good to go awesome all right well thank you guys for coming there are a lot of really cool U panels and and talks here at the same time as this so thanks for coming and and seeing this Alaska Texas boy come and chat with you a little bit my name is Mark Cameron I write uh the Jericho Quinn Thrillers the Arles cutter Mysteries and also uh the last seven of the Tom Clancy Jack Ryan no s my seventh and last comes out next week maybe or two weeks I can't remember um but it comes out pretty soon and that will be my last time stepping away to focus more on the arless cutter novels I live in Alaska I was Deputy United States Marshall for about 22 years before that I was a police officer um I'm not I don't have a big slideshow for you in fact I don't have any slideshow for you I being a former federal government employee I pretty much lived through all kinds of PowerPoint hell and so I would rather just chat with you and since I was here last year and actually recognize a few faces I don't want to belabor the point or go over things that we talked about last year because a lot of times I mean I kind of changed it I edited what did I do here uh I edit I edited my little slideshow thing to writing the propulsive Thriller instead of uh writing the a great Thriller I think is what it is um that's like saying come to my class how to write it how to earn a million dollars there's a lot of ways to earn a million dollars there's a lot of ways to write a A propulsive or a good thriller I'm going to talk to you a little bit about my experience now I um when I was nine I lived a very I lived a very feral childhood I was fortunate in many ways because writers have to go through have a lot we have to have a lot of angst we we have to have a lot of you know trauma all that kind of thing right and I was fortunate to live a very feral childhood and we were we were actually quite poor um but that poor that poverty we we we raised okra and my dad was a a a teacher and we lived in North Central Texas or Central Texas part of the time and we sold okra and cook neck yellow squash to Safeway and you don't make a lot of money raising okra but we lived on this little farm and I got to travel the farm and by myself at 9 years old with my bow and arrow and my dog and and fish and hunt and and spent a lot of time out by myself thinking and writing stories and I I read Where the Red Fern Grows when I was eight and decided right then I want to be a novelist so my mom was from Louisiana and every summer we would make this trik to Louisiana where my mom's family was from and kind of get off the the farm not have to pick so much okra and I but my sister and I were close to the same age and my sister didn't like to play outside and my aunts their their only toy in their house was a snow globe from some someplace in Louisiana but it was a really boring toy and so I had to go out and entertain myself or I sat on the porch with my ants and I learned how to entertain Myself by listening to these stories and maybe tell some stories of my own because there was three ants that live nearby now that summer that I was nine we went before that but I don't have any clear Recollections of it that summer that was nine I was playing out in the Piney Woods and the Sass fras and I got a tick in my belly button well as I said I'd grown up in Texas and we have ticks and stuff like that but I'd never gotten one I saw him on a cow and I saw a couple on my dog but somehow I don't know how I escaped it but that summer I was in the bathtub and I got a tick in my belly button and I first I didn't know what it was but then I was but I didn't tell anybody because you know it was my belly button and these people were old and I um was sitting on the porch and usually I would sit and eat on a chicken leg or some cornbread or something like that and the old women the ants and my mom and my grandmother would shell peas purple hole cow peas and so they would sit and talk and tell stories and I would eat a chicken leg and listen and the stories were usually about somebody that died or somebody that got sick or that particular summer it was about the little Horton boy down the road who got a tick and they pulled it out and they left the head and the Horton boy died and I remember sitting there just terrified and so I did what any nine-year-old boy would do had a tick in his belly button and I kept it to myself because I didn't want them to pull it out and I didn't dawn on me that the head was in there whether the body was on it or not and so I lived with this tick for a couple of days now I sat and listened to these stories I listened to stories about about death and about Vietnam about my grandmother who' be the my great-grandmother who had been the mother of one of these ants and how she found the boy the kids found a a a blasting cap and they brought it to her cuz Camp pulk Louisiana was nearby where they the the the boys as my aunts would call them the boys would run Maneuvers and she brought the the kids brought this blasting cap to my my great grandmother and she picked at it with a needle until it blew up and blew three of her fingers off so the whole time I knew my great grandmother she she smoked a corncob pipe and but she did it with like these the thumb and part of a the M the left