Meet Devne Greene

Deven Greene has previously published six medical thrillers. She has a PhD in biochemistry, a medical degree, and has practiced pathology for over 20 years. She incorporates elements of medicine and/or science in her works.

Full Transcript.

Let's Talk Forensics, Murder, and Writing a Thriller with Deven Greene

Laura Williams: [00:00:00] Ever wonder how much research is too much when you're writing a book, or how a single real-world fact could completely unlock your next major plot twist? Joining us is Deven Greene, author of six gripping medical thrillers. With a PhD in biochemistry, a medical degree, and over 20 years of experience practicing pathology, Deven weaves real science into high-stakes fiction. She is the perfect guest to help us unpack how deep research can elevate your plot, how to manage the time and cost of chasing facts, and where to find brilliant story opportunities hidden in the data. Deven, thank you so much for joining me today. How are you?

Deven Greene: [00:00:40] I'm doing well. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you.

Laura Williams: [00:00:43] We had some technical issues. Luckily, we got them straightened out, because I was really looking forward to this interview. I do a lot of research, mainly for books, and I love to research maybe too much. So I'm interested to get the information from you. When you [00:01:00] get a new idea, where does the initial research spark usually begin for you, and how do you protect your writing time from getting completely swallowed by the research rabbit hole? Which is my personal demon.

Deven Greene: [00:01:15] Well, it's different for every book I write, but I get an idea. Sometimes it just comes to me, or sometimes it's from something I've read. It's usually about something I know something about already. It piques my curiosity, and I start thinking about all sorts of things I can do with it. Before I start writing something, I think a lot about it. What do I want to do with this? What are the characters going to be? What is the plot going to be? Some writers start with characters. I start with plots, and then I think of the characters and where things are going to go. After I think about it a [00:02:00] lot, I try to determine what I know enough about and what I don't know enough about, and I always have to do some research for my books. The amount depends on how familiar I am with the topic. Often I have to research things that are kind of off topic, because I have that come up in the story that aren't what the main focus is, but people have lives, so I research things about stuff that might happen, stuff they might come in contact with. And when I start doing my research, I don't spend a lot of money on it. I know some people might travel to places. I don't feel you have to actually go to places, although it's certainly nice. Now, my first published novel takes place largely in China, and I happened to have gone to China a number of years before I ever considered writing this book, [00:03:00] so I had some memories of it, and that helped. I live near San Francisco, and I have some scenes in this area, and sometimes I've actually traveled into the city and walked around and looked at where's the police station, things like that. Not necessary, but if it's easy I'll do it, and I take pictures. And then I use the internet a lot, and it's very helpful. One must kind of trust but verify, because not everything you read is true, so it's nice to have different sources, and if you look something up, you might want to do it several times. You might get several answers.

Laura Williams: [00:03:43] Right.

Deven Greene: [00:03:43] When I first started, AI wasn't a big thing, but now we have ChatGPT and other AI resources. A lot of my writer friends use ChatGPT and other engines also, and I [00:04:00] resisted that, but now I actually shell out 20 bucks a month for ChatGPT. And I do find that it's helpful, not only in research, but also it will help me maybe write little blurbs and things like that, that aren't integral to the story. I get library books, which is free. Occasionally I'll buy a book if it's something I'm really interested in and I would buy it anyway. But between books and the internet and actually talking to people, I think I find out what I need to find out, and that's how I approach it. To get back to your question, I get to a point before I start writing where I feel like I have enough, and at some point you have to draw a line and say, “I've got to [00:05:00] start writing.” So I don't spend tons and tons of time researching, but I kind of know when I have enough. I feel like I know when I know enough, and then I start writing, and I do research as I write. Things will come up when I get into some details, I realize, “Oh, I don't really have that detail,” and then I look it up. I actually use a very large screen on my computer, so I have my document out, I use Word, I'm typing, and then I'm opening up on the side, you know, Google and ChatGPT or whatever else reference I might want, so I can be reading that and working on it as I'm writing. So I don't really finish all my research before I start writing.

Laura Williams: [00:05:55] I write fantasy fiction, but you would be surprised how much research I have [00:06:00] to do. Like this series that I'm working on now is based in Louisiana. I've never been to Louisiana, but it has a historical aspect to it, so I needed to look up the history of Louisiana and make sure that I fit well enough within the facts. And then there's another historical piece where this gentleman is writing in a journal, and he does things like visits New Orleans for a business meeting and meets this woman there. And so I needed to know what the town looked like, or now a city, but what it looked like at that time, and all the different things. And I find also, too, that I'm a very visual person,

Deven Greene: [00:06:44] Mm-hmm.

Laura Williams: [00:06:44] so images of places are really helpful for me to build settings and decide how my characters will interact with the environment. I love that part of it. That's one of my favorite parts about [00:07:00] writing, is the research.

