Follow “Hit and Miss with Monique Ming Laven” and find other episodes on kiro7.com/HitandMiss
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Daniel James Brown transcript:
Daniel James Brown: “I felt like the world had imploded. I mean, I just felt so embarrassed and so guilty.”
THAT DOES NOT SOUND LIKE A MAN WHO DOMINATED THE NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER LIST FOR MORE THAN TWO YEARS--
A MAN WHO LOOKED INTO THE EYES OF GEORGE CLOONEY -- AND TOLD HIM WHAT HE GOT WRONG.
Monique Ming Laven: “You have to - did you tell him the truth?” DJB: “I did.”
OR A MAN WHO NAVIGATED THE TRICKY WATERS OF HOLLYWOOD
DJB: “And then there was Harvey Weinstein.” MML: “Oh. Oh, boy.”
BUT LIKE ALL PEOPLE WHO ACHIEVE SOMETHING GREAT-- DANIEL JAMES BROWN HAS ALSO EXPERIENCED FAILURE.
DJB: “It seemed like I’d made a horrible mistake at the time.”
AND HE TELLS US WHY IT’S THE KEY TO HIS SUCCESS.
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HI, EVERYBODY. I’M MONIQUE MING LAVEN, AND THIS IS A PODCAST ABOUT REALLY SUCCESSFUL PEOPLE – AND THEIR MISTAKES.
BECAUSE IT’S THE MISTAKES, THE SETBACKS, THE SCREWUPS THAT MAKE YOU SMARTER AND STRONGER.
YOU HAVE TO KEEP TAKING YOUR BEST SHOT, OVER AND OVER.
AND IT IS GOING TO BE … HIT AND MISS.
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Few people have brought as much attention to the University of Washington as Daniel James Brown.
His third book, “Boys in the Boat” is available in more than a dozen languages --
it’s sold more than three million copies –
NATS MOVIE
and it’s become a major motion picture, directed and produced by Hollywood royalty, George Clooney.
Success beyond the wildest dreams of most writers.
I feared getting Brown to launch “Hit and Miss” was a longshot
But it turns out, I was lucky in a couple ways:
When I reached out to Brown last summer, he happened to at his Redmond home to give the commencement address at U-Dub.
And while Boys in the Boat shines a spotlight on U-Dub –
Brown’s loyalties run deeper with a former Pac-12 rival, his alma mateur, the University of California.
I’m a fourth generation Golden Bear – my family bleeds blue. So I shamelessly used that in my pitch, and he appreciated it.
And lastly, Brown’s an incredibly humble, warm person, who was drawn to the idea of this podcast – looking at people’s mistakes and failures and seeing how they’re actually critical to success. He was so open about his own personal setbacks.
We’ll get to that.
But first, Boys in the Boat:
For those of you who haven’t read the true story—a primer:
The central character is Joe Rantz, who triumphed despite a stunningly harsh childhood during the Depression:
He was 15 when his family abandoned him -- just left him in an unfinished home in Sequim.
My mother read the book years ago and still gets upset thinking about what his parents did. “Terrible, awful,” she’ll repeat.
But Rantz made it through high school - got into U-Dub -- and rowed in the senior varsity eights.
They went on to win the gold medal at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.
It’s the story of the entire team, but Rantz is really the heartbeat.
And when I sat down with Daniel James Brown -- we were just steps away from where Boys in the Boat was born.
Monique: How did you meet Joe Rantz?
Brown: So I actually was in this room, at a homeowners’ association meeting. I didn’t know Judy very well. My neighbor, Judy Rantz Willman, was at that meeting. We were talking about homeowners stuff, whatever it was. But after the meeting, she came up to me and she said, “You know, I’m reading your first book to my dad, and he really is enjoying it. He’s, he’s living under hospice care at my home. But he’d like to meet you. So would you come? Would you mind coming down to meet my dad?” And then she said something about he won an Olympic gold medal.
Monique: Oh, by the way. (laughs)
Brown: But that didn’t. He didn’t even register with me particularly. So I said, well, sure, I’ll gladly meet your dad. So, I went down. I think it was the next day.
