 Good day everyone. I'm John Harrison and this is conversations with great authors and we're here today with Gary gush-garion of Arlington who is a an author and a professor of writing and English at Northeastern University welcome Gary to John nice event So tell us about your writing how it started. Thank most people who write probably were inspired or they're in high school or college That kind of happened to me. I did well in high school and I liked writing But I decided it was the the space age and decided I wanted to go into physics. So when I got to Worcester Tech majoring in physics, I decided by my sophomore year that I much enjoyed the printed word then electrons and so I took all the English courses that were there and I decided what I really need is to To become a writer is to get advanced degrees in English and eventually to teach English and then I'd have the summers off to pursue What are you writing as luck would have it my first teaching job was at Northeastern University? And as even greater luck would have it my officemate was the famous Robert B. Parker who became very close friends for the next 40 years and About the third year. We would jog around the track at Northeastern several times a week and Maybe in the second or third year. He said I got an idea about writing a book He had just finished his doctorate at BU in the hard-boiled hero with detective fiction and he wanted to write his own so I watched him demystify the process and I was chomping at the bit to write my own novel. I was feeling very verbal, but I did not have a story and Then about the same time in the late 70s. I learned how I could go to Mallorca Spain and died and part of a scientific expedition to die for ancient Roman and Phoenician shipwrecks and I did and we were attacked under water by pirates who were involved in black marketing antiquities from two to three thousand years ago and One day while we were in about 30 feet of water on the non-jet-setted side of Mallorca a Speedboat cut across our bubbles once a mistake twice on purpose or it's stupid three times on purpose and after ten times We were going to be gaffed by Pendant anchors dragged on chains behind the boat because we had discovered an archeological site at 40 feet down and I said if I ever get out of this thing alive, I've got a book and We had discovered it was you know the very hot antiquities thing. I just moved it to the my favorite Aegean island Santorini, which was the basis of Plato's Atlantis legend and that became Atlantis fire Which is a marine archeological? novel based on my experience at Mallorca and it's one of those fascinating places on earth and particularly in the Aegean and that was published in the early 80s and In the inspiration of watching Parker write chapter every other day and yeah So none of your future books involved harrowing experiences like Mallorca, but they're kind of a calmer Cerebral yes Much calmer. Yes. They are in the life of the mind enough, right, right? Yeah, so so what was it? this association of the robot pocket that really stoked your Ambition to write or did you have it kind of before that and then this just intensified it? So I had the belly fire I wanted to write and now that I had a storyline About the you know the the black marketing What he did was demystify the process He you know if you can write a 350 page book don't see it as a 350 page book It's like you know a squirrel does not get go to an acorn the size of a basketball You write five or ten pages a day think of a 350 page book as 35 ten page chapters and And so I saw him do this and that was what made it stretched it out made the process doable and It took me a year and a half to write a Lantus fire while I was teaching and it worked And so in a sense the watching someone else do it masterfully Just became I Incorporated that in my pro my program to write now with with your first book How did how did you get it published? I mean how did that did you did you get an agent? right away or Yeah, how did how did that happen? You still needed an agent and in fact you didn't even more so need an agent back then Parker set me up with a young new agent in his own agency and He's on the second submission we got it got an offer dialed press with part of double day and it was easy back then it's not easy anymore and You know they get very nice advanced. They get a good promotion and You know even optioned at one point for a movie But that you know got my foot in the door and it's much easier was much easier than than it is today and did did it did that first publication was that part of a Three-book deal or or was just that individual book and then later there were other opportunities Yes, it was a one-book deal and shortly after that my first son was born then a few years later my second son was born and I was doing Nonfiction college textbooks Which began to eat up most of the time of the 1980s. It was in the 1990s that once my kids were grown I was able to do a book every year and a half back back to fiction writing So there was a hiatus of a 12 or so years before the next book came out. Oh, so so you the fire was still there But the fire was there. Yes. Yes, but we had to pay bills You you mentioned it just briefly and passing in your response, but we've both been in the book business for over 40 years and I Found that it's changed a lot. I've been in the business end until the last couple of years and you've been in the writing publishing end for say 40 years and What changes have you noticed in in the book worlds in the book universe? Through those decades Positive or negative right right Positive for those who are brand names in the 80s a negative for those who are not brand names in the 80s 20% of all the fiction in America in the 1980s had three names on it Stephen King Tom Clancy and Daniel Steele and I was hired to be a fiction editor at a small startup Company in Boston no longer with us Which had a very good and aggressive program and because I knew Stephen King they said, you know could you you see if we can get a contract with Stephen King for one one book and I called him and the the option was that if he took this