November 19, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Dr. Kent: Welcome back to Sound Authors. Today is July 11, 2008. The next guest I have on the show is Laura Duksta. She wrote a book called I Love You More. It was on the New York Times bestseller list for awhile. It’s a flipside book and on the front she says Flipside book, like love, it never ends. Today on the show Laura is going to be talking to us about her book and then at the end she’ll be speaking to us about her music as well, or we could mix it up a little bit. But this will be a great honor speaking to the author Laura Duksta of I Love You More. Welcome to the show.
Laura Duksta: Thank you Kent thanks for having me.
Dr. Kent: Tell me a little bit about the success this book has had.
Laura Duksta: I self published it to start off with. I was a bartender with no real good idea what to do with my life after graduating from college and one night I had the idea for this book where it kind of came to me as divine inspiration. I was saying a prayer for my sister and nephew and all of a sudden this idea just flooded my being.
It was one of those ideas that wasn’t going away so I decided to self publish it after I had sent it out to a few agents and a few publishers and got a handful of nos. We self published the book and we sold 179,000 copies. Then last year it got picked up by Source Books Jabberwocky, their new children’s imprint and they re-released it and now our numbers are up to I believe 250,000 and like you said we hit the New York Times bestseller list three times.
Dr. Kent: How do you do that with a self published book?
Laura Duksta: The numbers; like one of the things we were able to do as a self published author and the way that we did it we kind of remained under the radar so we were this best selling book that nobody knew about. Not nobody but this is one of the tips that I like to pass on to authors, one of the things that really resonated with me when I was learning about the process. They said one of the toughest, not worst places, but one of the toughest places to sell your book especially if you’re a self published author is a bookstore.
One self published authors they have the bookstores have so many books from the publishers that they already work with to deal with that its hard to get your title in there and then its hard to get seen, even when you’re with a publisher. So the advice that I heard was find your niche, consider who your market is and then find out where they are. It was really just another I think divine moment of inspiration or divine intervention I should say that had me go into a they actually happened to be the number one American craft gallery that year. Seldom Seen Gallery on Source Boulevard.
I walked my book in there with every ounce of courage I had and I said, “I have this book and I live down the street and would you like to carry it? He said, “Well I don’t really carry books.” And I said, “Oh, I just got an endorsement from Wayne Dyer,” he said, “I don’t really much like Wayne Dyer.” I was like well if you can just stick it with some of the other artists you have and he took a look at it and said “Okay, I’ll take ten copies just as long as if they don’t sell I can give them back to you.” I said no problem. Three days later he had sold the ten copies; it was like from Monday to Thursday. He took another 12, I know fully believing that I had sent my friends and family in to purchase those first ten. But he sold those 12 by Monday and then he called me and said how do these books come and I told him they came in cases of 40. He said bring me in 40 and come sit in my office.
He started giving me the names of gallery owners and gift shops across the country that were taking 40, 80, sometimes 160 copies at a time and selling this as one of the only books in their store. It’s just a really special message, one that parents want to share with their children; grandparents want to share with their children. And then because the title of my book I Love You More, people would say, oh my goodness that’s what my mother always used to say to me, and they would buy one for their 80 year old mother or 45 year old children. What was so ideal about this market for us was that people that would never end up in the children’s section of a bookstore were seeing our book and the title and the message and buying multiple copies and sharing our message and our book all over the world.
Dr. Kent: You talk about your message. What exactly is your message?
Laura Duksta: This is another one of the things that I kind of learned in self development, human potential world that I was studying was have a mission or a cause greater than yourself. Ever since I was a child I remember being like seven or eight years old. I felt this strong connection with St. Francis and somehow knew that I was meant to travel the world, meet my brothers, and spread the message of love.
So when we came up with the idea that we were going to self publish the book, I said alright lets create a vision that is so great that we can kind of live and play too so we created the mission of the possibility of generating the conversation of love around the world. That was another thing that really helped us sell the book when I was talking to store owners, I’d show up sometimes unexpected all over the country and I’d tell them we have this book and our mission is to generate the conversation of love around the world, they were really moved by that and I think they liked the book and the message and the illustrations are beautiful. So I think they got really excited about helping to bring that conversation of love into their stores, into the lives of their customers and then into the world.
Dr. Kent: So I’m intrigued by you say you had a connection to St. Francis and I believe isn’t he the fellow who in the middle of the church took off all his clothes, gave them back to his father and said “Now I’ve paid you back for what you’ve given me,” and went off into the woods and took care of people and animals? Is that the same guy?
Laura Duksta: Yeah it is and I like to sometimes say that I’m like; well I have to add more. Like St. Francis meets Wayne Dyer meets Dr. Seuss and I have to come up with some jet set gypsy multi-billionaire. Because I resonate with St. Francis though instead of walking the earth in my sandals I think I would like to be flying around in my private jet instead and I do believe that anything is possible, but yes he is the patron saint of animals. He was known for walking the world in his sandals but yeah a little bit crazy and I can’t say that I’m not.
Dr. Kent: Now I want to ask you at the very beginning of your website you explain that you don’t have hair. Obviously in all promotional pictures you proudly show yourself the way you are. What does that have to do with your message of love, the book itself, any of that?
Laura Duksta: One of the things I guess is I had the opportunity to do so many radio interviews, which are great. What your listeners can’t see is that as you said I have absolutely no hair. I have a condition or disease called alopecia arietta that I got when I was 11 years old. I had long brown hair waving down my back and my hair slowly started falling out to the point that I had none and had to wear wigs. I wore wigs for 19 years and never let anyone see me without a wig on. I just became very introverted and shy and probably very depressed.
