My ALLi author guest this episode is Patrick D. Joyce, who grew up at U.S. embassies in places like Moscow, Havana, and Managua, surrounded by secrets, spies, and surveillance. He went on to become a journalist, earn a Ph.D. in political science, and eventually found his way to writing Cold War-era young adult thrillers. We talk about how his past shaped his storytelling, how music and history inform his work, and how he's connecting with young readers today.
Listen to the Inspirational Indie Author Interview: Patrick D. Joyce
Inspirational Indie Author Interview: Patrick D. Joyce — About the Author
Patrick D. Joyce is the author of two thriller novels for young adults, Back in the USSR (a Publishers Weekly BookLife Prize semifinalist) and Strawberry Fields, both inspired by his experiences growing up at US embassies during the Cold War. He has been a newspaper reporter, a political science lecturer, and a medical practice manager. He lives in Massachusetts, where he can be found haunting coffee shops, taking long walks with his wife, and practicing martial arts. You can find him at patrickdjoyce.com and follow him on BlueSky, Instagram, Facebook, or TikTok.
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About the Host
Author Howard Lovy has been a journalist for 40 years, and now amplifies the voices of independent author-publishers and works with authors as a developmental editor. Find Howard at howardlovy.com, LinkedIn and X.
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Read the Transcripts
Howard Lovy: My guest this episode is Patrick D. Joyce, who grew up at US embassies in places like Moscow, Havana, and Managua, surrounded by secret spies and surveillance. He went on to become a journalist, earn a PhD in political science, and eventually found his way to writing Cold War era young adult thrillers.
We talk about how his past shaped his storytelling and how he's connecting with young readers today.
I'll let Patrick D. Joyce tell his story.
Patrick D. Joyce: Hi, my name is Patrick D. Joyce, and I am the author of two young adult mystery thrillers set during the Cold War. The first one back in the USSR is about two 14-year-olds who race against spies and mobsters to try to recover a priceless vinyl record that just might save the world.
My second book, Strawberry Fields, is about two young journalists caught in the middle of the invasion of Prague in 1968, who receive a cryptic message concealed inside a song and have to uncover a shadowy conspiracy before the city falls.
Howard Lovy: That's great. You've got music, you've got cold war, you've got spies, even mobsters. So, that's quite a combination.
Let's start from the beginning. Tell me where you grew up and was reading and writing always a part of your life?
Patrick D. Joyce: Yeah, so to take the second part of that, first, I can't really remember a time in my life when I wasn't writing something. I started to write poetry in high school and in college I wrote for the student newspaper.
After that, I became a newspaper reporter and was writing on deadline, and really honing my craft as a writer. I switched gears after that and went for my PhD in political science and switched to a completely different kind of writing, which was academic and much different than the very sort of sparse, powerful, concise kind of writing you need as a reporter in journalism. I wrote academic articles and a non-fiction book.
So, it wasn't until a long time after that I started writing fiction, after I became a stay-at-home dad and then began to help my wife out with her career as a paediatrician. We started her own solo medical practice.
Howard Lovy: Let's go way back to your childhood again. So, I guess you had a kind of unique upbringing. You lived in a lot of different countries.
Tell me all the places you lived as a child.
Patrick D. Joyce: The flashback before the flashback.
I grew up in a diplomatic family, Howard. My father was a US foreign service officer, so I spent a lot of time growing up at embassies in foreign capitals, and he was actually a Soviet expert.
So, we lived three times in Moscow during the 1970s and 1980s. We also lived at a bunch of embassies in different countries, but also at in some other countries that were allies of the Soviet Union, other communist authoritarian countries like Cuba and Nicaragua.
So, those experiences definitely informed the choices and the kind of things I write about in my novels.
Howard Lovy: Now, did your parents or your father tell you a certain way to behave in those environments? What to say, what not to say, things like that.
