Dan Buzzetta is a litigation partner at a national law firm with more than 1,100 attorneys, where he has built a reputation for tackling complex, high-stakes cases. A graduate of Tufts University and Fordham Law School, Dan’s legal career has taken him from corporate boardrooms to high-profile investigations, including a landmark case in which his team worked closely with the U.S. Department of Justice and the FBI to recover over $240 million for thousands of investors defrauded by an international criminal network.

A self-described “mafia aficionado,” Dan has long been fascinated by organized crime and the intricate dynamics of power, loyalty, and corruption. That passion, combined with his deep experience in the legal world, inspired his debut novel, The Manipulator. This fast-paced legal thriller introduces readers to Thomas Berte, a brilliant Harvard-educated lawyer thrust into a deadly battle with a global crime syndicate while confronting corruption that hits dangerously close to home.

When he’s not in the courtroom or at his writing desk, Dan enjoys traveling and skiing with his wife and their three children. He also serves as a volunteer firefighter in his hometown of Colts Neck, New Jersey, where his commitment to service and community mirrors the themes of integrity and resilience that run through his fiction.

The Manipulator, the first book in the Tom Berte series, will be released on August 19, 2025, with two more installments planned for 2026. Blending legal authenticity with page-turning suspense, Dan’s work is earning early praise from readers and bestselling authors alike.

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Show Notes and Transcript

Summary

• Dan Buzzetta, a litigation partner and thriller author, discusses his debut novel “The Manipulator,” part of the Tom Berte Legal Thriller series.
• Buzzetta’s interest in law began early due to his love for advocacy and persuasion, leading him to a career in litigation.
• He shares a past experience involving a legal case with the Department of Justice and FBI that inspired his book series.
• Buzzetta outlines the plot of “The Manipulator,” featuring a Harvard-educated lawyer facing moral dilemmas and high-stakes situations.
• The novel explores themes of justice versus moral compromise, with a focus on creating engaging cliffhangers.
• Buzzetta discusses the process of writing legal thrillers, leveraging his legal background for authenticity while enjoying the creative freedom of fiction.
• He writes primarily in the mornings, balancing his legal career, volunteer firefighting, and writing.
• Buzzetta received a four-book deal, with subsequent books continuing the protagonist’s story and exploring new legal and ethical challenges.
• He advises aspiring writers to make intentional time for writing and pursue stories they are passionate about.

Video

Transcript

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This transcript was generated with the help of AI and only got a quick once-over from a human. So if you spot a typo or something that doesn’t make sense… let’s just blame the robots. 🤖

[00:00:05.020] - Intro
This is Meet the Thriller Author, the podcast hosted by thriller novelist Alan Petersen. Each episode, Alan sits down with some of the most exciting voices in mystery and suspense, best-selling legends and rising stars alike, to talk writing, process, and the art of crafting a killer story. From Dean Koontz and Walter Moseley to Frieda McFadden and Lee Child, over 200 authors have joined Alan for deep, revealing conversations that every thriller fan and aspiring writer will love. You can find transcripts, show notes, and the full archive of episodes at thrillerauthors. Com. And don't forget to check out Alan's own heart-pounding thriller at thrillingreads. Com/books. Now, here's the latest episode of Meet the Thriller author.

[00:00:54.500] - Alan Petersen
Hello, everybody. This is Alan with Meet the Thriller Author. On the podcast today, I'm joined by Dan Buzzetta. He's a litigation partner, a mafia aficionado, and now a thriller author. His debut novel, The Manipulator, is the first book in the Tom  Berte Legal Thriller series, which will be released on August 19th, 2025. That's coming up tomorrow. By the time you listen to this podcast, it'll be out, so you guys can go get it. Dan, welcome to the podcast.

[00:01:25.200] - Dan Buzzetta
Well, thank you very much, Alan. Very nice to be here.

