Crime writer Mofina juggles work and murders

By Belinda Goldsmith

SYDNEY (Reuters Life!) - By day Rick Mofina is a Canadian civil servant, commuting to work by bus, but by night and at weekends he travels through the worlds of espionage and murder as an award-winning thriller writer.

Mofina said his latest book, "Six Seconds," released in the United States and Canada this week, was written the same way as his other eight books -- plotted on the bus on the way to work then typed out in his suburban basement in Ottawa.

He has been published in the United States, Canada, Norway and Sweden and he has received the Arthur Ellis Award, Canada''s top literary prize for crime fiction, and was shortlisted by the International Thriller Writers for a Thriller Award.

"Six Seconds" draws on Mofina''s travel experiences when he was a reporter and is the tale of two mothers, strangers from different worlds, who become ensnared in an assassination plot using a missing California boy as the weapon.

Mofina, who works as a communications advisor for the Canadian government, spoke to Reuters about juggling life as a working author:

Q: Did you always want to write?

A: "Yes, for me it has been a lifelong affliction. Every since I was a child I have enjoyed writing and reading. It became a lifelong thing for me and I felt I had to write every day."

Q: When did you write your first novel?

A: "I wrote my first novel when I was 17 or 18. It wasn''t published but then I worked on some short stories. I thought I didn''t know much as a young person and journalism seemed to be the path most writers have followed so I thought I would try to see if I could get into writing. But it was a secret passion. I told no one about it."

Q: Why did you keep it secret?

A: "That was the way I could get things done, without people asking me about my work. It was a separate world. But when I was a full-time crime reporter at the Calgary Herald, I suddenly thought that this could be the area I could fictionalize, knowing the anatomy of a crime scene and the natural story-telling that reporters encounter everyday, so I started my first crime novel ("If Angels Fall") in the late 1990s and it was published in 2000."

Q: How did you get it published?

A: "I wrote the book and managed to get it into the best shape I could then mailed about 100 query letters to agents. One agent then contacted me and asked to see my work and then the whole manuscript and that led to a contract."

Q: No rejections?

A: "Well, I do tell aspiring writers that I sent out 100 letters and only got about 15 responses of any kind, some of those "thanks but, no thanks." The percentage on my unofficial survey was a 10 percent response of any type. Then it took about 11 months for the agent to place the book. It was rejected numerous times. It was a magical day when it got accepted."  Continued...