I love these kinds of episodes.
I just love it when one of my clients works hard, makes steady progress, and keeps with it through all the highs and lows that go into creating a book.
Then, one day, their book is launched, and I’m able to interview them here on the show as a published author!
Today is one of those days.
In this episode of The Writing Coach podcast, I speak with my client: author Phillip L. Wray.
We discuss the creative process of his debut novel, THE PONTCOURT MURDERS, how his love of French culture inspired the story, as well as his unique approach to combining musketeer adventure with Agatha Christie-style murder mystery.
Listen to the episode:
Or watch the video:
The Writing Coach Episode #136 Show Notes
Get your copy of Phillip L. Wray’s novel, THE PONTCOURT MURDERS.
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Get Kevin’s FREE book: NOVEL ADVICE: MOTIVATION, INSPIRATION, AND CREATIVE WRITING TIPS FOR ASPIRING AUTHORS.
The Writing Coach Episode #136 Transcript
Hello, beloved listeners and welcome back to The Writing Coach podcast. It is your host as always writing coach Kevin T Johns here.
These episodes are my favorite episodes. I love it when one of my clients publishes their book, and I am able to bring them on the show and interview them as a published author.
Today, I am talking with my client, Philip Ray. His book, THE PONTCOURT MURDERS, came out today and I interviewed him just a few moments ago. Now I’m recording the intro, and I am just so excited. It’s been such a delight to work with Phil on this book and on the sequels in the series. As I mention in the interview, I don’t know if I’ve ever had a client who is as productive as Phil has been over the last couple of years. He has written several excellent novels. And the first one came out today, so head on over to Amazon and pick up your copy of THE PONTCOURT MURDERS. You’re not going to regret it.
It’s an amazing mashup of historical fiction, musketeer adventures, and a traditional murder mystery. If you like Agatha Christie-style murder mysteries, if you’re interested in historical France, and you want some fun, adventure, sword fights, and a little hint of the swashbuckling fun that we see from musketeer stories, you’re definitely going to want to check this book out.
With all that said, let’s cut to that interview now.
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Philip, welcome to the show.
Thank you.
Today’s a very exciting day. Your debut novel launched literally today.
Yeah. It’s been a, it’s been kind of a whirlwind day, but it seems to have come together. All right.
The book is THE PONTCOURT MURDERS. It is a historical murder mystery, musketeer, adventure, mashup. How did this all start for you? When did you decide to write this book?
I started writing the beginning of January of last year or so 2021, but it sort of had its Genesis during a trip to France back in 2019. And if you’ve ever been to Paris, they have a tour for everything there from perfumes to Hemingway sites, to whatever. And I’ve always loved three Musketeers Alexander Duma stories. And a lot of that took place in Paris. So I thought, well, we’ll find a three Musketeers tour, but they didn’t have one which surprised me because I started researching. And a lot of the places mentioned in the book are still in existence. And then the actual places where some of the real historical characters lived or, or were also in existence. So I thought, well, there’s a gap there. I could put together a tour maybe, and start trying to sell that or work with a tour company. I had the maps, I did the research. I had the walking tour. I’ve still got it kind of a script for it. And as well as where the tour would go, had it all trimmed us to be the right length and then COVID hit and sort of derailed all those plans. So I was left with stacks and stacks of research on the three Musketeers on the books that timeframe in Paris and needed to do something with it.
I can honestly say you’re the first person I’ve ever interviewed whose novel started out as a tour.
Yeah, it was a, it was a walking tour that maybe someday I’ll get to give. But now it’s, you know, I thought I’ve always loved mysteries. And there were some quirks about the history with the three Musketeers Protestants had been given a lot of rights under the previous king, but they were slowly being taken away and you pretty much had to be a good Catholic or at least a Catholic to advance in society at this time. But at least two and maybe three of the, you know, actual Musketeers that the three Musketeers is based on were Protestant. And that started getting me thinking actually one of the first things I thought of was, well, what would happen if, you know, there was this mix of religion and how, how would that play out for a musketeer? And I started thinking, and you’ve probably remember this, that one of the first scenes I wrote was a musketeer falling in love with someone who was Jewish. And I was just curious how that would play out and then also the idea for the mystery part, but the, the, that, that romance part kind of went by the wayside and the mystery took over.
