telling you i had jurassic park sitting above my
desk oh kind of had i remember that was my first novel uh short fiction prior to that so i
was writing my first novel i wasn't sure how to write a novel again no formal training
in writing so i thought i'm going to use jurassic park as a template so i'm looking at
like when does he first introduce the dinosaurs okay well that's what you're going to see the
first monsters in my book you know when does he kill off the first character well that'
s that's
a page i'm going to kill off a character so i used jurassic park almost as a template for for
building my first story folks before we start this episode if you could do one thing would you please
hit that subscribe button it really helps us out we'll kick those tires and start that virtual
fire once again we are camping remotely due to our fantastic gas price situation here
and uh given that our current guest lives in the beautiful paradise of tahoe
and we are down in southern cal
ifornia we are not able to be together
today but don't let the dissuade you um he has told me how beautiful it is up there
and so we are there in spirit my guest uh is actually a very distinct and diverse array
of hobbies including amateur spelunking scuba diving and was a veterinarian before deciding to
leave behind the exciting world of cats and dogs to something even just marginally more interesting
is sci-fi fantasy thrillers and becoming a best-selling author so was that the right care
er
move we will find out today from mr jim rollins james rollins thanks for being here sir jim is
good okay and uh and not not former veterinarian i can i can still neuter a cat in under 30 seconds
if uh if uh the need arises i still work with a uh a group that basically i do volunteer work with my
degree now they trap feral cats in the sacramento valley i spend one sunday a month spaying and
neutering them i did i did see that that you still do use your degree to do that and uh that's
tha
t's uh i'm glad you find that fulfilling um i do it for two reasons it is fulfilling i mean
it is a way of controlling disease vectors and those little kitten factories out there they also
do it for the uh the underlying sense that at some point someone's gonna go hey this guy really can't
write uh you know if your scalp don't get back to work you know i need to keep my my skills a little
bit at home in case that that scenario ever arises that's true and i well you're so prolific and
author
and we're gonna have to get into how you actually do all this and i love that you wrote
it seems like you were able to write amidst meowing and barking and birds chirping and still
managed to crank out this many novels and become a international new york times bestseller so i am
going to have to ask how it seems a shot across the bow to people who say they can't work in
noisy environments when you seem to have proven quite the opposite if anything i prefer i can't
write if it's deathly qui
et uh you know i've got it with this music but generally what i have
is a syrup behind there there's a little black corner of a television screen oftentimes i'll have
that on just muted low not mutable but just on low just to get a little bit of background white noise
uh when i write it's just uh if it's totally quiet it unnerves me and maybe it's because for
the first you know almost decade of my career i was working out of my uh veterinary clinic
and so working on my lunch hour so we're i
nterrupted by receptionists phones ringing dogs
you know barking cats male as you mentioned uh so one of the best places i get writing done is
on an airplane and it's just that background noise and the rumble of the engine and people
chattering around uh really an airplane and coach of course i man i don't know i just i can't do
the t-rex thing um i'm 6'5 and i don't know how like someone reclines and it's like my computer
turns into 3d it just like you know boom i've tried writing i do app
reciate that when you're
locked you know and the only option is mediocre movies um and you're starving and you can just you
know crank out i guess you know have you uh do you work on like international flights i've heard of
authors that will actually charter like they'll forget on flights because they know that's
like uninterrupted 12 hours of like you know they actually one guy was saying he flew to
japan and back so he could finish a book no i have not i've not done that not that extreme
of
uh you know i can turn the television on that's that's sufficient for you know trapping me and
having me to write um yeah i mean it's always disconcerting sometimes when you're you know the
person sitting next to you you know looking over your shoulder reading what you're writing and so
you know my stories are full of you know blood and gore and destruction so sometimes i'm wondering
you know what people think when they're looking over my shoulder and if they're in the middle seat
they'
re like this guy in the aisles like a serial killer or a great author you know at least you get
some feedback right like it's maybe get some weigh in on some story notes right one one person that
was reading uh my uh what i was writing and he goes oh you're writing about you know great pierce
are you writing fan fiction for the sigma series i don't know it's actually my series so oh that's
cool that's awesome that's really cool now i i do have to ask so as just being a a veterinarian for
