Adversity as the Trigger: Lighting Your Reinvention Engine Ep. 60

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where Eddie writes about entrepreneurship, reinvention, and identity.
Get Eddie’s free course: 8 Ways to Supercharge Your Motivation & Crush Sales
 at https://bit.ly/8supercharge

JV Hilliard Resources:
JV Hillard’s The Warminster Saga  - https://amzn.to/4k3vaD9
JV Hillard’s Website - https://jvhilliard.com/

Episode Summary:
 What happens when the world shuts down—and suddenly, you’re free to ask: What kind of life do I really want? In this episode, JV Hilliard shares how the COVID-19 pandemic became his unexpected launchpad for reinvention. After years as a defense lobbyist in Washington, JV took a bold leap into writing epic fantasy full-time. He unpacks how he shifted his identity, aligned his lifestyle with his purpose, and turned a side passion into a creative business. If you’re sitting in discomfort, stuck in a role that no longer fits, this conversation will show you how adversity can trigger the reinvention engine that changes everything.

Key Takeaways:

• How the “default life” can trap high performers—and how to escape it
• Why COVID created the ultimate pause button for reassessment
• The moment JV chose authorship as his new identity
• How to align lifestyle goals with creative work
• What reinvention feels like when it’s working

Time Coded Breakdown:

• 00:00 – 03:21 | Welcome + Intro to JV Hilliard
• 03:22 – 07:44 | Career before the pivot: Defense lobbying in DC
• 07:45 – 11:10 | The pandemic hits—and unlocks unexpected freedom
• 11:11 – 16:30 | First pages, first steps: Starting the Warminster Saga
• 16:31 – 22:55 | Designing a new identity: From suit-and-tie to swords-and-sorcery
• 22:56 – 29:40 | Building a creative business that supports your lifestyle
• 29:41 – 36:00 | JV’s advice to anyone facing a moment of change
• 36:01 – 38:15 | Where to find JV + Final thoughts from Eddie

Join the NEWSLETTER at http://TransformYourFuture.com
where Eddie writes about entrepreneurship, reinvention, and identity.
Get Eddie’s free course: 8 Ways to Supercharge Your Motivation & Crush Sales
 at https://bit.ly/8supercharge

JV Hilliard Resources:
JV Hillard’s The Warminster Saga  - https://amzn.to/4k3vaD9
JV Hillard’s Website - https://jvhilliard.com/

Subscribe to Transform Your Future Newsletter Where Eddie writes about personal development, reinvent & identity: http://transformyourfuture.com

Transcript

0:00

Any aspects of it at all. Okay. So Joe, thank you so much for coming on the Transform Your Future Podcast. We've been talking back and forth. I've been very excited. I love talking to authors. I love to talk about the author's journey. So let me start this out by kind of just jump writing in your first book, the Last Keeper, tell me what was going on that you decided to put the pen to paper to get this book done. What was going on with you and your life at that time that you decided you wanted to do this? Sure. Well, first of all, thank you very much for having me on. And secondly, to answer your question, COVID happened when Covid happened. I had an opportunity like many new authors to actually pen the novel. They've had rattling around in their heads for a number of years as my day job. I do defense and technology lobbying in DC Fantasy Adventures, a far field from that. A lot of folks, I think when they find out that I write fantasy adventure novels often think that, oh, maybe historical fiction or maybe some history book or something like that. And no, no, it's the nerd side of me. It really was inspired from about 20 years of tabletop role playing games. I'm a DD enthusiast. I've been playing since I was 10. A lot of my friends still play on Sunday nights six to 10. We've used Zoom and things like that these days to do that because we're scattered around the country, but always been a fan of the genre and always wanted to be a writer. But life gets in the way of those things. And when Covid happened, DC was shut down for about a year and a half, and I didn't have much else to do in order to eat up some of that time. As we were all sitting at home, I started writing what I thought was going to be a standalone novel, turned out to be a four book series with a bunch of standalone novels coming after the fact, and another trilogy after that and a video game and now a graphic novel. So it's really taken off in a way that I didn't expect, and actually I enjoy it better than I enjoy doing my day job. So this is the way I've started to migrate things over and hopefully this will be the back nine of the career. So maybe in the future it'll just be Joe, the author, JV Hilliard, the author. That's awesome. So I mean, it's an interesting thing because I feel like most people, many people have the idea that they have a book in them. As a matter of fact, I think the saying is something like everybody has at least one book in them or something like that, but to actually sit down and do it and to complete it and to get it out there in the world, there's a certain amount of determination or perseverance belief that you have to have to do that. Tell me a little bit about, did you have any struggles doing it? I mean, were there challenges? Any obstacles you had to go through? Yeah, well plenty. I had never written a book before and there's no manual that says here's how write book. And so you have to learn a lot of different things. And for my day job and for about 20 years, I was writing every day, but it was nonfiction, right? It was speeches and or grants or legislation and or other things. But it gets you into the practice of writing. So one of the advantages I had was unlike some authors who just sit down and start to plug in and hope they can write something, I was pretty disciplined. I was used to writing for 4, 6, 8 hours a day. So for me, it was part of my existence. Before it was just a matter of getting over that first