An Interview with:  Charlie Sheldon
Saturday, December 4, 1999

BA:   The Boomerang Heist seems like quite the modern day swashbuckling tale, is this the only book you have written, and if not, do you feel there is a central element to most of your books?

CS:   I have written four other books. Fat Chance was published in 1991 by Pocketbooks. It was about industrial espionage and how two strangers are blackmailed about an anti-cholesterol drug. It is set in new York and is a sort of mystery-thriller. I have three others yet unpublished which I will put on the same ToExcel system if it is successful for me. These are Loggers Landing, about a bank robbery gone horribly wrong on Bainbridge Island near Seattle; Chasing Davy Jones, about how a young ambitious fishing skipper from Cape Cod gets used by a canny, devious hustler with his own, much more dangerous agenda; and Guardian, a story about a family and the dynamic among the son, father and grandfather over the son's choice of a new sport and then the grandfather's illness unbalancing the family. If there is a central theme, it is that the characters that visit me and demand to enter my stories are ordinary people, with some edge, who then run into extraordinary situations.

BA:   You apparently have drawn from real life for at least the name of this new book, do you draw many other elements of your writing from actual experience or is the rest based on pure fantasy?

CS:   For this book I use a lot of real life, at least as regards creating a realistic setting so the reader can believe what he or she reads. I am a project manager for the Port of Seattle and I spent five years building a huge container shipping terminal. There really is a Boomerang Box and it really does still sail the oceans of the world as an education tool for kids.  These jumped into a story I had already started about a hijacked container ship in response to a question from my son in 1996 when he asked me, "Dad, why can't you steal a whole container ship instead of one or two containers?" Similarly, in Chasing Davy Jones I draw on my 20 years in the commercial fishing industry. Guardian is set in the Connecticut Valley where I grew up, and it about the sport of rowing, which was my own passion for five years. I worked in new York for five years; hence the setting for Fat Chance. I need to have experienced the settings enough so that when I write about them I can see them. Then when the characters appear (I have no control over this) they behave in scenes I can easily describe. None of my characters or stories are autobiographical, however, although I have written another non fiction book about where I grew up in the 50s.

BA:   What book by another author is your favorite all time read?

CS:   Moby Dick by Hermann Melville. I was forced to read it in high school (as most of us were) and I found it tedious and impossible to understand. I remember it as a book of five thousand pages, at least. Then, fifteen years later, I was a hundred miles offshore laying to in a gale of wind aboard an offshore lobster vessel and with nothing to do I found a paperback copy of Moby Dick beneath all the skin magazines, and I started reading it. And in that instant I discovered magic, for Melville had written a sea story and now that I understood the sea, all those endless pages I wanted to skip as a kid came alive and spoke to me. The book seemed no more than a hundred pages long. My other favorite story is Typhoon by Joseph Conrad.

BA:   What book that you have written is your favorite? Is this the book you enjoyed writing the most? 

CS:   This book, Boomerang Heist, is absolutely the one I have had the most fun with, but it is also the most recent. Each book I have done has been, in the time I did it, tremendously rewarding on many levels, mostly dealing with surprise and discovery as these character who appear start to take over. All my books are a process that follows a similar pattern. First I get this vague notion to write around. For example in Fat Chance the first line came into my head one day and that started it: "The lounge lizard made his move about eleven, just when Frank was closing in for the kill." For Logger's Landing it was the question, what would happen if an old man driving alone cross country ran into a gang of robbers? For this book, Heist, it was exploring my son Jack's question, why not hijack a container ship? That started the process of first determining how one could steal a ship and then, more important, why one would even consider it. But most important, with all the stories, is the wonderful treat of watching the story happen through the characters as they act and move and become real and then tell me what to do. And until I have three or four real live characters walking on their own legs it is very hard to write, an effort. An exercise in faith, trusting that the characters will bring everything alive. Happens every time. With Heist I was interviewing people I work with, longshoremen, stevedores, shipping agents, customs personnel, Port workers, agents, everyone. And because this is a book about the city I work in, about the industry I have worked in, and about the institution I work for, the Port of Seattle (though none of the characters are real at all) I have had great fun with it, and am now having great fun as folks who know this waterfront read it and laugh. And the story is especially meaningful right now because of the World Trade Organization events last week here in Seattle, as my story is also about a trade conference in Seattle, a fictional one set in the year 2000.

BA:   Who do you feel has most influenced your work as an author?

