The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Misunderstood by Jay Sherfey

Episode Date: July 24, 2024

Misunderstood by Jay Sherfey https://amzn.to/3SkJb3W Jaysherfeytales.com Something bad had happened in New York. Misdiagnosed as psychotic, abandoned by family, and in the hands of Pennsylvania Social Services, Jason Sutter enters the Dubois foster home for difficult cases. The voices come from every direction and plague his waking hours. The medication offers relief but banishment from the house to the toolshed outback quieted the screams and sobbing calls for help. Jason is not psychotic. A gifted telepath he must struggle to get out from under the medication then start down the long path to discovering what happened and how to control his abilities. He will make friends along the way and learn more and more about himself and his enemies: dangerous people like himself and normal persons like his foster mother Lydia Dubois. The story in Book 1 tells how Jason recovers and decides how best to protect his friends and himself. Future installments will capture the battles, the reuniting of his family, and how Jason's kind came into existence. About the author An electrical engineer by trade I am closing on 60 years old. I am married with two near adult children. I live in Worcester, MA.

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But we are the family that loves you Regardless of you know what type of person you are Unless you're evil Then we want to fix you But other than that you can listen to the show And learn how not to be evil That's the great thing about the show. We have all sorts of great psychologists on the show that can help you with your evilness.

And always great authors tell their stories, et cetera, et cetera, on the show. Tell your friends, neighbors, relatives. Go to goodreads.com, 4chesschrisfoss, linkedin.com, 4chesschrisfoss, chrisfoss1, the TikTokity, chrisfossfacebook.com, and all those other places. And you can buy me a coffee at buymeacoffee.com for us that's chris voss we have an amazing young man on the show with us today we're going to be talking about several of his books he's a multi-book author we're going to be talking mostly about his misunderstood trilogy that he has coming out and should be pretty insightful

and wonderful stories that we'll tell and learn from and all that good stuff. Jay Shurfley joins us on the show. His series, Misunderstood. The first book came out November 9th, 2020, and he has the second book out and currently working on the third book. He has worked 32 years as a semiconductor engineer, pushing the storylines, rattling up in his head to the back burner. He's been married since 1981 and his him and his wife claudia did all they could to help children from troubled homes stay in school believe they could succeed they adopted two such children in 2000 brother

and sister john and kristin through those years they helped them develop working knowledge of how to social safety net helps and fails the rest of us and so arriving at the doorstep of his successful engineering career didn't come easy he gained a BA in history and philosophy from NYU not sure what he wanted to do after he studied music on a whim he took a physics course at City College at New York in the Bronx. The light went on as the math and physics came easy, giving him his calling. He's now 71 years old and retired from Intel. I told you he was young. And he finally let the stories foaming in his brain free. I had that foaming in my brain one time, but it was from a dog bite. Anyway, though engineering was a blast and great fun,

he now loves writing and consuming his time. Welcome to the show. How are you, Jay? I'm doing just fine, Chris. Glad to be here. Glad you're here with us as well. Give us your dot coms. Where can people find you on the interwebs in the sky? Okay, jayshurfeytales.com. There you go. G-A-Y-S-H-E-R-F-e-y-t-a-l-e-s.com. There you go.

So give us a 30,000 overview of your Misunderstood Trilogy series. Okay. The story started bugging the hell out of me several years ago. What if people existed in this world that could read people's minds, move things with their minds? And with that concept, how could it happen? Obviously, if it's going to happen, it's going to happen with genetics. So how would that play out? And little by little, the story came about Jason Sutter, that there are communities in this country and around the world where you have 100, maybe 200 people who can do this kind of thing, but they're heavily outnumbered. They have a long history of being destroyed because people thought they were evil, magic,

wizardry, witchcraft, things of that nature. And so the first book is about a civil war that did not go well for Jason or his parents. And Jason finds himself stripped of his abilities to protect him. And in a normal, somewhat normal foster home where over the course of the book, over time, he starts to recover. But he has to deal with a lot of interesting characters on the way. And that's book one. Book two, which is nothing to joke about, extends from book one in that in book one, everyone thinks Jason's nuts. So he has a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist has the ability to find

out where his mom is okay his mom is in book two is about rescuing his mom and finding out exactly what he doesn't know about the communities around the world oh wow and he does there's a lot of fun to write he's just gotta dig it out of him then. Yes. And then we'll get into the other book that you have, Foxtail, here in a bit. So tell us about your upbringing and stuff. How does an engineer with a master's degree stumble into writing?

How did you grow up? What were your influences? And when did you kind of start realizing you could write? You're talking about a very confusing time. 17, 18-year-olds, which is not abnormal. Like many of the men in my family, I had a yen for history. Enjoyed it. I have a degree in history.