Deven Greene: [00:07:03] Oh, yeah, me too. I just learn so much stuff. I'm kind of naturally curious. I learn all sorts of strange facts. I didn't mention this, but I rely on YouTube also. I had a scene in a subway in China, and actually I went to China, but I never used the subway, so I was able to get video. It's kind of fun, because now I have a little bit of information about a lot of things, so sometimes things will come up in conversation, and I'll say, “Oh,

Laura Williams: [00:07:32] Right.

Deven Greene: [00:07:32] about that,” you know?

Laura Williams: [00:07:34] I've always been like that, and people just look at me sometimes like, “How do you... Where did that come from? How do you know

Deven Greene: [00:07:42] why do you know that?”

Laura Williams: [00:07:43] that?”

Deven Greene: [00:07:44] Yeah.

Laura Williams: [00:07:45] My mom's the same way, so we have the wildest conversations, and I'm like, “Why did you even think of that now? Where did you get that information?” And she's like, “Well, I read it in this article.” But I love that curious mind, and I think most of us writers have [00:08:00] that innate curiosity about what the world is like and our place in it, and the humanity. It's just so cool.

Deven Greene: [00:08:09] Yeah. Yeah.

Laura Williams: [00:08:11] I know one tool that I use a lot is NotebookLM, because I can... It's a Google product, and it's free up to a point, but you can definitely just use the free version. But I throw all my research, depending on what I'm working on, into a notebook in this program, and then when I do have a question, because I can't remember everything, I can go back and ask it. So I have a lot of information on New Orleans, and I can ask it a question about that, and it'll give me back the answer out of my research with cited sources and everything, so I know where it came from. It's not just random. So that's a really cool tool, if you have a chance to check that out. It's helped me a lot. [00:09:00]

Deven Greene: [00:09:00] Yeah, I'll...

Laura Williams: [00:09:00] And I don't just do it on my writing. I use it for all kinds of things. I have a notebook just on how to podcast, so anytime I see an article or something interesting in podcasts, I throw it in there, and then later on, you know, I may not need that information now, but six months from now I might need to know that. So it saves me a lot of time of, you know, hunting down information that I had seen before, because we all do that, and you tuck away notes and everything everywhere and then can't find them,

Deven Greene: [00:09:29] and I sure wish I could remember everything I've learned.

Laura Williams: [00:09:33] Oh, but I would be so annoying.

Deven Greene: [00:09:35] Yeah, right. I guess it's good we don't remember everything,

Laura Williams: [00:09:41] we have to have some limits to our nerd power.

Deven Greene: [00:09:44] Yeah, yeah, yeah. We'd be intolerable.

Laura Williams: [00:09:47] In the writing that you do, I know that accuracy has to be important, and so I know you had to spend so much time mastering scientific concepts. How do you [00:10:00] handle getting the information to actually weave its way into your story? I know this is a hard question to answer, but how do you try to do that? Can you kind of voice that?

Deven Greene: [00:10:11] Okay, so sometimes I'll have a concept that I want to communicate. You know, everybody does it differently. I hope that I do it effectively without it appearing to be too much of an info dump, but I do let facts get in there. It will be a part of the story, and usually I have it as a conversation. It can be somebody just kind of experiencing something. Actually, those tend to be the hardest parts to write, because I really am interested in these different scientific processes, or facts, or, you know, relationships and that sort of thing.

Laura Williams: [00:10:54] Right.

Deven Greene: [00:10:54] So I put a lot into my stories, and then I know it's too much, and of course I have a [00:11:00] lot of technical jargon and things like that. So I just bang it out. I mean, when I write, I just bang it out. So I bang it out, and then I go back and I look at it, and then I simplify it. I like to keep everything

Laura Williams: [00:11:13] Makes sense. Mm-hmm.

Deven Greene: [00:11:14] I like it accurate, and I like it to be fully explanatory of the concept I'm trying to get across. It goes through a number of iterations, and then what I do is I give it to a friend or my brother, who doesn't have a scientific background, and ask them to read it. And it invariably comes back that it needs to be redone. “This is too complicated, I didn't get that,” you know? So

Laura Williams: [00:11:49] good, though,

Deven Greene: [00:11:50] yeah.

Laura Williams: [00:11:51] you know

Deven Greene: [00:11:51] I find these things very interesting, and I want people to learn things from my books. There's a lot of smart people out there that haven't [00:12:00] gone to medical school or don't have advanced degrees, whatever, but they're smart, and they can understand. So I want it to be understandable, okay? So that's very important to me. And so I go back and forth and get it to a point where it's understandable. Sometimes I will leave out, and it pains me, it really pains me. Sometimes I'll leave out a detail which I think is really cool, and I want to put it in there, but it's just too much, okay? I have to make some tough decisions there, but at least it's accurate. I try to keep it as accurate as possible. A few things may be left out when necessary, but only when I think it's necessary and that it would bog things down, slow things down. But I really try to keep those passages short, and maybe there'll be a few, but my books are mostly action and things happening. It's not a [00:13:00] dissertation.

