[00:00:00] Jane: Welcome to Historical Happy Hour, the podcast that explores new and exciting historical fiction novels. I’m your host, Jane Healey, and in today’s episode, we welcome New York Times bestselling author Tosca Lee to discuss her latest novel, The Long March Home, which was co authored with bestselling author Marcus Brotherton.
[00:00:20] Jane: Welcome, Tosca. Thank you so much for coming on. Thank you so much for having me. So I’m going to give you a quick, do a quick bio about you and then I will dive right into questions about this really amazing book which I loved. So thank you. Tosca Lee is the award winning New York Times bestselling author of 12 novels, including The Line Between The Legend of Sheba and Iscariot.
Her work has been translated into 17 languages and been optioned for TV and film. She is the recipient of three International Book Awards, Killer Nashville, Silver Falchion, is that ECPA Book of the Year, and the Nebraska Book Award, and has finaled for numerous author, numerous others. Again, welcome, thank you so much for coming on.
Thank you, thanks for having me, and hi everybody. Thank you everyone remember to put in the comments where you’re zooming in from, what you’re reading so talk to me about The Long March Home, the premise for this novel which you co authored. Yeah, you came up with it.
[00:01:20] Tosca: That’s a story in and of itself.
So this book was written with my friend Marcus Brotherton and Marcus wrote to me about six years ago and said, Hey, I’ve had this back burner project. And Marcus is probably best known for his World War Two nonfiction. So he’s interviewed the Band of Brothers. He has many books about these heroes of World War Two.
And he said, I’ve been working on this this book idea for World War II in the Philippines. And I’d like to have a coauthor and would you like to join me? And I said, I have to be honest. I don’t know a lot about World War II in the Philippines. A lot of people actually don’t. And that’s what intrigued me because, you hear about the European theater.
You don’t hear as much about the Pacific. And so I said, yeah, let’s do it. I had two more books on a contract left to do so I was finishing those, and then turned to this project and Marcus had it on his desk in between projects for seven years already. And I added five years to the process by the time I researched and everything and this is a 12 year project, actually between the two of us.
And, oh, I see Omaha, Nebraska. Sorry. Oh, and a friend of Judith Barnes. Oh, who’s a friend we just lost. Hello, everybody. So the Long March Home is the story of three best friends from Mobile, Alabama. And they enlist in the Army in 1941 in September. And they are stationed in the Philippines with the 31st Infantry.
And at first life just seems, ideal. It’s just, it’s beautiful. The Philippines is great back then. It was called Manila was called the Pearl of the Orient. The dollar went far. It was, you would drill in the morning and it was hot in the afternoon, so you could take the afternoon off and do something else.
The guys would pull a few dollars together. They would pay locals to help them with their KP and their laundry and all this other stuff. And so life was pretty awesome until the morning over there of December. Because what I didn’t know when I said yes to this project, but very quickly learned is that 10 hours after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the Philippines was bombed and plunged into war.
And so it’s the story of three best friends as they go from this kind of life of paradise to sudden war in the Philippines. And it’s a war of logistics and where they are outmanned, outgunned, out provisioned. And they fight until April of 1942. By which time the Allied forces the local Filipino soldiers and the American soldiers are hungry, starving, living on quarter rations.
If they, if that with malaria and dysentery and. The surrender happens in April of 1942, and for those who haven’t made it that long, it is just the beginning of a terrible chapter in history that begins with the infamous Bataan Death March. And this is 60 miles these POWs, about 70 some thousand of them, were marched about 60 miles over six days, without food, water, they weren’t allowed to stop, if you stopped you were you were bayoneted or shot, and they were marched all the way to Camp O’Donnell.
And for those who had survived the war and for those who survived the march, it was the beginning of nearly four years of life as a POW. And it’s the story of friendship, it’s the story of brotherhood, it’s the story of hope. And and this book does have a dual timeline. So every few chapters we go back in time to a simpler, nostalgic, less complicated time when these guys are growing up as kids and doing the things kids do.
So we get a chance to step back from the war, but also then we understand better why it’s so imperative that all three of them survived together. So that is the story of how the book came to be. And the story also of of the book itself.
[00:05:21] Jane: Amazing. Amazing. Thank you. I always ask about research cause I am I love research.
It’s one of my favorite parts of the writing process and the historical detail in your story was so incredible. It almost felt like I was reading a memoir at times and I want to read for everyone. This is from your author notes in the back. It’s from a book that you, one of your source books called Death March by Donald Knox, the Bataan men, most in their late teens or early twenties, when the war began, entered a wilderness that had no rules.
