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Episode 410: Brian Fairbanks and "The Last Shall be First"
626 Plays1 year ago
Brian Fairbanks is an author and journalist whose piece for the 150th issue of the Atavist Magazine, The Last Shall be First, chronicles the actions of a corrupt New Orleans cop and his trail of victims still crying for justice.
Newsletter: Rage Against the Algorithm
Show notes: brendanomeara.com
Social: @creativenonfiction podcast on IG and Threads
Support: Patreon.com/cnfpod
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Transcript
Introduction & Patreon Shoutout
00:00:00
Speaker
Hey right at the top of the show want to give a shout out to David flaws for increasing his patreon contribution and welcome Kate carpenter to the patreon crew All right, but listen seeing efforts I'm not one for many ads on this show. You know that I don't actively court them I do like the cross promotional stuff. No taxes there
Patreon Importance & Editing Services
00:00:24
Speaker
This show takes a lot of time and part of what keeps the lights on here at CNF Pod HQ is if you consider hiring me to help you with your work. A generous editor helps you see what you can't see. So if that is something you'd like to consider, email me and we'll start a dialogue. There's also patreon.com slash CNF Pod and you know what I do that is super cool and you get a super discount on it?
00:00:52
Speaker
depending on your tier I offer, one on one time. Sometimes a lot of one on one time. Face to face time to talk things out. I recently gave away, it's just one of those things that you never know what I'm gonna just drop into the Patreon ecosystem. I gave away my six figure earning book proposal to every tier. You just never know. You might just get some free stuff and who doesn't like free stuff?
Atavist Magazine Recommendation
00:01:23
Speaker
And, uh, oh yeah, you know, just, uh, it's that Atavistian time of the month. So there's going to be some spoilers ahead. So visit magazine.atavist.com to read the last shall be first by Brian Fairbanks. Consider subscribing to the Atavist magazine. And no, I don't get any kickbacks. So you know, my recommendation is true. And that I think.
00:01:50
Speaker
is the strongest thing journalists can do is to publish and to put themselves behind the story. Put the victims that need justice in the spotlight and at the risk of my own safety and hope that people pick up on this and get something out of it actionable.
Interview with Brian Fairbanks
00:02:22
Speaker
Okay, seeing efforts, it's the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, a show where I speak to primarily badass writers about the art of telling true stories. I'm Brendan O'Mara, my bad. Today's show features Brian Fairbanks, a freelance journalist and author who plugged into the seedy underbelly of New Orleans law enforcement to tell the story of Len Davis, a crooked cop.
00:02:45
Speaker
who terrorized New Orleans and even hired a hitman to murder a witness. Reads the deck. In 1994, a corrupt New Orleans cop ordered a hit on a civilian. He went away for murder, but he left a trail of other victims in his wake. They are still crying out for justice.
00:03:03
Speaker
I'll give a few more details on Brian once we get to his portion of the conversation.
Show Notes & Newsletter Info
00:03:08
Speaker
Show notes to this episode and more at BrendanOmero.com, where you can also sign up for my monthly Rage Against the Algorithm newsletter, a short riff, four books, and seven links. It literally goes up to 11.
00:03:20
Speaker
There's a writing prompt in there, a link to a happy hour, first of the month, no spam. As far as I can tell, you can't beat it. That's when the newsletter publishes first of the month. The happy hour is usually like the third Wednesday or the third Thursday of the month. Anyway, this issue of the activist is 150.
00:03:40
Speaker
It's crazy. This amazing magazine, digital magazine, that tells a feature story once a month, no ads, beautifully designed. Sayward came on board to the Adivis, I believe it was like in the 60s, she talks about this in her portion of the conversation. Jonah was in about the 80s. Ed, the designer, came in in the 90s, I think. And though I'm not on the Adivis dole, we partnered up at episode 100.
00:04:09
Speaker
And I'd like to think that some subscriptions for the Adivus have come their way as a result of the show. And I know the audience in reach of this show has benefited from our relationship. So cool that we get to do this, really. And that's where we're going to start with editor-in-chief, Sayward Darby, about the 150th issue and to tease out a bit of Brian's wonderful
Sayward Darby on Atavist's 150th Issue
00:04:32
Speaker
feature. Let's do it. Riff.
00:04:44
Speaker
I think that I went back and looked because I was curious. I think I came in at issue number 68 or 69. Jonah came in around issue number 83. And Ed, our art director, came in around issue 90. And I want to say that we were purchased by Automatic, so that became our home around issue 80. So I kind of went back and I was just like, where are we? How long have I been here? And it is wild to think that I
00:05:15
Speaker
been at the out of us for, you know, at this point, while more than half of the stories that it's published. And, uh, and you kind of, I kind of lose track of time, you know, I'm just doing my job and enjoying my job and not really kind of thinking about the broad span of things. But, you know, it really is, I think.
00:05:33
Speaker
Evan, Nick and Jeff who founded it had such an incredible vision for what long-form storytelling could look like and what it could be like. And it's really a testament to that vision that then the magazine did as well as it did when it was still an independent company and that automatic saw real value in it and purchased it and has continued to be a great home for it.
00:05:58
Speaker
And it's a bad time in media. It's been a bad time in media my entire career, but it's a particularly bad time at the moment, I feel. And I think that
00:06:08
Speaker
It's really special, and I feel very lucky to be working at a place like this. I have so many friends who have struggled with layoffs and difficult freelancing careers and all different things. And I myself, I was laid off from a job before this. It just is what it is. Not is what it is, we should all be fighting for a better industry. But I guess what I'm saying is, I don't know, the out of us to me is just such a special little oasis in the media.
00:06:36
Speaker
clusterfuck in which we find ourselves.
Atavist's Team & Contributor Recognition
00:06:40
Speaker
You can definitely use that on the podcast. Yeah. And I'm just, I'm really proud of it. I really am. And I'm grateful to everybody who supports it, whether that's a person who reads a story,
00:06:54
Speaker
a person who subscribes, a person who reads it on Apple News, but also all of the people behind the scenes. It's always been really important to us to give credit to everybody involved, which is why we have the credits box in every story. And we have such an incredible team of
00:07:09
Speaker
I mean, certainly the core team, which is me, Jonah, Ed, and Sean Cooper, our copy editor, who, it's funny, he's such a silent hero of all of this. I'm pretty sure he's copy-edited all 150 out of his stories. Sean's the best and one of the smartest people I know and saves me from myself all the time in stories.
00:07:29
Speaker
But then we've had such a great team of fact checkers over time, artists who Ed finds periodically researchers, translators, fixers.
Design Approach & Storytelling Consistency
00:07:40
Speaker
It's just, I don't know, it's a labor of love, but one of the real pleasures of this job is getting to work with just a really, really cool array of people.
