Please note: the transcript was generated using AI and may contain occasional errors or inaccuracies.

[00:00:08.380] – Alan Petersen
Hey, everybody. This is Alan Petersen with Meet the Thriller author. And today on the podcast, I have USA Today. Bestselling author, Ty Hutchinson, the creator of the long-running Abby Kane Thriller Series and other readers. Ty writes high concept, fast-paced thriller that readers that keep readers up at night. And his latest, DarkBright, might be as creepy as yet, coming out on July 26. Welcome to the podcast, Ty.

[00:00:33.540] – Ty Hutchinson
Hey, Alan. Thanks for having me. Happy to be here.

[00:00:36.240] – Alan Petersen
Yeah, it’s so great. If people are watching this and see why I’m smiling is Ty and I, we’re friends in the real world, so it’s a different way.

[00:00:47.800] – Ty Hutchinson
We’re not just virtual friends.

[00:00:49.370] – Alan Petersen
Yeah, yes, exactly. But so glad to finally have you on the podcast. Yeah, so DarkBright, man, that’s such a chilling and mysterious premise. What What was the spark that led to the idea? You got to tell me about that one.

[00:01:03.220] – Ty Hutchinson
Well, it’s like what you said. I would say most of my stories start off with me asking the what if question. And it’s just whatever pops into my head. Well, what if there was this girl in the middle of nowhere and all she could say was this one word that doesn’t make sense to anyone? Because when I thought up DarkBright, I just put two random words together and I went, Okay, that sounds weird. Let’s start there. Or what if you move to a new country and the friends you made, you find out that they had these really terrible rules such as no unapproved pregnancies allowed? So everything starts off with me, What if? What if, what if, and I just build around it. I can’t explain how the story vomits itself out, but it just does.

[00:01:52.780] – Alan Petersen
You’ve been writing the Abbey King series for about a decade now. I can’t believe how time plays.

[00:01:59.380] – Ty Hutchinson
Yeah, a decade. It’s weird because it’s not the first book I wrote. I wrote a couple of other books before that I didn’t really feel like was capturing what I wanted. I killed the series and sat down and was like, Well, you know what? I like reading mysteries and thrillers and stuff like that. And my aunt, Abby King is actually based off my aunt, who’s a retired FBI agent, and she’s short, 5’0, probably 100 pounds, soaking wet. And she would tell me these stories about her life in DC and what she had to do. And I just found it so fascinating. So she sparked Abby King professionally. The personality of Abbey Cain is really my mom. And I don’t know if she ever figured it out or not, but I remember when my dad read my first Abbey Cain book, I don’t think he was maybe two chapters in, and he stopped and he looked up at me and said, Does your mom know that Abby Cain is her? He picked up on it right away and I said, I don’t know. She’s never said anything if she did.

[00:03:09.440] – Alan Petersen
Wow, that’s great. Getting ideas from the real world for your books.

[00:03:14.300] – Ty Hutchinson
Well, yeah. I think a lot of it has to do with my background in advertising. In advertising, you’re talking about inanimate objects most of the time or services, and you’re trying to make it relatable to to people, why people should care about it. So if you’re trying to sell a watch, this is an inanimate object, what we would try to do was humanize everything we’re doing, give it some personality, some trait that people can relate to, or at least see as something that, oh, that’s familiar. And so I think that, coupled with my curiosity in people in general, is what I think is where I pull a lot of my ideas from and into my stories, which is great if you travel like how I do, because the amount of experiences you get to pull from multiply.

[00:04:10.900] – Alan Petersen
Yeah. And that’s a big part of you, right? Because you’ve been writing full-time since 2013, and you’ve been a digital nomad, basically, right, for all that time?

[00:04:20.530] – Ty Hutchinson
Yeah, I’ve been homeless all that time. I haven’t had a permanent residence. I’m like a ghost. You can’t find me. You don’t know where I’m going to be. But But yeah, it is. I credit it to my wife because at the time we were separating. It was on good terms. And she told me, she said, Hey, you know what? You’ve always wanted to write and travel. Why don’t you go and do that now? As soon as she put that thought in my head, I started thinking about it. I took two days. I made up my mind, Yeah, I’m going to do this. In two months, I had sold everything I had, packed everything I owned, what was left into a small a little backpack, and I took off on a one-way ticket. My plan was to maybe stay six months in some major city around the world and try and write a book. That’s how it all started. There was no research, no planning, no himming and hawing or anything like that. I just did it and thought about all the great things that could come out of it and really didn’t think about all the things that all the negative things that could have gone wrong.