hurdle, which was now I'm writing fiction and there's dialogue and there's prose and there's pacing, and there's all of these other things, character arc and plot development and stuff that you have to think about that isn't part of what I was doing on a day-today basis. And then hurdle number two is understanding the industry better. And right now folks can pursue publication in a variety of different ways. You can go the traditional publishing route, which I did, and that's finding a publisher out there who will buy your story and then help you get your books on the shelf somewhere. There are the independent route, which is the opposite, which Amazon brought to the fore over a decade ago, allowing authors to publish for themselves through Kindle Direct publishing and or other sources very similar to them. And then there's hybrid publishing and things like that. You just dunno what you dunno. And I wrote something and I shared it frankly with a friend of mine who's a professor and she read it and said, this is very publishable. You should send it to a development editor, someone who's going to read the book to find holes in your plot lines. Then that'll go onto a copy line editor, and then it'll go onto an agent or a publisher that will help you get it published. And it's amazing how little I knew about it. And so for me, the biggest challenge was going from nonfiction to fiction. And the second biggest was learning enough about the marketplace to understand where my books fit, how I can get them there and how I get them sold. Just the stylistic changes it took in my everyday writing to accommodate this style of writing. Well, but I have to say that I commend you a hundred percent because there are people who feel that they have to go through some type of rites of passage in order to get there. They need so much of many people's lives are based upon social experience. And so if you don't have this social experience of writing and people telling you that you're good at writing or they want to read what you're writing or you should write more and they don't encourage you if they don't have that kind of experience in their life, sometimes they feel like they're not ready. I mean, even one of the guys that I follow, because I like nonfiction and I'm working on a nonfiction book right now, is James Clear? There. You go. So James Clear, he's written a number one bestselling book, a New York Times bestseller and sold millions of copies. He said that he started blogging 10 years ago and it took him 10 years of blogging before he felt he could write a book. You know what I mean? He had to do that. Whereas I think, well, but if you're blogging and you're writing articles every day, then you're a writer already. What difference does it make? But for him, he needed to establish himself really well in that domain and connect with people in that way before he took on writing a book, which I think is interesting. So I think it's great that you just had the kind of belief that I'm going to do this. I'm going to get it done, I'm going to get it out of me, I'm going to do the work, I'm going to figure it out, and I'm going to start showing it to people I think, which is fantastic. Yeah, I think part of what he said is true. I mean, there's the discipline of writing every day, and there's also, I think if you're going to do what he was doing in terms of blogging, you need to develop an audience. Your readership is important. I mean, you can write a book and if it's just for the art of it and you don't care who reads it, and it's just for family and friends and it really doesn't matter. But if you're out there fishing to create a community that will eventually buy your book, you have to find them first. And sometimes that does come in the form of blogging or does come in the form of building up your social media accounts and things like that. But that's why I found comfort in working with a traditional publishing house is that they already had some of that stuff. When we launched my first novel, they had a 35,000 person mailing list that it went to because they had sold books to other people. And so it does take some of that time, but you're right, I personally have always been an entrepreneur. I've owned a business since I was 27. I own three businesses now, and I've never had the risk aversion that some have for trying something new or jumping in once you see a hole in the marketplace. In this case, it wasn't a hole in the marketplace as much as it was. I thought I had a good story, and once I realized it was more than just a book and it wasn't just an exercise of kicking something off my bucket list and that it had commercial appeal that I wanted to run at that in the same way I would run at any other kind of business opportunities for me, I've never had that aversion or risk aversion. And so I didn't mind just jumping in and seeing where it went. And I also knew that there was more than one story in me. So if it didn't go anywhere, I would just write a different one and I get better as I go. So you learn some of those things along the way, and in your first book is your worst book, no matter who you are, it's just your worst book. You just get better as a writer in the same way you get better as practice based. Perfect you 20,000 shots or what's that 10,000 hour theory that's out there? You can become an expert at something by doing it for 10,000 hours and that kind of stuff I think is helpful and you'll get better at it. Some people just need, if you needed a little affirmation and wanted to build a community, there's nothing wrong with that. It's just a different path than the one I took. What was the name of the first publisher? Dragon Moon Press, and as you could tell by the name in my kind of books. Which is a real benefit obviously, because the network that they've built, yeah, they're very niched down, a publisher that's niched down. That's interesting. And you chose