Cam: All my books, start with either a real world search and rescue mission that I’ve been on, or a place where there’s been a real world search and rescue mission. And then I figure out how do you insert the bad guys? Because in real life search rescue missions usually don’t have criminals involved. Every once in a while we might come in after the fact for something criminal, but not normally.

​Mark: Hello and welcome to the Thriller Pitch Podcast, the director’s cut of the thriller book world. Today I am joined by Cam Torrens, author of the Adventure Thriller havoc. Cam, thank you so much for being here today.

Cam: Thanks, mark. I really appreciate you having me on the show.

Mark: I’m very excited to talk about your book, havoc, this series, really, which we’ll get into in the Colorado Trail. Before we do that, let us get into the pitch. So pitch me your book Havoc.

Cam: Great. Well, when Tyler’s on a retired Air Force veteran and now Search and Rescue Volunteer and Deputy Reserve Sheriff finds out a helicopter has crashed in the Colorado Rockies, he’s not overly surprised. It’s happened three or four times in the past 30 years. When the radio call comes in, that one of the people in the helicopter’s been shot in the back of the head, everything changes. His daughter and his girlfriend are hiking on the Colorado trail just miles from where the helicopter went down. Tyler’s on duty to try to get out there and find out who was doing the shooting. Comes a point where he is gotta decide which is more important, doing his duty, saving the woman he loves, or the daughter he loves just as much or more.

Mark: Hmm. That’s awesome. Thank you. So let’s get into the making of this. Before we jump into this particular book and where the idea for this particular book come from. I’d like us to take a step back at slightly bigger scale because this is book five in this series where did the idea for this series come from and like the Colorado Trail and your background with it? If you can get a kind of get into all that.

Cam: Okay. Yeah, I spent 30 years in the Air Force myself as a, mostly as a C one 30 pilot, hauling trash around the various places around the world and flying with plenty of times with Canadian pilots out there when we were doing, uh, NATO operations. Uh, so big respect there. But I’ve always been a lifelong reader. And after I retired from the Air Force in 2018, I took a couple years trying to figure out exactly what I was gonna do, and, and I decided, oh, I wanted to give riding a shot, maybe try to emulate, all these authors books that I’d enjoyed, you know, through the years. And, uh. I got into it and, uh, found out there was a heck of a lot more to it than, uh, having read a lot.

Mark: Yes.

Cam: As you probably know, with all the books you’ve written, it takes, takes a while to figure out what the heck you’re doing and, uh, they say, write what you know, but I wasn’t overly interested in writing military thrillers. I like them. Okay. I tend to read other thrillers more than military thrillers, but military is what I knew and when I settled in Colorado, I also had joined Search and Rescue out here and I’m still a member of Search and Rescue and so I decided to write more about thrillers that happened with Search and Rescue as kind of a b story and have my character be a retired veteran like I was. And uh, that was kind of the genesis of the character. And then the setting was all around me. You know, we moved out here in 2019. We spent a year in a motor home looking around for the right place to live. And, uh. When I got out here and I started doing these search and rescue missions, there was no shortage of places to set the novel. And basically I had my protagonist, Tyler Zan. He came out of the military after a hard go. He had some bad stuff happened, in the aftermath of the Iraq war, and he didn’t leave the military on good terms, and he wants a fresh start out here in Colorado. And he’s all about trying to find a place where he can be useful. He’s really not too excited about being in charge of anything.

He’s had enough of that things didn’t go well the last time he was in charge in the military. And that, that opens up for the prequel of the series damaged. And we progress through the stages to it, to the book that, um, that you read, book five, where Tyler at first is kind of finding himself. Uh, the second book is, uh, trying to reconnect with his daughter. The third one, he, there’s a search and rescue member that disappears, that he was close to, and they’re trying to figure out what exactly happened to her. And then the next one is a locked room mystery and, and a love gone bad for Tyler Za trying to get a restart on romance. And, uh, and then that rolls right into havoc where, uh, he is been a little bit lucky in love and now, you know, she’s in jeopardy. That’s kind of a, a nutshell of the, the series and where we’re at. I, I try to write ’em all where they can stand alone. There’s a little bit of a thread going through the last three or four with the missing search rescue member.

Mark: How do you decide what you’re gonna do with the history of the character in a book five? Because you don’t necessarily, and I haven’t read the other four, but you don’t necessarily want to rehash all the trauma, but at the same time realize that he has been through all these. And it was interesting reading as I was reading the book, I was wondering, I wonder what was in book four and what was in book three, as you’re putting these little hints in and it’s very standalone, which was great, but how did you balance that between like, oh, I, I can’t just retell four books in this book.

I have to kind of hint it here and there and, and especially with the character, how you not have him constantly thinking about all his trauma and things that he would’ve experienced in the military.

Cam: Well, mark, it makes my heart go good. When you say that, uh, you thought of red walls as a standalone, as you know, I mean, it’s always a learning process on the writing thing, and so the first book I wrote on the second one. You know, I made sure I had a sentence to mention the incident in the first one. And , and as I got going I realized that I, you know, you didn’t have to do that right away. And so one of the things I learned was, you know, not to do the backstory dump at the beginning,

Be patient because as long as you got pacing intention, the reader’s gonna stick with you. So you can dribble stuff that happened in the back into dialogue, you know, a third of the way through the novel. And the reader will pick up on it. It doesn’t have to be narrative in the first page or two, you know? And so, took me a little bit to catch on to things like tricks like that, you

Mark: Yeah. What about the trauma of that Tyler had been through? How do you decide what to carry through and what to be like? I think he’s processed this in a different book, and it’s okay to not keep bringing this up because there’s that balance between, in reality, he may fight with that the rest of his life, but in, in fiction, we can’t just keep hashing, you know, that he’s going through this or do you?

Right.

