Today I’m interviewing Dale Wiley, author and Missouri attorney, who has some fascinating credits to his name. For starters, he has had a character named after him on CSI, owned a record label, been interviewed by Bob Edwards on NPR’s Morning Edition and made alternative fuel motorcycles for Merle Haggard and John Paul DeJoria. He is also one of the few people to who have met Ronald Reagan and Flavor Flav.

Dale has three awesome kids and spends his days working as a lawyer fighting the big banks. He has als0 written three novels and is currently developing two original scripted projects for TV: the gritty drama, The East Side with Andréa Vasilo; and the sitcom, Confessions of a Bunny Smuggler, with Fayr Barkley.

In this episode Dale and I discuss:

• How metafiction it works, how you can use it to tell your story, and which pitfalls you need to avoid.
• Writing about writing: Why it’s not always a good strategy, but how you can do it right.
• Crafting a villain who is both dangerous and also appealing to the protagonist (and the reader).
• The settings both of the story and the story-within-the-story, and how Dale made them come alive.

Plus, his #1 tip for writers.

About the Author

Dale Wiley is a Missouri attorney, who has had a character named after him on CSI, owned a record label, been interviewed by Bob Edwards on NPR’s Morning Edition and made motorcycles for Merle Haggard and John Paul DeJoria. He is also one of the few people to who have met Ronald Reagan and Flavor Flav.

Dale has three awesome kids and spends his days working as a lawyer fighting the big banks. He has also written three novels and is currently developing two original scripted projects for TV: the gritty drama, The East Side with Andréa Vasilo; and the sitcom, Confessions of a Bunny Smuggler, with Fayr Barkley.

To find out more about Dale and his writing, check out his website, www.dalewiley.com, or follow him on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter.

Southern Gothic

Misery meets Gone Girl, SOUTHERN GOTHIC is Dale Wiley’s latest page-turner. Not since his incendiary thrillers, Sabotage and The Intern, has Wiley treated readers to his heady brew of hair-trigger suspense and dark secrets.

In this twisted and delightfully disturbing novel, one woman learns the true price of making a deal with the devil. Lovely Meredith Harper is living a life of lonely indifference – shuttling between her beloved Savannah, Georgia bookstore and her empty house, pining after a dream of being an author that now seems out of reach. Publishers had resoundingly passed on her only novel, Red Ribbon. In spite of herself, she’s haunted by her ex-husband’s insult – that she’ll never be a real writer, only a fan.

Everything changes when Meredith finds a red ribbon tied to the inside of her doorknob. No one in her life would do such a thing. There is only one possibility: Michael Black, her favorite author, who was the only person besides friends and publishers to receive a copy of her manuscript. But he vanished years ago and was even rumored to be dead.

Meredith races to uncover the truth behind the mysterious visitor, and her suspicions about his identity are confirmed. But how? Why now? Why her? And, most confusingly, why is Michael Black offering her a completely rewritten manuscript of Red Ribbon to publish under her own name?

Exploring the dangerous divides between fame, fandom, romance, murder, and possession, SOUTHERN GOTHIC fascinates until the novel’s final breath. It makes the offer you can’t refuse—and shackles you to the demons of your fantasies.  

If you decide to check out the book, we hope you’ll do so via this Amazon affiliate link, where if you choose to purchase DIY MFA makes a small commission at no cost to you. As always, thank you for supporting DIY MFA!

Link to Episode 136

(Right-click to download.)

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Until next week, keep writing and keep being awesome!

The post Episode 136: Adventures in Metafiction — Interview with Dale Wiley appeared first on DIY MFA.