Beyond the Draft

He did not research his characters. He watched them for eighteen years.

R.L. Carpentier spent nearly two decades in law enforcement, watching human beings at their most vulnerable, most desperate, and most revealing. He watched the ones who did the right thing and the ones who did not. He watched the ones who surprised him and the ones who broke his heart. And the voices of all of them stayed with him long after the cases closed.

Then he went to the mountains.

Not as an escape. As a homecoming. The Catskill Mountains of New York, small towns, rural communities, landscapes where everybody knows everybody and the land itself becomes a character in every story told inside it. He completed the Catskill 3500s, climbing all thirty-five peaks over three thousand five hundred feet. He and his wife traversed the twenty-four mile escarpment trail in a single day.

This is not a writer who imagines his settings. This is a writer who has walked every inch of them.

His debut novel, Our Lady of the Overlook, is the first book in a trilogy of small town mysteries and crime procedural fiction set in the Catskill Mountains. And it is built on one of the most honest creative commitments a novelist can make.

The plot is made up. But the people living inside it are completely real.

In this episode of Beyond the Draft, Rodney opens up about what eighteen years of watching real human beings under pressure taught him about fiction. About how he takes real people and transforms them into characters without losing the truth of who they are. About what a small mountain town gives a crime story that a city never can. About why he committed to a trilogy before the first book was even out. And about the creative code he refuses to break, only writing from what he has truly lived, truly seen, and truly walked.

This conversation is for every writer who has a life full of real experience they have not yet trusted themselves to put on the page.

R.L. Carpentier just gave them permission.

🎙️ Host: Imma

📚 Guest: R.L. Carpentier / Law Enforcement Veteran /Catskill Hiker /Debut Crime Fiction Author

📖 Our Lady of the Overlook: R.L.Carpentierwriter.com

Beyond the Draft/ Where the real story begins after the writing is done.

Your words have power. Your story matters. Keep writing.

He has spent decades in book publishing. He has worked with hundreds of authors. He has watched books succeed, watched books fail, and spent his career trying to close the gap between what writers dream will happen when their book comes out, and what actually does.

Terry Whalin is one of the top 27 content producers in the entire world, with over 1,700 entries on his blog, The Writing Life. Six hundred million blogs exist on this planet. He is in the top 27.

He wrote a book called 10 Publishing Myths, not to discourage writers, but to arm them with the honest picture nobody else was willing to draw.

In this episode of Beyond the Draft, Terry gets brutally honest about the biggest lie the publishing world tells writers before they sign their first deal. About the myth that destroys not just authors' careers, but their confidence. About what separates the writers who make it from the ones who disappear after their first book. About how to keep the dream alive without setting yourself up for heartbreak. And about what he would tell his younger self before signing his very first publishing contract.

This is not a polished, careful conversation about publishing. This is the real, unfiltered, I-have-seen-it-all truth from someone who has spent his entire career trying to save writers from the mistakes that cost them months or years of heartbreak.

If you are a writer standing at the edge of your publishing journey wondering what nobody is telling you, this episode was made for you.

🎙️ Host: Imma

📚 Guest: Terry Whalin/Author of 10 Publishing Myths/Editor /Top 27 Content Producer Worldwide

📝 The Writing Life Blog: Terrywhalin.com

Beyond the Draft/Where the real story begins after the writing is done.

Your words have power. Your story matters. Keep writing.

What if becoming a number one bestselling author changed absolutely nothing?

In this eye-opening episode of Beyond the Draft, Imma sits down with author, book launch strategist, and Biz Book Pub Hub founder Robbie Samuels to challenge one of publishing's biggest myths.

After achieving #1 bestseller status in 37 categories across four countries and collecting more than 900 Amazon reviews across four books, Robbie discovered a hard truth: bestseller badges don't automatically create revenue, clients, opportunities, or business growth.

Together, We explore:

• Why authors chase the wrong success metrics

• The difference between vanity metrics and business impact

• How reviews become revenue-generating assets

• What every author should do in the first 30 days after launch

• Why a book should be treated as a business tool, not a product

• How podcast appearances can transform an author's reach

• The biggest mistake authors make after publication

If you're a writer, entrepreneur, speaker, coach, or aspiring author, this conversation may completely change how you think about book success.

