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Q & A with Ron Yates (Part 3)

If you could have dinner with one person, dead or alive, who would it be and why?

Winston Churchill. He was brilliant, and I would hope that by the end of dinner, some of that brilliance would have rubbed off on me though I seriously doubt it.

What is one food you would never eat?

Monkey Brain Sushi (yes, it is a real dish in China, and I won’t tell you how it’s prepared). It is considered a cure for impotence (what isn’t?).

Another dish I will continue to eschew is Balut, which is a delicacy in The Philippines. It is fertilized chicken or duck eggs in which the developed embryo is boiled and eaten from the shell. Yum!

Which brings me to some advice an old Chicago Tribune copy editor named Spokely gave me when I was getting ready to leave Chicago for my first posting as a foreign correspondent. “You are going to places that serve strange food, and you will be tempted to say ‘no thank you,’ when it is offered. Don’t do that. It will be an insult to your host. When somebody offers you something to eat that looks or smells horrible, just remember Spokely’s Law: Everything tastes more or less like chicken.”

What were the last couple of movies you watched?

1917, Midway, Little Women, Bombshell, Joker, The Good Liar, and Harriet.

What was the scariest moment of your life?

There have been several. One was during the evacuation of Saigon in 1975. The last day was chaos incarnate. Russian made 122mm rockets were slamming into buildings, 130mm mortars were hitting Tan Son Nhut airport, and the U.S. Embassy was surrounded by frantic South  Vietnamese desperate to get out of the country because they had worked for the American military or some U.S. agency. The city was in full panic mode. Several of us made our way to the sprawling Defense Attaché Office building at Tan Son Nhut, and we were finally evacuated by a U.S. Marine CH-53 Sea Stallion helicopter. It was a relief until the door gunner told me later aboard the U.S.S. Okinawa that the pilot had to drop a flare to misdirect a S.A.M. -7 (surface to air missile).

Another was during the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre when several Chinese students and I were pinned down near the square for 30 minutes or so by Chinese soldiers shooting in our direction. Several students near me were wounded, and we were helping them get to a doctor’s house nearby so he could treat them. I was convinced I was going to wind up dead in the square. Then suddenly, the shooting stopped, and I was able to get my Red and White bicycle that I had chained to a lamppost and peddle like crazy for the Jinhua Hotel where I was staying and from where I was filing my stories to the Tribune.

Another memorable moment was during the revolution in El Salvador when two German correspondents and I were stopped in our car near the town of Suchitoto by Communist guerillas. They put cloth bags put over our heads and forced us to kneel alongside the road. We were sure we were going to be executed. However, suddenly the “jefe” (leader) showed up and set us free. “Don’t kill journalists–unless they are armed,” he yelled at his troops. I was greatly relieved that I had left the Model 1911 Colt.45 pistol I had purchased a few days earlier back in the hotel in San Salvador. I believe it is still there.

Ahhh yes, the life of a foreign correspondent…never a dull moment. Nevertheless, I still believe I had the best job in the world, and I wouldn’t trade my career for anything.

What books have most influenced your life?

Scoop, by Evelyn Waugh; The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck; The Quiet American, Graham Greene; Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger; The Jewel in the Crown, Paul Scott; Kim, Rudyard Kipling; Huckleberry Finn, Samuel Clemons (Mark Twain); A Passage to India, E.M. Forster; Sister Carrie, Theodore Dreiser; The Naked and the Dead, Norman Mailer.

What do you do to unwind and relax?

What else? I read. I find that a good book helps me escape from my writing, which I need to do on occasion.

Do you have a Website or Blog?

Yes, I have both. My website is http://ronaldyatesbooks, and I am continually updating it. My blog is http://ronaldyatesbooks.com/category/foreign-correspondent/ I try to post to it at least once or twice a week. I also have an Amazon Author Central page at http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001KHDVZI, and an Author’s Page on Facebook called Ronald E. Yates Books. It is located at https://www.facebook.com/Ronald-E-Yates-Books-688075584557417/

What is your favorite line from a book?

I have a couple, and they are both from Evelyn Waugh: “Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole.” It is a line from Waugh’s book Scoop written by nature writer William Boot for the London Daily Beast just before he is mistaken for a famous foreign correspondent and sent off to the fictional African country of Ishmaelia to cover a war.

AND from Waugh’s book, Vile Bodies comes this great line: “I know very few young people, but it seems to me that they are all possessed with an almost fatal hunger for permanence.”

If it were mandatory for everyone to read three books, what books would you suggest?

