Discovered Wordsmiths

Roger discusses a problem many authors face – starting strong but not finishing. Or not knowing how to finish. We talk about tactics that can be used to help finish your book.

So before we get onto our topic of discussion let me move my notes a little bit. What have you learned that you’re doing different now about writing publishing than when you first started? Not necessarily clear back in eighth grade, but your books now.

Roger: The more I write, the more I trust my own instincts to just begin the process and watch it unfold.

When I wrote my first, I set a goal to write my first novel before I graduated from high school. And I when I’m focused and when I have a goal, I am driven. And so I used to race home from school every day. By that time, my parents had bought me a little portable electric type. And I had it on the floor in my bedroom.

And I would sit crosslegged and I would put the paper in the roller. And I was typing. And I was 17 years old at the time. And I remember one day my conscious mind was looking down at my fingers on the keys. And the keys seemed to be moving and my fingers and the keys were, seemed to be moving on their.

And it frightened me a little bit cause I was only 17 and I wasn’t, didn’t know much about the creative process and I thought, is this a form of, I was really

Stephen: concerned, very much is a form of madness.

Roger: My, this symbolizes the crux of the creative process. So what I’ve learned and what I allow myself to do more and more is to get my conscious mind out of the way, to clear my conscious mind as much as I possibly can, cuz that’s where my editor resides.

The editor in me, resides in my conscious mind and let the, that spiritual and creative energy flow so that when I’m working on my first draft, things just move and low and behold. Things that I couldn’t have figured out or necessarily worked out in an outline. They worked themselves out in that first draft.

Not that the first draft is ready for publication by any means. There are several revisions that need to happen, but you don’t have anything to edit and revise until you’ve got that draft. So the most important lesson I learned that I’d like to share with your listeners is in the creative process, Let it flow.

Open up and let it.

Stephen: And that’s a difficult state. You have to write a lot, do a lot of sitting down and doing it before you get into that flow. And athletes talk about that. I know doctors, brain, surgeons and stuff will talk about it. They get into that state of just un, their consciousness almost just goes by itself.

You can. It’s hard to describe unless you’ve experienced it. Yeah.

Roger: And it takes experience and it interesting that you bring up the idea of athletes because one of the analogies that I use with the people that I, when I teach my writing courses or when I coach my, is I say your creative muscles are like your physical muscles.

When you first start exercising, you really have to motivate yourself to go to the. And you’re just learning how to use the equipment and it hurts afterwards because you’re not used to using those muscles. But if you do it consistently, then your muscles get attuned to what you’re doing and they get stronger and they get better, even better.

They start hungering to do that on a consistent basis. So if you work out on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, then I can guarantee after a few. Thursday night, your muscles your system is getting ramped up because it knows you’re gonna get up Friday morning and work out and it needs to be ready.

Creativity works the same way. If you write consistently, if you have some kind of schedule and you stick to it consistently, then in time your creative energy start setting up for it. There are so many people who, when they’re on their schedule and they’ll start dreaming. Solutions to the complications in their plot that they couldn’t figure out on paper because their subconscious mind knows, Okay, he’s getting up at tomorrow morning and he’s gonna write that night.

Whatever I was working through or struggling with or couldn’t come up with, my subconscious just gave it to me in a dream because I’ve developed the creative muscle. We all have that same propensity to be able to do that, and so it just comes from. For overtime builds that muscle and strengthens that creativity.

So it gives to you as much as you give to it?

Stephen: Yes. And for me that getting that state is sometimes I go for a drive which is not necessarily the safest when I’m like, Oh, what city am I in? I was just like, zoned out. Not a good thing. and the other thing. I don’t wanna say I’m like admonishing and yelling at parents and teachers, but I think for kids in school, the same thing we talked about with the reading, the same with the writing.

That if we give a kid an assignment to make them right, and it has all these million strict guidelines, and you have to follow this word structure and this many long sentences and spell the words right and get the punctuation right. They’re so overloaded with rules and things they have to follow that they lose their creativity.

To write. I think especially the younger grades, they just need to write the spelling. I know tons of authors that can’t spell worth anything, but they have software that does it. And if we just encourage the kids and focus more on the creative writing, we’ll get so much better writers from the kids and they’ll enjoy it so much more.

Again, the way it’s handled in school. And this isn’t the teacher’s fault, it’s just how we’ve done it, but I don’t think. Teaching kids writing by diagramming sentences and doing spelling words is the best way to teach writing. They need to write. And then we worry about the rest of it. Cause then they’re excited and they can see the mistakes they made much easier.

Roger: That makes sense. And that works for adult writers as well.

Stephen: Yes it does. Yeah, I’ve tried to tell some other ones that, not that I always follow my own advice

Roger: So on, on that note, let me share with you. So these are the two basic rules I give to authors when they ask me about writing. I said, I say rule number one in the first draft.

Don’t get it right, get it written. The biggest mistake and the biggest hurdle that. Aspiring authors make that keep them from finishing that first draft and ever getting a book completed is they edit as they’re writing. If you can free your creative subconscious to just write everything and leave the editor behind until the revision state, you’ll get to where you need to go.

And I explained to my students and my, my. You don’t know what to revise until you get to the end. Cause everything, whether it’s fiction or non-fiction, is building to a climactic scene or a major point. And until you get there and until you have that full first draft completed, then you really don’t know what to revise or edit.

So people who work on a chapter and then edit and revise and then work to the second. Most of that is wasted energy because you don’t know what actually you’re gonna have until you see the overarching story that you have, or very idea what persuasive argument making in your funnels.

Major point. And then the second rule that I share is rewriting is also real. I used to have this rule that, oh, I always had to be creating something new or it didn’t count. The revision process is as essential as the first draft creative process because the first draft, you’re writing something that means something to you.

Every revision you make after that, you’re recreating your work so it makes sense and has meaning for a reader. Both are equally.

Stephen: And I found myself after doing it through several iterations that some of my best writing was when I was editing and revising after I’d written it already. And that’s the stuff that came out the best that I liked.

I, a lot of people love first drafting, and then after that they don’t like the process. I’m like, Man I gotta slog through the first draft. And then it gets fun a totally different mindset. Now you mentioned the typewriter which I’m assuming you don’t use the typewriter to write all your stuff now.

So do you have any good software and services that you like that you’d recommend? I

Roger: do everything on Microsoft Word. I just write in Microsoft Word, and that’s still the standard for the industry so far as I know. When you send something to your formatter if you’re going to be self-publishing or if you own a publishing house, as I.

And you have a formatter. They’re transferring things from one program to another to get it into the shape that it needs to be to go to print. If you have it in Microsoft Word, that’s the standard that it’s easy, it’s easiest to convert from there. Recently someone is currently working on the ebook for my first last year, and we couldn’t find because my computer crashed around the time of the pandemic and everything, when everything just imploded in my life of.

Which was turned out to be a blessing cuz I had to start fresh with everything. But the original Word document was missing. But I had that formatted from my printer cuz I had already sent those files to the printer and had the hard copies. So I was able to get that version from the printing company and then send it to the ebook creator.

She had to convert it to Word and then convert it to the Eub Wow. Version. So I don’t use any fancy software or anything. I just use the basic tools and then work with people who use the different tools to create the products we put out.

Stephen: Nice. Okay. And what are you doing to market your book?

Roger: I have publicists who work with me.

One is a social media expert. The other one is a publicist who gets me interviews like this one here. I love to do speaking engagements. I do, as I mentioned, In our first talk that wasn’t didn’t get recorded. I have a keynote speaker and I create original presentations where I can tie award-winning films to any topic or any group.

And I have publicists who do that with me and to make, to get the word out and to get me connected to the right people.

Stephen: Nice. Good. Okay, so our topic for discussion. Tell us what it is and why you chose this topic. Cause I always ask authors a topic that we can talk about on the second half.

And yours, yours is very catchy. Cute, almost. I like so why? So mine

Roger: is stellar starts and fine tune finishes. I like alliteration. It’s easy. It’s either, it’s easy to remember alliteration. So I use a lot of alliteration when it comes to science,

Stephen: right? Like Peter Parker . There

Roger: you go. .

Stephen: So why did you choose this as a topic for us and for other authors to hear about, learn about?

Roger: I’m sharing this mostly with aspiring authors, not necessarily seasoned authors because the most frequent questions I get from people who are thinking of writing books or have dreams of being writers but don’t really know how to start I think if they know how to begin. That’s a powerful tool.

And then another frequently asked question is, How do I know when this manuscript is done? How can I tell? And so those, the two issues that I thought would be most helpful to readers who were listening.

Stephen: Yeah, absolutely. And so the starting of a new book I’ve known some people that jump, they will get partway through a story and then jump to the next new thing, jump to the, and they do that or.

They work on it and then they’re working on it, changing this paragraph, this sentence, this for four years. So that seems to fiddle along the lines of why I started off really strong, but now I’m afraid to finish it. What would you tell those people about judging their own starts and finishes to books.

Roger: That’s the example that I gave earlier. Their editor is getting in their editing mind is getting in the way of their writer. I know there’s some debate now about how much validity there is to the left brain, right brain mentality, but it’s a good analogy. So I’ll go ahead and use it.

So here’s a good, here’s a good test that you can give yourself. If in school you tended to enjoy math and science better, you’re probably more left brain, if you tended to enjoy English and history better, you’re probably more right. You might be wondering, what does that mean left brain people?

Your left brain thinks in concrete sequential patterns, so it likes to organize things. It likes to outline your right brain likes to just jump right in and just do stuff. So the key to a successful writing career, I believe, is to be able to use both sides of your brain effectively. And so to do that, I recommend that if you know you tend to be right brain.

Then just dive right in and start writing. If you have an idea for a book, at minimum I usually have an idea of where I want the book to end. It’s Okay, if this book is about such and such, then how do I want it to conclude? And then I just sit at the typewriter and just start moving through it.

That’s if you’re more right brain. If you’re more left brain, then you would benefit from outlining some ideas. Come up with some ideas and think, Okay, if I wanna write whether this is for fiction or nonfiction, it’s what are some of the things that are important to me? What’s this book about?

What genre is it in? What elements of that genre have to be there for it to fit into what the reader’s expectations are? And outline your ideas, set the outline aside, and then start writing. The idea though is we each tend to. We favor one type of thinking over the other. So if you know which type of thinking your brain favors, you can enhance your chances of getting started by using the ones are familiar and

Stephen: nice and which one are you, Which do you tend to lean towards?

Roger: It’s interesting you ask that. I think I’m a little bit unusual in. I was at a teacher in service one year, and we had to line ourselves up in relation to other people on where we thought we fit on the spectrum. I was at the extreme of either one, because if you look at my closet, you would think, Oh my gosh, this guy is so left brain, which makes sense because I became a librarian.

All my shirts are solid striped pattern dark to light, very. So in that way, I’m very left brain, but when it comes to writing or spiritual work or anything, my whole focus is let everything I think I know, push it to the side and just trust that there’s some bigger force that’s guiding me through what I’m doing.

Just sit down and write. So looking at a blank screen doesn’t intimidate me at. I just hit in front of that blank screen, put my fingers on the keyboard, and when inspiration hits it just starts going right. And I think I’m a little bit like you also, I’m a computer programmer database guy, so it’s very logical and structured.

Stephen: My closet is not like that though, . But I also have a lot of creativity. I played d and D when I was young, and I would rather sit down and create a dungeon module than just prop my feet up and watch football So I’ve got a little of both of those going on, and I think for other writers, People hear advice from someone who’s been doing this while, or someone that’s been successful or has books out and, oh they outline, so I’ve gotta outline, but it doesn’t fit and work with them.

Or they, Oh, that person uses this software. I better use that software. It’s good in that you try things and experiment, but everybody’s different. You really have to find what works best for you and embrace it and just use. Without using excuses don’t say, Oh, it’s the afternoon. I just low period in the afternoon, so I don’t do any writing on these days.

That’s now copying out an excuse and you gotta realize that too. Yes, it takes some experience.

Roger: I think the most important thing a writer can do is just trust is or her own instance. If it feels right to you and it seems like something that will work, try that and trust. Yes.

Stephen: So to finish up a book, what recommendations do you have for an op or that is done and has gone back and reread it and messed with it, and then went back and reread it and changed some things and they’re in this continuous loop cycle of it could be better, I can improve it, I can do something better.

What would you say to them?

Roger: First of all, you could always, we could always improve anything we. Everything that we write, if we reread it five years later, if we can’t see things that we would do better five years later, we’re not growing as a writer and we should. So it’s always going to be as good as it can be at that stage in your life, but not necessarily as good it can ever.

So when people ask me, how do I know when I’m finished? First, I wanna just. Aspiring writers and writers aware that when you spend months or years on a manuscript, you become very emotionally attached to the work and the process, so it can be very difficult to let it go. Sometimes authors just keep working and reworking something because they’re too intimidated to set it free.

Yes, and send it out to publishers or to their beta readers, or to whomever. They’re just they’re blocked by the intimidation of getting that work out. So I just say that to, to let writers know that is part of the process. That part of the process is the creative process is letting go of something at a certain point and just trusting that it needs to get out there.

Cuz it’s not helping anybody if nobody else is reading it by you. Yes. And the other bit of advice that I give, and this is what works for me when people say how do I know when I’m. I know I’m done when I make changes in my manuscript and I make them different, but not necessarily bad. And what I know.

I reached my level of, this is as good as I can get right now. I have to trust that it’s as good as it needs to be to help the people I’m writing for. Send that one off to your publisher or work on the self publication events through route you’re taking and then start your next.

Stephen: Something that I had to come and realize myself is reading books that I enjoy.

Stephen King. I’ve read him since I was like 10. Recently I’ve picked up some Kevin J. Anderson books which I’ve always enjoyed when he wrote Star Wars and XFiles and stuff But I’m reading these and I, an exercise I’ve done with others is just open one of your favorite books. And find a page or paragraph or whatever and read it.

And then rewrite it and rewrite it so it’s very cut and dried and not interesting. Write it very flowery and just exercise of just rewrite it. And you really come to realize that everything can be rewritten 10 different ways. Yeah. And it says the same thing, but it’s how your voice is. And you have to kinda let that go.

And then I’ve read. Books. King’s a good example where I read a sentence and I’m like, That sentence sucked. If I was a teacher, I’d mark that sentence wrong. It, it’s not written in it but it’s one sentence out of usually an 800 page book. Yeah. And you don’t remember that one sentence at the end.

It’s the overall story. So if King could write crappy sentences, but have good stories for the most part and other Kevin J. Anderson and Riling she gets dinged all the time. Her grammar isn’t good and this isn’t good. But everybody loved and read it, so guess what? She wins. Yeah. That’s way more important and it’s taking me a while to understand that if I go back through and I add a couple commas or I rearrange a sentence or two, nobody’s go care, remember.

And it will not improve this story. Exactly.

Roger: A bit of advice that I read years ago, I’m paraphrasing it, but William Faulkner said if any book he ever completed. Was ever as good as how he imagined it would be when he started it, he said, My career would be over. The creative process is always that hunger to get it as good as you imagine it when you first start creating something, and we never can quite get there, but that’s what keeps us writing.

Yeah. That keeps the whole process exciting because next time we can do better and we will do better if we stay in the practice of writing. Yes. You

Stephen: gotta keep writing. Great. Roger this has been really fun and great talking to you. But before we go do you have any we had a discussion on lots of topics, but do you have any last minute advice you’d give to new authors out there?

Roger: Yes, one, start the process and stick to a regular schedule. There are two ways you can do. Either decide you’re gonna write a certain amount of time every week, or you’re going to create a certain number of words every week, but choose the schedule that fits for you and don’t waiver from that. I guarantee if you get on a schedule and you follow it consistently, you will finish the novel or a non-fiction book much faster than you ever imagined possible.

It just happens. You get in the flow and it develops. It gets easier, it gets faster, and before Your first draft is done.

Stephen: Nice. Yep. Good. Great. And I hope some people listen to that and I hope it helps. I wish you luck on your book. We’ll put links to in the show notes for everyone to go check it out.

And I appreciate you getting on and chatting with me today twice for some parts of it, .

Roger: Thanks Steven. This was fun. Thank you. Yeah, thank you.

Dr. Roger Leslie is a scholar in the fields of success and education. Through major literary houses, medium and small presses, and his own publishing house, Leslie has published fiction and nonfiction books in multiple genres: historical fiction, inspirational self-help, spirituality, writing and publishing, movie reference, teaching and librarianship, biography, history, and memoir.
Leslie has won numerous national awards including ForeWord Book of the Year, The Ben Franklin Award, and Writer’s Digest’s #1 Inspirational Book of the Year. At its inaugural event, Leslie received the Houston Literary Award for his body of work.
Leslie is in demand as a teacher, coach, and keynote speaker. He leads FLY (First Last Year) courses based on his blockbuster memoir, My First Last Year. He draws from decades as an author, editor, and publisher to coach writers in groups and individually. He is also a sought-after speaker for his lively, entertaining keynotes relating award-winning movies to any topic or group.

