Travis Kennedy - THE WHYTE PYTHON WORLD TOUR

[00:00] Cindy: Welcome to Thoughts from a Page, a member of the Evergreen Podcasts Network. I'm Cindy Burnett, and I am so glad you're here. I personally select and read every book featured on the show so I can bring you thoughtful spoiler-free author interviews.

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[01:05] I am so grateful.

[01:07] Today, Travis Kennedy joins me to chat about the Whyte Python World Tour.

[01:11] From the moment I heard about this book, I knew I had to read it and it definitely did not disappoint.

[01:17] This is such an entertaining and engaging read. There is humor, thought provoking topics,

[01:23] wonderful characters, and an engaging setting. I highly recommend this one.

[01:28] Put it on your list now. Travis is the grand prize winner of Screencraft's 2021 cinematic book contest for Sharks in the Valley to be published as Welcome to Redemption. His work has been recognized in the Best American Mystery Stories anthology.

[01:41] He lives in Scarborough, Maine with his wife and their two children. I hope you enjoy our conversation.

[01:49] Welcome Travis. How are you today?

[01:51] Travis: Thank you Cindy. I'm great. I'm so excited to be doing this. This is my very first podcast,

[01:57] so be gentle with me. I'm just thrilled to be doing this and to be talking about this book with you and your listeners. It's just been such a joy to work on and I'm so happy that the world's about to get to read it.

[02:12] Cindy: Me too. I had so much fun reading this book. I just can't even tell you how much I loved it. I can't think of the last time I had so much fun reading a book.

[02:21] Travis: Oh, thank you for saying that. I mean,

[02:24] I've written a handful of books now and I think over the next couple of years you'll start to see them and it's a different experience every time. And it's always positive.

[02:33] It's always something that I love doing. But I can't remember working on anything in my lifetime that has given me so much sustained joy than writing this book.

[02:45] It's a multiple year process when you take a book from an idea to the bookstores and that's revision after revision and you bring in your editor and then you work on new things with them and then copy editors, and I can see it getting exhausting.

[03:02] But every time I reopened the Whyte Python World Tour manuscript, it just improved my mood. It's just such a fun world to play in.

[03:12] And honestly, the hardest part of all this for me now is knowing that I've turned in the last copy. It's at the printer, it's done.

[03:18] So I guess I'll have to write another one because I just miss,

[03:21] I miss living in Whyte Python's world so much.

[03:24] Cindy: That would be great if you wrote another one.

[03:27] And I always say when I'm reading a book and I'm loving it so much, and it just seems like there is so much joy behind it that I can tell exactly what you're describing.

[03:36] That the author himself or herself had so much fun writing it. I just feel like that leaps off the pages. It's interesting.

[03:42] Travis: Oh, good, good. Yeah. I hope that it would make it to the reader because it feels like a gift to give somebody when you can make them laugh or you can brighten their day with a fun story.

[03:52] And if I feel like I'm putting that through the pages to people who are reading, that's just a nice little gift I can give them. And it's wonderful to hear that it has worked for you.

[04:01] Cindy: Definitely. Well, let's back up a little bit and why don't you give me a quick synopsis of the Whyte Python World Tour for those that haven't read it yet.

[04:08] Travis: Great. Okay. And I'm going to be careful about what I say because there's a lot of fun stuff I don't want to spoil.

[04:13] So the Whyte Python World Tour starts in 1986 and it features Ricky Thunder, who's our narrator for most of the story.

[04:23] And he's a drummer who is playing in these sort of go nowhere,

[04:28] Sunset Strip metal bands.

[04:30] And he's kind of just barely getting by. He's living in an abandoned paint store,

[04:35] and then all of a sudden, he meets the woman of his dreams and everything changes. Before he knows that his band is doing better and he's getting bigger gigs and making a little more money.

[04:46] And then the opportunity of a lifetime presents itself when the drummer of a much bigger band called Whyte Python has to lose his job. And this position opens and lo and behold, Ricky ends up the drummer for the biggest band in the country.

[05:04] There's a brief period of nothing could go wrong. They're touring the whole country, they're having a blast, he's making friends with his bandmates. And we very quickly learned that there's more going on to Whyte Python and Ricky's success than we might have suspected.

[05:22] And remember, this is the back half of the 80s. And as it turns out, there are much more powerful forces propelling Whyte Python's success and they,

[05:33] they become 

[05:35] A device to try and tip the scales in the final years of the Cold War.

