Show notes
Dwight Holing’s contemporary western
thriller series starring Nick Drake owe their success to their readers, who are
vocal in clamoring for the next book . . .
Hi there. I’m your host, Jenny Wheeler and today
Dwight explains how he sees writing as a collaboration and agrees with feted
author John Cheever who once said “I can’t write without a reader. It’s
precisely like a kiss. You can’t do it alone. “
We are delighted also to be offering a Nick Drake Giveaway – two E-book copies of The Sorrow Hand, the first book, in the Nick Drake series – to two lucky readers. Details of how to enter the draw can be found on the website, The Joys of Binge Reading.com or on Facebook Binge Reading page. Offer closes April 4 so enter the draw now.
Six things you’ll learn from this Joys of Binge Reading episode:
The importance of a positive mindset
Getting to know your lead characters well
Dwight’s passion for Oregon’s mountain deserts
Reclaiming humanity after a war with no rules
The family connection to Raymond Chandler
Jack McCoul – urban hustler and ex-con
Where to find Dwight Holing:
Website: http://dwightholing.com/
Facebook: @dwight.holing
Twitter: @Dwightholing
What
follows is a “near as” transcript of our conversation, not word for
word but pretty close to it, with links to important mentions.
But
now here’s Dwight. Hi there, Dwight, and welcome to the show. It’s great to
have you with us.
Dwight Holing: Well. Thank you, Jenny, and it’s really a pleasure to be here and
I’m glad to be on your podcast. I also
want to thank everyone listening in, because it’s really readers that have
gotten to me to transition from writing nonfiction to fiction. And what I
always like to tell readers is one thing, and that is to quote the great
American novels, John Cheever, I can’t write without a reader. It’s precisely
like a kiss. You can’t do it alone.
Dwight Holing – author of contemporary western and urban thrillers
Jenny Wheeler: Oh, that’s just wonderful actually. And this podcast – we try and
target it for readers, rather than other writers. When I looked at the idea of
doing a podcast, I thought there were quite a lot of podcasts there for other
writers, but I couldn’t see so many that were really for readers.
So that’s really appropriate and it’s a
good place to start because. we know that we were a very successful nonfiction
writer doing travel and nature books, but how did you get to that switched to
fiction? Was it the readers who helped you to make that change?
Dwight Holing: Well, the change really wasn’t an “aha” moment for me when I decided to close the book on nonfiction and open a new one, writing crime fiction novels. I see writing as a journey and I’d always been moving in the direction of fiction as a nonfiction writer.
Moving from magazines to novels
I wrote mostly for magazines rather than newspapers, and that allowed me to exercise more voice and use experiential viewpoint.
But at the same time as writing nonfiction,
I was also writing personal essays and short stories based on those experiences
and observations and people or characters I met along the way. Some of those
made their way into print and literary journals and the like and even won an
award or two. Those essays and short stories, in fact, a small literary
publishing house in Georgia, called Snake Nation Press, actually published them
all in a collection.
That was my first bent into fiction, a
publication. And then when I was writing nonfiction books on nature travel, I
was also working on a novel. I think most writers are doing that. And in my
case, I was writing more than one at a time.
Discovering indie publishing
And this was before the advent of indie
publishing, when the only way to get a novel published was to get an agent and
have that agent shop your work for you. I did that. I landed at a top New York
agent and I thought the bestseller list was right around the corner for
me. The agent and I would have lunch or
phone calls and he was always saying, you know, “Hey, patience is the name
of this game.”
But self-doubt really set in after one particularly long stretch of not hearing from him. It wasn’t for another couple of months that I discovered he’d actually dropped dead at his desk earlier in the year. But right around that same time, San Francisco Litquake, which is this great gathering of writers and readers, and they were holding their annual festival in San Francisco.
Jack McCoul Capers – a San Francisco con man reformed
Jack McCoul is born
And I attended a workshop on indie publishing
and right then I learned that the idea of being in control of everything, about
seeing the novel through from the concept of it, to writing it, to editing it,
to cover design, to publishing, to marketing. That really appealed to me and
that was it. I’ve never looked back.
Jenny Wheeler: Oh, that’s fantastic. We will talk about your nonfiction work a
little bit later on, but we’re really focusing on your mystery and suspense
today. You’ve got two series going. You’ve got Nick Drake, and you’ve got Jack
McCoul. Now, as far as I know, with Nick Drake, you’ve got three books out and
a fourth – The Whisper Soul – out March 2020.