00:07:49
Speaker
Yeah, it's pretty cool to be at 150. What I always admire too is that every story, it gets reinvented or redesigned in a way. Like it's not beholden to a house style of graphic design. It's like each story kind of, it has its own visual element too. So every month it feels new and fresh and spotlights an entirely different collaborative experience that's unique to just that one particular story.
00:08:19
Speaker
Yeah, I'm glad you feel that way because that's absolutely the goal. And I think that especially, and I was not at the out of us for those first 68 issues, I think they tried a lot of different things and there were definitely periods in which stories could look pretty radically different from story to story.
00:08:36
Speaker
But at the same time, undergirding that was this Atmos publishing platform, our IP no longer exists, has kind of been incorporated into WordPress CMS at this point. But there were really strong bones there for how do you put together a long form story that's really visually appealing and accessible. And then ultimately, I credit Ed, our art director, so much because when we redesigned
00:09:01
Speaker
the magazine in 2021. Sure, 2021, that sounds right. We had migrated from the Atavist platform because it was sunsetting to Newspack, which is a WordPress toolset. Ed did this amazing job of finding a way to kind of create these
00:09:19
Speaker
What's like, I'm trying to think of like a good musical word for this. It's like kind of those like bass tones, right? Like these things that kind of undergird the whole project that are really like solid and consistent. So, you know, certain fonts, certain like stylistic choices, they're all really subtle.
00:09:36
Speaker
But they are what really connect piece to piece. So you can look at something and be like, okay, this is a singular experience because of the different art involved, some of the different choices made almost always by Ed to put a story together. But then there are these subtle consistencies that make you realize, oh, that's an out of a story.
00:09:57
Speaker
And I think that that's a really special quality of things. So like, you know what to expect, but you also don't know what to expect. And that's kind of what we're going for is not something that feels totally out of left field, but something that does feel fresh each month.
00:10:11
Speaker
Nice. And I'll just add one more question, too. With milestone publication, publication milestones can give us a sense not only to reflect like you have, but also to look forward. And what are some of the ambitions you have going forward to the next 150, things that are in the bucket listy kind of things that you're excited about, perhaps?
Quality, Diversity, and Scaling Challenges
00:10:36
Speaker
Honestly, the big goal is to just
00:10:40
Speaker
keep doing what we do and doing it at a really high quality. I consider myself an ambitious person, but I also consider myself a pretty pragmatic person. And, you know, we're a small team. We don't have all the resources in the world. We have, you know, generous resources, but not
00:10:57
Speaker
You know, we're not the New Yorker New York times. And so, you know, what's important for me is like always serving, okay, what, what do we have at our disposal in terms of, you know, human resources and then, you know, financial resources and whatnot. And how can we make sure we're always performing at a really, really high level? And so really maintaining that consistency is, is crucial for the next 150 for the next 200, 500, whatever issues, you know, however long we're, we're able to, to keep doing what we're doing.
00:11:26
Speaker
I think within that it continues to be important to me and this is something I think about a lot and can admittedly be kind of tough to work on just because I'm one person. But I really want to keep diversifying the people we work with in terms of who they are, where they come from, what their profiles and backgrounds are.
00:11:49
Speaker
and those types of stories that they want to tell. And I think we've really come a long way. Not that we were ever in a bad place at all, but we certainly have reached gender parity and we've kept it there over the last several years. And it's something that was not the case before. And I really want to keep
00:12:12
Speaker
I don't know. It's like, it's, I don't want to do, I'm not interested necessarily in doing really flashy things that are going to, you know, excite an audience. It's more about, okay, we do what we do and we do it really well. How can we improve and expand our horizons almost like internally in a way that I think will then like enrich even further what we do really well.
00:12:35
Speaker
Well, there's something to be said for just you do you do something really, really well. You know, it's like a restaurant that does like really good like cupcakes or like good cheesesteaks. And you don't want to diversify the menu too much because it dilutes what you do so well. So you just looking to maybe get just more more like just different chefs in the kitchen to kind of put out the great, you know, the great meal that you put out every month.
00:13:04
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, to kind of continue the metaphor, it's like, I don't want to necessarily franchise, right? I think we have a really good kitchen and I'm excited to get other cooks in the kitchen at various points to show me, you know, bring their own ingredients, bring their own recipes, like, you know, have great ideas for stories and, you know, show me things I haven't necessarily thought of. Um,
00:13:26
Speaker
But I'm not interested in opening a new location. I'm not interested in tripling our size at anything like that. We've definitely seen what a folly, expanding for the sake of expanding, spending more for the sake of spending more, pivoting to video, all those things, the real pitfalls in that. And so just kind of keeping a level head because I also think that
00:13:55
Speaker
There aren't a lot of places these days where long-form storytellers can go and pitch stuff and feel like they can get the kind of real personalized editing experience that we try to provide. And I want to keep being that place for people. The only benefit of expanding would be that we could have more of those people that instead of publishing just 12, maybe we could do more. But at the same time, there's a cost-benefit analysis there.
00:14:25
Speaker
So yeah, I think doing what we're doing, continuing to expand and diversify the types of contributors we work with, the types of stories we tell. And then certainly, I'm always, we have another podcast in the works, another narrative podcast, no date yet set for when that'll be released, but that's something we've been working on.
00:14:51
Speaker
You know, always eager if we feel like a project is really in keeping with our mission and our style and whatnot. You know, always, always keen to think about new projects or collaborations, partnerships, whatever it may be. But yeah, I don't know. It's a great job. It's a great spot. Yeah.
00:15:08
Speaker
And just I want it to keep feeling that way for people. Oh, that's awesome. Well, I'm psyched that you're still going strong and that it's just doing its thing. And its thing is so valuable. So it's great to be able to celebrate 150 here. So congratulations. Thank you very much. I will go blow out a candle or something. Probably not. But no, thank you so much. I appreciate it.
00:15:38
Speaker
Just a topic that we've talked about in the past and I would love to revisit it. It has to do with, I believe your phrasing is the, what is it, the skeleton, the meat and the bones? Or something of that nature. I was wondering if you can expand on that, given that maybe a lot of people out there who do some deeply reported pieces or books, they might have a lot of
00:16:01
Speaker
let's say biological details, a lot of good factual stuff, but maybe they're lacking in pure story mechanics. And I think embedded in your metaphor is how to get at the story, at the crux of it.
