CNN - Stuart Woods - May 4, 1998

May 5, 1998
Web posted at: 10:48 a.m. EDT (1048 GMT)

(CNN) -- Stuart Woods has just published his 17th novel. "Swimming to Catalina" picks up where his previous novel, "Dead in the Water", left off. Retired cop Stone Barrington finds himself on the hunt for the missing wife of a hot Hollywood actor.

Woods recently spoke with CNN's Laurie Dhue about his latest novel, and his previous work, on CNN Sunday Morning.

CNN ANCHOR LAURIE DHUE: "Swimming to Catalina" picks up where the other book left off: Stone Barrington is in a rather interesting and rather mysterious predicament at the end of "Dead in the Water". Can you kind of fill us in on what we're looking at in "Swimming to Catalina"?

STUART WOODS: Well, in "Dead in the Water", which is just out in paperback, Stone's girlfriend had just left him to marry a movie star that she had been writing a "New Yorker" profile about. She's gone out to California. So in the first chapter of "Swimming to Catalina" he gets a phone call from her husband announcing that she has vanished and asking Stone's help in trying to find out what's happened to her.

DHUE: You haven't had a book set in California for a while. What made you go back?

WOODS: I think the last book was "L.A. Times," that was set in California. I like it out there. I get out there for four or five days at a time on book tour. I have some friends; I get to see them. I get to get a little sunshine. It's warm in the day and cool in the night, but there are undercurrents out there. There's always something going on that outsiders don't understand. And Stone is really in over his head, as it were.

DHUE: You tend to weave a lot of your own personal experiences into these books, whether it's flying a plane or sailing a boat. What does that give the reader?

WOODS: Well, I think it gives a little authenticity when you're writing about your own experiences. I did do a single-handed trans-Atlantic (voyage) and another one as skipper of a larger yacht. I've flown across the Atlantic with my wife. We went both ways, east and west and so if I choose to write about those things, I can put some of the real feelings that one experiences into the books.

DHUE: You say you love to fly but you hate airports.

WOODS: What I hate is the airport experience, where you have to walk 10 miles to the gate and then wait an hour for your luggage and then they've lost it. And when you fly yourself, you fly into a little airport and somebody backs a car up to your airplane and takes the luggage off and 20 minutes later, you're where you want to be instead of standing in line for a taxi.

DHUE: What kind of plane are you flying these days?

WOODS: I fly a Piper Malibu Mirage, which is built in Vero Beach, Florida, which is my winter home, and it's a wonderful airplane. It flies high, it's pressurized, it's comfortable. I like to think of it as a kind of a miniature Air Force One.

DHUE: I understand that you get some of your story ideas from unusual places.

WOODS: I get them from tiny places. "Palindrome" was set on Cumberland Island (off the Georgia coast). I was down there purely for my own pleasure when I saw a photograph on the wall of the inn's living room. A picture of a young man -- obviously an old photograph -- in a kind of a Tarzanian loin cloth, with a knife at his belt, standing in the surf firing a rifle out over the sea, which I thought was a very odd thing to do. And if you'll look at the cover of "Palindrome" that photograph is reproduced. That was, in fact, the grandfather of a friend of mine. And out of that photograph grew a whole novel.

DHUE: And that is really a novel that first brought a lot of attention to you. I have always wondered though why none of your books, with the exception of "Chiefs" being turned into a TV mini-series, why none of your novels have turned into major motion pictures.

WOODS: Two of them have been actually, not major motion pictures, but "Grass Roots" was also made into a mini-series by NBC. And there are two books under option right now. One for feature film and one for a television movie, but you never know what's going to happen out there. Hollywood is a capricious place. It might get made, it might not get made.

DHUE: You recently signed a three book contract. Tell us what we're going to see by the end of the year.

WOODS: Well, I've just completed the first one. The title of that book is an illustration of how great oaks grow from small acorns. I belong to a yacht club in England. I was reading their quarterly newsletter and there was some classified ads -- people selling their club jewelry and their boats, and there was an ad for a Labrador retriever for sale and the headline was, "Excellent Working Bitch!" And I thought, what a great title. I can get a novel out of that. And I did. And my publisher and I are struggling right now to find out whether they're actually going to use the title.

DHUE: I was reading where you might be changing the title of the book.

WOODS: Well, I hope not. It refers to a dog. It's about a police woman and her dog and at one point the police woman, when she sees that designation says, "Oh, me too."

DHUE: You keep up an extremely rapid pace. You write at least a book a year.

WOODS: I'm writing two a year now.

DHUE: Do you ever feel like you're writing the same story over and over again?

WOODS: No, no, no. I tried very hard to make all the books as different as possible from all the other books. Too many writers have worn me out as a reader and people who write the same book over and over again with minor changes. So, I think what my readers have come to expect from me over the years is a completely different experience each time, but hopefully a good read.

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