 Okay, we're back. We're live here in Community Matters at the three o'clock block on a given Monday with Chris McKinney. Chris McKinney is a journalist and an author and a person who appreciates the media for those reasons. Welcome to the show, Chris. Thanks for having me, Jeff. So let's talk first about your books. That might be backward in some ways, but the books interest me more. You've written several books. Let me just go through some of them anyway. Midnight, Water City, and there's a trilogy, The Water City Trilogy, and then you've written six other novels. The Tattoo, The Queen of Tears, Bolo Head Row, Mililani Mauka, I love that, Boino Good, Boino is one word, I think, and Yaku Doshi, which reflects your age and mine. Yaku Doshi, Age of Calamity is the title. So this is really interesting. This is local stuff, but it sounds like it's more than that. Can you talk about the common denominator of all these books? I guess they're all novels that you have written. I think, I mean, well, the first novels from The Tattoo to Yaku Doshi, it's all pretty much contemporary fiction set in Hawaii. There's usually crime involved. It usually has a noir vibe going on. The last one, Midnight, Water City, has both of those things, but it has been a bit of a departure for me because it's science fiction and it is set 170 years in the future. It's basically, it is technically set in Hawaii, but Hawaii is, only people who know Hawaii will recognize it as such. But yeah, I guess, I mean, you could say that place is the common denominator, whether it be contemporary or whether it be 120 years from now, I'm always sort of anchored to this place and it reflects in my writing. What kind of plots do you find most appealing? Are these books of relationships? Are they books of institutional transition? Are they books about violence and vengeance? What are they? I think all of the above is just sort of, I think that one of the interesting things about writing a book is that you can take everything that you feel any sort of level of passion for, whether it be positive or negative faction, and you can sort of just, you can just roll it out in a single novel. I think that with this last one, one of the things that I thought about before I started writing it is that today, I mean, reality is feeling more and more artificial. And in some ways, it's almost, it's more difficult to tell, write about our present reality. So it's sort of, that's part of the reason why I sort of turn to science fiction to speculative fiction. Because I just, am I going to read scenes in which people are texting each other and posting stuff on TikTok? And I mean, I just can't, you know, it just, it just doesn't, it just feels this, it just, our world now just feels, we're just so disconnected. Yeah. So when you get the ideas, you know, you go outside and look at the sky, where does it come to you? I can never, I can never anticipate when they'll come to me or how, for this last one, I was living, I was living in Kakaako at the time, and I was sitting out on my balcony and looking at the Kakaako skyline, and I just want to ask myself, I wonder what this would look like if you took the whole thing and turned it upside down and dropped it in the middle of the ocean. So that became sort of the genesis of this new setting that I imagine where people live floating on or live in buildings constructed under underwater. Yeah, let's take a minute and you, you selected a paragraph that would sort of give us a handle on the way that works, that world that you created. Yeah. I would like to hear that in this context. Yeah, sure. I'm flying at top speed above the ocean. Looking down at the pleats of breaking water, I'm amazed at how well organized something as chaotic as the sea can look like from afar. I break to the west side of the island and dip down to the well-lit coast. Seas for a pair of cabana beach caps to the right, a giant aquatic theme park connected to the beach, shaped like a giant oyster with a pearl-like dome in the middle. Golf courses, a couple of shabby ones for the OBB, the rest exclusively for the money. This side of the island is where a few of the money live, the older ones who prefer land under their feet, own prime acreage cut from lava rock, fronting vast man-made white sandy beaches and gliding over the estate of Idris Ishana, inventor of the IE. He died a few years back at 121. His chateau is being converted to a museum, soon to be another stop on the Savior's Eye pilgrimage. It's next to the shuttle field where people transport to the continents and other faraway water cities. The whole scene probably looks like any point in the history of civilization. The past smeared with the present. Do you favor the past or do you favor the present? I don't want to say I have a preference, but I think that even if you look at whatever exists now, I can look out my window and I see houses that were built probably in the 1960s with houses that were just built probably three, four, five years ago, rebuilds basically. The whole world is just this mishmash of contemporary technology with things that are decades, if not more years old. I think that that's always reality. You can look at whatever Constantinople looked like in the 1000. It'd be sort of the same, the sort of consistent thing as it's always the past smeared with the present. I can really relate to that. You told me before the show that this is set in the year 2042. 2142. 