Brought to you by OBS Staffer Annabell Cadiz.

Read Annabell’s review of Whisper here.

Annabell: How did you come up with the concept behind Whisper?

Thomas Wilson: I grew up reading science fiction, watching Star Trek, reading Jules Verne and seeing Science Fiction turn into real life inventions. The communicators of the original Star Trek are so like cell phones, are they not? Most of the stuff Jules Verne came up with eventually came about in time. I think people will be playing around with technology that will mess with time, as time, space, speed, and matter moving through space, are all inter-related.

Annabell: How much research did you have to do in order to create the technology that the story and characters are centered on, the Phase Time Shifter?

Thomas Wilson: Not much, Sci-fi rumors about the Philadelphia Project suggest this is possibly what the Navy was playing with years ago. I just took a different and modern twist of that idea to create a plausible way to move through time. It was going to be a time traveling novel all along. I allude to SAC, a Submersible Aircraft Carrier, in the opening chapter, that was, or later when released, will be Wiley’s first command. How he was specially trained for command of the ship and the tragic first mission, for which he trained for over three years.

I honestly knew, being my first novel it would always be my worst written, edited, produced, etc. It’s a start, so I picked Whisper because of the adventures I have planned for Wiley Randolph, Whisper was by far the weakest story I had. I wanted to learn some about the craft, see if I could finish it, self publish it, and bring it to life, so to be. I didn’t want to waste a super blockbuster story on a first effort attempt.

Annabell: Which character do you think you can relate to most from your novel? I, for one, feel I can relate to Wiley. He’s good under pressure. Do you think you’re good under pressure?

Thomas Wilson: I feel I relate more to Russell Reynolds, just trying to invent, explore, and create and being pushed and pulled by life and a myriad of outside pressures forcing me into situations I feel are beyond my control most of the time.

I do feel I am excellent under pressure. I prefer a peaceful, quiet, and organized existence. Life is not that accommodating. My day job is Operations Manager of an extremely dynamic tire wholesaler in the middle of the country. Most major cities have maybe two Tire Wholesalers, Kansas City has five! Can you say intense competition! My life is tense, extreme pressure, deadlines, team building, making the impossible happen all the time.

SAC – Strategic Air Command (which doesn’t exist anymore) had a motto. It is on a sign in my office. “The difficult we do right away, the impossible just takes a little longer.” (During the cold war, the SAC was responsible for scrambling all available aircraft our country had and getting it in the air, in minutes, when they were alerted of a possible threat or just testing our countries readiness. My father served in SAC in the 1960’s.)

Annabell: Did you base any of your characters on any of the people in your life?

Thomas Wilson: The Military Elf bit was a true story of a stunt I was dared to do, and did, during a morning formation in the United States Army in 1986 at Fort Knox, KY. I toned down the language of the First Sergeant in the book, and I didn’t get busted, but the point was definitely made, never to do that again. The military structure does not have any sense of humor, but many terribly funny things do happen in the military.

Annabell: What made you decide to add romance into the story?

Thomas Wilson: I was married for 13 years and it ended in divorce. I’m sure I am not the only person stuff like that happens to. I ended up later getting re-married to the love of my life. We have been happily married for six years, and we have two young boys as a result of this wonderful union.

I wanted Wiley to have a chance at happiness, with a younger woman and later I can explore some aspects of culture-time differences between people of different ages. There is a sixteen years difference between me and my wife. Wiley’s, is by far, taking this to a new extreme. I am a hopeless romantic at heart, but I want to write Sci-fi adventure thrillers. Much later, somewhere between novels 8-10, I will start a series that starts in 1938 and will work its way to the present time. It will have history, magic, technology, multiple relationships of a group of seven major characters, it will be like nothing I have ever seen or read before. I want to polish my craft and skills at writing before jumping into this series with both feet.

Annabell: Will there be a sequel to Whisper? Can you give some hints to what readers can expect if there is a next installment?