And Jack is also still going. Nick Drake 3# is The Shaming Eyes, isn’t it?
And Nick Drake follows
Dwight Holing: That’s right. The Shaming Eyes came out last July. SInce releasing
The Sorrow Hand, which was the first in the series a year earlier, I’ve really
kept my boot planted firmly on the gas pedal in writing this series. The fourth
in the series, The Whisper Soul will be released in a couple of weeks on March
10th. There’s a few reasons for this breakneck pace, and one is the characters
themselves. They’re speaking to me really loud and clear right now.
And as soon as one story’s finished, the
characters are telling me about the next. The second reason are my readers.
They read a lot faster than I can write, and they’re not shy about telling me
that, be it on email, Facebook posts. I mean, even in reviews on Amazon and
Goodreads, they’re saying, Hey, we’re, we’re ready for the next.
The Shaming Eyes – Nick Drake Book Three by Dwight Holing.
Momentum important component
The
third reason is., I love doing this. I love writing. I love connecting with
readers and hearing what they think. I love the online community. I’m part of a
big international community of other writers and bloggers like you, editors,
photographers, cover designers, and of course readers. Momentum is an important
component in each of the Nick Drake novels. I’m striving to mimic that in my writing
habits as well.
Jenny Wheeler: That’s fantastic. Yes. Nick is a Vietnam vet who’s back from the war.
The books are set in the late sixties although they have a very contemporary
feel. It’s funny for me to think of the late sixties – in some genres that’s
regarded as historical fiction, but even though it doesn’t really feel like a
historical novel.
He’s escaping PSTD by being a wildlife
ranger in Oregon. It’s a set up that gives you tremendous scope for both high
action as well as some telling personal and social commentary. Tell us how Nick
came about as a character.
Soldier in a war without rules
Dwight Holing: Well, Nick Drake is really an embodiment of people I know and love –
both family, friends and people I met while traveling or writing nonfiction,
both people living in dead. I grew up in the late sixties too, and we all know
people like Nick, we all see parts of them and ourselves. People who have
experienced great heights and fallen into great depths. People who have loved
and lost and learned to love again, people who have a moral code that helps
guide them when facing good and evil.
In Nick’s case, he’s a decorated soldier in a war without rules. He blames himself for the death of all the men in his squad and their deaths led him to become an addict, where he wound up being held at Walter Reed Hospital for treatment of what is now called PTSD.
Reclaiming humanity in Oregon mountains – Book 2 in the Nick Drake series by Dwight Holing
Reclaiming humanity lost in war
It wasn’t called that back then, but someone saw the inherent good in him and threw him a lifeline and paying that forward allows him to help others and in doing so reclaim the humanity lost in a war.
Jenny Wheeler: And it’s lovely the way that he’s developing as a character through
the series. In The Shaming Eyes you leave the end quite intriguingly open on to
fronts, both in his work front, whether he was going to stay doing what he was
doing, or whether he might be getting a change and also in a relationship with
Gemma. The woman.
He’s much more open emotionally by book
three than he was in the first one, isn’t he?
Dwight Holing: He is, and, and I’m trying to grow him as much as I’m growing the other characters. I like to read too, and, and I get a little bored with characters that are too predictable and stay the same. In our own lives we’re always growing.
Emotional growth with each book
At least we’re trying to grow or we hope we grow. And next doing that, he’s coming from a place of trauma. He’s trying to find himself, the characters around him are also growing at the same time he’s interacting with them. There is a love interest, as you mentioned there with Gemma, who’s a large animal veterinarian, and her father who’s a crusty old deputy sheriff from the area, and also the Paiute people who live there.
Growth is a fundamental part of the character and a fundamental part of the story. And as you mentioned in The Shaming Eyes, it is left a little open at the end, but in the new one, the same is true in The Whisper Soul.
I hope it drives readers to want to see
what happens next if they fall in love with the characters.
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Perfect for a woman’s ‘rescue’
Jenny Wheeler: Yes, it did occur to me that Nick is actually a perfect romance hero
in the sense that he’s the sort of guy many woman want to take in hand and help
or rescue or whatever isn’t he, and I can see it actually being a crossover
success in the romance field as well.
