H.B. Berlow (The Time of Judgment) Hunting a Nazi War Criminal: Law, Justice & Revenge

SPEAKER_02 0:00

In the office of stories collected. When the office waited, let's cure the city guide. All daughters invited. Unravel the tale at our podcast.

SPEAKER_03 0:25

Welcome back to the Author Spotlight series. This is where we step behind the pages to meet the people who create the stories we love. We'll talk about their latest books, their writing journey, the story behind the story, and probably a few things neither of us plan to talk about. Because around here, the best conversations have a way of taking us somewhere unexpected.

SPEAKER_04 0:48

Most definitely. Today I'm putting HB Burlow in the spotlight. HB, welcome to Travel Time Stories. We're so glad to have you here. I'm pleased to be here and I'm honored that you invited me. So thank you kindly for that. I appreciate it. Before we dive into your book, I'd love for you to introduce yourself to our audience and tell us a little bit about who you are.

SPEAKER_00 1:10

Well, uh, besides being HB Burlow, I'm also known as the Tiki Man, which you can tell by the shirt. I'm uh primarily a writer of Midwest historical crime fiction, but I don't limit myself to any genre. It's necessary as writers that we uh push the boundaries as much as we can. I'm also co-host of Tiki Man and the Viking podcast. We uh interview creatives, mostly writers, but we've spoken with poets, uh, filmmakers, painters. We're trying to get a hold of a few musicians as well, too. We discuss craft and process, and it's very fascinating and it's uh inspirational to us, and uh hopefully it helps out uh those uh writers and creatives as well. I'm also a baker and a sausage maker, and I am retired, which uh my co-host and dear friend for 20 plus years, Brian Johnson, likes to count the number of times I use that word in any environment. So after this podcast air, I will be sending him the link and asking him to count the number of times. I won't tell him in advance, he'll have to figure it out for himself.

SPEAKER_03 2:14

Oh, so we're making a drinking game out of it. So every time, audience, every time HB says retirement, then everybody must take a drink.

SPEAKER_00 2:23

Very good. Exactly. If you're listening to it late at night, you can drink whatever you'd like. Yes.

SPEAKER_03 2:29

Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 2:30

There you go. And whatever you'd like.

SPEAKER_03 2:34

I love that. Well, we're excited to get to know you and talk about your historical crime novel, The Time of Judgment. And at the center of the story is Harold Bergman. He's a Jewish private detective and a World War II veteran, and he becomes involved in the search for a Nazi war criminal, believed to be hiding in all places, Kansas. I was like, Kansas, really?

SPEAKER_00 3:01

There is there is historical precedent on that, by the way. There is historical precedent on that.

SPEAKER_03 3:06

I figured as much, since most of your books are based around historical facts and not just fiction alone. So yeah, but we this becomes much more than simply uh finding him because Harold eventually has to confront a question that no courtroom can easily answer. And that's does it follow the laws of man or the laws of God? And so, HB, let's start right there. Where did this story begin for you?

SPEAKER_00 3:36

Well, it it it it began, we're gonna have to go backward. I started writing historical crime fiction years ago, about 2016. My wife's late uncle lived in a small town in Kansas called Arkansas City. Anyone outside of Kansas will call it Arkansas City, we call it Arkansas City. This small town was known for having underground tunnels that were built during the days of the Indians. There were hideouts then, but in the Prohibition era, the uh gangsters would hide out down there, go from uh building to building, hide their booze. And it was also referred to as Little Chicago because a lot of the gangsters from the big cities, when they were trying to escape and hide out, came to places like southeastern Kansas or northeastern Oklahoma. So her uncle is telling me these stories for years, and it's practically writing itself. I write the book, I go to a writer's conference in Oklahoma and pitch it, and a publisher indicated to me, you know what's selling now is uh series. And I had only thought of this as a one-off. So on the entire two and a half hour drive home from Oklahoma City to Wichita, Kansas, I am contemplating the next two books in the series. Don't worry, I paid attention to the road. Just in case my wife hears this, she thinks every time I took my mind off of something. But so I started writing. There were three books in the series. I was on the fourth, and sadly, he passed away. So I felt it was prudent to uh just end the series with the fourth book in the series, and I was enjoying it. I loved the research. I loved finding interesting tidbits of history that people don't know about. One book in the series involved the an escaped German POW from a POW camp in Kansas. And it's like, really? Uh so that was interesting. So I created a character that was more akin to myself. I had to make him uh younger, of course. Nobody wants to read about an old guy, but uh uh I made him Jewish, like myself. I made him a devout Jew, less so I'm not as devout, but I made him that way to take away as many of the tropes of traditional hard-boiled crime fiction. I didn't want the smoking and the gunplay and the cheap booze in the drawer. A man who had come back from World War II questioning how he fits in in the new world, as it were. His father wanted him to be a rabbi. Well, he can't be a rabbi because he doesn't have enough faith in himself to dole out advice. He can't go back to being a policeman because the aspects of law and order just don't make sense after coming back from war. So the first three books in the series were more character studies, good crime elements, strong crime investigating aspects, and it was all building up to the ultimate, the utmost. When you're sitting here in 1947-48, you're dealing with Nazis, you've just come off the Nuremberg trials. So to have a Jewish private detective being forced to confront the search for an escaped Nazi war criminal brings us to that moral divide. Now that's something you're not going to find in your standard hard-boiled crime fiction, and that's where I think my work is separated from that, inspired by, but separated from that. It's interesting because there's a lot of back and forth with some of the other characters, one of which is a Jewish FBI agent who seems to have a different aspect or a different idea of what we should be doing or what they should be doing. I'm proud of it just because of the ability to incorporate the actual history. And again, there is historical precedent for Nazi war criminals being found in various parts of the country, including Kansas. My way of thinking, you've got the two words, historical and fiction. History means you're using fact, places, people, events, and the fiction is what overlays what makes it fleshed out. It's not dry history like we're going to school. It's about people. So my historical crime fiction is still always going to be about people, always going to be character studies.

