A Lifetime of Discovery

For some people, their early life is carefully designed and curated to promote the best possible result. For others, your childhood – and likely your adulthood – were about discovery. This was me.

Consequently, I grew up with no idea how to choose or make friends. Or the knowledge that some places, people and activities could be damned foolhardy, if not dangerous. This led to several near drownings and some catastrophic relationships.

My father, however, left a bookcase full of children’s classics and a set of Encyclopedia Brittanica where I could find and investigate them. Treasure Island, Robinson Crusoe, King Arthur, Black Beauty, Tom Sawyer, etc., were my early mentors.

Why I Write About The People I Do

I grew up in a small town near a reservation where, as a teenager, I played for dances and experienced poverty and alcoholism firsthand. Later, for a journalism project at the University of Washington, I interviewed Robert Satiacum, perhaps the best-known Native American activist in the state, and the mother of a teenage boy taking part in the nightly fishing demonstrations on Puget Sound to restore their historic tribal fishing rights. Respect for their ecology, spiritualism, and bravery led me eventually to write my first novel, Soul Catcher.

Like some, if not many of you, I am scarred emotionally by life’s tragedies and various levels of relationship trauma. Dealing with health issues as a child led to being bullied. Death, especially the much-to-early death of a childhood friend and the suicides of two dozen friends, neighbors and acquaintances, affected me in ways I am still trying to sort out. I became fluent in the language of yearning and the struggle for fairness. Which led me to write the deaf character of Evan in Soul Catcher and, later, the blind Valerie in Swimming with the Angels.

After moving from Washington State to Southern California, I enjoyed living in one of the most culturally diverse places in the world. I also worked and traveled internationally for a multi-national company where people were accepted for who they were, not their ethnicity. I resolved to make inclusivity a theme in my writing. As you will notice, regardless of their sex, color, age, or disability, my characters value fairness above all else.
As someone who has lived, worked, worshipped and traveled among a multi-ethnic population, I find that people are all much more alike than different. If a writer can’t write about anyone but someone like themselves, why bother? To grow as a writer – or as a person – it’s necessary to explore, to observe, to discover what’s similar and what’s unique.

Why Thrillers

Hiking, fishing, river rafting, boating, and climbing Mt. Rainier, I learned to not only to appreciate the stunning beauty of nature, but also its danger: the wind that could turn a sailboat outing into a desperate battle for survival, the whiteout that could obliterate a mountain trail, or the river that could seize and sweep a body out to sea.
I write thrillers. I greatly admire authors like John Steinbeck who can write pages about a desert tortoise making its slow but methodical way across the heat-baked earth, but my stories typically rush toward a conclusion, with words flying across the pages. I describe it as black panthers racing across a field of snow.
I write for readers who enjoy action and adventure, but who also seek romance and emotional depth. If I can touch you through imagery or emotions that resonate long after you finish reading, I have accomplished my goal.

Stories Drawn from the News

A newspaper article and the letter of a friend were the genesis of my first novel, Soul Catcher, a supernatural thriller that won critical acclaim. After reading a news article in the Seattle Times about the mysterious deaths of two boys who drowned in Puget Sound, my curiosity was piqued. When found, their bodies were mysteriously wrapped together in fishing line. As I began to consider the possibility of a wind or whirlpool that caused their small boat to spin, I received a holiday letter from a friend whose husband had nearly died from the attack of a spirit wind.

Her husband was a dentist in Alaska who flew his own small plane to villages in Alaska. Upon spotting a remote and pristine small lake, he landed his float plane to try his luck fishing. While casting from the pontoon of his plane, a wind came out of nowhere to flip his plane. He nearly drowned and might have frozen to death if not rescued by a couple of Inuit tribespeople. They called the wind a “Williwaw” that guarded their mountains and holy places.

Swimming with the Angels, my second novel, similarly began with a news article. This one was about a secret financial organization headquartered in Belgium called SWIFT that handles the billions and trillions of transactions between countries, banks, hedge funds and other financial institutions. One evening over dinner, I asked a friend who was employed as a software engineer at a mutual fund if he thought SWIFT could be hacked. His affirmative response got me thinking about what might happen if a naïve employee at a large financial firm decided to use their position to hack $100 million. To add to the tension, I had the missing millions belong to a Mexican drug cartel who were laundering their dirty money through legitimate investments and who were more than willing to use utter savagery in their pursuit of revenge.

The Secret of Charley Grace came about from reading about the worldwide stir that was created when a Chinese researcher named He Jiankui edited the genes of twin girls before they were born to remove the possibility of being infected by HIV. For his breakthrough bioengineering efforts, He was found guilty of conducting “illegal medical practices” and sentenced to 3 years in prison. As the pandemic overwhelmed the world, I wondered what might happen if a husband-wife team of Chinese researchers were to attempt to protect their unborn daughter from COVID and other diseases and extend her life to twice the normal limit.
If you enjoyed one or more of my stories, please let me know at colinkersey@gmail.com