Copperfield’s Books | Serving Spring/Klein, Texas for over 30 years. Family owned and operated 7 days a week. (copperfieldsbooks.net)

Roger, welcome to Discovered Wordsmiths. Again, this is kinda a back to the Future Groundhogs Day scenario.

For those of you listening, we got halfway through our. And I forgot to hit record. So all on me. Roger has been doing wonderful. And he can’t strangle me Roger, welcome to Discovery Word Smith. How are you doing today? Nice, Steven.

Roger: I’m doing great. Thanks for having him. Yes at least we didn’t get through a whole hour and find out, hey we didn’t record anything.

Stephen: In my defense, this is on new setup, so I’ll go with that. Roger again. Tell everybody a little bit about yourself, where you live and some of the things you like to do besides writing.

Roger: I live in the Houston area and I am passionate about writing and I teach writing. I’m a writing coach.

I am an editor. I’m a publisher of other people’s books. That’s all the businessy stuff that I do besides writing my own. And for my own personal edification, I love spending time with my dog and my family. I love old classic movies and I love anything that deals with spiritual growth. So anything that I can learn more about how life works and how I can work better with as life as it unfolds, I’m all.

Stephen: Nice. Nice. we talked in the unrecorded part about classic horror movies and watching those, cuz it’s almost Halloween. And so we’ll just summarize and say we talked about classic horror movies, , which is one of my favorites. So Roger, tell everybody why you wanted to start writing it.

It was a great story. I’ve heard it. Let’s tell everybody else for once what .

Roger: When I was 13 years old, I just had the inspiration that I was gonna be a writer. I had no prior experience or skills that told me I had what it took to be a writer. I loved reading and I loved television and movies. So I appreciated great writing.

But I didn’t know if I had the skill to do it, but something told me that’s what I wanna do. That’s how I’m gonna leave my mark outta the world. And I was just excited about that prospect. Here’s something I teach in my courses and in my TED Talk and in there are several areas. The rule for any great accomplishment is to take inspiration to action.

So I needed to take that inspiration to. What’s even better is before we ever get an inspiration, life already sets up everything we need to begin and to succeed. So it turned out that the very week that I had this inspiration that I wanted to be a writer, my English teacher at the time, assigned something that she had never assigned in all the years I’ve been in school.

She said, I want all of you students to do any kind of creative project. Doesn’t matter what it is. I just need you to do a creative project for a major. I knew immediately, okay, I’m gonna write a story. And that’s when I started. I just went back to my house. At that time actually, I used to type an old standard typewriter.

I had my dad had one with black keys and my grandmother had one. It was a gray one with gray keys. She helped me write my first short story and I wrote it on that old Ray typewriter. Manual typewriter. And when she passed away in 1990, my dad gave that typewriter to me. I have it in my office right

Stephen: now.

Oh, that’s nice. Nice. Okay, I’m glad we did redo this because you did not mention the first time around that you did a TED Talk. I That’s pretty fantastic cuz they’re pretty picky. So tell us real quick about that TED talk.

Roger: So there I was working as a librarian at a high school. I was an educator for many years.

I was an English teacher and. There was a faculty member on my campus who got a grant to be able to do a TED Talk with educators in our district, and he picked the people he thought that could give the vote, who might be able to give the most inspiring TED Talks. And so he knew about my book Success Express for Teens.

I’ve been working with teens on how to be successful and how to set goals for many years. So he asked me if I would be part of that program and I was, They recorded it, and then mine was one that was selected to be on the talk channel.

Stephen: Nice. Wow. That’s pretty cool. I’ll have to get the link from you for that.

Okay. So we can find it and link to it. That’s pretty. Okay. You are extremely busy and creative. So tell us about your book. Why did you wanna write this particular book?

Roger: Over the years, my focus had always been on writing fiction. My was, I wanted kind that inspired young reader f Scott Fitzgerald and the Great Gatsby Carson MCs.

And the Heart is the Lonely Hunter James Baldwin. And several of James Baldwin’s books, they just really touched my heart and I thought, You know what? This is what I wanna do. So I always focused on writing fiction, but as I was working through my career as a teacher, ideas and opportunities kept coming up, and I ended up writing in all different kinds of genres.

If you go to my website, roger leslie.com, you’ll see my books. I have books in all different kinds of genre, mostly nonfiction as well as. So I didn’t really have a specific idea of what book I wanted to write next. I was already in the process of writing few books and one night I had a dream, and in that dream I was told expressly to live the next 365 days as if I would never experience those calendar dates again.

As you can imagine, the dream that scared me on was like, Are you telling me I’m gonna die? But the dream. And the instructions continued and it said, Don’t prepare to die, but live each day so clearly and so presently that you can make an impact every day of the year as you live those days. It continued right about it.

Journal about it, and make that your next book. That idea thrilled me cause I thought, ok, I had another book idea and then the dream concluded with one more bit of. After I wrote the book, I was told teach other people how to live and get the most out of their life as well. That book became what I call my first last

Stephen: year.

Nice. Okay. That tells us a lot about the book. It’s, is it fiction or nonfiction?

Roger: It is nonfiction. It is a memoir of my experience. So through the year when I was first promoting the book I said it is like, Henry David throws Walden, except I didn’t go to the woods cause I don’t like to get dirty.

In essence, I lived a Walden experience, but kept the context of my life the same. I didn’t quit my job, I didn’t go off to, to any remote area and live by myself and grow my own food and of those details. What I did was I be, I focused on being completely present every day and really appreciating what I had each.

And also focusing on doing everything I wanted to do that year so that I, when I got to the end of my life, whenever that was, whether it was a year from that moment or whether it was anytime in the future, I could look back on my life with no regrets. Nice. And that was the focus of my first last year.

Okay.

Stephen: So give us an example of a few of the things in the.

Roger: So many different things occurred. I set some I’ve always been a big goal setter. I used to teach my students how to set goals. I help I teach courses called Fly First last year and that this is how that happened. This was interesting.

So while I was journaling as instructed and living my first last year, I kept writing out the words first last year, and it just kept taking so much. I just abbreviated it and it turned out to be f l y for first last year. And I, and the minute I wrote it down the first time, I thought, okay, that’s the theme of the courses that I’m gonna teach.

I’m gonna teach people to fly. So I focused on being present, being appreciative, making sure I was really living each moment instead of always having my mind somewhere in the future. What am I gonna do next? What am I gonna accomplish next? What? What’s the legacy I’m gonna. So it was being present and setting goals for everything I wanted to do, assuming that I had to do them that year.

Stephen: Nice. Okay. What are people saying about the book? People who have read it already,

Roger: of the book and the courses people are saying it changed my life. I’ve had some really great feedback on the book. Major players in the field of spirituality and inspiration as well as many people, just reviewers and just readers who enjoy the book and who taken and or who taken the

Stephen: classes.

Nice. So do you feel the book gives people what’s in the classes or is there more how do you get ’em together?

Roger: So the book and the classes were exclusive of each other. The book is My Journey, and so it was my first last year. It’s the journal that I kept during my first last year. So it can serve as an example or a template, but the focus of the fly courses is I teach people that no matter where you are, no matter what your dreams, I can help you make your dreams come true, and the way your first last year develops and evolves doesn’t necessarily have to look anything like mine.

If it does, and I set a great example for you, that’s wonderful, but if it only creates a springboard to giving you your own ideas of how you would do it even

Stephen: better. Nice. Okay. And do you have any plans for a follow up book to that or another course or anything to go with it?

Roger: Yes. So I’m continuing to create new curriculum and I’m doing different kinds of curriculum for different kinds of audiences.

One of my upcoming books is a Fly Book of Days, which is a calendar book, because one of the things I did during my first last year was anytime I did anything that I thought was really memorable or meaningful to me on a particular day, I recorded it in my book of days as this is. I will, I always want to remember that on such, such a date, I did this or accomplished this or had this experience.

So one of the next books that will be coming out within the next year is the fly book of days, which is which people who are working on getting the most out of their life can use so that they have a record rather than in journal form, just in calendar form what they’ve done and what they’ve

Stephen: accomplished.

Oh nice. And you keep expanding it. That’s pretty good. Cuz different people use and learn in many different ways. Yes. So that’s a good thought. Very good thought. So your fiction, do you have any plans for more fiction?

Roger: Yes, actually I’m doing the final revisions of a novel that I started last year.

And that novel should be, I’m hoping by Christmas of 2023 I’ve got a little bit more work to do on this one. But in the meantime I have three other nonfiction books that’ll coming out. So one of the things that happened when the pandemic first hit was that many of the writing clients that I had and the editing clients that I had everybody just disappeared cuz we didn’t know if the world was ending or anything.

And people were holding onto their money and staying at home. That opened up my schedule. And I, so I had a first last year inspiration. I thought, okay, so if everything else has been cleared away and now my time is free to do whatever I want to do, what is it that I most want to do? And that’s when I realized this was my opportunity to write.

And I did, And now I am actually at different stages of eight different books, five novels and three nonfiction. That will be coming out over the next few years.

Stephen: Wow. That, that’s very ambitious there. And you mentioned the website, so I assume all the books are on the website.

Tell everybody what your website

Roger: is. It’s my name roger

Stephen: leslie.com. Okay. That’s easy. We’ll put a link to the show notes for checking it out. And you said you’ve written in multiple fiction genres over time.

Roger: I’ve written in multiple non-fiction genres mostly. Okay. Most of my fiction is historical fiction.

Okay. Okay. I really, I, I love past time periods and everything I, my the different genres are nonfiction. I write inspirational and self-help. I write books that help people with success. I’ve written books for librarians. I have written biographies and memoirs. Little bit of.

Stephen: Nice. Nice.

Okay. We’ll put a link to the show notes. People can check out all the books there. So l let me switch gears just a little bit find a few things out about you. Growing up, what were some of the books and authors that you liked to read? Some of your favorites?

It could be now too.

Roger: Sorry. I’ve always been a voracious reader and so even when I was younger, I was reading. More adult fiction. My parents were very nice that way. They were very understanding. And let me read books that were meant for adults, not just children’s books. So as I mentioned earlier the book that touched me the most in high school was the great guest.

It was a heartbreaking experience for me. I was really struggling at the time with my own loneliness and just different issues that I had as a team feeling isolated, and it just resonated. And this a similar experience I had with Carson McCull is the member of the wedding and the heart is a lonely hunter.

And so those were some of my favorites. I love Winesburg, Ohio. I love, I’ve got that on my list to read. Oh yeah. I love that book. I read that once on vacation and I always connected that book now with where I was when I was reading it because it just made such an impression on me. I love the House on Mango Street by sans, which is a book I used to teach literature to my students, and so I created a unit.

This was back in the eighties and nineties when teachers had more. And more leeway with what they could create in their curriculum. So I taught senior honors and so I developed a unit great called great novels, and I picked 50 of the greatest authors of all time in English language. So they were British or American.

And I picked what was considered their masterpiece, and I created a unit where each student could pick a different novel, and then we would do different things with it. We’d have Lincoln Douglas debates. They’d have to write a research paper, they’d have to do a creative project, but that gave me a chance.

Because I had read some of those books, but quite honestly, I didn’t read all of them before I put them on that assignment. So that first year was interesting. I had a stack of those novels on my car seat as I was driving. And I would stop at the light and I’d open the book and start reading to the lighting so I could keep up cuz I needed to stay ahead

Stephen: of the students.

Wow. And that’s one of the, I love that they get a choice. One of the things I’ve talked to some other teachers about and. We always lament the fact that kids don’t wanna read. They’re not interested, they don’t wanna read, but then we force ’em to read books they’re not interested in. And I’ve, I’m like, Do you see the problem there that if you’re forcing ’em to read something that they’re not enjoying, they’re not gonna read and they’re not gonna care, and then that goes into their adult life.

But if we. Get them hooked on reading first and then worry about the books that we want them to read. It, sorry. It’s a easier process because they already like to read. Yes. You hit the nail on the heads, Stephen, when you, with what you just shared, because. I was also a librarian and when I got my degree in library science, my certification in library science, that’s one of the first tenants they teach you is you’ve got to get kids to love to read.

Roger: And one of the ways to get them to love to the to read is to pick books on topics that they’re interested in at a reading level, that they’re comfortable. Yes.

Stephen: Yes, and that, that was one of the reasons back in the day. Now this was beyond our time, but the Goosebumps books, I know a lot of parents like, Oh no, I’m never letting my kid read those books and stuff how many kids like devoured those and then went on to read everything available?

Because they liked to read and they got hooked on reading was something they really enjoyed. So man, if you give somebody Daniel Defo Robinson Cruso and say, Here, read this, or the great white Moby Dick and say, Here, this is the first book you’re reading. Read it now. Sixth graders go, Oh my gosh, this sucks.

But if they

Roger: read up, they think that’s what reading is. They think, Oh, a book must be dense and heavy and hard. Difficult to wallow through. That becomes their association and they associate with the emotion of feeling dread and oppress and boredom. No wonder they don’t wanna read if that’s how we start out.

Yeah. Yeah, I agree. And that’s one of the great things that JK Rolling did with the Harry Potter books, is she got them to read what they cared about and what they love and made the book so long. The first several publishers, she took them. Rejected them simply because they were too long.

They said, Yo middle school kids will never read this long of a book. Little did they

Stephen: know and their parents are gonna read it too. Exactly. I always look at the Har Romance women because they’ll read 10 books in a week and I’m like, You’re reading this cuz you enjoy it. You’re not being forced, It’s not dense.

They’re quick, easy reads so why are we telling our kids, Oh no, you can’t read anything you enjoy, you have to read this other stuff. We’re making your read. I, I don’t, that’s one of my crusades in my life. So maybe sometime if we meet up we’ve got the same message we could pass on to teachers and parents and for their kids.

Love that idea. Okay, so besides the books, do you have a local bookstore that you like to go to?

Roger: One of my very favorites is called Copperfield Books in the Houston area. It’s a run by a husband and wife, and the wife’s mother also works the register very often. My first experience there was so great because they have some local author events and so many years ago I found out about the store and I stopped by and I told them that I’m an established author and.

I would like to do some kind of a keynote rather than just set up a table and stand around. She was immediately amenable to that idea. She let me do a presentation on how to start writing a book. If you ever go about starting to write a book. The attendance was great. The people were fun, and it just started a great relationship that I valued.

Chapter books in the

Stephen: Eastern area. Okay. I’ll put a link to them in the show notes. And I, one of the things I’m doing an expert, not an expertise, but something I’m interested in, have some knowledge of is writing stories for video games. And I do a workshop with kids about writing stories for video games and how to make a video game without being a programmer.

And that’s a job you can actually get, which parents are like, ah you gotta. Get them to understand that a hundred years ago, being a screenwriter was not a job. Now it is. This is the next thing. That’s a workshop I’ve been working on with kids cuz kids love it, oh, I get to make a video game and I’m writing stories.

Roger: So good for you and good for them.

Stephen: Yes, it’s really cool. And I’ve got a contact that runs a school for video game stuff and he’s helped me a bit on it. So yeah, I love the things you’re doing and working with kids. Who’s go read our books when they’re adults if we don’t get them reading and who’s go write the next Harry Potter if the kids aren’t writing.

Exactly. All right, so Roger, before we move on and talk author tell everybody. If someone came up to you and said, Roger, I heard you wrote a book why should I get it and read it? What would you tell ’em? My

Roger: mission in life is to inspire people to live the life they dream and to empower them to follow their own unique journey to success and fulfillment.

If that’s what you’re looking for, If you wanna live the life you dream, and if you wanna feel empowered to li to follow your own unique. Read one of my books.

Stephen: Nice. Very succinct and well thought out. For any authors listening, you should come up with that paragraph to answer that question. I had an author go, Oh, I’m going to a book fair that I’m gonna be at.

And I ask that question. They’re like, Oh, I bet someone will ask me that. Maybe I should think of what to actually say. That you’ve practiced that I could tell. That was perfect. All right, Roger, I appreciate you being on talking about your book.

We have a great discussion about how to keep on writing. Many authors find it difficult to move on to the second book and Diane has some advice to help with that.

Since we write for kids, we include some discussion about working with kids and getting their imaginations going to write some great stories.

Stephen: All right, so let’s talk author stuff. Now we’re gonna talk about, the work part of it, not just the fun reading part. Okay. Before we get onto our topic, which I think is a great topic what are some things that you’ve learned that with your writing that you’re doing different now than you did at the beginning?

[00:26:25] Diane: That’s a, that’s really a good question. Before I didn’t really give a lot of thought to things. I just sat down and started writing, which is good. And I would just write anywhere, which is fine. It works with a lot of authors, but I find like I’ve really been studying this craft, learning from other authors, joined author groups, and in this I decided I needed to.

Have a room that was just a holy space for inspiration to come. And actually you’re sitting in the room right now. Over to the right is a desk that I have, and that’s where I just have a little meditation and. Just start riding and see what happens. And that didn’t happen before. Other things I do is I have I really resonate to smell and so forth.

I love oils and things, and I’ll get the ones like, Oh, I really need to have this kind of thought. And so maybe I’ll inhale some really lovely perfume that has a lot of wood in it and so forth. See where my mind takes me. Depending on, like, when I was writing the Rise book, I was in some chapters that I really needed to listen to music from the 1920s and that, I think that’s what one of the major differences is setting the environment and maybe the mood for that particular book.

