[SPEAKER_01]: Sit back relax, and have a bucket sure is ready for it
[SPEAKER_06]: Welcome to Drinking Bros.
[SPEAKER_06]: Kids Friday night edition live from Barnes and Noble and North Austin.
[SPEAKER_06]: Is this the Arbitorium up here?
[SPEAKER_06]: Arboretum, but Clarboretum?
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_06]: Arbitorium, Arboretum, words of tough.
[SPEAKER_06]: I write romance novels for dudes.
[SPEAKER_06]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_06]: I'm not as esteemed as this man right here.
[SPEAKER_06]: Greg Herbids.
[SPEAKER_06]: How are you buddy?
[SPEAKER_06]: I'm doing good.
[SPEAKER_06]: I'm glad to be in Austin.
[SPEAKER_06]: 27 novels.
[SPEAKER_06]: when he's a lot of type and that's crazy to me.
[SPEAKER_06]: That's a lot.
[SPEAKER_06]: I'm in five and I said I'm all good.
[SPEAKER_06]: I'm kind of passionate about it.
[SPEAKER_06]: My wife cashed me out.
[SPEAKER_06]: She said no more after this.
[SPEAKER_06]: We got kids.
[SPEAKER_06]: You got a couple other businesses.
[SPEAKER_06]: We can't do that anymore.
[SPEAKER_06]: And so I said I understand.
[SPEAKER_06]: I'm good with it.
[SPEAKER_06]: But you guys are out of kids.
[SPEAKER_06]: You and your wife.
[SPEAKER_06]: We just came back from dinner tonight.
[SPEAKER_06]: They're all out of the house, so you're good to go forever and ever.
[SPEAKER_03]: I always get all the way through.
[SPEAKER_03]: I have to write like, like, you have to work out.
[SPEAKER_03]: If I don't write, I'm not fit for a human consumption.
[SPEAKER_06]: I agree to a certain point where, if I'm not doing this on a daily basis, I feel like I lose it after 72 hours, and I'm not kidding.
[SPEAKER_06]: If we're not doing podcasts, Dan and I are on daily, we have been for a long time.
[SPEAKER_06]: If it,
[SPEAKER_06]: If we miss one of those or have some form of vacation, I can't live my life.
[SPEAKER_06]: Like, I feel like I've skipped it and then I feel borderline for us going back to that.
[SPEAKER_04]: Mine comes more in the form of, I have an idea and I have to unload all of it onto her before I can move on and she hates it.
[SPEAKER_04]: Because I can see her eyes glossy over us.
[SPEAKER_04]: I'm trying to explain something that doesn't matter at all.
[SPEAKER_04]: And it's something about the stoic, stoic philosophy here.
[SPEAKER_04]: Nothing she cares about.
[SPEAKER_04]: for sure.
[SPEAKER_04]: Well, no, usually it's some dumbass math or science thing actually.
[SPEAKER_06]: Ah, which is crazy, but like obviously you've got a big audience here.
[SPEAKER_06]: You're all fans of the series.
[SPEAKER_06]: 27, he's one of the best in the biz, but just had a curiosity.
[SPEAKER_06]: Do you guys actually want to know about the personal life of Greg and what happens behind the scenes versus who he is in the books?
[SPEAKER_06]: Because a lot of times people have a hard time separating the arts from the artists.
[SPEAKER_06]: So if that's what you want to know, we'll get deep in it tonight.
[SPEAKER_06]: because Craig was honest at dinner.
[SPEAKER_06]: Maybe a little too honest at dinner, but because when you're on book 27, you think to yourself, who has that much creativity in their brain for 27 books?
[SPEAKER_06]: Usually we all have a best friend in real life who says, hey man, I've got this right to you for a book.
[SPEAKER_06]: It's awesome, man.
[SPEAKER_06]: Thinking about writing it, it could be cool.
[SPEAKER_06]: Could you hear this idea, the thing?
[SPEAKER_06]: Whatever, and you're just like,
[SPEAKER_06]: Can I just read the drafts?
[SPEAKER_06]: Like, if you give me a draft to the book, then I can actually help you out with it.
[SPEAKER_06]: Problem is, nobody ends up doing it.
[SPEAKER_06]: So let's start with your very, very first book.
[SPEAKER_06]: How long did that take you?
[SPEAKER_06]: What was the inception into it?
[SPEAKER_06]: And then for all the people out here who are curious about the personal aspect of it, what do you tell your partner, your loved one, and everything else when you're starting to write a book?
[SPEAKER_03]: I only wanted to be a novelist, my whole life.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's the only thing I ever wanted to be.
[SPEAKER_03]: Who is your hero?
[SPEAKER_03]: From fifth grade at Westeven King?
[SPEAKER_06]: Same.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: All Stephen King.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yep.
[SPEAKER_03]: I remember reading Salem's lot, like under the bed with a flashlight, and I couldn't believe that somebody could put a combination of familiar words together in an unfamiliar way and a listen and just conjure that much fear in me.
[SPEAKER_03]: It was like a magic spell.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I thought when I get older, I want to do that to other people.
[SPEAKER_03]: But you know, I've mysteries, I wrote an illustrative of the crayons from third grade.
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, this was all I wanted to do.
[SPEAKER_03]: So when I was 19, I had a dream about an underwater prison, and a guy who escapes it, and when he leaves, he throws open all the vents, and the prison floods level by level, and it traps everybody in their cells and drowns them.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I just got up, I wrote that whole scene down, went to college, did my junior year, went back, turned it new novel, I wrote a supremely shitty rough draft the summer before and after senior year.
[SPEAKER_03]: And then basically I wrote 16 drafts of this first book, it's called the Tower.
[SPEAKER_03]: Um, yeah, I just kept kept doing it.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's funny.
[SPEAKER_03]: I meet writers a lot of times who were saying, you know, I've written 10 drafts of, you know, I've written 10 different books and nothing sold.
[SPEAKER_03]: Cause you have to write one book 10 times.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's what you need to do is to get better and better and better at it.
[SPEAKER_03]: And basically, I was super fortunate.
[SPEAKER_03]: I kind of stalled, I went to England for a year.
[SPEAKER_03]: I got a master's in Shakespeare and Tragedy to have a really, you know, very useful, practical degree.
[SPEAKER_03]: In case my primary aim of becoming honest didn't pan out.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I came back and sold it, and I never had a real job.
[SPEAKER_03]: And then basically, it was amazing.
[SPEAKER_03]: But I just, I rewrote the hell out of it.
[SPEAKER_03]: It wasn't very good.
[SPEAKER_03]: I got it in a shape, and I sold it.
[SPEAKER_03]: And then I thought of money when I first sold it,
[SPEAKER_03]: It was like gas in the tank, so I had an advance.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I thought if I live on $2,500 a month, how long will that last that I can continue to write?
[SPEAKER_03]: Just every time I did a deal, I only looked at it for how many months that would buy me to be able to write.
[SPEAKER_03]: And then I just started writing all eight hours a day.
[SPEAKER_06]: What's interesting is as soon as you said 16, half the audience guessed, and they were like, oh my god, 16.
[SPEAKER_06]: Usually it's way more than that, which is even scarier.
[SPEAKER_06]: And that turns everybody off of writing.
[SPEAKER_06]: That kind of pumps up the volume where you're like, all right, cool man, 16.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, it's just what we're doing, we're good.
[SPEAKER_03]: It took me three books.
[SPEAKER_03]: My third book is called Do No Harm.
[SPEAKER_03]: That was the first book that the rough draft actually resembled a novel.
[SPEAKER_03]: The first two were disasters in the rough draft.
[SPEAKER_03]: I had to take them apart like an engine block.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think the only way to learn how to write a novel is to write it and screw it up and then to figure it out on the way.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's kind of like parenting.
[SPEAKER_06]: But did you have an editor who told you you were screwing it up along the way, and who said, hey, these storylines and characters aren't matching up.
[SPEAKER_03]: I had an agent early on who was quite brilliant.
[SPEAKER_03]: He was, he's manic, gay, brilliant, brilliant.
[SPEAKER_03]: He was, I think, all but dissertation, PhD in English, and he was brutal.
[SPEAKER_03]: He would just eviscerate.
[SPEAKER_03]: It was like, it was like getting edited by Oscar Wilde.
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, he would utterly mock anything that didn't work.
[SPEAKER_03]: And he was just brutal on me and it was really good because I needed that.
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, I remember one point, it was like the pacing needs work, the structure needs work, the characters need work, the language needs work, it was just everything.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I came up, you know, I did a lot of a sports growing up.
[SPEAKER_03]: I was a pole vaulter in high school in college, and so I was used to hard coaching, and I was used to being...
[SPEAKER_03]: put to task and knowing one of the things that's really good with sports as a background is that in sports you have to go out and train really hard on day 13 for like the taginal championships that are happening nine months later.
[SPEAKER_03]: Sure.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's a lot of what novel writing is.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's discipline, it's ritual, it's bringing up the bottom of your game.
[SPEAKER_03]: You know and so I think of it also with the sports metaphor, you know if you're a if you're a
[SPEAKER_03]: Triple A baseball player and you're seeing the ball better than you ever have.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's like those days when we sit down to write and everything works.
[SPEAKER_03]: The words are right there before you need it.
[SPEAKER_03]: But what distinguishes someone who's a pro is they bring up the bottom of their game too.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so if you're having a shitty day, you're not seeing the ball well, you can draw a walk.
[SPEAKER_03]: You're still good on defense.
[SPEAKER_03]: You're good in the clubhouse.
[SPEAKER_03]: Like you figure all that out.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so very early on, I think I was really making sure that every time I sat down, I could get something done, no matter how bad, that I could make headway, regardless of what was happening.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, what does it mean to bring your game up in writing?
[SPEAKER_04]: Obviously, if you're a pitcher, it's being able to get out without your stuff.
[SPEAKER_04]: If you're a hitter, draw a walk, if you mentioned, what does that mean for a writer?
[SPEAKER_04]: Well, number just to have six pages of slop that you have to throw away the next day, or what is it?
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, what's I think part of it is is being I was I'm very unafraid to fail.
[SPEAKER_03]: I fail a lot, and it doesn't bother me.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so I was never afraid to just get a vomit draft down.
