#AuthorInterview with R.A. Van Vleet
Today, Feathered Quill reviewer Diane Lunsford is talking with R.A. Van Vleet, author of Payback.
FQ: I want to thank you for taking the time to talk with me today. Before we get into the mechanics of Payback, I would like to ask a few questions about you. Thank you for your service to our country. What is your most memorable moment you had while serving our country in the Marine Corps and why did you choose this branch?
VAN VLEET: In World War II, my dad was medically discharged from the Marine Corps because of the injuries he received during training, so he never saw combat. My uncle was in the second wave on Iwo Jima, so I wanted to become one of the elite forces. I enlisted when I was 18 years old, and I served a little over two years of my active four-year service in Japan, where I worked for the Field Analysis Office in Yokosuka. When I was not working, I taught a class to the dependent children of the members of the military. I also started an adult actor’s workshop and a young actor’s workshop where I taught acting, directed plays, and played in some of them. I won Marine of the Year twice in a row and received the awards in Tokyo from the American Ambassador of Japan. After I received the second award, the ambassador was stabbed by a knife-wielding Japanese man. Thankfully, the ambassador survived.
I caught a MAT’S flight back to the naval base in San Francisco to continue to my assigned base in California, but I was eligible for an early release and accepted it. I received my discharge papers the morning President Kennedy was assassinated. I learned the next day that all discharges, leaves, and liberty were canceled, and Marine Corps enlistments were extended for a year. Had I not been the last marine out of the gate in San Francisco, I would have been sent to Vietnam. I served a total of 6 years in the Corps, four active and two in the active reserves.
FQ: Focusing on your acting career for a moment, can you elaborate on a time that stands out in your broad acting career in Soap Operas? Motion Pictures? Television Series?
VAN VLEET: What stands out is my luck in receiving one of the 13 scholarships being offered by ABC to attend the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City out of 24 thousand applicants. Talent scouts from Paramount, Universal, and Screen Gems saw some of the plays I was in and offered me a job to join their talent departments. I chose Universal because they did movies and television shows unlike Screen Gems who did television comedies and Paramount who did mostly movies. Screen Gems and Paramount paid more money, but I accepted the 150 dollars a week offered by Universal.
The first year at Universal I did about 23 guest starring roles where I played the villain. Because of my ability to do stunts, I performed all of my own stunts and performed at the stun area in the tourist section at Universal doing high falls from a tower. I co-starred, or guest starred, multiple times in the television series, The Virginian, The Bold Ones, Adam Twelve, Dr. Welby, Name of the Game, Night Gallery, To Catch a Thief, Cannon, and a slew of others as well as the movies Airport, The Young Country, a Don Knox’s movie (I forget the title of the movie), and the movie Ben where a photo of me being eaten by rats made it in the December issue of Life magazine and was captioned, “Movie star Ben, eats actor.”
I joined the cast of All My Children in 1975 playing the role of Dr. Chuck Tyler. I was nominated for an Emmy two years in a row before I quit the Academy because I refused to nominate myself. I left All My Children ten years later and was surprised that I was immediately hired the next day and joined the cast of The Guiding Light assuming the role of Dr. Bauer, which I did for two years. All My Children asked me to return to the show, so I continued to play the role of Dr. Chuck Tyler until 2005. As a side note All My Children and The Guiding Light were the number 1 rated daytime shows while I was on both of those shows.
FQ: When you pivoted from All My Children and assumed the role of Dr. Ed Bauer on The Guiding Light, was there any backlash because of this? If so, how did you address the situation? If not, what was the experience?
VAN VLEET: I really enjoyed my role in The Guiding Light because Dr. Ed Bauer was a man who had a flaw. He developed a drinking problem which led him to impregnate a woman while he was intoxicated. She became pregnant and tests proved it was his baby. As I mentioned, I played villains and drunks in nighttime television, I had always been a character actor and not a leading man, and when I joined The Guiding Light, I felt at home because I could go back to building a character that was unlike the role I had on All My Children. To be honest, when I first started to play the role of Chuck on All My Children, I was afraid the camera could see through me and see my insecurities, but I finally relaxed and built a character close to myself.
FQ: Last question regarding what people may not know in terms of who you are. Your bio states you are an artist and sculptor. What is the medium you gravitate toward most and why?
VAN VLEET: I still draw and paint occasionally, but I stopped sculpting because I don’t have the room to do that on the boat where I live. I drew face portraits of people when I was 14 or 15 years old at a festival our church was holding. I continued with portraits when I was in the Marine Corps, but those were oil paintings on small canvases of the girlfriends of my fellow Marines. I also used enamel to paint the names of the officers and nude women on coffee cups. The funniest one I did was for an officer who didn’t ask me, he told me to paint one for him. I did. I painted a fat, ugly woman on his cup and before I showed it to him, I showed him his name on the opposite side of the cup. He was livid when he turned the cup around.
