Writing Your Opening Scene with Thomas Mullen

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Last week's interview with Lori Galvin
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Link to Thomas Mullen's website
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3 BIG TAKEAWAYS

1. Writing opening scenes
2. Incorporating big ideas into your writing
3. Using existing literature to fuel your writing

EPISODE INFO:
How many times do you revise your opening scene? 

If you’re anything like me, you’re constantly concerned with giving away too much information and boring readers in your opening. 

Or maybe you're worried about going to far the other way and confusing readers by not providing enough context. 

Thomas Mullen is going to talk through how he nailed the opening of his new novel, BLIND SPOTS, which is out today! I highly recommend you pick it up!

BIO: (From ThomasMullen.net)
Thomas Mullen is the author of seven novels, including his internationally acclaimed series set in midcentury Atlanta: Darktown, an NPR Best Book of the Year, which was shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Southern Book Prize, the Indies Choice Book Award, and was nominated for two CWA Dagger Awards; Lightning Men, which was named one of the Top 10 Crime Novels of the Year by the New York Times Book Review and was shortlisted for a CWA Dagger; and Midnight Atlanta, which was shortlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger. His first novel, The Last Town on Earth, was named Best Debut Novel of 2006 by USA Today and was awarded the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for excellence in historical fiction.

His works have also been named to Year’s Best lists by The Chicago Tribune, USA Today, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Irish Times, Kirkus Reviews, The Onion’s A/V Club, The San Diego Union-Times, Paste Magazine, and The Cleveland Plain-Dealer, and have been nominated for or won awards in France, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. His stories and essays have been published in Grantland, Paste, The Huffington Post, Atlanta Magazine, Crime Reads, LitHub, and The Bitter Southerner. He lives in Atlanta with his wife and sons.

His new novel, Blind Spots, will be published April 4, 2023.

Tweet me @DavidRGwyn

Transcript

WLIS 340 TM

Thomas Mullen: [00:00:00] But I also think that, it's something one learns as we go that not being as verbose or being more tactical about what, what we write and what we don't and like what we hold back. So I, I think part of that is just experience and not wanting to bog the reader down with a lot of stuff right away, 

David Gwyn: So how many times do you revise your opening scene? Is there anything like me, you're constantly concerned with giving away too much information and boring readers in your opening or going too far the other way and confusing readers by not providing enough information. 

Thomas Mullen is here to talk through how he nailed the opening of his new novel Blind Spots, which is out today. I highly recommend you pick it up 

last time on the podcast. I talked to literary agent Lori Galvin, about what she's looking for in a client, how to hook an agent in your first pages and more. 

Lori Galvin: I go toward things where I feel like I am gonna add value and I am gonna make a difference. And I sort of [00:01:00] like get the book. Maybe, you know, this isn't very humble, but maybe better than anyone else, other than the author gets the book. So if I can give the author the perspective that's going to get them to think about things.

Make the book more, powerful or propulsive or stronger, then I feel like. I am the right, the right person. 

David Gwyn: I'll link that in the description. If you're interested in hearing more. 

Thomas Mullen is the author of the new novel blind spots. His novels include the internationally acclaimed series set in mid century Atlanta. Darktown. Which was an NPR best book of the year and was shortlisted for the Los Angeles times book prize. 

The Southern book prize, the Indies choice book award and was nominated for two CWA dagger awards. Is novel Lightening men was named one of the top 10 crime novels of the year by the New York times book review. And was shortlisted for a CWA dagger. And that's not even half of his impressive bio. 

[00:02:00] Basically this Thomas Mullen guy knows his way around a keyboard. And luckily he's here to help us with our openings. 

So let's get straight to that conversation. 

 Welcome to the interview series. Thanks so much for being here. I really appreciate you taking the time. 

Thomas Mullen: Hey, thanks for having me. 

David Gwyn: Your newest novel blind spots, which will be out by the time people hear this, so congratulations.

thank you. Can you tell us a little bit about what it's about? 

Thomas Mullen: Yeah, blind Spots is sort of a speculative crime novel. It's kind of written in the vein of minority reporter Blade Runner. You know, I was inspired by the, the, the writings of Philip k Dick and honestly about, you know, some of the movies that came out in the eighties and nineties, you know, inspired by his work.