Patrick D. Joyce: Yes, so I grew up around all kinds of rules and strictures, both that were imposed by the host governments of the countries we lived in, and also by our own government. Basically, you had to watch your step everywhere, so it wasn't just my father telling me what to do or not do, but the US government had certain ways that it wanted us to behave.
Also, there was a lot of surveillance of foreign diplomats by Soviet authorities. For instance, in Moscow, our phones were bugged, there were bugs in the embassy and most likely in our apartments in one way or another.
Basically, we lived in this very guarded environment, and we had freedom to move around the city, but this constant sort of suspicion, paranoia, watching your step, was something you got used to.
Howard Lovy: That's a lot of pressure to put on a child, isn't it?
Patrick D. Joyce: Yeah, I think having the community of the embassy around you normalizes it, gives you a community to live in full of other Americans faced with the same kinds of situations. So, that's what made it our sanctuary for us.
Howard Lovy: I'm assuming some memories of that childhood eventually came into play when you began writing about the Cold War?
Patrick D. Joyce: Yes, exactly. The protagonist, the narrator of my first book, is a 14-year-old son of American diplomats, like me. So, I think about him as, not exactly me, but someone who might have had the same experience as someone I might have met, that kind of thing.
I have a lot of vivid but vague memories of that period of my time growing up. So, a lot of that sort of powerful visual and memories that I have went into the story too, but also some of the concrete experiences that I remember.
I have my character go to a lot of the same places that I knew and still remember, and deal with a lot of the same kind of uncertainties that I faced.
Howard Lovy: So, all this political intrigue that surround you as a child, did that influence your decision to become a journalist and later a PhD in government?
Patrick D. Joyce: Yeah, absolutely.
When I was in college, I was a little bit all over the place about what I wanted to do. I knew I wanted to write in some way or another. Like I said, that was always a part of my identity, but I figured, hey, my dad worked for the US government, I must know something about government. So, I majored in government, and it was a natural connection to write for newspapers, when you want to write and you have an interest in politics.
So, it absolutely informed that choice, and then doing the PhD in political science as well.
Howard Lovy: So, then you transitioned from a journalist to more of an academic writer. Who did you write for?
Patrick D. Joyce: I wrote articles for journals, for political science journals, and then I turned my dissertation into a book. It was actually about race relations in American cities in the eighties and nineties, surrounding the Los Angeles riots in 1992. Urban politics was my specialty in my PhD.
That was published by an academic press, which is very different from traditional publishing in a lot of ways. A lot easier in some ways. But the last piece that I wrote as an academic was my book.
Howard Lovy: There's no peer review in the traditional publishing except, I guess, you can count beta readers, but that's a different kind of peer review.
So, what was that switch that turned inside your brain when that made you want to go from nonfiction to fiction?
Patrick D. Joyce: I think that I had always had this dream. I actually remember working as a journalist, and one day my boss asked me what I wanted to do, like long term, what I pictured achieving decades down the line. I remember telling him, I want to write international thriller novels at some point. I want to be a journalist and then a thriller novelist.
So, I don't know if that was ever present, but it was maybe a seed that was always there.
I left academics for a variety of reasons, but the main one being family related, and it was a tough market when I was in it, and my wife was growing her medical practice as a paediatrician in the area. So, we decided to stay put and I exhausted a number of the college lecturer jobs that I had in the area.
So, it was also a personal decision too. Then basically, I was with my kids and then I was working with her on the solo practice that we formed together, and it just clicked, and I realized that, hey, this is the thing I haven't done yet and I want to really give it a try.
Howard Lovy: So, the thriller, it sounds like that was a natural progression for you based on your childhood and what you wrote about as an adult.
Patrick D. Joyce: It's one of those things, you look back and sometimes you don't imagine that your life has had this direction, but looking back, it does seem like that sometimes.
I think the things that I put into these two novels that I've written, and there's a third I'm working that on now, the third book in the series, I pour everything into them that I love or that I'm concerned about. They are repositories for who I am as a person and as a writer.
