James Patterson is not only America’s highest paid author but also one of the world’s most successful ones, having sold approximately 300 million copies of his books, and was the first author to sell more than 1 million e-books.
Among his works are the Alex Cross, Michael Bennett, Women’s Murder Club, Maximum Ride, Daniel X, NYPD Red, Witch and Wizard, and Private series, as well as many stand-alone thrillers, non-fiction, and romance novels.
I had the wonderful opportunity to chat with Mr. Patterson to discuss his most recent release, The Noise, which he collaborated with J.D. Barker.
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FOG!: Mr. Patterson, thank you for making the time to discuss, your latest book, The Noise. How would you describe it?
James Patterson: That’s my joke about when you go out on the road, you got to whatever and you’re in Topeka and they haven’t read the book and they go, tell us about your new book. Have you read it, Stefan?
I have.
It’s dramatic a little bit, little sci-fi, but an accessible kind of sci-fi.
What I like about it is when you have a book where you get hooked, and you got questions; I always think suspense is about questions that you must have answered. I think that’s what this book does. It sets up like, How the hell can this be happening, this noise? How can it be sweeping through the Northwest, which is what it does, just as noise? And it isn’t a one note thing because it keeps twisting and turning in terms of what it is, which I think, I like that.
I love it when it just keeps twisting and turning. Then at the end, hopefully it satisfies you. And I think it does. And it’s not like, “I think the aliens did it.”
I’ve read all of your Alex Cross books and read a couple of the other ones, but one of the things I thought was really interesting about this is that you throw some threads throughout the book; is there a possible supernatural aspect to it? And it’s a little bit Michael Crichton-esque. Where there’s the technology aspect that; Who knows how likely it is? But there’s a possibility that it could happen.
That’s kind of interesting. I don’t know that I follow that totally down though, but I’m like, okay…then you want the second book if we ever did, I don’t think we would, but you know, you start out, we were wrong.
Now, J.D. Barker is your collaborator for this book. What was the genesis of the project and how did he come aboard?
We’ve done a couple of things.
He approached me at one point and that happens a lot and usually I don’t. He sent a book and I liked the book that he had done. I especially liked the way he got into it and then it was a little bit of, I don’t know if it’s building as I would have liked to have seen it build. But, I thought he was an interesting guy and talked to them and we’ve done a few books now. We have another one coming out Death of the Black Widow early next year and we’re thinking about another one. It’s an interesting combo because I’m kind of the outline and let’s try to figure it through but I don’t want to become a slave to the outline, but I l kind of try to do the outline and he’s kind of a run and shoot like, I love the first chapter. I don’t know where the hell it’s going…
Between the two of us, I think it’s good. This is more disciplined than some of the things we’ve done; The Noise. We really thought it through. We didn’t know exactly where it was going to end and we had a few possibilities and part of it was I think we both thought the book was so good that we didn’t want to mess it up with a shit ending.
That’s what you leave the reader with.
As I said sometimes you go like really?
Stephen King did it once and I don’t know if somebody else could have pulled it off because it was like, “this can’t happen. It’s just evil,” but it’s okay, because it’s Stephen King.
But it was one of those like, “what? How can they be?” But he got away with it. It was a delicious read. But we tried not to pull too many punches. I think as a reader you go, “this is pretty satisfying.”
I don’t read that much. In fact, I just called the publisher, Mulholland Books they have a mystery line and I got, “I got nothing, man. I got nothing to read”. It’s sort of television. I can’t. I’ve seen everything on Netflix. I’ve seen everything… there’s nothing. I have nothing left. They sent me a few. But I get that way. I think for a lot of people with The Noise they’ll go, “that was a cool one. That was good.”
I did enjoy it quite a bit. What was interesting in the other books of yours that I have read, you have a very unique structure with each chapter lasting for three to four pages, switching from first person to third, which I think creates a very fast moving approach to storytelling. The Noise, the chapters were longer with a third person point of view throughout. Was this intentional? Is this something that J.D. brought to the project?
No, I’m all over the lot when I work with other people; you never know. The longer chapters would be certainly by J.D. and sometimes I had to take his chapters and cut them. But I like to mix it up. I do kids’ books, which are very different. I’ve done some nonfiction. Now I did Filthy Rich, the Jeffrey Epstein thing, which is its own interesting horror story. What’s fascinating about that book is, I did that book in 2016 and I said, this is such a messed-up story and mostly people outside of Florida didn’t know the story very much at that stage and I took it to CNN, and they took it to Fox. I took it everywhere and they’re going, “what’s the big deal?” And I’m like, “Really?”
