Hello on good morning everybody. Good. How are you doing today? I'm
doing good. How are you? Absolutely fantastic? Janis Man. I love
your accent. Oh I still have it. Huh. I'm the back to
Boston for about thirty years. Thirty years. Oh, you never lose that.
I mean it was Mark Twain that used to say all the time,
you don't ever lose your accent because that is your personality and that is everything.
You are everything. Huh. Yeah, that's a lot, so is
your book. How is it that you can have so much of a real
world inside this book? I mean, I mean you really don't hold back
when it comes to, you know, the struggles of racism and women's rights
and things. I mean, you you deal with real stuff. Yeah.
I feel like that's why I wrote it. I didn't really want to write
a book and not say anything. But see, I like that because that's
the big thing right now, is that they want the authors and the poets
and the musicians to start seen some things and if it doesn't show up in
print, then nobody else will talk about it. Yeah. Really so.
But the other thing about it is it's not preachy. It's just telling a
story and through the story you get the lessons. The name of the book
that we're talking about is Looking Up Invasion. What led you to this title
for the book, because, I mean, you know how people are.
They like to judge a book by its cover. But I believe that title
is the selling point. Yeah, it's it's a combination of things. Looking
Up refers to the name of the farm where the aliens land, but it's
also a philosophy. The farmer family came from modest means, they were poor
in the depression, and they got plucked out of the sea of migrant farm
workers in California. They came from Oklahoma during the depression, and a guy,
a rich guy, rescued him and put him on the farm and ended
up giving him the farm. And they developed a toy called the Looking Up
way. And the other side of it is that some of the family members
have a facial deformity where their left eye is misaligned and it points up into
the left, so that gave them the looking up idea. The looking up
means you get your head out of wherever you like to tucket and look around.
You look at the people around you and consider them. How are they
doing? How are they feeling. So it's about it's about empathy there,
and the invasion is unintentional. The aliens didn't mean to come. They didn't
come into spaceship with superior weapons. They showed up poor and unexpected and and
they have nothing in terms of weapons or anything, and they don't intend to
take over. But by the end you're wondering with the cultural changes that they
go through, just who is invading who? Yeah? Right, But see,
that's that's what's great about the way that you write books is the fact
that you give us that little cliffhanger kind of of an age that makes you
wonder, Okay, what would happen if this were happening right now, and
how would I react to it? Yeah, exactly. It's in contemporary California,
and it's a real family, and how do they react to a green
skinned family that just shows up on their farm unexpectedly from a completely unknown world,
And seeing as they're desperate for help, they hire them and keep them
hidden and they get to know each other. And it's amazing what the cultural
differences are. But it's kind of difficult to empathize when you have no idea
where somebody's coming from. But they listen and pay attention and manage to do
it anyway. And it's a lesson in how different our perspectives can be and
how somebody might seem like they're totally crazy to you, but if you take
the time to understand where they're coming from and what their background is, what
they're saying, it might make total sense to them. Yeah, it almost
goes along with the things that we learned as kids. Walk a mile in
my shoes and then let's have a conversation exactly. That's the theme basically.
Yeah, when you create a world, and especially a new world like this,
as the author, how do you find yourself believing in it so that
we as the reader believe in it as well? Well? You have to
completely immerse yourself in it for a time. I spent many days without writing
where I really thought this through about how this world was. And you have
to consider every detail like what do they eat, where they get their food,
what is their social structure, what's their infrastructure, what resources do they
have and not have, and what's their technology level. You have to consider
all the aspects of the society to make it whole. And then once you
do, you've got to work world and you can work in that world and
it kind of works itself after you've got the parameters set up the part of
the book in the world, and in my second book, when I spend
more time in this alien world, it's very freeing. You don't have to
tie yourself to anything going on on Earth. You just can immerse yourself in
that world and write pretty much whatever you want as long as it's consistent.