Dwight Holing: Well, I think romance is part of life, isn’t it? And the interaction
between all people comes down to emotion, to love, feeling. And Nick is not
immune to that. it helps him with his own growth and healing from being in a
place at war where men and women – because women also served in Vietnam – were
asked to put their humanity aside and do inhumane things to other humans.
To come back from that place you have to
rediscover your humanity, and it’s again, something you really can’t do on your
own. You need other people to do that with you. If there’s romance involved in
that, so much, the better.
Malheur Forest scene – Oregon County
Harney County’s beauty & mystery
Jenny Wheeler: The setting that you have for the series, that’s also, rather lovely and poignant. You have a lot of beautiful descriptions of the setting, in quite a remote part of Oregon. It’s a county, which is one the least populated in the U S and you make the observation that it is about the same size as Vietnam, which has a certain poignancy as well about it. What drew you to Harney County?
Dwight Holing: Well, I’ve discovered the beauty and mystery of Harney County many, many decades ago. My folks had a place in nearby Klamath County, which is also in Oregon. And that served as a great base for me to launch hiking and camping trips throughout Oregon. And that’s how I found Harney County. It’s close by.
Later when I earned my degree in journalism at
the University of Oregon, the campus is in Eugene and Eugene is on the rainy
side of the state. The Cascade Mountains divide the state between the wet side
and the dry side. Well, the dryness and heat, the high lonesome of Harney
County was always beckoning.
Hart Mountain Refuge – Pic Credit Thomas F Brown.
Rich cultural diversity
Then there’s the rich culture diversity of
the county itself. It’s sparsely populated, but it has really rich communities,
from the Paiute to the multi-generations of settlers and ranchers. There’s a
larger Basque community there, and all of that makes for great characters. And
then there’s just the sheer beauty of the landscape.
I mean, to me, to soak in a natural hot
springs way out in the middle of nowhere, beneath the night sky that has more
stars shown in it than grains of sand in the desert around you – well, it
doesn’t get any better than that.
Jenny Wheeler: No, it doesn’t. I wondered if
it was an area that you had personally, you know, hyped and tramped in it
because it comes through very strongly.
Nature reserves & wildlife wonders
Dwight Holing: Yes. I love there. Love it there. I go there often. I live in California. I’ll be going up there in a few weeks, during the spring, Harney County is like the center for the bird migrations that go through. There’s a wildlife refuge there around Malheur Lake.
Millions of birds fly through there. It’s a great gathering of both wildlife and also people from all over the world go there, so it’s just got so much going on. And the hiking is great. Being in the desert, the wildlife, you can see everything from pronghorn also called pronghorn antelope, to deer and mountain lions. And of course, just the desert landscape of sagebrush, juniper trees and blowing tumbleweeds. It’s beautiful.
Jenny Wheeler: You’ve mentioned a couple of times the Paiute people, and that
thread seems to me to becoming more prominent as the series progresses.
Certainly in The Shaming Eyes it’s a very significant part of the story. Was it
difficult research that side of things?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Lfw7AnTbWY
A Native American voice
Dwight Holing: There’s a great literature about the Paiute. Of course, the Paiute themselves are great storytellers, and they are very helpful. I also weave in some other of the local American Indian tribes. Again, I’m writing in the 60s, and that’s where the books are set, when terms like ‘native American’ really wasn’t in parlance then.
But the other people I talk about are the Klamath people who live nearby. I introduced a character at the end of The Shaming Eyes, who becomes a character in the prominent position in the next book, The Whisper Soul. Also the Washoe people who live in in Northern California. The thing I try to mimic the books a bit on the way the Paiute tell their own stories.
They call themselves ‘Numu’ – ‘the people’ – in their language, and they’re known as great weavers.
Eiguren Brothers Farm – Keeping Basque traditions alive in central Oregon.
Weaving stories into artifacts
They’re hunter gatherer bands and people that room throughout the Great Basin, and they create these beautiful baskets for carrying food and water and backboards for carrying their babies. And they use a variety of natural materials for these creations, like strips a willow or sumac, or tanned hides and dried grasses.
And each of these things, these materials
in each item they weave, tells a story about them, their traditions, and their
culture and the land in which they live. And that’s what I’m trying to do too,
is to take all the elements, the natural elements in the region, the people,
the stories that the Paiute tell and help use those to tell the story about
Nick Drake and the people he encounters in Harney County.