00:16:18
Speaker
Yeah, I mean I think that each story is different obviously, but for me when I'm trying to figure out what the actual narrative structure should be, so I guess that's like the skeleton if you will, I usually start from a place of doing a timeline because I often find that
00:16:36
Speaker
uh just having in mind what kind of the key points in a story are so not worrying about detail not worrying about you know oh how am i going to describe this or anything along those lines but just like what are the key moments in a story and to be clear like you write all those moments out i do this hastily it's not you know a pretty process but it's just to visualize it for myself and there are plenty that you then wind up not
00:17:00
Speaker
needing to use or not needing to emphasize, I should say. I think the other thing to remember is sometimes by timelining something, you're able to see where things coincide or overlap. So by way of example, in Brian's piece, the last shall be first, which we just published and this is what we're talking about.
00:17:19
Speaker
There are a couple of like kind of key moments where things coincide. I mean, certainly there are a series of murders that happen in, you know, a roughly like six to eight week time span. And that is notable. And in addition, then when legal processes start, you know, the injustice of what happened to some of the main subjects in this story are magnified by the fact that the person who
00:17:45
Speaker
had not necessarily single-handedly but very much been a key force in the injustice against them was on trial for his own criminal behavior at basically the same time these people were. So their criminal trials were just two months apart. And then when one of them is acquitted but then has his acquittal or acquitted on appeal and then has his acquittal thrown out, the acquittal being thrown out happens at the exact same
00:18:14
Speaker
in the exact same year, I think just a couple, maybe like two or three months before this person who had, you know, created this injustice for him was re-sentenced for what he had done. And so, like, it's sometimes to me, like, time-lining is just a really helpful way of being like, oh, okay, I kind of see where there are moments in the story that are really consequential. And then, of course, you start building detail out around that as you're writing, and that's, like, the meat of it all.
00:18:42
Speaker
But that isn't to say that you necessarily tell a story in a strictly chronological order, but just having that chronology in front of you and knowing when things happened and what was going on around the time of those things happening.
00:19:00
Speaker
is a really, really helpful way for me to get a grasp around the story that we're telling. So writ large in the case of this story, and Brian and I had to talk about this quite a bit over time, not necessarily talk, but going back and forth in edits,
00:19:17
Speaker
You know, he had originally kind of framed the piece around this idea that 1994 was the deadliest year in New Orleans history. And that's absolutely true. And it was a catastrophic year from any number of perspectives in the city. But, you know, the deadliest year is a book.
00:19:35
Speaker
That's a survey of things that happened over the course of that time. Some of which is really well known if you are a person who either lives in New Orleans or knows about New Orleans history. Some of the murders and other events that took place within that year are very, very well known.
00:19:55
Speaker
And to me, what really jumped out was that one of the most well-known murder from that year, which was a hit ordered by a cop against a civilian who had filed a brutality complaint against him,
00:20:10
Speaker
he actually, because if you do something that terrible, chances are you've probably done some other bad stuff in your time as a cop. And lo and behold, within that deadliest year, but also before, he had in fact, you know,
00:20:27
Speaker
potentially framed or otherwise, you know, kind of railroaded innocent people for other crimes. And so we talked a lot about how the frame wasn't actually the year 1994. The frame was there's this incident that so many people know about. What they don't know about are all of the other things that the person at the heart of that incident.
00:20:47
Speaker
who was the person that did this really terrible thing, also left this trail of other harm in his wake. And so we were exposing it. That was kind of the idea, was bringing all of that, not unknown stuff necessarily, because I think to a certain audience, locally in New Orleans, it was potentially known, but no one had really strung all of the pieces together and showed the way that this very, very notorious
00:21:15
Speaker
murder actually had these threads connected to other people and the ways that they were affected. So that's the skeleton in this story. There are always a lot of different ways to tell a story, I think, but from our standpoint, and Brian and I talked about this again quite a bit, it was like,
00:21:35
Speaker
What is the story people don't know? What is the value add that we can really do here from an investigative and a storytelling standpoint? And it wound up really being the story of these hidden victims is what we call them in the piece.
00:21:48
Speaker
And you're very skilled at finding ways into the stories. The leads of your stories are always very compelling and people I've spoken to too. When I talk about the openings, they're like, oh, that's say word, that's say word, that's say word. So when you were looking at this one, what was the entry point that made sense to you that helped kick this story off?
00:22:14
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, if I recall correctly, I can't remember all of the early drafts well enough, but you know, I think Brian had always been interested in starting with what is a resentencing of Len Davis, this cop in New Orleans, who was the first person, one of the first two people, the other being the hitman he hired.
00:22:33
Speaker
uh, convicted and sentenced to death under federal law for violating someone's civil rights. And what happened was that his initial sentence got thrown out, and then there was a resentencing hearing in 2005. It happened in New Orleans, like, three, four weeks prior to Hurricane Katrina hitting, which is, I think, symbolic in its own, like, sort of morbid way. What is interesting about that moment, I mean, on the one hand, it's a court scene, so it's not, you know, necessarily the most exciting thing ever.
00:23:00
Speaker
But at the same time, I think it was a signal to a lot of people that the story was over. The story of Lynn Davis was over. He had firmly been resentenced. He was going to be on death row, continues to appeal his case, but I think it was from a public perception standpoint, that was it.
00:23:19
Speaker
What the entry point for us was the fact that there were people for whom the story was not over. There were people who were behind bars for life. There were five men that Brian ultimately focuses on in the story who were behind bars for life because of really bad police work that Davis had done. And so the point is kind of a
00:23:41
Speaker
Even if you think you know this story, you actually don't know this story. And that moment in 2005 is kind of the starting point for that. And of course, then we jump back in time and do lots of storytelling of what actually happened in 1994 and before that.
00:23:58
Speaker
But it was kind of that that immediate pivot from this seems like a final kind of moment in a story, but it's actually not at all. For a lot of people, it was for a lot of people in the story, it was actually a midway point, right? Because they spent another 17 years trying to get the justice system to listen.
00:24:16
Speaker
very nice what it's always always great getting your side of the table and then uh... you so uh... with with the story that uh... with live a couple days ago now we're gonna kick over to brian to get his insights into into this incredible piece that you guys have uh... have put out to the world says always say
00:24:39
Speaker
Alright, always fun to get the editor's side of the table. Brian Fairbanks is the author of Wizards, David Duke, America's Wildest Election and the Rise of the Far Right. In June, his next book comes out. It's called Willie, Waylon and the Boys, How Nashville Outsiders Change Country Music Forever. That's available for pre-order.
00:25:03
Speaker
And in this episode, excuse me, we talk about how Brian got his start in narrative journalism, working with Stephen Ambrose, outlining movie scores he likes to write to. I've been really into the arrival
00:25:20
Speaker
soundtrack, the movie Arrival, the really creepy, amazing sci-fi movie, of which I just took it out from the library again to watch it again, and yeah, it's a really creepy, eerie, yeah, hair is a raise on your arms kind of movie score, I like it. And also the favorite, Brian's favorite notebooks, and you know I love notebooks. So let's not waste any more time seeing efforts, let's get right into it, okay?