2142, sorry. That means science fiction and all. It's in Hawaii, but you never actually mentioned Hawaii. On the other hand, if you listen to that prose carefully, you'll see it is Hawaii. Yeah, definitely. It reminds me of The Descendants, the book about the valley under the rule against perpetuities and what was his name? I forget the guy who played it. It was a Hollywood version of Hawaii and it was fictitious, but it was rooted in a lot of fact about Hawaii. I always felt that if somebody wanted to make a movie, it should be a local filmmaker to really treat that properly and that Hawaii had a thousand stories like The Descendants that we could find it right and make movies of it. We regrettably, we haven't done that. What about your books? Could they be movies? Yeah, I suppose so. I sold the rights to a couple of them. They've never been they've never reached the point of production. I sold the rights to two books. This last one or this most recent one could definitely be made into a film, but it would be an extremely expensive film to make. Yeah, so we'll see what happens. So what kind of reviews have you had, especially in the last one? How much support have you had on it? You know, Soho Press has been great. I've gotten reviews, very positive reviews, great reviews from publishers weekly. I also did an interview with them. I've gotten reviews from Kirkus, from the Toronto Star, from BuzzFeed, the Bustle, even, you know, the things that sort of surprised me. I got blurbs from writers like Kiana Davenport, who's the great, you know, native Hawaiian writer of Shark Dialogues. So yeah, it's Newsweek. I was in News, you know, the book was in Newsweek Magazine, which was especially great because I remember Newsweek being around in my dad and my stepmom's house all the time, you know, that and Time Magazine, right? So yeah, that was great, too. So are you on Amazon? If I type your name in on Amazon, am I going to see all these books? Yeah, that's pretty good. All published by Soho. Soho Mutual Publishing, which is a publishing company here, published the majority of them. Soho published his last one. So Soho also published about the, I guess, what you could call the mainland rights, the first two as well, several years ago, and they published those two, The Tattoo and the Queen of Tears. Yeah, so Soho published his last one. So why did you write these books? I know that's a question you must have asked yourself a long time ago, because it's been a long time since you've been writing, but why did you get into this? It's not easy to write books. No, it's, you know, part of it is, you know, part of it is love, really. I mean, it is just sort of when I was in graduate school, years ago, my master's thesis was my first novel, The Tattoo, and I was fortunate enough to have get that published. And then it became something of, it became almost a compulsion after that. It's sort of like, it's what I tell my creative writing students who are interested in writing novels or, you know, writing fiction is that you probably don't want to do it unless you can't help yourself. And I've come to sort of discover that, you know, just for me, it's just, it's a compulsion. So I write because I can't help myself. And that's really maybe the only reason to do it, because if you can help yourself, there are other probably more productive and financially intelligent things you can do at your time. So does it come to you? I mean, do you hear the voice in your head? The voice that tells you what language you should type out? The voice that is a sort of a stream of thoughts that keeps going? Do you have to work really hard at the language, or does the language just come to you? I think that the language primarily comes from understanding the main character. So it's sort of like once you, once you can wrap your head around and imagine fully who this person is, then it's almost as if you're allowing them to simply tell the story in their voice. So that's that to me, that's a very important step is really fully understand your main character. And then once you do that, then the telling of the story actually becomes, that makes it kind of flow. So once I have that, I can finish a draft of a book, you know, within a year, typically. So but that, that is that is unnecessary. And that is sort of a hard initial step to develop. Oh, well, to develop the character in your mind before you write, or do you develop the character while you're writing or both? I develop the character before I write the book. So, so you know, that's what these are. The gaps between my books in part are is are is due to me developing character for the next book. So I don't really start writing the book until I have an understanding of the character. And I have a rough understanding of about how the first two thirds of the book is going to go how the how the plot will move forward. Now that can change over the process of the actual writing of the book, but I need some kind of blueprint to sort of even just get the thing rolling. Are these characters based on people you know, are there isn't autobiographical? Is it like Mr. Potato Man? Do you have a little here a little from there? Yeah, I think you know, I think with some of the early stuff, yes. And I think that that's that's sort of what happens when when you write novels is that it's kind of like music, right? It's a pop music. It's sort of when an artist debuts, a lot of their material is typically semi semi autobiographical in the beginning. But what happens is is that you spend that early. And eventually you come to discover