My love of music, my interest in history, the kinds of books that I like to read. All of those things went into this novel. I think once you discover that writing a novel reflects a lot of things about you that maybe you weren't even aware of, you become conscious and aware of that and you start to act on it, and you act self-consciously and do it even more.
Howard Lovy: One theme that's really interesting to me is music. I remember those times, and it wasn't only Reagan and Brooke Gorbachev that brought down the former Soviet Union, it was the Beatles and Western music that gave people in the eastern block a hint at what Western life was like.
Patrick D. Joyce: Yes, and that is that's exactly what my books plug into. A lot of people aren't aware of how much the Cold War had this cultural dimension too, and not even just ideological, but it was also these warring cultures trying to achieve cultural dominance in addition to geopolitical and military and economic dominance.
So, music was definitely a part of it, and both governments tried to exploit that, too. The KGB and the CIA actually made all kinds of endeavours to use artists, their own American or Soviet artists, to further their interests in the Cold War.
Music has this power to inspire people. Also, on the flip side to inspire people, to feed the human spirit, to fight repression, and it found its way behind the Iron curtain and was really this thing that grew beneath sort of the watch of the authorities in communist countries.
This is something that I wasn't really aware of when I was growing up. That's something I discovered later and found was a real sort of backbone of both of my novels.
Howard Lovy: Your novels are named after Beatles songs. Did you have to navigate any copyright issues? So, you don't specifically quote the lyrics in the book, do you, or did you get permission?
Patrick D. Joyce: No, I didn't. I was very concerned about that and so I did research. I actually talked to a lawyer in sort of general terms for advice about that, and what I came to understand is that song titles are not copyrighted, or not subject to copyright.
They can be trademarked in very rare, occasional circumstances, but most times they aren't.
The more fraught territory is quoting song lyrics, and I did not do that at all in the book. I occasionally paraphrase or misquoted song lyrics and made that into sort of a plot point, but I didn't want to do that, and I tried to navigate that and still make it very much about the music, if not about the words themselves. How the music made people feel and what it inspired them to do.
Howard Lovy: If this reaches the attention of Paul McCartney or whoever owns the rights to the Beatles songs now, that's a feather in your cap anyway, even if it's followed by his cease-and-desist order, but it sounds like you're on solid ground.
You've said that setting is also crucial in your book. So, how do you recreate the historical cities like Prague and Moscow?
Patrick D. Joyce: That's a good question. So, for Moscow, like I said, I had a lot of these very vivid memories, and I knew a lot about the city itself, but I also supplemented that with other kinds of research, like all kinds of different sources. I did the same both for Moscow and for Prague.
I read not only nonfiction, but also, I read novels set in both places, written by people who actually had spent time there. I studied maps, I read firsthand accounts, I watched movies; all kinds of different multimedia sources to really get a feel for places.
And as my characters move about the city, I follow and trace their movements on maps so that they're realistic in terms of the time that they take to get to places, what the challenges are in each particular place, both physical and otherwise.
So, I really tried to get a feel for what it was like to be in these places so that my readers could be running right alongside my characters.
Howard Lovy: That was very important to me.
One thing, and I can't help it maybe because I'm an editor, is when I read period-based thrillers or any kind of book, I look for anachronisms.
Obviously, you're not going to have somebody talking on their cell phones in 1968, but things like the vernacular or slang of the time. Is this something that you're especially careful about?
Patrick D. Joyce: Obviously, anachronisms are something I was very concerned about, as someone who did a PhD and is very concerned about historical accuracy and things like that.
But in terms of language, I don't think I really was very concerned about making my characters talk like people in those times, necessarily. What I would do is I would have them use certain phrases occasionally, but I wanted my readers to be able to connect to the voice, and I think I'm an efficient writer. So, I use like hints rather than over explaining, at least I try to.
Howard Lovy: Not too much of ” groovy” and stuff like that?
