The Crime Cafe

This episode of the Crime Cafe podcast features my interview with crime fiction and nonfiction author, Phil Halton

His website poses a question: How do we create meaning in the face of chaos?

Riddle me that, eh? 🙂

You can download a copy of the transcript here.

Debbi (00:52): Hi everyone. Today I have a guest who says he didn’t plan to become a writer, but as a soldier and later a security consultant, he’s traveled extensively throughout the world to most places and situations that very few people get to witness. What better background for a writer, I say.

(01:16): It’s my pleasure to introduce my guest, Phil Halton. Did I say that right?

Phil (01:22): Perfect.

Debbi (01:23): Phil Halton?

Phil (01:24): Perfectly.

Debbi (01:25): Excellent. Good. Good to have you here, Phil. How are you doing?

Phil (01:29): Good, good. It’s good to be here though as it’s odd to be here on the 11th of September.

Debbi (01:35): Yes, it is. Very odd indeed. The whole day has felt slightly strange for that reason, that it’s the 25th anniversary and all, because I remember the day it happened a little too well for comfort. So you didn’t plan to be a writer, so what made you decide to be one?

Phil (01:59): In some ways I kind of fell into it. I identify I think more as a storyteller, and so I was always the guy who had the stories. I had a bunch of experiences that I didn’t want to write about directly, but I though, oh, I can rework some of this and tell some stories that I think are actually of use as well, of value. Because my first novel in some ways is kind of the origin stories of the Taliban. It ends when the Taliban begins and it’s based on my experiences working with former Taliban and others in Afghanistan. And so I had things I wanted to say, I had things I wanted to express, and so that’s how I decided to do it.

Debbi (02:43): Sounds like you got some very interesting inside information in your work.

Phil (02:49): Yeah. Well, I think too that when I dig and dig and dig and dig in these things, I always find humans at the base of it. And so I think of my stories as really human-centered stories, even if they’re in strange places and with strange customs and strange. It doesn’t matter. You can always find the human element of it.

Debbi (03:12): Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s absolutely true. I think that’s what draws us into reading the books. If you can’t find the humanity in the character, how are you going to care?

Phil (03:23): Yeah, I think so. I think so. And I think in the end, that’s a positive message that we all have this common humanity and perhaps aren’t so different after all.

Debbi (03:35): I love that message. I wish there were more of that out there. Were there certain steps you took to get started as a writer or did you just fall into it naturally and know how to tell a story from the get-go? Well,

Phil (03:51): Well, I don’t know about that, but yeah, certainly I started with writing screenplays and I worked with an established screenwriter, and so we partnered up on a couple projects that actually didn’t really go anywhere. People loved them and didn’t want them. And so we did that a couple of times and I decided I’m going to write my own thing here, my own screenplay. And again, people loved it, nobody wanted it. And so I realized this might do better as a novel, so I rewrote it as a novel and wouldn’t you know that I sold the novel and the screenplay within a week of each other.

Debbi (04:32): Wow.

Phil (04:33): Yeah.

Debbi (04:34): My goodness. That is remarkable.

Phil (04:38): It is. The screenplay was never produced. It died in production hell, but that’s okay. I got paid and the novel was published and became This Shall Be a House of Peace. Then from there I just kept building on my experiences and kept working at it, though my military background really gave me a mindset about professional development, that that’s important. I pursued that as well as a writer. I just finished a doctorate in English literature and I see it as my development as a writer.

Debbi (05:17): Well, that’s going to develop you all right. That sounds like quite the program. A lot of people don’t go through that kind of rigorous development for sure. How do you choose your particular topics and your particular characters? Are they based on people you’ve known, situations you’ve been in or just made up?

Phil (05:45): Well, I think like a lot of writers, I’ve got 20 stories in my drawer here that I’m trying to pick which one I’m going to do next. So it’s never a shortage of stories. It’s always like will I live long enough to tell all these stories? And they’re typically not drawn directly from any experience of mine. The characters are often kind of a hybrid of people I know, and sometimes it’s kind of surprising that there’s a villain in a book and someone’s like, “Well, who are they based on? They seem really realistic.” And it’s like, “Well, actually it’s me. I based it on myself, the worst version of myself.” So yeah, I try not to write too directly about my own experiences and try to take it a little farther.

Debbi (06:38): Is there a favorite among the books that you’ve written?

Phil (06:44): Yeah. Well, that’s hard to say. I guess my favorite of all the books would be Every Arm Outstretched, which is, it’s set during the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua, but it’s really a story of friendship and loyalty and humanity again. I think it’s kind of the most fun book that I’ve written.

Debbi (07:10): Interesting, because I noticed it’s about veterans, correct?

Phil (07:17): Well, no, it’s about the two young men who get wrapped up in the revolution. They’re not high-minded folks, but they get forced into it and then really confront how to be a good person when there’s no rules anymore.

Debbi (07:35): Yeah, I noticed there were a lot of ethical issues coming up in some of the descriptions of your books, and I like that. Those are always intriguing stories.

Phil (07:44): Yeah. And I think that idea, how do we make sense out of chaos? What do we do when no one’s telling you what to do? Those are stories that always attract me.

Debbi (07:54): Yeah. Now, I have to say that Postslop is a really great title for a book because it immediately got my attention. And unfortunately, we experience it all over the internet, cluttering our inboxes and gently sucking our brains out.

Phil (08:11): Yeah.

Debbi (08:13): What do we do about this? Is there something we can do?

Phil (08:16): So my doctoral thesis was in literary theory, specifically postmodern theory, so kind of a French philosophy of the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s. And as I was doing all this deep theoretical reading, I realized that these theorists were talking about things that we’re experiencing now, and they were theorizing about it, but it’s sort of come true that images have become detached from their meaning, that things are circulating on social media and on the internet, and they don’t really mean anything anymore. It’s this kind of brain rot material. And so as I was doing this work and listening to my kids, who my kids are in their early 20s and are struggling with this stuff, never having known life before the internet, that I realized that, well, what are we going to do about it? And that I needed to write a short book for them, and so it’s postslop because we can’t go backwards.

(09:21): We can’t get before there was slop. We have to get postslop. We need to move on and actually ground ourselves in what’s real, because slop, it’s not just AI-generated stuff, it’s humans that are making it. Influencers, I find it must be the saddest people on earth because they have a boss, it’s the algorithms.

(09:45): And they have to tune their work to that in order to survive, in order to make money. So the book is really about how do we get past being inundated with slop as individuals and ground ourselves back in what’s real?

Debbi (10:03): That’s definitely a book I want to read, for sure. Let’s see. I recently had an exchange with a chatbot I wanted to tell people about. It did absolutely everything it could to keep me from speaking to a human being. I thought that was interesting.

Phil (10:26): Well, there’s economics behind this too, right?

Debbi (10:29): Oh, yeah.

Phil (10:31): It’s not just an aesthetic choice for businesses. There’s an economic reason why we’re all getting sucked into chatbots.

Debbi (10:38): Yeah. It’s a little bit disturbing when you’re trying to fix a complicated problem and the chatbot just isn’t designed for it. And you keep saying human being, and they keep saying, “We understand you want to talk to a human, but I can help you. Uhh. … bye.” Let’s see. How much research do you do on your books?

Phil (11:06): Well, so I flip back and forth between writing fiction and non-fiction.

(11:10): So I think I take a non-fiction approach to a lot of my books because I’ve written fiction set in Afghanistan. I’ve also written a scholarly history of the war in Afghanistan. So I do a fair deal of research, though I think sometimes it surprises people because a lot of the research doesn’t necessarily make it into the book. I just want it for my foundational knowledge and it’s like a little sprinkling through because my one crime fiction book, Red Warning, is set in Afghanistan in 1978 and follows a corrupt police detective, and people are like, “Oh wow, how did you get all the details of how the police station worked and the detective’s office worked?” And I was like, “No, no, I made that up. I just made that up.” But I based it on dysfunctional offices that I’ve worked in before, and it rings true, I think, because it does touch something that’s true, even if it’s not exactly how those things worked in real life.

Debbi (12:23): I think that’s just the best way to write, because sometimes people get too hung up on reality, so to speak. Fiction is not reality. That’s a documentary or a non-fiction work. Storytelling is about creating situations where people can feel something for the characters.

Phil (12:44): That’s right. And you need just enough to make it believable, because I coach writers as well, and that’s a common problem, particularly for historical fiction writers, that they’re just so lost in their own material that they’re like, “Well, it can’t be that because X.” It’s your story. It can be anything you want.

Debbi (13:06): It’s fictionalized history.

Phil (13:08): Yeah, that’s right. So I always say it’s spice. It’s just the spices that you’re putting in the historical research. It’s not the foundation of the whole thing.

Debbi (13:19): Right. I mean, if you’re writing about the 1800s, obviously women don’t have the vote yet, but human nature is human nature.

Phil (13:31): Yeah, that’s right.

Debbi (13:31): That’s kind of what it comes down to. I think

Phil (13:34): We all want to show our homework. I think that’s what authors do. They’re like, “Look how much I know about this period.”

Debbi (13:41): Yeah. It’s kind of like, yeah, they want to show off and say, “Oh, look, look, look at how this computer works, and this is how this gun works.” And well, sometimes it can get a little too detailed. Let’s see. You’ve also done a graphic novel. How did that come about?

Phil (13:58): Yeah, so that was a failed screenplay.

Debbi (14:01): Oh, that figures. Visual.

Phil (14:03): Yeah, that was one of those screenplays I wrote with another screenwriter. And again, we never found a home. And so at one point in my writing career, I was looking through my box of unpublished stuff, like what did I have that maybe had legs that being a short story or a novella or whatever I had that just hadn’t found a home. And that screenplay really felt like this could be something. And so I naively thought, oh, a screenplay to a graphic novel, that’ll be easy. And it’s not as simple as that. So you end up having to rewrite it pretty extensively. And then of course you have another creative involved because we hired a graphic artist to actually draw it. So it became a really interesting group project that is very different than normal work for me, which is very solitary and just me and a computer.

Debbi (15:10): Yeah. That’s the thing about screenwriting. Screenwriting is highly collaborative.

Phil (15:17): Yeah, it is once it gets going.

Debbi (15:19): Working with an artist is also, same thing.

Phil (15:22): Yeah. Yeah. And in fact, in this case, the artist had a lot of experience drawing manga, and they brought a completely different visual sensibility to the story than I had imagined, but it was terrific. I really liked how it worked, and it was all them. I would never have thought of it. I would never have pulled it off if not for them. So the collaboration was really positive.

Debbi (15:46): That’s awesome. That’s really great. I think it’s great when you can find another person to collaborate with because the result can be absolutely spectacular sometimes.

Phil (15:56): Yeah, I think writers don’t do it enough. It’s such a solitary thing.

Debbi (15:59): I agree. I agree with you. Let’s see. What kind of writing schedule do you keep?

Phil (16:07): Well, my schedule has been pretty strange lately just because I’ve been in school full-time, but my typical writing schedule is I write about five hours a day, five days a week, because it’s what I do for a living, so I don’t have a lot of other distractions. I can’t really produce more than five hours. That’s really the limits for my brains. And it intends to be during the day, get up, walk the dog, have some coffee, read the paper, and then sit down to write. I like monastic silence when I write, so I need a very quiet, dim place to go and write, but I also tend to go in fits and starts. And so when I start a novel, then I just drive all the way through it, and then I’ll take a bit of a pause, plan something else out, and then dive in again.

(17:03): So right now I need a pause.

Debbi (17:03): Yeah. Yeah. Take a pause and take a look at what you’ve done and figure, am I going the right way? That kind of stuff.

Phil (17:13): Yeah. What do I want to do next? What really attracts me?

Debbi (17:16): Are you more of an outliner or a pantser?

Phil (17:19): Oh, I am an outliner extraordinaire. I have big corkboards covered in index cards. They’re color-coded. I do all of that. I did try more of a pantser method with my last book that is currently looking for a publisher because it was a really complex structure. It was a chiastic structure, so like a ring structure, which you would think needs more planning, but it was so complicated that I couldn’t plan it. So I planned the first half and then just tried to figure out how to write my way back to the beginning again. And yeah, it was interesting. I’m still a planner though.

Debbi (18:03): Oh yeah. Same here. I’m more of a planner than a pantser, though I tend to deviate from my plan a lot. I like to say, wait a minute, maybe I should go this way instead. That seems to be better.

Phil (18:17): I forget who said it, but plans are useless, but planning is essential.

Debbi (18:21): Right. Yeah, I agree. Yeah, totally. Let’s see. What are you working on now? You’re taking a pause, you said.

Phil (18:32): Yeah. So this is a funny year for me. So it’s a three-book year in terms of publishing. Now, most of them have been stacked up years before, but it looks like a pretty massive output. And I just finished writing a novel a couple months ago, and so I’m planning my next book, which I think actually is going to be nonfiction and will be a guide for veterans who want to write memoirs, so a guide to memoir writing.

Debbi (19:04): That’s great.

Phil (19:06): Yeah. Yeah, because I coach a lot of veterans and coaching’s expensive and not everybody can afford it. And so I thought this would be an easier entry point for veterans who have stories to tell and are kind of one and done writers. They may not have a second book, but they have one that’s really burning.

Debbi (19:25): Yeah. I write about a female veteran actually, so this is kind of interesting for me.

Phil (19:32): Yeah.

Debbi (19:33): I can get the Canadian perspective on this then.

Phil (19:37): Yeah. Well, it’s probably not that different actually, to be honest.

Debbi (19:39): I would think not. It’s the human perspective, eh?

Phil (19:43): That’s it. That’s it. Yeah.

Debbi (19:47): What advice would you give to someone who’d like to write for a living?

Phil (19:54): I think there’s two parts to that. Someone who wants to write and then someone who wants to write for a living. When I first was circulating the idea that I was hoping to write for a living, I was in a poker group of writers, writers and poets and reviewers and editors. And when I said, oh, I think I might give this a go, someone said to me, “Phil, do you know the difference between a writer and a large pizza?” “A large pizza can feed a family of four, maybe an extra large pizza nowadays.”

(20:34): So I think if you want to be a writer, it’s actually very easy. You just write. A writer is defined by the action, and so you carve out some time in your day or your week and write. Write for yourself, write for publication, whatever you want to write. And if that’s on your phone or whatever, whatever, I think that’s a noble enterprise on its own. If you want to write for a living, that’s a lot tougher. I think certainly in the beginning it constrains what a living is, but there are a lot of people making a living as writers. They’re just not writing the way that people might think. They’re not sitting down to write the great novel and then that gets published and then they live off their fame and money for the rest of their lives. There’s a lot of copywriting jobs, there are magazine writing jobs.

(21:34): So I think you got to find what do you want to write about and then how you can monetize it.

Debbi (21:39): Yes, that’s important.

Phil (21:41): Yeah. And I’m not going to say that it’s easy, but it’s also not impossible. You can certainly monetize writing, but it might be in a weird place that you don’t necessarily expect.

Debbi (21:54): Exactly. Yeah. There are a lot of writing jobs out there and there are a lot of opportunities for writers to make jobs for themselves, to be entrepreneurs.

Phil (22:06): Yeah, because I think if you’re a writer, you’re a business. You have to think of it. You’re not an artist, though maybe you are, but primarily you’ve got to think about it as a business and make those decisions so that you can survive. I don’t think there’s any glory in being a starving artist.

Debbi (22:26): There isn’t.

Phil (22:27): I don’t think there’s any value in that for itself.

Debbi (22:33): Yeah. I mean, artists really do have to think of it as a business, even artists.

Phil (22:41): Yeah, artists of all kinds, and writers are artists.

Debbi (22:43): Truly, that’s pretty basic. If you’re going to make money at anything, you better treat it like a business. That’s all there is to it. Is there anything you would like to add before we finish up?

Phil (23:01): Yeah. I’m really thinking about this thing about writing as a business or writing for a living, because I think people feel sometimes that if they want to be a writer, that’s the only way that to be serious, they have to write for a living. I don’t know. I don’t think that’s necessarily true either. How you pay your mortgage, how you pay your rent is kind of a separate question from what do you do that gives value to society.

Debbi (23:33): Yes.

Phil (23:35): And so I think you can be a very credible writer who also has a job that doesn’t involve writing. And I think that’s really okay too. And I wish more people wrote, particularly in the face of all the AI slop and the rest of it, just sit down and write. Write a story for fun, write something to express an opinion or a concern you have. I think these are important skills actually.

Debbi (24:06): I love hearing this.

Phil (24:09): Yeah. Well, and I find it sad. I work with a lot of veterans and writing their memoirs and they’ll say, “Well, I kind of dictated a bunch of stuff into ChatGPT and then it spat out this memoir. Now I want you to edit it, Phil.” And I’m not going to edit it. And also, do you realize that the one thing that you had going for you is that the only person who can tell this story is you.

Debbi (24:37): That’s right.

Phil (24:38): The only person who can tell your story is you, and you’ve given that up. So yeah. Again, I think there’s a lot of value, a lot of value in writing and storytelling. It’s kind of the code of how humans work, how human society works.

Debbi (25:00): Yes, you’re right. You’re absolutely right. It’s funny, there are so many contexts in which I tell people that storytelling can help them.

Phil (25:11): Absolutely. Yeah. I think leadership is essentially storytelling because you’ve got to create a convincing story, if you will, as to why people should do the things that you’re asking them to do and to all work together for a purpose. You can’t do that without crafting a narrative around why we’re doing whatever we’re doing.

Debbi (25:33): Yes.

Phil (25:35): For good and for evil, these narratives get created. So yeah, it’s powerful stuff, writing.

Debbi (25:41): It is. The pen really is mightier than the sword.

Phil (25:46): I think so. I think it is. Yeah, having waved both, I think it is.

Debbi (25:52): Hey. All right. Well, thank you so much for being here, Phil. I really appreciate your time and all of your thoughts, and we can hang around afterward and do a quick bonus episode for the Patreon supporters.

Phil (26:07): Okay. Sounds good.

Debbi (26:08): All right. Well, thank you so much, Phil, for being here. And I will just say thank you to my listeners for tuning in, so to speak. I like to say tuning in, even though we don’t have a radio frequency. I’m just an old-fashioned gal who used to listen to the radio. Music, that is. I wasn’t around for the shows. Those go before my time. Anyway, you can get ad-free early access to the podcast as well as book reviews and updates on what I’m doing if you become a Patreon supporter, along with chapters from my books and other things. I hope you consider becoming a member and take advantage of the perks. On that note, I want to thank you again for listening. In two weeks, we’ll have another author on, and until then, take care and happy reading. I’ll be seeing you. Take care.

*****

Check us out on Patreon!

Hi there! 🙂 On the Crime Cafe this week, we have my interview with Matt Witten, who’ll tell us all about his latest novel, 51%, which will (with any luck) be adapted, produced, and distributed to a television set screen near you. He is also optimistic in the face of the insanity we’ve all been subjected to about the future, which is somewhat reassuring.

For a copy of the transcript, click here.

Debbi (00:54): Hi everyone. My guest today has worked in a wide variety of media, from writing novels, writing for television, writing for the stage, and producing film. His latest novel, 51%, has the most intriguing concept, which I will let him tell you about. As of this moment, it’s still science fiction, I believe, I hope. It’s my pleasure to have with me the author of 51%, Matt Witten. Hey Matt, how are you doing?

Matt (01:25): Great. Thank you, Debbi. It’s so good to be here.

Debbi (01:27): Excellent. It’s great to have you on. Oh, you look so relaxed and happy out there on that porch. That looks nice. I should be on my porch right now except that it’s kind of sweltering out there a little bit from what I understand. Where are you located?

Matt (01:42): I’m in the Adirondacks. I used to live in Los Angeles and our house was in the Palisades Fire last year, so we were very fortunate that we had this small second home in the Adirondacks. So this is where we live now.

Debbi (01:55): Oh my gosh. Well, that’s nice. Very nice. Tell us about your latest book. I am so hooked on the concept already.

Matt (02:04): Thank you very much. It’s called 51%. Here’s a picture of the cover. And it’s about a world 20 years from now. I used to say 30 years, but after one year of Trump, I’ve decided that it’s more like 20 years. And sometimes after I describe the concept to people, they say, “Oh, it sounds more like 10 years.” Anyway, it’s a world where the big six corporations, they own just about everything. They own schools, they own parks, they own the post office, just about everything’s been privatized and they even own people. So our hero, our two heroes are homicide detectives for the New York Police Department Incorporated, because in this world, even the police department is private. So for instance, if you want to investigate a murder, you have to raise money to investigate the murder because you got to raise money for your own salary and half goes to you and half goes to the corporation that owns the police department.

(03:01): So you raise money from the victim’s spouse, their partner, their friends, their neighbors, their family. You might do a Kickstarter campaign in order to raise money for the murder. And so yeah, we have two heroes. One’s a homicide detective and the other is his partner and she’s a crime marketing expert. She’s the one that raises the money.

Debbi (03:28): Wow. Interesting. It’s just so intriguing to listen to you describe this concept because it’s so similar to something I’m working on in certain ways.

Matt (03:36): Okay. All right, good. Well, we should join forces.

Debbi (03:39): I’m a little more optimistic in terms of when this happens in the future.

Matt (03:44): You put it further away?

Debbi (03:45): I’m being a little more hopeful, I guess.

Matt (03:48): Yeah.

Debbi (03:49): Let’s give us a minor bit of hope here.

Matt (03:51): Well, I try to be hopeful in this in the sense that I describe them as the two main characters, but really the homicide detective’s ex-girlfriend is leading the resistance and the resistance is fighting the forces of evil. And she’s got this big action that she’s going to do on Saturday night at midnight, and hopefully it will jumpstart a revolution against the forces of evil. So there’s a lot of hope and love stories to give us hope also.

Debbi (04:22): Well, that’s great. That’s wonderful. And I understand that you will be writing an adaptation of this for somebody for television?

Matt (04:29): Yes, I did. Yeah, I wrote an adaptation of it for TV, co-wrote with Charlie Greg, a showrunner for NBC. So that was very exciting. And we have some meetings scheduled the next month, so we’ll never count our chickens too quickly, but—

Debbi (04:48): Oh, absolutely not.

Matt (04:49): That’s exciting.

Debbi (04:50): That is an amazing bit of news though.

Matt (04:53): Yeah.

Debbi (04:53): And it sounds like things are progressing as opposed to stalling.

Matt (04:57): Yes. Well, yeah, I think so. Yes.

Debbi (05:01): That’s fantastic. Congratulations. That’s a big win for you.

Matt (05:05): Yeah, thank you.

Debbi (05:07): I really want to see this thing. I want to read this book too. Let’s see. What really inspired you to write this book? She said somewhat like a dumb interviewer, what inspired you to write this book.

Matt (05:23): It’s always a good question. Well, I would say two things. One is, ever since I first started following politics, I’ve just watched as the government got more gridlocked and government became smaller and big corporations became bigger and more powerful. And we’ve got guys like Elon Musk, some days they’re trillionaires and some days they’re only close. And I’ve watched the middle class getting squeezed, basically the middle class and the poor getting poorer and the rich getting richer. So all my feelings about privatization and big corporations taking over and all of this came to fruition in this. And I’ll also say more specifically, the day that I got the inspiration for this, I went out to see a lecture by a TV executive named David Nevins, and Nevins was involved in the creation of some terrific shows like ER, The West Wing, Homeland. And he said something that night when I saw his lecture, he said that the best TV shows, and my guess is the best novels, but anyway, the best TV shows are the ones that speak to our deepest fears.

(06:34): So I walked home from the lecture that night. I was in Connecticut and I thought, “What are my deepest fears?” And two words came back to me, and those two words were student loans.

Debbi (06:47): Oh, my gosh.

