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Keep Moving Forward with William Martin · WriterCon

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This week on the writer Con podcast. Always keep moving, keep your characters
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moving, don't keep them moving forward. Give them an objective and let them
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work toward you, and start putting obstacles in their way, bigger obstacles and
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bigger obstacles until they get to that objective. Welcome to writer Con, the
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gathering place for writers to share their knowledge about writing and the writing world.
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Your hosts are William Bernhardt, best selling novelist and author of the Red Sneaker
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books on writing, and Laura Bernhardt, Award winning author of the want Land
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Files book series. They're writers. This is our first podcast for November twenty
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twenty three, so I have two super special announcements. First, this time
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around, we're interviewing William Martin, one of the most successful, big shot,
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big time best selling authors we've had the pleasure of having on this podcast.
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Second, the next issue of the all new writer Con magazine is about
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to be released. Laura, that magazine is kind of Katie's project, but
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a little bit. Yeah, what are we gonna writer con magazine? That's
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so awkward? Can we call it the writer on Zine or rit zine or
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uh? Because I'm doing the initials you're the one who told me that tonight
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we're watching a nap, right, that is true? Fair writer Writer con
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magazine though, could be woom? What about what about mag con mag Con?
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Yeah, it's like a magazine about right, you know. Anyway,
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Okay, we'll work on that. Just works out that listeners, if you
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have any ideas, send them. Yes, yeah, absolutely to Bill contests.
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Tell us what to call this and we will give you credit in the
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magazine. Great idea. Now we got a contest going. This is exciting,
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but beyond the contest, lark, can you tell us what's actually going
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to be in this? Yes, yes, definitely. We have some excellent
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inspirational pieces again, as well as some instruction for our aspiring authors. We
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have camera back giving us some fantastic advice on how to world build in the
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future. And this is some good stuff. Really like that and ai she
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did is yes, and now we're going to talk about world building in the
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future. She's got some really good advice. So if you're fantasy author,
2:58
you don't want to miss that. Authors in general, though, we're going
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to have some advice on how to use the guidelines from the Hero's Journey to
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help you shape your story. And this is something that can be applied to
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any written piece of work, honestly, So this is a pretty fascinating piece.
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Christy, Yes, Christie's piece, so now she got published. I
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love that Christie's piece is wonderful again, inspirational, amusing, so sweet.
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She just writes the most poignant works. I love hers and more. And
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I think we're going to have yeah, and I believe if I can,
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I share a potential maybe, but don't hold me to it. Uh sure,
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because people would be pretty upset if I said no at this point.
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So I think we're going to start adding in a regular column with book reviews
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in it. I'm excited about that. We don't have our first one just
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yet, but I'm excited about that. Okay, writer Con Magazine. If
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your interests, please go to substack and search for writer Con and decide whether
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you want a subscribe or not. Our interview today is with William Martin,
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which I think I already mentioned because I'm pretty excited about this. This is
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the man critics have dubbed the King of the Historical thriller. His most recent
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of many huge New York Times bestselling novels is called December forty one, which,
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as you probably guess from the title, involves Pearl Harbor and It's aftermath.
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But he's also written The Lincoln Letter and Cape cod and a host of
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other prominent and genuinely important historical novels. And we will talk about all that,
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But first the news, Jesse take. You may have already heard about
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this first story because it has gotten so much pressed online, I mean,
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far more than bookstories normally get, and especially articles about the decor in bookstores.
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That's exactly what we've got now because apparently, as first reported by the
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New York Times, many Barnes and Nobles stores are ditching that kind of green
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stripe hunter green wall thing, you know, and now they're painting off,
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painting it over with sandy shades of white or pink or whatever that particular bookstore
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thinks might work in that particular area. In other words, more individualization.
