Life’s experiencing made him complete; now he’s turning all that experience into novels.

Please, introduce yourself. Tell us about your personal life, family, education.

Thanks for giving my book a little more exposure. I grew up in Chugiak, Alaska—a small community on the edge of wilderness when my parents took me there in 1954. After graduating high school, my life revolved around sports, hunting, and fishing. I joined the Army in 1972 as an MP, and after leaving service at the close of the Vietnam War, I worked security on the trans-Alaska pipeline construction, then later on the North Slope until the Anchorage Police Department hired me. There I worked Patrol, Uniformed Investigator, Crime Scene Team Specialist, and finally Detective.

I left APD to move to Texas and alternated between self-employment and private sector work—primarily construction. At 51, after earning my BS in Computer Science, I entered IT work in Virginia and became a private contractor until joint replacement forced my retirement. My Attention Deficit Disorder required I do something that didn’t involve heavy lifting. So I started writing.

I am the father of two girl’s stepdad to three others. Grandfather to ten kids and great-grandpa to nine and expecting a new princess in a few months.

What do you like doing in your spare time?

Traveling with my wife is the most fun. At home, I do yard work and remodel our nearly 80-year-old house. I can’t give up building altogether. Writing has taken up most of my spare time for the past decade. Since I didn’t need it to put food on the table, it was a hobby I could afford until I sold something and made it a business.

If you are active in career fields other than writing, what do you hope for the future of that business? Describe your work or business activities in which you are presently active.

For the past nine months, my work has been learning to market a mystery novel while writing the follow-up and starting book three. Otherwise, I’m enjoying retirement – between building a deck for one kid and putting new flooring down for another.

Bought an Airplane

Do you have hobbies? How did you get started in them?

My first real hobby came from boredom while working on the North Slope. I started doodling and progressed into pencil-art drawings. That kept me busy until my eyes got old and it became too hard on my head. Then I bought an airplane I didn’t know how to fly – a Piper Super Cub that eventually I was licensed to fly. I rebuilt it from nose spinner to taillight. Once I became a Detective, the flying hobby was too time-consuming, so I sold the plane. I didn’t count hunting and fishing as hobbies since I had a guide’s license and commercial fished as side gigs over the years.

If you are a writer, are you an avid reader?

I hope I can call myself a writer now. Until I went to work on the pipeline, I didn’t consider myself a reader. Boredom is a recurring motivator in my life, and God has used it for my betterment. I have dyslexia that went undiagnosed until my youngest daughter tested positive for it in fourth grade – an inherited trait we assumed came from her mother’s side because for more

than a decade I’d been reading about 50 novels a year. Turns out, forcing myself to read over a 9-week tour of working 7–12-hour days with nothing to do in 55-below weather but watch thenorthern lights and the trees grow, I taught myself to read and to love it.

What is your ultimate writing goal as you see it today?

Gold Miner’s Daughter was my 13th manuscript. Up until that time, I’d set a goal to find a publisher who thought I warranted using the ink and killing trees for the paper. Now that I have that book out there, It’s the pilot for a series. At my age, I hope it becomes my life’s work. The series is based around the main character becoming the only federal special agent on the only federally owned railroad in America – the Alaska Railroad – in 1961. His cases can take me through to when the State of Alaska took over the railroad more than two decades later. By doing two books a year, I’ll probably croak before the railroad changes hands.

Inspiration

What inspired you to write your first book?

I love this question, it seems to be the most asked. Usually my stories come from “what-if” questions. Then, as a pantser, I generally allow the characters to direct where the story goes from there. On advice from seemingly everyone, I write about what I know, which revolves around criminal investigations or at least crimes. I also know Alaska and the West, and because I don’t like modern technology, I prefer an early time. I’m a child of the sixties, and the railroad ran through our neighborhood.

My first attempt at a novel was sparked by a trip to Old Mexico and my imagination working overtime about “What if I somehow witness corrupt Federal Police Officers massacring a busload of tourists, but I escaped?” The lone survivor without a passport, unable to get on a plane or go to the police, 1,200 miles from the US border on foot.

Unlike any other story, this my first published novel, I had an idea for the lead character before the “what if,” and I wanted him on the railroad. There were three ways to enter Alaska in 1959: boat, plane, or by way of the Alcan Highway. My guy was a broke drifter, so the highway made sense. I wanted a setting that was raw bush Alaska, and I immediately thought of the mining community of Chicken near the border with Canada and on the Taylor Highway, which, like the Alcan, was a joke description of a dirt road through the wilderness.

My high school geology teacher/basketball coach was a gold mine owner who had a daughter in my class from sixth grade on. She worked on the family claim near Chicken, Alaska. For research, I touched base with her through Facebook, and we talked about mining. I’d seen her claim from the highway when traveling through. She sent pictures, and the story wrote itself from there. Easiest novel I ever typed.

Book Titles

How do you decide on the title of a book?

