Nate Granzow is a professional magazine editor by day, a novelist by night. He’s also a husband, father, avid outdoorsman, woodworker, leatherworker, and competitive shooter.
Always in love with writing, Nate graduated from Drake University with degrees in English writing and magazine journalism. His work has been published in over ten professional publications to date, and he currently works as a magazine editor in Des Moines, Iowa.
Nate Granzow
His debut novel, The Scorpion’s Nest, was selected as one of 1,000 finalists in Amazon’s Breakthrough Novel Awards 2012, and was ranked first in the Mystery/Suspense/Thriller category at the IndieReader Discovery Awards 2012. His sophomore work, Cogar’s Despair, reached top 100 bestseller status in Amazon’s “Men’s Adventure” category. It was followed by Cogar’s Revolt — a Top 3 finalist in the Clive Cussler Collector’s Society’s 2014 Adventure Writer’s Competition.
I interrupted Nate’s work on two more novels — the next entry in the Grant Cogar series, and the debut novel of a new series — and he graciously took some time to reply to my interview questions.
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The Vigilante Author: Nate, thanks for introducing yourself and your work to my readers. Tell us a little about your novels, and please focus a bit on the latest.
Nate Granzow: Thanks, Robert! I currently have a running series starring a vulgar, boozing, womanizing war correspondent — Grant Cogar — and I have written two stand-alone novels in addition to the two from that series. My most recent release is a novel titled Hekura — a jungle exploration/science-gone-wrong thriller in the vein of James Rollins’ or Michael Crichton’s work.
The Vigilante Author: Cogar is definitely a departure from the kind of heroes usually spotlighted here. In fact, I find your stories tricky to categorize. How would you describe them?
Nate Granzow: I write what I find exciting as a reader. I’ve tried my hand at historical fiction, science fiction, travel adventure, and I’m even working on an archeological thriller now. I suppose they could all be loosely corralled under the title “adventure,” but they’re very diverse. I write and edit for a living, but much of that work is technical in nature. This is my creative outlet. I try to challenge myself regularly, and explore and expand my writing skills with unique projects.
The Vigilante Author: What did you have in mind in creating as unusual a protagonist as Grant Cogar? Did something or someone inspire you to create the character?
Nate Granzow: The idea for a fallible antihero like Grant Cogar came to me after reading George MacDonald Fraser’s “Flashman” series. The protagonist, Sir Harry Flashman, is an illustrious Victorian soldier in the British Army and is a complete lout, both ignoble and, in many ways, utterly contemptible. Yet he’s wildly entertaining, and by the end of each novel, despite Flashy’s displayed cowardice and lascivious behavior, the readers find themselves cheering him on. I thought I’d reinvent that same concept in a war correspondent, since journalism is something with which I’m intimately familiar.
In many ways, though, Cogar has surpassed a mere comical exploration in character development. Cogar is my doppelganger — the yin to my yang. The man I might have been if my life had taken on a different direction — no wife, kids, or nine-to-five job. And that makes him really fun for me to write. The depth of character I’ve been able to achieve with him, particularly in forthcoming works, regularly surprises me.
The Vigilante Author: So, Nate, what life path did you follow that led you to write fiction?
Among other things, Nate Granzow is a competitive marksman
Nate Granzow: I was born to humble parents on the barren, snowy plains of Minnesota. Long, long winters there. I spent a lot of time reading, and the natural segue is to go from reader to writer. Of course, even as a young man I knew that you had to make money to survive, and I figured even then that writing fiction wasn’t the way to make it. So I turned to journalism. My favorite character in my favorite book, Gideon Spillett in Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island, was a war correspondent, and he left a lasting impression on me. I wanted to be a man of action. I wanted to write. Journalism sounded like the right fit.
I continued writing fiction, mostly short stories and poems, just for giggles. It wasn’t until my junior year of college, when I took an English class on writing novellas, that I started down this road as a novelist. It began as a personal challenge to write a novel. Then, I realized that I’d been wrong all these years about the viability of writing novels for a living. There’s really never been a better time to be a self-published author than right at this moment.
The Vigilante Author: As someone who also migrated from nonfiction and journalism into writing fiction, I can relate to a lot of your career path. And I also agree with you that there’s never been a better time to be an indie author. But we writers all face challenges. What are some of yours?
Nate Granzow: Finding the time to balance my work and home life, while still eking out a few minutes to write my novels each day, can be really tough. Fortunately, I have an understanding and supportive wife and daughter. I’ve also found writing early in the morning, before anyone else in the house is up (and preferably before the sun comes up), is when I’m most productive.
