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We're chatting about the people, places, events, and flavors that make Johnson City, Tennessee a lovely place to live. An interview show hosted by Colin Johnson.
Proud member of the Maypop Media family of podcasts.
0:00:00 - (Colin Johnson): It is a hot but beautiful August day here in Johnson City, and kids are going back to school. It's the end of summer, I feel like. And yeah, times are changing in Johnson City, but the people are not. And we are bringing you another wonderful person from Johnson city. Welcome to the podcast, miss Nancy Williams, my friend, my neighbor, and authorization, and a super cute dog lover. So how are you today?
0:00:29 - (Nancy Williams): Well, I'm doing great. Love being here.
0:00:31 - (Colin Johnson): Well, thank you so much for being on the podcast. I know we tried to connect a few times and get you on here, but the work. Wait. Has been worth it, I'm assured of it. And I'm sure the listeners are going to be excited to hear what you have to say about Johnson City. But first, questions first. What do you love most about Johnson City?
0:00:51 - (Nancy Williams): I knew you were going to ask that question, so I started thinking about it, and I really have to say that it's the people here. I truly believe that we have a halo effect here in this community because of the people of faith who have lived here over the generations. I know so many new people have moved in. It's changing because of the dynamics and so forth of the influx. So it's kind of hard to find people that have grown up in this area.
0:01:19 - (Nancy Williams): But we moved here in 1995.
0:01:22 - (Colin Johnson): Okay, so you've been here a little while, almost.
0:01:24 - (Nancy Williams): Almost 30 years. And so I've kind of watched the growth over that span of time. But my husband is from here originally.
0:01:32 - (Colin Johnson): Gotcha.
0:01:32 - (Nancy Williams): And his dad was a preacher and got moved around different areas. He lived in Kingsport, and then Mark went to. By the way, I am married to Mister Wonderful. He's the most wonderful husband in the whole world.
0:01:46 - (Colin Johnson): He seems like a really nice guy.
0:01:47 - (Nancy Williams): He is pretty nice guy, or he's.
0:01:48 - (Colin Johnson): Either a super nice guy or he's a good faker when I meet him. Cause he seems like he's very nice.
0:01:52 - (Nancy Williams): He's just a great guy.
0:01:53 - (Colin Johnson): Yeah.
0:01:54 - (Nancy Williams): And anyway, his dad was almost like a circuit rider type preacher and lived in different areas around here. But Mark, he was from East Tennessee. And so I thought, well, he's got potential because everybody who's ever lived here wants to move back. So. And at the time, this was in Memphis. So, at any rate, there's just a wonderful group of people here. It's. It's just one of the nicest, friendliest places that you could live, and you could say that about a lot of places in the south. But I think it's just really particularly true of this area.
0:02:33 - (Colin Johnson): And I think Memphis is special. And my dad Washington, boring around Memphis, and I was, too. And I, you know, I think it was from when I. Over my memories of going back a lot because my grandparents lived there. We left when I was young, but I loved it. It was great. The people were fantastic. And so I think, you know, state as far away as you can be in the end on the state. I mean, the people are great all the way around, so.
0:02:58 - (Colin Johnson): But, yeah, Johnson City is just special. Tell me a little bit about. So you said you met Mark in a Bible study, so you had a christian upbringing and love the Lord, too, so that's awesome. And so then to be yoked with your husband, that's just a huge blessing.
0:03:14 - (Nancy Williams): It is great. And we have a wonderful church family here at Westminster Presbyterian Church. It's a great place. Anybody that's listening that would like to come visit us, you can do it online first by going to YouTube and listening to some of the services that we have. Well, we've got just a great church family there, I think, with a lot of good teaching and music and so forth. That's been, again, sort of an anchor for us in the community, too, and that's been really nice.
0:03:46 - (Colin Johnson): Yeah, I think, you know, you can throw a rock in Johnson City almost and hit a church, which is, I think, a reason that it's awesome. You know, I tell people that we just love people and we show it, you know, we're not afraid to hide that. And so I go, yeah, but if you don't. Yeah. If you don't want to be a part of that, that's okay. But if you're a jerk, like drive on kind of stuff, if you're nice, stay.
0:04:09 - (Colin Johnson): But if you're a jerk, keep going.
0:04:10 - (Nancy Williams): Yeah.
0:04:11 - (Colin Johnson): So you grew up in Memphis?
0:04:12 - (Nancy Williams): Yes. I was just gonna say everybody in Memphis has some kind of an Elvis story.
0:04:18 - (Colin Johnson): Do you have one?
0:04:19 - (Nancy Williams): I grew up sort of in the. I grew up in the Mississippi delta, which is Greenville, Mississippi. It's right on the river, like Memphis is.
0:04:26 - (Colin Johnson): Yeah.
0:04:27 - (Nancy Williams): It's like living in a skillet.
0:04:29 - (Colin Johnson): Uh huh.
0:04:29 - (Nancy Williams): Okay. Hot and sticky.
0:04:30 - (Colin Johnson): Yes, I remember.
0:04:31 - (Nancy Williams): And Memphis is, you know, a lot of the same thing. But I lived in white Haven, where Elvis's house is, and everybody in Memphis has some kind of Elvis story. So I wrapped presents for him when Christmas, that was mine, but my aunt's locker was next to his, and my grandmother met him and so forth. So that's sort of the Memphis lore. But when I was little, my parents would take us to Chattanooga area for a family reunion, and then we'd come up to the smokies and camp out, and I thought I'd just died and gone to heaven. So I was wanting to come to east Tennessee and live over here.