deal would be like a five million dollar Contract for him And he said he missed me by three days because new American library just offered me are you sitting down a contract of 34 million dollars? So the the the 80s were ridiculous It was very a piggy if you give somebody 34 million dollars for the next three unwritten books There's not that much in the coppers for new want to be writers the 90s became more sane What happened in the 90s and beginning in the 80s is that large mega corporations started buying up successful publishers in America? Organizations most people have never heard of like Holt's brink And it was a munitions company, you know washing machine company and they had one little finger They wanted to have at the end of their umbrella And all the projections coming down was it was a it was a publishing company And so what they did was they wanted to buy Trophy have trophy authors and that was that made the 90s said a Period where they were looking for brand names trying to make brand names But the advances were were a lot lower than the stuff like King and Daniel Seale were commanding however At the same time we had the birth of the internet and the birth of self publishing And so things got very very complicated as they are today because people can publish their own books and Shying away from detouring from traditional publication and traditional publishers What what do you see or do you see as the future of these changes? I see that as a skittishness in in terms of the major publishers in America They're not going to offer many contracts They've got to make sure that they maintain the editors maintain their jobs They have to make sure that they find writers who can sell a lot of books make a lot of money for everybody And so that puts a constraint on the publishers and makes them less open to Unknowns so what has happened consequently to squeeze up a little one minute It's enlarged at the other end with the internet self-publishing happened and people who could would not even Able capable of getting an agent who gets 15% of what he or she sells Decide on their own to just you know pay to have their books published That's good news and it's bad news It's good news for those who've always wanted to get a book published and couldn't find a traditional publisher or even an agent to sell and It's good because they get something that is offered online digitally and you know on demand print on demand The bad news is I'm an English professor And I've seen some of the books that get published and many a mirrored The violations of Basics of fiction writing you would have four four different points of view in the opening paragraphs Which is ridiculous. It's it's it's it's it's jarring You don't know who your anchor is for particular scenes and all their other kind of basic violations What bothers me is that as an English teacher People who buy online books may get some real gems they may also read absolutely poorly written books and think these are the standards of literature and And that is troublesome to me as troublesome to colleagues of mine who see absolute Some a few great Liter from our literary point with great books, but a majority of them are not so good or even particularly articulate Now what are you talking about when you say some books are awful and four points of view in the first page Yeah, yeah, these books presented or published by some of the big publishers. No, no, absolutely talking only about the small self-publishing You could even use your your pet cat's name as you know as daisy publications Yeah, and and so it's you know, they but and they're paid you pay to have these books published I Don't like that. I've never had to pay and I wish people didn't have to pay Given the fact that tradition of publication publishers are not taking many books and looking for brand names and pushing those that they think are gonna become TV series or movies It's kind of sad and it really does borrow a lot of talented people's who are forced to self-publish What do you think of this new phenomenon? the the franchise author Bob Parker has the Spencer novels being written by ace Atkins and his sonny Randall novels written by now Mike Lupica and This Jesse Stone I forget who the author is but James Patterson is also a franchise author So that's become for the top tier that's become the new phenomenon. Mm-hmm, and I Must say I mean I I continued to read Spencer I think ace Atkins does a good job with with the The way that Spencer the character is in the way that Bob Parker wrote him and and right And I don't know what the future of that is but I would expect that if that's gonna bring in Money to the coffers that that the publishers will continue doing this. Yeah, but what do you think about that? As an author is effective as an author who knows Bob Parker, right? What would Bob Parker think of that? Even on one hand he might be happy that he's now a franchise that he's so popular but in the sense of purity of the writing Style etc. What do you think of that? Well in terms of Bob Parker? He's been dead for 10 years, but he's still publishing I I met ace Atkins I got to know him and and Joan and I and ace Atkins who were on a radio show together when ace had done the First Bob Parker book. I was hoping he would choke and be totally unsuccessful But it was like he was channeling Bob Parker from on high. I mean I was absolutely amazed at how He had Parker's voice down. He had the wit down and he is not I Sent 40 years Parker's like family friend He spoke like Spencer. He was funny like Spencer He was quit quick and quippy and like Spencer ace Atkins is not but when he's at the keyboard He sits down. He's yeah, he's channeling Parker. Yeah, and I was astounded and I congratulate him for doing a great job And and that that I could speak to you because I knew the original Clive Custler James Patterson, they have a stable of writers who do their stuff Yeah, that's a little bit different. It is different You know what happens with Patterson who I know about him is he would come up with a story line And he would hire Grant Blackwood or and someone else in a stable to write the book and