Maria Olsen is an actor, casting director, director, and producer from Los Angeles, California. She’s played many roles, and appeared in Percy Jackson and The Lightning Thief, and Folklore among many others. She is also acting in and producer of Slash, currently being directed by Rycke Foreman. His associate producer is Miranda Foreman. Both are known for their great magazine 69 Flavours of Paranoia. Slash is a slasher movie that sounds as though it is set to take the film industry by storm. The story explores the nature of reality and fantasy. Maria met me at The Slaughterhouse were we talked about horror and the forthcoming Indie release.

Do we live in an enclosure and to what extent is horror an enclosure that reflects our consciousness?

Yes, I believe we all live in enclosures of our own making. We all place boundaries and limitations upon ourselves, and we all feel most comfortable living within the “known”, in our own comfortable little space. When we venture out beyond these confines, we like to label some of the experiences we have out there “horror”.

What one person sees as “horror”, though, is another’s “comfortable little space”, so our own, personal horrors always reflect our own consciousness as they also reflect how we deal with the world, with the known and with the unknown.

As an Indie director what do you feel is needed for the industry to free itself from the censoring shackles of Hollywood?

Although I have nothing against the studio system, I do feel that the films that are being produced on that level consist of far too many remakes, next installments in huge and once-popular franchises and – their latest craze – “enhancing” older classics with 3D technology and re-releasing them. I much prefer living among the trees in Indiewood – a term coined by the amazing filmbiz entrepreneur Tom Malloy – where the stories are, for the most part, fresh and cutting edge and the enthusiasm and pride in achievement, genuine. I don’t know, however, if the two will ever truly meet because Hollywood is an industry – a business – where, as with all businesses, the make or break line will always be the financial bottom line, while Indiewood is a place where stories still get made for the sheer joy of it, even though money obviously does still factor into the process.

How does the image differ from the word and is a script a bridge?

The word is written by the writer while the image is created by a team: the director, the DP, the set designer, the wardrobe department and others equally as talented. The word is one dimensional – although it itself does invoke a picture in the reader’s brain – while the image is two dimensional, and appeals to more than one sense.

A script is a collection of words where each individual word is placed in a specific context by those around it. It is this context that helps words transform into images and that gives the creative team attached to a picture the vital clues showing how the word should be translated into the image.

Tell us about Slash.

Slash is a film that will take you on a journey between fantasy and reality. It’s – as the name so obviously indicates – a slasher film, but it’s also a coming of age film and it’s also a mystery.

Rycke Forman has written, and will direct, a story about two step-brothers trying to find their own identity in a world where a dark Ripper-esque killer stalks and kills members of a theater company. It appears that it’s only a matter of time before our heroes Cade and Trench are on the kill-list unless, of course, one of them is the killer…

Technically, Slash will be unlike anything seen before, and this is not just an empty boast; it’s because new 3D techniques are going to be used in the film. Slash is a fever dream of a story that hangs onto its secret of who the killer really is until almost after the end credits have rolled.

To what extent does the uncertainty and fracturing of identity set against the backdrop of theatre play a part in the film?

I think that the fact that Slash plays out against a backdrop of a show going through Hell Week reflects the story’s increasing tension: as we approach opening night and the chaos that ensues, so we approach knowing who is behind all the chaos. It also becomes apparent that, throughout the story, people are playing two roles in real life, which also echoes the goings on in the theater where people take on another persona the minute they set foot on stage.

These are, of course, subtle themes within the story of Slash, and they are not written so that an audience is hit over the head with them. It is, after all, the objective of all theatricals to be as lifelike and as unobtrusive as possible…

How has your work as an actress influenced your vision as a director?

Up till now, I’ve only directed for stage and not screen; my screen directing debut will come soon, however, with the promo short film for Phoenix Cross’s horror feature Slaughterbox. But directing is directing, and I’ve found that being an actor before I became a director helped me incredibly as it gave me an insight into the actor’s needs and situation that I would otherwise never have had.

Also, when I direct, I can “see” the story both as a whole and point the point of view of one particular character; and when I say “see”, that’s literally what I mean as I can, for instance, change the leading lady’s dress color in my mind’s eye and see how that change would affect an entire scene. I have a very visual mind…and I’ve found that this is another invaluable tool in my director’s arsenal.

