The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – US 98: Destination Dade City by Paul Dean Moore

Episode Date: June 16, 2026

US 98: Destination Dade City by Paul Dean Moore https://www.amazon.com/Us-98-Destination-Dade-City/dp/1961845075 US 98: DESTINATION DADE CITY is a story of the LeMay family placed in Witness Protection, due to actions of a crime syndicate. Keep your head down as the tale unfolds about hiding, dogs, murder, and Florida high school football. Victims, law enforcement, and villains each play a role moving towards the conclusion. Each trying to survive. PAUL DEAN MOORE presents his third story based in small towns along Florida US 98. He brings to life characters inspired by his forty years of ministry dealing with people and families in crisis in varied situations. Moore took up fiction writing as a challenge from his youngest daughter, Adina. He dedicates this book to his six children and his in-laws, Clifford and Vernette Oberg, as well as Jerry and Barbara Miller. Moore lives with his wife, Sue, near US 98 in Lakeland, Florida.

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still does daily, daily posts of wonderful interviews. I was like, what do we do again on daily basis? Anyway, refer to the show to your family, friends, and relatives. Go to Goodreeds.com, force, Chris Foss. LinkedIn.com. Forrest S. Chris Foss, Chris Voss 1 on the TikTok and he and all those crazy places on the internet. To do an amazing young man on the show. We're talking about his book series and the books he's writing and he's written and the ones he's writing for the future. I was trying to do past-present future there, but I screw that up.

But that's why you listen to the Chris Foss show. It's because we're human here. We do screw-ups. But it's sound of funny in my head. Opinions expressed by guests on the podcast are solely their own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the host or the Chris Foss show. Some guests of the show may be advertising on the podcast, but it's not endorsement or review of any Kind. Today's featured author comes to us from books to lifemarketing.com. With expert publishing to strategic marketing, they help authors reach their audience and

maximize their book success. He is the author of the latest book to come out called US 98 Destination Dade City by Paul Dean Moore. He's going to be joining us on the show. And his series, it's a three book series, part of a three book series, maybe more. We'll find out. is all under the U.S. 98, if you search for it there on the interwebs in the sky. So we're getting to it with Paul here.

He is a retired Salvation Army officer living in central Florida. He writes using an understanding of people he has met in 40 years of active ministry in the Midwest of the United States. Writing is one of his many hobbies, inspired by his love of life and challenged by his youngest daughter. Welcome to the show, Paul. How are you? I'm fine. Thanks for the introduction. I appreciate it. Nice to meet you, by the way.

Pleasure to meet you as well, and thanks for coming on the show. Give us your dot-coms. Where can people find you on the interwebs? Actually, they can't because I have no website at this point. They're just going to have to come find me. I just find you on the Amazon. They can find you on Amazon. That's the one place they can.

Amazonian. Do you have any emails or any social media? I do have my email, and anybody's welcome to get a hold of me there at PDMore 52 at AOL.com. Yes, I still use AOL.com. Yeah, and I'm old and I lean right into that. You've got to own it, right? That's right. Whatever you're doing in life, just own it.

And then they'll probably look good. So give us a 30,000 overview. What's inside your book, sir? This book particularly is a story about a young woman and her son. She was in love with a Ohio State football player who was supposed to be the next great thing. And he was African American and she was Caucasian and she got pregnant and he got hurt. He was never going to be able to play football again. Oh, no.

And so with that backstory, he kind of goes off and they separate and she goes off and raises a child alone and he goes off to the East Coast, finally finds a job. And he finds out after he's had the job for a while in logistics that he's working for a mafia family in New Jersey. And along the course of his life, He's done real well, keeps his head down, keeps his ears open, he finds out some things, and the head of the family's son takes a dislike to this young man and threatens him, threatens his former girlfriend and the child. And with that background, then he decides, I'm going to go state's evidence against this family, this particular family in the mafia.