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They're not all the same. And this is of course the work of James
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Daunt, who we've mentioned before is in charge of Barnes and Noble. Now
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he is British. He first founded Dot Books, and then he was appointed
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to Waterstones and basically rescued that large book chain and then when that hedge fund,
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Elliott Advisors took over Barnes and Noble by buying the majority stake, they
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brought Daunt overtrage and see if they could turn Barnes and Noble around after years
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of losing money, and he seems to have help. They're not, you
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know, they're not leading money anymore like they were, although there's a lot
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of room for improvement, and that's probably what this is about, not making
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it look like the same old, boring I shouldn't have said that, the
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same old Barnes Noble, but one that has modular fixtures that can be snapped
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out and combined so they can show finyl records if they want, or dope
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bags or whatever. I looked at some of those pictures and it looked more
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like that dress store. Our daughters keep taking me to anthropology, you know,
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That's what it kind of looks like. Now. I don't know,
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but Jesse, I'll talk to someone who I know goes to bookstores. Though
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you're not actually a writer yourself. You think that this will be the move
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that finally makes Marnes and Noble financially secure. Well, I don't know if
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it's going to make them financially secure. But I do know it is a
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good smart business idea because let the bookstores, you know, individualize themselves from
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whatever market they're in, Like Barnes and Nobles don't need to look the same,
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right let them, you know, they come in all different shapes and
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sizes, let them. Let them have some fun, like it will make
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it interesting. It'll make you want to stop into a Barnes and Noble you've
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never gone to before to see what it looks like. You know, I
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like Hunter Green, but yeah, change, yeah, have some fun,
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Lara, What do you think or do you have some other idea they might
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have for increasing sales numbers, like caring more of our books. Well,
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obviously I'm always going to be behind that, but you know me, I
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will use the same thing until it falls apart. I usually when I like
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something, I like it, and that's it. You were just we just
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determined that the jacket I'm wearing is like twenty years old, and you ask,
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why why are you still wearing that? Because I just I'm not one
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to change for change's sake. That said, I think this looks gorgeous and
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I don't think there's anything wrong with them transitioning, making some changes to change
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with the times, and I would I'm behind this. I'm actually excited to
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get to see one of these stores. It looks very pretty. It gives
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me a nice, calm, soothing feeling when I look at it. We
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know people who, yes, some young people, even a daughter and a
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husband, love to just go to the Barnes and Noble nearby and they just
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go spend time in it. They go up and down the aisles. They
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enjoy looking at not just the books, but games and other things that they
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have on hand there, having some coffee, make it a place to go
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socialize. I think it's a great idea. Yeah, that's great. Whereas
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they do do that all the time. Whereas I'm still sulking because Barnes and
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Noble wouldn't hang any signs about Peter Khan in its window. But I'll probably
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carry that to the grave. And it really has nothing to do with the
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decorse this corporate policy. The manager did ask if she could have one for
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herself personally, so we'll give her. We'll give her some. Listen.
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Maybe this philosophy will lead to individual stories being allowed to make decisions on their
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own for involving local community. So maybe so all right, news story number
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two, which is really two stories, but I kind of cheating, so
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Amazon does not completely dominate the line up up. But just as there's a
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chance you've already seen this story about Barnes and Noble day Core you g given
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how much press it's received, you may also have heard about Amazon's stellar third
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quarter earnings. This commercial giant shot up, its stock price went crazy,
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and after all our trading just a few days ago, as we record this,
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apparently in Q three their ad revenues by twenty six percent to about twelve
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billion, which was well ahead of what was expected. They're overall revenue is
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get this, this is gargantuan one hundred and forty three billion, which is
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up thirteen percent from what analysts expected. So at the same time that Meta
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and Tesla and everybody else in tech is seeing horrible numbers, Amazon stock is
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up about forty five percent so far this year. Wow, it almost seems
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trivial to mention the other part, because clearly Amazon is doing something right.
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But it's Nick Taylor Swift, right. She was already almost a billionaire and
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now she is a billionaire. So they just keep breaking it in and when
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she writes her biography, which seems inevitable, they will do the Barnes Noble
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over in her color right, and what is her never mind? The other
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Amazon story is that they're now allowing authors in their author Central area to recommend
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books. I mean, just to be clear, you could before, but
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you didn't get any credit for it. But now they've got it set up
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with two columns, and if you submit three book recommendations or more, they
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will allow you to push those to the people who follow you. Just to
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be clear. On your Amazon an author page, which you should set up
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if you haven't already, people can go in and follow you so that they're
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notified anytime you have a new book. But you don't have access to that
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list over Amazon. Only Amazon does. So it's a lot like you can
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use. Wouldn't you like to have that list to promote whatever? But now
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there's another way to access that. You can get there through book recommendations,
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and like I said, you can answer questions you're going to do recommendations about
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your own books, you can do recommendations about other people's books, and though
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at some point will be pushed to your followers. So Laura, you brought
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this story to my attention. Do you think this is going to be a
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valuable publicity avenue for authors. I'm excited to try it and see. I
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think anything that could potentially help is worth trying. I personally think that Amazon
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is trying to compete with BookBub on this because book Bub absolutely encourages you to
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go follow authors, get out there and claim your own books, but also
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recommend others follow other authors. And when you do push those recommendations that you
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make, they go to fele. I get those from book Bub all the
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time. This person that you read or this person that you follow recommended this
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book, you probably want to give it a try. So I wouldn't be
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surprised if we start to see something like that coming to us from Amazon.
