July 26, 2025 • 60 mins
Join Off The Shelf Books host Denise Turney for an electrifying interview with Dr. Bruce Farmer—adventurer, world traveler, and author of the explosive military thriller Blood Saphire’s Revenge. Discover how Bruce’s real-life journeys, love of action, and deep insight into human nature fuel this gripping, high-stakes novel. From global intrigue to personal redemption, this episode delivers suspense, inspiration, and the power of a well-told story!
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
You're listening to the winning literary show Off the Shelf
Books Talk Radio Live with host Denise Turney, author of
the books Long Walk Up, Porsche, Love, More Over Me,
Spiral Love Has Many Faces, and Rosette Us Great Hope.
Turn up your dial and get ready for a blast
of feature author interviews four one one on book festivals,
(00:21):
writing conferences, and so much more. Ready, let's go.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
Good morning, Good morning, and welcome to Off the Shelf Books.
By this Saturday, July twenty six, twenty twenty five, this
is the last Saturday in July. I tell people, this
month went so fast. It doesn't even feel like a
full month. I don't know what it is about summer.
I guess we filled our lives up with a lot
(00:52):
of things and it goes so fast. Before we kick
into the show, I want to start with a quote,
as I generally do. Some of you may love these quotes.
This one is by Isabelle la Fleche. Your passion is
waiting for your courage to catch up. Your passion is
waiting for your courage to catch up. And now instead
(01:16):
of you know, I normally will tell you about one
of my books and then introduce our guests, but I
want to get in quickly to letting you meet today's guests.
So instead of going in briefly about one of my books,
I do encourage you to visit me online at cistel
c h I s t e l l dot com.
(01:37):
You can read free excerpts from my books. You can
actually even catch the Off the Shelf Books platform through
my books, sign up for the book Lovers having my
literary newsletter which comes out monthly and it's completely and
absolutely free. Again, that's cistel c h I s t
(01:57):
e l l dot com. Hope you hop over there
and enjoy your visit, and now let us go and
meet today's Off the Shelf guest. And this morning's guest
is doctor Bruce Farmer. He is an avid outdoorsman. He
has explored many lands, traveling domestically and abroad, and his
(02:19):
careers have led him to healthcare and education. His outdoor career,
travel and outdoor experiences influence his writings, including his latest book,
Blood Sapphire's Revenge. He is a devoted father and grandfather,
and Bruce invice you to explore his writings at doctor
(02:41):
Bruce Farmer dot com. And that's spelled d R b
r u ce f A r M e r dot com.
And one more time d R b r u ce
f A r m e r dot com. Please stop
over in his website even now while you enjoy listening
(03:03):
to today's show. So honored to have doctor Bruce Farmer
with us this morning. Welcome, Welcome, doctor Bruce Farmer.
Speaker 3 (03:12):
Thank you, thank you so much. It's an honor to
be here. Thank you.
Speaker 2 (03:17):
So to kick off today's show, can you please tell
off the shelf Books listeners where you grew up and
what life was like for you growing up.
Speaker 3 (03:28):
Well, Denise, I was born in nineteen fifty two, so
I'm a boomer, single child. Parents military, so I'm an
army brat. Dad was a veterinarian and a nuclear researcher,
(03:49):
and the army basically put him on the Area fifty
one and he worked on the atomic bomb. And so
that upbringing took us all over the planet with lots
of adventure right there, and he settled. We settled in Beaverton, Oregon,
(04:14):
so I could go to high school, the same high school,
and I felt a call to medicine, and I went
to Portland State University and then graduated as a doctor
of Medicine from Oregon Health Sciences University in nineteen eighty
(04:38):
three and went into trauma surgery and burns. Ultimately, I
practiced emergency medicine in rural Oregon and then felt a
call to go into the seminary and not to be
(04:58):
a pastor, but to lore philosophical issue of determinism or
sovereignty and free will. Ultimately, I taught at Life Pacific
University in San Dimas, California, and then severed day severe
(05:18):
back injury and was got an operation and rehabbed, and
that led me in to develop my own company called
Fitness Therapeutics on rehabbing bad backs. And ultimately, I'll say
that in the year two thousand, when I went to seminary,
(05:41):
I had a bit of a vision. I was reading
the Book of Esther, now this is what twenty five
years ago, and I was suddenly captured by this story
of this Persian queen, century Persian queen who is an
(06:04):
orphan and no one knows her identity, and she's in
essence the most powerful woman in the world, but no
one knows she's Jewish. She's incognito. And as the story goes,
there's an evil guy named Haimon who comes to destroy
the Jews, and ultimately it's it's Queen Esther who is
(06:29):
challenged by her uncle Mordecai and says, Esther, you need
to talk to the king. And she says, if I
go in unannounced and he didn't, he didn't, you know,
approve that I'm dead. I'm a dead woman. And Mordecai says,
(06:50):
maybe for such a time as this, you were born.
And that has captured my imagination pretty much since then,
that I have this sense for myself and for everyone
that I meet people wherever, that we all have a
(07:13):
call of destiny on our lives, and that when we're
wondering what in the world is going on, we can
ask ourselves the question, maybe, for this moment I was born,
I need to step up and fulfill my destiny. Well,
I had this vision, what would it be like to
take this Queen Esther, bring her into our century, the
(07:36):
twentieth century, twenty first century, and make her a specop's
elite sniper in the Israeli Defense Force. Yeah, And then
I wondered, what would it be like if I put
her this sniper named Hadassa Abrams Hattie Abrams in the
(08:01):
same predicament where Jerusalem is about to be annihilated by
a madman with a nuclear tipped rockets, and she is
beaten and forlorn. There's been a lot of stuff going
(08:24):
on in her life, and she gets this call from
a Massade, the director of Masade, who says, you know,
we are looking for this guy named X and he's
going to destroy Jerusalem. He says, that's great. Why are
(08:44):
you talking to me because everywhere you show up, he's
at your heels trying to kill you. He's got some
grudge against you. And so the next time he shows up,
we're going to be there. And she says, you mean
I'm the goat and he says, they Hattie, maybe you
(09:06):
were born for this moment. Maybe this is your time
to step up and do the right thing, and without
giving too much away, that's that's what happens. She goes
head to head, she finds this guy and with her
love Wolf James, New York City detective, and he goes
(09:34):
right down to the wire. There you go.
Speaker 2 (09:38):
Now it's other questions, but we could come back to
the well, actually I did want to ask you this,
and I want to come back to the novel because
this might play into it. And you just explored some
of what made your interest in you wanted to study
seminary and esther and how you came about that that
picture interest when you just checked going back a little
(10:00):
when you were a kid. I know your father was
in the military, but what did your dream of being
curious when you talk destiny and whatnot, when you were
a kid, what did your dream of becoming what does
it want to be?
Speaker 3 (10:15):
I don't recall having a lot of dreams about becoming anything.
We were always moving every year, every two years. We
were in a different place and life was exciting. And
all I can say is about the age of twelve
(10:36):
thirteen fourteen, I discovered that I had a natural interest
in philosophy that I started engaging my dad in. I
remember we had this big conversation on honesty and I
was saying, what is honesty? What is lying? And he said, well,
(10:59):
there's cash register honesty. I said, what's that? He says,
that's when someone looks at you and says you're ugly. Oh,
he says, but you can be a lot more polite
and say wow, I really like that hairstyle. You know, Well,
(11:20):
here I am at this early age, talking through moral
issues and films, and that is what gripped me. When
I went into high school, I started reading existential literature
and became fascinated with Frederick Nietzsche, who thus spake Zarathustra,
where the madman is running through the village at night
(11:42):
and says, we have killed God. And Nietzsche was the
one who said God is dead. Now the antagonist to
Nietzsche was Soren Caguard Danish and Carekaguard was writing at
the same time, and he said he coined the phrase
(12:04):
the leap of faith. So in the kind of eighteen sixties,
we have these two giants of philosophy. One coins the
phrase God is dead, and now we all kind of
think like God is dead. We hear that a lot,
and we have character GUARDI says, talks about the leap
(12:25):
of faith. And what he was talking about is you
have to leap out of an airplane with no parachute,
and you're saying God is going to catch me or not.
And I was fascinated with this stuff. This is so
I suppose I was thinking about going to college and
(12:47):
pursuing some kind of thing with philosophy, but at the
same time my dad was a veterinarian and a researcher
and all of that, and so I was being pulled
into to think about medicine as well. Just it was
(13:08):
just fascinating.
Speaker 2 (13:10):
Okay, what I wanted to ask you again before we
get back to your book, what if you share like
two things you learned about people while practicing Madison Because
you've worked with people probably in very heightened emotional states.
But what did do two things you learned about people
while practicing medicine that helps you to create dynamic, intriguing,
(13:32):
multi dimensional characters.