0:05:12 - (Nancy Williams): I was thinking more of the Knoxville smokies area, but mark was from this region up here, and I've just fallen in love with it. When we moved in and we walked in the front door, I told Mark, I said, I'm home. You've moved me to a resort, and I'm just as happy as a clam here. You know, this is.
0:05:33 - (Colin Johnson): Are these trees and mountains around all the time?
0:05:36 - (Nancy Williams): Yes.
0:05:37 - (Colin Johnson): Yes. And Memphis is beautiful in its own right, but, yes, it is like a resort. So how did you get into, like, writing and studying and doing all the things around literature?
0:05:50 - (Nancy Williams): Well, I graduated from college with two degrees in French and history, so I already had that history background, two things. But I wound up going to UT for an extra year and got plugged into the advertising program there. And then I came out and I worked for a couple of ad agencies in Memphis as a copywriter. So I used to write commercials for. Oh, goodness, doctor Pepper and first Tennessee bank before it was first Horizon and Terminix and Labonner hospital there. Just did a lot of writing on different things. It was fun.
0:06:27 - (Nancy Williams): Coca Cola. And then I went to work for FedEx and worked for them for ten years in their corporate communications.
0:06:35 - (Colin Johnson): There are a few people in Memphis who work for FedEx.
0:06:37 - (Nancy Williams): Yeah, for a few people. So I actually had a fairly low employee number, which was nice. So. But by the time I left, there were, like, 150,000 employees around the world. So it was amazing.
0:06:49 - (Colin Johnson): That's unbelievable.
0:06:50 - (Nancy Williams): That was a real good experience. But I was a writer for them. So then I came, we moved here, and I did some freelance public relations, because that's what I had been doing some of. And I taught pr out at Milligan for almost ten years. Enjoyed that, loved. Loved my students out there. So while I was doing all that, and then Covid hit, of course, and they had to shut down. But I was having to retire about that time anyway just to help take care of my mom and my husband's mom.
0:07:22 - (Nancy Williams): And so during that time frame, I thought, you know, I think I really want to write a book. And so I started thinking in terms of that. That was just one aspect that I had not done before. So I first wrote a devotional for women, especially for women who are experiencing infertility issues. And so it's a christian devotional book, and then that's cool. I have a friend who's an author, and she's part of a publishing group, and she was part of this series of fairy tale novels.
0:07:56 - (Nancy Williams): So I said, if you ever need a writer, let me know. I'd love to do it. And she was like, yes. We're getting ready to start a series based in the 1940s. Bingo. My history thesis was on World War Two.
0:08:09 - (Colin Johnson): Oh, wow.
0:08:10 - (Nancy Williams): And also, it had to have different parameters. It had to be a christian book. It's for women. But I tried to write it with as much interest for men as possible. It had to be about based on a fairy tale plot, but it said in the 1940s, and then it had to have a little romance and mystery and murder, whatever mayhem in it. And I knew of this story that my father in law had told us. It was about a top secret mission in World War Two called Project Hula. I found this out more later. He was not a secret.
0:08:48 - (Colin Johnson): Like, it was a legit top secret, a legitimate toxic. So we're telling you're releasing top secret secrets on.
0:08:54 - (Nancy Williams): That's it.
0:08:55 - (Colin Johnson): Okay.
0:08:55 - (Nancy Williams): Just make sure it was. It's been declassified, declassified in the 1990s, so you can look it up on Wikipedia if you're interested. But it's called Project Hula. And what it involved was a transfer of naval warfare. What am I trying to say? Not aircraft, but watercraft, I suppose. Not as big as, say, aircraft carriers, the smaller ones, like destroyers and so forth, that were being transferred from the United States over to Russia to get them involved in the war, because as of early 1945, Stalin still had not declared war against Japan.
0:09:39 - (Nancy Williams): So they were trying to get them armed up for a d day type invasion of Japan.
0:09:45 - (Colin Johnson): Gotcha.
0:09:46 - (Nancy Williams): So there was a base called Fort Randall in the aleutian islands that became the center for this transfer of ships, undercover, so to speak. And my father in law was in the Seabees. Now they spell it s e a b e e s. I read that.
0:10:04 - (Colin Johnson): In here last night when I was reading through it. Yep.
0:10:06 - (Nancy Williams): But it stood for actually the initials Seabee construction Brigade. And they were part of the marines. And my father in law was put in charge of the laundry. That was his job. So he had to do the laundry for the russian officers. And he wound up befriending this young officer. And they figured out by talking together somehow, just using little translation books, that they were both christians. And so Arnold and he just kept up a little conversation for several weeks and would talk and chat and so forth.
0:10:39 - (Nancy Williams): Then one day, he didn't show up. When Arnold was expecting him. And so he asked some of the other officers, well, what happened? Where is he? They said, oh, he's dead. And so they told him where his things were, asked, where is he buried? And so Arnold went out on the beach, and his clothing had just been thrown up in the dunes. And so Arnold picked it all up and brought it back with him. And in his clothing was a 1918, actually, a 1917 New Testament, which was published before the revolution.
0:11:18 - (Nancy Williams): And so we think what happened is he may have been martyred for his faith because he was really carrying something that was contraband. So, anyway, that's where the story starts.
0:11:31 - (Colin Johnson): Well, yeah, I read the prologue yesterday, and I was like, this is really good. And, like, you could. I mean, the way it was written, I was like. I felt like I was on the beach watching this guy being drugged down the beach by these two russian guys. And. And then the way you talked about his thought process, like how he wouldn't talk about his faith and how, you know, he wouldn't. He wasn't going to renounce it. You know, they even gave him the option, but he said, you know, he didn't. And at the end, I guess that was his demise. And so, yeah, I think he was martyr in the story, and I'm looking forward to reading the rest of it, because I think it's just going to continue to get better and better. So to love a falcon is the name of it.
