The latest Author Ecke with Frank Zafiro, a very accomplished author. The River City series is a must read. Come to find out Frank and I have some thing in common. It's a small world and just not a Disney.

Hey everybody.

Welcome back to Author Echo.

We have Frank Zafiro.

He is our guest today and he's gonna introduce himself.

We're gonna talk about, not maybe just one, but he's written a lot of books.

So we're gonna of get into that and see what it accomplished author

over years, how he's done it.

How has he maintained that?

Drive to do it some more.

Great.

All yours, man.

First off, thanks for having me.

I guess the most concise way to introduce myself would be to say that

I was a police officer for 20 years and today in Spokane, Washington, that's

on the eastern half of the state there.

Retired in 2013.

During my career, I was fortunate enough to either do or command the

unit that did pretty much every job that a police agency does.

And so that, that gave me some great experiences.

As you might imagine when it came to writing about about police work.

I write gritty crime fiction from both sides of the badge.

My flagship series is the River City series, which is a thinly veiled Spokane,

and those are police procedurals.

With a, with an ensemble cast of police officers and detectives, although the

core character really is an officer actually now detective Katie McLeod.

These are procedurals, which for those that aren't familiar, is

basically where the emphasis is.

Not so much on who did it but whether or not, and how the cops might catch them.

And so that's my flagship series.

But I do write hard boiled from.

Si from the viewpoint of the criminal in my spoke Compton series and

private detective series in the Stephan Kopriva Mysteries, which

is a spinoff of River City.

So if you like mystery, aside from cozy or traditional life, I've probably

got something in your sub genre.

Excellent.

My, my son was stationed up in.

The we used to call it Fort Lewis.

Yeah.

Learned, Call it there.

So that's around that neck of the woods.

Really beautiful.

I used to work for Microsoft and I grew up to Seattle every once in a while.

So beautiful up there.

Thanks for your service, by the way.

So Great.

Yeah.

Great.

So what possessed you to write about your work?

Cause it had.

Bring back some some images and things that you've dealt

with in your police career.

I've always been a writer.

Even as a young kid, 10, 12 years old, that's how I felt about myself.

Kind of a musician might feel, even if they're not in a

professional band or anything.

And I've been writing my whole life.

I had a little bit of a gap from about 96 to 2004.

I came on the job in 93 because during that time period I was going

back to school using the Army College Fund to get my undergraduate degree.

Were you an mp?

What'd you do in the Army?

Were you an mp?

I was a linguist, actually.

I was a czechoslovak linguist.

And I wore headphones in spite on the Check Army radio transmissions

back in I was stationed in southern Germany in Bavaria.

So this is strange.

I was in the second number Calgary regiment.

Yeah.

And I used to guard the Czechoslovakia border all the way up in German border.

Then I went back and I was a 19 Delta cab scout, and then I did the Coburg

sector of the East, West German border.

Wow.

Awesome.

Thanks for your service.

Of the folks you're listening to you as well, so you basically

were right there, the fold gap.

Oh yeah.

Yeah.

So I've seen people talk about communism.

I've seen it yeah.

Unfiltered lens.

What con communism is.

Without a doubt.

It was a weird time a glorious time in some ways to be in that

position because it was in the era of Goche as a Soviet leader.

And while I came in, in, in the Army in 86, and that was pretty much the Cold

War was still pretty frosty at that point.

Yes.

But by the time I left in March of 91 the checks had the Velvet Revolution

and installed a poet as president.

The Berlin Wall had come down, East and West Germany were

negotiating to, to rejoin.

All of the other eastern block nations were in some stage of breaking away

from the Soviet Union, which was in the middle of glass and Paris Stroka,

which was reform and openness.

Essentially 91.

Yeah.

Yeah, and I left in 91.

Interestingly.

You talked about seeing communism.

Here I was a American soldier who was had a top secret security clearance

and was spying on the checks in say, 88, 89 in 91 when I got out.

I drove my Nissan Sentra with US Army plates.

Oh yeah.

I've been into the check to cia.

Yeah.

Moved to, pulls in past places where I had memorized Army units were stationed.

It was oddly surreal and then stayed in, pulls in for a few days

and saw just what it was like there.

And it was it hadn't had a chance to change from what it had

been under the communist regime.

It was mere months I guess a year and a half since the Velt revolution.

But it was not.

It wasn't a a westernized city yet.

It was still very much a communist city.

It was weird.

Things can happen fast, but I feel like those were good things.

Yeah.

My wife German, so I.

We go back, but you can still go into former East Germany and still

see that they're night and day.

