Podcasts about jd robb

In this episode of Podcast in Death, AJ is joined by listener Dana to discuss Nora's tendency to repeat character names. We of course have a few spreadsheets to refer to, and we also talk about character names that repeat from Nora Roberts titles to JD Robb titles. It's an [...]

In this episode of Podcast in Death, AJ is joined by listener Dana to discuss Nora's tendency to repeat character names. We of course have a few spreadsheets to refer to, and we also talk about character names that repeat from Nora Roberts titles to JD Robb titles. It's an interesting look into the statistics of character names.

My VOW for Girls project - a special treat for you all. About the new book in my favorite series and how I miss the edge it once had. Also: endorsement quotes (or blurbs) - do they work? Does anyone care? I say YES.

Ugh, what's worse than an entitled, bored, narcissistic rich boy? TWO entitled, rich, narcissistic boys. Eve has her hands full in this one with two killers, but thankfully she has the team (including Roarke behind her)! Listen as we try to contain our feminine rage as we discuss Seduction in Death (2001).

We are excited to be back with Eve and Roarke! We are loving seeing their relationship (both personal and professional) grow. But, uh oh, Peabody and McNab are NOT okay. And have we mentioned the gruesome murders that need to be solved? Listen in as we discuss Betrayal In Death (2001).

Holiday reading round up, series picks, and more. Cheryl's Books:    Sustainable Wardrobe: Advice and Projects for Eco-Friendly Fashion by Sophie Benson Wasteland: The Secret World of Waste and the Urgent Search for a Cleaner Future by Oliver Franklin-Wallis A Woman in the Polar Night by Christiane Ritter Tove and the Island with No Address by Lauren Soloy The Summer Book and other books by Tove Jansson Jessica's Books:   I Heard There Was A Secret Chord: Music as Medicine by Daniel J. Levitin The In-Between Bookstore by Edward Underhill Ingrained: The Making of a Craftsman by Callum Robinson Mentioned: Turning to Stone: Discovering the Subtle Wisdom of Rocks—Marcia Bjornerud Eve Dallas series by JD Robb, first book: Naked in Death Guild Hunter Series by Nalini Singh, first book: Angel's Blood Wayward Children series by Seanan McGuire, first book: Every Heart a Doorway, latest Adrift in Currents Clean and Clear Mari's Books:    Ode to Grapefruit: How James Earl Jones Found His Voice by Kari Lavelle These Deadly Prophecies by Andrea Tang The Judgment of Yoyo Gold by Isaac Blum Mentioned: Keeper of the Lost Cities by Shannon Messenger Wings of Fire by Tui Sutherland  Dragon Girls by Maddy Mara Dragons in a Bag by Zetta Elliott Magic Tree House Original Series by Mary Pope Osborne Series Mentioned:   Jim Butcher's Dresden Files Louise Penny's Inspector Armand Gamache Mysteries (Three Pines Mysteries) Diana Gabaldon Outlander Novels Neal Shusterman's Arc of a Scythe Series Looking for more books to read?  Here is the first selection of titles suggested by CADL Staff members at our annual in-service: Long Live Evil by Sarah Rees Brennan Tender Is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica The Hollow Places by T. Kingfisher In the Dream House: A Memoir by Carmen Maria Machado True Gretch: What I've learned Life, Leadership, and Everything in Between by Gretchen Whitmer

In this episode of the Podcast in Death, we talk about ‘Devoted in Death’ by JD Robb. This is a book that many fans (including us) read once and rarely if ever read again because the crimes in this book are very disturbing. BUT… the good parts of this book [...]

We are back with In Death, and there is trouble in paradise! Eve has a mess on all sides in Judgment in Death (2000). Cops are dying, cops are dirty, cops (*cough* Webster *cough*) are hiding in her bushes, and Roarke isn't speaking to her! You don't want to miss this one!

Is this an In Death or Agatha Christie?? Witness In Death (2000) is scaling down the In Death universe to a more intimate mystery. It's a real whodunit and we loved it! Also, Eve and Roarke are super cute in this one. (Swoon.)

Another In Death! And the stakes are HIGH in this one. Eve is taking on Cassandra - a greedy terrorist group with a delusional self-image as selfless vigilantes. Even with all that going on, what's really on our mind is...what's happening with Peabody and McNab?? Listen in as we discuss Loyalty In Death (1999)!

We are back in the In Death universe! For one of us Conspiracy In Death (1999) is our favorite In Death so far, and for the other, it has our biggest heart flutter in the series! Don't miss this one!

Hey, Everyone! In this week’s episode, we look at the reviews of “Random in Death,” so, if you haven’t read that book yet, you may want to skip this episode. For the rest of you, hold on to your hats and glasses, because this is going to be a wild ride! As we have already said on our last episode, the common theme among all of these reviews is that people HATED all of the slang as in: “…the focus on teen slang is sooo boomer.” “It is distracting, a good mystery but silly with the slang.” “I also needed whomever wrote this to chill on the hip terminology…”dooser” is not plausible in any universe.” “JD Robb is to making up future slang as Stephen King is to making up past slang. If either has ever met a teenager I’d be shocked.” But, that’s not all: Some of these reviewers HATE Peabody: “Peabodys character acts like an immature teen” “Peabody was annoying again in this one.” Good reviews for this one include: “The detective team is top notch. There are obvious friendships and respect for partners.” “This book was compelling from beginning to end.” “… it was like listening to a story from an old friend. I loved it! Susan Ericksen does an excellent job with the narration…” This was a fun episode to record, and we hope you all enjoy it!

Getting into the holiday spirit In Death style! We are closing out season 6 with Holiday In Death (1998). Is it wrong for us to say that we had SO MUCH fun while reading this festive Christmas tale with a murdering Santa Claus? Because we did! Seriously, don't miss this one!

A certain cop who struggles with work-life balance and her billionaire husband have been on our mind, so it is time to return to the In Death universe! Vegeance in Death (1997) doesn't disappoint with gruesome murders, explosions, passion, a trip to Ireland, and the introduction of McNab!

Hello, Everyone! It's "We Review the Reviews" Time again! In this episode, we are reviewing the reviews of fan favorite: "Treachery in Death." Because this book IS a fan favorite, imagine our shock (or maybe not) about how many horrible reviews this book has! First, someone who gave this book a One Star review because they didn't like Eve and also the book didn't have "enough adrenaline or testosterone." Also, this is the first book in the series this reviewer read because they "can't be bothered to search for the #1 to start with every series." Another reviewer who says Eve is "utterly unlikable" and a "supercilious twit." Yet another reviewer who "expected better from Nora Roberts" and now they know "to stay away from J.D Robb forever." There's a review that simply says "Vulgar," and one that tells Nora to "find a Thesauras…." and as you will notice, that reviewer spelled Thesaurus wrong. BUT... There are a few bright spots in the mix of reviews including: A reviewer who is "IN LOVE with this series!" A reviewer who said: "Whenever I need a pick-me-up, I grab Treachery ID because it never fails to lift up my spirits and put me back into fighting mode." We agree! A reviewer who states: "I really enjoyed it. I should admit that JD Robb read by Susan Ericksen is pretty much always at the front of my comfort shelf." We agree with this, too! Overall, a really entertaining mix of reviews! Enjoy!

Our Trailblazer conversations continue this week with legend Nalini Singh, whose groundbreaking paranormal series changed the game. We talk about the early days of her writing (when she was a kid!) about building her career in New Zealand, about how she came to publish in the US, about her beautiful relationships with readers, about the way she thinks about her series and how the stories hang together, and about her moves into contemporary and beyond. We are so grateful to Nalini Singh for making time for us, and for her amazing books.If you want more Fated Mates in your life, please join our Patreon, which comes with an extremely busy and fun Discord community! Join other magnificent firebirds to hang out, talk romance, and be cool together in a private group full of excellent people. Learn more at patreon.com. Show NotesWelcome Nalini Singh, author of dozens of romance novels, including several popular paranormal series. You should subscribe to her newsletter on her site! We did a deep dive of Caressed by Ice in Season 4.Preorder her new thriller, There Should Have Been Eight, coming November 21st, right now.Authors & Books: The Time is Short by Nerina Hilliard, Christine Feehan, Sherrilyn Kenyon, Jayne Ann Krentz, Yvonne Lindsay/EV Lind, Karina Bliss, Louisa George, Helen Bianchin, Emma Darcy, JD Robb, Meljean Brook.Publishing Professionals: Berkley editor Cindy Hwang, bookseller Barbara Clendon owner of Barbara's Books.

For this episode of "We Review the Reviews," Jen is on Vacation, so it's just AJ and Tara. Since this is a brand new book, there aren't as many reviews as with a book that's a bit older, but we still found some "doozies." Among those are: Oh too predictable and Eve is one-dimensional Love scenes are terrible and why doesn't Eve ever have cramps Story is thin and trite Antagonists are kind of stupid We have someone who starts out their review saying, "How I hate reading J.D. Robb." and ends with: "Why do I read the Eve Dallas books? Because there is another writer whose name I can never remember whose protagonist is also police and whose name is Eve? Dee?" We wish this person would just figure out who that other author is and go read them. Also, that person who says they're "disappointed with Eve and Roarke's relationship" because it's "not going anywhere," which we think is just code for "Babies." And, of course, we also have the person suggesting that maybe there's a ghostwriter. BUT... "Bob" gave the book a 4 Star rating and says "Dallas's investigation is clean and focused. There are no sidetrack plot developments that take her out of the investigation." Someone who said: "No grand fireworks in this one, but that didn't stop me from turning the pages as fast as I could read them. I was hooked; I needed to know 'whodunnit'." A really lovely review from someone who said: "Strong characters and relationships, unique plot lines and tight pacing make this a must read series for fans of crime and police procedurals. I highly recommend Payback In Death to fans of the In Death series and to everyone who enjoys a challenging mystery and police procedural." You knew we had to have one positive Susan Ericksen review with the reviewer saying, "But the combination of JD Robb's writing and Susan Ericksen's narration have kept me sane in February and September for almost thirty years now. That deserves 5 stars unless she does something egregious." And we end with a reviewer who thanks Nora for enriching her life for so many years. We agree!

In this week's episode, I celebrate finishing the 14th and final book of the SILENT ORDER series by looking back at the writing of the series over the last six years. This week's coupon is for the audiobook of GHOST IN THE STORM, as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy. You can get the audiobook of GHOST IN THE STORM for 75% off at my Payhip store with this coupon code: GHOSTSTORM The coupon code is valid through September 29th, 2023, so if you find yourself needing entertainment as we proceed deeper into the school year, perhaps it's time to get a new audiobook! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Coupon of the Week Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 167 of the Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is September the 8th, 2023, and today we're taking a look back at writing the Silent Order series and a retrospective of the last six years. First, let's start off with Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon is for the audiobook of Ghost in the Storm as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy. You can get the audiobook of Ghosts in the Storm for 75% off at my Payhip store with this coupon code GHOSTSTORM. That's GHOSTSTORM and you can find the link and the coupon code in the show notes. This coupon code will be valid through September the 29th, 2023. So if you find yourself needing entertainment as you proceed deeper into the school year, perhaps it's time to get a new audiobook. 00:00:50 Writing Updates What have I been working on? Brand new-wise, as you can probably tell from the title of this episode, Silent Order: Pulse Hand is done and it is published and you can get it at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Google Play, Apple Books, Smashwords, and my Payhip. So the series is complete and the last book is now available and it's selling briskly. And thank you all for that. Now that that is done and my Summer of Finishing Things is finally finished with Dragon Skull and Silent Order being finished, I have started on the Ghost Armor series and the first book will be Ghost in the Serpent. And I am 10,000 words into it as this recording. And if all goes well, I'm hoping that will be out sometime in October and the audiobook of it before the end of the year. Starting a new series like this involves a fair bit of world building, and there's one good trick to know if you've picked a good name for a fantasy character. You Google it and you get 0 results. I do always Google character names before I commit to them. Sometimes you accidentally pick the name of someone who's been some sort of notorious criminal or controversial political figure, so it's best to avoid that, which I have to admit is less of a problem with fantasy names. However, when inventing fantasy names, you do occasionally stumble on a name that means another language, something like “very impolite term for women who sells carnal favors to the lowest echelons of society.” And you definitely don't want your character named after that, so it is always wise to Google. In audiobook news, the recording is underway for Dragonskull: Fury of the Barbarians. I expect we will start proofing chapters soon and I am looking forward to sharing that with all of you once it's done. We have one reader question this week from Wilson, who says: When are you coming back to the Third Soul series? Also Sevenfold Sword Online is calling you, lol. In answer to that… How to phrase this? I'm not saying no to doing more than Third Soul, but I don't have anything planned at the moment. I wrote The Third Soul, what would become The Third Soul now, 14 years ago, back in 2009? And so if I was to do it today, I would want to do many things differently. So if I did do something in The Third Soul, it'll probably be a slightly improved version of the setting with new characters, which, as I said, I'm not saying no to, but I don't have any current plans to do so. I am working on the Sevenfold Sword Online book. I'm on Chapter 2 of…actually, I don't know how many chapters it will be, but probably in the upper teens. But I am about 5,000 words into it. And I think that will probably be the either last book I published in 2023 or the first book I published in 2024, we'll see how the rest of this year goes. 00:03:40 Silent Order Retrospective Now, on to this week's main topic, a retrospective back on the Silent Order series, which seems suitable because as I said earlier, my Summer of Finishing Things has finished. The Silent Order of science fiction series is finally complete after 14 books, 769,000 words and six years. In fact, September 2023 marks the six year anniversary of when I published the first five books in the series. Like I did with Dragonskull, the other series I finished in summer 2023, I thought I would take a look back at the end of The Silent Order series in the Internet's favorite favored format, a numbered article and or podcast episode. Minor spoilers follow for The Silent Order series, but no major ones. 00:04:22 #1 The Protagonist When I started thinking about The Silent Order way back in 2016, I had just read the original James Bond books by Ian Fleming for the first time. I decided that I wanted to write about a spy, but in space. I also wanted to write a character who is essentially the opposite of James Bond, so the name was a play on that from James Bond to Jack March. The inspiration was that bond stays in place, but march is moving forward. Unfortunately though, I didn't realize it until the books were published and people started pointing it out to me, this meant that Jack March had the same initials as I do, which led to occasional accusations of him being an author avatar. This was definitely not what I had in mind. If anything, the closest match to my personality in any of my books would be The Sculptor from Frostborn: The Dwarven Prince, a curmudgeonly technician prone to occasional ranting. I did make March a contrast from James Bond, at least the literary version. Bond is gregarious, charming, drinks way too much, and has a different girl of the week. Well, every weekend, sometimes every day. March is grim, taciturn, very professional, and gets annoyed at the thought of a girl of the week. His fight against The Final Consciousness is personal in a way that various nemeses in the books rarely were. I believe Ian Fleming originally intended to make the Soviets the overarching big bad of the Bond books, but after tensions eased marginally between the West and the Soviets in the 60s, he switched to different villains and eventually settled on Specter and Blofeld. 00:05:56  #2 The Setting Specifically, Calaskar. March works for The Silent Order, part of the intelligence agency of the Interstellar Kingdom of Calaskar, which has seven core systems and several hundred minor colonies of varying sizes around the solar systems it claims. Calaskar is more culturally conservative than its neighbors, especially Rustaril and Raetia. But not terribly repressive. An American from the 1950s would find it rather relaxed, while an American from 2023 would probably find it stifling and conformist. It was a thought experiment on my part. How would a technologically advanced, yet relatively stable society look in the distant future? Of course, Calaskar isn't always stable. Where Rustaril and Raetia used to be part of the Kingdom but broke away and went in very different directions. It helped that March was born inside the empire of The Final Consciousness and so able to look at Calaskaran in society with a critical eye. He does think it tends toward the conformist and the parochial, but it doesn't have the brutality of the labor camps of The Final Consciousness, the social decay of Rustaril, or the vast gap between rich and poor of Raetia and the Falcon Republic. 00:07:08 #3 The Final Consciousness The Final Consciousness, also known half mockingly as The Machinists, is the overarching villain of the series. They're basically space communists combined with some of the crazier transhumanist ideas. The initial inspiration was the first few original James Bond books, where the Soviets and SMERSH were the chief adversaries. Further inspiration for the final consciousness came from college professors and crazy tech million. Years, sometimes college professors and academics will propose the most appalling things, like we need to reduce the Earth's population to 1 billion people, or everyone should be housed in giant cities and not allowed to leave, or children should be taken from their parents at birth to be raised in impartial institutions. The academics are always super unclear about how to do that and glide over little details like, how exactly the population will be reduced from 9 billion to one or how will they be encouraged to move into giant cities. These various tech billionaires also provided additional inspiration for The Final Consciousness. If you will forgive something of a generalization, it seems that if you become a billionaire in America, there's a non trivial chance you're going to turn into a transhumanist weirdo, like you'll want to put computer chips in people's brains, or you'll spend all your time worrying about the singularity and artificial intelligence. Or you'll spend 18 hours a day exercising and taking experimental treatments and claim to have the body of a teenager when you're 43, when to the unprejudiced eye, you actually look like a very fit 42 year old. The Final Consciousness is what you would get if all these people had unlimited resources to put their very bad ideas into practice. What they ended up with was a tyrannical hive mind ruling over an essentially enslaved population. The hive mind, believing itself to be the final stage of human consciousness and evolution, was driven to expand and destroy all the obsolete societies around it. That did not match the self perceived perfection of The Final Consciousness. Since Machinists tried and failed to militarily conquer Calaskar they turned instead to infiltration and subversion, which touches off the plot of The Silent Order series. Of course, the hive mind was built on the technology of the Great Elder Ones, an extinct alien race, who turned out to be not so extinct after all. 00:09:16 #4 The Great Elder Ones In a lot of science fiction, you have sort of elements of Lovecraftian cosmic horror working their way in, and that's where The Great Elder Ones came from. I had the original idea of The Great Elder Ones way back in the late 2000s, long before I discovered self-publishing. I was thinking about a fantasy series in a world that had an early modern level of technology. The study would have a communist revolution which would create the inevitable dictatorship and secret police state that always seems to follow communist revolutions, but the twist would be that the secret police organization was actually a cult worshipping a dark power, and they plan to use the mass loss of life associated with revolution to fuel a summoning spell to bring their dark power back to the world. I abandoned that ideas as unworkable and unlikely to sell, but I returned in the relationship between The Great Elder Ones and The Final Consciousness. Of course, Silent Order is science fiction, not fantasy, so it was cast in science fiction terms. The Final Consciousness used the surviving technology of The Great Elder Ones to build their hive mind, but that made them vulnerable to manipulation and control from The Great Elder Ones. The Great Elder Ones have been locked outside this universe by their ancient enemies, but plan to use The Final Consciousness is pawns to allow them to return and destroy the universe like they originally intended. 00:10:32 #5. The First Five Books I originally started writing Silent Order: Iron Hand on New Year's Eve in 2016. My original plan was to actually write the first four books, and once they were done, release them once a week until they were all out. I ended up writing a fifth book because of a news article I read. Originally I planned to go straight from Silent Order: Axiom End to Silent Order: Fire Hand. However, I read an article in mid 2016 arguing that an iPad made for better productivity tool than a Linux desktop. I found this implausible. In the seven years since then, the iPad has become better as a productivity tool, and since you can get a keyboard case and cast it to a bigger screen, but it's still really expensive and it's a lot easier to hook up an ergonomic keyboard and a big ‘ol monitor to a Linux System than to an iPad. It's substantially cheaper too. So to make a point, I wrote, edited and published Silent Order: Eclipse Hand entirely on Ubuntu Linux. Back then I still wrote about technology and Linux on a regular basis, so it fit neatly into my workflow. I also designed the cover entirely on GIMP on Ubuntu. More on that soon. All five books were ready to go in September 2017, and then I published the first one at the end of September, and the rest in October of that year. The initial plan was to put them in Kindle Unlimited since science fiction was very popular in Kindle Unlimited at that point. However, this disappointed enough people that I abandoned the initial plan and switched to wide distribution, which means books were on in addition to Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Google Play, Apple Books, and Smashwords. This series had a good start and I thought that it would be an open-ended series with a new adventure of the week with every boo. More soon or why this didn't quite work out. However, moving the books out of KU proved a wise decision. For all of 2023, as of this recording, only 49.1% of Silent Order's total revenue came from Amazon, the rest came from the other retailers. If that was a parliamentary democracy, they could make a coalition against Amazon if they wanted. There's no way KU page reads could have made-up that difference, especially since the Kindle Unlimited payment rate per page is quite a bit lower than it was in 2017. 012:55 #6: History I set the Silent Order books a long, long way into the future. Like roughly 100,000 years from now. I did this for a couple of reasons. First, it's always a little painful when you read older science fiction, you come across a sentence like mankind had its first hyperspace flight in 1996, or the protagonists have a problem but need to conserve computer power because they only have so many data space/data tapes. The phenomenon of one's futuristic science fiction becoming dated is called zeerust, and something I wanted to avoid if possible in Silent Order. Second, having the series take place 100,000 years into the future left a lot of wiggle room in the setting's back story. It meant that things could be lost, forgotten, or distorted for most of the series. No one is entirely sure exactly where Earth was, because the information has been lost after 100,000 years of human expansion into space. Obviously that kind of thing can be useful for plotting. In the Silent Order back story, there were five United Terran Empires that ruled over mankind for thousands of years at a time, but they all collapsed for various reasons. It also meant there could be lost technology plots as all the Terran empires had technological expertise that was lost when they collapsed… genetic engineering and high level AI and so forth. Third, it let me disconnect Silent Order from a lot of contemporary disputes here in the early 21st century. One of the tricky parts of writing near future science fiction is that it's easy to have the books take a stance on the immediate crises of the day, which can annoy a lot of readers. Having the books set so far into the future means that from the perspective of characters, years the various concerns of the 2020s seen as academic and as dusty as, for example, the Investiture Controversy or the dispute between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines seems to us today. So to someone in Jack March's time, the 2020 election and all its upheaval, or the coronavirus pandemic would be as distant and academic as the Investiture Controversy is to us today. 00:14:55 #7 Technology One complaint about the books was that Jack March regularly used a gun, a chemically propelled kinetic firearm, or that he often used a handheld computer he called the phone. Like, why didn't he always use a laser pistol or a particle gun, or have some sort of hyper advanced neural implant that functioned as a phone? Isn't this science fiction, for heaven's sake? Of course, that's a bit like asking why in 2023 you're still using a knife to cut your bread when instead you can use a high end laser cutter. The answer, of course, is that the knife is cheap and reliable and fulfills this technological niche so perfectly that even though there are more advanced alternatives available, it would be costly and pointless to use them. I think chemically propelled firearms fulfill that niche as well. People forget this, but firearms have been around for over 800 years. King Edward the Third used cannons in the opening battles of the 100 Years War, which started in 1337 A.D., quite a long time ago. Obviously firearms have been refined and improved considerably since that time, but the basic principle remains the same: metal tube, metal projectile, chemical propellant. Even in Jack March's time, a chemically propelled firearm offers many advantages. It doesn't require electricity and can be built without computer parts, meaning the weapon is immune to an EMP effect. Additionally, it is much less fragile than a more advanced weapon. The AK47 could famously still fire even after being dragged through a stream or left in the dirt for a while. Granted, it may not be terribly accurate, but it could still fire. With 100,000 years' worth of small improvements in material science, You couldn't 3D print a working firearm in your basement. It wouldn't even be made of metal and therefore much harder to detect. When March uses a phone obviously it would be more advanced than anything available today, but the word phone is a convenient shorthand to refer to personal data, mobile computing and communication device, and I settled on that instead of using a more science fiction-esque word like data pad or personal terminal. I didn't want to call it a communicator because that brings Star Trek to mind. Besides, one the cardinal rules of writing is to never use a long word when a shorter one will suffice. 00:17:02 #8 The Covers If I remember right, I ended up redoing the covers for the Silent Order series five times in total. The first set used a combination of a stock photo spaceship and a stock photo planet along with the custom font I paid for. After a while I had stock photos of people holding weapons against space background, but that really didn't work, so I switched down for a new set of stock photos of spaceships and planets. I was bumping up against the limits of what I could do with stock photos and GIMP. The difficulty of stock photos is their limitations. What you see is what you get. Ask anyone who's done any design work of any kind, and you'll probably get stories of searches for stock photos that turned up many pictures that almost good enough, but not quite. Then the COVID hysteria came around and I used some of the free time that generated to take a Photoshop course. I managed to produce a fourth set of covers, ones that used human figures and looked quite a bit better than the previous set of covers. However, shortly after that I saw Penny Arcade cartoon that has solidified my opinion on science fiction cover. They needed planets and they needed spaceships, and they needed to be in proximity. I redid the covers one more time. Suddenly, on five years after the final look of the series, which featured a spaceship, a planet, and in close proximity planets and spaceships was indeed the way to go. The series has had its best sales with the final set of covers. 00:18:29 #9 False Ending Despite my best efforts, Silent Order never sold as well as my fantasy books, and after eight books I wanted to do something else. Originally, as I mentioned, I planned for the series to be open-ended and ongoing. However, in the years since I've learned that in fantasy and science fiction, especially indie fantasy and science fiction, that really doesn't work. Like if you're John Sanford or Jeffrey Deaver, Jonathan Kellerman, JD Robb, or CJ Box, you can write books where your protagonists essentially has an adventure of the week or year, given traditional publishing schedules, without an overarching plot to the series. However, that's a different genre than fantasy and science fiction. And in traditional publishing, it's basically a different business model. I think because of certain well-known authors in fantasy literature who haven't finished their series, readers in the indie fantasy and science fiction space expect completed series with an overarching plot that gets resolved and quite a few of them refused to read an unfinished series at all. So I decided to wrap things up with Book Nine, which was Silent Order: Ark Hand in 2018 and give the series an ending with Jack March settling down on Calaskar. I intended to stop there and did stop there for three years. But people kept asking when I was going to write more in the series and I did feel I left too much unfinished with the Pulse and the Great Elder Ones. So in 2021, I decided to pick it up again, thinking it would take one or two more books to wrap up the series with a further ending. It turned out to be 5 more books for 14 total. I thought it was going to be 15. But after I finished #13, I thought 14 and 15 would be better combined as a single book, which is how we got Pulse Hand. 00:20:00 #10. Thanks, Chat GPT It only took six years to write the series, which isn't all that long, but technology has changed quite a bit during that six years and insane AI was a feature of the books dating all the way back to Silent Order: Wraith Hand, which I wrote back in 2017. I first introduced the character of Thunderbolt, another insane AI when I wrote Silent Order: Royal Hand in 2021. Though she wouldn't appear in the books until Thunder Hand in 2023, between the writing of Royal Hand and Thunder Hand, ChatGPT, Mid Journey, Bing Chat, and all the other generative AI tools entered the mainstream. This was a tremendous boon to me. Not because I used them for the writing. My overall opinion of generative AI remains that it's bad. And if it's not meaning the strict legal definition of plagiarism, then it's at least sitting on the same couch as plagiarism, but because of all the tales of AI meltdowns that made it into the mainstream press, like when Microsoft rolled out Bing Chat AI and it famously would go on unhinged rants, threatening people, dissolve into incoherent logical loops, and insist that factually incorrect information was the truth and threatened anyone who doubted it, and otherwise have all kinds of glitches that range from hilarious to deeply disturbing. I read those articles with great amusement and delight and based Thunderbolt's personality off them. Of course, Thunderbolt has rail guns and their own automated fleet of space warships, so when she has breakdowns, it's a little more concerning. So nearly seven years after I had first had the idea, the Silent Order series has come to its conclusion, its proper conclusion this time. I do hope that you found the ending satisfying. 00:21:26 Conclusion I'd also like to thank Silent Order readers for the enthusiasm for the series in ‘22 and 2023. After I settled on the final cover design, it sold better than it ever has, but still doesn't sell nearly as well as my various fantasy books. That was one of the reasons I was going to stop after Book 9, but the sheer enthusiasm people had for the books and the nagging sense that it wasn't quite finished led me to write 5 more. So thank you all for reading and for coming along with Jack March on this long, long journey. And if you've never heard of Silent Order or if you're one of those people who only reads completed series, the first book is free on all the ebook platforms, so why not check it out? You get Silent Order: Iron Hand for free at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Google Play, Kobo, Apple Book, Scribd, and Smashwords. So that is it for this week. Thanks for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.

