Writers Chair - Eliot Kleinberg

Welcome to In the Writer's Chair with host Lana McAra! Today, we pull up a chair with veteran journalist and author Eliot Kleinberg. After a 33-and-a-half-year career at the Palm Beach Post where he wrote roughly 14,000 stories, Eliot transitioned into writing captivating historical fiction. 

As the creator of the original Weird Florida books—first published in 1998 before the "Florida Man" craze took over—Eliot has always had a knack for finding the wildest true stories. Now, he is channeling that passion for his home state into vivid historical novels. 

In This Episode, We Discuss:

• From Journalism to Fiction: Eliot shares why he waited until retirement to tackle fiction, and why the secret to good writing is simply to write, read, and write some more. 
• The Dilemma of Historical Fiction: Discover why Eliot is likely the only novelist who includes bibliographies at the end of his books to prove his wild historical scenes actually happened. 
• Florida's Forgotten Civil War History: We dive into the Battle of Olustee, the most important Civil War battle in Florida's history, which inspired Eliot's novel Peace River. 
• A Wild Prohibition Era: Eliot explains why Florida's Prohibition era was even crazier than the 1970s drug wars, complete with rum runners and gangsters. 
• The Adventures of Nate Moran: Get an inside look at Eliot's upcoming four-book series featuring a Miami police detective. 
• Real-Life Inspiration: Learn the tragic and fascinating true story of a 1930 shooting that inspired the first Nate Moran book, Hypocrites Row, releasing in February 2026. 
• Writing Process: Eliot reveals why he considers himself a "hybrid" writer who skips outlining but relies on a solid historical framework. 

About Our Guest

• Eliot Kleinberg is a passionate advocate for Florida history who regularly lectures on the topic. 
• He is on a mission to teach people that Florida's history didn't start with Walt Disney in 1970, noting that St. Augustine is actually 55 years older than Plymouth Rock. 
• You can sign up for his newsletter, check out his speaking schedule, and read his blog "Something Went Horribly Wrong" at his website: ekfa.com. 

Sponsor Spotlight

• This episode is brought to you by Vendela Publishing. 
• Vendela Publishing is a traditional publisher with a unique model that provides marketing help without requiring authors to have large social media or email followings. 
• Learn more at vendelapublishing.com. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

In the Writer's Chair. Candid conversations about the writing life with Lana McCara and Vandela Publishing.

SPEAKER_02 0:10

Hello and welcome to In the Writer's Chair, where writers pull up a chair to talk about writing craft, the writing life, and what's happening for writers right now. Today I'm delighted to welcome Elliot Kleinberg to our podcast. Elliot is the creator of the Civil War historical novel Peace River, The Adventures of Nate Moran Novels, the original Weird Florida Books. He spent nearly half a century reporting on local news and writing about Florida and Florida history. He produced two history columns and wrote 14 books, and co-wrote or contributed to several more, all of them about Florida. Son of longtime journalist Howard Kleinberg, he lectures regularly on Florida topics and runs a blog on better writing called Something Went Horribly Wrong. And you can see him at his website, eKFLA.com. Welcome, Elliot.

SPEAKER_01 1:14

Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

SPEAKER_02 1:16

Well, I have to ask you before we do another thing. What are the Weird Florida books?

SPEAKER_01 1:23

Weird Florida came out in uh 1998, and then Weird Florida 2 came out about five or six years later. There have been many imitators, uh, which is very flattering. And uh of course now I've I've lost the franchise because everybody in the world is writing about Weird Florida. The nowadays they call it Florida man, uh, but we were first, and uh people used to ask me, uh, are you worried you'll ever run out of material? And you don't you can imagine my answer.

SPEAKER_02 1:59

Yeah, someone that lives in Florida as well. I totally understand. Yeah, well, that's that's cool. That's cool. What what gave you the idea for Weird Florida?

