Jerome Preisler
Net Force Moving Target
DOSSIER: When you worked with Tom Clancy, he pretty much just let you go in whatever direction you wanted. Do you still enjoy that same level of autonomy with the NET FORCE series you write? Like, do you have to check in with Marc Cameron and Don Bentley to see what they’re working on?
PREISLER: Marc, Don, and I meet at an undisclosed location. Don lands in an Apache chopper. Marc usually arrives riding a large, Alaskan beast. Usually a saddled moose, but once it was on the shoulders of some kind of bear. A grizzly, maybe. It had dark, matted fur and gnarly teeth. That time Marc told me he didn’t want me to have any characters named Ryan in any of my Clancy brand novels. First name, last name, middle. No Ryans, period. That furry thing he rode in on glared at me and I acquiesced.
Other than being terrorized by those two guys, I have even more freedom writing NET FORCE than I did with POWER PLAYS. When we mapped out the relaunch, people knew me, and they knew my work, so I had an existing track record. I turned in a very extensive breakdown with master plan for the first four books and beyond. That was the basis on which the series was eventually sold to Hanover Square Press.
DOSSIER: For the one big city change Clancy wanted you to make for one of your stories, did you remind him who you were and explain that it was your way or the highway?
PREISLER: Oh, definitely. My words were very assertive and drew a clear, wide line in the sand. I think they were something like, “YES! YOU GOT IT! NOOOOO PROBLEM!”
DOSSIER: When and where do you write, and what kind of environment do you prefer? (Music/silence/the dock for the Circle Line Ferry in Manhattan?) The Circle Line might be interesting. Or the Staten Island Ferry, for that matter!
JP: Actually, I need to write in solitude. I have two offices in my home. The bigger, sunnier one is upstairs. But during the winter wind shakes my computer off my desk and icicles start hanging from me. So, around November I hole up downstairs in the library. Or more accurately, a tiny space off the library that’s crammed with shelved and unshelved books. At first it felt a little cramped. I got lost in there a few times and the cops had find me. But over time I’ve started to like it. It’s gotten cozier and I’ve grown to enjoy the seasonal shift.
It used to be that any noise would drive me crazy. A persistent, buzzing fly could ruin my writing day. But that’s changed over the years–who knows why? Now I must have music. Silence is my ruination. Sometimes a character winds up getting a theme song that I play over and over again. For the past few books, I’ve started to imagine some music as being part of the score for the television or movie version of the story. I often think of what I’d like to hear doing the closing credits. Suddenly I’m scoring the imaginary blockbuster movies based on my work. As I said, things have changed.
DOSSIER: Are the writing cats at your home inspirational, collaborative, disruptive, or … and I’ll go out on a limb here … ambivalent to your wishes and demands and choose instead to do whatever they want whenever they want to do it?
PREISLER: My cat staffers tend to assume different roles based on their personalities and skill sets. They’re very scientific and organized. One’s very good at determining the stability of a stack of books by balancing atop it and seeing how long it holds up before crashing down on my head. A while back she did a quality test on my Macbook by leaping down onto it from the shelf above, landing on all fours, and then springing back off to the floor. It was a very athletic move. The screen failed the endurance test had to be replaced to the tune of a few hundred bucks. So, there’s a great feline talent.
Sometimes the cats insist on hogging the spotlight. One of them, Spooky, wound up being a running character in a series of cozies. She used an AKA, Skiball, and appeared on the cover of every book. Another cat, Mickey, had a recurring role in the POWER PLAYS series. In the story she used the name Missus Frakes and belonged to a former special agent for the ATF named Lathrop, who’d gone more than a little bonkers and become a stone killer. Not coincidentally, Mickey had the same disposition and murderous inclinations. But that’s a long story.
DOSSIER: You’ve done so many types of writing with your 40+ books of the years. What drives you to dedicate some 80k words on a particular project—the characters (or non-fictional personalities), the specific story, setting, or theme, or is it the need to keep funding your dark web collection of obscure New York Yankees memorabilia?
PREISLER: All the above. It just depends. If it’s a project I come up with, whether fiction or nonfiction, it’s usually that I think there’s a great story and characters at the heart of it. But I’ve done a lot of work that maybe was offered to me, and I didn’t think would be a match, and turned out to be very rewarding and creatively successful.
And I refuse to talk about the Yankees this season. Refuse. In fact …
What Yankees?
Website: Jerome Preisler | Amazon Author Page