Meet the Author Monday: Patrick Joseph Healy

It’s Meet the Author Monday! Each week we meet a new author and get to know a little about them, their writing process, publishing experience, and tips for other writers. Today we’re talking to Patrick Joseph Healy, author of “Please, Let Me Save You“.

About Patrick Joseph Healy:

Patrick Joseph Healy is the author of Please, Let Me Save You, and the acclaimed short story “Space Princess“, published by Platform Comics. In the last fifteen years, he has written for comics, television commercials, and digital marketing. He holds a B.A. in Psychology from San Diego State University, and studied writing and cinema at Santa Monica College.

Patrick was drawn to psychology because of his own neurodiversity, and his intense interest in how the human mind works. He studied cinema in pursuit of his love for storytelling, an investment that informs his narratives and descriptions.

Patrick was born and raised in San Diego, California, where he now lives with his wife, daughter, and their three cats.

About Please, Let Me Save You:

The world is ending. Who will save you?

On October 30th, 2020, Americans remembered the year for its pandemic, people in the streets, toilet paper shortages…

For Timothy, an independent movie theater owner, it was the year the state shut down his business, costing his family their home. For Denise, it was when she discovered her husband was about to run out on her and their two kids. For Yolanda, 2020 was when she could no longer afford to pay for her father’s healthcare.

But on October 31st, an unprovoked nuclear attack replaces those painful memories with a wide-awake nightmare.

Now, Timothy finds himself stranded on the highway with his family, trying to escape nuclear fallout as racial violence erupts on the roads around them. Denise must evacuate her family (including her rat bastard two-timing husband) through California as the state is consumed by wildfires.

And Yolanda? She doesn’t realize it, but she’s being targeted by a mysterious stranger capable of bending her to his will. Who is this mysterious stranger?

He’s the person having the worst day of all.

You see, that Halloween is when Brandon discovers every time he dies, he finds himself exactly where he was thirty minutes earlier. Too bad he’s at ground zero of the nuclear apocalypse. Every thirty minutes, he’s back in Venice Beach with a nuclear bomb about to detonate above Century City. There are no basements in Los Angeles. People don’t have bomb shelters. It took over a hundred thousand times stuck in this loop, but he’s checked. No matter what happens, when the bomb falls, everything is obliterated, and he’s forced to start over. But in this endless hell, he masters time’s series of events and learns to hypnotize people so he may subdue their will. Will these dark powers allow him to escape the time loop?

And what will happen to Yolanda, Denise, and Timothy if he does?

Author Interview with Patrick Joseph Healy:

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How much ‘world building’ takes place before you start writing?

I tell people I spent five years writing Please, Let Me Save You, but the first year was spent not just outlining the book, but outlining every book in the series. I detailed every chapter, every character, I drew scenes where I could visualize them, and then I created a timeline and mapped the story beats out. Each book in the series is a collection of interconnected stories, so I had to map beats for a three-act structure for the series, each individual story, and each individual chapter. I created backstories that begin before the development of our solar system and character nuances that I had to cut from the book because it was too expository. This wasn’t how a I spent a few hours each month, but I spent hours and hours every day, late into the night and early in the morning because all these separate stories have to inform the others in someway. This is a product of my monotropism, which is common in autism. So the answer to how much world-building did I do is “until I was bursting with confidence that everything was straight in my brain”, and that took a long time.

How many unpublished and half-finished books do you have?

Well, when I was in my teens I wrote a book series called Under Fire. It’s all over the place and was born from my maladaptive daydreaming, so I don’t really consider it but I definitely planned it all out and spent years writing it to completion. However, since then, I wrote my Ascension series, and solo books The Best, Last Invisible Man, Secret Identity, and We Begin at the End. These books were all completed. Why have you never heard of them? Well, I would shop them to one or two agents, feel bad about myself and give up.

Why would I give up? I couldn’t have told you back then, but it was like I would spend months or years working on a project, and a darkness would come and swallow it up and I would forget all about it and move on with my life. This made me doubt myself even more, because I knew I was a good writer with lots of stories to tell, but I didn’t think I could ever be published. As I got older, I learned that was pretty typical of people with ADHD, who often struggle with their self-esteem and negative narratives. It’s a form of neurological overstimulation. So when I would submit a book I was proud of only to get a boiler plate response from an agent, I would spiral into a sense of worthlessness and helplessness. My brain became overwhelmed with negative thinking, painful memories, and it was easier for my mind to stop thinking about things that brought those things into my consciousness to begin with. This is a manifestation of my Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria. Being neuro divergent comes with a lot of these nuances. The byproduct was that I would eventually forget about my book, usually as I found inspiration for something else that I would also later forget.

But this is the reason I started my B+ series on YouTube (pronounced “Be Postive”), because I knew there were a lot of creatives who were struggling with what I was dealing with, whether it was being neuro divergent, a lack of self-confidence, or just a lack of self-love. I started making videos telling people the things I needed to hear or wanted someone to say to me because I was hoping maybe I would accept those things and grow past the impediment.