that sometimes to your horror that you have to actually use your imagination and completely make stuff up. So I think that I learned that years back. I would say that as far as you know, semi autobiographical stuff is concerned early on more now, not really. You said it took a year and that was quick to write to write a novel. Why did it take you that long? Why don't you just hear the voice, write it out and be dumb in 10 days? I wish. And I mean, if I could do that, then I'd be on my hundred novel. But it's just, I mean, I do, you know, there is there there needs to be quality control. So I find that so for me, and it's sort of like you find your process, the process that works for you. And for me, the process is writing two to three hours every weekday. I and there have been times in the past where I've exceeded that and I've went bananas and written seven, eight hours. And I noticed fairly quickly that the quality suffers. So it's sort of the quality of the writing is is good for at least, you know, acceptable to me for let's say five pages, you know, three to five pages. And once once I start cranking out 12 pages or 15 pages a day, then the quality of the writing suffers. You got to know when to stand up. You got to know when to stop. Yeah, this is important because if you run a role, you want to keep going. If you've been successful, you want to keep going. But but you but you're as your experience tells you that at some point, you got to draw the line pencils down. Yeah, part of discipline is sort of knowing when to stop to write it ironically, because you know, people think of discipline as always just the discipline of doing. But there is a discipline of stopping as well. Interesting. So of course, this is, you know, directly related to your life as a journalist. And can you tell us what your career has been? You've named a lot of things you've done around letters and literacy. But what about the journalism part? Can you talk about that? And how that relates to writing these books? I didn't I mean, I wouldn't call myself a journalist journalist. I mean, I did a column for midweek for about a year. I didn't do a little over a year. And then I, you know, I did other stuff, little freelance stuff here and there. Like I interviewed Daniel de Kim for a Hawaii luxury magazine, you know, stuff like that, like just freelance stuff. And honestly, that stuff was more that it really didn't connect with my fiction writing. It was almost as if it was just fun stuff. It was, hey, can, hey, Chris, do you want to do this? And I said, sure, that sounds fun. Yeah, I'll do that. You know, review movies, interview, you know, celebrity. It was just, it's just stuff that sounded fun. So I did it. But it was a total separate process from my fiction. Sure. And the interview thing is really important in journalism, isn't it? You have to have the people skills to engage, to relate, to draw out, you know, your interviewee and so forth, which I think you do have. So what about the writing style, the choice of words, the metaphors, the sentence structure, the punctuation, all that shrunk and white kind of the rules of the language, doesn't one help you with the other? It's sort of because of the room to move that I was given by midweek and white luxury. And even with the Hawaii review of books, it's sort of like they just kind of let me use my voice and let it rip. So it's just, so it's actually, it's just, it's far easier to write that stuff than it is to write fiction because I'm writing, you know, from the perspective of people who aren't me. But because of the sort of loose parameters that I was given when it comes to stuff like the Hawaii review of books, it's just, yeah, just writing your voice. And so that stuff was easy and fun to write. The fiction is always fun. You think books, especially fiction books have become more important in, you know, the public experience the public conversation than they were. I mean, you know, you always wonder if kids are going to, you know, come up, not giving a damn about the written word. It's so easy to do television, radio, social media, and reading for hours at a time. This is not, not as much fun. So query, I mean, am I wrong about that? Or kids reading? Is the electronic download of books helping? Are, are, are we still a book reading society? Or is it on decline? I, you know, it's sort of, I feel like, and, you know, even I've said this in the past, you know, it has always been my fear that maybe, maybe books are declining. But then something, you know, I see something or I learn something that, that assures me that that's not the case. For example, it's not the same. It's constantly changing and evolving. But to give you an example, audiobooks, audiobooks are, are kind of the rage now. And that, that's helpful. That's helpful because even I listen to audiobooks too, because it's something that I can do while I'm driving, while I'm walking around the grocery store. And it makes, makes those times where I'm running errands or doing what I have to do feel productive. And I think a lot of young people are listening to audiobooks. My daughter, who's 17, reads kind of a lot. And she, but she reads stuff that I would never read. So she reads, for example, a lot of fan fiction. And is fan fiction the sort of traditional literary genre of the no, absolutely not. It's just, it's just, there's stuff out there, they find stuff out there that they enjoy reading. And it might not be the same stuff that we did, or the same stuff that