Matt (06:48): And so I thought about student loans all night long, and by the morning I had this world, the name of the book is 51%, and it’s based on the idea that there are, if you want to go to college in this world or you want to go to high school, there’s no public colleges, there’s no public high schools, so everything is private. So if you want to go, you’re going to have to pay your own way, and lots of times you’re not going to have the money for it. So you get a loan to go to high school and college. And what it is, it’s an income share agreement where you agree the corporation is going to pay for your high school, pay for your college, but you’re going to have to pay them X percent of your money for your salary for the next 10 years.

(07:29): So 20% of your income, let’s say for the next 10 years. And I should say, by the way, this is already happening. These income share agreements exist now. People on the right, like Marco Rubio are very supportive of it. People on the left or the middle, like Hillary Clinton are very supportive of it. So it’s already happening. So I thought, let’s say this catches steam and then it’s used for other things because the way the world is going, fewer and fewer people, at least in the last year or two, are having health insurance. Nobody gives a heck about Obamacare. Excuse me, the rich people don’t give a heck about Obamacare. And so what if you get a situation, you God forbid, get cancer, you’re going to have to give up X percent of your income for a certain number of years. You need help with childcare, which the United States government or state governments don’t really seem to have what Europe has in terms of childcare.

(08:20): Okay, you want childcare, you have to give up another percent. So some people wind up over 50% owned, and when they wind up over 50% owned, 51%, then the corporations own them, could tell them what to do. If you want to be a poet or whatever, they’ll just laugh at you. Poets don’t make any money, so you got to work whatever. You got to work at a strip club, you got to work in a mine that can cause cancer. You have to do what we tell you to do. So it’s just basically.

(08:51): Anyways, that’s what inspired me. It’s basically looking at this world we have now where middle-class people are getting more and more squeezed and to the point where the corporations 20 years from now own us. And at the same time that right now we have these evil guys with. I mean, I would just say Trump, I’ll just say it, evil guys like Trump who are doing all these things to make our world worse, but there’s tremendous people who are fighting back against them. And it seems to me in every generation we’ve had a bad guy or the bad force, evil that we’ve had to fight. And so in my book, 20 years from now, there’s going to be evil again and good people of goodwill are going to come together and fight it. And that’s going to be the way the world works, I think, till the end of the world. Good is always going to.

(09:41): I don’t know, it must be a line of the Superman or something, but good is always going to fight evil. That’s the way it is.

Debbi (09:47): Thank you for articulating all of those thoughts that need to be expressed. I just think that was a very nicely expressed sentiment, all of it.

Matt (10:01): Thank you. I appreciate it.

Debbi (10:02): I wish more people thought that way and started thinking about it and started resisting.

Matt (10:08): Thank you. I’ll tell you, the thing that makes me anxious when I talk like that is–

Debbi (10:11): I get it.

Matt (10:11): I’m imagining the reader, or not the reader, the listener to your podcast sitting at home saying, “Man, that book sounds pretty heavy. No way I’m touching that book.” So then I always have to follow it up with, “It’s a very sweet love story. There’s a lot of action.” People that read it, it’s like, oh, super fast-paced and all that, because whatever, I’m a TV writer. I don’t want people getting bored, so I got to keep it coming.

Debbi (10:36): Think about all the spy movies you ever watched. That’s pretty serious stuff, but still it’s very watchable.

Matt (10:43): Yeah, it’s interesting. If something doesn’t have something to it, sometimes it’s like, why am I reading this? It’s like there’s nothing to it. It’s too airy or something. But yeah, if something’s too heavy, obviously I’m going to put the book down after page two or three. So just trying to get that match and create something that I would enjoy reading, and I think a lot of people are enjoying reading.

Debbi (11:08): You’re not writing a treatise, you’re writing a novel, a thriller novel at that.

Matt (11:12): That’s right.

Debbi (11:13): So it’s going to be thrilling. Let’s see. Let’s see. I was looking at an interview you did where you talked about “wars without consequence.” I thought that was a really interesting expression. Can you talk a little bit about what that means, wars without consequence?

Matt (11:32): Well, could you say a little more? I don’t remember what it means.

Debbi (11:37): It had something to do with bombing countries where we didn’t have any interests.

Matt (11:41): Yeah. Well, I think probably what I was thinking. I wrote a movie called Drones, and so I was probably talking about that. In this movie, there’s guys, these Air Force privates actually, who were hitting buttons and killing people in Afghanistan. And there’s no danger to Americans anymore. We can go. In Iran, I mean, we’re killing our economy and we have wounded or killed 750 people. So maybe that’s not the best example, but there are a lot of wars that we have fought that nobody knows anything about. We’ve had drone attacks on Sudan, and even in Iran to a certain extent, we’ve managed to kill tens of thousands of people in Iran, and hardly any Americans have suffered as thoroughly as that, as being killed by it. And we have these wars where if we don’t die, we don’t feel it. If we don’t suffer, we don’t feel it. And it means we’re likely to have more wars. The bar will be lower to have these stupid wars.

(12:52): Venezuela as being another good example, in my opinion. In the one hand, it’s like, “Oh, great. We’ve got these great weapons. We’ve got these great drones. It’s terrific. We’ve got these great bomber planes. We’ll be able to do this and be so powerful.” And yet on the other hand, it just means we’re going to get more wars, we’re going to kill more people, we’re going to alienate more people, we’re going to create more wars.

(13:18): At this point also, everybody’s got this ability. Ukraine’s got the ability. Iran, obviously, they have these weapons that are pretty relatively cheap and they’re able to hold us off. So it’s probably what I meant by war without consequence. It’s different from you’re going into battle like a Mel Gibson movie or something. You’re going into battle across the plain and some of you are going to die and some of the enemy are going to die, and it’s real, and you really got to deal with it, and it’s right in front of you. I don’t mean to romanticize, it caused great carnage, but it also is great disincentive to declaring war on somebody.

Debbi (13:57): And it also isn’t going to be covered by the media quite the same way as say, oh, Vietnam.

Matt (14:02): Right. I mean, Vietnam was. Yeah, because everybody was scared of getting drafted. That’s why the Vietnam War created that huge movement. And Iraq war was just as stupid as the Vietnam War, but nobody had to worry about getting drafted. So though there’s a lot of anti-war sentiment, it wasn’t like the streets were full of people protesting because if I don’t have to worry about getting drafted, I may be ticked off with the war, but I might not be so likely to go out and protest and do things.

Debbi (14:32): Yeah. Let’s see. Sometimes I get the sense that we’re so busy trying to keep up with technology that we don’t have time to really think about what we’re doing. Would you agree with that?

Matt (14:48): Are you thinking in terms of AI specifically?

Debbi (14:50): I’m thinking in terms of all the technology. Things happen so fast. We get so many things in email from people. Here’s a great way to promote your book, blah, blah, blah, stuff like that. I mean, it’s like they come fast and thick, these offers sometimes, especially when you’re doing something like screenwriting.

Matt (15:16): Yeah, yeah. Well, you definitely get a lot of spam for sure. I mean, as a writer, you get a million emails that they might claim to be from, whatever, from John Grisham and saying, “Oh, I read your book. It’s going to be terrific.” And it’s a hustle. I believe that. I know. It’s crazy. And then you get so many offers from book clubs, and I think about 99 out of a hundred are scams, and it gets to the point where I don’t even answer them, and I probably miss a book club here and there, but it’s just not worth it to me to try to figure out each one. Okay, is this a scam or is it real? Since it’s a scam 99 times, I’d rather just get rid of it. But yeah, I don’t know. I mean, technology, I don’t know. I don’t know.

Debbi (16:03): Let’s think of AI then. I mean, AI itself is also a huge … to me, it can be hugely problematic for us. I’m not saying it doesn’t have benefits. I’m just saying it could be a huge problem if we’re not careful.

Matt (16:19): Yeah, I agree. Well, everything. Yeah. I mean, Instagram, people are very concerned about it for kids and social media in general. So yeah, I don’t know. I think in general, technology has improved our lives in the last, whatever, thousands of years or hundreds of years.

Debbi (16:37): Absolutely.

Matt (16:38): I had a funny conversation with somebody recently, a friend of mine, Wendy, who’s in her 70s, and she was complaining about the world, and I said, “Well, do you think that the world has gotten worse in the last 30 years or 40 years?” And she said, “Well, yes.” I was kind of shocked, because the way I view it, it’s like people’s lifespans around the world are getting longer and infant mortality is less. The percentage of people who’s hungry is a little bit less than it used to be. And so to me, it’s like things are getting better. But I was trying to think, let’s say Wendy’s daily life or my daily life, is it better or worse than it was? I mean, I think all the medical advances probably means that I’m healthy. Actually, I know. Medical advances means I’m healthier than I would’ve been. That’s the main thing. But other ways, I don’t know. Is food better? Is drink better? Is movies better? Is entertainment better? I don’t know. I have to think about that some more because I don’t know how you feel, but I always took it on faith that things were getting better for us.

Debbi (17:43): Well, I don’t think things are getting worse. I think we’re being bombarded with information of various sorts. Some of it is edited, some of it isn’t. So sometimes you hear stuff and it sounds worse than it really is, and some of the headlines are worse than what they’re saying, than what they’re actually saying. I think we just are so bombarded with information that. And we’re also living in an extraordinary time when it comes to people who violate the Constitution around here. I mean, I’ll just say it, they are violating the Constitution left and right up at the federal level. And Congress, I don’t know, whatever happened to balance of powers? That’s what I’d love to know.

Matt (18:32): Right. Yeah. In that sense, maybe things are getting a lot worse.

Debbi (18:36): In that sense, that part is getting worse. But I don’t think the world generally is getting worse. I think we’re just better informed of the bad parts of it.

Matt (18:46): Yeah, I think, I don’t know. I mean, I don’t know what’ll happen after we get rid of this president and things change a little bit. I really don’t know. Will this be a blip or will it be just things continuing to go down the tube? It’s hard for me. I mean, in that sense, it’s hard for me to tell.

Debbi (19:01): Well, I never like to make predictions, so I don’t believe in them because you never know what’s going to happen, really. I’ve seen games where I was convinced my team was going to lose and they come back from behind, that sort of thing.

Matt (19:17): Oh, were you a Knicks fan this year?

Debbi (19:20): No, but I’ve been a Mets fan for many years. I remember when they were absolutely terrible. That’s how old I am. So have you ever listened to a podcast called American Afterlife?

Matt (19:33): No, I never have.

Debbi (19:34): It’s about what happens in the Northwest. The Northwest just basically crumbles into the sea, and there’s National Guard trying to keep control over everything, and there’s this one girl, a young girl who. She’s like a teenager, young adult, who is trying to find her mother, but she has a whole set of issues with her mom. And well, it’s interesting. It’s just a really interesting end of the world kind of thing that might interest you since you’re dealing with the technical part of it in your book, and they’re dealing with natural catastrophe.

Matt (20:11): Oh, that sounds good. I’ll remember that. American Afterlife. I’m reading a great novel now called Murder at the End of the World, and it’s about—

Debbi (20:18): Oh, I’ve heard of that.

Matt (20:19): Oh, it’s amazing. In fact, I think we can make a great movie or TV show. I was curious to see if it had been optioned yet, but it’s about the big asteroid’s about to hit. It’s going to destroy the world in a few months. At the time the book starts, it’s two months from now, so what are you going to do? Your world is going to destroy it. And the hero of the book decides to go to driving school. She’s 23, I think, and she’s decided, “You know what? I’m this old. I should have gotten my license. I’m going to get my license.” And it turns out there’s one teacher still at the driving school, and so she is going to help her get her license. It’s a cool concept. They’re living their lives, and then it takes a twist, which is that they find a dead body in the trunk of the car that they’re going out to drive.

(21:10): So then it’s like, “What do we do? We’re not going to let this murderer get away with it. I don’t care if there’s two months left. We’re not going to let her get away with it.” And then to make it really work, first of all, the author emphasizes how the victim suffered in the last part of her life because it was a vicious kind of murder, and then it turns out it was a serial killer. So it’s like, “Okay, we got to avenge the victim because they really suffered, and other people are going to suffer in the next two months.” So really, even if it’s two months left, you want to keep the people from suffering, let them die when the asteroid hits, it won’t be as bad. So it was just a beautiful book. It was a buddy story between these two characters, but it was also just beautiful. You’re going to live and no matter what happens, even if you’re about to die, it was great.

Debbi (21:59): Yeah. Live until you die.

Matt (22:01): That sounds like a good policy.

Debbi (22:04): That’s what I always say. Just keep living.

Matt (22:09): That works.

Debbi (22:10): Live now. Don’t wait to live. Don’t say, “Well, I’ll wait 10 years and start living then.”

Matt (22:17): You’re right about that. You’re right about that.

Debbi (22:19): That’s kind of what I’m feeling these days. Well, it sounds like you have a lot of hope for society despite everything you write about in your books, and I like that. I just want to say that.

Matt (22:32): Okay, thank you.

Debbi (22:33): Is there anything else you’d like to add before we finish up?

Matt (22:38): No, I’ve enjoyed being on here. It’s a pleasure. So I know you’re working on a movie short, so good luck with that.

Debbi (22:47): Thank you. Thank you very much. I’m excited, very excited. So I’m sure it will be fun. And I’m also doing post-production on my first movie, so that’s coming together finally.

Matt (23:03): Wow.

Debbi (23:04): Slowly.

Matt (23:04): Well, that’s exciting.

Debbi (23:05): Things happen with me very slowly.

Matt (23:07): That’s very exciting.

Debbi (23:09): Yeah. Thank you. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. And I am happy to have you on today and hope that you’ll hang around for the bonus episode that I’ll do after this, like a 10 minutes bonus.

Matt (23:24): Sure.

Debbi (23:25): Excellent. Great. So thanks so much for spending time with us today, Matt. I really appreciate it. It was very interesting hearing you talk and talking to you. Your book sounds fantastic, and good luck with the show.

Matt (23:40): Thank you. Thank you very much.

Debbi (23:42): To all my listeners and supporters, I would like to thank you very, very much for listening or watching on YouTube. If you’d like to follow us on Patreon, you’ll see that the Crime Cafe is now kind of rebranded into the Crime Cafe and multimedia experience. That’s kind of the best way I can put it because I’m kind of into podcasting, novel writing, screenwriting, and now filmmaking. So what does that all mean? I don’t know. We’ll see. I would welcome your thoughts on the show. Do you enjoy listening to it? Would you enjoy listening to a scripted podcast, for instance? Are there any other features that you would like to see as part of my newsletter? Let me know. Just shoot me an email at [email protected]. On that note, thanks again for your attention, your interest, and we’ll be back in two weeks with more.

(24:43): So in the meantime, take care and happy reading. Be seeing you.

We’re still on Patreon. 🙂

My guest this week on the Crime Cafe podcast is crime writer and screenwriter M.M. DeLuca.

Among other things, we discussed what it was like for her to study with a Pulitzer Prize winning writer.

For a copy of the transcript, click here.

Debbi (00:54): Hi everybody. Today my guest is the author of five critically acclaimed suspense novels, including her latest novel, The Divorce Party. Originally from Durham City, England, after studying at the University of London Goldsmiths College, she moved to Winnipeg, Canada, where she worked as an English literature teacher, then as a freelance writer.

(01:20): It’s my great pleasure to have with me Marjorie DeLuca, who writes under the name MM DeLuca. Hey Marjorie, how are you doing today? Let me see if I can get you in view. There you go. Awesome.

Marjorie (01:35): It’s great to be here. Lovely to talk to you.

Debbi (01:38): Well, I’m very pleased to have you on. It says, oh, how are things in Manitoba, anyway? How are things in Winnipeg?

Marjorie (01:48): Hot and humid.

Debbi (01:50): Hot and humid.

Marjorie (01:51): Hot, humid, windy with periods of rain.

Debbi (01:54): Oh my, that sounds like us.

Marjorie (01:57): It’s greener. Greener than usual.

Debbi (02:00): Well, there you go. There’s that.

Marjorie (02:01): Yeah. Yeah.

Debbi (02:03): Let’s see. Now in your bio, it says that you studied advanced creative writing with Pulitzer Prize winner Dr. Carol Shields. What was it like to study such a subject with a Pulitzer Prize winner?

Marjorie (02:17): It was like meeting a rock star. It really was. We were her final class before she retired, and we were all sitting there that day in awe because she just won the Pulitzer Prize. We were sitting there just waiting for her to come in, and she slipped through the door. She was this very petite, quiet lady, and she was just amazing. She had a charisma about her, and she wasn’t just your teacher. She was a friend, a mentor, and she loved to meet with us outside of class and we’d all go for lunches and she’d say, “Tell me the gossip. Come on.” And she was just a wonderful teacher. And actually, a lot of the things that we did in class, I used as an English teacher, but she had a profound influence on my career. It was an amazing one year that we spent with her.

(03:22): And after that, she moved away to the coast, to BC, and sadly passed away some years after that. But yeah, it was a fabulous experience.

Debbi (03:36): Was this during, I assume these are graduate studies?

Marjorie (03:43): Yes, it was, but you had to send in a piece of work or several pieces, and she selected the participants. So it was a one-year, just once a week course. Yeah.

Debbi (04:00): Sounds very much like a fellowship or something like that.

Marjorie (04:04): Yeah. Well, she was a professor at the University of Manitoba for many years. And when she won the Pulitzer Prize, I think she was the only female professor at the time.

Debbi (04:15): Oh my goodness.

Marjorie (04:16): The other male colleagues were a bit miffed, I think.

Debbi (04:20): Oh, dear.

Marjorie (04:22): She won the prize. But anyway, no, maybe that’s not fair, but she had been there quite a while as a teacher, a professor.

Debbi (04:34): Well, that’s just extraordinary that you had that opportunity. That’s fabulous.

Marjorie (04:38): Yes.

Debbi (04:41): What genre would you say your writing falls into?

Marjorie (04:45): I’m all over the place, really. I get bored in one genre. I started off in sci-fi, young adult sci-fi when I was teaching grades 10 to 12. And around that time, The Hunger Games came out and the kids just loved it, even reluctant readers. So as I was reading them, I thought, “I could write something like this.” And so that’s when I really started getting serious about putting something together.

(05:18):And I wrote a trilogy called The Forevers. Here’s the cover of it. I couldn’t find a publisher, so I self-published the trilogy and actually did pretty well. And later on, I adapted it into a series, and I actually got shortlisted for a Netflix call for submissions with my pilot and pitch, but they didn’t pick it up, but I’m still hoping that someone will. So I started off with that. Then you can see I’m all over the place.

(05:57): Then I went into historical fiction and wrote this family saga called The Pittman’s Daughter. And that’s based on my mother’s reminiscences as growing up in a culinary town in Durham, near Durham in the northeast of England. She was a Pittman’s daughter, a coal miner’s daughter. I couldn’t get that published by a publisher, so I self-published it.

And then I really love historical fiction. The first book I got published was this, The Savage Instinct, which is fact meets fiction set against the trial of real life serial poisoner, Mary Ann Cotton. So that’s when I started getting into suspense. I wrote another suspense book called Lilah, and then began a string of contemporary suspense.

So I had The Perfect Family Man, which was a big bestseller, The Secret Sister, The Night Side, which is sort of dark paranormal suspense. And then The Divorce Party, which is. I sort of got tired of being in the dark side after The Savage Instinct and The Night Side.

(07:32): I thought, I think I need something light. So I came up with The Divorce Party, which is exactly what it says. Friends from university who were invited by their frenemy, I guess, to her divorce party in Las Vegas. I had a lot of fun writing that.

Debbi (07:56): I was going to say, that sounds very acerbic wit stuff.

Marjorie (08:02): Oh, it was such fun writing it and researching it was so funny. There’s a whole industry devoted to divorce parties

Debbi (08:12): Oh, my gosh.

Marjorie (08:12): In Las Vegas.

Debbi (08:13): Oh, I can imagine.

Marjorie (08:14): I had no idea.

Debbi (08:15): I didn’t know. I don’t know anything about it, but I can imagine, wow.

Marjorie (08:20): No, I didn’t. I knew there’s the marriage thing. Well, there’s the whole marriage thing with the chapels and all of that. Note: There’s divorce cocktails. There’s special divorce playlists. There’s divorce party games. It’s incredible.

Debbi (08:38): Divorce party industry. Wow, that’s fantastic.

Marjorie (08:42): I know.

Debbi (08:42): Fantastic stuff. Places you go when you start looking.

Marjorie (08:47): I know. And it’s actually not as depressing as you’d think because a lot of these divorce parties are looking at things as a fresh start, a way to reinvent yourself. Unfortunately, in my book, it’s not as nice as that.

Debbi (09:06): They’re reinventing themselves in bad ways perhaps.

Marjorie (09:09): Yes. They’re actually trying to reinvent themselves, but the past keeps popping up like a corpse in a swimming pool.

Debbi (09:18): That’s right.

Marjorie (09:20): And then my latest one is another one of these destination thrillers, and that’s set in Mexico in a big villa at a 60th wedding anniversary.

Debbi (09:34): Deadly Diamonds.

Marjorie (09:36): Yeah. Actually, the book is still at the copy editing phase, and the publisher hasn’t done the cover release yet.

Debbi (09:52): Yeah.

Marjorie (09:53): Yeah. So it’s set in Mexico during the weekend of Día de Los Muertos. And that’s why I’m wearing a T-shirt with a –

Debbi (10:05): Nice.

Marjorie (10:07): Yeah.

Debbi (10:08): Very nice.

Marjorie (10:10): So I’m all over the genres. I jump it back and forth.

Debbi (10:16): That’s pretty impressive. I see you’ve done a combination of self-publishing and publishing through presses. Is that correct?

Marjorie (10:23): Yes. Yeah.

Debbi (10:26): But you started with self-publishing?

Marjorie (10:28): Yeah, I started with self-publishing.

Debbi (10:31): And when was that?

Marjorie (10:34): That was probably around 2013. The market was way less crowded. When I started self-publishing, it was possible to sell a decent number of books. So The Pittman’s Daughter and The Forevers trilogy did quite well. Nowadays, I’m not so sure. I think it’s really, really competitive and expensive to market.

Debbi (11:04): I know. Believe me, I know.

Marjorie (11:07): Oh, yes? You’ve self-published?

Debbi (11:09): I’m right in there. Yeah, I’m self-published. Yeah.

Marjorie (11:12): Yes.

Debbi (11:12): I am totally self-published at this point.

Marjorie (11:16): Yeah, and it takes a lot of your time.

Debbi (11:18): With a few exceptions. Oh, yeah, it does. It takes a lot of time. The thing is that I’m also involved in screenwriting, so there’s a lot of time that gets devoted. You do screenwriting?

Marjorie (11:32): Yes.

Debbi (11:33): Excellent. Most excellent. Good to know. How did you get into screenwriting?

Marjorie (11:41): My daughter is a costume designer for film, and one of her earlier projects, she was involved in some Hallmark movies, and I saw some of these. I can write one of those. So I co-wrote a Hallmark feature with a friend of hers who’s involved in the movies as well. It never got anywhere. Then I adapted The Forevers and did that pitch and the pilot episode and got a lot of encouragement from the Netflix executive who really loved it. But unfortunately, there’s that phrase, “We love it, but we’re not going to go with this.”

Debbi (12:26): Yes. Getting the green light is hard.

Marjorie (12:29): I know.

Debbi (12:30): It’s become harder.

Marjorie (12:32): Yes. It’s more difficult than even getting a book published, I think. And then I met up with another friend of hers who’s a production designer, and he wanted someone to co-write an action thriller with him. So we co-wrote an action thriller, which is actually going through some early stages of development, so I’m hopeful.

Debbi (12:57): That’s great.