Because the real work doesn't end when the book is published.

It begins.

She spent more than twenty years studying what happens inside the human body. Then she started imagining what happens when everything goes wrong.

Deven Greene is a pathologist with a PhD in biochemistry who spent decades solving medical mysteries inside one of the most intellectually demanding professions on the planet. She examined disease. She found answers nobody else could find. She lived inside the quiet, precise, endlessly complex world of medical science.

And then she became a thriller writer.

Not because medicine stopped mattering. But because there were stories inside her that needed a different kind of telling. Stories where science becomes suspense. Where expertise becomes imagination. Where the same mind trained to find answers starts following questions instead.

She has now written six novels. She has experienced traditional publishing and self-publishing. And she has spent years proving something the publishing world rarely says out loud that expertise and creativity are not opposites. They are partners. And the writer who truly understands how medicine works is the writer who can make a reader genuinely afraid of what happens when it fails.

In this episode of Beyond the Draft, Deven opens up about the moment she realized science alone was no longer enough. About what pathology taught her about writing thrillers,and what thriller writing gave her that medicine never could. About the responsibility of writing fiction rooted in real science. About why she loves research when most writers dread it. About what six novels have taught her about persistence, craft, and the difference between wanting to write and actually becoming a writer.

And about the quieter kind of reinvention not the dramatic overnight transformation, but the kind where someone spends decades mastering one life and then has the courage to become a beginner in another.

This conversation is for every professional who has spent years building one identity while quietly dreaming about another. For every scientist who wants to write. For every expert who believes it might already be too late to begin.

Deven Greene just proved it is not.

🎙️ Host: Imma

🔬 Guest: Deven Greene /Pathologist / Biochemist/Medical Thriller Author

📚 Six novels available now

🌐 devengreene.com

Beyond the Draft/Where the real story begins after the writing is done.

Your words have power. Your story matters. Keep writing.

It started in a library. A little girl. Her mother beside her. A bag overflowing with books.

That little girl fell in love with reading before she could fully sound out the letters. She won a young author's competition in fifth grade and made a decision she never walked back. At fourteen she was published in her hometown newspaper and received her first check for something she wrote. And then Maya Angelou came to her college — and in a car ride from the airport told her it took a year to write I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings.

Something clicked. She could do this.

Tonya Ellis became a journalist, a wife, a mother, and then she looked at the books her children were reading and noticed something missing. Characters who looked and acted like her children and their friends. So she created Sophie Washington, read the first draft to her kids as a bedtime story, adjusted it based on their reactions, and published it herself.

That bedtime story has now sold over 175,000 copies.

The eighth book in the series was purchased by Scholastic. She has a picture book with HarperCollins. She has publishing contracts with Charlesbridge and Penguin Random House. A literary agent. And six more upcoming books on the way.

In this episode of Beyond the Draft, Tonya opens up about the little girl who never stopped believing she was supposed to write. About what Maya Angelou said in that car that changed everything. About why representation in children's books is not optional, and what it looks like when a child finally sees themselves in a story. About how self-publishing built a movement before traditional publishing ever called. About what Scholastic, HarperCollins, and Penguin Random House taught her about the other side of the industry. And about what she most wants to say to every writer who has a story children are still waiting to find on a library shelf.

This conversation is for every writer who has been carrying a story that does not yet exist in the world, and who needs to hear what happens when you finally sit down and write it.

Tonya Ellis kept every promise she made to herself as a little girl in that library.

And this episode is the story of exactly how she did it.

🎙️ Host: Imma

📚 Guest: Tonya Ellis/ Children's Book Author · Self-Publishing Pioneer · Diversity Advocate

📖 The Sophie Washington Series · They Built Me for Freedom (HarperCollins)

🌐 tonyaduncanellis.com

📱 Facebook & Instagram: Tonya Ellis Books

Beyond the Draft/Where the real story begins after the writing is done.

