~~~ Interview with Randall Ingermanson, by Linda Mae Baldwin ~~~ 

Hi, Randy, thanks for agreeing to do this email interview. Let me just getting the gushing out of the way – I am a huge fan (and I mean that emotional not physically! GRIN) and one of the biggest honors ever, for me, was to talk with you at the ACRW conference last year. Thanks for that!  

[Randy sez:  You’re welcome!  I’m always excited to meet somebody who “gets” my writing.  Not everybody does.  It was great talking with you at ACRW!] 

Okay, now for the interview. 

LMB -- Tell us a little about your background and how you came to write? 

I was at Berkeley, working on my Ph.D. in physics, when I started reading thrillers.  Mainly, it was a way to decompress after a long day of studying.  After a while, I started imagining that I could write better than some of the authors I was reading.   

I was dead wrong.  Writing is a skill, just like doing brain surgery or being a fighter pilot.  But I didn’t know that, so I decided to write me a novel.  Unfortunately, my writing was awful.  That’s normal for a beginner, but I didn’t know that either.  Fortunately, I’m a persistent devil and I never give up, and I kept working on it for the dozen or so years that it takes to break in.  That is also normal, but (you guessed it) I didn’t know that either, or maybe I never would have tried to write a book.   

LMB -- I have all your books but I when I reviewed Transgression off the ARC I got rid of it, waiting for the book. Now, the book is in limited quantities and it’ll cost me 35 bucks to buy a used one off Amazon! That’s pretty cool! You’re fan base is broad I think. What inspires you to a certain story? 

Story ideas come in strange places.  I got the idea for TRANSGRESSION while taking a shower.  I wrote it down and stuck it in my “Idea File” and then several years later, when I needed a new story idea, there it was waiting for me.  During that time, it had ripened up a bit, and there was enough there for me build a whole story. 

The idea for OXYGEN came from my buddy John Olson.  He emailed me and said he had an idea for a story about a space accident, “kind of like Apollo 13 on the way to Mars.”  He told me all about it and then asked if I wanted to coauthor it with him!  I couldn’t pass that one up.  I wish all story ideas were that easy to come by. 

LMB -- When I reviewed Double Vision I was a little taken aback at the beginning because there is so much M-A-T-H. (I am an illiterate M-A-T-H student.)

But, I couldn’t stay away from the riveting story. My husband is a computer geek and as I asked questions about certain things in your book (not because I didn’t believe they were real but I was amazed that these things exist!) he was captivated by the story, too. Do you find a big crossover in your fan base? 

If you mean, crossover between men and women readers, yes.  A lot of my readers tell me that their husband never reads fiction, but they got him reading my novel and he couldn’t put it down.  And sometimes, a guy will buy my book and then start telling his wife about my characters and then she’ll want to read it too.  I tend to be balanced between characters and plot, so my books appeal to both men and women readers.   

LMB -- So, are you a genius?  

<mysterious grin>  I’ll never tell! 

LMB -- All your books involve some aspect of science. Why?  

My whole working career has been in science.  I have a Ph.D. in physics and I’ve worked as a computational physicist ever since I escaped from school.  This scares some people, until they find out that my stories are about people, not technology.  There’s a bit of techie stuff in every book, but that isn’t what the story’s about.  Some of my biggest fans are ten-year-old girls. 

LMB -- How much research do you do for things like Fifth Man and the astronaut line? Or for the off beat girl in Double Vision. Time travel for the City Of God series? How long does it usually take for you get from conception to final product? 

I do as much research as I can.  For OXYGEN and THE FIFTH MAN (both books about NASA), my coauthor John Olson and I went to Houston, toured NASA, and talked to engineers there.  We had one of the world’s leading planetary scientists and one of the world’s most famous astronauts read the manuscript for accuracy.   

For DOUBLE VISION, I did a lot of research on the new kind of quantum computers.  (The cover story in the January 2005 issue of Scientific American was “Unbreakable Quantum Encryption Has Arrived”—which was the premise for my book.) 

