Speaker 1: Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back to the fob Left Sets podcast.
Speaker 1: My guest today is waiter Harlan Covid. Harlan, I'm good
Speaker 1: to be here. So where exactly are you right now,
Speaker 1: New Jersey About a half hour outside of my hat.
Speaker 1: And to what degree is COVID affected you in your lifestyle? Well,
Speaker 1: me personally, not so much. Social isolation is what we
Speaker 1: writers do. Uh, I'm fat. I had more people home
Speaker 1: and was busier because my kids who were all rage
Speaker 1: in age from eighteen to twenty six, and four of them,
Speaker 1: three of them were here. But they've all kind of
Speaker 1: gone back to their lives in various ways. So I'm
Speaker 1: back to being an empty nester. But you know, worried
Speaker 1: about the world, worried about my kids, worried about all
Speaker 1: that stuff. But my day to day life is probably
Speaker 1: less affected than the population. And to what degree are
Speaker 1: you taking all quarantining? Seriously? Very we we do all
Speaker 1: the steps I don't see. And again, you know, to
Speaker 1: be fair and non political, it's easier for me. You know,
Speaker 1: I have a fairly nice set up at home. Um,
Speaker 1: I'm used to being at home. I don't really have
Speaker 1: to go out and see people so I'm not a
Speaker 1: very social person, you know. I think all writers are
Speaker 1: a little bit of introverts, and maybe a socially a
Speaker 1: depth introvert, but introvert after all. So I take it
Speaker 1: very seriously. I haven't done anything at all that one
Speaker 1: might call risky. To what degree do you find the
Speaker 1: pandemic inspiration for your writing? I would say zero. I
Speaker 1: think it's the opposite. In fact, that was I was
Speaker 1: in the middle of a book when the pandemic hit,
Speaker 1: and because you really don't know how the pandemic is
Speaker 1: going to go, and especially back then, I decided instead
Speaker 1: of making I usually did. The book is very contemporary.
Speaker 1: I made it in the year two thousand nineteen, so
Speaker 1: I can make sure I could have boyd the pandemic altogether.
Speaker 1: I think at first, certainly, I felt that my job
Speaker 1: was to give you a divide diversion from the pandemic,
Speaker 1: the shows and the books, to be a diversion from it.
Speaker 1: So right now I don't find it in the least
Speaker 1: bit inspirational, and I think it's hard to write about
Speaker 1: right now except in a very short window because we
Speaker 1: don't know where it's going. You know, I could write
Speaker 1: a book that just took place in the month of
Speaker 1: March or April, but I don't know where we're going
Speaker 1: to be in September, October, and neither is anybody else.
Speaker 1: But you're a last bestseller just recently came out Boy
Speaker 1: from the Woods. You do Virgin too. Politics. How did
Speaker 1: you make that decision? Well? Politics, I really tried very
Speaker 1: hard to be as as nonpartistan as possible. Um I
Speaker 1: do as a writer in general, not because you know,
Speaker 1: because you're gonna turn this. I don't want people to
Speaker 1: go into my books thinking, oh, he's a right wing cook,
Speaker 1: he's a left wing nut, whatever it is. It takes
Speaker 1: away from the story. Um, I try to do it
Speaker 1: in a more subtle way. And the politics here, I
Speaker 1: think we're more about certain extremism than it was, and
Speaker 1: about cult type figures that we take on sometimes every side,
Speaker 1: more than I was saying, you know, the right bad,
Speaker 1: left good kind of thing or left bad, right good.
Speaker 1: So I just you know, my books are contemporary, so
Speaker 1: I'm dealing with what I'm seeing in public. So for
Speaker 1: The Boy from the Woods, it's whatever's kind of going
Speaker 1: on and run away to what was going on in
Speaker 1: the world of seeing a lot of people doing, for example,
Speaker 1: DNA ancestry websites. I thought that would be good. I'm
Speaker 1: seeing people who are doing with viral videos. I see cults.
Speaker 1: I see this sort of political behavior where it's really
Speaker 1: more about tribalism. Um. I think the app thing sometimes
Speaker 1: with the politics is to call like the Yankees and
Speaker 1: the Red Sox. Like, if you're a Yankees fan and
Speaker 1: you find out your manager is a cheat or and
Speaker 1: a horrible person and was killing people, you don't become
Speaker 1: a Red Sox fan, right, You're still going to cheer
Speaker 1: for the Yankees no matter what. And that's where our
Speaker 1: politics has gone. And so I was more exploring I
Speaker 1: think that than you know, tax breaks or whatever else. Well,
Speaker 1: the book only came out recently. When did you start
Speaker 1: writing the book right about now? I would say last year.
Speaker 1: I usually started right about now, which you know we're in,
Speaker 1: uh the summer. Usually lately I've been starting it around
Speaker 1: the summertime, and I finished about nine or ten months later,
Speaker 1: and then it comes out a year after that. So
Speaker 1: it would have been uh, two years ago right around
Speaker 1: now I was started the book, and that is a
Speaker 1: traditional lag time in the publishing industry. How do you
Speaker 1: feel about that in today's digital world, certainly someone of
Speaker 1: your renown. Well, I've done certain ones where I had
Speaker 1: been tighter um, where I finished one book for example,
Speaker 1: I think in July and we had it out in September.
Speaker 1: Publishers can turn it around faster, and they claim and
Speaker 1: we see that like the Bolton book, or we'll see
Speaker 1: that with nonfiction book. There really with fiction book they
Speaker 1: can do it too. They don't want to because they
Speaker 1: want to. They take it's better for marketing if they
Speaker 1: have time to make copies and getting people like your hands,
Speaker 1: so maybe you'll put it on your podcast or or
Speaker 1: or your newsletters. So they're trying to publicity. They want
Speaker 1: it earlier. They can do it. They can do it faster.
Speaker 1: It's not easy in terms of timely. But I hope
Speaker 1: all the novels I write in some way, um, you know,
Speaker 1: last more than six months. Anyway, they're not they're not
Speaker 1: fruit on the shelf. So hopefully you know, you can
Speaker 1: still read my books from when I started, and even
Speaker 1: though they may seem dated, they're supposed to be during
Speaker 1: the year, still capture that year. But the spirit and
Speaker 1: the story and things like that that shouldn't really change.
Speaker 1: The technology might change, the politics might change, but the
Speaker 1: story shouldn't change. Let's just stay with technology, not the
Speaker 1: content of the book. But what's your viewpoint on digital publishing,
Speaker 1: the kindle pricing, accessibility. You have a take on that, Well,
Speaker 1: this may sound a little bit like a duck, but
Speaker 1: it's not. If we are a business, I am the
Speaker 1: content side of the business, and as a content provider,
Speaker 1: I don't care if you listen to it on audio.
Speaker 1: I don't care if you digitally do it. I don't
Speaker 1: care if it's paper, I don't care if it's stone tablets.
Speaker 1: My theory is, if my story is good enough, you're
Speaker 1: going to find it and you're going to want to
Speaker 1: listen to it. So I really focus hard on the story.
Speaker 1: It's all I focus on because matter two, I'm not
Speaker 1: smart enough to be able to tell you what's going
Speaker 1: to happen in the book world. And I've heard of
Speaker 1: my whole career. You know, for a while Barnes and
Speaker 1: Noble was going to destroy the industry about taking over
Speaker 1: and boarders is going to destroy the industry. Oh wait, no,
Speaker 1: it's Amazon. Amazon is gonna destroy the industry. Oh e books,
Speaker 1: E books are gonna put paper out of business, and
Speaker 1: they're all wrong. And if it's I'm like a child
Speaker 1: when I hear that. And I regularly recommend this to
Speaker 1: writers and content producers, creators, whatever you want to call yourself.
Speaker 1: I stick my fingers in a year and I got
Speaker 1: la la la la. I can't hear you. All I
Speaker 1: can control is how good my story is. So if
Speaker 1: my story is going to be good enough, you're going
Speaker 1: to find it. So I don't really worry. I don't
Speaker 1: care how you get it. Um, you know, the last
Speaker 1: few years, audio is really exploded. I don't know exactly why,
Speaker 1: but the last two or three years, audio has really exploded. Um,
Speaker 1: the book had exploded for a while. Now the book
Speaker 1: is actually a little bit on decline, even this last book, Bob,
Speaker 1: but you might find really interesting. So my book came
Speaker 1: out March seventeenth, which is the very start, literally the
Speaker 1: start of when we went into quarantine. So I was
Speaker 1: about to go on book tour. I obviously canceled it,
Speaker 1: and all the stores closed, right, all the stores closed,
Speaker 1: And yet my physical book sales were actually up, and
Speaker 1: my e book was up just a little bit a
Speaker 1: little flatter. But my physical books is actually up more
Speaker 1: than my book. I would have thought it would be
Speaker 1: the opposite. Everybody's staying at home. They're gonna get kindles
Speaker 1: or or nooks or whatever. You're gonna audience on order
Speaker 1: it that way. But that wasn't the case. The physical
Speaker 1: book has come back the last few years after getting
Speaker 1: you know, after the book jumped up to have fifty
Speaker 1: or six even of sales. Now if you flattened or
Speaker 1: moved down where the physical book seems to be going up.
Speaker 1: This is anecdotal information, but that's how I I'm seeing it. Well,
Speaker 1: the music business been the canary in the coal mine
Speaker 1: for digital disruption, and certainly there's been a big issue
Speaker 1: in books talking about this, which is a what is
Speaker 1: the value of a book? And be that leads to
Speaker 1: the pricing. Have you felt any pressure on your end
Speaker 1: or you're so successful that your deals are independent of
Speaker 1: those constraints. Well, I don't know, you know, I'm not
Speaker 1: so successful. I'm sure like everybody everything else, I'm you know,
Speaker 1: price is a factor buying my books or whatever else. Um,
Speaker 1: I don't know, you know, it's a very interesting thing.
Speaker 1: So people will often say the books should be much
Speaker 1: much cheaper because you're not printing any paper. You don't
Speaker 1: have to do this, you don't have to do that,
Speaker 1: and so the books should be much cheaper. But the
Speaker 1: other side of the coin is that twenty years ago,
Speaker 1: I told you, where you're standing right now, you can
Speaker 1: press the button and have a book just appeared to
Speaker 1: you right now the second how much would you pay
Speaker 1: for that convenience? And I bet a lot of people
Speaker 1: would have said, well, hell, that's magic. I pay a
Speaker 1: lot for that. So I don't really know. I find
Speaker 1: the book, you know, again, market, I think maybe it
Speaker 1: works here sometimes, you know, I just so. I think
Speaker 1: The Woods, the one that's the new Netflix series, I
Speaker 1: don't know it still is, but for a little while
Speaker 1: it was being priced the e book form for only cents.
Speaker 1: So if you're you're savvy shopper, you can find things
Speaker 1: like that. Um So you know, if somebody told me
Speaker 1: I can get it that quickly, that automatically I can
Speaker 1: carry you know, if you have a kindle or nook
Speaker 1: or or don't, you can carry a thousand books, a
Speaker 1: thousand books. What would you pay for that if I
Speaker 1: told you that a few years ago. So I'm not
Speaker 1: so sure that it's as simple as you're not made
Speaker 1: using a paper anymore. It should be much cheaper. I
Speaker 1: can't put on my bookshelf afterwards. It should be much cheaper.
Speaker 1: I don't know. Now, going back to your point about
Speaker 1: you don't care how people access your work, let me
Speaker 1: say if I said a hundred million people in America
Speaker 1: would be reading your book, but you'd make a hundred
Speaker 1: thousand dollars, or ten thousand people would read your book
Speaker 1: and you'd make two million dollars. Which choice would you
Speaker 1: make now? I would choose the first. I can't say
Speaker 1: what it before, but right now money is not really
Speaker 1: much of a factor for me. But I'll tell you
Speaker 1: my my, my chicken, my chicken. Ass answer to that is,
Speaker 1: I've never chased the dollar. I've always chased the reader,
Speaker 1: the reader's heart, because I've always found the dollar follows anyway,
Speaker 1: so they really I've always been one and the same.
Speaker 1: I've never made a deal where I tried getting the
Speaker 1: last dollar and not caring. I want readers. Um. If
Speaker 1: that makes me commercial horror, it makes me a commercial horror.
Speaker 1: I think every reader does you know the one the too?
Speaker 1: Every writer has this in common. I don't care if
Speaker 1: you're talking to the most commercial writer for the most
Speaker 1: literary writer. Every writer I know wants better reviews and
Speaker 1: wants more readers. And if they don't, they're lying. I'm sorry,
Speaker 1: they're lying. If you have if you have a guy
Speaker 1: on here saying I just care about you know, really
Speaker 1: great quality, I don't care if anyone reads it their lyne.
Speaker 1: You right to produce, You're you're right to have communication
Speaker 1: with somebody. It's it's the Berkeley tree falling in the woods,
Speaker 1: and nobody hears it doesn't make it sound. Um, So
Speaker 1: I do both. I've always said, if the reader or
Speaker 1: the viewer likes what I'm doing, the money is gonna follow.
Speaker 1: It's just it's gonna follow. If I go out thinking,
Speaker 1: you know what, I could get more money here, but
Speaker 1: less people will see it. I've never made that deal
Speaker 1: in my life, so um, I don't think I would
Speaker 1: do it now. Okay, you're you started before or just
Speaker 1: at the advent of this whole digital craziness in the Internet.
Speaker 1: One thing we know in the last ten years is
Speaker 1: there's a lot more clutter. Everybody's vying for attention. Therefore,
Speaker 1: no matter who you are, it's harder to spread. First,
Speaker 1: there's the issue of reaching your fans, letting them know
Speaker 1: you have new work. Do you feel this at all
Speaker 1: that it is harder. Let's just use the vernacular to
Speaker 1: have virality with your work. Yes, I mean, and first
Speaker 1: of all, everything also is the cycles of life, but
Speaker 1: we know and the media cycles are much shorter, so
Speaker 1: you have a very short window. Book openings have become
Speaker 1: similar to movie openings, where in the old days I
Speaker 1: think you would move up the charts, so to speak,
Speaker 1: you know, and maybe the same with music. I don't know,
Speaker 1: but you start maybe a fift team and move up
Speaker 1: to twelve, up to ten. How is my first New
Speaker 1: York Times bestseller? Now You're opening week is your biggest
Speaker 1: week by far. It's like an opening of a movie.
