What's the best part of being an author?

Well, for me there are multiple “best parts” about writing, especially writing fiction. I enjoy getting to indulge the world of my imagination and doing my best to turn it into a temporary facsimile of reality for my readers. I want to write scenes that make the reader laugh out loud in the library, and tales so gripping they miss their bedtimes. I enjoy constructing dialogs, events, tragedies, successes, failures, and joys for my characters. My own viewpoints and biblical principles often come through the mouths and lives of the characters I create—hopefully without becoming preachy.

The research is fun, too. I don’t know how other authors do it, but my research is very targeted, and generally (though not always) tied to the Internet. Whether it is searching for the tail number of a particular F-16, or a realistic Russian name, or what day of the week a certain date in the future is, or discovering what indigenous peoples live on St. Lawrence Island in the Bering Sea, or what sort of prairie grasses grow in Iowa, I enjoy hunting for that one piece of information I can drop into a sentence to make the story as authentic and realistic as possible. After all the military and weapons research, and the FBI, CIA, NSA, KGB, and GRU research I did for the Falcon trilogy, I’d be surprised if I’m not on some sort of NSA or CIA watchlist. The result is that nearly every detail of a C. H. Cobb novel actually exists—every road, every restaurant, every description of a weapon, or a location, or a historical event. I can usually count the details that I invent out of whole cloth in any given book on one hand.

Sometimes when I need a particular ambiance for the whole story, my research is more general. For The Candidate I read books on presidential campaigns, The Federalist Papers, and a host of governmental, academic, and journalist reports, and legal decisions, on aspects of the U.S. government, Constitution, education policy, etc. For the Falcon trilogy, to get some background on the secretive GRU, I read Inside the Aquarium, The Making of a Top Soviet Spy, by Victor Suvorov (a pseudonym). I also read a number of books on the US Navy SEALS.

I enjoy writing with an agenda—seeking to explode ill-conceived myths and constructs of the modern day and the progressive cultural scene. I write with a self-conscious underlying platform of a biblical Christian worldview. Although my stories do have Christian characters, I object to some of the contemporary Christian fiction in which the believers are all good folks, the unbelievers are all dishonest, and someone always gets saved. That simply does not correspond with reality, or the believer’s pedigree shown in 1 Corinthians 1:26-29 or Paul’s self disclosure in Romans 7 or 1 Timothy 1:15.

I prefer making unbelievers my protagonist heroes and presenting non-Christians as flourishing under Common Grace, with sins and all. The believers in my stories stumble, fall, succeed, fail, and sin, just as we experience in real life. Painting on a canvas that more closely approximates reality as everyone experiences it means that the reader can connect with the problems, as well as with the wise characters who come alongside in the story to help and shed light on a situation.

The goal of my writing is to cause the unbelieving reader to start asking difficult questions of his own worldview, and to put him on a trail of breadcrumbs that might one day lead to the Gospel.