Well, I love the way that you that you introduce these characters from from
a different place, because you know, we always think that it's going to
come in with you know, fighting spaceships and you know they're coming in to
take over the planet, and in reality that you've got a book here about
relationship. And I think this would be my new vision of this is how
I would like to meet an alien and one on one place, maybe at
a nature preserve park. It's like, whoa you? You don't look like
me? Who are you? Yeah, that's pretty much how it comes up.
But they show up at your door. But that's the way I would
want it. That's exactly the way that I would want to do that though,
because you really give you know, you give us that opportunity to say
I've never had this ever explained to me this way. This is a new
way to look at it exactly. It's all about perspective. Yeah, is
it? Is it wrong to think though that, you know, because you
know a lot of people say, oh, this is a science fiction book.
But but to me, the realm of the reality is is that you
know, I understand that it's sci fi, but you make it real.
Yeah, it's hard to genrefy this. I you know, I struggle with
the genre in sci fi because of the portal, and there's other aspects that
they come through, and there's other aspects that are sci fi and science.
It's also fantasy, but it's also I would almost dare say it's literary because
the themes are what really dominate the book. This is the kind of thing
where you know, young adult readers read a book like this and all of
a sudden they're gonna start talking about it, and then they're gonna then they're
gonna fit into that world, you know how they like to do that.
They're very faithful to the authors. Yeah, they could be really you know,
yeah, into this world. And yeah, I'd like to see a
series or a movie, but I haven't really got the wherewithal It would be
great. I think it would catch on big. Oh my god, there's
enough YA readers out there that know how to do TikTok and know how to
do videos and things like that. I wouldn't be shocked if they don't make
up their own videos and all of a sudden it starts ending up in your
emails. That'd be fun. Yeah, would Yeah, that'd be great.
They do that for me when your characters aren't perfect, because so many times
authors like to have the perfect family, the perfectness, or if they're not
perfect, it has to be the tragic. And so that's what I love
about this is the fact that your characters aren't perfect, and I think that's
very relatable. Yeah. I tried to get very into their heads, and
I kind of I like to rip the top of their heads off and report
what they're really thinking. Yeah, and it's not all it's perfect, and
it's a lot of things that they wouldn't say out loud, and a lot
of things that maybe they wouldn't even admit to themselves. But it gives them
a lot more depth developing the characters. I usually put pictures or I envision
people who would be playing this if it were on television or in a movie.
How did you develop these characters well? Picturing them it's hard to say.
I got well, I picture Valco as being Jason Manoah for starters,
but it's it's just kind of they come to me in my head and their
whole characters. And the thing about them is I know them so well that
I can just drop them into a scene and a situation and they just take
over and run with it and do what they do, and I just type
as fast as I can, well, they're doing it because they're so well
developed that I kind of guess subconsciously I know what they're going to do,
or I sometimes they surprise me though, that's the one part, and the
character just does something that you didn't expect, and it usually works out really
really good with the rest of the books. Yeah, but usually when something
like that happens, you have to go back a couple of pages and kind
of set up the scene there because your continuity has got to be spot on.
Yeah yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah. There's lots of revisions catching
all those things. But I've found that my memory is really good. I
can remember everything about the character I don't really have to write them down and
stuff. Like some people have a file where they write notes about all their
characters, and I'm finding that I remember everything about them as if I know
them from one writer to another writer. What is your writing time? What
is your energy space? You mean at length of time to complete or daily
on a daily basis, because mine, I'm a morning writer. Yeah,
I'm a morning writer. Yeah, definitely a morning writer. Yeah. That's
that's when things are nice and clean and let's let's get on with this thing.
That's make it happen. Yeah, And sometimes I'm a panther and right
now I'm kind of more like a plotter. But I started out as a
panther. And and I got on a tear one time while I was writing,
well I had it was the second draft of this first book. But
on the alien side, I went on a tear one time for like a
month, and I just started writing the whole alien side of the story.
