Q&A Mailbag Bonus Episode: The Tape Recorder Trilogy

Here's a Q&A Mailbag episode to bridge the gap between Seasons Two and Three! 

We received questions through the Typeform link in every episode's show notes, as well as via Bluesky, Facebook, LinkedIn, Reddit, and by email. There were so many great topic ideas and discussion prompts, in fact, that there is another ~30-minute 'bonus of the bonus' episode available for Patreon subscribers to enjoy as well.

The first episode of Season Three will be published Monday, June 22nd, 2026. Until then, happy listening!

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The moderator for this Q&A episode is Nate Simpson, a many-times published and much celebrated Canadian poet, and a co-founder of the monthly writers group Geoff Micks has belong to for more than a decade.

Born in Guelph, Ontario, and raised in the wilds of the countryside east of Fergus, Nate Simpson now writes, runs, and lives in Toronto. Nate’s poems have appeared in Words/Pauses/Noises, Juniper, the Hart House Review, and the Spadina Literary Review, amongst other publications. A number of these poems and others works are included in his chapbook, “Hard Red Berries.”

Nate writes at A Transit Diary, of Sorts. Purchase your copy of Hard Red Berries here. What could be better? Well, purchase your copy of Hard Red Berries plus an online reading by Nate here!

Proceeds from every Hard Red Berries chapbook and chapbook plus reading package sold will be donated to Story Planet!, a Toronto-based registered charity, "...devoted to amplifying the voices of children and young people in Toronto's equity-deserving communities. Our creative writing and arts programs inspire kids to imagine and write stories while building literacy, confidence, and self-worth." (Charitable # 827252057RR0001)

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Enjoying the show? Tell us a little about yourself, submit a comment, and/or ask a question through this short survey.

For more, visit my podcast website and personal website. 

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Credits: 

Contributing Voices - Geoff Micks and Nate Simpson 

Editing - Geoff Micks

Music - Dimitri Kovalchuk (MokuseiNoMaguro) through Pixabay

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:24

Hello again, everyone. My name is Jeff Nix, and for the first and maybe the only time in the entire run of the Cape Recorder trilogy podcast, I have someone here with me as I record this. I would like to introduce all of you to my friend Nate Simpson. Uh Nate is one of the founding members of the Monthly Writers Group I joined over a decade ago now. He's a many times published and much celebrated poet, and he has agreed to help me out with today's special episode.

SPEAKER_00 0:47

Oh boy, Jeff. Celebrated. Well, I appreciate that. Uh you may be overselling it, uh, uh, but uh but no, I appreciate it very much uh and as well this opportunity to be part of your podcast.

SPEAKER_01 1:01

No, no. Uh first of all, I celebrate you, so I don't think it's over celebrating. But um, you know, I have been to several of your readings and book launches over the years, and they're always very well attended. I don't know what the metrics are on modern poetry, but I'm comfortable calling you the most accomplished and widely read poet I personally know. And I hope by the end of this episode, some of the people listening to this will go and find your stuff online.

SPEAKER_00 1:23

Yes, yeah, no, I appreciate that again very much, Jeff. Uh, you've been very kind uh in this in this instance for sure. And over the time that we've known each other, uh, with your support of my poetry. And yes, I have a couple of projects uh upcoming that uh I uh look forward to sharing with whomever may find them. So why don't you introduce yourself as you think best? Yes, well, poetry and and running have always been a home for me uh ever since I was a kid growing up in Guelph. For those that aren't familiar, just about an hour and a half west of Toronto, where I live now. And you know, throughout my full-time career in the fire protection engineering sector, spanning about 30 years, and then now running my own business in a related field. The things that have sustained me, you know, really are the poetry and the support that I have from the the writing group uh for these many years. And so uh, you know, I'm I'm just fascinated as well as a poet by people with uh the skills like yourself, uh uh such deep skills in in novel writing and that uh you know I sweat a haiku, as you know. Uh and and here you are creating entire worlds. So it's been uh a real joy and a pleasure to get to know you and and the other members of our group uh again over these 10 plus years that we've been together.

