He Deleted 50,000 Words He Thought He Was Supposed to Write | No Easy Way Back Dissected with Josh Jensen

So let's start with your pitch for the book.

Tell me all about No Easy Way Back.

No Easy Way Back is a neo-western thriller.

I'm not sure if that's an official categorization.

That's what I'm going with.

I'm trying to own it.

And it's set in my home state, in my hometown in Utah.

And it centers around a protagonist named Graham Hayes that's a member of a former member of a tier one unit called the Regimental Reconnaissance Company.

Throughout my research and stuff, I found out that it's pretty not a lot to go on there.

So it gave me some creative freedom and gave me a non-Navy SEAL type ex-military protagonist.

And at its core, it's a story about redemption.

He reluctantly returns home to Utah when his kind of estranged, chaotic brother finds himself in the center of a storm he can't really navigate.

And Graham returns home and faces his demons and also some very real threats from a corrupt venture capitalist with some cartel ties.

And there's a lot of Western undertones and themes and things like that.

So I really tried to blend the modern thriller with Western storytelling.

Awesome.

So let's talk about that a little bit more.

Neo-Western.

What does that mean? What does that mean to you if someone picks up this book and wants to read it? What should they expect? Are we talking about, and obviously I've read the book, so I know the answer, but just for the reader, should they expect, you know, horseback and cowboys or should they, I mean, you mentioned modern warfare or modern tier one teams.

So let's talk about that a

little bit.

No, I really tried to make it very Western themed in a modern thriller sense.

So I think a lot of these quote unquote modern Westerns are thrillers with cowboy hats.

And I, that's not what I wanted.

That's not what I set out to accomplish.