What a prisoner did to stay alive one day might cause his death the next. There were no maps to show a prisoner how to get from sunup to sundown alive. Every emotional and physical path had to be explored afresh each day. Men who did so successfully lived. Those who didn’t died. Talk about the extensive research that you clearly did for this story and if there was any surprises along the way that you discovered.
[00:06:16] Tosca: So what you, that part you read is the part that was, is so difficult because just as you said, what got you through one day was not guaranteed to get you through another because the rules were constantly changing. The best research and the best detail came from survivor accounts. And those are so important because so many of those who did survive to go home never spoke of their experiences.
And this is one of those rare. This book has been a completely different experience for me because when I go out and I talk about it I have people who tell me afterwards, my, my father, my grandfather, my uncle a friend of ours who lived down the street worked, served in the Philippines or were in the Death March or were POWs in the Pacific and so rarely did they ever speak.
So when they did, it was often later in life and those. Those few times that these survivors sat down and write, wrote memoirs those details are so incredibly precious and I’ll, one of the most one of the most detailed and vivid memoirs I ever read was by a guy named Joe Johnson, who was 14 when he enlisted, he lied about his age.
14. And so by the time that the allied surrender came in April of 42, he was 15. So he was a POW at 15. And then by the time he survived POW life and the war ended and he got home, he was 19 years old. And. The detail in his memoir was absolutely incredible from the bougainvillea that grew outside the big bay windows of the barracks in the old city of Manila, the old Spanish part of the city in Manila, to the Parker rolls and roast beef that they were served in the mess hall was just incredibly helpful and vivid, for us.
So thank goodness for those and for the oral accounts and the projects like Don Knox’s Death March book, which is a fabulous resource as well.
[00:08:16] Jane: Yeah. That’s unbelievable about the 14 year old. I can’t even imagine like a baby. That’s, it gave me chills when you said that, cause one of the characters in the book is quite young, who he enlists without them knowing.
And I want to talk about the three main characters. So it’s told from the perspective of Jimmy. And his two best friends, Billy and Hank, and they all joined up and ended up in the Philippines together. I’ve read about the nurses in the Philippines during World War II. I’ve never read about from the perspective of the POWs themselves.
And so talk about how you came up with the three main characters and were they based on Any direct, directly based on any of the POWs you learned about in your research, or were they composites?
[00:09:00] Tosca: They were a composite and Jimmy is our main character, and he’s the everyman. He’s not as cool as Hank, and, Hank is the bad boy best friend.
Billy’s kind of the younger brother, jokester, character. So they’re all different, but Jimmy’s kind of just your average guy. He’s your everyman, but. Everything that happens to these three characters. happened to somebody, and there is, there’s, and this is not a spoiler, and I won’t say who it’s, who this happens to, but one of the guys is debriefed towards the end and tells the story of what’s been going on, and he’s told, son, you’re one lie away from a court martial because nobody could have survived all that.
And when you ask, what’s the most surprising thing about the research? Honestly, the most surprising thing is that anyone survived because it was so brutal. It was just like one chapter after horrible thing. And it is incredible that anyone came home and those who did come home were often never the same.
We didn’t have, you PTSD. It was shell shock or survivor’s remorse. And those. Those who came home were very different people. And often, like I said, never spoke about it, but yeah, everything that happened to them actually happened to somebody.
[00:10:14] Jane: It’s, it is unbelievable because you read, everything they go through in the story from the march to, to the camps to having to go on missions outside of the camps, you think there’s no way that anyone could really get through all of this and come back on the other side it’s just, it’s shocking and I want it and you don’t shy away.
From the horrors of it. And I was one I wanted to ask about, you, you really go into detail about what they went through. And I think, which I think is so important. And you really paint a picture of some of these things that they survived. And part of the reason they survived is because their friendship.
But I noticed that you balance out these very intense war scenes with these flashbacks from home when times were dark. Simpler and there’s crushes and there’s dances and it was that intentional kind of the give readers a breather every once in a while
[00:11:04] Tosca: much so absolutely and in fact we had more detail about what they were going through and we actually pulled back a little bit and it would have been absolutely historically accurate to keep it but you know there’s a fine line you know as you know between wanting to be historically accurate and not wanting to traumatize your reader And so we wanted to put readers, we wanted to seat them in this immersive experience and put them on the forefront of what’s going on, but we didn’t want to traumatize them.