[00:05:34.300] – Alan Petersen
Yeah, because you went to play. I mean, you didn’t know anybody. You went to Thailand at first, right?

[00:05:38.160] – Ty Hutchinson
I didn’t know anybody. Yeah, Thailand was only supposed to be six months, but I was having so much fun here that extended it for another six months, then another six months. Then I finally, after a year and a half, I forced myself to move on, and I spent time in Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia, Taiwan, Korea, Cambodia, Laos, just making my way around through the big cities and then even into the smaller towns. And I would just stay as long as it held my interest. And the minute it stopped holding my interest, I would look on the on Google Maps and go, Where do I want to go next? And then I would just move around. And during that time, I was just living in hotels and Airbnbs, which is interesting in itself, because if you’re living in a hotel for, say, three months, the staff gets to know you. And it’s a completely different experience than if you’re there for a five-day holiday. You’re living there, and they know it. So again, that’s an experience that can only come through traveling the way I travel. And I’ll take those experiences. People think when you travel like I do, you’re going to pull those experiences and write books based on a culture or the temple that you went to and stuff.

[00:06:56.860] – Ty Hutchinson
And I don’t. My books aren’t based off of my travels that way. I use my travels as reasoning, salt and pepper, to enhance a scene or enhance a character. Just because I found a temple in Cambodia interesting, I’m not going to wrap a story around it, but I might take what I learned about that place and the feelings I got and add it to someone’s house in San Francisco. So that it’s not that house. Or if I have an interesting conversation with a Malaysian shop owner and he had some interesting tics or personality traits, I’ll take that and apply it to someone who works in a cubicle in the tech industry just so that they’re not like some person who works in a cubicle in the tech industry.

[00:07:42.440] – Alan Petersen
When you do all this traveling, we use you riding out of cafés or the places you were-I was riding everywhere, riding in cafés, mostly coffee shops, whatever coffee shop I can find, sometimes on the beaches, sometimes hotel lobby in my room.

[00:07:57.280] – Ty Hutchinson
It didn’t matter where it was writing. I can pretty much write anywhere. I don’t need a desk, a quiet, serene place. In fact, I prefer chaos. I prefer energy around me. I think that comes from years of working in… I don’t want to say corporate America, but working in the ad industry, there’s always people around you. It’s craziness. When I’m in a quiet area, it actually works against me because I can’t function because because it’s too quiet.

[00:08:32.120] – Alan Petersen
Some people do total quiet and stillness.

[00:08:36.300] – Ty Hutchinson
You need chaos. I’m the complete opposite. I need noise, I need chaos, I need all that around me. So coffee shops or restaurants or any place like that work pretty well.

[00:08:48.180] – Alan Petersen
I remember you said you were in the advertising world. You did the Super Bowl commercials. You were like the big times.

[00:08:55.220] – Ty Hutchinson
I did. The advertising I worked on was what they call brand advertising. It’s all the crazy stuff. It’s not like, Come on down. We got this condo Accord for a $9. 99. It’s got four doors. I call that dealer advertising. But that’s really aimed at people who have already made a decision. I’m going to buy a car. It’s between these three, which am I going to buy? Whereas brand advertising is more about making the brand relatable to the person or positioning it in a way that they remember it or repositioning it if it’s got a negative aspect to it. So you get to do a lot of these crazy things without the hard sell. And so for the longest time, I was in advertising for 20 years. My job was ideation. It was coming up with ideas. So you get used to coming up with a lot of ideas under pressure with a lot of constraints. So coming up with an idea for a book for me is so easy because I don’t have those constraints. We You need it in an hour. It’s like you can do whatever you want. So to me, it’s super easy because I don’t have all these rules baked in.

[00:10:09.580] – Ty Hutchinson
But advertising, I love to advertise. It was the funnest job I had for a long time until it wasn’t fun. It stopped being fun when they made you work in management. I didn’t like managing people. I missed sitting around and making my friends laugh and coming up with stupid ideas. It’s like how I imagine if you’re a comedian, and all they do is sit around and try and make each other laugh because that’s what they do. They’re comedians. Yeah.