SPEAKER_01 2:12

You know, I I worked at the Palm Beach Post for 33 and a half years. I grew up in South Florida, uh, and uh I've lived in Florida almost my entire life. And uh when I started working at the paper, of course, you know, crazy stories would come through. People would always say, Where do you find this stuff? I said, Where do I find it? I have to dodge it like a hockey goalie. And uh there was a fellow named, I want to give my props, there was a fellow named Brandon Farrington, associated press writer in Tallahassee. And he started writing an annual end-of-the-year piece on the craziest stories of the year in Florida. And I talked to him, you know, he said it was the toughest part was deciding what to leave out. And uh so then there was a book called News of the Weird. This is all coming off the top of my head. And they collected just crazy weird Florida crazy weird stories from around the country. So I said, you know what, there's a franchise here. I even wrote the guys and said, Do you mind if I do my own version just for Florida? And they're like, fine. So, you know, I was writing about crazy weird stuff for the Palm Beach Post, and I was seeing weird stuff coming through the the wire services, and finally I decided I had enough for a book. And a few years later I had enough for a second book. And like I said, if if I was a victim of my own success or the success of my genre, because pretty soon everybody was doing it, so that's that's when I quit. I I realized I couldn't compete. But I got the two books, and they're the originals.

SPEAKER_02 3:57

Yeah, truth uh really is stranger than fiction. I've found that, you know, myself um just in my my own book research, you know, for my material. Um so that brings us to the fiction. So, what caused you to jump from journalism into the fiction arena?

SPEAKER_01 4:17

When I got out of college, uh like many uh aspiring writers, I decided that I was going to sit down and write the great American novel, sell it in 15 minutes, and get a million-dollar advance. Um you could tell that didn't happen. Uh and uh I soon realized that that was a pipe dream. Uh also, frankly, uh I go back and look at what I wrote, and I wasn't anywhere near the writer I am now. We none of us are. You know, I I wrote, we figured out that just at the Palm Beach Post, I wrote probably 14,000 stories. And, you know, everybody knows the secret to good writing. You probably were going to ask me this at some point anyhow. But the secret to good writing is to write, write, write, write, write, and then read something somebody else wrote and then write some more. So if I had tried to write a book when I got out of school, it would have been terrible. Uh and in addition, I I uh I knew I had to make a living, I had to pay rent. My dad was a journalist and uh ran the afternoon paper in Miami for many years. And when I first got to college, I said, well, I don't know if I want to follow in my dad's footsteps, so I thought I would be a uh lawyer. You know, you got a Jewish mother, it's the law or medicine or else. Uh uh, I actually got into law school, but I uh my undergrad had been journalism, and I realized that uh after I got into law school, that once I got past the chase, I realized it wasn't what I wanted to do, and I probably would have been a terrible lawyer or flunked out of law school. But I was looking at my writing, and even my friends at at the col at the school were saying, Elliot, this is what you should be doing. So I went into journalism and I had a long and uh wonderful career in journalism. I'm very proud of it. I believe it's a noble profession. It's under fire right now, both politically and financially. And I always tell people that they need to be really, really afraid of not having a local paper. And it's already a reality in many, many parts of the country. So while I was working at the paper, I started developing this Florida history thing. Eventually, I wrote a lot of Florida history features. Eventually, the paper allowed me to write a local history column that ran in the Palm Beach Post. And then when the Palm Beach Post was bought by the people who later became Gannett, uh, all of a sudden I had two dozen Gannett newspapers in Florida. And I said to the guys, why don't I also write, in addition to the Palm Beach County column, why don't I write a Florida history column? And that ran in all two dozen papers all over the state. Uh in addition, I had started writing nonfiction books while I was at the paper. Some of them were collections of columns I did for the paper, um, and a couple of them I actually wrote for the paper. The paper commissioned the the production of the book. When I got out of, when I retired from the newspaper, and uh, you know, uh I could do whatever the heck I wanted, I had always wanted to write fiction, and I said, Well, you know, if nothing else, it can be your hobby. And that's what I did.

SPEAKER_02 7:35

Wow. What a what a great life. I mean, I sitting here listening to you, I'm a little jealous because you got to do this your whole life. For me, it was just side hustle, you know, while I had to earn a living and uh you figured out how to how to do it full time. That's amazing.

SPEAKER_00 7:53

Yeah, uh, you know, I I'll go to conventions and I'll meet writers who, you know, probably will never get published.