what was left of her finger these were Fascinating People and I remember watching them and listening and listening to the way they told stories listening to the way they they kind of built that that that hook and built that Arc in fact the way my aunt and my think my mom might have talked to them a bit about maybe toning down the death and destruction and cancer stories for their her kids because we were the only kids there in fact I'm not so sure we weren't the only kids for like 50 miles there's no never anybody to play with um just a lot of very old people and so my aunt Bessie she would have been probably 75 or 80 at the time she's probably 50 10 years old younger than I am now but she seemed like she was 80 or 90 and she was chucking peas and she looked up and she said of course you all know about the Horton boy who died to that tick and of course then she didn't then she could tell us the rest of the story cuz we didn't know about it she gave us that hook so I learned the way that stories were told and when people ask me or when I do a talk about writing Thrillers or somebody says I don't know if I could be a writer can everybody be a writer no I see I see somebody say I don't think they can now I think that people that you can learn the craft and you can write your own story and that's great so really anybody can be a writer can anybody be a successful Storyteller I don't know can everybody be a a my my oldest son's a optham Opthalmic surgeon I have a trimmer in my hand I would hate to get cataract surgery from me I will never be an Opthalmic surgeon never was I was I was I was a good shot it's not that bad of trimmer but I know my limitations but I have talked to so many people here that I would say that probably most people can be a writer if they want to and they put in the effort and they learn the craft here there's so so many good um talks and panels and teachers that have learned about the business side of writing but up here in the the masterminds thing that I I listened to we all heard I think um one of the I was really pleased to hear somebody say write the book first and then worry about the rest of it you really have to know how to tell a story so when somebody says I don't know if I can write I'll say can you tell a joke can you tell a story if you tell if you can tell a joke and you know when the punchline happens if you know how to build that you know and I'm talking more than a more than a knock knock joke but if you know how to build that tension then you can probably write it's not Opthalmic surgery it's not you know rocket surgery like my son says um and all of us have limitations right my wife of course she's got a son that's a doctor right so anytime that she's got a ailment she calls him on FaceTime and like shows herself to him on the the iPad and and he says Mom that's body medicine I don't know anything about body medicine I deal with your eye so she said all right well look at this eye thing so what I think when I think about Thrillers I think about hooks I think about opening lines I think I talked about this last year didn't I I talked about the my favorite first line of all is the opening line from charlott's web it's where's papa going with that axe isn't that a great opening line so I might work for days on an opening line of a book now I've heard I heard a couple of the The Mastermind writers I've chatted with some folks about whether we plot or pants uh the picture is not up here now but in the I add some pictures of things of me doing some research with the the Marine Corps and some helicopters and v22 Os sprays and flying in helicopters that's cool that's great research I enjoyed it and it allowed me to write a couple of the Tom Clancy books I dove in the Arctic Ocean I went in some caves all kinds of stuff but more of what I learned did go in the book than did because you can really over you can just oversaturate your reader so but in the center of all those was a picture of me in my living room by my fireplace where I do a lot of writing with like 15 giant Post-it notes with plot written on them sometimes you just have to sit down and write the book there was another question where somebody said do you write a clean first draft or a messy first draft I write messy first drafts but I plot and plot and plot and plot so my first draft is really just a natural it just flows naturally from that all that plotting but two things that I work on when I'm just freew writing and sort of putting everything out there for the books I work on my first sentence and I work on the ending because I believe that good thrillers good Mysteries good romances have something called resonance if you you know what I mean when I say that so when you get to the end you go Ah that's familiar to me from the beginning and so I have to know the end so I can write a good beginning and we were talking I can't see where you are but we were talking earlier about how somebody was writing uh post-apocalyptic stuff and that's you right so post-apocalyptic stuff if an apocalypse happened my characters have failed so I need to I I need for them to stop the bomb so when I when I tell a story I want to have a ticking Time Bomb I don't want that bomb to go off that tipping ticking Time Bomb can metaphorically could be the