It was after I had the idea for the book I kind of just out of nowhere and its ten years ago this week, my 30th birthday I decided I wasn’t going to wear wigs anymore. I didn’t know how connected the book and its message and the decision to stop wearing wigs really was until I started to experience it. It really freed me up so much creatively. It gave me this experience no longer always wondering if people knew, when I was going to tell them, I hadn’t realized how much of my life was consumed by this almost like this thing I was keeping a secret.
So not only that but then I started going into schools to talk about my book, my mother was the kindergarten teacher I was like okay this is great I’m going to go and read my book in her classroom and the first thing that every five year old will say to you is “Hey lady, how come you have no hair?” so really quickly it began and the funny thing is what I realize is adults will sit there and wonder and they might not ask but you could talk to them for 30 minutes or three hours and they may not hear anything you say because they’re wondering is it cancer? Oh she’s so young; oh my sister had cancer without getting a question answered.
So I really turned my school programs into something that we call self esteem through love, empowering our children to shine. The first thing that I address is why I have no hair and that’s really important. Simple, though not always easy lesson to just be yourself but we learn from kindergarten and sometimes I really think we spend our whole lives learning to embrace.
Dr. Kent: You’re lucky you don’t really have any strange lumps on your head. I think if I didn’t have hair I would look pretty horrible but you have a good looking head.
Laura Duksta: Thank you. So many people say that and its kind of a joke in the bald community that you know God made a few perfect heads and the rest he put hair on. Who knew?
Dr. Kent: It also explains all the times your parents dropped you come out once you don’t have hair.
Laura Duksta: It’s been a real blessing.
Dr. Kent: Tell me a little about the movement. I know you have a web presence beyond your website lauraduksta.com. You have an expanding interest in helping people and things like that. How are you doing that?
Laura Duksta: The internet is so fascinating and I think one of the things that really helps is like what I said. I want to travel the world, meet my brothers and sisters and spread the message of love. Generate the conversation of love around the world. One day I’m sitting in front of my computer. I have a social network called cocreatingourreality.com and I’m sitting there and connecting with people all over the world and all of a suddenly realized that this isn’t exactly how I planned to travel the world and meet my brothers and sisters but how amazing the internet is that it can connect us as in your program with people from all over the world. It’s just a phenomenal entity.
So I have several websites and it’s just so brilliant that you can get your music out there, your message out there, products out there, people can download products in Australia if they’re interested in being an author. I’ve got transcripts and mp3s on self publishing and how to market your book successfully. As I said, I have an amazing community that I started with two other women called cocreatingourreality.com and we started that a few years ago and after the release of the secret and especially after their appearances on Oprah our community really took off and I would say we’ve got close to 2,000 members who are setting intentions, goals and co-creating the life of their dreams using universal laws and principles, which I really believe.
With how, generate the success of our book especially self published and now we’re with a publisher. A couple on MySpace, we got Lauradukstamusic and the I love you more book tour and we’ve also got lauraduksta.com and my illustrator has a website, we call ourselves hippie and the bald chick.
Dr. Kent: I was about to ask you about the hippieandthebaldchick.com website. That’s pretty fun. Can you talk about your illustrator? The illustrations are gorgeous of course. How did you end up teaming up to write this? She’s obviously your original illustrator?
Laura Duksta: Yes and she and I were friends from our bartending days in South Beach on Miami’s infamous Ocean Drive at the Clevelander Hotel. I had gotten the book done and one friend thought that he would illustrate it for me but his career really started taking off by the time I had it done and I was looking for a mutual friends name or number who I knew as an artist and Karen said, “Well, why? What do you have there?” I said, well I wrote this book about love and she said I remember as clear as day. “I might not be a famous artist but I know what love looks like to a five year old.”
She pulled out a bag of pastel chalks she’d gotten at yard sale for 50 cents and she said I’m sure if we sit down together we can do these pictures. She started drawing these beautiful pictures that do have this child-like quality and softness and beauty to them that are I believe are really genius; they’re just gorgeous. I kind of laughed like who would have thought after seven years of bartending that hippie and the bald chick would be sitting here writing a book about love.
Dr. Kent: The book itself is a flip book. You flip it over on the other side it also says I Love You More, it also says New York Times Bestseller and there’s a picture of you see the child and on the front cover you see the mother but it’s the same picture on the front and on the back. Where did you get that idea? Was that her idea, yours?
Laura Duksta: Yes this book was really a collaboration, one with spirit. Like I said I was praying for my sister and something clearly answered me and said your sister is fine, pray for your nephew. I began praying for my nephew. Well first of all I said that’s strange. But as I began praying for my nephew this whole idea for the book came to me and it was just all these different random ideas. I love you more than spaghetti and meatballs, I love you more than chocolate milk, and then gradually over the next few months, several months actually, I began to put it into a book format.
The first person that I showed it to after it was done and I was certain that it was fabulous. I showed it to my mom who was a kindergarten teacher for 38 years. She said honey its great and we argued and she says but; we argue that she says she said and, and she’s probably right, she said “And if you really want this young audience, teachers and parents to love this book it really should rhyme.” So when I first wrote the book it didn’t rhyme. I huffed and puffed a little bit but I went back to my office and rewrote it so that it rhymed and then I showed it to my sister who has four children.
So she had read a few children’s books in her life and she said oh this is a really great book but I think at the time it was called The Story Between A Mother And A Son, but it was just read like a regular book and every other page was mother, son, mother, son. She said I think this would make a really great flip book if you took out the son’s story and took out the mother’s story and have them meet in the middle. I thought it was a really great idea and will make the book unique. What I see with the students when I go into a classroom visit is that how many drafts, how many rewrites it actually took to get it to look just the way it does.
