When Gaylon Greer was 15, he hopped a freight train to Anna, Illinois to pick peaches. "The county fair was in full swing there, and I hated peach-picking," the ITW debut author says. "I signed on as a shill for one of the midway games." Of course, Greer always won, and onlookers were tempted by his success to try their luck. It worked.
A year later, as a big and muscular 16-year-old, he began working with the carnival's athletic show. "The inside man--the heel, or heavy--would challenge locals to wrestle. My job as the baby-face was to mingle with the crowd and accept the challenge to defend the town's honor by battling the bad guy."
This was only the beginning to Greer's remarkable life, and it provided plenty of fodder for his creative muse. The migrant farm worker and carnival shill became a member of the Air Force's Air Sea Rescue Service, where Greer earned two graduate degrees. Later, he added a Ph.D. in economics and eventually served as a university professor before publishing several books on investing and personal financial planning.
But Greer had always wanted to write fiction, and a 2002 New York Times article on a new government policy only for illegal immigrants from Haiti provided the spark for him to sit down and pen his first full-throttle thriller.
"I thought, why a special policy for Haiti?" Greer says. "It appeared to be aimed at the 95% of Haitians who were descended from slaves and mostly lived in abject poverty. I asked myself, what if a member of Haiti's "small white minority"--who are generally much better off economically--was forced to flee for political reasons and got caught in the blanket Justice Department policy? In America with no relatives or friends to fall back on, cut off from their Haitian resources and afraid to contact American authorities because of the draconian policy applicable only to Haitians, such a person would become prey for knowledgeable degenerates and would be forced to rely solely on his or her own cunning to survive."
The Price of Sanctuary stars Shelby Cervosier, daughter of a wealthy mixed-race Haitian businessman. "A former professor in Haiti, Shelby has lived a life of privilege," Greer says. "Adrift in the dark underworld of illegal immigrants in America and hunted by contract killers, she must rely on her wits to protect herself and a seven-year-old sister."
Accused of killing an American Immigration agent, Shelby has undertaken a mission on behalf of a secretive American espionage agency in exchange for a promise of legal amnesty and political asylum. Now, however, the agent who coerced her into accepting the assignment wants her dead to cover up the bungled mission. Two hit men compete for the bounty that has been placed on her head, and the novel gathers speed to a thrilling final showdown.
Greer calls writing fiction more "challenging" than his non fiction work. "Textbooks and 'how-to' books require knowledge of the subject and a craftsman's command of writing; fiction is an art form. And because it is an art, writing fiction is more engrossing. The challenge of using words to stimulate emotional responses in readers pulls me out of bed to work at sometimes ungodly hours."
Greer tries to write five days each week, setting a minimum number of words or a minimum time for editing and rewriting. "Mornings are my favorite time; the earlier the better. When I'm engrossed in a new manuscript, it isn't unusual for me to perk coffee and fire up the word processor between two and three a.m. I prefer to use a word processor, because my thoughts get so far ahead of a pen or pencil that I lose track of where I'm going." Greer works with a bubble chart with connecting lines, showing the sequence and thrust of each planned scene. Even that, he says, is often abandoned in the heat of writing.
Greer isn't wasting any time pushing forward with new projects. He has recently finished a sequel to The Price of Sanctuary and is shopping it around with publishers. "Meanwhile, I'm working on a novel set in the business world--trying to get some mileage out of my prior life as a business school professor."
Nate Kenyon is a two-time Bram Stoker Award finalist, P&E Horror Novel of the Year Award winner, and author of BLOODSTONE and THE REACH. He has a trade paperback science fiction novella, PRIME, coming in July 2009. Kenyon lives in the Boston area, where he is at work on his next novel.