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I have a feeling that's the model that they're trying to emulate. Okay,
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Jesse, So you're reading your email, we'll say, and you see this
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book recommendation from some random author. Let's say me, are you going to
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buy a book just because you saw an Amazon recommendation in your inbox? I
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mean, I think I I if I take the other part of my life
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and the other things I follow, like I listen to when an artic.
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When a music artists I like talks about their influences and names a specific album,
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I will go listen to that album. So I think if there's not
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like listen, if if Brandon Sarson put out a list of authors to read,
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I would probably check some of those out. So yeah, when I
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get those emails from book bubb almost always click on them and look, I'll
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look at the book that has been recommended, and I'll want and ask myself,
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does that sound like something i'd like too? I think it has the
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potential to be a nice little networking. Like if I'm waiting and now continue
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to wait for whenever the next Game of Thrones books come out. If Georgia
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R. Martin recommends a book, I'll read that. I got nothing else
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to read, so I'll tell you these recommendations. I won't read though,
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James Patterson coming for you. It's been too long. You're going to be
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reading the AI generated version of Game of Thrones and listen. That's George R.
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Martin's fault, not mine. Get all right, Jesse, give you
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up the music. Let's talk to William Martin. William Martin, Welcome back
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to the podcast. Hello, glad to be here. Hello, Lara,
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how are you? I'm good, Thank you well. As a friend of
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this podcast, you know what I'm going to ask first, if you could
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offer writers one piece of advice, what would it be? Always keep moving,
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keep your characters moving, keep them moving forward, give them an objective
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and let them work toward it, and start putting obstacles in their way and
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bigger obstacles and bigger obstacles until they get to that objective. The best stories
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are about four momentum, and if you don't have forward momentum, you don't
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have a story. So that's what's great advice. The other advice is keep
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your day job. Also great advice from a guy who was fortunate enough never
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to have to have a day job. But I bet you've given that advice
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on several occasions. Oh yeah, absolutely, yeah. Well can you tell
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me, including to my son, right, that's what I meant. Yeah,
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you have a recent release out from last summer. Yes, yes,
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that's about December forty one. December forty one is a World War II thriller,
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A little bit of a departure from me, a World War two thriller
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that begins on the day after Pearl Harbor, when the FBI raids a fascist
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compound in southern California, a place by the way that you can still visit
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if you know where to look for it. You drive out Sunset Boulevard and
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right opposite the Riviera Country Club, you take a right and get up into
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the hills, and way back up in there is the spookiest damn place you've
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ever seen. You'll find the powerhouse, the fuel tanks, the water tanks,
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the terraced gardens that they had planted back up in there. And you
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can also find the plans at the UCLA Archives, the plans for a forty
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room mansion that was to go in there and was intended to have been Hitler's
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Western White House. And in the book, and as it happened, the
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FBI raided this compound and arrested everybody down there on the day after Pearl Harbor.
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In the book, one guy gets away, and he's the one they
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should have caught, because his job is to get himself to Washington, d
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C. And shoot Franklin Roosevelt on Christmas Eve when he likes the National Christmas
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Tree complications and sue. It's a great premise, a great yea, fascinating.
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I remember the last time you came to writer Con, except I'm not
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sure we called it writer Con yet, but at any rate, I remember
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you gave a great talk, fascinating really about sort of the genesis of the
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Lincoln Letter, because they have been your most recent one then, and the
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research you do. What kind of research and work did you do to prepare
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for this book? Well with this one? First of all, the idea
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came to me when I was watching the movie Darkest Hours with Gary Oldman as
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Winston Churchill. We're in this pack theater right after Christmas, and everybody was
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really into the movie, and there's a scene about halfway through, right at
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what we writers like to call the midpoint turn, where Churchill faces his darkest
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hour when he picks up the phone and calls Franklin Roosevelt and begs him for
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help. It's May of nineteen forty, France is falling, the Nazis are
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moving on Dunkirk. Everything seems as black as it could ever be, and
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Churchill begs Roosevelt for help, and Roosevelt says, I can't help you.