0:12:15 - (Colin Johnson): And. Yeah, and I was just dealing with boats. And now you brought planes into it, and so you want to talk a little bit more about how it plays out a little bit. And it's cool. Is Arne now becomes a fictional character?
0:12:28 - (Nancy Williams): Yes. He's not fictional, but he's not. But in the story, he starts the story out, because I had to start with the murder and then kind of go from there. So, actually, that part of the story, the prologue, is true.
0:12:43 - (Colin Johnson): Yeah.
0:12:44 - (Nancy Williams): Then the rest of it is historical fiction. So I took the premise. What if the russian naval officer left a sweetheart back home, a fiance who doesn't know he's dead? And if you've seen the movie misses Harris goes to Paris. That's a cute little movie. But she's in the same conundrum in that her husband just sort of disappeared during the war, and she never knew if he was living or dead. And so that's kind of what happened to so many people, because there was no communication, there was no follow up. There was just a lot of chaos, you know, during the war.
0:13:20 - (Nancy Williams): So the story blind proceeds with that, and it includes the introduction of the MiG nine, which was the first jet powered aircraft produced by the Russians for combat. And the story progresses because through this, I had to find a russian fairy tale to go along with this. So I based on this one called Finnist the Falcon, spelled F I n I s t. Finnist the Falcone. And it's an unfamiliar fairy tale to most people, but it's kind of a Cinderella ish kind of story.
0:14:04 - (Nancy Williams): And it's also in Wikipedia, so if anybody's interested, they can go look it up in Wikipedia and read about that as well as Project Hula, just to get a little bit more background.
0:14:14 - (Colin Johnson): Yeah, I love it.
0:14:15 - (Nancy Williams): So that was the fairy tale that I chose on this. So it's, the protagonists in the story are a female aircraft mechanic and a Mig test pilot. So I had a couple of things that helped me with this story. I've said it's a perfect storm for me because I love history. I'd studied russian, soviet government, politics, and college. I had studied Russian. We went to Siberia in 1999 to adopt our son Alex.
0:14:46 - (Colin Johnson): How cool was that?
0:14:47 - (Nancy Williams): And so we have a Russian in our family.
0:14:49 - (Colin Johnson): That's awesome.
0:14:49 - (Nancy Williams): And then also my father in law, of course, I had his story. Alex is a pilot, so I could consult him on a lot of the aviation things.
0:15:03 - (Colin Johnson): That's cool.
0:15:04 - (Nancy Williams): And then I have good friends from Elizabeth and Keith and Willett Ericsson. And Keith was a maintenance instructor for a number of years at Moody out there, so I could ask him about being an aircraft mechanic. And then I also knew another girl, good friend of mine named Beth, who is a former aircraft mechanic, so I could get her female perspective from things. So it was just very easy to sit down and go blip, blip, blip and get it.
0:15:30 - (Colin Johnson): She knocked it out in an afternoon kind of thing.
0:15:32 - (Nancy Williams): Just about. It was about six months, so it didn't take that long.
0:15:35 - (Colin Johnson): Yeah. I mean, yeah, I'm awe of people who write novels and works. It's just, I think lyrics from the start, like, very daunting. And bringing it all together and how it comes together wonderfully in the story culminate. It's just cool. So congratulations.
0:15:53 - (Nancy Williams): Thank you.
0:15:53 - (Colin Johnson): I'm excited to read it. Thank you for giving me up a copy.
0:15:55 - (Nancy Williams): It's called to love a falcon. It is available on Amazon if you want to shut up there. And so is my other book. And also anybody can go to my website, which is nancycwilliams.com.
0:16:08 - (Colin Johnson): Yeah.
0:16:09 - (Nancy Williams): And they can.
0:16:10 - (Colin Johnson): For the copyright there. Mm hmm. So talk to me a little bit about Alex. This is a cool story, right?
0:16:16 - (Nancy Williams): It is a cool story. So it's a God story.
0:16:19 - (Colin Johnson): And we have an Alex, too. You may have met him from China, and he's kind of our sort of adopted son, but he's not. He's got parents, but he was our foreign exchange student for a couple years.
0:16:29 - (Nancy Williams): Oh, nice.
0:16:30 - (Colin Johnson): And he is a total God story. So, anyway, I want to hear about your Alex, and how did all that come about?
0:16:37 - (Nancy Williams): We went through infertility before and after the birth of our daughter, Elizabeth. She's our daughter and beautiful, wonderful girl. And then we realized that we needed to just go ahead and adopt if we were going to have another child in our family. So we started looking around, and we went through an agency that was actually working through Russia, and we thought, okay, that would be a good place to go. We'll just work on that.
0:17:04 - (Nancy Williams): So we went through, and they gave us Alex on a video and showed him to us from the orphanage and said, would you be interested in adopting him? And what was funny at the time was that he didn't say a word on the video. We were a little concerned maybe he was, because it said on the paperwork that he was developmentally delayed. Well, apparently they put that on all the paperwork so that they can actually adopt them out.
