Sleeping Wizards: Author Rusty Marcum on Grief and Genre mashups

Sleeping Wizards: Author Rusty Marcum on Grief and Genre Mashups

Host Tanya Roundy interviews writer Rusty Marcum who shares his background, love of mixed genres, and how grief shapes much of his work. He describes his award-winning pilot/spec script “Jasper,” about a family grieving a son’s suicide who move to a haunted Colorado town where once-friendly ghosts turn dangerous, and notes early Netflix interest faded. Rusty discusses inspirations from short stories and classic films, plus a sci-fi/fantasy concept sparked by a hiking experience and a dream. He explains how “Sleeping Wizards” evolved into a graphic novel after industry feedback, finding artist Joanna Taylor, and selling the pitch to publisher Iron Circus; a Kickstarter (Feb 16–Mar 18) seeks $18,000 with digital, print, and D&D one-shot options. He closes with advice to writers to be easy on themselves.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ironspike/sleeping-wizards?ref=3q00iz
https://www.facebook.com/johannamation
https://ironcircus.com/

00:00 Show Intro and Guest
00:29 Rusty Background and Writing
01:39 Grief Themes and Projects
02:48 Godzilla Genre Talk
05:25 Jasper Series Breakdown
08:03 Volcano Dream Story Idea
11:04 Reading and Writing Influences
13:54 Sleeping Wizards Origins
16:49 From Screenplay to Comic
18:24 Finding the Right Artist
19:51 Pitch Pages and Publisher Deal
20:59 How to Read Graphic Novels
23:18 Artist Details and Visual Language
25:10 Kickstarter Rewards and Trailer
27:42 Other Publications and Community
29:10 Short Stories and Open Endings
30:23 Be Easy on Yourself
32:05 Final Thanks and Wrap Up

In a world full of uncertainty, how does one cope with unbearable loss and pain? A Christmas tragedy finds Steve and Maria struggling to find hope. With the love and support of family and friends, will they find peace as they walk through the fire of Uncertainty?

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:39

Welcome to Roundy's Rants Raves and Reviews. I am Tanya Roundy, your host, and I have with me Rusty Markham. I'm so excited to have him here with us to share with you today. So, Rusty, will you tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do?

SPEAKER_02 0:55

Yeah. So feels a little bit like the job interview when they ask, but the first part, right? Yeah, exactly. My name is Rusty Markham. Currently I reside in Gilbert, Arizona, where we live for 13 years, lived in California, grew up in New Mexico in the four corners, been married for 30 plus years. That's a safe way to say it because I don't remember the exact year. Got four kids, three boys and a girl. The youngest is 19. My oldest has three kids, so I'm a three-time grandfather. And I'm getting a dirty look from the cats. So I guess I should mention that I have two cats, two uh ragdolls, Charlie and Charlotte. Oh. Let's see what else. My professional career is boring and not the reason why we're here. So what I do in the fun times is I write, and I typically write anything that comes to mind. So I do fantasy, sci-fi, horror, supernatural. I had a script called Jasper, which has won some awards, and that deals with a family that's dealing with the loss of a son due to suicide. And they moved to a town that's the most haunted town in the U in the US, and it just goes from there. I do a lot of my writing centers around grief because that's just an interesting and powerful topic. And as I've studied grief and the experience of my own, I've learned that we just don't really grieve properly. We think we have to move through these seven steps, step one, two, and then we'll be all done. But we may be done with grief, but it's never really done with us. And so I write a lot from that perspective and kind of that that tempers a lot of you'll find a bit of grief in a lot of my stories for one reason or the other. I got a short story coming out in the Splinterverse anthology, which obvious enough deals with grief. And then I have a Kickstarter that's going on right now, a book called Sleeping Wizards. I've been working on it seems like forever. And that's the it's a graphic novel, and that was my first foray into that, and I loved it. Probably won't be my last. And that's just kind of me in a nutshell. I love Godzilla.

SPEAKER_01 3:17

Oh, I love that. Godzilla.

SPEAKER_02 3:21

Yeah, yeah, he's my boy.

SPEAKER_01 3:22

I'm trying to figure out where does the Godzilla realm go into? Is it fantasy? Is it sci-fi?

SPEAKER_02 3:27

Is it a little bit of everything because it it depends on which film we're talking about? Godzilla minus one or minus zero, whatever that was. I can't remember the name that just came out recently. Yeah, that was actually Godzilla more of a whore. Right. And but then some of the older Kookie, the Toho ones in the 60s, that was more of I think sci-fi because we have aliens and so he runs through it has been diagrams all over the place.