00:25:53
Speaker
Yeah, sure. So I got my start at the age of 15 as a film critic, believe it or not. And that was because The Hartford Current, which is the oldest newspaper in America, had, you know, a job posting essentially saying, we're looking for someone to write
00:26:14
Speaker
for teenagers about cinema, books, just the entertainment world generally, for a special Sunday back page of the newspaper, which is read by something like a million people in Connecticut, which is pretty much everyone, knowing how small Connecticut is. And I was going to high school there, and I said, why wouldn't they just hire an actual teenager to do this?
00:26:44
Speaker
but I submitted a couple of reviews and they called me for the interview and realized immediately, of course, that I was 15. So they decided to kind of reconfigure their approach and created this back page that was all teenage writers every Sunday. And from there, you know, people started to notice me. They were like, oh, this kid's only 15 and he's doing journalism. I did some features.
00:27:13
Speaker
And they ended up giving me bigger and bigger things to do before I graduated high school. And then I moved to New Orleans to go to the University of New Orleans. And there I met Doug Brinkley and Stephen Ambrose, who, you know, two major nonfiction writers and professors ended up going to work directly for them instead of going back for my sophomore year. And I worked on a book with Hunter S. Thompson.
00:27:43
Speaker
and Steve Ambrose and Doug Brinkley. And I worked on Jack Kerouac's diaries and all these other people that I worked with, including the NAACP and Julian Bond, they all became my influences, I guess. You know, I hadn't really done a lot of nonfiction writing outside of assignments for the Heart for Current or for freelance publication, but
00:28:11
Speaker
once I started working for these guys, it was just like, oh, you know, I could really, you know, hurdle over the competition, you know, skip going back to college and just become a nonfiction writer with this sort of track record that I've already developed while I was still a teenager. And I kind of did for a while. And then, you know, the publishing industry changed a lot. This is, you know, early 2000. So the internet comes along and
00:28:41
Speaker
obviously chaos begins in the publishing world. So it felt like eventually that I had to do other things and I went into the film and TV industry and wrote there and worked behind the scenes. I was in some movies myself and I just kind of tried to find ways to get paid to be creative essentially for a long time.
00:29:05
Speaker
um until i ended up back in new orleans in 2014 and then i was writing fiction i was writing movies but it just wasn't clicking until the capital riot happened um and that served as the sort of end to the book i'd been pitching around that i didn't know was out there of course because it hadn't happened yet but once i had that you know angle that it was all building up to that
00:29:36
Speaker
Starting with the 1991 Louisiana gubernatorial election, I realized that this was going to sell and that this could be my new career as writing nonfiction books. And so I've been doing that, yeah, for the past.
00:29:50
Speaker
a couple of years. I've written three now and there's a fourth in the works and the second one's about to come out finally. Last week I had, I spoke to Earl Swift. He's been on the show a couple times and he's had a very esteemed journalistic career and also as a non-fiction book writer and he's been able to really
00:30:16
Speaker
Chainsmoke book projects over the last, you know, several, I don't know, say 20 years or so, he's been able to to do that. And and for you, it looks like you're really kind of you're in that flywheel. So, you know, for for people who really want to kind of lock into writing nonfiction books and the whole proposals and chainsmoking them and overlapping projects, you know, how have you been able to cultivate that in the early goings so far?
00:30:50
Speaker
it's been it's been tricky i mean that my first book was out from vanderbilt which is a great publisher but it's really small um and at the same time that i came up with this idea i think a lot of other people said oh there's a connection between trump and david duke there's connections between you know the sort of proud boys white power movement side of things and
00:31:08
Speaker
Well, um
00:31:18
Speaker
you know the KKK directly and obviously it all kind of they're all have the same goals and things like that so there was a lot of competition going on from from other writers I just figured out pretty quickly that my niche was going to be connecting you know sort of past
00:31:41
Speaker
history, you know, things that happened at least 30 years ago with something that is happening right now. It's not so much a warning like, you know, history, you know, those who don't know their history are bound to repeat it. It's more about just sort of acknowledging that history will repeat. Like no matter what we do, things are going to happen again and sort of looking at how they resolve the first time
00:32:10
Speaker
how we were able to overcome adversity and other issues and basically course correct, at least in this country. And so this book, what's called Wizards about David Duke and Edwin Edwards and Donald Trump, that
00:32:31
Speaker
follows that sort of structure. And then my country music book, believe it or not, that's coming out in June, follows that same sort of pattern. It's about the highwaymen individually and collectively when they got together and formed countries first super group in 1985.
00:32:48
Speaker
They are detailed, you know, chapter by chapter, they're sort of parallel lives. And then I talk about the sort of Sturgill Simpsons, Brandy Carlisle's, Alison Russell's of the world, the sort of current crop of outlaw country slash Americana artists that are kind of following in their footsteps, whether they intend to or not. And then, you know, my subsequent books are kind of the same thing, too.
00:33:15
Speaker
And really this article, I know we're not talking about that yet, but this article about Len Davis and the NOPD was sort of played out that way as well in the original form.
00:33:28
Speaker
What it does reveal is oftentimes when you leave yourself open to discovery in a current project, oftentimes there are these little sparks that are lighting off the flint of the current thing. And those can often catch fire. And I imagine that through the course of your reporting for wizards and stories of that nature, Len Davis did come up. Right. Yeah.
00:33:57
Speaker
Len Davis came up originally because of the book The Yellow House. I don't know if you're familiar with that. Her name is Sarah M. Broome and she's from New Orleans. She's from New Orleans East. And, you know, the book won the National Book Award. It's a memoir.
00:34:15
Speaker
of growing up before Hurricane Katrina devastated her neighborhood and her house specifically. But growing up, she sort of knew about Len Davis as Robocop.
00:34:30
Speaker
And it turned out that he was working both sides of the law and that other people knew him as the desire terrorist. And he was responsible for a witness's death, essentially. And she just sort of alludes to this. And I said, well, I've never heard of this guy. How have I never heard of him? And this is in October 2022. I started to research him. And I think the day
00:35:01
Speaker
before I first Googled Len Davis was when the three teens from Angola had just been released from jail after 30 years behind bars for a crime they didn't commit. And they were there because Len Davis essentially framed them. And that was, you know, incredibly eye opening. I remember getting chills and thinking,
00:35:26
Speaker
Wow, if he framed these guys, and they're on the same case, and he killed a witness, and people knew him around the neighborhood as the desire terrorist, there's probably more to this than just these guys. And of course there was, there were multiple other people that were released very soon after that. I just thought, I better get ahead of this, I think.