Laura Williams: [00:13:01] Right. Yeah, that's the way I would think about it. I love, though, that you have people to read it over and see if it is hard to understand, because you don't want the reader to have to stop and say, “I don't understand that. What is she talking about?”

Deven Greene: [00:13:18] Exactly. And I do have one friend who still says, you know, she skips over the science parts. I, you know, what can you do? Some people just aren't interested. Although Tom Clancy has a large following, and someone else has taken over since he passed away, most people I've heard skip over his highly technical discussions of the technology of what he's writing about.

Laura Williams: [00:13:46] Right. I know I have. I've read a lot of his work, and I know that sometimes, because it just gets like, for example, weaponry or something, I don't need that to finish the story. But I mean, also, too, you know, people [00:14:00] skip over sex scenes in books too. So, I mean, we get what we want out of books and move on, you know?

Deven Greene: [00:14:06] Yeah, as long as I don't know about it, it's okay. No.

Laura Williams: [00:14:09] No, that's right. You don't want to know that they just killed your darling, right?

Deven Greene: [00:14:13] I try to make it very accessible, fun to read, but some people just aren't interested.

Laura Williams: [00:14:18] I agree.

Deven Greene: [00:14:19] I don't understand it. How could you not be interested in that?

Laura Williams: [00:14:22] Yeah, it's fun. Even in the stuff that I write, I did a lot of research on witches. I know a lot about that stuff now, but I don't have all that in the stories.

Deven Greene: [00:14:33] Mm-hmm.

Laura Williams: [00:14:34] I had to absorb it to be able to take the information and make it realistic in a way,

Deven Greene: [00:14:45] that,

Laura Williams: [00:14:45] a dance

Deven Greene: [00:14:46] It's an important thing what you said, because sometimes you learn about something, and I think I've read books where the author has learned about something and they want to put in everything that they've learned, and [00:15:00] it kind of shows. So I realize I do learn a lot of cool stuff, but it's not going to get into my story.

Laura Williams: [00:15:08] Right.

Deven Greene: [00:15:09] It's not about all these facts, it's a story, and the facts, I put in what's needed to make the story work.

Laura Williams: [00:15:17] Yep. I enjoy it.

Deven Greene: [00:15:18] more. Yeah.

Laura Williams: [00:15:20] I really like doing the research.

Deven Greene: [00:15:22] Mm-hmm.

Laura Williams: [00:15:22] I have a book that I haven't finished, but it has a little girl murdered. I had to learn a lot for that, because some of the clues in the case were forensic things. I had to learn how police handle the evidence and all that. I had a friend that was a policeman that I had talked to — it makes your book seem more real. But then there's also a balance too, sometimes, because if you're trying to give too many real facts, like forensics, sometimes that can hurt your story, because if you get too far into the weeds on it, it can turn some people off. And I don't just [00:16:00] mean the medical jargon, I mean the subject matter. You can tell how somebody is brutally murdered and give a very vivid description of it without getting extremely specific. Do you know what I mean?

Deven Greene: [00:16:17] People die in my books, but I don't describe, you know, things happening.

Laura Williams: [00:16:23] No.

Deven Greene: [00:16:24] I mean, I've read some books that people love, and they talk about, you know, the blood dripping and the this. I don't want to write that. It doesn't interest me. And a pathologist, so I'm used to seeing a lot of stuff. I'll just say there's all sorts of readers out there.

Laura Williams: [00:16:41] Yeah. Well, I mean, you think about horror stories, they can get pretty graphic, but you have that expectation with a horror book. You don't always have that expectation with other novels, and then you're dumped into that, and you're like, “What is going on here?”

Deven Greene: [00:16:55] I'd say there's some thriller writers that always have a lot of gruesome stuff in it, [00:17:00] and it's expected.

Laura Williams: [00:17:01] Have you ever been in the middle of researching a topic and uncovered something — a real-world fact — that completely changed your plot or handed you a brilliant twist you hadn't planned for?

Deven Greene: [00:17:16] Well, now that you mention it, that actually happened on the latest book I wrote, which isn't out yet, coming out in August. It's my first non-medical book, it's an eco-thriller, and it's called Rhino Horn Underground, and it's about the rhino horn business. As you know, rhinos are being killed for their horns, and I had an idea — I hate to say too much about my books, okay? I'll say this much: I had an idea, it's scientifically based, it's not really medical, because it's rhinos, all right? I had an idea about how to approach that, stop [00:18:00] rhino poaching. So I start writing my book, and I thought, you know, I like my things to be doable. They probably haven't been done before. I'm working on this thing, it seems doable, and then I think, “I wonder if anybody's ever tried this before, if anybody's thought of this before.” And then I decided to Google it, and I found that yes, they had.