When my sister said this would make a really good flip book I had to pull out the two stories. That meant I had to go back and rewrite the entire book to make it rhyme again; that was how we made it a flip book. And then when we self published it, it actually had the exact same cover on the front and the back. Then together with our publisher we came up with the idea of putting the mothers face so that you see it on the front cover because its her sharing with her son or child how much she loves him or her and then when you flip it over it’s the child story so you see the child’s face. And that’s what the message of the book is, the story of a love shared between a mother and a child.
On the one side you’ve got the boy saying mommy, just how much do you love me? And she’d say things like I love you longer than the longest path ever wound; I love you prettier than the prettiest flower ever found and then when you flip the book over the mother asks the child, well just how much do you love me? He responds more childlike things like rocket ships, lollipops, kites and bubbles.
Dr. Kent: It truly is a beautiful book but lets talk a little about you have another life; well you have many lives. You can sell some self publishing and things like that. You’re a speaker of course, you talked about that. You’re also a musician and this show features authors of sound as well as sound authors. So I’d like to play an entire track from you called We Are One. Can you tell me a little about that song?
Laura Duksta: Thanks and I love the way you just phrased that. Authors of sound, that’s gorgeous. I’ve been trying to figure out singer/songwriter musical artist but artist of sound is beautiful. We Are One came about when you hear the words you will see that it really resonates with the message of generating the conversation of love around the world and really believing that we are all brothers and sisters and it’s a little bit of a wake up call to get back to that awareness.
Dr. Kent: Let’s listen to the entire track, We Are One, by Laura Duksta.
[Music 19:03 – 23:16]
Dr. Kent: There it was, We Are One by Laura Duksta. Tell me a little bit about your music career.
Laura Duksta: Actually this is just kind of getting, I’m still in the inquiry I guess really of what this next stage is going to look like. I have a company called I Shine Inc. As I said our mission is to generate the conversation of love around the world through books, music, speaking, TV, film and the web. So this is my first step into the music arena. I always had it in my heart when I was young and I wanted to sing and I think I actually remember an older and much cooler cousin of mine told me you don’t sing, you say the words.
I don’t even know if they said you can’t sing or you’re not a good singer, but I just kind of shut down that dream for a long time. Then a few years ago I said you know what? I think its time to revisit that. I wrote twelve songs, got into a studio, found an amazing group of partners that were producers that really helped me with the music and getting it out there and a little bit with my voice. We’re still working on that a little bit and I really wanted to create music with a message.
Not necessarily a children CD, I’d like to say our book is a book about love presented as a children’s book because it certainly is a children’s book but the message is for everyone. So a lot of people ask me about the music and ask me if it’s a children’s CD and I say no, its adult contemporary but its one you can listen to with your children. All of the songs have some sort of message about life, human potential and of course love.
Dr. Kent: Well it’s been a real pleasure speaking with you. The book is called I Love You More. Of course that’s been on the New York Times Bestseller list. Do you have any more books in the hopper? Are you thinking about writing some more?
Laura Duksta: Yes, Karen and I are doing another book together called Purple Potatoes, which doesn’t have a release date yet. And then I’ll be doing another book, the fourth book with Jabberwocky, which will be released next fall. Again it’s a children’s picture book but the message will certainly be for all my brothers and sisters.
Dr. Kent: Wonderful. I’d love to listen to one more track after we find out we can go to your website lauraduksta.com, and we can Google you on the web as hippie and the bald chick, there’s your MySpace page, there’s tons of things. What do you have planned in the near future? Are you on tour?
Laura Duksta: Well actually, this summer I have the next two months to write my next book that will be released next fall. So that’s first and biggest on my plate. Then really just stepping into looking at how to get my music and my message out to the world so I appreciate this opportunity you’ve just given me today.
Dr. Kent: We’re going to play one more track. Would you like to hear They Say or Expose?
Laura Duksta: They Say is a little dancey. So let’s show them that, this is good for dance music in the clubs and we’ve gotten a good response from that one.
Dr. Kent: Perfect; it’s been a pleasure speaking with Laura Duksta. Her website again is lauraduksta.com. Thanks for being on the show.
Laura Duksta: Thank you Dr. Kent have a bright and blessed lifetime.
Dr. Kent: This is They Say from Laura Duksta.
[Music 27:05 – 31:03]
Dr. Kent: Thanks for tuning in today to Sound Authors. It was a real pleasure speaking with John Straley, Peter Webb and Laura Duksta. Special thanks to Jody Walls, Amber Bean; see you next week.
November 18, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Dr. Kent: Welcome back to Sound Authors. Today is July 11, 2008. My next guest on the show has a book called Rainbow’s End. His name is Peter Webb and welcome to the show.
Peter Webb: I’m pleased to be there.
Dr. Kent: So the back of your book the Rainbows End says “To err is human, to forgive, divine.” Tell me a little bit about what this story is about.
Peter Webb: I guess it’s when I was a young boy and I was at war with all the adults in the world. I had made some decisions that were not very good. Later on in life I realized that I was being a little obstinate too and it took 25 years for me to realize that I should forgive someone and in return they forgave me, which was like purifying to the soul I guess.
Dr. Kent: So you grew in England with five siblings during the Second World War and that’s something not many of us have even thought about that outside of the few stories we’ve heard. Can you tell us a little about that?
Peter Webb: Well yes it was, as a young child and I was pretty young at the time, somewhat exciting for us to see the airplanes coming over, seeing the dogfights in the blue sky above. When the attack on London started, that was the time we started to worry. We had an indoor shelter and we all ran inside and huddled together until the air raid sirens gave us the clearance to come outside.
