#AuthorInterview: Stanley Moss, Author of The Hacker series

Today I have with me for virtual coffee, a man of many talents and the author of The Hacker, Stanley Moss.

Stanley Moss
(b. 1948), is the author of The Hacker
and The Book of Deals. A brand guru,
philosopher, writer, and artist, he divides his time between Europe, India and
Southern California. He’s also CEO of The Medinge Group, the Stockholm-based think-tank
on international branding. He was a fine artist, sponsored by Absolut and
Johnnie Walker Black Label, and exhibited landscapes in the US State Department
Art in Embassies program.  His “New Wave
Cookbook” is in the permanent collection of the MoMANY. He is a faculty member
at Academia di Belle Arti Cignaroli of Verona, Italy; Travel Editor for Lucire, a New Zealand fashion magazine;
and served on the Board of the Rocket Mavericks Foundation.

Wow, totally mind boggling. 🙂

Welcome to Njkinny’s Blog Stanley!
I am so excited to have you here.
Lets start the interview. 🙂

Q1.
Tell me something about yourself.

I’m a native
Californian, born on the East side of Los Angeles in 1948.
I was educated in
public schools (in the USA this means government-funded) and graduated from the
University of California at Santa Barbara with a degree in Literature in 1972.
I worked in a bookshop as a boy, and I will always love the smell of real books
and real bookshops. I lived in New York City for 25 years, then in Portland
Oregon. For the last 10 years I have been traveling the world, and I have been
based in London, Paris, New Delhi and now Northern Italy. I get back to the USA
several times a year, but I consider the world my home. These days I do a lot
of writing for my work, which is international brand advising. I run a think-tank
about branding, headquartered in Stockholm. I tend to move around a lot. Since
I’m travel editor of Lucire, a
fashion magazine out of New Zealand, I also write a lot of travel articles.

The Hacker

Q2. In one sentence, what is your book The Hacker about?

The Hacker is an
exciting novel about youth culture, the collision of the old and new and the
meeting of East and West in today’s digital India.

Q3. How did you decide on writing about a story based in
India and what research did you do?

A friend of mine
in Delhi, who was at the time an executive at an Indian technology company,
called me up one day and said, “You ought to write a novel about a company like
ours.” Fortunately I was given access to a young firm he knew, who allowed me
to visit their offices, interview their people –from top to bottom- and spend a
lot of time on-site, learning how their business was done. I made 7 trips to
India, including visiting Infosys in Bangalore, and got a sense of the people
who are building the India of tomorrow.

Q4. What was the hardest part of writing The Hacker?

Writing the
words “The End”. I loved every minute of it and wished it wasn’t over!

Q5. Please share with us your one happy memory since
publishing The Hacker?

Holding a real
printed, bound book with my name on the cover, a book which had been issued by
a quality young publisher in India. My greatest hope had been to reach the
market under the best possible conditions, and these were them.

Q6. What are your views on the current IT industry in India?

Impressive, as
the record shows. I think the obstacles to growth are more from the government
side than in entrepreneurial culture. There seem to be real regulatory and
bureaucratic roadblocks like I write about in my book, which impede progress.
But the people and their skills are already world-class and India has nothing
to be ashamed about in terms of the quality of work presented in the global
arena.

Q7. How do you approach your writing? Is there a set pattern
to your writing?

I write whenever
time permits, and I work hard at it. I like the process and I revise rather
heavily. My schedule isn’t all that regular, since I am in contact with
multiple time zones, so very few patterns can occur. The only pattern may be
that I need a good block of hours to concentrate while I write. I do outline
and I spend a lot of time simply thinking about the story, telling it to myself
over and over again.

Q8. What steps did you take to get your work published?

Remember that I
have been writing for 40 years, and that the publishing model has changed
completely in that time. I tried in the old days to develop a relationship with
agents. I had a couple, but they didn’t help me to get much- perhaps because
the work was so hard for people to understand. I got a lot of rejection
letters. I labored anonymously for years, but never stopped writing. I am a
much better writer today than I was 40 years ago, so I think my output must be
of better quality. These days I have gone both routes, self-publishing, and
being published by commercial entities. It’s great to be validated by other
people, but when you self-publish you have total control and the royalties are
optimal.

Q9. What are your views on the current publishing industry?