Speaker 3 (13:35):
Well, I have maybe one pointed memory. I was the
resident of the burn unit at the Manual Hospital Level
one Trauma, and I'd been on the burn unit. I
did six months as a resident there, which is long,
and you see the most horrific, horrific injuries, and many
(13:59):
of them are well, I won't anyway. I was taking
a break and was sitting in the waiting room in
my scrubs coming out of the burning unit. I was
just just felt so much grief and inexplicable pain over
(14:20):
some of the things that were going on in the
lives of these people. When this man is sitting across
from me, and he's wailing and he's crying, and I'm
sitting there, going what's going on? He says he had
lost his entire family that day. His daughter, granddaughter, and
(14:46):
mother were killed in an auto accident. He was wailing.
At that moment. I said to myself, I must read
the Book of Job, which is a supreme testament of suffering.
I said, so I became aware of suffering and pain
(15:09):
is part of the human condition. We cannot escape it.
And that's the existential dilemma, is we are faced with
suffering and pain. And Job is a righteous man who
suffers everything. And so it's this drama between him and God.
(15:33):
How God, if you're a good God, how can you
do this? And so it's anyway, so I suppose that
memory comes to mind because in trauma, you see you
work with people in pain, and you become aware that
that is the human condition. And I tended to approach
(15:59):
it philosophical and theologically. And yeah, so I don't know
about a second, you know, I think that's probably yeah, okay, love,
I have a love for medicine, loved what I did, and.
Speaker 2 (16:23):
Yeah, okay, who were what inspired your love for writing?
For writing novels? Where did that come from? Out of
academia and Madison.
Speaker 3 (16:33):
Well, you know, when I got this vision back in
two thousand, it wasn't long before I was teaching at
this college, this college of undergrads, and I got into
a really nice discussion with the director of arts, the
art director at the college, who was connected with the
(16:55):
Hollywood scene, and she listened to this story that I
was spinning in my head about this woman queen Esther
transformed into this and she looked at me and she said,
you know, if you can keep this and work it
and develop it and it, you know, put it on
(17:17):
paper and it becomes a film. I see this as
a film. It will become a movie at some point.
She said, I know this, And so I was gripped
with that and I began writing back then. But over
the years I would write for a while and then
(17:39):
put it down, write for a while, and put it down.
And then in twenty sixteen, I had some real business reversals,
basically with bankrupt and was faced with Wow, what direction
is my life going in? Where should I what should
(18:02):
I do next? And I ended up looking for counsel
from a union therapist, Carl Jung psychotherapist who trained in
Zurich and was a senior counselor. And you know, Martha
Blake is phenomenal. So I had heard her name and
(18:26):
Carl Jung and I have this dream. I'd had this
gripping dream. So I went to Martha and I said,
you know, I don't know where my life is going,
but I have this dream. Now, when you tell a
Union psychotherapist so you have a dream, they get out
their pencil and they get out their pad and they
(18:47):
start scribbling and they look at you like with intense eyes,
and they say, tell me your dream. You know, I said, well,
I dreamt I was laying on my back under a
mountain stream that was cascading down this mountain, a cold,
(19:10):
clear mountain stream, and it was covered with ice, and
I was trapped inside trying to get out. But I
looked like Robert Frost, the American poet, and the moon
was coming up and the edges of this around this
(19:36):
water cascade were melting like And she looked at me
and she said, for fifty years you've been in medicine
and science, and in Carl Jung's thinking, that means you've
been living under the sun. The sun is productivity. That's
(20:00):
you being. You followed in your father's footsteps. You have
lived under the sun. You've been a provider that ed
d dad. But in the Union world, the moon represents art, music, literature,
(20:22):
the feminine. And she said, were you ever a poet?
And I said, at the I just I went, well,
when I was yeah, when I was in high school, yeah,
I wrote. She said, maybe there's a poet in you
(20:47):
trying to get out, and the moon is coming up
and it's signaling your subconscious is signaling you from beyond
that you're going in a different direction. You are going
into literature. She said, have you been She said, have
you been writing anything? Went well, actually yes. She said, well,
(21:15):
next session, bring me the first chapter of your book.
I want to listen to it. And I ended up
writing a lot of this book. And every time i'd
get together, I'd read something and talk about my dreams
to Martha, and she was such a brilliant wise woman.
(21:35):
We have people in our lives, not many, but we
mark our lives by certain people that I call the
wise woman, the woman who sits on the edge of
our life, that we go to and say what's going on?
He speaks with wisdom from the moon. So that's what happened.
(22:01):
I started, and then as I wrote, every time I wrote,
she said, you know, I see myself reading this book
in the in the in the airport lounge. I also
see this as a movie, and it's just so in person,
in your face literature. And I went, it's funny, you
(22:25):
see that every time I write it, I see I
see this as a movie. I know this sounds crazy,
but I see Hattie Abrams like wonder Woman, like gal Gado.
So anyway, long story short. When I finished the book,
(22:48):
it got into the hands of an award winning screenwriter
who has written as kind of a screenplay and now
is shopping the screenplay to producers. Oh my goodness. So anyway,
maybe anyway.
Speaker 2 (23:08):
I hope, I hope. But I look up and I said, oh,
doctor Bruf Farmer. I interviewed him off the chef, and
I'm when I see hopefully on the big speed. Now,
can you introduce us You told us earlier about the
story and how I came back about from your your
reading and studies of Esther in the in the scriptures,
but can you introduce us to one of the main
(23:29):
characters Hattie Abrams. Can you share her family background, what's
her personality, like, how old is she and what what
drives her?
Speaker 3 (23:39):
Hattie Abrams is a woman faced with a terrible dilemma
on the at the moment she was born, her father
was murder and her father is murdered by an enforcer
(24:08):
of the Sakarovs syndicate, an evil syndicate. So she doesn't
know that. She just knows that when she was born.
Every time her birthday comes up, she's celebrating her birthday,
but she's also aware that her father died, and this
grips her so much. She's a she learns g Kundo
(24:32):
Bruce Lee's Karate martial art. She's expert in Krav magaw.
She's a very live, cheetahlike and at the age of fourteen,
she is involved in swimsuit modeling in Manhattan. She's a
beautiful lady and she goes against her mother's advice not
(24:57):
to go to that party out in South Hampton, and
she does and she's raped. So in that moment, she
has a close relationship to the God of Israel. She's
very close. She's very very Jewish. She's very Jewish, and
(25:25):
she suddenly is faced with this terrible thing, saying what
did I do to deserve this? And then she has
this moment where she faces God and she says, you
did this, you are responsible. And from this moment on,
I kill you. So that's this dilemma in her, and
(25:50):
then she decides to go into the military. Her expertise
at being a sniper is recognized and so she finds
herself on these as an elite specop's sniper throughout the world.
(26:10):
And finally, as the book opens, we are you know,
meeting Hattie and her sidekicks Shira Shara, who is the
spotter on a mission to kill an al Qaeda terrorist,
(26:31):
and there she is facing her twenty seventh birthday, which
is essentially you know, two weeks three weeks away, and
she is made up her mind she is going to
kill herself. I hate life, It's meaningless, I hate it,
(26:54):
and I'm not going to do this again. I'm not
going to face my father's death on my birthday. I'm
killing So as the story goes, she prepares a place
and the Benjamin for us to kill herself at a
pool and commit Harry Carey, and she has her Tonto
knife and on this day, She's at this pool and
(27:19):
she goes to slit her throat. Her thighs are tied together.
She's at the pool. It's windy and stormy, and this
pool is ringed with pine trees, and she goes to
cut her throat when a tree cracks and splashes into
the pool and her knife pops out of her hand
(27:41):
and she fells, what in the world was that? So
she gets herself all together again, gets the knife, goes
to cut her throat when there's this snap, a loud
shot behind her, and she falls into the pool, breathing
in water. She's, you know, spluttering, angry and fearful. She
(28:03):
turns around to find out what's going on, and she's
looking into the eyes of a twelve prong Persian fellow
buck deer, a very rare kind of deer that is
present in the Benjamin Forest, who's stock still across this
little pond looking at her. And at that moment she
(28:31):
recognizes that this is an accident. And suddenly this fearsome
darkening comes over this pool and she collapses onto her
face and this dread, this fearsome dread, falls upon her
and she is looking at bottomless fear and she knows.
(28:56):
She says, what do you want? And this voice says,
what do you want? And she goes to know why
you killed my father on my birthday? And she has
(29:20):
this suddenly sees herself standing at the edge of the
Grand Canyon, South Rim, looking a mile down at that
that river, and behind her is the burning sands. And
to go into the burning sands is to say I'm
gonna kill myself. I'm gonna pursue this. To jump is
(29:45):
to leap, and the voice says, then leap, So she
leaps out, wakes up three hours later, knowing that she's
had this, this confrontation with this unseen powerful voice. You know,
(30:07):
I never I don't anyway. I leave it at that. Okay, God, Yeah,
she said, I'm going to quit the army. And but
she had met this job dropping hunk of a guy
while climbing Mount Ray near nine years earlier, and their
(30:31):
eyes connected on the while they were going past each
other in the snow, and they both knew at that
moment they were meant for each other. But they don't stop.