In this week's episode, I take a look back at the DRAGONSKULL series, and discuss what it took to complete a 9-book epic fantasy series. TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction, Writing Updates, and Reader Questions Hello everyone. Welcome to Episode 165 of the Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is August the 25th, 2023 and today we're going to talk about how I finished the Dragonskull series with a look back. Before we get to our main topic, let's have an update on my current writing progress and some questions from readers. Right now I am working on Silent Order: Pulse Hand. I am pleased to report I am 55,000 words into it, which puts me on Chapter 13 of 16. I am at the climactic scene of the book, and indeed the entire series, because this is the final book in the series as part of my Summer of Finishing Things, and so hopefully that should be out sometime in September if all goes well. Once Silent Order: Pulse Hand is finished, I will start in my next book which will be Ghost in the Serpent, the first book of Caina's New Ghost Armor series and hopefully that will be out in October. In audiobook news, recording is underway for Dragonskull: Fury Of the Barbarians. If all goes well, I think we'll probably have that out in October sometime. But we will see how the next couple of weeks go. Our first question this week is from Michael who asked: Concerning the Dragon Skills Series, are you going to do all nine books as a pack? It would be great to purchase once rather than scroll through nine different titles. Unfortunately, no. That would just not be financially viable, I'm afraid. Later this year I am going to put together a Dragon Skull Omnibus One so I can have a nice, big four pack with three books and a short story, both in ebook and audiobook format, but I don't have a plan to do a complete series bundle just because I would have to charge so much. It would not be a cost savings for you the reader, and it would still be cheaper to buy the individual books. Our next question is from Guy who asks: Hey, Jonathan. Have loved the Silent Order series and can't wait to see how it ends. I know I've asked this before so please forgive me, do you have any other plans to revisit the Demonsouled series? They are awesome. Also, will we see more of Gareth Arban, another amazing series? Thanks, Guy. I'm glad you've enjoyed all those books and answered your question. At the moment, I have no current plans to go back to the Demonsouled series, but I'm not ruling it out entirely. We will just have to see what the next few years bring. In answer to your other question, we will see more of Gareth in the Shield Wars series, which I'm going to start next year, since that is also in the world of Andomhaim. Our next question is from Justin, who asks: I expected the Silent Order series to go to 15 books based near your past writing. 14 will be collecting the spoiler and reporting back, 15 would be the final act. And answer to that question, I did originally plan for Silent Order to be 15 books. However, as I was looking through the outlines of book 14 and book 15, I thought these look a little thin on their own and I'd have to you pad them out a bit with some extraneous subplots, and as you get towards the end of the series, especially a really long series like Silent Order, you don't want to be adding in subplots, you want to be, you know, having subplots be resolved as you narrow the focus down to the conclusion and the resolution of the main conflict. So I looked at those two outlines I thought either I would have to pad these out a bit or I could combine them and make one slightly longer book to finish off the series. And I thought, yeah, I'm going to do that because that's what I'm doing right now. And I think it's going well and I think and I'm hopeful that readers will be satisfied with the ending to the Silent Order series. We will find out next month. Our next question is from Rob, who asks: Did I imagine the new Ghost Series, Ghost in the Serpent? I've been trolling,but I can't find it. Rob asked this on Facebook, which has this very irritating habit of not showing things in chronological order and sometimes disappearing posts, even if you looked at them already. But in answer to Rob's questions, you did not imagine a new Ghost series. After Silent Order: Pulse Hand is done, I will be writing Ghost in the Serpent, the first book in the Ghost Armor series. Hopefully that'll be out in October and hopefully the audiobook will be out before the end of the year because I have a spot reserved with the narrator to have her recorded in November 2023, if all goes well. And our last question this week is from Jerry, who asks: How did I miss you continuing on with the Silent Order series?  Last I read was book eight. What Happened with Book 9 and did not get published on Google Play Books? The last one I read, Jack retires and lives with the professor lady. Thanks, Jerry. I'm glad you enjoyed the books and in answer to your question…there's a couple of answers. I had originally planned to stop with Book 9, Silent Order: Ark Hand, but I decided that the series was incomplete at that point and so I ended up writing five more books. The fifth and last one of which I am writing right now. For a while there was a metadata error on Google Play where the series order of the books was not displaying correctly. I believe that has since been corrected and all 13 books in the series I've written so far should be available on Google Play and the 14th one I fully intend will be there in a few weeks. So those were the questions this week. If you have any questions you'd like to have the answer on the show, please leave a comment on my blog or Facebook site. And if I see it and I have time, I will make sure that gets included on the show as a question. 00:05:28 Main Topic: A Look Back at Dragonskull Now to our main topic this week, a look back at Dragonskull, which seems appropriate because after two years, nine books, 731,000 words, and 10 short stories, the Dragonskull series is finally complete. Thank you all who came along on the quest of the Dragonskull. I hope it was an enjoyable journey for all of you who've read it. So, it's time to take a look back at the writing process of the series. We'll do this using the Internet's favorite form of communication, a numbered list. Note that this podcast episode will have minor spoilers for some of the nine books, so if you haven't read them all, it would probably be a good time to stop listening to this episode and go read the rest of the Dragonskull series before you continue onward. 00:06:12  #1 Deciding on a New Series. After I finished writing Dragontiarna: Warden way back in summer 2021 (almost two years ago to this recording in fact), I knew I wanted to write another epic fantasy series. I just wasn't sure what I wanted to do. I did know that I wanted it to be different than Dragontiarna. If you will recall, Dragontiarna had five main point of view characters over the 10 books, Ridmark, Niall, Tyrcamber Rigamond, Moriah Rhosmor and Third, along with a bunch of secondary point of view characters and writing that got to be really challenging towards the end since it's generally best to include something of an arc for every main POV character in a book. So after writing Dragontiarna, I wanted to write something a bit less complicated for my next series. Of the nine Dragonskull books, the first five, with the exception of the epilogue, are entirely from Gareth Arban's point of view. I also wanted to write a series with a more focused scope and stakes, like in Dragontiarna the fate of the Cosmos was at stake, and you can't do that with every book and every series. You can't have the character of saving the Cosmos every book. Dragontiarna sometimes had major battles taking place simultaneously on two different worlds, and so I wanted to write something with a tighter focus for the new series. I thought for a while about starting the new series in an entirely new setting. I do intend to do it at some point, but not this year and probably not in 2024. Since Andomhaim and neighboring realms is such a big place, I decided to set the new series there and visit locations that we didn't see too much of in Frostborn, Sevenfold Sword, and Dragontiarna, the Qazaluuskan Forest and beyond. So that was the start of Dragonskull. 00:07:52 #2 Choosing a Main Character I wanted to try a younger main character this time around. Ridmark by the time of Dragontiarna was a middle-aged man and by the time most people reach his age, they are usually are who they are going to be. By contrast, a younger protagonist has more developing and maturing to undergo, which means that there is an opportunity to tell a different kind of story than you can with a middle-aged protagonist. I settled on Gareth as the main character and decided to start the series when he was 17. Now most of us, when we were 17,  1: know nothing, 2: think we know everything and 3: usually undergo a variety of unpleasant experiences to cure some points 1 and 2. Naturally, this provides excellent opportunities for storytelling. In Gareth's case, he thought he knew what it took to be an honorable knight but he got some of the particulars wrong. In hindsight, I think it took too long for him to develop. If I could do it all over, I probably would have had that pivotal scene at the end of book two rather earlier than it actually took place in the series. 00:08:52 #3 The Villain The main villain was Azalmora, though of course we had numerous other villains over the course of the series. I actually happened upon Azalmora 's name by accident. In the first draft of The First Sorceress, which was her first appearance, her name was Azurmara, and then I was editing and I mistyped her name and came out with Azalmora instead. I thought that sounded much better, so by happy accident I changed her name to Azalmora. She turned out to be a pretty great villain: disciplined, intelligent, and self controlled, which of course makes it easier to write the protagonist, since the villain doesn't make obvious mistakes, so they have to be willfully blind not to exist. #4 Improvising the Norvangir As you might recall, if you read my website for any length of time, I usually outline everything in advance and I did the same thing with Dragonskull. I did however, improvise the Norvangir entirely. In the original outline, Gareth and Company would meet the Ghost Path Tribe of Halflings after leaving the Qazaluuskan Forest. The closer it got to that point, however, the more bored I became with the idea, since I felt like you would just be digging up an obscure point above Frostborn: The Skull Quest. At that time, I happened to watch a National Geographic or possibly PBS documentary about how the Vikings came to North America , specifically, Canada, substantially sooner than anyone originally thought, and an idea took hold. What if a group of Vikings accidentally sailed into a mysterious mist that was actually World Gate and ended up in the world of Andomhaim? I liked the idea enough that I rewrote the series outline to accommodate it, and thus the Norvangir were born. I do wish I got in the Ghost Path Halflings into the story, but once I had swapped in the Norvangir it seemed like an unnecessary side quest at that point. 00:10:30 #5 Improvising Niara Niara was always in the outline for the series from the very beginning. I wasn't entirely sure what her personality would be like, though. Early on, I envisioned her as much more somber and stoic. As the books went on and the character developed, the stoicism remained, but the somberness was replaced by a combination of the love of fighting, stubbornness, and a violent charisma. When Niara is convinced that she is in the right, she absolutely will not back down and will cheerfully fight anyone who tries to force her to change her mind. I found that happens quite a bit when writing fiction. You envision s character one way, but then you actually write them and they start interacting with the setting and the conflict and the other characters, and they turn out quite a bit differently than the way you originally thought. 00:11:12 #6: The End I've realized that when writing a series, you need to have a definite endpoint in mind. Like, if you're JD Robb, John Sanford, or Jeffrey Deaver, you can write a long series of open-ended novels about the same detective. But that doesn't really work in fantasy. The reader expectation is that there will be an ending, a fairly epic ending, at some point. I've tried writing a fantasy series with an open-ended plot line in mind. But it never seems to work, so the ending is important both for the individual books and definitely for the entire series as a whole. I think I arrived at a satisfactory ending for the series. The key to a proper ending, of course, is that it needs to provide emotional resolution to the conflicts previously raised in the story. Fantasy as a genre has a bad reputation for unfinished series. Mostly this is the fault of the publishers, with a few notable exceptions. They'll contract a writer for trilogy or five book series, and then cancel it after the second book only sells 80% of the copies of the first one. On occasion, it is the writer's fault. The writer just bit off more than he or she can chew or got excited with a new idea it, didn't really plan it out or think it through. So I hope the ending for Dragonskull is satisfying, and if it isn't, remember that disappointing ending is much better than no ending at all. 00:12:28 #7 What's Next? Dragonskull is over, but there is more stories in the land of Andomhaim and neighboring realms. If all goes well, I will start on Shield of Storms, the first book in the Shield War series, sometime in the sometime in the first half of 2024. And finally, I would just like to thank everyone who came along for the Dragonskull ride. I'm glad so many of you enjoyed the books and that series has been my best selling one for the last two years. So once again, I would like to express my gratitude to everyone who has read, bought, and enjoyed the books and shared them with your friends. Thank you very much. It is very appreciated and you are the best readers in the world. So that is it for this week. Thanks for listening to the Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found this show useful. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave for review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.

A round-up of my weekend, including a fun event with the fabulous Melinda Snodgrass. Also thoughts on including twists in stories and what's required to earn them. Preorder ROGUE FAMILIAR here https://jeffekennedy.com/rogue-familiarRUBY is out now! https://jeffekennedy.com/ruby FIVE GOLDEN RINGS is now available here: https://jeffekennedy.com/five-golden-rings SAPPHIRE is available here: https://jeffekennedy.com/sapphire and PLATINUM is available here https://jeffekennedy.com/platinum.THE LONG NIGHT OF THE RADIANT STAR, a midwinter holiday fantasy romance in the Heirs of Magic series, now available!! https://jeffekennedy.com/the-long-night-of-the-radiant-starSHADOW WIZARD, Book One in Renegades of Magic, continuing the epic tale begun in DARK WIZARD. https://jeffekennedy.com/shadow-wizard is out now! Including in audiobook!Interested in Author Coaching from me? Information here: https://jeffekennedy.com/author-coachingROGUE'S PARADISE is out (https://jeffekennedy.com/rogue-s-paradise). Buy book 1, ROGUE'S PAWN, here! (https://jeffekennedy.com/rogue-s-pawn) and book 2, ROGUE'S POSSESSION, here! (https://jeffekennedy.com/rogue-s-possession).If you want to support me and the podcast, click on the little heart or follow this link (https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/jeffekennedy).You can watch this podcast on YouTube here https://youtu.be/hfpjghqdr_ISign up for my newsletter here! (https://landing.mailerlite.com/webforms/landing/r2y4b9)Support the show

Have some project you really want to do? Why you should put it in motion today! Also thoughts on worldbuilding in Fantasy, monetary systems, making mistakes and fixing them, and how pitching never gets easier.You can find all the FaRoFeb events here https://farofeb.com/events-and-giveaways/ and the giveaway I mention is here  https://kingsumo.com/g/pujmm3/farofeb-2023-week-one-giveawayPreorder ROGUE FAMILIAR here https://jeffekennedy.com/rogue-familiarRUBY is out now! https://jeffekennedy.com/ruby FIVE GOLDEN RINGS is now available here: https://jeffekennedy.com/five-golden-rings SAPPHIRE is available here: https://jeffekennedy.com/sapphire and PLATINUM is available here https://jeffekennedy.com/platinum.THE LONG NIGHT OF THE RADIANT STAR, a midwinter holiday fantasy romance in the Heirs of Magic series, now available!! https://jeffekennedy.com/the-long-night-of-the-radiant-starSHADOW WIZARD, Book One in Renegades of Magic, continuing the epic tale begun in DARK WIZARD. https://jeffekennedy.com/shadow-wizard is out now! Including in audiobook!Interested in Author Coaching from me? Information here: https://jeffekennedy.com/author-coachingROGUE'S PARADISE is out (https://jeffekennedy.com/rogue-s-paradise). Buy book 1, ROGUE'S PAWN, here! (https://jeffekennedy.com/rogue-s-pawn) and book 2, ROGUE'S POSSESSION, here! (https://jeffekennedy.com/rogue-s-possession).If you want to support me and the podcast, click on the little heart or follow this link (https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/jeffekennedy).You can watch this podcast on YouTube here https://youtu.be/MuowkqErQ2USign up for my newsletter here! (https://landing.mailerlite.com/webforms/landing/r2y4b9)Support the show

Thanks to our Patreon supporters, we have a new In Death episode for you! Continuing from where we left off, we are discussing Rapture In Death (1996) and Ceremony In Death (1997). And boy, we had some things to say. Listen in on our longest episode yet!

