 My name is Elaine Gallant and I'm your host of Books, Books, Books, a live streaming series with Think Tech Hawaii on Oahu. In this program, we'll talk about reading books, writing them and everything in between and beyond. But this topic is the multi-story life of Toby Neal, author of more than, well, nearly 50 books. I don't know how she does it or why she does it or what's coming up next. But I'm awfully glad she's here with us today. Welcome, Toby Neal. Tell us how you do it. Hi, Elaine. Thanks so much for having me on the show. I am thrilled to be on Think Tech Hawaii. How do I do it? Well, I took a long time to come to it. I was a late bloomer, but I always wanted to be a writer. And if you ever check out my most well-known book, it's called Freckled. It's my memoir of growing up wild in Hawaii. I grew up on the island of Kauai back in the 70s. And this is a story of a little girl running through the jungle with very little clothing, teaching herself to write stories. But after that started life, I really wanted to be stable and respectable. And so I went to college for a really long time and became a mental health therapist. I worked for Department of Education as a school counselor for many years. And little did I know that I was actually researching all that would become my future books, including the first of my stories called Blood Orchids set on the big island of Hawaii. And that's something that viewers may not know about me is most of my books take place in Hawaii. And they are based on real Hawaii issues. Blood Orchids was actually inspired by one of my experiences as a school counselor doing grief work with two young girls who had been drowned in our community. And it activated a part of me that really wanted the answers to the crime. And I began an online blog that turned into eventually this best-selling book that sold over 200,000 copies and started a 15 book series called The Paradise Crime Mysteries. Which is amazing. And I've read several of those books. I've also read Freckles. You lived off the grid as a child, sometimes intense, which is pretty amazing. We still have people here in Hawaii who also live off the grid. So it's not too abnormal, but for most people they would never even consider it. But you did, and you had some interesting experiences, I must say, and it made you who you are today. So we're so happy that you became a writer because you do tend to other career. And if it wasn't for the fact of the tragedy that happened, you probably wouldn't have written your first book the way that you did, which I also read that. It's true. That's like several other ones as well. So kudos on that. You, how many books do you have in your Paradise Crime series? Is that your Leigh series? Yeah, the ones with Leigh, I have 15 books and they're also an audio for folks who like to listen to something in the car. I insisted that a Hawaii girl, the Hawaii voice actress, Sarah Malia Hatfield, also from Oahu did the dictation and she did an amazing job. Pronouncing Hawaiian words and doing pigeon English is just not something somebody outside of the state should even try, in my opinion. And so I got a fantastic Hawaii voice actress to do the narration of these books. So they're very accessible in whatever form you prefer to read. And then my next series is a spin-off, a character that appeared in book four of this series just had such a vibrancy on the page. She's a MMA fighter and a hacker and a domestic violence survivor. This woman, Sophie Ong, took hold of my heart and I knew she deserved her own series, which is much more thriller and edgy and dark. So even though I've got some gritty stuff in here, the thrillers with Sophie are edgy and dark and much more kind of international. So they're set on Honolulu, but then she goes to Thailand, she goes to Hong Kong, they're international crime and syndicates and all kinds of fun stuff that lay is a cop in those books. And so I was sort of bound by the rules. She's a straight shooter and she always plays by the rulebook. Sophie is outside the box as a private investigator and all kinds of shenanigans happen that is just a blast for me as a writer. But I always come back to the issues of Hawaii and particularly in the lay books, issues of conservation, of homelessness. I repeatedly go back to that, having been homeless myself, the inequities between the rich and the poor at working class in Hawaii, the fact that the Hawaiians are priced right out of their own islands. I tackle all of these issues in the context of the story, not in a preachy way, but in a way that my deeper goal with the books is my heart of a social worker because that's my degree, I'm a social worker. And so I want to bring awareness through an entertaining mystery to the public about the real Hawaii, not just the Mai Tai with an umbrella in it, that the tourists see. Now your progress as a writer has been quite interesting because like you say, the paradise books stay mostly in Hawaii for reader's sake. Does it stay just on the Big Island? Cause I know the first novel is on the Big Island, the second novel I think is on the Big Island. And then I haven't read all of them. So does it travel throughout the islands? Yeah, yeah. So my goal at first, and you see that Lei has a very hectic life because