Author Interview With Allen Renfro

I write what I call Dark Fiction, I love the dark side of life and that ranges from the supernatural to psychological thrillers.

Opinionated, unabashed, driven and loves to push people’s buttons.  He is hopelessly devoted to friends and loved ones and is fun to be around. Controversy could be his middle name.

Yes, I work for a Fortune 500 company.

I think as soon as I learned how to write the alphabet and understand words I wanted to put them together to tell stories. I believe there are many stories to tell and I’ve been rewarded with the talent and determination to be a person who tells some of them.  I do think that my motivation has evolved. I have an incredible drive to be creative with words and that drive is more to express myself. I am lucky that other people find what I have to say entertaining and worth reading.

I gave up writing after a failed relationship.  Biggest mistake of my life.

I do read books on a Kindle but in my home office my bookshelves are filled with books. There’s something about a physical book that adds warmth to a room. I think ebooks are absolutely the path the publishing world is taking but I don’t think physical books will ever go away. If I really love a book that I’ve read on my Kindle I will get a physical copy of it.

I am an indie author. As a writer my ultimate goal and reward is having people read my work and enjoying it and provoking thought, money is not a factor in why I write. The traditional route definitely offers a writer the opportunity to share one’s work with more people through greater exposure but the wait could be years in finding a publisher. Call me impatient. I didn’t want to wait years to share my novels.

Snap is a very dark story about revenge. I wanted to delve into the conflict that families have with religion and sexuality and of course being a fiction write take that to the extreme. The “villain” in Snap called Killer Ghost is obviously a killer and an arsonist. As the story evolves through the eyes of a young hustler named Danny we learn there are many layers to the “villain” and the reader ends up actually cheering for him.  It’s an examination of what happens when a good person is pushed to the breaking point and the result of that. I like taking someone who on the surface would be considered evil and unraveling the mystery around him. I’m not attempting to justify murder or arson but show that even good people if pushed could do evil things.  I want to show why he does those evil things and make the reader wonder what they would do if in the same situation.

For me it’s developing my characters and watching them come to life in whatever ways that are possible like giving them depth or making them shallow. I love character driven stories and I love when my characters become so vivid that they create the story for me.

Currently I’m working on the sequel to my first novel The Raised called The Falling.

I’m a people watcher and a history buff. I absorb information from as many sources as I can. I think just being in the world inspires me.  I listen to music when I am writing and the music always reflects the mood of the story. I love all genres of music and yes I do have what you could call a writing cave.  It is the only place I write though I take notes and jot down lines everywhere I am when the inspiration hits me.

I’m fascinated by Young Adult Fiction because it is so popular.  There is an innocence to teenagers, an eagerness to discover the world and that curiosity could lead to some very interesting stories to write.

Absolutely not.  I think all you need is a love of writing. It doesn’t matter if you ever share your work with anyone else or ever are published. It is creative expression and it’s a joy just to be able to do that.

Anne Rice is my favorite author. I can read the entire series of The Vampire Chronicles over and over again. Her attention to detail amazes me. The lush descriptions she offers gives her stories and her characters such depth it’s hard to deny their appeal.  I love so many books it would be hard to pick just one. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein would be on my list as would Anne Rice’s Queen of the Damned and as a teenager S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders which to this day I will read once a year.