And, of course, the United States government, the Department of Justice, likes that idea. And they want to protect the child and the mother. And so they put them into witness protection. Oh. And so they've been living outside of Columbus, Ohio for many years. She works in a dentist office as the business manager, but suddenly they've got to go somewhere else and become somebody else. And so it's a story about them doing that while he's trying to stay away from the family. And there's all kinds of intrigue with that because the mafia people still want to kill him.

They still want to harm his family. And the U.S. Marshals are there to keep it from happening. And it's just an interesting story. I like writing it. It was a lot of fun. I read the book. Really enjoy it. They say they're great characters.

And I'm just glad the way the book has come out. It's a fun book to read. That's all it's supposed to be. Now this is book three in a three book series or is it capped at three books, I should ask. It's not capped at three. I'm working on the fourth book right now. And that one, the stories are all different. What ties these stories together is they're all in small towns along U.S. 98 in Florida.

And so I decided that would be how I would tie the books together, not by character, not by time frame, not by anything else, just the fact they're in these little towns along U.S. 98 in Florida. And I live not far from there in retirement. And it's a nice place to live. And I love small towns. That's where I came out of. I noticed in your biographical stuff, you came out of a small town in Iowa. I can't have a small town in Indiana.

You might be thinking the other Chris Voss. Oh, okay, it might be. Yeah, there's a Christopher Voss who hijacked our brand. Oh, yeah. Well, too bad. Yeah. So, but you write what you know, right? I do.

You're writing these small towns of Florida and different things. What was that thing? What was that movie The Monster? Where that gal was cruising up and down the small towns of Florida and killing people, I think. She was a, I don't know if you remember that. I don't remember that. And I watch a lot of movies. I think it's Theron.

Levis Theron? Yeah, Charlize Theron. Charlize Theron, I believe it was her. I'll double check this as we go through. But what inspired you from this story? Imagine it was from your rich history we cited in your bio that this experience, you write what you know. Yeah. And I've met so many different personalities over the years, all different kinds of people.

And what I try to do is just listen and hang on to pieces of it and bring them together. in the characters. And so that's really, all of my characters are a composite of people I've known through the years. And I'm really, I'm fortunate that I've had this opportunity because, to be honest, being in the Salvation Army, I have met people that are living on the streets, all the way up to people who live in governor's mansions and everything in between. And so I've, I've had a lot of experience. I've been a lot of places in the Midwest. And people are all the same. everybody has a story. And that's what I try to tap into, are the stories. Ah, everyone has a story. We talk about that a lot on the Chris Vos show.

Stories are the fabric of our lives. It's everything about us. Our stories, what we collect, what we talk about, what we experience. If you took away all my stories, I don't know what I do. I just sit around and I don't know, stare at the wall or something. Yeah, even today, I was talking to a young man I'd never met before. He's in his probably late 30. and he was telling me about he spent 13 years in the U.S. Navy and talking a little bit about that. And that's his story. And I wanted to hear it. I said, tell me, tell me about yourself. Tell me your story. So that's great. And people are like that and everybody's got a story. When did you first tune into the importance of stories and being a story collector?

What used to be in Africa before they could write stuff down was called a griot. And he would be the human, he or she would be the human griot, the human. and historian for the tribe. And they would keep all the stories and all the records of the tribe in their head, which is interesting as long as the librarian doesn't get eaten by the lion. But so we're coming out with disease, but I guess they have a backup too. But when did you get tuned into this that stories were important and collecting stories and the interest in them? It really goes back to my childhood, growing up in this small town in Indiana and watching things happen around me and much of those tragedy. I was relating to someone today that at five

years old, I watched one of my best friends die. He'd been hit by a car. And I can remember running down when the sirens came, running down the street and seeing a fireman holding this friend of mine in his arms and the child is bleeding from his everything on his head when he died. And then they had the wake in his family home. I remember being drugged down the alley by my brother. And out of those experiences came stories. And later on, there were other tragedies that I saw. A member of my own family was actually killed by her son, who was mad at his mother. He was 13 years old.