then Patterson would have the final say in it and the the name at the bottom of the the co-author is very very tiny It would say with or and But it's not Patterson's voice and it's not no longer the late Clive Custer's voice other people are writing the books If people buy them You know fine, then it works for them I have not read the Custer ghosts or or Patterson's ghosts But when Patterson was writing I recognized the voice Maybe maybe his ghost writers are just as good as ace ace Atkins is for Parker interestingly enough Bob Parker's nickname was ace when I first met him he was ace and Ace Acton shows up and he's got it is And Jones said the same Jim Parker Bob's late wife said you know she was amazed not only at the coincidence, but just how good or a good a voice He is for Bob. Yeah. Yeah, so I think that's that's good for people who love that character Sure, and there's I guess there's a new film do out soon. Yes. I Mark Wahlberg is gonna be here. Yeah. Yeah, so so Spencer and Bob Parker live on is still alive Your works are Science-oriented you you have a degree from wister polytech in physics, and of course in in English and so of varied degrees and Experiences in the academic world But how did you kind of lean to the medical thriller which your most recent books are that? That particular genre, right? I Wrote a book called rough beast Which was based on my wife and my moving into our home here in Arlington and we had gone through the entire place Scouring it for for lead paint For radon gas and I swear one night my wife was in a backyard with a geiger counter to come from nuclear waste and we had stripped the house for an awful lot of money and get rid of asbestos and all that and It was all based on the the anxiety What if something outside gets into the precious bodily fluids of our newborn baby, Nathan reminds us of what's going on today in a way Yeah, absolutely. Yes Coincident with that there were terrible. Well, maybe a few years later terrible a spike in the cancers of people in Wuburn, Massachusetts nearby which was considered almost a carcinogenic swamp because Several companies would dump me their waste into it and that gave me the idea and so I decided to Write a book that something bad gets in the water and there's a cover up that goes right to the White House It comes out of the Vietnam era when the government was trying to come up with a a genocide germ To use it in North Koreans during the war. It was scrapped It was buried in Arlington, Massachusetts, which I call Carlton, Massachusetts And that gave me the idea, but then I needed to do the science Having a degree in physics help but not so much in medicine biology But I knew how to frame questions that get me from A to B and not make me sound as stupid as I might have been and Boston is the medical hub of the cosmos and Doctors love talking so your research research easy at least access to the to the world I start with my primary and said get me a neurologist get me a cardiologist get me an Optometrist, you know, I kind of them the optician or whatever Optometrist and so I was I had all these leads and one of the books I wrote skin deep this guy here is With the toughest one I had this isn't bow as the title implies. It's it's about beauty and deals with cosmetic surgery getting the face you weren't born with and Based on having a face of famous people the problem was when I called my primary I couldn't find a cosmetic surgeon who would sit down and have lunch with me Because I was me out of in charge three hundred dollars a minute So for ten grand I would sit down and eat a cheeseburger and get some information about a nose job I couldn't afford that and Finally my primary caught me so I got just a guy for you to help you through a facelift and nose job You've lived lift all that stuff He was head of cosmetic surgery at Harvard. He retired man named Robert Goldwyn. He retired He was widowed. He was still brilliant and he was lonely and I descended on him like a Vulture in a zebra carcass and he gave me 18 hours of cosmetic Technical cosmetic surgical procedures which I laced into the book not gonna blind the reader with you know all that stuff But enough to walk me through a nose job in a facelift And so Boston was the place to be and even found a man to help me with could you have? Done that book without did that knowledge so he was integrals Because there's always people out there who have who know technical stuff sure always you send you flaming emails You got this wrong you can't do that and and so they're technical people out there another book called Another book I had done Which I had a scene where I had a underwater snake in the Virgin Islands Now I got a letter from an herpetologist a snake person said you Discard this grad h. Or not us very accurately However, the closest one to st. John is in the barrier reef in Australia and 7,000 miles away So so there's technical people out there. You got to really watch your research might there be others in this genre Going forward. I know you have a big book coming out Which we'll discuss in a minute, but might there be other medical thrillers down the road or? science No, not not one. I had finished which is it has some medical stuff in there but the The one that's coming out in 2021 the collaboration Has again some medical issues in there, but all of my books With the exception of one or two of them are essentially based on the theme from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein Watch out what you wish for tampering with you know with with nature break through so I mean the Elixir this is the first book that we went with the pen name and I Was in Papua New Guinea Nothing to do with books Diving expedition and our our host was a one generation out of the Stone Age and He had billable watches and a Harvard t-shirt and cut offs and he was getting his PhD in University of New Guinea in marine biology and We went into his village people didn't wear any clothes. They had feathers in their nose and pigs were running around and Yet there were reps from Eli Lilly and Merck who were paying shaman the holy man of the village in shells For any medicinal