them. Just curious, at the time when you did this, you knew and you went and did the education to find out what's available, and you saw a hybrid, which is a kind of mix of self-publishing and publishing with some physical copies always being available to go out there. And then you've got the self-publishing just pure self publishing to Amina, and then you've got the traditional way of finding a publisher to get it out there in the world. How did you choose to go with a publisher as opposed to those other methods? I'm just curious. Yeah, so there's two answers to that question. The simplest one is if there's that old saying that if you don't know the horse, don't make the bet. And what that means for me here is that I didn't understand this industry and I needed air cover. I wanted someone to help me understand it so that if I was going to eventually do it professionally or do it in a great enough way, that was impactful to me financially or my readership, that I needed someone to show me the ropes, right? So I got a Sherpa and there was value in me exchanging a portion of my royalties for bringing on a publishing house to help me do that. And in this case, the publishing house specialized exactly in what I was writing, which was epic fantasy and Dark Fantasy. And so I was in the right place at the right time for that. The other answer was it was a referral from my development editor. When I showed this to my professor friend, she said, you've got to go out and you have to find somebody that'll do your development edits. And I didn't even know what that was at the time, so you could find people like that on Fiverr or Upwork or other similar things. And I went on to Upwork and found a guy in England who helped me through it and really helped me understand how to write in the fiction category and became better at that. And as a result, when we had what we thought was a final product, he said, you know what? I used to work at a different publishing house with this woman who now owns Dragon Moon Press, and explained to me who she was and he said, I think this is good enough. She might want to take a swing at it. So he connected me. I did not find an agent. I didn't query a single publishing house. It was a referral from my editor, and as fate would have it, she loved it. But she looked at me and she said, people don't read one book in fantasy. You don't write standalones in fantasy, so I'll sign you, but I want at least a trilogy. And part of that goes back to the idea that you spend half the book world building, and once you've built that world, your readership doesn't want you to leave. They want to stay in that world. So it's hard for you to it and see that even the most famous stuff, the most recent Star Wars phenomenon with acolyte or the Boba, all these spinoffs with Obiwan Kenobi, they're all set in the same world because you don't want to leave that galaxy far, far away or middle earth. Everything that was written before middle and after is in Middle Earth or Token, or Martin is in Westeros or Sheara for Terry Brooks, the forgotten realms for a bunch of people. And so she said, I'll publish you, but it has to be I want three, and it turned into four and now it's going to turn into seven. So pretty excited about that. And so I think it was just a mix of those both having the right referral at the right time, coupled with the fact that I didn't want to jump into an industry that I didn't understand and needed somebody that they're bringing their domain expertise to it. So it was a perfect mix. So there wasn't a time when you were going through this and going through the process that you thought, gosh, this is really difficult, or something that happened that you thought, I'm not going to be able to finish this, or it's not going to get published, or it's not going to get done or anything, no challenges like that. Well, there's a few hiccups here and there. It was never that it wasn't going to get done for me. I'm always, I'm motivated enough that I knew I was going to finish it. I just didn't know if it was going to go anywhere. If it was just an exercise in a catharsis where I was getting what I thought was a really good story out onto a piece of paper and say, ha, I did it, and then that would be the end of it. Instead, this thing had some legs, and so it grew into something greater than what I thought it was going to be in the beginning. And for that, I'm really kind of grateful. But the other hiccups, look, there's a writer's block that happens. I don't get a lot of that during my writing because I'm a big planner. So I often, my writer's block comes in finalizing the plot before I start writing it, and I write backward to forward. So I start with the end and I finish the story, then I write the beginning of the story, and then I fill in the middle parts and then tweak the manuscript as we go through variations of the draft. So for me, I didn't struggle there, but not knowing what I was doing. It was a year's worth of work, and now every three months, every four months, I could finish a book. I've gotten better at it and I know what to do and what not to do, but it was just a matter of not knowing. And then being open to coaching, I didn't know that I needed an editor. I didn't know what those editors are going to look like. And in the beginning you're scared of editing. You're like, oh my goodness, what are they going to say? Are they going to like and they're not going to like it? And there's this imposter syndrome that takes over. It's like, well, am I really an author? Am I really a writer? Can this really be the case? Am I good enough to do that? And then when someone buys your first book, all that goes away and you're just like, well, I did it. I'm over the top. As long as you're open to. I think that coaching so that you're listening to folks that have been there, done that, and my editor is also an author and he has a dozen works to his name in