They're part of a group, and they they go past
each other, going wait, wait, what am I doing? I
need to turn around? And and and the guy is
(30:53):
going It turns out to be Wolf James, who is
a ranger, a master sard in in the Rangers, who's
going to retire, and he looks at her and he goes,
I know that's the woman for me. He doesn't stop. Well,
here she is on this pond. She's fallen over since
(31:18):
I'm going to quit the army, and I want can
you find me a man like that with amber eyes?
A man who will love me well? As it turns
out then that that day, because it was early morning
when this happens, it turns out that she goes back
(31:39):
to her barracks and she ends up going out that
night with this honky squeeze of a first sergeant. And
into this bistro enters a young boy who is strapped
with dynamite and its closives. He opens up his coat
(32:02):
and shouts Allahu Akbar and pulls the cord and Hattie
is flung across the room into a brick wall. And
now she's gonna wake up in the ICU, terribly burned, terribly,
(32:23):
her face has been blown, is shredded, and she says,
I gave you my life and this is what I
get so now she she is on it. She's fearful,
she doesn't know what's going on, and as it turns out,
(32:43):
she will recognize that someone is trying to kill her
and she will run and flee and and and have
this conversation with I don't bring this out a lot,
but you know she's she's struggling with what happened. And
as she struggles to escape and find she doesn't realize
(33:08):
she's being pushed ever closer where she will meet Wolf
James and the two of them will end up facing off.
Speaker 2 (33:21):
X I was going to ask you how and why
did Haddie and Detective Wolf James passcross, but you just
answered that question for us. But what is Detective Wolf
James doing in Ukraine being that he's a New York
City detective.
Speaker 3 (33:38):
Well, it's funny because he's he he too, He goes
in to become a New York City detective because his
family was burned alive when he was a boy, and
he discovered he knows that it's there's a malign presence
(33:58):
that did it, so he he is devoted to finding
his his family's killers. He learns that actually the guy
in charge of this whole thing was is this Zacaroff
(34:18):
syndicate who who is headquartered in Odessa, Ukraine, And so
Wolf ends up being assigned by Captain Greening of the
Ninth Precinct to go to Odessa on this on this
mission for the Ninth Precinct. The Captain doesn't understand all
of this stuff, and Hattie is also in Southampton at
(34:44):
her grandfather's place, and that's when she gets the call
from the director of the Masade, who says, you are
going to Odessa because we know X can be traced there.
We don't know if he's there, but that's where you're going.
(35:04):
So that chapter where these two meet is one of
my most favorite favorite chapters because they've been looking for
each other for nine years wow considered each other dead.
She doesn't know he even exists, and he has written
her off. And she gets off the plane as this
(35:29):
gorgeous Specops gal and he's coming out the gate by.
He's been told he has to meet this Israeli person
who's going to help in this finding X. He doesn't
know what he's doing there. Why is he there picking
up this girl? And of course they.
Speaker 2 (35:52):
I just think, yes, are there real life events in
the book Blood Sapphire's revenge, and it's so, why did
you choose approach? Are there what real life events in
the story, Events are actually historically occur that you put
in a story.
Speaker 3 (36:10):
The book is really super accurate as to detail. I mean,
when when Hattie picks up the McMillan, you know, fifty
caliber tacked one sniper rifle, the reader ends up learning
about the rifle. It's a thirty pound cannon that's six
(36:31):
feet long and it shoots a two and a half
inch you know bullet. I mean, you're right there.
Speaker 2 (36:39):
It.
Speaker 3 (36:40):
People have asked me though, because I started I got
this vision back in two thousand and I started writing
it in twenty sixteen. And they read it and they go,
this is crazy. X is an oligarch, a Ukrainian oligarch
who's friend friends with Vladimir Putin, and the two of
(37:03):
them are in cahoos and they it turns out that
Hattie and Wolf are both they were both born in Odessa.
And so people look at this and go, you had
no idea about the Russians invading Ukraine, about current events,
(37:32):
And I said I didn't. And when I asked Martha
Blake that, she said some many Times writers, artists, they're
the subconscious is connected to events that are unfolding that
we're not aware of. And you were connected to what
(37:55):
was going to happen, and that fueled some of the
angst in writing this, and I went, oh, well that's interesting.
So yeah, you've got so you are very much in
(38:16):
all the details of Southampton and New York and all
the street names and all the apartments and all of
that is down to the wire detail. If you if
you go to the apartment building where Wolf James is
hiding out to capture this drug lord, you know you'll
find it. Okay, yeah, okay.
Speaker 2 (38:38):
Now is this what you've described as for our listeners
as a fast paced novel or more of a psychological thriller.
Speaker 3 (38:48):
Well, it's.
Speaker 2 (38:51):
It.
Speaker 3 (38:52):
It somewhat defies description. It's a very fast paced, can't
put down turn So my rule of thumb in writing
is you must give the reader a reason to turn
the page. So at the end of every page, I'm asking, okay,
(39:13):
they have to turn the page. What is it that's
gonna make them turn the page? So many people pick
up the book and can't put it down.
Speaker 2 (39:24):
Ah, very good.
Speaker 3 (39:26):
But it is character driven. Okay, I'm very much into
the psychological makeup of every character. The psychopathy of the
Enforcer Evan Jurich, the schizoid personality disorder of X, who
(39:46):
has a photographic memory, who remembers every detail of his life,
who is a Jew but hates his race and wants
to destroy them, which is we have historical examples of that.
And one of the chief henchmen of Stalin Kaganovich, was
(40:09):
a Jew who helped murder millions of his fellow Jews,
and so X has examples. You can read about Kaganovich.
Speaker 2 (40:20):
You know.
Speaker 3 (40:20):
So these are all so X is he's a genius,
a photographic memory, but he is a schizoid is He's
a he's one weird dude. So, and then the Enforcer
Ivan jurik is Uh is truly a psychopath. Now. Also
(40:46):
we have part of the ex household is his personal
assistant of Fusako Kitty Serikawa, who is a beautiful Japanese
As it turns out, she's a Yakuza, member of the Yakuza,
and she is there to assist X, but actually her
(41:12):
grandfather has sent her on a mission to ultimately kill him.
So she's an assassin and she has her own manic
depressive weirdness, and since I practiced medicine, I love getting
into the psychology that drives people to do what they do.
(41:36):
So a lot of times my characters are speaking inside themselves.
So Hattie might be saying, I'm here to kill an
a sure salam with the sniper rifle, but inside she's going,
what would mother think of me? Yeah? What? Years? Make
(41:58):
me change my mom? So because it's easy to point
a gun at someone and say he pulled the trigger
and she died and we all go so what. But
if you're inside the character and you're into their past
and what's going on, the reader has a chance to
get inside and ask questions of themselves, so they get
(42:23):
pulled into the drama.
Speaker 2 (42:26):
Yeah yeah, Now have you traveled? Did you have you
actually traveled to Ukraine and or New York City to really,
like you said, if you went to one of the areas,
you would actually see that apartment.
Speaker 3 (42:39):
I actually went one time when I was in I
lived in Staten Island for a while, and then I've
been in Manhattan three times and walked the city streets,
and then I was out of Southampton and I was
basically game entrance into a Southampton mansion and studied the
(43:04):
architecture and the landscaping. So when you're in the house
of Hattie's grandfather, David Abrams, who's an art gallery guy,
the house, if you've been to that New York subway
tile kind of architecture, you'll recognize, Wow, that sounds like
(43:30):
one of these houses. And the privet hedges that are,
you know, twelve feet tall, and the oyster crushed gravel driveways,
and the Agawam Lake. All of these things are because
I was there. I went. I had a ticket on
(43:52):
Ukrainian air the airlines to go to Odessa. I purchased
the ticket and COVID hit. I never got my money
back because Ukrainian International Airway nearly went bankrupt. So I
was close to And the reason I came up with
(44:14):
Odessa goes way back when I was reading Innocence Abroad
by Mark Twain, a book that I've read about three times,
and I love Innocence Abroad. Where they are getting off
their steamship, the first steamship, luxury ship to go around
the world that was like eighteen, I don't know, seventy
(44:36):
two or somewhere in there, and they get off and
go up to Odessa, and Odessa was a pretty fresh
town back then. And Mark Quain describes Odessa as the
streets and the dust and looking westward and he said,
this is the west. There was something about it that
(44:59):
captured my ma imagination about Odessa being the frontier, like
the western frontier of the US, the frontier of this
new land. And it captured me and I never forgot that,
so I went back to Odessa.
Speaker 2 (45:20):
Wow, how interesting. How long did it take you to
write Blood sat Fhire's Revenge. The idea came to you
in two thousand. You started on it in twenty sixteen,
which is pretty impressive, that sixteen year gap. How long
did it take you to finish the novel?
Speaker 3 (45:35):
I'd say five years, oh, five years. And now it's
in the hands of Nick Potter, who is this amazing screenwriter,
and so we're he's pulling all the levers and doing
all the things that you do to he doesn't see
when he first read the book. And if you know
(45:59):
that world, he didn't read the book, you know you
have to pay the screenwriter a considerable sum of money
to read your book, because at his level, he said,
I'm not going to read your book unless you pay me.
