Seeley James, author of Chasm of Exiles
FAP: Can you reflect on a personal experience or a turning point that significantly shaped your writing?
JAMES: While there are many experiences that have shaped my life, three experiences forced the most dramatic changes. The first was being kicked out of my home and family at age fifteen. The subsequent struggle for survival taught me self-reliance and determination not to mention a callousness I've long since struggled to reconcile.
The second turning point came when I was nineteen: a three-year-old girl adopted me. Instantly a single father, self-reliance took on a whole new meaning, as did ambition. Despite hoping to become a writer, I discovered children require a good deal more money than young writers can support, so I pursued a corporate career.
The third, and most defining turning point, was the unexpected death of my beloved wife of thirty years. I'd come to rely on her in so many ways that the last ten months have been my biggest struggle as a father and as a writer. Combined, these experiences have the largest effect on the shape of my characters and the arc of my stories.
FAP: Regarding your latest work, Chasm of Exiles, what aspect of this story do you feel is most reflective of your own worldview or emotional journey?
JAMES: As mentioned above, my emotional journey manifests in three distinct ways: abandonment, adoption, and loss.
Abandonment: Whether it is an emotionally abandoned spouse, or a mentor-abandoned worker, or a child of distracted parents, I often see unrecognized abandonment issues playing a big role in the actions and reactions of others. My writing incorporates that common thread in several characters.
In my most recent novel, Chasm of Exiles, the character of Symone has overt abandonment problems but several others have underlying problems. The abandoned lover, the hero hoping to abandon his calling, the spy abandoned by the agency, the sycophant abandoned by the villain, and several others find themselves striving to crawl out of the same lonely chasm.
Adoption: My previous novel, The Rembrandt Decision, covers adoption overtly in the story's mystery and through reflections on Greek mythology. In Chasm of Exiles, our hero has unwillingly adopted a troubled teenager.
Many other characters struggle with adopting new hierarchies or shifting allegiances. The subtext demonstrates how some adopt and adapt to new situations while others suffer the consequences of refusal.
Loss: Long a staple of fiction, loss and tragedy power most stories in some form or another. In Chasm of Exiles, our hero has long since lost his fiancé and now struggles with the loss of a motivating force in life. His transformation reflects the shocking loss of my wife in real life. Before her death, Jacob Stearne was a happy-go-lucky hero. Now he broods over the cost of his life choices. Other characters in the novel also grapple with loss in their lives, some embracing grief while others try to ignore it.
FAP: What is a central question or theme you feel compelled to explore in your writing, and why do you keep returning to it?
JAMES: Not to sound like a broken record but those three emotional journeys mentioned above appear in some form in nearly all sixteen of my books.
I'm much better at expressing and demonstrating their costs and benefits in Chasm of Exiles than I was in my first book, The Geneva Decision, but even the first characters I created were designed to express those three fundamental emotions. Within those three, exploring the complex changes in personality and perspective has been a form of therapy, not only for me, but also for many readers.
I've several emails and DMs from readers eager to share their experiences of being visited by a recently departed loved one. Others have shared their difficulties dealing with accepting, or being accepted by, new family members.
Oddly, or maybe not so oddly, few have expressed feelings of abandonment. Perhaps that is because our psychological defense to abandonment is denial.
FAP: Was there a specific moment when you felt a shift in how you viewed your work or your place within the literary landscape?
JAMES: I'm not terribly smart. I don't say that with any false humility or to beguile the reader, it's simply true. I'm what I call slow-smart. I figure things out, but it takes me longer than a noticeably intelligent person like a surgeon or physicist.
My writing career has been evolutionary. After writing my first two novels, I thought about what I was doing from the 30,000-foot level and decided I needed a new direction. I spent several weeks working out how to make my cast of characters stand out.
When I worked out what I wanted (more humor, less gratuitous violence), I separated the cast into Sabel Origins (books one and two) and Sabel Security (the next six books).
After writing Death and Vengeance (book 6 in Sabel Security, 8th overall), I worked out the inherent problem with female heroines in violent thrillers.
It was something that had bothered me after seeing the success of the movie Wonder Woman and the failure of nearly every female-led thriller before or since: thriller heroes must be beaten to one stitch short of death before coming back to save the day — and people don't like to see women beaten to one stitch short of death.
Wonder Woman and Alien are outliers in which the heroines were threatened but not horribly beaten. I knew my heroine, Pia Sabel, was better suited for a role like Ripley in Alien or Clarice Starling in Silence of the Lambs than Bruce Willis in Die Hard.
So I made the decision to separate my dynamic duo, creating the Jacob Stearne Thriller series and the Pia Sabel Mystery series. Fans approved.
FAP: How do you balance the internal process of writing with the external realities of publishing and marketing?
JAMES: You've hit on a constant problem for all indie authors. For over a decade, I've tried to keep my calendar clear for distinct sessions lasting months at a time. Three months writing, a month marketing, a month editing, another marketing, and so on. But the writers I know who do a little of each every day appear to be more effective at marketing.
My biggest problem is that I love writing so much, I've come to loathe the marketing periods. That is the worst attitude to take into marketing.
That leaves me considering traditional publishing or rearranging my wide-distribution (I sell direct mostly, Amazon, Kobo, Apple, and Google), turning to Kindle Unlimited, and hiring someone to market for me.
What I've never done, and I hear intimations of it in your question, is realign what I'm writing to better suit the market. What I write is not so well crafted in my brain that I can massage it to fit someone else's demand.
For example, I could never write romance or police procedurals because in the former's case, the required ending with "happily ever after" (or HEA in the business) is so statistically unrealistic in the real world, I'd produce something closer to Romeo and Juliette than Twilight -- and that would herald the end of my romance career.
In the latter, police procedurals, it doesn't take much research to discover "good cop/bad cop" only exists in fiction and never in real life. Real interrogation techniques are boring.
In real life, they take hours if not days or weeks to cozy up to the suspect in a nice way.
For those reasons, I write thrillers in the action adventure tradition: unrealistic but vaguely plausible scenarios in which our hero prevails with grit, determination, and a bit of luck.
FAP: Was there a specific moment when you felt a shift in how you viewed your work or your place within the literary landscape? Can you share that experience with us?
JAMES: I'm not terribly smart. I don't say that with any false humility or to beguile the reader, it's simply true. I'm what I call slow-smart. I figure things out, but it takes me longer than a noticeably intelligent person like a surgeon or physicist. My writing career has been evolutionary.
After writing my first two novels, I thought about what I was doing from the 30,000-foot level and decided I needed a new direction. I spent several weeks working out how to make my cast of characters stand out. When I worked out what I wanted (more humor, less gratuitous violence), I separated the cast into Sabel Origins (books one and two) and Sabel Security (the next six books).
After writing Death and Vengeance (book 6 in Sabel Security, 8th overall), I worked out the inherent problem with female heroines in violent thrillers. It was something that had bothered me after seeing the success of the movie Wonder Woman and the failure of nearly every female-led thriller before or since: thriller heroes must be beaten to one stitch short of death before coming back to save the day — and people don't like to see women beaten to one stitch short of death.
Wonder Woman and Alien are outliers in which the heroines were threatened but not horribly beaten. I knew my heroine, Pia Sabel, was better suited for a role like Ripley in Alien or Clarice Starling in Silence of the Lambs than Bruce Willis in Die Hard. So I made the decision to separate my dynamic duo, creating the Jacob Stearne Thriller series and the Pia Sabel Mystery series. Fans approved.
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