[SPEAKER_03]: So if I wasn't feeling it, I wouldn't get hung up and paralyzed.
[SPEAKER_03]: God bless you.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's the most delicate sneeze I've ever heard of my life.
[SPEAKER_03]: God bless me, God bless me, God bless me, God bless me, God bless me, God bless me, God bless me, God bless me, God bless me, God bless me, God bless me, God bless me, God bless me, God bless me, God bless me, God bless me, God bless me, God bless me, God bless me, God bless me, God bless me, God bless me, God bless me, God bless me, God bless me, God bless me, God bless me, God bless me, God bless me, God bless me, God bless me, God bless me, God bless me, God bless me, God bless me
[SPEAKER_06]: that bless you.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_03]: But look, I mean, so get a vomit graph down.
[SPEAKER_03]: You can't fix a blank page.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so really early on, I would go, I would just get headway down.
[SPEAKER_03]: And then it's pretty easy to edit through the next day.
[SPEAKER_03]: And then eventually that instinct comes that anything you're getting down gets kind of better and better slowly.
[SPEAKER_06]: So yeah, because what's interesting to me is I know you as a writer Dan knows you as a fan.
[SPEAKER_06]: He's been a fan for ever of yours.
[SPEAKER_06]: So I'm curious in the technical aspect of it versus the fan aspect of it.
[SPEAKER_06]: Obviously all your fans are here.
[SPEAKER_06]: The question is...
[SPEAKER_06]: do you want to know what goes on behind the scenes versus what is actually in the book in the preparation of it because when you're getting paid for it as you know and any agent will tell you it's clinical whether like hey man you've got sixty days to turn in the first drafts and you don't get that advance.
[SPEAKER_06]: You got another 30 days to turn in that edit and everything else.
[SPEAKER_06]: Like, how are you able to separate it, knowing what the audience wanted, knowing what you wanted, or maybe you were one of those people, those rare writers who never had a problem hitting a deadline.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm one of those rare writers who never had a problem heading a deal.
[SPEAKER_06]: There you go.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm way out of head.
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, I've already finished the next book.
[SPEAKER_03]: I like to write out a head because I like to do fun stuff.
[SPEAKER_03]: So for instance, I got a job helping to write the opening to the last world cup.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's super fun.
[SPEAKER_03]: So like off I went, you know, it's two weeks.
[SPEAKER_03]: We're doing all that.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'd like to have room if I have a movie going to production.
[SPEAKER_03]: I get weird opportunities that come up and I like to be out ahead of schedule, so I'm not up against the wall.
[SPEAKER_03]: And also I just need to write all the time.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so, you know, you can get a lot of writing done if you actually like writing.
[SPEAKER_03]: I love writing.
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, lots of people who want to be writers, but I meet fewer who want to actually write.
[SPEAKER_06]: or who love writing and who like the work ethic.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I'm so far ahead, I don't want to be, I don't want time to ever get in the way of the best story and what I need to do in the story.
[SPEAKER_06]: Because we had dinner with my wife and your amazing wife earlier, how does she feel about that when it's like, hey, when we can't go to the fun party, the fun thing, I've got to write, I've actually got to pay for this house.
[SPEAKER_03]: She just said it never happens.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm always going to the fun party.
[SPEAKER_03]: Really?
[SPEAKER_03]: Are you ahead of that far ahead of schedule?
[SPEAKER_03]: I have a hard time saying no to things that will be fun.
[SPEAKER_03]: Okay?
[SPEAKER_03]: So yeah, I can carve out the time.
[SPEAKER_03]: I get a lot of work done and I get a lot of play into.
[SPEAKER_03]: I find a lot of hours in the day.
[SPEAKER_06]: Well, let's take 365 days in here, obviously.
[SPEAKER_06]: How many days are you actually writing out of those 365 year?
[SPEAKER_03]: It's a little different now because, you know, my tours are longer for instance.
[SPEAKER_03]: Like today I've been traveling all day.
[SPEAKER_03]: I woke up in Houston, you know, drove here.
[SPEAKER_03]: I have a flight a day now for the next three weeks.
[SPEAKER_03]: So that's really hard when I have other events.
[SPEAKER_03]: Every time I'm home I'm riding and I'll take weekends off now and then.
[SPEAKER_03]: But you know, I'm just up.
[SPEAKER_03]: The best thing for me is to have phones off.
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't even have a phone in my office.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'll take everything out of my office.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'll sit down.
[SPEAKER_03]: I just want to be in the world of the orphan acts.
[SPEAKER_03]: I got to be in the world.
[SPEAKER_03]: I got to be in the mindset of Evan Smoke, you know, whether I'm writing Candy McClure, whether I'm writing about Joey, I got to be in that space before I'm in the rest of the world with the email and all that stuff.
[SPEAKER_04]: Well, how different was it, um, enemises when you were writing from Tommy's perspective in quite a bit?
[SPEAKER_04]: That was because now you're now you're getting into schizophrenia a little bit, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I mean, look, what was so fun with that is Tommy is one of those voices that came just very readily to me.
[SPEAKER_03]: He's got such a distinctive voice.
[SPEAKER_03]: Scott Brick does a great job of doing his voice on the audiobooks.
[SPEAKER_03]: How many of you are audiobook people?
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, and Scott's 80% dude, it's always 80% now.
[SPEAKER_03]: We've been listening to stories a lot longer.
[SPEAKER_03]: We've been reading them as a race, you know?
[SPEAKER_03]: So, but with Tommy, I just, I had it in there and I had the conflict between him and Evan.
[SPEAKER_03]: And what's really cool is when you get to a point in a series and you're living with these characters for long enough, that you know when they fight, how they fight, the way you know if your friends get in an argument or your siblings.
[SPEAKER_03]: They know where each other's vulnerabilities are, they know what can piss each other off, and getting to a point by the tenth book, and a lot of you have come along through that whole series.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's pretty cool to have started that dynamic between them, and it was, it was wild.
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, that was the first book.
[SPEAKER_03]: where a lot of people, there's a moment or a stretch of that book where Evans liked the bad guy in Nemesis, because he's coming for Tommy.
[SPEAKER_03]: He's coming for the kids who does young men who Tommy's dealing with, and he's this relentless force of vengeance.
[SPEAKER_03]: And we've been on the other side of that with Tommy, meeting them and engaging with those kids.
[SPEAKER_03]: and so there's a different feeling.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's very hard to hate from up close.
[SPEAKER_03]: And we spend a lot of time up close with them.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so from the outside, there are a bunch of racist malicious shit had to deserve whatever is coming to them.
[SPEAKER_03]: But inside and up close, it's way more complicated.
[SPEAKER_03]: There's way more nuance of what's happening with them.
[SPEAKER_03]: And all of a sudden we start to see
[SPEAKER_03]: Evan's code coming as something that's very rigid, very black and white, that doesn't understand the context and the nuance of what's happening.
[SPEAKER_04]: That's what's happening.
[SPEAKER_04]: So you take rigidity from two different angles and you've got to find a way to make them both redeemable.
[SPEAKER_03]: Right.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, you do.
[SPEAKER_04]: Colleges are the things to do at some point because human beings like resolution, you're not going to end the book in a gray area, typically.
[SPEAKER_04]: No.
[SPEAKER_04]: Like there's some resolution at the end, just like a sitcom or something.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: I like endings where everything resolves, but it's not incredibly clean or neat.
[SPEAKER_03]: Like there's some price that has been paid in some way.
[SPEAKER_03]: That certainly happens at the end of NEMASESS, but in a way that's different than we anticipated, moving to it.
[SPEAKER_03]: But, you know, Dennis Lahane is one of my favorite writers.
[SPEAKER_03]: He did Mystic River and Shutter Island, the Angie and Patrick series, and he's really good at that, where it will resolve.
[SPEAKER_03]: You'll get the answers, but there are some costs that's been paid by people.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's not that everything's super cheery, because people come out of adventures wounded.
[SPEAKER_03]: People come out of healing rights and rituals banged off.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so Evan comes out banged off and he comes out with things to think about each time.
[SPEAKER_06]: And sometimes when you do know the ending, you're like, oh man, I wish I didn't know the ending.
[SPEAKER_06]: I missed the grabbering all those little, like those were those books for me where I was just like, oh God, I wish it had a happier ending, but it didn't end up like that.
[SPEAKER_06]: And that's the issue.
[SPEAKER_06]: But as you're going through this, I mean number 27 right now, trying to keep it different and interesting for the audience is gotta be the biggest challenge.
[SPEAKER_06]: I mean, 27.
[SPEAKER_03]: I took a long time to start to write orphan acts.
[SPEAKER_03]: I had it in the back of my head.
[SPEAKER_03]: I was scared to write it.
[SPEAKER_03]: I wrote another book first and another book first.
[SPEAKER_03]: I was waiting to get the elements that I thought that one day would have a shot.
[SPEAKER_03]: I wanted an orphan next to have a shot to be in the pantheon with those authors who I loved, like, or the characters, like, born and bond and richer.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's all these characters I grew up with.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so I just kept waiting till I had the right combination of things that I knew I could stay with when character throughout is.
[SPEAKER_03]: And for orphan acts, it's always, it's the line that Jack John's tells him when he's 12 years old when he takes him out of the foster home as a kid and he's training him up to be an assassin and he says, the hard part is not making you a killer.
[SPEAKER_03]: The hard part is going to be keeping you human.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so all of a sudden, if I'm writing a series about someone who's been taught a scream
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, he's been drowned proof, but he never was taught how to speak the strange language of intimacy.
[SPEAKER_03]: He doesn't understand fully what it means to be human.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think of him always that he's like outside the aquarium glass and he's looking in it people who can have a normal life that can have normal relationships that he himself can never have.
[SPEAKER_03]: So what he can be is the wolf who hunts the wolves to protect them.
[SPEAKER_03]: And if he's learning to try and speak this strange language and if he's going to become more real, it means that the people around him are going to become more real.
[SPEAKER_03]: Or even the insane people in the HOA who he has to do all of the building where he lives.
[SPEAKER_03]: But that's Joey.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's Mia.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's Peter.
[SPEAKER_03]: Right.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's all the people around him.
[SPEAKER_03]: And then it becomes the people he's protecting.