Speaker 1: So the first week that an author has a new
Speaker 1: book out, if he doesn't hit one, then he's not
Speaker 1: hitting one unless the next week is a real disaster
Speaker 1: for everybody else. You jump on one, then you start
Speaker 1: flipping down, and after a few weeks you know they're
Speaker 1: they're moving on to the next thing. So part of
Speaker 1: it is this whole culture that we see in movies,
Speaker 1: we see in music, and we've seen everything where you're
Speaker 1: just not in the news. Um, quite as long. Books
Speaker 1: are always hard to get attention for anyway. Uh. You know,
Speaker 1: every once in a while, once or twice a year,
Speaker 1: a book seems to get people's attention and and they,
Speaker 1: you know, look at it. But for the most part,
Speaker 1: it's very very hard. So um, I don't really do
Speaker 1: much different myself. Uh. And I recommend to new writers
Speaker 1: don't don't lose your mind with the marketing. I know
Speaker 1: it's so hard, but I haven't seen maybe you have, Bob,
Speaker 1: because you're in a little better at this During this time,
Speaker 1: I haven't really seen like a book that's made it
Speaker 1: just on its in fact, that the guy's got a
Speaker 1: great Twitter account or is really funny on instant I
Speaker 1: think it's the opposite almost. I actually think that Instagram
Speaker 1: and my Twitter accounts are negative. A few years ago,
Speaker 1: giving a quick example, I'm friends with Gillian Flynn, who
Speaker 1: of course wrote Gone Girl, which is a huge book.
Speaker 1: And I would say that people who would ask me
Speaker 1: this question, and people are always looking for the easy out,
Speaker 1: not writing the book, isn't reading that a book. Writing
Speaker 1: on a book isn't easy out. Figuring out that magic
Speaker 1: key that that will get me a lot of readers
Speaker 1: by acute tweet is so I said, well, look, the
Speaker 1: biggest book the last year two has been Gillian Flynn's
Speaker 1: Scout Girls. So look at her Facebook account, look at
Speaker 1: her Twitter, look at her Instagram. See how she's done it.
Speaker 1: She didn't even have one. I think now she hasn't
Speaker 1: a Twitter that she almost never does anything with, but
Speaker 1: she didn't even have when she had zero online presence.
Speaker 1: Dan Brown, I think is very little online presence, um.
Speaker 1: Grisham just starting up a very little online presence. So
Speaker 1: I don't think that there is much of a correlation
Speaker 1: there for books. And again, that's not TV, that's not movies,
Speaker 1: it's not music. But in terms of books, I don't
Speaker 1: think it's It's not helpful that question how active are
Speaker 1: you on social media and what is your intention with
Speaker 1: social media? Um, I'm actually probably more active than most
Speaker 1: best selling authors. Part of it is, UM, I don't
Speaker 1: mind it. I sometimes kind of enjoy it. I have
Speaker 1: a real love hate relationship with it. UM, and I'm
Speaker 1: dealing with it like everybody else. I don't know how
Speaker 1: I feel about it. One day I think it's the
Speaker 1: worst thing in the world that I gotta stay away
Speaker 1: on the next day. I'm a little bit um addicted
Speaker 1: to it, so I don't. I'm still working out where
Speaker 1: I am on that on that spectrum. Um. You know,
Speaker 1: I have a Twitter, I have a Facebook, I have
Speaker 1: an Instagram. I do very little on the Facebook other
Speaker 1: than the mostly it's marketing kind of stuff. Twitter and Instagram.
Speaker 1: I feel like you have to open up a little
Speaker 1: bit more. It's just not fair necessarily. I think people
Speaker 1: get bored if I'm just putting up pictures of my
Speaker 1: books or my TV shows, So you have to be
Speaker 1: a little bit. I'd do a dog a lot, because
Speaker 1: no one gets upset about the dope anything. Political people
Speaker 1: seem to get upset about on one side or the other.
Speaker 1: Now we live in a world where everybody is accessible.
Speaker 1: That does not necessarily mean you need to respond. Do
Speaker 1: you interact with people? I sometimes don't. I always regret it,
Speaker 1: always regret it. I did actually yesterday with somebody and
Speaker 1: I just was after you know, a friend of mine,
Speaker 1: Richard Osmond from England, had tweeted this brilliant thing about
Speaker 1: don't give the idiots, don't respond to the idiots, that's
Speaker 1: all that gives them air, and I did. I responded
Speaker 1: to an idiot, and I gave him a hair and
Speaker 1: then I was like, okay. Now I also block if
Speaker 1: someone will come on, for example and say, uh, someone
Speaker 1: did you well, you know, why did you make the
Speaker 1: woods in Polish? I hate foreign language things. This is
Speaker 1: a piece of ship. I just blocked. I didn't followed
Speaker 1: with it. He's on. He probably is a fan of
Speaker 1: my books. He's been following me a long time, and
Speaker 1: you know, and then of course you get the rep of, oh,
Speaker 1: you can't listen to criticism. I don't have to listen
Speaker 1: to criticism. I don't want to. It's my page. But
Speaker 1: when people are rude like that, now I just now
Speaker 1: I'm trying to reach a state dry, just blocking and
Speaker 1: move on. What I always say is temper center. The
Speaker 1: public is certifiably insane. The only problem is you don't
Speaker 1: know what ten percent that is. People who seem totally
Speaker 1: reasonable end up like you can't get rid of him,
Speaker 1: and it's crazy. The other thing is, even if you
Speaker 1: correct someone on facts, they won't accept it. Well, the
Speaker 1: sky is black today, No it's blue. No, you're wrong, blah. Yes,
Speaker 1: I retweeted some a friend of mine. I put something
Speaker 1: about the Confederate statues, and you know the difference being
Speaker 1: the Confederate statues were to honor these people. You know,
Speaker 1: people keep saying, oh, how can you leave up concentration cancer,
Speaker 1: which is such a disingenuous false equivalency. So the person
Speaker 1: put it and I retweeted it, and somebody says, I
Speaker 1: didn't think you'd want to upset all of your you know,
Speaker 1: your right wing readers or your Republican rea years ago.
Speaker 1: Tell me what that tweet you don't get? I mean,
Speaker 1: tell me what that sweet you disagree with? Do you
Speaker 1: think that the Confederacy and the Holocaust sent No, I'm
Speaker 1: my relatives in the Holocaust, Like, so, what's your problem
Speaker 1: with the actual thing? And then they go off on
Speaker 1: some tangent. You know, it's like they they so there's
Speaker 1: no point in doing it because it doesn't matter. You
Speaker 1: can't win the argument, you know. So I agree, I
Speaker 1: agree totally. But just staying with that one concept, to
Speaker 1: what degree in your books and your interactions, are you
Speaker 1: worried about alienating potential fans potential readers. Um, I don't
Speaker 1: real about alienating potential readers or yes, on internet, on
Speaker 1: social media, do worry about that? In books? I don't
Speaker 1: in books. As I said before, I intentionally don't potentially
Speaker 1: take sides also that I don't necessarily agree with because
Speaker 1: part of being a writer, big part of it, One
Speaker 1: thing I hope we all have is you have to
Speaker 1: be empathetic, not sympathetic, and not necessarily in a positive way.
Speaker 1: But I have to get how that person thinks. And
Speaker 1: I have to create created characters, especially in the villains, um,
Speaker 1: where you should be able to understand them. In fact,
Speaker 1: one of the things I joke is I've been working
Speaker 1: much too hard on my villains over the last few years.
Speaker 1: I realized villains don't have to be all that complex
Speaker 1: or interesting or sympathetic. They could just be complete monsters
Speaker 1: that's we're seeing every day. Um. But I want to
Speaker 1: do that. So UM, I've argued for a lot of
Speaker 1: stuff convincingly, I've taken it. In one book, I took
Speaker 1: a pro hunting side that I thought was really kind
Speaker 1: of fun. So but that's part of the job, is
Speaker 1: you you know you, I'm not. I'm not really here
Speaker 1: to teach you or moralize that. That kills a book,
Speaker 1: and may they may be lessons in it, But if
Speaker 1: you said that, to do that you're right, and you're
Speaker 1: gonna kill yourself. You're gonna really quick kill your book.
Speaker 1: Going back to marketing, you were mentioning that your book
Speaker 1: tour was canceled from someone on the West Coast music
Speaker 1: movie entertainment spectrum. It really looks like bookmarking is antiquated.
Speaker 1: So I must ask when you do these road shows,
Speaker 1: do they have any impact? In my view? No, I
Speaker 1: think there are waste of time. I've told my publishers,
Speaker 1: so I tried cutting them down. Um some years they
Speaker 1: left me. Some years they don't. There's I think there's
Speaker 1: a couple of things that they do. Um one is
Speaker 1: and this is why I personally am not that opposed
Speaker 1: to doing them. And I you know, part of it.
Speaker 1: You know, you're part of the team and you have
Speaker 1: to do that. But I do think it helps the
Speaker 1: independent bookstores. I do think if I can go to
Speaker 1: your store and you can sell four hundred copies of
Speaker 1: a hard covered that cost bucks, that's a big day
Speaker 1: for you as an independent bookstore. That gets people in
Speaker 1: your stores, that gets people interested in reading that. You know,
Speaker 1: it's a way of introducing other authors to people. UM
Speaker 1: So part of it, I think a lot part of
Speaker 1: when when your author, you know, is already selling well,
Speaker 1: that he's doing it is to give cover for other
Speaker 1: writers as well. So I think I think that my
Speaker 1: publishers have never told me this, but I do think
Speaker 1: there's probably something be not not not quit pro quote.
Speaker 1: But I do think there's something where if we send
Speaker 1: you this big name, we will also take this newcomer
Speaker 1: who no one's really gonna know, but you can promote
Speaker 1: them in your story. You can put their book in
Speaker 1: your window for a week. You can make sure you
Speaker 1: get that guy gets attention to. And so in terms
Speaker 1: of the overall ecosystem of independent bookstores and and and
Speaker 1: Barnes and Nobles and the and the chains, because it's
Speaker 1: not many of them left, um, I do think it
Speaker 1: helps them more than it helps me. And I have
Speaker 1: no problem with that. So I'm happy. I'm happy to
Speaker 1: do that. Um. I also don't mind interacting with readers.
Speaker 1: You know, to quote a song, to quote to puteh
Speaker 1: Keed Vogelberg, the audience is heavenly, but the traveling is hell. Right,
Speaker 1: That's right. I love that line. That's how I look
Speaker 1: at torting. I got It's not you know, despite what
Speaker 1: authors a whine about it's not that hard to have
Speaker 1: people walk up to you and say, God, I love
Speaker 1: your books. It's really not that hard. If where's your
Speaker 1: whole freaking for that, enjoy it right and enjoy the
Speaker 1: moment for them. You know it's gonna be different because
Speaker 1: I was always I stand up from my entire book
Speaker 1: book run because I know people want photographs nowadays, and
Speaker 1: I think it's so awkward they do that photograph where
Speaker 1: you're sitting down and they're leaning over awkwardly. So I
Speaker 1: stand up, put my arm around everybody, have the camera
Speaker 1: ready with a guy so they can get the picture
Speaker 1: that they want. They really took the time to come
Speaker 1: out and see me. That's a tremendous on it really,
Speaker 1: and a tremendous drill. So that's the other side of touring.
Speaker 1: But in terms of your overall question, does it help
Speaker 1: Harlan Coben sell books, My view is no, because, first
Speaker 1: of all, if you're coming to a Harlan Coban book signing,
Speaker 1: there's a chance of buying my book anyway. So who
Speaker 1: else comes to my signings? People who don't like my
Speaker 1: books as ever heard of me, So you know what
Speaker 1: I mean. So I think that. I do think it's
Speaker 1: but again, it's probably good for the whole ecosystem, and
Speaker 1: I'm happy to help with that. So what is effective
Speaker 1: marketing for one of your books? The truth is, I
Speaker 1: think with books from my books, I don't know anymore.
Speaker 1: I think in my books it's very hard for me
Speaker 1: to go too far up or too far down. It's
Speaker 1: hard to break out more than once or twice. So
Speaker 1: Tell No One was my breakout book. Tell No One
Speaker 1: changed my life overnight. Was it the book or the
Speaker 1: movie of the book. The movie was out five years
Speaker 1: after the book, so it was Why do you think
Speaker 1: that was your breakout? I had written seven Myron Bolletar
Speaker 1: novels in a row before that, and while they did well,
Speaker 1: it was very hard to convince, especially the female reader,
Speaker 1: who is the majority. I think stole readers. Probably my guests,
Speaker 1: of my readers, and most readers in the world are females.
Speaker 1: And no matter how much they told you, tell them
Speaker 1: you're gonna love this. It's about a sports agent. He's
Speaker 1: a sports agent who solves crimes. That's just not a
Speaker 1: good book. But when you tell somebody here's what. Tell No.
Speaker 1: One's about a man and a woman or married. The
Speaker 1: wife is murdered. Eight years later, he gets an email
Speaker 1: and sees his murdered wife on a webcam. Is she's
Speaker 1: still alive? You're buying the book? That's it in a nutshell.
Speaker 1: That was the poster for the movie eight years ago.
Speaker 1: Dr Beck's wife was Dr Beck's wife was murdered eight
Speaker 1: years ago today you got an email from That was
Speaker 1: the movie poster, and it helped the movie explode out
Speaker 1: in France. So, um, I think that was the reason.
