Discovered Wordsmiths

Dale lives in Kansas and writes mystery novels. She’s liked mystery since she was young. Unlike most authors, she uses Linux for her writing and we discuss this.

Dale Kesterson was born in Manhattan, NY and grew up on Long Island. Since then, she has lived in six widely diverse locations, from New Orleans to deliberately moving to a town so small it does not have a red-yellow-green traffic light. She has been creating stories and putting them on paper since the age of seven, even writing and producing a neighborhood play at twelve. Life, however, kept her busy doing things such as majoring in science in college, teaching math and science, studying nursing, and managing a small home business with her husband. Odd creative opportunities presented themselves throughout the years, however, with two highlights. Dale did a two-year stint with an opera company where she performed pantomime characters while singing with the chorus and she worked on a radio show as an anchor and character voice artist. She co-authored the first two Time Guards novels, and now pens the Lauren Kaye Mysteries. Resort to Murder was the premiere in 2021 and Staged for Death followed in 2022. Dale is a seasoned traveler who is also a professional photographer. In 2018 she auditioned for a part for a community theater and has been active as an actress, singer, and assistant director with two local community theaters in her area. Her roles have included Cinderella’s Stepmother in Into the Woods, the store psychologist in Miracle on 34th Street, and most recently, the dual parts of Mrs. Dilber and the Ghost of Jacob Marley in A Christmas Carol – A Ghost Story of Christmas. Dale lives in southwest Kansas with her husband (of over 30 years) and their hairless cats. When she’s not writing, performing, or appearing at conventions as an author or panelist or songstress, she does handcrafts. This lady hates being bored!

Dale Kesterson – Author & Performer

Stephen: . So today on Discovered Wordsmith, I want to welcome Dale Kesteren. Dale, how are you doing today?

DAle: I’m fine. Had an interesting weekend, but it’s, it worked out

Stephen: okay. Oh, good. Good. Yeah. So I wanna talk about your book but before we do, let’s find out a little bit about you.

So tell us where you live and some of the things you like to do besides writing.

DAle: We live in a tiny little town in the middle of nowhere in southwest Kansas that is so small. It doesn’t even have a red, yellow, green traffic

Stephen: light. We’ve got one and we don’t have a post office. So I understand. We have a post

DAle: office.

We don’t, we have a grocery store. We have a drug store. We have a we’re the com county seat. So we also have the county community critical access hospital.

Stephen: Oh, here we are.

DAle: But if you eliminate the cats and the dogs and the cat and the various other animals, it’s the population’s about 900.

Oh,

Stephen: okay. Ours, if you count the cows, it doubles our population.

DAle: Yeah, I can understand that. If you double, if you count the cows, the population of the county triples. We’re in the middle of wheat and cattle country, but we moved here and everybody gets startled by this. We moved here by from New Orleans.

Stephen: Ooh, nice. Ooh. That was a

DAle: change. And our daughter was asked if she could do voodoo dolls and love charms and such. When she, we got up here and she’s going you moved here from New Orleans. It was the pit of hell. But it was deliberate and it was before Katrina.

Stephen: Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah, I was down in New Orleans a couple years ago and some of the trolleys were still offline from Katrina.

DAle: Katrina completely decimated the city. Brennan’s is gone. I didn’t know what Brennan’s was. The world famous restaurant, Brennan’s is no longer, and it’s you don’t go to nowhere. You can’t go to Brennan’s. Oh my God. But no, we moved up here way before then and people thought we were nuts, and then Katrina hit and all of a sudden we weren’t quite as crazy.

But I was born in Manhattan, New York. Wow.

Stephen: That’s a lot of changes.

DAle: Yeah. The real shock, culture shock was moving from Detroit down to Jackson, Mississippi. Oh, yeah. I can

Stephen: see that.

DAle: I’ve lived in a lot of places and we’ve been here for 30 years. Okay, nice. There are advantages to a small

Stephen: town. Yeah, there are disadvantages, but yes.

DAle: If you wanna go to Wendy’s, you gotta drive 30 miles, but hey, who needs that,

Stephen: right? Absolutely. We have to drive 10 miles to get to a grocery store. So I get it. First of all, I really like your TARDIS down there in the corner. That I can sp see.

DAle: Yes, you can see the tardis. I haven’t tested it, but it’s there.

Stephen: You’ve moved around a lot family. So why did you wanna start writing?

DAle: I’ve been writing most of my life. It’s just life kept getting in the way and I wasn’t able to really, seriously address it until let’s see. I started a book that turned into the beginning of the Lauren K series and it is a series Excuse me, I, we had rain for two days and our sinuses don’t know what to do.

The manuscript, original manuscript to the book is in pencil on legal pads. Wow. That’s how old it is. And I, every ti other time I moved, I lost it. Oh. And had to, what box did I put this thing in? You know how that goes. Yeah. And it’s something I really wanted to do. And in the meantime, I got involved with Star Trek fandom and Babylon five fandom.

And I wrote fanzines. I edited fanzines, I wrote short stories, fan short stories and such. So I’ve always kept my hand in. But the first professionally published short story in an anthology came out in 2018. Okay. The title of the anthology was Tales of the Interstellar Bartender’s Guild. It’s from pro se Press and the editor and the gentleman who created the anthology concept called me.

He says, I need a short story. I said, Hey, great. No, I can, I can knock out one of those. And he said, yeah, I like the way you write. And he told me the title is You, Aubrey, you’re looking for bar fights. I don’t fight and I don’t drink. This may not work out real well. And his immediate comment was, you’ll think of something.

But I called him after I watched the movie Gettysburg. He was one of the reenactors. And I said, Hey, I have an idea. And the man hung up on me. And I called him back. I said, what was that for? He said the last time you had an idea, I ended up as a singing Klingon in a fan production at a convention.

And I went, this is for a book. He said, okay, I’ll listen. And I pitched what became the Time Guards two, two novel series. Two part series. Wow. Okay. And that was also for pro se press. But as much as I love science fiction, my first love is mystery. Like a lot of people, girls my age, I grew up on Nancy Drew.

And I wanted to see, excuse me. See, it’s a box set now.

Stephen: Ah, okay. Nice.

DAle: See? Nice. I finally found. I apologize. I really do. The first publisher I took Resort to Murder for too is told me it was a good story, good concept, good characters, great dialogue, but it needed to be spiced up. And I went, no. I wanted to see if I could find a home for it that would accept it as is.

Now, in the meantime, I run our home bus computer service business, and my husband’s it. Can you edit this out? I’m gonna have to cough.

Stephen: Yeah, that’s fine.

DAle: I swear my characters don’t.

Let’s see. That’s a little better. We I was told to submit it to Jump Master Press the book to Jump master press, and they loved it. So I joined their seminar group and they do have a monthly seminar group for the Jump Master press Writers group based on Facebook. But in the meantime, in between everything else I was doing, I took my very nervous heart in my very nervous hands and or auditioned for community theater productions.

So I’m also an actress. Nice. Have done 10, 10 plays and two how should I put this? Showcase singing talent type shows fundraisers, and I stay busy. I’m old enough that if I don’t stay busy, I’m probably gonna lose my marbles and I don’t wanna

Stephen: do that. Yeah, I understand that. I’m always pretty busy.

And some people are like, how do you do that?

DAle: I did, I’ve done two conventions with the Jump Master Press people. I know that’s You’ve met them. And one was in, remember I live in southwest Kansas. One was in Tupelo, Mississippi, and then I did the Huntsville Pop Culture Expo a few weeks back and I drive.

Oh, wow. Okay. We’ve got a car that gets 50 miles per gallon and above. Nice. Nice. Otherwise I wouldn’t be able to do it.

Stephen: Nice. So you showed your box set, which I know Jump Master Press does some nice box sets. And it was a duology. So there’s two, the book we’re gonna talk about is Staged for Death.

Tell us a little bit about that one.

DAle: Okay. My main character is a get that up. There is a 25 year old reporter. The books are set in 1950. They’re period. And they’re period. Accurate. They’re, she is, Lauren Kay is, they’re all called Lauren Kay Mysteries resort to Murder was the first one. Staged for Death.

It’s the second one. Murderous Intentions is going to be the third one. It’s about two between two thirds and three quarters done. Okay. I’m working on it. They’re screaming for it and, Lauren is a 25 year old reporter in 1950. She’s on Long Island. She’s a full-time reporter and a part-time night student.

She is independent, feisty, and a bit of a smart alec. Now, all of that now is normal. Back in 1950, working your way through college was exceedingly rare, and the idea that she is not interested in a Roman permanent romance relationship, a k a, the wedding ring is makes her very odd. She hasn’t got time. She knows it, she admits it, and in staged for death, she’s working her way through college.

She promised her mom, she’s an orphan. She promised her mom that she would finish her degree. She now goes to night school, she’s whittling away at her credits and her advisor in stage for death. Her advisor has signed her up for a day class in music appreciation. Lauren’s tone deaf, and she goes into her advisor and said, I can’t do this.

If I take this class, I’m gonna lose my job because I can’t take, three hours out of each Tuesday or Thursday to take a class I really don’t want any part of to begin with. And he signs her up. They work a deal with the dean and he, they sign her up as a ready for award, A supernumerary. Okay.

Okay. It’s fun to say, it kinda bounces. A supernumerary in an is an extra. On an opera stage, they don’t sing. They just the crowds the soldiers, the party guests on stage that really don’t do anything. So she goes, okay, as long as I don’t have to sing, she looks at a friend of hers when they’re talking about it and she said, Hey, it’s a class assignment.

What could go wrong?

And of course, everything does right. But that’s the basic setup for the second

Stephen: book. Okay. All right. And this isn’t your first book. You’ve written other things. Have they all been mysteries?

DAle: No. The first two novels that came out, I co-wrote with. Aubrey Stevens for Pro Se Press. The first one is called the Devil to Pay Time Guards Volume One.

And we took two people from a 2015 reenactment just outside of Gettysburg and Drop kicked them back to 1863 with no warning, no manual, and no instructions. And they spend the entire first day going, what in the heaven’s name has happened here? Oh my heavens. We’re really there. Oh my goodness. And we can’t change history.

Oh crap. It was your basic oh crap moment. And the second book picks up as four score and seven time guards book two. And it is parts one and two with the same. Same story. They get involved in trying to thwart a conspiracy to assassinate Lincoln at the Gettysburg Address at the Gettysburg Dedication.

Oh. And they’re not sure if they’re stuck or not. So it was fun. I co-authored it with Aubrey Stevens and Pro Se Press took a look at the original book and went a first novel of 140,000 words. I don’t think so. So we split it into two books.

Stephen: Yeah. A lot of times I’ve heard that happening.

DAle: Yeah.

But the, and my Myster mystery series, the Lauren k Mysteries from Jump Master Press are family friendly. There’s no gratuitous gore sex violence or profanity. There is a bit of profanity in the time guard’s books, but nothing overt. And, but I have people, I have readers as young as 1314 reading the Mysteries.

Now Mysteries is my first love, but I also have a science fiction novel running around in my head. As soon as I get book the Third Mystery out, I’m gonna work on that.

Stephen: Oh, okay.

DAle: Nice. But I hate being bored, so if I’m not working on anything else, I do cross

Stephen: stitch. Yeah. What type of feedback have you been getting from people who have read the books?

DAle: The feedback on the mysteries I sold copies of both Mysteries to a friend and her note back to me was, oh, I love them. I’m not sure I like you anymore. And it’s like I looked at the note and I’m going, oh my gosh, what happened? And she says, I lost a lot of sleep because I had to know what happened.

That’s a good thing. The question I get most often from any, anybody who has read both and has read, the second one is, when’s the next one coming out? That’s a good thing too. So I’m assuming I’m doing something right. Yes. The funniest sequence I have written to date is end staged for death.

Lauren, when she gets mad or upset, tends to exercise her vocabulary, but she doesn’t swear.

She hits somebody. All right, I’m gonna have to cheat. You wanna hear a paragraph?

Stephen: Yeah. Yeah. Can I do that? Yeah,

DAle: let’s do that. Okay. I’ve used this as a reading in at conventions. This, the guy she’s talking to has royally torqued her off. Big time. She almost gets bounced from the opera production.

It’s set against an opera. GU knows Romeo and Juliet. The opera is not the focus, it’s the setting. So you don’t have to know anything about opera. I take care of that. And she says, Ash, I put my hand on his face, he smiled. Auntie, I want to up. I grabbed his ear lobe and used pressure. Use Supercilious solipsistic, narcissistic egocentric lethario.

I sat cutting him off. How dare you entangle me in your infantile in Broo, you could have gotten me fired. And I need this class to graduate of all theile. Sure. Cow Callow pranks. You don’t have to understand all the words individually to know what she is saying. And I love that sequence. Later on in the scene he says Lauren, would you translate those high powered words you just used on me?

That’s funny. And she says, sure. If you can repeat them back. Nice. She’s fun to write. Yeah. And they are told first person.

Stephen: Okay. All right. And So you’ve got the two out and you said you were planning a third one. Would that be the end of the series or No?

DAle: Okay. We’re looking, we had a discussion of about this in Tupelo, and again, in Huntsville we are probably aiming at a series of six books.

Okay. And oddly enough, the last one to which will be published is actually the first one I wrote. The reason being I had to establish the characters. I set it in a house and I asked permission to use the house from the person who owned it. I said, I love this place. Would you mind if I set a book here?

And she, what kind? I said, A murder mystery. She said, oh, do you mind? She said, no. Have at it. And a friend of mine read the book. And she said, it’s wonderful, it’s great. It kept me guessing up until the last minute. But it’s a closure. It’s not an intro. So the last one’s, it’s gonna need severe editing, but it’s already exists.

So I’m preschooling leading up. I know where I’m going. It’s a matter of getting there. Okay. All right. But it gave me, knowing the setting gave me the opportunity to develop the

Stephen: characters and that’s, something that a lot of authors give the advice, know where you’re going.

And

DAle: You have to know, especially in a murder mystery, you’ve gotta know where you’re going. The only major mystery author I know of that never plotted it out in advance was the amazingly brilliant Agatha Christie. And I read her books and I’m going, my gosh. You mean you solved your own mystery as you wrote it?

No. So my advice to anybody writing a mystery is please, before you start, get your basic plot line with at least who did what to whom, how and why.

Stephen: Got it. Okay. Good advice for all the mystery writers. And I’m sure the readers agreed too. They wanna yeah,

DAle: I do. Don’t wanna have to solve your own puzzle because you could really write yourself into one heck of a corner.

Stephen: So now if you were given the choice, would you rather turn these into movies or TV shows?

That’s

DAle: a good question. A TV series would be exceedingly expensive. I know enough about productions to realize that. Anything period, anything in the past, you’ve gotta have the cars, the clothes, the, and renting those. That kind of car, we’re talking 1950s, so we’re talking cars from like 1947 to maybe 1952 and getting ahold of those that look like they’re still on their wheels.

That gets pricey. Keeping the production values, you gotta remember, I do stage work, keeping the production values accurate, and these will not update properly. I may have written myself into a hole there, but. I would say movies rather than tv, but they may not be intricate enough to take to the movies.

Frankly. I’d rather take my main three characters to the stage. Oh, that

Stephen: would be interesting.

DAle: Lauren is an orphan. Her dad was killed at Normandy during World War ii. Remember we’re in 1950 and her mom died of cancer a few years later. She’s on her own, but she’s not alone. Her best friend’s father has taken her under his wing and she goes head to head with a, the local police captain who hates amateurs getting in his way.

In his investigations, he’s a curmudgeon and they bump heads solidly in the first book Resort to Murder, which is this one. Lauren gets her first Sunday supplement front page, front page Sunday supplement assignment and this, and is asked to check to see if a death at the brand new resort was an accident or not.

And of course it isn’t. And she, and the Captain Bunk completely collide and she holds her own. But the, my three main characters, Lauren, her best friend’s father Robert Mallory and the police captain Danny O’Brien, are my three mates. And it takes, usually takes, it’s usually gonna take all three of them to make sense out of

Stephen: stuff.

Okay. All right. And if people wanted to check out all your books, do you have a website that they could go to?

DAle: I have a website which includes all of the books. It’s. Www Dale Kesteren, d a l e k e S T E R S O N, just the way it sounds.com. And we recently updated the website to include the second anthology, which is from Jump Master Press, called Dreams of Time and Space, in which I proved to my publishers that I, a, I can write science fiction and b, I don’t have to write in first person.

I can use third because it drives one of them nuts because he’s not a big fan of first person and I’m going tough. They’re my books.

Stephen: Nice. Okay, and we’ll,

DAle: and of course you can get, anybody can go to www jump master press.com and. Find my books from Jump Master The Mysteries and the Anology there.

Stephen: Okay, great. All right, so Dale what are some, I see you got some books behind you. What are some of your favorite books and authors?

DAle: My favorite author, and you can’t see it behind me because it’s in front of me in a glass case. After I finished with Nancy Drew and Judy Bolton, the Dana Girls and Sherry Ames student nurse, and all those, which were major series when I was growing up.

I’m old. I saw a, went to the library and saw a shelf of books with black covers and little red skulls at the bottom of the spine. And I looked at my mom. I was maybe 10 or 12, and I What’s those, what are those? I couldn’t reach ’em. Neither could she. And she said, oh, that’s Rex Stout’s, Niro Wolf series.

What I’m looking at off camera, I have reading copies over here behind me over here, but I’ve collected some of the hard back first editions of the Nero Wolf novels. Nice. He is my favorite author I think of all time. And yes, it was an influence. The books are always told by first person, by Archie, his character, Archie Goodwin.

But I can’t even begin to mimic him. So it’s okay, I’ve gotta have my protagonist action. And her support has gotta be movable too, because Nero Wolf just sits and. And is an irascible. Curmudgeon.

Stephen: And do you have a favorite bookstore you like to go to get your books?

DAle: I live in the middle of nowhere in southwest Kansas and everything locally, we used to have a Hastings, we used to have a Barnes and Noble fairly local.

It was 60 miles away. But with the brick and mortar stores closing, it’s hard. So I hear about something and I do what Mo a lot of other people do. I jump online and the time guards novels are on Amazon. Of course, everything from Jump Master is probably on Amazon, although I, we really prefer people to get them from Jump Master cuz they’ve got a variety.

It’s a small house based in Alabama. They’ve got a wide variety of style authors and styles and genres, including young adults.

Stephen: Yeah. Yeah. They had a really nice presentation display when I saw ’em in Virginia about a month ago.

DAle: It’s called a traveling bookstore for a reason. And they finally got the subject, like historical fiction, fantasy time travel signs up. So now we no longer have to completely go around the room when we but yes. In Huntsville we had I think nine authors. Oh, nice. And they just did meth con in Chattanooga. And they had three, five, because Kyle and Gene, Kyle, Hannah, and Gene Rowley both. As well as run the company.

Stephen: Yeah. I talked to both of them. I met Jean at the Con I was at, and I’ve had Kyle on, he’s coming up an upcoming episode going to be on. So they’re,

DAle: they really, and I think most of their authors feel this way. I know I do. I was extremely grateful that I found a home for Lauren Kay. The Lauren k Mysteries that wouldn’t, in, that didn’t insist on throwing in the gratuitous gora sex, violence, profanity stuff, and accepted her, accepted the mysteries.

They’d never published a genuine, traditional, cozy mystery before I came in. And we’ve been amazed at the response we literally sold out in Huntsville. Of my books. Nice.

Stephen: That’s a good thing. I’m glad to see that cuz they were great guys to talk to. And I bought a few books and, there were others I was looking at and I’m just glad to see that there’s such a nice press getting out there.

Because you hear about something, there was somebody talking to one of the authors there and they’re, oh yeah, I got this thing from author House or something that they said they would publish and blah, blah blah. And it was like, it’s gonna cost $8,000 and so many people are getting ripped off by these scam places that, to see a place like Jump Master doing well and looking like they’re growing and that’s Oh, they’re growing.

DAle: Yeah, they’re definitely growing. Somebody, I was talking at another convention without. The bookstore. I was basically there on my own. I do shadow Con in Memphis. It’s a, what we call a relax con. My co-author from the time Travel books, Aubrey Stevens is on the committee that runs it. And I was sitting with a couple of other authors or wannabes and they’re saying, who do you have?

Who did you find to edit your books and how much did it cost you? It’s whoa. My editor as editor in chief, assign somebody to edit the book and I’m sorry, money shipments in this deal. Only go one way. Not making, I’m not gonna, probably not gonna make a fortune, but I know that it will be handled and.

Self-publishing is fine if you know how to do the editing or can find an editor and can afford to pay one. And yes, you can get it, you can get it published, but you have to worry about the cover, the editing promotion website, how to handle the money, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And frankly, I don’t wanna be bothered.

So I found a house that would take it, and I sit back and yes I have a lot of input into the covers. I love this one. I really love that cover. Yeah, it’s a nice cover and with the hand holding the curtain back, the but it’s just nice to have the support behind you as a writer. I can focus on writing.

And I don’t have to worry about a lot of the other stuff. Yeah. Now I will admit, I’ve been an editor, so most of my stuff goes in pretty well assembled and needs just minor tweaking, which they appreciate.

Stephen: Yeah, I’m sure. I’m sure. So let’s talk a little bit about some of the writing stuff. So what are some things you’ve learned in your writing career from your first book to this one?

DAle: I was, had the tremendous pleasure and fortune to be a, have as a good friend. I’m sorry, I just thinking about him, he’s gone and I miss him very much. The late insanely talented Robert Aspirin. Oh yeah. Fulls the myth series. Yes. Fulls and the full series. And I was listening to and talk up to a group of people who, oh, I will, I’d love to write a book.

I’ve got ideas. How do I go about it? And he’s going, okay, let’s go back to writing 1 0 1 is the first thing he always said was, never write anything You don’t wanna read 350 times,

Stephen: at least 350 times.

DAle: It’s people say, what was, what’s the book you’ve read the most Mine?

Stephen: Yeah. The last one I was working on.

DAle: The last one I’m working on. Yeah. And you don’t wanna know how many times. And he also said, if you don’t enjoy what you’re writing, don’t do it because there’s no point. You have to, this is one of those where you have to love what you do. Otherwise it becomes such a drudge that you’re not gonna finish it.

And yes, Heline has his rules of writing and people should check those out. I’m not gonna go into them. I don’t have the handout in front of me, but if you’re going to write, you have to write. If you wanna be a writer, you have to

Stephen: write. And that’s, I’ve been finding more and more through my own personal experience and just talking to authors that it doesn’t matter what class you go to, it doesn’t matter what group you join.

It doesn’t matter how many books you read, that none of that makes hardly any difference compared to just sitting down and writing and writing and not writing one book and then revising it and editing it for seven years. That doesn’t improve your writing. It’s actually writing something and moving on to the next thing, and writing more.

DAle: That’s one of the things, the Highline five rules of writing is you have to write, you have to finish what you write. You have to submit what you edit to the best of your ability. But don’t sit there and tweak it, as you said, for seven years. Submit it and move forward. Move on. Yes. Learn from what you do.

If you were to read the story I have in Tales of the Interstellar Bartenders Guild and then the short story in dreams of Time and Space, which is the Jump Master anthology I even kept one of the same characters. They’re different stories, but the difference in the writing techniques. Yeah. I really learned a lot.

You can tell the difference. You can tell that I’ve learned a lot even between these two books and they came out within a year of each other. Yeah. Every, so I’m still any writer that will not admit to learning as they go ignore. Because hey, even Stephen King needs an editor. Yeah,

Stephen: exactly. And he’ll

DAle: admit that to, and you have to learn how to take criticism without being crushed.

Not personally. I did a one-on-one with Jean early on when we were, I was developing resort to murder. It needed help. And we did a one-on-one zoom, like I’m in the middle of nowhere. Nobody lives here. Nobody lives close. And he said, now I’m gonna, I’m gonna get critical. I said, come on, I do stage work.

You’re a director. I’m an actor. Go for it. He said, A lot of people take it personal and they shouldn’t. We’re not, If I give somebody criticism, it’s I’m not cr, I’m not coming down on you. I’m trying to help build what you’re

Stephen: doing. I always try and tell people that I wanna hear what your thoughts are.

I wanna hear what didn’t work, what didn’t sound right what’s missing and all that. Because I would rather have somebody I know tell me, Hey, this, you missed this. And it sucked than to thi to be told, oh yeah, it was great. I loved it. And then you put the book out and every review says this kind of sucked.

It’s much more cruel to me to have somebody tell you, yeah, it was great when it wasn’t. There

DAle: are basic rules. The one you would hear around a jump master seminar the most is show don’t tell.

Stephen: Which I everybody’s heard that. If you’ve been writing for more than a week, you’ve heard that and they’ve told you that, but there’s not much follow up at times.

It’s what do you mean show don’t tell? And I’ve keep it, act, keep it active but I think sometimes new authors don’t understand what we mean by show, don’t tell. And I think it needs a little more using examples is good. When I’ve talked to people, but I’ve had to learn myself because I went from applauding this action to a little more flowery, I guess language.

Not really flowery, but better language, rather than just stating a bunch of actions, more of grammar and nice lines of sentence lines. And the show don’t tell. I started picking up on it more by, Reading other people’s stuff and seeing how they did it and real. And again, because I have been writing a lot, I could have examples in my own writing.

It’s oh, I can improve that here. And I just think it, it took me a couple years to really get down, show don’t tell, and be able to see it in my own writing and see it in others. So again, you gotta keep writing.

DAle: You have to put your reader there. Yes, you have to put your reader in your book. And I’m gonna do it again.

Hope you don’t mind. No. Let’s go back to resort.

Okay. I’m gonna put you right there. The telephone’s ringing, ringing bell, barely audible through my lock department door taunted me like a naughty three year old sticking out its tongue. Listening to the dangling sound, I stood in the narrow dimly lit corridor, struggling to juggle full grocery bags and my oversized purse fervently.

Wishing humans had three arms. A myriad of tantalizing odors wafting through the air, reminded me I forgot to eat lunch. My stomach growled at me like a grizzly bear coming out of hibernation. I got the key into the lock. My determination to enter the sanctuary of my apartment heightened when the infant in the apartment down the hall started to wa inhaling deeply through my nose and frustration.

I concluded my neighbor across the hall once again succeeded in scorching his dinner, which reinforced my decision to decline his standing invitation. The key to my new apartment stubbornly refused to cooperate. Exasperation, mingled with the fatigue of the long week, making my Friday complete. Give up.

I’m mumbled to my unknown caller. I don’t want any. You’re there. Yeah, but that’s Lauren and that, that’s also an Lauren’s introduction. That’s Lauren. She’s a working, li working girl. She is. Got classes she’s got. An apartment of her own finally. It’s tiny, but that puts you right there with her. And that’s the

Stephen: magic, right?

And that’s what everybody struggles and that show don’t tell. It’s an easy to say, hard concept to really

DAle: grasp. It’s, and it’s, I still struggle with it. I just printed out the first 90 pages, 90 pages on a word screen, not 90 pages of a book. And reread it. And I’ve got my, I edit, I personally, I edit better on paper than I do on a screen.

I miss stuff on the screen. And it’s also easier on the eyes and. I’ve got little marks and pencils all over and little lines on the sides saying, okay, you need to, this, you made a change here. You when you go back over and have the papers here and the screen here. Yeah. And everybody has their own methods, but the rules are basic.

I have been known to take a telling and turn it into a dialogue. Interesting. But I write, now that was a scene description, but you heard some of my dialogue earlier. I write dialogue possibly because I’ve been a movie fan and you can’t show everything. I’m also, and I’m now into stage stuff.

So the last production I did, I was actually two characters in one play. We did a steampunk accented version, believe it or not, of Christmas, Carol. Nice.

Stephen: I love that. And

DAle: I was, I played Mrs. Dilbert, Scrooge’s Cockney housekeeper, and I also played the ghost of Jacob Marley to completely disparate characters.

Yeah. To completely different voices, to completely different accents, to completely different costumes. And as I told the director after it was all over, that was fine. I had no problem separating all of that. It was the two completely different makeups that drove me nuts.

Stephen: Yeah, I’m

DAle: sure. But I do accents. I do di I write dialogue.

I have found in my personal way of doing things that I. I can get a plot point out better with less telling by turning it into a dialogue. Writing first person does limit you if your main character doesn’t see it or hear it. It hasn’t happened, but somebody can tell her that it happened, and that’s where I pick up my slack.

A lot of people can’t write first person. A lot of people only write first person. I can do, I do both.

Stephen: It does it. That’s a whole nother skill because when you first start writing first person, the tendency is to, I then went and did this, then I went and said this. I was saying, I went, it’s like I everywhere.

And I did the, and they miss out a lot on the inner monologue that the person’s got going on. Inner dialogue and. Bringing out some of those feelings and stuff. It’s done differently and I think a lot of people should write some more in practice. I’m not, that’s not criticism cuz I’m no better, but that’s, how do you get better at it?

DAle: The other thing you do need to do is read. Yes. You have to read, you do have to read books. Your favorite author, vary it a bit. I’m sitting here looking at, here comes a brag, looking at signed copies of things like Lucifer’s Hammer by Larry Niven and Jerry Porn and yes, they both signed the book.

Nice. One of my prize signed books is I have a copy of a book called Mirror Friend, mirror Faux co-written by Robert Aspirin and George Toay.

Stephen: Nice. Wow. And both,

DAle: I got them both to sign it. I’ve got a lot of Bob’s books signed, obviously, but he now, he wrote in first person for the Myth Books, but third person for the Fools Books, the Fools Company, fools Paradise, that’s the send up of the military.

And I found that very interesting. I’ve got I’ve read Mercedes Lackey for years. There’s a, you will see, I don’t, you can’t see titles, but we’ve got the Arthur Clark’s behind me and you gotta get I, yeah, I

Stephen: saw 2001 right there.

DAle: Yeah. And, but up top I’ve got the hitchhiker complete. By Douglas Adams and beautiful.

You have to read, you have to be able as far as action goes. And action sequences are actually my weak, my weakest point. Read some child. I love cu. I love Clive Kessler books.

Stephen: So is my mother. So let’s, before we ramble too long on many other topics, one of the big things I really wanted to talk to you about was you’ve made an interesting choice in your computer.

Now most people, I’m sure I would probably say. Almost a hundred percent of the people listening to the podcast watching the videos are using either a PC or a Macintosh and PCs. The difference is Mac is created by Apple. The hardware and the software are both created by Apple. They control all of it, and PCs are by a large. Number of manufacturers, but the operating system is usually Windows. And that’s from Microsoft. Just yeah, to clarify, because a lot of people get mad and say, ah, stupid Microsoft, my hard drive went out. Microsoft didn’t make your hard drive. They made That’s right.

It’s different. So I’m just clarifying that because you made a completely different choice that most people probably haven’t heard of. And that is Linux. And Linux is an open source for, and there’s many versions, there’s a lot of ver You can’t just say, I run Linux. You’ve got Mint, you’ve got Ubuntu, you’ve got Red Hat.

There’s a ton of different Linux. So what version of Linux, first of all, do you use Mint? You use Mint? I’ve started using that one a little more when I’m doing personal stuff.

DAle: I use Linux Mint my road warrior this is the, this the computer I’m, the laptop I’m using now is a Dell. It’s a I don’t, not even sure it’s been so long.

The, it’s the only one. We’ve only got two laptops in the house that have cameras and microphones. It’s and the other one that is equipped with a camera has a bandaid over the camera to give you an idea of how much we love that. And it’s my husband’s, but my road warrior is a certified refurbed.

It’s probably close to eight years old now. Dell latitude. It’s good. Good machine. It’s a good machine. It’s a solid machine. It travels well. I’ve got the nine cell battery on it, which makes it heavy, but Who cares? Yes. And it, it’s an old machine. As far as technology goes, it’s not quite ancient, but it’s getting there and he put Mint on it.

He put Linux Mint. Linux is, uses less resources than Windows. It interferes less in Windows than Windows does. We just bumped into a I just bumped into a pop-up. We’ve been, we were outta town from Saturday through yesterday and I was accessing something on Friday and popped up and you need to do this.

And it was on my main windows. I’m running Windows 10 on my main system. It’s go away. And no matter what Windows programmed I opened that came up and I’m going. I’m gonna go kill somebody on paper. And he hasn’t, I don’t think he’s straightened. I don’t think he’s had the time to straighten it out yet.

But yeah, real And Linux doesn’t do that. It’s also less prone to viruses.

Stephen: Yes. They don’t attack it cuz not many people are using it, part of it, but it’s also got more security in it. It’s

DAle: got more security in it. I use proton mail for email, which is encrypted. And I use the free version because I don’t have to sync it up with a smartphone.

I don’t own a smartphone. My daughter calls this my average intelligence phone because it isn’t smart.

Stephen: That’s good. Nice. And

DAle: I don’t even text. Drives people

Stephen: nuts, but So what on your Linux machine, what do you use to write your manuscripts? Libra office, that’s pretty

DAle: typical standard, which, all of which mimics all of the windows office applications.

And I can save it as a Windows, as a as an Word doc. A Word file? Yeah. And just take the little flash drive and plug it into the big machine and go. But I have a Windows seven machine that I use for my writing because Windows 10 gets too finicky and too mu it’s too much of a pain in the neck, and that’s not pain in the neck.

Three feet lower.

Stephen: What other. Using Libra office and you export it as a Word doc and then you could take it and usually, send it. Have you found any other services or things that have been difficult to use because you’re on Lennox?

DAle: Yes. When had this conversation? When we first started to set this up.

Yes. Yes. Linux does not like Chrome. And a lot of the zoom type programs. I know I did another podcast interview with all things writing. I won’t mention his name because that’s like the other guys, but we tried and I am married to an IT pro. He sets everything up and well, the first time.

I’ve been playing with computers for a long time. My first actual computer system had an 80 88 processor.

Stephen: I used one of those as a doorstop at one point. They all, if you

DAle: take out all the innards and work it you can actually turn it into a neat drink dispenser. I’ve seen that done big and heavy, but yeah.

And my first, very first laptop had a brace yourself, 10 megabytes hard

Stephen: drive. I knew you were gonna say that,

DAle: but Oh, I loved it. It was a Panasonic and the top just folded back a little, and it was not, it had the best laptop keyboard I’ve ever owned. But yeah, the he being an IT profession, he says, we need a new computer.

It’s okay. And he came, he, I came home from work one day from shopping one day, and he had bits and pieces all over the floor, and he is, this is your new computer. And I looked at it and I looked down and I rolled my eyes and I said, okay, I don’t want anything to do with it. And until it’s got a screen, a menu, and a start stop button, right?

And then one day he we, one Saturday, he said, all right, I’ve, and I wa I loved Word perfect 5.1 for Doss.

Stephen: That’s going back, having to put in your own tags and stuff there.

DAle: But it gave you a blue screen with white letters and it was so much easier on the eyes, it wasn’t even funny. And one day that day came, he said I’ve loaded Windows 3.1.

Okay. He said, this is how you get into it. This is how you get out of it. I gotta go see my parents. Bye.

Why are you leaving? He said, because I don’t wanna listen to what’s gonna come outta your mouth. You tried to find your way around this stuff. And that was my introduction to Windows. My introduction to my first computer was even actually, even funnier. I had somebody build it for me and he came in and he delivered it and he said, this is your new computer.

And this is back when they had just come out with the amber letters on the monitor. Yeah, I’m, we’re going

Stephen: back. Yeah, that’s a way

DAle: We’re talking 19 86, 87. And he said, go ahead and sit down. And I h put my fingers over the keys. I hadn’t even touched one. He’s standing behind me. Bill was standing behind me and I about to touch a key, and across the screen came programming error.

He swears he never saw me move, but the next thing he heard was my voice from the doorway of the room going, it doesn’t like me. Take it back.

I hate computer. I hate computers.

Stephen: Yeah. They’re

DAle: a fact of life. Yeah. But I still don’t have to like them. I certainly don’t trust them.

Stephen: Especially with the new AI stuff.

DAle: Oh man. Everything I have gets backed up at least two different places.

Stephen: That’s smart. That’s a good way to go no matter what system you have.

Yeah.

DAle: I, and always hit the save button every 10 minutes, whether you need to or not. That is probably the best piece of writing advice I could give any writer.

Stephen: My and my default documents folder is my cloud drive folder. So when I hit save, it’s putting it up on the cloud automatically as I continue typing.

So that’s a tip. What is that

DAle: piece of artwork over your shoulder?

Stephen: This one? Yeah. That is my book cover. It was drawn, painted by a man named Thomas Zoller. He lives up in Cleveland. He. He does a lot of his own stuff, but he was also involved in the, my Little Pony reboot of 10 years ago or so.

So yeah, middle grade fiction. That’s the book cover, huh?

DAle: I’ve been looking at it and I wanted to ask. Yeah, so see, the, isn’t that the Millennium Falcon? Oh,

Stephen: that is the Millennium Falcon there. Yep. It’s a tin that I got hanging up. I’ve got an Indiana Jones poster. I have to get up yet still from my original location.

Let me ask you this, so we talked about Libra office. A lot of what authors do now is online with browsers and services, so you can access that through just about any computer with a browser. But there are some softwares that people do use. For example velum it only works on Mac, it won’t work on Windows, it will not work on Linux.

And there are like pro writing aid. You can do it. Through the browser, but it’s easier on a desktop app. They might have a Linux version. So do you find the frustrations sometimes? Trying to get some of the, people will say, oh, get this program. It’s I can’t, people need to understand if it’s written for Windows.

It only works on Windows. If it’s written for Mac, it only works on Mac. A lot of them will work on both, but even then, a lot of them don’t work on Linux. You’re

DAle: talking about writing tools like Scrivener and Yeah. Outlining tools

Stephen: and stuff. Yes. Plotting tools, various things like that. You ready?

Yeah.

DAle: This drives Gene Rowley up the rally up the wall. I don’t outline.

Stephen: Oh, okay. You’re the

DAle: quote unquote. I’m a answer. It’s here, but as as anybody who writes. If they’re being honest, we’ll admit, no matter how you outline your characters can decide, Nope, I’m not gonna do that.

Stephen: Oh, yeah, that, and anyone who hasn’t written that wouldn’t really understand, does

DAle: not understand that.

I’ve, I, I’ve got, I was had a plot knot, a plot line knot, and it just would not unravel. I’m, it was, as I finally said, screw this, I’m gonna go to bed, and at three o’clock in the morning, my police captain woke me up. I’m not gonna do, that’s whose book is this anyway? And people look at me like you gotta be kidding, right?

You hear voices and everything and it’s yep. Oh, I know what he sounds like. But if he’s not, if they’re, those characters are not real to me, they’re never gonna be real

Stephen: to you. And no matter how much plotting you do, sometimes the characters look at your plot and your outline and say, that’s not how I would act.

And they act how they would act. And your outline

DAle: changes. Yeah. No. I don’t know.

I don’t know how I do it. I’ve got a, as I said the, you’ve gotta have, there were three things involved in a mystery and you could drop a mystery into anything. It usually makes it a better book. Even if it’s just a suspense that has to be resolved. Any question that has to be resolved can, becomes a mystery to some degree or other.

And you’ve got to know means opportunity and motive the mom of mysteries. But you have to know who is, I have to know who is gonna do what. To whom, how and why, or I can’t even get started now. I’ve changed the who I haven’t changed the who, but I’ve changed who’s help assisting, the accessory before the fact, if you wanna get technical.

And that has changed twice just since I started the third book. So I consider pantsing flexi to a degree. Flexibility. I know a writer who outlines so thoroughly that all he has to do is put in the conjunctions.

Stephen: Wow. That sounds like Patterson.

DAle: And it’s I’m sorry, that’s locking me in too much.

In the third book, I decided I needed a minor bounce from the n from the narrative. I needed a. An incident, an action incident, and I wrote a sequence and Hey, that does work. Okay. Now, when I was about 30,000 words into murderous intentions, which is gonna be the third book, and it wasn’t working.

So I read, I printed it out and read it and went, oh, okay. I need to make a left turn here and back it up. And I wasn’t allowing myself enough of a timeframe for the action. Murderous intention takes place basically in a week. This one took place over a weekend stage for death. Takes a few months, but I don’t drag it out.

A rehearsal process takes time. And the main action occurs during the actual production and then follows for the next day or so. So you’ve gotta, you’ve gotta paste these things. And I had actually outpaced myself with the first version of stage for death. So I backed it up, scrapped it, and started, not started over, but inserted a couple of extra days that I could use to help build this over overall arc of suspense.

Try that three times

Stephen: fast. Nice. All right. All right. Dale this has been great talking to you. I’m glad somebody else uses links. I don’t use it day to day all the time, but I do have a Linux machine sitting right here. I pull up some things.

DAle: I love it. It’s and we do have it double encrypted.

I have to, use a password to open the thing up and then I have to use a password to get into my programs and We set that up. The first time I took a major trip and I didn’t want anybody messing with my hard drive stuff. And I keep my stuff backed up on one of the drives that is not attached to the internet because my Windows seven is not attached to the internet.

I even have a Windows XP system still running. Wow. I have as long as it’s not attached to the internet, it’s fine. But that’s run, that’s where I run my Photoshop because I’m not about to pay for the new versions of Photoshop but cuz I’m also a professional photographer. Oh

Stephen: wow. Okay.

Nice.

DAle: Yeah, my husband calls our vacations expensive photo shoots.

Stephen: I can understand that.

DAle: But yeah, it’s I love the Linux machines because they’re not bulletproof, but they’re close. They’re closer than anything else. Cuz Mac, they are targeting Macs with viruses

Stephen: now. Yeah, a lot more. And I’ve been having a lot more problems with Mac users having issues, just acts up as much as Windows sometimes.

But on the flip side, I don’t know if I’d recommend Linux for everybody because there is a bit more hands-on, a bit more you have to do sometimes you can get programs, but you have to sometimes do a little bit more work with them to get ’em. Yeah. We

DAle: tried to load a version of Chrome that would allow us to use the program that the other podcast other podcaster wanted to use.

And it’s we can’t get this thing to work. And the camera is attached to a Linux machine. I’m sorry, I’ve got limitations here. And we ended up doing a Zoom, and I appreciated the flexibility that you gave me because I didn’t wanna go through

Stephen: that again. I like Zencaster because the audio recording is better than on Zoom.

But more people have used Zoom. Like I said, I

DAle: told you I did have the headset. All right. I trained audio wise, I trained when I was working on the radio and Jackson, Mississippi, oh. We did a Satir newscast once a week call in show we hoped people would call into called the Week in review program.

We were all T W I R P, twerp reporters. A lighthearted, lightheaded look at the week’s news. And I ended up doing with no training, I ended up doing anchor position and character voices, and that’s how I eased into acting. Oh, nice. And I took that to, then I was encouraged to audition for the chorus of the Mississippi Opera and made it, and that’s how I ended up on an opera stage.

And yes, there is an event and then killed somebody in this. No, actually I didn’t, my, I played Juliet’s mother as a member of the chorus. Oh. I sang with the chorus. But Lauren is not me. She’s she’s probably what I would’ve wanted to be at her age, but I didn’t have the confidence in myself to do that.

But hey, I am living proof that it’s never too late to try. Agree. Cause I was 72 years old in December.

Stephen: Wow. Congrats.

DAle: Yeah. It’s as I keep telling people and people laugh, what do you do? I kill people on paper.

Stephen: Keeps you young. It

DAle: keeps me functional. Yeah. Maybe not young. The body’s going, are you kidding me?

You wanna do, but no. If I can keep my mind active and this is one of the ways to do it and it’s fun, right? But the people say, my gosh how old I was two we, when the first short story came out in the bartender anthology, and I was two weeks away from my 60th birthday. Nice.

Stephen: Yeah. So what’s not to like?

Yeah, I’ve talked to all ages. All right, Dale. We’ve been chatting a while and I appreciate it. I wish you luck on your book and thank you for taking the time to be on today.

DAle: I’ll pick one up at some point and let me know what you think of it. Do, they’re fun reads. I’ve had parents tell me that their kids’ grammar scores are going up because of the books.