Cam: Yeah. So you know, what happened to him in the military was a combination of a tragedy in his family and a tragedy with, uh, one of his air crews. And I find that I just bring it up in the follow the later books if it directly correlates. So in most cases it’s been family type stuff because he’s concerned about family.

And, and so I’ll bring up the, the fact that, uh, that he’s a fa had a family member in trouble before. But if I recall in book five, I might have mentioned the air crew because we were dealing with, air crew that went down. And I’ll also mention that, you know, I don’t, I said I don’t, uh, wasn’t really interested writing military, but the most fun I’ve had in writing was when I took havoc and decided to go with the dual timeline.

I didn’t originally. When I added in that military stuff, that was the most fun riding I think I’ve had in my riding journey. I’ve spent a lot of time in helicopters over Iraq but as a passenger and, uh bringing back the memories of the shadows, the plateaus, the desert, the villages, and then getting it down on paper. You know, I won’t say it was cathartic, but it was fun to be able to write something outside of the Colorado Mountains, which I’ve been writing in the first four books, and, uh, actually know what I was talking about a little bit, you know? So that was neat for me.

Mark: yeah. There’s definitely a level I felt. I’m not a pilot, so I, but I felt a level of on authenticity to the Colorado Trail and to the, the plane and the pilots and the problems that they have without giving away plot, the problems that they have while flying and all that felt so real. Uh, yeah, it was great.

I really enjoyed that.

Cam: Thanks.

Mark: So the dual timeline and let’s say the plot for this story, where did that idea come from? Like, how did you, how did you come about that? Did you just decide, or did you start writing and then kind of jump right into history? Or how did you do it? What came first?

Cam: you know, all my books, start with either a, a real world search and rescue mission that I’ve been on, or a place where there’s been a real world search and rescue mission. And then I kind of figure out how do you insert the bad guys? Because in real life search rescue missions usually don’t have criminals involved.

You know, every once in a while we might come in after the fact for something criminal, but not normally. And that’s how I worked those. In this particular one, they’re, I’ve been out by the black Hawk training. They run out in Eagle County called hats that I mentioned in the book.

And there’s been four black Hawk helicopter crashes in the peaks around the town that I live in, be Vista, Colorado in the last 30 years. Real world crashes, a couple that folks walked away from, but others that involved some long search and rescue missions. So I’d already knew a little bit about those, and I did some more research and, I thought that would be an excellent plot point to, to have another crash. It would be something that wasn’t impossible or required a suspension of disbelief because it’s happened before. So that was what inspired the opening scene. And I tell people, I’m not giving you a spoiler on the book because it opens in chapter one with the crash and that the dual timeline, uh, was inspired because when I wrote the book that I wanted to write. I got done and it was 45,000 words long. It wasn’t long enough. And I was like, wait a minute. I, I’m convinced, I know I have a good story here. It was a good 45,000 words, but it’s not long enough for a book. And then I realized I can have a whole nother plot line going along to, to take us up to the crash. And, uh, that, and that really came out quick, quickly.

I, it takes me usually longer to, to write that, that much writing. But of that, that timeline with the 20 15 16 uprising in Iraq.

Mark: Wow, that’s very cool. So you’re, you wrote a 45,000 word full story and then inserted this whole thing and re you obviously reworked the end. Maybe we’ll get into that in the, at the end of the show, the spoiler section. But you worked that in. That’s a lot.

Cam: Well, I, I tell you that the dual timeline, going back and writing the helicopter stuff, that was quick integrating, it all actually took longer than writing either of those sections. It still takes me a good year to write a book.

Mark: Okay. Do you have beta readers that. Read the book, like people who have other like pilots or people who have, or people

on the Appalachian Trail,

Cam: I do. I so I write for Black Rose writing and there there’s a cohort of authors there that we read each other’s work. And so I have five or six beta readers that I can count on for early, early reads when it’s in really rough shape. And then I also have friends and family they say. You know, never use your family for beta reading, but, , I’ve got tough family.

Uh, they don’t, they don’t hold anything back.

Mark: they’ll tell

Cam: The only one that compliments me, no matter how good it’s is my mom, and by the time my other beta readers are through with me, I need my mom to be telling me how good it’s,

Mark: Yeah.

Cam: But I, I’ve got, uh, high school friends, you know, that that aren’t authors, but they’re avid readers.

And no, I find that, that I have to have beta readers that are readers first, as well as fellow authors to get the, the full scope of things. So, by the time I’m all said and done, I probably had 20 beta readers for each book.

Mark: Nice. How do you decide what they say for feedback? Because often I’m just going through the beta feedback from my upcoming novel and there’s a lot of contradiction where one will say, this was my favorite one will say this is my favorite spot. The others will be like, that took me right out of this story.

You know, with 20 beta readers, I imagine there’s a lot of competing thoughts. How do you put, how did how did you, I guess, with havoc put that, take that and then make the changes that were like, seemed like the right decision?

Cam: If one person’s says, oh, you’ve gotta change this. And I don’t have a history with that person, I’ll bring it up to a couple other beta readers. If I do have a history with that person, and I think, eh, that might be more your personality than mine. Oftentimes I’ll ignore it. But if I have two or more beta readers point something out, I look really hard at whether I’m gonna keep it or not. Because I, I’ve found that I could be pretty blind when it comes to my own writing. I can get wrapped up in what I think sounds right.

Mark: Yeah.

Cam: Uh, and I’m wrong, and more often than not, if I get 2, 3, 4, say the same thing, that’s something I change.

Mark: Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. Were there any challenges that this particular story presented for you and maybe as far as the research we could talk about First?

Cam: I, I have written a lot of the, uh, the helicopter scenes, first draft through without any knowledge of helicopters except for what I was fighting on the internet and my sitting in the back as a passenger time. And, uh, I realized that sometime before I put this book out, I was gonna have to talk to some people.