SPEAKER_01 2:56

Wonderful. Well, let me tell people what is going on, and then I'm going to put you in the driver's seat for the rest of this episode. Great. Okay, so I've mentioned several times now, both in bonus episodes and through social media, that I wanted to do a QA mailbag episode during the gap between seasons two and three. I asked people to submit questions through whatever channel they preferred. I'm delighted to say I received probably more questions than we're going to be able to do in a reasonable amount of time. So I will edit what we come up with today so we have a good chunk of them in this episode, and I will probably also include some extra questions for our Patreon listeners as well. You know, if this proof's popular, I may do another one as a special post-series bonus wrap-up episode after the series finale too. With that said, I really did not want to read the submitted questions to myself, and so Nate has very generously agreed to act as a moderator. I'm going to give him the questions that were submitted in what I think is a logical order, but I'm also going to give him the freedom to reword them or ask follow-up questions as he thinks best for the sake of making this a proper conversation. You know, thank you for doing this, Nate.

SPEAKER_00 3:56

You're very welcome, Jeff. As I've said before, just really pleased to be sharing this uh this part of your amazing journey, uh, both in the writing of the trilogy and in this audio drama that uh that you've created. So thank you very much.

SPEAKER_01 4:10

Sure. So I should also give a quick spoiler warning before we get too far into things. You know, I have some notes on how to reply to the submitted questions, but my answers are not fully scripted or anything. I am going to be speaking on the assumption listeners have heard all of seasons one and two, but none of season three, which hasn't aired as of the publishing of this episode. So for anyone who is listening to this out of publication order, you know, consider yourself warned. With that said, I'm now going to hand things over to Nate. Why don't we get into the first question?

SPEAKER_00 4:38

Well, actually, Jeff, I want to start off with a question of my own that you haven't seen yet, if that's okay.

SPEAKER_01 4:45

Of course. Um, I should also highlight for people, you know, as you've said, you know, you were around when I was writing these books that the audio drama is based upon. You know, you're thanked in all three novels' acknowledgments. You know, you know the project from its earliest days. So, you know, what would you like to ask?

SPEAKER_00 4:59

Why don't we start off by talking about those early days? Uh, where did the idea come from and how did it become the books and audio drama we have now?

SPEAKER_01 5:09

Great, great place to start. I I've mentioned in uh some of the earlier bonus episodes, I have written a couple of other novels. They are rather long. They are uh historical fiction. One is about the Zulu in the 1860s and 1870s, and one is the decline and fall of the Inc Empire, told from their own perspective. I had a literary agent for a while. I was trying to get them traditionally published. You know, they're they're niche topics. It didn't quite work the way I would have imagined when I was young, but I I'm happy with how it all shook out. Anyway, when I was in my late 20s and early 30s, a very dear friend of mine, Lee Beaton, who the first book is actually dedicated to, he wanted to learn how to cook. And he decided, you know, living alone, being a bachelor, not a lot of fun cooking for one. So he decided to have a weekly dinner party and he would make these elaborate meals. He had a relationship with a butcher, so you know, whatever was the cool thing coming in, he would like let us all know. He would set menus. It was a beautiful weekly tradition, and it became sort of an intellectual salon. There were there were college professors, there were writers, there were uh artists, there were bohemians, and you would sit around and you'd talk about art. And, you know, having written a couple of novels, a lot of people wanted to say, well, what are you doing next? And I very much wanted my next book to be traditionally published. And I came up with maybe the argument why I wasn't finding success was that I wrote these long things that are not particularly, you know, widely known from the jump. What if I wrote something short? What if I wrote something that people would get? You can make an elevator pitch, you know, what is it about? And Lee also introduced me to Kurt Vonnegut, who writes these really interesting, almost novella-length novels that go in weird and wonderful places. And I decided, okay, well, I'm going to try to write a Kurt Vonnegut-esque novella. And what is my Kurt Vonnegut heightened framing device that will let me do a historical fiction thing? And I thought, well, what if it's someone who has been alive thousands and thousands and thousands of years, and someone is coming who is finally going to be the death of him, and he gets a tape recorder and he tells his life story as fast as he can. And my original thought, and it makes me laugh now, was that this was going to be about 200 pages long. It was going to be five or six little short stories with this framing device, and then it was going to be done. And I was bringing it in to the writer's group, and you get to bring in 10 pages a month, but it just kept going and going. And, you know, uh Piero Marinatos, another member of our writers' group, who the second book is dedicated to, saying, you know, you're writing a real doorstop here, and it hadn't occurred to me how thick this thing was getting. It's hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pages, which was not the original premise. So I decided, okay, well, I'll break it up into a trilogy. And when I decided to break it up into a trilogy, it made so much more sense because all of a sudden the stories that I wanted to tell, a third of them, are actually predating recorded history. So I've got archaeology, anthropology, and mythology sort of falls into beginning. The classical age sort of falls into middle, and then sort of the middle ages through to the present falls into end. So it was a very natural breakdown. And then, you know, I published them through Amazon and they've done okay. But to be honest, I think 90% of my readership are people who liked the first two books and wanted more from me. They didn't find their own audience. So over the years, people have said, you know, it's a guy talking into a tape recorder. Why is this not an audio book? And I have always hesitated with the idea, you know, if they didn't take off on Amazon, why are they going to do better on Audible? It's an awful lot of work to put something out into Audible and it not find an audience. And in the meantime, I have gotten into podcasting. I have a friend who is very pro-audio drama, and he said, okay, well, do it here. It'll be free, but I mean, it'll find a listenership. And he was right. So I do actually really think that this is the future. I wonder to what extent more writers are eventually going to clue into the fact, you know, no one reads like they used to. If if someone's only reading five or six novels a year, how are you persuading them your novel is going to be one of them? But people listen to podcasts while they do chores, while they work out, while they travel, while they commute to work. That's where readers and listeners are going. And it's not a huge jump to take writing and and make it an audio experience. So that's how we got to where we are.

