Andrew Colvin

I grew up in steel town in western Pennsylvania, USA, called Ambridge. I was the middle child with an older brother and younger sister. Sports and school were the most important activities growing up. I played baseball, football, basketball, and track and field through high school. My best attribute in sports was that I had a very good throwing arm, enabling me to throw a baseball faster, a football farther, and a javelin farther than my peers. Accuracy and control weren’t always my forte. Good grades and college were non-negotiable in our family. I’ve always loved science and technology, particularly space. This motivated my early reading.

I started reading comic books a lot when I was young, then gravitated to history and Tom Swift Jr. and other science fiction and adventure stories. I remember a fourth-grade teacher retired and gave me many of her history books on the ancient world and the middle-ages. I devoured these and continue to love history. I consumed a steady diet of science fiction novels throughout much of my life.

Beyond writing and reading, exercise is my top interest. I love running, hiking, weight lifting. I find that I exercise more as I age, running away from the years chasing me.

Yes, I do. We lived in Albuquerque for almost 20 years and loved it. The culture and people are amazing. The weather is the best.

My daughter advised me to use a pseudonym to ensure that I maintained my privacy. My novel is a dark psychological thriller with many triggers so I understood her advice. We used an approximate anagram to come up with Andrew Colvin. I’m now writing the sequel to The Mad Girl and will probably move to my real name.

Where should I start? When I started, I didn’t really know what I was doing from a structural standpoint. My voracious reading habits helped to absorb the works of many different authors, ranging from literary stars to first time authors. I learned what I liked in a story. I read a lot of books on writing and watched more than a few lectures on it which helped a lot. As I wrote The Mad Girl, I found I was writing too much backstory. Every character had a backstory. My developmental editor helped me trim this down, though amputate might be more accurate. She was phenomenal with her recommendations and I’m very thankful. In hindsight, the backstory helped me understand the extended world around my characters, how they developed in their lives, made the decisions that created the character in my story. About halfway through, I created a two, large spreadsheets with all of the characters, events, and timelines. One timeline was a day-by-day flow while the other was a year-by-year flow. This helped me build more structure in my writing. I believe this was essential to completing the novel.

Throughout my life I’ve loved stories, books and films. My daughter and son both had a talent for writing. My son writes and directs independent films. I toyed with writing short blurbs, really playing with writing. I became serious about writing as I fleshed out the story arc of what would become The Mad Girl. The difficult part in the beginning was carving out the time to write. My day job averages about 60 hours a week requiring me to be disciplined to carve out small segments of time in the early morning or at night for writing. The weekends are my big blocks of time to write or edit. I do use my time hiking or exercising to think through plot details and problems. Once I developed the cadence and discipline, the joy of the story pulled me forward. Writing became my primary hobby. I love it and plan to continue into the future.

The character of Cee Stark is a composite of multiple people I’ve met over the years and characters. I tested Cee’s characteristics with my daughter and others, along with extensive research, to ensure that I was accurate in her character. I wanted a strong, highly intelligent young woman as my main character, someone who though traumatized from a young age, would fight to recover and try to make the right decisions. However, her trauma often prevented her from knowing what the right decision was. The quote that I used to start the book was: “A mind broken by events sees paths that exist on the edge of reality.” At times, Cee can’t determine if something is real or in her imagination. Obviously, that impacts her decisions. Katniss in The Hunger Games was one model for Cee’s PTSD that I used. Father Benkovsky, the primary antagonist, was inspired by Joseph Conrad’s Mr. Kurtz and Francis Ford Coppola’s Colonel Kurtz. Relatively normal men driven insane by events.

I originally struggled with whether The Mad Girl should be a YA or an adult novel. I discussed this with my developmental editor and several beta readers. The key items that convinced me were the age of the main character, Cee, and the theme of the story. Cee’s journey was a battle through the trauma of her childhood and the betrayal of the adults around her. She had to find her own path to recovery. Consequently, I thought that The Mad Girl was more a YA book, though a very dark tale.

My strategic planning role involves evaluating product, manufacturing, economic, and competitive trends and determining what manufacturing capacity should be and the required investments. This requires know where to obtain the best sources of knowledge are in these and other areas, obtaining the latest updates, and weaving them into a narrative of a potential futures and a recommendation. The skills needed are a working understanding of these areas to be able to interpret the trends. You also have to recognize that all forecasts and predictions will soon be incorrect.

Great question. I would like to see more YA novels dealing with themes like cyber bullying and social media sexual harassment. There was a lot of bullying when I went to high school years ago but now the kids have more dangerous tools for bullying with phones, computers and social media. In The Mad Girl, I use the analogy of a social media drone pilot. It’s so much easier to bully or psychologically damage someone else behind a phone or PC screen than it is to do it face to face. The teens are under enormous social pressure in today’s high school.

I’ve greatly enjoyed the experience. I’ve had many roles and the breadth of experience has given me a wealth of technical experience and also taught me the importance of developing a strong and broad network.

I love all three for different reading situations. I listen to audiobooks when exercising or my hikes, when I drive, and doing chores around the house like cleaning, etc. I read on my kindle when I run on the treadmill and in bed at night. I read a physical book when I want to go slow and study the prose. For many books, I have all three versions. My preference for most books is an audiobook. If I really love a book, I will buy the audiobook and the hard cover.

I’m writing the sequel to The Mad Girl now. Without giving away the ending of The Mad Girl, the sequel moves between Cee as a successful therapist for traumatized children when she is in her 30s and when she makes better decisions in high school. However, there are some problems that won’t stay buried. The story questions what is a person’s destiny?

Great! I’ve been very happy with how AllAuthor has helped me reach new readers to The Mad Girl. Thank you!