One time we were in there, there was this awful bang and we saw all the plaster on the ceiling crack. That was one of the German airplanes that was shot down and landed in a school yard about 50 yards away. After that incident we were sent to North Wales to get out of the target area. That’s as much as I remember about the actual battle.
Dr. Kent: Your book itself; you’ve written before, you have some novels. Why did you write this book? From that point on, from this raid of London, you tell a story about your life; you end up in Canada. Why do you tell your autobiography?
Peter Webb: Well I guess really it was a selfish thing in that after 25 years separation from my father, I decided that I’d wasted a whole lot of interaction so I wanted to actually get rid of some of the demons as it were and in doing this, probably I wrote and said things that were probably better not said. But it did give me a sense of satisfaction that I had faced up to my talks and made peace before my father passed away.
Dr. Kent: How difficult is it to write an autobiography. There’s many people out there that have experienced things with their lives. What was that process like for you?
Peter Webb: The most difficult part was my need to unburden my emotional package. I had carried that for far too many years and as I said, perhaps I bared my soul more than was necessary; however, in doing so I discovered some very important attributes that passed me by in my earlier years.
Dr. Kent: Let’s say someone is going through the process of writing a book. What did you do? Did you sit down and say okay, this happened to me, that happened to me? Did you create a plan before hand? What was your great method?
Peter Webb: To sit down and write a biography of course you’ve got to have a plan and you have to have your milestones to make the story flow. It’s a little different when you’re writing novels but I guess the most difficult part was writing about my faults with the same enthusiasm as I wrote about my achievements.
Dr. Kent: Let’s talk about the book itself. It’s an autobiography and you invite the reader to join you in your journey. What kind of messages do you convey to the reader?
Peter Webb: There are a number of messages applied to almost everyone. It’s really come to mind as important and the first is the power of forgiveness. That is what purifies your soul. To forgive a person is not to acquiesce; it’s really a divine act. The second is to avoid building up an emotional package that over time can result in damage to your personality. The third and it is important, have the courage to step up to the plate and prompt the challenges and make an honest assessment of your work to society.
Dr. Kent: It’s been a real honor speaking with you. Peter Webb is the author of Rainbows End. We can find it online. It was published by Outskirts Press. It’s available around the world, it’s a fascinating book about self discovery and Peter Webb also has three novels; Mallard Island, The Castleport Murders and the Chatham Incident. We’ll check you out on the web and I really appreciate you being on the show.
November 17, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Dr. Kent: Welcome to Sound Authors! Today is Friday, July 11, 2008. Today is the day that Apple is releasing the second version of the I-Phone. A bunch of things happened in history on this day; it’s always fun to check those out. The pope in 1533 excommunicated England’s King Henry VIII; very pertinent to today’s show. Maybe not, but E.B. White, an author of essays and children’s books was born in 1899. It’s been 109 years since then and he was a testament to writing. I’ve got three authors and one musician on the show today as always; it’s an exciting show. My first guest will be a fellow from Alaska who writes mysteries. My second guest is someone named Peter Webb; he has a book called Rainbows End. My third and fourth guest is a woman named Laura Duksta; she has a New York Times bestselling children’s book and she’s also a musician. So we’ll be featuring her on both of those segments. And now my first guest. His name is John Straley; he’s published with Alaska Northwest Books. His latest book is The Big Both Ways. Welcome to the show John.
John Straley: Well thank you, it’s great to be with you.
Dr. Kent: Tell me a little bit about how you got to this point? How did you start writing novels about Alaska from where you sit as a private investigator of a small town in Alaska?
John Straley: Well I grew up moving all around the country when my dad worked for the phone company when I was growing up. I ended up working in the woods in northeastern Washington and I fell in love with the story telling that you hear out in the woods and around campfires. I ended up getting a degree in writing and English literature in Washington and in 1977 I got married, graduated from college, got married and moved to Sitka, Alaska in 1977 with my wife and everything happened to me that summer.
I kept working in the woods, writing different things. I wrote essays and poetry and just by hook and crook I ended up getting a job as a private investigator tracking people down, talking to people and I thought since I’d always loved this story telling I thought I’d give that a try. In 1993 I published The Woman Who Married A Bear, which won a Shamus Award that private eye writers of America best first novel that year. Since then I’ve just kept writing, kept working. I’m the current writer laureate of Alaska appointed by the Governor and I’ve got a book of poetry coming out with the University of Alaska Press in September. So things have been good this year for me.
Dr. Kent: So as a writer out there in Alaska, do you feel like its really shapes the way you write as opposed to if you’re sitting in a cubicle in New York City.
John Straley: Oh yeah. I mean I love writing about Alaska. I mean the place, the setting, the wildness of the country, the wildness of the characters that come here. It’s just a perfect natural setting for a mystery. Now if you think of Raymond Chandlers mysteries about Los Angeles after the Second World War, it had all that mood and atmosphere and mysteriousness. I think southeastern Alaska, which is where I live, is the reigning country. Boardwalk towns, lots of fog, lots of desperate characters who maybe running their path living on the edge to the wilderness. It just has tremendous mood and atmosphere and I love writing about it.
Dr. Kent: So I lived for a little while in the Cascade Mountains of Washington State in a tiny little village and it was not that far away from the TV show Northern Exposure. It was a bit odd and people got a little stir crazy in winter. Is it a little bit like that up where you are? Are people a little different than elsewhere?