Do you think horror works by playing on those parts of the psyche that exist in displacement, all those characteristics that people tend to push away, and alienate from themselves, so they do not recognise them when they see them?

Yes, horror very much works with those emotions that we, in polite society, like to shun and lock up in a small corner of our minds. Horror is also a lot more emotionally intense than other genres, and no holds are barred in showing the depths to which one can sink.
Acting in horror is also more intense than acting in other genres – here horrific villains need to find it within themselves to believe what they’re doing is right or else their performance won’t be believed – and Piper Laurie reputedly balked at the intensity required of her for the role of Mrs White in Carrie, but look how wonderful that turned out!

If horror dealt with the emotions that we show in real life, it would be called drama…

Is there a particular event that has changed your life and influenced you as an actor?

I’m going to be answering that as two separate questions.

The event that changed my life as an actor was moving to Los Angeles in 2005. I grew up in South Africa and, although I participated in every stage show that would have me, I could never get ahead in the film world because the town I grew up in was very far away from SA’s fledgling film community. Once I moved to LA, though, I quickly found my feet on the stage and then moved on to what I had wanted to do since I was a child: act in films.

I wouldn’t, on the other hand, say there was one particular event that influenced my acting career. I grew up watching many leading ladies in many films in South Africa – Jane Fonda, Kathleen Turner, Sigourney Weaver, Jodie Foster among them – and, after each film I saw, I wanted to grow up to be whatever they played in the film. One day, though, I worked out that i wanted to do what they, as actresses, did and not what they, as characters, did…and this changed my entire outlook on my future.

Tell us something about Maria Olsen no one knows.

Something about me that nobody knows is that, for a long time when I was young, I wanted to grow up to be the English poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning : )

What advice would I give to myself as a young woman?

“Everything will be ok in the end so there’s really no need to analyse everything to the nth degree and stress so much” : D

Thank you Maria for an informative and perceptive interview.

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John Lescroart is a New York Time bestselling author known for his series of legal and crime thriller novels featuring the character Dismas Hardy. His novels have sold more than ten million copies, have been translated into twenty-two languages in more than seventy-five countries, and fifteen of his books have been on the New York Times bestseller list. In addition to more than twenty novels, Lescroart has written several screenplays, and appeared as a contestant on the game show Tic Tac Dough in 1979, as well as on Joker’s Wild, Blank Check and Headline Chasers. Under Crow Art Records, Lescroart has released several albums, including a cd of piano versions of his songs performed by Antonio Gala. He has for some time been writing and living in Davis, California. He is an original founding member of group International Thriller Writers. He has a new novel out, The Ophelia Cut and it sounds like another great one.

John met me at The Slaughterhouse, where we talked about his new release and the moral challenges his characters face within his fictions.

Tell us about The Ophelia Cut.

In THE OPHELIA CUT, Dismas Hardy takes on the legal defense of his brother-in-law, Moses McGuire, who is accused of murdering Rick Jessup, a young San Francisco politician who allegedly raped McGuire’s stunningly beautiful daughter Brittany. Complicating matters considerably, for Hardy as well as for his best friend, homicide lieutenant Abe Glitsky and Hardy’s law partner Gina Roake, is the fact that Moses is an alcoholic struggling with the aftermath of an event (recounted in THE FIRST LAW) known as the Dockside Massacre, in which, six years before, Hardy, Glitsky, Roake and McGuire were forced into a gun battle with a group of corrupt San Francisco private security forces that left five men dead. When police investigating the murder of Rick Jessup close in on McGuire as their main suspect, McGuire begins to drink again and to come undone. As the trial progresses, will McGuire inadvertently reveal the fatal secret that links him to Hardy, Glitsky and Roake, ruining all of their careers, if not their lives?

Meanwhile, Brittany becomes involved with a shadowy figure named Tony Solaia, a federally-protected witness who weaves through the action of the novel like a ghost. At the same time, Hardy uncovers troubling connections in the life and work of Rick Jessup that raise the question of how many other people may have a reason to have wanted him dead. Finally, in a feat of legal legerdemain that is staggering both in its implications and its simplicity, Hardy finds a witness who at a shocking stroke dismantles the basic theory of the case.

But at what price?