SPEAKER_00 9:34

Well, you covered a lot of ground with that answer. And I think it it will give everybody that's listening to this a great foundation for understanding from that very fertile ground that you established with that with that group, uh having those dinners and so forth, the origin story of beginning, middle, and end, how it went from one massive mork to to now three uh books, which I think was a great move uh as well. Just speaking very personally, knowing the project uh you know, a bit in the background. So uh so with that, I'm going to actually ask another question that that you haven't seen yet. So what I was really curious about is, you know, with with Zulu to Inca to these works uh in the in the tape recorder trilogies, you they're populated. These are stories are populated by really interesting characters, whether they're there through the whole story or they come in and out. It's always populated by such interesting character sets. Focusing in on the tape recorder trilogy and and uh and the character of Cammy, uh I was wondering that it was such uh an engaging work uh that has meant uh obviously so much to you personally. How do you guard against uh interjecting too much of yourself of Jeff Mick's voice into the character, say in this case of Can Me, how do you guard against that and and and actually let uh Can Me live and breathe as his own character and person?

SPEAKER_01 11:16

I I think that's a great question. I I actually wish I'd had a minute to think about it, but I'll I'll try to do this off the cuff. I think you'll find most writers do have a protagonist or a character who is a self-insert in some way. There is someone who has their sympathy, someone who they wish good things for. And so you have to have the discipline to say, you know, first of all, it's not you. And second of all, interesting stories have bad things happen to good people. I do have a member of the writer's group, George Panayotu, who he has said you gravitate towards people who are intelligent and competent, but maybe a little too academic and maybe a little too stuffy for their own good, which is probably a pretty good description of me. So again, when I write a character, I try to give them some attributes that are not me. In Inca, you know, I have someone who, you know, he is academically gifted, but he's also athletic in a way, and he lacks confidence in a lot of things. He's very confident in his abilities, but like his personal life, he is always at the whims of the people in his world who are bigger personalities than him pushing them around. I don't think that's true of me. Zulu, I was very clear, like, okay, well, there's a couple of brothers, and I'm a little bit of this brother and a little bit about that brother, but I also gave each of them things that are powerfully not me. With the narrator, and and you called him Kanmi, and I almost corrected you. I'm like, Kir, oh no, can me, oh, but like he's got a few names. I really tried to view it as if an actor is playing a character, a role, they're not thinking of themselves as the actor, they're thinking of themselves as the character. And he goes through life every 10 or 20 years, he has to become a new person. And so it's pretty easy to separate me from him because he's separating himself from whatever life he's about to lead. You know, the same guy who's hunting mammoths in in the beginning, you know, he's uh sailing around Africa as the Phoenician captain of an Egyptian fleet in the middle. That's the same character. He's living a wildly different life. So it is pretty easy to have some distance between me and him. One of the things I do have to be conscious of as a writer, I think there are people who read my books in some kind of order. I want to make sure the protagonist of Inca doesn't sound like the protagonist of the tape recorder trilogy. So that I'm actually more careful of that that they have separate voices than that my voice might bleed through to one or both of them.