And I went okay, and then he said that intollge
(46:23):
you one hour, a one hour interview after I've read it,
and I'll let you know whether we should proceed or not.
And so I was on pins and needles waiting for
this call. And finally it came two months later and
he got on the phone and he said, I love
(46:43):
this book. He said, it's not going to be a movie.
You have five years of material here for a TV
series and that's what he's doing.
Speaker 2 (46:57):
Okay. Was there ever a time when you struggle to
continue developing a story? You were in psycho therapy, you
read a chapter to your therapist Martha and get I'm
sure she'd give you feedback, particularly more on what might
be going on with you unconsciously. But was there ever
time when you struggle to continue to develop writing a story?
And if so, how did you move through that challenge?
(47:20):
And I ask you that for our listeners who might
be writers themselves, who might get to a part in
a story where they just struggle to continue.
Speaker 3 (47:29):
Well, I often think in terms of pictures, and so
my response is taken from a mind picture that comes
to mind about my writing style and my struggles. I've
had the opportunity to raft the the Shoots River in
(47:49):
Oregon more times than I can count over many years.
And the river it's a three day flow with some
huge rapids, and it's very exciting and it's quite an adventure.
And riding, to me is a little bit like hitting
(48:14):
white Horse rapids or you know whatever, where you're just
you're just holding on for dear life and the riding
comes and it's just happening. It's flowing, and then you
hit these spots of calm where it seems like the
(48:37):
river is not moving at all, and you're sitting on
the surface of the water, going are we even moving?
And but you know that you are. You know that
you are. You can look over at the banks and
see these little whirlpools, these little eddies forming. You can
(49:00):
look at the at the surface of the water and
see it boiling up from deep below. You know it's moving.
And when I get to these spots where the book
isn't happening, I basically rest in this raft of who
(49:20):
myself or whatever. And I know that if I'm patient
and I'm intending to what's going on the rip, we'll
we'll hit another we'll hit another rapid Wow.
Speaker 2 (49:36):
Okay, that's kind of.
Speaker 3 (49:37):
How I think about this. You know that you have
this gift, you know you've been called to do this.
You trust to that call, maybe for this moment, you
were born to write. So if you're a writer and
you've had those rapid moments where it all just comes out,
(49:59):
and then you hear those long patches of nothing's happening,
I can't think of a thing, I don't know where
to go. You you just trust to what's going on
inside you.
Speaker 2 (50:16):
Okay, what is the inspiration? And I'm listen to you
as you talk about the story. Where did you get
the book's title? What's the inspiration behind the title of
the book.
Speaker 3 (50:27):
Well, it comes from the moment when Hattie was born.
Her mother, Sasha, is a seer. She has this gift
of seeing the future. She can see in the people
and we know people like that, people that we meet
(50:48):
that they kind of look at you and you have
a sense that they're looking right through you. And Sasha
has that gift and she has very vivid, vivid dreams
that are prophetic they come true. So when Hattie is
(51:09):
being born, she has this dream of this bloody dagger
that's encrusted with blood saphire, the sapphires soon the blood
sapphire zone, which is kind of a it's not ruby red,
it's more pinkish, but it she sees this, this dagger,
(51:36):
the hilt is covered with blood sapphires, and it's bloody.
And as Hattie's being born, Ultimately, when Hattie's, you know,
when she's older, she will tell her I saw you
being born, and I saw you killing the man who
(51:56):
killed your father. Wow. Hattie will re jet that and say,
and she says, and Hattie, you have my gift. And
Hattie will say, I don't have your gift. I'm not
going to kill him. I'm going to kill myself in
in six days. So there, as it turns out, it
doesn't happen that way. But so that's right. I just interesting.
Speaker 2 (52:19):
Interesting. The more you share, the more intriguing, bless that
Fire's revenge becomes. Can you share three steps you've taken, Bruce,
that you personally have found to be effective at getting
the word out about your book?
Speaker 3 (52:33):
Well, getting them if you're a self publisher, of which
I am, it's it's it's a job. I think The
first thing is is uh, I have a web developer,
a web designer who is an expert. And so the
(52:56):
first thing for me was a web presence and realizing
that people really are not drawn to Blood Sapphire's Revenge.
They're drawn to the author, doctor Bruce Farmer. They want
to know about you as a person, they want to
get to know you, and then they go, Okay, I
think I'll try the book. So the first thing is
(53:20):
is a web presence that really and this guy said, look,
I want pictures of you. You know, the book cover
is a model that we found. My wife and I
found this at the studio of a very famous photographer
(53:43):
who does all the Nike photographs action and swimmers and everything.
And he took us into his studio, which is this
amazing place, and he brought forward all these albums of
models and we told him what we were looking for.
We flipped through them again, and finally we drilled down
(54:06):
to this one person, this is ours, and then he
made the call she was available, and she came in
and so when you see the cover, she's holding the rifle.
My son is a former military officer, and he came
(54:26):
on set and dressed her, told her how to hold
you know the weapon, told her how the knife has
to be. You know, it got her all dressed up
and she would come around the corner or pose and
finally I said, you know this, I don't think you're
getting it. I want you to come around and realize
(54:52):
I'm on the ground as a with a person with
a gun and I'm going to shoot you. You're going
to be shot dead. So you got to come around
ready to respond. You got to look intense. And she
got it, and we captured that on pictures. So that's
(55:13):
the picture, the photograph on the book. And then this
web designer said, well he took pictures of you. I
want pictures. I went, okay. You know. So anyway, that
was a lot of the process. And then you find
(55:34):
people who are marketers who understand marketing books. And the
person who found this found you a stress free marketing
out of Atlanta. He says, look, this is what this
is what I do, and so you but you have
(55:59):
to make the investment. You have to make the time,
book clubs, signings. Sometimes I'll give away the book, and
you know, you just you're always in the process of Unfortunately,
it's self promotion, which gets really tiresome. And anyway, I
(56:22):
had written this autobiography and then Nick Potter came along
and he wanted to make a pitch deck, which is
going to go before producers. They could kind of see
the book like a you know, see the book in
slide picture formation. He says, Then they're going to look
at this. I want them to read about the author.
(56:46):
I want an autobiographical note or. I said, Nick, I've
worked on that autobiography piece and I'm sick of it.
And he said, stop it. He said stop it. Now,
here's what I want want you to do. I want
you to step outside yourself, pretend you're someone else and
(57:07):
look at this character and whatever, get angry, do whatever
you need to do, but write about this person in
a way where you're not that person. I went, oh,
I said to do, and just spilled it out and
(57:28):
I sent it to him and says, that's fantastic. Okay, okay,
it's a process.
Speaker 1 (57:33):
Yes.
Speaker 2 (57:34):
Are you working on any new books? Bruce?
Speaker 3 (57:37):
Well? I started Blood Sapphire's Revenge and I'm about twelve
to fifteen chapters into it, and I suffered a big
setback when my computer crashed, and although I back everything up,
I hadn't backed up some of the files, which is
(58:00):
which is which is terrible because you lose weeks of work.
So I've started, and I'm essentially on that pond in
the the shoots. My juices have just kind of like
I'm just sitting there going you know, because both Sapphires
(58:20):
Revenge picks up from where Blood Sapphires I excuse me, Yeah,
the the second book, the second book picks up from
the moment the first book ends at the castle exss castle,
(58:41):
the drama at the last moment. You start from there
and begin the second book. And so it's yeah, so
I've I've started, and but I've hit the calm waters.
Speaker 2 (59:00):
I can tell you, Okay, where can off the shelf
listeners get a copy of Blood Sapphires.
Speaker 3 (59:06):
Well, everything is on Amazon. I mean, you can just
go to blood Sapphire's Revenge. It's in audio. I did
the audible, so you're listening to me and you've got
the print and the kindle and the heart and everything,
and it's you know, it's it's priced the way my
(59:28):
Marketer said it should be priced. You know, I didn't
come up with these prices, you know. He just says
this is what this is, blah blah blah, and I
went okay, so yeah, it's super easy to get ahold of.
Speaker 2 (59:40):
Okay, we have had the pleasure of interviewing doctor Bruce Farmer.
He's the author of blood Sapphire's Revenge. He's working on
book two in the story and so you can look
forward to seeing that on the market one day in
the future. His website is doctor Bruce Farmer dot com
d are u ce F A R M E R
(01:00:03):
dot com and he's looking to get the bus satisfire Revenge.
Hopefully you see it either the major motion film or
a TV series. So thank you doctor Bruce Farmer for
being here with us and taking time out of your
Saturday be with us here on off the Shelf books.
As I always tell our listeners, first of all, thank you,
(01:00:27):
thank you for being here with us. And I encourage
you to go out and support doctor Bruce Farmer and
get a copy of blood Sapphire's Revenge. And as I
always tell you, you really are amazing. We forget that sometimes
you are incredible. Please go out and create a fabulous
day for yourself. Doctor Bruce. I'll send you an email
(01:00:48):
when the show finishes streaming. Thank you, thank you, thank
Speaker 3 (01:00:52):
You, thank you, thank you, Denise, Bye for now, bye bye.
