Interview and Book Giveaway with Suzanne Hartmann

by Jeff Reynolds

This is the second time I've had the privilege of interviewing Suzanne Hartmann on this blog, and we'll be giving away a copy of her latest book Conspiracy.  Rules are below, including how to get an extra entry into the drawing. Also, don't miss her telling about the details of the Facebook launch party for Conspiracy.

AND WE HAVE A WINNER!!!

Congratulations to Heather Day Gilbert!

Jeff Reynolds:  Last time you were on, I asked about the inspiration for your story, but I neglected how you got started in writing. Do you feel it was more an interest you always had or a call?

Suzanne Hartmann:  Actually, the two are intertwined. I mentioned in my previous interview that the stories which eventually became the first story in the Fast Track Thriller series began as scenes I created to entertain myself while sitting through my kids’ various activities. But the idea to craft them into a novel didn’t even enter my mind until a thought popped into my head while I was taking a walk. It came out of the blue, and it took several weeks of prayer to determine that it was a God-nudge not an early mid-life crisis. So I began researching NASCAR (since I wasn’t at fan at the time), and a couple of months later started writing. Since then, God has led me on an amazing journey full of doubts, anguish, inspiration, and joy. But He has faithfully encouraged me every step along the way

JR:  The second installment of your Fast Track Thrillers has just crossed the starting line. Could you tell us about the series and your new release?SH: Conspiracy picks up only a few months after the dramatic, surprise ending to Peril, and we rejoin Joanne Van der Haas, a top-secret agent with enhanced strength who works for the nation's most clandestine intelligence agency. Her boss is accused of selling government secrets, and she must choose which to trust: the man she's worked with for many years or the NSA’s evidence. When the heat turns up and a traitor threatens those she loves most, Joanne’s friend, NASCAR champion Stuart Jackson, is the only person she can trust to help her follow the trail of clues. Although untried in the intelligence field, Stuart is willing to face the danger in order to bring the truth to light and keep Joanne from being implicated.

JR:  I have the impression that you've dealt with several obstacles both on the writing track and off. What has it been like, and what lessons has God taught you through the false starts?

SH:  Yes, I have, Jeff, both the typical obstacles any new author must negotiate as well as medical issues, including a major surgery last year that led to another trip to the OR in the midst of the editing process for Conspiracy. The main thing I’ve learned from both types of obstacle is the need to keep my eyes on Jesus. When I put my focus on people, I will inevitably be disappointed. But when I lay my troubles at God’s feet, I can rest in the knowledge that He will meet all of my needs. Much easier said than done, but He continually shows His faithfulness when I look to Him as my provider.

JR:  In the previous interview, I asked you about your non-fiction book, Write This Way and you shared about filtering as it relates to POV. Any other interesting facts that might help writers here in their literary qualifying attempts?

SH: Another stylistic error I address in Write This Way that I don’t see talked about much is the unnecessary use of small movements: turning, reaching, walking across the room, etc. Every action involves multiple smaller actions, but we don’t want to bore our readers with every single, tiny action required to accomplish something. For example, I could write, “James made a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.” That involves many steps, from reaching into the cabinet to pull out the jar, to spreading the jelly. But since readers are familiar with how make a PB&J, we don’t need to include every little step. In the same way, readers automatically fill in little actions like reaching out before touching someone, or walking across the room to answer the door, or turning towards the window before looking outside. So we can leave these small motions out when writing.

JR:  Speaking of writing, I found your characters captivating, including supporting ones like George. What helped you develop that good a pit crew to keep the story running?

SH:  Thank you so much! I tried hard to create the type of characters readers want to get to know and read more about. The fact that you found them captivating thrills me more than you can know. The main thing I did to generate such characters is to make sure they were realistic. A huge factor in doing this is motivation. Whether for one of my protagonists or someone only in one scene, I continually asked myself, “How would this character respond?” “What would she do next?” and “What would make him do that?”

JR:  Again in the earlier interview, you mentioned getting writing ideas while driving your children around and how your daughter got interested in NASCAR. Could you tell us about your family? And have you ever made it to a NASCAR race?
SH:  My wonderful husband Steve and I celebrated twenty-five years of marriage this year, and we have three children: Andrew, David, and Rachel. We have homeschooled for sixteen years, and graduated both of the boys, so it’s just Rachel and I at home now.

I attended numerous NASCAR Nationwide and Truck Series races during the four years I volunteered with Midwest Raceway Ministries at Gateway International Raceway in the St. Louis area. It wasn’t until two years ago, however, that my husband and I attended our first Sprint Cup race at the Kansas Speedway. While we were there, we were blessed to be able to meet Jimmy Makar, the General Manager of Joe Gibbs Racing and the person who wrote the foreword for Peril, as well as Billie Mauldin, CEO of the Motor Racing Outreach, who handed out a hundred copies of Peril at the 2012 spring Bristol race. Both of these gentlemen realized even more than I did that my novel could be a powerful and unique outreach tool, and I am thankful that God led me to a connection with each of them.

