. First, at age 12 I already had NFL wide-receiver speed. So what came of that? At 15, in a track meet, I ripped a quad nearly in two. My right leg now has two eighths. ? Second, one of my grandmothers was 32 when I was born. My other one was 67. Third, when I was 17, I helped design and build a diving apparatus that just about drowned by best buddy. He forgave me, probably because it wasn’t the first time he almost drowned … nor was it the last.

Q: Milk or dark chocolate? Coffee or tea?
A. Milk and dark chocolate. You put them in the coffee, stir, and drink. Then dump the tea down the drain.

Q: Favorite TV show or shows?
A.I don’t watch any TV shows regularly and haven’t for several years. Back when I did, I loved a good detective show like Spenser for Hire, or Rockford Files, and the classic TV westerns like Wagon Train and Bonanza.

Q: Where can readers find you on the internet?
Author web site: HLWegley.com
Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/HLWegley
Amazon author page: http://www.amazon.com/H.-L.-Wegley/e/B00B1XMR56
Twitter: https://twitter.com/hlwegley
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4460203.H_L_Wegley
Publisher’s site: http://pelicanbookgroup.com/ec/index.php?main_page=index&manufacturers_id=124

Q: Anything else you’d like to tell or share with us?
A. Maybe a bit more about Triple Threat. The MCs are young, only 20 and 23 when the story starts, and it’s their first experience with romance. So, I thought about making this a YA novel. I didn’t, but the story will probably appeal to some YA readers. I don’t think I could have packed any more romance or action into the story without something splitting at the seams. Also, readers will learn a bit about Middle-Eastern countries’ complex relationships with terrorist groups and a little about the history and theology of Islam. One last thing, if you’d like to see a breathtaking panorama of part of the Whistler setting for Triple Threat, take a look at my About Me page.