SPEAKER_01 4:01

It really is. I was just thinking about it when you said that. I was like, dude, that because it was that sci-fi genre that was coming out in the 50s and 60s, basing it on all of those old 20s and 30s books. There was a huge push for all of those. And even recently, the new TV series with Monarch and that bringing all that kind of things. And again, you got the multiverse with sci-fi coming and hitting Godzilla, and all I'm like, it's nuts. It's going on everywhere. But then that one horror, I was like, oh my goodness. And then you got the romance, and you got it's just it's all over. It is my way it's so popular.

SPEAKER_02 4:38

Yeah. I sat in a theater after Godzilla minus zero or minus one. I can't remember what it is. I should be ashamed for not getting it right. But after it ended, I just sat there with my daughter going, That monster movie had no business being as good as it was. It was we just we talked about just about all those different themes that it hit about survivors, grief, and guilt, and family, and nation trying to come together and just all these things. I was like, wow, that was just an amazing piece of work that was done there.

SPEAKER_01 5:15

When they do a remake or they do the break-offs or the whatever we want to call those rights, they do they can be so good.

SPEAKER_02 5:22

And then there's all the other ones that they just keep remaking, and I'm like, why you just exactly we don't need this 15th version of the Lion King reanimated or whatever we're doing here.

SPEAKER_01 5:36

Yeah, every live remake that just needs doing anymore. I'm like, really? Do we really know?

SPEAKER_02 5:41

Let's just no, we really don't.

SPEAKER_01 5:43

It's okay with the way it was. It's all right. Let's move on. Let's come in.

SPEAKER_02 5:48

Yeah, I know you guys got enough of scripts that you're on your desk that you can make money off of.

SPEAKER_01 5:53

You would think, right? They should they've got to be getting like thousands in there a day of things like that. Well, tell me that. So you talked about Jasper and being about grief, and that is it a stage play, is it a movie script?

SPEAKER_02 6:05

What kind of script was so Jasper is what we call in the industry a pilot or a spec script? It means nobody asked for it, but we said, hey, this is a great thing. So it was envisioned as a mini-series. And so the premise is that this family they lost their son due to suicide, due to bullying. And they spend their, he doesn't immediately pass away. He's on life support for a while, which drains all their finances. So not only are they dealing with the loss of him eventually, but they deal with this financial situation where they've they're penniless. They have an uncle that passes away and gives them uh this house in this small town in Colorado named Jasper, which in this world is legitimately a haunted town. And so they move to this town, and so they're dealing with this grief. It has some racial undertones because she's African American and he is Native American. And the town doesn't know what to do with them in this aspect. And then there's this mystery of why are suddenly the ghosts in this town that have been friendly in the tourist attraction starting to go poltergeisty and hurt people. So that's where the mystery aspect of this comes in. So anyone gonna pick it up since it won an award or we we had some people back in this is pre-COVID, I think, or COVID-ish, that were sniffing around a bit Netflix, and then they went through a big people there, and it died on the line, and nobody's really been it. I we've entered it in other contests since then, and nobody's been interested in it. So it's a great idea.

SPEAKER_01 7:56

We got one.

SPEAKER_02 7:57

Yeah, yeah, thank you. It's probably gonna end up in another graphic novel.

SPEAKER_01 8:02

Well, that would be cool too. Oh my goodness. I could I can see that because that lends us up to that mini-series format so well. Well, and when I teach my students about graphic novels, and I also teach my film kids, it's like they're the same thing, guys. They're just a storyboard. And yeah, it really is. And we're just two sides of this coin because you have to storyboard it for the film and then things like that. So it's like, yeah, it's a great way. So tell me about so you write fantasy. What's some fantasy that you've written then, or what are your favorites that you've done with that?

SPEAKER_02 8:32

Um, one of my favorites is a sci-fi fantasy mix, and a lot of my stories come from experiences I've had or dreams, mostly dreams. And so when my kids were doing the scouting thing, and we lived in Northern California, they wanted to hike up this volcano called Mount Lawson, which is uh north by Ready. And so we were all the dads there, and I wasn't in great shape at this time, and my knees are horrible anyways. And so while we were hiking this volcano, all the other dads were just like mile up ahead of the trail. My kids wanted to be with their friends, and so I got ditched. And so I get up to the top of this volcano, I sit down to eat them with lunch and eat lunch with them, and they sit and talk to me for like five minutes and like, okay, dad, well, we're gonna hike down. And I'm like, I just got in here.

