Michelle Cruz
Even When You Lie
DOSSIER: You’d written stories since you were a teenager but didn’t get your “adult voice” until you really buckled down about 4-5 years ago. How do you think your service as a Captain in the U.S. Air Force helped change the writer in you from when you were young versus when you finished the draft for EVEN WHEN YOU LIE?
CRUZ: I think the easy answer is getting me out of East Texas. It broadened my exposure to all different types of personalities and people with different cultures/life experiences and allowed me to live in places I would never have chosen, then taught me to make the best it—it’s really empowering to learn that by controlling your attitude when you have limited (or no) control over anything else, you can take back a narrative. But that’s probably what every writer says about the military, right?
So it also instilled a sense of discipline to my writing; if nothing else, SERE taught me that a lot of things really are just a matter of making your mind up to get through (even finishing a draft!) and pushing to completion. But probably most importantly, I learned failure is vital because it’s what you learn from. It’s why we train and drill so much, why our debriefs for schoolhouses and stateside exercises can be brutal, so you experience failure when the threat is low and go onto bigger success. Oh, this agent rejected a query, or this editor passed on a submission or I’m not on a list? Well, I’m at ground level pulling zero Gs and have no troops-in-contact, I’m still good, and next draft I do better.
DOSSIER: The idea of mixing a steamy romance theme into a thriller novel really wasn’t something that was acceptable in your conservative East Texas upbringing. Do you think it’s always been just a matter of time with conservative culture that’s allowed a book like yours to be accepted now, or is there still a staunch group that believe that murder & mayhem in books is an acceptable storyline while a strong female lead with sex scenes is still taboo?
CRUZ: I think there’s still a pretty staunch faction that doesn’t want to have either sex scenes nor strong female leads. The modern evangelical church has always had a hang-up about sex, though. I’ve been reading “The Making of Biblical Womanhood” by Beth Allison Barr as research for…reasons 😈 …and it’s fascinating the lengths that have been gone to in order to rewrite women out and subjugate them. This is just another front in the same long war. I don’t know how many times growing up I heard that romance novels were simply pornography for women, and that reading any sort of fictionalized love story could lead to unrealistically high expectations. But if strong female leads and concepts like female satisfaction and consent are unrealistically high expectations, perhaps that says more about the culture than we want to acknowledge.
DOSSIER: When and where do you write, and what kind of environment do you prefer? (Absolute silence/music playing/front porch overlooking that lush East Texas landscape?)
CRUZ: Ideally, I write on a comfy couch with Torchy’s tacos/queso and Summer Moon lattes delivered on demand, my pups curled up beside me. But you know that line from the movie Fury, “Ideals are peaceful, history is violent”? That’s my writing life. I have middle-schoolers and a day job, so I have to seize what I can get—the margins I grab from family, professional, and social obligations. So drafting usually involves headphones, a white noise playlist, and the maternal instinct to determine if that shriek from my son is just him getting what he deserves from his older sister or if there’s actually blood. Like many working parents, I’ve written on the sidelines of sports practices (especially during lacrosse season!), edited in airports, and listened to books while I walk. In fact, I started drafting what eventually became EVEN WHEN YOU LIE in the elementary school pickup line.
DOSSIER: Based on your personal military experience, combined with your professional advocacy work supporting military communities, do you see yourself someday writing a military thriller along the same lines as you’ve been going and try to bend that genre a little? Having military service under his belt, The Dossier guy is certain there are plenty of sex scandals and malfeasance to work with on any military base, wouldn’t you say?
CRUZ: Oh the scandals…! Certainly if we ever wind up at a conference or something, we’ll have to grab a drink and discuss some of the bad behavior we’ve seen. So while I don’t have any plans for a plot like this on tap, if there’s anything I have learned, it’s to never say never! I think it would be really fascinating and maybe a great way to collaborate with some other veteran writers.
DOSSIER: You’ve done a lot of writing collaboration through critique groups, and you also belong to formal groups such as the Writers’ League of Texas. How much have those affiliations helped with your path to publication versus if you had tried to just go it alone? The Dossier imagines you, May Cobb, Meg Gardiner, and Don Bentley regularly getting together up in Austin to talk shop.
CRUZ: I’ve only been lucky enough to cross paths with Meg Gardiner just once, although I treasure my signed copy of Bad Habits! But I try to hang out with Don and May whenever I can, and their friendship/mentorship has been instrumental to so many intangibles in my writing life. So often we romanticize writing as a solitary pursuit and while I absolutely feel that first draft should be written for the writer, at some level we crave community—and not even just for feedback. For questions like how do I manage taxes? How do I prioritize my writing time? How do I handle the agent relationship? Coming from the military, I was very familiar with those Friday afternoon O-calls when the beer light goes on and you’re in a non-attribution environment with senior squadron or group leadership and can benefit from hearing the stories of their “adventures.” I don’t think I would be where I am without the advantage of having local writers who are authentic enough to engage in similar conversations over a drink and dessert. I would love to see a military veteran writing network emerge, where we could mentor, collaborate, engage and champion each other’s work across genres.
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Jeff Circle 