The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Long November by Walt Gragg

Episode Date: May 27, 2024

The Long November by Walt Gragg https://amzn.to/3VhJ8Yg In the tradition of Red Storm Rising and Red Metal, an American military force fights a desperate battle against an overwhelming enemy. What started as a military coup in Pakistan has ignited South Asia and threatens to spread to the world's largest democracy in India. American and British allies struggle to rescue Western civilians who have been cut off in Islamabad. What starts as a desperate race turns into a grim siege. But the fate of a few innocents pales in comparison to one inescapable fact: Pakistan is a nuclear power and some of those weapons are unaccounted for.About the author Walt Gragg lives in the Austin, Texas area with his wife, children, and grandchildren. He is a retired attorney. Prior to law school, he spent a number of years in the military. His time with the Army involved many interesting assignments including three years in the middle of the Cold War at United States European Headquarters in Germany where the idea for The RED LINE took shape. In this assignment he was privy to many of the elements of the actual American plan in place at the time for the conduct of the defense of Germany. While there, he also participated in a number of war games that became the basis for many of the novel’s events.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. This is Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com.

Chris Voss, welcome home. There you go, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the big show. We certainly appreciate you guys tuning in. As always, the Chris Foss Show is a family that loves you, but doesn't judge you, at least not as harshly as your mother-in-law, because, you know, she didn't like you anyway. She was hoping that she'd take it up with Doug, and she didn't.

She chose you, and now she's stuck with you. And you're stuck with her. That's the beauty of marriage. I don't know why we're beating up on all the mother-in-law talk today but it sounded like a funny thing to go on as always get her on your good side tell her to go to goodreads.com for chest chris fuss linkedin.com for chest chris fuss chris fuss one on the tiktokity all those crazy places on the internet today we have an amazing gentleman on the show and a brilliant multi-book author.

He's the author of the new hottest book to come out May 21st, 2024. It's called The Long November by Walt Gregg. He's going to be talking to us about his new book and some of his previous books that he's taken and done that have been hugely popular. He lives in the Austin, Texas area with his wife, children, and grandchildren. He's a retired attorney. Prior to law school, he spent a number of years in the military. And his time with the Army involved many interesting assignments, including three years in the middle of the Cold War at United States European headquarters in Germany, where he got the idea for his first book, The Red Line, took shape. In this assignment, he was privy to many of the elements of the actual American plan in place at the time for the conduct of the defense of Germany. And while there, he also participated in a number of war games

and became the basis for many of the novel's events. Welcome to the show, Will. How are you? I'm doing pretty well, Chris. Doing pretty well. Awesome. Thrilled to have a book coming out today. There you go. Today is the day, the launch day. Congratulations.

Give us any dot coms, any social media places you want people to go find out more about you on the interwebs. My website is waltgregbooks.com. And then I have on Facebook, I have Walt Gregg and Walt Gregg Books. There you go. So give us a 30,000 overview. What's inside your new book? Boy, I wish I could do it in 30 seconds.

We'll give it our best shot here. Take as long as you want. We got time. Okay. Let's start with the Pakistani military and government collapses. There's a huge void in this really volatile country and into that void steps a very cruel totally awful man by the name of Salim Basra Basra is the little despot of a few villages up in the middle of nowhere in the tribal territories and his little army roars forth and becomes bigger by the hour. Literally

within days, he's got 2 million fighters. And he roars across Pakistan, even before the Americans can react. The Pakistani army's fallen apart. And the 6,000 innocents are soon going to find themselves trapped in the American embassy with 100,000 insurgents surrounding them. At the last moment, a single Marine company has arrived, and they're going to do their best. And that's not the only problem the Americans have. Basra has, at the same moment he's surrounding the embassy is seizing pakistan's nearly 200 nuclear weapons so the americans have got their hands full and it's just the first hour of november there you go that's you know it's going to be a interesting end of the year christmas is isn't going to be fun

this year the long november and you wrote this in the tradition of red storm rising and red metal and things like that now is this a continuum of characters in your previous books it is a continuation of my second book the first book the red was a standalone. It's the one that takes place in Germany, in Central Europe. Americans Against Russians, which I'm getting nervous about the way things are going in Ukraine. Yeah, you may have read this somewhere. The second one is The Chosen One. It takes place in North Africa.

