Allan Leverone: Final Vector

This contest is closed. The winner is:

Linda Kish.

For the first time, Number One Novels is featuring a contest for an eBook! One electronic copy of Final Vector is available in this week's contest.



Title: Final Vector

Author: Allan Leverone
Publisher: Medallion Press
eBook: 340 pages
eBook ISBN: 978-1-60542-205-3

Number One Novels: Congratulations on the publication of your first book! Tell me a little about it—what's your pitch?


Allan Leverone: Thanks so much, and thanks for having me! In Final Vector, air traffic controller Nick Jensen’s life is falling apart. His wife—a Pentagon auditor—is dead, victim of a mysterious accident after discovering potentially treasonous material on a fellow employee’s computer. Desperate to escape the pain, Nick throws himself into his work at the radar air traffic control facility serving Boston’s Logan International Airport and is on duty on an overnight shift when the facility is overrun by armed terrorists. Nick escapes capture, but with U.S. President Robert Cartwright scheduled to fly into Logan in a matter of hours, he must use the information uncovered by his dead wife to foil an assassination while unarmed, outnumbered and on the run…

NON: How did you get the idea for your novel?

AL: This is kind of a funny story. I was pitching a manuscript to an agent at Thrillerfest, the International Thriller Writers annual convention/shindig in July, 2008 and it was clear this particular agent wasn’t the least bit interested in my book. To make conversation, he asked me what I did for a living in the real world, and when I told him I was an air traffic controller, he gave me the look most people reserve for the lunatic who cuts them off in traffic. He said, “Why don’t you write an air traffic control thriller?” like it was the most obvious thing in the world to anyone who wasn’t a complete dolt.

I’m only a partial dolt, so it’s not like I hadn’t even given it some thought, but I was worried that an aviation thriller might not appeal to a wide enough audience. In any event, that prompting from a publishing professional was what it took to make me take a few plot ideas I had been mulling over and start running with them.

The funniest part of the whole story is that I can’t for the life of me remember the agent’s name. I’d love to send him a nice thank-you note, but I can’t!

NON: No two authors seem to take the same route to publication, but almost every author has an interesting story about their journey. How did you get published? Did you use an agent? How did you find out that your book had sold?

AL: One thing you learn very early in the process of trying to write for people’s entertainment—at least if you want to maintain your sanity—is how to deal with rejection. Final Vector had seen more than its share of rejection from both agents and publishers before receiving a very enthusiastic reaction from the folks at Medallion. They saw its potential and for that I will always be incredibly grateful.

I’ll never forget the night I found out Medallion wanted to buy the rights to Final Vector. It had been kind of a long day and I was pretty tired. I was sitting in bed going through my email, and when I came to theirs, I literally had to read it over three times before it penetrated my thick skull that they wanted to publish my novel. I may have said this already, but the feeling I had that night is something I will never forget.

I sold Final Vector without an agent and, in fact, I am still agentless, but it’s a nerve-wracking way to work. So if you’re reading this, Donald Maass or Stacia Decker or Barbara Poelle, give me a call. Collect would be fine.

NON: I think that names say a lot about a person, especially a fictional person. How did you decide on your protagonist’s full name? Did you have any other names that were in the running?

AL: That’s a really good question and there’s a lot of truth to the statement that you want your characters’ names, especially your protagonist’s name, to project a certain image. In the case of Nick Jensen, I wanted something solid, something that projected reliability and dogged determination. For some reason it was easy—his name just kind of came to me without a lot of difficulty.

On the other hand, I really struggled with to pick a name for the female FBI special agent who gets trapped inside the air traffic control facility with Nick. My younger daughter had been after me for quite a while to name a character in one of my books or stories after her, and I decided this would be a good time to do that. So my female main character became Special Agent Kristin Cunningham; the “Kristin” part being my daughter’s name. I picked “Cunningham” because it just sounded good rolling off my tongue when combined with “Kristin.”

NON: Do you have another book in the works?

AL: I’m always writing, so I can always say there is another manuscript in the works. As of right now, I have not yet sold another book, but I’m shopping another thriller titled The Lonely Mile that I have high hopes for, and am getting ready to start work on a project I’m very excited about—a cold war thriller set in the late 1980s about an air traffic controller who tries to save the pilot of a burning B52 bomber after it crashes on emergency approach to an out-of-the-way airport. The controller unwittingly takes possession of an item the KGB, USSR’s secret police, will stop at nothing to intercept because it threatens their very existence.

NON: What's your writing routine? Do you write in the mornings, nights, daily, or when the mood strikes you?

AL: My only real routine is to try to squeeze in time to write whenever I can. I work a full-time job as an air traffic controller with a really funky schedule and also have a family that I want to spend time with, so writing at the same time every day is pretty much impossible. Sometimes I write early in the morning, but more often it’s either during some free time before work or even during my breaks at work. The time of day doesn’t really make any difference to me. But when I’m in the middle of a book I feel like the story starts to slip away if I don’t put time in on it every day.

NON: What’s your favorite way to procrastinate?

AL: Wow, how much time do you have? I’m not really good at a lot of things, but I can procrastinate with the best of them. Facebook can really become a time drain if I’m not careful—I love to play Scrabble and usually have a dozen or so games going at once—and so can sports. I’m a huge sports fan, so I could watch ESPN all day long. I try to force myself to get my work done before I play, but my success rate in doing that is somewhat less that 100%.

NON: What’s your favorite non-essential item on your desk?

AL: I write on a laptop, so my desk is actually wherever I happen to open it up. I’ve written in bed, I’ve written in an empty office on my breaks at work, I’ve written with my laptop resting on the stove in my kitchen while holding a sleeping baby on my shoulder (Don’t worry, the stove was off). Pretty much the only place I haven’t written is at a desk. So in that sense there are no non-essential items. But the one non-essential item I wish I had is one of those magic 8-balls so that when I get hung up on a sticky plot point and don’t know how to proceed, I could just shake it and get pointed in the right direction.

NON: What are you currently reading?

AL: 61 Hours by Lee Child. I’m a big fan of Jack Reacher, although I suppose that goes without saying. I’m not sure how you could write thrillers and not be a Reacher fan.