Laura Williams: [00:18:26] Wow.

Deven Greene: [00:18:26] Yeah, there had been a couple of companies that were trying to do what I was writing about, and they were all out of business.

Laura Williams: [00:18:37] Really?

Deven Greene: [00:18:38] I did a little investigating, and in fact I got a lot of help from somebody who had one of those businesses. He's now something else, he's a venture capitalist — smart guy, actually he's an MD — and he had started this company, and he explained what it... They got shut down by [00:19:00] environmentalists. Wildlife environmentalists shut them down and put a lot of pressure on the, just say, the cooperating... And he was very helpful to me, and I realized, and we both agree, that these wildlife environmentalists are just really off the mark. It's not 100%, you know, in that community, but they have been the loudest voices. And I believe that what I write about can be done.

Laura Williams: [00:19:39] That must have been absolutely fascinating to research. I mean, it's a difficult subject, don't get me wrong, but it must have been fascinating to research, because there are so many arms to the rhino horn business that, you know, obviously, your [00:20:00] normal person wouldn't know much about. So I mean, I've actually read a few things on it, but that's really fascinating.

Deven Greene: [00:20:09] I was really shocked that this had been thought of before, except I'd never heard of it being done, so I kind of thought it was an original idea, but that it had been shut down, and how it had been shut down, it was all very interesting. When I started writing, I was either going to do rhino horns or elephant tusks, and when I started looking into it, I was surprised to find that rhino horns are much more valuable than elephant tusks.

Laura Williams: [00:20:37] Right.

Deven Greene: [00:20:37] I thought it the other way around for some reason, but they're not, so that's why I chose rhino horns. It led me down this path, I had to add things about, you know, the environmental... I mean, there's a lot of stuff that's happened, I'll just say that, in the rhino horn sphere. It doesn't seem like it's going to be stopped the way [00:21:00] it's being approached, so, which is too

Laura Williams: [00:21:02] Whenever money's involved, that's a big problem.

Deven Greene: [00:21:05] There's a lot of money involved,

Laura Williams: [00:21:07] yeah. And sometimes you're dealing with corrupt governments and corrupt law enforcement, so it becomes even more complicated.

Deven Greene: [00:21:17] It's like the drug business, you know, [00:21:20] to get rid of it, [00:21:22] you can't, it just keeps happening. So

Laura Williams: [00:21:19] Right.

Laura Williams: [00:21:20] That's a good parallel.

Deven Greene: [00:21:21] yeah,

Laura Williams: [00:21:21] Yeah.

Laura Williams: [00:21:23] Well, that's interesting. That comes out in August?

Deven Greene: [00:21:27] That comes out in August. So I'm excited about that book.

Laura Williams: [00:21:31] I'm excited about that book. I think it would be a great story.

Deven Greene: [00:21:37] Yeah. So, my first eco-thriller, and yeah, I hope other people are interested in that. And I've had experiences with other things where things have happened that I've had in my books that hadn't happened before, or they come to my attention, because, for instance, in my first published book, Unnatural, has to do with genetic engineering [00:22:00] of human embryos, and it takes place in China. And when I wrote the book, there was an international moratorium on human genetic engineering, and it's still in place, supposedly. So I thought, “Well, what if people really did it?” You know, possible, right?

Laura Williams: [00:22:22] Why?

Deven Greene: [00:22:23] I figured, well, if it's going to happen, it's going to happen in an authoritarian government, and I thought either Russia or China, and I picked China because it's more scientifically advanced. And I also thought, well, it'd be easy to pick out a Chinese person with blue eyes. That makes it kind of easy to spot. Something happened to that kid, right?

Laura Williams: [00:22:47] Right.

Deven Greene: [00:22:49] So anyway, I write the book, and I'm editing it, and then, three or four years ago, a Chinese scientist announced that he had genetically engineered four embryos. It was a big [00:23:00] brouhaha, and, just as follow-up, you know, at first the Chinese government acted very outraged: “How could he do this? This is terrible. We would never allow that. And oh, we're going to... death penalty, this is the worst.” And I kind of followed it, and it turns out that he wound up getting house arrest for several months, and he's now back working at a university.

Laura Williams: [00:23:22] Yeah, because they just wanted the technology, I would think.

Deven Greene: [00:23:27] Well, they

Laura Williams: [00:23:27] pushed him into a corner and they're like, “Okay, we'll slap your hand, but we want that technology.”

Deven Greene: [00:23:35] Oh, I think they had it. There's four kids, and there's no follow-up, we don't know, their privacy's being protected. He was working with different genes than I had in my book, okay? But it shows that, of course, it's possible to do, and it actually happened. I was actually mad because my book wasn't out yet, and somebody had already done it. But I added something about it before it came [00:24:00] out.

