An action-adventure story about antihero David Liecht, who worked his way to the top of the commercial real estate world, only to lose everything while finding love…and then teeter on the brink of losing that too.
TALKIN’ BILLIONAIRES INTO OR OUT OF SHIT IS WHAT I DO.
Some would say I’m slick with the lingo.
Other people will tell you other things.
I’ve been a wheeler and dealer my entire life. I’ve had some monster wins, and I’ve taken some big hits. You’re going to read about the worst of it.
Of course, there’s a woman involved.
Not your thing? Don’t worry, there are a plethora of other players in the story too.
Let’s see, there’s a hooker and a general. One looks killer, and one is a killer.
There are Muslim drug lords, now in real estate. A Venezuelan hillbilly who was out playin’ in the dirt and struck oil.
And you’re going to meet an African prince with diamonds to spare.
Let me think…There’s a fat redneck from the sticks of Florida and his buddy, an MS13 gang banger who wants to be a rapper. More millionaires, a couple of billionaires. And oh, I can’t leave out the Count. A Frenchy, who fancies himself a mobster…in the Med.
Spoiler alert: He gets whacked.
The “good guys” do eventually show up. Most of ’em in those stupid blue windbreakers, three dumbass letters across the back in case the crewcuts and aviators didn’t make it clear enough.
Wait ’til I tell you about the kidnappers and the Russian Shylock I call “Yak-off.”
These stories are going to spin you on your head, but that’s it for the teaser.
I’ll see you on the inside.
—Bank Robbin’ Dave
ABOUT G.C. Brown
From a farm in
small-town Indiana to the diamond fields of Africa to federal prison back in
the States and everywhere in between, GC Brown has surfed some big waves in the
ocean of life's adventures. Now, he's balancing babies, books, and business
from his home in California, where he lives with his wife, two sons, and
their brand-spanking-new identical twin boys. SNIFF: Book 1 in the SNIFF,
SMOKE, SHOOT Series is his debut novel.
Kenneth
Atchity began writing stories as a child under his mother’s
supervision. By the age of 16 he was a book reviewer for the Kansas City
Star (no one at the newspaper realized how old he was when they hired
him over the phone).
Ken started in the film industry after working as a professor for 17
years because he wanted to work on the creative side of story rather
than the critical side. He came up with an idea that turned into 16
films and never looked back. His company has developed over 30 films and
published over 150 novels. Ken has a reverence for stories and the art
of storytelling that shines through in this interview.
Listen to interview
The way to sell a story to its largest audience is to write a book
and make a movie out of it. You can also do it the other way, and write a
book based on a movie.
The power of having a story that is both a movie or TV show and a
book is that you have two separate audiences that discover the story and
each of them will seek out the story in the other medium.
People who read the book first will watch the movie or TV show, and people who watch the TV show first will buy the book.
To make your story into a movie or television show, it has to be
highly dramatic and have a universal message that a large audience can
connect with.
A good treatment can sell them with the idea of your novel even if
your novel is missing some basic elements of a good Hollywood
screenplay.
A treatment is a brief written pitch that shows the movie that
exists in the story. Ken’s book on treatments can be found in the Links
and Resources section below.
After you’ve written your treatment you should reach out to a contact in Hollywood.
If you don’t know anyone directly to you don’t have any friends who
might be able to connect with someone one place to look is writers
conferences. You can go to writers conferences and sign up for a lecture
from somebody who is connected in Hollywood and that will give you a
point of contact.
When you meet your point of contact simply ask them for their
advice. Don’t ask them to buy your story idea. Give them the elevator
pitch of your story. If they’re excited by that give them a copy of your
treatment and they’ll look at it seriously. Often if they aren’t
interested for some reason they may be able to point you in the
direction of somebody who might be.
Don’t offer to buy them lunch. Just ask for five minutes of their time.
You should be able to tell people what your story is about one or
two sentences. If it takes longer something is wrong with your story.
The pitch for under siege starring Stephen Seagal was Die Hard on a boat.
the pitch for Splash starring Tom Hanks and Daryl Hannah was: It’s a fish out of water story only she’s a mermaid.