[00:10:37.990] – Alan Petersen
That’s the next thing you know you’re the boss. Yeah.

[00:10:40.740] – Ty Hutchinson
That’s the next thing you know the boss. The dynamics are not the same. It’s like, It sucks.

[00:10:47.240] – Alan Petersen
It’s a down with your writing process, too, because it doesn’t sound like… What is your writing process? Do you outline or do you just start writing? It sounds like you’re like a writer.

[00:10:57.940] – Ty Hutchinson
I was a pantser at first, and to be honest, it’s because I didn’t know what I was doing. So I didn’t know how to outline. If you didn’t take any creative writing courses or all that stuff, you don’t know any of that. And even though I was a copywriter in advertising, very little copy writing is done. More of it was big picture ideas, visually driven. So the longest thing I ever written was probably a paragraph. So I didn’t know how to outline all. So So I would just panse it. I would ask a question, Okay, this happens. What happens next? Well, this would happen next. And then what happens next? Well, this would happen next. And I keep doing that until the story is done. That was literally how I do it. Now I semi-outline because the process is a lot quicker when I do that. I don’t necessarily follow the outline, but I will spend time jotting down a few sentences, what I think is going to happen, just so that I have it there to refer to if I need to refer to it. For the longest time, I’ll just make it up.

[00:12:08.600] – Ty Hutchinson
If I had a great idea and I couldn’t remember the next day, then my thought was, well, it must have not been that great because you can’t remember it. Come up with something else.

[00:12:20.580] – Alan Petersen
I like that. I would be like, Oh, what was that idea? I’d be torturing myself.

[00:12:24.680] – Ty Hutchinson
You’re torturing yourself. Why? Just come up with another idea. No one’s going to miss it because no one knows about it. You were the only one.

[00:12:38.520] – Alan Petersen
Wow. It’s so incredible. So DarkBrightis going to be the 19th, right? Abby Cain, is it?

[00:12:44.600] – Ty Hutchinson
Yeah, 19th Abby Cain. I never thought the series would go on this long. I actually never thought I would have a career as an author. Again, it was a spur of the moment thing. I was well paid in advertising, but I hated it towards the end. And I just naively thought, well, I’ll just become an author. What’s the heart about writing a book? And I think that’s actually great because I think if you don’t realize how difficult it can be and you don’t realize all the hardships and you go into it blindly, I think it’s better because then you don’t start questioning yourself. You don’t start overthinking and you don’t start going, well, maybe I’ll wait for this, or maybe I’ll wait until I have more money saved up and all that stuff. I just looked at it. It was like, how different can this be than creating a 60-second commercial. It has a beginning, middle, and an end. That’s all I need to do is make a beginning, middle, and end and just make it interesting. I figured if I can make a commercial about a watch interesting to someone, I sure as hell can make a story interesting.

[00:13:47.080] – Alan Petersen
You went straight into the self-publishing, right? You didn’t deal with trying to find the agents or querying or any of that. You just said, I’m going direct.

[00:13:54.340] – Ty Hutchinson
I was going to do that because I didn’t know any better. Then I found this blog blog about this author who was self-publishing. And the more I read it, I was like, Wow, this is right up my alley. This is what I should be doing instead of going the traditional route. Because in advertising, you’re making commercials, you’re making print ads, you’re making outdoors. Yeah, I’m not actually filming the commercial. You hire a director. You hire people who are really good about it, but you’re there through the process. And so you are involved and you’re making these things. You’re part of it. And so I was like, why would I turn all this control over to some publishing house or whatever? And to be honest, I thought I could market my books better than they could. I thought I could design my covers better than they could, or at least I could hire designers and brief them better than what they would have done. Yeah, you got to scroll, too. Yeah. That was only because of my background. I’m not saying I pulled it off right every single time. In fact, I think there were times where having an ad background worked against me because it was too I would make things too commercially, and it would lose a little of the rawness.

[00:15:05.930] – Ty Hutchinson
So I had to forget a little about my past.

