Interview

Working Writers: Matt Ambrose

July 11, 2012, by 7 comments
Matt Ambrose, copywriter

Matt Ambrose, Freelance Copywriter (Living Abroad)

Matt Ambrose, copywriter

Matt Ambrose

Matt came to my attention in the early days of the Underground (he’s one of the earlier UK copywriting bloggers), and since then he’s moved to the small Mediterranean island of Malta, where he takes every sun-drenched opportunity to taunt those living in less temperate locations. For that, I will eventually hunt him down and kill him.

For now, Matt’s making a living and enjoying his life in the process, which makes him an ideal candidate for this episode of Working Writers.

Tell Us Who You Are and What You Do?

I’m Matt Ambrose — a six year veteran trading as The Copywriter’s Crucible. Previously I worked at the head office of Argos (UK consumer goods chain). But after stints in various cubicles, I decided the corporate ladder wasn’t for me. So I took the plunge into living by my wits and word processor; I’ve never looked back.

I mainly write B2B copy about software and techie stuff. What I find interesting about B2B is that it’s not always about the technology but what’s going on in the world around it. I recently wrote a bunch of articles about employee productivity software, except the focus wasn’t on the software but on the skills shortage due to our aging workforce. The old adage of selling the hole rather than the drill is alive and well in the B2B world.

A couple of years ago I thought I’d up the ante and relocate 1400 miles south to the Mediterranean island of Malta. Since the move I’ve missed out on a few projects but I love the variety. At the moment I’m writing a book about Malta’s history for one of its tourist attractions, last week I wrote a brochure about a luxury yacht (no time for firsthand research, unfortunately) and I’m about to start working on promotional material for a national boxing event. I can’t imagine how I’d have got these opportunities in my hometown of Milton Keynes.

What Hardware & Software Do You Use?

Nothing fancy: Just a battered Dell Inspiron 6400 laptop, MS Word and a notepad. Now that I’m living in Malta I have yet to decide whether to plant roots and upgrade.

I’ve been working on laptops for the last six years now, and I’m starting to forget what it’s like to work on a full sized keyboard that doesn’t hammer out typos and a screen that isn’t going to give me an RSI.

But while I’m shuttling forwards and backwards from the UK a few times a year, portability is a must. The 10kg limit on cabin luggage can mean a nervous wait in customs, so maybe upgrading to a sleek Ultrabook deserves serious consideration.

For staying connected to the motherland, Skype is fantastic. It enables me to retain a UK phone number so prospects don’t get frightened by an international dialing code and IM is great for quick fire questions. I’ve also started using Google Drive and Dropbox for document sharing and avoiding the email merry-go-round where you end up having to amalgamate a colourful mess of track changes.

Any special copywriting or workflow tricks to share?

The Internet is the biggest drain on productivity known to man. I can easily wile away the hours unless I set some strict boundaries. Firstly, I set half day targets, like a 500 word article or collecting together my notes for a brochure, rather than a vague schedule of what I need to get done each week.

I also use a Google Chrome timer so I work in 40 minute chunks. After which I’ll allow myself five minutes to swan around the web and waste as much time as I like.

Despite all these controls, my blogging schedule still goes down the drain.

What Pieces of the Puzzle Are You Missing?

I’ve spent years battling to get on the front page of Google and sometimes wonder why I bothered. The majority of the emails I get just want to know my rates and then don’t reply when I tell them I don’t live in a box and I charge more than $10 for 500 words. I’ve had much better results approaching clients and marketing agencies offline.

My advice to other freelancers is to attend local networking events and approach businesses directly. High paying clients on the Internet are a rare breed.

Just The Facts

Name: Matt Ambrose
Website
Blog
LinkedIn

Interview With A Marketer: James Hathaway Creates The Orvisnews.com Social Media Strategy

April 11, 2012, by 2 comments
James Hathaway, Hathaway Communications

Today’s interviewee isn’t a writer. Instead, James Hathaway created the social media and content marketing program for Orvis — one of the biggest retailers of outdoor/lifestyle/fly fishing gear.

James Hathaway, Hathaway Communications

James Hathaway, Hathaway Communications

For several years, Hathaway fought to bring content marketing and a new media strategy to longtime fly fishing/outdoor lifestyle sales powerhouse Orvis, who despite their direct sales leadership, wasn’t embracing blogs, podcasts, social media and other new media strategies.