SPEAKER_01 8:02

And I I'm not saying that as a snob. They probably know it. They probably know their writing may never be good enough, or the industry, as you know, is is so subjective that they may write a great book that never gets published. But and they work regular jobs, they're doing it for the love. And uh when I sat down to start writing books, both nonfiction and fiction, I wrote what I was passionate about. Thank god, thank goodness I didn't need the money because none of them were bestsellers. Uh, none of them made the New York Times list. But if I wanted to just write for money, I'd write the phone book. Uh I wanted to write what I was good at, and I wanted to write what I was passionate about, and I wanted to write about something that I wanted people to learn. I wanted the people to learn about Florida because it may be the most misunderstood and underreported state in the country. Everybody thinks that that Florida is, you know, Disney World and a couple of billboards and a stretch of beach. And you and I know that even from the different parts of Florida we live in, that it's it might be demographically the most schizophrenic state in the country. I mean, could live oak and boca retone be more different? And and on top of that, people think that Florida's history, that Florida, Florida exploded out of the forehead of Walt Disney in 1970. And it didn't. You know, I I do talks and I down here in South Florida, everybody's from up north, and I said, anybody here from New England? And a couple of hands go up. I said, you know Plymouth Rock? St. Augustine is 55 years older than Plymouth Rock. And their eyes bug out. Because they don't think anything is older than New England. But Florida is. And that's what I wanted to teach people. You know, the average person in Florida has been here for 10 minutes. So anything I teach them is news. And that's what I wanted to do.

SPEAKER_02 10:06

Absolutely. And the fact that you are from Florida is so unique because so many, I mean, probably, I don't know what the statistics are, but I would say probably at least 80% of the people here are for somewhere else.

SPEAKER_01 10:21

The number I use is that about a third of Florida is natives, born in Florida. And down here where I am, um it's probably Palm Beach County is probably about 17%. And uh in your part of the state, if somebody wasn't born in Florida, they were born in Alabama or Georgia or someplace like that. Down here, they could have born and been born in New York, New England, Cuba, Europe. It's a smorgasbord. When I do talks uh down here, um I'll say I'm a Florida native. I've had them burst into applause.

SPEAKER_00 10:54

They've never seen one before.

SPEAKER_02 10:58

Yes, and and you're absolutely right. Here in Suwannee County up north, um, I think probably more than 50% of the people that I know are actually from this area. They are local people. It's a it's almost, you're right, a schizophrenic state. Totally different here than what people would think of, you know, Orlando, Miami, or any of those places. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 11:25

But but but here's here's the thing. I want people in Florida to feel like it's their home. And that's a big problem here in Florida. Uh I've I've told people this to their face. I said, you know, how long have you been down here from New York? Oh, 20 years. Well, you're a Floridian. Well, no, I'm not. Well, yeah, you are. You are. You live here full time, you're a Floridian. You want to keep rooting for the New York Mets? I don't like it, but that's your business. You want to feel nostalgia for your old neighborhood in Brooklyn? That's fine. I have nostalgia for my old neighborhood in Miami. But this is where you live. You know, you sit and you watch the New York City Commission on Zoom, and you've never been to a county commission meeting in your community. They're building a park in New York. It doesn't affect you. You don't live there, your kids don't live there, but they're building a park three blocks from your home in Florida, and you don't want to know how much they're paying for it, how many seesaws it's gonna have. Did some local developer get a sweetheart deal? Why on earth are you more uh f connected to where you have where you've left 20 years ago than to where you live? Now, I can berate people into caring about Florida, good luck with that, or I can teach them about Florida and its history and its culture in hopes that thou that will make them feel more like it's their home.

SPEAKER_02 12:48

Yeah, yeah, so important. And with the way the the population is moving these days, um, I think that's true of anywhere in the country that people are out of place, they're not in their in their home state, they're somewhere else, and uh Yeah, we need to bloom where we're planted, we need to be where we are, yeah. So moving on, how much of your novels are based on fact? Because you're you're a fat guy. Um how much of your novels are based on true events?

SPEAKER_01 13:28

In my book I actually say this that I've debated with friends and family about the great dilemma of historical fiction. If your historical fiction is based on real events, but you don't tell your reader which are the real events and which you made up, the reader loses the value of understanding that that really happened. I have a scene in my uh first historical novel, Peace River, which is based during the Civil War, in which wounded soldiers on the battlefield are executed at the end of the battle. Guys come up to them and just shoot him in the head. Well, that really happened. So if I don't somehow, whether it's in the back of the book or whatever, let people know that that really happened, they just think I made it up. Well, anybody can make that up. You know, it's nice fiction. I'm like, no, it really happened. So I'm probably the only guy in the world who writes novels with bibliographies. And I have several pages at the end of my books, and I say, this incident is based on this incident. Here's a link to it. Here's a link to an article I wrote about it at the newspaper. Here, this person is a composite of these two people. Here's their biographies. Because I want people to know, you know, the the uh the primary event in my Civil War novel, Peace River, is the Battle of Olusty, which you're probably familiar with. It's not that far from you. It's between Lake City and Jacksonville. It's the most important Civil War battle in the history of Florida. Now, for starters, a lot of Floridians don't even know that we fought in the Civil War or what side we fought on. But we did. Florida was the third state to leave. It was fiercely Southern. And the Battle of Alusti was one of the major battles. It may have extended the Civil War by a year, because if the Union had won at the Battle of Alusti, they could have seized Florida, and the Confederacy, having lost one of its states, could have collapsed. It's a huge battle. They have a huge reenactment every year. So the scenes I made in the Battle of Alusti really happened. And I need to tell my reader that, or they just think, oh, that's a pretty good line you made up.