[00:15:09.900] – Alan Petersen
Yeah, so it is interesting writing a long-running series like the Abby Cain books. So you have readers who expect something from the Abby Cain, from those books because they love her and they love that series. So how do you balance that with doing something new, like DarkBright? Can you tell us a little bit about that? Because that’s a little bit… This is like a psychological thriller-ish, and there’s It’s like that dystopian thing going on.

[00:15:33.480] – Ty Hutchinson
Yeah. I don’t think about it that much because that’s just the type of stories I write. I like big, high concept ideas. I like ideas that are so easy to elevator pitch that when you pitch it to someone, the average person can run with it. To me, that’s how you know when you got a really strong idea because you can pitch it in a sentence. And someone will be like, Oh, my God, I totally get that you can do this and this and this. This can do this, and it can be about this. So when the average person can start ripping on it, then you got a solid idea. And I love coming up with ideas like that. And again, it’s probably tied into my ad background. So that doesn’t lend itself to the typical crime thriller, where it’s like, okay, let’s just start off with a crime, and how do we make it interesting and how they solve it? Because I did write Abbey King books like that. But when And I did write those. They didn’t really fulfill me as much as coming up with this big idea, which is the reason why I write trilogies within the series.

[00:16:41.320] – Ty Hutchinson
And that’s through a lot of people. It’s like, wait a minute. One book, one crime. Next book, new crime. And I was like, now I’m writing a trilogy. And so I would write like books three, four, and five would be a trilogy. Books seven, eight, and nine would be a trilogy. Books 10, 11, 12 would be a trilogy. And I think from the very get-go, you’re either going to like what I do because it’s different or you’re not going to like it. And a lot of people don’t like it. But thankfully, hundreds of thousands of people do.

[00:17:15.000] – Alan Petersen
I’ve been doing it for over 10 years now. This is amazing, this business. Yeah.

[00:17:19.640] – Ty Hutchinson
I feel really thankful and I’m grateful. But I always thought everyone was doing that well because I never paid attention to the industry. I was too I’m busy traveling that the whole business of publishing and writing was really secondary. So I actually thought people were doing really well, or at least as well as me, or if not better, because I wasn’t sure if I was doing well. I was thinking, Well, I’m not making as much as I made in advertising, but I can still afford to pay my bills and travel. So I guess that’s good. And That’s exactly where I left it. But yeah, I never thought I would have this career. And then again, at the same time, I guess I expected I would have this career because I stupidly quit my job and left.

[00:18:17.580] – Alan Petersen
It worked out. You didn’t have a plan B, did you?

[00:18:21.160] – Ty Hutchinson
No, I had no plan B. I really didn’t.

[00:18:26.860] – Alan Petersen
Now, I always ask about the tools of the trade. So What do you use? Use Word? Use something else? Or do you use to write your books?

[00:18:34.150] – Ty Hutchinson
I just use Word to write. I tried using Scrivener and stuff, but I don’t know, the learning curve, I guess, was too much. I’m pretty simple. So Word solves the issue. And if I need to, I’ll refer to an outline. Well, that’s where the outline comes in, because then I can look at the outline and Oh, okay. This is where I wanted the story to go. But yeah, word pretty much solves all my issues and problems.

[00:19:09.820] – Alan Petersen
Yeah. And when you’re writing a book, do you have like a… I hate this word. Do you have a routine? Do you say, I’m going to write 5,000 words a day?

[00:19:20.300] – Ty Hutchinson
In the beginning, I didn’t. I would spend my mornings writing because I was most productive then. But if I’m sitting… I remember once I living in Bali. And my routine was to get up in the morning, eat breakfast, go to this coffee shop. It was always empty. It was huge, but it was always empty. No one went inside there. So I had the place to myself. And I was sitting in the corner, I would listen to music, writing, singing out loud, and the staff, they wouldn’t pay me any attention. And then one day, this other foreigner came inside. And that screwed up the routine because we both came there. He wrote blogs, and we got absolutely nothing done every single time we were there on the the day because we would just talk and talk and share stories about… He was traveling like I was, but he was married, and he had a little kid. I think his daughter was maybe two years old or three years old, so they were traveling as a family. And so we would just waste a whole bunch of time. And it got to the point where he and I decided, Okay, I’m going to work in this coffee shop.