A complex morality tale that pits lifelong friends against one another in the crucible of the courtroom, THE OPHELIA CUT presents Dismas Hardy with his most personal case to date, and one of his most complicated, where the ever-dangerous truth is not always a stepping stone on the path to justice, and where long-buried secrets still have the power to redeem or destroy.

The themes of THE OPHELIA CUT are betrayal, family, loss of innocence, rape, date rape and vigilantism. The center of gravity in THE OPHELIA CUT is Brittany McGuire, a beautiful and confused 23-year-old recent college graduate who shares the all-too-familiar story nowadays of young women getting out of college and being forced to accept work as a barista in a coffee shop. Brittany is very much a young woman of our age, and her struggles as she tries to define and find herself are a core and compelling component of this book. But THE OPHELIA CUT also features two longstanding male friends, Dismas Hardy and Abe Glitsky, both of whom inhabit the very hard world of criminal law. The legal battles and moral issues that infuse the book should also appeal to anyone who enjoys “courtroom dramas.” And in fact, this book walks the thin line between mainstream and genre fiction.

This book began under the title of THE TARGET and originally was going to center around the character of Tony Solaia, a person in the federal witness protection program. I wrote well over a hundred pages before I realized that the story was not moving in a direction that I found important. The idea of a big book about the legal and emotional issues surrounding rape kept flirting around the edges of my consciousness, and so – much to my own dismay – I jettisoned my first hundred original pages and committed myself to the new and better idea that became THE OPHELIA CUT.

This book has many themes, both personal and universal: A young woman’s casual attitude toward dating and sex ensnares her in a terrible relationship with a truly dangerous man – every parent can identify with this scenario. When this man drugs and then rapes Brittany, her father’s rage leads him to seek revenge. Meanwhile, the young man works as Chief of Staff to a politician, Liam Goodman, with plenty of dirty laundry in his closet – Goodman has been defrauding the US government for years; he has also been in business with a Korean businessman named Jon Lo, who is a big player in San Francisco’s international sex slavery/human trafficking trade. There are big issues and evil people everywhere you look in this book.

But compassionate and ethical people also abound – Dismas Hardy, his wife Frannie, their daughter Rebecca, Wes Farrell (San Francisco’s District Attorney) and his girlfriend Sam, Hardy’s law partner Gina Roake and his best friend police lieutenant Abe Glitsky. These people lead “normal” lives: they cook, tell jokes, go out to dinner, try to do the right thing often in tremendously adverse circumstances. They protect one another, they reach out to others, they persevere. They know that there are no easy answers and that life is ambiguous and yet worth living.

Also, and critically, these good people had to break the law in the past to protect the people they love. They didn’t do it blithely; they did it because there was clearly no other way. And as much as they love their lives, they’re living with the fact of having done something they dearly wish they hadn’t had to do, and broke the law to do it. What makes this book distinctive is the intertwining of these personal and public issues in a way that makes the story resonate as universal and true to real life.

To what extent do you think revenge is lawless justice?

Though I understand and to some extent empathize with the urge for revenge, and think that it provides very fertile soil for fiction, in real life I am not in favor of it at all. It may, as you indicate, provide a sense of justice, but it is usually not justice under the law. In other words, it is lawless. And why do not laws usually embrace the concept of revenge? Because hundreds if not thousands of years of human experience have proven that the most common result of revenge is not justice, but a cycle of more revenge. If you kill my relative, then true revenge demands that I kill one of your relatives; and then, of course, you feel the need to avenge that violence with more violence of your own, and so on down through the years. This universal truth was perfectly expressed in ancient Rome by the statesman and philosopher Lucretius, whose quote on the topic serves as the epigraph for The Ophelia Cut: “Violence and injury enclose in their net all that do such things, and generally return upon him who began.”

Fiction often challenges institutions, be they legal structures or political ones. Thinking of St Dismas, do you think within religion there is absolution for criminals and if so what does it entail?

