Guest Post: Mike Meyer

Today, I’m honored to have as a guest poster, author Mike Meyer.

Author bio:

I have resided in and have visited many places in the world, all of which have contributed in some way to my own published writing. I have literally traveled throughout the world, on numerous occasions. I have lived in Finland, Germany, Thailand, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Saudi Arabia, where COVERT DREAMS is set. I gained the wanderlust to see the world, to experience other cultures, at an early age, and this desire has never left me. If anything, it has only gained in intensity as I have aged. I try to travel internationally at least once a year. In the interim, I spend lots of time traveling around both my home state of California and other nearby states.

I spent my early years in the small town of Lone Pine, California, the home of almost every western movie, in addition to a wide variety of other genres, made in the 30’s, 40’s, 50’s, and 60’s. In fact, Hollywood still films parts of big-time movies there today. My dad, the town’s lifeguard at the time, personally knew John Wayne, Lloyd Bridges, and Lee Marvin, all of whom came to the town’s pool, the Memorial Plunge, at times to cool off after a hectic day of working in the sun. I was even an extra in a movie filmed there in 1957, MONOLITH MONSTERS, a B-cult favorite even today. I was ten years old at the time. Even though I resided in a small town hours from the big city, I was exposed to the excitement of action and heroes at a formative age, and, thus, my interest in writing novels of suspense such as COVERT DREAMS was born.

As a recent retiree from a forty-year career as a professor of writing, I now live in Southern California wine country with my wife, Kitty, and our two other cats.

I have been asked many times in my life what inspires me as a writer. I am a keen observer of people, for one thing. I can sit on a barstool and easily converse with a person who might diametrically oppose everything that I believe politically or religiously, and yet we can get along. We can communicate. I know how to listen, and I pick my words carefully. I enjoy seeing how people interact with others, how they cope with what life deals them. Bits and pieces of what I have observed and heard appear in both the dialogue and scenes that I have created.

I have always been fascinated by the human brain. I like to try to reconstruct what must have been going through a person’s mind at the moment of some great tragedy or some wonderfully unexpected event. What must have General Custer been thinking the very second he saw his own death? What went through Captain Smith’s mind the second he realized that his Titanic was doomed? I like to imagine shouting out to historical figures way before tragedy strikes and tell them, “No, don’t forge ahead! No, don’t ignore the ice warnings!” The very act of creating people and being in complete charge of their thinking processes, and then putting them into a situation where they must act—this sort of thing appeals greatly to me, and, thus, I am a writer. The characters and events in my international thriller COVERT DREAMS are people and situations that I have created, and yet they seem so real to life to me. Even now, when I reread my own work, I find myself judging their actions, and empathizing with their plights.

I enjoy being alive. I am inspired when I see a small dog born with only three legs, hobbling around and having the time of his life. I am inspired when I see a small plant sticking its head out of a crack in a boulder, when I see a small ant carrying twice its weight to who knows where. Inspiration is all around us. And when I see evil, or hear of it, I am inspired in another way: I would like to destroy it. Often my imagination is the only way to do so, and that brings me to my own need to write.
COVERT DREAMS is filled with characters, both good and evil, who inspired me in one way or the other as I created them. Some of them I greatly empathize with, while others I detest, the way of the world. And that is precisely what COVERT DREAMS is: a worldly novel, an international thriller whose birth came about through my own inspiration.