In this episode, we talk about "Eternity in Death," which is a novella originally released as part of the "Dead of Night" Anthology. In this story, Eve is dealing with the death of a young socialite, Tiara Kent (who bears a striking resemblance to Paris Hilton). Tiara looks to have been bitten by a Vampire (at least Peabody thinks so) and Eve is then dealing with a wannabe Vampire Dorian Vadim. Lots of fun to be had with that theme...Baxter hangs up garlic, Roarke gives Eve a Cross to wear, and Baxter also supplies Eve with a stake to take with her to take down Vadim (which does come in handy, so good job, Baxter!!) This is a good Halloween themed story, even though we didn't really like it as much as Haunted, but still a good, fun read.

Here we go, everyone, with our We Review the Reviews episode for "Desperation in Death"! Since this is such a new book, there's not the amount of reviews to choose from that we have with other titles. Still, we find some doozies. Our first reviewer found this book to be the "most unpleasant of all the books." Several reviewers find the book formulaic, yet somehow not? And Eve hasn't grown at all since her past "shows up in every. single. book." and she needs to "get a shrink." Someone who wants to know why people have to ask permission from Eve to go into her office and make themselves a cup of her coffee "Robb's writing is spot on" but somehow the book was "bland and a little disappointing." And..."ferengi? really?" One reviewer from Australia charges that Eve: "handed the defence a gift in this?? Assault during an arrest and violation of rights??" AJ takes that comment and goes off on a rant about actual US laws regarding use of force for police, and we go point by point describing the takedown of Iris Beaty, showing how at no point did Eve violate Beaty's rights according to US law. As we always do, we found a few reviews that praise Susan Ericksen, and one who says: "I hope Nora Robert's is aware of how fortunate she is to have such a fantastic narrator doing her work such justice." (She Does). We read a great review that states "the series is still so fresh, the characters engaging and entertaining, storyline gritty and suspenseful." And end with one who says the book was "Another Grand Slam AGAIN!!!" We had fun with these reviews, and we hope you have fun listening to them!