The Vigilante Author: When I write fiction, I wear my convictions on my sleeve, so to speak. Do your stories present your philosophical or political views, or do you try to mask them?
Nate Granzow: I try not to be blatantly political in my work, but I do want readers to feel as though my work is substantive and thought provoking. The first Cogar book, Cogar’s Despair, takes place in Korea during Kim Jong Un’s transition to power. The country was on the brink of war, teetering on the reactions of the South Koreans, and I did my best to capture the essence of the tension and the sense of we’ve-been-here-before futility held by many during that time. There was even a scene where Cogar interviews a North Korean woman who had escaped from the DPRK labor camps. Heavy stuff.
In the second book, Cogar’s Revolt, Cogar finds himself in Cairo, Egypt, during the Arab Spring uprising. For research, I spoke at length with a young woman who was there during those uprisings. I quickly learned of the frustration and anxiety experienced by the people living there at that time, and of their unity and resilience — joining together to call for a dictator who had wronged them to step down.
I feel that such powerful themes come with a responsibility on the part of the writer to properly translate or convey their importance in their writing. I hope I did it successfully.
The Vigilante Author: I’m a meticulous planner and outliner when I write fiction. More so than most authors. What about you, Nate? Outliner or seat-of-the-pantser?
Nate Granzow: I began my writing career as a bit of a “pantster,” with only a ballpark idea of what the novel would be about, but my style has since evolved. I’ve found that meticulously plotting produces a much better product and actually frees me to be more creative, since I don’t have to worry about the “bones” of the story coming together.
The Vigilante Author: Yep, I feel the same way. Now let’s pretend that the NSA planted a hidden video camera in your office. What would they see?
Nate Granzow: They’d probably see a man hunched over a wood desk too large for the room it’s in, a kitschy coffee mug emblazoned with a cat batting a ball of yarn in one hand, fingers of the other kneading the bridge of his nose. Sometimes, he sets the coffee down and taps his laptop’s keyboard for a while. After years of this, he releases a novel.
The Vigilante Author: Strange profession, isn’t it? Lots of people think it takes a special kind of person to write professionally. What qualities of character do you think are most important for an author to succeed?
Nate Granzow: Perseverance and tenacity, hands down. In the few years I’ve been writing books, I’ve met many new authors who released their first book expecting it to be an instant chart-topper, and they were so utterly crushed when it didn’t, they quit. The number of authors who have been wildly successful with their debut work is miniscule — Robert, you’re the exception, not the rule —
The Vigilante Author: I’ve been damned lucky, for sure.
Nate Granzow: — but that’s not to say that one can’t still enjoy a very lucrative career in novel writing by staying the course. I look at it like fishing: Each book you write is one more line in the water. Eventually, you’re going to land that lunker, so long as you don’t pack up and go home before the fish start biting.
The Vigilante Author: What can readers expect from you in the future?
Nate Granzow: Cogar will return, this time in the midst of the Syrian Civil War, in the third book in the series — Cogar’s Crusade. That novel, more than any I’ve written, has been a slow grind. This one sees our typically lighthearted, witty protagonist at his most mortal. It’s a darker read and more profound, I think, than either of the other two books in the series.
Simultaneously, I’m working on my first entry into a new series: an archeological thriller titled The Phaistos Paragon. The protagonist is a counter–Indiana Jones: Instead of artifacts “belonging in a museum,” Lane Bradley believes that precious relics held by museums in war-torn areas would be safer in the hands of wealthy private collectors in established, peaceful countries. Research for how best to bypass contemporary security systems has probably put me on at least a dozen government watch lists.
The Vigilante Author: Yeah. When I was researching online for BAD DEEDS, I visited sites specializing in improvised bombs, private “drones,” computer hacking, planting “bugs” in offices — the sorts of naughty things that might provoke a visit from the FBI.
Anyway, Nate, I’m sure that you’ve intrigued my readers sufficiently to check out your work and follow you online. How can they do that?
Nate Granzow: All my books can be found on Amazon in both print and digital formats, and readers should always feel free to connect with me on Facebook and Twitter. I’d also encourage them to sign up for my (very occasional) newsletter updates at my website.
The Vigilante Author: Which I definitely encourage them to do. Best wishes to you on your writing and publishing adventures, Nate.
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Photo (c) by Debbie Scott