Speaker 1: And then they went back and they were by the
Speaker 1: Myron Boulturs, and then you know, and then the Myron
Speaker 1: Boltar end up having a good following. But that was
Speaker 1: the thing I said. I think I think that's why
Speaker 1: what literally got I mean there's literally millions of books
Speaker 1: a year. What literally got the attention that book? Was
Speaker 1: it hand selling in a bookstore? Was it viralty? Was
Speaker 1: what was done that made that work? No one likes
Speaker 1: to hear this, but it was something in the book, Um,
Speaker 1: because it happened not just here, it happened all over
Speaker 1: the world France. Who became a number one best seller?
Speaker 1: Actually the better Like I remember my publishers saying, well,
Speaker 1: I think it was just great cover. The that a
Speaker 1: really great cover for it, but France had a crappy
Speaker 1: cover that kind of leaked it out. And then one
Speaker 1: magazine wrote it up really well and next thing, you know,
Speaker 1: in France and ended up being doing better relatively speaking,
Speaker 1: and it did in America, it did well in the UK,
Speaker 1: it did well in Spain, it did well in poland
Speaker 1: did well in in a ton of countries. So there
Speaker 1: was something about that hook in that book that made
Speaker 1: it happen. In the end of the day, books are
Speaker 1: all are still still word of mouth are the two
Speaker 1: biggest things that could have happened to her. Being an
Speaker 1: OPRAH book club took now being a Reese Witherspoon book
Speaker 1: club pick. But outside of that, and even then, you
Speaker 1: know how you know, I'll ask you, Bob, how do
Speaker 1: you find your books? It's almost always somebody telling you
Speaker 1: that people. It's almost the opposite. You don't trust people
Speaker 1: who are hyping you. And you see a full page ad,
Speaker 1: you say, who is this impacting? I would listen to
Speaker 1: this right that that it could be, you know, so
Speaker 1: I don't. I think in the case of Tell No One,
Speaker 1: some countries that went slower, some countries that went faster.
Speaker 1: But it's something about that book got people buzzing, and
Speaker 1: I could say, see it. You can almost see it happening.
Speaker 1: I can. I'll tell you an interesting story. I went
Speaker 1: to college. I was a fraternity brother with Dan Brown,
Speaker 1: the Da Vinci Code author um, who was a friend
Speaker 1: of mine. And so tell No One broke out several
Speaker 1: years before DaVinci Code came out, maybe five or six
Speaker 1: years before. And when Da Vinci Code, Dan sent me
Speaker 1: an early copy to blurb, you know, and when you
Speaker 1: get those copies and you write the blurb on it
Speaker 1: if you like it. And I started to see it
Speaker 1: happened to Dan before Dan did. And I remember speaking
Speaker 1: to Dan not long before the book came out, and
Speaker 1: I said, dude, this is going to change your life.
Speaker 1: I can. I'm seeing it. I'm just hearing the industry
Speaker 1: start to buzz about it and talk about it. And
Speaker 1: I don't know how you create that. You can try,
Speaker 1: but it's a book. Isn't resonating. It's not gonna happen,
Speaker 1: which is which is the way it should be, right,
Speaker 1: I mean it should be. I've seen so many books
Speaker 1: that people are trying to hype via money. It doesn't work.
Speaker 1: But when people are telling you they liked the book,
Speaker 1: be it Da Vinci Code, Last few Years, being Gone Girl,
Speaker 1: being a girl on the train, be it this zero
Speaker 1: and the claud Dad sings. Whatever that book is, people
Speaker 1: are liking it and telling their friends. Rarely is the
Speaker 1: book something that people aren't liking and they're managing to
Speaker 1: get people to buy anyway. Well, that begs the question,
Speaker 1: that's a little dicey. What's your view on James Patterson?
Speaker 1: I have no I have nothing negative to say about
Speaker 1: about Jim. I've known I've known Patterson um for a
Speaker 1: long time. He's honest about what he's doing. I think
Speaker 1: at the stage of the game, UM, he was a
Speaker 1: marketing guy. Um from day one he understood he understands
Speaker 1: how to market better than anybody. Uh. He has a
Speaker 1: bunch of different people working. I don't. But I don't
Speaker 1: really study him or follow him. So it's not like
Speaker 1: I know him better than my opinion on him would
Speaker 1: be any better to listen to than anybody else's. I
Speaker 1: don't really, I don't. It sounds maybe I don't really
Speaker 1: care what my colleagues are doing in that way. The
Speaker 1: guys that I do like and then I hang out with,
Speaker 1: I sort of I really do wish them. Well. Um,
Speaker 1: that sounds kind of fake, but there's two signs to
Speaker 1: one is this boat rises and things together. If you
Speaker 1: read a Michael Conley or a Lee Child or whoever
Speaker 1: it else it is, and you like them, you're gonna
Speaker 1: want to read more and maybe that one of those
Speaker 1: books will be mine, and vice versa. Um, no one
Speaker 1: has to fail so that I can succeed. That's my motto.
Speaker 1: I'm not saying I'm not good of a person that
Speaker 1: I always pick it, but it's a great it's a
Speaker 1: great motto to have nobody has to fail so that
Speaker 1: I can succeed. It's really hard in the writing game.
Speaker 1: I think for people who are upcoming not to get jealous,
Speaker 1: not to look at what somebody else has. There's always
Speaker 1: gonna be somebody ahead of you. Do. There's always gonna
Speaker 1: be somebody ahead of you. So I try to use
Speaker 1: that to fuel me and not to get bitter or
Speaker 1: to get angry. Tell no one is your breakthrough novel.
Speaker 1: And of course it doesn't necessarily happen instantly you're already
Speaker 1: working on something else. But frequently when someone has a
Speaker 1: huge success and people are paying attention. It's inhibiting in
Speaker 1: terms of further work. Did you experience that, well? It is.
Speaker 1: I mean, I've seen it happen with a lot of writers.
Speaker 1: I was extraordinarily lucky. I had just finished Gone for
Speaker 1: Good when Tell No One broke out. I had just
Speaker 1: finished the book before because I'll tell you I was
Speaker 1: thirty nine, so I wasn't a kid when it happened.
Speaker 1: And it messes with your head. Success does mess with
Speaker 1: your head. I don't know how these young guys who
Speaker 1: are actors or musicians handle it. I really don't because
Speaker 1: the mess with my head. Luckily, I happily married, I
Speaker 1: had my fourth kid was born the day that I
Speaker 1: hit the New York Times Best Start Let's for the
Speaker 1: first time, Um July eleven, two thousand one, coming up
Speaker 1: on the anniversary. So um, I got all of that.
Speaker 1: So what I did learn and I advised writers if
Speaker 1: I see a writer like my saw DaVinci Code about
Speaker 1: to break out, I'm like, my warning to writer is
Speaker 1: put your head down now and start writing, because once
Speaker 1: it hits, it is going to be tough. If you're
Speaker 1: gonna be paralyzed for a little while. And the advice
Speaker 1: that I give the writer who has this lucky enough
Speaker 1: to have this happen, is just get it out, because
Speaker 1: they're gonna slam it no matter what. I mean, they're gonna,
Speaker 1: you know, the critics are gonna and the same thing
Speaker 1: with musicians, right, they're gonna sharpen depends. They're going to
Speaker 1: crap on you. And then you can have a career,
Speaker 1: get to your third or fourth album, and then you'll
Speaker 1: be all right. You'll be over that, over that home
Speaker 1: to what to do you? Are you a student of
Speaker 1: the game? Do you follow especially now there's so many statistics,
Speaker 1: especially on Amazon. Do you follow that pretty closely? I don't. UM.
Speaker 1: I did for a little while, maybe twenty years ago,
Speaker 1: ten fifteen years ago. Um. You know, I was first
Speaker 1: trying to hit number one, and I was getting close
Speaker 1: a couple of times, so I would sort of follow it.
Speaker 1: This last book, I haven't followed at all. I mean,
Speaker 1: I get a call on a Wednesday saying, you hit
Speaker 1: the New York Times listener X your lot. So but
Speaker 1: either that, I don't anymore, and I tell you for
Speaker 1: them again. The advice for the new writers, don't um.
Speaker 1: I was lucky when I started out. I was a
Speaker 1: paperback original guy at Dell, which is a big name,
Speaker 1: but it's a small I mean, it's a paperback original.
Speaker 1: So I my first Myron Bouletar novel, I got five
Speaker 1: thousand dollar advance, and not to brag, but by the
Speaker 1: time I wrote my fourth, I was up to six thousand.
Speaker 1: So but here's the thing. Because I had no information
Speaker 1: it was a major publishing house. There's two copies in
Speaker 1: almost every bookstore and paperback. I thought I was the
Speaker 1: cat's ass. I couldn't look at my Amazon rankings back
Speaker 1: and this is when I first started Amazon. Really, I couldn't,
Speaker 1: you know, watch the watch my Amazon rankings, like their
Speaker 1: stock ratings, and see how it was going up. And
Speaker 1: now I thought I was doing great. If someone told
Speaker 1: me the aspect, then I probably would have killed myself.
Speaker 1: But I just wrote the next one. I didn't worry
Speaker 1: about how well it was doing. I was still in
Speaker 1: the game, you know. Was that that I hadn't struck
Speaker 1: out yet? I was. I still had my swings left.
Speaker 1: It's like you're a battered I had ten ten swings
Speaker 1: at ten strikes instead of when or too, So I
Speaker 1: just kept put my head down and right. So I
Speaker 1: tell her it's don't you know, don't spend all the
Speaker 1: time looking at Amazon yet book is not going to
Speaker 1: break out. It's not if that book hasn't broken out yet.
Speaker 1: Nothing you do by looking at all these things is
Speaker 1: going to help your career. The only thing that's really
Speaker 1: going to help your career is writing the next one
Speaker 1: and making it better and somehow getting more people to
Speaker 1: read you. So I really I was blessed. We didn't know,
Speaker 1: you know, meals and ratings, We didn't have book scam.
Speaker 1: Now that um, I know, there's people who tell me
Speaker 1: you can call into books scam and find out way.
Speaker 1: I don't. I don't even want to know, because, first
Speaker 1: of all, what number is good? Someone shit to you,
Speaker 1: I sold eight thousand copies of your book last week.
Speaker 1: Is that's a good or bad? I don't know. I
Speaker 1: still don't know, So I don't want to know. As
Speaker 1: long as everybody's happy I'm hitting one my first week
Speaker 1: out usually I'm good. Not I mean to know anymore?
Speaker 1: What else do we need to know? Okay? And do
Speaker 1: you read your reviews? Yeah? Most of the time. I
Speaker 1: don't read Amazon reviews or any of that. Goodness to
Speaker 1: the numbers are too big to even try. I'll sometime,
Speaker 1: so I haven't done it. I don't think for a
Speaker 1: book for Boy from the Woods, I've even looked CHET,
Speaker 1: but I will look every once in a while. But
Speaker 1: it's always the same. I'm always four to five stars.
Speaker 1: Most people are, you know, happy with it. And then
Speaker 1: there's the people who say, oh man, he really changed
Speaker 1: this time that and I hated that, And then the
Speaker 1: person who says he wrote the exact same thing again,
Speaker 1: wasn't gonna change. There's never anything I gotta you're going
Speaker 1: through my reviews for the last twenty books, you'll see
Speaker 1: the exact same thing. I'll be between three point nine
Speaker 1: and four point one, and it will be the exact
Speaker 1: same thing. So if I saw one book and someone
Speaker 1: would tell me that all of a sudden, dope down
Speaker 1: to a one or was at four point nine, I
Speaker 1: guess I would pay a little more attention to why
Speaker 1: or whatever else. Um. And if I'm reviewing New York Times,
Speaker 1: yeah I read it, you know, but I don't. I
Speaker 1: don't take it to heart anymore. I know it doesn't
Speaker 1: change my life. A great review is not going to
Speaker 1: change my life. In A shitty review is not going
Speaker 1: to change my life. I know that now. Uh does
Speaker 1: a review in a major publication, the wallpo of the
Speaker 1: New York Times? Does it help at all? Um? For me?
Speaker 1: I look, everyone has to help. Um how much it helps,
Speaker 1: I don't know if it helps as much as it
Speaker 1: used to. I don't think so. Uh. Like rom was
Speaker 1: starting out or in the mid to late nineties, a
Speaker 1: really good spot would be People magazine. They would do
Speaker 1: four or five books to have a photograph of the book.
Speaker 1: People really paid attention to it. It got a fair
Speaker 1: amount of sales and hits. UM. But there's no one
Speaker 1: thing anymore, not even like my Today Show appearance, that
Speaker 1: makes a book zoom the way it did in the say,
Speaker 1: the early nineties, early the mid nineties. I'm sure if
Speaker 1: you're an unknown you're getting a full page review in
Speaker 1: the New York Times. Um, that's going to help you,
Speaker 1: in the front page of the New York Times, book,
Speaker 1: of course, But other than that, you know, even good
Speaker 1: reviews in the New York Times. I see books vanished
Speaker 1: out of nowhere. So I don't I just don't think that.
Speaker 1: I don't know the answers. I don't know what makes
Speaker 1: it anymore. It seems to be a lot of things
Speaker 1: that have to come together to reach a certain level,
Speaker 1: but be happy at other levels too. It's not everybody
Speaker 1: has to be a number one or number in. I
Speaker 1: wasn't for a long time either a number of top
Speaker 1: best seller. You could just be doing well and eventually
Speaker 1: you're in the game. Maybe something happens movies for a
Speaker 1: long time movie times. I mean, you know how much
Speaker 1: bigger did George R. R. Martin become after the TV
Speaker 1: show Game of Thrones came out? How much bigger did
Speaker 1: Charlene Harris become after True Blood? Sometimes it has a
Speaker 1: big effect on books, sometimes it doesn't. You don't really
Speaker 1: know to what degree are you in news and internet junkie.
Speaker 1: I guess I would say average. I don't know what
Speaker 1: average is anymore. I pay attention to it, especially right now.