[00:01:27.640] - Alan Petersen
Yeah. Well, thank you so much for coming on. I have to ask you, you are a litigation partner for a big national law firm. What drew you to the law and specifically to litigation? I'm so curious about that.

[00:01:40.860] - Dan Buzzetta
My earliest memory of someone asking me what I wanted to do when I grew up, I think I gave the answer I wanted to be a lawyer. I love the idea, I think even as a child, of advocating, of trying to persuade, of representing, taking on an issue or a client and trying to persuade others to whatever the cause or the issue might be. My parents always said that when I was younger, I would always question why I had to do certain things and try to persuade them that maybe there was a better or a different way to do something. I think from an early age, I just thought of this would be what I wanted to do. As far as litigation versus other areas of the law, I mean, frankly, when I went to law school, I really didn't think there were other areas of the law. I've now come to learn that, of course, there are. But to me, litigator is what being a lawyer is all about, representing people, representing their interests in a court of law, and trying to redress an injustice or get justice for them. I really enjoy doing this.

[00:02:44.840] - Alan Petersen
Yeah, it's very fascinating within your bio and your background. You worked on a case with the Department of Justice and the FBI. It actually inspired the series we're going to be talking about here in a moment. But you actually recovered $240 million. Can you tell us a little bit about that and how that How it's related to this series and how that all came together?

[00:03:02.880] - Dan Buzzetta
I was one of many attorneys on a team of exceptional lawyers at a law firm. We were retained by a court-appointed trustee who was put in place because a publicly traded company, which had filed for bankruptcy, the two former co-executives of the company were charged by the Department of Justice with running what was essentially a pump and dump scheme. They would run up the price of the stock based on false information that they put into the marketplace. Investors bought the stock, and when the fraud was revealed by the New York Times in a series of articles, the company went belly up and the investors were left holding the bag. The court appointed the trustee. The trustee in turn retained the group of lawyers I was working with. Our charge was to go and find the money. It was a fascinating case that took me to far off places like Cyprus and Vienna and Isle of Man, and of course, London, a lot of places in Europe. I probably spent six or seven years of my life working on that case, again, with a team of lawyers. Ultimately, we succeeded in freezing $40 million, which had been created in bank accounts in the Isle of Man.

[00:04:19.660] - Dan Buzzetta
We got court orders to recover that money and eventually distribute that money to the investors. When I turned to write this novel, I had had the general framework for this novel. Almost 30 years ago when I was in law school. I actually wrote the first three chapters of this book when I was in law school, the summer between my first and second year of law school. I knew how the book was going to start, and I knew how it was going to end, but I don't know that I knew much of the details, or frankly, at that time, how to even write a book. I intended to get back to finishing that book at some point, but life took over. I finished law school. I took the bar exam. I started practicing law, building a career. I met my wife. We got married, we had kids, and life took over. In the back of my mind was always this story that I had started writing about. As events happened, as I experienced things during my career, I always thought, Gee, that might be a nice filler, a nice way to build the storyline. When I sat down to write this book in the early days of the pandemic in 2020, that case that I just mentioned was top of mind.

[00:05:29.420] - Dan Buzzetta
I weaved in elements of that case into the story that had been percolating for over 30 years. That's how, ultimately, after a year and a half of writing, that's how the manipulator came about.

[00:05:42.080] - Alan Petersen
You always wanted to be a writer? That was something that has always been with you for 30 years?

[00:05:48.580] - Dan Buzzetta
At least, right? I remember reading books when I was a kid, and in high school, and in college, and in law school, and thinking, Gee, one day I'd love to do this. It's funny. Back then, I didn't think it was that hard. How hard could it be? You have a story, you put down words, and you write it. Well, what I left out about what I just said is those first three chapters that I had written when I was in law school, by the time 2020 came around and I went back and dusted off that old manuscript and I read what I had written 30 years ago, it was garbage. It wasn't very good. I scrapped those three chapters and started over again in writing. But yeah, I think I always I just had a goal to want to write a novel. Again, I had the general outline of what the story would be, which eventually became the manipulator, and I knew how I wanted to start it and finish it. Thirt 30 years of being a lawyer and life experience inspired me with the details to fill in the 299 pages in between the first and the last page.