I started sculpting when I was in college and continued to sculpt and paint while I was getting my B.A. degree some 15 or 17 years later at the University of Denver and my M.A. degree at the University of California at Sacramento where I was involved in independent films, as an actor, director, editor, and director of photography in some of the films. Judge Me Not is a film I wrote, directed, and starred in. It won Best Picture at the Northern California Film Festival and received a 97 rotten tomatoes score before it was on Amazon.
FQ: Payback was a great read because the pace was fantastic. How long did it take you to launch it from your imagination to a growing number of pages and ultimately to published form? Was there ever a stall in the process and if so, how did you overcome it and continue writing?
VAN VLEET: I got the idea from obscure actual crimes I was researching, and from a young woman I met who experienced a cop’s criminal abuse. She was a very beautiful young teenage girl when I first met her, and she was the daughter of the Chief of Police in Los Angeles. But years later, when I saw her, she was no longer as beautiful. Her face was misaligned, her jaw was slightly to one side, her nose was off center, and one of her eyebrows was lower than the other. She had been married to a police officer who was physically and emotionally abusive. Nothing happened to her now-divorced husband; he was never charged or arrested and was still on the police force. I couldn’t understand why her father, who was still the Chief of the Police, didn’t do something about it. I asked her, but she didn’t, or couldn’t answer me. She didn’t know why her dad didn’t do something about it. I had to assume the Blue Code of Silence was the reason; protect your own at all costs.
My personal experience had a lot to do with the plot line in Payback because I enjoyed playing villains when I was under contract with Universal and in Independent Films. It was rather easy to put a part of myself in the despicable villain roles in Payback.
FQ: I think one of the vital elements to delivering a vibrant read is to have a very accomplished editor. I recall when writing my book there was a moment when I went back and forth with my editor insisting a certain scene needed to remain in the storyline. After further discussions, it became clear she was spot on, and I removed the scene. Was there a time when you were in the editorial process where something similar happened between you and your editor?
VAN VLEET: From the last question, I didn’t experience a stall in writing. It seemed to just flow. I did have to go back and do some rewriting and of course some editing. The editor at Atmosphere Press was extremely helpful in punctuation and correcting errors I missed, and I would highly recommend all authors to take advantage of the editors at Atmosphere Press.
I didn’t experience a misplaced scene or a scene that shouldn’t be in the novel. I read a lot of novels. Every morning I read novels on my Kindle, and the last novel I read contained a recap of what happened that went on for pages. I finally gave up and quit reading because the recap was totally unneeded.
FQ: What is the one thing you would caution an aspiring writer to avoid when crafting his/her work and how would you suggest they approach avoiding such a situation?
VAN VLEET: I was requested to read several novels from authors at Atmosphere Press and critique them. One was so slow to develop a storyline or a plot that after 80 pages I gave up. The second story was supposed to be a crime story, but it was so religiously oriented that it damaged the impact of the story and the ending. If the authors are writing thriller or crime novels, I would recommend the authors immediately engage the reader by constructing interesting characters and their connection to the plot of the story.
FQ: If you had to cite your five all-time great crime thriller novelists, who would they be?
VAN VLEET: Agatha Christie, Lee Child, Michael Connelly, Dashiell Hammett, and Arthur Conan Doyle.
FQ: Crime doesn’t pay, but in the current climate of the world, it seems to run rampant on many fronts. Without going down a political rabbit hole, what are you passionate about when seeking out the perfect administration for guiding the country forward and does faith and religion play an integral part in making your decision?
VAN VLEET: As far as the political movements in our not totally democratic society go, banning books in classrooms and libraries, removing a woman’s right to control their own body, and having judges on the Supreme Court who perjured themselves when they swore under oath that the 50-year-old right of a woman to control their own body had been established in law, they should be removed from the bench and jailed for perjury. For example, I lived through the years when homosexuality was illegal, and they could be sent to prison. Now transgender people are at risk of losing their rights and birth control pills are at risk of being outlawed. I’m a Christian and, as I mentioned, I gave sermons in church. When I was in the Marine Corps, I also read to my fellow Marines passages from the Bible. I no longer attend church, but I believe what Christ said: God is in each man and he need not flout it, but believe in him.
FQ: It has been a pleasure to talk with you today and I want to thank you for such a great read. Is there anything currently in the works and if so, are you able to share a sneak peek regarding this?
VAN VLEET: I’m currently working on my next novel, which is entitled Honeycomb.
Ian Martin is a DEA agent and working undercover. He’s waiting to be hired at Port Hueneme, located in Ventura County, California, so he can discover who the men are, and the name of ships that are bringing drugs into the United States. While he waits to be hired, he works as a substitute professor at Ventura Community College. He meets Sam Williams, an extremely attractive actress and real estate agent and her possessive agent, Ray Calderon. When Ian gets involved in a knife fight with Ray, Ian suffers a knife wound and Ray gets arrested and that marks the beginning of the attacks on Sam. Ian is suspended from his undercover work and fired from his teaching job. His main duty now is to protect Sam and find out who are the people behind the attacks on Sam. It is a fast-paced mystery thriller with an explosive ending where Detective Michael Ryan exposes a secret long ago hidden by Sam.
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