The Nautilus Studio M31 Files interview mystery writer Mark Stevens

Studio owners Yves LF Giraud (Studio M31) and Mr Bill (Nautilus Studio) interview mystery writer Mark Stevens (part 1).

Find more about Mark Stevens here:

https://www.writermarkstevens.com/

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:28

Hey, this is another wild adventure of the Nautilus Studios M31 Files. And today we have with us singer, songwriter, author, Mark Stevens. And we're going to learn a little more about Mark today. And he's a bass player, and man, he's in the right group here. We we're bass players. That's right. So yeah, let's uh let the interrogation begin.

SPEAKER_01 1:01

Songwriter is the one credit I'm gonna take off because I wish I could write songs. I've never done I've put some lyrics together like occasionally, but they always seem so corny. I have no idea. But you know, I know I know. I'm fascinated by people who get, you know, write a lyric and then put it to a melody because I just don't well that that's a different game.

SPEAKER_03 1:24

Uh at least the lyrics, I would think you would write something, I'd be pretty clever.

SPEAKER_01 1:30

I I want to put I challenge myself and write some lyrics, I really do. Yeah, but I just haven't done it. Hey, you know you can do everything.

SPEAKER_02 1:38

We're still young. That's right. It's all relative. We got a year or two left to before we're shaking hands with the man.

SPEAKER_03 1:49

So uh to go back a little bit on who actually uh we brought you as, which is a writer, which is I'm I'm so in awe with that because I I wrote a book and I'm terrible. I mean, you know, it's my first language on top of it. So anyway, so I want to know um before we actually start talking about you as a writer, uh, where are you from?

SPEAKER_01 2:16

I grew up outside Boston. Okay in uh the suburbs of Boston. Nice, beautiful, upper middle class you know, town. Really nice. I had my parents were both librarians, you can imagine that. But both on the kind of like uh heady educational end. They were both had their masters in library science. My father worked there was a master in library.

SPEAKER_03 2:38

Library science. Yeah. The Dewey decimal decimal system.

SPEAKER_01 2:43

Where does that decimal go? Actually, my father, my father was in like the 60s. He was working at MIT in a thing called Project Intrex, information transfer experiments. And they were trying to get computers to send information from one computer, imagine this, to another computer in the 60s. Yeah, yeah. And so they they were working at a really kind of high level micro.

SPEAKER_03 3:09

Well, MIT, I mean, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's pretty much as high as you can.

SPEAKER_02 3:13

So that was with Fortran and C Tran and Card Card. It was, it was. And they were trying to communicate?

SPEAKER_01 3:25

They did actually because he ended up building uh library networks across the southeast, connecting libraries from Florida all the way up through Ohio. He was based in Atlanta for a while, this can uh network called Solonet, which was Southern Library Network.

SPEAKER_03 3:41

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 3:41

So and that was in the late 70s. I mean 15 years before the internet really started. Yeah. And I'm not saying he foresaw the building blocks. Yeah. So that's amazing. I grew up in this very I mean, I would wish this on anybody to be raised in a house with intellectually curious parents. You did wouldn't wish that on anybody. I would wish that on anybody. I thought you said why not? I would wish that on anybody to rape be raised in a house where ideas were just good, you know, just discussion, and you'd sit at dinner and talk about interesting things and the latest book you've read or something like that. I mean, they were they weren't like this is the way the world works.

SPEAKER_03 4:30

The kind of people and uh did that inspire you at all in terms of wanting to go a bit more towards like your dad's science, your mom, uh what it what it gave me was the reading bug.

SPEAKER_01 4:44

The reading bug the reading bug. My I think my I had two old one older brother, one younger brother. I was in the middle. I think I was the one that really got the reading bug.

SPEAKER_03 4:54

Um really young really early on.