Jenny Wheeler: Well, it’s lovely. If people were interested in doing a Nick Drake
tour, if they wanted to come to Oregon and see Nick Drake country, is there a
tour that you would suggest to them?
Where to go in Harney County
Dwight Holing: A lot of the travel in Harney County is best done by foot, by horse
or by vehicle. I think the easiest thing to do if people are coming from great
distances away is to somehow get themselves to an airport close by.
There’s not one in the main town of Harney County, which is Burns, unless you fly privately or by air taxi, but in nearby Redmond, which is over by Bend, central Oregon’s largest city. You can fly in there. You can rent a four-wheel drive vehicle and in two hours you’re in Harney County and Burns. Burns is a great jumping off point for the rest of the county.
It’s the biggest town, a population of 2,500. From there, you can make treks down to the wildlife refuges like Malheur Lake. You can go a little further south down to the Hart Mountain Wildlife Refuge. A lot of these are self-directed, but they also have individual guides and trips that you can get there easily find online, self-directed trips are what I usually do, but I also like to go to the wildlife refuges because I can meet other people there at the visitor centers or out tramping around looking at birds or are whatnot hiking.
Burns Paiute tribal celebration.
Jack McCoul a change of pace
You can go camping almost anywhere. There
are camping sites around. There’s also small guest inns and it’s just a great
place to get away from it all. It’s
remote. The people are friendly and the scenery is nonstop.
Jenny Wheeler: That’s fantastic. And then just completely switching style, you’ve
got Jack McCoul. Are you still writing the McCoul series?
Dwight Holing: I haven’t written Jack McCoul since I’ve finished the fourth book, because right from that, I went into the Nick Drake novel series, and I’d gone to a point after four books in the Jack McCoul series where I felt I left Jack McCoul and his family in a really good spot.
He’s such an interesting character and he’s
so different from Nick Drake. And the time is different. The settings are
different. Jack McCoul’s capers are set
in San Francisco in modern time. He’s a con artist or a recovering con artist.
And along the way, he always gets involved in solving crimes.
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Classics that influenced McCoul
When I first started that series, I was drawing upon the past, what I used to like to read when I was growing up and stuff. I loved the ( Dashiell Hammett) Thin Man series. Later I liked the Carl Hiaasen books. Another one I used to like was the It Takes A Thief series. Things like that where you have humor, you have a lot of places, a character, you’ve got interaction, and light banter.
The violence is fairly minimal and the bad
guys get their comeuppance, and they all made for great stories. But the
biggest character in all four of those books i s the city of San Francisco, and
that’s what I was really trying to shine a light on. All the diversity that’s
there, all the difference, all the foods, the streets scene, the action that’s
happening there, whether it’s from sports culture to counterculture to the
great arts culture there.
A flip, mouthy, ex-conman
That’s what was happening. But again, since
Shake City, which was the last one I wrote in that series, I haven’t gone back
there. I don’t close the door to it. I’m
not saying that I won’t, but for now, the Nick Drake characters in those
stories have really got a hold of me and
it’s hard to turn my back on them.
Shake City – Jack McCoul caper Book 4 by Dwight Holing
Jenny Wheeler: Oh, that’s great. While
you’re flowing, it’s important to keep it going, I think, isn’t it? Jack is
very urban, flip, mouthy and has lots of smart one liners. It’s quite different
from the more intense spiritual, meditative aspect, the underlying aspect with
Nick. It’s terrific that you could do both so successfully, really quite
contrasting characters and styles and yet you can comfortably do both, which is
fantastic. How did you come across Jack? What made you start with Jack?
Learning to hustle
Dwight Holing: Well, I think Jack is a little bit of, again, people that I know,
people that have been hustlers. I’m not a con artist, but as a freelance writer
all my life, there always a little bit of a hustler in me as well, trying to
make a buck as a writer. What could I do to get out there and convince somebody
to pay me money, to go on assignment, to travel to the ends of the earth, to
write about nature and natural history.
There’s just that feeling of okay, I’ve got
to get somebody to do that. Be it a publisher or a magazine editor. How do you
sell them a good story? There’s a little bit of a con in there too, because
you’re never quite sure what the story is going to be when you get there, but
you have got to paint the picture, sell them on it, to get there, and then
deliver it at the end.