[SPEAKER_03]: And he starts to feel and understand their pain and even understand a little bit what empathy might feel like.
[SPEAKER_03]: And then it's eventually even the people who he's going to kill and the people who he is targeted because as we become more complex and differentiated and more human, so does everything else in the world.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so that's helped me a lot to keep the series moving.
[SPEAKER_03]: Because those first ones, if you go to orphan acts in the nowhere man, you know, I couldn't have written Nemesis or antihero back then for for those books.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, I think that's one of the reasons what you're describing is why it always resonated with me because I was a fan of all the other thriller series before.
[SPEAKER_04]: But that idea of being on the outside and looking in is something that a lot of military veterans feel when they get back.
[SPEAKER_04]: It's even if you had it before, it's a lot more difficult to speak that strange language of intimacy when you get back and we nobleize the idea of staying the wolf because we have to protect the herd, right?
[SPEAKER_04]: But in a lot of way, that's a scape as I'm in its own right.
[SPEAKER_04]: I mean, it's strange that as it sounds, putting yourself in constant danger is less dangerous to me than locking eyes with my woman sometimes and just telling her how I'm feeling.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: You know what I mean?
[SPEAKER_06]: You're the song is sucks.
[SPEAKER_06]: You know, like that's hard.
[SPEAKER_06]: That's hard to tell your wife.
[SPEAKER_06]: I did tell my wife that the other day, I'm kidding.
[SPEAKER_06]: I didn't tell her that.
[SPEAKER_06]: About the whole song.
[SPEAKER_06]: I wish I would have, though.
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, she's not here.
[SPEAKER_06]: Let's say, yeah, they'll listen.
[SPEAKER_06]: I need that suck.
[SPEAKER_03]: But yeah, it's this little moments that are you're trying to make real and trying to make well he marvels through the series like exactly what you said he's he marvels at his lack of courage all the time and he's somebody who we take for granted the kinds of things he's done i mean he got himself arrested into a high security prison so he could execute someone then escape right this is not somebody who wants for courage
[SPEAKER_03]: But at the same time, you know, there's a scene where there's an older woman who's husband's passed away and she's been living as a widow for years.
[SPEAKER_03]: And he's just contemplating on how the house is filled with the absence of her husband who died.
[SPEAKER_03]: And it's this sort of pain that he's never risked, so he's never going to feel it.
[SPEAKER_03]: And he marvels at that.
[SPEAKER_03]: He doesn't understand that.
[SPEAKER_03]: and he doesn't understand a lot of little things like like one of the scenes really on.
[SPEAKER_03]: Mia Hall is the single mother district attorney.
[SPEAKER_03]: She lives downstairs from him.
[SPEAKER_03]: She's got a little eight-year-old boy named Peter and you know, they always have a don't ask don't tell relationship because if she ever really knew what he did for a living then she'd have to, you know, arrest him.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: Is that my gun?
[SPEAKER_03]: Still got it.
[SPEAKER_03]: There we go.
[SPEAKER_03]: But you know at one point Peter is kind of marveling to Evan because there's a shooting that took place and he's heard about he goes, he goes, you know, he's just thinking in moral terms like how do you kill someone?
[SPEAKER_03]: And Evan goes, you know, two shots of the chest and one of them had.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's a different, it's a very different framework and he doesn't like he's a second late to understanding what the question really was.
[SPEAKER_06]: And that's why the mic went out, somebody got killed in the back.
[SPEAKER_06]: Oh, yeah.
[SPEAKER_06]: Sorry, RIP, you were great, and I loved you.
[SPEAKER_06]: And Dawson's, sorry about that.
[SPEAKER_06]: No, but as you continue writing these books in everything else, and obviously your audience gets older, is there an end date?
[SPEAKER_06]: Because a lot of us,
[SPEAKER_06]: No, not you guys, but I feel the same way because I've written a series where I'm like, holy shit, if I don't end this, I wonder if people are gonna get pissed off of like, man, I don't know if I'm gonna get to the end of this or not.
[SPEAKER_06]: I'm gonna live through it.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I mentioned Dennis Leheen earlier, was one of my favorite writers.
[SPEAKER_03]: He's a good line.
[SPEAKER_03]: He says you never hear anybody say their favorite novel in the series was the 27th one.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_03]: So at some point, I think I will, the story will shape itself up to a conclusion.
[SPEAKER_03]: There is going to be the right conclusion, and I'm not going to overstay my welcome.
[SPEAKER_06]: But you don't know when that is.
[SPEAKER_06]: I don't know when that is.
[SPEAKER_06]: Because you don't know this about me, and you know, even though we're home is in real life.
[SPEAKER_06]: So it was in a coma.
[SPEAKER_06]: And I had one book left in this series, and when I got out of it, the first thing the fans asked was like, hey, dude, thank god you're alive.
[SPEAKER_06]: But if you didn't finish the last book, we wouldn't know how it ended.
[SPEAKER_06]: And I was like, oh shit, I never considered that.
[SPEAKER_06]: And I still didn't during the process.
[SPEAKER_06]: I was in the hospital for 45 days, and everything else.
[SPEAKER_06]: But that pushed me to finish it where I was like, there's an ending.
[SPEAKER_06]: Everybody who supported me along the way in the future and came out to book signings and everything else.
[SPEAKER_06]: They got the ending, the satisfactory ending, and like,
[SPEAKER_06]: Hopefully I gave that to them and it finished.
[SPEAKER_06]: Does that ever enter your minds of like shit man, if I keep writing these and I die in like a weird plane crash?
[SPEAKER_06]: Nobody's got the ending of this.
[SPEAKER_06]: Well, not till now.
[SPEAKER_06]: Well, it should, I don't go, give it to you.
[SPEAKER_03]: What are you doing?
[SPEAKER_06]: Do you know what it is?
[SPEAKER_06]: The ending?
[SPEAKER_06]: Yes, I got an idea.
[SPEAKER_06]: I got an idea where I had one, too.
[SPEAKER_06]: And that's what pushed me.
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, it's one of the things that's a bummer.
[SPEAKER_03]: You've done a ton of screenwriting.
[SPEAKER_03]: Right.
[SPEAKER_03]: So Ross has worked on 150 movies.
[SPEAKER_03]: Millions, yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: And in TV, one of the things that's frustrating is, I worked on a show one time that was the reboot from V.
[SPEAKER_03]: you remember that with marina backer and v was the big science fiction oh yeah yeah but you know we got it i came in later the end of season one there was a season two pick up as doing a lot of just writing and producing but then it got canceled and there's all these fans who are watching a show and the show kind of cliffhangs and then it doesn't get to come back yes
[SPEAKER_03]: I think there's a responsibility to make sure each book on its own can stand alone.
[SPEAKER_03]: Even if somebody hasn't read any of the orphaned textbooks, you can pick up and read the answer here, and I will on board people, which is good because I'm getting new readers every year, not good.
[SPEAKER_03]: But also you want everything to be satisfying when it closes also.
[SPEAKER_03]: But in terms of a bigger arc on the way he's moving, I do have ideas.
[SPEAKER_03]: And now I have a new whole host of anxieties.
[SPEAKER_03]: Thanks to you, Ross.
[SPEAKER_06]: good and you should like I look I want the pressure on Greg for Christ 6 because I was at the White House a few years back and one of my favorite shows of loss.
[SPEAKER_06]: You guys the loss fans here?
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah same huge fan and the two writers, one of the two had writers was in across me and I go, hey dude.
[SPEAKER_06]: So like during season three and four, like I started to check out, I didn't know what was going on, and they go, we didn't either, and I go, okay.
[SPEAKER_06]: So I go, fill me in on this, and it was off the negative time now, it's over.
[SPEAKER_06]: I don't give a shit, so I can tell you.
[SPEAKER_06]: But I go, what happened?
[SPEAKER_06]: And they were like, they never told us how many seasons we were going.
[SPEAKER_06]: Therefore, we just kept writing, and it was all these characters, storylines that were open ended, and then when it got to the end,
[SPEAKER_06]: tied up the polar bears and the thing and everything else and I was like, well, how did you make that, how did that feels right?
[SPEAKER_06]: And they were like miserable because they knew they were going to blame us for it.
[SPEAKER_03]: There's a, there's a great part, one of the great parts about being a novelist is it's a very intimate relationship with the reader, which is really funny because it's such, usually people are pretty introverted who are novelists.
[SPEAKER_03]: But every time, every single one of you when you read anti-hero is going to have a different
[SPEAKER_03]: It's a collaboration.
[SPEAKER_03]: I get the words down.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's also why we don't like when people overwrite.
[SPEAKER_03]: If it's too much gore, if it's too much telling you what the emotion is.
[SPEAKER_03]: So whenever I write a scene, I always think about like, let's say this scene is, you know, Joey tells Evan that she loves them.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's like a brick and then you build the scene around it and what should happen is you then slide that brick right out and she never has to say it and the scene still holds.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so part of writing is I'm trying to intimate because you all come to a book with your fears and vulnerabilities, the things that terrify you, what your hopes are, and if I can intimate towards that and leave it there, each one of you is going to fill that with things that are distinct to you.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so it's a really cool aspect of writing that's different when I write a comic, everyone sees the same comic.
[SPEAKER_03]: Everyone sees the same TV show.
[SPEAKER_03]: Everyone sees the same movie.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: But there's something different that happens with these books.
[SPEAKER_06]: But do you ever look out of your audience and say, all right, like, you know, I'm looking at all the people here, I bet you each and every one of you guys has a different hope and dream for what the ending is.
[SPEAKER_06]: And I'm sure you could tell me if I interviewed you one by one and say, this is how I want it to end.
[SPEAKER_06]: Do you listen to what they're saying on message boards and read it and everything else to influence potentially the end of your series?
[SPEAKER_06]: No.
[SPEAKER_03]: But I want you to know,
[SPEAKER_03]: I did, by the way, that's why you wound up in a coma.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, yeah, very true.
[SPEAKER_03]: Right now, no, I mean, look, I love, readers are amazing.
[SPEAKER_03]: I love being on tour.
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, the travel part gets, you know, as I get older, that gets older, but being at an events is, it's amazing because of what the books mean, but I don't defer, I don't write by Democratic consensus.
[SPEAKER_03]: I have a sense of what I want to do and then it's my job to get it there in a way.