Huckleberry Finn; Grapes of Wrath; Sister Carrie. Not only are these classics, but they are also beautiful stories about the human spirit, its resiliency and strength, and its deficiencies and weaknesses.

Is there ever a time when you feel like your work is truly finished and complete?

I don’t know if that ever happens. I do know that at some point, YOU MUST LET IT GO! Writing a book is a bit like rearing a child. Eventually, after you have imbued the child with as much of your worldly experience and wisdom as he or she can grasp and absorb, you have to allow your creation to encounter the world. It’s the same with books. Writers can fiddle with plots, characters, endings, and beginnings ad nauseam and never feel the book is finished. My advice–JUST FINISH THE DAMNED BOOK! Get over it and get the book out into the public domain. Readers will let you know if you have finished the book–and if they like it.

What is the biggest misconception beginning writers have about being published?

Probably that once you get a publishing contract, you are going to become a millionaire. I have published two books before Billy Battles with traditional publishers, and I am still in the hunt for my first million. The J. K. Rowling’s of the world are anomalies. However, thank God they do exist because it keeps the rest of us working our tails off in pursuit of that elusive kind of success. Now, I believe many writers write for the sheer joy we get from telling a good story–at least I do. The money is less of an incentive.

What would you like readers to gain from reading your books?

Because the Finding Billy Battles trilogy is historical fiction and is set in the 19th and early 20th Centuries, I would like readers to get a sense of the time and place of the story told in the three books. I would like them to have an appreciation of the way people lived, how they thought, and how they dealt with both adversity and triumph in a very different era. Finally, I would like readers to finish my trilogy and think to themselves: “Damn, I didn’t want that story to end!”

BOOK BLURB:

The Finding Billy Battles trilogy tells the story of a remarkable man who is born in 1860 and who dies in 1960. For decades Billy lives an improbable and staggering life of adventure, peril, transgression and redemption. Then Billy mysteriously disappears. For several decades his family has no idea where he is or what he is doing.

Finally, with his life coming to an end, Billy resurfaces in an old soldiers’ home in Leavenworth, Kansas. It is there, when he is 98 that he meets his 12-year-old great-grandson and bequeaths his journals and his other property to him — though he is not to receive them until he is much older.

Years later, the great-grandson finally reads the journals and fashions a three volume trilogy that tells of his great-grandfather’s audacious life in the old west, as well as his journeys to the Far East of the 1890s—including French Indochina and The Philippines—and finally, in the early 20^th century, to Europe and Latin America where his adventures and predicaments continue. One thing readers can be sure of, wherever Billy Battles goes trouble is not far behind.

AUTHOR BIO:

Ronald E. Yates is a multi-award winning author of historical fiction and action/adventure novels, including the popular and highly-acclaimed Finding Billy Battles trilogy. His extraordinarily accurate books have captivated fans around the world who applaud his ability to blend fact and fiction.

Ron is a former foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune and Professor Emeritus of Journalism at the University of Illinois where he was also the Dean of the College of Media.

The Lost Years of Billy Battles is the final book in the trilogy and recently won the Independent Press Award’s 2020 Distinguished Favorites Award. In 2019 it also won Best Overall Book of the year and the Grand Prize in the Goethe Historical Fiction Category from Chanticleer International Book Awards as well as a Book Excellence Award and a New Apple Award. The second book in the trilogy, The Improbable Journeys of Billy Battles, was published in June 2016. It won the 2017 KCT International Literary Award and the New Apple Award in the Action/Adventure category. The first book in the trilogy, “Finding Billy Battles,” was published in 2014 and won a Book Excellence Award and Laramie Award from Chanticleer International Book Awards.

As a professional journalist, Ron lived and worked in Japan, Southeast Asia, and both Central and South America where he covered several history-making events including the fall of South Vietnam and Cambodia; the Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing; and wars and revolutions in Afghanistan, the Philippines, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala, among other places. His work as a foreign correspondent earned him several awards including three Pulitzer Prize nominations.

Ron is a frequent speaker about the media, international affairs, and writing. He is a Vietnam era veteran of the U.S. Army Security Agency and lives just north of San Diego in Southern California’s wine country.

SOCIAL MEDIA LINKS:

-Twitter   https://twitter.com/jhawker69

-Facebook https://www.facebook.com/ronaldyatesbooks/

-Website   https://ronaldyatesbooks.com/

AMAZON OR OTHER PURCHASE LINKS:

Amazon:

Barnes & Noble:

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/finding%20billy%20battles/_/N-8q8

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