so
long i imagine you've seen the gamut of strange occurrences with animals uh is there a particular
incident that i love asking er doctors this too is there any particular noteworthy bizarre
incidents involving uh pets or animals that stand out to you that are appropriate
for most audiences well i definitely um you know part of my practice was exotics so it
was me and one of the doctors were the avian vets for the area so you know i was the one seeing
birds and reptiles and you know the othe
r pocket mammals that a lot of the vets typically won't
see because the biology and the medicine is very different and um so one time somebody brought in
a tarantula because the tarantula had lice on it i was like okay you know i'm an exotic fat but
i don't really want to touch your tarantula and you know the idea of uh you know another insect on
another insect no that's just too much that's that that's enough for me right there okay so
that was a pre-existing condition and you had to turn
them away so yeah exactly this is
you know if i get spraying with raid i think that'll take care of both problems oh man
what's the weirdest pa sorry the tarantula's pretty up there is there what's the most rare
bizarre pet you've seen someone come in with probably the one that was most disturbing but
also exciting at the same time was somebody was breeding they wanted to produce a spotted
cat now there are spotted cats out there the cats particular but actually what they are
they're inter
rupted stripes they're actually not true randomly spotted cats there's no
there's no domestic randomly spotted cat so they were built they were breeding a wild tibetan
cat with domestic cats to try to produce a hybrid and uh so that she brought her tibetan
wildcat which is about a 30 pound feral cat and to this day i've never really seen the cat
and she brought him in multiple times always comes wrapped in netting and i'd give it vaccines or do
some blood draws but i would always come wrapp
ed tightly in a net and thank goodness because i
think was you know hell on wheels oh my gosh well i it seems you had all the perfect breeding for
a thriller rider with uh tarantulas and lice and uh exotic exotic cats and uh yeah i mean i just
imagine all and also just the random things i imagine dogs must have swallowed or eaten
just the stories like you know i hit a rope or you know is this the questions like my pet did
this you know is that normal you know or i don't know i just uh they
i'm almost just a very
weird story stuff that's not really probably you know you have to be uh it's not fit for the
general public some of the things that people came in with or questions they asked well hopefully
you can integrate your stories that's great i am well i guess you know i'd love to ask um you know
so you i always find it fascinating when people have career shifts and yeah i imagine you got into
veterinary medicine because you enjoyed it uh you and you don't get into exotic bir
ds and you know
reptiles without having some you know cursory interest in it and then was the writing thing
something that just lingered in the background and you were always like man i really want to try this
and i'm i'm asking for all those people who may be trapped treating tarantulas for lice and
are thinking is there more for me you know well yeah a lot of uh you know lawyers become
authors mostly because i think they hate their job not too many veterinarians have strayed from
the pas
t because we actually like our job yeah because i you know i wanted to be a veterinarian
since you know i mentioned this before in talks since third grade because i remember specifically
getting that assignment you get sometime during your elementary school years where
the teacher says hey go home write an essay tell us what you want to be when you grow up
and i remember it was a point of moral dilemma for the third grade version of myself you know
i had a blank sheet of paper in front of m
e knew i wanted to be a veterinarian i only probably
didn't know how to spell it i thought i'd put fireman i could cheat and then you know go
out and play but i did the one thing that all third graders are loath to do i went
and got the dictionary and looked up a veterinarian so i could fill out that essay as
a veterinarian so even for third grade i knew that's what i wanted to be it was dedicated
towards that career attracted towards that um but i i you know i liked i was a
bit of a story
teller in my family i have three brothers and three sisters so we raised
a polish roman catholic you know basically keep the polish flag in your window you have to have at
least six kids so my mom had to spend my goal was just to terrorize my younger brother and sisters
with wild outlander stories uh the craze through the better if tears were involved all the better
you know i call it storytelling and call it line and but that's the side of my brain that there's
fun tails decided like medic
ine science um this seemed like a career track you could follow you do
this this and this you can become a veterinarian or you could do this this and this and fail
horribly as a writer so i went this way and uh but i kept reading which is like
throwing gasoline on this side of my brain uh it kept me thinking about stories kept
me wanting to spend stories it kept me the desire to someday walk into a bookstore and