A message that I wanna get across. Sorry for being so longwinded.

[00:27:50] Stephen: No, that’s great. That’s I, the whole purpose of the podcast initially was to help authors who are getting started and, aren’t USA Today bestsellers, because we hear a lot about the authors. Break out and start doing good and then everyone hears about ’em.

So the whole purpose to start with was focusing on authors that are getting discovered that need to get out there, that no one ever talks to. And I expanded with the second half here for the author part because I realized a lot of authors to these podcasts and they hear about, they hear authors on the podcast talking about their book.

But then they also look at how that person’s so successful and I’ll never be like that, et cetera. So I added the second author part partly to show, hey, we’re all in the same boat. I’ve had authors their laundry dings in the middle of talking to ’em, because authors think, Oh, every other author but me is working.

Fulltime in a nice office and blah blah. And that’s not the case. They like to hear from authors. It makes ’em feel, Hey I’m just like them. And that was the whole focus here of this podcast. So You’re fine. Yeah. Your stories are great. They, it comes across really well and they love that.

So thank

[00:29:03] Diane: you. It’s wonderful what you’re doing and what I’ve discovered about authors compared to some of the other things I’ve done in my life professionally is that, Authors are kind to each other, and authors love to help one another, and it’s not a competition. It’s okay, share ideas.

And you’re not like, Oh, I share my idea, you’re gonna steal it. And it’s no. It’s just, let’s go explore. And I just love that energy.

[00:29:32] Stephen: Yeah. I agree. Absolutely. So when you’re writing, you mentioned you listen to music and you’ve got oils and things like that. So the, you have an interesting process to help you get in that mood, get the inspiration.

Do you have anything else that you use, particularly any special software or services?

[00:29:50] Diane: No, not really. . A lot of times I do the old fashioned way. I love to just write on with paper, pen and paper, actually pencil and paper and just see what comes to my brain. And I try to carry with me a notepad because something might.

Come to me while I’m driving, and then I’m gonna have to pull over and write it down. . And I know I could quickly do it on my phone, but it’s just so much faster just to do old technology, paper and pencil. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:30:20] Stephen: I don’t write down much because by the third word, it starts becoming hard to read.

And by the second sentence it’s like illegible. So I’m not I think I I always say, If God wanted us to write, he wouldn’t have invented Word processors. And, so I’m glad for that. But I do have a voice activated recorder, and if I just have things churning in my mind, I can grab that when I’m driving or out with a dog or something and talk and try.

That’s very difficult. For some reason, I think it’s just my mindset. When I sit and I’m typing and writing it flows. But when I’m trying to just talk without typing, I stumble a lot more, so I think it’s something I need to work on a little more. That’s what I’m trying to get more of when I’m out and don’t have the computer in front of me.

[00:31:09] Diane: Yeah, so I think you’re lucky that you can just pull up the voice recorder and do that. I should do that. I think it’s great. Everyone has their own style. I think what’s lovely about the voice doing it, it almost puts you in the mood immediately because your brain, I think has that memory muscle.

Okay, yeah, I was right there. I know exactly what you’re. And reading a writing can take you that way, but there’s something about that audio that just puts your brain straight into your imagination, I think. Yeah, absolutely. Probably sounds silly,

[00:31:43] Stephen: but . So Diane, what are some things you’re doing to market the book?

You mentioned visiting schools and zoom in that how do you get those and what do you talk about at.

[00:31:53] Diane: I wished that somebody would’ve told me about this. I didn’t know authors could have publicists. I thought it was just movie stars. And when someone finally, goes, Diane, you need a publicist.

I’m like, What? And yeah, that would be something I would do so differently was immediately get a publicist and to tell your listeners that you don’t have to wait to get two books, to get one book do and I had the most amazing, incredible publisher making milk of sand. I hope that’s okay to say.

Yeah. And he is so down to earth and. I learned from him all the time and I just feel very blessed to have him. And now I don’t have to, I still market, but I don’t have to. I rely on him and it’s so nice cuz I can spend my time to, What do I love? Imagination.

[00:32:50] Stephen: I like that. Do you remember Disney World?

Figment the dragon?

[00:32:55] Diane: No. Oh, I remember Fantasia , the movement movie,

[00:32:58] Stephen: but there was, they had this whole thing about using your imagination, one of the rides, and they had this little purple dragon called Figment cuz he was a figment of your imagination. Oh, cute. Back in high school, I, we went for a band trip and I got one of those.

I still have my figment and they don’t have ’em too much anymore. I miss that. I wish they would. It was, I loved it. It was very Willie Wonka and what’s her name? , the maid that comes down on the umbrella. Mary Poppin, Mary Poppins and Peter Pin. It was all of that wrapped into one.

It was just, Imagination and trying to be a little crazy in that. So wish Figment was still around. . I am.

[00:33:37] Diane: Maybe you should write them. It sounds incredible and I love the name and you just mentioned two of my favorite things, Mary Poppins. I remember seeing it while you were probably still an angel in heaven.

Because it came out in fifth grade and. I had to see it twice. And back in those days, mom and daddy just didn’t give you your allowance. She had to earn it. So I was doing anything and everything to earn it to go back and watch it again. Cuz obviously you didn’t have Netflix yet, right?

[00:34:06] Stephen: Oh, dang. I was gonna ask something now I forgot. I’ll probably remember . That’s ok. I was did you like the the sequel that Mary Poppin’s returns that came out a couple years?

[00:34:16] Diane: Yeah, I thought it was really good. But, sometimes you just can’t, you just can’t remake some of the magic that happened with the originals,

[00:34:25] Stephen: agreed. Agreed. Yeah. Okay, so you suggested, we talk about why it’s important to keep writing as an author. Why did you choose that topic?

[00:34:35] Diane: I chose it because a lot of people start writing and then they think, Oh, I’m terrible. Nothing’s ever gonna happen. And they talked themselves out of it, and yet they had a beautiful message.

The one thing I’ve learned from many authors that are much more established than me, because I’m still learning this craft, is that just right. And so you get your first one out and you get published and it feels great, but by the time you’ve written your eighth book or your ninth book, you look back and go, My gosh, I’ve improved so much.

And it’s just it’s a learning process, right? If you have this message that you really feel like will resonate in the world and the people need to read it, write it, and get it out there, and there’s so many ways to do it, you don’t, as we mentioned earlier, hybrid, indie, and even if you just wanna write something that’s for your family, then you know, there’s blurb and I love blurb and we do some private things for our family only, and.

How lovely is that? Right?

[00:35:44] Stephen: And I agree with you. I think we mentioned, earlier, sometimes we lose our imagination as we become adults. It’s almost like you’re not allowed to have an imagination and enjoy some of that, like when you were a kid. . So I think more authors need to embrace that, but I think it’s also important for, no, excuse me, any teachers and parents that are listening.

Kids are natural storytellers. They are full of imagination. And I think sometimes they get that stifled. Parents are like, Oh, that’s stupid or that’s silly, and they don’t wanna encourage it. And they really. That hurts our world. It hurts the kids growing up. Then they feel like, Oh I can’t write because I’m no good at it.

And that’s just not true. I think kids could really, could use some encouragement sometime cuz we could have some amazing writers from that.

[00:36:33] Diane: Ab, Absolutely. You have hit a strong button with me where , I’m sure many people have stories growing up where the classroom teacher has done something.

And so I as a young teacher, I even wrote an article and had it published about, I called those teachers mushers. Where they smushed the imagination out of you. And there are parents that smush it too, because some parents wanna live through their kids and so they’re like, I want you to be in this direction.

But the kids like, but I really wanna go this direction. That’s not what our family does, but I really do this, because Every child is different. So maybe you don’t realize it as a parent, but maybe that child has a gift that came from the great Grandpa needs to have it brought out.

And imagination allows that. So I say to people, in your other podcast I mentioned how the Little Girl in the Moon was the first book that I painted when I was in sixth grade, my art teacher she made fun of me. And you can, I can feel the pain already. And I never took art after that because of the different things that she said.

And then one day when I was trying to figure out how to illustrate this book had started, I started taking painting classes and I thought, I don’t have to illustrate like everyone else. I’m gonna illustrate my way. And that teacher. I need to un hypnotize what she’s done to me. And now I do this whole thing with with adult teachers and parents and so forth.

When I give inspirational classes or speeches, let’s get un hypnotized. Let’s remove the smush that happened to you. We are going embrace imagination. I love that. Yeah. Thanks. And we’re all storytell. And that’s one thing I love to go and teach with adults is have them realize that they’re storytellers and we’ve always been storytellers.

[00:38:34] Stephen: Absolutely. And no kid grabs some Lego or dumps out Play-Doh or a box of crayons and says I better do this absolutely perfect, and I must plan it, and blah, blah, blah. They just wanna experiment and play and enjoy and have fun. It’s only when the adults step in that the kids start going, Oh, maybe I’m not doing this right, or Maybe this isn’t as good as I thought.

They just enjoy it and then we stamp it out of them like you. And I think that’s writer’s block right there. For adults, you get stuck because you just let it out, let the imagination out. So what if it’s not perfect? Sometimes a story that comes out is better than one that’s been fine tuned and tweaked in all, there’s some emotion to it.

This happens in music a lot. You can go to a hear two different cover bands play the exact same cover song. One of them’s on fire and it sounds good and gets you moving. And the other one you’re kinda like, Yeah, okay. You can’t define that feeling, but they know how to embrace it or they don’t. Same, with the

[00:39:35] Diane: writing, That was a great analogy.

Absolutely. You’re absolutely right. And I think the other we get naturally there’s something about peer pressure in kids and. And I can clearly remember thinking, Oh, that popular little girl there, she’s so popular. And look at her. She’s just away and

[00:39:54] Stephen: and I. You go to conferences or you’re on a panel or podcast with a q and a session or something like that, you always get that author going what do you do to write so many words every day? Or, I get stuck and I don’t write for a week. What do you do to get over that?

And I’m always thinking to myself just go You gotta stop thinking so much about it. Just get something out. And I’ve heard others say, too, so what if you erase it later or change it, or, That’s fine. But sometimes you get some of the best stuff. You get that feeling and that emotion into it. When you’re not worried about the grammar, that, okay, your teacher, what drives me crazy with stories and I’m not saying anything negative and bad about teachers or schools or curriculum or anything except that.

There is sometimes way too much focus on the craft diagramming stories and the grammar and the punctuation and the spelling, and, they wanna focus on the spelling so the kids get out of their own heads. Is that spelled right? Did I, And they lose the whole momentum of writing. I think especially the younger grades.

Just let ’em write, Worry about all. Other stuff later, they can fix all that. But until they get to writing and the joy and the feel of it, all they’re going to be doing is writing well written sentences that nobody wants to read.

[00:41:11] Diane: You hit something else with me completely. I agree with you because I I really wanted to take journalism in high school, but I couldn’t because I made a B in freshman English on diagramming sentences.

If you made a B in that section, you weren’t allowed to take journalism. You couldn’t be on the newspaper. Nothing. Wow. I know. Isn’t that sad? And so I had it in my head. I wasn’t a writer because of what had happened. And then when we would have creative writing and I would just, I was one of these people that my ideas would just start flowing.

And so I just and then when the paper came back for the first edit, I was in shock cuz it was covered in red, move this paragraph here and why did you think like this and why didn’t you use an exclamation point? And I. And everyone else is Oh, this is so good.

At least I felt that way, as I looked at the popular kids and I had long hair and so I would just take it and drap it over and then I would just hide my eyes because I’d just be crying, . And so it is kind funny. Now I wanna find my English teachers and tell that I’m a writer. ? Yes. Nice.

I know. I’m so sad. So are you out there? Don’t worry about that. Just put it down. You’ve heard how there’s two kind of writers. Have you heard that? There’s special words. There’s the person who sits and just writes everything that comes down and doesn’t worry about it. Cause you’re gonna mesh it all around.

So that’s me. And then you have the person who has to map it all out and know how the story line’s gonna go. And that’s great too because you know they have great stories. But for me, I just, the idea comes and I just wanna let it flow and then I end up. Meshing it all around and moving. It’s like taking clay and then shaping it so you’re happy.

And actually the person who does the whole mapping out and then writes each chapter the way they want, eventually they become meshing it all around too. So each one shares each one, but Right. Just write. And if you only get five words that day, are you only write for five minutes. And before you know it, the next time you’re gonna write six minutes.

And the next, before you know it, you’re writing 10 minutes and it’s gonna grow. And I know that because that was my experience.

[00:43:45] Stephen: And I find it interesting because you were talking about telling your stories to the kids, talking to ’em, and when you were describing your story, you got into that mode,

But thinking about it, and if you just transcribe what you said there’s probably sentences that could be worded better. There’s s in between things and Yeah, there’s, you may have forgot a little part. Oh, you have to. So when we’re telling the story and talking, we don’t think about and worry about the gra the craft and the grammar and all that.

We just tell the story and people get into it and they miss all that. And I think we, our theme, just keep writing. We forget that sometimes I go, I think of two of my favorite authors, KOTs and King, that their first books KOTs had the vision and King had Carrie. And out of all of the stuff I’ve read by them, those are my absolute least favorite books out of both of them.

Their first book. So if they were so worried about how great this first book was and everything, they wouldn’t have wrote all the other great stories that I do love. And sometimes it’s the third or the fifth book that. Really gets into and that, think of your favorite musicians, favorite artists.

Let’s say the Eagles. The Eagles have had a ton of hits through their lives and careers, but we don’t think about all the songs on the albums that are duds and we really didn’t care for, We remember all the hits and we think of them as big and popular, famous. So sometimes you gotta write and tell the stories and maybe more people need to practice Duke being storytellers and talking and telling the.

Rather than so worried about writing with the grammar and craft and all of that.

[00:45:19] Diane: No, you’re absolutely right. And just write, it’ll come. And I loved how you talked about, the first, these incredible authors that you just mentioned and. How their first ones weren’t that great, but look what they’re doing now.

And you’re like, you can’t put their books down. They’re like, Oh my God is so scary. But it wasn’t, there, but again it’s learning the craft, learning what I call your toolkit with words. And and just have fun. Just let that imagination flow. Ask yourself, what is the message that you want to convey?

And once you know what that message is, and people get stuck on, Oh, my opening sentence has to be great. And I’m like, No, you’re opening sentence when you first write it isn’t gonna be the opening sentence by the time you finish that story just right. Yeah. And you might find that opening sentence is really your closing sentence.

And you just had fun and by the time you write it, and don’t be afraid if you are like going, okay, this is the third time through. Let me tell you my rise, a girls struggle for more way. It’s a historical fiction. So it took a lot of years just to study the history, but that edit, I must have had about 10 edits even with an editor.

By the time that one was finished, and that was a whole craft all in itself. But that gave me the strength and taught me that, wow, I really am in awe of people who write historical fiction or any kind of chapter book. It’s amazing, but it gave me the confidence to know that I could do it. But opening sentences.

Don’t sit there and go, It’s not a good opening sentence. I can’t write anymore. Oh, it’s not a good, And you’re just stuck on that opening sentence. Just write.

[00:47:15] Stephen: Yeah. And another aspect of that with the whole keep on writing thing is sometimes you gotta just stop editing and fusing around with the one you’ve been working on, Let it go and move on to the next one.

Keep writing that next in series over that next book idea. Because sometimes what you’ve got with. Book you’ve been working on for two and a half years is as good as it’s gonna get. Any changes are so minor, no one will notice. But you can invest all your new thoughts, ideas, and everything into the new book, the next one, and sometimes we have to keep writing and just move to the next one.

[00:47:51] Diane: I am so glad you said that, and that is so true. So even while I was working on Rise, I was writing children’s books and there were many times that I totally didn’t even touch rise. I needed to just get away from it. And just embrace back into my children’s head mode of imagination. And then again, in the middle of the night, bam, it came and I was ready for another chapter.

And it’s amazing how that can happen. But again, writers be open to when that inspiration comes and let it come and write. Yep.

[00:48:32] Stephen: Absolutely. And. That’s a great way to end our talk in the podcast. That’s good advice for everybody. Thank you . Diane. It’s been great chatting with you and talking about your books and about the writing craft and the imagination, especially with kids.

I I feel inspired now for the rest of my day. I appreciate it. You’re welcome. So I wish you luck on the book and I’ll let you know when this does go live. Thank you so much for chatting. Thank

[00:48:58] Diane: you for having me. What you’re doing is amazing and I’m gonna make sure lots of authors tune in to

[00:49:04] Stephen: you.

Good. Great. Thank you. Thank.

Diann Floyd Boehm is an award-winning international author. Diann writes children’s books and young adult books. In addition, Diann writes books to inspire kids to be kind, like themselves, and to “Embrace Imagination”.
Diann’s Story Garden YouTube Channel gives children the opportunity to hear different children authors read their stories.
Diann is the co-host with Dr. Jacalyn on USAGLOBALTV.
Diann continues to be involved in various humanitarian projects with multiple organizations.
Diann was born to parents of George and Mabel Floyd in Tulsa, Oklahoma, but grew up in Texas with five brothers. She has traveled extensively to many parts of the world and has lived in the Philippines and Dubai.