[05:41] So Whyte Python ends up recruited to help foment regime change in the Eastern bloc by the CIA.

[05:50] And there are opposing forces who are suspicious of what they're up to.

[05:55] And it becomes this,

[05:57] spy caper that began

[06:01] As a music caper. So it's combining these two really popular genres, and it's a satire of both.

[06:07] And certainly they end up,

[06:10] as the title suggests, on a world tour where the stakes couldn't be higher.

[06:14] But their goal is to save the world through rock and roll. And I think you'll be happy with where they end up.

[06:21] Cindy: I agree that the readers will be happy with where they end up. How did you come up with the ideas for this one?

[06:26] Travis: So it's funny. I've had an idea for a hair band story for probably 20 years.

[06:36] Something about the genre of music just attracted me from largely an entertainment standpoint. I mean, these guys are just so objectively funny.

[06:44] But the more I sort of would read their autobiographies and watch films about them,

[06:50] it wasn't that I was obsessed with the music so much as it was just this fascinating time in pop culture history when these bands all sort of came together and were intermixing with each other and they had none of the tools for fame.

[07:04] And so I had been looking for this story forever.

[07:08] And then I heard a wonderful podcast, which I couldn't recommend more, by an investigative reporter named Patrick Radden Keefe. And. And the podcast is called Wind of Change. And the premise is that there's apparently a long standing legend, a rumor that the CIA wrote the song Wind of Change by the Scorpions and that was it.

[07:30] I mean, the thing that was missing in my story was, okay, I can take the elements of these characters, but then what do I do with them? And the idea of putting them in a spy adventure just felt like a story telling itself.

[07:44] So once I had those sort of two pieces together,

[07:47] I was off and running and it just poured right out.

[07:51] Cindy: I am a huge fan of Patrick Radden Keefe and I haven't listened to that podcast and you're reminding me that I need to because he's phenomenal.

[07:58] Travis: He is.

[08:00] He's so fantastic. And I think that what you may not get. I read all of his work too. What you may not get from reading the investigative journalism is that he has a fantastic sense of humor.

[08:10] And so he understood just innately the concept of this is very funny. But then he goes about it in his investigative journalist way and that the challenge with that is you're never going to catch the CIA doing something that they don't want you 

[08:24] To catch them on. So it's hard to get that dream resolution you're hoping for.

[08:29] And that was the final piece for me, is I thought, well, if it's fiction, if I'm making it up, then anything can happen that I want to.

[08:35] And I think

[08:36] That was the goal of taking this wonderful concept that was researched so well and saying now forget all the facts and just make it fun.

[08:44] And the result is a fake band in a very real world.

[08:50] Cindy: And you mention hair bands and how much fun they are. I'm not a huge fan of the music either. Obviously, certain songs resonate, but it's not something I know a ton about.

[08:59] But they're just so much fun in the way they look and what they do and made for a perfect premise for this book.

[09:05] Travis: Yeah, I grew up, I was a kid in the 80s at the time when the story's taking place.

[09:11] And so for me, seeing Motley Crue and Poison and Guns N Roses and Def Leppard, seeing their music videos, they were like the Muppets. They had these wild costumes and big hair and makeup and they were singing about partying and they were just so fun and funny and had this energy that was just infectious.

[09:30] And even for children,

[09:32] the music was. There were suggestions, but for the most part it was reasonably clean.

[09:38] And so growing up, I always had that image. Writing this book,

[09:43] There's a little bit of nine year old Travis telling the story the whole time. And I think a little bit of that comes through in the characters in a really fun way,

[09:51] which is I sort of understand the world that they were living in then, which is much more

[09:57] R rated than what I thought it was when I was a kid. But you can kind of get that sense of playfulness of a kid's eyes seeing these guys and their,

[10:07] the trouble that they get themselves into and, and the fun that they have and the fans that they inspire. 

[10:11] Cindy:  So they do actually make a likely group for doing something like this kind of CIA project.

[10:19] Travis: Yeah. You know, that's another funny thing that I came upon in my research,

[10:23] which is that the impression you have of them, that impression that I had as a kid, was that these are just these careless party animals. And the truth about a lot of the musicians in this genre is that they more often than not were misfits.