Marjorie (12:58): Yeah. And I’ve had some interest in The Divorce Party, of people interested in adapting it, so we’ll see.

Debbi (13:06): Wonderful.

Marjorie (13:06): You never know until the green light comes on.

Debbi (13:12): Exactly.

Marjorie (13:14): It’s in suspension.

Debbi (13:15): It’s all very sketchy until it actually happens.

Marjorie (13:18): Yeah.

Debbi (13:20): And even if it’s happening, it might get shut down. You never know.

Marjorie (13:24): I know. I know. But screenwriting does help with novel writing.

Debbi (13:29): It does. You’re absolutely right about that.

Marjorie (13:32): Yes.

Debbi (13:33): I learned that fast. How do you decide which story you want to tell?

Marjorie (13:46): It’s interesting because it takes me a long time. I’ve usually got two or three projects going at the same time that come to me through either. The inspiration either comes from a memory, an image that was catchy to me, something that I saw in the news maybe, or somebody that I met that’s kind of sparked an idea. So a project that I’m working on right now that might be picked up by a publisher, it was suggested to me by a childhood image of when I was a kid. We lived in a house just outside of Durham City. And I remember one day there was a terrible accident outside the front of the house, a car accident. And I remember we had a little kind of bank that I could look out onto the road from. And I remember seeing a pair of red child’s shoes and this red shoes, red shoes thing stuck in my mind forever.

(15:05): And just that image sets up a whole set of different ideas for me. And it takes me a while to explore the ideas before I start writing in, because I’ve done it the opposite where I’ve gone full tilt on an idea that’s not fully developed. And then you’re like, okay, now what?

Debbi (15:29): Exactly.

Marjorie (15:30): So then I’ve got another project, which is a sci-fi one, which that came to me when I thought about deserted shopping malls. We went for a visit down to Grand Forks, which is just south of us in North Dakota. And the mall, which used to be busy in the ’90s, was a dead zone. It was the weirdest place I’ve ever stepped into. The food court was empty. There were no stores. It was a ghost town. And then I started thinking, wow, what if these in the future were places that people lived? And what if the grid failed basically, and people were forced to live in these malls, but the wealthy people lived in biospheres? I came up with an idea there were three classes of people, the wealthy people living in the biospheres, the mid-range people living in the malls and the old Costco warehouses, and then the feral people living wild,

(16:49): And came up with this story about the wealthy people wanting to move off the planet basically. And it’s a whole complicated story, but that idea was just suggested by the mall. So I’ve got all of these projects going, and I kind of dot from one to the other. And my rule is if it doesn’t get me in the gut, if I don’t feel an emotional connection after writing it for a while, I put it aside. For me, it has to touch the emotions somewhere. And that’s how I decide. I kind of have the two or three projects. I write a bit here and a bit there. But if it hasn’t got some emotional resonance, then I put it aside for a while until I can come up with something better.

Debbi (17:49): I know the feeling because, I think it must be a screenwriter thing because I have multiple screenplays that I’ve started. Ideas that I really want to develop and take somewhere.

Marjorie (18:02): Yeah. Yeah, I know.

Debbi (18:04): It’s always about which one do I really connect with the most?

Marjorie (18:09): Yes, I know. I mean, I’m sure writers have so many ideas in their draw when they’re sitting on their laptop that could be great stories. I’ve got lots of thoughts.

Debbi (18:22): Exactly. Yeah.

Marjorie (18:23): But it takes a really fully formed idea to go to the end of a novel.

Debbi (18:29): Exactly. Or a feature film.

Marjorie (18:32): Yes.

Debbi (18:33): I was going to say that you must be an outliner at heart.

Marjorie (18:38): No, I’m not actually. That’s why screenwriting was so good for me. It forced me to outline things. Yeah. So I’m a kind of semi-plotter, semi-outliner. I’ll have a basic outline, and I usually know the ending, and then I’ll start writing from there. But I’m not a beat by beat person unless I’m writing a screenplay.

Debbi (19:05): Yeah. Yeah, definitely. I tend to be more beat by beat, but I’m willing to vary from the beats. This is the thing for me. It’s like if I know where I’m going, that’s what counts.

Marjorie (19:18): Yeah. Well, you do need to know the ending.

Debbi (19:21): Yeah.

Marjorie (19:21): It’s interesting because we are working on the publisher, the editor, my publisher that published The Savage Instinct, we are working on an adaptation of it, but it’s amazing just how much a feature movie requires you to strip the story right down to the essentials.

Debbi (19:44): Absolutely.

Marjorie (19:46): So I’ve done the beat sheet for The Savage Instinct, and I had to cut lots of the story out. I had to cut some side plots and some characters because the movie is just really lean. You have to get down to the essence of it.

Debbi (20:11): Exactly. Yeah. You can’t have too many subplots. You can’t have too many characters. Not only is that going to confuse the audience, but the cost goes up. More actors.

Marjorie (20:24): Yes. Well, that’s the thing. Yes.

Debbi (20:25): This is a reality.

Marjorie (20:27): Yeah. And that’s what my editor kept telling me. More characters, more money. And at the center of The Savage Instinct, it’s really a story about two women, a childless woman and a child poisoner. And it’s set in the Victorian era, but it’s a really strange dynamic between these two women. The childless woman is a prison visitor visiting the child poisoner. So a very strange relationship develops because the childless woman’s husband is very oppressed. He’s basically oppressing her. And yes, she forms a friendship with the poisoner and a sort of strange mentorship arises. I won’t say anymore.

Debbi (21:28): Yeah, that does sound like a strange mentorship. Let’s see. What authors do you like to read?

Marjorie (21:39): Interesting. The book that I’m currently reading now is written by a Canadian author who I really loved his first book. It’s called The Caretaker by Marcus Kliewer. He wrote, We Used to Live Here. I don’t really have heard of that one. He’s very, very good. I love Margaret Atwood. I think I’ve read most of her books. I read, I’m trying to think. I have so many books that I like. I used to read more suspense and thrillers than I do now. I liked Gillian McAllister.

Debbi (22:30): Oh, yeah. I think

Marjorie (22:30): It’s Gillian McAllister. I really liked her. Lisa Jewell, I’ve enjoyed some of her books. Then I just read a book called Liberty Street, which is by another Canadian author about a journalist that goes into a woman’s prison in the ’60s. She gets herself admitted to a woman’s prison because in the ’60s you could be sent there if you were incorrigible. You are an incorrigible young woman that your parents couldn’t contain you. You could be sent to this awful prison.

Debbi (23:09): Oh, my goodness.

Marjorie (23:11): Yeah. So I read a variety of books.

Debbi (23:15): Wow, that sounds like quite an interesting book.

Marjorie (23:18): Yeah.

Debbi (23:19): Scary and horrible, but interesting. Yeah. How do you divide your time between writing and marketing?

Marjorie (23:29): I probably don’t do enough marketing. The publisher does some. I’m published at present with a smaller British press, Bloodhound Books, and they’re really good at producing marketing materials. They do beautiful visuals and they make a trailer for the book and they’re really helpful, but you still, as the author, have to do quite a bit yourself.

Debbi (24:01): Oh, yes.

Marjorie (24:02): There’s Instagram posts. Well, I don’t know. I mean, if we knew what worked, I’m not sure. I see people nowadays are doing lots of recorded messages on Instagram and stuff, I guess, to make sure that people don’t think AI wrote their book or something. They’re trying to personalize their author platform.

I have a website, but it takes a lot of time to do all this stuff. Oh, yeah. For sure. I write every morning, but once I’ve gone through the emails and then looked after a couple of things, I’m like, okay, where’s the time going? I haven’t written anything. So I have to have deadlines.

I work best with a tight deadline. So my book, The Night Side, was published with Seven House who were taken over now by Joffe Books. And so I might be doing another one for them. I’m not sure, but I gave myself a deadline to finish this book. So once I know it’s coming up, then I really go to it and forget the marketing for a while.

Debbi (25:26): Yeah, that’s probably best.

Marjorie (25:29): Yeah.

Debbi (25:29): When you’re in the zone on something, you really just have to stick with that.

Marjorie (25:34): Yeah.

Debbi (25:36): Let’s see. What kind of writing schedule do you keep?

Marjorie (25:40): Well, I write every morning and take the afternoon off. Otherwise, my husband would be like, “Come on, let’s go out.” And I’m like, “Okay.” We golf and all of that. Then I write sometimes in the evening as well. Depends just what kind of a schedule I’ve got.

Debbi (26:01): Yeah.

Marjorie (26:02): You do have to set aside a period of time, but you can’t do it all the time. And I tend to write more in the winter. Summer’s a bit difficult because you’re just wanting to get outside and to be in the fresh air.

Debbi (26:20): Absolutely.

Marjorie (26:23): I write Saturdays and Sundays. There’s no day off. And in fact, really, there’s no time off ever because you probably know this, you’re always thinking about ideas.

Debbi (26:36): Oh, yes. A writer never really takes a vacation. No,

Marjorie (26:40): No, no.

Debbi (26:43): There’s always something good cooking up there. I don’t know.

Marjorie (26:46): Yeah. Even when I’m on vacation, I’m thinking,

Debbi (26:51): Yeah, yeah. What will I write about this?

Marjorie (26:53): Yeah. Yeah.

Debbi (26:56): That’s interesting. Sometimes I catch myself blogging in my head.

Marjorie (27:01): Oh, really?

Debbi (27:01): Yeah. So to speak. Yeah. How would I blog this particular scene that’s taking place right now?

Marjorie (27:09): And then you drift away and your husband’s probably like, “Hello?”

Debbi (27:12): Hey, are you there?

Marjorie (27:14): Yeah.

Debbi (27:14): Listen to me. Okay. Yes.

Marjorie (27:18): Actually, I’ve gotten into trouble a few times because I’m a people watcher and staring at people and their interactions. And I’ve had more than one set of people say, “Do you want a photograph or something?”

Debbi (27:33): It’s funny because I have to really catch myself not to do that. It’s like I will see something and I’m just like, “Wow, that’s really interesting.” I mean, if people start to get to the point where they’re like, “Hey, what are you looking at?” That would worry me a little bit.

Marjorie (27:51): Yeah. Well, actually, that was something that Carol Shields told us to do. She said, “You have to develop your writer’s eyes and ears. So you would look for something beyond the obvious.”

Debbi (28:08): Exactly.

Marjorie (28:09): “And then you listen to other people’s conversations.” And actually I have that in, I think it’s in my book, The Night Side maybe. Yeah, I talk about that. The character talks about that. It’s either that or The Perfect Family Man. I can’t remember. Now I’m getting them mixed up. But I used to tell that to my students because I taught creative writing at high school, and I’d send them out to just find images, find things around the school that they’d never looked at before. And they would come back and write it all on the board and there’d be a mass of different images. And it was amazing experience. Then I’d tell them to listen in on conversations and we’d make big displays of that. And they would go away and write stories inspired by one or more of those images or sound bites. They loved it.

Debbi (29:15): That’s a very cool thing.

Marjorie (29:17): Yeah, it was.

Debbi (29:18): A very cool thing to get people writing.

Marjorie (29:20): Yeah.

Debbi (29:21): Good writing prompts.

Marjorie (29:23): Yeah.

Debbi (29:24): What advice would you give to anyone who’s interested in a writing career?

Marjorie (29:30): Have a day job.

Debbi (29:33): Yes.

Marjorie (29:34): You can’t make enough money as a writer unless you’re one of the top. I don’t even know what the percentage is now. There’s not enough money to support you as a writer. So have a day job if you’re a young person, have a backup and have a very thick skin because you’re going to get criticized, you’re going to get … You’re going to be putting your work out there and you’re going to get some very weird reviews sometimes, but you can’t personalize it because not everybody’s going to like what you put out there. And another thing I would say is that for the older writer, it’s never too late. Writing is one thing that you can do regardless of your age. It doesn’t matter how old you are, as long as you can sit down and come up with a story, keep going with it. It’s a great thing to do as a retired person because you’re not worrying so much about the financial side of it.

(30:45): But I would say only do it if you’re willing to pour out, sort of plunder your own emotional life and lay it bare for everyone to see. It’s a risky thing to do.

Debbi (31:03): Yes. Yes, it is.

Marjorie (31:08): And you expose yourself to other people’s scrutiny.

Debbi (31:13): Yes. Yes, it is. It is a risky thing. And I’m not sure people really appreciate that until they actually do it.

Marjorie (31:24): Well, the very first time that I had to share a piece of my work was in Carol’s class, and your heart’s pounding, you’re flushed and hot and cold, and you’re like, “People are going to hate it. People are going to hate it.” And then you read it. And thankfully, people liked what I read. So once I had done it a few times, I was fine, but I know a lot of young writers are reluctant to share their work. I would get students coming to me and saying, “I’ve got this book of poems. Will you look at it?” And I’d say, “Well, do you want me just to read it or do you want me to give you constructive feedback?” And some students would say, “No, I just want you to read it because it’s part of me. I don’t care to revise it.” And others would say, “Yeah, I want to make it better.” So know why you’re writing.

(32:25): Are you writing to share it with other people? Or is it just something cathartic for you? And if it’s something to share and publish, then you have to know that writing is a business as well.

Debbi (32:43): Yes. Yes to all of what you said.

Marjorie (32:46): Yeah.

Debbi (32:47): I mean, what great advice. Wonderful. Thank you. Is there anything else you’d like to add before we finish up?

Marjorie (32:57): I think one of the things that as a writer that has been wonderful for me is, and probably for you too, is finding a community of writers, a virtual community, as well as writers here in my own hometown. But I have a very tight-knit group of writer friends all over the UK, the US, and Canada. And because it’s such a solitary pursuit, it’s great to have those people to complain to vent, to ask how they’re doing. It’s amazing. Do you find that too?

Debbi (33:37): Oh, it’s definitely a good thing to have community for sure of people to talk about these things.

Marjorie (33:45): Yeah,

Debbi (33:46): Absolutely.

Marjorie (33:49): And there’s some great organizations that are helpful in that, but I get to meet some of these people in person now at the Bouchercon in October. That’s right. The International. No, it’s not the International Thriller Writers, that’s Thriller Fest. Yeah, this year it’s in Calgary.

Debbi (34:14): Calgary, yes.

Marjorie (34:14): Big conference. Yeah. So I’m looking forward to that and moderating a panel.

Debbi (34:20): It makes me wish I decided to go.

Marjorie (34:24): Yeah.

Debbi (34:25): Shoot.

Marjorie (34:26): Calgary’s a beautiful place. Yeah.

Debbi (34:28): I really would love to go back up to Canada and see more of it.

Marjorie (34:33): Yeah, I think they’re doing some tours to the Rockies to ban from. It’s not too late.

Debbi (34:41): I’ll give it some serious thought.

Marjorie (34:43): Yeah. Yeah.

Debbi (34:44): See if I can convince my husband to go up to Canada. I don’t see why he would object. He objects so much that’s going on down here that going to Canada might be a relief.

Marjorie (34:58): Yeah, escape to the Rockies. You’d love it.

Debbi (35:01): Yeah, yeah. Escape to the Rockies.

Marjorie (35:01): And Calgary’s such a lovely town.

Debbi (35:04): I’ve heard that they’re fabulous looking too.

Marjorie (35:06): Oh, spectacular. Yeah.

Debbi (35:09): Well, I want to thank you so much for being here and hang around for a little bit more because we’re going to do a bonus episode for the Patreon supporters.

Marjorie (35:18): Okay.

Debbi (35:18): Alrighty. Excellent. Thank you so much for being here, Marjorie.

Marjorie (35:22): Thank you. It was great to talk to you.

Debbi (35:24): Great talking to you too. Thank you.

Marjorie (35:27): Okay, thanks.

Debbi (35:29): So to all my listeners, thank you so much for listening. That goes especially to my Patreon and Substack supporters. Thank you for following me there and for supporting me there. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a review. They help. And until next time, happy reading and I’ll be seeing you.

This week’s guest is William Stuart, executive producer and director of the popular scripted podcast American Afterlife.

Imagine, using a scripted podcast as a proof of concept. Because we talk about that here

Download a copy of the transcript here.

Debbi (00:54): Hi everyone. My guest is a veteran entertainment executive with extensive industry experience. As president and CEO of Aurora Productions, he oversees its slate of film, television, and podcast projects. He’s also executive producer and director of American Afterlife, a highly successful scripted podcast adapted from the best-selling YA trilogy.

(01:23): It’s my great pleasure to introduce my guest, William Stuart. Hi William, how are you doing today?

William (01:29): Very good. How are you? Glad to be here.

Debbi (01:32): Very happy to have you on. I’m very interested in your podcast. I’m interested in scripted podcast in general, but what’s the logline for your show?

William (01:43): Yeah, I don’t know that we fall quite in the crime drama, but we’re going to get there.

Debbi (01:48): Okay.

William (01:51): The idea is based on fact, but then becomes fiction. So Pedro Hoffmeister, who lives up in Eugene, Oregon, has been writing about the big earthquake in the Pacific Northwest, and everyone up there is sort of bracing for it. And as a writer like yourself, he sort of said, “How do I fictionalize this and what would happen if?” And he wrote his novel, his book based on the fact that the earthquake happens. And one girl, a 15-year-old girl decides she doesn’t want to get rescued by the National Guard and be skirted away, but she decides she has to look for her mother. And as you can imagine in this post-apocalyptic world where authority is gone, electricity’s out, dams have broken, that it’s a new world. In terms of visually, we’ve been talking about The Last of Us or Station Eleven, this sort of post-apocalyptic world where many of the rules are thrown out and you just have to survive.

(03:15): And that’s what our heroine Cielo has to do or tried to do.

Debbi (03:21): Yeah. Yeah. It’s a very interesting concept, frightening concept.

William (03:26): Yes.

Debbi (03:27): Also very suspenseful. I think it falls pretty well into a thriller genre in any event.

William (03:37): Well, there’s two aspects to it. One, it’s certainly a thriller and even a bit of a psychological thriller with her, a young girl in this new world. But then it develops into a crime series. There’s been a number of murders and we don’t know who’s responsible. And at first she’s even blamed for them, but then we find out it wasn’t completely her doing, but she was involved.

Debbi (04:10): Interesting. How does adapting something like that into a podcast differ from adapting for film and television other than the need for sound versus visuals?

William (04:25): Yeah, it’s a very good question. Something that was a challenge for us, but we knew from the beginning this really had to feel like a movie. I hate to say that, or a TV series, as if you closed your eyes and were watching it.

Debbi (04:42): Exactly.

William (04:44): So the performances, and especially that of Scarlett Estevez, our lead, and Josh Mesnik and Ted Owens had to be spot on. And then with the soundscape that we designed, that brought the audience into it. So you can imagine Scarlett, who’s done a lot of voiceover and animation, was very comfortable with it because she’s usually just reading from a script and not acting with other people. But there is the advantage that usually they will show you the picture and the character you’re voicing, and you’ll look to that. In our podcast, I had to ask her to create a whole new persona. There was no Scarlett, no Cielo in real life. So Scarlett went away with the scripts and came back with what she thought the character should be and should sound like. And she was really great and I think got it 99%. And the other 1% or what have you, we worked on in the room, in the studio.

Debbi (06:02): Wow. It sounds like you really had a collaborative process going with the actor, that actor at least in particular, and others, I assume?

William (06:10): Yeah, all of them.

Debbi (06:12): All of them.

William (06:12): Yeah. It was an interesting process because of scheduling and such. In the beginning, they were all in the studio with us separately, and they were doing their own pieces. And I had heard obviously Scarlett’s piece, so then I could tell Josh what he was reacting to. And then we could tell Ted Evans where he had to be. And then eventually we thought it would be really cool to get all three of them in the room, which we did. And that was amazing. I mean, we went back and fixed some stuff. I was able to put Scarlett sitting opposite Josh, which is what they’re doing if you know the podcast. It’s an interrogation in that sense. So now they’re sitting opposite each other and we got even better performances, I think.

Debbi (07:05): Yeah, the performances are excellent. They really are.

William (07:08): Yes.

Debbi (07:09): I mean, they draw you in very well. What do you think accounts for the show’s great success?

William (07:20): I think it’s the fact, number one, we started with a great premise, a great book. It already had a strong following. It was a bestseller. And when we started telling Pedro’s audience what we were doing, they were all there on social media asking, “When’s it coming? When’s it coming?” And like all good Hollywood things, it took twice as long as we hoped, but we made it twice as better, I always say. I think it’s the fact that we took the time to do it right, that we went back over the performances and honed them and got them better. And then we had the time, we made the decision to take the time to do the soundscape properly, to really go into it. And we did, I think, three or four edits of the soundscape for each episode just to make sure it wasn’t over the top and cartoony, but just stayed in that realistic place where people really feel and felt, I think, immersed in the world.

Debbi (08:37): Yeah. I noticed when I was listening to it, there’s a very distinct difference between listening to Cielo, think to herself, voiceover style versus being in the room with the cop.

William (08:49): Right.

Debbi (08:51): It sounds more like a room.

William (08:53): Yeah, which is something which is easy to do if you know you have to do it. And what it was just behind the scenes, it was just turning on this air conditioner noise that there would’ve been in this Holiday Inn in Eugene. She’s talking to herself, she’s almost in a soundproof room or something. It’s in her head.

Debbi (09:19): Exactly.

William (09:19): And that’s sort of what we were playing with. And the sound effects, I think, do take you from one location to another.

Debbi (09:28): Absolutely. Yeah. Certainly it’s less costly to make a scripted podcast production than a full film production. Is that a good motivator for people to start thinking about perhaps breaking into writing scripted podcasts?

William (09:46): Well, I’ve done a couple of interviews now, and that question, like yours, got asked. As a filmmaker, it’s fun just to make stuff. My process is I find material, I find a script, a book, even a news article that I think is interesting and see if we can make it into a movie. And in the past, in order to pitch these to the studios or now the streamers, you had to get something creative together. And that was always a pitch, maybe with some visuals. Once in a while, we’d even do a poster. But with this project, we said, “Well, podcasts are becoming of age.” Not so much dramatic, but just podcasts in general, there’s a big audience. So we were saying, “Look, the end goal between you and us is that we hope this will be a TV series.” And we did the podcast with that in mind.

(10:58): So this is our calling card towards something bigger.

Debbi (11:02): Yes.

William (11:03): And it allows the, I’m going to get in trouble for this, the short attention span buyers at the studios to just listen to one or two episodes and totally understand what we’re doing or trying to do.

(11:24): And as I referenced always in Hollywood, the tone of it is The Last of Us, the tone of it is Station Eleven. The tone of it is one other project or something. So they get an idea going in what it’ll be like. But still the challenge will be to find a top TV writer, which we’re doing now, to hone and develop probably because there’ll be a longer, probably eight, 10 episodes to develop more characters, more situations for her, take more from the book. We actually left a lot out of the book, but expand it and expand it and of course make it much more visible. We’ll obviously see the earthquake happen. We’ll see the dams break. We’ll see the helicopters. We’ll see the National Guard arriving, et cetera, et cetera. So it’s primed for a TV series. As you mentioned earlier, if we could get the money together to make something like that.

(12:35): But podcasts are reasonable to make. Something at our level in terms of production value is more difficult to the individual out there, but I’m very lucky in that I teamed up with Benstown Media, who are a radio production company, and they brought everything to the table that they could in order to make this a first-class podcast.

Debbi (13:08): That’s fantastic. Well, I’m glad that it’s worked out so well for you so far because it’s a very, very interesting story. How did you find the actors? And do you think audiobook narrators would be a good place to look for talent in this area?

William (13:27): And say that again about narrators? Oh, book narrators. I’ll do.

Debbi (13:31): Yeah, book narrators.

