Vincent Amato Disclosing A Thrilling Secret
By Sandee Rodriguez
What are you currently working on?
Due to be released in January 2016, Disclosing The Secret is a Dan Brown paced Sci-Fi action thriller. It explores the idea of introducing an extraterrestrial presence into contemporary civilization and delves into its implications on our social, political and religious beliefs, challenging the reader to ask, “What if?”
Where did that inspiration come from for that nail-bitter story?
The inspiration for the book stemmed from learning about Col. Jesse Marcel Jr.’s recollection of what his father once brought home one night when Jesse was a young boy. His father was an intelligence officer with the US army and was sent out to investigate something that crashed in the desert. Jesse’s father had brought home wreckage pieces to show his family because it was something he had never seen before. His father had described what he had found to Jesse as being “not of this earth”. The incident was reported in the papers in 1947, but was subsequently retracted by the US Army.
The more I learned about the geometry of the crash fragments, the more their section properties made sense from an engineering point of view. Col. Jesse Marcel Jr. had described these crash fragments so vividly that I thought their existence would make a great premise for a Sci-Fi story if the crash pieces were to become empirical, measurable evidence of an ET presence in contemporary times.
I jotted out an outline, wrote a few chapters, but it wasn’t until I contacted Jesse Marcel Jr. that momentum built up. I had written to tell him about my work on the novel and ask to his permission to use his family name in the narrative. Image my surprise when I received a positive response. The more I learned about the geometry of the crash fragments, the more their section properties made sense from an engineering point of view. 114,000 words later there was completed manuscript sitting on my desk.
Where do you get inspiration from for your writing?
I’ve asked myself the same question… It seems to happen unpredictably, I get a blast of narrative or ideas for a series of scenes, sometimes at the most un-opportunistic moments. Thank God for smart-phones with note taking apps! At least thirty to forty thousand words of the novel were written on my iphone. Then, when I’m in front of my screen and the words do flow, at times I have no idea where it’s coming from. I can read back over it months later and it’ll seem like it was written by someone else.
What is your background?
By profession I’m a Structural Engineer living in Australia with completed building projects that pepper Melbourne’s city skyline. Although born in Melbourne, my work has taken me to Dubai, Bahrain and Sydney. I guess you could say that I’m a reluctant writer. That is, I didn’t grow up wanting to become a writer. But the more I learned about the subject matter, the more dimensions the story developed and the narrative took on a life of its own… all I did was write it down as the character’s individual story arcs wrapped around the novel’s central plot. The very first books on my shelves were those of Arthur C. Clarke. I enjoyed the military narratives of Tom Clancy and really resonated with the writing style of Dan Brown. The Non-fiction influences whose teachings and theories seem to have crept into my writing are the works of Michio Kaku and Stephen Hawking.
What areas of science fascinate you and why?
Quantum Physics, or as Einstein called it, “Spooky Physics”. Take for example Quantum Entanglement which predicts that two or more particles can become “entangled”. Then, after they are separated over a distance and an action is performed on one particle, the other particle will respond instantaneously (or somehow know what’s happening to its partnered particle). This means if the partials are separated over a distance spanning light years, information sent between them will still be instantaneously transmitted. However, this quantum reality breaks the universal speed limit, as nothing, not even information, can break the light-speed barrier. Scientist still don’t understand how particles can send instantaneous messages to each other, but I bet there’ll be a Nobel Prize waiting for the first scientists to figure it out
It’s the frontier of known physics that I find so interesting, because what you read in a text book can sometime seem like science fiction.
Who are you influences and mentors?
Dan Brown, Tom Clancy, George Lucas, J. J. Abrams. There are also scientists and physicists that have had an influence such as Steven Hawking, Dr Michio Kaku, Nicola Tesla, Carl Sagan, Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson and Dr Steven Greer.
What else do you write?
I’ve written a screenplay called “Seven Seconds”. However, professionally I’ve written within my engineering field, an example is the following article:
Click here to see engineering article.
What do you enjoy reading?
I’m a fan of action thrillers, starting with anything written by Dan Brown, Lee Child or Tom Clancy. I also like reading science periodicals and articles on astronomy. But over the last couple of years the majority of my reading had to do with research for the novel. So it’s mostly been eyewitness accounts, abductee interviews and any works by serious researchers such as Stanton Friedman.
What do you keep fueled with while you read and work?
One of my better creations would be a chicken crepe dish with hummus and walnuts.
What are you working on next?
The next book will be the prequel to Disclosing the Secret. It will explore how the main antagonist from the first book rises through the ranks of the NSA to discover the deep black world of extraterrestrial technology acquisition and suppression. As per the first book, it will be a “factional” novel. That is, it will weave certain truths, as well as the subject of disclosure, into the storyline such that information presented within a fictional framework will enable its message to reach a wider demographic who would not normally be interested in this subject matter.