a genre. I think that if you just listen to that coach and follow the rules, you can get there. You just have to be dedicated to it. And that was never my problem was I think not understanding how to do it. It's like, here's a manual to build a car. Well, great. I mean, I'd have the tools to build that car, and that's really what it came down to is I knew I could be a writer, and so it was just a matter of sitting down and going through all those steps. That's great. So now that I've spent all this time finding out how you did it, how you got started, what you had to go through, I love it. First of all, everybody needs a coach. It's so helpful to work with somebody else who's been there, knows what to do, and can help get you there a lot quicker than just floundering around on your own. Absolutely. But tell me now a little bit about the Last Keeper and the world that you created that all these books live. Yeah, let's Get all the good stuff. Yeah, the good stuff. So the World is the Realm of Warminster, and it was created based on, I said before, about almost 20 years of Dungeons and Dragons play and having good characters and good quests and excellent players, and learning how to be a dungeon master, which is very succinctly storytelling at its best if you've not ever played the game before, the Dungeon Master controls pace of the game and the campaign in which the quest that your characters are going on. And so you have to be a good storyteller to captivate your players for that. So I learned the craft backwards. I learned about telling it verbally as opposed to writing it down, but I did memorialize a lot of those better things. I kept character sheets, kept maps of stuff that we had done as part of the gameplay, and I think that helped me put a lot of this stuff together. Fans of tabletop role playing games, will games likely see a lot of familiarity in the pace and in the storytelling as it's to gameplay, whether it's Dungeon Dragons or Star Wars or whatever you're playing, it doesn't matter. But also I think the world itself was something I really wanted to do from the beginning. I started to Frankenstein together all of these modules that I had run my characters through over the years, and a lot of them had great ideas and they were so unique to only a handful of people that played them with me, that it was easy for me to put them together and create the realm warminster. So I have my own pantheon of Gods, I have my own currency, I have my own races that you'll find the monsters are unique to it. The spell system is unique. I think that's really what's made it fun is it was almost putting together a game so that I can write stories about what happened in this game that I never played. And I think that was cool. But the story, the Last Keeper itself really is a hero's journey. So you're familiar with the Luke Skywalker arc or the Harry Potter arc. It's the same thing here where you've got a young man, he's not coming of age as much as he's coming into his own and finding a power that rests within him. And it's kind of the, if I would describe it in a way, it's sort of like the chosen one versus the false prophet, right? Sous Arick, who is the main character in the novel, has this power to see the future, and he belongs to a sect of people called The Keepers that learn. They go to this cathedral where they can learn how to harness these powers. And once they harness them, they're sent out about the world to help other countries and empires and kings and queens and all those across the land so that they can make the most difficult decisions based on his connectivity to his God. This God ud, who is the sexist God of knowledge, but he's the only one of his sect who could see the return of a fallen keeper, a man who had used this power of sight for his own gain. And he sees this fallen keeper coming back to seek revenge on the cathedral. That's hence where the last keeper takes you. It takes you on a ride with his maturity, his ability to come into his own, and then eventually that epic battle between good and evil. Right and wrong happens by the time you get to Book four in the Quady, and that's really where it comes. But if you're familiar with that hero's journey, hero's journey meets false profit, times chosen one kind of trope is where this will be with a little bit of fantasy romance scattered. It sounds enjoyable. It sounds exciting. My mind's going in a lot of different directions with what you're saying. So it sounds like you've got a lot there to play with. I enjoy it, and that's why I think epic fantasy is my, it's my cup of tea. You can build a realm that has a history and it has a future and you're living it through the present. I looked at it as a chore in the same way that Tolkien did in the same way that Martin has with Westeros and others, because you wanted to build a realm that was first fantastical and fun to read about, but also there was some level of reality that was baked into it. And a lot of my real life experiences, especially those in DC, either with the defense department or with Department of State or just with politics in general, also are woven into this thing. And that way you get a little intrigue, but it's all believable. And so when you're building this world, you have to tell people whether or not there's gravity or whether the sky is blue or are they riding in horses or they have cars or whatever they're doing. When you're building this world, you need to ground it in some form of reality. And so there are things that you'll read about that are very familiar to you. So you'll see the battles between church and state, or you'll see the battles between various as part of this. And there's a civil war that is really at the core of this, and of course some individual battles that come between the good guys and the bad guys as well. And I've used some of those experiences to inform the novel and in this case, the series in