metaphorical train with the damsel tied to the railroad tracks and not to be sexist because I like to write stories where the damsel frees herself sometimes where she even saves the the protagonist if that you know I generally write from a a male POV um but my many of you have or will meet my wife she's the beautiful lady with the long silver hair um when we were coming through TSA on Sunday the the um TSA lady stopped us and she said please tell me that you guys love Christmas and do a Mr Mrs Santa photo every year and I said we do we absolutely do but every female character in my book is my wife whether it's the villain or the heroine or the anenu or whatever somehow she's I've lived with her for 40 years and you know throughout since we were 20 um which is a long time um and so I can I can see bits and pieces of her so I um I forgot where I was going with that I get talking about my wife and it gets me all wacky um so I'm I want to talk to you just a bit about wanted to talk to you just a b about those few things when it comes to writing Thrillers working on that first line I would tell you go to a bookstore go on Amazon look at where it says look inside read make it an assignment I do it all the time read the first few lines of a book there's a really good book by Noah lukeman a um a agent in New York uh his his name is Noah lukeman and he wrote a book called the first five pages agents are so busy readers are so busy what are we dealing with right now that competes for our readership we're dealing with games we're dealing with movies we're dealing with all kinds of things that that are just bombarding people to get them to not read our books I have a friend who works in the gaming industry and she's a she's a seven figure always head hunted away every time I talk she's working for a different company Netflix will hire Amazon will hire her this Chinese company hired her to work on gaming and we went on a a research thing together and I was chatting with her about Ai and games and the state of the world and she said I won't even let my kids have smartphones I just I just won't because she said my goal is to keep kids and adults whoever to keep viewers on that phone to keep we call it the compulsion Loop we want them to just scroll to just go from real to real or game you know page to page whatever so when we write when I write I don't want to sound quite that horrible but when we write a book that's what we want is that compulsion Loop my best review that I can get and I and I'm kind of known for not reading my reviews I want reviews I like getting reviews and I'll go on uh good reads or Amazon or whatever and see that I'm getting reviews but I I refuse to go look at them I think no good can come of it it's like no even if they're good reviews it's U it's like knowing your own IQ what what does that matter like I'm super smart or oh man I'm dumb I didn't realize it um I remember my first Jericho Quinn book I got like I don't remember 70 80 five star reviews they didn't affect me and I got one one star it gutted me for two weeks and so I realized what's the point right but my favorite email review that I ever got was a lady that said I read your books through SP fingers and I'm always tired the next day because I couldn't put it down so that's what we're looking for with a thriller right Thrillers by definition keep us amped right they keep us wondering they keep us wondering what the heck happened to that tick in your belly button right are you ever going to tell us what what happened well what happened and then I'd like to get some Q&A going and rather than me direct where we talk what happened is that I went to my mother who's very quiet in fact most of my friends thought that she was mute when I was growing up she's just very quiet lady and I told her about it and she made the mistake of telling my aunt Bessie the lady that told us about the Horton boy and at that time it was late in the evening by the time I had the gumption to mention the tick and we were all out and our family had this thing where in the evenings all the men and women would get together they're very old men and women and they had these two picnic tables in the backyard old wooden picnic tables and they would cut watermelons in half on newspaper and we would sit with and this lisiana and they ate watermelon with salt and so they' have salt shakers on the on the uh T the picnic tables and everybody would have spoons and we'd sit around together and talk and eat watermelon out of the same sloppy halves of these you know watermelon carcasses and I would listen and my mother told Aunt Bessie hey Mark's got a tick in his belly button what do we need to do they the men who were all ranchers and heavy equipment guys and loggers they swooped the the watermelon cuses off the table and they threw me back like a human sacrifice and I'm nine right so and I don't think they held me down but their eyes held me down I mentioned that I have a trimmer I inherited that for my aunt Christine and she had a cigarette in her hand and she was going let's burn it out um my Uncle Homer was going to spit tobacco in the middle of my belly button to try to get the tick out and they had all these different and and the whole time Aunt Bessie is is telling us about the Horton