see my book on a shelf um but never seemed like a career goal uh even when i be
gan writing wasn't
that i was going to be switching professions it was mostly just as a hobby i joined a writing
critique group in sacramento shared stories with a bunch of short fiction that's not buried in
the backyard uh didn't get a single story sold but based on that you know amount of experiences
i'm gonna write my first novel first novel sold another one sold my clients at the veterinary
hospital became suspicious something was going on with their veterinarian mostly because of you k
now
poster in the lobby you can't spay get a free book so you know questions would arise dr jim what
do you what's your long-term career goals here you have a successful veterinary hospital what's
this writing business you're doing i said well you know while i'm draining your dog's anal
glands i'll do my best to answer your question um for about 15 years this point writing was
my my was but it's a hobby it was it wasn't really learning much of my first few books my
main paycheck still was
veterinary medicine i told my client you're basically on the
line you know maybe 10 15 years down the line it'd be fun maybe to see eventually
those roles reverse uh where maybe a uh you know writing becomes my paycheck
and veterinary medicine is my hobby and so like i said i still do some uh spaying
and neutering so basically now all i do with my veterinary is just remove genitalia but uh it
is a hobby that goal at this point um but yeah so it's uh it's a weird track for a veterinarian
to
divert but uh you know i've had no formal training in writing and i think anybody that wants
to write i think if you have a nate's you know i i've taught writing occasionally at different
writing conferences and writer's retreats and most of people you know i can
teach you the tools of writing there are rudimentary things i could teach you to
make your writing stronger but i can't teach you to be an actual storyteller i think you know you
have to have this innate sense why tell stories or
it's just not going to be a a job that's going
to work very well for you so you have to basically be fundamentally dishonest exactly i'd be a good
liar yeah that's right okay that's good for all you future readers out there remember be good good
writers are liars writers are liars that could be that's what fiction is in a nutshell that's great
yeah so again it's it's uh if you really want to write if you have any desire to do so uh
there's no reason you can't do it i mean like i said i had
no form of training and writing
and it was all i took a single english comp class in college again career trek to be vet medicine
it was all science and medicine and biology uh but you know i just sort of taught myself
the fundamentals of uh of writing on my website i have a sort of a q a section there's
a section also about what i learned from from uh that career track of trying to teach myself how to
write uh rather than reinventing the wheel i can point you towards some directions of sho
rtcuts
and tools i use to become a writer absolutely so this is interesting so i love the lack of
formal training because i think you know there's a there's a debate around that and um so did you
did i hear correctly did you sell your first book your first knowledge you wrote yeah we didn't
didn't sell immediately i was rejected by 49 different agents it was a the 50th agent that saw
something in the story rejected quite soundly um one you usually get the former injection letter
you know d
ear sir ram we hate your book don't submit to us again editor uh but some editor
might give you a little pat on the back a few words of encouragement you know we like this
one character that was really cool too bad the rest of your novel sucks and for my first books
i got that form rejection letter from my editor and he had a little note to me in the back just
three words this is unpublishable which i thought was you know kind of him not only to reject me but
take the extra special time to
write this note and kick me in the nuts besides so you have to sort
of appreciate that but uh like i said if i had stopped there at that 35th or that 40th rejection
i might not ever got published i just kept submitting it submitting it and finally somebody
saw the diamond in a rough and the book got picked up nbc picked it up for a mini series that never
got made but got very close to being made uh yeah it was uh the screenplay was done they had
the talent hired and then the entire staff at
nbc uh got uh canned and they
brought in a whole new uh uh you know team in theirs they they chucked
all the old teams material which was me so your project got neutered eggs exactly i'm
sorry to hear that um no i uh it's funny actually i did want to ask you about rejection um obviously
i've never been rejected you know clearly but uh for asking for a friend um there's a friend
of mine you know we'll call him brian uh who recently was you know working on our proposal
and uh it got mostly
positive feedback which that's when you start to smell something's
wrong you know like because you know what's going on here and uh i finally got uh uh brian
to tell me the story that's uh you know he had an an agent finally called said look yo actually
i want to be really honest there's some you know i love i have the gift of discouragement and i
was like you know i'm hearing the story and i go great and they go um this is absolutely awful