SPEAKER_00 13:40

Oh, very interesting. Yeah. And and I can see that that dynamic that you just ended with there is one that could be very challenging in the context of the books that you write and then the projects that you undertake to not have that transference of one character's approach or dynamics or personality being too similar to something in a to to another protagonist in a different book. Very interesting. So with that, we'll turn things over to the submitted question portion of our discussion. If that's okay with you, Jeff.

SPEAKER_01 14:19

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 14:21

Perfect. So this first one was submitted anonymously through the typeform survey. And also a very similar question to one that was asked by someone named Sam on Facebook. And that is, how did you choose which historical events to feature in your trilogy? And the follow-up question uh were there any events that you wanted to include but didn't for some reason? Or after the fact, I wish you had included.

SPEAKER_01 14:58

Some of which I will get into in later questions. I I've seen what's been submitted, so I've sort of got some thoughts that I'll I'll speak to further down the road. I will say, for the sake of answering this one, one of the rules I set myself for this, even back when it was going to be a single book, was that each of these chapters should be a short story that either stands on its own, or if it's a little too long to be one chapter, maybe I make it two chapters that stand on their own as a short story about something that I already basically had the research in my head and had the premise for a story in my head, but I knew I'd never make a whole novel out of it. And so that makes it pretty easy to say I'm never going to write a whole book about any of those chapters. I feel I said what I wanted to say in the piece. In terms of things that I could have done or would have liked to have done, I've mentioned a couple of things in some of the bonus episodes and historical notes of ideas that I had to discard for one reason or another. One that we haven't gotten to yet because it's in season three. Again, I didn't do it, so it's not a spoiler. Beethoven, as a young man, was actually uh a dueling pianist. He went from town to town challenging the local virtuosos. And there was a champion pianist of Europe who challenged him in a big salon full of all the aristocrats, and uh he played beautifully, marvelously. And uh Beethoven sat down at the piano, turned that guy's sheet music upside down, and then improvised a backwards rendition of what this guy had played while making eye contact with him. And I would have loved for my narrator to be in the room while all the blood drains out of this guy's face. And at the end of this piano duel, he got up, he walked out of the room, and for the rest of his life, he refused to be in the same city as Beethoven. And I look at that and I'm like, that is a one-episode chapter that, you know, yes, the narrator gets to name-drop some of the famous people he meets throughout history, and what a little chapter that if you don't know anything about classical music, you know who Beethoven is, but you think of him as the deaf composer at the end of his life. You don't think of him as a young man basically in a pissing contest with every pianist in Europe and showing them up so beautifully. And I actually got five or ten pages of that down as a first draft, but that third book end is almost half again as long as the first book. I can't make everything fit. So that is that is one example of I had a ton of stories that I would have liked to have done. Some of them might be their own book, some of them I had to get rid of for pacing reasons. You know, another one that I'll just flag, I'm Canadian and I still can't believe I never got this guy to Canada. I mean, I I've got like a line of dialogue where he invests in a Kimber company, but like I had a whole plan for him to be a lumberjack for a while, but there just wasn't a way to do it in the logical order and pacing of what I wrote.

SPEAKER_00 17:39

So those are a couple of examples. And we'll move on to the next question. It was submitted by a Patreon supporter named Amy. What was the hardest part of writing these books?