Didn't do too much for me. But miraculously, as you read in my bio, I stumbled into physics. And physics was such a blast, especially the math, quantum mechanics, amazing stuff. And I really enjoyed all of it and did well. I had a good living working for Intel, making sure that the electrons went where they were supposed to go in solid state devices. And they took care of me and I took care of them from the writing point of view what can i tell you in high school i stumbled into jr r tolkien a lord of the rings the hot yes he's a phenomenal writer i am not as good as he is but i hope i can tell a good story i just my writing i hope is good enough and go ahead and just just keep getting better too. I mean,

it's a learned art, right? Yes. Yes. You get more comfortable with things, with writing. Although I have to admit, my upbringing is Catholic grammar school and Catholic high school. And what does that do for you? If you set the religious aspects aside, you know how to write a sentence. The nuns and the brothers were really insistent that English be taken seriously. And then, of course, basic mathematics. I came out of high school knowing trigonometry. And that came easily in high school, which probably should have been a message to me that that's the way I should have gone. However that might be, it's been a blast.

It's been a real blast. And I got over my confusion. I did both. There you go. There you go. Let's talk about Foxtails, too. That's another book that you have going as a thread now that might potentially turn into something, I think. Tell us about that.

The Fox's Tale is a book that practically wrote itself. It's a story about a fantasy country called the North and a fantasy country called the South and a fantasy country called the Mountain Country. And it all kind of looks very much like England. I've read extensively on English history, and it just came out that way. It just made perfect sense to me to write it this way. So what you've got is the North had invaded the South 100 years earlier, taken all of their energy projectors, which is the fantasy side of the story,

people who could project energy and make things happen. One of our characters can project into the soil and make weeds go away by themselves. Wow. And grow anything. That guy at my house. Again, a lot of fun. My main character is Jack Fox. And we find out that the North is like Rome, arrogant, powerful.

They think very little of people in the South. It's really prejudiced. But again, they made the fundamental error thinking that they had captured all of the energy projectors in the South and brought them north. Genetics plays out. They may skip a generation,

but they're going to be there. And that's what my main character finds out. He basically is betrayed by his father and taken to the north with the expectation that he'd be a slave. But it turns out that in doing so, he hurt his son. And he winds up in a clinic of sorts on the border. And lo and behold, he's healing himself. And he shouldn't be able to do that.

Only projectors can do that. And then we find out just how powerful he is and his family and on from there. I want to be able to self-heal. Yes, it gets rather complicated. And then the northern people get tired of the southern people getting in the way of their need for slaves, children mostly. And they send a force down to just quiet them down. But a force very much reminiscent of the force sent against Spartacus. Oh, wow.

No, they didn't set up any kind of protection, no defensive screens or anything. And that did not go well. So I'm pulling in British history. I'm pulling in American Civil War history. I have characters saying things like, kill them, Mrs. Hargreaves. Kill them all. When they were talking about slavers. And that comes right out of Jackson talking to his men after one of the southern cities of Virginia were destroyed.

So I'm playing with history, having a good time. And the physics of the thing. There you go. And the genetics. It's fun. It's just plain fun. So it sounds like a lot of your engineering sort of mindset and physics and all these different things play into a part of it. Absolutely.

Absolutely. And a very, very strong part of it also are the very real human interactions. If they aren't real, the story is worthless. You really have to write your characters in such a way that, oh yeah, any reader can see themselves in some of the characters, that it's very, very real. With human weaknesses, human strengths, and basically my book starts out with some tough things that are going on, but it ends with redemption. Redemption. People love stories of redemption.

I feel redeemed. It's redeemed you, so there you go. That's a good thing. There you go, yeah. There you go. That's a good thing. Tell us about the main character in your first book and the setting on it. Jason Sutter in Healing Jason Sutter.

The title is a play on healing, very much like goodwill hunting. You're playing on words there where goodwill is hunting for something as opposed to good name will hunting. So it's a play on words. Jason winds up in foster care facility, a big old Victorian house where there are many children. And it's basically a money's game for the people taking care of these kids. They do the least they can to get the most money out of the state. And my main evil character is Lydia.

And when Jason gets his power back, there is no way he can fix her. But other people in the house, the kids and her husband, most notably, start feeling better. And there's no reason for it. They don't understand why. And that's because Jason has this ability to bring the best out in people. And he doesn't even know he's doing it wow and it's part of one of his skills then or his ability yes exactly part of his skills i need that because sometimes i bring out the worst in people maybe that's my skill not to me yeah then i don't do it on the show i I do it on the show. Oh, okay, okay. I hear you.

I hear you. There you go. That really does come at me. It seems like mostly happens on Facebook and Twitter, so there's that. So, I mean, you retired after 32 years. Why not just relax and take it easy? And, you know, writing can be demanding. Like, why not just enjoy your retirement?