And, and I know, I knew two Black Hawk pilots, and so I reached out to them. I just didn’t realize how much I had gotten wrong until I got ahold of ’em. So in the acknowledgements of the book, you can see those two guys that I called out and thanked them and sent ’em books because they really saved me from some big mistakes, although they missed one, and I don’t know whether they didn’t notice it or not. But this is kind of an interesting anecdote. I still read and listen to a ton of books, you know, 10 or 12 a month. And

Mark: Oh wow.

Cam: I was listening and I had all kinds of genres. And I was listening to this romantic comedy by Catherine Center called oh, I can’t even remember, but it was about a Coast Guard rescue guy, you know, little Romance down in Florida, whatever.

And he drops outta choppers and saves people out in the ocean or, and, uh, they had this sing in there where, uh, they were, there was a military thing and somebody called it a chopper. And the guy goes, now you don’t call ’em choppers in the military. And I’m like, what? And I went through and looked and I had used chopper. You know, you can call a police helicopter a chopper, but not a military helicopter. And I asked my, Black Hawk guys. I go, is that true? And they go, oh no, we would never call it a chopper. I didn’t tell ’em that. Well, you let it go by 23 times in my book. You know, fortunately I was, I was on the last, like, round of edits or whatever and I was able to go in and fix it. I had a couple other helicopters in there that I kept the choppers, but that was like a last minute saved from a romance author. I tried to send her, I tried to get ahold of her email address and thank her, but no luck yet.

Mark: I can almost visualize you running the search through the manuscript for the word chopper and just being like, no. Too many times.

Cam: right. And what are the odds that you get saved by a romance novel when you’re writing a thriller? Huh?

Mark: Yeah. What are the odds? Yeah. So when people finish this book and they put it down, what are you hoping that they’re gonna get out of it? What are you hoping they’re gonna feel when they’re done?

Cam: Well, one of the things, that I didn’t, I don’t think I wrote to this, but when I was done with it, I was like that thing where he is trying to, my main character’s trying to compartmentalize what he needs to do next. And he’s got this duty as a reserved deputy sheriff, and he is got, uh, two people who loved, who may or may not be together anymore at this point in the book. And he’s got this conflict between duty and family,

which, you know, as a military veteran is not an unusual conflict to be in, in the military. Whether it’s something as simple as they want you to go on a deployment, you know? Right. When two of your kids are having their birthday party or struggling in school or something, you know, not necessarily life and death. Up to do your duty when they told you, go do your duty. But you know, there’s also this unspoken, sometimes spoken duty, to your spouse and your kids if you have them. And they don’t always line up. And you know, I think sometimes the general popula who hasn’t been in the military doesn’t see that in the military.

And so I hope that highlighted it. But I also wanted to bring it up because it’s something that first responders deal with. You know, in the civilian world every day, firefighters search and rescue EMTs, you know, same type thing. They some, sometimes just because your 12 hour shift is up, you don’t get to go home and when when you’re needed at home, you know? And so that resulted out of this book. Well, it wasn’t something I went in thinking about but that’s something I hope people take away from it.

Mark: Do you feel like you, process some of the things you’ve been through in your life through the book and some of the challenges that you’ve had through the characters in the book?

Cam: I, I do to a degree. I often talk about, my protagonist, Tyler Zn. When he self-reflect, he knows sometimes that he comes across a little bit stoic or unemotional it’s because he is so good at compartmentalizing, and that’s how I was in the, in the military as well. You know, this is, this is work and when I’m done with work, I’m gonna put that in a box and go home.

So I’m not taking that type of work home with me. And that can be useful for something like that. It’s been useful. Uh, this year in search and rescue, we found, we found a, a lost hiker deceased and ended up spending eight hours with them in a ditch until. The CO could get in and there was several of our team that needed to talk that out, and I wasn’t one of them because I’d been in this situation before. But to answer your question, I do find that when I’m putting it out on paper, it actually impacts me a little bit more than it did at the time when I just dealt with it, tucked it away. I guess it’s just still back there somewhere so, you’re right. A little bit of the reflection comes out and it can’t be a bad thing for me, I’m sure.

Mark: no, no. I think it makes the story stronger and more relatable because it’s sometimes, it’s just those little moments and those little things that he says, or the little things that he thinks that actually brings the character the most to life than anything that he does in a, you know, active response to things.

Cam: Yeah. I think you’re right. I think you’re right.

Mark: So what was your process like for this book, from Beginning Idea to a published book? Do you have an outline that you create and then you, you work with that outline? It sounds like you, whether there’s an outline or not, you definitely added it in a whole other timeline. So that answers a little bit. But what is that process like for you from the day to day to the, the big picture for the book? Havoc.

Cam: Yeah. So I’ve already talked you through a little bit of what happened in havoc, and I, I could tell going through the outline, oops. What scene by scene I could tell about halfway through the outline. Oh, this isn’t gonna work out because all these scenes are gonna have to be, you know, 4,000 words long, and that that just doesn’t work. But, uh, for the other books, pretty, pretty straightforward. Uh, I tried one without an outline and I won’t do that again.

And then, uh. ones pretty much I go, I make an outline. When I say outline, it’s, it’s a one or two sentences per chapter that I envision it going through, and then I just take it, take it from there. Then it’s kind of seat of the pants for those scenes after I got the sentence of what I want to happen.

Mark: Mm-hmm.

Cam: And of course, then I have to adjust the outline because sometimes the scene will turn out different than I expected. But usually I’ll try to, uh, write a thousand words a day for four months, and that’ll end up being actually three and a half months of actual writing, because it was gonna be at least two weeks mixed in there, 14 days where I just couldn’t write for family reasons or stuff going on.

But it comes out to, around a hundred, 90 to a hundred thousand words. And then I spend the next, six to seven months. I overwrite.