And he killed my mother. But things like that. And those make an impression. They must make an impression. So I began to hold on to those stories. And then I got married, had three little children, and my wife was killed in a car accident. Oh, no. And suddenly it's okay.

not only am I a single father, not only am I grieving, but there's a story. And I want to preserve the story for my children so they would know who their mother was because when they, when she died, they were nine, seven, and three years old. Oh, wow. And so I did. So I sat down and I started to write it and get it down on paper so they would know what happened and who she was and what she was all about. That to me is very, very important. And I've just continued to do that all my life. I'm glad you realized that. It took me until I was like 50. I was a story collector all my life and told stories and it wasn't until I was like 50 that I had this epiphany one day and I'm like everything in the world is about stories. TV, radio, movies, movies are, that's why we love movies. They're great stories. And a lot of these stories we learn from, there's no owner's man that comes to life. And so sharing our stories helps us share not only uplifting things and exciting things and inspire us to do, better and help lift all of us, but also overcoming tragedy, overcoming cathartic times where we find ourselves at that bottom and we rise from the ashes like Phoenix.

And those stories, we love those stories. We like the comeback stories. We like the stories of good versus evil and good wins. And sometimes it doesn't. And those are stories too. But those are the ways we learn. So I'm glad you found that out. I wish I'd thought about it earlier, identified it earlier, because stories,

became much more valuable to me. And hopefully they are to my audience, because that's what we all are as storytellers. And what you take away our stories, good, bad and ugly. The things we survive in life, a lot of people can learn from those lessons. When did you start writing? I actually started writing many years ago. I decided late in life, I was in my 50s, actually, to go back and finish my education. And I ended up going to a doctoral program that was part of the Crystal Cathedral in California

you when Robert Schuller was still alive. And I went there and got involved in a program with them. And so I was working on this doctorate and I was listening. I had the ability while I was there to listen to some of the best preaching in the world. They had videotaped, I don't know, over a thousand different people preaching. And most of the really good ones, the ones that I identified with were people who told stories. And so that really got me at that time. And I've just continued to do that.

So when I wrote my dissertation, it was all about people. And I wanted to help other Salvation Army people be better at presenting God's word. And so I worked with them on that. It's how you do it. It's not necessarily always what you say, but sometimes it's how you say it. Ah, that's really true. Because you can say a few to somebody or you can nicely say a different way of saying a few. Exactly, exactly.

I'll call you later or something, I don't know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, yeah, it's great that you discover that in early age. I think there needs to be more writing classes that help teach people how to write. It's so amazing that when people, especially ADHD people and people that, I don't know, deal with depression, different things. Writing stuff down really helps because the brain is usually beating over the head trying to remind you of stuff. So it doesn't forget.

And when you put them down to paper, it tends to back that brain off and that old monkey brain off and go, hey, okay, he's got on paper, so it's good. So it can be really cathartic, too, when going through challenging times, like you said, for life passing and stuff like that. It can be a good therapeutic resource to put those feelings to paper. Otherwise, you're washing them, and your monkey brain keeps you focused on them so that you don't make same, you don't do the same things and focus you on what's important. But writing stuff down really helps put it down pen to paper and kind of get out of your brain. And I really like that. It's a great feature, especially if you're up late and I worrying about things, put a pen and paper next to the bed and write stuff down. And sometimes that's where you get your best inspiration for books.

Now let's talk about some of the other books in series. The second book in the series is called US98 Tales of Carabelle. But let's go back to the first one, the US 98 Fort Mead Dreams. This is where I'll begin. Is that correct? Okay, Fort Meade Dreams isn't actually Carabelle is where it started. Oh, I'm sorry, Carabelle. Which one you want me to talk about?

