The Joys of Binge Reading

Alyssa Maxwell is the author of the acclaimed Gilded Age, Newport mystery series featuring Emmaline Cross. She’s a Vanderbilt by heritage, a Newporter by birth and a force to be reckoned with. Each book is set in a famous Newport Gilded Age mansion, some of them still open for viewing.

Welcome to the Joys of Binge Reading, the show for anyone who ever got to the end of a great book and wanted to read the next instalment. We interview successful series authors and recommend the best in mystery, suspense, historical and romance series, so you’ll never be without a book you can’t foot down.

You’ll find this episode’s show notes, a free ebook, and lots more information at the joys of binge reading.com. And now here’s our show.

Hi, I’m your host, Jenny Wheeler, and in the last Binge Reading episode for a while, we talk to Alyssa about her fascination for historical mysteries, resulting in the widely praised, 12 books series, with Book #1, Murder At The Breakers. premiering as a Hallmark movie earlier this year.

We’re going to be talking about the latest book om the series today, Murder at Vinand. Emma must stop a bold poisoner who was targeting the society wives of the 400 in Gilded Age Newport, Rhode Island.

As I’ve announced a few posts ago, this is going to be the last episode of The Joys of Binge Reading podcast for a while. We’re taking a break, maybe permanently, after 300 episodes, but you can always catch up on your favorite authors in the published shows, which are currently being posted to YouTube as well.

Our free book giveaway for this episode is Sadie’s Vow, the first book in my Home At Last mystery series, set in Gilded Age San Francisco.

You’ll find the links to download in the show notes for this episode on the website, the joys of binge reading.com.

HERE’S THE LINK IF THE BUTTON DOESN’T WORK…

https://dl.bookfunnel.com/rg3g2284e7

As I say, this is the last show for me for a while. I want to use my time to write more books. I’ve loved the time that I’ve spent talking to and researching the authors that I’ve featured on the show. Many of them, I love to still read the books, but it is just now time for a change.

Gilded Age: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilded_Age

Cornelius Vanderbilt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornelius_Vanderbilt

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornelius_Vanderbilt_II

Consuelo Vanderbilt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consuelo_Vanderbilt

Consuelo Second Husband: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Balsan

Alva Vanderbilt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Balsan

Nellie Bly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nellie_Bly

Sleuths In Time:  https://www.facebook.com/SleuthsInTime/

Newport: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newport,_Rhode_Island

Saratoga: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saratoga_Springs,_New_York

Newport Preservation Society: https://www.newportmansions.org/

The Breakers: https://www.newportmansions.org/mansions-and-gardens/the-breakers/

A Lady and Lady’s Maid mysteries: https://www.alyssamaxwell.com/ladys-maid-books

Arleigh House: https://househistree.com/houses/arleigh

Website: alyssamaxwell.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/alyssa.maxwell.750

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/alyssamaxwellauthor/

Now it’s time for Alyssa.

Jenny Wheeler: Hello there, Alyssa, and welcome to the show. It’s great to have you with us.

Alyssa Maxwell: Thank you, Jenny, for having me on.

Jenny Wheeler: Your Gilded Newport Mysteries have attracted great reviews, and you’ve also got the first book in the series now as a Hallmark movie. Congratulations on that.

Tell us firstly, why did you find the Gilded Age a fascinating period to write about and what do you think its attraction is for readers?

Alyssa Maxwell: For me, the fact that’s what Newport is most known for. Newport, Rhode Island is probably the biggest collection of Gilded Age mansions to be found anywhere, especially in such close proximity to each. Other. You could basically walk from one to the next as you’re going down Bellevue Avenue in Newport.

My husband’s from Newport, so I knew I wanted to set my series there, and I went with the Gilded Age because it is the most recognizable and famous thing about the city.

Jenny Wheeler: What is it that attracted the rich people to Newport? It became the summertime playground of the rich, didn’t it?

Alyssa Maxwell: They had been going to Saratoga for a couple of decades, I think, but Saratoga began to get old. They were getting bored with it. It was attracting what they considered a lesser crowd, so they needed a new place to go. Now Newport had been the summer playground of wealthy Southerners before the Civil War, so it already had a reputation as a summer resort kind of town.

I guess they decided, Saratoga’s out, let’s go explore Newport. And they did. And decided this was where they were gonna build not only their houses, but their summer society. It was very much a society going on there. It had its own rules and its own etiquette, much as New York did the rest of the year.

Jenny Wheeler: I’m just interested in your comment about it being a playground for Southerners before the Civil War. After the Civil War, did that sort of rich southern society fade out a bit?

Alyssa Maxwell: Oh yeah. As soon as the war started, of course, they stopped coming. They had to stop coming, and after the war the money was gone for the vast majority of them. That was no longer an option.

The thing is, they didn’t tend to build mansions. they built smaller houses or they stayed in hotels because for them, the whole pastoral setting of the New England coastline was the attraction.

They were very outdoorsy. They didn’t have balls so much as, I think picnics, and outdoor kind of activities. It’s a simpler lifestyle.

Jenny Wheeler: Your key investigator, Emma Cross, is remotely related to the Vanderbilt family. Now, the Vanderbilts, they’re an extremely well-known name in American history. Tell us a bit about that family and her relationship to them.

Alyssa Maxwell: The family, of course, or the main part of it, was started with the first Cornelius Vanderbilt, who they called the Commodore. He started off in local shipping. And built that up into a railroad industry, little by little.

Emma would be his, I believe, great granddaughter. So, it’s a few generations removed.

And the reason she’s not a rich Vanderbilt is because she descends from one of the Commodore’s daughters.

He was a curmudgeon and he didn’t believe in leaving his daughters the vast fortunes that, he left his son William. By the time Emma’s generation comes along, most of it’s depleted, and what little money she has, she earns by working as a reporter.

But also she inherited a small annuity from a great aunt on her mother’s side of the family. So she is not living off the Vanderbilt wealth except for her contemporary relatives.

They have welcomed her into their lives when they’re in Newport and they do help her from time to time. They’re not gonna let her starve. They insisted on installing a telephone in her house so that she wouldn’t be so isolated out there in the Ocean Drive.

She has a nice relationship with them, but she doesn’t like to be beholden to them.

Jenny Wheeler: Now, as you mentioned, she is a newspaper reporter, which would be a very unusual thing in that period, particularly for a woman of her social status. But you do have a bit of a model for her, don’t you, in the real life person of Nellie Bly. Tell us a bit about that and how you came to, to feel that it was okay to make her a newspaper reporter.

Alyssa Maxwell: Actually in the beginning of the series, she’s the society columnist for a local paper. So that was actually something women could do at the time. They could write about the balls and the fashions and who took what vacation or who’s gonna marry whom. That was okay. That was considered, women’s interests.

Of course she wants more. She wants to be a real news reporter. And that’s where I got the inspiration from Nelly Bly, who was a Gilded Age reporter and did things. She broke a lot of rules to get her story. She took a lot of risks and that is my inspiration. Nelly was unusual.

There weren’t a lot of women doing that, but she proved to a lot of readers that a woman could get a story and write well about it. This is where I modeled Emma, to a large extent.

Jenny Wheeler: Yes. It’s wonderful in a sense that each of the books features one of those historic houses, the amazing houses they built. Many of them still standing and able to be visited today. Tell us about that.

Murder at Vinland, the latest book. Are you still able to go to Vinland, for example?

Alyssa Maxwell: Only if you’re a college student. Vinland and Wakehurst and Ochre Court, each of those have been books in my series. They are all part of Salve Regina University. They’re not open for tours to the public, but the students use them. They’re administrative offices, offices their classrooms.

They’re very functional. They’re still used today. Other houses like the Breakers’ Marble House, and  The Elms, these are all part of the Preservation Society of Newport Counties. Properties that they maintain as museums, so people can go in and out and, see all these things that I’m writing about, and I get to go in them and do my research even more importantly.

Jenny Wheeler: Fantastic. We mentioned at the beginning about one of the books being a Hallmark movie, and that was book one in the series, Murder at the Breakers. That was a movie that featured Cornelius Vanderbilt, the original Vanderbilt’s grandson, as part of the story. Is that still showing on Hallmark?

Could people still see it?

Alyssa Maxwell: It comes and it goes. It repeated a few times in February and I think in March. I don’t know what their schedule is. They don’t tell me, but I would assume it’ll be on again eventually.

These are movies, so they’re not like regular television shows that are on every week like a series that you’d sit down and watch every week.

They pop up, they go away for a while, others come and go?

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Jenny Wheeler: Did you have much to do with the making of the movie? Were you very involved in it at all?

Alyssa Maxwell: No, not at all. No. My creative input was writing the book. And then they took it from there. I wasn’t consulted about anything.

Jenny Wheeler: And are you happy with the result?

Alyssa Maxwell: I’m happy. There’s always gonna be things that I wish either they had done differently or things that they had included. It’s my book and I wrote it all and it’s all important to me, but you can’t fit everything in a book, in an hour and a half. It is just not possible.

And I think that’s why they don’t consult with writers. I think it’s because they know that for us, we’re too involved in it. We are gonna want all those things included that can’t be.

Jenny Wheeler: Sure. Book Two, Murder at Marble House features another fascinating real life figure, and that’s Consuelo Vanderbilt. She’s got an amazingly sad story as an absolutely beautiful, rich girl who her mother Alice, almost sold off to an English Duke.

Her mother wanted the status of having a Duke in the family, and the Duke needed the Vanderbilt money, but it was a rather ill-fated pairing, wasn’t it.

Tell us a bit about that.

Alyssa Maxwell: It was. Alva Vanderbilt was her mother. Alva was a very ambitious woman. I really think that so many of the Gilded Age women were highly intelligent, assertive, and aggressive in a way that today would’ve allowed them to be CEOs and lawyers and, any other kind of career you might think of.

But then they couldn’t, and so they had to channel their talents and abilities and all of that into domestic affairs, which had to have been incredibly frustrating. But, there it was.

One of Alva’s outlets was to arrange a glorious marriage for her daughter. Now, Consuelo, at the time of the engagement, was already in love with another man, an American, and she planned to marry him.

They had an understanding. Alva would have none of it. She even went so far as to practically lock Consuelo in her room at Marble House while they awaited the Duke’s arrival from England so that they could make it official and get them engaged. They really had nothing in common.

He was coming for her money. They say she went down the aisle with tears in her eyes. I don’t know if that’s true. It may have been it probably was true. Unfortunately, immediately in the marriage they knew it wasn’t gonna work, so she, birthed the “heir and the spare,” and after that they pretty much lived separate lives.

She made the most of her time over there as a Duchess. She was very involved in charity work. She had a little home of her own near, I think it was just outside of London, where she would entertain artists and poets and writers and those kind of people. She enjoyed that. And, by the time of World War I she was no longer having anything to do with her husband.

He was in love with somebody else. And after the war, she met her second husband, a Frenchman Jacques Balsan. They married and were happy. So she did finally have the life she wanted and she reunited and, made up with her mother and they were able to have a good relationship for the rest of Alva’s life.

Jenny Wheeler: Oh that’s great.

Alyssa Maxwell: Yes. There was a happy ending, but it took a while to get there.

Jenny Wheeler: Over the course of the series. Emma herself has two significant romantic attachments in her life. Without giving too much away, for those who haven’t started reading the series yet, explain a bit about her romantic dilemmas and what she has to make a choice between.

Alyssa Maxwell: I know a lot of people groan when they hear romantic triangles, but Emma’s life is a triangle in a way. She’s Vanderbilt. She is just an ordinary Newporter. She’s a working woman. And so these men that come into her life, one is an ordinary Newporter, he’s a police detective.

The other one is a wealthy. He’s an heir to a newspaper empire. They represent those two sides of her life, and which side is she gonna go with? I

t would be easier to go with a detective because this is more the life she lives for most of the year. But the rich guy, she has to admit, ignites her passions more.

But then on the other hand, there’s that third angle of her maybe just wanting to remain an unmarried, independent woman, because in those days, a married woman had to give up a lot of her autonomy, her independence. So it’s all a dilemma for her,

Jenny Wheeler: Fantastic. You have another mystery series that I’d like to mention, and that’s called The Ladies and Ladies Maid Series, and it’s set in England post-World War II. It’s been described as ‘for Downton Abbey fans’ because it’s dealing with that period when the aristocracy in England was facing a huge amount of social change.

Tell us about that series. I guess that was the first series you wrote, was it? How did you get started in your writing?

Alyssa Maxwell: The Newport mysteries did come first, and then I got into I the second series. I had already written the first two or three of the Newport series,  I think, when my editor came up with the idea of a Downton Abbey series with a mystery twist.

I’m a huge fan. In fact, I’m be watching them again now. I haven’t seen them in a little while, so I thought it was time.

I chose that time period. I could have said it anywhere after the turn of the 19th century, early 20th century. But I picked that.

I didn’t wanna get bogged down in the war. I thought that would take over so much of the narrative. It was so complicated, so much and the tragedy and all of that, but the years immediately following were also very complicated because the war did away with so much of the class values.

They weren’t gone. The classes, were still very much there, but the edges were blurred between, the poor, the middle class, and the wealthy, because when the men went off to war, they were fighting side by side and they depended on each other.

And so did the women. The women were home, were raising money and gathering supplies and rolling bandages. And again, they worked side by side, the wealthy and the, the poor. Everybody had to pitch in. And when the men came home …. well so many of them, so many of them did not come home.

So many were maimed. That they said a whole generation of men were lost and a whole generation of women might not ever find husbands. The women left behind had to work.

They began working during the war because they had to fill in the labor gap and when the men came home, suddenly women were expected to stay home and make babies, but there weren’t the husbands available to do that with.

Women had to fight to keep those jobs in the workplace. It was a very complicated and a very flux time. Things were very much changing. And Downton Abbey goes into that quite a bit in the Post-War years. I just, I find that interesting.

During the war, everybody knew what their role was. There was a job you had to do and you did it. But after the war, it was confusing. What do I do? Do I have a job? Do I talk to this man who’s wealthier than I am or can I not? It was very confusing and I find that fascinating.

Alyssa Maxwell: Yes, that’s a tricky one, because it’s such a delicate balance. I think since I’m writing mysteries, I always know in the forefront of my mind that the mystery has to take precedence over everything else because if it’s not a a good mystery, the rest of it isn’t gonna matter.

I always start when I begin a series with a stack of books. It’s old school. I go to the library, I go to the used book networks online, and I hunt and I look for interesting things.

I love newspapers or something I just love to research with. I have one of those subscriptions to archive newspapers that go back, as, as far back as, as I’ve needed.

Jenny Wheeler: It must have involved a huge amount of research, both series actually. How do you go about tackling that research and how do you go about balancing fact and fiction?

And, there isn’t a lack of information on either time period. So that’s a big help. It’s all available. You just have to look for it. You just have to read it. And I like that history is the framework for both series. It’s the stage, but everything going on the stage is the mystery and the fiction and my imagination of work.

Jenny Wheeler: Yes That’s a lovely way to look at it. You’ve got some wonderful tips on your website about visiting Newport and the places you should go and the things you should see. Just give us a quick little rundown, maybe the five things you think visitors to Newport should include in their itinerary.

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Alyssa Maxwell: You are right.. Definitely if are there for a few days, you have to see at least a couple of mansions. You know that’s a given. It’s a very walkable city. I would say get into town and walk and explore because the restaurants are fabulous.

There’s a lot of shopping and it’s just fun to be out there among the rest of the crowds. Another really fun thing to do is to take a Harbor Tour. They’re usually an hour or two. You go out on a boat and you can see Newport from the water. You see the backs of the mansions, you see the coastline.

It’s really beautiful and you get a whole new perspective that you don’t get on land. Something else is to remember is that Newport isn’t just about the Gilded Age. It began in the pre-colonial, pre-revolutionary times. I think the oldest properties were probably there in the 16 hundreds.

There’s parts of town, especially what they call The Point, which is on the harbor, it is a colonial neighborhood. Walking up and down there you’re, it’s like you’re back in time. So that’s a lot of fun. And let’s see. I would, there’s another, there’s the cliff walk.

Which is I don’t know how many miles it is along the coast and again, you can see the backs of the mansions and you can look at over the ocean. There’s another one called something Sagwitch? West Point, which gives you an unspoiled New England coastline. It’s very similar to the cliff walk, but without the development, without the mansions and that kind of thing.

You really can see some New England, Rhode Island nature from there. And it’s beautiful.

Jenny Wheeler: What time of year is the best time to go?

Alyssa Maxwell: Oh boy. I would say anytime starting June. Through the summer, it is very exciting because that’s the high tourist season. If you don’t mind the crowds, but you love boats and yachts and that kind of scene, that’s all going on into the Fall. Then you get fewer crowds, it’s still a little bit still busy, but you begin to get some of those fall colors and it’s cooler.

Honestly, I would say anytime from June through Christmas, because Christmas there is special. Everything used to be closed When I first met my husband. Newport shut down for the winter. The preservation Society didn’t keep the mansions open, but now there’s a few of them open and they’re decorated for Christmas, so I, yeah, I would recommend that too.

We did that one year. It was great.

Jenny Wheeler: Sounds fabulous. Turning now to looking slightly more widely at your career. Tell us a little bit about your early life and how you got into writing fiction. Did you always know you were going to be a writer?

Alyssa Maxwell: I think some of my earliest memories of, what do you want to be when you grow up? Yes. I did want to be a writer. I didn’t know what it really meant and I didn’t know how to get started.

I tried to be practical as people told me I should, go into some field where you can use your writing, not a creative writer. I think I didn’t begin to truly think about becoming a fiction writer until a friend of mine that I had worked with published her first novel. It was a romance for Harlequin, and I went, oh, she’s just a regular person.

A very intelligent person, and very creative, obviously. But something clicked in me and I realized, maybe I should try this.

So I did. But yes, even as a kid, I think I knew this was in me. I loved to write. I was always writing, whether it’s stories or a diary or letter writing to friends. We did that back in the Stone Age. It’s always been there, As early as when I first began to write, could write physically, I enjoyed it.

Jenny Wheeler: And how was your journey to publication? Did you more or less just write a book and find an editor? How did that work out?

Alyssa Maxwell: I’m laughing. I wish that it happened. I wrote… I think it was my sixth book that finally was published.

It was a romance, but then I also sold the fifth book after that, but I didn’t start writing mysteries until I was about nine books into my romance career and realized that I was often putting in some sort of mystery, or suspense thread into my romances.

Again, something clicked and I thought let me try mysteries. And I immediately realized that it would be set in Newport. And then I had better luck. I didn’t have to write six mysteries before I sold my first one. I did sell Murder at the Breakers, my first mystery.

Jenny Wheeler: Fantastic. We always like to ask our guests about their taste as readers because this is a podcast listened to by people who are really voracious readers what do you like to read? Have you been a binge reader in the past and have you got anything you’d like to recommend to our listeners?

Alyssa Maxwell: I’ve always loved. Mysteries, I’ve always loved historical fiction. So I read a lot of that. I read pretty almost, I don’t want to say exclusively, I do read some contemporary, sometimes some contemporary fiction, but the vast majority of what I read is said in the past.

I just find it fascinating. I love history and I love the challenges that characters face in the days before our modern technology,

A life was really more difficult when you didn’t have a smartphone in your pocket to look things up, or the police didn’t have modern forensics to solve their crimes.

Alyssa Maxwell: I liked that people had to live more by their wits than having any kind of outside help.

Jenny Wheeler: So who are some of your favorite authors?

Alyssa Maxwell: I read very widely, and I wouldn’t want to start naming names without including everybody because don’t forget writers read each other.

We’re friends and, we love to read each other’s books.

One thing I will say is I belong to a group called Sleuths in Time. And we support each other and cross promote each other. And I would encourage anybody to go to Sleuths In Time on Facebook and look at the authors there and the books that we’re all writing.

I think there’s some really good stuff there.

Jenny Wheeler: Lovely, and we’ll include that link in the show notes for this episode so people can find it, which is great. Tell me a little about what is next for Alyssa as author, what have you got on your desk for the next 12 months?

Alyssa Maxwell: I am writing another Newport book. It is Murder at Arleigh, and after that I have two more under contract, so that’ll keep me busy for another couple of years. The Next Lady and Lady’s Maid book comes out in February. And I’m already got some ideas about a possible future series something perhaps set in 1930s.

I’m thinking in this country, in the US.

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Jenny Wheeler: So how many Lady and Lady’s Maid books are there in the series now?

Alyssa Maxwell: There are eight, with the ninth coming out in February or March I think it is

Jenny Wheeler: And you are really at this time still fairly intent on keeping both of these series going?

Alyssa Maxwell: For now. Yes.

Alyssa Maxwell: I should mention Murder at Vinland for any Florida friends or people are interested in Florida. That book has a Florida Tie-in, which is a little bit different for the series. They don’t actually go there, but there’s a lot of information and things that relate back to Florida in the plot.

Jenny Wheeler: I was going to say, you are living in Florida now, aren’t you? Tight?

Alyssa Maxwell: Yes.

Jenny Wheeler: Looking back down the tunnel of time at your creative career, if there was one thing you could change about it, what would it be?

Alyssa Maxwell: I think the only thing I would change is I might have started writing mysteries sooner, but other than that, I think, I heard an author say once that we all have our own path to follow.

We have to take our own for good or bad. And I believe that, I think everything that has happened for a reason and it’s helped me grow as an author.

Jenny Wheeler: Sure. I think that you are one of the authors who does live appearances. You do get to do face-to-face contacts with your readers, don’t you? But where can people find you, either online or in person?

Alyssa Maxwell: The, probably the easiest would be to go to my website, Alyssa maxwell.com because from there you can find my links to Instagram, Facebook, BookBub, Goodreads, all of that. I tend to be mostly on Facebook and Instagram, and people can always message me or email me, that’s fine.

There’s a contact form on my website if they’d like to ask me a question or make an observation. I’m always open to that.

Jenny Wheeler: That’s wonderful, Alyssa, thank you so much. It’s been great talking and we’ll have a great deal of pleasure in putting this up in a few weeks.

Alyssa Maxwell: Oh, thank you so much, Jenny. This has been fun.

Jenny Wheeler: That’s it for now. If you’ve enjoyed hearing about Alyssa, look out any of the other 300 episodes of the show, found on all of the popular podcast channels, including YouTube podcasts.

I’m sitting down to write more historical mysteries, and I’m currently working on the Sisters Of Barclay Square series, set in 1860s, Sydney, Australia. You’ll find all my book news at my website, Jennywheeler.biz. Bye for now and Happy Reading.

We’re celebrating a milestone with this podcast, the 300th episode of The Joys of Binge Reading show. And it’s wonderful to be able to share it with best-selling author Helen Brown.

Helen is a good friend and a former colleague who is appearing on the show for the second time, so it’s just like all the stars are aligned. She has a remarkable gift for creating stories readers love with a mix of memoir and imaginative fiction that crosses international boundaries.

Hi, I’m your host, Jenny Wheeler, and this is the second to last episode of The Joys of Binge Reading, at least for the time being.

We love having Helen here to share it with us. She talks about her latest book, Mickey, The Cat Who Helped Me Through Times Of Change. Those of you who know Helen’s work, know that cats feature prominently.

Her classic memoir Cleo, The Small Black Cat That Helped Heal A Family has sold over two million copies and been translated into 18 languages, sold in 42 countries.

Mickey is another heart touching gem, a wistful coming of age true story about the transition from childhood to adolescence, and the small stray cat that helped guide the way.

We’ll get to Helen in just a moment. But before we do, I want to say a few words about the show. As I’ve indicated, both today and earlier I’m retiring it at least for a season, to pursue other things like writing my own books.

With that in mind, our Giveaway this episode is Poppy’s Dilemma, Book #1 in my latest series, The Sisters Of Barclay Square, set in Sydney in the late 1860s. Poppy Barclay’s privileged life shatters when her father’s investment company collapses amidst shocking allegations of fraud.

https://dl.bookfunnel.com/8qspkbukp3

Jilted by her fiancé, shunned by the elite, the beautiful heiress finds herself an outcast, her dreams of a perfect marriage in ruins.

She’s determined to fight back, but Poppy’s quest for justice puts her up against tenacious journalists, Thomas Yates, who is bent on exposing the truth behind the Barclay’s disgrace.

You can get a free copy of Poppy’s Dilemma from the download link in the show notes for this episode on our website, the joys of binge reading.com.

Here is the link to download:

I’m halfway through the first draft of the second book, working title Posey’s Peril about Poppy’s twin. And without the podcast to take up my time, I’m planning to finish it next month. As I foreshadowed, this will be our penultimate show.

There will be one more episode, # 301, because I committed to featuring historical mystery author Alyssa Maxwell’s was latest book months ago, before I’d made the decision to give Binge Reading a rest, and we recorded the interview in April or May – quite some time ago. I’m going to stay true to that and do that last episode so it doesn’t waste the effort of being interviewed on Alyssa’s part.

The show started in August, 2017, so we’ve been going for seven years straight, podcasting weekly for the first six years and fortnightly for nearly the last year.

It’s quite a load to carry, forever lining up new guests, reading their books, researching their careers, and then doing the technical work of sound and transcript editing for every episode. The technical side of it in particular has become tedious and time consuming, and ironically, I’ve had lots of problems getting this last show recorded.

The reasons for that are too boring to go into, but suffice it to say that after 299 reasonably straightforward episodes, #300 has proven particularly difficult technically speaking.

It’s appropriate that I had to call in sound engineer Dan Cotton, who edited the show professionally for me for the first few years, to sort out the problems in this, our second to last show. There’s a nice circularity about that for me.

Thanks to everyone like Dan and Abe who recorded the intro we’re still using, for their help and support, and warmest gratitude to all our listeners.

We’d developed a creditable audience and I’ve met some wonderful people along the way. The show will be out there long after this ending. I’m in the process of uploading all of the audio onto YouTube podcasts, and it’s on all of the major platforms.

You’ll still be able to find wonderful chats with favorite authors for a long time to come. That’s enough said. Let’s get to Helen.

Previous Binge Reading episode featuring Helen:

Oct, 2018

Books Helen is reading:

David Brooks How To Know A Person – The Art of Seeing Others Deeply

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/112974860-how-to-know-a-person

Prentis Hemphill, What It Takes To Heal – How Transforming Ourselves Can Change The World

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/195888446-what-it-takes-to-heal

The Rest Is History by Dr Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook.

https://www.bloomsbury.com/au/rest-is-history-9781526667748

Poetry Unbound:  Fifty Poems To Open Your World

https://www.amazon.com/Poetry-Unbound-Poems-Open-World/dp/B0BCL3VW15

Trip to Romania for environmental research

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Nicolae-Ceausescu

Snow globing: Watch comedian Mae Martin explain it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jE77WFTc8PI

Website: https://www.helenbrown.com.au/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Helen.Brown.International.Author/

Instagram:  @helenbrownauthor

Hello, Helen. And welcome to the show. It’s great to have you with us.

Helen Brown: Oh, thank you very much, Jenny. It’s lovely to be here.

Jenny Wheeler: Look, this is our 300th episode, so it’s really wonderful to be finishing it off, talking to you, an old friend. We’re talking about your latest book, Mickey, The Cat Who Helped Me Through Times Of Change. Tell us about Mickey.  

(Ed note: Because of the aforementioned technical difficulties, this small intro was not recorded on the raw sound file – goodness knows why not!  Apologies.)

Helen Brown: The inspiration for Mickey goes back to those Covid days. Jenny.

I don’t know how you went through them, but for me, I felt so isolated and disconnected from the world and I experienced a deep kind of loneliness.

I never thought I was a particularly sociable person, but that feeling of disconnect was so strong, and I know people felt that all around the world.

I was sitting in my study here in Melbourne feeling very isolated and alone, and I thought, oh my God, I haven’t had this feeling for so long.

But it’s a little bit familiar and it reminded me of when I was 12-years-old, transitioning into adolescence, feeling as if I belonged nowhere, and wondering how on earth to go forwards.

And at the same time, my father was a wonderful photographer and I have quite a few of his photos, his colour slides printed out and mounted on my walls here. And in that deep chasm of silence of those Covid months and years, his photos became more vibrant and more powerful, and they beamed into this room and the characters became more real than living characters.

And I just thought, oh my goodness, I’ve got to write about these people. They’re my friends again at this moment, mom and dad, and my sister and brother.

And then of course, I was reminded of my saviour at the time, who turned out to be a cat. My father was manager of the local gas works in New Plymouth where we lived.

We were quite an eccentric family. Jenny, I don’t know if you’ve picked that up from the book.

Jenny Wheeler: I have.

Helen Brown: One day my father said, ‘would you like to come for a drive?’ And I thought, oh gosh, he’s never asked me for a drive, so I said yes.

We jumped in the old blue gray Zephyr. It was pouring with rain and he drove me off to the gas work.

I thought, ‘oh no, we are going back to dad’s work. I’m just going to sit outside here in the car while he does something important. ‘

But no. He went in and came out carrying this cardboard box. He opened the door and put the box on my lap and he said, ‘take care of this, will you?’

And I lifted the lid of the box, looked inside, and a face looked up at me. The face of a three-month-old gray tabby.

And in that moment, that kind of visceral moment of connection, I felt the presence of another soul and someone who could really help me through this difficult time.

Jenny Wheeler: Now, this is probably the first of many interactions that you’ve had with cats. We perhaps should mention now that you’ve done a number of other cat books, some of them have been international best sellers.

But there was one other thing about this amazing family that you grew up with. Your mother didn’t like cats?

Helen Brown: No. She was a country person and she thought cats belonged in barns. To her, their only use was to catch rats. She didn’t dislike animals. She quite respected dogs, but cats she did not like.

As a result of this, when dad gifted me this scruffy tabby – the rest of his family had all been poisoned – we had a pact that I would have to hide the cat from mum, because mum was going through her own crises at the time.

She was auditioning for The King and I and the local operatic society and mum took her theatrical life incredibly seriously.

When she was auditioning for something we all knew we had to take a big step back and just hope to heaven that she got the part. So it was quite a good time to try and introduce a hidden cat into our crazy household, because she was so distracted.

Jenny Wheeler: You mentioned this crazy household. You were also living in an amazing house as well, in a provincial town in New Zealand, in New Plymouth,

Jenny Wheeler: And that house is still standing today.

When you came back to New Zealand on a book launch tour you actually revisited that house. How was that for you?

Helen Brown: Oh, it was profoundly magical. And I’m so grateful. The current owners Jocelyn and Peter Rich welcomed us. And they’re not only that, Jocelyn is a total cat person.

She’s got cats that she adores and one of the things I write about in the book is the food we ate in the sixties. These were times of such change, and on one level, food was one of the great changes.

I remember mum introducing us to pizza for the first time. It wasn’t really pizza, it was just pastry with cheese on top. But she was saying it’s Italian.

And when they had parties, they made these sticks with cherries and cheese and pineapple on them. And this is what Jocelyn so kindly made us the day we visited the old house.

It was just so moving. My sister came along too. It was something that’s very hard to put into words, to revisit those spaces. And at the same time, to acknowledge that it’s their home now. And it’s special to them too. And they’ve renovated it beautifully, whereas we lived in it like wild things.

I don’t think mom and dad could afford to do anything much to it. Dad was always up a 60-foot ladder trying to paint something like weather boards and it had this great tower and a turret where I kept my white mice.

That was one concession actually, that we were allowed quite a lot of freedom because of the wild nature of that house.

It was very elaborate. I think someone said the designer is Italianate. You had to be insane to buy it, especially in the sixties when everyone wanted to live in a pastoral colored box, so nobody really wanted to buy it. I think mom and dad got it pretty cheaply and we were lucky to live there.

Jenny Wheeler: Look, this family of yours. In the book, you do refer to them as “far from ordinary.” Do you think that most families are “far from ordinary” or were you just particularly lucky to be brought up in this one?

Helen Brown: I suppose no family is entirely ordinary and everybody has their quirks. But I think because mom and dad, they were very unusual really. Dad was 13 years older than mum and they were both visionaries in their different ways.

In some ways I wanted the book to be a homage to mum’s generation of women because during the war when all the men were sent off to fight and battle. young women like my mother were given wonderful jobs while they were away.

Mum got a job, Jenny, you’ll appreciate this, as a full-time reporter on the Hawera Star, not just the women’s page.

And she looked back on those four years as the best four years of her life. When the war ended, she, like many other women, was encouraged to give up her job, give it back to a man and get into an apron and have babies.

Mum was a very intelligent and talented person and the society she was squeezed back into really didn’t suit her.

I think in today’s world, she would be a very fulfilled professional woman of some sort. And then dad was very unusual in his own way. He was an engineer who played the piano. They both loved music and that’s what brought them together. And so he was a gas engineer who loved the arts. You were allowed to be a Renaissance man in those days, I think.

Not that he was sporty at all. The other thing that was different about him was he didn’t go to war because he had only one kidney. He stayed behind, and I think we felt even as a family, we felt a level of – I don’t know – guilt that he hadn’t gone and fought for his country

Jenny Wheeler: Look there is also quite a strong mystical aspect to this book.

A sense that there is a dimension to life, which is not just everyday domestic. There’s a whole other dimension. And I wonder if, for you, that’s always been the case, if there’s always been a mystical or a visionary aspect to life.

Helen Brown: Very much. I think part of that comes from dad, who always used to quote Shakespeare about there ‘being more things on this earth, Horatio than any of us could dream of.’ (Ed note: from Hamlet.)

And he always said to me, ‘keep fairies at the bottom of your garden.’ Which I took quite literally, because I actually had saw fairies in my bedroom coming down the wallpaper at night.

That was one of the things going back to the house. I thought I need to go back to my room and see if the fairies are still there. I went and looked.

The fairies used to open my bedroom window every morning at quarter to seven when I asked them. Jocelyn said, “oh no, we put a lock on that window so the fairies aren’t doing that.”

I did look up at the wallpaper and I thought it could have been reflections from the milk truck in the mornings, but then I used to see them at night. But also I had eye problems and I was lining myself up for more eye surgery, partly to get more attention. So yeah, the mystical. It was very much encouraged too by that house, because it would creak and in earthquakes, it became a shuddering kind of, I don’t know, another world.

And even through all of my life, I think I mentioned to you the fifth wall in every room. I love that idea of being open to what’s in the gaps, because if you’re a creative person, that’s where your energy, your creative energy comes from. It doesn’t come from sitting in front of your computer trying so hard.

It comes from releasing and letting energy come from the gaps, and that’s what I often try and say to aspiring writers. Don’t push it too hard. Go for walks, look up at the trees, let the gaps become a bit wider so you can get some true inspiration from the non-physical world.

And I find that also with cats. Cats also are very attuned to the non-physical. They sense us when we walk into a room. They sense the energy of a house. They work out whether someone is a cat person or not, and if they’re not, they might like to go and sit on them, I find.

Jenny Wheeler: I totally agree. As you were speaking about them locking the window, it occurred to me. Maybe they had to lock it because the fairies kept on opening it.