Now — after building Orvis into the fly fishing industry’s only legitimate content/social media powerhouse — Hathaway recently formed his own communications firm (he works on a contract basis for Orvis, Clear Path International, and the Morris Animal Foundation).

I’m hoping his experiences will prove useful to my marketing readers — as will his thinking about the kind of skills needed to write or manage an online presence.

/Interview On

Q: You advocated for a social media and content marketing strategy at Orvis for quite a few years before Orvis built Orvisnews.com; what were the barriers to gaining acceptance for “new media” marketing?

I think just the fact that it is “NEW” media. Orvis is a place with a lot of smart of people who are very good at what they do. It is difficult to measure the ROI on social media and hard to make a case for it if you go from that direction. When we started seeing social media as a customer service tool, then it became a no-brainer and upper management committed to making it work.

When I started with Orvis in 2005, I proposed OrvisNews.com within months (Ed: the Orvis blog site), but the culture wasn’t yet right. We weren’t ready to pull it off in a way that was authentic. If we had gone too early, we would not have been able to create the kind of product you see now.

Today, if you took the name ORVIS out of OrvisNews.com or the Orvis Fly Fishing Guide Podcast, it would be hard to tell that you were reading a blog put out by a retailer. That was the goal, to create a resource for anglers for fly-fishing tips and entertainment that was as brand-agnostic as possible. That was a tough sell six years ago at any company. It is getting to be easier now that most people realize the value of content marketing and customer engagement.

To Orvis’ credit, we have really done something pretty cool and not what you would expect from a 150+ year old brand. The benefits to the brand and to our customers, many of which are not-yet obvious, will be felt for a long time, I believe.
 

Q: What aspect of it remains a hard sell to management?

Whenever you try something new, you are going to get push-back. Making investments in time and money for something like social media that does not have a direct return to the bottom line is always going to be a hard sell, and it should be. If I had my way, we would have spent a lot of time prepping for Google+. Look how wrong I was! I am sure all 7 anglers that use Google+ are disappointed.

If you have a vision and you communicate it well, the hard sell is a good exercise in fine-tuning your proposal and getting it, as Orvis says “absolutely right”.
 

Q: In 200X you were instrumental in getting Orvis to launch their new, high-end fly rod (the Helios) via bloggers instead of traditional media channels. Did that pay off for Orvis?

Did it ever!

Back before we released the Helios, before it had a name, Tom Rosenbauer called an off-site strategy meeting with a small group of us at the Inn at Willow Pond in Manchester, VT. Tom wanted an offsite meeting to reinforce the idea we were doing something new. Orvis had a game-changer on its hands and our marketing of the product should reflect that. It was an exciting time.

We knew from people both inside and outside of Orvis that our R&D team had come up with something that was going to blow people away. In the past year, though, we had released the Zero Gravity fly rod to critical acclaim, winning Field & Stream’s Best of the Best award. Most companies would have ridden out the success of the Zero Gravity for a while longer, but Perk believed we had developed a truly great product and it should go to market ASAP.

Since we didn’t yet have a name, and didn’t even have a color for the rod, yet, the Helios had this mystery around it. Back when I was a kid, I worked in the Burton Snowboard factory when it was still in Manchester, VT and worked on the Mystery boards doing some god awful thing like grinding edges all day long. It made me think that we could pre-market the Helios as this “mystery rod” to blogs and give them this sneak peak. If the rod sucked, it would be catastrophic to the launch, but we knew it was a game-changer.

Tom loved the idea. We sent out the rod with almost no information, just instructions from Tom to fish it and tell us and your readers what you think. The results were AWESOME. We had customers calling us, asking when they could get the rod, coming into the store asking to cast it… but it wasn’t available yet.

We created an exciting buzz that helped create one of Orvis’ top selling products. Don’t get me wrong, the rod was going to be a success anyway — it’s a phenomenal product — but the buzz helped ignite a lot of initial interest and we wound up winning back-to-back “Best of the Best” awards from Field & Stream magazine.
 

Q: Orvis has created a podcast (which just saw its two-millionth download), multiple blogs, and Facebook and Twitter accounts (it already had an active email program). Which have been most effective for Orvis?

For the quality of the engagement, for now, it’s the podcasts. Social media, when done right, humanizes your brand. Rosenbauer has done something truly great, here that transcends the conventional customer-retailer relationship. He has built a community around his podcast and I believe our listeners feel he is more like a fishing than a brand representative. That’s the goal. To connect with people in an honest, meaningful way around the Orvis brand. Orvis is lucky to have Tom and Tom is lucky that Orvis gives him such freedom to be exactly who he is. There is no one besides Tom and me deciding how we talk to thousands of anglers everyday.