I can talk about it. Let's lead off with Carabelle. Let's kick right back to the beginning and then we'll wander through. Carabelle is a small town along US 98 up in the panhandle of Florida. It's probably about 60 miles south of Tallahassee, the state capital. But it's right along what's called the Hidden Coast. And I don't know if you remember this from old war movies, but when the military would do an assault on a beach, They would send these crafts, these landing crafts in, and the door would drop down and the guys would rush out.

All those drivers of those were trained in Carabelle, Florida before World War II. And so that's where the story actually begins is with a man who went there as part of his military duty and learned how to drive these things. And after the war, World War II, he came home and he decided he loved this little village. And so he moved there with his wife and they had a child. And after a few years, it's a town today. of about 2,800 people. It's a very small town. But he decided that he couldn't stay there. There was no future for him work-wise. So he gets ready to leave and he and his wife pack up and

leave, but the son wants to stay. And the son ends up working on fishing boats. And then it becomes his story. And then he gets married and they have a child and it becomes their story. And then with time, then that child has a child. It becomes his story. And so it just moves through the generations of all these. And the final character in the book is actually a boy who has autism, who is a musical savant. And it talks about this child going to school and he has absolutely no understanding of numbers at all. And I actually have a grandson who is 80. And he also is, he has some aspect of the spectrum of autism. He doesn't have exactly what this character had, But this little boy, he goes to school and he finds out in working with him one-on-one with his tutor that he really understands music.

And he can sit down. If he hears it, he can sit down at the piano and he can play it, even though he's ever had any lessons. And so it becomes this little boy's story of what happens to him. And then he loses all his family and he doesn't understand why they're all gone. And he thinks he's all alone in the world, but come to find out he's not. And that's what the story is about is about this boy and his story. And I call him Willie Boy, actually Willie Boy. Everybody in town calls him Willie Boy, and they all know him because he walks around.

He mows people's grass for free. Oh, wow. Yeah, and that's kind of his story. But, again, it's the story of his family and what happens in his life. And that's the Carabelle story. And it's, again, it's a good story. A lot of things happen. I had one person who criticized it and said, too many of your characters die.

And I said, have you ever looked at life? People die. That's what they do. They die. But you have to learn to deal with that too. But that was my first story. And then about a year later, then I started working on the second book, which is at Fort Mead. Fort Mead is about, I live just outside of Lakeland, Florida, which is between Tampa and Orlando. And about 13, 14 miles south of me is a place called Fort Mead. It's a little town again. And there, I set the story for a young man who goes off to the Civil War. And he's a horseman.

So he gets into the cavalry for the south and gets injured, ends up having to hobble back to Florida from Ohio where he's in a prison camp with one of his legs removed because it was shot and he comes on a crutch. But what he wants to do is he wants to build an Atlanta-style mansion for his family that he's eventually going to have in this little town of Fort Meade that he came from. And what happens is once the house gets built, all these strange things start to happen in dreams. People start, everybody who stays in the house has dreams. And so the title of the story is Fort Meade Dreams. And in the story, it kind of works its way through, why did the dreams start? What are they about? Are they real?

And then what happens with them at the end of the story. And so that's what it works is through. And it comes to current day. The house is rehab by an architect who used to live in West Palm, and he and his wife, they start having dreams in the house and they find out some things about the history of the house. They didn't know. That's what that book is about. So, very different. It's my favorite, actually, of the three books I've written.

I like the story there the best because I think it's a little different and it's a lot of fun in that sense. Now, do you see yourself, do you see yourself making a fourth book in the series and onward? Yeah, actually, I've already started on it. And the next one is called Secrets of Perry. Perry, Florida is also a long US-98. It's north and west of where I live. And again, this one is going to be about secrets that become uncovered in the course of the story. And the story has to do with a young man who grew up outside of Tallahassee and ends up moving to Perry after he's been in the military and sees his best friend shot and killed in Afghanistan.

And so he's got PTSD issues. He's got all kinds of issues. His father has remarried because his mother died. He can't go home. What's he going to do? Where's he going to live? He ends up working in a cemetery. He's open to dig graves.