[SPEAKER_03]: But that doesn't mean that I'm not thinking about the best ways to clarify it's all the creative end though for me.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's all driven for me.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I'm thinking I can't be too clever, it's all this stuff like when I'm writing well,
[SPEAKER_03]: If there's humor that's in the book, it's appropriate to the book.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's not that the author's being clever.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's what should happen.
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, you guys can all raise your hands and tell me where I've missed it.
[SPEAKER_03]: Likewise, on research, I do all this research.
[SPEAKER_03]: I do, you know, I've been up and stunned airplanes.
[SPEAKER_03]: I've gone on a demo ranges with breaches and blown up cars.
[SPEAKER_03]: I've got, you know, I've, I've,
[SPEAKER_03]: gone under cover in a mind control cults.
[SPEAKER_03]: I do all this research, but that research is just the glacier for the tip that goes into the story.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I know exactly what to pick.
[SPEAKER_03]: I've had drafts where I put more of it in because I'm so smart, I did all the research you're all going to read about it.
[SPEAKER_03]: And there's a line people use sometimes where they'll say, you know, if something's early on a draft, they'll be like, your research slip is showing.
[SPEAKER_03]: because you don't, you know, so a lot of what it is is the story has to be the paramount thing regardless.
[SPEAKER_03]: So when I'm thinking of the readers, I'm thinking, am I out of the way?
[SPEAKER_03]: Am I being too clever?
[SPEAKER_03]: Am I stretching too far?
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, so I'm making sure that that collaboration is smooth.
[SPEAKER_06]: Is there a voice that tells you, mind's my wife?
[SPEAKER_06]: So my wife will read everything and then she'll be like, hey dude, no, this, this and this and then she'll give me advice.
[SPEAKER_06]: Is there anybody on the outside that you actually trust?
[SPEAKER_06]: Agent, wife, manager.
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, this is weird, it's actually your wife also, she calls me, yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: And she's like, well, we've been, yeah, she's been like, you're second act as a fucking mask.
[SPEAKER_03]: No one cares about these characters and I'm like, don't you have a husband?
[SPEAKER_03]: Like, you have kids?
[SPEAKER_03]: I have a few.
[SPEAKER_03]: My wife is a very good
[SPEAKER_03]: average reader.
[SPEAKER_03]: She's a brilliant woman, you know, she's psychologist, psychology professor, but she's like a dead average reader in terms of what annoys her, what she finds pretentious.
[SPEAKER_03]: She catches a shitload of typos and all that stuff because she reads very slowly, meticulously.
[SPEAKER_03]: She's not a huge fan within the genre, so that's really helpful.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so she's one of my first reads,
[SPEAKER_03]: My sister who is the only person I know who's read more mysteries and thrillers than I have.
[SPEAKER_03]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean everything so she's kind of hard to help.
[SPEAKER_06]: Have a fan.
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, like a fan of that genre.
[SPEAKER_06]: I swear to God.
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, like giving you notes.
[SPEAKER_06]: That's right.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I understand.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_03]: So she's that.
[SPEAKER_03]: And then I have a buddy who I
[SPEAKER_03]: I co-wrote my last couple scripts with his name's Philip Eisner, he wrote a movie called Event Horizon, if you remember that, and our last movie was called Sweet Girl, that starred Jason Mamoa on Netflix, and he and I just got thrown together on a writing job years ago, and he's just a, he's got a really smart, he's an amazing screenwriter, and he's got really good story sense, but we also have a really good shorthand for like bullshet if
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm throwing something by or something's cheap or something's not you're not going to buy that a fight would go this way so he's got a really good detector and ability to say that.
[SPEAKER_03]: So they're kind of my early just throw it out and get some feedback that's generalized.
[SPEAKER_03]: And then now I'm it's very routineized the way it goes now.
[SPEAKER_03]: I've been really lucky.
[SPEAKER_03]: I have a great great agent.
[SPEAKER_03]: She's spectacular.
[SPEAKER_03]: So it goes to her next.
[SPEAKER_03]: She reads it.
[SPEAKER_03]: She gives sets of notes.
[SPEAKER_03]: My agent rep, you know, that they represent Baldachi and Harlan Cobin and Robert Crase and like, and she's really, really bright.
[SPEAKER_03]: And then it goes to my subject matter experts.
[SPEAKER_03]: There's a hacker for Joey because there's no way I know a quarter of what Joey knows about anything with hacking.
[SPEAKER_03]: I have weapons guys who are, you know, make sure that's fix.
[SPEAKER_03]: If God help you, if you get a, if you make a gun mistake, the only thing you can do worse in a book than if you screw up a gun thing is if you kill a cat.
[SPEAKER_06]: So I talk to the guy in the military over there, I'll tell you, every single movie, book mistake, he'll be like, no, that's not right.
[SPEAKER_06]: They didn't have a tech advisor.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: So yeah, what we were watching on the other day, and I'm yelling at the TV, like, just, it's, it's, the problem is, is it, is it?
[SPEAKER_04]: It makes you confront the fourth wall.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yes, you're out of the story.
[SPEAKER_04]: I think it's interesting that as a writer or not necessarily for stuff that's going to appear digitally, you're still concerned about prioritizing theater, the mind, and avoiding expositional dialogue.
[SPEAKER_04]: Even on the
[SPEAKER_04]: page, right, which I think is really clever because, again, now instead of writing one story, you're writing hundreds of thousands, if not millions of stories.
[SPEAKER_04]: Because you described the scenery and it gets to a point where somebody has to confront some sort of social or emotional situation and now they're overlapping their entire life onto it.
[SPEAKER_04]: And create in the own the story inside their head.
[SPEAKER_03]: Right, and what jars you out is if, you know, it's the safety on a clock or, you know, it's like it's all stuff that doesn't work.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I think part of it.
[SPEAKER_03]: Look, I think the cat people, I can't worry about the cat people.
[SPEAKER_03]: They're cat people.
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, if you heard a cat, they come for you.
[SPEAKER_03]: Your career's probably over.
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't want to speak ill of them.
[SPEAKER_03]: But with guns, there's something to the fact, like if I'm going to write crime fiction, if I'm going to have an aspect that is military, there's a very strong,
[SPEAKER_03]: like pose or aspect to that and writing in that field and embodying that thing.
[SPEAKER_03]: And if you can't be so foundational is to get the facts right for the weapons that you're sort of borrowing to cosplay.
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, and I've shot all his weapons.
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, I take it seriously.
[SPEAKER_03]: But I understand why that wrinkles people, you know, like people don't like that and they ever write not to.
[SPEAKER_04]: There's another, you can't mess with nerds either, typically.
[SPEAKER_04]: Star Trek, you can't start track fast.
[SPEAKER_03]: Star Wars, too.
[SPEAKER_04]: You can't mess that up, but I think one of the guys is the best out of the Andy Weir.
[SPEAKER_04]: He just does a really good job of getting all the science right, like the Martian, and then the new one's coming out soon, right, the new movie.
[SPEAKER_04]: What is it, Project Hail Mary, I believe it's called?
[SPEAKER_03]: Yes, he has Hail Mary in there.
[SPEAKER_04]: There we go.
[SPEAKER_06]: Hey, there are ants about.
[SPEAKER_06]: Oh, yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: Are you out?
[SPEAKER_04]: Oh, yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: Look at that.
[SPEAKER_04]: That's a really good word for him.
[SPEAKER_06]: The book is great.
[SPEAKER_06]: What do you got?
[SPEAKER_06]: Nine out of ten.
[SPEAKER_06]: I'm not done.
[SPEAKER_06]: Okay, I'm not done.
[SPEAKER_03]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_06]: We'll come back.
[SPEAKER_06]: Oh yeah, you got to review?
[SPEAKER_06]: Where's that at?
[SPEAKER_06]: Oh, good reads.
[SPEAKER_03]: Oh, you're falling up after.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: We're going to take a hold up after.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_06]: I'll read the reads here in there.
[SPEAKER_03]: Look, you know, there's so many things to get right.
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, people get mad if I get a medical diagnosis wrong.
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, one time I had a character go on the run, I know exactly what happened in this case, because I had to rewrite something really fast and I had to add a scene in a book.
[SPEAKER_03]: But I have them take a bus from two locations in Alaska that are not connected by land.
[SPEAKER_03]: And it's like, that's just, that's just stupid.
[SPEAKER_03]: I heard from it.
[SPEAKER_03]: They would have died, they would have died, they would have died.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so, you know, any of those things can knock people out.
[SPEAKER_03]: So it's like, that's part of the balancing act is, I want to, I also am not writing gun porn.
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, I'm not going to take forever to go all the details about all the weaponry.
[SPEAKER_03]: And, you know, Tom Clancy was a more extensive research writer than me.
[SPEAKER_03]: Like, you read his stuff, like, you practically know how to operate a submarine.
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, he does all of the details with all that.
[SPEAKER_03]: I feel pretty confident.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, we could do it.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: But I'm always trying to like also make sure that I have it right, but that it's glancing.
[SPEAKER_03]: And because my readership is very varied.
[SPEAKER_03]: I have a lot of guys who are, you know, from spec ops, like, you know, all the way through people who are reading, who are, you know, just...
[SPEAKER_03]: whatever and in their like their own life they they that they might like Mysteries people who read cozys even.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's a rangey because what I want to do is is fulfill that Expectations of everybody without leaning too hard in one area that you start to feel like it's to contextual I think a lot of thriller writers.
[SPEAKER_04]: I would say most are about the action though That's what they're focused on in yours are clearly about the characters more so than the action the action is not Superfluous with its background to the character development
[SPEAKER_03]: There's a weird thing, thank you, that's what I try and do, so that's good to hear.
[SPEAKER_03]: People talk a lot of times, they say like, what's more important, plotter character?
[SPEAKER_03]: And for me, the only thing that plot is is character in motion, because if my character is engaging with the plot, when Orphan X, when Evan engages with something, he doesn't react like Jason Born or Jack Reacher,
[SPEAKER_03]: or James Bond, because if he does, then he's not a distinct character.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so what that character does and says in every single engagement that they have is defining of the character.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so a character in movement through the plot is what actually constitutes it.
[SPEAKER_03]: It can never be separated.