Monique: This was just a social call.
Brown: It was just social call. Yeah. Just being neighborly and. And Judy was there and her dad, Joe Rantz, was there and Joe was on oxygen. He was very weak. He was in a recliner, but he was very alert mentally. And so, Judy, we talked very briefly about the book. My first book that Judy had been reading to him. But then with Judy’s prompting, he started talking about his experiences growing up during the depression and how he’d been abandoned by his family, and how he’d found his way onto the rowing program at the University of Washington, and how that had turned his life around and how. Along the way, they beat all the elite schools from the East, and they’d beat the British schools, and they’d gone to the Olympics and they’d beat this Nazi crew and won a gold medal. And the story just kept getting more and more interesting as Judy sort of drew it out of him. And so, by the end of that couple of hours I spent with Joe, I was just like, well, I, I usually takes me forever to find a book topic. But I was like. But it just poured it out. I said, “Joe, can I write a book about your life?”
Monique: The same day you met him? Yeah.
Brown: And he said no.
Monique: Really? Why?
Brown: He said, you can’t write a book about me. Then he looked up and he had tears in his eyes, and he said, but you could write a book about the boat. And I didn’t know what he meant. I thought he meant the physical boat. But then I realized, oh, he means I need to write about all the guys. The boat meant for him, the whole crew. Well, and so then I was even more interested. So, I said, okay, that’s what I’m going to try to do that. So. So yeah. So, I just was really all on board that day, but I didn’t know at the time was when Judy had invited me down … She had been looking for somebody to write her dad’s story. She had thought about trying to write it herself. She’d collected all these notes and things, which later turned out to be a godsend. Yeah. Because Joe only lived a couple of months after that. But, she had been hoping that I would take an interest in the story. So.
Monique: Marvelous bit of manipulation.
Brown: Yeah, it worked out. It worked out well for for all of us, I think.
Monique: So when he was telling you his story, his childhood was so harrowing. Yeah. Was he forthcoming about that from the beginning, or did you have to, to really pull it out or his daughter?
Brown: Yeah. So he was reasonably forthcoming. But Judy definitely pulled stuff out of him that I think he might not have. I know he was. The thing about Joe was he had just very traumatic experience as a child. His parents abandoned him, his stepmother and his father abandoned him. But he was surprisingly not bitter about that. Judy was pretty bitter about it, but Joe was very, very forgiving about that. So Judy was Judy. They sort of drew out all the details, and Joe was perfectly willing to talk about it and to explain what had happened.
Monique: Was he emotional?
Brown: He was emotional. Judy was really emotional. I mean, that was the first of many meetings I had with Judy because Judy then after Joe passed away, she she was the custodian of this story. I don’t think we had a single meeting where Judy didn’t cry at some point during the during the interview. There was a lot of emotion, a lot of stored up. Anguish over what had happened back in 1934 -35.
Monique: And to her father, whom she just lost.
Brown: And to her father, who at that point added it, and then she lost him. And so there was even more emotion. But it was all from a writer’s standpoint. It was all good in that people were opening their hearts and telling me all this stuff, because that’s the fuel of a good story. And. And so I worked very closely with Judy for the next couple of years. Delving into every aspect of his story and I started to write the book.
Monique: And doing that with the other families of the rest of the boat?
Brown: Yeah. So one of the great things that Judy was able to do was she had stayed in contact with family members of the other boys in the boat. And so she introduced me. And this took a while. Over the course of a year or a year and a half, we went around and we interviewed everybody that we could find every one of the kids or grandkids in some cases of the the guys from the ‘36 crew. So as I say, that took a long time, but it was enormously, enormously helpful.
Monique: That’s a I mean, you knew that first day, that first conversation. Whoa, what a story here, right? I mean, it’s a huge opportunity, but it’s a huge responsibility, too.