John Straley: Oh yeah, I mean I live in a town which is on an island. Sitka, Alaska is on Baranof Island. We have about 15 miles of main road. There’s 8900 people that live here. We get more than 100 inches of rain and the winters are not as cold as they are further north but its dark and we’re on the island all together so people get grouchy. It’s similar where I live to the Cascades. I lived in Washington; I lived in the Methow Valley in a place called Winthrop. I lived there and it used to be the end of the road up there in Winthrop. When I left there in the 60s and 70s. But yeah, people at these end of the road communities, isolated communities, they get a little grouchy and hence some of our crimes sort of involve this cabin fever.
Dr. Kent: Tell me a little about your characters in this book. Its kind of the cover shows how the book itself is a little bit different than most mysteries. The characters have great names. Tell me a little bit about a couple of your main characters here.
John Straley: I have a series, an earlier series, that feature Cecil Younger and those are for the contemporary private eye novels and there’s six of those. The Big Both Ways is my seventh novel and it’s a departure from the series. It’s a historical novel set in 1935. It starts in the Cascade Mountains and a logger whose down on his luck named Slippery Wilson. He decides to quit working in the woods and he’s hitchhiking to Seattle and this is early spring 1935. He gets picked up by a woman who ends up having a corpse in the trunk of her car.
That crime leads them into all kinds of trouble down on the docks in Seattle and they have to get into a dory, a small boat and row north up through the inside package. They get picked up by boats and they’re being chased along the way by union organizers and by the Seattle detectives. So Ellie Hobbes is the woman and she has her niece named Annabelle. So its Slippery and Annabelle and Ellie are all in this dory and Annabelle is a ten year old girl and she has a birdcage with her little cockatiel in it. So it cuts quite a good figure of this boat rowing up the narrow fjords of the Inland Passage with these three wild characters in it.
They end up in Juno in the summer of 1935 just in time for a violent mine strike that occurred there in June of ’35. And I use all kinds of historical events; weave the history of the Pacific Northwest; the radical labor movement and some of the odd characters that lived up and down the coast in that era.
Dr. Kent: Your wife is a marine biologist and she studies whales. How does that influence your work?
John Straley: Well, yeah my wife is a really well known marine biologist. She’s out on a boat right now, she’s out on a crab boat filming hump back whales with a French film crew and doing research on the feeding behavior of the hump back whale. She leads a very exciting adventurous life. In my Cecil Younger books my first two books with Cecil, he was lovesick and he couldn’t get it together with his ex-girlfriend who he always refers to as the woman who used to love me. But in my third book called the Music of What Happened I just was getting bored with him not having a good love life so he fell in love with a marine biologist who studied hump back whales because it was something I knew something about.
My wife’s work is what brought me to Alaska. I would have stayed in the Cascades if it hadn’t been for her and her adventurous spirit and her independence that fit so perfectly in Alaska. So she’s been a tremendous influence on me. Also, all writers, any artist, having a supportive spouse, supportive spouses have done more for the arts than the MacArthur Foundation. She’s helped me tremendously.
Dr. Kent: Very nice. You have so many books out already, your seventh novel and they’ve all been fairly successful all across the world. Are you planning another one? Are you in the middle of writing? What’s going on with you?
John Straley: Yeah I am. As I’m speaking now I’m here at the public defender agency in Sitka and at nights and weekends I’m working on my eighth novel, which the characters in the Big Both Ways end up in a little village called Cold Storage Alaska and my eighth novel is called Cold Storage Alaska and it takes up into the future from where the Big Both Ways characters are. It’s going to be a story about the descendants of these people that made this trip in the dory.
My idea was inspired by the Steinbeck books of Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday and I really want to write a series about a place in Alaska, this little village called Cold Storage. So my series I did with these recurring characters back and forth in history whereas a place itself is really the central character, the central focus, the mood, the atmosphere, the mystery of life on this wild outside coast. And like Steinbeck’s Cannery Row, it’s the poetry of the place that really animates the story. I’m really excited about that. I’m hoping to have that up and out and around shopping to my publisher by September and hopefully have it out in the stores next year.
Dr. Kent: With your Cecil Younger series, with the Big Both Ways and with the upcoming book, why the Pacific Northwest? Do you have less interest in writing about say Africa or Asia or the Midwest? But is it really because you are rooted in that place? Talk a little about that.
John Straley: Well yeah, I mean I would love to write about Africa and Asia but I don’t know much about it. I really believe that we are made from the places that we live in and that we love. I think that people that love to live in rainy places or in rainforests are different than people that live in the desert so I really believe that the place helps shape culture and character and stories. I mean the crimes that happen in Sitka, Alaska are different than the crimes that happen in Phoenix or Seattle.
So I know something about the world here and I find it beautiful and mysterious and that’s what I want to write about. I’m not a real intellectual writer in that I will pick an abstraction that I want to write about. I write about the things that I hear, that I see, that I experience every day and I’m just trying to make sense of it.
Dr. Kent: Your job way up there has got to be different than somewhere in an urban area, even somewhere in a rural area. I know the story Into The Wild where the fellow ends up in a bus in the middle of nowhere. You must run into some pretty horrible stuff in your job out there.
John Straley: Working in real crime you’re always running into genuine grief; really hard situations where real people are really suffering and that makes it sort of different than crime fiction where it has a sort of atmosphere of the fun of the chase. Alaska sadly has the highest percentage per capita of domestic violence. The drug that is the scourge of the towns and villages is alcohol.
We have a huge number of alcohol related assaults and homicides. Anchorage has a different kind of crime scene. Anchorage has some more recognizably urban crime scenes but rural Alaska has real difficulty with alcohol, domestic violence and crimes that people commit without any real intention of getting away with anything. They’re impulse crimes and so those often really tear families apart. So yeah, it is a sobering place to work.
