Author Spotlight: Meet Mystery Writer Christopher Null

Congratulations, Kari N! You are the winner of an autographed copy of Christopher’s novel Cul-de-sac! He will be in touch with you! Thank to you and everyone who stopped by to meet Christopher! 

I’m excited to welcome fellow Tule author Christopher Null to the Author Spotlight today. I love great mysteries and thrillers and Christopher has just released a new one. He’s here to tell us about and he has a giveaway!

Christopher Null is an award-winning writer and journalist who regularly contributes to Wired magazine, and who muses daily about wine and spirits on the website Drinkhacker, where he serves as editor in chief. His first novel, Half Mast, was hailed by critics as “the best of contemporary American fiction.” Chris has been featured in dozens of publications and programs, including Wired magazine, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, ESPN, Folio, and National Public Radio’s All Things Considered. He received a BBA and an MBA from The University of Texas at Austin in 1993 and 1996, respectively. Christopher currently lives in Austin, Texas with his wife Susanne.

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N: Welcome to the blog, Christopher. I’m so pleased to have you with me today. So, what inspired you to start writing?
A: So excited to be here and to share with you and your readers, Nan.
I have been writing for as long as I can remember, but it really got started in fourth grade, when I won a local poetry competition and they published my poem in a wall calendar. (It was four lines long.) My mother framed that page and it was on the wall for my entire adolescence, taunting me to keep writing, which I did.
I was in the literary club in high school, wrote for my college newspaper, and wrote as a freelance journalist for various publications until I moved from Texas to California in 1997. There, I quickly got a job at a technology magazine and from that point on, I’ve been a career writer in one form or another.

N: Writing has been your life for a very long time—you have been featured in many publications, including Wired magazine, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. You’ve also written two novels and a couple of nonfiction books. Today, we’re going to talk about your latest novel, The Cul-de-sac, which released February 10 from Tule Publishing. What is the most surprising thing you discovered about yourself while writing The Cul-de-sac?
A: Writing The Cul-de-sac made me emotional at times. I think it marks the first time I’ve killed off characters in a story that I genuinely liked. When a character would die in the book, I’d have to process it almost like a real death in the family. I’ve heard from some early readers that were upset about certain plot developments in the book in much the same way. But that’s how it goes in the world of suspense. (I had another reader tell me there weren’t enough murders, so I guess there’s no pleasing everyone.)

N: What is your “day job” and what do you bring to your stories from it?
A: After working on staff at magazines and the web (at Yahoo!) for many years, I am now fortunate enough to make my own hours, and I still write for a number of publications, including Wired, PC World, AAA’s Via Magazine, and Distiller. I also provide content services to corporate clients, mainly big technology companies who don’t have in-house writing staff (or just need some help with creative work).
I’m not sure I get a lot of ideas for my fictional writing from this kind of work, though I did write one story set in the high-stakes business world. Maybe it’s a world I’ll revisit in fiction somewhere down the line.

N: How did you balance suspense with character development in The Cul-de-sac?
A: I’m hardly an expert in this, but my goal has always been to try to build suspense and characters together. The Cul-de-sac made that easier because each chapter shifts the point of view to a different character, about eight in total. That way we get to see the inner workings of each character’s mind rather than just one narrator, and the reader can be let in on their secrets and their fears, bit by bit.

N: The Cul-de-sac is set in the suburbs as is much of your other work. Why are the suburbs an ongoing theme for you?
A: I grew up in the suburbs and, like most of us, moved back to them after I had children of my own. While today I love the peace of the suburbs compared to the constant assault of living in a city – I lived in San Francisco for about 15 years – but there is something that is so isolating about the ‘burbs that it has always struck me as haunting and full of dread. I remember riding my bike around the neighborhood as a kid, looking at all the houses with their curtains drawn, wondering what is going on behind those windows. It was always so quiet and stifling. Like most kids, I was desperate to get out of there as soon as I could.
The suburb I lived in in northern California, after moving out of SF, was particularly remote, which directly inspired The Cul-de-sac. I’m writing a little piece about it for the Tule blog now.

N: What was the most challenging aspect of writing a serial killer mystery? Motivation? Developing the killer’s character and the victim’s character? Creating a chilling atmosphere? How did you overcome those hurdles?
A: It’s no spoiler to tell you that the killer is revealed on page one. I like how one early reviewer put it: “The story is not a question of who the killer is, but who the victim is.” I like to twist things up and go against expectations, and readers who only enjoy straight genre books with tidy endings aren’t like it. I don’t think I’ve ever written anything where any of the main characters wind up happy (if they’re even alive).
In my first book, Half Mast, the murder is revealed by the narrator on page one. The rest of the book is about why and how it happened, and what the impact of that killing ultimately had on the narrator’s life. (Spoiler: Nothing good!)
So with that in mind, the most challenging part of writing The Cul-de-sac was ensuring I was raising the stakes with every chapter and creating new mysteries and thrills along the way. I spend a lot of time outlining and working (and reworking) through the plot, but the truth is that all my best ideas come to me while I’m lying in bed, unable to sleep. I also have to give major credit to my editor at Tuli, Julie Sturgeon, for helping me refine things after she dug into the draft. She’s been a huge champion for the book.