[00:20:25.140] – Ty Hutchinson
Right across the way was a Starbucks. And he’s like, Okay, I’ll go to the Starbucks. And we had to separate Or else, literally, nothing would get done. So back then, it was like, I would just follow whatever interests me. And if I could get some writing done, I get some writing done. But nowadays, The business is completely different. It’s not like how it was back then. I stick more to a schedule now. I have things that I know I need to get done, and it’s more of a priority. I don’t just drop things and just go and travel. I think I’ll go do this and this and this and this and forget about the book for two weeks, which is what I did a lot back then.

[00:21:10.060] – Alan Petersen
Yeah. That is something, too. It is much more of a business now than it was 10 years ago.

[00:21:15.800] – Ty Hutchinson
Yeah, totally. Again, it’s like, I don’t know how… I can’t explain to people how I actually got here. It just worked its way out. I always tell people, just follow your dreams, follow your gut, because most often than that, your gut is probably right. You might have to tweak what it’s telling you to do, but most of the time it’s right. Sometimes it’s wrong. I remember once I was traveling in Indonesia, and I think it was in Yogicarta, and I got off the train, and I knew I wanted to see certain temples, but they were really far away from each other. There was no way to get there So I’m using public transportation. So when you get off the train, there’s all these talents, and they’re selling you stuff like, I want to be a guide. I could be a driver and all this whatnot. So I knew I needed a driver. So this one guy came up to me, offered his services as a driver. And so I hired him. I said, Okay, take me to these places tomorrow. He’s like, Sure. So he met me in my hotel the next day, takes me to the first temple, and I have a great time there.

[00:22:24.900] – Ty Hutchinson
He’s just sitting in the car, and I go do my thing, and I come back, and we’re going to go to the second place. He tells me it’s about an hour away. So I say, Okay. So doing that hour, because I’ve been traveling really hard the last couple of weeks, I fall asleep in the car. Next thing I know, I wake up, we’re parked in a garage of some house, and he’s sitting in the front seat looking at me. He’s like, we’re at my place. And I was like, What? And I’m still in this fog. I just woke up. I’m still in this fog. And he goes, Come inside. You’re tired. You can rest here. And I was like, Okay, that’s where your gut should sound the alarms. Yes. But I was so tired. I was like, Okay. I stupidly followed this guy into his house This is like total serial killer set up. You know what I mean? And the whole time I’m going, should I be doing this? Should I tell him, no, let’s just keep going? But I just follow him inside and start looking around his place. And I go, well, it seems normal.

[00:23:28.260] – Ty Hutchinson
I don’t see anything psychotic. And he comes to your couch and goes, You can sleep here. I’m going to go rest in my room. And I was like, okay. And so I laid down and I just went to sleep. I didn’t think anything else about it. I could have ended up with my gut split, slice open, and I wouldn’t be here talking to you. But I don’t know how long I was asleep, probably like almost an hour. And then I was awakened by him. He was shaking my arm, and He was leaning over and he’s like, It’s time to get up. I looked at him again. I was like, Okay. And then he’s like, It’s time to get up. He goes, My wife made us lunch. Let’s eat. I was like, whew. Because the minute he said wife, I was like, Okay, normal. Sure enough, he led me into the kitchen and there was this huge Indonesian spread, and his wife was there, and she was all bubbly and happy. She was saying hello. We proceeded to have this really great meal and conversation after. It turns out he was He had been working really late the night before, didn’t get enough sleep, and he really needed to sleep, or else he was afraid he would crash the car while driving.

[00:24:38.940] – Ty Hutchinson
So it was innocently, but I guess that’s the great thing about different cultures. In America, you’d probably ask, do you mind if we do this? Or there, they just do it.

[00:24:49.200] – Alan Petersen
Yeah, that’s cool.

[00:24:54.380] – Ty Hutchinson
In that case, was that a good thing to follow my gut? I don’t know, but that’s a great experience that I use to season a scene or something.

[00:25:03.900] – Alan Petersen
Yeah, that’s a great story.

[00:25:07.200] – Ty Hutchinson
Yeah. Could have been one of those missing people. I think that’s from your background, though.

[00:25:20.820] – Alan Petersen
I mean, is that like you’re saying, you use your background to season stories, but when you’re writing something like DarkBright, can Can you tell the listeners a little bit about the actual story about that? Because it’s wild. I love the elevator pitch.

