Garage Band Blog Tour Alert!

BLOG TOUR STOP TIME!!! And I am quite excited to welcome Adam Alexander to the Pewter Wolf!

Adam is the author of Garage Band, and it's a little outside my comfort zone (hence why I was super excited to be on board with this tour! I like pushing myself into trying new things). Garage Band follows Lanthus who, after 17 years of working at Eastland Insurance, has been let go for "young, fresh minds". Angry and betrayed, Lanthus wants his boss - no, the entire company - to feel his rage. He decides that he wants to take down the entire company - but one man can't do it alone. And as he begins to put together his team, things start going awry. The Police are closing in, someone else wants a piece of the action and Lanthus is beginning to wonder if he can keep it together long enough to pull his plan off...?

See... not my typical read, huh?

Anyway, before I hand it over to Adam, who wrote the guest post, I just want to thank him for taking time out to write this - I know how busy you must be, so thank you! And thank you for Faye for asking if I wanted to be on this blog tour!

Oh, if you want to say hi to Adam, you can go to his website at adam-alexander-author.com/ or pop over to his Twitter at @AdamAlexAuthor! Now, onto the Adam chatting about Lanthus!

Garage Band – From Idea To Completed Novel

What’s most sinister thought you’ve ever had?  

Garage Band was born out of a sinister thought I had one day when my wife and I went shopping on a Saturday morning. I don’t know about the rest of the world, but cars in South Africa are bloody expensive, and us South Africans love to show off with our cars. As we stepped out of the car that day, there was a Ferrari parked next to us, then a G-Wagon, and there were a few more really expensive cars in the same row. My wife made a remark about what the cars must be worth. I made a flippant comment, and said that the basement of the shopping center was probably worth more than the entire shopping mall. And then I had a thought. A really sinister thought. 

I don’t remember what was going in the world at the time or what TV series we were watching – probably the TV series “Hostage” - but I thought, if bad guys were looking to get someone’s attention, instead of holding people hostage, why not just threaten to blow up all the cars in a parking garage like Sandton City where the richest of the rich in Sandton hang out.  That would get their attention.  But most people are probably insured anyway, and it wouldn’t hurt them, it would hurt the insurance company. Bang! Say hello to Garage Band. 

I had just finished writing a Jack-Reecher thriller called Porter’s Rule, and I thought I’d try something different. Instead of making the hero of Garage Band a tough guy like Matt Porter from the Porter’s Rule series, I made this hero of the complete opposite. I created an anti-hero in Lanthus Trilby. Even his name had to be something that spelled “loser” when you first encountered him. I put him in a boring job, made him a hen-pecked husband that you wanted to yell at: “get a life”. And this guy had to be the one to bring Garage Band to life. Talk about a challenge. 

I didn’t have to search long to find a name. I borrowed it from an experience my wife had when her computer broke and she had to call Dial-a-Nerd. The guy who came to fix her computer was a total nerd, and his name was Lanthus.  

Building the story for Garage Band was probably one of the quickest idea to completed novel development timelines I’ve ever done, because the character was so well defined, and easy to identify with. The most challenging part of writing the story was finding a plausible way to pull off the caper, and to keep the conflict and interaction between the characters vibrant and entertaining. 

I tried to weave a richer background into the supporting characters, and probably the most developed character other than Lanthus is Jason, the hacker. I’m a software developer by profession, so I know the world of technology well. My challenge was to make the story interesting and completely non-technical. Jason comes into the story early on to do all the hacking necessary to help the team pull off the caper, but Jason’s past and background brought an unexpected dimension and plot twist to the story that I hadn’t planned at all. I’m going to leave that to the reader to discover, and won’t spoil anything here.

Setting the book in Johannesburg gave me immediate access to real places and real people to use as my characters, but I tried to make the people composites of stereotypes with unique flavours instead of making them completely South Africans. I don’t know about you, but I find most SA movies poorly produced, and poorly acted, and that leads me to the question: are SA people just not entertaining to watch? I wasn’t going to let that drag the book down, so I made the characters and dialog more universal and less local. There are a few local phrases here and there, but essentially the book could take place anywhere. 

Why read Garage Band? It’s a fresh take on the age-old theme of revenge. It’s been described as “raw, gutsy and entertaining”, with witty dialog that has the reader in stitches. It has no shortage of suspense and plot twists that keep you guessing right to the end.