And it's, it is a novel that's set in, you know, the not so distant future, but it's set in a world in which. Mankind for reasons unexplained lost the ability to see, but fear not technology came in and saved the day. And everyone can see again thanks to these little devices that they have sort of implanted in their temple.

And it downloads visual data [00:03:00] directly to their brain. So it's just like people can see again, yay, everything's great. But no, the problem is someone has figured out how to hack this. Someone is committing murder while being blacked out of everyone's view. They're, they're like a human censored bar, like they've been redacted from everyone else's vision.

So our protagonist, the detective, has to figure out who is doing this, how are they doing this? And also, you know, what does this mean for the world if a technology that people rely on for something as basic as vision can be hacked? 

David Gwyn: Yeah, it's super fun, read. recommend people checking it out. So where did this idea come from?

How did you come up with this premise? 

Thomas Mullen: You know, I read a couple of books that did interesting things with redactions. One of them was, it's called An Ordinary Spy by Joseph Weisberg, who is now much better known as the showrunner for the Americans. He was once a cia. Employee officer, I'm not sure.

Something. And you wrote this really cool novel where it is a fact that if you were a former CIA employee and you write, I think anything, like even a novel, [00:04:00] the CIA has to read it and vet it and they can redact some things. I think that came up years ago. And Valerie Plain wrote something. So his idea for the novel is that it's written as if it's sort of like a memoir of a CIA agent, but lots of it has been redacted.

So there's sections of. Most pages, there's a few words that are blacked out, and then it's at times, like an entire page is blacked out. So it's a really cool story, but you don't know what country it's set in. You don't know what culture it's about, but it's, it's a really well done mystery. And I thought, did you know a lot of interesting things with the idea of what are we not being shown and what does that mean?

And there's also a really cool book, and I'm gonna butcher his name, but a novel called Censoring an Iranian Love story. Shri Manna Poor, which like it says, it's, it's a love story set in Iran. And the idea here is that Iranian cens are censoring the story as you read it. And in that one, he didn't black out the words, but he crossed out a lot of words.

So you could see what was crossed out, but you could see what the sensors disagreed with. So I really enjoyed both of them. I, I read [00:05:00] them not back to back, but probably like the same season. And so I was. Toying a lot with it, the idea of redactions. And I have seen, you know, redacted government reports and you'll see news stories about such and such, finally being released, but with a lot of redactions and some somewhere along the line, and I'm not sure where or how, but some fault of lightning was struck or struck me.

And I thought, look, what if a person could be redacted? What if you could redact people from other people's view? And I didn't know exactly where I was going with that at first, but I liked it. I thought it was cool, but then I begged the question, well, how could you do that? You can't black something out.

From my vision, I, I can see just fine. And so I had to kind of construct a world in which this would be possible. I was like, well, if we were in a world in which all of our vision was being mediated by technology, if we were seeing through a device, this would be possible. And that's where the idea was born.

David Gwyn: Yeah. That's so cool. And so it sounds like. You did some research for this, this novel. I mean, is this stuff that you're just [00:06:00] generally attracted to and you were reading this and this idea kind of was fermenting as that was happening, or did you have an idea and then kind of seek out these these types of 

Thomas Mullen: books?

I had just read both of these books. I don't know, somewhat randomly. Again, one of them is a spy thriller. One of them is a literary novel about young romance. So they, the books don't really have that much in common. They just both played with the idea of withholding text from the viewer. So that's kind of where the first germ of the story came in.

But you know, I like a good. Mystery. And I'm always trying to find, you know, unconventional ways into mysteries. Like, one of the things we love about mysteries and one of the things we love about crime fiction is there is this certain, you know, scaffolding that provides some familiarity to us. So we, we have a basic idea of what's typically going to happen in some way, but within.

That scaffolding, there's all kinds of crazy things you can do to make it unusual, make it different. And I've always been drawn to books you know, by, sometimes by quote unquote crime writers, sometimes by quote unquote literary writers, [00:07:00] where, you know, the author takes a mystery, takes a crime story, and does something very bizarre with it.