Speaker 1: I'm dying to be bored. Though I really wish I'd
Speaker 1: go back to the days might didn't have to look
Speaker 1: at it every day and feel like I'm watching the
Speaker 1: world and uh again. I compared to sports, I think
Speaker 1: sometimes we watch it like it's our team, and did
Speaker 1: our team out a good game? It's good, a good
Speaker 1: inning to be scorning ones that did our team score
Speaker 1: some runs? Um, it's a sad, it's a satisfact. How
Speaker 1: about you know? I don't know? Okay, So what comes first?
Speaker 1: Do you have the idea, do you flesh it out?
Speaker 1: Do you start writing? What's your process? Um? I usually
Speaker 1: start with an idea, um, and then I try to
Speaker 1: figure out, you know, good hook and the ending and
Speaker 1: that's and then I asked, who's going to tell that story?
Speaker 1: So it's usually three steps. So when people say, are
Speaker 1: you going to write more? Myron Bolts, are you're gonna
Speaker 1: write more? When I after I think of the story idea,
Speaker 1: I'll ask who's going to tell it? In the cas
Speaker 1: tell no one. So I had this idea that I
Speaker 1: loved about a man wife is murdered, he can't get
Speaker 1: over her death, he still loves her. Eight years past,
Speaker 1: he gets in the email, he clicks the hyperlink, he
Speaker 1: sees the webcam and his dead wife walks by. I go, oh,
Speaker 1: I love this. But I realized I had written seventh
Speaker 1: straight Myron Boultard. He couldn't tell he didn't have a
Speaker 1: wife who died eight years ago. So who am I
Speaker 1: going to create? Well, let's make him an interstity pediatrician
Speaker 1: because my wife is one of those, so I get
Speaker 1: the research that way. It's just simple, you know. Then
Speaker 1: I started thinking about that character, um, and of course
Speaker 1: I have to know I in my case, I know
Speaker 1: the end most a lot of authors bon't. I know
Speaker 1: the last twist. I knew when you've read The Boy
Speaker 1: from the Woods. I knew it was going to be
Speaker 1: on You know who did it? Who did what? Before
Speaker 1: I started the book, I don't know everything, but I
Speaker 1: know pretty much who did it and the meanning. How
Speaker 1: I'm gonna get there. I have no idea how I'm
Speaker 1: going to travel it. I have no idea about things
Speaker 1: I see on the road, but I usually know the
Speaker 1: beginning of the ending before I started. Okay, how long
Speaker 1: how long does that process take before you actually start
Speaker 1: writing the book? I say to I say, like right now,
Speaker 1: I'm I'm doing one book a year. I would say
Speaker 1: two or three months are downtime thinking about it, coming
Speaker 1: up with the idea, Like I've finished a book, um
Speaker 1: a month or two ago. Uh, which is my next
Speaker 1: one called Win, which is about my character Win for
Speaker 1: the first time, he's going to tell the story himself.
Speaker 1: He's been Myron bulletar sidekick, and now he's gonna tell
Speaker 1: his own story. And when I finished it, you know,
Speaker 1: I thought of nothing for a while. It's like your
Speaker 1: boxer and you just finished the twelfth round and you
Speaker 1: threw everything you could. You've got nothing left, not a thing.
Speaker 1: And then slowly, as time goes on, you know you're recovering.
Speaker 1: You're the bruises are going down in the distance. You
Speaker 1: start seeing another opponent you've gotta start facing. So now
Speaker 1: I've started the wheel to turn. I've decided the next
Speaker 1: book is going to be a sequel to The Boy
Speaker 1: from the Woods. Because I left a lot of this.
Speaker 1: I didn't tell you his origin story, and I feel
Speaker 1: like I should. Um, so his next book will be
Speaker 1: his origin story, which I kind of already knew when
Speaker 1: I started this book. So it's a little bit easier
Speaker 1: to start laying out. Okay, so the wheel start turning.
Speaker 1: Then you see there are two or three months of downtime.
Speaker 1: How long after the wheels start turning do you start
Speaker 1: to actually write the book. It depends. I'm hoping to
Speaker 1: get started in the next week or two. The TV
Speaker 1: stuff interrupts me. Now, which is different from me than
Speaker 1: a has been in the past, um, so I haven't
Speaker 1: found it really hurts it at all. So my guess is,
Speaker 1: I'm hoping, you know, next week of the week after
Speaker 1: I've come up with the idea, I wrote my two
Speaker 1: page synapses that I send my publisher UM to see
Speaker 1: if they liked this idea and make sure that they're
Speaker 1: on board. Two Um, and now I'm sort of I'm
Speaker 1: ready to go. I gotta start. I gotta start, you know,
Speaker 1: thinking about what are the first few chapters going to be?
Speaker 1: How am I going to start it off? Okay? What
Speaker 1: about now? Has your publisher ever said we don't like
Speaker 1: the idea? Never? Okay, not yet? Okay. So when you
Speaker 1: write the book, you're figuring out as you're writing all
Speaker 1: the points in the middle pretty much. I mean again,
Speaker 1: I compare to a journey. I'm in New Jersey, I'm
Speaker 1: coming out to you in l A. I may go
Speaker 1: Route eighty, but chances are i'll go via the Suez
Speaker 1: Canal or stop in Tokyo, but I'll end up in
Speaker 1: l A. But I may know a few places along
Speaker 1: the way I definitely want to stop at, so I'll
Speaker 1: know that, and then some character stuff I will leave
Speaker 1: to the end, not to give anything away. On the
Speaker 1: very last page of Boy from the Woods, I wasn't
Speaker 1: exactly sure what he was going to do with this
Speaker 1: one decision. It's not the answer to the mystery. It's
Speaker 1: a personal decision that wild the Boy from the Woods makes.
Speaker 1: I kind of thought I did, but I said, you
Speaker 1: know what, let's just get there, write it, and as
Speaker 1: you're writing, and to see what he decides to do.
Speaker 1: And he actually did what I thought he was going
Speaker 1: to do. But I wasn't sure until I actually started
Speaker 1: to write it. So some things were organic, something's kind
Speaker 1: of come to you, and some things are planned. And
Speaker 1: is it about rewriting or is it about the first draft?
Speaker 1: In terms of story, it's all about the first draft
Speaker 1: for me. Um in terms of the under the fine tuning,
Speaker 1: UM rewrite and rewrite a lot. I rewrite every day,
Speaker 1: so I don't write, you know, straight ahead. I go
Speaker 1: back at the start of each day and I rewrite, reread,
Speaker 1: and rewrite what I wrote the day before. So I
Speaker 1: start that way, and then every seventy five pages or so,
Speaker 1: I go back to the beginning of the book and
Speaker 1: reread it from there to make sure I still am
Speaker 1: you know, it helps me get momentum. Is like getting
Speaker 1: a running start to jumping, you know, like a long jump.
Speaker 1: So I do that. So at a time I finish
Speaker 1: a book, the first chapter is probably rewritten eight or
Speaker 1: nine times. Ready. Um. Later stuff happens faster, and it's
Speaker 1: easier to write once I get there because I've been
Speaker 1: seeing it emerge for months on end. So the end
Speaker 1: comes a lot faster to write than the beginning and
Speaker 1: needs less rewriting. Do you enjoy this process? It's a
Speaker 1: really good question, and it's one I don't know the
Speaker 1: answer to. UM. A lot of writers have been given
Speaker 1: credits for this. I give it. I first heard it
Speaker 1: from Oscar Madison on The Odd Couple, but I think
Speaker 1: Dorothy Parker probably gets it most where she says, I
Speaker 1: don't like writing. I like having written, UM, and I
Speaker 1: think it's the same for a lot of it. I
Speaker 1: think it's kind of the same for painting, and it
Speaker 1: made me the same for recording. But I don't think
Speaker 1: so not music slightly different. But if I said, you know,
Speaker 1: we have friends and maybe you're one of them that
Speaker 1: love the paint. I love to paint. Oh my god,
Speaker 1: I love the paint. I'll spend the whole day painting,
Speaker 1: But at the end of the day, if that canvas
Speaker 1: is blank, did you enjoy it? If at the end
Speaker 1: of the day, I have no words to show for
Speaker 1: what I did all day, I don't think I would
Speaker 1: say I enjoyed it. So it's a you know, now
Speaker 1: we're getting into philosophical questions of creation versus creating and
Speaker 1: all that. But what I write if no one ever
Speaker 1: saw it, and no one ever read it, and I
Speaker 1: never looked at it again, I don't think I would. Um,
Speaker 1: that's that. That's that's being brutally honest. So I don't
Speaker 1: think i'd necessarily enjoy that. But I love writing books,
Speaker 1: and I love that moment when I'm in the in
Speaker 1: the thralls of it. But I love it because I
Speaker 1: know what's going to be is going to produce something.
Speaker 1: It's like I'm building a house. If I build a
Speaker 1: house and the end of the day I did, I
Speaker 1: was hammering and I'm looking at coming together and I'm
Speaker 1: really thrilled with it. But then the next day it's
Speaker 1: completely gone and nothing's there. Did I enjoy it? I
Speaker 1: don't know. Larger philosophical questions and very interesting in terms
Speaker 1: do you have a rigid schedule in terms of writing,
Speaker 1: I don't. I try, um best now in the mornings.
Speaker 1: When I was younger, I was best in the evenings,
Speaker 1: um my best days. Or when my kids were younger,
Speaker 1: I would take them to whatever school. My wife a pediatrician,
Speaker 1: so she had a real job. But I would take
Speaker 1: them to school and I dropped them off or whatever
Speaker 1: and go to a coffee shop to be there by
Speaker 1: about eight or a fifteen. And if I could work
Speaker 1: eight to noon straight, that would be a fantastic day,
Speaker 1: get a couple more hours in the afternoon if I
Speaker 1: was lucky. Um, Now it's harder, it's a little more hodgepodge,
Speaker 1: and I might have to be a little bit more
Speaker 1: self motivated. You know, a lot of the old motivations
Speaker 1: are gone. It's you know, will you ever be a success?
Speaker 1: Will you ever have in theother novel published? Will you
Speaker 1: ever you know hit a best seller list? We ever had?
Speaker 1: Tenderly ever get to one? Do you know? Are you
Speaker 1: gonna be able to feature family? Those motivations are pretty
Speaker 1: much gone. Um. So the motivation I have left really
Speaker 1: is that I still love to tell stories. I still
Speaker 1: love that communication with people, and also fear the fear
Speaker 1: that what am I if I'm not this? UM? That's
Speaker 1: I think it's a big part of all creative process
Speaker 1: that the fear that we are that, UM, I have
Speaker 1: no other marketable skills. I have to get a real
Speaker 1: job if I didn't do this? What else am I
Speaker 1: if I'm not this? The good things that in my
Speaker 1: life that have come about by being a writer, like
Speaker 1: being on your podcast, vanished if I don't continue to write.
Speaker 1: So those motivations still move me UM as well. Okay,
Speaker 1: do you say, oh, I don't write on the weekends
Speaker 1: or every day is up for grabs? Do you have
Speaker 1: a specific amount you want to accomplish? Are there certain
Speaker 1: days you accomplish nothing? There's certain days I accomplished nothing,
Speaker 1: especially media days. If I'm you know, uh, the Woods
Speaker 1: came out out for Netflix on the maybe three weeks ago,
Speaker 1: so like two or three days trade. I was on
Speaker 1: Zoom with Poland doing you know, in Europe, doing news stories.
Speaker 1: So I know those days it's not gonna happen, But
Speaker 1: I think about it every day. I take notes every day.
Speaker 1: There's never time I'll go out by the pool that
Speaker 1: I won't bring a notebook with me or a laptop
Speaker 1: with me. Even if I don't open it, It's on
Speaker 1: my mind all the time, and I feel tremendous guilt
Speaker 1: if I'm not doing it, if I'm not producing. So
Speaker 1: you write at home, you have four kids, you have
Speaker 1: a wife. Can you be interrupted? Um? Well, for a
Speaker 1: lot of years I didn't. I mean by four kids
Speaker 1: are grown now so they're not home. But when the
Speaker 1: kids were home, it's one of the reasons I used
Speaker 1: to write a coffee shops or libraries or wherever I
Speaker 1: could other than being home. Home is not necessarily the
Speaker 1: best place to write, especially the people around. But here's
Speaker 1: the thing with writing. You'll use any excuse to avoid wedding,
Speaker 1: any excuse. So if I'm home, I'll sit there, I'll go, oh,
Speaker 1: you know, all right, but first, you know what, this
Speaker 1: house needs aluminum siding. I end up put aluminium sliding
Speaker 1: on that house. Then I'll get back to writing. So
Speaker 1: if I'm out of the house in the old days,
Speaker 1: two I would go to places that did not have
Speaker 1: any internet, which the whole world does now, and so
Speaker 1: I wouldn't be distracted or have excuses. A lot of
Speaker 1: that is shutting out that noise um. I always wrote
Speaker 1: on vacation. I used to joke because my kids were
Speaker 1: in college. We took a couple of vacations, and I
Speaker 1: would joke saying, if you wake up at six the morning,
Speaker 1: seven morning, you can get a lot of work done
Speaker 1: before your kids wake up, like six hours work, because
Speaker 1: my kids wouldn't wake up to one and after now.
Speaker 1: So I liked writing on vacation, like wading people's around around.
Speaker 1: My wife used to joke there'd be times that the
Speaker 1: kids would call her work about something and she said, well,
Speaker 1: why don't you have dad? Where's dads me home? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Dad songs the next room, But why don't you ask him?
Speaker 1: I don't know, he looks like he's busy. So sometimes
Speaker 1: my kids really had a lot of respect for my work,
Speaker 1: and sometimes they didn't. Okay, but are you fearful of
Speaker 1: did they mean? You're basically kind of answer the question.
Speaker 1: They knew if you're working, don't interrupt you. There was times,
Speaker 1: I mean, like, especially towards the end of the book,
Speaker 1: I grew a playoff beard. I don't talk to anybody,
Speaker 1: I don't change clothes, I smell they throw a banana
Speaker 1: at me, so I have something to eat and then
Speaker 1: they run away. Um so they yeah, I guess they
Speaker 1: could send to something. I'm not to said they didn't
Speaker 1: do it, but they were pretty good most literally my kids.