SPEAKER_03 7:47

Yeah, I love that. And I had no clue that there was that many that tied back to Kansas. Just never thought of it that way. But I guess I mean that's a good place to hide out versus bigger cities or are more well-known places, you know. So that that does make a lot of sense.

SPEAKER_00 8:07

Well, I mean, and it has towns that are were built up by German immigrants, towns that were built up by Russian immigrants, Czech immigrants, Scottish immigrants. So Kansas, in terms of the 1800s, had a lot of immigrants that came over from Europe. So you could, if you had an accent, hide out in a town and get close to your compadres, even though you might be a Nazi war criminal. Hello, you know.

SPEAKER_03 8:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 8:35

And you're right. That there's something almost unsettling about the contrast of, you know, the enormity of the crimes versus seemingly ordinary Midwestern settings, small town, so to speak. That contrast is important. So very important. So was that contrast part of what interested you when you Well, yes.

SPEAKER_00 8:57

I mean, I again the the whole point of even we we talked about our Kansas City being a small town in Kansas, and Wichita is the largest city in Kansas. But still, we always talk about hard boiled or noir, and we're thinking about Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia. It's like, okay, hard-boiled crime can and did and does take place all over this country. So it's just as feasible to put the setting somewhere that's not typical. I mean, there's there's a series of shows on TV that are Chicago med, Chicago Fire, Chicago PD. It's like Chicago, Chicago. Okay, Chicago's not the only uh city with a fire department. Just saying, you know.

SPEAKER_05 9:42

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 9:42

Uh I think and I think people will find it uh interesting in that regard. But again, I presented as historical crime fiction, but the underlying aspect, and Ann, you probably noticed this, is it's about people. The characters are the things that are driving the story. More the case is the impetus, but it's the impetus to bring out the sense of the characters and who they are, and maybe put their feet to the fire. Okay. Like what would you do if type of thing.

SPEAKER_04 10:12

Right. That makes you question. Absolutely. So Harold is a very interesting character that you've developed. He's you know, he's not just approaching this simply as a detective. He's Jewish, he's World War II vet, he's carrying his own past. How much do you think the three identities shape the way Harold actually approaches the investigation?

SPEAKER_00 10:39

Uh 100%. I mean, uh the prior books in the series involved the first book in the series uh involved a wealthy businessman looking for his wayward daughter only to find out that he is not as jiffy clean as he would appear. All those type of noir type aspects. I think everything character-wise about Harold Bergman in the first three books leads us to this point where there is a far greater moral complexity. All right. If somebody is asking you to find somebody who's missing, it's a missing person's case. Now the reason that they're missing may be interesting, etc., etc. Somebody says, I need you to help me find a Nazi war criminal. You're a devout Jew. Whoa. So there's the part of him that was a policeman before he enlisted in the war. He's got that investigative sense already built into him. He knows how to do this type of thing. He's diligent. There's the part of him that's a well-read young man whose father, whose parents wanted him to be a rabbi, so you know that he's immersed in his faith, and there's aspects about that. It does bring into mind a conflict. The bottom line, though, is justice still has to be served. It's just a question of which kind of justice. And the heart of the matter is searching through a series of immigrants that are of spurious nature and determining uh in a clue-like fashion, you know, Professor Mustard in the library with a candlestick type of thing, who the Nazi war criminal is. And really, after we reveal that, okay, what's what's his attitude gonna be now? Of course, we can't give that away to anybody who still wants to read the book, naturally. Exactly. But uh that's where I'm driven. And uh the fifth book in the series, which is written and not yet in the hands of my editor, will wrap up everything. And I didn't think that the series was gonna go on ad infinitum, but we uh ourselves, we did a uh interview with Jim Butcher of the Dresden Files, and he made a comment that writers have to know when to end a book, when a book should end, and also when to end a series. And at that point I was just finishing up this book, The Time of Judgment, and it dawned on me at that point, okay, where does it go from here? I I'm almost to the ultimate aspect of the series. I'm almost to the very end. Can it go on? And that's when I realized, no, I really need to focus on how to end it, and then think about where I'm gonna go from there as a writer. So that was important. It's funny because for the longest time before all the technology stuff, I was going to poetry meetings, I was sending out queries by letter with self-addressed stamped envelopes to returns. And then we segue into the world of uh technology, and I'm okay, I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna do the social media thing. I'll be on Facebook and Instagram and I'll do all this stuff. Great. I can teach myself how to do that. I did. I've got a presence. I've been my blog, The Tiki Man Says, has been up and running since 2009. Great. And then all of a sudden, you start to say, well, I'm writing more. I'm really publishing more. Uh, I want to get and find my readers. And then, of course, there's the whole retirement thing. That's number two, if anybody's counting.