[SPEAKER_03]: And with action, one of the things for me that's been very important is I look at my action scenes.
[SPEAKER_03]: All of them is three act plays.
[SPEAKER_03]: They have their own internal logic.
[SPEAKER_03]: There's a sort of story that's within them.
[SPEAKER_03]: And Evans engagement in them is the thing that we're also learning.
[SPEAKER_03]: So even the fight scene has some aspect of character that we're dealing with and figuring out with him.
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't want just like a shoot out in a warehouse because it's neat.
[SPEAKER_04]: Well, I would say especially this latest book because now he has to take in the consideration the desires of the person that he's fighting on behalf of, I suppose, I don't want to give too much away.
[SPEAKER_04]: Right.
[SPEAKER_04]: Now it's like he's in the middle of an actual fight and being conscientious at the same time, which is not an easy thing to do, by the way.
[SPEAKER_03]: We should lay that out, I think, that's an okay promise to lay out, so without giving too much away.
[SPEAKER_03]: So in anti-hero, one of the things that happens is
[SPEAKER_03]: is first of all Luke Divine, who you all might know from the previous books, who's an insane brilliant billionaire power broker, has a manic snap, and the only person who can go out to confront him is Evan, because he's out of his head, and when Luke Divine's out of his head there's a lot of things that risk in the world.
[SPEAKER_03]: So Evan goes out to see that and try and handle Luke, but when he does, he comes across the story of a young woman who is kidnapped off a subway in New York and was just brutalized, brutally assaulted and left for dad.
[SPEAKER_03]: And he goes to track her down and when he finds her, he's going to go and search of this pack of young men, nihilistic young men, just raised online, which is porn and video games and nothing being real to them.
[SPEAKER_03]: Everything for them is fake is if it would exist in somewhere else.
[SPEAKER_03]: And, um, and basically when he gets to her, she's an Orthodox Christian, which is the weirdest thing for Evan spoke.
[SPEAKER_03]: Evan is not religious in the least, and she makes him vow that he will not kill anybody who did this to him, who did this to her, if he finds them.
[SPEAKER_03]: So, he's set off into a mission now as the greatest generation of, as the greatest assassin of this or any generation.
[SPEAKER_03]: He's now going off with both of his arms tied mine as back.
[SPEAKER_03]: He's going into a mission where he can't kill anybody if he or else he's going to cross or if he can.
[SPEAKER_03]: And the situations are lethal situations, too.
[SPEAKER_03]: So we're not sure he's going to do in them as he goes in.
[SPEAKER_03]: And it's the combination of these two codes and whether he can reconcile them and come out alive that's sort of the thrust of what this book's about.
[SPEAKER_06]: I know we've chat about this in the past because you've been on a few times.
[SPEAKER_06]: Do you have an end date in minds?
[SPEAKER_06]: and date for the series.
[SPEAKER_06]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_06]: Keep pushing this end.
[SPEAKER_06]: Look, we've been on the so for over years at this point.
[SPEAKER_06]: We've known you for a long time and it keeps going on and like 27 is intense, obviously, but is there a number that doesn't have a love in it?
[SPEAKER_06]: Like, hey, dude, I want to, this series of 11.
[SPEAKER_06]: This 27.
[SPEAKER_06]: Oh, yeah, that's a lot.
[SPEAKER_06]: I mean, it's hard to, I mean, you take Harry Potter for Christ 6.
[SPEAKER_06]: I mean,
[SPEAKER_06]: Is there a number at the end of this?
[SPEAKER_06]: We're like, all right, man.
[SPEAKER_06]: I've got to stop here.
[SPEAKER_03]: There will be somewhere to tell there will be and I will tell you next year.
[SPEAKER_06]: You okay promise promise next time on the show.
[SPEAKER_06]: That's why I want to ask that one to do is bring up one of your fans.
[SPEAKER_06]: Who's got the same question and you said on pop is lap if you want to come on up that way you can ask him of like, hey, what is your dream ending for this book?
[SPEAKER_06]: I'm just curious from whatever one else thing.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yes, you're fans.
[SPEAKER_06]: We can and if you've heard that or not I've got a dream and it come on up.
[SPEAKER_06]: Yes, yes, oh, he doesn't want to dance
[SPEAKER_06]: So, so that's the other part of it.
[SPEAKER_06]: He doesn't want him to end, but if you die in an ice cream cone accident, which has happened a lot over the last couple years in Austin, or I paid all those people who have lost themselves in that.
[SPEAKER_06]: then what happens like this guy in the back doesn't have any answers and he's gonna go home and shoot up a fucking post office i can tell by the look in your eyes sir that you're you've got to know the answer i i need to know the end of these things like i'm one of those people i've got to know the ends of books i've got to know the ends of movies well we don't do that anymore though yes jack right up excellent uh... excellent uh... example jack Ryan like
[SPEAKER_06]: You don't think about any of that, if like, all right, man, I've got to get to this answer and then either start a new one or keep going like, you know what we better be doing.
[SPEAKER_03]: We all better be bringing George R. Martin some Kel Smoothies.
[SPEAKER_06]: Oh, hey, thank God you brought that up.
[SPEAKER_06]: Okay, so my nanny loves George R. Martin and everybody else who watch Game of Thrones and all the other stuff they hate him now.
[SPEAKER_06]: because he's not finished the book.
[SPEAKER_06]: Yes, they hate him with a passion because he did not finish.
[SPEAKER_06]: So those of you guys who were game a thrones who watched underneath B.O.
[SPEAKER_06]: That was the writer's for HBO.
[SPEAKER_06]: That wasn't him.
[SPEAKER_06]: He didn't have any say at the end of that.
[SPEAKER_06]: And to be honest with you, I watched the last show with my roommate and he was my roommate, my roommate from I have said he was dying in cancer.
[SPEAKER_06]: We were at the Mayo Clinic in Cleveland.
[SPEAKER_06]: It's a true story in the hotel and he goes, hey,
[SPEAKER_06]: We used to hear with me and watch the end of Game of Thrones.
[SPEAKER_06]: And I was like, if this is your last line of earth, I will do it and we eat all flown up.
[SPEAKER_06]: And it was a thing and we had taken mushroom chocolate bars and swear to God, that makes it scarier.
[SPEAKER_06]: Because it was nine o'clock on an HBO.
[SPEAKER_06]: We just had this conversation at dinner.
[SPEAKER_06]: Nine o'clock on HBO and everything else.
[SPEAKER_06]: And I go, I go, great.
[SPEAKER_06]: I'll do this with you.
[SPEAKER_06]: We're all doing this with you.
[SPEAKER_06]: We'll sit in the same room.
[SPEAKER_06]: But what happens if this isn't the ending that you want?
[SPEAKER_06]: I don't know.
[SPEAKER_06]: I don't know how I'm going to feel.
[SPEAKER_06]: Well luckily, you know, it gets to the ending.
[SPEAKER_06]: It was not what he wanted whatsoever, which was a lot of people.
[SPEAKER_06]: I see a lot of people shaking their heads in the audience.
[SPEAKER_06]: And I said, hey, how do you feel about this and it goes, hope this fucking cancer surgery goes good tomorrow?
[SPEAKER_06]: Otherwise, I'm going to be really angry at the end of my life.
[SPEAKER_06]: That's a lot of pressure to put on a writer or anybody else.
[SPEAKER_06]: And for me, I told my name is same thing.
[SPEAKER_06]: I go, look, he will never finish this, because all those books are a thousand pages.
[SPEAKER_06]: The continuity and everything else that goes in to writing all of these.
[SPEAKER_06]: He's just too old and he can finish this on a satisfactory end, plus the series had already ended.
[SPEAKER_06]: So how do you deal with that mentally because that's got to be something on your mind I would think yeah, I didn't I don't know I wouldn't want to get there I promise you all.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm in good health I'm keeping a good rigorous routine.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm getting my scans.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm gonna I'm gonna be here to finish it.
[SPEAKER_03]: I promise But one is that
[SPEAKER_04]: That got me now.
[SPEAKER_03]: We have to do it in a quick show.
[SPEAKER_03]: Is it new in the crowd?
[SPEAKER_03]: Have a question.
[SPEAKER_04]: I actually have.
[SPEAKER_04]: I've got one.
[SPEAKER_04]: Even if it's going to end at some point, but you and I've talked about, and you've done some novella's on it, standalone, joey stuff.
[SPEAKER_04]: One thing that I've always been really interested in is a prequel jack John story, because we don't know much about that.
[SPEAKER_04]: We know he was a pipiter back in the day, but we don't know the full breadth of what he got into.
[SPEAKER_04]: Because you see those guys that are, especially, I know these people in real life, people that are in the intelligent services that are on the operational side for a very long time.
[SPEAKER_04]: The majority of them who are what I would consider high quality people get out early because it's impossible for a normal human being to do that stuff, for a protracted period of time.
[SPEAKER_04]: But you've got a guy in Jack who did it for a protracted period of time came away and he's an agency guy Yeah, especially the agency people I wouldn't say he came away unscathed, but he came away determined to make sure that the next generation had what he didn't have Which is mentorship to be a good man and in addition to all this other stuff, right?
[SPEAKER_04]: That's a story that I would like to hear
[SPEAKER_03]: All right.
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, we're going to add it to the list.
[SPEAKER_03]: So far, there's a lot of expectations and stress sitting between you two for this there should be because if you ended this then you can get to his story and then everybody else story and everybody else somebody asked me recently about Jack that they said
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, was Evan that he's obviously done this for a long time because Evan's not not the first kid who he trained and was he always that way.
[SPEAKER_03]: And was interesting as I knew the answer, but I never thought of it because when I'm writing a book it's almost like I have to see the whole mosaic even if the story is me coming and picking one.
[SPEAKER_03]: piece of the mosaic and you're going to hear this from this perspective.
[SPEAKER_03]: Then this, I'm choosing it, but I have a version of it all and no, he'd never had somebody who is always a good man.
[SPEAKER_03]: He always raised people well.
[SPEAKER_03]: He trained them in the program competently and fairly.
[SPEAKER_03]: It was all that stuff.
[SPEAKER_03]: But Evan was something that was special and was different from him.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I think it's because Evan was the smallest kid in the foster home.