And in that, there are secrets. And he starts uncovering secrets with another character in the story. And I think it'll be a fun ride for a reader just to follow that story along and see where it goes. There'll definitely be secrets. Definitely be secrets. Maybe some, what do they call those things? Egg, the egg, they're little, they're like egg, egg, it's like when you find an egg. They're like a little Easter egg. They do that in gaming. They put little secrets in and little nuances that you can catch. So do you see a cap to the series or is it going to write it out as long as you can? As long as there's small towns in Florida on US 98, I can keep going as long as I want. So it really has to do with me at this point. I'm retired. I'm not doing this for money. I'm not doing this for anything like that. that, I'm just doing it because I want to give something to my friends to read that's just entertainment.

We have enough bad things we can see. All we've got to do is listen to media and we can hear bad things and hate everybody. And I don't want that. I just want people to have something they can hang on to and they can enjoy. It's great to entertain. Do you see any other types of books or sometimes authors will have multiple lines of stories. They'll have one character or so we're doing this. They have a different character.

this storyline. Do you see any future of maybe you writing any other sort of storylines? I don't know. I've actually written seven books total at this point, but the others are not fiction. I wrote one that was really fascinating to me. I was in the Twin Cities, Minnesota, and I don't know how aware your audience would be of this, but there's a big, big influx of people into Minnesota who were Scandinavian. It's happened over the last hundred years. And, And the Salvation Army actually had some strictly Swedish-speaking Salvation armies. And I worked on putting their history together. And so they had many, many thousands of pictures and articles in Swedish.

And my wife was from there, and it was just fascinating. And my father-in-law was still living. He was 97 and was sharp as attack. And he was able to tell me stories of things that happened back in the 30s and the 1930s. And I was able to incorporate all these. And I found things that went back actually before the 1900 stories out of this group of people from the Salvation Army and what happened when people emigrated to America. So I've written that book.

And I've written my dissertation book, which has to do with preaching. And then I've written my family story. And I've also written my own personal story. And someday those will be available to people if they want to read it, if they find them fascinating. I think I've had a pretty fascinating life, actually. I mean, I've not, I told you that I buried my first wife. I buried my second wife, too. She had cancer.

It's very rare. In fact, it's interesting, as an author, I wanted to know what other authors have written about two deaths of spouses? What males? There's not one. There's women who have talked about having multiple spouses who have died, but not men. And I thought maybe that's something I should think about writing someday is the experiences, because it's very different. different. Yeah. Yeah. And it's, it's, I think you should write about it. Like you said, there's not a people who have that experience. When, can people go on the show that have

experiences that most people don't have? Like, one time we interviewed, we've interviewed we've interviewed few billionaires, we've interviewed people on the show that had the president of United States hate tweeting them on social media. And I've asked, and you ask people, what does that feel like? Because most people don't get to have that experience and know what that feels like is a human experience. And so, you know, different things that we had, I think, a secretary for SCOTUS on, and that was for Ruth Bader Ginsburg. And it was her last book before she died.

She co-wrote with a gallon. It was an emotional experience that someone went through. And I think sharing these emotional experiences really help other people. When I shared my story, I've told a million times in the show, about when my dog passed, and I wrote this huge thing of what I felt and what the experience was like. I thought no one's going to care about what this is. is. It's just a selfish sort of me, me, me, oh, I feel bad because my dog died sort of thing.