SPEAKER_03 14:03

Oh, yeah, gotta take a drink.

SPEAKER_00 14:04

Yep. Okay, fine. Cheers. And and I've started, because of being retired, to go out. And I've been doing cons and book signings and all kinds of events. And regardless of how good or not good the sales have been, I'm getting engagement. We're talking with people. We're finding out what they read and why they read and uh this this whole thing of so it's great. I've developed the online presence. That's fine. Everybody's doing that. People want to see the old guy with the big beard and the Hawaiian shirts who talks with his hands. That that's a that reminds me of a story from growing up. We can tell that if we have some time. But the bottom line is the the sense of personal engagement. If it weren't for this kind of medium, and your podcast is a video podcast, and people get to see you as the host, they get to embrace you and follow you, and then hopefully they get to embrace the guests from whatever they're talking about. I think people want to get back to that sense of human engagement. And I love being out there. I'm gonna be at an event on October 9th at Old Cowtown. It's a museum that celebrates the uh birth of Wichita, and they're putting on a fundraiser for that museum. I'll be going uh October 17th, I'll be down in Tulsa with my co-host, Brian Johnson. We're gonna be presenting at the Tulsa Nightwriters uh Craft of Writing Conference. I'm gonna be doing a talk at a World War II museum in uh El Doreda, Kansas in early December. It's like, yeah, I want to get out there. I want to tell my story or my character stories, but I also want to hear stories. We don't work in a vacuum as writers. We need that kind of uh it's like making sourdough. You gotta feed it in order to keep it growing. There you go. There's that analogy. There's an analogy.

SPEAKER_03 16:03

And is bad. Yeah, and is back now. Hey!

SPEAKER_00 16:08

And we have you back. We said retired while you were gone, so you know you'll you know.

SPEAKER_03 16:13

You gotta take a drink. Yeah, you must get kicked off. You were talking a little bit about the I guess the tug of war you would you would call it that Harold is facing within this search. And so would you rather the reader finish the book knowing exactly what they believe in regards to what Harold should or shouldn't do? Or should they still be arguing with themselves about what Harold should do?

SPEAKER_00 16:39

I mean, I've read an essay called The Death of the Author that Roland Barthes wrote it, and I've taken it to heart. He basically says that this essay was about literary criticism, and his bottom line is once the writer writes something and puts it out, it is no longer his. It is to be interpreted by the reader. I have no say in it. Whatever my intention, theme, notion is by writing it is meaningless. Even to my wife, she has to find something for herself within it. Just be okay, we've been married so long, so no, we we don't agree on everything. The bottom line is a reader needs to find for themselves what they feel about the whole story. Uh and I'm perfectly happy to let the bird fly off, as it were. There's a long period of time that I didn't even read older work. But recently I came across two novellas, a collection of novellas, and two previous previously published works that I got the rights back to because the the publisher went out of print. And I again we talked about learning the technology. I wound up going through all of them, editing them, reformatting them, and they're up on KDP now. Because that's amazing. The thing is, it's a good thing to move forward. It's definitely a good thing in any field of endeavor to get better, to enhance your craft, whatever it may be, but we should not be so dismissive of the past as if to say, well, that's there. When I started rereading these things, I'm like either cracking up or going, Whoa, that wasn't bad. Uh it's not historical crime fiction, it's all just contemporary crime fiction. One is a one's a comic caper, one is a little weird thing that's got some esoteric characters to it with some other crazy stuff. It's like I wrote that? Okay. You know? No, I don't want the reader to do anything other than to enjoy it. The first thing is we're here as entertainers, storytellers. Okay? I'm not here to change anybody's mind about anything. I hope that when you purchase ebook, audio, physical book, whatever, when you purchase one of my writings, I hope you enjoy it first. I think the worst thing for most writers is if you read somebody's book and you asked how it wasn't, they go, it's okay. It's okay. How about you loved it or you hated it? If you hated it, tell me why, and then I know that you had a passionate response to it, an emotional response. Okay is you know not what I'm looking for. But we take what we get as uh creatives. I have no say over comments, reviews. My wife usually gives me a good review, but you know, I have to, you know, make a nice dinner to make sure that that happens.