Either puts it in an unusual setting, maybe they have an unusual protagonist like, you know, motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Letham, where the, the main character has Tourettes. He's trying to solve a crime, but he's somewhat hindered by the fact that he has Tourettes. You know Michael Shavon Policeman's Union, which was.

You know, our murder mystery set in this imaginary Alaska, that was the homeland for the Jews because FDR briefly considered making Alaska such a place. So said, Hey, what if I set a murder mystery there? You know, books like The City, the City by China Mayville, which is a mystery set in this imaginary World War ii.

Cities are superimposed upon each other and you live in one city, but can't acknowledge the existence of the other. So I've always just been, you know, drawn to books that take that mystery, take that suspense idea, but do something. Very unusual to it. And I just, again, when I first had this idea, I wasn't entirely sure of where I was gonna go with it, but that's often where my ideas come from.

At first I just, I'm like, this is interesting. What could I do with this? And then [00:08:00] I just play around a little bit. Yeah. That's 

David Gwyn: super cool. And, and so kind of speaking of your ideas, I know you've written some more, like historically situated thrillers in, in the past, things that were not speculative, but kind of, kind of set in, in history.

Can you talk about why you were attracted to projects like. 

Thomas Mullen: Yeah, I think if someone were to write like a Venn diagram of my books, there's like historical, there's crime and there's speculative, and so a lot of my books fall in two of those bubbles. One of my books falls in all three. Actually, I have a book about bank robbers in the Great Depression who come back to life, so that's probably historical and crime and speculative.

But yeah, I, I never like sought out to be a quote unquote historical novelist or a crime writer. Like, I just like to write books. And so, you know, I mentioned again, a lot of the books that I really dig, those are books that kind of straddle different genre boundaries. And I do think that I am drawn to books that kind of play on those borders, that, that play with different elements, that kind of mixed chemicals and just see what [00:09:00] happens.

So, Some of my early manuscripts, the ones that weren't good enough to get published were like a contemporary. Novels about young people living in the nineties, cuz it was the nineties, you know, getting into trouble and things like that. And I enjoyed writing them and I enjoyed writing. I enjoyed reading a lot of books like that, like Foster Wallace or early Michael Shaban and Dave Eggers.

But you know, publishers were not knocking down my door to publish those books. And it just so happens that the first book that resonated with an Audi, a larger audience and with agents was a historical novel of books set in the 1918 flu epidemic, which became the last town on earth. And, and so, you know, I'm.

I never say, okay, my next book is gonna be historical, or My next book's gonna be crime, or My next book's gonna have some crazy speculative element. I'm just looking for a good idea. And sometimes those good ideas are set in the past. Sometimes those ideas are set in the not so distant future. 

David Gwyn: Yeah.

That's cool. And so kind of a perfect segue to my next question, which is, well what's your, what's your next good idea? What are you [00:10:00] working on now?

Thomas Mullen: My next book, which I think will come out in about a year, cuz I just, my editor just signed off on, on the manuscript, so we're done. Nice. Going into copy edits.

It's called The Rumor Game and it is, it's another historical crime story set in Boston during World War ii. It follows a young female journalist whose job is to disprove harmful war rumor. Rumors. Like for example, if women with perms work in a war factory, their heads will explode. That was in fact a rumor.

So she has to disprove these rumors to keep the patriotic spirits high, and one day she finds herself reporting on a rumor that turns out. Someone does not want her to write about it, it follows her and it follows an Irish Catholic FBI agent of which there were only a few at that time, whose job is to ensure that there is no sabotage of the war industries and the two of them both wind up pursuing A case involving the murder of a war worker.

They both kind of come at it at different angles and enter sort of a, a very tentative treaty [00:11:00] with each other to try to solve the crime and get to the bottom of what's going on. So, sort of a little, little bit of espionage, a little bit of crime, and a little bit of history of, you know, a very volatile time in America when there were a lot of people who, you know, We're okay with the idea of Germany winning World War ii.

You know, it doesn't get talked about all that much, but there were definitely pockets of, of Hitler's sympathizers in America and, and that that book kind of tackles that. So there's a lot going on in it, but I'm really excited about it and looking forward to that. Coming out. That's about a year away.