SPEAKER_00 15:41

It wasn't made up.

SPEAKER_02 15:44

I just drove past that battleground uh within the last month. I was on my way to Jacksonville. I had to go down to Lake City and I took that 90 cutoff back there, and I went past it, and I went, oh, I didn't know there was a Civil War battle in Florida.

SPEAKER_01 16:01

No, it's huge. And then when I started with uh then when I started with the Nate Moran novels, that was those stories wrote themselves because I've written so much uh about that era, the 20s and 30s, uh, which to me is really one of the most important eras in Florida. Um you talk about the drug wars in the 70s and 80s, they had nothing on prohibition. Uh, you know, from moonshiners up in North Florida to drum runners running between the Bahamas and Florida, prohibition was a joke. And every, you know who was making money? Gangsters. Once they have made it illegal, they didn't stop it. They just handed it over to the gangsters. And when gangsters have that kind of money and power, what do you think happens? So um as I wrote, I actually wrote four books, four Nate Moran books, uh, and and Level Best Books generously has has agreed to publish all four. And they're all about Nate Moran, who's this Miami police detective, and in the first book, he's chasing rum runners and gangsters. Well, just about everything in the book is based on actual events: actual shootouts, actual robberies, actual arrests, actual gangsters, actual people.

SPEAKER_00 17:18

And so it was easy to write. I already had a base.

SPEAKER_02 17:24

Yeah. I love the fact that you're using real history in your novels. That's tremendous because uh most people don't know a lot of history these days.

SPEAKER_01 17:36

What happened, what what what inspired me to write Hypocrites Row, and I'm not giving anything away here, is that I stumbled across a little clip in the newspaper from 1930. There was a federal prohibition agency. They actually created an agency to enforce prohibition, and two prohibition agents knocked on the door of a guy who was a alleged rum runner, and he shotgunned both of them and walked on a technicality.

SPEAKER_00 18:08

I stumbled across this in the clips, and and it was just, you know, a little story.

SPEAKER_01 18:13

And I said, you know, I need to write a big story on this. And I wrote the story, and I found the the grandson of one of the prohibition agents, and he actually lived in Bo Crootone, right around the corner, uh, from because the shooting was in West Palm. And he had the letters that his grandmother had written to her dead husband. Not ghoulish, but heartbreaking. How can I live without you? And not only was it a was it this amazing story about a man about a and by the way, it happened two blocks north of the Palm Beach Post building where I worked, and I never knew it. The building's still there. Uh not only did it really happen, but it was this heartbreaking thing that let people know that these people that that these people that were killed were real people. They weren't cartoon characters. You know, a man died. I talked to the man's grandson, he showed me his grandmother's letters. And uh later I while I was writing all this prohibition stuff for the Palm Beach Post, including this big shootout, I found out that on Palm Beach across the water, one of the hotels had a secret room where people could go to drink during prohibition and get away with it because they had money and power.

SPEAKER_00 19:31

And the room was called Hypocrites Row. And I said that's the title of a book.

SPEAKER_02 19:39

Yeah. That there was so much hypocrisy in those days. It was absolutely incredible, the people that were involved in the uh bootlegging, transporting, and everything else during that time. Yeah. Well, I'm gonna take just about 30 seconds right now to mention our sponsor, Vandela Publishing. Vandela Publishing is a traditional publisher that has a little different model. So if you are looking for a traditional publisher that does not require large numbers of social media or email, a publisher that will help you with your marketing, uh check us out. Vandela is v asinvictor en D E L A publishing.com. Well, let's move on. And um I'd like to explore a little bit about how you develop a book. Once you get that seed thought, hypocrite row, or whatever, um, how do you go from there to flesh it out?