 

Mark: So this might be a little bit of a, spoiler for readers, but there’s a scene where essentially there’s law enforcement who are being held and they still have their weapons, and I thought that was fascinating because I’ve never, I’ve never read a story where you have law enforcement and everyone still has, everyone still has their weapons.

How did you come up with such an almost, it was just a cra like it was crazy and I, by the end you completely understand, but it just, it was so, it was so, interesting of, of a, a way to go

Cam: Right.

Well,

Mark: taking away law enforcement.

Cam: so Sergeant Rescue in our county of most of the counties in Colorado administratively falls under, uh, the sheriff’s office. And so I have, we

have, uh, two of the members of our team, uh, work for the sheriff’s office as deputies. So they, they don’t always go out on a lot of missions ’cause they’re always working, but we have a lot of contact with the sheriff and so. I went down and I’ve got, I got a tour of the office down in Salida, which is 30 minutes south of Vista where I live because I knew I wanted to have this scene where the entire counties deputies, you know, they were all able to get ’em in pretty much in one spot, you know, except for the folks who weren’t on duty. And it’s possible with a county like ours, I mean, there’s only 20,000 people in our entire county, and, uh, Salida, the town has 5,000 people. And, but Vista, my town has 2,800 people. So we’re talking small town, Colorado out here. And I just, I tried to figure out after seeing their location, you know, what I could do with a with a locked room and, uh, how I could make it work. And, uh, that, that was where I got the idea, uh, when I ran it by, uh the deputy sheriffs that’s on the search and rescue team, he was like, there’s no way in hell I’d let those sons of bitches take us like that. So,

Mark: Yeah. Okay. Fair enough. I was wondering if there was like a moment from real life too, because you have such an intimate knowledge of that a like the area, like you said, that small town feel. There was a maybe a moment in your life too, where such a thing was plausible.

Cam: no, no, that one, that one came out of the imagination. My wife told me it took greater imagination to have a middle aged man get out of there than the rest of this does.

Mark: Yeah, true enough. I didn’t think of that, but that’s very clever. Yeah. So my last guest on the show had a question for you Luke Richardson. He was my last guest on the show, and he had a question for you, but I see, oh, there, it’s, I was scrambling to look for how do you balance the details of location with the story so you don’t make it a tour guide of the location, which is the Colorado Trail, that it’s not a tour guide, and that there’s still plot and story driving the story forward.

Cam: That’s a good question because I’ve been complimented before on my description of the Colorado Rockies, and I’ve also, uh, been told that, well, you know, sometimes it waxes a little too, too poetic. And so as I’ve evolved one, I’ve had to figure out how to describe it in different ways.

So I’m not you you know, winds blowing wisps of snow, like cotton candy in every single novel. But two, I, I’ve tried to, uh move it to good breaks, logical breaks in the pace pacing instead of inserting it between pieces of dialogue or action. And, I realized that a little bit of the description that I was doing in early novels, um, was while, while things were happening, and, uh, it was breaking the pacing up a little bit.

And so I, uh, I do more of it when I’m either, uh, opening up a new scene or when there’s just a logical break in the scene, uh, whether it’s, you know, sitting down for something, when I’m between two scenes of action or something like that. But I don’t, I try not to, to cut too much, uh, description of the scenery, rather just spread it out because I, I’ve gotten a, a, lot of compliments on the fact, especially locally in a small county like this, I’ve got a lot of, a lot of my sales are people right here in Chaffee County, you know, and so the books are a little bit of a love story to the place that we live. And,, so I don’t wanna leave it out because they like reading about places they know, the places they see every day. And to see ’em described in another

Mark: Yeah. How much of your book is you remembering being on the trail and the things that you saw, and how much is you, do you actually just go drive out there to where the scene is more or less and just look around and you’re, you’re just like, oh, look at that mountain, and look at that mountain and look at this.

Cam: Yeah. So a lot of the, the scenery on the books is, almost all of it is. I’ve been, I’ve seen almost everything and those parts that I haven’t seen, I, well, I usually rename those because I’ll only use the actual names of places that I’ve been to. Through, I’ve made up geography before for the purposes of my plot and the action that was gonna happen, but where I make it up, I change the name so that people will be like, what?

There’s not an antelope lake there, you know? But I’ve seen so much on these search and rescue missions. I mean, we do between 50 and 60 missions a year, we’re very busy. We have 14 peaks that are 14,000 feet or higher within a 35 minute drive of our town. And so most of our search and rescue missions are on those. And I generally, I do, uh, well over 50% of the missions a year. So, you know, I’m getting out there in the missions 20, 30 times a year to be able to see those things. And when you’re hiking up there to try to find somebody or somebody’s hurt or whatever, you got plenty of time to think because it takes, you can only go so fast. But the seeds on the Colorado Trail. So the Colorado trail’s almost 500 miles long. And I’ve hiked the first 300 miles of it already. I’ve been doing it, pieces of it every summer. And, uh, so I’ve hiked all the parts that were described in the trail in the book, except for the last chapter of the book where they hiked down to the end of the trail. I’ve, I’ve never hiked that, so that I will have, but I haven’t yet. And I had to, I actually had to talk to a couple people that had finished the trail to get that part right.

Mark: Do you plan to go there and, and finish the

trail?

Cam: do. I mentioned to you before the show, uh, my daughter and I are hiking the Pacific Crest Trail in less than two months. We’re starting on April 5th down south of San Diego in the Mexican porter, and that’s gonna take all summer and possibly maybe first or second week of September. Before we finished a tour country, uh, at the border there on the, where the Cascades spill into Canada. But then the following summer I’m gonna get back on the Colorado Trail. I don’t, I have just under 200 miles left. I don’t know whether I’ll make it all the way to Durango because, especially one lesson learned when I hiked the Appalachian Trail in 2018, I got off and within two or three hours I mentioned something to my wife about, well, I can’t wait till my next through hike, and it might have taken me two or three years to recover from that verbal faux pa there. She was not excited about me disappearing for another four month hike again anytime soon.