I actually took her to every single main island before she settles on Maui. So, and that kind of reflected my own journey. I have lived on most of the islands except for those little tiny ones, but she even visits Niihau in one of the books. So if you read the whole series, she will go through all the islands and spend time on each one crime solving and exploring their local issues. And then she settles eventually on Maui and, you know, and then we kind of have that context. Followers of the series, I've had fans tell me that they love to read on their iPad because then they immediately, while they're on a trip, they're looking up all the places that I appear in the book. And for the most part, I stay true to them. Sometimes I will throw in an imaginary one, especially if I wanted to do something, say a few things, say somewhat negative about a neighborhood or something. So I will go ahead and like invent a town, but almost everything is based on real people and real life. Yes, that's what I thought. Now I did read some of your Wired novels as well. Again, I haven't followed that because you have how many in Wired? I have, I'm working on number 13. I don't know how to say it, I don't know how you do. But it's like I said before, I spent a lot of years suppressing that writer calling because I wanted a stable, real job. And I was convinced as many people are that you can't actually make a living as a writer. It turns out that I'm self-published and proud of it. And I can write all these books at the speed that I can produce them in a quality way. And I have been able to give my family a more than six-figure income for the last 10 years by writing and self-publishing. So I ended up leaving my department of ed job that I thought I was a lifer in because it just, I did better writing and having my business that way. And now I can write anywhere that I want to. And right now I'm in our second home in California. I can take it to the road like passages. Michael is gonna share a link to my travel blog because after my hippie upbringing in Kauai, I contrarially wanted to go camping a lot. So we got a travel trailer and we spent the last four months road tripping around the United States and seeing the national parks. And I was writing about it in what's gonna be my third memoir called Passages. So you can read that in real time as I put out the essays once a week. And not only passages, but you have some novels that you've written from places that you've visited. And I think you have five or six in that series. Yeah, so I started writing romance because the dark and edgy stuff, I needed like a palette cleanser. So I write romance as kind of like a break from the darker themes of murder and mayhem and organized crime. And also because I can set them, all my books start with somewhere in. So there's somewhere in Maui was actually, the first one I wrote was a fun one that was about a therapist who accidentally sets up two of her clients, which I experienced as a therapist. Like I said, hey, you should try online dating. And then I said to another client, you should try online dating. Lo and behold, they were dating each other. And I thought, oh, this is too good. I gotta make a book out of this. That was my first romance. And then I ventured into somewhere in California, somewhere in Montana is my next one coming out this year. And then I get to really dig into an area or a town that I find interesting and write about it under Toby Jane, which is my romance pen name. So if you look for Toby Neil, which is my real name, you're gonna find all my mysteries and thrillers and TW Neil for the memoirs. But the romances will come up under Toby Jane and they're really fun. And they're, for me, a palette cleanser from the darker themes. Okay. And how many of the Toby Janes do you have? I think six. I think I've got six right now. Yeah. Three memoirs. Let's not forget that. You have crickles and you have your passages. And then open road is the next one. It's the story of my journey sort of back to health. So in the progress of trying to find this respectable life that I was craving, I basically sacrificed my health to all these years of school and workaholism. At one point, you know, again, it takes a lot to make a living in Hawaii. I was working three mental health jobs and losing my own mental health while I was at it. So that's kind of the story of how I went into writing and took trips away from Hawaii that also brought me back into discovering who I was, that little wild girl from the jungle who still wanted to express herself and does mostly through writing. So that's open road. And that's also out on audio. If you like a road trip, you know, story, it's really an entertaining one, more upbeat than freckled. And then I'm working on passages now. So I've got three main, or actually four main genres, mystery, thriller, romance, and memoir. You make me tired. I'm just kidding. You have a fan question, speaking of which your fan base is quite large. I was flipping through Facebook and also your website and all of that, and very impressive. Raven Alexandria asks, is there a character you've written that you identify with? If so, who and why? Oh, that's a pretty easy one. I identify most with Dr. Wilson, the therapist in these books. So one of