boy and how we got to get that tick head out uh and I was balling you know my sister was probably crying cuz at that point she I think that was one of the days she liked me um and they ended up my mother said how about we just put some fingernail polish on it and it back out you know wisdom prevailed and I I got rid of the tick and all of that but that was a really trying time for me it was thrilling and I remember so when I write a story I think back I think back how I felt as this young boy in my head I'm tied to the table but I really wasn't um and and and how terrified I was so I channel that when I write a fight scene I've kind of run out I tell I've got some law enforcement friends here we all get together and tell our war stories and I tell my friends that aren't in law enforcement I say if you got a buddy who is a cop and he's got more than nine War Stories where he you know no crap I was there he's probably borrowed other people's War Stories so by the time I get to my and I don't know where I came up with nine that's all I have so that's all I'm giving anybody else um and most of my War Stories I look silly but when I'm writing a fight when I'm writing a Chase I can look back on those War Stories or stories I have known so do you have to write what you know no no no I think because otherwise how could I ever write about CIA uh spies how could I write about stazzy officers how could I write about um women I could write about people of color I could write about one of my main characters in The Arles cutter book is a a Maui uh cook Island Maui woman from from ronga where my wife and I visit I know people that are that way I can draw from them I can draw from how they speak I can interview them I can chat I can watch them I contend that writers all of us in this room we're like the mollusks of the sea right we just sat there we sit there and we you know this year we got this this bigger um notepad like last year we got a smaller notepad but my kids I have I have probably 40 of these little mol notepads and I carry one around with me all the time I hope that when my grandkids are older or maybe my great grandkids they'll stumble on to this Treasure Trove of how to how I learn to tell time looking at the Big Dipper how you know how I learn to navigate sailing how I my trip my they're my journals but they're my notes when I talk to people I remember um you know I I might have told the story story last year where I remember being in a conference or a meeting with a bunch of Department of Justice bigwigs and I was a chief Deputy in Alaska for the Marshall service so the deputy director was there and a bunch of big wigs from Main Justice and several assistant directors and they all knew I wrote I think I had like three Jericho Quinns out at the time and some westerns it was right before I retired and so I'm sitting here with all these big wigs and some of it brought books to for me to sign right uh some the attorneys hated that I was writing but they couldn't stop me cu I had get out of jail free letter and so I was signing the books and they all knew that I carried this book around and this man this like Assistant Attorney General from the Department of Justice said something really funny and everybody you know he's the he's like the boss of the room so we're like and I laughed and then he looked at me and he goes what the hell Mark and I said what and he goes write that down that was really good I said okay all right so a lot of little stories here a lot of vignettes but in the last 20 minutes or so 203 minutes I don't is that 20 minutes till it's over okay last 20 minutes I want to get some I want to be able to focus the conversation I want you do to leave this though thinking about that opening line thinking about that hook you know when I write for boy life we learned that when you write for 13 14 15 year old boys if you don't write about poop or death they're just not going to write read the book book and I'm sorry to say adults are kind of the same way are there any questions out there cuz I can keep being like a a Peanuts cartoon adult and just W would you come up to the mic please so I am curious uh whether or not you have any I want to say genre conventions or tropes that you see more frequently or most frequent quently and how you twist them or if you twist them or if you're even looking at conventions of like the Thriller oh that's a really good question so I write three series I write the arless cutter series which is what I'm really focused on now about a deputy Marshall based in Alaska I like to make the I like to make law enforcement look good now there's and and the same with the Clancy books if if I were to write of course now I'm writing for the clanes I was writing for the estate and so I'm writing for an icon I mean I read Clancy when I was I read the hunt fored October when I was a a rookie policeman so I know over the course of my career what was going on with those books but you know the word the First World Trade Center bombing I was protecting the judge and Hauling Ramsey Yousef back and forth to court while I was reading the sum of all fears that had just come out in paperback so I you know I can remember that so this was a big deal to me so I wanted to do right by his characters which meant that