Jeff Carson is the Amazon-Bestselling author of the David Wolf series, thrillers set in the high country of Colorado, chock-full of action, mystery, thrills, and suspense. With millions of copies sold internationally, he's regularly recommended as suitable for fans of David Baldacci and Daniel Silva. Hi I’m your host Jenny Wheeler and today on the Binge Reading show Jeff Carson talks about how he turned a year-long stay in Italy into a fulltime writing career, and his new series, a big change to David Wolf, featuring Italian woman police officer Ali Flavia, set against the backdrop of Italian culture, ancient walled towns, tourist mayhem and fabulous food and wine. Two Free Book Giveaways We’ve got two book offers this week, and the first books in my two series are on offer. The Thriller and Mystery series Giveaway has Sadie’s Vow, #1 in the Home At Last series on offer. download free books ​https://books.bookfunnel.com/thrillingfreebies-jul/4h2xrdstd8 The Kobo Editor’s Pick’s promotion has the Of Gold & Blood book set - #1 and #4. Kobo Editor's Pick kobo free books selection Visit the following link(s) to see the promotion: ​https://www.kobo.com/p/free-ebooks​! If you live in a country that isn't included in this promotion, you may have trouble accessing the sale link. If this happens, change the flag at the top of the Kobo homepage to one of the included countries to see the sale link properly. This is one of the last shows I’ll be doing for a while on The Joys of Binge Reading. I’m taking a break after two more episodes, but I’ll be posting many of the past interviews on YouTube so if you’ve missed them, you’ll find them there. Links to things mentioned in the show Carabinieri: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carabinieri Disc Golf: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disc_golf MHZ.com: https://www.mhz.com/ Ali Falco: https://www.jeffcarson.co/ali-falco-series What Jeff is reading now: Lincoln Child: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln_Child https://lincolnchild.com Agent Prendergast series: https://www.prestonchild.com/ Douglas Preston: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/12577.Douglas_Preston Marko Kloos: https://www.markokloos.com/ Where to find Jeff online Website: www.jeffcarson.co Or his Amazon books site:  https://www.amazon.com/Books-Jeff-Carson/s?rh=n%3A283155%2Cp_27%3AJeff+Carson Introducing Jeff Carson, thriller author Jeff Carson - thriller author of David Wolf Colorado Mountain series But now, here’s Jeff. Hello there Jeff and welcome to the show, it’s great to have you with us. It's great to have you with us. Jeff Carson: Nice to be here. Thanks for having me. Jenny Wheeler: You are somewhere in Colorado and I'm in Auckland, so that's a good long reach between us. You've got this Amazon hit on your hands. It's obviously not a surprise because you've written 17 in the series now. David Wolfe, a small-town, Colorado mountain sheriff. Tell us about David. How did he come to life for you? Jeff Carson: Yes, you've got that right. He is a small-town Colorado Sheriff. My wife is from Italy. I guess it was like 2012, 2011? We were visiting Italy for a year because we had a son, and my wife wanted to go to Italy and be with our young son there and to be with her mom and dad and get some support with the young son and stuff. And I was at a crossroads in my professional life. I did not like what I was doing and I got this idea that I was going to start writing fiction. Long story short, I got looking into these self-published authors and all, I was just like, I didn't even understand that existed until when we got to Italy. And then I realized in the drop of a hat. I'm going to be a fiction writer. My wife was nice enough to not disown me or leave me after that. But I decided to start writing books. I'm in Italy, in this country where I don't know, in the area, nobody speaks English whatsoever, and I didn't really speak Italian that well. A brain storm in Italy I felt very isolated, but I just got this idea to start writing. I knew you're supposed to write about what you know, and I knew Colorado and I knew that I missed Colorado. That was the first thing that came up into my mind of the guy. It was actually the second idea I had, but whatever the first that stuck was like having a cop in the mountains of Colorado. I missed the mountains of Colorado. I decided to make this series about the mountains of Colorado, about this cop. So that's how it came about. Jenny Wheeler: On your website you have got quite a funny blog post about that experience and you describe it as “firing first, aiming later.”  How much research did you do before you started out? You are compared with people like David Baldacci and Michael Crichton, real top of the line popular fiction authors who were very much in the mainstream. Did you aim to settle yourself there right from the beginning? Jeff Carson: Yeah. I was so like rock bottom with what I was trying that I was just like, ‘what the hell?’ Why would I not try to be just the best I could? I loved all those authors I. was reading them at that time. And I wanted to be precisely like them, make my covers like them and make my books just as compelling as theirs were. I read a bunch how to write fiction books. Just devouring them, like one per day because I was in such a hurry to make this thing work. I knew it wouldn't. probably work for years, but I had definitely a fire lit under me. I learned the basics of what it takes to write fiction, or, maybe not the basics, but how complex it is. And then after I read like three of those books, I was like, ‘Okay. Come on. They're saying the same things. I'm gonna have to try it now.’ Cliffhanger endings - a No No!! I made every mistake under the sun at first; my first book had a cliffhanger ending. It pretty much ended in mid-sentence, so you would buy the second book, because I knew I was going to write a series. And that was the business plan also, as well as just the fiction plan, the story, arc plan. There was no aiming for the first couple books. It was just try to make a great, and then I had to go back and rewrite everything, knowing that if I was going to keep doing this, nobody's going to read the first book and continue on reading the other books. It doesn't matter how many books I write, if that first one could really turn some people off.  I had to go back and really hone those first couple books. Jenny Wheeler: I think cliff hangers are interesting because I think some people still believe that they're really necessary. You've decided perhaps that they're not the best way to go. Jeff Carson: No, there're actively terrible ways to go if someone's thinking about it. There’s a certain nuance to it. If you're going to leave certain storylines unresolved, the main storyline better be super resolved.  Sub storylines? I have kept them unresolved just because wolf is constantly growing as a person. His love life, his family life, his professional life. But as far as if there's a murder, the murder's got to be solved by the end of the book. If you're going to throw a ball up in the beginning of the book, it's got to be caught and dealt with by the end of the book. People get very angry, if you don’t. Jeff Carson learned from his mistakes Jenny Wheeler: Did you have readers who gave you that sort of feedback at the beginning? Jeff Carson: Yes. I was getting one star reviews right off the bat and they were saying like, ‘I'll never read anything he writes ever again. I don't care how much I like the story,’  I'm like, wait a minute. That's okay. That's some anger right there. But yet they liked the story like, oh no, what? What did I do? And then I realized, yeah, you can't do that. Jenny Wheeler: It's interesting that you mention about the development of family because the other thing about doing series, especially if you have a child in it, is that it's hard to fudge the timeframe, the timeline thing. And you do have David having a son who's 12, I think, when series begins. I haven't read right through the whole thing, but I did wonder how you've managed to let his son develop in a realistic way, but also keep a kind of father son relationship going. Did you find out a bit of a challenge and where are we up to with the son now? Jeff Carson: Oh yeah, it's super difficult. Because I didn't want every book to just be the next day, all of a sudden another crime happens. It's like just the murder capital of the world, the middle of the mountains, in Colorado, So there's time lapse in between each book, at least usually seven months, nine months, a year. And then possibly even a more between a couple books. So now his son in one of the books is having his own son. Wolf’s son was freaking out about that and Wolf had to help him through that. And it's tough yet to how to gauge the speed at which you're going to go through this timeline of their lives, because precisely what age is Wolf? Even I still don't know.  I don't want to admit it, but I don't even know. He's probably early fifties, mid-fifties or something, and every new book, you have to gauge I and think, okay, what's going on here? Where is everybody? What are their ages? What are their kids' ages? I actually had a reader help me go through all my books and give me the names of all the characters and what their relative relations are and when they showed up and, because it's really a big deal, Jenny Wheeler: Amazing. That is what they call, a Series Bible. And I was going to ask you if you had one of those. It's often helpful not to be too specific about those things, isn't it? Because then a few books up the track, you find yourself trapped. You can't have somebody being, oh, suddenly they're 23 when two or three books ago, they were 22.