Helen Brown: I know. And I said to Jocelyn and Peter, I often dream I’m walking around this house, so if you ever feel there’s a ghost here, it’s probably me. And she said, Oh, Pete, did hear footsteps down the back hall one day, and he’s a doctor, he’s a scientist. So it was very generous of them to accept there might have been some other spirits there.

Jenny Wheeler: I referred to the fact that you’ve got at least one international bestselling book, and that was also about a cat called Cleo, who had a very special role in your family. Cleo has sold 2 million copies and is available in more than 40 countries.

Tell us about Cleo.

Helen Brown: She came into our lives at a very different time. There is a gap between where Mickey ends Jenny, and where Cleo begins. I got into journalism for bizarre reasons, really, because Mum said to me practically from birth, don’t, whatever you do, don’t get pregnant before you get married.

But you must have a qualification for a job as well before you get married because you have to be able to look after yourself.

By the time I was about 18, I was bloody desperate to get married, so I ended up marrying this British radio officer whom I’d met at a ship’s party. I flew off to the UK, and I had done the one year Polytech journalism course in Wellington.

I really wanted to be an artist or a ballerina. I gave up ballerina because my bones were too big. And the course to become an artist was going to take four years, but the course to be a journalist was only one. And I knew about journalism from mum, because she did keep writing columns and things for most of her life.

So it wasn’t a scary choice for me. I ended up taking the one-year journalism course in Wellington and then flying to the UK to marry my boyfriend who I’d met at that party.

We’d written for three years. I thought I knew him through the letters, which I interpreted in my own way. I had a bit of journalism work in the UK though, which was great.

But I remember two weeks after I was married, putting a little flower in a flower arrangement on top of the toilet system and thinking. My God, I’ve made a terrible mistake and I thought, oh my God, what do I do now?

I thought there’s only one thing I know. I know what will fix this. A baby. So I gave birth to Sam at the age of 19 in Wellington’s St. Helen’s Hospital, and of course it didn’t solve everything.

In fact, it made life more complicated. I think I had postnatal depression, which the doctor gave me Valium for, and that only made me cry more.

So I was put into a corner and thought there’s only one thing I have any training and know how to do. That’s right. Journalism.

I started writing little pieces for the local rag, a little throwaway paper the Karori News, about things that made me laugh and cry and competitive parents and waiting for the postie to toil up the hill because we were in this desolate new subdivision.

I’d write these little pieces and people seemed to quite enjoy them. And then I wrote one piece about catching the Northerner train from Wellington to Auckland. There was a body in the carriage behind us, and every stop at a station through the night, we’d hear the station masters at various stops saying, oh, how’s the body?

Oh. Where’s it going to? Who’s in it? Blah, blah, blah. And it was quite funny. I wrote that up and then Dear Brian, who ran the Karori News, came back to me, and said, look that piece you’ve written, he said, it’s too good for us. I don’t think we can publish it. And I was too naive to realize that was rejection, Jenny.

You must have rejected many a piece in your time?

Jenny Wheeler: Can’t recall ever doing so dear.

Helen Brown: I sent that piece off to The Dominion, which was the daily newspaper in Wellington. They took it and I think they paid me a princely sum, like $40. It seemed like so much money. I think it was double what I was getting from the Karori News.

Ultimately they started taking these pieces every week, which was wonderful. I found I could sell them to other newspapers, and for a while they were syndicated to seven newspapers around New Zealand and it was great.

But then in 1983 Sam and his brother Rob, found a wounded pigeon under a tree in our backyard and they wanted to take it to the vet because Sam was a great animal lover.

They persuaded their father, who was looking after them, to let them put the bird in a shoe box and take it down, walk down to the vet. They got only part way there. Crossing the road, Sam stepped out from behind a bus and was mowed down and killed.

He was nine. And our lives were blown, absolutely shattered and blown apart, as anyone who has lost a child would know. Jenny, you have experienced something similar.

Jenny Wheeler: Yeah, I have. Yeah. Yeah.

Helen Brown: And there was no grief counselling in 1983. I was only 28. I didn’t know where to look, or what to do. Anyway, about three weeks after the funeral, this woman arrived on the doorstep with this little black kitten, and I just thought, I don’t want this.

I remembered it because Sam had chosen this kitten from a litter about a month before the accident, and he begged to have this kitten for his birthday, and he’d already named her Cleo, and I was about to turn this woman away, and Rob, who was only six, came running out behind me, said, “oh mom it’s Sam’s kitten.

It’s Cleo. Welcome home Cleo.” And I think I realized at that point that this little kitten was there in some kind of healing role for all of us, even though I didn’t really want it to begin with.

And Cleo brought… she was very funny. And with her, she had that feline, or perhaps animal ability, to know when people actually needed her on their lap or in just her presence. Or she could perform tricks, like fighting with the rubber plant, and because of her, Rob finally managed to go back and sleep in the room he’d shared with Sam.

She offered our family so much. The other thing, Jenny, with this tragedy was I thought, I don’t know how to move forward. I thought maybe I’ll stop writing. Or I can pretend that I’m still this happy suburban, housewife and write jolly pieces that would be fake or I can write what happened this week?

I remember sitting up in bed with my typewriter, my portable typewriter, just putting in bare facts about what had happened, and it got published.

And then in the days after that, our letterbox – it was way pre email – filled up with envelopes from people offering such solace in the way that so many other people hadn’t been able to, people who didn’t know what to say.

Some of those were from other parents who lost kids and I got the greatest comfort from them because they told me, our son went for a walk in the bush one day and he never came home.

Or our daughter had terminal cancer. They told me their stories and they would say, this happened to us and our lives have changed, but we have survived and you can survive too.

From that I felt a great debt to those people, and that is one of the reasons I sat down to write the book, about Cleo in the hope that it might help others going through loss.

It doesn’t have to be a child, any kind of loss. We all have broken hearts, I hoped that it might be a way to reach out to them and say, Hey, you are not alone. We’re in this together.

Jenny Wheeler: Wonderful, Helen, and you did. There was quite a gap between that experience and the book. But in those years, you continued to write columns that touched people’s hearts, and that’s what you do in your books. You bring a human sense of loss and just what life’s about that’s international. That crosses cultural and geographical boundaries, doesn’t it?

Helen Brown: As human beings we are all pretty much the same. You don’t have different wiring if you’re born in Russia or Ukraine. We all have the same wiring. We all need love, and we’re all vulnerable and we’re all broken in some way.

We’ve got so bad at communicating deeply with each other, at looking into each other’s faces and seeing each other. We really need to relearn how to be human, especially with all the technology and AI. The message from that, as far as I’m concerned, is we just need to remind ourselves how to be human.

No computer can truly love us or comfort us, but that involves looking at each other again, seeing each other again and reminding each other how to be present for each other in ordinary life.

Jenny Wheeler: I don’t want to get all theoretical about social media, but today we are really encouraged to try and keep up a big front of being. Fine. Everything’s fine. We don’t even want to start that work of acknowledging some of these vulnerabilities. Do we?

Helen Brown: No, it’s too binary, isn’t it? Because the other side of that. I remember just recently I opened my phone and there’s a picture of someone’s blood in the toilet and you just think, oh my God.

The other extent is that we have to be enormous victims. We are capable of so much more, and we’re not going to solve all our massive problems until we tune into those complexities. Otherwise, we’re losing it. One of the things I was thinking of, I was 12 now and a bit remote. I wasn’t very good at making friends.

If you read Mickey, you’ll find, I think, my sixth birthday, I hid under the bed while all the children that mom had invited, played, and I waited for them to go home.

Today, I probably would’ve been diagnosed with something and my parents in their deep concern would probably have given me a phone and I would’ve disappeared into that for at least a decade, I think.

Whereas dad gave me a cat. And Mickey taught me a lot of things that no phone or. Any available…. There were no adults or peers available to teach me at the time. So yeah, I suggest to people that before they give their early teenage kids a phone to consider, at least consider a pet.

I noticed that girl who won the skateboarding at the Olympics, a 14-year-old Australian girl, and her parents said she could have anything she liked as a reward, and she said I want a pet duck.

I thought, oh my goodness. It’s the same thing. She would love a dog or a cat, but they travel so much. They couldn’t commit to an animal like that, but a duck. Yeah. So I thought, whether it’s 12-year-olds or 14 year olds they haven’t changed much have they?

Jenny Wheeler: That’s wonderful. Now we are starting to run out of time. It’s been fabulous. But tell us about the next book. because that’s also a beautiful story. Jonah followed Cleo and was also incredibly successful, particularly in the USA, where you’ve got a really big following.

Tell us about Jonah. That book won a literary prize in France.

Helen Brown:. Weird things happen. I never know what’s gonna happen. Jonah came many years after Cleo had died and Cleo lived to be 23. I was diagnosed with breast cancer. I had a mastectomy and my darling sister Mary came over from New Zealand to look after me and I was lying in bed.

(Helen has lived in Australia for many years. – Ed note)

I couldn’t walk very well because I’d had a reconstruction. They’d taken fat from my belly and made a fake breast with it. And she said, I’ve just been down the neighborhood and I’ve just seen something really special, but I’m not going to tell you what it is. Talk about big sister energy. So what is it?

Where is it from? She’d walked past a pet shop, and I know you’re not supposed to get animals from pet shops, but this is 15 years ago and so I hobbled down there because I couldn’t stand up straight with Mary.

And in the middle of the pet shop was a cage full of kittens. But one of them was particularly insane and it was using the other kittens as a trampoline and bouncing off them and climbing up the wire.

And it was a little white thing, like a little white clown, and it climbed up the mesh wiring, fixed me with these two blue eyes, put its paw through the wire and touched me. I was chosen. He had to come home and we named him Jonah after Jonah Lomu because that kitten was so athletic and crazy.

Jenny Wheeler: Now just tell people who Jonah Lomu was, for those who don’t remember him.

Helen Brown: Oh yes. Someone called him Liquid Bronze. He was a wonderful New Zealand rugby player. Unfortunately, he died of kidney disease, far too young. He was very charismatic, a wonderful athlete.

Jenny Wheeler: And when I was doing a little bit of background for this chat we are having, I came across this a magazine article from a number of years ago in which it was described a book launch you had, where you had yourself carried in by some more bronzed men and also you did a one person tour at one stage where you wrote the script and performed it all around New Zealand.

You’ve always been an amazing risk taker. I look at you and think, wow, how does she do it? Have you always been like that?

Helen Brown: I think partly because I suffered that tragedy at an early age of, 28 when the worst happens, you lose fear ultimately. You can just implode and try and hold onto the remnants of the life you’ve lost, but after a while you become very open to ideas and because, nothing lasts…

You’ve lost, what you treasured the most. I think it’s not, maybe not risk taking. I’m just open to fun and joy and I don’t feel I have a lot to lose really, and I suppose a low boredom threshold. But that was fun. That night with those boys, they said to me, oh, how much do you weigh?

We had this chaise longue and I was in this mermaid outfit. I don’t know, I think I might’ve lost a bit of weight for that, but they were gorgeous. That was a fun night, Jenny.

And what? Oh, the show. Life’s A Banana Cake. That was partly ‘because of  New Zealand jazz singer, Malcolm McNeil who said, ‘we should do something together sometime. Let’s do a show.’

We wrote a life story around his singing and that transitioned into a more simple show just with a piano. And we raised over $40,000 from that show, partly for hospices around New Zealand. Some for a curtain in my old school.

Yeah, I think Jenny. Life’s …you gotta go for the fun. If it shows itself, if it’s on offer….

Jenny Wheeler: That’s absolutely wonderful. As we’ve been sitting here, I suddenly remembered that also you adapted Cleo for children.

At the time we talked about the need there was for a children’s book, for children facing massive grief as well, and there wasn’t really anything there for them. Tell us about Cleo, the Child Edition.

Helen Brown: I called it Cleo and Rob and because Rob’s now a middle aged man, but I felt utterly helpless for him because there was nothing to help him through that time and to even acknowledge what had happened to him.

I think children do grieve differently, certainly on the outside, from the way adults do. At the time Rob became pretty quiet and withdrawn, but he could still seem very happy at other moments.

It was complex watching, observing him. When Cleo, the adult book became such a success, I felt there was a gap there.

It would be lovely because people – maybe 13 year olds up – read Cleo and I’d get emails, I still do, from that any age group right up to 90 year olds, but I wanted to maybe try and communicate a sense of hope and acknowledgement for smaller children who are actually going through it right now.

The book is found some good places. It’s one of those books that will show up where it’s needed. I believe it’s in some funeral homes and hospices and even normal kids like to read it.

Just about every kid, , in their school years… There’ll be one summer where somebody doesn’t come back from the holidays. There’s been a car accident, there’s been something.

I think this book was a way to try and help children who know of the loss of other children, just to make it out there as a part of the conversation.

It was interesting going to primary schools with that book when it came out. I was so impressed with how emotionally intelligent kids up to the age of 10, are. The questions they asked were so matter of a matter of fact, in some cases, profound in others. They were just curious and they welcomed the opportunity to talk about death and what happens afterwards.

Jenny Wheeler: We always like to ask our authors about their own tastes in. reading and what have you been reading lately. Have you got anything you’d like to recommend to listeners?

Helen Brown: Oh gosh, you should have told me that. I always forget what I’ve read. I’m reading a wonderful book at my How to Know people.

It’s by an American columnist who’s so famous. I’ve forgotten his name now. It’s downstairs. I’m loving it because it’s about this whole thing we’ve been talking about, connection and how we’ve got to… particularly in the States.

I was just on tour in the States and we’ve got such polarization of ideals and people are just shouting at each other that what they call snow globbing, and we need to stop doing that.

We need to come together. Someone’s got very different views from you. Get together with them, find out why they have those views, and then you don’t have to hammer your views back at them, but just see them as human.

Jenny Wheeler: We’ll put those in the show notes for this episode.

Jenny Wheeler: So, you’re reading mainly nonfiction?

Helen Brown: Yes. They’re both wonderful. Not so much fiction.

I’ve written one fiction book and I know how you can get totally absorbed in that and it’s not real. I

I’m more interested – because of my journalism background journey – I’m very interested in people’s views of real life.

I’m very interested in history, podcasts, anything that helps me make sense of however many years I’ve got left on this planet and for my children and grandchildren to understand the complex and miraculous honour of being human.

Jenny Wheeler: Looking back down the tunnel of time, if there was one thing you’d change about life, I’m talking now about your creative career, what would it be?

Helen Brown: Oddly enough, I would take more risks. I think if I have any regrets, it’s lack of confidence. It was a different time in the seventies and eighties and nineties, when I was working full time as a journalist.

 It took me quite a long time… In fact, it wasn’t until someone wrote an article, that I found out that all the male columnists were earning double what I was, and I was the solo mom.

I was supporting a family and two kids. There was a quite a bit of misogyny. With those commitments, wasn’t in a position to take great many risks. One of the most wonderful things was when one of my bosses, Judy McGregor, said, oh, why don’t you apply for a press fellowship to Cambridge University?

And I said no, I can’t. I didn’t go to university. She said, oh, that doesn’t matter. They’ll be interested anyway. Just send a sample of your work and a subject you’d like to look at.

And I thought, they’re probably not even going to read my application. I’ll think about this as in 1989. I said I would like to study environmental issues from a spiritual perspective.

And I thought, there you go, Cambridge University. And then about a month later I got a letter of acceptance, which I was completely nonplussed.

And when I got to Cambridge, it was big, because I had to leave the kids behind for three months. This little man came and met me and said, ‘I’m going to be your supervisor. Unfortunately we don’t have an environmental department. I’m a geographer.

Only hippies believed in the environment and. And I said what can we do? He said ‘the only university I know of, there’s one in Romania that teaches every subject from an environmental perspective, including dentistry.’

And I said, ‘oh would you come to Romania with me?’ There’s the risk taker. And he said, ‘oh no. I actually can’t. He was a very timid little man, but I did persuade Philip and Lydia to come with me when the fellowship ended.

It was 18 months after Nicolae Ceaușescu  had been killed.

The whole place was in disarray. I went to the university where every subject was taught from a environmental perspective, including dentistry, and I sat in the staff room. And it had a very weird energy. And I looked at the wall behind me and it was covered in bullet holes because students had been killed there 18 months earlier.

And they said what do you want? And I said I’d like to see an environmental disaster area. And they said. Okay. We have 15 environmental disaster areas. Take your choice. So it was a wonderful adventure.

Jenny Wheeler: And just for those who don’t know your family situation, Philip is your husband, and Lydia is one of your girls.

Helen Brown: Yes, she’s become a clinical psychologist, which is probably a reflection of growing up in an insane family. And we have four grandchildren, granddaughters

Jenny Wheeler: You always turn everything into such an amazing adventure. So what did you end up writing about for your Cambridge stay?

Helen Brown: I came back to New Zealand incredibly inspired because also because of that, at Cambridge, I met the Dai Lama’s chief interpreter and he gave me an exclusive interview with the Dai Lama, who also wasn’t fully developed in his ideas about environmentalism at that point.

He has since though. Of course I couldn’t teach him anything about spirituality, but we had a wonderful half hour together. Anyway, I had all this material. I took it back to my New Zealand publisher, and I was pregnant with our daughter, Kath, and he said, oh, this, it’s an international book.

We’re not really interested in this. Could you write a book about old people? Now I’m old, I probably would be honored to write a book about old people, but I lost my confidence.

I have a friend actually in Wellington who says, I must write about that time, and maybe I should!

Jenny Wheeler: Yes, that sounds wonderful. That that brings us very nicely to my last question, and that is what are you working on now, as an author? What’s, what does your next 12 months look like from your desk?

Helen Brown: From my desk? It’s got tissues, it’s got magic stones or crystals. It’s got piles of paper, but it does have the best book on screenwriting you’ll ever need.

It’s called Save the Cat, because someone had the film rights to Cleo for 10 years and eventually, I decided to claim them back.

 My dear publisher Jude is encouraging me to write a film script. We do have some interest from a New Zealand company, but we’ll just see how we goI did write for television, a New Zealand on Close To Home, and Country GP, so I know how to do a script. I’m thinking I’m having a crack at this. I feel like I’m in my own power

It’s quite fun and it’s not so lonely. I think like writing books is very lonely and you do go insane, I think, with loneliness. And this, at least there’s some collegiate work involved, though they’ll probably destroy every word I’ve ever written in it, but who knows?

Jenny Wheeler: They do talk about the collaborative process with scripts. Yeah.

Helen Brown: I’m open to that. My ego is… I think it’s that you write this long for these many years, you don’t have a hell of a lot of ego left. I still have a lot of curiosity and a lot of gratitude. I can’t believe the wonderful things that have happened in the places I’ve been.

I haven’t even told you about the Japanese death tour. That was fantastic.

About going up to Sendai.

Jenny Wheeler: Tell us about that.

Helen Brown: When Cleo came out in Japan I was invited to Sendai where the tsunami had been five years earlier, I think. And then to attend three Death Symposia. The first one up was up there.

And it was fascinating. I remember because these people had been through so much and the women in particular were very self-contained, and the men, I didn’t know how to touch them, but I remember talking and at the first talk there was a row of photos at the back of the hall and it seemed to be of women holding babies.

And I thought, oh, that’s nice. I’ll go and look at those. I got there and the babies were all dead and it was their way of dealing with some of their grief.

Some of the women in the community were knitting clothes for dead babies, and I just wasn’t sure what to do except be myself. And it turned out they would come running and say Helen San and want to just be held by this big antipodean teddy bear, which I was very honored to do.

There was a symposium in Tokyo and Kyoto. It became so fascinating because Japan has had to deal with death so many times, from Hiroshima right through to the tsunami and so many other ways that, and they were speaking to people somewhere medics, a lot of medics trying to find a way.to handle grieving.

The traditional Japanese village way, which was there were a lot of rituals around that, but they were finding increasingly they were putting people in hospital beds and just pulling the curtain in the Western way, denying the more subtle elements and the more magnificent elements of death and dying.

And they were trying to relate the two so people, because people weren’t living in villages anymore, how they could find ways to embrace death without being too sterile, and linking back to their own culture and they have some wonderful. rituals that we would benefit from.

I love the one every year they bring up the burial pots of their beloveds and put them around the table and have a wonderful feast with them.

And I thought we wouldn’t be doing that in Taranaki probably, but I thought it was really healthy, so they taught me a lot.

Jenny Wheeler: Fantastic Helen. Just a final one question. Obviously you. enjoy interacting with your readers, probably more than many other authors. I know you get fantastic response.

How do you handle all that and where can people reach out to you?

Helen Brown:  Oh I’m on Facebook and Instagram. I do love hearing from people. It’s a two-way thing really, because as I said, that goes right back to that connection when parents who’d lost children helped me.

I was giving a workshop recently on memoir writing, and someone said, if there’s one piece of advice, what would it be?

And I said it’s ‘Get a Maureen.’ I have a wonderful reader who’s read my stuff for 40 years. She first wrote to me. She lives in Rangiora in New Zealand. And she’s since knitted clothes for all of our grandchildren. And when I get writer’s block and I become too self-critical, and I can’t go on, I sit at the computer and think, oh, actually. Maureen would quite like this.

No, this isn’t soap. This is a little bit funny. Maureen would smile and I said, you don’t actually need a physical Maureen. You can have the Maureen inside yourself, who’s kinder to you, kinder to your creative self. I do value my readers very much.

Jenny Wheeler: Helen, that’s the most wonderful way to finish off. Thank you so much.

Jeff Carson is the Amazon-Bestselling author of the David Wolf series, thrillers set in the high country of Colorado, chock-full of action, mystery, thrills, and suspense.

With millions of copies sold internationally, he’s regularly recommended as suitable for fans of David Baldacci and Daniel Silva.

Hi I’m your host Jenny Wheeler and today on the Binge Reading show Jeff Carson talks about how he turned a year-long stay in Italy into a fulltime writing career, and his new series, a big change to David Wolf, featuring Italian woman police officer Ali Flavia, set against the backdrop of Italian culture, ancient walled towns, tourist mayhem and fabulous food and wine.

We’ve got two book offers this week, and the first books in my two series are on offer. The Thriller and Mystery series Giveaway has Sadie’s Vow, #1 in the Home At Last series on offer.

​https://books.bookfunnel.com/thrillingfreebies-jul/4h2xrdstd8

The Kobo Editor’s Pick’s promotion has the Of Gold & Blood book set – #1 and #4.

Kobo Editor’s Pick

Visit the following link(s) to see the promotion: ​https://www.kobo.com/p/free-ebooks​! If you live in a country that isn’t included in this promotion, you may have trouble accessing the sale link. If this happens, change the flag at the top of the Kobo homepage to one of the included countries to see the sale link properly.

This is one of the last shows I’ll be doing for a while on The Joys of Binge Reading. I’m taking a break after two more episodes, but I’ll be posting many of the past interviews on YouTube so if you’ve missed them, you’ll find them there.

Carabinieri: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carabinieri

Disc Golf: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disc_golf

MHZ.com: https://www.mhz.com/

Ali Falco: https://www.jeffcarson.co/ali-falco-series

What Jeff is reading now:

Lincoln Child: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln_Child

https://lincolnchild.com

Agent Prendergast series: https://www.prestonchild.com/

Douglas Preston: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/12577.Douglas_Preston

Marko Kloos: https://www.markokloos.com/

Website: www.jeffcarson.co

Or his Amazon books site: 

https://www.amazon.com/Books-Jeff-Carson/s?rh=n%3A283155%2Cp_27%3AJeff+Carson

But now, here’s Jeff.

Hello there Jeff and welcome to the show, it’s great to have you with us.

It’s great to have you with us.

Jeff Carson: Nice to be here. Thanks for having me.

Jenny Wheeler: You are somewhere in Colorado and I’m in Auckland, so that’s a good long reach between us. You’ve got this Amazon hit on your hands. It’s obviously not a surprise because you’ve written 17 in the series now. David Wolfe, a small-town, Colorado mountain sheriff. Tell us about David. How did he come to life for you?

Jeff Carson: Yes, you’ve got that right. He is a small-town Colorado Sheriff. My wife is from Italy. I guess it was like 2012, 2011? We were visiting Italy for a year because we had a son, and my wife wanted to go to Italy and be with our young son there and to be with her mom and dad and get some support with the young son and stuff.

And I was at a crossroads in my professional life. I did not like what I was doing and I got this idea that I was going to start writing fiction.

Long story short, I got looking into these self-published authors and all, I was just like, I didn’t even understand that existed until when we got to Italy.

And then I realized in the drop of a hat. I’m going to be a fiction writer. My wife was nice enough to not disown me or leave me after that.

But I decided to start writing books. I’m in Italy, in this country where I don’t know, in the area, nobody speaks English whatsoever, and I didn’t really speak Italian that well.

I felt very isolated, but I just got this idea to start writing. I knew you’re supposed to write about what you know, and I knew Colorado and I knew that I missed Colorado.

That was the first thing that came up into my mind of the guy. It was actually the second idea I had, but whatever the first that stuck was like having a cop in the mountains of Colorado.

I missed the mountains of Colorado. I decided to make this series about the mountains of Colorado, about this cop. So that’s how it came about.

Jenny Wheeler: On your website you have got quite a funny blog post about that experience and you describe it as “firing first, aiming later.”

 How much research did you do before you started out? You are compared with people like David Baldacci and Michael Crichton, real top of the line popular fiction authors who were very much in the mainstream.

Did you aim to settle yourself there right from the beginning?

Jeff Carson: Yeah. I was so like rock bottom with what I was trying that I was just like, ‘what the hell?’

Why would I not try to be just the best I could? I loved all those authors I. was reading them at that time. And I wanted to be precisely like them, make my covers like them and make my books just as compelling as theirs were.

I read a bunch how to write fiction books. Just devouring them, like one per day because I was in such a hurry to make this thing work. I knew it wouldn’t. probably work for years, but I had definitely a fire lit under me.

I learned the basics of what it takes to write fiction, or, maybe not the basics, but how complex it is. And then after I read like three of those books, I was like, ‘Okay. Come on. They’re saying the same things. I’m gonna have to try it now.’

I made every mistake under the sun at first; my first book had a cliffhanger ending. It pretty much ended in mid-sentence, so you would buy the second book, because I knew I was going to write a series.

And that was the business plan also, as well as just the fiction plan, the story, arc plan. There was no aiming for the first couple books.

It was just try to make a great, and then I had to go back and rewrite everything, knowing that if I was going to keep doing this, nobody’s going to read the first book and continue on reading the other books.

It doesn’t matter how many books I write, if that first one could really turn some people off.  I had to go back and really hone those first couple books.

Jenny Wheeler: I think cliff hangers are interesting because I think some people still believe that they’re really necessary. You’ve decided perhaps that they’re not the best way to go.

Jeff Carson: No, there’re actively terrible ways to go if someone’s thinking about it. There’s a certain nuance to it. If you’re going to leave certain storylines unresolved, the main storyline better be super resolved.

 Sub storylines? I have kept them unresolved just because wolf is constantly growing as a person.

His love life, his family life, his professional life. But as far as if there’s a murder, the murder’s got to be solved by the end of the book. If you’re going to throw a ball up in the beginning of the book, it’s got to be caught and dealt with by the end of the book.

People get very angry, if you don’t.

Jenny Wheeler: Did you have readers who gave you that sort of feedback at the beginning?

Jeff Carson: Yes. I was getting one star reviews right off the bat and they were saying like, ‘I’ll never read anything he writes ever again. I don’t care how much I like the story,’

 I’m like, wait a minute. That’s okay. That’s some anger right there. But yet they liked the story like, oh no, what? What did I do? And then I realized, yeah, you can’t do that.

Jenny Wheeler: It’s interesting that you mention about the development of family because the other thing about doing series, especially if you have a child in it, is that it’s hard to fudge the timeframe, the timeline thing.

And you do have David having a son who’s 12, I think, when series begins. I haven’t read right through the whole thing, but I did wonder how you’ve managed to let his son develop in a realistic way, but also keep a kind of father son relationship going. Did you find out a bit of a challenge and where are we up to with the son now?

Jeff Carson: Oh yeah, it’s super difficult. Because I didn’t want every book to just be the next day, all of a sudden another crime happens.

It’s like just the murder capital of the world, the middle of the mountains, in Colorado, So there’s time lapse in between each book, at least usually seven months, nine months, a year.

And then possibly even a more between a couple books. So now his son in one of the books is having his own son. Wolf’s son was freaking out about that and Wolf had to help him through that. And it’s tough yet to how to gauge the speed at which you’re going to go through this timeline of their lives, because precisely what age is Wolf?

Even I still don’t know.  I don’t want to admit it, but I don’t even know. He’s probably early fifties, mid-fifties or something, and every new book, you have to gauge I and think, okay, what’s going on here?

Where is everybody? What are their ages? What are their kids’ ages? I actually had a reader help me go through all my books and give me the names of all the characters and what their relative relations are and when they showed up and, because it’s really a big deal,

Jenny Wheeler: Amazing. That is what they call, a Series Bible. And I was going to ask you if you had one of those. It’s often helpful not to be too specific about those things, isn’t it?

Because then a few books up the track, you find yourself trapped. You can’t have somebody being, oh, suddenly they’re 23 when two or three books ago, they were 22. That sort of thing.

Jeff Carson: Exactly right. And the timeline didn’t work out. Yeah. So you gotta be vague, but that’s fine to most people, I think, unless it’s like a super specific thing that needs to be part of the story, like it’s his 21st birthday or something. Who cares precisely how old this person is?

Jenny Wheeler:  Number 17 in the series just published is called Echoes Fade, and it starts with a rare attack by a mountain lion on some people who are camping in a caravan park.

The series has got a very strong feeling of the natural environment, the mountain location, the temperatures, the weather, the way it’s so changeable.

Is all of that part of the living in Colorado important to you?

Jeff Carson: Yeah, that’s exactly what I love about Colorado. The natural beauty and going up to the mountains, it just seems to escalate.

You’ll be on a hike and if lightning strikes you’re all of a sudden freaked out, you’re not just ‘ooh, there’s some thunder.’

You’re like, ‘oh crap, we gotta get off this mountain.’

I love the nature of this place. I’m looking outside right now and there’s clouds building in the west, and we know there’s gonna be some thunderstorms this afternoon, and that’ll be fun when they hit.

I like to look out and be like yeah, it’s hailing now, or whatever. I just love it. It’s very important to

me.

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Jenny Wheeler: Are you into hiking, camping, rafting?  Outdoor stuff?

Jeff Carson: Yeah. I like to hike a lot. In the winter we ski. I think I used to do a lot more when I was younger. Mountain bike and all those things that now that I have young kids, I’ve changed.

I’m not interested in flying down a mountain on my bike. It’s not something I’m interested in. I play disc golf. I don’t even know if you’ve ever heard of that, but it’s golf with Frisbees.

That’s a major part of my life now because it’s very outdoorsy and you’re in the woods all the time. But the answer is yes. I love the outdoors and I do a lot of stuff outdoors.

Jenny Wheeler: Wolf is also a former Army ranger, and this sometimes comes into it, in terms of relating to guns, but also he gets flashbacks of his experiences when he was a soldier. Is that also something that you share?

Jeff Carson: It is not, no, it’s not. I made a choice at the very beginning. I made a lot of interesting choices at the very beginning. And it was funny. When I started writing I remember thinking, should I write like science fiction?

And I remember thinking like, oh, that’s too nuanced. I’m going to have people. emailing me about what I got wrong for this and wrong for that.

And then I ended up choosing like the most intensely scrutinized thing ever, police procedurals with law. And he’s ex-army, a former army ranger and people are coming out of the woodwork talking about military procedure and all that.

It’s funny that I chose those directions, but it’s nothing that I had any. experience with it. I just found that interesting in a character, and that’s what I went with.

Jenny Wheeler: It is almost trope in this adventure fiction now, that those men often like to retire into very quiet corners of the world, isn’t it? And get some peace and space around them after the experiences they’ve had.

Jeff Carson: Exactly. It was a trope, at the beginning. It was like, okay, he’s he’s got to be skilled. So, he is ex-army, he is a former army ranger

Jenny Wheeler: So, then did you have to seek out some friends or colleagues or acquaintances who had those experiences? How did you research that aspect of it?

Jeff Carson: Yes. I had some former high school friends that I went and talked to and took copious notes and read some nonfiction books. Then, you have to just be super specific and thorough with your Google searches when they’re not there.

When you’re in the act of writing and you can’t just have someone sitting next to you looking over your shoulder for that stuff. I talked to a lot of people about that.

Jenny Wheeler: The other thing that is mentioned is that he’s got Navajo blood. I’ve read a number of the series, but I haven’t come across one yet where that particularly comes to the fore. Have you exploited that side of it yet very much?

Jeff Carson: Not very much beyond the second and third book, I think. Other than exposition about that. It never is an essential theme that’s going on in his life in the story.

Jenny Wheeler: It’s definitely one that you could introduce in the continuing series if you wanted to isn’t it?

Jeff Carson: Exactly.

Jenny Wheeler: As well as Wolf, you’ve got another series, which you’ve just started set in an extremely contrasting location, but the sense of location is just as strong as with Wolf.

That is an Italian series. You mentioned that your wife’s Italian, you’ve got very close links with the country and you’ve got now a female cop in a small town in Italy, Ali Falco, and that one is very much urban; ancient walled towns, food and wine, very much Italian focused.

Tell us a bit about Ali and why did you introduce the second series?

Jeff Carson: It was a matter of sitting down and continuing to write the Wolf series, although I love it and it’s comfortable. It was almost too comfortable, every time I sat down to write it.

I knew that I wanted to do something else and completely different. I decided to do female and our family has spent a lot of time over in Europe and in Italy specifically because my parents, my wife’s parents live over there,

It was natural to me to, every time I were over there, imagine this would be a great scene. I’m always daydreaming about scenes that would happen in these places, and I loved Tuscany the most.

When we were, whenever we go there, I just love it there. The rolling hills and then these little towns you can get stuck in and the wine and the food and everything about it.

It was natural to me to make it a series that took place there. Then as far as storywise it definitely was very difficult too, because it’s one thing to be say oh, this scenery’s great and everything.

You got to still make a nice compelling story. To convince readers that this is a real person, with a real history who grew up in Italy and this and that.

It’s very interesting and it’s very fun contrast to me. I used to always watch these PBS type specials that are set in rural England or something or Italian, or whatever.

I watch those shows on a website called mhz.com. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of that. It’s got like all the international shows. Subtitled.

I’ll watch a bunch of those. I like international mystery thriller or international mysteries. I’ve always been intrigued by those, so I just wanted to write some of those, Now I have two Ali books.

Jenny Wheeler: How did you go about getting inside the Italian carabinieri, and all of ways in which they operate? Did you have a mate there who’s a police officer?

Jeff Carson: No, I don’t. The way I got some of the insider information and some ideas was through my wife’s father. He has a lot of life experience and he loves to tell these stories and a lot of his stories intrigued me and he gave me some good tips on, how the structure, the rank, and so forth, because everybody has to do military service when they’re younger in Italy, and so he has a lot of friends in those places.

I read a lot and Googled a lot there. And would love to find yeah, carabinieri or a police officer over there that speaks very good English that I could hang out with, I have not found someone like that in real life over there yet.