They're rebuilding.

They started rebuilding East Germany in 1990 where the German

started right after World War ii.

It was remarkable.

So thank you again for your services.

That's kinda coincident you were the guy that was gonna call.

The everybody including my unit and say, Hey, the T 72 s are

rolling through the fold day gap.

Not a good day.

Hell outta here . Not a good, We were counting on You guys

still give us a heads up.

Oh, simply a speed bump.

So you started, when did you write your first novel that was publish?

That was published I wrote Under a Raging Moon, the first book in the River City

series, the first draft of it in 1995 after I'd been on the job for two years.

Oh, wow.

And you can really see both the.

And I can see this now quite a few years later, you can see the immaturity of the

person that wrote it the attitudes of a two year cop who was in love with the job.

And you can all and certainly if I pulled out that early draft, you would

see the skill level that I was at the time which was not ready for prime time.

And so I I wasn't able to get it published and then I started college

and then I'd mentioned the 96 to 2 0 4 sort of gap in my writing.

And I was writing a lot during that time, but I was writing college papers.

I was learning a new job in police work just about every

other year cuz I got moved around and got promoted and so forth.

And so it wasn't until about 2004 when I was a sergeant by that time and I had this

kind of, Day shift, office gig, basically.

I was in the volunteer services unit overseeing that, and that's

when I had the luxury essentially of getting back to fiction.

And it was also pretty fueled by the fact that I ran into another

cop who was also a a writer who was in the early stages of his work.

A guy named Colin Conway who.

Worked with quite a bit in the, since then and we we started encouraging each other.

We started re reading each other's works talking about writing

all the time and so forth.

And so I started kicking out a lot of short stories and it,

and then pulling out the novel and getting to work on it again.

And so it shouldn't really be a surprise after being on the job for,

at that point, I guess 11 years that What came out was law enforcement

stuff crime related stuff, because that was what know, I was living

did, and that's what I wrote about.

I was a little nervous about saying Spokane and my real name because I didn't

know how my bosses were gonna react.

So how did they react?

How did the other, not only.

Your bosses, but your peers how did they take that you were

writing these crime novels?

My bosses surprised me because both times I went to them cuz I had to go basically

say, Hey, this is a an off duty job.

It's a separate career.

I needed to get permission essentially by policy.

But there was no reason for him to say no.

I wasn't too worried about it, but I was worried that.

Anybody read a couple of the grittier stories, maybe one where the cops

weren't the greatest in how they were portrayed, that they might come

to me and say, Okay, enough of that.

And I didn't wanna be in the position where I couldn't say,

No, I'm gonna keep doing this.

So I changed Spokane River City and started using a pen name Frank s Farro.

And then so does Spokane, a river running.

Oh yeah.

Oh, , Spokane River.

Oh, but it's the Looking Glass River in River City, . River

City is so close to Spokane.

It's it's half a bubble off of an alternate reality.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I only changed a few things.

Obviously anything that says Spokane, I had to come up

with a different, Name for it.

And then I changed I massaged a few locations and so forth.

But they they were pretty receptive.

And then a few years later when the newspaper reporter at the newspaper

fared it out that I was doing this, she wanted to write a story about it.

And I said, Hey, that's great, but.

Can we keep it quiet that I really do this here in Spokane?

And she's No, you don't get it.

That's actually the story It's that's why we wanna write about you.

I can't that's why people might be interested is cuz you do work here.

And I'm like, ah.

So I went and talked to the chief then and that was a Chief

Kirkpatrick and she was wonderful.

She was like fly, bird fly.

Don't you know, be free.

That was great.

My, my colleagues have former colleagues now.

Just been all over the map, much like family is.

Some people are super supportive and interested, other people are generally

supportive, but it's not their thing.

Some people aren't even aware of it or could care less cuz it's just not

in their wheelhouse or in their orbit.

Yeah.

But those people who are interested and have been supportive that I used to

work with have been super supportive and there's still people I can reach

out to if I come across something that I don't have an expertise in.

And recently that series I, I wrote with, I wrote a series with

Colin Conway here in the last five years, six years the Charlie three

16 series, which is a procedural series, and it is set in Spokane.

And there were some, there were.

Homicide related things that I just didn't have quite the expertise on.

And I was able to reach out to a detective that I knew.

And actually we created a character with his name as an homage.

And Oh wow.

. I do the same thing, by the way.

It's kinda cool too.

I don't know.

I can do a lot of research, but, so I'm, get some perspective of something.

So I reached out actually to a Air Force boom operator.

Cause I wanted to have an air refueling scene in the book.