Wow, and got into that world completely. And uh, I wrote all
the way up into book four on the alien side. But the Earth side,
like I say, is a little harder to do because I tied to
uh actual events, So that's more of a plot plotting, pre you know,
outlining kind of ideal because I'm trying to coordinate with the real world on
the Earth. Speaking of that real world, how long does it take you
to come back to the real world when you when you put yourself in a
position like this, Because I mean, even as an on air talent and
radio if I'm doing a show for a different city, my mind believes I'm
in that city and it takes me a while to find out that I'm here
in Carolina. Well that's really good. So you put yourself in somebody else's
shoes kind of that way. That's exactly that. Maybe that's the reason why
I can relate with these aliens. Yeah, it's kind of like when I
went to Disneyland and I came out of Disneyland and LA looked like a fake
world and Disneyland seemed like it was a real world. Hey, we've got
something in common. I love for stuffed animals. I still have my stuffed
animals from when I was a kid. Oh yeah, oh yeah, oh
yeah. Oh. I ended up having a losing when I lost my parents
and then moved and everything, but I still have a dinosaurs. Dinosaurs.
See, now, that would be a great book Aliens Meeting Dinosaurs. I
haven't read a book like that. Oh, there you go. Now,
what genre are you going to put that in? Right? See, that's
the business side of writing you're talking about now, yeah, historical fiction.
Well where can people go to find out more about your writing? Because I
mean you you let me in on a little insight there that you're already working
on the the you know, your four books into the alien story. So
now I know that people need to follow you and give you a lot of
love. Yeah, they can look me up on looking Up, look and
up dot us us. I love it. I love it. That's my
website. Well you've got to come back to this show anytime in the future
because the door is always going to be open for you. Okay. Well,
I have your phone number, and when I get my other book,
I'm hoping to get it done by summer maybe sooner. Well then I expected
to have a conversation with you in about five months. Then. Oh that'd
be great. I'm glad you enjoyed it, and I hope other people enjoy
it. Oh, I know they will, They absolutely will. Yeah,
I think so. I had sure fun writing it. Well, it shows
having fun writing the second one, although it is a little bit more difficult
because it's contemporary and I'm getting up into two thousand, like year two thousand
and tying it to actual events. So things are getting a little hairy.
Now, Okay, let's talk about that just for a second here, because
that's what happened to my first book, because it's called Halloween seventy eight,
and when it started catching up to the real world as an author, I
was going, I don't know, I don't I like writing about things in
the past and living in that moment. So what is it like for you
to be able to I mean, you're stepping up here into the two thousands,
like you said, Yeah, I meant to act at twenty twenty at
the end of this book see this new book. But well, one thing,
the COVID epidemic sure hit me because I had the first book ending in
twenty twenty and there's a scene at the fairgrounds which is kind of critical,
and I realized if out March of twenty twenty that that wasn't going to happen,
it wasn't going to be a county fair in twenty twenty in the fall,
So I ended up backing up the whole series by three years. So
I made the first book twenty fourteen to twenty seventeen instead at twenty twenty.
So I had to I learned right then that don't write contemporary like that.
Have a couple of years. The whole world didn't know what was going to
happen then, So true, all you had to say was March of twenty
twenty, and I knew exactly what I was doing at that time. Everything
that we were scheduled to do done, It was over with, and so
I'll never forget that period of time. Yeah. Yeah, it should have
devastated everything. That's like, nobody in the world knew what was going to
happen next, So how could I write that? So I had to give
myself a little distance, moved everything back, and there's a lot of eclipses
in there because my aliens are definitely afraid of eclipses because of their religion.
I had all the eclipses tied to real time. Oh wow, And I
had to back those all out and change some of the schedule of the book
to meet the eclipses that occurred in twenty fourteen to twenty seventeen instead of the
ones from twenty seventeen to twenty twenty and it actually kind of worked out better.
Wow. Wow, it was a lot of work. Wow. Well,
please come back to the show in the future and have yourself a beautiful
day today. I love your story. Well, thank you so much and
thanks for having me. You bet you'd be brilliant.