[00:06:57.840] - Alan Petersen
Were you always a fan of the thriller genre as a reader?

[00:07:02.040] - Dan Buzzetta
I have. It's the genre that I enjoy reading the most, starting with Nelson DeMille. I remember reading Nelson DeMille when I was in high school. And then, of course, I started reading John Grisham novels in my, I guess, late teens, early '20s. And it was a genre that I always liked suspense, thriller. So I just started reading and reading, and I knew that Eventually, when I'd get back to writing a book, it would be a thriller novel, and of course, a legal thriller in particular.

[00:07:37.120] - Alan Petersen
Yeah, especially with John Grisham, when he became so popular in the '90s.

[00:07:40.800] - Dan Buzzetta
I feel like I grew up with him, right? When I was in law school and learning what being a lawyer was all about and how to practice law. John Grisham had just come out with his first couple of books, and he was at the top of his game. And then, of course, there were the movies, right? So when I think of lawyers at the I thought of Tom Cruise in the Firm and all the other actors that played it. He was a tremendous influence in me. I loved his work, and I thought to myself, Gee, if I could write half as well and create story and plot lines that are half as entertaining as he did, maybe I can do it, too. So I set out to write the novel.

[00:08:28.520] - Alan Petersen
I got curious, too, now, because the legal system, being an attorney, sometimes that stuff can be a little dry. You're trying to make it exciting, a thriller, a page turner. But I'm assuming, too, as an attorney, you want to keep things real but not bore the reader. How do you balance all that?

[00:08:45.700] - Dan Buzzetta
Yeah, so good questions. Obviously, with that one case that I mentioned about where we were traveling around the globe trying to find money that these co-executives had defrauded these investors through this pump and dump scheme, there were some elements of it that were quite exciting. I remember being in Vienna, Austria at the time, and going on a raid with local authorities to try to find a computer hard drive, which we thought would have contained evidence that we could have used to uncover the fraud. We worked closely with the Department of Justice. We worked closely with the FBI. There was an angle to it that was quite sexy, frankly, quite quite exciting. I remember many days ending with cliffhangers in the real case that we had. What are we going to uncover tomorrow when we do this raid? What are we going to uncover when we meet with this witness? Is this witness going to be able to tell us anything that's incriminating? We had documents that we had discovered, but we didn't really know how these documents fit into the case. When we were interviewing witnesses, there was the anticipation of what would the client say.

[00:09:56.580] - Dan Buzzetta
Believe it or not, maybe because I'm a lawyer, I find that exciting. I find that interesting. When I wrote the novel, someone who I met early on told me that the purpose of ending every chapter, the purpose of the end of every chapter is to keep the writer, I'm sorry, the reader, interested in wanting to read the next chapter. What I tried to do in the manipulator, and I don't know how well I accomplished it, but I tried to create little mini cliffhangers. Maybe not at the end of every chapter, but at the end of most chapters, I try to leave the reader wondering what's going to happen next. An unanswered question, a feeling that the protagonist has. I foreshadow that something might be coming in hopes that it gets the reader to flip the page and read the next chapter and eventually get to the end of the book.

[00:10:47.720] - Alan Petersen
Put you little chapters to keep you going. They're always fun. The manipulator introduces your character, a Harvard-educated lawyer, pulled into some high-stake stuff. There's some moral and ethical things that he's got to deal with. Can you tell us just a little bit about him? And is there how much of you is in him or none?