Time-travel is a little dicier.  I did a lot of research on that before starting the City of God series and I took the best option for time-travel I could find.  (There were a bunch of papers written on time-travel in physics journals about fifteen years ago.)  For that series, though, the historical research took a lot longer than the scientific.  I’ve been researching first century Jerusalem for twenty years now. 

I usually come up with an idea and let it simmer in my Idea File for three or four years.  Then when I’m ready for it, I’ll pull it out, spend six months doing research, then write the story in a couple of months.  Once I turn in a novel, it usually appears on the shelves about a year later.  So the total time for the process can be five years or longer.  Of course, I always have several ideas going at once. 

LMB -- One of the reasons I like you so much is your generosity to new authors. Your web-site is full of information to help us figure out where we are in our careers and how to get where we want to be. Why did you decide to do this? 

I can remember being an unpublished writer and wishing there were someone who could answer all my questions.  And I was too shy and intimidated to go ask some big-name (or even little-name) author to help me.  So it took me over ten years to break in.  Once I finally got published, I decided to put some of those answers on my web site to maybe reduce the time other writers spend in training.  I think it’s possible to go from newbie to published author in about four years.  Anything longer than that is usually time wasted (though not always).  And I hate to see people’s time getting wasted. 

LMB -- When you do a Google search of your name that Snowflake Method pops up! How’d you come up with that, and why share it free? It’s very popular and you could no doubt sell it.  

I guess I always assumed everyone developed story ideas in a logical and organized  way.  Then we were discussing it one day on one of my writing email loops and I discovered that most published authors do things differently.  I spelled out my method in about tens steps, and one of my friends, Janelle Schneider, got interested enough to ask me a lot of questions.  We went back and forth many times and I finally wrote up a Word document with the whole thing laid out in detail.  After Janelle told a few people about it, I posted it on my web site.  Two years later, I’ve probably had eighty thousand hits on that one page.  People all around the world, including some published authors, are now using the Snowflake to organize their story development.  It’s exciting to see that. 

I don’t like to charge money for such a short document.  It only took me an hour to write it down, and it doesn’t seem right to sell it.  I am planning a book on the Snowflake soon, and I’ll have to charge something for that.   Also, I’ll be producing an audio CD containing a lecture on the Snowflake, along with some extra materials that help explain how it all works.  I’ll charge a reasonable amount for those, but the basic Snowflake document will always be free. 

LMB -- Your City of God series has such a strong Jewish thread in it. How did you come to know so much about the Jewish religion?  

Well, that was hard.  I had to relearn a few things.  I’m a Christian, and I was raised in a very conservative church, so I’m very familiar with the Bible.  The Bible is a Jewish book, so I just assumed that I would automatically know about Judaism.  Wrong!   

The Bible is a Jewish book, true, but I had been reading it all my life through Christian eyes.  When I got the idea for the City of God series, I decided to learn more about Judaism.  I joined the Jewish Book Club and bought a bunch of books and that really opened my eyes.  Then I started attending a Messianic Jewish congregation in San Diego.  I was hoping to learn some Hebrew, and I did, but I also made a number of great friends who helped me unlearn things I thought I knew about Judaism.  Thirteen years later, I’m still there. After all this time, I think I’ve finally learned a bit about how Jews think. 

By the way, one thing I learned early was that Messianic Jews are kind of controversial.  Controversy makes for good fiction, so I threw some of that into my story.  I also learned a whole lot about Jewish-Christian relations over the centuries, and it wasn’t very pretty.  So I threw that in, too.  I guess the biggest thing I learned was to respect Judaism on its own terms.  Of course, I threw that into the story too. 

LMB -- Do many people of the Jewish faith read your books? Ari is such a strong character, how do Jewish readers respond? (This question may not be too clear, sorry about that, I’m trying to ask if Jewish people are put off because of the Christ message in your books.) 