And that’s another reason why we have that other storyline so that when we go back in time, we can see these kids doing, goofy things that kids do, falling in love, playing jokes on each other. And it is just a chance to breathe. Before we go back to the reality of how are these guys going to survive?
[00:11:52] Jane: Yeah, and it worked really well. Did you find it difficult to write some of these particularly brutal scenes in the book? Did you ever have a hard time yourself writing them or is that something you’re a pro at this? You’ve been doing this a while.
[00:12:05] Tosca: It was hard to read about it the first time like reading and learning it is actually I think harder than after you’ve digested it and now you’re trying to figure out just how to portray it on paper.
Reading it for the first time because you’re not prepared for what you’re about to read. to ingest, as you’re researching this. And I think the other thing is, we have twins and our twins were the ages of these characters as, I, as I was working on my end of the book, as we were, as I was going through this the last, several years, my they’re 20 now, but at the time they were 14, 15, 16.
And so they’re the same age as these guys. And It was unthinkable for me to think of our twins being put in these situations.
[00:12:50] Jane: Unthinkable. And every time, I’ve written a couple World War II novels as well, and I, you realize they were just babies. They were babies, boys going over there. I have a different perspective as a parent than I did, years ago.
It’s just unbelievable that any of them survived and went through what they went through and then came home and lived a life like that is just right. Yeah, I want to talk about Claire too because she’s the fourth friend in the group. She’s the older sister Billy. She’s a love interest and she’s going through her own trials at home.
Was Claire always a part of the story or was that something that did she come along later?
[00:13:30] Tosca: She was always a part of the story. She wasn’t always Billy’s sister. But so Claire is, and one thing I love about how they did this cover is you’ve got the three best friends on the front, but then we see a little bit, a hint of Claire on the back, which is, I thought that was so cool how they did that.
[00:13:48] Jane: I love
[00:13:48] Tosca: that. She wasn’t always Billy’s big sister, but she became Billy’s big sister as we were writing and rewriting, and she is Jimmy’s love interest and Hank’s too.
[00:14:01] Jane: No spoilers,
[00:14:02] Tosca: but
[00:14:03] Jane: yeah. I love another thing I enjoyed about the story, I love it when in historical fiction, you learn about historical figures that you didn’t know about before, so can you tell me And tell everyone a little bit about Phillipa Kulala.
Am I pronouncing that correctly? Yeah. Yeah. Great.
[00:14:21] Tosca: Yeah. Go ahead. Yeah. She’s a freedom fighter. She was a Filipina. She was a a freedom fighter. And so this was. This was not unheard of in the Philippines because the men were all fighting. And so often women had to take it upon themselves to lead these guerrilla groups.
And Filippa Kuala was a real historical person and she makes an appearance and she’s fighting, bands of Japanese who are on the island there and fighting to protect her homeland. And the boys encounter her. And she is not a woman you want to mess with. And She’s really fascinating.
And and it’s so interesting because everybody’s curious about her and we get so many questions about her, but yeah, she’s a fascinating character for sure.
[00:15:04] Jane: Yeah, totally fascinating. So that was a really interesting person to learn about. And I loved how you weaved her into the story. I have a bunch of writing related questions, like process questions that I always ask.
The first one is, how do you strike a balance between fact and fiction in your story, and are there any strict rules that you adhere to overall?
[00:15:29] Tosca: I really try to keep the anchors of historical details and timelines and all that stuff straight. That’s important to me. I’ve established a reputation for my research and I really, want to, honor that.
I’m really paranoid about getting stuff wrong. And we’re not infallible, right? As, as writers, we just do our best. But I think the more historically accurate it is, the better the suspension of disbelief. That’s really important to me as far as like the Backstories and, the personal stories, that’s all fair game for me.
My, my big thing is it has to be historically accurate. And then it has to be accurate to human nature because history changes, but people don’t, right? And all of our hopes and dreams and things like that, they’re really not that different. Yeah, it just has to ring true. Humanity wise,
[00:16:19] Jane: yeah, no, that’s a great point.
[00:16:21] Tosca: Yeah. The crazy thing is real life is always stranger than fiction. Yes. Yeah. And, so when you’re researching, there’s always this weird oddball stuff where you’re like, what? And then it’s can I even put this in there? Because nobody will believe this, right? Life is weirder.