It’s quite a
transformation, isn’t it? The old models don’t hold, traditional relationships
don’t work, and everyone is scrambling, trying to figure out what a book is. I
think we are migrating to a mostly electronic world for the simple economics
and expediencies of it- traditional paper books are going to be a luxury item.
That’s not to say old style printed books are bad. But they are fast becoming a
rarity because they are precious. They also represent a slower, more deliberate
and meditative process, which is against the prevailing trend of fast media and
instant gratification.

Q10. How do you publicize your work? Which medium suited you
best?

I rely on my
publishers to use their networks at first. Then I support their work through my
own blogs, social media, and public appearances. I think meeting real people in
real settings works best for me. I enjoy the human contact, and while I’d like
the work to stand on its own, it is also very clear that when people like someone’s
work, they want to meet the author. I enjoy public speaking very much for that
reason.

Q11. What are the four most important things you take care of
while writing a book?

1. an
entertaining premise

2.
sparkling prose

3. no cliches, and

4. a good
villain

Q12. Is writing a career for you or just a hobby?

Definitely a
career, but it only took me 40 years to get here and I had to hold other jobs
along the way!

Stanley Moss in Venice, 2014

Q13. What are your other interests?

Cooking, travel,
visiting Neolithic ruins, watching movies, water coloring, talking with
friends.

Q14. What is your advice to new or aspiring authors?

Read a lot, and
don’t try and make every piece a masterpiece. It takes a long time to get good
at writing, thus much of what we do resembles sketches made on which we base
later work. Not everything you write is going to be “War And Peace.” And don’t
delude yourself into thinking everyone is interested in you. They’re
interested in your sharp observations on life which they can apply to their own
lives. In both fiction and nonfiction, rich details and smart depictions count
more than cute or clever phrasing. And kill the cliches. Try and say it
originally!

Q15.  What are the ten
things about you that no one knows?

1. I’m from Mars.
2. I actually like “Tree Pose”.
   
3. I will never refuse marzipan
   or Hollandaise sauce.
4. I wish I lived closer to my
   daughter.
5. I think I look cool in a
   kurta.
6. I am waiting for my hair to
   turn all white.
7. I understand far more than I
   let on.
8. I am overly attached to the
   memory of my maternal grandparents.
9. I find it very hard to say
   goodbye to my friends.
10. I would drink ten cups of
    coffee a day if I could, but I can’t.

Q16. What is next for you, writing wise?

Captain Blackpool Trilogy, Book #1

I’ve just been
to Venice for a month, working to complete a new novel, “Fate and the Pearls”,
the second book in the Captain Blackpool Trilogy. I wasn’t able to hit my word
count goal, so there’s still a bit left to complete. I’m going to take a break
from Captain Blackpool after this is done and write another novel set in India,
and I would also like to attack “The Hacker 2.0”, which is outlined.

Stanley Moss in Venice, 2014

Q17. How can the readers connect with you?

Probably best to
message me on social media like FB or Goodreads, or email via [email protected].

Facebook | Blog | Goodreads 

Q18. Before you go, how about an excerpt from The Hacker to
intrigue and tantalize us?

One challenge an author faces is how to tell the back story of a
character in an interesting and different way. To do this, quite often you need
to break from the action of the story and zoom backwards in time. This explains
a character’s motivations, and also fills in the world they occupy, what’s
important to them, reveals quirks of personality. In this excerpt, one of
Talsera’s executives is on the trail of The Hacker- but what motivates him?
Where did he learn his unique skills? And how has it shaped him in his pursuit?
Since this particular character in my book was shaped by his service in the
Indian Army, and during the Kargil incident, my idea was to write this chapter
beginning in the style of Ernest Hemingway. I went back and read a number of Hemongway’s
war stories. This technique and style allowed me to make the book more
authentic by describing an actual historic event, and then weave it into my
fictional account. Jaitendra’s character is based on a real person I met during
my research.

                                                                    

From Chapter 14
of The Hacker:

That May of 1999,
they rode up the valley called Joli La into an early thaw—where mud turned into
stones the higher they climbed—and then marched through loose, punishing rocks
as they pushed toward the sangars that stood along the ridge line. They
never told you about the brilliant blue sky or the wild passage of clouds up
there, or how the peaks stood out so clearly from so far away. In the night,
the Mirage 2000s came and pounded the enemy supply lines. You could hear the
firepower from the passes below at sixteen thousand feet, bad guys getting
hammered. Afterwards, you looked out onto the jagged peaks that bled crimson
haze around their edges, framed by billowing grey cloud dispersed in the high
atmosphere, then all went dark and black, quiet and starry again. Raw country,
where the winds blew harsh and the cold dry air made your skin go leathery and
your eyes burn. Headquarters said the enemy positions were full of army
regulars, mujahideen, mercenaries and SSG operatives.

