H. L. Wegley Interview

Q: Let me start with asking you to tell us a little bit about yourself.

A:  My wife and I are approaching our 50^th wedding anniversary and we’ve already made reservations – 2 weeks in Maui, walking miles of sandy beaches, reading on the beach, snorkeling in 80-degree water. Can’t wait! Over those 50 years I’ve served in a lot of capacities – USAF intelligence analyst and weather officer, research scientist, computer scientist and, after retiring, I’m working on making the romantic thriller an official subgenre and am finishing my 9^th novel.

Q: When did you first realize you wanted to be a writer?

A:  I’ve always been a writer, but what I write has changed a great deal over the years. In elementary school, I wrote for extra credit – the lazy boy’s path to an A – then intel reports, research reports, Meteorological journal articles, computer system specifications, computer code – a million lines of it – and now novels. But writing my first novel in 2010 changed everything. I was instantly addicted. And, with fiction, there are few limits other than my own imagination and constraining my stories to the Christian worldview.

Q: Do you (or did you) have other career aspirations?

A:  I was blessed to have the USAF pay for my degree in Meteorology from Texas A&M. Once weather is in your blood, it’s there to stay. Even though I transitioned into developing large-scale computing systems for Boeing, I still watch the weather and make my own forecasts for our beach trips to the Olympic National Park. My wife, Babe (that really is what she goes by and it fits) only seems to remember the forecasts I bust, like the sunny forecast that turned into a record breaking—let’s not go there. Let’s face it. Meteorology isn’t an exact science. I think God created this scientific discipline just to teach us humility. But, in hindsight, I wish I had remained in Meteorology.

Q: Do you find certain themes reoccurring in your books? If so, what are they and why? If not, what is the theme in your current release?

A:  The fact that God’s word has spoken to virtually every area of human life and endeavor is emphasized in most of my 9 novels. For example, in my current release, the hero is a Millennial, a brilliant 24-year-old blogger who exposes the corrupt administration that’s trying to take the US into tyranny. He’s part Christian apologist, part philosopher, part political scientist, and a great writer. He’s very good at spotting the points of tension in other people’s beliefs, everybody’s beliefs but his own.

Q: Would you tell us about your current book release Voice in the Wilderness?

A:  Let’s see if I can do this in one sentence:

Set in the immediate future, Against All Enemies, #1: Voice in the Wilderness, is an inspirational, political thriller, with romance, about a neo-Marxist president, in centrist’s clothing, who plans to take the nation into tyranny, and the young man and woman who start a resistance movement to stop him.

Whew. Almost, but not quite, so here’s a little more. This is a character-driven story about two incredible Millennials whose deep childhood friendship is ripped apart when the KC Banning’s (heroine), father is elected to the US Senate. The events bringing them back together threaten the future of America. KC and Brock Daniels (hero) each have a piece of the puzzle comprising the president’s conspiracy and, together, they have the abilities required to spawn a grassroots resistance. Their problem … how to stay alive.

Q: Where did the idea for this story come from?

A:  The childhood friendship came from the fact that I’ve known my wife since we were three or four years old. My beta readers affirmed that using two childhood soulmates as backstory quickly endears my MCs to the reader. The thriller-level plot came from exaggerating current political trends in America into something even more sinister. But I wanted this story to be an example of what I hope will become an official new subgenre, the romantic thriller, a genre with stakes much higher than romantic suspense, more intense, but with the romantic thread and thriller plot so integrated that neither could exist without the other. And, I wanted women to love the story. So, when there was violence, I carefully avoided anything graphic. The question was, how does one do all that? I had a good start with the childhood friendship as backstory. But after pitching this idea to Susan May Warren at a writing conference, she gave me some more ideas. Then we scheduled a few coaching sessions. Initially, I had some doubts about some of her recommendations, but took her advice and was blown away by what emerged as the story iterated to completion. The early reviews say that readers are having that same reaction to this story, a story that will resonate in the hearts of romance lovers and patriotic Americans.

Q: Tell us a little about your main character and how you developed him/her.

A:  KC Banning is a slender, redheaded, freckle-faced, Irish beauty who wears her heart on her sleeve, is loyal to a fault, is passionate about everything she believes and every opinion she holds, and who has a temper hovering around 211 degrees Fahrenheit. I think I just described my wife, Babe. But my wife is computer phobic, while KC is a computer genius.

Brock Daniels, at six-foot-five, 235 pounds, should be pitching in the majors, but is also a gifted writer whose blog has grown to over a million followers, people looking for hope as the US spirals downward, politically and morally. Brock has no real-word counterpart, that I know of. He came from my imagination and the story’s requirements.

