Eugene Bradley, author of The Adventures of the Beat 5 Boys in the Adventure of the Swirling Waters agreed to answer some questions for me. I hope you enjoy reading the answers as much as I did.

What inspired you to write The Adventures of the Beat 5 Boys? How long had the idea to write their adventures down in a book been floating around in your mind?

I moved back from Florida to a house that I had built in 1993 on a tract of land that bordered the Big Abbey Creek. Being back that close to the place where we had those good times in the 1960s brought back old memories. I remembered that the boys that grew up in this area were called the Beat 5 Boys. I decided to write about the good times we had but it quickly turned into a fiction book about two of the Beat 5 Boys, Herring and Bradley.


How much research did you have to do before writing this book?

None to start writing the book and very little research was done throughout the book. A little research on the history of baseball, railroads, gold mines, rivers, creeks, customs, etc.


Bradley and Herring's adventures begin when they are fishing and they continue to fish every place they visit while traveling through the time warp. Did you by any chance love to fish when you were young? If so, do you still have that same love for fishing?

Yes, we loved to fish. There was not much else to do growing up in the rural South during the summer time except to work in the fields and go fishing and hunting on the weekends. I still love to fish, but don't get to go fishing much anymore. Maybe that's the reason I wrote so much about fishing --- not really though --- as you know the Beat 5 Boys were always camped out somewhere by a stream for several reasons. Camping out like they did makes the story sound more adventurous and they fished a lot to eat because they had no money that would be good to use most of the time because they were time travelers.
 

How did you decide which historical characters Bradley and Herring needed to meet?

Ever what character that came to mind that lived during the time that they were in. Some of the characters they met were pure fiction and just popped into my mind as I was writing, such as Frost and Old Fly By Night.


Once you started writing the book, how long did it take you to finish it?

I started writing the book in the fall of 2007 but did not get too involved in it until the fall of 2011. I wrote about 1/3 of the book during those 4 years then wrote the last 2/3 of the book in about 8 weeks after I found out about self-publishing.


Did you have specific readers in mind when you wrote The Adventures of the Beat 5 Boys?

Not really --- I figured it might appeal to certain teenagers ages 13 to 19 and certain adults of all ages that love science fiction or fantasy adventure stories.


I have a couple of questions about your writing style. Could you explain to the readers why you chose not to begin a new paragraph each time a new person began to speak?

I chose to use this style of writing for this book so that I could pack more words, more of the story, into a book that I had calculated to be around 400 pages. I wanted the book to be around 400 pages, which is what I considered to be the average size fiction novel.

Doing it this way I could give the reader more to read in my book than they would get in a novel the same size done the traditional way of a new paragraph every time a new person speaks. Doing it with a new paragraph every time a new person speaks, you would have a lot of one sentence paragraphs. Another reason was I had a long story to tell and I wanted it to not be over 400 pages so as to keep the price of the book in a range that the reader would feel comfortable in paying.

If you would like to obtain a copy of The Adventures of the Beat 5 Boys so you can experience Bradley and Herring's escapades, I have provided 2 links to Amazon below. The first link is for a Kindle version of the book, the second for a paperback copy.

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