Welcome Kevin Bohacz:
Has writing been something you always did,
or was it a discovered talent that came to you at a later point?
I always loved books. However, writing was an unquenchable
thirst that came out of nowhere. It was like turning a corner and finding
yourself face-to-face with love at first sight. I honestly cannot explain how or
why I began writing. In my early 30’s I was living in Venice Beach California
and had just started a new company, which would become my primary source of
income until my first bestseller many years later. I had all these ideas and
emotions clamoring to get out of me. One night after reading Interview with a
Vampire and feeling the wild emotions Ann Rice conjured in that piece of
literature, I just decided I needed to write. After that night I wrote
constantly. I was as obsessed as if my novels were unrequited lovers. I wrote in
the early morning before business hours, at lunch, and in the evening after
dinner. More than one girlfriend from those years felt that writing was my
mistress and one relationship actually broke up as a result. My wife Mazelle,
who I married in 1995, did not feel this way. She supported and nurtured me on
so many levels. She was my lover, my muse, my manager, my editor, my #1 fan, and
my best friend.
Do you remember
how it felt when you were offered that first contract? What emotions stand out
in your memory?
It was 1993 and the offer was totally
unexpected. My agent had been shopping my first novel, Dream Dancers for
years and had run out of steam. I had an amazingly large and colourful
collection of rejections slips, but I was not about to give up and was working
on a novel that would later radically morph and a billion years later become the
bestseller that made me a fulltime writer. My emotions when that first deal came
in were off the chart! It was everything from relief that I was not insane to
the surreal of a long sought dream becoming real. To say I was bouncing off the
walls would have been an understatement. If my then girlfriend had been present
I might have impulsively proposed to her. I was high on life for days and maybe
weeks afterwards.
Is this a first
book, part of a series, or the latest in a long line of many?
Immortality
and Ghost of the Gods are my 2nd and 3rd novels.
These two books together form a single story.
What is the oddest
thing that’s happened to you since you chose to become a professional writer?
Will it ever make it into a book, or is that a secret?
The last 5 years have been filled with strange inexplicable
synchronicities. My wife, Mazelle and I noticed these events and found them
impossible to explain in any scientific way. I’m a scientist and for much of my
life I’ve approached mysteries guided by scientific methods of investigation. If
I could not perceive something with my five senses then extraordinary evidence
was required. I’ve always been spiritual but not the least religious and find
those two realms are often in bitter conflict with each other. My spiritual side
is guided by intuition. When I was younger, I was a seeker weaned on the
philosophies of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky with a solid helping of Castaneda’s
dream-work, but as a scientist I always remained optimistically agnostic about
things spiritual such as near death experiences or the soul. This all changed
for me, everything in the universe change for me when Mazelle, my life, my best
friend of 17 years died in my arms with us looking into each other’s eyes. They
say life wrenching crisis can transform us or break us. First I was broken by
grief and emotionally dismembered then I was transformed and reassembled but not
completely.
In the time that followed after Mazelle’s body had died, when
I was alone and drowning in grief, I could hear my wife whispering to me, “Write
my love… Write.” So I wrote. I wrote so hard that my arms grew sore. I wrote so
hard that I gave myself tendonitis but the pain in my arms did not slow me. My
writing saved me from grief that was dark enough to crush the life from anyone.
I completed Ghost of the Gods in a short period of time while also
simultaneously working on two new novels.
Something else came out of this dark time of transformation.
At some point in the middle of it, I looked back over our lives together
focusing on the odd pattern of events. Two years before Mazelle was diagnosed
she began telling me that the world was spinning out of control and we were not
going to live to an old age. She did not tell me this with any kind of fear but
more a matter of fact kind of observation. I told her that was not going to
happen. Science was going to help us live for a very long time. Yet I too was
plague with what I considered “irrational” fears. When at rest stops on our
frequent road trips to Laguna Beach, if Mazelle went inside to get some coffee
or whatever, I would suddenly be gripped by gut wrenching illogical fears that
she was not coming out, that she had vanished from the face of the Earth never
to be seen again.
One night while we were in a Walgreens drugstore, her 15 year
old very expensive custom solitaire engagement ring literally exploded off her
finger. The gold band shattered in two places and parts of the ring went flying
across the store in all directions. In wordless panic we scrambled to recover
the diamonds and shards of gold. By the next day we were at the jeweler getting
the ring remade and adding a few more diamonds. The jeweler was baffled and
could not explain the simultaneous fractures or how the pieces could have been
literally launched from her finger flying in different directions for dozens of
feet. Once the ring was back and better than new, we were soon joking about the
entire event. I would tease her that she secretly broke the ring so that she
could get an upgrade. Two years later to the day and almost the exact hour that
the ring exploded is when she died in my arms. I now have a list of over a
hundred big “coincidences” which occurred in the three years leading up to her
leaving this world. In our last ten months together, after Mazelle had been
diagnosed with pancreatic cancer these inexplicable synchronicities grew in
intensity and frequency. Mazelle and I discussed them and noted their
otherworldly nature. What were these events? The scientist inside my left brain
has given up trying to explain them while my right brain simply calls them
premonitions.
