The Reader In Me

From the moment I picked up my first grade primer and learned how the letters on the page formed words to tell me the adventures of David and Ann and their dog Spot, I have loved to read.

I grew up with books in the house. We had shelves full of books: the Cherry Ames, Nurse series, the Nancy Drew mysteries, the Hardy Boys, Don Grady Among the Gorillas. There were so many and I devoured them all. I used to like it when I got sick because my mother’s library card allowed her to get an unlimited number of books to bring me, while my card limited me to three at time.

When I was ten, I borrowed a library book titled “Marjorie Morningstar” because my older sister had read it and I idolized my older sister. It was the story of a young woman who joined a summer stock theater company and there was sex in it! I had no idea what I was reading but I wasn’t interested in kids’ books after that one!

I once read James Clavell’s Taipan—all 736 pages of it—in one sitting. It took me about thirteen hours and my eyes looked like they were bleeding by the time I was done but what a book!

My love of reading is what led me to write. Writers have always been my heroes because they were the ones who allowed me to go places I’d never been, imagine things I’d never imagined and think about things I’d never been aware of until those words jumped off the page and into my brain.

People ask me who my favorite author is and I have to laugh. I have so many! It’s hard to begin the list without thinking of another and another and then another. I appreciate the creepiness of Stephen King, the lyrical style of Dean Koontz (yes, I do consider his writing lyrical!), the introspective style of Patricia Cornwell, the political savvy of Richard North Patterson. I love biographies and autobiographies and historical books, fiction and non-fiction alike.

When asked what I like, my answer is always the same: Everything and anything, as long as it’s well written.

Which brings me to my pet peeve, perhaps the biggest pet peeve I have going: That being a writer who is sloppy. I hate it when I’m a quarter of the way through a book and I already know who did it. I paid my money and I want to be entertained and don’t want to know the payoff before I get to the big climax. And it’s happened. I won’t mention the name of the writer, as she is well known and sells a lot of books. Just not to me. Another thing that really chaps my hide is the writer who constantly has zingers in the plotline—things that maybe once could happen but not every other page. I think it’s lazy and a contrivance to keep the reader on the edge of his seat. All it does for me is make me close the book.

I don’t care how outlandish the story is, I just want it to be plausible.

That’s what I try to do with my books: create characters who are real, put them in situations that are believable, even when they’re fantastic, and build a story to make you keep wondering what’s next. You may think you know where it’s going but then it’ll go somewhere else and you won’t know the ending until you get there. Because I respect the fact that you paid your money—even if it’s just 99 cents for an eBook—and I wouldn’t expect my readers to accept anything less than I would accept. That’s what I did with Decker Jones and Albert Crawford and Ruby Wheeler in Dreams and Nightmares and what I did with Amanda Harris and Seth Crowfoot in The People Next Door and what I will continue to do in the books I will publish in the future. Because I want to be one of those writers you think of when you think of your favorite stories.

I like Bad Guys!

I like bad guys. Not in real life. In books.  Love, love, LOVE ‘em! They fascinate me and I guess that’s because deep down inside of me, there’s a bad guy (or gal) lurking. I just don’t let him (or her) out. I know I’m not the only person who feels this way, otherwise people like Thomas Harris, Dean Koontz and James Patterson wouldn’t have an audience. There’s just something so cathartic about getting into the mind of a seriously disturbed individual without having to bear the consequences. It’s why we like horror movies and novels like Silence of the Lambs, which was made into a very scary movie.

I have found, however, that there’s one thing I like even better than reading about bad guys or watching them on the big or small screen and that is creating them. I’ve written a few novels and even though I’m an avid and eclectic reader, when I sit down to write I just naturally gravitate to the dark side. There is nothing more fun than coming up with a totally horrible person and bringing that person to glorious, bloody life!

Take for instance, Albert Crawford, one of the protagonists of my newly released novel Dreams and Nightmares. I had Albert down before I ever put word one on the page. He was a character in a novel that didn’t gel but I’d come up with this wonderful character and I just couldn’t let him go. Eventually, a light bulb went off in my head and I found the perfect home for Albert and his band of miscreants.

Meet Albert:

Albert Crawford had a face that looked as if it had been pressed upon glass. His nose, larger than most, had been broken in a bar fight some years back and it spread across his face like silly putty left too long in the sun. Thick, protruding lips opened in a perpetual pout exposing teeth that looked more like they belonged to some feral animal than to a human being. His smile, an infrequent thing, was literally wolfish and had the tendency to scare people; except for Ruby Wheeler, his biker girlfriend, who seemed to thrive on danger and what she referred to as Albert's "edge". At one time, his mother had purported to love that face and she'd promised the boy she would get the money to have his teeth fixed. The promise, like so much of what she said, was a lie. Empty words uttered by an empty woman. She was dead now, at the hands of her loving son, although this was a fact known only to him and Ruby. His eyes, his best feature, were a shade of blue that bordered on turquoise. They would have been beautiful, were it not for the hardness in them that chilled the soul of anyone unlucky enough to become the object of their scrutiny. To compensate for his lack of physical beauty, Albert worked out like a demon and had a physique that could easily have been the envy of Conan the Barbarian.  

This is a guy you don’t want to meet in a back alley. For that matter, you don’t want to run across Ruby Wheeler either, because she might just be a bigger badass than Albert and that’s saying something!

I’ll let you in on a secret. When I’m writing some of the awful things these people do, it never fails to strike me funny. I mean, I will sit there and spew the worst of the worst on my computer screen—scare myself half to death sometimes—and then I’ll read over what I’ve just written and laugh (sometimes hysterically) because I can’t believe that what I just wrote came from some fevered part of my brain that otherwise would never see the light of day. It certainly does alleviate any tension I may have built up in the course of my everyday life.

If you like bad guys (and gals) too, then I invite you to check out how Ann Werner does them! For only 99 cents—not even a buck!—you can meet the gang in Dreams and Nightmares. It’s just been released on Kindle and also on Smashwords for you Nook and other e-reader fans.  My advice: pull the covers up over your head so the bad guys don’t get you!

Read the first two chapters here.