So, so between you and I and every listener, I plan on, uh, finishing that Colorado trail. Eventually I know how quick it’ll happen after that five month hike I’m doing with my daughter.

Mark: Yeah. Wow, that’s amazing. And it sounds like 20 or 30 rescues a year. That’s a, I would not have thought that many. That’s, that’s a lot. Like, that’s practically your pre-training. Like do we even need to train to be, to go with your daughter or is it just your life is search and rescue pretty much trains you for everything you need to be ready

for.

Cam: No search and rescue’s, uh, good training, but you can’t count on, even if you have 20 or 30 missions a year, you can’t count on them all being ones where you get a workout. Sometimes you go out there and you get, find somebody who fell off their horse and the whole mission takes less than an hour.

And sometimes it’s an all-nighter, you know, we have one where we pulled some Air Force Academy cadets off a mountain, but it was a scree evacuation and a letter with a bunch of rope systems, and it took 16 hours to get down. So you, you, can’t count on that. But I mentioned that what I have in common with you, you’re an ultra runner. So I run every day. I’m a streak runner and, uh, and so I do at least a mile every day, but I average about four miles a day. And then that won’t get you in perfect hiking shape, but it’s a good base for starting the PCT. You know,

Mark: Yeah. Awesome.

Cam: I guess the search and rescue is the best thing it does is give me a carrying a pack shape because I’m always carrying a pack and search and rescue.

Mark: How heavy is the pack do you figure in search and rescue or even your hiking pack?

Cam: So yeah, the search and rescue pack’s heavier than the hiking pack. So through hiking pack for me, uh, is usually 25 to 30 pounds depending on how much food I’m carrying. But, uh, search and rescue, I’m starting off with 35 pounds at least because of first aid materials and ropes and gear. And then depending on like if we have to carry. A litter up to somebody to pull ’em out on a stretcher. You know, it breaks in half and each person will carry a half and somebody will carry a wheel. Or the, or is the stuff we use to slide it down if we’re on snow? So it can get up to 40, 45? Sometimes 50, but hopefully not.

Mark: Yeah. Yeah, that would be tough. Uh, I may have to pick your brain at some point when I, when I go for my next hike,

Cam: Yeah,

Mark: the next, my next trail, like, I don’t know if I’ll get down to anywhere near Colorado, but I’ve done the, uh, Adirondacks and I, I absolutely loved it. ’cause they have trail’s, not the Adirondacks is right. I almost next to my home, so.

Cam: Oh, if you make it to Colorado, don’t come without looking me up.

Mark: Yeah, well maybe you can rescue me. You might be the one rescuing me. Yeah. Look for my name on the rescue list and make sure you take that mission and then I can meet you on the trail.

Cam: Hope not.

Mark: So when you’re writing a book, do you ever stop to think about the number of characters and, and if there’s a way that you intentionally try to help readers keep track of kind of who is who, if they’re jumping, especially jumping into a book five with the dual timelines. Now if, I don’t know. ’cause I, well I didn’t know, Tyler, is there anything that you try to do to help readers just keep track of, of the different personalities and things?

Cam: No. Well, so if I have too many characters, my editor usually points it out. Like, she’ll point out that, hey, unless these guys are gonna show up later on in the book, you don’t have to give ’em a name. And I’ve been guilty of, of, doing that. You know, they’ll, we’ll meet the server at the restaurant and they’ll never see them again. And, uh, my editor’s like, I can just be a, a server, you know, it doesn’t have to be Joe who did this, and he told us about their side hustle and well, so I don’t do that as much anymore. Um, and then I, I could just, I could do a word search and pass books, but I’ll tell you what, so, you know, there’s, there might be some controversy out there about, ai. And I don’t, I don’t use a ton of AI for, I do use some AI for research, like some of the helicopter stuff, but I end up having to, when it’ll point things out, then I have to go, like, look on websites to make sure it’s telling me the

Mark: Yeah, that’s right. Yeah.

Cam: But one of the things, you heard of that an ca anthropic case where they were loading authors books on, AI and giving them out or whatever they were using, or they were learning, teaching their learning machines from authors books.

Well, all of my books were on that list. They got uploaded, you know, for AI to learn from. And so my philosophy is that I can ask AI questions about my books. And so I’ve loaded up my books before on ai and I’ve, I, if I can’t remember, if my character studied Chinese in college or whatever, I can ask ai what book did my character talk about his education or what school he went to, you know? And it’ll come back and then it’ll trigger me, oh, it’s that book. And I, that’s the spot, you know? ’cause word source doesn’t always work that well.

Mark: Yeah.

Cam: That’s one example where, uh, I’ve used AI as a tool and, and I don’t feel like any guilt or reason why I shouldn’t, you know, as long as if I’m not worried about AI getting a hold of my stuff, then

Mark: Yeah,

Cam: you know,

Mark: yeah,

Cam: work.

Mark: Yeah. I see a world pretty soon where we’re paying AI to read our books so that like a marketing scheme so that when people search for it, ’cause it’ll be a search engine, soon enough AI will actually talk about our books. Then it’ll be how much are you willing to pay AI to tell somebody to read your book? And that’s like, I’m, in my view, that’s the future of Of book search.

Cam: I don’t think you’re, I don’t think you’re wrong. I mean with the economy that they’re betting on it, you know, it’s gotta make money in the end.

Mark: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. You gotta bring all that money. Yeah. All that investment has to come

Cam: They gotta pay for all that energy.

Mark: Yeah. Building on the topic of them character names, you also have trail names and fun trail names and things of, and pilot names, like nicknames that they get, which is all, I mean, it’s all realistic. It all happens. So tell me about that, but the real life, for those listeners who maybe don’t know what the real life is like and, and how you decided to implement that into your book.

