C.L. Thomas

I believe our lives are made up of many experiences, and from these experiences we draw our inspirations and ideas. Being a Military Police Officer allowed me at a young age to form a world view of life beyond the safety of childhood. In the Army I met people from all walks of life and learned many things from them that shaped my view of people from different walks of life. In the Hollow, and beyond, I bring the harsh realities of being a soldier to the story and use those experiences to shape the life of Bruce Westman.

Being a police officer for 32+ years influences much of my writing. Just the act of writing report after report taught me how to shape and mold details that most people might miss. A police officer looks at the world from many different directions and learns to live in the gray when most people see things as black and white. As an officer I received many hours of intense training, and sought out with a purpose, the classes on serial killers, missing persons, and the effects of child abuse on adults. I believe I wove many of these lessons into the development of my bad guys.

I started writing stories when I was in High School, and most of them involved vampires, werewolves, and other assorted creatures. Bruce Westman was one of these ideas that came out so many hours of sitting at my small desk in the basement of the house where I grew up. Back then Bruce chased the vampires or other things that went bump in the night, but then one day I simply placed him up on a shelf and forgot about him. Then six years ago, I was back home up in Connecticut sitting in the parking lot of Globe Hollow swimming pool. It was late in the afternoon. The sky was dark gray, and leaves were falling from the trees. The pool was closed for the winter, so I had the parking lot to myself. It was quiet as I sat there looking through the chain link fence wondering how a pool that had been so large when I was a child had shrunk in size. As I sat there a thought came to me, what if there was a body floating in the water? Later that night as I sat on a hotel room bed with a pad of paper in my lap I began to resurrect Bruce Westman from the shelf where most of my stories had gone to die.

As I stated above, I took everything law enforcement had to offer as well as many personal experiences as a soldier and then later as a police officer to shape Bruce's new stories. The Hollow is just the first book in the Bruce Westman series. Book 2, Killer Art continues his adventures and I am at work right now on book 8.

In Book 1, The Hollow, Bruce, a former Iraqi war Veteran with PTSD, is chasing a serial killer across Connecticut with his brother, Jeffery Westman, a police detective with the Manchester Police Department. The Hollow is a thriller/suspense story along the lines of James Patterson and David Baldacci. The reader can expect a fast-paced story with many twists laced throughout.

My goal as a writer is to entertain people and leave them guessing as to what will happen next. I'm not sure there are any messages or themes to take away from the story other than, anyone can be the hero, even someone as broken and damaged as Bruce.

In book 2, Agent Jerrod Shelby, an FBI agent we met in book one, hires Bruce on the side to assist with a killer stalking prostitutes in an area of the Bronx called Hunts Point. With the assistance of a street walker named Laurie, Bruce races against the clock to stop the Rosary Killer from leaving a path of mutilated bodies across New York City.

In book 3, Missing, Bruce is hired by the dying mother of a girl who has been missing for sixteen years. The story, that begins in Connecticut, travels halfway across the country to Houston, Texas. Bruce is assisted by Laurie from book 2 as she escorts him through the dirty underworld of human trafficking.

I believe the Hollow is a necessary read to get to know Bruce Westman and his pain. Deep down, Bruce is a broken and damaged person suffering guilt and trauma from his life experiences. As an avid reader I always wanted to know what happened next in any story I read. As a writer I am the same way. When I started the Hollow, I thought it was just a one shot story but even before I finished, I wanted to know what came next for Bruce Westman. It is my hope as a writer that I can cause that same reaction in the people reading my stories.

I love researching the history of the places where a story takes place and then weaving this information into the book. I like explaining where and why something exists and how it might have gotten there. For the crime aspect of the story, I draw on my own life experiences and the many real life cases I studied as a police officer.

Yes and No. I use the idea of people I know or have seen and create something new. Places and people are woven throughout the stories but only my imagination of them, not who they really are.

I try to use the KISS method to keep things simple. If people really knew how much paperwork and sitting goes into police work, they might wonder why we ever chose the job in the first place. The paperwork is mountainous. I can't tell you how many trees I must have killed over the years, but all that aside, there were many days when I came home from work and told my wife, "I would have done this for free tonight." There is nothing like the feeling of chasing the bad guys and catching them. I spent eight years on a tactical team running down drug dealers and violent offenders. I was privileged to work with some of the finest people you would ever want to meet. One of them, William Jeffrey, someone my children called Uncle Bill, gave his life to protect the citizens of Houston. Bill was gunned down by a wanted violent offender while serving an arrest warrant.

Oddly enough, I don't find that hard at all. I do find writing for the bad guy easier than the good guy. I'm not sure what that says about me, but getting into their thoughts and ideas almost feels natural.

I am a true organic writer. I write with a point in my head. In the hollow, all I knew for sure was that I wanted a body floating in that pool. I wasn't sure how it got there or who was going to find it, but I knew it was going to be there just the same. I just sat down in front of my laptop when I was back home in Texas, took a deep breath, and started writing. This is how I have always done my writing. I write a thousand words and then go back to the start and edit until I like what I see. The next day I go back to the beginning again and edit things once more before pushing a thousand words forward into the story. I do this over and over again until the story is finished, and then I read through the whole thing out loud making changes as I go, explaining things better, and fleshing things out more. Once this is done, I start the next story because, like I said earlier, I always want to know what comes next.

Dark and Intense. That is a good way to describe my writing style. I don't pull any punches. I allow everything to just hang right on out there. Policework, the things I've seen people do to each other, the harm human beings are capable of doing to one another fills many of the pages I write.

My plans have plans. I am writing book 8 at the moment in the Bruce Westman series. How far the series goes I'm not sure. I'm thinking 12 books, but once upon a time I thought 3, and before that, just 1, so who knows. I am also working on a middle grade fiction story at the moment. When I was a kid, my dad would threaten me with calling someone named Archibald Popscaluski and sending me to the Little Boy Factory. I'm working on creating a whole world centered on a boy taken to this place by Archibald Popscaluski. I also have many stories on the shelf that I've written over the years that I want to take down and resurrect. Like Bruce Westman, there are some characters just begging to come back to life in one form or another.

I have nothing but good things to say about working with AllAuthor. I enjoy the cover of the month contest. The Hollow did well, making it into the final round. I didn't win but the experience was a good one. I love learning about other authors and the stories they tell. I love that they provided me the opportunity to sit down and do this interview.