Stephen: Oh, nice. That’s a good

DAle: thing. Which is not a bad thing, but I’ve also got an 85 year old fan going. All right. What’s she gonna get into next? Yeah, so it cuts clear. The Myster mystery’s cut across the board

Stephen: and I’ll have links in the show notes. Okay, great.

DAle: Thank you. And send me a

Stephen: link. Will do. Thank you.

Thank you. Have a good day. You too. Bye.

CS Devereaux declares she’s a southern writer and has a story – Fall from Snowbird Mountain – that uses her southern-ness. She started writing memoirs and morphed into historical fiction.

For the writers, we discuss the use of tools like Pro Writing Aid. There are advantages and disadvantages which we discuss.

NOTE: CS Devereaux chose the topic, but I personally use Pro Writing Aid and recommend it as an affiliate.

https://www.csdevereaux.com/

https://www.facebook.com/winderbinder/

Good morning. Welcome to Wor Discovered Wordsmith. See, I’m already fumbling. I wanna welcome CS Devereux to the podcast.

How are you doing today?

Devereaux: I’m doing great, Stephen. It’s good to see you. Good. Thank you for having me on your podcast.

Stephen: Yeah, this is great. I think it’ll be fun. Tell us a little bit about you, who you are and some of the things you like to do, where you live, and that stuff other than writing.

Devereaux: Okay. I grew up in Birmingham, Alabama.

I live in Chattanooga, Tennessee, but I did a vast amount of things in between there and here. I’ve lived in major cities all over the us. I’ve traveled a lot. And had varied career paths, but I’ve always been a creative person whether I was painting or designing or writing. I began my working life in New York City as a flight attendant for a major airline.

And did that for about four years, and then went to work for a marketing company in LA and that took me all over the world. I lived for a few years in Tokyo and Hong Kong while I was with them. And Then moved back across the country to Atlanta cuz I wanted to be closer to home. And I had basically learned how to be a designer while I was with them rather than, I didn’t learn a whole lot about marketing, but I learned a lot about designing.

And I was went to college and got a BFA degree. In painting. I had the instincts there, and so I used that in Atlanta and eventually that led me into carpet and rug design, which if you know anything about the area Atlanta, Dalton, that’s, that. It’s not an unusual place to, to go because in, in my designing, one of my most favorite things to do was to design a custom rug for a client.

I liked, oh, I loved it. I loved the textures and the colors, and just getting my hands in it. And so it was a natural. Transition for me there. And so I stayed in the southeast at that point for the most part, but I still traveled a lot and all along the way I kept journals and so I was always writing.

I actually began writing when I was about a. 11 or 12 years old when my mother gave me a diary and that got me into a lot of trouble. But we can talk about that later. Cuz I started making up stories and So I kept journals and wrote and, but I didn’t begin writing seriously until after I retired about 10

Stephen: years ago.

Okay, great. So you said you were in marketing for a little bit. I’m gonna jump a little bit here. Has, have you found that’s helped you market your own books now?

Devereaux: You would think so, but I don’t know that it has I’m pretty much a loner. I like, I’m like the introverts, introvert.

I don’t like being in front of people. It’s a lot for me just to do this and talk to you. But in, in marketing a book, you do have to get out in front of people and when the marketing. My experience was before was pre-computer, and so I am not particularly technol, technologically savvy.

Much of the marketing, successful marketing, I think is done online and I just don’t know how to do it. I try and, I haven’t even gotten my off my Facebook. Author page set up yet, because I looked at it and I got confused and I said, somebody’s gonna have to help me with this. I asked my husband, he said, I don’t know.

And my son’s too busy. There’s just nobody to help. I go to author fairs and that sort of thing. And since I my book just came out a few months ago, so I’m doing book fair, book the comic cons, the cons with publisher, and just anything that comes up.

Podcasts because it’s easy to talk. And that’s as far as I’ve gotten so far because the actual marketing only could begin. When my book was published, really. I thought that’s when it would be in, and that’s only been three or four months. Okay.

Stephen: Yeah. All right. Let’s talk a little bit about that book fall from Snowbird Mountain.

Tell us a little bit about it and why you wanted to write this book.

Devereaux: Okay. That is an interesting story. The book. Is it takes place in Appalachia during the Civil War era. But it’s not about the Civil War. It’s about a man who lived in what is today, Robbinsville, North Carolina. He was the local school master there, and so he was a good guy.

He had a large family to support, but when the school closed after the start of the war, he lost his livelihood and was having, he just couldn’t support his family and he was desperate for money. A friend offered him an opportunity to and his troubles and invited him to a meeting between him and his partners.

And at that meeting he discovered that the opportunity was counterfeiting and He had a rare, a real, I, this is a true story, so this is not the, that’s not the fiction part. I’m telling you the true part of the story. Okay. Then I’ll tell you, you know how I got to write this story.

He got into the counterfeiting with this group that was the largest counterfeiting ring and that’s ever, that the United States has ever seen, and was with it for about 10 years. And became very instrumental in his area. And though he, part of him wanted to quit, I believe he stayed with it until they caught him and put him in jail.

But meanwhile, he became the county sheriff. And after the war during the war, he disguised himself as a Cherokee Indian to hide from the law because he’d grown up with Cherokees. He spoke the language, he knew the culture. And he did that. That, to me, that was just so fascinating that he could do all of that like a chameleon and so the way, and it’s a very interesting book.

Very, people are loving this book actually. Nice. The way I came to write it is when I began writing, I started writing memoirs because I, as much as I don’t like getting out in front of people, I really like studying people. I’ve always been a people watcher. I love doing research and just getting into the nitty gritty of things and basically have been a student of people my whole life, I’ve always been curious about them and what made people do the things that they do, and So memoirs were a good way for me to get started.

After I had retired, I was fooling around, taking online classes from one of the local universities university of Tennessee, and but didn’t have a direction, and that was one of my problems. I never had a direction, and so a friend asked me one time if you could do anything, what would you do?

If you could write anything, what would you write? And I said, I think I would write memoirs because it just seems like something that’s always been fascinating. So I wrote a couple of memoirs and then another friend asked me if I would write about her mother and her family and told me there had been a terrible tragedy.

And sh and that no one had ever really written about and she thought it would make a great book. But the problem was she couldn’t tell me anything about it. She just said it happened and where it happened, but she couldn’t, she didn’t know anything about her family or. The details of this terrible tragedy.

So I was gonna have to just dig deep and do it all myself, figure it all out. So I thought it’s a challenge and I like a challenge. I started digging into her family’s history and as I went back to a couple of generations, I discovered her great-grandfather and he. Is the man I’ve been telling you about.

He was so fascinating. I decided that’s where my book had to start. That if I could write this book, then I’d be able to write her book and which is I’m doing now. And so that’s how it came about.

Stephen: Okay, great. That’s a cool story and I love the research behind it. So can, are there any other books that you can think of out there that are similar for people that might be interested in reading yours?

Devereaux: Similar but a stretch I would say would be Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier. Okay. And maybe any of Sharon Macro’s ballads like Ball of Tom Dooley. Even a greater stretch might be the known world by Edward P. Jones. Okay. But it’s historical fiction. It’s mostly, it’s about true events and with embellishments and and in a lot of inspiration and imagination where to fill up the holes in between.

Nice.

Stephen: And you mentioned the other book you’re working on just give us a little, a brief about when that’ll be out, a little bit more about it. Maybe. I can’t

Devereaux: really say when it’ll be out. Okay. Cause I I’m not quite halfway through it, but it ta it follows my protagonist in the first book.

The mistakes he made follow his family into the next generation, and it takes place in 1922. Okay. I’m not gonna tell you anything more about it.

Stephen: Perfect. That’s fine. That’s fine. So it’s a series. Do you have any Yeah

Devereaux: It’s also a mystery. Okay. It’s a mystery, a murder mystery, and and a terrible tragedy that relates just like the first book does.

It relates a lot to things that are going on in the world

Stephen: today. Nice. And do you have plans for a third in the series or you continue it or? No, this is gonna be it. Just a duology, yeah. Okay, nice. Yeah, my friend is,

Devereaux: she doesn’t get more than two books about her family.

Stephen: Got it. Okay. So you said there’s been a lot of good feedback from readers and you’ve been doing Li Life Faires, you’re having face-to-face communication, talking with these people. What are they saying about

Devereaux: the book? Oh, the feedback has been outstanding. I have, right now five stars on Amazon and five stars on my publisher jump, master Press, their website, and people who have read the book they just say, it’s says page Turner.

And fascinating as they love the historical details and the descriptions that bring the characters and the setting to life. They love that it’s a true story and that it’s a, about a part of the civil war that no one really has written about before, and that’s counterfeiting.

Stephen: Nice. Okay. So you got that unique angle with some things in it that people like from those types of stories.

I love that. So you’ve got a book out and a second book coming. If someone said, Hey, we love this, would you like to see it turned into a movie or a TV show? What would you choose?

Devereaux: Oh my goodness. I think it could be either. Recently I heard someone make a comparison between the two, and this person had a career as a writer in television, and he said that Movies are a director’s medium, while TV is a writer’s medium, because while movies have a script, of course the director actually directs the movie.

But in TV, the, you have a whole team of writers and they get into a room and they talk everything, and they’re the ones who are directing the story in the series that you’re watching. And I almost think that it might, if this were made into became a visual entertainment, it might do better as a limited episode series on TV because it would take a lot of money.

A lot of money to put this on a big screen with battle scenes and that sort of thing. There aren’t many, but there, there are a lot of characters and there would just be so much, I think it would be better because of the human quality of it, if it was on tv.

Stephen: Nice. Okay. And I love that description of the difference between movies and television.

I think that nails it right on the head. It does. It’s a good thing to think about. And that also explains why. A lot of times you get those books turned into movies that you’re like, eh, not as disappointing. They’re more disappointing because you can really sink into a book and imagine a lot of stuff in your head.

Whereas the movie, it’s a little more flat. You don’t get, like you said, the character buildup like you do in TV now, especially with the way they treat TV now with limited series and it’s not. September through May 24 episodes. It’s whenever eight to 10 episodes. Yeah. So totally different than used to be.

Yeah. With

Devereaux: TV you can go back and re-watch

Stephen: something. Yes. Nowadays, back 40 years ago, that was a totally different story. I think it was very different 40

Devereaux: years

Stephen: ago. Yes. I think that’s why. Most authors, have that feeling of, oh, I’d to have it turned into a movie. But honestly, it seems like the limited series TV shows are doing much better at making these books come alive.

I’m not a big thriller reader, but. I watched the Reacher series and I thought it was fantastic and read the book and fell in love with Lee Child’s style of writing. So I probably I didn’t do any of that after the two Tom Cruise movies. It was a TV show that made difference. All right.

CS, do you have a website that people could go visit and see your book and any future books?

Devereaux: Yes. The website is my name is cs devero.com and DeVero is D E V E R E A U X.

Stephen: Okay. And we’ll make sure and put links to that. Maybe if it may

Devereaux: be backwards, but let’s see. Can you see it there?

Stephen: Yep. No, it’s fine.

Yes. I love that with people. I’ll put in the show notes also. I’ll put a link to the book. For you personally, what are some of your favorite books and authors?

Devereaux: Oh most of the books that I love are by southern authors and A lot of them are historical fiction. I would say William Faulkner, Tru Truman, Capote, Flannery O’Connor, but also contemporary authors like Ron Rash and Sharon McClum.

Charles Frazier. Daniel Wallace. But I also like spy thrillers. I have always loved spy thrillers, so John Le Carre and Graham Green and Ken Fett, who is both a historical fiction writer and you right, the thrillers the first book of his I ever read was Eye of the Needle. Okay. And I loved it and I saw the movie and I loved that just as much.

And I didn’t know at the time that he also wrote historical fiction until I was in an airport somewhere and picked up a book that looked interesting. And he was the author and it was World Without End, which was the end of a trilogy that he had written. And so he is actually responsible for me finding my fi finally finding a direction that I wanted to be a historical fiction writer.

Nice. Cause I, when I picked up that book, I was writing memoirs at the time I had read. Other things of his without, really even remembering. When I looked through a list of what he had written, but the eye of the needle stood out. And then I went, when I finished world Without End, I just said, wow, this is how I wanna write.

Could I ever do that? Could I, and I said, no, I don’t think I can. It’s just too good. And then I said you won’t know unless you try. So I’m trying to write like Ken Fett.

Stephen: Nice. Ok. So for anyone that likes Ken Fett, check out your book because you’re trying to be similar. So very different. Of course.

Yeah. Ok. So I actually have a couple other friends in the Chattanooga area. Maybe you’ll run into them at some fair or something sometime. But do you have any favorite bookstores that you like to frequent?

Devereaux: No. To tell you the truth, Chattanooga doesn’t any longer have an awful lot of independent bookstores cuz I like independent bookstores the best.

During the pandemic we lost several of them. We now have a store called Winder Binder, and then we have a fairly new one that opened during the pandemic called book and cover. And they’re both very good. Book and cover. Focuses a lot on children’s books, but they carry, they carry pretty much everything.

They also promote local authors. And winder binder, while they don’t do so much promoting, they carry local authors books and they carry both used and new and just a lot of other things too. But another favorite, which is just like the hands down, easy Pick is Barnes and Noble. And they are special because they’re as a franchise, the franchise owner also.

Carries local authors and helps to promote them. Nice. They have a, an open mic night every, once a month and we can get up there and talk and, present our books for sale and that sort of thing. You know that’s another way, that’s another way to market my books. Yes.

Nice. I love that. Yeah. That’s, those are the three.

Stephen: Okay, great. I’ll put some links in the show notes. I like helping out bookstores, and not the authors. All so we wanna talk a little author stuff, but before we do if somebody came up to you on the street and said, Hey, I heard you wrote a book.

Why should I get your book and read it? What would you tell ’em?

Devereaux: Because it’s good. It is a true story about family and human frailties and very relatable situations. And it, while it’s a story of desperation and destruction due to war is also a movie about, a book about money and greed and intrigue.

So it, it hits a lot of buttons and so that’s what I’d tell ’em. I’d say Go buy

Stephen: the book. Okay, great. There you go. We were talking about getting to write your book and things you’ve been learning. So what are a few things you’ve learned with this first book that you’re applying to the second book?

Devereaux: Oh, that I’m applying to the second book. What I learned with the first book is not to use passive verbs.

Stephen: Ah, okay.

Devereaux: Yeah, that was a big one because it, there was a, that’s a hard one to learn. That and head hopping. But I think it’s hard for a lot of people because we talk, we speak in passive voice very often, especially southerners.

And so when, if you think in that way, I, in using was, let’s just start with was,

Stephen: and I have a problem with that one too.

Devereaux: Yeah. And so it, it doesn’t take very much, rethinking to turn a sentence around and put it in an active voice, and Say I did, this happened.

Not, it’s just a different way of thinking. And when you start writing that way, I also find out that my, my speech gets better too. That I’m a lot more direct, I don’t so southern anymore. I’m just more direct in my speech pattern. But that was a biggie. The passive verbs and also head hopping.

I belong to an excellent writer’s group. That’s another thing that I learned while I was writing the book, that you cannot write in a vacuum that you really need feedback from other people. About the work that you write and the best feedback is gonna come from other writers. And because they’ll be honest with you.

Your friends will pat you on the back and say, Hey,

Stephen: yes, this is great.

Devereaux: Not helpful. Yeah. But another writer will say this stinks, right? You need a total rewrite here. Let me tell you what you need to do. And that’s the beauty of the writer’s group. They say, let me tell you what you know, what will help you.

And they’re not critical in, in a negative way. They’re always very positive to, lift. We lift each other up. And so that’s another very important thing I learned is,

Stephen: and if you do find a writer’s group where you feel like they’re tearing you down, everybody’s just critical. That’s the wrong, I’m a different writers group because that might not be the right one for you.

No, and I know there’s one writer’s group I’ve been a part of where. Two of the strongest personalities are both like thriller writers. So when they give feedback on anybody else’s stuff, it’s always from the thriller writer viewpoint, and that doesn’t always fit everything else. Romance and horror.

I’ve heard them give critiques on romance and horror, and I’m like, wait a second. This is a horror novel. You’re trying to turn it into a thriller novel. They’re different. They have different buildup and setup, so the advice you’re giving them will hurt them in the horror genre. And, there’s a little bit of clashing going on there.

Yeah. Yeah.

Devereaux: The writers in my group, none of them write horror or science fiction or anything like that. I wish that I had more contact with people like that because, not because I wanna write that, but it would be really fascinating to see the differences and learn how the different media, what, the different genres are put

Stephen: together, and also what you said earlier about the passive verbs. I think a lot of writers I had yeah, I did a check on, my early stuff and like every other sentence, I started with an I N G word. Yeah. And I’m like, oh my gosh, this I can’t believe.

And I’m like, but what’s wrong with that? And then I started learning and changing it and writing more, and I’m like, oh, I see it now. I understand why. So that’s always my advice when I see writers who are newer than me, I’m not. Years of experience. I don’t have tons of books out, but I have reached a point where I know I am the next level or so, a above somebody that’s brand new, so I can help them out a little bit.

And the advice I’ve been giving more often is, Stop worrying about editing that one story over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over because you’re not going to help yourself. You reach a point where you’re not changing it enough or learning anything new to make it better you’re much better off stopping and just moving on to another story, writing another book, writing some short stories.

You, you don’t really. Understand some of the advice or some of the things that make the writing better until your five, six things written down the road and then you can look back. But if you’re focused on that one piece yeah you miss a lot of it. Yeah. So that’s been my advice lately.

Devereaux: And then there’s a couple of other things too.

When you’re writing, I think it’s helpful to use a good digital. Writing program. Yes. Yes. I use pro writer’s aid. Me too. Yes. And I, that has helped me a lot. And also with the passive verbs and the garns. I wasn’t even sure what a garrin was. It was those little i n g words. It won’t make you a better writer. Although they have a new feature, a new AI type feature that will help your sentence structure. Yes. That I use once in a while and I never copy it, but it gives me ideas, of how to make my sentence better. Because if, sometimes they’ll just be this one sentence that just bugs the heck outta you.

You can’t quite find the right words to make it work. And and you go in there and they can they give you different choices of how you could. Move the words around and you go, oh yeah, that’s pretty close to what I’m looking for. And Got it. And Let’s see. Oh, there was one other thing.

It’ll come back to me cuz it was

Stephen: I also use pro writing aid and love it. And I know there’s some authors out there taking a big stand against these programs, especially with some of the new AI tools added to it. But I, and I’m not going to really get into that argument with them. Hey, that’s your choice.

Okay, fine. But for me personally I don’t have. Too much life to spend arguing about these things and debating it. My whole point is I use it as a tool to make my writing better. I don’t throw my manuscript in there, hit fix everything and be done with it. I read it, I evaluate it, I look at everything.

I learn from it, and my writing’s improve. Yes. Because it’s teaching me. Yes. And that’s the best way to use it. And the way I feel is if this tool can help me. Make better writing and make more sales, I’m going to use it. If it’s not hurting somebody else, if it’s not stepping on somebody else’s head to get higher, this is helping me without hurting you.

And so I’m going to use it and help make, get a get done faster, get done better, have more sales and the thing. But the thing is, what I’ve also come to discover is there’s. Separation, I think between the craft of your writing and the sentences and your story itself, because people will remember the story itself way longer than any problems in your grammar and spelling and all that.

But if you have too many of those problems, it draws them out of the story. It does. So there, it’s a balancing act and I always try and err on the side of good story as opposed to worrying so much about the grammar and that, because I’ve read hundreds of books. I cannot tell you good sentences, good chapters, and specific grammar in any of those books.

Cuz I forgot all about it. But I remember the story when the

Devereaux: story’s good, you don’t notice that. Yes. And only a writer like you and me is gonna notice those little things, right? Oh they should, you could have used a better word there. Or, that’s misspelled,

Stephen: yes.

It can pull you out. Especially if it’s continuous. Badly worded sentences. Yeah. So it’s good to start that. But if you’re at, if your writing is where your sentence structure is so bad continuously, then you really do need to do some work and learn some things. Again, if you’re not going to school, you’re not having feedback.

Using one of these tools, writing, a 7,000 word short story and running it through the tool to learn and then forgetting about it and writing in our story is you’re learning that’s, in school, even if you take a test and you learn a module and you don’t do so well. They don’t always have time to stop and reteach it to you.

I know my kids’ school did some of that, but they move on, so it builds on it, and at some point down the line, the earlier stuff usually starts to make sense and click a little more. So sometimes you just have to keep moving to help out the earlier stuff too. That’s true.

Devereaux: The other point I was gonna make is that writers need to read good quality.

Books, they need to read the work of other really good writers.

Stephen: Yes. Define good quality though, because that is very subjective and Yes, and I know a lot of people will say, oh, Stephen King sucks because this, and this. But I’m like, but that’s true, but here’s what he does. So when I read Stephen King, which I love, I’ve read almost all his stuff.

These are the things he does well that I can learn from. Sure. A lot of his endings get horrible and it’s what were you thinking? But the way he draws you into the world and the characters and makes it come alive, that’s a lesson we, and obviously it works. I don’t care all the problems you can tell me about.

And Lee Child, which we mentioned, I noticed his writing. He has short sentences. Short words and that’s mostly it, almost all the way through the book. And that’s total opposite of what some writers try and do. They want these big, flowery sentences? No, he just writes and you keep turning the page.

Totally different style of writing. So it’s very subjective to say, good writers, something that you enjoy. Somebody that. Has sold a lot of books. That’s the court of popular opinion, you could say.

Devereaux: This is true. That’s the, you know what the quality is and good is defined according to the genre and according to your own personal taste.

Yes. But the, and you just. Made me think of something else about the sentence links. That’s another thing that you have to learn that would, works with one genre, but maybe not another one is that the pacing, the short sentences are what make up a scene move faster. Yes.

And then, if you wanna, when you wanna slow it down, then you can go to the longer sentences and relax and, meander along for a paragraph, but then, speed it back up again as you’re approaching the next, the next piece of drama or, and you learn how to build.

Stephen: Yes, and you just said it again. You learn how to build. To learn how to do that though, you have to keep writing more and more things. Go straight back to that. And recently I picked up tokens, the Hobbit. It’s the fourth or fifth time I’ve read it. But I’m seeing things totally different than I did the last time I read it, which probably was a good 20 some years ago.

His style of writing is as if. He was sitting at a campfire just telling you a story and that’s how it’s written. Yeah. And I never realized that before and it’s so casual in how he does that. Totally different than something like Rothfuss name of the Wind, which is a more modern fantasy. So I’m like, wow, I never realized that about tokens Writing before is how casual and it’s.

Stephen King has a lot of that too. That down home a shucks feel.

Devereaux: I like. Yeah, I love that. In fact, I just reread The Hobbit myself over the Christmas

Stephen: holidays. Nice. Yeah I’ve read the I read the Lord of the Ring’s trilogy because the second time in high school, because our English teacher, we had to write book reports and the last on the list was Tolkiens Trilogy.

And she goes, but. You probably don’t wanna read that because that was my master’s thesis in school, so I know it well. Okay. Challenge accepted. And you know what, she marked me wrong for something on that report that I pulled out the book and showed her I was right. She refused to even look at and said, I know what I’m talking about.

I was like, are you kidding me? But I’ve never cared for the trilogy. In return of the King as much as I did, like Hobbit and Fellowship, there’s just return of the king gets, I don’t know, too dry and confusing for me. Yeah. All so we’ve been chatting, I’ve been running on, I apologize if I took too much time there.

These are some we’ve given some advice for new authors. Is there anything else you would tell new authors? Listening that are just starting out.

Devereaux: Yeah. I gave this a little bit of thought before this podcast and if I wanted to give some sage advice to young authors, what would I say? And the very first thing, and I think it’s really important, is to write what you love.

They tell you all the time to write what you know. And that’s important because as I said, I like spy thrillers, but I would never attempt to write a spy thriller because I don’t know that world. I didn’t live it. And I think you really have to live it in order to write something like that. But if you write what you love, Then your passion is gonna show through, for what you’re doing.

And the second thing we’ve touched on a lot of different points danced around this during our conversation. And I was writing down my notes and then I came across just by chance this piece of Japanese philosophy called Rahi. Hari, it means follow, break away, transcend.

And follow is means study the basics of good writing. You’ll learn the rules, learn from the masters and the experts, and that’s shoot and then break away. And once you understand the fundamentals of writing, then use your creativity in unique and intuitive ways. That’s ha. And then and combining your creativity with the traditional skills.

And then the last part is transcend, is express your creativity. And, uniquely and using your intuition and just, go rise above where you ever thought you could go before. Just let yourself go. That’s ri and that’s Sri. And so nice. Yeah, I thought that was beautiful. And the last thing that I wanted to say was that I think could apply to anyone, whether it’s writing of someone who wants to be a writer or who wants to follow any dream.

To paraphrase f Scott Fitzgerald, it’s never too late or too soon to be whoever you want to be. You can change or stay the same. It’s your choice. But live a life you’re proud of, and if you’re not, have the courage to start over

Stephen: again. I love that. I’m not a big Fitzgerald fan, but that’s probably one of the best quotes I’ve ever heard from him.

I love that. CS it has been really fun talking to you. I enjoyed myself this morning. It’s still morning here. Yeah. So I wish you luck on Songbird and your next book. Maybe we’ll touch base again once it comes out. Snowbird, fall from Snowbird, sorry.

Everyone’s gonna be looking for this songbird book by you. No, it’s Snowbird. Yeah, sorry about that. Alright, so I wish you luck on that.

Devereaux: For that I’m gonna write a book and title it

Stephen: Songbird, please do that. Instead of me fixing what I said, now you have to write a book so that you know it works out.

Maybe some alternative universe. It’s all good. Great. All right. You have a great day.

Devereaux: Thank you, Steven. It’s been a pleasure.

John Bruening is from Cleveland and writes a series of pulp fiction for his Flinch press publisher. These are modern books that have that pulp flair.

This episode is also a cross-over episode with my Relentless Geekery podcast. The 3rd voice you hear is Alan Baltis, co-host on that podcast.

Hey John. Hey, John. Okay, you got your

Stephen: mic off?

Let’s see.

Alan: How’s that? There we go.

John: There we go. Okay. How’s the look, how’s. Looks fine. I got that sort of shiny thing going on here. That’s

Alan: true. You got the, a little bit of glare from the window, but it casts your face in

John: a heroic, it’s a noir kinda thing there.

Exactly. Yeah, I had a second.

Stephen: All the radiation from his monitor and that’s what makes him,

John: yeah it’s gonna turn me into some kind of a superhero or something. That’s what we would hope. Try these, this boy. Okay, there we go. Exactly. These are for like, far away. And this screen is it’s like my eyes have reached a point where there’s no sweet spot.

You just have to like,

Stephen: to nerd it up there, my glasses so I had Lasix a couple years ago when I had cataract surgery, and so I can see far away. I can see things just fine, but up close I. Can’t see. So I asked them specifically my glasses to tune them for how far away I normally sit to the computer.

So these glasses, I can’t really read with them, but at the computer it makes everything look perfect. So there’s nerding it up. I think

John: I followed that. Yes. I just had an high appointment in December. I had a, I had an appointment in December and I’m in the earl They told me early stage cataracts, which really sucks.

I’ll be 60 at the end of this year and I’m just I’m gonna need eight months. I’m gonna need the eight months between now and December to just get my head around that concept. But yes, yeah, we’ve

Alan: actually talked about that before. I don’t have any diagnosis of cataracts yet, but I’m really not looking forward to it because I’m really flinchy Ah-huh.

We’re gonna bring that in about things going near my eyes. I hate putting in eyedrops. I hate, like, when I get puffed at, when they’re doing the they don’t do that anymore. Test and stuff like that. It’s just

Stephen: they’re modern now, Alan, they don’t do the puff. They have a device. They actually stick on your eye and make everything go watery.

Wavy

Alan: I do have the new one, but even like that the little thing moving into my field of vision and getting uncomfortably close, I’m, there’s. I know we always jump around in our discussions. There was a great book, great Books by Gene Wolf, the Shadow of the torturer books. Remember those? And one of the things they talked about how one of the most base human instincts is to protect your head.

Like you, you react to stop an arrow sword, whatever might be coming at you before your thinking. Mine could do it, right? And one of the ways in which somebody gets dispatched is he’s got two heads and they, he protects the one but the other one gets killed and that still kills him. So there’s a science fiction fantasy reference that even that incredible base human thing of avoiding falling and keeping your temperature and.

Protecting your head doesn’t work if you’re zab bile bro type where you’ve got two heads anyway,

John: guys, I’m gonna go shut my door and hopefully my dog won’t gimme one second, I’ll be right. Sure.

Stephen: Yeah, we’re gonna talk Pulp Fiction. Hey, we got five minutes left, so let’s mention Pulp Fiction a bit.

That’s how

Alan: it goes. I really, I actually did, make some notes to try to get, I made notes as to good questions to ask and stuff. Here we go.

Stephen: Here we go. Don’t ruin things now. Good questions. Oh man, John, so

John: we started yet, what are we doing here? Yeah,

Stephen: we kinda roll and we, then we figure out a good place where we started.

Okay. John?

John: I wish I’d known that. Okay.

Stephen: Alright. You mentioned December. When’s your birthday? The 19th. Oh, I’m the 16th.

John: And now the whole world knows.

Alan: Yeah, so Oh yeah. Oh, no. Security breach.

John: Okay. Yeah, it’s too late now.

Stephen: Yeah. So we know you John.

John: But had I known we were on the air, I would’ve said 28.

But whatcha are you gonna do? There

Stephen: we go. Yeah. We know you, but for any anyone listening give him a brief who’s this third voice on today?

John: Third voice, but only one head. Let’s see. I am I’m a lot of things actually if we’re talking about the Pulp fiction from a pulp fiction standpoint, I am the author of the Midnight Guardian series, which began in 2016 with a book called hour of Darkness and continued in 2019 with Annihilation Machine.

And the most recent installment, it wa was published in November of this past year, 2022 a book called God and Sinners. I am one half of a very small two. Small press publishing venture called Flinch Books. My partner is Jim Beard in the Toledo area. I’m in beautiful Cleveland, Ohio where it’s about, oh, I don’t know, 35 degrees in Midap.

Just coming off of a couple days in the seventies. That’s, it’s how we roll in northeast Ohio, Indian winter instead of

Alan: Indian summer,

John: kind of something like that. Yeah. What else am I? I am the father of two, the husband of one. What else? What else can I tell you? I I’ll, I’ve been a professional writer for the better part of 40 years.

First as a journalist, and more recently in in marketing. That’s my day job when I’m not hammering out stories. That’s about the short version, unless there’s something more you wanna know that I haven’t mentioned, but that, that sufficient. That sounds great. Ask away and I’ll tell you everything or exactly.

Just about anything.

Alan: The reason that we were happy to have you on the show is because through separate paths Steve and I both discovered you and your works and we’re very happy. I’m a longtime fan of Pulp Fiction, even before the Quentin Tarantino movie I had Yes. Read so many Doc Savages and Shadows and G Eights Yes.

And Operator fights and all of those things back in, back to Tarzan and the early science fiction, early horror and stuff like that. Exactly. I occasionally go to Pulk Cons or the pulp section of Comic-Cons and so forth, and that’s when I first discovered your work and. You loved it. I tend to thank you.

I love small press or independent press is maybe a better way to put that. And I really try to my own little Medici. I love whatever money I’ve made from being a computer guy. I love making sure that it goes back to people that this work deserves to be in the world.

John: That it’s always appreciated.

I can tell you, I speak for a lot of small press publishers and independent authors. When when someone says they, they try to support the indie author or the indie publisher, it’s always appreciated.

Alan: There you go. So we’ve had a chance to talk a couple times after you had done a reading at a Lakewood bookstore after I had met you at Alcon in Westlake, if I remember right.

And Yes. And just that, yeah. Each time, I think probably after your first book had come up, then I’ve tracked you, I always add people to my follow list or just become aware of them Stalk me. Yes. Stalk you exactly that. Yes. It’s fun to have. Just to find out that there’s a human being behind these things.

You know what I mean? Any number of offers, they really are. It’s a remove, and I’ve never been a stalker type guy, but when we had a chance to have a conversation and it was actually pleasant instead of. You’re getting a little close there, sir. I’m gonna be back,

John: stop breathing through your mouth.

Yes, exactly. So la last time El as I recall, Ellen, last time you and I talked it was at Logan Berry Books in near Shaker Square in Cleveland. Yes. And you were wearing a mask. As every responsible citizen does or should. And I didn’t recognize you for the first couple minutes as you walked up to the table and I was embarrassed about that, but don’t worry about that.

That was last November I read on Thanksgiving, I

Alan: think. Yes. Yeah right after the third book in the series came out. Yes. And in fact, as I recall, I by, because Christmas was coming up, I had to get something from my good friend Steven, and there I was going, I think Steven would love these.

And so I actually bought a couple and had you sign them for him. So it all is this wonderful, it all ties together. Sure. Have

John: you heard from Steven? Is he still speaking to you? Is he, yay, nay. Thumbs up, thumbs down. Has he said anything? I

Stephen: was super excited to get all three of ’em cuz I’m like, I know this guy.

I’ve seen him before.

Alan: Especially when, obviously Stephen and I have been doing this for a couple years now and have a whole bunch of these in the cam and we knew we had many shared interests, but even amongst the world of. You name it, movies, comic books, et cetera. They’re still more rarefied atmosphere like whether you really like the older pulps.

Some people they start reading whatever was written since they were born. And in fact that’s one of my common, not a complaint, but it’s an awareness of there really are some people that they won’t watch a black and white movie because somehow Oh yes, life didn’t exist in color Yes. Before they were born.

Whereas I had that joy of finding out when I was growing up in the sixties and seventies. Y you go back to read things from the thirties and forties and it really was a whole different world and not now the world of cell phones and so forth. But I loved that the world was unexplored, that there was new technology that really was like jets were first around, ultraviolet light was first available and yes.

The pulps really were some of those that wonderfully popularized and threw those wonders out into the world for other people to learn about. And that’s so much what you have in your series is. I’ll return to those wonderful days. Union City is a great not only sense of place, but a sense of time for those kinds of things.

John: Funny thing about Union City I don’t know I was trying a couple different names for a sort of a fictional town that was part New York, a little bit Chicago and a little bit Cleveland. And I didn’t realize till after I published the first book that there is at least one or two actual Union cities.

I think there’s one in New Jersey and I think there’s one out west somewhere. And I had, I known that I might have gone in a different direction with a different name, no mayors have contacted me yet to file lawsuits. So I think I saved, but yeah, no, it just I was looking for something that’s like you.

Every town usa like Metropolis or Gotham, but exactly

Alan: like Springfield from the Simpsons, I think they called it that. This is the most common town name and they figured everyone to know somebody from Springfield.

John: Like Bedford Falls. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. But to your point about history though, that, that’s I’m right there with you.

I have said many times to many people, including my own kids who are in their ear they’ll this soon, they’ll soon be 22 and 20. But I try to impress upon them that the world did not start on the day they were born. And because it feels like I encounter so many people so often who just, they can’t fathom that oh, there was a whole period of history that existed before I was born and important things happened and important decisions were made and circumstances took place that sort of shaped where we are right now.

Exactly. And it always surprises me that people don’t really take stock in that and recognize that, The world didn’t just appear as we see it now. It’s a, it’s been a gravel gradual evolution of a lot of different decisions and influences and decision makers and circumstances.

And it all, it all comes to a point of here and now, but there’s a lot that went on decades ago, century centuries ago and beyond.

Stephen: John, I got a question. Yes. Why? Or do you have any favorite pulps from the past? Any heroes? Any books?

John: Wow. There the more I read pulps and I don’t read pulps exclusively, but the more I do read, the more I, the more no, the more I dig, the more I discover.

I, I would say that the first, for me I don’t know if, I don’t know if I’d call, I wouldn’t have, I’m not sure I’d call it a favorite, but the first for me was John Carter. The the Ed Royce Burrows books. That was my doorway. I was reading those in my twenties. No, I, let me think. No, I was reading Tarzan in my teens.

I read a few of the Tarzan stories. I didn’t read all of them. And then I started digging into John Carter in my, I wanna say my late twenties. As far as favorite characters gosh, I know Doc Savage is the go-to. A lot of people say that, but I have to say it’s Doc Savage.

It just it really is for me

Alan: too.

John: It’s funny because Doc Savage keeps showing up to this day in popular culture in different iterations. I remember when the first Indiana Jones movie came out in, I think it was 1981, if I’m not mistaken. Okay. Yeah. And my dad, who, my father who grew up in the 1930s and forties, he, you know he got one look at this guy.

And he said, hell, that’s just Doc Savage with a hat and a with a hat. And at the time, when he said that 1981, I’m 17 years old, I barely knew who Doc Savage was, but then I’m gonna say a decade, 15 years later when I started reading Doc Savage, I realized he had Dad was right. Certainly we see Doc Savage in, in Indiana Jones, we see him in a lot of comics.

It, it just it just it’s a he’s an idea that keeps popping up. And he was a distillation of a lot of, a lot of ideas that predated him. But in the 40 plus years since, He keeps popping up in different iterations. Exactly.

Alan: The self-made man, the doc. Yeah.

The pardon the super, the self-made man, the superhuman man. You know what I mean? We actually, we had a session recently, maybe even just last one or two ago where we talked about that, that the appeal of it to me was how much he Batman follows from him in terms of Yes. He really learned all the martial arts and all the science and tried to make it so that there was nothing in the world that would surprise him, and that he could use all these tools and technologies for him, surrounded himself with a band of assistance that also were specialists in various different places.

And one of the cool things about the book is it’s not just doc wandering the world, it’s the camaraderie of it. And yes, the, like a group of friends do, they kinda like rank on each other and, have their own little personal conflicts and personal achievements and stuff like that. And that was.

What’s your, when you’re a teenager, you’re like, that’s my, I wanna be in a gang like that. I want to be in the g I wanna be another thing.

John: You definitely see Doc Savage in the Fantastic four, I think especially in the early days of the Fantastic four, the Jack Kirby Stan Lee era. I think you see him like in a team from, television in the 1970s.

So yeah, it just it’s that the idea of a team led by a really smart, really savvy guy that, and there’s in fighting and there’s, there’s snark, but yet when push comes to shove, they get the job done. So That’s right. It’s they would

Alan: die for each other.

It’s not that they really sure. Each other. It’s that little bit of, kinda like I had used to have a weekly poker game, a monthly poker game, and so much part of the game wasn’t just playing cards, it was the little, I played back and forth, the little insult, boy your money is warming my pocket from last week.

You know that guy? Sure.

John: Yeah. Anyways, Are you guys familiar with James Rollins? The the the thriller author? Yes. Yes. He, he was in town several years ago and doing a book signing, and I can’t remember which book it was. I, it’s on a shelf over there that I can’t see because I it’s demon Crown.

Demon Crown. Anyways I had read Be before he did that, this is 19, dude, this is 2017. And before he came to town, I had read an interview that he did where he, when he was a kid, he read all the Doc Savage books, and I asked him about that in, in the during this, the presentation he did before the signing.

He said, yeah, I read ’em all. And yes, they are a big influence on what I do. His whole Sigma series, I think it’s called. Yes. And he even has a character named Monk in his books which is a nod to, Lester Dent. Very cool. And this is a modern day thriller writer who’s been a bestseller for the better gosh, at least 20 years.

He’s been, pretty much every book he publishes, winds up on the bestsellers. Doc doesn’t go away. Alan, that

Stephen: needs to be your next talk. The influence of Pulp Fiction. Doc Savage on modern literature and movies and everything.

Alan: That’s right. It’s also worth acknowledging like when he says he read every one of them I have too, but that’s not like most people think, Hey, I read a couple dozen books.

There’s 181. It’s one of the, an amazing maybe Per Rodan outdoes him. I think there’s hardly any series and it like, and also I think the Shadow has more, but I think it wasn’t all Maxwell Grant that is Walter Gibson. Walter Gibson, yeah. So that it’s another cool thing that I’ve always, I don’t know why this is, but I’ve always liked series fiction and if you’re looking to read something, it’s sometimes great.

I read the whole dozen books of this, but there’s almost a sadness when it’s over. And Docx said, which was for years and years, wow. They’re getting republished. They’re putting out the omnibus editions now. You know what I mean? I was like, so happy to have a chance to get. This tap into this wonderful kind of fiction for a long time.

John: It was very sad. It’s gonna, it’s gonna take me a long time to get through all the doc books if I ever do because Yeah. That those are just one of many books I read in many genres. I’d say if I had to guess right now, I’d say I’ve read maybe three dozen, maybe 30 or 40 of them.

But, Okay. That’s, that’s just a fraction of what, of the output from the original series from street and Smith. And of course Will Miller is writing his stuff. I’m reading some of his and he writes very much in the Lester dense style. Exactly. But it’s, it will probably take me the rest of my life to read all the doc stories.

That’s, I even

Alan: back when I was reading ’em, I didn’t read them serially. Haha. I always had a sprinkling of, I liked the the Tarzan books as you were saying. I read, other, not just Pope things, but the mo more Modern James Bonds. I read all kinds of men’s adventure, the destroyers and stuff like that.

And so sure. It was. It was cool to compare and contrast between, the more modern ones that were a lot more death, a lot more gritty, maybe more swearing, more sexual escapades where his doc was pretty much a boy scout, quite mobile, quite, he hardly ever killed someone, but he let people, the villains get themselves in trouble.

The Avenger was even more about that, rob Henry Benson. Richard Henry Benson, yes. Almost all of his victories were not, he plotted against the villain. He let the villain be hoisted on their own batard in various different ways. That was a

John: particular thing. To your question Steven, to, to your earlier question another favorite not necessarily character, but another favorite writer is Raymond Chandler author of the the Philip Marlow books.

Certainly he was a favorite. I and I have to, this is, I hesitate to even say this because it’s almost embarrassing, but on, on more than one occasion, I’d say twice. Two people who have read my books have said, there’s a little bit of Raymond Chandler and you’re writing, and I’ll take it.

I, I just I’m, again, I’m almost it’s almost embarrassing to, to say my own name in the same sentence with Raymond Chandler. But if somebody sees that when they read that I’ll take it. That’s very complimentary. Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. I’ll take it. Yeah.

Alan: And

Stephen: all the talk about Doc Savage which I didn’t really read any until I was adult later.

I didn’t discover ’em as early, but there was also Tom Swift, which is almost the kid version of

Alan: Doc Savage. That’s right. Ya, doc Savage. Exactly.

John: Yes. Doc Junior.

Alan: When I first saw the cover of your first book, and I saw the goggles, I thought, oh, this is like ga in his battle laces cuz they look like aviator goggles.

Sure. And of course when I read it discovered, no, actually it’s the gimmick, if you will, the instrument that allows him to have enhanced senses and capabilities and so forth. And so it was a pleasant surprise, if you will, because G eight was not one of my favorites in terms of, I don’t know I don’t have a feel for adventures in the air.

It helps you get around the planet, to be sure. Kinda travel and stuff like that, but, so it’s a very distinctive look. Is that something that you had from the moment you started this series? Or did you try out various different things in your head as to how will I give this guy a leg up?

How will I give him

John: special? I’m glad you asked that question, Alan, because if I can switch over to a slightly different genre, but still very much in the pulp. Vibe cereals. The the cliff pairing hangar cereals from 1940s thirties and forties. One of my favorites, if not my favorite, my all time favorite was called Spice Smasher.

Okay. And I’ve seen it a number of times and there’s something about that look that really appeals to me. It’s it’s not quite World War ii, post World War I, it’s that World War I aviator look. And he’s got that motorcycle. And the stunt work is fantastic and I’ve watched it a number of times and I think it’s fair to say that was a pretty big influence on the development of the character and the development of the story and the development of the whole sort of tone of the of the story and the.

So when I went to Tom Gianni the artist who did the illustration, I said I sent him some pictures of Kane Richmond, the actor in that getup saying, this is what I’m looking for. And he really understood. He really got the, he understood the tone that I was going for. He understood the style and he just nailed it.

