PeterHogenkampWrites

PeterHogenkampWrites: About the author : Hello all. In continued preparation for my website launch, I am posting the about the author section to my website for y...

Hello all. In continued preparation for my website launch, I am posting the about the author section to my website for you all to review. Let me know what you think. And please share the link and leave comments. I read my first thriller, an old paperback copy of Alistair MacLean’s Fear is the Key , when I was ten years old, and I have been hooked on the genre ever since. A few years later, in the summer before I began high school, I decided to try my hand at writing a thriller and I finished a good hundred pages before depositing it into the bottom drawer of my bureau. It would make a good story to say that I discovered the manuscript thirty years later, polished it up, and attracted dozens of literary agents with its magnetic power, but the truth is I have no idea what became of the notebook—I recall it was dark green—in which I scrawled a story about a maverick MI5 agent trying to save the world from a warped genius armed to the teeth with nuclear missiles.

I wanted to finish up the Q/A section of my website with several of the questions from the Kracht Klub, the literary posse that surrounds Liz Kracht, my fabulous agent. Q) Do you use an outline when you write? A) I have tried, but I find outlines to be very restricting and detrimental to my writing. I work best when I have a general idea what I want to do, and let things develop from there. For example, with Absolution , I knew I wanted to make the MC a Jesuit priest, and put him in a situation for which he was totally unprepared--by both disposition and training. Once I discovered the way to do this, the book essentially wrote itself, proving, as my friend Albie Cullen has always maintained, that "a good thesis writes itself." Q) Do you listen to music as you write? Is there a particular sound track you like? A)I do most of my writing in public places. Bars, eateries and coffee houses are my favorite settings; half of my book was written in Sugar and Spice, the world&#

Thanks to those of you who gave me some ideas and positive feedback about my website content. I will continue with the Q/A, using some of the questions which were suggested to me. Q) I understand you lived in Austria for several years. What brought you there? A) I should say I was lured there by a lifelong obsession with The Sound of Music , but the truth is I just couldn't stomach the idea of going straight to medical school after college--and my pre-med advisor suggested I take some time off. I was a little put off when he delivered the news, but it turned out to be a big favor. (Shout out to Dr. Michael McGrath!) It was his idea I move to Europe, and he even helped me find a job teaching chemistry at an international preparatory school in Salzburg. I had only planned on staying for a year, but I fell in love with Salzburg from the moment my train rolled into the Bahnhof and I gave serious consideration to making it home. Q) Parts of Absolution are set in Salzburg. Did you

With the help of the incomparable Maddee James from xuni.com, (Ok, it's true, she is doing everything) I am launching my author website, peterhogenkamp.com, next week. So, I thought I would enlist your aid to help me write/edit the content. We'll start with the Q/A section. Please let me know what you think of the question I asked myself, and the answer I gave back. If you can think of another question you'd like to ask me, please do, I am sure I can confabulate something. Q) When did you start writing? A) I have been writing stories since the first grade, and I received my first rejection (of many, many more) in the fourth grade, after submitting a story about a police dog to the New Yorker. I started my first novel in the eighth grade, but abandoned the effort after receiving bad reviews from my father. Ten years ago, I picked up the pencil again, and started scratching another novel in an old college notebook. Those pages ended up in the filter of my sister-in-law'

PeterHogenkampWrites: It's my submissions day! (I am making that term up... : To celebrate the day my agent has sent off my pitch to various publishers, (she does all the work and I do all the celebrating--this is a gr...

To celebrate the day my agent has sent off my pitch to various publishers, (she does all the work and I do all the celebrating--this is a great gig) the following is a list of several of my little darlings that were killed by the Liz the literary agent. If you like any of them, please respond somehow. If you agree with Liz (that these lines deserved the painful death to which they were sentenced) please keep it to your self and your therapist (who you are going to need if you make it through this sampling. Some of the killed darlings: 1) ...but it occurred to Marco there was another motivation at play, deep below the surface like a giant grouper, lurking malevolently in the coral. (of note, Marco is a fisherman so the giant grouper simile pertains, No?) 2) Blood trickled out of his mouth, coloring his beard red. His intestines spilled out from the wound in his abdomen, spewing forth a noxious mixture of blood and stool. (How could anyone not like this line! Tell Liz next time you

PeterHogenkampWrites: Why you should want to work with a literary agent!... : Hello again. I haven't posted in a while, being busy doing the final revision of my manuscript--tentatively titled Absolution --taking a...

Hello again. I haven't posted in a while, being busy doing the final revision of my manuscript--tentatively titled Absolution --taking a lot of naps, watching reruns of Downton Abbey etc. Over the past month, I have greatly enjoyed working with my agent, the talented Liz Kracht of Kimbereley Cameron & Associates, and I thought I would dedicate a post to the reason why. In a nutshell, the working partnership you form with a good literary agent will make your ms stronger. When you devote yourself to something like a writer devotes him or herself to a manuscript, you want feedback. Although it is true there are numerous ways to get feedback--Beta readers, critique groups, having your mother read it--the best feedback will always come from an agent. I was very fortunate to have three excellent beta-readers (shout out to Thomas Cosgrove, Kirsten Marsh and Olga Lawrence) who provided me with keen insight into what was working and what did not. (As an aside, if you haven't done

PeterHogenkampWrites: Signs you are close to getting a literary agent! : How do you know you are getting close to signing an agent? Let's assume you have queried widely, gotten the usual hodgepodge of respon...