I think that one of the greatest inventions of mankind is the twin concept of sin and forgiveness. Since we are all imperfect, it’s inevitable that we will all sin. Then, lest we be cut off from salvation, from our connection with the rest of humanity, it’s essential that sin be forgiven, that we be given absolution. Religions that have institutionalized this concept have proven to be very successful in controlling their adherents, and in giving them something to believe in. Saint Dismas, the so-called Good Thief, was obviously a criminal who had committed at least one capital crime. He had been sentenced to death, to crucifixion. As he was on Calvary, hanging on the cross near Jesus, he asked for absolution from his sins. He would still be punished for them, but the sins themselves would be forgiven. Jesus told him that “this day, thou wilt be with me in Paradise.” And hence for Catholics, he became Saint Dismas. At the same time, Christ took the opportunity, as he hung dying on his own cross, to show by example the power and validity of absolution. He absolved Dismas of his sins, and promised him a permanent place in heaven. The lesson is clear: no matter what sins a person has committed, absolution is possible. It entails acknowledgment of the sin and a sincere desire for forgiveness. After which, the soul is clean again.

Who are your literary influences?

This is an easy question. I’ve been a voracious reader my whole life, and it sometimes feels as though everything I have read has been an influence in one way or another. I distinctly remember that my first real novel was Tom Sawyer when I was halfway through 3rd Grade. Still in grammar school, I was completely sold on the Landmark Books, biographies of famous people from Babe Ruth to Lindbergh to Clara Barton (“Girl Nurse”). Then I was an English major in college, specializing in the Continental Novel in translation, and was immersed in the works of Tolstoy, Camus, Dostoevsky, Stendhal, and so many others. About the same time, for fun, I discovered Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Rex Stout (Sherlock Holmes and Nero Wolfe, respectively), and here suddenly we are getting into the people who truly influenced what I wrote and to some extent how I wrote it. I also wrote my first novel in college, and tried to inculcate into it some of the values of Hemingway and — to the degree they could be reconciled — Lawrence Durrell, author of the Alexandrian Quartet (four novels — Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive and Clea — which changed my entire literary world view). When I started writing modern mysteries, I devoured John D. MacDonald (Travis McGee) and Lawrence Sanders (“The First Deadly Sin,” etc.) then everything Elmore Leonard ever wrote. And then finally I was on the boards with my own voice. My last “conscious” influence over the past few years has been Patrick O’Brian and the Aubrey/Maturin series.

There are so many great whodunnits in crime fiction, perhaps the first great whydunnit is Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Do you think Raskolnikov is seeking guilt or redemption in the novel and how closely related are the two?

This is a real “English major” question, and my history at UC Berkeley makes me feel as though I should answer in a ten-page essay with footnotes! But here, if you don’t mind, I’ll just give you the short version. Raskolnikov is clearly one of the most ambiguous and interesting “heroes” in fiction. Though an intellectual of the first order, Raskolnikov is really what today we would call a sociopath. I think that to say he is “seeking” either guilt or redemption is to somewhat miss the point. When he commits murder, he is — to me — doing it more out of intellectual curiosity. He wants to know how its feels, how the knowledge that he’s taken a life makes him feel. I never really got the sense that he was concerned for the salvation of his soul so much as that he wanted to experience the feeling of guilt so that he
could understand it intellectually. I don’t believe that Raskolnikov’s concept of redemption was spiritual, either. He knew that punishment would not bring him to a state of redemption. What he wanted to know, again, was what it felt like to know that his punishment was deserved. As to the second part of your question: how closely related are guilt and redemption? Well, without guilt one has no need of redemption but, as we discussed earlier, the element of absolution is necessary as a bridge between the two.

How would you like to be remembered?

This one’s easy. Though I’m proud of my books and my career, and hope they continue to be read for many years, I’d like to be remembered not so much as an author as an honest and loyal friend, a loving and faithful husband, and a good father. The basics.

What do you make of the E Book revolution?

Let’s start with the positive. It’s wonderful that so many people are reading, in whatever format. Kindle and Nook and all of their brothers and sisters are certainly convenient, lightweight, and eminently usable. More books than ever before are more easily accessible — the push of a button! — than they had ever been. Authors are able to see their own work disseminated to the public more quickly than ever before, and with no middleman in the way to drive up consumer prices. So, in all these ways, the E-Book revolution is a positive force.

That said, for there are significant drawbacks. The very term “author” has become devalued to a great extent. It used to be that an “author” was a person who had published a book that had been chosen, edited, vetted, and published by industry professionals with admittedly subjective, but nevertheless relatively uniform standards. Now, especially with E-Books, an “author” is someone who has put their own book into the marketplace. All of this, which used to be called “vanity publishing,” is now generally included in discussions about published work, and I don’t think this is a service to anyone. Last year saw the “publication” of 340,000 titles, the vast majority of them mostly unread. I think that the marginal quality of much of this unedited work devalues books in general.