The secret to a good pitch is to make it short. Make it something that leads the person you’re talking to to ask questions.
If you’re in a producer’s office in Hollywood and they ask you five
questions about your story, they virtually invested in your story
already.
The most important character in every story is the audience. Always
pay attention to the audience. Always be thinking about where the
audience’s attention is at.
Structure your story for your audience.
How to engage your audience when they aren’t responding to the story you’re telling.
After you’ve sold your story stop talking.
Never bring notes to a pitch meeting.
Stories are about humanity.
Storytelling is about capturing the audience in a relationship with you that leaves the rest of the world out.
The audience lives inside your story. That’s why it’s so important
to not have anything in the story that takes them out of the story.
The most important thing when selling your story is to keep the
audience on the edge of their seat all the way through the pitch. If you
can do that chances are very good story will sell.
Ideas themselves don’t make movies. Good storytelling makes movies. Writing a good story shows that you’re a good storyteller.
There are no new stories. It’s how you tell the story that makes the difference.
An idea can’t be protected. Only written documents can be protected.
If you have a good story idea at least write a treatment of it so it
can be protected.
The human race runs on stories.
Storytelling is a sacred vocation.
Before the written word storytelling was how civilization got passed down from generation to generation.
Storytellers were a protected class of citizen in ancient times.
Storytelling is our primary way of holding reality together.
The myth of the starving artist is just another destructive story we
tell ourselves. It’s a story rooted in victimhood, and no good
protagonist is ever a victim for long. Western culture prefers stories
of heroes who overcome their obstacles.
Salvador Dali once said: The difference between a madman and myself is I am not mad.
The only difference between an artist who is seen as crazy and an artist who is seen as a genius in success.
The only way to combat the naysayers in your life is simply keep writing.
As a writer always remember that your calling is writing. Keep a sense of perspective when people try to tear you down.
Start writing more it will get rid of all these moods you’re having.— Ray Bradbury
You have to have the story you’re telling nailed down, but you also have to have your personal story nailed down as well.
Writers write. That’s what they do.
The only way to be sure they will succeed as a storyteller is to
keep telling stories until you succeed. You have to persist as long as
it takes.
The only way to fail is to give up. If you don’t give up you will eventually succeed, or die trying.
As a writer you’re living a dream life. Millions of people dream of
having the courage to do what you’re doing. If you die without any
external success, you still died in the middle of living a dream life.
Is there anything better than that?
The sure fire cure for writers block: never sit down to write until you know what you’re going to write about.
The good thing about writing is that it’s a democratic art form.
Anyone can write. It’s not limited to a specific social class or
morality.
Basic Elements of a Hollywood Story
A protagonist we root for and identify with.
An antagonist for the protagonist to struggle against.
A visible goal that the protagonist wants to achieve.
Obstacles for the protagonist to overcome.
Follow the three act structure. Make sure your story has a beginning, middle and end.
Make sure that your story has a big climax. Hollywood movies need big climaxes.
Q: What inspired you to write Talmadge Farm, and how did you create your cast of characters?
A: The Baby Boomer generation brought about a great transition in our country. I’m a little older than the Baby Boomers so I remember what life was like in the ‘40s and ‘50s, when segregation was rampant in the South and television and rock-n-roll didn’t exist yet.
I grew up on a tobacco farm, and the kids of the sharecroppers on the farm were some of my best friends. But it wasn’t a life they wanted, and sharecropping as a whole began to die out as young people began to look for a life off the farm. I thought this period of time from 1957 to 1967 was one that deserved some conversation and attention.
The cast of characters were based on my own experience growing up on a tobacco farm in Sampson County, North Carolina.
Q: The Kirkus Review of the novel says, in part, “At the heart of the novel is a thoughtful meditation on the inexorability of change, and what happens when justice results in a redistribution of success.” What do you think of that description?
A: I think it’s a good characterization of the story. The ‘50s and ‘60s were a tumultuous time, with major changes taking place in both the farming industry and the banking industry.
It was also a time when the balance of power began to shift as new opportunities became available for women and people of color.