the hopes of grounding it at some level of realism for folks. So it's easier to suspend belief. That's great. My undergraduate degree was in creative writing. I got a creative writing degree. So I understand a lot of the things that we're talking about on a deeper level, but what I'm curious about is so much for a writer has to do with finding his voice, right? Finding their voice. As a writer, what would you say about your voice as a writer and finding your voice as a writer? Well, I think that's 100% correct. And I think you can see that when you're reading other people's work, and you can tell where sometimes you think you're reading something that they didn't write and stuff like this. Because when you have a number of people that are reading your stuff through the editing process or the beta reading process or the publishing process, they might suggest things to you, but they can't write them for you. It has to be in your voice. So when you're reading it, it has to be in that consistent voice of the author or else you could jarred out as a reader. So that's very important. And for me, I have a tendency to write densely, you're very Hawthorn, very Tolkien esque in the sense that I don't mind going into some longer descriptions to build the world out because I think know where things are coming from. But also around that, you have to understand that it's always best to let the readers formulate how things are in your world in their heads, and everybody will have a different understanding of that. I once was at a conference where I saw Aria Salvatore, a very famous fantasy adventure author when it was asked how a magical cat in his realm was pronounced. He said, it's pronounced, however it's pronounced in your head. He didn't want to tell the reader how that was. And I think that's true. And so that's all part of it when you're reading it, it has to be my voice in your head telling the story, but it's you formulating the characters. And if I describe them down to the T, sometimes that's a little too much. Readers are smart, they can figure stuff out for themselves, and you can infer things without having to spell it out. But I do love setting the table, and that's a lot of fun. And for me, I don't mind writing things that are much broader and having history and stuff like that. I think I find it entertaining. And for someone that enjoys epic fantasy, I think they'll too. I like what you're talking about. So from the creator, the author to the audience, the audience is bringing something to the table, and that's their interpretation of whatever it is. And so there's always that aspect in anything that we create that it might actually be completely different for one audience member from another audience member, the way they perceive the characters and the challenges that they're going through. Yeah, that's interesting. It's right, you're dead on. I mean, how many times have you gone to a movie after reading the book and saying, this is nothing. I use this example all the time. I'm a big fan of Lee Child and the Jack Reacher novels. That's way far out of my extreme. But in the books, when you read it, my interpretation of Jack Reacher was six foot 8, 290 pound muscle bound, just brutish Viking like guy as Jack Reacher. And then in the movie, they cast five foot six Tom Cruise, and it's just like, wait a minute, this isn't Jack Reacher, and it jars you out. And the same thing happens when you read a good book and you go to a movie, it's like, well, that's not how I pictured that character. And in your head, it's perfect because it's your imagination, it's how you interpreted it. So even though I might not have said blue eyes, brown eyes in your head, you might've read something blue eyes, someone else in their head, somebody brown eyes, it doesn't matter. But when you see it on the screen or in a different medium, sometimes that's jarring and you might not like it as much because reading is the ultimate storytelling in the sense that I'm telling you the story, but you're imagining the story as we go. And so my voice translates into your imagination and hopefully that sparks fly and they like the book. So when we see the film, this is somebody's interpretation of the book they read. And obviously in a movie, there's a lot of other things that go into the creative process and so many challenges that they face with so many people being involved in it. It's not, you lose the authority usually because one person can control everything usually. But yeah, I like the way that you, basically from the beginning, you are including the audience as a member of the cast in such a way, right? They're taking part in this and you are allowing them the space for them to do that. I think that's great. Yeah, I dunno who said it, but a wise writer once said that to be a good writer, you have to be three people at once. You have to be the author, the character, and the reader. And that's all true. And you see that a lot during the editing process. And what I mean by that is you miss stuff because your nose blind to it. You're so close to it as a writer, you think that you've said something. And when your editors or your beta readers reader for the first time, and it's obvious to them that they don't understand what just happened, that's the point where you have to go back and correct it. You're like, oh, wow. In my head that already happened because I knew that character was doing it. But from their eyes, the reader's eyes, they have no idea what happened. So you have to go in back and explain those things. And so yes, you have to be the writer who knows the tale of the story. You have to be the character so that you're in the moment so that that character is doing exactly what that character would do. And if that character deviates, your readers will tell you, they'll be like, wait a minute, this is out of character for person A, and you have to go back and correct that. And