Q: You have been a police officer, an insurance fraud investigator and a private investigator. Now you write novels that feature investigators. What attracted you to investigations as a career to begin with?
John: I worked as a gas pump jockey in high school at the gas station where my local police department gassed up. I would talk with the officers and listen as calls came across their radio. They would peel out of the lot, using their lights and sirens, with me standing there with my squeegee dripping. I was hooked. I came home one night and told my parents I wanted to go to college to study criminology. I graduated from an in-state college and got a job on the same department. After a couple years of low-pay, nights, weekends and holidays, I took a job as an insurance investigator and that is when my desire to be the best investigator really took over. I dedicated 40 years to the craft of investigation and investigative interviewing.
Q: You have several books (fiction and nonfiction) that released over the past four years. Are you a prolific writer or were some of those books already written when you decided to publish?
John: With the exception of my first novel where I answered the muse and published in 2013, the remaining eleven books were all written and published between the end of 2017 and the fall of 2021. I worked on a three-months-per-book drafting schedule. I wrote one day a week and both days of the weekend. I would self-edit at night before turning them over to content editors, copyeditors and multiple proofreaders. All the covers are professionally designed. I credit the speed and efficiently to taking the time to develop detailed outlines, so when it came time to create, I had a running start. I tell people that the mindset around prolific writing is that you make time for your writing and that you don’t ‘find’ time for it. I am pretty draconian about my schedule.
Q: What fuels your fiction most: your time as a police officer or your time as a private investigator?
John: Even though I was a uniformed officer for only two and half years, it was formative in my outlook towards investigating. Since 2005, I have been involved in several high-profile murder investigations as a criminal defense investigator and that led me to work with wrongful conviction exoneration cases. I have looked at policing and criminal investigations from both sides of the aisle. I was also a reader of Lawrence Block’s Matthew Scudder series, Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch series and Laura Lippman’s Tess Monaghan series so I always had a great crime novel on my coffee table or nightstand. I am a hybrid between real life experience and reading those greats. I can’t forget Joseph Wambaugh whom I had on my podcast
Q: FBI Agent Marsha O’Shea, protagonist of your series by the same name, first appears in your debut novel Phantasy Baseball: It’s About a Second Chance. Can you tell us more about that decision and about her evolution?
John: Good eyes. Yes, Marsha O’Shea was the protagonist’s love interest in my first novel. When I decided to write my debut crime thriller with a mystery twist, Odessa on the Delaware, that protagonist, Joe, plays a cameo and I also brought forward a newspaper reporter with Marsha O’Shea and started asking “what if” questions. That is how the story developed. Marsha comes from a cop family and is a female field agent in the male hierarchy of the FBI. A student scholar athlete, she is very competitive, but as 9/11 turned the Bureau from the alpha crime-fighting federal law enforcement agency to the domestic intelligence gathering arm of Homeland Security, she found herself counting her days to retirement on a back-water organized-crime squad. Then a shooting war with all the crime families in Philly starts and she realizes this is a chance to get her mojo back. The remaining books in the series follow her growth as a top-gun investigator with a lot of bumps along the way. She and Joe heat things too. I won’t spoil the ending.
Q: Why did you choose self-publishing over traditional publishing? Any advice for those struggling with that decision?
John: When I decided to write my first novel, I came to that fork in the road. I read J.A. Konrath’s tome: The Newbies Guide to Publishing. It sold me on the indie path from jump street. Why on God’s green earth would I give up publishing rights, over 82% of my royalties and so much control over how my book would look and when it would be published? As an entrepreneur, I was not afraid of publishing and marketing, so the decision for me was a no-brainer.
I gave a traditional author advice who asked me this question after a podcast just this past week. I said that the publishing and marketing steps can be broken down into smaller steps and you can plan to take one step at a time. I took Joanna Penn’s How to Market a Book and treated it like a college text. Then I took a blank white board and started filling it with different colored sticky notes for writing, publishing, marketing and website development and I ordered the sticky notes of tasks in a step-by-step fashion. When I was not writing the best damn books I could, I worked the steps. I listened to her podcast and the Self Publishing Show by Mark Dawson and James Blatch and the Sell More Book Show by Brian Cohen and H. Claire Taylor. I learned what I didn’t know and I am still learning. I would never consider the trad route and would tell wannabe authors to not to get overwhelmed with the prospect of publishing and marketing your books. You do it one step at a time.
Q: You enjoy acting as well. Can you tell us more about that?
John: I am fortunate to attend a church in New Haven with one of the few scripture-centered acting troupes in the country. I am taught how to act by the same director who taught Paul Giamatti. I gradually took on more difficult roles over the years and just love working with a cast to bring a play to life. We do a couple plays a year and it is fun.
Q: What are you working on now?
John: Upskilling my writing. I moderate a study group using Donald Maass’s The Emotional Craft of Fiction and hope to be accepted to a critique group which focuses on one deep-dive critique a week on just one writer’s work. Both are very powerful. I want to be a better writer and find that self-study doesn’t do it for me. Group accountability is the key for my growth.
I am also working on my Milford Series of Gwendolyn Strong Small Town Cozy Mysteries. I am enamored with the immediacy of the first person present POV in cozies and was a big fan of Agatha Christie, A Conan Doyle and Dorothy Sayers. I hope to release all four books, so far, in the fall. I am commissioning covers as we speak.
I still have one Wrongful Conviction Exoneration case on my desk and won’t quit until all the appeals are exhausted.
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