The sad end to that story is Tom has since passed away. He was struggling with cancer when he was painting that illustration. And and I went to him for the second book a couple years later, and he initially said, yeah, I’ll do it. Then he got involved in some cancer treatment that was really knocking him out, and he got back to me.

He said, I just don’t think I can pull this off. I’m gonna hand it off to my friend Doug Klaa, also in Chicago, who did a great job and who is now my go-to for the covers. Okay. But but Tom really he is the artist who really helped me bring the character to life in a very visual way.

He completely captured. The tone and the style. I was looking for that sort of CIA tone to that cover illustration. Yeah. I dedicated the third book to Tom and I just it just, it as parting gifts go, it was a, it was an incredible gift and I’m, it’s just unfortunate.

Not only were we collaborators and partners in a publishing venture, we became friends in the process. And I really I miss the fact that he, I can’t work with him again. But yeah, he he really helped me bring that the character to life and the tone and style and the vibe.

Yeah. And it was, but very much influenced by Spice Smasher the serial.

Alan: Okay. Thank you for sharing that. I, the color covers are similar enough and I hadn’t really looked at it. One of the things we also talked about was what attracted me to the doc sandwich paper Max was the James Obama covers incredibly photorealistic and very cool.

And yours really captured the spirit of the pulps in terms of the figure in the foreground, whatever, whatever villain is going on. Oh no. Someone’s strapped to an operating table. Those kinds of things. Yeah. And there’s almost tropes in that, but if they’re done well, it really is what I gotta, I need to find out what’s going on in here, another reason that I really like that is that there’s people that, I don’t know, they don’t seem to have either their own vision of what they’d like it to look like, or they don’t get what the genre is about in some ways. To be able to not pay homage, to, not slavishly follow it, but definitely get enough of those elements so that people who are attracted to that are gonna go, huh.

What’s this I’m curious already, because it looks like a book like this should look

John: you hit it. You hit an interesting point when you say paying homage but not slavishly. I think, and I have to tread lightly here when I say this. I think there are those who want their modern day pulp fiction to.

Read and feel just like the stuff they, that was being published 80 or 90 years ago. And I think that the

Alan: criticism is where you’re not true enough to it. And it’s

John: and I think to adhere that closely to that style is a disservice to the 21st century reader.

I think. I think if you really want to tell a good story, you have to bring a level of sophistication to the storytelling that may not have been there back in the twenties and thirties. And I don’t want to, and I don’t wanna disparage any of those writers. They were, they, in their own way, in their own time, they were doing great work.

But I think we’re at a point in terms of, the audience sophistication where I think they, they want and expect a little bit more in terms of character development, a little bit more in terms of depth. Yes. There has to be a reason why the hero does heroic things as opposed to just I’m just the hero.

That’s what I’m supposed to do. I think, I think there has to be some degree of motivation that, that the reader has to understand, why does this person do this? What motivates him? What what compels him to keep going back into the room where the bullets are flying, as opposed to just here comes the hero to save the day because this is what he does in every issue.

So here he is again. It just, I think readers want more than that. I think writers want to do more than that. I think to tell the same story the same way that people were reading in the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, I think is just it is, it would make for a very stale experience, I think.

Alan: I think you’re right.

Yeah. In fact, one of the things that we had talked about was a lot of those were done like, what’s the cost per word? They were churned out on a weekly or bi-weekly basis. Oh yeah. That’s crazy formulaic. But it was also just, they had to get it done i, when I read your book, it was like, wow, there’s a lot going on in here compared to the relatively slender paperbacks, various different things. And yeah. I each said of it being that it didn’t have the spirit of, and it was more there’s a lot more going on here. I love books where it’s not just the plot line and enough other things. Certain authors are regularly criticized for their characters cardboard and they too.

They too much get to the point. I don’t mind a little ps I don’t mind a little backstory and motivation and all that kind of stuff. So I’d say you’re like if we’re gonna grate on the Rodney Dangerfield system of, oh, that weighs about an A, your book was nice and thick and there was a lot going on. It wasn’t filler, it wasn’t, I love Charles Stross books because it’s not only the main plot line of the thing.

He has so many other cool ideas going on, each of which could probably be its own book. And I saw that a lot in yours as well, that you had a lot of interesting things. And maybe if you’re thinking about, hey, this could be a series, you wanna lay those little treasures out there that this could get answered in a successor and stuff like that.

John: So thank you for saying that because I took some heat after the first and second books from a a couple, one in particular a couple people, but one in particular who just insisted that the books were too long. I I take issue with that. I stand by my story literally and figuratively.

I, I just I don’t, I, if my feeling is if you have a problem with a book that’s any more than 200 pages long maybe the problem is not so much with my book, but the problem is with your attention span. And all the time, I just I just and that’s and there are some great writers who can tell a very good story in a very short time.

But I, I don’t know that it just, I don’t know. I just feel I could go on and on, but okay. It just, I just feel if you have a good story to tell and you need three or 400 pages to. As long as you’re keeping things as tight and streamlined and well-paced then you should have the luxury to do that.

If you’re just meandering around for four or 500 pages and not getting anywhere and not getting anything done, yeah, you need to dial it back. But if you need that space to tell a good, rich, dense story then you should take that space. Yeah. Steven,

Alan: you’ve talked about how in some of the authors that you’ve spoken with your Undiscovered Workspace podcast, you can tell, hey, some people need an editor.

They really are, they have a good story to tell, but they really don’t seem to have that filter, that focus. So what would what do you think about that, Steven? How did you know?

Stephen: What John said is absolutely true. And the funny thing is, I interview a lot of new authors. Some of these people three months ago wrote their first book and now they’re talking to me on the podcast.

And it’s funny because I can’t say I’m anywhere near as experience as John, but I’ve gotten enough experience and talk to enough people now that I can start to us like, yeah, you’re really new. Because you don’t understand the story is the story. The story needs to be as long as it needs to be.

You don’t understand that until you’ve written some and gotten that out of the way is the past ones. Cuz then you can see the difference in your writing coming up. And again, I’m not speaking from decades of experience or anything, but the little bit I’ve done, I know that now from back, a couple years ago what I was thinking now I was thinking of it.

And that also, I wanted to ask John, so in modern times, why did you choose to write books that were basically pulp fiction books? Because and we talked about the kids and stuff, there’s people that have no idea what we mean when we say pulp fiction other than the movie. So why choose to write that style modernly?

John: You mean that style or that period? Or both?

Stephen: Cause more the style, but the period too

John: would be good. Okay. Okay. Okay. The style, certainly okay. I will say, I would say that, I tried a few other things in a few other genres.

I tried some science fiction. I tried, some de I tried some detect. I just I w I was, I couldn’t find my way in wh where do I fit in the overall scheme of, if I can use the word. Loosely literature, what kind of story do I want to tell?

And I tried to tell a, a science fiction time travel story and times travel stories just make my head hurt. Because it’s just, every time you tell a time travel story, you always hit the, the same paradox that you just, you know, the world we live in exists in cause and effect.

And when you start tampering with that, it gets very I get a migraine. But anyways, it, so my point is when I started reading stuff like John Carter or Doc Savage, I real, I thought, okay, this is a way in this is a doorway. This is a place where I can land as a writer.

So if I can get more familiar with this type of popular fiction, maybe this is the kind of story I could tell. So there’s that. And there’s also the issue of, the period because all the great classic pulp fiction. Was prevalent in the twenties, thirties, forties.

And that’s a real sweet spot in history for me. Not just because, oh, it’s, it’s glamorous. Speaking of the clothes, the style, it’s just, it’s, if you think about what was going on from say, 1929 to 1950, the world was changing dramatically, in, in ways that were just comprehensive and everything was up for grabs.

Whether it was, the economic depression of the 1930s and then the run up to World War ii, no one knew what the future, none of us know what the future looks like. But the world was a very uncertain place. Where’s my next meal coming from? Is my brother gonna come home from the war?

Is my dad gonna come home from the war? We haven’t heard from him in months because he’s on, on sun, some secret mission, whatever, it’s just, that’s when people like, have to make really hard decisions when they’re faced when they’re confronted by circumstances like that.

In times like that. And that’s when I think the great stories really emerge when people are like, backed up against the wall by their circumstances or, how do I feed my family? What’s gonna happen? Are we gonna be overrun by Nazis? At what point did they start coming up the Atlantic Coast?

You know what’s, it’s easy for us to say, oh yeah, we won that war. In 19 42, 43, that was, we didn’t thing. That’s right. We did not. And things were looking pretty rough. And nobody knew what the future looked like. And I think when you’re confronted with circumstances like that, that’s when the really, the people do, they, they take extreme measures and that’s when the really.

They’re really great stories. E emerge when people are confronted with really make or break do or si do or die circumstances,

Alan: right? When I’ve had people talk to me about like, why this really strikes a chord with me while I really love them. It’s and they’ll often say that’s just escapist literature.

And it’s it, there was really tough times to try to escape from, but it was also not at all escapism. It was what you were just saying, confronting, we’re really in a tough place. We really don’t know where our next meet was coming from. We didn’t know what’s gonna happen during the war. We don’t know what’s happening with this new technology.

And that ability to project yourself into those things and say, what would I do in those circumstances? Would I stand up? Would I be a man, be a hero, or would I right, kinda be a bystander? Would I be a spectator in my own life? Am I gonna do the right thing if I have. Some risk, real risk right at stake here and stuff.

And those are the kinds of things that I get often out of those books is that it isn’t just, I don’t like my life and so I’m trying to go to the past or to another planet or whatever else it might be. It’s that there’s always things to be found. Therefore, if I project myself into those heroes, I hope that I would be as heroic as they are and that it kinda, whatever that muscle is of nobility and making hard choices and being proud of who you are.

It absolutely those. They get you, you work that muscle, you get where then in the real world, you can actually say, I did indeed not let a bad boss make me do something wrong. I did indeed not abuse someone when they were drunk or anything like that. You

John: know what I mean? I think, I think a lot of times people are, not just readers, but people in general, they’re looking for, they’re looking for hope.

They’re looking for something to be hopeful about. Yes. And it sounds very lofty and abstract, but I think you know it’s, why do what, what do, what are we looking for entertainment? We’re looking for some, something to hang on to and be hopeful about. And I’m finding that that’s a, it’s a through line that’s running through the Midnight Guardian series and I’m not sure if that was my intent when I started out.

That’s where it’s going. I think that very much, it was a theme of this third book. It takes place at a time of the year when people are really trying to ha hold onto to hope. And we’re, at this point we’re like, we’re what? We’re eight. It’s, it takes place at the end of 1938.

We’re at Christmas time, we’re still rocked by depression. And we know that something scary is starting to happen on the other side of the ocean up in Europe. And what does it all mean? And and suddenly this young kid is kidnapped in my own town. What’s gonna happen to this kid?

Christmas is coming. Is he gonna be reunited with his family? What happens when you put different people from different circumstances, different walks of life in a, into a situation and say, okay, we gotta find this kid. How do we do this? We have people who are destitute, we have wealthy people, we have Christians, we have Jews.

Maybe that’s a lot to throw into a pulp fiction story, but. I don’t know. It’s how I roll. I don’t know how else to do it. I just, yes, I want to tell a fun, exciting story, but I just, I can’t do it without just bringing something more resonant to it. I just feel like I have, I have to bring some resonance and some depth to it.

I think

Alan: that’s I really have enjoyed that in, in other words, instead of it just being, oh, a couple battles of fisticuffs and maybe trying to fight clue clues and stuff like that, it’s actually nice to see here’s what society was like back then and they were working out how to work together in those kinds of circumstances.

It was very easy in 1938 to say, wow, anybody of German ancestry, are we getting worried that they’re all saboteurs? And sure. Yeah. You know what I mean? And whatever aspersions were being cast on the Jewish people by those people. There were a number of people that were buying into that, that are they the secret, controllers the bankers and stuff.

To get people to put aside their prejudices. And boy, a lot of what you said earlier of there’s The world has always had elements like this. It’s not that we just learned about prejudice, it’s not that we just learned about, there, there’s all through history and not just going back into the twenties and the forties, but you named a period of history.

Sure. There’s always been rabble rousers or hate mongers. There’s always been Yes. Diasporas and people coming into new cultures and how are they going to be accepted or carve their own way into, a place in that society and so forth. And that’s Many of those kinds of things, like when you’re meeting a whole new civilization and you don’t know anything about their religion, their technology, their, you hope that they’re not head hunters and human sacrifices and stuff like that.

But there’s no guarantee about that either. You don’t know if you’re gonna make a gesture or say the wrong word and find out you just insulted the king without meaning to, it’s, there were really those interesting things, the clash of cultures and the exploring of the world.

Maybe we were opening the world up in a way that we had never done before of just like the us being the melting pot and having that there were different, what would you call ’em, colonies of, Hey, here’s where the Swedish are and here’s where the the South Africans are and whatever.

There’s all the different waves of immigration that came into the United States, and each of those was. Adding to the melting pot. But it wasn’t always easy. It was trying to decide, are the Irish really okay? Are the Italians really okay? And fill in whatever minority you want, to have us, when will it get to assimilation instead of suspicion?

John: And I try, it’s funny cuz I tried to make Union City sort of a microcosm of America, just all the things you’re saying, just, we have a lot of, I, if you notice, I try to throw as many ethnic names into my stories as possible. Exactly. Some are po Polish, some are German, some are Italian, and just and I try to make it a city that’s, of people who generally follow the better angels within themselves. There’s a bit of a soliloquy that goes on in the second book about halfway through the district attorney ed Gallagher, he’s talking about.

How he’s referring to this Nazi element that has taken root in the city, and he just, he basically says, I’m paraphrasing here. How the hell did this happen? This is h how did this happen in a city so fair as this, that we, how did this sneak in when we weren’t paying attention?

Now all I’m gonna say about that is I was writing that book in 2017 or 18. I’m just gonna leave it at that. When we were

Alan: confronted with that same question, we thought that was a settled issue and

John: no and so it just, I’m telling these stories in a specific period of history, but stuff sneaks in that even I’m not aware of, it’s happening until it happens.

There are things that ha, I have frequently said, especially with this most recent book, it just. Writing any kind of, whether it’s fiction, non-fiction, whatever. But writing fiction is a mysterious process. You, on one hand you are consciously controlling what’s happening, but on another hand, there are things happening, subconsciously that they’re on a track of their own, that you don’t necessarily, you’re not necessarily, your hands aren’t necessarily on the wheel.

Yeah. There, I made a revelation about a character in the third book that I didn’t see coming until the second book. And I realized that this character, oh wait there’s an aspect to this character’s background that I wasn’t aware of until the, I, the second book was taking shape and I realized, oh, this guy has a whole backstory that I wasn’t aware of, but it’s revealing itself to me in the writing of the second book.

So I presented that to the. In the third book, and if you’ve read it, you probably know what I’m talking about. I do it, but

Alan: I really, it’s kinda, your characters are real enough that they’re talking to you, they’re letting you know what kinds of, that’s very cool.

John: Like I say it’s a mysterious process, but it’s fascinating and I’m, I enjoy it when it happens because it’s just okay, I must be doing something right.

If these characters are taking on a life of their. And they’re steering me a little bit. Hopefully that’s a good sign. I’m learning as I go guys. I really am. And I just, I, and I’m, but I’m doing it in front of an audience, full of people, and that’s a little scary, it just, it’s I hope to God I’m doing it right, because I gotta, I, I wouldn’t say I have millions of people watching, maybe a couple hundred if I’m lucky.

I don’t know. But I’m learning in front of an audience, so I’m just doing the best I can with this.

Stephen: Your numbers are gonna jump after being on our podcast.

Alan: Oh, absolutely. Influencers, taste

Stephen: makers. Hello. We’ll have to get you a T-shirt. We actually do have t-shirts.

Alan: Okay. But you said

Stephen: something, John, from the author’s perspective, that I love that you tried different things and you fell into this.

And I think that’s a big thing with authors is discovering exactly what you write well, what stories you write. Yes, because yes, we, Alan and I talk about plots and stories a lot and all the books we like, and you can do the same type of plot, but with, serial fiction or steampunk or science fiction or whatever.

And you gotta get the stories that are you. And I think that’s what you discovered with that.

John: Yeah. It took a while. It did. I dabbled a little bit in detective fiction. I like that more. And I’m gonna go back to that but. I tried science fiction, and it just I just, I don’t know, for whatever reason it was close to the sort of adventure kind of story I wanted to tell, but it wasn’t quite there.

So it’s kind so I, you’re right. I just I had to feel my way until I found the place where I could land and feel like I had landed safely and I was in the movie in the right direction.

Alan: I, one of the things that I’ve noticed is sometimes people work in multiple genres, and it’s a very cool thing to be able to put on a different hat to say, no, I’m writing westerns.

I don’t know. Robert P. Parker wrote very successful, detective fiction. Yes. And then did some westerns and did things from a female detective perspective and from the alcoholic police chief perspective. And I almost thought it was very interesting that he was able to create enough distinction between them that it wasn’t like, oh, we had a couple spare Spencer Plots, but he had already saturated the market.

And so he went over here. He really seemed to have created not distinct enough things and enduringly. Created them and fleshed them out enough that now even with his passage, other people could step in and say, this is in the style of Raymond Chandler. This isn’t the style of rubber b Parker, whatever else it might be.

John: I’ve read all 40 Spencer novels. I think it’s 40. I’ve read ’em all. Me too. I have to say he’s a huge influence on what I do. There are moments where I I write a piece of dialogue and I step back and I look at it and I really like it, and I think I can thank Parker for that because I, I just if you’re read enough of anybody, they work their way into your d n a and he was one of those writers.

He just really just even when he wasn’t completely on his game I’d say the second, this maybe the second half or the last third of his career, I think he was not quite on his game the way he was earlier. And there were moments, there were times when like the stories themselves weren’t compelling me a whole lot, but God, the dialogue was so good and I just, I would read it just for the damn dialogue cuz it was just so punchy and snappy and funny.

That I just, I kept reading until his very last book. So that’s, yeah.

Alan: Yeah. I mentioned it in specific because I to flatter you, it really was, your dialogue is very well crafted, it really is. Some people, they really only know how to write ex expository. They really don’t know how to talk.

Like people really talk with they don’t speak in complete sentences. There’s cutting each other off and they’re, you know what I mean? There’s all kinds of more, much more human element to Sure. Especially the wisecracking. It really can’t be, people don’t speak in full jokes. They, they kinda speak with each other. And especially when someone to be able to have multiple people in a dialogue that you can tell what kind of person they are just from. How they do it, what their word choice is, whether they’re simmering, anger, whether there’s, carefree. Yes. He was really good at that.

And I think I see some of that with you too. You don’t to be saying at this point the hero is, really gets it in the neck. It, it’s much more There’s real dislike between these two, but they’re having to deal with a common enemy, so they’re gonna put submerge that Yes. But there’s enough still little digging on each other because they just can’t they can’t conceal that.

They just aren’t, don’t, aren’t the best of

John: friends. That kind thing. And I, first of all, thank you for the comment. I appreciate that. I just I’ve, I have enjoyed the relationship that has developed between Jack Hunter and the the police Detective Mike Duggan.

Okay. It seems like I, for whatever reason the repartee, the banter between those two gets really lively. And it just I remember I’m not a huge fan of Quentin Tarantino but I remember an interview that I saw with him talking about screenwriting, and he said, it’s different for, it’s a different process for different writers, but for me, I put two characters in a room and I just start writing down what they say and I remember I saw that interview many years ago and I didn’t quite understand what that meant.

But then after writing three books and several short stories I get it. It’s just if you understand these characters well enough, you just you know what they’re gonna say to each other before you even type the words. Exactly. Don’t, Stanford

Alan: is great with that as well.

The guy who writes the Lucas Davenport Yes. Books. The praise book. Yes. They, his characters sound like they should sound like Yes. And they’ve grown over time. They’ve gotten a little bit older. They get a little, when they’re under pressure, they’re different than when they’re cool, calm, and collected.

He’s also ave a master gist, if that’s a word. Yes.

John: I’ve read the first, I wanna say the first like 10 or 12 Lucas Davenport books by John Sanford. What is he, what is Lucas has gotta be. 80 years old now. Is that, that’s yeah

Alan: they operate on comic book time where they are in suspended animation for the sake of the series.

Yeah. And actually he did a good offshoot of those called Virgil Flowers, other character that is like a hippie cowboy, but really is smart as hell and people always underestimate him. And the way that he’s a, also able to have multiple series that embrace different kinds of characters.

His latest one is Lucas adopted a daughter, Lenny, if I remember correctly. And now she’s following in the father’s footsteps, but she’s of course her own woman. And in this world of still determining whether we think women are actually human, that they actually are smart and tough and stuff like that, they’re very good to have.

Show those things without having to be like a screed about it. You know what I mean?

John: It just, yeah. So if Lucas Davenport has an adult daughter now, it’s been a long time since I’ve read those books. There you go. It, I think there was a little girl involved at some point, but I, and she is

Alan: now either just outta college and is now her own, I think she’s either doing her own private detective stuff or she’s doing it for friends and then is finding out, I this anyway.

I don’t mean to distract to someone else’s work, but those are good examples of, that’s the kind of thing that I seek out and that I’ve seen in

John: yours. So thank you. Appreciate it. The microphone is on. It’s good to know. There

Alan: we’re going, the show is loaded with poll quotes, yeah, exactly. Gotta write all these down. Arkins to Raymond Chandler. Yes. Wow. John,

Stephen: let, lemme ask you one of the things we love to talk about is all the things we do. Alan and I are quite busy usually. Yeah, we compare notes. So what’d you do this weekend? Okay. We got this list. Every year coming up is Pulp Fest, and I know you Yes.

And Jim, go to that. Tell everybody a little bit about what Pulp Fest is for anyone interested.

John: Pulp Fest is is a, is an annual convention. Originally was in, in Columbus, but it has since moved to Pittsburgh several years ago. It is a collection it’s a convention of pulp buyers and sellers and dealers of original pulp magazines and also writers of modern day pulp like myself and like Jim.

You’ll find anything from Pulp Magazines to paperbacks to you’ll find you’ll f I think there’s some video vendors there. It’s just a it is just a mixed bag of people who just really love that whole genre of, Fiction from, I’m gonna say anywhere from the early 19 hundreds all the way up to maybe, the 1950s or sixties.

And then you’ll have, like I say, you’ll have the more modern day writers like myself. But they’re very much dialed into that pulp aesthetic. Yeah. And when I say pulp aesthetic, because there are plenty of characters who aren’t really technically from the pulp genre. There’s, the Green Hornet came out of radio the Lone Ranger came out of radio and television.

But I, it’s, I think it’s safe to call them pulp figures as well, if you use the general term pulp in terms of the pulp aesthetic as opposed to pulp with a capital P, so yeah it’s it’s a fun experience. I’ve gone almost every year since 2000.

There was, let’s see. They did not have a convention in 2020 because of Covid. The following year, 21, I did not go because I had a family conflict. My daughter was moving into her dormitory at Ohio State that same weekend. But other than that, I’ve been to every show first as an attendee in more in the last 10, or in the last eight years I’ve gone as a vendor.

But yeah it’s a fun time. It’s I recommend it, if any, anyone who’s even remotely interested in Pulp Fiction, that is one of two shows that you really wanna be at in the course of the year. And it’s not

Stephen: just the vendors. They have all sorts of celebrations Oh, yeah. Of different authors.

Yes. And they have talks and

John: yes, you’re right. There’s the whole pro programming aspect as well. You’ve got great presentations about artists, about writers, about. Specific periods about certain publishers who specialized in in, in certain kinds of genres. They have in the past had guests of honor, but they haven’t had really good luck with that in the last couple years.

People backing out pe a lot of the guests of honors are getting up there in years and they sometimes they they commit to coming, but then they can’t because of an illness or something. I think they’ve. For the time being. They’ve done away with the whole guest of honor concept.

But yeah, there’s a lot of great presentations in the late afternoon and evenings that just in addition to the dealer room where we actually go and buy cool stuff. Yeah,

Alan: exactly. One of the things I love about going to those conventions is we are, none of us are getting younger and Yeah, just like they had a big project like from the Smithsonian or something like that, where they were determined to talk to as many makers of Appalachian music.

Because they were dying, they were leaving us. And if we don’t capture so much of that is oral history and especially oral performance we’re gonna lose it. And that’s one of the joys of going to pulp conventions, comic book, science fiction conventions that you really get to meet the Ray Bradbury’s of the world before we lose them.

The that we’ve already, yeah. Any number of help. People are already gone, but there, there’s. Like you said, maybe it’s unfortunate that the guest of honor you really would like to meet, I don’t know, Hugo Greens back. Is he still around? No, I don’t think so. No. No. There’s all kinds of No, he fantasy figures that I would just love to have one more conversation with.

So at least there is this wonderful venue. I’m not sure the organizers are, but labor of love to say, all the people that were into this, we’re going to have a way that we’re all gonna gather for three, four days and we’ll just revel, revel in the fact that this is still going strong.

That there’s, we get to meet each other and I love that those things are still going on, even if it really is. Wow. 80, 80 years at least since it was lively. But that’s the whole point, is that some of those. Change people’s lives. They really want to continue to have a chance to talk about ’em, to celebrate them and meet the people who did them and kinda show off.

Yeah. I got every one of the omnibus or whatever else it might be.

John: I think, the writers from the original the original the heyday of Pulp Fiction, that they’re, I think they’re all gone at this point there. There’s a guy who who has been he he’s written a lot of like adult westerns.

His name is Robert Rani. He’s still alive. He’s in his early seventies, I think. And the plan was for him to be the guest of honor at last year’s show. And the plan was for me to interview him on stage just do a evening present guest of honor presentation. I would sit down with him and do q and a.

Yeah he it, the plan fell through. He couldn’t make it. So he opted not to come. And so that never happened. But and he has been called the last of the great pulp writers and he’s in his seventies at this point. I think we’re running out of. Pulp writers from the original era, whatever the original era is, anywhere from, I guess 1940 to 19, 19 70, I don’t know. Yeah. There, there, there aren’t many left and the ones who are, maybe may not be able to make it to, to events like that. But but yeah, to your point, it’s just, it’s it’s a great opportunity to dial into, when and where you can just to dial into that, the, that those folks who really like, slay the groundwork for the stuff that we read today. Yeah.

Alan: So one of the things I always hope in this era of, there’s way too much television to watch, books to read, movies, to watch, but that also means that every single genre king, its time in the sun. It. I just finished watching the Night Agent and it was, like a serialized maybe 10 or 12 episodes.

Very much the government intrigue, you don’t know who to trust, kinda like Jean Lak. There’s any number of people that are really good at those kinds of things. And it the fact that we have Indiana Jones five is about to come out and every time one of those comes out, I really think this could be the time when they really do say there’s more in this.

We could try to bring the buckets up of cool things that have this same, we’re gonna go treasure hunting, archeologically, we’re going to fight the Nazis, we’re, whatever else it might be. So any, anything that might work that way for you? Do you have the the movie options, people coming to visit you occasionally and saying you’ve got a fully blown character you could do?

You know what I mean? It, I would love for that thunderbolt to happen for you. I want you to be shamed by how much money they shower back the money up. Alan

John: and Alan. If that call comes in, I’ll take it in a heartbeat. But I don’t think that’s coming anytime soon. Yeah, I mean, I, trust me I have a whole lineup of actors I would like to see in my who, midnight guardian

Alan: casting.

That’s a constant discussion on all the boards.

John: Dreamcast. Exactly. I said that because I wanted you to ask that question, Steve. I think I like Chris Pine. Okay. Yeah. As Hunter after he shaves that beard back off just beard’s gotta come off. And I like Emma Stone as Betty Carlisle.

Okay. Yeah. I like, I cannot figure out, I cannot figure out who’s gonna play Buzz because Buzz is a very special character. He is, that’s Buzz is a character I hear about a lot. A lot of people say, I really like Buzz. He’s like the conscience. He’s he’s not just Jack’s conscience, he’s like the conscience of the city.

He’s that sort of, Boyish, good-hearted, innocent, but crazy smart guy who pretty much knows how to build and fix anything. He’s inspired by a couple characters I’ve seen in film and read in books but I can’t figure out who would play him in, in, what modern day actor would play Buzz.

I’d like Kevin Costner for Ed Gallagher. The the District attorney, Mr. Attorney. I’d like Paul Rudd. As Bart Maxwell. The reporter. The columnist. Okay. I think from the first book Nikki Diamond or Nikki Dynamite would be let’s see. Paul Muni’s dead, but that’s who I picture for that character.

The

Alan: tough kind of crazy Don’t know what He’s little crazy.

John: Yeah, exactly that. Yeah. Who’s got the Yeah. Kinda yeah. Eric

Alan: Roberts Will Defoe, I’m trying to think of yeah. Okay. Yeah, sure. Okay. There’s something in the eyes. Michael Keaton playing a villain. He was respectable, but then he goes in.

Yeah. Like

John: I, I want that, I want the actor who you put him in front of a camera and you don’t know what’s gonna happen. Like Exactly. Even when you’re the director, you don’t know what’s gonna happen. That’s who I want for Nicky Diamond. Diamond Nicholson, 40 years

Alan: ago a thing.

John: Sure. Yeah. Or maybe or maybe Vincent Donofrio 70 pounds ago. Just okay. Yeah. Cause he’s got the

Alan: kingpin thing conquered now. Sure. Archetype when he was leaner, like you’re saying. Exactly.

John: Okay. But I lo, I love Donofrio because like I say, you put it in front of the camera, you don’t know what’s gonna happen.

You don’t know what’s gonna happen. Yeah. And so yeah and then I’ve even picked out like actors from the 1930s, from that period in history, who would be good actors in

Stephen: that. They can do that now with all the deep fake stuff. See exactly

John: where. Sure. Jackie oh my God.

Oh my God. Lou Gehrig. Why am I 19? The actor? Yeah. James Stewart. No. Prior to the Jesus, I can’t believe I’m yeah. Prior to the Yankees, prior to the Yankees played Lou Gehrig he played. Oh my God, I can’t believe really. He’s like the, one of the most iconic actors in in, in the history of Hollywood.

Gary Cooper, Jesus, Gary. Okay. Gary Cooper. Yes. That’s why I wanna say Jackie Cooper. But that’s just different guy. Yeah. Yeah. So anyways, yeah. I like him as a 1930s version. Jack, hunter. There we go.

Alan: That, when the casting people come to you, you’ll be able to say, here’s the kind of person that I had in my, while I was writing it, or that it occurred to me that while I was writing it, they started to inhabit your, those icons.

You know what I mean? This is they, there are modern equivalents of the, I don’t know, going back to the thirties, who looks like Peter Laurie who looks like or acts like, and Sidney Green Street and the whole Sam Spade that is Humphrey Bogart. Sure. You know what I mean?

That, that inhabit adapters. There’s things that, do we have modern equivalence of some of those? I think so. Who’s oil detective? Who’s the who’s the wisecracking. Brilliant guy. Is that, so Simon who did let’s see, who’s Scotty in the latest Star Trek movies? Simon Peg. Peg Simon

Stephen: Peg, yeah.

Yeah. But not, see, he’s

Alan: already, it’s funny, some people age out of the program, while they were trying to get one flow over the Cuckoo’s Nest made. Kirk Douglas couldn’t play Randall p Mc Murphy anymore, even though he owned the rights to it for a long time.

So anyway, I’m just,

John: yeah, no, there, there’s whole, there’s a whole generation of younger actors that I’m just not familiar with. There, there are probably some great, there are some great actors who would play the parts that I can’t come up with, but Yeah. But they’re like something like between say 25 and 35, and I’m just not dialed into that generation of actors yeah, I know.

But

Alan: who’s got a little wear on em? Who’s got the perfect chin, exactly. Yeah.

Stephen: And with all the streaming and all the content being made nowadays, you got a good chance. I could see a station Tuby is doing serial shows now, and they’re free tv, but what’s his name that did wool back in the day?

His show’s now getting, or his book’s getting made into a show. So I would love to see a good. Pulp fiction ish noir feel show, we don’t really have that.

John: Now. Again, if the call comes in, I’ll take it in a minute. I’ll, I just, I’m happy to talk to anybody who wants to talk to me, but yes I’m not holding my breath, but yeah,

Alan: you know this Peace, Steven, I’m sorry.

No, go ahead, Alan. Go. No I’m gonna be the stereotype for a moment. Everybody else says hey, where do you get your ideas? Steve and I often talk about, wow, I have so many ideas that it’s more a matter of choosing amongst and quieting the chorus of all the things. It could be. How do you work?

Do you have already ideas for a fourth and fifth and sixth book, or are you waiting for inspiration because there is something in the modern world that you’d like to be able to, one of the joy. Past fiction or science fiction is, you can really comment on what’s going on now, but if it’s the Borg doing it, then you’re not getting in trouble for being too Right.

Sharply focused on something like that. Do you have certain subjects you’d like to visit or do you have certain locales, certain mees? What’s next for your main character that you want him to go through this kind of trial by fire or

John: there’s a couple different ways to answer that question.

There’s certainly, there are plans in the works for Jack Hunter, the Midnight Guardian. We’re, it should be fairly clear by now to anyone who has read all three books that we are, we’re careening towards World War ii. And, and here’s this guy in this city.

This sort of cosmo if cosmopolitan is a word that you can use in the context of the 1930s, here’s this guy who, with this, with this, these abilities, these enhanced abilities that are almost like a secret weapon. And the question becomes at what point do you know do people in positions of power and authority recognize this guy could be an asset?

And that’s all I’m gonna say, but okay. We’re heading in a direction where we’re heading towards international conflict. And, and here’s somebody who can do things that most people can’t. Okay. And at what point does that become, a secret weapon of some kind?

Alan: Is it gonna be by request or is it gonna be dragooned into doing

John: it? Because, Hey, that’s a very good question and I have an answer to that, but I’m not gonna tell you. Okay. But then another way to answer that question, Alan, is, there are others, there are other. Periods of history that I would like to explore.

And there’s the whole Cold War thing. And all I’m gonna say about that is I have introduced, I have already introduced a character who you will likely see again in a different series. Taking place in a slightly different period of history. Interesting. And

Alan: the making of the generational saga.

Okay. Okay.

John: Yeah. Yeah. So there’s that. It, it, what my, my problem and I is that I’m interested in too many things. Yeah. Recently I’m familiar, recently I’ve developed this fascinat I’ve always had I I’ve always enjoyed delving into the various aspects of, the history of World War ii, the causes the various battles, the various campaigns, the individuals involved in shaping the war, and how it turned out the technology that was developed to, to take us from.

40 to 1945. Lately I’ve developed a real fascination with the French resistance in the early part of the war. There have gotta be a million stories in in, in that whole aspect of is underground

Alan: and the

John: Okay. Yes, ma’am. Exactly. I mean that you I feel like you could build an entire series around that.

I probably shouldn’t say too much that no one steals any ideas, but okay. And, and then there’s in the last couple months I’ve been working on a couple of short stories, westerns actually. One is for a flinch book that’s flinch anthology that’s coming out in mid-year.

And another one is for an anthology being published by Storm Gate Press. I’m not, if not sure you’re familiar with them or not. So I’m immersed in like the whole western genre right now. I’m like eating, sleeping, and breathing. I’m reading a lot of westerns is to immerse myself in the genre.

I’m finishing up two stories. I’m looking forward to getting those behind me so I can get back to reading and doing and writing some other things. But I don’t know that I ever would pursue writing Western novels on a regular basis, although I wouldn’t rule it out. It’s a genre that’s very foreign to me.

There’s something in there about scale, the sheer physical size of the of the unexplored Western United States that just, I can’t get my head around. It’s if you tell an urban noir story, your stage is maybe a couple blocks of a, of an urban city and no one can see much farther than the wall of that office building that’s maybe a hundred yards away.

When you’re out there on the planes, you look out and you can see that Indian scout sitting on a horse on the top of the ridge, literally a mile away. I, I grew up in the suburbs of Cleveland. I can’t imagine being able to look out that far and see, a rider on a horse.

I just, it just it’s a, it’s sense. It’s a sense of scale that I really struggle with. It’s just you look out and all you can see is open land and mountains and sky. I just, yeah. I just, it’s

Alan: a very cool observation, and I have been, yeah, we’ve been all over the United States traveling, and that’s one of the things, once you get out, the mountains are bigger, the valleys are bigger.

You really can get we’re at the top of one mountain. You look down the valley to the other one, and it’s that looks like. We’re gonna be, we’re gonna be at the mountains, soon, and then you drive a whole day and you’re adopted that next set of mountains. You know what I mean?

John: And for a writer who’s not familiar with that kind of landscape, because he’s never lived in a landscape like that, I think that’s a big leap to just to try and write stories that take place on a stage that is that large and that wide open and that sparsely populated.

It’s just like the whole style of storytelling I think becomes different because, your sense of space is different. And that’s not to say I never would do it or never would wanna do it, but it would be a big shift in gears to try to write about, write stories in that kind of a setting on a regular.

Alan: There are others, as we’ve talked about Steve and I, about Louie Le Moore wrote any number of great westerns and yes, Elmore Leonard actually started off doing westerns and turned more to a hard boil detective. And so there are people, yes, that multiple links, but there, there almost certainly is a change in mindset where it really matters that where your next watering hole is as compared to I walked into the other room and turned on the top.

You

John: know what I mean? Or I drove to the gas station or I just, yeah I went into the diner to get a cup of coffee. It just, it’s a whole different, and that diner’s a block away, maybe you’re walking like 150 yards, whereas, like you say in or you’re riding a horse for four days to get to the next mountain range.

It’s just a whole different experience that’s sense of scale. That’s very cool. Okay. Yeah, I’m just, I’m not sure I have it in me to do that. I, I’m open to trying, but I don’t know. It’s, it’d be a challenge to do it on a regular basis. So do you have

Alan: a writing environment? Is there a certain room where you have certain music, certain, like how do you have a dog, you have family.

How do you get, do you need focus? Do you like having a little bit of distraction? Steve has talked about this a little bit that, Steven has how he works best and I have never taken on any big works, but I’m often at the computer and I’m writing my little essays, but I don’t need to isolate myself necessarily to do that.

I do it more with coding cause I’m a computer guy. So back to you. Do you have a happy place, time, et cetera? Do you outlast everybody and do it at two in the morning? What do you do?

John: It’s funny because I will tell you right now that the, this laptop and the camera that is embedded in this laptop is carefully positioned so that you don’t.

The freaking mess that is in this office. Chaos. Okay. Yeah. Yes. I turn this maybe like an inch and a half and you’d see a very different picture, but

Alan: the reason I use backdrops is so that you can’t see, oh lord, that’s, I’m up in sky in the attic. Who’s a lot of stuff. This guy, he’s a collector.

You could tell. Okay.

John: I’ve got a, I

Alan: see Uhoh. Uhoh. We’re frozen a little bit. We, oh, here’s, hoping it’s just a matter of lag as in cared. Do we’ve lost him? Oh no. John, if you can still hear us, you are frozen on our, we, oh, we dropped. Okay.

Stephen: We’ll just hang here cuz. Yeah, maybe he just, he’s coming back.

Alan: Alright. Yeah.

John: There we go. I got timed out. I’m not sure what happened there, but sorry guys. You just told me you have timed out. I what are we have? We’re like, I guess we’re

Alan: wise or something. Okay.

John: Okay. Anyway, I’m sorry. So anyways, so yes I have a lot of, certainly a lot of books in here and a lot of clutter.

It’s not the ideal but it’s, it is my space. We have, we, we live in a modest post-World War II bungalow. It’s pretty much myself and my wife now because my, our kids are in college and they’re home for part of the year. So there’s more room and there’s more time than there was before.

So that’s good. But it’s also a matter of getting my head in the right space internally as opposed to what’s going on around me. I have to get focused and I have to, I have a day job. I work at home, which is a whole story unto itself. I work for a company, but I work at home.

Thank you Covid. So the eight hours of my day is still focused on that, my wife is very good about,

Alan: yeah. Big pardon? You have to handle the transition between their time and your time. Yes. Cause my wife has a lot of problems with that. She also works at home and she is regularly given more to do than she should have.

But then how much of your life do you keep giving over instead of grabbing some back for yourself?

John: Yeah, and you have to, when you work at home, you just have to like, you have to say, okay, it is time to stop doing this job and go back to my life outside of work. And then you have to negotiate, what does that look like?

I wanna make sure I’m spending time with my wife. Yes, we have a dog to your question. And, he requires a certain amount of attentions. But my wife is very good about giving me time and space to do this. She’s always been extremely supportive, so that’s good. So I would say I have more time now to write than I did say a few years ago when my kids were in grade school, in high school when they needed more of my time and my attention.

I wish I had the wherewithal to clean up this space and make it feel more inviting and conducive to being creative. This room has become like the storage area for stuff that I don’t wanna think about right now. So I’ll just put it from there. But I cleared off this desk for the sake of this conversation so we could do it here.

So it was a good first

Alan: step. We appreciate you not peering out from between stacks and stuff like that.

John: It wouldn’t take much, let me tell you. Yes. Yeah. So hopefully that answers your question. I don’t know.

Stephen: Yeah. So John, we’ve mentioned that Jim a couple times and you mentioned Flinch. Tell everybody what Flinch books is and what you guys do.

John: Flinch books is we we’ve been publishing now for, let’s see, we are this is, we are in our eighth year, I think, or it was, no, it was eight years in January. So I guess technically we are starting our ninth. We emphasize quality over quantity. We don’t publish a lot of titles in a given year.

We average about two, maybe three some years. We’re just a two person operation. It’s the two of us. And we have a, an a very excellent graphic designer who helps us with our covers and our internal page formatting. She’s fantastic. But it’s just the two of us. And we publish books mostly anthologies, but also long fiction, novels in the spirit of, and that’s an important phrase in the spirit of pulp Fiction, classic pulp fiction of the twenties, thirties, forties.

And I say in the spirit of, because to get back to a point we were talking about earlier we certainly wanna we wanna latch onto that aesthetic, but we also want to do it in a way that’s a little bit more progressive, a little bit more interesting, a little bit more We put our own spin on it.

But very much with a nod to that period. We’ve done everything from science fiction to adventure to detective. Jim has his his a cult fiction his a cult detective series called Sergeant Janice. There’s three books in that series. I think he may be working on a fourth eventually.

I’m not sure what the plan is there. As I say, we’re working on a western anthology right now. We’ve done sword and sorcery. We’re open to anything that’s gonna work. We’re open to anything that’s gonna just tap into an audience, but yet give them something that’s maybe a little bit different from what they might be getting from other small price publishers like us.

The phrase new pulp gets thrown around a lot. I’m not fond of it for a lot of reasons, but I just like to think of what we do as being in the spirit of pulp fiction from back in the day right now.

Alan: Straight jacketed by it, if you will. Okay. Correct. Yes. I’ll tell you, I, I am, much a fan of your stuff.

I haven’t explored the anthologies, I haven’t explored that the Detective Janice series. My wife will be happy to hear hoki, I need to go buy some more books. Our best is

John: coming, but really we’re, we are working on a website, hopefully, I don’t know when it’s gonna happen because it’s a costly endeavor, but we need to have a centralized place on the internet where people can go and just see all of our books.

We’ll be up to 13 or 14 by the end of this year. Excellent. Again not as many as some publishers who are cranking ’em out, like eight or 10 titles in the course of a year, but I’d like to think that we deliver a level of quality that you might not see elsewhere. Nice.

Stephen: Excellent. You got anything

else,

Alan: Alan?

I, we’ve done our, or plus I, that’s what we were hoping for. Yeah. I’m can’t thank you enough, John for taking time. It’s been really great time to

John: talk. Thank you. I appreciate it. I

Alan: appreciate it. Getting insight into, who you are, what you do why we are fascinated with these kinds of things and just it’s it really so much appreciated.

You know what I mean? The point of relentless geeky is because it’s got many faceted diamond. And this is one of those things that it it’s not only a joy to read the works, but to meet a little bit to people behind them and then find out that they’re actually pretty cool too. You know what I mean?