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American politics ties my hands. Churchill hangs up the phone and the camera pulls
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back and he slumps in despair. And as I watched that scene, I
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thought to myself, in the year and a half, right after Pearl Harbor,
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those two two men will stand together on the south portico of the White
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House to express the unity of our two countries and to light the national Christmas
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tree on Christmas Eve. That's the kicker in the book, by the way,
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the German assassin gets all the way to Boston to Washington and finds when
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he opens the newspaper the Churchill's there too, so he can really get a
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get a twofer in this assassination attempt. But when I when I first saw
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that in the movie and I thought about it, I said, what a
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target they will make. And and that's just by by the dinner that my
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wife and I had after dinner after the movie. By that time, I
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had it well underway in my head as to what this would be and how
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Yeah, sometimes you know, you go to conferences or what people say,
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where do you get ideas? And I think, how do you not get
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them? Yeah, you read a book, you read the newspaper, and
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that's in a temple of no one else. But you had that experience when
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they watched that movie. That's right, that's right. And so then to
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answer your other question about research, well, we got to go to that
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Nazi compound. We knew where to find it in Los Angeles. Whenever we
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would go to Los Angeles, I'd say to my son, who lives out
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there, Okay, I have a scene in the Bradbury Building, let's go
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there. I have a couple of scenes in Musso and Franks, the famous
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old watering hole in Hollywood. So let's go down to Hollywood Boulevard and have
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a few meals at Musso and Franks. And you know, then, of
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course there are scenes in Union Station. We walked the ground of Union Station
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in Los Angeles. We talked about traveling on Amtrak from Los Angeles to Chicago,
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because, of course, the middle of the book takes place on the
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Santa Fe Superchief. I kind of envisioned this whole novel as a nineteen forty
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spy thriller, something that Hitchcock would have made, you know, and naturally,
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you've got to have a train trip in one of these in none of
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these books, but the Santa Fe Superchief was the Grand Hotel on wheels and
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Amtrak, even when you get one of those roomettes, it's not quite the
22:30
same experience. And so we decided that we'd pass on that and I'd use
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my imagination. However, we were up in northern California visiting our other son
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and his family, and in Sacramento there is a spectacular museum for anybody that's
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interested in railroading, and a museum where they actually had giant locomotives and so
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forth, and they have the actual dining car that was in that consist which
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is what they called those trains, all of those Santa Fe Superchief trains.
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Each car had a name, and it was like it was like a sailing
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vessel going across America. And so we walked onto that dining car and I
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grabbed my camera and I started taking pictures in every direction, saying I'm in
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a scene from my novel. And naturally I photographed the menu that was framed
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hanging on the wall, so that everything the characters eat on the train trip
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was on the menu in nineteen forty one, including the most expensive item on
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the menu, a bottle of verv Clico champagne for the princely sum of nine
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dollars and ninety five cents. It was a little bit more expensive now,
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and you don't get very clear on amtrak no matter how much money you've got.
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That's right. You alluded to this earlier. But I so remember hearing
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you give the talk where, among other things, you talked about, you
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know, your son informing you that he wanted to be a writer, and
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you were playing, I really rather you went to law School's right, here's
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this hugely successful writer saying, hey, let's have some sense. But it
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makes me wonder, how did you become a writer? Well, you know,
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I said to my father when I was graduating from college, Dad,
24:59
I want to go to film school. Uh. And he said film school.
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I'd really rather see you go to law school. But if you don't
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do what you want to do when you're young, you'll spend the rest of
25:14
your life looking over your shoulder, Dad. Yeah. And then and then
25:19
when Dan graduated from college and said to me, Dad, I want to
25:22
go to film school. I said film school, et cetera, et cetera.
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And of course now he writes writes games. Yeah, I played the
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Star Trek game. I got stuck. You can't get past the taks because
25:42
of the is there a glitch in it or I'm just okay, okay,
25:49
I guess that might be a good thing if it's if it's challenging enough for
25:53
you. I don't know, And he's probably not devoting you know, days
25:56
and days at a time. Maybe if you had nothing else you were doing.
