Welcome to BookView Interview, a conversation series where BookView talks to authors.
Recently, we interviewed Craig Allen Heath about his writing and his recently released novel, Where You Will Die: A Novel, a potent, atmospheric, and wholly satisfying mystery. (Read the review here.)
Craig Allen Heath decided he wanted to be a novelist at age fourteen. He achieved that goal fifty years later by publishing his first novel, Where You Will Die, in 2022.
In those five decades he wrote hundreds of poems, songs, stories, essays, articles, plays, and scripts. The published portion of that catalog earned him the equivalent of a long weekend’s lodging at a Comfort Inn somewhere along Interstate 5 in California’s Central Valley.
He made his living during that time as a journalist, technical writer, and pen-for-hire. This portion of his output kept body and soul together, making him a decent prospect to marry, raise a son, see a bit of the world, and have enough left over to buy that comfy recliner his teenaged self never thought he’d want.
He lives in southwest Washington state with his wife, Pat, too much lawn to mow, a vegetable garden, and a mischievous pair of doggos, shepherd Lobo and husky Aura, whose antics earn them the nicknames Thing 1 and Thing 2.
Craig is now working on Killing Buddhas, the sequel to his first story about Alan Wright in Eden Ridge. Ideas for other books form a lengthy list. He hopes for enough eyesight and breath to write the good ones.
Q: Tell us a little about how this story first came to be.
A: The main character, Alan Wright, is me if I was a better man. I modeled him after myself in every way except that he has the guts to take his spiritual and ethical beliefs into the real world, instead of just talking or writing about them. Like me, he worked for decades in the technology field, but then started his second career as a self-proclaimed, somewhat unorthodox minister. But he’s not just a talking head on YouTube or a podcaster. He ministers to people directly – feeding the hungry and sheltering the homeless, visiting the sick and the prisoner – something I am too cowardly to do. So, I thought if I could make him into a fictional protagonist, I could somehow live that life vicariously.
I developed Alan and several other characters, then modeled the setting – Eden Ridge – after Paradise California, where my wife and I lived the first 21 years of our marriage. When it came time for a plot, I decided that a good old fashioned murder mystery would get the ball rolling. I then just let the characters and the situations lead me into the story, using the method called “pantsing”.
Q: Writing “by the seat of your pants”, as you said, means you write not knowing the story ahead of time. How long did it take you to find the story and finish the book?
A: I started in September 2017 and published it in September of 2022, so five years of elapsed time. I estimate I spent three-plus of those years actively working on it. In November 2018 I was sending an early draft to friends and family for beta reading when the Paradise Camp Fire took the lives of 84 of our neighbors, took our home and thousands of others, and basically destroyed the town. So, 2019 was difficult for us as we relocated, and I didn’t get much done. Then I spent a couple of years rewriting it to appeal to agents but got no takers. It was good I had that difficulty because it took that whole time for the story to mature. Then I found an excellent developmental editor who helped me do the hard work of making it whole. I was making changes to key parts of the book up until three months before it launched.
Q: How does your faith life/ethical outlook inform your writing?
A: My outlook on life is the core of my stories. I said that Alan Wright is a minister, but he’s a self-proclaimed, unorthodox one not affiliated with any church. He builds a spiritual center in Eden Ridge called The House of the Universal Message and professes what’s commonly known as “The Perennial Philosophy”. This is the core of all spiritual traditions throughout history – that we and the world are one and that it is our mistaken ideas that separate us from each other, from nature, and from God. Like me, he was raised Catholic, so he has a basic Christian grounding but his only nod to that faith is what the man called Jesus reportedly said and did – be kind, help others, love all of creation and recognize that you and all the world are one. Through Alan, I get a chance to live that philosophy in action.
Q: What do you hope readers will take away from this story?
A: I would wish it to give people the idea that they are okay in themselves, do not suffer from original sin or an evil human nature, and belong in the world just as any natural creature. Alan is the embodiment of the man I would like to be, but he’s no saint or stoic hero. He has deeply troubling issues with his mind and heart and deep doubt as to the rightness of his beliefs. But he soldiers on and does the best he can to help people and deliver his main message. He says it best: “In a nutshell, we come from the world not into it. We are expressions of the world the way leaves are expressions of a tree. We belong in the universe as much as a star or a starfish. We’re all the same, we’re all connected, and the only divisions between ourselves and others, ourselves and the world, ourselves and God, are the fictions we create in our minds.”
Q: Do you try more to be original or to deliver to readers what they want?
A: I started out writing the story as I discovered it, without any conscious effort to “be original”. When I started sending it out to agents, I tried to hammer the story into a specific genre/subgenre (cozy mystery) but failed. No agent wanted the story I had because it didn’t fit a specific niche. I could have changed it enough, I suppose, but I didn’t want to. I would have lost too much of what the story was to succeed at traditional publishing. When I gave up that goal, I consciously set out to just write my story, the only story I could tell. I’m not trying to be original. I’m just trying to tell the story I have in me and write it such that others want to read it.
Q: What’s next for you?
A: I am working with my editor on a late draft of the sequel, Killing Buddhas. It’s the next story of Alan Wright in Eden Ridge, about eight months after the events in Where You Will Die. After doing all the work to develop the characters and setting, I was able to focus a bit more on the plot of this one up front. But I’ve found that this story is also leading me more than I am leading it. I started it in 2019 and lost track of it for over two years, but now I’m hoping to have it ready to publish this fall. I have lots of ideas for the series, and hope to nail down at least seven stories before I can’t write any more. I published my first book at age 64, after five years working on it. I either need to speed up my production or lower my expectations for how many I will write. Time is fleeting.
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