From a Rainy Afternoon to Five Novels: My AllAuthor Interview

AllAuthor invited me back for a second interview, and this one went deeper than most conversations I have about my writing. We talked about the rainy August afternoon in 2015 when the stories started playing, my Dominican and Puerto Rican roots, the reader who held up a mirror I didn’t know I needed, and how five novels turned out to be one story: the Stony Brook Chronicles. Here is the full interview.

---

You’ve always been a storyteller, but you began writing books only a few years ago. What inspired you to finally put your stories on paper?

I’ve been telling stories my whole life. Around the dinner table, in conference rooms, anywhere someone would listen. What I hadn’t done, for decades, was write them down.

Then one rainy afternoon in August 2015, the images started playing. That’s the only honest way I can describe it. Scenes from a Long Island summer, faces I hadn’t thought about in years, a lighthouse at the far end of the island. I sat down and tried to keep up. Six weeks and eight hundred pages later, I had the rough framework of Last Exit to Montauk.

I didn’t set out to become an author that day. I was in my late forties with a full-time career, four sons, and every reason to say I didn’t have time. I just couldn’t stop watching the movie in my head, and the only way to keep it was to put it on paper.

Your journey led to a publishing contract sooner than you might have expected. How did that moment change your perspective on becoming an author?

Eight hundred pages is not a book. It’s a mountain of raw material, and I knew it. When I finished that first manuscript in November 2015, I knew nothing about the publishing business. I certainly didn’t expect someone in it to read those pages and see a book worth publishing.

But Janet Fix at thewordverve did. By January 2016, we were working together on what would become Last Exit to Montauk.

That was when becoming an author started to feel real. Until then, writing had been something I did for myself, late at night and early in the morning. Now someone else believed in my story enough to invest in it.

Readers I’d never met would eventually hold it in their hands. That brought a responsibility I hadn’t considered when I started typing. I wanted to become a better writer and give them a story worth their time.

Janet is still my editor and publisher today. In the acknowledgments of my first book, I called her my editor, publisher, friend, and confidant. All four are still true.

Your debut novel, Last Exit to Montauk, draws inspiration from your memories of summers on Long Island. What makes those memories so special, and how did they shape the story?

Long Island in the ’70s and ’80s had a soundtrack. Billy Joel, Springsteen, The Police, Prince and the Revolution. Everything felt enormous at that age: a beach, a car radio, a roller rink.

I was twelve when a girl at a local roller rink asked me, “Wanna skate?” We skated to the Eagles’ “New Kid in Town.” While I never got her name or her number, I’ve never forgotten the song.

That’s the feeling I wanted Last Exit to Montauk to hold. It’s set in the summer of 1987, and it’s about first love, the kind that teaches you what love is before you know it won’t last. The story moves from a Long Island youth to adulthood in Florida, and it closes at Montauk Point with the lighthouse keeping watch. If the book sends a reader back to their own first love, it has done its job. I was grateful when it went on to win multiple awards, from the Manhattan Book Award to the award for first place with TopShelf.

How have your Hispanic roots and personal experiences influenced your storytelling, characters, or themes?

In every way. I’m of Dominican and Puerto Rican descent, and grew up on Long Island, in Stony Brook. A white-collar bilingual household where English and Spanish were both working languages. My mother was a Dominican-born physician with her own practice. My father served as Commissioner of the Human Rights Division for the federal government. I lost him when I was thirteen.

Every protagonist across my five novels shares my Hispanic heritage. That’s not an accident.

You can also watch my comfort with it grow across the catalog. In Last Exit to Montauk, I stopped to explain the Spanish. By Searching for Sarah, I let long Spanish conversations stand on their own, because that’s how families like mine actually spoke around the house. And Death in Utopia sends Detective Karen Skaryd to my mother’s country, the Dominican Republic, where she had no authority at all and had to earn every inch.

My roots aren’t a theme I add to the stories. Like my life, they’re the ground the stories stand on.

Your second book, The Captain & the Queen, followed your debut. How was the writing experience different, and what did you learn from your first book?

My first book taught me that the first draft is a framework, not the finished house. Eight hundred pages had to become a novel, and that meant letting go of scenes I loved. I carried that lesson into The Captain & the Queen. I was less verbose, more focused, and understood that much of the real work would happen during editing.

