Recently, I sat down with debut author Ronie Kendig to talk about her novel, Dead Reckoning.
I'm very intrigued by the idea of a CIA father's history and reputation touching his grown-up daughter's life as it does in Dead Reckoning. I'd love to hear more about your character, Shiloh Blake and her journey for independence.
Shiloh's story was actually borne out of two previous novels, one that we (my agent Steve Laube and I) tried to sell and one that I skipped to write Dead Reckoning. After having been snatched and experimented on, Shiloh is rescued by her parents, and that's when the real turmoil begins. Her "seizures" in the book are the product of those experiments, and then, as an older child, watching her mother murdered in front of her own eyes are the source of Shiloh's intense hatred of her father. As a teen, she and her father grew further apart, until she finally races off to college just to get away from him. She opts to major in underwater archeology because of her mother's love for the ocean, and because it will take her far away from her father and make her unreachable--and unable to be spied upon by her father's minions. She believes she's been successful in this, but in reality, her father has kept close tabs on her, allowing her to think she's finally won her independence.
The CIA is utterly synonymous with spy thrillers. Yet you captured the tone and pacing of a spy thriller while keeping the plot largely focused on Shiloh's own career and life versus that of her father and his esteemed CIA background. Did you find this a difficult balance to capture?
Thank you! Fortunately, no, it wasn't hard to capture for me. I really wanted Dead Reckoning to be about Shiloh, not her parents. I had Shiloh's father clearly established in my head since I'd already written his story, and this freed me to write Shiloh's story. Yet, his career, his mistakes, his good-but-culpable intentions had undeniable effects on Shiloh, so I had to show that. Her hatred of him and "what he did to their family" is a key part of Shiloh's arc.
Speaking of balance, as a Christian writer did you find capturing the gritty details of a spy thriller a more difficult task?
Life is gritty, whether you're a Christian or not. Being a Christian doesn't make me immune to the world's problems. As a matter of fact, I consider it my mission to reach out to those who are hurting, so writing this raw, vulnerable story (and others like my military series) demands that I be authentic in what I write. The difference comes in where I focus--on the heart, on what matters most, not on the blood, guts, and gore. Now, I know I'll get flak from some who think my stories are too raw, but that just tells me those readers aren't my audience. My upcoming military series shows the ugly side of what our soldiers/heroes go through, and I know some won't like reading such vulnerability and 'violence," but again, then that means my stories aren't for them.
Debra Webb wrote her first story at age nine and her first romance at thirteen. It wasn't until she spent three years working for the military behind the Iron Curtain and within the confining political Walls of Berlin, Germany, that she realized her true calling. A five-year stint with NASA on the Space Shuttle Program reinforced her love of the endless possibilities within her grasp as a storyteller. A collision course between suspense and romance was set. Debra has been writing romantic suspense and action packed romantic thrillers since.