SPEAKER_03 19:43

I was gonna say, is that is that after you make her a nice dinner or a beautiful loaf of bread or something, then she'll give a bad review?

SPEAKER_00 19:50

Yeah, no, let me let me tell you what's happened every single time. I've had four books in the first series, four books in the second series. I've had eight books published right now, okay? And when I get uh the release date, I'm able to buy advanced copies and get an author's copy. Great. So of course I get my author's copy, and what do I the first thing I do is give it to my wife. She reads it. And usually the the pre-sale is a good, you know, month beforehand. She reads the book. It's still three weeks to the release date, and she'll give me the when's the next one coming out? It's like, come on, it has this one hasn't even come out yet. You're gonna have to just wait, you know. It's nice that my wife is a devoted follower, you know. That's what I'm hoping for. Exactly. You know, that's it.

SPEAKER_03 20:33

Exactly. Not all of us are blessed that our spouses, you know, are followers of our creative endeavors or read our books or anything like that. So that's wonderful that you're Z.

SPEAKER_00 20:45

Well, she's also been a character of one sort or another in every book.

SPEAKER_05 20:50

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 20:50

Now, and you've read the book, of course, and there's there are some secondary characters, a very uh gregarious, outgoing pulp fiction writer named Bradley Wolrebinsky, and his wife, a I think it's Lithuanian Finnish artist, and her name is Svetlana Halonen. Well, Bradley Wolrubinski is actually me, because my middle name, the B for HB, is actually Bradley, and Wolrebinski is Burlow backward with an Inski, okay?

SPEAKER_03 21:20

Oh my gosh.

SPEAKER_00 21:23

So, yeah, so the gregarious, outgoing, flamboyant uh pulp fiction writer is me. What else, right? And his lovely wife, who puts up with him and puts him in his place, who's also very much into landscaping and crafting, is Svetlana Halonin, and that's the initials of my wife. And uh, she has actually embraced the name Svetlana. She said if her if her name wasn't her name, she would take that instead. So I love it. Yeah. So yeah, I mean, and that's that's been all four books of this series. In the previous series, she was a waitress and a secretary, you know, minimal stuff, but in in this series, she She's top of the line. I love it.

SPEAKER_04 22:03

That's great. Yeah, that's wonderful. So I wanted to ask, is Harold someone who genuinely believes he can leave the past behind and or does some part of him know he will it's always gonna be there. It's always gonna follow him.

SPEAKER_00 22:19

I think based upon his deep abiding faith as a Jew, he knows the past is always there. Jews don't uh divest themselves of the past, of history. It's a uh an element of their strength, whether it was something good to uplift them or something difficult that they had to overcome. When I was growing up, uh four years of Hebrew school and Sunday school, I mean, uh there wasn't a year that went by that there wasn't some discussion of the Holocaust. And it wasn't designed to scare nine, ten, eleven, twelve-year-old kids. It was designed to give them a history lesson and remind them of the need to speak up and be strong. So I think that based on the fact that Harold is a devout Jew, maybe not devout enough to want to be a rabbi or believe he could be, I think that his faith plants him deeply into an acknowledgement of the past. And I think he's always trying to learn from a The biggest issue for him is still trying to figure out his future. I mean, if he was he was a policeman trying to be a detective in the Wichita Police Department prior to 1941, Pearl Harbor comes along and as a patriotic young American he enlists. That being said, he now has to contemplate he's come back from the war, he's got an injury that causes him to have a a bit of a limp, so he can't go back to being a police officer. He doesn't feel qualified to be a rabbi. Where does he go from here? What does his future hold? And you know, that's that could be true for any character in any hard boiled or or noir type uh setting. Right. Uh you you get a lot of detectives that are the cliche. I used to work for the DA but got into, you know, trouble. Uh maybe they had a relationship and they're divorced, maybe they had a drinking problem. Those detectives, those the even the cliche ones, are still looking for a place in the world and trying to figure out what their future might be. So I think it's more significant to always write the books with a an eye toward, okay, the detective saw the case. What's next? And by what's next, not necessarily what's the next case, but what have I gleaned from this? What have I learned to help me move forward and where is forward and where is it going to be? What's the next stop? So that's how I look at my historical crime fiction.

SPEAKER_04 24:56

Yeah. Well I was gonna say an important character is Dr. Douglas Price Kingsley.

SPEAKER_00 25:02

Yes.

SPEAKER_04 25:03

Yes. He represents another unresolved case that threatens the future that Harold's trying to build. Correct. So without giving too much away, what does Kingsley represent for Harold?