SPEAKER_01 4:57

Okay. Really early on, just would voracious reader. Love going to my school library, love going to the town library, all of that. Wow. And just getting it. You were the smart guy. Everybody was looking over your shoulder that what you're No I was still getting C's. Oh really. Believe me, I was a C student all the way through high school. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 5:18

Was there music going on in your household?

SPEAKER_01 5:21

There was in my, you know, so my older brother and I, um, we've already discussed our age, so we won't go into that. But I was nine when the Beatles hit, and we were just Beatle freaks. That was it. We were Rolling Stones freaks, we were into the Who. We would we we'd go on the weekends to buy records, we'd come home and just sit in my rooms. I mean, he had a record player, I had a record player. We'd which room do you want to change things? We just yeah, yeah. And we we had the music cranked all the time, and often doing air guitar, you know, playing along with the case.

SPEAKER_02 5:56

That's what got me started. I uh felt the uh what an audience can do to get you high is uh the uh uh introduction to the show Bonanza was down and land off and I used to get through the TV and do my air guitar, and everyone would crack up and I he's pretty cool. I'm funny, I'm a funny guy. They're looking at meanza, you know. So that then I worked on surf music pipeline after that.

SPEAKER_01 6:24

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, my older brother liked the beach boys a bit more than me, uh-huh. So it was kind of like so I was more of a stones guy. We both love the Beatles, we both love the Who, but he was more Beach Boys, although of course I came around totally appreciated and Jan and Dean.

SPEAKER_02 6:41

And the English invasion, though, was I mean, went so far the animals mean animals. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_03 6:50

Yeah, some some other people came out at a time that was. Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 6:54

No, I was really just swept up in all that. That was and I haven't stopped. You know, I mean, I going right through um I love the punk era, I love the new wave era, I love the grunge era, I love all the independent music today. I mean, I just I just I loved rap. I have a huge, huge rap collection, huge reggae collection. Love reggae, yeah. Love rap. I have I can't say I follow hip hop today, but there was about 15-20 years of just really consuming a ton of open-minded kids. I know, right?

SPEAKER_02 7:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 7:33

I remember one time going to uh on a vacation and just transcribing Eric B. and Rakim, you know, one of their early albums, just transcribing the lyrics before you could get the lyrics and just like being amazed.

SPEAKER_03 7:45

True an album. Yeah, yeah. Oh, transfer you had them on the album.

SPEAKER_01 7:49

No, I'd write them down because there was no place you could get them. You had to go back and forth and back and forth.

SPEAKER_02 7:55

Yeah. It was like that the f you remember the first James Taylor album that opened up uh in uh um Fire Great. Yeah, Peter Peter Asher was the co-guy, and they were doing all this uh symphony music in between songs that would morph into the other. Well, they had the lyrics on that album, and they a lot of them weren't right, and I had every correction from the very all through that. I mean, I knew that album back and forth. That's great.

SPEAKER_03 8:25

So on the album they didn't put the right lyrics?

SPEAKER_02 8:27

They didn't put the right lyrics. I had I yeah.

SPEAKER_03 8:29

They probably were not quite involved in the colour.

SPEAKER_02 8:31

Yeah, you know, it's like James Taylor, you know, it probably wrote these things, and when he went to sing them, and yeah, and and who's gonna tell him that that was wrong, James.

SPEAKER_03 8:41

Well, you're you wrote it this way. Sometimes they decide a last second in the studio, you know, they keep singing that line. They're like, you know, oh, why don't I change that for the thing? But he had already written the album thing maybe weeks ago.

SPEAKER_02 8:55

But it had a lot of editing in it, yeah. I wish I still had that original album because you're probably the only one who paid that close attention.

SPEAKER_01 9:02

Oh man, I did.