if I wrote about the military they generally needed to be good but and and I remember writing an early book and thinking and saying I was going to have this uh Secret Service person that was bad and I got this note back said no no no Tom Clancy would never do that you got to be good and I at up to that point my wife and I had become Tom Clancy experts and we like chapter and versed I'm like well what about this what about that what about that and they were like okay do whatever you want um so so yes you do have to twist them a little bit and and I do want to have in in an upcoming jur uh uh Arles cutter book AR is going to go up head-to-head against a former friend in the Marshall service that's kind of gone Rogue if you will so um you do have to twist them but I I would say that my biggest Trope in the kind of books that I write the good guys eventually win and um I would like for law enforcement military I like to knowing that there's damaged goods out there I like to highlight the good stuff hey jod thanks for making me feel relevant and asking a question you're very relevant I wondered if you could you said you were a plotter and I am too can you talk a little bit about how you plot the suspense like do you do that in the very beginning does it come to you like how does that look yeah that's a good question so so I free write I do a lot of free writing I I let it all Let It All Hang Out in the beginning and I'll have like for a Clancy book that's got eight you know seven eight subplots I'll have eight or nine yellow tablets just full of and out of that mange I will have um I will divide that into scenes and then I will take oftentimes I'll take that because I'm trying to put off writing I'll color code it and all kinds of stuff um and then when I finally get down to the writing I will um expand those scenes out so I've got all these color codes CED by POV and then I can take those scenes on my and something that I do I I turn in my manuscripts because I'm from the old U typewriter days when I started doing short stories I never I didn't get published until computer days but I sent a lot in that way so I like to write and my editors like to read in Courier this is probably too much inside baseball but when I write my summaries I write them in times so when I look at a manuscript I can see all these times New Roman synopses of all these scenes and I know oh that's in Courier I must have worked on that already right because in a 130,000 word Clancy novel it all just sort of comes at you in in a million different directions so but because I do so many scenes then if it doesn't snap and it doesn't Propel me I can move them around and I I do a lot of moving around in fact often times in fact I would say more than 75% of the time I write three or four chapters of the book and then get to the first sentence and say all right here we go was the first where the first three chapters wasted not at all I might use them later one of our online Bure like to ask for emotional resonance is it important that crimes are punished and stories are needly tied up that is that is a really good question and I get I think that might have been one of my bad reviews um like curse you Mar Cameron I in the beginning and I will tell you that one of my first um editorial comments when I turned into Jero Quinn so I'd written Western's and I got a note from my um editor and he said I want you to think about this I want you to start with a massacre and build from there I said okay all right and and kill more people in the first chapter I was like okay all right you're paying the bills I can figure this out well I I rewrote a chapter and it was the only rewr he had me doing the whole book but I introduced this character who is a police officer in Colorado who had some burns on his face he's former military and he watches from this it's kind of based on Castle Rock so he's up on the Rock he's looking down at this mall and he watches a a mall explode because of terrorism and his wife and one of his sons is at the mall and so he's on the phone with him huge explosion kind of akin to a World Trade Center thing A lot of people are killed and that starts the the trajectory of the book and how Jericho gets involved and all of that and the you know it introduces the bad guys well in my mind because I had written that after the whole book was written that was a cool character I showed his angst I showed oh that's horrible that we know his wife and son probably died because everybody else did and I went on with the main story I still that book came out in 2011 I still get spanked because I didn't say what happened to that guy um his wife and son died and he's now remarried and happily living in bokeh I I don't know um I wanted to show what happened how terrorism hurts everyone and I stupidly thought that I tied that all up but I think there is a lot to in fact my wife will often say I don't have beta readers except for my wife when she reads it cleans it up I rewrite it all 25 books I've never not taken her advice when she's cleaned it up and I rewrite it I send it to my editor and we're done well I say that then a bunch of other editors get it but by far her most common criticism is what happened to Jody what happened to whoever right so I think it's very