Next, the mainstream publishers have done authors a great disservice by not standing up to Amazon (and other E-outlets) about the timing of the release of published works. In the days before E-Books, the hardcover book came out usually a full year or more before the book was available as a paperback, in a cheaper format. So fans of authors would spend extra to buy the hardcover if they wanted to read a book right away. In the E-Book environment, publishers caved in to Amazon’s demands to release the E-Book on the same day as the hardcover, at roughly one-third the price. Of course, a huge percentage of hardcover buyers started buying the cheaper, downloaded book. While this might sound good to authors — after all, more books were being sold — in reality this resulted in severe cuts in income, since the royalty on a $12.99 book is significantly lower than the royalty on a $26.99 hardback. On top of that, the royalty as a percentage of the sale price is far lower in E-Books than in hardcover, so that even if you’re selling more of your books, you’re making less money.

In all, I would say that the E-Book revolution is here to stay, but that it has not generally been a positive thing for authors thus far.

What are you working on at the moment?

I’m working on my next novel, due to come out in May of 2014. It’s a Hardy/Glitsky book tentatively called The Keeper, and is interesting in that I don’t see it turning into a trial book. Glitsky, about six months into his retirement, is getting a little bit bored with his life, and with Wyatt Hunt (Hardy’s private investigator) on an extended honeymoon in Australia, Hardy asks Glitsky to look into the disappearance of one of his prospective client’s wife. And he doesn’t get too far down that path before unsettling things start to happen.

How much does Dismas Hardy balance and resolve moral conflict in your fictions?

One of the things that makes Dismas Hardy an interesting and sympathetic character is that he is constantly trying to balance (and understand) his inner life while at the same time dealing with the professional demands of being a criminal lawyer. Every one of his cases involves not just a crime, but moral ambiguities that need to be addressed — or at least Hardy feels as though he needs to address them. In real life, of course, many if not most lawyers hew to their strict obligations as attorneys. Because of their oaths, they need to stay within certain well-defined ethical boundaries, but these seemingly endless questions of ethics vs. responsibility vs. morality are ever-fascinating; and Hardy labors to give each part its due. This is more than most lawyers attempt, but it makes for a richness in the books that identifies them as fiction at the same time as it (hopefully) provides a deeper satisfaction with the outcome, especially when these conflicting concerns all resolve in a believable and powerful way. In any good story, the order of the universe falls apart and then is restored, and Hardy’s unflinching connection to what is moral and just, as opposed to what is simply and strictly legal, is a critical component of this restoration of order.

What advice would you give to yourself as a younger man?

What a fantastic last question! The advice I would give myself is probably what I’ve tried to convey to my two children: Life is long. Be patient and keep on trying, since persistence is as important as talent. Have as much fun as you can. Love with your whole heart.

John thank you for a great and perceptive interview.

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T. Jefferson Parker is the critically acclaimed author of some of the best crime novels out there. His first, Laguna Heat, written on evenings and weekends while he worked as a journalist, was published to rave reviews and made into an HBO movie starring Harry Hamlin, Jason Robards and Rip Torn. The paperback made The New York Times Bestseller list in 1986.

Parker’s following novels—all dealing with crime, life and death in sunny Southern California—were hugely successful, and appeared on many bestseller lists. Silent Joe and California Girl both won the Edgar Award. His recent novels feature protagonist Charlie Hood, a Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department deputy “on loan” to a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms task force working the illegal gun trade along the U.S. Mexico border. Parker has a new novel out, The Famous and the Dead, and it sounds like another great one.

Jeff met me at The Slaughterhouse where we talked about his new release and his protagonists.

Tell us about The Famous and the Dead.