26:00
Bill Yeah, well, you know, he wrote fourteen hundred pages of
26:07
screenplay for that for that game. Wow. Because even you know, and
26:15
this could be a topic where you could have him on, he'd be very
26:18
he'd be great to talk with about writing this sort of thing, and the
26:23
and the incredible challenge that it is to write a game, because when we
26:27
write a novel or a screenplay, we're thinking down the page and then turn
26:32
the page, down the page. But when they when they design these games
26:36
and write these games, it's almost like this row of capillaries going out because
26:41
every decision that the character makes has to be scripted and and then and that
26:47
leads to another series of decisions that will be made in the next scene.
26:53
I don't know how they do it. Tired enough to do the straight line
26:56
material that we that we do, but right anticipating all those contingencies that you
27:04
know, kind of spider web out every time somebody makes a choice, I
27:07
just think, yeah, yeah, Well you mentioned film work. I know
27:11
you're kind of a film buff. I remember us being at a New York
27:18
breakfast cafe with your wife arguing about Jaws. I think I remember the breakfast
27:26
I was. I didn't remember the argument. Discussions, detailed discussion about the
27:32
evolution of Jaws. Anyway, You actually wrote the Square for what is now
27:37
a stone cold cult classic Humanoids of the from the Deep, Humanoids from the
27:42
Deep. Tell us that story, would you please? Uh? Well,
27:47
after I after I graduated from film school. One of my professors who was
27:52
a long time script doctor, and he made money writing the exploitation and low
28:00
budget features for Roger Corman, the king of the B pictures then and actually
28:06
now he's still well into his nineties. He's still going. And of course
28:12
Corman had given a start to Martin Scorsese and Jack Nicholson, Robert de Niro
28:19
and all of that generation just a little bit older than I am. All
28:25
of them got their start with Roger Corman. So when Corman's story editor,
28:30
with whom I had developed a relationship, called me up one day right after
28:34
I had finished my first novel. But before it had spent fourteen weeks on
28:38
the New York Times bestseller list. That Lightning Strike hadn't happened yet. She
28:44
called me up and said, we have an assignment for you. I said,
28:47
oh yeah, and she said we All we have is the title and
28:53
the tagline. And I said what's the title? And she said, Humanoids
29:00
from the Deep? I said, what's the tagline? They're not human,
29:04
but they hunt human women, not for killing, for mating. And at
29:14
that point I was hooked. How could I turn that down? And you
29:19
know, that damn movie, according to at least one report that I have
29:26
read, was the second most financially successful movie of the summer of nineteen eighty,
29:34
surpassed only by The Empire Strikes Back. Wow, that had a bitter
29:40
budget. Though that's a really fair comparison, I know, but if you're
29:45
working for Roger Corman, you only worked for scale with no back end points.
29:49
Unfortunately, so I got the princely sum of twelve thousand, five hundred
29:55
bucks for that movie. Wow, that was you know, that was decent
30:00
money back then. Plus considering all of the screenplays that I had written up
30:06
until then that hadn't been produced, it was nice to know that somebody was
30:11
actually going to take what I had written and put it into production, because
30:18
that movie was going to happen. And it did happen. And now I
30:22
use it as a great, a great source of all kinds of anecdotes of
30:29
the young writer's life. And one of the ones you've got an I m
30:33
b d. Credit till the end of time. That's right, I do.
30:37
That's nice. Yeah, And then uh and and I learned stuff from
30:44
it that that stays, that stays with me today. And you could almost
30:48
reflect back to what I just said at the beginning here, uh about always
30:55
moving forward. Corman called me into the office once. This was very late
31:02
in the process of writing the movie. I had written a couple of drafts
31:06
here in Boston and then got on a plane and went back out to Los
31:10
Angeles to write the last draft. And I'm working down the hall from Corman,
31:15
and he calls me into the office one day and says, you know,
31:19
the foreign distributors don't like the ending. You think you could come up
31:25
with something better. And the young tyro screenwriter that I am, I perch
31:30
on the edge of the sofa and begin to spin. I say, okay,
31:34
how about this. How about if the monster tacking the dock. He
31:37
into the movie. They're breaking the dock apart, people are falling into the
31:42
water. In the water, the monsters are killing all of the people that
31:45
are falling into the water, and they're climbing up and out, and they're
31:48
chasing women all around. But Doug McClure, remember him, Doug mc Doug
31:53
McClure was our hero. Doug McClure is out in the harbor in his fishing
31:59
boat and he's got a fifty gallon drummer gasoline on his boat, and he
32:02
takes the gasoline and dumps it into the water, and then he pulls out
32:06
his flare gun and fires a flare into the water, and the whole harbor
32:08
explodes, and we kill all of the monsters except for one that we saved
32:12
for the sequel. Roger Corman looks at me and he goes, Yes,
32:20
explosions. I like explosions. The audience likes explosions. You remember this for
32:30
the rest of your career when in doubt blows something up. I love it.