There’s all manner of creators that are, you name it, a little prickly or a little, I dunno, full of themself. And I you are wonderfully down to earth and wonderfully aware of. Why you love it and why you love sharing these kinds of things. And so it just, it’s builds my enthusiasm as opposed to, can’t separate the art from the artist where you’re gonna have to, cuz this guy’s kind of a jerk and you’re not a jerk.

You know what

John: I mean? Oh, thank you. I just, I’m just a guy trying to tell good stories, and I just, and I’m happy to talk to anybody about the process, about the end product. You guys have both, individually and together have been very supportive and it’s very much appreciated, I think people don’t realize that, a lot of times a writer needs to hear again if, is the mic even on?

Are people even listening? Are people reading to this? Are they reading this stuff? Are they aware of what I’m doing? Am I just doing this in isolation? Is anybody out there? I have often said, I write my books, I publish my books, I send them out into the world. They’re like a message in a bottle and you just, I put ’em out there and just wait to see what comes back.

And the, when I have opportunities to have conversations like this one, it’s it’s it’s encouraging to know that there are people out there who are not only reading this stuff but actually kinda like enjoying it. And they’re waiting for more. It’s good to know. Exactly.

Alan: Thank you. Breath. There we go. Yes. Okay. Thanks very much. Thanks. Thanks.

John: Thanks guys. Alright. Appreciate it. See you

Stephen: again. Take care. Maybe at Pulp Fest. I’m gonna try and

John: go. We’ll be there. We’ll be there. Yes, absolutely. When’s the next one? August, maybe? No. August. I think it’s, oh shoot, I think it’s like 4, 5, 6, 7 Or is it about first weekend in August?

3, 4, 5 six’s. That’s Thursday through Sunday. So it’s, Whatever that first Thursday through Sunday is. It’s given that

Alan: we were sharing birthdays, mine is right around there. So maybe that’ll be my treat for myself is that I go wallow and pulps, Colleen and explore Pittsburgh and et cetera, et cetera.

So you’ve got me

Stephen: John’s trilogy. I’ll have to get Jim’s Sergeant Janus, cuz you said you don’t have ’em. I’ve read

Alan: the first one. If you’re saying that I might need a very good books.

John: Very good books, very good at cult detective stories are fantastic.

Stephen: Also, if you ever read Kakkis some more pish type fiction time.

Exactly. Is that

Alan: Simon Green? I love his stuff. The Cari Institute, that kind of, okay. Yeah. Alright. Yeah

John: it’s right in that, it’s that right in that wheelhouse. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

Stephen: Perfect. Cool. All Alright gentlemen. Thank you very much. Good evening. Good evening everybody.

John: Thanks. Take care.

Thanks guys. Bye-Bye. Bye.

Kyle is the author of sci-fi book – Space Pirate. He lives in Alabama, where he not only writes but runs a small publisher called Jumpmaster Press.

www.rkylehannah.com

https://www.jumpmasterpress.com/

Stephen: Today I’m discovering wordsmith. I wanna welcome Kyle. Kyle. Hello. How are you doing this? Great afternoon.

Kyle: I am great. It’s a beautiful day. So same

Stephen: here. Same here.

First thing I’ve really gotta say to you is, oh no, Mr. Bill.

Kyle: Isn’t that? Yeah. I, excellent. And you’re wearing a

Stephen: grumpy old men’s shirt, right?

Kyle: Yep. Grumpy. Do what I want. Yeah. I do what I want. But

Stephen: we’re some of the people that would recognize that? I think

Kyle: Oh, the bill? Yeah. Yeah. It was, it’s actually a dog toy.

But when I saw it, I said, oh no, it’s mine now. Nice. And I actually play it a lot during Zoom meetings. Somebody will say something and I’ll just, And it’s a perfect attention getter. Nice. Nice. All right we’re

Stephen: gonna talk about some of your books and about the business you are a part of jump, master Press.

But before we do all of that, let’s find out a little bit about you. Where do you live and what are some of the things you like to do besides writing?

Kyle: Okay. My name is Kyle Hannah. I live in the suburbs of Birmingham, Alabama. I retired from the Army about eight years ago. I spent 30 years as a paratrooper in finance and logistics guy.

If you see me walking around, it’s usually with a sm slight limp. But you know what, it was worth it. I got to travel a lot. I saw the world. And that’s not too bad for a country boy from Alabama. Nice. But these days I write, I edit I, I go play in the backyard and just enjoy the sunshine and just enjoy retirement.

Stephen: Nice. I see a guitar in the background. You play. I.

Kyle: I, I play at it more than I play yet there’s also a keyboard back there. There’s a bass. Yeah. If anyone just walked in and looked, they’d say, wow, you’re a musician too. And I’m like, Yeah, sure. Yeah.

Stephen: I’ve been struggling to try and learn some chording on guitar.

It’s just so small for me. I’m a bassist and a drummer. Oh

Kyle: yeah.

Stephen: All right. So let’s talk about some of your books. I know we picked out a

Kyle: couple that we were gonna talk about.

Stephen: So why did you, after being in the Army and a vet, why did you wanna

Kyle: start writing books? Actually I started writing in high school.

I had a very overactive imagination, and this was years and years before anyone said the initials, a, D, H, D, but that was me to a t. So instead of acting out in class and getting sent to the principal’s office and then getting home, And getting in even more trouble, I decided to apply my gift toward just sitting quietly and letting my mind wander.

And I spent most of my high school years getting, good grades, but most of my time my head was down and I was writing something and somewhere in the house, I still have those. 35, 40 year old stories. They’re absolutely horrible. They will, no one will ever see them, but they’re still here somewhere.

And believe it or not, for one of my series I wrote about five or six years ago, I actually pulled out some of the ideas. I wrote in those stories and incorporated them into this universe I created, and it actually worked out very well. And I keep wanting to go back and go, I’ve got this, that I could possibly, and then I start looking at it again and go no, it’s just too silly.

No, not gonna do it. Nice. Okay. Yeah I’ve been writing for years. I never really took it seriously until I was deployed to Afghanistan in 2002. That’s when I wrote my true first novel, came home, put it on a shelf until 2010. And then since 2010 it’s, I guess it’s been an average of a book a year.

I’m, I’ve got 12 novels out. Nice.

Stephen: That’s great. And I was talking to someone yesterday with taught novels and that for my podcast,

Kyle: that puts you in the rare

Stephen: elite of people who have been writing a while. Most of the people I get have two maybe most of ’em are one That was the whole idea.

So what are some of the books we’re gonna talk

about?

Kyle: Tell us about those. Okay. I picked out three of the 12, and you can see, I keep my little library up there. The first one is called No Harbor, and it is a Space pirate story. And I’ve always said I was either born 200 years too late or 200 years too early.

For this one I took a lot of the pirate lore. I always do a lot of research for my stories, and so I took I researched the pirate lore and I just put everything, two or 300 years in the future and had a a. A fast-paced, action-oriented pirate story. Nice. My latest book came out last year.

It’s called A thousand Cuts, and it is a futuristic crime thriller. So I took, I, it’s about 30 years in the future so I could have a few liberties with geographical landmarks and cities and stuff like that. I just had some fun with it. But that’s actually a big departure for me. Most of my stuff is sci-fi fantasy.

In this case I did A crime thriller with safe crackers and it’s very character oriented, which I’m an action guy. I write action stuff. But the first three quarters of the book, it’s very character oriented, very plot driven, and then it devolves into my normal, shoot ’em up at the end and you don’t know who’s gonna live, who’s gonna die.

But it’s a rip roaring good time.

Stephen: Nice. Nice. And yeah, I was gonna ask you about

Kyle: being a vet in the Army.

Stephen: But you’re writing sci-fi. I, it just seems sci-fi didn’t seem like the first thing that would’ve come to my mind. I would’ve thought some military, something, maybe military sci-fi

Kyle: or something like that.

My first novel was military sci-fi. And And I keep a lot of the military and the action oriented stuff from what I learned in the Army. But I’m a huge sci-fi, I love starships, I love exploring planets and stuff like that. So when I set down to write a space opera, if you will, which I’ve got one up here.

I tell when I’m at a convention and telling people about the Tri System Authority I’ll tell ’em, I said, look, it is a very Star Wars esque story. The Starship battles the world building. I’ve got creatures, I’ve got, you walk into the the Tatta cantina that’s in there. All the alien races, and I tell Authors all the time.

I said, have fun with it. I’ve got an alien race that when they get nervous they secrete cinnamon. You can smell ’em a mile away. And I just threw that in there, just, for fun. But it works cuz we don’t know what an alien species would do, right? Or how they would react, or what smells they would smell like.

So I just have fun with it. Nice. I like that. All right, so what’s the third book here? The third book is called Harvest Day. It took me about five years on and off to get this story right and it actually won best sci-fi novel at the 2020 imagined awards. Nice. And it is a futuristic, dystopian after the aliens invade story, but it’s not your typical story.

It’s got turns and twists action. A love triangle, believe it or not. And just. And then my mother-in-law said it was buck Rogers meets the Hunger Games. That’s how she described it. And I said, you know what? I love Buck Rogers. I’m gonna take that one as a win. Absolutely. Yeah. Buck

Stephen: Rogers

Kyle: is rules.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Cool. So those are the three if you wanna ask questions I’ll tell you everything but the ending,

Stephen: that’s a good thing.

Kyle: So you said there

Stephen: sci-fi you wrote a little military sci-fi. Do you have any authors or other books out there that are similar that you feel your writing

Kyle: is like?

One of, one of my favorite authors what in the military sci-fi genre is William Deeds. He he did the the Legion Series or Legionnaire series bounty Hunter ca, Cade Bounty Hunter. He’s got, a dozen or so novels that are very influential. And I actually got to meet him a few years ago.

Got some books signed, and he got a couple of mine. It’s nice to trade ’em out. I. I sat down with him for about 30 minutes and we just talked shop, which was absolutely amazing. So yeah he was a big influence. Lately I’ve been reading a lot of Larry Korea his fantasy and the Monster Hunter series.

The weather’s turned nice, so I’ll go sit on the back porch with a book and just, sit there and lose track of a couple hours, but I’m seeing his style and, other author styles and I’m like, I could do this with something. And, it just gets the mind going that, that old adage, if you wanna be a better writer, be a better reader.

And in a lot of cases it is true. I’m not gonna copy their styles. I’m going to I’m gonna learn from what they did because, They’re at the next level, and that’s where I want to be. The I’ve got to learn a few more tricks. Got it. Okay.

Stephen: And that’s great. I’ve always said, I think authors are better than actors because

Kyle: actors get that

Stephen: standoffish, a little bit of ego and they’re better. They don’t have time to talk to all the fans and stuff, but authors can walk down the street and they’ll talk with you. They’ll take pictures and they, then they treat other people as authors, not I’m better than you or anything like that.

Kyle: A co. A couple of things about that. One, I’ve done some screenplays. I’ve written a novel from a screenplay. Screenplays are very important. But the actor, they get the screenplay and it says, angrily say this. And that’s what they do. They act it out. The writer is the unsung hero because they’re actually writing what the actor says.

Without a good writer and we’ve all seen a movie going, oh Lord, what was that? The acting was good, but the writing was horrible or vice versa. You’ve got to have a good writer and a good actor to really bring it forward, right? Yeah, writers are the unsung heroes in everything.

So from a screenplay to the actors on stage to a radio production it’s all, it all boils down to is the writing any good?

Stephen: And that’s, subjective. And it also depends on the style of genre you’re in. I just talked to an author. What movie was the novelization?

Kyle: Oh, it’s a friend of mine.

He’s a director. Nice. Yeah. He wants to go to the next step. He’s out of Atlanta. He wrote a horror horror screenplay, and I’ve known him a few years. He said, won’t you write the novel for me? I said, okay. And I thought he was in production for the movie. I was like, man, this is gonna be great.

Everything’s gonna hit at one time. And then it comes out. He goes, okay, the trailer’s done. Wait a minute. I, where’s the movie? I’m still doing this, but you know what? The books turned out to be one of my best sellers. Nice. And so I’m happy he’s happy, but I, and then I’ve written a few I’ve got a alternate history time travel series called Time Assassins.

And not to steal anything but think Quantum Leap with historical events. Okay. Yeah, so I actually took the first book and wrote the screenplay for a TV series. I think it would be a fantastic time travel series. I. And so I’ve got I’ve got the first episode written. It’s in screenplay format, so if anyone’s out there, gimme a call.

We’ll talk right.

Stephen: There you go. I just talked to an author who wrote the screenplay for the attack of the Killer Tomatoes movie. Oh, wow. 40 years ago. Yeah.

Kyle: So I always miss

Stephen: the novelizations. I used to love those back in the eighties. A good movie. I’d get the novelization and read it, but Oh, yeah.

Now there’s hardly any of those out there, so I think it’s cool that you did one.

Kyle: Yeah. And I’m gonna talk to somebody this coming weekend. And propose the same thing. I’m not gonna say any more than that. Tease but if it works out, I’ll be back on your show to tell you all about it.

That would be awesome.

Stephen: We’ll have I like getting authors back a second time and see what they’ve been up to. And

Kyle: It is funny. Let me say something that you said a minute ago, you said something about not pleasing everybody or, you can’t please everyone, whatever.

My Harvest Day award-winning book, three stars. Oh my God, this is just so trophy, blah, blah, blah. I’m like, if you’re, if you want to be a writer, if you want to be an actor, if you want to be a musician, not everything you write is going to hit it out of the park with everybody. Just be prepared, right?

Some of the stuff I go, Ugh, I wrote this. It’s okay. People love it. And then it’s man, this is great. It’s okay. You just never know how it’s gonna affect someone or not affect them. I got a friend who does

Stephen: write military sci-fi and he is been doing it for 35 years and, all of his books have on the cover big spaceships with guns and shooting and blowing up and over an alien planet.

Kyle: All of them look like that. And

Stephen: He laughs about this one, one star review that said this is a horrible romance. Yeah, of course it is cuz there’s no romance in it,

Kyle: yeah. My my business partner and I to segue into jump master press if you want we take a lot of joy in turning lackluster reviews or onestar reviews into advertisements.

It’s I got one my, the audiobook it was for Harvest Day. I, I. Yeah, no one, oh. It was for Jake Cutter. It was the Tri System Authority. The guy says left me a review on Amazon after listening not Amazon, sorry, let me back up. The guy left me a review on YouTube after listening to the audiobook, and he said, this has no basis in reality.

And I went, duh, it’s a sci-fi book. It’s got spaceships and aliens and lasers. No, it does, has no basis in reality. He’s absolutely right. That’s right. So I took that, copied it and made it into an a a social media post and say, hey, you know what? If you wanna get away from reality, like this guy did don’t listen to Jake Cutter.

Yeah.

Stephen: Nice. Crazy That and I do have a bunch of questions for Jump master press. Sure. In a couple minutes. But first of all what we talked about some of the feedback from your books. Yeah. But if you had a choice would you rather see your books turned into movies or TV shows?

Kyle: It depends on the book. I’ve got two. Three Book Trilogies The Time Assassins and the Tri System Authority. I think Time Assassins would make a great TV series. There’s already three or four seasons worth of material in the books. The writer the script writers don’t have to go far, but then I’ve got stuff like Harbor Day or No Harbor that would probably make pretty decent movies and their standalones.

So it really depends On the book my writing style is I will sit right here, I will stare off in the space and see the scene. I see the movie, and then I write what I see, and that’s my writing style. So it can very easily be transferred. To, to the bigger or small screen, because that’s how I see it when I write.

Okay. All

Stephen: right. And do you, besides

Kyle: Jump Master Press, do you have an author website all? I used to but when we started Jump Master Press about five years ago I just turned everything off and put everything I do into the company now. It’s only been the last. Probably six months that I’ve slowed down working for the company and started back on my own projects.

I’ve been doing a lot of short stories for anthologies lately which has been great. Trying to find bigger audiences out there doing, podcasts like this just to get the name out there, let you know, hopefully stir some interest. I’ve got, Three books that are done that’ll be released over the next year, probably.

A detective story, which again, totally off the wall for me, but the concept was too good, so I wrote it. And then I’ve got a two book series called Terran Coalition, and it goes back to my roots. It’s a military sci-fi kick, the alien’s butt kinda story. Nice. With a few turns and twists because that’s what people have come to know me for.

Nice. Okay.

Stephen: So before we talk about jump master press, which I think

Kyle: people will love to hear about. Okay. Do you have any other favorite

Stephen: books and authors that are yours? Not necessarily that you write but ones that you just

Kyle: enjoy reading? I’ve probably read Starship Troopers a dozen times.

Not only because of the action, but because I was a paratrooper. And it starts off not like the movie, I’m talking about the book. It starts off with the guys doing a drop. And I’ve always enjoyed, seeing that kind of stuff because I experienced over a hundred parachute jumps. That’s something I can relate to.

So Starship Troopers way up there on my favorite list and the other, Speaking of Buck Rogers is buck Rogers. I think it’s Buck Rogers 24 50 something ad It was written by Phillip Nolan based on the original characters. And it came out in the late seventies, early eighties, I think. And it’s very different from the TV show that we all know and love and very different from the 1930s cereal.

But it’s a very good book. I probably read it a dozen times. I don’t think the covers on it any anymore. That’s, yeah. But those are two books that I will go back to every once in a while just to get away, just to, reread. Again John Scalzi I really liked his ghost brigades books William Deets.

Yeah, just all kinds of good stuff. Nice. Do you have a favorite bookstore in your area? No I used to work at the predecessor to Books A Million, so I’ve had my share of bookstores in my life. But there is a local used bookstore. I’ve done a couple of book signings there.

I took a lot of duplicates and stuff over and gave it to her. She’s got some of my books on her shelf that she sells from the local author kind of thing. But. Most everything these days it, it’s like everything else. And I hate to say it, it comes from Amazon. Yeah.

Nothing against Amazon, capitalism go, but they do not treat authors well. And that’s all I’m gonna say. Yeah. Yeah.

That’s

Stephen: a whole nother discussion. All right, so before we move on to jump master press if someone met you on the street and said,

Kyle: Hey why should I get your books and read them?

What would you tell ’em to entertain yourself? I write ’em to entertain myself and others. If you like. And I’m gonna say this, if you like a clean book I keep everything PG 13. All of our authors do if you like, action if you like. And I’ll say, fairly developed characters.

I. I’m not the character development guru by any stretch, it, I write good stories. They’re full of action. They keep you turning pages. And every once in a while I throw in a very good curve ball to make you go, what? Why did he do that? That’s cool. And, and then you just turn to page and keep going.

Nice. So if you wanna be entertained, Check out, jump master, press and look for my books. There you go. All

Stephen: right. And we’ll make sure to have links in the show notes for the books. So before we turn over to, we’re gonna talk some author stuff before we do jump Master press, you’ve written 12 books.

And I’m sure you’ve learned some things and you’re doing things differently now than you did at the beginning. So what are some of those things that you’ve learned

Kyle: and you’re doing different? I, it’s a good question. My first book, and. Let me say this. Jump master press we do a monthly seminar via Zoom.

It’s free. If you’ll join the Facebook Jump Master Press Writers Group, you’ll get all the information. In fact four hours from right now Thursday at two 30, so six 30 tonight. I’ll be hosting the next one as a matter of fact. I tell, we, we tell everybody. A lot of authors go through this, they’ll go, I finished my book, your Welcome World.

Ah, where’s my million? And it doesn’t work that way. My first book, I just wrote the story. I wrote it how I think, how I talk, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It’s a good story, but it’s nowhere near the way I write now. In fact, I market it to eight to 12 year olds. They eat it up. So younger reader.

But the second book I ever wrote was, is called Time Assassins. And I found a publisher out of Canada. She picked it up and she taught me how to edit. She and I always joke that she had stock in red ink. Because every time she sent me something back, it dripped, right? But I took those lessons and then the second book in the series is, that much better.

The third book is that much better. And over the last, 12 years, I’ve truly, honed my craft. I’m still not, I’m not the greatest writer in the world. I won’t ever claim to be, but. I’m a pretty good writer. And it shows, if you read them my first book to aid and protect and you read a thousand Cuts, which came out last year, you’d swear it was two different writers.

And so we take those lessons and we put them into the seminar we do each month, and, We have students all over the country. We’ve signed five of our students over the last couple years because their writing went from here to there. Because some of the lessons and everything like that.

And that’s all we’re gonna be doing tonight is going over some of these editing lessons to help the writers hone their skills. Nice.

Stephen: Okay. And we’ve been hinting and talking about Jump master press a little bit. So tell everybody what Jump master Press is, what you guys do and what benefit

Kyle: you have for authors.

Okay. Joe Master Press was formed in 2018 with me and EG Rowley. He, we served together in the Army. I’d written, four or five books and he was writing his first. And I’d gone through two or three publishers for various reasons. I’d self-published one, found a publisher, got rid of that one, found another one, and I just wasn’t happy.

And he said why don’t we just form our own company? We’ll take all the lessons you learned the hard way and we won’t do them. So in August of 2018 we formed Jump Master Press, and it was me and him and we signed our first guy about November that year. And since then, we’re now over 30 authors in four countries.

We have a celebrity author. We’ve got mystery writers time travel, sci-fi, horror, look at everything. We’ve got children’s books, historical fiction. We are a full fledged publisher. And like I said earlier, we try to keep everything family friendly. And all of our authors have agreed to that.

And we put out somewhere between 15 and 20 books a year. And as, and it’s Jean and I running it, we do probably a dozen cons a year. And like this weekend will be in Huntsville, Alabama. I’ve got six authors coming in from across the country. To join us. So we’re gonna have eight authors at this sci-fi convention or pop culture convention.

And readers can come by, they’ve got multiple genres to choose from, and the author sitting right there to get ’em, get their book signed. So that’s what we do, that’s what we bring to the table is we are proactively going out there to these conventions. To these readers and presenting our books.

We’ve got a robust website. And that’s what we do. And I know

Stephen: I saw you guys at Scares That Care,

Kyle: Which was a great

Stephen: event. I had really enjoyed myself. Really wanna be coming back.

Kyle: Yeah, do it

Stephen: again. And you guys had an enormous booth. You had a big wall with books you had tables, you had a little of everything.

I was like, and you did take quite a bit of my money that I was eating ramen for a week.

Kyle: No, not no. Sorry about that. No, don’t apologize. I got a stack of books. Yeah. That’s always a good thing. Yeah. W the skiers was kind enough to give us about a 30 foot section of wall and we filled every bit of it.

And then we had our, one of our authors Armon Shimerman from DS nine Fame, he played cork. He’s been on the podcast, historical fiction authors. So he sat there and he signed books and autographs all weekend. He had a great time. We had a great time. And yeah, it’s definitely on my list of things to do in the future.

Yeah,

Stephen: It was a fun event. Lots of, oh, man I did not expect that many author tables with books everywhere. I was like, oh my gosh. If you like horror, And you’re looking

Kyle: for authors that is the place to go. Yeah. But you asked what jump master press can bring to, to audiences.

One of the things we’ve prided ourselves on is we innovate products. One of our first things we did right out of the gate was, and I actually happened to have an early prototype. We did. Audiobooks. My business partner is a nationally recognized voice actor, and we wanted a way to get away from Amazon and a cx.

So what we did, this is an early prototype. It’s called a Jump card. Yep. And it’s a U S B drive credit card sized U s b that has the audiobook on it. That’s cool. So this is one of our innovative projects. This was, this is all three of the time. Assassins, trilogies on one, believe it or not. And that was an early prototype.

It’s gone through five iterations, but we’ve got almost 20 titles available in audiobook. Check out john master press.com and click on jump card and you’ll see them all. But that’s an innovative project product. It’s a way, for authors. Our authors, when they do their own conventions, somebody will walk by us like, yeah, I’ve got it available in paperback or audiobook, and they’re like, whoa.

Audio. And then another thing that was like the first year the second year came out and we. Found a way to sell e-books at conventions. And I don’t have an e-book card with me here, but they’re on our website. We can sell e-books at the convention. We don’t have to send them somewhere else.

Stephen: The e-book cards are a little bit like, if

Kyle: anyone’s gone

Stephen: into GameStop and they have those cards you can buy that’s a game, but it’s, so you can put it in a ca in a birthday card and give it to somebody, and then they type in the code. They go to xbox.com, type in the code, and boom, they’ve got it on their Xbox.

So yours, your

Kyle: cards are the same type of thing? Yeah. Yeah. It’s a nice little card. It, and when we first started it, we started it with individual covers, for each of the books and all this stuff. And, again we’ve honed it. We’ve Squeaked it a little bit over the last couple of years.

And so we’re about to start doing just plain generic cards to send people to our website and then they can pick out whatever book they want. And then this last year the latest innovation that we’ve done is box sets. Most authors, independent authors have found that box sets are cost-prohibited.

Cross prohibited. They it’s about a thousand dollars for the setup fee and then you gotta pay for this. So if, and then you gotta buy like a minimum of a hundred or some something crazy. So you know, it’s $1,500 for box sets. Gene put on his engineer hat and figured out a way to do it. And now our two book and three book trilogies, we have box sets and they’re, go out to jump master press.com.

You’ll see them down on the bottom of the main page. They are super sharp, they look fantastic. The books fit in. They’re tight. You can actually hold ’em upside down. The books won’t fall out. Yes, Uhhuh, because I bought

Stephen: Monds Trilogy. Yes. And we couldn’t get ’em out to

Kyle: have ’em signed. And that, that’s a.

A unique way of for authors to present trilogies and collections and stuff like that. And we’re finding it hard to keep them on the shelf this weekend in Huntsville’s gonna be the first test since we’re gonna have the authors and the box sets there. I’m expecting a lot of people walking around carry, carrying stuff like, it’s gonna be en entertaining, but that’s one of the things that, that we do for our authors and some of our affiliate publishers as well.

We make things unique. It’s a unique experience. When you come to the Jump Master press booth, we put down a floor if it’s on a concrete, we put down our own floor, we welcome you into the bookstore. It’s a unique shopping experience and, normally we’ll have a couple of authors there, so people get books signed and then, everybody’s happy.

And you had reesey’s

Stephen: peanut butter cups,

Kyle: so Yes. Yeah. And you can’t go wrong with those,

Stephen: right? No, absolutely. If an, if there’s a, an author listening and they’re like I’m interested in jump master. What do you guys look for and what do you expect from authors?

Kyle: Right now we are opening for general submissions in August.

We do that one time a year because, and we shut down. A couple of years ago because we were just constantly inundated with submissions. And as the editor-in-chief, I spend about half of my day every day editing our signed authors books. So we had to narrow the time down so that I can concentrate on a one 30 day period and then, get the rest of the work done the rest of the year.

Plus write something for myself, which is right. Something I haven’t done in a year. But anyway what we look for we look for good writing. Anything but erotica and poetry. We don’t publish that. We try to maintain a PG 13 rating. That means no gratuitous sex, no n none of the good words.

If you will if they can say it on primetime tv, we pretty much allow it. But Like I said, sci-fi, fantasy time, travel, murder, mystery horror, historical fiction, kids books. Steampunk. Steampunk, yes. General fiction. We’ve got several thrillers on the shelf as well. We, like I said, we’re a full fledged publishing company.

We look for good, solid writing, and once you submit to us, You basically fall into two categories. One, and lemme back up. We have a selection committee. It’s not just me sitting there going, Ooh, I don’t like this guy, or whatever. We actually have a committee of about four to five people that will grade every submission.

And what they look for is, the plot the writing, the grammar, et cetera, et cetera. And. Once it’s graded, most everybody falls into two categories. It’s pretty good with a little editing. This is good. So send them an acceptance letter and then otherwise it’s a revision letter. What I do is I actually take the time to do an edit on the first couple of pages of the submission, show the author what we’re looking for, how they can improve, and then I’ll send them a revision letter going, Hey this is what we found.

We really like this, but you really need to work on this and, try again. And I just last couple of weeks ago, I had somebody six months after the fact send me in their second thing, and, they got that much better. It’s very rare that we do an outright rejection letter.

I think I’ve done less than 10 in five years, just flat outright rejection. And I hate to do it because I think everybody has some potential. But, At some point, I’ve got to weigh the cost benefit of do I want to spend, do I have the time to spend trying to make this story, acceptable or not?

And, there’s a few unfortunately that I just don’t have the time for. And and it’s not a personal decision, it’s a business decision because y I, most of my day, every day is either, Editing, marketing or writing, and that’s, eight to 10 hours every day. All right. So

Stephen: what, what did for authors that do wanna submit what would be your advice to new authors before they would send to you or just, publish their book out there, anything like that?

Kyle: The current standard. Standard and again, There is no right or wrong. Okay? I for you authors out there, write your story.

If somebody tells you, Hey, you need to add in more sex or you need to do this, write your story. There’s a publisher out there for you. Second piece of advice, do not ever pay to get your book published. Okay? I did it my very first book. I did it. I never got that investment back. So don’t do it. You can go you can go and do it yourself, and it will cost you a thing.

But what we look for again, good writing limited use of passive voice. We want everything. Active voice. We want you to show, don’t tell. I don’t want you to tell me the story. I want you to immerse me in your story. I want to feel like I’m living it. And we have a class called, he said, she said, on writing female and male dialogue because it is different women talk differently than men did.

And all of that’s on the writer’s group. We want a good story and when we open up for submissions, The first three chapters, a summary of the story, including the ending, and a short bio on you. No pictures. I don’t wanna know your demographics. I don’t want to know any of that except, Hey, I’ve written 14 stories.

I’ve got a BA in, in English, and your welcome world. I, I don’t I don’t need demographics. I need good writing. Got it. All right.

Stephen: Kyle it’s been great talking to you. I’m glad to Yeah. Catch up with you and we’ve got a bunch of jump master authors coming up from you guys, so we’ve got some

Kyle: good interview.

I told you if you sent me your information, I’d get you, I get you a full slate, yep, we

Stephen: did I’ve got quite a few, so we’ll have a lot of those. I

Kyle: get I get a lot from

Stephen: various sources in that, so we’ll be having some good jump master press authors and I’ve got, Some good books on my read pile from you guys, so

Kyle: I appreciate that.

Good. I do invite everyone to check out jump jump master press.com. You’ll find all of our books, you’ll find all of our audiobooks, all the eBooks, our upcoming events. We do a, like I said, about 12 cons and we’re all over the southeast of the United States. We’ve even got a page for our authors so you can read a little bit more about them.

But if you’re an aspiring writer, join our Facebook group. Follow us on. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok for our YouTube channel, we’ve got free audio books out there. I do a weekly vlog. I’m not doing one this week but I do a weekly vlog talking about our authors upcoming books where we’re gonna be.

Who knows what the subject might be next week, you can stay up to date with everything that’s going on with us, by following us on social media. Great.

Stephen: And I’ll put links in the show notes

Kyle: driving people. I appreciate my website, all

Stephen: right, Kyle, I appreciate you taking some time today.

It’s been great talking

Kyle: to you. Hey, thanks. I always welcome the opportunity if if you need anything else from us, just reach out. I’ve got plenty of authors to interview. Cool. Great. And I’ll, I’m

Stephen: sure we’ll run into each other as I get to more cons and events, maybe scarce at care next year.

Kyle: Yeah. It’s on the list. We’ll have to see. All right. Thank you, sir. I appreciate it. Hey, thanks everybody. Appreciate it.

Bye.

Like many young men in high school cursed with a dash of creativity, Jim found a love for writing, which everybody else thought was practically useless. Those folks urged him to get good at math and science instead, and so he worked at those, but he was never sure if he could hack them out at a university level. After he graduated said university with an arts degree (where he had to read an awful lot), he wondered what other young people had gone through the same thing. It’s always been his dream to inspire young men and women to pursue STEM projects, as he thinks the world could use as many helping hands it can get and he thinks they are up to the challenge.

In other news, he grew up near Toronto, Canada and devoured any written adventure he could find, including many of the works written by Kenneth Oppel, D. J. MacHale, Christopher Paolini, and Rick Riordan. Later on, it was Jim Butcher, R.A. Salvator, Hajime Isayama, and Tsugumi Ohba who fueled him through his early adult years and to whom he associates much of his personal growth to.

HUNTED BY FIRE

What is fifteen-year-old Felix Deltorei supposed to do when he longs for rebellion? In his world, where the dragon Gods reign with barbaric force, such thoughts could cost him his life.

The risks have been drilled into Felix and his friends since they were children. The war between humans and the winged Gods ended with a treaty; humanity would serve them or be driven extinct. Hundreds of years later, under the watchful eyes of the Gods and their devoted followers, those same laws remain.

Felix knows he has to find his place in the world before he’s found out. Surrounded by teachers who only ever value faith, obedience, but also technological advancement, Felix strives to achieve security and a better life in the only way he knows how; with his inventive mind. However, just as he gets his chance, one of the province’s famed inquisitors arrives in town. Little does Felix know, the devastating events about to take place will risk exposing him, but they will also push him out into a journey that might mean the deaths of the ones he loves if he can’t escape in time.

Jim Hepburn Website

Stephen: today on Discover Wordsmith, I wanna welcome Jim Hepburn.

Jim good afternoon. How are you doing? It’s a bright, sunny spring day here. How about you?

Jim: Yeah, no, it’s good, Stephen. Thanks for having me. It’s it’s kinda cloudy, overcast, but it’s warm, so that’s what

Stephen: matters sometimes. To let our audience know a little bit about who you are, tell us some of the things you like to do, where you live, and things you do besides writing.

Jim: Yeah, sure. So I live up in Canada. I’m right around the Toronto area there. And I I spend a lot of my time when I’m out riding, I usually either cook or do I do lots of jiujitsu also. I love doing that. Getting beat up for fun is great. And and yeah, between that, hanging out with my dog and my fiance and then writing that that captures about 95% of the time that’s there.

Stephen: So what’s your favorite thing to cook?

Jim: Oh, pizza, hands down. I yeah, no, I you know what was funny? It was my family has always loved pizza forever, and I could eat pizza every day of the week if I had the opportunity. But for Christmas, my mother gave me this. Book this pizza Bible written by a 12 time pizza champion in New York or something like that.

So I studied up on it and got the pizza stone and the pizza pan. And I went to town on that a couple times and I like to do that when I have time. But It’s it’s awesome.

Stephen: I’d love to get an outside pizza oven. One of those brick pizza ovens they have.

Jim: Oh, yeah. Yeah. That would be the dream. One day right now, I just, I gotta make with the oven and trying to peel the thing off the, and when I shove it in there and Yeah, I’ve, yeah, maybe one day I’ll be a pizza master, maybe down the road for my grandkids,

Stephen: but Pizza Master or a Jiujitsu Master, one of those maybe.

So you take jiujitsu, is it mixed, like kids and adults or do you just take adult classes?

Jim: Nope. No. It’s specifically adult classes. And it’s any, it’s pretty much anybody over 18 you jump in and Nice and ju jujitsu’s interesting. It’s so interesting about it is you can you jump into it and your weight.

Doesn’t matter when you’re really good at it. In a way, it’s our coach actually, so I’m six foot, I’m 185 pounds. I like to keep in shape as much as I can. Our coach is a guy, he is in his thirties and he’s 135 pounds. So very small, and he’s phenomenal. It’s amazing what you can do when you know the art really well and how you can defend yourself with it.

It’s, Obsessive, in a lot of ways. Yes.

Stephen: Nice. Yeah, I took a style called Kwan, it’s Korean. Oh, for years with my kids. Yeah. Oh, wow. I love that. I actually, I think the guy that does Kwan and the guy that originated Jiujitsu in America, I think they’re like friends. They actually know each other.

Oh. So I think if I remember the history, something like that. But anyway why did you wanna start writing?

Jim: I started writing because I really felt like I needed to. It was something that let me rewind. So I started write about when I was 25 and for the longest time, you, you consume books all if you really like fancy and literature.

You consume books all the time. And I got to the point where I went to school and I had to then start consuming books for to pass as opposed for fun, as opposed to for fun. And. I got edited for a little while and I came back to it and work was pretty smooth and things were going well, but I felt like something was missing and I wanted to do something more constructive with my hobby time.

And I had always tried to write a book, back when you were 16, 17, you might pull out a piece of paper and scribble on something and try to see how that works before getting completely overwhelmed. And so I wanted to go back to that and then, It started off as a see if I could do it sort of thing, and it just kept evolving as I wrote more and more chapters before turning into the debut novel there, hunted by fire.

And then afterwards I really tried to turn it into something that I thought I would’ve really loved when I was 13, 14, 15, 16 age. Yeah.

Stephen: Nice. Okay, so let’s talk about that book. Tell us a little bit about it. Give us a title again and a little bit about it without, giving away the whole story.

Jim: Yeah, no problem. So it’s called Hunted by Fire. It’s a young adult fantasy, and it’s about a, it’s about a young boy, 15 year old boy, and in his world, humanities ruled over by the tyrannical barbaric dragon gods. And they’ve been ruling over humanity for thousands of years and. The status quo is is it’s not good, I guess let’s say that.

And and so this boy, unlike most others around him, like his friends and his family, he feels like something’s off. Like how they’re being treated isn’t right. And so he dreams of rebelling, but he’s stuck too because he’s young and he needs to hide those thoughts while trying to find his own place in the world from people who might wanna seek him out.

And so this boy, he’s not combat trained though he’d like to be, and he isn’t exactly charismatic like some of his friends are. But he’s clever. He’s got a knack for building and inventing and for science and engineering, and. And coming up in this hometown as this famous contest held by the gods to determine who the smartest and most determined young people are.

And so our protagonist, this boy, he wants to enter and he wants to do it not just to prove what he can do to everybody else, but also to help find his own place going forward in the future. But in the background, there’s some events happening unbeknownst to him that That are gonna cause some, maybe some scary and some familiar people to come looking for him.

And he’s gotta get gritty and get resourceful if he’s gonna have any hope of escaping them.

Stephen: Nice. Great. And I like the elements in there, the fantasy. It sounds a similar to what I’ve got coming of age type fantasy stories. Those are some of my, I love those. So why did you wanna write, I’m sorry, go ahead.

Jim: I was just gonna say, which kinds did you read there?

Stephen: That I read. I like Warden. Oh yeah. When I was reading JK Rowling to my kids and when I first started writing, I’m like, okay, she’s like the biggest, let’s do what she does, and that’s. So I live by Kent State and they do a wizarding world Festival every year.

So I said, oh, I’ll write a short story. That way I can have something and set up an author table, I can offer it for five bucks or something. Sure. And that short story turned into not just one full novel, but a planned five to seven bucks series. So Oh, wow. She was my inspiration. But I actually think I write style wise a little bit more like den Oh yeah.

Okay. What, are there any books out there that you would say are similar to yours?

Jim: Yeah, I tried to write it in a way similar to maybe Christopher Paulini and Aragon. It they’re thicker books for sure. A hundred by Fires, 400 and some pages there. Wow. But I would say most like Aragon I suppose.

And then with elements of. Maybe some Brent Weeks or Jim Butcher down the road, but those are more adult style books. I, yeah. Yeah. So I was trying to, when I was writing it there, I wanted to bridge the gap a little bit and see if we could get some of those elements.

Approachable wife

Stephen: with younger guys, arguably Jim Butcher he’s not too explicit or out there with either violence or sex and stuff like, like that, no. If my kids were 12 or something, I’d have no problem with them reading the dresses and stuff.

Jim: Yeah, the dresses and stuff’s amazing. It’s so great.

It’s yeah,

Stephen: actually in the middle of the first one, that’s the first time I’ve read it. Oh

Jim: really? Yeah. You’re in for a wild ride. If you wanna stick with it, it’s he writes fast-paced action scenes very well, very clear, very easy to visualize. It’s awesome

Stephen: stuff. Yeah.

I’ve been enjoying it. My son kept pushing me for it cuz he loves ’em. Oh. Yeah. So he’s still young. He has lots of time to read, so he reads a whole lot more than I do.

Jim: Yeah. It’s funny. We have so much time when we’re younger to read and do all that stuff and then we get older and things get in the way and,

You have to be choosy with your time sometimes, especially when you have kids. Yeah.

Stephen: I was just gonna say, you said fiance, so I imagine there’s gonna be a wedding someday and probably kids someday, so Yeah. You don’t know what not having time is like yet.

Jim: That’s true. That’s part of the game plan. I like to prize the time that I have right now.

Cause I know it’s gonna be gone very soon, but it’s a

Stephen: good gone it. It really is. And I think that’s part, I enjoyed my kids when they were young and I think that’s part of the reason I enjoy writing middle grade. Fiction so much, partly because my kids say that’s just, I’m like a 12 year old, so it fits so What ha.

Have you had any good feedback from readers? What have people been saying about your books?

Jim: Yeah, I’ve had lots of great feedback. It’s been awesome. You get feedback from friends and family, which is one thing, but the prized feedback is really the feedback from people outside yourself that make its way back to you.

Yeah. And it’s been great. Like lots of kids especially who’s who the book is for. They’ve read it and they’ve loved the action scenes. They love the main character. They loved the They love the the kind of steam punkish feel to the fantasy. And they like supporting a character who’s got some got some intelligence behind him who’s resourceful, who can solve some problems that way as opposed to with just I guess just combat prowess in a sense, which is what a lot of things are doing right.

But Yeah, I, no it’s been very encouraging. It’s been

Stephen: great. Yeah. Nice. It, I was gonna say your main character sounds a little bit like the fantasy world version of MacGyver, which I’m all for. I

Jim: love that. You know what, I, I don’t know MacGyver, I’ve heard the name. I can’t, you’re young.

Stephen: Okay.

Okay. I say that cuz the original MacGyver the actor Richard Dean Anderson, that was my favorite show when I was younger. And that’s one of the things that started me. I wanted to write a story with a character like that and I actually met him a couple weeks ago. I was very excited. Life.

Wow. Fan. Got to meet him. You should, I think it’s on Amazon Prime. You should find or cbs. Bs. It’s CBS bs. You should find an episode or two and just watch it because the way you described your character sounds a lot like him, even though they’re getting a little outdated for shows, but Oh yeah.

Jim: Yeah.

There you go. I’ll have to check that out then. Maybe I was inspired by it. So there

Stephen: you go. Speaking of shows, if you had a choice, what would you rather turn this into? A, a TV or a movie?

Jim: TV shows are so nice that you get to cover so much more content in the, over the span of a TV show. I guess I’d have to go with that for sure.

It’s I think probably like any content creator, Would love to have shows, delve into the nuances of all their storytelling that they have there. Some things get lost in a movie, but movies are nice too, cuz they have that completion factor. You get the closure at the end for sure.

Which sometimes you worry about with a long TV show.

Stephen: So you had plans for more books in this series or was this a standalone?

Jim: No I’m writing avidly. I so I work full-time. This is this is something that I do as a side as building the dream sort of idea. So right now I’m about three quarters through the second one in terms of finishing that.

And then yeah, I’m gonna make many more hopefully just to keep building on it and having fun and exploring the world and seeing what the characters can do,

Stephen: nice. Yeah. That. Do you have plans for how many books are gonna be in the series or are you just writing ’em as you think of ’em right now?

Jim: Yeah. I don’t wanna overextend the story. I want to have, at least I always thought in my head to have at least five for sure. 10 seems like a stretch when you’re only done book one, working on book two. You never know. But I think if it’s, if there’s something there that people really like and that people respond to, then I can see myself writing it for a long time and Right.

And really like I said, just really. Exploring the full length of it, of all the characters that are in there and the story that could be had and making something that could be really epic and fun that somebody could, a kid ideally, maybe you could really sink into on book one and be excited.

There’s nine more books coming. I always felt that myself. I, whenever I found a series and there’s a lot of books in, in the in a row, you get giddy cause you don’t have to look for a while longer. My parents even found the same thing, trying to find me proud.

Stephen: Yeah. Yeah. And then middle grade, Type age range is great cuz they become avid readers, but they’re omnivorous.

They don’t just wanna read fantasy, they don’t wanna read just mystery or whatever. They, one of this and one of this and one of this, and they read lots and I know I had a friend in school, he would read 10 books a week and he still reads several books a week even, full-time adult with job and kid and stuff.