important Lois or loo what do you prefer to be known here either word okay okay along the vein of um when you mention writing what we know which is a great great jumping off point we still have to do a lot of research and last year you talked a lot about the research and I'm wondering how you balance that so that you don't go into info dumps when you're like for example if you were to tour the CIA Museum and you know you're did you get a tour no I didn't but I was I was excited that you did yeah um but anyway so when you're writing that um and you're researching it out so how do you balance that so as not to infodump the reader yet at the same time it's you're excited about it and it's really neat and me and how do you draw the line about what you think the reader would want to know about that that is an absolutely excellent question and it's something that I struggle with all the time often I give more than I should and then end up deleting a bunch of it I tell newer like the guy that was writing the the Jack Ryan Juniors and now Andrew and Wilson who are writing the they've taken over from me to write the Jack Ryan seniors I tell them go we' go back and read all the Tom Clancy books and then think about how they make you feel don't think about what he's written down think about how they make you feel because there's a new Clancy estate writer our job is to make and Craig mentioned it up here earlier our job is to make the reader feel a certain way if I were to write a Clancy book right now and spend a chapter talking about an electron going through the wires of an atomic device people would tldd they they would say I'm not going to read a a chapter of a how a device like this works very few he wrote for a wide audience and had a huge audience but readership has Chang readers have changed um he spent and without remorse he spent a page and a half talking describing a Kar knife because nobody knew what I mean most people didn't know what A Kar knife was now the United States has been at War for two decades and so that's disconcerting when that turns red but awesome good um so I have to now know that I can spend a little less time doing that so when I do research I get all the information I can but the number one reason that I do research well there's two reasons the number one reason is so I don't write what I don't know not write what I know but I don't want to write something wrong so if I write about a a Glock and put a safety on it all the police officers and weapons people here are going to go you idiot right um I am less I I see lots of um lots of arguments back and forth and I think I think they're a little pedantic about whether you can call a revolver a pistol or not little things like that yes it is not a pistol I should say no it is not a pistol technically I grew up in Texas where everything was a pistol and you whacked a surly bartender with your pistol which was a revolver so I don't get too strung out about that but I do want to make sure that I don't call a magazine a clip and that I don't call a I don't put a Glock you know a safety on a Glock I don't write about the ca M CIA museum being at a separate facility than Langley so that when I write it I can write it for real and the way I use the so the CIA Museum for those who don't know that it's touted as the most interesting Museum you'll never get to see because You' got to have an end you got to know somebody to invite you in and they do a background and all of that um so rather than going to an info dump I set a scene in the CIA Museum between John Clark and a young acolyte who he kind of is bringing on board and and so I can describe it but there's no so that there's some ver similitude when I write about Argentina I I'm writing about those unknown unknowns that I figured out and I learned when I was over there I didn't go over trying to learn that inflation was so bad that the taxi driver would say inflation here goes up faster than the bubbles from a scuba divers fart but man when he said that I thought that's going into a book Bubba that's the awesome stuff um so just you got to be very judicious with that sir thanks L you mentioned uh um when you're that you do a lot of plotting beforehand and you're you make notes on different uh yellow pads how much time do you spend doing things like that before you actually start writing yeah that to far too much um I I just love the process I like to write long hand and the way I get past that is I I divide all these scenes and then many of those scenes in the free writing come out as a first draft because I love to write long hand they gave for the speakers they gave us these really cool Craig gave us these really cool pins here um I like a gel pen I like a fountain pen um I order my pens um from Japan the Cheapo um gel writer pens I'll get them by the gross um and I'll write start on one of those scenes or segments you know and it just gets fleshed out and I would say that probably a third of my any book that I write is written in long hand first because it makes me break that I can play around and you know and move scenes around all this is exciting and really at some point you just have to put your butt in a chair and write the book and you and also I have a wife that you know I told her she I told you she