Q&A

My freelance-writer-self interviewed my wannabe-published-author-self about Wicked Good, mindful of not blowing up key reveals and plot twists.

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How did you get the idea for the book?

A TED talk. Actually, it had been rattling around in my head since the mid-1990s. I took a swing at it then, but popped out. Then came the TED talk, I realized I was on to something. A social scientist said the future of humanity would not be determined by governments, politicians or the moneychangers, but by lab techs tinkering with the human genome. Breakthroughs in genetic engineering, like CRISPR, powered by AI, have the potential to transform the human species, compressing evolution from hundreds of thousands of years, to months, days, hours. That drew me back into writing the book.  It doesn't take much research to understand that the technology now far exceeds ethical guardrails. It's the Wild West out there, and the tools to change the genome are getting dirt cheap. Yet, the promise of eradicating incurable diseases is irresistible—still, you have to ask, at what cost? What are the unintended consequences? Nobody knows. And nobody is going to stop moving the ball down field, either. That's ripe territory for speculative fiction. The What If  ... what if the bad guys got proprietary control of the most powerful medical tool in the history of mankind—first?  

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You wrote a 'book within a book.' There's the missing manuscript that everyone wants.

My McGuffin. The Swamp House Diaries. It's like the suitcase in Pulp Fiction. The undelivered package in Cast Away. The statue in the Maltese Falcon. Hitchcock invented McGuffins, only mine actually has something in it that powers the plot. It's the book's organizing device, coveted by all the key players—good guys and bad guys. I can't say much more about it or my publisher, who hasn't found me yet, would likely admonish me for such a rookie mistake.

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Why a washed-up ex-pro baseball player as your protagonist?

I love baseball. I didn't want a skilled cop, detective, PI or medical examiner to swoop in and solve a murder mystery or investigate various crimes. I wanted an Everyman, who had to rely on his/her own innate strengths. In Peter Wilder's case, the stuff that made him a great athlete, before his fall. After suffering a career-ending injury, he's lost his marriage, his family, his money, his dreams—he's become this self-absorbed, rudderless guy, a likable enough jerk with no prospects, at the ripe old age of thirty-one. When the story opens, he's a mess, living in his family's old beach cottage, driving his dented Porsche he can't afford to fix, trading on his faded glory days, drinking too much and carousing—but he wants to reconnect with his estranged son, Jack. The boy is his lifeboat. Through his son, is there redemption for the father? That notion plays out in the fraught relationship Peter has with his own father, a professor, a cool distant guy, who had never there for Peter, who committed suicide shortly after his wife's drowning. The heartache and pain are thick—but so is Peter's love for his son. One of my challenges was to redeem a character mired in horrific loss through a love story. 

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Your female leads, Grace and Cassie—where did they come from?

Cassie, as the good girl turned wickedly bad, came first. But the darker her journey, Grace emerged as a powerful presence that I had to deal with. Totally unexpected. The two girls are complementary opposites, like Cassie's yin-yang amulet from her mother, they balance one another, the light and the dark sides. There's a book called The Passenger about Carl Jung's dark 'shadow side' that resides within each of us. It's a theory. Well, that resonated with me, thinking about Cassie. Why not give 'the passenger within' a genetic expression? I mean, it's not that far off from the study of epigenics—where trauma is passed down through damaged genes, from mothers to children before birth. Wicked Good attempts to roll a bunch of these ideas together into a plausible genetic soup. (Yes, I'm being intentionally vague.)

 

Speaking of ghosts, you write about the phenomena of "gene jumping"—where edited genes can inexplicably hop around the genome and trigger other genes lying dormant for hundreds of thousands of years. You call these reactivated genes—ghosts.

​Yeah, that was convenient. I didn't make it up. 

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Can you talk about that more?

You know, the thing about writing a mystery-suspense-thriller using biogenetics, or any science to drive the narrative, is to make the technical aspects of the story sound plausible, without getting lost in the weeds. Authors like Robin Cook and Michael Crichton are brilliant at this, but it's a tricky, to balance story and science, especially if you're not a doctor or scientist. I'm neither. Wicked Good leans on biology and genetics to push the plot—but at its heart, it's still a love story and redemption story ... which might surprise you. 

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If you say so. Your book is a medical mystery thriller. What's so thrilling?

Ah, Florida stuff. A daring escape through a gator-filled swamp ... a harrowing bridge jump over the Intracoastal ... an ocean drug bust  ... lost at sea and swimming with sharks and man 'o war ...  an old sugar mill ignited into a raging inferno ... discovering cryo-suspended bodies ...  getting caught in a flooding underground cave ... a shootout or two ... more gators. Florida stuff.  