[00:16:36] Jane: Life is weirder. And yeah, you’re right. It’s even like when they were describing at the end of the war what they went through and people were like, there’s no way possible that you could have lived through that. Yeah. Yeah. It’s incredible. Yeah. What was it like? You, this is not the first time you coauthored a book.
And so what’s, what is that process like? And do you have, do you enjoy doing that more or do you enjoy writing on your own more?
[00:17:00] Tosca: It’s totally its own animal. So it’s. Co authoring, I find, often takes longer than it would take to write a book on your own,
[00:17:11] Jane: because
[00:17:12] Tosca: there’s so much time spent communicating.
The process both times was very different. The first time I co authored a trilogy with Ted Decker and we built that series from the ground up. And so we plotted it from the ground up and then we plotted the chapters and then we took turns taking the lead on writing the rough draft with Marcus.
Marcus had a draft and this is really rare. You probably won’t hear about this very often from partnerships, but he actually just said, here you go, take my baby and do with it. What you will. And I said, Okay, and so I did. I pulled it apart. I added I took away moved stuff around and and I really appreciated that because it showed a great deal of trust for me.
I will say that when you write with male co authors. And I found this both times, oftentimes somebody, somebody will say, Oh, it’s so nice to see so and so bringing the action and Tosca bringing the romance and the feels and the emotion. And I’m like no I don’t do romance. And for me, it’s a little painful, I don’t write the kissing scenes.
I write the war and the other things, but there’s a weird kind of funny assumption that the women write this and men write this. And whenever I see a review like that, I just yeah. Whatever.
[00:18:35] Jane: Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Okay, so you mentioned plotting, and so I always ask this question, are you a plotter or do you write from the, as a pantser, writing from the seat of your pants and it sounds like you’re very much a plotter.
Is that true for all your projects or it depends?
[00:18:51] Tosca: I have tried to pants and it has been unsuccessful. I’ve learned, I knew that from the get go. When I wrote The Line Between, which was one of my thrillers, I thought that I could pounce it, and that was my 10th novel, and I just made a big mess, and I, it ended up taking a lot of time to pull it apart, and.
Figure it out and line it up and put it back together. So I am a plotter not like super detailed, but I need something, or I’ll just go off in the weeds, somewhere, . And I have friends who are cancers and I keep thinking, oh, maybe I can be like them, but nope, yeah,
[00:19:26] Jane: I know. I know very well.
I don’t know how they do. I don’t know. Are you a plot or two? I am. I don’t know how they, how to do it without a math. It’s too terrifying. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And like you said about the weeds, I’d just be, I feel like I’d be flailing around for too long and wasting time. I’d be
[00:19:41] Tosca: flailing off on Mars or something.
And then I wasted so much time the time I did that. And actually the sequel was delayed because I had, it took me so long to go in and fix it.
[00:19:51] Jane: Oh, geez. Yeah. Yeah. So you have to try though. Lesson learned, right? Yeah. I won’t try that again for a while. So you’ve written, another thing I find so fascinating, you’ve written in all different genres like mystery thrillers, supernatural, historical fiction how is writing historical fiction different from the other genres you’ve written in and do you have a favorite?
Favorite genre,
[00:20:15] Tosca: In some ways, I don’t think of it as very different because to me, I’m just trying to tell a story that will ultimately keep a reader up at night. And that’s my one goal. I want to keep you as a reader from going to sleep. That’s big. And because that’s what we all want in a great book.
We all want a book that we don’t dare put down. And that we call into work sick for the next day, but I love all the genres when I wrote the progeny, which was one of my thrillers. And when I read the line between, I really wanted to see how much I could amp the story up. And in the second book, it was my goal to amp it up even more to take the sequel and speed it up even more.
historical. Sometimes historicals paste a little differently because, we have to, get some more information in there. But I really love keeping the stakes high. I really love putting things in context. And I don’t know, every genre is a kind of a fun challenge. And I love reading across different genres.
So I think that’s why it’s fun to write across different ones.
[00:21:20] Jane: Very cool. I know my agent hates
[00:21:23] Tosca: it.
[00:21:24] Jane: I was gonna say, yeah, because the agents like to put you in a box. So that’s
[00:21:28] Tosca: my agent at the time was like, could you just stay in one or two lanes,
[00:21:34] Jane: right? But it’s working for you. So good for you.
