Featured Interview With Mitch Aigner
Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
I was raised in Madison, Wisconsin, and after too many freezing winters and mosquito bites, moved to the Pacific Northwest. As an Electronics Design Engineer, moving to the “Silicon Forest” seemed the right move, and it worked for a while. But now, unemployed and caught in this latest Recession, with so many technology jobs getting shipped to China, I’m thinking that maybe I should have just learned how to drive a bulldozer and work on a state road crew, as they can’t out-source that off-shore. As an Engineer, I always did like bulldozers and similar toys. But I would still live out here in the northwest. It’s very pretty.
At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
A Computer Game junkie from way back, I started writing free on-line Game Guides for a variety of games. If you type my name into Google, many of the hits will be for those old guides. I still write a guide for a game these days called World of Warcraft.
My first real adventure in writing came when my son came back home for a visit after two years in Business School and had no idea what a Stock, Bond, Mutual Fund, or 401K was. His Mom still did his taxes every year. I decided to give him a few lessons, and started writing a brief short course in investing, and how the markets work, for his next visit. By the time I finished, I realized that I almost had a book, and that there were a lot of other youngsters out there about to hit the job market with no idea what a 401K or Roth IRA was. So I re-packaged the course and finished it off into a complete book. I then sent query letters to about a hundred different publishers and a few dozen different agents. What followed was a long and painful exercise in rejection. Fortunately, E-Books were invented, and I finally was able to publish it myself on Amazon. If you don’t have a Retirement plan going yet, you should read it. Short, simple, no long words.
Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
My favorite genres are Fantasy (Lord of the Rings, Dragonlance series), Action/Adventure ( I always liked Robert Ludlum, Clive Cussler, and Tom Clancy), and Science Fiction (was always an Isaac Asimov fan).
Tell us a little about your latest book?
My first novel, it’s a roller coaster ride, like my favorite Action/Adventure books, mixed with a bit of The Hunger Games, in that most of the hero’s are kids. Very unusual kids. That’s all I’m going to say about it. You can read the first few chapters on Amazon, but to meet the kids you have to buy the book 🙂
I hammered most of it out in about two months, then got a bit of writer’s block for another two months. It turned out that the solution was to go back to the beginning and start the editing process, which takes a lot longer than people think. In re-reading the whole thing several times, from start to finish, looking for errors (there were lots), I found new ideas to fill in the holes to finish it.
The other problem I had was that some of my proofreaders complained that it was a little short as novels go, and that I should add some “filler”. I couldn’t think of any “filler” that would add much to the story. I finally realized that the filler I didn’t want to write, the readers really wouldn’t want to read either, and besides, a roller-coaster ride is supposed to be fast-paced. The solution was to just state right up front that it’s a short novel. No additives or preservatives.
Marketing blurb:….
A short Novel
Category: Action/Adventure
Ted Kingston had worked for the CIA for almost twenty years, and was not very happy about it. Returning from a particularly unpleasant mission overseas and ordered to take a long vacation by his sympathetic boss, he accidentally witnesses an event that would eventually lead him to an ancient file that the CIA would prefer nobody ever opened. A very dangerous file. A file about a top-secret project that began in World War II, as the unstoppable Nazi war machine was rolling across Europe, and the Japanese bombs were falling on Pearl Harbor, and America was desperate. Very desperate. Desperate enough to….