SPEAKER_01 9:29

I just want to for a minute.

SPEAKER_02 9:32

And so we start hiking down, and then pretty soon they ditch me again, and I'm just walking along with my box, feeling sorry for myself. And I was like, what would they think if I just like disappeared on this mountain? Just that what would that be like? And I thought, oh, that's nobody wants to hear your pity party, get down the mountain, they're waiting for you because I'm getting texts like, Where are you? And so I was just gonna take it in from the top of this volcano where the things are coming down, you get the great look over this valley. There's some hot thermal hot vents and everything off of it. So you have this setting. And so that night I had a dream where I was in this parking lot, and I couldn't figure out why nobody was around. And so I finally find somebody who gives me a phone and I call my wife, and she's like, Where have you been? You've been missing for five years. And so I started thinking about this experience about what would happen if a dad goes hiking with his kids and something happens, and he shows up in the same place five years later with no memory of where he's been. And so I started playing with that theme and some other things, and then so it's kind of like sci-fi and fantasy. He ends up being taken to another world that's like a steampunk where people need humans to do their job because they suffer from like severe, I can't remember what the disease is called, where brittle bone disease. And so there's that and their feliax as well. And so they have us to do all these things, but there's people on that world who are like, this isn't cool. We need to so I started playing with that, and then he comes back five years later from this experience. What would that be like as he's starting to remember these experiences and dealing with kind of the fallout of him being gone at home? So that's it, that's sitting on my need to finish pile.

SPEAKER_01 11:26

Very cool. I'm excited. That's the cool when it comes out, man. But we gold meet steampunk, yeah, alien. Okay, my mind is like, yeah. What are the the influences that you read either now or in your earlier life that kind of has influenced you and led to this kind of mixed genre that you love to write?

SPEAKER_02 11:50

Yeah, I think growing up in the 80s, there there was a lot of. We didn't read a lot of novels in junior high. We let a read a lot of short stories. Like, and my mind always goes blank when I think of them, but the Reddy Bradbury, Summer in a Day, like where the kids are on Venus and it stopped raining and they all have that one day. Like that story has always stuck with me. Or another one that's just a hurt, a great story, but really hard to read, is called The Scarlet Ibis, about one brother who's has a younger brother who's born with some physical limitations, and how it's really hard for him because he gets the younger brother gets all the attention and he doesn't, and so he becomes jealous and makes some bad decisions. And so it's some of these short stories that, and then my dad gave me a book that was like the best short stories of the best science fiction short stories of the 1950s. And there's some amazing stories in there. Oh, yeah. So that kind of sparked my interest in wanting to be a writer. And then there was the I think they were called Apple books that we used to get this thing called the weekly reader.

SPEAKER_00 13:09

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 13:11

And so some of these stories were really great. Like one of them was called The Girl with the Silver Eyes about this girl who her mom took an experimental pregnancy drug and she had telekinetic powers. And she starts, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 13:24

I haven't thought of that for years, but oh my gosh, I remember that premise. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 13:29

And so it was like it was just a bunch of fun. Then as I got older, then there was, of course, Tolkien that starts to get introduced to you in junior high and or later on in high school. Then you start moving through the classics as you work through high school, and then it was just a potpourri literary influences that came in. And then my dad was a huge movie buff. And so we were always watching the classics Force 10 from Navarro and Rambo or whatever it was on Star Wars. He just liked watching movies, and so I was raised on those classics. And I think they just all just bled into this story mix.

SPEAKER_01 14:56

It's very unique, and I love that it's coming from so many things because you've got this very unique niche that just some people are like afraid to mash things together, and I'm like, why? Sometimes that's where the interesting things can happen. I'm just like which leads me to you're now mashing up all of this stuff you've been doing. And tell me about getting into a graphic novel, because that's that's definitely harder and definitely takes a lot longer to do because it's a different process. So tell me about this. Jump into comic romantics.

SPEAKER_02 15:33

This is something I never would have even considered. Oh really? So yeah, just because I my uh drawing abilities are a stick figure. My death. And that's it. I can trace stuff. So it was just nothing that really I like reading graphic novels. I'm dyslexic. So sometimes I have ADHD, so sometimes it's easier for me to have that quick hit with a story. But so it started waiting. I like this idea of sleeping wizards has been brewing with me for a while. I went to a writing class, yeah, writing class, I guess you'd call it with Orson Scott Card.