In the novel, Jake, a Black teenager, runs away to Philadelphia and eventually goes to medical school. His sister goes to secretarial school and gets a job at the clerk of court. These opportunities did not exist for young Black people just a few years prior.
So we have some characters who embrace and benefit from changing times and some – like Gordon Talmadge – who are unable and unwilling to adapt.
Q: Did you know how the novel would end before you started writing it, or did you make many changes along the way?
A: I had a rough outline of the novel before I started. Certain plot points – the smokehouse attack, Jake going to Philadelphia, Will’s encounter with the sheriff, Gordon losing the bank and Gordon’s lung cancer diagnosis – were predetermined. The rest of the story came together in the writing process.
Q: What do you hope readers take away from the story?
A: I hope they like the characters, and I hope they gain an understanding of some of the changes that happened during this time period, such as the demise of sharecropping and how the Research Triangle Park became a reality and made a significant difference to North Carolina and to our country.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: We’re gearing up for the release of the novel! It’s been a labor of love for several years now, and I’m really excited about connecting with readers and learning their thoughts about the characters and the events that take place in the novel.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: I’ve always been a big reader throughout my whole life. I enjoy talking to friends about books and we often make recommendations to one another about books we like.
I enjoy a variety of genres. I’ve read a number of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s presidential biographies. For a while, I was into books about World War I. Then I moved onto David Baldacci mysteries. I love how books can both transport us to new worlds and provide deep insight into subjects we may be unfamiliar with.
Deborah Kalb is a freelance writer and editor. She spent about two decades working as a journalist in Washington, D.C., for news organizations including Gannett News Service, Congressional Quarterly, U.S. News & World Report, and The Hill, mostly covering Congress and politics. Her book blog, Book Q&As with Deborah Kalb, which she started in 2012, features hundreds of interviews she has conducted with a wide variety of authors.
"Talmadge Farm has often been described as a love letter to the South. Daughtry says, “Despite what the South has done and is doing, everybody loves the South. The South has a charm about it, and this book talks about the good parts of the South, how good the people are, and what the South has meant to so many of us… It’s a love story in many respects.”
It’s 1957, and tobacco is king. Wealthy landowner Gordon Talmadge enjoys the lavish lifestyle he inherited but doesn’t like getting his hands dirty; he leaves that to the two sharecroppers – one white, one Black – who farm his tobacco but have bigger dreams for their own children. While Gordon takes no interest in the lives of his tenant farmers, a brutal attack between his son and the sharecropper children sets off a chain of events that leaves no one unscathed. Over the span of a decade, Gordon struggles to hold on to his family’s legacy as the old order makes way for a New South.
Virginia Beach Navy chief warrant officer pens first novel: ‘No damsels in distress or princesses here’
Ama Adair stands next to a bookshelf at her home in Virginia Beach, with a copy of her book "Shadow Game" in the background. (Courtesy of Ama Adair)
Ama Adair first got the idea for her book series on a dark, narrow road in Baghdad, Iraq, as her military convoy drove past seemingly abandoned buildings and the hair on the back of her neck stood on end.
A Navy chief warrant officer specializing in counterintelligence and human intelligence, Adair didn’t begin writing until about six years after that 2010 deployment. But her vivid real-life memories helped shape her thriller “Shadow Game,” published in October under the name A.M. Adair. The book is the opener in a planned three- or four-part series.
“Shadow Game” features a strong female protagonist named Elle Anderson, a CIA operative who leads an elite team charged with destroying a terrorist organization.
“No damsels in distress or princesses here,” says Adair, a Virginia Beach resident. “She is a powerful, intelligent woman who is not very emotionally driven. She certainly doesn’t need rescuing. I would love if my daughter and other girls could see more characters like her.”
Ama Adair's book, which published in October, is the first book in a four-part series. (Courtesy of Ama Adair)
As a first-time author, Adair, 40, had a steep learning curve with the writing, editing and publication process. And as a mother with a full-time job, she had to squeeze much of her writing into two- to three-hour sessions on evenings and weekends. Her husband Jake, an active-duty Navy chief, took over parenting whenever he could.