You mentioned reading Dumas when you were young through muskier stuff. Is that what got you interested in France? Because I know you’re from Texas, <laugh>, you know, when someone thinks of an author from Texas, they probably don’t think of a French expert. So did it all start with the three Musketeers?
I think it probably started there, but you know, when I got to college, I mean, I took French in high school. And when you got to college, I had to have, you know, two years or four semesters of French or a foreign language. So I stuck with French. And then by the time, you know, those two years rolled around, I didn’t really want to stop and immediately forget everything. So I just kept taking French classes and, you know, went to Paris during the summer with, with school and took a couple of classes over there. And just at that was really when I just completely fell in love. Well, with France and the language, the history, the, the, everything,
What is it that attracts you to French culture?
You know, I think it’s just, it, it, the history is fascinating. I mean, it had just, just phenomenal, great people in terms of, you know, influential people, you know, whether good or bad, you know, Napoleon Louis the 14th. My personal favorite is, is good. King Henry, who was Louis, the fourteenth’s grandfather that also had, I mean, they, for a good portion of the last several hundred years, they’ve been the center of a lot of culture, philosophical thought. I mean, you were painting. I mean, really just about almost any, any part of society they’ve been, they’ve been a leading light and it just fascinates me, plus, I mean, if you go to Paris, it’s, it’s a huge city in terms of number of people, but it’s very small, you know, geographically, you could walk a lot of it and, you know, everywhere you go, you see something famous. It’s, it’s just fascinating to me.
You also have the history of political upheaval, right? From the French Revolution to students still protesting today.
Yeah. That, and that’s kind of one of the things that’s sort of a joke over there. They talk about the, you know, one of their national pastimes is going on strike and well, you know, I mean, it’s just part of it, you know, whether it’s the students going on strike or transit workers, someone’s always going on strike about something. I think last time I was there, the farmers were going on strike or at least had driven a bunch of tractors. I mean, hundreds of tractors into Paris that, and essentially paralyzed the city cuz they were, they were upset, frankly can’t remember what they were upset about, but it was I’m sure it was that they weren’t getting, I think they weren’t getting enough pay for some of the, for some of their crops.
As a published historical author now, what is your take on history? Clearly, it’s something you’ve been interested in for a long time before, maybe even before you were interested in writing. When you look at history, do you say, oh, look at how far we’ve come or do you say, look how we’re repeating the same mistakes all over again?
Oh, I guess it’s a little of both, you know, we definitely over, if you look back over enough time, you see repetition of things. I mean you can look at some of the stuff, just very very obvious, you know, Hitler’s invasion of Russia, well that kind of modeled or, or followed with what happened to Napoleon’s grand army invasion of Russia, which I think before that, I, I can’t remember if it’s Frederick, the great someone else had tried, and you know, you could see, you can look at some of these big things like that, where a leader makes the exact same mistake. Someone did a hundred years before, you know, and you know, so you see that, but then you also see kind of, we have enough political upheaval going on now that’s a little more Gente than, than the terror in France when they, you know, executed the nobility and the priest and everything. But you still get a lot of, some of the same undercurrents there. I don’t know. I mean, it’s, it’s, to me, it’s kind of fascinating to look at.
You’re obviously interested in history. You did this work for this tour. COVID happens. You decide to write a book. Did you always know it was going to be a murder mystery? Cause we’ve talked a lot about your interest in history and in France and in musket tears. Well, where does the murder mystery aspect come into it?