32:40
And I saw him many years later and told him that story again,
32:46
and he says, well, you know what I was really trying to get
32:49
across to you. Was something that the great Southern California detective novelist Raymond Chandler
32:55
used to say was his best advice to young writers. When you run out
33:00
of ideas bringing a man with a gun, Introduce conflict, you know.
33:07
And by introducing conflict you are you're raising the stakes of your story. You're
33:13
cranking it up, You're heightening the intensity, and that's what will keep people
33:17
turning pages. So Corman understood, that's a fascinating That's why last these years
33:23
I thought The Land that Time Forgot was Doug McClure's best picture. It's humanoids
33:30
from the deep clearly, that's right. That's right. This is really good
33:35
advice that you're giving. And honestly, it kind of brings us to the
33:37
next thing we'd like to talk about, because many of our listeners are writers
33:42
and are very interested in the process. Would you to start with, would
33:47
you label yourself a pancer or a planner when you're starting out on novel I
33:53
have been both earlier, earlier novels like like That Bay and all of the
34:00
novels the peter fallon novels, which are the buried treasure stories that go back
34:06
in time and forth in time. I've really plotted most of those books out
34:13
very carefully from beginning to end, simply because they're they're so big, and
34:17
they cover such long spans of time, and there's the plot is so complicated
34:23
that you have to do it that way. But as I've gotten older,
34:30
with December forty one and uh, actually with the Lincoln Letter earlier, I
34:37
did not plot them quite so much. I simply signposted. I said,
34:42
Okay, at this moment in this book, I'm going to have to be
34:47
at this point, I want to I want to have the I want to
34:52
have the raid in southern California, and then we'll see where that goes.
34:58
And at the end I want to have a train trip. We'll see where
35:00
that goes. And then of course at the end, I want to have
35:05
a big spectacle on Christmas Eve on the South Lawn and the Ellipse, with
35:09
the German assassin in the crowd, et cetera, et cetera. Uh,
35:14
and then I just let it all roll. From that point, I got
35:17
into my head who the characters were, and it works either way. And
35:23
I have always found that whatever outline I've written, I usually digress from very
35:30
quickly anywhere. So maybe like a rough outline, right outline, to get
35:36
you started and to keep you on track. But of course we all know
35:39
that things change as we start to write. Of course, my training as
35:43
a screenwriter when I started out had begun and ended basically with the treatment.
35:52
You know, in order to sell the screenplay, you wrote a present tense
35:57
prose retelling of the screenplay that was like twenty pages rather than one hundred and
36:02
twenty pages, and that was the basis on which you would try to sell
36:06
your screenplay. And so that was sort of what I started doing with the
36:12
novels, and that helped me to sell my first novel on the basis of
36:21
an outline. Wow, which even in the late seventies, yeah, even
36:25
in the late seventies, that was pretty rare. But after that I said,
36:34
Okay, this seems to be the way it works for me. And
36:37
the problem was I'd spend a year planning all that stuff out. The other
36:45
way though, by being a seat of the pants, you can lose months
36:51
of your time by following a pathway that doesn't work out. Then you have
36:59
to cut it out, you know, Oh no, this story needs to
37:01
go in another direction. Well, I like what you said, you found
37:06
what works for you. I think that that's most critical. I think every
37:08
writer needs to find what works for them. So what does your typical writing
37:13
day look like for you? Well, I come up here about eight o'clock
37:17
in the morning and sit down and stay here for about four hours, and
37:22
then we go out and have lunch, and we go for a walk in
37:27
the woods or something like that, and then I come back up around two
37:31
and I stay atill six. And that sounds like dolic to me. I
37:37
love it. Yeah. I haven't worked quite as hard of late, but
37:44
I'll get back to it, I promise. Well, you just had a
37:46
new one. You had a write last summer, right, you got to
37:50
kind of get the engines and again. Yeah, so I'm taking life a
37:53
little bit easier now. I guess. Well, I have another book planned.