Your words have power. Your story matters. Keep writing.

For fifteen years she had a front row seat to one of the most important and most broken systems in human civilization.

Tiffany Smith is a registered nurse who worked across critical care, emergency rooms, hospice, home health, and long term care. She watched patients and families become overwhelmed, financially strained, and emotionally exhausted trying to navigate a healthcare system that feels impossible to understand even from the inside. She watched healthcare workers quietly break under the pressure, especially during COVID while trying to hold everything together for everyone else.

And then she said the thing nobody inside the system dares to say.

Bedside nursing was killing her soul.

So she wrote Broken and Brave: The Fight to Heal American Healthcare. Raw frontline experiences. The emotional realities of healthcare work the public almost never sees. The human cost of a system that prioritizes productivity and profit over people's lives. The conversations that happen behind the closed door that patients and families are almost never allowed to hear.

And then she built Broken and Brave Health, a platform dedicated to helping family caregivers navigate the overwhelming realities of caring for someone they love, so they never have to feel as alone and as lost as the system makes them feel.

In this episode of Beyond the Draft, Tiffany pulls back the curtain on everything. The gap between what patients believe healthcare is and what it actually is when the visitors go home. The real story of what COVID did to the people caring for the sick while the world watched the sick. The difference between burnout and moral injury, and why that distinction matters enormously for how we think about healing the healers.

The conversations every family needs to have about end-of-life care that almost nobody has until it is too late. And what she most wants every exhausted caregiver to hear right now.

This is the conversation healthcare has been avoiding.

Tiffany Smith is done avoiding it.

🎙️ Host: Imma

🏥 Guest: Tiffany Smith RN/ Author/ Healthcare Advocate /Caregiver Champion

📚 Broken and Brave: The Fight to Heal American Healthcare

🌐 brokenandbrave.org

Beyond the Draft /Where the real story begins after the writing is done.

Your words have power. Your story matters. Keep writing.

What happens when a bestselling business author stops writing for the marketplace and starts writing for his grandchildren?

In this heartwarming episode of Beyond the Draft, Imma sits down with Bret Ridgway, entrepreneur, publishing professional, business author, and creator of the children's book Games Animals Play.

After building companies, writing bestselling books, and helping countless authors find their voice, Bret found inspiration in the most unexpected place: a phrase he couldn't get out of his head.

"Crickets playing croquet."

What began as a whimsical thought became a colorful children's book, a creative adventure, and ultimately a legacy for the people who matter most.

In this conversation, Bret shares:

His journey from telemarketer to publishing entrepreneur

• How he overcame a fear of public speaking

• The biggest mistakes authors make

• Why grandchildren changed his perspective on writing

• The surprising power of following seemingly silly creative ideas

• What legacy really means when family becomes your audience

This episode is a reminder that not every great book is written for the world. Sometimes the most important stories are written for the people who will remember us longest.

If you've ever ignored a creative idea because it seemed too small, too strange, or not serious enough, this conversation may change your mind.

Because sometimes a silly phrase becomes a story.

And sometimes a story becomes a legacy.

Listen Now!!!!!!!!

He led a state through the most contested elections in recent American history. And the whole time nobody knew what it was actually costing him.

David Maeda served as the Director of Elections for the Minnesota Secretary of State from 2019 to 2024. He navigated the machinery of democracy at the exact moment when that machinery was being questioned, attacked, and defended in ways that tested everyone inside it. He certified results under scrutiny. He faced threats. He showed up every single day for one of the most important and publicly visible jobs in America.

And through all of it — he was quietly battling depression. A heart that had been broken more times than he can easily count. Mental health struggles that did not stop because the ballots needed counting.

His memoir is called This Is Not Who We Are: Confessions of an Elections Official. It rose to number one on Amazon in biographies and memoirs and six other categories at launch. And it is in his own words not political. It is extremely personal.

It is about music. Cats. Friends. Heartbreak held with humor. And what it looks like to carry a deeply human interior life inside one of the most publicly scrutinized jobs in America.