What Monahan is doing on OrvisNews.com is just as powerful, and people are recognizing that. OrvisNews.com is the real deal. We get emails from readers thanking us for creating this great, free content and for helping them finally learn how to double-haul or inspiring them to teach their daughter how to tie flies. That is the kind of customer engagement that builds loyalty. It will grow. I am sure of that.
 

Q: How have you been able to measure the results of your work? Any success metrics you’re willing to share? Has it been hard to find useful metrics?

We have a number of metrics we use to track engagement. OrvisNewscom struggled for a while until we implemented real-time link tracking. This was a big help to see when we publish social media objects (podcasts, YouTube videos, blog posts, etc) to determine not just how many clicks an object gets, but how quickly they get them. What did our readers really want?

When things were lagging Perk asked me why I thought OrvisNews.com numbers were below my expectations. My response was “We are putting out great content. People just don’t know it.” Perks response was dead-on “You are making the biggest mistake and one that we all make from time to time. You are telling the customer what they want and not listening to what they want”.

He was so right… that was when we started measuring not just click-throughs, but the speed at which people clicked posted content. Those were our winners. Our page views turned around quickly and OrvisNews.com became a much better product than it had been thanks to basic customer service principles.
 

Q: Can you describe the biggest surprise you experienced during the buildout of the Orvis content marketing strategy?

The biggest surprise has been the quality of engagement from podcast listeners. We get really thoughtful questions sent to us nearly every day. The gratitude… I never thought we would get actual fan letters, you know? People thanking us for helping make their fishing trips better or being able to “be on the water” while riding the subway to work.

I love that. I really do. Makes my day when it is obvious our relationship with the or customer had become more meaningful than just selling stuff. When we do it right, we are improving their lives on a totally different level. That’s magic.
 

Q: Can you sum up the experience of creating and managing a whole new online presence for a category-topping company? The results?

I was fortunate to be working with a company like Orvis. We didn’t have to establish authority. We were well-recognized as an industry leader. What I wanted people to see was this deep bench of talent that made our success possible. Everyone knows the Perkins family, but behind them are guys like Jim LePage, Tom Rosenbauer, Steve Hemkens, Phil Monahan, Pete Kutzer and Paul Fersen. Giving a voice to these guys has been good for the brand.

Don’t get me wrong, selling OrvisNews.com internally was not always easy, and there are still things I would have done much differently, but all-in-all, we have created something really unique and genuine.
 

Q: What skills do you need to build and manage an online presence like Orvis?

You need to be ready to produce and manage consistent content. I tell people quite frequently that they do not need a social media strategy, they need a content strategy. Then think of the delivery of it in social media. How are you going to feed this hungry, content eating monster once you build it?

You have to to be able to think and act like a media company.

You have to like to engage with people in a genuine, friendly way. If you can’t create consistent content and if you aren’t very personable, this may not be the right direction for you.
 

Q: If you were going to hire a writer to write/run a content marketing program, what would you look for?

First and foremost, an expert in their field. You have to be able to offer something that it not easy to get elsewhere. There are a ton of blogs out there. How is your content going to rise above the nose. What do you have that is unique?

I would want someone that understands not just the content, but online culture. If you don’t know what RSS feeds are or why it is important to have comments on a blog, I am not interested in hiring you to run my site.
 

Q: In retrospect, what would you do differently — and what advice would you offer someone taking a slightly behind the times organization into a chaotic online marketing universe?

I made a lot of assumptions about people’s understanding of what I wanted to do. I have been blogging since 2001. That’s forever. I assumed too often, and still do sometimes, that this stuff is obvious. It’s not.

The benefits of online customer engagement are not always apparent. If you have a good idea, take the time to lay out your vision in detail and be patient with push-back. Social media and content marketing will display the culture of your company. If the culture is ready and the company understands the importance of your efforts, you will be successful. If they are not ready, take the time to get them there. It is well worth it.

Interview With A Successful Writer: Rebecca O’Connor, Award-Winning Memoirist

December 13, 2011, by 13 comments

Rebecca O’Connor wrote a critically acclaimed memoir that… didn’t sell. Now she’s taking charge of her own future.