SPEAKER_00 16:12

Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_02 16:12

And then he ch he challenged us to come up with different magic systems as a class exercise. And so mine was is that as wizards passed their magic, they burned calories. And so you would want to have your powerful wizards, would be these bigger people who could have more calories to burn. And then I'm like, okay, but what happens if you burn too many calories? Well, then you fall into electricoma. And then the story kind of just I couldn't really determine what that story was and who was going to be in that story, and then et cetera. And then one day I was thinking, well, what happens if the wizards are in a coma and they're dreaming, and their dreams actually, because of their powers, become real.

SPEAKER_01 17:04

Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_02 17:05

And I was like, Okay. And so I used to have to I still have a friend, but when I lived in California, he and I would get together about once a month and bounce story ideas off of each other. And that was our jam sessions. And so he was like, okay, so so what? The their stories, that was always his pushback on me was like so a lot. And I'm like, okay, well, they have to create a special area, a special shrine to keep the wizards in when they're dreaming, so their creatures don't go destroy the countryside. And so that story evolved into a little bit of what sleeping wizards is today. And when I was taking my daughter to piano lessons one time, she was just this is probably 2019. She was telling me about how frustrated she was with the female heroes at that time. That they always needed a guy to save them in the end. They always ended up falling in love. And as a 13-year-old girl, that just didn't interest her at all. And she goes, I just want somebody who was like not the most awesome ninja warrior out there, but capable. And if there's a guy in the story, they're just friends. That'd be nice. And I was like, Okay. And so she was in as I was waiting for piano lessons, the story started percolating about this person. And then the next thing I knew, the main character, Eliza, was sitting in the car with me. And we wrote out the first six pages of the screenplay that was going to be sleeping wizards. And it would be like in the vein of Ella Enchanted, kind of quirky, with the narrator talking throughout it. And so in the well, in about a week, I wrote a screenplay for this and started shopping around. And one of my friends who is in the industry said, This is really great, but nobody's going to ever touch it. Right. And I was like, Why? I mean, why? He's like, Because you're creating a new world here with original, with original IP, and they're just until it has a following, they're not gonna, nobody's gonna be interested. This is Jasper all over again. I was like, oh he goes, but I think this should be a really cool comic book. And I'm like, I don't know anything about comic. And he's like, Well, I'll think about it. And so I started talking to some people, and they're like, Well, you don't have to draw it, man. You can hire an artist to do that. And I'm like, where do you find an artist to do that? Well, social media. And so now we're like 2023. I'm reviving the project. My mom, somebody told me that the blue sky app is where all your artists and comic book people hang out, got on there, found this one artist that I really liked. I was looking at her art and I'd been put I need to back up. I had been previously scammed by somebody a couple months prior to this who used AI.

SPEAKER_01 20:09

Oh no.

SPEAKER_02 20:10

Draw the pages. And when I was showing it to some of my friends for animators, they're like, that's AI. And when I confronted them about it, they I never heard from again. They I couldn't track them down. So I was really like putting in this process of trying to find out who this author is, what are they doing? And I found my I mean the artist, I found this artist named Joanna Taylor, Blue Sky, and she was showing her work and talking about her graphic novel that she wrote that's coming out called The Ghost Keepers. And I'm like, her animation is exactly what I want for sleeping wizards. And so I started talking to her about it, and she's like, Yeah, I can let's like what your project is, let's do some pitch pages and see where it goes. And I'm like, okay, I know about pitches.

SPEAKER_01 20:58

So done those before, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 21:01

So, how does this work for the graphic novel world? And she said, Okay, patted me on the head and told me this is what I needed to do. And so we got the the first 10 pages of the graphic novel done. And I'm like, Okay, any suggestions about who to pitch with this? And she gave me some names. I'm like, I'm just gonna go from the top down, who she gave me. And so I sent the pitch to Iron Circus, who's a kind of an indie, the smaller comic book publisher out in the in Chicago, and they called me two weeks later and said, Yeah, we love this. And so it was like my first pitch I hit with this, and just with contracts and everything between three different parties, it took a while to get to, and that was fine because in the meantime I was finishing the book, and then here we are.

SPEAKER_01 21:55

And here we are. That is such perseverance. One it's amazing how sometimes stories and things that we get so are much earlier take this time to do it, but they come out when they're supposed to and with what and who they're supposed to, and I good on you for sticking with that because I'm excited about this concept and this idea. I was never like the a comic book person, my husband, my kids are all into it, and I was like, I never did that growing up. Yeah, they're not by my vein. But then they've started doing these classics as graphic novels, like Scarlet Ladder, 1984. And I'm like, and I've loved those when they've been done well. And I'm like, okay, and now that I'm getting into storyboarding and stuff with my film classes in the last several years, I'm like, okay, I got this, okay. I don't think I could ever write one, but it's like you'd be surprised about how easy.