SPEAKER_00 25:16

Uh a misguided altruistic approach. His character was from the the previous book, The Crop of Wickedness, which involved a group of people that were originally attempting to stop all wars. And this was after the First World War. They got together an international group of people, and when their legitimate methods of doing so failed, they turned to uh nefarious methods. Obviously, if Dr. Douglas Price Kingsley is in the book four, then we know that he got away in book three, so we gave something away, but not much. Uh his he represents a perverse way of quote unquote doing good in the world. His original intentions, his group originally tried to eradicate war. Hey, who can't say that's a great idea? But when the mechanisms of modern society, and modern for the twenties and thirties, as it were, the banks, the governments, the military prevented them from implementing something altruistic, they now had to resort to something more nefarious. Uh he is a thorn in Harold's side because Harold was, based on Book Three, the only person who has ever come up against him and defeated him, quote unquote. As he comes back and returns to the story, he is an adversary who is now attacking Harold in a more personal basis, not because he just beat him, but because he still, in some fashion, wants him to join him. He wants Harold to join him on this nefarious journey because he recognizes Harold has the integrity and the intelligence to do all this. And Harold's like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Not gonna go there. We all come into that. I mean, there are people that want us to join, to be a part of something, and you say, Well, why? What what do you want from me? Well, what I want from you is to help me overtake the world. That's like, nah, not today. I gotta bake some sourdough, you know. That's the way I look at it. So it's also perhaps even to some extent, he could be the darker side of Harold. I never thought of it completely in that fashion. I just looked at him as a powerful adversary, but there are there are some aspects of him that make it look like the dark version. I mean, we all have supposedly a darker doppelganger out there in the world. Right. Mine probably has a darker beard.

SPEAKER_04 27:41

I'm just guessing. You know, I actually picked up on that a little bit in the book and wondered.

SPEAKER_05 27:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 27:47

So interesting. So how do you yeah, how do you write a character who wants to move towards happiness while just this huge part of them is still in the past?

SPEAKER_00 27:56

It's I don't want to say it's relatively easy. I mean, we we can all look on there's not a single one of us here, or anybody that would be watching or listening to this podcast episode, that wouldn't say, I'm attempting to achieve happiness in my life. And you could say to yourself, Well, why aren't you there yet? And the answer would be there's so many things that get in our way. Sometimes it's ourselves, uh, sometimes it's external forces, sometimes it's just situations that just transpire. The thing to keep focused on is the character's desire for happiness, not the fact that there are obstacles that prevent him from getting to it. If Harold were a weaker character, and I'm proud to say that I find him to be stronger in many aspects than I am, it could be because he's younger, but I find that he has a sincere desire to achieve some degree of happiness. Coming back from the war, it was what do I want? And he came across as from all three of the books before this one, he reconnected with a high school sweetheart, and they've fallen back in love, and they're moving toward something that would and that any, you know, a Jewish parent, ah, yeah, my son, you know, anybody would want. And the obstacles that get in the way are only that. Because he's still trying to achieve that happiness. He has figured out what he wants in this post-war environment. I'm no longer gonna be a policeman, I don't have the qualifications to be a rabbi. I found what makes me happy and what makes me fulfilled. I want that. So therefore, that character is gonna go headlong into that, into the fray, and do whatever it takes, even at the sacrifice of his own life, which is an irony if you think about it. I'm striving for my happiness, I'll give up my life to achieve it. It's a little strange, but that's how human nature works.

SPEAKER_04 29:43

I think I told you before we started recording, I this book actually kept me up really late one night because I was so very into the story and I love the characters. And it made me think, who was H. B. Burlow when you first started writing compared with the author, the writer sitting here today? Good question.

SPEAKER_00 30:05

Very good question. Uh, my my wife has told me that over the course of the eight books that I've written, that my storytelling has improved, telling a good story. From this kind of we all have the plotter and the pancer, you know, analogy. All right. Yeah. I'm more of a hybrid where I write an outline with a basic indication, but I do allow the story to grow organically. I've learned as much about Harold from him as I have by creating him, as it were. I started by creating a character that may have been parallel to me, also Jewish. And if you notice Harold Bergman's initials, by the way, anybody? Harold Bergman? Yeah, yeah. Hello. I gave him parents that uh advocated for his education. I gave him parents that gave him a degree of spiritual guidance and basically let him go on his own. That was exactly my parents. Uh there were books in every room of the house. As you can see behind me, I'm in my office currently, and this is just a smattering of books behind me. There's a lot more over there and a lot more over there, and both sides. I had parents that uh set me up in Hebrew school to be Bar mitzved, and but they gave me all that and allowed me to move forward in that regard. I always enjoy my main characters, especially over the course of a series, because I do learn a lot about them. And there is some sort of sadness in ending a series. By the same token, I moved to Wichita from Boston, which is where I met my wife 31 years ago. I had a lot of friends there. I moved. I left and kept up with a few, but you have to move on. Harold is after the fifth book is not going to be part of my life anymore, nor I part of his. But I will hope that he moves on in a positive direction as he has been doing. And I hope that he will continue to develop as a individual, fictional, of course, much as I will continue to develop. And just to let you know, the fifth book is already written, and the first book of the new series is already written. This is what happens when you're retired. Retired. There we go. There you go. I have been blessed to have more time for my passions, and uh I think that really has set me forward more on a path that I'd already been on, but walking carefully. When you have to uh worry about gotta wrap up on Sunday night because I got to work tomorrow, and I don't have to do that. When I can go shopping any day of the week and not days that I don't work, the freedom associated with my new status, as it were, puts me in a position where I have the luxury of extra creative time and creative opportunities. The notion of creativity is very, very important to me. I came across a couple of years ago a quote by the Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman. He said, if I don't create, I don't exist. And I took that deeply to heart.