is my first critic and um early on she would say stuff you know swap me on the butt and say go right as a couch go right as a chair whatever as she learned that this was our primary bread you know that this is our primary Money Maker um now she's very critical because this is our business so she's like this isn't working for me Mark early um earlier it was like how do you know so much about prostitutes and stuff like that yes ma'am continuing on the on the subject of the of the plotting when you start do you just start with okay I have an idea for subplot so I'm going to just start writing long hand or do you actually sit down and kind of think here's my beginning here's my middle here's my end here's how I think I'm going to get to the middle here's how I think I'm going to get to the end how do you do that part how early on do you know how you're going to get to the end when I'm freew writing it's it's almost as if you read my I I talk to myself here's what I think or maybe we could do this perhaps we could do this line through that you know I I have this conversation with myself with my my wife bought me a um M Blanc pin back when I made Chief Deputy long of 20 years ago and um so I I write with that same pen I do a lot of just conversation back and forth with myself and um work through my issues work you know and and so the ending I generally start with a so since I write character character you know U series I will I will um come up with a plot and then plunk though and sometimes it's a place I want to I want to do a Chase in Union Station in DC how can I make a Chase happen here and so I I approach it from all different directions but I want to have that terrible plot hanging you know ticking Time Bomb plunk these characters down and then have them react as I know they would got just a couple more minutes let's and I you may have just answered that but maybe if you wanted to elaborate that'd be great because my question is as a subset of that how early on do you figure out what your ticking Time Bomb your ticking clock is going to be is that can you move forward without knowing that no okay that's got to be my first that's that's a good question though yes three minutes and 43 seconds diing Time Bomb no pressure thank you for your time um when you're considering your twists when you're considering the twists um um how much are you thinking about your antagonistic side or your villain when you're thinking about where those twists should come and how the reader is going to experience them that's a very good question too I do a lot of thinking because I write in a over the shoulder third person POV so when I write I want to I I don't write in first person but I want the reader to feel like they're a camera and a microphone on the shoulder of whoever my POV character is that's plugged into their head head so the vernacular even in my in my Exposition will sound for instance if I'm writing about um somebody from a foreign country I generally don't use contractions because and I don't I just think that's a way to signal to the reader okay this is someone else speaking here that's not speaking in English but you're reading it in English um but I I think a lot I'm not I think that Stephen J canel what are the bad guys doing kind of a thing so I like to hop back and forth back and forth and my twist generally happen maybe every other book I'll know wow this is going to be a delicious twist before I start but other times they happen just kind of in a fun way as you're discovering I mean I I plot very specifically and methodically but they happen um as I'm going along and I I remember writing a about a a a character um in one of the clanes three or four clanes ago and he's his mother is azabani his his father was Russian he ends up in KGB his mother was uh KGB also but uh he you start writing about these little things and I and he's working in Iran for the I say KGB it's svr it's the new stuff um and he's you know you want to write about the little things and I wrote about him being a sign that's really fry little car and he's got a ride around Tron and he ends up becoming a mole on it's an older book so if I wreck it for you he becomes a mole in place in place asset for CIA and his name is Eric doino and so doino is instead of describing what it's like to be a young svr operative I talk about this car and I'm writing along thinking about it I wasn't thinking about any cool little turns of phrases or whatnot but he's Russian he's in Iran he's got this sucky little car it's basically the size of a suitcase and he calls it an axle of evil and I thought yeah that work that was pretty good and I think it was actually a misprint when I was writing it so sometimes they just they just happen we've only got 50 seconds I appreciate you guys coming and talk there's so much good going on here I I lwed you for what you're doing I um I had a young lady named Arley Jacobs come up and chat with me yesterday we had had a little talk like last year she from that talk she finished a book and she gave me the book and it's really good it's really good I started reading it last night um finishing something is a big deal work just sitting down that chair and writing something is a big deal congratulations to you guys for doing it thanks for coming