This whole bizarre story about the death of Robert Hansen, the Alaskan serial killer, just keeps getting stranger and stranger. My collaborator on RESURRECTION BAY and the guy who came up with the story to begin with, Wayne McDaniel, sent me this the other day:
Robert Hansen’s in the news more now that he’s dead than when he was alive. Does this make him the Elvis of serial killers?
Dennis Ferrier, one of the lead reporters of our local NBC affiliate, WSMV-TV, came to my home office and interviewed me on September 1st about the death of Alaskan serial killer Robert Hansen. This whole creepy coincidence–where Robert Hansen died in a hospital prison ward the same day Wayne McDaniel and I met for the first time–is continuing to resonate with readers all over.
Yesterday, I was interviewed by a Kim Vangkilde, a reporter from the Danish newspaper Ekstra Badet. It seems Hansen is of Danish descent, and readers there are fascinated by this whole weird story…
If you’d like to see the interview with Dennis, you can find it at:
http://www.wsmv.com/story/26420906/nashville-mystery-writer-completes-book-on-serial-killer
Brad Schmitt’s article on Resurrection Bay hit the front page of the Tennessean today. Check it out:
A few weeks ago, I was asked to write a blog post for the Killer Nashville and I chose to write about my experiences collaborating with Wayne McDaniel on Resurrection Bay. I had a lot of fun with it and I’m especially grateful for Clay Stafford’s kind words about my work. I’m a fan of his, too…
To check out the blog post, go to the Killer Nashville blog:
Take a look at the fabulous Killer Nashville site as well. This is a wonderful conference, one of the best of the year:
Wow, what a great night at Parnassus Books. The signing last night went really well. A good crowd, lots of good questions, and the chance to catch up with some friends I haven’t seen in awhile. I’m grateful to all the folks at Parnassus for hosting the event. It’s a marvelous bookstore and I encourage everyone to spend their money there!
As for catching up with a few buddies, here are a couple:
Tomorrow, June 17th, is my first signing for RESURRECTION BAY. It will be held at Parnassus Books in Nashville at 6:30 p.m. We’ll also have copies of BY BLOOD WRITTEN for sale as well. I look forward to seeing friends, family, colleagues, supporters and anyone else who wants to come and support independent bookselling!
Here’s a link to the event:
http://www.parnassusbooks.net/event/author-event-steven-womack-author-resurrection-bay
I admit it: I’ve been in a long dry spell the past few years. From time to time, it happens in a writer’s life. About all you can do is put on your big boy panties and soldier on through it.
So when my former agent and friend Nancy Yost sent me an email on May 12, 2011 and told me about an acquaintance of hers who was looking for a collaborator, I was open to talking about it. She hooked me up with Wayne McDaniel, a writer who lives on the west side in upper Manhattan, a few miles north of my old apartment in Chelsea.
Wayne and I began talking and emailing. He had a spec script he’d written that was based on the life of Alaska’s most famous serial killer, a twisted little eff-stick named Robert Hansen.
This guy was a genuine piece of work. He was a baker in Anchorage with a wife and kids. He was a deacon in the church. Every summer he’d put his wife and kids on a plane to the Lower 48, then he’d go kidnap a woman, fly her (in his illegally piloted Piper Cub) to a secluded spot in the wilderness, then turn her loose in the woods and literally hunt her like wild game (this is the sanitized version; the reality was much worse).
The script had been optioned, Wayne told me, but as so often happens, it had wallowed in the black hole of development hell until it was dead. His agent advised him to write a novelization of the script, sell the book, and thereby get the script back into play.
It was a good strategy, but Wayne was struggling with the novel and wanted to take on a collaborator.
We talked, made nice. I read the script; it was dynamite. I read what he had of the novel; I wanted to get involved.
So we played Let’s Make A Deal and went to work.
Some writers are wary of collaborations, but let me tell you, when they work, it’s magic. And that’s the way it was for us. This was, simply, the most successful collaboration and partnership I’ve ever had. Wayne and I have become close friends as well as literary partners and we’re seriously thinking about a second book.
And almost precisely three years after we first talked and emailed, the end result is nearly here. Resurrection Bay will be published on June 8, 2014 by Midnight Ink. Here’s the link to the book on Amazon.com, where you can pre-order it:
It’s a hell of a book, if I do say so myself. I hope you’ll take a look and I hope you enjoy it.
Want to know the really weird part? Wayne and I have never met. Never even been in the same room together…
More about that, and the whole collaboration process, later.