After publishing a novel and a handful of informational books about birds, Rebecca O’Connor wrote an award-winning falconry memoir titled Lift, which married jaw-dropping honesty to a soaring narrative about falconry.

Despite excellent reviews and critical acclaim, Lift didn’t sell very well, suggesting it represents the classic “lost” book; it crossed several genres (memoir, falconry, chick lit), defies easy classification, and as a result, sales suffered.
Rebecca O’Connor wrote an eye-opening blog post detailing her difficult path to publication — and her book’s relatively low sales.

After that post, you could see the gears changing; O’Connor — already active on social media — ramped up her online presence and started self-publishing her own stories, even using Kickstarter to secure funding for an audio version of Lift.

Rebecca O'Connor

Rebecca O'Connor and friend

Her “What We Lost When We Lost Barbara Jean” story remains one of the best I’ve read this year, and her “Home For Thanksgiving” essay was selected for inclusion in the New California Writing 2012 anthology.

She is currently writing a new novel, works at Ducks Unlimited, holds a BA and MFA, and has also worked as an ice cream slinger, professional animal trainer (helpful when dealing with editors) and a process server.

With a background like that, asking a writer for an interview is a foregone conclusion. And I did.

The Memoir & Road to Publication

Q: Lift received critical acclaim and a lot of positive reviews, yet in this blog post you revealed some fairly distressing sales numbers:

The publisher was very excited about their “woman warrior” book. Galleys went out, some even hand delivered by the hardworking small press. LIFT got a starred review in Publishers Weekly (a starred review!!), a nice write up in Library Journal and glowing reviews almost across the board. It was happening! So the hard working writer invests the money and the time making appearance, doing readings, talking on radio shows and sends out galleys to many bloggers. Every free moment, every spare dime into this project she believes in with all her heart. The publicity is all great and the reviews continue to be stellar and here’s what happens…

A year later LIFT has sold 411 copies.

It’s been almost a year since you wrote the above; have sales of Lift gone up in the face of the positive reviews and growing online presence?

That post was really meant to be a moment to whine and get over it. Then it got a surprising amount of attention for my quiet little blog. It was a bit shocking, honestly and maybe a little embarrassing. I’ve only seen the royalty statement for the six months following that post and about another 100 copies sold, which is lovely.

A year after being published, my book could just as well have slipped off into the great void and it is very possible that its audience will snowball. Lift won’t go out of print, so who knows what the future holds for it…

Q: Was Lift a difficult book to write, or did it all spill out on paper once you started? Read more →

Interview With A Successful Writer: Outdoor Book Award Winner Anders Halverson

October 10, 2011, by 2 comments

Halverson Wins A National Outdoor Book Award First Time Out…

I adpated this short interview with Anders Halverson from a longer interview we posted on the California Trout blog.

Award-winning author Anders Halverson

Author Anders Halverson

Halverson is the author of An Entirely Synthetic Fish — a National Outdoor Book Award Winner and a riveting read about fisheries management.

It’s a subject I thought would be as dry as dust, but Halverson — a biologist who has also worked as a journalist — crafted a series of riveting narratives about fisheries management in the USA using the rainbow trout.

In addition to winning the 2010 National Outdoor Book Award, An Entirely Synthetic Fish has generated uniformly positive reviews.

The writing-related portions presented here are regrettably short, but if you want to read the whole thing, go here.

The Anders Halverson Interview

Q: Your book was something of a surprise; I expected a dry-to-the-taste-buds science book, and instead found myself reading a series of riveting stories.

That was my goal. When I decided to write the book,I was finishing a PhD in aquatic ecology. But I’d been a reporter before becoming a biologist, and I wanted to write a popular book about the history of freshwater fisheries management in this country. Somehow I convinced the National Science Foundation to give me a grant to do it.

I decided to write about rainbow trout to provide narrative focus. But ultimately, the book turned is really about people and how we’ve related to the natural world over the last 150 years.

Take the title. I’ve gotten a lot of feedback from people about that.

Q: It threw me too.

I want to state for the record that the title is meant to say more about us than the fish. It’s a quote from the director of the federal fish hatchery program who was moved to declare in 1939 that his agency was now capable of creating “an entirely synthetic fish.”

Q: Got it. Besides the title, what parts of the book do people react to most strongly?