Oh yeah. Good for him. Yeah, it, so it’s nice to. Have the books for them to read. Cuz they, if they love it, man, they wanna read all

Jim: of them. Yeah. And I was like that too. I remember getting any kind of book like JK Rowling, reor the new Aragon books. Anything I would devour them two days and it would it would be all you would want to do.

You just get so absorbed as a young child, just reading this volume and reliving this story. It’s so yeah. So I always wanted something like that for my readers too. Hopefully.

Stephen: No, it’s good. Yeah. Just go to sleep. No, just five more minutes, mom. Yeah. The flashlight under the blankets.

Yeah, that’s right. Yeah. Do you have a website that people could go to and check out your book in future books? Yeah,

Jim: absolutely. It’s author jim hepburn.com. It’s It’s fairly easy to find, but yeah I put all my updates on there. Any artwork I get, I put up on there. I even have, I have a progress meter actually on there too, of the next book.

So people can have a bit of an idea when it’s coming. Nice. And set the expectation. Yeah,

Stephen: Yeah. As long as you remembered update it, it’s not magically automatic. That’s true. That’s true. I had one and I looked at it, I said, oh, Book one’s 15% done. I just published it, so better update that. Oops.

Jim: It was a big update that day.

Stephen: Yeah, it was. I did a lot of writing last night, Jim. So we’ve talked about reading and books. So what are some of your other favorite books and authors? You’ve mentioned a few.

Jim: Yep. I did mention Jim Butcher. Jim Butcher, honestly, has to be one of my favorites just because of the simplicity of the writing the fast pace of the action, the The way he’s able to really build up a critical climax and develop the characters in a way that extends the stories over so long and keeps you invested.

It’s awesome. It’s definitely one of the be I think he’s, I think he’s underrated in a lot of ways. I think he’s great. And then of course everybody, I think everybody mentioned this a lot too, but Patrick Rothfus is also equally amazing. And that’s a whole conversation to be had about the un how about that series and its status.

But but the way he writes was, I think when I read that for the first time when I was in my early twenties was just next level. Yeah. Something to really aspire to in terms of in terms of writing skill and how he makes everything so immersive. Yeah,

Stephen: Yeah. Agreed that book hit me outta left field.

I heard a lot of people buzzing about it, and I picked it up and I said, okay, I’ll give it a try. I’m like I got done. I’m like, what just happened? It was like, wow. Yeah,

Jim: that’s right. Yeah. It’s so mind blowing and like I said, there’s a whole conversation you could potentially have about that, but yeah that’s up there for sure.

Patrick, and it’s,

Stephen: Do you have a favorite local bookstore you like to go to?

Jim: I’m from a small town, so we actually don’t have a local bookstore here that’s independent. So whenever, when I grew up, there was a chapters nearby that I always frequented, and it’s still there. I guess now it’s Indigo maybe is the the Canadian version, I think.

But But yeah, that’s where I would always go and then picture my book, maybe being on that shelf one day and and finding whatever else I could. And also going to those employees over the years and going, Hey, what else can I find that’s like this? And trying to scour their brain for something else.

That’s

Stephen: awesome. And that’s a good point. That’s the best reason, especially with kids, to go to a nice. Local bookstore because they get to know you, they know what you like, and they have recommendations. I have a gentleman come on about once a month on the podcast and he talks about new books coming out or a selection of books that are recommended and things.

And we did middle grade books. It’s cuz he, he’s like, when middle grade kids come in they wanna, what else do you have? What else do you have? So I agree. I love do I used to love doing that on vacation with my kids. We’d go find bookstores.

Jim: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I find sometimes that chapters there, at least last time I was there I remember combing through the young adult section looking for books for if I was that age and I was looking at the chapter shelf, okay, what would I be interested in?

What do I think would catch my eye? And I still could find myself doing that from time to time.

Stephen: Nice. Yeah. Alright before we move on, we’re gonna talk some interesting author stuff. Why if someone came up to you on the street and said, Hey, I heard you wrote a book they had a kid maybe and said, why should we get this book for us or our kid?

What would you tell ’em? I would tell ’em

Jim: it’s an immersive story and it’s about a character that isn’t gonna solve his problems with bran. A lot of pro, a lot of problems in our life are. Or mental, you gotta use, you gotta solve them with discipline and focus and assertiveness and force of will and cooperation.

And so I would tell them, becau, I would tell ’em that if they were gonna buy what they get, if it is hopefully a character who can inspire their kid to really, I guess really latch onto. Those ways to solve problems. Does that make sense?

Stephen: Yeah, absolutely. And based on that answer, you really should go seek out the original eighties MacGyver, cuz that’s almost pretty much describing the show.

Oh yeah. So good to know. Yeah, go check it out. You might enjoy it. Yeah, it’s a little outdated. But, sure I still love that character. So let’s talk a bit of author stuff for all of our author friends in the writing business. You’ve written a book and you’re working on another one.

What are some things that you’ve learned that you’re doing different since you wrote that first one? Since

Jim: I wrote the first one I find, I guess start, starting a series is so challenging in a lot of ways, right? Because you have to set so many, you have to introduce things at a good pace while.

Keeping readers engaged and setting up what the story’s gonna be like. I find writing the second book is a lot easier in a sense because you’ve been there, done that you’ve set the stage. Anybody who’s read the first one knows what’s gonna happen in the second one, and things are a lot quicker.

You can get to the action quicker. You can get to critical moments faster, I find, which is great. It’s exciting for me as a writer, but what I’ve learned, I guess I’ve learned that. You can get, I think everyone must say, everybody must say this too, but you can get it on the page and then you can edit it after and you can, it’s a, it’s all a performance art sort of idea.

So you can edit that thing as much as you want to make it and per, and tweak it and alter it and perfect it until it sounds like exactly how you want to say it. And it reads the exactly you want it to read and hopefully catches those emotions and the Exactly. You want them to be caught. Then you can, then at that point, then you can call it done.

And whereas before, I think I spent a lot of time trying to, in the moment, find the right word, the right phrase. So I didn’t have to go back and do that all as as much. But that’s probably one of the big things.

Stephen: Yeah. I think that’s a great point, and it’s something that I’ve, heard lots of people give similar advice.

It’s that, it’s just words don’t be so precious of individual words or sentences. Get rid of it if you need to expand it, if you have to, change it, if you have to. And I think until you’ve written a bit, you don’t really get it and understand that you have to have something under your belt or a couple somethings before it really clicks.

It’s yeah. I’ve written, 150,000 words, I can change these. It’s not, it’s not that big of a deal. Cause I know some people really get, oh, I don’t wanna change anything,

Jim: yeah. That’s tough too. That’s tough too. Actually, on my first book, so Hunted by Fire is about 180,000 words.

The first draft was 290. Wow. And I didn’t know how long that was. It took, I was, I had an editor who I was engaging with and I told ’em the word count and they said, are you for real? It’s like 290,000 words. And I said, yeah, and what’s the big deal? Isn’t that kind of what the standard is? And they said, okay.

And this is how they broke it down for me. They said, okay, you know the first Harry Potter book? Like very first one Philosopher Stone? And I said, yeah. And they go, that’s 80,000 words, right? I was like, oh, okay. And they’re, order the Phoenix, the fifth one, the biggest one, the thickest one.

I said, yeah. And they said that’s 290,000 words. Oh, okay. So then I had, yes. Then we cut it down a lot and it was painful. But

Stephen: yeah. So that’s great. I wanna hear a little bit about that because if. I know a lot of authors have a really hard time cutting things out. Everything’s essential. I love it all.

So you had essentially two or even three books depending on how big, kids’ books are 80 to a hundred thousand middle grade fantasy. So what did you do and what did you cut out? How’d you decide what to cut out and did you put it elsewhere? What’d you do with that whole process?

Jim: Sure. I think the critical part of that was determining. What, because there’s because there’s so many aspects to a story. When you are building it up from the bottom, right? You envision this thing that you’re gonna make that’s all encompassing and has all these elements and you’re tying them all together at the end.

And I looked at that 290 draft and I sat there thinking the same thing. Like I said, everybody else must think, oh, I can’t know. I don’t know what to cut. I’m gonna have to cut things out of the story. And. It was, I trying to find that realization and trying to actualize it about all those little encompassing things that, that, to you as the author, make your story look complete.

It was trying to find which ones were actually distracting, or maybe that didn’t hit as hard emotionally that then. Even though it’s, even though it’s great and even though it was, it’s awesome and it makes sense and it’s complete from a story perspective, we’re maybe distracting from something that could be a bit brighter underneath sort of idea.

So a lot of it was going, yeah.

Stephen: Oh no, please finish,

Jim: finish. No. Yeah, so a lot of it was going into the beginning, finding these extra chapters that I had ha I had in there to get to know the characters a bit more before some critical conflict, and then going, okay Do they? Do I really do they really, does the reader really need to read this to understand who this character is or have an idea?

And so then maybe that meant cutting out two chapters, which would be something to the tune of 10,000 words maybe. And then going into those first chapters, those very beginning chapters where you first met them and highlighting even more what their qualities were, what made them stand out so the reader had a better idea of who they were going into the rest of the story.

Yeah, there’s just, like I said, just all these little completed parts that you had to take out from the beginning and from the end to then reveal the core story that you really wanted to tell.

Stephen: Right and like we said about the writing itself, the editing, the chopping, the moving and whatever, that’s another skill.

It’s probably even more important that you’ve gotten through some stuff and edited and chopped and moved to get that experience or, because I, I. I’ve known authors, I’ve talked to ’em, heard ’em, where it’s oh yeah, I sent this book to my editor and they told me to cut this, that and the other thing.

I didn’t listen to ’em and published it like it is. And I’ve begun to think wow. They missed that learning experience. They missed what could have made their book better. Cuz sometimes cutting things out improves the book. And that’s a skill you have to learn by going through it a couple times.

Jim: Yeah, I think it’s important to under to remember at the end of the day That as an author, you wanna make something that’s so that’s so complete and beautiful and perfect in a lot of ways. But I think as a reader, you’re looking for something that’s engaging and entertaining that if you’re lucky, will inspire you or make you feel something that you’ve never felt before or have all these other things that could happen as a result of engaging from it.

And so to make something engaging, entertaining, often you must focus on what’s only need that only needs to be there,

Stephen: yeah. And so when I always ask authors, Hey, let’s talk, let’s find a topic to discuss for the second half with the author talk. And you said, Hey, let’s talk about STEM in high school.

And I went, oh, yeah, I’d love to. That’s right up my alley. Yeah. Why did you wanna talk about that? In what areas do you want, did you wanna discuss a bit?

Jim: Yeah. It was so important to me because something that Related to the, related to Felix, who’s the protagonist in this book and hunted by fire.

He, like I said, he has to solve all of his problems with his mind. And it’s something that I think when you are a young person entering high school, a lot of times you get a little classified as an arts kid or a science kid at the beginning. Maybe you have a really good experience with something or you get a good mark on a test or maybe it could be.

A negative aspect where maybe you had a bad teacher experience once and so kids, I think, go through high school and they’re trying to figure out who they’re gonna become and what they’re gonna do in life. They have this connotation that, oh, stem, math, science stats, it’s hard.

It’s not for me. And then they immediately classify themselves as, it’s not for me. It’s not something that’s, that I’m gonna be ever be able to do. I should avoid it and steers myself somewhere else. And so for me in high school when I was reading at the Prime of my Life and going through that type of stuff, I had a similar situation where I was really good at English and the arts and whatnot, and I had to struggle at math and science and it didn’t come naturally.

And I but I worked at it a little bit though because I wanted to, my parents were very encouraging and they wanted me to get good at that to, theoretically go on to school and maybe do something in engineering or be a scientist or have something with that sciencey background that everybody thinks is really valuable.

And it is valuable in a lot of ways. But so when I was there in high school, unfortunately we had a program where, It was very uncertain when you’re in high school going to the next level of university or college, if you could hack it out at that level. So if for example, if we’re, I had teachers in English class and also in the arts classes, that would tell us, okay, just so you know, like our high school is really good at we excel whenever kids go off to English programs or philosophy programs or what have you, or journalism programs.

But we, the kids from our school always tend to struggle whenever they go into math or engineering or something like that. So hearing that as somebody going through was a little nerve-wracking cuz you’re gonna, you’re about to take this big step and the biggest thing you wanna avoid is failing or disappointing your parents or disappointing yourself.

And so I thought about that and I went and I did something artsy. I did a psychology degree.

Stephen: Yeah, that’s artsy.

Jim: Yeah. Yeah. It’s yeah, there’s some science in there too but that’s what I chose to do. And that’s what I did. So when I graduated school and then I got involved in the working life and I understood what the world a little bit more was about, a little bit more, I looked back and I thought to myself, I wondered what would’ve happened if I had just stuck with it a little bit more if I had believed in myself a little bit more if I had understood that.

The science and the maths don’t come to very many people very naturally, but you gotta work at them and the work that you put in yields a reward that wasn’t tangible to me at the time. So that so that’s why I wanted to talk about stem because it’s such a, It’s such a daunting topic to a lot of kids, and it’d be nice, I think, in a lot of ways if kids were inspired to just grasp onto it a little bit more, to, to try it one more time to find some value in it that maybe is beyond beyond them right now.

Stephen: You said, the teachers said the math, science our students struggle. The first thing that came to my mind was if this is a common thing going through various years of school, maybe it’s the teachers, maybe you should look at getting more training for the teachers or switching teachers or something.

That was just my first thought. Yeah.

Jim: You know what I’m sure that that was a thought too. I don’t know. I think And back then it was very focused on maybe it still is, I don’t know. But everybody was very focused on getting into that next step, even if it might not be right for you. In a way, we had a, in our high school at least, we had a big focus on getting kids to university or to college, and that was where they wanted to funnel you.

Which isn’t necessarily right, but that’s what they did. For better or for worse, and. Yeah. And so I think to them, they had kids, Hey, just to get to university, you know what? You should know what you should do. Maybe you should take this arts course, this English course, do this. Take the minimum required mask.

Cause those are hard. Don’t bother with those and then you’ll get there. I think that kind of was the feel a little bit if I had to, if I had to spit bullet I guess. But yeah I wonder too if maybe there could have been a bit of a change there. Maybe there has been in the years since. Who knows. But,

Stephen: It sounds like you. Feel important that it’s an important thing, and you put that into your writing that’s, you described your character’s all about math and science. So was it a conscious thing that you wanted to give back to kids and try and encourage them through your stories?

Or was it just felt good or something, wa was there a specific reason you did

Jim: that? No, a hundred percent. I, absolutely. My dream is that somebody will read, hunted by fire. And be inspired by the main character and how he solves the problems in the world and be in, and then be inspired to reengage with the harder problems they have in their own world, which are very likely math and science and whatnot.

And and just challenge and just, I guess just find the the will to want to challenge themselves a bit more and delve into something that maybe is a bit scary and a bit daunting, but can yield great results for them down the road. For sure. Nice. Yeah. Cause I think, there’s lots of problems going on in the world and it can’t be denied.

There’s lots of, there’s lots of things going on, but I think you could use as many well-rounded people out there to help solve these things. And so part of being well-rounded is engaging with the math sciences in times when maybe they’re. When they’re hard,

Stephen: Yeah. And I think a lot of teachers are trying now different ways of introducing and approaching teaching that.

Yeah. And there’s, that’s awesome. Way more cool opportunities. My, my cousin’s grandson they have a robot Lego course. I didn’t have a robot Lego course. Nice. And then they just do all these Yeah. My kids, they build a working diorama of the Panama Canal. Okay. It’s wow, that’s pretty cool.

I would’ve loved doing that stuff when I was in school. So I think understanding that these are sometimes tough subjects for kids to wrap their brains around and instead of just beating on ’em and here this, and here’s the rules of science and the rules of math. I think they’re trying new things and different ways of doing it.

And I know the school my kids went to, it’s a stem, it was a STEM high school, and they. I think weren’t trying to avoid anything, but instead of focusing on here’s. A different lesson for every week, and we’ve got all these assignments and we’ve got all this homework and all this. They said, let’s focus on this and this, and they did projects and they learned geometry by doing a string art project for art class.

And that Wow. Was partly for geometry in their math. And I think it made a whole lot more sense, even if maybe there were a few lessons that didn’t get focused on. The basis of what they got was much stronger than, yeah. Just trying to buzz through everything with nobody understanding any of it’s.

So I think there are some differences nowadays.

Jim: Oh yeah. That’s so cool to hear that. There’s, teachers going about that and there’s programs that are angling it in that way. That’s awesome to hear that that story about the Lego and the Panama Canal, like reconstructing the Panama Canal would be such a learning experience, not just for maybe those subjects, but for life.

Like it’s things that Things that have those real world anchors that you can then base off of and be and have an understanding as to why you’re learning something, which I think make all the difference.

Stephen: Exactly. And along with that, I’ve started to come to the thinking that we need more story in school, more not trying to say every kid should be a writer and write a novel, but there’s more and more.

Story opportunities for writing as kids get older, but also I’m seeing a lot more in the business world, the non-fiction world, where things are presented in a story like fashion. And I think we focus too much on grammar. We focus on spelling without the reason why they’re learning grammar and swelling.

Very similar to the sciences, like you said. Kids always say, What do I need this in my life for? I’m not going to do advanced math, so they don’t care. Same with spelling and grammar. Why am I ever going to use this? I don’t care. So I think, yeah, that’s a little bit of the

Jim: problem. Yeah, they lack that engagement.

A, I feel that, if they had a real like I said, if they had a real world example to maybe then go, oh, this is what I used this for and this is what people used this for, this formula for to make this dam and to make this work, to calculate the flow. I feel like it just like it. It must just make so much more sense sometimes, to a kid, right?

Yeah. Wow. Ok.

Stephen: Exactly. Yeah. I was talking to another author, teacher, and I said, I think we’ve got it backwards. We focus on the spelling and grammar and hit ’em with that and push it. And then the only thing we ever ask ’em to actually write is, what did I do last summer? Or a book essay when they’re in high school, and so they don’t connect it.

I think if we started the lower grades, With writing stories, writing fan fiction. Go see a movie and write a fan fiction about it. Or, one of the things I suggested was the CS Lewis Lion Witch in the wardrobe. The battle, that first movie, the battle at the end is like 10, 15 minutes long.

Yeah. In the book, it is literally one paragraph. That’s the whole battle. Yeah. And I’m like the writing in the book that could be expanded. Do that with your kids, have ’em expand that battle and write it down. But by writing all of this, then when you point out the spelling and the grammar, it makes a whole lot more sense for the kids.

Absolutely. I, I like your thoughts, similar type of things. With science and writing. Yeah,

Jim: absolutely.

Stephen: All right. Jim I’ve been babbling quite a bit. Great talking about this stuff. That’s some of my favorite stuff to talk about. I’ll get going forever. Before we get rolling though, or get going do you have any last minute advice you would give to new authors or authors in high school kids?

Jim: I think any new authors, I would just, and we’re all on our own journeys, aren’t we? We’re all at different stages. So I think any new authors, I would just say, just keep going, just. Just keep going, keep trucking at it. Keep writing, keep trying to manage everything in your head and getting it all in the paper.

Matthew Bennett Young is a British author and has published in many forms (picture
books, flash fiction, short stories and poetry) although his big passion is for picture
books. Not only does he write but sometimes he illustrates as well. He is also an
artist-educator and has been teaching his inspiring workshops all over the world. He
currently resides in Montreal and is a member of Artist Inspire and Culture a L’Ecole.
He believes all creativity is a form of expression and is essential for wellbeing,
especially now, and it takes practice!

The soccer ball in this story leaves Earth with a mighty
strike of the boot and rockets past every planet. Each planet
has a landmark of a famous soccer city in the UK. See if
you can work out which city and soccer club it is!

Website

https://www.onewildword.org/

So welcome today on Discovery Wordsmith. I am Matthew Bennett.

Matthew, hello. How are you doing?

Matthew: I’m very well, thank you, Steven. Thanks for having me on.

Stephen: Yeah, great. It’s great to sit here talking to you. So before we get into your book, tell us a little bit about you what you like to do, where you live things like that, other than writing.

Matthew: Okay. I have something here that what should tell you a lot about who I am.

It’s It’s a mug of tea build builders tea. I’m just gonna have a slurp. Okay. That’s a pretty big cup. I tend to I tend to lose my voice when I’m when I put more than 10 words together. I think it’s part of the, the isolation during the pandemic. You where’s my voice gone, no it’s PG tips. So that’s a big bra brand in the uk. I’m from the uk. Originally Stephen and a long time ago, I I left the uk went via Sweden, spent some time in Sweden, and then came over here to Montreal for basically my, my ex-wife’s career. We came over for that reason, and we’ve been here since 2012.

Yeah. Nice.

Stephen: Yeah. So where exactly do you live now?

Matthew: In Montreal? Yeah. I don’t, where are you, Steven? Where do you I am

Stephen: a little way south. I am right below Lake Erie, about an hour south of Lake Erie by Kent State, where the Kent State shootings were.

Matthew: Oh, okay. Dubious claim to fame.

Stephen: Yeah. But everybody knows it, okay.

Matthew: Yeah. So what are some of the things you like to do? You mean besides what I, what my writing is obviously a big passion. Yes. And particularly children’s or picture books. I must there’s a reason why I catch myself saying children’s books because I I don’t specifically write for children.

And when we get onto it, I think, I don’t. Know if you have any questions about that, but I really write to try and encourage a dialogue between adults and children or just adults, as well. I don’t see why picture books should have a, should be exclusively for children at all.

They are associated, that’s a strong association, but so many of them Deal with and have adult styles. And yeah, I just find the art and literature beautiful relationship to put together in that format. So that’s really why. Otherwise I I try and keep fit. I’m doing a bit of yoga. I really love that.

I love cooking trying different styles of cooking. Yeah. What else? Yeah, I can’t really think. I think,

Stephen: so you mentioned the tea and around here my son has become a tea connoisseur. He has, he goes to a specialty tea places and he told us all how hot the tea should be for different types and how long you steep it for different types.

And he is got like a specialty tea kettle so he can set the temperature just right. Certain mugs you’re not allowed to use. With anything other than tea. And he’ll put different herb teas or berry teas and stuff in different mugs and yeah, he’s really become the picky little connoisseur about it.

Matthew: That’s interesting. I’m kudos to anyone who becomes a connoisseur of anything really. I think and tea, I think the tea I’m drinking is vulgar if in the literal sense of the word. It’s just typical. That’s why they call it builders tea.

It’s what you have at a break. Lots of tannin, pretty strong flavor. There’s nothing delicate about it. Let’s put it this way. I don’t think your son. Would bother with it, but I know what you mean. It is, there’s some there’s a really nice Persian tea shop here in, in in Montreal and I had a black tea there once when I was meeting with a friend and it was just delicious actually.

Just on its own with no, no milk, nothing, just very fragrance and light and yeah. So I can Completely understand anyone becoming fascinated with different teas. And of course there’s, there are. Like everything, there’s such a, once you get into it, there’s such a di diverse range of products.

I remember, I dunno if you remember the, I was looking at Lapsang, Soong. Do you know, have you tried that one? You No. Okay. It was because it disappeared and growing up. Or at least maybe when I was a young adult, I really enjoyed that. It’s got a very smoky flavor and that’s apparently the reason it fell outta favor was because there was an association with po Possible association with carcinogens.

And so it wasn’t, it wasn’t sold anymore. But really unique flavored tea, a little bit like smokey malt whiskeys and things like that, in that bracket of. Of PT flavors. Yeah. Okay. That’s

Stephen: cool. Yeah. He gave, got us some on Christmas and brewed ’em up just right and I was impressed.

It definitely did taste. Very good. Brewed correctly, and steeped just the right amount and stuff. So yeah, I was like, okay you sold me that. Teas can be better than I always thought they were. I, I’m standard American. Put a teabag in. Okay, it’s done. Whatever.

Matthew: Yeah. No, and it’s great when, if he’s looking at the herbal teas as well, they are really camera mile tea is just, is definitely something that you might consider before, before bedtime, if you just need a, yeah.

Stephen: So ma, we’re going to talk a little bit about your book called Space Ball. But before we do that, what got you into writing? Why did you wanna start writing?

I

Matthew: think What we’ve, yeah, I think what we have planned to talk about today is really all those things are connected, of course, but I think how can you not experiment with writing? I think if you, whether you continue or not is another thing, but I think everybody must surely experiment at some point.

And if you discover a voice or something, if you enjoy it, then you might continue as I have. But I have, as far as I can recollect, I’ve always enjoyed it. So in, in various formats, this is the picture books are really what I do now, but I’ve. Occasionally I write a poem as well.

Little stories, vignettes, a little bit of magic realism as well. I often get asked in, I do workshops for children in schools actually about creative workshops for producing. Your own stories u using, actually using music, which is very interesting to, to stimulate their creativity initially at least.

But and one question is very common of course is, are you gonna write a proper book? And yeah I’m just full of admiration for. For authors who engage with a longer work. It’s not been my thing. I have a few ideas, but which could, which certainly could work.

But I think I, I love producing, thinking of a concept that’s simple. Producing a picture book with obviously with pictures and text and Giving somebody a glimpse of a beautiful literary artistic world for, five or 10 minutes. And that really appeals to me. And then, and I, ideas have never been a problem.

So I’ve, I have so many that I want to do. So that’s it. I just, the time that it takes to produce them is I’m not gonna have enough time for the ideas that I wanna explore.

Stephen: Yeah, I understand that. Your book baseball we’re gonna talk about tell everybody a little bit about what it is and why you wanted to write this book.

Matthew: Yes. All my books I think are ultimately about, Bringing the reader to a place where they reflect on their ex their own experience, is the simplest way I can put it. Even though they all do that in a different way, that’s ultimately the foundation of what I think I’m doing.

And that reflection can involve, A healthy sort of disruption of routines in the way that we think about things. And that’s what I like to do. If I can, if I’ve done that and that’s what the reader gets from it, then I’m very happy because I think reflection about one’s own perceptions is really important.

As you, as we navigate our way through, through our lives. So with baseball that’s done in a very dynamic way. As I said in the beginning, using this very powerful, these two very powerful forces of entertainment, which are yeah the universe I suppose, which never fails to.

To stimulate the imagination and and soccer which is ob obviously I think the biggest sport globally. But the book is really a journey to the, to a point where there’s an expression in the book. There’s a father child relationship and. At three quarters of the way through the book, the father says, without spoiling it too much there’s a goal scored in the book, and the father says, that must be the greatest goal in the history of everything.

Okay. And that point is really the climax because th that’s the point I wanna bring the reader to, to consider. The history of everything. So your own history, your social history, political, your cultural and then that of others. So there’s, so at that point the child and the story fo, just focuses on that one expression.

And I love that because for me, sometimes you’re listening and we all drift off. But then something, somebody says, it could be one word or an expression, suddenly, you latch onto that. And that’s really what happens at that point in the book. In order for the reader to just con consider what is my own history?

Who, who am I and what is everybody else and what constitutes the history around me as well. But it’s a lot of fun. The soccer and the space bring the reader to that point, and that’s really the purpose of the book.

Stephen: Nice. Okay. Why did you wanna write a book like this?

Matthew: Oh, cuz I think that’s important, Steven. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I also, so perhaps to answer your question more fully, I don’t want to do I don’t want to bring, you want to bring the reader with a certain amount of energy and engagement to that point. There is this sense of momentum building up through the book and a complete change of direction then at that point.

But it’s, it. I hope people find it. It’s a lot of fun. I’m all the people that I have read it have said so to me so far. Yeah it’s very easy to follow. And then you, ideally you are left with that reflection. So as a, as an author, I think you’re always trying to think certainly I am of You want your reader to to want to read your book again, to want to pick it up again, to want to check things, to continue the thinking after the book.

And I think that’s a really great piece of literature. If you can do that, then you’ve you’ve really achieved something a, as an author. I hope that that the package as it were of this book manages to achieve that.

Stephen: Nice. So you mentioned the reader feedback and people have read it.

Have you gotten kids saying, they love the book, or parents saying, my kids have read the book and loved it and that they’re asking for more. Oh, sure.

Matthew: Yeah, sure. Yeah. Yes I it’s such a I should explain Steven to you and you, the audience. I did, I had done a, had a bit of marketing experience before in other work that I was doing and.

Really the soccer and the space are really marketing vehicles for this book. So yeah the chil children love the energy and all I did the illustration as well, and it’s all collage, another objective of the book was to try and encourage children to do their own.

Illustrations. So they’re not perfect. It’s a bit messy. Here and there. It’s done with cutout cardboard and images from various magazines and also crayon, which I love. I love the textural, excuse me, of in illustrations. So there’s a strong flow.

To the book, and I think that there’s a good harmony to it. Yeah.

Stephen: Nice. And are there any other books or authors out there that you can think of that are similar to this book?

Matthew: I’m sure there probably are, but I don’t know Steven I creative nonfiction and will account for probably most of books about space. But this is really taking a unique spin on that looking at our solar system. But it starts off with a quote from Einstein.

Who I just think must, he was such an amazing character and interesting person and thinking again about. Just things that he said. He was so succinct and saying that fantasy, one, the book starts with his, a quote from him saying that fantasy is more important than knowledge.

And, you would be, if you don’t think about it more on a deeper level, you would be surprised that he might say that because he was he’s so famous for what he achieved academically but. Definitely, it makes sense that he would say that because without his imagination he wasn’t able to use the scientific knowledge that he had to, to progress in his thoughts.

I think that’s what he means with that. And I think that’s a beautiful way to set up the certainly. My picture book in this case. And great for people to, to bear in mind generally. So yeah.

Stephen: Nice. This is a little weird for your type of book, but could you see this being turned into like a movie or a TV movie or a TV show?

Matthew: I don’t, I haven’t thought of that. No. No, it hasn’t occurred to me. No. I don’t know. I don’t, I’m not, I’m, I sorry Steven to interrupt you, but I I do, no, I do. Of course, I’m aware in the publishing World Series are so popular, so in that sense it could be part of a series. But I haven’t thought about animation.

I, there is, there’s another book that I’ve done. I haven’t even. Published it yet, but graphic designer I was working with asked me, have you considered this as an animation? And it’s just another world to me. I, it is something I don’t have any experience of in terms of what I’ve done.

So I’d love to, I think the next step for me, certainly tech, technically. In that sense is doing audiobooks. But I’m, yeah, I’m definitely open. I love collaborations and using the material in any way that you can. I think that’s really important.

Stephen: And do you have plans for your next book?

Matthew: Yeah, I just, I’ve just finished a draft of my next one actually. It’s The first book I that was published was, it was all, it was about color called Maybe Colors. And that was really a poetic, simple poetic text with beautiful illustrations biographic designer in Sweden. As I told you, I was there for a while and it was, it’s really a playful experience or book that explores the experience of color, in a very simple way.

And young, young, younger children could definitely re relate to this. In fact, they have in my experience when I’ve done workshops with that book And readings for a younger audience. So it’s nice to do that kind of thing. But this new the next book I’ve just done the draft it’s uses color as a theme again, but in a kind of, it’s quite conceptual, so it’s not a story.

It’s just something I’m interested in in a. In that I, I’m interested for that particular concept and it’s called What’s your favorite color? It’s gonna be, should be published very soon. So we’re, yeah, all the work’s finished.

Stephen: Now you said you do the art

Matthew: also sometimes. Yeah, but I’ve done, yeah, I’ve got I’ve worked with.

Three other artists now on picture books. And I’ve done two myself. So there are some that I plan on illustrating in the future. I just enjoy it, I’ve always enjoyed that side of it too. It’s so exciting when you finish a text and you have the opportunity to illustrate it. But It’s great to work with illustrators as well.

And this book that’s about to be published I worked with a very talented young artist, Stella of Oleo. She’s he here in Quebec as well. And we’ve just finished I think it maybe took six to eight months to finish. Wow.

Stephen: Yeah. Picture books take a while with the art especially they can

Matthew: do Yeah.

That, that’s interesting. You say that. I think. That’s another common question I get. And I have to say it depends on the picture book. In my experience, I think I mentioned maybe Colors was my first book. When I knew what I wanted to write, how I wanted to write it, it took me maybe an hour or two to write the whole thing cuz it’s quite repetitive, but not in a dull way, that’s, and that’s something you’ve gotta be really careful of as well.

I, or. I try and be aware of. So as a, I think with experience as an author you are gaining your own sense of fluency and awareness of where you are in your book and. Hopefully there’s less editing to do in that way, structurally with the more experience that you get. But that book was very quick because it’s more, it’s like little stanzas that are poetic.

But my second book, snowman, is actually a tra more traditional story, and it took me ages to get the, it took me nearly a year to finish the text cuz I could, I just didn’t feel. I didn’t feel right about it. I just didn’t feel like it, it was put together. And that was more of an organizational thing not the text itself, but where things should fit in, together.

So it’s very interesting. Yeah.

Stephen: Okay, good. So let me ask you some things besides your book what are some of your favorite books and authors, ones that you like to read?

Matthew: Yeah, I yeah, I,

I could say Stephen, there’s a lot of stuff that’s quite generic. That’s just the way it is. There’s a, but then you look at, some authors have taken that in a really constructive way, and one in particular sticks out, which you’ll know very well. Robert Munch. Okay. Okay. So he, I think he’s fantastic and how he gets his sense of humor across.

I find his books amazing and so I like him very much. I didn’t know about him. I hadn’t discovered him till I came to Canada, so I’m very grateful for that. I think. There’s just a joyful sense of humor in his, in, in his picture books that aligns very well with the other objectives of that, that he had with each book.

I think so. Robert Munch A big influence when I was younger, certainly as a child. Is David McKee? I don’t know if you’ve, you know of him? Yeah. Okay. And actually older as well. And it’s interesting to talk about him, his work because he really did tackle subjects that were perhaps more adult orientated.

If you look at. He’s, he wrote one book called, which was really a social commentary. It was called, not Now, Bernard. I don’t know if you’ve come across it.

Stephen: No, that doesn’t ring a bell.

Matthew: Okay. And it’s quite shocking because four pages in a child a young boy goes out into the garden and.

Discovers a monster in the garden and he goes back indoors to try and tell, to tell his parents. And it’s really about parenting actually, because it is a comment on certain styles of parenting, cuz the parents just aren’t, don’t l listen or look at their child at all. And so he goes, he says, and his dad’s hammering a nail or something and.

Not now Bernard, it says so, so he goes to his mum to try and tell her, mommy, there’s a monster in the garden. She’s and they’re annoyed with him because she’s watering the plants and she doesn’t even look, they don’t even look at him when he is talking. And you get this kind of dreadful sense of how bad parenting could be sometimes.

And this, and it’s stark in this book and it’s course, he, of course, he wants to do it. The kid goes back out into the garden and a monster eats him a whole lot.

You can’t read that to a child.

Stephen: I’d read it to my kids, but they’re a little warped.

Matthew: I, I, I think my mine are quite sensitive and I just, no I couldn’t I think there’s enough out there that’s shocking that they Yeah, that’s really true. You can’t filter out, so I don’t need to.

But as a, as an artistic work, I’ve just found it amazing because he doesn’t, he could have stopped there. And this is what I admire so much about, about, the talent of some people. He takes that and. And the, basically the monster adopts the personality of the boys. So the monster goes in having eaten, the boy goes in, and because the parents aren’t even looking at, they don’t realize the mon, it’s the monster.

So they’re going, not now Bernard. And the mother serves the monster that his tea and the monster goes up to bed. In sleeps in the boys bed and the parents don’t even realize. So I think let’s

Stephen: Very like grim fairytale yeah. That sounds like something you’d read in a grim fairytale,

Matthew: But huge.

I just think, I just find him an amazing author, huge talent and did, he produced so much. There’s another book called The Hill and the Hill and the Rock, and it’s just really a fantastic folley. I just laughed my head off. And again, it goes back to this ability for of some people to, to use their imagination in such a way that you were just carried off.

In, in the sort of carnival of their imagination. It’s a he was a big influence.

Stephen: Are there any local bookstores that you like up there?

Matthew: There are a few. There are a few, yeah. There’s a local there’s a local publisher called Drawn and Quarterly. They do a lot of interesting work with adult literatures.

They’re doing all, they publish all sorts. They do a lot of graphic novels and they have a picture book outlet as well which is great. It’s great that They can make it work. Because given the, the amount of competition there is, certainly online now as well.

It must be very difficult to keep that, that, that sort of business going.

Stephen: Okay, so before we talk a little bit more author stuff if a parent or whatever came up to you on the street and said, Hey Matthew, I heard you wrote a book. I was thinking of getting it for my kid, reading it with them.

Why should we get your book? What would you tell ’em?

Matthew: I would tell the parent that What I hope for and certainly it’s been the case so far in my experience, the book will make you want to talk together as a, parent-child relationship about your experience of something. The first time I read my first audience for maybe colors was My son who I dedicated it to him in Sweden at the time.

He was eight years old, I think. And he read it with his friend and they hadn’t even finished the book before they started talking about their experience of their own experience of colors. And that’s what I. What I want that, that engagement between generations and, within generations as well and within yourself.

A simple concept to enjoy. But a one that, that, could sustain itself for a while. You want your reader to. To return to your, what you’ve done in their thoughts. And really about it. It’s about changing that, that perception that we were talking about, so that the next time that you see a color, it’s not just part of your everyday landscape, it’s, oh I, I read maybe colors that, that was very specific in directing my thoughts in a particular way.

And it’s almost like. C b t you are, you’re hopefully giving the reader another perspective in their everyday experience.

Stephen: Nice. Okay, great. So let me ask you, you’ve written several books. What have you learned through that process that you’re doing different now than when you first started?

Matthew: Yeah, that’s an interesting question. I

I think with, when you produce more than one and they are varied in their style and presentation, I think you gain a lot of confidence from that when you know when you’re. In taking on new projects, I think you also feel a lot more comfortable about dropping ideas. I’m a, I’m much more aware of what it is that I think I can work with in terms of an idea might come along but if it.

Then I like to leave it in, leave it in my thoughts for any, any length of time It can be really I have a book that I’m planning on which I’m really excited about actually. But I’ve had it in my thoughts for several years. It’s ba it’s based in London, in the UK actually.

And I know what I want and I did some research when I was over there last summer. So I, I think you just get a, you get a lot, you gain a lot of confidence. You get a lot more a sense of how to do, how to complete what not to do and where you are when you’re involved in a work.

You’re involved so deeply. I think one of the hardest things is to understand is to separate yourself objectively and. And experience it as a consumer would, or the, the reader will eventually you can’t do it, but you can to a certain extent with more experience. And I think now I’m a lot more aware of what I need to do in certain parts of a project.

To make it coherent.

Stephen: Okay. Yeah. I can see that I get the same way as I’ve learned and done more. I think a lot of authors feel that, and that’s good to know for new authors that it starts coming together as you do a little bit more.

Matthew: Oh, definitely. I think my first, the first things I wrote were very poor.

Just, yeah, you, you’re really just finding your feet, finding your voice, finding out what it is that you want to do with and I think once you have that mindset, that frame of mind then a lot of what you need comes in through experience. So yeah.

Stephen: Okay. And so you suggested we discuss word games, which I found very interesting because, we’re I’m a big gamer.

I love the game and word games are something that authors should probably be good at. And people don’t want to play against the author in the group in a word game. First of all, what are some of your favorite word games, and why is that important to you to talk about? Do you

Matthew: know Steven, I have to be honest, I, I.

I thought about you, you, when you asked what would you like to talk about in the second part of the interview? And

I don’t think they’re talked about enough. That’s that, that’s the thing. And I, and it was, my experience, I’m not saying this would work for everybody, but I think a big part of my childhood experience was playing Scrabble and. As, this might come as a surprise, but it’s, yes, it’s about it’s competitive in the sense that you are trying to score points off words, but you are looking at combinations of letters and then you realize what combinations work well and you get a sense of.

Of words from that. But what I loved about that game was the opportunity that it gave you to also that kind of word game I enjoyed because you can discuss intermittently with you, with your opponent, anything, in a very, really, Pleasant way whilst you are, ruminating on what word?

So it’s a kind of, it’s a, I find that game fascinating because it’s probably the closest I can get to multitasking. It’s is ha having a conversation and yet giving yourself the time to. To play with with the combination of letters and the spontaneity of not, of not knowing what letters you’re gonna get.

It’s great, but I think, I don’t know enough. I wish I knew more. Bo there’s a, boggle was very popular, but then there’s a stress ile Yeah. There’s a stress to that though. I, that I think is appropriate. Sometimes, but not always. If you compare that to Scrabble, you’re talking like an entirely different tempo.

Yes.

Stephen: And Scrabble gets more of the feel of playing chess with somebody. If you’re playing somebody that’s about the same level player as you, it can be a lot more fun. But when you’re playing somebody who’s a pro that has like the Scrabble dictionary and just knows so many words it loses some balance to it and not quite as much fun for a newbie a lot of times the same as playing a chess game.

Matthew: I have a solution for you, Steven. I thought of a variation for my kids. Which I love, I have to say, I know it’s me. This was me saying it. But there, there’s it fits in with what I do with workshops with kids as well. But for my kids, I came up with, because you want to try and get them at the table before, you become adept at playing scr.

The typical game, right? So I said to them, look, You can put down any words you want. You can spell a word as long as you can define it. It doesn’t have to be a word in the dictionary.

Stephen: Nice. You’re raising little Shakespeares.

Matthew: Yeah. There you go. And this is something that brings, it, it resonates with, when I was doing workshops back in Europe when you’re dealing with kids at that age they’re so creative.

I used to do an exercise with them where, I would just say, and every single kid had a word that they made up and they knew what it meant. And very often the sound of that word. It was appropriate to their, what the definition or the meaning that they gave to that made up word.

So made up Scrabble and it’s just, how much fun is that? It just, it’s just so cool. And it gives you, you, you give your kids a chance to beat you where you don’t stand a Charles really.

Stephen: Yeah. They’ll definitely, no matter what, Tiles they have. They’ve got a word to put down.

They’ve got big words to put. Yeah. But I love that too, because instead of worrying so much about the competition and worrying about trying to compete at an adult level, it brings the game to a kid’s level and encourages their creativity. Yeah. Which is vastly important in my view. In their whole lives, especially if they wanna write or play music or many other endeavors.

Yeah. That creativity I think sometimes we don’t nurture it enough I’m sure you got some Scrabble purists out there going, oh my gosh, you could never

Matthew: do that. No. It’s just, I was just thinking the same thing. Yeah. Yeah.

Stephen: But you’re using the tool in a different way and that’s, perfectly acceptable.

There. There’s a new game out on digital, on phones and stuff called Wordle, and I know I see a lot of people playing that one. I think sometimes people avoid the word games because they associate them with Scrabble and, oh, I’m no good at Scrabble. So they think of all word games as Scrabble

Matthew: yeah. I think. I think a lot. Imagine if you’re dyslexic as well, what a nightmare it must have been to to have that, have that sort of proposed as a game. But again, yeah, if you could make up your own words, it wouldn’t matter how you spell them, I don’t know. Steve and I dunno, Steven I think whatever way you encourage connection with. The form the graphic the sound, just if you can get people to enjoy that, any a any one of those things then you’ve, you are, you’re helping them in a world, to To develop a a much better way of and improving their communicative skills.

That’s, and games are a great way. Yeah. That’s so important. In my work, I had the workshops I do the mu the musical stories workshop. I’ve got one actually on Monday that I’m gonna do. Here in Montreal with a group of eight, nine year olds it’s all about use, developing a sense of literacy in terms of feeling words.

And that, that’s ultimately about being able to communicate with your, within yourself and with your. With within your, with your relationships as you grow older. So it’s it’s disguised because the children walk off with a, with their own story. And that looks like it’s the objective.

And of course that’s a great objective. But actually what they’re doing in my, for me is they are nurturing their vocabulary for the way that they feel. And

Stephen: That’s not only important for kids to be able to express themselves, but for writers to be able to describe that for other characters and worlds and things.

Yeah, I

Matthew: like that. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So it’s yeah it’s it’s great to do that with with the games. What is also completely. Different in terms of what became very popular though I’m sure you remember when it happened cause it took the, a bit like wordle, but the magnetic words that you put on the fridge.

