"A funny thing happened: as I was writing, my brain kept trying to rebel against the outline."

Author Nick Kolakowski on becoming a plotter, streamlining an overstuffed story, and his new crime novel, WHERE THE BONES LIE

Check out the collection of past Words With (Author) Friends, wherein I g-chat with an author and you get to read over my shoulder, and order Nick’s twisty new noir, available now.

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Me: Good morning, Nick!

Nick: Good morning! How's it going?

Pretty good over here! How about you?

Good! My day job has assigned me to build a customized AI bot, so I'm very rapidly learning how to converse with a machine.

That is...quite the assignment to give an author!

It is! I'm finding it's sort of like writing a recipe for a cookbook, only you need to tell the person following the recipe to also not set the kitchen on fire, pour a gallon of water into the Cuisinart, etc. The AI has zero context for anything, so you need to set pretty tight parameters on it. The interesting thing is, after working on this, I have less fear of AI gradually swallowing up creative jobs...

Well, that's reassuring, anyway! Although if you're teaching it to grow smarter by the hour..........

Let's not dwell on that, lol

Huge congrats on WHERE THE BONES LIE! How are you feeling post-launch?

I'm feeling pretty good! We had a nice rollout at Kew & Willow Books over the weekend, which is an awesome independent bookstore in Queens. It seems like folks are responding to the book well on Goodreads and all those other platforms. I had a bit of ambivalence about launching a book right now, when the world is clearly on fire and so many folks have much larger, weightier issues on their minds, but I'm hoping the book can give people a bit of entertainment amidst all the heaviness.

Yes! I get that. But people need escapism and want to cheer on an author they admire.

Can you share a little about the book?

Yes! WHERE THE BONES LIE follows Dash Fuller, a former Hollywood fixer who's a bit traumatized after cleaning up too many studio messes. When the book begins, he takes one last assignment from his former boss: tracking down a lunatic movie star who's disappeared. That assignment goes very badly, but it does put Dash in contact with Madeline Ironwood, a young woman who needs help with a very peculiar quest.

Madeline's father, Ken Ironwood, was a famous smuggler who rubbed shoulders with Hollywood's elite in the 1980s and 90s. He disappeared 20 years ago, and his bones were just discovered in a barrel in a dried-up lake north of Los Angeles. The cops don't seem to care much about the case, and Madeline's had no luck hiring a detective to help her, so she convinces Dash to drive north with her to figure out what happened to her Dad. Along the way, they encounter a whole bunch of bad folks and buried secrets.

So many fun elements rolled into one! Where'd the idea come from?