The thing I hear the most about is the Green River “rehabilitation.” In 1962 we poisoned all the fish in a 15,000 square mile watershed so that it would be safe to introduce rainbow trout. It was such a massive project and nobody has really heard about it. But it was also a turning point in how we relate to native species and wilderness. In fact the backlash was one of the things that led to the creation of the Endangered Species Act.

Q: You mentioned that facts about the Green River project were hard to come by; how did you write the Green River chapter?

I expected to find all sorts of stories on the front pages of the newspapers from the day. But when I started going through the microfiche, I couldn’t find a thing. Finally, I found some stories in the sports pages. That’s almost the only place the project was covered–in stories that talked about how great the fishing was going to be.

It’s hard to believe in this day and age, but there was simply no controversy about the project at the time. Imagine the US Fish and Wildlife Service killing all the fish in an area the size of Connecticut and Massachusetts combined so they could introduce a nonnative species.

Q: They were poisoning a whole watershed and nobody cared? Read more →

Interview With A Successful Writer: Essayist John Gierach

September 1, 2011, by 4 comments

John Gierach is a writer who sits high atop a niche market, and whose every book published since 1986 is still in print.

Simply put, his work has legs.

John Gierach, fly fishing writerHis niche is the fly fishing essay, and his seminal essay book (“Trout Bum”) is credited with changing the face of the fly fishing world.

As testament to his broad appeal, every one of his 16 published essay books — dating back to the original Trout Bum in 1986 — are still in print. And in a small publishing niche — where 4,000 books is a pretty good run for an essay title — Gierach’s hardcovers and paperbacks sell upwards of 60,000-70,000 books per title.

In a useful lesson for any writer, Gierach decided what he wanted out of life and then made it happen. Gierach wanted to fly fish as much as possible, and he simply created that reality.

That’s probably a little new age-ish for his tastes, but it represents an important lesson for writers, too many of whom define “success” in terms of external validation instead of internal rewards.

Of course, it doesn’t hurt that Gierach’s a stunning writer, though I’d suggest he’s a misleading one; his talent has always been his ability to wander through a fishing trip, picking out the relevant pieces and enhancing the narrative with insight gained elsewhere — all of which comes together in a moment of revelation the reader never saw coming.

NOTE: I excised most of the fly fishing-geek-only content from this interview (you can read the long version on my Trout Underground fly fishing blog), hopefully leaving behind the writer-friendly bits. Enjoy!

Gierach On Writing For a Living

Q: Editors of fly fishing magazines have admitted their fees haven’t increased since the 70s, and you’re probably the only writer making a decent living in the fly fishing space. Have things gotten better or worse for writers in the fly fishing space?

The only reason I make a living is Simon & Schuster. There was a time when it possible to make a passable living freelancing [articles]. But that’s not the case any more.

This book is like my 16th; and they’re all out there making money for me.

The guys now aren’t making much money. I’m not sure I would be able to do today what I did then.

I’m frankly glad I don’t have to figure it out.

Q: What do you think about fly fishing’s online writers, the bloggers and ezine writers? Read more →

Interview With a Successful Writer: Novelist, Screenwriter Lee Goldberg

June 27, 2011, by 12 comments

Lee Goldberg has written everything from pulp thriller novels to feature film scripts to television shows — even the tie-in novels related to those television shows.

He’s a living counterpoint to those who contend that writers should focus exclusively on one kind of project, and to give you an idea of the range of his career, he’s even recently become an advocate for self-publishing ebooks (though he admits it’s not for everyone).

Lee Goldberg

Lee Goldberg, Mr. Versatility

He clearly possesses a lively entrepreneurial mind, and serves as a good example of the writer as marketer; he just launched a multi-author series of pulp/horror/mystery books aimed at the ebook market.

He’s also written scripts for the much-missed Spenser: For Hire TV series, wrote and produced the Diagnosis Murder TV series (for which he also wrote the tie-in novels), other TV shows, a feature film and several short films (you can read his own bio page here.)

His blog is active and informative, and he refuses to answer questions about his whereabouts during the Roswell Incident, which we frankly find suspicious.

Now to the interview…

Your Career

Q: You just launched a new multi-author pulp/horror/mystery book series titled The Dead Man. In terms of workflow, it appears to be an interesting mix of individual novels and TV-style group writing; how are you organizing multiple writers around one central character–and keeping everyone on track?

We have a private google group that we use to keep writers up-to-date on what everyone else is doing, stories in development, creative issues writers are having with their DEAD MAN tales, etc.

Q: Are you using any special tools to accomplish this? Version control, cloud, etc?