Well, I always loved gore Sherlock Holmes and probably more so Agatha Christi. I, I think my writing’s a little closer to, to how she would write and structure stories. It’s kind of that traditional mystery genre and you know, I’ve always, like I said, I’ve always enjoyed them. And I was just trying to think of something I could do with all this historical research, something that was a little different. I mean, I didn’t want to just write another, you know, action, you know, war story. And I thought it would be more interesting to kind of meld my sort of passion for the mysteries with, with the musketeer affinity and see, see what came out of it.
We’ve got the classical Sherlock Holmes and the Agatha Christie mystery genre, and we have Dumas in the musketeer stories. Were there other influences, either literary or historical, that went into THE PONTCOURT MURDERS?
Those were the main things. I did look and, and you know, I’ve got some sequels or probably not sequels other books in the series in the works that are a little more grounded in actual historical event. The other stories pick up some of the, some of the other events that were going on at the time. There’s a great book called blood work that involves kind of the fight between the doctors over whether you could do transfusions and how you could do ’em and you know, some of the philosophical ideas like, well, does that affect your humanity? If you transfuse from an animal to a human and, you know, they were struggling with some pretty, pretty deep concepts at the time. And that’s some of that pops up in a later book, you know, to, to an extent. And there was also an a series of murders in the reign of Louis the 14th involving the nobility and that, that also crops up in a, another book. That’s like the, the affair of the poisons and blood work. They’re both by a author named Holly Tucker. Who’s just phenomenal.
Your background is in law. Did your law experience in law play into the writing of the novel?
I think it does in some of the, maybe the structure of it, the character is having to investigate, even though he is not a police investigator, not a, not a, you know, a Jean DARM or, or, or anything. And I think there’s a certain amount of maybe my training that kind of bled over into that. I’m used to having to question people, try to figure out what happened in a case. So, and I think that tends to be where I’m a little stronger in my writing is when I’m interviewing suspects that the actual interrogation parts of the book.
How about your experience playing into actually just getting words on a page, because I have this experience, I’ve had a lot of success with doctor clients and with lawyer clients like clearly doctors and lawyers are smart people, but I, I feel like there’s some sort of work ethic that comes along with these sorts of careers, perhaps that transitions over really nicely into novel writing. Would you agree?
I think so. And you can just look at all the people who’ve had legal training and they’ve written like Terry Brooks who writes a lot of, you know, the fantasy, the Shaara books, and he can just churn out these voluminous books, but in most areas of the law, you’ve got pretty tight deadlines. You have, you can get extensions, but for the most part, you’ve got to get the work done when it’s due. And it doesn’t matter if you’re not feeling well or you’re bored or, you know, it’s, it’s an interesting work. You just have to fight through it. And so there’s a certain amount of that. I think it’s, I think that also tends to make you write quicker. And probably one of the things that I struggle with is it also makes you write pretty lean. You try to just, here’s the fact 1, 2, 3, which doesn’t necessarily translate well to a novel. It might help you speed through it a little more, but it, you know, it definitely makes it a little bit thin at times.
Did you have any fiction writing background prior to the novel?
Not really. I, actually, I don’t know if we’ve ever talked about this, but I, you know, I, I did write something in high school that was more fantasy related and I’ve still got it somewhere. I just I’m terrified to go look at it now, cuz I’m sure it’s just horrendous, but really that was it. You know, once you know, once you get out in the working world and have family and everything, you just start set, you, you don’t have quite as much time. So you know, that sort of went by the wayside.
So with limited fiction writing experience, what was the process of sitting down and writing the first draft of this book? How did you go about it?
Well, I, you know, I had the idea, you know, of the killing and or killings and I sort of knew who the killer would be. And I just had the the general idea for the story and, you know, really didn’t know anything about kind of the rules of like structure of the story or the pacing. So I just really just wrote it, you know, and I forget, I think the first draft, which I thought was huge was like 37,000 words. And I thought, oh my gosh, you know, this is, this is it, this, this is a book. And then you know, then I started learning about actually how, how to structure a story, the genres and what you’re, you know, what’s expected and kind of came to realize that my book was not all that at the beginning. So, you know, that’s, that’s really how I got started, but yeah, so I had this 37,000 word thing, you know, now Vela, maybe I don’t know what you would even call it and just wasn’t sure what to do with it from that point.
