Thank you for joining us again as we talk to author Robison Wells. If you missed Saturday’s installment, please click here.
Rob, when you wrote “Wake Me When It’s Over,” did you already know that you would be writing a sequel, or did that come along as a happy realization later?
It was always planned as a series, as you can tell by the “to be continued…” at the end of “Wake Me When It’s Over.”
You smart aleck!
However, I’d originally intended the series to have three books instead of two. But when I finally got into writing it, I realized that the story I had planned just wasn’t long enough to spread into two remaining books—instead of writing two watered-down novels, I decided to cram all the good stuff into one.
You took some risks with this book, and it paid off for you very well. Everything is going to seem a little tame to me after reading “The Counterfeit.” Do you realize that you’re setting a high bar for the LDS suspense writers who follow you?
In “Wake Me,” Eric and Rebekah were pursued by bad guys, and shot at, and injured, and had to run away. I knew that The Counterfeit had to really up the ante—to make everything more dangerous, to make the possibilities worse, and more importantly, to make some bad things happen. It’s a book about normal people in very awful situations, and it wouldn’t be very plausible if, along with their successes, they didn’t have some catastrophic failures.
Brandon Sanderson, a friend of mine who writes national fantasy novels, used to say that a book didn’t work until the fabric of the universe was in peril. In early versions of “The Counterfeit” I still had the same characters and motivations, but stakes weren’t very high. So, I tweaked things in later rewrites and came up with the current version.
I’m a Tom Clancy fan, and I’ve always admired something he did in his novel “The Sum of All Fears” (which is way better than the movie, by the way). In that book, terrorists get a hold of a nuclear weapon, and the good guys slowly begin to get wind of it. However, as you’re reading, and the terrorists are getting closer to their goal, you start to realize that the good guys just aren’t keeping up. And then the nuke explodes, and vaporizes half of Denver. That takes some real courage on the part of the author, I think. A lot of books put the characters in danger, but don’t have the guts to ever let anyone get hurt. In “The Counterfeit,” people get hurt. I’m glad that the risk paid off, and that people are liking it.
We are liking it very much, Rob.
We’ll conclude our talk with Robison Wells tomorrow. Be sure to join us.
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