Pat Conroy

Well, prior to Dark Matter in print and TV, Blake was well established as an author.

His debut novel, Desert Places, published in 2004, earned a gold ring of blurbs when Pat Conroy called it, "A whacked out combination of Stephen King and Cormac McCarthy." Blake moved on from that series to write several standalone novels and The Wayward Pines trilogy, which was the source of the Fox TV series of the same name.

Blake wrote three episodes and served as consulting producer and executive producer.

More novels followed, including Good Behavior, which in turn served as a springboard for the 2016 TNT series.

[laughs]

... that I would actually get to experience, but it was definitely, uh, what I wanted and what I was hopefully driving towards as early as, I would say...

Well, in h- I started writing my first novel in h- in my senior year of high school, and then it was this big Pat Conroy family saga [laughs] kind of rip-off.

Um, and-

But anyway, Brandon, once he gave himself some space, figured out his health issues, and came back to reading, this is what he said he discovered.

Quote, "I feel like a teenager again, rediscovering the heady drunkenness of falling in love with Pat Conroy or Leal- or Leo Tolstoy." I can't say Leo Tolstoy right now.

[laughs] Leo Tolstoy or Liz Carlyle, my favorite romance novelist.

You know those long syrupy hours when you're young and unattached, and you can feel every word transmit directly into your brain's pleasure center? What I am describing, of course, is the total immersion in a book that becomes harder the older you get, harder not just because of your attention span, but also because you become too knowing, too wised up about publishing and books and life and literature, and all the things you think you know preempt what the author is trying to communicate to you.

I'm reading constantly, but I loved...

The period of time when I just read books, and like you're saying, some of my favorites were the thickest ones, whether it was Pillars of the Earth or World Without End or any of the Pat Conroy stuff.

Loved it.

I would have everything Nelson Demille ever wrote.

So, um, I put everything together, all the pieces.

I wrote an outline, g- got the transcript, uh, all the, uh, media that I could, and I wrote two authors, Southern authors, John Grisham and Pat Conroy.

I said, "I'll be glad to h- help you, uh, p- in any way I can, but here's the story y'all need to write." I never heard back from Grisham.

And, but I did hear, hear back from Conroy, and I, I still have the note somewhere.

And there's just so many hikes a man can take and so much bourbon a man can drink when he's got to do something.

So I, I put pen to paper.

I tried to channel Pat Conroy.

I knew he wrote his books longhand using cursive and legal pads and Montblanc pens.