[00:25:36.920] – Ty Hutchinson
Yeah. So it’s about this young woman who’s found battered, beaten, bruised, stumbling along this remote mountain road. And the only thing she can say is DarkBright. No one understands what it means. She can’t explain it, but that’s all she can say is DarkBright, DarkBright, DarkBright. Abby Cain, the FBI agent, and her partner are brought into the investigation to figure out what’s going on. And during her investigation, she follows the trail that Swam left behind. She ends up vanishing. And she later wakes up in this sterile maze of identical hallways. It’s so weird. It’s so like, what is this place? Because everything looks the same. It’s like this endless maze of hallways that are identical. And then she discovers that there are other people living there. They can’t explain to her why she’s there. They can’t explain what DarkBrightmeans, but they all look extremely happy, and it’s as if it’s utopia. So that’s how the story is positioned and set up. And her partner, Kyle Kang, is like, The hell happened to Abby? That’s the other side of the story. It’s him searching for her, and she’s in this weird Stepford Wives type of environment.

[00:27:00.400] – Alan Petersen
Yeah. It was like Stepford Wives meets… I can’t remember.

[00:27:05.560] – Ty Hutchinson
Silence of the Lamb meets Stepford Wives because the ends up… The villain is this intelligent psychopath, and he’s crazy. That’s a perfect example of how I season the character. So I wrote him the way I thought I should write him to play the role. But then when I went back, I started pulling in experiences that I remembered or thought of and attributing it to him to pump up his character a little bit more to give him some… So that he’s just not… I mean, how many books out there that have serial killers as a villain? Hundreds of thousands.

[00:27:44.940] – Alan Petersen
At least.

[00:27:46.280] – Ty Hutchinson
Yeah. And how many books have you read where they sound the same? It’s like whatever. So I try to give them things that make them, I guess, again, humanize them. I love humanizing the villains and making them seem normal. And this just stems from the fact that how many times have you watched the news and people are like, oh, yeah, he seemed like a great guy. I didn’t realize he had 18 kids stuffed in his basement. This is the neighbor. We barbecue and grill every weekend. How was I supposed to know? He was chopping kids up. Why? Because the guy came across as his normal human being. He was relatable, he was friendly. So that’s So that’s humanizing a villain. But then you also want to season it and make it different because a lot of people, a lot of authors humanize their villains. So I just think about, well, how can I make him a little bit more different? And that’s where travel comes in because of all the people I meet, I steal from them. Technically.

[00:28:54.060] – Alan Petersen
And how many books do you have out now? Because you’ve written Stunnel and Psychological Thrillers. You’re in a lot of different Genres, another type of books, too.

[00:29:02.280] – Ty Hutchinson
I do, but I stay in the thriller lane. If I were to only write Abbey Can, I would probably get bored. So I push out into action readers. I push out into assassin readers. I push out into psychological readers just to keep myself interested. But I still write readers. I’m working on all kinds of stuff. I’m working on fantasy readers. I’m working on a dystopian thriller, but they’re all readers. I’m going to write them as thrillers, but they’ll be flavored as those other things. Whether or not people will actually like them, I don’t know. But that’s not something I really pay attention to. I’ve always done what I think people will like now. In my The real reason is if I can make a commercial interesting and have someone pay attention to a 60-second commercial, I know I can make a story interested and write it the way I think it should be and write it so it’s relatable and has human aspects to it. I think that’s what really matters to readers is that if they can relate to the story, if they can somehow find some truth or some… Besides it being interesting, I think it’ll be successful.

[00:30:28.780] – Ty Hutchinson
It’s when stories are missing that part that it just becomes stale, a little bit stale, and just running through the motion. You don’t really care. I was just watching this movie the other night, some Viking action movie, and it had all the plot beats that you would want, bloody sword fight and axes and some lovemaking, mystery, intriguing, mythology. It had everything. But it was so boring because there was no humanity to it. You didn’t really care about why someone was doing this or whatever, and it’s just like, whatever. But it had all the other things. I think Fast and the Furious is interesting because at least the characters are interesting and they make you want to see it, but it still has all the plot points of an action flick. You know what I mean?

[00:31:26.700] – Alan Petersen
Oh, yeah.