David Gwyn: Yeah, that's great. I mean, hey, you gotta come back and talk about it now. Now I'm invested. I feel awesome. Thanks. Yeah. So let's go, let's go back a little bit further and talk a little bit about how you got started writing. Did you always know you wanted to be a writer or how did that whole process work out for you?

Thomas Mullen: Yeah, pretty much. When people ask me like, why I write or have, I always wanted to write, like I've always wanted to, I, I don't know how to answer like where it came from. It's just always been a part of me. I've just enjoyed writing stories, you know, draw stories, draw picture books as a kid. So that [00:12:00] led to, you know, writing imitation Hardy Boys books and imitation.

You know, Alfred Hitchcock and the three investigators, stories, things like that, and imitation this, imitation that. And you know how it goes, you imitate until you can figure out how to do it yourself. So I, I've always loved doing it. It's just, it's what I enjoy and, and it's, it's my happy place to be like, lost in a story.

David Gwyn: I, I'm always interested when I have an author on here who's, who's knocked out as many books as, as you can. So my question is, what is your process and, and have you kind of figured it out and can you tell the rest of us. 

Thomas Mullen: No, I mean, there's no magic bullet. I'll, I'll say this too, like the. I still feel like the hardest part of the process when you're done with one thing and you need to start the next.

That is by far my least favorite part of the process. And prior to my new book, blind Spots, I wrote three books in a series set in Atlanta in sort of the moments right before the Civil Rights Movement. And one of the, one of the many things I loved about that was that when I finished one, I knew what I was doing next.[00:13:00]

Cuz before, you know, I would finish a book and it's like, well what do I do next? You know, I've always had a lot of different ideas kicking around in my head, but it's a big question to figure out like, what is the next thing that I wanna spend the next one to three or more years on? Like that's a big question and especially.

You know, I, I feel this is less of a problem for me now, but it's still a bit of a problem all the time. You know, when you're starting something out, it's like, well, what tents do I wanna write this in? Which character's perspective is it coming from? Is it gonna be, you know, is it gonna skip around narrators?

What's the style like? All these things you gotta figure out, and like often it's not working at first that's perfectly normal, like, Unusual. If not, it never happens that you start something and it's just gold from the start and you're like, oh yeah, this is it, baby. Sweet. I'm gonna keep on going. Like, no, that never happens.

You know? Usually it's like not working and so you gotta ask yourself. Is this not working? Because this is just a natural part of the process and I just need to like knuckle down, [00:14:00] roll up my sleeves and keep going with it and experiment and change this and change that. But you know, don't let it get you down.

Or is this not working? Because this idea is just bad and I should stop because unfortunately, I have had field projects. I have had books that I spent a very long time on only to. This isn't working, or only to have my agent or editor tell me this didn't work and that that sucks. That's, that's a, that's a bad experience and I don't ever want that to happen again.

So, you know, it's always hard when you're starting something new and you're, again, it's early, it's not quite working cause you're like, God, well is it because it's doomed and I should walk away from this? Or is it just because I need to keep tinkering? And it's, it's hard to figure that out. I, I think it.

Easier for me to figure it out now that I've, you know, this is my seventh book, so I've been at it a little bit and I've learned some lessons here and there, but that never totally goes away. 

David Gwyn: Yeah, that, that sounds so tough. I, I think that's so important for people to hear though, is, is and something that, that not a lot of [00:15:00] writers talk about, which is deciding on a project and, and how to choose a project and, and when to give up on a project is something that I think is hard for, for a lot of writers.

 Whenever I have authors on here, I, I like to have them give their agents a shout out. What made you wanna work with Susan Goum of writer's house? 

Thomas Mullen: Gosh, so the story of how I first broke in it, it's long and, and mandering and, and winding.

It's a little dated too, but I'm happy to share it. You know, I've been trying to break in for a while looking for different agents and, and striking out partly cuz I started too soon. I was, you know, pitching manuscripts that, that just weren't, in retrospect, just weren't that good. But eventually I had a, a decent manuscript.

And in 2000 the New Yorker came out with this like 20 authors under the age of 40 fiction issue. And so I read all, I mean, I was a subscriber. I. All those stories and if I liked the story, I sought out that author's novels or novel and, and then if, and if I liked their novel, I was like, I'm gonna pitch them.