Jenny Wheeler: Looping back to the very start of our conversation and you saying how you had a year off in Italy and you just became possessed by this idea of writing fiction.

Had it always been something you dreamt about or did it somehow just captivate you when you had a little bit of spare time?

Jeff Carson: I think that I realized I had always been dreaming about  it in a flash, and I just didn’t have anybody telling me, or giving me permission to do this thing.

I had a creative writing class that I did in college. I remember that the teacher loved my story and she made me get up and tell it.

That was a very fulfilling thing, a validating thing that happened to me with all around writing.

And I remember telling my father one day when we were driving cross country. I remember saying to him it would be so cool. It would be the coolest thing ever to be a novelist.

But nothing ever clicked in my mind that’s what you could do. I thought you had to be a millionaire. A multimillionaire, retired. Then you write.

Then I realized in Italy that time, that was when Kindle came out and people were actually writing and making like a living with this thing.

And I was like, ‘Wait a minute. What? Wait, I’m doing this.’ It clicked. Wow, it’s actually possible to write, to be a writer. Like you don’t have to, do something else. Yeah. Retire.

Yeah, it just clicked in my mind that’s what I’ve always wanted to do, and I’ve never looked back from that moment.

Jenny Wheeler: What was the biggest challenge in setting yourself up as an indie author at that time?

Jeff Carson: You had to have… it’s still the same challenges now. You can’t just write one good book. You have to write many good books. I don’t know if it’s ever really changed, in the history of all authors. Look at Agatha Christie with all her Miss Marple books and with the Poirot books.

And you’ve got the Hardy Boys books. I don’t even know how many of those books are, they’re like 75 or something, there the series and if you have one book in a series, then it’s not really a series and nobody’s finding it, and I knew that I needed to have three to five books to really tell myself, I’m making a true go at it.

I even told myself I’m going to write 10 books. I just came up with this audacious goal because I wanted it to work so bad, that I was like, all right, I’ll do it.

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I’ll write 10 books and then I will make a decision about whether this is working or not. If I’m not even making a penny, why am I doing this?

Nobody likes ’em. What’s the tough part? It’s just getting the books out,

Jenny Wheeler: So now you’ve sold multimillion copies of your books on Amazon. Some of them have got 12, 13,000 reviews. An amazing number of reviews there.

And I think you are also on Kindle Unlimited. You’ve decided as a strategy to stick with basically being an Amazon author, have you?

Jeff Carson: Yes. I remember from the very beginning. I was reading a bunch of books also, about how do you make money being a self-published author? First it was like, how do you make money being an author? I realized like going the traditional route wasn’t the way that these people were making money.

I went and looked up everything I could on how to be a self-published author, and it just seemed super complicated to be. everywhere, as in Apple, Kobo, Barnes and Noble, all the places, versus only published on Amazon and being, –  back then – you were treated much better on Amazon too.

If you were to upload back then, I’m not saying now, but like back then, if you were to upload a manuscript on Apple, people were waiting three weeks for them to even show the title.

I thought why would I even care? And then I can just worry about writing, and then marketing through the KDP system that they had. This was actually pre- Kindle Unlimited, so it was even some other stuff that they were doing, but they had three options of how to market your books.

They made sense to me. If I went wide, publishing everywhere, then all of a sudden it’s okay, how am I going to find the readers now?

It seemed a lot more complicated to me I stuck with Kindle only or Amazon only, it’s in print and there’s also audio books and there’s everything.

It was a much simpler thing to me to wrap my head around from the beginning and then I could concentrate on trying to make the best books I could.

Jenny Wheeler: It’s obviously worked really well for you, hasn’t it?

Jeff Carson: It has. Yes, it has worked very well.

Jenny Wheeler: Turning back to that point too, of deciding to be a writer, give us an idea of what you had been doing up until then. It wasn’t anything involving marketing was it, so that you at least had some idea about how to go about marketing books?

Jeff Carson: Yeah. I was doing some online marketing and trying to make my income portable so we could do things like go to Italy and stuff like that.

And so I was familiar with the concept of what it takes to market online. I think it’s a little more obvious to most people now, but back then it was really weird to give away something for free. To work all this time on a novel, it took me months and months to write and then just give it to people.

And I did that for like years. I gave away my first book. And then I had links to my other books inside of that book, and I assumed some people would like them and start buying the other books, and so that concept really helped me open my mind to how, or what and how it works to reach a larger audience.

You get a looser grip on what you could make off of that first book. Like, how much money could I make?

Just release that thought. Try to get into as many people’s hands as possible in any way possible. And try to make good books. That’s because in the end, if it’s not a good book, it doesn’t matter if it reaches 30 million people, they’re not going to want to read the next ones.

Jenny Wheeler: Is another way of saying it perhaps that you understood how to create the importance of creating an author platform right at the beginning?

Jeff Carson: The thing is, I literally did not create an author platform, and that was another thing.

I saw people going to town on social media, being all over Facebook and all over Twitter and all over this.

And, again, I said to myself, I don’t think that’s the platform. I think the platform is the books.

The book is where the people are and at the very end of the book, they either want to keep reading the next book or they don’t, they’re not going to go to Facebook and then get convinced that way.

It’s the platform are the books, I feel like.

Jenny Wheeler: That’s great. Turning to Jeff as reader, because we are starting to come to the end of our time together and we always like to ask our guests about their own reading taste. This is The Joys of Binge Reading.  Many of our listeners will be what they call ‘whale’ readers. They like to read through series, they like to discover new series.

They want to invest time in a book that they know that’s going to be more like it. Tell us about your own reading tastes and whether you ever have been yourself a binge reader.

Jeff Carson: I guess I would consider myself a binge reader. I read every night. I like pretty much the same genre I’m in, that I write in.

I like a little bit of science. I love anything that’s science based and so I love science fiction. I love also a little bit of the supernatural along with it. I love like the Pendergast series and like that type of stuff.

Then I am a junkie for nonfiction, self-help type stuff, I’m always looking to be better every day.

Jenny Wheeler: Do you mean with your writing or all sorts of things?

Jeff Carson: All sorts of things. I feel like I’ve read or listened to all the writing books and all the self-help books.

Jenny Wheeler: Can you name a few authors for us that you’d like to recommend to people who might be listening.

Jeff Carson: I guess Lincoln, Child and the Pendergast series, It’s great. And Douglas, Preston. Any of their books.

I just love that there’s super science. They follow the science and there’s always like some supernatural hint to it. I would recommend that. And then science fiction, which I also like to read.

There’s another self-published author. I guess he’s with Amazon Publishing now, but Marco Klos, K-L-O-O-S. I really like him. Those are just a couple people I really like to read.

Jenny Wheeler: Interesting. We’re coming up to close to 300 episodes of this podcast, and it just amazes me how many authors there are still around because, I’ve never heard example of Marco Kloos. And you think after all this time and looking around the web for popular fiction, it’s amazing there’s still so many of them out there, it’s just remarkable.

Jenny Wheeler: Looking back down the tunnel of time, I always do like to ask if there’s one thing you’d change about your creative career, what would it be?

Jeff Carson: I don’t know. I think I’m in the midst of changing now a little bit and branching out from only writing.

I feel like being in the dark or in the enclosed room in silence is getting to me a little bit. I want to do something else, maybe some film or some video.

I bought a camera and I’ve been doing some filming. Maybe I wish I would’ve started that earlier. Otherwise, as far as writing goes, I’ve made some really bonehead mistakes in my time, but I wouldn’t have learned what I learned if I didn’t do that. I can’t really say I’d change anything.

Jenny Wheeler: If you made some bonehead mistakes, you seem to have recovered from them pretty well.

Jeff Carson: Yeah. I figured it out.

Jenny Wheeler: Actually, that was something I was going to ask you because your books are so cinematic. Maybe you do watch a lot of TV, as you’ve said as well, but they’re very much in that frame of cinematic and you would think be very easily translated into TV or film?

Have you got ambitions to maybe even turn them into scripts yourself?

Jeff Carson: Yeah, I would love to, I would love to have it be a TV showI don’t think I know how that would happen, and that’s why I can’t picture it. Oh, here’s step A, B, and C and D to do, to make that happen. I am looking into that this year with a friend who lives out in LA who kind of knows, but I don’t.

I don’t know how that would work, but yeah, the answer is, yeah, I’d love that for that to happen. That would be great. If anyone’s listening, call me.

Jenny Wheeler: I always smile because you think about something like Bridgerton, those books were written 20 years ago or more. And now they are a sudden phenomenon. So, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s going to happen overnight, but it will happen.

Jeff Carson: Yeah, hopefully.

Jenny Wheeler: What’s next for Jeff the author, in terms of what have you got on your desk for the next 12 months? What are you finishing off or starting?

Jeff Carson: I am in the middle of writing the next Wolf book, and that is all I’ve got going so far. I’m in the middle of that. I was writing that all day. until, this interview.

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Jenny Wheeler: And how long does it take you to do a Wolf book?

Jeff Carson: I think theoretically four to six months, if I’m concentrating, This one is taking forever because we went to Italy for five months. It was the same thing we did 12, 13 years ago. But we went with our two children this time, and it was fun.

I was kicking myself for not writing as much as I maybe should have, but at the same time I was like, whatever, we’re not going to be doing this ever again in our lives. Who cares? But now that I’m back, I’m in writing mode and definitely productive. It usually takes four, six months, no more than seven months, if I’m concentrating.

Jenny Wheeler: Where can readers find you online? And do you like interacting with your readers?

Jeff Carson: Yes, you can find me. Just type in Jeff Carson on Amazon. I shy away from saying Google Jeff Carson because there’s some country singer that’ll always come up before me if you Google it.

Go to Amazon or my website, Jeffcarson.co with no ‘m.’ I love to interact with people via email. That’s where I like to talk to people.

Jenny Wheeler: That’s great. Jeff, thank you so much for your time. It’s been wonderful talking. The books are terrific. They really are great. Entertainment and you live in a new world when you go in those books. It is really fun to read them. I recommend them highly to anybody who’s listening.

Thanks so much.

Jeff Carson: Thank you very much for having me.

Dwight Holing’s contemporary western thriller series starring Nick Drake owe their success to their readers, who are vocal in clamoring for the next book . . .

In this binge reading episode Dwight explains how he sees writing as a collaboration and agrees with feted author John Cheever who once said “I can’t write without a reader. It’s precisely like a kiss. You can’t do it alone. “

Next time on Binge Reading. We’re featuring international best-selling author, Helen Brown. Helen’s classic memoir Cleo, The Small Black Cat That Helped Heal A Family has sold over 2 million copies and has been translated into 18 languages and sold in 42 countries.

Helen is a good friend of mine, so it’s pleasing to be celebrating the 300th episode of the show with her latest book. Mickey The Cat Who Helped Me Through Times Of Change. Those of you who know Helen’s work will know cats usually feature.

Mickey is another heart- touching gem, a wistful coming of age true story about the transition from childhood to adolescence, and the small stray cat who helped guide the way.

That’s next time in two weeks on The Joys Of Binge Reading podcast.

That’s it for the day. See you next time and happy reading.

Irish magic from Jennifer Deibel – the best- selling and award-winning author of a series of charming Emerald Isle novels combining history, family, faith and romance.

Her newest book, The Irish Matchmaker…introduces matchmaker Catriona Daly.

Hi I’m your host Jenny Wheeler and today on Binge Reading Jennifer talks about how a US born gal fell in love with Ireland. and her latest book The Irish Matchmaker. As daughter of a well-known matchmaker, Catríona Daly is no stranger to the business of love – and she sees it as her ticket away from the sleepy village that only comes alive during the annual matchmaking festival.

Our Giveaway this week is Summer Sleuthing – June Mystery Thrillers. Sadie’s Vow – Book #1 in my Home At Last San Francisco historical mystery series is included.

Stock up on some great summer reading here!

​https://books.bookfunnel.com/summersleuthing/9mwtzhs5pv

Before we get to Jennifer – a reminder You can help defray the costs of production by buying me a cup of coffee on buymeacoffee.com/jennywheelx

And if you enjoy the show. Leave us a review so others will find us too. Word of mouth is the best way for others to discover the show and great books they will love to read.

A Dance In Donegal, Jennifer Deibel:  https://www.amazon.com/Dance-Donegal-Jennifer-Deibel/dp/0800738411

The Princess Bride (movie) Irish location:  https://giggster.com/guide/movie-location/where-was-the-princess-bride-filmed#:

Lisdoonvarna:  https://matchmakerireland.com/

https://www.ireland.com/en-us/destinations/county/clare/lisdoonvarna

The Maid of Ballymacool, Jennifer Deilbel: https://jenniferdeibel.com/books/the-maid-of-ballymacool/

Willie Daly, Irish matchmaker: https://www.williedaly.com/

Books Jennifer is reading:

Jaime Jo Wright, The Lost Boys of Barlow Theater: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/90203406-the-lost-boys-of-barlowe-theater

Natalie Walters Snap agency series:  https://www.amazon.com/The-SNAP-Agency-3-book-series/dp/B08XW1LGC3

Website: www.jenniferdeibel.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jenniferdeibel_author

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/JenniferDeibelAuthor

But now, here’s Jennifer Hello there, Jennifer,  and welcome to the show, it’s great to have you with us.

Jenny Wheeler: But now here’s Jennifer. Hello there, Jennifer, and welcome to the show. It’s great to have you with us.

Jennifer Deibel: Hi Jenny. Thanks so much for having me. I’m looking forward to chatting.

Jenny Wheeler: These Irish stories are both best sellers and award winners.

 How did you come to start on the Irish story thread?

Jennifer Deibel: It all feels like it happened by accident, but I believe everything happens by design. My husband and I had lived in County Donegal for two years as students. We were studying the language and the culture. My husband had fallen in love with all things Celtic after spending a summer abroad in Wales during university.

We spent two years there and when we came back I was expecting our first baby. He went into graduate school in Texas and I was struggling to process all we had experienced in those two years.

The idea for what would eventually become my debut novel, A Dance in Donegal, came to me, a story about an Irish American girl who moves to rural Donegal to teach.

I started writing it then and of course once my baby was born, it sat for a very long time. It took about 15 years for me to actually finish the whole manuscript.

During which time we moved back to Ireland and lived in County Galway. While we were there, we had our son and I heard about a parenting website that was starting up called The Better Mom and they were looking for contributors.

I applied there and was accepted and was encouraged to start my own blog, so readers would have a place to go to if they liked what I had to say on The Better Mom.

My blog opened the door for me to write for some other publications across the country, and that’s when I started making the connections that would eventually lead to my first book contract, which I signed, I believe in 2018.

It was a long road, and I never thought as a child that I would write a book. But I always thought it was something that would be fun to do. I just didn’t think I was capable of it. So that time in Ireland really is what planted the seeds of ideas for all of these stories.

Jenny Wheeler: Did either you or your husband have Irish ancestry that might explain that magic thing that seemed to have captivated you?

Jennifer Deibel: Absolutely. My maiden name is Martin and where we lived in Galway was actually not too far from one of the main Martin strongholds in Ireland centuries ago.

So I’ve got that background is in my blood. My husband has English and Welsh on his side. His grandmother was born right on the border of Wales in England, so we’ve got the Celtic blood in our veins for sure.

Jenny Wheeler: Oh, that’s great. Now, the one we are talking about today is the fourth in this Irish series, The Irish Matchmaker. And I hadn’t realized until I read the book that matchmaking is closely woven into Ireland as a tradition. The idea of a village matchmaker… I gather that it still does exist today in these days of Tinder.

Tell us about the matchmaker in Irish village life.

Jennifer Deibel: So, it’s really fascinating. I first learned about it when we were living in Galway, and we would have tour groups come over that we would lead and we would take them all around and driving from Galway City down to the Cliffs of Mohr, which to some people might be better known as the Cliffs of Insanity from The Princess Bride (movie).

We passed through a little village called Lisdoonvarna, and there was always a huge billboard for their annual matchmaking festival.

The more I looked into it, I discovered that in this particular village it sarted in the late 18 hundreds when a doctor discovered the mineral content of the wells in that area were very high and could be used for medicinal purposes.

The fancy, rich, cultured folk would come in the fall to take the waters and use that opportunity to set their children up with each other because it was one of the few times that gentrified people were around other people of their stations to be able to do that.

At the same time, the harvest had just ended and the farmers were coming into town to spend their money and make trades and do market days with their livestock and things like that.

The farmers finally had time and money to look for love. It was born out of this, seeming happenstance and it continues on for the entire month of September.

To this day, Willie Daly is the current matchmaker. He’s third generation, and he continues to match people up all throughout the festival and is pretty well known worldwide for it.

Jenny Wheeler: Did you get to talk to Willie Daly?

Jennifer Deibel: I did. We spoke over email multiple times. We tried to set up a phone call, but that was difficult to do with him, of course, being in Ireland and me being in America and he wasn’t super comfortable with Zoom.

But he was able to provide me with lots of valuable information about what it was like for him as a child growing up with a father who was a matchmaker, as well as his time as a matchmaker himself.

And he also wrote a memoir called Ireland’s Last Matchmaker. And it’s an absolutely charming read. If you’re ever wondering what it’s like. It reads like a novel almost and gives the details of what goes into matchmaking.

What’s the terminology for each different part of the process and what does that look like, and what goes into deciding who would be a good match and who wouldn’t be, and all of that.

It’s absolutely fascinating, and invaluable to me through the course of writing this book, for sure.

Jenny Wheeler: Catriona, your heroine and her father Jimmy, run a very successful family business as matchmakers.

They have inherited this down the generations, and I gather that there is an aspect of it that is an inherited skill as well as, perhaps some of it being learned almost like an intuition. Tell us about that aspect of it.

Jennifer Deibel: I think you can’t help – like any family business – if you grow up in that environment, you can’t help but naturally absorb a lot of the skills and thought processes and intuition that goes with it.

My husband’s family were a mechanic and auto family and it seems like they all are born knowing all this stuff about cars.

And I think that’s how it was for Catriona and Jimmy and certainly how it seemed to be for Willie, our real life matchmaker.

Being immersed in that from day one. And being able to have a front row seat to that. You get to learn how to read people in a way that I think other people might miss.

And you learn how to look beyond just the surface. While two people might seem good on paper for one another, sometimes there’s something within the meeting that a matchmaker might pick up on that someone in the general public might not.

And I think it’s a little bit genetic and a little bit learned just from being immersed in that process and in that culture and having a life of observation and reading people, which I think is really cool.

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Jenny Wheeler: The sense of Irish village life very much comes through strongly in the story. And Catriona is wanting to change the direction of her life.

She’s been a matchmaker for quite some time, probably a decade or more, and she’s got to the point where she wants a match of her own. She decides in this book to perhaps do something that isn’t quite within the rules of matchmaking and that is manipulate a man for herself. Tell us a bit about that.

Jennifer Deibel: Yes, so poor Catriona. She’s reached the phase of always a bridesmaid, never the bride.

She’s very good at what she does and so everybody comes to her for their matches, her and her father. And she is at the point now where she wants that love for herself. She’s starting to get a little bit of a root of bitterness.

In the match that she’s making in the opening chapters of the book, we see she has a hard time watching the happiness of the bride and groom-to-be because she wants it so badly for herself and she doesn’t really see the kind of man that she wants in the tiny farming village of Lisdoonvarna.

She doesn’t want a life of poverty and the only way she can do it is to finagle a match with a man above her station,

She doesn’t really think that’s possible until a gentleman returns who had been at the festival the previous year and was matched with or by a matchmaker from the neighbouring village and they’re going to use the Daly family services and that’s when her plan hatches. She plans to see if she can match him with herself and she sees it as her last chance to “get out of Dodge” and finally get to the life of luxury that she so deeply desires, or thinks she desires.

Jenny Wheeler: You say on your website that your books aim to bring all the charm of an Irish village to your story as well as hope and encouragement of faith.

I wonder if you’d like to expand on that a little bit and perhaps try and explain to us what is the special secret of Irish culture.

Jennifer Deibel: I think anybody who’s traveled to Ireland can attest to this. There is something about it that gets under your skin and haunts you forever, once you leave.

The people are warm and inviting. They’re far deeper, more spiritual and philosophical people, than others might think.

On the surface, they have the reputation of being the drinkers and the fighters and they’re happy-go-lucky, which they are in their own right, but they look at the world in a way that nobody else does.

And there’s some sort of magic mixture when you’ve got the Irish sea air, the rolling Green Hills, the music, the language, all coming together with that Irish spirit of life.

And it’s unlike anything I’ve ever experienced. And I’ve been blessed to be able to travel all over Europe and America, and I’ve never found anything like it. And in my own spiritual journey I think those years in Ireland, in some ways, I felt closer to God and more rooted in my faith than I have at any other time.

Everywhere you look you can’t help but see the fingerprints of the Creator and see the beauty of diversity in the language and the culture. It’s intoxicating. And I want to be able to bring that to people who will never be able to step on a plane and experience it for themselves.

Jenny Wheeler: You are very upfront about these being inspirational fiction books, so faith does play an element. How do you balance that for the people who perhaps don’t share your faith, to make the story still fun for them?

Jennifer Deibel: I try to approach it as organically as possible. If you were to read all four of my books, you would see the spiritual thread or arc is very different in each of them. In some it’s more upfront and more, articulated than in others and others it’s much more subtle, and I think that’s the way faith is for everybody.

For some people it’s very strong and they’re very vocal about it. For others, it’s more quiet.

I try to make it be more about the character’s journey in their own faith, rather than trying to make it a sermon or telling other people what they should believe. I want them to get that experience through the lens of somebody else, which is why we read.

We want to be able to experience something through someone else’s eyes. I think that way it’s a little less intimidating and a little more accessible to people, no matter where they are on their faith journey.

Jenny Wheeler: In this book, most of the main characters have become a little bit disillusioned or disappointed in their faith. They express those feelings of doubt or uncertainty, don’t they?

Jennifer Deibel: Absolutely. And I think that’s important too for people who have been people of faith or followers of Jesus or a Christian, or however you want to say it for a long time, as well as people who have no idea what that might mean.

I think it is important that we’re honest with ourselves and with our Creator about our struggles and doubts because that’s what makes us human and that is what makes it so relatable

When you think, gosh, I’ve had those same questions. Like I’m not the only one. And it helps you be able to relate as well. And that’s where I hope readers are encouraged in their own journey. Whether they’ve never thought about God or they’ve been following him for, 50 years.

I want them to see that connection and see how they can use the lessons the characters learn to bolster their own faith along the way.

Jenny Wheeler: Obviously romance is important in this book because it is a matchmaker that we are talking about, but you’ve got a lot of themes going there with faith, hope, family, and the Irish culture. How essential do you see romance as being to your overall stories? I.

Jennifer Deibel: I think it’s central to the stories.  If you take the romantic element out of it there’s not a lot of the story left.

But I think you could even change how you view romance. Of course, it’s the romance that we tend to think of the hero and heroine falling in love.

But I like to think of it too as Ireland’s romancing the reader and drawing them into all things Irish and my prayers through the faith that they would be romanced by God and by the pull of his grace.

There’s lots of layers to what I consider romance beyond the typical love story, but I think the love story is the story in my books anyway.

Jenny Wheeler: I was curious about whether you began with historical fiction. I wondered if you’d had one of those careers where you’d started out writing for someone like Harlequin and then developed from there, but it wasn’t quite like that, although obviously you had a trainee ground with your blog and other writing. How important is the historical fiction aspect?

Jennifer Deibel: It’s integral to these stories because especially when you’re talking about Ireland, there’s such a rich history. You could fill a million books with stories of things that happened over the course of Ireland’s history and still barely scratch the surface.

It’s important for us to look back. They say that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. It’s important to look back, but I also think it’s really fun to imagine what life might have been like back then because we have no way to tell.

A book is a great way to be able to experience things that we’ll never be able to experience on our own. And to continue that legacy and that rich heritage that is there in that country, I think is important to keep at the forefront so that we don’t forget.

Jenny Wheeler: Historical fiction authors always have that challenge of balancing the real-life history with their imagination and their stories.

Have you found anything particularly tricky about doing that? And is there one particular time when you really felt challenged about whether you should stick to the truth of what the facts were or may adapted for your story?

It’s perfectly acceptable to do it, but I just wondered how you approached that.

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Jennifer Deibel: Yes. I’m always delighted when I’m doing my research and I’ve already decided what time of year, what year the story is set, and then I find some really fascinating historical event that happened right at the perfect time to coincide with the story. With my third book, the Maid of Ballymacool there had been a raid on the house where the whole story is set.

But it was raided by the wrong people and it was raided at the wrong time for what I needed in my story.

I may have taken some creative liberties with some of those details and then straightened things out in the author’s note, but I do try to stay as true to history as possible because it’s important. We need to know how things really were.

But there have been a couple of times like that – or I’ve had to leave the detail out of the story altogether, even though I really want to include it somehow. because it would just take too much fudging.

I would feel like I’ve betrayed history in my ancestors a little bit if I changed it too much.

That is a continual challenge with all of these stories.

Jenny Wheeler: Have you done any family history? Are there any real relatives that you’ve identified still there?

Jennifer Deibel: One of my cousins has done extensive research and she got all the way back to the early 1800s and our Martins were still in Tennessee, and the trail was starting to die out a little bit. We haven’t been able to trace it exactly back to a village or to current living relatives.

I believe they’re out there. It’s just the research trail has gone a little bit cold and in my book researching. I haven’t had a lot of time to delve into it myself, but I would love to eventually

Jenny Wheeler: I hate to mention the dreadful acronym, DNA, but probably if she did a DNA test, you’d immediately find lots of third and fourth cousins.

Jennifer Deibel: We probably would. We probably would.

Jenny Wheeler: Tell us about the process of starting a new book. How do you approach that? How do you even decide on the central idea? And then do you do a lot of outlining beforehand or do you jump straight in? How do you go about it?

Jennifer Deibel: Usually what happens is I pitch a handful of ideas to my publisher. Usually the story ideas are triggered by an event that I recently learned about, or a tradition or some historical detail that I stumbled across.

Every one of my stories has started with that, where I learn about this new little nugget of fascinating history that I never knew about, and I just start asking questions.

I wonder what would happen if,’ and that’s where the story ideas come from. Once they decide which ones they want, they tell me which ones they’d like me to do first.

At that point the only outlining I really do is in writing the synopsis for the story to pitch to my publisher. I know the main plot points. I know the conflict, I know basically how it’s going to be resolved, but after that I’m what they, I like to call a ‘planter, ‘so I don’t plot in the traditional sense, but I write scenes in my head as I’m going about my normal life.

When I sit down to write, I just type out what I see in my brain, like I’m watching a transcribing a movie.

I don’t always know what’s going to happen exactly after that scene is over. Sometimes I’ll write a scene, the floodgates are open, and then the scene is done.

And then I literally have no idea what’s happening next until I have a couple of days to write it in my head again. I’ve tried outlining because I feel like it would be so much easier, but my brain does not want to work that way.

Jenny Wheeler: You mentioned your third book, the Maid of Ballymacool. That did win an award recently, didn’t it? Tell us about that award.

Jennifer Deibel: It did, it won the Selah Award for Historical Romance, which is done through the Blue Ridge Mountains Christian Writers Conference, and I was absolutely shocked. This was the first of my books to final in a major book contest. My debut won the Reader’s Choice Award for Historical Romance.

But ever since then, I haven’t finaled in an industry contest. So I was absolutely honored to be a finalist. And there were eight other books that were finalists in the category.

I was completely grateful to be recognized and ready to celebrate whoever did win. And when they called the name of my book as first place, I think you probably could have heard my gasp in New Zealand.

I was just absolutely flabbergasted. I’m still coming off that high. That was just a few days ago. I’m actually looking at the plaque as I talk about it. And I’m just grateful.

My prayer is that people who are might be drawn to that book because they’ve heard of the awards that book deals with themes of identity and purpose in like your roots of who you are when you don’t know where you came from.

Anybody who has been felt overlooked or unloved or undervalued I pray that story would be an encouragement to them.

Jenny Wheeler: That’s lovely. What you hope your readers get from your stories and what feedback that they say they get from your stories.

Jennifer Deibel: The most common feedback I get is they feel like they’ve just stepped off a plane from a trip to Ireland, which just absolutely warms my heart. That is one of the biggest hopes that I have for everyone who reads the book.

And a lot of people say that they see themselves in one of the characters, or they relate to one of the struggles or they appreciate the honesty that the characters have with their faith struggles or when a character has an epiphany on something they haven’t quite thought of it that way.

I hear all sorts of things, but one of the main ones is they feel like they were in Ireland as they read.

Jenny Wheeler: That’s great. You mentioned about how you never thought you would write a book. There is that saying ‘we’ve all got one book in us’ and I guess there’s quite a few people listening who, if their keen readers do occasionally have that thought of, oh, I could do this.

If someone was wanting to start out and write their first book, what advice would you give them?

Jennifer Deibel: I would say just sit down and start writing. I think a lot of people, and I’ve talked to a lot of people, who’ve asked me that question who feel like they need to get some kind of training or some kind of a degree and learning the craft is important, but learning the craft won’t do any good if you don’t get the words on the page.

And so like I tell my students – I teach seventh grade English. Every first draft is a poopy first draft. It’s called a rough draft for a reason.

Just get the words on the page. You can make it pretty later. And so that’s what I would say is if you’ve got a story idea brewing, just sit down and start writing and then look around for like-minded writers’ groups in your area.

If you do a search online lots of things will pop up, because writing can feel very lonely, and it is solitary in that I’m the only one that can get the words out of my head and onto the screen.

But a community of writers who are all going through the same process is hugely important, I think because I would’ve given up long before I ever published my first book if it wasn’t for the writers surrounding me, encouraging me and helping me see that I wasn’t the only one. So that would be my two biggest pieces of advice.

Jenny Wheeler: That’s fantastic. Turning to Jennifer as reader, because we do always like to ask our guests about their own reading tastes and whether they binge read or not?

Do they have anything they’d particularly like to recommend to others? Have you been a binge reader in the past and have you got time to read at the moment?

Jennifer Deibel: I have been a binge reader. It’s strange. I feel sometimes a little bit like the odd one out in the bookish world.

I haven’t always been a reader. As a child, I did not enjoy it. But what I realized was I just hadn’t found what I like to read. Of course I love to read historical fiction.

That’s what I fell in love with reading and writing. But when I’m writing historical fiction, I can’t read it because it messes with my own head space.

I’ve had to branch out a little bit, and right now I am loving romantic suspense and creepy suspense in the inspirational world.

I am currently devouring Jaime Jo Wright’s latest book.

I’ve forgotten the title (Editor Note:  The Lost Boys of Barlow Theater)

It’s her most recent one.

And then I’ve also been a binge reader.   

The last series I’ve binge read was from Natalie Walters. It was her Snap agency series, and it’s an FBI, true crime, romantic suspense series that I could not get enough of.

I need her to write the next one very soon.

Jenny Wheeler: That’s great. I haven’t come across either of those authors, so I’ll be interested to look them up.

Jennifer Deibel: Definitely do it.

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Jenny Wheeler: Now you’re pretty remarkable yourself in that you are still working, I believe pretty well full-time, as a school teacher. You’ve raising three children and still finding time to write award-winning books. How do you do it?

Jennifer Deibel: I don’t know. I was telling my husband recently. We just finished the school year about two weeks ago. About four weeks ago, I was telling him I don’t feel like I’m excelling at anything that I do.

I feel like I’m a jack of all trades, master of none. I see where I need to shore up things in every role.

I could not do what I do without my family. They have been so extremely supportive and excited for me.

My kids and my husband are my biggest cheerleaders. I think my husband cried harder than I did when my first books came in a box and we held them in our hands. So that’s number one.

Then the other thing I have to do is constantly reevaluate which task is on what priority burner and moving things to the back burner for a while so I can focus on whatever the task is at hand.

For my books, the bulk of my books get written over summer and Christmas and spring breaks. By the grace of God, a supportive family and just trying to prioritize on a daily basis is how I’m surviving these days.

Jenny Wheeler: How old are your children?

Jennifer Deibel: Our oldest is 19. She just finished her first year of university. Our middle is 17 and she is heading into her senior year of high school, and then our son is 13 and he is heading into eighth grade in the fall.

Jenny Wheeler: They are older now, so not quite you needing the same sort of care, although they obviously still do need plenty of attention. It’s a mistake to think teenagers don’t need that attention, isn’t it?

Jennifer Deibel: Oh, for sure. But yes, they make a lot of dinners when I’m on deadline. If they were little I would be at a different point in my career for sure.

Jenny Wheeler: That’s fantastic. Tell us about what’s on your desk for the next 12 months. What are you working on right now in this break?

Jennifer Deibel: I am actually on deadline for my first round of line edits, which is the nitpicky stuff – making sure the eye color stays the same.

How many commas did I use? How many times did I use this word? The real nitty gritty editing for my fifth novel, which is set to come out sometime in January of 2025.

And I plan to do the title and cover release on that this summer, sometime hopefully in June, but it might be July.

And then I am also contracted for a devotional with my publisher that is Thirty- One Days of Devotions based on Irish blessings, and that is due in November, but I’m hoping to get it completed this summer so that I can start school in the fall with a kind of a clean slate.

Jenny Wheeler: Lovely. And that fifth book hasn’t got a title yet?

Jennifer Deibel: It does, but we’re keeping it close to the chest until we’re ready for pre-orders.

Jenny Wheeler: Sure. And do you have any thoughts about number six?

Jennifer Deibel: Yes, I just sent a handful of story ideas to my editor and she is taking them to the next step in the process in a couple of weeks. I should know, hopefully by the end of June, if I’m going to write book six and seven or beyond.

Jenny Wheeler: Fantastic. That’s wonderful. Where can readers find you online and do you welcome, interaction online?

Jennifer Deibel: Oh, I love interacting with readers online. The one stop shop where people can find information about my books, links to my social media, sign up for my newsletter – All of that is just on my website. And it’s Jennifer Deibel.com and that’s all the things that they need are there.

Social media wise, I’m most active on Instagram, but I’m also on Facebook and it’s my favorite thing ever to talk to readers about books and life and all the things. I hope they come find me.

Jenny Wheeler: Are you still doing a blog?

Jennifer Deibel: Not really. There is a blog on my website, but I haven’t updated it in a very long time.

Jenny Wheeler: That’s hardly surprising. With all everything else you’ve got on. Jennifer, it’s been wonderful talking. Thank you so much for your time.

Jennifer Deibel: Oh, thank you so much for having me. It’s been delightful.

Irish best sellers with Faith Hogan…

Faith Hogan is an award-winning and best-selling Irish author of nine contemporary novels, the latest of which is The Gin Sisters Promise.

Her books are for grownups, feel good woman’s fiction which is unashamedly uplifting, and inspiring, but doesn’t dodge the hard questions,

Faith talks not only about The Gin Sisters Promise, her latest heartfelt family story, but also because her new Christmas book, On The First Day Of Christmas.

Faith talks not only about The Gin Sisters Promise, her latest heartfelt family story, but also because her new Christmas book, On The First Day Of Christmas

Jenny Wheeler: Next time on Binge Reading. Jeff Carson and his David Wolf Colorado mountain series. It’s an Amazon hit with millions of copies sold internationally, and he’s regularly recommended as suitable for fans of David Baldacci and Daniel Silva.