So it was with this cauldron of grief bubbling up in my
heart, inexplicable mysteries dizzying my mind, and with my lost wife
whispering, “Write my love… Write…” that I wrote the hope filled sequel to
Immortality, titled Ghost of the Gods.
Will this odd sequence of synchronicities and premonitions
make their way into a novel? How can they not? I think we all write from our
soul and so this will have to come out onto the pages of one of my books… and
that book is titled The Bridge. While The Bridge is fiction it
will contain many events and lessons drawn from the last years of our life and
the three subsequent years of my life when I was transformed by a horrifying
emotional fire.
Do you have your
next book underway, or other titles in the planning stages?
I have two books underway. One is titled
Dream Signs and it should be on sale before the end of this year.
Dream Signs while not a sequel is a continuation of the themes and
cosmology begun in my first novel, Dream Dancers, which was about the
unexpected power of lucid dreams. The second novel I am working on is The
Bridge. As I mentioned, this novel unlike all the other novels I have
written, will draw on some events from my life. It will be a highly emotional
ride and also unlike all my prior novels it is written in first person past
tense instead of third person intimate.
Do you have a
favourite genre and why? Is it one you write in, read in, or both?
I love hard science fiction and I
love thrillers but more than anything I love the type of hard science fiction
that is theoretically possible and set in present day, which is pretty close to
the definition of one kind of techno-thriller. This is the brand of
techno-thriller that I love to read and the genre that I write in. I often get
compared to Michael Crichton since he is arguably the inventor of this type of
techno-thriller. I actually bend the techno-thriller genre a bit to my own
liking. Thrillers typically are supposed to be action and suspense first and
foremost but I take the time to do enough character development to create fully
realized three dimensional people. My characters are not perfect. They are
flawed like all real people. For me the stories are all about the characters. If
the characters are not 100% real and true to whomever they may be then the story
stumbles. If a reader has strong emotions for the characters whether it is hate
or love then the story soars.
The other thing I enjoy about my slightly bent genre is that
I make everything scientifically possible. Making everything possible leads to
greater levels of suspension of disbelief in the reader. I feel this makes the
stories more compelling. When I am reading a story nothing can cause me to
stumble quicker then reading something portrayed as fact that I know is not
possible. Whether it’s something simple like a real street described incorrectly
or a technical device that is highly unlikely, it all equals the collapse of my
suspension of disbelief. The same is true for the characters. I stumble reading
a story if a smart character does something slightly foolish just to move the
plot along or vice versa. So the bottom line is that I write the kinds of
stories that I love to read and my slightly bent techno-thriller genre allows me
to do this.
What, to you, is
the most exciting part of the writing process? Does it change from book to book
or remain the same?
If you could
co-author a book with anyone, who would you choose and why? What kind of book do
you think would come from the collaboration?
It would definitely be Michael Crichton. The reason is that I
consider Michael Crichton to be the father of the genre I write in. His early
work and style resonates with me. The result of the collaboration would be
interesting. Crichton’s books demonize technology. The source of the conflict in
many of his books is the evil of technology run amok. Crichton and I differ
greatly in our worldview and politics. Unlike Crichton I feel it is people run
amok, and not technology, that is the problem. So any story we create would be a
story of opposites colliding and hopefully we would not kill each other in the
collaboration.
Where can
readers find you on the web?
I can be found lurking somewhere near my
FaceBook author’s page.
So if you want to strike up a conversation, find out what I am up to, or when
the next book is coming out, go over to FaceBook and like my author’s
page.
I am Kevin Bohacz the bestselling
novelist of Immortality and a lucid dreamer… Welcome to my dreams. I am also a
writer for national computer magazines, founder and president of two high
technology corporations, a scientist and engineer for over 35 years, and the
inventor of an advanced electric car system – the ESE Engine System (circa
1978). I was also a short order cook for I-Hop, flipped burgers at McDonalds,
and delivered Chicken Delight. All of those careers and more are behind me now
that I am a full time storyteller, a catcher of dreams. Thank you for reading my
stories and making this all possible.
His latest books are
Immortality and Ghost
of the Gods.
Visit Kevin’s website at www.kbohacz.com or follow him on Twitter at
www.twitter.com/kevinbohacz
Dorothy Thompson
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