And I'd read in some writing magazine or book or something that [00:16:00] like you could just, and I don't know if this is true anymore cuz this is, this is, we're going back about 20 years now, but you could call their publisher, ask to speak to the contracts department. And ask, just say you wanted to know who their agent was, and they would tell you, they wouldn't know right away.

They'd have to get back to you. And you're probably talking to like a 23 year old assistant on the phone. And sometimes they'd ask, why do you wanna know? And I would just say, I'm an author seeking representation. And they'd say, okay. And then two days later they'd call you. But you know, these days there are other ways.

There's probably easier ways to find agents, you know, most author. Especially in their first novels, we'll, thank their agent. And some of us thank our agent in all of our novels in the acknowledgement section, or you just can go online and typically find this information. But yeah. One of Susan's clients is Jonathan Fransen, and he was about to come out with the corrections.

The corrections wasn't out yet, but I read what was at the time, his most recent novel, strong motion, and I really dug it. So, you know, I, after. Reading the New Yorker issue and, and choosing, you know, seven or eight young authors whose work I dug, I pitched all of their agents and [00:17:00] I, that went a lot better.

Like I got responses from all the agents most much more quickly and I got more positive responses than I had before because it shows the. Agent, you're doing your homework. You're not just pitching them randomly, you're pitching 'em cuz hey, you represent Jeffery Degen. And I think my new novel is similar to the version suicides because of X and Y and Z.

Like if you can say that they at least know that you're doing your homework and they at least understand that, well, maybe we have similar tastes because. They love Jonathan Franzen cuz they work with him and they hear that you do too. It's like, oh, maybe, maybe. We'll, you know, maybe our tastes align. And so that, that's how I got her.

She had worked with Franzen. I think actually I didn't pitch her right away because she wasn't listed in any of those like guidebooks. And again, this is. Probably dating me too, but like they would publish, you know, that 2006 Guy Delivery Agents and you could go through it and see which agents worked with which type of authors and who they repped.

And she wasn't listed in that. So I figured she was some like impossible to access Manhattan hotshot. But then I read a [00:18:00] wonderful first novel called Carter Beats the Devil by Glen David Gold. It's a, a novel about a magician in the 1920s. It's a great, great book. It had the misfortune of coming out on September 11th, 2001.

So it got a little overshadowed, but it's an excellent, excellent novel. I can't recommend it highly enough. But he thanked her in the acknowledgements. I was like, oh, well, he was a, he was a nobody. He was a first time writer and she worked with him. So, so I think when I pitched her, I actually compared my book to that book, and that's what, you know, she responded to and one thing led to another and she became my agent.

But yeah, so I think, you know, I, I read two books that I loved that she represented. So I figured we had similar. 

David Gwyn: Yeah, it's funny, the, so I, I, I just got agented two months ago. Awesome. Congratulations. Their process now. Thank you. And it's funny to hear how different kind of the facilitation of the process is.

Like, I, I don't even know if that, publisher's Guide to Literary Agents comes out. I don't even know if that exists anymore. Everything's online, as I'm sure you can imagine. But the, but the kind of key [00:19:00] components that you talk about are still in play. You gotta know what they represent.

You gotta, think critically about the kinds of books that they're, that they're interested in. And so it's interesting to hear like, even after all this time and all this technology has, has grown, like. How much of it is actually still the exact same as it was? You know, you know, back when you got agents agency, which, which I think is really interesting.

Yeah, 

Thomas Mullen: that's true. Like when I did it, there were agents were just starting to use email, which is kind of, I feel so old saying that, but yeah, like, you know, agents, they can tell if you're spamming them. They can tell if you're sending an email to like every agent out there. But if you're like, you know, you represent this person and I love this person and my book is similar because of X and Y and Z, they still might.

Want it. They still might think the idea isn't good or it might be too similar to a book they just worked on, or they might think it's a cool idea that won't, you know, there's lots of reasons why they might not take it, but at least, at least you're in the game. At least you're, you know, giving yourself a decent shot if, if you go about it that way.

Yeah. 

David Gwyn: . That's great advice. 