0:17:28 - (Nancy Williams): And. And so just by the grace of God, by the way, that he orchestrated everything, we wound up going, you're accepting him, we're going to go over there. And then all of a sudden, we had to wait ten months because the judge over there decided to hold up all the paperwork. It's a long story, but we wound up going, our case went to Madeleine Albright with the State Department. It went to the Russian Supreme Court, but she was waiting for this one piece of paperwork that nobody else was willing to give, nobody from the US was willing to give, and she was not stopping, whereby Alex would become an american citizen in the russian court as soon as he was adopted. And the Americans were saying, no, he has to be in the United States on american soil, et cetera, et cetera. A little back and forth, because my fingerprints have been just pretty much washed off from the fact that I've been doing so cooking and so forth over the years.
0:18:29 - (Nancy Williams): I had an inside number to the INS director in Memphis, and this was 20 something years ago. And so I called him up and I said, hey, we've got to try to work this out. Nobody else is doing this. Can you work this out? And he's like, ah, sure, just send me the paperwork. I'll do it. So we wound up being the first of 50 couples to go into this judge's court in Siberia. So we go to Siberia. So that's another reason for, hopefully you end in summer.
0:18:56 - (Nancy Williams): No, we were actually there when Lake Michal was still frozen over and cars were driving across it. It was an amazing experience. It's a beautiful, beautiful part of the country, but it was just very interesting being in the russian court. There was a cage in the courtroom. I mean, you think like a gorilla cage there. That supposedly is where, I guess, defendants sit. So it's very much a kind of a guilty until proven innocent type of court system.
0:19:30 - (Nancy Williams): But we managed to.
0:19:31 - (Colin Johnson): There's a reason it has a. Like a big history in all the movies, right?
0:19:36 - (Nancy Williams): Yes.
0:19:37 - (Colin Johnson): We're going to send you to Siberia.
0:19:38 - (Nancy Williams): Yes, yes. And that may have happened to some of Alex's ancestors. We don't know, but we were able to bring him home. He was age three. He was a siberian tornado. But he was. He is a great, great guy. Extremely smart. He's 28, and he's working in computers. Brilliant. Awesome, fellows. So enjoying his work.
0:20:01 - (Colin Johnson): Alex, I look forward to meeting you when you're in the neighborhood next. Yes, I'd love to. Love to meet you. Reading through some of your stuff, you said you had an aha moment and your writing of the book, was it just because of all the stuff that came together? You, like the Lord said, all right.
0:20:17 - (Nancy Williams): Yes.
0:20:17 - (Colin Johnson): Here is the perfect time for it all to come together.
0:20:20 - (Nancy Williams): I wanted to have a mission for the book, other than just writing a novel. So I really wanted to talk about some of the persecution that the christians faced, and if I was going to leave anything with my readers, I wanted them to know that there was a real persecution, for example. This is true. And so when you're writing historical fiction, you're really putting truth in there, as well as the fictional elements. And one of them was that there was this league of militant atheists, or the militant godless.
0:20:55 - (Nancy Williams): So these were people who were commissioned by Stalin to go out and eradicate all forms of religion, much like Saul from the Bible. Pardon?
0:21:05 - (Colin Johnson): Like Saul.
0:21:06 - (Nancy Williams): Yes, yes.
0:21:07 - (Colin Johnson): Just go kill them all.
0:21:08 - (Nancy Williams): Kill them all. And so it was a brutal time. And so over the years, well, actually, during World War Two, Stalin backed off a little bit from it because he wanted to get the support of the church for the war. But then they went right back to it. And by the time that the sixties and seventies had rolled around, religion or Christianity was for the weak or the mentally ill or the old and elderly. So that was how it was viewed. It was uncool to be a Christian and still is, you know, for that matter, in Russia.
0:21:45 - (Nancy Williams): So I wanted to talk about that, the fact that persecution, really, I haven't talked about in the book, but persecution still exists today in so many countries.
0:21:54 - (Colin Johnson): Yeah. Isn't that crazy?
0:21:55 - (Nancy Williams): So. It is crazy. So we think, you know, we've got it so easy here in the United States. We don't realize that that's one of the things.
0:22:01 - (Colin Johnson): Yeah. Especially when it comes to talking about Jesus. We can do it anytime we want, which we take very for granted, I think.
0:22:06 - (Nancy Williams): Absolutely. So. And then the second thing I wanted to talk about was forgiveness.
0:22:10 - (Colin Johnson): Yeah.
0:22:10 - (Nancy Williams): So there's some things that they have to work through, and I don't know if. If I could be as strong as my characters are in being forgiving of somebody that would be hurting somebody that I loved, you know, but that's what people, Christians are facing around the world today.
0:22:26 - (Colin Johnson): So, yeah, that's tough. I was talking to a friend the other day, and he said one of his friends, his daughter, had gotten murdered by this guy, and he went to court and he said, and he got the opportunity to stand up in court and tell the guy he had forgiven him. And he was like, I would have told him anything but that, you know? And he said it was just a testament to this guy's faith that he could forgive the guy who did horrible things to her.
0:22:51 - (Colin Johnson): You know, not just.
0:22:52 - (Nancy Williams): It's horrific.
0:22:52 - (Colin Johnson): Yeah, it was awful. It was awful. So, yeah, forgiveness, and then, you know, it really is powerful. You know, when you let go of whatever it is you have against someone and you choose to love them, it just breaks down so many walls. And the Lord knew exactly what he was doing when he created forgiveness. So it's really cool. Really cool. What are some other things we can learn to expect from and learn from reading your novel? I think you have a few other things.