Patrick D. Joyce: Yeah, exactly. So, it's very occasional. I sprinkle non-English words into the text also, but I don't over overdo them.
Sometimes you don't need a lot of detail to create a scene or to create dialogue to fill it out, you just need one or two really well-chosen details and that was my approach, and also what I learned from some of the editors I worked with who gave me very good advice about that.
Howard Lovy: So, you finally decided to go the indie route after, I think you tried the traditional paths. How's that going? What's been the most rewarding and most challenging part of being indie?
Patrick D. Joyce: Oh, wow. Like I said, I love a good project, and I do have this sort of entrepreneurial spirit, which I discovered running a business.
But everything about it is challenging, Howard, and I think that there is just so much experimentation involved because there is so much really great advice out there.
One of the first things that I did when I decided to self-publish was join ALLi, and I never regretted it. It's paid off in so many ways and I'm still discovering new ways.
Howard Lovy: I didn't tell you to say that by the way.
Patrick D. Joyce: That was voluntary.
Howard Lovy: A natural endorsement.
Patrick D. Joyce: Yeah, you just have to experiment with so many things and a lot of things will not work. I've tried so many things that have worked just a little bit, and I think fortunately I'm a creative puzzle solver, or I like to solve puzzles. I don't always solve them, but I like to try and it's really helpful, I think, because I'm constantly coming up with new things that I want to try or reading about new things I want to try.
What I'm engaged in right now is actually one of the most rewarding so far, and that is I'm trying to connect to teenagers in middle schools and high schools in my area, to begin with at least, and going to schools and library groups to speak to kids about writing and storytelling.
So, very recently I've given a talk to an eighth-grade assembly and joined a young writers group in a public library, and it's great just talking to these kids about books and about writing.
Just helping them to see that they've got a story inside them, and using their sort of own perspective as experiences they can bring that out, and it's become a mission for me, I think, even apart from my writing, but it's connected because, of course, I want them to know about my books too, and potentially get interested in them.
Howard Lovy: Are they interested in the Cold War era? I guess the comparison would be that when we were kids there were kids our age into World War II.
Patrick D. Joyce: Some of them are, and some of them maybe aren't as much, but one group of kids I was talking to recently, we were talking about dystopian fiction, which is still really big among younger teens, like the Hunger Games, those books are still big, believe it or not.
So, I talked about how a lot of the themes in dystopian fiction come straight out of the Cold War, and trying to make that kind of connection. You put it in those terms, and I think a lot of them get it, because dystopian worlds are all about surveillance and repression and authoritarian governments, and they may be set in a near future, but they're rooted in the past experiences that we've already had. So yeah, it's something to help them make connections.
Howard Lovy: So, young people are reading. I have two college age sons and one of them is telling me that young people are actually unplugging from devices and reading physical books now.
So, that gives me some hope.
Patrick D. Joyce: Ditto. It's heartening to hear things like that. I witness it. I know it's happening, even if numbers seem to be going the other direction.
There's a lot of people in the world, right, so even if fewer kids are reading than used to, there's still a lot of those kids who are reading and hopefully it'll catch fire and spark interest in their friends and peers also.
Howard Lovy: What about you? You're working on a third book in your Cold War Trilogy, are you working on anything else?
Patrick D. Joyce: I think that's enough, Howard.
Howard Lovy: More. More. We want more.
Patrick D. Joyce: Of course, like a lot of writers, I always have future projects in mind. So, I want to go back to the older historical mysteries set in 17th century England that I spent 10 years trying to write before I wrote these books.
I want to go back to that and work on that.
I have other ideas for both this series that I'm working on and for other projects. Unfortunately, I'm able to concentrate mostly on one book at a time. It's hard to keep a writer down when it comes to hunting after and following and chasing ideas.
Howard Lovy: Now, what about marketing? This is a question I ask all indie authors because that's the most challenging part, getting people to notice you. What are you doing in terms of advertising or marketing or social media, or any of the above?