Mostly I pick a line from the story. Craig Johnson suggested any title over three words was too long. Who was I to argue with him? In this case, the name was self-evident. The publisher agreed, but the first cover art looked like a romance novel and not a murder mystery, so we resubmitted it to the cover creators and subtitled it Cold Justice on the Last Frontier.

Have you developed a specific writing style and why?

I read somewhere that Stephen King and J.K. Rowling, both suffering from imposter syndrome, tried publishing under pseudonyms, and both were busted by agents or editors who spotted their style. Clearly, they didn’t see their own style. I haven’t worked on a style. It took me forever to grasp the idea of narrative voice. When I started drawing, an art instructor told me I had 300 bad drawings in me, keep drawing until you have most of them out, and then what you do will be mostly good drawings.

Another author said something similar about writing novels: plan to write eight novels you’re sure will sell but don’t. Then you’re getting close. I guess I’m slow – it took me five more attempts. Do I have a style? I can’t identify it, but my editor and beta readers think so. I wonder if Tom Clancy thought he had a style. Clancy books come out several a year, and he’s been dead for decades. Obviously, he had a style, but I doubt it was apparent to him.

How much of your books is realistic and experiences based on someone you know, or events in your life?

When you write what you know, it would be difficult not to draw on experience. But much like AI, we create fiction from everything we know, and we write until we find something we don’t know – like the round-trip time from Anchorage to Fairbanks on the Alaska Railroad in 1961. Then we learn something from research, usually much more than will be in the book, but the information is still there to be used somewhere else.

In a period book occurring in a real location, things like elections, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the 1964 Earthquake have to at least be acknowledged. The first state governor elected in Alaska — it’s hard not to mention if government or politics influences events in the story. Fiction, only to a point.

Who is your favorite writer, and what is it about their work that really strikes you?

I have many favorites. My great-granddaughter would say this or that was her favorite and change her mind when presented with a new option. Out of owing him my love of reading, overcoming dyslexia, and giving me the audacity to believe I could write, Louis L’Amour is my favorite. I might like newer authors better to read, but Louis’s The Quick and the Dead was the first novel I read cover to cover in that cold pickup truck at Sourdough Pipe Yard in the winter of ‘75–‘76. I read everything he wrote that I could get my hands on.

Rereading I found he didn’t rely on gimmicks to write a compelling story. No profanity, no outward graphic sex scenes. Wrote in a memoir that such things looked contrived and took away from the story he wanted to tell. I agree.

First Book

Do you remember the first book you read?

Mrs. Emmons’s first grade class: Fun with Dick and Jane. The first I read for pleasure was 16 years later in that pipe yard.

Is there an author, past or present, you would love to meet? Why?

Louis L’Amour. As made obvious above, the world can hold him responsible for whatever I write. He’s a very strong influence on what I consider to be a good story.

If you could not write, how would you express what you wish to convey through any stories?

I participated in Toastmasters International for more than two decades. Speech writing is a study in short story composition. My lead character Wyatt, in Gold Miner’s Daughter, entertains through reciting poetry. When it is Robert Service or cowboy poetry it is a form of verbal story telling. I would have to perform, and I do by telling war stories to whichever friend or kid takes an interest.

When you see new authors struggling, what single piece of advice could you give them on a moment’s notice?

The same advice Jenny Milchman shared with me: you have at least eight novels to write before someone else believes you’re worth publishing. It might be more or less, but it’s a goal. I also found out that those old stories always had the potential you thought they did before you had the skills to tell the story. Revisiting them with a practiced eye may turn a prospect into a gold mine.

How do you want others to see you or remember you? Is it important to you?

It’s important for me to be remembered as Dad, Gramps, or Great Gramps more than for what I write. When I learned to read for pleasure, I was a blue-collar guy. I didn’t have a white-collar job until after college, and I found I preferred creating and building, so I went back to that work. I see this as I saw contracting. My customers want something. They have an idea of what they want – a murder mystery – but not exactly what they want, or they would write it. I had a customer who wanted a deck on his house. It was a big house, and he was a millionaire. What we came up with incorporated his expectations for his deck.

Most readers who follow Reacher, Longmire, or the Sacketts have an idea what they want to see in a story, but Lee, Craig, and Louis build it for them. I’m a builder – maybe not of skyscrapers with a fancy NYC office, but instead I can build a nice cabin that’s just what my readers want. Each one different, each in a different setting, but always a cabin with what my readers expect to find there, with little surprises. One thing I recognized when Louis L’Amour passed away was that writing a book becomes a form of immortality among readers. Not important to me but a profound concept when I chose to enter into the world of being a published author. Am I worthy?

Do you have a blog or website viewers can visit for updates, events and special offers? Include HTML links to any and all of your sites.

My website – https://ricksteebyauthor.com — has links to blog posts and email newsletters. I don’t like getting inundated by online campaigns, so I don’t send out something every time I get bored, which is way too often.

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rick.steeby