That’s amazing. I find it inspiring. I know we have aspiring authors in the audience. And now, like I said, you’re a pro. You’ve published a dozen books. What is the best advice you can give them about writing and getting published? Which are very, two very different things. Yeah.
[00:21:56] Tosca: I’d say don’t worry about the publishing part until you’ve done the writing part, especially if you’re writing fiction.
And I tell this to people all the time because it’s so easy to get ahead and think, how do I write to the market or how do I market or how do I get a publisher? How do I get an agent? It’s you really can’t until you have a story. And by the time you have that in a, even if it’s in a few months, the whole publishing world is going to change between now and then.
So don’t waste your time worrying about the publishing part yet. Just spend your time writing the best story that you can write. And my best advice for that part, for the writing, is to write as though no one will ever read it. And the reason I say that is because it takes all the pressure off. You don’t worry about that.
You’re not scared about your mom or your Shrink or whatever, reading it, you don’t think about all that stuff, just, this is the advice I have to give myself too, because I get in my head, I’m working on a new one now. And I get in my head and I get really bunched up about it.
And at the end of the day, you have to go and you have to have fun spending that, that yarn. And if you have a good time, other people are going to have a good time too. Then you go worry about polishing it, and then you worry about all that stuff.
[00:23:09] Jane: That is excellent advice. As you were saying, and I’m like, I have to remind myself of that every day, like, when I’m drafting a first draft No one is going to see this one.
It’s okay if it’s like terrible. I make notes to myself. This paragraph is terrible. I’ll fix it later. No one’s going to read it yet. So yeah, it is. Yeah, it’s a mind game. I think when you’re trying to get that first draft out. Yeah.
[00:23:30] Tosca: Completely. And I think it becomes harder with each successive book.
So if you’re not published yet, you’re still in this really cool protected space because you’re not out there. You’re not having to play super mind games with yourself because you already have a contract. You’re take advantage of that. And I always say right with all the Moxie that you can, because you’re setting the bar for how much Moxie you’re going to, try to write with next time.
[00:23:54] Jane: Yes. Yeah. Also excellent advice. I totally agree. I stole this question from another podcast I was listening to because I really liked it. Was there a book that you read growing up that made you think, I want to do that. I want to write stories. I want to be a novelist.
[00:24:09] Tosca: I, this is like a long time ago.
I read a book when I was a teenager called clan of the cave bear. Oh and that’s, clan
And that book so inspired me because the depth of detail, so the clan of capers about a young woman growing up in like prehistoric times.
[00:24:26] Jane: And
[00:24:27] Tosca: coming up with prehistoric tools and in living with early, early groups of early man. And the research was so incredible, and the human relational part was so incredible.
It wasn’t dry at all. It was very relational. And that book actually really inspired, I wrote a book about Eve as in Adam and Eve and called Hava. And that, that, Clan of the Cave Bear really inspired me in the writing of Eve. And just, I think it just made an indelible mark on me. Because it was so in depth.
Yeah. And that was, like I said, in the 80s.
[00:25:03] Jane: It was really, and that was a kind of a huge book like that kind of where I was really well. Yeah. Yeah, I remember that one. Yeah. I have two more questions and then I’m going to take questions from the audience. We already have a couple, but if you have questions for Tosca put them in the Q& A or the or the webinar chat and I will ask her you want, do you want to talk about what you’re working on right now?
[00:25:26] Tosca: Yeah, so I’m doing another historical. This one is back a few hundred years. So I’m doing a story about the European witch hunts and it’s set in the, yeah, the late 15th century. In Europe, and it’s another one of those like you think of witch hunts and you think of Salem, but there’s other theaters where this happened and in fact, in Europe for about 200 years.
The death toll of the witch hunts was somewhere between probably 40, 000 and 400, 000, mostly women over this time. Over about 200 years. There was a lot that went on that we don’t see as much in fiction. And so trying my best to do a good job. Does
[00:26:15] Jane: that have
[00:26:16] Tosca: a title or a date yet? That sounds fascinating.
No, not yet. But We don’t have
[00:26:19] Jane: a publisher for that one yet just working on the early stuff, oh, I love the premise, though. That’s a great premise. How can readers best keep in touch with you, and do you Zoom with book clubs? Double question.
[00:26:31] Tosca: I love Zooming with book clubs. I adore book clubs not just because readers are so fun to spend time with, but as an author, you and I know book clubs are bread and butter, and so I’m grateful for every single book club that reads a book of mine.