SPEAKER_02 22:54

Well, I don't want to say how easy it is, but it's not as hard as you think once you get the flow of it. It's right easier in the way that your descriptions you can just say very like when you're writing a screenplay, it's like your average nineteen eighty living room. Whereas in a book, you can't do that, you have to go through. Would describe everything in this room so people get that it's a 1980. So the graphic novel and the screenplay is a little bit of a cheat code.

SPEAKER_01 23:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 23:23

In that. But you have to be very economical with your words and your descriptions.

SPEAKER_01 23:28

Right. Because it's all about the visuals combined with that. They have that power. I hate watching my students who are just like flipping through the pages. I'm like, you gotta like look at the pictures and see everything that's going around. Earlier this year, we like actually taught our kids how to read a graphic novel and how to read an informational graphic novel. Uh based on some like real life stories of people around the world and things like this. Mouse, things like that. Mouse is amazing. Right. But they just skim through it. They just like, I'm like, no, guys, stop. Look at this picture and see all the if you're taking your time, you're gonna see so much in this. And making them slow down and actually see it is sometimes so hard. But the ones who are into it, they'll just sit there and just like flip through, like they'll go through through graphic novels in the class period just reading. And I'm like, no, you're missing. I just think it's not a race. It's not a race. It's not. And I'm like, they're missing so much of the power of the visuals and the storytelling. And I just skimming through it, it breaks my heart. But one day, maybe well do this.

SPEAKER_02 24:35

Well, yeah, and it's good that you're teaching them to do that because the artist always puts a little extra on huge panel. Like Joanna is so amazing in this. Like, I'll give her a panel, which is kind of like you're a scene on a script about this is what I want this to do. And then I'll read it and she'll send me the rough draft in the inks, and I'll be like, oh my gosh, I love that little thing that you put on there. Like one of the one of the best examples is I have to show a passage of time over quickly in four panels, but showing the years. I hope that makes sense. Because I had to be economical, I only had like 80 pages to tell this pretty complex story, so I had to really get into the story fast. And so each scene was this the main character Eliza sitting on a box waiting for her dad to come back, and the seasons changing around her, and you see her getting older. But is what Joanna did is there's a star in that panel that she moves, showing the year, showing how a star would be different each year, just little by little. And it is when I saw that I was like, oh my gosh, I didn't even think about that.

SPEAKER_01 26:03

Artists have such an incredible language of their own, and the way that they can write and tell a story is so yeah, it's out of my depth for sure. I can do words, but what they can do with colors and light and shadow is it's so amazing. It is so incredible, and I just it's so powerful what can happen when we do that. Well, we've got a Kickstarter for you then to help get this off and out into the world. Um, and so this so tell us a little bit about your Kickstarter and how we can help and how we can get this going for you guys.

SPEAKER_02 26:40

Yeah, well, so the Kickstarter's on. I can send you the link for that. It's been going since the it's been since the 16th of February, and it's gonna wrap up on the 18th. So let's hear pretty soon. We hit 15,000 today out of 18,000. Nice, and so we're getting close, but we're also getting down the wire. So I would I would the prices are six dollars for the for the Kindle version of the comic, or twelve dollars for the hard copy, and then there's some add-ons on there. I created a DD one shot that's based off the book, that's on there for five dollars. And then there's some really high dollar things if you want to do that. Like you buy like comic bundles for other fantasy books that aren't circuses up as well. Even if you don't want to buy the full comic, any dollar helps at this point in time.

SPEAKER_01 27:38

Well, I was gonna say that's an easy way to that's not an expensive way to get it on the action here and help you guys out and also get your graphic novel at the same time.

SPEAKER_02 27:47

Yeah, check it out. If you get it on the Kickstarter link, we had a book trailer made for it. Yeah the person who did the trailer, Iris J knocked it out of the park. She created there's a like kind of a creed that goes that's being said during the trailer. That was written by Herc. Oh, really? Yeah, just off of a description of what I told her the stories about and some of the pictures. So she wrote this creed, and I was just like, wow. That is the book amazing. And so, yeah, check it out. I think it's middle grade, the young adult, and the there's no swears in there. There is violence in them because they're fighting nightmare creatures, but the gore factor is pretty mild. Nothing that you wouldn't see on the K-pop demon hunters, which everyone loves night now. So yeah, nothing more crazy crazy than that. Very cool. It's not Game of Thrones here.