Thomas Wilson: Yes, there will be a sequel. I am dividing my time in the evenings after the boys go to bed, writing the sequel and editing my second book. The sequel to Whisper will be “SAC – Submersible Aircraft Carrier.” I am challenging myself, with carrying on where Whisper leaves off, while going back to tell the story of Wiley’s training coming out of Annapolis, the Navy’s Military Academy.

The book starts at a wedding and reception, can you guess who? They go on a honeymoon around the world, because they can, Wiley is retired. Lisa returns to London for a visit, and just so you know the SAC mission goes horribly wrong, much worse than Whisper. Hopefully, my second novel will be out this summer and “SAC” will be out by Christmas, first of 2012 at the latest. If you’re wondering about why so long, I still have a day job as I am not a professional writer yet. Besides that, you can check out my blog, I have great respect for writers now than I am one; it is a lot of hard work. A LOT!

Annabell: What do you do to get into a writing groove? What inspires you to write?

Thomas Wilson: I am blessed with having more ideas, than time to write them. I love the writing part of being a writer. You write the book you would love to read. I write best listening to oldies music playing lightly in the background, sitting on a very uncomfortable chair since it’s a small desk and I haven’t gotten around to getting a better chair.

What inspires me is all the books where I think I know where it is going or how it will end up, and they let me down or don’t go as far as they could. I try to write my stories and to take my readers somewhere they have never been, and get as crazy as I want to get, push the limits of imagination, explore technological ideas I don’t have the means to build but can conceptualize in my mind.

Whisper is not the finest example of what I am talking about. Whisper starts slow, primarily because I wrote chapters 1 – 5 from 2005 to 2010, along with the starts of about thirty other different stories. Chapter 5 till the end of the book, were written in 2010, when I really started writing seriously. If you get to Chapter 6 it kind of takes off from there, but realize, it was the weakest story I have.

Annabell: Do you plot out your stories entirely before writing or as you go along?

Thomas Wilson: I write an outline of what I want to include, bring out in the story, the order in which I want to tell it. I have discovered how you tell a story is sometimes more important than the story, to make it interesting. A good story really helps also. Whisper’s only saving grace, in my opinion, is the story makes up for my lack of experience in writing.

Even with an outline, some stories have a way of changing and developing into something better than what you originally imagined, and when this happens you adjust and go with the flow. Even if it means rewriting the entire first part of the book; the stuff like that along with research, editing, and formatting aids in way it takes so long for subsequent books to come out from your favorite authors.

Annabell: Which authors have helped to inspire you to write? Or books?

Thomas Wilson: Too many to include all of them. James Rollins is by far my favorite, because I got a hold of a paperback of one of his first stories, early in his career. He is the first author I got to follow along and see his writing and stories improve with each new book. The whole time this was happening I was piddling around with story ideas and thinking I would like to write a book. I would say between James Rollins and the ladies of my book club who insisted on me bringing in chapters of my great series, the one I will write around novels 8 – 10, so they could help me edit, offer opinions and critiques of. It got me serious about writing every week. I selected my weakest idea and set my mind on finishing it. I also finished my second novel in 2010 also.

I love reading James Patterson, his bad guys are really scary in the Alex Cross novels. I love Jack Higgins, he knows how to spin a tale about World War II spies and make it so believable, and intriguing. I hope to end up a mix of Rollins, and Higgins, with bad guys as scary as Patterson’s, with my crazy faced paced stories, with realistic characters my readers will fall in love with.

Annabell: If you could have the chance to interview one of your favorite authors, who would you choose and what would you ask?

Thomas Wilson: I would love to meet James Rollins because he has inspired me so much over the years. I just want to keep being amazed at how James Rollins pulls so many pieces of disconnected research into such technological thrillers, in his Sigma Force Series.

To get to interview an author I would pick James Patterson, because I don’t know how he can write such sick, messed up, scary characters unless there is a part of him that is really messed up.

Thank you to author Thomas Wilson for granting Open Book Society such a candid interview! If you want to check out more about the author, just visit his blog at: http://thomaswilsonstoryteller.blogspot.com/