SPEAKER_02 9:02

I just uh I flipped out. I in fact I had a friend that was going to Harvard uh uh from San Diego. We were uh doubles partners in San Diego uh tennis, and uh he was one year ahead of me, and he called me up and he said, You gotta check out this guy. He's got a brother Livingston, but he's playing out here, and he says, You gotta check him out. He is gonna take the country by storm. And that was before the album was even available. So as soon as it came out, I grabbed and go, Whoa. Yeah, you know, this is James Taylor. James Taylor's first album, which to me was just jumps everything up. It had everything, you know. I mean, uh, you know, I I need to listen to it.

SPEAKER_03 9:47

Oh, yeah, it's good. I know you've listened to just about anything that you possibly find.

SPEAKER_01 9:52

I think it's amazing that James Taylor's still here we are in 2026.

SPEAKER_03 9:56

Still named. That's so cool. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 9:59

Incredible.

SPEAKER_03 10:00

Yeah, yeah. So ri uh writing. Um so you said you got an interest in reading. Huge interest from your parents. Yeah. In a way, being exposed. Was there a style of of of writing that you you you were drawn to at that time? Well.

SPEAKER_01 10:17

Yeah, I I really didn't see myself as a writer for quite a while. What I what I knew I wanted to do was be a reporter. I was uh for some reason I was in middle school, high school. I loved consuming the news. I loved reading the newspaper. My mother would bring it home from downtown Boston where she worked, and I'd grab the Boston Evening Globe and just sit on the couch and read it. Talk about a nerd. And I'd go I'd go watch Huntley Brinkley on the TV, you know. And I really I just wanted to be a reporter. I thought that would be so cool.

SPEAKER_04 10:50

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 10:50

So I really focused on So you studied that?

SPEAKER_04 10:52

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 10:53

Yeah. I worked on my high school paper, I worked on my college newspaper, I had a really good job in journalism right out of college, and you know, I really was focusing all my writing on that kind of stuff. And then in the early 1980s, a friend handed me a mystery novel. I never read any crime fiction, you know, detective fiction, you know, that kind of darker stuff. And uh I just I went, wow, this is amazing. I love the whole format and genre of it, the whole the fact that crime fiction, when you get into it, there's all these different characters and types of detectives, or sometimes there's no actual detecting going on. It's just a story about a warped person who makes some bad decisions and gets in all these um gets in all these weird situations and has to get out of it. Usually there's a murder and you know, some some Well in your books usually there is so then I when I s discovered you know that genre, I thought I wonder how hard it is to write a a a novel.

SPEAKER_03 11:57

Did you have a um so you you studied writing, right? In school? I studied English. And write about the heavy books like Conrad or Hemingway or Did you did you did you feel you had learned things that were applicable to to understanding how a fictional book is constructed? No. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 12:22

Because I think reading reading big heavy books and then trying to write an essay about it is a whole different thing than than saying, okay, I'm gonna tell you a story, but I'm gonna put it on a paper. I'm gonna put it on paper.

SPEAKER_04 12:35

Right.

SPEAKER_01 12:36

And I'm gonna write it down, and then I'm gonna it's gonna be this long and I'm gonna go find a publisher. That's a whole different um it's a whole different mentality, exactly, than trying to analyze a book and trying to make some juicy points out of some and trying to impress a professor and to how show them how closely you read a book.

SPEAKER_03 12:57

So most of your studying uh ended up being that.

SPEAKER_01 13:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 13:00

And now uh so how old were you when you when you you said it was in the nineties, right?

SPEAKER_01 13:05

I started wr writing in the early nineteen eighties, but I didn't get published till two thousand and seven. So it took twenty-three years to get away.

SPEAKER_03 13:12

Well now, did you have developed uh a a specific uh series already or or at that time or not? No.

SPEAKER_01 13:20

So I it was kind of um lucky, I guess is the only way to say it, because I had written four complete books. I had really good agents in New York for all four. And then finally the third book in the fourth I four I'd written got picked up by a small publisher in um the Boulder area and that came out in two thousand seven and it did well enough that people said turn this what I thought was a standalone novel, turned it into a series. Yeah, and it's a kind of a long, you know, it's not a very interesting story, but it ended up being five books with three different publishers and that's just you know, just it's very difficult business in a lot of ways because companies close and but that all led to just getting a r another really good agent in New York and then the sort of second phase of my career has been in the last ten years or so.