Kelly Brakenhoff is an author of six books and an ASL interpreter from Nebraska. She has served as an interpreter for deaf and hard of hearing persons now for over 30 years. You can tell how much she likes her chosen professions by listening to her as you get to do in this episode.   Kelly is especially excited by a series of books she has started involving Duke the Deaf Dog where she introduces readers to ASL, American Sign Language. She is working to help readers, especially children, better understand the deaf and hard of hearing community. On top of everything Kelly has done, she has used the crowdfunding program, Kickstarter, to help fund her newest book. It turns out that another famous author also used this program to fund their efforts. You get to hear all about it.   I very much hope you enjoy our episode this time and that you will give us a 5 rating. Thanks for listening.   About the Guest:   Kelly Brakenhoff is an author of six books and an ASL interpreter from Nebraska, US. She divides her writing energy between two series: cozy mysteries set on a college campus, and picture books featuring Duke the Deaf Dog.  Parents, kids, and teachers love the children's books because they teach American Sign Language using fun stories. And if you like a smart female sleuth, want to learn more about Deaf culture, or have ever lived in a place where livestock outnumber people, you'll enjoy the Cassandra Sato Mystery series.   Social media links:   kellybrakenhoff.com and follow her social media or blog by using this link: https://kellybrakenhoff.com/quicklinks/   About the Host: Michael Hingson is a New York Times best-selling author, international lecturer, and Chief Vision Officer for accessiBe. Michael, blind since birth, survived the 9/11 attacks with the help of his guide dog Roselle. This story is the subject of his best-selling book, Thunder Dog.   Michael gives over 100 presentations around the world each year speaking to influential groups such as Exxon Mobile, AT&T, Federal Express, Scripps College, Rutgers University, Children's Hospital, and the American Red Cross just to name a few. He is an Ambassador for the National Braille Literacy Campaign for the National Federation of the Blind and also serves as Ambassador for the American Humane Association's 2012 Hero Dog Awards.   https://michaelhingson.com https://www.facebook.com/michael.hingson.author.speaker/ https://twitter.com/mhingson https://www.youtube.com/user/mhingson https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelhingson/   accessiBe Links https://accessibe.com/ https://www.youtube.com/c/accessiBe https://www.linkedin.com/company/accessibe/mycompany/ https://www.facebook.com/accessibe/       Thanks for listening! Thanks so much for listening to our podcast! If you enjoyed this episode and think that others could benefit from listening, please share it using the social media buttons on this page. Do you have some feedback or questions about this episode? Leave a comment in the section below!   Subscribe to the podcast If you would like to get automatic updates of new podcast episodes, you can subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher. You can also subscribe in your favorite podcast app.   Leave us an Apple Podcasts review Ratings and reviews from our listeners are extremely valuable to us and greatly appreciated. They help our podcast rank higher on Apple Podcasts, which exposes our show to more awesome listeners like you. If you have a minute, please leave an honest review on Apple Podcasts.     Transcription Notes* Michael Hingson  00:00 Access Cast and accessiBe Initiative presents Unstoppable Mindset. The podcast where inclusion, diversity and the unexpected meet. Hi, I'm Michael Hingson, Chief Vision Officer for accessiBe and the author of the number one New York Times bestselling book, Thunder dog, the story of a blind man, his guide dog and the triumph of trust. Thanks for joining me on my podcast as we explore our own blinding fears of inclusion unacceptance and our resistance to change. We will discover the idea that no matter the situation, or the people we encounter, our own fears, and prejudices often are our strongest barriers to moving forward. The unstoppable mindset podcast is sponsored by accessiBe, that's a c c e s s i  capital B e. Visit www.accessibe.com to learn how you can make your website accessible for persons with disabilities. And to help make the internet fully inclusive by the year 2025. Glad you dropped by we're happy to meet you and to have you here with us.   Michael Hingson  01:21 Hi, and here we are once again with unstoppable mindset, the podcast where inclusion, diversity and the unexpected me. And the unexpected, as always, is the fun part of the podcast. We love to carry on different kinds of conversations with people learn about them. And you know what I'm going to say once again, for any of you listening out there, I'd love to have conversations with you. I'll bet you have stories that we should talk about. So definitely reach out. Michael hingson.com/podcast or Michaelhi@accessibie.com. And I'd love to chat with you. But for now, we have Kelly Brakenhoff, who is here with us. She is an author, and ASL interpreter, and a Kickstarter campaign runner par excellence. But does that elevate you are what Kelly Welcome to unstoppable mindset. How are you?   Kelly Brakenhoff  02:18 Hi, I'm great. Thank you for having me. today. I'm really excited to be talking to you.   Michael Hingson  02:24 Well, I'm really excited to have a chance to chat with you and learn all about you and and learn why you're unstoppable. When I started this podcast, because we think that everyone has a story to tell, we all have had challenges in our lives and, and we've overcome them. And it doesn't need to be a huge challenge. But still a challenge is a challenge. And when we overcome it, that's great. And when we recognize that we did something that we didn't think we can do, then I think we fall into this concept of being able to move toward a mindset of unstop ability. And so we started unstoppable mindset, and we have a lot of fun with it. Well, why don't we start with your story a little bit? Why don't you tell us about you kind of growing up or anything about that that you think we ought to know?   Kelly Brakenhoff  03:12 Well, sure. Um, yeah, I'm a fan of your, your mindset, your your podcast, I think this is just the coolest thing. So like I said, just super excited to be here today. Um, I've been an ASL interpreter for more than 30 years, and an author for just over three years. So although I'm a veteran interpreter, I'm still a baby author and publisher. I learned new things every day. So I guess you can teach an old dog new tricks. I guess. I've moved around. One thing that's interesting about me as I've moved around quite a bit. I grew up in Connecticut. I've lived in Nebraska, Boston, Hawaii, Seattle. And then now we've been in Nebraska for quite a while since Austin. Last Boston, Boston. Yes.   Michael Hingson  04:01 So can you say it pack your car and have a yard? Of course.   Kelly Brakenhoff  04:07 My uncle is from South Boston and so he married my aunt who's from upstate New York and listening to the to talk was so fun. I lived with them for a summer in college. And and I just had such is such a fun time, especially if they like had a little discussion or something you know, and they they get the voices raised and they'd start going in their accent they revert.   Michael Hingson  04:35 I lived in Winthrop, Massachusetts for three years and spent some time in the in the Boston area before then and back a little bit but I love the accent but I love Massachusetts. I love New England in general. And my wife and I have a story about Mr. Connecticut. We were going there for something and And I don't even remember what it was. And we were we were traveling the right way but we were traveling a lot further than we thought we needed to to get to Mystic So ever since I've been saying that one of the things about mystic is it moves around and doesn't stay in one place. So I'm sticking   Kelly Brakenhoff  05:17 to memory of mystic is going there on probably a sixth grade field trip. And you know afterwards, the field trip they take you through the gift shop and I bought a little pewter whale. Yeah, sure. I still have it somewhere in the bookcase somewhere in my house.   Michael Hingson  05:39 We stopped at a restaurant there. The second time we went to mystic and I'm still convinced it wasn't in the same place. It was the first time we went to a restaurant and sat right along the river and watch the drawbridge coming up, which was   Kelly Brakenhoff  05:55 that is really fun. Yeah,   Michael Hingson  05:57 definitely. Yeah. We love New England. And I hope that we get a chance to go back there. I have all sorts of stories about Boston. We went I went a lot over to Daniel hall into Quincy Market and ADA Durgan. Park. Have you ever eaten there?   Kelly Brakenhoff  06:13 I have it in there. Yes, I love Faneuil Hall.   Michael Hingson  06:16 I don't know whether Durgin Park is still open. I've heard it. I've heard that it is. But I'll have to tell you. Well, I'll tell you the story about Durgan Park. It's a Durgin Park, for those who don't know, is a restaurant that if it's still there, serves food family style, and they have tables along the side. That will seat for people. But you have to have four people, if you want to sit at one of those tables. If you have three, you sit at the long tables in the middle. If you have too long tables in the middle. They're very snotty about it. In fact, waitresses and waiters are hired to be snots. It's all an act, but they're supposed to be absolutely obnoxious. They're just what some people would say the typical clothes New England style of of being, if you will, but anyway, we go into the restaurant one night, and it was me and two other people and my guide dog Holland, who is a golden retriever with the most luscious eyes in the world. And the hostess said, you know, I'm just going to let you guys sit at one of the tables for four. So she seats us and the waitress comes over. And she says what are you people doing here? You can't sit at this table. And I said, well, the host has put it put us here. No, she didn't you just snuck in here. You can't sit at this table. And she yelled at us. And we said no. We got to sit be seated here because we have a guide dog under the table. No, you don't I don't believe that. You're not going to fool me with that. You can't sit here and she just went on. Then she goes away. And she comes back and she said you can't sit here I said, look under the table. Finally she looks. There's these eyes just staring back at her. And she just melts. And the next thing we know she goes away. One of the things about Durgin Park is that they serve a when they serve prime rib. It's a huge piece of prime rib that takes the whole plate. She comes back with this plate. She said somebody didn't eat much of their prime rib. Can I give it to the dog? And oh, it was great. But it's just fun memories of all over Boston. So I'm glad you had a chance to be there. Well, enough about me in that. So you've lived all over?   Kelly Brakenhoff  08:29 We have we've moved a lot and you haven't moved a lot recently. But when when I was younger, I moved quite a bit.   Michael Hingson  08:35 Yes. What caused you to be moving around. Um, we   Kelly Brakenhoff  08:39 grew up in Connecticut. And then in high school, my parents decided my mom's from Nebraska so and my dad's from upstate New York. So when I was in high school, we moved our family moved to Nebraska. And then when my husband and I first got married, he worked for a construction company who moved us to Hawaii for five years that works. That worked. That was a great honeymoon, We'd only been married six weeks. And so that was that was a five year honeymoon. That was awesome. Our first couple of kids were born there. And we decided that we after a year or so they really didn't get to see their grandparents very often. So he decided to move back to the mainland and we made a stop first in Seattle and then we came back to Nebraska. So we've been in here for quite a while but I really enjoyed getting to experience all the different cultures and all the different places and I also have a very soft spot in my heart for New England to   Michael Hingson  09:35 Well, it's great to live in various parts of the US shows what a wonderful and just incredible country we are with all sorts of different cultures that can really blend and meld together to form what we get to experience if we only keep the culture going as as really we are the melting pot and that just makes it so Great when we get to see that,   Kelly Brakenhoff  10:01 I totally agree i Yeah.   Michael Hingson  10:04 So how old are your kids now?   Kelly Brakenhoff  10:07 They are grown up. We have four kids, three boys and one girl. And so the oldest is 21 going to be 29. And our youngest just graduated from college last year. So he's 22 in Nebraska, and Nebraska. Huskers everybody's a Husker.   Michael Hingson  10:28 Go Huskers Go Big Red. Yep.   Kelly Brakenhoff  10:31 So um, but we have four grandkids too. So that's a lot of fun. And we're really lucky. They all live in town, so I get to see them quite a bit.   Michael Hingson  10:38 That works. So you see you fix it up. So you now have this this Braden half ghetto, if you will,   Kelly Brakenhoff  10:45 yes, my Twitter handle is actually in Brockville. Because one of my friends quite a while ago used to tease me that I was trying to create my own village. So we call it in Brock anvil.   Michael Hingson  10:59 There you go, that works. Nothing wrong with that. Well, so I know you're an author. And I know that you are an ASL interpreter, and so on, tell me how you got into being involved with ASL. And a little bit more about all that.   Kelly Brakenhoff  11:16 Sure. Um, I in high school, I volunteered at a camp for deaf kids. My parents wanted me to do something in the summer and stay out of trouble. So they kind of sent me to go volunteer. And at this camp. In the end, I didn't know any sign language. So I got a book. And I started trying to figure out a few signs before I first went to this camp. Of course, the first few weeks I was there, I had no idea what anyone was saying, because they were all using sign language. And I didn't know it. But by the end of the summer, I had learned quite a bit and I had made some really good friends. And I just kept learning during the school year, when they went when they were all gone. I kept taking classes and reading more books. And it actually turned out to be my, the language that I took when I was in college, it counted as my foreign language. And I just kept learning and hanging around with Deaf people. And eventually, my mentors in ASL, the deaf people that I was friends with, invited me to try interpreting for them. And I didn't, if I had known, I wasn't very good, but they were very kind. And they they asked me to interpret so I did and it just ended up kind of something I fell into. It wasn't something I intended to do. But it's become my whole life's work, and I really like it.   Michael Hingson  12:40 So is that kind of a full time job? Or are your vocation then?   Kelly Brakenhoff  12:43 Yeah, I would say it, it's my Well, it's hard to say what's my vocation because I also really love being an author, even though I haven't been published until recently. But I've been a writer my whole life in college, I actually majored in English. And I always wanted to be a writer, it just, I guess the interpreting thing just kind of was a very long detour. But I always wrote even when I was interpreting and so in raising my family and stuff, so once my kids started getting into high school and college, and I started looking around for something to fill some of my empty hours. That was when I really got serious about finishing my first book.   Michael Hingson  13:27 Well, from from an ASL standpoint, and interpreting it certainly is something that's, that's a little bit different. What have you learned about deafness and disabilities and so on from being involved in all of that,   Kelly Brakenhoff  13:41 oh, my goodness, we don't have enough there's not enough time in the day to talk about it's just changed my whole mindset, like, like, you've talked about that. I think it's just a way of looking at the world. Like a lot of people think that people who are deaf and hard of hearing, it's about your ears being broken, but it's really just a different way to move through life. So instead of a hearing world do like they have a visual world, so everything is visual. So it's like the opposite of what you experience now. So it's, it's just a way of moving through the world, you know that. And so instead of being like broken and something that needs to be fixed, it's just kind of a way of life. I guess. I just have a lot of respect. I've worked a lot in at the University of Nebraska. So I work with a lot of college students. And I've over the years done just Gosh, 20 Something different majors. I sit in on all the classes. I interpret what the teachers seen at the front of the class, and the discussions that the students do. And so I've gotten to learn a lot of things just by osmosis over the years and I have a really deep respect for the students because you know, their classmates sitting in the same room with them, they can listen to the lecture, write notes, you know, go online and do stuff all while this is all going on, whereas the deaf student has to sit there and watch me. If they want to take their own notes, they kind of have to look down and take their own notes, but then still keep an eye on me. And then if there's a PowerPoint, they're trying to watch that. And if there's a video, they're hoping that it has good captions, and so like, there's so many things going on, that it's amazing that they can get as much as they do out of the classes. And then of course, they have to study so much more afterwards, because a lot of times, they have to go back over the notes or back over the reading to see what they missed, because they were just, you know, a lot of their attention during the class is on me. So it's just given me a really healthy respect for how intelligent and how hard workers the students are. And I've just kind of seen that in all walks of life. I've interpreted for a lot of different situations, and different businesses and all kinds of things. And I just, I'm always in awe of how, how hard workers, the deaf students and just deaf adults in their job, or   Michael Hingson  16:13 how did the students then really get the job of notetaking done? Do they oftentimes have people who take notes for them? Or are they successful enough at taking notes themselves,   Kelly Brakenhoff  16:26 it really depends on the student and their preference. You know how some people don't mind having someone else take the notes, because then they can pay more attention to the interpreter and the PowerPoint and the teacher. But then other people maybe don't, you know, when you take notes, we could listen to the same speaker and your notes would be different than mine. And so some students don't really trust that another student is going to write down the same things that they would have written down if they were taking their own notes. So it really is a personal preference. But luckily, now, with the technology, I have a couple of students who, so they're deaf, and they use ASL and they use interpreters, but they also use cart, which is the captioning service. And so they'll have a laptop, or they also use like an otter, which is an app that the teacher wears a microphone and then it, it makes a transcript of everything that the teacher has said, and then they can save it. So I have a few students who even though they're, you know, pretty much dependent on the sign language for comprehension, they still use the transcript, because then they can go back later and like highlight the parts that they thought were important. And then it's kind of I think more in their control. Or if sometimes, like an English word has, you know, five different signs for it. And so if I do a sign, and they want to know what the exact English word was, they can look at the transcript and see oh, okay, that's the word that, you know, I need to remember or that's the word that I want to know. So I think it's great that they have all these tools. Because, gosh, back in the day, when I first started, none of that existed. And a lot of times, they would just have someone else take notes for them. And if that person wasn't a good note taker, they were kind of out of luck.   Michael Hingson  18:25 We use otter actually to do the transcribing of all of these podcasts. So that one unstoppable mindset is published. There's a written transcription as well. So we use otter to do that. And oftentimes, I will use otter to transcribe a meeting, or make it possible, make it possible for for people to come into the podcast, and listen and watch if you will in real time, which makes a lot of sense. So I found that otter works really well.   Kelly Brakenhoff  19:00 Yeah, I've tried several different apps and different services, because I have a thing to like you, I really want to make my website as accessible as possible, and my appearances as accessible as possible. So I get transcripts made of all the podcasts that I do whether the provider does or not. And so I've tried several different services, and I do agree that I think otter is a it produces a good product, and the price is good, too. So   Michael Hingson  19:33 I certainly right, you're right, the price is certainly right. But also, it does a good job and it's improving over time. Some people have said they're better systems than otter and I haven't really tried other services. And the people who help with the podcasts have looked at various things and we all end up settling on otter it really works well.   Kelly Brakenhoff  19:54 That's good to know. That's good to know, because a couple of years ago I tested several and I haven't read rechecked back into it. And the last six months, it's great. I think the one of the good benefits of the pandemic has been, how everyday people have realized that speech to text. And other, just things that we used to think of as being accessible for people with disabilities are now helpful for like everyone. And people have just come to realize that with all the Zoom meetings, and all of the the work from home solutions, so things that used to be just in the realm of special are now every day and they're all getting better, because we all demand that they get better. So the AI captions and everything are so much better than they were even just a few years ago.   Michael Hingson  20:47 Well, and then look at that you bring a very good point to light, which is that oftentimes, there are things that we use, that when other people start to use them first of all makes them much, much more affordable. But also, that will cause them to improve a lot more than otherwise they would have look at Dragon Naturally Speaking that started out as Dragon Dictate and did okay. And now Dragon is a lot better. I don't think that it transcribes as well as otter does in terms of plugging in punctuations, and so on. But I'm not surprised or wouldn't be surprised if that improves over time. But when you look at what otter does, it's pretty incredible.   Kelly Brakenhoff  21:31 It is it really is. And the What's incredible to me is the the short amount of time that it's gotten better. So I think that's great. But like you said, I think I guess it's sad to me that it takes it took a pandemic for enough people to use the tools that we've all been using for years to you know, demand a higher quality and a lower price. But I guess you know, if that's one good thing that comes out of all this, and that's great.   Michael Hingson  22:02 I think we tend to just get locked in to doing things one way and we, for whatever reason tend to be very slow at looking at other options. And you're right, the pandemic has made a significant difference and look at how many people are using zoom as opposed to pre pandemic, yet, Zoom has been there. The other thing that we've noticed along the way with Zoom is that they have deliberately and absolutely focused on accessibility and inclusion. So when a person who is blind encounters a problem with zoom in something is working right. There is a process to report that and we find that very quickly, it gets resolved, because they have a whole team working on issues to make sure that Zoom continues to be very inclusive.   Kelly Brakenhoff  22:55 Yes, I agree. Because I think when we first started with Zoom, the there was no, the only way you could have captions was hiring a person to do the captions. And then once they started making them automatic and everything that that was huge. That was that was huge. That's I'm glad to hear that they have a team doing it. And I agree, their improvements have have been amazing.   Michael Hingson  23:23 I don't want to put zoom on the spot, but have you compared otter with, if you compare it to otter with the zoom, automatic closed captioning,   Kelly Brakenhoff  23:31 um, I have, I guess if I just stop and think about it, I think they're pretty similar. What's actually kind of funny is when I will do a large meeting on Zoom, where I'm one of the interpreters. So I'm one of the little heads in the Brady Bunch group of people on Zoom. So I'll interpret for some of the deaf people in the meeting. And what I'll do sometimes is I'll turn on the captions because, you know, occasionally I might have a hard time hearing someone talking, or I might miss something or whatever. And so I can look at the captions and see if you know try to correct myself or, you know, check my accuracy. And yeah, so I have seen some pretty bad interpretations on our transcript on on Zoom and on otter, where things just don't come out. Right. It's, it's definitely for people who speak like standard slow American English once you have any kind of an accent or any kind of, if you speak too quickly, then the captions pretty much everywhere are a lot harder to understand. But they like I said, I still think they've gotten a lot better, which   Michael Hingson  24:48 I only asked that just out of curiosity because I know that the service is there to do automatic transcription or captioning. And I've never, never asked anyone exactly how well it does, except I've heard that it does a good job, but I've never compared it to like otter or something. And I bought otter for teens. And the reason I did that is so that it is now set up and integrated with Zoom. So it automatically starts when I opened a Zoom meeting. And what I do usually is unless there's a need to I will stop it. But it automatically starts when I come into a meeting that I that I initiate, and that's great, because then I don't even have to think about it. And it's a an effort of volition if I want to stop it.   Kelly Brakenhoff  25:42 Oh, yeah, that's great. I didn't realize you can set it up that way. That's awesome.   Michael Hingson  25:45 Yeah, the otter for teams. Home, I think, unless the price has changed, it was like $240 a year. And if you're a nonprofit, or whatever, it's half that. So it's not even a lot of money to do it, which is what's great.   Kelly Brakenhoff  26:00 That is That's awesome. Well, thank you. So the more users that use things, then the cheaper the price for everyone. And I think that's what we're seeing now with a lot of these tools.   Michael Hingson  26:12 It is ironic that we have to go through something like a pandemic to see things become more available, and for people to start to see that maybe some of the tools that say a person who is blind or low vision, or a person who is deaf or hard of hearing uses might very well be relevant for the rest of us. I'm still amazed that in driving with people using cell phones, we don't find more automatic use of the verbal technology voiceover for Apple and talkback on an Android, I'm surprised that we don't see more use of those verbal systems. In the driving experience, there's no reason not to do that, and do more to keep people's eyes on the road. Unfortunately, we're going the other way, we're getting more driving experiences with touchscreens, which means somebody's got to watch the screen, or look down and then quickly look back at the road. Why should that even have to happen today? Because we have such good voice technology. And we can also have good voice input technology to go along with it.   Kelly Brakenhoff  27:21 That's an excellent point. That's, that's so true. Yes, there's definitely you know, all the fancy touchscreens. But when I got my latest car, I had to sit in the driveway with the owner's manual for an hour just to figure out how to reprogram the clock. So you definitely don't want to be doing any of that while you're on the road. Well,   Michael Hingson  27:42 if you and I, I love Tesla's and I think that the technology is great, it is demonstrating the state of the art technology that's out there. But it's all controlled by a touchscreen, which means a blind passenger, I can't even do what a passenger would do to tune the radio or turn on a podcast or turn on whatever the services are available, much less anything else, because it's all touchscreen. And there's no reason for that today, we should be able to keep people's eyes more on the road. Even if you have the Tesla copilot function, which can take over a good part of the driving experience. It's not an autonomous vehicle software, but it can help with the driving experience. People should be keeping their eyes on the road not watching a touchscreen. And I'm still amazed that we're not seeing more people recognize the value of audio input and output.   Kelly Brakenhoff  28:36 I did not realize that I wrote in my first Tesla just a few months ago, and it was really neat, but I didn't I guess I just assumed that they had voice input things. I mean, wow, that's that's really shocking. as fancy as that whole system is that is very surprising. Well, let me let me rephrase that Ilan and say, hey,   Michael Hingson  28:59 well, let me rephrase it a little bit. There is availability of voice input for some things, but it's not an automatic process. So you have to invoke it, then you have to do something, I think to make it work every time you want to use it. What I'm saying is, it should be as much a part of the driving experience as anything else. And I'm saying it should be more part of the driving experience than using a touchscreen, it should be automatic. And we don't do that. We're too young to eyesight and we think that eyesight is the only game in town. Just like I'm sure that people who are deaf and hard of hearing would say that most people think that hearing is the only game in town. And in the in reality is neither is true. Exactly. I've said for years that I've said for years that people with disability, well, people who have eyesight, have their own disability and that is their light dependent. They can't do things without light Thomas Edison as the Americans with Disabilities Back would define it developed a reasonable accommodation for light dependent people when he created the light bulb. Let's get real, and I and I don't have the stitches. Lee it's true. You know, it's it's unfortunate that people are so locked into doing things one way that they're missing opportunities to make driving safer. But there you go.   Kelly Brakenhoff  30:22 I love that. I love that idea. I love that idea. I think that should be used to make that a thing as a political movement. I love that.   Michael Hingson  30:31 Yeah, well, we got to get Elon to go along with it.   Kelly Brakenhoff  30:34 Well, you know, he's kind of busy with Twitter right now. So maybe that all wrapped up, then he can he can focus his brain power on this?   Michael Hingson  30:43 Well, once he gets it set up, and if he's gonna do Twitter, then we'll start doing tweets. Oh, there you go. There you go. What a world we live in right now. So you said that you've done a lot of writing, you've been very much involved in writing, since college and so on. Why do you like writing so much?   