Interview with Ricardo Sanchez, author of 'Bigfoot Blues'
Our guest today is Ricardo Sanchez who is a writer, toy buff, and lifelong comic
book fan. Elvis Sightings, the first novel in his Elvis Sightings Mysteries
series, was released in September , 2014. Bigfoot
Blues, the follow up, was released in May, 2015. Ricardo has written several books for DC Comics, including Batman:
Legends of the Dark Knight, Teen Titans Go! and Resident Evil among
many others. His original project, A Hero’s Death, was a successful
Kickstarter released in May, 2015. In addition to writing, Ricardo is an Emmy award winning video and animation
producer. When he’s not writing, Ricardo maintains a vintage toy blog, drives
70's muscle cars, and shops year round for Halloween decorations for his home
in California.
- Visit Ricardo Sanchez’s website.
- Connect with Ricardo on Facebook and Twitter.
- Find out more about Ricardo at Goodreads.
About Bigfoot Blues:
She eloped
with Bigfoot. Or maybe Bigfoot kidnapped her. Either way, I've been hired to
uncover the truth behind Cindy Funk's disappearance. Me? I'm Floyd, and I'm a
PI living my life as Elvis would have wanted. Not just in sequined jumpsuits.
With character.
Cindy's trail
leads me to River City, Oregon—aka the
Mythical Creature Capital of the World—where I catch Case #2. This one from an
eccentric billionaire who's lost a priceless piece of "art." Enter
one dead body and I end up deputized to solve Case #3, tracking down a
man-eating mountain lion. Or maybe it's a chupacabra. Or just an ordinary
murderer. Hard to say.
I've handled
my fair share of crazy, but River City's secrets
have me spooked. With an influx of tourists arriving for the town's annual
Elvis tribute contest—what are the chances?—I've got to save the girl, solve
the rich guy's problem and leash that chupacabra before a second body is
discovered. It might just be mine.
Read more
about Floyd's adventures in Elvis Sightings, available now!
- Bigfoot Blues is available at Amazon.
- Pick up your copy at Barnes & Noble.
- Discuss this book at PUYB Virtual Book Club at Goodreads.
- Read excerpt here.
Q: Welcome to The Writer's
Life! Now that your book has been
published, we’d love to find out more about the process. Can we begin by having you take us at the
beginning? Where did you come up with
the idea to write your book?
Bigfoot Blues is the second book in my Elvis Sightings Mysteries series. To explain where it came from,
you need to know a little bit about the first book, Elvis Sightings. The idea for that one actually started with a play
I write in college, a long, long time ago, after I read a Weekly World News
story about an Elvis sighting in Idaho,
where I’m from. I thought to myself, where in the world could Elvis Bigfoot Blues,
the question for me was, where else could Floyd go where a detective in a rhine
stone studded jumpsuit go where he would fit in? This time the answer was River
City, Oregon, where the annual
King of Elvis Tribute Artists contest is underway and the town is literally
filled with men and women in jumpsuits. Then I just needed to come up with a
mystery suitably unusual enough for Floyd to be the only man who could solve
it, so in Bigfoot Blues, my Lifestyle
Elvis P.I. is looking for a piece of missing crypto taxidermy (a stuffed animal
that never really existed) and trying to find Bigfoot, the only man more
elusive than Elvis.
Q: How hard was it to write a
book like this and do you have any tips that you could pass on which would make
the journey easier for other writers?
Honestly, the second book was
much easier than the first one. All in, I probably spent six years working on Elvis Sightings on and off, trying to
figure out my book. But I wrote Bigfoot
Blues in a little under eight months, from first word to final edit. The
big difference was that when I went to write the second book, I did a better
job of understanding the ending I needed to write, the backstory of the mystery
Floyd would need to solve, and I had a stronger understanding of how to
structure a story. I’m not sure I could have figured any of that out without
going through the process of writing the first book, but doing a lot of
planning up front and meticulously plotting out each scene in advance helped a
LOT.
Q: Who is your publisher and how
did you find them or did you self-publish?
My publisher is a digital first
company called Carina Press. They’re an imprint of Harlequin. I’ll be honest, Elvis Sightings was a hard sell. There
were a number of potential intellectual property issues with the story, and the
premise verges on the absurd. I took it to a lot of agents and publishers who
either said no, or said yes, but wanted me to make some fundamental changes to
the book. But the reason I ultimately went with Carina is because my editor,
Kerri Buckley, got the story. She bought into what I wanted to write. Most
writers won’t make much, if any, money from writing novels. I knew this going
in. So if I was going to spend hundreds of hours writing a book, I wanted it to
be my book, and Kerri made that happen.
Q: Is there anything that
surprised you about getting your first book published?
I’ve been around publishing in
some form for most of my career, so there wasn’t too much that was a big
surprise, but I will say I wasn’t prepared for how much impact the editor can
have on a manuscript. I’d worked with editors before, and they’d always made my
work stronger, but Kerri didn’t just add a little to the process, she added a
ton. She challenged a lot of work, in a good way, and she really pushed me to
improve the prose, the plot, and the characters. The book that actually got
published was orders of magnitude better than the one I had submitted. If
anything surprised me, it was discovering how much my prose could be improved.
It was both very humbling and gratifying at the same time.
Q: What other books (if any) are
you working on and when will they be published?
I have two projects I’m trying to
wrap up. The first is a book of zombie themed poetry. I’m going to have it
illustrated and release it as a Kickstarter. The other project, in keeping with
the zombie theme, is called Odd Jobs for
the Undead. It’s about a zombie who’s a lot like you and me. He has
feelings. He’s self aware. But because he’s a zombie, he can’t get a place to
live, find a job, get cable. The book is about his struggle accepting himself
as a zombie, and his attempt to find out who he was before he woke up on a
mortuary slab as one of the undead.
Q: What’s your favorite place to
hang out online?
The New York Times. I like
reading the comments on articles and opinion pieces. Reading what is often
pretty raw emotion helps me get a feeling for other people’s mindsets. I think
it’s really important to challenge one’s own belief system as a writer, it
helps you to create characters that are unique from one another. I get that in
spades in the comments. Plus it’s just plain entertaining. But if I’m actually
going to interact with other people, it tends to be on Facebook or Twitter.
Q: Finally, what message (if any)
are you trying to get across with your book?
I’m not a message writer. I was
an English major in college and have read a lot of what is considered serious
literature. I know that some of the best books have layers of meaning and point
they’re trying to get across. I just like telling stories. They don’t have to
mean anything, they just need to entertain you. If I can make a person laugh
out loud, I feel like I’ve done my job. I’ve been told there are a few of those
LOL moments in Elvis Sightings and Bigfoot Blues. If it’s true, then I am
one happy author.
Q: Thank you again for this
interview! Do you have any final words?
Thanks for giving me some column
inches!
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