SPEAKER_03 14:17

So yeah, and you've been super successful. I mean how many books have you written?

SPEAKER_01 14:22

So I've got eight books, eight books out, and I've got a few in the bullpen, I guess I'd say, they're in my back pocket um that are ready to go as far as I'm concerned, and my agent is trying to find a home for, and so and uh if you don't mind.

SPEAKER_03 14:38

Yeah, yeah. Just going back to your agent in New York originally, um so even with an agent in New York having a hands on four books, not just one, but being a in in and eventually she got a small publishing company in the boulder. Well Colorado.

SPEAKER_01 14:59

I actually so the the first published first agent I had uh still there, this was 1989.

SPEAKER_04 15:06

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 15:07

Uh that that agent is still a major agency in New York. They tried to sell that book and they dropped me. Second agent, second agent I got, second book, different book, uh was actually John Grisham's agent, you know, at the time. Yeah, pretty good guy. You know, I thought and I thought I was set. John Grisham's agent is gonna sell my new mystery novel. I mean, I thought I was set. They couldn't sell it and they dropped me. Third agent in New York still exists to this day, great agency, represents some big time authors. Uh we worked together for a year, actually, more like a year and a half, making the book as good as it could be. We went out to the editors, got turned down, we made some more changes to the book based on their feedback. The agent took it back out. Well, he said he was gonna take it back out, and then I got a letter in the mail saying we're done, goodbye, good luck. Just after a year and a half of work together.

SPEAKER_02 16:01

Yeah, and you had all the hope.

SPEAKER_03 16:04

That's the it's that yo-yo that they did with you. Right. It's so tough.

SPEAKER_01 16:08

So then I wrote the fourth book and couldn't get an agent for that. And I thought, well, this isn't going that great. But then I just met through Networks a guy who was starting a publishing company outside Boulder. So he was a small company, I think he ended up publishing like six different authors, and then he ran for about five or six years, and then he folded his tent and closed down. But by then, people were asking for the second book in that series, which was about a female hunting guide in uh the flattops wilderness, which is in Colorado.

SPEAKER_02 16:41

I I would uh I want to I want that. Okay, well, I have five of them. Yeah, it's a series. Yeah. What is the name Allison Coyle? Yeah, that's the character or the title. Character. Character. What's the title?

SPEAKER_01 16:54

Each book has Yeah, Antler Dust, Buried by the Roan, Trapline, Lake of Fire, and uh the Melancholy Howl. And Lake of Fire, of course, after the Nirvana well, it was actually a Meat Puppet song. It inspired that title. Yeah. I actually had to write the Meat Puppets to get permission to quote their lyrics. Oh no. Yeah, okay.

SPEAKER_03 17:14

Well, at least you did. Right. Yeah, I want to ask you some things, so because I don't want to forget this. So, um from from your first agent to the point where you started getting actually published and and things started taking off, whichever way that they did.

SPEAKER_02 17:30

Right.

SPEAKER_03 17:31

Did you feel you were learning something about what to do on your next book or how to arrange them? Or what was the feedback?

SPEAKER_01 17:41

Okay, there's an amazing paradox. Absolutely. I I learned so much. I learned so much. I really started learning a lot when I joined writing groups, which you could almost put a chart together. Like here's here's sad little Mark writing his books by himself and getting good agents, but he's all by himself. And he thinks he's gonna be a world famous author someday, but he's nobody. Then he joins writing groups and really everything just sort of blossomed, and I just had friends and people advocating for me. What's ironic and the and the paradox of all this is if those early books had gotten published, I would have been trash. They were so bad. Looking back, I learned so much about how to make them. I they were okay, but I'm so glad I I would I'd have one star on online for all those books. They would be wow because I can look back and see how much I learned.