SPEAKER_01 20:54

Well, of course, I I'm certainly not the expert on this because I've only written a few books, you know, and there are people out there that have written 20. Um I have gone to writing conferences. I didn't really start going to fiction writing conferences until I started working on the fiction. It was, I just I decided that as long as I was still at the paper, the nonfiction worked because it was an auxiliary of what you know, a nonfiction book was just a gigantic newspaper article, basically. Uh, but fiction was a different animal. And so I decided early on that I would not even go into that world until after I retired from the paper. So once I retired, I started going to these writers' conferences, and of course I was completely out of my league. Uh uh There's something called a cozy mystery, and I and it means you know that it's uh there's really no real violence and stuff like that. You can you can sit and read it at the fireplace or whatever. And I went to one of these conferences and I said, Oh, what's a cosy mystery? And they all stared at me. And I said, Please, please, I'm a novice here. So um there's a big discussion about uh outliners versus panthers. You might have heard this. And outliners sit down and And there's some amazing writers who, before they write the first word, have outlined pages and pages of outline and backstory and character development and cross references and everything else before they start writing. That ain't me. I'm a pantser. I just sit down and start writing. But I like to call myself a hybrid. Because even though I don't outline the story, I do have the framework. So for example, in Peace River, my wife, my mother grew up in Chicago, my wife's family lives near Chicago. I go up there a lot. And when I started writing Peace River, I wanted it to be not just in Florida. So I got the idea to start it in Chicago. So I had to learn all about the Civil War in Chicago, which there was stuff going on. Actually, there were a lot of Southern sympathizers in Chicago, believe it or not. And uh and then I had this journey, because I'm real big on road trips, and I had this journey that goes from Chicago down to Florida. And of course I had to throw in the Great Prison in Andersonville, Georgia. And uh and then I started thinking about it. You know, uh I heard a guy talking about an incident in which people who had been released from Thomasville, uh from uh Andersonville prison started walking to Jacksonville, skeletons, walking skeletons, because they had been starved and everything else. And that's what started it. And then I said, okay, I want to involve the cattle industry because that was real big in Florida. That was the reason Florida was sucked dried during the Civil War, because Texas and Louisiana and Arkansas got cut off at the Battle of Vicksburg. So the Confederacy took all the cattle from Florida, and at the end of the war, Florida was broke, and they encouraged tourism and you know the rest. Because history is not a bunch of rocks in the backyard, it's it's a bunch of dominoes. And so the Civil War leads all the way to 23 million people in Florida. So I said, I want to work in the cattle business, I want to work in Cuba because you cannot write about Florida without writing about Cuba. You just can't, especially down here. And before I knew it, I had a story. He's a Miami cop, Prohibition. Well, I already had the shootout in West Palm. I already had the Ashley Gang, which was the most famous group of gangsters in Florida history. They made Bonnie and Clyde look like librarians. Um I had the Gulfstream pirate who was a guy who killed a bunch of Coast Guardsmen on the high seas between the Bahamas and Florida and got hanged in Fort Lauderdale. I had those three guys already. And so then all I had to do was build a story around it, you know, fictionalize them a little, change the places a little bit, change the circumstances a little, and boom, I had a story. So that was book one. And then book two was about uh was kind of themed uh in the South Florida land boom, which we all know was just this crazy craze, which was gonna collapse and it did. Book three is about after the crash, and then book four is about World War II coming to Florida. And I had written so much about all four of those themes that I already had my you know I already had my storylines laid out.

SPEAKER_00 25:17

So the Nick Moran series has got four books in it?

SPEAKER_01 25:22

Yes, the Adventures of Nate Moran, four books. Nate. First one, Hypocrite's Row, comes out in uh February. Uh Treasure of Indian Key comes out next year, Wreck of the Peter Carey comes out in the year after that, and then Midnight Pass is the fourth one, comes out the year after that. They're coming out every February, once a year. It's very exciting.

SPEAKER_02 25:44

Okay, okay. So, all right, I I didn't understand that this is the first book that's coming out now, and then the others are in the future.

SPEAKER_00 25:54

Right.

SPEAKER_02 25:55

Yeah. So the title of the first book and when is that going to be available?

SPEAKER_01 26:01

It's supposed to come out in February of 2026. So pretty soon.

SPEAKER_02 26:06

Yes, yes. We're recording at the end of January, but I believe the this podcast will probably be released in April, something like that.