Home – Diann Floyd Boehm

Bookstore | Black Pearl Books | Austin

Today on Discovered Wordsmiths, I want to welcome Diane Bo. Diane, how are you doing today?

[00:01:22] Diane: Great. I’m so happy to be here. Thank you very much.

[00:01:24] Stephen: For me, I live in Ohio and it looks like it’s about the storm. So we may get some lightning and thunder in the middle of our conversation, but tell us where do you live and a little bit about you and what you like to do besides.

[00:01:36] Diane: Sure. So I live in Austin, Texas, and can you please send some of that rain to us? , We would deeply appreciate it, , but uh,

[00:01:44] Stephen: actually the second Austin Texas author I’ve talked to today. Oh, really? . Yeah. That’s interesting. All right, go ahead. I’m sorry.

[00:01:51] Diane: Yeah no, it’s okay. I just had to throw the rain out there.

So yes. I’m from Austin, but I was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma. And my parents, we moved here when I was about 18 months. And so I consider myself a T girl, even though by the rules of Texans, you’re not a true Texan unless you were born on the land.

[00:02:12] Stephen: It sounds like you’ve spent more of your life there than not.

So we’ll give it to you, you think? I’ll give it to you. I’m not from Texas so I might try, but you can come to Ohio, We’ll take you, ,

[00:02:22] Diane: Right? Thank you. Ohio’s a lovely state. It

[00:02:26] Stephen: can be even during the storms. Yes. Even during the stores, there’s so much. So what are some things you like to do besides riding?

[00:02:34] Diane: So I wasn’t always a writer, I was actually in the classroom, but things that I love to enjoy, I love to sing.

Thank you. And I’ve been on stage quite a bit in my younger life as well as when we were living in Dubai, my husband job took us there and it opened up a whole new world for me. So I was able to be in some musicals with the West End out of London. And I love crochet singing. I’m eccentric.

I just, I love to dabble in lots of things, discover life. Enjoy gardening, listening to the birds, et cetera. .

[00:03:09] Stephen: Nice. Okay, great. So you were in the classroom teacher what did you teach?

[00:03:15] Diane: A variety of things. So I’ve taught from preschool all the way to eighth grade. In the classroom and then outside of the classroom.

Meaning in the classroom means you had one grade, but then I became a curriculum director and I was self taught before there was degrees in a technology and I was of that weird person who’s just Oh my gosh, these’s computers are amazing. I can do so much with my kids. And so I just totally embraced.

And before I know it, they were like, Okay, who knows how to turn on a computer? And everybody had just Okay, there is the weird teacher over there and . And the next thing I knew I was teaching from first eighth grade. Nice. Okay. Yeah, it was

[00:03:58] Stephen: cool. So what made you wanna start writing?

[00:04:01] Diane: I have always been a storyteller whether through singing on stage and acting as well as just making up stories.

My mother said when I was, the day I was born, I came out singing and I hadn’t stopped . Got it. And and singing such a way of a beautiful storytelling as and a day came, I was in the garden. And I’m not a great gardener, but I. To have fun planting flowers and playing in the dirt.

And then, this inspiration came to me saying I needed to take my stories and put ’em down. And so I thought, you know what, that’s really a good idea. And so that’s what I did, . Nice.

[00:04:41] Stephen: Okay. Yeah, so let’s talk about one of those stories. Your book, Little Girl in the Moon. Tell us what, it’s a little bit, what it’s about and a little bit about your writing it, what you were, why you wanted to write this.

[00:04:53] Diane: Sure I’ll be happy to. The little girl in the moon, she actually lives on the moon and I wanted to write this book because, especially cuz I’ve traveled throughout the world, I’ve been totally blessed to be able to do that. And I saw how there was similarities in different schools. Bullying is universal.

And I just thought, there needs to be books out there about kindness and love, and even if people are different, don’t look at their physical features, look at what’s in their heart, and So I thought, how could I do this? And also bring in curriculum so that teachers could use this book. So I decided I’ve always loved the moon and I thought I’m gonna make my own world.

And that’s what I’ve done. The little girl on the Moon’s a series and it’s morphed into the Moon Link Adventure. But in the first book that you brought up, and thank you very much, the little girl in the moon. You learn who she is and you learn who she is by the phases of the moon. And what I mean by who she is.

Her mama asks what she, why she wants. Earthling children to know who she is because moon lengths have never cared about earthlings and they don’t even know we exist. And the little girl in the moon’s because they love the moon as much as I love the earth. And so the mom is what is it you want them to know?

And she thought about it and she says, I want them to know. I like to sing just like them. And so you go through all these different. and when I’m in the schools and I read it to the kids, they get all excited. Cuz they see little I you learn about her through seeing like the. Phases of the moon, right?

So you see teeny tiny pieces until she appears and the kids are all excited and then they see what a moon lean looks like. And they’re like, Oh. And they’re like, Yikes. And I’m like you liked her a moment ago, but now you know what she looks like and you don’t think you wanna be your friend. And the little kids are like, Oh my gosh, she’s right.

And the takeaway is, Okay. I’m gonna like people, even if they’re different. And isn’t that what life’s about? We’re supposed to look for the beauty of people.

[00:07:12] Stephen: Yeah, absolutely. And I love the fact that you totally went into your school Kid Voice

Totally did that. I love that. excited. It’s, Interesting. Do the kids pick up that they’re like learning a lesson or do they just enjoy the story?

[00:07:28] Diane: They en they just enjoy the story and then we talk about afterwards and then they discover, they learned. But they’re so engrossed in finding out what happens because the way I I illustrated it and it’s the first pa, it’s the.

It’s the first artwork I’ve ever done in my life, which is a whole background story to that in itself. And the kids are just so amazed that they have to use their imagination and start thinking what they might, it might look like at the same time. They’re like oh, I’ve seen a banana moon. And they’re like, Oh, I know that part of the moon.

And so it is, it’s a really great way to engage kids. They’re not just staring at a picture, they’re thinking.

[00:08:09] Stephen: I love that cuz one of the things I wanna do is get kids to write more and understand that they can write their whole lives. I talked to a lot of adults, a lot of authors that are like, I didn’t know I could write.

And then I did and now I’ve written and I love it and kids can start now. I mean you, you don’t have to have a degree and to start writing when you’re in fifth, sixth grade, whatever. You can just do it. And the fact that you said they have to use their imaginations, I love that part too, cuz. Something we, I think we tend to lose as we become adults.

We kinda get that out of us. So having kids use their imaginations is just huge and to understand the power of that.

[00:08:49] Diane: Absolutely. And of course my tagline is embrace imagination. And that comes from all the way being in the classroom because the kids when you have me as a classroom teacher, it is all about creativity.

Yes, you have to learn the basics, but you learn it through creativity is the way I approached my c. And the kids today, I worry about them because they have all these devices and they’re so plugged in. And I, and it’s funny because I spent so many years teaching kids to be plugged in, but to use the computer as a tool yes.

And, but not take away the imagination. And so now I just think it’s so important. Take off your shoes, wiggle your toes in the grass, pour some, sit in the dirt, pour some water in the dirt and make mud pies. It’s really fun.

[00:09:46] Stephen: Absolutely. I love that. And I agree with you. I think we want, our kids had the best of everything and we get the iPads and the computers and the laptops and then we realize that, just going outside and walking on grass and your bare feet is sometimes what’s best.

I, I, Yes, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. So you mentioned it’s, the book has morphed into a series about the moon links you said? Yes. So tell us a little bit about the other books, the whole series.

[00:10:14] Diane: Sure. So thank you for asking by the way. So the next one that came out, and again, these. Ideas come to me in the middle of the night.

And so the big idea of the story by did is just hysterical. I had a fight with my angel. I don’t wanna wake up. You better wake up. Or I’ll give the idea to someone, but I don’t wanna, Anyway, so I up and and there came the story and it even has what I hope becomes a song one day. And.

That particular story is really about love and peace and harmony throughout the universe. And then the next one is Moxy and Tyco Town. And Moxie is the mooning dog and the mooning dog takes you on with the little girl on the moon, but you never really see her. So it’s Charlie Brown, you hear for the parents.

So that’s what I had because. I didn’t want everyone to be just stuck on what one mooning looked like. I wanted kids from around the world to envision their own little mooning as they travel through Taka Town and they start learning the very first of of mooning words through the community. So that one’s kind of fun.

And then it was time I kept getting, Please bring a boy in. Please bring a boy in. So I brought in the mooning boy, her best friend, and that morphed into the Moon League Adventures. And the first one is the Moon League Adventures. Seren Getty. And my youngest daughter who’s a professor at Skad University and teaches technology, by the way.

She’s the artist and just did a phenomenal job with it. And you get to learn about different animals in the Serengeti as well as where is the Serengeti. And and it’s just a, it’s just really a fun adventure, and I’ll have a new one coming out by next August.

[00:12:11] Stephen: Yay. Great. Nice. And are these, do you have a publisher or are they independently published?

Yeah,

[00:12:18] Diane: I am so blessed. I wanna say to your listeners that. It takes a long time to get published. Oh my gosh. There are more nos than there are books of mine published. But praise God that we have in indie authors, can publish is much easier now as well as hybrid. So I ooc publishing out of Canada.

Published has all my little girl on the moon series as well as a couple other books. And because I have so many stories and it took so long to get published I worked out a deal with OC Publishing in Canada and it’s just incredible the the founder and owner and so Texas Sister Press publishes some of my other books so that I can get, try to get two books out a year.

Because I really want my, I really want my messages out there and you never know when the good Lord is gonna need you somewhere else on another planet or something. So I’m like, I want my messages.

[00:13:19] Stephen: So good. So good. So how many are there right now? Total?

[00:13:24] Diane: I have nine books out. Wow. Ok. Yeah. I know.

Isn’t that exciting? And and then I just had a Yeah, nine books I just had. I’m taking a breath because I’m thinking about what’s coming up. I just had one book that came out that won an award called a song, a piece that came out this summer and then just about two weeks ago, a time to fly. Just came out some so stoked about it.

As you probably know and your listeners too, but just in case, if you’re wanting to write, just start writing because what you first write probably isn’t your greatest, but you just get better and better. It’s like you’re learning this craft and the inspiration that comes to you just like.

It just gets better and better. I don’t know what to say, so just keep doing it. So it’s time to fly. I fall in love with each baby when it’s baby, meaning my book when I

[00:14:16] Stephen: hold it. So it sounds like the kids get into the books and enjoy them and you’re on book nine. So you’re getting some good feedback, I assume.

What are the parents.

[00:14:24] Diane: If it hadn’t been for Covid, I was my grow being asked to come into the schools were it was really growing. Luckily different parents in the different parts of the world that are educators have invited me into their schools through Zoom. So I’m getting really positive feedback and before Covid and also living in the Middle East, I was lucky enough to teach in Saudi Arabia creative writing all the way up to think I did up to sixth grade, and then spoke to the eighth graders and did a q and a.

And then I’ve been at a lot of British schools and American schools overseas and Wow. So it’s kinda fun to know that here in America, now that I’m back in, in my homeland, that I have school teachers reaching out to me now and asking me to come. So that’s cool. And then, yeah, that’s very good.

And then, because of Zoom, I can now go back into these other schools and go, Okay, I’m in Saudi Arabia and a British school today. How cool is that?

[00:15:22] Stephen: Very cool. Yeah. Yeah. That’s something definitely an experience you may not have gotten and it, it brings the world a little closer together, I think, too.

[00:15:29] Diane: Absolutely. And it. When you’re in these international schools, you’re with, one of the American schools in Dubai has 175 different nationalities just in that one school. And that’s huge. And to be part of that, It isn’t just about me sharing my books, but learning from these kids too.

Because what I like to do is not just come in and read a story, I wanna be engaged with the kids. I want them to share their thoughts. So I always try to make sure that I’m asked to do creative writing with them and learn from them.

[00:16:07] Stephen: Nice. Yeah, I like that. Thanks. So if you had a choice the world traveler that you are, would you rather see your books turned into movies or TV shows?

[00:16:18] Diane: Oh my goodness, it would, That’s a great question. Hey, that would be amazing on any level. It would, it really would depend on the storyline. I truly believe that the little girl on the moon, Which is morphed into the Mooning Avengers makes great, would make great animation and excitement for the kiddos because there’s no fighting, there’s no violence.

It’s your learning, but you’re having fun and your imagination is growing. Where my book, that’s a young adult historical fiction rise. A girl struggle for more Definitely is is a movie. Definitely is a movie. Okay.

[00:16:54] Stephen: Now you mentioned being in schools all over. Do you get your books translated or are they still in English and you’re going to these schools with an English copy essentially?

[00:17:06] Diane: Another excellent question. Yes, they’re all in English and English is the international language. So even though I’ve been in lots of schools, including in schools in Africa, in several countries, because Africa has lots of countries, people forget it. So con it’s a lot bigger

[00:17:22] Stephen: than it shows on the maps that we show our kids.

It’s

[00:17:25] Diane: huge. And yeah. And all the different countries are just so amazing. But but even like in Uganda, Ethiopia, and Kenya, I am like way out in the barriers are in the Philippines way out in the Barrs as well, and everybody speaks English and I’m always blown away by, My husband, he is blessed with a wonderful ear and can pick up languages and speak several languages, but for me, I just did not have that confidence even though I, definitely studied languages in high school and even actually junior high school and college.

But I just didn’t have the confidence. But yeah, the kids, it’s amazing. Like in Uganda. and some parts English is the only language they want the kids to speak in school because they want the kids to get a job. And I find I, I found that very interesting.

[00:18:20] Stephen: Yeah. So let me ask a little personal question.

Your husband does he do different accents? Like he, can he imitate various accents?

[00:18:28] Diane: Oh my gosh, , that is a compliment that they all say. He was one person from Dubai and he an emira. That’s what. I’m called a Texan, right? I guess you’re called Ohio. What? What do you Yeah, Ohio.

Yeah, Ohio. So they’re, it’s Emiratis for the local and they’re like, I would’ve never known that he was in an Emirati, which is like the greatest compliment. And then I remember going to dinner one night with some new clients that came in from Korea, and they were. You as me has that Korean accent done so well, and I’m like, I’m so proud of that

I’m like, How does he do that?

[00:19:04] Stephen: Yeah. I asked because I am not good at picking up languages and I’m also really horrible at accents, so I think they go together.

[00:19:12] Diane: Yeah. Yeah. It’s something about that rhythm. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:19:16] Stephen: Okay. So Diane where can people find your book? And do you have a website?

[00:19:21] Diane: Yes, I do. Thank you. Of course Amazon, Amazon’s kind of Santa Claus. They bring everything, right? And Amazon did not pay me to say that anyways but you can find me at, I’m gonna, I’m gonna say my name and then I’m gonna spell. So it’s Diane Lloyd ba.com, but I’m gonna spell it because it’s different to spell it.

Yeah. Ok. D i a N as in Nancy, N F L O Y D B O E H M dot coms. And it looks like Behe, but it’s Diane Floyd ba.com.

[00:19:57] Stephen: Ba. Okay, got it. Okay, we’ll links in the show notes.

[00:20:01] Diane: Thank you. And I’ll tell you a teeny, tiny story cause I know it we’re, It’s almost time to go. Oh no, Keith, go ahead, please. Oh, okay. So the reason Floyd is that it’s my maiden name and my daddy, he said, Diane, he knew he was gonna leave us to go to heaven.

And he said, Diane I know you’re gonna be published one day, so I have a favorite ask of you. And I said, Okay, Daddy, what? And he. Please bring back your maiden name. It would make me so proud. So after that I just went Diane Floyd Baam. And do you know what I was published , I think daddy, when we went to have made sure.

So

[00:20:39] Stephen: Nice. And you said you have a book coming out by next August. Give us a little preview what that one’s about.

[00:20:45] Diane: Sure that’s Moon Ling adventures birds around the world. And my daughter’s doing the illustration. It takes a while cause she’s a professor. But that book lets you see all these incredibly gorgeous birds that you may not have known about, but it also, without you realizing that you’re learning geography because of the migration and.

It’s gonna be incredible. Really. It’s gonna be incredible. And the way the moon links. So what happens is the moon links, they go to the observatory. So what I’m hoping is kids realize, Oh, I wanna go to the observatory and have their parents take ’em there, if as possible. And because they’re at the Moon Ling observatory, they’re able to watch the earthlings and different things that go on.

And they do a simulated. Adventure. And so kids are like, it’s really in tune to what kids are today, simulated adventures and fun. And so that’s how it all comes about. And the two, the little boy in the moon has his own doggy called Shadow, And Shadow and Moxie are all part. Of the story and the adventure.

So it’s really, again, take an imagination. So like when I’m in the classroom and I share these things with the kid has, I’m like, Okay, if you could go to what planet, how would you create your language? What would it be? I just wanna, you can do this, and before you know it, they’ve written their own little adventure and I just go away so happy because that’s what I want.