This story opens in the fall of 1986 at a boarding school in Stony Brook. A Hispanic boy from a middle-class family falls hard for the daughter of a Greek tycoon, and their relationship faces the pressures of two very different worlds. It’s a more intimate story than my debut, with a little comedy woven in. That gave me room to concentrate on the two of them. What draws them together and what threatens to pull them apart.

The book became a TopShelf Book Awards dual finalist, and this October, it came back into the world with a relaunch and its own music video. Not bad for a story about two teenagers navigating the 80s.

Your third book, Searching for Sarah, marks another milestone in your writing journey. What inspired the story, and what do you hope readers take away from it?

The inspiration came from the idea: what if someone I looked up to, held on a pedestal, lived a secret life? Had a love of his or her life, that I never knew about, and only found out after he or she suddenly passed away? How would it impact me? Why did they hide this from me? What does this say about them? What does it say about me and about society?

I was born in the 60s and grew up in the 70s and 80s in a traditional conservative-leaning white-collar Hispanic household. My novels, so far, and especially Searching for Sarah, reflect this upbringing.

That’s the building blocks for this novel, where tragedy strikes the main protagonist’s family. Tom Ruiz, a Stony Brook kid now living in Tampa Bay, sets out to find the love of his sister’s life. A woman named Sarah, who seemingly vanished.

It’s a book about love and family.

It was a milestone for me in two ways. It was the first time I let Spanish run on the page without stopping to translate it. And it’s where a detective named Karen Skaryd walked on as a minor character. Readers liked her. I liked her. She now has her own mystery series.

What I hope readers take away is simple: family isn’t always blood. It’s also the people who show up. As Tom tells Sarah in the book, “You’re family. Famiglia.”

You continue to work in software sales while pursuing your passion for writing. How do you balance these two very different professional worlds?

With care and a lot of coffee. I’ve spent more than twenty years in enterprise software sales, and I still do it full-time. The writing happens around it: late nights, early mornings, weekends. My wife, Jeanette, has put up with a lot of both.

What surprised me is how much the two worlds feed each other. Good salespeople are good listeners. You learn to ask the leading question that will facilitate conversation. To notice what someone isn’t saying, and to figure out what a person really wants. That’s character work. Every novelist needs it.

Good salespeople are good listeners. That’s character work. Every novelist needs it.

Phillip Vega

You’ve described the publishing industry as a whirlwind of marketing, analytics, refining, and writing. What has surprised you most about the business side of being an author?

I underestimated how much work comes after the manuscript. I thought writing the novel would be the hardest part. Then came covers, metadata, award submissions, ads, analytics, and events. You have to figure out where your time and money produce results.

The bigger surprise was how well my sales career prepared me. Enterprise sales involves long cycles and plenty of follow-up. You learn to listen, build relationships, and stay patient. Those habits help when you’re trying to reach readers.

I engage through Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, and Substack. Between novels, I share where the stories came from, the music, Long Island, and the characters who appear across my books. I enjoy those conversations. They give readers a chance to know the person behind the novels.

I also participate in local and regional events, sign copies, and meet readers where they live, face to face. Twenty years ago, I wouldn’t have predicted I’d spend weekends standing at a booth, introducing strangers to books I’d written.

How has your writing process evolved since you published your first book? Do you follow a set routine, or do your stories develop more organically?

My first book was pure instinct. The images played, and I typed as fast as I could. The spark still arrives that way, usually as a moment between two people, and I follow it. That ‘fly on the wall’ feeling.

What has changed is everything after the first novel. I now share unpublished pages with a local writing group, the Pinellas Writers and Authors Group. Their feedback keeps my ax sharp. Then Janet and I go through the manuscript carefully, line by line.

The other big change is continuity. Somewhere along the way, I realized my five novels are really one interconnected story. I call it the Stony Brook Chronicles. Characters cross from one book into another. Photographs of characters from Last Exit to Montauk hang on a darkroom wall in Fury in Her Eyes. Karen Skaryd has appeared in three novels across three genres. So, I now keep careful track of who knows what, who was where, and in which year.

When developing characters, do you draw more inspiration from people you’ve encountered in real life or from your imagination?

Both, and real life has a bigger hand in it than I first realized. The women in my novels who hold everything together without announcing it come from my mother. The narrator’s mother in Last Exit to Montauk is a pediatric surgeon who swears like a Spanish sailor. My mother was a widowed pediatrician, raising three young men. No help. No subsidies. Just her.