Kelly Brakenhoff  31:07 Honestly, I don't know. I think it's just how I think how I process things. It's communication, talking to people talking to people like you. That's just kind of how I think it's just, just what I do is is who I am. That's a pretty simple answer.   Michael Hingson  31:26 We'll put Hey, it works. It works. So you said you just pretty recently got involved in starting to actually write books?   Kelly Brakenhoff  31:36 Yeah, I think it was 2014. I joined NaNoWriMo for the first time, which for people who haven't heard of that, it stands for National Novel Writing Month, and it's in November, where, gosh, by this day, by last year, I think it was around 750,000 people around the world, try to write 16 167 words a day for 30 days, and you come up with a 50,000 word manuscript by the end of the month. And that was signing up for that challenge was because I'm kind of competitive. So if I sign up for a challenge like that, I'm gonna do it. So that was like the thing that broke the barrier for me of just having ideas and just wanting to write and whatever and actually finishing a manuscript for the first time. That's what kind of gave me that push to actually do it.   Michael Hingson  32:33 So what did you publish your own books? Are they published through a publisher or what?   Kelly Brakenhoff  32:38 Yes, they are. They're self published, I tried for about a year to publish my firt, or to find an agent and all of that for my first one. And then at the same time, I was also checking into self publishing. And I don't know I think just a lot of factors kind of all converged. And I just decided at the end that self publishing was was the way to go. I'm kind of a control freak. And I like to, I like to have the my input into how to make you know, I hire my whole team. So I have an editor and a cover designer and and proofreaders and all of that stuff. And I get to decide what the finished product ends up to be. And it turns out that, yeah, I'm kind of bossy I guess.   Michael Hingson  33:23 You have a publicist who helps with the PR, and all that. I do.   Kelly Brakenhoff  33:27 I do. It's a it's called creative edge is the one that I use. And, and they've really, I've really enjoyed being part of that group.   Michael Hingson  33:37 I met Mickey a couple of months ago, actually, for the first time, he was introduced to me by someone else that we interviewed on the unstoppable mindset podcast. And she said, you know, he works with a lot of authors who might very well have interesting stories for you. And so that's how we met him. And we've actually started working with him as well. We're just getting started. But having written thunder dog, which was, and we're blessed by the fact that it was a number one New York Times bestseller, and then was published by Thomas Nelson part of HarperCollins. Now, but then we self published our second book, which was called running with Roselle, which was kind of more for youth, but more adults by it than then kids do. And it's the story of me growing up and Rozelle growing up. And then how we met after she became a guide dog in training, and she became my guide dog, and you know, kind of went from there, but I love writing, but I haven't done that much of it. We are starting to work on a third book, and that'll be a lot of fun. And we just got a book contract for that as well. So that's pretty exciting.   Kelly Brakenhoff  34:46 That's great. Congratulations. I didn't know that. That's awesome.   Michael Hingson  34:51 But But I'm curious. You've written I guess basically what two different kinds of books children's books and mysteries. How do you do mystery How do you come up with a plot? And how do you? Do you make it all come together? Because I think mystery writing has to be if you do it well, it has to be a real challenge to come up with a not only a plot, but create all of the scenes, do all the things that you need to do. And essentially, keep the solution hidden until the end of the book unless there's some value in presenting that earlier. And it's really how you get there.   Kelly Brakenhoff  35:30 Yeah, that's a funny question. Because I definitely write in extremes. I mean, I write 70,000, word mysteries, and then I write 500, word picture books for the children's books. So very different, very different approaches. But yeah, the mysteries and thrillers are kind of the things that I have always read my whole life. So I thought when I wanted to do that first NaNoWriMo challenge, I decided to kind of mash up all of my experiences. Like I said, I've lived in Hawaii and Nebraska, the East Coast, Seattle. So I kind of took all of those different elements working at a college and I put them all together into this murder mystery. And I got about two thirds of the way through and realized exactly what you said that writing a mystery is hard. It's actually one of I think, the most difficult genres to do because exactly for the reason you said, you want to make that mystery puzzle complicated enough that it can't be solved too early. Mystery readers are very smart people. And so it's very challenging coming up with enough suspects and clues to keep people guessing until the end. I guess I just love a challenge. I think it's it's fun, but it's also just what I love to read and write. So a read so it was kind of the most natural thing to write.   Michael Hingson  36:59 I think you just hit on it. Essentially. mysteries are puzzles and puzzles are as good as it gets. Who are your favorite mystery writers?   Kelly Brakenhoff  37:10 Oh, I have so many.   Michael Hingson  37:12 Yeah, me too. Yeah.   Kelly Brakenhoff  37:15 I think like my, you know, the ones I kind of grew up with was like Sue Grafton. So that letter A is for those Jana Ivanovic. There's Stephanie Plum Siri   Michael Hingson  37:27 plum. Hey, come on. We all love diesel, but that's another story.   Kelly Brakenhoff  37:30 Oh, yeah, diesel's awesome, too. Well, I'm sure being you live. You said you live in New Jersey, right? Oh, yes. Yeah. So you're very familiar with tenants. Definitely. Trenton definitely fun. And then I also just love like John Grisham and James Patterson and Michael Connelly. I mean, gosh, I just, that's all. I haven't really met very many mysteries that I didn't like.   Michael Hingson  37:54 Yeah. My my favorite still is Rex Stout with the neuro wolf series. Oh, yeah. Yeah, they I've never solved any of his books before the end. And I worked at it. I love Mary Higgins Clark. But I was able to basically figure out all of the, the mean people in that before the end of the book, still, they were fun to read   Kelly Brakenhoff  38:20 is fun, right? I mean, as long as it's a good story, even if guests are having an idea of did it by the end, as long as the character still keep you in it. And a lot of times this setting is kind of a character to then I don't mind, you know, reading to the end to confirm that I was right. I think what's funny since I became a writer, and I don't know, you can tell me if this is true for yourself. But since I became a writer, an author, I kind of ruined for reading, like I read a lot. But I read now to learn and to see what when I read a really good book, I love to pick it apart and and see why it's good. And not just the structure of it. But like if I if that paragraph was beautiful, I'll go back and read that paragraph several times and try to figure out what is so great about that paragraph, or when someone throws a twist or a turn in or I thought I knew who it was. And then at the end, I find out it was someone else. I just love that. That thrill of like, oh, you fooled me, you know, and I really like to think about all of that. But that means that a lot of times I'm not really enjoying the book. I'm like studying the book. And so I have found that if if I really get so sucked into a book that I am not doing that, that means that it's a really, really good book because if it took me out of my analysis into just enjoying it, then that's a me that's the mark of a very good book.   Michael Hingson  39:53 Sue Graf passed away from cancer did her last book ever get published? Because I don't think she finished it, did she?   Kelly Brakenhoff  39:59 It did not odds are one of those.   Michael Hingson  40:01 Zero Yeah,   Kelly Brakenhoff  40:03 yeah. The sad things. Is it never it's, it's not finished. I don't even know how far she got in it. But it wasn't finished enough to be published. Yeah,   Michael Hingson  40:12 yeah, I guess that's kind of what happened. But her mysteries were definitely some of the best. And we read them all. And some twice, which is always fun if I if I want to read a book a second time. And I don't have that many hours in the day that that's easy to do. But if I want to read a book a second time, then I know that there is something about it that I must have enjoyed. And we read here, a lot of books on audio, audible and other sources. The reason we do is that instead of watching TV, we pipe books through the house, my wife has learned to listen to audio. So we listen to books together. What I've been occasionally finding are editor mistakes where they said something and then later on referring back something, they say something different. Somebody messed up in editing it, and I don't see it often. But I do occasionally see it and I always find them. Which is a fun.   Kelly Brakenhoff  41:15 It is it's i It's funny, because, you know, even though my books are self published, I work really hard not to have those kinds of errors. Yeah, they go through an editor, at least one editor, numerous BETA readers, numerous proofreaders. And then, you know, six months after I published it all open it up, and I see a typo. And it's like, at first I used to get so frustrated at that. And then now I saw something one time on Facebook, it was like, cheers to you, you typo you made it through three rounds of editing, 10 proofreaders and you still made it you you go, you know,   Michael Hingson  41:58 I when I was in college, we used in freshman and sophomore physics, a series of books called the Berkeley physics series, because it came out of there. And I had a dorm mate, who looked in detail at every single book, looking for a mistake, because he said a lot of books, there are editing mistakes. And he said he finally found one in one of the Berkeley physics books, but he said it was so fun looking just to see any error. And he couldn't find them in the Berkeley physics series. It was just incredible that he spent that time. On the other hand, he was an excellent student. So I guess he learned from it as he was reading.   Kelly Brakenhoff  42:43 Have a niece who's a doctor and they actually some textbook company paid her. I don't know if she just got free books. Or if she actually got paid her last year of med school, they they paid her to go through the as she was going through the textbook to note down any errors that she found.   Michael Hingson  43:03 See, it's always good to to read as much as possible and proofread as much as possible. And you're right. There's nothing like a good editor to help.   Kelly Brakenhoff  43:12 Right, exactly, exactly.   Michael Hingson  43:14 So how hard was it to write your first mystery? Oh, must have a lot   Kelly Brakenhoff  43:22 of courage. And it was a lot of it was a lot of I think I must have gone through 10 or 15 jobs. It took me five years to finish it, it was ugly, there was a lot of tears. But you know, you just learned so much I kind of consider it like getting a master's degree. I just did it at home with my, my own process. But you know, I just had to learn a lot. You have to be humble, you have to be willing to accept criticism and advice from other people. But I feel like it taught me a lot. And of course, then the second book teaches you even more and the third and you know, each one you do, I think you just learn more, either about yourself or about writing. I'd love to read books about writing craft and how to do better. You know, I want every single book that I write to be better than the last. I think most authors are that way.   Michael Hingson  44:15 They get easier the more you write. That's a   Kelly Brakenhoff  44:18 funny question, because I'm right in the middle of writing my fourth mystery right now. And I've been stalled for quite a while. And what it's taught me is just about myself and my process and what I thought my process was versus what I'm finding. I thought I could speed it up, but it's actually making me slow down. So that means that I was not speeding it up correctly. If that makes sense.   Michael Hingson  44:46 Yeah. Well, and I don't know whether it becomes easier or not. I have been very blessed when we did thunder dog. I had someone to collaborate and help with it Susie Florrie And that happened because she actually found Me, because she was writing a book called Dawn tales, which was 17 stories about dogs who had stories. And she wanted to include Roselle in that. And she did. But as we discussed my story, she said, You should really write a book. And so we got started down that road. And I met her agent who became my agent, Chip McGregor on thunder dog. And we, we had a good time and collaborated well. And I think that there was a lot of value in that for me, because I know that I don't have the writing experience as such. But I know what's good when I read it. And I also know that I can add value. So we really had a very collaborative process of writing thunder dog, a lot of it is hers, and a lot of it is mine directly. And we blended the two which was great. Now with the third book that we're getting, which is getting ready to do, which is going to talk about fear and controlling fear and people learning that they can overcome fear and not let it blind them, if you will, to being able to make decisions. The working title is a guide dogs Guide to Being brave, and I'm doing that with a friend of Susie's Carrie, Carrie Wyatt can't. Because Suzy is in a Ph. D. program. Yeah, we love the title. We'll see what the publisher does. We've got a contract for it. We'll see what the publisher does with it over time. But so far everybody likes it. That was a carry creation, because I was going to call it blinded by fear, which was more accurate in some senses. But I think a guide dogs Guide to Being brave is a lot better title.   Kelly Brakenhoff  46:35 Yeah, it reminds me of that one. Is it the Art of Racing in the Rain? Yeah, yeah, it kind of reminds me of something like that, where it's it's a little off of what the theme of the book is, but it's still engaging, and it makes you want to know more about it.   Michael Hingson  46:54 It was a good book. And so   Kelly Brakenhoff  46:57 you said something that really resonated with me, you said, I know, it's good when I read it. And I think that's a big obstacle for beginning writers. And is that usually, if you're a writer, you're a reader first. And so I've read tons and tons of great books, and I know what great literature is, and I know what a great story is. And then when I write my first one, it's not very good. So you kind of have that, that huge gap between what you know is good and what you've produced. And so it's, it's, it's hard, you have to overcome that, that feeling of, of my stuff is really bad, you know, and then you have to work really hard to make it as good as, as you want it to be, you know, as good as it is to be able to actually share with the world, you know, to get up to that level of what your your bar is the bar that you've set. And so I think that's something that stands it's a barrier to a lot of people. And that's where I think a good editor comes. Yeah.   Michael Hingson  48:05 Yeah. Well look at John Grisham. You mentioned earlier the first book he wrote If I recall was a time to kill but it was the third one published the first one that he wrote, and it was published was the firm and then I'm trying to remember what the second one was. Was it the Pelican Brief the Pelican Brief right? And then A Time to Kill, which was the Jake Brigantes initiator, if you will. But if you look at all of them, you can see how the the books evolved over time in his writing style. So it's it is a natural progression. And I mentioned Rex Stout, a Nero Wolf, if you go back and read fair to Lance, which was his first book, and you compare it with especially much later writings, you can see changes, but you can see where everything is starting from and you get engaged in in fact, fair Lance was not the first mirror wolf book I read. by a longshot. It wasn't the first, but having gone back and read it. Even though everyone in the book all the characters developed a fair amount and since then, and his writing style improved. It was engaging. Mm hmm. Well, tell me about your mystery series,   Kelly Brakenhoff  49:26 sir. Um, it's about a college administrator named Cassandra Sato and she lives in Hawaii. She gives up her her life in Hawaii to move to Nebraska because she wants to accept her dream job at a tiny college called Morton college in the middle of nowhere in Nebraska. And she and her eventual goal is to become a college administrators or college president. So she thinks this is you know, the Path is gonna get her there. But of course, moving from Hawaii to Nebraska is a very, very large cultural, cultural shift. And so she encounters all kinds of problems, discrimination, barriers, everything. And a few months into her job, a student turns up dead on campus and see has to be part of the group of people who figures out what happened to the student and then find justice.   Michael Hingson  50:28 Yeah, come on. Cassandra really did. And she's been hiding a whole series. Yeah, that's   Kelly Brakenhoff  50:33 the end of the series. It was Cassandra.   Michael Hingson  50:35 That will come later on about the hundreds book, right. That's awesome. When Karen and my wife and I are talking about who did it in various books, we, we usually do things like that. We've been reading a lot of the JE NACHA as well, we read a chance to but the JD Robb books, the in depth series, have you read those. And so I read very many of those now, we we oftentimes will spin a story how Eve Dallas really did it. Or Roark did it and had just a lot of fun with it. But again, a great series of books is there's a lot of sex in those books, but they're still taking Ross. Yeah, they're great mysteries.   Kelly Brakenhoff  51:20 Yeah, a lot of times people like the ones that I write well, obviously, I have four kids and grandkids. And my kids would cringe if I if they had to read a sex scene that I wrote. So, you know, my kids were like, high school and college age when I started writing. So I decided all the sex in my books, there's gonna be behind closed doors, and yeah, nobody, nobody wants to have their mom. Yeah, no.   Michael Hingson  51:46 I've, I've talked to several authors who say that who, one who said I would never any more, I would never let my daughter or my wife, wife read the books, or I changed the sex so that they could read them. But the value of having them read them as they're great critics, and so it's worthwhile. But yeah, it is fun to to see how people react. But, you know, a mystery. Doesn't need to have all the violence thrown at you right out in the open, which is why puzzles are so great. At James Patterson tends to be a little bit more violent, but not nearly as violent as he could be. So we we've always enjoyed Of course, the Alex Cross series.   Kelly Brakenhoff  52:33 Yeah, it's there's such a huge variety in Yeah, the violence level and all that stuff. I myself, I have a pretty vivid imagination. I don't really need people to spell some of that stuff out for me. My mysteries are technically like cozy mysteries, which kind of means that there's no like blood on the page. There's no swearing, there's no sex. So like, even you know, high school kids can read them and, and that kind of thing. So I guess that's just, I just write what I like. So that's only because I like to read. So that's what I like to write.   Michael Hingson  53:12 Come on. That's only because Cassandra is trying to hide everything, but we know the truth.   Kelly Brakenhoff  53:18 That's right. She's really Voldemort.   Michael Hingson  53:21 Yeah, she's really Voldemort. Speaking of another good series of books   Kelly Brakenhoff  53:28 that's that's a whole different ballgame.   Michael Hingson  53:30 But but you know, looking at the Harry Potter books, again is another one where going from Book One through Book Seven, just how it evolved. And they're so fun.   Kelly Brakenhoff  53:42 They are they're definitely one of my I, I like all genres. So yeah, I loved Harry Potter Lord of the Rings, Narnia. I mean, you name it, it's I thought during the pandemic that I would just read all day every day but it turns out I actually have to do other stuff too.   Michael Hingson  53:59 So I hate it when that happens.   Kelly Brakenhoff  54:02 There is no laundry fairy I hate to be the person to tell you this but there is no laundry fairy,   Michael Hingson  54:07 I haven't found one either. And I get to do the clothes washing at our house which is fine. So for me, I love the brainless activities on Sunday. So there are three tasks that well for that I do on Sundays. It starts with doing the laundry or starting the laundry. Another is we I take the cat box out we use a litter called litter one it's not sand, it's all pine kernels. And you buy them and they come in a disposable box. So we just use in different new box every week. And it's about the same as using regular sand that you buy in the in the store. But at the end of the week, you just throw the whole box out and put a new one up and the cat is very demanding when it comes time to change the box. So that happens on Sunday. I take the trash out on Sunday. And then we have a little If we do get housecleaning help during the week, Karen's in wheelchairs, he has been in a chair her whole life. So it's kind of hard for us to do some of those things. So we do have a housekeeper that comes on Thursdays, in fact, and today's Thursday. So Jeanette is here, but we have a robot vacuum and I do the vacuuming again on Sunday with the robot in our bedroom, because that's also where Alamo my guide dog sleeps. So we get all those. So those are my four tasks on Sunday. And they're they're all pretty brainless in a sense. So I can read while they're going on, which is fun. And Karen is a quilter. So she's usually in sewing. And and she's reading the same thing I read. So it's a question right now, who finishes which JD Robb book first?   Kelly Brakenhoff  55:44 Yeah, that is definitely the the good thing about audiobooks is being able to multitask on some of those things that you don't have to pay so much attention to.   Michael Hingson  55:54 Tell me about your dupe the deaf dog ASL series.   Kelly Brakenhoff  55:58 Well, that is the second series that I started after I finished the mystery novels, I kind of had a moment where I realized that I, you know, I started my own publishing company. And I just had a thought, I mean, it's kind of cliche, it was actually a dream that just came to me of like, what I could do with this publishing company, if I just kind of unleashed it. And so I came up with the idea of, of this orange, English spaniel dog who is deaf and all of the people in his or all of his family can hear. And so it's just about different experiences that he has as the only person in a family of hearing people, and trying to get deaf and hard of hearing children to see themselves and their everyday life experiences on our pages of our books. But I also want kids who can hear to understand what it's like to hear differently. We just finished the third book, and I'm actually actually we just finished the fourth book, the third book just came out. But the fourth book is in production right now. And I had no idea when it started, what it was going to end up being but it's actually turned out to be more successful. And I would say even more fun than my mysteries, the mysteries are kind of like my thing that I enjoy. As far as, like you said, creating the puzzle and, and the challenge of it, but the Duke, the deaf dog ASL series, is kind of what I feel like I'm taking my 30 Whatever years of interpreting and hanging around with really cool Deaf people, and then like sharing that with the world.   Michael Hingson  57:49 So it's not a mystery series.   Kelly Brakenhoff  57:53 No, it is not. They are picture books. So they're only like less than 500 words. And each one is a different situation that do gets into so there's like a different message. And each one more than 90% of children who are born deaf or hard of hearing have parents that can hear I did a lot of research to before I started the books, and there's very few books for young children that have deaf and hard of hearing characters. Once you get into like high school age, or even beyond, there's more books that have deaf and hard of hearing characters. But at the kindergarten, first grade age, there's very few books. And you know, my kids had lots and lots of choices of books to read. So I feel like deaf kids did have lots and lots of choices, books that have characters like them in there. So each book has a different message like the first one was called nevermind. And the message is that everyone deserves to be included in conversations. I mean, how many times do we tell people nevermind when they ask us to repeat ourselves? Or maybe we have, like a older parent or spouse who doesn't hear well, or even like someone who's just a little bit slower to act, or to understand a lot of times we just get impatient and say forget it. I'll explain later. And this book like after I published that first book, I've had so many deaf people come up to me and tell me stories of times when they've been told nevermind. And they thanked me for sharing their stories because they want hearing people to understand how hurtful those words are and what it feels to be left out. So I have a pretty long list of situations I've seen throughout the years that I plan to incorporate into the books and I I'm only stopped by my amount of time and and money to hire illustrators at this point.   Michael Hingson  59:55 Back to mysteries. Of course there's the cat who series Lily and Jackson Brown and also Rita Mae Brown and sneaky pie Brown. But in thinking of the cat who books, why not have a Duke, the Duke, the deaf dog series, solving mysteries, and also deal with all the frustrations that Duke has of trying to get his humans to listen? And how he has to figure things out, not being in a hearing world himself.   Kelly Brakenhoff  1:00:27 Yeah, that's a good thought. I'm actually like I said, I have so many ideas that it's really limited by my time and money, but um, the picture books are more like so Duke's a dog. Right? It's more like he's like a pitbull, like, they stand on their hind legs. And they kind of like even his dad wears like a tie. So they kind of are like human, but they're dogs. But it's a nice way to be able to show diversity and like breeds of dogs and colors of dogs and abilities and body types and stuff without actually having like different children in there. So it's kind of like, like, I don't know, if you remember the Mercer Mayer series, little critter. That's kind of what I thought of, as I   Michael Hingson  1:01:13 was able to read them. Yeah,   Kelly Brakenhoff  1:01:15 that was like my, my model, I guess of who I thought of it's like, so Duke is more just like a character, a fictional character. But I do have a couple of other ideas for series for like middle grade age kids. And those would be mysteries, and those would use some characters. I have a couple of young characters in the Cassandra Sacco series. I did a Halloween short story last year called scavenger hunt. And that two of the main characters in there were 10 year old kids. And so I think I want to do a separate series with them and have those be mysteries because I agree, I think I can incorporate a lot of the things that I know about the Deaf community and Deaf culture and ASL into a mystery, and they get kind of fun that way. And   Michael Hingson  1:02:05 it's great that you're using this opportunity to teach people more about deaf and hard of hearing. And not only as a culture, but as just as much an included an inclusive part of society as everyone else. I am concerned when you're talking about do looking like a character and looking a little bit like people. I just don't want to see a new book coming out about do the deaf dog ASL series goes to Animal Farm just saying. But Duly noted. So So you you did one of your books. As a Kickstarter campaign?   Kelly Brakenhoff  1:02:43 We did. Um, the the most recent one that just published in January, I did my first Kickstarter campaign.   Michael Hingson  1:02:51 Now why did you do that? What brought Kickstarter into it.   Kelly Brakenhoff  1:02:54 I went to this conference last fall in Las Vegas, and I met some authors who publish their books first on Kickstarter, before they release them more widely and other stores. And listening to them made me realize that Kickstarter might be a good way for me to reach new readers. The nice thing about Kickstarter, which I think you said that you've supported a couple of campaigns, honestly, before I had gone to this conference, I did not think starter was something I needed to do, I hadn't really gone on there, I hadn't pledged sponsored anybody else's project. So I just kind of went into it blindly. But I realized that the cool thing about Kickstarter is you get to develop a direct relationship with people who want to buy your product. So in my case, it's a book, but I've gone on there. And since then, I've supported all kinds of different projects. I've done a board game, and a coloring book and a purse. And I mean, there's so many neat, creative ideas that people come up with and put them on Kickstarter, just to see. So then the the customers can come on and pledge money towards that product and say, Yes, I think that's a great idea. The world needs that. And I'm willing to plunk down my money to pre order that thing that you want to make. And so if enough of those people say that they'll pre order the product, then the project is successful, and it funds and then the person who listed the project goes ahead and makes it. So that's been really exciting. But you have this direct relationship where the creator is sending you messages and keeping you updated on the progress like, okay, you know, we're finished in publishing, you know, in the case of publishing, you say, Okay, we finished the illustration and we're waiting for them to be printed and then I actually personally boxed everything up and mailed them to the people with personal note and some extra stickers and everything. So I think I'd really enjoy that contact with people and that communication because it goes both ways, then people can actually respond to me. If I just sell stuff on Amazon or in the local bookstore, I don't really know who buys my, my books. And so the Kickstarter has been a really cool way to just kind of, I guess, learn more about what people want and what people like about them. And it's kind of a neat way to have this direct relationship. It made me I funded my first project successfully, we raised $2,500, which was enough money to buy some hardcover books. In the past, I haven't been able to afford doing those books, as a small publishers. So it's great to be able to order those books and get those into people's hands they came with, they're very well done on nice thick paper with really vivid color illustrations. And then there's photos on each page of different ASL signs. And the photos are really clear. So it was definitely worth I guess, the experience. So I'm actually going to be doing another one in July for the, for the next Duke book. But as a person, like you said, you you have a contract to do your next book. And so you get a lot of times authors will get paid in advance, this is kind of almost the same thing where I'm making this idea. And then I'm, like pre paying some of the costs that it cost to produce the book, like, you know, the illustrating, or the printing, or all the different things that are associated with making the book, it's like a way for me to almost get like an advance except this directly coming from the customers instead of from the publishing company.   Michael Hingso