So I say talk me through.

Yeah.

I mean if you're writing a book that people expect to be yeah.

Then you need to be right.

But yeah none of my colleagues.

Negative about it.

Nobody gave me a hard time, or I got teased a little bit,

but that's just friendly.

But I didn't have any negative experiences ever.

They were all great with it and occasionally people would come up

and be like hey, I got one for you.

You can use this in one of your books.

And they'd tell me something and either a story or, or something

funny that somebody said or did.

And most of the time their instincts were pretty good.

I've used quite a few of them actually.

You didn't give any money.

You mean you give em Royal through?

No, I gave him credit where credit was due.

And then I took credit for writing and they gave him a ticket.

That's great , so what, where do you write?

Do you have a favorite time or how do you write, You outline it or

what's your strategy providing?

I used to do it a lot differently.

I used be a pantser, a me, Here's an idea, let's roll with it.

And I used to have to write when I had time and that time tended to come

in blocks, not very regularly, just because of the kind of schedule I had.

But fortunately I, I retired in 2013 and I did.

Consulting and teaching after that.

But I've been fully retired from everything except my writing

career since the end of 2017.

And so that allows me to structure my day.

However I like.

And I like to get up early.

Early can be me too, between five and six 30, depending

on where I'm at in the cycle.

Trying to get back to that 5:00 AM.

Timeframe.

Now I'm, Do you do PT in the morning?

No.

usually don't.

I usually I'll go to the gym in the afternoon, either early or

late afternoon, depending on if my wife's going with me or not.

But but I like to do the creative writing in the morning.

And that's something that my, my buddy call Colin really impressed on me.

He'd been doing that for a while and he'd done some reading about it and

he of formed a, formed an opinion that Whenever in the day, your

creative energy is the highest, and for most people it's in the morning.

And that's true for me.

Yeah, you should give that creative power to yourself.

Don't use it to do work for other people.

Don't use it to do work that doesn't require creative energy.

Use it for.

What requires the most creative energy, That's your own work.

And so that's what I do.

I work on my, I agree.

Whatever's new, whatever I'm working on right now, I'll

do that in the morning hours.

And then any editing or other kind of marketing work or whatever

I tend to do that in the late morning and afternoon and evening.

That's great.

I do too I get up, I do walk in the morning and then I come back cuz I think

about what I'm gonna write as I'm walking.

That's a good strategy.

And then I come back and I live in Texas, so the weather

is beautiful 95% of the time.

Whereabouts in Texas?

North of Dallas, Little town called.

Yeah.

Beautiful.

And so I sit out back and hack away for about an hour and half, two hours.

And then what else do I wanna be able to do?

And so I enjoy that aspect of it.

So yeah I'm a dancer.

I.

I quit doing that.

I I had to because I wrote, I've written about 15 of my books with other

authors with four different authors.

And you can't pants, you just can't pants it when you're not

when you're collaborating.

No bad cause nothing you think about.

And if you go on that walk in the morning and you think about something, you come

back and you sit down and then you open up the file that the guy just sent you.

Or whoever your partner is for the book.

It's, and they went off on a completely different tangent.

Your law you got, you've gotta have at least a bullet point.

Outline.

And I've been doing that with those.

I didn't do it much with the, with a couple of the series that I did, the

the Onya series with Jim Wilky and the brick and cam bricks and cam jobs

series that I did with Eric Beater.

Those were very loosely outlined.

We basically said, Here's the premise.

Let's roll with it till we get about to the three quarter mark.

Basically pants it like you're talking about.

And then at the three quarter mark, we're gonna have to decide

how we're gonna wrap this up.

And I mean that worked really good for seven different books.

Yeah.

But but we were a technique as a strategy.

And we were writing a dual first person narrative with alternating chapters.

And so there was a lot less of a chance that somebody was gonna write something

in their chapter with their character that was gonna completely screw you up.

in your chapter with yours.

Occasionally it happened, but we corrected when it did.

It's a little different when you're writing a like the

Charlie three 16 series, a third person, multiple viewpoint.

Procedural that has a lot of interlocking parts.

And so what Colin and I will do is we will brainstorm it together, we'll

outline it together, and the outline is basically a series of separate

paragraphs broken up by scene.

And so we both know where things are going.

We both have the map, and then we figure out who's gonna write.

And that has eventually landed on, you write this character scenes, I'll

write this character scenes from their point of view when they have

the pov, although who writes which character has changed between books?

I can't remember.