Yes. Yeah. And I love, I just think that was fantastic. When I first came across it, I dunno, 20 odd years ago of course I bought a set straight away and it’s just that Notion of it, it’s very clever because it is, it’s those moments that you, when you’re doing something else totally unrelated.

So you go into the kitchen, you wanna put the kettle on or chop a apple up, or whatever it is, and they’re a couple of words on the fridge. You just, of course you’re gonna play around with them while you’re waiting for the ket kettle to boil or whatever. And so you are moving through that.

World of words again in, in but you are presented with, you are forced because of the words are complete. I love that as well.

Stephen: And they have variations of that too, where it is words and you’re supposed to put ’em together in sentences or sayings and phrases.

They, they make ’em to leave messages for people, but I’ve seen other ones that are. Focus more on creativity to allow kids to, we’ve already got all the words here. Just put ’em in an order that tells a story, makes sense, whatever.

Matthew: It related to this completely is on my website.

I think there’s a few examples, but you met you asked me, about my experience and I think we talked a little bit about that. In terms of picture books, but one thing I really enjoyed was there was a challenge on the radio once many years ago. And I forget what the program was called, but they invited famous creative personality, and in this case it was David Lynch that came on and they, talk about creativity in their process, of course, but then at the end of the program they the creative would, would offer six words and you had to write flash fiction in a hundred words or less using those six words.

Oh, wow. And I just thought what a brilliant exercise it was and so productive in many different ways. And I enjoyed it so much. I think he, I can still remember some of the words that he used bacon fire yeah, scissors, I think were in there as well. And I ended up writing three different stories using those just those six.

But the the challenge, what a challenge it was to try and. Create a coherent piece in under 100 words. Yes. So you are constantly, while you are being creative, you’re trying to edit as well. And that, that was really useful for me as a, as an exercise. I must do some more of that actually.

Nice.

Stephen: And you mentioned your website. What is your website address?

Matthew: It’s www.one wild word. Org. One wild word is all one, one word. And there again, it was I called it that because I liked the idea that all you need to start with is one word, like a seed and where you can take it from there is the fascinating journey of writing, I think.

Stephen: Nice. Great. Yeah. All right. Matthew, before we go could you do you have any advice for new authors out there? Especially picture book kids authors, which I think is still more difficult than a lot of people would realize. Any advice for them?

Matthew: I think get, just get tested and don’t and don’t try not to be too sensitive. I, that’s, it’s easy for me to say. But there was a time when I took negative feedback very personally. And now I love it. Actually. I it seems silly to say it, but I do say to people that sometimes I say, negative feedback can be more important than positive.

So don’t worry if it’s really what you are. If you really have the, if you have this passion it’s more like a need. You need to do it. And certainly in my case I can’t stop. It’s not something that I can just switch off. It’s something that I, it’s a way that I need to express myself that works for me.

But of course, it’s such, such a delight when you go from. A concept in your head to something that somebody can hold and enjoy and relate to is really a phenomenal joy and achievement. And one, one should always be proud of that you forget about it. But it’s, culturally it’s such an important resource artistic expre expression in any way.

But I would say most of all, What I, I don’t I, it’s so easy to be discouraged in so many ways. But try and produce something that, that works for you and then give it to somebody who you don’t know you’ve never met. Somehow you’ve gotta get it to an audience that isn’t emotionally related to you.

Yeah. You don’t have a relationship with and try and get feedback then and then look at the feedback in a very, in a very sort of sensible and productive way. Because the more I, the longer I’ve done this, the more I realized that a lot of feedback, like my fir the first, one of the first feedbacks feedback I got on maybe colors was from quite a prominent reviewer at the time.

But she wrote, the blue is too blue in the book. I was like, oh, okay. And then I, that was really important for me. That was a really sort of significant point in my career, in my health, my mental health as a, as an author was, I just realized, you’re not gonna you can’t satisfy everybody.

It doesn’t matter how much you want to. And then when you get feedback from so many different sources about the same thing, you realize everybody likes different parts and that’s a good thing. And they don’t like this and he doesn’t like that. She didn’t like that. But they like, he liked this and she liked that.

And so it works when you get that feedback back, you realize, okay, all of this is fine. I, you accept all of that. But then you might get something where you realize, okay, structurally, There’s a comment or some feedback where you realize, yes, I should have done that instead, or I can change that because that person is actually right.

I can see that now. And you real, you, you realize that you may have overlooked something that could be a problem. So I would say get as much feedback as you can and work through it. And that means. When you think you finished, you never have.

So don’t ever think you finished anything,

Stephen: right?

Famous. You don’t finish it, you just abandon it.

Matthew: So that’s what you’re not supposed, that’s what you shouldn’t do. But I think it’s never what it is a, ultimately what you produce in the end is a version that’s, That you might be happy with and that you think has longevity, but to get to that point, I think you are, you could do any number of 10 to 20 revisions of everything, right? And that’s, yeah, that I’m glad I said that because I think that’s something that you. I think you don’t realize as starting out you, you might think this is finished, and then you get your feedback and then, but you should always try and look at where where that particular project might be found lacking.

Yeah.

Stephen: Great. Matthew, it has been really fun talking to you. I, your book sounds great. Baseball. I’ll provide links in the show notes to it and your website so everybody can check you out. I appreciate you taking some time being on today.

Matthew: Thank you, Steven. It was a real pleasure. Thanks so much.

This is a super special episode. Jeff Strand is back to talk about his novelization for the movie Attack of the Killer Tomatoes. This cult comedy horror movie is over 40 years old, and Jeff does an absolutely fantastic job with the writing.

You may notice something else of interest – there are 3 people on this episode. That’s because this is a big crossover with the Horror Lasagna podcast and that other person is my co-host, Rhys.

Stephen: So this is a special episode. It’s not even one of our bonus episodes, Reese. This is just a special episode. It’ll take the place, the highest place of honor amongst all our episodes. So it’s a crossover event. It is. We’re going to do this with Discovered Wordsmith also. So Jeff you get to be on my other podcast twice.

You’re one of the lucky handful. Before we get rolling, everybody knows. Me and Reese, all four people in Ram Motion that listen to us. Hello. So first of all, we’ve got a guest Jeff Strand. So Jeff tell everybody a little bit about who you are and then we can start making fun of you.

Jeff: I’m a writer. I have written a little over 50 books. My most recent one was demonic. Tomatoes, the novelization, which I assume will come up at some point during this discussion.

Stephen: Oh, we probably should have

Jeff: some young adult comedy pretty much all over the place, but mostly horror comedies where I’m at.

Stephen: And I know I’ve mentioned you to Reese and others a couple times that I just fell in love with your books.

And I texted you the other day, I said, oh my God, I’m reading the attack of the Killer Tomatoes and it’s your best one. I am l out loud laughing and I’m reading it to my son, just bits and pieces and he’s laughing, just listening to the little bits I put. We wanna talk a little bit about the movie and the novelization a bit My first question, Reese.

Oh, you had a couple questions. Background. I did

Rhys: actually Jeff, this is the first time I’ve met you. And aside from a friend of ours who we know who left a long time ago to go live in Alaska, Alaska is one of the three places that I’ve told my children I should never go because I probably never come home from.

So I’m gonna ask you to disuse me of my romantic notions of what Alaska’s so what was it like growing up in the great white North?

Jeff: I didn’t know any different, so I, I was born in Baltimore, but I grew up in Alaska from six months old till 15. So I, didn’t know any different.

So the fact that it is light, 24 7 during the summer. It was not weird to me. That’s just the way it is. The fact that it gets, I would get on the bus to go to school and be pitch black and then by the time I got on the bus to come home for school, pitch black. There are a little bit of daylight in the middle, so the long nights during the winter, the long.

Days during the summer, that was just the way things were. So people would visit in the summer and like, how can you sleep? It’s, four in the morning and it is bright out and, but that, none of that stuff was weird to me. What was, what I realized was the most weird and didn’t impact me at all growing up was in Fairbanks.

You were in Fairbanks. Like right now I’m in Chattanooga, Tennessee. I, think nothing of, I’ll drive to Nashville tomorrow, I’m gonna go to Atlanta. Knoxville, the whole, continental United States is at my disposal without it being that big of a trip. Whereas in Fairbanks, Fairbanks was the only place I was unless we took a vacationed anchorage, which was like six or eight hours.

So there were tiny little towns that were basically a, gas station and maybe a restaurant. But for the most part, I, if you were a resident of Fairbanks, that’s where you spent all your time because there weren’t other cities that you could just drive to on a casual basis. Nowhere else to go.

Yeah,

Stephen: I talked to a lot of Canadian authors and it’s the same thing. They’re like yeah, I got a favorite bookstore. It’s three and a half hours north of me. I’m like, do you have anything closer? No. That’s like the closest, and I thought it was bad here driving eight miles to get to the.

Grocery store. Yeah.

Jeff: Fairbanks had everything, it had a movie theater, it had bookstores, it had restaurant stuff, but you just, there was nothing beyond the boundaries of it. Yeah.

Stephen: So did I know we go a little south here into Amish country and there’s lots of places that have horse and buggy set ups.

So did they actually have like dog sleds set ups that people drive to the movie theaters to

Jeff: see the movies? No. You had dog sleds that were people training for the Iditarod race, but you didn’t have people who were dog sledding as a means of transportation.

Stephen: Oh, there you go. See my, my fantasies are gone.

They’re dashed on

Jeff: the rocks. Yeah. This was Fairbanks, which was the second biggest city. If you’re in Anchorage, it’s basically like any other big city Fairbanks. Quite a bit smaller, but yeah, you didn’t have the, mush.

Stephen: Let’s go to the movies type thing. The, Riker from Star Trek was from Fairbanks, so Good company.

Yeah. And he did live in Kemp for a while, which is one of the reasons I went when, after I read his, the one book Cyclops Road, I went, oh my God, this guy like was in Kent about the same time I was. Living in this area and we’re like two days apart. Reese, you call me old man cuz we’re like five months apart.

Jeff is actually two days older than me I’m not the oldest anymore.

Rhys: Look at that new senior man in the room. Yeah,

Stephen: Look at that. All right, so first of all, the movie itself now, I know a lot of people probably haven’t seen the movie which is good. That’s what we want. We want movies like that.

It is not your typical horror movie, especially for what Reese and I do, it’s comedy. Jeff, how would you describe the movie and what you enjoy it with? It.

Jeff: It’s just, it’s as silly as you would think from Attack of the Killer Tomatoes. It’s weird seeing stuff saying, it’s one of the worst movies ever made where they don’t acknowledge that it’s a comedy.

It’s not a straightforward movie about Killer Tomatoes. It wasn’t some guy saying, we’re gonna make the scariest movie ever about, killer Tomatoes. It’s a goofy comedy from beginning to end. It’s. Just joke. Not every joke lands, but a lot of them really do. Even, 45 years later, there’s lots of genuinely funny stuff in the movie. And, it, some of the jokes are overplayed, some of the, they’re, it’s not, A flawless masterpiece of cinematic comedy, but it really works. I think. I love the movie. I think it’s really entertaining and fun. A

Stephen: absolutely agree. And if you like airplane movies, there’s probably a lot in this you’ll like, but the funny thing is, I like attack at the Killer Tomatoes, but I’m not as big on airplane.

I, I never,

Jeff: I love airplane too. So Airplane, naked Gun, all those movies, they’re all in my wheelhouse.

Stephen: Yeah. I’m weird. I know. My son tells me I’m a weirdo for not liking him, and I’m like, I don’t know. I, when I saw him, I guess I didn’t find them funny, so I. It just stuck.

Jeff: But I agree with your son here.

So

Stephen: like you said, with Killer Tomatoes it’s got some things in it that are very subtle and you have to really pay attention sometimes to pick up on ’em. And there’s a few jokes that are little outdated, let’s say. Nowadays it probably would get people upset, but the stupid little things, like they go into that conference room and it’s so narrow they have to crawl across the table.

But they don’t make a big show of it other than if you think about it or when the Japanese guy hits the picture and it’s the Arizona and it falls in a fish tank. And the funniest part for that for me is there’s no fish tank in the room. So where did that fall into the fish tank? Yeah. That, it’s little things like that I think are great.

Jeff: Yeah, the conference room is great because it doesn’t overplay, it’s not like wacky music, like it’s just people trying to retain their dignity while they. Gets seated in a room that’s way too small for them.

Stephen: What’d you like, Reese?

Rhys: I mentioned to Steve just before we started, I liken it almost to a mad magazine.

Because it, it moves so quickly between one joke to the next and the scenes. So you are probably 30 to 40 minutes into the film before you actually have any recognizable recurring characters because everything is just happening so fast. And then they do the same kind of like Mad magazine used to do with, they’d have little.

Jokes that would be running across the bottom, like a ticker tape kind of thing. And you’re like where’d that come from? So that’s one of the things, airplane and those kind of movies are almost a genre unto themselves. But this feels like something that’s a little set outside because and I’ve mentioned it before with movies, they have a literary feel and this does feel like I’m opening a new issue of Cracked Magazine whenever I’m watching this.

Stephen: Yeah. Mad Magazine was superior though. It

Rhys: was. Just throw some love to the other stuff.

Stephen: Yeah. Yeah. So watching the movie, Jeff, and I’ve read the book, watched the movie now, I told Reese I owe him a copy of the book because it’s just pretty fantastic. He’ll love it. How did you come about and get this, okay, first of all, I, if anybody hasn’t read the book we’re trying not to get Jeff arrested so we won’t mention him killing Mr.

Tomato book writer, but that, that right there made me laugh. That was the prelude, and you just flowed right in with the feel of the whole movie. And then each scene you expanded on. So let’s back up. How did you get the gig and why did you wanna do it and what took so long? This is 40 year old movie.

Jeff: Part of it was just, it would be a really fun book to adapt, because the book is, the movie is just, all jokes. I’d love to do an adaptation of airplane too. They’ll never let me do it, but that would be, so what really happened was I was thinking of, what to tweet, what will amuse my Twitter followers?

And so I just said, how is it possible that no one is. Invited me to do a attack of the Killer Tomatoes Novelization, not, it was not meant to be a legitimate solicitation of work. It was just something funny to tweet. And then Mark Miller had Ency Apocalypse books sent me a private email and said, Hey, if you’re serious about that, I’ll see what I can make happen.

Yeah. And then within a few weeks I was on a Zoom call with the filmmakers. Who were all in, my resume is pretty good for someone to write an attack of the Killer Tomato. It’s not oh man, let’s take a shot on this guy who has no experience in that particular genre. It’s like when it was announced, they’re like, yeah, Jeff Strand, attack of the Killer Tomatoes.

Yeah, that makes sense. But it was Jeff Strand doing Casablanca. Wait, what? But Attack the Cold Tomatoes is something that I can pull off. Basically their, they, the only request they had was keep it as family friendly as the movies. The movie, it’s a, it’s pg but it’s 1978 pg, so it’d be a right.

Fairly strong PG 13. Now I check for that, which is what I would’ve done anyway, and I basically pitched it as I’m going to treat it like you guys had Marvel Cinematic Universe money to make the original movie, and so they were all in and. I was set free to write the attack of the Killer Tomatoes.

Rhys: Did they have any any.

Handcuffs as far as like lore goes or anything like that you had to follow or were you, because the movie’s very short on where they came from or anything like that? There’s not a lot of backstory to it. It just jumps right in. And they developed it more in the later films. But. Again, some of those weren’t the exact same people, so I wondered if they were like, Hey, you need to stick to this and you can move from there and go forward, but start here.

Jeff: No, there was nothing and I treated as a wow. Self-contained cause original. My original thought was, I’m gonna weave in elements of all the movies and the cartoon series and all that. I thought, no, cuz if this is successful, If someone else wants to do a return of the Killer tomatoes, I don’t wanna step on their toes.

So there are no George Clooney jokes. There are no, professor Gangrene isn’t in. I basically, I decided I would stick exclusively to the first movie and not mess with what other people might wanna do if, there is a future of more attack of the Killer Tomatoes novels. But yeah, they, there was no, you need, these characters need to be in it.

You need to stick to this. It wasn’t, I did a short story that never got published. For a major video game franchise and they were very strict. Yeah, these characters need to be handled this way. What happened ultimately was that the story went to their lore person who said, that’s not really the direction we wanna take with this character.

And I got paid info, but they didn’t use this. Story’s not like that. It was, have fun, we trust you. They read it, it wasn’t like they, they have read the book. They love it. Oh that’s good. No no, no handcuffs, no stick to this. Just

Stephen: have fun. Which is good because like I said, I read it and I was laughing and I love your books.

And this one just made me laugh even more than normal. So just. You had a structure, but you were able to do what you wanted with it. I think it worked really well. But the weird thing to me was why choose a movie Novelization now because they’re not that popular. They used to be way more popular, but nobody sees too much, especially for a low budget movie from 40 years ago.

It’s an super. Interesting choice cuz it fits us well. And the fact that we’re talking about this low budget movie that had sequels Reese, I mean that, that’s, oh yeah. So why? I know it was like, Hey, let’s make this happen. Why do you think they wanted to do it? And I’m moving novel. The

Jeff: psycho apocalypse has done some vintage novelizations, so they’ve brought back some that were written at the time, but they’ve also gone back and done, creature and stuff like that.

And they’re, they’ve announced a few more. They’re doing nail gun, massacre and Dead girl and redneck zombies. So they’re there’s a little bit of a niche market. We don’t know how big it is. It’s too early to gauge the success level of stuff like attack the killer tomatoes. But really it was just a fun thing.

It’s, I think you need to pick movies that people can see the novelization. Potential in like technical tomatoes. It’s, it’s going to be a really dumb book. It’s just easy, fun. It’s not meant to be a literal pa, it’s. It doesn’t follow the previous trend in novelizations, which were, you have seen the movie in the theater, you’re never gonna see it again unless it goes into a second run.

But you’ve got the novelization so you can relive the story of et the extraterrestrial, right? Whenever you want in book form. Whereas now it’s just you have to bring something more to it. So it, it’s not meant to just be a transcript of tackle the killer tomatoes. It’s basically all new jokes, unless I took their joke and used it to springboard to something else because the jokes in the movie are, Perfectly good.

My job was not to retell stuff that already works, the movie. My job was to take the framework of the movie and expand on it and do all new jokes.

Stephen: And even there though the two I thought of reading it, the one with the bad Japanese over dub with the guy’s lips movie. And then you hear a voice say, and then I said, and that cracked me up.

Cuz obviously the Godzilla movies and everything else. But then the musical number, I don’t know if I’ve ever read. Such a great retelling of a musical number in a novel format. And you did that great, expanded that scene. Wonderful. So I think you broke new grounds. You pioneered a new, modern modern novelization of a movie.

Cuz the stuff makes you laugh in the movie if you have twisted minds like some of us. But again, the book just expanded on all of that, making it even funnier, I think. Yeah,

Jeff: what I wanted it to be the best way to read the book. You could read it without any prior tomatoes experience. The best way to do it is to have freshly seen the movie, cuz a lot of it is callbacks to the film.

So the optimal way to experience it and you watch the movie and then you go right into the book and then I think it, there’s a lot of stuff that works even better in that context. But yeah, the point, again, it’s not to. You could watch Tackle of the Killer Tomatoes whenever you want. It’s on streaming, you can get the multiple DVDs.

There’s the big collector’s edition. It’s very easily accessible. So what I wanted to do was give the book its own identity. It works as a separate, but it’s completely linked to it. It’s not, I love Attack of the Killer Tomato. This wasn’t me being better than the movie. This was having fun with various aspects of it and trying to.

Very similar tone with a completely different experience with

Rhys: the frenetic pacing of the film. Was that at all of a challenge when you were writing it? I would think it would be hard to get into a groove and, pound a bunch of pages out because the movie

Jeff: shifts gears so quickly from scene to scene.

The scene, not really, because I’ve got experience in it, this, there’s a reason I was the right guy to write this book, so I’ve done my. Adult horror comedy novels. I try to treat the horror legitimately, but have lots of laughs. But I’ve done young adult books that are just joke.

So I’ve done, Oh, it’s not, if you read a Attack of the Killer Tomatoes and then you read my book, A Bad Day for Voodoo, there’s, you can see there’s still the meta element. And so I’ve, I have done books that are just pure comedies all the way through. So it wasn’t like, okay, how am I gonna tackle this?

I have that little experience. It’s hard. It’s not oh yeah, I could just easily knock this out. It’s a, it was a fun book to write. It is, when you are doing something that is just, joke after joke. And you’re not letting the characters or the story carry you through. Cuz I’m, I’ll be honest, kill the novelization.

You’re not going to get deeply invested in these characters. I don’t care if it’s funny or not, I’m just, I need to know what’s gonna happen to this guy. That’s not the experience you’re gonna get with it, and it’s, it’s not a scary book, it’s just. As funny as I could possibly make it.

So yeah, you do need to keep the pacing up. You it, yeah. Creates a scenario like, like the movie airplane, like the movie Naked Gun, like attacking the killer tomatoes. You can’t let up on the laughs because the book doesn’t. To have the framework to allow you to say, let’s just cool down for a couple pages.

No, it has to be nonstop throughout, which is not for everyone, but the people who love it.

Stephen: Which actually you, even you do a lot of fourth wall breaking in the book and you even reference that. It’s okay, Mr. Arthur, now maybe we should slow this chapter down and not put so many jokes.

So the joke was the not doing so many jokes which I thought was pretty, pretty brilliant. And, Every Reese, so we talk a lot about the special effects in movies, and the special effects in this one obviously is not computer graphics. They do it wonderfully though because they don’t try and make all these big, scary looking tomatoes.

They just take like garden tomatoes and put ’em on the ground, then overdub it with every Yeah. What what are thoughts on the special effects? I know a lot of people would say this movie sucks, like you said, because the special effects suck. But I think the special effects are part of the comedy.

Rhys: The movie starts off with one of arguably the greatest special effects in all of cinematography when they accidentally crashed the helicopter that they hired for the scene. Yes. Then they’re like, oh, hey, let’s just use that in the movie. You don’t get much more authentic than that. After that, the special effects they use ramp up because it starts with just tomatoes and then it progresses from just tomatoes.

There’s some stop animation at tomatoes. Yeah. In the grocery store. Towards the end of the film, they figured out how to make giant tomatoes out of foam and put them on wield carts. So you know, it slowly built up over time. But again, it’s not, you’ve referenced before Steve in movies where they try to show too much of the bad guy.

Yeah. And it ruins it. And in this case, even though they’re being silly, they’re still being very prudent with the usage of the giant tomatoes and things like that. So I think it works really well, especially for the film, the way it’s, the way it’s set up.

Stephen: Yes. Agreed. Jeff I know some of Reese’s favorite movies, like all 1200 of them.

What are some of your other favorite horror movies?

Jeff: Shawn of the Dead is my favorite horror movie and favorite movie, so it’s it works brilliantly as a comedy and brilliantly as a horror movie. So it’s not like attacking the killer tomatoes that in Shawn of the Dead. It’s really funny, but you’re also fully invested in the characters.

When things get serious, there are actual stakes. So that’s my, I’ll swing over to my. Poster and then return of the Living Dead. One of my all climb favorites that one. I think to me, that’s the eighties horror movie that holds up the best. I think it’s, it still plays just as well now, even though a lot of the stuff that they originated is now, zombie lore.

It’s got, the fast zombies, that Return of Living Dead, that wasn’t 28 days later that was living dead. The fact that, they. A hit to the brain won’t kill them, that you have to dismember them. The fact that they the meta aspect, the fact that this is based, neither Living Dead was just a movie, so the character’s referring to neither Living Dead.

So it’s got all kind, talking zombies. It’s got all kinds of stuff that was done later, but it does it all in one movie. So that’s one of my old time favorites. I love the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre. That’s probably my favorite, just. Straight horror movie, although that has lots of dark comedy tune, it’s got the funniest line of any movie of,

Stephen: look what your brother did to the

Jeff: door.

That one line is the most perfect comic relief line ever because it is completely logical in a. In a movie where suddenly logic shouldn’t apply, right? So it’s like you’ve got this guy wearing, human skin chain, sawing a door, and of course you’re gonna be upset that this guy chain saw your door.

But in the context of the movie, you don’t think they care about their door. So then to have, look what your brother did to the door just suddenly takes you back to the reality of the situation is. Absolutely brilliant. So original Texas Chainsaw Massacre. And then there’s, as for more obscure stuff that maybe not a lot of people have seen, may one of my all-time favorites.

Yeah, that’s a good one. Lucky McKee with Angela Bees that I saw that at f Film Festival and it rocketed to the all-time favorites and there’s a Lower. Much, much, much lower budget we called found, which is just one of the darkest and most, I dunno, that one disturbing things. That’s something good you should cover.

Check it out.

Stephen: Yeah. Yeah. We’ll have to look it up. Yeah. Reese always makes notes of any he hasn’t seen. And then we’ll watch movies in reference, here’s 20 other similar ones. Jeff, have you seen Todd in the book of Pure

Jeff: Evil? I have not. I’ve heard it’s really good. It, oh. You

Rhys: would enjoy it?

Stephen: We enjoyed watching. We reviewed it enjoyed it. Another one that comes to mind PMA of the Paradise. Yes.

Jeff: I hadn’t, I. Family of Paradise is something I’d been wanting to see for a really long time. And back when I first saw the documentary Tear in the Aisles, they had a clip from it. It’s where he hits I think Garrett Graham in the mouth with the toilet plunger, and I’m like, I have to see this movie.

But I didn’t know what movie it was and they didn’t, the documentary didn’t identify the clips, so I would watch the end credits. They had the long list of all the clips, like I don’t know which one it is. I don’t know which one it is, cause I haven’t seen all these movies. So I finally discovered that it was Fent on the Paradise, but I could never find it on video.

I finally saw it about three years ago in. The actual movie theater. They Wow. The theater. Atlanta played it. So I went, so my first experience with fans of The Paradise was seeing it on the big screen with a big crowd. And it was wonderful. You looked as it was meant to be.

Stephen: Not in our basement, in the dark, race. Yeah. Like most of the bad horror movies we’ve watched through the years. Yeah. So re what else you got Reese? I know you had a whole list and I’ve jumped in. Oh no.

Rhys: You, we’ve covered a lot of it. I you had gone to Bowling Green for school. And while you were in Bowling Green, did you ever go see Mary B’s fingers?

Jeff: I did not. I’m not sure what that is.

Rhys: There is, there’s a small Museum, for lack of a better word. And they had a display of the last public execution in Bowling Green. And it was a farmer who in a mad rage butchered his wife basically. And when the sheriff showed up, he. Put three of her fingers into jar full of whiskey to use as evidence in the case.

And those fingers have lasted this entire time. They’re still in a jar on display in this museum along with the Hangman’s rope and the knife he used and tickets for the hanging. But it seemed to Cobb and bazaar and enough. I wondered if it was something that you had seen while you were there.

Jeff: No, I spent too much time in movie theaters and bookstores. I missed out on the fingers.

Stephen: And I did. Yeah.

Rhys: It I’m building it up, but it really is, you walk in and you’re like, yep, they’re there. And then you’re gone.

Stephen: But really, how many people can you go up to and say, have you seen Mary B’s fingers?

Oh yeah, I’ve been there. You get no. What’s that? Let me tell you. It’s all the presentation, it’s true of doing something that they haven’t done. I love doing that. Yeah.

Rhys: I also had noticed that your first publication was in a literary magazine, and my brother and my dad back in the seventies were big into getting, Isaac Azimov and astonishing tales delivered to the house, so they had subscriptions.

And I wonder if you think that society is at a loss now that. Literary magazines seem to be a thing of the past.

Jeff: Yeah, it’s not as much fun. I used, cemetery dance. It’s published very infrequently now. It’s still a print magazine. I got the latest issue a couple weeks ago.

But yeah, I used to get tons of them. I would go to the bookstore and there’d just be a whole rack of horror fiction magazines and I would. Read a lot of new stuff that way. Now I really don’t, now I either read anthologies or just novels. So yeah, it’s, it was more fun to, I wasn’t getting published regularly back in those days, so I would get lots of rejections.

So I have, I don’t have a big stack of literary magazines. I’ve been in, I have a big stack of rejection perspective magazines. Yeah. It’s still, it’s more fun to, see your story in an actual printed magazine. It’s like the.

Stephen: The fake money drop off. You take all your rejections, put ’em in between the two magazines you’ve been in, and so it looks like you have a huge pile of these literary magazines.

Oh, there goes Reese again. He’ll be back. I’m sure we’ll just keep going and we’ll pretend these ghost we’re doing so well. So Jeff, for people listening, we asked you a little bit about yourself. What books would you recommend that someone start with? I discovered Cyclops Road because I got a free copy.

I’ve told you that. Oh, look. A free horror movie. I’ll, or book, I’ll take it. So what books do you recommend

Jeff: of my own? Generally I would interrogate them. Okay. Do you want the goofier stuff or do you want the more serious stuff? In the absence of any information, I generally go with Wolf Hunt. Which is a super violent comedy horror crime werewolf book.

So that’s like my default. I also sometimes will say Autumn Bleeds into Winner, which is a coming of age thriller, or Alison, which is a telekinetic horror thriller. Lots of humor in all of those. So I don’t dweller is one of my most popular books, but it’s also. Sort of an outlier cause it’s very sad.

And I don’t generally do bummer books, but dweller is a bummer book. So that probably is my most, the most popular thing I’ve ever written with readers, but it’s not necessarily my starting place and stuff like pressure again, that was. One of my most popular ones, but it’s also very dark and intense and so on.

If you’re like, okay, what best exemplifies what a Jeff Strand book is, and I’m all over the place, but I generally would say, okay, Wolf Hunt Alison, or autumn Bleeds in the winter.

Stephen: I haven’t read Alison or Autumn Bleeds. I did pick up Allison when I saw you, but Wolf Hunt and Forbidden Forest and Blister.

I like those forbidden forest and wolf hunt. I’ve got those on audio and I’ve listened to ’em a couple times. Oh, cool. Because they’re good fun to listen to it. They crack me up still. And it’s. Also at the scares of that care, which you were recently at when I saw you, Armon, Shimerman was there and he wrote some, what I call fan fiction Alternative Shakespeare history.

And those are much heavier to read now. Even comment, I said, yeah. I liked reading the first one. I said, but it takes so much brain power to read it. I said, I need to get something. You know that a little more fun and easier to read and your stuff has fit that perfectly. Plus then I’ve gone back multiple times.

So for everybody listening, you got a favorite movie, horror movie that we’ve done, you watch. Great. Here’s some favorite horror books to add to that collection. Everything’s Got

Rhys: Teeth is the Jeff Strand book that I own.

Stephen: You actually have one? Yeah. I didn’t know

Rhys: that. Awesome. When you first brought him up this is what I was saying about literary magazines.

They’re so nice because you can read authors, several authors you’ve never heard of, all in one compilation. But you brought Jeff up to me and I was like, oh, I’ll check it out. And so I just picked that up and I enjoyed it a lot. I like anthologies in general,

Jeff: but Thank

Stephen: you. What’s.

You’ve got some other great titles like Dead Clown Barbecue, which I’ve got digitally you haven’t read yet. Was that one of the Mayhem books or not, or is that an

No?

Jeff: Dead Clown Barbecue’s a short story collection. Okay. I’ve got. Five. Five of my books are just collections of short stories. It’s gleefully, macab tales, dead clown barbecue.

Everything has teeth candy coated madness and freaky briefs. Then the others are not novels. Okay, and then one non-fiction book, the Writing Life,

Stephen: which again, for all the writers, if I put this up on my write, everything I is. My, I have two writer books that are go-tos that I have both read both of them a couple times, and one was Stephen King’s on Writing.

Yeah, that’s a good one. I think his beginning autobiography part is just, Great read to listen to, it’s not dry or anything. And then the advice, yeah, that’s okay. But then the other one is your writing life because it’s so personal and down to earth and makes me laugh while also making me feel better.

It’s yeah, I had a really crappy day. I feel like the worst writer in the world. I’ll read some Jeff Strm because he’ll make me feel a little better about my life and it actually has. So you’ve,

Jeff: that’s what it’s supposed to be. It’s not a book about here’s how to write the perfect query letter, or here’s how to create characters that you know, come to life.

It’s meant to be, here’s what it’s like if you do a book signing and no one shows up and here’s how to cope with rejection. It’s kinda like the real stuff about being a working writer who is not making, a hundred million

Stephen: a year. Which I absolutely love because that’s why I started the podcast because I was tired of going into all those Facebook groups of people going, Hey, look at the a hundred thousand I made this month on the three books I’ve written and I’m going, I can’t relate to that.

And I’m looking around going, there’s 50,000 people here. You can’t tell me. 50,000 authors can relate to that. And that was the genesis of the podcast. All right. What you got? Anything else to add to this conversation, Reese, before we let Jeff go? Oh,

Rhys: just really quickly and if you can’t say anything it’s fine, but during some of our research for, I don’t remember which movie it was, one of the ones recently became across that somebody was working on a movie called Blister.

And at the time I think Steve had asked if I knew who that was by, and I said, I have no idea at all. And so we’re wondering if you had anything to do with a movie option.

Jeff: I do not. I have lots of movie stuff going on, like there’s actually really cool stuff happening, at this very moment that I’m not allowed to talk about.

But Blister is not one of them, so that was okay. Blist Blister is really, it’s one of my best selling novels, but the movie interest has been, Almost non-existent. So I’ve got lots of cool stuff going on. But yeah, if there’s a movie being made a blister, they’ve either done it without telling me or it’s someone else.

Stephen: Blisters is an interesting book of yours too, because it’s not super dark, but it’s also not super funny. But it definitely is that, just cuz someone doesn’t look like you, watch how you treat ’em.

Jeff: Yeah. Now you were leading up to the question I was ready to say yes, but I can confirm nothing, but sorry.

Not me.

Rhys: No, it’s it’s funny because a lot of the movies that we review are either early in someone’s career or the people never really took off and became huge directors or anything like that. So a lot of times you’ll hear about projects they’re working on and they will never ever see the light of day.

And I thought it would be, if you could actually confirm that it was something you had work been involved with, maybe it had a better chance of

Jeff: being done. No, I can officially deny. Excellent. Hopefully this will be outdated and, blister have been this massive success. He was, no, I’m not involved in a b movie.

Stephen: As soon as a big one comes out we will review it and we’ll do a link between this one and then we’ll get you back on to tease you about it. All right, I’m ready. That’s why we work. All right, Jeff I appreciate you taking some time chatting with us today. Thanks for having me. Yeah.

Thanks so much. Yeah, thank you. We’ll let you know when the episode goes live. You can hear about all the background stuff that we discovered, and then tell us about the things we didn’t know. All right. Thanks, sir. Thank you guys.

Catherine joins me from Houston Texas where she lives with her husband and kids. She is a recovering lawyer, though she still does writing for a hospital.

Her book is a medical thriller about a person who’s immune system can cure cancer. The book is timely in that it talks about bodily autonomy.

Today on Discover Wordsmith, I have Catherine Devore. Catherine, how are you doing today? I’m great.

Catherine: How are you? Thanks

Stephen: for having me. Yes. It’s great to have y on. I’m doing well. Thank you. Before we get rolling, talking about your book, the Panacea Project, tell us a little bit about you, yourself, what you like to do where you live, things like that.

Some of your hobbies.

Catherine: Yeah. So I I live in Houston, Texas. Grew up here mostly. Although I was born in Chicago and then made my way down the middle of the country down to here I am a former lawyer. I like to joke that I’m a recovering attorney. And now I work part-time at a large children’s hospital as a writer and editor.

Nice. I have two kids. I have a 14 year old and a 16 year old. They keep me really busy. I what do I like to do for fun? I I love to do stuff with my kids. I’ve got one who’s a theater kid and one who’s an athlete. So between rehearsals and track meets, I’m pretty busy. Yeah. Of course I love to read all the time.

Houston has a really great restaurant scene, so I love to go out and eat with my husband. And I also, I’m obsessed with coffee, so I’m almost every day you’ll find me in some Houston Coffee house probably trying to write or. Or reading something

Stephen: Great. Nice. Love that. You’re actually the third or fourth recovering lawyer that I’ve had, so there must be something with that needs to push people in the, it also seems to be big.

Seems like a lot of it people go into writing books. Yeah. Yeah. And being busy with your family and that we’re gonna talk a little bit about that later in some of our author talk in finding time. And that I love hearing that because that was the goal of the podcast is to show other authors that you are not the only one with a full-time job, with a family, with other commitments, that there are others like that.

Out there that not everybody is sitting in a cabin typing out words and getting three books out a month and making a million dollars a month and stuff. Not everybody’s like that. I think that’s great. You’re right in there to show people, hey, yeah, this can’t be done. So yeah. Let’s talk a little bit about your book.

Why did you, oh, wait. Before we even do that what do you do for the Children’s Hospital to write?

Catherine: So I’m in a small team of, there’s three of us actually, and ironically enough, we’re all former lawyers and writers. And so we do a variety of things, but when we help edit grants and manuscripts, we don’t have a science background.

But I think coming from a legal background, we’re really good at. Kind of synthesizing complex ideas and helping people to just write as pers persuasively and succinctly as possible. And then we also just do other various writing projects for the hospital. Like a, on from a marketing

Stephen: perspective.

Okay. That’s an interesting gig. It really is. That does, do you find that doing that helps your fiction writing? You

Catherine: know, I haven’t, I’ve only been doing this job for about a year and a half now and I haven’t actually done any creative writing since I started that cuz I was, trying to transition back into being in the workforce.

It remains to be

Stephen: seen. Okay, great. You were a lawyer and now you’re doing some writing and other stuff. Why did you want to get into writing and why did you wanna write your book?

Catherine: I’ve always, ever since I was a kid, I’ve just been obsessed with stories. I used to stay up late at night and get rug burns on my elbows cuz I’d lay in the hallway reading, trying to sneak books.

And just been obsessed with the idea of how stories are crafted. And I think once I started working as an attorney, I realized I really needed a creative outlet. And I guess I was talking a lot about a book. And about writing a book. And so one day my husband came home, we live near Rice University, and they have a great continuing education program, and he brought home a pamphlet and he had marked a course, like a one day course for novel writing and was like, you need to do this.

And I realized I, how much I had actually been talking about it. So I just jumped in and. Started writing a novel and went to that course, met a really great group of people, joined a writing group, and it took off from there. And that was the beginning of my writing journey and it was 12 years ago.

So

Stephen: it’s been a long journey. So you started when your kids were really little because you said you have teenagers.

Catherine: Yes. So they were two and four when I

Stephen: started. Yeah. And we’re, again, we’re gonna talk about time. I’m sure there’s some, there’s a

Catherine: reason it took 12 years.

Stephen: Okay. So let’s talk a little bit about your book, the Panacea Project.

Tell us a little, without giving it all away tell us a little bit about the book and what it’s all about.

Catherine: So the Panacea project tells the story of Calla Hammond. She’s a young woman who discovers that her immune system can cure cancer. So she joins a medical study to help translate that into treatments for other people.

But word about the study leaks out and when it does, obviously she becomes the focus of really intense attention from. All over the world and everybody starts to try and take advantage of her because of what her blood and her bone marrow

Stephen: can do. Nice. So it’s a medical type thriller.

Catherine: It’s a, it crosses some genres because it, it has some.

Aspects of women’s fiction, but if I had to put it into one box, I’d say medical thriller

Stephen: for sure. Okay. Is there any other writers or any books out there that are similar to yours that if people liked it, they’d say, Hey, let me read Catherine’s book.

Catherine: A absolutely. I the books that immediately come to mind aren’t necessarily medical thrillers, but so Jodi Ultz my Daughter’s Keeper was a huge influence on me, and that’s a story about a girl who is born to essentially save her sister’s life because she is an exact bone marrow match with her sister who has leukemia.

And then another book called The Farm by Joanne Ramos. Not a medical thriller, but it’s about Surrogacy farms. So it both of those kind of address the issues of autonomy and who owns what comes out of our bodies. And then from the non-fiction side the Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Slut was a huge influence for me.

Stephen: Nice. And I think Robin Cook does a lot of medical, right? Yeah. And I, and actually Michael Creighton started with that a bit. I was

Catherine: just about to say, that’s I u I’ve been a thriller, a lover of thrillers and medical thrillers my whole life, and I’ve, yeah I adore Michael Creighton, so Yeah, for sure.

If you like medical thrillers check him out.

Stephen: Nice, nice. And is this a standalone book, or do you have plans for a series?

Catherine: It is a standalone book. Yeah. I don’t have plans

Stephen: for a series. Okay. Are you working on another book?

Catherine: I am. I am working on an idea for another book. It’s completely different.

Like my reading habits. I’m all over the place, and so when I write books, as a matter of fact, the Panacea Project is the second book I’ve ever written. The first one was Pure women’s fiction. It was a mother-daughter story. So the new one that I have rattling around in my mind is more of maybe speculative fiction.

So it’s about a woman who kind of dies by mistake and ends up having to navigate this very bureaucratic afterlife too, to try and get

Stephen: back. Reminds me of dead Like Me, the TV show. Oh, I haven’t seen that one. It’s reapers and their afterlife and as they go to kill other people.

And the girl that. They focused on died because a toilet seat from the i s hitter oh no. Yeah, it’s a quirky, dark humor book or story. Yeah, definitely. I’ll have to check it out. Cool. And so what type of feedback have you been getting from people who have read your book?

Catherine: So far mostly really good.

Yeah, people have, I people have especially loved. It’s a fast read. They say it’s a page turner. Most people finish it really quickly. And I think there are, and I, a lot of people tell me that. They get mad at me cuz they’re like, and now I’m crying. So they say the ending makes them cry, which I understand because the ending makes me cry every time I read it.

Even one of my, one of my editors we had to read, we were read, doing a last copy edit and she emailed me at one point and was like, and now I’m crying again. So I do think it moves people to think about the topics that I really wanted to. To make people think about in the book, which is like bodily autonomy and who owns our bodies and the things that come out of

Stephen: them.

Nice. Okay, good. That’s, I made people cry. That’s actually, not a bad thing in this instance.

Catherine: I hope it’s like good cry. It’s not. Yeah, it’s They like, the, they loved the characters and they were really invested in them and were moved by the ending.

Yeah, that’s good.

Stephen: Trying in a good way, right? Yes, exactly. So if you were given a choice, someone had came up to you, would you rather turn this into a movie or a TV show?

Catherine: I think this would make a good movie. Yep. I think it would be, yeah. It’s perfect for,

Stephen: for that. Yeah. I, listening to you, I would agree though if you had a series following a doctor and, these type of things, that could be a good series.

Thank you.

Catherine: Yeah. I have had a few people ask, ask Are you gonna write a sequel or a prequel? And I, like I said before I feel like it’s a standalone book, but to your point it could be interesting to, take some side roads and explore what some of the the, not just the main character but the other characters in the book.

Their journey. As they go through this process.

Stephen: Right. Great. Katherine, do you have a website?

Catherine: I do. It is cd johnson author.com.

Stephen: Nice. That, that getting harder to get just your name for website know.

Catherine: And my name is too long, like Katherine Devor Johnson author. It’s just, it’s too long.

So we had, I had to. Had to smosh it

Stephen: down. Yeah I’ve had people, I’ve had to adjust mine. I have a secondary website that forwards to my main website cuz somebody’s no one’s gonna know how to spell Schneider. I’m like German people will. So anyway so I wanna talk a little bit about the time and the writing the other stuff.

But before we go, anyone listening. If they said Catherine I like thrillers and I heard you wrote a book. Why should I get your book and read it? What would you tell ’em?

Catherine: I would tell them I’m gonna, it’s gonna, I’m gonna repeat a little bit of what I said before. If they want a fast read that kind of grips them right from the start and doesn’t let go, then this is the book for them.

And also, if they want a book where. They can fall in love with the characters and really be provoked to think about some deeper issues. Then this is the book for them.

Stephen: Nice. Great. It seems to fit today’s world quite well.

Catherine: I know. Not on purpose, but it worked out. It worked out that way.