Okay. So far, we've heard about how Thomas broken to the industry, what kinds [00:20:00] of projects he takes on and a lot about his process. And the next part of the interview, we're going to dig into the opening chapter of blind spots. I got to ask him all about how he thinks about an opening chapter and what we should be doing when we tackle our own opening scenes. 

If you're enjoying this conversation, be sure to join the five minute writers series. I share writing advice that takes about five minutes to consume, but will drastically improve your writing. Be sure to sign up for that the link for that is in the description

Let's head back to the interview now. 

So I wanna get into one thing here, which, I loved so much about blind spots the opening chapter was just so well written. It grounded me in the world. It wasn't, it didn't overdo it, it, I felt like I knew the characters.

I knew it was happen. And I feel like a lot of aspiring writers can learn from your whole book, but also even just that opening chapter and how you kind of strategically withheld the right amount of information early on and, and, you know, you're dealing in a speculative world, which I feel like adds that extra kind of [00:21:00] tricky element to how much to give and how much to, to keep back from.

And so my, my question is, how did you facilitate the process for that opening chapter? did you have to go through , giving a ton of information and then pair back, or did you kind of try to hold as much back as you could and then had to add a little bit along 

Thomas Mullen: the way? Yeah. It's, it's tricky.

So I do think that's one thing. One gets better at. And in fact, I remember one of the, the criticisms that my agent had for my first book, which, which was a historical novel. She's like, you have this tick where like you introduce a character and you give us their entire backstory, right away.

Like, don't do that. , that's no, stop. And I was like, oh yeah, you're right. And that kind of learned that like, you know, there can be suspense in character building. You can allude to. The fact that a character, something terrible happened to their father once, or, you know, every time the subject of a father comes up, they get tense or something.

But you don't need to tell the reader right away, what it is. You can wait till page hundred 50 to have this really, moving reveal where you explain this horrible thing so you can build suspense and, and [00:22:00] generate reader interest, not just in the plot, but just in, in who these people are and what they've been through.

So that was, you know, a lesson I kind of learned. But I also think that, it's something one learns as we go that not being as verbose or being more tactical about what, what we write and what we don't and like what we hold back. So I, I think part of that is just experience and not wanting to bog the reader down with a lot of stuff right away, but also, As you mentioned, I, I've done speculative stuff and I've done historical stuff, and those two are very different in a lot of ways.

But what they have in common is that world building is very, very important to both. It's not a contemporary novel set in the world that you and I live in today when you write a book like that, you don't need to spend as much time explaining the, the situation, the world. But in historical novel, you want some amount of, of detail, but you also don't.

Bog reader down with all kinds of extraneous facts and details and how much a ham sandwich cost and things like that, that really just don't matter. But you wanna hint that or show how worldviews were different, how people interacted with each other in different ways. The [00:23:00] fact that just people had different jobs or There were different ways that men and women might have interacted with each other. Things like that, that can go a long way to building the world. And so with a work of speculative fiction like this, where in a lot of ways the world is similar to the one you and I live in, but a lot of ways it really isn't.

And so, you know, it's just kind of. Revealing that in little bits and pieces and knowing that no reader wants to read through like two blocky pages with tons and tons of info. And a lot of it is, you know, copy and pasting. I'm a huge proponent of copy and pasting. I move stuff around a ton when I write, and so there might have been some things that I explained on page 25 and later I moved to the page 60 or, or vice versa sometimes.

You will later realize, you know, hey, this, this exchange of dialogue means that I no longer need these two paragraphs. You know, that came a par a chapter later or a chapter earlier. Like I got that across in dialogue more efficiently than I did in these big paragraphs. I don't need those big paragraphs anymore.

Which nothing against big paragraphs. I'm not trying to [00:24:00] sound like become against words, but like, There are different ways you can convey information, and sometimes it's through a line of dialogue. Sometimes it's through like a brief description and things like that. So just finding, you know, more concise and, you know, more impactful and more like emotionally resonant ways to convey information, I think helps a lot.

Yeah, 

David Gwyn: it, it, it's funny listening to you kind of explain it now and, and as I'm kind of like running through that first chapter through my head again. I'm, I'm seeing a lot. What you're saying here in, in that chapter, just even having the characters kind of move through the world and they kind of experience it as it's happening.