Laura Williams: [00:24:00] The thing is, how often do we see that — something that's in a book or in a movie that we consider futuristic that later on does come true? It happens so much. Authors like you that work in that kind of space where they're doing medical thrillers and things like that, further down the line, whatever they thought up is true.

Deven Greene: [00:24:22] Yeah, I mean, a lot of things can happen, and sometimes there's laws against it, but there's things that are probably happening now that we don't know about, okay? So we know what's publicized, but we don't know what's not publicized. For all I know, they're genetically engineering a bunch of kids in China right now. They say they're not, but I don't know. The last book I actually published, called Happy Sun Farm, it's a bioterrorism story — a country comes in and buys up a lot of farmland, and they have a plan, I'll just say that. They [00:25:00] have secret labs in rural areas, okay? Sometimes things just jump out at you when you're writing about something. I saw a story on TV that in a farm area in Central California, they discovered a secret lab. It was found just by accident — somebody from the local government was investigating a parking violation.

Laura Williams: [00:25:25] Wow.

Deven Greene: [00:25:26] There would be out there in the rural community. But she saw this building that was abandoned, she smelled something coming out of there, and there was a pipe with stuff coming out. And she went in, and there's a lab with a lot of Asian people in there, and they had rats or mice that were genetically engineered,

Laura Williams: [00:25:49] Oh, wow, that's terrifying.

Deven Greene: [00:25:52] They had pathogens. Yeah. And I followed that, too, and they found out who owned the lab, and [00:26:00] they found him and sent him out of the country.

Laura Williams: [00:26:03] I've had this happen myself. So when you're researching something that has an emotional element — like the rhino horn story has an emotional element — when you're researching it, and you're like, “This is so horrific,” like in your book, The Organ Broker, which is about black market organs, how do you compartmentalize the dark real-world research without draining your own creative energy? How do you manage that?

Deven Greene: [00:26:31] Yeah, well, I pick these subjects because I'm interested in them. I've seen a lot of painful things. People get bad diseases, they have bad outcomes, it's just kind of part of life. And sometimes in my books, I do write scenes that actually affect me. I just move on, okay? And I have some scenes when I reread them, to this day I kind of tear up. I still write them. [00:27:00] And I think I can remain objective. I mean, when I'm writing a pathology report, for instance, I would like to say everything's normal,

Laura Williams: [00:27:10] Right.

Deven Greene: [00:27:11] it's not, I have to put it in the report.

Laura Williams: [00:27:14] Right, right.

Deven Greene: [00:27:15] I can't make stuff up. And it's kind of interesting, because sometimes I would get a specimen, and there's no disease, and the doctor submitting it thinks it's going to be something terrible. And so if I tell them it's not what you thought it was, it's not X, it's Y, and they thank me, you know?

Laura Williams: [00:27:34] Right.

Deven Greene: [00:27:35] “Oh, thank you, thank you.”

Laura Williams: [00:27:37] Right?

Deven Greene: [00:27:38] I mean, the treating doctor always cares about the patients, but they kind of act like I made it that way. And sometimes if it's the opposite, they try to argue with me, like,

Laura Williams: [00:27:49] Oh, I get that.

Deven Greene: [00:27:50] “How can it be that?” And, you know, I have to stick with the facts.

Laura Williams: [00:27:53] Well, yeah, because in your position as a pathologist, what you find really impacts people's [00:28:00] lives, so you have to be very careful.

Deven Greene: [00:28:02] Yeah, no, you have to tell the truth, and whatever it is, it's not my fault

Laura Williams: [00:28:06] Right.

Deven Greene: [00:28:07] it's good, and I didn't make it bad. I'm happy when it's better than expected, I'm happy, but it's

Laura Williams: [00:28:14] Perfect.

Deven Greene: [00:28:14] not really something I actively did.

Laura Williams: [00:28:18] Yeah.

Deven Greene: [00:28:18] Same thing with, you know, when I'm doing my research and things like that, these are the facts, this is, you know, what happens. Some of it is a bit dark, I mean, nothing like a horror thing, or

Laura Williams: [00:28:31] I mean, life is dark. Not everything in life is all roses and rainbows.

Deven Greene: [00:28:38] But I always like to have a good ending. A couple are maybe a little ambiguous, but in general they're good endings.

Laura Williams: [00:28:45] So we

Deven Greene: [00:28:46] Yeah.

Laura Williams: [00:28:49] talked about the cost of research and everything, and I totally agree the internet is such a big help.

Deven Greene: [00:28:56] Yeah.

Laura Williams: [00:28:58] Neither of us are spring [00:29:00] chickens, and we remember doing book reports in school and having to slog the books from the library,

Deven Greene: [00:29:07] Uh-huh.

Laura Williams: [00:29:07] sitting there with the index cards and notepaper, making notes and drawing all our little illustrations, because we couldn't just print them off. A lot different now. I think now writers probably don't have to travel nearly as much as they used to, because you don't need to walk the streets of Paris. You can go onto Google Maps, or YouTube, or look at other people's pictures and get a feel for it. It's so much different now, it's easier, but also, too, I think that we kind of miss some of the romance, you know?