And is that what led you to working with me?
Yeah, so I had followed an editor on LinkedIn, and this would see her, you know, occasional comments and it would be, you know, some of it was kind of big picture stuff on story structure. Some of it was like, how do, how do you use a, an Oxford comma? You know, how does this, so it, it could be anything. So I just sent her a, a message one day and said, I’ve got this. I don’t know what to do with it. I had, you know, I, I don’t even know I had no concept of what steps to take and she, you know, so she asked me a few questions. I told her how I’d gotten there. And she said probably needed a writing coach, a and to make sure I learned kind of the craft part of it and fix kind of put my story into the right shape and that’s yeah, that’s, that’s how I found you. And then we, we plowed through it.
We certainly did. And you are probably one of the quickest learners I’ve ever worked with. You’re an extremely productive writer, but also, you know, I’d tell you how to properly use an Oxford comma once and then you’d use it properly from then on. Do you have any sense of, have you always been a quick learner or how were you able to, I mean, I just, I saw you progressing week to week at an extraordinary pace in terms of learning these fundamentals, but then also executing on them.
I think that probably to some extent goes back to the legal training cuz you can’t, I mean, you can’t, I, I do it. You can make the same mistake over and over, but at some point your clients are not gonna be happy with it. Your bosses aren’t gonna be happy. So you just have to learn whatever it is, you know, the whatever particular thing you’re doing, you just you’ve, you’ve gotta cut down on the mistake. So I think that’s part of it. And, and as a lawyer, I think just about any kind of law, you have to read a lot and a lot of it’s pretty dry material. But you have to assimilate a lot of information. And so, you know, that, I think that helps. Maybe I can, I wouldn’t wanna say focus more, but I think I tend to retain more information. I think
What was the biggest challenge you encountered in the writing process of the book and how did you overcome it?
Well, I think my ignorance at the beginning was, was one of the main things cuz I thought, well, 37,000 words, that’s that’s a lot. And I remember, I think one of the first things you asked is like, what I think it was, it was the end of January of 2021. And you said, well, how, how long do you think, or how long do you expect this process to take? I was like, oh I think we can have this done by March. You know, just cuz I had no idea what I was doing or what I was dealing with or the process. So that, that was certainly a challenge just to figure some of the nuts and bolts stuff out, aside from learning how to structure a story. And I think the other thing is, like I mentioned earlier, is the tending to write lawyerly and you know, sometimes you do that all day. Then I get a switch and try to do a description of a scene. And I sort of default back to the very dry writing, you know, very, very thin, very little description and it, I have to work to not do that.
As someone who’s edited your work in many people’s work, I always say there’s, there’s basically two ends of the spectrum. It’s either you have way too many words or you write super lean and very few people are actually in the middle, but on the lean side, the benefit of writing lean is clarity. You know, like you said, you’re following into lawyer mode, but what you mean by lawyer mode is being super, super clear about what’s going on. So I think that’s a great starting point for a first draft or any draft is at least we know what you are trying to communicate as an author. And then we can build on that. We can add the meat and really flesh out details. But the core of what you’re trying to communicate to the reader is there. And I think that’s great.
I think that’s a, that’s a fair assessment, but you know, it still is a struggle where the editor will come back and say, you know, you described everyone in this story as having brown hair. What do you mean by brown? They can’t all be exact. I’m like, well, you know, it’s different kinds of brown, but it’s just brown. <Laugh>, you know, it’s like, okay, we’ve gotta gotta work on that. So it’s that, I think that’s probably one of my bigger challenges.
How did you grapple with the historical detail?
