☼ A Place In The Spotlight ☼ with M.C.V. EGAN: Homicide: Party of Twelve by Michael Bronte Genre: Suspense, Thriller

How did you come up with the name of this book?

The common theme throughout all of my books is that the heroes are just everyday people. As such, I thought writing a book about people who work in a restaurant would be an interesting story with characters who have a lot of side interests. We all know of servers who want to be actors or writers, or are working their way through school, etc. The intent was to have characters with a lot of depth that the reader could identify with, and certainly, there are thousands, or maybe millions of people who could identify with working is a restaurant. And certainly, nearly everyone could identify with the words a hostess or maitre d’ announces when a table is ready: “Smith, party of four, right this way.” Thus came the title of the book, except that instead of a person’s name, it’s the crime of murder that’s referenced, and “Party of Twelve” is the number of bodies that fall in during the course of the story. I wanted to use “Party of four,” but the body count just kept increasing!

How long have you been writing?

I’ve been writing for about twenty-five years on and off, and I started writing when I got a job with an advertising agency writing copy for radio commercials. This was before the time when everyone had a computer in their home, and long before email, so my employer gave me a computer to use so we could “telefax” copy back and forth to each other due to the fact that we lived far apart. “Here’s a computer. Learn how to use the word processing program so that we can telefax the radio copy,” were my instructions. So, I asked myself, what do I write in order to learn this word processing program? I decided to write a story about some of my college experiences, and six months later I had written my first book.

What advice would I give to new authors?

The only advice I would give is to be dedicated. Whether you study creative writing or do it as a hobby, you have to have the dedication to learn what makes good writing. That’s a monumental task on its own. Then come the publicizing of the work, which even harder. There are a zillion books out there, and no one will buy or read your work if they don’t know about you. As a writer, if you don’t have the dedication to learn the craft and overcome the difficulty of creating an awareness of you and your work, you’ll be writing only for yourself.

What is your writing process?

For me, it starts with a story idea, which I get from many places: from friends, my kids, the news, daydreaming in church—the story ideas literally come to me out of the blue sometimes. The idea also has to reflect the ending. If I don’t have the ending in mind, I don’t start writing until I do. Otherwise, the writing will directionless, and you have to have direction in order to devise the scene-and-sequel chain of events that make the story coherent. Once I have the ending in mind, I conceive the geographic setting, the characters names (I find that conceiving the names helps me to build the personalities and qualities of the characters), and then finally the plot which is aimed at the end I already have in mind. From there a proceed to write the first scene, and continue with the scene-and-sequel process (if you don’t know what that is, don’t start writing; do your research). Every scene, every sequel, every line of dialogue, every turn of the plot has to come together at the end of the book. It’s like a big funnel where all the action, incidents, and dialogue all come together at the bottom of the funnel at the end with all questions resolved.

Do you believe in writer’s block?

No. I believe in being afraid. I think writers freeze when they don’t have a “perfect” idea in their heads as to how to proceed with a piece of work. I say, “Force yourself. Write something, anything you consider as the best idea at that point in time. Often, ideas will come to you once you overcome the lack of writing inertia, and thought start to flow. If something isn’t right, you can always go back and edit, rewrite, eliminate, or add to what you’ve written to make it work. Unless you force yourself to get some words down, you’re dead meat.

Do you prefer to write in silence or with noise?

For me, it’s relative silence, meaning with no TV blaring, or jackhammers going off outside my window or mindless blithering from the radio or some other source. In addition, I find that I work much better if I’m in my “writing spot” where I have everything in reach: my computer, my thesaurus (online in this day and age), my Chicago Manual of Style, etc. I also find that writing at the same time of day is helpful. Usually, for me, it’s the first thing in the morning. I’m too old to be writing in the middle of the night. I need my beauty sleep.

Homicide: Party of Twelve

by Michael Bronte

Genre: Suspense, Thriller

Homicide: Party of Twelve takes us to Jersey City where the boss of Chez Alain restaurant has just been gunned down in a drive-by shooting. Frankie Fortunato, a hardworking server, moves up to become the new manager. New Jersey State Police Detective, Matt Klimecki, catches the case and leans heavily on the restaurant's employees to help solve it, including Frankie and his girlfriend, Gabby D'Angelo, who also works at Chez Alain. The plot twists and turns as Frankie struggles to please the owners and reopen the restaurant, while also dealing with the opposing forces of gun-running criminals and the authorities who are trying to catch them.

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Michael Bronte is a graduate of Union College in Schenectady, New York, and George Washington University in Washington, D.C., and lives with his wife in New Jersey. "All of the heroes in my novels are everyday people," says Bronte. "Any of them could by your next door neighbor. None of us really know what we're capable of until the time comes for us to reach beyond the boundaries of our everyday lives. Remarkable feats of courage are performed all around us. It's amazing."

As a young teenager I remember reading paperback mysteries under a huge oak tree outside my parents’ neighborhood grocery store in Dalton, Massachusetts, a small town located in the heart of the Berkshires. I can recall pulling a book from the rack and getting locked in to those novels as the fragrant summer breeze of Berkshire County tried to turn the page before I was done reading it. I don’t know why, but I was greatly affected by a book titled The Fan Club, by Irving Wallace. When I was done reading it, I can still recall thinking that someday I’d be able to write a book like that on my own; I knew I could do it.

Well, the idea stayed dormant for over thirty years while I did what I thought I should have been doing for a living (looking back, it all seems so trivial sometimes) until I rekindled by infatuation with writing novels. Now, may years later, and many mistakes and failures later, there are nine Michael Bronte novels available. They are: The Dealership, Presidential Risk, Porchball, Call Me Crash, The Tenth Caller, Lost Friday, The Brothers, The Handyman, and the newest Michael Bronte novel, Homicide: Party of Twelve

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