Robert P. French was born in Oxford England in 1944. Early on he developed a love of working with computers. As you will learn, he lived within 40 miles of the first 5 computers in the world.   He obtained his first software job in 1963 and never looked back. Well, not back, but as you will learn, he did find new directions along the way that greatly advanced his career and took him along different life paths.   Today he is the author of, thus far, seven books in the acclaimed Cal Rogan series. Robert's life story is fascinating and by any standard unstoppable.     About the Guest: Robert French is a software developer, turned actor, turned author. He is the writer of the seven (so far) Cal Rogan Mysteries, crime thrillers about a drug-addicted ex-cop who fights his way from living rough on the streets to being a much-sought-after PI. The series, set in Vancouver, Canada, reflects the best and worst of the city. He is passionate about having the right words on the page and with every new book, his goal is to make it better than the previous one. Robert was born in Oxford, England and was brought up in the East End of London. His fascination with computers was born from his love of science fiction, especially Asimov's I Robot books. At age 26 he emigrated from the UK to Canada “for a couple of years” and his been here ever since. At age sixty, he started a transition to writing and after many false starts he published his first book seven years later. His loves are his family, science, language, certain elements of philosophy and craft beer       About the Host: Michael Hingson is a New York Times best-selling author, international lecturer, and Chief Vision Officer for accessiBe. Michael, blind since birth, survived the 9/11 attacks with the help of his guide dog Roselle. This story is the subject of his best-selling book, Thunder Dog.   Michael gives over 100 presentations around the world each year speaking to influential groups such as Exxon Mobile, AT&T, Federal Express, Scripps College, Rutgers University, Children's Hospital, and the American Red Cross just to name a few. He is Ambassador for the National Braille Literacy Campaign for the National Federation of the Blind and also serves as Ambassador for the American Humane Association's 2012 Hero Dog Awards.   https://michaelhingson.com https://www.facebook.com/michael.hingson.author.speaker/ https://twitter.com/mhingson https://www.youtube.com/user/mhingson https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelhingson/   accessiBe Links https://accessibe.com/ https://www.youtube.com/c/accessiBe https://www.linkedin.com/company/accessibe/mycompany/ https://www.facebook.com/accessibe/       Thanks for listening! Thanks so much for listening to our podcast! If you enjoyed this episode and think that others could benefit from listening, please share it using the social media buttons on this page. Do you have some feedback or questions about this episode? Leave a comment in the section below!   Subscribe to the podcast If you would like to get automatic updates of new podcast episodes, you can subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher. You can also subscribe in your favorite podcast app.   Leave us an Apple Podcasts review Ratings and reviews from our listeners are extremely valuable to us and greatly appreciated. They help our podcast rank higher on Apple Podcasts, which exposes our show to more awesome listeners like you. If you have a minute, please leave an honest review on Apple Podcasts.     Transcription Notes UM Intro/Outro  00:00 Access Cast and accessiBe Initiative presents Unstoppable Mindset. The podcast where inclusion, diversity and the unexpected meet. Hi, I'm Michael Hingson, Chief Vision Officer for accessiBe and the author of the number one New York Times bestselling book, Thunder dog, the story of a blind man, his guide dog and the triumph of trust. Thanks for joining me on my podcast as we explore our own blinding fears of inclusion unacceptance and our resistance to change. We will discover the idea that no matter the situation, or the people we encounter, our own fears, and prejudices often are our strongest barriers to moving forward. The unstoppable mindset podcast is sponsored by accessiBe, that's a c c e s s i  capital B e. Visit www.accessibe.com to learn how you can make your website accessible for persons with disabilities. And to help make the internet fully inclusive by the year 2025. Glad you dropped by we're happy to meet you and to have you here with us.   Michael Hingson  01:22  Welcome to unstoppable mindset. And today. Wow, this is a fascinating way to introduce someone we have a software developer turned actor turned author. I don't know what to say to that except Robert French. Welcome to unstoppable mindset.   Robert French  01:38 Thank you very much, Michael, I'm delighted to be here.   Michael Hingson  01:42 We're going to have to get into this software developer and all of that. Robert and I have had some interesting discussions, among other things, talking about computers. Robert was born in 1944. I was born in 1950. But when Robert was was born, and for a while there were a total of five computers in the world. And they were all within 40 miles of where you were born in England, right?   Robert French  02:07 That's correct. Yeah. Yeah, they were to Bletchley Park,   Michael Hingson  02:12 ah, probably used for decoding or something.   Robert French  02:16 That's right. Yes, they were under the care of the famous Alan Turing.   Michael Hingson  02:21 Right. And, of course, we've got a few more computers in the world than that today. But I remember when Robert and I were talking, I pointed out how both of us grew up in a time when a disk crash was really a disk crash. This were these large 16 inch platters that you would place into a disk drive and the heads would flow over the disks a tiny, microscopic amount above the disk. But if something messed up, and the head dropped onto the disk drive, it tore it up, and it made a wretched noise.   Robert French  03:02 Yes, and all your data was lost?   Michael Hingson  03:07 was immediately and totally lost. Absolutely. It's, it's pretty amazing. Well, tell me a little bit about about you and growing up and so on and how you got into the whole business of software development and such.   Robert French  03:23 Well, yeah, it was interesting. I was born in the East End of London, which is like the dodgy End of London. I was born actually in Oxford, but brought up in the East End of London, which is the kind of dodgy End of London. And my parents sacrificed quite a lot to send me to a good school, where I became fascinated with mathematics and wanted to become a mathematician. Then I started reading science fiction. And the idea of computers came up and I got fascinated with the whole idea of computers. I made a decision. That's where I wanted to place my career. Rather than being a mathematic mathematician and working in kind of esoteric arts. I thought I'd rather do something practical with computers. And so I became a computer programmer and did that for for a lot of years, almost 50   Michael Hingson  04:30 I remember Isaac Asimov's UNIVAC   Robert French  04:35 I actually worked for the company UNIVAC at one point in my career. Yes, I do.   Michael Hingson  04:42 It's one of my favorite Isaac Asimov stories. And I heard about it long before I actually was able to read it because it finally got put in a in a readable form for me, was the ultimate question. You're familiar with that?   Robert French  04:55 Yes, yeah.   Michael Hingson  04:56 And and of course It was it was, what was well, what was the question? I was trying to remember. Oh, it had to do with entropy. When entropy doesn't expand anymore, or when does it? Yeah, first, when does entropy reversing think it was. And, and the story goes that there was the UNIVAC and it progressed and became more powerful. And eventually it lived in hyperspace, and was an all encompassing computer. And every time anyone asked the question about whether entropy could be reversed, the computer always answered, I don't know, I don't need insufficient data to know the answer to the question. And finally, at the very end, the computer said, I have the answer. And the answer to the question was let there be light.   Robert French  05:51 Yes, that's the nice a great story. A couple of other as in life stories have inspired me. But one is his robot series. Yeah, the AI robot. That was one of the things that made it made me want to be a programmer. He vastly underestimated the time it would take for artificial intelligence to emerge. He missed it by about 50 years, but still pretty good. But another one that really interested me and inspired me was I forgotten the name of the the actual book, but it was about the planet Aurora, where people didn't ever didn't meet in person. But they projected images of each other holographic images of each other. So if you wanted to go for a walk in the woods with a friend, they would walk in their words, you would walk in yours, and each of you would have a holographic image of the other one walking with you. And in some ways, that was the precursor of the internet.   Michael Hingson  07:02 Sure. Yeah. Sure, well, and in with iRobot, and the series, of course, the three laws of robotics, he is very, very creative and clever about what robots could do and couldn't do. And then of course, there were a few times that the laws got circumvented. And it turns out it was human error and turn instructions to the computers or to the robots and so on.   Robert French  07:28 Yeah, the the three laws of robotics, it's interesting that there are lots of discussions these days in the world of artificial intelligence, about the whole issue of how do you control artificial intelligence, and how you might put the three laws of robotics into into effect. So a lot of people are concerned about artificial intelligent intelligence running amok.   Michael Hingson  07:55 Right. Well, and, and just the whole lack of discipline and a lot of what we do today, of course, today, yeah, everyone wants everything immediately. And they want everything and they want their so called freedom, and they don't recognize, which is what the laws of robotics at least addressed. They don't recognize their own responsibility to freedom.   Robert French  08:14 Mm hmm. Yes. So there's the old adage, you have no rights without duties.   Michael Hingson  08:23 Correct. So you got into software development, love to learn a little bit more about that.   Robert French  08:28 When I started on, obviously, mainframe computers, it was this was in my first job was, I started my first job on January the 11th 1963. And the first computer I worked on was, of course, a mainframe because they were all mainframes. And I worked for years on mainframes, I emigrated from England, to Canada in 1971. The original plan is I'd go to Canada for a couple of years and work and then maybe go back to England and now 51 years later, I haven't gone back to England, or not to live anyway. And, you know, I graduated through the mainframes worked on many computers, then worked on PCs and I had one of the early luggable computers, which was an Osborn computer. And I just worked on mainly I did some, I had during my career I had some jobs in marketing and in in product management, but and in but mainly I still my love was always developing software. I just I loved working on the development of piece of software and then what seeing people use it being happy with it. That was that was a great motivator for me?   Michael Hingson  10:01 Well, of course, you've seen so many different kinds of advances much, not just the whole physical issue of computers and so on, going from the big huge things that were programmed by patch boards that you would just plug into slots and systems that we talked about. Well, I, I was a student in Palmdale High School, and was a lab assistant for our physics professor. And one day, he asked me to take some time. And he had these big patch boards, he said, Just take all the wires out of the patch board, which was a major struggle into themselves. Because there was a lot of fun. But, but computers have progressed physically. So now of course, one of those patch boards wouldn't even be of small fraction of what goes on a chip.   Robert French  10:56 Oh, no. When I think back to the mainframe days IBM's I think last large commercial computer was the 371 58. Yeah, I believe my iPhone is orders of magnitude more powerful than that machine, which cost $2 million, or there abouts.   Michael Hingson  11:22 I remember at UC Irvine, we had an IBM 360. And we had a PDP 10.   Robert French  11:29 Yeah, they were great machines, those PDP 10 machines, as long as you didn't cut your fingers on the paper tapes. Yes.   Michael Hingson  11:38 And as long as you were careful about putting the duct tape in the right way, yes. Well, so now of course, the other part about computers is how software has advanced. And as you said, the iPhone is magnitudes more powerful than the 370. And we we started hearing even in the mid 70s, about computers learning what we now call artificial intelligence, I worked with Ray Kurzweil, as he was developing the original Kurzweil breathing machine. And the thing about the breathing machine was that it also did learn and you could start scanning a page with the computer, of course, scanning was totally different than you have to build up a page of text, line by line with a camera, literally scanning each line then moving down a little bit and scanning the next part until you got a whole page as opposed to just taking a shot. But as it scanned and as you read, the machine really did learn something about the text and the print and re had done the what at that time, were probably very simple, but still steps to allow the machine to learn to read better is the more you read a book.   Robert French  13:04 Hmm, yeah, he because while he's a genius, you're lucky to have worked with   Michael Hingson  13:09 him. And of course, he went on and did other things after he sold Kurzweil Computer Products. But it still was very creative and clever to be able to have a machine, even then, that learned and as a user of the machine and then helping with the original testing and evaluation. As I read books with it, it was clearly obvious that it learned as it went along, it literally would read pages better the more I read, when I could go back and read a page that I had read and just see how much better it was after reading several pages.   Robert French  13:41 Yeah, it's amazing, isn't it? And now, of course,   Michael Hingson  13:44 it's a whole different ballgame in terms of what artificial intelligence does and can do, and its availability. But it's interesting to see how things are improving and getting better over time. And it will be fun to to really see what happens as machines learn and so on. I'm not a fan of Ray Kurzweil singularity necessarily. I'm not sure that we're going to marry the brain and artificial intelligence together, although problem will try but I don't know whether that will be a good thing or not. But I guess we'll see.   Robert French  14:19 Yeah, yeah. Well, certainly, even if one can't map the brain and download it to a computer, I could still see a possibility of a brain being connected to a directly connected to a computer and living inside a robot. Sure. So which is a pretty scary thought.   Michael Hingson  14:49 What were some of the last projects you did in terms of software development?   Robert French  14:54 The last the last major project that I did was a A system that would create would put all of an organization's manuals, online and searchable. So the basic idea was, hospitals were a target market for us. The basic idea was that you could take all of your manuals as PDFs, and word documents, and JPEGs, and whatever you really wanted. And you put them all into our system, you just upload them to our system and create a structure for a set of for all of the manuals of your organization. And you could search all of the manuals in very sophisticated ways more flexible, even than Google searching. Yes, you could say things like, I want to find a document that has the word, heart, and catheter within five words of each other. And it would instantly present that document or documents to you. And it had all sorts of built in security. So you were only allowed to search for what you needed. But it meant that anyone in our hospital had access to all the documents that exists all the manuals that existed in that hospital. At that time, it was I it was a problem finding manuals, you know, people would spend an hour searching for a particular manual to do a procedure. So that was the last big project that I worked on.   Michael Hingson  16:42 And you said that the manuals typically were in like JPEG format or something like that.   Robert French  16:47 Usually they will Word or PDF. But you know, sometimes they would have JPEGs that were associated with the Word documents or the PDF documents. Of course, they couldn't search the JPEGs.   Michael Hingson  17:03 Well, I was wondering about that, of course, today. Now, even more people are demanding that the documents are accessible. The Google, of course, had the large library of millions of books that didn't inherit it, and they would put them up as pictures. And it took a court fight to get Google to agree and slash be compelled to put the documents up as accessible documents.   Robert French  17:31 Hmm. Yeah, that's I didn't know about that. That's, I'm glad that I'm glad the court said that.   Michael Hingson  17:38 It's all about inclusion, of course. And well, they are and, and other organizations are beginning to work on that. Now, of course, in this country, it's not quite as stringent in Canada yet. But in this country of within the last month, the government has said that the Americans with Disabilities Act does apply to websites, because a lot of times lawyers have been making the case or trying to make the case while the ADA was passed before the internet. So how can websites be held accountable and responsible for being accessible? Clearly, the ADEA doesn't apply. And a number of us have said, well, of course it does. Now, of course, the government has finally said, Yes, it does. But Congress still needs to stiffen the laws. And that will be another story.   Robert French  18:24 Yeah, yeah. Well, first getting Congress to move is not always easy.   Michael Hingson  18:31 Yeah, well, it says bad is will can entropy be reversed? And maybe the ultimate question will be the same, will have the same answer. So you worked with that until you were 60. So what was that? 2003 years or so?   Robert French  18:54 Yeah, yeah, it was about the company fails to get its last. Its last financing because of the burst of the tech bubble in 2003. And that's when that's when I started to think about other options.   Michael Hingson  19:13 So what other option Did you decide upon to reverse your entropy? Difficult? Or maybe to see entropy and larger growth? Yes. I don't think that most people probably understand that that whole joke and it's a physical basically, the laws that entropy can't be reversed. And things are constantly expanding like the universe is constantly expanding. And you know, it's like Murphy's Law, which is if anything can go wrong, it will route around and then there's no tools commentary on Murphy's Law which was Murphy was an optimist. But But then the other one, which is the commentary on Murphy's law that says once you open a can of worms, you can only put the words back in a bigger can. So yeah. So maybe it should be continued to expand for?   Robert French  20:07 Well, just on this subject of entropy, it's probably one of the worst understood words by the general public. But what? Well, it was interesting. You know, whenever a company folds, the first thing that you do is start looking for contracting work, which is what I did, I got on the phone and started calling people. And this particular day, it was in March of 2003, I had finished talking to a bunch of people and I put down the phone. And I opened a Word document, because I'd had this idea in my head for quite a while. And it was about a strange plague hitting the Earth. It was kind of an apocalyptic sort of tale. And I started writing, this was about three in the afternoon, I started writing, and I just kept on writing. And suddenly, it was no one in the morning or something. And I just written for eight hours. And I'd written 1000s of words. And I thought, wow, this is the most fun I've had for a such a long time. And that's how it all started. That book, I kind of ran out of steam on. So I started a different book. And the second book was going nowhere. So I started a book about an assassin. And it just wasn't that book became boring. Though, I did use the opening chapters in another book that in one of my Cal Rogen books. Then finally I got an idea for a kind of a business thriller. But I had said in an area in which I had some experience, I were somebody I know was was conned by a, a venture capital company, or will they call themselves a venture capital company somewhere to novel based on that. And I actually finished it, it was the first thing I actually finished completely. And I was I was quite happy with it. I thought it was pretty good. So I sent out query letters to I think it was 70 Publish literary literary agents, and a bunch of publishers and got back 70 rejection letters and other things. Yes, exactly. And this was before the day that you could submit submit via the Internet. The publishing was really quick, I was really slow to adopt technology. So as luck would have it, I booked myself into a Writers Conference. And I thought, well, this book is good. I mean, it's just I don't know how to market it. That's the problem. So I went to the Writers Conference. And the first day was the all the all the all the sessions were about the art of the art of writing. And   Robert French  23:27 I went, took those those courses, and realized the marketing wasn't the problem. The book was the problem. And I it was just that I didn't really understand how to write a book. I, I assumed because I was an avid reader, that I would be a natural writer. But as luck would have it at that conference, I met an editor who gave me a 37 page report on the book. And I decided that the book was a non starter. But through that, through that editor, she she was wonderful. And she mentored me through my first real book. And it all started because I was doing it contract in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, which is the dodgy area of town. And every day I'd walked past this alley to get to the to the the office I was working in. And this alley was full of drug addicts. And I remember saying to my editor whose name was Lisa. I said, Gosh, I go past this alley every day. And I keep thinking, how awful would it be to wake up in that alley, which was just awful, just terrible place? And she said, Well, who would wake up in an alley like that? And I said, Well, if it were a lawyer, yeah, that would be kind of ironic. And if it were a businessman, we interesting but then I thought well if you're a cop That would be great. And so I have this idea of a cop waking up in a alley full of drug addicts covered in blood. And Lisa asked me a bunch of questions. And the first my first novel, which is called junkie, started to come together in my head. And she mentored me through that novel and the second one, and that's grown into a series of seven books now,   Michael Hingson  25:26 are they self published, or traditionally published,   Robert French  25:29 this self published, I tried going the traditional publishing route, I got some interest, but I think my age was working against me, because publishers are more interested in people who are younger than I am. And who will have lots of books in them. So anyway, I, I learned about self publishing and took a bunch of courses and went that route. And now I think if a publisher came to me, and made me an offer, unless it was a really good offer, I don't think I'd be interested.   Michael Hingson  26:06 But you, you now have seven books. So you've clearly established a track record, in the fact that you keep writing them. I'm sure it's in part because you want to, but I would also suspect that you had success with   Robert French  26:19 them. Yeah, yeah. I've had some success with them. And, you know, somebody asked me, When are you going to stop writing? I'm 77. Now. So they asked me, When are you going to stop writing? And I paraphrase Charlton Heston and said, when they prize the computer out of my cold, dead hands, so I'm just gonna keep doing it. And one of the main reasons I do it is, over the years, I have established a mailing list of people who are fans of my my books, and the feedback I get from those people is just wonderful. It's this, I've met so many wonderful people through this mailing list. And they are the people that that keep me going. When I have bad times. It's those people who make me feel that I can still do this.   Michael Hingson  27:20 Do you publish through Amazon? Or where do you how do you publish?   Robert French  27:24 Amazon? Yeah, I went, I decided to go exclusive with Amazon. Because when I when I was publishing through Amazon, and Kobo, and Apple and Google, Barnes and Noble, I did an experiment with a couple of books and made them exclusive to Amazon. And they just did so much better. So I decided to go exclusive with Amazon on all the books. Can you   Michael Hingson  27:55 answer those when you're publishing through Amazon? I assume it's Kindle Direct Publishing? Yeah. Can't Can't you also make the books available from Amazon through other distribution channels and so on?   Robert French  28:09 Yes, you can. Yes. And Amazon will do that, too. Also, Amazon. Another reason for being with Amazon is that they also do the books in paperback, and in hardcover now. So I've got all of my books are in paperback and in large print. So that's, that's one of the things that Amazon does, which I like.   Michael Hingson  28:36 So have any of them been also produced in audio?   Robert French  28:41 Not yet, I really want to do them in audio. But I have a particular problem in doing them in audio, because the books are written in first person, present tense, from the point of view of multiple characters. So some chapters will be written from the point of view of a woman's, for example, and some even from a child. And then they'll say, there'll be saying, man standing here waiting for cow, and he's late again. So I need a woman actress to voice those, those chapters. So it means that in order to do audiobooks, I need to put together a team. Well, I did have a stint of acting. So I do know a bunch of actors. So I will do that at some point. But and hopefully soon, but right now, I'm just so busy that I can't devote the time to it.   Michael Hingson  29:41 I'm thinking though that with the fact that you're going through Amazon, it would be interesting to see if you could raise a discussion within Bada bing published through audible which is owned by Amazon because ANA has has produced they have done what they call audible originals, and they're very capable and Do oftentimes use more than one person to deal with a   Robert French  30:05 book. Oh, I didn't know that.   Michael Hingson  30:08 Oh, there's a lot of that.   Robert French  30:11 So because my thought was that I would know how to edit audio and video, I thought of assembling the actors and getting them to read the chapters and then editing it into an audible book, which, you know, Amazon will let you do that. So they're called Amazon, audible originals. Did you say, well,   Michael Hingson  30:36 audible originals are books that are not traditionally published elsewhere, but published through audible. Do you use Audible at all?   Robert French  30:46 No, I don't. I'm not a I'm not an audio book.   Michael Hingson  30:49 That's fine. We want to and it doesn't violate the laws of robotics. But But in your case, I'm sure it would be called an audible original because it's not published anywhere through traditional publishing, although the your books are so either way, though, they they do produce audio books, and oftentimes have at least two people reading it, if not more. I remember one that I read last year, you've seen the movie Alien? Yes. Yeah. Okay. So there's a book called Alien shadows, which is another one where, oh, what's the Gorny weavers character's name? Yeah. And the cat? Yeah. Are, are they actually they were in suspended animation. And they're brought out of suspended animation for something and they ended up fighting aliens again. And there are like about 10 different actors that are dealing with all the different characters. So I really think that it would be interesting to explore whether audio audible could do it and would do yeah, I'll certainly look into that. Thank you. I would, I would think that would make a lot of sense to do. I do a lot of audio reading on airplanes. But nowadays, mostly not opposed to Braille. Because I believe that Braille is still the basic means of reading and writing that I have. My wife and I read books together. So we pipe them through the house. So whatever we're doing, there's a book going, usually TV, but a book. She's learned how to listen to audio, and not fall asleep. So she That's great. Yeah, it's it's really wonderful when a number of actors do it. And there are some actors that can do a number of voices. But I understand what you're saying for your book. But I would definitely explore audio through audible and see what you could do.   Robert French  32:52 Yeah, I will definitely do that. Thank you,   Michael Hingson  32:55 it would make a lot of sense to do. Well, so you, you were an actor, while software developer, actor and then reader tell me more about that. Yeah,   Robert French  33:05 I, my first one, my first job when I was five, I wanted to be a cowboy. But my first job that I wanted to do is I wanted to be an actor. And my father probably quite rightly, taught me out and said, you know, with your mathematical ability, you should do something else. And actually, to some extent, he was instrumental in pointing me towards computers, or encouraging me towards computers should I say, but I always liked acting. I was in every school, my every play my school ever produced. And after school, I did a few acting, few plays and musicals. So in my 50s, I thought I'd like to try acting. So I took a tour course and went for auditions and found myself getting lead roles pretty quickly in local theater. And then I kind of realized I needed a better acting, a better acting coach. So I took lessons from Larry Silverberg, who was a wonderful, wonderful teacher, and he was in Seattle, and twice a week I would drive down to Seattle and do courses with Larry, and then I'd started doing a few movie things. Then, I just kind of realized that acting no matter how good an actor you are, in in the world of movies, it's they're always looking for a look. And I didn't have one plus or didn't have the one they wanted. Plus the the The movies that are made in Vancouver are all three American audiences almost all, and they needed people with American accents. And although I can do an American accent, it's just not very good. So that so I decided that pursuing that as a profession was not a good idea. So I continued acting in local theater for a while. But once I started writing that just completely overtook, took all my spare time. So that's when I stopped acting.   Michael Hingson  35:36 It's always radio for the BBC or the CPC.   Robert French  35:39 Yeah. I wouldn't mind doing radio. Yeah.   Michael Hingson  35:45 So you, so what's your next book,   Robert French  35:48 The next book is was in inspired by a podcast that I listened to, I'm a bit of a podcast addict. And it was about a, an amazing, but quite evil woman who ran this cryptocurrency scam. And I thought that would be an interesting part of a book. And so that's, that's the next book in the Cal Rogen series that I'm starting to write. Plus, I've got another series of books on the on the development stage. And my protagonist has a 12 year old daughter. And so the next series of books will be her as a detective in the year 2040 2045, when she's grown up, because in the current series, she's got five years old. So I'm very interested in what the near future holds for us with robotics and artificial intelligence and the social issues that we're facing and social media and cryptocurrencies and all of those things. So I'm very excited about writing books set credit, five years in the future.   Michael Hingson  37:10 Have you ever read any of the books by JD Robb the in depth series?   Robert French  37:14 I haven't No, no.   Michael Hingson  37:17 So JD Robb, who is nor Roger, yeah, Roberts, has written a whole series there, the Eve Dallas series, and I think they're now 54 or 55 books. And they start out in like 2058, I think, or 2057. And are very, they're fun to read. There are some steamy parts, but that's okay. They have absolutely captured what both me and my wife's attention. So she doesn't even want to read those piped through the house. She wants to read those on her own, but she wants the audio version. So we're both now on book number 20 in that series, but they're fun. And I'm sure that your take will be different. And that's a good thing. So it's a wonderful series to write. But she has been very successful with that.   Robert French  38:05 Oh, that's great. Oh, definitely. I knew I knew that Nora had started writing books under the JD Robert, I didn't know anything about them. So I will check out to the Eve Dallas series.   Michael Hingson  38:20 They're all they're all something in depth. And they're fascinating the characters evolve and grow. And the whole series has been very fascinating to observe character, character development, and because she's done with them, but I'm anxious to read yours as well now, so definitely get them out there and also get them out in audio, that'll be a lot of fun for a lot of people, for sure. Actually, something that you might think about is there is a the Library of Congress has the National Library Service for the Blind and print impaired. And I'm sure there is an equivalent in Canada. They also use their own readers to record books, and it might be worth reaching out to them to see if they might be interested. I've not seen any that they individually record that have several actors, but nevertheless, it's a fascinating thing, but I would still think audible would be the best way.   Robert French  39:19 Hmm, yeah, I will definitely look into that audible originals idea. That'd be great.   Michael Hingson  39:26 Well, tell me more about sort of your view about self publishing as opposed to traditional publishing and the differences in the values and so on.   Robert French  39:34 Well, I'm not a huge expert in traditional publishing. There. I know people who are both traditionally published and self published and generally prefer the self publishing side of, of their, their work. traditional publishing is going through some huge upheaval Almost, and they're very, they've been very slow to react to the ebook market. And they, they just don't seem to have got it. Their books, the one of the key things about the ebook market is books should be cheaper when they're ebooks than in on paper. But frequently, the traditional publishers will have the ebook and the paper book at the same price. And it seems like they're trying to grab all the money they can out of the marketplace before it's lost to them. So now, they might well be wrong. But that's, that's a bit how I see it. If somebody came to me and said, I wanted to be an author, which way should I go, I would say if you're going to choose go with self publishing, you have more control you make you make more money and midlist author with with a publishing house, doesn't make a heck of a lot of money. But a midlist author, on KDP, with Amazon can make a very nice living. So I would I have become a big fan of self publishing.   Michael Hingson  41:27 And the more you learn how to market, the better you will be and the more successful you will be in it is true that with self publishing, you have to do more of your marketing. But even in the regular publishing world today, authors aren't usually selected that can't bring their own marketing skills and marketing presence to a book. They want you to have significant social media presence, newsletters, blogs, Facebook, and social media outreach and so on, that you again, bring yourself much less what they might do,   Robert French  42:10 huh? Yeah, gone are the days when you signed a deal with a publisher, went back home and started writing the next book. And they did everything?   Michael Hingson  42:20 Yeah, very much. So. So tell me about your writing process, your style, and so on.   Robert French  42:25 Yeah, it'sa bit weird,   Michael Hingson  42:27 which you talked a little bit about it, but   Robert French  42:30 goes with goes with my personality. I don't do a lot of planning of a book, I tend to write by the seat of my pants as a pantser, as they say, so I'll get an idea for a book. And I'll kind of do a mind map of where I think it's going and what it's going to what it's going to be like, and who's going to be in it. And just, I don't even always know how it's going to end. But once I've kind of got got it settled in my gut, I just start writing. And I write and things happen. And now of course, I have a cast of characters who are in most of the books, and when they show up, they know, I know what to do with them. And it's it's a lot, it's a it's a lot of fun. And I frequently surprised myself, you know, I'll be writing thinking that this chapter is going to end a certain way. And then somebody will say something, and it will trigger something in my mind, and the chapter will go in a quite different direction. Now this can be difficult, because you can write yourself, it's write itself into a corner. And sometimes it takes a while to get out of it. But I always think if I can surprise myself, I can surprise my readers. So it seems to work for me. And I really like working this way. I did one time just for fun. Think about planning out of book, The wet. Some people know they know how many chapters it's going to be what's going to happen in each chapter. And I started to do that and my head exploded. I just couldn't to couldn't do it. So sorry.   Michael Hingson  44:24 Your characters are beginning to tell the story.   Robert French  44:28 That's right. That's absolutely right. Yeah, yeah. Sometimes you ask a question. And I'll think, hey, what would be an interesting answer to that question that I just wrote down? And that might send something in a completely different direction. The other thing is sorry, gone. No, go ahead. But the other thing is that one of the things that I learned from the literary agent and author Don Masse is With every book should have tension on every page. And so when I'm not fixed in what has to happen in the chapter, I can make tension appear on a page by somebody giving a an odd answer or asking a question that nobody's got the answer to. And all those things create tension, but they're sometimes drive the story in a different direction. So that that works really works for me.   Michael Hingson  45:35 Does it sometimes surprise you when that happens? Oh, yeah. Oh,   Robert French  45:38 yeah. I'm constantly surprised. Sometimes, you know, at the end of a day of writing, I'll, I'll look at what I've written and say, Wow, that was good. But different.   Michael Hingson  45:52     Robert French  45:57 Oh, yes. Yes. Oh, yeah. Yeah,   Michael Hingson  46:01 probably must be depressing. After a while   Robert French  46:03 it is. I'm subject to depression as well. And sometimes writer's block will be one of the triggers. But I usually get writer's block, because I've let the storyline go in a really interesting direction. And have a really unexpected, you know, I've been working towards an expected result. And I thought, No, this unexpected result with much better, and then sometimes takes me a long time to re gather the strands of the story with this new element in it. And, you know, that can take, you know, a couple of days to work out. But yeah, it's except when I'm in a long period of depression, writer's block may last a day or so how do you get over it? What happens? Well, in the, in the short term writer's block, eventually, something will click, you know, at some, you know, sometimes I'll wake up in the morning and think something, wow, that might work in the book. And so that will happen. When I get into, you know, a long, longer period of depression, that writer's block becomes semi permanent. And what gets me out of that is, I'll end up going to my doctor, and he'll getting some medication. So   Michael Hingson  47:31 until you allow yourself to relax and start to just really think about it again. Yeah, listen to your characters.   Robert French  47:39 Yeah, yeah. In a recent depression, something happened that helps quite a lot, is I woke up in the morning, and I was still half asleep. And I had this image of two women standing over looking down over the dead body. And I built a whole chapter in my mind about it. And as soon as I got up, I actually wrote down first 500 words of the chapter. And it was indicative of being in a depression because it was very, very dark. But I thought, you know, if I didn't make it quite so dark, it could actually be an interesting start to a story. So things like that help stuff pops into your mind. And you think, Wow.   Michael Hingson  48:30 Well, I'm looking forward to checking out some of the books certainly, and I can't end this without asking you, what kinds of thoughts and observations and advice you might have for people who want to write. Yeah, it's   Robert French  48:45 interesting that you're out, you should ask that I've just finished a guest blog post for a blogger in United Kingdom. And the title is what to do for an aspiring writer. And my advice would be that if you're don't think that you just you're just going to be a writer, the chances are, you're going to be a publisher too, and you're going to need to be good at it and good at marketing too. But the thing that will distinguish you over the long term is good writing. So if you don't have experience in writing don't do what I did. Don't assume because you're an avid reader that you're going to be a good writer. I spent I didn't waste but I used up quite a few years writing when I could have done a lot better. So make sure you're good. Writers Conference is a great thing to go to for aspiring writer, because they have courses which are given by actual published successful authors on how to write. You can meet agents, you can meet editors, you can meet publishers. But take as many courses as you can, on the craft of writing, read as many books as you can on the craft of writing, and just become a very, very good writer. Because at the moment, self publishing is what is the Wild West, but that's not going to last forever. And the good writers will be the ones who stay in and, and rise to the top, they've still got to be a good marketer and publisher. But I think the key is to become a very, very good writer. And if you if you can go to somebody I know went to a conference, they met one of their favorite authors, and asked me author if they would become their mentor. And they say, yes. So that's, that's something that is always worth doing. Because if you have a mentor, I was lucky that Lisa, my editor became my mentor. And, you know, I could call her anytime and ask her any question about writing? And she would, she would tell me, so a mentor is really good if you can get one. Do you work with an agent today? I don't work with an agent. Now. Now, it's all self publishing. It's all self publish. Yeah, but I do use Edison's   Michael Hingson  51:29 and there's a lot of value in editors, good editors are going to help you really bring out what is important and relevant about not just telling you how to rewrite something or whatever, I remember when we did thunder dog, we had a wonderful editor. And Chad said up front, I'm not going to try to rewrite this book, this has to be you and your story and your style. But what I need to do is to help you enhance it, to make it something that people will want to read and will connect with them. And he had some great suggestions about transitions and so on in the book. I don't know whether you if you read thunderdog, or not.   Robert French  52:13  Yeah, it's no, it's on my list.   Michael Hingson  52:15 Well, one of the things that we do in Thunder dog is we start off with something that happened on September 11. And then we transition back to things in my life that that are relevant to that and taught me something that I could then use to that event. And then at the end of the chapter, we go back to that event, finish it and then go to the next chapter and do the same thing. And Chad said, Well, the problem is, I get lost with the transitions. I don't know where I am, I'm suddenly somewhere else. The transitions are not very good. That's a fair comment, as opposed to, well, you got to you got to rewrite all of this and all that. He said, The transitions aren't good. So we we I actually spent a weekend working on the transitions. Once he taught me what that meant. And the transitions became, I think one of the better parts of the book, and others have said the same thing. And that's, that's one of the things that an editor should do is really help good writers become even better writers?   Robert French  53:14 Mm hmm. Absolutely. I had a, I had an experience with an editor. On my third book, Lisa, was involved in a couple of other projects. And she couldn't be my editor for that book. And so I found another editor who was really, really wonderful. And the book I mentioned about the assassin that never went anywhere, the first chapter of that book was great. And I used it in the new book. And it was a long, long chapter. And it was a it was a flash forward. So you know, after that chapter, it flashed back 14 days to see how one got to that situation. And the editor said that chapter is way too long. And so I broke it up into three different chapters, and flashed, flashed back after each chapter. And it really, really worked. And just, you know, but just to know that the chapter was too long, that's all she had to say, to make me fix it, which was really great and actually had a lot of other really good comments as well, where somebody was acting out of character, you know, would that person really do that? And I thought they probably wouldn't. So,   Michael Hingson  54:48 yeah, that's that's the sign of a good editor. Oh, she was great. Yeah, yeah. Well, if people want to reach out to you and learn about the books and other things like that, how do they do that?   Robert French  54:59 They thing to do is to go to Robert P French.com. That's my website. And if you first page is a list of my books, the book junkie is the first book in the series. And if you click on that, I'll send you a free copy of the first book. So so if anyone's interested in following up, that's the way to do it.   Michael Hingson  55:28 And is that that's the best way then to contact you, as opposed to email or something like that.   Robert French  55:33 But yeah, on my website, just click contact, and then then my email addresses, then people can email me,   Michael Hingson  55:40 and they can learn all about any social media that you happen. So   Robert French  55:43 yeah, I've got Facebook. So Robert P French offer?   Michael Hingson  55:49 Well, I really appreciate you coming on and giving us your insights and demonstrating that you, you took up challenges that came in your life, and you work through them, and even with depression, and so on that comes up, you're able to, to eventually get past it. So don't don't stop doing that. You don't want to depressed, Robert around.   Robert French  56:11 No one does.   Michael Hingson  56:13 But we're really glad that you you came here and you're talking with us. And I appreciate it very much. And so people can go to Robert P french.com. And get all the information and I hope they buy your books. Well,   Robert French  56:25 thank you very much. And thank you very much for inviting me onto the podcast. I really appreciate it. And just as an aside, I didn't after our first conversation I did have I did go to accessibe.com. And it was really very interesting. So I'm glad you made that connection for me.   Michael Hingson  56:49 Well, I hope that you'll use it to to get to work on your website, if you haven't yet. I certainly will. Yes, it works. Well. Yeah, I was very impressed with the demo. Well, thanks for being here. And I want to thank all of you who listened today, I learned a lot and enjoy talking with authors. It's fun to compare notes. And it's also fun to talk about the good old days of computers and such things. So thanks very much for for doing that, Robert. And again, thank all of you for listening. If you'd like to reach out to me, it's easy. You can go to www dot Michael hingson.com/podcast Michael Hingson is M I C H A E L H I N G S O N .com/podcast. Or you can email me and you're welcome to do so at Michael M I C H  A E L H I at accessibe A C C E S S I B E.com. And wherever you're listening to this, please give us a five star rating. We really appreciate your ratings. And thank you very much for do that. So again, thanks for being here. And Robert, thank you for being here as well. Thank you.   UM Intro/Outro  58:02   You have been listening to the Unstoppable Mindset podcast. Thanks for dropping by. I hope that you'll join us again next week, and in future weeks for upcoming episodes. To subscribe to our podcast and to learn about upcoming episodes, please visit www dot Michael hingson.com slash podcast. Michael Hingson is spelled m i c h a e l h i n g s o n. While you're on the site., please use the form there to recommend people who we ought to interview in upcoming editions of the show. And also, we ask you and urge you to invite your friends to join us in the future. If you know of any one or any organization needing a speaker for an event, please email me at speaker at Michael hingson.com. I appreciate it very much. To learn more about the concept of blinded by fear, please visit www dot Michael hingson.com forward slash blinded by fear and while you're there, feel free to pick up a copy of my free eBook entitled blinded by fear. The unstoppable mindset podcast is provided by access cast an initiative of accessiBe and is sponsored by accessiBe. Please visit www.accessibe.com. accessiBe is spelled a c c e s s i b e. There you can learn all about how you can make your website inclusive for all persons with disabilities and how you can help make the internet fully inclusive by 2025. Thanks again for listening. Please come back and visit us again next week.