Some of it was just the research had already done. But there were things that, you know, I, and I’ve done a lot of reading just over the years on the history of Paris. Whether it’s, you know, the art or the city or, or whatever architecture, but there were still things that just slipped by me every now and then. And you would, you know, you just fall into that trap. Like I, I think in the first book, at one point I had referred to them being on the left bank. They didn’t call it the left bank for another couple hundred years. I, so I just tried to double check a lot of that stuff. And if it was something I, you know, there’s some things you could take a little bit of license with. I can’t tell you exactly how long this street is, cuz they’ve redone the streets or they’ve cut through neighborhoods.
So you can say it’s X distance and there’s not really anyone that tells you you’re wrong. But if it’s a, you know, a historical fact that is discoverable, then it’s, I just try to nail it down before I made a, an assertion, you know, I wanna make sure, for instance, the types of weapons that they had, that particular weapon at that year, didn’t hate to write it and then have it find out it didn’t come into existence for a couple more years. Yeah. But yeah, you can find books on just about anything. I, I, cuz I wanted to make the meals, for instance, I wanted to be historically accurate. Well I, as much as research as I’d done, I don’t, I didn’t know what they ate at that time. I just, I never thought about it. So yeah. I found a French cookbook from like the 1650s and I’m like, okay. And it tells you what you serve with what I’m like, okay, that’s we’re going with that. You know, if I need a, if I need to have a meal and it’s, you know, a fancy meal, I’m just gonna lift it from that cookbook.
What was your favorite part about the writing process?
I just thought it was fun. I thought it was fun to make progress on it. You know, there were the times where it was sort of frustrating where you think, I don’t know how I can add to this or I don’t know, or this is how I’ve viewed it now I’ve gotta completely undo that section. You know? So that, I mean there would be the frustration, but as the story took shape, it was just, it was just fun. It was a, it was a kind of story that I would like to read. So hopefully someone else will, but you know, I, I just enjoyed the, seeing the story kind of roll out.
That’s certainly one of the benefits of my job as well. I, I just love seeing authors like yourself grow and develop and, and take, say this first book, which was a little rough around the edges, as you said at the beginning and just see it grow in iterate and become the great book that it is today. That’s now being published. It’s like watching your children grow on fast forward, you know, it’s, it’s so great to see something go from ideal or rough, rough piece of story, into a great book that people can now, you know, as of today, go to Amazon and purchase.
Yeah. Yeah. It’s it’s fun. And now yeah, hopefully the second one be out in three months or so, and just kinda keep going from there.
All right. Well, let’s talk a little bit about that. I mean, certainly we want people to go and pick up this first book right away. So everyone head onto over to Amazon or to my website, I’ll have links to Phil’s book there, but you’re gonna have a sink wall hot on its heels.
Yeah. Well, you know, that’s what everyone says is the really, the only way to even potentially make money is to have a series to have enough books that they can sort of grow, you know, together, you know, feed into each other. So I was lucky guys. I had an idea for the second book about the, as I was finishing up the first. And so while it was going through the editing process, the first book that is I could, I went ahead and started on the second and went from there and it, yeah, I think the second one’s better, you know, I think it’s just more polished and I, I had a better understanding of what I was doing, going into it. So I didn’t have a, I didn’t have to go back and clean up all the, the mistakes I’d done the first time around,
Right, right. You’ve got, I mean, that’s the thing about so many people send so much time on a first book is because you’re writing a book and you’re learning to write a book at the same time. And once you’ve finished that book, now it’s like, you’ve been through the process, you understand the steps, you still have to do them all, but you can go through them so much swifter cuz you’re not learning and executing. You’re just executing. So, of course, we’re always learning as well as we go. But for the most part, you know what you’re doing.
