Blake: Not really, because usually, when I’m writing, I tend to know what lines I’m crossing, and I’m okay with it.
Joe: The magazine cover photo was taken at BeerKon 2010. Best conference ever?
Blake: Oh, no doubt. 2011 will be even better.
Joe: We've collaborated on a bunch of stories, and are now doing a novel, Stirred, which will be the last Jack Daniels ebook, and also conclude your Andrew Z. Thomas/Luther Kite series. How do all of these books connect and intertwine with one another?
Blake: One of our brilliant cover artists, Jeroen ten Berge, is currently working up a graphic on this. Essentially, Serial Uncut, soon to be expanded as Serial Killers Uncut, is the centerpiece of our universe—all our villains (from your Jack Daniels and Jack Kilborn series, from my Desert Places series, Snowbound, Abandon, and others) in one novel-length work. The way these villains’ paths cross tangentially connects almost every one of our novels. For instance, Luther Kite is one of the bad guys from my Desert Places series. He shows up in my novella Bad Girl, which is a part of Serial Uncut, which sets him up to pursue Jack Daniels in Shaken, a battle which will be fully resolved in our collaboration novel Stirred. We’re essentially doing the same thing comics have been doing for years: creating a shared universe for our characters. It facilitates our collaborations, but more importantly, encourages readers who like one of our books, to try the other 20 which are connected in some way or another.
Joe: How does your collaborative writing differ from your solo writing?
Blake: My solo writing tends to be slower, more methodical. Not that this is a good thing or makes my writing any better, I just don’t have you breathing down my neck since you write about ten books a year.
Joe: You're exaggerating. Last year I only wrote 7. How did the Draculas project come about?
Blake: You had the basic premise and title and called me up and pitched it. I thought it sounded like a blast. We developed a cast of characters, a setting, and then contacted F. Paul Wilson and Jeff Strand to see if they wanted to be involved. Luckily, they did. We then gave Jeff and Paul first pick of which characters they wanted to write (they took all the cool ones that had weapons), and we were off.
Joe: You busted ass marketing Draculas. What are some of the things you did to ensure it had a big launch?
Blake: We started thinking about marketing very early on, like in August, when we had only written about 10,000 words. We all had fan bases to pull from, and started wondering what the effect on sales would be if we could launch a book with over 100 reviews on day 1, just blow up the blogosphere. So we made a call for reviews on your blog, and also contacted all of your Goodreads friends to see if they would review the book prior to publication. I also reached out to all of my contacts. We got 260 people to request the book, and at that point, knew if only half of those folks came through for us, we’d be golden. Luckily, most came through.
Joe: You're ruler of the world. What laws do you pass?
Blake: Just one. Express lane in coffee shops for people who drink actual coffee and not shit with whipcream and nutmeg on it that takes five hours to make.
Joe: Happy endings or tragic endings? (I'm talking stories, not massages.)
Blake: Mostly tragic, but I’m trying to change.
Joe: Are there any writers you'd love to collaborate with?
Blake: Many, but I’ll only call out one of them. Top of the list…David Morrell. You?
Joe: David would be fun, but I gotta go with Stephen King.
Blake: Careful…he actually writes faster than you do.
DESERT PLACES
Published in January 2004 by Thomas Dunne Books
DESCRIPTION: Andrew Z. Thomas is a successful writer of suspense thrillers, living the dream at his lake house in the piedmont of North Carolina. One afternoon in late spring, he receives a bizarre letter that eventually threatens his career, his sanity, and the lives of everyone he loves. A murderer is designing his future, and for the life of him, Andrew can’t get away.
Harrowing...terrific...a whacked out combination of Stephen King and Cormac McCarthy.
PAT CONROY
[C]arried by rich, image-filled prose. Crouch will handcuff you, blindfold you, throw you in the trunk of a car, and drag you kicking and screaming through a story so intense, so emotionally packed, that you will walk away stunned.
WINSTON-SALEM JOURNAL
Excerpt from Desert Places…
On a lovely May evening, I sat on my deck, watching the sun descend upon Lake Norman. So far, it had been a perfect day. I’d risen at 5:00 a.m. as I always do, put on a pot of French roast, and prepared my usual breakfast of scrambled eggs and a bowl of fresh pineapple. By six o’clock, I was writing, and I didn’t stop until noon. I fried two white crappies I’d caught the night before, and the moment I sat down for lunch, my agent called. Cynthia fields my messages when I’m close to finishing a book, and she had several for me, the only one of real importance being that the movie deal for my latest novel, Blue Murder, had closed. It was good news of course, but two other movies had been made from my books, so I was used to it by now.
I worked in my study for the remainder of the afternoon and quit at 6:30. My final edits of the new as yet untitled manuscript would be finished tomorrow. I was tired, but my new thriller, The Scorcher, would be on bookshelves within the week. I savored the exhaustion that followed a full day of work. My hands sore from typing, eyes dry and strained, I shut down the computer and rolled back from the desk in my swivel chair.
I went outside and walked up the long gravel drive toward the mailbox. It was the first time I’d been out all day, and the sharp sunlight burned my eyes as it squeezed through the tall rows of loblollies that bordered both sides of the drive. It was so quiet here. Fifteen miles south, Charlotte was still gridlocked in rush-hour traffic, and I was grateful not to be a part of that madness. As the tiny rocks crunched beneath my feet, I pictured my best friend, Walter Lancing, fuming in his Cadillac. He’d be cursingthe drone of horns and the profusion of taillights as he inched away from his suite in uptown Charlotte, leaving the quarterly nature magazine Hiker to return home to his wife and children. Not me, I thought, the solitary one.
For once, my mailbox wasn’t overflowing. Two envelopes lay inside, one a bill, the other blank except for my address typed on the outside. Fan mail.
Back inside, I mixed myself a Jack Daniel’s and Sun-Drop and took my mail and a book on criminal pathology out onto the deck. Settling into a rocking chair, I set everything but my drink on a small glass table and gazed down to the water. My backyard is narrow, and the woods flourish a quarter mile on either side, keeping my home of ten years in isolation from my closest neighbors. Spring had not come this year until mid-April, so the last of the pink and white dogwood blossoms still specked the variably green interior of the surrounding forest. Bright grass ran down to a weathered gray pier at the water’s edge, where an ancient weeping willow sagged over the bank, the tips of its branches dabbling in the surface of the water.
The lake is more than a mile wide where it touches my property, making houses on the opposite shore visible only in winter, when the blanket of leaves has been stripped from the trees. So now, in the thick of spring, branches thriving with baby greens and yellows, the lake was mine alone, and I felt like the only living soul for miles around.