The Wall Street Journal and The Miami Herald, they both jumped on it a bit.
Then there were newspaper articles with The Miami Herald, I think it was 2018. The writer had talked to these women who were a little older. In my book, we had the police interviews with the young girls, and they were devastating.
But all of a sudden, and the reason that it became a big story, which is really messed up, is (R. Alexander) Acosta had been involved in terms of him getting the 13-month sentence, which actually made some sense, given the law team that he had and how he might have gotten off. But Acosta had been named by Trump as Secretary of Labor. Suddenly, it’s a Trump story and it’s all over the place. Most people are going like, “Who the hell cares about Acosta?” But, his story is insane. That’s a fascinating thing.
The press, they’re just not too smart.
I think it’s a 24-hour news cycle now.
I don’t know what it is, everybody has the same footage. It’s like there’s no reporters? I read it on a blog, it must be true…
What? Want to make up some stuff? (laughs)
This kind of actually is a two-fold question because it actually ties into what you were just talking about with Epstein, which is, what kind of research do you do? I’m assuming with The Noise, there’s a certain aspect that’s fictional, but obviously you mention DARPA. I don’t know how much research is done in terms of, “is this a possibility?” But also with Epstein you have a guy who, when you’re researching him, or even your John Lennon book, there’s information out there and what kind of research do you do?
With Epstein, I had to be really careful. I actually hired three private investigators. We investigated everything. We investigated Trump, we investigated Clinton, we left no stone unturned, but still, you had to be careful because I was getting letters from his attorney every other week, saying, “you don’t know what you’re getting into. Don’t do this. Stay away, back away, blah, blah, blah.” So that was a little scary and I was like, “fine, sue me. I’m not going to put anything in here that I can’t verify.”
So, that’s different from some of the research. The research for me, it’s if it’s Hawaii, some beaches on Hawaii, I’ll go do the research myself. (laughs) Crackhouse in the Bronx, maybe I’ll send somebody else to go check it out for me.
You recently announced you have a collaboration coming out with Dolly Parton (Run, Rose, Run). There’s also a companion album with the book. You’ve done two books now with President Clinton. Do you have any dream collaborators?
Pope Francis (laughs). I don’t know (laughs)… My wife and I the other day were actually talking about that. We’ll see what comes up.
People bang on the door a lot. I don’t have anything that I’m thinking of right now. The Dolly thing is really cool and the Clinton thing.
I’ve actually become pretty close friends with him. Here’s the interesting thing about the Clintons and you read all this baloney and stuff. My wife and I have gone out to dinner with he and Hillary half a dozen times now.
The first time, it was three or four hours, and we’re at this restaurant, and we hadn’t been with them before; the two of them, and like three or four times during the meal, we noticed that they were holding hands under the table. People don’t think about that; that’s not the way they see them.
For Christmas, we exchange gifts and stuff and what did he give me? Monopoly for Socialists for Christmas. Which is pretty cool. He’s funny. We get along nicely and the Dolly thing has been great. She sang “Happy Birthday” to me over the telephone. Who gets that? JFK had Marilyn Monroe sing to him. That was cool.
So, I don’t know. Bono?
He’s known for his books.
(Laughing)
You’re the world’s bestselling author…
Probably J.K. Rowling, but whatever.
But with success also comes a fair amount of criticism.
No shit!
Stephen King has famously criticized you, but he also gave a very positive review of The Noise.
That was very nice and surprising. To me, just the way I’m wired, the criticism is just too grade school to me. I’m just not going to get into it. It’s just me. The thing is I like a lot of his books. The End. That’s kind of where I leave it.
Understand, behind the computer here is the Hudson River, which is great. It’s like two miles wide here and I grew up in Newburgh, which is up the river about 25 miles .
It’s a small town; ranked the sixth most violent small town in America a couple of years ago. Tough way to grow up. My father grew up in a poor house there and I consider this a blessing; I look at things the way a kid from Newburgh would. It’s like, “holy shit, Bill Clinton. He called?”