Embrace imagin.

[00:22:19] Stephen: I love that. That’s exact . It’s funny you say that. My, my, I. On my website, I have things for teachers and parents called Imagination Inspiration, and it’s little prompts to help parents. But my first book is called Embracing the Magic, and Oh, wow. The lesson in it, it’s a fantasy book in a fantasy world.

It’s, with some fantasy creatures like Golans and stuff like that. . But the whole point is trying to show kids that there’s magic in the world. Yes. Even with us here, And that’s my point. So we’ve got a good, we think a lot alike. We should sit down for coffee sometime,

[00:22:58] Diane: please. I think we’re kindred spirits.

[00:23:01] Stephen: That would be great. Yeah. I love that. . So let me ask you this. Oh, who are some of your favorite authors and books that you like to read?

[00:23:07] Diane: I’m horrible about saying the author’s names and that just terrible. But I get so engrossed in the books and really, I read a lot of children’s books.

So what if you could see me right now? If everyone could see me right now, you would see that you’re in my Story Garden. So I like sun far. I have over I painted that by the way. I have over a, a hundred children’s books that I’ve read mom and daddy read to me as well as books that I collect.

And, but when I think about books that I like, the reason I like children’s books is because people say, Oh, Children’s books are just for kids. And I disagree with that. I think they’re for everyone because they have a message and it’s a simple way to do it. So one of my favorites was my sons Alexander and the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.

I just love that because we all have those days, right? But in the end, It’s gonna be okay. And then, there’s another book that doesn’t get much hasn’t talked about that much, but it’s really wonderful. The big fat strawberry and a hungry bear and the big fat strawberry. Do you know that one?

[00:24:21] Stephen: No, I don’t know that. So it’s a maybe, but yeah, I don’t

[00:24:25] Diane: remember . So it’s, you know this bear and he has this strawberry, No, the mouse has this strawberry and the mouse thinks someone’s going to get it. So he puts he chains the strawberry. And you see this shadow and then as you read the book, you’re thinking, is it really a bear?

And so the author. So clever because in the end there’s a question, is there really a bear who ate the strawberry? And again it just, the kids are like making up their stories.

[00:24:57] Stephen: Yes. Yeah. Okay. And there, in Austin, where you live, do you have a favorite bookstore that you go. Oh,

[00:25:04] Diane: Yes. . So I do, We have an indie we have an indie bookstore and we have a new one that just opened up called The Pearl. And I’m really excited about it because they support indie authors and yay.

And I’m all about supporting IND authors.

[00:25:20] Stephen: Yeah. Agreed. I like that. Okay. Yeah. So before we move on to author stuff, and we’re going to talk about keep how important it is to keep on writing as an author. For those of you that are listening, that’s our second half. But before we go, if someone asked you, I’m looking for a book for my kid, Why should I get your book?

What would you tell ’em? ,

[00:25:39] Diane: if you’re looking for a book for your child and you want to inspire. My books are about kindness, peace, hope, love, and if those resonate with you, then definitely my books are for you.

[00:25:57] Stephen: Okay, there you go. Great. Thank you Diane. The book sounds wonderful and it’s been a great talk.

I hope some people are interested in. Go check out the show notes.

[00:26:05] Diane: Thank you again. Thanks for having me.

David marketed throughout his career and has used that information to get his books into bookstores.

Let’s move on and talk some author stuff for all the authors listening.

So before we talk about our topic, which is going to be lessons learned in marketing what are some things you personally have learned? You mentioned some things you’ve learned from your editor. How to write what to put in the book and that, so talk about some of those things that you’ve learned from when you started with book one to now with book five.

[00:25:26] David: One of the big things that I’ve learned and I had a a professor that I I went to for some help sometimes. And. He told me I had a, I tried to overwrite things and I remember one thing that he told me, he says, trust your reader. He says, they’re smart enough to read. They read one of your books, they can read at least of an eighth grade level.

And he said, trust them, you don’t have to tell ’em over and over. about something. And that, that I did that in my first book. And I got away from that. I learned and there’s just a lot of things. A good editor can point out to. That you do. And any of these independents that write books and don’t get a good editor and have a thorough editor, not just one editor.

I, I have a editor that I use just for Spanish because I use a lot of Spanish words in my books. And I have them check to make sure that the Spanish in my books. Is correct. And that, that’s the thing about the Indies and they, when they went to everybody, started going to the, in indie or self-published they, we can just let’s face it.

We can put a book out there and throw it up on, on the deal. Have an ebook overnight. A lot of stuff’s got out there. That’s just not good literature and we’ve gotta. The all authors have gotta make sure their works are edited, properly edited and formated and ready to be published. I think that’s key and I’ve always done that cause I’m whatever I do, I want it done.

[00:27:04] Stephen: Okay, nice. And that’s a good lesson right there. And when you’re writing, so you’re in your RV and you’ve got your dog helping you out. So what do you use to write what services or what software do you like, or do you do anything special with your writing?

[00:27:19] David: Not anything special. I put everything on this laptop right here that we’re, I’ve written three books on this laptop that we’re using here to communicate with.

I take it along. It’s a small laptop I use word and I get it all together and I don’t worry. Too much about my grammar or anything at that as I’m reading it, I’m trying to get the story out as it’s in my mind. And one of the fallacies that I have when I get into a good scene, I’ll sometimes write till I just can’t go anymore.

I think the record is about 18 hours, but I had a good scene going. It was up here. And I wanted to get it. I wanted to get it on paper, so that’s that’s how I write. And I don’t have anything special software or anything like that. But I have some good people. I have a good assistant who goes over and she’s got an Eagle eye.

She can miss a. If I see something or just a little space off she’s on top of it. And I get it, her to get it in tip top shape before I go to an editor. But I use in this last book, I had six what I call advanced readers. Once we got the manuscript where we thought it ought to be, I sent it out to six good readers who I knew and never.

Ever ask somebody that loves you to critique your work. always find somebody afar. That’ll do and give you a good a good critique,

[00:28:53] Stephen: right? I, yeah I found that out. I had several close friends and family members read my book and the feedback I got was, yeah, I liked it. It was. Which doesn’t help me at all.

And I don’t know if I completely believe them, especially if the book wasn’t written for them. So

[00:29:11] David: one of those readers advanced readers that read my book, I wanted her, she’s a Spanish teacher here in San Antonio and a friend of mine. I said, I want you to read it and make sure all my Spanish is correct.

Nothing that would be misconstrued or offensive. To anyone that was Spanish speaking and she read it and she found a few things where we missed a thing or two and got it corrected for me. And I said what did you think about the book? She said, I didn’t like the ending. I said, why. She says, I didn’t want it to end.

And I said it didn’t cause the next book will be it didn’t end. And that’s the wonderful thing about as saga series like this.

[00:29:57] Stephen: And that’s, you mentioned earlier it’s about the characters and I think that’s stronger and more important. Even the movies and stories about battles.

If it’s not character driven, people aren’t as interested in it. People think they’re going to be, but just action battles are not as interesting as people think.

[00:30:15] David: The characters make it all. And yeah. And Steve, I had written for the family, a narrative form about our family and who they were when they were born, when the Indians killed them and all that sort of thing.

And I found they didn’t read it. They didn’t, I knew they didn’t read it, cuz I’d ask ’em about it and my own children and the reason is. Facts are boring as hell. You gotta tell, you gotta have a story. You have to bring those facts into your story. And that’s what my books are all about is taking things that actually happened and put a story around them.

And I used my family because they were there. To do that. Yep.

[00:30:59] Stephen: Okay. So Jim, we were talking a little bit before we started the podcast and you come from a career, a life of marketing and you’ve applied some of that to your book. Tell us about what you used to do with marketing. And then what are some of the things you’re doing to market your book that lessons learned?

[00:31:17] David: I was with the L w a Taylor company for many years where the importers across kava eight cognac and a lot of fine wines and products. And we marketed a different way. We. We went out and got distribution. Our distributors were required if we came out with a new label or new size or product or label change to get distribution that first week up to 50%.

And if they didn’t have it up to 70%, by the end of the first month we’d find another distributor and they knew that. That’s how we call that the push, we put the push on. I tried that with my book. I tried to get it into every store. I could, find. And at that you gotta realize the time my first book came out there, there was no Kindle.

And I thought the only way to sell is get to the bookstores. And I did, I got it in a lot of bookstores. I’m not like James Patterson, nobody knows about David Boles and down in that’s why you’re here. That’s,

I’d, I’ve hired Mike Kelson. Who’s great PR public relations person. And he knows what he is doing and I’m gonna listen to. I tried to sell books. Like I sold Al kava cognac, and it doesn’t work that way. And so I’ve had to learn about social media and all that sort of thing and everything that I was originally told this, I went to writer’s conference and at that the writer’s league put on and they kept saying when you social media and you know what.

They’re right. And I’m not real excited about social media. Cause I, I tend to spend about two or three hours a day that I could be writing on social media, but that’s where my little 400 and something stories I told you about that’s on my website. I tell those little stories and it’s amazing. People read them and they say, wow, I wanna get his book.

So that’s social media is what it is. And you can get in all the bookstores you want to, but if they, and if you don’t have a name, if you haven’t become a branded author, nobody’s gonna find one or two books. In a store with a hundred thousand books, like a big box barns and noble. I thought, boy, let’s get in every barns and noble.

And we did. And guess what? That day came. When they, I thought I was gonna get a check in the mail and they says, Hey, oh, every store has got three of you books. What do you want us to do with them? And I knew what it cost to send them back. And I said, just keep ’em. And that’s why you see those books for 75% off when you go in the front door of a big barn, noble.

Cause the books have been given to em they could sell ’em for 10 cents and still make profit.

[00:34:11] Stephen: Yeah. So you did marketing, you marketed alcohol essentially and yes, things like that. And what you found was most of the lessons you’ve learned, didn’t apply to what you wanna do now it’s different, but

[00:34:24] David: I will tell you what did apply.

You gotta tell a story. And I got my company to start with some of our products. One of ’em the first I ever did was on TM, Maria, Tim Maria’s a coffee flavored Laur similar to K and. Wasn’t selling very good. And I convinced them that we should come up with a story of the black bean, because I went down to Jamaica and saw where they were making it using a black bean.

And I made a story. Fictional story, but a believable story about the black being, being and there, but black pearls and the Tia Maria and that story got written up quite a bit. And we used it in marketing and it worked because it was just a story and there’s all kinds of stories that if you’ll ever notice.

Old Jack Daniels and Jim beam and all these guys, there were some great stories. Some of ’em, they can’t tell cause it wasn’t till 1939 that they were legal.

[00:35:36] Stephen: So I love that. You just said that. So it fits right in. Marketing is telling the story of you, yourself, your brand, your books, and tying all that in people want stories.

And I think I’ve been hearing that more with nonfiction and people don’t just wanna read a dry book on how to do this and how to do that. A business book. They want a story in there and nonfiction has become more conversational and more easier to access because of that. Using stories to tell what you.

[00:36:07] David: In education teachers have now learned that telling a story. And I had a he history teacher that was really great at telling stories that once you heard her story about a historic event and somebody in that event you’d remember it forever. But just reading it out a book that this happened on such and such a day and wherever it was you lose that real.

But if you have a story tied with it, you’ll remember that story.

[00:36:36] Stephen: Absolutely. So you didn’t use a lot of your marketing that you had learned, you had to relearn and you mentioned social media and you said how important that is and you spend time on social media. And I know I’ve talked to other authors that say the exact opposite of that social media is not that important that they don’t do it at all.

So why do you use social media and think it’s important and what do you do on social. The

[00:37:00] David: reality is it’s all you can do. When I was in the liquor business, we had a 30, I had a 35 million marketing budget and we bought billboards. We bought magazine, we bought all kinds of advertising on our brands and we always did it upright.

No, author’s gonna have that kind of money. And even the few publishing companies that are left in the world, which is only four of ’em I believe now I think we lost another one just recently. I don’t know if that deal went through or not, but yeah, I don’t remember. Yeah. It’s I think it’s about four now and they’re not even American owned.

And the the, even they are not spending a lot of money. The only ones that are spending money on is the Jane Patterson and the like rows who started out. And I think we should point that out JK row started out as a self-published independent author, whatever you wanted to call ’em.

She didn’t have, she didn’t have anybody behind her once she, she sold some books with no market. And then suddenly what happens a big publisher comes, jumps in the middle of your act and wants to and really took that off movies and the whole ball of acts. But if you don’t have that, I, as far as I can see social media is the only thing an independent author has is a social meeting, especially Facebook.

I have 5,000 People who are so so-called friends. And then I have, oh, about a thousand on my web, on my author’s page. And we communicate they’ll sometimes say something about my book or this and that. And I communicate with them. I have probably about two or 300 that I actively every day. Go through, read their post, make a comment and it takes time, but I don’t know what else I could do.

I could take that same time and sell down a street corner and sell books, , I’ve tried just about everything else, but it’s amazing how I sell books when I do my storytelling

[00:39:05] Stephen: and I like that. So you, you basically are. Telling some of the short stories that you have talking like around the campfire again.

Yes. Getting people interested, getting people to come to you is that, and if you

[00:39:18] David: noticed on my, I don’t use the word blog on my website the little button that you push to get to my stories. It’s campfire stories. And here where I live, we have a campfire and just we get around and tell stories at the campfire and.

I, I tell stories at the campfire where I’m heading off next and I’ll always wear my hat and what I like about the campfire, we can have hot chocolate or something out and it is just real casual and old Becca. She runs goes around and keeps everybody happy. She’ll go and set by somebody and they’ll pet her for about a few minutes and she’ll go to

They get tired of pet her. She goes to the next one and seems like everybody likes that in the stories. Nice. And I generally when I do sell books they usually buy the entire series. So that helps a lot in the book sales having the series to sell rather than just one book.

[00:40:13] Stephen: And I think several things you’ve said are good lessons for everybody.

First of all you’ve got, how many did you say? Like 450 short stories. I know. Yes. I know a lot of authors don’t wanna give away a book. They don’t wanna write a short story and give it away. They want paid, but what happens is all those short stories you’ve written, get people interested, and then they do go by your whole series.

[00:40:38] David: And I hope someday those chart series, I might make ’em into it, an anthology, or I

[00:40:44] Stephen: was gonna ask that. Yeah. Yeah. And then the other thing you said that I think a lot of people miss is you probably have heard this, that the best advertising for your book is your next book. That you get a series, you get books and they help sell each other.

But what you also said. You’ve gone through, you use several different editors and help to make sure your book is top notch. And that’s a lesson right there. Whether it’s your short stories that you give away free, or the books themselves, if they’re not top notch and they haven’t been edited well, nobody cares what your next book is.

They’re not going to wanna buy a whole series. Like you said, people do with you yet. That’s

[00:41:21] David: a, that’s the key you’ve just gotta, you’ve gotta make that product. Perfect. You can’t have one mistake in it now, I don’t know anyone that’s ever going. You’ll find something, but the one thing that’s great about Amazon lightning source now print on demand is you do make a mistake.

You. You can get it corrected. You can go in and you can get it corrected, but I like it to go out there. The first readers are the most important readers. You’ve got you think about the person that buys that first book they’re gonna tell two or three other people. They either like it, or they didn’t like.

So it’s gotta be good.

[00:42:06] Stephen: Agreed. And obviously people like yours cuz you’ve, even though it sounds like only 23, I know a lot of authors that struggle to get just one or two reviews. So you’re doing pretty good. Getting that

[00:42:18] David: 23. I’m fortunate to have, I believe five stars on all four books.

Yeah. It looks like. And I, the only thing is I don’t have enough of them. I don’t know how to go. I hate to beg people, give me a review, if they want to give me a review, that’s good, but I’m I don’t wanna beg them. And but I always try and mention it. I really appreciate reviews.

And I do that. If somebody writes me or I put a little note in says, Hey, I would really appreciate a review, but I find a lot of readers don’t understand that what you’re asking for is an Amazon review. And that is a lot of people don’t buy their books from Amazon, and, but nearly everybody has an am Amazon account, nearly everyone does.

So I would hope that they could Give me a review. They don’t have to buy the book, from Amazon, as long as they have an account, they can they’ll accept a review or

[00:43:12] Stephen: even better getting reviews on some of the other platforms. Cuz I think. I even though, I don’t know a lot of authors making a full-time living from the other platforms.

I know that there are some sales and there are some people that buy from those platforms and there’s probably some genres maybe that are even more popular. So if you could get people to give you reviews on other platforms, it just makes you stand out that much more on the books that are there. Yeah, absolutely.

[00:43:38] David: I’ll take a review anywhere. I can get it even a bad one, even a bad one. I have, fortunately, I haven’t had any bad ones, but I that’s good. I like

[00:43:47] Stephen: reviews. Agreed the more you have the better. And eventually you’ll probably get a bad one or a not as good one, but what the studies have shown that I’ve been seeing is that it’s not so important to have all good reviews, all five stars that it’s actually good to have.

Some bad ones with people saying things like, oh I thought this would focus more on the battles of the civil war or something like that. Yeah. And somebody else will say or see that and say, oh I don’t care about the battles of the civil war. So actually I’m glad it doesn’t have that.