Unfortunately,

Stephen: this book took you 12 years to write. You’ve, you had a career, you had family. What were some things you learned through that long process that maybe you were doing different at the end than you’re doing different for the new book?

Catherine: Actually this book, so the whole, my writing pro, my, I guess my writing journey took 12 years.

Okay. Okay. So I started out writing that first book. Okay. That women’s fiction book. And I, if nothing ever happens with that book, I learned so much from just the process of writing that book, which took I. I wanna say eight years from start to finish, because I had, the two-year-old, the four-year-old, and

Stephen: and the husband and I husband.

The hu Yeah. Husband. Husband should be a bit. I know I’ve been one.

Catherine: And part of the inspiration for the Panacea project was our family’s cancer experience. So in the middle of all that, my husband got cancer. And that definitely shut down creative writing for a while.

And the good news is that that he’s doing fine. He had surgery and then it came back after 18 months and so he had to have radiation therapy. But I. But he is doing great. It’s been over five years, so he’s actually, with the type of cancer he has had considered cured. And my mom had two strokes five years ago, and so I am now her primary caretaker.

She doesn’t drive anymore I do all of that. It’s, there’s just, there’s been a lot. So it was a slow process. So I wrote that first book, rewrote It, worked with an editor. And started the process of trying to get a literary agent. And I sent 197 query emails. And finally, and of course at the end, that’s when everybody, I started getting full impartial requests and had to play them all off each other.

But I did end up with a great agent and we tried, we pitched that book, we got it on the desks of some big publishers and some smaller ones, but it didn’t take, and so in the meantime, all of that, Cancer stuff had happened and all the medical things with my mom. And so I had come up with the idea for the Panacea project and I pitched it to the agent and he was like, Ooh, I like that idea.

Go write that book. And like I said, I think the experience of writing that first book made it easier to write the second one. So the Panacea project came out of me in a year, which is fast for me after the eight years writing the first book. And so we pitched that again and again. It just wasn’t getting traction.

So I had some friends who were, are also writers and had the same experience with their agents and publishers, and they had decided to go with hybrid publishers. So I submitted the book to two hybrid publishers for consideration and I got accepted at both, but went with one that’s out of Austin called Greenleaf Book Group, and they’ve been.

Absolutely phenomenal and I couldn’t be more happy with the experience.

Stephen: Nice, nice. Great. And our discussion is about writing and time, and you mentioned a couple things in there. A lot of people that wanna write do it because they’ve got they, they’re stay-at-home moms or dads. They’ve got little kids, but they wanna write.

They’re not their old career. How do you write when you have little kids?

Catherine: Oh, let’s see. You write when you can and even then, I would get these snatches of time to myself and I’d end up just spending the whole time just staring at the wall, maybe just working through a plot point or how I wanted to develop a character and I wouldn’t write a word.

And so it was just something that happened in fits and starts pro. Even if it was just in 15 minute increments, if it was 200 words a week. So you just have to, at least from my experience, I’m not telling anyone what to do, but. You just can’t give up and you’ve gotta find time when you can and not beat yourself up if when you do find that time you don’t write anything.

Cuz I think anytime you’re working through a story, even in your mind, you’re making progress. And then you, sometimes you just have to get creative. I, I was lucky enough a few times I could take a weekend day or even two days. My husband would stay home with the kids and I might have checked into a hotel room and just.

Done nothing but right for a day or two days. And like I said before, I was in a writing group, so we would meet once a week and that, that was nice cuz you can create accountability for yourself and you’re surrounded by people who are doing the same kind of thing. So I would just say do whatever it takes.

Don’t beat yourself up if you don’t make the progress you wanna make. And certainly don’t

Stephen: give up. I would agree. And I think that’s important. Don’t beat yourself up. I told you one of the reasons I started the podcast is because a lot of the groups and a lot of the other podcasts, you always hear the same people that are like, oh yeah, my career took off and they’ve bought five dip books that I’m working on, and I get to write for six hours a day and walk my dog.

And I have, a chauffeur. Now it’s just and then all these other people I’m talking to are like, yeah, I can’t relate to that. That’s not me. And it. Made people feel like I’m not a real writer, I’m a failure. I, but everybody’s situation’s different. And like you just said you gotta take what you can get.

This is what you got. Keep writing. It. Doesn’t mean you’re not a writer, doesn’t mean you can’t get the book done. You just gotta do it differently and keep going at it.

Catherine: Yep. I couldn’t agree more. I think persistence is the key. And also just being flexible, it wasn’t even, obviously it took me a long time to write the book, the first book, and even the second book.

I know some people can get books out, in a month or two. And for me it was a year. But then you have to be persistent about. How you get it published, how you get it out in the world. It can be really hard to break into traditional publishing. And and also, so there’s that. And then I think that the way that we consume media is changing so much so that you’ve gotta be open to other pathways to getting your story into the world, like hybrid publishing or self-publishing.

And I love that the stigma that was attached to those things is it seems to be going away. And I love that. It’s not great hybrid publishing. You have the resources of a traditional publisher, but you’re paying for it yourself as the author. So that is definitely a roadblock for a lot of people.

And I don’t love that. And I know I’m certainly really lucky that I. Get to utilize that option. But my hope is as we keep moving forward and the industry changes, all of that’s gonna become more accessible to more and more people.

Stephen: Agreed. And it’s been changing even over the last couple years.

And you mentioned that little fits and starts. I know. Some of the tools now out there allow you to work on your desktop, on a laptop, on your phone, on a tablet, anywhere you’re at. With little kids or like you said, your husband going to the doctor, going to the hospital, you might be waiting, who knows, 10 minutes.

You might be waiting an hour and a half quite often, and you pull out the tablet and even if you get a couple sentences, it keeps that flow going because one of the problems I found is, Like you, if life happens and writing becomes the lowest priority that you don’t do for a while, when you do get back to it, you gotta get going again to get in the whole thing going, what was this story about?

And now I’m, I. Several months different and my feelings and thinking on the book. So I don’t wanna change the whole book or the tone or anything like that. So it takes, sometimes it’s even more work than if you were able to sit down for three, four hours a day and just write, because you have to catch back up and that’s very difficult to do sometimes.

Catherine: That is so true. I’ve had that experience so many times when. I’ve had to take a break for a few weeks or even a few months, and you’re absolutely right. You, it just, there’s, you’ve gotta ramp back up into it. And that’s some of that, what feels like that dead time I was talking about where you’re just thinking, but it’s absolutely necessary to the creative process.

And you might not be writing down words, but But you’re doing work. And the other thing that I, what you said, it triggered a memory for me is, so much of both of my books are emails that I sent to myself because I learned the hard way. I’d be on a walk or something and I’d have a great idea and I’d think to myself, oh, that’s such a great idea.

I won’t, there’s no way I will forget that. Absolutely. Forgot it every time. Yeah. So I just learned, it was like the second I had a thought. Just shoot an email to myself. Yeah. Love that. And also, yeah, in terms of tools I’m a big fan of s Scribner. I don’t know if you’ve ever used

Stephen: that to write I, but I use, I discovered it early.

Oh. It’s just

Catherine: so great because you can create little documents for each chapter so you’re not just scrolling through an endless Word document. Yes. But then you can still look at everything together. I just, it’s so powerful. So all the writers out there check out s

Stephen: Scribner. And it’s funny you say that because they’re really Are two different camps.

I’ve talked to a lot of writers and I hear, oh, Scribner’s way too hard and complicated words fine. Then I hear others are like, oh man, Scribner is so easy to use because it does everything I want rather than word, which is just maddening. And it’s so interesting to hear that because I discovered Scribner because I was writing the first book that very few people have ever seen and probably ever will see.

Of course. And very quickly I’m like, oh my gosh, this is mad mean trying. I realized, oh, this chapter goes better here. And trying to move a chapter, but with Scribner, you just drag it around. It’s a lot easier. It’s great.

Catherine: Yeah. It’s so modular. It’s like little puzzle pieces. It’s just, it’s, I don’t even use all the functionality of it, but just that is enough for

Stephen: me.

Yeah, and I’ve tried to explain that to other authors. I’m like, look, my car, I can pop the hood and it’s got this little sensor and I can check this thing. I didn’t use that for the first week. I drove it. I just got in, hit the gas pedal and steered the wheel. Just get on Scribner and type some stuff.

Figure out the rest as you go. Don’t, yes. Overwhelm yourself. And, but it does like we’re talking about does take a little time. And I’ve discovered more features as I’ve been using it. Yeah. And. What was it like when, don’t I’m not trying to pry. When your husband had cancer and you were dealing with all that, I’m sure the emotional level was just out there and you’re writing a medical thriller.

So once things calmed down a bit with your husband, what was it like going back to the book, which I’m assuming you really hadn’t visited much probably for months. And now you’re done with a medical crisis and now you’re talking about a medical crisis almost. What was that like?

Catherine: I actually didn’t start writing the book until after we got through that.

Okay. But it was definitely hard and emotional to, to put myself back in those those moments. Sorry. No, I still get emotional about it. It was, when someone asked you like, what’s the worst day of your life? I can pinpoint that day, I bet when he came home and was like, so something’s wrong.

But I, I’ve really tried to channel all of that into the book. And the unfortunate truth is that so many of us have had cancer or know someone who has cancer and they’ve been through this in some way. So hopefully I’ve done that experience justice and people can connect with that.

Stephen: Nice. Good. That’s a positive thing to come from it. Yeah. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to get you upset on that. No, it’s ok. I,

Catherine: I, it’s just, yeah, I’m just a super emotional person. Sorry.

Stephen: But I love how you used that into your book and I you said it made people cry at the end. I would bet.

There was a little therapy in writing the book, and I bet that knowledge and just the feelings came out in the book and probably made it way stronger, which is one of the things you can do with writing is you aren’t joking all the time. It’s yeah, piss me off. You’ll be dead in my next book.

That’s the author joke. But how often do we use our emotions and take ’em out on the page? In one way or another you get mad at somebody and you jump and you write that fight scene in your book. You had a great moment with the kids or stuff, and now you’re writing something similar in the book.

You, you, it’s a way to get those emotions out. And me personally, a lot of authors are introverted, so sometimes getting the emotions out is a little difficult and this is a way to do it, I think. So I, I. I, I’m just saying I think you may have learned a lot about writing, but I think the emotional part of it probably came from that a

Catherine: lot.

Oh, absolutely. Yeah, and there was actually a part of that, that, that experience that I didn’t even mention, which is that made it even harder or, and more, more emotional. The day I brought my husband home from his surgery two of my friends called and said that another friend from high school was in hospice care with stage four gastric cancer.

So it just felt like cancer was everywhere. And I was able to see her, but she died four days later. And she actually plays a role in the book. And and yeah, to, to your point to what you were saying, I really hope that I was able to infuse it with all that emotion that you can see from me right now.

And also it’s a tribute to them. And it’s my like, No, sorry for the bad language, but Fu Cancer fantasy, which is, I’m gonna wipe you from the face of the earth. Killing that, killing off that character. But for me it was

Stephen: cancer. Nice. Got it. It. And there’s a really good video game out there with the same type of premise.

I think it was actually their kid got cancer and they created a video game to help them. Deal with it during the treatments that the kid could actually go in to shoot at and fight cancer. And I love that. Leave it out for a charity thing. So now we’re talking the time. Now your husband’s better.

Glad he is. And that you can now concentrate on the books. Your kids are a little older, teenagers, so mom, we don’t need you around as much. I remember that stage quite well and so does it. But you’re working for a hospital and stuff now, but does it free up, not just. The time, but your mind, you’re not having to think about the kids as much, not having to worry about your husband as much.

You got your job, but you put that aside at the end of the day. So do you find that your writing feels different now or you have more time for it or anything like that?

Catherine: Man, I wish that was true.

As of this moment I don’t feel that way and I, it’s just been such a busy time. My daughter just went through the process of, I. The way she’s at school, she had to apply to high school and did this whole thing to apply to a magnet program here in Houston. And it’s just been I don’t know.

I I feel like every second is filled with either work or kids, even though you’re right. My son is driving now and that’s taken a huge load off, even though I just feel like my heart is traveling outside of my body every time he gets in his car. But I do have hope for, I think very soon it’s gonna all settle down and I.

I do hope that I’ll be able to get back to being creative with my writing.

Stephen: Good. Good. So when do you think this next book, what’s your expectations on completion and getting it out?

Catherine: I’m not setting any expectations on myself so that I don’t get too stressed out. Yeah, I’m gonna, I think my goal is to get through the end of school.

I have my site sent on June, and that’s when I’m, I’ve got, it’s on my to-do list. I’m like, I’m gonna start trying to write every day. I’d love to finish it within a year of starting it. So maybe that’s a soft goal. There you go. Great. Check in with me June, 2024.

Stephen: Okay, great. We’ll look for that.

All right. Katherine, it’s been really cool talking to you. I appreciate it. But before we go, do you have any last minute advice you would give to new authors out there?

Catherine: Let’s see. I think in addition to the, don’t give up. Be persistent and be flexible in your approach. I think one of the most important things I’ve learned, and I hope this doesn’t seem strange, is to be really judicious about who you get to read your work.

Pick a few people, maybe three or four. I wouldn’t say. What I’m, I don’t wanna give people hard and fast rules, but, I, I found with my first book, I got a little overwhelmed because I gave it to so many people and I had two experiences. One, I got a variety, such a variety of feedback.

It was hard to really sift through it. And then the other thing was that a lot of people will say oh, we wanna read your book, but then they don’t. Yes. And then you’re sitting there and you’re like, Ooh, do I poke them? Do I not? And I think it’s really just some people are afraid to. They say they wanna read it, but then they’re afraid to read it cuz what if it stinks and they have to be honest with you or they have to lie to you about it.

So that was one of the biggest lessons I learned. Be careful about who you give it to. Give it to someone else who’s, is gonna be honest with you, but also constructive because I don’t think that feedback that tears you down. It’s just not

Stephen: helpful. Correct. Yes. I have several people that have read my stuff and they’re like, oh yeah, I’d love to read it and give you some feedback on that.

And then their feedback is, oh, I liked it. Yeah. That does not help me. And, and I talked with a couple people and I, they were like I, if I don’t like it, I don’t wanna hurt your feelings. And so I’m like hold on. Don’t you think it’s worse that if. I get told it’s good and then I release it and then people gimme one stars and rip me apart online.

That’s way worse. Aren’t you like setting me up to get hurt more? I’m like, it seems a little vicious to do that actually, and people are like, oh, I. I just personally can’t hurt your feelings. I’m like, okay, then I don’t need you to help. I want people to tell me when they got bored or what they didn’t like about a scene or a character or parts of the book so I can improve it and get better.

You don’t have to hate me. You don’t have to hate the book. You don’t have to rip it apart completely, but give me the. The feedback of, yeah, I, my, my son’s good at that. Eh, I just didn’t care for that scene. I didn’t like that character. And, he was too wishy-washy or whatever it happens to be. I love that way more.

Catherine: Oh yeah, me too. I’ll take that any day of the week. But I think people are just they’re just afraid if they’re your friend. Or a family member, some of them can be really afraid to do that. I’ve even had that experience. Now that my book is out, I’ve had people tell me I’m struggling with to write in my review cuz I want it to be perfect and I don’t wanna hurt any, hurt your feelings.

And I’m like, listen, I’m probably not even gonna read it cuz reading this review stresses me out. But it’s just been such a surprising phenomenon that people. Even once the book has been out, have been afraid to give feedback sometimes. Most people have, but I’ve encountered a few are like, I’m just scared to write a review cause I don’t know exactly what to say and I wanna make it perfect.

Stephen: You can call ’em a little bit and say, most people out there won’t read the review either. And if they really wanna help If they give you a four star, it’s probably even better because when they, the studies and things I’ve heard is when people look at a new book and there’s not a whole lot of reviews, but they’re all five stars and they all happen within a week or two.

It’s oh yeah, all their friends and family went on there and they ignore it. And actually people are more impressed just by the number of reviews and as long as it’s not super low. So a four is. A four without, a lot of writing is probably just as good as anything else. Or better.

Catherine: Exactly. Yeah. It’s so interesting. All the things that go into writing a book, marketing a book, all

Stephen: of it. So yes, absolutely. All right. Catherine, thanks for taking some time today. I appreciate having you on. I wish you luck on your book and hopefully we’ll hear about you when the next one comes out.

Catherine: Thank you so much. It’s been such a pleasure to talk to you.

Molly was a school teacher and now write middle grade books. She has read her books to her class and engaged them in storytelling. This also leads to a nice discussion about teaching kids storytelling and how grammar and spelling fit into that.

https://mollyperryauthor.com

Fire Keeper’s Daughter – Angeline Boullie

Sea of Tranquility – EMily St. John Mandel

The Ferryman – Justin Cronin

In the Lives of Puppets – TJ Klune

The Climate Book – Greta Thunberg

Poverty, by America – Michael Desmond

Knowing What We Know – Simon Winchester

Chain Gang All Stars – Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah 

Happy Place – Emily Henry

Stephen: today on Discover Wordsmith, I wanna welcome Molly. Molly, good morning.

How are you doing? I’m doing

Molly: great.

Stephen: So I know we live fairly close by, so since you’re in Ohio, and I have a question for you, how do you know it’s springtime in Ohio?

Molly: Oh,

Stephen: no more snow. No, the opposite. You get more snow than you did during the winter.

Molly: Oh my gosh. I have snow right outside. My, yes. That’s Ohio.

Welcome to Ohio. But when spring comes, Ohio is beautiful.

Stephen: Yeah. Yeah. All right. Molly, we’re gonna talk about your books today, but before we do that, why don’t you tell everybody a little bit about yourself, where you live, what you like to do outside of writing

Molly: books. Okay. So I live in in the suburb of Cleveland, Ohio, near Lake Erie.

And I have been I guess teaching. And the other thing that I love to do is dancing. I’m, I love to do swing dancing and all kinds of contra dancing and all kinds of dancing, and it brings me a lot of joy. Where do you go for dancing? It’s all over the place. There’s little venues and different, like church basement, church basements and one that’s nearby is a community of saints in Cleveland Heights.

And we just it’s wonderful because the people are very down to earth and it’s all group dancing and just, and then, we have a little break in the middle where we socialize and of course we have to eat nibble. Nice. It’s a, and it’s just so good for your body, but it’s also good, releases any stress.

You just, you laugh and you enjoy each other. Nice. And the swing dancing is a lot of, it’s mostly on the west side of Cleveland. I live on the east side, but we carpool over and it’s, you don’t have to be perfect. You just move to the music and Nice. Good. Yeah.

And so I, one of my earliest memories. Of me as a child, I would I was like, I would be dancing around the house, holding my ma, holding my notebook with my stories. So I combined both things and teaching I guess I was just a natural born teacher, I loved children so much. And it’s, it just I think if I had to say something about teaching that is that when you have two choices, when something goes, awry in the classroom, you could be very tough and say, this is the rules and this is, but I found that kindness and is a huge part of my approach to teaching.

I’ll tell a quick story that I was teach, I taught third grade most of the time. Now I’m teaching just groups, little small groups, which I love too. But I was teaching third grade and we were studying the different states and. The kids were doing all these parts of the project and one of them was to do a a big poster and it had to have the name of the state and they had, books and things to do, write about him, pictures, and they had to put a cap.

We learned what a caption was, so everybody was working on him. My little boy comes up to my desk and he shows me his poster in progress, and it was a wreck. It was a mess. It was awful. It was just scribbled all over. He, and so in that moment I had a choice. I could have said, oh my gosh, that’s a wreck. You have to start over.

Oh my God, I can’t believe, blah, blah, blah. But I decided to go a different route, and what I said to him was, what you have here is a good start. But I think we could use another poster, go get a new poster. And there was no crying. This is not, wasn’t being mean. He grabbed the poster. I sketched out a few, the letters on the name of the state.

And I went, we put the pictures, lay them out, and I said, okay, Luke on those pictures and type over the thing, tape over what I wrote and then bring it back and let’s see what we can, else we can do. And he was happy as a clam. I didn’t have a breakdown. He was excited about the project and I feel like I didn’t mess up.

Nice. Nice. And so yeah, I, that’s how I approach children all the time. I’m, when they’re, if you go from a positive approach, it’s just tremendously more powerful.

Stephen: Yeah. Nice. Okay. And we’re gonna talk about teaching and working with kids later, cuz you’ve written some middle grade books. So let’s talk about those. So you’ve got two books out right now. Tell us a little bit about those books.

Molly: Okay the main characters are,

Stephen: Lily. What are the titles? And I know you have them if you wanna hold ’em up too.

Molly: Yeah. So this is the title of the first book And I wrote this book in front of my third grade class and they chapter by chapter, they listened.

But this book is called The Game and it’s the Game is where three main characters three children Lily, who’s about 12, and then her brother Jimmy, and I’m gonna hold up the second book cuz there’s a picture of them. Lily is, and this was a little bit older Jimmy, her brother and their next door neighbor, Jamal, who is their best friends.

And in the first book in the game, they are they’re playing a game like Monopoly and that they found in their father’s startup children’s museum. And so they roll the dice and they pick a card and it said go to Ottos antiques. And they said, what? But they took their tokens, they stuck ’em in their pockets and they took their bikes over to this antique store.

And Otto is a main, is another character. But he sends them down the basement and they open up a, they open up this guidebook that they find about sweet Abundance, which is the name of the la cartoon Land. And so they open it up. And so without going into too much more detail they go to the back of the basement and Jimmy climbs under these curtains.

And he says, oh, wow. And he opens up the, they open the curtain and he’s a cartoon and they’re stunned. And so they end up crawling through the window and they go to this cartoon world called Sweet Abundance. And there they they meet all their car, their tokens turn into a. They said in the guidebook, if you add water, tokens will come to life size.

So they, so that’s another funny thing about Jamal, he’s a great character. They’re sitting in there, they said as a, we all, if he was add water to the tokens, but we’re in the middle of a park, I don’t know how we can do it. So Jamal takes the van token and he spits on it, and he says it’s water.

And he puts it down and it’s and it grows. And then they had the other one was the the other one was a dund. And so they spit on that token and he gets to be life size. And so they’re scratching the din. And they said, oh, what’s your name, boy? And in perfectly clear words, as I say, he said they don’t give, do dogs tokens with names in the factory, come on, don’t you know that?

And he said, I really prefer the name Bernard, because St. Bernard’s. They get to be heroes. They save people. It’s right up my alley. So nice. So those are the main the two, the three kids. And they drive around in the van named Randy. And they drive around sweet abundance and they meet different characters.

But the main part of the story is that there is a villain named John Hartless, which I think is a great name for a villain. And he looks like a s nightly whiplash, if you ever watched that right. Cartoon, the top hat and everything. And he wants to take over sweet abundance and he chases them around and finally skipping through all the different parts of the book.

At the very end, he’s got them, he’s cornered them. And there’s just nothing left. And Lily doesn’t know what to do. So she stands up and she kisses him on the cheek and he says, no, no one’s ever kissed me before. And my mean aunt raised me and he starts to shrink like the Wizard of Oz, but he doesn’t shrink all the way.

He gets to be like a four or five year old boy. And he starts crying and he said, my aunt looks very mean to me. And a, an adult character in the story steps in, and he says, it’s okay, Jo Little Johnny, I’ll take care of you. And pretty much that’s, then they go back and they end up being asked to come back again.

And you know that there’s, they’re losing all the color in sweet abundance. And so they somehow get, oh, they, in that story, another character comes up that is a very big favorite, as my grandson designed it. It’s a a robot named Tramo and Trio they find him in this antique store in a box.

Cause they’re, they got a letter saying that, please come back. We need you. The color’s disappearing from sweet abundance. And trio they push the right button and he comes alive and he’s got spring legs and he jumps all over the place. And they go back and the color is missing.

So they, that whole journey to find the color and also another main character is missing also. But it’s a beautiful story of what Ha Oh, forgot. The most important part in the second book, Eddie is the v is the bully at school. And he’s bullying Jimmy and he follows them into sweet abundance by mistake.

Cuz they go through this into the, through the store, the antique shop. He follows them in and What happens to Eddie in the story is really amazing. He’s really mean and he, he chases them around and a second car is actually born in that story cuz he chases him around in their car little car.

And he, things work out and he ends up so much better and they all end up as very close friends by the end. Nice. So it’s really lovely ending.

Stephen: Nice. Great. What would you say you work with middle school kids, younger kids, what other books out there are similar to these that you could point to for re readers that are interested?

Yeah,

Molly: I wrote them down that I have used before. One of them first, actually, the first one is an old book that is actually when I was a child. I read these Beverly Cleary books. In fact, she just died at 105 or something. And the characters were very real in there. They’re, they’re not these I don’t know.

The they, they get into me scraps, scrapes, and so Beverly Cleary is a huge, was a huge influence. And even though they’re old books, I like them. What did I do with race? Oh, here. So I read the book that I really liked was the recent book was the Voyage of Sparrowhawk. And the author is Natasha Farran, and they go on a journey also.

They are in a boat and they get into all kinds of scrapes and they go to these various different places. And the other one is Mr. Lemon Cell’s Library by Chris Stein. And it’s, again, it’s another adventure. They had this museum that’s really really strange, but really cool in there. So those are the, some of the books that Similar.

Stephen: Nice. Great. And have you had any of your students reading the books? What have they, what have people said about the books?

Molly: Okay two things. One, as I was reading them to my class as I was writing the first book when I got near the end, the kids in my GRA class, they’d like to lay on this rug while I was, I read stories to them.

He jumped up and he started saying, this is gonna be a movie and I’m gonna be Jimmy, and you’re gonna be Lily, and you’re gonna be Jamal. And they were just completely, they became the huge fans that really pushed me into getting it, published and everything. And then I I got I hear from the kids at my school who’ve read them.

In fact, in the second book, the second car, and it named Tony, she raps and my brother said to me, you’re really not gonna write, try writing raps are you? Molly said, give it a shot. If it comes out horrible, ill, I’ll take it out. So Tony does all these raps and these in my school, these girls that ha love my books and read them their teachers said they were marching around the classroom going with my determination, I’ll reach my destination.

And yeah, I there, there’s one girl that I see in school, she carries my book around with. Nice. That’s great. Yeah, I have, and I had I actually ran into some parents of a, of the From the class where I read the books the first class, and they were the parents there. And I ran into them and they remembered me.

I actually didn’t remember them exactly, but you

Stephen: get how many kids every single year. Yeah. You,

Molly: but I smiled. Oh yeah. I remembered their son. And he said he just loved your books, and she said, and she said, we credit you in your books to his love of reading. I thought, I wish I had a video of that I could carry around my head.

That was the most, I almost wanted to grab the mother and hug her. And I’ve I, the comments that I’ve gotten, I actually got a letter from a girl I, or she’s a paper letter and It was, oh, I almost should have brought it with me. But anyway, it was I just, she she is a student at the school of where I wrote the book, and I don’t teach there anymore.

And she said, you had my two brothers. And she said, but I, she said, I got lost in the story and I just love the characters and I can’t wait for the next book to come out. And so I I wrote back, I, I found out who her mom was and I remembered, and I called her and I said, how in the world did she read the book?

She said, oh no, our. Your books at our house is a big deal. So Nice. When she read it. So I received an actual paper letter and I’ve actually posted it on Facebook for my friends to see

Stephen: them. That’s beautiful. Love that. Yeah, kids, it’s great. That’s one of the things with kids, they, when they get into stories, they are so into it and love it.

And that’s one of the best things. Writing, reading with kids and all that. A absolutely. You get a group of adults and you read a little bit to ’em. They’re like, so kids are always so fun.

Molly: Oh yeah. They, there’s no holding them back, they it just comes. And I think that’s what I really love about them.

Stephen: Yeah. Obviously one of the little boys thinks that your book should be a movie. What do you think a movie or TV show for the books?

Molly: I like the idea of a movie. Yeah. I like the idea of a movie. It’s it lends itself to it. There’s the description of them. And in the first book I do have illustrations.

Second book, I did not do illustrations. Someone said in middle grade books, you really don’t need them. But I can see, I can, so here is a picture Oh, nice. Of, that’s Lily and Jamal and Jimmy, and they’re in the basement looking in that guidebook before they climb through the window and get into sweet Abundance.

And the the woman who, Sylvia Masic, who did the illustrations, she, it was strange because she just really liked the book and her kids liked the book. She’s the illustrator. And in the book, in this picture, she put little clues on his backpack. No. There’s a picture of the van somewhere on the shelf.

And the dund, the Bernard and then there’s thing that says dead end in one. In the first scene, they meet the main, one of the main character in Isador Benefactor. He’s the president of the bank and he’s like the head of the whole place of sweet abundance. And they found him. And originally I put him in jail, but that’s too close to Monopoly, so I called it that he was stuck in dead end.

Ah. They named did it. And so she put the word, this little sign that said, dead end there. So Nice. It’s the, yeah. And the kids. I I just love their reaction to it. I just love their reaction. Great. So yeah, I would say a movie. Okay.

Stephen: See, I always had the idea, you know how in the summertime some of the theaters show kids movies like every Tuesday and you could get a pass.

Oh they show like 10 movies through the summer every Tuesday or something like afternoon. Oh, that’s great. What I would love is to take my book and turn it into a cereal cartoon, and then every week for those 10 weeks, they show three minutes of the whole thing. I, that’s what I would love to do if it was, if I could figure out how to make it possible,

Molly: yeah. That I would, yeah. That’s a very, I didn’t know about those. I have to look for ’em and see if I can go see them.

Stephen: That’s, yeah. Yeah. I used to take my kids to ’em. It’s a lot of fun. Yeah. Molly, do you have a website for people to check out?

Molly: Yes. It’s molly perry author.com.

Molly

Stephen: perry author.com.

Molly: All I’ll puts. Yeah. Yeah. I I have on there some Just some posted. I just, things that are on my mind, it’s not necessarily, it should, I’m kinda learning about it. So yeah, they, and they can order the, they can order the book on the website. There’s a, the person who did it, they wrote the word Amazon, and if you just click on the word Amazon takes you right to Amazon on the

Stephen: Nice.

Okay, great. And what’s your plans for your third book?

Molly: So I’m about three quarters of the way through writing it. And the third book is wild, crazy also. They don’t go to sweet Abundance right away. Because the thing I didn’t tell you about the first book is they I did they found the game in the first book at their father’s.

Museum. He was trying to start up a children’s museum, which does get started up. And they found the game in a in a wooden box that was locked up cuz it was all just packages and things. And in fact he so they were left alone in the museum. He had an appointment and so they pulled it out and they played the game of Monopoly.

And so it sends them to the to the antique store. But this time it starts out with the characters’, main characters of the book showing up at their house in Mayville. That’s the real world. And they, the, is it, our benefactor is with the little little Johnny and Bernard at their front window, at their front door.

And he said, you gotta come right away. There’s very big trouble and we really need your help. And so they They get in the they go to the museum and they said, we can’t tell you now, is it her and his brother was there also, blah, blah, blah. And so they go to the museum and they find and they wanna make sure that the game is okay at the museum.

And and there is a twin museum in a suite. Abundance is a cartoon museum. It’s a twin. So they came because the game disappeared from the museum in sweet abundance. And they had come to the real world to see what if the game was still there in the real world of the real world. And they found out that it wasn’t, it was missing.

And so it was horrible cause I didn’t know if sweet abundance was gonna disappear. And so the father, Says we have to, oh, little Johnny crawls under the table, which normally kept the game was on display. And he, you hear him pulling and he crawls out and he’s ho there he’s holding the game.

This package the wrapped a package with these silver, that silver tape, and it looks like a spider and he holds it up. And so some things happen, but the father goes back to his office, which normally is his little tiny office in the museum, with a beat up old desk and a, a file cabinet.

And the father said, follow me. And everybody follows him. And they opened the door and the music, the offices changed. It’s huge. It’s beautiful. It’s big. And there’s a big new d the desk with his old swivel chair, which he’s very grateful for. They got the old swivel chair, but on and on. The one wall is this huge painting, so they all gather around the painting and it’s a painting of a field and a mountain, and there’s a little cabin at the top of the mountain and in the air, some birds.

So what I didn’t tell you in the first book is they talked about ho sweet abundance came into being. It was very short part of it. It turns out that is, the villain, John Hartless had run away from his job as an artist in this company because his boss was really mean. And so he went up to his cabin where he goes to relax and he starts drawing pictures.

Of this world of sweet abundance. And he drew it enough and says, and as if you believe in something long enough, it’s gonna become real. I thought I was gonna get a lot of flack from it, but everybody accepted it. And so he opened the trap door in the cabin, and he went into sweet abundance.

So there’s a, that, that’s what the cabin is at the top of the mountain and in the air are two new characters in the air. They said, they look closer and they said those two birds over there aren’t really birds. And they look, they said they look like little dragons. So they look closely in there.

They’re these two, two little dragons. And so the father opens up the package and there’s another character that appears. It’s actually a diary of a journey. And it turns out it’s the grandfather of Isador and. Otto. And so they take the guidebook with them and they said, and the father said, we follow me.

They go back to the room where the game was and they push this big bookcase away from the door and they open up these doors that open up like wings, whatever. And they see this hallway, this dark hallway with bricks, and there’s a torch stuck into the wall. And they said, this is where you’re gonna take your journey.

So the all the the kids go into that hallway and Jamal and of course Bernard goes and the three kids and and Tramo trio’s in this thing. I haven’t talked about him. And then I don’t know. This may or may not continue, but Right. But I had little Johnny say, you know what, I’m not, I’m brave.

He’s a little boy and he runs in with them and he begins to change and get to be their age. And he’s part of the team. I don’t know, it’s too many characters, so I don’t know what, but I like little Johnny. Anyway, so they go into this and they climb up this, these steps and they see these two little giggling faces of those two dragons and one’s green, sparkling green, her name is Emerald and the other one is Purple Sparkling.

Her name is pear Purple Emerald. And so they go in there and they climb up, and they see them at the top and they go into the store. And they’re in the cabin where, from the first book where they had actually created the Land of Sweet Abundance. And they go on this journey to.

Find the games. And it’s crazy because there’s another, they go open the trap door again and they go down and there’s railroad tracks in there. And Lily’s really thrilled that she doesn’t, that she doesn’t have to continually TRAs around, because there’s a train and a, an old fashioned train shows up with the, these smoke popping out.

And it’s Bruno, he’s the train and he, they travel on this train towards sweet abundance, but they go down this mountain and that’s where the real problem of the story actually comes about because it’s really bizarre. But they are encountered with a rat. His name is King Poison, and he, oh they stop in halfway down the mountain and they go into this house.

They see this lady sitting on a porch and she’s asked them for cookies, but she seems very suspicious. And, but they go in the house and she actually changes into this rat, this female rat. And she’s wearing this old baggy dress and there’s a, and she’s trying to capture them. So she said, you should go into this little wire box where she had two, two cats that were her kind of prisoners.

And but they somehow they won’t, they don’t go in to the thing that the cats actually popped the door open. And all the other people that were waiting outside, the traveling people broke into the, went in, and she ran away. And so if the next part you meet her name is of course, now I’m not gonna remember her name, but she goes to, oh no, her name is Malice.

And actually the word malice popped in my head before I started writing the book. I had no idea what the book was about, but there was gonna be a malice. And so she goes over and meets up with, and she’s Terri and she’s scared to talk to King Poison because she left the, everybody the cats escaped and everybody escaped and she ran away.

And he’s furious, but then they they go chasing them and they are Chas chasing them. And as they’re going down the mountain they no that when they go down the mountain, that’s when they meet Alice, the whole thing. And then they escape the house and they go down the mountain and they have to stop again.

It’s a crazy thing, but I won’t tell you about that, but up in the mountains, they see the wrath. They see king poison and they see malice and hundreds of rats. Wow. So the whole thing about the rats are, is that they said, somebody says in one part of it, they just, I wish they would just go home.

And one of them said they can’t go home. Rats have no homes. They live in behind the walls and in sewers, but they have no home. And they’re gonna find, there’s a home in sweet abundance, another land, a cartoon land, and the rats wanna take over sweet abundance and king Poison has the games, but they’re disguised as dice in his safe.

Stephen: That, that, and that’s a lot coming up, A lot going on.

Molly: First of all I’ve been telling everybody, I don’t know I know I have too many characters. I know I have too many characters, but everybody knows the main characters so well. So I have, the dragons and then the rats and the Bruno the steam.

So I don’t know, I guess that’s part of writing the book. You have to play with it.

Stephen: Great. Okay. So let me ask you a couple things about your teaching in that. Okay. Because I, with my books am working on a study guide and I’m working on like words to know and cuz I wanna get kids writing a bit more.

So as a teacher of young peoples what’s some of the problems you face getting them to read and some of the problems they have with the books and reading and e and even enjoying it and all that. What do you see as some of the problems?

Molly: I think the problems are, first of all, if they are, they they need help in learning how to read.

Then for some of them that’s where they really get difficult and they just don’t want, they know they don’t wanna do that. And I think for, as a classroom teacher, when you read, when I read a book to them, I’ve read some Roll Doll books and there’s one Roll Doll book, the short book, and it’s hilarious.

And I burst out laughing. Year after year I burst out laughing. I can’t stop laughing over these books. And the kids start laughing. And so I said, oh, you’ll have to, I’m sorry. And they said no, it really was really funny. And or I’ll be reading to them, so I’m going from another angle of reading to them instead of, then getting to the books that we read that they have to read.

And I’ll say, what do you think is gonna happen now? And they have all these ideas, so that’s to just get them. Hooked into the book, into the story. I said one time I tried various things and I said let’s make a little short story together. So I said in this book that I just read, this royal doll, he has this character.

So I said, let me just name some characters and I’ll put ’em in there. And I’ll tell you the beginning of it, are you up for it? That’s what I say. Are you up for it? And yeah. And so I say, okay, is this there in this character? And I said, the problem is da. What does there think of a better problem?

Yeah. He could have lost his homework in his, in trouble with the teacher. Oh yeah, let’s use that one instead. So I, and we create this story. I don’t, I can’t spend too much time on it, but I create a story and then I’ll say what, let’s brainstorm some Some endings. We talked about the characters, blah, blah, blah.

So that’s, it seems like a, a ti for some principles that’s wasting my time. I should just really teaching vocabulary and make them read the book. And and then she’s right, we should learn the vocabulary, but I just want ’em to get the idea of loving, of the process of writing a book so they understand the book.

And then I read to them every day. I read to them every day. And so they oh the other thing about before I get into that as a teacher, as I read to them an unexpected consequence or good, it was a good consequence happened about, from my books, they started bringing in from home their books that they wrote.

It could have been like two pages I thought I. If I made an assignment, everybody has to write a story, but all these books start coming from home that they were writing at home. The parents were so excited that they were doing that. If you, I think your general attitude towards the book that you’re trying to teach is excited, then I think that they get into it a little more.

I, repeat your question again so that I

Stephen: make sure No, I was just chatting because I like what you do and what you said about that. One of the things, and again, fu this is a touchy subject because first of all, I think our teachers are extremely undervalued and not admired. I have said for quite a while that I have the solution to fix everything in our country.

And what we do is we take the pay for the politicians and the pay for the teachers and switch ’em and Oh my God, yes. 20 years. The kids going through a system with highly paid teachers would have all the answers to everything, and we wouldn’t be listening to politicians that are underpaid. And it would solve our

Molly: problems.

And having them tell us how to teach too

Stephen: is right. And what you said about the principal thinking you should teach ’em grammar, teach ’em vocabulary, teach ’em spelling. But to what end? What’s the point if the kids don’t know how to use the spelling and use the grammar to write stories or tell stories, or read and understand what they’re reading, what’s the point in learning all of that?

Because, spelling, my, my cousin doesn’t spell great. And he says, why do I have to, I put everything on my phone. It tells me what I spelled wrong. So if you’re learning spelling in a vacuum what? No wonder they don’t care and wanna learn. But if they see, oh, I’m writing stories and these stories are exciting and people are reading ’em and enjoying them, and I read stories it’s it all feeds on itself.

That’s my thoughts and opinions. Abs.

Molly: Absolutely. It really does feed on itself. Absolutely. I saw this the, this Teacher, this really super teacher that they gave us, came to talk to us, and she told us about a thing that she did with spelling, and I loved it. What she does is she said, she has her spelling list from the book, and she said, but from their stories that they write, she said she finds books, words that are misspelled all the time, said, and she said she adds them to their individual.

So you have the 10 words, and then these words that she finds in their writing that are misspelled she adds them to individual’s spelling tests. I thought how you, how do they do it? So what she did was she gave the spelling test. And then everybody gets in pairs at the end for the last three, and they swap this card, which she keeps an index card of all the words that they misspelled.

And if I had your list and you had mine, I would give you those three, three words from their card of all these spelling words that they, words that they misspelled in their work. And and then if they spelled ’em right, I call, I call ’em and I crossed off the things on their card.

They said, yes, I’m gonna get everything off of my card. I said, yes, I bet you will. And so it, it individualizes their spelling, but you’re right. You need to know how to spell the words, but if there’s a motivation to do it it’s, I don’t, it’s very hard.

And I you do it and I. I had this one teacher. She was very smug. She said to me, how is it that your, the kids’ spelling scores on the tests are so high? I said they misspell them first, and then they spelled ’em right for a test. She was just very annoyed. She left. She didn’t, that’s impossible.

I said, I got it from a teacher’s top teacher. She told me how to do it. But I don’t know. I, sometimes it’s the way you teach the story you have those readers with the short stories of it encourages love of reading and writing. I, my first year of teaching, I had this principal who was, yes, they needed a better principal.

So she comes in to look at me, to observe me. But she just really wants to see my lesson plan. And I said, when I saw her, I said, oh, you gotta come to see my reading group. This is cuz there was three groups and I had my top group in front of me when she walked in and I wasn’t looking at her, I thought that she was following the group.

I said you wrote this little short story in the reader. I said, everybody, did you come up with your own ending? I changed ending to the story and they were all excited cuz these kids were like super brilliant kids and they were reading some of their own endings to the story that were in the book.

So I dismissed them and then, I went over to her and she was just looking through my plan book and I said, did you like the lesson? She said, your lesson plans need to be in more. These are very scattered. I wanted to just say, is that what you got outta this visit? Oh my.

Stephen: And right there. I love that you do that.

And I, I think that’s part of the problem is we’re so focused on the paper of what Common Core says we should do. Oh, yeah. And the kids aren’t really learning. And we’ve gotten, I know a lot of schools will spend a whole week preparing the kids for Common Core, so all they’re learning is how to take the Common Core test.

They’re not learning and oh, yeah. Telling, there’s so many things in telling a story. Like reading the stories, like what you did. I think some exercises I’ve suggested and some people were like surprised is the kids all went and saw the new Harry Potter movie, or the new Star Wars, or the new cartoon that’s out from Disney, whatever it happens to be.

So the following, if they, if you see it in the classroom or they’re all talking about, it’s like, Why don’t we write fan fiction? Why don’t we write our own story with those characters? What happens next? Oh, that’s a great idea. And then they’re, because they’re interested. Who cares?

Because then you can introduce some spellings. You know what, this is on our spelling list. It, you could use that word here. And when they see it, it clicks so much. Because I noticed with a lot of early write writers, adults in the, not just kids they read all these craft books. They read all this, how to do this, that, and the other thing.

But they haven’t written anything, so it doesn’t click. Oh, I know that. That’s okay. So we’re teaching spelling, we’re teaching grammar, but we don’t teach ’em how to write a story. So none of that clicks. And I, if we wrote or what you said hey let’s stop here. Why don’t you write how this story would end?

Yes. Yeah. And you could do, and then you could take what they wrote and do the grammar. You could do the spelling from that and that they’re more

Molly: engaged. Yeah. That comes later. First they’ve gotta be psyched. Yes. If they don’t like that story, I’ll say, yeah, now you got a great story. But we, we have to do, have to fix up the spelling.

So do you want me to circle the words and so you fix it up. Do you want me to do that? Oh yeah. If I had said cir, there are circled words. Fix them. It’s a whole different, yeah. I tell this story. This is, I didn’t plan on telling this, but I was teaching at this school and I. This little boy had run out of his, out, ran away from out of the building.