Brown: Yeah. Anytime you write about real people, particularly real people who are no longer with us, you do you feel a real weight? You’re going to represent their life to the to the rest of the world. And as it turns out, in The Boys in the boat, that meant to millions of people. And so you do you feel an obligation to get it right? I mean, I’m writing nonfiction, so I have to get everything factually right, but I also have to get everything emotionally right. You know, I have to tell this story the way it deserves to be told that the heart that it deserves, to have it told. And so that is one of the things through all my books, but particularly through the last two books, that’s been always in my mind is, am I doing justice to these guys? Am I getting it right? Am I treating everybody fairly? You know, one of the characters in The Boys in the Boat is Joe’s stepmother. Who was the force that led to his abandonment? Because she really.
Monique: My mother would like to tell her off. Boy.
Brown: My wife has choice words for Thula too. And, you know, and she does come across as the sort of the evil stepmother in the book, because everything we know about her. That points to what you did, which was to convince her husband to leave Joe behind. But I do always try to keep in mind. When I talk about do I want to give book talks? That Thula died in 1935. So she’s not. Yeah. I couldn’t interview till I couldn’t get her side of the story. And I always like to point that out. And then also sort of point out that, you know, this. She was this 22-year old girl or something like that, who married an older man who was kind of a fast talker. And then she found herself. Living in a little mining camp in Idaho, and then on a stump farm out in the Olympic Peninsula with a bunch of little kids to feed. And this large teenage boy who ate voraciously, who wasn’t her kid. And she was apparently a very talented young woman. She played the violin very well. So I try to point out that it was probably very hard for her, and that it would have been hard for anyone. I don’t think it excuses what she did, but I do try to, you know, give as much of her side of the story as possible.
Monique: Let her remain human, at least.
Brown: Yeah.
Monique: So you have this opportunity, this responsibility. You have excitement behind this. It’s a it’s a long process and a long book. Was there a particular time at which you went okay. I got this? Was there a sentence, a chapter a day? Any mark?
Brown: Yeah. No. You know, even when I’d finish the whole book this whole time, I was going back and forth with my agent. I was trying to decide whether or not she was willing to represent this book and try to sell it because she said one of the better agencies in New York, and she’s quite picky about what she represents. And so I was feeding her sample chapters and we were going back and forth, and she was critiquing it and asking for more and more and more. There came a point where she said. You know, I think I can sell this. That gave me a lot of hope. Because in the back of my mind, as great as this story is at the back of my mind, there’s always this –it’s a story about a bunch of guys in a rowboat. Who cares? And that was always in the back of my head. And so I was like, I was not sure myself. But when Dorian, my agent, said, I think I can sell this. And then subsequently we got all kinds of interest from all kinds of publishers and in publishing.
Monique: Immediately?
Brown: Immediately it wound up being auctioned to different publishers. You know, at that point I thought, okay, well, publishers like it, but I still don’t really know if it’s going to sell, if people are gonna like it. And so I’m just that kind of person. I worry about something till I can’t be worried about anymore. And so it was only after the book came out and it actually took off kind of slowly. But there came a point, and I don’t remember what the trigger was, where it just suddenly shot up and wound up on the New York Times bestseller list. And then I said, okay, this is.
Monique: Here we go.
Brown: Here we go. This is real.
Monique: Yeah. How many languages?
Brown: 10 or 12 languages translated, I think.
Monique: And counting perhaps.
Brown: Maybe we may still get some more.
AND IT’S ALREADY BEEN TRANSLATED ONTO THE BIG SCREEN--
BY A LITTLE HOLLYWOOD NOBODY NAMED GEORGE CLOONEY.
HE DIRECTED AND PRODUCED IT.
BUT IT ALMOST SANK.
Monique: And now. Oh, by the way, George Clooney made a movie out of it. Yeah. I mean. Did you anticipate? You knew you had something good here on the line, but did you anticipate that it would be the huge kind of phenomenon that it is?
Brown: Well, as far as movies go, the day after we sold the book rights to Penguin Random House, my agent in Hollywood started calling me and saying, I’ve got interest from studios. You need to stay in your hotel room. I was in a hotel in Tucson, and so studio started calling me, and I very quickly realized that it was going to be somebody wanted to make it into film. Unfortunately, the person that wanted to make it into a film was Harvey Weinstein, and so.