In this episode of Beyond the Draft, David opens up about the personal story behind the institutional one. About why he chose to write about depression and heartbreak instead of political drama. About what music gave him when nothing else could reach him. About the humor that refused to leave even when everything else felt too heavy to carry. And about what he most wants every person holding it together professionally while quietly struggling personally to hear.

This conversation is for every human being who has ever shown up fully for a job that demands everything while their interior life demands everything else.

David Maeda just gave them permission to finally be honest about what that costs.

🎙️ Host: Imma

📚 Guest: David Maeda/Elections Administrator · Memoir Author · Mental Health Advocate

🌐 davidmaeda.com

📖 This Is Not Who We Are: Available on Amazon

Beyond the Draft — Where the real story begins after the writing is done.

Your words have power. Your story matters. Keep writing.

What if financial freedom wasn't the destination?

What if it was the beginning of your real work?

In this episode of Beyond the Draft, host Imma sits down with debut novelist Lukas Gaines, a former Big Tech professional who pursued Financial Independence not to retire early, but to build the freedom to write.

After years of disciplined saving, strategic planning, and intentionally building his own runway, Lukas walked away from a successful career and dedicated himself to telling the stories he wished existed when he was younger.

The result is FIRE on Fire, a queer romance releasing July 21, 2026, following Ash, a spreadsheet-driven tech manager pursuing Financial Independence, and Kael, a broke artist who challenges everything Ash believes about control, success, and what freedom is actually for.

In this conversation, you'll discover:

• Why Lukas used the FIRE movement as a creative freedom strategy

• The mindset required to leave a successful career without guarantees

• What Big Tech taught him about ambition, optimization, and identity

• The surprising connection between financial independence and creativity

• Why queer love stories matter beyond representation

• The emotional question at the heart of FIRE on Fire: What is freedom actually for?

• How writers can build their own runway instead of waiting for permission

• The courage it takes to build a life around the stories that matter most

This is a conversation about risk, purpose, creativity, and the difference between making a living and making a life.

For every writer, creator, entrepreneur, or dreamer who feels trapped between security and calling, Lukas offers a powerful reminder.

You don't have to wait for permission.

You can build your own runway.

Connect with Lukas Gaines and learn more about FIRE on Fire: Lukasgaines.com

If you've ever wondered whether the life you're building is serving the work you're meant to do, this episode is for you.

Listen now.

What if some of the most important conversations of your life have already happened?

What if God has been speaking to you all along, and you simply didn't know how to recognize it?

In this powerful episode of Beyond the Draft, host Imma sits down with Rev. Dr. David Chotka, Founder and Director of Spirit-Equip Ministries, international speaker, theologian, prayer leader, and author who has spent more than twenty years studying the Greek text of Scripture.

Drawing from decades of ministry, global teaching experience, and deep biblical scholarship, David explores one of the most profound questions a person can ask:

How does God speak to ordinary people today?

Together, they dive into the conversations many churches avoid, healing prayer, the supernatural nature of Scripture, spiritual experiences, discernment, and what the Bible actually says when read in its original language.

In this conversation, you'll discover:

• Why David believes God has been speaking to far more people than they realize

• What twenty years in the Greek text revealed that surprised him most

• Why many churches struggle to talk about the supernatural

• The difference between biblical supernatural experiences and spiritual speculation

• How prayer transcends culture, denomination, and geography

• What happens when believers read Scripture expecting God to act

• The common experiences people dismiss as coincidence that deserve a second look

• How to approach spiritual experiences with both faith and discernment

Whether you're deeply rooted in your faith, wrestling with unanswered questions, or reflecting on experiences you've never fully understood, this episode offers both theological depth and practical wisdom.

Rev. Dr. David Chotka brings together scholarship, pastoral experience, and spiritual insight to explore what Scripture says about hearing God's voice, and why that conversation matters now more than ever.

Connect with Rev. Dr. David Chotka and Spirit-Equip Ministries: Spiritequip.com

If you've ever wondered whether a moment in your life was more than coincidence, this conversation may change the way you think about it.

Listen now.