Too many of the examples right now, but the one that always comes to mind is that

he wrote the Chief of Police in one of the books, and I wrote it in one of the other

books, and I can't remember the other two who wrote it, but that's changed from

book to book occasionally, but always the same person throughout the entire book.

And then as we're writing it, so if you and I were doing it, And we got to that

point where we'd mapped it out and we got, Okay, and you're gonna write character A,

D, and E, and I'm gonna write B C and F.

And then I'd sit down, I'd write, say chapter one, send it to you.

You'd read chapter one, give it a quick edit, and then write

chapter two, Send it back to me.

I'd read what you did to my chapter one and respond to it.

Editing wise.

I'd edit chapter two that you wrote, and then I'd write chapter.

And then that process would just continue all the way through 80, a hundred

thousand words, whatever it ends up being.

The beauty of that and why it's worked for us is it accomplishes two things.

One is that when you get to the end of that first draft, it's really at

least draft 1.5, maybe 2.0, yeah.

We've already been through it.

Yeah.

And the other thing.

That a with such heavy and we have pretty heavy handed editing.

There's no hands off.

It's all every word is as if it was your word.

There's no don't edit mine.

So hard type of stuff going on.

So what you end up with at the end of that first draft isn't my voice or your voice.

It's a third.

Voice, That's the voice of the book.

It's the voice of the series.

It's our voice, essentially.

Because that editing process is so all encompassing and so constant, even

during the creation of the first draft.

And that's worked really well.

And in fact, it's worked so well that I outlined my own books at

that, to that same level now.

I have a pretty good bullet point.

For all of them anymore.

And that's just what works.

It keeps me on track and a lot of people who pants like you do and

maybe this is your feeling about it as well, will say that it, they get

bored with it if they know exactly where it's going, that the map is off

putting and takes the fun out of it for.

and I understand that it I could see that happening for me too.

At least that was how I felt.

But what I've learned is that there's so many details that you're gonna

delve into if the scene just says Capriva confronts his mother yeah.

That's all it says on there.

I know what that means.

Yeah.

I got all that work to dive into Discover, just all I know is he is

gonna confront her about whatever.

That's so that's how and when I get the writing done.

Yeah.

I do I'll think of something and I will do is I have a little section

at the back of the end of the book that I say stuff and I'll just put,

Okay, I wanna put this in the book.

So that, or I'll mind map it, I'll mind map some of the stuff.

Cause I, to me, I like to make sure if I say that text is gonna do this, that

he has to do that somewhere in the book.

Just can't drop it out of the book.

Cause i's gonna notice that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So I always have to follow and I always look back to make sure that

I do that, but I never, I didn't know how collaboration worked.

That's pretty interesting.

And that's just how we do it.

Collaboration works as many ways as there are collaborators, I suspect.

The key to it is that you have to be on the.

The same page.

Oh, sure.

Yeah.

You have to trust each other.

Has to, doesn't have to be an equal relationship.

I There's the whole Clive Cussler with Soandso James Patterson with Soandso.

That's a that the power dynamic there is Bill Wi Billio with somebody, right?

Yeah.

That's not a, an equal power dynamic.

But when you do have.

An equal relationship like I've had with all of my co-authors, then it

does just become a matter of trust and a willingness to accept that any

edits that I make or that you make are in the best interests of the book.

You're not trying to prove you're better writer or edit yours or something.

Yeah, that's crazy petty who's just trying to entertain.

So when you write, when you co-author, do you write.

Your own book at the same time.

Can you do two at once?

I have in the past.

I, I don't got away from it the last few, when Colin and I were working

on the Charlie three 16 series, that the first four books in that series.

But I certainly did prior to that.

And it was just because it was such a different experience and

different world that it was, I was able to compartmentalize them.

Or maybe I was younger, I don't know, but I I won't.

Carl and I have a couple, three more books.

Come on, man.

Don't say that . I'm not gonna do, I won't be writing anything else while

we're writing I'll do other work.

There's plenty of other work as an independent author to, to keep you busy.

Oh, there is a ton.

You talked about it earlier.

You have to strat strategize your day to when you, Cause there's

multiple things you need to get done.

Then you still have the family and everything else.

But when you gotta take time to write, you have turn to

market to time to design things.

What's the cover gonna look like?

How am I gonna send this thing out?

So I think, do I release it?

Yes.

How do I promo it?

What all those things come up.

And then of course, all the creative things that you're dealing with.

What do you where the series is going, what whatever book you're not writing,

but you're planning how that's gonna go.

All the stuff that, So do you plan the next book?

So I did one, I'm almost done with the second, and I'm already thinking about

the third and how I'm gonna continue.