I, I think that's really great and, and I recommend people who are listening check out blind spots. Read that, that opening chapter. It, it just does such a nice job of situating you as a reader in the world without overdoing it. So definitely, definitely check that out.

 It's clear to me that you write with theme in mind that, that it seems like there's like some type of like the. [00:25:00] Move that you're making and so my question is, what do you hope people get from reading your story?

Thomas Mullen: It's always a tricky question because I don't, I don't wanna dictate what people should think. My books don't have like lessons, quote unquote, or morals and things like that. So, you know, and, and in fact I try very hard to avoid that. Like in a lot of my books, maybe all of my books, there are people who have very strong disagreements.

And I don't try to stack the deck. Like Owen's the main character, you know, he's a detective. He's kind of got a bit of an alpha male thing going, although he's also down on his luck in a lot of ways. I'm not him at all. He has a lot of opinions that I do not share. So, you know, I've never been somebody who writes.

Characters or, or rights protagonists that are like stand-ins for myself and just like this, this is gonna be a vehicle for all of my opinions that I wanna get out in the world. Like I, I've consciously, deliberately not done that. I like to have characters that disagree, and I like to use fiction to explore the pros and cons and different viewpoints and to try to [00:26:00] get 360 degree views into different issues.

So I do think that's super important, but at the same time, theme. It's a big part of why I write, and it's usually what motivates me to tell a particular story., I don't wanna just write a thriller about a person who's in trouble and they're trying to save their life, and, and it's exciting and you're turning the pages, the end, like there's nothing wrong with that.

But that tends to not animate or motivate me. I want there to be some, some larger question that the characters are pondering and, and in this book it's about, what is technology doing to us and how is technology. Affecting how we see the world and how we see each other and how we interact with each other.

 It's an allegory in a lot of ways to, you know, today we do not use devices to see, thank goodness, but we use devices to mediate our experience with the world in a lot of other ways. And I think we're all feeling that strain. We're all feeling how our attention span or divided. It's harder to read a whole book than it used to be without checking your phone and checking this.

And we all feel like we're suffering from. Bits of [00:27:00] d h d from all the ways we're being pinged left and right. And you know, I, I think we all have certain concerns about like, what is this doing to our brains and what is this doing to our society? So I kind of wanted to find a fun way of playing with that idea and coming up with a story, that would feel different and unique and enjoyable and, and let readers sort of think.

Things that they're dealing with in their life today with technology, but getting to explore it in a very different way, in a very different world. 

David Gwyn: So my last question is, is an easy one. So where, where can people find you? Where can people look you up? 

Thomas Mullen: I am on Twitter and Instagram as @Mullenwrites.

My website is ThomasMullen.net. It's Mullin with an E, and there is no s there's only one of me. But yeah, I'm, I'm probably not on social media as much as I should be, but, you know, again, perfect example of technology getting in the way. So there you go. But yeah, I, I, I am on Instagram and Twitter and I've, I've got a Facebook fan page as well.

And, and a website that has links to all my. Cool. Yeah. 

David Gwyn: And and if you're listening, I [00:28:00] will link to all that stuff so you have easy access to Thomas. Your website has maybe the best bio I've ever read. So entertaining. I don't, thanks very much. 

Thomas Mullen: I enjoyed it. Yeah. I want that up there for 10 years cause I can't bring myself to change it.

I appreciate it. I've, I've had people at bookstores just read that as my bio without saying I wrote it. They just read it. Like they wrote it and I'm like, I wrote that and I actually didn't really, I didn't really intend that to be read out loud, but That's cool. 

David Gwyn: Yeah, it's awesome. It's, it's well worth the read.

So if you're listening, go, go check that out. Thanks very much. Yeah. And, and definitely check out blind spots. And, and Thomas has been an absolute blast. I feel like I learned so much. Thanks so much for taking the time to chat.

Thomas Mullen: Hey, thank you so much and good luck with your books. 

David Gwyn: Thank you. I appreciate it.

Okay, so there you have it. Thomas was such an impressive guest. I loved top. It was so interesting talking to him. And I feel like i learned so much His book blind spots is out now so make sure you check that out