Monique: Oh. Oh boy.
Brown: So I got on the phone.
Monique: Well, did you know that was unfortunate back then?
Brown: No, I didn’t know anything about Harvey. I literally did not know. I had to ask my wife, who is Harvey Weinstein?
Monique: Oh, really? Okay.
Brown: And it happened that the Oscars had been on a couple of nights before, and she says that he’s the guy that went up and got all those Academy Awards.
Brown: So I, we had a choice of several people, or there was a big outfit in London, a small studio, and then there was Harvey Weinstein. And so I didn’t know anything about Harvey Weinstein, but I said, okay, well, we’ll sell to the Weinstein Company.
Monique: Okay.
Brown: Kenneth Branagh, the actor would got on the phone with me. He was going to direct it. He is actually the one that talked me into. He said. I can handle Harvey.
Monique: Wow. This is heady stuff.
Brown: This is all heady stuff. This is like. Wow. This is amazing. Anyway, we wound up selling it. The Weinstein Company, the Weinstein Company being what it turned out to be, just sort of spiraled down the drain. And, and so when the Weinstein Company imploded, finally, that the movie rights were released and they wound up at MGM, the big studio. So. Wow. So it took the the point is, I guess it took a long time. It took ten years between the time I sold the movie rights to The Weinstein Company and The Weinstein Company didn’t do anything with it. And then the Weinstein Company collapsed. Wow. As it should have. Yeah. It took a long time. During which I didn’t know if there was going to be a movie or not.
Monique: And you are not a screenwriter - yet. What was that like handing over your baby?
Brown: Yeah. So it’s. You know, it is a strange thing to. I’d seen several scripts because The Weinstein Company wrote a couple very bad scripts, both of which they showed me and I thought were very bad scripts. And then MGM wrote one that I thought was considerably better, which is one that eventually morphed into the movie. It is a weird thing to see a script based on your book, because the script leaves out – necessarily - 80% of what’s in the book. It just won’t work any other way. It has to condense or be very selective in what it includes. So I’m not a screenwriter. I don’t purport to be a screenwriter. It is kind of a jarring thing to see this script and see the movie. As it turned out, the movie that Mr. Clooney made. I mean, I’m happy with it, I liked it. The Clooneys actually had us down to Los Angeles and gave us a screening of it, a private screening of it, and then immediately came over and asked me what I thought of it.
Monique: Okay, so tell the truth.
Brown: I did.
Monique: Did you tell him the truth?
Brown: I did. Because we had already we talked actually, we talked a little bit before the screening and then again after it, and I said, I said the truth, which is I like it. I think it’s a nice, sweet, uplifting. Kind of old fashioned film, and I think it gets the heart of the story across. There were lots of things that I would do differently if I was making the movie.
Monique: Like what?
Brown: I would include more of the backstory. But I also recognize that you in an hour and 15 minutes of runtime, there’s only so much of the story you can tell. And so I think, you know, they they zeroed in on the- They’re all going picky here. The year where they actually won the gold medal and he chose a relationship with Joyce and they made a nice, compact, tidy little package out of it that I think works.
Monique: But they left out part of the emotional core.
Brown: Yeah. I mean, I think, as I say, I if it would have been me, I would have included the backstory, particularly Joe’s abandonment story, because I think that helps you to understand. Why he is the way you see him in the beginning of the movie, which is kind of a grumpy, you know?
Monique: Yeah.
Brown: A guy who can’t quite see the end. That’s that’s all true. And so I would prefer that it had done that, but. As I say, I am not a script writer. I don’t know that I could have written a script that would have done all that in an hour and 15 minutes, I don’t think I could.
Monique: Was he receptive to your feedback?
Brown: He was. I mean, I had given them this feedback earlier based on the script I told them when I saw the script, I really think you should have some flashbacks or something to Joe’s story. And they actually, as I understand it, they did film some of those, but then they weren’t able to actually use them when they put the whole movie together. Okay.