[00:31:28.220] – Ty Hutchinson
But, man, I almost DNF this movie, but I don’t want to say what the name was, but that’s what I’m trying to say. I don’t know if I answered your question. I went off on a tangent there.

[00:31:44.580] – Alan Petersen
No, that’s good. No, you answered it. It’s good. What’s so interesting about DarkBright, too, is now you’ve already talked about it, but it’s a trilogy, but it’s the 19th book of the series. So there’s going to be two more books in this DarkBrightCan you tell us a little bit about that?

[00:32:01.240] – Ty Hutchinson
Yeah, exactly. And again, this goes back to me running the right high concept books. And I tried writing them and making them fit in one book, but they’re just… To keep it at a manageable rate, like 80 to 90,000 words at the most because you don’t want the book to get too big. Because readers, they got to move quickly. I’m not writing epic fantasy here. So that’s why I write the trilogies. I break them up because then I can explore aspects aspects of the story and I can keep asking the question, what if, what if, what if, what if, what if. And when you keep asking that question over and over again, you poke into areas you normally wouldn’t have poked into when you’re trying to make the book fit within 70,000 words or 80, whatever your word count and the word count you want to be. So it’s books 19, 20, and 21. It doesn’t bother me because most people discover Abby with book seven which is the start of the suitcase Girl trilogy. So that’s book seven, eight, and nine. And no one’s complained about starting at book seven. So what I do is rather than forcing people to start at book one and go through it chronologically Logically, I tell people, Here’s how I think you should read the Abbey King series in the most interesting way.

[00:33:23.720] – Ty Hutchinson
And I start them at book seven. I start them with that suitcase girl trilogy. And I go, Then you might want to read this, and You might want to read this. I don’t think you need to start at Book 1 to get the whole thing. There are some people who might feel like they need to, and I was like, Fine. Okay, then here’s the order. But I really think you should read it this way. So when I’m done with the DarkBrighttrilogy, I’ll probably direct people as first-time readers of Abby right into that because it’s Book 19. But it won’t come across as Book 19. It’ll just come across as a great story. And hopefully, they’ll have the same reaction that they have when they read the other books like, Oh, I like this. What else does this author have? Well, you might like this trilogy with Abby, or you might like this one.

[00:34:08.780] – Alan Petersen
So what are you working on now then? Right now, what are you working on?

[00:34:15.100] – Ty Hutchinson
I’m working on the second book in another trilogy about this girl. Her name is Akiko Ohno. The first book is called The Little Sushis. Sushi Chef, and it’s about this woman who wants to be a sushi chef. And that’s all she ever wanted to do. But in Japan, it’s a man’s world. There are no women sushi chefs. And so she decides that that’s all she wants to do. She wants to do it. She’s going to make it happen. She gets accepted to this prestigious apprenticeship, but it turns out to be nothing like what she expected. It’s survival horror. And the way I tell people, it’s like, if the menu meets squid game, it’s your vibe, this book is going to be the book for you because the whole premise of the book is the last chef standing or the last chef alive wins. So that’s what she gets herself into. So again, it’s a trilogy. And I just started writing the second book in her, I guess, I don’t know, adventure. But in the first book, it’s all about the apprenticeship and surviving. In the second book, it’s going to be like, well, what’s life like now?

[00:35:34.780] – Ty Hutchinson
Now that I’ve survived this horror, what do I do next? And so, again, I can explore what happens next. I can continue Are there other survivors from past apprenticeships? What about the winners of the last one? What are they doing after knowing what happens in this program? So there’s so many things you can explore that if you were to try and shove it all into one book, it’s just It would be too much. It’s just too much. And again, I’m writing readers, so you got to keep the pace moving. You don’t have time to dwell on things. Readers who enjoy these types of books, it needs to move. The pages need to keep moving. So you got to keep that in mind. And I found the best way to do that is to just write trilogies. And that’s pretty much where I boil down my approach is that I’m just going to write trilogies on everything that I write. And they could all be part of the same series or not. But if I’m working on a thriller, I guess you would call it historical fantasy thriller, and I’m going to write it as a trilogy.

[00:36:48.500] – Ty Hutchinson
I may never write another book. I may write a fourth book for it. I may not, but I don’t care. And then I’ll throw it out there and I’ll move on to something else.