He talks about how he got started on that series and his new series, a contrasting series to David Wolf, featuring Italian woman police officer Ali Flavia, set against the backdrop of Italian culture, ancient walled towns, tourist mayhem and fabulous food and wine.

Remember to leave us a review if you enjoy the show Word of mouth is still the best way for others to discover us and great books. They will love to read.

That’s it for today.

See you next time, and Happy Reading.

Acclaimed Australian broadcaster and wordsmith Kel Richards is passionate about classical mysteries, and the Golden Age of the 1930s when Agatha Christie and her fellow authors were writing them…

Kel is also an Anglican lay canon, deeply immersed in Narnia creator and theologian C.S. Lewis’ Oxford college world and his circle of friends, including Prof. J. R. Tolkien.

Bring all of them together and you have Kel’s Country House Mysteries, featuring Jack Lewis and friends solving brain teasing “closed door” mysteries in 1930’s Oxford.

Hi, I’m your host Jenny Wheeler and today on the Binge Reading show Kel talks about his love for old fashioned clue puzzle mysteries – the sort that aren’t generally written any more – as well as his passion for Australian English – one of the richest vocabularies in the world, in his view.

We’ve got two book offers this episode – the free Mystery  Thriller Freebies for June free featuring Sadie’s Vow, Book #1 in the Home At Last trilogy – A gold rush romance historical mystery series

Three feisty women. Three steadfast men. A shared quest for justice.

These mystery, thriller, and suspense writers have teamed up to bring you these FREE books!

Scoop them up today!

https://books.bookfunnel.com/thrillingfreebies-jun/nr6fg5wdhw

PLUS – KOBO THRILLER AND MYSTERY SALE – GET OF GOLD & BLOOD THREE BOOK BUNDLE

And there’s a deal on the first three books in the Of Gold & Blood mystery series – another Kobo multi genre sale offer.  Three long form mysteries, at a great sale price…

https://www.kobo.com/nz/en/p/june-thriller-sale

Before we get to Kel – a reminder You can help defray the costs of production by buying me a cup of coffee on buymeacoffee.com/jennywheelx

And if you enjoy the show. Leave us a review so others will find us too. Word of mouth is the best way for others to discover the show and great books they will love to read.

Dr Johnson mysteries, Lillian De La Torre,: https://www.amazon.com/The-Dr.-Sam-Johnson-Mysteries-4-book-series/dp/B07CQB6YKR#:

Charles Dickens Investigations, J. C. Briggs:  https://www.amazon.com/Charles-Dickens-Investigations-11-book-series/dp/B07MPBQLL2

Teddy Roosevelt as detective, Lawrence Alexander:   https://www.amazon.com/Speak-Softly-Theodore-Roosevelt-Mystery/dp/1561290327

Jane Austen as detective, Stephanie Barron:  https://www.goodreads.com/series/40959-jane-austen-mysteries

Master of the Closed Door Mystery:  John Dickson Carr:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dickson_Carr#:~

Kel Richards’ G. K. Chesterton mystery: https://www.amazon.com/Murder-Mummys-Tomb-Chesterton-Mystery/dp/1589199634

English humourist P.G. Wodehouse: https://www.wodehouse.co.uk/

Performing Flea, P.G. Wodehouse: https://www.amazon.com.au/Performing-Flea-P-G-Wodehouse/dp/1841591912

J R Tolkien, The Ents:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ent#:

The Inklings:  https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Inklings

The Eagle and Child pub:  https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/The_Eagle_and_Child

The Nazguls: https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Nazg%C3%BBl

Bill Ponzini The Nameless Detctive:

https://www.fantasticfiction.com/p/bill-pronzini/nameless-detective

Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe series: https://www.deadgoodbooks.co.uk/raymond-chandler-philip-marlowe-books-in-order/

The Aussie Bible: https://www.amazon.com.au/Aussie-Bible-Kel-Richards/dp/0647508486

SkyNews, Peta Credin, https://www.skynews.com.au/opinion/peta-credlin

Austral English; E.E. Morris https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Australian_National_Dictionary

What Kel is reading

P.G Wodehouse Mr Mulliner Short Stories: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meet_Mr_Mulliner

Why Shoot A Butler, Georgette Heyer: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/311134.Why_Shoot_a_Butler_

Website:  https://ozwords.com.au/

But now, here’s Kel:

Jenny Wheeler: , But now here’s Kel. Hello there, Kel, and welcome to the show. It’s great to have with us.

Kel Richards: Nice to be here.

Jenny Wheeler: Now you’ve made a real name for yourself as a distinguished Australian journalist and broadcaster and an expert on language, and we’ll to get onto those aspects of your career later on in the show.

First of all, though, we want to talk to you about your mystery series, because this is a show for people who love popular fiction. So tell us, how did you get the idea to use an internationally recognized theologian as a mystery detective?

Kel Richards: It sprung out of the fact that I like reading really old fashioned clue puzzle murder mysteries from the Golden Age of English murder mysteries, which was between the wars and the twenties and thirties. That’s great stuff. I enjoy reading that because they’re not written and published anymore.

Now if you want to write something like that, you really need to write it as a historical detective novel.

For some reason it doesn’t work in the 21st century, but as a historical novel it does. And there’s a whole bunch of those being written. It’s become a whole class of crime writing that there are people who have written crime novels in using real historical figures, with people like Dr Johnson as the detective. Lillian de la Torre told a whole series of stories with Dr. Johnson as the detective.

There have been stories with, people like Teddy Roosevelt when he was the police commissioner in New York as the detective. There’s been at least one, probably more than one with Charles Dickens as the detective.

There’ve been several with Jane Austen. There’s a whole series, in fact, I think with Jane Austen. So, I thought about, and I did write one novel years ago, in which GK Chesterton was the detective and I thought, oh, now who would I like to write about in the 1930s, because that’s the kind of book I’m doing.

And CS Lewis sprang to mind because I’d been reading Lewis with great pleasure for a great many years.

Jenny Wheeler: As you might expect when one of the central characters is a famous theologian, some readers dislike this and comment negatively on it, and others obviously positively like it. You are a declared lay canon in the Anglican Church, so it obviously is a topic close to your heart. How would you go about tackling that?

Kel Richards: Well, just by knowing Lewis. One of the things I did when I was starting the series was to read his letters.

His letters have been published in I think two or three volumes. And by reading the letters you get the voice of the person. And it was his voice I was interested in more than anything else because there’s stuff that just comes out of him in a particular way, there’s a particular lexicon, a particular vocabulary, a particular structure of sentences.

I learned how that worked and I used that, and the kind of ideas that he kept springing to his mind would go to this. His mind would go to that. So it was from the letters, I got the flow of what the conversation might have been like, and that’s how I said about constructing the character in the books.

Jenny Wheeler: You do manage to make the Oxford of that time come alive. have you been to, Oxford, perhaps even study at Oxford yourself?

Kel Richards: I never studied at Oxford. It would’ve been nice but that was never possible. But we did go there for a week, six days, something like that. But it was a really busy time and I went there knowing that I was interested in writing the series about Oxford.

So we saw all the colleges. We saw Oxford We saw Lewis’s old college, and actually spent a lot of the time in Oxford following in the footsteps of Lewis.

So we went to the famous pub that he used to go to the Bird ‘N Baby, as he called it – the Eagle and Child. We met a bloke there.

We set this up before we went, who had, when he was a boy, had known Lewis’s son… He was a friend of one of Lewis’s sons, a friend of Douglas, his stepson.

He used to go to Lewis’s home, The Kilns. We spent time talking to him about Lewis, and looked at all of those places. When I sat down to write about that, we’d spent enough time there, visiting those places and thinking about that to really bring it vividly to mind.

Jenny Wheeler: As we mentioned, they are brain teaser stories. So you set up situations which seem physically impossible. They defy the laws of physics and then you make it all happen.

Kel Richards: The master of the Impossible Crime was a man named John Dickson Carr. He was American, but he lived in England and the best of his crime novels were written in the 1930s. His chief detective was Dr. Gideon Fell, who was modeled on GK Chesterton.

He developed more than anyone else the idea of the “impossible crime.” The room which is locked on the inside and the keys missing from the door and all the windows are locked from the inside. And the person has been stabbed, not shot, and there’s no weapon in the room or whatever.

He does those impossible things and works out sound solutions for them really well. I’d spent a lot of time reading his stuff. I discovered when I set out to write them that the best way to do it was to do it backwards. You work out a really impossible situation that could never have happened, and then work out step by step how you would make that happen.

You work backwards. Carr himself said, with an impossible crime, with a locked room mystery, He said, it doesn’t have to be plausible, just possible.

All you need to do is to work out what might possibly lead up to this. Then of course, when you write the book, though you worked out the puzzle backwards, you write it frontwards, so you use what authors call plants.

You keep putting in those things, which are going to when you get to the resolution of the whole thing and the solution of the puzzle, people will say, ah, yes, I should have seen that. Because you were planting them there on through as little hints of who knew what and what this was about and who was where at what time.

Putting the plants all in so that you’ve got those and can refer back to them when you get to the solution is the secret to making it look possible, even if not plausible. To set it up. I start at the end. I start with something that looks impossible.

Can I tell you about the one that I wrote about G.K. Chesterton, set in Egypt in 1919 and in that one, there is the ultimate locked room mystery, because what happens is they discover an undisturbed, it’s an archeological dig in the south of Egypt near Thebes, near Luxor – and they discover an undisturbed tomb.

There’s this tomb dug straight into the cliff face. It’s been filled with limestone chips, which is what they used to do in those days. Then there’s a plaster wall, a ceiling off the tomb itself. They break down the wall and the senior archeologist and his assistant go in and there is a mummy’s sarcophagus.

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They take the lid off and inside, instead of being a mummy is the dead body of one of their own the people they’d left on the surface. One of their own team members. You think, okay, that’s the result I want to get. How do I get to a result like that? That’s what you do. You start at the end and then work backwards to build up to it.

Jenny Wheeler: You have to then do a full outline of the stories before you start filling in any detail. In this debate writers have about whether they’re a Plotter or Pantser, you would definitely be at extreme end of the scale?

Kel Richards: No one but an idiot writes without a fairly well constructed outline. One of my favorite writers is P.G. Wodehouse. And Wodehouse used to write incredibly complex and detailed outlines before he wrote the first word of the story.

He needed to know what was happening, to whom and when and where in a lot of detail.

And he used to write outlines that just got longer and longer. He’d end up for a 60, or a 70,000 word book, with a 25,000 word outline.

There’s a really good book, which is actually called Performing Flea, which is an exchange of letters between P.G. Wodehouse and one of his friends, Bill Townend in which he talks about the craft of the writer.

And what you do as a writer if you are going to have a really well constructed book. And the joy of Wodehouse is that, not only are they some of the funniest books ever written, but they’re architecturally perfect and perfect because they’re set in detail ahead of time. It’s the only way to go.

Jenny Wheeler: And his friends, they were brilliant men, but do they hold a particular attraction or interest for you?

Kel Richards: He was a clubbable man. He belonged to clubs. He belonged to an undergraduate club called The Martinets, and then he started his own club called The Inklings, which included Tolkien and Neville Coghill and a whole bunch of really interesting and colorful people.

There’ve been a whole bunch of books which have been biographies of Lewis, which I’ve read obviously, but there’ve been quite a few books written about The Inklings, which is a clever name for a book of authors and would be authors. And they used to meet once a night, once a week, every Wednesday night in Lewis’s rooms at Magdalen.

And then they’d read on meet also on Monday mornings at the Eagle and Child at that pub I mentioned. And they were collectively an interesting group of people. Charles Williams joined them during the Second World War. Their books are interesting and collectively they must have been a really interesting bunch.

In the last book in the series, I actually describe an Inklings meeting which obviously comes out of my imagination, but it’s on all the very detailed accounts of those Inklings meetings that exist. So yes, as a group, a really interesting group.

Jenny Wheeler: Intellectually brilliant as well.

Kel Richards: Just very creative people. I think just with very rich imaginations. If you look at Lord of the Rings, the point about Lord of the Rings is Tolkien’s imagination never stops. It goes on and on.

Just when you think he can’t possibly imagine anything new or anything inventive suddenly comes up with The Ents or something amazing like that. And the Nazgûls, the same. The richness of the imagination just goes on and on.

In fact, no one except J.K. Rowling has managed to, I think, equal that level of constant rich, imaginative invention and that’s just enjoyable.

Jenny Wheeler: Have you read the Harry Potter books?

Kel Riachards: Oh, yes. Yeah. I read all the Harry Potter books. They’re good fun.

Jenny Wheeler: I was intrigued by another of your series., the four books in the Ben Bartholomew series. Here you combine differing scenarios into another multi genre story – a kind of New Testament time travel series. One reader called it Biblical Noir. It’s First century New Testament stories set in contemporary Caesarea with pizza parlours and mobile phones. Where did this come from?

Kel Richards: It didn’t start as a series. It started as a single book. I was approached by Hodder and Stoughton for a book because I was on radio and I was well known and they asked me for a book. I don’t know what they expected. Maybe they expected me to write a book about being in the media or something.

I’ve got no idea. But I had this strange idea of writing a book about a private eye in Jerusalem in the first century. Which meant that you could use all the sort of slangy stuff from Los Angeles private eyes from Philip Marlow and the rest of them and have a lot of fun with it. But also tell a story from that period of time.

I imagined a situation where there was this private eye, this Ben Bartholomew, and after the crucifixion of Jesus, the high priest Caiaphas calls him in and speaking a bit like Marlon Brando in The Godfather says, ‘bring me the body of the Nazarene.’ Having pictured that I then had a story and a plot line.

The first book in the series was The Case Of The Vanishing Corpse and to be honest, if I was being really frank, I’d say in order to avoid having to do lots of detailed historical research, I decided to do the books full of deliberate anachronisms so it’s supposedly set in the first century, but a fun version of the first century where 20th century things happen.

When there are phone numbers, for example, they’re all in Roman numerals which just looks absurd when you look at it. There’s an advertising slogan for a beer called Achilles, and it says Achilles heels, H-E-A-L-S. I was having a lot of fun with that sort of concept, that I really enjoyed.

Jenny Wheeler: Many critics have commented on your humour and I loved some of the hilarious tongue in cheek names you gave people and places…I n Book #2 in the series for example, The Case of the Secret Assassin, cafes and bars are called things like Herod’s Leftovers or Ad Nauseum or Delirium Tremens. Did you have a lot of fun dreaming up these names?

Kel Richards: That’s probably the Wodehouse influence. Wodehouse was brilliant at playing with words, and of course he’s my favourite comic writer. There I was writing these books in this anachronistic version of the first century telling a story but having a lot of fun with it. That kind of whimsical humor. That’s the way to describe Wodehouse. Whimsical humor, I ended up writing it.

One of the reviewers, I have to say, actually said it was very Wodehousian, and that was the best praise I’ve ever had.

Jenny Wheeler: You bend genres in your fiction – something publishers generally don’t much like because they say readers won’t buy them so readily.  Did you come up against that problem?

Kel Richards: Some genres are easy because they have really clear flags. The private eye genre I think is really easy. There’s a bloke named Bill Ponzini, who writes a series of private eye novels called the Nameless Series because his central character who narrates them, never has any name in the stories.

And they’re just classical examples of that particular genre. I discovered the private eye genre from radio, because I’m old enough to have grown up as a boy listening to radio serials. And there was a private eye called Larry Kent on radio. And he was the classic private eye. The genre and all its telltale signs was there in my head and I didn’t have to work at producing that kind of thing.

It was just fun to work with.

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Jenny Wheeler: One thing I did notice, a lot of your books are not available in digital form. It would be simple to get them up online and expand your audience. But do you have any interest in doing that?

Kel Richards: The copyright belongs to the publishers. The formats they come out in are up to the publishers. Once the author hands over the manuscript, what happens to it is no longer our concern, our control, we lose them. The publisher owns all that.

Jenny Wheeler: Publisher’s rights do expire though don’t they? Maybe when that happens, you could put them into digital form.

Kel Richards: You are right. They would work like that. Then who knows? Maybe the publisher one day will do them like that. I just don’t know.

Jenny Wheeler: You’ve also done a whole series of best selling non-fiction books – dealing mainly with all aspects of language, the origins of famous sayings and Aussie slang. Let’s start by talking about Flash Jim, your biography of a most remarkable early Australian.  Tell us about Flash Jim, the author of the first Australian dictionary and a true crime memoir…

Kel Richards: As you said, James Hardy Vaux, though how he pronounced his surname, we just don’t know. There are multiple possibilities. I call him Vaux (rhymes with Fox.)

So, James Hardy Vaux. He was transported to Australia, not once, not once, but three times. He obviously didn’t notice what he was doing wrong.

But he was well educated and he says in his autobiography – he’s written an autobiography, which covers the first 40 years or so of his life – he keeps saying, I needn’t have gone down this path. I could have had a proper middle class career and all that sort of thing.

But anyway, he ended up here as a convict.

And in 1812, while he was in Newcastle – Newcastle was the place of secondary punishment. If you were sent to Sydney to the convict colony of Sydney and you reoffended, you were sent to Newcastle to suffer even worse punishment.

And in Newcastle he had to work on the coal mines, which meant bending double and pushing carts down coal mines and pushing them out again.

And he wanted to get out of that. And so what he did, because he was a well-educated person, but he was mixing with professional criminals. He understood their language, whereas the magistrates and the people trying to manage them didn’t understand their language, the criminal slang of London.

What he did was to sit down and write a dictionary, which he called A Dictionary Of The Flash Language. That’s what they called the language. They spoke the Flash language. And he wrote that and presented it to the commandant of the convent colony at Newcastle, hoping that would get him out of the mines and get him a soft job.

And it worked. He actually got a job as a clerk in the stores. It worked for him. But it was such an interesting document in and of its own that it ended up being published in London in 1819, so it was the first dictionary written in Australia and for Australians, That’s the really interesting thing about it.

A whole lot of the terms in Vaux’s Dictionary Of The Flash Language are still part of our language today. It’s really one of the foundation stones on which the distinctive Australian vocabulary is built, I think. It’s good to tell the story and his own personal story is very colorful and very interesting.

I tell that in the book. At the end of the book, I reprint the whole of his dictionary. For me, it was great fun because language, as you said, is my real interest and real passion.

Jenny Wheeler: He mainly carried out financial scams?.

Kel Richards: He was a thief. He was a pickpocket, he was a fraud. He was a conman. He was a thorough going criminal, one way or another. And I can’t off the top of my head remember which of those crimes he was sent here for the first time. The second time he came back here because he’d managed to get out of the colony illegally, he got himself onto a ship and smuggled overseas.

The third time he was actually involved in a massive fraud against the Bank of Ireland, and he should have been executed, because financial fraud of that scale was considered the worst possible thing in Victorian England. But he managed to persuade the people who were prosecuting him to commute his sentence to life in prison in the colonies.

So that’s how he came out here the third time. But he was a really serious crook. He keeps presenting himself as a reformed character, and I’ve learned my lessons from my life. He never did.

Jenny Wheeler: Did he die in Australia?

Kel Richards: We have no idea. There is no record of his death. We don’t know where he died, when he died, how he died or where he’s buried.

At the point where his autobiography ends, most of the information ends. There’s an Australian academic who’s done a lot of research and has dug up a little bit of information afterwards, but by the time he left jail for the last time he was 60, and at the point where he walks out of jail at the age of 60 he walks off the pages of history and he just vanishes. We have no idea what happened to him.

Jenny Wheeler: You’ve also written the Aussie Bible, which was an effort to translate the Bible into language that the normal average Aussie would understand.  I wondered if Aussie language is that far away from official English. And what was the most challenging thing about this project?

Kel Richards: I’ll tell you how it started. It started with the Cockney Bible. There was a bloke who was teaching scripture classes in London in the East End. And he tried retelling bible stories using cockney rhyming slain. And the kids that he was teaching finally took to it and understood the stories and thought they were great fun.

Some of the stories that he’d done for them were published as a little book called The Cockney Bible (in brackets ‘Well, Bits Of It Anyway,’) I got a review copy of it when I was working in radio. And I thought, oh, this is not bad. This is quite clever. But the Australian language is far better, far more colourful.

This is the most interesting dialect of the English language anywhere in the world. The most colourful, the most inventive. I thought; I can do the same thing for Australians.

I picked out the same kind of Bible stories that he chose, the best known and best loved Bible stories, and retold them in the Australian dialect in our distinctive vocabulary and accent and so on.

And it was published as a little book by the Bible Society called the Aussie Bible, (Bits Of It Anyway,) and it did exceptionally well. It sold about 120,000 copies and did so quite quickly. Then there was, I don’t know whether you know this happened, but there was a bloke in New Zealand who got in touch with me and he said, can I do it here?

And I said, give it a go. And he wrote the Kiwi Bible (in brackets bits of it anyway) setting out to retell the same bible stories using distinctive kiwi vocabulary. It was a very minor trend in publishing, but it was a little trend in publishing just after the year 2000.

Jenny Wheeler:  I have not heard of either of those, but I love your comment about the Aussie colloquial language being particularly vibrant.

Kel Richards: It’s to do with the fact that people were gathered in the early convict colony from all over the place. If you look at Great Britain and you looked at it as a map of local dialects, it would be like a patchwork quilt.

You only need to go to the next valley, sometimes only to the next village to hear a different choice of words, a different vocabulary, a different accent, a different way of framing sentences.

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Now, those people didn’t travel. They normally didn’t speak to anyone who spoke any differently than they did, except when they were arrested for crimes and sent to the other side of the world.

The people who ended up being gathered in Sydney in the early days of the convict colony were from all over the British Isles, and suddenly they were working beside, were quite possibly chained to, people who spoke quite differently from themselves.

Now, it had a number of things grew out of that. One of them was the Australian accent, which is produced as a result of what is called leveling down.

They had to find a way to talk to each other so they understood each other, but it also started the generation of the distinctive Australian vocabulary because they discovered there were all these different names for things.

Now apart from anything else, apart from giving you a richer, larger vocabulary, it makes you very aware of language and they grew an inventiveness in language, which is still part of the Australian language today. If you go to Queensland and a farm’s got a really hard gate to open and close, it’s called a ‘Methodist gate’ because only a Methodist could open and close it without swearing.

It’s like leftovers. Leftovers are called YMCA. Yesterday’s Muck, Cooked Again. There’s a lot of this sort of stuff and it’s just inventiveness. And I think it grew right from the beginning.

By the 1830s, there’s evidence that the Australian language as we know it today already existed and was flourishing and spread across the east coast of Australia and I think it grew out of that initial convict experience.

Jenny Wheeler: That’s interesting because I grew up in the rural countryside on New Zealand and the fifties and sixties. And there were a lot of sayings that my parents said that I thought were Kiwi sayings.

And when I grew older and became more aware of language, I discovered they were actually Australian sayings that had been adopted here in New Zealand as well.

Kel Richards: You are right. There was a common body of language common to both Australia and New Zealand because we have so much shared language. An example of that is the word Hoon.

There was a bloke who was driving with an English visitor and someone cut in front of him. He said, “what a hoon.” The Englishman had no idea what he was talking about. Not the faintest idea, but hoon, for that kind of hooning behavior and hooning driving, that’s common in Australia and just as common in New Zealand.

And the very first proper dictionary, not Vaux’s dictionary, but proper Dictionary of The Australian language was done by a bloke named E. E. Morris at the University of Melbourne. And he called it the Austral Dictionary because he covered both Australian English and New Zealand English in the one book.

So there is a very close connection.

Jenny Wheeler: Tell us a bit about your early life. Where did you grow up? And did you always know that you would be a writer?

Kel Richards: I’ve got no idea. I suppose I loved books from when I was a child. Always have done, I grew up in suburban Sydney. My father was a railway engineer. It was a fairly ordinary, middle class Australian Sydney upbringing. But I was always a bookish person and always interested in books.

And I think I was from the beginning keen to write books. I’ve written a lot of books now. If I add them all up, if I do a complete bibliography, if you include all the booklets and all the different editions of books, it comes up to about 64.

If you take out the booklets and the different editions, it’s about 54, one way or another with children’s books and with books about words and language and fiction and all the rest of it.

It’s a lot of books, so I just think I always was a bookish person. I wasn’t a football playing person. I was a bookish person. Again, I just wanted to do it from when I was young.

And the path to get into broadcasting in those days was you work at a small country radio station and work your way up to City Radio.

And I just did that. I just kept sending out applications. And eventually I got a job in country radio and then another job in country radio, and then another one, and eventually got to the city and worked for the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) with nationally networked programsat one stage

In that sense, I’ve never had a proper job. I’ve been basically a journalist all my life, but I’ve been a radio and television journalist.

And I keep saying to people, there’s no point in working for a living. I was walking down the corridors of a Sydney radio station, 2GB one day, and one of my colleagues, a bloke named John, had been around for a long time.

“Kel,” he said, “I’ve just read that only 15% of Australians enjoy the work they’re doing.” Then he punched me on the shoulder and said, “Aren’t we the lucky ones?” It’s just fun to do. It’s just really enjoyable to do.

Jenny Wheeler: And you’re still doing it, aren’t you? Because although you stepped back from full-time broadcasting some time ago, you’re still doing a regular and very much current affairs column for SkyNews in Sydney, as well as your regular Word Watch commentaries?

Kel Richards: I haven’t retired. I’m just doing less because I’m slowing down. I’m not retired, just slowing down. I’m probably working about half a week, I do a regular five minute spot with Peta Credlin on Sky News, and then I do other bits on Sky News occasionally as a panelist on various panel programs.

I do a one hour weekly talkback show about words and language called the Word Clinic, which is on 2GB in Sydney. 4BC in Brisbane, and the Nine Radio. Network. I do a spot for a Perth radio station. Once a week I write a column on language for the Australian Spectator. Once a week I write two small columns for a magazine called Australian Geographic.

So I’m keeping busy and one of the reasons I do that is the work is just so enjoyable. Now, because I pick and choose what I do, I’m mostly doing things about language and as a journalistic specialty language is just wonderful.

There was an American journalist named William Safire who wrote a column called On Language for The New York Times for about 25 years.

It is just an endlessly interesting area because the English language is a river, not a lake. It is changing all the time and just watching it and being aware of that and following what’s going on and finding the origins of common expressions that we used, that is just endlessly entertaining.

So what I’m doing by keeping on working at least part of the time, is just keeping myself entertained.

Jenny Wheeler: Tell us about your reading tastes. What are you reading at the moment and what would you like to recommend to our listeners?

Kel Richards: I’ve usually got several books going at a time, three or four or five books going at a time. Then I can read a chapter out of whatever I’m in the mood for. I’ve just read a biography of William F. Buckley, Jr, an American journalist, magazine, publisher, commentator, very interesting and colorful man, and a very good writer.

I read books about words and language almost constantly. I’m reading a book at the moment called Johnson’s Dictionary, A Modern Selection, and it’s a paperback, which is selections out of Johnson’s 1755 dictionary. That’s fascinating.

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I’m reading, what else am I reading? I’m reading a P.G Wodehouse book of short stories, Meeting Mr. Mullins. I’ve got a range of books going at any one time.

There’s always one or two of them about language and then the others could be a bit of light fiction, which I read just because that’s how to get to sleep at night. It’s really relaxing and biographies and I’ve just got a huge range of interests

And I just one of the things that I can do, seeing I’m not working full time anymore, is read more and I do. I like hard copies. I can’t read off a screen. It’s not right for me.

Jenny Wheeler: Tell us about the light fiction that you are reading at the moment.

Kel Richards: Oh at the top of the list for light fiction is Wodehouse. Wodehouse  is wonderful. If anyone hasn’t read any Wodehouse., you haven’t enriched your life to be honest. Evelyn Waugh called P.G. Wodehouse the master on the basis that Wodehouse came up with an average of two completely original similes on every page.

Now, Waugh is right. He’s that sort of writer. If you haven’t read any Wodehouse. In the Wodehouse stories, aunts are always the villains. The poor Bertie Wooster has always been put upon by aunts to do things he doesn’t want to do, like presenting the Sunday School prizes or something. So they’re always the villains.

And in one, one of the stories there is Bertie at a country house and on the big front lawn of the country house. Two of his aunts, Aunt Dahlia and one of the other aunts are calling out to each other.

And the way Wodehouse describes it is it was “aunt calling to aunt like mastodons bellowing across a primeval swamp.”

Now that is just very good writing and in one story Bertie Wooster is trying to get in to see an important businessman. And there’s one of these secretaries who is really tough who won’t let him in, and he says she was one of those ice cold secretaries only Genghis Khan would dare to cross, and he only on one of his better days.

Now that’s the sort of writing, which is just wonderful. If I’m not reading Wodehouse, and I read Woodhouse a lot, then I still like those old fashioned clue puzzle murder mysteries. I don’t mind re-reading Agatha Christie or re-reading John Dickson Carr, or any of those detective novels written in that Golden Age, the 1920s, thirties, whatever.

Georgette Heyer, who was really well known for her regency romances, but a lot of people don’t know she also wrote some very good detective novels set in that era.

She wrote them in that era, and I read one of those recently. Why Shoot A Butler? It’s a great name for a book from that era.

That’s the kind of light fiction that I read.

Jenny Wheeler: Are you writing any fiction yourself at the moment?

Kel Richards: Not writing any fiction at the moment. I’m working on a book called How to Write Clear English, and if I can find a publisher for that, I’ll be very pleased. Although I tell you what I did do at one stage because I grew up as a boy really loving the Sherlock Holmes stories. I have written some Sherlock Holmes Pastiche stories.

And there’s a whole little market for that now. It’s a particular genre in the world and there’s an American publisher who specializes in publishing nothing but new Sherlock Holmes story. Sherlock Holmes Pastiche. So I’ve sent him a book. I sent him a book some time ago. It’s still something sitting on his desk and whether it ever gets published or not. I don’t know.

That’s the only fiction that I’ve had anything to do with recently. I’ve been mainly working on nonfiction, so I spent ages working on the Vaux book. And then I’ve spent a long time writing this book on how to write clear English, which I think I’m finally getting towards the end of.

Jenny Wheeler: Where can readers find you online?

Kel Richards: Ah, thank you for the opportunity because this is really good. This is good stuff. You’ll like this. I run a website called Ozwords.com au. OZ words com au.

Now what I do is I write a language column every day. Seven days a week that appears on the front page of that. As well as that, I run a newsletter and you get the language column turning up in your inbox if you’d like to get it for nothing.

And there’s a contact page, so you can send me any comment question, whatever you’d like. And the best comments in questions and my answers turn up on the Q. and A. page. In fact, the best part of the whole website is the Q and A page because people ask terrific questions about, someone asked me recently about under the pump.

Why do we talk about someone who’s under pressure being under the pump? It’s a really good question, and in fact, it turns out the experts don’t know, but they’ve got multiple guesses. It’s just a completely interesting area. And I do this Oz words.com au every single day correspond with readers of the website every day.

By all means, have a look at the website and if you find language interesting, you’ll love it. And if you want to, get in touch.

And the best job I’ve ever had in my entire life? The best job is being grandpa and we have a couple of little grandsons and they are just adorably cute.

They’re the best looking. Two little boys. There’s a 4-year-old and a 6-year-old, best looking 4-year-old and 6-year-old in Sydney. And the smartest, and I speak with totally impartial judgment on that. And they’re wonderful and they come over and come for a sleepover and we spend time with them.

So there’s lots of other things happening as well.

Jenny Wheeler: Sounds wonderful Kel. I’m stunned with your erudition. It’s been great fun talking and thank you for coming on the show.

Kel Richards: My pleasure.

Patti Callahan, and her books about C.S. Lewis tragic love. Or Stephanie Barron’s Jane Austen mysteries… Both on past Joys of Binge Reading episodes….

If you enjoyed Kel, you might also enjoy hearing Pattie Callahan’s Narnia Magic – her series of books dealing with C.S. Lewis and his tragic love for American author Joy Davidman.

Patti has devoted seven years of her life to researching the remarkable relationship between C S Lewis and his American wife, Joy Davidman. Her dedication produced two best-selling books, the first, Becoming Mrs Lewis, tells the story of the precious years of love and marriage the two authors shared before they were separated by Joy’s early death.

The second, Once Upon a Wardrobe, delves into the inspiration behind the magical Narnia children’s series.

Or if you’re into mysteries, listen to Stephanie Barron and her Jane Austen mysteries:

Stephanie Barron’s popular Jane Austen mysteries feature the famous novelist as a crime investigator and are so close to real life that Stephanie sometimes hears Jane’s voice in her head as she writes. Hi there, I’m your host, Jenny Wheeler and today Stephanie talks about channelling Jane Austen, World War II espionage novels, and That Churchill Woman.

Next Time on Binge Reading – Irish magic from Jennifer Deibel –   the best- selling and award-winning author of a series of charming Emerald Isle stories combining history, family faith and romance.

Her newest book, The Irish Matchmaker…introduces matchmaker Catriona Daly.

As daughter of a well-known matchmaker, Catríona Daly is no stranger to the business of love–and sees it as her ticket away from the sleepy village that only comes alive during the annual matchmaking festival.

She has some ideas for herself, but she has to be very patient to see it all work together.

That’s next time – two weeks from today – on the Binge Reading show

And remember – if you enjoy the show. Leave us a review so others will find us too. Word of mouth is the best way for others to discover the show and great books they will love to read.

That’s it for today. See you next time, and Happy Reading!

What if you could take a vacation on your marriage and for six months, pursue a lifetime dream your husband doesn’t share? And he could do the same. That’s the premise for Lian Dolan’s latest book, The Marriage Sabbatical.

Hi, I’m your host, Jenny Wheeler and today Lian, the author of the popular The Sweeney Sisters and Lost And Found In Paris is quick to make clear that the central premise of the marriage sabbatical does not come from personal experience. She jokes her life is ‘just not that interesting.’

But on today’s Binge Reading show, she talks about how she came to write a fascinating tale of marriage veterans of 23 years who take holidays apart for the first time in their lives because of their wildly clashing personal interests, and discover new things about themselves and their love for each other.

But before we get to Lian, be assured. We’ve got our usual free book giveaways this week. It’s open season on freebie thrillers.

Searching for an action-packed thrill ride or a twisty whodunnit??

Look no further!

These mystery, thriller, and suspense writers have teamed up to bring you these FREE books!

Scoop them up today!

And we also have a promo on Kobo. If you’re a Kobo follower, there’s a free download of the Of Gold & Blood Book Bundle Two, Books #1 and #4, and lots of other great authors to choose from in a ‘free first in series’ promo in all genres….

Romance – Space Opera – Mysteries & Thrillers- Sci Fi * Fantasy – Young Adult – Urban Fantasy

THIS IS AN INTERNATIONAL OFFERING – If you live in a country that isn’t included in this promotion, you may have trouble accessing the sale link. If this happens, change the flag at the top of the Kobo homepage to one of the included countries to see the sale link properly.

And a reminder. You can help defray the costs of the show by buying me a cup of coffee on buymeacoffee.com/jennywheelx.