Doing this thing, I did a book; it got published. I remember the first book, The Thomas Berryman Number. I had left J. Walter Thompson, And one day I’m working and I get this phone call and it’s a woman from the Edgar Committee and she goes, “we couldn’t find you…”
I don’t know why. They said the Edgar thing is going to be that weekend or the following weekend, whatever hell it was, and you have to come because your books been nominated for “Best First Novel” and I go, “I can’t come”. I don’t remember what it was, but I couldn’t come.
And she said, “no, you have to come. You’ve been nominated for “Best First Novel.”
I said, “I heard you the first time. But I can’t do it.”
She says, “you’ve got to come. You won.”
I said, “okay.”
And I went, and it was funny; I was 26 years old I wasn’t living at home, but I did bring my mom and dad. I remember getting in there and I was still nervous because I go, maybe she’d lie just to get me here. But I won and I got up and even though I knew I won, I wasn’t prepared, or I was too shy or nervous.
I remember saying, “I guess I’m a writer now.”
I think what I meant by that was that in those days, it may be still, if you hadn’t published anything and you’re just writing stuff;You meet somebody at a bar or whatever. “What do you do?”
“I’m a writer”, and they go, “what have you published or have I read anything?”
“I haven’t actually published anything.”
They’d look at you like you’re mad person. I think maybe now you get away with it a little bit more..
I think that now that’s changed because of eBooks. I think eBooks changed the playing field.
I think you’re right. Anyway, but that’s what I meant by by, “I guess I’m a writer now.”
That’s pretty awesome though, to win an award for your first book.
Yeah! I mean I was a baby. But, I still look at stuff the same way. It’s still like, “wow, this is cool….Oh, there’s my book.”
Criticism in general, do you read your reviews?
Depends! I try not to. My style is a colloquial style. It’s a way we tell stories verbally to one another. I think it’s valid. I don’t think it’s the only way. If everybody wrote this way it would be a bore. I like James Joyce; I like Ulysses, I actually read it twice. That’s a whole another style. I think the colloquial thing is valid.
I mean, if you wrote down the story that you tell everybody, and you know it works well; but if you wrote it down, probably no spectacular sentences, but it’s still valid. That’s kind of what I do.
Some people go, “he just writes the outline; he just writes the 70-page outline.” Well go and try to write a 70 page outline and see what you think of it. It’s more complicated than you think it is to tell a story and as I said before on The Noise, to come up with a premise that you think people will go like, “What? How can this be going on?”
And you’re buying into it.
There is a thread. I don’t want to give any spoilers, but there’s quite a bit of the book where you don’t know exactly what we’re dealing with. Especially when we see religious people consulting with the President…
Yeah! Because nobody can figure it out, so all bets are off; is it religion, as you said before, is it is sci-fi? Is it aliens? That’s all fun to play with and to get the reader going, “like what the hell is this?”
But at the end of the book, we see a lot of things happen, in the story.
They’re right about to attack Portland I was on with Portland yesterday. They’re like, “haven’t we had enough? We’ve had fires, we’ve had the floods, we’ve had the riots, and now you got to bring The Noise to Portland?”
There is a satisfactory ending. There’s a satisfactory solution to the science.
I think so…
One of the questions I have for you is, you’re actually known quite a bit for collaborating with others, you have your own series, several series, but is there a method that you have for selecting co-writers?
I’m kind of full up. It’s a funny thing. Not too much up here, but we’re in Florida. There are a lot of vets down there and I’m sure they got stories and they’ll come up, “I got to tell my story. Can you tell me what to do?” And you want to be nice to people; I do. But sometimes, it’s like, this guy came up to me and he goes, “I want you to write my autobiography .”
And I’m going, “I don’t know. How would I write your autobiography?”
He goes, “well, you’re the writer”(laughs).
You want to be nice to people because they probably have some story or pieces of a story, but I’m not going to do it. In terms of how do I pick; there’s a lot of people that I know. The J.D. thing was very unusual in that he sent me his last book. I read a chapter and I went; this is pretty good. This guy knows how to write; and more than anything else in terms of my collaborators what I look for more than anything else is whether they can actually write scenes. I kind of know the story. The one year I wrote, I wrote two books by myself and then 2600 pages of outlines.
That’s a lot of frigging outlines. It’s crazy.
I have just been doing some stuff with sports writer Mike Lupica, and I think we’re really cool together because we’re both pretty funny and agree about the dialogue; where it’s going and how the scene should go and we’re open minded.