Patrick D. Joyce: A bunch of those things, and my campaigns to connect with local schools is my big project right now, the one that I've embarked on, so that's the newest part and I'm going local.
But yeah, I've tried my hand at a little bit of advertising, and my social media efforts are ongoing.
When I published my first book, I was able to get the manuscript out to lots of arc readers locally, and that was really helpful to get those reviews on Amazon when the book first came out.
So, I almost feel like, what haven't I tried?
There are certain things that I've let go by the wayside when they felt too much like work and I wasn't enjoying them enough, or if they just didn't seem to be paying off. But I'm still at the point, Howard, where I'm still working for every sale. I realized that I'm only two years into this now.
My first book came out two years ago, and two years is really not that much time. So, I'm still working for every sale at this point.
Howard Lovy: I like the local focus. I've been hearing that a lot with other writers. That's really important, not just the school visits, which I think are a great idea, but you can probably get some local media attention.
Patrick D. Joyce: Yeah, exactly. One of the things I wish I had done differently was to start with that. You really don't know what you're doing, no matter how much research you do when you begin this process, there's always a learning curve and you've got to keep trying new things.
Howard Lovy: Now, you're in Massachusetts. What town in Massachusetts?
Patrick D. Joyce: I live in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Howard Lovy: I guess my last question is, what advice do you have for other writers, especially those who have juggled other careers in their lives and want to get into writing fiction?
Patrick D. Joyce: For me, for a long time when I first started trying my hand at writing a novel, one thing I didn't understand was that it's not just about putting the words on the page, sitting down and typing or handwriting your book, it's about really giving your mind, your brain, space to think about it.
One of the patterns that I've really adopted for myself is doing things that get my subconscious to kick into action and start doing a lot of the work on its own, so that I'm giving my brain tasks and it's working on them, and then ideas will come to me whenever they do and then I just have to be ready to capture them, have my notebook handy, or pull out my phone and start typing into it furiously to capture, so that I can capture ideas and have them ready for me when I do actually find the time to write.
When I was actually busier in my professional life and it was really hard to find time to write, that would've been really helpful for me to know, I think. That you have to find ways to live and breathe your story apart from just the actual writing process, and the words will follow more easily if you can.
Howard Lovy: That's great advice, especially if you're juggling a career and family. It's hard to, at the end of the day or beginning of the day, just sit down and say, okay, be creative, now.
Patrick D. Joyce: Exactly, because it's just extra pressure when you do that. I had a lot of trouble with that.
One thing I did, coming off of being a researcher, a political scientist with a PhD, was that the one thing I knew how to do was to research. So, that was my initial crutch for when I first started writing a novel, for the one that I haven't published yet that I hope to go back to, that was my way of generating ideas.
And that's okay, and that works for certain kinds of novels, but for my young adult mystery thrillers, I think what really enabled me to get them out was finding how to give myself space to think and not just to force myself to sit down and write.
Howard Lovy: I have a novel coming out next week, and I wrote it primarily in my head while I was running, exactly when the endorphins are doing their job and your brain starts to make these connections. The trick is then after you cool off, after your run, to sit down and remember these inspirations you had while you were exercising. But that's what works for me.
Patrick D. Joyce: Yeah. First of all, congratulations, that's really exciting.
I think writers have to find their own way of getting their creative juices flowing and then their own ways of capturing the ideas, but it's probably going to be different for different people.
Howard Lovy: Thank you, Patrick. I appreciate you taking the time to talk to us. We covered the Cold War, we covered music, we've covered how to get inspiration.
Is there anything else that you want to add that, that I didn't ask?
Patrick D. Joyce: No, I think that covers enough. I really appreciate you having me on the podcast. I'm a listener already and so it's just amazing to actually be on the show. Thank you for having me.
Howard Lovy: Wonderful. Thank you, Patrick.
Patrick D. Joyce: Bye-bye.