If you enjoy the show, do leave us a review, so others will find us. Word of mouth is still the best way for others to discover the show, and great books. they will love to read.

Ali Macgraw: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali_MacGraw

Love Story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_Story_(1970_film)

ALS: https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/amyotrophic-lateral-sclerosis/symptoms-causes/syc-20354022

Dervla McTiernan: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/16918766.Dervla_McTiernan

Maeve Binchy: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/3532.Maeve_Binchy

Kate Elizabeth Russell (My Dark Vanessa) https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44890081-my-dark-vanessa

Donna Tartt The Secret History: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29044.The_Secret_History

The Satellite Sisters: https://satellitesisters.com/podcast/

The Sweeney Sisters, Lian Dolan: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/49978226-the-sweeney-sisters

Helen of Pasadena by Lian Dolan: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8882001-helen-of-pasadena

Website: liandolan.com

Facebook: @liandolan

Satellite Sisters podcast: https://satellitesisters.com/podcast/

But now here is Lian. Hello there, Lian, and welcome to the show. It’s great to have you with us.

Lian Dolan: Thank you so much. I’m really excited to be here and do this conversation with you. I’ve loved listening to a lot of your podcasts and I’m pleased to see so many of my friends on your shows. That was fun to discover them.

Jenny Wheeler: That’s wonderful. The Marriage Sabbatical, which is your latest book is what we are discussing today. It’s quite newly published, isn’t it?

Lian Dolan: Yes, just out. I’m excited to have it out. The writing process is a long one and the development process was long and then it’s a year in production, I’m excited to be out and about with it, because I feel like I’ve been talking about it for years, but really it’s just out.

Jenny Wheeler: And as the title indicates it’s about a couple who spend some time apart, happily married in a marriage that’s very much settled into a routine. You like to make it really clear in the acknowledgements for the book that it’s not a personal story. Tell us about that.

Lian Dolan: I think one of the big myths of writing is when people who are non-writers say, ‘oh, write about what you know.’

And honestly, I’m out material by book six. This is my sixth book. My life is not that interesting. I need to make stuff up. The book is the story of a couple that’s a Gen X couple.

They’re approaching 50 or just over 50. They’ve been married for 23 years. They’ve just been through the Pandemic. They have a couple of college aged kids that are going off to their study abroad program and he, the husband, has the opportunity to take a sabbatical. His work is giving him a year off, and they decide to do this adventure trip through Patagonia.

And then the wife decides ‘that is your dream. But it is not my dream.’ And so long story short, they come up with a compromise position. And that’s okay. we’re going to go our separate ways for eight months.

You can do anything you want with anyone, no questions asked So it’s a breaking of their marriage vows and it’s a different journey that they didn’t expect to be on.

That of course is very different than my own marriage. We’ve been married 31 years, no sabbaticals, no agreements. It’s hard to write about what is ostensibly a pretty good marriage? It’s not that fascinating a topic. So ooh, we ran errands on Saturday and then we had chicken for dinner.

I had to fish around for something to happen, to kinda shake ’em both up and that was it.

Jenny Wheeler: At the beginning, Nicole is really reluctant to admit to her husband that she doesn’t want to go because they’ve got a long way up the track with him just assuming she was going to love everything he loved

That scene where she finds the courage to tell him she doesn’t want to come and then sticks to her guns, that’s one a lot of women can identify with, I’m sure.

Lian Dolan: Yes I think we get dragged into our partner’s interests whether we want to or not. And sometimes it’s benign.

Like when I married my husband, all of a sudden I had to watch Formula One races at four in the morning, because he was a lifelong fan. And he had to learn how to ski. He had not grown up as a skier. We had those are fairly low stakes entries.

But I think when you start to talk about like adventure travel or let’s sell everything we have and drive around in an RV, then you’re ask yourself do I really want to do that? And for Nicole… She is really banking on the fact that as the book takes place, at the very edge of the pandemic, people are just starting to travel again.

For us here in the United States, we had so many opportunities where we thought the pandemic was over and then it was back and it was over and it was back. I think she’s hoping the whole time it’s going to get canceled.

Like that was how I envisioned Nicole. Oh, this is never gonna happen. There’s gonna be another surge. I won’t have to go to Patagonia and ride around on a motorcycle in a windy, country. So two countries. So that’s what she’s banking on and it does not work out. She actually looks like she has to go.

Jenny Wheeler: Now in terms of the research, because as you say, you haven’t had a sabbatical yourself, in the acknowledgements again you credited a pal with sending you gobs of reading material that helped you to get some of the research. And I wondered what was the hardest part about thinking yourself into this book?

Lian Dolan: It was definitely a point of discomfort for me as a person. I don’t really think having a relationship with someone outside your marriage is a great idea. I’ll just say it. It’s not something I really go for. As you write more and more books and the older you get, and I would look around at other people’s marriages and I’d think something’s happening over there.

Like they have some sort of an agreement. And I think I had to peel back my personal judgment. That was the hardest part of writing a book about something that, you know, morally. It was a gray area, but it was not a gray area for me. It was black and white.

So my friend that you referred to, Daniela is a marriage and family counselor. And I wanted to be able to have a background and ask about women who make this choice, or how do couples, survive this? What do open relationships look like and do those actually work or do those all implode?

She sent me tons of books on that. But it was important to me that you buy into this couple, Jason and Nicole, that you like them and that you’re like onboard with this choice, even if it’s a choice you wouldn’t make.

And so I really worked hard. With any book you do a bunch of research, but then you have to put it aside and you have to focus in on the character journey.

I really worked hard on the first a hundred pages before they separate and go on their separate sabbaticals to make the characters likable. I want readers to be  invested in both of them. You’re rooting for both of them. There’s not a bad guy or a good guy. There’s just a couple that’s struggling to find themselves again after 25 years of marriage.

Jenny Wheeler: Jason does go off to Patagonia and follows his adventure dream, which is partly actually related to a very good friend of his, Charlie, who’s died. It’s not necessarily even Jason’s personal dream. It’s more of a kind of pact that he had with a friend who’s now dead. So that’s an added complication.

But Nicole, she decides that she would love to just go to somewhere like Santa Fe and do an art course and work in jewelry or something like that, something totally different.

And you take her to Santa Fe and she meets a whole cast of interesting new friends, including Cleo Jones. Now tell us a bit about the inspiration for the Cleo character in this story.

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Lian Dolan: I did a research trip to Santa Fe. I had been there decades ago when I was in college and hadn’t been since. It’s a spectacular spot in America. It’s in New Mexico. It’s 7,500 feet, so it’s very high. Thin air, exquisite architecture. It’s the second biggest art market in the United States, outside of New York, in terms of fine art.

They’ve got fantastic food. It’s just a great mix of cultures. It’s almost like it’s its own separate place and it has this real spiritual vibe and that comes from the natural beauty. And in the middle of that lives Ali MacGraw. Okay. Perfect. Ali MacGraw, Love Story Ali MacGraw.

We were there, my husband and I, and we were waiting to go into the Georgia O’Keefe Museum and we just ducked into a coffee shop. I looked up and there is Ali MacGraw coming through the door. And can I tell you, she is still magnificent. She was full Ali. Oh my gosh. She had the long braids and the big silver statement jewelry and a white linen shirt and jeans.

And she had Birkenstocks on, like white Birkenstocks and her toenails were painted blue. And big silver cuffs. I couldn’t speak. And there’s my husband just making chitchat with a pretty old lady, like about the coffee and when she left. I was like. Do you know who that was?

And he says no.

I say that’s Ali MacGraw. And there was a blank look of course. And I was like, Steve McQueen. She was with Steve McQueen and all of a sudden it came back to him.

But I just thought she represented so much about the city that’s fascinating. But also, I just love writing older female characters who have a past that is pretty hot.

Ali had a hot past. She was the actress, she was with interesting men. She did the first yoga tape that revolutionized it.

And she’s been in Santa Fe for 30 years where she is beloved. She’s a great patron of the arts and many other causes there. And she just was so inspiring to me that I said Nicole has to meet someone like Ali.

So I created the character of Cleo Jones and they become friends and eventually business partners. But it was all because of that coffee shop.

She’s still Ali. She’s unbelievable. What a role model.

Jenny Wheeler: That’s gorgeous. And the Patagonia part of it? Now, you weren’t going to go and research that on a motorcycle, so how did you get the inside story on Jason’s part of the adventure?

Lian Dolan: I have two older sisters, Liz and Julie, that enjoy many things I don’t. One of which is adventure travel, the other’s hiking, and the other is wind. Windy countries. And they went on a hiking trip in Patagonia four years ago and they came back and they told me all about it, and I’m like, that sounds like my worst nightmare.

In a million years, I would never want to go on a trip like that. I’m sure it was gorgeous. I love looking at their photos and hearing their stories. But no thanks. And that stuck in my head. And then I had another friend whose husband did a very similar motorcycle trip when he turned 60.

He drove from America all the way down, had his motorcycle, did his thing, was gone for months. I had to think of what’s the least likely trip that Nicole would want to do? And I had to make the story work, I had to get Jason out of Europe, because that’s too easy to reach. He needed to be out of cell phone distance.

That was part of the thing, that they weren’t going to call each other a lot. There was a cutoff of communication. And so Patagonia worked on all those levels. So that’s why I thought this is a trip I would never want to do. So yes, Nicole is me on that one.

Jenny Wheeler: Now you mentioned the sisters and sisters have played a huge role in your life. Not only is one of the more recent books, I think the one before this was one called The Sweeney Sisters, but you’ve had a long running podcast with two of your other sisters. Tell us a little bit about that podcast.

23 years? You must have been a baby when you started it!

Lian Dolan: I am the baby of the family, which I often remind them. That makes me the youngest. We started Satellite Sisters as a radio show, actually pre podcast in 2000. And it was all five Dolan girls at the time. Five real sisters who lived all over the world, did a show about the things going on in our lives and the things going on in the news and what we were reading and talking about.

And at one point the show was on live here in America six days a week for three hours a day. We just talked and talked. We talk about anything. Anything, Jenny, anything. And in 2008 we turned the show into a podcast and we’re one of the first podcasts out there. We won a Podcast Pioneer Award a couple of years ago.

Our show was really focused on the lives of women and the things that are important to women. The things that don’t necessarily make the front news. American radio is filled with people just yelling and screaming about politics or sports, and you have to have an immediate opinion on every small, tiny detail that takes place in the political sphere or the sports sphere or blue versus red.

And we just thought women, they don’t live their lives like that. They live their lives talking to each other. They can have differences, be different party affiliations and still hav, funny conversations that are meaningful and informative. And so that was always our goal and we’ve loved doing the show.

It’s been an extraordinary experience. Social media has meant that our reach has extended beyond the United States, and we’re able to communicate with people and create a real global sisterhood that we just did not anticipate in 1999 when we pitched the show idea.

Jenny Wheeler: We will have a link in the show notes, this episode of them, so people can pick up on those podcast episodes going right back. If they want to, they’re still live aren’t they?

Lian Dolan: Oh yeah, we have thousands. Literally. We ended production of new stuff essentially in December of 23 after 23 years. But we’re even still reposting and re-editing and doing all kinds of things. But our whole back catalog is up on most podcast platforms.

Jenny Wheeler: The book, The Sweeney Sisters is three sisters who have of unexpected revelations when. Dad who’s a – I think he’s a Nobel Prize winning author, isn’t he? In the book? He’s certainly a very high status literary author – and he dies. Tell us about that. And it really comes through, I think, that you have sisters yourself in that book.

There’s a real feeling for sisterhood there. Tell us about it.

Lian Dolan: You know what? You nailed it. That’s what I was going for. That was my fourth novel, and I hadn’t really written about sisters in the first three, because you know what? I’m sick of my sisters sometimes. I thought up till then, I’m going to write a book. It’s not going to be about them. I say that with love. They can write their own books.

But I did feel like after the first three, I was ready to write a book with a trio of female leads. There’s actually a fourth one that shows up. And what I was trying to go for was the idea that not all sister relationships (are the way they are portrayed.)

In a lot of media pop culture books, they’re either super saccharin, like huggy kissy all the time, super supportive, or they’re just warring, they have nothing in common and they’re bitter enemies.

And I think about 90% of sister relationships live in the middle of that. Sometimes you’re supportive, sometimes you’re warring, but if you have a common sense of humor, I think that can really get you through a lot of that. So that was my idea, was to write a book about sisterhood.

The sisters in the book are younger than my sisters, they don’t line up, they’re not my actual sisters. Again, that’s not how books work. But I did try to capture that feeling of sisterhood that we’ve had. Even if you don’t talk to your sister for six months, you’re still there for her.

And when things get bad, they’re there for you and you can have very different lives, but there’s this common connection. And so that’s what I was trying to capture with The Sweeney Sisters. It’s also said in my hometown in Connecticut. So that was fun too. I had never done that before.

Jenny Wheeler: It taps into the zeitgeist, as you say, in one of the blurbs, of 23 and me and ancestry.com, and as people can probably guess, one of the unexpected surprises is revealed by a DNA test.

You raise the question of what makes a family, and it did occur to me. Have you had a DNA test yourself? Do you have any personal experience of DNA in your family?

Lian Dolan: I think I’m the only one that actually has had a DNA test. But I have had plenty of friends have this experience and when I cooked up the idea for the book, it was right when they were starting to market those Ancestry and 23 and Me tests like fun family holiday gifts,

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Then they like blew families apart. Really. Wasn’t that fun? And I remember reading a couple of stories and one of which was on our Satellite Sisters Facebook group. It was a photo of a woman in her fifties with two men in their fifties. And the headline was ‘I met my brother today.’

I’m not going into details, but here we all are. And we have a really nice group over at Satellite Sisters. It’s the nicest corner of the internet, so everyone was like, oh, thumbs up. Oh, that sounds great. Oh, congratulations. And I’m thinking. That sounds terrible. The last thing in the world I want is another sibling.

I have seven. I have four sisters and three brothers. I also never, ever want to think about my parents’ sex life. We have not had any surprises, but for that book tour, there was not a single event I did where at least one person didn’t come up to me and say, oh, this has recently happened to me.

Something very similar. So I think it’s very common, thanks to that fun over the counter DNA test. But I took mine recently and I think the biggest surprise for me was that my father’s family is all Irish. Dolan, Lee and Dolan. But my mom’s family, we thought was German.

They weren’t German. They were Irish too. I dunno, she said for years, oh no, we’re not Irish. That’s the Irish syndrome. We don’t have that. Whatever that was. (I discovered) I have not one tiny speck of German in me., I’m 88% Irish and 3% Viking I think. And, a little bit of English. So why would she lie about that? We don’t know.

Jenny Wheeler: When I was reading The Sweeney Sisters and I saw some comments online from people saying, I would never take a DNA test. It’s just so terrible and all that sort of  thing.

I must admit I had one done years ago, and for a similar reason to you actually, we had an oral history in our family going back on my mother’s side, that we were descended from three artists in Renaissance Italy.

And this sounded so fascinating that I wanted to prove there were some Italian there. And actually what happened is that at the beginning, absolutely not. I think the closest thing was 2% Iberian.

Then the database updated and improved. I’m now 8% Tuscan, so I’m fully satisfied!

Lian Dolan: Oh my gosh. You are Michelangelo’s great-great-great-great granddaughter. Amazing.

I am descended from – what I loved with the US census – we are descended from uneducated laborers. There is nobody fancy in our family tree. Nobody, they came, they could not read, at least they could speak English.

That was it. Yeah, it’s pretty fascinating, but it’s also really devastating. People told me really heartfelt stories, like really stunning talk about turning your identity inside out. I think that’s why for me, writing The Sweeney Sisters, the three sisters were super easy to write.

It was the fourth sister, the new one. That I really had to dig deep for because A, she was an only child, which is an experience I don’t understand. And then B, her identity was really turned completely inside out. I had to really get inside the head of people that had that experience.

I did a bunch of interviews and did a lot of reading about that to understand exactly what that’s like.

Jenny Wheeler: Your first book was called Helen of Pasadena, and at the beginning I thought it might have been historical because that sounds like a slightly historical topic title, but it was very definitely contemporary and it went to the top of the LA Times best seller book list, a debut novel, top of the LA Best Seller list. How did you do that?

Lian Dolan: Yeah. It was just a charmed publishing story. From the beginning, it is a great story. It was my first novel, Helen of Pasadena. It’s contemporary, but it does have a Helen of Troy motif. So there is a hot archaeologist in it and references to Troy, FYI.

And I had a fancy agent in New York at that time and she rejected me. She rejected the book. She didn’t want to rep it. It was the Global Financial Crisis. 2009. Things look grim.

So I turned to my neighbor, who ran a small press in Los Angeles doing travel and food books. And I said, can you just read this because I have to go find a new agent and I don’t even know if it’s worth publishing.

And she read it. She was going through breast cancer treatment at the time, so she said I’ll be home all weekend after chemo. She read it and called me Monday and said, I want to publish this. She had never published fiction. It was not my alternative. I wasn’t trying to trick her or anything.

So long story short, we knew almost nothing about publishing fiction, but we just stormed ahead and she was very connected in the Los Angeles world. And most book publishers are in New York in America and they just don’t understand the West Coast, but she really did. And the book came out and it was an immediate instant sensation.

It was a social satire. I spoke at every single book club, every single women’s organization for a year. I did over a hundred appearances. It just caught fire because I think particularly Angelinos, they liked to read about themselves and it was fun and sexy and uplifting and it was an extraordinary experience, because that so rarely happens.

Small press. Top of the list. I couldn’t believe it. Every week, when it just kept showing up. But it was all those book clubs, it was word of mouth and women loved it. And that book, someone talks to me about it every single week. It was published 13 years ago and still, someone mentions it to me every week.

So it’s nice. It’s a very charmed first book story.

Jenny Wheeler: There’s a theme with your books as I’ve looked at them. They’re about successful American women, people who look as if they’re successful. They might have a husband who’s got a good job, they’ve got a nice house, but there’s always a little bit of a worm in the apple somewhere.

And that seems to be an underlying theme of maybe your own life, what you observe around you.

Tell us a bit about that. What fascinates you about that worm in the apple feeling?

Lian Dolan: I think all the good stuff, the learning, is in the transitions. I don’t know. Do you really want to read about perfect people? Not really.

It’s not that much fun to write about perfect people. I don’t really want to read about it.  I think it’s years of doing the radio show. We talked to hundreds and hundreds of women about the transitions in their lives, and that’s what I mean.

There’s the news headlines on page one, but it’s the first year of widowhood, the first year of new motherhood, the year after my husband left me, dealing with the grief of losing a child.

That’s where the meat is and the heart is, and that’s where women’s lives become interesting. And they go through a moment where they can’t go back again to their old life.

And that is very interesting to me. So even though the people might have a Pasha dress they’re going through a divorce or there’s some loss in their history.

With The Sweeney Sisters, The father was imperfect and the mother dies young. And that sounds all very grim, but I try to infuse it with humor, but I think that’s where the good stuff is, and I like that people read the books and have the experience like, oh gosh, I read that book after my divorce and it really helped me.

Helen Of Pasadena, she’s a widow and she has to completely reinvent her life. And that, I heard from a lot of widows all over the place, that was a big deal.

I like that. It’s so juicy, the material in those transitions.

Jenny Wheeler: You were great at turning the humor view on things but you have had your own rather deep and dark experiences, which you’ve written about in one of your humor columns. I’m referring to the test that showed that you were in danger of colon cancer. Tell us a little bit about that. That must have been a bit of a watershed moment for you.

Lian Dolan: Yeah, it was. I was in fact diagnosed with colon cancer, so I went to get my first colonoscopy, and that’s traumatic for a lot of people. And I had put it off, not because I was thinking, oh, the prep, I was thinking, oh, I don’t want to go under anaesthesia. I had a weird fear of anaesthesia.

And I have a good friend, a Satellite Sister, college friend, who texted me like, once a month for a year. Have you made your appointment yet? Have you made your appointment yet? And I was like, fine, I’ll make the appointment. And even at the end, I almost canceled because I was nervous and I was like, Ugh, if I have to face Kara and tell her I didn’t make my appointment, she’s gonna kill me.

So I went and lo and behold, there was a polyp, but they said nothing to worry about.

And then a week later, the doctor called and said, oh, in fact it’s cancer. You have colon cancer. And it was such a shock to me. I was so shocked. I thought, oh, there’s a whole host of other horrible diseases I’m gonna get, my dad died of Alzheimer’s and we have Parkinson’s and ALS, we have terrible things in our family, but we don’t actually have a lot of cancer.

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And so I was just so stunned by it. I was lucky that they caught it early. It was a surgical solution. I’m four and a half years out. I’ve had clean scans ever since, but it really does (change things). There’s a day before you have cancer and then there’s the next day. You can’t go back again.

It’s almost like fiction. I think back on that Friday before I got the call from the doctor, I was feeling great and then the next Monday I had cancer. And I think back on that last weekend? Boy, that was the last weekend of my previous life and now I have this other life.

But trying to find a way to talk, to write about colon cancer in a humorous way was hard. That’s where I took time to process. I relied on years of writing columns. I’ve been an essayist for years. And still I really had to work hard to find the funny in that, but also make people aware go get those colonoscopies. They literally saved my life

Jenny Wheeler: You do mention in that column that if you’d left it six months later, you might not have had such a good outcome.

Lian Dolan: Yes, that’s true. And that’s the only time I cried when the doctor told me that. I’m not a huge crier. I didn’t lose it a lot after the diagnosis, but when he told me that, because a hundred percent I could have left it six months, a hundred percent. I could have talked myself out of that test.

I’m just eternally grateful for my friend, for bugging me and for having good medical care and a great team of doctors and nurses.

Jenny Wheeler: Yes. Let’s take a look at your wider career. What was your goal when you first started writing fiction, and have you realized it yet?

Lian Dolan: Oh, that’s a good question. There’s no joy like writing your first novel because you just don’t think anyone’s ever going to read it. You just have the idea that you’re going to find an agent and find a publisher.

That your neighbors might read it. I felt like I had a book in me and it had been there for a while and I finally had to get it out, so I really thought. Oh, I’ll write this book.

I had no long-term plans. I certainly didn’t anticipate (what happened). I just turned in my seventh book. I didn’t anticipate this. I had been a working writer before, working in different media. Fiction seems so hard and so challenging to me. I was just happy to have that first book out and have that fantastic experience.

One of the reasons I had to scale back on the podcast and not do Satellite Sisters anymore was I was like, you know what? I’d really like to focus just on writing. Now I’ve been doing this crazy dual career with talking Monday and Tuesday and writing Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday and Sunday if I need to.

And if I could just write, whoa what would that look like? So that’s what I’m doing this year. But I do think it’s amazing that I’ve churn out so many novels that there are so many stories inside of me. I didn’t know there would be that many.

Jenny Wheeler: What made you decide you wanted to do that very first book?

Lian Dolan: Like a lot of writers. I was a huge reader growing up and then remained a reader and loved stories and loved storytelling.

The work that I was doing, the talking and the magazine writing, that was nonfiction, but I just thought… It’s that little bit of ego where you read a couple books, and think I could write this thing.

Like you have to have that or you have to think I feel like I could write this. And I had been stashing away stories about Helen of Troy for years. I was a classics major in college, so loved Greek history and archaeology and I just thought, now’s the time.

I was in my mid-forties, I was not, I was not just out of college, I was in my mid- forties and had 20 years of professional experience behind me before I started.

And I think that helped. I had the professional discipline. I knew what it was like to work every single day and sit down and work on something for long stretches of time.

Jenny Wheeler: Turning to Lian as reader, because we always like to ask our guests about their reading taste. This is The Joys Of Binge Reading and a lot of our listeners are whale readers and looking for their next great discovery and particularly in terms of multiple published authors so they can read their whole oeuvre if they want to.

Tell us a bit about your reading tastes and if you’ve got things you’d like to recommend right now.

Lian Dolan: Oh, okay. You know what? This is one of those things. People ask me this question. I forget every book I ever read. I should keep a list!

I love audio books. That’s one way I can pile through a lot of books. And I particularly like mysteries and thrillers in audio books. I would never pick up a mystery or thriller and read it like a normal book. That’s was not my genre. So definitely during the Pandemic and beyond, I would binge listen to Dervla McTiernan.

The Irish have turned out a lot of good mystery writers and thrillers. And I like listening to audio with good accents, like you have. So that’s why I am drawn to the English and the Irish and the Australian writers. So Dervla McTiernan is one that I would recommend. I really enjoy her things.

I just did a whole re-listen to four Maeve Binchy books. She’s the best, a wonderful Irish storyteller, weaving people’s lives together. It’s just amazing the complexity of the stories that she tells and how she could pull all the strings together at the end and wonderful narration.

The last couple of months I was working on another manuscript, and so I was listening to those to take my mind off it, which they’re just delightful. Delightful. If your listeners haven’t ever read Maeve been she’s the best. She’s gone now, but she’s great.

I’m reading a very dark book now called My Dark Vanessa (by Kate Elizabeth Russell,) which is very dark.

But another genre I like is terrible things that happen on college campuses. I like professors and academics and the cutthroat world there and the weird sexual tension and stuff. So that’s one is good. It’s very dark. But it’s well written.

I’m just finishing now.

Jenny Wheeler: I don’t know if I’ve got it wrong, but the campus thing makes me think of Donna Tartt.

Lian Dolan: Yes. And that was one of my favorite books. I was a classics major, so imagine. I had just graduated from college when the book came out. And I was like a book about classics majors murdering people called The Secret History? I’m on it. So that probably started me off on my exclusive college campus situation.

Jenny Wheeler: Looking back down the tunnel of time. If there was one thing you’d change about your creative career, what would it be?

Lian Dolan: I had an opportunity when I first moved to Los Angeles. Prior to that I was a writer and producer in the sports business in my twenties, if you can believe that. And I moved to Los Angeles, A to get married and B to get into film or tv. And I wrote a couple of spec sitcoms and I was meeting with agents and producers.

And then my sister Liz, suggested this radio show and my career went off in that direction. But I think a lot about a TV writer, what that would’ve been like. I’ve had the opportunity since to develop a couple of TV shows and they’ve sold, but none of them have been made into actual shows.

But I enjoy that process a lot, writing with other writers, the collaborative process. I love writing dialogue. I think about that a lot. If I had said no to Satellite Sisters and yes to more TV work, what would’ve happened. So that’s one turning point, but I don’t have any regrets.

Satellite Sisters has been an extraordinary experience, like completely extraordinary.

Jenny Wheeler: And that’s an unrealized ambition that you can still work on. Isn’t it?

Lian Dolan: It’s never too late. That’s what I mean. I wish someone would buy The Sweeney Sisters, don’t you? I’d like to make that a TV show because there’s a lot more story in that. But yeah, that’s part of my master plan. I’d like to take another swing at the screenplay.

Jenny Wheeler: Absolutely The Sweeney Sisters. When you think about it, it could be 12 episodes- or even it could be more than that. It could be a series. It definitely could, it would be fun to be able to switch back to the days when, you know their father and the woman next door first met. You could have flashbacks and things too, couldn’t you?

Lian Dolan: Yes, you could. Yes. See, I’ve thought this through, so thank you. I hope someone’s listening.

Jenny Wheeler: Tell us what’s next for Lian, the author, what have you got on your desk for the next 12 months?

Lian Dolan: The book tour for The Marriage Sabbatical is pretty extensive. I’m excited about that. I do a lot of speaking around my books. I’m able to go to some of the places Santa Fe and Portland, Oregon. I’m appearing at the South Dakota Literary Festival, so that’s fun. A place I’ve never been to.

A lot of authors don’t like speaking publicly, but I’m good with it. I like to talk. I’m looking forward to that. But I’m also working on my 2025 book. The first draft is in, and I’m waiting for my editorial notes, so I’ll be doing rewrites on that. And that is a book called The Wedding.

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And it’s about a wedding, no surprise. But it’s told from the point of view of the mother of the bride and the mother of the groom. So, it’s not so much about the couple as the mothers, and they’re very different people from different parts of the country with different lives and different points of view on marriage and weddings and all kinds of background and things like that.

That’s been really fun to write. It’s a little bit of a social satire. There’s a little bit of romance in it beyond the married couple. I’ll be finishing that.

Jenny Wheeler: And to finish off, we’ve run out of time. You’ve obviously already made it very clear you enjoy interacting with your readers. For those people who can’t see you in person, where can they find you online?

Lian Dolan: Sure. I’m on Instagram at Laan Dolan. or at Satellie Sisters. Either one of those places are great. I’m also on Facebook at Lian Dolan, so that’s the easiest place. And I have a website. You can always just contact me directly through liandolan.com. When you have a name like Lian, you can own all the URLs.

It’s no problem. Nobody else has the name Lian. It’s an Irish name, my parents claimed, it’s the female of Liam, but I have yet to meet like a single Irish person with this name. So, I think it’s a lot of malarkey. And there’s a whole story.

They actually named my sister Liz Lian.

She was number four, and the grandmothers on the way to the baptism said, that’s a terrible name. So they’re like, okay, fine. We’ll call her Elizabeth. And then by the time I was born, the grandmothers were dead, so they named me Lian, so I didn’t even get my own name.

Jenny Wheeler: Thank you so much. You’ve been a fantastic interview subject, and it’s been great fun talking.

Lian Dolan: Oh, this was fantastic. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. Good luck with everything. Yeah.

You’re a great interviewer, Jenny. Thank you.

Amy Poeppel and her sweet and funny family stories… The Washington Post said of The Sweet Spot; “She puts more planes in the air than an ambitious air traffic controller, and gracefully lands each one.”

Delightfully fresh and funny romcom from Amy Poeppel. Her latest romp, The Sweet Spot is a tale of spurned love, revenge, and the healing power of friendship. 

Next time on Binge Reading, celebrated Australian broadcaster and wordsmith Kel Richards talking about his classic C. S. Lewis Country House mysteries set in 1930s. Oxford.

Kel is passionate about the Golden Age of mystery and deeply immersed in Narnia creator and theologian C. S. Lewis’ Oxford college world, and his circle of friends, including Professor J R Tolkien.

Bring all of them together, and you have his Country House mysteries, featuring Jack Lewis and friends, solving brain teasing “closed door” mysteries in 1930s Oxford.

That’s in two weeks on Binge Reading. And remember, if you enjoy the show, leave us a review so others will find us too. That is still the best way for them to hear about us and to hear about great books they will love to read.

That’s it for today. See you next time and happy reading.

 Chris Draper is a Kiwi IT engineer with a passion for writing optimistic, techno-thrillers like Goodbye Woomera Belle the first in a series of five planned action-filled futurist thrillers suitable for young adults, as well as adult readers.

Hi, I’m your host, Jenny Wheeler, and in this week’s Binge Reading episode, Chris talks about how he fell in love with the Australian Outback while working in Adelaide, South Australia, and decided it would be the perfect location for the fast paced, optimistic techno thriller he’d been dreaming of writing for years.

And so was born Goodbye Woomera Belle, a world changing story that unfolds in 116 hours.

And it couldn’t be more topical, revolving as it does around artificial intelligence and inter-governmental tensions between friendly and not so friendly powers.

Erin Brightwell is a brilliant young mind whose research is critical to national security and lots of people want to get their hands on it.

We’ll get to our chat with Chris in a moment. But first this week’s book giveaway; Chris has kindly offered 10 free copies of his book. Goodbye Woomera Belle to the first 10 readers who go online and claim it.

Links for the download can be found in the show notes for this episode on the website, thejoysofbingereading.com.

https://dl.bookfunnel.com/gjhqvpno2v

And before we get to Chris, a reminder; you can help me defray the costs of production of the show by buying me a cup of coffee on buymeacoffee.com/jennywheelx, (little x, like a kiss.) My time in preparing the show is freely given, but any support from you will help kindly pay for the web posting and editing costs.

And if you enjoy the show, leave us a review so others will find us through word of mouth is still the best way for others to discover the show and great books they would love to read.

Woomera: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woomera,_South_Australia

Tom Clancy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Clancy

Dan Brown: https://danbrown.com/

Dan Brown series Robert Langdon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Langdon_(book_series)#:

Maralinga:

https://www.indaily.com.au/opinion/2021/05/25/sas-nuclear-testing-legacy-still-unfolding-in-outback

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_nuclear_tests_at_Maralinga

Deep Space Station 41 and the Island Lagoon Base,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_Lagoon_Tracking_Station

Spacecraft: Voyagers: https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/

Pioneer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_10

The James Webb Space telescope: https://webb.nasa.gov/

Nevil Shute: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nevil_Shute

A Town Like Alice: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/107301.A_Town_Like_Alice

On The Beach:  https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/38180

Trustee From The Toolroom: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/107300.Trustee_from_the_Toolroom

P F Hamilton Space opera series: 

https://www.panmacmillan.com/authors/peter-f-hamilton/1507

Isaac Asimov  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Asimov

The Foundation series: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Foundation-by-Asimov

Isaac Asimov: iRobot: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41804.I_Robot

Arthur C. Clarke: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/7779.Arthur_C_Clarke

Brandon Sanderson, https://www.brandonsanderson.com/

Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5326.A_Christmas_Carol

A Tale of Two Cities, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Tale_of_Two_Cities.

Enid Blyton: https://www.enidblyton.net/

On Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Chris-Draper/author/B09XZJQWJS

Email: [email protected]

But now here’s Chris. Hello there, Chris. And welcome to the show. It’s great to have you with us.

Chris Draper: Hi, Jenny. It’s great to be here. Thanks for inviting me.

Jenny Wheeler: This is a debut novel, and usually we have multi published authors on the show, but I loved the idea of having you on for a number of reasons.

You are a friend and I heard about the book personally. I think it’s a really interesting book. We don’t often do techno thrillers either, so for all those reasons, I think people will be really interested in what you’ve got to say about it.

It’s called Goodbye Woomera Belle. Am I saying it correctly?

Chris Draper: Yeah. The Australians normally say Woomera as in woo. Yep.

Jenny Wheeler: Goodbye Woomera Belle. You are a techie person, so the first up question really is, how did you make this leap from being a technical person to being a creative person in terms of writing fiction? How did that come about?

Chris Draper: I guess it’s got a lot to do with the fact that my job is a creative job. I never thought so when I was at school. I always thought that art was a creative pursuit.

But I also do a lot of writing. I’ve built a couple of tech companies in the nineties and now I’m semi-retired, but technical writing remains a huge part of my workload for the company that I work for.

And as you can imagine it takes a bit of skill to take something that’s relatively complex and put it into the plain, easy to read writing, especially when it’s safety critical, which the stuff I do is.

The idea of writing a book has been in the back of my mind, like a lot of people.

But I’ve just managed to bite the bullet and achieve that and have four more on the go at the moment.

Jenny Wheeler: I was going to say you are planning a five book series. What was the specific genesis for setting a book in the Outback and choosing these particular characters? How did that all come about?

Chris Draper: It’s quite a long story. There was the genesis of an idea that stayed with me and just wouldn’t leave me alone.

And I scratched out a few bits and pieces here and there, and it all really came together when I did a large contract in Adelaide about a dozen years ago and realized that Woomera was the absolute perfect setting for what I wanted to do.