CS:   A woman named Ann Colvin, who was the mother of my sister's best friend, who when I was only seventeen and even then writing short stories spoke to me and told me that I should persist in this, that I had talent, and that she believed in me. Others told me the same thing, I even won a prize in high school, but Ann's encouragement with one short story I wrote in 1965 has always stayed with me.

BA:   Is this person the main reason you are writing now, or is there another major reason?

CS:   The main reason I am writing now is because writing books was what I was going to do from my earliest conscious memory. I know that when I was eight years old I decided definitely to write books. I have had no choice in this. It just took me until I was 41 years old to really try chasing this dream in a serious way. You see, the wonderful thing about dreams is that as long as you don't try to follow the dream you can imagine anaything. The risk when you do start to chase a dream is that you may find the dream is not for you after all, and that is a bitter thing to imagine. And I think it is this fear that keeps so many people from ever really trying to start with. What happens, of course, is that the dream most often does come true because the dream is driven by the soul and that is truth, always.

BA:   What is your favorite character type to write about?

CS:   My characters appear, they are not created. I do not do outlines and I do not write pages and pages of personality profiles. Instead a character will emerge from within the pool in my mind and take shape and eventually walk away on his or her own legs, and then is real. I love all my characters. I especially like the characters struggling with the demon of self-betrayal.  These are my favorite people, for their struggles are the most poignant and real.

BA:   Where do you see yourself going from here? Are you planning on going off into any new directions with your writing?

CS:   I have two or three projects in mind for future books which I plan to start once I get the books I now have on the web system, which will take a few more months. Then one or two stories, or vague notions, are there to work with. I do want some day to tackle a story about early America in the first years of the eighteenth century, early 1700s, in western New England, due to an ancient personal family myth and mystery concerning a bell, settlers, warring tribes, and evil. But mostly my goal is to keep doing this, on the ferry, back and forth, watch the stories appear and be delighted to see what emerges.

BA:   What do you see as the most challenging problem or opportunity facing authors today?

CS:   Getting published and out there is terribly hard. This publish on demand system has real advantages but of course none of the big push from the big houses with big advances and marketing. I believe that if what I write is entertaining and enjoyable, and stays available on the Internet, and can be ordered, and people like it, with the passage of some time I will get out there and give many people enjoyment. That's what it's all about, isn't it?

BA:   What one piece of advice would you offer to aspiring authors?

CS:   I would say to aspiring authors - and remember I am not by any definition successful by any standard measurement - that first you must really MUST write, be driven from some inetrior force. Second, at least in my case I had to do some substantial knocking around in the various halls of living to get into my thick skull the pictures and expressions and scenes I can now use as backdrops for stories. Third, write - find a system and mechanical process that works for you to write every day when you are writing. This is key. For me it started by writing on the train commuting to New York, half an hour each way, and then when I moved to the west coast in 1990 I chose a place which forced me to take a forty minute ferry ride to and from work. It is absolutely astounding how fast a book appears whenh you write twice a day, five days a week, on a conveyance. There is an entire novel one could write about the mechanics of writing - notebook? laptop? pocket-top? And, finally, get out of the way when you write. By that I mean, at least for me, when I take my hands off the wheel and stop looking over my own shoulder, and let the scenes and characters tell the story, then magic happens. As soon as I start driving the car it comes to a stop.

BA:   What do you like most about writing, and is this now your main career?

CS:   This is not now and probably never will be my main career, which is being a project and program manager for big capital projects having to do with shipping and transportation. Without the ferry I am not sure I could do this. What I like most about it is that it is a frustrating, disapppointing, difficult, trying, faith-testing experience ninety percent of the time, but when the magic starts to happen, either with that first draft or then with those wonderful months tearing that clean first draft to bits to shape it into something useful, when that magic happens it is all worth it. Of course, in the end it is essential that others find half the joy I had in the story, and when that affirmation happens it is wonderful.

BA:   Do you feel that there is one common denominator with fans of your work, or do you feel that they have little in common?

CS:   Not sure about that yet. I think people who read my work need a little bit of a sense of humor and an appreciation that life can be pretty absurd and ironic sometimes.

BA:   If you had to synopsize your work for a potential reader, what would you say about it?

CS:   I write about ordinary people who end up in extraordinary situations, and what they learn from it.

BA:    Thanks for talking with us, the Books Anywhere bookworms appreciate these tidbits from you.

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