SPEAKER_01 26:15

So it would be but then the books, yeah. But then the book should be out, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 26:20

Yeah, yeah. So um uh Amazon, Barnes and Noble, where will it be?

SPEAKER_01 26:27

Amazon for sure. Um it's the it's level best books. They're a they're a publisher that that connects us to all the distributors, so it should be in every bookstore.

SPEAKER_02 26:39

Okay. Do you have a website?

SPEAKER_01 26:41

I do, ekfla.com.

SPEAKER_02 26:45

Oh yeah, I said uh that was in your bio. I said that at the beginning. ekfla.com, and I love that. It's so appropriate because you are all about Florida, and I love that.

SPEAKER_01 26:59

Exactly.

SPEAKER_02 27:00

Yes, so social media, um what are you where's your social media presence?

SPEAKER_01 27:06

You know, I am all over. I post stuff on Facebook, Twitter, or whatever it's called these days, Blue Sky, LinkedIn. You know, I I'm one of those people that just I believe in just throwing it out because I have no idea who's gonna see me where. So uh I'm doing a lot of posts for uh uh hypocrites throw. I've started a newsletter. So if you guys go to ekfla.com, you'll see the the newsletter. You can sign up and you'll get you know additional newsletters. I'm gonna do them as long as there's material. Uh I've booked already. Well, by the time this comes out in April, I'll have already done, I think, 10 talks in March and another five in April, mostly in South Florida, but um but I'm I'm working on the rest of the state. Uh I'm also part of the Florida Humanities Council, and I do a lot of talks for them. Unfortunately, um they have only so many topics that uh I can go through them, and prohibition isn't one of them. Uh but while I'm traveling around the state for them, I will also be doing some separate talks independently on prohibition. Uh so any group out there that wants me to come talk to their uh, you know, I don't want to come and talk about my book. Okay? I want to come and talk about prohibition and the book's about prohibition. So I I do two things. I plug my book and I also teach people about prohibition in Florida.

SPEAKER_02 28:40

That's great. When I teach uh the marketing classes for the publishing company, uh I emphasize find something in your fiction book that you can teach, talk about, engage people. That is beautiful. So you go around giving these talks on prohibition, and generally speaking, what are the venues? Where where are people located that you are targeting to you know for your for your talks?

SPEAKER_00 29:10

Historical societies, libraries, bookstores. I'm easy. Whoever will have me, basically.

SPEAKER_01 29:20

Right now I'm focusing on South Florida mainly because you know, as much as I'd love to do it, you know, to drive all the way to Tallahassee on my own nickel to talk about my book, it's a little tough. But uh I've got talks from scheduled for March, from Stewart all the way down to Southern Dade Counties. You know, a lot of stuff going on. And I'm doing Zoom calls like yours and with other podcasts and bloggers and uh Facebook groups, you know, really trying to get the word out uh because um I know that I have a niche. I understand that. Um, and that's fine. Uh like I said, I want to write about what I love. And if that means it limits my audience, you know, I would argue that this is a universal, these are universal stories that just happen to be about Florida. Uh, you know, uh Michael Connolly, who I know, uh writes about this cop in LA. Well, people in Seattle still read the book. They don't say, oh, it's in LA, I don't want to read it. Uh people write books about New York City. Well, other people read it. Um, so and and uh Lord knows that Florida is an interesting place that people like to read about. So uh I'm hoping that once they get the word that this is about a fascinating time, a wild. I mean, think about the movie The Untouchables. That was going on in Florida times 10. And so uh that's what I'm hoping will attract people.

SPEAKER_02 30:52

Yes, I'm this is so great. Uh this we didn't plan this conversation, but this is what I love when stuff like this comes up, because you have identified a topic of high interest. It was a crazy time in the whole United States, but especially in Florida, and people want to know about it, they want to hear the weird stuff, the stories. Um I um have spoken at a group called OSHA. Are you familiar with them? OSHA. It's an acronym, all capital letters. OSHA OSHA. It is a common.

SPEAKER_01 31:34

You're not talking about the occupational safety No, no, not that.

SPEAKER_02 31:38

Not the department, not the federal department of whatever. Um this is a um it's usually sponsored by a local university, and it is for older people to do continuing education on these various topics. I wish I could remember what the OSHA stands for.