uh this is terrible um and i this would only work
if you were very famous or a magical writer of
which i do not believe you fall into either camp um wow no obviously that was me i'd be very
offended but this is from my friend uh and uh but i did want to ask you about uh you know for those
who do find themselves getting rejected is that i mean that's astounding it's first off the 50th
agent sounds like a great title for your next book um and so you want to you know get that domain
but i mean that's that should be encouraging for people who
are you know getting rejected that
you know here's a here's someone who international best-selling author of gazillion books and you
were told basically some of your writing is basically unpublishable yeah i mean if you look at
uh um the novel the martian that was rejected by countless people too that eventually uh the
author self-published and then of course it became a movie and became a big success um you know
jk rowling with uh you know harry potter could not get that book sold for the
life of her
and finally somebody saw a little bit of hope saw something there and picked it up so i
hear from occasionally from writers that gosh i've been rejected by like six agents i
should just give up i'm going you just started you haven't even begun to scratch the surface
oh yeah do you think there's a support group for people who turn down harry potter uh like
do you think they meet monthly and like they all have like hi my name's so and so this
is the date that i passed up on harry
potter uh that'd be horrible oh my gosh that's
uh well i'm glad you found the 50th agent uh and that's so cool and what did it feel
like when you finally got the let's do it uh first of all again the call came from that
50th agent um at six o'clock in the morning because new york apparently does not realize
there's a three-hour time difference between uh the two coasts and so it's i'm i'm thinking it's
an emergency call from the clinic um so i'm in a little bit of a bad mood thinking i can
't go in
early and uh so this you know this woman saying hey you know i i'm pesha rubenstein and i you know
read your novel and uh i think i can represent it and i think you know i think you know with a
little bit of work we get this thing published and what i'm looking at at this point
49 different rejections and i'm thinking you know good luck lady uh you know i've got
in writing from a new york professional this is unpublishable but you know it's not as long
as you're not charging me yo
u know have at it yeah i love it you tried to warn
her you know let's uh don't do it that's so man that's so cool i'm that persistence
is so violent now to counter that you know at what point do you say all right you know what
like don't be stubborn like this does need work you know because you could easily take that and
be like i don't have any problems with my writing like i am i am literally the next steinbeck and
you know i just got to get to my hundred agents until the you know it's al
l downhill from there
well luckily with subterranean um it probably was unpublishable in the format and that
i wish i submitted it it was luckily that some agent uh saw some potential in it and
the editor also saw that potential and uh my editor when she got hold of
subtraction and said hey for just the gist of what subtraction is about it's
to give you the elevator pitch for subterranean um i was going to take five characters drop them
two miles underneath the antarctic continent throw in
some monsters and shake that was
my detailed outline for subterranean and she told me you know jim you it takes you 150 pages
before those five characters get down that hole you need to get them down that hallway page
50. so you need to cut 100 pages out of the front end of your novel and so i thought
well i'm willing to do that because again i want to get published so i began trimming
and trimming and look listen i've got it down to page 100. she said no i said 100 it's
got to be page 50
. so i trim and trim and trim i change the the font size and margin
sizes you know trying to get it to a feature and uh look at 79 no not 79 i said 50 and so
it kept trimming and trimming and she was right it was it was very bloated at the front end of
the book um so you know it's finding that right combination of agent editor that's willing to
work with that diamond in the rough um so again it's uh you know you have to have some humility if
i said hey no this is you know that i'm steinbeck
they're not going down that hole until page 150
that wouldn't be published and if it was published i don't think it would have done as well in the
marketplace because no one would have been willing to wait 150 pages before the action actually
starts in the novel absolutely well that's good it is tough to kill your darlings i know that's
uh i know that's really tough fight um but uh so let me ask you this what is a typical day i
know you talk about your writing process on your site and i lo
ve it it's you tell people read every
day write every day even just a few paragraphs be persistent uh what does a typical day look like
we've had a few authors on and i love hearing the contrast like summer the like nine hours just
crank it out and then we had joe landsdale on and he was like no man i arrived for three
hours now i go out and hang out you know i got to live my life man that's my joe lansdowne