You're listening to the winning literary show Off the Shelf
Books Talk Radio Live with host Denise Turney, author of
the books Long Walk Up, Porsche, Love, More Over Me,
Spiral Love Has Many Faces, and Rosette Us Great Hope.
Turn up your dial and get ready for a blast
of feature author interviews four one one on book festivals,
(00:21):
writing conferences, and so much more. Ready, let's go.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
Good morning, Good morning, and welcome to Off the Shelf Books.
By this Saturday, July twenty six, twenty twenty five, this
is the last Saturday in July. I tell people, this
month went so fast. It doesn't even feel like a
full month. I don't know what it is about summer.
I guess we filled our lives up with a lot
(00:52):
of things and it goes so fast. Before we kick
into the show, I want to start with a quote,
as I generally do. Some of you may love these quotes.
This one is by Isabelle la Fleche. Your passion is
waiting for your courage to catch up. Your passion is
waiting for your courage to catch up. And now instead
(01:16):
of you know, I normally will tell you about one
of my books and then introduce our guests, but I
want to get in quickly to letting you meet today's guests.
So instead of going in briefly about one of my books,
I do encourage you to visit me online at cistel
c h I s t e l l dot com.
(01:37):
You can read free excerpts from my books. You can
actually even catch the Off the Shelf Books platform through
my books, sign up for the book Lovers having my
literary newsletter which comes out monthly and it's completely and
absolutely free. Again, that's cistel c h I s t
(01:57):
e l l dot com. Hope you hop over there
and enjoy your visit, and now let us go and
meet today's Off the Shelf guest. And this morning's guest
is doctor Bruce Farmer. He is an avid outdoorsman. He
has explored many lands, traveling domestically and abroad, and his
(02:19):
careers have led him to healthcare and education. His outdoor career,
travel and outdoor experiences influence his writings, including his latest book,
Blood Sapphire's Revenge. He is a devoted father and grandfather,
and Bruce invice you to explore his writings at doctor
(02:41):
Bruce Farmer dot com. And that's spelled d R b
r u ce f A r M e r dot com.
And one more time d R b r u ce
f A r m e r dot com. Please stop
over in his website even now while you enjoy listening
(03:03):
to today's show. So honored to have doctor Bruce Farmer
with us this morning. Welcome, Welcome, doctor Bruce Farmer.
Speaker 3 (03:12):
Thank you, thank you so much. It's an honor to
be here. Thank you.
Speaker 2 (03:17):
So to kick off today's show, can you please tell
off the shelf Books listeners where you grew up and
what life was like for you growing up.
Speaker 3 (03:28):
Well, Denise, I was born in nineteen fifty two, so
I'm a boomer, single child. Parents military, so I'm an
army brat. Dad was a veterinarian and a nuclear researcher,
(03:49):
and the army basically put him on the Area fifty
one and he worked on the atomic bomb. And so
that upbringing took us all over the planet with lots
of adventure right there, and he settled. We settled in Beaverton, Oregon,
(04:14):
so I could go to high school, the same high school,
and I felt a call to medicine, and I went
to Portland State University and then graduated as a doctor
of Medicine from Oregon Health Sciences University in nineteen eighty
(04:38):
three and went into trauma surgery and burns. Ultimately, I
practiced emergency medicine in rural Oregon and then felt a
call to go into the seminary and not to be
(04:58):
a pastor, but to lore philosophical issue of determinism or
sovereignty and free will. Ultimately, I taught at Life Pacific
University in San Dimas, California, and then severed day severe
(05:18):
back injury and was got an operation and rehabbed, and
that led me in to develop my own company called
Fitness Therapeutics on rehabbing bad backs. And ultimately, I'll say
that in the year two thousand, when I went to seminary,
(05:41):
I had a bit of a vision. I was reading
the Book of Esther, now this is what twenty five
years ago, and I was suddenly captured by this story
of this Persian queen, century Persian queen who is an
(06:04):
orphan and no one knows her identity, and she's in
essence the most powerful woman in the world, but no
one knows she's Jewish. She's incognito. And as the story goes,
there's an evil guy named Haimon who comes to destroy
the Jews, and ultimately it's it's Queen Esther who is
(06:29):
challenged by her uncle Mordecai and says, Esther, you need
to talk to the king. And she says, if I
go in unannounced and he didn't, he didn't, you know,
approve that I'm dead. I'm a dead woman. And Mordecai says,
(06:50):
maybe for such a time as this, you were born.
And that has captured my imagination pretty much since then,
that I have this sense for myself and for everyone
that I meet people wherever, that we all have a
(07:13):
call of destiny on our lives, and that when we're
wondering what in the world is going on, we can
ask ourselves the question, maybe, for this moment I was born,
I need to step up and fulfill my destiny. Well,
I had this vision, what would it be like to
take this Queen Esther, bring her into our century, the
(07:36):
twentieth century, twenty first century, and make her a specop's
elite sniper in the Israeli Defense Force. Yeah, And then
I wondered, what would it be like if I put
her this sniper named Hadassa Abrams Hattie Abrams in the
(08:01):
same predicament where Jerusalem is about to be annihilated by
a madman with a nuclear tipped rockets, and she is
beaten and forlorn. There's been a lot of stuff going
(08:24):
on in her life, and she gets this call from
a Massade, the director of Masade, who says, you know,
we are looking for this guy named X and he's
going to destroy Jerusalem. He says, that's great. Why are
(08:44):
you talking to me because everywhere you show up, he's
at your heels trying to kill you. He's got some
grudge against you. And so the next time he shows up,
we're going to be there. And she says, you mean
I'm the goat and he says, they Hattie, maybe you
(09:06):
were born for this moment. Maybe this is your time
to step up and do the right thing, and without
giving too much away, that's that's what happens. She goes
head to head, she finds this guy and with her
love Wolf James, New York City detective, and he goes
(09:34):
right down to the wire. There you go.
Speaker 2 (09:38):
Now it's other questions, but we could come back to
the well, actually I did want to ask you this,
and I want to come back to the novel because
this might play into it. And you just explored some
of what made your interest in you wanted to study
seminary and esther and how you came about that that
picture interest when you just checked going back a little
(10:00):
when you were a kid. I know your father was
in the military, but what did your dream of being
curious when you talk destiny and whatnot, when you were
a kid, what did your dream of becoming what does
it want to be?
Speaker 3 (10:15):
I don't recall having a lot of dreams about becoming anything.
We were always moving every year, every two years. We
were in a different place and life was exciting. And
all I can say is about the age of twelve
(10:36):
thirteen fourteen, I discovered that I had a natural interest
in philosophy that I started engaging my dad in. I
remember we had this big conversation on honesty and I
was saying, what is honesty? What is lying? And he said, well,
(10:59):
there's cash register honesty. I said, what's that? He says,
that's when someone looks at you and says you're ugly. Oh,
he says, but you can be a lot more polite
and say wow, I really like that hairstyle. You know, Well,
(11:20):
here I am at this early age, talking through moral
issues and films, and that is what gripped me. When
I went into high school, I started reading existential literature
and became fascinated with Frederick Nietzsche, who thus spake Zarathustra,
where the madman is running through the village at night
(11:42):
and says, we have killed God. And Nietzsche was the
one who said God is dead. Now the antagonist to
Nietzsche was Soren Caguard Danish and Carekaguard was writing at
the same time, and he said he coined the phrase
(12:04):
the leap of faith. So in the kind of eighteen sixties,
we have these two giants of philosophy. One coins the
phrase God is dead, and now we all kind of
think like God is dead. We hear that a lot,
and we have character GUARDI says, talks about the leap
(12:25):
of faith. And what he was talking about is you
have to leap out of an airplane with no parachute,
and you're saying God is going to catch me or not.
And I was fascinated with this stuff. This is so
I suppose I was thinking about going to college and
(12:47):
pursuing some kind of thing with philosophy, but at the
same time my dad was a veterinarian and a researcher
and all of that, and so I was being pulled
into to think about medicine as well. Just it was
(13:08):
just fascinating.
Speaker 2 (13:10):
Okay, what I wanted to ask you again before we
get back to your book, what if you share like
two things you learned about people while practicing Madison Because
you've worked with people probably in very heightened emotional states.
But what did do two things you learned about people
while practicing medicine that helps you to create dynamic, intriguing,
(13:32):
multi dimensional characters.
Speaker 3 (13:35):
Well, I have maybe one pointed memory. I was the
resident of the burn unit at the Manual Hospital Level
one Trauma, and I'd been on the burn unit. I
did six months as a resident there, which is long,
and you see the most horrific, horrific injuries, and many
(13:59):
of them are well, I won't anyway. I was taking
a break and was sitting in the waiting room in
my scrubs coming out of the burning unit. I was
just just felt so much grief and inexplicable pain over
(14:20):
some of the things that were going on in the
lives of these people. When this man is sitting across
from me, and he's wailing and he's crying, and I'm
sitting there, going what's going on? He says he had
lost his entire family that day. His daughter, granddaughter, and
(14:46):
mother were killed in an auto accident. He was wailing.