William (13:31): All right. Yes and no. Where we had our talent, I cast this like a movie. I went after actors. Scarlett, I don’t believe she’s done book narration, but she’s done voiceover and cartoons and animation and stuff. Josh is not, he’s just a young guy wanting to be an actor. Ted Evans is a veteran voiceover guy and radio guy, does a ton of commercials. I believe he’s the Aflac Duck, if you want to make a reference.

Debbi (14:12): Oh, yeah.

William (14:13): He’s one of the top sound guys in Hollywood. And usually hard to get him, but he loved the project. And he’s never been asked to do something more extended. When he does a commercial, it’s 10, 20, 30 seconds of voiceover. Here, we wanted him for all the episodes and he was thrilled by that.

Debbi (14:37): I guess so.

William (14:39): Yeah. Yeah. And he was terrific. Talking about what we’re going to do, which was a bit of your question too, we’re already starting to develop season two of the podcast. And we left it as a cliffhanger where, I don’t know if you’ve gotten the last episode yet. Not yet. I don’t want to spoil it for you. Well, I won’t spoil it for you.

Debbi (15:06): There’s a cliffhanger, of course.

William (15:07): It’s a cliffhanger. And obviously like every good series like this, we left it open to more episodes. And we’ve already started to talk about how to do that and how many and when and all of the good things. But clearly what happened on Apple, that we went to number one in the podcast in Drama. Immediately we knew we had to do more with this.

Debbi (15:33): Yeah, that’s amazing. Congratulations on that.

William (15:37): Thank you very much.

Debbi (15:38): Fantastic.

William (15:39): We were happily surprised, but not astonished.

Debbi (15:44): Well, that’s wonderful. What kind of production schedule did you have? How far ahead were you writing things before you had them out there?

William (15:54): Interesting. Yes, a good question. We set a date for the launch, and I think it was back in, I don’t know, January, February, something like that of the year. And then we said, okay, let’s backtrack from there. If we do three episodes, if we have three episodes in the can, then we can continue on and do the fourth and the fifth while we are launching it already. It’s just sort of the television series model. They will write six or seven episodes. They’ll get it on air. And then if they’re smart, they’ll wait to see the audience reaction to certain characters and where the story’s going. And therefore they’ll modify episode six, seven, eight, nine as they’re going along and they can make changes. And that’s what we though we were going to do. But then after we got number one and number two in the can, we said, “Wow, this is so good. We’ve got to launch it.”

(17:01): All in the series, we decided to just do it all. Just do all the episodes, do the sound. The soundscape was easier to do with all the episodes there. We could start promoting it. We could start doing, which you may or may not have heard, the little mini-episodes in between where we go behind the scenes a bit and meet other characters and meet Scarlett and meet Ted Evans and Josh off camera, so to speak. So then we got it all in the can, as you say, and then we picked a date and we set that date. We did some promotion around it. I was able to arrange a meet and greet and a Q&A at Barnes & Noble where we brought in the author from Eugene. We brought in Scarlett. We brought Josh and myself, and we did it in the Barnes & Noble in Glendale so we could push and promote the book and the podcast and what was coming next.

(18:17): And that was very successful and fun to do. We might try and do another one with the second series launch.

Debbi (18:27): Wow, that’s really something. Yeah. It sounds like you had fun doing it too.

William (18:34): It was one of the funnest, if that’s a word, projects I’ve done. Great partners at Benstown Media. Scarlet and the other actors were just a joy to work with. I know it’s said a lot in Hollywood, but it really was. She’s getting a lot of attention. She’s coming out in a movie in August, I think an Adam Sandler movie. So her career’s on the rise and we’re on her coattails right now.

Debbi (19:03): That’s fantastic.

William (19:05): Yeah.

Debbi (19:06): That’s amazing. If an author were interested in having their book adapted into a scripted podcast, what would be the best approach for them to take?

William (19:16): Yeah. Well, calling me, I guess, would be one idea. We’re excited about it. We are hoping to have a conversation. Are you familiar with Blumhouse? Of course you are. Yeah. They tried to launch some podcasts in 2004, I think, horror podcasts. But we thought we could bring our expertise to the table and maybe do some sort of anthology, a horror a week, a crime a week, something like that where-

Debbi (19:53): Very cool.

William (19:54): We would have a host every week. Trying to think back to the shows I watched. The Wild World of Disney, whatever it was, where Walt Disney was hosting every week, where we could get a celebrity every week to say, “Hey, thanks for coming. We’ve got a doozy for you. Hope you like it. Listen in.” So there’s a plan there. We haven’t had that conversation with them yet, but something I’m trying to make happen.

Debbi (20:28): Well, I was going to ask, do you take queries?

William (20:33): Yes. Yes. From writers, from crime writers.

Debbi (20:37): Well, I can think of a thousand crime writers right now who might be interested.

William (20:45): Well, let’s keep that open because I also, in my development slate, have one or two or three scripts for features that we couldn’t get made. And we’re talking about reviving those in some way and seeing if they’re adaptable to a podcast series of this kind. I think almost anything is, depending on how you go about it.

Debbi (21:20): Exactly. Yeah. I was going to say, is there a particular type of work that you think is best for this type of media? Or really can you do anything?

William (21:30): I think anything. I mean, I was skeptical when we said let’s do one set in the Pacific Northwest, outdoors mostly, in a deserted landscape. But then the writers were able to balance that with the interrogation room and other elements that made it sound bigger than it really is.

Debbi (21:52): Yeah. Yeah. That sound design really.

William (21:54): Yeah. That takes you in the interrogation room and out of it. Do you remember, did you ever listen to Homecoming?

Debbi (22:06): That sounds really familiar.

William (22:08): Yeah, it was very popular. They had, I think, Laura Linney and I forget the actor’s name. Anyway, they were doing it and it was very contained. It was all almost in one building, a couple of rooms in a cafeteria and all that in one building. And it was interesting to listen to, but there wasn’t much dynamic to it. It was a quiet podcast, not big sound effects, a lot of interrogation room, and a lot of expositional dialogue because they didn’t have the sound effects. And then they made a movie about it with Julia Roberts, which was a failure, but they got it made.

Debbi (22:58): Yeah.

William (22:59): That’s 99% of the challenge here in Hollywood.

Debbi (23:05): It seems like a miracle when anything actually gets made, and yet things get made.

William (23:10): Things get made.

Debbi (23:12): They just do.

William (23:14): It takes a lot. I mean, it used to be a very friendly atmosphere for creators like myself, independents, where you could get into a studio, have a conversation. 75% of the time it’s no. But then 25% of the time you could get into a dialogue where they say, “Okay, I like this. Could you change this? Could you change that? Then come back.” How about “we like it, we want to option it, and then we’ll develop it.” But those conversations have sort of ended. They’re looking for independent producers to come in with a proverbial package. So do you have a director? Do you have a script? Do you have a star? And all those elements, which we now have to put together just almost to talk to them.

Debbi (24:10): Yeah. Yeah. You pretty much have to have the whole thing set up in a package ready for them to look at.

William (24:19): And say no.

Debbi (24:20): Very beautifully presented, very little thought, a whole lot of, “Here’s what’s in it for you.”

William (24:31): A lot of work goes into it. You’ve got one shot, but still most of the time it’ll be a no, but at least you’ve gotten in the room and had the conversation. What’s most difficult is to, and I’ve done it recently with this podcast, is to make a few phone calls to the agencies or some independent production companies. And just to get people on the phone or an email chain is diabolical.

Debbi (25:04): Yeah. Yeah. Getting people on the phone is difficult.

William (25:08): Difficult, difficult. Or getting people to return calls, whatever. But that’s what producers do, and I guess that’s my life now. Or it has been for a while, I should say.

Debbi (25:19): I get it. I get what you’re saying.

William (25:23): I assume it’s like going to get books published.

Debbi (25:27): Yes. There’s a lot of waiting, a lot of speculation.

William (25:32): Right.

Debbi (25:34): And nobody knows anything, as somebody once said.

William (25:38): That is so true. Nobody knows. What was the saying?

Debbi (25:43): Nobody knows anything.

William (25:45): No, but there was another one in the movie side of it. Oh, I don’t know if I like it. No one’s told me yet. That sort of thing.

Debbi (25:59): Yes, that’s a good one.

William (26:01): I won’t know if I like it until someone tells me I like it. So that was old studio in the agency mantra because no one wants to pass on anything, but no one wants to take it to the group meetings and say, “Hey, there’s something interesting. What do you guys think?”

Debbi (26:18): Too afraid.

William (26:21): I guess. But it’s become such a, I hate to date myself, but back in the day, the business was not a family, a family business in a way. On the movie side, I knew most of the players. They knew me. I wouldn’t call them with something stupid. And when I called them, they would turn the call and we’d have a conversation. But then it became a younger executive, a younger group who didn’t plan on staying anywhere a long time. And we’re told that the way to advance is to change companies all the time. And so they planned to be there a year or two, and they had the projects that were ready to go right away. And if you didn’t have it all together, they didn’t want to go to the meetings and get shot down. So it’s gotten to the point where they still won’t say no, they just won’t return your call, but they’ll hardly say yes.

Debbi (27:32): It’s hard to get a yes. Yeah, for sure. And even when you get a yes, that doesn’t mean you’re going to get the total green light.

William (27:42): No, the green light’s way down the road.

Debbi (27:44): It’s way down the road.

William (27:46): Just to get it in the place that can help you get to the next step.

Debbi (27:51): Precisely.

William (27:53): Yep. Yeah.

Debbi (27:55): What advice would you give to anyone who would like to get into what you’re doing?

William (28:00): Podcasting or producing?

Debbi (28:02): Either podcasting, writing, or producing, or all three.

William (28:07): They’re three different things.

Debbi (28:09): Yes.

William (28:10): The interesting thing with writers, as you know, is if you want to create something, you don’t need a team of people around you. You’re able to go, like I say, writers, painters, you’re able to go into a room, close the door, and write, and you don’t need outside help doing it. You want feedback later, but you’re doing what you’re doing. With a movie, I can’t get a normal movie made without a hundred people being involved. And I’m starting with a writer coming and doing it, then a writer and I convincing a director to do it. Then the writer, director, and I convincing an actor to do it. At the same time, maybe convincing a studio to do it. And then you get the studio together, and then you have to convince the studio that you’ve got the right budget. And then you have to go find the rest of the cast and the crew and the time.

(29:17): So it takes really a village.

Debbi (29:21): Yes.

William (29:21): Takes forever. With a podcast, it was me in the room with three people. Then you put the soundscape of four. I think our team was 10 people at the end of the day and all kicking in to do a good job. So I think that’s the difference. Now, the results are quite different. At this point, there’s very little money in dramatic podcasting, but there’s a satisfaction in getting it done. It’ll help book sales. It’ll help Pedro It’ll help Scarlett, it’ll help all the elements involved. It’ll help myself. But what the next step is with it is a complete unknown.

Debbi (30:11): I was going to say, do you get advertising dollars? Is there a subscription? Is there a Patreon or something?

William (30:18): The podcast world?

Debbi (30:20): For your show.

William (30:22): For myself?

Debbi (30:23): Yeah. Is it financed through ads or what?

William (30:30): Yeah. Well, this case, again, we were financed by Benstown, but we were able to do it on a budget because they already owned the studio. They owned the people who did the announcing, the people who did the soundscape, all these bells and whistles they already had in-house. We were able to do all of that easily and cheaply. We did try and get a sponsor on board once we could show all the episodes. We said, “Well, let’s go get a sponsor.” And we worked with a company called Gamut. It was another big radio company. And the reluctance was it’s something they’d never heard before. It wasn’t Joe Rogan. It wasn’t some celebrity podcaster or actor having a podcast, et cetera, et cetera. It’s something new. It’s dramatic. Who’s the audience? How many people will listen? And nobody knew. In the end, I was able to go to a company that I knew called Pair of Thieves, which is in the same marketplace in terms of social media and all that with us.

(31:52): They actually sell socks and underwear to a young audience, to a hip young audience. And they saw what we were doing and said, “Hey, this is great.” They came on board to sponsor the series. We did a tie-in with them, a giveaway of socks, and they got radio time, et cetera, et cetera. And it worked out really, really well. They sold some more socks. We got some more listeners, but the numbers still are small. I don’t think we’ll make back our budget on the first one. But the second series, which as I said, we’re planning, then we’re probably going to get a sponsor for a good sum of money, something that’ll cover the budget and also cover the budget in number one to sort of get us in there. They’re not big numbers, I mean $100,000 for the series. We’re not looking at millions of dollars, although we might ask for millions. We’re not expecting that. Yeah.

Debbi (32:52): Well, I just wish you the best of luck with this because it really deserves a wider audience in that sense.

William (33:01): Share with your friends and your followers.

Debbi (33:06): I will.

William (33:08): Hopefully that’ll help. We’ve been very steady with the downloads since the beginning, which is very encouraging. They haven’t dropped off a cliff. They’ve been very, very steady. So word of mouth is going around.

Debbi (33:20): That’s fantastic.

William (33:20): Apple started out really strong. Spotify then came up behind Apple and started growing. And now the two of them together, and we’re on Gamut Radio and all of those, but those two are the bulk of it because they’re people in their car or they have 20 minutes, the kids have 20 minutes to listen to something wherever they are. So that’s worked very well.

Debbi (33:47): Well, is there anything else you’d like to add before we finish up?

William (33:51): Wow. No, I just encourage people, everything I can. Television or features or whatever it is, it starts with great material, great ideas, and having a way to explain those ideas to the next person. Be it a script, be it a pitch document, be it a podcast. How do you grow your idea? And that’s the challenge. How do you bring people on board to support your vision and say, yes, I’ll get on board. I’ll help you do this.

Debbi (34:33): Exactly. Yeah.

William (34:34): Yeah.

Debbi (34:35): Kind of like finding your people. Yeah. All right. Well, thank you so much.

William (34:42): A pleasure to meet you.

Debbi (34:44): It was a pleasure to meet you too, William. I really had a good time talking about this, and I really do love that show, American Afterlife, everybody. Check it out. It’s excellent. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a review. You can also support the podcast by becoming a patron on Patreon or subscribing on Substack. Until next time, take care and I’ll be seeing you.

*****

My guest this week on the Crime Cafe podcast is poli-sci professor and crime writer Caleb McGee Husmann.

We talk a little about his academic specialty–political science–and mostly about writing and crime fiction!

For a copy of the transcript, click here.

Debbi (00:54): Hi everyone. My guest today is the author of several novels, including Exteriors and Interiors, Feral Chickens: A Hawaiian Comedy, and Owen O’Shea: Stay-At-Home Dad, Wannabe Detective. I love that title. Originally from Minnesota. He now lives in North Carolina with his wife Beth and their daughter, Jo.

(01:18): It’s my pleasure to have with me today, C. McGee. He writes as C. McGee, but his name is Caleb Husmann . Hi, Caleb. How are you doing today?

Caleb (01:28): I’m doing well, Debbi. How are you doing?

Debbi (01:30): Just fine, thanks. So according to your bio, you are both professors in the department of two at a small university. Now, is it the subject that is so arcane that only two people are doing it or is the university so small that it can only afford two people in that department?

Caleb (01:51): Option B. Option Be. We only got a thousand students. So it’s a small school in downtown Raleigh, North Carolina. So William Peace University. So we’re it, the Department of Two. My wife is my boss, so she’s my boss at work and at home, all the time.

Debbi (02:10): I see. I see. And what subject do you teach?

Caleb (02:14): We’re political scientists. So we are the entire department. We do a little bit with the criminal justice department as well and then pre-law, but political science is the main thing.

Debbi (02:25): Well, it’s an interesting area to be in right now, I guess.

Caleb (02:28): There’s always world events happening. That is one, I overall view it as a positive about being a political science professor is even when you’re teaching the same topics, it’s still new because you tie in current events that are happening now. And so I’m whatever almost 15 years into being a professor. I honestly think if I was teaching a subject that didn’t refresh every semester, I would kind of be exhausted of it, but I love it because sure, I’m teaching federalism again, but this time it’s California’s trying to go independent instead of Texas trying to go independent from four years earlier. It’s always something new, which is great.

Debbi (03:09): Exactly. Yeah, that’s true. When did you start writing fiction?

Caleb (03:16): Graduate school. So it’s funny I say that because in graduate school you’re already writing a ton. You’re writing for class and you’re writing your dissertation and all that sort of stuff. But actually it was during the summer I was interning in DC and usually I was working on the Hill for my member of the house that I worked for, but on my days off, I started to write. I guess I started writing a little bit short stories and stuff before that, but that was the first time I started to write a novel. I don’t know. I guess I was looking for, I played a lot of soccer growing up. I played soccer in college, had a couple trials with some pro teams, and then it didn’t work out. And then I was like, “Well, crap, I got to do something else.” And then I ended up going to grad school and figured out I still needed something that I could really strive for that I wasn’t sure I was going to succeed at.

(04:14): I think that was part of the draw of soccer. I love playing soccer, but there was no guarantee that you were going to make it, and so you were striving for something that was kind of out of reach. And with writing novels, I mean, it’s somewhat the same as it’s a tall order and finishing it and getting it out there. And then can you get it published and that whole ordeal? It’s a monumental task, but I find those sorts of challenges draw me in for some reason. I don’t know, maybe I’m a sadist, who knows?

Debbi (04:45): I think most writers have a tendency to think of themselves as masochists. We are always seeking ways to challenge ourselves and do better.

Caleb (04:56): Yes. Masochist. There you go. That’s the word.

Debbi (04:59): Yeah. We are sadistic to ourselves.

Caleb (05:01): Yes, there you go. There you go. Thank you.

Debbi (05:04): Split personality.

Caleb (05:05): Better vocabulary.

Debbi (05:07): We have split personalities. We have a sadistic side that picks on our masochistic side.

Caleb (05:12): That sounds right.

Debbi (05:14): Let’s see. Now your writing style seems very humorous. I like that about it. I love the tone of the O’Shea story.

Caleb (05:27): I think it goes along with my personality. I think all of my writing is humorous. Owen O’Shea is definitely the novel that’s, the main character is the most me. The other novels, I definitely had to think through, okay, what would this character be thinking at this time? With Owen O’Shea, I was basically like, all right, what would I do? So it was the easiest to capture that voice because it was the closest to myself just in that sort of situation. But yeah, I think the goal was to find some line between the mysteries. There’s the gritty noir mysteries that tend to come out of Scandinavia and stuff like that. And then there’s the comfy, cozy, Jessica Fletcher, Murder She Wrote type mysteries. And I feel like there’s not necessarily a ton that are in between where they’re a little bit more suspenseful and the humor is a little bit more adult and adult things happen, but it’s also not dark and like The Killing or something like that.

Debbi (06:36): Exactly. Yeah. It’s not grotesquely scary or whatever, but there’s just enough in there to keep you on the edge of your seat, keep you turning the pages, that kind of thing.

Caleb (06:48): Exactly. So that’s the goal.

Debbi (06:50): Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Let’s see. What inspired you to write comedy in general?

Caleb (07:00): I think it’s always been a big part of my personality. Another professor was asking me what was my main value? And I think they wanted something profound, but I said fun. Fun was my main value.

Debbi (07:14): That’s a great value.

Caleb (07:15): Yeah. I mean, who doesn’t like having fun? And I think sometimes we take life too seriously. And even in more serious situations, I’ve always found humor is a great way to deal with it and handle it. And it’s just kind of a natural part of my personality so it naturally comes out in my writing. And so I’ve rolled with it from my first three novels. It’s interesting, the one I’m working on now is the first one I’ve written that’s not really comedic because it’s a horror novel, which is different. But that actually took more time because the comedy is my default way of thinking and so it comes out easier.

Debbi (07:55): Exactly. Yeah. Interesting. Do you have a writing routine? Do you have a time when you write?

Caleb (08:03): Yes, absolutely. If I don’t sit down and treat it like a shift, then it’s not going to happen.

Debbi (08:09): Exactly.

Caleb (08:10): I think there’s this romantic notion for writers, but really for all the arts of like, oh, the muse is going to strike and then I’m going to write this great thing. And that’s not really… I’m sure there are people like that. I don’t think it’s most people. I think most people, you show up and you sit and you push, and then two hours later, hopefully something came out. So that’s typically what I do, is typically I will set a timer depending on the day and how much time I have for just two or three hours. And that’s every Tuesday and Thursday because my schedule allows for it. And then Saturday and Sunday, assuming I’m not bringing my daughter to a sports practice or something like that, then I try and do two to three hours on Saturday and Sunday as well.

Debbi (09:01): Yeah. Yeah. It takes diligence to do this and you really do have to devote time to it. People don’t realize how much time writers put into their work.

Caleb (09:11): It takes ages, ages. And I’m always jealous of… So I just read Stephen King’s On Writing, which was one of the best books on writing. It’s up there with Bird by Bird as my favorite books on writing.

Debbi (09:23): I love Bird by Bird.

Caleb (09:25): It’s so great. It’s so great. But Stephen King, who it’s interesting, his novels are up and down for me. There’s ones I love. It is one of my favorite novels of all time. The Body‘s one of my favorite novellas of all time, but then there’s other ones that I DNF’ed. So I didn’t know what to expect into going on his book on writing and it was spectacular. It was so good. And he talks about that, that he’s got to sit down and do it. But also in his two-hour session, he can write whatever, 2000 words or something crazy like that. I’m like, at the end of two hours, I’m lucky if I have 500 words. His output is insane.

Debbi (10:03): Everybody varies in terms of what they can produce.

Caleb (10:07): Yeah.

Debbi (10:08): I mean, I know people who say, oh yeah, I can write 10,000 words a day. And it’s like, well, okay, that’s you. Not everybody is like that.

Caleb (10:18): I can’t even wrap my head around that.

Debbi (10:20): I mean, these galactic figures that I’m just like, okay, really? And how many of those words do you end up throwing out, I wonder?

Caleb (10:29): I think maybe that’s some people’s process, having talked to them, is that they just spew it all out.

Debbi (10:35): They spew it out.

Caleb (10:36): I think the editing really takes them ages and they’re really adding a ton more to the story afterwards.

Debbi (10:43): It could be. Or taking out a lot sometimes.

Caleb (10:45): Yeah, that’s definitely true.

Debbi (10:47): That’s true for movies, that’s for sure.

Caleb (10:50): Yeah. I think most novels benefit from being cut down a fair amount, my own included for sure.

Debbi (10:55): Oh, I think there’s a lot of air in writing that can come out. I see it all the time. And you said you’re working on a horror novel now. That’s interesting.

Caleb (11:08): Yeah, it’s a pretty big change for me. I’ve always read a lot of horror. I’ve always loved horror movies, but because comedy I think is my default, I didn’t go in that road. Although there’s a lot of good horror/comedy stuff. The Apple TV series that just came out, what is it? Widow’s Bay?

Debbi (11:27): Oh yeah, I’ve heard of that.

Caleb (11:28): Oh, if you haven’t seen it, you should watch it. I mean, I’m aiming for horror and for comedy, but it really hits both out of the horror element and the comedy element.

Debbi (11:38): Interesting.

Caleb (11:40): But I found I couldn’t keep the tension and the tone of the horror novel when I threw in the comedy. And so the horror novel’s definitely not as comedy-based as my other books, not even close. I mean, there’s not really any comedy in it. It’s a straight horror novel.

Debbi (11:58): Yeah. Okay. Well, that sounds interesting. Be a new, interesting direction for you to go in.

Caleb (12:06): Yes, it’ll be a change of pace. It’s interesting too, writing query letters to publishers and agents too, that’s so different. The other ones were like comedy, and then this one I’m writing explaining this supernatural horror that haunts them from their youth and this camp that has this unnatural draw to it. So it’s a very different, even just marketing the novel and trying to get an agent and a publisher for it is a whole different process.