then lastly, you have to know that what you thought you said, actually you said in the right way through that character so that the reader can digest it. And so that's where the editing process really kicks in. Now, handing this, and I say that writing is the ultimate team sport because people always, always are like, oh, you just sit in a coffee shop somewhere and write, and then you go home. No, you write, and then it goes on to your copy editor or your development editor who shoots holes in it, and it comes back to you and you fix those holes and it goes back to that development editor again and they shoot more holes into it, and then it comes back to you and then you send it back to them. And once they approve it, it goes onto a copy line editor that tells you where you had your grammar mistakes and your spelling mistakes and your punctuation problems and your syntax and all that stuff. And it comes back to you to fix that again. And then it goes out to your beta readers who are now going to read it, and I liken them is to your audience in a movie theater who they have no experience and don't even know what they're going to see. And you're showing them three different endings. And then you pull them and tell them, tell me what ending you like the best. And once they do that, that's the one you choose. And it's sort of like a survey audience for that matter. And again, they're going to tell you what's going on. And when you're done with all that stuff, it goes to your publisher and then your publisher says, change these five things. You go back and by the time you're done a dozen to almost two, Reddit seen it, basically giving it the Good Housekeeping seal of approval, and then it goes out to market. And it takes me now just as long to get through that process as it does to write a new book. And if you're not doing it and in the beginning you're afraid of it as an author, you're like, oh my God, that someone's going to just be too constructively, not even constructive, just critical of it. And you're afraid your piece of art that's out there. But as an author, you have to discipline yourself to say, it's like going to the dentist like, Hey, you know what? I don't want to go to the dentist. Going to the dentist sucks, but when I come out of there, I'm going to be clean. My teeth are going to be good. I'm not going to be problems not going to lead. And that's the thing is you've gone to the dentist, all the hard stuff has come out and iron sharpens iron. Be open to constructive criticism and let them tell you where they think you're failing and go in and fix it. And as long as you have that mentality that this is a good thing, that first manuscript is not the final product, it's just the test run. It's the dry run before and then you go in and fix it before the main show, then you're good to go. You just have to get over that as an author. That's a lot of good advice there for authors and people starting out and people helping them to find their voice. Absolutely. So what's next for your, I'm sorry, I've lost track because you have the trilogy that turned into four books who've got the game. You are working on a graphic novel now, right? Novel, that's what you're working on now. Right. So we have book four, which will conclude the Warminster Saga comes out next month, July here of 2024. And then series, there's going to be three origin stories, standalone novels, about three of the more popular characters in the series that'll launch between 2024 and 2025. And then 2026, the new trilogy will roll out, and that will align with the launch of both the video game and the graphic novel. So yeah, 2026 is going to be a pretty big year and there's a lot of writing between now and then that has to happen, but I'm excited about it. I can't wait to get there. Yeah, it sounds like you got your hands full. Just a little. So am I correct that you're still working while you're doing this right now? Yeah, so I own a couple of companies, one of which is a government affairs company. I also do, I own a magazine called Altered Reality, which is a magazine for speculative authors of fiction. So if you read sci-fi or fantasy or dystopian or horror or monster stories, the magazine is for you. And I accept submissions from speculative poets and speculative writers as part of that. I also own a sports magazine that focuses on the four major, like the N-F-L-N-B-A-M-L-B and NHL drafts. And those things kind of pay the bills while I'm doing this and getting this off the ground. It takes a lot of book sales to make a real legitimate salary. So those businesses kind of keep everything else afloat while I'm building toward hopefully a career change here. And just doing the authorship stuff through retirement. Those magazines are attributed on paper or electronically or. Magazines. So if you go to altered reality mag.com or draft nation.com, you'll find those other two magazines. It's all electronic, therefore no expenses like the old school magazine racks you'll find in a Barnes and Noble or a Giant Eagle, I don't have that expense. And then the site is paid for by sponsor, and the sponsors want to get in front of the members. Or in the case of the real writing folks, they want to get in front of readers because if they like something they read and they read a short story from you, they might go and buy your books. And same thing holds true for the sports stuff you do that it's just like, Hey, I want to get in front of your fans of the NFL draft because I'm selling something that NFL people would like. Right. And so you get paid based on the sponsorships and things like that. Yeah. That's awesome. So you have your hands full. I mean, I'm just curious. I have my hands full. I run two different businesses and I'm also writing and doing a podcast. It takes quite a bit of time, so I keep a full schedule. I would say that I am very busy seven days a week, and I do reserve some amount of that