Let me look at it. So the bad reviews actually sometimes help define better what it’s about and help people make decision.

[00:44:28] David: I agree with you that, and like I say, social media, you tell me what else an author can do. I just, I can do book signings in the stores and that sort of thing. And but it’s the social media.

That’s the only way I see. And I took, I’ll tell you, it took me a while. It took me a while to, it took me a while to get there. I understand it.

[00:44:52] Stephen: I do if you take the term social media we use that to communicate in groups and be with others. But when you were talking about telling your stories around the campfire for others, That’s the more long term social media.

That’s, what’s been around a lot longer. And it seems to be working for you.

[00:45:11] David: That started with the Indians by long before the white man came

[00:45:15] Stephen: all right. David I really appreciate this talk. We’ve had some interesting discussion on some marketing that you’re doing before we go and wrap things up.

What advice would you give to new authors that are listen.

[00:45:26] David: Keep your day job for sure. Or have another source of income. Cause it gonna take a while before. Anyone knows who you are. If you just started writing. And now if you happen to work for Fox, that’s not a problem. you promote your book on Fox.

You can sell a lot of copies real fast, but it, it’s not an easy, I will tell you this. I’ve had quite a few jobs in my life, but this is, and I’m older and I’m working harder and I’ve ever hurt, worked

[00:45:59] Stephen: in my life. Nice. That’s some interesting insight for those listening that may not may be wondering, should I do this or not?

Not. So I think it’s

[00:46:11] David: good. And, if you’re writing to make money, it’s hard if you’re writing because you enjoy it. It’s

[00:46:19] Stephen: good. It’s easy. I agree. All right. David, I appreciate you taking some time and talking with everyone, Dave, about your books, and I wish you luck when the new one comes.

Thank you, Steve.

David Bowles used to be a marketer for whiskey but now spends his time writing great western books based on real past events. And maybe some whiskey sipping. His family has lived in Austin for five generations.

His series of books follows a family through multiple generations as they deal with the westward expansion and America changing.

https://www.cactusbookshop.com/

today on discovered wordsmith. I have David Boles, David. Good morning. How are you doing

today?

[00:03:20] David: Good morning. You Steve.

[00:03:21] Stephen: David before we talk about your book let’s find out a little bit about you. So tell us where you live and some of the things you like to do other than writing.

[00:03:29] David: I’m presently living in San Antonio, Texas, been here for the last 14 months, but for the last six years my dog Beck and I have been traveling around the country in a a class, a motor coach telling stories and writing books.

And we’re fixing to get on the road again. I’ve just purchased a new RV and we’ll be heading out north to the Rockies here on Wednesday morning. Nice. But I’m originally from Austin. I was born in Austin, fifth generation to be born in Austin. And this is about as far as I ever moved away permanently to San Antonio.

And that was back in 1968 for hemisphere. Okay.

[00:04:06] Stephen: All right. You’ve been traveling. What are some nice areas you’ve been to or good sites you’ve seen?

[00:04:11] David: At 2000 and 17, we spent the summer in Alaska and Canada and that’s the place for me and the thing. And I say one, my last Bookman trace.

I, they sat on there. My editor wanted to know what I wanted to say on the back of the book about where you live. And I said tell ’em I live in Texas in the wintertime and a summer anywhere summer or anywhere, but Texas. So Texas is a, is my home, but it’s, I don’t tend to live here in July and August.

[00:04:44] Stephen: Yeah. Not the most pleasant place that we could be at that time.

[00:04:48] David: Yeah, it’s been really, it’s been really hot, but we love the Rockies. We spend time I spent two summers in angel fire in New Mexico, and I did storytelling there at at the RV camp, in the RV resort in sold a lot of books up there by telling stories.

Nice.

[00:05:05] Stephen: Beautiful. All right. Why did you wanna start writing these books and what got you into

[00:05:10] David: writing? I always heard the stories my father told my grandparents told, and they really interested me and I came from a. A long line of porch setters. And that’s what we had to do back when I was a kid, we didn’t have air conditioning.

And so we always sat out on the front porch. Neighbors would drive down the lane. They would see us on the front porch and they’d stop by. And boy, they’d tell some stories. I started listening to these stories and they just kept going around in my head. Some of ’em were my family and some of ’em were just neighbors, but there were stories that I thought needed told, and until I could retire and have the time to write these stories, I couldn’t, but I did a lot of research over 20 years of research and I have the stories down pretty well.

And I’ve got ’em in, I’ve written this westward saga series. And right now four books and it’ll probably be another two books to finish it up, but it’s the story of America moving west. Okay. So all the way to California.

[00:06:17] Stephen: So you took the that’s a, longstanding tradition taking the oral stories and passing ’em down through generations and you took those and turned them into a series of books is what it sounds like

[00:06:27] David: exactly what I’ve done.

And I use them in my storytelling. Good old

[00:06:31] Stephen: stories. That’s pretty cool. So let’s talk about that series. So your series of books is called westward sagas, and you’ve got book five coming out in a couple months. Tell us about that book. What’s it called and tell us about it.

[00:06:43] David: It’s a sheriff of star county and star counties in south Texas on the Mexican border.

And prior to 1850, that it was called it was in Mexico. And after the war with Mexico, the United States war with Mexico, they decided Texas had always thought that the Rio grand was a border and Mexico thought that Oasis river was a border, which left a little, a strip of land about the size of the state of Tennessee.

That was unclaimed. And after the treaty, Hidalgo February the second of 1848, that area became the United States in the treaty. Those people there, all Hispanic, Spanish speaking. There. And so there was this sheriff hit, the time was a Texas ranger named will. Smith happened to be my great grandmother’s uncle.

And he was appointed to be the sheriff down there in star county when it was organized and no one spoke English and he didn’t speak Spanish is interesting how he was the only law man. And an area as big as the state of Tennessee. And he did a pretty good job of being a sheriff. And so it makes a great story, but there’s a lot of love story.

You’ve got a couple of love stories in there. He lost both of his lovers. I shouldn’t tell that, tell my story way, but it, it makes a great story and about him is true. It is a true story about a guy named William Smith. And in the book I call him will Smith.

[00:08:25] Stephen: Nice. And this is book five. So you’ve had this saga, you said going on for several books now, but it’s the same family over

[00:08:34] David: time.

Yes. And different, different generations. But the first generation was they actually had the home. Their farm hunting 107 acre farm was the Gilford courthouse bat. The battle of Gilford courthouse, doing the American revolution. When old general Carn Wallace came through. And these old hillbillies up there in the mountains of North Carolina managed to beat him up pretty good.

He ended up winning the war, but it’s the old story. He won the war. He won the battle, but he lost the war. And it makes a great book and it’s named Springhouse because the women and children were in the Springhouse on the battlefield during the battle of Gilford courthouse.

And then later book children of the revolution is a story about how those children who went, were on the battlefield today of that terrible battle. And it was one of the most dramatic battles in the American revolution and the movie, the Patriot. Was, that was the general idea that they, that Tom Hank’s movie was based on was the battle of Gilford courthouse.

It wasn’t very factual, but it was a very good movie. .

[00:09:48] Stephen: Gotcha. Okay. So do you, can you think of any other books or an author that writes similar to what your books are like? So people get an idea of what to.

[00:10:00] David: I’ll tell you. Yes, I, my books and I had somebody tell me this about my books. Who’s read ’em all.

And she told me, she said, you started out writing Laura Engles with little house on the Prairie. And you ended up like Larry McMurry and dead man walking . So there’s a pretty range there. And I liked all of them. Larry McMurry does great work and of course, Laura Engel, she died so long ago, her works live on and people love to read the stories and the movie series that they made based on her writings You can still see it today, you can, they run.

’em still, so

[00:10:40] Stephen: there you go. If you liked Laura Engels, when you were younger and you are interested in McMurdy now you’ve got something more to read from

[00:10:47] David: from you. Oh yeah. But I find, I don’t have too much time for reading anymore. That just a lot to do when you’re selling books.

[00:10:55] Stephen: Definitely. So why did you want to. Write these books. And why did say, when I retire, I’m going to write why did you wanna do

[00:11:03] David: that? I kept thinking about it and I kept thinking if somebody needs to write a story about this, I tried to get, I have members of my family that have.

Educations and journalism. I couldn’t get that. I started trying to find a ghost writer to write and I called on HW brands in Austin. He belonged to the Austin writer’s league which I’ve been a long member of for a long time. And he was at a book signing and I was able to talk to him and see if he would possibly, if I could give him all the research I had done.

And he told me, he said, David, you’ve done the research, the story. And you’ve got to tell it. And then I came across Cecil. Murphy. I don’t know if I think he’s probably the most prolific ghost writer in America. And I had the opportunity at a book conference to speak to him and he told me the same thing.

And I said I don’t have any experience. I don’t have a degree in journalism or anything like that. He said, no, but you know the story and you can find an editor that can help you. And I was fortunate enough to find an editor that could help me. I didn’t know. Doodly squat. About writing a book and I started writing it and it just came to me and it came out very well.

Springhouse came out very well, but in my mind, when I wrote that book, I was thinking about my family and I overwrote it. If you wanna if I, I wanna make so sure they understood how. How things were back in those days. And I went in, even, I wrote. Almost a chapter about how to make soap, because I had to make soap back in the day I went even went and just studied how to make St soap my editor cut that whole thing out and broke my heart and she says, nobody wants to know about how to make soap.

So I learned, I’ve learned a lot since my first. And I think now that the last two, especially are more on the style of Larry McMurtry’s work and anybody that likes Larry McMurry would like my work.

[00:13:14] Stephen: Okay, good. That’s nice. And this is independently published, correct?

[00:13:17] David: I got a publishing house called plum Creek press.

Okay. I own that trademark and it’s my publishing company. I’m not advertising to do any publishing right now. Cause my hands are full just doing my work, but I do, I own it. It’s trademarked and registered and it’s going. Got it. Okay. Yes, I own the publishing company.

[00:13:40] Stephen: and what type of feedback have you been getting from readers?

I see that you’ve got some good reviews. You’ve got 20 some reviews on all your books and it’s five stars. It looks like. So

[00:13:50] David: like I’m very fortunate. I get, I get a lot a letters, people write me letters and. Lady just last week I got one and it meant so much to me. It sometimes, it gets discouraging on books.

You don’t sell near as many as you think you will, expenses are high and that sort of thing. But she wrote me a letter and it really stimulated me. She just told me, she says, you have a God gift, God given ability to tell a story and please keep on writing. And I tell you getting something like that means a lot to a writer and to get it handwritten.

Not, handwritten on it from call Oklahoma. If you know where that’s at, I don’t even know where it’s at.

[00:14:32] Stephen: So well, I know Oklahoma is on the other side of the country to from that’s. And we talked a bit about this in email. So if you were asked, would you rather see your books turned into movies or a TV show?

[00:14:44] David: I think a TV show would be better because everybody can see. Not everybody’s able to go to a movie anymore or one reason or the other and in the home they got it. They can record it and they can have it forever. Nice. Yeah. And uh, but I’ll take whatever I can get, but this would make one heck of a movie for somebody the series would

[00:15:07] Stephen: so I think you’re looking at if you could something on ABC or NBC or CBS instead of the streaming services.

Yes.

[00:15:15] David: I don’t know enough about streaming to make a decision on that, but I would like to see somebody take this and make it where everybody could see it. Yeah. Agree. And. Especially the early book, the Springhouse, which is so important to America and that battle, people just don’t know unless they read about it.

I know in, in high school I was, they just touched on it a little bit. It was just one of many battles, but it was an important one. And I think that story and the Patriot. Was a good movie, but it didn’t get into my books are not about battle or fighting. It’s about the people and how the battle and the fighting affected them for years and their children for many generations after.

Nice. Okay. And I can tell you a little story about that. Yeah, go ahead. Tell us, let’s hear, my four, three great grandfather was killed in Austin, Texas by hand. Seven months before he was killed his son, Ja uh, James w Smith, who was the first county judge of Travis county, Texas was killed by Indians and his little boy was kidnapped and taken off to Santa Fe New Mexico, and where that fits into the next generation.

As I can remember, my grandmother. Now my grandmother’s two generations away from that family and she’s at our house and I’m going outside and it was dark. And she looked at me and she says, you she’s old and she’s getting little feeble, but she looked at me and started trembling and she says, don’t go out there tonight.

There might be Indians out. And this was in the 19, would’ve been in about 1950. Wow. That, that happened. And I just saw her tremble and I thought, boy, that’s crazy. Didn’t no Indians around here, but to, in her mind, she was a little girl when all of that went on and there were still Indians around and I have my great grandmother’s Bible.

That she started after the civil war and she was the one that was first born in Austin, Texas. Her El name was El nor van CLE. That Bible has a place where an era had penetrated it during an Indian rate wow. In the seventies. So those things they live on, and they affect families and how they think and everything about everything.

They. And it just goes on from generation it’ll pass on from generation to generation, right? Yeah. That’s interesting. How it affected my grandmother, even though she wasn’t, there was two generations before, but she remembers the fear of Indians that she had.

[00:18:04] Stephen: Did you say earlier that you now live in Austin, Texas?

No

[00:18:08] David: I live in San Antonio, which is 75 miles south of there. And when I can get through the traffic, I have a lot of family there and all my nieces and nephews all live there. They’re and I’ve got eight into the eighth generation burned in Austin, Texas.

[00:18:24] Stephen: Yeah. Yeah. I was gonna say, you said your great-great grandfather.

Killed in Austin. I’m like, yeah. You might wanna get away from Austin. no.

[00:18:31] David: That was in, that was the, he was a county treasurer and and his son was. County judge. Think about that at the same time. Yeah. Wow. Both of ’em were killed within seven months, so they didn’t get to, they didn’t get to, they were appointed.

They didn’t get to run for election , but they didn’t last very long. But the rest of the family fortunately my my great grandfather, El nor van cleave, he survived and his wife, Margaret, and they had a pass of children. And then on my mother’s side, the same thing, both of them.

They’re together. So I on both sides of the family, I’m fifth generation, so nice. We’ve been around a while.

[00:19:12] Stephen: Nice. Good. And do you have a website,

[00:19:14] David: David? Yes, sir. I do. And it’s westward, sagas.com.

[00:19:19] Stephen: Okay. We’ll make sure I’m put and

[00:19:20] David: I’m on Facebook and that’s David Burrow’s author on Facebook and I have a Facebook page for my right and for my stories.

Okay. And one other thing, if I could, I’ve got about 450 shark stories on that website. If anybody wants to read some little shark stories and they’re short and sweet, no more 250 to 500 words. So they’re on there available for free.

[00:19:45] Stephen: Nice. Okay. Yeah, definitely. We’ll put some links to that.

I’m sure. Some people would like that. I interviewed an author a couple months ago from about the same area, Jim Christina, and he writes westerns. If somebody likes both of your guys’ stuff, there you go. We’ve got you on the webs the podcast. Great. So your next book is coming out in February.

What are your plans for any book after that?

[00:20:08] David: It’s already in my head and I’m kinda laying it out and it’s old will my, my main character in the book, he’s up in years. And he ends up over on the king ranch. If have you heard about the king ranch? No, I have not one of the largest ranches in the country and he and old captain king got some stuff up the sleeve , and the story goes

[00:20:30] Stephen: on.

Nice. Okay. So it’s just continuing more stories from the family through the years. Yeah.

[00:20:36] David: Stories that I know about. And I would like to bring it up to about the 1940s or fifties. And that’s when things were fun. Things were happening. Oh, Linda Johnson was then uh, they a Congressman from Texas.

And I’ve got some stories to tell about him too. Cause my dad grew up on the Perton Alice river. Close to where Lydon Johnson lives. So I’ve got some stories I might have to change some names. might have to use some fictitious names. Yeah,

[00:21:07] Stephen: there you go. David, let me ask you what are some of your favorite books and authors to read?

[00:21:11] David: I loved Elmer Kilton and he says San Angelo, Texas. I used to stop by and try and see him every time I went west up towards Lubbock and that, that area there, San Angelo’s about halfway between San Antonio and. I always stop there. And I’ve got a friend that runs a bookstore, the cactus bookstore, gotta give him a plug and he’s got all of Elmer Kelton’s books there, every one of ’em.

And he got all of mine too, and a great place for old books and stories and things like that. But Elmer Kelton really did some great writing and his stories sound a lot. My stories I’ve never tried to copy anybody. I’m not smart enough to copy anybody. I just have to do it my way. But he’s one of the greats and a regional writer.

And of course we had a guy way back there in high school and I broke my teeth on him, old J Frank Doby, and he wrote a lot about Texas and the west and that sort of thing. He wrote some great stuff.

[00:22:12] Stephen: Nice. Okay. And you mentioned the cactus bookstore. It sounds like they support local authors. Is that one of your favorite bookstores?

[00:22:20] David: Yes. Cactus bookstore there is a specialty bookstore. You won’t find any Harry Potter stuff there for sure. But if you like Western stories and if you wanna research the west, I’ll tell you McMurry went there a lot. To get books, old books, they’re outta print.