impression everybody that's a good impression um you know working full-time in any
author i think
any writer needs to make find out where that writing is going to fit in your life that's that's
a struggle um and so i had read a screenplay writing novel that novel nonfiction book again
my learning curve of trying to learn how to write screenplay writing books are very good for
teaching you how to kind of put a plot and the title of the screenplay now which i have right
up there is how to write a screenplay in 90 days um and the first page it says if you want to
write a sc
reenplay in 90 days you have to write three pages a day so i closed the book and never
read any more of that book that's all i needed okay that was scan i'm going to commit to that i'm
going to do three pages a day while working my day job but then i kept qualifying it no not three
pages three double spaced pages which is really about a page and not every day let's do five out
of seven days of the week and so once i found that accommodation i can do a page and a half five
out of seven of th
e days of the week and still not feel like i'm not having any life and i
always thought if i ever get rid of the day job i will be much more productive and i am of course
i now do five double-spaced pages a day that's all i can manage uh it takes about an hour for me to
write each page um so that's about five hours of new writing each day the rest of the day is uh
following john uh lansdale's recommendation no actually usually borrowed the day is you know
it's social media it's the business
side of writing it's uh it's website maintenance it's
research it's calling up scientists finding out details i need or doing research and for other
aspects that are going ready the next day so it typically ends up being about eight hour day but
five hours if it's writing three hours is just uh busy work really that's great no it's interesting
i some authors say three some five that's great and it's uh is do you find writing to be are you
naturally introverted do you find uh writing to be
consistent with your personality um because
i know you you like it you don't like it super quiet but i know a lot of writing but writing is
if you're by yourself essentially for five hours as opposed to neutering cats with a good team
you know that's a it's a different experience i'm definitely on the introverted you know
spectrum of of things um the hard part of the hardest part of learning of the writing career
was realizing that it's just not uh hold up in your office writing there's a w
hole business
side to the career it's the book tour it's uh it's social media it's keeping uh active with
your readership and you know when i first started my first summer training was published in 1997. uh
and this was at that point the internet was fairly new very few authors had websites um so i thought
it was gonna be innovative and have a website when facebook came around i thought well
this is an intriguing way of communicating to my readership and so i approached my
publisher and sa
id hey you know this is a new thing called facebook you know i'm thinking
it might be a good way of uh promoting my books and you're talking about my books you know can
you help me guide me through this a little bit and they were like facebook it's a flash to the
pan don't bother with it i didn't take that to heart how long i'm gonna keep going on with
it and i found that uh it's nice having that communication with your readership that you
could never get before and back only in my career u
nless you got an email or a handwritten
letter you wouldn't have much communication with your readership whereas with facebook and on the
social media you have that immediacy uh with them so you know i've bounced title options uh through
facebook and through instagram just to see what do you think what what do you think of this title
or here are three options vote um i've had uh you know gray ended up in bed with a character at
the end of one of the novels we didn't know which woman he was
with was he with the assassin or was
he with the uh the italian woman uh i didn't even know for sure what woman he was in bed with at
the end um so again i pitched it to facial social media who do you think he's in bed with and why
and who do you want him to be in bed with and why and so i got that feedback so it sort of
informed me you know what people were thinking how they were interpreting the characters so
it helped me then when i was working that next novel to to jump off from a place
where i thought
was pretty strong that's awesome uh yeah also good to let me you know i hope to never find myself in
that situation of you know in bed with a probable assassin so that sounds that sounds terrifying
do you ever find yours is it is it a curiosity that you're you have so much gore uh in your
novels uh you know or is that like do people like would they find that surprising like oh he's
such a congenial like nice guy and then yeah he's you know there's assassins and gunfire and
you know violence and yeah my my clients especially they were they would look at me with
a jaundiced eye after you know i read your book and sort of with an accusatory tone and uh i'm
not sure you should be looking at my animal uh why uh why what what is the calculus
of writing under a pseudonym uh it's mostly because my last name which is
czikowski it's it's in the uh copyright of every one of my books and if you look at it it's again