Debbi (12:38): So you are actively looking for an agent?

Caleb (12:42): Yes. So I’ve published my first three novels with Roundfire and they’ve been good. They’ve been great, but obviously you can get an agent and get in with one of the big four, that’d be great. I mean, one of the big four publishers would be ideal.

Debbi (12:56): Right.

Caleb (12:57): Not going to even look at you if you don’t.

Debbi (13:02): Yeah. They don’t always give you the support that you think they might.

Caleb (13:09): Yeah.

Debbi (13:11): I’m sure you’ve heard the stories at this point.

Caleb (13:14): Yes, I have. A bunch of mid-list publishers that do great things and really work with their people. I don’t want to say that Roundfire has been… I have nothing negative to say. It’s been great. It’s just if I can get bigger, I’ll go for it. But yeah, I’ll be happy if it ends up coming out with Roundfire as well.

Debbi (13:36): Well, I wish you luck with that.

Caleb (13:38): Thank you.

Debbi (13:39): I hope that they fully support you as they should, whoever you are with.

Caleb (13:45): So fingers crossed.

Debbi (13:46): Fingers crossed. Do you have a favorite author or genre that you like to read?

Caleb (13:52): Oh, I read all across. Are there genres that I tend towards more? Yeah, I like horror, like I was saying a lot. I like a good thriller mystery, but I’ll read anything from a philosophical treatise to a cozy mystery. Give it all to me. I’m totally on board. As far as favorite writers go, I love Jim Thompson. So he’s an old pulp writer. He wrote Pop. 1280 and The Killer Inside Me and all those. I think he’s massively underrated. Most of his books were almost out of print. And then I actually think Stephen King, we were just talking about, mentioned once that he was his favorite crime writer and now all of his books are back in print, which shows you the power of Stephen King.

(14:38): And that’s great. He deserves it because he’s amazing. So Jim Thompson is definitely up there. But I also like comedy stuff like Nick Hornby, who wrote High Fidelity and About a Boy and all that sort of stuff. And then I’m trying to think. I wasn’t really a reader until I was about 17. And then almost every one of my generation, I read the Harry Potter novels and got hooked on reading. And so JK Rowling will always have a special place because of the fact that she got me to be a reader and then a writer because I wouldn’t be a writer without being a reader for sure.

Debbi (15:15): That’s right. Yeah.

Caleb (15:17): And so Patricia Highsmith, I love her. All the Ripley books are great. Yeah. And then let’s see. And then for being out there and really different, Danielewski who wrote House of Leaves, he just came out with a new one called Tom’s Crossing that is also awesome. He is unlike any other author that has ever existed. I don’t know. I don’t want to overstate it, but I feel like he reinvented the novel.

Debbi (15:45): Interesting.

Caleb (15:46): Pretty great.

Debbi (15:46): Well, I’ll have to check that guy out.

Caleb (15:48): Oh yeah. House of Leaves is the first one you got to go to.

Debbi (15:51): House of Leaves.

Caleb (15:52): House of Leaves. You will have never read anything like it. I can guarantee you that.

Debbi (15:57): That’s interesting. Wow. Because one of my favorite writers did something really remarkable with a private eye novel. I think it was Jonathan Franzen [With apologies to Jonathan Lethem], I think, maybe who did Gun with Occasional Music. I’m trying to remember if he was the one who did Gun with Occasional Music because I love that book so much. It has weird dystopian sci-fi and a private eye involved in investigating a case with these bizarre creatures just doing business with human beings, ordinary human beings. I can’t remember what they were like, but they were really bizarre creatures in some way. These fantastic creatures that he can’t quite grasp. It’s like, I don’t like these people, whatever they are. And then the ending is just so clever. It was like, oh my God. It kind of blew my mind.

Caleb (17:07): Brilliant.

Debbi (17:07): And the title makes sense, but you have to read the story for it to make sense. It has to do with weapons and music, gun with occasional music.

Caleb (17:19): Oh, that’s pretty good.

Debbi (17:21): Weapons that play songs. It’s all very strange. I’m having a hard time remembering the details because it’s been a while since I’ve read it, but it was really a remarkable book. But now I have to read House of Leaves.

Caleb (17:35): You won’t be disappointed.

Debbi (17:36): And Tom’s Crossing and the rest of this guy’s stuff.

Caleb (17:39): Yeah. House of Leaves is definitely the one I would start with. But Tom’s Crossing, which is the most recent one, is my second favorite. So yeah, Danielewski’s amazing. Franzen’s amazing. I think the thing that gets me about Franzen is, so I’ve read Freedom and The Corrections and maybe one or two more, but those are the two that stick in my head. And I don’t like any of his characters. I loathe all of his characters, but I still love the book, which that’s pretty remarkable. If you can write a novel in which you’re kind of rooting against every single character in both freedom and the corrections and still be turning the pages at a crazy pace, that’s amazing. He is so talented to be able to pull that off.

Debbi (18:28): When you can get people to relate to unlikeable people because they have something about them that makes you like them, that’s really pulling off a remarkable thing I think. Yeah.

Caleb (18:40): It is. I totally agree with that.

Debbi (18:42): And you see it a lot. You see it a lot on television. I mean, Tony Soprano does terrible things, but we’re all on his side on various issues.

Caleb (18:52): Yeah, especially with Breaking Bad and all the anti-heroes.

Debbi (18:56): Breaking Bad? Better Call Saul.

Caleb (19:00): Yeah. Yeah. I mean, Better Call Saul. Yeah. I think what Franzen does that truly blows my mind is that they’re much more ordinary, nasty people. They’re just kind of the crappy people that you know as opposed to with Breaking Bad and The Sopranos, which I agree, both those are amazing and Better Call Saul. They’re –

Debbi (19:24): Bigger forces.

Caleb (19:25): The crime world and there’s larger forces at play and it’s somewhat escapist versus when I’m reading Freedom, Freedom takes place in Minnesota near where I grew up, and it’s just very relatable. And the people’s bad qualities are bad qualities that you know in people. I don’t know any mobsters, but I know people like the people in Freedom and they’re crappy in the same way that people are crappy in Freedom. And he just captures it though in a way that … I can’t even put words to it.

Debbi (19:56): Yeah, I know what you’re saying. Yeah. Ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, things like that, are interesting to capture. Or just the ordinary conflicts that people endure in daily life sometimes make good material.

Caleb (20:15): Absolutely.

Debbi (20:16): Strangely enough. What advice would you give to anyone who’s interested in writing for a living?

Caleb (20:24): I mean, I don’t know that this is very profound, but just do it. So many people just talk about doing these things and they don’t just sit down and do it. And you’re going to realize it’s not as glamorous. It’s not catching the muse like you imagine it to be. But in many ways that makes it more rewarding.You sit down and grind and at the end of a lot of hours of work, you have a novel. And so I’ve talked to a ton of people who’d say, “I would love to write a novel,” or other big life things, but they just never actually do it.

(21:03): Just actually take that first step and then take the next and the next and keep the momentum going, don’t slow down. And even when you get stuck, keep on grinding away. You asked about my writing routine. I mean, I normally try and write two hours, at least three to four days a week, but sometimes that week will go great and I’ll produce a few thousand words, but I know that there have been many weeks where I turned around and deleted everything I wrote that week or I was trying to grind and nothing would come and by the end of the week I had 200 words. So you just got to push through those moments. And honestly, I don’t think that they go away unless you sit down and grind through them. At least they don’t for me. You got to power through.

Debbi (21:53): Yeah. I think it was, I’m trying to remember the name of the author who said, inspiration doesn’t come to him. He has to hunt it down with a club.

Caleb (22:05): Yeah, that’s good. I like that.

Debbi (22:07): It was Jack something. Somebody famous that I’m blanking out on.

Caleb (22:13): Yeah.

Debbi (22:14): I hate that.

Caleb (22:15): Hunting it down with a club sounds like Jack London, right?

Debbi (22:17): Jack London, that’s it. That’s the one. Yeah, there goes the mind. Oh well. Is there anything else you’d like to add before we finish up? By the way, do you use an outline when you write?

Caleb (22:33): No, that’s a great question. Yes-ish, but I don’t follow it hard and fast. But I do get gigantic artist pads, the biggest one you can get at the art store. You’re not getting this puppy at Target. You got to go to the specialized art store to get this gigantic one. And then I’ll outline the whole thing on that sheet of paper. But also I recognize that as I go, sometimes the characters develop in ways you’re not expecting. Sometimes the plot develops in ways you’re not expecting. So do I follow the outline broadly? Yes. But if it feels like the story should head in a different direction, I don’t hesitate to change direction with it and then –

Debbi (23:15): Absolutely.

Caleb (23:16): When I need to.

Debbi (23:17): It’s really like just having a little roadmap and then you realize, oh, I don’t really want to end up there. I want to end up here instead.

Caleb (23:24): That’s exactly right. Yeah.

Debbi (23:27): Yeah. Personally, I think it’s a great way of keeping yourself going if you know that there’s another place that you have to get to on that outline.

Caleb (23:35): Yes. And I think when you sit down at the beginning of your two hours that you’re going to write that day, it’s less daunting if you have a general idea of where you’re headed as opposed to, “All right, I’m going to sit down and write for two hours today, but I have no freaking idea where I’m going to go. ” It’s much more intimidating.

Debbi (23:54): It’s much more intimidating.

Caleb (23:55): Yeah.

Debbi (23:56): If you have some idea, you can always play around with that idea and maybe go in a slightly different direction or not, depending. It’s going to depend on where the characters take you.

Caleb (24:07): That’s right. And then if it’s an outline, if I’m out on a run or playing golf or I’m somewhere off on my own and my mind is kind of wandering, I can outline the story in my head. I can’t write a scene in my head, but I can outline where the story’s going in my head. So it’s a good way to do some work on my writing even when I’m not sitting down and doing my two hours of grinding it out.

Debbi (24:35): Yeah, I’ve noticed that if I’m really stuck on something, sometimes if I walk or even just take a shower, something where I’m doing something entirely different, it’ll just come to me. Did you think about doing this? Oh, no.

Caleb (24:50): That is so true.

Debbi (24:51): Sometimes it’ll just come to you, a solution of some sort that you can try out.

Caleb (24:58): It’s amazing how many breakthroughs you have while you’re in the shower washing your hair and all of sudden it’s like, oh my God.

Debbi (25:03): I know. What is it about showers? What is it about that kind of thing? I don’t know. It’s an interesting thing. Well, I want to thank you for talking with us today, Caleb. I really appreciate it. Thank

Caleb (25:17): Thank you so much for having me, Debbi. So I appreciate it.

Debbi (25:19): I was happy to have you on. So thank you so much and stick around. We’ll do a bonus episode for Patreon supporters.

Caleb (25:28): That sounds wonderful. Awesome.

Debbi (25:29): Excellent. Excellent. All right then. Well, everybody, thank you for listening. I want to thank everybody who supports me on Patreon and Substack. I would like to also request that if you could, please leave a review for the podcast if you enjoyed it because they do help us. Until next time when I have M M DeLuca on as my guest, I’d like you to wish you all a good two weeks and take care. Happy reading and I’ll be seeing you.

My guest this week on the Crime Cafe podcast is thriller author Jennifer Lycette.

Check out her book titles: The Algorithm Will See You Now and The Committee Will Kill You Now. So … clearly a cozy writer? 🙂 Nope, medical thrillers.

Transcripts available for download to all free and paid Patreon members.

Debbi (00:54): Hi everyone. My guest today is a doctor who writes medical thrillers with a high tech edge. Author of The Algorithm Will See You Now and The Committee Will Kill You Now. It’s a pleasure to introduce my guest, Jennifer Lycette. Hi, Jennifer. How are you doing today?

Jennifer (01:14): I’m good. Thank you so much for having me.

Debbi (01:16): I’m pleased to have you on. Believe me, I’m always pleased to hear from the medical community as well as medical writers, even though I can’t watch medical shows to save my life anymore. They just make me too tense. Thank you so much for being with us today. I get the feeling from the titles of your books that you might have the tiniest bit of concern about how technology could affect or is affecting the practice of medicine. Is that—

Jennifer (01:45): Yes, I think that’s fair to say. I enjoy using fiction to explore complicated scenarios both from the technology and the ethical standpoint.

Debbi (02:02): I can appreciate that. Yeah. The ethical standpoint is often a really great place to find those conflicts that you can use in fiction. The titles alone almost sell the books if you ask me, but they are so intriguing. What prompted you to start writing these stories in particular?

Jennifer (02:24): Gosh, that’s such a good question. So I can’t really identify any one moment, but I started writing the first one, which was Algorithm about 10 years ago and I had started writing creative nonfiction as sort of a professional outlet and I’ve written some essays about that, like going through professional burnout and discovering writing as I think I’ve heard other authors on your show talk about, and for a lot of us, I think writing is in some ways some form of therapy. And so I was really enjoying that writing and connecting with colleagues. And then I had this idea that I wanted to reach people outside of medicine. And so I think like a lot of new authors, I didn’t know how hard it would be to write a novel, but I sort of grew up reading a lot of thrillers and medical thrillers, Robin Cook and all this, and I thought, well, maybe I could write a medical thriller. And so I just thought of the idea and started writing one day.

Debbi (03:45): They just come to you. Yeah.

Jennifer (03:46): Yes.

Debbi (03:47): They really do. They both take place in Seattle, I noticed, but it’s not the same protagonist. Is it the same hospital or different hospitals?

Jennifer (04:01): Yeah, so it’s different hospitals and different protagonists, but they are connected. So they each can be read as standalones. But the second book, The Committee is actually a prequel going back 30 years to tell the story of the antagonist in Algorithm. So I think just all the character work I did to develop her, there’s another minor character that as I was writing Algorithm, I just was like, I think these two had a relationship in the past, but that’s just one line in Algorithm. And so it just got in my head and I was like, I want to write their story. And so I went back and wrote, so they’re middle-aged in Algorithm. And then I went back and wrote when they were young residents in Seattle and just to tell more of the story of how the antagonist whose name is Dr. Mara Maddox, how she ended up being the person she is in Algorithm.

Debbi (05:12): That’s really interesting. I love the way you went back and did backstory in a prequel. That’s fantastic. That’s an excellent approach because so often we get to know our protagonists better as we write.

Jennifer (05:26): Yes.

Debbi (05:26): Am I right?

Jennifer (05:28): Yes. There was all this that didn’t end up on the page in Algorithm and I was like, I think I have an additional book here.

Debbi (05:37): How I wrote the book of Algorithm.

Jennifer (05:41): Yes.

Debbi (05:43): This is what I went through. Let’s see. What is it about Seattle that made you choose that as a setting?

Jennifer (05:53): That’s a great question. So I think a lot of it was just, it’s near and dear to my heart because that’s where I went to medical school. And I think also I wanted to write something a place I was familiar with, even though I don’t live there anymore. And I think also in a lot of audiences’ minds just because of some of the other media and shows and things, there’s kind of a link between Seattle and medical.

Debbi (06:26): That’s right. I keep forgetting about that show that’s named after a book. So to speak. Yeah, I did a little research on you actually. I noticed that you are originally from Alaska.

Jennifer (06:41): Yes, very true.

Debbi (06:43): I thought it was fascinating. And you went to medical school at a school that would take students from places that did not have medical schools in their state. I thought that that was very unique and interesting.

Jennifer (06:58): Yeah, that’s absolutely right. So I went to University of Washington Medical School, but they have a program called WWAMI that stands for Washington, Wyoming, Alaska, Montana, and Idaho. And so those states don’t have their own medical schools. So they basically have a certain number of applicant spots for each of those states because they want to hopefully encourage graduating doctors to go back and practice in those states or in more rural environments. So yeah.

Debbi (07:38): I can’t help but be reminded of the show Northern Exposure. Did you ever see that?

Jennifer (07:46): I never watched the whole series, but yes, I’ve seen some episodes back some time ago, I guess now.

Debbi (07:55): Yeah, that was a very amusing look at Alaska and somebody who is from a very non-Alaska place as I can speak to from experience having lived in New York. Oh boy, going to Alaska from New York would be quite the shock.

Jennifer (08:14): I think so.

Debbi (08:14): Yeah. And for a while you had a rural medical practice in Astoria, correct?

Jennifer (08:22): Yeah, that’s correct. So I didn’t end up going to practice in Alaska, although I did do some clinical rotations up there when I was in training, but I did practice for some years in rural Oregon.

Debbi (08:43): Yeah. So that must’ve been quite an experience dealing with rural medicine. I mean, some of the stuff in the things that you talked about in your interview were just like, yeah, that’s the way it is out there. Not everybody has equal opportunity, equal access to good medical treatment or know the right way to take care of themselves.

Jennifer (09:10): Yeah, I think that certainly influenced my book idea with Algorithm because I had previously worked in a metro practice and even though I grew up in Alaska, I grew up in Anchorage, which is a fairly moderate size city. And so I think I was a bit naive about some of the limitations of living in non-urban areas and talking with colleagues about, like you said, equal access and even equal access to technology. I don’t want to necessarily go into any deep dives about AI or anything. I think people are probably a bit tired of that. But even just, for example, I had many patients who didn’t have internet, so even checking the patient portal to check their appointment, they didn’t have that. And so just really basic things that I think maybe when at least I know for me, living somewhere where that’s taken for granted, that just experiencing that and how we need to make sure we’re still making sure everybody has equal access and equity. It’s not as straightforward as it at first seems, I think, even in the US.

Debbi (10:46): Yeah, definitely. And now you’re in British Columbia and you have a medical practice there, I assume?

Jennifer (10:56): Yes, I am still practicing. I’m a medical oncologist, so I still practice. And so yeah, a lot of writing happens on weekends, but—

Debbi (11:09): I was going to ask you about your writing routine. Do you have a set number of hours you like to write or a time you like to write?

Jennifer (11:21): I would say not typically. There are times when I’m drafting that if I’m really on a good streak, I will try to just hold myself to a thousand words a day. But the reality is just there are some evenings I come home from work and I have enough energy to write and then other times I don’t. And so I just have to tell myself that’s okay. And then I just write on the weekends. So I tend to be someone who just might do a really big chunk on one day and then not anything for some days. So I’m probably not a good role model.

Debbi (12:04): Oh, I always figure everybody has their own way. Some people are cranking out 20,000 words a day and then other people are just like, I write whenever I can.

Jennifer (12:16): Yeah.

Debbi (12:17): So it’s like whatever works for you works for you. What sort of books do you tend to gravitate toward reading?

Jennifer (12:27): Oh gosh, I actually read pretty much across all genres except I will say I don’t tend to like horror and I like thrillers obviously, but I don’t tend to like real violent or serial killer types. But often I actually, unless I’m reading for writing research, I tend to actually gravitate these days toward lighter cozy fiction.

Debbi (13:09): I get it. Yeah, I can kind of get it. Yeah. I’ve been reading some very funny mysteries lately. It’s like, oh, these are relief, relief from the stress of everything.

Jennifer (13:24): Very true. Yes. I find that, too.

Debbi (13:28): Okay. I have to ask, are you a big fan of The Pitt?

Jennifer (13:33): So it’s so funny you would ask that.

Debbi (13:35): Is it as good as everybody says?

Jennifer (13:38): So like you kind of mentioned a little while ago, so I will admit I don’t watch medical shows because for me it’s like being at work. So I have family members that are huge fans of The Pitt. And back when I was in training and ER was the big show, I did watch that. That was probably the last one I watched because then as I got farther along in my training, like we were just talking about with reading, I don’t actually watch a lot of shows. So if I make time for a show, it’s usually something just kind of like comedy or light. So I feel like I would be a fan of The Pitt if I watched it and I know I’d probably immediately get sucked into it as my family members try to get me to, but I’m just like, “Oh, I just had 12 hours of that today.”

Debbi (14:39): That’s right. Yeah, this is too much reality. Well, that’s a change for television actually. I’m not sure whether that’s good or bad, but yeah, I keep hearing wonderful things about it.

Jennifer (14:55): Yeah, me too.

Debbi (14:56): Are you working on anything now in terms of books, projects?

Jennifer (15:02): Yeah, so I’m a very slow drafter and reviser. So each of my books from concept to publication took about three years. So I’ve been working on something for the past few years and I am to the point where I think it’s getting close. So it’s not in this world, it’s something new. It is, I guess I’ll call it a speculative thriller, but it’s not necessarily a medical thriller. So I was maybe trying to write something a little more mainstream, but it’s almost there, not quite out there. So I feel like I’m not ready to put it out there, but maybe soon.

Debbi (15:47): So a thriller that isn’t as medical or is somewhat medical?

Jennifer (15:53): Yeah, so I would say it’s medically adjacent, the characters are not healthcare professionals or anything like that.

Debbi (16:06): Interesting. Let’s see. So a lot of people would like to write but don’t know how to get started. What advice would you give to encourage these people to get started? What would you say to them?

Jennifer (16:21): Yeah, so a couple of things, I guess. I guess the first thing would be just write even if it’s for yourself because unless you come from a background of writing, like for me, which I did not, you have to just dive in and then you’ll learn from your mistakes. And I think also getting a supportive community around you. I was very fortunate that after I had been writing Algorithm for about a year, I entered a contest that doesn’t exist anymore, but some people might remember it called Pitch Wars and I got assigned a mentor and then through that I met other writers and then some of them I’m still in touch with and we have an online writing group and I realized for that year I was just trying to do it on my own, how much better it is now to have the support. And then also when you connect with other writers like that, you realize that everyone else, even those who are successfully published, they go through rejections and doubt and all those things, so you don’t feel so alone.

Debbi (17:48): Exactly.

Jennifer (17:52): I think a lot of opportunities nowadays for online writing groups or a lot of local libraries have drop-in writing groups. It might be a way that you can connect if you’re just starting out of the blue like I did without really knowing anyone or knowing what you’re doing.

Debbi (18:14): Yeah, it can often start with a local writing group or organization. I know that’s the way it started for me.

Jennifer (18:21): Yeah, absolutely.

Debbi (18:21): It really probably started with a class I took actually at a community college. That’s really where it kind of started and people in the class got together and formed a writer’s group, of course.

Jennifer (18:34): Yeah, absolutely.

Debbi (18:35): That’s what writers tend to do. They form these little groups. They prop each other up.

Jennifer (18:42): Yes.

Debbi (18:43): Let’s see. What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever gotten?

Jennifer (18:49): Oh gosh, that’s such a good question. I’ve got to think for a minute. I think probably the best advice which is not unique and I think out there a lot is just, which is really hard sometimes, but don’t get so attached. Sometimes one of the hardest things is if something isn’t working in your story, but it’s your favorite thing or maybe the thing that you thought was going to be the best thing and then it’s just not working and you just have to cut it and that’s okay. But I think that’s another thing with meeting other writers is getting that feedback and beta reading. And I think too, I guess this would be a second thing with advice would be when you get feedback, take some time to process it because I’ve found for myself so many times when I first read through it, everything feels negative I think just because it all feels so personal.

(20:01): So then I usually will skim it and then I’ll set it aside and then I’ll come back a couple days later and I’ll look at it again and then it’s like your brain works better or something. Then I’m like, “Oh, well, this actually wasn’t negative at all. This was really positive. This is really helpful.” So I think just taking time to process that kind of feedback and knowing that I think a lot of our brains work that way as writers. We just tend to see the negative first.

Debbi (20:35): Yeah, it is hard sometimes, especially, I don’t know what it is about screenwriting, but boy, that is a tough arena to impress anybody in. Let’s see. Is there anything else that you’d like to cover that we haven’t talked about?

Jennifer (20:56): Oh gosh.

Debbi (20:57): Is there anything you want to talk about?