we had to read when we were in high school or college, because I think the curriculum and the reading lists are changing drastically as well when it comes to that. I wonder, I don't know, I don't know how much Milton is taught anymore. Let's connect all of this though, the reading, the novels with, you know, the, and sort of the public, the, those things that influence the public in various ages, with what we know to be very popular, the social media, cable news. And of course, those channels, I will not name them here, on cable news that don't tell you the truth, those channels. So we have a, you know, huge divide about the truth. I remember when Kelly and Conway was part of Trump's campaign team back in 2016, she invented the phrase and sold it to us called all truth or all reality. And the notion was it's okay to have fiction, it's okay not to care about the truth. It's okay to have alternate facts, which are in fact, not facts. This has changed our world, hasn't it? And from the media point of view, only the last few years, we have seen an extraordinary transformation of the way news is delivered and the way news is consumed and the way false news. I mean, it's interesting that the guy, that the guy who invented or at least popularized the term fake news is the one, is the most prolific fake news merchant in the world. So the first thing about fake news is called the other guy's news fake news, but then you give your fake news better. So a competition for fake is what it is. So query, how does this affect the public sentiment? How does it affect the public the reality as far as the public is concerned, from the point of view of somebody who watches the media like you? I would say, you know, the first thing that I would I would note, sort of in this sort of recent history is that it's kind of funny where we came from because I remember, you know, when Obama was elected, social media was celebrated by the Obama administration as being this tool that one can use to sort of get the word out there. And then we saw the other side of that with the Trump administration, where it became something different. I would say that politics, I think a part of politics has always been to get people to vote against their self interests. And what social media has done has it has made that easier to do. So, and this this sort of acceptance where you know, it's almost like, oh, yeah, you can lie. So it's yeah, all that all what it really has done is is it has made it easier for people to vote against their self interest. It's like the people, the people who don't want to take vaccines get COVID and they're lying on their deathbed. And they still believe that COVID is a hoax extraordinary and talk about against your self interest. It's against your life is what happens and millions of people feel that way. And so I don't understand, you know, the sort of a public population that can engage in that because it's not rational. But then, you know, I'm mentioning all this because I think there's a connection. There's a connection to accepting the facts, if you will, the universe of a novel, the world that you create in a novel with the old facts world that politicians create. They're creating a fictitious world. And you're just as happy to move into that world and accept the parameters and believe in it. And even if it hurts you, do you see a comparison there? I do. And you know what makes it difficult to I mean, fair. I mean, I would say that this is sort of a I'm trying to be fair here is that this world that we live in is so complicated that essentially to truly understand it, you need to understand organic chemistry. You need to understand you know, climate change. You need like five different science degrees to actually understand computer science. Like I said, with global warming and climate change, I mean, and it becomes easy to sell a fiction because not who knows all of that stuff. I don't. I mean, I understand the gist of what an mRNA vaccine is, but it's explained in, you know, it's almost like, you know, people to explain this stuff, people need to like use plumbing metaphor to explain how this works or that, you know, and it's sort of then it becomes easy to easy to lie. Because I can, I can, I can point to you and you can say, well, you should get vaccinated and I can point to you, Jay, and say, you know, nothing about vaccinations, which is kind of true, right? It just sort of like, and then, you know, and then it becomes, yeah, it just becomes easier. And it's so ironic because this is a time in which we have more information available at our fingertips. I mean, hands down more than ever before. And we're just getting more stupid. So it's just sort of like, and I think that that's that's part of what's going on. And I think that that's part of what I kind of touch on in my book, right, is just imagining this future where how, how is it that we as a species collectively we're getting so, we know so much more, way more than we ever have before. And it's just, it's not making it's not making us smarter. It's just it's so weird. True, true. Well, like, you know, I'm learning from what you're saying. And I, what I take from that is, you know, I'm tired of everybody trying to tell me I should learn about this, that and the other thing. I want to cut the corner on this. I want to get right to the solution. I want it easy spoon feed it to me real easy. If you tell me that horse warming medicine is the solution, you know, or, you know, the toilet medicine, the bleach