Monique: So did you call yourselves friends with the Clooneys now? Is that something you can say?
Brown: Well, we did get to hang out with the Clooneys, several times. And that was. That was fun.
NATS MOVIE AGAIN
THE MOVIE REALLY FOCUSED ON THE TRIUMPH --
THE *MEN WHO WOULD WIN THE GOLD MEDAL.
BUT AT THE CORE OF THE *BOYS IN THE BOAT WAS THE EXPERIENCE OF JOE RANTZ AS A TEENAGER,
FLESHED OUT BY AUTHOR DANIEL JAMES BROWN --
WHO WAS ONCE AN ANGUISHED 16-YEAR OLD DANNY BROWN.
Monique: I’d like to rewind a little bit. Obviously you have four books now, boys, and about this huge success, for both your career and also for the University of Washington. It’s brought them a lot of attention. So, I was pleasantly surprised to find out that you’re a CAL bear instead of a Husky. And, looking into your background, I was also really surprised, to see, in addition to that, and your folks, both being Cal students, also to hear that you were a high school dropout.
Brown: Yeah.
Monique: Can you tell me about that?
Brown: Yeah. So that was, I think I was in my junior year and high school, and I was in I was in biology lab. One afternoon, I got up and I walked out of the class and walked across the street, and I got in my 1963 Chevrolet Impala. And I drove, and I told my parents, I’m not going back. What what had happened was what was going on was that at the time, I was experiencing extreme anxiety attacks. You know, and this was a long time ago. And in those days, people didn’t really have the kinds of diagnoses about anxiety that they do now or the kinds of treatments for anxiety. So I had been going to school just with extreme crushing anxiety and panic attacks.
Monique: What did you think it was?
Brown: I just thought I was a loser. I mean, I just thought I was, like, so confused. I didn’t know I was having all this fear, but it was absolutely debilitating fear of being in school. And so. So I left and I told my parents and my, you know, my my father was sort of stunned into silence. My mother, I think maybe they had cried a little bit, but I was just not going to go back. So everybody took a deep breath. And my mother thought of a plan, which worked out really well for me. In those days, you could take correspondence courses. So we we made a deal where, whereby I was to spend eight hours a day at the university library in Berkeley completing these correspondence courses. And by completing those, I could apply them to the high school and get my high school diploma and graduate. So I spent a year and a half going into Berkeley every day, going to the university library, working on these correspondence classes, and I quickly found I could get the classes done in like half a day. And I’m in this library. And so I started just like reading a lot of stuff. You know, I would just pull stuff off shelves and start reading them.
Monique: Had you been engaged in school before?
Brown: I mean, I was a decent student, but I wasn’t having any academic problems. It was all social anxiety related. But. But I, I started doing all this reading and I started thinking, this place is really cool. And so it gave me this love of reading and other libraries and other literature that really got sort of born in that, in that moment. So in some ways, you know, it seemed like I’d made a horrible mistake at the time.
Monique: Right?
Brown: But I think actually it turned out to be one of the better things that’s happened to me along the way.
Monique: As a teenager, though, I’m sure it didn’t feel like that.
Brown: No. I felt like the world had imploded. I mean, I just felt so embarrassed and so guilty. And why am I what’s happening to me? But really, the being in the university environment sort of was rehabilitating for me. And I realized, yeah, I, I like learning, I like school, I like books. And so from there I went to, local community college. And I just loved that I had an English teacher that turned me on to English big time. And then from there I went to Cal Berkeley and had great English professors there and then UCLA for graduate school. So it all, you know, in some ways, my whole trajectory of who I have become started with that. Walking t out of high school that day.
Monique: Feeling like a loser.
Brown: Feeling like a loser. Absolutely. Yeah.
Monique: When did that turn around? Was it just when you figured out what your plan was or.
Brown: Yeah. I mean, I continue to have problems with anxiety. Through much of my life. I don’t really anymore, but. I think. I think it really was when I got to community college and I started making friends there, and I, I started getting really interested in my classes, and I was doing really well there. That’s when I really started feeling much better about myself. And, and that just got was even more true by the time I got to Berkeley and went to Cal.