0:23:19 - (Nancy Williams): That's pretty much it. I really wanted to focus on just sort of the characters and the development in there and just some of the challenges that are in there. I had fun with the characters. I really had fun writing this book. That was what made it, you know, really neat. And it gave me the opportunity to say, okay, I've done this. I grew up reading Nancy Drew mysteries and Sherlock Holmes and Hardy boys and Tom Swift. My brothers had the Hardy boys and Tom Swift books, so I loved mysteries, loved reading those kinds of things. And so I thought, I've always wanted to write one. Here we go.
0:23:55 - (Colin Johnson): This is my mystery that's fun.
0:23:57 - (Nancy Williams): So I'm really thinking now about writing one about Johnson City. Yeah, I started it about five years ago and then put it aside when this one came up to do. So. I've been busy with trying to work on this one to write it and then also to market it, promote it.
0:24:17 - (Colin Johnson): Yeah, we want to get it out there.
0:24:18 - (Nancy Williams): That was a big thing. But I'm hopeful that I can get back into the Johnson City one. I've written the first few chapters, but it involves a time slip, if you've ever heard of that terminology before. But it's something that a time slip is a jumping back and forth between characters, one who's set in the past and then one who's set in the present.
0:24:40 - (Colin Johnson): Same character just given perspective, different characters. Okay.
0:24:44 - (Nancy Williams): But they have a connection somehow.
0:24:46 - (Colin Johnson): Gotcha.
0:24:47 - (Nancy Williams): So in this case, I've got a girl who's been called to Johnson City from St. Louis, and so she's going to be introduced to Johnson City in the present. But I've also got somebody from 100 years ago. So what was happening 100 years ago in 1924? Prohibition.
0:25:08 - (Colin Johnson): And so I wonder who you might be focusing on.
0:25:11 - (Nancy Williams): Yes.
0:25:11 - (Colin Johnson): Well, he was a popular character around here.
0:25:14 - (Nancy Williams): Yes. Charmer. Al Capone. Obviously, I'll have to come up with somebody fictional, because Al Capone is still sort of an unproven. You know, the legend, the lore. Yes. Proven. No. Real hard evidence out there that we know of.
0:25:31 - (Colin Johnson): You'll never guess.
0:25:32 - (Nancy Williams): Yes. But the moonshiners, those guys were legit, so that'll be kind of playing into it a little bit, along with things like the VA and Etsu, because those were around in that. The tree streets, just some of those little elements, the downtown area, just the things that are in the region, as well as what's going on today.
0:25:53 - (Colin Johnson): Yeah.
0:25:54 - (Nancy Williams): So I'm hopeful to make it a very positive book about Johnson City.
0:26:00 - (Colin Johnson): That'd be cool.
0:26:00 - (Nancy Williams): Now, the problem with doing that is it just introduces more people to Johnson City.
0:26:04 - (Colin Johnson): I know.
0:26:05 - (Nancy Williams): And I want they keep coming.
0:26:08 - (Colin Johnson): You guys who are listening keep coming, which is great. Like I said, we love having you. Yeah. But it's definitely changed in the last ten years. I feel, like, significantly. I've been here 40 something years, so. Okay, yeah, 45. And, yeah, I mean, we used to drive by, or where we live now, our neighborhood. It used to be, you know, strawberry, a real strawberry field at Strawberry Field. And then that was just a big field and farmland. And I remember starting them, driving, building those houses, and I was like, man, those houses look really nice, you know, to live in one of those one day, and then the Lord just kind of shows up one day and you're like, oh, thanks. You know, it's fun how he surprises you. But yes, lots of people are coming and we're glad to have them.
0:26:53 - (Colin Johnson): Speaking of coming and going, you've been on some writing pilgrimage in your upper, is that right?
0:27:00 - (Nancy Williams): Well, I go every year to one that we have up in the mountains, and I've got a good little group of friends there that are wonderful christian authors. They're published, they have all different varieties of writing that they do. But it's always been great to just get away and just not have any distractions because if I'm working at home, I get little snippets of time but to sit down and really write something. So I'll be going next month again to that, talk to her. And then also I have a friend, Mary Ellen Miller. You know Mary Ellen?
0:27:30 - (Colin Johnson): I did Mary. She's been on the podcast, one of.
0:27:33 - (Nancy Williams): My wonderful friends and prayer partners. And so she and I try to take every year a pilgrimage over to the co and do these personal spiritual retreats. I can't say enough good about them. They are a great time for you just to get away, get out in the mountains, take some hikes, and have just some personal time with the Lord. So that's always a good thing for me, just to kind of plan for the future and talk to God and just get some things straightened out. That's always good.
0:28:04 - (Colin Johnson): That is really good. I haven't been. I keep saying I need to go, but, yeah, to have Billy Graham start something that's just continuing to keep going forever, it's right over the mountain. We should go.
0:28:16 - (Nancy Williams): It's a neat place.
0:28:17 - (Colin Johnson): Yeah. Did you always want to be a writer growing up?
0:28:25 - (Nancy Williams): I would say no, because that was not on my radar. I thought I was going to be a teacher at one point. Then when I wound up getting intrigued by advertising, I decided I wanted to be a copywriter. And I've always had a pretty good verbal thing going. But I can look back at my first grade teacher who asked each of our children, this is first grade now. This was. And I didn't go to kindergarten about drugs.
0:28:53 - (Colin Johnson): You skipped it. You were smart.
0:28:54 - (Nancy Williams): I skipped it. Well, I skipped it because I really was able to do some of the things that I would have learned in kindergarten already. So about drove the teacher nuts the first few weeks because I didn't have any concept of a classroom. But the, you know, the, she would say, write a story. This is first grade, you got to write a story. And I would sit to me, okay, I was just going crazy, and I was writing all this. I'd write a long story.