Speaker 1: Maybe it says I raised them right in this way.
Speaker 1: They were never very needy. When they were very little.
Speaker 1: It was one thing, but they were like, oh, well,
Speaker 1: you know, we want to talk to dad, we want
Speaker 1: to hang with dad. They were that way. You know.
Speaker 1: I never had to go to their schools. I never had.
Speaker 1: I still can't name one teacher any of the four
Speaker 1: had in high school. Don't just one jerk, but I
Speaker 1: forgot his name right now too. So I was never
Speaker 1: that kind of even though the kids did really well.
Speaker 1: My youngest is a brown and they're kids, you know,
Speaker 1: oh into grade schools. I think it was her mom
Speaker 1: maybe more. My kids just didn't really need me that
Speaker 1: much that way. Okay, So where did you grow Livingston,
Speaker 1: New Jersey was right outside of new Ark. I was
Speaker 1: born in Newark, New Jersey. And what were the circumstances
Speaker 1: of your growing up? Uh, you know, it was sort
Speaker 1: of idyllic. Uh. Sixties and seventies, mostly seventies are my memories.
Speaker 1: Because I was born in sixty two. So I grew
Speaker 1: up in the seventies and the eighties. Um, what did
Speaker 1: your parents? My dad was? My dad worked as he was,
Speaker 1: he was a practicing attorney, but he worked for his
Speaker 1: vice president of a company that did laundry for like
Speaker 1: restaurants and stuff like that. That was that was sort
Speaker 1: of his job. My mother always had different, different jobs.
Speaker 1: She was a school teacher I was very young. She
Speaker 1: ran a travel agency when I got a little bit older.
Speaker 1: She always worked, Um, and she was. My mom was
Speaker 1: a tremendous early feminist. Um you know, our bit of
Speaker 1: bumper sticker when I was a kid, saying, which I
Speaker 1: think is still genius women whose tick to be equal
Speaker 1: to men, lack ambition, which a genius women's place in
Speaker 1: the house and sentate. We had all that stuff in
Speaker 1: these My mom was very much and I wrote an
Speaker 1: est day on her. She was the very first female
Speaker 1: littleague umpire in the early seventies. Really, so she was
Speaker 1: a Yeah, she was a firebrand. Both my parents died young. Um,
Speaker 1: how relatively young. My dad was fifty nine, my mom
Speaker 1: was sixty. Well to what did mean? You know? My
Speaker 1: father died at seventy and when he passed. My mother said, well,
Speaker 1: his dad died at seventy He never thought he'd ce
Speaker 1: seventy two. What degree do you have that in the
Speaker 1: back of your mind? A lot. I'm not turning fifty
Speaker 1: nine next year, so I'm fifty eight right now. So yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a it's a it haunts um he died. You
Speaker 1: had heard issues, and a number of years ago I
Speaker 1: met a great guy who was who was involved in
Speaker 1: the hard stuff, and he said, if thoroughly checked me out,
Speaker 1: and he said, you don't have your dad's heart. So
Speaker 1: that gave me a sense to release because I've always
Speaker 1: felt that was sort of mine, my curse. But yeah,
Speaker 1: it was something that you kind of forget. So how
Speaker 1: many kids in the family. I have four, my butter
Speaker 1: to two butters, one older, one younger, so you're the
Speaker 1: middle kid. I'm the middle kid too, although my siblings
Speaker 1: are girls. So usually the hopes and dreams are in
Speaker 1: the first one. The youngest one wants attention to the baby,
Speaker 1: and you're in the middle, and you're kind of ignored,
Speaker 1: both in good and bad ways. Was that your experience? No? No,
Speaker 1: I mean my older brother my younger brother are both geniuses,
Speaker 1: so both uh. I went to Yale undergraduate of Harvard Law,
Speaker 1: perfect both perfect essay T scores. My brother graduated Harvard Law.
Speaker 1: I think it's twenty one, so both of them were.
Speaker 1: I was, relatively speaking, the dumb one in the family. Um,
Speaker 1: but I also was the one with personality. Uh. I
Speaker 1: don't really think the birth orders were also fairly far apart.
Speaker 1: I was four years younger than my older brother and
Speaker 1: five years older than my youngest brother, so there was
Speaker 1: a pretty good spread there between all of us, so
Speaker 1: we didn't really compete. We never were on the same
Speaker 1: team's UM, so maybe that kind of helped a little
Speaker 1: bit with that sort of a thing. Are you popular?
Speaker 1: You have a lot of friends. I was, I was president.
Speaker 1: You know. The funny thing is my senior year of
Speaker 1: Livingston High School, I was president of the student council
Speaker 1: and Chris Christie was president of the senior class. So um,
Speaker 1: and I was actually practice what he preached. That was
Speaker 1: a lazy affair government. I did not think as president casil,
Speaker 1: I just didn't do a damn thing. But I was
Speaker 1: captain the basketball team. I was president student council, so
Speaker 1: you know, I I would say I was in the
Speaker 1: mix certainly. It wasn't like a nerdy introvert who as
Speaker 1: a writer. I was athletic. I played college basketball as well.
Speaker 1: So how did you decide to go to Amherst Um.
Speaker 1: I wanted a small were school where I could probably
Speaker 1: you know, and actually because of my basketball UM and
Speaker 1: having good grades, I could get into you know, Amerson.
Speaker 1: I wasn't probably good enough to play Division one, so
Speaker 1: I wasn't like I could have used it. I was
Speaker 1: sort of, you know, a very good student, like a
Speaker 1: lot of kids in my school. We're back in those days.
Speaker 1: So what made me stand out was my basketball, and
Speaker 1: Amirst wanted me UM for that, and it was sort
Speaker 1: of the best school I thought I could make academically,
Speaker 1: and I liked the small school environment. I had a
Speaker 1: fairly big high school, one of a few people whose
Speaker 1: college had a lot less people in the class um
Speaker 1: in high school amirates at that time, I think, you know,
Speaker 1: it was a really magical place for me there. I
Speaker 1: learned a lot there, had a great liberal arts education
Speaker 1: with no prerequisites whatsoever. Um, you didn't have to take
Speaker 1: a math, you don't take a science and take any
Speaker 1: of that sort of thing. Well, that bigs a question,
Speaker 1: did you take math or science? I took one math
Speaker 1: class and no science. I basically almost all the classes
Speaker 1: I took were also because I was lazy. Um, I
Speaker 1: took all. I took a lot of political science and
Speaker 1: history and American studies and things. Where yet do I
Speaker 1: two or three five page papers a day, which I
Speaker 1: could a week or a semester, and I can always
Speaker 1: take those, you know, if I did no work, I
Speaker 1: didn't like reading any of the reading or whatever, I
Speaker 1: could always take those and get a B plus versus
Speaker 1: having you to take a test where you really have
Speaker 1: to work. So part of it was being lazy. But
Speaker 1: you know, I already I kind of thought I had
Speaker 1: a knack for writing, necessarily realizing I'd want to be
Speaker 1: a writer. Yet I wasn't one of those guys who
Speaker 1: always knew UM. And I really enjoyed those classes. I
Speaker 1: we had some great professors, small classes where you really
Speaker 1: have a lot of give and take a lot of
Speaker 1: the Socratic method. And really, I think what Amer's taught
Speaker 1: me more than anything else, which has been helpful with
Speaker 1: what I write is critical thinking and problem solving, which
Speaker 1: is a lot of what my books really are. I
Speaker 1: was probably better mess student in high school than I
Speaker 1: was an English student. But it's not really that. The
Speaker 1: writing was really about being able to see problems and
Speaker 1: solve them. Did you play basket ball all four years? Yep? Yep?
Speaker 1: In fact, I was a Jewish All American, Yes, right,
Speaker 1: I was. It was There's not five Jews who played
Speaker 1: college basketball and made a team. I guess. Okay, So
Speaker 1: when your college career is over, do you play anymore ball?
Speaker 1: Do you feel the absence? What goes on? I played
Speaker 1: up until I was in my late forties, and then
Speaker 1: I had a knee injury, and my friend, who was
Speaker 1: a northopedic surgeon, said, you can keep playing like your
Speaker 1: friends and end up on my table where you can
Speaker 1: retire now and maybe not end up on my table,
Speaker 1: and so I retired. I didn't push it after that,
Speaker 1: so I've never had to have any surgery or anything
Speaker 1: like that. But I played up until I was I
Speaker 1: think forty seven or forty eight. I played and pick
Speaker 1: up and I do miss that every once in a a while.
Speaker 1: I still had that yearning, but you know, I've also
Speaker 1: accepted it. It's times. Well, since you're a basketball player,
Speaker 1: that pigs a question. How tall are you I'm six
Speaker 1: f legit six four right right, asupposed everybody that lives. Okay,
Speaker 1: you're in Amherst. What's it like being a Jew and Amherst?
Speaker 1: It was. It was interesting because because I grew up
Speaker 1: in Livingston, New Jersey, which is a very Jewish town,
Speaker 1: so I hadn't really experienced all that much anti Semitism,
Speaker 1: and an Amhurst, I started to a little bit nothing heavy,
Speaker 1: but I remember in the first week or two they're
Speaker 1: hearing people saying, stop trying to jew me down, stop
Speaker 1: being a Joe, gave me the money, those sort of
Speaker 1: things that I found somewhat shocking. Um uh, because it
Speaker 1: was the first time I wasn't in a area that
Speaker 1: was a majority of Jewish. But it really wasn't like,
Speaker 1: you know, it wasn't like the movie school Ties or
Speaker 1: anything like that. It wasn't like it was that horrific.
Speaker 1: And there were other ones, so um yeah, I don't
Speaker 1: think it was been fairly lucky. Also being an athlete
Speaker 1: and that kind of a thing where I never really
Speaker 1: experienced anything dreadful or serious. Okay, so you're in college,
Speaker 1: any thought of what you're going to do for a living. None,
Speaker 1: I mean, I was a political science major, which is
Speaker 1: a euthemism for I have no idea what the funk
Speaker 1: I want to do with my life. I was going
Speaker 1: to go to law school because my brother all Rebutter,
Speaker 1: gone to law school, my father had gone to law school,
Speaker 1: and my aunt, my uncle, everybody had been a lawyer,
Speaker 1: and it just seemed like the natural next step. Um.
Speaker 1: And then my grandfather had a business that he needed
Speaker 1: help with, so I deferred. I was actually gonna go
Speaker 1: to Universe of Chicago law school. I deferred one year
Speaker 1: and in two years, and then I never went to
Speaker 1: think of this. Okay, so you're working in his business
Speaker 1: doing what it's a travel business. I was setting up
Speaker 1: tours overseas and writing the brochure and doing the marketing,
Speaker 1: UM and stuff like that. Base you know, we had
Speaker 1: a travel club. We would set up tours to Italy
Speaker 1: or France or Asia wherever, we packaged them, sell them
Speaker 1: to sell them to different people, to our members. And
Speaker 1: that was what I did, Yeah for eight years? From yeah,
Speaker 1: I did it for how long? Eight years? So when
Speaker 1: did the belt of off that you wanted to be
Speaker 1: a writer? My senior year of college when I first
Speaker 1: started to do and That was how I sort of
Speaker 1: talked about it going to law school. My grandfather sort
Speaker 1: of said, if you go to law school, you're probably
Speaker 1: not gonna ever write here why you're there, you can,
Speaker 1: you know, work in this job, you can, you can
Speaker 1: try to keep writing. Um, And I did, And then
Speaker 1: I guess I had a book or two out before
Speaker 1: that business imploded, and and then I went out on
Speaker 1: my own. Well that begs a question of finances, because
Speaker 1: if you're making five or six K a book, how
Speaker 1: are you making rents? So to speak? Well, it's an
Speaker 1: interesting time. Um. You know, my wife was working as
Speaker 1: a pediatrician. So first of all, made I made. I
Speaker 1: helped grow the business to the point where I was
Speaker 1: making decent money with the family business for a little while. Um.
Speaker 1: But then it did come to a stage when that
Speaker 1: when that left that, I had a very good job
Speaker 1: offer for a regular executive butt on a suit every
Speaker 1: day kind of a job in Stanford, Connecticut. And I
Speaker 1: didn't want to do it. And I was going to
Speaker 1: do it because I had fighting family. My my wife
Speaker 1: is probably their first kid. I guess around then, and
Speaker 1: remember I said to my wife, I'd really like to
Speaker 1: give this writing a shot with what the savings we
Speaker 1: have and what you're making as a pediatrician. She's working
Speaker 1: the publicly, she's working in a hospital. So it wasn't
Speaker 1: like a ton um, can we do? You think we can?
Speaker 1: We can do it, And I don't know how anybody
Speaker 1: does without a supportive spouse. I had a super supportive spouse.
Speaker 1: My wife was fantastic. She said, yeah, I give it
Speaker 1: a go, and you know, but I mean so for
Speaker 1: a little while, I just enough to contribute, not those days,
Speaker 1: not the five or six thousand dollar stage, but then
Speaker 1: you know, obviously became a worthwhile investment in the end.
Speaker 1: But this is another thing that you know, you said
Speaker 1: to right at the point where people sort of think,
Speaker 1: if you don't hit it right away or you're supposed to,
Speaker 1: you gotta move on to something else. And yes, publishers
Speaker 1: may not be as patient as they were in those days,
Speaker 1: but I don't think my publishers were patient. I think
Speaker 1: I just so far under their under their radar, they
Speaker 1: just didn't kind of notice. You know, it just was
Speaker 1: being renewed at five thousand dollars a book for a
Speaker 1: few years, and then I won a couple of awards,
Speaker 1: and you know, I changed agents, and some things happened
Speaker 1: where I made where I was able to to move
Speaker 1: up the ladder a little bit, and then it was
Speaker 1: fifty thousand and a hundred thousand, So you know, it
Speaker 1: was that it was a slower, slower step. But I
Speaker 1: get emails from people it's like, you know, I've written
Speaker 1: three self published books and digital. How can I'm not
Speaker 1: selling like you and Patterson? You know that's not how
Speaker 1: it works. There's as a tremendous impatience nowadays, and um,
Speaker 1: I almost like grumpy old man. But it's okay. It
Speaker 1: was my tell No. One was my tenth published novel,
Speaker 1: was my first New York Times bestseller, my tenth So
Speaker 1: as long as you're let's drew down a little bit.