But if I am looking, which is rare, it’s somebody where I think they can write the seeds. What I will do, in almost all cases I’ll write at 50-80-page outline, then I want the collaborator to come in and add or subtract in some cases. For two reasons; one, I want their thinking, and second, I want them emotionally invested and sometimes they don’t add that much, but they go, “Okay, now it works for me” and I think, great. Because if it doesn’t work for you, you’re not going to do a good job. At this point in my life; and it doesn’t always work out, but at the end of the day, at the end of the project, you want to go I’m really glad I started that
For example. I don’t know if you’re aware of it. I did a nonfiction book this year, Walk in My Combat Boots: True Stories from America’s Bravest Warriors.
Once again, you don’t know when you start out whether it’s going to be any good. I met this guy actually through the guy who turned me on to Jeffrey Epstein, Matt Eversmann
Matt Eversmann was the actual Sergeant portrayed in Black Hawk Down. He was an Army Ranger. Tough guy, not nice guy. He’s a good friend at this point and I saw Matt do some interviews of military people and my experience and most people’s experience, like when my dad came home from World War II, he never talked about it ever.
A lot of times, men and women, they won’t talk about it. They’ll talk about it to other vets, but they won’t talk about it to people who haven’t been through the experience. But I watched Matt Eversmann do these interviews, and he could get people to talk. And that’s where the idea of Walk in My Combat Boots came from. I knew that most people hadn’t told their stories and so, we went out and we did almost 200 interviews.
Matt would do these 40-50-page interviews and then I would turn them into these 5,6,7 page nuggets that captured who that person was up to a point and then what their experience was like.
There was one guy. He had been reservist; he was a dentist. He got over there and they captured Saddam Hussein, and he was having tooth aches. They throw in this guy with Saddam Hussein as his dentist; so, it’s a seven page story. It was great.
There was another woman who, after 9/11, she went into the Marines and she said, “I want to go into combat” and at that point, they said, “we don’t have women in combat”.
She said, “what’s the toughest, toughest thing I could do?”
And she said, it would be hard, but you could become a door gunner in helicopters. You can’t be in combat, but you could be a door gunner. But to do that, she had to go through these four steps; four schools, and she had to be number one, because she was a woman. That is a really cool story. You have your G.I. Jane, which is bullshit, and this thing was amazing and she became a door gunner.
When Matt and put it together, our mission was, if you’ve been through it, you’d say Eversmann and Patterson got it right and if you’re one of these people that bullshits about, I know what the military is, you have no idea.
We just finished one with E.R. nurses (E.R. Nurses: True Stories from America’s Greatest Unsung Heroes). A mind blower. You have no idea what E.R. nurses do. This is pre-COVID and we did COVID, too. I said to Matt, don’t let them talk about COVID until the end of the interview, because we want to get their story and COVID will just take it over.
But it’s unbelievable and you read this thing. The other thing about E.R. nurses is if you wanted to write a book about the underbelly in this country, where do you go? You go to neighborhoods, “who’s the craziest bastard on this street?” or whatever.
No, go to E.R. Rooms, they see these people every day. There’s a lot of stories like this. For example. this nurse is talking about how it was relatively quiet for a couple hours in the E.R. and it was one guy sitting there was singing obscene songs on one bed and then there was another guy who claimed he was pregnant.
Suddenly she looked at the guy who said he was pregnant, he had blood all over his shirt and she said, “Sir, can you take your shirt off for me?” And he took his shirt off, and the guy had carved up in his stomach and inserted a baby doll in his stomach.
When I talked about the underbelly, they’re seeing this stuff every day and it’s unbelievable in terms of really understanding where some people are coming from. At any rate, but the point being, you just don’t know. You think it’s going to be great. I think these two books, Combat Boots, and E.R. Nurses are the most important books that have ever done by far. We’re doing one on cops now, which is also fascinating as somebody that writes cop novels and now you interview 120 of them, and it’s like…okay. (laughs) This is interesting.
You famously write your books in longhand. How do you think that affects your creative process?
It slows me down, thank God. My pencil is slower than my brain.
In research, one thing that I found to be very powerful was that your statement that you wanted to set out to, “prove there’s no such thing as a person who doesn’t like to read only to people who haven’t found the right book yet.” And you’ve donated a lot of money to teachers, teacher scholarships, and children and the military. Do you remember the book that made you fall in love with reading?