“Luckily, military life trained me for not sleeping a whole lot,” Adair says. “Things got easier once I let my characters take over and stopped trying to force the plot. A lot of my own ideas for how to get to the key scenes I wanted kind of disappeared, which made it more fun.”
Although the series is fictional, Adair’s 10 overseas deployments — including four in Iraq and one in Afghanistan — served as background research. In fact, creating Anderson’s story helped Adair address some of her own feelings: “Elle goes through some post-traumatic stress and a lot of physical and emotional challenges. I found it very therapeutic for me.”
An Ohio native, Adair joined the Navy shortly after 9/11 and has lived in Virginia Beach since 2005. While always interested in reading and journaling, she had no writing training beyond school classes and the formal military papers required in her job.
After years of considering a novel, Adair typed the first chapters of “Shadow Game” on her laptop during downtime on a 2016 deployment in Italy. A self-described introvert, she found the solo pursuit a perfect fit.
Back home, Adair often settled down to write in a favorite recliner after her kids Arya, now 7, and later baby Finn, born last April, were asleep for the night. She also has juggled work toward an online bachelor’s degree in intelligence studies through American Military University.
The 300-page “Shadow Game” took about nine months to finish, followed by a similarly long editing process. “It was often me being too wordy,” she says. “I discovered that having too many details actually slows down the tempo.”
Since Adair is active-duty military, the Pentagon had to screen her thriller before publication. “Shadow Game” was released through Kindle Direct Publishing with representation by Story Merchant Books, a company that facilitates such independent publishing. It is currently for sale exclusively on Amazon.
“I was a complete nerd when it came out,” Adair says with a laugh. “I immediately ordered like five copies of it, plus the Kindle edition. I was in awe holding it.”
Adair is almost finished with book two of the series, “The Deeper Shadow,” which she started in 2017 but put on pause during her most recent pregnancy and Finn’s newborn months. She hopes to publish it in the summer and then immediately dive into book three. Once she retires from the military, her dream is to be a full-time writer.
“In a perfect world, I’d do a lot of hanging out with my laptop and some good cups of coffee,” she says. “I just want to let my imagination keep taking off.”
"The characters in this book could be people who lived; many like them certainly did. It was a time of innovation, which Daughtry made clear, but also a time changing values. For those people caught between the old and the new, it could be hard. Daughtry did an amazing job of putting that conundrum on paper/audio, when he wrote this book. It is heart-breaking in many ways, and not just the obvious, but for those who are not able to change, and really shouldn’t have had to in many ways. A man brought to his knees, through his own fault, because of culture change is a sad thing. Daughtry showed it with grace and kindness."
"Talmadge Farm has often been described as a love letter to the South. Daughtry says, “Despite what the South has done and is doing, everybody loves the South. The South has a charm about it, and this book talks about the good parts of the South, how good the people are, and what the South has meant to so many of us… It’s a love story in many respects.”
It’s 1957, and tobacco is king. Wealthy landowner Gordon Talmadge enjoys the lavish lifestyle he inherited but doesn’t like getting his hands dirty; he leaves that to the two sharecroppers – one white, one Black – who farm his tobacco but have bigger dreams for their own children. While Gordon takes no interest in the lives of his tenant farmers, a brutal attack between his son and the sharecropper children sets off a chain of events that leaves no one unscathed. Over the span of a decade, Gordon struggles to hold on to his family’s legacy as the old order makes way for a New South.
Dennis Palumbo, M.A., MFT is a writer and licensed psychotherapist in private practice, specializing in creative issues, primarily in the entertainment industry. His award-winning series of mystery thrillers—Mirror Image, Fever Dream,Night Terrors, Phantom Limb,Head Wounds and the latest, Panic Attack—feature psychologist and trauma expert Daniel Rinaldi. He’s also the author of Writing From the Inside Out, as well as a collection of mystery short stories, From Crime to Crime. Recently he served as Consulting Producer on the Hulu limited series The Patient, and here (in an article first published in the journal Capital Psychiatry) he tells us about how the play out of the television crime drama affected his real-life patients.