Deven Greene: [00:29:44] Well, there's still

Laura Williams: [00:29:45] of the writing

Deven Greene: [00:29:46] “Oh, I have to go, you know, I have to go here or there to write this book.” I'm like, yeah, well, maybe, maybe not.

Laura Williams: [00:29:55] Of course, then you have such a high expense. Would you [00:30:00] rather spend the money on traveling, or would you rather spend it on the actual publishing of your book, and your book cover, and your editor? You probably have access to things that a lot of us wouldn't have, and correct me if I'm wrong, but I know that in some of the other projects I've worked on, I would love to have had better sources than were available to me, but I couldn't get those sources because maybe they were a published paper or something like that, it wasn't easily attainable for me. Do you ever do that? You may have access to those kinds of things, but do you ever find yourself contacting university libraries or professors or something for clarification? I know you said you talked to the one gentleman who had the business, but

Deven Greene: [00:30:51] At first I was really hesitant to do things like that. You know, I'm not the most outgoing person, but I've been doing more [00:31:00] about that. The only time I actually contacted a university was for The Organ Broker. I wanted to talk to some transplant nurses. I know about transplants, I know about matching, I know about this, I know about that. I mean, when I was a resident, they had a big liver transplant program, I knew a lot of stuff about it, but I didn't really know the nuts and bolts behind the paperwork, the approval process,

Laura Williams: [00:31:26] That's a good perspective from nurses, because they kind of see everything

Deven Greene: [00:31:31] There are transplant nurses that operate the program, and there's different levels to that. So I wanted to talk to a transplant doctor, but I didn't need to, I never touched base with one of those. But I occasionally do know some people that can be helpful, just because I'm in the medical field. But if I have a question about running a restaurant, I wouldn't know. I don't know anybody who owns a restaurant, okay? So, and just as an [00:32:00] aside, I attended something called the Police Writers Academy, or Writers Academy, and they have a thing

Laura Williams: [00:32:08] Wow.

Deven Greene: [00:32:09] where they have a police academy for writers,

Laura Williams: [00:32:12] That had to be fascinating.

Deven Greene: [00:32:14] it was great. It was a real kick. There were real cops, they gave lectures, and they did stuff. We got to do stuff, fire a gun. It was just fantastic.

Laura Williams: [00:32:26] Oh, I would love that.

Deven Greene: [00:32:28] Well, you can look into it. They have it every year. You can go, it's in Wisconsin.

Laura Williams: [00:32:32] Oh, that's cool.

Deven Greene: [00:32:34] Yeah. So you have to travel there, and it does cost some money.

Laura Williams: [00:32:38] Well, yeah.

Deven Greene: [00:32:38] They always have a good speaker. Oh, and get this — things just happened, okay? I don't know if you know who Janet Ramsland is.

Laura Williams: [00:32:46] Don't know.

Deven Greene: [00:32:47] She's a well-known psychiatrist, forensic psychiatrist, and she's on a lot of crime shows talking about criminals and things like that, okay? She's written a lot of books [00:33:00] about criminal serial killers, et cetera. She's not naive, and she was a featured speaker when I went, okay? I thought it was really interesting, and I especially thought it was really interesting because this happened shortly after the arrest of the guy who murdered those students in Moscow, Idaho, okay? You remember the four students that were killed. So, and I remembered reading about him, he was a criminology student, and he had studied under Ramsland. I thought, “I wonder if she's going to talk about him.” Well, she didn't, she didn't mention it. She gave a good talk. I wasn't sure if I should ask her, but I asked her what she thought of that, and she said he was her student, he was the most wonderful person, and she was sure he didn't do it. She was going on and on and on, [00:34:00] and I thought, “Interesting.” She really thought he didn't do it. She had such a good impression of this fellow.

Laura Williams: [00:34:07] Isn't that the way, though, especially with sociopaths, that they... My mom met a serial killer one time down in Florida. He came into the business she was working in, and she said, “He was not only good-looking, he was just so easy to talk to and polite.” I'm like, “Oh, that's creepy.” My daughter says that if anybody comes into my house, if the FBI comes to my house, that I'm probably going to be in trouble, because I have, like, two full bookshelves of ways to kill people — you know, books on forensic science and, what is his name, Jim Lee, he's a very famous forensic guy.

Deven Greene: [00:34:50] Oh, there's...

Laura Williams: [00:34:51] one of his te-

Deven Greene: [00:34:52] yeah,

Laura Williams: [00:34:52] one of his textbooks, which is amazing. I'm so thrilled that I got hold of it. But I have books on [00:35:00] poisoning, the body farms, all kinds of stuff. But, because it's...