[00:36:56.600] – Alan Petersen
Yeah, I love that you describe it that you write popcorn readers, high concept popcorn readers. I love that line. Can you explain that? What do you mean with that?

[00:37:06.300] – Ty Hutchinson
Yeah. These are the books that are not going to blow your mind away, but if you need something to entertain yourself on a flight from Los I’m just to New York, my book will do it. And then after, you can throw it in the trash. You’ll have a really great time reading the book, and then you’re free to move on after that.

[00:37:26.750] – Alan Petersen
Get out with your life.

[00:37:28.220] – Ty Hutchinson
Yeah. That to me is what a great what a popcorn thriller is. It’s not Michelin Star, and I don’t pretend to write Michelin Star books, but it’s going to be addictive. It’s not like a Lay’s potato chip. You can’t just have one.

[00:37:43.760] – Alan Petersen
Yeah, it’s a great story and entertaining, I think, especially nowadays.

[00:37:48.160] – Ty Hutchinson
Exactly. Yeah.

[00:37:50.480] – Alan Petersen
All right, Ty. Well, before, I always ask my guests in the podcast before I let them go, because I know I do have aspiring writers listening to this, and We know we all get into our own heads. Any advice for somebody wanting to write readers?

[00:38:05.760] – Ty Hutchinson
Yeah. You’ve probably heard this advice many times, but yeah, just sit down and start writing, because What you write, it’s extremely important to see how readers react to what you write, because what you may want to do, or what you may think you want to do may not be what readers are reacting to or want from you or want to read. So the sooner you can put stuff down on paper and get it out there, the sooner you can get feedback on what you’re writing and whether or not it’s going to work or not. Because I know a lot of authors, and I was in that boat, too, in the beginning, is that I just want to write what interests me, and I still only write what interests me. But if you want to make a living at it, there’s the other half of the equation. The person you writing it for also has to like it. But if you just want a hobby, do it as a hobby, and your friends and family can do it, then fine. Write whatever you want, don’t pay attention to anything else. But if that’s not what you want, you want to turn this into a paying job, then you got to see how people are reacting to it.

[00:39:21.660] – Ty Hutchinson
You got to make sure what you’re offering them. And your book is a product. It’s a product. What you’re offering them is something they want. If it’s not what they want or a majority of people is not what they want, it’s not going to work. That’s just the way it is. And you either accept that or you don’t. And I know a lot of young authors and newbie authors don’t want to hear that, but that’s the reality of it. If you don’t want to do that, then just treat it like a hobby, because the truth is we don’t make money from friends and family. We make money from strangers. Yeah. And when you’re convincing a stranger who doesn’t care about you, doesn’t care about your book, doesn’t care about you making rent, doesn’t care about any of that stuff, you have to have a compelling offer on why they should part with their money.

[00:40:11.420] – Alan Petersen
Yeah, that’s the business part of it, that people write Yeah.

[00:40:15.540] – Ty Hutchinson
A lot of people don’t want to hear about that because they want to be artists. That’s fine. You do you, whatever makes you happy. And then eventually, you’re going to see what the fallout is, and you’re either going to be okay with it or you’re not. Yeah.

[00:40:33.040] – Alan Petersen
That’s good advice, man. And so where can the listeners find you? Where’s your website, social media? I know you’re active.

[00:40:39.340] – Ty Hutchinson
They can’t. I’m a ghost, remember? I don’t have a permanent residence.

[00:40:43.680] – Alan Petersen
Well, physically, but virtually.

[00:40:47.660] – Ty Hutchinson
Well, you can always find what’s happening with me at tyhutchinson. Com, my website. Or if you look up Ty Hutchinson on Instagram, Facebook, or TikTok, you’ll most likely find me there, too.

[00:41:02.280] – Alan Petersen
Yeah. And people can buy you books directly, right? For someone who’s on Amazon, the fact that people can buy you books directly from you is wild for me.

[00:41:22.680] – Ty Hutchinson
I offer the best deals possible on my website so that I get people coming to me because it’s like, I don’t have to worry about the commissions that the other retail platforms take so I can pass that savings on to the reader. So I always encourage people to browse my website.

[00:41:48.970] – Alan Petersen
Thanks so much for coming on the podcast. It’s a fun talking to you.

[00:41:52.110] – Ty Hutchinson
Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.