0:29:19 - (Nancy Williams): And so it was exciting, and it was fun and great. And then later on, you know, you get to high school and college, and you're having to write these papers, and they're just dull and boring. And I'm thinking, oh, the last thing I want to be is a writer.
0:29:32 - (Colin Johnson): Yeah.
0:29:33 - (Nancy Williams): But my senior year in college, I wound up looking at old Saturday evening posts from the 1940s, and that's when I did my research on war related advertising. During the 1940s.
0:29:48 - (Colin Johnson): That's cool.
0:29:49 - (Nancy Williams): And I just had fun writing about it. And then I had fun writing ads.
0:29:54 - (Colin Johnson): Yeah.
0:29:55 - (Nancy Williams): And then I had fun writing this book and writing stories. I love writing stories. I think storytelling being in. Also in another environment, there's this storytelling resource place down in Jonesboro. That's great.
0:30:06 - (Colin Johnson): Yeah. International storytelling center. Not that one. There's another resource center.
0:30:10 - (Nancy Williams): There's another one that people need to know about. It's called the storytelling resource Place, and it's the little house that's right down below Tennessee distillery.
0:30:16 - (Colin Johnson): Okay. Yep.
0:30:17 - (Nancy Williams): There's the old salthouse Tennessee distillery, and then right down below it is an old house, and it's a great resource. They've got library stuff. That's cool for storytelling.
0:30:28 - (Colin Johnson): Yeah. And then you can get a degree in it here in Johnson City at EtSU, you can get a master's in storytelling.
0:30:34 - (Nancy Williams): And they have also, I'm going to be doing some of my research over there. They've got the appalachian archives. Great place to get local history. And that's the other thing that's neat. This area is just so full of history, you know, being settled so early on. And my mom and I were doing Ancestry.com and found out that some of our ancestors were some of the first settlers here. Bought property from William Bean Junior.
0:31:00 - (Colin Johnson): Well, that's cool.
0:31:00 - (Nancy Williams): And so it is cool. So I'm living two creeks away from where my, like, five great grandparents lived.
0:31:08 - (Colin Johnson): That's awesome.
0:31:09 - (Nancy Williams): So isn't that fun? Yeah. Didn't know it till we moved up here.
0:31:11 - (Colin Johnson): And I'm helping people become landowners. So that's.
0:31:14 - (Nancy Williams): There you go.
0:31:14 - (Colin Johnson): So there you go. Like, it's all coming together. Yeah. So let's talk about. Maybe you can give some tips and tricks, somebody who's like, oh, I've always wanted to write a book, and it seemed daunting. What would be your advice to them?
0:31:30 - (Nancy Williams): Start writing. Just sit down and start. Just put it all down, and it'll. You will look back at it when you. When you finished it and go, oh, that. That's gotta be changed. And you can do that, but you gotta get started. You gotta have a game plan. Now, for me, I'm kind of a combination between a planner, what they call a pantser. A pantser is somebody who flies by the seat of their pants when they're writing.
0:31:53 - (Nancy Williams): I'm sort of in between those. I liken it to getting on a train. You know where you're getting on, you know where you're gonna get off. And so you gotta start from that premise, and then just wait and see what happens along the way, who you're gonna meet, and so forth, and you can incorporate people into your stories. This is fiction. You know, if you're writing the truth, it's actually much easier to write nonfiction, because the truth never changes.
0:32:20 - (Nancy Williams): But if you're writing fiction, you're telling a lie, and you gotta remember what lie you told, you know? And I'll have to go back and go, oh, wait a minute. Did I spell Brian b r I a N or Bryan? And. But the good thing is you can look at that, but just get it down on paper. Write a. Write a story that you think people would want to read.
0:32:41 - (Colin Johnson): Yeah.
0:32:41 - (Nancy Williams): Or write a story that's really good. So it's. There's just that what I'm trying to say is, write a story about something that's true, which is what I started with this and then tried to follow up with it.
0:32:57 - (Colin Johnson): Okay. And then you're here. When do we. When can we expect this Johnson city book out? You want to put it on record now to give yourself a semo?
0:33:04 - (Nancy Williams): I wish.
0:33:05 - (Colin Johnson): Soft deadline.
0:33:06 - (Nancy Williams): Every. My soft deadline is the first part of next year, so it won't take me long once I have everything mapped out in my brain about what we're doing. The problem for me right now is really developing some of the characters. Gotcha. What they will be like. And there's something called a character arc, which in a good novel of any kind, the character goes through some sort of transformation. So, you know, if you read even nonfiction, like JD Vance's hillbilly Elegy, which is really a very good book, his character goes through a transformation in his life, and he tells about that and how, what he came from and where he is now and so forth.
0:33:50 - (Nancy Williams): So that's what you want to accomplish in your book. You don't want people to end the book with something discouraging, but something encouraging.
0:33:59 - (Colin Johnson): Or some question maybe. Unless you're going to do a sequel.
0:34:02 - (Nancy Williams): Yes. Yes.
0:34:03 - (Colin Johnson): Yeah. Anything that you've read recently that is just like, this is the best book I've read.
0:34:10 - (Nancy Williams): I'm reading Charles Martin right now, but I'm not finished with it, so I don't really know. But one of the best suspense books, and I read it basically to find out about suspense was called the last flight. And it is. It is. It will knock your socks off. It's really very well written, very suspenseful and so forth with a lot of little twists.
0:34:31 - (Colin Johnson): And does it just blow your mind that we're still coming up with new stories, new books?
0:34:36 - (Nancy Williams): Yes.