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Your title—Wicked Good. Care to explain?

I'm horrible with titles, this was maybe the 99th for this book. In later drafts, I've jumped around to The Ghost Writer, The Swamp House Diaries, Wicked Grace, Twin Killings, and Do Know Harm. You prefer any of those? All have double meanings, or multiple ways to interpret. In any event, Wicked Good was the title for an article Sports Illustrated wrote about Peter's ability to throw a baseball, and it also captures the duality (light and dark sides) of Cassie and Grace.

 

Who are the writers who most influenced you? 

Back in the day, when I studied English lit and journalism at the University of Florida, my Big Four were Tom Wolfe, Ray Bradbury, Kurt Vonnegut and Ernest Hemingway.  (Who makes an appearance in Wicked Good.) Talk about widely diverse styles. But each made me want to be a writer. I tried to imitate them. I did the Joan Didion exercise of writing their sentences over and over again, trying to feel the rhythm, find the magic. 

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What about your favorite thriller/mystery/suspense genre authors?

Surprisingly, I migrate to some old noir guys, for guidance, like Robert Parker, Ed McBain, Donald Westlake. All pulp fiction wizards—they were absolutely amazing, pumping out a new book every couple months in their heyday. You gotta be kidding me? I'm painfully slow ... Of the more contemporary writers, I'm reading David Baldacci and Margaret Atwood and took their Master Classes. Two more wizards.

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Which authors influenced Wicked Good?

In tone and style, I'd say the Irish writer Allan Glynn of Graveland and Limitless had a huge impact. He writes in this gonzo marketing/advertising style, which is the world I came from. Punchy, fragmented phrasing. Frequent paragraphing to push pace and tension. I like that. Also, William Goldman's Marathon Man helped me with story architecture, of the Everyman-against-a-dark-force-type thriller. Lawrence Sanders showed how to write vivid character descriptions. On the science front, Walter Isaacson's The Code Breaker profiled Jennifer Doudna, who opened Pandora's Box with the modern gene-editing tool, CRISPR, so that book was invaluable.

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What books are on your nightstand now?

I pick at Neil Howe's thick The Fourth Turning Is Here to understand why the world is falling apart, as we speak. It's comfort food for the panicked, to know a massive Crisis Period rolls around every 80-100 years. Like the four seasons, history goes through a rebirthing  process, and unfortunately, we're in the dead of winter. But alas, spring is out there, in the early 2030s, till then, watch your back  ... During the pandemic, I rediscovered Joan Didion, another prose poet, and read everything I could have hers, including an essay titled "In Bed"—about her life with migraines and vertigo. I've suffered both, as well, and decided that the migraine/vertigo syndrome would be one of the perfect miserable 'side effects' of the genetic experiments in Wicked Good.

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Are you a panser or plotter?

Hybrid. I started out as a panser and wandered into endless dead-ends, because I had no clue what I was doing. I tried plotting and that killed the daily discovery process—which is the fun part of writing. So eventually,  I combined them. I read a bunch of story structure how-to books, like Save the Cat and Story Grid, and that helped me develop a loose outline between major plot points—between beats. After years of fumbling around in the dark, I wrote the last two-thirds of the book in eight months. A legit breakthrough. My hybrid panser/plotter method got me to the finish line of a first draft. After that, I took another year and seven drafts before I had something readable. 

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What was the best writing advice you ever got?

"When going through hell, keep going." Winston Churchill wasn't talking about writing, but it works. The first draft was really hard. I turned my back on it several times. But I kept returning for the punishment. I'm an old marathoner, so it felt like more of the same, where you're desperate to pack it in, full of self doubt—that's when you get a second wind. The point?  Just keep going.

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Are you anti-genetic engineering? Yours is a hard take on a potential game-changing science.

No no no. Wicked Good is a cautionary tale.  Every new, advancing technology is ripe for cautionary tales—think fire, splitting the atom, social media. Genetic engineering is going to cure cancer and thousands of other diseases; aided by the power of artificial intelligence. Sooner than later. But as a writer, I didn't feel obligated to come down on one side or the other. Ambiguity is my friend. The book is a yellow flag, to slow down, as our capabilities have gotten way, way ahead of our ethics—what we can do versus what we should do.  The promise and perils of genetic engineering, and the genetic transformation of human beings, will be a monster topic in the 21st century, if we don't destroy the planet first.  

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