They’ve got out print books and stuff about the old west and things like that have been outta print for years and historical type stuff.

[00:22:47] Stephen: Oh, nice. Okay. Make sure and put some links to that also in notes. Alright before we finish talking about your book and move on to author, If someone came up to you and said, David, I heard you wrote some westerns.

I like westerns, but why should I get your book and read it? What would you tell ’em?

[00:23:02] David: If you wanna know how this country was founded, it’s a good way to get a history lesson from, I had a lady who’s a now resident of Houston, Texas come to see me just recently in the last couple of weeks. And we had lunch together and she told me.

She says, I didn’t understand about America and Texas and all these things and says that once I read your book, it started that American revolution. And it took me through all that people had to go through to get here. Back in the 1840s and fifties, when they started coming to Texas and moving west and then opening up California going on westward.

And that’s where the WestBridge S is. She says, if anybody reads your book that doesn’t know American history, they’ll understand it after it’s over with, because you’ve laid it out chronologically and the same family. And what happened to. I’ve had people tell me, your story sounds just like my family’s story.

And it does because they all came down the same trail. They came down that trail and crossed the Sabean river into Texas and they had. Hard life. My family, when they got to Austin, there was nothing in Austin. Austin wasn’t founded till eight, not 1839. It was, ju it was a new city built just to be the capital.

They had to sleep under their wagons. There was no place, they had to, until they could build a little cabin, there was no place to live except under their wagons. So nice. That’s the way it was. Wow. And the women in my family, I wanna tell you, they’re tough. , there’s some tough women. You don’t wanna take any of them on.

I’ll tell you that.

[00:24:49] Stephen: Nice. Okay. Okay. Great, David, thank you for sharing your book, talking about your book. I appreciate it. It sounds exciting. If you love westerns, it sounds like a great series to get. Thank

[00:24:59] David: you, Steve. Thank very much. Appreciate you having me on.

[00:25:03] Stephen: Yep. No problem.

Steve reads chapter 6 of his book – Murder by Numbers.

Steve attributes the success of his series to his great character, Joshua Oates. He had the idea for the series because he had the character so well developed.

We discuss how focusing on the character helped him to create the series as a whole.

All right. So let’s talk some author stuff.

Before we talk about writing your series based on your character let’s a few other things you’ve been writing for a while. What are some things you’ve learned that you’re doing different now than you did from at the beginning?

[00:26:41] Steve: Yeah. One thing get a comfortable chair. Because you’re gonna be on that keyboard or writing on a notebook or whatever, but you’re gonna be sitting down and you’re gonna be writing.

And that’s a task that if you have a comfortable chair, that helps a lot. What else can I tell you? The things that I did yes, be compact. Be economical. What I mean by that is. You can be writing and you have rambling sentences that people, don’t we really wanna read. You really wanna get to the action.

What’s taking place, the dialogue is something you learn as you go, I think and you want crisp short dialogue that goes with the story that, makes it go. You can have reflective dialogue, but I find that when two people are talking to each other two characters are talking to each other.

You wanna get to the point,

[00:27:38] Stephen: right? Yep. Okay. Now, I picture with that hat and talking about the 1920s, I picture you sitting there at an old Remington steel typewriter taking away at it, but I assume you don’t do that. What, so what what do you do when you write, is there any software or services that you particularly like?

Yeah,

[00:27:58] Steve: I tried different ones. First I tried a Microsoft word, which is good. And then I went to Google docs, which I use now. There are many others out there that I’ll probably experiment and try different ones. But right now the Google docs seem to work. One of the things it has is that if I misspell a word it tells me, Hey, this word does not spell like that.

Okay. all right, then. I’ll correct it. And. And I can I can use that and you can actually convert Google docs to either a PDF file or a Microsoft word file. So yeah. So you can have the best of both worlds,

[00:28:41] Stephen: okay. All right. And you had also mentioned earlier about marketing and that, so what are you doing to market?

Do you have any interesting marketing you’re doing.

[00:28:50] Steve: I’m doing I’m doing podcast, which I’m thankful on. Thank you. Thank you for having me by the way. And I’m also doing some book signings. I also do some what would I call it? The library has different author days, my local library.

So I do those. And I also get on as many websites as I can to try to promote my book. I do have the Amazon author page. I do have the Facebook page. I not on Instagram and I don’t do Twitter. It’s probably, I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing for an author. But that’s what I’m trying to do that.

And also there’s book fairs too, that I enter to try to do it that way.

[00:29:37] Stephen: So how are you finding like the book fairs and things to go to? Are you just Google searching or do you hear about ’em from other places?

[00:29:45] Steve: Yeah. A little both. And then I have author friends that tell me about. and I read about it in the newspaper and yes, I still read a paper newspaper that comes in.

[00:29:58] Stephen: With that hat, you have to, ,

[00:29:59] Steve: You gotta do, you gotta go for it. Yeah and I get and word of mouth, I hear about. From different people that you have contact with. And I think that that helps authors if you have contact with other people that like to write and and you hear things and you exchange ideas,

[00:30:18] Stephen: Right.

Okay. And so now for our discussion, you brought up an interesting topic of choosing or writing your series around your character. So what exactly did you mean by that and what are you doing to make that happen?

[00:30:34] Steve: Yeah Joshua oats. Is the primary character in my, the Joshua and venture series, but, and he came as he was a, like a secondary character in vengeance of the ripper cause was all about white, urban bat Masterson and and Jack ripper.

And then some other characters that take part in the novel and he was. In the background as this police captain. And he was very young at the time and I thought to make a sequel, let’s flesh him out. Let’s flesh this character out, make him more three dimensional. And we did that by saying that he was divorced and then he started drinking.

And that led to his leaving the police force. And then he wandered the country for a while. Then he entered the great war, which was world war I, and he he was actually a Lieutenant in the war that lost his men in a battle in France. And of course that led to. What they call shell shock, cuz he experiences the horrible things that happen in war.

And he got as far away from his old job in California as he could. And he sets up his detective. Office, because that’s what he knows. He knows being a former policeman. That’s all he knows. So he becomes a private investigator in Boston, Massachusetts, which is where Spencer was in the Robert V. Parker movies, but only it’s 19, 19, almost the beginning of the roaring twenties.

And I saw, and I started typing. I started banging in the keyboard. And I came up with a complicated, but interesting story about this ex-police captain who becomes a down and out private investigator and gets involved with somebody from the past that happened inventions of the ripper. And from there.

Different things happened. He met Angela Lang, which is his girlfriend who happens to be a police detective in training in 19, 19, and later becomes a full detective. And the two of them get in different adventures in my stories that happened after that. And it was, it just one thing led to another and it led to a series.

[00:33:13] Stephen: Do you think if you hadn’t developed the character, that your series would not have happened or would’ve been completely different if it had been some other character, it

[00:33:22] Steve: wouldn’t have happened. okay. Cuz was I going to do a sequel will with wire, for example? I don’t know about that because at that point in the 19.

Twenties. He was in well in his seventies. He couldn’t be doing too much other than, trying to enjoy life in sunny, California. So I said how about this young police captain? I said let’s give him this backstory. And I said you know what? After I wrote the sequel, which is target of fear, Couple years later, fans, some fans who actually bought the book and read, it said, are is there any more adventures with him any more adventures with Joshua and said yeah, I have some ideas.

And then I began writing. And soon I came up with my third book which is a darker shade of greed, which took an idea ahead from my grandfather who was a tailor in Springfield. Back in the 1930s or forties, but I had him in the 1920s and he told me a story years ago when I was a young kid, he told me a story, or I heard a story that he used to take trips into Washington, DC from Springfield, mass, something about gambling.

I said, So then my relative said no maybe it did happen, but we don’t know. So they said that wouldn’t make an interesting story a tailor that has to go into, but I didn’t make it Washington DC. I made him going into New York city cuz that’s where Joshua Oz has his adventures mostly. And so I had him going into New York city and he’s carrying something in a suit that he made.

And this led to something else and something else. And it’s a really good adventure. And then after that people said, oh how about another book? So I wrote the killer’s code, which was my fourth book in the series. And this led to something about what if Joshua oats went back to California, where he left the police force in disgrace 10 years ago, this would make an interesting.

[00:35:34] Stephen: So he did that. And mystery stories are very much plot driven. You’ve got the whole thing, figuring out the, whatever the mystery is usually murder. It seems. But a lot of ’em like what you’re talking about are very character, too, that main central character has to be bigger than life.

Something that people can glom onto. Whether it’s because they’re a heavy drunk drinker and they’re struggling, or they’re an ex cop because they killed their partner. There’s some something that draws people in, you gotta have both from a murderer series that people get into Spencer being a great example.

[00:36:08] Steve: Yeah. Some of the reviews I got back said Joshua OTZ is an endearing character because of his struggles and because of how he tries to do the right thing. He’s not like a Sam spade where he is gotta solve the mystery or a Mike hammer where he just goes in. But he’s more of a a little more complicated character that does a lot of self-reflection, but gets in on the action because he he gets in a lot of fights when he tries to do these investigations and he learned how to fight.

When back when he was a police captain. He gets in the fist fights a lot. I dunno why ,

[00:36:47] Stephen: when you mentioned that dialogue, that’s super important for developing a character. It helps not, you get their thoughts and stuff throughout the book usually, but the dialogue is how they interact with everyone else is how it not.

Propels the plot, but you get a lot of that character in dialogue, right? So

[00:37:06] Steve: when he’s when Joshua is confronted by these these hoods that he meets these mob bosses and stuff, he’s more of a wise cracking guy, like Spencer in his novels. So Josh was you. Getting threatened by these mob bosses.

And then he goes he says something sardonic and just, witty. And it goes over the head of the bad guy and , but he yeah, so that’s the way he he reacts to that and I got that from the Robert B. Parker novels. Yes. So I

[00:37:38] Stephen: borrowed, but so have you been. Working on a character arc for your main character or is he pretty much the same character in every book?

[00:37:47] Steve: No, he grows he grows from book to book. He each story is like an arc, although you can read the book as a standalone novel because each book has its own. Sort of characters, but also it it does rely on some information about the past novels, which I incorporate in a sentence or two that tells you a little bit about the background of a certain character that, if you didn’t read book number two, you wouldn’t necessarily know who this person was that Joshua was referring to.

But if I give a little background in a paragraph that sets up the next story,

[00:38:35] Stephen: so good. And. I can think of a lot of series that like Mac boon, the executioner, there’s 300 of those. So he doesn’t really change. There’s not a lot of arc growth in his character. And Spencer himself there’s a little bit, but he’s, he stays pretty constant throughout the series.

Yeah. Yeah.

[00:38:54] Steve: Josh was sorta like that but he’s a little wiser with each book. Okay. Uh, Yeah I think that’s the best way to express

[00:39:03] Stephen: it. Do you think in this type of story series mystery, do you think that character growth from start to finishes important? Or do you think the, that people are reading it?

Cuz they like the character the way he is and they want more adventures?

[00:39:16] Steve: I think a little of both. Okay. Uh, You don’t wanna be like stagnant. You don’t want your character be too stagnant? Let’s take, I don’t know. I guess James Bond would be a good example. You want James Bond to, be sophisticated and, have, drink the, his martini shaken, not stirred and having liaisons with different, beautiful women and be a spy, and act like a spy.

Tark would be the same. He’d be in the jungle of Dan Jane and, but Joshua basically the same, but he grows a little bit with each novel. He cuz he re he’s a reflective type of detective, but he also is

[00:39:59] Stephen: an action figure too. And James, Bond’s a good example, cuz I think the latest James Bond movies, which the books are one thing, I mean there’s a certain amount of books as are done.

He doesn’t change a lot there. And a lot of the early movies, it was pretty much same character and that’s what people wanted. But the Daniel Craig movies, I think they tried to give him a much deeper art with this boyhood home Skyfall and

[00:40:21] Steve: everything. Exactly. And there’s good and bad in that.

Should I do a ? No I shouldn’t give away the plot in the last movie, but it was different than it was something that out of the ordinary. Yeah. You don’t do that to James Bond.

[00:40:35] Stephen: right. No, there was, his whole art, he quit for a while because he felt betrayed. Yeah.

Yeah. And he got shot by his own people. And then he went to his boyhood home to save M and and then the last one, definitely an art completion. Unless

[00:40:52] Steve: this is a multiverse James Bond from another dimension.

[00:40:56] Stephen: Arguably it could be that there’s a, we keep getting different faces and he’s been around for 60, 70 years.

So there’s something going on there, is it just, is it’s the dread pirate Roberts? Yeah, exactly. Passing on that’s

[00:41:10] Steve: right. That’s right. You have different actors, but it’s the same character basical.

[00:41:14] Stephen: Which honestly I’ve said for a while, I wouldn’t mind seeing that with Indiana Jones. I could take a, another actor being a young Indiana Jones to get the adventures because right.

I like Indian. I like terrorism Ford, obviously. But I think more Indiana Jones movies would be awesome. Kind of James Bond. Like I, I personally would be okay with that. I’m not with everything. I don’t wanna. Star wars redone with all new actors. I, with the, in this old time period, but I, I think some things I’m okay with.

Yeah. Yeah.

[00:41:47] Steve: Trying to think Indiana Jones without Harrison Ford. I don’t know. I don’t know. Would it work? I think the adventures would work. And we’ll have to see Indiana Jones five. What comes out of that? The rumor is that the the person that’s helping him becomes the new Indiana Jones, but

[00:42:06] Stephen: I don’t know.

Yeah. We’ll see different people have different opinions, different thoughts, all steve I think this has been great. You got any last comments on characters and series? Yeah.

[00:42:16] Steve: Know your character for you because I’m my own worst critic and you want it. You want it to be, yeah, you want it to be good.

You want it to be a good read, something that somebody’s gonna get, write from, start to finish, that they don’t wanna put down. And you want it to be fun too.

[00:42:37] Stephen: All right. Steve, it’s been really great talking to you about your book and writing your series around the character. So I wish you luck on that.

And as soon as this goes live, I’ll let you know.

[00:42:47] Steve: Thank you for having me. I enjoyed it. It’s a

[00:42:49] Stephen: lot of fun. Yeah. Great. And I look forward to seeing more from you. Thank you.

Steve lives in Connecticut and has written a murder mystery thriller called Murder by the Numbers. This is actually part of a series, which we discuss in the Part B episode how he came up with the whole series.

He has also been a musician and cartoonist, which helped shape his creative writing. His main character, Joshua Oates, grew from an earlier book and has experienced finding Jack the Ripper, the war, drinking, and even PTSD. All of this takes place in the early part of the 20th century.

http://www.steveleshinwebstarts.com/about

About Us – The Book Rack

Steve, how are you doing today?

[00:01:10] Steve: I’m doing fine. I’m trying to cope with the Florida type weather we getting now in new England. It’s gonna be 90 plus degrees in the afternoon and that’s gotta be thunder showers. And I remember visiting my parents in Florida years ago, and that was the weather every day.

This is new England. So I wasn’t expecting this all the time. What part of new England? I live in Connecticut. Okay. I live in I live actually 10 miles east of Hartford in the town of Manchester, Connecticut. And it’s centrally located. So if you wanna go to New York or Boston it’s a good middle in between.

[00:01:49] Stephen: Place. Yeah, I’m in Northeast, Ohio. So it’s a bit of a drive, but we got similar weather. It’s been hot muggy humid, and I had rainstorm. Oh, it’s crazy stuff. Last night. Yeah. Crazy stuff. I was just reading about meteorologist. Define meteorological seasons. And they’re very specific. September 1st is fall for meteorologists, but it’s not the real fall for what we see.

So it’s interesting how they, they do that, but I sure wish we could depend on the weather it’s oh, it’s September time for cooler weather, so I see you have a guitar back there. You play some music.

[00:02:23] Steve: I, I try to strum the guitar. I when I was growing up. What are the, in the fifties and sixties I was in the rock music for a while and I said, okay, I’m gonna form a band with my buddies.

And we did have a garage. That’s my parents’ garage. And we did have a guy that could play like the drums, but he didn’t really have a set of drums. He had something else that he was using like those beginner drums. And then I strummed on the guitar. I got an electric guitar and then I have the acoustic back there, which I try to play once in a while, but it never went any place.

Our band. Was called the velvet moose and never actually had any gigs. So what could I tell you?

[00:03:07] Stephen: yeah I was in the a rock man in high school too. Played bass, trying to learn guitar now played drums in high school. So a little bit of everything. So a lot of musicians, a lot of authors also play music.

So interesting. Yeah.

[00:03:22] Steve: Output. Yeah. When I. I usually have music in the background. Oh, okay. It varies, if I’m if I’m on a roll, I’ll do rock and roll. If if I’m thinking, if I’m contemplating about what I’m gonna write about, I usually listen to classical music or motion picture.

Yep. Composers, because that gets you in the mood. And some of the great composers now are doing soundtracks for movies. Yeah. As and TV shows.

[00:03:52] Stephen: So there’s some good stuff. So who’s your favorite band?

[00:03:56] Steve: My favorite band right now. Ah, it depends on the category. Is it a rock music,

[00:04:03] Stephen: rock and roll?