Only Google Groups and Dropbox.

Q: How many writers will you ultimately involve in the series? Are you acting as an editor?

We have a dozen now, My guess is that we might add three or four others, but I think the core group is likely to do more than one book each.

Q: Four Dead Man books are out (with a fifth on the way). Assuming this series was aimed primarily at the ebook market, can you tell us about the percentage of print vs digital sales of the series?

Right now, the majority of sales are in the ebook format… easily 95% or more.

Q: You’ve written tie-in novels for several series (Diagnosis Murder, Monk, etc); how hard is it to write a character who is seen every week on TV — one who is loved and studied by most of your readers? Read more →

Interview With a Writer: Science Fiction Writer Walter Jon Williams

April 26, 2011, by 8 comments

Because stalking is (technically speaking) a crime, I’m channeling my interest in writers into a series of interviews, the first of which you’re reading now.

You’ll soon discover I’m covering a lot of ground; you’ll hear about life as a science fiction novelist, screenwriter, memoirists, essay writer, etc.

A mix of the serious and the irreverent, I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I enjoy making them.

An Interview With Walter Jon Williams

Deep State by Walter Jon Williams

Deep State by Walter Jon Williams

Walter Jon Williams is a talented science fiction writer whose work, as people sometimes put it, has trees in it.

A professional writer since 1979, he’s been nominated for (and won) science fiction’s most prestigious awards, and one of his earliest novels (Hardwired; 1986) helped launch the cyberpunk movement.

In the years since, Williams has covered a lot of literary ground within science fiction, writing everything from cyberpunk to a mystery to an award-winning short story collection to Deep State – his just-released near-future thriller about a government agency manipulating social media to foment revolution in a foreign country.

Just as Deep State released, the “social media revolutions” in Tunisia and Egypt erupted, and suddenly, Deep State read more like a “how-to” guide than science fiction novel.

It’s a remarkable story — both his career and Deep State’s giddy intersection of reality and fiction — and we’re happy to have Walter Jon Williams here to tell us more about Deep State, his career, his writing habits — and his work teaching writers at the Taos Toolbox Writer’s Workshop he founded.

/Interview On

Q: What’s it like to see Deep State — your work of fiction — playing out in real life in Egypt, Tunisia, and other locations?

I watched individual scenes from my book played out on CNN. It was all pretty startling.

But when all’s said and done, I was confident that those scenes would be played out somewhere. I just thought it would happen a few years in the future. So I was surprised, and not surprised.

[Ed: You can read Williams' own take on his book's relationship to the events in Egypt and Tunisia here and here]

Q: Has the timing affected sales of the book? (Sub-questions: did you buy lottery tickets, and will you warn me if your next book involves uprisings against bloggers? Thanks.)

I have no idea if sales were affected. All I can say is that no overstuffed sacks of fan mail have started appearing on my porch.

Q: I Googled the book, and it appears — oddly — that few media outlets beyond science fiction sites noticed that you neatly predicted the future, and even had the foresight to release your book just as things hotted up. Did you see more media attention than it appears? If not, was that disappointing?

Nobody outside the field gives a damn what science fiction writers think or do.

My publisher’s publicist tried to get the book some traction with major media outlets, but it went nowhere. I’m just a writer, I’m not qualified to have thoughts worthy of anyone’s interest.

If I were only a movie star, they’d have been all over that book.

Q: You’ve been active in Role Playing Games (RPG) for many years, and Deep State seems so carefully plotted that it really could serve as a template for an “online” revolution. How much did your game-playing experience help? Was this a case of “write what you know?”

The first book in the series, This Is Not a Game, was based in part on my experiences writing an Alternate Reality Game (ARG) some years ago.

ARGs ask theirs players to develop a certain skill set. They have to analyze evidence, use and break codes and ciphers, solve intricate puzzles, sort through raw data for crucial evidence, find hidden motivations, and sometimes go out into the real world on missions.

What I realized is that these are practical intelligence skills. And that’s how Deep State was born.

As for plotting, I just happen to have a knack for it. I create tricky plots in books, I create tricky plots in games. (And I teach this skill, by the way, at Taos Toolbox.)

Q: In Deep State, I sensed an almost paternal attitude towards Dagmar (note: the lead character is a sci-fi writer, gamer, etc — perhaps a young, female version of our interviewee). Dagmar is a richly drawn character, and is that because she’s so similar to you? Read more →