To start off can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your background?

I come from a land of successful people. It’s known as Brooklyn. I was one of the country’s top federal investigators, a forensic accountant, which can be described as a CSI for auditing: you find a pile of documents and determine whether they match the real world. In the process, you follow leads and interview people to separate guilty from innocent, and you try not to get hurt.

 

What inspired you to write Creds? How much is based on your own experiences with the IRS?

I began to write Creds as a journal on the day of my interview for the IRS. It was so evocative that I didn’t want to forget any of the details or the phrases that came to mind as events unfolded. When you’re a writer, you just start writing. But of course when I changed it into a novel I had to disguise everyone involved. For the sake of storytelling, multiple people are sometimes combined into one person. You have to shake out the complexities or no one can follow it. If you want to know which of the stories happened to me personally, that’s classified. I can tell you that more of it is true than anyone will believe, and that one of my audit subjects did try to kill me in the manner I described in the book.

 

Much of the book is critical of the bureaucracy that exists in the IRS, does that reflect your own opinions?

I actually see it in a more holistic way. As big as the IRS is, it’s part of a much larger process. You can’t even analyze the federal government unless you realize how big business drives it. What you have in the Treasury Department is a handful of heroes who overcome the handful of rogues and the multitude of nine-to-fivers to keep the machine marginally running for 325 million people who hope they don’t ever have to meet someone at the IRS. And every year you have thousands of stories of justice and injustice.

 

You released Creds in four separate parts, what was the reasoning behind that and does the complete edition differ in any way?

The four separate parts was a structure I chose mainly to keep the excitement level high. Each one has either a cliff hanger or a significant amount of dynamic tension. It’s my method of taking the story of a life—which is continuous—and making it episodic as they do in television because otherwise the multiple-year span with key events scattered throughout is a challenge in novel form. Since this was an Amazon serial release and part of a long roll-out, it was also a way to test whether the adaptation from pure memoir to what I would call a “memoir novel” was working.

 

When did you know that you wanted to be a writer?

If we ask when did someone become committed to an idea and the dedication it requires, that’s a gradual process. If we ask, however, where was the first key moment that you can identify on the path, then I would say that it was when my elementary school teachers first began to tell me that my book reports are unique, that my analysis of the stories were refreshing perspectives, far from anything they had seen before. By sixth grade, I had won a statewide essay contest in competition with high school students, and the last peg was when I got to high school and my fellow students paid me to write stories. By most definitions, you become a professional when people step up to pay you for what you do.

 

Do you have a process as a writer?

For me, a nexus of ideas creates a starting point. If those thoughts spark a key scene in my mind, that’s something I want to write down and test out, first to see if I have actual plot elements, which is what makes an idea a story, and further down the road, to see if it contains sufficient scope to be a novel.

 

What are you reading right now and what genres are you drawn to?

I’m reading The English Spy by Daniel Silva. So by genre, I can easily say spy novels, and broadly speaking, I can also add science fiction. I can rarely say mystery. After Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians, everything else lies in its shadow. Mystery is often a fun read, not a masterpiece. Crossovers that are part-mystery are a different story because they can be very challenging to create.

 

What advice would you give to aspiring writers?

Momentum. There are fantastic writers out there, who I know personally, that establish a pattern early in life that denies them an enriching writing life. (And I’m not talking about money at all, but rather the value of writing from the perspective of the writer.) Coming up short arises from the pattern of thinking that baby steps don’t count. Another aspect of the problem is knowing that you have a talent, and being satisfied with that knowledge instead of finding out how much further you can go. It’s the one-day-I’ll-go-on-a-diet mentality. Aspiring writers of all ages need to allow themselves progress by any increment they can muster and let it develop into a pattern of constant writing.