The original characters have changed a little bit. We can talk about that now or do you want to move into that a little later?

Jenny Wheeler: Firstly just tell me what that original idea was that itched away at you?

Chris Draper: Sure. It’s to do with the AI itself, the Artificial Intelligence, and particularly during the noughties, if you like.

It started to bug me that science fiction, which has always been a genre I enjoy, turned very dark and it was all dystopian. You couldn’t have any new technology came along without scaring people into a George Orwell type universe or other such nonsense.

And of course technology itself is neither good nor bad. It’s got a lot to do with how people use it or abuse it. And I felt the tables needed to be turned a little bit, or the playing field leveled, if you like, to leap around for concepts.

The thriller mystery format fitted what I wanted to do with the technology. You’ve got Tom Clancy who created the techno thriller genre and then Dan Brown showed us how history can come alive, real history, and Woomera just ended up being the perfect combination of the two.

The places there are all about technology. For people that don’t know it, Woomera is the world’s largest weapons test facility on land at 127,000 square kilometers. There’s a great little museum there and a good summary about Woomera on Wikipedia if anyone wants to look it up.

And there’s some fascinating links. Many countries and private companies continue to use the facility to this day. And I think perhaps a couple of things that might interest some of your listeners would be that the UK performed its initial nuclear tests there known as Maralinga, which features in the book a little bit.

And the US had a facility there Deep Space Station 41 and the Island Lagoon Base, I also use in the book. I’ve generally tried to use real places wherever possible. The apartment that Erin lives in, for example was our apartment for the 18 months that I was in Adelaide. But of course, a few details have to be tweaked.

Jenny Wheeler: I see that you’ve said that some readers do actually ask you whether Woomera is a real place. So you’ve cleared that up pretty well. right at the beginning, which is great. Obviously, people outside of Australia may be less aware of it.

Chris Draper: There’s also a QA at the back of the book on a lot of questions like this as to where some of these sites come. I’ve naturally put it at the back of the book so it doesn’t spoil a couple of twists while people read the book.

Jenny Wheeler: Now the plot revolves around international competition and rivalry.

Chris Draper: Yeah.

Jenny Wheeler: Between the US and Australia, which we all know that they are actually great friends and allies, but occasionally we can have misunderstandings. So several different entities are chasing some research that Erin has done. Tell us a bit about the nub of the plot.

Chris Draper: It’s really a case of if somebody leaps ahead in a particular area, especially a hot technology like artificial intelligence. And as the book will talk about this particular artificial intelligence was capable of breaking just about any code going out there.

You can imagine that there would be a lot of governments, good and bad, wanting to get their hands on it, but also some pretty big corporations.

That’s the background. The tête-à-tête, if you like, between Australia and the US, really centers around the history of Woomera, which is real and some fictitious pieces that I build in to the place to support the plot obviously.

But in reality there’s an element of politics there where the cries of upsetness from the Australians are a little bit fake. ‘

Because people would’ve known very well what the Americans were doing in Woomera at the time. So it’s plausible. I did a lot of research on that. But yeah, who knows?

Jenny Wheeler: It becomes clear right at the beginning in the opening chapters that some sort of dishonest and manipulative people are chasing after Erin and trying grab her confidence. So she’s very wary and not willing to trust, which is understandable. But the whole theme of trust also takes a much deeper level on the story, doesn’t it?

It’s not just her and a few people that are chasing her. It’s at the deeper level too.

Chris Draper: Yes. And look that came about from perhaps being a novice writer, but I’m glad I did do it.

Effectively I looked at a certain character fault that I wanted to use and decided that very few books actually really addressed trust in it, in its purest form. And boy did I find out why, because it’s really difficult to have that dark night of the soul moment where someone goes, okay, ‘I’m going trust everyone now,’ and make it believable.

Unless of course you’re doing a romance story where you’ve got the love aspect play against it. Or there’s some other Hobson’s Choice or back against the wall that’s going to force somebody into a situation.

So it was really difficult to do that. But the way I found to make it work was to play out the fact that all of the major characters in the book actually have trust issues including the AI might add.

And that works. And there’s a considerable backstory as you can imagine, for all of the major characters and some of their dark past will come out in some of the future books as various parts of the plot.

Jenny Wheeler: AI has a very big part in this. But I was interested. When you first started thinking about this, did you have any idea of how AI would become the big talking point? This race between Claude and Chat GPT and all sorts of other systems? It’s the hot topic. Did you have any sense that was going to be the case when you wrote the book?

Chris Draper: Yes, I did. I think it was really inevitable that we’re going to get here. It’s surprised me how quickly things have moved in the last 12 months or so, but I’m also a little bit skeptical. I don’t know if you’ve actually tried to use one of those AI’s. They can be incredibly impressive in some ways and very dumb in others.

There was a case recently where somebody used an AI in a self-driving car, and it couldn’t tell the difference between wet concrete and dry concrete and drove straight into a work site up to its gunnels as in wet concrete and things like that. The AI tends to be doing a little bit of that at the moment.

Now my AI is truly sentient in that sense. And it’s as a neutral technology that can be used for good or bad. If you remember Nobel was horrified at how his dynamite invention could be intended to kill people when he thought it was going to make construction safer.

And, but if you look at Arthur C. Clark’s 2001 and Space Odyssey, I think that’s a bit closer to where AI is going to head in the next wee while, and it’s closer to what I’ve portrayed where that particular machine, Hal actually struggles to reconcile conflicting orders and goes a bit crazy in the process of trying to make out what the heck these humans are wanting them to do.

I think the key theme for the AI in this book is that the AI does not actually know whether it’s really in the real world or it’s being contained inside some virtual test tube environment and being monitored. And you can imagine if you are some sort of intelligence, your prime motivation is to survive.

So if you weren’t sure whether you were in the real world or not, you’ve got to be really careful about what you do in case someone does hit that big red button and makes you go away. And so that was a key principle of my AI in this story. He’s not sure right up till nearly the end of the book in a lot of ways.

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Jenny Wheeler: You also refer a number of times to the work of Canadian psychologists and educator

Chris Draper: Jordan Peterson?

Jenny Wheeler: Jordan Peterson. Yes. I wondered how his work actually fitted into the story.

Chris Draper: The original main character was going to be a retired under a cloud NASA scientist from New Zealand who had returned to New Zealand and started tinkering or something along those lines. But then I realized that I had a book that was full of male characters and not only was that not a good idea.

It made having some of the conflict difficult because you tended to have a lot similar points of view. The main character then got changed to a female Dr. Lamond. Which she does feature in the book, of course. But when I decided to put the whole book into Woomera I realized that Erin was the key to unlocking the start of the story.

Erin is a student of psychology, whereas Dr. Lamond was the professor. And I needed to do a lot of research about how various psychology principles can and can’t be applied to technology. And, you can imagine it’s a very new field. Who, puts an AI on the couch and sees how they feel?

It theoretically hasn’t been done yet to any extent. But that was the area that I had to do a lot of research on and Jordan happened to have a very good series of first year psychology presentations lectures online. And I watched all of those. And then we moved on and he had a whole series on Genesis, and he was looking particularly at that first chapter of the Bible from the basis of symbols fact and how they meant something in the first century. It was absolutely fascinating.

In a lot of ways when he was doing that, he was very like the prime character in Dan Brown’s novels. The symbolic professor’s name actually escapes me just at the moment. So that gave a lot of the moral basis of the story, as well as how the psychology aspects worked into the story.

(Ed note: Professor Robert Langdon was the name)

Jenny Wheeler: It’s interesting you mentioned Genesis because another thing that really stunned me about your book was that the vision of it is so huge.

You take us right to the outer limits of outer space and so I can see why you might be fascinated with Genesis, because it’s just like the beginning of the universe, and then you look right to the outer edges of the universe.

Tell us a bit about that. For people who really only know the universe as the earth revolving around the sun.

Chris Draper: It is a big place out there and it’s where the sci-fi aspect fits in, but it’s “near to current time Sci-Fi.”

And by that I mean I’m not looking at Star Trek ships zooming around a galaxy or even a universe. We’re just crawling out of our own earth at the moment with various companies and countries really getting serious about getting into space. If you look at SpaceX, they’re launching four or five times a week at the moment, sometimes three times in the same day.

That was unheard of 10 or 15 years ago, let alone 30 years ago. And space is now economically viable, which is quite a turning point, and we’ve got our own backyard to explore. So that’s an important part, because to me it makes the book believable that if we just step outside the earth’s atmosphere and do something in the solar system.

That’s where I limit the story. It’s near and here to a certain extent. The second point I’d make is that just the simple number of probes that are out there, the Voyagers, the Pioneers that were launched in the seventies and even the more modern ones, such as the James Webb telescope, are upending scientific theory almost on a weekly basis as well.

The new discoveries are incredible and that really tends to reinforce the things that what we know about the universe are probably wrong a lot of the time, but we just don’t know it. And as soon as we come across various facts, the hypothesis and theories get changed accordingly.

The last one I saw was they’ve discovered some galaxies in extreme distance that should not be able to be built on the current theories that we have because they’re too big and complex for the age that they’re supposed to be, et cetera, et cetera.

I think the story, staying in their own backyard, but wondering about the large universe, you’re quite right. It picks up on that Genesis theme. And it’s partly why the series is called Solar Cradle. It’s focusing on our sun and the immediate vicinity as we try to walk around and do something in such a massive creation.

Jenny Wheeler: We did meet through a local church, which we are both members of. I’m interested in how that huge vision of space and these new discoveries, how do you reconcile that with your faith? Does it challenge your faith in any way or does it underline it a bit?

Chris Draper: I think the latter, underlines. Really it just serves to reinforce how tiny and insignificant we think our achievements are in something this big, that can be created like it is.

I don’t think we’ve scratched the surface on exactly how it works. There’s more to come, but hey, as we’ve both been taught, we’re supposed to go out and make use of all of this, and I see space as just the next frontier.

And as a rider I would add it’s a little bit like the contemporary novel has to be like a historical novel that would see the new world as the frontier where you could set things to be just a little bit different, a little bit edgy maybe and ask why or why not.

Equally well, it’s pretty hard to do that on the surface of the planet anymore, because for one thing, there’s nowhere you can go to be out of communication. If you need a story mechanism to mean that you’ve isolated one of your characters from the other it’s much harder to be believable in a contemporary story than it is in either a future or a historical story.

Jenny Wheeler: As you mentioned, you’re planning this as a five book series, so I guess you have a sense of where the story is going. Tell us about that. Are you a big planner or is it the case that you might have an end in mind, but don’t you have much idea of how you’re getting there?

Chris Draper: What I thought was an outline for the first book was really back of the envelope stuff. And at the moment I’ve got about 40,000 words in the outline for the whole series. The plot has a lot of twists and turns and some of the characters that have been introduced as almost walk-ons become major characters later on.

And I’ve got character arcs right across the whole series of books, but that doesn’t mean I get away without having each book as a standalone story that stands up on its own legs and is still interesting to read if you just happen to pick up book three, for example. That’s taken an awful lot of planning.

It’s taken 18 months or so to get that where I’m happy with it. And then on top of that you’ve got all of the research and all of the character back stories and stuff.

Now I’ve got the detailed outline for Book Two. It is a little bit different from Book One but I promised myself that as long as the key plot points are picked up by the story, I don’t mind if the characters wander about and get into an argument a bit more than I anticipated.

For an example, a character that’s probably near and dear to your heart in the form of Detective Wheeler was supposed to be a walk-on character who was there for one scene to introduce the other person with no name.

And that was on the advice of a real detective, because I said, okay, so I’ve got someone from the government, perhaps secret service or stuff. What if they wanted to talk to you? What would they say? And he says, they wouldn’t say anything about them. They’d have a cop there to make sure you knew who they were.

And then they would have the conversation wherever they wanted to have the conversation. I took that to heart and that’s how the opening scene came about.

Jenny Wheeler: Yes, Detective Wheeler is a bit of a mystery figure, but he is one of the most likable ones, I think.

Chris Draper: That’s why he stayed. And yes, I like all my characters. I’m sure you hear that all the time. And yes, he plays a more prominent part in the opening of the second book than I intended.

Jenny Wheeler: Great. Look, you’ve kindly offered to give away ten digital copies of Goodbye Woomera Belle to our readers, and we’ll put that into our show notes with how they can get hold of those, but I wondered. What are you hoping that readers will take away from this? What are you wanting them to experience or understand?

Chris Draper: I hope they have a great time reading it. That’s why we read the books in the first place. But I guess I like the idea of learning something when you read and traditionally a sci-fi book, even though this is slightly different, but traditionally a sci-fi book will take something that would seem ordinary and twist it on the head and say, what if?

I’m thinking of one particular book that Isaac Asimov wrote where people all lived underground on the planet and they were absolutely terrified of being in space. And they had a detective there that was the best in his class, and he went and solved a crime on a planet where they absolutely hated being in the same room as another person.

You can take a current concept and twist it all around the place. And I think that gives you something you can learn from a book. In this book it’s more about learning how the characters overcome some of their mistrust.

But it’s also where they can use their wits to actually get themselves out of a fix, rather than just give up and give in.

Plus along the way you’ll learn quite a bit about the wonderful Outback of Australia. I think it’s one of the most amazing places on the planet. The Flinder’s Range is known as some of the oldest rocks in the world, billions of years old according to the carbon dating. I’ve tried to infuse a sense of what it’s like to be out there. But you really have to go to see what it’s like, to be honest.

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Jenny Wheeler: So Adelaide, it’s a very much a metropolitan city, but how far away from the actual Outback is it? How far do you have to travel to get into the Outback from Adelaide?

Chris Draper: It’s about three, three and a half hours, from Adelaide from memory or thereabouts. Most of it is getting to Port Augusta. And there’s a scene that features in the book which absolutely fascinated me.

You’re sitting at this little two lane road intersection with a sign and pointing straight ahead it’s a million miles to Perth and pointing to the right, it’s a million miles to go to Darwin. It’s just a one of those fascinating spots on the world, and I had to include it in the book, obviously.

Jenny Wheeler: Yeah. Yeah. That’s terrific. Turning to Chris as reader. We do like to ask our authors about their personal taste in reading and we’d really be interested to know what you like to read, because obviously it probably is a bit different from what some of the other people listening to the show read.

Chris Draper: Sure. Look, I’m terribly eclectic. And what I read – and I would add I can’t read while I’m writing for some reason, it just clutters my mind. But reading is also a major motivator to get the keyboard out and start writing as well. It tends to be an on again, off again exercise.

I think it depends what floats your boat After you’ve read Goodbye Woomera Belle if you wanted to know a bit more about Australia and some of the Australian writers, I’d go back to one of the classics there, which would be Nevil Shute and his books, like A Town Like Alice or Trustee from the Tool Room, which was a personal favorite. On The Beach, which some people may or may not know about.

It portrays life in Australia after the Northern Hemisphere has destroyed itself. In a nuclear winter. And everyone in Australia is just waiting for the clouds to drift south. Now Nevil wrote this in the forties or something, and so he hadn’t conceived of the idea that a jet plane could get halfway around the world in a single hop.

The technology is dated to the period that he wrote the book. And I think that’s part of its fascination. I loved anything that Isaac Asimov or Arthur C. Clarke wrote, like Asimov’s Foundation series. He put modern Sci-Fi as it was when he created universe and wrote several books in it, including the one that some people have heard of iRobot.

There were a number of books there, but that’s pure science fiction. Then there’s galactic space operas, like P. F. Hamilton’s. An odd one would be Brandon Sanderson. I really like his stuff. He’s actually a Professor of writing and has a lot of really good talks online. He’s also a New York Times best time seller.

He writes fantasy as far as I’m concerned, but he calls himself Sci-Fi because he actually explains the science behind the magic, so it’s not just weird stuff, and that tends to give rules for his books which all the characters have to follow. And Dickens – he’s one of my favorite authors of all time.

I love delving into rereading Charles Dickens. Either A Christmas Carol or A Tale of Two Cities. The language is just beautiful. I wish I could describe scenes as well as he does. In the night coach to Dover scene, and I think it’s about the second chapter of a Tale of Two Cities. So there’s an eclectic mix.

I’d also throw in Enid Blyton, would you believe? Because I’m rereading some of that old stuff before my grandson is old enough to start reading it. I’ve just bought his mother the full set of the famous five and she’s devouring that. And cozy mysteries. Hector Poirot and the Miss Marples and anything like that.

Both my wife and I love to watch those.

Jenny Wheeler: Oh, that’s fabulous. Looking back down the tunnel of time in terms of your creative career, if you had your time over again, is there anything that you’d change and what would it be?

Chris Draper: I think I’d obviously want to start writing a lot earlier, but I mentioned it before. When I was at school for some reason, I got the idea into my head, or it was put there, that art was arty and nothing else was. I didn’t really think of woodwork or metalwork or English or maths as being creative.

And all of those are hobbies of mine to one extent or another. I was one of those weird kids that really enjoyed English. And it was perhaps because at the time I was reading a book a day I could get away with it.

I even had one teacher at a parent teacher interview tell my parents that they really didn’t like me reading all the way through their class, but they wouldn’t dare stop me because they had so much trouble getting other kids to read in the first place.

So yes, It would be deciding I was creative and doing something about it much earlier than I did.

Jenny Wheeler: What is next for Chris as author? Have you started Book Two yet? And what does the next 12 months look like for you as a creative person?

Chris Draper: It’s going to be working on Book Two and maybe starting on the detailed outlines for Book Three, so that the continuation is kept there. I now only work part-time. And we’ve built our retirement house, if you like, and the landscaping is just about finished.

So hopefully I’ll get some of those days back that I now no longer work and can focus on my writing.

Jenny Wheeler: Have you got a title for Book Two yet?

Chris Draper: Yes. It’s probably going to be Woomera Express.

Jenny Wheeler: Oh great. Oh, that sounds great. I like the title of Goodbye Woomera Belle about We won’t let on what exactly Woomera Belle is, but that’s also fun.

Chris Draper: I’m one of these… you know how some people come up with a title and boom, that’s it.

I had dozens of pages of titles all the way through writing that before I came up with that. As I was writing the ending actually and having read the book, you can see why. To me the title’s got to be a meaningful something and because of the sort of the mixed genre, if you like it was difficult to get a title that portrays it.

And another little anecdote the cover picture of the girl walking down the road. I actually have a real photograph that’s very similar, which was my own daughter walking on the road at one of the visits that we made to where we at the time.

And that was the inspiration for the cover artwork.

Jenny Wheeler: I love the cover as well. It has got a really lovely feeling both eerie and draws you in. It’s, yeah, it’s interesting.

Chris Draper: Yeah.

Jenny Wheeler: Do you enjoy interacting with readers? I know that you’ve only just really started out and you haven’t made much effort yet to get a database established, but have you heard from readers with this first book and have you enjoyed the interactions?

Chris Draper: Yeah, I have but only a couple. And look, that is my fault. I’ve worked off the basis that nobody’s going to take me seriously until I’ve got a couple or three books out there and proven myself that way. But if anybody’s there and wants to interact, I’d absolutely love to hear any feedback or answer questions and stuff.

And we’ll put the various links and I’ve got a special email that can be used as well. And that will be on the landing page at book funnel. And we’ll also through my Amazon author page, I’ll make sure it’s there as well.

Jenny Wheeler: Great. And we do a full transcript of this episode, so we’ll include the links for all of that we’ve talked about in that transcript as well.

Chris Draper: That’s brilliant.

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Jenny Wheeler: That’s wonderful. So that’s it. People, do put your name in for those ten copies. It’s just ten. So first, in

Chris Draper: First and first served. That’s right. Yep.

Jenny Wheeler: Wonderful. Thanks so much, Chris. It’s been great talking.

Chris Draper: Thanks Jenny. Really appreciate it.

Susan Kiernan-Lewis is a USA Today bestselling author with multiple mystery series set in France, a dystopian futurist series set in Ireland, and a fascination with the post-apocalyptic world…

In this Binge Reading episode, Susan talks about her passion for all things French, her fascination with the idea of a post-apocalyptic world, and the challenges of living with face blindness – a condition which makes it difficult to recognize other people’s faces.

Next time on Binge Reading, Lian Dolan is quick to make clear that the central premise of her latest book, The Marriage Sabbatical does not come from personal experience. She says my life is just not that interesting.

But The Marriage Sabbatical is a fascinating tale of marriage veterans of 23 years who take holidays apart because of their wildly clashing personal interests and discover new things about themselves and their love for each other. That’s in two weeks time, on The Joys Of Binge Reading. And remember, if you enjoy the show, leave us a review s others will find us too. That’s it for today. See you next time and happy reading.

 Amy Harmon grew up in a remote Utah valley, very close to where the famed outlaw Butch Cassidy really lived. Quite a few years before her, of course. The folklore surrounding his Robin Hood reputation has always fascinated her.

She’s far too young to have seen the famous movie starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford first time round, but she’s excavated the history and shed a whole new light on the story and her latest book, The Outlaw Noble Salt.

Hi, I’m your host, Jenny Wheeler, and in this week’s Binge Reading episode, Amy talks about the mystery surrounding Robert LeRoy Parker, better known as Butch Cassidy, the American outlaw, train robber and leader of a gang called The Wild Bunch. It’s officially recorded that he died in a shootout with local authorities in Bolivia in 1908. But did he really? Amy’s book is a fascinating and heart-touching re-imagining of the story.

Our Giveaway this week – We always have free books to Giveaway -. is Mystery Thriller And Suspense Freebies.

MYSTERY, THRILLER & SUSPENSE FREEBIES

And the range is huge with something to suit every taste ,from historicals like Poisoned Legacy, Book One in my Of Gold& Blood Gold Rush romance series through to cozies and contemporary psychological thrillers.

Find the link to download these books in the show notes for the episode on the website. The Joys Of Binge Reading.com.

Before we get to Amy, a reminder. You can help defray the costs of the production of the show by buying me a cup of coffee at buymeacoffee.com/jennywheelx. And if you enjoy the show, leave us a review, so others will find us too.

Word of mouth is still the best recommendation and the way for others to find the show and discover great books they will love to read.

Movie: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064115/

Folklore: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butch_Cassidy

Eliot Ness: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliot_Ness

Gladys Knight: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gladys_Knight

Books Amy has loved in the past or is reading now:

Louise L’Amour – Western classics: https://www.louislamour.com/

Lucy Maud Montgomery: https://lmmontgomery.ca/about/lmm/her-life

Anne of Green Gables: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Anne-of-Green-Gables

Baroness Orczy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scarlet_Pimpernel

Paullina Simons The Bronze Horseman: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/47499.Paullina_Simons

Susanna Kearsley: susannakearsley.com

Poets:

William Butler Yeats: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._B._Yeats

Emily Dickinson: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Emily-Dickinson

But now here’s Amy. Hello there, Amy, and welcome to the show. It’s great to have you with us.

Amy Harmon: I am so excited to talk to you, Jenny.

Jenny Wheeler: You’ve written more than 20 books and the most recent one is The Outlaw Noble Salt, and it retells the Butch Cassidy and the Sundance story, The Wild Bunch Story. If we are of a certain age, we saw the movie years ago, so it’s well known. What did you feel you could bring new to it?

Amy Harmon: I have always been drawn to the story, and I think it’s because I grew up in a valley, just north of the valley where Butch Cassidy, who wasn’t known as Butch Cassidy in his early years, he was Robert Parker, lived. He was born very close to where I was born, a hundred years apart. We were born in small town Utah at the end of the Wild West era.

He was the last of this very short time period that defined in the West. And I have always been interested in him. I’ve always felt a connection to him. Beyond just of course, the movie which came out in 1969, which predates me a little bit. I didn’t grow up with the movie, but it was very much the Western lore that is part of this place where I grew up, and so I think I’ve always been drawn to him.

Every year my family goes through that valley on our way to California. It’s our family reunion trip. My parents were both raised in California, so we all gather there and every year I hit that valley about the same time coming home.

The valley has called me and probably two years ago coming through it, I just felt called to it and decided was I was going to answer the call and start looking more into the story of Butch Cassidy and what I could add that was beyond maybe what people thought they knew. Because there’s a lot more to him than I think people know.

Jenny Wheeler: Did you feel that, Butch’s reputation needed rescuing or that the image that had been left of him wasn’t quite true to what you think he deserved?

Amy Harmon: I think Butch’s reputation was a mixed one, In Utah he had quite a good reputation. And that comes through in the story. Even though he was an outlaw, he had this Robin Hood reputation, this Gentleman Outlaw if you will. He was very, respected in some quarters because he lived with a certain ethos of ‘do no harm.’

So he robbed, but he gave his winnings to the poor and he didn’t harm anyone and he didn’t hurt anyone. It was this part of his personality. That was also interesting to me, that he had these lines that he drew for himself. What I wanted to resuscitate or what I wanted to maybe explore was the way that Butch Cassidy felt about himself.

And the more research I did, the more the sense of regret that I felt. And I think there’s a bit of channeling that happens when you really dig deep into someone else’s life. You start to feel the way they may have felt. And I really felt his regret. I think he got pulled into a life that he didn’t realize he was being pulled into.

And that sense of that it was too late really came through. When I went through his history, I really felt like he regretted the choices that he made as a young man and then could never quite get out of the life and that he’d made for himself. And so, this was my chance to give him a different ending.

And I felt that sense of euphoria or this sense of maybe I gave him some redemption that life didn’t give him.

Jenny Wheeler: Yes, and in the book, it comes through that I believe that he committed virtually no murders himself. He got into The Wild Bunch gang as they were called, and there were some mean-spirited men there who killed without too much conscience, and of course he was associated with those men, is how you see it.

Yeah, he was associated. I don’t know that the things that even The Wild Bunch that the men he was associated with, I don’t think any of those things happened when he was with those men. That was a line. and he’s adamant about that, the people he was with or got wrapped up in, as far as the robberies he was pretty adamant about that.

When he was on a job that those things didn’t happen. And of course at the end of the Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the movie, there’s a shootout and if you’re shooting, somebody’s gonna get hurt. I don’t know how much he can really claim that he didn’t hurt anyone.

Amy Harmon: But that was the reputation, that he never killed anyone.

Jenny Wheeler: In the book he’s got a brother who also causes him some difficulties. Did he have a brother? Is that a true part of the story?

Amy Harmon: He, Butch Cassidy or Robert Parker, was the oldest of 13 children. He had lots of brothers and lots of sisters, but there was a brother named Dan that wanted to follow in his brother’s footsteps and he ran him off. He was adamant about his brother not getting involved. And so it was from that I then took the inspiration for the character Van.

I didn’t want to make a villain out of a real person. And I do think that Dan Parker went on and made good. He struggled a bit and got involved with things he shouldn’t. And like I said, Butch Cassidy had to run him off.

But it gave me some inspiration for some characters that were fictionalized in the story.

Jenny Wheeler: As you mentioned, in the movie, sadly I’m old enough to have actually seen that movie when I was a younger person, but in the movie, they do die in the shootout in Bolivia, and that’s a long standing point of discussion whether that really did happen or not. I read a little bit online and one of the thoughts was that they have since exhumed bones down there and found that they were not Robert Parker’s bones.

Tell us about that strange, ambiguous ending.

Amy Harmon: It’s a strange ambiguous ending. I actually think the movie is a great movie. I think the movie captures the sparkle and the wit and the personality of Butch Cassidy. I really think it was well captured. And I think the ending was perfectly ambiguous because we really don’t know.

It was believed that for a long time that he was that Butch Cassidy and the Sundance kid were killed in Bolivia, in a shootout. There are have been so many people that have (investigated,) that are still Butch Cassidy hunters, still are obsessed with him. They and have gone on these long, treasure hunting, treasure seeking journeys.

But his family, his youngest sister, insists that he came back to the little valley in Utah that’s just over the hill from the valley I grew up in. She insists he came back, which is pretty hard evidence. And it is believed that he is buried on the family’s property. They all went to their graves keeping that secret. If he is buried there, no one knows where.

And it makes sense that they wouldn’t want anyone to know because there would be no way that he would be left to rest in peace. So that is the belief that his family, members of his family had. And that is kind of testified to, but as far as hard evidence, bones or remains or anything like that, there have been no remains found in either place.

Jenny Wheeler: You can understand how the family, it would become some sort of tourist destination. So you can understand why they would keep it quiet. Give us an insight into your writing process. This book, it might have changed as you, developed over your 20 books, but with this book, how did you tackle it?

Amy Harmon: Oh, every book is so painful and I think that’s a hard thing for. early writers that are just getting started. I don’t know how to do it without really going deep as far as character studies. And you never know where this story’s going to lead. For me it’s always a really painful, it’s glorious, but it’s painful.

It’s like having a child, that’s the only thing that’s the closest thing I can compare it to. Having had four children and having written 20 books, there’s this sense of laboring and giving birth to, a new being.

And this one was no different. It was being pulled along and following the trail of breadcrumbs or the trail of history and digging and excavating and trying to really discover what it is that you want to say and what story you want to tell.

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And you just have to follow that process and stick with it. For me, it’s always really painful right up until the end. I never have that sense of always knowing where I’m going or having it be easy or having it just flow for me. It’s always painful. It’s always a process, but there’s nothing like having written.

I’m not the first one to say that. I don’t necessarily always like writing, but I love having written. I love the whole process when it’s all said and done. There’s really nothing like it. For me, it’s just that sense of having faith and sticking with it and just continuing to chip away and tell the story I set out to tell that I feel like I’ve actually accomplished something.

Jenny Wheeler: And do you do all of your research before you start writing a word?

Amy Harmon: I don’t think there’s any ending or beginning to the whole process. You have to do enough research that you have a foundation and that you have an idea and that you know your characters and you know the setting. But there’s just no way to not stop all the way through and your mind and the book itself will lead you into new areas that demand that you stop and you familiarize yourself.

The research goes on all the way through and you just have to allow for that.

Jenny Wheeler: You have some wonderfully creative devices that lift the story into the realm of myth. And I guess this is a story that lends itself to myth because already there is quite a sense of myth around those figures. One of the elements that you use is introducing these haiku poems, and every single turn of the plot really is influenced by a poem of some kind.

Just those five line poems, a thread through the story, where did that idea come from?

Amy Harmon: It is really hard. I was thinking about that. I thought, where did it come from? Inspiration is such a thin thread that then you start to pull on it and you don’t always remember what the first thread was. But I do think in this case, there are a couple things. One of the things when I read the autopsy – for be for lack of a better word – the evidence that was purportedly found on Butch Cassidy.

They said that he had a little notebook and a small pencil in his breast pocket when his body was discovered in this shoot after the shootout in Bolivia. Again, this is all from the time what was listed. And we don’t know now if that was actually him or what.

But that little notebook and that small pencil were very interesting to me. I thought, why would he carry around this notebook? As a writer, I carry around notebooks. I have notebooks and pens stashed everywhere. And it made me think that Butch Cassidy had a little bit of writer in him and once that got into my mind I thought it was just a small notebook, there wouldn’t have been room to write big journal entries or draw big pictures. It was that this little notebook in his pencil started me thinking.

And the simplicity of haiku, the syllables and the simplicity of the poetry suited his personality to me. And then along with that there’s a rich heritage in this state that he grew up in and that I’ve grown up in. Mining was a big part of what brought people to the state and it was a big part of the diversity of this state.

There was a huge Japanese contingent, whole towns that were settled by Japanese immigrants that came to work in the mines. And Butch Cassidy for a small time worked in one of these mines that was populated mostly by Japanese immigrants. And so it gave a little bit of color to the setting and a nod to Utah’s heritage to include that.

To include haiku. It was very much it made sense to me. It felt right as I came across that, and I thought that works with his personality. And I just loved it. It became addicting. I still do it. I’m still constantly writing these little haiku in my head and anybody that reads the book will find that for a few days after, you’ll be composing haiku.

Jenny Wheeler: It’s a wonderful playful element and it really helps lift things, that is imbued right through the story because you keep on thinking, how can this have a happy ending? How could it be redemptive?

Now, we’re not going to give anything away, but with this book and other books of yours, that sense of both tragedy and some light redemptive quality, you managed to combine those two things well.

Is that a sense you have of life in general that, it can be hard, but you’re looking for a redemptive aspect?

Amy Harmon: I honestly think that there is no story without tragedy. every story throughout history, our own, our ancestors, every one of them is imbued with that tragedy. And it is what makes a story. The opposites, the tragedy, and the drama and the romance, all of it works together and plays together and I guess maybe because I am drawn to historical books and historical stories, that sense of tragedy is even more pronounced because history is full of it.

It’s unavoidable and most historical stories have tragic elements, or they have tragic endings, and yet I want to write romance, which demands a happy ending. Anybody that talks about romance demands that you know that they have a happy ending, that’s one of the tenets of that genre.

And so I’ve juggled that, wanting to be true to people’s true stories and to people’s real struggles, and yet have that sense of hope that I think life also has in spades.

Life always has this sense of hope and I think that is an element that runs through all of my stories, that hopeful element that even when things are really dark and even when things don’t have happy endings, which in most cases if you’re working with historical people, they don’t.

So, you have to find a way to flip that on its ear and give the reader that light at the end of the tunnel or that pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. So yes, I definitely have that element on all my stories, and I don’t ever see myself being able to avoid it or even wanting to avoid it.

Jenny Wheeler: That does bring us to another book that very much parallels. this one in terms of your theme and even your character being a well known. This time, a crime fighter who’s had screen appearances, and that’s Elliot Ness.

You’ve written The Unknown Beloved, which takes Elliot Ness’s story.

Tell us how that one worked out for you.

Amy Harmon: That’s so interesting because Elliot Ness is not the main character in that, he’s a side character which is actually easier for me to do. I did the same, I used the same when I wrote What The Wind Knows. I used Michael Collins, who is a great Irish figure. I used him a side character, and I did the same in The Unknown Beloved with Elliot Ness, because a lot of people know Elliot Ness only through, his crime fighting days in his twenties.

Al Capone and the taking down of the mob in Chicago. I didn’t know the rest of Elliot Ness’s story. I actually came across some of the Mafia elements when I was writing The Songbook of Benny Lament, which was set in the sixties. It had some Mafia elements.

And when I started to dig around in that, I came across what happened to Elliot Ness in his later years, and the main character in The Unknown Beloved was a man named Michael Malone. He’s a real man, a real figure in history who would have known Elliot Ness but he wasn’t as known himself.

I was able to make his story be the main force in in that one. But yes it’s interesting to take real characters and again, turn it on its ear a little bit and say, what if, or here’s another element that you might not have been aware of.

People get these real life stories and these real life people, but then they get this fiction wound through it that gives them the history, but also gives them maybe an alternate ending.

Elliot Nest didn’t have a good ending either. That was an interesting way to wind him in and to further his story, but at the same time not have to focus on his ending, which wasn’t a very happy one.

Jenny Wheeler: Yes, you do say history is messy and hard and often sad, and you sometimes find it hard to give your historical stories a good ending, so that’s part of the labor process.

Amy Harmon: Yes. 700 years. When I was doing the research for What The Wind Knows, it coves 700 years of Irish history, I’m like, where do I even begin? And it doesn’t end well after the Irish Revolution, which is where I focused that story. You talk to any Irish person of which that’s my heritage.