that Trump was talking about a year and a half ago. That's easy. That's really easy. And what it says is, Jay, you don't have to learn about science. You have to know about science. It's just as simple as you're right in front of your face. So take this, and you'll find this works well. And in the process, you are discrediting all the scientists who confuse you and make you work at it, you know, and make you learn and read and study and whatnot. And I think there's something about what you said is it's a complicated world. And people will looking for simple answers. These are simple answers. That's what it is. Yeah. And you know, when you look at COVID-19, I mean, remember a novel virus. So it's kind of like this thing where they, you know, to expect the science community to slam, don't understand this thing within whatever, you know, within a week of when it's exploding is unreasonable to expect that. On the other hand, it's interesting because when it comes to politics, if you're leadership, you have to act like you know what you're doing, right? It's reassuring the people that you have your hand on this, on this thing, this gigantic, Titanic size thing, and you have your hand on the wheel of this thing, and you have to act like you can control it, or you know what you're doing. At the same time, when you're dealing with something that's so, that's new, that nobody really knows every, I mean, it takes time to dismantle this thing and to know what it is. And then you make one mistake or two in your messaging or anything like that, then it's over. Then people, you know, and then you have, you have, you know, people. Prices of confidence as well. And then I think that's part of it too, that, that, you know, the world is so complicated that you need teams. Before that was a luxury. Now it's an absolute necessity. You need a team to help you. You need somebody who's an expert in this, this, this, and this. And your job as a leader is to put it together and make sense of it and manage, manage the thinking process and whatever things. And any link in the team that's weak, and the whole team fails potentially. Yeah. Go ahead. Yeah, there's no, I mean, and people, people probably mistakenly believe that the scientific community is always on the same page, and it's always, there's always a consensus. That's just, it's, it's, it could, it's as divisive as politics sometimes, right? So it's just sort of, I mean, when Einstein came out with relativity, other physicists thought he was, he was a crazy idiot, right? So it's just sort of, so, you know, there, there isn't, and but people expect that, right? It's like everybody's supposed to, you know, scientists, you know, they all have, they are supposed to agree, and they're not supposed to know exactly what a thing is. And, you know, discovery is an evolving process, learning is an evolving process. So yeah, it's, I think healthy skepticism is, is good. But once, once you get into the realm, to me, where your beliefs, like you have beliefs and it checks the box of one political party, all of the boxes of one political party or the other, I think you've become indoctrinated. How is it that you agree with every single thing one person says, unless you've been indoctrinated? That's a really good question. That's a really good point. I totally agree with that. It's, it's, it's too good to believe. Yeah. And then your brain releases chemicals that, that make you experience pleasure when people tell you things that you agree with. So, you know, it's just, so when you, whether it be MSNBC or Fox News, you're watching it. And if you, if you believe, if you agree with all of that, you're essentially getting pleasure out of hearing somebody agree with you on everything. And so you keep watching and watching is like a rat, you know, hitting the thing for another snack, a little pellet or whatever. It's kind of the same principle. Does it bother you if I tell you I agree with you on everything, Chris? I hope not, Jeff. No, no, no, no, I don't want to, I don't want to start a cult. Well, take the cult phenomenon, take social media, take alternate facts, take, you know, what's been happening over the past few years is sort of the revelation about the society in this country and how they deal together and how they find divisiveness whether among themselves as an internal process or an external process, including a process from Vladimir Putin, you know, whatever it is. Take all these things to take, take the decline of the print press. Take the decline of the distance between, you know, reported news and opinion. Take the merger of reality between the facts you hope you hear on television or in the paper versus the facts you hear in novels such as the ones you write and, you know, create those worlds. Okay, here's my question. It's coming. Where's this going? Is there hope for us? How does this turn around? I think that the, what it is, I think, I mean, I hope so. I mean, I'm cautiously optimistic. I would say that like anything else, I mean, maybe we as a species every once in a while, we need to get smacked around a bit, right? So it's just sort of, so it becomes this thing where, you know, and nobody wants anything bad to happen, but, you know, and sometimes we're our worst enemies, you know, maybe something will happen that sort of shakes at least the majority of us. Not everybody is going to be on the same page probably ever. So it's just sort of, you know, just enough because and one of the things too, one of the scary