If I can join you in person I will because book clubs have the best snacks, but I can’t get there in person I will definitely zoom. I’m on Facebook, Instagram. Twitter, my newsletter. You can sign up for that on my website. Most people follow me on Facebook and Instagram mostly to follow my dog.
What kind of dog do you have? I have a 160 pound German Shepherd. So he’s a giant behemoth, like Jurassic dog. I asked for a purse dog and, had three boys at home and a husband and I got outvoted. And so he’s more popular than I am on my social media. And that’s okay. It’s fine.
[00:27:28] Jane: Does he have a Halloween costume?
[00:27:30] Tosca: No,
[00:27:31] Jane: he is the Halloween costume. That’s right. 160 pounds of love. Yeah. Okay. We have a couple of questions. Sharon person. Hello, Sharon. What was the most shocking thing you found in your research and did you use it in the book?
[00:27:49] Tosca: As I said, one of the biggest things is that anybody made it through it that anybody survived at all.
I think one of the things is just this like it never stopped. And at one point, a lot of these POWs were transported to mostly Japan to work in mining camps. They were transported in ships that were not marked as having POWs. Japan had not gratified, ratified the Geneva Convention. So they were not abiding by certain rules.
And they had not marked the ships as as having POWs. And so they were actually bombed. And they were hit by American allied forces and some of them sank and many of these prisoners died in that way. And so the fact that this, these guys could not catch a break then they were doing slave labor in these mining camps.
So that, there’s torture, there’s extreme malnutrition. I will say though, that one of the common threads is that those who survived often had a friend To help look after them. And so this theme of friendship was so incredibly important to the survival of those who were able to make it.
[00:29:06] Jane: I meant to mention at the beginning, this is a, was it just chosen as a one Nebraska read for 2025? Did I just learn that?
[00:29:14] Tosca: One Book, One Nebraska. So talk about
[00:29:16] Jane: what that means. That’s exciting. Congratulations.
[00:29:18] Tosca: So it’s the a statewide program where over the course of a year those especially affiliated with libraries or book clubs that are affiliated with the libraries or the Nebraska Library Association or anyone who follows the One Book, One Nebraska program will all read the same book and discuss it.
And then. I will be getting out to as many of those libraries and groups as I can throughout the next year. And Marcus will too, but Marcus lives in Washington state. So he’ll be zooming in and I’ll be trying to get to as many as I can in person.
[00:29:50] Jane: Congratulations. That sounds amazing. That will be a really cool year.
Lynne Haneman Haneman has a question. I was privileged to have read the ARC. Although it was not my first exposure to the Japanese prison camps, it was so intense that I had to take several breaks. It was so powerful. I agree. I kept thinking about how difficult it must have been to write this. I, you talked a little bit about this already, but can you comment on your personal experience on writing those parts?
[00:30:16] Tosca: Yeah, I honestly just learning about it was the hardest part, once you’ve digested it and then you think about how best to put it on the page. I will tell you I cried a lot writing these scenes. I’m not just the scenes though. in the camps, but the scenes towards later in the book where you’re so emotionally vested at that point.
[00:30:40] Jane: And
[00:30:40] Tosca: not all of them had to do with war events or, torture or any of that stuff. A lot of them were just emotional scenes. And so You know but that happens a lot. But yeah, I cried a lot writing, writing this book. And I will say too, like I was working on this during COVID. And we had just torn our whole house up.
We literally had a toilet sitting in the middle of the basement. All the boys were home from school. And pantries torn up and the kitchens torn up and so it was not really ideal. And that was a rough few years. So you take this subject matter what you’re trying to do in the middle of this, but, at the end of the day, it was so important to Marcus and I to just tell the story well and to Give honor to those who
[00:31:26] Jane: served absolutely.
And and you did so well. Tim Hayes has a question. Did you have anyone in mind when writing this? Was it autobiographical? Were they written about to show the horror of wars? I think they yes, definitely. We wrote about the horror wars and you said you wanted to write about I like you talked about in the beginning.
I don’t know of many books that many novels that cover this part of the World War II history, not many American novels. I, like I said,
[00:31:55] Tosca: there’s a couple because we had to look for comps, for proposal. So when you try to sell a book to a publisher and we did not have a contract and we did this, so we did this on our spare time on spec, which means.
We didn’t have a contract. We didn’t get paid anything. We didn’t know if we’d sell it even. So we were writing this just as a kind of side project, hoping we would be able to sell it. Wow. Yeah, but we, so when you write your proposal they, the publishers and agents want you to give Comparable titles.