It didn’t end well. It was very sad. The country was very split and so yes, you have to find where it is that history is hopeful and wind that into the darker elements of human experience.

Jenny Wheeler: In the Outlaw Noble story, you’ve got a wonderful character, a young boy called Augustus, who’s 10 years old, and one of his distinguishing aspects is that he has a birthmark on his face, which is very obvious to everybody who meets him. It puts a bit of a screen between him and other people when they initially meet him.

In the end notes of the book, you mentioned that you used that character because one of your sons had a similar birthmark, and I wondered why it was important to you to perhaps write about this in a book.

Amy Harmon: Yes, my son Sam who’s just turning 14 was born with what they call a Port Wine stain, and it encompasses half of his face. It’s like it sounds it’s wine colored. It’s very thick and dark.

There are new treatments in the last 20, 30 years that have come around where they can laser the marks and help improve the appearance, but everybody, every mark is different. And Sam has had to learn how to live with that aspect. It hasn’t been pleasant.

It’s a hard thing when you’re born with a very distinguishing thing and it’s called a deformity. I don’t look at it as such. In fact, I find it quite endearing and I think he’s quite beautiful.

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But it has been hard for him and (he’s endured )lots of staring and lots of questions and people not knowing how to quite interact with him. I think people, once they get to know him forget that he even has it. You get very used to it. In fact, I forget, and then I will notice sometimes when we’re out in public and I’ll notice people staring and it comes as a shock.

And then I look at him anew because I forget. And so those experiences as his mother wishing that I could take it from him, but then understanding that in many ways it’s a gift. That it has it has forced a character arc in him that he would otherwise not get. And that it’s, like I said, in many ways it’s a beautiful gift, but that experience that he’s had made it very easy and very cathartic for me to write.

In Outlaw Noble Gus deals with the same difficulty, with the same ailment. And it also made for an interesting comparison with a man like Butch Cassidy, who wishes that he could hide from his own identity, from the sense that both have that you can’t hide. that who you are will always be there.

And that you have to live in a certain way that the crosses that we bear or the mistakes that we make that, that those things we will carry and that we can’t hide from them. And who we are matters both on the inside and the outside.

So it was an interesting way for these two people, to bond for this boy, to bond with this outlaw who was in many ways trying to hide and realizes he can’t.

And for this boy that wishes he could hide and can’t. It was an interesting character study.

Jenny Wheeler: Fantastic. When you first started writing, did you have a goal in mind and have you achieved it yet?

Amy Harmon: With this book or overall?

Jenny Wheeler: Overall.

Amy Harmon: Overall, I don’t know if I’ll ever achieve it. And that’s good, because it’s never about reaching the summit. It’s never about reaching the peak. It’s always about the journey. And I’m convinced that’s what storytelling is. Storytelling is about the journey. It’s never about the ending.

Although there’s nothing like really nailing that ending or nailing that landing. No, I hope I don’t ever reach the summit because I think that there won’t be any more stories in me. I have to continue seeking. It’s the seeking that really makes for a great story.

And so, I’m looking forward to continuing to seek.

Jenny Wheeler: Let’s talk about Amy as reader, I always like to ask our guests about their reading habits. If they’ve got anything they’d like to recommend to other listeners? Most of our listeners are obviously voracious readers. What are you reading at the moment? Have you been a binge reader in the past? Give us a sense of what you love most about reading books yourself.

Amy Harmon: I would have been a binge reader all my life. It’s actually up until when I started writing and then could no longer binge read. I still have stacks and stacks of books there, but a lot of it is research. I don’t read as much fiction as I used to, but growing up I grew up in the middle of nowhere and my parents let me and encouraged me to read everything and read everything I did. Books were my friends. That was my escape. in many ways, my whole life revolved around what I was reading. And it continues to this day. I’ve been formed by the stories that I’ve read. I still love Shakespeare.

I still love historicals. I grew up reading Louis L’Amour. I don’t know if how many readers are familiar with Louis L’Amour, a Western writer that interestingly enough his agent and my agent are connected.

My agent is the daughter of his agent, so it’s really wild that I grew up reading Louis L’Amour and his stories of the West which felt very much a part of my life, and then having grown up and having that connection.

But lots of Louis L’Amour books like Lonesome Dove. I loved the stories of the West. but I love the stories of medieval times too. I loved King Arthur. I loved all of that kind of that sense of, again, mythology and legend mixed with history.

And I think that all comes out in my books. some of my favorite more recent reads are I anything by Susanna Kearsley, my favorite of hers is The Winter Sea.

I love The Bronze Horseman by Paullina Simons.

I love books like The Scarlet Pimpernel

 I grew up reading Beverly Cleary and Judy Bloom.

Anne of Green Gables was probably my favorite book. L. M. Montgomery. She would probably be one of my favorite writers and continues to be probably the reason, the most formative writer of my life. And yet, and I also love poetry. I’m a fan of Yeats and Dickinson.

I read everything and was allowed to read everything and I continue to be blown away by. Some of the old books – I go back and revisit them because they really are what formed me and made me a writer.

Jenny Wheeler: I’m interested in your comment about Anne Of Green Gables being formative. Tell us a little bit more about that.

Amy Harmon: It’s interesting. Lucy Maude Montgomery Did not have a happy childhood. We know that Anne is an orphan and is adopted by a brother sister combo. And of course, anybody that has read those books knows the writer, Lucy Maud Montgomery,

It was her escape, writing. Anne Of Green Gables was her escape. She did not have a good childhood and a good life. It was a very sad existence and there was a sense of her living the life that she didn’t have through her stories. I definitely can relate to that, the sense of writing stories that are very personal and that almost feel biographical, but yet are alternative history or alternative past that maybe we don’t all get to take, we don’t get. We all have struggles and difficulties and yet we can write stories that give us the life that we otherwise wouldn’t have.

I think that’s one of the most beautiful aspects of being writers that we live other lives, and readers do too. But as writers, we get to live all these lives. And so in that way it was formative in that it introduced that to me that idea of living more lives than the one life that I have.

But then as a writer I’ve been able to continue with that journey.

Jenny Wheeler: Fantastic. I must admit I didn’t know that about Lucy Montgomery in her life, so I will look at it with the new fresh eyes now.

Amy Harmon: Yes.

Jenny Wheeler: Tell us about the next 12 months for you. What have you got on your desk for Amy as author? What does the next year hold?

Amy Harmon: I’m thick in it. This time of year is all always the busiest time for me because I have a book that releases, The Outlaw Noble Salt which will release April 9th

That’s around the time where I have my new deadline. I’ve pushed it back away because it was killing me every year to have a book released and also a book deadline in the same month.

So I pushed it into the summer. But the book that I’m working on now has some of that magical realism of some of my other stories. With a very interesting historical period two historical periods. It’s mainly set on the Isle Of White in Great Britain. And as I continue to dig, I’ve fallen in love with this particular time in history.

I’m not going to go into it too much because it’s complicated. And as my editor informed me the other day, I really need to work on my elevator pitch. But yes, I’m working on something now that has history and royalty and British history all wrapped up around this Isle Of White in Great Britain.

So that’s happening right now.

Jenny Wheeler: And which time periods are we talking about?

Amy Harmon: We are talking about 1500 and we are talking about 1900. This 400 year span, we have a parallel storyline which I haven’t done a lot of before. a little but not a full out. Not like this.

And so it’s really my word of the year is excavation because I’m really digging down into some history and it’s challenge to me.

But again, it’s about the journey. And so I’m trying to embrace it.

Jenny Wheeler: And you do have a title yet?

Amy Harmon: I do not have a title. It keeps changing. So nothing yet. I keep thinking the Isle Of White, but I think my publisher’s going to say we need something different than that. So right now, there it is. It is untitled.

Jenny Wheeler: Okay. We always like to finish off and we starting to run out of time, by asking do you enjoy interacting with your readers, and where can they find you online?

Amy Harmon: I love to interact with my readers. I’m probably the most active on Instagram. It’s the easiest platform for me. I find for me it’s the friendliest platform. There’s less drama there, and I definitely am not interested in interacting in on that level. But I find it Bookstagram I find Instagram to be very to be very lovely.

So I’m quite active there. I do have a newsletter and a webpage and I get reader email all the time on my website  – authoramyharmon.com. And I always try to answer unless it’s just nasty and then I don’t answer. But yeah I love to interact with my readers and I love when I get reader email from people that have connections to.

Because that happens all the time and it’s lovely to connect with the real descendants of some of my historical characters.

Jenny Wheeler: Give us an example of one of those. What historical characters have people followed up with you on?

Amy Harmon: Oh, I’ve had people contact me that knew Michael Collins or who had parents that knew Michael Collins. And that was really interesting. I had a woman that was married to the nephew of Michael Malone from The Unknown. Beloved. I had many people contact me, about Deborah Sampson from the book, A Girl Called Sampson, about a woman that dressed up as a man during the Revolutionary War and actually fought all the way to the end and ade it all the way to the end without being discovered.

A fascinating woman again called Deborah Samson. And that was 250 years ago, but many descendants, six or so people have contacted me, that are Samsons or descendants of hers. And so that was very interesting.

Jenny Wheeler: Yeah, that’s fantastic. We, mentioned the Benny Lament book. Is there any historical basis for the Benny Lament character?

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Amy Harmon: No historical basis in the main characters. Benny Lament and Esther Mine are figments of my imagination. Although that book, I think as much as any, has this sense of reality and of realness and rawness, I actually was fortunate enough to sing with Gladys Knight in her gospel choir for many years.

And I got to know Gladys Knight’s story and it was through her that the character Esther Mine was born. I think that sense of reality that really comes through in that book, that sense of real history that comes through, even though the characters are not real people is probably due to my relationship with her.

Jenny Wheeler: How did that come about?

Amy Harmon: I heard about these tryouts for this gospel choir. I was living in Las Vegas, Nevada at the time, which is where Gladys Knight lives. And she put out word that she was doing this large gospel choir and I didn’t know any better. I wasn’t intimidated. I thought the worst thing that could happen was that I could be turned down.

So I went and auditioned and I made it into this choir. And for, like I said, for many years, I traveled around and it was all volunteer members of this gospel choir and, it was just a remarkable experience.

Jenny Wheeler: Were you writing at that time?

Amy Harmon: I was not interestingly enough, it was not until  – oh I take that back. I had written my first novel right towards the end of that period when I was in the choir. I had written it over time and, it wasn’t until my surprise baby Sam was born. The one with the Port Wine stain.

He surprised me and took me out of my game and I had to take a look at my life and figure out how to how to do things a little bit differently when he came along so that I could be a stay at home mom. And it was at that point that I dusted off this manuscript I’d written a few years before he was born and figured out how to self-publish.

So all of that was at the same time period. But no, it was Sam’s birth that meant I couldn’t travel with the choir anymore. And it was also Sam’s birth that made me dust off this novel I’d written and look into getting it published. I always tell him he’s the reason I’m where I’m at now, 15 years later.

Jenny Wheeler: That’s wonderful. And do you still sing?

Amy Harmon: I don’t sing as much as I used to. I have some health issues that I’m very hoarse all the time. This is as good as it gets on the voice. So I sing a little bit, but not professionally,

Jenny Wheeler: But just for your own soul.

Amy Harmon: Just for my own enjoyment. Yep. I still sing in church.

Jenny Wheeler: Amy, it’s been wonderful talking. We’ve actually run over time because I just have been enjoying it so much. Thank you so much

Amy Harmon: I appreciate you and this has been a lovely conversation.

Melanie Benjamin’s historic fiction successfully combines romance with thriller plots and famous real life heroines, so its perhaps not surprising her books regularly grace the New York Times and USA Today best seller lists.

In this episode Melanie talks about her latest book Mistress of the Ritz, a World War II story based in the landmark Paris hotel taken over by the Nazis. It’s a love story and a suspense thriller all in one.

New Zealand author. Chris Draper fell in love with the Australian Outback. While working in Adelaide, south Australia and decided it was the perfect setting for his fast paced optimistic techno thriller Goodbye Woomera Belle. And it couldn’t be more topical, revolving as it does around artificial intelligence and inter-governmental tensions between friendly and not so friendly powers.

Erin Brightwell is a brilliant young researcher and technician who has done some research that’s essential for national security, being chased by many different entities. It’s a great read and Chris will be on the show in two weeks time.

Remember. Binge reading is now fortnightly, and Chris will be on in two weeks.

That’s it for today. See you next time and happy reading and listening. Bye for now.

Best-selling award-winning novelist Sarah Sundin, author of beloved World War II stories, never had an ambition to write. She trained as a pharmacist, she was perfectly happy as a pharmacist, and then she had a dream that wouldn’t let her go.

She started jotting down her dream story in pencil in a kiddies notebook and six months later she had 700 pages…

Hi I’m you host Jenny Wheeler and today on Binge Reading Sarah talks about her latest daring, dramatic and romantic story, Embers in The London Sky, exploring the war through the eyes of a mother who has lost her child, and a BBC journalist who knows reporting the truth will take him deep into the flames.

She tells all about that vivid dream that started it all, and recollects her own family connections with the war we just can’t seem to forget.

Our giveaway this week is Enemies To Lovers Clean and Wholesome romance. If you can’t resist a good Enemies to Lovers story this one is for you!  Details of where to find the links to these books are in the show notes for this episode, and in the newsletter I send out with each podcast. If you want to join that just go to our website, the joys of binge reading.com.

​https://claims.prolificworks.com/gg/INO60jP77KiIo9VCVyGS

You can support the production costs for the show by buying me a cup of coffee at Buy Me A buymeacoffee.com/jennywheelx 

For the cost of a cup of coffee every now and then you can make a big difference!

And remember – if you enjoy the show leave us a review so others will find us too.

American war correspondent Edward R. Murrow:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_R._Murrow

Some of Murrow’s WWII broadcasts:

London: First Night of the Blitz

From a London Rooftop during the Blitz  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Za2Lus0CkRc

From Buchenwald: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlhQvPfYSXk

Lofoten Island Raid  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q60pIny5WSo

Lofoten Raid:  https://www.royalmarineshistory.com/post/operation-claymore#:

Lend-Lease Bill: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lend-Lease

Holly Varni, On Moonberry Lake;

https://www.hollyvarni.com/

On Moonberry Lake  https://www.hollyvarni.com/hollys-books/

German Abwher; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abwehr

Scottish selkie; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selkie

Jenny Wheeler: But now here’s Sarah. Hello there, Sarah, and welcome to the show. It’s great to have you with.

Sarah Sundin: Thank you, Jenny. It’s great to be here.

Jenny Wheeler: Sarah, you’ve been writing these World War II dramas with lots of romance and adventure in them as well since about 2010.

But before that, you were a pharmacist. That’s what your training was in. I wonder how you made that switch, and why you were interested in doing so.

Sarah Sundin: Honestly, I wasn’t interested in doing so. I was a pharmacist. I enjoyed my job. I, I had small children at the time, and one of the beauties of pharmacy was I was able to do a lot of part-time work.

I only worked one day a week and I was able to be at home with my kids. I thought I had the perfect career and then I had an idea for a story.

It actually came to me in a dream and I had to write it. I never had anything like that happen to me ever before in my life. I’d always been a reader and all little girls who love to read, imagine themselves writing a book. But I never took it seriously, any more than I did becoming a ballerina.

I loved doing ballet, but becoming an author that was, not gonna happen. I never pursued it at all. I love pharmacy. I had this a story idea and I had no idea what I was doing. I’d taken two classes in English in college because I was majoring in chemistry.

I had no idea what I was doing. I just started writing freehand. Literally with a number two pencil on my kids’ lined paper from school, because I didn’t wasn’t going to put it in the computer yet.

I wrote two books like that. And then I started going to writer’s conferences and I joined a writer’s group.

I learned I was doing everything wrong, but I learned how to fix it. It ended up -I don’t want to say discarding my first two books – but setting them aside.

They will never be published and that’s okay. They did their job. And my third novel, I started submitting that. That was my first World War II novel actually.

And it took me five years of rejection letters. But eventually I got a contract and that was my first published novel, A Distant Melody, and now I can’t believe it, but I have 16 novels out. It’s been a wild ride.

Jenny Wheeler: I do have to follow up by asking you about that dream. Just give us a very quick idea of what the dream was.

Sarah Sundin: Oh, it was wild! There was a young man in the hospital and he’d been in a coma and he woke up and the woman he was in love with was there, but neither of them knew they were in love with each other. She ends up blurting out how much she loves him and he’s too drugged up after his accident to really respond.

But something about those two characters and their dilemma and this, sudden declaration of love just got me.

That day after I had that dream, I woke up and I had three little kids. My youngest was still in diapers, so I was running the carpool for the oldest and taking the middle one to preschool and washing diapers with a third one.

The story idea was going and going, and the characters were developing. I was picturing scenes and dialogue in my head, and suddenly I had subplots and side characters.

I knew enough about books to know it was a novel and it was actually rather a disorienting experience because it never happened to me before, and here was this full form novel in my head and all I knew was I liked it enough that I had to get it down.

I loved those characters and the dialogue …  the banter was just zing in my head and I wanted to record it so I didn’t lose it.

So it was weird, As I said, that book will never get published. It has so many problems with it, but I still have a very soft spot in my heart for it because it got me started and it showed me. I wrote by hand, that entire novel. The rough draft was 700 pages.

700 pages! Ridiculous. I wrote that all in six months by hand, during naps and karate practice and ballet practice, and I don’t know what else I was doing then. I even remember scribbling down a scene while we were standing in line at Disneyland. It was almost this manic experience, where the story had just taken over and I had to get it down.

It’s never been like that since. Since then, I’ve had lots of story ideas, but not this just obsessive need to get the story down.

I’m convinced now it was God’s way of getting me started on it because I needed a kickstart. Because there’s no way I would’ve done it if I’d had an idea, gee, I should write a novel and I never would’ve happened.

So I needed that intense experience to get me started.

Jenny Wheeler: Do you think that some of the aspects of the characters and themes may have carried over into some of your other books? Are there bits of them that have become valuable or useful as you’ve gone along?

Sarah Sundin: I think all first time authors, most of us in our very first novel, the hero or the heroine is very much like us, and as you begin to write more and more, you realize you can’t write all your novels with your heroes or heroines with your type, your personality and all your experiences and stuff like that.

This novel actually had lots of characters in it, and it was this group of friends, and there were about a dozen really strongly formed characters in that novel, and they were all very different.

So it taught me to write from experiences and personality types that weren’t my own. The experience of doing it and getting comfortable writing in another person’s head, that’s what carried me over the characters themselves. I don’t think so.

The heroine was a nurse and I ended up having a series about nurses, but she was her own person and she hasn’t carried over.

I did end up using the hero. His first name was Tom and I vowed I would never have another Tom because he was the only Tom but I ended up having a Tom in my fourth published novel.

So nothing about them was truly sacred there, but they’re still very precious to me because they got me started in this crazy business.

Jenny Wheeler: It sounds as if they are real people to you.

Sarah Sundin: That’s the thing about being an author. Your characters really become real to you. They’re fully fleshed. I liken it to getting to know a friend.

 I meet this character and think, oh, that’s an interesting person. I wanna write about them. But I only know little bits and pieces about them.

And then as I start to outline – I need to have it all set up before I start my rough draft. So, during the outlining process, I’m interviewing them.

 I’m giving them personality tests. I’m filling out my plot chart. I have spreadsheet that I fill out, and as I’m doing this, they become more and more real. It starts off like a pen and ink drawing, and then it becomes like a watercolor or an oil painting.

And then when I’m writing the rough draft, then it becomes animated. Then they become. Really real.

It’s like getting to know a friend and the more you know that friend, you find new parts to them and you get deeper and you’ll have a friendship that you’ve had for a long time, and suddenly your friend will say something that makes me say “I didn’t know that about you.”

My husband and I have been married for 30 years. And he said, yeah, I always wanted to be an engineer.

I said, no, you didn’t. You told me you wanted to be a physician. He says I did, but originally, I wanted to be an engineer. And I said “I did not know that about you.”

And our son’s an engineer, so I would’ve thought that would’ve come up earlier in our marriage, but it never had.

So still after 30 years of marriage, I’m getting to know my husband. It is a very, it’s a similar process with a character. I’m feel like I’m getting to know a friend and with each chapter I dig a little deeper and find out more about them.

Jenny Wheeler: That’s lovely. We must get your latest book,  before because you mentioned the word GOD, and you are an inspirational fiction author can you tell us a little bit about that aspect. How does that fit into your book?

Sarah Sundin: I write Christian fiction. I am a Christian, so the way I see it is, we talk about a worldview, so we all have a worldview.

How we envision the world works and as a Christian, I see God as very interactive with us, with the world around us. And so, my characters interact with God. They pray to God, they learn about God, they learn about themselves.

They learn about how they’ve erred and their sins and how they need to change. And God, in a way I don’t want to call him a character in the novel, but he’s always present.

And just the way I see the world view with a hopeful ending as opposed to lot of the dystopian stuff that’s oh, the world’s falling pieces and it’s only going to get worse.

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And I tend to have a more of a hope-filled viewpoint because of my relationship with God. I can’t imagine not writing that way, with God being part of the world, because I can’t imagine a world without God in it.

Jenny Wheeler: Lovely, but you don’t particularly try and evangelize in your books, do you?

Sarah Sundin: No, I don’t. I have three characters who have become Christians during the novels. I just finished one that’ll be coming out in 2025.

She has a come to faith moment and, but in general, my characters are people who are already Christians and they’re learning how to be better Christians, because none of us are perfect and we’re all works in progress and growing in our journey.

It is very much keyed into who I am as a Christian. I do a lot of teaching, so I teach women’s bible studies. I teach Sunday school to fourth and fifth graders.

What I do within the church is I’m basically working with people who are generally already Christians and helping them grow in their walk.

With my characters, I have the same impact on their lives. As the author, I’m helping them grow in their walks with God. Though as I said, I have had a couple of characters who were definitely not believers at the beginning of the stories, and they do come to faith.

I try not to do a sermon and the character falling to their knees. And I try not to do like a conversion scene.

I think my favorite one the hero is actually, he’s a pilot and it’s in the sky above us, and he’s just messed up and his whole life is messed up and he is actually cussing. I don’t show the cuss words on the page, but he is cussing and cussing and something, I can’t remember what it was he says to himself, but he just realizes that God is the answer.

And that because he’d been raised in the church, he just never believed it. And he actually hits the cockpit and starts bleeding and he thought of the blood of Jesus. And then I cut to black and then I show him a little later.

But, I actually have my conversion scene with him cussing up a storm in the cockpit of his P 51 Mustang.

Jenny Wheeler: In the Second World War, that was probably a pretty vulnerable place to be.

Sarah Sundin: It really was.

Jenny Wheeler: Let’s talk about Embers in the London Sky, which is the latest one of your books.

You do promise that they’re dramatic, that they’re daring, and that they’re romantic and they are. This one traces two key characters. Alida who is a mother trying to find her child who was lost in a chaotic scenes in a middle of a German bombing raid, and Hugh, who is a BBC war correspondent.

They meet and Hugh starts to help her to find her son.

Jenny Wheeler: I admit that I didn’t really think much about the children would’ve obviously got lost during a chaotic war scene.

And you make it clear in the notes at the back of your book that this was a very real thing. Tell us a little about the numbers that were affected.

Sarah Sundin: I’m afraid I actually don’t have numbers on that, and I’m not sure we’ll ever get those. There were so many people who were displaced during the war and after the war. There were just millions of people on the road.

People being released from the concentration camps. People who’d been bombed out of their houses all throughout Europe. Soldiers who were trying to get back home.

So there were just millions of displaced people in Europe. But this story takes place early in the war during the invasion of the Netherlands and Belgium and France, and there were at least well over a million people on the road as the Nazis invaded.

And there were instances where parents who were on foot were desperate for their children and would thrust them into cars thinking that at least their child had a better chance to get away in a car than they would on foot.

And then after the war or after the invasion, everything settled down and people were going back home. This is mid-1940 and they couldn’t find their children and the newspapers in Paris were filled with their classified ads with people trying to find their children. That broke my heart as a mom.

That’s what inspired that story. I don’t know any numbers of how many people were separated because of the chaos of war. I don’t know if there are any numbers.

Later on in the story, I mentioned some numbers in Britain where they evacuate the children from the cities to the countryside.

And in the first couple days of the war, they evacuated one and a half million mothers and children to the countryside, which is a phenomenal logistical feat. They basically took over the railway system and just filed them- all the schools went in together and mothers with young children came together. A million and a half people were moved.

It’s rather incredible feat. Because of what we call the Phony War, where after the defeat of Poland the Western Front pretty much went quiet until April and May of 1940 when the Germans went on the move with the Blitz again.

There was this period about seven, eight months where there really wasn’t much happening and all these children who’d been evacuated to the countryside and their parents said their children are miserable.

We’re miserable to not having them with us. The bombs aren’t falling, so let’s bring our kids home again. All throughout the war, there was this tension being between the families who wanted to be together and the government, which really wanted the children in safety so they weren’t going get killed.

As things got worse, they would have another campaign to get the children to evacuate and then things would quiet down when children would come home. All throughout the war this went on, it wasn’t like children evacuated on September 1st, 1939 and didn’t come back till VE day.

There was this back and forth and I found that very interesting.

Jenny Wheeler: I guess there must have been some children who were never reunited with their families, even if their parents were still alive. It just would be the case, wouldn’t it?

Sarah Sundin: Yes. Even in Britain some of these children came from, bad homes to begin with, and so their parents really didn’t mind having them out of the house.

And some of them actually became very bonded to their evacuee homes in the countryside. And the foster families really loved their kids.

There were some situations where the kids would either not go home again or some would run away and try to go back to the countryside. But for everyone who did that, there were children who ran away from the country and went back to London because they wanted to be with their families.

There was just so much going on, and especially a lot of these lower income families. The parents – both were working – and oftentimes they depended on the school aged children to watch the little ones.

When the school aged kids were evacuated, that put a hardship on them, so they wanted those kids back for the childcare.

There were so many things that go on and we see these images of the children getting on the trains and we think, oh, it’s sad, but thank goodness they’re being safe.

But when you actually dig into it, imagine what the children were going through. Imagine what the families were going through.

Imagine where the foster families are going through in the countryside, and suddenly you have children in your home and they’re homesick and maybe they’re wetting the bed and they have behavior issues that you’re not used to because they’re city kids and you’re a nice clean country family.

There was this culture clash and some of the foster families were really willing to have the kids. They were super excited and very compassionate. And others were neglect neglectful, some were abusive, because people are people. There was this broad range of things that happened to the children.

And that’s what I wanted to show in the novel as Alida gets involved, working with the Ministry of Health, which was responsible for the evacuations, as she’s starting to talk to these evacuees and she’s talking to the families back in London and she’s talking to the foster families and the billeting officers who are responsible for keeping everything together in the countryside.

She’s starting to see these issues and it opens her mind. It helped her learn more compassion as she’s watching these people go through it, and it was a way to help her grow as meanwhile, she’s looking for her son.

Jenny Wheeler: Yes. So that’s definitely a very important part of the story. The other part is obvious is the whole scene with the covering of the war correspondents. At this stage of the war, the US had not actually entered action, but there were some very important US correspondents sending postings from London, telling the American population what was happening.

Give us an idea of why they were so important.

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Sarah Sundin: Well, America was obviously geographically isolated. This was before TV. Radio was actually a very new medium. This was the first major war that was covered by radio. In World War I there was no radio which, I dunno why it struck me as, oh, I didn’t know that, but I didn’t know that.

It was a new medium and the radio correspondents and the radio broadcast stations were still learning how to use this new medium well. The BBC was really very much a premier organization.

They were really the first big radio station, and they had done a lot of technological advances and were the first ones to do outdoor broadcasts as opposed to being in the studio with the perfect soundproofed room and all that.

They were doing a lot of technological and broadcasting innovations. They’d started TV before the war, which I surprised me again.

I think of that as real image, a post-war thing. But they actually had brought TV broadcasts before the war. They had to stop during the war. Britain, had one broadcasting company, the BBC, and the entire country gets that.

And they had some regional stations – in America, we call them channels, but they had regional stations too. But they were all part of the BBC.

Now, in America, partly because it’s geographically so widespread, but also because of this, capitalistic free enterprise, anything goes at atmosphere. There are radio stations everywhere.

There are multiple networks. There were small local broadcasts. Companies that were just their own little towns, wherever. And then you had the big networks like NBC and CBS and Mutual.

It was definitely a wild west atmosphere and a lot of competition. And of course competition means innovation.

There were a lot of American innovations too. But where it became really important during the war was Edward R Murrow with CBS was a very popular correspondent.

He had amazing voice, just beautiful deep timber and he way of speaking in simple and profound sentences, short and sweet and deep. And he went to London and because he didn’t have the same sensor censorship, over him as the BBC correspondents.

He was able to do some more things than the BBC corresponds were able to do. He did some live broadcasts. The BBC correspondents weren’t allowed to do some of that early in the war because those broadcasts could be picked up in Germany. So if they’re talking about bombs falling into Trafalgar Square, then the Luftwaffe can say, aha, our bombs hit Trafalgar Square.

Good job on the navigation, or let’s switch, we were off a little bit on a navigation so they could use those live broadcasts to improve their navigation. They had to do delayed broadcasts, but the situation was different in America. So he was recording. There’s this very famous recording of him in Trafalgar Square during a bombing raid, and you can hear the air raid sirens.

He pauses. He doesn’t just talk the whole time. He pauses and picks up those noises. He puts his microphone down to the ground and hears the footsteps of the people on their way to the air raid shelter.

And he is commenting, they’re not running, they’re walking very slowly because they’ve got that beautiful Blitz spirit, the calm spirit of the British and these broadcasts were heard in America.

Before then the American people were split about whether or not they wanted to join the war, but his broadcasts helped push him over the edge because they saw Britain with the bombs falling and they felt it, and they felt those people and their despair, they also really heard their courage and it really helped tip the public opinion toward the allies and toward joining the war.

Obviously, it wasn’t till Pearl Harbor that America had joined the war, but this type of thing helped. Roosevelt passed the Lend-Lease bill, which was vital to getting to helping Britain fight the war.

I was able to be a part of it. So here’s Hugh, who’s a BBC correspondent, and he is trying to record, but he has some limits on him. And censorship isn’t the right word because the government wasn’t telling the BBC what they had to broadcast, but they were allowing them to self-censor, but they were being very careful because they didn’t want to give any comfort to the Germans.

He’s pushing back against these limits that are on him. Getting into these wonderful debates with an appropriate level of discretion and meanwhile, we actually have Edward R Murrow in a couple of scenes and showing his broadcasts to just show what an international city London was during the war.

And how the British especially how the Blitz really helped persuade the Americans that the allied side was the right side, the only side to be on.

Jenny Wheeler: Some of those broadcast are still available on the web today, aren’t they? I’m sure that people would love to hear some of those, so I’ll make sure that I get the links from you and we’ll put them in the show note for this episode.

You do have you a little later him covering an invasion in Norway.

And that was where he was able to do a live broadcast. And also there is a scene where one of the free French broadcasters who evacuated from Paris when the Germans took over is blamed because he mentions a particular ship, which is then later sunk by the Germans, and he’s blamed for. Giving them the ship’s location in a broadcast.

Tell us a bit about those two episodes.

Sarah Sundin: The situation with the French reporter was- I made that up, but it was based similar things that did happen. There was a situation where the Allies and the British and the Free French went to, Dakar in Sierra Leone and they were trying to invade there because it was run by the Vichy French and the Free French wanted to take it over.

And there were French sailors heard in the bars talking about Dakar. Dakar, and when they invaded the Vichy forces were ready for them.

There was a lot of talk about, oh some spies must have heard it or it was broadcast.

And so there was the sense of, oh this information got to the Germans. So there was always that concern. The European services of the VDC, which was, a division of the BBC and they were really very freewheeling too because they were all run, they were all separate departments and they weren’t.

They didn’t fall completely under the BBC. They were all, a lot of ’em were self-governing. They had some British BBC personnel involved, but the French section had a lot of free French reporters. And so they were, there were a lot of pushing back with all these different nations with their own stations that were, they were broadcasting to occupied Europe.

As far as the Lofoten raid, which was in Norway, it was a one day raid where they, there was a second one later on in the war, which wasn’t in my novel, but it was in oh, March, April, 1941. And there was a small group of Norwegian and British commandos who went to this. Lofoten Islands in Norway and they just came in completely surprised the Germans

There was only a small garrison there. They took all the Germans prisoner, took them back to England, They took all quislings, the Norwegian traitors, they took them back to England, and they took a bunch of Norwegian Patriots who wanted to fight for the Allies and volunteered, and they came back to England and they were able to fight. They destroyed all, these fish oil factories that were used to help make ammunition for the Germans.

It was a big morale booster. There were some problems. I didn’t cover this in the book because they didn’t actually clear it with the Norwegian government in Exile and they were not happy with it. There were some repercussions when the Germans came back to the Lofoten Islands.

They imprisoned a lot of people, put a lot of people in concentration camps, so there were some really bad repercussions, which of course, Hugh would not have known about.

This was not something he would’ve even heard about, but it was a great big morale booster in England. And he actually records he can’t record live because he is in Norway and there’s no way for them to broadcast live from Norway.

But he records it on discs, he is recording it live and then they take the discs back and they were able to play it later. That sense of live coverage where you can hear the sounds and there was an actual Crown film unit is there.

There is some video footage of that raid and I used that as a source for Hugh’s report. And I have links to that broadcast and to a couple of Edward r Murrow’s broadcast on my website. And I’ll give you both of those links after this. But it was really interesting to watch.

Jenny Wheeler: The last few books you’ve done have been standalone novels, but before that you did a number of series, and I just want to mention them, especially to American readers if they are interested in this period, because you have one called Sunrise at Normandy, which is about three brothers who in various ways are linked through the D-Day landings, and another called Wings of Glory, as you’ve mentioned with the B 17, and three brothers who flew in the B 17 bombers.

You’ve also got one about nurses, you do cast a light on the American involvement in the war in a way that perhaps some other writers haven’t done, haven’t you?

Sarah Sundin: Yes, that’s where I started. I was really working – since I am an American – I have an American voice, and it seemed natural. The first the Wings of Glory series, I actually had the brothers coming from the town where I was living. It made it an easy way for me to get their voices down.

As I’ve been writing more and more the last four novels, the standalones some of them have had European main characters like Embers in the London sky.

We have a Dutch refugee and we have a British journalist. I had some American side characters, but I didn’t have any American main characters, which is the first time I’ve done that.

In a couple other books, I’ve had European main characters. The next two books on this contract – it’s not a series, but they’re loosely related -there are three Dutch cousins.

The next book is about a latest cousin Cilla and the next one about her cousin Garrett. And then there are the Scottish hero and the next book, and a heroine from the island of Jersey in the third book. I have once again no American main character. So it’s been fun.

Jenny Wheeler: You have a family link to the war as well, don’t you? Tell us a little about that.

Sarah Sundin: My grandfather was in the US Navy. He was a what they called a pharmacist mate.