Jennifer (21:01): Not that I can think of. I just appreciate so much that you invited me on and it’s just so fun to meet you. Again, just I think the writing community is just one big, large, supportive community, which is so wonderful. So I guess to anyone out there who’s maybe feeling stuck, just keep writing.

Debbi (21:26): That’s right. Write on. Thank you. Those are great words to end with. Thanks a lot. I really appreciate you being here, Jennifer. Thanks.

Jennifer (21:35): Thanks again for having me. It was fun.

Debbi (21:38): It was my pleasure, believe me. And to everyone who is supporting the Crime Cafe on Patreon and Substack, I want to thank you so much. To everyone who’s listening, thank you for listening. If you enjoyed the episode, please leave a review. They do help. Until next time when my guest will be Caleb Husmann, take care and happy reading. Be seeing you.

My guest this week on the Crime Cafe podcast is Clay Stafford.

Check out the plans for the upcoming Killer Nashville conference, which celebrates its 21st anniversary. So, it can now legally drink whatever it wants. 🙂

Transcripts available for download to all free and paid Patreon members.

Debbi (00:54): Hi everyone. Before we get started with the show, I’d like to announce that my third Erica Jensen novel is out now. It came out on June 6th as an ebook. It’s also coming out in print, hopefully soon, probably sometime next week. So be on the lookout for that. And with that, I just hope that you will check the book out and consider giving it a read. Now let me introduce my first guest for season 12. You could say he’s even a regular here. He’s just part of the show now, really. He is in fact a bestselling author, award-winning filmmaker, and creator of Killer Nashville, a fantastic conference that’s held every year in Nashville. It’s Clay Stafford. Hi, Clay. How are you doing?

Clay (01:46): Hi, Debbi. I’m doing great. Yeah, I’ve decided that I’m just going to move in, so I hope you have a spare bedroom or something.

Debbi (01:53): Dear me.

Clay (01:56): Congrats on the new book.

Debbi (01:59): I’m sorry?

Clay (02:00): Congratulations on the new book.

Debbi (02:01): Oh, well, thank you very much. It took long enough for me to get it finished in between trying to tweak screenplays and do other things in between.

Clay (02:09): There’s always something going on, always juggling.

Debbi (02:12): It’s weird. I mean, it’s like, okay, I’m going to go back to the book now and where was I? And who was this person? I got to go back and check. And I would find things that would change and it was like, oh my God. You really have to spend some time with a novel to really get it done.

Clay (02:34): Yeah, you do.

Debbi (02:36): It’s like trying to pitch a TV show, actually. TV shows are so dependent on characters that it’s just really, unless you really, really know your characters and where they’re going, there’s just no point. And you really have to know this stuff like the DNA of the whole world you’re creating in a sense. So it’s really interesting. But enough about me and my thoughts about screenwriting. It’s very good to see you. And I was going to say, how many decades have you been running Killer Nashville? And then I looked and I realized it was two.

Clay (03:16): Decades. Yeah, started in 2006.

Debbi (03:18): That’s amazing.

Clay (03:20): Our 21st year. It’s funny how numbers work like that because 2006, 2026, but yet it’s 21. So I don’t know how math works, but …

Debbi (03:31): Oh, wow.

Clay (03:32): Yes.

Debbi (03:33): Oh, wow. Okay. So 21 years. Ooh.

Clay (03:36): Years.

Debbi (03:37): Darn.

Clay (03:40): I’m like 20 years ago today.

Debbi (03:43): Yeah, I guess so since you started on The Zero. Yeah, that’s kind of like counting the centuries there. Interesting. Oh, math. Yeah. So what was it like at the beginning versus now? I mean, how many people signed up for the first one and how are you doing now?

Clay (04:05): We had about 70 people that showed up the first year and then we started climbing and really our cap this year is 500.

(04:19): And we sell out. We’ve been selling out for the past four years now. And so we will definitely sell out and I think we’re going to sell out. Even somebody I was talking to today said we may sell out at the conference by the end of June and the conference is not even until August. So any of your listeners or viewers out there that want to come to Killer Nashville, better check out the website and maybe move forward because we may be selling out early this year, but we sell out every year. And part of it had to do with the venues because they only cap a certain amount and we had only so many conference rooms. And so the first year we had a linear session where it was like class and then another class and another class.

(05:13): Now we have 11 sessions going concurrently. So you got a choice of 11, you have to pick one and that goes on for the full four days of the conference. And so there’s a lot of sessions that are going on. So we’ve expanded since in the past two decades into what we’re offering as well as the increase in attendance. But we could have more people there if we opened it up. But those pesky fire marshals, they only say you can have so many people in there at the same time. And so they know what’s going on. But I think we’re at the Embassy Suites in Cool Springs area and they’re incredibly nice and they’ve refurbished the entire hotel. I mean, gutted the hotel this past year. We were the last event before they were waiting for us to finish and the next day they had the demolition crew in there tearing everything out.

(06:14): So everything is completely brand new. They added restaurants and the whole little village section around it. So the place is really great. So we rent out the whole hotel and then it’s like a fishbowl. As you know, everybody in there, 100% of them are writers or publishers, editors, attorneys, publicists, and everybody is in there together and you just really get to network and get to know people. And so you asked how to expand from 2006 to now.

(06:52): It has gone in many different directions and the expansion’s been good. I can’t believe we’re still around after 21 years. I never thought when the first one, I never looked ahead and thought, well, 21 years from now, I’ll still be doing this. I didn’t have that in mind, but it’s a blast. I love it. I enjoy every year. What’s changed there? There’s more opportunities for writers to find publishers, to find agents through Killer Nashville than we did back in 2006. And so part of the fun for me has always been, as you know, seeing people get a deal, seeing somebody reach a goal that they had and knowing that Killer Nashville and the attendees at Killer Nashville, not just me or not even me, had something to do with the confluence of events that caused that to happen. And I think that it’s been 21 years of seeing people’s lives transformed that in what I think is the most noble profession of all being a writer and being a purveyor of ideas. And so it has just been a joy ride for me. And so I look forward to 20 years more. We’ll see.

Debbi (08:29): That’s fantastic. Yeah, that’s great. I can really appreciate what you’re saying because it is wonderful when you can help somebody out with something, give some knowledge to somebody that really helps them out. I’ve done some mentoring with people in my alumni, alumni mentoring, that’s the kind of thing. And it’s the kind of thing I’d like to continue to do actually. Well,

Clay (09:00): Well, it’s fulfilling.

Debbi (09:03): It is.

Clay (09:04): I think that’s very good.

Debbi (09:08): By the way, where can I find your films or film?

Clay (09:12): Most of them are from PBS and NBC, CBS, ABC, and a lot of them are not available anywhere. And I have absolutely no control over that because I do not own the rights. It costs, the economics of it. People say we produce a film and throw it on Netflix. Actually, you pay Netflix to put it on there. And if the production company like PBS, PBS has a lot of my stuff. If they decided to pay Netflix or whoever, any streaming service, then you would be able to see it, but I don’t have the rights to it, I can’t stream it or put it on anything. So that answers your question.

Debbi (10:05): Oh, that’s too bad. But you have made films.That’s cool.

Clay (10:10): A few films. I mean, over different kinds between documentaries and episodic TV and stuff, probably about a hundred different credits. And I understand some of the stuff that I used to act in, I got a royalty check from The Guild for performances that are showing in Japan of all places,

(10:38): Not in the US and not Japan of all places, but of all places, why isn’t it showing in the US? I don’t know. But anyway, stuff is out there, but it’s really, content has changed so much in the decades that I’ve been in this business. And there are tons, if you’re an old film fanatic such as myself, there are tons of TV shows and films that were major when I was growing up that you can’t find anywhere because it just costs money to put them up on a streaming platform unless the company is NBC or Paramount or something and has their own streaming network. So there’s a whole bunch of deal-making things that have to go into all that. And unfortunately, creators don’t always have the leverage to be able to be involved in those discussions. I took a long way to answer your question.

Debbi (11:52): That’s okay. You covered some points that are very interesting. We could really get into that, but instead I will just mention that you have a podcast now.

Clay (12:03): I do have a podcast and I’m very excited about that and it’s gotten favorable results so far. People are actually listening to the podcast, but it’s an extension of what I’m doing. I’m talking with bestselling authors just similar to what you do and getting some good perspectives on the industry and you can, of course, stream it on any podcast platform. And I’m just always looking for ways to try to keep getting the information out there to the people that need it. So I mean, that’s what Killer Nashville is all about. So the podcast was a natural evolution on that. And then Killer Nashville Magazine is now going to be an ePub. Starting with the July one issue, that you can purchase on any platform, Amazon or Google or Apple, all of those easing platforms.

(13:16): And so that’s an exciting thing as well because we’re getting more exposure for our writers by doing that. And that’s really one of the things that I’ve done. I’ve been really happy. I mean, we’ve gotten picked for best mystery anthologies of the year and all kinds of stuff. So we discover a lot of great talent. And for your listeners, if they’re interested in submitting, we would love to have … I mean, we’re actively looking for submissions in all different things from short stories to craft to even novellas to flash fiction poetry. Look on killernashvillemagazine[dot]com and you can find all the stuff that we’re looking for. And we love discovering new voices and publishing established voices and take all of them equally in what we’re doing.

(14:17): But yeah, that’s expanding and there’s a couple other things that are in the works. So next year when we talk, we’ll be talking about some different things

Debbi (14:28): The world will have changed some more.

Clay (14:32): But yeah, so there’s been a lot of expansion. There’s another thing, how is it different since 2006? We got a podcast going, got an e-magazine going and we get tons of people. It’s Killer Nashville International Writers Conference and we have probably, I don’t know, 10% of our well-known, more than that, probably about maybe 15% of our demographics are outside the US from all parts of the world. So that’s been a major expansion.

Debbi (15:13): Very, very interesting. Do you see any change in what people are looking for from the conference?

Clay (15:21): I try to stay up-to-date and of course I do a lot of consulting and I’m always involved in the industry and I know a couple of people and so I get to hear the inside scoop on things. And so I always try to make the conference applicable to right now and even to take it beyond a lot of conferences are how to write great protagonists and stuff and that’s very important. But some of the different aspects of today, even social implications of writing that we get into academic type classes as well as just the craft classes. And then of course we got the forensic classes and forensics is always moving forward in terms of what they’re able to do in terms of uncovering crime. So that’s always contemporary and we’re trying to stay on top of all of that as well as legal issues pertaining to crime and crime punishment and justice and even in cases, some cases of injustice, try to cover all of that with all of that focus toward how to make somebody a more informed writer in terms of making sure that everything they write is plausible, especially in the crime business and making sure that everything is entertaining, which is just a basic literary thing. So we cover a lot of ground.

Debbi (17:02): Interesting. Do you have any thoughts about what’s going on with AI and the copyright implications of using it?

Clay (17:14): I think that any tool can be an asset and any tool can also be abused. And I have never seen a piece of AI material that I felt sounded like a real person wrote it. It’s absent of voice. So I know that on some platforms people are writing AI stories and selling them and you’re going to have that. You’re going to have people doing that sort of thing. But if you read it, it’s just for lack of a better word, very simplistic, if not some of it’s just downright trash. I’ve seen some things where people have to actually taken the AI formatting and just into a book and published it on a platform for people to purchase and they haven’t even taken the trouble to change the formatting or anything. It’s just laziness. But my son and I played an interesting game with AI, which is just fun for us.

(18:26): We go on an AI program and say, write a story about a romance where this happens and then something else happens and then there’s a murder and then there’s whatever. And we have a little party just hanging out listening to the stupid stories that we up with. So in terms of writing stories, which I think is what most writers are fearful of, it’s going to take our jobs, it’s going to take whatever. I don’t foresee that at all. Now AI is excellent if you say I am doing a plot on whatever it happens to be, where’s a great place to research this or what are three books that really can give me some insight into that? AI is great for giving you that. I mean, it’s got access to data and can compute faster than … It can compute faster in a few minutes than I can at what we used to do, go sit in the library and look at microfiche.

(19:44): Maybe who arrives first at a crime scene and AI can give you a list of who shows up and who gets called next and how that process works. So for that kind of stuff, AI is great, but when you start using it like that, it falls into Scrivener or any kind of a Word or docs. It just becomes a tool that you use, a research tool and there’s nothing wrong with that in terms of expediting what we used to laboriously have to do in libraries. And my eyes have crossed many times looking at that microfilm to do research on projects and now it’s just type it into an AI program and they can bring you up all sorts of leads that you can then just go investigate without having to do all that manual searching yourself. It’s been an incredible time changer.

Debbi (20:55): It is. Yeah, I agree. It’s amazing the sources you can find and the way you can organize information, it will give you take something and summarize it. Most of the time it comes out really good, really well.

Clay (21:13): And I will say, news seems to thrive on the bad things and it has to be something stirring the pot. And it was like, oh my gosh, cassettes have come out. My gosh, eight tracks are going to change the world. You remember eight tracks?

(21:44): And ebooks are the death of publishing. It’s audiobooks. Nobody’s going to be learning to read anymore. And so it’s always just people looking for something to talk. Let me give a message to your viewers out there. Instead of worrying about how ebooks are going to destroy the industry, which we’re not worried about now anymore, everybody’s found that they’re very lucrative. Let’s look at AI. How is it going to destroy the industry? Because there’s always some nefarious thing that’s coming to destroy the industry, but it doesn’t destroy the industry. This is a multi-billion dollar business. And instead of worrying about all of that stuff, it might be best if we reframed our minds and our time to write that next page and focus there instead of all the things first of all that we cannot control. Second of all, it’s just chatter, use any tool for the good purposes and don’t be stupid and use it for something that’s bad and don’t support the people who use it for something that’s bad.

(23:08): So that can apply to everything that’s been going on in the publishing industry since maybe the 1940s or if not before.

Debbi (23:19): Yeah, there have been so many changes.

Clay (23:23): Not that I have an opinion on the silliness of it,

Debbi (23:27): Of course not. Neither of us have opinions about the publishing industry for heaven’s sake. It’s simply delightful.

Clay (23:41): I don’t know how you feel, but I feel like I’ve got the best job in the world to be in the center of books that are coming out and books that are doing very well and authors that are trying to get there and writing my own stuff. I mean, for me, I can’t think of a better job. I’m just absolutely blessed. But somebody else in another profession is going to go, “Be a writer? That’s blessed?” But yeah, for me in my little world, publishing industry and the entertainment industry is an incredible place to be.

Debbi (24:19): Well, I quit practicing law just to become a writer because all my life I’d wanted to be one and I said, it’s about time I started, huh? Yeah. So I did. What is it that keeps you going without burning out?

Clay (24:39): Yeah, I absolutely love what I do. I think that’s what I said earlier. I am more of the Phineas and Ferb mentality, the 10-year-old boy mentality. I wake up every morning and say, okay, what am I going to do today? And I have incredible people, teammates that I work with and they make my day a pure joy and we all create together on various things and working on Killer Nashville and all that other stuff. And so I’m just surrounded with incredibly creative and wonderful people and doing something you love. If it’s work, then after a while it starts wearing you out. But if you’re playing then, and I’m a builder, I’m a creator, that’s what I’ve always done. And when you’re playing, it doesn’t feel like work. So it’s not unusual. I mean, we’ve talked before, most of my days are 14-hour days, Monday through Sunday, seven days a week.

(25:53): I don’t take days off and because I miss it. It’s like I get to show up and hang out with my friends. And so how do I prevent burnout? I don’t know. I’m just having too much fun.

Debbi (26:07): I understand actually. It’s really interesting because I’ve never been more engaged in a process than I was when I was directing my first movie and you just get so into the process that whatever is bothering you disappears. It’s really weird. It’s kind of like writing a novel. I mean, it’s like really just focusing on the thing that you’re doing and just getting into it and feeling that flow of creation. Really, there’s nothing like it.

Clay (26:45): One day I’m going to grow up and not be the 10-year-old boy anymore, but we’ll see when that happens.

Debbi (26:51): I know the feeling. I know the feeling. Is there anything you’d like to say that we haven’t covered?

Clay (26:58): No, I think I came with no agenda other than to be here.

Debbi (27:05): Well, I’m so glad that you came today and that you spent some time with us. I really appreciate it. Thanks, Clay.

Clay (27:11): Is there anything you want to cover that we haven’t covered?

Debbi (27:14): Oh, we can talk about that in the bonus round. How does that sound?

Clay (27:19): That works great.

Debbi (27:20): I love the bonus round. I get to ask all sorts of weird questions. Let’s see. It was really great to see you, Clay.

Clay (27:30): Same here. Thank you for having me back on your show.

Debbi (27:33): Well, thanks for being here. And to all my subscribers, whether you’re on Substack or Patreon, thank you so much. Thank you to everyone who’s listening. If you enjoyed the episode, please consider leaving a review. They’re helpful. They really are. And so until next time when my guest will be Jennifer Lycette, take care and happy reading. Be seeing you.

My guest this week on the Crime Cafe podcast is Gregory Poirier.

Check out what Gregory has to say about screenwriting, as well as crime writing!

You can download a copy of the transcript here.

Debbi (00:54): Hi everyone. Our guest today is an acclaimed screenwriter, director, and producer whose work spans film and television. His credits include National Treasure: Book of Secrets, Knox Goes Away, and Rosewood. A graduate of the USC School of Theater and the UCLA Master’s program in screenwriting, his debut novel, A Thousand Cuts will be coming out very soon. In fact, you can probably pre-order it today. It’s my pleasure to have with me, and I forgot to ask how you pronounce your name, so please just say it.

Gregory (01:31): Gregory Poirier.

Debbi (01:33): Gregory Poirier. Thank you so much. The one thing I forgot to do at the beginning of this.

Gregory (01:40): I pronounce it a little more technically than that in France, but …

Debbi (01:43): True. Yes, yes. France is … Yeah, they would do it totally right, and we do it totally wrong, but whatever. Sorry about that, France. So anyway, thanks for being here today.

Gregory (01:58): Yeah, my pleasure.

Debbi (01:58): After a career in film and television, what prompted you to write your first novel?

Gregory (02:04): Well, it actually was sort of an organic thing that came up. I mean, there’s a lot of conversation now amongst me and my friends about how this business of ours is changing, and it’s becoming a lot more challenging because it’s shrinking, shrinking, shrinking.

Debbi (02:23): Oh, yes.

Gregory (02:24): And I’ve been very fortunate that it hasn’t shrunk me out yet, But you never know. And I actually had this idea for this story and I was trying to work it as a screenplay. And I just at some point just decided that the sort of specific voice that I was going for and the sort of tone that I was hoping for wasn’t really coming across that well in the screenplay version. And I finally decided that it’s an action thing. The way that I started this thing was I wanted to do a film that was the film that Humphrey Bogart or Robert Mitchum or one of those guys would make if they were alive now, something with a real sort of noir weigh into it, but with a modern sensibility, modern action, all that kind of stuff. And so that’s what I was trying to achieve. And for whatever reason, it wasn’t coming across. I know I can write a noir because Knox Goes Away was a noir, and that’s probably the favorite movie of mine that I’ve ever done.

(03:33): But this was something different and it just wasn’t working. And I was sitting with my gang of writer friends at the Farmer’s Market one week and one of them said, why don’t you write a novel? And I thought I might have the perfect thing to try that. And so I just basically started it as something to try and to see if this story worked better in that form, which it definitely did. And that’s how we got here.

Debbi (04:02): Why do you think it works better as a novel?

Gregory (04:05): I think that there’s a lot of reasons, but I think for one thing, I think it’s easier to exert your own voice in this form of writing as opposed to in a screenplay. I mean, I feel like Knox, to bring that movie up again, it’s probably the closest thing that I’ve ever done where it was sort of my voice that came across. But a lot of time you’re trying to not inject your own voice into it. For instance, Rosewood, which was a historical drama, needed to have a certain cadence, needed to have a certain feel and way of speaking and all of that kind of stuff. And it’s not me. You’re purely, at that point, a writer, which is great. I enjoy that very much. But this, I just wanted to inject some of my personality into it more. And that’s definitely easier in a book than it is in a screenplay.

(05:03): And in a screenplay, you write it and then it goes through actors, it goes through directors, it goes through editors. I mean, there’s a lot of people between you and the audience, whereas in this thing, you’re talking directly to your reader, which I really enjoyed a lot.

Debbi (05:19): And I take it that you worked with an editor who got what you were trying to say.

Gregory (05:25): Absolutely. I worked with Keith Wallman at Diversion Books, and he was very, very into what I was trying to do. He understood it right away and was very supportive.

Debbi (05:39): It’s fascinating how the fields differ in that respect, how little of yourself in a sense goes into screenwriting. At the same time, how much of it, because where do these characters come from except from you? So we start with that and then people start to chip away at it a little bit.

Gregory (05:58): It’s also a really different type of writing. I mean, screenwriting is 100% external.

(06:07): All you can put on the page is what the audience sees and what the audience hears. You don’t get a chance … You need to bring out whatever the emotion of the character is and whatever their journey is and all that through those two things, what you see and what you hear. And that’s all you have. You don’t have this ability to delve into the inner monologue and to go into the past of everybody and to sort of really dig into these characters. So it’s a very highly technical form of writing. There’s very rigid structures to it. It’s just very different than this. And it’s not easy. I mean, it’s difficult to do, but it’s just different. And so this was a lot of fun.

Debbi (06:51): That is a very good point. I’m so glad you said that because that’s one of the things that I emphasize when I talk to people about screenwriting, about how different it is.

Gregory (07:00): Yeah, it’s totally—

Debbi (07:01): Similar, but different.

Gregory (07:04): The analogy I sort of use is that I’ve been an electrician for 35 years and I’ve been gathering all these electrician tools, and now I’m trying to take all the tools that I’ve gathered and do some plumbing.

Debbi (07:16): Exactly.

Gregory (07:19): You’re still trying to do something practical, but it’s a completely different form and you need different tools.

Debbi (07:26): And you hope there isn’t a leak in your pipe somewhere.

Gregory (07:28): Yeah.

Debbi (07:31): Somebody’s going to point that out to you. Let’s see. What attracted you to the spy genre? I love the spy genre.

Gregory (07:42): It’s interesting because this is a little bit spy genre, but it’s also, what it’s really about, it’s about a bunch of ex-spies. So it’s about a lot of people that have a lot of skills that they developed when they were working for the CIA that are now out of that world and are trying to figure out ways to use the things that they know how to do in a different way, which is why when we meet our main character, Max Starkey, he’s working as what I call a recovery man for the mob, basically. If they lose something or something gets stolen from them or whatever, he goes and he gets it back. And it’s like the only thing he was able to find in civilian life were the things that he learned how to do in the CIA were of use to him. So I do like the spy genre and I do like those kind of books, but this is really like a post-spy drama more.

(08:41): And at the same time, the other couple, I guess you would call them the antagonists in the book are the same thing. They’re people he knows from his past, but they’re also out and they’re using their contacts and their skills and all that kind of stuff to make a very, very good living, doing highly questionable things.

Debbi (09:04): Did you—

Gregory (09:06): I’m sorry?

Debbi (09:07): Oh, I’m sorry. I was just going to say, did you have to do a lot of research on the subject?

Gregory (09:12): I did. And a lot of the research that I did, I did years earlier for other things because I’ve been writing for a long time. I’ve been a screenwriter for 35 years and like every screenwriter, I have a lot of projects that came and went and never got made and that kind of thing. But I’ve been to Langley. I’ve met all these people. I’ve done all this stuff in my career over the years in research for other projects and stuff. So I didn’t have to really dig into that stuff too much. I know how Langley works. I know what the building looks like inside. I know I have all that stuff, but I did do a lot of research in terms of locations and tech stuff, like the things that I wanted to use in the book. I don’t know what you would call it, guns and hotels or whatever.