[10:40] They grew up in broken families or abusive families. They didn't do well in school very often. They didn't have many friends. They came from hard lives and they sort of converged in these places with other people like them who maybe didn't think that they had much of an opportunity or were going to make much of themselves,

[11:01] but they had this thing that they liked and that they were good at, which was music.

[11:05] And so they were. They were so underappreciated and underestimated by the world around them, but they were also willing to live in squalor and they were super creative. They would come up with all of these really smart ways to market themselves that didn't cost any money.

[11:21] And so you have people who are underestimated, who are willing to live in challenging conditions, who are way smarter than you think they are. And these are all really good qualities for a spy.

[11:32] Right. So even whether they, you know, whether any of them actually were or not, as funny as the idea is on the base of it, when you think about it, these guys are perfect for this sort of thing.

[11:42] You never see them coming.

[11:43] Cindy: It totally works. Well, I'd love to hear more about your research.

[11:47] Travis: Yeah, it's funny. It's one of those things that I didn't realize I was doing it for years just because I was so drawn to and entertained by, by that era and that kind of music.

[11:57] Because so quickly I caught onto this thing 

[12:01] that I didn't understand as a kid, that these were people sort of working through their pain by finding each other.

[12:06] And of course their adventures were funny, but their adventures were funny because they didn't have the tools to be famous or to deal with having money and fame. And there was always this sense of dread that went with the adventure. So reading books like The Dirt,

[12:26] which is the book that Motley Crue worked with a writer to tell about themselves and its autobiography. There's a great oral history of the genre called Nothing But a Good Time, which I think has actually been turned into a TV series.

[12:42] There's a film by Penelope Spheris called Decline of Western Civilization Part 2,

[12:48] and that's about the metal genre.

[12:50] And all of these pieces were coming together just sort of reading and watching for entertainment of understanding who these people were.

[12:58] And so, so much of the research had been done just for my own fun.

[13:03] And by the time I was working on the book,

[13:06] a lot of the research that I did was trying to fit them as realistically into the era as possible,

[13:14] because this is a wild story, but I wanted it to feel like it existed in the real world for people who were there and for people who remember it.

[13:22] You know, there are things that you may not expect were researched. Like anytime there's a concert mentioned that's not a Whyte Python concert, not only did that concert really exist, but the set list that I might have mentioned in the book was the set list that they played tours that were moving around the country at the time.

[13:40] It was really important to get that music world as accurate and real as possible, because,

[13:48] As you know, Cindy, a lot of real life people wander into Whyte Python's adventures.

[13:53] And I wanted to make sure that, for instance, if they met Bret Michaels in Texas,

[13:58] I wanted Bret Michaels to have been in Texas at the time they met him. And the things that he tells them about had to have happened in his life already.

[14:06] And that was. It was so lovingly, meticulously researched. The other side of it, the CIA stuff, I did a lot less research because the fun thing about the CIA is you can accuse them of whatever you want, and if they deny it, that just makes them look 

[14:20] More guilty.

[14:21] So it was far more focused on the music and. Less on sort of, When I was looking into the global political events at the time,

[14:31] less on what was happening at the government level and more at the human level.

[14:35] How were protests starting to come about what was happening in these countries among the people who are organizing? That was so much more important to me because that's the world that Whyte Python ended up engaging with.

[14:47] Cindy: Right. And that is exactly what they're trying to do, is help bring about the change. And so you wanted to make sure you had it accurate in these various countries.

[14:54] Travis: Right, right. And far more at the human and community and school level than at the government level, because that was never

[15:03] Their goal.

[15:04] They were never changing hearts and minds in the Stasi, but they hoped to reach people in some of those East German communities.

[15:10] Cindy: Exactly.

[15:13] One of my favorite things about hair bands are the names. And so I love Whyte Python, spelled white with the Y,

[15:20] and Ricky Thunder. So how did you go about picking your names?

[15:25] Travis: It's funny how you talk to a lot of writers, and I'm guessing that some of them sometimes will say this bizarre almost.

[15:37] It's hard to even put a word to the sense of it.

[15:39] It just came to me,

[15:41] and it wasn't a thing 

[15:43] That I sweated over so much as I just was sitting at the keyboard and I typed Davey Bones, and I thought, oh, my gosh, that's perfect.

[15:50] More often than not, the names surprised me with Whyte Python specifically.

[15:56] A lot of bands at the time were putting white in front of their name for some reason, and they loved snakes.

[16:02] And so that was a fun combination of those two things.