And then the third, The Long November, is a follow-up book, a sequel to The Chosen One. Ah, there you go. Let's talk about your history because people like to get to know the author a little bit early on. Tell us, in your words, kind of your experience, how you grew up, what got you down the road you led to. And when you first started writing and going, hey, I think I got a knack for this writing stuff. I'm still wondering about that last part, the part i was born in los angeles i i grew up in a farm in washington state so i lived in part of my life in a huge city and part of my life in the suburbs of the town of 244 people so that was an

interesting start right there yeah i then found myself drafted and on my way to lovely Southeast Asia for the beautiful Vietnam War oh wow I ended up spending 20 years with the army and gosh I've lived in one two three about eight states I think and of course three years in Europe, three years in Asia. It's been a very interesting life. We've been in the Austin area now for, gosh, over 30 years. This is the one place I've been able to settle down and not move. And how did I get into writing? Gosh, I don't know. When I left the military, I went to law school at the University of Texas and did that for a while, was a state prosecutor for a while,

did lots of different things. And along the way, the book idea I'd come up with years and years ago when I was in Europe just wouldn't leave me alone. So I thought, what the heck, I'll try writing this stuff. I will tell you a little secret. For those who want to become writers, it's not as easy as it looks. It took a while for me to figure out how to do this. How I ended up as a writer, you got me. I was just telling my wife before we went on the air that how in the world did I get here?

It is not easy I'm sorry it is hard it's not easy to write I a lot of people try and don't I think that's why we kind of appreciate books and writers and authors because you know a lot of us that have tried to write not myself included but you know even then trying to write a second book for me it's a a challenge. And, you know, I, you know, for me, it's a little bit easier because I write in business for nonfiction, you know, and so I'm just telling business stories, but, you know, you guys, when nonfiction, you know, you're making up characters and plots and scenarios almost out of whole cloth. I mean, there's some of your experience that you utilize, but for the most part, you know know you guys are designing everything from scratch and

and and you know you plot lines character development all that sort of stuff and how that reads through the book it's fairly complex I mean I'm not even sure I could pull that one off me I'm just I just stick with you know stuff that I know like this one time this one guy did that in my company there you go there's a story so yeah it's hard and i think that's what makes it revered because i think if everyone could write books like we wouldn't think of it much we'd just be like you've read a book and people are like so what so god bless it oh i still get a little bit of that but oh maybe once Oh, maybe once in a while. Is it from your wife?

Yeah, could be. Could be. No, she's kind of my writing partner. Oh, there you go. I can say that. There you go. She's got a big role in plotting and editing and telling me when a scene is not so good. Oh, there you go.

She's very much a part of this. There you go. So she's not one of those wives who's like, I don't care about your little book business. Take the garbage out. Oh God, no. No, no, no, no, no. She is deep into this. There you go.

That's good to have. You want her vested. She's in four different book clubs. Oh really? Yeah. She's really into reading and she paints and does all kinds of neat things. Women really love books. I think it's because they have just more imagination they can keep up in their head and how they think about things. Because they visualize, I think, more in their head than men do.

Men, I think, are very, you know, what's in front of us is our thing. I don't know. So tell us, what made you choose the plot and the gist of this story and how you laid it out? What were some of the things that made you decide these are the scenarios to use? I'm kind of a, I wouldn't say I'm a history expert, but I'm a bit of a history buff. One of the first things I do when I'm looking for a new story idea is to kind of look at what's happened before. And to say, what if something similar happened now so i and i love to write kind of a combination of geopolitical and conflict

war if you want to call it that but i prefer not to call it war because that already limits the number of people who think they want to read this Yeah, I I mean there's all sorts of different conflicts that I guess can lead to war right oh, yeah Oh, yeah. Yeah, it's not hard to find a Sensitive place in the world that that's got possibilities I mean you look at Pakistan when I was looking at this one, you just look at it on a map. You've got Iran on one side, Afghanistan on the top,

China and India, not exactly the most stable corner of the world. There you go. And so tell us about some of the characters that you're using in the book. What's, what's their makeup? What are their motivations? Give us a little bit teasing,

if you will. I've been told, in fact, one of the great things about The Long November is, while it's still early, we have received some reviews and they've been just incredible. I just am astounded by how much people are taking to the book. And we get, one of my wife's book clubs was actually test readers for us about a month ago. And this was one younger man and six older women. And all the women told me right off the bat, this is not something I thought I would want to read, but every one of them loved it. Like the head of the book club told me that she missed her hair appointment because she couldn't put the book down and you

know so i thought that was a good sign when a woman's willing to miss your hair appointment to read my book i'm not sure her hairstylist thought it was all that great but you might like a call from the hairstylist attorney that you're cutting up slowing the business down there so anyway i'm every writer does this differently. Some write these detailed outlines that by the time they're through, they've almost got the book. But I consider it creative writing. And so usually the only thing I know when I start the book is the beginning

and the end. Everything in the middle is just going to show up on its own. The characters take me there. Literally, the characters will take me where they want to go and they'll say what they want to say. And as I was telling the book club a few weeks ago, yes, I do hear the characters in my head. I see them talking, you know, and so the characters in this one are pretty interesting. You've got your Marine captain in charge of the company in charge of the desperate defense. His name is Sam Erickson.