Dr. Kent: Do you end up processing a lot of that through your fiction or not so much?
John Straley: Yeah that’s a good question because most of my Cecil Younger works I wrote while I was working at the public defender. I’d work late at night and when I would sit at my typewriter or computer and work on these stories, I’m often trying to process kind of have work things out better in my own little world. I try to save the lives of some of these people I’ve encountered. I do process a lot of what goes on in my own mind through my books. But of course I have to exaggerate the adventures and exaggerate my characters’ own problems. But they’re not biographical, they’re not autobiographical but they are my attempt at making sense of what I’ve seen and heard.
Dr. Kent: This has been a real fascinating discussion. The Big Both Ways is John Straley’s last book. He has six books out in various editions. They’re all across the country and the world. The first one of those was the Woman Who Married A Bear. Is there one of those early ones that are your favorite?
John Straley: Of the Cecil Younger books you don’t really have to read them in order. There is sort of a character arc, he’s down and out and kind of a whiny drunk in the first and he really pulls himself together in the series. Sometimes I recommend to people if they’re coming to a goal to start with the third book right in the middle. That’s the Music of What Happened.
Dr. Kent: Well it’s been a real pleasure chatting with you. It’s not often that I get to speak to someone who’s actually in Alaska. How’s the weather out there?
John Straley: We’ve had a wet spring and some scattered days of sun in the summer but today is a beautiful day and people are catching King Salmon off the coast and the berries are ripening up and the bears are snuffling around through the woods and coming into our garbage cans so it’s a pretty nice day.
Dr. Kent: I envy you about the berries, that’s about the best thing in life. It’s been a pleasure having you on the show John Straley.
John Straley: Thank you for inviting me. I look forward to talking with you again sometime.
November 16, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Dr. Kent: Welcome back to Sound Authors. Today is the first day of summer and what do kids do in the summer? Hopefully they’re reading! I know a lot of kids are planted in front of the TV but we all wish that they were all reading these wonderful books. My next guest on the show, her name is Jeanie Ransom. She has a fantastic children’s book put out by Peachtree Publishers called What Do Parents Do When You’re Not Home and its hysterical, it’s built on a great premise, something we all wonder about. So welcome to the show Jeanie Ransom.
Jeanie Ransom: Well thank you very much it’s nice to be here great to be talking to you from lovely Ireland over here. It’s very green at the moment.
Dr. Kent: Tell me a little bit about where did this come out of? Did you have children? Did you think as a child what are your parents doing when you’re not at home?
Jeanie Ransom: Actually I have three boys and they give me some really good material and like many of my books the idea came out of something my one son said. He said why are you something about when they went to stay with grandma and grandpa what are you doing when we’re not here? It’s going to be so boring with us not here so that’s where it started from. The young boy in the story imagines what mom and dad are going to be doing when they are at grandma and grandpas, which it’s all G-rated of course.
Dr. Kent: The funny part of the title of course is that any one of us who reads the title starts laughing hysterically because we have a special secret that our children really don’t know, right?
Jeanie Ransom: Yes that is true.
Dr. Kent: And that’s part of like you’re building a myth just like the story. I really love it. Tell me a little about your children’s books. This isn’t the only one you’ve written, you’ve written several; a story about divorce. You tend to write things that are very useful for children. Talk a little about that.
Jeanie Ransom: Yeah, I have. I tend to write humor books and then since I’m a counselor I also write self help books for kids. So it’s kind of a mix between funny books and practical books. So a little humor and a little just regular everyday serious topics that kids have to deal with, like divorce as you were saying.
Dr. Kent: When did you first start doing the children’s books?
Jeanie Ransom: I’ve been writing for a very long time. But so much for kids, you know a lot of people start writing for kids and I started thinking oh, I can write a children’s book and I did and that’s when I started my standards as a writer or whatever and reading those books over and over somehow I could write one of these. It’s got to be really easy and I found out its not real easy. You can write them but to get it published is pretty hard in the children’s market.
Dr. Kent: One of the fascinating things about the children’s market for me is that books have to have wonderful text and rich text but the book really won’t sell without a good illustrator. How did you find an illustrator that could express your ideas?
Jeanie Ransom: Well I’m very fortunate. I can’t draw; I am advanced at stick figures so my publisher finds the illustrator for me and I get three different publishers and was just very fortunate that they’ve found someone that clicked with the text. You kind of just let the illustrator go and do their job and hope that its going to be the very best it can be so I’ve gotten very lucky.
Dr. Kent: Talk a little about, you’re also a counselor, you visit schools, and you think about children’s book publishing in a different way than many children’s authors do. This is something where it gives you an opportunity to get into a child’s world. So talk a little about that.
Jeanie Ransom: You’re right; I’m a counselor as well so I visit schools a lot of children’s authors do visit schools but I think that working with kids therapeutically, you do get into their world and you want to write about things that matter to them and help them. It’s kind of my goal. Like the divorce book.
I wasn’t a counselor before I wrote it, I just knew that I couldn’t find a book that I liked for my niece because my sister was getting divorced. I looked and looked but I couldn’t find something that was simple and dealt with the feelings that kids go through so I wrote the book and it’s been a really good one. So if I can help one kid with my books, that’s what it’s all about for me.
Dr. Kent: Talk about in this world, it’s so funny. I watch the TV and see these ads that have books that talk to your children for you and then they’ve got children’s video games that are supposed to be good for mind development and I can’t help thinking that one of the best things for my childhood were these children’s books, what’s your opinion on that.