Well. Yeah. And some of it was the nuts and bolt stuff. Like, I don’t know if you’d put the showing and not telling or part in there as nuts and bolts, but knowing just how to, how to write dialogue where it’s, it’s paced properly, things like that, where you then are not having to go back and fix that. You’re you’ve, you’ve got it down. You know, you might need to tweak the dialogue, but you’re at least you’re not having to also move commas and things, things like that. So the process starts getting a lot faster. So yeah. And the third one then was, was much faster. I’m seeing a, I’m seeing the timeframe of writing starting to compress more, which is nice.
Yeah. Well, as I said, you’re incredibly productive. So I love that.
It’s nice hobby. Now turn it into a business maybe.
Absolutely. All right. So Phil, who is THE PONTCOURT MURDER for? Who should pick up this book?
So if you like those old Agatha Christie or the thin man, those, those kinds of stories, I think that’s, that’s kind of the, the person that I’m shooting for. And if you like France or want to learn about, you know, some of the, kind of maybe more obscure stuff, like what did they eat? You know, I mean, that’s that, I think those people would find it interesting too.
Well, it’s funny. The one you haven’t mentored is like kind of the group of people I consider myself in, which is, I just love adventure stories. I love stories where people go out there and fight bad guys and, and have an adventure. And you certainly overlay that adventure tone over the murder mystery and the historical.
Yeah. That’s I think you said earlier’s kind of a mashup between three Musketeers and you know, a traditional mystery. I guess I would put it in a genre as a traditional mystery, but I also wanted to keep the action in it. Otherwise there would be no real reason to have a musketeer being the person investigating it. You could just have a, a clerk or a, someone who worked for the court doing it or a Jean DARM or something. But I wanted that, that musketeer aspect. So gotta have some sword fighting, maybe a, a gun fight here or there. Yeah.
Horse chase.
Yeah. My, my horse horse knowledge is still a little lacking, but I’m getting there.
Phil, the book was published today. Congratulations. I’m so thrilled. See it out there in the world. What’s up in terms of book, promotion. Oh, you mentioned you have the second, the sequel coming out in three months. I assume you’re incredibly busy with that already, but for now, what have you got coming up in the next month or two in terms of THE PONTCOURT MURDERS?
Well, I’m going do I’ve couple of signings getting those organized. I need to do more of these types of things and then been for the last week. That was probably two weeks. I’ve been contacting pretty much everyone in my network of, of lawyers and friends, just out and about kind of letting ’em know this was in the works. A few people I had told, you know, what was going on throughout the process. But a lot of people didn’t know I was writing anything. So I wanted to give them a heads up. And then in the last day or two I’ve been saying, okay, it’s, it’s going to be released imminently. So get ready. And then today I’m following up sending him the links and everything. So it’s just, I haven’t really thought a whole lot beyond that, but you know, at least I know I’m going to have a, a signing in October, probably two different ones.
Excellent. Well, the book is THE PONTCOURT MURDERS, SO head on over to Amazon today and pick it up. Phil, any final comments for the folks out there?
No, I just really appreciate all your help in, in getting this book across the finish line and the editors and I mean, it’s, there is just my ignorance in how to write was one thing, the process of actually getting a book published that was a whole other animal. So yeah, I highly recommend using you to make that process go smoother.
Well, Phil, it was such a pleasure working with you and continuing to work with you and congratulations on the book launch.
All right, well thank you very much.
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There you have it my friends, my interview with author Philip Ray. The book is called THE PONTCOURT MURDERS. It is out now, si head on over to Amazon, pick up your copy. You are going to love it. It’s a fantastic read. Whether you’re looking for a mystery or you’re looking for adventure, or you’re looking for a little taste of what 17th century France was like, Phil has it all in the book. Again, the book is THE PONTCOURT MURDERS. Pick it up today.
Man, I love it when my clients find success; it is so amazing to watch them go from a rough draft of a book to a successful published author the way Phil and the way so many clients that I’ve worked with have. It’s the most rewarding part of this job as a writing coach.
Alright, my friends, I’m not gonna give you any other calls to action. Just go pick up Phil’s incredible book. I know you’re gonna love it.
I will see you on the next episode of The Writing Coach.
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