SPEAKER_05 33:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 33:08

And it wasn't about writers, musicians, sculptors, painters. We all create. You you make a loaf of sourdough, you make a wonderful dinner, you plant you put some annuals or perennials, you create a flower bed in your yard. There's a lot of ways of being creative, and I think that's what makes us human. And I just want to hold on to my humanity for as long as I can, not just my life and not just my health, but the mind and the creativity. So I'm moving forward. We talked about looking backward at old works. I'll continue to do that. I'll always embrace my youth, my upbringing, the culture, and everything that I was raised in. But ladies, I'm on a path and I keep moving. And uh, you know, like that shark. You know, that's that's what I do. Just keep moving forward. I don't have the bad teeth though, you know.

SPEAKER_04 34:02

I just keep you young.

SPEAKER_00 34:05

Keeping you young. Yes, yeah. Yeah, really.

SPEAKER_03 34:08

I I love that quote too. I had never heard that before. So yeah, that's that's a that's a wonderful quote. And that's what I feel like we're we're doing here. Our creativity is the podcast. Exactly. And and then on the side from that, I am writing a couple books. Hopefully one day those will be finished.

SPEAKER_00 34:28

Okay.

SPEAKER_03 34:28

Who knows?

SPEAKER_00 34:29

Well, I mean, look, when I look at your when I look at your website and I look at your podcast, it's like, where do you have the time? Oh my gosh. You know?

SPEAKER_03 34:38

Well, well, I'm I'm slowly working to get to your level of, you know, that status of retirement. And so that I have more, I can indulge more in my creativity than what I have right now. But I mean, I think when you're on that creative path, that creative path feeds your soul. Yes. Then you make the time to stay on that creative path, even though you may have 50 million other things going on over here. You know, that creative path is what's feeding your soul. So you make the time to be on that path. You know, that's kind of where I am right now.

SPEAKER_00 35:20

Well, it's really funny. I remember 20 odd years ago, I was working with a young man who also was a writer, and he always used to complain about, I don't have enough time to write. Okay, so I mentally consider the two of us. He was just dating somebody, I was married.

unknown 35:35

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 35:36

He lived in an apartment. I was a homeowner. He was struggling to write. I had two books published at that time. And I'm realizing, oh, you're up till two o'clock in the morning playing online role-playing games. Okay. If you want to write, if you want to plant your garden, if you want to bake bread, if you want to, you will do so. You will find the time. Exactly. I I offered to bring him down to writers' conferences so he could go along with me and so forth. And he didn't. We're not going to say anything further about him, but everybody makes their own life choices. I my mine was wrote, I mowed the lawn, I went grocery shopping, everything, everything fit in. I did what I had to do along with what I wanted to do. I was able to do both. What's wrong with that?

SPEAKER_03 36:25

You know, nothing at all. Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, that's what I'm doing now. So there you go.

SPEAKER_00 36:31

Yeah, you know.

SPEAKER_03 36:32

And I don't see anything wrong with it.

SPEAKER_00 36:35

There you go.

SPEAKER_05 36:36

There you go.

SPEAKER_03 36:37

I mean, case, case in point, before we started recording today, I was not feeling well. I had a very bad night. But as soon as you got on here and we started conversing, I immediately my spirit lifted. I felt so much better. And this is why I do this, because it beats my soul.

SPEAKER_00 36:57

Yeah, I mean, it's just it's like, you know, you're standing behind the curtain, the curtain rises, it's showtime, you know, and that's it. I mean, yeah, neither hail or sleet or snow. Well, we're not mail men, but you know what I'm saying.

SPEAKER_03 37:12

I'm just gonna say we're not delivering the mail here, HB. I didn't know we're delivering something.

SPEAKER_00 37:16

We're delivering something. We're delivering that product that you and your followers have come to appreciate. And uh yeah, we're packaging it up nice and we're making sure that uh everybody gets a nice delivery as far as that goes. So that's how it works.

SPEAKER_03 37:31

And we talked about this, and you were away for a moment. You dropped off for a moment, but HB and I were talking about technology while you were away. And I have to ask, is there a point where technology right? You were on sabbatical. There she goes again. See, we talked about it and jinx her.