I still haven’t read it. I was not a big reader. That’s probably why I’m not a better writer, but I wasn’t a big reader and then I worked at a mental hospital from age eighteen on and I worked a lot of night shifts, and I started reading like crazy. It was all serious stuff; Günter Grass, Henry James and whatever. I didn’t read any of that crap that I write (laughs). Now I’m kidding about it. I was all James Joyce et cetera, et cetera. Then I started scribbling stories and somebody said, you’re lucky if you find something you like to do, then it’s a miracle somebody will pay you to do it. And man, I just loved writing stories.
As a kid, my mother was a teacher. I went to Catholic school. I think they turned us off more than turned us on. I think that’s why the kids books that I do; I think I actually the best books I do are the kids’ books. Because a lot of the books that I read as a kid I thought they sucked. I didn’t like them. Treasure Island I liked. There were a few, but mostly no. I liked The Most Dangerous Game, which wasn’t a book, but a short story.
But there was very little and most of us in the school is like we listened carefully for the stuff that we were getting and nobody sort of said, “you got to read this, this, and that”.
It was like you read this stuff that’s going to bore you to death and learn all these rules about grammar and so, we had people that didn’t like English class. It was a good decent Catholic High School, everybody went to college for my class, but almost none of us liked to read. When we moved to Massachusetts, and I started working at the hospital, I started reading like crazy and that’s where I fell in love with reading and writing and then it was, read everything I could get my hands on. Years later, and I really wasn’t into commercial fiction, I was probably a snob about it.
I read one year, The Exorcist and The Day of The Jackal and I went, these are pretty good. I can’t write 100 Years of Solitude, I don’t think I’m that good, but I might be able to write something like this.
That turned me on to sort of commercial fiction.
But it wasn’t stuff as a kid that got me into reading. The big thing about the kid stuff is right now, there’s, I think like 46-47% of the kids in this country reading at grade level, which is a disgrace; it’s awful. People are going to die because of that, kids. They’re going to go to prison. It’s just awful things.
I’ve been working with the University of Florida for four or five years now; they actually we have the vaccine, they have a way to help teachers to become better teachers, they have numbers up into the mid-70s to mid-80s, in school, after school after school, we can fix this. The problem is getting state governments to commit to it and then have to commit to more money, they just have to spend the money differently and we can solve that we can get the whole country reading at 70% of kids reading at grade level. That means a hell of a lot more kids got getting into high school, getting through high school, getting to college, if that’s the appropriate place for them to be ; being better human beings. It’s important. It’s just so hard to get legislators to kind of consider thinking outside of the box just a little bit.
Personally, I feel very old that, because I feel like cell phones and social media has kind of taken away the notion of reading because it’s important. I’ve always been a very voracious reader from the time I was a kid. My dad was a voracious reader. I would read adult fiction, I read a lot of commercials. I was a big fan Robert B. Parker, I had read all of the Spenser books starting when I was 12 years old. I think now there’s too many distractions where kids don’t realize that the ultimate distraction is a book. What a wonderful portable way to go into another world.
I get it. Speaking of Spenser. The year I first went to the Edgars for “Best First Novel”, won first best first novel, Spenser won “Best Novel” for Promised Land, I don’t remember which one it was. At the end of it, they had a little photo session. I’m standing next to Parker, and I had read all of the Spenser novels and I was nervous and shy and I blanked on Spenser’s name. I said, “I read all your books…I’m sorry, I can’t remember…”
And he looks at me and he goes, “Spenser, like the poet.”
I go, “oh yeah, right…” (laughs) It was so fucking embarrassing. (laughs)
Do you actually have a preference for good reviews or bad reviews?
Good reviews! At least I like it that they read the goddamn book. One of the publishers found out that the majority of the people that don’t like my books, have never read any of my books and that doesn’t work for me. Read the book. Hate the book. Hate me. But you got to read the book. You’ll like The Noise.
For instance, your last book I was not crazy about. I was disappointed with it. That was The Shadow.
Okay. That’s one of those ones where you’re really going to go with that or not. I’m okay with it. We didn’t set it in the Thirties, and some people are going to go, “that’s not what I’m looking for.”
The trick is warning people that it’s not going to go where you think it’s going to go. Did one for Doc Savage, it’s also very different. I think that one is really good, but it doesn’t deal with”The” Doc Savage. It deals with a descendant.
If it wasn’t The Shadow, I would have thought it was a fun thriller.