SPEAKER_01 17:54

Well, let me start off by saying I actually found writing the books to be a joy and a welcome distraction. You know, I had a pretty serious long-term relationship end within the first months of me starting this project back when it was still going to be just one book. And I remember making the decision to pivot the time I would have spent with her into my writing and editing. And so a huge part of the first two books that became the first two seasons were written while I was getting over a breakup by making myself happy creating this world. You know, I remember you and the rest of the writers' group joking that I was a man-possessed. I wrote the first two books in a little over two years, and I had the trilogy done within four. You know, when I did finish writing this four-year project, I would come into my local pub on my way home from work, and uh every member of staff over the course of a week or two said, You're in early. You know, that's how much time I was spending on weeknights, to say nothing of my weekends. Now, with that said, the question was, what was the hardest part? And I think I'm going to have to say a lot of the stuff people think would be hard, I had already done. I already had most of the history and stories in my head, at least enough to get started. What was hard was figuring out the rhythm to tell the stories. You know, first is one book, and then once I broke it up into three, I really had to think about pacing, which I sort of intimated earlier. Um, you have the framing device. So you know how each book begins and ends. You also need something about the framing device in the middle. So now each book is divided into a first half and a second half. Now, in each of those halves, you want to have some personal stories where you linger on a friend or a lover or some important story from the narrator's life that you want to share, but you also need to make time to tell these historical explanations for what comes next. So, for example, the first three chapters, which make up the episodes The Augur and the Chief, My Father and My Wife, and Stories of Stones, you know, that finds time to talk about the narrator's first life in a lot of detail while also taking the story from an unknown time when there were still mammoths in whales. So that's the Paleolithic, through the Mesolithic and Neolithic, to the point where copper and bronze tools are starting to make their way into Western Europe. Then the next episode is a personal story about the narrator living as a bronzemith in a community he loves that he feels he can't just slip away and abandon as he has done in past lives. The balancing act of short time frame deep story and long time frame shallow story that informs the reader or listener without feeling like you're cheating them was really tough to figure out. Now throw in things like, you already did a mammoth hunt with Flint Spears, are you going to make time for an Assyrian lion hunt from the back of a chariot? Or, you know, you already spent a whole chapter circumnavigating Africa. Are you going to circumnavigate the British Isles? Sail into the North Sea, the Baltic, maybe even up into the Arctic Circle with the Greek explorer Pythias two chapters later. You know, a lot of good ideas had to get thrown out or given lip service just because there wasn't room and timing to do both. Now, throw in, you want each book to have its own mood and feel while being related to each other, and you want the conclusion of one to be both satisfying and enough of a hook to make people read the next. And yeah, the hardest part of writing a trilogy is the balancing act of putting the right pieces in the right order so it looks effortless while behind the scenes. There were so many decisions being made while balls were in the air.

SPEAKER_00 20:58

Yeah, thank you, Jeff, uh, for your answer there. And, you know, for me, you know how I like to sweat a haiku, as I said before. And I can see and have seen uh in the background how you sweat all of these very complex interactions so that it achieves that desired outcome, that it looks effortless. And so thank you for your answer there. And we'll turn next to uh a couple questions on your writing. Submitted through type form. Some creative people use creators from the past to inspire their style. Do you have any authors whose writing style inspired your personal style?

