Author-2-Author with D.H. Dublin, Forensic Thriller Author

Using the pen name of D. H. Dublin, Jonathan McGoran has written three forensic crime thrillers, Body Trace, Blood Poison, and Freezer Burn with Penguin Books. Jon was born in Philadelphia and is the editor and columnist for The Weavers Way Shuttle in Philadelphia, PA.

C. L. Vaughn: Hi Jon, welcome to Author-2-Author. I´m always curious when a writer chooses to use a pen name, so I guess I´ll start by asking why you´ve decided to use a pen name and why you´ve used D. H. Dublin?

D. H. Dublin: The whole pseudonym thing was kind of strange to me at first, but I´ve gotten used to it. My agent had originally approached Penguin with a different manuscript and they said I was kind of ambivalent about using a pseudonym, but

C. L. Vaughn: I confess, I haven´t read your work yet, but I will say that your three books sound amazing and I´m looking forward to reading them. Have you published anything else like short stories?

D. H. Dublin: No, just a few magazine stories and some political satire.

C. L. Vaughn: Out of your three novels, Body Trace, Blood Poison, and Freezer Burn, do you have a favorite and why?

D. H. Dublin: I usually tend to be the most excited about that which I just finished. I´m pretty excited about Freezer Burn, which may be because it´s the most recent, but also it was a lot of fun to write and a lot of fun to research and I think it will be a lot of fun to read. There´s a lot going on in it: more bodies, more action, more interesting twists, and more for the characters to think about.

C. L. Vaughn: What was the reasoning behind making your main character a female? What challenges have you had to tackle as a male writer writing a female main character?

D. H. Dublin: That´s an interesting question. The decision to have a female protagonist came from conversations with my editor, and while I was very intrigued, I was also definitely nervous about it at first. I tend to outline pretty extensively and write a lot of notes, so I do a lot of work before I start writing the first draft. I think that served me well, because by the time I was actually writing Body Trace, the first book, I felt like I knew the character so well that I wasn´t thinking, "Is this how a woman would think or act," I was thinking "Is this how Madison would think or act." It wasn´t until I was almost finished the first draft that I remembered my earlier concerns, and by then I felt like I knew Madison so well, it wasn´t really an issue for me. I think the fact that it is written in third person helps, as well, because the intimacy of first person might have made it more of an issue. As it turns out, Madison Cross as a character has a definite personal reserve around her; she´s not stand-offish, but she has very definite boundaries, and I think the intimacy conveyed by first person would almost have violated that.

C. L. Vaughn: I´ve always enjoyed writing my stories as third person POV because I like to think of my stories as movies for the mind. What POV do you prefer to write in and why?

D. H. Dublin: I like them both, but they are very different. I write somewhat visually as well, and third person lends itself to that. In the Madison Cross series, the third person point of view is fairly close, and after the prologue, the rest of the book is all from Madison´s POV, so you gain some of that depth of character, but you lose some of the freedom to cut to other scenes and reveal information without expository dialogue . I just finished an unrelated novel that jumps all over the place -- several different story lines and a bunch if different points of view -- and that´s a lot of fun, because it really is like film, you can jump from one scene to another, all over the place, reveal action from different points of view. On the other hand, I have also written in first person, and while it can limit what you can show, it gives you this great freedom to have realistic and entertaining internal dialogue, which can go a long way toward creating a rich voice.

C. L. Vaughn: I can imagine that writing a forensic thriller would require a significant amount of research, especially with the popularity of crime shows on TV and in movies. How much research goes into your novels and what tips would you like to share with our readers about researching for a novel?

D. H. Dublin: It is a huge amount of research, and it is a lot of fun but it is an awful lot of work. I would just tell writers to be persistent and try not to get discouraged. Especially if you don´t have a book to point to, it can be hard to get people to help you. People are busy, and I can appreciate that. But if you keep at it, you will encounter some great people who will be unbelievably generous with their time and expertise. The other thing is that reading and using the internet are both invaluable, but there is no replacement for talking with a human being or seeing things firsthand. There´s a huge difference between knowing the scientific principles behind a certain technology and knowing whether you have time to get a cup of coffee between step one and step two, or knowing how to depict the technology in use.

C. L. Vaughn: What are your writing habits? Do you have a specific way that you write your stories, outline, or just jump in?

D. H. Dublin: I always outline. I like to write plots that are fairly complex and tight, and that requires outlining. I think also, with forensic fiction, the manner and pacing and techniques you employ in revealing information to the characters and to the readers is critical, so that is part of the outline as well. I usually start out with a central idea, and that can be anything, a character, a situation, a motive, or even a particular forensic technique, and then I spend a while brainstorming and free thinking about all the different tangents and off shoots and possibilities that emanate from that central idea. Once I have direction and a set of ideas that work, I´ll start outlining, and then I´ll start the first draft. Especially with forensic fiction, research is a part of every step, informing the central idea and the other ideas that come from it, figuring out what could work and what can´t, and then fleshing it all out.

C. L. Vaughn: I saw that you are also the editor and a columnist for The Weavers Way Shuttle. Would you care to share what the Shuttle is and what you write about in it?

D. H. Dublin: The Shuttle is the monthly newspaper of Weavers Way Co-op, a food co-op in the Mt. Airy neighborhood of Philadelphia. We cover the community and the co-op itself, but we also cover a lot of today´s really interesting food issues: organics, sustainability, genetic modification, buy local. It´s a very interesting time right now; there´s a lot going on. I´m actually in the outlining stages of a thriller that would incorporate some of those elements.

C. L. Vaughn: What is in the future of D. H. Dublin? Is there a fourth thriller on the drawing board?

D. H. Dublin: I have some definite ideas about what could be next for Madison Cross, but I´m currently working on a couple of other projects and for the moment I am concentrating on them.

C. L. Vaughn: Would you share with us how you became published, was it a long process for you to find a publisher? Did you ever consider self publishing?

D. H. Dublin: It did take me a little while, and my route was not the usual one. I had written a novel and my agent at the time was shopping it around to different publishers. Penguin basically said they liked the book but it wasn´t what they were looking for at the moment, and would I be interested in writing a forensic series instead. I had actually thought about writing forensic thrillers; I´d always found the science and the ideas to be fascinating, but I thought the research would be too much work. It was a lot of work, but it was immensely interesting. I´ve been having a lot of fun with it.

C. L. Vaughn: Thank you again Jon for being a part of Author-2-Author. Is there anything else you´d like to share with our readers?

D. H. Dublin: No, I´d just like to thank you for helping authors get the word out about their books. Keep up the good work.