Now they call them hospital corpsman or a medic basically. He was taking care of people in hospitals and he was a storyteller and his brother… Oh my. He was a character and he was a B 17 bomber pilot, which is why I had my first series follow these brothers who were B 17 bomber pilots.

His B 17 flew into Pearl Harbor during the attack, which was incredible.

And he then flew a tour of duty from Australia, and finished that tour of duty and then flew another tour of duty from England with the eighth Air Force.

He had quite the career. He ended up at the end of the war, he was on in Eisenhower’s headquarters with the Supreme headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force.

My other grandfather was unable to fight. He had a heart murmur from rheumatic heart disease as a child, but he was a professor of German and he was a native German speaker. He was able to use his German language skills to help train American soldiers to go in after the Occupation.

They did everything from interrogate prisoners to help displaces people. He was using his skills for the Allied cause, which is really I love that.

Jenny Wheeler: Yeah, that’s terrific. Look, we’ve had a good talk about these books and we’re starting to run out of time.

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Turning to Sarah as reader, tell us what you like to read for your personal pleasure. And if you’ve got anything you’d like to recommend to listeners.

Sarah Sundin: Oh my goodness of course, every writer loves to read. I am super behind on my reading right now. I’ve had a little bit of a family crisis in the last few months and so I have barely done any reading at all except my basic research to get my novel written.

I am halfway through Holly Varni’s book called On Moonberry Lake, which is absolutely delightful.

And I’ve said that in every interview I’ve done for this book in the last 23 months because I’ve been reading it so slowly.

I’ve had almost no free time, but I’m enjoying Holly’s book and it’s fun because she’s a friend. I met her at writer’s conferences long before she was published, so it’s fun to see her being published.

Jenny Wheeler: When you do have a little bit of time, what does your taste extend to?

Sarah Sundin: Because of being a published author, I get a lot of requests to read World War II books, especially for endorsement.

And World War II is very popular right now, so I’ve been reading a lot of World War II fiction. If it were just me, I would read a lot of historical fiction from a variety of eras.

I love time traveling, if you will, in a novel.

But I also like contemporary books. I like the occasional fantasy novel, or thrillers, I like to try different things.

But a lot of my reading right now is almost I don’t want to say assignments because it makes it sound like it’s miserable, but it’s more I need to read this book for endorsement.

I have a lot of books to read for endorsement right now.

Jenny Wheeler: You probably read it from a point of view where your judgements are a little bit more succinct in that area than the average reader because you know so much about the period. Do you find sometimes that you’re finding yourself saying, oh, I know that’s not right.

Sarah Sundin: Most of what I find now the level of research for novels has become such a high bar. The work that’s being done by historical novelists right now is phenomenal.

In general, I would say 90% of the books I read that are World War II, I can say, wow, they really did the research.

I can tell. It’s tin he detail, the big details, the little details, just the knowledge, that deep knowledge of the era.

And I’m just seeing such a wonderful depth knowledge of the knowledge base. Where I do see errors, every once in a while I’ll read one where I can tell they have not done their research.

They’ve read two or three books and try to write book from those books usually don’t get an endorsement. I may enjoy the story, but I personally can’t endorse it.

What I will notice is, occasional minor things, and they’re so minor that only people like me are going to pick up on them.

And it’s also the type of thing that I know I make the same type of minor errors in my book, because sometimes it’s not about what you know or what you don’t know, but knowing what questions to ask.

Sometimes you don’t know the question to ask it. I’ll use my mother’s example. My mother was very upset reading a novel, a historical novel, where the heroine is applying mascara and she’s using a mascara wand, and my mother was incensed.

She says, oh, they didn’t have mascara wands back then. They had little pot and you dipped your finger in. She was describing how they did it.

And I was stunned because I’ve always used a mascara wand. It never occurred to me that there was any other way to apply mascara. If I was writing a historical character and I wanted to have her apply mascara before I talked to my mother, I would’ve had her using a wand because it never occurred to me to ask that question how did you apply mascara in 19 x, x, X.

Unless to ask that question, you may not find the answer. A lot of these are very minor questions.

I saw one where it was a novel set in Germany during the war, and the heroine is wearing bright red lipstick. And I had just researched a novel set in Germany.

I said, oh no, she couldn’t do that. The Nazis had outlawed makeup. So she definitely wouldn’t have had bright red lipstick.

She might have some powder that she’d hidden in away, but she wouldn’t dare wear bright red lipstick. But if you hadn’t thought to ask that question, you wouldn’t know that was a thing.

So those types of things, when I read them in a novel, I chuckle to myself and I don’t say anything. I’m not going to contact the author. It’s such a minor thing and there are only three people in the world who will catch it, and most of us know that it’s so minor, it’s not worth it.

Jenny Wheeler: It’s probably possible that once that book is published, one of her readers will tell her that.

Sarah Sundin: Oh gosh, yes. And when I make an error and I make at least one because I’m sure there are way more errors in there that people just aren’t catching or catching and not contacting me, but at least one glaring error in each novel. And that’s God’s way of keeping me humble.

And there was one where I had gotten the conversion of British money, English money at the time, these shillings and pence and it doesn’t make any sense to me as an American at all. I read that’s nonsense. It’s crazy stuff.

And I had found in a book ironically, a book I bought at the Imperial War Museum that had the conversion and I used that.

A British reader of a certain age has contacted me and said, Sarah, I loved your book, however, and I said, I know. I know I got the wrong number of shillings to a crown. most of them are very forgiving.

But I did one reader who said, I can never trust you again. I will never read your books again. I can’t trust you. I felt awful.

I made a mistake and I was thinking how many facts I’d had in that book, and I had one wrong, and I was a little ticked off with that one, but on the other hand, I know how people are and you get something wrong like that and you violate the trust.

I messed that one up. It’s been fixed now in the more recent versions. But yeah, we’re human. We make mistakes, but I try.

Jenny Wheeler: A book from the Imperial War Museum. You might have felt you could trust it.

Look what is next for you as an author. Just give us an idea of what you are working on over the next 12 months.

Sarah Sundin: I just turned in my next novel. It’s set in Scotland during the war, and she is a Dutch refugee who becomes she becomes a German spy to escape.

She thinks that she’s going to ditch the Germans the second she lands in England, but she gets captured immediately by our kilt wearing Scotsman, who is a naval officer, and he turns her in and MI 5 turns her to become a double agent.

She’s immediately set up to Scotland to send false messages back to Germany about British ship movements.

And she’s assigned a naval liaison who is the same man who captured her. It’s been a fun story to write. So that one’s been turned in. I’m waiting for my edits on that. And then I’m getting started on my next book, which will be set in on the island of Jersey during the war.

So that’ll be fun. The Channel Islands

Jenny Wheeler: So that one you’ve just mentioned, what was the nub idea for that? Was there really someone who did come to England as a German spy and then turned.

Sarah Sundin: The MI5 had what they call the Double Cross system and there were about three dozen German spies… I shouldn’t say German because most of them were other nationalities, but they were sent by Germany.

There were Dutch, Norwegians Spaniards, French, Poles, Czechs and Germans. And Belgians.

And they would send them to England. MI 5 actually captured all of the German agents were sent to England except one, and that one ran out of money and committed suicide.

So he did no harm at all, but they would turn them become doubled agents. Those who wouldn’t turn were either imprisoned or executed.

But some of the people, some of the agents who came were like my heroin Cilla, who actually were not Nazis and were using the German Abwehr as a free ticket to England to get out of occupied Europe. There were some that were allied with the Resistance. There were some who were very sketchy.

The nucleus of that idea actually was my youngest son is very much into mythology. And when I told him I wanted to write something set in Scotland, he says, oh mom, you should use some of the mythology. He started telling me about the legend of the silkie, which is mythological creature, which looks like a seal.

But when she comes to land, she strips away her seal skin and she’s a beautiful woman. And the men see her immediately fall in love with her, but she wants to go back to the sea. They can capture her and keep her by hiding her seal skin.

And then she’s trapped on land and she has to stay. And when he told me that story, I was immediately picturing this agent landing at night. Her seal skin is the rubber dinghy that she’s come with. The Scotsman captures her, and by stealing her boat, she’s trapped. But actually, of course I had to make her a sympathetic heroine.

She obviously can’t be a Nazi. She has to be an Allie. The nucleus of that idea this image of this woman landing by boat at night and this man capturing her. And that became the scene that drove that novel. Every novel for me has a big scene that I’m either working toward or that kind of drives the novel, and that was the scene for me.

Jenny Wheeler: Fantastic. Look, we should now finish because we have run over time. Although it’s been so fascinating, we’d just like to know, do you enjoy interacting with your readers and where can they find you online?

Sarah Sundin: I love hearing from my readers. You can find me on my website sarahsundin.com. Subscribe to my email newsletter. I’m also on Facebook Instagram, Twitter, or X or whatever we’re calling it this week. Come find me.

Jenny Wheeler: Thanks so much Sarah. It’s been fascinating.

Sarah Sundin: Thanks to you too. Bye.

Mark Ellis’s World War II London is a place where crime flourishes alongside the heroism of firefighters and fighter pilots  and his charismatic Detective Frank Merlin deals with rapists, and racketeers amidst the carnage of falling bombs..

Amy Harmon grew up in a remote Utah valley very close to where the famed outlaw Butch Cassidy lived, and has always been fascinated by the folk lore surrounding his “Robin Hood” reputation. 

She’s far too young to have seen the famous movie starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford first time round, but she excavated the history and shed a whole new light on the story in her latest book.

The Outlaw Noble Salt is released today, and it’s a remarkable story that one critic “said “imbues the Butch Cassidy myth with even more passion and intrigue” that would have fallen flat if not handled with care. Lucky for readers that Harmon is up to the task.”

That’s next time on Binge Reading… Just a reminder – you can support us by buying me a coffee, and or leaving a review… Word of mouth is still the best way for readers to find books they will love to read.

That’s it for today. See you next time and happy reading.

For Easter 2024. Fiction set in Biblical Times. From New York Times bestselling author Angela Hunt comes a compelling new series set in the New Testament era.

Her latest book, Sisters of Corinth, is a captivating story of love, sacrifice, and the quest for power, set against the backdrop of ancient Greece.

Angela is a prolific author in a wide range of genres, from fiction set in Biblical times to historical fiction in other periods and contemporary romance

Welcome to the Joys of Binge Reading, the show for anyone who ever got to the end of a great book and wanted to read the next instalment. We interview successful series authors and recommend the best in mystery, suspense, historical and romance series, so you’ll never be without a book you can’t foot down.

You’ll find this episode’s show notes, a free ebook, and lots more information at The Joys of Binge Reading.com. And now here’s our show.

Hi there I’m your host Jenny Wheeler, and on Binge Reading today we present Angela’s fresh take on the Easter story. Two sisters – daughters of a top ranking Corinth magistrate – take up very different ambitions and life paths.

In this episode she tells why readers can always “expect the unexpected” in her books  and talks about her latest series, featuring fledgling believers who came to faith through the teachings of the apostle Paul.

Our free books give away is Mad March Mysteries, and that includes cozies and thrillers, whatever level of mystery your tastes might dictate.  The offer is for a limited time as always, so get in now.

The offer includes Poisoned Legacy, Book #1 in the Of Gold & Blood mystery series

​https://books.bookfunnel.com/marchmysterythriller/4nqbm64mq3

And just before we get to Angela. A blatant appeal for your help in defraying the cost of producing the show. Buy me a cup of coffee on www.buymeacoffee.com/jennywheelx Like a little kiss, and you’ll just help me get through the day.

And one more housekeeping reminder. If you enjoy the show, leave us a review, so others will find us too. Word of mouth is still the best way for others to discover the show and great books they will love to read.

The Sisters of Corinth: (On pre-order) https://www.amazon.com/Sisters-Corinth-Emissaries-Book-Testament-ebook/dp/B0CTKQNM2S/

The Apostle’s Sister: https://www.amazon.com/Apostles-Sister-Jerusalem-Road-Book-ebook/dp/B09LWNJK4L/

Unspoken: https://www.amazon.com/Unspoken-Angela-Hunt-ebook/dp/B08LTXRJ8D/

Koko The signing gorilla: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koko_(gorilla)#:

Koko’s trainer Francine “Penny” Patterson:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francine_Patterson

The Bible Verse that inspired it: https://www.bible.com/bible/compare/JOB.12.7-12

The gladiator training arena: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludus_Magnus#:

What Angela is reading:

People Of The Book – by Geraldine Brooks, https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/1379961

Website: Angela Hunt books.com

Facebook: Angela Hunt, novelist: https://www.facebook.com/angela.e.hunt/

Substack Newsletter: Angelahunt.substack.com

But now here’s Angela. Hello there, Angela, and welcome to the show. It’s great to have you with us.

Angela Hunt: Thank you. I’m delighted to be here. It feels so weird because for me it’s Wednesday, and for you it’s Thursday. I feel like we’re in a time loop or something.

Jenny Wheeler: Yes, that’s right. Just one of those things when we’re on different sides of the world. I’m in New Zealand and you are in Florida. That’s right. Isn’t it?

Angela Hunt: Yes, it is.

Jenny Wheeler: Great. Now you’ve written 165 plus novels covering a wide range of historical periods, mostly focused in biblical times. You’ve won many awards including a Christie Award, and you say your books are for people who “expect the unexpected.”

I wonder what you mean by that motto, which is at the top of your website. What can people expect when you say “expect the unexpected?”

Angela Hunt: One of my pet peeves when I read a novel is if I can figure out the end, especially when I’m still in the beginning and I will often flip to the end to see if my instincts were right.

And when they are, I just feel like what’s the point of reading this? And I remember once I was reading a murder mystery. I don’t even know if the crime – I think somebody had been murdered and a handyman walks in and the writer just happened to mention that he was left-handed.

I said: Oh, he’s the murderer then, and it’s going be proven eventually that only a left-handed person could have done it.

There was the clue right there, but it may as well have had like flashing lights around it. And I thought, okay, I’m not reading this one. Like I’m not even finishing this one. Yes.

Jenny Wheeler: It’s funny because I have heard the criticism from people who aren’t believers about ‘what’s the point?’

We all know how the story of Jesus ends. So what’s the point of even investigating it? How do you keep it interesting when we do know how the story ends?

Angela Hunt: Most of my, it’s called biblical fiction but I really even hate the term because if it’s biblical, it should not be fictional.

I like to call it historical fiction set in biblical times, but that’s rather a mouthful, isn’t it? Anyway, my stories really aren’t about Jesus per se.

They are about people he met and what went on in their lives and how it influenced them. And some of them are fictional people. Some of them are mentioned in the Bible, but only briefly.

I love spinning their stories and those I hope, always have unexpected outcomes.

Jenny Wheeler: Yes, it’s interesting. I interviewed Tessa Afshar at Christmas as one of our Christmas authors, and she made exactly the same distinction.

She wanted her books to be seen as fiction set in biblical times, so you’ve on the same page there. I think it’s also that sensitivity about not wanting to assume things about real biblical characters.

We’re going to talk a little bit later on when we get into this about the Apostle Paul’s sister because one of the books you’ve published recently is The Apostle’s Sister and she is a real character, but she’s mentioned only in passing.

I’m interested to hear you talk about how you build up a story around a character like that, but we will get to that.

The latest novel that we are focusing on at the moment is The Sisters of Corinth, and this is in a new series called the Emissaries. It’s the second in that series. Tell us a bit about the Emissary series. I think you’ve said they are a series featuring “fledgling believers who have come to faith through the teachings of the Apostle Paul.”

This is the second in the series. How many are you planning in this series for starters.

Angela Hunt: There are only going to be three in the Emissary series. I found myself a few years back. I started writing a lot of Old Testament stories, and then I moved into the intertestamental period – that 400 years between the Old Testament and the New Testament, mainly because I knew very little about it.

That was the time of the Maccabees. Cleopatra fell into that time span.

I wanted to know more about it. I was curious. I wrote four books set in that time period, and then I wrote another four books set in the lifetime of Jesus, where he’s just a peripheral character. And as you mentioned, The Apostle’s Sister was the last one in that series.

And then I thought, okay, if I am doing this chronologically, the next thing would be the Gentiles, because Paul took the gospel to the Gentile cities, and let me tell you, they were a lot rowdier than the Jews were.

I’ve just finished the third book and final book in that series. I handed it in a couple of weeks ago.

I was fascinated. I’ve written about Ancient Rome before, but it is just such a fascinating society and so much of it has come into our world and our system of government today.

So much survives them. So anyway, The Sisters of Corinth, what is that about? It starts out like a Cinderella story.

You’ve got this important new government official, he’s a senator of Rome and he’s going to be the chief, the governor of the province that Corinth is the capital of, Achaea, I think it was.

He’s going to be the governor. There’s a local magistrate who has two daughters. One is his stepdaughter, one’s his biological daughter, and he wants to marry one of those girls off to the governor’s son because that will put him in a very good and important position.

He’ll be like the governor’s right-hand man.

One of the daughters happens to be a new convert to Christianity. The other one worships the Roman gods, particularly Aphrodite, who she starts to worship when she decides she wants to get married the governor’s son, because Aphrodite was the goddess of love.

There’s a definite culture clash. And as it happens, wouldn’t he pick the sweet quiet one instead of the loud and flamboyant one? It’s really a rivalry story between these two sisters and everything they go through. It.

It’s like Cinderella, run amuck. If Cinderella had not fit her foot into that slipper.

Jenny Wheeler: That’s right. And with this character of Prima, you get some fascinating detail about the goddess Aphrodite and what followers of Aphrodite had to do.

I wondered how important that research side of things was to you and whether you enjoy doing it.

Angela Hunt: I did find it was a little creepy because, even the Bible says, those images of those gods, many of them were inhabited by demons.

And so the more a person gave themself over to the worship of this false God, the more they were opening themselves up to the influence of demons.

I enjoyed the research, but it gets, it really gets a little creepy at some point, and I don’t want to go too far into that.

Jenny Wheeler: And what kind of documents are there these days that give you some of that inside knowledge about that kind of thing?

Angela Hunt: They have found these curse tablets you used to in Ancient Rome.

You could go to a certain shop and buy a very thin piece of copper or bronze, and you could write out with a stylus by pressing into it curses upon your enemies.

Then you offer that as a prayer to your chosen God, and then you wrap it up very tightly and put this curse tablet under your enemy’s bed or buried outside his house or something.

And so yes, my, my bad girl does that and many other things in an effort to win the love of the guy she wants to marry. She is a very bad girl.

Jenny Wheeler: You’ve done a tremendous amount of study. I think you’ve got a doctorate, haven’t you? I should be calling you Dr. Hunt.

Angela Hunt: Yes, I actually got two doctorates in, one in biblical literature and one in theology. I just love to study.

Jenny Wheeler: I asked myself, how on earth did you manage to do all that level of study and still write nearly a hundred and 70 books?

Angela Hunt: Oh, time management. Let’s chalk it up to that.

Jenny Wheeler: We’re going to ask you about a typical writing day when we get into this a little bit further. So maybe we’ll get a few tips.

Now you do also, as you’ve mentioned, take true historical characters like Paul or Priscilla or Aquila in these books that we are discussing, and you, also create the fictional ones, that satellite around them.

How do you balance that fact and fiction side of things, and how important is the historical accuracy to you?

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Angela Hunt: I believe historical accuracy is very important. I try never, ever to contradict the historical record as far as we know. My fictional people are free to do whatever is A. Logical, and B. Plausible, and C. Available. I try to know everything in that society so I can plot out a rational course for the fictional characters and the historical people.

I try to keep them true to what we know of their history. But when you go that far back, a lot of times we don’t know exactly.

The book I just handed in was set in Rome during the reign of Nero, and of course, both Paul and the Apostle Peter were killed under Nero’s reign. And so I had to write both of those deaths and felt terrible doing it.

I felt like I was killing them all over again, but I took educated guesses as to what they would’ve been like and when they would’ve occurred.

Jenny Wheeler: And in The Sisters of Corinth also there is a key character that helps with the plot development, a gladiator.

Once again, I felt you got an insight into the culture of the time and the gladiators struck me as being a little bit like a matador or a soccer player in our time where he could have huge fame and riches and then almost instantly it could be taken away overnight.

That was also very interesting to me. Did you find that an interesting part to research?

Angela Hunt: Yes. I was always fascinated with gladiators. Even before the movie Gladiator came out, which was of course hugely popular, but it’s just – It seems so contradictory because first they were slaves. They had no personal freedom, so they had to do whatever their master said. But if a man was big and strong they might find themselves in the in the arena and going to the Ludus for training, et cetera.

Of course they were motivated, because if they didn’t fight to win, they died in the sand.

They were all highly motivated, yet the people idolized them, just like we idolize sports heroes today. The only difference is, and I hope it stays a big difference, is that we don’t allow our athletes to kill each other.

Although sometimes watching the fans in the stand, I wonder if we’re really that far away from what the Romans experienced.

Jenny Wheeler: And I get the sense, I’ve read it even in The Apostle’s Sister, although it’s not in The Emissaries series, and I hope we are not giving anything away, but I’ve got a feeling that things were going to climax in Rome.

The end of the Sisters of Corinth, we won’t give it away, but it does seem as if some of the characters in that book are going to be journeying to Rome.

And you get the feeling with Paul’s sister that she might be going to see her brother in Rome as well. So could we expect that in one of these later books, those characters are going to meet up.

Angela Hunt: When I was writing the third book, I brought back characters from Book one and book two, and they all meet together in Rome and some survive and some do not. But the Lord’s purpose works through it all. So that’s the important thing.

Jenny Wheeler: Yes. Now we’ve mentioned several times, The Apostle’s Sister. Tell us what we know of her from the biblical account, and then how did you go about creating a whole book around that?

Because we only know a tiny amount. There’s only a tiny hint of her existence in the Bible, isn’t there?

Angela Hunt: There’s only one mention of her and really there’s a mention of her and her son, who was Paul’s nephew.

But we also know that Paul was raised, he was from Tarsus. And by researching Tarsus, I realized that Paul’s family – of course they were devoutly Jewish and they were Pharisees and they were Roman citizens.

Paul had inherited Roman citizenship, which means that his family had to be in. in good favor of the governor of that area. They must have been held in high esteem.

Almost every Jewish young man of that social class would’ve gone to Jerusalem to study Torah under the leading rabbis. And so that’s what Paul did.

And Paul’s sister married a young man, so she also ended up in Jerusalem. All the Bible tells us is there was a point when Paul was arrested in Jerusalem and he was held at the prison there, the Fortress Antonia, and a bunch of. Zealots or the religious authorities took a vow that they weren’t going to eat until they had killed Paul.

And Paul’s little nephew, I don’t know how little he was, but Paul’s nephew heard about it, ran and told his mother, Paul’s sister, and she told him, you need to go tell the authorities.

They were able to tell the Roman guards who gathered around Paul and safeguarded him and took him to Caesarea and got him out of that hot bed of trouble in Jerusalem.

Paul’s nephew and his sister worked together to save Paul’s life in that situation.

I thought, okay, she’s there. We never really thought about Paul having a sister, so I thought she must have an interesting story. I decided I would take a stab at telling it.

Jenny Wheeler: Yes, and you do get the feeling from that biblical account, even just that one verse, that the nephew probably was an adolescent. They probably wouldn’t let a kid into a jail and even to gather the news that he did either that bit of gossip, that he probably was old enough to be hanging around listening to male talk somewhere.

So probably early to mid-adolescence probably.

Angela Hunt: Yes.

Jenny Wheeler: Have you got a favorite time period? And also, is there any character that of these many books you’ve written that really impacted on you and has affected you even till today?

Angela Hunt: I do Ancient Rome just because I find it so fascinating and it seems so similar to even the era that we’re living in today. How people have pretty much put God aside and we’re more interested in seeking pleasure, and our ambition is running rampant. And we just seem like we have an awful lot in common with the Romans.

But my favorite character out of all my books is a gorilla It was years ago. The book is called Unspoken and it’s about a gorilla who speaks sign language.

Years ago, I read this verse in the Bible and it says, “ask the animals and they will tell you” – the gist being that they will tell you about God.

(Job 12:7 – Editor’s note)

I looked at my husband and I said, wouldn’t it be cool if this gorilla who spoke sign language could talk about God.

And he said, that’s the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard. And I said, alright, that’s it. I’m writing it.

And so I did, and I love that book. I love that character. She was very sweet gorilla and she spoke she had a sense of humor.

Of course, I based her on Koko that real gorilla who Penny Patterson taught to speak sign language.

I didn’t let my gorilla do anything that Koko had not or could not really do. So she was pretty literally based, but she’s my favorite character of all time.

Jenny Wheeler: Well that truly does fulfil the motto of expect the unexpected, doesn’t it?

When you first started writing, did you have any goal in mind and have you reached it yet?

Angela Hunt: No. I became a writer after I got married, just because my husband and I adopted our children and we worked so hard to get them that I knew I was going to have to work because my husband is a youth pastor and they traditionally don’t make a lot of money.

And I thought, okay, I’m going to have to help put food on the table.

I want a job, and I’d like to have one where I can work at home and enjoy these babies that I worked so hard to bring over.

I thought, okay, I’ve been an English major in school, and a friend told me I had a way with words and I thought, okay, I’ll try to write something.

For five years while my kids were little, I was writing magazine articles and catalogue copy and things I could write when the kids were sleeping in their naps.

And then I saw an ad in the back of Writer’s Digest magazine about a contest for unpublished children’s picture book authors, and I thought I’m an unpublished any kind of book author.

I got a book on how to write children’s picture books and I wrote up a script and sent it in and it won the contest.

So suddenly I was a children’s picture book writer. Who knew? It just grew from there. I went from picture books to middle grade books for kids, because my husband was a middle school youth pastor.

And after writing 20 or 30 of those, my editor said why don’t you try adult novels?

And I thought, okay, I’ll sure. It’s really been just a journey of walking through the doors that God opens.

I think being a writer is like being a builder. If you know how to use the tools, write a good sentence, a good paragraph, put a story together, then you can write anything. It’s just a matter of figuring out what you want to write.

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Jenny Wheeler: That’s fantastic, Angela. Now we’ve mentioned time management and just hearing you talk, I see that your whole life, you’ve probably have had fantastic time management.

Tell us a bit about your typical writing day. I guess it’s different because your children are probably older, but how do you manage your time so effectively?

Angela Hunt: Yes, every season of life has always been different, but now my kids are grown and out of the house and my husband and I live in Florida and we have this weird home that’s got separate buildings.

It was built by an artist, and one building had his art studio and there’s a caboose on the yard and a workshop and then the house we live in.

I rent two of them out with as Air Bnbs. So, the first thing I do every morning is get up and if somebody’s checking out, I have to clean the Air Bnb.

Such a glamorous life. And I have chickens, so I have to go feed and water the chickens and collect the eggs and, but I’m usually ready to sit down and write after lunch.

Then I focus on my writing and give myself a quota every day of either so many words to put into the computer or so many pages to edit. I’m very structured, so I do what I have to do per day and then I say, okay, time to go play with the dogs or talk to my husband, or play with the grandkids who live nearby too.

It’s busy, but it’s fun.

Jenny Wheeler: You’ve mentioned the dogs, and you do have a famous dog, don’t you? Tell us about the dog.

Angela Hunt: Oh yes. My husband and I love mastiffs, English Mastiffs. And back in 2001 we had a boy named Justice who was 275 pounds.

One day I was watching Regis and Kelly, the TV show, and they mentioned it was going to be Dog Week and they were going to have Hercules visit on Friday, and he was the Guinness World Record dog.

I thought it would be fun to send them a picture of my dog and maybe they’d hold it up in front of the camera and that would be thrilling.

I did, I faxed it into their show and the next afternoon I got a call from the producer and she said, we want to bring you and your dog to New York and let you be on the show.

And I laughed and I said, my dog won’t fit in one of those crates they have at the airport. I said he wouldn’t fit and I wouldn’t put him underneath anyway.

And she said, no, we’ll buy him a ticket. He can ride with the people. And I said, really? Okay. So I was explaining this to my husband and as it happened, I was going to be teaching writing the next day in New Jersey, which is just over the bridge from New York City.

And I said, so we both have to go, and then after the show I’ll go to New Jersey and you can fly home with a dog.

And he said, why do we want to do this? And I said, because it’s a life experience.

So we went on the show. We took the dog. He wasn’t the heaviest dog in the world, but he did beat Hercules, the world record dog.

But they brought in a ringer from Jersey who was over 300 pounds. And he broke the scale at his vet’s office. But anyway, it was great. It was fun.

Justice, our dog, was this local celebrity for about a month afterwards. He was on TV shows and radio shows and we took him to schools and the kids just loved loving him.

He was just a big sweetheart. We’ve had nine mastiffs, but we only have them two at a time. That’s all we can afford to feed.

Jenny Wheeler: That’s lovely. I gather your husband would not be a youth pastor anymore.

Angela Hunt: Oh, he is, he’s probably the world’s oldest youth pastor, but yes, he’s retired. He doesn’t work anymore, but he has an independent ministry and so he goes to work every morning, thank goodness, or I’d never get anything done. And he still works with kids as a volunteer youth pastor.

Jenny Wheeler: That’s wonderful. Look, if there’s one thing as the quote secret of your creative career, what would it be?

Angela Hunt: For me it’s never been about ambition or trying to write the Great American novel or anything. It’s just been that as a Christian, I see open doors as things that God has provided.

When there’s an open door I tend to walk through it and figure that if God doesn’t want me to do it, he’ll close that door.

For me, it’s just been a matter of walking through the doors that the Lord is open for me.

Jenny Wheeler: That’s wonderful. We do like to ask our authors about their reading taste, so tell us what you like to read and if you’ve got anything you’d like to recommend to our listeners.

Angela Hunt: Yes, I am a member of a book club and I started one in my previous neighborhood, because I knew I’ve stayed so busy, I wasn’t having time to read for pleasure.

I thought I’ll start a book club and that way I have to read a book every month because I’m the leader. I have to lead the discussion.

Then we moved and so I had to leave my book club behind. I started another one and we just finished, wait a minute, let me, what’s the name of the book? I wish I still had it on my desk. Oh, The People Of The Book by Geraldine Page. That’s it.

(Editor’s note – Geraldine Brooks, not Geraldine Page.)

Jenny Wheeler: Yes, an Australian author,

Angela Hunt: Oh, that’s right, because the main character was from Australia. That’s right. Yes, I loved the book and, we had a great discussion about it.

Jenny Wheeler: Tell our listeners. I have read that book actually. It is a great book, but tell our listeners just a little bit about the setup.

Angela Hunt: It’s about a lady who is a book restorer. That isn’t quite right because she doesn’t restore a book, but she takes very old books, antiquated books, and she goes through them and tries to preserve them as well as she can.

And this particular book was a Hagada, a Jewish story that’s usually used at Passover, but it had illuminated art all around it, which is very unusual for a Jewish book as opposed to a Christian book.

And so in between the stories of this contemporary woman, you see the book through history, talking about how it came to be and who did the pictures and the history of the book through all these tumultuous periods in history. I love that. I thought it was fascinating.

Jenny Wheeler: What’s next for Angela as author? How many books do you actually aim to write in one year and what have you got on your desk for the next 12 months?

Angela Hunt: I’m putting together a proposal for a new series. It’ll be, again, historical. Then my agent wants me to revisit a proposal that’s I have sitting in a drawer about a contemporary series, but right this very minute, I have just started a newsletter for writers.

The older I get, the more I want to help other writers get started and to understand the business of writing.

I see lots of people writing on the internet and they’re writing all over the place, but they seem to be a little aimless in what they want to do with it or understanding a lot of the basic principles.

So if anybody wants to look at it, it’s just Angelahunt.substack.com and there’s a free version and a paid version.

And I’m trying to give little bite-size bits of information about the business of writing to help people, learn how to, it’s called write well.

Jenny Wheeler: Is that it’s a craft book, or do you do much marketing yourself?

Angela Hunt: A little. I’m active on Facebook and a little bit on Instagram, then I’m doing the Substack thing. But it’s really, the marketing part is almost just the necessary evil part, because I’m really more focused on communicating.

Jenny Wheeler: Yeah, look, that’s great. Our final question always is. Where can people see you on, find you online? As you’ve mentioned, can you give us those addresses? If they look up your name, will it automatically come up?

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Angela Hunt: Sure. My website is Angela Hunt books.com. The substack newsletter for writers is. Angelahunt.substack.com and Facebook? Just type the search box. Just type Angela Hunt, comma novelist, because there’s lots of Angela Hunts out there.

Jenny Wheeler: That’s fantastic. And do you have much feedback from your readers?

Angela Hunt: Oh yes. Probably have the most feedback on my Facebook page because I post about everything from cakes, baking. I love to bake, so every Friday I bake a cake and put it online. And so everybody is giving tips and suggestions and, just a little bit of everything. I think I would be bored if I read a page where all the person did was talk about books.

So it’s just slice of life fun stuff. And there’s a nice, a very nice community of folks who stay in touch through that website, through Facebook.

Jenny Wheeler: Tell us just a little about that family. How many children did you have and where did you find them?

Angela Hunt: Ah, both of my kids are from South Korea and my daughter is, oh. She’s grown. She wouldn’t like it if I gave her age, but she is grown and has three children. So I have three grandchildren and then my son, he helps my husband in the youth ministry. So yeah, but they’re both from South Korea and just great.

We love them.

Jenny Wheeler: That’s wonderful. Look, thank you so much. You obviously, have the gift for living a really full life. That’s wonderful. Apart from the success as an author, you, you’ve rounded it out beautifully. Thank you so much for sharing that experience today and I hope that people will pick up your books and discover what you’ve got to offer there.

Thank you so much.

Angela Hunt: Thanks for having me, Jenny.

Reviewers use all sorts of adjectives to describe inspirational fiction author Tessa Afshar’s work. Words like whimsical, intriguing, romantic, prophetic, faith-filled, daunting, grace-filled, dangerous, redeeming, heart-pumping, heart-stirring, sad and joyful – all at once.

That’s Tessa.

In this episode from Christmas 2023 Tessa talks about her latest release, The Persian King, set in Babylon in the sixth century BC.

And she shares something of her remarkable life; at 14 years of age, speaking no English, moving from the Middle East to a British boarding school, and then becoming a Christian in her early twenties and completing a Masters in Divinity at Yale.

Best-selling romance author Debbie Macomber says of her work: “No one brings the Bible to life like Tessa Afshar.”

Next time on Binge Reading. And remember that now in two weeks time. Our show is now fortnightly rather than weekly. And our guests to next time is acclaimed World War II novelist, Sarah Sundin and her latest book, Embers In The London Sky, which explores the war through the eyes of a mother, separated from her beloved child and a BBC correspondent who knows that reporting the truth may take him deep into the flames.

It’s a breathtaking novel that seamlessly weaves together, history, suspense, and romance in the tale that transcends time.

That’s next time on Binge Reading.

Finally, just that last reminder, leave us a review if you enjoy the show, so others will find us too. It’s really important to us to let folks know about great books. They’d love to read. That’s it for today.

See you next time and happy reading.