He also has a lead role in The Chosen One. And the love of his life is a famous television reporter by the name of Lauren Wells, who he met in the earlier war. And they're going to meet again. He doesn't know she's in Islamabad. She doesn't know he's on the way. And yet they're going to find each other. And then there are other characters. I usually write about four different storylines in each book, so that you've got four different tales going on at once, which sounds confusing, but I assure you it never is. The readers are never confused. So the second storyline are the Green Berets who go after the nuclear weapons. And my two leads there are Sergeant

First Class Aaron Porter, who's a weapons specialist, and Staffant Charlie Sanders, who is an engineer. And it's Sanders' job to disarm the nuclear weapons at a particular site when they're able to get it back from Basra's people. And so that's my second story. And along the way, I was doing an earlier podcast and the fella absolutely loved the next character. He couldn't talk more about her. Along the way, they will aid and then be aided by a little 11-year-old Pakistani girl by the name of Farida. And Farida becomes a very central, very popular character in the book. Like I said, this reader, he just couldn't stop talking about her.

And then we've got a couple of other stories on top of that, but that's kind of the main ones. What do you find the benefit is of having four different storylines going? I can cheat and write. If I get hung up on one story, I just move on you know i can write chapter 14 before i write chapter 11. i'm cheating i mean it's it just i did it with the red line to start with because i wanted to show as much of the entire war as i could but no one character could do that so i ended up with five different storylines in that book and through that was able to show pretty much everything that was going on.

And so it became kind of a neat way of doing it. And different characters would dominate different portions of the book and maybe come back in later for a few chapters. And like I said, it's a fun way to write it. And readers have found it to be a lot of fun. I even had one reader. I think that might have been on a podcast. One reader on The Chosen One who said she read the whole book, loved it. So then she went back and read the four stories individually.

So she would skip through the book from Charlie Sanders and Aaron Porter, The Green Berets. She'd read their whole story and just skip all the chapters in between. And she loved it that way. So it was a lot of fun for her. So you can read the books quite easily, even though it sounds complex. It's really not. There you go. So people really loved it so far.

So far, yeah. I've had tons of compliments on all of the books, but right now, except it's early, I just got a few professional reviews in, but they have been outstanding. I'm just shocked. People loved your prior books. I mean, they have tremendous reviews in your prior books,

and I'm sure people are going to love them. The Red Line, just on amazon alone 1220 ratings 708 ratings on goodreads at 3.8 4.0 on amazon 1048 want to read it on on goodreads that it said and i think i might be reading the kindle versions of this looks like the same as you know your other books did incredibly well too. So people love, you know, your writing, what you're talking about, how you're doing it, and they love your books. That's great. I said, I'll be honest with you as the writer, I have no idea if they're any good or not. I'm the last person to ask whether my books are any

good. I just, what I do is I work, as you can see, I've only put out three books in seven years. And what I do is I work them and work them and rework them. My goal literally is to have the words leap off the page. And I've been told that that exactly happens. And both the first two books, I had readers tell me they had to put it down for a minute because they found themselves literally standing in the middle of the scene. And and they were. And, you know, so it's it's really intense. But but the reviews have been really positive. Like I said, 4.0 is for both books on Amazon.

And I'm pleased with that. And just let your readers know they can pick up, all three of them are available in print book, e-book, or audio book. Whichever way they like to do it. However way you want it, you can get it. So there you go. Great stories. Give us your final pitch out

and.com as we go out so people can find you on the interwebs. Okay, it's waltgregbooks.com or you can go to Walt Gre greg or walt greg books on facebook there you go thank you very much for coming on the show well it was wonderful to have you on do you have anything planned for the next book have you started any work on that by yet if the if your listeners actually read the long november i would pay attention to the epilogue because the epilogue is going to be important

to the next book. And that's getting a ton of compliments. It's such a twist that I think I shocked everybody. So there you go. I'll have to get to the end to see that. There you go. Thank you very much, Walt, for coming on the show. We really appreciate it.

Thank you, Chris. I've been thrilled to be on with you. Wonderful. Thanks much, Walt, for coming to the show. We really appreciate it. Thank you, Chris. I've been thrilled to be on with you. Wonderful. Thanks so much for tuning in. Go to goodreads.com, 4chesschrisvoss, linkedin.com, 4chesschrisvoss, chrisvoss1, the TikTokity, and all those crazy places on the internet. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other.

Stay safe. We'll see you next time. And that should have us out.