Cam: Was your question about real life trail names and,

and,

Mark: Like where does that come from and the heritage of it and, you

Cam: Yeah. So in the military, call signs for pilots are real common. They, they actually weren’t that common in, uh, in the transport and air refueling world, which I flew in. But the fighter pilots all had call signs and, uh, a lot of the army, uh, helicopters have call signs as well.

So that’s where that came from. The trail name is definitely a, a trail culture. When I hiked Appalachian Trail, I hiked the first two weeks with my, uh, sister and she quickly got the trail name, uh, pokey because, uh, she always told people she liked, horses and she always told people what a slow hiker she was. And pokey, if you remember, there’s claymation things back in the, well, you’re probably too young,

but they had claymation. It was Pokey and Gumby pokey was this yellow pony and Gumby was this green stick figure.

And, I happened to be wearing a green jacket. So as soon as they gave her the trail name, pokey, I became Gumby. And my trail, my trail name is still Gumby to this day, so I’ll be Gumby on the Pacific Crest Trail. And yeah, unless you’re out there with everybody, you don’t necessarily have an idea unless you’ve read the books about all these trail names. But it’s hard to find somebody out through hiking one of these long distance hikes that doesn’t have a trail name. And the rule is you’re not supposed to give yourself your own trail name. Somebody else has to give it to you.

Mark: yeah.

Cam: So in this book, uh, havoc, fainting Goat was a, uh, real trail name. From a hiker I met on the Appalachian Trail and her, uh, people she was hiking with gave it to her because he passed out on them.

Mark: Oh, it’s wild. I love it. Any other names that that have as history of the character trail names that you

Cam: Yeah. So, the, uh, I hiked with a guy on Appalachian Trail, young guy for about 10 days, and his trail name was Moldy Beans. And that was where, that was where that trail name came from in my book. So these, yeah, these were real trail names. And his moldy beans was because he tried to dehydrate his own food and take it on the hike, you know, and make it last the whole way with these mailboxes that he dropped. But he started getting mailboxes where the moisture had gotten into the boxes and the beams were already rehydrating by the time he pulled them out so he couldn’t eat them.

Mark: What a way to get a nickname. I may pronounce his name wrong. Is it Shavano? Shano.

Cam: Oh, uh, Chavin mount, uh, Chavin the trail the call sign for the helicopter pilot, and that was based off of the town of Salina, where the sheriff’s office is in the book is 30 minutes south of where I’m at right now. It’s got a peak that overlooks the town is 14 greater than 14,000 feet called Mount Chau.

Mark: Mm-hmm.

Cam: And it’s the one that, it has a gully coming down the middle of it with branches on either side and when it fills up with snow, like right now, but it’s the last snow to melt and it forms the shape of an angel. So they refer to it as the angel of Shao from the town.

Mark: Cool. That’s such fun little pieces of like history and, and things that you add into your book. I thought I loved it and I had to look it up to see if it was a real mountain after I, I read it and then, and then I, I read about it and I was like, wow, this is so cool. Well done with all those little things that you put into your books.

Cam: it’s a, it’s neat and, uh, interesting story, the, all my books are available on audio. The first book, when it came out on audio, the publisher didn’t tell me that it was coming out on audio. I found out when it was released and, uh, when I went and listened to to it, the geography names were, weren’t what they were supposed to be.

They geography names sounded like they were spelled, but if you’re up from out here, they’re pronounced differently. And, I was a little disappointed about that. And I know a couple people said, well, it doesn’t matter. You know, you’re trying to sell your book nationwide. You just have a, you’re from a small county or whatever, and I’m like, but those are the people I care about the most when it comes to reading the book.

They’re the ones I’m gonna see in the grocery store. But fortunately my publisher was able to put me in contact with the narrator and then we established a connection. He lives in Baltimore and I, I send out a glossary before each book, before he starts working on each book, and we can go back and forth on the names. And so he’s got it all squared away now.

Mark: so you use the same narrator for all your books.

Cam: I do. I do. Uh, young black guy from downtown Baltimore does ’em all and I think he does a fantastic, uh, envoy, so I don’t wanna go with anyone else. So, yeah, his name’s Tim Morgan TMO Audio. He does a wonderful job.

Mark: Awesome. I could. Do you ever think that that’s part of his voice, is now part of who your character is and changing his voice? People would be like, who is this Tyler that’s now talking on the, in your book?

Cam: Yeah, I mean, I, I do you do a lot of audio books?

Mark: I don’t know. I haven’t moved into audio.

Cam: Yeah, I mean, I, uh, there’s a couple, I read a lot of, uh, CJ Box and, uh, Craig Johnson. They both write about, law enforcement in Wyoming. And I like, whenever I hear these audio narrators, the two people that do those books, you know, I, their voice instantly makes me think of that character.

Mark: What advice would you give someone who just published their first or second book?

Cam: The first advice I’d give is if you published your first or second book and you wanna be a writer, you should already be working on number three.

Mark: Hmm.

Cam: I didn’t know that when I started. I just assumed that you would kinda see how each book did, and then if it was looked like, like especially if you’re gonna do a series, if it looked like it was gonna do well then you’d start working on another one. But I didn’t realize that the turnaround time for a publisher, and this is the advantage of self-publishing, is that you’re in total control of everything.

But for my books by the time I get a, a contract, the book’s not gonna come out for 18 to 22 months

later. That’s a long time. And so by the time that you turn in a book for final edits your publishing company, you need to be working on another book already, I think if you want to be a writer. So that would be my advice. And as a follow onto that is if you’re trying to get published or, or you’re saying, oh, I’m gonna try to get published with a publisher, or Then I’ll self-publish while you’re getting rejections, if you get rejections, I mean, hopefully you just get picked up right away, right? But while

Mark: it works, isn’t it?