The Famous and the Dead is the final volume in my six-part “Border Sextet.” The protagonist in all of them is Charlie Hood, young and single, employed by the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department but attached to an ATF (Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives) task force. So what he does day-to-day is the work the border between the US and Mexico, trying to stop the illegal flow of weapons heading south. Working this “iron river” (iron=guns; river=flow) brings Charlie and his task force brethren into the world of gun runners, corrupt lawmen on both sides of the border, and, of course, powerful and ruthless drug cartels. Several other characters accompany Charlie through the series. One is Bradley Jones, the son of Charlie’s one-time lover, who was both a history teacher and an armed robber. He works for the LASD just as Charlie does, but his morals and ethics are, well, in question and Charlie is hip to Bradley’s chicanery. Another is diminutive Mike Finnegan, who claims to be mid-level devil but seems more of an insane genius bent toward mayhem. The Famous and the Dead settles the scores between these three characters in a rather flamboyant way.

How important is it to you to show a point of view antagonistic to your protagonist in your novels?

Oh, a good question. The striving between protagonist and antagonist is really what makes a thriller, in my opinion. Maybe rivalry is a better word. Or, if you want to balloon up those words a little more, and say “good versus evil,” then you have a fair idea of what the Charlie Hood series, and The Famous and the Dead are all about. Maybe “good versus evil” is an oversimplified way to view the world, but it also might be just about correct. We certainly, most of us, carry the seeds of both inside, and the job of a storyteller is to give to those seeds bodies and faces and agency, and let them go forth upon the stage and slug it out. Of course, there are many fine novels throughout history that don’t boil down the drama to the simplicities of good and evil. But I do think that, within what one expects from thrillers such as the Charlie Hood books, this kind of protagonist/antagonist distillation and amplification is a good thing. One of the things I’m most happy with in The Famous and the Dead are the faces/bodies/agency I’ve assigned to good and to evil and to the many things in between.

Do you think the best detectives have strong criminal shadows?

It seems that fiction tells us so. I interviewed Michael Mann decades ago and he told me about growing up in Chicago, and how in his neighborhood, the bad guys and the good guys were mixed all together, using the same establishments, frequenting the same haunts. His implication was, I think, that given the same nurture, the crooks and cops were not really that different, fundamentally. It was just a career choice. Certainly Thomas Harris would have us believe that Will Graham understands Francis Dolarhyde because of some common wiring. Since Harris, you see that kind of assumption in thousands of thrillers, TV shows and movies. I’m not so sure that connection bears up in real life, though. The cops I know – I mean law enforcers in general and as a group – have a much different mindset than the crooks. There’s a basic belief in the rule of law that doesn’t apply across the line. They’re comfortable within the rules, mostly. There’s also a selflessness in law enforcement people, in my experience, that precludes the sociopathic commitment to one’s own pleasures and advancements. So, I think the idea that cops and crooks are more alike than we might think is a wonderful tactic for storytelling but is it really true? I doubt it.

Do you think the power of the Mexican drug cartels triggers a deep fear in the American psyche and how realistic is that fear?

Oh wow, fear of cartels is all around us, writ large. You see it everywhere from my Charlie Hood series to “Breaking Bad” to “Sixty Minutes.” The fear is real and justified, in my opinion, though certainly exaggerated. Fear makes terrific stories for newspapers and other media, and it informs and propels dozens of works of fiction every year. Most people enjoy fear, so long as it’s enjoyed at a distance from the actual stressor. So we mystery-thriller-action creators can put the drug cartels to good use. If you really look at the nuts and bolts of it, there is a lot of drug cartel influence in the U.S., as in other parts of the world. The generous tides of drugs going north into the U.S., and the dollars going south are by now well known. What appeals to me most about Mexico as a writer isn’t always the fear of violence “coming north.” What’s more interesting is the actual battleground between cartels and government (and regular citizens) south of the border, in Mexico itself. There are towns overrun by narcotrafficantes. There are towns abandoned, completely shut down. There are towns where you live in fear and keep your children home from school. There are states where you simply – as a citizen of any country – do not want to go. There have been some 70,000 drug-related murders in Mexico in the last seven years! Not to mention kidnappings and disappearances. So there’s a general state of lawlessness in some parts of this wonderful country, and that is where I’ve set a large part of my border series. That’s the nub of it – lawlessness. A place where the laws of man no longer apply. There’s something Conradian about it. Mexico as the Congo. Up river. And all of that, taking place in broad daylight and living color, adjacent to one of the wealthiest countries on Earth.

Why is Orange County such a useful location for your fictions?

