I recently had the pleasure of meeting a great indie author whose book Coercion was just launched by Thomas and Mercer, one of Amazon’s publishing imprints. He’s a fantastic writer with very strong reviews on all his books, and he’s also a hell of an interesting person. I asked if he would do a guest post and he obliged. If you haven’t read any of his books, I strongly recommend them.
Michael
Tim Tigner
Delightful Deception
You hate it when your boss does it, and bosses frequently do. You may cry if your partner does it, although hopefully that’s rare. If your friends do it too often, they’ll be friends no more. But you love it when thriller writers lie—so long as we play by the rules.
When Michael and I lie, it’s to take you someplace you couldn’t otherwise go. We give you fascinating friends and guide you to incredible environs, we may warp time or bend the laws of physics, but there are limits to our lies. If we don’t keep things within the shadow of the truth, you’ll trip and the book will fall, never to be picked up again. That’s where our juggling act comes in.
As authors writing on technology’s edge, we have to weave a story that credibly brings a wide range of readers to the same depth of understanding, and we have to do it without confusion or tedium. While that delicate balance inevitably ends with research, it typically begins with our own expertise.
My career began with Soviet Counterintelligence in the Green Berets and progressed to medical technology Silicon Valley, so my international thrillers naturally revolve around devious devices of military or medical invention. To stay in that sweet shadow of truth, I try to keep just ahead of the curve, but that’s no easy task.
Terrorists caught up with the core concept of my second thriller while it was with my agent. If I’d published BETRAYAL a month earlier, I’d have been making the talk show circuit, but those real-life weasels stuck me with a major rewrite instead. (Others had it worse.)
I avoided the technology trap in my latest novel by making it historical. Just launched by Thomas & Mercer, COERCION is a cold war thriller about a KGB general’s devious plan to restore Russia’s glory at America’s expense. It draws heavily from both my Special Forces training and the decade I lived in Moscow. You can read more about COERCION here.
2016 will find me out on a technology limb once again with my forthcoming thriller, PUSHING BRILLIANCE. You are invited to visit timtigner.com where you can pick up the beta version for FREE, just please don’t pass it on to any terrorists.