Jeanie Ransom: I agree. Growing up that was the best thing. In the summer you would go to the library, fill up a bag with books and you go home and read them and go back in a week and fill it up again. That’s the way I grew up and my husbands a reader. My kids are readers and in fact we’re on vacation now and we all visited the book store at least once to get some more books. I think if parents are reading they set a good example for their kids. I know there’s so many distractions like the computer and video games like you said and all those kind of things. We’re missing something.
Dr. Kent: What do you do when you go into a school and there are kids that are used to having video games and here you’re a children’s author. What is it, are they excited? Are they stimulated?
Jeanie Ransom: Yeah they are very excited because they get to see if they know about authors, they learn about illustrators and it doesn’t matter really if you’re a famous author or just an every day author. Just the fact that you wrote a book; there’s something magical about that to them. Even in this as we say jaded video game society. The kids really get excited especially because at school they’ve been learning how to read and write so they kind of understand the whole process. But to see someone that’s actually done it. That’s big stuff and it can make a really big impact on them.
Dr. Kent: Tell me about all your books. You’ve got; I Don’t Want To Talk About It, Grandma U, Don’t Squeal Unless It’s a Big Deal, and that’s a book about tattletales; but tell me about all of those books.
Jeanie Ransom: Okay, well the first one was a divorce book; I Don’t Want to Talk About It and its been a story about divorce for young kids and it goes through all the different feelings that children feel when their parents are separating and getting a divorce. I wrote that before I was a counselor and before I even went back to school to get my degree in counseling. It was kind of instinctive and now many years later I am a counselor working with divorced kids and their parents so it’s kind of an interesting full circle on that one.
Then my second book Grandma U came about again from one of the questions one of my sons asked as I was driving around in the car. Driving around in the car you get some great discussions between parents and kids and he said, “Mom, how come grandma knows so much. She knows everything.” I said I don’t know maybe she went to school and of course she went to school. And I said well what if she went to a grandma school to learn how to be a grandma and answer all those questions. So Grandma U is actually Grandma University. It’s a school where grandmas go to learn how to be modern grandmas so that’s where that one came out of.
Then let’s see, what’s the next one. Don’t Squeal Unless It’s a Big Deal; a book about tattletales and that grew out of my experience as a school counselor and year after year the teachers coming to me and going please come in and talk about tattling because its just such a problem with kindergarten on up to second or third grade. So I wrote that book and it’s been a really good book too. School counselors tell me how they use it in the classrooms so I’m real pleased with that one. What Do Parents Do When You’re Not Home is the fourth one and we’ve already talked about that one. Then I have a fifth book coming out next spring. That’s a fiction book mystery, What Really Happens At Home.
Dr. Kent: What do you have planned for the future? I have only fifteen seconds left. It’s been a pleasure speaking to you and we can find you on jeanieransom. What’s your next plan?
Jeanie Ransom: Well the next book is a picture book mystery so I’m going to hopefully just keep writing and selling picture books, visiting schools and hopefully bringing joy and help to kids everywhere.
Dr. Kent: Well it’s been a real honor speaking with Jeanie Ransom. I love the book What Do Parents Do When You’re Not At Home and all the others as well. We’ll visit you on the web and thank you so much for being on.
Jeanie Ransom: Well thank you.
Dr. Kent: Thank you for tuning into Sound Authors this week. I had four guests on the show. Jeanie Ransom, Raymond Benson, Mac Morin and Susan Benjamin. Thanks to all of them and thanks to Sound Authors, the people behind the scenes, I appreciate all their work. We’ll see you next week. Be safe.
November 15, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Dr. Kent: Well my next guest on the show, his name is Raymond Benson and he’s written several James Bond 007 novels; he’s the fourth official author of those and he’s done many, many other things. Welcome to the show Raymond Benson.
Raymond Benson: How are you?
Dr. Kent: So tell me about your latest book, A Hard Days Death.
Raymond Benson: Well it’s the first in a series hopefully of a rock –n – roll detective named Spike Berringer. It takes place in the world of rock and roll. I’ve skewed the universe to be a very dangerous place so there’s lots of murders, kidnappings, blackmailings, illegal downloadings, and so Spike and his team have to sort out all the bad stuff.
Dr. Kent: Where did you get the idea for starting out these rock and roll thrillers?
Raymond Benson: Well, I’m a huge fan for one thing. I’ve always been into music, I’m a classic rock aficionado and you know I thought it would be a good series. Take a title of a rock album like Hard Days Night and change it slightly to Hard Days Death. The second book is finished; it’s going to be called Dark Side of the Morgue. So there’s a lot of humor in it and real rock stars will make cameo appearances throughout the series and hopefully it’ll give readers a nice read on the beach or in an airplane or somewhere like that.
Dr. Kent: You have a whole bunch of experience, not only with music and with writing but computer game designing?
Raymond Benson: That’s right. I spent about not quite ten years, maybe about eight, as a computer games designer in the late 80s and early 90s.
Dr. Kent: How do all these things come together for you? What’s your daily rhythm? What are you working on mostly?
Raymond Benson: Now I’m a full time novelist. I gave up the computer game business in the mid 90s after I got the gig to write the James Bond novels. So I have not looked back. I’m a full time novelist. I do still dabble in music; I play the piano at a cocktail lounge two nights a week and every now and then dip my toe in the theater but mostly I’m writing.
Dr. Kent: How does this James Bond thing come through for you? Was it connections? How’d that happen?
Raymond Benson: Back in the 80s, early 80s, I wrote a nonfiction coffee table size book called the James Bond bedside companion and that was pretty much the first of its type. Kind of an encyclopedia on James Bond and Ian Fleming, Bond’s creator, and analyses of all the books and all the films done so far. When I was researching that I went to England and met members of Ian Fleming’s family and his business people.