A low rider kind of guy
A little bit of that was in there. The other characters in the book are people I know. I have a character in there called Hark who is Jack McCoul’s right-hand man – best friend – sidekick. When I was younger, I used to work during high school and stuff at an auto paint and body shop and there were a lot of Harks there, guys that were into cars and guys that knew about painting cars and low riders and Hark is a low rider.
Lowrider display – San Francisco
And there was a good low rider culture from
my background. And I drew that into the thing.
So that’s the people. And then I know the city really well. San
Francisco, I’ve lived there. It’s great
to rediscover it as a writer and walk down its streets, see the people go to
cafes, listen to the music and put that into a book.
Jenny Wheeler: Yes. In a recent blog posts, do you hint that writing might be in your genes because you’ve got writers in your immediate family going back to your grandfather, haven’t you?
The Raymond Chandler connection
You told a tale online about your mother reporting on a meeting with Raymond Chandler, one of the great names of noir fiction. I wonder if you could tell us about that colorful background you’ve got.
Dwight Holing: Well, my mother’s father, my grandfather, who I’m named after – his
name was Dwight Mitchell Wiley, and he was a short story writer back in the 30s
and 40s. He wrote for the Saturday Evening Post and McCall’s and periodicals
like that.
His stories his genre, was light, romantic,
humorous pieces, and he was good at it. I mean, they’re just great stories for
the time. One day the call from Hollywood came in and he was hired to write a
screenplay and he became part of the Paramount scribes.
And among them also was Raymond Chandler, the great detective writer, Philip Marlowe’s creator, and they would hang around and together and my mother tells the story of them in their bungalow waking up in the morning, and there was Raymond Chandler asleep on the couch. Still wearing the white gloves he liked to wear when he played poker and drank gin.
Influenced by ‘Hollywood romance’
It was just this fabulous story. And that always stuck with me about this romantic idea of the writers, you know, living in Hollywood and writing screenplays and writing for magazines or writing novels, no doubt had had an influence on me.
Raymond Chandler – crime novelist who defined a hard-boiled genre
Whether I inherited the talent from my
grandfather or not, I don’t know. But it makes for good memories, that’s for
sure.
Jenny Wheeler: And have you, any ambitions yourself to do screenplays or scripts
sometime?
Dwight Holing: I’m pretty comfortable
writing novels. I’m very comfortable writing short stories and magazine
pieces. I’ve never written a screenplay.
I wouldn’t say no to it, but I’ve got my hands full right now working with Nick
Drake and his group up in Harney County and that’s keeping me pretty busy.
The ‘secret of success’ for writers – Dwight Holing’s view
Jenny Wheeler: Sure. Turning to your wider career, is there one thing you’ve done,
perhaps more than any other that you’d say was the secret of your success?
There are probably people listening who have got ambitions to write. What would
you advise them to do?
Dwight Holing: This was a hard lesson for me, to learn. I eventually did learn it and I think it came
a little late in my life, but it is to get out of your own way. It’s too easy
to tell yourself that “you shouldn’t do it. You can’t do it. Don’t do it.”
If
you’ve got the drive to write, you just have to write. You have to trust
yourself. You have to believe in yourself and do it and get out of your own way
to do it. The other thing is, you can’t write alone. There’s always this image
of the writer in the garret all by themselves, writing away.
Team so important
Well, part of that’s true. You do have to
churn out the words. You do have to create it. But you’re a better writer if
you involve other people in it. I’m very fortunate to have found other writers
and other readers who wanted to be part of what I call my ARC team, my advanced
reader copy team. And when I finish a manuscript, I send it to them. Call them beta readers, whatever you want to
call them, and they read it and they get back to me with comments, feedback.
It’s terrifically helpful. I couldn’t do it
without them. They’ll point out things
where I’m factually inaccurate or the story bogged, or of course they’re also
encouraging, which we all love to hear, and that’s very important too. So I
think just just do it. Just get out of your own way, right?
If you love to write, write every day too.
It doesn’t matter what you’re writing, just write and get it on paper. Get it
on your computer screen, dictate it, however it works best. Just do it.
Dwight Holing as reader
Jenny Wheeler: That’s fantastic. Turning to
Dwight as reader, because this is called The Joys of Binge Reading, and it’s
predicated on exactly the sort of readers you have, the ones who are fairly
voracious, like to read series and want to hear about the next book. Are you a
binge reader yourself, and who do you binge read? Who would you recommend to
others as good people to look at?