SPEAKER_03 18:37

But yet you did get agents. I don't think they would even pick you up. It was close. It was close.

SPEAKER_01 18:43

It was just like C plus B minus. Right, right. When you say they were they were they were not that bad. They were they were okay. Yeah, they were okay with that. But you cringe when you go back and look at it. Cringe. So it's you know, it's time if I could tell myself I could feel a song. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Just be patient, you know, and and but anyway, having friends and joining writing groups is the key to building your network and having people look at your stuff or listen to a song, give you some, you know, feedback and say that doesn't work for me, this section is it boring, take out all this stuff, and you know, so yeah, I I've read a few Stephen King books recently, uh and I hadn't read anything uh forty years ago, the stand, you know.

SPEAKER_02 19:32

Right, but uh I read him and I I thought, man, you know, I'm not that impressed to tell you the truth. Uh I'm looking at a lot of stuff and I'm going, you know, I just uh I I didn't think it was up there. I thought it was kind of in here, you know.

SPEAKER_01 19:52

Yeah, his his um word by word stuff is kind of flat. Yeah. But his ability to draw you into a story. Yeah, yeah. Um, you know, I I love some of his short stories where he's really just dialed in and really excited.

SPEAKER_02 20:06

That's probably what I would enjoy more, but I was reading the the series there of the gunslinger and stuff. Dark tower. Yeah, Dark Tower. Yep. And uh yeah, some of it I'm just going, that's pretty weak, you know. Uh you know, let's move you know, let's get going, you know. But anyway, that's that's me just as a reader, you know.

SPEAKER_01 20:26

Hopefully, speedback gets back to him so he can change what he's doing. Steve Yeah, well, we'll see. Steven, yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 20:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 20:33

You might make might make some money if you listen. Yeah, you know, that's uh we're gonna help you. No, that's for me, it's too go, you know, it's not my kind of thing. I I I like I love uh mystery and and and science, and I love when it it has a little bit of sense, you know, when it gets to the point where it's like magical and the cause killing people, I'm like, okay, uh this is this is too much for me. It's like yeah, paranormal is not but and and especially when it's shocking, you know, like people getting uh uh brutally murdered, you know, not my thing. Yeah, but um going back to you, uh because really that that is. So um I when I looked at um, you know, as I as I mentioned, uh sadly I wrote a book because I wanted to do it once, you know. But I went online because I know absolutely nothing, and I found out a few do's and don'ts that seem to be across a lot of people that apparently are are you know professional people that are successful and they can give you some advice and you do whatever. And did you do that at all if ever?

SPEAKER_01 21:51

Oh yeah. Okay. Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_03 21:53

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 21:53

Oh yeah, and do you I don't know a writer who doesn't consume all that kind of advice. And guidance. It's the thing is it's endless. There's no shortage of advice about what to do.

SPEAKER_03 22:07

And I've seen some that contradictory, which is like okay, what the there is no it's an art.

SPEAKER_01 22:17

There there are formulas, there are people who think they know the right way to do it. I think the more um didactic and kind of the more emphatic they are, like this is how you do it, the chances are they're wrong.

SPEAKER_03 22:32

Yeah, yeah. You know, there's nothing is black and white.

SPEAKER_01 22:35

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was talking to somebody this week and she said, Um, I was told that I can't, if I write two pages of fiction, I can't go back and edit. I have to keep writing to the end. I said, Absolutely not. You can go back and edit. She said, No, my instructor said I've got to keep going.

SPEAKER_03 22:52

A flow thing. You want a flow thing.

SPEAKER_01 22:53

I said, Do what's right.

SPEAKER_03 22:54

When you read, to me, sometimes it helps you with a flower.