I'm driven, number one. And number two, I'm not dead yet yeah plus your wife still goes to target and amazon probably yes feed that monster of buying things at amazon yeah all my married friends are like chris she goes to target twice a day like hey you married her anyway you do what you got to do yeah i'm the bad one in the house, though, because that's only me. So I'm the one who's ordering all the Amazon packages every day. So there you go. It's either me or someone I marry.

So I'd just rather it be me. I think that's how I'm working it. So when you finish this trilogy you're working on, do you have an anticipated release date for the third book? The third book will probably come out in about six months. The third book is going to cover exactly how they came into existence. I go back a million years. What happened in Africa with pre-humans?

How could their genetic code be changed? Obviously, they ran into a virus of some sort. And not all of them did, just some. And how that genetic change worked through their systems and through their bodies for the time it took for Homo sapiens to come in. There you go. And then you jump to that particular brand of humanity. And then the real brain talent comes in, the telepathy, telekinesis, things of that nature. So it develops slowly over time, which genetically makes sense. That's a bummer.

I didn't get any weird special powers when I got a virus in Thailand. I hear you. I'm not sure what that was about, but it cleared up, I think. Anyway, it's always Thailand jokes. Anyway, so are there any other books in process in your head, in your mind, maybe that you're thinking about writing? Are you going to stick with the trilogies and maybe a second Fox's Tale book? The trilogy first, but I've got a book that's currently titled

The Madness of Jonathan Langford. Oh, wow. And that story is in a way attached to The Madness of Jonathan Langford. And that story is in a way attached to The Madness of King George III, in that he leaves reality and comes back. And it's a condition that is in his male family tree. And it varies. He's got the version of it where he becomes happy-go-lucky and doesn't hurt anybody, just has a hell of a good time and spends an enormous amount of money, which he can afford. But then other men in his family, most notably, unfortunately, his son has the darker version where he doesn't leave reality. He's just evil. He can't connect with people he is totally narcissistic to the

point of mental illness but doesn't recognize it in himself people around him do and so that book is about a third done and i'm not quite sure where i'm gonna go with it yet. So that's always fun. Would you call that a bit of historical fiction? Not really. Okay. But it's based on King Henry? George III most notably had a reality break. And it's historical. And that kind of thing appeals to me.

And that's where my story starts with that idea. There you go. That'll be interesting to see, man. And you've, you're really, you know, you blossom with this whole writing thing. Do you kind of have some regrets as to not exploring this sooner? Or would that, have you been an option with, I mean, you did a lot in life from what we talked about with your biography.

That's a tough question to answer. My 32 years as an engineer, like I said, I had such a good time doing that. It was fun. Good people, smart people, exchanging ideas, constantly trying to improve yields in a processing line that was pushing the limits on what can be done in physics with solid state. And they've gone much further since I retired. And again, I could get back into that. That could be a lot of fun. But when these stories started getting in my head and wouldn't release me, I had to write them down.

As soon as I wrote them down, even in my notebook and pencil and paper with no editing yet just a raw deal it quieted it quieted the voices there you go i need something to quiet the voices of my head and lithium no i don't take lithium folks that's a joke calm down but maybe maybe i should i don't know so you're there's some i see here there's something about coming soon to Spotify on your website. What is that about? What they want to do is to bring any videos that we do, anything like this, to the website. And again, take advantage of anything and everything that the younger folks are looking at. I am not addicted

to my cell phone. If it's off, that's fine. I have no problem with that. What? There's an off button? Yeah, right. But my daughter and son, they live on their phones. I got to connect with people like that who like to be on their phones a lot. Yeah, it's definitely a great selling point. I mean, having audiobook versions of your book is important as well. So there you go. Any final thoughts as we go out that we want to miss or give people a final pitch on the book?

I think we're going to do a screenplay. So that's going to happen. If you like fantasy with a good, strong, realistic bent toward the science that's available to us now, please read these stories. The people are real. The relationships are real. None of this fantastic kind of stuff.

It's just they have these little talents that makes it a fantasy story. There you go. There you go. So fun is fun and you finally reached that pinnacle i'm glad you got a lot of stuff going people love series that's one thing i've learned from a lot of the novelists we have on the show they like to see the characters progress yes through the different book scenarios and they love series and so that's uh you know anytime i talk to a novelist who's like i'm thinking about writing this book as a one-off

like man if you can create a a series because people love following the characters, seeing them develop. We've had people on the show that have written 100-plus books, and they have multiple threads of different series and characters, and it's like just a living environment, if you will. Give us your.coms as we go out so people can see you on the interwebs. Okay, that would be J. Scherfe, J-A-Y-S-H-E-R-F-E-Y, tails, T-A-L-E-S, all one word,.com.

There you go. So thank you very much for coming on the show. We really appreciate it, man. Oh, thank you, Chris. Thanks for the opportunity. There you go. Check out the show, or I'm sorry, the book called Misunderstood in the Trilogy by Jay Shurfly. You can find it wherever fine books are sold or on the

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