[00:11:08.360] - Dan Buzzetta
Tom Berte, you're right. A Harvard-educated lawyer who is working at a top law firm. He's an associate at one of the top law firms, really, in the world, and he's on partner track. He had gone to Harvard undergrad, Harvard law. He had had a lot of successes in his life. And he was always surprised at how he was able to achieve tremendous successes throughout his career, whether it be on the sports field, in college, in law school. He had a runway. Things seemed to come easily for him. He worked hard for it, but he always was able to achieve things that he wanted. For example, he was a law clerk for the First Circuit Court of Appeals, which is a very prestigious position that only go to top law school candidates. So when he's at the pinnacle of his career on a partnership track at this law firm, he's offered the number two job at the Department of Justice. Again, something that was surprising, but yet in keeping with how easily things came to him. And so he decides to leave his law firm partner track position, join the DOJ, and suddenly, he's tasked with bringing to justice the elusive mastermind of an international criminal syndicate.

[00:12:22.050] - Dan Buzzetta
I write in the book that this was the Mafia 2. 0, right? An elusive mastermind who lives on this mega as a yacht and commands his entire syndicate from this sailing fortress, never touching land, always eluding the authorities. And here Tom is tasked with bringing this person to justice. And really who that person is, who that mastermind is, what his relationship is to Tom, and how Tom got all the benefits and the achievements that he had secured in his life is really what the story is about. I hope people that read it will come away thinking it's a fun and entertaining story to see how his successes and his achievements tie into the position that he was offered at the Department of Justice and really who the mastermind is, ultimately, that he's tasked with bringing to justice.

[00:13:25.000] - Alan Petersen
Is that something when you're writing these? Do you have also fun creating the antagonist, the villain, or is it as much fun as writing the good guy as writing Thomas?

[00:13:36.960] - Dan Buzzetta
I got to tell you, I think writing the bad guys is a little bit more fun. Tom is a wholesome person. Tom is a person who might be a little nerdy, was a rule-follower, always did the right things for the right reason. Even though he had tremendous success, it never got to his head. He was humble, and he recognized the value in working hard. He was a son of a single parent and always appreciated what his mom had done for him and the sacrifices she made for him in his life. So he's a very honorable stand-up person. At the end of the novel, he's faced with the decision. Does he turn his back on people that have supported him and that have given him so much in order to pursue the rule of law and pursue justice or not. So it's a moral dilemma that he faces throughout. And I really wanted to create him as a hero, and I think he is a hero. Someone, frankly, that I would love to be. You asked me if I wrote him in thinking of me. I don't know that I'm as good as Tom Berte. He's really one of the people.

[00:14:51.840] - Dan Buzzetta
He's someone who I think you come away with with a real good feeling about as a hero. The bad guys, and there are a lot of them in this book, I had a lot of fun writing them, the anti-hero. Cosmo Benedetto is as bad as you can get as head of this organized crime syndicate that has killed people, that's involved in the drug trade, that's involved in financial frauds, that has cost a lot of lives and a lot of treasure. And some other bad people along the way, the head of the law firm that Tom used to work with, some rogue FBI agents who get in the mix of it, some of the people that that support the mastermind. His name is Cosmo Benedetto, some of his lieutenants. So I had a lot of fun writing those parts.

[00:15:37.960] - Alan Petersen
It seems like the novel's Justice Against Moral Compromise. Was that an important theme for you? Is that something that you set up from the beginning that you wanted to tackle that in your novel?

[00:15:47.580] - Dan Buzzetta
Yeah. So when I said that I had the general framework of the book, Going Back to Law School Days, that was the tension that I wanted to write about, right? When you break it down to its simplest, it's good versus bad, Justice versus evil. And I wanted that tension throughout. And I wanted there to be a good guy who is unquestionably a good guy, and he faces a moral dilemma of loyalty, trying to be loyal or thinking about wanting to be loyal to people that have been loyal to him or the rule of law, the pursuit of justice, no matter the cost, no matter who gets caught up into it. One of the tag lines that I created that I came up with after I wrote the book, frankly, was something like, Good lawyers keep secrets, great ones expose them to get justice. And this was the theme that I had in this book, right? Tom knows certain things about his law firm, about his own family, certain secrets. Is he loyal and does he protect those that he loves, or does he expose those secrets in order to get justice at the end of the day?

