Stacey Cochran was born in the Carolinas, where his family traces its roots to the mid 1800s. In 1998 he was selected as a finalist in the Dell Magazines undergraduate fiction competition, and he made his first professional short story sale to CutBank in 2001. In 2004, he was selected as a finalist in the St. Martin's Press/PWA Best First Private Eye Novel Contest. He lives in Raleigh, North Carolina with his wife Dr. Susan K. Miller-Cochran and their son Sam, and he teaches writing at North Carolina State University. His books include CLAWS, CLAWS 2, The Colorado Sequence, Amber Page, and The Kiribati Test.
Why readers will like the book?That’s a hard question to answer. What I can tell you what I enjoyed in writing the book. Angie Rippard in CLAWS 2 is a sympathetic character. I enjoyed seeing how she had fallen after CLAWS and how she responded to her isolation and loneliness. I totally enjoyed setting CLAWS 2 in southwest Colorado near Telluride, and I loved visiting the region frequently when I was researching and planning the novel. It really is a nearly unadulterated pocket of wilderness in Colorado, and I hope it stays that way for many years to come.
Of course, I enjoyed researching grizzly bears and getting to the bottom of the original research question that prompted CLAWS 2: Do grizzly bears still roam southwest Colorado?
And there’s a night-time skinny-dipping scene in the novel that was one of the most enjoyable scenes I’ve ever written.
The ending is very noirish compared to how I had ended earlier novels, so it’ll be interesting to see what readers have to say about where Angie is by the end of the book.
Why you went indie?I’ve been sending work to publishers since I was sixteen years old. Literally for twenty years. During that time, I’ve received more than 3,000 rejection letters for eleven novels and many short stories. After a decade of endless rejection, I was starting to lose my mind. I finally decided in 2004 to try to self publish a novel. I’ve published about one novel per year since then, and have continued to query agents and editors.
For CLAWS, I managed to get two different literary agents in five years, and they both worked extremely hard to sell the series. As yet, no publisher has made an offer.
The first book came up in the self-pub rotation last summer, and now CLAWS 2 is in its launch week.
Who are your favorite writers?John Rector, Stephen King, Michael Crichton, Charles Williams, Dean Koontz, John D. MacDonald, Ron Rash. Did I mention Scott Nicholson? Uh, George Pelecanos, Michael Connelly, Robert Crais, Lee Child, Scott Nicholson, Charles Bukowski, Hunter S. Thompson, Dashiell Hammett, Hemingway, Toni Morrison, Scott Nicholson, and Scott Nicholson. JA Konrath, Allan Guthrie, Denise Mina, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Crumley, Harper Lee, Scott Sigler, Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, Edward Albee, Tracy Letts, and Richard Matheson. That’s it. No one else. Except RJ Keller, Holly Christine, Elisa Lorello, Sam Landstrom, Kipp Poe Speicher, Dawson Vosburg, Jon Merz, Peter Straub, Joe Haldeman, Agatha Christie, Shirley Jackson, and Scott Nicholson.
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