SPEAKER_01 22:58

Yeah, exactly. And I I said, that's exactly what I do. So if it works for me, why wouldn't it work for you? Just you need to get comfortable with your own style. And everybody says, What's your process? You know, when do you write? How what machine, or do you write by hand? Uh how many words a day? Do you need quiet? Do you need coffee? Do you need alcohol? Whatever it might be. It's like, I mean, you know, it it what it matters is you sit down and put some words together. It doesn't everything else doesn't matter.

SPEAKER_02 23:29

You just gotta initiate it. You gotta get it rolling, huh?

SPEAKER_01 23:33

If it's up here, how can I read it? Yeah, you need to put it in a form.

SPEAKER_03 23:38

Yeah. Uh well how did you how did you get to uh that first the the the book that became a series?

SPEAKER_04 23:45

Right.

SPEAKER_03 23:46

Um when you wrote that book you said you didn't see it as a series, it was just another book. Right, right.

SPEAKER_01 23:52

Right.

SPEAKER_03 23:53

What what how do how did you see how did you come up with the ideas basically? I guess that's what I'm coming at. Yeah, like how did you okay, uh series, okay. How well what do I do next?

SPEAKER_01 24:04

Yeah, yeah. Well, I guess I was somewhat fortunate because um just a little bit about the main character in the series. She's an outsider, she's she is a hunting guide in the flat tops, but she survived a commercial airplane crash. So she's there healing from you know her trauma mentally and physically, and she becomes a hunting guide and she becomes very passionate about the outdoors. And in the first book, I had quite a few characters other than her that built around her, and there was a big story that kind of finishes at the end of book one, but I had enough other characters to keep in motion so I could just give them other storylines. Okay. And then because it's Colorado, because it's this beautiful wilderness area, the flat tops is north of Glenwood Springs, south of um Meeker, kind of rifle, all that Yamper. Skinny fish uh lake. There uh yeah, there's 140 lakes back in there. It's beautiful, beautiful. So you have all these environmental pressures on the area. So the second book looked at um the issue of fracking and all the drilling around there, which the Rhone Plateau has got all this drilling on it right next door. The third book looked at uh uh for-profit prisons and illegal immigration, which you'd think you couldn't do, but I found a way to do it, and that book actually won the Colorado Book Award for Best Mystery. Then Lake of Fire was about um forced fires, and uh just it actually had a whole subplot about uh characters who are anti-government and kind of um people who don't believe in government, they had that wholesome theme. And then the melancholy howl was about uh legalized marijuana.

SPEAKER_03 25:48

So you just you just took issues that were sort of happening and said, how can I bring them up into the you didn't just come up on another story for the character to to s to go through, you added elements of the area, right? Yeah, and each book addresses a different yeah, yeah, and it's really cool.

SPEAKER_01 26:09

And then there's changing relationships among all the subcharacters, and so like one there's a reporter in Glenwood Springs who kind of has it has uh thromantic interest in Alison, but then that shifts to her best friend, Trudy, and so there's just sort of some you know. Well, you have to have it all human. I mean, yeah, yeah, yeah. Human uh soap operas. But yeah, those did well. I thought I would keep writing them, and then other things happen, which is fine.

SPEAKER_02 26:38

Well, you have some material brewing uh that's getting ready to happen here in the western United States. Don't you feel like you want to delve into that?

SPEAKER_01 26:49

Yeah, so there's I mean, uh the Flynn Martin series, which started just about a year ago, and now book two just came out last month. We're in May, yeah, it came out last month, and book three will be out next spring. In that series, that's all set in Denver. And that I can't change that, it's under contract. I've got to finish book three and get it out. Yeah. Now I'm in.

SPEAKER_03 27:11

And what what is the the subject of that series?

SPEAKER_01 27:14

So that series is about um it started with a book called No Lie Lasts Forever, came out last year. Okay and No Lie Lasts Forever is about a uh retired serial killer who he is, yeah, he's hiding in plain sight. Is he getting a pension? That's good. He's gonna rewrite the serial killer unit with my check.