Do you have any new series planned?

I do have a new series planned. In fact, Please, Let Me Save You is going to be the first installment in the Agony series. I love this first book, but the truth was I had to make myself write it because I so excited to get to the other books in the series but they are so fantastic that I felt that if you didn’t ground the reader with the first book, where our characters begin in a world that we know and relate to, it was never going to deliver the same impact. The entire series is about the end of the world, seeking to challenge the notion that world could end in a flash. So, the first book is what we usually think of as the end of the world. I wanted it to be a reflection of the climate crisis, and nuclear war was the fastest way to reach the most visible threats of global warming. But the next two books focus on the four years that follow leading to the actual end of life on earth. The next book, the title of which oscillates between “Follow Me” and “Pikadon”, is the end of the world through the eyes of mortals (or the characters we meet in Please, Let Me Save You) whereas the third book is through the eyes of gods, or the characters we meet who connect more closely to Brandon’s story and experience of reality. I like to describe the series as “Wizard of Oz” meets “Hellraiser”, and while each book is connected and builds upon the last, they are very, very different.

What kind of research do you do, and how long do you spend researching before beginning a book?

I have done a lot of research for my various books. Please, Let Me Save You features not just nuclear explosions, but tornadoes, alternate realities, acid or “black” rain, and I wanted to know as an author and as the creator of this universe, that I understood these things enough to write them in a way that an informed reader would be benefited by their knowledge and not frustrated by it.

Brandon, who dies countless time in the nuclear attack on Los Angeles, has the wherewithall as a character to essentially bring readers through the explosion, through death, and out the other side. So for a long time, in Chapters 4 and 8, there were detailed descriptions not just about how the explosion would work on the atomic level, or how it would be experienced by an individual, but why it triggered a quantum mechanical response. In this instance, why the energy was causing protons and electrons to vibrate and superposition in a new universe. For me, how long was spent researching these things was determined by how soon I could explain it to the people around me in a way that made sense to them.

My wife also has ADHD and sometimes when I’m sharing my big ideas, they become overwhelming and hard for her to track. But if I can explain why black rain falls from the sky after a nuclear explosion in a way that she will look at me like, “No, duh, tell me something that isn’t obvious…” then I know I’ve researched the subject enough.

Do you read your book reviews? How do you deal with bad or good ones?

I do read my book reviews, and I love them. For a very long time, my Rejection Sensitive Dsyphoria would make that very difficult, because I would focus on the negative and maybe give it too much space in my brain. With Please, Let Me Save You, I wrote and rewrote the book for about four years. Many, many people read it in that time and many, many people gave me criticism. I had maybe ten beta readers in the last year alone. The product of all that is when I read a negative review, or a reviewer is complaining about something, I just nod and think, “Yes, well, I did that for a reason. I respect that you don’t enjoy it.”

Because that’s life. The greatest works of art are open to criticism.

One reviewer said my villains needed a motivation that amounted to more than “mustache-twirling”. I try to respond to every review, and I simply told him I like the “mustache-twirling” descriptor. The villains in the book are not humanized because it’s not their story. It’s not a story about whether bad people will triumph. It’s a story about whether or not our humanized characters will survive the overwhelming circumstance. Taking time to try to humanize vile characters, to me, denigrates our main characters who don’t know the backstory of these menacing individuals. It puts good and evil on equal footing. Again, if this were a story about good and evil, I would see that as a failing on my part as a writer. But no one watched Deliverance and said, “Now, give me three good things about the guy who says ‘Squeal like pig…’” Not every story is supposed to do that.

How many plot ideas are just waiting to be written? Can you tell us about one?

I have two ideas I would love to spend more time with if I weren’t focused on Please, Let Me Save You and the Agony series. One is called Thoughts Continue, which told through the experience of a character experiencing brain death. In it, memories and fantasies surround the character, as he tries to keep his mind active in the hopes that an EMT will find him and revive him. The main character can no longer tell what really happened and what he imagined, and so he spends the book (and the final moments of his life) discovering what was truly important to him.

The other is a series called Savage Garden, with the premise being the last traces of humanity all live on a ship floating through deep space. When the ship has to be evacuated, two teenage couples land on a moon at the edge of the universe. Their culture was deeply religious and they were each assigned to their procreative partners, but on this moon with no parental or religious supervision, they’re free to explore life, love, and sex unsupervised. It deals a lot with how culture informs our expectations of romance and intimacy, and compares it to the astro-biological discoveries the characters make in this cosmic wilderness.

What period of your life do you find you write about most often? (child, teenager, young adult)

When I was in college, I got my girlfriend pregnant and she gave birth to the most amazing person in the world, and a blessing I strive to be worthy of. In Please, Let Me Save You and the Agony series as a whole, pregnancy and abortion are recurrent themes in each of the stories. The main character from Thoughts Continue also got his girlfriend pregnant (in high school) and he spends a lot of time remembering the moments around that and the decisions that followed, how they shaped his life for the better or worse.

