Fame & Fortune: Stuart Woods
'Chiefs' author soars with five best-selling
book series
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Woods: I hadn't thought
about it as writing about the wealthy. There are certainly wealthy
people in the books. People have a limited tolerance for reading
about the poor. Steinbeck wrote "The Grapes of Wrath"
once, but he did not write "The Grapes of Wrath II," you
may recall. I think people want to be transported to a place that
maybe they're not quite so familiar, a place where they might like
to be. But my principal characters are not terribly rich people;
they're comfortable but they have to work for a living. They rub
shoulders with a lot of rich people to get their money from them,
but they're not rich themselves.
Bankrate: Your success
also has allowed you to continue in an adventurous vein, living in exotic locales
and piloting your own plane. Do readers frequently confuse you with your jet-setting
characters? Woods: Yes, some of
them seem to think I'm Stone Barrington, and I'm not. I'm not even sure that if
Stone and I knew each other that we would be friends. Bankrate:
Did your love of flying come out of your love of sailing?
Woods: Some of the satisfactions
are the same in that you are able to leave one place and arrive
at another on your own hook. You begin to get the feeling that you
can actually fly or you can actually blow the boat across the sea.
Flying is not something I do on a Sunday afternoon; I don't go out
and fly around and look at the scenery. For me, it's a means of
travel and is particularly useful in my work doing book tours. If
I had to fly the airlines these days on a 21-city book tour, I wouldn't
do it. I don't think I could get through that many airports without
a coronary.
In the spring, I do a longer tour because I like
going to the L.A. Times Book Festival. I work my way across the country to L.A.
and do that festival and then work my way up the West Coast and back across through
Denver. That puts a lot of cities between me and home where I can stop. I come
back to Key West in the winter, Maine in the summer and New York in the spring
and fall. Bankrate: Have you ever
had a mishap flying yourself around the country? Woods:
Oh no. Once in a great while I'll have to cancel a signing because there are thunderstorms
between me and the bookstore, but that's a rare event. I have an instrument ticket
that allows me to fly in less-than-perfect conditions, but I don't fly in violent
weather. It's not worth risking my life to sell a couple hundred books. Bankrate:
Do you take the controls as well when it comes to investing?
Woods: Yes. I mean, I
have a broker and a private bank that does it. I'm not really much
good at that sort of thing and pretty much leave it in their hands.
It's a fairly conservative program with a smattering of this and
that. Well-diversified, as they like to say. If the market takes
a dive, I get hurt a little; if it goes up, I get helped a little.
Bankrate:
What's ahead for you? Woods: More
of the same. I've been doing this in a very regular way for a very long time and
I'm accustomed to getting up and working in the morning. I only work for an hour
a day, but I think about it all the time, which makes it easier to sit down and
write a chapter quickly. | 