time for my personal life to do things personally and time to spend with my people I love. But it's a big schedule and require some discipline to do things. I'm just imagining that's kind of like how you schedule is you got a lot, you got full plate, so you keep pretty active. I do. I think thankfully a lot of what I do is virtual. So the average daily commute for me is from my upstairs to my dining room table. And if I go out somewhere, it could be at a coffee shop like I've joked about before for times of the year where that's different when you're doing NFL scouting or NHL scouting, you have to go where the players are. But a lot of that is also watching film and the development of the game or the development of the graphic novel are things that others are doing. And I'm sort of on the sideline as part of the storyboarding processes and that's about it. So for me, it's a lot of me sitting there saying, here are the guardrails, and you can write everything in between, but if you go outside the lines, it won't make sense to those that have read the books and stuff like that. So thankfully, that does save me a bit of time. And I have a wife who married me, she married me when she knew what I was she was getting herself into and knew that I was going to always have businesses in 24 7 stuff. She's very understanding and that I appreciate. A friend of mine wrote a book called Married to a Monster, and I thought, that's an excellent title. What an excellent title. That's definitely a book my wife could write. That's what she thought. It takes a certain kind of person to be able to put up with me. I can tell you that and my schedule and everything I do. She tried to talk to me earlier and I was in a call and then she just opened up the door and went like this to me because she's going out, but she's used to it and she's a great person. So. Yeah, once, and they knew what they were getting into too. When they married guys like us, they knew we were going to be 24 7, 365. I was completely honest about it and I'm sure you were too. So it wasn't like I was trying to hide. Yeah, no, she knew she knew. So it wasn't anything. She can't complain about that now. And thankfully, I mean, she was the one that really set me down the path of writing and it was almost a joke. She knows how much energy I have. And when Covid happened, she's like, you're going to drive me nuts. Go do something. And I was like, well, would you mind if I just putz around and see if I can get this book idea off the ground? She's like anything except for nothing. And she just was like, shoot, go away. And I lock yourself into the study and have to come out every now and then for food and drink and let the dogs out and take it for a walk or whatever. But for the most part it was her support. And all joking aside, it was her support that led me down this path. And it was because she also believed in me and she was willing to do that when we had all sorts of downtime and there was nothing to do. And there's only so many house projects you can take on before you have to do something different. And this has really led to that something different. I don't think I would not be in a relationship with somebody who didn't support me and didn't give me the freedom to explore and do whatever I needed to do to figure out I need that kind of relationship. Agreed. And look, it's a partnership too, right? She's doing things I'm not doing and vice versa. And the same thing goes for her. I mean, loves softball. We met in college, I played hockey, she played softball. It was one of those things where she's still playing softball today, coaches, she umpires and I would never get in the way of that and just let her do what she wants to do and support her for the stuff that she's doing there around her job and stuff like that. And she owns her own business too, so she gets it. It's just hers is a little different. It might not be as creative, but she's a state certified childcare provider and she also is a senior companion. And so she's bouncing from client to client doing different things, and she's always had her own business too, so she understands in a little bit of a different way than the cycles my business. Have someone, hey, the kid is sick, or elderly person went to the hospital, her day changes, her week can change, her month can change based on those things. So she gets the idea of it being a fluid situation and has the patience for someone like me. Well, and then a lot goes to be said about living the life to live, doing the things that you intentionally really want to do and not being in a situation where you feel like, this is not the life I'm supposed to lead. I'm not doing the things I'm supposed to be doing. It sounds like you both in my relationship, we both have things that are important to us that we desire, that we want to do, and we don't want anything to stop us from doing that. Agree. Yeah, she's been great since day one. Why? It makes a perfect team. And it's important, but the thing is, I just brought it up. I think it's an important part of our lives and so many people don't honor that part or make sacrifices in that part sometimes. And I encourage people to fix that. That's a terrible thing. I was in a relationship before for many years that I felt I couldn't really be myself. I couldn't really do the things I wanted to do because I had these constraints that I had to do things to fit into this box. And anyway, that's over. That's way in the past now, and I don't ever want to go back there. There you go. So I'm one for one though at the plate, so I'm going to ride this one out 25 years. Yeah, no, you did good. You did good, Joe. Thank you. So do you want to talk a little bit about your plans? Because I know you mentioned laying out that you have several more books on the rise that you're working on and completing over the next year and a half and the graphic novel and the video game. Do you