Cam: While you’re getting rejections, work on the second book, and while you’re getting rejections work on the third book. So the reason that I’ve got a prequel that’s number four in my series is because that was the first book I ever wrote, and it never got picked up by anybody. And the second book that I wrote never got picked up on any by anybody. The third book finally got picked up by Black Rose writing. And when they picked it up and I told ’em I had the second book, I didn’t tell ’em about the first book. They’re like, okay, we could do, you know, they looked at it. That was how those two books got going. And then I wrote another book, and by that time I was kind of established with the publisher and I said, Hey, by the way, I really had a really, really first book. Can I rewrite it?

And, uh, I pitched, I pitched it to him, and I, they took that because, you know, it could be that your third and fourth book before you get noticed, it doesn’t mean you wasted time on the first books. It just means you hadn’t gotten seen yet. So, so, right, right. Right.

Mark: Yeah. Did you know Tyler Song was gonna be a series when you started, like book one or was it, I’m just gonna write this book ’cause if I have this idea,

Cam: I went into it knowing that I wanted to write a series, again, uh, back to the CJ Box and the Craig Johnson, novels. I was deep into the middle of both of those series, which are both over 20 books long, and I was like, that’s what I wanna do.

Mark: Okay. Yeah. Yeah. . If you could pick one thing that you felt led to your success so far, what would that be?

Cam: Back to your comment about beta readers, and it applies to editors too, and that is to, uh, recognize my blind spots and be willing to accept help from others. So, I mean, I, I really feel like I’ve gotten, uh, better as a writer. Because of the community, which I didn’t start with. I mean, I wrote the whole first book without being in a writing club, without having a group. Just thinking I was writing masterpieces day after day, you know?

Mark: Yeah.

Cam: And, uh, it wasn’t until I got the loving critiques of people that knew a lot more about what I was trying to do than I did, that I felt things started to improve. To me, it’s no surprise that the books didn’t get picked up right away. It was very surprising at the time because I just assumed with how much reading I did well, how hard can it be?

Looking back, you know, thank goodness they didn’t get picked up because it gave me the chance to, to improve. And I, I still feel like I’m in learning mode. I really do.

Mark: yeah, yeah. We never wanna stop learning, right? There’s always

that, that like, how do I become a better writer of all the things I still have to do, like marketing and everything else? How do I still improve as a

Cam: I don’t know how you do it. I looked at your production on books and you run this podcast, and then I saw that you’re also an editor and provide all kinds of author services. I was like, wow,

Mark: Yeah.

Cam: a lot. I’m impressed.

Mark: yeah. Highly organized. I guess that’s my one skill I would say, for

Cam: on you.

Mark: Thank you. So where can listeners find your book or find more about you?

Cam: Yeah. So all the books are available on Amazon and, bookshop. The, uh, hardbacks are available at, Barnes and Noble, Cobo, some of the traditional places. You find that they’re all available on the audio, but it’s through Audible, which is part of Amazon. And you can find me cam torn.com. All one word. And also I’m on Facebook cam torn writer. It’s my writing page.

Mark: okay.

Cam: And then like if you go into Instagram or LinkedIn I have count accounts on those as well. And good read.

Mark: Yeah. Awesome. Well that is great. So we are about to move into our spoiler section. So thank you for being here. The spoiler section’s, just a couple of questions. If you are a reader and you don’t want to know how havoc ends, now is the time to pause read the book, go download it, read it. You’ll be back in a couple of days or however long it takes you to read a book and then you can listen to the spoiler section.

Last couple of questions of the show. So you mentioned that you wrote 45,000 words and then added the dual timeline. I’m curious now, what was the ending like? How did the first book and

Cam: How did, uh, havoc end or

Mark: Yeah, the original story, that was 45,000 words. ’cause there must have been quite a difference in the stories, right?

Cam: So the, the conflict with the guys and the helicopter happening on the pass? I knew that was gonna happen, so, and I knew who the bad guy was gonna be, so that, that part didn’t, didn’t change. But in the process of writing all that backstory, I had all the information on, uh, the characters that I didn’t have. When I, when you’re just picked it up, you know, with a bunch of dead crew members, so I knew the bad guys better. The whole part about, about the Chinese American guy that was part of the original air crew back in Iraq, got developed on the rewrite, you know, so that really influenced the ending.

And, uh, and it really, like it wouldn’t have worked for sure, even if 45,000 words would’ve been enough, it wouldn’t have worked as far as getting the reader to suspend the disbelief and until they had more of that backstory, I think. And

Mark: Yeah.

Cam: so I don’t know. Did you enjoy, did you get thrown off on the dual timeline at all?

Mark: No, no, I loved it. Now, once I knew who everybody was and I got into the stories, uh,

Cam: There were a lot of, to throw in four characters like that rapid fire and, and make it, you know, five years in the past. A lot. So make sure your patience. Fortunately they were

Mark: the timeline started to close, you had me, because that was like, oh, like, and then you see the scene where, you know, she is the, the helicopter crash. So, you know, the crash happened. You find out who’s dead. You don’t necessarily know who’s alive, and then there you go back in time and you’re like, oh my God, how did this happen? Like, that just carried me right through. It was. I had to know how these timelines met and what happened. So it worked, it would definitely worked for me. So Ethan and, and Doubles and or Lisa, I think was her name. She was all, they were all part of the original 45,000 word story, or that was added later, like their history and relationship. Was that all added Later.

Cam: It was added later because, um, I didn’t have, I didn’t have them dating so that, that kind of all came to me as I was putting together the. Dual timeline. And so that, that’s another example of, uh, I just, he was gonna be the co-pilot and she was gonna be the aircraft commander with all I knew.

Mark: Okay. And is that the way you originally wrote? The end, the way that we see it ends, like with the, with the sheriff and the big, I guess the big reveal as we would call it, and why, how we become to understand how. How it was possible to keep, keep these police

Cam: Yeah. That, that,

Mark: room is

Cam: I mean, the, the physics of it were the same. But, you know, I added in the, the part about the, uh, original crew member who we I’m trying to remember his name now. I’m working, I’m working on book seven right now.

