I started writing my nonfiction Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader in 1991, published the first edition in 2004, updated it a bit for the 2006 English paperback and the Japanese edition – and kept on watching Pyongyang, saving material for a nonfiction sequel. The conditions that had enabled me to pull it off the first time failed to be replicated, however: 1. I was no longer a somewhat isolated voice in the wilderness, taking on the Vietnam-era Korea revisionists who (wrongly, I believe) conflated Kim Il Sung with Ho Chi Minh and the Korean War with the Vietnam War. There were a LOT more Pyongyang watchers by the first decade of the 21st century, most academically trained and able to work in the Korean language without interpreters/translators, and many of them shared my basic perspective. 2. The North Koreans wouldn't let me back into the country after 2007 and, before long, the outward flow of defectors/refugees with great stories to tell an interviewer declined rather drastically in volume. 3. The basic storyline changed little. The regime's MO – which had been unfamiliar to many of my readers before they'd picked up UTLCOTFL, shocking once they'd started to read – remained pretty much the same old same old, even after Kim Jong Il died and Kim Jong Un came on the scene. I didn't give up completely on the nonfiction sequel idea but I decided I should try reaching a different market in the interim. Besides entertaining readers with a financial thriller plot, my goal was to use all my additional reporting to make the country come alive to them. I wanted the background details to be accurate. Nuclear Blues didn't sell well. I was handicapped by the fact that, before I finished writing it, Kim Jong Un's hackers pulled off the ~$171 million Sony hack in retaliation for the film "The Interview," in which the third Kim is assassinated. No agent or publisher would touch my manuscript and I had to self-publish. But I got some very gratifying reviews and I'm glad I did it. I keep hoping Hollywood will grow a pair and pick it up for a streaming series since the storyline still fits with North Korea as we know it today. But a big-time West Coast agent told me recently that everyone's still scared shitless.
I started writing my nonfiction Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader in 1991, published the first edition in 2004, updated it a bit for the 2006 English paperback and the Japanese edition – and kept on watching Pyongyang, saving material for a nonfiction sequel. The conditions that had enabled me to pull it off the first time failed to be replicated, however: 1. I was no longer a somewhat isolated voice in the wilderness, taking on the Vietnam-era Korea revisionists who (wrongly, I believe) conflated Kim Il Sung with Ho Chi Minh and the Korean War with the Vietnam War. There were a LOT more Pyongyang watchers by the first decade of the 21st century, most academically trained and able to work in the Korean language without interpreters/translators, and many of them shared my basic perspective. 2. The North Koreans wouldn't let me back into the country after 2007 and, before long, the outward flow of defectors/refugees with great stories to tell an interviewer declined rather drastically in volume. 3. The basic storyline changed little. The regime's MO – which had been unfamiliar to many of my readers before they'd picked up UTLCOTFL, shocking once they'd started to read – remained pretty much the same old same old, even after Kim Jong Il died and Kim Jong Un came on the scene. I didn't give up completely on the nonfiction sequel idea but I decided I should try reaching a different market in the interim. Besides entertaining readers with a financial thriller plot, my goal was to use all my additional reporting to make the country come alive to them. I wanted the background details to be accurate. Nuclear Blues didn't sell well. I was handicapped by the fact that, before I finished writing it, Kim Jong Un's hackers pulled off the ~$171 million Sony hack in retaliation for the film "The Interview," in which the third Kim is assassinated. No agent or publisher would touch my manuscript and I had to self-publish. But I got some very gratifying reviews and I'm glad I did it. I keep hoping Hollywood will grow a pair and pick it up for a streaming series since the storyline still fits with North Korea as we know it today. But a big-time West Coast agent told me recently that everyone's still scared shitless.