SPEAKER_01 21:44

So I think I want to just pivot that question just a little bit from maybe inspiration into heroes, because I think you can have someone you admire who maybe, you know, if I was to say, Oh, this is this is how I try to write, it I don't achieve it. I I've got my own voice. And it doesn't quite equate. And I wouldn't want to put my name next to their name and have people say, well, that that doesn't line up. So better to say heroes of mine. I will say the Zulu book that I wrote, the first four decades of Wilbur Smith's career, he wrote a book a year every year. He dedicated them all to his wife. They're all fantastic. When she passed, his work sort of went downhill. I don't know if she was his muse or his editor or both. I can appreciate there are people who are going to hear the name Wilbur Smith and they're going to say, oh, you know, not a great writer. The first four decades, he was phenomenal. And so when I wrote Zulu, there were things that I wanted to put into that book because I was writing a book set in Africa that was historical fiction. My mind goes to Wilbur Smith. So I have an elephant hunt. I have a boxing scene. I have there are things that he hits on and I was careful to do. I can also appreciate, I should say, there are people who maybe are looking at Wilbur Smith and saying, you know, isn't he a little bit of a racist? Worth saying the man was South African from his time and place, and his work was so progressive when he was writing it, apartheid South Africa bandit. So he was a progressive for his time. I am writing a novel from the Zulu perspective, which is not something he did. That is how I sort of differentiate it. But when I wrote that book, I was thinking of Wilbur Smith. Inca, you know, I it's the thrill of my life as a writer that so many people have said this is like Gary Jennings Aztec, because yes, absolutely. It's it's uh it's a new world civilization you don't know a lot about when you read it. You're gonna learn everything you want to know about it. Fantastic. Gary Jennings gets bored every 50 pages if his characters aren't having sex. I cannot say my writing and his writing equate. I can say, in terms of like depth of research and dedication to telling the whole story from their own perspective, I feel I did that very well. My narrator and his narrator in those two books are wildly different. And, you know, I think both projects are better for it. But I mean, yes, Gary Jennings hit a home run, and it would be uh something that always makes me proud when someone says, this is like Gary Jennings Aztec. I don't think it is, but I had that in my mind when I wrote it. How could I not? And I'm glad I got there. Uh I already mentioned Kurt Vonnegut was sort of the starting point for this. Uh, he does sort of heightened absurdism to talk about everyday truths in a lot of his fiction. And I thought that was fascinating. And this is where you can have an immortal human being, and the original premise was it was going to be an angel of death. I came up with a better idea, but like they can sit down and have a conversation about why he's not dying. But in the meantime, he's telling his life story. Like that is a Kurt Vonnegut approach. And I took it and I ran with it. Some of the other big historical fiction writers that I I love. Bernard Cornwell is uh is a hero of mine. In another world, I am writing a 10-book series about Julius Caesar told from the perspective of a soldier in one of his legions, whose side hustle is he's an entrepreneur. Like I have that plan, but I'm not a full-time novelist. But I get that idea from Bernard Cornwell. He's phenomenal. James Clavell uh is having a resurgence right now because Shogun has been remade as a television show, but all of his stuff is is incredible. I can't write like James Clavell, but I would love to. Uh, I also have to give him credit. He is an old, he's dead now, uh, a British man of his generation who wrote women and Asian people as completely equal, well-rounded, deeply thought-out characters. And it just blows my mind that he could take himself out of his situation and put himself in their situation and then tell it to a third party. I admire that so deeply. Mary Renault, Hilary Mantell, Colleen McCullough, these are giants of historical fiction, and they're women. And I read their stuff and I just know I can't do that. And I think it's the women's perspective. I I their stuff is brilliant, but it doesn't sound like me. And I would say their stuff doesn't sound like men. They they have their own way of telling the story that is just as interesting, just as intricate, just as good. And I think about that a lot. What is the difference? And I try to round off some of the hard corners of my story to approach what they do, I assume, effortlessly. Now, I'm sure they would, if they were doing interviews, say, well, I try to make it look effortless. And then maybe the final two that I'm going to mention: Robert Graves and Gore Vidal were deeply intellectual, stuffy, nerdy, academic wasps. And I see some of my pros when it gets a little navel gazy and it gets a little proud of its research and it gets more interested in telling the history than the story. I pull back a little and I say, Don't, don't write too much like Robert Graves or Gore Vidal, who I love and admire, but their stuff today is not as well received by a popular audience as it was at the time because the world has moved on. People don't have a classical education in high school anymore. You can't write with the assumption people know the deep cuts of Greek mythology or whatever it's going to be. You have to educate and inform and entertain as you go, rather than start from a base assumption that everyone's on the same page as you, and if they're not, it's their fault. You can't write like that anymore. Heroes of mine, but a cautionary tale. So those are some of the big authors that I have in mind when I write. Again, I would be deeply embarrassed if anyone ever tried to line up my prose to their prose because they are different, but they're influences, they're heroes, they're inspirations.

SPEAKER_00 27:25

Well, for me and for those listening to this episode, I think what comes through so clearly is the depth of research study education that you have in literature broadly, uh and and and more so beyond that. And uh really comes through uh quite clearly to me in your response there. And just a note here from me to all those that have submitted questions, thank you. Uh, these are some really great questions, the one that we've covered so far and the ones that we'll be getting into next. So I just wanted to uh give a shout out to all of your listeners, Jeff. That's been really great seeing all the questions come in. Are any characters based on real people, you know?

