The discipline that makes me good at preventing disaster is the same discipline that let me finish a novel and judge it honestly. The cautious day job is what made the creative leap work.
As a part of our series about entrepreneurs who transformed something they did for fun into a full-time career, I had the pleasure to interview David R Leng.
David R Leng is the award-winning author of the Echoes of Fortune historical conspiracy thriller series, whose debut, The Search for Braddock’s Lost Gold, won the 2025 PenCraft Thriller of the Year and reached #1 on Amazon’s Thriller new-release list. For more than three decades, he has worked as a chief risk officer at a financial and insurance firm, an investigator whose profession is anticipating what goes wrong, analyzing the possible issues, implications and impacts, while uncovering blind spots, the exact instincts he now brings to building a believable conspiracy on the page. A Penn State alumnus who grew up near the Braddock battlefield in southwestern Pennsylvania that inspired his first novel, Leng has earned Kirkus Reviews “GET IT” Picks for both Knights of the Golden Circle and Shadows Over Cozumel, a BookLife by Publishers Weekly Editor’s Pick for Shadows, and lives in Pennsylvania with his wife, children, and grandchildren.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Can you tell us a bit about your “childhood backstory”?
I was a kid who grew up in the ’70s. You went out to play, and you were told to be home when the streetlights came on, except we had no streetlights. So you listened for the neighbors yelling that it was nine o’clock, or you just came home when it got dark in the summer. You had to use your imagination. We invented games, played board games, played Dungeons & Dragons. I still see the same kids I grew up with, even though some of them live a thousand miles away now. And here is a funny thing: after my parents passed and I bought our family’s home, I found I still had some of the same neighbors.
But that porch is where I learned the art of storytelling, listening to my parents sit outside with the neighbors, trading stories. One of those neighbors turns a hundred this year. She had a lot of stories, and she also gave me the dirt on my parents.
I was always writing after that. Short stories, mostly for fun, the kind my family and friends would actually read and enjoy. Maybe someday I will release an anthology of them, if only to give people a laugh at what an eight-year-old thought was worth writing about. Later it was articles for national magazines, and several business books. But fiction, a full novel, was a different animal, a genuine risk, and I did it on my own.
What pulled me in was history. I grew up aware of the legend of Braddock’s Lost Gold, and almost a decade ago I was kayaking the Youghiogheny River when I noticed a man in the shallows with a metal detector. I paddled over. He said he was looking for Braddock’s gold, the British Army payroll that vanished in 1755. We talked for twenty minutes on a gravel bar in the middle of the river, and he told me things I had never heard. I went home and started researching.
Then it became personal. My mother was a teacher who loved to read and proof my writing. She fought cancer for six years, and when she went into hospice she made me promise to write the story of Braddock’s gold. She never got to read the finished novel. I kept the promise anyway. A stranger handed me the story, and my mother made me finish it.
What was the catalyst from transforming your hobby or something you love into a business? Can you share the story of your “ah ha” moment with us?
The man on the river was the spark, but the honest “aha” was realizing I was going to do it at all. I am wired to weigh risk, and taking up a brand-new craft, with no assurance anyone would ever read it, is exactly the kind of thing my profession trains me to be wary of. I was not walking away from anything. My risk management and insurance career is going very well, and I have no intention of leaving it. But I could see something else taking shape, a passion that might one day become my second act, the thing I walk toward when I eventually walk off into the sunset of the first career. Deciding to bet on myself and build it, while everything else was still going strong, was the real turning point. My mother’s promise sealed it: it turned “someday” into “I will finish this.” That is the moment the hobby stopped being a hobby.
There are no shortages of good ideas out there, but people seem to struggle in taking a good idea and translating it into an actual business. How did you overcome this challenge?
Let me start with where the day job really comes from, because it is the heart of why the two lives fit together. Four months out of college, I showed up for a first meeting at a manufacturing plant and found police cars and ambulances in the lot. A man had been killed on the job that morning. I watched what it did, to the workers, to the owners, and to his family. From that day, my mission became simple: get people to go home the same way they showed up. Thirty-five years later, that has not changed, and it is why I will not give up that work.
The work itself is accident investigation, analyzing failure, predicting catastrophic scenarios, and uncovering the hidden causes, the blind spots, as I call them. But the deeper part is human. I have to understand the people inside an organization, read the culture, and figure out how to get someone to take that extra second and ask, “should I really do this, this way,” before they do something that alters their life or their family’s forever.
That is exactly what a good conspiracy thriller requires. When I build a plot, I am doing what I do professionally, asking how a system fails, who benefits, what evidence gets left behind, and what someone would do to keep it hidden. The discipline that makes me good at preventing disaster is the same discipline that let me finish a novel and judge it honestly. The cautious day job is what made the creative leap work. I did not have to abandon one for the other. Each one strengthens the other, and neither is going anywhere.
Is there a person in the world, or in the US, with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why?