[16:07] You know, white lion, White lion, White snake. Pick the animal. It was funny. Probably picking the snake was the thing that I put the most thought into because it had to be the right snake.

[16:17] It had to sound right. Whyte Python rolls off the tongue and. And it feels like something these guys would have come up with.

[16:24] And then the band members, a few of them have nicknames, others just use their real names. And it was.

[16:31] It felt gifted to me more than something that I had to put an enormous amount of thought into.

[16:36] Cindy: Oh, that's great. Because I could see where that would be a bit tricky.

[16:39] Travis: Yeah. Yeah. And,

[16:41] of course, you want something that sounds of the era that's not too silly, but is also a little bit silly. You know, I mean, I wanted it to be funny when you have an East German general furious that people aren't taking Ricky Thunder more seriously.

[16:58] And that sentence alone is hard to take seriously. You know, it's funny when you have all of these very serious people conspiring about Ricky Thunder and his friends in Whyte Python and they're not in on the joke.

[17:10] None of that sounds funny to them at all. And so that. There was definitely a lane that I wanted to.

[17:17] To work within.

[17:18] But, you know, some names in the book changed, but more often than not, it was extra characters. It was people in the CIA, for whatever reason.

[17:26] Once I named the band and the band members, they all just felt like real people, and their names were never gonna change.

[17:33] Cindy: Well. And you lead me right into my next question, which is the humor. There is so much humor in this book. I loved Ricky Thunder, and I loved how some things were so funny about him that he doesn't even realize half the time are funny.

[17:46] Like, it was just so engaging. My husband was like, what are you reading? Cause I was laughing out loud all the time.

[17:52] Travis: That makes me so happy to hear. I mean, humor is a swing. You, you, you. You always have to hope that you're hitting the humor in a way that it connects with the most people, that you're not making it too narrow, but also that it doesn't distract from the story that you're trying to tell.

[18:08] And I think that the point you made, Cindy, is exactly it. The reason it works is that these guys don't know that they're funny.

[18:14] Ricky Thunder doesn't think that he's telling a funny story at all. He's telling the story of his life, and it ended it. It had

[18:22] heartbreak and big adventure and times when his life is in danger. And none of this, to him, is funny. But just the person that he is recounting it is funny for us to experience and to hear.

[18:36] And I think one of the big keys for me was that was why I tried not to linger on any jokes.

[18:44] He makes an observation,

[18:46] and then he moves right on. And he would never stop and say, isn't that strange? Or isn't that funny? Because he just accepts the things that are presented to him,

[18:56] and sometimes they're just genuinely, the circumstances of his life are so funny that you can't help but laugh, even if he's not trying to entertain you.

[19:04] Cindy: Yes, he's often pretty naive, but so likable. So he's one of those characters. You're not laughing at him, you're laughing with him. But it's really entertaining.

[19:12] Travis: Yeah. Oh, thank you. And that's another thing where the story surprised me early,

[19:18] because initially I had an idea that it would be more cynical than it ended up being and that the band would be maybe dumber and cruder than they ended up being.

[19:31] But I started to write in Ricky's voice when I made that decision, that it would be a first person account.

[19:37] And by the second or third chapter, I thought, I just love this guy. I want to root for him. And the character that he became changed so much because I liked him.

[19:48] And I set about to write his backstory in the fourth or fifth chapter. And by the end of it, I thought I'm totally rooting for him.

[19:56] And then I thought, what kind of world would a person like this hopefully surround himself with? And who are the people? And I want to root for them, too.

[20:04] And it became much more positive and hopeful

[20:09] And the characters were people who.

[20:12] I hope that even the ones who might be challenging at first to accept you sort of see what makes them likable or to root for, that all came from being totally surprised by who Ricky ended up being in those first couple chapters.

[20:27] Cindy: I like the way you frame that, that you want to root for him, because that's exactly it. I really just cheered him on the whole time, but he definitely had me cracking up a lot.

[20:37] Travis: Good, good.

[20:38] Cindy: So you mentioned that the book really crosses genres. It is a couple of different things pulled together,

[20:44] and it works beautifully. But how was it trying to sell that? I know sometimes that can be a little tricky in the publishing world.