N: How do you balance journalism and other writing projects with novel writing?
A: I don’t, not very well. My day job can easily consume the full workday with writing and editing, and despite my best intentions I can find 5 o’clock arriving without ever having opened the file for my next novel. After a full day of writing on other projects, I often just feel too drained to be creative and write even more, but sometimes I have to kind of force myself to work on the book anyway. And I often find that once I do get back into the groove, the prose flows well. It’s just hard to get things going.
I wrote my last two novels almost entirely on the weekends, when I felt fresher and less stressed. Unfortunately that makes for really slow going. I think I spent two years working on The Cul-de-sac before turning it in.

N: And now for a few sort of personal questions because readers love to know more about us beyond our writing life: What do you like to do when you are not writing?
A: My biggest hobby is also a bit of a side hustle – I run a popular website called Drinkhacker where I write about wine and spirits and have a team of another half-dozen writers who contribute their own reviews. I’m a big wine and whiskey nerd, so it’s a fun way to combine my love of these beverages and my love of writing. (Of course, that means even less downtime from writing…)
I’m also a huge movie fan – and was a film critic for nearly 20 years; yes, more writing – and I love to cook and eat great things. My wife is also a huge foodie, and we are constantly on the hunt for great restaurants near and far.
We also travel extensively, all over the world. Our next trip is to Korea in the spring. Most of our itinerary is built around finding the best things to eat.

N: If you could tell your younger writing self anything, what would it be?
A: Not everyone is going to like your stories, and that’s OK. Not everyone is going to agree with your plot decisions, and that’s OK, too. It is going to be much more difficult to get published than you think it will be – and it’s going to take a huge amount of practice before you get anywhere. So don’t quit.

N: What did you want to be when you grew up?
A: A filmmaker. Back in the ‘80s, my friends, my brother, and I made home movies on a Polarvision camera and charged people in the neighborhood 25 cents to watch them. Polarvision was Polaroid’s ill-fated video product: The tapes were three minutes long and were self-developing. You couldn’t edit them once you recorded something, and there was no audio. You just had to figure it out as you went, scene by scene, and if you messed up it was too bad. Somehow we always convinced enough people to watch our movies to earn enough money to buy another tape, which cost about $10. Then we’d make another movie.
In later years I tried my hand at screenwriting and had an agent in Hollywood, and I even got to pitch some scripts to studios, and while I got close, nothing ever sold. I did however make (and star in) a short film called Pressurecooker that played the festival circuit in the late ‘90s.
I think The Cul-de-sac would make for an amazing mini-series.

N: Favorite book when you were a kid?
A: I read a lot of fantasy in my early teens, but discovering Kurt Vonnegut was what really got me interested in reading and writing. Slaughterhouse-Five is still my favorite book ever.

N: Are you working on anything at the present you would like to tell our readers about?
A: I’m working on a new psychological thriller I’m calling American Anarchist. In the book, a rising political star faces an investigation – and his own demons – when his long-buried criminal history as a teenager comes to light many decades later, spurring him to take increasingly desperate measures to keep the past in the past.
It also takes place in the suburbs.

N: Finally, my favorite question to ask my guests: If you could choose three people, living or dead, real or fictional to invite to a dinner party, who would they be and why?
A: Cleopatra, Rasputin, and Jesus. Why? I just think we’d have a lot to talk about, don’t you?
We’re going to need one hell of a translator, though.

N: I’d love to be a fly on the wall at the dinner! So glad for a chance to chat with you, Christopher. I hope you’ll come back again soon!
A: Thanks so much for having me, Nan.

GIVEAWAY! As a parting gift, I’d love to offer one of your readers an autographed copy of The Cul-de-sac. To win, just drop a comment below telling me what your favorite or least favorite thing was about the street you grew up on. We’ll pick a winner at random and send out a copy of the book!

The Cul de sac

How well do you really know your neighbors?

Veteran serial killer Klaus Fischer is determined that his most recent murder will be his last, but like many retirements, this one isn’t sticking. No one has come close to suspecting he’s buried the victims on his quiet suburban California cul-de-sac property—but he’s feeling the urge to kill again, and this time he’s set his sights on a target dangerously close to home.

Widowed Peg Jurgensen has lived on the cul-de-sac for the past fifteen years, and she’s ready to shed her doldrums and re-enter the world around her. And where better to start than with mothering the curious young teen Eliza van Damal, whose family just moved to the cul-de-sac in order to expose their daughter to a better life.

Eliza, however, prefers to coerce the enigmatic hermit next door, Alex, into helping her pass math. Alex wishes the lot of them would disappear.

The closer these misfits become, the more danger even the most ordinary conversations invite. As the body count rises, can these residents trust anyone hiding behind their doors on this street?

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