0:34:37 - (Colin Johnson): Like, I got. It's kind of like you think it's all been done. Same with movies, right?
0:34:40 - (Nancy Williams): Yes.
0:34:41 - (Colin Johnson): And now they are remaking a lot of movies because they don't have great stories. So they're like, oh, we're gonna go remake the good ones. But, yeah, it just blows my mind how the creativity and just the imagination of people come up with this new idea, new things. It's unbelievable.
0:34:56 - (Nancy Williams): Well, we've got the technology now with Amazon. They do the print on demand. Okay. Which is revolutionize the publishing industry.
0:35:07 - (Colin Johnson): Cause there used to be a huge under, I mean, financial undertaking to get a book printed.
0:35:11 - (Nancy Williams): And even still, if you try to go with a major publishing house, there's just a lot of dedication that they have to make. You have to really be a guaranteed good writer, published writer and so forth to go with one of the traditional publishing houses. Right now, there are more than a thousand books uploaded every day to Amazon. So I'm just one little bitty author out here waving my hand, saying, I've written a book.
0:35:41 - (Nancy Williams): Don't you like to read my book? And I'm competing with thousands of other people.
0:35:46 - (Colin Johnson): Yeah. Every single day, uploading 365,000 books a year.
0:35:51 - (Nancy Williams): Yes. Very, very, very few of them will actually succeed. And so it's kind of like trying to record a, you know, top hit or a podcast song or a podcast.
0:36:03 - (Colin Johnson): Or a podcast, and you get hundreds of thousands of people to listen to it.
0:36:06 - (Nancy Williams): Here's what you're doing, which is very successful. You're being consistent. You're doing frequently. You're podcasting frequently. You are on target. You're an excellent interviewer. Oh, thank you.
0:36:21 - (Colin Johnson): You're an easy guess.
0:36:22 - (Nancy Williams): Well, thank you. But you're an excellent interviewer. And so you're bringing in people, you're positive. You're covering a broad variety of subjects. So all those things are moving towards a successful, you know, landing spot.
0:36:37 - (Colin Johnson): There that's the hope Mitch and I hope to make millions of dollars off this one day. Right, Mitch? And let's go to the speed round as we're getting ready to wrap up. Okay. You and Mark are going to dinner. Date. Fancy date. My son is dating a girl. They have a. He'll probably kill me for telling you this, but they have a wardrobe status. Like numbered. It's numbered for fancy being. Being seven is like black tie.
0:37:06 - (Nancy Williams): Okay.
0:37:06 - (Colin Johnson): And down to one. And so let's say you're going business casual, which would be four ish. Where are you guys going to dinner?
0:37:14 - (Nancy Williams): Well, we just went Saturday night to courses down here at Watauga Brewing Company.
0:37:21 - (Colin Johnson): And I've heard this is great.
0:37:23 - (Nancy Williams): Well, it was excellent. Yeah, it was very good. They have a signature dish, which is pork chops, but it's got local peaches on it. And then some of their other, like, my daughter got the steak when we went there and it had Mister Stripey tomatoes with it. So they're kind of. They were. They're fusing tuscan cuisine right now, just for the summer with local farm to table veggies. Veggies.
0:37:49 - (Colin Johnson): That's fantastic.
0:37:49 - (Nancy Williams): So they're located in the middle floor of Watauga brewing, which is right across the street on Market street from the Johnson City press building.
0:37:58 - (Colin Johnson): Yep. Right downtown.
0:37:59 - (Nancy Williams): So. And we got easy parking around there. I was really surprised.
0:38:01 - (Colin Johnson): That is a better place to park than over by label because you're walking a mile.
0:38:05 - (Nancy Williams): Yes. So it was great down there. And the service was delightful. We were there at 530 in the evening. It was very quiet. We were going to go upstairs for just to check out the ambiance up there, but we didn't get a chance. So we're going to go back and go to the rooftop. So that would. I would say right now that was just a very pleasant, very pleasant place to go. And we like gourmet. That's awesome for fancy.
0:38:28 - (Colin Johnson): Fancy. And then I see you at the club occasionally for brunch. How about coffee? What's your favorite coffee shop? I know you may just be a tea person. I don't know.
0:38:38 - (Nancy Williams): I like still waters out in gray. I like several here, too. I like dos gatos and open doors. And I've been to the moon. I like it. Any place where I can get tea, because I'm a tea drinker. And a tea drinker is called a sinenceophile. It's a made up word.
0:38:56 - (Colin Johnson): It sounds very fancy.
0:38:57 - (Nancy Williams): But it sounds fancy right up your alley. The camellia sinensis is the plant that the tea bush grows from. So I love all varieties of tea. I drink everything. I drink copious amounts every day. The entire pot. And my teapot came from the Jane Austen museum in Bath, England, so I feel very fancy when I have my tea.
0:39:17 - (Colin Johnson): I was just in bath around the roman bath.
0:39:21 - (Nancy Williams): Yes. Yes. It's fascinating.
0:39:23 - (Colin Johnson): It is fascinating. All right. Pizza. Where are you guys gonna get a pizza?
0:39:26 - (Nancy Williams): I haven't eaten pizza in so long. Okay, same on you. Well, I love pizza, but it doesn't love me. So we've typically, in the past, gone to Johnny.
0:39:38 - (Colin Johnson): Bruce goes.
0:39:39 - (Nancy Williams): Bruce goes. That's been one of our go to places.
0:39:42 - (Colin Johnson): Have you tried Cootie Brown's pizza?