want to talk about any of those other things before we wrap up? Yeah, sure. So simply put, the books are now kind of on autopilot. So we've got the fourth book, which will conclude the first series coming out in the next month. And then over the next year you'll see the three standalone novels I mentioned earlier, and those are ready to go to editing. Then we'll start to plug them in for release dates, probably the first of which will come out around the holidays this year. And then next year we'll space them out, maybe one in the spring and one for the fall. And then as we're ready for a big 2026, the goal for me in 2025 is to have all of these novels done in 2024 written and all we have to do is release them and promote them. So I can use 2025 to write the next trilogy, get that done for release in 2026, and then that will mirror the stuff we're doing with the video game and the graphic novel. And that way it'll all come out at the same time. And hopefully that will be real big bang and take us to the next level and where we're with stuff right now. But the first two are Amazon bestsellers, the third's on its way. And I'm hoping that the fourth one when it comes out, when we could sell it in a box set, we're going to pull all those books over the line as well. And it's been fun going around the country at different conventions and book signings and things like that. It's been some of these things. You go to a Galaxy Con or a Comic-Con somewhere and there's 65,000 people at the door and you're not selling five books there, you're selling hundreds of books there. And they're all super fans. They might not all read my stuff, but everybody that walks in that door is in my demographic target market. And those things kind of help too. So I like bringing some of that entrepreneurial and to this world. I think other authors might be able to benefit that from that a little bit too, especially if they do care in order to make this something that they can do full time. They have to sell books. And not all authors are good at selling their books. Some of them have a tendency to be introverted. And I always look at it as I am my brand and my books are the product and I've got to do something to move the needle to get people to buy it. And they've got to see cool covers, they have to see cool book trailers, they've got to see a robust social media platform, all those kind of things. And that's where I think it becomes its own business and takes on its own life. So that's what I'm looking forward to, continuing to grow that out and seeing where we could take that by 2026 when we have that big bang. Yeah, I was going to ask you about that in closing. So you brought up the publicity that you do. How much time does that take for you? And I'm just guessing that it's associated with each release. So you release a book and go on a publicity. Yes and no. The yes part is yeah, is exactly right. You push out, we're 30 days out from the next release, so it's going to heat up and when there's a 30 day content calendar on the backend, then the release and then a 90 day content calendar on the other end to push you as far as you can go with the new release. And the idea that some folks, readers don't buy books that are in series until the series is complete. Sometimes they get left at the altar by indie authors who fall away and don't complete the series. Or in this day and age too, when you get into the millennial and the Gen Zs of the world, they want everything on demand, right? They're used to having Netflix or their phones at their fingertips and they don't want to wait around for years worth of release. A lot of publishers are practicing a rapid release program where they are looking for books at least every three months, if not every six months at the worst for epic fantasy. And some books aren't even the size of books anymore. You're reading 25,000 word manuscripts as opposed to 150,000 word manuscripts. It's part of that just to keep the attention span of those that want that on demand feel to it so that they know next month they're not going to go anywhere because they know you're going to come out with another book. It might not be as long as mine, but it's going to be there. And so the cadence is a little different and we work on those things too. So for me, I mean, social media is an everyday thing. You want to make sure that you've got something out there that's fresh content wise. So I do as many of these podcasts as I can or radio shows or book signing, so therefore I'm either promoting something I'm already done. And that helps keep you in the eyes of the reader and also helps move some of the algorithms so people can find the easier online. That's awesome. Joe, I've appreciated you so much and all the information you have, and as I listen to you now at the end, I just got to tell you, you have gone through a lot, you have learned a lot, and you are definitely becoming the thing you wanted to be for sure. A hundred percent. There's no doubt in my mind and I'm going to follow you. I'm going to learn more and I'm going to keep in touch. Well, thanks my friend, and if there's anything I can do, you're a writer too. Is there anything I can do to help you out, beta, read some of your stuff, offer suggestions, contacts, networking. Lemme know. I'd be more than happy to help. That's incredible. I'm so grateful that you offer that. I would love that. That'd be awesome. I love feedback. Even though the podcast, I'm constantly always. Asking never ending side of it, coming from this side. So don't worry about. Even with the podcast, I'm regularly asking everybody, please give me feedback. Let me know what you like, what do you want to see? How can we make this better for you? Yeah, absolutely. I got you. Alright brother. Thank you Appreciate it. Yeah. I appreciate. It. You got it. Lemme know when it releases and we'll catch up and we'll do a cross promotion on it. Sounds good.