Nora Roberts is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of more than 240 novels. There are currently more than 500 million copies of her books in print, and the New Yorker has dubbed her "America's favorite novelist." Nora shares the story behind her success, and reveals her three-step process for writing a book.

En este final de temporada abrupto hablamos de "Desnuda ante la muerte" de JD Robb y sobre cuál será nuestro próximo libro para el Club de Lectura Desactualizada (Proyecto Hail Mary de Andi Weir). También comentamos algunas anécdotas que nos han pasado desde que no grabamos y os recomendamos que no vayais a por el Sol que os quemáis, mejor apuntad a las estrellas... Nos vemos en Septiembre... mientras tanto, disfrutad del verano y muchas gracias por apoyarnos hasta cuando no sacamos programas. Sois l@s mejores!!!

Join Alyssa and Melissa as they discuss their favorite (and not so favorite) books, movies, and shows! Titles: She's Come Undone by Wally Lamb, Esperanza Rising by Pam Munoz Ryan, Baby-Sitter's Club by Ann Martin, Birdcage, The Crown, The Southern Vampire Mysteries by Charlaine Harris, Sometimes I Lie by Alice Feeny, Rock Paper Scissors by Alice Feeny, JD Robb novels, Public Secrets by Nora Roberts, self-help, true crime, Adnan's Story by Rabia Chaudry, Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer, cookbooks, We Don't Eat Our Classmates by Ryan Higgins, Pajama Time by Sandra Boynton, Between Shades of Gray by Ruta Sepetys, The Selection by Kiera Cass, Twilight by Stephanie Meyer, The Office, The Book with No Pictures by B.J. Novak, Why Not Me? By Mindy Kaling, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? By Mindy Kaling, The Mindy Project, Never Have I Ever, People I Want to Punch in the Throat by Jenn Mann, The Office: the untold story of the greatest sitcom of the 2000's by Andy Greene and more

In this episode of Podcast in Death, we welcome back our friends Emily and Heidi from Romancing the Shelf! We talk with Emily and Heidi about their experience reading the first three "In Death" books for the very first time!! Those of you who are followers of our podcast may remember that on episode #74 from back in November of 2021, we spoke with Emily and Heidi after they read the Nora Roberts/JD Robb crossover book, "Remember When." On this episode, they tell us that while they are reading every Nora Roberts title in order of release and would have most likely read "Remember When" at some point, they didn't really plan on reading any other JD Robb titles. BUT... after reading "Remember When" and coming onto our show, they both decided that they really needed to at least read the first three JD Robb titles. (Naked in Death, Glory in Death, Immortal in Death). As we here at Podcast in Death expected, they LOVED them! Emily has even gotten her mom hooked on the series (we now really need to record an episode with Emily's mom) and also recommended them to several members of her true crime book club! We get Emily and Heidi's overall impressions of the first three books, the differences between Nora Roberts and JD Robb, their impressions of Mavis and Peabody. Then they announce that they have plans to read the next two books in the series (Rapture in Death and Ceremony in Death). This will happen once they meet their Patreon "Stretch Goal" so, if you listen to Romancing the Shelf, go to their Patreon page and become a patron so that they can start reading some more books in this series!

"Origin in Death" is a book that is really jam-packed with great stuff to read! It's got probably one of the most insane plots in this whole series, that has a lot of heavy moral questions attached to it. And in the midst of that, we get Roarke's entire Irish family coming for Thanksgiving, Eve having some conflicted feelings when her "work spouse," Morris, is seen flirting with the gorgeous Amarylis Coltrane, we meet Cher Reo for the first time, all the girls get together for a spa evening, and Eve gets another tattoo AND Eve has a fight with Mira. PLUS...the ending has robot spiders (which are NOT okay), an army of clones, and the bad guy pushes the "self destruct" button for the building and Eve and Roarke have only a few minutes to make it out before the whole place blows...it's a LOT! Some of our very favorite quotes come from this book. There's some really great banter between Eve and Roarke and/or Eve and Peabody. Eve inviting Crack to their Thanksgiving dinner was so sweet. Eve having to deal with meeting Roarke's whole family is just funny, especially her exchange with Roarke's cousin, Sean. There's also a very controversial ending where Eve purposely lets the main suspect(s) get away. So much to talk about here. Also, as we know...this case becomes a pivotal point in both Nadine and Eve's careers, and becomes something that creates many plots and subplots for the rest of the series. It's the book that keeps on giving!!

"Origin in Death" is a book that is really jam-packed with great stuff to read! It's got probably one of the most insane plots in this whole series, that has a lot of heavy moral questions attached to it. And in the midst of that, we get Roarke's entire Irish family coming for Thanksgiving, Eve having some conflicted feelings when her "work spouse," Morris, is seen flirting with the gorgeous Amarylis Coltrane, we meet Cher Reo for the first time, all the girls get together for a spa evening, and Eve gets another tattoo AND Eve has a fight with Mira. PLUS...the ending has robot spiders (which are NOT okay), an army of clones, and the bad guy pushes the "self destruct" button for the building and Eve and Roarke have only a few minutes to make it out before the whole place blows...it's a LOT! Some of our very favorite quotes come from this book. There's some really great banter between Eve and Roarke and/or Eve and Peabody. Eve inviting Crack to their Thanksgiving dinner was so sweet. Eve having to deal with meeting Roarke's whole family is just funny, especially her exchange with Roarke's cousin, Sean. There's also a very controversial ending where Eve purposely lets the main suspect(s) get away. So much to talk about here. Also, as we know...this case becomes a pivotal point in both Nadine and Eve's careers, and becomes something that creates many plots and subplots for the rest of the series. It's the book that keeps on giving!!

It's the week of Thanksgiving here in the US and in this week's episode of Pages n' Pages we talk about all the books we're thankful exist. From childhood favorite to recently reads, we focus on books that have had an impact in our lives over the years. Let us know what books you're thankful for! Happy Thanksgiving everyone! Books we mention: Tiger King: The Official Tell-All Memoir by Joe Exotic Lore Olympus by Rachel Smythe, The Dutch House by Ann Patchett, Gilded by Marissa Meyer, Seven Days in June by Tia Williams, Heartstopper by Alice Oseman, House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune, Under the Whispering Door by TJ Klune, A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas, Bet Me by Jennifer Crusie, Twilight by Stephenie Meyer, Hyperbole and a Half by Allie Brosh, Where the Sidewalk Ends, Falling Up and A Light in the Attic by Shel Silverstein, The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster, The Frog Princess by ED Baker, Fangirl and Carry On by Rainbow Rowell, Percy Jackson and the Olympians by Rick Riordan, Stephanie Plum series by Janet Evanovich, The Hating Game by Sally Thorne, Untamed by Glennan Doyle, Red, White and Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston, Dumplin' by Julie Murphy, In Death series by JD Robb, The Princess Bride by William Goldman, Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller, Harry Potter series by she who must not be named. Check out Pages n' Pages on Instagram. These opinions are entirely our own. Image by Kapona via Vector Stock.

Hey, Everyone! This week is a really fun episode. As you may know, because we've mentioned it several times, the Emily and Heidi of "Romancing the Shelf" have NEVER read a J.D. Robb book. Ever. Emily even read the first part of "Remember When"  before, but she never went on to read the rest of the book! So a short while ago, we asked them if they would be willing to read "Remember When" in its entirety, and then come on our show to talk about it. And we are happy to report that they loved it! So much so that they have decided to also go on to read "Naked," "Glory" and "Immortal"! It's really fun to hear their perspective on it as brand new JD Robb readers, and we had a really great time talking with them about this book. Enjoy!

It is the episode you have all been waiting for… Corban finally gets to discuss the works of JD Robb during this very special episode of Shelf Logic. Alyssa discusses the works of Nora Roberts in celebration of Nora's 71st birthday on October 10th!

We sit down with the hosts of Podcast In Death for a dive into the In Death series. Did Nora use her own earlier works as inspiration for this epic series that now spans over 50 books? Listen in to find out!

On this episode of Booklist’s Shelf Care: The Podcast, host Susan Maguire talks to Karen Toonen, Collection Services Manager at the Naperville Public Library (IL) about how her library’s circulation changed during lockdown, and what she did about it; Audio Editor Heather Booth shares the five essentials of business books on audio; and Adult Books Editor Donna Seaman shares what she’s reading and loving. Here’s what we talked about: Reunion Beach: Stories Inspired by Dorothea Benton Frank by Elin Hilderbrand, Andriana Trigiani, et al. It Had to Be You by Georgia Clark. The Cult of We by Eliot Brown. Bridgerton, aka The Duke and I by Julia Quinn. Naked in Death by JD Robb. Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women that a Movement Forgot by Mikki Kendall. Read by the author. The City We Became by N. K. Jemisin. Read by Robin Miles. All Together Now: A Newfoundlander’s Light Tales for Heavy Times by Alan Doyle. Heather’s Tips for Selecting Business Books on Audio: 1) Look to the stars! 2) Look to the *other* stars 3) Think like a talk-y management business-y type 4) Shop the airport 5) Trust the content The Man Who Lived Underground, by Richard Wright. Leonora in the Morning Light, by Michaela Carter. Leonora Carrington Tarot card deck Rescuing the Planet: Protecting Half the Land to Heal the Earth, by Tony Hiss. Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest, by Suzanne Simard.

Join Corban and Alyssa as they discuss romantic books to prove that love is in the air. Books include a variety of J.D. Robb, Meet Me in Monaco by Hazel Gaynor, The Kiss Quotient by Helen Hoang, and The Hating Game by Sally Thorne.

Surprise! This episode is not what we announced last week! But, this is still a great show, so enjoy!! This week we have a show that we put together at the last minute for reasons that will be explained in the episode. Tara gives up her week off to record this podcast with AJ and her daughter, Caitlin. The topic is the various book covers from the J.D. Robb "In Death" series. Mostly, we are looking at what we would call the "Neon" covers. These are the covers that had bright, neon colors on them and compilations of different elements that would hint to the contents of the book. We show Caitlin several of these covers to see if she can then guess what the book was about based on those elements. Jen is on vacation this week, and we're kind of sad about that because we could have used her extensive knowledge of "In Death" book details in this episode. For a full gallery of the covers that we mention in this podcast, please see our episode page on our website here: https://podcastindeath.com/episode-39-j-d-robb-book-covers/

Surprise! This episode is not what we announced last week! But, this is still a great show, so enjoy!! This week we have a show that we put together at the last minute for reasons that will be explained in the episode. Tara gives up her week off to record this podcast with AJ and her daughter, Caitlin. The topic is the various book covers from the J.D. Robb "In Death" series. Mostly, we are looking at what we would call the "Neon" covers. These are the covers that had bright, neon colors on them and compilations of different elements that would hint to the contents of the book. We show Caitlin several of these covers to see if she can then guess what the book was about based on those elements. Jen is on vacation this week, and we're kind of sad about that because we could have used her extensive knowledge of "In Death" book details in this episode. For a full gallery of the covers that we mention in this podcast, please see our episode page on our website here: https://podcastindeath.com/episode-39-j-d-robb-book-covers/

This week, we review Conspiracy in Death, a book that pretty much shows up in just about everyone's Top 5 or Top 10 from the whole series. There is just so much great stuff in this book, Highs and Lows and lots of angst but also lots of humor, and some of our favorite banters...just a fantastic book. This is a book about "Power." Acquiring power, taking power away, who has power and who does not. A few characters that we all now love and are now important members of this series are introduced in this book: Troy Trueheart, Louise Dimatto and Don Webster. All fan favorites. Baxter makes his second appearance, and has an important role in this book, but also in future books. Plus, Nora is starting to establish Eve's bullpen, and we see a bit more of Baxter in this book. We love Baxter, but we feel sorry for him in this book because Roarke takes his anger out on Baxter and slugs him, when Baxter is just trying to do his job. We talk about how Ellen Bowers is "The Worst" and dislikes Eve for no apparent reason. She files a complaint against Eve for using inappropriate and abusive language, which we are all shocked at, because, as we know from reviews of "Shadows in Death," Eve has never used inappropriate language this early on in the series. Eve is going through a LOT in this book, so we see a lot more of "Jokey Roarke" who uses humor to try and tease Eve out of her mood. When that doesn't work, he uses tough love by suggesting maybe they could start a family and Eve could get pregnant. This approach DOES work. There is a LOT of sex in this book also. More than usual? Jen thinks Eve needs to "chill the fuck out" about Roarke being involved in so many companies, and boards and properties, and also that Roarke continues to give her money. Also, why is it always "Level 3" for Eve? ALSO... Just FYI, you can find good iced tea at your local PF Changs, Substation 2, or Dickey's BBQ Pit.

This week, we review Conspiracy in Death, a book that pretty much shows up in just about everyone's Top 5 or Top 10 from the whole series. There is just so much great stuff in this book, Highs and Lows and lots of angst but also lots of humor, and some of our favorite banters...just a fantastic book. This is a book about "Power." Acquiring power, taking power away, who has power and who does not. A few characters that we all now love and are now important members of this series are introduced in this book: Troy Trueheart, Louise Dimatto and Don Webster. All fan favorites. Baxter makes his second appearance, and has an important role in this book, but also in future books. Plus, Nora is starting to establish Eve's bullpen, and we see a bit more of Baxter in this book. We love Baxter, but we feel sorry for him in this book because Roarke takes his anger out on Baxter and slugs him, when Baxter is just trying to do his job. We talk about how Ellen Bowers is "The Worst" and dislikes Eve for no apparent reason. She files a complaint against Eve for using inappropriate and abusive language, which we are all shocked at, because, as we know from reviews of "Shadows in Death," Eve has never used inappropriate language this early on in the series. Eve is going through a LOT in this book, so we see a lot more of "Jokey Roarke" who uses humor to try and tease Eve out of her mood. When that doesn't work, he uses tough love by suggesting maybe they could start a family and Eve could get pregnant. This approach DOES work. There is a LOT of sex in this book also. More than usual? Jen thinks Eve needs to "chill the fuck out" about Roarke being involved in so many companies, and boards and properties, and also that Roarke continues to give her money. Also, why is it always "Level 3" for Eve? ALSO... Just FYI, you can find good iced tea at your local PF Changs, Substation 2, or Dickey's BBQ Pit.