Q: Who/what has influenced your writing career the most?

A:  The 10 years I studied the Christian worldview and apologetics, and accumulated a library of more than 1500 volumes, didn’t produce the textbook or course material I had intended, but it has certainly influenced my stories and the characters who inhabit them. For the past two and a half years, Susan May Warren’s books on writing and her coaching have shown me a way—not the only way, but a very good way—to craft stories and develop characters.

Q: Would you share with us what you are working on now?

A:  I’m currently polishing up the sequel to Voice in the Wilderness, titled Voice of Freedom. There are 3 couples in this 3-book series. These 6 people comprise a group of Americans thrown together by life-and-death circumstances. Each book features one of the couples – their romance, their spiritual growth, and their roles in taking down a would-be tyrant. Book 3 in this series, Chasing Freedom, the series prequel, is only a very rough draft that I’m just beginning to massage, layer, and polish.

Q: If you were a dessert, what would it be and why?

A:  Most of my favorite deserts are drinkable. If I could be one of them, it would be a 12 ounce, double-shot, caramel macchiato. It’s sweet, but with two shots of espresso, not too sweet. The caramel gives it a wonderful flavor and two shots of espresso can really rev a person up. Sweet, rather than sour, flavorful, and highly motivational—sounds like the kind of person I’d like to be. Unfortunately, I sometimes fear I’m only a cup of black, brewed, bitter coffee.

Q: Is there something about you most people wouldn’t know about you?

A:  In junior high, in the ‘50s, I won the hula hoop contest at our school. The last time I checked, I still hold the long jump record there, too. But, about the hoop, I don’t seem to have the same midsection these days, the one that holds that hoop just above your hips. Or, maybe the manufacturers have changed the size or weight of those silly things. These days, twice around and they’re on the ground.

Q: If you could have dinner with 2 people, who would they be?

A:  Usually, when answering these types of questions, I pick someone from the past. But there are some incredible people living today that I’d like to visit with. One that I admire is Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. How does he maintain such restraint when his citizens are attacked every day by terrorists, some killed every week and, last year, over 1,000 rockets were shot over the borders of this tiny strip of land along the South Mediterranean Coast that we call Israel? He maintains an admirable level of restraint even with international leaders, people with far less intellect than him, waving their fingers in his face, lecturing him as if he were inferior, and telling him to just sit there and take it while the nations surrounding Israel try to destroy it. Maybe I need both dinners with Benjamin Netanyahu to more fully understand this man, as well as the life and death national issues and political pressures with which he struggles, daily.

Q: Is there a place you have always wanted to visit? A vacation spot, historical monument, overseas, etc?

A:  Ever since I read Ray Blackston’s Lost in Rooville, a delightful story, I’ve wanted to visit Australia. But there are other reasons—love that accent, what country has a de facto national anthem that can match Waltzing Matilda, Banjo Paterson’s ballad The Man from Snowy River, Rolf Harris’s Tie Me Kangaroo Down, the Outback, the Great Barrier Reef, and it’s the home of Hillsong Church, the source of so much of our modern worship music. But there are drawbacks, the cost of such a long trip, box jellyfish, saltwater crocodiles, the poisonous blue ring octopus, venomous stonefish, 3 species of deadly sharks, the marble cone snail (a snail that can kill you in a few minutes), the redback spider, and I haven’t even gotten to the snakes, yet. Maybe Babe and I will just go half way and stop in the Hawaiian Islands.

Q: Where can readers find you on the internet?

A:  My author’s web site and blog are at: http://www.hlwegley.com

Lately I’ve been pretty active on social media:

Facebook author’s page: https://www.facebook.com/HLWegley

Facebook profile: https://www.facebook.com/harry.wegley.1

Twitter https://twitter.com/hlwegley

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/harryw51

G+ https://plus.google.com/u/0/101169236968699201479/posts

Pinterest https://www.pinterest.com/harryw51/

Q: Anything else you’d like to tell or share with us?

A:  There are a couple of things. First, Against All Enemies is a 3-book series releasing across the election year, 2016. Voice in the Wilderness officially releases February 26, Voice of Freedom in May, and Chasing Freedom (the Prequel), hopefully in August, about political convention time.

Second, Brock Daniels, the hero and blogger in Voice in the Wilderness, is actually blogging. Sometimes he’s an academic, sometimes a Christian apologist, and at other times a critic of the administration’s policies. If you’re interested, you can find him at: http://www.againstallenemiesbookseries.com/