Why a Talk Radio Host Wrote a Techno-Thriller

People ask how a talk radio host ends up writing a techno-thriller. The honest answer is that it’s the same job pointed somewhere new.

Radio runs on one question

I started podcasting out of my basement in Fort Wayne in 2012. Then came WOWO in Fort Wayne, 95.3 MNC in South Bend, and now mid-mornings on WBAP News Talk 820 and 93.3 FM in Dallas-Fort Worth. Every one of those jobs comes down to one question: who decides what the audience gets to hear?

Talk radio taught me that whoever controls the feed controls the argument. Pick the stories, pick the order, pick what gets left out, and you have shaped what people think before they’ve thought anything.

So what happens when the feed is your eyesight?

That’s where Eye See came from. A news bulletin you can argue with. You can turn it off, change the station, call in and push back. But what if the feed isn’t something you listen to? What if it’s the picture arriving directly in your head, and it looks exactly like the real world?

Kane Lewis, the main character, was born blind. When an implant called OptiLink gives him sight, he has nothing to compare it to except the truth, which makes him the only one who can see the seams. Everyone else has been looking through the feed so long they think it is the world.

Same instincts, longer form

A daily show trains you to find the angle fast and keep people listening past the break. A novel needs the same thing for 346 pages. I wanted Eye See to read like the shows I like to host: plain, fast and asking the question nobody else in the room wants to ask.

If you listen to the show, you already know how I think. Eye See is that thinking, turned into a thriller. Read the synopsis, catch the radio show weekdays 9 to 11 Central, or get your copy of Eye See.