plants miracle plants growing on trees Such as digitalis. Oh, yeah, such as quinine which the the Americans and Japanese knew that the reason why New Guinea had Such battles there is that the Chincona tree the car the the the bark of the Chincona tree Had quinine and if you can have fight jungle warfare you needed some defense against malaria And so the point is that I saw these people who were paying Shaman in shells because they're too far and you know the real though these very high deep valleys Too far from the ocean never seen the ocean. So you give me these beautiful calorie shells that can make necklaces And I said, you know, what if some guy from Boston Went there and a shaman who was a friend gave him a flower That could prevent aging and that is where You're fine Start any of that again or yeah, Katie, where should they start over there? Now you already here to put up the elixir vote What were you guys talking about? What were you guys just talking about last? Well, you know, guinea and Miracle drugs growing on trees what wouldn't it be and your idea wouldn't it be amazing if you the flower that could stop age? Yeah, I think that's where you came in Yeah, yeah start from yeah, you guys start from there You guys talking about the shells, right? Yes, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So did you get the part about the flower? What if Yeah, yeah flower could tell me about the flower. Did you guys a flower that could stop aging? Did you get that much? Yeah, if you guys want to start from there, okay, that'd be cool for just after that. That's yeah, okay. Yeah, all right, okay So right after the idea that what if there were a flower that a guy from Boston, right? Yeah, learn would save right and and that became you know that the basis for elixir Which is you know, it's an Arabic name for something that keeps you alive and definitely a fountain of youth drug And that is where the and that was optioned for a movie by Ridley Scott Who had you know got an Academy Award for Thumb and the Lees and you know black Hawk down and gladiator? and That is the what was the birth of the pen name. Oh, I'm just gonna say we did what did that come from it's gonna ask you that Okay, so we had these Ridley Scott option for elixir 1820 years ago and it looked like it was going to be a big movie by a well-named director anti-aging drug that have many novels about that and so they Publisher called me aside and said, you know, we want to print up ten times as many of elixir than the last gosh-garrion book So would you mind changing your name and I say I said one of the guidelines something short for the outfit I said, how about Stephen King? That's got a nice ring to it. Just know that's taken and I said you're joking So we're not joking. I said, okay, I'll change my name and I said the front of the alphabet and I said yes so gosh-garrion is long and It translates from the armenian as shoemaker, which is over to long the back of the alphabet But I found the grandfather of mine who was killed in a genocide and never you know at the age of 29 Never left Armenia or Turkey actually but his first name translated as brave or braver person and so I Bet it was my children my wife's Gary Braver and they said yeah, it sounds cool Which is very interesting and it gives the insight of publishing go back to his original questions. I Called my side of Friday They were told me to come up with a new pen name was come up with a pen name and on Monday I called and I published your I got my editor's assistant and I said This is Gary Braver aka Gary gosh-garrion. Oh, I like that And I jokingly said can I keep my gender? And I hear just a legitimate question today He wants to know if we can keep his gender and then everything is quiet and they're thinking we don't have a female Thriller writer at tour forage McMillan and they and whereas random house has Karen slaughter and some of these others And I said I am not going to change my gender. I mean not gonna show up signing and drag Carly Braver Yeah, right exactly. So I say with Gary instead of a maid now I I know the title of your next big book coming out soon thou shalt not correct and I know we can't divulge your Collaborator correct or in anything like that, but tell us some of that story how the collaboration okay, so a Well-known author came to me a year and a half ago So and said would you like to write a book together and I said give me a nanosecond? And I said of course so we did and I was doing the male characters and the collaborator was doing the female characters and I decided that a good place to set this would be at Northeastern University Involving a 40-year-old college professor. I know I look a lot older thing A 40-year-old college professor who gets romantically involved with the student and it leads to kind of a it's a murder mystery And all sorts of complications as a result of that and we'll see this when When do we expect to see? Spring or summer of 2021 of 2021. Yeah, okay thou shalt not yeah, that's great looking forward to it Well as we finish What advice do you have for? Butting young authors what I tell them is if you think you have talent right and don't stop reading read books of People you want to emulate and don't read them study them look at them the way a carpenter looks at a house the angles You know these efficiency Study how how the dialogue doesn't sound like real talk, but it's real dialogue a study the the Economic depiction of characters how in in five inches of linear space you get a sense of a voice of a character the insides read slowly don't speed read and write Take notes Henry James once said be one on whom nothing is lost if someone says kind of interesting kind of Turn a phrase write that down if person is is has a quirk write that down I once had an interview with someone who was just finished eating a sesame bagel and took my Business card and took a seed out of his teeth, and I thought this is interesting. This is gonna go in a book Thank you for joining us for conversations with great authors, and we'll look forward to Thou shalt not maybe come back here and and discuss that when it's out Was fun John