[SPEAKER_03]: Evan was not supposed to be recruited out of that foster home.
[SPEAKER_03]: It was supposed to be Charles Vanskiver.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, who's the big bad bully who continued to be his nemesis through some of the books.
[SPEAKER_03]: But Jack was watching and Evan got knocked down.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's a line from Floyd Patterson, your namesake.
[SPEAKER_06]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_03]: With boxing.
[SPEAKER_03]: He said he's boxing well.
[SPEAKER_06]: One of the greatest holes.
[SPEAKER_03]: For the most knockouts, which is he was knocked out 16 times in a fight.
[SPEAKER_03]: And he said, I may hold the record for getting knocked out the most times, knocked down the most times.
[SPEAKER_03]: But it also means I hold the record for getting back up.
[SPEAKER_03]: and that's what Jack's on Evan when he was this little kid and that cracked something open and Jack, I think, you know, Jack's wife is dead.
[SPEAKER_03]: He doesn't talk about it.
[SPEAKER_03]: He's super emotional around it.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's the one thing that he holds at kind of a secret distance and it's her made in name that he gave to Evan, right, which is really interesting.
[SPEAKER_04]: I think Evan in a large way, I always read it that way when you see that scene where he gives Evan the last name, it became clear to me that that was like a redemption story for Jack.
[SPEAKER_04]: Right?
[SPEAKER_04]: He's rediscovered purpose outside of just the daily shit that he's doing.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yes, somebody to make it good.
[SPEAKER_04]: You know what I mean?
[SPEAKER_03]: And that part of it is, you know, and you and I've talked about this, but him keeping that humanity, um,
[SPEAKER_03]: alive in Evan in a way it's it's uh like you think that that's a blessing but every blessing has a curse just the same way every curse has a blessing so that makes life way more difficult for Evan that makes him that he feels the outsider aspect way more acutely and he has to be on a collision course eventually that causes him to leave the program right it causes Jack's death in a way it causes everything that he has to know that was coming to just how to
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, he used not just he's not a dumb man and knew that was coming Yeah, he was always prepared for it, too.
[SPEAKER_04]: That scene on the helicopter where he says There's nothing you can do to me to make me betray that boy.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, right like he knew what was coming That's right.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, and he so he raised He raised a a boy into a man who could chatter
[SPEAKER_03]: the world with all the corruption in it that he himself and bought it in a way because that's why I haven't leave the program every mission when that phone rings have any of you called one eight five five to nowhere.
[SPEAKER_03]: All right, if you haven't you can call it and you can see if orphan access is the phone.
[SPEAKER_03]: But when somebody calls that number and he takes a mission now, it's aligned with his moral compass.
[SPEAKER_03]: And that's the more compass Jack put in him and backed it with the stoics and backed it with military historians and backed it with, you know, learning foreign etiquette to understand etiquette in different countries because that'll get you killed, but it turns out that's also a really useful thing to know as a human being if you're reading a mapping people.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so he put all those things into him.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so here it is, you know, on Book 11, and it's coming full circle in a way, because that code that is in heaven that puts people different, his moral compass in a way is outgrowing jacks almost.
[SPEAKER_03]: If he can manage to do this, this thing that this woman has tasked him with,
[SPEAKER_03]: that's the stepping out of him, you know, and it's not a coincidence that his, that, you know, he was dealing with issues of seeing his dad, you know, that that was hanging around them.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm going to write about that more.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, that's really interesting.
[SPEAKER_04]: I mean, he's gone from a robot.
[SPEAKER_04]: He's transitioning from a robot into a person, which is something I identify with quite a bit, honestly.
[SPEAKER_04]: And I remember reading that scene for the first time when he's on the helicopter, and it made me think that,
[SPEAKER_04]: The thing that you, the part of you that loves the thing you love most in the world is the best part of you, right?
[SPEAKER_04]: Like that's that we, we should teach ourselves and teach other people to chase that thing.
[SPEAKER_04]: That's right.
[SPEAKER_04]: Instead of all the trappings that we chase because that's the thing that's going to refine the best parts of you as well, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: and that's driven for me the the rabbit to follow to that for me is always been curiosity.
[SPEAKER_03]: I've always cleared any practical considerations from everything as best as I could manage and only followed and paid attention to the thing that was the most fascinating to me or that I was the most I felt the most alive when I was engaged with it or studying it.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's the only thing I've ever followed and I think that leads you to that.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's the demon from Socrates, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: That's the sprite that flickers at the edge of the forest that you follow on some adventure, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: That's going to lead to a new version of your server, right?
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_06]: For you guys, this is one of the rare times.
[SPEAKER_06]: I'll walk you out of the crowd.
[SPEAKER_06]: Do you have questions for Greg?
[SPEAKER_06]: That you would love to ask, because this is your one shot, and I saw you.
[SPEAKER_06]: I know you do.
[SPEAKER_06]: Go ahead, fire away.
[SPEAKER_06]: She's got an ending, but my question is you get so close to these characters and that's what drives your almost taking dictation on the plot.
[SPEAKER_03]: You're gonna miss Tommy
[SPEAKER_03]: grief in that.
[SPEAKER_03]: There is, you know, Tommy Sto Jack.
[SPEAKER_03]: So when I name my characters, I name them after spec ops guys or baseball players because they have unimprovable last names.
[SPEAKER_03]: Like, if you name your kid Buster Posey, he's not going to be like middle management at Merrill Lynch.
[SPEAKER_03]: Like, that boy is going to be a catcher and majors.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's it.
[SPEAKER_03]: This is Go Giants.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's right.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so, you know, so Mike passed guy's wing gate was a guy who I knew who is a spec ops guy.
[SPEAKER_03]: And one of my buddies who I met through a couple of my friends who were seals was a crusty old wavy Navy dude.
[SPEAKER_03]: He was an early UDT diver in the Navy seals.
[SPEAKER_03]: Before the seals, I mean, he was a, he was a, he was a, he was a, he was a, he's a, he's
[SPEAKER_03]: before even seal team six as a UDT diver and he was he was taught me he was that guy in his last name was Stojak because he was Billy Stojak I never acknowledged him till he passed away and he died at his in his gun shop sitting in a chair calculating stuff.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so it was wild.
[SPEAKER_03]: It was wild for me, but he was amazing and then I could say what his name really was I asked him if I could borrow that name But he had guys on airplanes call him and go, I'm reading a book and you're in it, man I know it's you like all these guys in the military and so I'm gonna want money, Greg
[SPEAKER_03]: he was amazing.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so, you know, that's a voice that's very slain.
[SPEAKER_03]: He's got all his own vocabulary.
[SPEAKER_03]: There's so much about him that's amazing.
[SPEAKER_03]: The good thing is I can always bring him back and it's stories.
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, I already did that.
[SPEAKER_03]: Did you read the recital, the short story of the recital?
[SPEAKER_03]: Okay, there's a short story I wrote called the recital.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's about Joey, Joey has a piano recital at UCLA.
[SPEAKER_03]: She's taking a piano class and she doesn't have any family to invite, because everyone brings family.
[SPEAKER_03]: So she sends invitations to Oregon, or Ria, Evan, and Tommy.
[SPEAKER_03]: Because it's like the only people who she knows.
[SPEAKER_03]: And then none of them want to go.
[SPEAKER_03]: They're like, you want us to go watch you practice?
[SPEAKER_03]: Like, why are we going to rehearsal?
[SPEAKER_03]: And it's this whole thing, but Tommy shows up.
[SPEAKER_03]: And there's all these things that happen.
[SPEAKER_03]: I wrote that right after I wrote Nemesis, because I just had to spend more time with him.
[SPEAKER_03]: So there's ways I can still find them and have that voice live in my head.
[SPEAKER_06]: Now we've got your youngest listener here.
[SPEAKER_06]: Hi, how are you?
[SPEAKER_06]: What's your name?
[SPEAKER_05]: Emily and Pine.
[SPEAKER_06]: Nice to meet you, what's your question?
[SPEAKER_05]: Are we at some point going to see all of these books made into the series on HBO?
[SPEAKER_03]: and a movie so things are moving actually well on that front on the feature film side and I hope I'll have something to announce soon.
[SPEAKER_03]: Hollywood is always like you're running hurdles and so we're over you know six hurdles but there's three more we could still trip on and just wind up dead on the track but it's going well I have a great producers I have a great studio and it's lined up as well as it's been since the first time I sold the rights way early on and was going
[SPEAKER_03]: Okay, okay.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm gonna have him move it along.
[SPEAKER_06]: I will.
[SPEAKER_06]: She says she's getting up in years.
[SPEAKER_06]: Now you know, so you gotta speed this up.
[SPEAKER_06]: Okay, I'll put it I'll put in a phone call in the way to the hotel.
[SPEAKER_06]: She's like you can't go 37 books, Greg.
[SPEAKER_06]: Like I didn't get the time, bro.
[SPEAKER_06]: I didn't get the time.
[SPEAKER_06]: No, we appreciate it.
[SPEAKER_06]: And you had a ton of fans in the back here who were embarrassed to ask, I don't know, you can ask whatever you want.
[SPEAKER_06]: Greg's cool like that.
[SPEAKER_06]: You understand it.
[SPEAKER_06]: You got, I can tell you've got questions.
[SPEAKER_06]: Come on up, you're good.
[SPEAKER_06]: Do we really, ah, I knew it.
[SPEAKER_06]: Is the same question I had?
[SPEAKER_06]: It goes, do we really not know how much longer it's going to go?
[SPEAKER_03]: It's so odd to have one of my friends talk shit at a public event.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's so unpredictable.
[SPEAKER_06]: I know what the audience wants, right now you do not have done 6,000 shows.
[SPEAKER_06]: I get it.
[SPEAKER_06]: Come on.
[SPEAKER_06]: Curse you.
[SPEAKER_05]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_06]: But do you not know for real?
[SPEAKER_06]: Dancer his question.
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't know.
[SPEAKER_06]: I don't know for real.
[SPEAKER_06]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_06]: Well, no, we don't know.
[SPEAKER_06]: I mean, we don't know.
[SPEAKER_03]: We don't know.
[SPEAKER_06]: I had a guess it.
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, but we didn't know.
[SPEAKER_06]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_06]: What's your name, sir?