SPEAKER_00 37:51

We have that power. I should write horror or something like that. That'd be cool.

SPEAKER_03 37:54

Yeah, we should hey, we should collab on a horror. There we go, HP.

SPEAKER_00 37:58

There you go, there you go, there you go. Fair enough, fair enough.

SPEAKER_03 38:01

But is there a point where technology stops supporting creativity and begins to interfere with it? Do you think?

SPEAKER_00 38:09

I'm not 100% sure. I think that's uh up to the individual as far as their use of technology. You know, I am not a creator, I'm not an influencer. Yeah, I'll make a video and post it on TikTok. It'll be about a two-minute video. If you watch it, you watch it. If you don't, you don't. Same thing with Instagram. Instagram is really where I post the food photos, and I'm sure you've already seen those.

SPEAKER_03 38:30

I love that, yes.

SPEAKER_00 38:32

But I think it only interferes with creativity if the creative individual allows it to. There's another classic line by uh an English uh critic, Cyril Connolly, you know, better to write for yourself and have no audience than to write for an audience and have no self. There are, I've got a couple of pieces that I've been trying to pitch, query out there, and they're unique. They're different. They're not literary fiction, they're not genre fiction, they're a little experimental and off the wall. And, you know, would I alter them to try to get them published? No, because I'm really proud of what I was trying to accomplish with them. So I'm not going to subvert the intention of any specific work. I've got the historical crime fiction, I've got other works that are out there. I'm proceeding. They're all little babies that I enjoy, but you know, if one of them gets published, great. And if they don't, I'll keep nurturing them and nursing them until they do.

SPEAKER_03 39:29

Yeah. And in this day and age, you have the option to self-publish if you wanted to.

SPEAKER_00 39:35

Right. And again, as I mentioned earlier, I found, you know, several earlier pieces which I had just put into the trunk because I'd written them. They'd been published. What else was I needing to do? Well, let's take a look at them. And they are published. They are self-published on KDP, and they're there because I wanted to reshare them and see if people would accept them, enjoy them. I find them enjoyable. My my co-host, Brian, he uh was aware of a piece that I had done for NanoRimo back in the day. That was it's called The Stooges, and it's about three guys who think they're tough guys who are really petty criminals and they try to pull off a job, but they're just too stupid to know what to do. So it's a really dark comic caper, and the tone shifts throughout, and I'm going through a re-edit of that. It's not historical crime fiction, it's just really dark and comic at the same time. And you're like, okay, let's run with it. Let's see if people accept it.

unknown 40:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 40:39

Why not?

SPEAKER_03 40:40

I like the sounds of that. I'm gonna have to look it up on Amazon so I can check it out.

SPEAKER_00 40:45

Be about another month, Shannon. You don't have to wait. Right now, as I told you after this interview, I gotta go make a batch of breakfast sausages. I've got, you know, we go from we go from the writing and the social media to the cooking. It's just one to the other, you know.

SPEAKER_03 41:00

I love that. So you've mentioned it already, but you're the co-host of the Tinky Man and the Viking podcast. Yes, ma'am. And you're you're normally sitting on the other side asking the questions. Right. So how does it feel being the one under the spotlight today?

SPEAKER_00 41:16

It is weird because I don't have my co-host with me to back me up, but you have to listen to this eventually. I it's actually refreshing. People often ask, you know, you I do a lot of cooking. Do you go out to dinner that much? And the answer is no, I don't, because I'm too, I want to say picky, but you know, nobody cooks for my wife as good as I do. Okay, that's a that's the bottom line. But when I do go out, I'm very discerning. It is fun to share my story because I have one. I mean, my goodness, I've been alive this long and I do stuff. I got a story to share. And and you folks have got a perfect venue for that because your podcast and your website is all about people's travels, people's journeys, and everybody has one. Everybody's gotten wherever you are right now. Where did you start? And I don't think enough people stop and look back enough. Right. Not not to dwell, not to think, oh, I should have done X, Y, or Z. No, just to, you know, I went through that. Wow, I did that. Listen, we do, you know, and then you start, you know, talking about, I'll give you an example. I've known my best friend for 58 years. Okay. Yeah now there were some people that I talked to that were in their 30s, they have no concept of what I just said when I said that. And every time we get together, which is few and far between, conversation picks right up where it left off. So we have a long history, a long history. But we chat about those stories in the past, but it's just about it's just as much about what's happening now as anything else. So I don't dwell on the past, I don't sweat about the future. I'm just living in the moment right now. And when I have this opportunity, hopefully there's a bit of encouragement. Hopefully there's a bit of somebody out there that's like, well, he's not New York Times bestseller, and he's not this big guy, but he's having the time of his life. Maybe I can do that too. It's just like, what can you do for your fellow man? I'll give you a I'm gonna show this to you right here, if I can get it through my beard here. This, okay? Okay. Brief story, I won't make it too long. I just encountered this gentleman in the grocery store about three weeks ago. Just I'm passing, I when I go grocery shopping, my wife knows she doesn't go grocery shopping with me because I'm having too much fun. Yeah, I know, it's a little strange, fine. But I made a cute comment, he made a cute comment, we started talking. And it went from cute comments to something deeper. And then I noticed he was wearing this on his neck. I said, Hey, tell me about that. So he takes it off and he hands it to me. And I thought he was doing that for the purpose of letting me see it and catch it and so forth. And he goes, I made it. Now our natural inclination is to a gift from a stranger, like you know, why are you doing that? We live in blinders, we don't see that so I accepted it, accepted it graciously. And with exception of one or two days, I've been wearing this every day. It's just a reminder of generosity, it's a reminder of grace, it's a reminder of blessing. It's a reminder of you and a complete stranger have more in common sometimes than some of the people you actually know. That's how I live my life. The fact that I inherited this gift of gab from my mother, I've had several people tell me my mother didn't know a stranger.