This all harkens back not just to an important experience in my life, but a common experience of men and women and my desire to de-stigmatize unplanned pregnancies, to give visibility to the discussion of abortion, which is not only about the health and prosperity of women, but in Judiasm, is something that’s accepted. Obviously, there are Christians who also accept and support abortion. But part of Agony’s exploration of the end of the world is how our cultural norms and ethnocentrism fails us when society requires rapid and drastic change. Without that unintended pregnancy experience in college, a lot of my work would be very different.

What were the key challenges you faced when writing Please, Let Me Save You?

The biggest challenge in writing this book was creating an experience people would enjoy. I’ve pitched my book to lots of people, and even casual listeners have stepped in and said, “I would never read your book but it sounds fascinating.” They would never read the book because nuclear annihilation is so central to the premise. Particularly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and there were renewed threats of nuclear escalation, people just didn’t want to read it. My wife only recently read the book because the topic made her so anxious. Now, she read it and ended up loving it, but there’s this tremendous hurdle I have to get over to even get people open to reading about the topic. Early drafts of the book were also pretty bleak.

The original ending was very similar to controversal conclusion of The Grapes of Wrath, a book that deeply inspired me when writing this first installment. In my mind, this ending was a glimpse of hope in overwhelming circumstances, and if people accepted it from Steinbeck, then who was to say my ending was anything short of inspired? The answer to that question was “the beta readers”.

Part of the reason writing this book took four years instead of two was at one point, I had to walk away and imagine what I could do with the ending that didn’t feel like I was breaking from the outline or existing content of the book but was tonally antithetical to what I had. Eventually what I did was move a big Book Three reveal to the end of Book One, and the result was tons of enthusiasm from my readers. But I couldn’t have done that any faster because part of the problem for me was, I was outlining and imagining it from a place of despair and cataclysmic dread.

I essentially had to walk away long enough to change who I was in order to see the opportunity for hope and heroism. If you have ever seen the movie Aliens, imagine Ripley never gets in the power loader and goes toe-to-toe with the queen alien. That’s what the book was like for a long time until I was able to change enough as a person to be the writer who could deliver that kind of excitement.

Do you write listening to music? If so, what music inspired or accompanied this current book?

I absolutely listen to music when writing. Creating playlists was even part of the first year of outlining and I already have several for books that are still unwritten. Wojciech Kilar’s soundtrack to Bram Stoker’s Dracula was central in writing the first story of Please, Let Me Save You. It’s dramatic, dark, and powerful. But during the period where I realized I needed to elevate the book out of the darkness, I was listening to a lot of music by the rapper Prof. His song “Motel Room” had absolutely nothing to do with my book, but as I listened to it, I was reminded of how often music in the 90’s would be used to promote a a movie it was tonally different from. To refer again to Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the credits play to Annie Lennox’s
“Love Song for a Vampire”. Batman (1989) ends with Prince singing “The Arms of Orion”. And Batman Forever had the unforgettable, “Kiss From a Rose” by Seal. None of these songs matched their films at all, and yet I remembered them so vividly.

I went back and rewrote much of the relationship between Brandon and Penelope to meet the vibe of “Motel Room”. It is not a song about surviving, but it is a song about sex and love and being extremely passionate about things that maybe don’t require you to be. One of the questions I heard early on from beta readers was they didn’t understand why Brandon keeps risking his life to save a woman who may just break up with him, anyway. “Motel Room” was my emotional answer to that, that it’s not about what you would logically do, it’s about what you would emotionally do in the moment so I set out to meet that song’s level of passion.

Music is such an essential part to the story and I am really eager to share that, as well. Anyone would like to discover what music informed which stories and moments can discover that by visiting this page.

Do you hide any secrets in your books that only a few people will find?

I do hide secrets in my book. The ending to Book Three in the Agony series is foreshadowed in the first installment, Please, Let Me Save You. I asked all my readers about it and no one caught on to it. In fact, this first book in many ways largely is intended to introduce readers to this very strange world they’re about to enter. One of the main characters, Brandon Hensgens, discovers every time he dies he ends up exactly where he was thirty minutes earlier. A lot of readers really got into that, some people took issue with the fact that I don’t break fourth wall and speak to directly to the reader and say, “This is what’s happening and why, these are the rules…”

I have reasons and I have rules, certainly, but Brandon’s story and introduction is actually intended to demonstrate these rules because in the next book we meet characters infinitely more powerful than he is. If I began with those characters, they wouldn’t seem as wondrous because they would be the status quo. But if you know Brandon, how his powers work and what he does with them, in the next book you are able to appreciate how truly cosmic the story is about to become and it’s not something you can appreciate from the first book alone.