[SPEAKER_00]: Steve.
[SPEAKER_06]: Steve, what are you doing for living?
[SPEAKER_00]: I have a non-profit health code to help impart people to help their lives.
[SPEAKER_06]: Look at that, proud of you.
[SPEAKER_06]: There's everything my kids are eating in a cereal bullshit, yes or no?
[SPEAKER_06]: Probably, God, no wonder one of them walks to the lamp I'm kidding.
[SPEAKER_06]: What's your question?
[SPEAKER_00]: That's what I'm going to give you to some love your health.
[SPEAKER_06]: Oh, love your health.
[SPEAKER_06]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_06]: Yes, I will love my health.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thanks.
[SPEAKER_00]: My question, Greg, I think I've heard maybe you talk about this before.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it was interesting when you said how you are studying Shakespeare in England.
[SPEAKER_00]: And how Shakespeare and his characters sometimes have influenced your writing to some extent,
[SPEAKER_03]: Oh yeah, I'd be happy to, so here's the thing that's weird if you hear that a thriller writer loves Shakespeare because everybody thinks of Shakespeare as being a horny toady.
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, Shakespeare, first of all, he's sheer commercial capabilities or staggering.
[SPEAKER_03]: So he performed all the performances were in the globe theater, and if you cut the globe theater in half, and
[SPEAKER_03]: It was a perfect cross-section of all of Elizabethan society at the time.
[SPEAKER_03]: So there was royalty in the boxes.
[SPEAKER_03]: There were educated people and on the floor were groundlings who could come in for almost free.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so whenever he's writing, he's modulating the pace and the timing and the
[SPEAKER_03]: the references to high culture and low culture all the time to hold everybody's interest so he'll make a like a glancing reference to avid's metamorphosis to the royalty who's sitting up there and then he'll make a dick joke for the groundlings and he's in the action is always there he's cliffhanging it's highly structured.
[SPEAKER_03]: novels are very structured.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's a structured form, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: Everything was five acts, and they're very narrative-driven.
[SPEAKER_03]: He's writing histories, comedies, and tragedies.
[SPEAKER_03]: They're tales of lust, intrigue, and murder.
[SPEAKER_03]: So you have narrative-driven, highly, highly structured,
[SPEAKER_03]: stories that are designed to sell out across the entire cross section of a culture.
[SPEAKER_03]: And that's what he did when striving for.
[SPEAKER_03]: I love also, and of course, this goes back to the Greeks, but in Shakespeare and tragedy, like an old tragedy, the downfall of the character is due to a flaw that they have that's inherent to them.
[SPEAKER_03]: So, you know, King Lear, it's as pride.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's the thing that's inside you that affects and push is pushed outside in the world to return some fate that's befitting to you, that like rhymes with what it is you need to learn.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so that's like an amazing and essential part of all fiction.
[SPEAKER_03]: My characters have terrible things happen to them.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's almost always their fault and there's some small way that they've made a tiny misstep or moral misstep that opens the door into unforeseen consequences, that they do not deserve the decimates them.
[SPEAKER_03]: But it's always what's within us, these little choices that we make, that's at the center of everything.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's the character's choice.
[SPEAKER_03]: Because if I just have stories of really bad shit happening to really good people, and
[SPEAKER_03]: It's not narrative, that's not what a story is, that's just life, that's pancreatic cancer, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: That's a plain crash.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so there has to be a reason and a rhyme to that.
[SPEAKER_03]: And Shakespeare did that more compellingly than anybody in the English language.
[SPEAKER_06]: My question to you is, I'm going to switch over to biographical.
[SPEAKER_06]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_06]: If you could write anybody's biography, who would it be?
[SPEAKER_06]: Have you ever been offered that?
[SPEAKER_03]: No, I don't like biography.
[SPEAKER_06]: Really?
[SPEAKER_06]: That was my favorite as a kid, and that's what kind of veered me off into that direction.
[SPEAKER_06]: Even the fiction I write deals with some sort of historical fiction because I like the actual people during the actual time period.
[SPEAKER_06]: There's nobody over the course of your life for you were like, that was, it was that interesting that I would kill to write that person's body.
[SPEAKER_03]: Not write it.
[SPEAKER_03]: So biographies are tough for me, the same reason the biopics are tough for me, which is a life isn't inherently structured
[SPEAKER_03]: Right, and so there's certain moments that rise to that, like Oscar Wilde's trial, Oscar Wilde was tried for being basically gay in court.
[SPEAKER_03]: And the entire time that he was on the stand, he acted like Oscar Wilde.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so that court case in his life plays, it's a perfect play, it's like in her at the wind, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: It was a moment that was structured out, or the story that you wrote about Washington Cross in the Delaware.
[SPEAKER_03]: So there's episodes for me that are fascinating.
[SPEAKER_03]: But the biopics picks that I like the best is, you remember walked the line that was about June, Johnny Cash?
[SPEAKER_03]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_03]: With respect.
[SPEAKER_06]: With respect.
[SPEAKER_03]: So that's structured around their relationship and love story.
[SPEAKER_03]: So it has a structured aspect to it.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so I'd be much more likely to write about an incident in a historical incident than I would a biography.
[SPEAKER_04]: Well, I mean, that's so you can still write the character.
[SPEAKER_04]: It's the story of Johnny Cash's life was his pursuit of June Carter.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, you can still get into that.
[SPEAKER_03]: Exactly.
[SPEAKER_03]: But you're not doing right like when you see something, and then there's always the scroll.
[SPEAKER_03]: Like you live 10 more years in one in Oscar.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: Ascans are, you're like, what just happened?
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, you're popped out of it.
[SPEAKER_06]: Well, if you didn't say that, because most of the movies now are focusing on one section of the life.
[SPEAKER_06]: And then they're out of there.
[SPEAKER_06]: My wife and I just watched the Bruce Springsteen one.
[SPEAKER_06]: And it's set up upon Nebraska, but it was like, oh, born in the USA and all that stuff was right afterwards.
[SPEAKER_06]: What happened then?
[SPEAKER_06]: But they're all structured on one aspect of their life.
[SPEAKER_06]: Maybe that's why.
[SPEAKER_03]: There's two stories screenplays.
[SPEAKER_03]: They read them as screenplays that I based on historical incidents.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I'll say what they are and then I think you'll get, you'll understand what I'm saying.
[SPEAKER_03]: So one of them was,
[SPEAKER_03]: James Meredith, when he was at Ole Miss, he's the one who broke the segregation there.
[SPEAKER_03]: Ole Miss used to have rallies that look like two-clutch grand rallies.
[SPEAKER_03]: It was crazy.
[SPEAKER_03]: And he went off and fought in World War II.
[SPEAKER_03]: And he came back fully American applied to Ole Miss.
[SPEAKER_03]: He didn't say what his race was.
[SPEAKER_03]: They accepted him.
[SPEAKER_03]: And then he said, like, surprise and black, and I'm coming to school.
[SPEAKER_03]: And they shut down and they said, absolutely not.
[SPEAKER_03]: And then he called up the Kennedy's,
[SPEAKER_03]: noise and movement towards civil rights.
[SPEAKER_03]: And he was like, well, if you mean what you say, that he kind of put them on a collision course to prove what it was that he needed.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so here they go, they're going down to to there, the entire state police are there.
[SPEAKER_03]: There's blocked right.
[SPEAKER_03]: And then eventually at one point, they had to roll the national guard and they went in.
[SPEAKER_03]: There was full writing.
[SPEAKER_03]: People were shot.
[SPEAKER_03]: The US marshals went with him.
[SPEAKER_03]: They enlisted him.
[SPEAKER_03]: They went to his room that night.
[SPEAKER_03]: There was shooting people still acid from the chemistry lab.
[SPEAKER_03]: We're throwing it on people.
[SPEAKER_03]: By the time they rolled tanks, they'd thrown the street signs off.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's so nobody could find him.
[SPEAKER_03]: And the U.S. marshals enlisted him the next morning.
[SPEAKER_03]: His smoke was clearing.
[SPEAKER_03]: And there were soldiers there.
[SPEAKER_03]: And tanks enmoved it and walked up.
[SPEAKER_03]: And registered him.
[SPEAKER_03]: And he signed his name.
[SPEAKER_03]: And the United States Marshall service stayed with him.
[SPEAKER_03]: 24 hours a day, seven days a week for three years.
[SPEAKER_03]: So he graduated.
[SPEAKER_03]: Wow.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's amazing story.
[SPEAKER_03]: Then later in life, there's all this weird stuff happening.
[SPEAKER_03]: He became like a strong, thermon fan and became very far conservative and then he got like shot at a rally.
[SPEAKER_03]: All these other weird disparate things happened to him that continued to be of noted and notable life.
[SPEAKER_03]: But for me, that was a story and that was a moment in time that I would write.
[SPEAKER_06]: Interesting.
[SPEAKER_06]: Now, as I've been like, you know, as far as your agent goes, anybody pitched you ideas that you've turned down, we're like, all right, well, I'm sorry I'm working on this, and I can't get to that, but I loved it, and I wish I had the time to do this.
[SPEAKER_03]: No, I'll always add the time if I would love to do something.
[SPEAKER_03]: I believe in just stacking disciplines.
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, I've said yet, yes, just so much stuff.
[SPEAKER_03]: that I've no idea how I'll do it, but then you do it.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's the same way that if you want something done, you give it to someone who's busy, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so if I can get up that gallop, if all the things are that compelling to me, I have gotten more choosey about what I will focus and put enough, put my time and passion into.
[SPEAKER_03]: Sure.
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, in driven towards, but if something sounds amazing, I'm going to do it.
[SPEAKER_06]: Well, like, out of your fans, this is something that you wish Greg would write.
[SPEAKER_06]: You're like, hey, I would love to see this.
[SPEAKER_03]: What was the last one I'm sorry, candy, a whole series about candy McLaren that is orphan V that is she's like cat woman is Batman, what will you say man?
[SPEAKER_06]: Oh, can you or for next books the last book you are for next book is the last one she wants to read and that's it That's the kindest thing anyone's ever said to me in my life That's amazing, but yeah, because we've all got our favorite authors in this life We always say would give a shot at something whatever that something is and I'm always curious about it Right now the current winner Hollywood is Quentin Tarantino in Star Trek
[SPEAKER_06]: So they want him to direct the last Star Trek movie and write it and everything else.