He hated school. And so they pulled him out of that school, and I don’t, they came to our, the school where I was teaching, and the principal stuck him in my room. She said, I’m giving him to you. I said, okay. So he came up to my desk, the kids were working, and he was. And so I said to him would, I just would like you to write me a little story.

I didn’t know anything about him. So he said, oh, I said, but make it funny or exciting or something, I got ’em all prepped up for it. And he wrote this story. It had to be maybe 50 words. And he came up and he pointed it down on my desk and I looked at it and the words were all mushed together.

There, there were, there, it was un unreadable, but I saw the little word, the, in the middle of it. And so I came up with this, come here. I said, I said, I feel cheated. He said, what? I said, I feel cheated. I said, you wrote a story. I don’t get to hear the story. And he said, why? I said, I can’t read it.

And he looked at and he said there’s the, I said, I know I saw it. I said, but now I don’t get to read your story. And he said I could rewrite it for you. I said, would you? And he sat down and he, now that’s a take B. He, he calls up a kid, this story is a mess. I can’t read a word of it except that word the redo it and the kid does this.

No, I’m not. And you run this building, he voluntarily sat there and I said, if you put your finger between each word, I’ll be able to see it better. Cause that’s where we teach. And the story was a nothing story, but I read it and I was exci, I was excited about it. And he and I. Did very well.

That was many years ago. I ran into his sister and I said, how is he doing? He said, oh, he is happily married. He has two little ba two little kids, and he is part owner in the gas station where he works. And I said, fantastic. So I’m not saying he was this genius, but he probably was very good with his hands.

And, but he found a home in my class that he was safe. He wasn’t gonna run away. I wasn’t gonna beat him up. And that’s part of what you’re saying. It’s gotta be an atmosphere where, you’re encouraged to do things. And I once taught haiku and I was being observed by this principal.

And cuz I, the new job, a possibility and I had all these people in the back and I had this haiku lesson, which is my favorite, one of my favorite lessons. And I had this packet with all these haiku that I had found. So I told ’em about the history of the haiku, that it third grade class. And I said I said, this describes a mountain and the fish jumps in the water at the end.

So I said, it tells a little story. I said, we’re gonna do haiku, but we’re not gonna follow how many, we’re not gonna count how many sounds or anything, we’re just gonna enjoy the haiku. When you get the high school, you’re gonna have to count the sounds. But right now, so I did, I wrote down a baseball haiku that, from another class that had written, it wasn’t the, it wasn’t the one that was from the Haiku book.

And at the plate holding the bat, bam, home run, whatever. And of course they understood that they could picture it. And so then I said, but let’s read some of the other ones. And we went around and, I said, we don’t have a lot of time, so just somebody, we’ll take four people, volunteer, look through the thing.

Who wants to read? So they read them. And so I said At the back is this pink blank with these lines on it. I said, see if you could write a haiku what could we write a haiku about? And they said, baseball. And then they said spring, summer, vacation all these different things, going to Camp Thanksgiving.

I said, yeah, go for it. Try something. So I, this is what I tell other teachers that are new. I said, I walked off the stage, I let them be on the stage. So I walked off to the side and I said, okay, who’s willing to, I said, and I said, let’s, I turned to the principals and every, I said, now we don’t wanna criticize.

We’re just gonna listen. Yes. I said, because they’re brave to do this, to come up in front. So they came up and they were okay. They did it and we all were, we’re all very happy with them. And then like a gift from heaven. This boy said, can I write some at home and bring them in? I said, let me think.

Should you write some at home and bring them in? Yeah. Nice. And so we wrote all these haiku and we walked out and my principal said, you’re hired. And because I stepped off the stage, it became theirs. It was them, I wasn’t grading them at the time, and, it, and so my, the one lady, no, it wasn’t her, it was this woman I shared the classroom with.

She said, Molly, what you do is you love them into submission mission. And I do, I love the kids, and I don’t have, I, that’s, and that’s part of teaching, but it’s also, I love the stories and I, I and I, and I. I, I did play a trick on that boy with the thing, but I, I didn’t do it with being

Stephen: mean, but Yeah. But you’re right. Like when you told the principal, we’re not criticizing because in the younger grades we need to encourage them in writing and their stories because that’ll get ’em excited and then they’ll read. And once you read your spelling and grammar becomes easier and better.

Absolutely. But we have it so backwards in that the only time we ask ’em to write something is, what did you do this summer? That’s the only thing you ask. And then we say, here, read this book. We know it’s dry and you’ll hate it, but you have to read it cuz we said so, okay, let’s do spelling.

And there are all this stuff in it. It gets ’em like, who cares? By the time they’re in eighth, ninth grade, they’re like, I am so tired of spelling. But if we just worried about. The story and the reading in the younger grades then when they’re like,

Molly: you’re a great teacher.

Stephen: I’ve been told that, and I do love to teach and I work with kids a lot.

I always have, even when I was younger. It is just, honestly, I don’t think I could have handled all the politics and the stuff. I would’ve been one of the teachers driven out by all the administration.

Molly: Oh I could not go back into the classroom because every minute is scheduled for me.

I can’t tell my stories. I’m a storyteller. If I, I would say one time I said about the word said to this one little group or one class. I said, I hate the word said. I said, but my son David, he’s the one who helped me with the word, said, they’re looking like I lost my mind. And I said Them. He, I said he had written a story for school and he asked me to look at it and he had misspelled, s e d I said, which is how he should spelled?

So I said, I dunno how you’re gonna re I, I really wasn’t being tricky. I just was, I don’t know how I can, I teach kids how to spelled. And he got up off the table. He said, let’s try this. And he took a step, s a i, and he was stepping with each letter. I said, do that again. S So I said, okay, fix your words.

Fix the word setting paper. And so I went to school and I said, I got this great idea from my son how to spell the words that, what’s his name? They wanna know everything about you. His name is David. And I said, get outta your seat. I said, let’s try what he did. I told them the story and they were gonna go, oh, walking around s a i, I said, So I shouldn’t have a word misspelled said in our, and I know that there would be teachers who say, I wasted all this teaching time playing around with step stomping around the room.

But you know what? Fun is good. That’s my motto, by the way. Fun is good.

Stephen: Exactly. And they learn through that better. And I think sometimes hitting them with, here’s a list of 10 spelling words for the week. Go home, memorize it. And the spelling test at the end of the week, and then 10 more next week.

So many kids, my, my stepson was bad at math and he had a hard time with math and working with him, what we discovered was that he would work on a lesson and work on learning a principle and a topic, but then when he went to the next one, he forgot all of that. And so it wasn’t connecting and it made the next one harder and yeah.

Great. Some kids. Thrive in that I’m gonna sit down and memorize 10 words and get ’em right next week and 10 more. And other kids are just like my brain’s turning to mush. But, If you wrote stories and told stories and they used those words, they would, so many more of them would then get it.

And there’s just, we’ve been learning that kids learn in different ways and work in different ways and it’s, is it more important for them to do 10 words a week and forget all of ’em and never be able to spell hardly any of ’em correctly? Or is it better to learn five or six that they use and they know how to spell really good and can always spell it?

It’s like my kids when they went to school, instead of learning in chemistry, all the elements on the table, cuz we had to do that, we had to try and memorize them and where they were and the A two letter combination and, memorize that. Instead, they were put in the groups of five and they got assigned two elements each and they had to research it.

Who discovered it? Oh my god. Discovered. And what led to that and how does it work with other elements. And so they became experts at just two elements. And then they had to give a presentation, which got ’em in front of kids talking. And so they all heard about all the elements, but they only really worked with two.

And there were parents arguing that now my kid doesn’t know all of ’em. Like they know ’em as well as they would have, but they know two of them like intimately

Molly: and it was right. And they, and if they needed to know another one, they know how to research it and find out

Stephen: about it. Yes. We don’t need to teach ’em how to memorize these element, how to look it up, research it, work with other people, how to give presentations.

And the rest of it comes, it falls. You work with other

Molly: people. That’s. Very

Stephen: important. Nowadays it’s big. They teach classes on it. It’s like, why teach classes? Just put ’em in the groups. They learn how to do

Molly: it. That’s right. That, yeah, that’s, yeah. The, I love that. I love that style of learning. In fact, when I was taught my third grade class, we learned about Native Americans and there was a map of all these different tribes.

And so I broke the kids up into five groups and this is after talking a lot about their culture and food and blah, blah, blah. And I said, we’re never gonna learn about all of ’em. It’s impossible. I’m doing exactly what you’re talking about. So I said, here, I’m gonna break you up in groups of five.

And I said, and I said, I’m not sure how to do this. Should I, should you pick a tribe? I said, I don’t want everybody to pick the same one. Cuz then you can get together, you can make, pictures of their homes and, Oh my God. They went crazy. But the, and it turns out we picked five different tribes and I gave them time in class to, and I think I gave ’em an outline of, food, this, what to do.

And then they made a presentation of it and they loved it. They loved it. And I just went around from group to group and we, and then they made their presentations. And I, when, I learned so much about Native Americans that about these different groups and some things about how certain things that certain tribes do well, they, they actually got passed along through, so some of the things, maybe the north or the south, right?

They got pa passed along. And like the Totem poles. They were, I think the north first, and then they finally they found ’em in Florida. So the, those things who knew I didn’t know about, but that’s really learning some interesting stuff about it. And the one year I did that, and there was a mother that came in to videotape their presentation because they’ve been working so hard on it.

That’s when you get worried, how much were you involved in this? But yes. Yeah. But anyway, but no, the more involvement, the more you’re off the stage. The talking head, because I remember taking a class in college and the ta, the teachers talked about that, and he said, when you just stand there and talk to them, usually only one third hears anything you said.

That I never forgot that. And your enthusiasm. Should be in the classroom. No, they shouldn’t be in the classroom because they wouldn’t let you.

Stephen: It’ll kill me. But no I’m working on some presentations to give the classes so I could come in as a visiting author. Yes. And do things with storytelling with video game.

That’s video game storytelling is where I’m really pushing some things because they can relate to that yeah, it’s stories, it’s video games. You can do it now, that type of thing. And that’s gets them more excited about what story is, even though it’s told in a different way in a video game.

But that’s where they’re at. That’s what their interest is. So instead of fighting it, use it.

Molly: Yes. That’s the difference. That’s the way that teaching should be. You shouldn’t be, I walked down my, in my school and there’s these teachers sitting at their desk and they’re pointing to things and then the kids are working.

And I’m thinking, I’m falling asleep, just walking, seeing you sitting at the desk. Right?

Stephen: It’s not the 18 hundreds anymore,

Molly: but you’d be surprised all up and down the hall, people sitting. And then you see one, I saw there’s one teacher. I love to watch her. She’s pacing around and up and down and the kids are all wound up and excited.

And I that’s a teacher. Not that you have to be that way all the time. But, and and just, they, you need to get them participating and doing and creating. Yeah.

Stephen: And we gotta the, this is a whole nother topic. And I know we gotta get going here, but yeah, we gotta watch the.

We’re so concerned about the grading system and who’s getting A’s and B’s, that we only focus on those numbers and we have to quantify it, that we’re missing what the kids may actually be learning and what’s useful and helpful and making ’em, people I know there’s some new, the kids, the high school my kids went to, they had different ways of grading whether kids were passing or not, and what their grades were.

And I like the system. I don’t think it’s perfect yet. I just think we need to, discuss, open our eyes and talk about it more rather than this is the way it’s always been. Let’s keep doing it.

Molly: Also I find that, who’s creating all this stuff? I don’t know if they’re in the classroom, creating textbooks or creating curriculum.

I don’t know if they’re in the classroom. Do they have any, and so how can they even begin to understand things that you can’t write about in a book? You’re, you, the way that you care about them, the way that you. Your personal enthusiasm. I don’t think that is addressed, but the teachers who haven’t and do it, the kids come back to visit, they come back to visit me.

Absolutely. And I’m talking about that and, I that’s that’s it’s, we have such an opportunity. You have those kids together. You don’t know what the heck’s going on at home and fear of the world blowing, going to heck right. And all that stuff. So you have a million different things going on.

And for you to just tell them to study for this spelling test, that’s the least of their issues we should. Start campaign.

Stephen: I’m sure we’ll be in touch a little bit more. I’ll let you know when the episode goes live and I’m sure being a close teacher and stuff I might shoot you some emails and have thoughts and discussion.

That’d be awesome. I’d love it, Abby. And sit down for coffee one morning or something. Oh, Abby, she’s a character. Yes. Yes. I’m gonna see her at the end of the month at the writer’s conference over at the library. Oh, I’m gonna be there. Oh, I’ll see you there on the 25th. Yeah. Yeah, I’ll be

Molly: there. Yeah. I’m gonna, I have to leave a little bit early, but I’ll be there for most of it.

Stephen: Great. Oh, excited. I’m, there’s an author I’ve been talking to, I want meet, so yeah, it’ll be a fun day. Okay. So Molly, before we go real quick since we’ve been talking about writing and your stories and your books do you have any advice you’d give out there to parents of their kids to encourage them to write or anything like that?

Or young kids that are writing.

Molly: If, just off the top of my head, if you if you can read a simple story with them, sit down, and then when the story’s done, we’ll say Billy and Johnny and that story, maybe we can make an adventure with them. And you write what their ideas are and, and then say, okay, if they’re old enough, read your story.

You become the just the writer, the script scribe, whatever. And depending on that, but like with the haiku, I’ll say why don’t you write one? And I, that day I had the kids a hard time getting the kids to stop coming up with more, running to the front, waiting to write another one.

And finally my time was up. They were really, I said if you wanna go home and your teacher will listen to them. Nice. And they were psyched, and that’s what we’re looking for. Yeah. You, if you you’ll get them to write if you appreciate their efforts, maybe. But in the end, say yeah, I love this.

We, we really got a great story now, but now here’s the part that we all have to do. So what do you think that would be? I’m not gonna, we have to write it in Anitas writing. Yeah. We’re gonna have to do that. But before we do that, we have to do stuff. Here’s, if I as a, I don’t like to talk as an author particularly, but when I was in school and when I have to write things, what do I do?

I have to fix what’s, what’s mistakes and I have to read it again. And one of the other, and I said, and when you write your stories cuz my kids were writing stories for me at home and bringing them, they typically would repeat the same thing over and over and over again.

So I said, can I give you one hint? I said sometimes I, when I write it, I do this. When I write a story, I’ll write it and then I find myself writing the same thing over and over. So would you mind if I like, circled that paragraph and said, you just, you know you’re doing that? And they said, yeah. I said, then you don’t, because then it won’t.

Cuz they say, my story’s five pages long. My story’s 10 pages long. I said, it doesn’t have to, it doesn’t, it’s not, but I’d rather have it one page long or two pages long. But you’re not repeating cuz you have some good story, but you just wanna make it even better. So that’s, and they let me circle ’em, but I have their permission.

It’s, when you get back a thing from a teacher, it’s all red and all that you.

Stephen: Yeah. And I love that you just said that you have their permission, you get the kids involved empower them. They want to get better. They wanna learn, they wanna know. They really do. But again, when we’re just hitting them and all that it turns ’em off.

Yeah, absolutely. Yep.

Molly: Yep. All right. I, you make a good teacher.

Stephen: All right, Molly, it’s been wonderful talking to you. I wish you very much luck on your books and I can’t wait to see you in a couple weeks. Okay. I’ll see you soon. Thank you. Take care. Bye-bye all. And I’ll let you know when this goes live. Oh

Molly: Yeah, please.

Jake Brown is the author of 50+ books and creator/host of ABOUT THE AUTHORS TV.  With over TWO MILLION viewers and counting since TUBI TV began airing Seasons 1 & 2 in the Spring of 2022, The Associated Press recently spotlighted that ABOUT THE AUTHORS TV “has found an audience among both fans of the writers they profile on the show along with an aspiring crowd of wordsmiths just learning the craft.”  The first-of-its-kind streaming television project, which Publisher’s Weekly has already reported, “features long-form interviews with best-selling authors across all genres,” along with promoting their new upcoming releases.

https://www.youtube.com/c/AbouttheAuthorsTV

Carrie Soto is Back by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Happy Place by Emily Henry

Pineapple Street by Jennie Jackson

Five-Star Weekend by Elin Hildebrand

Only Love can Hurt Like This by Paige Toon

The Summer of Songbirds by Kristy Woodson Harvey

So today, and then I’ve got a great Of author on my podcast. He’s got some great pictures of stuff in the background. This is Jake Brown. Jake, how are you doing today?

Jake: Great. Thanks for having us. Thank was me, I should say, in the show by extension. Great.

Stephen: So is that really signed by heart?

Jake: Yeah that’s, I co-wrote that book with them years and years ago. Bless their hearts in two thou back in 2006 and seven. Wow. And then I met them in 2009 and they signed that and comically, I was sitting there in the Ryman’s dressing room waiting to meet them, and I was so nervous.

As understandably anyone who grew up on heart would be that they would like the book too. Cause this is my first time hearing. Did they like it? Did they hate it? And Alison Krause and her husband are sitting there as well, and I didn’t even know. I was polite. I talked to them. I, but I wasn’t like, oh, you’re al and it wasn’t that I ever get like that, but I was almost too passive.

So she leaves. And the cuz everyone else was getting, her, the manager for heart comes in and she goes, oh, it’s so nice you got along with Allison and her husband. And I felt like a jerk cuz they brought them out later on. She came out later on stage in, sang these dreams with Nancy Wilson.

But they’re, they were the sweetest, I wrote that book at a point in my career where It’s fair to say that I had written, authors, I’ve been doing this 25 years in 55 books. So at this point I’ve gone through peaks and valleys like everybody, but I had written mass market hip hop paperbacks for five straight years, and it was reaching a point where I either needed to.

In my career trajectory, I needed to start writing for bigger audiences, publishers, et cetera or not. And the Tupac Shakur State authorized a book through a fe shakur’s mother called Tupac in the studio that actually launched this series. And then Hart was the next to say yes to it. And that.

Put me on a different, that put me in a different league. And then that got me nice. An audience with Lemy and we wrote the Motorhead in the studio book, and so things just started rolling. So I hang it there because it has perpetually been like my good luck charm.

Stephen: Nice. We’re just jumping right into things and everybody listening.

It was probably like, okay Steve, shut up. Let Jake talk because he’s way more interesting,

Jake: but No, currently talking too much. I’m happy to answer any questions you have though.

Stephen: Yeah. Yeah. That’s awesome. See what I would’ve done if I was hard knowing you were nervous if my agent said, Hey.

This guy’s really nervous or something. I would’ve come in and slammed the what the hell? Those book sucks. I can’t stand and just, messed with you. And then I would’ve told you how much I liked it. But that’s just me and that’s probably why I’m not in that position.

Jake: Only thing that was cool is Nancy Wilson told me that she had not only read it, but her kids had read it and Cameron Crow had read it, who at the time they were married and that, and growing up an influence.

The size. He was on me through fast times and say, say anything right and this kinda stuff. I was definitely definitely honored at that. Are you able to edit this? Yeah. Oh, absolutely. Hey, gimme 30 seconds. I gotta one.

I got signed for this ups. Oh yeah. My bad. So one.

Stephen: Sorry about that. No, not a problem. Not a problem.

Jake: Yeah, man, so that, that kind of got things launched and then a few years later I had another opportunity to write a book with Joe Satriani, oh, his memo. It was a musical memoir, which I’m careful to say because at some point he will do his own.

I’m sure more. I was born in this date and, but we really Got into every, if you’re a fan of whether it’s, flying in a blue dream or surfing with the alien, the early stuff all the way through his more recent work, it doesn’t it, we did the paperback update. In 2017. So there’s a couple records past that, but you can really hear firsthand from him.

And one thing I started doing with these books that became a sort of key part of how I write books is I think first person narrative, if it’s gonna be like in Joe’s case, is really exciting for the fans. But if you can blend that, and it’s not me, I’m not the only one that does this, but I tried to do it a little bit.

But in the studio books, I talk to all the engineers, the producers, the song, the songwriters, the guitar players, the band members, past, present, whatever. To the degree the artist allows me. And we, and that’s been pretty thoroughly through that series. And we reconstruct every one of these records as you’re listening to them.

You can read along with pretty much every sound lyric, lick, drumbeat, et cetera, you hear. And that kind of, Echoed outward into this Kenny Aronoff book. The drummer Kenny Aronoff, he was John Lanham’s term in the eighties, probably got 200 number ones. I met him through the Satriani book. So what I mean is you also get opportunities where you meet people through that.

Led to this U s USA Today article. I have friend of here from Beyond the Beats in 2018 where I interviewed God, in that first book we had Lar Ulrich, Tommy Lee, Joey Kramer, the drummers from Aerosmith, Motley Crew, guns N Roses, Jane’s Addiction, foo Fighters Taylor Hawkins. Gimme a really elaborate one.

Red Hat Chili Peppers journey creds Clearwater Revival. It was just an incredible list. Smashing Pumpkins. So there’s been a kind of weird pattern throughout my. Music writing career where one project typically Initiates another. Initiates another Teddy Riley, legendary king of new Jack swing, inventor of that genre.

My prerogative, writer, producer, and that’s coming out. We hope at the end of this year or early next year, but it’s actually being shot right presently. So there’s a lot of these projects, gest date, sometimes over long periods. Sometimes you write them in, two or three years. Sometimes you write them in seven or eight years.

Sometimes you write them in a year. It just depends on the contract. But yeah, so all of that. Laid the groundwork for what I do now, which I can get into when you’d like. That natural songwriter series is right There is another one. So they just I profile all the songwriters on Music Row and chronicle the stories behind them and their songs that write all the country music hits that you hear on the radio for the most part.

So it’s been a very interesting definitely career.

Stephen: No, yeah, it sounds like it. So something you said, and I’m gonna jump on while we’re fresh for authors. You did a project, it led to the next project. It led to the next. Sometimes you hear this I’m just not getting anything that I like or what, sometimes you gotta get out, you gotta improve your odds.

You gotta get out there, do the do the work. And music’s that way too. Just sitting at home in your living room, waiting for that. Agent to call or that band or whatever. Sometimes I found a band I played with because I went to an open mic night and they were playing with, and they said, Hey, we’re, I was listening to ’em like, wow, these guys are pretty good.

I enjoy it. And they said, Hey, we’re looking for a basis. I went, Hey let’s talk if I hadn’t gone, so same thing with writing it. Anything creative always needs that.

Jake: Yeah, and there’s a, it’s called Always Be Writing as the rule. And, I ghost write on top of the 50 plus in my own catalog.

I’ve ghosted another 40 books, I think over the last, 10, 15 years just to pay bills. And if you, and then I’m writing scripts for the show when I’m not writing those. If you’re not writing. You’re just, you’re not a writer, right? And that’s just the cold, hard truth of it. They’re not. Now with that said, writer’s block, I don’t believe in writer’s block because a, so an example of a lot of the people I talked to for the show authors, and I’m sure that you do, they start in journalism.

You don’t, they don’t, editors don’t care if you’re not inspired people, word counted, deadline. You write it and deliver it. It’s the same thing with a book. If a publisher puts up a contract and they’re paying you in advance, To write a book. Write the book. Now that sounds overly simplified, but if you do it long enough, you get into the rudiments of that to be able, if you’re having a bad day with one chapter, you flip to another.

If you’re having a hard time with one character, work on another. If you’re having a time, timeline issues, one timeline work on the next. So there’s never an excuse to not be writing something, or if you’re not writing edit. Go over your own material again and again and again.

And if you’re having problems with it, think about it or listen to it on we get a lot of people that talk about the benefit now with technology and word even has, and Google has it too. You can have one of these deals where it reads to you out loud, right? You can hear so many things that you wouldn’t see reading when you hear something to know what, okay, and then maybe you just sat there that day and listened from an editing standpoint, and then you, okay, I fixed all these things.

Or this needed to go, it might lead you to a new door. So that theme is important because in 2020 I got stranded, like millions of people at home, and I had written this book. You see how thick that is? 600 page first country music producers guide of its kind had every one of the big guys and ladies all under one roof had their old backs stories, they hit stories behind their hits, et cetera.

We’re going out to promote and my publicist calls me and says, Barnes and Noble has called. The publisher. The publisher just called me book’s not coming out in physical because they’re closing all the stores. So in other words, everything we had planned for this could not be really done. And then Zoom came into the mix, I think like 3000 people had Zoom in February of 2020.

And 3 million people had it by April, right? Yeah. So by the time I was catching onto it in May, Four months into its big boom, it was already thank goodness established. And so we went out and did morning shows. We did a bunch of, a very long list of really nice, podcasts and all, a lot of ’em very new because it was like this new boom happening.

But also in the course of all of that, I said, I, for years have wanted to adapt the format of doing like what we’re doing or what I do with bands to authors and. Part of that, and I want to be very respectful of podcasts like yours, which allow this, but one of the things I ran into in 2020 that was really maddening when you’re trying to promote a book, you have a finite amount of time to do it in.

And a lot of the peers that I deal with ran into the same thing is because there was a big advent of new podcasts happening and publishers were just pushing everything they could out. You would wind up. For 10 minutes of 45 minutes or an hour talking about the book. And the other 50 minutes would be spent not on the book.

Often it would be spent talking about how different the podcast was from all its competitors where there is post-production, and that can be done in post, and then you can spend more time talking to the author and I get it, it was like a thing where people were all competing for the same listeners and it was a whole new thing.

So I took a lot from that campaign and things I thought podcast did really well and things that I wanted to do that I realized I couldn’t do in that format. But streaming television had just. It had been around, but it hadn’t really had that Tiger King thing kinda if that guy gets a streaming television thing, anybody should get one.

So it was like, okay, what if I could. Put together a TV show, which is really crazy sounding, where I have a set, which is about a mile from me in Hendersonville here in Nashville where I film. Nice. Yeah. And just start, and start formatting this around the idea of Episodic Lake streaming television, which is not, didn’t exist in the format of author interviewing authors.

Where we went over the whole career. And started like I do in the books with the musicians when we talk about childhood and go all the way up. Now, that’s not unique in the fact that like your podcasts or lots of other great podcasts talk with authors in the timeframes that, exist for that.

But sometimes, as you might be getting somebody on and all they can really talk about is that one book they’re promoting. You know what I mean? Whatever. So the idea here was that first of all, it was gonna only work of a streaming network, picked it up. And we initially had some potential with an Amazon thing, and then there was all of these really well-intentioned and really left-wing voting apparatuses, but their iPhones that were making documentaries and Amazon had a self.

Video publish kind of pipeline that Jeff Bezos just stopped. So there was no non-fiction content going to Amazon for a year. And that was probably really healthy just to let the content be more about, non-political things. But it also shut out like educational programming. It shut all these.

So we had to go out and pitch this. And I went ahead and financed a $30,000 production overhead out of my royalty checks for the year and anything I could go strike, built the set, started reaching out to authors like Brad Meltzer, sum Monk, Kidd. Some of the amazing people that signed on at first, Heather Graham, Catherine Colter, and I just started throwing it at the biggest names that I’d grown up reading that were the biggest influence on me because I thought, you know it, I wanna start big and see if I get any interest in this.

And because I was an author of 50 books as a host, I can talk, with them about process. And luckily it worked, man. So we’re over 700 authors in two years later. Seasons 1 0 2 got picked up. God blessed them by tv. B Television, tv. Tv. I saw that. Yeah. And there’s 54 episodes in seasons one and two.

There’s another 68 that are gonna be coming here in what we’re talking about, seasons three and four. And I actually I have a little blurb I can read you. It’s actually Yeah please. I’ve just been putting together the frustration with streaming is you get approved and then they accept it, but then it can take three to four weeks for it to gest date down into the viewing cycles or algorithms, however that works.

So I’ve been working on this press release, but. We put together with Seasons three and four, there’s the Oscar-Winning Martian basically says, if you’re interested in getting together with the creators of the Martian, the Lincoln Rhyme franchise, star Wars Bones, Indiana Jones, Trueblood Billion Dollar Box Office franchise, Rambo Shining Girls, Donny Brasco, the Goonies Poltergeist, Blonie Longmire Troll Hunters spike TV’s doing the Marshal from Kim Stanley Robinson happen.

Leonard Judy Moody. It goes on and on. And then you went, we went back in time to Sarah Poretsky and Erica jg pioneers that were doing this when nobody else was in variations of crime fiction. In Perret’s case. And in Erica Jong’s case, really fear of flying, launched the second help launched the second wave of feminism.

Joyce Car oes was like an absolute shock that opportunity came. And that’s what I mean so once word of mouth started getting out Between 2021 when I was producing 2022 when it launched, and just now 2023, we’ve had over 2 million viewers. And that’s just come between the YouTube channel and Tubi and that’s just all come from organic word of mouth.

Nice. Because the other thing that we got was absolutely no press. Nobody would cover the show. Nobody would give us any on the mainstream level of that. And it was really an eye-opening thing for me because quite honestly, you get a little bit insulated and comfortable. As a music biographer when you write books with famous bands because you get used to being on Right.

You know what I mean? I don’t mean that in a negative ego way, it’s just people call and they’re like, Hey, we’re doing it. Like music’s greatest mysteries. I’ve been lucky to be a cast member on that show for a few years now. Breaking the bands, you get these invitations and I don’t do a lot of them, but I do the ones that I think are really cool.

That’ll be to the fan bases I write for. But this was like guys. You had my last five books in parade. What do you mean? You’re not gonna give us even a little blurb? They were like, you’re the competition now, dude.

Stephen: You’re not our yeah, sorry to, if you didn’t realize this, there’s probably not people going to the Soone.

Oh my God. A Jake Brown book. Oh, who’s this heart man? I’m probably That’s not what they’re buying it for. No offense to you.

Jake: But what I mean is even in that regard though, Joe Satriani was the kindest press sharer I’ve ever done a book. Oh, that’s cool. I love doing that out to c b s, the Hollywood Reporter to anywhere, variety all kinds of magazines that he could have completely been like.

Yep. He was great. Let’s talk about me. And he, yes, he’s so generous. And so what I’m saying is that kind of thing. And then afterward with a lot of the bands, I’ve been fortunate, as sad as it is, like lemy passing, you get, you sometimes get brought in to do that talking head stuff because you worked with that person and maybe like you were maybe only one of a couple people that got lucky to, so all of that went away.

So we had to build this from the organic ground up. And you know what did it we were very blessed was the authors social media, Twitter. Post the election era really changed and became more organic and grassroots again, and there was a lot less of the stigma. Oh, you’re on Twitter trump’s on Twitter.

Just keeping it real. Whether you were prohi or against him, it just went, it so Twitter has been a lifeline for us on top of YouTube, which has been the absolute reason we are existent because what we do on the YouTube channel is we’ll do early premieres, we’ll do advanced sort of previews.

We’ll do promos, but we’re pumping out new author interaction every week. In terms of new authors we’re interviewing, even if we’re months away from filming, like their actual, I have a, the set I reshoot at, but we’re just really. Trying to keep an organic connection with the people watching the show that are fans of the authors that want to hear in length about their catalog.

Some of these episodes run two hours, some of them run Wow. An hour and 45 minute. And yeah. And my host clips are as clipped as they can be. So the majority of the time you’re spending are with the authors. That’s awesome. And I mentioned like seasons one and two, just as highlights. It was like TC Boyle, Karen Slaughter, Brad Meltzer and Ranken.

Scott Tau. Katherine Coulter. Heather Graham. Chris Baha, and John Le Squad. We had ley Bailey’s final televised interview before he passed. Wow. Career length. Yeah. John Douglas who created, they created a mine hunter over so it just, it continued within seasons. Three and four, I mentioned Joyce, Carol Otz, there’s Jeffrey Deaver, there’s Barry Eisler, there’s Craig Johnson from Longmire.

There’s all kinds of. Joe r Lansdale, she kenon Joe Pistone, like it was Donny Brasco who wrote a bunch of books.

Stephen: Yeah. I was looking on Tuby, I was going through the list. I was supposed to be watching a movie with my son, and I’m like, oh my gosh, I’m gonna be talking to this guy. And oh, look at these authors.

And he’s yeah, that’s great. Can we watch the movie now? I’m like, you don’t get it. This is like huge.

Jake: It’s been, yeah. And the thing that it’s been really rewarding about it is our fa our viewers range from teenagers. All the way up to retirees who are just starting to figure out they wanna write a book.

It’s an ageless profession. We are certainly not the first to say that As you figure talk about in your podcast, people start at all ages. They do a job, their kids are off to college, okay? They can finally write a book. Mom’s been at home, a very common story. Mom’s at home with kids and now she has some time and they go off to school or whatever it is that you get that little bit of time every day to write it leads to these kinds of careers and many, most.

95% of the people that we talked to. It wasn’t like a, oh, my dad was an author and I’m an actor. Or he was an actor. I’m an actor. Cuz there was no familial help. It was like every one of these people went through the same things that every day oth people trying to become authors do. And did, and the other thing that we really try to emphasize is like aspiring authors.

There’s a bible of advice in this show like I’m sure on your podcast. We try to pull as much of that out as we can about the everyday life of a writer. You might have a million seller book and it might be 10 years before you have another, and then you might just be writing for a living in between then.

And so there’s always kinds of things that we hear about, whether it’s agent good or bad, agent stories, editor stories whatever kind of writing someone did to break in that they maybe don’t wanna talk about, but we try to touch on to just glean from what they got out of it, that they took forward with them.

So the idea is that whether you’re a, a kid, you’re in your twenties, 30, 40, 50 sixties, or whether you’re just a fan. Of this author, you don’t wanna watch skip five episodes and then you might find another one you like. Yeah. So the idea is a kind of a combination of discovery and education. As nerdy as those themes can sound within the realm of books, they’re very exciting.

You have a billion dollar budget movie in fiction. You can go anywhere you want on the page. And so we hear about these amazing. Minds that are creating, like we have a science fiction edition, locus Magazine. In fact, tomorrow is gonna be airing Kim Stanley Robinson’s episode, and there’s a whole science fiction edition.

There’s 40, 45 authors coming up all across that spectrum, men and women from all those generations. There’s a horror edition coming up. I have a UK edition seasons five and six, which is gonna be 80 episodes I’m actually filming now. So hopefully within the next year or two we’re gonna aim to build the largest on streaming episodic archive of author interviews.

That possible. So that’s

Stephen: the goal. That’s awesome. That’s the goal. The service not only for authors, but for people reading or people that are like, I haven’t been reading much, but that looks interesting. Or, and for kids, I love that. And the fact that you’re on a TV station, tuby YouTube, it’s video, it’s big name people, smaller name across the board.

I mean the, I don’t think some people realize that the benefits to the whole author community that you’re doing it’s phenomenal.

Jake: We’re, yeah we’re, and you know what, I appreciate that, but I say it in, in Congress of this being a community of people. And I say that not because it’s the cheesy thing that you say.

It’s really true. I nobody would watch this if the authors who agreed to be on it didn’t go out and promote it to their fan bases, bottom line. So I try to vocalize that credit as much as possible at the same time. It’s really notable as well to your point, that not only are we profiling the.

Hundred million selling catalogs, Dean kus, someone like that. But we go, we really do profile, like Deisha Philia won the National Book Award. She just came out with Secret Lives of church women. We have a spectrum, Jeanine Cummings of American Dirt. There’s some really prolific. Authors that are new, but they’re really building amazing catalogs.

Attica Locke, who’s really an amazing fiction author that also wrote on Empire. I had Don Winslow on last week. We talked all about his catalog. He’s going into retirement from this to focus full-time on film. Yeah, so the Richard Russo from Empire Falls was just on, so we’re starting to John Banville.

So the, when I, sometimes, the other thing is I get these really daunting as interview assignments, and so if you’re a writer, and then they ask me, so you’re, did you retire from book writing to do this? I said, no, we’re quite in tandem. But all the script writing I do, and I do elaborate prep. I do really extensive question guides and everything is I really try to honor their catalogs without fluff questions, but in depth things that I’m not suggesting other people ask, but I have gotten feedback from in terms of Hey, I really liked that we talked for 10 minutes about a book that no one bought.

But I love as much as we talked about the big hit series that everyone keeps buying that, that felt

Stephen: pretty cool. I like that.

Jake: It’s it’s a responsibility.

Stephen: I think I, I get that. Yeah. And you’re. You’re actually one of the more prolific long-term authors that I’ve interviewed. The whole idea of this was to get newer authors that no one knows about.

Now I’m sure there’s a lot of people that don’t know your name. Jokingly. I said about No, there. Yeah. I know. I’m gonna, I’m gonna, but that’s what’s the whole idea because it didn’t really exist and I think you’re on the next level of something like that. So I know you got a hard out.

I don’t wanna hold you up. Oh no, we’re good. Another few. But yeah. But, so tell us about what are some of the latest books you’ve been writing and what’s been coming out? What’s, what have those been? Because we have talked a lot about the, but we’ve jumped around a bit and I think that’s awesome because the energy of the podcast is great.

Jake: Yeah. New books are I’m trying to think of what I, can I, you know what? I have to confess that I can’t stand. I can’t stand with the whole, like I can’t really talk about that cause it’s under con, like this and that. But it’s true. And a lot of the people I talk to when I’m like, come on, just, and they can’t, so it’s really it has that kind of sheen of ego, but there’s no, you’re under contract, but I’ll tell you, I’ll tell you too.

Stephen: Okay. Yeah. I still doing the music biographies are you doing? Yes. Okay. I just,

Jake: It, I say it almost humorously because I’m writing it with the artist. But if the artist like the manager finds out and then we get in trouble cuz they’re trying to sell it. Yeah. But the one that is going out that I, that is, we’ve done enough on the people who are fans of Teddy Riley and New Jack Swing NUJ, Jack City was a movie based on the sound.

That this guy grew up making records out of his mom’s apartment and the projects in Harlem. And whether it was New Jacks, whether it was Bobby Brown, no, my Prerogative, or Keith Sweat, or Johnny Kemp or Guy, or as he graduated to Michael Jackson and then Blackstreet, and then on and on he’s just had one of the most.

Indisputably singularly influential careers in music. And I had the privilege for the last eight and a half, nine years, we’ve been working on this book quietly together. So it’s gonna be hitting store shelves at some point this year. I read a lot of hip hop, just, but now I do it, I only do authorized books as I have for years now.

Because I think it just gives me a chance to get much more personal with the right, with the artists and corrupt. From the Death Row era is another artist that I’ve been working with. Wow. And that’s fun. We’ve got d o c in that book and Snoop and Daaz and all the Death row camp. If you’re a fan of the Chronic and you’re a fan of doggy style of those records I grew up on from the nineties and eighties, I’m a child of the eighties high school in the nineties.

You’ll enjoy that book. There is a volumes three and four national songwriter are at some point in 2024 going to get out. That’s, there’s like a, that’s probably a two book deal cause that’s like a 700 page thing and I’m not cutting from it. So it’s gotta be cut in half. So it can be, cuz these, that’s the other thing I try to do is really keep these stories as authentic with the songwriters or with the producers.

I’ve got my behind the board series, which is Nashville, but also has Two Rock. There’s a volume two and three of Beyond the Beats coming out at some point here in the next couple years. And I’ve got an audiobook deal with Blackstone that they’ve been very patiently working with me on because they’re exorbitantly expensive and irritating to record.

And I read them myself, and then I have to employ editors to edit them. So it makes it sound like I did it competently. Full disclosure. And we weave in interviews. From the actual artist that I talked to, so that’s cool. Drum the beats. Yeah. Doctors are rhythm at the hip hop producers, so it’s more time consuming.

But yeah, between all of that. And then it’s a seven day a week endeavor doing this show. So I, if I get six hours a night of sleep, I’m happy. I interview probably 10 authors a week for new episodes. We film another five for the upcoming. So it’s just, I’m blessed to be in the third decade in this career, man.

And one thing I say to anybody who asks me about it is always be writing, always be trying to think out of the box. Always be thinking about marketing, which people hate to do. They think, oh, I’m gonna hide away and write my book, and then when I get done, it’ll all work out if you get done. And you and I, even with the ghost writing, I do, we try to do proposals while we’re doing it and have an idea of where we’re gonna be putting it when it’s done.

Because the whole point in writing a book is not. It’s first to do it for yourself, but then theoretically it’s to do it for readers. Think about the whole point of why we’re talking here. It’s because all of these authors made these indelible impressions on their readers. And then those readers when turn hear about how they created those books.

If you were just to say I don’t really talk about how, and some people do, some people are very, or they’re like Stephen King and they’ve just done so many interviews that lowly me or whoever is not gonna, but I really, we really try to honor the catalogs and get the full story and do it in a way that you can sit at home on a Friday night and watch it if you’re really book nerdy or or while you’re on the gym.

You at the gym, you can listen to it on your phone. You can, we don’t we don’t do. Like a podcast version because it’s a, you can stream it and listen, right? And we don’t wanna, and the other thing is I really tried to be respectful of is there’s so many great people like yourself doing book podcasts.

There’s fr friends of fiction which Patty Callahan, Henry hosts and some others and her partners. There’s a lot of really great. New content for authors looking for tools on how to do this in the space. And yeah, that’s something we just really tried across the genre. Every genre, every generation we try to profile, because that could be the next whomever or someone watching that could be like, you know what, like Eel James was.

That was, there was a lot of fan fiction that came out of that era that launched new authors. Yeah. There was a lot. Yeah. So hopefully roundly watching the show, you’re getting a sense of these people’s careers, their catalogs, their advice and how to move forward in your own writing

Stephen: career.

And you said something about the marketing. I think the way the mindset authors miss, for example, the Heart book, if you were, he, if you didn’t have other people promoting it, but if you were hesitant to market it to get that the word out there, then all the Har fans would miss that book. And they want it they’re like longing and dying for it cuz they love heart.

The same with just about any book that’s the, mar you’re not. Trying to get people to buy your book. You’re giving them an opportunity for some entertainment they want rather than entertainment they don’t really want, but it’s

Jake: there. And on top of that, yeah, we tr like Hart Souls at the, that book for years was sold at their shows.

Joe Satriani sells that book on his, G three tours all over the world. Bands go out these days and tour to make a living. It’s a bottom line. So if you’re writing with a band that you can then negotiate to get the book on their merch table as an example of thinking out of the box. That’s what I’m talking about.

This show was a completely out of the box concept. I have a wonderful agent, Frank Wyman at Folio Lit that helped me guide me on it. And I’ve been doing it 25 years, said I’ve been 35 instead of four, 34 instead of four. 44. I don’t know that I would’ve had the experience in maturity and had made the mistakes.

I’ve made, as many as I’ve had successes. I’ll tell you right before we go 2014, I had reached a peak. So starting from 2001, I was 24. I got my first book deal here. There’s, I was 37, 38. I know I had peaked, I had more press than I could have asked for this book In you for sat.

I could not sell a book to save my life for 2015. No matter who I called, no matter with my agent. So it you, every author that’s successful is also gonna prepare to go through dips of not being successful. And you have to reinvent yourself every few years. And so this show is, thank goodness me giving an opportunity to reinvent myself a little bit and learn so much.

Imagine getting to we both get to learn so much from the people that we listen to, and that’s the whole point is we can all learn more. We can all do better even if we’re successful. There’s always people competing for that next reader. It’s dollar and people think, oh, don’t judge a book by its cover.

They all do. So like the bottom line is the more. Depth we can give anyone beyond that cover. We’re trying to, because we’re in such a quick, phase now with the way people take in their reading, even their audiobook or their, my wife is a voracious reader, but she’s also a voracious audiobook listener.

Anyway I, we just have tried to and been lucky to fit into this new 2020s format and we just hope people keep watching and appreciate anyone who does. You can go to the YouTube channel about the author’s tv, Twitter. To b you just search about and it’ll pull up about the author’s tv.

And we thank you so much for Yeah. Helping promote it

Stephen: and I’ll put links in the show and it’s great talking to you. I appreciate e everything you’ve said. There’s been tons in here for authors. Yeah, man. But I hope musicians who liked bands will check out the books. Me too.

Jake: I appreciate it.

Thank you so much. All right. Thanks Jake. Take care, buddy. Bye.