Speaker 1: When you're working with your grandfather, are you writing at
Speaker 1: that time? I am. My first two books were published
Speaker 1: while I was still working, which is not a thing.
Speaker 1: I don't know. You don't have to quit your job
Speaker 1: to write. I don't know. That's just not true. Um.
Speaker 1: In fact, it's pretty much. I think the opposite. You
Speaker 1: have more of a hunger because you want to get
Speaker 1: the hell out of that job. So, um, I were
Speaker 1: you know, if it was gonna take you twelve months
Speaker 1: to write a book. If you're working full time, maybe
Speaker 1: it's like your four team months. And if you are
Speaker 1: one of those people are gonna tell me you're too busy,
Speaker 1: then writing is not that important to you. I'm sorry,
Speaker 1: it's just not. Mary Higgins Clark is the example. My
Speaker 1: dear friend who passed this yere, who I love dearly,
Speaker 1: taught me so much about life. But Mary Higgins Clark,
Speaker 1: when she was thirty six years old, has five children,
Speaker 1: and her husband died the very next day. Her father,
Speaker 1: her mother in law dies. So Mary, this is back
Speaker 1: in the fifties or early sixties, thing of the fifties.
Speaker 1: Still it's left the five kids, no husband, no prospects,
Speaker 1: no one. She worked full time, so Mary would wake
Speaker 1: up and she would write at her kitchen table from
Speaker 1: five am to seven am before the kids woke up.
Speaker 1: So don't tell me you don't have time to write,
Speaker 1: because it's horseship, you know, turn off the TV, wake
Speaker 1: up an hour earlier, skip lunch. So when I was writing,
Speaker 1: when I was working full time, I was writing almost
Speaker 1: as fast as I'm writing now. I just had it.
Speaker 1: I would be thinking about it when I had that time, boy,
Speaker 1: I would use it. And when did you write when
Speaker 1: you had that full time job? Lunchtime, early mornings, but
Speaker 1: mostly in that day because I was younger, mostly at night.
Speaker 1: So if I finished work at five o'clock or whatever else, Um,
Speaker 1: I would write from you know, seven to ten pm
Speaker 1: or eight to eleven PM or nine to midnight something
Speaker 1: like that. Ye skip the TV. Yeah whatever is How
Speaker 1: did you meet your wife? We've been to get her
Speaker 1: since I was in college where I was. I was
Speaker 1: a sophomore and she was a freshman at Amer's College
Speaker 1: and then both played college basketball. That's how we met. Wow.
Speaker 1: Now that begs a question, especially since you have Jewish
Speaker 1: references in your latest book. Is she Jewish? She is not?
Speaker 1: That was a mixed marriage, early mixed marriage. How about
Speaker 1: the kids? No, do your parents say anything? Um? My
Speaker 1: parents are not very religious people. Um. And again my
Speaker 1: dad died before I got married. Um. They both liked
Speaker 1: their tremendous amount my wife, so it really was probably
Speaker 1: more of an issue on her side where she was Catholic. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, on our side. It was back in those
Speaker 1: days that people it wasn't a mixed marriage, were not
Speaker 1: a big thing. This was I got married. They were
Speaker 1: just starting. It was like I remember, we had a
Speaker 1: search for a rabbi and no rabbis would do it
Speaker 1: because we want to do a mixed ceremony. Um. So
Speaker 1: it was tricky, but it was hard maybe the beginning
Speaker 1: when we first started, but we both I think softened
Speaker 1: our stances on both of those being not very religious. Okay,
Speaker 1: let's talk about telling no one the movie the book
Speaker 1: is successful. What's the genesis of the movie out? First?
Speaker 1: You know, I told the movie rights to that before
Speaker 1: the book came out in America. Had you had you
Speaker 1: sold book right movie rights to any book previously? I
Speaker 1: had had small options on my Myron boultitar series, but
Speaker 1: nothing like this. This was like a three studio auction
Speaker 1: and it went for a lot of money. Um. And
Speaker 1: it was more money than I've ever made on books combined.
Speaker 1: Remember being in a bookstore on book tour in Scottsdale
Speaker 1: getting calls. You know, Columbia moved up to here, Warner
Speaker 1: Brothers moved up to here. So it was this is
Speaker 1: almost a year before the book came out. I'm talking
Speaker 1: about the early buzz. People just read it and saw
Speaker 1: the potential for it. So I ended up selling it
Speaker 1: or optioning a company optioned it in the US. It
Speaker 1: was a long story. It was a weird offshoot company
Speaker 1: and uh, you know, it's kind of The first script
Speaker 1: was written by two well known guys I won't mention
Speaker 1: your names that people can google and sometimes and find
Speaker 1: it and it really they hated the first script. But
Speaker 1: I also I understood right early on that you you know,
Speaker 1: when you sell a book, you don't really get to
Speaker 1: decide that sort of the thing. Um, And here's the
Speaker 1: thing people don't realize. It's really hard. Always been really
Speaker 1: hard to get a movie made from the book, really hard.
Speaker 1: It's hard today still with all the streaming, and it
Speaker 1: was really hard back then with all that money behind
Speaker 1: and all of the meat, all the stuff that was
Speaker 1: going on, all the talent behind it. Um, it was
Speaker 1: really hard to get to that green light. They kept
Speaker 1: changing they changed this director and that, and they kept
Speaker 1: going back and forth. I tell the story too long,
Speaker 1: but there's a there's a moment at the three year
Speaker 1: mark when I had a chance of getting the book
Speaker 1: back for a while, they were willing to give me
Speaker 1: a lot more money to keep it again. But I've
Speaker 1: been starting to get a call from this crazy French
Speaker 1: guy named Gia Ken and I didn't know, you know,
Speaker 1: I don't I don't really follow I didn't at the
Speaker 1: time follow French and had no idea who Ken is
Speaker 1: and somebody. Then then he had a tier in a
Speaker 1: movie called The Beach with Leonardo DiCaprio, and Kennedy was
Speaker 1: the second lead in that. If you've ever seen that
Speaker 1: movie The Beach, he was the French guy that hangs
Speaker 1: out with Leonardo DiCaprio the home movie and version of Ludan.
Speaker 1: So he was, you know, he was sort of the
Speaker 1: Brad Pitt of France, and he was. He had directed
Speaker 1: one movie he sent me a copy of. I was like, wow,
Speaker 1: this is what was really good. It's got tremendous potential
Speaker 1: Pomony Doll and he was telling me his ideas for
Speaker 1: the movie. And it's kind of like it's gonna be
Speaker 1: into an American film. There's nothing much I can do
Speaker 1: about it. But when I had that chance of three
Speaker 1: year mark and I saw how bad the scripts were,
Speaker 1: I just didn't believe they were going to do it.
Speaker 1: I said to Gione, if you can match the option money,
Speaker 1: I'll tell Hollywood no and I'll give it to you,
Speaker 1: and everybody told me I was absolutely nuts. But I
Speaker 1: also knew that if France was going to put up
Speaker 1: that kind of option money, Unlike Hollywood, which could piss
Speaker 1: away that kind of money, the French could not. It
Speaker 1: would have to be made. They just could not do
Speaker 1: that unless they're gonna make the movie. And so I
Speaker 1: went with my gut on it. And it's one of
Speaker 1: the few times my gut was rook because we made
Speaker 1: a really he made a marvelous movie out of it.
Speaker 1: We had a great time making it. We're still friends
Speaker 1: with all the people on and I still communicated with
Speaker 1: a lot of It was a labor of love. No
Speaker 1: one expected it to do what it ended up doing,
Speaker 1: you know. And it ended up being the top grossing
Speaker 1: foreign film in the US that year, which no one
Speaker 1: expected it to do. We couldn't even get anybody first
Speaker 1: to show it in America, um, because I said, oh,
Speaker 1: you know, if if people want to watch a French film,
Speaker 1: they want to watch Emily or something like that. They
Speaker 1: don't want to watch a thriller. Why would they want
Speaker 1: to watch a French thriller? Again, a million American thrillers,
Speaker 1: but once it was shown here. It caught on and
Speaker 1: became the biggest grossing foreign film of the year UM
Speaker 1: that year in America and has become something of a
Speaker 1: of a cult classic, which has really been fun. To
Speaker 1: what degree were you involved in the production of the
Speaker 1: movie more than most writers but not I didn't write
Speaker 1: the screenplay. Giam ran a lot by me. UM. We
Speaker 1: talked about it a lot, but I didn't really have
Speaker 1: an official, an official role. I was on set a
Speaker 1: number of times. We talked about it a lot, UM,
Speaker 1: but this really was Giama's vision for the for the story,
Speaker 1: UM and he kind of he really knew what he
Speaker 1: wanted to do early on, and UM, I didn't really
Speaker 1: have too many disagreements. One of the things, for example,
Speaker 1: was most thrillers are dark. UM and Gillam had this
Speaker 1: idea that we should really have this dark story but
Speaker 1: with huge bright colors, something I still do with my
Speaker 1: shows today. Yeah, you know that the lake is beautiful,
Speaker 1: that seemingly's walking past, the pink roses are exploding out,
Speaker 1: it's colorful, wonderful cinematography by Christopher Austen's time, and all
Speaker 1: of those sort of things, and having the story dark
Speaker 1: underneath it Um, it was really fun. I remember going
Speaker 1: to a dinner in Paris where he had pictures of
Speaker 1: all the actors he was going to show me who
Speaker 1: was going to play the role, and how nervous he
Speaker 1: was to sort of show it to me. Um. So
Speaker 1: we had a great time making the film. I don't
Speaker 1: think any of us. I certainly didn't think it was
Speaker 1: going to be as big as they ended up becoming. Now,
Speaker 1: from an outsider's viewpoint, it's nearly a decade before your
Speaker 1: next visual production comes out, and Tell No One was
Speaker 1: a giant hit. What was going on in that period.
Speaker 1: It's like I said, it's hard to get things made. Um,
Speaker 1: I thought the same thing. I'm like, wow, let Tell
Speaker 1: No One. You know in France that did so well.
Speaker 1: I'm sure Hollywood's gonna be knocking on the door and
Speaker 1: making everything now. It's going to be you know. I
Speaker 1: was feeling very confident, but it didn't happen like that.
Speaker 1: You know, it happens. It's very strange, like we were trying.
Speaker 1: We're still we are still trying to remake Tell No
Speaker 1: One as an English language version of it. That movie
Speaker 1: was made in two thousand six. I think it came
Speaker 1: out it came out in the US and two thousand
Speaker 1: and eight we have had Liam Neeson, ben Athleck um
Speaker 1: uh oh my god z. The names are all passing me,
Speaker 1: passing through me. Um who have been We had like
Speaker 1: four or five major directors, four or five major stars attached.
Speaker 1: We've written, they've written scripts, Chris Terryo who wrote one script,
Speaker 1: the guy wrote Argo. We've had just for some reason,
Speaker 1: it just hasn't happened. And I wish I had a
Speaker 1: better answered meant that that's just the fickle way um
Speaker 1: that Hollywood is. I've had a lot of them close
Speaker 1: and then something would happen and it would fall through
Speaker 1: where it would actually be kind of terrible, and I
Speaker 1: would sort of not necessarily not with tell no when
Speaker 1: something the other ones sort of managed to be able
Speaker 1: to pull the plug myself because I could see it
Speaker 1: was heaving in the direction I didn't want it to go. Now.
Speaker 1: Other than John Grisham, a lot of people write a
Speaker 1: lot of books and they're not made into visual productions,
Speaker 1: whereas What Ship Your Stride? It seems like, you know,
Speaker 1: there's a couple of years, but they're made overseas. Why
Speaker 1: did that happen? Well, the manor receives for now um
Speaker 1: again because I think the French the French movie did
Speaker 1: really well. Tell no One and I joke on the
Speaker 1: Jerry Lewis of crime fiction. I go very well in France.
Speaker 1: For some reason. France is my biggest country relative to
Speaker 1: the size of the population um, Bigger than the US,
Speaker 1: bigger than anywhere else. So I've had a great relationship
Speaker 1: with France. Once I had that movie, I started in
Speaker 1: great relationships with the cinema over there, and so I
Speaker 1: did two other TV series which were both enormous French,
Speaker 1: The Enormous Business in France and Once the British Person
Speaker 1: saw a woman named Nicholas Schindler. One of the things
Speaker 1: is that I decided at some stage of the game
Speaker 1: that I didn't want to just option my stuff to
Speaker 1: Hollywood and and sit back. I was at an age
Speaker 1: right it was not gonna be influenced by Hollywood, so
Speaker 1: it wouldn't affect my book writing, which it would have
Speaker 1: a number of years ago. So I I ignored it.
Speaker 1: Part of the reason why nothing was being made was
Speaker 1: I had the attitude I'm just going to option I'm
Speaker 1: gonna have nothing to do with it after that, which
Speaker 1: is what Hollywood actually want. So there's a joke is
Speaker 1: you run up to a barbed wire fence, you throw
Speaker 1: the book over, they throw the money over. You run away,
Speaker 1: they run away. You know they always joke. You know
Speaker 1: who cares what the movie was? Uh? Cash, there's the check,
Speaker 1: cash clear um. And I reached the stage right, that
Speaker 1: wasn't what I wanted anymore. I wanted good stuff made.
Speaker 1: I didn't care if I made a penny from it,
Speaker 1: but I wanted some good stuff made. So about four
Speaker 1: or five years ago, I decided I was going to
Speaker 1: get involved, and I met some a woman in England
Speaker 1: named Nicholas Schindler who has a happy valley less tango
Speaker 1: in Halifax, queer as folk wonderful quality productions. Uh not
Speaker 1: high budget. We can make it on our own. We
Speaker 1: can make it ourselves. The networks will leave us alone.
