How (and why) I Wrote Pressure

A behind the scenes peek at my latest re-release

The decision to switch Pressure over to a Barry Napier title was an easy one…and one I wished I’d made much sooner. Three years ago, when I was still concerned about turning readers off because of genre-confusion, I thought I needed a way to separate my basic action/mystery titles from my supernatural and horror titles.

But as recent trends show, readers are starting to care less about genres, so long as the writers they are following continue to put out intriguing stories.

But there’s another reason I wanted Pressure to come back home under the Barry Napier umbrella: because it was a ton of fun to write and holds a special place in the overwhelming chasm of ideas always churning in my head.

Pressure came about because of some feedback I got from several editors and agents about six or seven years ago. That feedback stated that I often took far too long to get to the action of a story—that I needed to learn how to project the reader directly into the action as soon as possible and if possible, to never let off the gas pedal.

I started writing Pressure as an exercise to get better at this. I began writing a story ( at the time, I thought would be a short story) that placed the central character immediately into a gut-wrenching and terrible situation. An impossible situation, really. And I placed him in this situation with no clear idea how he would get out of it, trying to figure it out as I went along.

A few times a week, I’d come back to this exercise, trying to explain and progress the story, all while never letting up on the high-octane thrills. I wanted the literary equivalent of a 90s Jerry Bruckheimer movie (sans the cringy dialogue). And after a few months I realized I had a novella on my hands.

But it was a straight-out action story. Nothing supernatural, no horrors from the unknown. No, the monster in Pressure is very much a natural one of this world. So I was very hesitant to release it.

The ill-fated pseudonym of Warren Keith was the answer. It sold okay at first but faded into nothing after a while. And I didn’t think that was very fair to a story that really did come out swinging and provided me with lessons in writing as well as a great deal of fun.

Warren Keith is on his way out. There was a detective trilogy he was working on that was nearly completed that I do believe will one day see the light of day as a Barry Napier project, but that’s a date looming way off in the future. For now, I present you with Pressure, a quick little adrenaline jolt that I hope you’ll enjoy reading as much I enjoyed writing it.