Tell me a little bit about yourself, O. Stefan. What
do you do for a living? What part of the world do you live in? How long have
you been writing? That sort of thing.
I live in Sydney, Australia
and I've been writing on and off for the past 10 years.
Tell me a little about The Deadly Caress.
The Deadly
Caress is a fast-paced story set in California.
Suspenseful and thrilling, it is holds a mystery that Amanda Blake, a freelance
photographer, must unravel.
Amanda tracks down her birth mother, the multi millionaire Jean Campbell. Hours
after her arrival, Jean is murdered.
Amanda sets out to discover her mother’s killer. Her quest takes to Australia to
find the man she thinks holds the answer to the killer’s identity. While
visiting this man, she has to run for her life under a hail of bullets. Someone
will stop at nothing until she is dead. If she thought things were bad enough,
they are about to get much worse.
What was the genesis of that work?
It's what
captured my attention at one time from a newspaper article and it started me
thinking...what if a person was to discover that the woman she thought was her
mother wasn't. How would she feel? What if this mother was murdered? What would
this person do?
Then there's a scary scene with Amanda driving down a mountainside and that
comes from my memory banks. I grew up across the road from a very bad
intersection and every weekend there would be at least one horrific accident.
Some of these were youths speeding and chasing each other. Drunks and careless
or not drivers who had miscalculated the sharp turn and careened into an
oncoming car or the nearby light post. My dad would run over to see if an
ambulance was needed, as we were the only family in the street to have a phone.
He'd take blankets over if the person/people was badly injured and I would help
him. My sister and my mother would be too upset to be of help and didn't go.
I find my characters everywhere and nowhere.
I was intrigued by how you go from the female
protagonist's viewpoint to the creeper's viewpoint. Can you tell us something
about the process you follow to accomplish that?
I did get
upset when I had to put Amanda in difficult situations, as I’d grown fond of
her. I find writing about the evil people easier than writing about someone
who’s good because it’s harder to make the honest person shine but it does make
you grow as a writer.
Did this project take a lot of research?
The Deadly
Caress took a fair amount of research into police procedures and the prison
system. I emailed a detective in Monterey
who was very helpful. And for what it was like inside the prison system in the
US, I did all my research online by reading blogs from prisoners, to online
diagrams of layouts inside and articles posted online from newspapers.
What are your plans for the book in the near future?
I self published
“The Deadly Caress” early this year. Currently, I’m working on polishing my
next thriller “Lurking in the Shadows” which is scheduled for release in the
latter part of this year.
Your art work is striking. Who did the cover for you?
I found a
graphic designer on fiverr.com to design the cover for me. I’d researched the
covers I liked so that made it easier for the designer.