SPEAKER_01 31:58

But yeah, down here, down here they have O L L I. OLLI. OLLI, okay. Lifelong learning. Um, and I do I do some stuff with Florida Atlantic University down here, not related to my books. Uh I do current events for them. Uh so I am familiar with the with it, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 32:17

Yes, and I've also spoken at um senior centers. Modern Maturity Center in Dover, Delaware, where I'm from. They had me come in and talk about my heritage, and it I'm from the Amish. So there were people there that were curious about the Amish because there's a lot of Amish living around that town. You know, it can be about anything. It can be about anything at all. And there will be people that say, you know, they'll get the list, the schedule, and they'll go, Oh, they're talking about, you know, prohibition. I'm gonna go see what that's about because uh retired people have time.

SPEAKER_01 32:54

Well, one of the things I tell people is I say, you know, everybody saw the movie Scarface, and everybody remembers the cocaine cowboys. And here's a really important thing that you have to remember. During the drug wars, not everybody liked drugs. Okay, and there were different kinds of drugs. Some people were like, Yeah, I do a little pot, but I would never do cocaine, I would never do heroin for Pete's sake. Um, and so even the people who smoked a joint every once in a while were not big fans of the drug dealers. They said, Yeah, you know, I have to buy, but I don't like these guys, they're not nice guys. It was different during prohibition because what was prohibited was alcohol. And the vast majority of Americans liked their alcohol. Far more people in America drank alcohol in the twenties than smoked marijuana in the 70s. And so when the majority of the people were being denied something, it was a different animal. Everybody in the 70s knew that the drug dealers were bad dudes. Even if you bought your pot for them, you knew you were buying them from bad dudes and you felt uncomfortable about it. That wasn't the case in the twenties. The guys who brought in the booze were heroes. They were antiheroes, but they were heroes. And the cops who were trying to keep people's alcohol from them were the jack booted thugs of their time. The cops were the bad guys. There's never been anything like it in the history of America. That wasn't the case during the cocaine wars, but it was in the twenties, and it happened for thirteen years prohibition lasted. And that's how people like the character in my book got shot by a run runner, and the guy walked on a technicality, and people cheered him. You didn't have that during the drug wars. It was a different time.

SPEAKER_02 34:55

Yeah, for sure. I mean, old grandmothers were making alcohol. Everybody was doing it in their basement. Well, it alcohol isn't just for parties, it's for for cooking purposes and medicinal purposes and all kinds of different things that uh, you know, we use it for it It was a terrifying time because moonshiners were making bad moonshine because they weren't experts at it, and they were selling it to people who died.

SPEAKER_01 35:26

Uh there were uh cops all over America who were on the take. And uh it was just a terri and then in in South Florida and in Florida, you combined that with the the land boom and the fact that Florida's population exploded in the 20s. It went from this little backwater to this huge place, and you put that all together, and it's just really the I think the wildest time in the history of Florida. Really, I really do.

SPEAKER_02 36:02

Hmm. Yes, very interesting. Well, I'm excited about picking up your book, Elliot. It sounds fascinating, yeah, really. Um, well, thank you so much for being with us today. Is there anything else you'd like to add if someone is struggling with their writing or anything at all?

SPEAKER_01 36:21

Well, I will say one thing, and that is that you know, you hear every year, you're year in and year out, you hear about the demise of books.

SPEAKER_00 36:30

Nobody's reading books anymore. People are still reading books. Kindle came out, the ebooks.

SPEAKER_01 36:40

People said, Oh, you know, I I loved it, because all of a sudden people who wouldn't pick up a physical book would pick up an e-book. And frankly, I don't care if you read a book through a pill. You know, I want people reading books. And everybody said, Oh, people are on their cell phones now, the today's generation, they're on their cell phones, they have an attention span of 90 seconds, they're not going to sit down and write a book. And there are, I've talked to a lot of people, even people from my generation, who say, Well, I haven't read a book in 30 years. And I said, Well, why don't you? You might enjoy it. Um, and so I I bel I believe that reports of the death of books are greatly exaggerated. But I do believe that not enough people are reading books. And I'm gonna keep writing them. Libraries are holy ground. Uh and uh, you know, any gr any community that's not putting money towards their library, have them come see me.

SPEAKER_02 37:36

Yes, yes, absolutely. I love my local library here in Live Oak. It's a wonderful place. So thank you so much, Elliot, for being with us today.

SPEAKER_01 37:46

Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.

SPEAKER_02 37:49

And thank you for being with us today. Thanks for pulling up a chair with us. See you next time.