No one's going to really care. And it helped so many people. It helped people that realize people write me and they go, God, I never got closure with my dad or I never got closure with my dog and passing away. I didn't realize that I hadn't got closure and stuff. So writing some of these things, you'd be surprised. You just never know who it's going to help and who it's going to touch. And usually people that probably need it the most. So I would tell this story if I were you. Yeah, and that's really what I would like to do. But at the same time, I'm retired and I like being retired. And I like living in Florida. And since I've been retired, I've been able to take a couple of cruises and I'm going to take into Alaska soon. And I really

want to do that. There's things I want to do. I want to keep living. After my second wife passed away, I said to my children and I have six of them. I said, I want to keep living. I don't want to go into a corner and curl up and die. I want to live. I want to do something new. I want to have new experiences. And they looked at me kind of funny at first, I have to say, because my children are in their late 30s all the way to their 50s. And so it's dad, are you okay? Do you feel okay? I feel fine. And I need to do this. This is for me. I need to, I help care for my wife for the last three years of her life. And her father before that, I need to do some things for me. I want to do some things for me still. Ah. The great thing is you can do your pace, write at your pace and do everything at your pace. And you can make things the way you want to be because you're retired. You can do whatever you want. I am. That's a great thing.

Some of my mom says, I think she said, I'm retired. I do what I want. So did you ever learn to write? Did you take any classes or did you start writing and got better of it with practice? It's been a lot of practice, actually. I never really took beyond beginner creative writing in college. I never did anything beyond that. that. But as a preacher, I learned storytelling. And so I brought that into the writing. And then I have to say, I've learned to use helps from the internet on the writing. You know, I'll take a paragraph and I'll write it and I'll put it in there and say, and I'll let the internet tell me where it's strong and where it's weak and what they suggest maybe I could do. And so rather than using an editor on the Dade City book, I just let the internet believe me. It wasn't AI. But it was letting them look at my grammar, make suggestions.

Sometimes I took them. Sometimes I didn't. But it helped my writing be easier to understand, I think. Yeah. One of the things a lot of people do now, writers will do, is they'll create a Facebook group and they'll bring in friends and maybe audience members, people that they trust and stuff. And they'll put up pages or chapters of the book for a short time period and let them

read, the advanced copy, what do they call them, the arcs, the advanced reader copies you can put out before you publish and have people help you basically edit the thing that way. And it's pretty cool, pretty cool. With your writing and stuff when you get into it, where do you get your ideas? Do they mostly come? You said you worked for the Salvation Army for a long time? Yes, long time, almost 40 years. Wow.

And so, again, that's basically my whole life has been in. involved with that. Let me tell you a little story that I think is actually quite fascinating. I was in Madison, Wisconsin, State Capitol. It was Christmas Eve. I had sent everybody home. All the bell ringers were in. All the baskets were given out. The toys were all gone, everything. And I'm sitting, I'm the only one in the building. And I see a taxi cab pull up in front of the building. And a young woman gets out and she sets up her baby carriage and she gets a small child. and she doesn't have a coat on. The mom doesn't.

And she comes to the front door and the front door is locked. I go to the front door and I invite her in and she comes in and she tells me her story. And she just gotten into town. She didn't know where to go. She didn't know what to do. I got on the phone and called. We had a homeless shelter. And I told my staff.

And I said, hey, can you, do you have room for her? And her child? This is Christmas Eve. And it's like that was the Christmas story all over. again. Oh, wow. Yeah. They had no place to go. And yet it was fascinating. It was real. And I felt so good about the fact that I was there, I was able to help this young woman and get her a place to be safe and warm and her child to be safe and warm. And that's what I did. I just did my little part. Yeah. That's cool. That's cool. Taking care of the people, we often say on the show, on the Chris

Foss show, we're stewards of each other on this planet. We are. We're stewards of each other in humanity. And that's really important for us to remember because when we, when we fight each other and stuff, we don't get along. Everything goes to hell. It does. We tend to get along. Things seem to be good. We're kind of seeing how that works right now with wars and all the crap we're up to. Yeah, getting along and taking care of each other.

And what is your greatest love in writing and maybe the least enjoyable part? I think the greatest love in writing is to watch somebody finish a book and watch their face light up. And I just had that experience over the last weekend, a young woman who I'd met, she just finished the Carabelle book. And she just beamed. I didn't expect that ending. That was really, really good. I really like that.