the things I wanted to show was Lay is a child sexual abuse survivor. And in book one, she's very damaged and broken. And she gets mandatory sent to therapy from the police department, you know, to get some counseling for her behavior on the job. And we meet Dr. Wilson. And Dr. Wilson is like my alter ego, because that's my background. I would say she is the most like me in real life, although she doesn't look the same at all. But Lay is like that impulsive side of me that really wants to just get in there and take action. That's really not my style. I'm a talker. So it's Dr. Wilson that is the most, and Dr. Wilson has her own book. It's called Unsound. And you can check it out. So what I've kind of done is these spin-off books from the, ah, yes, Unsound is actually, I think one of the best things I've ever written. It's a psychological thriller set in Haleakala. And Unsound is Dr. Wilson's story of a confrontation with a figure from her past that tracks her down at her most vulnerable when she's trying to kick alcohol. She's a secret alcoholic. She's trying to kick alcohol in the crater and go dry. And she's caught by this client who takes her captive. And it's a very cat-and-mouse psychological story that really capitalizes on the setting of Haleakala. So I highly recommend that one if you like that kind of story. I recommend it too. I'm on Mallory, so it really brings it out, right? I recognize all the voices as well. Margaret Harada, nope, I'm gonna go back this way. Gloria Bush Greel asks, do you face some of your character's looks or personality traits on any of your friends or acquaintances? I sure do. I think every writer is always on the hunt for that colorful character or that person that they see or know that just you know the people will be fascinated with them. And the more I write, and I write fast-paced books with not a lot of description. So I admire writers who can capture a character in just a sentence or two, like Stephen King does that masterfully. And he'll just say one or two sentences and you immediately see this vivid and odd character, even these small characters that only do a few things. So I have worked on that aspect of my writing and really making those characters true to Hawaii. So usually they are based on someone I've seen or known or worked with in the past in my, you know, close to 50 years in Hawaii. And Hawaii is a very unique melting pot of a place filled with all kinds of different races. And when I go outside of Hawaii looking for, you know, a picture that represent like Lei, who is Japanese, half Japanese, one quarter white and one quarter Hawaiian, I can't find a picture of the person with this ethnic blend, you know. But it's part of the life that we live in Hawaii. And so I'm always on the hunt for a interesting new character. And they're usually based on people I've seen or known. Helen Weiss asks, what keeps you going? Well, that's a good question. I am, believe it or not, slowing down. This last year I only wrote two books. And a lot of it was because I was traveling. And while I'm traveling, I can't get into my fiction world. It's too distracting and exciting to be out in nature and camping and so forth. So I could do the travel blogging, but I couldn't write fiction. So I am slowing down. I am hoping to slow down more. I've just become a grandma in the last year and I'm loving it. So I'm hoping to, you know, just do, I don't know, three or four books a year instead of five. So of all of the genres that you've written and you've written several, which one thrills you the most? Which are you going to dabble in all of them continually or are you going to move in and out of different genres and maybe even look for new avenues? Exactly that. That's what you just answered it. I, what I've done is built series so that I don't get bored so that I can rotate between them and add a new book. But I am feeling like my extra long series. I lose readers. They drop off, you know, with any long series you're going to have, you're going to have attrition over the, over time. So I'm now looking at starting a cozy mystery series set in Hawaii with someone like one of my, one of my existing characters that, that my fans love like Auntie Rosario or Pono and Tiari who all live on Maui. So I'm going to keep doing what I'm doing and possibly add some new genres so that I can do new work. The interesting thing about being a writer is that you're a creative and anytime you're doing the same thing over and over you're going to get kind of dry. Even if, even if that is making money it's just not sustainable. So for me to do hop around and have different series that I can keep adding books to, is actually a smart way to go. And your ideas, where do they mostly come from? Do they come from places you've been, situations you've seen, people you know maybe, the life situations that they've been in? I mean, what excites you? What, you know, about writing the next book? I mean, after 50, well, 50 books it's gotta be really hard to come up with new ideas. So are you always looking, where are you looking? How are you doing? Mostly when I'm looking for Hawaii issues I'm reading the local paper. And the things that excite me are the things that matter to me as a Hawaii resident and life, you know, a third generation