0:39:43 - (Nancy Williams): Well, that was my other thing is that I found that I really like Cootie Brown's, and especially they're flatbread type pizzas, so those are very good.
0:39:51 - (Colin Johnson): We love that one, too. And then let's see, what would be the last one? What do you and Mark like to do for fun when you're not writing? Writing books together?
0:39:59 - (Nancy Williams): We hike. We love hiking. We love hiking the appalachian trail. You know, we'll never, ever be through hikers. I had hoped at one point to do some backpacking along the way, but, you know, it's just too comfortable to come back to our own bed since we're so close and just enjoy that. So we. We get out on different stretches of it, trying to explore other trails and waterfall sites around the area, because you've just got. There's just so much in the area. We just recently went up on Holston Mountain and did a little trail up there that takes you up to an abandoned fire tower.
0:40:39 - (Colin Johnson): Oh, cool.
0:40:40 - (Nancy Williams): I wouldn't want to climb up it because there were stair rungs missing. Like two or three stair rungs missing as you're climbing up. And I'm like, no, I don't think we're going to do that.
0:40:50 - (Colin Johnson): Yeah, you'd think the forest service would cut off most of the ladders we came and start, but there's so many.
0:40:56 - (Nancy Williams): Beautiful hikes around here.
0:40:57 - (Colin Johnson): Yeah. Yeah. It is a beautiful area, and thank you for making it better by being here. Um, what's one thing that I should have asked you that I forgot to do? You want to share anything? We tried to send your husband internal medicine business. We got a.
0:41:11 - (Nancy Williams): You asked me about writing. How would. How would I encourage somebody to start writing? And I think that it's. It's important for writers to support each other, and so to be in a. To find a writers group.
0:41:24 - (Colin Johnson): Yeah.
0:41:25 - (Nancy Williams): And I've found that.
0:41:26 - (Colin Johnson): Is there a local one that you know of, or how would one go about.
0:41:29 - (Nancy Williams): We don't have a name, but if anybody wants to get in touch with me and they're a christian writer, a wannabe author, or they just like writing stories or they want to write for their church, I just write all across the board on how can somebody connect with you on my website, they can go to nancycwilliams.com, and there's a little space down at the bottom that they can send message. There's a contact there? Yep. Contact us. And so I'll answer it if they'll send me a message.
0:41:58 - (Colin Johnson): I love it. I love it. Well, thank you for being one of my favorite guests on the podcast. Thank you for bringing me a book to love a falcon. You can find it on Amazon or anywhere books are found. Did you read a copy? Is it on audible?
0:42:12 - (Nancy Williams): I have not. I decided my southern accent would not sound very good.
0:42:17 - (Colin Johnson): Not a good german or Russian.
0:42:19 - (Nancy Williams): I can say. I'll tell you this. I can say, which means, hello, how are you? I don't speak Russian well.
0:42:30 - (Colin Johnson): You said those words very perfectly.
0:42:33 - (Nancy Williams): I learned a few very important words, like mrozhenoye. That means ice cream ain't the best ice cream in Russian.
0:42:39 - (Colin Johnson): Ice cream.
0:42:40 - (Nancy Williams): So that's.
0:42:41 - (Colin Johnson): Were you gonna get ice cream locally? If you were gonna need an ice cream. Have you gone out for ice cream lately?
0:42:46 - (Nancy Williams): No, I haven't. Again, for the same reason that they just.
0:42:49 - (Colin Johnson): It just doesn't agree with your tummy.
0:42:51 - (Nancy Williams): It's just so fattening. I absolutely love. I'll tell you what my indulgence will be when I get to my, what I might call my goal weight. And that's Annie Ruth's donuts.
0:43:02 - (Colin Johnson): So good. Have you been to their new cafe area over here? Like they have a rest. Like a little restaurant.
0:43:08 - (Nancy Williams): That's where I'm gonna go when I go. But you know, a good place for ice cream is main street cafe. Main street cafe in Jonesboro.
0:43:17 - (Colin Johnson): And now there's the scoop and grade. It's like a. An ice cream shop. And then there's a. In the summers, like right now on the way to Jonesboro, if you're coming from Johnson City on eleven e on the left, just past classic title insurance area. There's a little creamery place there. People say it's really good. It's like a little barna kind of thing. And then there was one other one.
0:43:40 - (Nancy Williams): Oh, I'll go to cook out if I really want some milkshake. Because they've got all those different flavors. It's fabulous.
0:43:47 - (Colin Johnson): I love a good milkshake. We were talking about the shamrock, I think, last time on the podcast, they make a great milkshake. So go there and get a milkshake.
0:43:53 - (Nancy Williams): Haven't had one of theirs so good.
0:43:56 - (Colin Johnson): Well, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.
0:43:59 - (Nancy Williams): This was a joy.
0:44:00 - (Colin Johnson): I loved getting to know you a little bit.
0:44:01 - (Nancy Williams): You're one of the nicest, friendliest people in Johnson City, and Johnson City is full of nice, friendly people, you know.
0:44:08 - (Colin Johnson): Well, I appreciate the high praise. Thank you so much for that. And until next time, I'm Colin Johnson with the Colin and Carly group. If you want to move here and meet Nancy, I'll introduce you. I know her. And so, yeah, if you want to invest in real estate, we help lots of people do that. We manage tons of property for people, help people build wealth, and it's just so much fun helping people get in houses.
0:44:29 - (Colin Johnson): I love it, I love it, love it, love it. And so I'd love to help you guys. So have a great day, and, yeah, look forward to meeting you.
0:44:35 - (Nancy Williams): All right, thanks.