[00:17:00.570] - Dan Buzzetta
It was definitely a theme that I had at the top of mind as I was writing this.

[00:17:05.740] - Alan Petersen
I was curious about this, too, with legal readers, because I read a few of them. It seems like the authors of legal readers usually always our attorneys, whereas a police procedural or FBI book, usually they're not agents. Do you think that's something that your background that helped you, or was it a challenge writing a legal thriller?

[00:17:26.120] - Dan Buzzetta
I think it definitely helped me. I don't think you need to necessarily be to be a lawyer to write good legal thrillers. I only do it from the perspective of being a lawyer. But to me, it helped me because it gave me the perspective of what the lawyer would be going through, the mechanics, the little details. How do you build a case? What's the evidence that you get? How do you get that evidence? Those little minor details which may seem inconsequential, but as you're building a story and as you're trying to explain things, my legal background allowed me to explain how things happened, how evidence came into being without either trying to suspend a reality or make things up. I leaned on it. I leaned on my legal background a lot. I never set out to write a legal procedural. The manipulator is not a courtroom drama. There are some scenes in the courtroom, but this is not the witness recanting on the witness stand or someone who's wrongfully accused of something. It's not that a story. It's really a story about a lawyer who gets caught up in something that's way bigger than him that he never expected and has a big decision to make about whether or not to follow that rule of law and continue being a rule follower or break it to protect some of the people that are closest to him.

[00:18:53.970] - Alan Petersen
And as an attorney, too, I'm sure you've written a lot of legal briefs during your career. So what's the difference between That type of writing and writing a fiction? What's more fun?

[00:19:05.220] - Dan Buzzetta
Writing fiction finally freed me up to make things up and not have to site check and source check every statement and every fact that I put into a brief. You're right. Legal writing for lawyers, everything you write has to be supported by evidence, has to be supported by case law, has to be supported by a fact in the record, and it's tedious, and it's time consuming. Sometimes it breaks the flow of writing. I found legal fiction writing to be so much more liberating. I can write a story beginning to end without dropping footnotes, without having to interrupt the reader to explain what the source is or what the citation is to a particular fact. And in true, I guess, fiction form, it also allowed me the freedom to create and make some things up within reason and which are credible. But especially with the technology, a part of the book that I write about about this new technology, it allowed me that creative outlet to write something that is fun and exciting and interesting, believable, but yet imagined out of whole cloth.

[00:20:25.560] - Alan Petersen
Yeah, I imagine that's very liberating compared to the day The day job, it's very structured.

[00:20:32.690] - Dan Buzzetta
There's a format, and the way you write is very formulaic, and there's a reason for it, and a good reason for it. But if I had to write that way in a fiction work, I wouldn't have been published. I don't think anyone would read it. I don't think anyone would like it. So definitely a different style of writing, and as you say, a much more liberating style.

[00:20:54.440] - Alan Petersen
What is your process then for writing when you're writing your fiction? You said that the lawyer writing, legal writing is very structured? Do you have an outline when you start to write your novels, or do you just get the idea and start writing and see where it takes you?

[00:21:10.600] - Dan Buzzetta
Like I said, I know where my books start, and I know where I'm going to end. What I don't do, and maybe to my own detriment, is I really don't outline every single detail in the book or even the chapters in the book ahead of time. I remember sharing this with my son and telling him about my writing style, especially Book 2 in the series, which will come out next year, and that I was having some difficulties with it because unlike Book 1, where I had the story in my mind percolating for 30 years, not so with Book 2. I remember my son saying to me, Hey, dad, wouldn't it be just easier if you storybook the entire book ahead of time? And he's right, it probably would be easier. But I'm so eager to get into writing. I'm so excited about writing, and I know I would wind up changing details anyway as I get into it. So I just immerse myself. Now, clearly, at the beginning of each chapter, I outline the chapter. I know what the chapter is going to be about, but I like to create as I go along. It's a lot harder to write that way.