[20:51] Travis: Yeah, I mean, I'm very fortunate. I mean, the best thing that has happened to me in my writing career is that 

[20:58] I found the perfect person to represent me in both writing and in other entertainment worlds. My agent, Ifat Rice Kendall. And what I've come to learn is that

[21:11] You write something and you send it out to agents. And the reason that it can be so hard to find one is that you really need to find somebody who connects with your work as deeply as you do and who loves the work as much as you do, because these folks might work for free for years until they get you set up in the right place.

[21:30] And so my wonderful fortune in.

[21:33] this life, in this world is that I found Ifat and she just understood how to connect it with people who would love it as much as the two of us do.

[21:44] And that was the magic of it, is she found Jason Kaufman at Doubleday and some other publishers who loved it a lot, too.

[21:53] And I was fortunate to be able to choose.

[21:57] And Jason understood it, and he understood it the same way that Ifat did. And he had things that he thought could improve it the same way that she did. And it's just this welcoming of more people into the circle who feel like they're in the band.

[22:12] And because I think we've found that path, it's felt a lot less tricky than it might have.

[22:19] Starting out in the world without somebody who's so in line with the story is as he thought was, and who also knows how to find people who will feel the same way.

[22:29] That's really the heart of all of this, of taking your story and getting it out to the world, is you need to find people on that path who will love it as much as you do.

[22:39] And when that's the case,

[22:40] the genre,

[22:42] the sort of complex mixing of genres, didn't matter as much because everybody who came into it, including then Doubleday's marketing team and sales team and then the publicists who I've brought on myself, are also enthusiastic about the story and love it so much that they don't feel like they're trying

[23:00] To fit a square peg into a round hole. They're just trying to share this thing that they really enjoy.

[23:06] Again, I don't have a lot of experience in direct, simple,

[23:11] specific genre, so it might be that this is a harder, more complex process 

[23:17] Than I know about, but it's felt so smooth because all of these people just can't wait to get out and share it and find other people who want to be in the band with us.

[23:30] Cindy: I love that verse. Be in the band with us. I feel like I have joined the band as well.

[23:35] Travis: Cindy, you're one of the first people who is not being paid to promote this book who reached out and said, I love this, 

[23:43] And again, this is my debut, so that you're, like, my first groupie. This is such a cool thing that you're the first person that I'm talking to about it, too.

[23:51] Cindy: I just love that. And your outside publicist and I have been trading emails about all the parts that we think are so funny. So I just love that. And I think your point is valid, that you find the people that get this book and understand it.

[24:03] And there's a beautiful letter in the front of my galley from your editor at Doubleday, Jason Kaufman, talking about what worked for him and why he liked it so much.

[24:11] And so I do think when you have something like this, that people are just gonna read and be like, this is phenomenal and different than other stuff I've been reading.

[24:19] Everybody's gonna be shouting it from the rooftops.

[24:21] Travis: Oh, gosh, I hope so.

[24:23] Cindy: No, they will. Well, you mentioned a little bit about Ricky's character changing, but was there anything else that surprised you when you were writing it?

[24:31] Travis: When I was writing it,

[24:33] there wasn't much that surprised me aside from how the puzzle pieces just kept fitting better than I even expected them to. It's this thing that happens when you're writing, and you've found the exact lane where it feels like the story is telling itself.

[24:49] And so one of the biggest challenges, one of the biggest logistical challenges anyway, was trying to decide exactly when it takes place.

[24:57] So it had to be a time during the Cold War when they could still be in danger,

[25:03] their work is still relevant. The end is not determined yet. But also when they might have been allowed to travel in those Eastern bloc countries, because the figurative wall started crumbling much before the literal one did.

[25:18] And once you sort of find that time and place that the story takes place,

[25:24] What's remarkable is all of the events that you go looking for to build your story are just kind of there waiting for you.

[25:30] And so most of the surprises in writing it were, oh, wow, this lines up perfectly 

[25:36] with this time in American history or in.

[25:39] the history of some of these countries that they visited for certain real life events to match up with the fictional ones.

[25:47] Cindy: Oh, that's great. Such an interesting time period, the Cold War. And I feel like more and more books are coming out about it, which I love, because it is a very interesting and different time period.

[25:56] And it's not World War II.

[25:58] Travis: Yeah, yeah. You know, the 80s are having a moment.

[26:01] I think that you see this happen. When I grew up, it was the 60s.

[26:06] Every movie was set in the 60s, and books were written about the 60s. And the 60s held on for a while because it was such an enormous pivotal time in modern American history.