polish and so it uses every letter of the alphabet and
uh you know even on my uh veterinary door it
was the doctor jim czykowski but they you know just called my doctor jim i don't even try this
last name so when i saw my first book they were like you know we like your book but that name's
got to go you know we can't we need somebody able to walk into a bookstore and pronounce
your name we can't i'm going into barnes and nobles and saying hey i'm looking for this book
by this polish guy and just hope for the best so the weird thing was they sa
id that i heard this
from two different publishing houses by the way that pick a pen name it needs to be phonetically
pronounceable makes sense and it needs to be two syllables and i asked them why you know
from two different why two syllables there must have been some type of marketing study
about stickability of names they said well you know one syllable names
are too hard to remember three syllable names are too easy to forget so
pick two that's the perfect sort of goldilocks area and i
'm thinking well you know stephen king
is just about to say stephen king is doing okay the child has no problem so uh uh but anyway so
rollins actually came because uh uh the university of missouri veterinary school went to schools on
rollins avenue so it's a little nod back tonight that's great well you have a new book out it's
right there i know tell us about it i actually dug a little around i'm really excited to read
this one but tell us about it and tantalize us and tease us you know i
s it a it's of course about a
a milita a military trained veterinarian right who uh does government-funded neutering of uh despotic
rulers right or is that that's upcoming there's a veterinarian in there he's a virus hunter he's
a wildlife biologist who's looking for viruses out in the wild and it's a big jungle epic um
it starts when all hell breaks loose at a u.n relief camp deep in the congo uh men women and
children are found to be in this sort of dull catatonic state they can barely ba
rely speak but
the environment around them is ramped up it's uh more dangerous more predatory more aggressive
and seems to be evolving at a exponential rate and it's up to my team of heroes that are my
serious sigma force the group of x special forces soldiers that have been retraining different
scientific disciplines they're scientists for guns uh they go out in the field try to figure
out what's going on there and it leads them to sort of a treasure hunt for this
lost kingdom in the in t
he jungle where um they could potentially find out what's
going on with this uh with this condition oh i like it and uh that's awesome and it's not
pfizer moderna that's behind uh any of the uh the conditions right okay and do my rocks youtube will
flag that for us so that's one way to get noticed there uh that's a do you and i i know i love that
you do you still spelunk and do you still scuba yeah both i actually stopped uh caving for a while
i took up caving in missouri because missouri's
sort of cave central a lot of wild caves as a
hobby up there a lot of fun and uh continued to do it for a while but when i got uh later on
in life a little across the 50-year mark and my belly was getting a little bit wider and my joints
were getting a little achiever i thought you know this is that's a young man's sport you know it's
hard to squeeze through these little shoots if your belly's really big so i want to stop going
except going to the garage these clubs that they have with the
uh national theological society
and it's not one of the meetings and there was this gentleman giving a uh slide show talk
about this cave that he just traversed and he had maps and you know how describing how he's
the rope work he needed to get up and down and you know the challenges of going you know
traversing this camera and it was challenging it was a challenge cabin but then then i found a guy
who was 65 years old and uh you're back at it now screw that so then i you know got determin
ed i
sort of i found there's a caving trip going to vietnam so it was like a year off back in
shape back in condition so that i can go ahead and join that caving trip so i still
do it i was caving uh about three weeks ago that's and i see how you were an active scuba
have you had any precarious scuba incidents uh again just stupid stuff you know i was
scuba diving in uh the great barrier reef and uh i just was made a mistake and balancing my
uh my uh weight belt and i was struggling with i
t and i lost a little bit of control
so i was gonna put my hand down on the seabed to to uh stabilize myself and just was
about to hit this rock that i thought was a rock swam away and it was one of the stone
fish was like one of the most lethal oh wow things i literally almost you know
hand planted right on top of that oh man is it so it's like it's topically dangerous to
touch or does it sting you yeah it stings you yeah it's got spines on it it'll shoot up and
stab you they're poisonous
and you die wow well that's uh man well get people up because i cave
in school some people say ask me you know do i do i do cave diving and i always tell them you
know i like caving i like scuba diving but cave diving is a death sport uh you know no thank
you i'm not doing that part there's a line i draw in the sand one question now i know you you