We got along well, they liked the book when it came out, we stayed in touch, I became involved in Bond fan clubs and was pretty much kind of looked at as a Bond expert by that time. in the mid 90s when John Gardner, the author before me, he decided to retire from the gig they called me up out of the blue and said how would you like to give it a shot?
Dr. Kent: What is it like writing about Bond?
Raymond Benson: Well I mean it was a dream job that I didn’t even think I was aloud to dream about. I was a huge fan, I grew up with Bond. I’m a child of the 50s and 60s and I saw the original Sean Connery movies as they were coming out in the theater so I was always a big Bond fan and I knew the universe inside and out. I knew the original books very well and so it was like visiting an old friend.
Dr. Kent: Now on to the new books, the rock and roll thrillers. Who’s your audience? I know you want will walk through the halls of every airport with our rock and roll on in our ears and hopefully reading your book, but tell me a little about A Hard Days Dead. What’s the plotline, what’s the action?
Raymond Benson: Well there’s a fictional rock star named Peter Flame, they call him Flame, he’s kind of the status of a David Bowie, that type of status. Kind of an aging famous classic rock star and he is found dead in his office hanging. First it looks like a suicide, then its determined that it’s a murder staged to be a suicide.
His eldest son gets arrested and so the sons mother who way Flames first wife, she hires Spike Berringer to look into the case and clear her son. So Spike has to interview and track down all of Flame’s cohorts and there’s plenty of suspects. Flame was hanging around this strange religious cult and there were former band members that always wanted to kill him and all kinds of stuff.
Dr. Kent: Here’s a question I’ve always wanted to ask a novelist or a mystery writer. If you’re sitting down and you’re constructing a scene for this character, do you ever just find yourself grinning from ear to ear because you’ve come up with such a great concept or a great scene?
Raymond Benson: Sometimes that happens, that actually does you know? Most of the time we’re all going and pulling our hair out and trying to think of something to make it better but every now and then it really works. I felt really good about this and I feel even better about the sequel, which is going to come out in March of 09.
Dr. Kent: How many sequels is this going to be? Is this going to be a series of ten? A trilogy? What’s your plan?
Raymond Benson: Who knows? I mean it kind of depends on how the first couple do. I’m sure there‘ll probably at least be a third one. If I get that far, then there’ll be more.
Dr. Kent: What’s the status on your James Bond work? Are you still writing books? What’s the word?
Raymond Benson: No, I’ve stopped the Bond stuff in 2002. I did six original books and three movie novelizations. The Fleming estate took a hiatus from doing the Bond novels for about six years and because this year, 2008 is the hundredth anniversary of Ian Fleming’s birthday, they hired a British author to do one book; it just came out a couple of weeks ago. It’s called Devil May Care. That came out and I don’t know what their plans are in the future; however, in the fall of this year, in October, an anthology of my Bond stuff will be coming out here in the US. It’s called the Union Trilogy. It’s three of my books together with one short story.
Dr. Kent: I’ve never read a Bond book and I hadn’t thought about it until I read about you but I’ve seen the books. I’ve seen them in stores and things like that. What’s the difference between seeing a Bond movie and reading a Bond book?
Raymond Benson: Well actually they’re very different. The Bond of the novels is a much more serious character. He’s not as flippant, he doesn’t have the sense of humor he has in the movies. He’s a lot harder, a lot colder, a lot more ruthless; he’s a killer.
The original Fleming books are of a time and place of their own and very sort of pulp fiction cold war thrillers that are quite remarkable and I highly recommend if you’ve never read an Ian Fleming novel to pick one up. John Gardner and I were required to update the character and place Bond in modern times and that was a little tricky because Bond is kind of an acronistic in that he has a lot of vices. He smokes a lot, he drinks a lot, he’s a womanizer, but that kind of makes him interesting. That makes him stand out against a more modern setting.
Dr. Kent: Are there are certain things that you’re not allowed to mess with like “shaken, not stirred” and that sort of thing?
Raymond Benson: Well yeah we wouldn’t want to mess with that because that’s part of Bond and yeah, I mean they knew that I knew what Bond could do and what he couldn’t do and what he shouldn’t do. So I was pretty safe with that but because I’m the only American that they’ve ever hired to write the books my hardest challenge was to make sure everything was British. I had to actually write a manuscript that seemed like it was written by a Brit. All my spellings had the U in them and stuff like that.
Dr. Kent: Did that lead a little bit to the rock and roll, you’re thinking British rock or do we have an American rocker in this book?
Raymond Benson: This guy Peter Flame is American, but it’s going to have everything. It’s going to have Brits, Americans; rock and roll is pretty universal I mean Spike Berringer is an American and he’s based in New York but each book is going to take place in a different city. The second book takes place in Chicago. The third one will probably be in Austin, Texas, where South by Southwest takes place.
Dr. Kent: What other kind of things do you have planned in the future? Any more series coming out of you? More music? More computer games? What’s in the future?
Raymond Benson: Well my latest book is actually kind of collaboration with a computer game and that’s Metal Gear Solid. It’s a very popular video game from Kunami and I was hired to write a novel based on the video game. So that came out about two weeks ago, three weeks ago, Metal Gear Solid. It’s in the stores now so I have two books in the stores right now; Hard Days Death and Metal Gear Solid.
Dr. Kent: Well, we’ll look out for it in stores and we can visit Raymond Benson on the web at raymondbenson.com. It’s been a real pleasure speaking with you.
Raymond Benson: Thanks for having me man.
Dr. Kent: My next guest on the show will be an author named Jeanie Ransom. She has a book called What Do Parents Do When You’re Not At Home. It’s a very clever book for children. Come on back for that.
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