[26:17] And the music was great, and there was so much cultural change over that decade. And the 80s stayed quiet for a while. And I think a lot of people remember the kind of tackier elements of the 80s that they didn't necessarily want to relive.

[26:33] But I think we sort of have enough of that in the rearview mirror that our perspective on the decade has changed. And it was another enormously impactful decade in history in ways that we can only kind of see with 

[26:48] So much time in the rear view mirror.

[26:50] Cindy: I agree with that. I think some of those issues are just now being unpacked.

[26:54] So I was scrolling through all of your glowing reader reviews, which I was very impressed by. That is wonderful. And almost every single one mentions wanting to see a screen adaptation, which I agree.

[27:04] I mean, I think this is just begging to be made into some kind of adaptation. And in your acknowledgments, you referenced that there has been some interest. Can we talk a little bit about that?

[27:13] Travis: I can talk. Yeah. I'm not entirely sure what I'm allowed to say, but that speaks volumes in itself. Right? What I'm pretty sure I can say. And by the time 

[27:24] This episode releases, there may be more public than I'm saying now. But, yes, there is an adaptation in the works. 

[27:33] We actually worked out an adaptation deal with Paramount at around the same time the publishing agreement was made. This is another case of Ifat finding somebody who belonged in the band,

[27:47] a guy at Paramount named Phil Cohen.

[27:49] And so that business is happening.

[27:54] I am involved as an executive producer,

[27:57] and Paramount has brought on a fantastic production company,

[28:02] Gold Day, to develop it. They did the Dungeons and Dragons movie recently.

[28:06] They did Date Night. They have a lot of really cool projects that are soon to come out that are in development. They're just really on fire 

[28:15] With the films they're making. And I think that they totally understand the scale and the comic elements, but also the grounding it in reality. It's been a phenomenal experience so far,

[28:27] working with them on taking the book and saying, okay, now, how about this story, this concept? But how do we tell it in a way that aligns in the space of an hour and a half movie?

[28:39] So it necessarily has to be different? And that's just been so fun exploring those things.

[28:44] That's about as much as I know right now, but it's been sort of running in parallel tracks with the publishing schedule all this time, so I'm hopeful.

[28:55] Cindy: Well, that's great news, and I look forward to it because I do think it will make a wonderful film.

[29:00] Travis: Oh, I hope so, too. I think. You know what'll be fun for me if we get there is hearing the songs that I wrote for the book and hearing how they're interpreted in real life, because I know how they sound in my head.

[29:15] And the idea that Whyte Python's music might exist in a real way is so exciting and fun for me.

[29:22] Cindy: I bet. And your wonderful, wonderful cover. I just love it. So let's talk a little bit about your cover and your title.

[29:30] Travis: Yeah, well,

[29:31] I'll give you one nugget that reveals maybe plans for the future.

[29:36] The original title, when I sat down and started writing was the Whyte Python Reunion Tour.

[29:42] And the prologue ended up stretching out into 200 pages. And that's when I realized I have to tell the story from the beginning.

[29:51] So I do think that there is probably more in the Whyte Python world to be told than what you have so far. But the premise of the original title, of course, is a reunion tour.

[30:03] And so it was very easy to just to back that back to the world tour that becomes so monumental and so important to Whyte Python into global politics, which is still a fun thing for me to say.

[30:16] The cover is so fun. It's so cool.

[30:19] That's the work of a really talented artist at Doubleday named Oliver Munday.

[30:25] And in our conversations with them, developing a cover is this iterative process that takes round after round after round.

[30:32] And they're so patient and they're so skilled. And so you start in one place and then you talk about elements of the book and the things that you want people to feel when they're reading it.

[30:43] And where Oliver ended up is this. It kind of reminds me of the opening titles of the Superman movies of that era, of this, you know, this title Bursting out of the Clouds.

[30:53] And it's like an 80s era movie poster. It's so fun. It's so lively,

[31:00] and I feel like it just captures the sense of, this is an adventure. This is fun.

[31:05] You're in for a good time inside this cover.

[31:09] Cindy: I agree. I just love it. And the marketing department, when they sent me my copy, sent me a press pass also,

[31:15] like, you know, being able to go behind the scenes at a concert. And I have it,

[31:18] backstage pass, and I have it hanging on my desk. And so every time I walk by, I see it, and it just makes me smile. And often the swag that comes, I'm like, oh, that's fun.

[31:27] But this one was perfect. 