SPEAKER_01 28:13

The short answer is no, but I did actually write out a longer answer I'm going to reference to make sure I get the details right. The tape recorder trilogy stretches from the ice age to what was at the time the present day as I was writing it in 2015, but I don't know any of the characters in the story. They're all either based on historical people or figments of my imagination, sometimes both. I will say that hasn't always been true. When I wrote my novel Inca, which has a huge cast of characters across 70 years in a culture where people had both a childhood name and then a different adult name, I found it useful to mentally cast certain people, you know, both famous actors and also friends and family, in various parts to help me make their dialogue distinctive in my mind, uh, or to help me keep straight how the narrator feels about them. Yeah, I didn't need to do that in the Tape Recorder trilogy, although I guess I did borrow a few things. You know, in the early episodes where I am naming characters in pre-history, I adapted names of people I knew in my university days into suitable gibberish names. I knew another guy named Nate, like you, who gave me the name Nat. I knew an Andrew who gave me the name Drew, which then my first round of beta readers asked me to change to Dro to sound less familiar. I knew a page, which gave me the name Pedge. Now, Nat and Dro and Pedge are nothing like Nate and Andrew and Page, but I needed a starting point for where to grab sounds that could be people's names. You know, worth adding that all the jazzy names are monosyllabic to suggest a prehistoric simplicity to their language. I then moved into two syllable names for the made-up names in later prehistoric chapters. You know, there's a run of names in the Stories of Stones episode, where the narrator is rattling off a bunch of women he was married to across different lifetimes, and I adapted the name of a bunch of women I dated in my twenties for that purpose, one of whom I'm still friends with, and she actually spotted her modified name in the list and sent me a very amusing ahem text message with a picture of the page and her finger pointing at her name when she was reading the book. The closest I ever came to basing a character in the Tape Recorder trilogy off of someone I knew in real life might be the character of Melissa White. You know, I had already come up with the name Melissa White in my earliest brainstorming back when I was thinking maybe she was going to be some kind of angel of death or grim reaper, but I had a friend who, by sheer coincidence, is named Melissa, who is a big help in my editing process. Uh, she now actually voices the character in the audio drama. And I will admit, you know, in the same way Bernard Cornwell wrote his Richard Sharp character one way for years and then shifted it to look and sound more like the actor Sean Bean once the television adaptation was made, my mental image of what Melissa White looked like and sounded like may have changed a little in the editing process, as maybe I massaged my first draft prose to be a little more like this friend of mine with the same name who was so taken with the character that she said, you know, if you ever turn this into an audiobook, I want the part of Melissa. You know, if there was a shift, it was maybe five or ten percent. But I think there is probably a little truth to that. For for everyone else, no, they're entirely fictional.

SPEAKER_00 31:06

This next one, I think, is a follow-up uh to that uh from the same Patreon supporter. One of the most fun parts of the series is seeing the real versions of myths like Daedalus or Icarus after the end of the trilogy is reached in this podcast. Do you see yourself continuing to demythologize other historical legends? Will the podcast continue with a different project? Or will it end when the trilogy ends?

SPEAKER_01 31:38

Okay, well, let me let me answer that in order. So, first I will say, do I see myself continuing to demythologize other historical legends? Sort of. So as a writer of historical fiction, I'm more interested in history than mythology, which is not to say deconstructing a myth isn't interesting and fun and can be done with a lot of resources based on archaeology, anthropology, an understanding of the mythology, an understanding of the history that follows. There is a joy to that, and I certainly wouldn't want to say I would never do one of those. I do have a little bit of an idea for in the same way this jumps through time because it's an immortal being, I would one day like to write a novel about Proto-Indo-European as a language. So you could start up in the steppe of Asia, and uh every chapter is a different generation of the descendants of these people going across the world and spreading Indo-European and where that goes. There are some archaeological things I find fascinating. Uh the Beaker people, for example, would have been an example of a Proto-Indo-Europe or an Indo-European language group moving into Western Europe. And uh, we know from their bones, even when they lived in coastal communities among people who ate fish, they didn't eat seafood. Why? And I I wonder if their cultural or religious touchstone, I would be making all of that up. That is sort of inventing a myth. But I I love that idea, and and there are things that I want to play with in that space, and maybe I'll write that book one day. I don't know that I'm going to take the Greek myths and deconstruct them back to people again. I don't know that I'm going to take someone else's mythology and deconstruct them back again. There are world religions that interest me. Zoroastrianism, I think, is one of these things that in the West, we don't give Iran its due for just the role it has played in human history, and someday someone's going to write a great book about them. I don't know that it's going to be me, but if I was, one of the ways I could get into that was through Zoroastrianism, which I guess would be deconstructing mythology, but it's also an act of world religion, so you have to be respectful, deeply informed. I haven't done enough homework on it. I do think Gorvidal's creation, to name-drop a guy who gets very nerdy, and you know, the the book is now dated, but Gorvidal's creation touches on some of that. It's something that if someone else wrote a book in that space, I would be delighted to read it. Right now I don't have a lot of plans to demythologize other historical figures. Who knows? I'm I'm in my 40s. I plan to write till the day I die. Never say never. As for will the podcast continue? It's three seasons and it's done. With that said, I have other audio drama projects cooking.