[00:22:18.090] - Dan Buzzetta
It makes it much more frustrating, especially when you hit a brick wall and you need to resolve that plot point before you could write the next chapter. Would have been much easier had I resolved before I got started, but it's just not the way I did it. I don't know that I could do it that way, again, because I'm so eager to start writing and creative. Then the details come to me. It starts flowing.

[00:22:44.140] - Alan Petersen
What is your writing What's this like? Because you have your busy practice, do you write at a specific time frame? What does that look like?

[00:22:55.320] - Dan Buzzetta
I write in the mornings. The mornings are the best time for me to write. Sorry about that. The mornings are the best time for me to write, from 6: 00 AM until about 9: 00, 9: 30, when the emails start coming in and when the phone starts ringing and when people from work when work takes over. So I'm a morning writer. I like to do it early, and I like to be done by nine o'clock and then start my day job. And I like to write on weekend mornings. Most people like to go for runs or or play golf. I get up at 6: 00 AM on a Saturday morning, and I'll write through 10, 11 o'clock in the morning, and that's when I get my best writing done.

[00:23:39.520] - Alan Petersen
Yeah, because you also like a volunteer firefighter, right? That's written on your bio. So you have a So yeah, as if I'm not busy enough in my life, I became a volunteer firefighter at the tender age of 52.

[00:23:53.460] - Dan Buzzetta
Covid, obviously, was a terrible time, but there were some blessings to it. Because of COVID, I was no longer commuting four hours a day to my office in Manhattan, two hours each way. I was working from home and did for the first two years of COVID. So that opened up a lot of opportunities for me. I started writing The Manipulator, something that I had long wanted to do, and now I had the time. So the two hours I wasn't commuting, I wrote. And then I I also became a volunteer firefighter, which required probably 12, 15 hours a week, two nights a week from 6: 00 PM to 10: 00 PM, were classroom trainings, and then one day on a weekend, all day out in the field, practicing the drills. It was a huge time commitment, but I took the opportunity provided from working from home to fulfill a dream that I really wanted to do since I was a kid, being a fireman and helping my community and being involved. I managed to do both.

[00:25:04.900] - Alan Petersen
Yeah, that's pretty impressive. You check two big dreams, firefighting and writing, readers.

[00:25:11.360] - Dan Buzzetta
Yeah, two big dreams while still maintaining my day job and still being a husband and a parent. I don't have much time for sleep, but sleep's overrated. But look, I don't have very many other hobbies. Yes, I love traveling and spending time with my family, but I don't play golf. I'm not in a band. The time that everyone has in their lives that they fill with things that they enjoy doing, I choose to fill with writing and serving my community as a volunteer fireman.

[00:25:49.060] - Alan Petersen
You mentioned that this is the first book in the series, and I noticed the book two and three are going to be released next year. Can you tell us a little bit about that? What's coming up next? What's the projection for this? Are you seeing this long term?

[00:26:06.380] - Dan Buzzetta
No, it's interesting. I sent out to write a book, one book. I only had one book to give. After getting an agent, which was a process onto its own, and after putting it out, submissions to publishers, and frankly, having more rejections than I care to even remember, the wonderful people at Severn River Publishing called and said, We love your manuscript, and we'd like to give you a four-book deal to write a series. I remember thinking to myself and saying to them, That's great. Who's going to write the other three books? Because I didn't think I had three other books in me. I didn't think I had the time. I didn't think I had the story in my mind. Again, I had set out to write one book and one book only, but they prevailed on me. Their model is to offer authors the opportunity to write series. And so I took a chance, and I did it. I wrote Book 2. Book 2 continues the story of Tom Berté. It takes place five years after the end of the manipulator, where Tom decided he's still practicing law, but in a small one-lawyer shop. He has a shingle outside his office in the country, in a ski town in upstate New York, where he's living with his wife and child.