mentioned you had actually watched a few episodes and i'm sure you're aware now of why this show
is adored by dozens of people around the world
um so obviously you you now know what the hype's all
about of course um but uh do you one question we love asking is is there any burning wisdom
you would go back and shake your former self or younger self and say hear me hear me jim
rollins you double syllabled prolific right are you i probably would have told myself it's a
poorly kept secret that early in my career i was writing under two different pen names that's
why i mean two different places and um it was perf it was it was forced up
on me because it was
two different two different genres two different publishing houses i had no track record so it
said rather than you know give us two different pen names one for each genre and one for each
publishing houses uh in retrospect that probably was a poor decision i wish i had resisted that and
just kept it under one one name i think uh it gets uh it's it's hard wearing that many hats between
you know here's james clemons the fantasy writer and james rollins the thriller write
r and james
jakowski the veterinarian eventually you know schizophrenia who threatened to kick in uh i think
it would better if i just stuck with one pending all right what's up if you're gonna assume an
identity assume one identity you know no know thyself uh that's great i i'm curious too what
do you uh do did you ever meet clive kessler i didn't but a couple times yup yeah i mean do you
find is that a parallel that goes down i mean i when i think of some of your writing too i mean
it's
more his was a little more um pg uh rated but uh with the just the the ruins and the diving
and all the fun stuff i do do you feel like i grew up reading clyde custer he's one of my greatest
influences him and michael creighton um so i you know i got to interview you know clive on stage
at the international thriller writers conference so uh you know he was one of the first ones that
gave me a blurb um you know he's besides being a great writer he's just a great gentleman he's
helped a lot o
f young writers you know by helping them with blurbs or helping them get their feet
off the ground or co-writing with them to start you know give them a career so it's a great guy
it's a shame that he passed away i know he was uh i remember because i read sahara movie was uh
sorry mcconaughey but you know the i remember that book i was like this guy comes up with the most
insane plots i like my friends like why should i read this like i'm just going to tell you civil
warship sahara desert j
ust just chew on that let that marinate for a minute there you know
so i i love that is there any i mean i know you mentioned in your in your bio obviously you
know jules verne and obviously a lot of the classics are there any other uh just writers that
you just absolutely adore and you tell people hey you know if you want to really get some great
story like just pick this up do if you haven't done this you're really hurting yourself
like you know get get a copy of these well again i think
this guy owns me uh royalty
uh it's dan simmons um dan simmons uh he's got some popularity he had uh his uh book
the terror became a a series on tbs i think uh i've been reading him forever he and what
he's a bit of a chameleon and that no matter what genre he writes in he wins awards he writes a
science fiction novel he gets the hugo award he writes a mystery novel he gets the edgar
he writes a horror novel wa award so uh jealousy partially that's why i love him he's
a great writer um and
also you know he switches genres uh right and left he just jumps between
things and you know what one pen name actually he's probably his real name but he doesn't you
know doesn't didn't switch names kept it all under simmons exactly two syllables on to something
there dan simmons so uh are you making right now a personal plea for dan simmons to come on this
show and acknowledge that he owes you royalties um is that what i'm hearing it's
the song of cali books he wrote the most horrific no
vel i've ever written you
want to find a novel that will literally change the way you look at life you know read
the song of cali it will it's as disturbing as hell all right well folks that's uh that's not
a royalty plea i don't know what is so that's uh that's fantastic uh last question how has
uh publishing and your experience changed uh over the years and what do you find i mean
obviously there's taking ownership more of your with social media and the advent of that there's
i imagine s
ome entrepreneurship that you have to own up to there's also i wonder uh i imagine every
time you release a book there's a flurry of movie rights that probably go around the same time and
i imagine that was not always the way it was right no probably not i mean that hollywood all seems
to have a bottomless pocket for you know optioning different novels you know my novels have been
optioned various various times various novels the entire sigma series just got optioned
about nine months ago o
h congratulations yeah so hopefully we'll aim for this streaming
service for that um but yes it's changed uh the most dramatic change i've seen is that there
is the the amount of responsibility put into the author's shoulders now yeah uh for promoting
your own work uh i talked a lot of uh i talked to um different authors that you know that were