00:35:49
Speaker
There's going to be national attention for this story. There's going to be other people that are going to put all these names together into one piece. And you know, now it's 18 months later or whatever. And I'm pretty sure this is still the first
00:36:03
Speaker
piece of any kind that is mentioning all these possible victims in the same context, essentially. Yeah, and desire terrorists. I mean, there was a development of public housing in New Orleans called the desire development. And so that's kind of where where Davis was able to, you know, inflict his awful influence. Absolutely.
00:36:28
Speaker
Yeah. And a lot of these people grew up there. They knew him growing up. Uh, Kim Groves apparently knew him growing up. She definitely knew him by the time they were in a security guard training program together. And then later she identified him as a, you know, assailant of an innocent teenager and.
00:36:51
Speaker
you know, ends up getting murdered because of it by Len Davis's hit man. So yeah, all these people are connected through the kind of ninth ward neighborhood and desire projects. But you know, his reach was throughout most of the city at the time, because he had so many cops on the payroll working both sides of the law, essentially. So
00:37:15
Speaker
So what was the culture and climate at the time that allowed this virus to take root? The culture was a lot like it is now, unfortunately, in some ways where you have both people fleeing the city because of apparent
00:37:37
Speaker
rising crime rates, housing prices fall, drugs are a problem, and
00:37:46
Speaker
it's hard to find police officers willing to work for low pay. And the city is kind of teetering on the brink of collapse in a lot of ways. And that all sort of leads to corruption, essentially, because people can do things like
00:38:10
Speaker
you know, work after hours for restaurants and get paid directly by them. Um, so it's in the police interests to protect their outside clients as well over sort of other obligations. Um, but also if they're getting paid more money to be, you know, moonlighting as security guards,
00:38:35
Speaker
that's going to end up becoming the focus and they're going to neglect their, you know, actual police work, which is actually dangerous versus, you know, guarding a restaurant that, you know, maybe in 20 or 30 years in business might get robbed one time. Um, maybe not. So there's just a lot. And then of course the cops are also in charge of these, what are called details. So
00:39:05
Speaker
They're possibly taking money on the side, taking a cut, a kickback or an outright bribe to hire their own friends and co-workers for these jobs and sort of farm them out. So that just leads to
00:39:27
Speaker
more corruption, more corruption. And the police department is already suffering from bad publicity, from the arrests and firings of high-level police officers who are in charge of vice squads and various other departments that are getting kicked out because there are front-page stories coming out about how they're stealing money during raids of bars and other
00:39:57
Speaker
businesses in the city. So that's the environment that Len Davis sort of squeaks through the police academy and into the fifth district, which is known as the bloody fifth by both the police who work it and the locals who suffer through it. And that name comes from, you know, both the fact that there are
00:40:24
Speaker
a lot of brutality complaints and the fact that there's a high murder rate in that area, which includes the desire development. And as you're doing your reporting and research on this story, at what point do you realize you have quite like an arc to make this kind of an adivicity in long form feature versus just kind of a different kind of feature that maybe profiles this area in this time?
00:40:54
Speaker
Great question, because the timing was so perfect, but also, for the first 24 hours, I thought that's a possibility that the story is just, Len Davis had a witness killed, he also framed these three guys, and everybody knows that. All the reporting on the three guys from Angola was exactly what I just said. There's this guy, desire terrorist,
00:41:24
Speaker
had a witness murdered, and he framed these three guys as well. So I was pitching it that way, as in, I'm not sure if there's more out there, but I just have a hunch there is. And within a few days, Sherman Singleton was also released, also connected to Len Davis and believes he was framed by Len Davis.
00:41:51
Speaker
So then those stories start coming out, and I say, OK, so my hunch was correct. There are more people. The question is, are there going to be more people that we're going to turn up in this investigation before they're released? And there wasn't specifically, although Duane LeBlanc's story was sort of buried,
00:42:18
Speaker
As far as I know, no local reporter did a story announcing that he had been released from prison. The sort of organization, the movement to free him did a blog post about it and they showed a YouTube video that they had shot of him, you know, hugging everybody upon his release. And that was the extent of it. So I knew that at the very least,
00:42:47
Speaker
Duane's story could be incorporated into it and that, you know, we had something there that wasn't being reported elsewhere. And then in subsequent, you know, research, we determined that the prosecution in Len Davis's original trial mentioned that the hitman, whose name is Paul Hardy, was suspected in multiple other murders from around 1994 and
00:43:17
Speaker
my sort of hunch about all this is that the wiretap picked up information in 1994 because that's the only year it was really active that Paul Hardy had killed these people and that Len Davis had either interfered after the murder in some way or
00:43:42
Speaker
helped ensure that there were no police around to arrest Paul Hardy at the scene. But we really don't actually know to this day like how deep, if at all, Len Davis's involvement was in some of these other murders because unfortunately they're not on the wiretaps in detail enough that the prosecution could make a case against both men for them. So
00:44:11
Speaker
We focused on what we knew, what we could figure out because Dwayne Sherman and the three Angola men are all still around and were able to talk to me so we could get the details on those cases from them. Unfortunately, of course, in the other murders, no one was framed or prosecuted. So we don't know
00:44:38
Speaker
the details as well as we do for these ones, if that makes sense. So as you're gathering information, how best do you get your head around the reporting and the research and organize it and maybe even outline in such a way that you can start to synthesize everything that you've gathered? Well, a funny story, I started writing not too long after I learned about Duane LeBlanc because I felt like I had
00:45:08
Speaker
an ending. Like I had something that nobody else was talking about. I could see the arc. But as I started to write that version, I started thinking about other NOPD officers in 1994. So they were technically on the same force as Len Davis, who also murdered people. There's Antoinette Frank, who's the only woman on
00:45:39
Speaker
Louisiana's death row right now. She killed her partner and several members of a family at a Vietnamese restaurant. And there's rumors of other officers that I won't get into, but there's a rumor about a officer who was later fired for the unsolved murder that he may have been involved in.
00:46:08
Speaker
And so I incorporated those people into it, and then once I had those people, I kept going into Hurricane Katrina, which was about a decade later, and there were a lot of police-involved murders during that, perhaps many, many unsolved and never-to-be-solved murders of civilians by officers and who knows who else
00:46:38
Speaker
during the evacuation phase of the city. We know about Danziger Bridge and some of those other cases that were adjudicated, but it just got really, really complicated, I guess. And it ended up being, I would say about 200 book pages.