At that moment. I said to myself, I must read
the Book of Job, which is a supreme testament of suffering.
I said, so I became aware of suffering and pain
(15:09):
is part of the human condition. We cannot escape it.
And that's the existential dilemma, is we are faced with
suffering and pain. And Job is a righteous man who
suffers everything. And so it's this drama between him and God.
(15:33):
How God, if you're a good God, how can you
do this? And so it's anyway, so I suppose that
memory comes to mind because in trauma, you see you
work with people in pain, and you become aware that
that is the human condition. And I tended to approach
(15:59):
it philosophical and theologically. And yeah, so I don't know
about a second, you know, I think that's probably yeah, okay, love,
I have a love for medicine, loved what I did, and.
Speaker 2 (16:23):
Yeah, okay, who were what inspired your love for writing?
For writing novels? Where did that come from? Out of
academia and Madison.
Speaker 3 (16:33):
Well, you know, when I got this vision back in
two thousand, it wasn't long before I was teaching at
this college, this college of undergrads, and I got into
a really nice discussion with the director of arts, the
art director at the college, who was connected with the
(16:55):
Hollywood scene, and she listened to this story that I
was spinning in my head about this woman queen Esther
transformed into this and she looked at me and she said,
you know, if you can keep this and work it
and develop it and it, you know, put it on
(17:17):
paper and it becomes a film. I see this as
a film. It will become a movie at some point.
She said, I know this, And so I was gripped
with that and I began writing back then. But over
the years I would write for a while and then
(17:39):
put it down, write for a while, and put it down.
And then in twenty sixteen, I had some real business reversals,
basically with bankrupt and was faced with Wow, what direction
is my life going in? Where should I what should
(18:02):
I do next? And I ended up looking for counsel
from a union therapist, Carl Jung psychotherapist who trained in
Zurich and was a senior counselor. And you know, Martha
Blake is phenomenal. So I had heard her name and
(18:26):
Carl Jung and I have this dream. I'd had this
gripping dream. So I went to Martha and I said,
you know, I don't know where my life is going,
but I have this dream. Now, when you tell a
Union psychotherapist so you have a dream, they get out
their pencil and they get out their pad and they
(18:47):
start scribbling and they look at you like with intense eyes,
and they say, tell me your dream. You know, I said, well,
I dreamt I was laying on my back under a
mountain stream that was cascading down this mountain, a cold,
(19:10):
clear mountain stream, and it was covered with ice, and
I was trapped inside trying to get out. But I
looked like Robert Frost, the American poet, and the moon
was coming up and the edges of this around this
(19:36):
water cascade were melting like And she looked at me
and she said, for fifty years you've been in medicine
and science, and in Carl Jung's thinking, that means you've
been living under the sun. The sun is productivity. That's
(20:00):
you being. You followed in your father's footsteps. You have
lived under the sun. You've been a provider that ed
d dad. But in the Union world, the moon represents art, music, literature,
(20:22):
the feminine. And she said, were you ever a poet?
And I said, at the I just I went, well,
when I was yeah, when I was in high school, yeah,
I wrote. She said, maybe there's a poet in you
(20:47):
trying to get out, and the moon is coming up
and it's signaling your subconscious is signaling you from beyond
that you're going in a different direction. You are going
into literature. She said, have you been She said, have
you been writing anything? Went well, actually yes. She said, well,
(21:15):
next session, bring me the first chapter of your book.
I want to listen to it. And I ended up
writing a lot of this book. And every time i'd
get together, I'd read something and talk about my dreams
to Martha, and she was such a brilliant wise woman.
(21:35):
We have people in our lives, not many, but we
mark our lives by certain people that I call the
wise woman, the woman who sits on the edge of
our life, that we go to and say what's going on?
He speaks with wisdom from the moon. So that's what happened.
(22:01):
I started, and then as I wrote, every time I wrote,
she said, you know, I see myself reading this book
in the in the in the airport lounge. I also
see this as a movie, and it's just so in person,
in your face literature. And I went, it's funny, you
(22:25):
see that every time I write it, I see I
see this as a movie. I know this sounds crazy,
but I see Hattie Abrams like wonder Woman, like gal Gado.
So anyway, long story short. When I finished the book,
(22:48):
it got into the hands of an award winning screenwriter
who has written as kind of a screenplay and now
is shopping the screenplay to producers. Oh my goodness. So anyway,
maybe anyway.
Speaker 2 (23:08):
I hope, I hope. But I look up and I said, oh,
doctor Bruf Farmer. I interviewed him off the chef, and
I'm when I see hopefully on the big speed. Now,
can you introduce us You told us earlier about the
story and how I came back about from your your
reading and studies of Esther in the in the scriptures,
but can you introduce us to one of the main
(23:29):
characters Hattie Abrams. Can you share her family background, what's
her personality, like, how old is she and what what
drives her?
Speaker 3 (23:39):
Hattie Abrams is a woman faced with a terrible dilemma
on the at the moment she was born, her father
was murder and her father is murdered by an enforcer
(24:08):
of the Sakarovs syndicate, an evil syndicate. So she doesn't
know that. She just knows that when she was born.
Every time her birthday comes up, she's celebrating her birthday,
but she's also aware that her father died, and this
grips her so much. She's a she learns g Kundo
(24:32):
Bruce Lee's Karate martial art. She's expert in Krav magaw.
She's a very live, cheetahlike and at the age of fourteen,
she is involved in swimsuit modeling in Manhattan. She's a
beautiful lady and she goes against her mother's advice not
(24:57):
to go to that party out in South Hampton, and
she does and she's raped. So in that moment, she
has a close relationship to the God of Israel. She's
very close. She's very very Jewish. She's very Jewish, and
(25:25):
she suddenly is faced with this terrible thing, saying what
did I do to deserve this? And then she has
this moment where she faces God and she says, you
did this, you are responsible. And from this moment on,
I kill you. So that's this dilemma in her, and
(25:50):
then she decides to go into the military. Her expertise
at being a sniper is recognized and so she finds
herself on these as an elite specop's sniper throughout the world.
(26:10):
And finally, as the book opens, we are you know,
meeting Hattie and her sidekicks Shira Shara, who is the
spotter on a mission to kill an al Qaeda terrorist,
(26:31):
and there she is facing her twenty seventh birthday, which
is essentially you know, two weeks three weeks away, and
she is made up her mind she is going to
kill herself. I hate life, It's meaningless, I hate it,
(26:54):
and I'm not going to do this again. I'm not
going to face my father's death on my birthday. I'm
killing So as the story goes, she prepares a place
and the Benjamin for us to kill herself at a
pool and commit Harry Carey, and she has her Tonto
knife and on this day, She's at this pool and
(27:19):
she goes to slit her throat. Her thighs are tied together.
She's at the pool. It's windy and stormy, and this
pool is ringed with pine trees, and she goes to
cut her throat when a tree cracks and splashes into
the pool and her knife pops out of her hand
(27:41):
and she fells, what in the world was that? So
she gets herself all together again, gets the knife, goes
to cut her throat when there's this snap, a loud
shot behind her, and she falls into the pool, breathing
in water. She's, you know, spluttering, angry and fearful. She
(28:03):
turns around to find out what's going on, and she's
looking into the eyes of a twelve prong Persian fellow
buck deer, a very rare kind of deer that is
present in the Benjamin Forest, who's stock still across this
little pond looking at her. And at that moment she
(28:31):
recognizes that this is an accident. And suddenly this fearsome
darkening comes over this pool and she collapses onto her
face and this dread, this fearsome dread, falls upon her
and she is looking at bottomless fear and she knows.
(28:56):
She says, what do you want? And this voice says,
what do you want? And she goes to know why
you killed my father on my birthday? And she has
(29:20):
this suddenly sees herself standing at the edge of the
Grand Canyon, South Rim, looking a mile down at that
that river, and behind her is the burning sands. And
to go into the burning sands is to say I'm
gonna kill myself. I'm gonna pursue this. To jump is
(29:45):
to leap, and the voice says, then leap, So she
leaps out, wakes up three hours later, knowing that she's
had this, this confrontation with this unseen powerful voice. You know,
(30:07):
I never I don't anyway. I leave it at that. Okay, God, Yeah,
she said, I'm going to quit the army. And but
she had met this job dropping hunk of a guy
while climbing Mount Ray near nine years earlier, and their
(30:31):
eyes connected on the while they were going past each
other in the snow, and they both knew at that
moment they were meant for each other. But they don't stop.
They're part of a group, and they they go past
each other, going wait, wait, what am I doing? I
need to turn around? And and and the guy is
(30:53):
going It turns out to be Wolf James, who is
a ranger, a master sard in in the Rangers, who's
going to retire, and he looks at her and he goes,
I know that's the woman for me. He doesn't stop. Well,
here she is on this pond. She's fallen over since
(31:18):
I'm going to quit the army, and I want can
you find me a man like that with amber eyes?