I get it. I’ve heard that a little bit and I think that’s totally fair. But a lot of it is just the expectations and sometimes like I wrote a book Woman of God, I think it actually is pretty cool. It’s about the notion that this woman is being considered as Pope and you get that right in the beginning. You’re like, “What?” It’s kind of a cool story, very saga-like. But the thing of it is you’ll get it and people go like, “I thought it was an Alex Cross.”
You’ve got to put it on the cover. “This is not Alex Cross,” or even if you put it, it wouldn’t matter. You put it on the cover. This is not Suzanne’s Diary for Nicholas; no one dies in this book; well at least no one gets killed. It’s all fair, but what you and try not to, because if you do something different if it’s not Rice Krispies, man, you can be in trouble . What you said about The Shadow is absolutely accurate. I mean it is and some people will not care for that.
It was interesting because I saw a lot of people online kind of vocalize about it and yet no one had read the book and at that point I had read it. I said if you don’t want to read it, fine, but don’t judge until you’ve read it.
I’m sort of in that camp of that stuff. See the movie at least and you get some of these reviews; and not just me but anybody. This is a beauty, The Cellist by Daniel Silva. The book comes out and I don’t usually watch this stuff, but I did a little bit because of the Clinton thing which had all of these incredible number of five star reviews for The President’s Daughter, much more than than The Reese Witherspoon pick. I’m going like you know this is really pretty good story. But I saw the Silva thing. It was two stars.
People love his character Gabriel Allon, and I look there’s about 20 people who have come on who had not read the book but because he dedicated it to the Capitol Police, they gave it no stars or one star What? One, he dedicated the book to the Capitol Police. So what? What’s wrong there? What did those people do that deserves you for coming down on them like that? And two, what does that have to do with the book? Stop being crazy.
My last question for you which is actually borders on complete foolishness is what else do you have coming up?
E.R. Nurses. The Dolly book next year. Another Cross book. I think the Cross books are holding pretty steady. Some of the series are interesting. Next year, there’s one called Blowback. I try to get Little, Brown to be aware of like what I think are the particularly good ones. I think The Noise is quite good. Some of them you go like, “I wanted it to be great. It was pretty good, but not great or sometimes, not very good. Whatever adjectives you want to use. ”
This one Blowback next year is particularly good. It’s about a, if you can imagine it, a President who goes insane in office How could that ever happen? (laughs) It’s a pretty cool story and I think it delivers. That’s a neat one.
The first one I did with Lupica. It’s not a thriller, The Horsewoman, in January. That’s a fun read. It’s about these two women a mother and daughter who are competing to go to the Olympics and equestrian sports and a question is interesting because it’s the only sport in the Olympics where men and women compete in the same arena and it’s kind of cool story. It’s different. I need to put on the cover, “No One Dies In This Book — No One Gets Murdered.”
When is Doc Savage coming?
That’s next year, too. That’s fun. That really turned out I thought really well. I get it about the shadow and I don’t disagree.
I know you have one that just came out but are you doing any more of the Ali Cross (centered around Alex Cross’ young son)? Was he named after Muhammad Ali?
Yeah, there’s two. I say Ali. Originally there was a little connection there. I did the kids’ book, Becoming Muhammad Ali, which was a cool one. Muhammad Ali’s estate came and asked me to do if I do something about when he was Cassius Clay, a kid in Louisville because most people just know he wasn’t a good student; but he was dyslexic and very charismatic; very smart and very wise about a lot of stuff, including racial relations in the South. I did it with Kwame Alexander. It’s part poetry part prose and it’s a really neat book for kids to read and to learn the story about a kid who really had no hope of getting out of Louisville, and whatever. But boy did he make it out in a big way; and became not just a great boxer, but a great human being.
That was an honor to do it. I went to Vanderbilt graduate school and his widow, Lani went there too, which was kind of cool. We got pretty friendly. It was nice.
I can do one with Stephen King. (laughs) That would wake him up .
I actually just finished my autobiography next year. It’s all stories. I think I’m pretty kind to everybody, including Stephen. But I do say in there, “it’s my loss, his loss, our loss.” I think it’s crazy, but it is what it is.
There’s only so many of you guys that reach this echelon.
Whatever it is. We’re both small town guys. We’ve been successful.
I think I’m funnier.
The Noise is available now in hardcover, e-books, and audio books.