Deven Greene: [00:35:04] Bundy, by any chance, that you were

Laura Williams: [00:35:05] That's exactly who it was. But, yeah, that was creepy. I mean, she thought it was creepy, it was disturbing.

Deven Greene: [00:35:11] The interesting thing, though, was that Katherine Ramsland is no naive person,

Laura Williams: [00:35:16] No. No, and especially being in that lane.

Deven Greene: [00:35:20] I was a little bit surprised that she...

Laura Williams: [00:35:22] I would have been too.

Deven Greene: [00:35:23] But then afterwards, she said, after he was convicted, I was just kind of interested in her response. She said, “Well, I was always afraid that somebody might take my courses because they wanted to learn how to do the perfect crime,” you know?

Laura Williams: [00:35:36] Yeah.

Deven Greene: [00:35:36] Which,

Laura Williams: [00:35:37] Well, see, there's a book there too,

Deven Greene: [00:35:40] Yeah.

Laura Williams: [00:35:40] it's somebody taking one of those courses to do the perfect crime, and you're the professor that's like, ‘Wait a second, there's too many similarities.’ That would be interesting. My mind was just going off

Deven Greene: [00:35:54] Yeah,

Laura Williams: [00:35:55] I don't know, probably not, if she felt that way. It would maybe be hard for her to [00:36:00] write about it. It's very interesting to me, about people who commit murders. Like the one book I was working on, had a murdered little girl, so I kind of had to think about that some. But the way people's minds work that commit murder, and that they can disassociate themselves from the act of the murder, it's fascinating to me.

Deven Greene: [00:36:21] Like the BTK killer, you know, you read about him. She communicated a lot with him and wrote a book about it.

Laura Williams: [00:36:28] Wow.

Deven Greene: [00:36:28] These people are just, you know, church-going...

Laura Williams: [00:36:31] You never know. But that's how we can get away with writing books that they can believe are believable even if they're unbelievable, is because you never know. You never know what's going to happen or how things will end up.

Deven Greene: [00:36:43] I try not to be too mistrustful of people.

Laura Williams: [00:36:47] No, you have to have a balance, of course, but

Deven Greene: [00:36:50] most people you meet are not serial killers, so that's

Laura Williams: [00:36:52] No, thank goodness.

Deven Greene: [00:36:54] Yeah.

Laura Williams: [00:36:56] That would be an issue.

Deven Greene: [00:36:58] yeah, but there's a

Laura Williams: [00:36:59] [00:37:00] I got to be honest with you, I have dated some men that flipped a switch, like, months later that were just like completely different people than the way they presented themselves. And it's like you see on TV, these women... I've never, thank God, been harmed or had my bank accounts emptied. But you see the women on TV, they're like, “This was the greatest guy, their whole family liked him, except maybe the one brother.” It's like, something's up with that dude. But it's hard to sometimes suss out who you're really talking to, unless you know them well.

Deven Greene: [00:37:38] Absolutely.

Laura Williams: [00:37:39] Yeah.

Deven Greene: [00:37:40] But, you know, the scariest people, I think, are the paranoid schizophrenics,

Laura Williams: [00:37:47] Yes.

Deven Greene: [00:37:48] because there's no... they believe in what they're doing

Laura Williams: [00:37:52] Right. There's no reality there. There's... And there's,

Deven Greene: [00:37:55] Yeah.

Laura Williams: [00:37:56] for people that are in a relationship with them, family members, [00:38:00] there's no way to get them to understand that what they're feeling is not the reality. It's very difficult. Yeah, mental illness is definitely a thread in so many of our books, and trying to understand it is difficult, but it also can make for a good book.

Deven Greene: [00:38:21] I,

Laura Williams: [00:38:21] you have to keep that in mind.

Deven Greene: [00:38:22] gone there, I don't think I

Laura Williams: [00:38:24] Yeah. Yeah, I think it would be hard, because I'm a very empathic person,

Deven Greene: [00:38:29] Mm-hmm.

Laura Williams: [00:38:29] I feel everything, and that's one reason, like the book that I was halfway through writing on this little girl that was murdered, I got to the point where the mother, who was going to be accused of the murder, is at the funeral for the little girl. I can't get past that. That book's sitting there, and the people who have read the first half of it are like, “This is so good.” Well, that's great, but I cannot get past that. It's just, you know, I have kids and grandkids, and it's just [00:39:00] something, my heart feels it too much.

Deven Greene: [00:39:03] Well, I guess you have to tell yourself it's fiction.

Laura Williams: [00:39:07] Oh, that's what I do, I do. But at the same time, as a writer, because of that empath nature, I put myself into the character's shoes, and it's just hard for me. So, do you have a project you're working on now, or are you waiting till the next great idea?