Mark: Yeah, no problem. I get it. I can sometimes I don’t remember my characters that I’m working on ’em right now, so.

Cam: Yeah. But, and also the bear and the cub were a late ad. You know, throughout, throughout the book, the Bears in the Cub,

I’d, I’d kind of got the idea. I wanted a, I had a bear in the book prior to this that got into the dumpsters, the, on my book Scorched. And I wanted an animal, and then I read this book, uh, the Frozen River by Ariel Lahan. She had this silver fox, and the way she had it is like this, not, not a b story, but like a C story or a D story just showed up every now and then. I just thought, oh, that was neat.

And it kind of related to the story, you know? And so the, the idea of a, of a mama bear protecting his cub was supposed to be Tyler’s aunt and his daughter a little bit, you know, so

Mark: Yeah. Do you write this stuff down as you go? Like you just come up with the ideas and then it just all ends up in one book? Because

Cam: you’re gonna love this. You’re gonna love this. I get, the best ideas from listening to writer podcasts. Like what we’re doing right now. I don’t listen to as many as I used to ’cause I’m reading so many audio books now, but, there, there’s oh, this guy named Alex that does thriller writers.

There’s a couple of podcasts that I was listening to a British guy and they will talk with an author about books and something they’ll say will trigger, inevitably, will trigger something that has in my mind has to do with the book I’m writing right now. And, uh, it’s not like I’m stealing ideas, it’s just like a technique or a twist or something. And, uh, I, it happens to me all the time, but especially on these podcasts and it that.

Mark: Did you ever consider a different ending where maybe Z made a different decision or Ethan was killed? The aftermath of that, well, I guess I would’ve made it a longer book, but the emotional aftermath and the cost of his relationship, which would’ve, I guess, twisted it into a whole other epilogue of who knows what.

Cam: No, I never did. I never considered a different one. And as a matter of fact, Ethan’s making a comeback in book seven,

Mark: Oh, nice teaser.

Cam: Like a cameo, not, not an integral part, but

Mark: oh, that’s fun. That must be fun to sneak in things like that too, right? You get like little pieces of things for readers who have read all your books and

Cam: Yeah.

Mark: little, little piece, little candies along the way kind of thing. They, they only, they know if you’ve read all the books.

Cam: My editor thought of it. She was like, she knew I was working on books. She goes, when are we gonna see Ethan again? You should put ’em in book six. And I book six is, I don’t know what she was thinking ’cause it’s already at the editor or at the publisher right now. And but I was right at a spot where there was a, uh, a helicopter in book seven just for a minor evacuation or whatever. And so I got Ethan working out in Colorado now.

Mark: Awesome. So after your, after a book is published, I don’t know if you look at reviews or not, that might be a separate question, and you get kind of mass market feedback. Is there anything that you’ve ever wanted to change in this book and in a fact or something that happened that you thought, I guess I could have written it differently? Or do you just, this is what it is. I’m on into books, you know? Well, now you’re book seven

Cam: I mentioned, uh, you know, I was frustrated with the pronunciation on the audio book, but that was a little out of my control. I don’t know whether, you saw this be because I’ve I’ve just read some excerpts of your books, so I’m not sure how you’ve evolved from beginning to end, but I’m sure there’s a lot of writers are like this.

But if I, when I go back and look at my first book, which the first in the series, which is stable, which I don’t go back very often, but what I do, it’s like, oh, I don’t know. There’s a style of writing and it’s my most popular book by far, because it’s number one. But I don’t know, I use a lot of filter words. There’s just some way that I put together senses that I feel like I say more with less now when I write, and I wish I had a chance to go back and fix some of that stuff.

But the number one thing would be that. And, uh, in my first book I wrote first book that got published, I wrote in four different POVs, and one of them was an 11-year-old girl. And I’m never gonna do that again. I just didn’t feel comfortable writing in a kid’s voice, you know, as a major POV. And I was like, well, that’s a lesson learned. I’m not doing it again.

Mark: Yeah.

Cam: But I haven’t.

Mark: is. It is different. It is a lot. Yeah. So my last question, what’s one question you’d like me to ask The next author who comes on the show and coming up next week is Michael La Alone who wrote The Quiet War. It’s a Canadian military thriller. So he actually tells stories with our, our Canadian Joint Task Force, which is our version of the Special forces.

Cam: Oh, that’s great. I guess, what’s the, uh, what’s the most important characteristic of the Canadian military that other militaries around the world don’t know about the Canadian military?

Mark: Ooh, fantastic question. Thank you. Oh, I look forward to that, him answering that question. Very

Cam: Yeah, I mean, and, uh, and I’ll say, I’ll, I’ll say right up front, you know, my experiences have, have all been, uh, fantastic. But, and I know about all the examples of the Canadians, fighting in our, in our wars with them, but with us. But, but I also know that I always associate Canadians with peace because they do so many of the United Nations missions and stuff.

And

Mark: Yeah,

Cam: you know, when I wa when I wanna know about Canadian war fighting culture, all I gotta do is pick up a good history book and I can find out about it. But if I wanna know about Canadian war fighting culture today, I don’t know, you know, because I don’t, I’m not in touch with any Canadian military. So,

Mark: yeah, yeah. Oh, fantastic question. I look forward to hearing his answer to that. , So if you don’t mind sticking around for the after show for our, uh, rapid fire round with our, for our Patreon members, which is free for anyone to just follow the link to our Patreon that would be awesome.

Cam: great. Thanks for, thanks again for having me on this section.

Mark: Oh, this has been great. Thank you so much. Cam Torrens, everyone, author of Havoc and, which is book five in his series. Go check it out. Thank you for listening and have a wonderful day.