I’m easily inspired by geography. When I first moved from my native Tustin to Laguna Beach (all of about eight miles away!) I was a young newspaper reporter searching for a novel to write. And I was quickly smitten by Laguna – the Pacific, of course, and the hills and the languorous village and the variety of people. I fell in love with it. And what was to become “Laguna Heat” suggested itself through those things, and I rode my enchantment straight into the book. It’s not just Orange County, though. Similarly, when I moved to Fallbrook twenty years later, I fell for the groves of citrus and avocado, the wonderful fragrance of the place, the widely varied peoples. All of those things inspired me. There’s a lot of Fallbrook in “Storm Runners,” and it’s cropping up in one of the stories I’m working on now. So…geography and location are really important to me. They get my fires burning.

To what extent are the conflicts embodied in your heroes and villains elemental?

I think the inner conflicts in people arise fairly early in life and help guide us through the world, for better or worse. And that’s true of good characters, also, they seem to be governed by forces that are, to use your good word, elemental. Things get interesting, for people as well as fictional characters, when those conflicts collide with other people and characters who don’t share them, or don’t see them, or are dead-set against such sets of mind. Thus the idea that “character is destiny.” I’d say also, that fictional characters are not as complex as real humans. Writers need to sharpen and clarify character – make it definite – whereas real people are less organized, messier, more prone to surprising us. A good character is a good approximation of life.

What do you make of the E Book revolution?

Well, people can read however they choose. Free will and free markets and all that. Personally, I think e-readers are a genuine pain. They’re digital and charmless. I borrowed one once and thought it had about as much soul as a TV dinner. I’d much rather have a book because I like books. I only buy books I think I’ll read and get something out of, and this accomplished, I want to have them right there on the shelf, original dust jackets in place, auras gently emanating, for the rest of my natural life. I could bequeath an e-reader to my sons – yes, you each get half the contents! – but really, I think the books themselves are a finer thing.

Is there a particular event that has changed your life and influenced your writing?

The one that stands out is a rainy winter day my sophomore year of high school. I had taken a “Mythology and Folklore” class at Tustin High School, taught by the attractive young Ms. Page. I took it only for the alleged “easy-A.” It was a bonehead English class, really, but Ms. Page was passionate about the subject. We misbehaved week after week. Mostly boys. One day she announced that she would not teach us that day because we were rude and incapable of learning. Yuk yuk we answered. And she ordered us to form a single-file line at her desk, upon which she had placed a large cardboard box filled with paperback novels from her garage. She ordered us to pass by the box one student at a time, and close our eyes, and choose a book at random from the box, and take it back to our respective desks and read in absolute silence for the period or she’d send us to Mr. Andrews – the man with the paddle. I closed my eyes and chose “Catch-22” by Joseph Heller, and I read it over the next week and it changed my life. When I was done, I wanted to be a writer and I muttered something to myself about someday writing a book that would give my readers one one-thousandth of the pleasure I got from that novel. I’m still trying to do that.

What are you working on at the moment?

Nothing! I’m in the dreaming-it-up phase of a novel, where I’m looking for the kernel of a story interesting enough to see me through the year it will take to write it. One of the first things you learn as a book writer – as you know – is that you better make sure your story is one that you can spend some time with. That means characters, setting, story, the whole package. I’ve always proceeded on the idea that if such an idea is interesting to me, it will certainly be interesting to readers. Don’t know how true that really is, but it sounds good! Actually, I’m finishing up two short stories, also.

What advice would you give to yourself as a younger man?

Well, I think I’d remind myself: do the things you love and don’t get distracted by the things you don’t. It sounds so simple-minded, though! More clearly: let your passions run full throttle. Do things now. And keep the bar as high as you can keep it. And finally: believe. Belief is the key that will finally get you in. Now you can see why I don’t write self-help books! Because I sound like Ward Cleaver at happy hour or something!

Thank you Jeff for a great and perceptive interview.

Links:

Find all things T. Jefferson Parker at his website here.

Pre-order ‘The Famous and the Dead’ at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk and Books-A-Million in hardcover, eBook, and audio compact disk – unabridged formats.

Find pre-order links for ‘The Famous and the Dead’ and buy links for all T. Jefferson Parker books in all formats offered at Barnes & Noble, Borders, Amazon.com, and Amazon.co.uk.

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