SPEAKER_03 44:37

Yeah, that's and she doesn't know a stranger either.

SPEAKER_00 44:39

And that's you know, why not talk to people? We're we're divided. I don't know anything about where this man might go to church, who he votes for. I don't, you know, we didn't talk about that. We passed in an aisle in the grocery store, made cute comments to each other, it evolved into something deeper, and I got this lovely gift. And if somebody encountered me and I might take this off my neck and hand it to them, it's that passing forward type of thing. So uh that's what telling my story means to me, is if it can inspire in just the smallest fashion somebody to start writing, do something creative, talk to a stranger. I'm never gonna know if I did or didn't. But I can't think of living any other way at this point in my life. I don't have a lot to give other than hope and inspiration, and I'm gonna give that out until I don't have any left, which probably will be by the time I pass away, because I got a lot to give, ladies, and I will continue to do so.

SPEAKER_04 45:45

I don't know about UHB, but every stranger to me is a potential story. Waiting, they're just waiting to tell me their story when I talk to them. Amen. Amen. I love people and and I love that you feel that way too. So tell us where can listeners find your book, The Time of Judgment, which again was very good, folks. Uh, and your other work and the Tiki Man and the Viking podcast as well.

SPEAKER_00 46:13

All right. Well, everything that I got, the published stuff and the self-published stuff, is all on Amazon. It is H period B period Burlow. I tell people if you take out the periods, it's pronounced hub. That's not the way it's pronounced. It's HB, so there's periods in there. The uh Tiki Man and the Viking podcast should it is there's an RSS feature, so it should be available at Spotify, Apple Plus, etc. I have a blog which is the Tiki Man Says dot dot dot, which is on WordPress. I blog once a week. I don't know when this will air, but the next blog post will be about the many hats that I wear. Now we're not talking proverbial hats, I'm talking literal hats. So after Wednesday, you'll see a post with selfies of me in my hats, so you can get that idea as well too. Of course, there's also the shirts. I'm going to do a quick plug, if you don't mind, for highseasrading.com. Terrell Agnew, American-based company. I think he's been business in 30 plus years. I have close to 70 or 75 shirts. About three-quarters of them are from highseasrading.com. At one point, I wanted to have 365 shirts, um, you know, to have one for every day of the year. And my wife said, okay, you can start, you know, laundering them yourself. I said, okay, I'll stop at 75. You know, and uh these these are an example of freedom and extravagance and exuberance. And well, there are no white sand beaches or palm trees or blue beaches in uh in Wichita, Kansas, so I have to create them up here in my mind, you know. Right. So that I'm I'm everywhere. As a matter of fact, if you were to Google HB Burlow, there's probably three or four pages of me. My wife doesn't have to do that because she finds me just in the next room. So that's fine. Yeah, just Google HB Burlow and you'll find me. I'm there. Awesome. Awesome.

SPEAKER_03 48:05

Yeah, that's awesome. And your your episode will air on October 14th.

SPEAKER_00 48:11

Oh my goodness sakes. Well, okay, fine, fantastic. Well, there'll be a couple blog posts out before then, so you'll you'll see the hat and whatever else I decide to blog about. Appreciate that. Appreciate that. No, this has been this has been an absolute joy. You ladies are engaging, delightful, and uh I love what you're doing with both the website and the podcast.

SPEAKER_03 48:29

Well, HV, thank you so much for joining us and letting us go behind the pages of the Time of Judgment. And to everyone watching and listening, we'll have HV's information and his books on our website, traveltimestories.com, and links in our episode description.

SPEAKER_00 48:47

And one final question to my dear co-host, Mr. Brian Johnson: how many was that, buddy? How many was that? Cheers.

SPEAKER_03 48:54

Cheers for how many retirements are in this episode.

SPEAKER_04 48:58

And remember, folks, every book has a story, but so does the person who wrote it.

SPEAKER_01 49:03

So join the teacher. We capture the heart with every story shared. A new world takes flight. As we gather tonight.