writing in the past i would say well how was it like you know back in the 80s when you're writing
so we did nothing you'd produce the book you might
have a book launch party but then you just you
could go right back to your office there was no social media you may have to respond to maybe a
handwritten fan letter or two whereas that is not the scenario anymore the houses depend upon you
to have an active social media presence to have a website that you keep current um you know they
expect you to be promoting promoting promoting unfortunate shows like mine right this is sort of
indentured public public relationships it never stops that'
s right i know that's what folks don't
know is i'm actually going over the author's heads now i'm actually going to random house and penguin
and telling all them to harpercollins you know give me your authors now you know get them
on there new ways of talking other stuff that's right well we're going to put some stuff on
tick tock too i think book talk have you followed the book talk trend yeah i saw that i mean you're
going to go on b n and they have a whole book talk section now yeah wher
e you can book talk
recommendations out there oh absolutely it's i remember i actually got a wreck from book talk uh
ken foles pillars of the earth which i had never read and uh that was fantastic that's that's one
of my favorite i was bologna also very violent but also very so i always appreciate when authors i
feel capture the reality of what that time period was like and i i walked away going god thank
thank god i don't live in 13th century uh france or britain i'm going this is awful li
ke what
impressed me about that is the balance between uh the melodrama of the story you know it's a big
revenge story a subplot and then have this whole detail about building the cathedral uh to the
point where you think gosh you know i think i can build a cathedral after reading this book
um so it's impressive to balance that so well that's right he was an architect i realized he
was an architect critic or architectural critic because i love it when you see people um like
point out that
expertise and it's fun same with i actually just read um uh michael crichton's
i finally read jurassic park the novel for the first time and i loved the movie i grew
up watching but the novel is fantastic in the book i was just telling you i had jurassic
park sitting above my desk oh kind of had i remember that was my first novel uh short fiction
prior to that so i was writing my first novel i wasn't sure how to write a novel again no formal
training in writing so i thought i'm going to use
jurassic park as a template so i'm looking at like
when does he first introduce the dinosaurs okay well that's what you're going to see the first
monsters in my book you know when does he kill off the first character well that's that's
the page i'm going to kill off a character so i used jurassic park almost as a template
for it for building my first story oh so michael cryden what a man i remember too he's like he
wrote his novel in medical school and i'm going i'm running out of excuses
not to finish a book if
uh these guys are doing it during medical school and cranking out you know three novels during that
time like this is this is insane insane pace uh and also he and i are almost the same height so i
have you know that's my that's my main comparison of michael crichton is like uh i hope for a blurb
like buffet is you know buffets uh comparison to creighton you know rooted in their height
similarity you know that's about it it's over at a book expo and there was a micha
el creighton was
signing a couple tables down for me and i was signing at my table and so of course he had an
incredibly long line of people wanting to get his current book signed and i had you know just
a few people but i signed really slowly and i would doodle pictures in my book which by the way
clyde kessler i got the idea from clyde kessler and uh so it took me a while to sign so for
a moment because i was signing so slowly he was signing so rapidly for a moment my
line was longer tha
n his that's great take a picture that's right i'm more than michael
creighton oh if only social media was around then to to really promote it that would have been
great oh man well thank you so much jim i so appreciate it it's been such a pleasure talking
with you and you seem strikingly normal for an author of such gory details so we you know i don't
know folks read the book to find out what we're talking about and if you have a tarantula with
lice seek medical assistance elsewhere exactl
y that's right well jim would you say this
this show is one of the great honors of your like last three days it has been and i've got a
glass of bourbon waiting afterwards so this will be the perfect end of a perfect evening
there you go folks you heard it right there new york times international best-selling author
two-syllable last name two pseudonyms just said perfect show is the perfect way to end a perfect
day so there's our sound bite folks well thanks for camping with us jim we so ap
preciate it
we hope when we get together in person we'll be able to get you by the fire and actually
do a real camping trip the way it should be that'd be fun awesome awesome thanks
so much folks thanks for tuning in
Comments
This is really well done. I’m just now starting to read JR. Surprised there are not more comments here.