It's not necessarily series, but the same folks.

Same team.

But I add folks to the team and now I can branch those off to do some, Cause

they do, they have a different skill set.

So do you do that too, or, Yeah.

I actually think that's pretty cool that you're doing it that way.

It's the a very similar way to what Colin does with this 5 0 9 series.

It's a rotating cast of who the lead is.

So there might be six or seven detectives in this unit, and they're

all in just about every book in some capacity or another, but they

take turns being the lead in terms of who's who, whose book it is.

And so you get to see these characters through.

The eyes of other characters and they don't all see each other in the same way.

So that, that's pretty cool.

I do have I do have a pretty good idea with my series.

Most of my series that are still open the ONA series that I mentioned

in the Brick and cam jobs series, those are both closed series.

They've, they're.

Cycle is complete.

Whereas the River City series is ongoing, the Capriva mysteries are ongoing.

My SPO Compton series is ongoing.

So I know I just am, I have the fourth book in the Copo Compton

series coming out in October.

Nice.

Congratulations.

I know what books five and six are gonna be.

I've got 'em pretty well mapped out.

I just, How me Can you do a year?

It varies.

It varies.

I've done as few as one and as many as I'd have to go double check, but I

think I've done five or six in a year.

It some of those might have been co-authored, so you're writing half a

book, but all the rest of the work is just as much as if you wrote it yourself.

Good for baby three, which is probably a lot of people are saying no, the one's.

That's a whole different conversation.

I have a friend who's very successful and he's, I think he does three, three

or four a year in his, I think it's three a year in his main series.

And his readers are used to it.

They're used to when those new books come out.

I really started.

Hard push to be as productive as possible at the beginning of 2021 and tried to get

as much work out as possible, but with the caveat of not sacrificing quality.

Cuz there's an old saying you can have it.

Yes, I agree.

Fast, cheap, or good, I think is how it goes, right?

Pick two.

You can have quality, quantity or.

It could be inexpensive, but you can't have all three.

And I never wanted to, the quality to suffer.

So if that means I put one or two less books out a year to make sure that quality

is, that's where I'm, that's where I'm at.

You can have fast food or you can have good food fest.

Yeah.

Or maybe it takes a little time in the kitchen to make

a really good, healthy meal.

Exactly.

That means you know that you gotta wait a little bit, then you wait a

little bit because it's worth it.

I originally had a pretty.

Pretty aggressive schedule for publishing.

And I met some of those goals, but I had to push a few of them back a little

bit to, to, just to ensure number one, that I wasn't wearing myself out.

I did get pretty f.

Ragged there for a bit, trying to meet basically a book a month is

what I was trying to complete.

That's tough.

Holy smokes.

Yeah, I was too.

It was too much.

And even though I had a slight head start when I started,

it's just too it was too much.

And I felt like the quality wasn't going to be there if I kept up that pace.

Because I wasn't, I got to the point where I wasn't enjoying it

quite as much, and that's gonna bleed through into the writing.

If you don't have a sense of wonder and a sense of how much you love what you're

writing that, that's gonna bleed through.

And the readers are gonna pick up on it.

And I just, I didn't want that to happen at all.

So even though I'm still putting out a lot of books pretty quickly, I've slowed

down enough to make sure that what I'm, that I'm very satisfied with the quality

that those, So where can everybody?

Get your books pretty much any digitally, pretty much

anywhere you download eBooks.

Actually, let me correct myself there.

I am, I'm Amazon exclusive at the moment you can get the eBooks on Amazon.

You can get the paperbacks through Amazon.

If you're a Kindle Unlimited reader, you can read 'em all for free on Amazon.

And you can get all those links and see the books that I've got

out of the different series on my website, which is frank ferro.com.

If you're not sure where to start I did put something on the sidebar there that

if you like the police procedurals, try these series if you like, hard boil.

Okay.

Try these.

If you like PI novels, try these because everybody has their

own flavor that they prefer.

Exactly.

I would agree.

Most interesting.

I learned quite a bit from this little conversation we had.

Our path might have crossed or I might have read something that

you put out and you might have read something that I put out.

I'm sure it had marking on it at one time.

So that's great, Frank.

I appreciate again, your service.

Thank you very much.

Double service.

So thank you very much and both check out his books.

If you are into the the police for pi, for those perspective, check it out.

He's gotta have something for you.

And if to start, you start at the beginning, but eventually you'll

wanna start where the whole crus of this thing started from.

So thank you very much.

I appreciate you taking the time today.

Thanks for having me.

I really do appreciate it.

Thank you.

Thanks Frank.