JR:  I know that you're working on Revenge, the third leg of this series. Have you thought about what you'll do when your trilogy has crossed the checkered flag?

SH:  Although I have been pondering the idea of a prequel, I have decided to move on when I finish Revenge and concentrate on two partially completed novels. One is also NASCAR-related, but it is a romantic suspense novel. The other—like the Fast Track Thrillers—has a twist of the unusual, but it is women’s fiction.

JR:  Thank you very much for your time. As I've mentioned before, I'm looking forward to reading Conspiracy. Any web pages you want to mention so your admiring fans can keep cheering you on?

SH:  Thank you for hosting me on Sleuths & Suspects again, Jeff. Your readers can find out more about Peril and Conspiracy at my Fast Track Thrillers website at www.fasttrackthrillers.blogspot.com, and I invite all of your readers to the Facebook Release Party for Conspiracy on April 10 on my FB Author Page (https://www.facebook.com/SuzanneHartmann.Author ) For more information about Write This Way: Take Your Writing to the Next Level, readers can visit my blog at www.suzanne-hartmann2.blogspot.com, where they will find tons of advice about writing.

Jeff to the readers: 
Now is the time to enter the contest. Three simple steps.

1. Leave a comment (that's not hard, is it?)
2. Include your e-mail address so we can communicate with you -- you can spell it out like AuntDotKahm(at)Ant(dot)com
3. Suzanne included NASCAR, a sport that she wasn't familiar with, in her story. If you were to include a sport or hobby in a book you wrote that you aren't familiar with but would love to research, what would it be?

BONUS!!! 

Suzanne is offering an extra entry into the contest to anyone willing to allow her to add your e-mail address to her update list. (Don't worry about getting inundated -- it only comes out a few times a year.)

EXTRA BONUS!!! 

I will add yet one more bonus point to the first person who correctly guesses whose endorsement is on the front of Conspiracy. And key word is guess -- no fair peeking at the top. And the person who wrote it wouldn't be guessing.

Interview with Suzanne Hartmann, Author of the Fast Track Thrillers

I've had the privilege of winning a few books, and one of them was Peril by Suzanne Hartmann. Today, I'm honored to interview Suzanne. Let me start off with her bio:

Suzanne Hartmann is the author of the Fast Track Thrillers series, Christian suspense novels with a twist of NASCAR. She began writing fiction when her children were young, and started on her first novel in 2006. That novel eventually became Peril, the first in the series, which was published by OakTara in 2011, with the remaining books, Conspiracy and Revenge, coming out in 2013. On the editorial side, she is a contributing editor with Port Yonder Press, and operates the Write This Way Critique Service, which offers free evaluations and reasonable rates. She has also compiled much of the advice she gives in her critiques into a book titled Write This Way: Take Your Writing to a New Level, available through her blog at www.suzanne-hartmann2.blogspot.com. When not writing, editing, or homeschooling, she enjoys scrapbooking, reading, and scouring local library sales for books to resell on-line.


Jeff Reynolds: Welcome, Suzanne. I've enjoyed reading Peril, the first of the Fast Track Thrillers. What inspired these stories?

Suzanne Hartmann: Thank you for having me here on Sleuths & Suspects, and thank you for your kind words about the first book in my series. I’m so glad you enjoyed it.

The stories that eventually became the Fast Track Thrillers originally began as a bunch of scenes I created to entertain myself while sitting through violin lessons, soccer and baseball practice, and the innumerable hours spend driving the kids to and from their various activities.

The twist of NASCAR came about after my daughter decided she had a favorite driver. I knew almost nothing about NASCAR at the time and had never heard of this person. In the process of researching the driver to decide whether he was someone we should encourage our daughter to root for, I realized racing would make an interesting setting for some of the scenes I had created and began incorporating racetracks into my stories.

JR: At the end of his book You Are What You See, film critic Scott Nehring looked at Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy, and looked at the telling of the story both as the three movies individually and then compared that with the larger story the three parts tell when combined. Did you have a framework in mind when you started this trilogy, or is this more of a blank page approach, with you having no idea where the story's going till you get there?

SH: As odd as it may seem, I didn’t realize that the three books in a trilogy are like the three parts of a novel until I started writing Conspiracy, the second book in the Fast Track Thriller series. When I started writing Peril, I had no idea if it would ever be published, so I wrote it as though it were a stand-alone novel. In the process of writing it, however, I got to know my characters so well that I could see more of their story unfolding after and began to jot down ideas for a second and third book.

