Author Interview: D.C. Corso

On Friday, I posted my review of Skin and Bones by D.C. Corso. Today I'm excited that she's taken time out of her busy schedule to answer some questions.

GJR: How much research went into the book?

D.C. Corso: Lots and lots; in fact, I think I am still researching it after the fact! I bought a few reference books and spent a lot of time at the FBI website, as well as the Seattle Field Office website. I also was advised by Island County Sheriff and mystery writer Mike Hawley (who is fabulous, BTW) on
procedural issues like search warrants and the like. I really enjoy
research but I think I could have saved a lot of time by doing it before I started writing.

GJR: I don’t think books about child abductions are easy to read, so they
have to be extremely hard to write. Why did you decide to tackle this issue?

D.C. Corso: I think I am perplexed by the presence of evil in humans, and try hard to understand what it is that compels a person to do this. It's an age-old question and the answer is, I think, that there is no answer. The brain is just wired wrong in some people and while I think they know what they're
doing is wrong, their compulsion overrides it. It is difficult to write about and that's one of the many reasons I try to keep most of the violence off-camera; I believe that people's imaginations are much more powerful than anything I can or should spell out.

GJR: What do you hope that readers come away with from the novel? Meaning, are there lessons to be learned?

D.C. Corso: I was hoping to capture a shift in attitudes at that particular time in our nation's history; for a while there (immediately after 9/11), a vigilante attitude became something that was respected and looked up to. And the message that we send our children about how we handle our problems is very much something I hoped to point out. They absorb a lot more from the adults they look up to than I think we realize.

GJR: Will we be seeing Severin Ash again? I liked that he was a damaged hero.
It made him more real.

D.C. Corso: I hope so!

GJR: Have you always wanted to be a writer?

D.C. Corso: I have been writing since I was a kid, so I think I have always been a writer, although it took a lot of practice to improve from those days!

GJR: Besides Skin and Bones, what else have you written?

D.C. Corso: When I was a kid, I wrote a lot of Nancy Drew-styled mysteries featuring non-identical (don't ask me why) twins, Sarah and Becky Spencer. In high school, I moved on to more teen-angsty short stories and even tried my hand at horror and sci-fi in my Stephen King/Star Wars period. In college,
I wrote a really bad novel (contemporary fiction) that has never seen the light of day thank goodness. I wrote a collection of loosely intertwined short stories called "Stranger Than Fiction" that is decent, but not great and needs a lot of work. I started something called "The Factory" that is really more of a fantasy about the mental trip taken by a woman in a coma;that's been ignored for a little too long. Nothing published aside from my Master's Thesis.

GJR: Are you working on a new novel? If so, can you tell us the premise?

D.C. Corso: I am, but all I can say about it is this: Agent Ash is trying to find his sister's killer.

GJR: Who are your favorite authors to read? Why?

D.C. Corso: For entertainment: Stephen King and Michael Connelly; their stories are fast-paced, their characters are real, and you really want to know what happens next.

GJR: What are you currently reading?

D.C. Corso: Lottery by Patricia Wood -- highly recommend!

GJR: What author’s have influenced you?

D.C. Corso: Definitely Stephen King in narrative voice, though I wish I had Hemingway's ability to self-edit!

Thanks to D.C. Corso for answering my 10 questions!!