Keeping it all together.

I’ll let readers draw their own conclusions.

Still, the characters in my novels are not direct copies of real people. I’ll borrow a voice from one person, a habit from another, a heartbreak from my own life, and then imagination takes over. Once a character is fully on the page, they start making their own choices, and my job is to keep up and get out of their way.

What role does your setting play in your novels? Do you choose locations to suit your stories, or do the locations inspire the stories themselves?

Settings are characters in my books, and Long Island is the heart of it. Stony Brook, the North Shore, Montauk Point. Almost every one of my novels starts on Long Island or ends in Florida, and usually both. That’s essentially the story of my own life.

Sometimes the place inspires the story. Long Island summers gave me Last Exit to Montauk. Other times the story needs a place that will test the characters. Searching for Sarah travels from Stony Brook to Tampa Bay to a Nevada desert to Surabaya, Indonesia. Fury in Her Eyes moves from a Long Island prep school to Washington, D.C., and then to Clearwater Beach and Dunedin. Death in Utopia takes a Clearwater detective to a resort in the Dominican Republic, where the beauty of the place makes the darkness hit harder.

Either way, I want readers to taste the salty air. Feel the humidity. Hear the sounds. Enter the world.

As you’ve grown as a writer, have you discovered any recurring themes or ideas that naturally find their way into your books?

Several. A first love that doesn’t last, and a second one who does. White-collar Hispanic Long Island families with Spanish spoken in the kitchen. Faith carried lightly but genuinely, with characters who pray and characters who argue with prayer. Prep school as a pressure cooker of class and race. Justice, and what it costs the people who go looking for it.

My old school, The Stony Brook School, has a motto: Character Before Career. I didn’t understand how deeply it had shaped my writing, or my life, for that matter, until I sat down to write about it. Nearly every one of my characters eventually has to choose between what’s good for them and what’s right.

You enjoy connecting with readers through interviews, guest appearances, and book signings. What has been your most memorable interaction with a reader so far?

A reader once pointed out something I had never noticed: every one of my five novels contains an absent or dying parent.

I lost my father when I was thirteen. He spent his career fighting for fairness as Commissioner of the Human Rights Division. I had been writing around that loss for years without seeing it. It took a reader to hold up the mirror.

That’s the gift readers give you. They don’t just receive the story. Sometimes they show you what you wrote.

If a story keeps playing in your head, that’s not a distraction. That’s an assignment.

Phillip Vega

What advice would you give aspiring authors who have stories to tell but haven’t yet found the confidence or opportunity to begin writing?

Start. That’s the whole secret. I went decades without writing, and I didn’t begin my first novel until my late forties. It is not too late for you.

Write the messy first draft and don’t edit while you’re drafting. Mine was eight hundred pages. You can’t fix a blank page, but you can fix almost anything else.

Find your people. A writer’s group, a few honest readers, an editor you trust. Writing is solitary. Getting better at it is not.

And know that confidence usually shows up after you begin, not before. If a story keeps playing in your head, that’s not a distraction. That’s an assignment. As Nike would say, Just Do It.

Finally, how has becoming an AllAuthor member changed your writing journey, and what can readers look forward to from you in your upcoming projects?

I view the AllAuthor platform as a strategic partner. An arrow in my marketing quiver, helping me deliver a message. From the seasonal banners, to exposing my work across social media, picking up new readers and followers. Even this interview. I will use it to promote my work.

As for what’s next, The Captain & the Queen just relaunched this October with its own music video, which has been a joy to share. Detective Karen Skaryd has more work to do, too. Death in Utopia ends with the words “The End … For Now.” Readers can draw their own conclusions.

The best way to follow along is my Substack newsletter at substack.com/@phillipvegaauthor, where I share the stories behind the stories, or at phillipvega.com. Thank you to the AllAuthor team for having me back. It’s an honor.

---

Keep Reading

Every novel mentioned here is part of the Stony Brook Chronicles: Last Exit to Montauk, The Captain & the Queen, Searching for Sarah, Fury in Her Eyes, and Death in Utopia.

For the stories behind the stories, the music, Long Island, and what Karen Skaryd is up to next, join me on Substack.

My thanks to the team at AllAuthor for having me back.