Speaker 1: And so I've now done three series with her, we're
Speaker 1: working on the fourth, and they've become bigger and bigger
Speaker 1: as time has gone on, and she's been a pleasure
Speaker 1: to work with. From that, Netflix seeing that, and because
Speaker 1: I sell a lot of books overseas, Netflix realized, well,
Speaker 1: you know, we can make these shows and other countries.
Speaker 1: We can really pound our memberships in those countries because
Speaker 1: they're gonna be so pleased, and yet we can also
Speaker 1: show them all over the world. And this was really
Speaker 1: heavy for me. I love this idea. I don't want
Speaker 1: my adaptations to be the exact same as my books,
Speaker 1: so I've embraced that. That said, there will be some
Speaker 1: American productions down the line as well, but right now
Speaker 1: we just got a Polish one. Next will be a
Speaker 1: Spanish one, probably soon a French one. Um, and I
Speaker 1: love that. I mean, it's been really great for me
Speaker 1: and I've been able. I haven't had a show yet
Speaker 1: where I go. I'm really ashamed to this, so this
Speaker 1: is really really bad. Some shows are better than others,
Speaker 1: but I've I've personally been happy met with them all.
Speaker 1: So the first English production is The Stranger the Five First. Okay,
Speaker 1: now some of these you they were they were not
Speaker 1: based on a previous book, correct, So what was the
Speaker 1: process there? But Nicola came to me she wanted to
Speaker 1: to option one of my books, and one of that
Speaker 1: book was optioned. It did a problem. You option a book,
Speaker 1: somebody will hold on to it for three years or whatever,
Speaker 1: not do anything with it. It tries me crazy, um
Speaker 1: and still pay you. But you know again, I've never
Speaker 1: been driven by the dollar. I've been driven by wanting
Speaker 1: to make something good. So when Nicola came to me
Speaker 1: to want to get this particular story, we started talking like,
Speaker 1: I've always had this idea, but it's it's I've always
Speaker 1: seen it visually. I may write it as a novel,
Speaker 1: but as four lead characters, and it's kind of hard
Speaker 1: as a novel. And I told her the idea for
Speaker 1: the five and our eyes lit up and she's like,
Speaker 1: do you know the ending? I'm like, yeah, I know,
Speaker 1: I know the ending. I know at the beginning of
Speaker 1: the end. And I think fifteen minutes later we had
Speaker 1: Sky Network buying it. It was that very fast Sky
Speaker 1: Network bordered that's down. Netflix hasn't here in the US
Speaker 1: and Sky hasn't in the UK. So that's how it started.
Speaker 1: I had this idea and then um, I had you know,
Speaker 1: we want to do another went together at the time
Speaker 1: we thought it was going to be for Sky. Um,
Speaker 1: so I came up with another another idea that I
Speaker 1: was working on, but I also didn't think would be
Speaker 1: a good novel, necessarily great novel that would be very
Speaker 1: visual and that became a show called Safe, and then
Speaker 1: we did The Stranger. So okay, so these are originals
Speaker 1: other than coming up with a concept. How involved are you? No,
Speaker 1: it's not just the concept, it's the whole story. I'm
Speaker 1: I'm the whole story. I write the whole story pretty much.
Speaker 1: We all have better guys do the actual scripts. Um,
Speaker 1: and sometimes guys who's doing episode six will be doing
Speaker 1: at the same time as a guy doing episode three
Speaker 1: or the woman. We've had half in half pretty much,
Speaker 1: but all the whole story is mine, from beginning to end,
Speaker 1: all the outline, you know, I work with maybe two
Speaker 1: or three other people are the writer's room, but I
Speaker 1: run the writer's room. I run So it's these are
Speaker 1: not like, oh, here's an idea, UM, you guys do
Speaker 1: something with it. I'm on every day. I watched over
Speaker 1: three D audition tapes for the five Safe and The Stranger.
Speaker 1: Each one of them I watched three each to do
Speaker 1: this to do the casting. UM. By the by the
Speaker 1: time we do The Stranger, they would send me hair
Speaker 1: styles in the morning for me to make sure I'm
Speaker 1: okay with UM. I watched the I watch them every day.
Speaker 1: If they're shooting in the UK. Are you in the
Speaker 1: U S Or the UK when they're doing this US?
Speaker 1: But they can every morning. But they just got my
Speaker 1: months from Spain. Every day, like I watched the Russians
Speaker 1: from the day before. We just started refilming. Um, we've
Speaker 1: been doing the show called The Innocence based off my
Speaker 1: book The Innocent in Spain. The last you know, we
Speaker 1: stopped for COVID. We just started up yesterday. So every
Speaker 1: day when I wake up, I have an email in
Speaker 1: the morning that has all three hours of whatever they
Speaker 1: stayed filmed for me to watch the scenes, and I'll
Speaker 1: then comment. I'll say, well, you know what, let's have
Speaker 1: the guy hit a little more of this or do that,
Speaker 1: or it's just perfect, keep doing what you're doing. So
Speaker 1: I watched it. I watched them all every day. For
Speaker 1: the English language ones, I have a lot. I am
Speaker 1: the I am technically speaking, what we call the show runner.
Speaker 1: And someone writes a script, to what degree do you
Speaker 1: tweak that script after it's written completely? I mean as
Speaker 1: a team, because it's very hard they're writing at the
Speaker 1: different times. We have to make sure that you know,
Speaker 1: if you're writing episodes six and someone else is writing
Speaker 1: episode three that you have the same voice, and it's
Speaker 1: a voice that's consistent with what we're doing. I've had
Speaker 1: the same head writer in terms of scripts. The guy
Speaker 1: named Danny Brocklehurst broke with me on all three of
Speaker 1: those English language shows. And the next one we'll do
Speaker 1: the same. We'll I'll rest write the first and the last,
Speaker 1: so we have that kind of bookmark and we have
Speaker 1: the voice that we we want. But Danny that working
Speaker 1: very hard and very close together with a guy named
Speaker 1: Richard C. So you know, it's a very small writer's room.
Speaker 1: Tho shows have on the six A ten writers. It's
Speaker 1: usually um, the three of us with Nicolaus isn't there too?
Speaker 1: And called the core four and we've done basically those
Speaker 1: are people who outline the show most of the story.
Speaker 1: My job is most of the story. Dannie will do
Speaker 1: a lot of the dialogue and the a cute setup
Speaker 1: stuff like that. So it's more of a team effort.
Speaker 1: But the story is usually made. And to what degree
Speaker 1: you involved in editing? All right? Um? You know they
Speaker 1: usually will send me rough edits and we again as
Speaker 1: a team meet and say, you know, we need more
Speaker 1: of this, less of that. Of this of that. Um,
Speaker 1: so I'm not in the editing room, although I have
Speaker 1: been actually sometimes, but um, you know, we we when
Speaker 1: the editor sends the stuff out, we have a lot
Speaker 1: of notes. It's it's a fairly active process. I kind
Speaker 1: of enjoy it. You know, I've spent my whole life
Speaker 1: alone in this room, this room basically you know that
Speaker 1: we're sitting in now, and it's really been kind of
Speaker 1: cool to be able to collaborate with other people. Actors too.
Speaker 1: You know, they contact me because I had the whole
Speaker 1: backstory on the guy, and actors laid backstory that they
Speaker 1: probably not necessarily need to know. But um, it's been
Speaker 1: a it's been a really kind of a cool process.
Speaker 1: But traditionally movies, uh see, these TV shows take a
Speaker 1: lot of time. How has that affected your schedule relative
Speaker 1: to writing books? Polittic Having a team helps. We also
Speaker 1: are all of us are no nonsense. I'll be honest.
Speaker 1: I don't understand why things take as long as they do,
Speaker 1: especially in Hollywood, but just in general, Um, every person
Speaker 1: has written a script based off my one of my
Speaker 1: books has taken longer to write the script than it
Speaker 1: took me to write the books. I can't understand why
Speaker 1: I gave you the whole goddamn story. I shouldn't take
Speaker 1: you more than than six weeks. So part of it
Speaker 1: is that the people that I work with were no nonsense.
Speaker 1: We actually do the work, and so I don't think
Speaker 1: we have to stay up twenty four hours a day,
Speaker 1: laur any of that we'd be I'm completely obsessed with it,
Speaker 1: and so are the people that work with. We all
Speaker 1: hate this term. We all share the vision um. But
Speaker 1: I do think that a lot of writers and screenwriters
Speaker 1: waste time and as part of the business. And it's
Speaker 1: almost like, well, I tell you, sure, I wrote one
Speaker 1: script will mention for who Are based off one of
Speaker 1: my novels and ends up not being made. So maybe
Speaker 1: it wasn't all that good. But when I finished it
Speaker 1: my age at the time, So what do you mean
Speaker 1: you finished it already? Like it was how long it
Speaker 1: was like two months? Two months? Ag? Well, you can't
Speaker 1: say that. Let's just say it's not done yet. We'll
Speaker 1: send it in a few more months later. So I mean,
Speaker 1: let's tell that. So I think a lot of times
Speaker 1: people are hustling for new business and doing other stuff
Speaker 1: other than just sitting and writing. So that's my answer
Speaker 1: to how we're able to do as much as we're
Speaker 1: able to do even though it didn't get produced. Writing
Speaker 1: a script is a different skill, and it's mostly dialogue.
Speaker 1: Did you find that a hard transition? Is it something
Speaker 1: you say? Well, I respect that, but I don't want
Speaker 1: to do it. No, I don't. The problem for me
Speaker 1: for scriptwriting is mostly from adapting my own thing. I'm
Speaker 1: I'm too close to it, and I understand that, and
Speaker 1: maybe I'm not the one who should be doing it.
Speaker 1: But a lot of my books have a tremendous amount
Speaker 1: of dialogue in them anyway. Um, so I didn't necessarily
Speaker 1: find all the difficulty. Maybe that's why maybe it wasn't
Speaker 1: not good of a script. I don't know. Um So
Speaker 1: I don't find I don't necessarily find it difficult. I'm all,
Speaker 1: you know. I tried. It's very hard. I tried, being
Speaker 1: very open minded. I said, I don't want the book
Speaker 1: to be the same as the TV series The Stranger,
Speaker 1: for example. Um, and this, I didn't do this. Everything
Speaker 1: I did to politically correct. That's not the reason. In
Speaker 1: the book The Stranger, the person is giving the secrets.
Speaker 1: It's kind of a nerdy teenage white male, which made
Speaker 1: sense when I wrote the book ten years ago or whatever,
Speaker 1: but visually it didn't work for me. Visually, even when
Speaker 1: we tried men of all sorts, of raised queens and colors,
Speaker 1: were kind of thinking of that person walking in that room.
Speaker 1: In that first scene with which at Armitage they were,
Speaker 1: the stranger drops the bomb about his wife baking your pregnancy,
Speaker 1: and I'm like, I think we need a woman. I
Speaker 1: think we need someone who's going to go in there
Speaker 1: and just be like super cool and super hip. And
Speaker 1: then we got Hinnah John Camman. As soon as I
Speaker 1: saw her performed like, that's exactly what we want. That's
Speaker 1: not how I wrote the character in the book, and
Speaker 1: that's okay. That's it was better. You know. We did
Speaker 1: that with the movie Tell Low One too. I told
Speaker 1: Giam we had this as a Korean hit man in
Speaker 1: the book, and that guy was in other books. I
Speaker 1: said to Gilm, we can't use him. So he ended
Speaker 1: up using this very muscular woman and she was scary
Speaker 1: as hell in the movie Tell No. One. So a
Speaker 1: lot of times we changed things, and in your fourth
Speaker 1: most corners, it makes it stronger, not not not not worse. So,
Speaker 1: what how long does it take to do one of these?
Speaker 1: Uh ten episode series or eight episode series? Um? It
Speaker 1: all depends, I think. Right now we're writing, for example,
Speaker 1: so we're gonna do. I had a choice of the
Speaker 1: other thing. We sort of a choice of doing a
Speaker 1: Stranger season two or a whole new book. And yet
Speaker 1: this is the third time I've kind of had that choice.
Speaker 1: In the third time, I've chosen to go with the
Speaker 1: whole new story. The problem for me is, you know,
Speaker 1: I could do The Stranger again, but I don't know
Speaker 1: if I could do it better. Um. I don't know.
Speaker 1: You know I could if I thought about it. Um,
Speaker 1: So I create the series with one season in mind,
Speaker 1: I don't. I don't think it's fair, for example, to
Speaker 1: not give you the answers at the end of the
Speaker 1: five or The Stranger and just set up the season two.
Speaker 1: That's just not what I'm doing. So I prefer to
Speaker 1: make it just one season, so right, and doing a
Speaker 1: season two of The Stranger, I don't rule it out.
Speaker 1: Maybe one day down the line, but we're doing you
Speaker 1: can do my book stay close. We've written one episode
Speaker 1: so far. We'll probably start filming early next year. Um.
Speaker 1: And then Netflix never. Netflix is very secretive. They never
Speaker 1: I literally find out a month or two beforehand. When
Speaker 1: it comes out, they don't even tell me. They're very
Speaker 1: speaking about releases. Okay, Now recently, as I say, you've
Speaker 1: had this Polish series The Woods, how did it end
Speaker 1: up being made by poll? Into? What degree were you involved?
Speaker 1: To what degree are you happy? Um? So the deal
Speaker 1: that I find a deal with Netflix about it, I
Speaker 1: guess a year or two ago, know, um to have
Speaker 1: all the books that were still available that we're not
Speaker 1: in my series, UM go to Netflix to be made
Speaker 1: into hopefully into series that we can try and develop
Speaker 1: into series. You don't expect them all to be made.