After seventeen years as a Hollywood screenwriter (the film My Favorite Year; the sitcom Welcome Back, Kotter, etc.), I retired from show business and have been a licensed psychotherapist in private practice for over thirty years. During this time, my writing has been confined to articles and reviews, as well as a series of mystery novels whose protagonist is a psychologist. My point is, it’s been so long since I was a dues-paying member of the Hollywood industry that I was quite surprised to hear from the team of Joel Fields and Joe Weisberg. Writers of the award-winning TV series The Americans, they’d reached out to me to act as advisor on a new show they were developing. Called The Patient, it was about a serial killer who kidnaps and holds hostage a well-known therapist, in hopes that he can “cure” the killer of his homicidal urges.
Apparently, my former career as a script writer and my current one as a therapist prompted them to see me as a reasonable person to act as consultant on the new series. Essentially, what they wanted was for me to vet each episode’s scripts for clinical accuracy and to “make sure the therapist sounded like a therapist”—or as much like one as possible given the bizarre circumstances of the show’s premise.
Over the coming months, I did my best to keep the narrative within the range of plausibility, including suggesting the occasional line of dialogue or therapeutic interpretation. Just as we were finishing the script for the last episode, it was announced that Steve Carell had been cast as the therapist. A wonderful actor, he’d been given a salt-and-pepper beard and glasses. Whether or not it was conscious on the writers’ part, he looked somewhat like me. Which, at the time, I just found amusing.
My working relationship with Fields and Weisberg was one of the most pleasant professional experiences of my life. Moreover, the two writers were very gracious about my contribution when doing PR interviews leading up to the series premiere. During one such interview, when writing up the story for Newsweek, the reporter off-handedly mentioned that Carell’s character looked like me.
It wasn’t until the series began airing on Hulu that the ramifications of this became apparent in my therapy practice. A number of patients who’d begun watching the show pointed out that Carell’s therapist character looked a lot like me, and on occasion even sounded like me. (No surprise, since I’d suggested some of the therapeutic comments the therapist made.) Naturally, I had to process this with these patients, some of whom were quite upset at seeing the therapist chained to a bed, helpless. More than one half-jokingly worried that the series’ premise would give “some crazy person” the idea of kidnapping me. Did I feel I was in danger? they asked. I answered honestly that I didn’t, while privately wondering why I’d never even entertained that idea when working on the show.
Moreover, had I been unforgivably clueless in not anticipating this reaction from my patients? I reminded myself that Steve Carell hadn’t been cast until the series’ scripts were almost finished, that I had no idea he’d be playing the therapist, and certainly no idea how they were going to make him look. Yet I still felt pangs of remorse for the distress the show’s depiction of the therapist was causing for some of my patients.
As the weeks went on, and episode after episode aired, it became obvious that seeing an avatar of their therapist was upsetting to a number of my patients. Of equal interest during sessions was the reaction of those patients who found the whole thing amusing, or at least presented it as such. They even joked with me about the series’ story-telling: why didn’t the therapist try harder to escape? Why didn’t he just refuse to talk to the serial killer? Is this how you would react in this situation, Dennis?
Of course, the narrative choices displayed on-screen were made by the show’s writers, not me. I was merely the consultant. But this didn’t matter. What did matter, and what ended up being of real clinical interest (and value) was what some patients’ transferential connection to the therapist character and the story revealed about both their own core issues and their relationship with me. As Robert Stolorow has reiterated, there is only subjectivity and context; in this unusual situation, there was a patient’s subjective experience of me in the context of our therapeutic relationship, and then a kind of meta-subjectivity/context experience through the narrative of a TV series.
(SPOILER ALERT: I’m going to discuss the series’ final episode)
For a select few of my patients, as I’d expected, it was the series’ final episode that elicited the strongest reaction. Not only does the therapist fail to escape, he’s strangled to death on-screen by the serial-killer patient. This horrible murder is hardly ameliorated by the killer’s decision to send an anonymous letter to the therapist’s family, telling them where they can find the body so it can have a proper funeral. The last time we see the serial killer, he’s the one chained to the bed, his mother holding the key to the chain’s lock. Since she’s known all along about her son’s activities, we’re left to wonder if/when she’ll release him to potentially kill again.