(10:17): I did do a lot of heavy duty research into that kind of stuff. And I like to be as realistic as possible in terms of it’s going to take this long to get from here to here, and these are the things we’re going to encounter on the way, and that kind of stuff. I like to make it as grounded as possible because it’s a bit of a fantastical story, but it takes place in the real world.

Debbi (10:40): Exactly.

Gregory (10:41): Yeah.

Debbi (10:43): Yeah.

Gregory (10:46): But I enjoy research. I like it.

Debbi (10:48): Me too. Yeah. It’s amazing what you find when you look.

Gregory (10:53): Well, my biggest problem with researching stuff is stopping.

Debbi (10:57): I know. It’s like, oh my God, this actually happened somewhere? Ooh, this is interesting.

Gregory (11:03): And I also, I’ve traveled a lot and I’ve traveled a lot in Southeast Asia, which is where the book is set. And so I was able to take a lot of experiences that I had down there and sort of incorporate them into the book in more dramatic ways. And than they happened to me obviously.

Debbi (11:20): Right, right. How do you structure your writing time? Do you have a time for writing? Do you have a schedule that you write on? How do you balance it with your other projects?

Gregory (11:33): For the first four hours a day, I berate myself constantly that I’m not writing. That’s the first step.

Debbi (11:41): I should try that. Maybe I’d be more relaxed.

Gregory (11:47): I walk around the house saying, “I bet Stephen King is writing right now.” But yeah, I tend to write about five hours, four to five hours a day is about my limit really.

(11:59): And I don’t really do a page count. I don’t put myself on that kind of thing unless I’m racing a deadline and say, okay, I have to do a chapter. I have to do two chapters or two scenes or whatever today. But for the most part, because I’m the kind of guy where I’ll sit down three days in a row and barely eke out three pages, and then on day four, I’ll write 20 pages or 25 pages. It’s just the way my rhythm works and I don’t understand it and I don’t really need to, just is what it is. But I also go through a couple weeks here and there where nothing comes out and then in a week I write a whole draft of something. I’m a very streaky writer, but I do try to sit down every afternoon for four or five hours and try to avoid playing bouncing balls and all that other fun stuff.

Debbi (12:56): Exactly.

Gregory (12:57): So I need that though. I need a structure like that. I have this nice spot here where you see me sitting right now, but I also write really well out in the world and even in busy places. I’m that cliche guy that likes to write in Starbucks. I like to write at our local library branch. I write really well in hotel lobbies and on airplanes. And I’m just, I don’t know, it’s almost like how if you want a toddler to fall asleep, you take them to a really busy restaurant and they sort of get overwhelmed and fall asleep. I think that’s kind of the same thing with me. If I go somewhere that’s busy, I have to shut everything out and it zones me in on what I’m working on.

Debbi (13:46): That’s interesting.

Gregory (13:47): Yeah.

Debbi (13:50): I’ve never been one to write out in coffee shops and things like that. So I always find it interesting when people do enjoy that. It’s kind of like-

Gregory (13:59): I’ll say my wife and I, we raised four kids and we’re all adults now, so sometimes the coffee shop is quieter than the house.

Debbi (14:08): There’s that. Our house is pretty quiet, I have to say that. Unless, of course, my husband is listening to loud music, but that’s okay. Loud music I can deal with.

Gregory (14:19): Can you write with music on?

Debbi (14:21): As long as it’s not too loud. I mean, if it’s on the background or something. If somebody’s listening to TV, I don’t care.

Gregory (14:28): Yeah, I tend to make, you don’t call them mix tapes anymore. I don’t know what you call them now, but playlists, I guess.

Debbi (14:36): Playlists, yeah.

Gregory (14:37): For things that I’m working on. And then I’ll listen to them, but not while I’m writing. I’ll listen to them in the car or while I’m puttering around and they sort of get you in the mood.

Debbi (14:49): Exactly. Yeah. Because sometimes when you hear music when you’re writing, it’s just a little too much stimulation or something. Too many things going on.

Gregory (14:57): Yeah, I get caught up in the lyrics and then I look down and go, “Well, I just wrote Welcome to the Hotel California. What the heck?”

Debbi (15:03): Where did that come from? Yeah. So is there a writer who has most inspired you as a writer?

Gregory (15:12): Ooh, boy. Well, it depends on which kind of writing you’re talking abo ut. Screenwriting would be different than … I’m a huge fan of guys like Preston Sturges, people like that. But in terms of books, I read so many books and I read so many different kinds of books. I’ll read anything, honestly. Right now, this is sort of a guilty little secret thing to say. I never read any of the Ayn Rand books. So right now I’m reading The Fountainhead for the first time at my age. But just because I thought, oh, that’s something I probably should read at some point before I kick the bucket.

Debbi (16:02): She was an interesting person.

Gregory (16:04): Yeah. Boy, oh boy, interesting writer too.

Debbi (16:07): Yes.

Gregory (16:08): But the stuff that I most enjoy reading, if I’m going to be a hundred percent honest, I love the Michael Connolly stuff. I love Bosch and Lincoln Lawyer. I love anything by Karin Slaughter. I love the Elvis Cole books. I love all those kind of things that are fun to read.

Debbi (16:27): Exactly.

Gregory (16:28): I mean, I’m enjoying this Fountainhead, but it does feel a little bit like some work I never got done and I need to do it. It’s an interesting read, but it’s not as fun as reading.

Debbi (16:40): Well, she’s very opinionated, was very opinionated. I will say that.

Gregory (16:46): I’ll definitely cleanse my palate with a Reacher book or something after this.

Debbi (16:50): I suggest you do so. Yeah. Take yourself out of that mindset fast. Let’s see. What advice would you give to anyone who’s interested in a writing career?

Gregory (17:02): Well, it depends on which kind of writing career you’re talking about. The advice might be slightly different for somebody who wants to go into screenwriting now, but my advice always used to be that if you wanted to be a screenwriter, you had to do absolutely nothing else. My advice used to be, if you can see yourself doing something else, go do that because unless this is the only thing you can see yourself doing, it’s going to be a really hard life and you’re probably not going to become successful at it unless it’s all you can think of doing. It’s the one thing that drives you. And I guess that’s still true, but I think nowadays I would counsel people to be a little more of an omnivore in terms of what they write. I think part of the thing that was responsible for this book that I wrote was that nobody will make anything now that doesn’t have IP.

(18:08): So I sort of thought, well, I’ll make some IP and then somebody will make a movie or a TV show out of it. But I think that just writing this as a script and sending it out and trying to sell it would be really hard in today’s market. So I would suggest just try writing all kinds of things, be a writer, be a writer of every form you can work on. And that’s going to be the easiest way for you. I mean, not easy, but it’s going to be the best way forward,

Debbi (18:42): It’ll be an easier way probably.

Gregory (18:43): Yeah. I mean, screenwriting right now is, the market has shrunk so much that even guys like me that have been doing it forever, I’m working still, but I’m having to find ways outside the traditional way to sort, oh, here’s somebody that has some money and wants to make a movie. Well, let’s do a script and let’s see what happens. And it’s a lot more spec writing now than it used to be, there a fewer jobs, but also at the same time, specs are harder to sell. So it’s a really challenging time, I think, to be trying to break in as a screenwriter. The other thing I would suggest if screenwriting is the goal is to just make some films, some small short films and sort of showcase yourself. You can also, if you can get short stories published, people are buying those to make films out of and TV shows out of. So that’s a way also.

Debbi (19:49): Absolutely.

Gregory (19:51): I would just say try to get a foothold in every way you can. That’s the only thing now. It used to be just keep writing screenplays, keep writing screenplays and eventually you’ll sell something. But I don’t think that model really holds anymore because-

Debbi (20:06): I think you’re right.

Gregory (20:07): Yeah. I would hate to be breaking in now. I’m sorry. I hope I don’t discourage anybody by saying that, but it’s tough right now.

Debbi (20:16): But that’s a very honest assessment that you gave, and I appreciate it very much because I think people need to know about this.

Gregory (20:25): At the same time, there’s nothing like it. A writing career is the greatest thing in the world. I’ve hated it every day and I’ve loved it every day, and it’s fabulous. If you can get it going, get it going, because it’s really a wonderful way to live a life.

Debbi (20:41): Well, that’s great. That’s a wonderful thought. Thank you. I wanted to ask you something else on the subject of … Oh, you mentioned IP. Talk for a second about the importance of IP. I’m always talking about this, and I never know if the message is really getting through. IP is kind of crucial now to-

Gregory (21:01): It is very crucial. And part of the reason for that is that the studios used to be run by people who love movies. Now it’s run purely by business people. They’re not movie fans. You go in there and try to reference some Clark Gable movie and they’ll look at you like you just came from Mars. They don’t know what that is. It’s a completely different set of people buying now. The studios used to be run by people who got into the movie business because they love movies. Now it’s people that have moved over from the restaurant branch of the corporation or whatever. It’s just people that are running it as a business and they’re all afraid to do the wrong thing.

(21:54): They used to develop scripts. They used to develop 25, 30 scripts for every movie they got made just because that’s how you mined good material, but they won’t do that anymore. They’re so afraid of everything. And so the IP thing is a crutch for them because they can go, well, look, this worked as a graphic novel or it worked as a book or it worked as whatever, a poem somebody scratched on the side of a building. And so if it fails, it’s not my fault because look, it already worked as this other thing. And so that’s why I think they really do look for IP now because it’s just a way for them to protect themselves.

Debbi (22:39): Hedging bets.

Gregory (22:42): The nice thing in the old days was they weren’t afraid to fail because you made a lot of movies and some of them didn’t make money, but a lot of them did. And you came out ultimately on the plus side of all of that. Nowadays, they’re going to make five movies a year and they’re so risk averse that they almost won’t buy a script unless you come in with a director and two actors attached. And it’s just this whole other thing now. It’s just a cover your ass business now. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to swear on your podcast.

Debbi (23:21): No, please do. I encourage it.

Gregory (23:23): Well then, no, I’m kidding. So it’s different. And I think that if you can, if you have the path to write something or to publish a short story or like I said, a graphic novel, if you can write a graphic novel and hook up with an artist and sell that first, then that can be your entry into … I mean, I’m not going to talk too much about it because it’s not public yet, but I wrote this book and it was optioned like that because there’s the thing and they can all point at the thing and say-

Debbi (24:05): We have a thing.

Gregory (24:06): There was a book. There’s a thing. Yeah, that’s what I always call it. I always say the main difference between screenwriting and writing this that I like, the main thing that I like about it is that you write the thing and there’s the thing

Debbi (24:21): That’s right.

Gregory (24:22): As opposed to the movies where you write the thing and then you wait two years for Dwayne Johnson to read it, and then you got to get a director. And then if you’re lucky in five years, there’s the thing on the screen. Maybe. Yeah. I said if you’re lucky. Yeah. But with this, you write it and they say, okay, here’s my thing. You either like my thing or you don’t like my thing, but there’s the thing.

Debbi (24:47): Exactly. Yeah. It is nice just to be able to create your own thing. Is there anything you’d like to add before we finish up?

Gregory (24:57): No, I just really enjoyed writing this and I really hope that people enjoy reading it. I read a lot and I tried to make this something that I would enjoy reading. I tried to put in some humor and some surprises and just make it a fun experience. So I’m hoping that that’s what happens is I don’t know how many people will read it, but I hope that the ones that do really have a good experience of it. And I’ve already written a second one, by the way.

Debbi (25:27): I was going to say, are you going to write another? That’s excellent.

Gregory (25:31): Yeah. Because I wrote this book on spec. I didn’t pitch it. And when they bought it, they contracted me for two books about the same character. So the second one is in the hands of the editors now, so we’ll see what they say.

Debbi (25:48): Wow. Well, that’s fantastic. Congratulations. That’s great.

Gregory (25:52): Thank you.

Debbi (25:53): Well, thank you so much for being with us today. I really appreciate it.

Gregory (25:57): Absolutely my pleasure. This was great.

Debbi (26:00): It was my pleasure too. Great to meet you.

Gregory (26:03): You, too.

Debbi (26:04): I would also like to thank my patrons on Patreon and my followers and subscribers on Substack. To everyone listening, if you follow me on Patreon, and it’s free to do that, I hope you’ll take a moment to fill out the short survey that I’ve provided there to get a better sense of what you’re looking for from the Crime Cafe. I can provide more interviews. I can provide more interviews with screenwriters. I can coach people on writing. Anything you’re interested in, let me know. This is the final episode of season 11. During the hiatus, I’ll give some more thought as to what the podcast could include as a perk for Patreon supporters. In the meantime, take care and happy reading. I will be seeing you.

My guest this week on the Crime Cafe podcast is Liz Lazarus.

Listen in on her remarkable story. I’m ready to sign-up for karate class now.

You can download a copy of the transcript here.

Debbi (00:54): Hi everyone. My guest today has an engineering degree and a very interesting background in general. Among other things, she lived in Paris for three years and speaks fluent French. She has a pilot’s license and has produced a music CD. She’s also the author of several legal thrillers, including her latest, Dawn Before Darkness, which is available on Kobo, as well as in print or will be, I guess, in May.

Liz (01:28): Will be. May 26th. May 26th. Yeah.

Debbi (01:31): May 26th. There, you heard it now. You heard it there. It’s my pleasure to introduce my guest, Liz Lazarus. I’m trying not to say Liz Lemon.

Liz (01:42): It’s a tongue twister. Liz Lazarus. Yeah.

Debbi (01:44): Liz Lazarus. It’s a lovely name. I love it. I love that name. That’s cool. What made you choose to write Thrillers?

Liz (01:54): Well, I would tell you, as you said, I’m an engineer. I’m probably the most reluctant author you’ll meet. I did not intend to be an author, and that may be the story for lots of people. But my first book, Free of Malice, was based on a real story, something that happened to me in college. And the novel actually was just me writing about what happened to start with. And then it turned into a novel. And I was going to be one and done after Free of Malice, and people that were reading it said, “Can’t wait for the next one.” And so I thought, okay. And it took me a while to agree to write the second one. And then once that was done, that was Plea for Justice, then came Shades of Silence and now Dawn Before Darkness. So now I feel like it’s a bad addiction.

Debbi (02:36): Wow. And each one of these is a standalone novel, not a series.

Liz (02:40): They are standalone. I like to give my characters closure and move on to new people.

Debbi (02:45): That’s cool. Yeah, I can appreciate that. Your first novel was inspired by a real event, correct?

Liz (02:53): Correct.

Debbi (02:53): What was it like to write in a fictional form about a thing that really happened?

Liz (03:00): It was therapy. So what happened in brief, I was in college at Georgia Tech. I was living off campus in this area called Home Park, which is a bunch of old houses, college students, a fair amount of riff raff. It wasn’t the safest area. And it was my senior year. I was going to sleep that night. I was living with two other girls in a house. And at four in the morning, I wake up to the sound of my bedroom door crashing open.

Debbi (03:26): Oh my God.

Liz (03:26): And I remember distinctly thinking, “Is this real?” And my next thought was, “This is real. You’ve got to deal with it. ” And you don’t know what you’re made of. Thank goodness I had fight in me, so I started fighting back. And eventually, at one point I write about this in the book, he says, “If you shut up, I’ll leave.” And I thought, “I’m not shutting up. I’m screaming louder.” And eventually he gave up and I left. So I didn’t have any self-protection at the time. I had a can of mace. I ran to the door, watched him run away into the darkness. And so for me, the writing about it, writing about the PTSD that I had. I didn’t even know what that word was, but I started writing about how I felt, what happened, how I would check every nook and cranny in the house.

(04:09): And I had said to my brother-in-law afterward, “If I’d had a gun, I would’ve shot him.” And he said, “Well, that may not have been self-defense. By the time you could have shot him, he was retreating off your property. You would’ve shot him in the back.” And that got me really curious about where’s that line between self-defense and vigilantism. And then my mother asked a question, which I won’t tell you because it gives away the ending, but she asked just the most out of the blue question. And I thought, wow, that would make a killer ending to a book. And that was it. And it took me years later. For anyone who’s thinking of writing a book, it took me years later. I did all those other things on my bucket list and the book just wouldn’t leave me alone, so I wrote it.

Debbi (04:51): Yeah. It’s kind of an itch that you got to scratch.

Liz (04:57): It wasn’t going away. And I had the plot in my mind, and it had been brewing in my mind for a while. And I’m super lucky. I had a lawyer who helped me with the legal part. I had a therapist who helped me with the EMDR therapy, which is in the book, therapy I never did. And so the whole thing was just a great project.

Debbi (05:16): Interesting. At this time, are you working at a regular job or do you have a business? I understand you were head of operations for a healthcare startup at some point.

Liz (05:31): I’ve done two startups. The last one, and now I’m currently on one, but we’re in engineering development, so they don’t need me a lot because I do more of the operations. So I’ve got a fair amount of free time at the moment. But my background was 20 years at GE Healthcare and 10 years consulting. And I do some consulting on my own, but when I’m writing a book or launching a book, I don’t do much consulting.

Debbi (05:53): Yeah. Yeah. You want to focus on that book. Yeah.

Liz (05:55): This is a job in of itself.

Debbi (05:57): It sure is. It sure is.

Liz (06:01): Yeah.

Debbi (06:02): I think a lot of people don’t really realize that when they get into this, how much of a job it is. Do you have a regular writing schedule?

Liz (06:12): I don’t. I do an outline. I am a plotter. I outline an Excel with color coding.

Debbi (06:18): Why am I not surprised?

Liz (06:19): Fair.

Debbi (06:21): You’re an engineer. You have a scientific mind, and I get it.

Liz (06:26): So because I do that, I don’t have to write in order. So I write when something gives me content. If I’ve met someone or a story shows up or I’ve interviewed someone, I write when I have content.

Debbi (06:36): Cool. I like that approach. How much research do you usually do before or while you’re writing the novel?

Liz (06:46): It depends. The first one and this fourth one are based on real events. And so I didn’t have to do as much as I thought because I knew a lot of it. Now, the legal part, I had to do research and I always rely on my lawyer friends to help me. The third one, I relied a lot on my friend who’s a detective, a retired detective. And this current one, it was a balance. So the current one, Dawn Before Darkness, is a stalker story and a guardianship abuse story. So the stalker part, I interviewed 10 women who had stalkers and combined their stories to this uber-villain. And then the guardianship story is actually my real story that I was fighting for guardianship for my mother. And so most of that, I didn’t need to do research. I lived it. And again, was therapy to write about it.

Debbi (07:33): Yes. How did you find the 10 women that you interviewed?

Liz (07:41): Great question. From my fan base. So I had just posted … Well, the first person, Dawn, Dawn Hillier was the inspiration behind me writing the stalker story. She had a stalker. We had become friends and she told me about her story. And so that was in my mind, I was always going to write the stalker story. And then I posted on Facebook just out to my readers and said, “If anybody’s had a stalker and is willing to be interviewed, I’d love to talk to you. “

Debbi (08:08): Wow.

Liz (08:09): And sadly, I had too many volunteers. That’s a sad state of affairs. So I picked 10 women, 10 stories. And then at that same time, my guardianship case was continuing to play out. And the real light bulb for me was, how do I combine those two things? How do I combine guardianship fighting for your mom and then a stalker? And when I was able to do that, I think this is my best one yet.

Debbi (08:34): Wow. That’s one of the most useful parts about Facebook, finding other people. And yet somehow I don’t really like Facebook. I wish I could like it more. You know what I’m saying? It’s so hard for me to get into it somehow.

Liz (08:55): It’s fun to keep up with people. I’m not 100% convinced it sells books, but to me, people tend to want the books when they’ve heard my talk or they’ve had a referral. So I do it some, but I don’t overpost. I feel like that might annoy people. So I try to do it with moderation.

Debbi (09:16): Moderation. Absolutely. That’s a great suggestion. What authors have most inspired you as a writer?

Liz (09:25): Different ones. Well, the very first one actually was my grandfather. He wrote a very different genre. He wrote a children’s book called Follow My Leader. His name’s James Garfield. And he wrote about a little boy who was blinded by a firecracker. That book came out in the 50s and it’s still in print today. So I guess I had the writing bug in me somewhere. And then as far as what I read, I read a lot of thrillers. And I tend to be, I’m on a kick right now with all the British thriller writers. So Clare MackIntosh, B.A. Paris, that crew. And a lot of it’s because I do audiobooks and I love listening to the British accent. But Michael Robotham, K.J. Howe, there’s so many.

Debbi (10:11): Yeah. Michael Robotham. I’m familiar with him.

Liz (10:14): He’s great.

Debbi (10:16): Nice guy, too.

Liz (10:17): Oh, you’ve met him. That’s great.

Debbi (10:19): We were on a panel once ages ago.

Liz (10:20): That’s a treat. Yeah.

Debbi (10:22): Yeah, It was. It was a real treat.

Liz (10:24): What I like about him is his twists, and I always have a twist. Every one of my books has a twist. His twists are earned. I love that about how he writes.

Debbi (10:35): Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Let’s see. How did you start writing fiction? Did you take courses or read books before you started your own novel or did you just launch in?

Liz (10:51): I just did it.

Debbi (10:52): Wow.

Liz (10:53): I don’t know if that’s a mistake. I think some of the best singers are just naturally gifted and don’t even have to take a course. I’m going to believe that’s my path. I’m sure if I took more courses or any courses, I would be better, but I read. I have good, good editors and I write.

Debbi (11:16): And you know what you like?

Liz (11:19): True.

Debbi (11:19): And that’s what you want to see. You want to write the book that you want to see out there?

Liz (11:24): I do. I write what I know and I like strong female characters. I like women who are sympathetic for some reason. Always have a good twist. When I know the twist, that’s when I know I’ve got my story.

Debbi (11:36): Yeah. Yeah. Let’s see. What advice would you give to anyone who’s interested in having a writing career?

Liz (11:45): Don’t do it, right?

Debbi (11:47): Run screaming.

Liz (11:49): Be ready. You named the things I’ve done. Pilot’s license, got my MBA, speak French. This is the hardest thing I’ve ever done, ever. Wow. So just be ready. Go in with not crazy expectations. When people ask me, when they’re thinking of writing a book, the first thing I ask them is, what’s your goal? Are you thinking you’re going to make money? Are you going to be famous? Do you want a movie deal? Have realistic expectations. And if it’s like me and it was just a calling that would not let go, then do it. Because if it’s not a calling that’s not going to let go, then do it. But go in with low expectations, get a mentor early. I did not do that. I should have. And the publishing businesses I have found doesn’t follow the business norms that I’m used to. 20 years at General Electric. And so be prepared for some of that. And that’s where a good mentor would help.

Debbi (12:45): Yeah. Yeah. Understand something about publishing. That helps a lot.

Liz (12:50): It does.

Debbi (12:51): People really don’t know

Liz (12:52): Well, you were indie before it was popular, which is very brave. Brave or foolish, I don’t know. But having to carve your way in a business that’s not friendly towards anything other than traditional is not easy.

Debbi (13:09): Well, it’s interesting. It seemed like it was a lot easier … how long ago was it? 13 years, 14, 15 years ago than it is today. Now, today it seems super-hard to get any kind of notice.

Liz (13:28): There’s so many books. There’s so many books out there.

Debbi (13:30): There’s so many books, there’s so many authors, there’s so many voices, and people are trying so many different things. And I’m not sure that we’re all really doing the right thing just yet. And I keep thinking there’s something missing here that we should be doing. Maybe it’s … I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t want to get all political here, but maybe we need a union. Maybe we need a collaboration, a huge get together of some sort where we all say, “What’s going on and what are we doing and what’s working and what isn’t?” These are serious questions, especially given what’s going on with AI and people hear the letters AI and they just start freaking out. Don’t freak out. Don’t freak out. Human voices will always be valuable. That’s the way I feel.

