Page Turning Books: A Day in the Life of Bob Mayer

A Day in the Life of Bob Mayer

Thanks for having me guest post on your blog. I appreciate the opportunity as my 51^st title, The Green Berets: Chasing the Lost is now out and #1 in Men’s Adventure, even though a woman is at the core of the story. Aren’t they always?

A Day in the Life of Bob Mayer

I wake up with my wife and two hairy yellow labs shoved in between us: Cool Gus and Sassy Becca. I can teach labs how to sleep very well. Which actually, isn’t that hard to do. I grab a cup of coffee, go downstairs and turn on the computer. I’d like to say I had the self-discipline to write a thousand words before checking email, but show me someone who really does that, and well, they’re weird.

Let me back up. First I take the dogs outside for their morning ritual (TMI?) and walk up the stone walkway to our mail box, which is a workout by itself, and get the NY Times. My wife will then read the entire paper. I mean the entire paper. She’s a walking font of useless information.

Until I need that information as she’s my “story whisperer”. She can ‘stream’ story to me when I need it. She also always has the remote control when we sit in bed in the evening and watch whatever it is she decides I need to watch. I’m much smarter because of that. For The Green Berets: Chasing The Lost, I had a really cool ending, which had a great twist. I was talking to her about the story one day, and she took that great twist and took it a step from awesome into totally wicked. Readers seem to agree so far from the reviews and emails I’m getting.

Anyway, I then bring up what I wrote the previous day and start there. I always have what I call a story grid; an excel spreadsheet. The first column is chapter #; then start page #; end page #; then location, time and date, and a brief summary of action in a scene. Thus each line is a scene. This is not an outline. It’s a summary of what I’ve written so far because I am terrible with details. I need that sheet to remind me what I wrote. My wife knows she can hide something from me in the fridge simply by putting it behind something else.

I split my time between writing, promotion, and running Cool Gus Publishing. I broke from NY Publishing in 2009, because I looked forward three years and saw the landscape being very different. And it is. I have over fifty titles now, and by publishing them through my own company, I do so much better than I ever did even when I was hitting the NY Times Bestsellers list. We also work with a handful of authors and are looking to sign two or three more (We’re publishing Jennifer Probst’s new series early in 2014) authors who have a following.

I work seven days a week and rarely take time off. I traveled all over the world when I was a Green Beret, so my traveling days are done and I’ve used up all of my adrenaline. I let my characters in my books use the adrenaline. In this book, Chasing the Lost, my hero from my first six Green Beret books, Dave Riley is now retired and living on Dafuskie Island (where Pat Control taught school) and my hero from Chasing the Ghost, Horace Chase, moves into a house on Hilton Head, one I actually lived in for a couple of years. The story has a woman at the center and works on the theme of how far should one be loyal?

It’s a great read, at least that’s what readers have been saying, with a hell of an ending that you won’t see coming, because I didn’t see it coming until my wife gave it to me.

Hope you enjoy and feel free to visit us at CoolGus.com