I don’t know.  My books are published by Christian publishers, so my main readership is Christian.  My Messianic Jewish friends are big fans of my books, but I don’t really know how the books are received in conventional Jewish circles.  I would hope Jews would read my books in the same spirit that Christians read Chaim Potok’s books. 

LMB -- Your last book in the series, Retribution, is very powerful. Especially the one scene near the end. Was it difficult to write? Draining emotionally? What did you do to get back from the edge?  

RETRIBUTION is the book that hit me the hardest.  That scene you’re talking about was very intense, and I never did quite get over it—I was never able to edit it intellectually without getting emotionally entangled in the story.  I’m afraid to admit this, lest the Authorities come and take away my Guy Card, but every time I read that scene, I cry.  After I finished that book, I needed something a bit lighter, so I was very glad to do DOUBLE VISION, which was a complete change of pace, with a lot more humor. 

LMB -- I heard your talk about how men think at the ACRW conference last year and I still hear a bit of buzz about it! Are you glad you did the talk or do you wish you’d not? (I thought it was great!) 

That talk was a lot of fun!  I’ll be giving it again at a couple of conferences in this coming year.  I have no regrets on it at all.  I was afraid the ladies at the conference might be aghast to learn “how guys think”.  But it turned out that the ladies already had strong suspicions!  What they really wanted was to understand why guys think like that.  And I was able to tell them in a way that made sense.  That talk was the runaway best-selling CD at the conference.  So far as I can tell, nobody was offended. 

LMB -- What’s next on your agenda? 

2005 is my year to break out as a writing teacher.  I’ll be teaching at five different writing conferences across the country.  Also, as I mentioned earlier, I’m working on some new materials on how to write fiction that I’ll be posting soon on my web site.  Some of this will be free.  Some of it (such as audio CDs), I’ll have to charge money for.   

In March, 2005, Baker Books will be producing a book of science fiction short stories for kids.  The title is EAT MY MARTIAN DUST, and I’ll have two stories in it.  It’s a fun book, a nice change of pace from some of the heavy things I’ve done lately. 

I’m also in the middle of writing another contemporary romantic suspense novel, DOUBLE CROSS, which will be out in 2006.  And I have a couple of other projects in the pipeline that I could tell you about, but then my agent would have to kill me, and that would be kind of inconvenient. 

LMB -- Anything else you want to add?  

People often imagine that published authors just magically “knew all along” that someday they’d get published.  This is not true.  Most all of us started life as voracious readers who never thought much about where the books come from.  Then at some point, we got it in our heads that we wanted to write a novel.   

But the process of getting published wasn’t magic for any of us.  We had to plant our butts in that hard, ugly chair every day after work and type a bunch words that just seemed to lie there dead on the page.  And we’d do that every day, year after year, without ever knowing if it was going to pay off.   

I did it for TWELVE YEARS before I saw my first novel on a bookstore shelf.  I have a friend who did it for TWENTY-SIX YEARS.  There is no magic in that.  There is only hard work and a refusal to give up the dream.  Writing is what happens between the cracks of regular, ordinary life.  You do it because you love it—or you give up.  Eventually, if you’re talented and persistent and lucky, you get published.   

Everybody has a dream—some secret thing they would do if they could.  When you’ve got a dream, you should ask yourself two hard questions:

Does this dream match my talents?

Do I really LOVE following this dream?

If the answer to both questions is “yes,” then follow that dream!  You may never catch it, but you’ll always be glad you tried.  And some people do catch their dreams.  They catch it, because they faced that hard, ugly chair for years and years and years and never, ever gave up.   

May each one of you choose a dream appropriate to your talents and your desires, and may you pursue it till you catch it!   

LMB -- Randy, thanks so much for doing this interview. I am thrilled you will be profiled on our website in March 2005 www.roadtoromance.ca

Best – 

Linda Mae Baldwin

Inspirational Review Coordinator for www.roadtoromance.ca