Liz (14:26): I think so. I mean, where I’ve used AI, it’s been a compliment, but it’s not been the centerpiece. And that’s where I have found it useful. And I’m just scratching the surface. I probably should take some courses to even understand it better.

Debbi (14:41): Well, I use it for making transcripts and that’s about it. And even then, I can’t trust the transcript necessarily because sometimes they’ll hear something wrong and they will get it completely wrong. And I’m like, oh, that is so wrong. I got to change that. So I have to review all the transcripts and takes time, takes effort, takes money, all that stuff. Anyway, not to bang on about that.

Liz (15:10): I will tell you, it’s great for vacation planning. I’ve used AI for that. You say, “Hey, ChatGPT, we’re going to be in this place or the city for this many days. Give me the best routing.” And it does a pretty decent job.

Debbi (15:23): That’s pretty cool. Well, I’ve never used it for that.

Liz (15:25): Try it. It actually is pretty good.

Debbi (15:29): Interesting. Beats Expedia, I suppose. I don’t know. Is there anything else that you would like to talk about that we haven’t covered? I think we’ve covered quite a bit.

Liz (15:41): Yeah. I mean, obviously where to get the books, go to my website, that type of thing. Absolutely. We could talk more about the plot of this recent one if you’d like.

Debbi (15:52): Okay. Go right ahead. Tell us a little more about the recent one, which is really a good book.

Liz (15:57): Thank you. Yeah, so it’ll be out in May. The ebook is up for pre-order, but the paperback and the audio will be out in May. But it’s about a woman named Dawn after my friend, Dawn, who meets a young man and she thinks he’s her prince charming and they begin to date. And as they’ve dated a couple weeks, she catches him in lies. And when she catches him in a lie that can’t be denied, she breaks off the relationship. And instead of accepting the breakup, he begins to stalk and harass her so much so that she has to get a restraining order. And beyond that, he goes after her mother. So he goes after guardianship and conservatorship of her mother. And people have said to me, “Well, you can’t do that. You’re not a relative.” And the crazy thing is anybody can sue for guardianship and conservatorship.

(16:44): All he has to do is prove she’s unfit. It doesn’t necessarily mean he’ll win, but it means he makes her lose. And he puts her through a horrible court battle. And I’ll kind of leave it at that because I don’t want to give away spoilers, but it is based inspired by my experience of battling for years to get my mother away from a third party guardian. And finally was able to do it, but it took me years. It took me thousands of dollars. And so when people say it might be implausible, the legal story in this latest book, I will tell you, Dawn had it easier than I did.

Debbi (17:19): Oh my gosh. Wow. That’s amazing.

Liz (17:24): That’s heavy. It’s heavy. This book is dark. When you talk about Dawn before Darkness, it is dark. It is heavy.

Debbi (17:29): Oh my goodness.

Liz (17:31): There was one part where my husband said, “Don’t you want to give her a break?” Like he said, “This is your best one yet, but you don’t give her a break.” And I’m like, “I didn’t get one.” So there are some vet stories. She’s a vet. I had a lovely friend, Becky Smith. That’s the Smith of Dawn Smith, the character, who’s a vet tech, and she shared so many great vet stories with me.

Debbi (17:53): Oh my God.

Liz (17:54): And so there is some levity because she’s a vet and you get to go into that world, which that was researched. And so there is a fun part. And every vet story in the book actually has a reason for being in there. It plays full circle.

Debbi (18:07): Oh, wow. That’s great. I can’t wait to continue reading this. I’m telling you, you’re just selling it to me all the way. Believe me.

Liz (18:17): Oh, lovely. Thank you. And you’ll have to call me when you’re done. I want to see what parts you caught, what parts surprised you.

Debbi (18:25): All right. Well, I will do that. I will definitely be in touch. Wow, this is fantastic. I just want to thank you so much, Liz, for spending time with us today and all of this.

Liz (18:38): Oh, my pleasure. And you’re great to do this. I have not taken on the brave job of doing podcasts and interviewing other people. So thank you for giving the rest of us a voice. We really appreciate it.

Debbi (18:50): I want to give you people, all of you a voice. I mean, seriously, there is wonderful, wonderful stuff to be read out there and you should hear about it. And you can hear about it here because I’ll have the people on to tell you about it. So to all of you who are listening or watching, thank you very much. I’m so grateful to you. If you enjoyed the episode, please leave a review. As many stars as you can manage with a straight face. And for ad-free episodes, book reviews, excerpts of my work and more, check me out on Patreon. We’re also on Substack for some reason or other. On that note, our next guest will be Marschall Runge. Until then, take care and happy reading. Be seeing you.

Check us out on Patreon!

My guest this week on the Crime Cafe podcast is Graciela Kenig, a crime writer who can tell you a tale in two languages. But she’s giving away her debut novel, The Plans They Made, in English. I forgot to ask about translations!

Check out the transcript of our interview here.

Debbi (00:54): Hi everyone. My guest today has been a feature journalist, online forum contributor, and careers columnist. Her work has appeared in the Chicago Tribune, the Sun-Times, and other national publications. Her debut novel, The Plans They Made, won the 2022 Page Turner Award for best genre writing. So it is my pleasure to introduce you to my guest, Graciela Kenig. Am I saying that correctly, Kenig?

Graciela (01:31): Yes, you are. Yes. And thank you for having me. It’s amazing. You’re saying both things correctly and that’s cool.

Debbi (01:40): Ah, well, you see, I’m married to an Italiano man. His last name, if you pronounced it correctly, would sound very different from the way people actually pronounce it, when they can pronounce it. It’s funny. I have no problem with vowels, folks. I did take Spanish, so that helped in junior high and high school and all that stuff. So how are you doing anyway?

Graciela (02:07): I’m doing fine. Thank you. I’m just looking forward to spring in Chicago.

Debbi (02:12): We’ve had a rough one.

Graciela (02:12): Yeah.

Debbi (02:14): All right. You’ve had a very interesting career from writing features to having your own column. How did you go about developing this particular career path?

Graciela (02:26): Some of it was very organic. I wanted to be a writer from the get- go when I was little, and of course the language, because I was born in Argentina and I wrote in Spanish. And so I moved to the United States with my family and I had studied English, but you don’t use it every day until you have to. And so yeah, it kind of started like that, that I wanted to be a writer. And for the longest time, even though I had been encouraged about how I could write well, I kept thinking that Spanish was the language I should write in because that’s what I was very comfortable with. So I entered the newspaper writing career because the Chicago Sun-Times had started a section in Spanish. So I started writing articles for them, no journalist training. It’s just like, okay, let’s see what happens here.

(03:23): And so I learned quickly and soon enough they asked me if I would come in part-time to help the editor because he was not a native-born Spanish speaker, if I could just do a final sweep of his columns. He’d already done his editing, so I had to go back and make sure that everything was okay. And so that column, I think it lasted for sometimes a couple years. And then you’re inside this newspaper. And so somebody says, “Do you write in English too?” I do. And I was always drawn to being somebody who could give you advice. So some of the things that I liked for a while, eventually I freelanced for the Chicago Tribune and there I got in because I was writing for a know-how section. So I could write about how do you put together a ceiling fan? And so those kinds of things like that.

(04:20): And I wrote for a bunch of local papers and eventually I kind of started doing other things, getting interested in helping people with their career. And then The Tribune started a Spanish language newspaper, and that one lasted 10 years. And I wrote the careers column. So it was this interesting thing that kind of opened doors for me as to how I can help people in a very more specific way. And I felt that I wanted to help the Latino community because oftentimes we tended to be real roaded into one kind of job or another kind of job. And at least I said, “If you’re bilingual, you can do that and the other thing.” And the more I did that, the more I realized it wasn’t just being able to speak another language, it was also about the cultural issues. So it was very organic and went like that, but I always, always wanted to write fiction.

Debbi (05:18): Oh, that is so cool. I love what you’re saying. That is just fantastic. What inspired you to write your novel? What inspired the idea for it?

Graciela (05:32): I knew somebody who had put off, reconnect them with their best friend back in the time when you didn’t have easily, you couldn’t send faxes. I mean, that kind of stuff, you just sent—snail mail was the only way to communicate or calling, and that was expensive. And so it was put off. And when they were about to get together, this other friend had died. And so that was the seed of this. But, in big part, I used that for, I was taking a writing class and that was a prompt. And it was something like I wrote one scene and then the next assignment was write it from the other person’s point of view, which is so me because I think I like writing and I think a lot of us in the arts tend to … You have an artist sensitivity when you can see things from different perspectives, when you can be an outsider.

(06:33): And within your thing, it’s very hard to know your own culture, your own … Everybody does the same thing in your little life.

Debbi (06:42): Correct. Yeah.

Graciela (06:44): You know what I mean, in your circle of friends and acquaintances. And so I’ve always felt somehow, especially after we moved to the United States as an outsider. So you observe things in very different ways. You notice things other people don’t. And that’s really … And that’s what I liked about the idea too, is I developed the protagonist, Kate, being a journalist. I had all that experience myself, but she was an outsider. She’s visiting London in a country she doesn’t really know, which also was helpful to me because that way I could look at London, not as the expert that I’m not. It was just like, okay, how did she see it as having been a journalist and a writer when she’s there trying to find who killed her friend? I mean, the inspiration, the person that I knew did not … was not killed. She was in an accident.

Debbi (07:44): Right.

Graciela (07:45): You take your, what do they call your literary?

Debbi (07:49): Exactly.

Graciela (07:50): Yeah.

Debbi (07:51): It’s interesting how things like a prompt and then twisting it around, changing the perspective can really make you think about it and the possibilities.

Graciela (08:03): Yeah.

Debbi (08:04): Good, good, good approach there. Great stuff. What was it that made you choose the thriller genre?

Graciela (08:12): In a sense, it was organic as well. I was taking … A few years ago during the pandemic, I became involved with this group, StoryGrid, which most people think of StoryGrid as an editing tool, but they did start something where we had these groups and Sean Coyne, who’s the founder who wrote the book, basically would have these workshops. And so I started to realize that what I was thinking about really was very much in line with a thriller. It wasn’t what I intended to do. And although I had never been a real avid reader of thrillers, I had watched a lot of thrillers and movies and that kind of thing in both worlds in Argentina and Spanish and here, because my dad loved that stuff. He loved detectives. He loved police procedurals and all those kinds of things. And I just watched them because he liked them and I liked them too.

Debbi (09:12): Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We watched a lot of those in our house too. And I remember distinctly when I was growing up, there was a show called Honey West about a female private eye, and it lasted for one season. I was so angry when they took it off. I said, I don’t believe they took that show off. The one show where I get to see a woman do something really cool.

Graciela (09:40): It’s pretty rare back.

Debbi (09:42): Exactly. Early ’60s, that was almost like a bizarre event, but it was really just a great show. And then The Avengers came along and filled that hole for me a little bit. Emma Peel was my heroine.

Graciela (10:02): Yeah. I liked the visual part about the movies showing action. It’s always a lot harder to describe action in words, but—

Debbi (10:11): It is, yeah.

Graciela (10:12): Punching. And I mean, I do thrillers, but I don’t like horror. It can be part of a thriller thing. And I also, I guess because of my upbringing, thrillers usually have to be political in nature, have some political thing.

Debbi (10:28): I get it.

Graciela (10:29): Yeah.

Debbi (10:30): I totally get it.

Graciela (10:31): There were like 15 political parties in Argentina, and even [inaudible] knew about them. It’s crazy. So yeah. Yeah.

Debbi (10:39): If we could only come up with a third one here.

Graciela (10:43): Yes, it would be helpful, wouldn’t it? Yes. Yes.

Debbi (10:46): A little balance somewhere along the line. Let’s see. You described yourself in another interview as a slow writer, primarily I think due to a lot of research that you do? How much research do you do before you start writing or while you start writing or while you are writing?

Graciela (11:06): I like doing research. It can be a rabbit hole. If I don’t stop myself. But I tend to just … With this one, and I’m writing a second novel now, with The Plans because I was still working full-time, it took me a long time to write it. And there I went to London to see that. And when I was in there, I came up with other ideas. I thought, oh, what happened that year in London? And there’s a chapter when it all has to do with President George W. Bush who was visiting there. So I thought he was here. So I like the idea of having … It’s not a historical novel, but I like having historical places, placeholders, so to speak. And that is how the story devolved in a sense. And I like that a lot because I do research a little before, but I also do a lot when I discover that I’m missing something and I don’t know.

Debbi (12:14): Precisely. Yeah.

Graciela (12:15): And, nowadays with the event of AI, I mean, it would’ve taken you months to get some of the things it can get for you and you’re just needing something for one sentence and okay.

Debbi (12:30): As long as you double check and make sure it’s not hallucinating. As a journalist, you know that.

Graciela (12:37): Yeah. Well, they usually give you sources.

Debbi (12:41): Usually, yeah. Yeah.

Graciela (12:42): I mean, but if they don’t, I check them. But I mean, it’s a good opportunity because I don’t know everything that I’m inventing.

Debbi (12:50): Absolutely.

Graciela (12:52): If you’re sending somebody to federal prison, for example, I learned, no, there’s no parole in federal prison since this act of 1984, and I didn’t know that until I just saw it in this research I did. So I enjoy doing that. Even if a lot of it doesn’t end up directly on the novel, at least it’s something that informs it.

Debbi (13:17): Yes. And what are you working on now?

Graciela (13:22): I am working on, I don’t know what you call it, a second or third draft of this one.

Debbi (13:28): Is it a sequel or a standalone?

Graciela (13:30): No, it’s not a sequel. Because I spent so much time with The Plans, I just wanted a break from that story. And this was inspired by something that was going to be a short story, but it’s not. It’s a novel.

Debbi (13:43): It’s funny how these things happen.

Graciela (13:47): So the working title of this is called Stuck in Paradise. And my protagonist is also a woman who’s out of her element, and Paradise is a Caribbean Island, and she goes here to help someone that basically plugs her from someone she knew in the past. So right now I’m deep into this thing of finalizing this draft, whatever number it is, I stop copying.

Debbi (14:17): After a while, you lose count.

Graciela (14:19): Yes, yes. But at this point, there are times when you go and you slog through it like, “What am I doing here?” I’m not sure. But at this point I ended up really pinpointing what I needed to do. So I’m in this really exciting period of like, oh, okay, I keep going. Yeah. So I hope you—

Debbi (14:40): I love that feeling. Yeah.

Graciela (14:42): Yeah.

Debbi (14:43): You got to keep that feeling going.

Graciela (14:45): It’s hard. It’s really hard because it doesn’t always come out.

Debbi (14:48): It is. Yeah, it is sometimes. What kind of writing schedule do you keep?

Graciela (14:57): I’m sorry?

Debbi (14:58): Do you keep a writing schedule? Do you have a—

Graciela (15:01): Yes, I do pretty much. And that’s part that started with the StoryGrid groups and I am on Central Time, so we write online. It’s kind of an accountability group, and so we all write at the same time and only share resources and questions at the end of the session. So we definitely do 10 to 12 every morning for me, Central Time. And I’m on a roll, I’ve been writing a lot longer these days, but I need breaks too. So often if I am going to do a minimum, it’s 10 to 12. I’m thinking about this story all the time, but that’s my writing schedule. Yes.

Debbi (15:45): I’ve noticed that you’ve traveled quite a bit. In addition to coming to the United States, do you prefer to go to a place before you write about it or do you just take it as it comes kind of like if you have to write a place that you’ve never been to, you just research it?

Graciela (16:07): I prefer to be there somewhat. I had been to London before I actually went and they had really good memories of it, but it wasn’t a research trip. So when I decided to set it there, I decided I had to go. And so it wasn’t a touristy thing. I just went there, which happened to be the first time ever I traveled by myself outside of the country. And I stayed at an apartment hotel where I could cook my own meals and it was wintery, so I had to be back by 4:30 or 5:00 so I could write, flesh out my notes. So I do like to go to the places, but I also like to travel. I see, again, talking about gaining outside perspective, oh yeah, this is things here and this is what they consider when they do this and that. And so yeah, right now I almost can’t go anywhere without at least thinking about those potential angles.

Debbi (17:08): Yeah, definitely for sure. Yeah, I love travel. I tend to think of thrillers as stories that test the limits of possibility because you’re always putting these people in situations that could happen that are unlikely, but could happen and have devastating potential results. What are your thoughts on that?

Graciela (17:33): Well, clearly when you’re writing a thriller, you have to make sure that you’re raising antes. There’s got to be a value change even in a scene.

Debbi (17:43): Exactly.

Graciela (17:44): Start out feeling this and a thriller, it goes from safety to danger or the other way around. But I also, I think that I see that as a very important thing to do because when we read about someone who’s in danger or how they came up with something, we learned something as readers. And so sometimes you’ll be like in a movie, you’d be covering your eyes if you’re scared. But in books, sometimes you have to take a moment and rest because—whew!—that was strong. But I also think that the more extreme situation the character is in, the more you understand that character and what is she or he made of.

Debbi (18:29): Exactly. The ability to relate with that character and to feel what they’re feeling in that moment. Yeah. It’s very important for screenwriting, I’ll tell you that.

Graciela (18:41): I know. I’m not a screenwriter, but I know that the character arc is important. They wouldn’t do certain things if they were someone different.

Debbi (18:50): Exactly. Yeah. What authors have most influenced you and inspired you to write?

Graciela (19:00): My tastes in writing are very eclectic in part because I also grew up in Argentina where I read back in the time of magical realism. So I don’t anymore because I got tired of it, but I loved it at the time and I loved all those authors. Gabriel Garcia Márquez who won the Peace Nobel, Borges, Cortázar. All of these people were really inspirational to me. But here in the United States in my early years, I really loved Anne Tyler and it was just, she’s not a thriller writer, but she’s so knowledgeable about people, the dynamic in families, which is always, was attracted to that for some reason. Her characters did quirky things.

Debbi (19:51): Yes, they did. I know. I’m a big Anne Tyler fan actually. Yeah.

Graciela (19:56): I’ve always loved her. And so for the longest time, if you ask me what’s my favorite book, it was Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant. I thought-

Debbi (20:03): Oh my God, yes. Oh my God, yes. Yes. Yeah, that one really got me.

Graciela (20:08): Yeah. But I do read a lot of thrillers. Now a lot of authors was one of my … I mean, Dennis Lehane, Stacey Abrams. I became a real fan of her. Somebody pointed her out to me and she writes a lot about political things like I like to write.

Debbi (20:27): Cool.

Graciela (20:29): Michael Connolly. Oh my gosh, he’s so good. Harlan Cobin. I have to write them down because I know I like a lot of them, but these are people who are very inspirational to me now. But foundationally, I think a lot of these people who wrote about their characters, Anne Tyler is certainly one of them.

Debbi (20:48): Yeah, for sure. Yeah, me too. What advice would you give to anyone who’s interested in a writing career?

Graciela (20:57): I think that, and it took me a long time to figure this out because people would always say in English and Spanish, how I could string works together really well. So my writing was poetic, blah, blah, blah, whatever it was, but you still have to understand story structure. And until I started taking some serious courses, I really didn’t. And I mean, there’s a lot out there nowadays, a lot of different people who are fantastic at teaching, and you could be spending money every day on something like that. You can have coaches. I think first of all, it’s a very lonely profession and you do need feedback. You don’t understand. And I mean, and again, I mentioned AI and AI will point out some very important things, but you still need humans to look at. It’ll say one thing, and then I have an editing group besides my accountability group, and we meet every week and we share a short part of what we’re writing. And the good thing is that they get to know your characters too. And they would say, “She wouldn’t do that. “

(22:04): So I think that you need to be working with somebody preferably who understands story well, whether that’s an editor or take a real … My first real courses that I took, I mean, I had taken many, but the ones that were really helpful to me were, UCLA has an extension writing program, so you can do that online. And I had really wonderful … I took three or four classes with them. And when I was talking about a writing class prompt, it was from one of those classes that I got this past book started. I really like how they do that. They teach you to give feedback, constructive feedback and to be good at that and to take it. We all have to take feedback and sometimes we don’t like what we’re hearing, but you have to, you learn from your feedback. So if you are not—

Debbi (23:01): That’s right.

Graciela (23:02): Then …

Debbi (23:05): It’s not going to work if you’re not willing to listen to what other people have to say about it, especially people who know how to write, who’ve been there and done it.

Graciela (23:16): I know. I know.

Debbi (23:17): You’re not doing yourself any favors by ignoring comments.

Graciela (23:21): Oh, I know. Well, when I would teach things at the university when I was running an internship program, which is really connected to careers, I designed courses, career management. And one of the projects was to come up with, you had to have a portfolio about what you did, an online portfolio about what you did in your internship. And then I would say, okay, you’re going to be in a team of three people or four or whatever, depending on the number of students I had. And so you don’t have to use their feedback, but if two or three of them said the same thing, it’s pointing something out to you

Debbi (23:56): Exactly. Yeah.

Graciela (23:58): And that’s probably one of the best advice pieces that I gave to them because they started to figure out, yeah, some’s not working here. And it was a very visual thing because they had to do it online. But it’s like a job that I had right before I retired from regular work was that. I worked at DePaul University, and it was a place where everything I did, my writing, my creating courses and advising people all came together there. So yeah.

Debbi (24:28): Yeah. So is there anything you’d like to add before we finish up?

Graciela (24:34): Wow. I’m so appreciative that you did this for me. Thank you so much. I really, really liked that. I just thought I like the idea of also suggesting that people, because when I finished this last novel we’ve been talking about, I did have to get beta readers, and that’s very different than don’t just give it to your cousin, your husband, your brother. I think one of the things that I learned is that when you … Beta readers that hopefully also read the kind of genre that you write because they will pick out … They know what readers expect of, for example, a thriller or a crime novel, and they should tell you. And when I did, besides getting those beta readers for The Plans They Made, I also consulted with somebody who lived in London because I thought, “Hey, I put a lot of stuff in there that I thought I heard correctly.”

Debbi (25:32): Good idea.

Graciela (25:34): And she was wonderful. She says, “Well, I’m your person in London.” And through a good friend of mine who was from England, but not from London, I connected with her and she was wonderful in helping.

Debbi (25:46): That’s awesome.

Graciela (25:48): Just look for help. I mean, I think sometimes people worry, “Oh, you’re going to copy my story.” No.

Debbi (25:55): Nobody’s going to do that. Don’t worry.

Graciela (25:57): Yeah. I mean, someone else can be developing the same idea and do something totally different.

Debbi (26:04): Different. Yeah. The idea is out there for anyone to use. The prompt was out there for anyone to use. They could have done anything with it. Yeah. So yeah.

Graciela (26:18): Yeah. So I mean—

Debbi (26:19): We all write individually and differently.

Graciela (26:22): Yes, yes. And even when somebody gives you an idea, you get to choose if that’s something that’s going to work for you. And if it does, it does. If it doesn’t, you don’t have to do what people say, but at least listen and consider that. If more than one person says that again, there’s a point.

Debbi (26:40): Keeping an open mind. Good idea. Well, thank you so much, Graciela. I really appreciate your being here and spending time with us.

Graciela (26:50): Thank you, Debbi. I appreciate the opportunity and hope to see you again in the future somewhere.

Debbi (26:57): Yeah, me too. That would be nice. It would be very nice. I would just like to also thank my listeners for listening. And while I’m at it, I will remind you to check out Graciela’s giveaway. She’s giving away a copy of The Plans They Made. I will include a link in the notes to this podcast. And if you enjoyed this episode, please give us a like on your podcast app of choice. I’m trying to speak the language here. I think I’m doing okay. The right language, the language I normally speak in. Our next guest will be Liz Lazarus. I love that name. Until then, take care and happy reading. Be seeing you.