Now I'm looking forward to reading the second book. That made me feel good. Oh, wonderful. The worst part is probably sitting down and hitting a roadblock in the story, get to a point where you just, I don't know where to take this story next and then have to wait. for that process to happen to work through. That's my least favorite part. Yeah, it can be challenging to develop these stories and you're like,

and when you get stuck and stuff. But sometimes just sometimes just keeping writing through writer's block helps. I don't know what you find. Do you find it helps just to wait? It does help to wait, but it also helps. I've been a, I've been journaling all of my adult life. And so, yeah, and so what I'll do is I'll go back to my journal and I'll work on my journal. and maybe I'll go back six months and read what I wrote six months ago and something will hit me and that's something, oh, hey, I might be able to use this idea.

Or I'll decide, oh, I'm going to go see a movie today and I'll see a movie and something happens in the movie. It's not like I'm plagiarizing the movie, but I'm taking a little piece of it and saying, ah, this would work in this situation. I just try to keep my mind open and my eyes open and listen. Yeah. Listening's probably an important factor on a lot of this, huh? I think so. Yeah. Because if you listen, you can hear the stories and you can, sometimes people are too busy telling their stories to listen.

And then even if you're telling them a story, they're setting up their next story or figuring out of interruption. Yeah. Yeah, it's pretty interesting that way, how it plays out. But if you listen, you can hear stories. And a lot of times if you just shut up and let people tell their stories, you'll get interesting things. Especially if you let them keep telling their stories. they'll get usually deeper and better. Sometimes, that or sometimes they'll just sit there and chew their gum and say every five seconds.

We know those folks. Yeah. Those are the worst stories because you never get to them. You're just, it's probably going to get kicked on my editor. My editor kicks repeat words that are unnecessary. So what do you want readers to take away from your stories? I would hope they might at least give me a shot at their readership. Maybe this discussion that we've had will pique their interest and maybe they'll decide,

hey, you know, let me see. Maybe this is somebody I'd like to read. And that's all I would like to do. Somebody grab my book and read it and walk away and go, that was pretty good. I enjoyed that. I'm not James Patterson. I know that. He's one of my favorite writers.

I love David Beldachi a lot. And I just read something by Sandra Brown. And it was great. And Nora Roberts, there's a lot of good writers out there. I recognize I am not on their level at all. But if I tell a story and it catches somebody's interest, then I've done what I'm supposed to do. You just pre-answered the question I had set up for you. What authors do you enjoy reading?

What genres do you enjoy reading? Right now, I'm actually reading something that was written by, it's a Christian book. It's written by David Jeremiah, who's a pastor out on the West Coast, and I'm reading something he calls it the book of signs. And I'm reading that right now. But before that, I was reading a David Baldacci book. I also like a guy by the name of John Sanford. who writes a lot of things about the Twin Cities, and they're basically crime books. But I do like to read those stories.

He's a great storyteller. So there's a lot of people that I do like to read. Dan Brown, I love his books. I try to read widely. And then I also try to read things that are not always fiction. So I do read some other things. I love history. And so I'll read a history book, and then I'll start a history book,

and I'll think that's boring and I'll put it away. Do you find that the variety helps just make for better writing for you? Yeah, it does. I like to be aware of their style also as they write and see how do they actually put things together. And is this something that I would like to try? So we'll see. Yeah, we'll see. Yeah, it's good to have that diversity.

And, of course, you can see how other people develop their characters and all that good stuff. and everything else. So it sounds like you got a great future going on with what you're doing. How has writing changed you personally, would you say? Well, that's a tough question. I think it's a thing. It simply made me more aware of people around me and their stories. I didn't really tell you how I started. I got this first inspiration to write. It was my daughter and I, I would drive her to school in the morning. She was about in fifth grade. And every day before we got in the car to go to drive her to school, this man would walked by our house. We didn't know the man. We knew nothing about him, but we knew we wore a blue coat every day. And my daughter and I started telling each other stories about the man in the blue coat.