37:59
Yeah you do, Yeah, plan on your next one. That's good.
38:01
Yeah. Yeah. So in addition to that IMDb credit, you've actually
38:07
received quite a few awards for your writing. Yeah, Robbie B. Parker
38:13
Award, Damuel Elliott Morrison Award, and the New England Book Award. Yes
38:21
to an author whose body of work stands as a significant contribution to the culture
38:24
of the region. That's pretty pretty nice. Yes, all the other authors
38:31
that have contributed to the culture of this region, that's a pretty nice one
38:37
at all. Yeah. Yeah. And one last question then, because you
38:43
you knew when you hinted that you were working on something else now that I
38:46
was going to ask, what can you tell us about the next project.
38:51
Well, it's going to bring back the main characters, the ones who are
38:54
left standing at the end of December forty one, right, and it's going
39:02
to revolve around the Russian efforts to get their hands on the nuclear secrets in
39:15
nineteen forty five. And I think it'll be pretty good. I think that's
39:19
a great And it's not a story that's been overtold. No, it isn't
39:22
really, despite Oppenheimer, despite the movie. They don't really get into any
39:29
of that in the movie. Yeah, but you can kind of, yeah,
39:30
you can kind of maybe link to that interest though that so I've either
39:35
caught I've either caught that wave or I'm ahead of it, or I'm back
39:40
in the backwash someways. But you know, I don't care anymore. Once
39:45
you get a good idea, you want to stay with it. And I
39:46
have a couple of more books planned in my head. We'll see how that
39:51
turns out. And you know, we are all fortunate to be able to
39:57
do this for a living. And as I say to friends, sometimes when
40:02
they ask me if I'm retired, I say, well, no, wait
40:06
a minute. Most of the most of the people I know who retire will
40:12
say to me, now, I'm going to do what you do right.
40:15
And I'll always say, and I'm sure you guys have heard this, I'll
40:19
always say good luck. And in my mind I'll be saying, they're going
40:24
to find out that this is this is a job too, but it's also
40:29
a very fulfilling one. So that's fantastic. Hey, Bill, thanks so
40:34
much for being on the podcast. And it's always fun to talk to you.
40:37
Guys. Come and visit us in Boston. Oh yes, please love
40:42
you. Remember when this is what a nice guy this guy is when we
40:47
were doing that small group retreat and he drove came down from Boston to sit
40:52
in on the Yeah, small group by those people got their money's worth.
40:58
You are the best. Well, thank you, thank you for having me.
41:00
It's always great. Good to see you guys, Very good to see
41:04
you. Thank you, thank you bye. Just a few parting words,
41:22
Laura, tell us about what's going on with your novel red Rain and Australia.
41:27
Is that we're Australia. It was selected for a promotion in Australia.
41:31
It'll be on sale all through the month of November. So any of our
41:36
listeners in Australia hop on over and take advantage of that sale. And we
41:42
have them too, so I'll flag that in the show notes. Australians click
41:47
here, and you know, I'm going to remind you that my new novel,
41:52
Partners in Crime, has also been released. This is the seventh book
41:58
in the Daniel Pike series and technically the twentieth, or if you count Final
42:02
Verdict, the twenty first appearance for Benkid. Dan's back in the courtroom after
42:09
a hiatus of several years while I wrote other things like The Florentine Poet and
42:15
other books. I don't know why I did that, because The Flying Poet
42:17
is not over my head right now, but it could be it was viewers,
42:24
it was earlier, So just know that, and for that matter,
42:28
neither is Partners in Crime, which is the book I'm actually talking about it.
42:31
Listen, send me little digital image of it. I'll put it right
42:35
there. That fantastic great, well, it's Dan Pike back again with Fin
42:42
kincaid and even the Grim Reaper kind of sort of, so you want to
42:47
check that out, all right? Until next time, Hey, keep writing
42:53
and remember you cannot fail if you are he to quit. See you next
42:59
time. Padan the Past Bats stands by fast Pas