ABOUT THIS EPISODE
Reality with Bruce de Torres 77
Susan Sloate: Forward to Camelot, A Time-Travel Thriller
On Rumble and the usual audio platforms
Susan Sloate is the bestselling, award-winning author of 26 published books (fiction, young adult fiction, nonfiction, biography, sports, and history).
With Kevin Finn she co-authored Forward to Camelot: The Final Edition, a time-travel thriller about the JFK assassination, which was re-published in 2013 as the 50th Anniversary Edition before its current 2024 edition. (Recently declassified documents confirm Susan and Kevin's original theory about the identity of the assassination planner--who appears as a major fictional character in the novel.)
Her website is www.SusanSloate.com.
Bruce devoured FORWARD TO CAMELOT. “I’ve been obsessed with John F. Kennedy since 2013.” Susan, “I started the journey when I was six, when Kennedy was assassinated. For years and years, it was in my mind.” She was reading about it.
In 1992, Susan saw Oliver Stone’s film, JFK. “It was terrific. Amazing. Afterwards, I was all churned up, thinking why did this happen? It didn’t have to happen. People knew it was coming. It shouldn’t have happened. And I wanted to somehow make it better.”
At her writer’s group, she wrote the beginning pages of what would become FORWARD TO CAMELOT, whose co-author, was in the group. “When you had a story problem, Kevin could figure out what was wrong. I dragged him into the story and said, I can’t finish this without you, and we ended up collaborating.”
“The driving force was to take this event that was so tragic [JFK’s assassination] and so affected American history and somehow make it better.”
“We’re very proud of the research because it didn’t just deal with the events of the assassination or the big names associated with the assassination. We also went into Kennedy’s life, his administration and everything that was going on there, and we discovered (and put in the book) an enormous amount of new material that no one had ever seen before.”
“We decided early on, and this was a big part of the entire thing, to make Lee Harvey Oswald [SPOILER ALERT] the hero of the book, because based on everything we saw, that was truly the role he intended to play. After publication, I sent a copy to the woman who was Oswald’s lover in the summer of 1963, Judyth Vary Baker.”
“She’s a friend of mine,” Bruce said.
“Good! After she read it, she said this is exactly what he was. This is the person that he was. That made me so happy because this is what I was trying for. People are constantly surprised, asking, you mean, Oswald’s not the bad guy?” Correct. “Anything to try to repair his reputation in history, that matters to me.”
Susan’s latest book is SCENES FROM A SONG, which she calls 1960s’ music fiction, the story of a song that makes us sing, that breaks our hearts, that stays with us forever, and the very special band that started it all.
SCENES FROM A SONG: Sloate, Susan: 9798998989407: Amazon.com: Books
REALITY WITH BRUCE DE TORRES
On Rumble (and the usual audio platforms):
See the amazing reviews for GOD, SCHOOL, 9/11 AND JFK: The Lies That Are Killing Us and The Truth That Sets Us Free at brucedetorres.com.
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