Corbon and Alyssa discuss the following books: Such a Good Age by Kiley Reid, JD Robb series, Lying in Wait by Liz Nugent, Finding Freedom by Omid Scobie and Carolyn Durand, Midnight Man by Meg Gardiner, We Don’t Eat Our Classmates by Ryan T Higgins, The Ruins by Scott Smith, Rising Strong by Brené Brown, Quackery by Lydia Kang, Only Plane in the Sky by Garrett Graff

Today’s guest is Spencer and Bree and we have a fun episode for you. We are chatting all things backlist for Jill Shalvis. As you know Jill has published over 100 books and it  can be intimidating to figure out what you should pick next. In this episode, we go over her series and tell you what you should pick up next.    BOOKS RECOMMENDED: In Death series by JD Robb - https://amzn.to/3436cOX Nora Roberts - https://amzn.to/30bGgQ3 Virgin River series by Robyn Carr - https://amzn.to/3n4KfYz Jill Shalvis - https://amzn.to/2HCKnhB  Heartbreaker Bay series by Jill Shalvis - https://amzn.to/3346ZzM Wildstone series  by Jill Shalvis - https://amzn.to/3mT7Efg  Lucky Harbor series  by Jill Shalvis - https://amzn.to/343oFL9 Animal Magnetism  by Jill Shalvis - https://amzn.to/3463Rma Flashpoint and Flashback by Jill Shalvis - https://amzn.to/3mYquBC  The Night Huntress by Jeannine Frost - https://amzn.to/2HCKvh5 Argeneau series by Lynsay Sands - https://amzn.to/3iawIuF A Quick Bite by Lynsay Sands -  https://amzn.to/30aDSck BOOKTUBE’S JILL SHALVIS GUIDES  Spencer’s Video UTC Video    PODCAST RECOMMENDATION The Fangover  CONNECT WITH SPENCER Booktube Instagram   CONNECT WITH BREE Instagram  Blog    JOIN PATREON COMMUNITY  Get weekly romance recommendations, early access to author interviews and exclusive Patreon audio series by joining the Patreon community. Monthly perks start at $1  a month. Want to join the fun? Sign up today; http://www.whattoreadnextblog.com/patreon   FROLIC PODCAST NETWORK  What to Read Next Podcast is part of the Frolic Podcast Network. You can find more outstanding podcasts to subscribe to at Frolic.media/podcasts!    AFFILIATE DISCLOSURE If you purchase a book through my Amazon or Bookshop link, I will receive a commission at no cost to you that will help cover the cost of the podcast    CONNECT WITH LAURA YAMIN  WhattoReadNextBlog.com Instagram  Goodreads

A rambling podcast today on sleep cycles and the importance of sleep, daily routines, how much I love the In Death books, and how I'm *still* vacillating on what to write for UNDER A WINTER SKY.First Cup of Coffee is part of the Frolic Podcast Network. You can find more outstanding podcasts to subscribe to at Frolic.media/podcasts!Support the show (http://paypal.me/jeffekennedy)

Earlier this summer, the Mellon Foundation — the largest humanities philanthropy in the United States — announced it was shifting its mission to focus more on social justice. It backed up that announcement with a $5.3 million grant to fund a collection of books to be placed in 1,000 prisons and juvenile detention centers across all 50 states. The Million Book Project was dreamed up by poet and legal scholar Reginald Dwayne Betts. It intends to curate a capsule collection of 500 books — Betts calls them “freedom libraries” — that will include literature, history, poetry and social thought, with an emphasis on books by Black writers and thinkers. Thursday morning, MPR News host Kerri Miller spoke with Betts and Mellon Foundation president Elizabeth Alexander about the project and what they hope to accomplish. Here’s a list of books and authors suggested by Miller, listeners and our guests: Fiction: “The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood; “Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison; “The Round House” by Louise Erdrich; “Black Leopard, Red Wolf” (The Dark Star Trilogy) by Marlon James; “The Ox-Bow Incident” by Walter Van Tilburg Clark; “The Da Vinci Code” by Dan Brown; “The Luminaries” by Eleanor Catton;  “On the Road” by Cormac McCarthy; “One Hundred Years of Solitude” by Gabriel García Márquez; “Love in the Time of Cholera” by Gabriel García Márquez; “Hopscotch” by Julio Cortázar; “Peace From Broken Pieces” by Iyanla Vanzant; “My Ántonia” by Willa Cather; “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values” by Robert M. Pirsig; “Grimm’s Fairy Tales” by the Brothers Grimm; “The Redwall” series by Brian Jacques; "News of the World" by Paulette Jiles; “Life of Pi” by Yann Martel; “The Old Man and the Sea” by Ernest Hemingway; “The All Souls Trilogy” by Deborah Harkness; “Their Eyes Were Watching God” by Zora Neale Hurston; “The Ranger’s Apprentice” series by John Flanagan;; “A Door Into Ocean” by Joan Slonczewski; “The Count of Monte Cristo” by Alexandre Dumas; “The Ocean at the End of the Lane” by Neil Gaiman; The works of Octavia E. Butler; The works of JD Robb; The works of Ilona Andrews; The works of N.K. Jemisin; The works of Franz Kafka; The works of Rick Riordan; The works of Ivan Doig; The works of J.R. Ward. Nonfiction: “Not by the Sword: How a Cantor and His Family Transformed a Klansman” by Kathryn Watterson; “March” series by Congressman John Lewis; “A Brief History of Time” by Stephen Hawking; “Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression – and the Unexpected Solutions” by Johann Hari; “In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction” by Gabor Maté; “The Power of Habit” by Charles Duhigg; “The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma” by Bessel van der Kolk; “The Souls of Black Folk” by W.E.B DuBois; “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents” by Isabel Wilkerson; “The Fifth Agreement” by don Jose Ruiz, don Miguel Ruiz and Janet Mills. Poetry: The works of Langston Hughes; The works of Emily Dickinson;  The works of Layli Long Soldier;  The works of Robert Frost The works of William Faulkner;  The works of Etheridge Knight; The works of Lucille Clifton. Guests: Elizabeth Alexander, poet and president of Mellon Foundation  Reginald Dwyane Betts, formerly incarcerated poet and legal scholar To listen to the full conversation you can use the audio player above. Correction (Aug. 8, 2020): “The Fifth Agreement” was originally listed under the fiction section. However, it is a work of nonfiction and has been moved to the correct section of the list.

Welcome to the What to Read Next Podcast. Today’s guest is Francesca from the Under the Covers Book Blog and YouTube Channel. In this episode, we chat about the Romanceopoly challenge that is perfect if you want to dive into reading more  romance. In this episode, we chat about romance, great paranormal book recommendations. .    NEW PODCAST ALERT Francesca did start a new podcast along with Suzanne and Stephanie and it’s perfect for Paranormal fans. The Fangover - Perfect for PNR Fans and Beginners  Instagram   ROMANCEOPOLY Website  YouTube Announcement   IN DEATH READALONG  JD Robb Instagram YouTube Announcement    BOOKS MENTIONED The Sinner by JR Ward The Rakess by Scarlett Peckham (So good!)  You Had Me At Hola by Alexis Daria (So good!)  Take the Lead by Alexis Daria  Chasing Cassandra by Lisa Kleypas Wicked Bite by Jeannie Frost Conspiracy in Death by JD Robb  Undercover Bromance by Lyssa Kay Adams  All I Ask by Corinne Michaels Heart of Blood and Ashes by Milla Vane  The Worst Best Man by Mia Sosa  Wild at Heart by KA Tucker How to Love Your Elf by Karrelyn Sparks  Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid The Boyfriend Project by Farrah Rochon  Lingus by Mariana Zapata    PARANORMAL RECOMMENDATIONS The Black Dagger Brotherhood  by JR Ward Immortal After Dark by Kresley Cole  Psychangeling Series by Nalini Singh Lord of the Underworld by Gena Showalter Wolf Gone Wild by Juliette Cross * Great for beginners   ENEMIES TO LOVERS The Simple Wild by KA Tucker The Opposite of You by Rachel Higginsson Reasonable Doubt by Whitney G.    CONNECT WITH FRANCESCA  UTC Blog Instagram YouTube  Twitter  Facebook JOIN THE CONVERSATION Visit WhattoReadNextBlog.com and share what you have been reading. If you would like a book recommendation, feel free to email me at whattoreadnextblog@gmail.com and I will be happy to answer your questions. BUY MY FAVORITE ROMANCE BOOKS - SUPPORT INDIE BOOKSTORES I partnered up with Bookshop  https://bookshop.org/shop/laurayaminreads an organization that supports Independent Bookstores. You can purchase most of the books that were featured in today’s podcast by visiting the storefront.   If you purchase a book through Bookshop, I will receive a small commission at no cost to you,  that will go towards covering the cost of the podcast.    SUPPORT THE WHAT TO READ NEXT PODCAST! If you’re enjoying the show, please subscribe and leave a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. Spread the love. And if you liked this episode, share it with your friends   JOIN THE ROMANCE BOOK CLUB Join the What to Read Next Podcast Patreon Romance Book Club. Each month, we will read a backlist romance title and we will meet to discuss. You will receive monthly romance book recommendation list and be part of a romance reader community. My hope is for you to make new friends, discover new to you authors, series and genres to binge on and have some fun.  Cost: $5 a month. Please note 10% of the profit will be donated to a COVID-19 fund of the group’s choice.  Want to join the fun? Sign up today. Click here to sign up https://bit.ly/WTRNRomanceBookClub CONNECT WITH LAURA YAMIN  Blog  Instagram Goodreads Twitter 

Mulling what "cross-genre" really means for SF and Fantasy Romance authors, if we accept the premise that SFF is setting, theme and ambiance, rather than an actual story structure. First Cup of Coffee is part of the Frolic Podcast Network. You can find more outstanding podcasts to subscribe to at Frolic.media/podcasts!Support the show (http://paypal.me/jeffekennedy)

In this episode, Shannon, Stacie, Meka and Natalia discuss the work of one of their favorite authors, Nora Roberts. They talk about her stand-alone novels, her various trilogies and her series written under the JD Robb pen name. They talk about some of the things that worked well for them and a few that did not. Mostly, you will feel the love! You can always contact the Book Bistro team by searching @BookBistroPodcast on facebook, or visiting: https://www.facebook.com/BookBistroPodcast/ You can also send an email to: TheBookBistroPodcast@gmail.com For more information on the podcast and the team behind it, please visit: http://anchor.fm/book-bistro.

Sarah talks about two literary women who solve murders, one in the past and one in the future. First, she talks about the In Death Series by JD Robb. Set beginning in 2058 the protagonist is Eve Dallas, a homicide detective in New York City. Next, she travels to the past. In the 1930s Maisie Dobbs is a remarkable woman, psychologist, and investigator who solves cases of all kinds.As always, if you enjoyed the show, follow us and subscribe to the show: you can find us on iTunes or on any app that carries podcasts as well as on YouTube. Please remember to subscribe and give us a nice review. That way you’ll always be among the first to get the latest GSMC Book Review Podcasts.We would like to thank our Sponsor: GSMC Podcast NetworkAdvertise with UsWebsiteITunes Feed GSMC YouTube ChannelTwitterFacebookInstagramBlogDisclaimer: The views expressed on the GSMC Book Review Podcast are for entertainment purposes only. Reproduction, copying, or redistribution of The GSMC Book Review Podcast without the express written consent of Golden State Media Concepts LLC is prohibited.

Whether you've wanted to try an audiobook or you're looking for narrator recommendations, this episode covers it all! Our librarians discuss why they listen to audiobooks, what qualities in an audiobook are important to them, and share their hot take on the controversial question; is listening to a book really reading it? Mentioned Works/Recommendations: www.audible.com www.rbdigital.com www.hoopladigital.com Libby/Overdrive App Etiquette and Espionage by Gail Carriger, read by Moira Quirk Harry Potter series by JK Rowling, read by Stephen Fry or Jim Dale The Last Letter From Your Lover by Jojo Moyes Works by Diana Palmer A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin, read by Roy Dotrice The Princess Diaries by Meg Cabot, read by Anne Hathaway Les Miserables by Victor Hugo Audio Recordings by Narrator Lorelai King Audio Recordings by Narrator Susan Eriksen The Stephanie Plum Series by Janet Evanovich Thrones by Glass by Sarah J Maas, read by Elizabeth Evans Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo, read by Ensemble Cast Outlander by Diana Gabaldon, read by Davina Porter The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum, read by Anne Hathaway Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, read by Maggie Gyllenhaal Becoming by Michelle Obama, read by Michelle Obama Down the Rabbit Hole by Holly Madison, read by Holly Madison Works by David Sedaris, read by David Sedaris Bossypants by Tina Fey, read by Tina Fey Yes Please by Amy Poehler, read by Amy Poehler Choose Your Own Autobiography by Neil Patrick Harris, read by Neil Patrick Harris One of Us Is Lying by Karen M. McManus, read by Ensemble Cast The Help by Kathryn Stockett, read by Ensemble Cast The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins, read by Ensemble Cast Behind Her Eyes by Sarah Pinborough, read by Ensemble Cast Carmilla (Audible Original) by Joseph Sheridan Le Fans, read by Ensemble Cast The Charley Davidson Series by Darynda Jones, read by Lorelai King The Cat Who series by Lillian Jackson Braun, read by George Guidall In Death series by JD Robb, read by Susan Ericksen Some Girls by Jillian Lauren, read by Tavia Gilbert Sebastian St. Syr series by C.S. Harris, read by Davina Porter BBC Radio Dramatization, The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien Focus on the Family Radio Theater's adaptation of The Horse and His Boy by CS Lewis Audible - YouTube Channel

I've finished THE ORCHID THRONE revisions and have been refilling the well - talking about downtime after work, reading, editor brain, and how annoying it is when movie monsters won't die. Support the show (http://paypal.me/jeffekennedy)

Amanda and Jenn discuss fiction about the Azores, wine books, lighter reads, and more in this week’s episode of Get Booked. This episode is sponsored by Recommended and Book Riot Insiders. Questions   1. Hello! My husband and I will be traveling to the Azores in September 2018 and I would love to get my hands on a “page turner” that takes place on one of the islands. I love historical fiction, murder mysteries, contemporary fiction, and non fiction (as long as it reads like a novel). I’m good with 300-500 pages but I like to keep things moving so over 500 seems like homework to me. No issues with triggers. I love your podcast and can’t wait to hear what you come up with! Thank you, –Robin   2. I really want to get a book for a friend of mine before I leave town. I don’t know when I will see her next after I leave so I am anxious to get it right! I sneakily asked her about her favourite books and, after the usual “how could I ever choose”, this was her response: Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, The Secret Garden, Authors: Jane Austen, Neil Gaiman, Patrick Rothfuss I look forward to your response!!!! –Kate   3. Hi there! Thank you for the show and all of your wonderful recommendations! I am hoping you can help me out with what might be a niche request – I would love to read something that includes an interracial, interfaith relationship or family. It does not need to be any specific race/ethnicity or faiths, but if it can include these two components, that would be great – either fiction or non-fiction is great. Thank you! –Emma   4. Hi Ladies, I’m looking for recs for my Mom. She’s a voracious mystery reader: she flies through books very quickly. I gave her Flavia de Luce after loving it (and hearing about it through you!) and she finished the series in about a week and asked me for more. I shared a recent episode with her where you recommended IQ, and she loved that as well: she read both of those, and we’re back at square one. She’s read a lot of the huge names (full leather bound collection of Agatha Christies, loves Rex Stout and other classics, read all of the Costco-display level best sellers like Sue Grafton, JD Robb, Robert Galbraith, Janet Evanovich, Clive Cussler, etc) Her other favorite series is the Dresden Files: I think she likes rogue type main characters who work alone and stories set in richly written worlds/cities. She likes more mystery than thriller, although she enjoys it when they intermix. Thanks for all you do! I look forward to each Thursday (and now so does my Mom)

Discord: https://discord.gg/0igWZxupFC0N8mH4 Patreon: patreon.com/starmike News DSC Ep 6: Lethe DSC Ep 7: Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad DSC Ep 8: Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum DSC Ep 9: Into the Forest I Go Disco shirts!! The Orville: Last episode was the best so far. Many things to think about. Ten Forward: Chris on Twitter: Which would u rather do: be the first person to test a transporter or the first person to test warp speed? Star Trek in pop culture: Book: Promises in Death by JD Robb - from the audio book 00:11 Last week in Trek Episode insight: TNG S4: Remember Me Character insight - Captain Jellico

Discord: https://discord.gg/0igWZxupFC0N8mH4 Patreon: patreon.com/starmike News DSC Ep 6: Lethe DSC Ep 7: Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad DSC Ep 8: Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum DSC Ep 9: Into the Forest I Go Disco shirts!! The Orville: Last episode was the best so far. Many things to think about. Ten Forward: Chris on Twitter: Which would u rather do: be the first person to test a transporter or the first person to test warp speed? Star Trek in pop culture: Book: Promises in Death by JD Robb - from the audio book 00:11 Last week in Trek Episode insight: TNG S4: Remember Me Character insight - Captain Jellico

Clostridium difficile (klos-TRID-e-um dif-uh-SEEL), often called C. difficile or C. diff impacts 453,000 people every year. And with 29,000 associated deaths, it takes more lives than AIDS and drunk-driving combined. Yet, most people have never even heard of it. That's a big problem because you can't protect yourself from a threat when you don't even know it exists. The impact on the business of healthcare is significant too. A study published in the American Journal of Infection Control found that C. diff-associated diarrhea (CDAD) increases hospital costs by 40% per case (an average of $7,285 ) and puts those infected at high risk for longer hospital stays and readmissions.  Some even believe those numbers are likely underestimated. C. diff presents us with an interesting problem at the cross-section of Infection Prevention and Control (IPAC). It's an environmental bacterium that's found pretty much everywhere and is difficult to kill, but it's usually held in check by the good bacteria in our bodies. The problem usually occurs when a patient is in a weakened state from some other healthcare intervention. That may be an antibiotic treatment for another healthcare-associated infection or chemotherapy, etc. With our bodies in a weakened state and our good bacteria depleted by antibiotics, we become susceptible to C. diff. So, it's important that we execute on all the other IPAC practices like proper hand hygiene and surface cleaning in the hospital so that, as our guest puts it, we can disrupt the chain of events that allow to C. diff to proliferate. Episode 005 (part 4 of our IPAC series): On this episode, we're joined by the co-founder and Executive Director of the Peggy Lillis Foundation (PLF), Christian John Lillis.  Like so many people who've dedicated their lives to driving change in the healthcare industry, Christian has a very powerful "why". He lost his mother to a clostridium difficile (C. diff) infection in April 2010. After struggling with the fact that he lost his mother to a disease he never heard of, and later finding out that it impacts so many people, Christian, along with his brother Liam, founded PLF and are building a nationwide C. diff awareness movement by educating the public, empowering advocates and shaping policy. Christian gives us a deep and personal take on his family's experience with C. Diff and the work that the Peggy Lillis Foundation is doing to help. We discuss: What is clostridium difficile (C. diff)? Is C. diff a Healthcare-Associated Infection (HAI) or something else? How important are hand hygiene and environmental cleaning in preventing the spread of C. diff? Why haven't more people heard of C. diff? Why is it so hard to measure the true impact of C. diff on our health system? How do we fix that? Why do only some states require reporting on outbreaks? How does that affect the business of healthcare? How does it affect the patients? What is the Prevention and Public Health Fund? Why is it under fire and what is the impact to the CDC, states and beyond? What is the financial impact of C. diff? Christian's story is powerful and it's full of wisdom that can help patients, families, and providers. In our quest to unravel the business of healthcare, it's important to understand the people we serve and how our work impacts their lives. This is a crash course and I hope it touches you as it did me. Enjoy. ~Don Lee   About Christian John Lillis Christian John Lillis is executive director of The Peggy Lillis Foundation (PLF), which he co-founded with his brother, Liam, following the death of their mother from a clostridium difficile (C. diff) infection in April 2010. PLF is building a nationwide C. diff awareness movement by educating the public, empowering advocates and shaping policy. He was previously managing director of prospect strategy & research at Teach For America. With more than 15 years' experience as a frontline fundraiser and behind-the-scenes strategist for healthcare, LGBT rights, and education organizations, he led prospect identification and research programs that increased resource development both nationally and regionally. Prior to joining Teach For American in November 2009, Christian served in a variety of roles for a diverse group of nonprofits, including as Director of Development for In The Life Media, Director of Major Gifts for the National LGBTQ Task Force, and Associate Director of Development Research for NYU Langone Medical Center. Throughout his career, Christian has been a frequent speaker at conferences including the Mid-Atlantic Researchers Conference and Creating Change: The National Conference on LGBT Equality. He was also a contributor to Prospect Research: A Primer for Growing Nonprofits by Cecilia Hogan. Christian is an adviser to the Patient Voice Institute and Gulf Coast C. diff Collaborative, as well as a member of Consumers Union Safe Patient Project and Chicago Area Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Network. He is a former member of the board of directors of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the City University of New York and the Association of Professional Researchers for Advancement (APRA) of Greater New York. Christian began his fundraising career at Lambda Legal Defense & Education Fund. He holds a B.A. in Political Theory from Brooklyn College, where he served as a term as President of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Alliance and won The Donald G. Whiteside Poetry Award his senior year. Christian is a native of Brooklyn, New York. He currently lives in Park Slope with his husband, Chris Young, and their rescued “beagle baby”, April. His hobbies include Tae Kwon Do (he is a black belt), Zumba, reading comic books and JD Robb's “In Death” series, and poetry writing. About the Peggy Lillis Foundation Mission: The Peggy Lillis Foundation is building a nationwide clostridium difficile awareness movement by educating the public, empowering advocates, and shaping policy. Vision: We envision a world where C. diff is rare, treatable and survivable. https://peggyfoundation.org/ 2017 C. diff Summit & National Strategy Meeting Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/PeggyFoundation/ Twitter: @PeggyFund Mentioned on the show: The Uncounted: The deadly epidemic America is ignoring. A Reuters report. Catastrophic Care: Why Everything We Think We Know about Health Care Is Wrong: One of my favorite books on healthcare. Be prepared to be jarred and probably angry, but more aware of what's going on in the business of healthcare. Also, a good listen on Audible at 1.25 speed. Patient Mortality During Unannounced Accreditation Surveys at US Hospitals About the Infection Prevention and Control Series This episode is part of The #HCBiz Show's Infection Prevention and Control (IPAC) series. We'd like to thank our partners InfectionControl.tips and the Center of Excellence for Infection Prevention and Control (COE IPAC) for their support and guidance with the series. About InfectionControl.tips InfectionControl.tips is a Pan-Access journal that extends globally and touches locally. www.IC.tips is: Free to Publish. Free to Access and provides Accessible Scientific Services. About Center of Excellence for Infection Prevention and Control (COE IPAC) Center of Excellence for Infection Prevention and Control (COE IPAC) is a collaborative effort to accelerate and support new solutions that hold the promise of significantly advancing infection prevention and control. On a quarterly basis, the Center of Excellence will evaluate at least 3 international innovations – giving them access to independent testing, publication as well as a US commercialization site. The #HCBiz Show! is produced by Glide Health IT, LLC in partnership with Netspective Media.   Soundtrack credit: Acid Lounge by FoolBoyMedia