Yeah. Rock and roll band.

[00:04:04] Steve: Oh, the Beatles of

[00:04:05] Stephen: course,

[00:04:06] Steve: Ile fan Beatle, maniac, and, rolling stones and Zeppelin and all that

alternative rock in the background. So nice. I can’t even mention some of the Some of the bands. They have like weird names today, but that’s okay.

[00:04:22] Stephen: well that’s cuz all the good names have been used for the last 50 years. They gotta get some new stuff.

[00:04:27] Steve: true. That’s very true. Yeah.

[00:04:29] Stephen: Other than music and that any other hobbies or anything you’d like to share before we get into your book,

[00:04:34] Steve: you saw my guitar.

I also like to play. I like to travel. I got a funny story about that. If you want to hear it. Sure. Please. When I was growing up in Springfield we didn’t go many places. And then after we, after I graduated college, me and two other guys decided to take a. Cross country trip from Massachusetts Springfield mass to San Francisco, California.

And we did it in a little car that used to call the gremlin. It was made by American motors. Yeah. So we were gonna go camping and try to save some money. And cuz we only had, a certain amount. Of change to spend. We packed in the gremlin, which is a little tiny car. It was like, I think it was a two door.

Yeah. Hatchback, but we didn’t know any better. We were in our early twenties. So we packed this car up. We put in all this camping equipment, tens and sleeping bags and things like that. So the guy who rode in the back seat. Cuz we took turns, there was a driver there was somebody riding shotgun and somebody had to be in the back seat.

So the guy in the back seat felt like the mercury astronauts in the early sixties where you’d be cramped in and, try to, try to be comfortable, but didn’t work but it was fun. We did make it to San Francisco. And in fact, one of our three guys decided. He wanted to settle there.

So we stayed there. So two of us drove back and we saw a lot of the country and I think it helped in my writing later on. Nice.

[00:06:02] Stephen: Okay. Let’s talk about that. Why did you wanna start writing?

[00:06:06] Steve: I think I’ve always been a writer. I just didn’t know it. So while I I did the conventional thing that people do which is to get a job.

Get married, raise your kid and so forth in between while I was doing that I had these thoughts in my head that maybe, I should be expressing myself in different ways. And one of the ways that I did this part-time. I started out as a cartoonist cuz I like to draw when I was a little kid, I liked to draw comic strips and superheroes and that sort of thing.

And this led me to say, maybe I could do cartooning. And I did that for a while. I was able to send cartoons. This is in the old days where you can send drawings into a magazine. I don’t know if people read magazines anymore, it’s all on tablet. And I was shot down hundreds of times, but on the other hand, they started to buy some of my cartoons and my drawing was crude to begin with, but then it got better, but it was the writing that cuz you know, you need to.

The gags to go along with the cartoons, like the old cartoons you had in the new Yorker magazine and that sort of thing. I did it for trade magazines, and I picked up a few bucks doing that and it was fun, but but then, one of the cartoon editors told me, you, you may be a better writer than a cartoonist.

So that was in the back of my mind. And I didn’t really. Get started on writing until I, it was later on in my life. I was probably in my fifties when I wrote my first novel, I wasn’t my fifties, now that I think of it but I came up with the idea and I think maybe this worked in my, to my advantage.

Because you have life experiences that you don’t have when you’re in your twenties or thirties. And you look back and you can appreciate what’s happened in your life and how it affects your writing. And then I, of course, I read a lot too.

[00:08:13] Stephen: Okay. You got your book? Is this your first book murdered by the numbers?

[00:08:17] Steve: No, this is actually number five. Okay. In Joshua O series. That’s why I’m wearing a hat. It’s my private investigator hat. I like the hat Joshua would wear in the 1920s.

[00:08:31] Stephen: Okay. Tell us about the series in the newest book. I will.

[00:08:35] Steve: Yes. Okay. It started out with my first novel. I wrote a book called vengeance of the ripper about Jack, the ripper escaping from London, England in 18 88, 20 years later, he settles in Los Angeles, California, and he meets old west legend.

Why? So I had this idea. What, if, what if WT met Jack de ripper and he was doing Jack de ripper was doing his murdering thing. And then he asked to face the old time law man, WT I, and one of the characters in the book was a police captain who was very young for his age. And his name was Joshua oat.

And he took part in hunting down, Jack ripper in the novel. I won’t say what happens in case you wanna buy the book. And this led years, some years later, because someone he asked me, you gonna do a sequel to venge of the ripper? And I thought about it. I said that was a novel that could stand on its own.

And I didn’t really think it would make a good series. But then I was thinking back to the young police captain, maybe it did something to him, maybe because at the end of the book, he was told not to talk about the biggest case he ever had, which was involving Jack ripper. And so this led to some problems at work as a police kept.

And I said, what. He started drinking. And what if something happened to him that caused him to quit the police force and wander the country and enter world war I, which the United States center in 1918. and he experienced the war. Then when he came outta the war, he had what’s called shell shock, which is PS, D , PTSD that we know about today.

So what would he do? And so I tried to flesh out this character and said, I think it would make an interesting book. So he started to write and that’s what you have to do when you’re a writer, you start writing. That’s how I learned to become an author too. That happened when I met I don’t wanna ramble too much, but that happened when I met Robert B.

Parker, who was the author of the Spencer novels. Yeah. Nice. And I was at a book signing at I think it was Barnes and noble a few years ago. And before I wrote vengeance on the ripper and I didn’t know how to write a novel I did write cartoon gags and I did write some short stories and some essays, but to write a novel, that was a.

Experience I never had. So I asked him, I said, how did you get, how do you write, how do you write a novel? So he of looks at me ly and he has a little grin on his face and he goes, you just write. And I said what kind of a cop out answer is that I was thinking. But then, when I thought about that, I said, you know what?

I started to write down my ideas, started to write a chapter, then another chapter. And I think what he meant was the process of writing. You come up with ideas and it, and you just do it or else you’re not gonna write that book. You’ll just think about writing it, but you gotta actually physically do it.

And I think the physical process of actually writing. My mind comes up with these ideas afterward. I don’t know if you find in your writings, but when you know, you have an outline, approximately what you’re gonna say. But I find that my way of thinking comes comes better for me when I write it down.

When I’m writing a novel I’m in that mode.

[00:12:32] Stephen: Yeah I, my, my series I’m working on right now started off as one short story that was like 7,500 words. And now I’ve got planned for it was seven books, but just the other night, I thought of a whole nother book. So now it’s eight books. So I need to start getting those all written down and out.

And I’ve got the first four planned. I’ve got the storyline for the first four, actually, the. A couple after that I’ve got the ideas for, so yeah I agree. It’s and we were talking about music. I think it’s that creativeness needs to come out and it comes out in various,

[00:13:04] Steve: just comes out.

It’s like a different part of your brain opens up and says, oh yeah, I know what happens next. Cause when you’re pounding on the keyboard you’re really have an, I, you just have a vague idea what you’re gonna rewriting, but then when it comes out and the sentences are there. And it’s almost like magic when it comes out the way you want it.

[00:13:24] Stephen: Yeah. Agreed. Okay. So you mentioned Spencer Robert B. Parker. Do you feel your books are like his, or do you have an author in books that yours are like,

[00:13:34] Steve: It is, and it is very much like his, because they’re the Joshua oats sequel that I came up with. It’s called target of fear. and he speaks in the first person and that’s how I write.

I write his adventures in the first person. You’re hearing it from Joshua, as he’s telling you about what happened to him since the events of vengeance of the rip, how he became a down and out private investigator and he gets caught up in these different things and things happen to him that really, I find it the dialogue is like Robert B Parker’s Spencer in that he’s wise guy type of private investigator where he comes up with observations about people that he meets during his during his story.

And Lets the reader get into the mind of this character. He’s down and out private investigator. He has an alcohol problem brings too much. And this is during an exciting period in American history. After the United States left the war, you came home, it was 19. 18 19 19 things were going on.

You had prohibition became the law of the land. The next year, 1920, you had the women’s right to vote. It became an amendment it’s called did I say the 19th amendment by may? The 18th amendment was prohibition. The 19th amendment gave women the right to vote. So a lot of exciting things were happening and.

You had celebrities in the 1920s. One of the celebrities that I use in the book, and this was makes I think what makes my detective novels a little different is that it’s also historical fiction. I take historical figures, like for example, In 1919, where target of fear takes place. I have Damon Runion appears in the novel and he was he was a sports writer who became a short story writer and he was a celebrity in New York city during the rowing twenties bat Masterson, who was a friend of Wyatt, hers in the old west.

Settled in New York city and became of all things, a newspaper columnist. And he became a celebrity in New York city. People knew who he was. I used to go to, speakeasies and bars and things and entertain folks with his stories about the old west and also Hibs observations about life. So I had bat Masterson in the story.

Damon runin Marie Curry. The scientist is in that story and Harry Houdini. Oh, nice. The great escape artist and musician, and my stories are different cuz I give them things to do. They actually take part in the adventure and they help Joshua because Joshua oats as a down and out investigator has an ability to make friends with these celebrities from history.

and that’s my background too. When I went to college, I was a history major. So I love to read history as long, as well as, fiction science fiction, that sort of thing.

[00:16:56] Stephen: So that, that sounds a little bit. There was a TV show in the early nineties, the young Indiana Jones Chronicles, George Lucas is put out and they had all the historical figures or quantum leap where he jumps around and he meets people.

Yes. At that times. Yeah. Yes. So a little bit of historical in there. That’s pretty cool. Yeah.

[00:17:13] Steve: Yeah. And I think it gives evokes a new element to the detective novel that I think just, gives it a lot of stuff that you can do a lot of stuff that you can write about.

Yeah. And it makes it a little more exciting.

[00:17:27] Stephen: Nice. It sounds a little as a little bit of the noir elements in there. Exactly.

[00:17:31] Steve: Yeah. It is. It’s a combination of no noir and historical fiction.

[00:17:37] Stephen: Nice. Interesting. Okay. A good

[00:17:40] Steve: hat. I get five star ratings on Amazon most of the time. So I think and my fans, I think like that element and like the story of Joshua Oz.

[00:17:54] Stephen: Nice. Okay. And this is indie published, correct?

[00:17:58] Steve: It is. Yeah. I actually, the vengeance of the ripper went through a small publishing company that no longer exists. So I couldn’t use them now, but cuz I wrote this back in 2010 sometime and then it was republished in 2014, independently by me. And So now it’s strictly independent.

I think part of it is my age. Like I say, I grew up in the fifties and sixties, so I’m not at that age where I don’t know if your traditional publisher really would want a series from someone of a certain age, but although we are living longer now I must say

[00:18:40] Stephen: Yeah. Who know. Yeah, definitely. And you said you’re getting good feedback from readers.

Yes. I have you gotten any really interesting comments from anyone? Yeah, they said,

[00:18:50] Steve: come

[00:18:51] Stephen: on, write another one.

[00:18:54] Steve: write another one. I wanna see what happens to Joshua and his girlfriend, Angela Lang, which happens to be another major character in the books. And she is a female. Who became a police detective in the 1920s.

Can you imagine? And I read it in history. There, there has been certain female cops back in the 1920s and even earlier, but it was really like, it was like an anomaly. You didn’t have female police officers or detectives. And and Joshua falls in love with an well, Angie is what her nickname is.

And the two of ’em get into pretty exciting adventures together. So

[00:19:41] Stephen: nice. I think it works nice. Steve, if you had a choice, would you rather see your books turned into movies or a TV show? That’s a good

[00:19:49] Steve: question. I think. The, from target of fear, which was my second book on, it would make a good mini series or TV series, the original novel vengeance of the ripper because it stars wired, rip and bat Masterson.

And Joshua was in the background. There would make a good movie.

[00:20:10] Stephen: Okay.

[00:20:11] Steve: Hope that answers your

[00:20:12] Stephen: question. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Now what you should write a story of your main character later in life meeting a young Spencer and encouraging him to .

[00:20:21] Steve: Yeah, we’re actually in my new novel, murdered by the numbers takes place in 1921 and I was gonna have.

Joshua meet a young Elliot ness, but I found out from history, Elliot ness was still at high school and no, he would not be involved in . He was not involved in law enforcement.

[00:20:41] Stephen: I write middle grade, so you always try and find the way to get the kids involved in something like that. So you could make that work.

It could be a,

[00:20:49] Steve: it would be a strange though, because Elliot was out in Chicago at the time. Going to high school in, you know what no, actually he was out in the Cleveland area.

[00:20:59] Stephen: Yeah. Yeah. He was over by us. Yeah. Maybe him and some buddies jumped in a car and took a trip.

[00:21:04] Steve: that could be but again, yeah, but I wanna try to make my novels as historically accurate as I can. So for example wild bill Hickok would not be in vengeance of the ripper because he was killed in 1870. Oh, okay. and of the ripper takes place in 1908. It would not work. No.

[00:21:27] Stephen: Got it. Got it. Where can we find your book?

And do you have a website?

[00:21:32] Steve: Yes. You can find my books on Amazon’s web websites Amazon and Barnes and noble and. Any discerning bookstore that might carry my books. And, but but mainly Amazon would have it. And then my website, I do have a website it’s Steve lessen all small letters, cramped in web starts at Let’s see.

Yeah. Yeah. Web starts.com. Okay. So Steve lessen web starts.com. And then I do have an Amazon author page and I also have a Facebook page Steve, less author. And I’m wearing Mike fedora like I am now.

[00:22:10] Stephen: So yes. Nice. all right. And what’s your plans for your upcoming book books?

[00:22:15] Steve: That’s another good question.

I have a vague idea for my next book in the series because during the relationship between Joshua and Angela Lang I always tease my readers that maybe they’ll get married. So I’m thinking maybe the next novel, maybe the make marriage plans, but something gets in their way.

That’s a big idea.

[00:22:41] Stephen: So didn’t Spencer and his longtime girl, go back and forth with that a couple

[00:22:46] Steve: times. Yeah, right? Yeah. Spencer, and his longtime love Susan Silverman never actually got technically married because he would have his own separate apartment and she would have her own separate house.

But somehow they made it work that way. Yeah. I don’t know. That’s yeah. So yes, I did borrow some from, Robert B. Parker and, but I also borrowed from other authors too, as you probably did in your quest to become an author and it’s, you make it work and you make it your own.

[00:23:21] Stephen: Okay. Let’s talk a little bit about some of the things you like. So what are some of the books and authors that you’ve liked throughout your life? Your like favorite books and authors? Okay.

[00:23:30] Steve: Grapes and wrath, you have to start with cuz. Set it all, then I also read oh, when I was growing up, I read Hardy boys and oh yeah.

That series. And then a lot of comic books, like I mentioned before, when I was a kid, it was Superman, Batman, the DC series. And then I switched over to Marvel for a while because I thought the iron man stories were interesting. This guy had a heart problem, but he was a superhero. What’s, I thought that was interesting.

And then later on I read I read a lot of history books from Doris Kearns Goodman who was a poller prize winning author. And also David McCullough, which wrote historical books that you could read like a novel. And then of course I read the Spencer novels when Spencer for hire was a TV show and he says, Hey sounds interesting.

I wanna read more about him. So I read like all his books and then he branched out and he wrote a Western too. And that happened to be when I saw him at the book signing in Barnes and noble. Nice. Yeah. And then I also read science fiction books. I read a lot of books. Because I also do book reviews for a website called reader’s favorites.

I don’t

[00:24:39] Stephen: know if you’ve ever oh yeah. I know reader’s

favorites.

[00:24:41] Steve: Yeah. So I do I do some reviews. I get to read some books from different authors, unknown authors, like myself, that turn out to be pretty good writers. So

[00:24:52] Stephen: nice. And where you live, do you have a favorite bookstore that you like to go.

[00:24:56] Steve: I did, but a lot of bookstores closed a lot of the independent bookstores closed. But I do to the, I do go to Barnes and noble that’s in town and I, and there’s another little bookstore in Vernon, Connecticut called the book rack and they take use books that you can exchange. and and you can loan them out and then you read ’em and then you can bring them back and you get credit and you can buy

[00:25:23] Stephen: another book.

Nice. Okay. And I appreciate you telling us all about your book. And I wanna move on talk some other stuff, but before we do te give everybody if someone came up to you and said, Hey, Steve, I heard you wrote a book. Why should I read it? What would you tell them? Oh

[00:25:39] Steve: I think you’ll find if you like detective Noar type stories with an exciting historical background, with a lot of action.

There is a lot of action in the books and there’s romance. And it’s in a background of prohibition and the roaring twenties and celebrities. And babe Ruth is in one of my books. And it’s just an exciting read. It’s a type of read you wanna read from from cover to back cover. And it’s just a fun read.

[00:26:12] Stephen: Nice. Okay, great. Appreciate you getting on and telling us about your book. What, tell one more time? What was the title of the book?

[00:26:19] Steve: The title of my new book is murdered by the

[00:26:21] Stephen: numbers murdered by the numbers. There you go. I appreciate it. Thank you much.

Charles read the first chapter from his book – Rocked in Time.