Dwight Holing: It’s funny because when I’m writing what I’m writing now -writing
crime fiction, I don’t read the stuff that I’m writing about or I love to read,
or that I always used to read.
Now I’m reading when I’m writing fiction or writing crime fiction I read nonfiction, I read histories and I read literature. I don’t read other crime writers and I guess that’s part of it because I want to hear my own voice. I want to hear it in my head.
All began with Travis McGee
But back in the day, yeah, I love to read the same writer and all their works at once, you know, one after another, like what people are doing now on a Netflix series or something like that. Because I think there was a link from each book they did. Whether it was a Robert B. Parker, whether it was a Raymond Chandler or a Carl Hiaasen or Dashiell Hammett.
I can remember as a young person, my mother
was a voracious reader. Her father was a writer and she really turned me on to
crime fiction. I remember the time she gave me the first John D. McDonald book
I ever read, the Travis McGee series. I
just sat there and probably to the detriment of my education, no doubt, because
I’d read all night long and I just read one after another.
Pulitzer Prize winning fiction
I couldn’t get enough of them. And so I love to binge read like that, and I still do it, but not when I’m writing. So right now I’m reading The Overstory, a novel by Richard Powers, a big, great, sweeping book, that won the Pulitzer Prize, and was short-listed for the Booker Prize.
Something that takes me a little bit away
from what I’m doing.
Jenny Wheeler: Sure. Circling back and looking over your writing career, is there
one thing you’ve done more than any other that you’d see as the secret to your
success?
Dwight Holing: I think discovering a good character in fiction. Once you find one, and once they’re speaking to you, and once you’re speaking back to them – I know that may sound a little crazy – but that’s the secret. You have to find that person.
The magic of compelling character
There’s a little bit of you in them. There’s a little bit of other people you know, in them, but you become very comfortable with them and you nurture them along as they grow, as the stories develop. And you are true to them. That’s not to say that you can’t change some of the stuff they do or, or have them make mistakes because they have to be real.
They have to be believable. People have to trust them and for readers to trust a character the writer has to trust them first and believe in them and take them places that carry the readers along with them in their development as they pursue the story.
Whether it’s a crime story where you’re trying to solve a mystery or a story about self-discovery, a story about discovery of another culture or another people, a land, that the readers are right there with you, they’re there with you because you’re there with the character that you’re creating.
Contemporary light on 60s problem
Jenny Wheeler: Sure. It occurred to me with Nick too, that there’d be a lot of
young men coming back from Afghanistan and other Wars now who would be
experiencing very similar things to what your character Nick experiences. Although
it stays in the 60s that’s still utterly relevant for today, isn’t it?
Dwight Holing: It really is. I mean, you see it in the sheer volume, the most
horrific thing that’s happening right now is the highest suicide rate among men
and women in service, especially men and women who’ve served in a combat
situation.
It’s horrifying. What’s happening here? How
can we figure out the cause of this and what can we do to help people. In
Vietnam that was certainly true. The Vietnam vets had a really rough
transition. Right now, a friend of mine is doing a work in prisons in
California. He’s creating a book told by long serving Vietnam veteran prisoners
as a guide to incoming prisoners, inmates, who are coming to prison, about how
to survive in prison. And their audience is people that have served in Iraq,
Afghanistan, they’ve suffered from PTSD, they got involved in drugs. They got
in involved in crime. They’ve been sent to California prisons.
Honoring soldiers service
This is just in California. I’m sure it’s
nationwide. And, and there are mentors are veterans from Vietnam that had been
there for decades. What’s happening here? We need to figure this out and, and
help the people. There is a corollary between the Vietnam War and Iraq and
Afghanistan in terms of the veteran experience of the help that they’re not
getting when they re-enter.
Jenny Wheeler: And I know in the Drake books too, some of the programs where they
use wildlife or horses or that kind of thing as a help in, in getting people
re-established.
Dwight Holing: That’s true. I talked about that in The Shaming Eyes and the use of wild horses, especially.
A healing role for animals
There are groups that have been working with combat veterans that have suffered from PTSD who are having a hard time re-entering and using wild horses as a way to reach them so that they’re caring and feeding for another living being. Again, it gets to the point of rediscovering or reclaiming your humanity, the humankind aspect of what’s at risk, obviously in war.