HE WENT FROM FEELING LIKE A FAILURE TO PURSUING HIS PASSION --
LITERATURE AND WRITING.
A DEGREE FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA -
AND A MASTERS FROM UCLA.
HE TAUGHT WRITING IN COLLEGE.
RIGHT WHERE HE WANTED TO BE--
BUT THEN, ANOTHER CROSSROADS.
Monique: And Then you find out about this job at this place called Microsoft.
Brown: Yeah.
Monique: Tell me how you go from. Because I would imagine for an English major who wants to write, to then take a job as a technical writer and editor for a tech company. Yeah. Might not be fulfilling.
Brown: Yeah. I didn’t think it would be particularly fulfilling. I mean, I was teaching at San Jose State in the English department there, partly because I wanted to stay in academia, I loved it. Academia was what had turned my life around higher education. But the point came where I got, married. My wife was also teaching at San Jose State. We got married, we looked around, we realized we couldn’t possibly afford a house in San Jose on teaching salaries, and so I didn’t know what to do. Yeah. And then Sharon got pregnant. And so I even more didn’t know what to do. But I found this ad in the San Jose Mercury, the one line ad for technical editor at something called Microsoft. And I didn’t know what Microsoft was, but they flew me up to Seattle and, they actually at that point, Microsoft was growing so fast. They offered me several jobs in several different groups. And actually I turned them down. I said, no. Oh, because I really didn’t want to leave the Bay area. Okay. So I went back to San Jose,
MICROSOFT WANTED HIM.
HE SAID THANKS BUT NO THANKS.
BUT HE AND HIS WIFE WERE PREGNANT, AND THE BAY AREA IS VERY EXPENSIVE....
Brown: but about 6 or 7 months later, I thought better of it. And so I called.
Monique: As your wife was getting more and more pregnant.
Brown: Exactly. So I called the recruiter at Microsoft back, I think. Anyway, I flew back up, and this time they put me and my wife in a car, and they drove us with a realtor, and they drove us around, and they showed us houses out here on the east side. And, you know, with the salary I was going to make at Microsoft houses were enough cheaper here in the Seattle area compared to Silicon Valley. So we could we could imagine our way to actually buying a house. So I went to work for Microsoft.
Monique: Great decision for your family. Yeah. Did you feel like you sold your dream?
Brown: I mean, I didn’t I didn’t really feel I was a sellout. Exactly. But I yeah, I perhaps I felt. As I say, I really loved the world of higher education and literature reading, writing. And, I didn’t, you know, I didn’t expect to be deeply satisfied or fulfilled by the job at Microsoft. I will say, though, that actually turned out to be much more interesting and fulfilling than I ever expected. Within Microsoft, I was hanging around with writers and editors and people who had come from similar backgrounds to my own. And so we did our thing within the context of Microsoft. And, I mean, I never ran, and I’ve never been around so many smart people as I was at Microsoft. This place was just abuzz with, with really smart people doing really interesting things. So I, you know, I was there 12 years, I think, and I. I didn’t enjoy every moment of it. There were moments that were not at all enjoyable, but I don’t regret it at all. I mean, I actually learned a lot from that experience and, served me well, I think.
AND SERVED UP THE CAREER HE TRULY WANTED.
IT SEEMED LIKE HE’D SACRIFICED HIS PASSION.
BUT THAT TECH JOB CASH BECAME A CUSHION.
HE BANKED ENOUGH MONEY TO TAKE TIME OFF AND DEVOTE ALL HIS TIME TO RESEARCHING “UNDER A FLAMING SKY”--
HIS FIRST BOOK, STOKED BY HIS OWN FAMILY HISTORY.