person from Hawaii. I never would call myself Hawaiian. That's the important thing that we know about Hawaii that's different from other states when they say, oh, you're an Ohioan. Yeah, that's fine. But you can't call yourself Hawaiian unless you are a blood Hawaiian. So I'm not a Hawaiian, but I am a third generation Hali from Hawaii. And I care a lot about the issues of Hawaii and my books are a way that I can expose those issues. So I just look in the local paper and I'll find something like, one of the things I wanna write about is, oh, this is gonna be tricky, corruption in the vacation rental industry, you know, because we've got different counties handling it different ways. And how does the vacation rental industry impact local workers having homes and being able to even live on their own island? And so in that way, I'm very proud of Maui for taking a stand and making it very challenging to get an okay for vacation rentals, even though that has also cost the economy in other ways. So these are very complex issues, but I love shining a light on them through some sort of, of course, murder. And then I'm able to elucidate about that topic in the story. So I get fired up by social justice, quite frankly. Reading the paper is quite funny because it's actually rather thin. And we have only, what, about 160,000 permanent residents here, but we have millions of tourists that come through. So we have very complex issues here. So I imagine that you will be very busy for a long time. I'm just gonna put out the telescope. I'm just gonna throw that out. I won't touch that one till it's a lot cooled down. That one's a hot one. Very, very hot. And so I do try to be careful when, if you do read my books, you'll see that I try to present the issue in a balanced way, so that I show both sides and lay as the crime solver is kind of not taking one side or the other, just sticking with like, who murdered this guy and why? One of the controversial ones that I am gonna tackle in my next book called Wired Target is the murder of the Moli albatross on Oahu. That, when that crime happened, I was outraged. And I am definitely going to, I'm building a whole story around that crime and around the issues that were exposed by it, of privilege and different kinds of things that are controversial. And so, I don't know if you know about that, but there was some albatross were killed at their sanctuary on Oahu, and it was very tragic a few years ago. So, things like that will be fired up. But like the, right now the telescope is just so hot. I'm, 10 years from now, I'll write about that. I'll write two more novels out of it. Here's a question I don't wanna be missed because it is a fan of you writing this in. Margaret Harada, Ibrahim Mori asks, what do you need for productive writing? Earphones, earplugs, no nearby neighbors, no humans around, all phones on silent, or can you write well with people and things running through your space? Oh, I wish I could say that I could. I tried to write while we were on our road trip, even just closing myself in our trailer, being in a new location was too exciting and too distracting. I couldn't get there. So, I very much need a calm routine and every day sort of being, I have to put on a lot of mental protection to get into my, I call it my movie mind because when I'm fully in the flow of writing, it's like watching an internal movie. And I'm just dictating down what I'm seeing and feeling and I set it up by outlining what the scene is gonna be. So the answer is I do need to protect my mind. I have to screen out a lot of the alarming things that are going on in the world. I have to just dose myself very small with social media or any kind of news, but that's what I have to do in order to preserve the ability to go somewhere that doesn't exist in real time. And yeah, I'm easily distracted. I wear headphones. I close my window shades. All right, we have a very little time left, just a couple of minutes. In about a minute's time, what would you like to leave your viewers with? Perhaps, what are you reading? What's on your bedside table? Oh, that's a good one. I am reading a really thoughtful memoir slash... I guess an inspiration book called Wintering. It's about withdrawing in times and dark times. I highly recommend it if you're going through grief, if you're experiencing the challenges of COVID as we all are feeling a lot of anxiety. Wintering is a beautiful bedside read for me at night that kind of affirms the need to withdraw from the world to recharge. So that's my book recommendation for the month. Very good. I hope we got all of your websites or URLs out there. In closing, I would like to thank you, Toby, for joining us. I hope you write 50 more books. I'm so proud of you. You're a Maui girl and we love you. I'd like to thank the broadcast team, the staff, Jay Fidel, who keeps us all together. The viewers, oh my goodness, and the donors. They've been, think Tech Hawaii's been going for 20 years just on donors. So we're most happy with that. I'll be, we'll be back. Books, books, books will be back in two weeks with my friend, Rita Forsythe, and then two weeks after that myself. Thank you for joining us. Many mahalos out to everyone. Until then, read, write, and create your world. Mahalo. And aloha. Mahalo.