Dan Brown. He’s the closest thing I have to a kindred spirit in this. What he does, take a real thread of history, the kind most people walk right past, and pull it into a modern thriller that sends readers down a rabbit hole, is exactly the itch I’m trying to scratch. I’d want to know how he decides which real detail to build a whole book around, and how he holds the line between what’s documented and what he invents, because that line is the most fun and the most dangerous part of what we both do. I’d also just want to compare notes on the readers, the ones who stop mid-chapter to fact-check you and are stunned when the strange part turns out to be true. And somewhere in that lunch I’d raise a glass to Clive Cussler, who’s no longer with us but whose blend of real history and adventure is the reason a lot of us write what we write.
What advice would you give someone who has a hobby or pastime that they absolutely love but is reluctant to do it for a living?
If you don’t try, it will always bug you that you didn’t. Life is too short to carry around a pile of “what if I had.” But here’s the more useful version of that, because the word “reluctant” usually means someone thinks they have to quit their job and bet the mortgage to be allowed to chase the thing. You don’t. I didn’t. I kept the career I love and built the writing beside it, and keeping that foundation is exactly what let me take the creative risk without it feeling reckless. It also kept the thing I loved from turning into a source of pressure. So my advice is don’t frame it as leap or stay. Start small, start now, keep your footing, and let the passion prove itself while the rest of your life stays steady. The only real failure is reaching the end still wondering what would have happened.
It’s said that the quickest way to take the fun out of doing something is to do it for a living. How do you keep from changing something you love into something you dread? How do you keep it fresh and enjoyable?
I cannot force it at the desk. When I am stuck, I do something physical, a bike ride, a hike, or get out on the water in the kayak. That is when my mind loosens and the solution comes. The answer to a plot problem almost never arrives while I am staring at the screen. It arrives on the river.
What is it that you enjoy most about running your own business? What are the downsides of running your own business? Can you share what you did to overcome these drawbacks?
The most rewarding thing has been watching readers refuse to believe the history is real. I wove documented history through the fiction, and I was floored when my beta readers and fans started emailing to say they had stopped reading to fact-check me online, only to discover the details were actually true. It still happens. People assume I invented the history, then find out the strangest parts are the real ones. For a writer, there is no better reaction.
The downside is the part of the business that has nothing to do with writing. I can control the story. I can edit, cut, and rebuild until the reader’s experience is exactly what I want it to be. But the moment the book is finished, control ends. Marketing is a completely different craft, and it’s one nobody warns a new author about, you can write the best book of your life and it can still sit unread if the right people never find it. That was a hard adjustment for someone whose whole career is about managing outcomes.
What I did was stop treating marketing as an afterthought and start treating it as its own discipline, the way I treat the writing. I learned the tools, I track what actually works instead of guessing, and I lean on the thing I can influence, connecting directly with readers who love this kind of history, rather than shouting into the void. I’ve made peace with the rest. You do the work as well as you can, and then you trust the book to find its people.
Can you share what was the most striking difference between your actual job and how you thought the job would be?
Two things, and the second one surprised me. The first is editing, and it turned out to mean far more than trimming. Going from outline to first draft took five months. Editing took almost a year. My original draft was nearly 190,000 words. The story was good, but parts dragged and I was uncomfortable with the ending. The hard work was not just cutting, it was rebuilding, a new ending and a reworked middle, while stripping out everything that did not pull the reader through. I brought in beta readers with real expertise, one who had worked for Scotland Yard for the investigative scenes, a former Marine platoon sergeant for anything military, and a friend brilliant at reading the emotional truth of characters. By the end, the book had gone from 190,000 words to 106,000, nearly half, and it was far better for it. Learning that cutting and rebuilding your own work is what makes it professional was the real turn from hobby to craft.
But the harder part, the one I did not expect, is marketing. And the difference comes down to control. Editing, you control. You decide what the finished story looks like, you cut what does not serve the reader, and the outcome is in your hands. Marketing is the opposite. You do your best to position the book in front of the right readers, and then you hope, hope it resonates, hope they find it, hope they enjoy it enough to tell family and friends and come back for the next one. For someone whose day job is managing risk and controlling outcomes, learning to do the work and then release it into something I cannot control has been the hardest lesson of all.
Has there ever been a moment when you thought to yourself “I can’t take it anymore, I’m going to get a “real” job? If so, how did you overcome it?
Honestly, no, and the reason is the whole point of how I did this. That “I need a real job” moment usually hits people who quit the paycheck to chase the dream and then feel the floor drop out. I never did that. I kept my career, and the writing grew up beside it, so it never had to carry the rent or the fear. That’s exactly what kept it from ever becoming something I dreaded. I’ve been lucky enough to end up with two passions instead of one. In the day job, my whole mission is getting employees to go home the same way they showed up to work. In the writing, it’s giving readers a little time away from the job they might not love showing up to. One keeps people safe, the other gives them somewhere to escape to. I can’t imagine wanting out of either.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
In the beginning, I had an idea, a rough outline, and not much else. I just let the story take me wherever it wanted to go, which was a lot of fun right up until it wasn’t. Partway through that first manuscript, I decided I’d come up with a better name for one of my characters. So I changed it from that point forward, feeling rather pleased with myself, and never went back to fix the earlier half. A little while later a beta reader called and very politely asked who this new person was, and what exactly had happened to the fellow from the first half of the book. As far as she could tell, one character had quietly vanished and a stranger had taken his place. I’d accidentally written a disappearance I never intended.