SPEAKER_01 28:54

Whole nother conversation on that, and I think love, hate relationships there. Where can we find your other work and stuff if we want to get in to see your fantasy and your sci-fi stuff?

SPEAKER_02 29:07

So the only thing I really have published out there right now will be the anthology that's coming out with the Splinterverse. They're a small press in Spanish orc. Fark. If you're just a little bit north of me.

SPEAKER_01 29:19

Yep. I like I live right there by it, actually. Oh, okay. I'm in basic. Oh, cool.

SPEAKER_02 29:27

Yeah, so that it's an anthology that's in there. There's gonna be some great stories. A lot of the people from my writing group, Taryn McQueen, Casey McQueen, and Kara Reynolds also wrote some just Kara wrote a story in there that is just gonna knock people's socks off when they read it. That's just amazing. I'm so excited for people to read that one. And Taryn wrote a fun little science fiction scavenger on the story, and Casey wrote a bonkers time travel story. Nice. Those are the ones I know about. I'm sure everything in there is gonna be awesome, but those are the only three other ones that I know about besides mine.

SPEAKER_01 30:03

Very cool. I need to get you in touch with there's I just interviewed him a couple about a month ago or so. But he does a sci-fi short story. They do publication every few months and they're out of Nobu. And I need to get you at them because you could submit to them, and that would be a great place for your work to come out, I think, too. Thank you. That would I'll have to get you in touch with them because he's a great guy. And then they had a great conversation there with them. Yeah, we had a great conversation about short stories and reviving the whole sci-fi short story genre and everything else.

SPEAKER_02 30:34

So yeah, it's a different beast. A lot of people expect a short story to follow a novel format, and it doesn't. It's uh your themes are unresolved, not everything is explained in a short story. You're just trusting that what the writer tells you is how things are, and yeah, it's tough for people and they're not really prepared to because they feel unresolved with a lot of things.

SPEAKER_01 31:02

That's what my son-in-law is writing his short stories, and I'm like, I want more of the stories. Like, but I just want to do this. I'm like, okay, short story form, you are. And so I'm helping him get his short story forms out, making sure it's enough information, but allowing that to I want more, but he does he's like, Nope, that's what it is. I'm like, okay, I get to be left in the ethereal verse of I don't know what's going on.

SPEAKER_02 31:24

You can always there's a there's a lot of short stories that end up becoming full-length novels.

SPEAKER_01 31:31

Exactly. They do. They'll start off that way, and then Isaac Asimov is one of those that's oh yeah, printable that way. And yeah. So I love him. Well, cool. Well, what is one message or one thing you would love to share with our audience that you think we should all know as we leave here today and be left with as we go forward in life?

SPEAKER_02 31:51

Oh man, I'll just tell you that the new Taryn asked me this whole uh I did the newsletter for her and is like, what's the and so most people will be listening to the writers or aspiring writers? Just be easy on yourself. Um there's so many, there's so much advice out there. Like, if you don't write 500 words a day, you're not gonna make it, or this or that. There's really no set formula for success. If you can do the 500 a day, power to you, I can't mentally. But be easy on yourself if you don't write the day, be easy on yourself when you get the rejection letters, be easy on yourself when you get feedback from your writing group or your beta readers. You're not a bad writer. And just be easy on yourself, and it the writing process will go a lot better.

SPEAKER_01 32:46

I agree, and I think that's a great life lesson, too. It's like being easy on yourselves, and life will go better too.

SPEAKER_00 32:52

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 32:53

That's and it's a thing out there. So I agree. I I have the art myself too. So yeah, good advice for me today. Huh? Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 33:01

If they were all our worst critics, and as my wife will tell you, she's a hypnotherapist, is stop. You beating yourself, the world's gonna beat you up enough, just you don't need to add to it.

SPEAKER_01 33:15

It's true, it's true. Get enough out there, we can be our own positive voices and help ourselves out that way. Well, thank you so much, Rusty. It's been a pleasure and I really enjoyed it. I'm gonna get this out as soon as I possibly can here so that you can get on this Kickstarter project, everyone, and hopefully get Rusty here to his end goal and get this book out in our hands as soon as possible. I'm excited and very cool. Well, thank you guys, and we'll see you guys next time on Roundy's Rants, Raids, and Reviews. Thank you guys.

SPEAKER_00 33:51

Thank you.