things is what we're really talking about, in essence, is we're talking about power. And it's just what we're seeing is what happens and it's happened throughout our history is when one person or a group of individuals or just a group has too much, wields too much power over other people. I mean, it will, it will almost always be abused. And today that happens to be stuff like social media. I mean, who owns Facebook, Instagram, and a large chunk of Koi, right? One guy. It's just, and who owns Amazon, right? And, you know, and we, it's funny too, because, you know, I'm not going to characterize somebody like Jeff Bezos as some kind of a novel and evil verse because, you know, he also owns the Washington Post, which we discussed earlier is probably the most credible newspaper around right now. So it's not as if, you know, but that is a lot of power. It's a lot of, I mean, in retail, Amazon, that's too, and it's hard not to abuse that. And that's, that's why I think what we're seeing is just these vacuum, these entities getting probably too much power. And something probably needs to be done about that on the government level in order to sort of stave it or, you know, lessen the negative aspects of it. Other than that, they're just going to get more powerful. Well, we're certainly in a, in a trans transition, I like to say a transformation right now. And I think that's in a left-handed way that's, that's stimulating to be in it and to realize you're in it. And then to watch the sea changes around you and they say, holy moly, this is different, different than I, than I've in my life so far is certainly different than what I expected. So my question to you, Chris, is in your novels going forward, are you going to reflect these transformations that are happening around us? Is this part of the new world you're building? And are your characters going to look like me? It is. I don't think, you know, one of the things about writing fiction, at least for me, and I think it's true for a lot of other novelists, is that you can't dampen out the sound of what's going on while you're writing a book, right? So when, you know, I, when I wrote the book that just came out, I mean, I've written it before Trump was elected. And so in a, in a way, you know, I can't say that this trilogy, you know, because it'll take a couple of years for the second book and the third book, there's no way I could say that it hasn't been touched by Trump, by COVID, by this sort of this, this crazy reality in which we all carry around this electronic device that if we somehow misplace or it's, it's out of our reach for even just an hour, we start going crazy, right? So it's just sort of, yeah, so all of that stuff is definitely sort of addressed in, in what I'm writing. Did you start it yet? Did you start that book yet? Yeah. So yeah, so this is the Midnight Water City, this, this book is the first book. And then, you know, this is the hardcover and it's out in, of course, in Kindle and in audio, audible audio book as well. So this, this one will be released next summer in Paperback, then the hardcover book too will be released and it's sort of like, so the whole book series thing, it's usually, I think there's maybe a year or two gap between each book and then this one just came out, but I wrote the other ones already. So they're, they're ready. I mean, they're ready to go through editing, which is what I would call sort of a literary audit. It's a painful but necessary experience. So yeah, so, but I'll, I talk about all of, it's, it's sort of, yeah, there's, there's some allegorical elements and a lot of this stuff, what we're going through now, I mean, it's impossible, almost, I feel like it's almost not, it's almost impossible not to talk about as I'm writing fiction. Yeah. And you have no intention of giving it up. This is a lifelong thing, right? Yeah, you know, can't help myself. So it's just, it's, I might as well sort of embrace that reality and yeah, I'll, as long as I have ideas, I'll continue to do it as long as people sort of offer me opportunities to freelance this or that and it interests me, I'll definitely, I definitely do it. I love writing. So yeah. Will you keep on teaching? Yeah, I mean, I, teaching has, has been great, great to me. I mean, because it's sort of like, you know, I've taught for almost 20 years now, I mean, I've taught primarily online, you know, freshman composition and creative writing. And so what it, what it has allowed me is this sort of flexibility, as far as when I do things. So it's, it's been great to have that and to be able to write and even have kids, you know, so I have two daughters, right? And, you know, the job with those, that kind of flexibility has been great for my writing career and for me as a parent. Yeah, I like the kids. So yeah, so it's, it's win, win, win. Well, it's Chris McKinney, a man of many seasons, a Renaissance man in many ways, so many parts of the public conversation really appreciate that. And I hope a lot of people write into you and tell you their story ideas and you can at least parts of them and your characters going forward. And we should, we should look forward to see more of your, more of your prolific writing going forward as a, as a kind of barometer, as a kind of canary in the coal mine, as a kind of bellwether from where, where we're all going. That's what I think you help us with. Thank, thank you. That's a very kind of you to say, thank you. Chris McKinney, author and media man. Aloha. Thanks. Thank you, Jerry.