A man who will love me well? As it turns
out then that that day, because it was early morning
when this happens, it turns out that she goes back
(31:39):
to her barracks and she ends up going out that
night with this honky squeeze of a first sergeant. And
into this bistro enters a young boy who is strapped
with dynamite and its closives. He opens up his coat
(32:02):
and shouts Allahu Akbar and pulls the cord and Hattie
is flung across the room into a brick wall. And
now she's gonna wake up in the ICU, terribly burned, terribly,
(32:23):
her face has been blown, is shredded, and she says,
I gave you my life and this is what I
get so now she she is on it. She's fearful,
she doesn't know what's going on, and as it turns out,
(32:43):
she will recognize that someone is trying to kill her
and she will run and flee and and and have
this conversation with I don't bring this out a lot,
but you know she's she's struggling with what happened. And
as she struggles to escape and find she doesn't realize
(33:08):
she's being pushed ever closer where she will meet Wolf
James and the two of them will end up facing off.
Speaker 2 (33:21):
X I was going to ask you how and why
did Haddie and Detective Wolf James passcross, but you just
answered that question for us. But what is Detective Wolf
James doing in Ukraine being that he's a New York
City detective.
Speaker 3 (33:38):
Well, it's funny because he's he he too, He goes
in to become a New York City detective because his
family was burned alive when he was a boy, and
he discovered he knows that it's there's a malign presence
(33:58):
that did it, so he he is devoted to finding
his his family's killers. He learns that actually the guy
in charge of this whole thing was is this Zacaroff
(34:18):
syndicate who who is headquartered in Odessa, Ukraine, And so
Wolf ends up being assigned by Captain Greening of the
Ninth Precinct to go to Odessa on this on this
mission for the Ninth Precinct. The Captain doesn't understand all
of this stuff, and Hattie is also in Southampton at
(34:44):
her grandfather's place, and that's when she gets the call
from the director of the Masade, who says, you are
going to Odessa because we know X can be traced there.
We don't know if he's there, but that's where you're going.
(35:04):
So that chapter where these two meet is one of
my most favorite favorite chapters because they've been looking for
each other for nine years wow considered each other dead.
She doesn't know he even exists, and he has written
her off. And she gets off the plane as this
(35:29):
gorgeous Specops gal and he's coming out the gate by.
He's been told he has to meet this Israeli person
who's going to help in this finding X. He doesn't
know what he's doing there. Why is he there picking
up this girl? And of course they.
Speaker 2 (35:52):
I just think, yes, are there real life events in
the book Blood Sapphire's revenge, and it's so, why did
you choose approach? Are there what real life events in
the story, Events are actually historically occur that you put
in a story.
Speaker 3 (36:10):
The book is really super accurate as to detail. I mean,
when when Hattie picks up the McMillan, you know, fifty
caliber tacked one sniper rifle, the reader ends up learning
about the rifle. It's a thirty pound cannon that's six
(36:31):
feet long and it shoots a two and a half
inch you know bullet. I mean, you're right there.
Speaker 2 (36:39):
It.
Speaker 3 (36:40):
People have asked me though, because I started I got
this vision back in two thousand and I started writing
it in twenty sixteen. And they read it and they go,
this is crazy. X is an oligarch, a Ukrainian oligarch
who's friend friends with Vladimir Putin, and the two of
(37:03):
them are in cahoos and they it turns out that
Hattie and Wolf are both they were both born in Odessa.
And so people look at this and go, you had
no idea about the Russians invading Ukraine, about current events,
(37:32):
And I said I didn't. And when I asked Martha
Blake that, she said some many Times writers, artists, they're
the subconscious is connected to events that are unfolding that
we're not aware of. And you were connected to what
(37:55):
was going to happen, and that fueled some of the
angst in writing this, and I went, oh, well that's interesting.
So yeah, you've got so you are very much in
(38:16):
all the details of Southampton and New York and all
the street names and all the apartments and all of
that is down to the wire detail. If you if
you go to the apartment building where Wolf James is
hiding out to capture this drug lord, you know you'll
find it. Okay, yeah, okay.
Speaker 2 (38:38):
Now is this what you've described as for our listeners
as a fast paced novel or more of a psychological thriller.
Speaker 3 (38:48):
Well, it's.
Speaker 2 (38:51):
It.
Speaker 3 (38:52):
It somewhat defies description. It's a very fast paced, can't
put down turn So my rule of thumb in writing
is you must give the reader a reason to turn
the page. So at the end of every page, I'm asking, okay,
(39:13):
they have to turn the page. What is it that's
gonna make them turn the page? So many people pick
up the book and can't put it down.
Speaker 2 (39:24):
Ah, very good.
Speaker 3 (39:26):
But it is character driven. Okay, I'm very much into
the psychological makeup of every character. The psychopathy of the
Enforcer Evan Jurich, the schizoid personality disorder of X, who
(39:46):
has a photographic memory, who remembers every detail of his life,
who is a Jew but hates his race and wants
to destroy them, which is we have historical examples of that.
And one of the chief henchmen of Stalin Kaganovich, was
(40:09):
a Jew who helped murder millions of his fellow Jews,
and so X has examples. You can read about Kaganovich.
Speaker 2 (40:20):
You know.
Speaker 3 (40:20):
So these are all so X is he's a genius,
a photographic memory, but he is a schizoid is He's
a he's one weird dude. So, and then the Enforcer
Ivan jurik is Uh is truly a psychopath. Now. Also
(40:46):
we have part of the ex household is his personal
assistant of Fusako Kitty Serikawa, who is a beautiful Japanese
As it turns out, she's a Yakuza, member of the Yakuza,
and she is there to assist X, but actually her
(41:12):
grandfather has sent her on a mission to ultimately kill him.
So she's an assassin and she has her own manic
depressive weirdness, and since I practiced medicine, I love getting
into the psychology that drives people to do what they do.
(41:36):
So a lot of times my characters are speaking inside themselves.
So Hattie might be saying, I'm here to kill an
a sure salam with the sniper rifle, but inside she's going,
what would mother think of me? Yeah? What? Years? Make
(41:58):
me change my mom? So because it's easy to point
a gun at someone and say he pulled the trigger
and she died and we all go so what. But
if you're inside the character and you're into their past
and what's going on, the reader has a chance to
get inside and ask questions of themselves, so they get
(42:23):
pulled into the drama.
Speaker 2 (42:26):
Yeah yeah, Now have you traveled? Did you have you
actually traveled to Ukraine and or New York City to really,
like you said, if you went to one of the areas,
you would actually see that apartment.
Speaker 3 (42:39):
I actually went one time when I was in I
lived in Staten Island for a while, and then I've
been in Manhattan three times and walked the city streets,
and then I was out of Southampton and I was
basically game entrance into a Southampton mansion and studied the
(43:04):
architecture and the landscaping. So when you're in the house
of Hattie's grandfather, David Abrams, who's an art gallery guy,
the house, if you've been to that New York subway
tile kind of architecture, you'll recognize, Wow, that sounds like
(43:30):
one of these houses. And the privet hedges that are,
you know, twelve feet tall, and the oyster crushed gravel driveways,
and the Agawam Lake. All of these things are because
I was there. I went. I had a ticket on
(43:52):
Ukrainian air the airlines to go to Odessa. I purchased
the ticket and COVID hit. I never got my money
back because Ukrainian International Airway nearly went bankrupt. So I
was close to And the reason I came up with
(44:14):
Odessa goes way back when I was reading Innocence Abroad
by Mark Twain, a book that I've read about three times,
and I love Innocence Abroad. Where they are getting off
their steamship, the first steamship, luxury ship to go around
the world that was like eighteen, I don't know, seventy
(44:36):
two or somewhere in there, and they get off and
go up to Odessa, and Odessa was a pretty fresh
town back then. And Mark Quain describes Odessa as the
streets and the dust and looking westward and he said,
this is the west. There was something about it that
(44:59):
captured my ma imagination about Odessa being the frontier, like
the western frontier of the US, the frontier of this
new land. And it captured me and I never forgot that,
so I went back to Odessa.
Speaker 2 (45:20):
Wow, how interesting. How long did it take you to
write Blood sat Fhire's Revenge. The idea came to you
in two thousand. You started on it in twenty sixteen,
which is pretty impressive, that sixteen year gap. How long
did it take you to finish the novel?
Speaker 3 (45:35):
I'd say five years, oh, five years. And now it's
in the hands of Nick Potter, who is this amazing screenwriter,
and so we're he's pulling all the levers and doing
all the things that you do to he doesn't see
when he first read the book. And if you know
(45:59):
that world, he didn't read the book, you know you
have to pay the screenwriter a considerable sum of money
to read your book, because at his level, he said,
I'm not going to read your book unless you pay me.
And I went okay, and then he said that intollge
(46:23):
you one hour, a one hour interview after I've read it,
and I'll let you know whether we should proceed or not.