And so wild horses have been a tremendous
help in that regard. You see it in other types of animals as well, in terms of
using dogs and whatnot. So those things are the bright spot where are we as a
society are, reaching out to our men and women who have served the country.
Jenny Wheeler: I wondered if you’d had military experience yourself because you
tell the story so well.
The ghosts of World War II
Dwight Holing: I have not. My main
experience with war really came from my father who served in World War II. As a kid, I can remember hearing my father’s
own issues trying to deal with the aftermath of serving in World War II. He was
a decorated officer. He was mustered out as a captain, but he served in the
Pacific in Guadalcanal. He never talked about the war, ever.
He never discussed his combat experience.
His point of view really was he was doing a service. It definitely had an
impact on him and his large family, of his brothers, sisters, cousins and
everything. Only he and his cousin served in military. My father made it back.
His cousin did not. As a kid growing up and hearing him in the middle of the
night, not often, but enough to make an impact.
And I have a brother-in-law who is working, and has worked for a long time, with Vietnam vets, Afghan vets, Iraq war vets.
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Same issue, different label
He’s a psychotherapist. I credit him with a lot of the work in my book, helping me with the research and identifying causes, effects, outcomes, what’s real, what’s not, with people with PTSD.
Again, back then it was called something
else. We went from shell shock to battle fatigue to combat fatigue. Vietnam war
was more combat fatigue, but all the same thing, the trauma that happens and
how people have to be helped with that.
Jenny Wheeler: Sure. Look, we are coming to the end of our time together, so just
let’s take stock. Where are you up to in terms of your work for, say, the next
12 months?
Dwight Holing: Right now I’m at the very end
of the manuscript for The Whisper Soul. My arc team has gotten back to me, the
proofreader’s editing as is done.
What’s next for Dwight
Now I’m in the fun part of putting it
together in a book form. I’ve got the cover designed and ready to go. I’ll be
launching that and doing the “get out the word” aspect in it over the
next couple of weeks. The fifth, Nick Drake is already titled and
“arced.” When I first started
this series, I had a burst of something – creative juice or whatever you want
to call it – where I set out five or six
of the first in the series. Titles, a brief thumbnail of what the books are
going to be about.
So I’ll be launching right into writing Book Five as soon as this one is hitting the market, and from that, number six will hopefully follow. It’s an interesting thing. I never close the door on what could happen, because I’ve found that once you start a book, some characters might pop up that take a bigger role, some action might happen that takes a bigger role. Some things that you thought were going to happen didn’t work out at all, and you and you jettison.
Remember to enter the draw
You have to be very flexible in this process of writing novels. So that’s what I’ll be doing for the forseeable future is hanging with Nick, keeping him going. He keeps me going and all the characters and they go with them.
Jenny Wheeler: That’s fabulous. It also probably is the right time to mention that
we’re going to have a great little competition going. We were going to offer a
couple of your eBooks of the first book in the series, The Sorrow Hand, all the
details that will be on the blog post when the podcast is posted
www.thejoysofbingereading.com.
I’m
really grateful to you for letting us have a couple of those copies to be able
to spread the word.
Dwight Holing: My pleasure and again, thank you so much for having me on your
podcast. This is terrific opportunity to experience and really appreciate it.
Where to find Dwight online
Jenny Wheeler: Just before you go, tell everybody where readers can find you
online.
Dwight Holing: It’s very easy. I’m at Dwightholing.com and I’d love to hear from readers and other writers as well. You can find me on Facebook, Twitter, and the usual places. But Dwightholing.com is as an easy way to see the work. And Facebook is always great to see comments, and I love getting comments.
Jenny Wheeler: That’s wonderful, Dwight. Look, thank you so much. It’s great to
have had you on board, and we will be posting this sort of mid to late March,
so it’ll be very close to when your next book comes out.
Dwight Holing: Terrific. That’s wonderful. Thanks so much.
Thank you. Talk to you later. Bye. Bye.
Bye. Thanks for listening to the joys of binge reading podcast.
What else might you like?
If you like Dwight’s books maybe you’d like Terry Shames’ Top Five Texan mysteries or Tony Park’s African game park thrillers.
Terry Shames Texan mysteries
Tony Park’s African game park thrillers
Thanks To Our Technical Support:
The Joys of Binge Reading podcast is put together with wonderful technical
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