00:47:00
Speaker
Obviously, this story is one screen, one link. There's not page two through 200 of this article. So I immediately recognized that we're talking about a much bigger investigation, potentially, and that I had to cut back to just focusing on sort of Len Davis and his victims, the editorial team,
00:47:28
Speaker
was also an agreement on that, I think. And we cut it back to just sort of focusing on the known victims, the living, wrongfully convicted guys, and Len Davis himself. And I think the piece came together from that vision. But the original version was just,
00:47:54
Speaker
throw the whole thing in there because the NOPD has more than just Len Davis on there. And he was not the only bad apple, shall we say. When you're reporting on an underworld of this nature, what's the extent to which you ever feel personally threatened? I didn't feel threatened at all from this
00:48:23
Speaker
because we sort of dropped the other officers who are still out there and may have something to lose. I don't feel like Len Davis can do anything from behind bars to harm me right now.
00:48:38
Speaker
Yeah, it was definitely a concern when I was sending the letter, because I didn't know his reaction was going to be. He could send threats or get out one day, who knows. And that would be something to concern myself with. When I was writing about the Klan, though, someone kept cutting my internet cable. I think they thought they were cutting power to my house.
00:49:04
Speaker
could be a coincidence, could be, you know, the UPS truck hitting it repeatedly over several days. But it was cut multiple times right after I announced that I was investigating them. So that was an interesting development. But, you know, I didn't really feel that in danger during this or even that writing either because I think with something that's
00:49:33
Speaker
old news. I think a lot of the people are not really powerful right now. And certainly, you know, once this piece comes out, that's taking away the power from a lot of these people like Len Davis, because we're exposing the structure, the corruption, some things that he had previously maybe gotten away with. And that I think
00:49:59
Speaker
is the strongest thing journalists can do is to publish and to put themselves behind the story. Put the victims that need justice in the spotlight and at the risk of my own safety and hope that people pick up on this and get something out of it.
00:50:24
Speaker
actionable. Is that where some of the juices for you in terms of what brings you back to stories of this nature of the old adage of holding the powerful to account and giving voice to the voiceless and stuff of that nature? Yeah. When I was at UNO, they said that your screenplays are funny, but make sure that you're
00:50:55
Speaker
holding the powerful to account. And pretty much ever since then, I've been kind of a political writer where I feel like I'm not trying to tweak the story to fit an agenda. But when I see a way to sort of further the goals of justice and moving the country forward and things of that nature,
00:51:25
Speaker
That is where my creative juices come out. That's when the best writing happens. I'm just sort of channeling that into the piece. And it just ends up being stronger. And those passages are more powerful because I truly believe in it. There's definitely moments in the writing of any of the stuff where it's really disappointing because you
00:51:51
Speaker
know in your gut that something is true, but you have no concrete evidence of it. And that came up a lot in this piece where there were things that were, you know, secondhand quotes and things like that where, man, they were so good. They were so powerful and the kind of thing where, you know, other outlets would want to quote them and they could help
00:52:20
Speaker
I don't know, get justice in some way, help with the lawsuits. But, you know, this is about telling the story truthfully and protecting ourselves too. We don't want to give Len Davis or someone like that any ammunition to come after us and to say, you know, this whole story is invalidated because
00:52:43
Speaker
this never happened and this was never spoken. We need to make sure that the story is accurate and insightful as well, but that's secondary to sort of putting together everything that we can prove as if it's a court case and fighting that fight through the print version, essentially.
00:53:12
Speaker
And in terms of the writing of the piece and just how you go about the writing in general, how do you set up your headspace, be it rituals or just things you like to have in place? Writing is hard enough as is, and I think we have to go through our own individual practices to bring our fullness to the work. So how do you approach it in that sense?
00:53:39
Speaker
Well, it's funny that this piece and some other things that I've written of the long-form variety, like books and other long pieces of journalism, I outlined ahead of time, had it in my mind, and then completely forgot about the outline. You know, the first paragraph, I was like, yep, this is the first paragraph in the outline too. And then,
00:54:06
Speaker
completely get in the zone and it just takes over. The outline sort of fades into the background, but it's sort of there as a backbone. It's not dispensed with in the sense that a final version doesn't closely adhere to the outline. It's just that somehow once I get going,
00:54:31
Speaker
I know instinctively what the next paragraph is. And it's not just chronological. It's not like, okay, well now it's January, so this happened in January. It's really, somehow the flow comes together beautifully in a piece like this. It started out with me writing about Kim Groves and the night she died and her movements and then
00:55:00
Speaker
Flashing back to essentially how we got there and then after her murder talking about the other murders that Len Davis may have been involved in or May have helped as an accessory after the fact that shall we say and and then going chronologically from there into the other police officers who may or may not have murdered people while on the force that year and Katrina and then
00:55:29
Speaker
jumping ahead to the release of All the Men today, it just all came together because this story is so damn good. It's not me, you know? Just there's so many interesting elements, but also shocking elements, unfortunately, that fit seamlessly because
00:55:58
Speaker
Thankfully because of the wiretap but also the court transcripts are very detailed and the fact that the living victims and everybody else involved was willing to talk to me
00:56:14
Speaker
It just was easy to tell this story, I think. Anybody could have done this, this is not. I didn't accomplish very much except channeling it, I think. And to be specific, my writing setup is I sit down in a dark office with many, many, many, many possible distractions and put on
00:56:41
Speaker
jazz or movie scores or music that I've listened to a thousand times so it's not distracting me like I'm not being like oh I've never heard this record before this is a really interesting you know lyric um and just kind of going off in a tangent thinking about these songs uh instead I'm just
00:57:04
Speaker
staying focused on the piece. And it takes a while. Sometimes I waste almost an entire day spacing out or checking my email or something until some sentence that I've been writing all day long just comes out perfectly. And the next thing I know I've written the paragraph after it and then a whole chapter and then a whole
00:57:34
Speaker
Yeah, that's really how it is. Yeah, I love that idea of sometimes you just have to kind of surrender yourself to the whims of the piece or the muse as Steven Pressfield might call it.