There are books that are similar, but we really had a hard time because there just are not a lot of novels about World War II in the Philippines. There are a couple, a few about the nurses of Bataan, as you mentioned. One is when we had Wings, which is Ariel Lahan, Susan Meister, and Christina McMorris.
And so there’s a few like that and there’s some non fiction books, but it is hard to find some, about the actual
[00:32:53] Jane: war. Which, but I think also it’s it’s nice, I love World War II history, but it’s nice that this, that you highlight this because it is, it’s shocking. I, you forget, oh, it was over 10, 000 Americans surrendered and 62, 000 Filipinos surrendered to the Japanese.
And it was, and everything they went through from there, it’s just, it’s shocking and not, I think people need to know this history as well. So it was really I’m glad that you both wrote about it. You did an amazing job. Is there any movie interest? I always have to ask.
[00:33:24] Tosca: Not yet, but not for lack of trying.
And Carol, I see Carol has John Grisham had he does have A part of a book is about this. I think he had a survivor of this. Was that The Reckoning or I’m trying to think of which book that was. It was in our research and it’s escaping me. I’m almost 55. I can’t remember things anymore. It’s struggling with menopause, but Yes, we remember that because we were looking at that.
I actually wrote to John Grisham when we were doing this and he was very kind.
[00:33:57] Jane: Oh, nice. It’s always nice to hear that, he’s huge. So that’s nice to hear. Yeah. Who would you have, do you have any ideas of like your dream cast? Who would be Claire? Who would play Claire? Jimmy,
[00:34:09] Tosca: have you thought about it at all?
No, who Hank reminds me of is a younger who’s the taller guy from supernatural that one of the brothers in supernatural kind of reminded me of Hank, like a younger version of him. And I don’t know who I can picture him. I don’t know. Yeah, I don’t know what the tall guy from supernatural.
The other guys? No, I don’t You know, and when I think about casting stuff like this, I always think, unknown people that, like up and coming.
[00:34:40] Jane: Yes. Because sometimes I think, if the actor is too well known, all you can think about is the actor and not the character. Like fresh faces.
Fresh faces are good. Yep. Yeah. And, oh, last question. Did you have say in this Cover design and was the title always the Long March home?
[00:34:59] Tosca: Oh, we went through so many titles. So really, yes. As I said, we didn’t at the time. I was between agents, so we didn’t I didn’t have an agent. Marcus had an agent.
We had no publisher, we had no contract. We didn’t know if we would sell this thing. We didn’t know if we would just shelve it. And we went through several different titles, one of which was Letter to Bataan. Oh, we had a short list, but the Long March Home seemed really appropriate because you’ve got the Death March.
You’ve got this idea of trying to make it to get back home.
[00:35:35] Jane: And
[00:35:37] Tosca: so when we suggest, suggested it, that is the one that won out. And I’m glad that the publisher kept that one. The artwork, I just, I love the artwork. I thought they did a great job. Yeah. Isn’t that? It’s beautiful. Yeah. It’s really cool.
[00:35:54] Jane: Yeah, and then the back.
I
[00:35:57] Tosca: love
[00:35:57] Jane: that they don’t do this very often. I kind of love how it’s two different designs. It’s very, I really appreciated
[00:36:04] Tosca: that because
[00:36:04] Jane: she
[00:36:05] Tosca: is the fourth friend.
[00:36:09] Jane: Yeah, like the anchor. Yeah,
[00:36:10] Tosca: we had to check and make sure that the gear looked right on the guys on the front because Oh, yeah, you’ll hear about it.
If not, yeah, you can’t use the wrong gear from the wrong time for your work.
[00:36:22] Jane: Yeah, I’m Tosca. This was lovely. Thank you so much for your time. I love that you and Marcus took this leap of faith on this project. Beautiful book and everyone should read it and and share with their book club.
Thank you again for coming on.
[00:36:35] Tosca: It’s my pleasure. Thank you so much. Thank you guys for joining us. Thanks so much. And hi, Jen from Lincoln.
[00:36:42] Jane: Thank you. Thank you. It’s for everyone for coming tonight. We’ve got Kimberly Brock and Marjan Kamali and many more coming up in November, December. And so just We’ll keep you up to date with my mailing list and the website and everyone have a great night.
Thank you again, Tosca. This was wonderful. Thank you so much
[00:36:57] Tosca: for having me. Take care.
