Q: Who or what was the inspiration for Steven Wendell, the main character in your novel, The Other Side?
Mark: Wendell is named after my father, who was Albert Wendell Leichliter. My father was a deeply moral, sincere man who was relentless in going after the things he believed in. There are aspects to Wendell as a cop that are drawn from a friend, who, like Wendell, enrolled in the police academy in his forties. But most of Wendell just comes from my imagination while listening carefully to him as his voice and personality emerged organically.
Q: What drew you to crime as a genre?
Mark: Elements of the novel were born from weather and long walks in misty woods when I first moved to Montana after years in Jackson, Wyoming. In mist and rain, it’s easy to let the questions run and imagine things like the challenges involved if a criminal really wanted to hide a crime in a remote place. From an intellectual standpoint, I’ve always appreciated how well crime fiction serves as a mechanism for the examination of societal patterns in and contemporary constructs in specific locales and environments.
Q: You are a ghost writer, a writing coach and a magazine editor. With all you are juggling, how do you find the time and energy for your own writing projects?
Mark: It really can be a juggling act. It’s not unusual that I am working on four different books at the same time alongside numerous short pieces. I’ve long followed advice I first heard William Stafford talk about, which focuses on regimented compartmentalization of my time. He broke his day into segments, and I do the same. I am religious about preserving my mornings for my own work. I start writing early and work through until about 11:00 AM, when I take a break to work-out, then it’s a shower, lunch, and then I move on to projects for other people. Doing something strenuous like trail running or a spin class and getting out of my head by focusing on the physical helps me reset so that I can be fresh as I start an afternoon of writing or editing on book projects for others or coaching writers who are looking to improve their craft. Typically, late in the workday I turn to reading submissions or editing for the magazine. After an evening relaxing with my wife, before turning in, I like to review the work completed on my own project that day, which gets me ready for the next morning. While the juggling act is demanding, I am very lucky that I get to work with smart, motivated people who are passionate about books and ideas. That in turn can fuel energy for my own writing projects, although I must admit that there are many days where I wish I had the freedom to focus only on the novel that is consuming me at the moment.
Q: Have you always known you would write novels someday or did you once have other plans?
Mark: I started college intent on becoming an architect. But not only did calculus humble me, statics and other courses reminded me of my academic weaknesses. I’ve been an avid reader all my life, and I’ve been writing stories since about the second grade. Even as I struggled with the introductory curriculum in the engineering school (I would have to transfer universities to complete an architecture degree.), I took courses that interested me and those were heavy on English, Journalism, and Sociology. Once I took a creative writing course with Don Murray, who was a visiting professor my sophomore year. I was hooked.
Q: Do you have any advice for struggling writers?
Mark: Find writing rituals and tools that work for you, make writing commitments and stick to them. I’m a great believer in writing process—things like breaking down a writing task into manageable sized pieces, producing poor work in order to get to good work, that sort of thing. And write the books that you want to write, not the ones you think would please others or that you’re convinced will sell—not only does good work find a way, you’ll never outguess the whims of others or the marketplace.
Q: What can we expect from you next?
Mark: I’m in the research stages of a novel that features three of the characters in law enforcement from THE OTHER SIDE. The book will focus on human trafficking, specifically on the trafficking of indigenous women. While set in Montana’s Flathead Valley again, it will deal with crimes that cross international borders.
I’m also about fifty pages into a standalone novel that’s more historical in nature and focuses on a woman who, at age forty, abandoned one life for an entirely different one and ultimately ended up serving in roles for the State Department in a number of hot spots, including working in Saigon starting in 1966 at the height of the American involvement in the Vietnam War.
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