C. T. Wente

The inspiration for Ice Man Cometh was literally handed to me in a purple Crown Royal bag by a former work colleague. Inside was a collection of letters written to her friend years prior while she was working as a bartender in Flagstaff, Arizona. As you might have guessed, each of the letters was a random, cryptically worded confession of love by an anonymous admirer that included a Polaroid picture from some exotic location. And yes, the bartender’s name was Jeri. Within minutes of reading the letters, I’d dismissed every unfinished manuscript on my laptop and was brainstorming the story line for Don’t Order Dog, which was eventually acquired by Thomas & Mercer and republished as Ice Man Cometh.

Well, the truth is, I’m not particularly interested in the clash of good and evil, but in the moral dissonance in all of us. I remember reading Atlas Shrugged as a kid and loving the idea of the story, but the characters were so unyieldingly moralistic that they came off as two-dimensional and robotic. Real people have doubts and second thoughts. Shit happens. In my opinion, a story plays much better when you allow for that element of human inconsistency to be present beneath the surface. By the way, Ayn Rand is now smoking a cigarette in her grave and saying, “Yeah, talk to me about character development when you’ve sold a million copies, asshole.”