Brown: Well, I am not sure exactly which came first. The idea to write a book or the idea that became the book. But I know it was over Christmas. My brother and I got into. We had moved my mother from California, up here to Washington, and she had this box of stuff that was a bunch of old, letters and books and diaries and photographs about this wildfire in Hinckley, Minnesota, in the 1890s. And I knew that my great grandfather had died in that fire. I knew that my grandfather and his mother had escaped from the fire on a burning train. And so, I thought, well, that’s, you know, how do people die in a forest fire? Why don’t you just run away from it? You know what happened here? So, I started diving into all this stuff my mom had saved from her father about the fire, and I just realized there’s a really interesting story here. These two fires converged on this little town, and there were all these heroic efforts to get people out of town and trains catching fire. And so, I just got really interested in finding out what had happened and turning that into a book. So I sat down. I didn’t have an agent, didn’t have an editor, didn’t know you’re supposed to have an agent.
IT TOOK HIM MONTHS TO FIND AN AGENT - LONGER TO FIND A SMALL PUBLISHER.
BUT, THE WHEELS STARTED TURNING
Brown: Your family was supportive of this? Yes. But and, you know, this was like, okay, if this can’t turn into money, this again, this can continue. So I. But it took months to find a buyer for to find an agent who would take the book and try to sell it to a publisher. I found an agent, sold it to a very small publishing company for a very small amount of money, and that was gratifying. But I was thinking, okay, well, this is still not, you know. But what happened was the book. The book did quite well. It actually got picked up. Barnes and Noble used to have a thing with, program called Discover Great New Writers, where they’d take a book by an unknown writer, and they’d put it on a rack in the front of the store.
Monique: When there still was a store.
Brown: Exactly. An actual physical store. So, they they did that with my book. And then that caught the interest of HarperCollins, a much bigger publisher. They bought the paperback rights and paid me a much more reasonable amount of money for that. So then that led immediately to another book contract for the second book, and that paid enough money that it was going to get us through another year or so at least.
AND THAT BOOK WOUND UP IN THE HANDS OF JUDY RANTZ WILLMAN.
A WOMAN IN REDMOND, WHO READ IT TO HER AGING FATHER...
JOE RANTZ.
Monique: There you go. Just one other question for you. Given this, I mean, what, what careers and a life you’ve had. Now you can certainly see your path of success. But what would you turn around and tell that 16-year old boy who felt like a loser when he left school?
Brown: Yeah. I wish I could give that kid a hug and say, Danny, it’s going to be okay, because there were a lot of tears. There was a lot of fear. There was a lot of guilt in my teenage years. I mean, who doesn’t go through their teenage years with a lot of emotions? But mine was really traumatic and turbulent in terms of --the anxiety issues. I just I just wish. I could give that kid a hug because, I still feel bad for him. And I’ve been blessed. You know, so much has happened to me that’s been so good. And I think, well, I think a lot of it’s from hard work and smarts, but some of it’s just luck too, and I’m perfectly aware of that.
LUCK, BUT ALSO DEDICATION ... RISKS... BIG SWINGS.
AND A LOT OF HIT AND MISS.
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Thank you so much for listening to this episode. Was it a Hit or Miss? I would love to hear what you think.
You can find me, Monique Ming Laven on Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube. All the links are on kiro7.com/HitandMiss.
Photography and editing – by Jeff Ritter.
Art Direction from Ryan Barber –
Invaluable feedback from Julie Berg, Kyla Grace, and James Sido.
I hope you’ll continue the ride with me. Please follow this podcast for all the episodes, dropping on Wednesdays.
Next time on “Hit and Miss:”
An ice cream career starts on the rocks
Monique [01:04:55] And this started with an entrepreneurial spirit of a young you bellied up to a bar in Idaho.
Molly [01:05:04] Yeah.
1 05 17 I started getting dropped off at my grandparents’ bar in the summers at about 8:30 a.m.
Molly Moon’s Homemade Ice Cream.
Now a Seattle staple
But success has not always been sweet—
Molly I should not have come and done an interview.
Monique [01:47:25] Why?
Molly [01:48:16] I received death threats. ?/? I did not feel like my kids were safe at their schools. 1 48 23
That’s on the next “Hit and Miss.”
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