Congrats on the new release! Cool cover and premise. 😍 Also love the back story about your mom and grandma. I agree, most "strong female leads" are actually very masculine, and often in a toxic way. Hearing that you're trying to write a strong and feminine lead has me intrigued. Adding this to my TBR....
Love your podcast, dude. Been listening since 2016. I'm genuinely curious, what makes so many guys nowadays create woman-centered stories? Is it strictly writing to market because woman are massive majority of fiction readers, or is it something else?
I originally created this character and this series as a pitch to James Patterson, and I'm pretty sure I was aiming to capture the heat of the market at the time. That was back in 2016.
When someone else got the spot, I moved on and kept writing my other books. All pretty much male leads. But one day I was between author conferences, hanging out in a resort hotel restaurant, and had little else to do but write. I'd had an idea for a fugitive character who was using an advanced AI to help "right wrongs," sort of A-Team meets Quantum Leap (without the time travel).
The idea was so similar to the one I pitched to Patterson, I swapped the male lead for the female lead I'd created. And now that she was female, it opened a lot of interesting opportunities for me.
But there was something else that ended up becoming part of it: I grew up with a lot of strong women as influences in my life. And whenever I encountered "strong women" in literature or film, they were never much more in my estimate than "men wearing dresses." In other words, the writers didn't seem to know how to write strength in a woman, unless they made her more masculine.
So I leaned in on that, and wrote a female character who is more like the women I grew up with. Like my Granny, whom I saw fall from a ladder and take a hit to the back of her head on the steel bumper of a pickup, then get up and go do housework like nothing happened. Or my mom, whom I watched get between me and a charging horse, while I ran for safety (I was very little).
Those were the women I knew, and that was the strength I knew. So that's what I wanted to write.
Great backstory. I loved the A-Team as a kid, too. My favorite part is they're separately wanted by the feds but they drive a custom van with a trademark red stripe and one of the members is a giant black dude with a mohawk and seventeen layers of jewelry. Nothing conspicuous about that.
Congrats on the new release! Cool cover and premise. 😍 Also love the back story about your mom and grandma. I agree, most "strong female leads" are actually very masculine, and often in a toxic way. Hearing that you're trying to write a strong and feminine lead has me intrigued. Adding this to my TBR....
Thank you! I hope you enjoy it!
Love your podcast, dude. Been listening since 2016. I'm genuinely curious, what makes so many guys nowadays create woman-centered stories? Is it strictly writing to market because woman are massive majority of fiction readers, or is it something else?
I originally created this character and this series as a pitch to James Patterson, and I'm pretty sure I was aiming to capture the heat of the market at the time. That was back in 2016.
When someone else got the spot, I moved on and kept writing my other books. All pretty much male leads. But one day I was between author conferences, hanging out in a resort hotel restaurant, and had little else to do but write. I'd had an idea for a fugitive character who was using an advanced AI to help "right wrongs," sort of A-Team meets Quantum Leap (without the time travel).
The idea was so similar to the one I pitched to Patterson, I swapped the male lead for the female lead I'd created. And now that she was female, it opened a lot of interesting opportunities for me.
But there was something else that ended up becoming part of it: I grew up with a lot of strong women as influences in my life. And whenever I encountered "strong women" in literature or film, they were never much more in my estimate than "men wearing dresses." In other words, the writers didn't seem to know how to write strength in a woman, unless they made her more masculine.
So I leaned in on that, and wrote a female character who is more like the women I grew up with. Like my Granny, whom I saw fall from a ladder and take a hit to the back of her head on the steel bumper of a pickup, then get up and go do housework like nothing happened. Or my mom, whom I watched get between me and a charging horse, while I ran for safety (I was very little).
Those were the women I knew, and that was the strength I knew. So that's what I wanted to write.
Great backstory. I loved the A-Team as a kid, too. My favorite part is they're separately wanted by the feds but they drive a custom van with a trademark red stripe and one of the members is a giant black dude with a mohawk and seventeen layers of jewelry. Nothing conspicuous about that.
It is from this show that I have learned to pity the fools.
*desperately wanted