[31:29] Travis: Oh, good. Well, there is more swag coming, so I'll make sure that some is sent to you. The Doubleday has created temporary tattoos which are the snake guitar from the cover of the book.

[31:41] And I think they have guitar picks, too. So I'll make sure that some of those get to you. Cindy, I know that those are going to the bookstores, the independent bookstores.

[31:49] Cindy: Okay, good. Please do. Because I love that stuff, especially when it's a book that's really resonated with me.

[31:54] Travis: That's so fun.

[31:55] Cindy: And that's great news that there may be another book coming about Ricky Thunder and the group.

[32:00] Travis: I have plenty of stories left to tell in their world, so I think you haven't seen the last of them.

[32:06] Cindy: Yay. Well, before we wrap up, Travis, will you tell me what you have read recently that you really liked?

[32:12] Travis: Oh, gosh. So I'm a constant, relentless reader.

[32:18] I'm probably a 70 book a year reader with a job and two kids and a writing job at the same time.

[32:26] So I go through them so fast that I'm going to have to pull up my library. There's a guy from Maine named Ron Currie, who wrote what I think is the next generation of crime novels.

[32:40] The guy who's taken the mantle from the Don Winslow's of the world who have retired.

[32:46] It's called the Savage Noble Death of Babs Dion. It takes place in Maine, where I live.

[32:51] Fantastic, fantastic book. I read the Lorne Michaels biography, which was fantastic. So if you're interested in not only Saturday Night Live, but how comedy has developed and changed over the last 50 years, that one is worth a read.

[33:08] Let me see if there's a third one I can give you. I love doing recommendations and throw well, so here's one. I'll do a quick plug for Doubleday and for my buddy Jason Kaufman.

[33:19] He put out last year the Boys of Riverside,

[33:22] which is a nonfiction book about a high school in California that's a deaf school and the entire football team are students who can't hear.

[33:37] And

[33:38] it was Amazon's book of the year. I think it's, you know, if you love the sort of uplifting hopefulness that you might get from reading Whyte Python. This is a true story about these remarkable kids and remarkable coaches who figured out, sort of similar to Whyte Python, how to take people who might be looked at like they have a disability or are misfits and turn that into a superpower.

[34:00] Just a wonderful read. The Boys from Riverside.

[34:03] Cindy: Okay, good. I've seen that cover, but I haven't read it, so I'll add it to my list. I often listen to nonfiction instead of reading it physically because it's just easier for me.

[34:11] And the Lorne Michaels is also sitting in my Libro FM account, so I need to get to it. And I've heard wonderful things about the Ron Currie. Have you read Paul Dornan, who's also in Maine?

[34:21] Travis: Oh, of course. Yeah. I'm a pre order on every Paul book. And he's great. He's so nice. I reached out to him when I first started to get publishing contracts just to say, hey man, what advice can you give me?

[34:34] And he's been so generous with his time. Just sort of saying, here's probably what's going to happen and here's how you should be thinking about, you know, scheduling when payments come in and everything.

[34:42] He's a wonderful guy and his books are every single one of them is great. I look forward to them all year.

[34:49] Cindy: I'm the same way. We're huge national park people. So anytime there's something like that that's set out in the woods, in a park, a park ranger, something like that.

[34:58] I read them and his are phenomenal. I've heard he's very nice. I've actually never interviewed him, but I've heard he's wonderful.

[35:03] Travis: Oh, yeah, I think you'd love a chat with him. He comes at it honestly. He has a lifetime and spending time outdoors in Maine and you can see it in the books.

[35:14] They're really great.

[35:15] Cindy: You definitely can. Well, Travis, thank you so much for taking the time to come on my show. And I just cannot wait for the Whyte Python World Tour to make it out into the world.

[35:23] Travis: Oh my. Cindy, thanks so much for having me. This has been a blast.

[35:29] Cindy: Thank you so much for listening to my podcast. I would love to connect with you on Instagram or Facebook where you can find me at Thoughts From A Page. If you enjoy the show and have a moment to rate it or subscribe to it, wherever you listen to your podcasts,

[35:41] I would really appreciate it.

[35:43] It makes a huge difference. And please tell all of your friends about Thoughts From a Page. Word of mouth does wonders to help the show grow.

[35:51] The book discussed in this episode can be purchased at my Bookshop storefront and the link is in the show notes. I hope you'll tune in next time.