The real lesson wasn’t “use find-and-replace,” though I learned that too. It was that flying by the seat of my pants had a cost. A novel is a system, and every piece connects to every other piece, so a change in one place ripples through a dozen you’re not thinking about. These days I build a much more detailed outline before I start, and far from boxing me in, it makes the whole process easier. I always know what connects to what, so I can be creative inside the structure instead of constantly cleaning up after myself.
Who has inspired or continues to inspire you to be a great leader? Why?
J.R.R. Tolkien, and second place is not close. It is the depth of the world he built and the feeling you get reading it. From the thriller and mystery side, Clive Cussler, Dan Brown, Agatha Christie, and James Patterson. Cussler especially; his blend of real history and adventure is close to what I am reaching for. In fact, one of the real mysteries behind my Shadows Over Cozumel, gold vanishing with fleeing Confederates who escaped into Mexico under Emperor Maximilian, is the same history that inspired Cussler’s Sahara. But Tolkien taught me something I use constantly: you have to give enough detail for readers to picture the world in their mind’s eye, but not so much that you get in their way. I am proud of the reviews and emails from people who have visited the real scenes in Western Maryland and told me it looked exactly like what they had pictured.
How have you used your success to make the world a better place?
Honestly, I’m wary of the word “success” in a question like this, because the thing that’s meant the most had nothing to do with sales or awards. When a reader emails to say I’m their new favorite author, that’s wonderful, and I never take it for granted. But one message stopped me cold. A woman wrote to tell me how much it meant that a free copy of Shadows Over Cozumel found its way to her while she was going through cancer treatment. My mother went through that same fight, so I know exactly what those days look like: the long hours sitting with an IV in your arm, waiting, with nothing to do but be there. The idea that something I wrote gave her somewhere else to be for a few of those hours meant more to me than any review ever could.
It also reminded me what the books are actually for. I don’t write to change the world. I write to give people a few hours away from whatever their day is, and sometimes that day is a very hard one. If a story of mine can be a good companion on the worst afternoon of someone’s week, that’s the version of “making things better” I can actually stand behind.
What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Started” and why?
1. Your “safe” career can be the engine, not the obstacle. I spent years thinking my profession and my writing were separate lives. The investigative discipline of risk work is exactly what makes a conspiracy feel real, and what gave me the discipline to finish.
2. Be willing to cut and rebuild. My first draft was nearly 190,000 words; the finished book is 106,000, almost half, with a new ending and a reworked middle. The words you fall in love with are often the ones that need to go. I have left a lot of scenes I loved on the cutting-room floor, but some are beginning to resurface on my website for my readers to enjoy.
3. Real history is your best material, because readers won’t believe it. The moments readers fact-check because they assume I made them up are almost always the true ones. Let the record do the heavy lifting. One of my favorite things now is a segment I call One Legend, One Fact in my newsletter. The reader feedback has been overwhelming.
4. Give readers enough to see it, then get out of the way. Tolkien taught me this: enough detail to picture the world in the mind’s eye, but not so much that you smother it. The reader’s imagination is your partner, not your audience. But getting out of the reader’s way was the hardest lesson for me to learn, especially with scenes set in places I know personally.
5. The hardest part isn’t writing the book. It’s letting it go. Editing you control. Marketing you don’t. You position the work as best you can and then hope it finds the right readers. For someone whose whole career is controlling outcomes, learning to release the work into something I cannot control was the real lesson.
What person wouldn’t want to work doing something they absolutely love. You are an incredible inspiration to a great many people. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.
If I could start a movement, it would be a small rebellion against taking history at face value. We have a habit of sanding the past down into something smooth and comfortable, and in the process we strip out the hard lessons, the ones usually learned at a terrible cost. That’s exactly the part we most need to keep. “Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it” is an adage for a reason. And you can’t learn it from newsclips and reels. The real record is stranger, messier, and more human than the tidy version, and you only find it if you dig past the sanitized noise, visit the actual places, and read the primary sources for yourself. Not cynicism. Curiosity. A country that fact-checks its own legends is a lot harder to fool.
It’s the idea that runs under everything I write. The tagline of my series says it in eight words: the past refuses to stay buried. It echoes into the present. That’s not just a hook for a thriller. It’s how history actually behaves.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
Being a huge hockey fan, Wayne Gretzky’s line, “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take,” ties perfectly to betting on yourself and starting the novel.
How can our readers continue to follow your work online?
My website is DavidLengAuthor.com, or EchoesOfFortune.com, which has the books, my newsletter (The Echoes: Dispatches from the Hunt), and everything else, including free stories. Readers can also find me on Facebook, Instagram, and Goodreads. The best place to start is the first book, The Search for Braddock’s Lost Gold, though each book is written to stand completely on its own, so you do not need any prior knowledge to jump in. And if you ever find yourself in the mountains of Western Maryland, know that a lot of what you read really happened there. That is the part I love most: the history is real, and it is closer than you think.
Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this.