Deven Greene: [00:39:26] So, the book I just finished — when I started it, I was working on two other things, finishing up the proofreading of one and publishing of another, and I decided that's just too much, so I'm just doing one thing at a time. So this book that I told you about isn't out yet, and today and tomorrow I'm going over the audio files, because I've got an audiobook that's going to come out, and so I listen to all the audio files. So I'm trying to complete everything, and I have two more books that just popped into my head that I want to write. So [00:40:00] I've got a waiting list now.

Laura Williams: [00:40:01] Oh my goodness.

Deven Greene: [00:40:02] I know what my next book is, and I know what the book after that is, and I don't want to have any more on my list. I'm actually thinking about the next book I'm going to write, thinking about details and plot points and things like that. It takes me a while to kind of put things together in my mind. I don't really write an outline, but I have to have a sense of how it's going to start, where it's going

Laura Williams: [00:40:27] That's a good end. Yeah.

Deven Greene: [00:40:28] what's it about. Chances are I'll start actually writing it before my next book comes out, because I hope to be done with everything before it's actually released.

Laura Williams: [00:40:39] Do you self-publish?

Deven Greene: [00:40:41] Yeah, I self-publish now. I had a small publisher at first, I published my first books with one small publisher, it was a trilogy, so I had the same publisher. And then I wasn't real happy with that publisher, so I got another small publisher for my fourth book, [00:41:00] and then I decided, you know, what are they doing for me? So actually I got the rights back — the one book, my fourth book, I'm going to get the rights back as soon as the contract is over, at least that's my plan. But I got the rights back for my first three books, and it was nice, because I got the files, it was all ready to go. I got the cover files, I got everything I needed, and so that was a good way to ease into self-publishing. I didn't have to figure out how to do all that stuff.

Laura Williams: [00:41:33] By the time you've worked with publishers, and then you decide to go out and self-publish, you have learned things along the way to help you, so it's not like you're just walking into a dark room.

Deven Greene: [00:41:43] I do have someone that does the cover design, and I use a program called Atticus that does all the formatting and everything for a book. How about yourself, do you have a publisher or self-publish?

Laura Williams: [00:41:55] I'm undecided what I'm going to do. I have a five-book series, and I [00:42:00] wrote three drafts, and then I realized on the third book there were things in the first book that didn't seem to make as much sense as they needed to, so I'm rewriting the first book, which is really a difficult process for me. So I'm doing that now. I haven't decided how I'm going to do it, but I tend to think, just because of my nature, I'll probably self-publish. But I want to have at least two books completely done, ready to go, before I publish anything, so that I can keep it going in a timely fashion. You know what I mean?

Deven Greene: [00:42:36] Yeah.

Laura Williams: [00:42:37] Instead of...

Deven Greene: [00:42:38] so much

Laura Williams: [00:42:38] Yeah.

Deven Greene: [00:42:39] now to self-publish, and then

Laura Williams: [00:42:40] It is. The tools are better, the knowledge is out there, it's much easier.

Deven Greene: [00:42:45] hybrid

Laura Williams: [00:42:45] Yep.

Deven Greene: [00:42:46] I would suggest some — you know, there's plenty of publishers that you can just pay, they take no royalties, they'll do as much as you want. And I'm kind of a techie, so I kind of enjoy fooling with some stuff.

Laura Williams: [00:42:59] Yeah, me too. [00:43:00]

Deven Greene: [00:43:00] If,

Laura Williams: [00:43:00] dude

Deven Greene: [00:43:00] I hated that, I would just hire one of these other companies

Laura Williams: [00:43:04] I've had a few hybrid publishers on the show, and you can just use the services that you need and do the rest yourself, and I really like that. That's more where my thinking is on the whole process. I do not want to go into a big publisher, I just don't want to deal with that. I just feel that I'm 63 years old, I don't want to wait around, I want to get things done.

Deven Greene: [00:43:30] Well, it takes a long time,

Laura Williams: [00:43:32] I know, that's why I just don't think that's a path that I'm going to wander down. So tell everybody how to find you and your books.

Deven Greene: [00:43:41] I have my books on all sites, of course Amazon is the big one, but I widely distribute it, and I have a website. It's Deven Greene, and it's spelled D-E-V-E-N G-R-E-E-N-E. Basically, I have it spelled [00:44:00] such that it's full of E's, the only vowel is an E, and there's lots of E's. If you don't have an E on the end of Greene, you get a transgender comedian who's got a big following. That's not me, okay?

Laura Williams: [00:44:18] Yeah, but I'll have your information in the show notes too. Well, thank you so much for joining me, I really appreciate it, and I've learned a lot from you today. It's been a very interesting conversation. To learn more about the podcast and to sign up to be the first to learn when new episodes are up, visit thewritingbiz.com. And until next time, take what you've learned, put it to work in your own writing biz. Deven, thank you so much.

Deven Greene: [00:44:46] Oh, you're very welcome. I really enjoyed it. Thank you.

Laura Williams: [00:44:48] Oh, g-

Deven Greene: [00:44:53] Okay.