00:57:50
Speaker
and it's and it's a yeah it's that nature it's maybe listening to a to a great movie score and you might just have be staring off but maybe a certain chord it strikes a certain mood and that might just trigger something in your brain that just sets it rolls the rock up the hill and suddenly it's going downhill and you're just you're just riding it now right it helps that you know a lot of these movie scores are
00:58:19
Speaker
a two hour movie mood wise boiled down to 45 minutes on a record or something. So you get the slow build to the beginning and then you've got your action sequences or whatever and your climactic scene and then your credits. And somewhere in that 30 to 35 minute range is when I really probably hit my stride and then
00:58:44
Speaker
running out of steam 45 minutes in and I need to slow down because it's just going to get sloppy. I might miss something that needs to be in there. So it just ends up being kind of this perfect arc, essentially, just like a movie. And of course, knowing the movie and knowing the score
00:59:06
Speaker
It's not surprising or jarring when something dramatic happens, violent strings or something like that. What are some of your go-to movie scores? I'm a real diehard Morricone fan. My favorite movie of all time is Once Upon a Time in America, and it's probably the best score ever. Also, Once Upon a Time in the West, it's a little more distracting because there's just a lot of dramatic electric guitars and
00:59:36
Speaker
kind of cheesy recording styles from the 60s. But also I love Sicario, the English patient, and the revenant
00:59:48
Speaker
all great, more sort of recent scores, I guess. The Usual Suspects is a good one, too. And sort of more like intellectual action movies, like The Usual Suspects or Heat or something like that, where the score isn't very, I don't know, overkill, Hollywood overkill. It's more of like an indie,
01:00:15
Speaker
um... style and uh... and it happens to be something i grew up on so i've heard it you know fifty thousand times yeah i like uh... the queen's gambit soundtrack oh yeah great great score that's a great one uh... what's another one that's kind of a go-to for me uh... i kind of like i mean it's a bit amped up but uh... the recent um... the batman score that one's a very brooding
01:00:42
Speaker
score that I particularly like. I'm trying to think of another instrumental one. Oftentimes, sometimes I will go on Spotify and just listen to whale songs and just have humpback whales or whatever just singing in the mail. That really does just sit in the background with some noise canceling headphones on, and you can really drill down. It's very ethereal and relaxing and haunting at the same time.
01:01:13
Speaker
Well, if that's your style, I also recommend if Beale Street could talk and 1917, which, you know, war movie, but in my memory, the score is just sort of driving and rhythmic. It's not like, you know, explosion scene and, you know, the big, you know, percussion crescendos or things like that that are just kind of jarring. It just has that steady, you know, tension.
01:01:43
Speaker
Because this is a one-shot movie, so they're kind of keeping it steady. And I loved what you said a moment ago, how you were just kind of, you took your outline and it was in the embryonic stages. And then, like an embryo, certain things become vestigial and just kind of get digested away in terms of the development of whatever biological being it's going to be.
01:02:07
Speaker
its point and then it does get subsumed by the rest of the organism as it develops. And there's an element of just surrendering to the story and the research and just let it, like you were saying, it just kind of, you're almost like taking dictation from your material. Was that a skill that you've had to cultivate over the years where you just had to surrender to the material at hand and just kind of get out of the way as the writer?
01:02:34
Speaker
That comes from a couple of places. There's the Ambrose style. Steve Ambrose would write longhand on yellow legal pads and I would type it up. So it's kind of this thing that other writers do, like type up the great Gatsby to get the rhythm of it, to get the flow of how that was structured and put together by typing someone else's writing slowly
01:03:02
Speaker
I sort of realized pacing and things of that nature that would really work. And so it's kind of been second nature since then. But also I hadn't read Robert Caro's books at the time and he
01:03:18
Speaker
is, you know, a long-form writer in the best sense. A thousand page books that have been apparently cut down from two thousand page books. But he's a newspaper man at heart. And so, you know, he's sort of used to telling a story and, you know, three to five hundred words. So his books have this great structure where it seems like you're reading this massive
01:03:47
Speaker
tome, but really each page is a mini novel. And I think between reading him obsessively and working for Ambrose and other writers, somewhere in there by Osmosis, I developed the same kind of like sense of pacing once I know
01:04:14
Speaker
where the story is going to go, it's really easy for me to fill it all in. Wizards and the country music book that are coming out are essentially first drafts that have been edited. I did not print them out after writing them and then start retyping them to sort of perfect them. They're not perfect, of course, but
01:04:42
Speaker
That was the idea is just write a damn good first draft, which is of course impossible, and then go back and really, really edit it like I did with Ambrose's writing and with other people that I've worked with.
01:05:00
Speaker
and just get to the meat of it and take out, you know, my sort of flights of fancy, some of the humor that is maybe misplaced or not landing and things of that nature. But essentially what you read is, at least in the books,
01:05:22
Speaker
the first draft you know made really damn good and uh instead of you know writing a bad first draft and i don't know where it's going and i don't know what i'm doing and then i you know rewrite it from scratch almost a second or third time which i know other writers do even in non-fiction um you know i just feel like that
01:05:47
Speaker
when I'm inspired, which is almost always only in the first draft, that's when it's gonna be the real backbone of the piece. And it's proved correct so far. I mean, this story, we did a lot of versions of it. We moved things around, we cut things, we added things back in. And the order's different now. It does not start with the murder of Kim Groves.
01:06:17
Speaker
Lynn Davis on trial in 1996 and then flashes back to his early days and you know goes chronologically from there. I could have started that way. But you know the original version I felt like because Kim Groves was the victim who died and everyone else is still alive. She should be the dramatic focus of the piece because
01:06:45
Speaker
we would probably end with her daughter Jasmine talking about how her life has been different because she lost her mother on her 12th birthday, essentially. And, you know, her search for justice. But, you know, it just it works better, I think, this way with a more chronological approach.
01:07:11
Speaker
and with the focus on everybody in a sort of balanced way. So just a good chunk of the piece, you know, 20% or something like that about each of the victims and an ending with Jaluk's son saying, well, I don't want to spoil it, but his comment to me at a press conference announcing a lawsuit against the city over
01:07:38
Speaker
their wrongful incarceration. And it just was just very
01:07:44
Speaker
Like, once I heard it, I said, this is going to be the end of the piece, and it is, so at some point. Nice. And Brian, as I bring these conversations down for a landing, I always love asking the guests for a recommendation of some kind for the listeners. And that can just be anything you're excited about, a brand of pencil or a notebook or a coffee or tea, whatever it might be. So I'd just extend that to you as we bring our conversation down for a landing.
01:08:12
Speaker
I am currently obsessed with Shogun, both the current version that is on FX and Hulu, but also the 1980 miniseries version, which I saw last year in anticipation of the new miniseries coming out. I highly recommend watching both because they are dramatically different, but also a random recommendation
01:08:38
Speaker
is for JotPad notebooks. Okay, I'm gonna punch in real quick. You know I love notebooks, and so I was looking around, I was like, JotPad notebooks, and I googled that, and I'm looking, I can't find it anywhere, and I'm like, God damn it, maybe it's a kind of subgenre of a different kind of company? I don't know, so I emailed Brian after this conversation was done. I'm like, can you send me a link to those notebooks so I can put him in the show notes?
01:09:06
Speaker
And he was like, oh, it's dot pads. It's not jot pads, dot pads. And it's by Rhodia or Rhodia, a modern notebook since 1934. I don't get any kickbacks or affiliate links or anything of that nature. But the link to it will be in the show notes. And I might even, because you know how I ask guests for recommendations, of course, at the end of this part of the show. And they might make for some good gifts in the end. So maybe...