None of the books in the series started as a truly blank page. With Peril, I had all of the scenes I’d created over a number of years, although I didn’t know what the ending would be when I started writing it. With Conspiracy and Revenge both start pretty much right where I left off in the previous book, and I knew where I wanted them to end as well as most of the major plot points, so no blank pages there either. But a lot of white space filled the area between those plot points, and I used a much more blank page approach regarding how to get from one point to another. I like to think of it as a dot-to-dot approach to writing. I know where most of the dots are going to be, but I fill in the lines as I write the story.

JR: The second part of this series, Conspiracy, is heading down toward the checkered flag and due to hit the shelves any time.. Could you tell us about this installment?

SH: Conspiracy picks up several months after Peril leaves off. While Joanne continues to deal with serious issues at home, her boss—the director of the nation’s most clandestine intelligence agency—is accused of selling government secrets. When bombarded with lies and deception from within the system, she must rely on God to show her who holds the truth. When she chooses to make a stand on what she believes is truth, she turns to her friend, NASCAR Champion Stuart Jackson, to help her stand against the falsehoods, which may cost more than she’s willing to pay, especially when the enemy is stronger than she is.

JR: Besides this series, you also have a book out titled Write This Way: Take Your Writing To a New Level. Anything you mentioned in this book that may be something I've never thought of before? And how did this book help with the Fast Track series? Or was it the other way around?

SH: the bulk of Write This Way walks an author through the steps of revising and polishing a novel, but also offers basic suggestions for prewriting and writing the draft. So it makes a great resource for both new writers who want to improve their writing and veterans who want to keep an easy-to-use resource book on hand.

One thing I mention in the book that you may have never heard of is called filtering. This is a telling issue, but is also related to POV as it involves filtering the action through the POV character’s senses. Here are a couple of examples: I saw him slip something into his girlfriend’s purse; I heard the screech of key as he scraped it along the side of the car; she wondered if the dress made her look fat. These sentences tell readers the character experienced something rather than showing what the character experienced. It is a POV issue because readers understand that everything shown comes from the POV character’s perspective. Therefore, we only need to show what the character thinks and experiences instead of filtering that through the character’s senses.

I wrote Write This Way after writing Peril. It is based on the many lessons I learned during the process of revising the very rough draft of Peril (my first attempt at novel-writing). When I realized the issues I dealt with were common among new authors, I began blogging about them to teach others how to recognize and fix them. Eventually I had so many blog posts that it just made sense to compile them into a book to create an easy-to-use reference tool. 

JR: In my opinion, Peril didn't fit neatly into a typical genre, combining elements from romance, suspense, science fiction, and auto racing. Did the uniqueness of this story create some obstacles in dealing with agents/editors? 

SH: I believe it did. Even though the story was well-written, it didn’t fit nicely into a particular slot—an oval instead of a circle, and many publishers don’t like to take a chance on such things. Thankfully, OakTara not only takes chances on novels that don’t quite fit the molds, but seeks them out, because they know there is a huge audience out there looking for books that are unique and break the mold. 

JR: What is the spiritual lesson of these books? What technique did you use to develop the faith element in your stories?

SH: Although there are numerous spiritual truths dropped in here and there, the main spiritual thread that overarcs all three is learning to trust God when the direction He’s leading doesn’t make sense according to our human reasoning. I suppose the technique I use to develop it would be hindsight, as recognizing and developing themes is something I struggle with. When I write, I write the story; I write the plot and the characters. The themes are there, but I usually can’t pick them out until the story is fully written. Then I develop them and flesh them out as I revise.

JR: I mentioned that the series is a trilogy. What should we look for next? And are there any other projects on your horizon?

SH: I am currently writing the third book in the Fast Track Thriller series, titled Revenge. This book will wrap up the series with an exciting conclusion: a traitor vows revenge against top-secret agent, Joanne Van der Haas, and will stop at nothing to make sure her deep-held secrets become public knowledge. As he becomes more desperate, his threats escalate to include those he thinks are harboring his enemy--including NASCAR champion Stuart Jackson and the entire NASCAR community--until Joanne must risk those she loves most to trick him into giving himself up.

JR: Thank you for your time, and I'll look forward to reading Conspiracy.

SH: Thank you again for hosting me here, Jeff.

Here are her webpages, so you can follow her and be ready for Conspiracy when it comes out.

www.suzanne-hartmann2.blogspot.com

WRITE THIS WAY: Take Your Writing to a New Level

PERIL: A Fast Track Thriller 

BOOK TRAILER for PERIL