[SPEAKER_06]: Well, he gave it a go, and he goes, man, I'm worried about screwing this off.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_06]: So I don't know if I want to piss off the fan base or anything else, like that's a difficult decision.
[SPEAKER_03]: that happened when I wrote Batman for two years for DC and I've written Moon Knight and I've written Punisher and I've written Wolverine and there's a there is definitely a pressure because you know when I'm before I was born there was Batman and when I'm dead and gone there's going to be Batman.
[SPEAKER_03]: my dad read Batman and like this is it's a public trust and so at the same time when it was handed to me my job is to infuse myself into it to infuse new life into it but you can't go you can't go too far and make it your own because you're dealing with something that is it belongs to the public it's beloved.
[SPEAKER_03]: So it's very different than writing here.
[SPEAKER_04]: I mean, you couldn't turn Batman into a gunfighter because that breaks his code.
[SPEAKER_03]: Right.
[SPEAKER_03]: And there's funny stuff too.
[SPEAKER_03]: Like somebody said, my editor, this leaked, and it became a big controversy that a ton of people made fun of from the early-day memes.
[SPEAKER_03]: But it was like Batman never sits down.
[SPEAKER_03]: And you're like, that's sort of that you're like, wait a minute.
[SPEAKER_03]: Like, you never see Batman sitting down.
[SPEAKER_03]: He's got to go for a bathroom.
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, Batman's got to go for a bathroom.
[SPEAKER_03]: This gentleman's got a crush.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, good.
[SPEAKER_02]: a good job of making Batman realistic, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: You have the orphaned kind of story with, you know, Jack Jones and Alfred many more type things, you know, and you know, can the clerk kind of puts out a very, very like, you know, the big reason and doing rather than that thing, you know?
[SPEAKER_02]: That's an interesting observation.
[SPEAKER_04]: Well, thank you.
[SPEAKER_04]: Well, he's also wealthy, I guess.
[SPEAKER_03]: So he's got all of that.
[SPEAKER_03]: Batman?
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, what's fun?
[SPEAKER_04]: Evan's smoke.
[SPEAKER_03]: Evan's smoke too.
[SPEAKER_03]: I didn't want to bother having him ever have to figure out a pay for anything.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm like, that's not a consideration.
[SPEAKER_03]: I want to play with.
[SPEAKER_03]: He's your heir.
[SPEAKER_03]: He's got a very unique set of skills.
[SPEAKER_03]: What's interesting about that, and thank you.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's very kind thing to say.
[SPEAKER_06]: Well, it is his name, by the way.
[SPEAKER_06]: And one of ours.
[SPEAKER_06]: Sorry, we have a mic on you.
[SPEAKER_03]: When I was writing Batman, what I got fascinated with when I was approaching that was that Batman, what I love about Batman is he can't fly like Superman, he does never ring like the green lantern, he can't make shit, there's no magic.
[SPEAKER_03]: He is the finest extent of what human endeavor can be.
[SPEAKER_03]: He's the best trained, he has the best weapons, he went to Tibet and he had to
[SPEAKER_03]: So he is perfect, he's close to human perfection, but he doesn't have any superpowers, he doesn't have any magical capabilities.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so he's close to perfect as you can be, but he doesn't have any intimacy.
[SPEAKER_03]: His parents were both shot when he's young, it's what drives him.
[SPEAKER_03]: There's Robin, but Robin's always getting killed, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: He's got girlfriends, they're always getting killed, and so I pushed him played with that a lot.
[SPEAKER_03]: And when I wrote the Penguin, I kind of reinvented the Penguin for
[SPEAKER_03]: the new 52 universe.
[SPEAKER_03]: That was my expertise was was writing a lot of the villains.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so that's a template that was used through the Gotham TV show and the Penguin series a bit.
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, they brought a ton of new stuff to it, obviously, but it was in there.
[SPEAKER_03]: But if you're the penguin, then Batman's a bully.
[SPEAKER_03]: And that was another way to flip it.
[SPEAKER_03]: Like, he's short, he's unattractive, right, penguins this whole thing, and Batman flies in and breaks four guys jaws, and, you know, sweeps out of there.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so it was really fun to play with that notion a lot, to, it was almost like a, like, a practice session to get up to, when, and then when I was writing Orphanax, I was writing Evan, I was thinking about a lot of the ways to have him not have to be frozen in perfection, but to start to yield perfection to all that messiness of human intimacy.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so it's almost starts where Batman would end, right?
[SPEAKER_06]: And when you're working on something like Batman, I'm curious.
[SPEAKER_06]: Do you watch every iteration of it?
[SPEAKER_06]: Because let's take the Penguin, for example, on HBO.
[SPEAKER_06]: It was fantastic.
[SPEAKER_06]: Do you watch that and be like, oh man, I wish I would have done that or this to this to this.
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, no, I have a cool relationship with that one because they've referenced that they base parts of that on my comic.
[SPEAKER_03]: So that's really cool.
[SPEAKER_03]: And then when it came out, the New York Times hired me and they wrapped the New York Times in a fake wrap that was the Gotham Gazette, which is like their sleazy New York Post magazine.
[SPEAKER_03]: Oh, that's awesome.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I wrote all the copy and we wrote ads from like the flood from the last movie.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I put all my calls, roommates, names, in different stories.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so I wrote this whole app.
[SPEAKER_03]: that was the rapid addition on that.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I have that framed at home with my with my penguin comics.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's amazing.
[SPEAKER_03]: What a dream.
[SPEAKER_03]: It was cool.
[SPEAKER_03]: Because you feel like if you do it right, you get to participate in this ecosystem.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so you put stuff in, they've made their own show.
[SPEAKER_03]: He's his own penguin.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's all amazing.
[SPEAKER_03]: But they draw on some of that stuff.
[SPEAKER_03]: And that's really special.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's a cool thing to be able to have played with.
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, for me, like I'm not a big gigantic comic book guy, but when my wife and I'll watch the Penguin, it didn't feel anything like a comic book, it felt like the sopranos.
[SPEAKER_06]: Where it was just a different iteration of this story, you're continuing it, you're trying to tell something completely different, and unique than everybody else is done in the past.
[SPEAKER_06]: If you need to work really great, or it can bomb horrifically, which we've seen back and forth.
[SPEAKER_03]: Always work taking a jump though.
[SPEAKER_03]: It isn't it?
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, not to be too on the nose, but those anti-hero stories are my favorite because it's not about again, and similar to great thriller writing in my opinion, it's not about the action, it's about discovering who this person is and what their motivation for doing these things are.
[SPEAKER_04]: That's the baseline, and then the follow-up is how does this person progress to meet the new need?
[SPEAKER_04]: Whatever it happens to be.
[SPEAKER_04]: You know, I think that's that's the thing that I like most about your writing specifically.
[SPEAKER_03]: Thanks, man.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, look at that, dude.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: This is good.
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, we ended it.
[SPEAKER_03]: We started off rough gentlemen, but I feel like we're ending on a more.
[SPEAKER_03]: I thought we started off fine.
[SPEAKER_06]: Okay, sorry.
[SPEAKER_06]: The audience needs to know when you're going to end this.
[SPEAKER_06]: All right.
[SPEAKER_06]: We got to know.
[SPEAKER_06]: For I can know how long I can stay alive for Christ's six.
[SPEAKER_06]: I got to call my doctor tomorrow.
[SPEAKER_06]: My birth certificate has an expiration date on it, so I'm good.
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, his does.
[SPEAKER_06]: So I got to know.
[SPEAKER_06]: But now it's the one that's show we get to the drinking bro the week, which is someone who has inspired you or helps you become the person you are today.
[SPEAKER_06]: Is there a writer or a mentor that has helped inspire you for all of these book series and everything else you do in life?
[SPEAKER_06]: Who is that person for you?
[SPEAKER_03]: The one who I didn't meet, but very much,
[SPEAKER_03]: is who I'm reading in the middle of one of his books now is Robert B. Parker, who wrote the Spencer for her series.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I'm so dumb.
[SPEAKER_03]: I didn't realize this till like a year ago.
[SPEAKER_03]: But one of things he did that was so amazing with Spencer is that he took the notion of the hard-bitten PI, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: The James M. Kane Raymond Chandler, Dashall Hammett.
[SPEAKER_03]: Down these mean streets, a man must go who is himself not mean the hard and noirish aspect.
[SPEAKER_03]: And in Spencer, he put him in the real world.
[SPEAKER_03]: So Spencer, he cooks.
[SPEAKER_03]: He's like, you know, super emotionally savvy.
[SPEAKER_03]: He references a ton of stuff from English literature.
[SPEAKER_03]: His girlfriend is a Jewish psychotherapist.
[SPEAKER_03]: Like there's all those weird stuff that all of a sudden happened.
[SPEAKER_03]: And that's very much what I realized that I'm trying to do with Evan Smoke, where he's starting at a point where he's like, let's say Batman or like an archetypal character, but he recognizes, oh wait a minute, I'm panochio, but I don't want to be panochio.
[SPEAKER_03]: Um, and so Robert B. Parker for sure, and then in terms of friendships, I'm very close with Robert Cres, um, and he's been great, and he, he's a wonderful writer, uh, wonderful L.A. crime fiction, you know, Elvis Cole, Joe Pike series, and he also has been really, really good to me through my career.
[SPEAKER_03]: He blurt me, uh, when I was a baby writer, and I, he actually brought me into his agent when I was switching agents, and so that's been a really close relationship for me.
[SPEAKER_06]: That's awesome.
[SPEAKER_06]: Well, hey, congratulations on the new book.
[SPEAKER_06]: It is anti-hero.
[SPEAKER_06]: It is out now.
[SPEAKER_06]: If you want to get them to sign it, come on up afterwards.
[SPEAKER_06]: You're welcome to it.
[SPEAKER_06]: If you like our show, go to iTunes, write it a five star and leave a quick review.
[SPEAKER_06]: Also, head over to Spotify, just a five star and you can walk away for David Anthony Holloway.
[SPEAKER_06]: Greg, her with some Ross Patterson, this is the drinking rose pot cast.
[SPEAKER_06]: Good.