And so I was on pins and needles waiting for
this call. And finally it came two months later and
he got on the phone and he said, I love
(46:43):
this book. He said, it's not going to be a movie.
You have five years of material here for a TV
series and that's what he's doing.
Speaker 2 (46:57):
Okay. Was there ever a time when you struggle to
continue developing a story? You were in psycho therapy, you
read a chapter to your therapist Martha and get I'm
sure she'd give you feedback, particularly more on what might
be going on with you unconsciously. But was there ever
time when you struggle to continue to develop writing a story?
And if so, how did you move through that challenge?
(47:20):
And I ask you that for our listeners who might
be writers themselves, who might get to a part in
a story where they just struggle to continue.
Speaker 3 (47:29):
Well, I often think in terms of pictures, and so
my response is taken from a mind picture that comes
to mind about my writing style and my struggles. I've
had the opportunity to raft the the Shoots River in
(47:49):
Oregon more times than I can count over many years.
And the river it's a three day flow with some
huge rapids, and it's very exciting and it's quite an adventure.
And riding, to me is a little bit like hitting
(48:14):
white Horse rapids or you know whatever, where you're just
you're just holding on for dear life and the riding
comes and it's just happening. It's flowing, and then you
hit these spots of calm where it seems like the
(48:37):
river is not moving at all, and you're sitting on
the surface of the water, going are we even moving?
And but you know that you are. You know that
you are. You can look over at the banks and
see these little whirlpools, these little eddies forming. You can
(49:00):
look at the at the surface of the water and
see it boiling up from deep below. You know it's moving.
And when I get to these spots where the book
isn't happening, I basically rest in this raft of who
(49:20):
myself or whatever. And I know that if I'm patient
and I'm intending to what's going on the rip, we'll
we'll hit another we'll hit another rapid Wow.
Speaker 2 (49:36):
Okay, that's kind of.
Speaker 3 (49:37):
How I think about this. You know that you have
this gift, you know you've been called to do this.
You trust to that call, maybe for this moment, you
were born to write. So if you're a writer and
you've had those rapid moments where it all just comes out,
(49:59):
and then you hear those long patches of nothing's happening,
I can't think of a thing, I don't know where
to go. You you just trust to what's going on
inside you.
Speaker 2 (50:16):
Okay, what is the inspiration? And I'm listen to you
as you talk about the story. Where did you get
the book's title? What's the inspiration behind the title of
the book.
Speaker 3 (50:27):
Well, it comes from the moment when Hattie was born.
Her mother, Sasha, is a seer. She has this gift
of seeing the future. She can see in the people
and we know people like that, people that we meet
(50:48):
that they kind of look at you and you have
a sense that they're looking right through you. And Sasha
has that gift and she has very vivid, vivid dreams
that are prophetic they come true. So when Hattie is
(51:09):
being born, she has this dream of this bloody dagger
that's encrusted with blood saphire, the sapphires soon the blood
sapphire zone, which is kind of a it's not ruby red,
it's more pinkish, but it she sees this, this dagger,
(51:36):
the hilt is covered with blood sapphires, and it's bloody.
And as Hattie's being born, Ultimately, when Hattie's, you know,
when she's older, she will tell her I saw you
being born, and I saw you killing the man who
(51:56):
killed your father. Wow. Hattie will re jet that and say,
and she says, and Hattie, you have my gift. And
Hattie will say, I don't have your gift. I'm not
going to kill him. I'm going to kill myself in
in six days. So there, as it turns out, it
doesn't happen that way. But so that's right. I just interesting.
Speaker 2 (52:19):
Interesting. The more you share, the more intriguing, bless that
Fire's revenge becomes. Can you share three steps you've taken, Bruce,
that you personally have found to be effective at getting
the word out about your book?
Speaker 3 (52:33):
Well, getting them if you're a self publisher, of which
I am, it's it's it's a job. I think The
first thing is is uh, I have a web developer,
a web designer who is an expert. And so the
(52:56):
first thing for me was a web presence and realizing
that people really are not drawn to Blood Sapphire's Revenge.
They're drawn to the author, doctor Bruce Farmer. They want
to know about you as a person, they want to
get to know you, and then they go, Okay, I
think I'll try the book. So the first thing is
(53:20):
is a web presence that really and this guy said, look,
I want pictures of you. You know, the book cover
is a model that we found. My wife and I
found this at the studio of a very famous photographer
(53:43):
who does all the Nike photographs action and swimmers and everything.
And he took us into his studio, which is this
amazing place, and he brought forward all these albums of
models and we told him what we were looking for.
We flipped through them again, and finally we drilled down
(54:06):
to this one person, this is ours, and then he
made the call she was available, and she came in
and so when you see the cover, she's holding the rifle.
My son is a former military officer, and he came
(54:26):
on set and dressed her, told her how to hold
you know the weapon, told her how the knife has
to be. You know, it got her all dressed up
and she would come around the corner or pose and
finally I said, you know this, I don't think you're
getting it. I want you to come around and realize
(54:52):
I'm on the ground as a with a person with
a gun and I'm going to shoot you. You're going
to be shot dead. So you got to come around
ready to respond. You got to look intense. And she
got it, and we captured that on pictures. So that's
(55:13):
the picture, the photograph on the book. And then this
web designer said, well he took pictures of you. I
want pictures. I went, okay. You know. So anyway, that
was a lot of the process. And then you find
(55:34):
people who are marketers who understand marketing books. And the
person who found this found you a stress free marketing
out of Atlanta. He says, look, this is what this
is what I do, and so you but you have
(55:59):
to make the investment. You have to make the time,
book clubs, signings. Sometimes I'll give away the book, and
you know, you just you're always in the process of Unfortunately,
it's self promotion, which gets really tiresome. And anyway, I
(56:22):
had written this autobiography and then Nick Potter came along
and he wanted to make a pitch deck, which is
going to go before producers. They could kind of see
the book like a you know, see the book in
slide picture formation. He says, Then they're going to look
at this. I want them to read about the author.
(56:46):
I want an autobiographical note or. I said, Nick, I've
worked on that autobiography piece and I'm sick of it.
And he said, stop it. He said stop it. Now,
here's what I want want you to do. I want
you to step outside yourself, pretend you're someone else and
(57:07):
look at this character and whatever, get angry, do whatever
you need to do, but write about this person in
a way where you're not that person. I went, oh,
I said to do, and just spilled it out and
(57:28):
I sent it to him and says, that's fantastic. Okay, okay,
it's a process.
Speaker 1 (57:33):
Yes.
Speaker 2 (57:34):
Are you working on any new books? Bruce?
Speaker 3 (57:37):
Well? I started Blood Sapphire's Revenge and I'm about twelve
to fifteen chapters into it, and I suffered a big
setback when my computer crashed, and although I back everything up,
I hadn't backed up some of the files, which is
(58:00):
which is which is terrible because you lose weeks of work.
So I've started, and I'm essentially on that pond in
the the shoots. My juices have just kind of like
I'm just sitting there going you know, because both Sapphires
(58:20):
Revenge picks up from where Blood Sapphires I excuse me, Yeah,
the the second book, the second book picks up from
the moment the first book ends at the castle exss castle,
(58:41):
the drama at the last moment. You start from there
and begin the second book. And so it's yeah, so
I've I've started, and but I've hit the calm waters.
Speaker 2 (59:00):
I can tell you, Okay, where can off the shelf
listeners get a copy of Blood Sapphires.
Speaker 3 (59:06):
Well, everything is on Amazon. I mean, you can just
go to blood Sapphire's Revenge. It's in audio. I did
the audible, so you're listening to me and you've got
the print and the kindle and the heart and everything,
and it's you know, it's it's priced the way my
(59:28):
Marketer said it should be priced. You know, I didn't
come up with these prices, you know. He just says
this is what this is, blah blah blah, and I
went okay, so yeah, it's super easy to get ahold of.
Speaker 2 (59:40):
Okay, we have had the pleasure of interviewing doctor Bruce Farmer.
He's the author of blood Sapphire's Revenge. He's working on
book two in the story and so you can look
forward to seeing that on the market one day in
the future. His website is doctor Bruce Farmer dot com
d are u ce F A R M E R
(01:00:03):
dot com and he's looking to get the bus satisfire Revenge.
Hopefully you see it either the major motion film or
a TV series. So thank you doctor Bruce Farmer for
being here with us and taking time out of your
Saturday be with us here on off the Shelf books.
As I always tell our listeners, first of all, thank you,
(01:00:27):
thank you for being here with us. And I encourage
you to go out and support doctor Bruce Farmer and
get a copy of blood Sapphire's Revenge. And as I
always tell you, you really are amazing. We forget that sometimes
you are incredible. Please go out and create a fabulous
day for yourself. Doctor Bruce. I'll send you an email
(01:00:48):
when the show finishes streaming. Thank you, thank you, thank
Speaker 3 (01:00:52):
You, thank you, thank you, Denise, Bye for now, bye bye.
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The Herd with Colin Cowherd is a thought-provoking, opinionated, and topic-driven journey through the top sports stories of the day.