Speaker 1: But we're doing a pretty good clip right now, the
Speaker 1: right we're going. Um. And they were The idea was
Speaker 1: for the International Division to control in the International Division
Speaker 1: to make the decisions. So my first meeting with Netflix
Speaker 1: and I went to their office is is they have
Speaker 1: They just had a lot of brilliant people. And they
Speaker 1: have a guy who does Netflix poem. The guy does
Speaker 1: Netflix Germany, you know, Spain, whatever it is. And we
Speaker 1: sat around and we saw which country would be best
Speaker 1: for which ones, and then well let's see what they
Speaker 1: come up with. Let let them send us in the pitch,
Speaker 1: the producers in the pitch, and it's you know, they
Speaker 1: have appeal, will continue it on our way. So we've
Speaker 1: had a lot and some we've decided to go with,
Speaker 1: some we haven't. And two of the first two well,
Speaker 1: the first we're Netflix Spain looking at the innocent wanting
Speaker 1: to do that, and I love the pitch they came
Speaker 1: up with, and Netflix Poland especially having the idea which
Speaker 1: I didn't write the book doing of the two different
Speaker 1: time zones. Um I flashed back to the camp in
Speaker 1: the in my case of the eighties, but they had
Speaker 1: the idea of doing very Polish kind of summer camps
Speaker 1: and current day with two different casts and all that,
Speaker 1: and I just thought that was a really cool way,
Speaker 1: um of telling the story. So uh, that's sort of
Speaker 1: how we decided that. You know, other countries were looking
Speaker 1: at it too, and then they talked about it. You
Speaker 1: know that the negotiation. This country decided to take that one,
Speaker 1: other countries decided to take that one. I'm happy with
Speaker 1: what the pitches on it. Sometimes I'm not um and
Speaker 1: then we go from there. We tried and we try
Speaker 1: to to to make it good enough that that that
Speaker 1: that Netflix ends up wanting to make it okay. So
Speaker 1: the last one being the Woods. After the pitch the
Speaker 1: pitches accepted, To what degree are you involved that one
Speaker 1: the least? Again, I don't speak any Polish. I don't
Speaker 1: know a lot of the cultural references and significances. You know,
Speaker 1: you're a music guy, so you'll probably appreciate this. I
Speaker 1: look at it like I had a hit single, hit song,
Speaker 1: I wrote and recorded a hit song, and now a
Speaker 1: Polish band wants to cover. I don't want it to
Speaker 1: sound the same as me. I want them to bring
Speaker 1: the Polish into it. I want them to bring Polish
Speaker 1: culture and Polish sensibilities and what makes this band unique.
Speaker 1: I don't who help wants them to cover the song
Speaker 1: and sound exactly the same as my fand so. Um
Speaker 1: there's things about the scripts I did not like when
Speaker 1: they first sun it to me. There were things I
Speaker 1: thought were not gonna work that worked better. Um, there's
Speaker 1: a so some things I'm also wrong on, which I
Speaker 1: find out if you watch the TV show. The lead woman,
Speaker 1: Laura is married to an older man that wasn't the book,
Speaker 1: and the book she was single when I first turned,
Speaker 1: I'm like, why she marries an older man. I kind
Speaker 1: of wanted to have it and that those things work
Speaker 1: the best. I love the guy I want to bring
Speaker 1: I want to bring them back in their own series.
Speaker 1: I'm lovely they're gonna play Leon. He was so terrific.
Speaker 1: So sometimes I'm wrong and and I get that. So um.
Speaker 1: That was one change that they wanted to make. That
Speaker 1: they that they that I wasn't sold on, but they
Speaker 1: convinced me. At the end of the day, I have
Speaker 1: to I I in that case, I didn't stand up
Speaker 1: to a lot. I let them kind of do their things,
Speaker 1: some of which I would would change now, and so
Speaker 1: much I did change in the editen I saw the edit, um,
Speaker 1: but most of which I'm really happy with the series.
Speaker 1: If you like Saithe and and and Uh and The Stranger,
Speaker 1: if you want that fast pacing, this is not that
Speaker 1: the show few. This is a it's more character driven,
Speaker 1: it's more atmospheric. Um, it's deeper. I think in many ways,
Speaker 1: it's more emotional, but it doesn't give that wham bam,
Speaker 1: let's twist here, let's twist there. Um Like my books
Speaker 1: and and and I think The Stranger did so it's
Speaker 1: very which I'm happy about. I don't want to repeat
Speaker 1: The Stranger either, so it's a very different series. I'm
Speaker 1: really happy with how it turned out. I tell people
Speaker 1: that cannot watch it, it's a terrible dubbing job. They
Speaker 1: did a terrible dubbing job. We were very rushed because
Speaker 1: it was COVID going on. Please don't watch it. Please
Speaker 1: watch it in its original polish with subtitles, and I
Speaker 1: think you'll enjoy it. Um just going back again, how
Speaker 1: do you juggle all this with your writing? I do
Speaker 1: that now. I do mornings. That did that, So I
Speaker 1: wake up early and the emails are here from the
Speaker 1: from the TV shows, usually in the morning, and I
Speaker 1: do them first as almost getting a bit of a
Speaker 1: running start, and then I'll do the stuff afterwards. So
Speaker 1: for today, for example, we're working on another show. I
Speaker 1: had a zoom with my Core four about the show
Speaker 1: that we're doing, because we had some questions is what
Speaker 1: you know we're filling in the gaps? And then they
Speaker 1: kind of come to me saying, well, we don't know
Speaker 1: how's he gonna get from here to there. So we
Speaker 1: met for an hour and did that, and that's all
Speaker 1: I did on a TV thing today. Um, I haven't
Speaker 1: yet watched my rushes from Spain, but I don't really
Speaker 1: have to do that much with Spain anyway. We have
Speaker 1: an unbelievable director and unbelievable talent there. I don't really
Speaker 1: have to watch that very closely. So you know, it
Speaker 1: is their shows in the end of the day, it's
Speaker 1: their shows. With my story, I'm more involved than just
Speaker 1: the guy who sold this novel, but it depends on
Speaker 1: the country and what I and what I think they need.
Speaker 1: I I wanted to push the Polish to be a
Speaker 1: little bit more like me in the sense of being
Speaker 1: a little bit faster moving, And what we ended up
Speaker 1: with was faster moving than the first cut, which was
Speaker 1: really really atmospheric. Could you like that atmosphere? You would
Speaker 1: have loved the first cuts? But I'm like, no, dudes,
Speaker 1: we can't have him take two minutes to get to
Speaker 1: his office. It's got to be thirty seconds to get
Speaker 1: to his office. So you know it's a negotiation or
Speaker 1: back and forth. Yes, But in terms of writing your books,
Speaker 1: how do you work that in when you're working on
Speaker 1: all these TV programs. I just do. But so, but
Speaker 1: here's the other thing. Uh, that's all I do. I
Speaker 1: have no other life. I have no I mean I
Speaker 1: golf that a little bit. I don't know. I have
Speaker 1: no hobbies. I don't like to do anything. I'm not
Speaker 1: a collector. Um, I'm a pretty boring guy. I'm not social.
Speaker 1: So how many how many hours do you need to work?
Speaker 1: And all this stuff? That's all I do. So I'm
Speaker 1: home all day to day. Right, I'm taking an hour
Speaker 1: or two doing this stuff, then an the restaurant. Okay,
Speaker 1: your wife is a doctor that tend to seat up
Speaker 1: a lot of time. But in terms of oh, it's
Speaker 1: Saturday night, let's hang with friends. Whatever that does or
Speaker 1: does not happen. Well, not during COVID it hasn't happened.
Speaker 1: But yeah, Saturday night, you know we will we have
Speaker 1: with him a friends who was wedding on a Saturday night.
Speaker 1: I'm not, but I'll wake up early the next morning
Speaker 1: on Sunday and all write why not? What what else
Speaker 1: am I gonna do? All of my down all the downtime,
Speaker 1: you know, I write. I try, and I'm always feeling guilty.
Speaker 1: When I'm on the golf course. For example, I'm having
Speaker 1: a few good moments because it's one of the few
Speaker 1: things I do enjoy. There's always a voice in my
Speaker 1: head that, you know, what, you should be home writing,
Speaker 1: And even when I'm there my friends no one, I
Speaker 1: get distracted, and all of a sudden, I like, go, oh,
Speaker 1: wait a minute. You know if he goes that room instead.
Speaker 1: It's just how you know, it's part of it is,
Speaker 1: It's how the mind works. The views isn't a angelic
Speaker 1: voice sitting on your shoulder. It's more like your mom's voice.
Speaker 1: What no call? It's Friday night? You don't call your mother?
Speaker 1: Why are you going out? What are you going through? So? Um?
Speaker 1: You know, people, I felt tilling, like, how do you
Speaker 1: have to do that? What else do I do it?
Speaker 1: What else do you do? So that's all I do?
Speaker 1: So um, I don't really and I don't go shopping.
Speaker 1: I don't go to the mall. I may have a
Speaker 1: lunch with a friend once a week. Um, but what
Speaker 1: else is there to do? So during that downtime? This
Speaker 1: is why the internet so bad. I kind of stay
Speaker 1: to hell off the internet. That's where you waste How
Speaker 1: many hours do you waste the day looking at your
Speaker 1: social media stuff? Don't do it right? Instead? And how
Speaker 1: have you a reader? Are you both now and through
Speaker 1: your whole life? Um, I've been to I'll tell you now.
Speaker 1: I'm getting better here. Beginning of COVID, I was really distracted.
Speaker 1: I couldn't read, write at all. I'll read it much
Speaker 1: at all. Couldn't write much heat at first few weeks.
Speaker 1: But that settled back in faster than than the reading.
Speaker 1: I think reading is harder than ever. I do think that, um,
Speaker 1: that the Internet is training us not to be very
Speaker 1: good readers, and I think I am sometimes I have
Speaker 1: to guard myself against that where I am stopping every
Speaker 1: two or three pages to check my phone. I don't
Speaker 1: know that I'm checking my phone for. What do we
Speaker 1: check our phones for. It's like the old bays, you remember, Bob,
Speaker 1: when the mail would come and we would go to
Speaker 1: the mailbox excited. I think ever came that was exciting,
Speaker 1: We look at the man. It's the same thing now
Speaker 1: on the internet we have we were looking for that
Speaker 1: little that little hit. But growing up, were you a
Speaker 1: big reader of books? I was a reader. I wouldn't say, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's not if you look back, my friends aren't gonna
Speaker 1: go oh. Harlon always had his nose in a book.
Speaker 1: I was a decent reader above certainly way above average.
Speaker 1: But again I wasn't the nerdy reading kid, the book
Speaker 1: kid that that wouldn't be what I would have been.
Speaker 1: People would know, would would say about me. I read
Speaker 1: a fair but I read a fair amount. I had
Speaker 1: a very active imagination. I was always trying to think
Speaker 1: of stories. My mind works that way. Whenever I'm watching something,
Speaker 1: it's not just figuring out what how that show is
Speaker 1: going to do, which I can usually do, but also
Speaker 1: things are eight other ways they could have done it. Um, well,
Speaker 1: they could have done this, and you know other things.
Speaker 1: That's just how um whatever natural abilities you're giving, that's
Speaker 1: one of the ones. I was good solving, because I
Speaker 1: said word problems in math, had a very good math
Speaker 1: s a T score. I can see those sort of things.
Speaker 1: I can see what's coming ahead, and so that sort
Speaker 1: of stuff always played in my head. And can you
Speaker 1: tell us the exact time and what was going through
Speaker 1: your mind when you decided to become a writer I
Speaker 1: had for the same family business ended up working. When
Speaker 1: I was in college, I spent two summers in Spain
Speaker 1: being the tour guide to the tour escort that watched
Speaker 1: the Americans that came over. So this was eighty one
Speaker 1: eight two right around there. So when you went on
Speaker 1: vacation like this, the strips, you know, groups of fifty
Speaker 1: would come over. I was in Acosta del Soul of Spain.
Speaker 1: I was the guy who picked up at the airport.
Speaker 1: I drove you there. I made sure you've got your room.
Speaker 1: I sold you optional tours. I told you how you
Speaker 1: can go to you know, Marbello or Managa or Seville.
Speaker 1: And my job was to watch you. And I thought
Speaker 1: it was a weird summer. It was a very weird that,
Speaker 1: like most people wouldn't just make an interesting story, I
Speaker 1: should write a book about this experience. And I came
Speaker 1: back my senior year college and I did. I wrote
Speaker 1: an entire novel my senior college on my own. I
Speaker 1: tried getting a professor who would taken on as as
Speaker 1: a thesis or something like that, but I hadn't taken
Speaker 1: English classes, so no one would take me on. So
Speaker 1: I just kind of wrote it myself and the book
Speaker 1: was probably probably complete crap um. But from that I
Speaker 1: got the writing bug um and started to write what
Speaker 1: I loved, which were not what I call a novel
Speaker 1: of the mersion. You can call a mystery or crime,
Speaker 1: but I call it the book that you can't put down.
Speaker 1: The book you take on vacation to santra Pe, but
Speaker 1: you'd rather stay in your hotel because he can't wait
Speaker 1: to find out what happens. And so I wrote three
Speaker 1: or four before one got published when I was I
Speaker 1: think it's twenty six and I was accepted for publication.
Speaker 1: For the best way to learn how to write was
Speaker 1: stact your weather novel. Sort a look at those as failures. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, the first time you got into basketball accord
Speaker 1: and you take a shot, I don't character Michael Jordan's
Speaker 1: if you know, shout a basketball before it's gonna miss,
Speaker 1: You're gonna be terrible. So I thought the best way
Speaker 1: of learning to write, in hindsight is just right, write
Speaker 1: a whole novel, Write two or three whole novels, and
Speaker 1: don't get mad they don't get published. Understand, that's that's
Speaker 1: your apprenticeship. Well, Harlan, this has been wonderful on so
Speaker 1: many levels, the tales of writing, the tales of your life,
Speaker 1: your insight. Thanks so much for coming on the podcast.
Speaker 1: Thanks Bob's great to finally meet you. In person, and
Speaker 1: you have been during uh green the newsletter for a
Speaker 1: long time, so it was great to hang it down
Speaker 1: until next time. This is Bob less sense