They
had not told him how beautiful it would be in this primitive place. It was a
brutal terrain, but he found a rugged quality to it that a man could love; it
was breathtaking and at the same time unforgiving. Some days he would watch a
MiG-27 turn its wide balletic radius overhead, and he admired the delicate way
they placed their bombs along the ridge. If you did not bomb the intruders into
submission, then the infantry had to evict them. That was his job. But he loved
the other beauty in the emptiness of the nights between skirmishes, when you
had the time to follow the arcs of satellites overhead as they transited lazily
among the constellations, girdled in stars, on a canvas vast like the universe.
When he slept, Jaitendra dreamt Boolean equations. He had learned them when he
was quite young, in a Ramanujam club, and he used them in relation to nearly every
decision he made in life. In the Army he chose his career options carefully,
and as he took his promotions, he saw and did things he could not tell people back
home—secret missions, midnight raids, interrogations of the really bad guys in
dark rooms. He vowed that if he got through this incident in Kargil, he would
quit and do the thing he truly loved, which was to fool around with computers.
Preposterous, he knew, a Major prepared to trade in twelve years of exemplary service
for the life of a tinkerer. He had only to stay long enough and one day he
might be a General. He could have a fine white car with curtained windows and
little flags on the front, and a Jonga full of uniformed soldiers, armed with
sten guns, following him. Experience had taught him that fighting a war could
be broken down into little algorithms and heuristics, a network of binary
decisions applied in split seconds. They had sent him to Kargil to retake the
LoC. Often he sat silently, his INSAS rifle draped across his lap, and looked
at the stars above and planned how he and his men would finish clearing the
Tololing complex. “First bomb them into oblivion, break their will to fight,
then overrun their positions.” The way the headquarters put it to them, it
sounded all too easy.

He
would not speak of the dead he had seen as they moved up the nullahs, or
of the lives he had ended. Let others do that. He had lost many good friends in
the operations. Slowly they had retaken the ridges, under the barrage of
artillery fire that crackled and boomed in the thin air. And when the last
defenders had been pushed back, he wandered around the smoking, stinking ruins
of their sangars. Among the rocks, he had seen corpses of people he
knew, faces he had studied with in Germany years before, when they went as
cadets to be trained by the Americans at a strange secret base in a forest
called Hesse-Darmstadt. Dark violent skills, survival, hand-to-hand combat,
weapons, psy-ops. Back then it was Indian guys versus Yankee guys, and they all
hung together. He remembered Yousef, who played a phenomenal game of squash,
unbeatable, now sprawled lifeless next to a crater. Mahmood, who knew by heart
the works of Ghalib and Faiz, and given enough beer would declaim their verse
in his eloquent voice from the head of the table, lay dead with a pistol in his
hand, his legs blown away. There was bloody Sharif, who could have been a professional
bowler if only he had quit the commandos and not stayed to defend this remote and
devastated place, lying hollow-eyed next to an abandoned heavy machine gun.
Among the last line of defenders, he found the remains of crudely dressed men he
did not know, who carried antique rifles and wore the coarse cloth of mountain
villages; fine snipers, men who would never go home, men whose corpses would decay
unclaimed on these savage slopes.

He
only wanted to be remembered as the man who brought all his boys home, but that
was not to be true. Instead, they gave him a medal because he led one mad
charge up a hill. And when he got home, time passed invisibly. He shook hands
with the President, posed for endless photographs, endured backslapping and
drinks sent to his table, called the grieving families of his lost men, went
out on dates with naive girls who flashed their dark eyes at him and who seemed
to fear him for what he had seen. Now that he was off active duty, he enrolled
himself in an MBA course. But he never spoke about Kargil, and what he had seen
there. Let others talk about it.

Thanks for taking time out from your busy schedule to talk to us, Stanley. It was great having you here. 🙂
Njkinny’s Blog wishes you the very best in all your future endeavours and I hope to read from you in the future. 🙂