A couple patients revealed that they’d cried at the end, one of them pointing an accusing finger at me and saying, “You better not fucking die!” Again, said half-jokingly. And yet, not. The few others who’d stayed with the show all the way to the end were angry at both the series’ writers and at me. Their reactions ranged from disbelief (“How could they end a show like that? How come the killer gets away with it?”) to frustration (“That’s not fair to the viewers. We deserved a better ending.”) to simple creative criticism (“I hate ambiguous endings.”).
As difficult as the sessions were with these patients over the course of the series’ run (including my own guilt at having put them through it), some of the clinical work that arose from our discussions was quite beneficial. A greater understanding of the contextual nature of our therapist/patient relationship undoubtably occurred. Moreover, we often reached a deeper understanding of the dependency/resentment dynamic at work in the therapeutic dyad. And, in one or two cases, the discussion regarding the show was a springboard to a more energized, proactive engagement on the patient’s part.
Still, I have somewhat mixed feelings about my participation in the series. It was often an exhilarating experience, due primarily to the talent, receptivity and warmth of both Joel Fields and Joe Weisberg. And while I regret the distress that the lead character’s words and looks evoked in a few of my patients, I also felt this similarity led to real forward progress in our work together. A potential disjunction becoming a fruitful conjunction.
That said, if I’m ever asked to consult on another series, my only hope is that the lead character looks like someone else.
"Talmadge Farm has often been described as a love letter to the South. Daughtry says, “Despite what the South has done and is doing, everybody loves the South. The South has a charm about it, and this book talks about the good parts of the South, how good the people are, and what the South has meant to so many of us… It’s a love story in many respects.”
It’s 1957, and tobacco is king. Wealthy landowner Gordon Talmadge enjoys the lavish lifestyle he inherited but doesn’t like getting his hands dirty; he leaves that to the two sharecroppers – one white, one Black – who farm his tobacco but have bigger dreams for their own children. While Gordon takes no interest in the lives of his tenant farmers, a brutal attack between his son and the sharecropper children sets off a chain of events that leaves no one unscathed. Over the span of a decade, Gordon struggles to hold on to his family’s legacy as the old order makes way for a New South.
In this Film Courage video, Dr. Ken Atchity (Author, Publisher, Producer), shares how his own pursuit of living his dreams spawned a book on the subject and what blocks most people's road to success.
Talmadge Farm by Leo Daughtry immerses readers in rural Southern life in the mid-20th century, offering a vivid portrait of its settings and characters. The Talmadge family is a fixture in the Eastern North Carolina community, and the story opens with their annual dove hunt. Beginning in September 1957, the narrative unfolds against the backdrop of Talmadge Farm—a sprawling estate encompassing hundreds of acres of tobacco fields and the imposing Talmadge mansion. Gordon Talmadge is a typical Southern patriarch obsessed with maintaining his family's legacy and fortune through the bank he controls. He cares very little about the welfare of the sharecroppers on his farm, especially the Sanders family, highlighting the stark contrasts between their privileged existence and the struggles of those bound to the land. The tension grows at different levels and escalates between Gordon and the Sanders family when Junior, Gordon’s son, attacks Ella Sanders. The fallout has dire ramifications.
Leo Daughtry has crafted a character-driven narrative with a solid historical setting. The characters are finely drawn, and watching them evolve through multiple conflicts is interesting. Gordon Talmadge is an ambitious man with domestic issues and hints at an underlying strain in his marriage with Claire, creating suspense. The dynamics between the Talmadges and the Sanders family, notably when sharecropping is at play, highlight the social and racial tensions and the disparity in their social standings, exacerbating misunderstandings and conflicts. Daughtry deftly illustrates the South's racial and class tensions, revealing how the social fabric frays when underlying injustices surface. The characters are not black-and-white caricatures but flawed individuals who react to their circumstances with varying degrees of morality. Talmadge Farm is an engaging tale that transports readers into an intriguing historical moment and place.
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