[00:27:35.420] - Dan Buzzetta
So he becomes a small town lawyer after having been the number two man at the Department of Justice and on partner track to an elite law firm. And When he's in this role as a small-time country lawyer, he's hired by a client to investigate some nefarious dealings in this small little town. Of course, nothing can remain small when you're writing fiction. So it's a story about international terrorism. It's a story about Tom being caught in the middle of this plot that could potentially harm hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions of people with a weapon of mass destruction. And it's how Tom weaves through all of that. This book, I made it be that he's a little bit morally compromised because how he goes about getting the evidence to prevent this mass tragedy from happening is not necessarily the way lawyers normally do it. And so he faces that dilemma of following the rules, so to speak, because he's a fool a rule-follower, but yet, on the other hand, having the potential for this mass tragedy to occur, and he has to navigate those rules. And I think ultimately, he makes the right decision on how to do it.

[00:29:12.160] - Dan Buzzetta
So that book, which is called The Winter Verdict, will be out in 2026. The third book, System of Justice, I think also will be out in 2026. To be honest with you, I haven't finished writing System of Justice. I think the publisher got a little ahead of myself, and I have no idea what book four is going to be about. So any suggestions, I'd love to hear them.

[00:29:37.220] - Alan Petersen
All right, let them know, everybody. One quick question. I always ask, too, because I'm always so curious about what other writers use to write their books? Do you use Word? Do you use a Scrivener, some other type of software?

[00:29:52.360] - Dan Buzzetta
So I use Word. I started, interestingly enough, on Google Docs. I don't know why I started on Google Docs, but I found it too difficult, too different from Word. I use Word at work, and so I transitioned early on in writing the manipulator to using Word, and I haven't looked back. I'm a Luddite when it comes to technology. I'm always asking my son who is the techno star in our house for advice. He's my IT director, and I lean on him a lot, but But yeah, I'm a word guy.

[00:30:32.240] - Alan Petersen
All right, Dan. Before I let you go, though, I always ask to my guests because I have aspiring writers that listen to this podcast. Any advice that you could have for them, especially if they have a busy schedule like you I have.

[00:30:46.220] - Dan Buzzetta
Yeah, make time. Make time, be intentional about it, and find the time that works best for you. Don't try to cram it in. I don't know. Speaking for myself, I can't write when I'm cramming it in. I I can't write in between other projects. For me, having a set time every day works, and that's the time that's early in the morning when I'm at my best, my mind is clear, I haven't started my day yet, and I'm at my most creative. So find a time that works for you, be intentional about it, and make time for it. If you like the story you're writing about, and you really want to have a product that you're proud of with the goal of being a author, make time. Make time for it. And that's what I've done. And so far, I have a book coming out tomorrow. I've achieved my dream of being a published author. I don't know if it's good, bad, or not, and people will make their own choices and their own decisions of it, but I'm proud of having done that.

[00:31:50.060] - Alan Petersen
Yeah, congratulations. It looks like it's a great book. Yeah, congrats. It's always exciting that lunch day.

[00:31:59.260] - Dan Buzzetta
Yeah, a little A little nerve-wracking. Look, again, I like the book. I don't know if anyone else will like the book. I don't think that this book is not going to create world peace. It's not going to change anyone's life. I didn't set out to do any of that. I set out to write a story that I thought was entertaining. I hope it's entertaining. I hope others think it's entertaining, too.

[00:32:21.700] - Alan Petersen
All right. Well, thank you so much for joining me today, Dan. It was a great hearing about your journey from the courtroom to the page. It's very fascinating.

[00:32:30.660] - Dan Buzzetta
Thank you, Alan. I appreciate it.