Interview with Liz Lazarus – S. 11, Ep. 20

My guest this week on the Crime Cafe podcast is Liz Lazarus. Listen in on her remarkable story. I’m ready to sign-up for karate class now. You can download a copy of the transcript here. Debbi (00:54): Hi everyone. My guest today has an engineering degree and a very interesting background in general. Among other things, she lived in Paris for three years and speaks fluent French. She has a pilot’s license and has produced a music CD. She’s also the author of several legal thrillers, including her latest, Dawn Before Darkness, which is available on Kobo, as well as in print or will be, I guess, in May. Liz (01:28): Will be. May 26th. May 26th. Yeah. Debbi (01:31): May 26th. There, you heard it now. You heard it there. It’s my pleasure to introduce my guest, Liz Lazarus. I’m trying not to say Liz Lemon. Liz (01:42): It’s a tongue twister. Liz Lazarus. Yeah. Debbi (01:44): Liz Lazarus. It’s a lovely name. I love it. I love that name. That’s cool. What made you choose to write Thrillers? Liz (01:54): Well, I would tell you, as you said, I’m an engineer. I’m probably the most reluctant author you’ll meet. I did not intend to be an author, and that may be the story for lots of people. But my first book, Free of Malice, was based on a real story, something that happened to me in college. And the novel actually was just me writing about what happened to start with. And then it turned into a novel. And I was going to be one and done after Free of Malice, and people that were reading it said, “Can’t wait for the next one.” And so I thought, okay. And it took me a while to agree to write the second one. And then once that was done, that was Plea for Justice, then came Shades of Silence and now Dawn Before Darkness. So now I feel like it’s a bad addiction. Debbi (02:36): Wow. And each one of these is a standalone novel, not a series. Liz (02:40): They are standalone. I like to give my characters closure and move on to new people. Debbi (02:45): That’s cool. Yeah, I can appreciate that. Your first novel was inspired by a real event, correct? Liz (02:53): Correct. Debbi (02:53): What was it like to write in a fictional form about a thing that really happened? Liz (03:00): It was therapy. So what happened in brief, I was in college at Georgia Tech. I was living off campus in this area called Home Park, which is a bunch of old houses, college students, a fair amount of riff raff. It wasn’t the safest area. And it was my senior year. I was going to sleep that night. I was living with two other girls in a house. And at four in the morning, I wake up to the sound of my bedroom door crashing open. Debbi (03:26): Oh my God. Liz (03:26): And I remember distinctly thinking, “Is this real?” And my next thought was, “This is real. You’ve got to deal with it. ” And you don’t know what you’re made of. Thank goodness I had fight in me, so I started fighting back. And eventually, at one point I write about this in the book, he says, “If you shut up, I’ll leave.” And I thought, “I’m not shutting up. I’m screaming louder.” And eventually he gave up and I left. So I didn’t have any self-protection at the time. I had a can of mace. I ran to the door, watched him run away into the darkness. And so for me, the writing about it, writing about the PTSD that I had. I didn’t even know what that word was, but I started writing about how I felt, what happened, how I would check every nook and cranny in the house. (04:09): And I had said to my brother-in-law afterward, “If I’d had a gun, I would’ve shot him.” And he said, “Well, that may not have been self-defense. By the time you could have shot him, he was retreating off your property. You would’ve shot him in the back.” And that got me really curious about where’s that line between self-defense and vigilantism. And then my mother asked a question, which I won’t tell you because it gives away the ending, but she asked just the most out of the blue question. And I thought, wow, that would make a killer ending to a book. And that was it. And it took me years later. For anyone who’s thinking of writing a book, it took me years later. I did all those other things on my bucket list and the book just wouldn’t leave me alone, so I wrote it. Debbi (04:51): Yeah. It’s kind of an itch that you got to scratch. Liz (04:57): It wasn’t going away. And I had the plot in my mind, and it had been brewing in my mind for a while. And I’m super lucky. I had a lawyer who helped me with the legal part. I had a therapist who helped me with the EMDR therapy, which is in the book, therapy I never did. And so the whole thing was just a great project. Debbi (05:16): Interesting. At this time, are you working at a regular job or do you have a business? I understand you were head of operations for a healthcare startup at some point. Liz (05:31): I’ve done two startups. The last one, and now I’m currently on one, but we’...