01:09:35
Speaker
I will put together a, I don't know, a holiday gift guide based on recommendation from the guests. I don't know what I'm talking about anymore. I take all my notes longhand at first because it's just easier to remember things. I think when you write them down by hand, you have to put way more effort in, especially for someone like me who types really, really fast.
01:10:05
Speaker
When I take notes on a computer, it seems like I, I don't know, I just blow through them and I don't really pay attention to what I'm even writing down. Um, but if I have to be more methodical about it, I get more interesting content essentially, but I use a notepad that has little dots every, you know, centimeter or something. I don't know how big the gaps are, but, uh, they are.
01:10:33
Speaker
Perfect for making your bad handwriting, which I am guilty of look really, really nice somehow. And then I also take photos of my handwritten notes and then I use a program that converts them into
01:10:51
Speaker
text, really, you know, computer text, which saves me a lot of time in typing. Wow. I recommend doing that for all the journalists or anybody else who takes notes out there, students and the like. That's incredible. So what's the, so it Jotpad, is that the brand?
01:11:12
Speaker
Yeah, that's just a notebook brand that I use. I mean, obviously, you can use everything. I found using lined paper to be too restrictive, and I need to make my letters much bigger sometimes when I'm writing quickly. But I like the JotPads, because they have little dots in them. Get that kind. And then I use a program called Image to Text Converter, which is free online. It just limits how many images you can convert to text at a time.
01:11:42
Speaker
Take photos of my iPhone, airdrop them to the computer, and then drop them into image to text converter, and they convert them into, I would say semi-accurate text. But then you can just go through and fix all the errors, which are entirely your own. It's all because your handwriting is not as good as computer text, and just
01:12:11
Speaker
just improving the typos that come up there. And then you have a completed piece of paper in like five minutes. So it's pretty nice. Fantastic. That's cool. I love notebooks and stuff of that nature. So that's always something I love geeking out on. So that's cool. That's a great one. So yeah, Brian, this was wonderful getting to talk shop and celebrate your piece for the activist. So just, you know, thanks for coming on to talk some shop and thanks for being so generous with your time.
01:12:40
Speaker
Yeah, thanks Brendan. It's a real joy to be here and I'm so glad the piece is out and that, you know, people are starting to talk about it. So it's nice to see you. Time for the pot and chat.
01:13:02
Speaker
Thanks to Sayward and Brian. Congrats to Atavus for 150 issues. Keep on keeping on, you journalistic oasis. I got my notes from my editor, and you'd think that being a writer for 20 years, speaking with hundreds of writers on this show, that I'd have some skill, and the answer is no. Unequivocally no. The note to my generous and patient editor.
01:13:27
Speaker
sent along, according to a trusted editor friend of mine who's written something like a hundred books, said it was the best editorial letter they'd ever seen. Since I don't have 44 hours to talk about the work that needs to be done on this biography, I'll zero in on just one aspect for the next couple minutes.
01:13:52
Speaker
And this is my phrasing. I have a lot of, let's say, good details or biographical details, but I don't have what you would call a biography. For that I need to be more authoritative. I need to tell the story I want to tell.
01:14:09
Speaker
I need to weigh in, not in first person, but I have to be the driver of the tour bus, you know, pointing to passengers. Look over there. Okay, now look over here. You know, this is important. This is my interpretation. It's on the biographer after interviewing dozens and if not hundreds of people, and I've interviewed probably, it was well over 100 people for this.
01:14:32
Speaker
depending on how many biographers you talk to, they might snub their nose at that. You work with what you work with, okay? Okay, I'm not gonna give myself shit for only talking to 130 people. Reading, I read thousands of articles. You know, you need to be assertive and to make assertions. This is a little snippet from the editorial letter.
01:15:00
Speaker
What is the story you want to tell? You are the Steve expert. You can draw conclusions, interpret events, analyze facts. You can break it all down for the reader and explain what it means. Your narration is the glue that holds this book together for the reader. This is what's going to help the book flow and transition.
01:15:22
Speaker
So I was outsourcing too much of the color to other people's quotes, you know not one to get in the way Instead of say merely paraphrasing what they were saying and using my own words to call greater attention to them and more cohesion in that sense
01:15:38
Speaker
There's an upsetting amount of work that needs to be done and I'm sure I'm not the only one disappointed in what I have put forth, though I reserve the greatest amount of that disappointment. The past 24 hours I've been largely paralyzed. It's probably the closest I've come through writer's block in my life. It's almost harder, no it is harder than the blank page because that doesn't freak me out. What freaks me out is
01:16:03
Speaker
being painted into a corner or having dug such a hole which is starting to feel like a grave. So it really is like a 3,000 piece puzzle. You can't even find the corner pieces and you gotta somehow find the framing.
01:16:21
Speaker
But the 120,000 words of this first draft, the rough draft was 167,000 words, and so the first draft is 120. It's a reference photo, I guess is what I'm trying to say. So I don't have to do much by way of new reporting. It's just if there is new, it has to be very tactical and pointed reporting in research. But for the most part, the bones are good.
01:16:48
Speaker
It's my capacity to crystallize the narrative that I have to really focus on this higher level stuff is always hard for me to get my head around. And I don't mean to sound too self-deprecating here I tend to do that and it's probably a turn off for a lot of people. I have a tendency to be a Debbie downer.
01:17:09
Speaker
breaking news, news flash. And I don't mean to come off as too self-deprecating here, but when it comes to stuff of that nature, I'm just not that smart.
01:17:19
Speaker
I know I'm not a total moron, but when it comes to this, that kind of stuff, that higher level stuff, the what's it about stuff, it's like I have a speech impediment of some kind, like I just can't articulate it. It's like I can feel it, but I cannot speak it, and then I cannot execute it on the page, and that's ultimately where it has to come out.
01:17:47
Speaker
But in terms of the narration and trying to get my head around that, I came up with this Jedi mind trick of sorts that I hope will help. I don't know if it will. And it's just take what I've got, which is basically a gigantic outline, if you want to call it that, and write it like a novel, but don't make anything up.
01:18:10
Speaker
In which case, we can sink into the story a bit more. And it doesn't feel so heavily reported. Like all I did was string together thousands of newspaper and magazine stories with some interviews and into this cohesive timeline of events. While integral, a story it does not make. So that's where my head's at in this first week of May, 2024.
01:18:37
Speaker
And I'll keep sharing a little. Every week I'll let you know if the sun is actually poking through the clouds or if we are mired in nuclear holocaust with the rewriting of this book. So stay wild, CNFers. And if you can't do, interview CNFers.
01:19:15
Speaker
you