Every day, it'd be like a new chapter about the man in the blue coat. And we knew nothing, but we were just making up these stories. And by the time I dropped her off at school, we told the next chapter of the man in the blue coat. And after I retired, my daughter, who is now a child therapist in Orlando for kids who have been abused. Yeah. She, She said to me, Dad, when you retire, you need to write the story of the man in the blue coat. And I did, but it was only two chapters long. And she says, no, not a short story. You need to write a long.

So that's all you're getting on the man in the blue coat. But that's what inspired me then to start writing the first novel. That's good. You had that inspiration that some critical advice there. Yeah. And what's also interesting with her is in my second book, the Fort Meade book, I needed a picture of a house that did not exist for the cover. because this was a fictitious house. And so I said to my daughter, I said, hey, can you write, can you draw me a house?

She drew this house. Oh, the one that's on the cover? Yeah, she was an art therapist major in college, so she really knows her art. And she drew the house exactly the way I wanted. And I give her credit inside the book that she's wrote the, she designed the cover for me. It's a family affair now. Family affair, that's right. Yeah.

I love when authors, you know, if their children are willing, I suppose, bring them into the fold. Sometimes they'll write a co-book with them and try and inspire that authorship. Yeah. Man, I'm just, as a kid going, man, I wish my dad would have been like, let's write a book together somewhere. Let's write some books. Because they definitely was writing at an early age. And I'd write little Limerick poems like Dr. Seuss-type sort of rhymes about people in my school or my classes. and then we'd get up and read what funny stories that we'd written about people.

And I was writing and interested in reading and writing early on, but I never really put the thing together. I just started writing lots of crap, and then eventually I was like, maybe I should try this in our book or something somebody wants to read. And so, yeah, what surprising discoveries have you made during your writing process, maybe about yourself, about your life, maybe epiphanies you have? Yeah, one of the epiphanies is I'm not really good at the business.

is part of this. And there are a lot of people out there that want to take what little ability I have and try to exploit it for their own financial gain. And I'm getting calls literally daily from people who want, we could help your book. We'll take it to the Manila Book Fair. We'll take it to Singapore. We'll take it to Miami. And what's this going to cost me? Oh, for only $700. We'll take it for you. You don't have to go. We'll just take it. We'll put it on our stand. I said, yeah. And I said, how much will I gain from that? And the answer was, we can't guarantee anything.

And those kind of things. And that's one of the things I've learned. I'm really not that. I'm not a marketer. I don't know the first thing about marketing. I know a little bit about writing. That's all I know. Yeah.

That's all I know. That's my story. I'm sticking to it. Give you a final pitch out to order up your books. Dot com's emails, wherever you want people to contact you and get in touch with you. I would say, first of all, if they want to look at one of these books,

go to Amazon, look up my books under my name Paul Dean Moore, and there's three of them, US 98, and start there. Or if they want to contact me directly, they can contact me at PDmore 52 at AOL.com. And I'll be glad to respond to them and give them information. Well, thank you for coming on the show, Paul. You've been an excellent guest and done a wonderful job here. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Moniz for tuning in.

Order up his books, wherever fine books are sold. You can check out the third in the series. US 98 destination day city out recently here. What's the release date? November 28th, 2020. Thanks for us for tuning in. Go to goodrease.com, Fortresschus Christchristch, Chris Voss, LinkedIn.com, Fortresschast Christfoss, 1 on the TikTok and he all is a crazy place in it.

Be good to each other. Stay safe. We'll see you next time. You've been listening to the most amazing, intelligent podcast ever made to improve your brain and your life. Warning, consuming too much of the Chris Wall Show podcast. lead to people thinking you're smarter, younger, and irresistible sexy. Consume in regularly moderated amounts. Consult a doctor for any resulting brain bleed.

All right, great job, wonderful stuff there.