SPEAKER_00 34:17

Yeah, you've given us all uh a few breadcrumbs there along uh the trail of your response, but you didn't actually say what you're doing next. Do you have plans for another audio drama through this one?

SPEAKER_01 34:30

I have a couple of ideas, but I'm already actively working on one that I hope to have at least the first few episodes ready to publish as the tape recorder trilogy wraps up, so people who have been enjoying this can immediately pivot over to more content from me. So it's actually going to be an adaptation of my most popular novel, which is Inca. I actually had some people before I started this project say, Why are you adapting the tape recorder trilogy? Why don't you adapt Inca? It's a lot more popular. And I will confess at the time, I wasn't sure if an audio drama was going to cannibalize book sales. I it turns out it's not. I've actually seen an uptick in sales for the tape recorder trilogy, which thank you to whoever's listening to this who has also bought the book. It means a lot to me. And that has given me the confidence that if I do an audio drama version of Inca, I'm not going to kill my golden goose, which, you know, it's not much of a golden goose, but I do like to joke, you know, picks up my bar tab. Maybe now it's paying for my vacations. By the time I retire, it'll be a lovely, wonderful supplemental income. Anyway, it's got more than 400 four and five-star reviews on Amazon, which is no small thing. A lot of the reviewers mention Gary Jennings' Aztec in the same breath of it. It is the best thing I've ever written. And I say that despite the fact that I've written a lot since. I was in my early 20s. For five years, I had access to the University of Toronto's library. Whatever else I was doing in my academic life, every week I took out books about the Inca until I read everything in that library that was written in English. And I wrote this book, and it is exhaustive, but it is also a great story. And uh it is the decline and fall of the Inca, told from their own perspective. It is an old Inca man who was at the top of a bureaucracy that no longer exists, and in the ashes of the world that he used to keep quietly running. He gets his hands on a Spanish priest and he makes the Spanish priest write down his life story so that something of the Inca's world will be remembered. And it's wonderful. And it will be a great audio drama. And uh, I'm not nailing your colors to the mast. To make it an audio drama, it can't just be my voice. I am writing in uh another speaking part, and it's actually going to be Nate who's going to lend his voice to that. So thank you for that, Nate.

SPEAKER_00 36:44

Oh, you're welcome, Jeff. And uh again, just so uh appreciative of that opportunity and and looking forward to joining you on that journey for your next audio drama and and Inca. What a book. Uh for those that aren't familiar with it, that haven't read it yet, please look it up, buy it, read it. You'll love it. Another one of your Patreon subscribers asked the following question. And I'm guessing that they have read your other books based on their question. Do you imagine Inca and Zulu taking place in the same universe as the trilogy? Is it possible the narrator was standing in the background of a scene in one of those books?

SPEAKER_01 37:35

Uh, so I'm going to do a small spoiler for for season three and answer as quickly as I can that uh yes, I do imagine it's a shared world. And again, when you write historical fiction and you're trying to tell an honest story, I think you should imagine things are in a shared universe because it's set in history. So in the third season, I actually have the narrator meet the Spanish friar from Inca, and he's going to meet two of the characters from Zulu, and that will create that shared universe. And for the rest of my life, whenever I write something, I have an immortal narrator in this thing that I can put into the background. So hopefully everything I ever publish moving forward will touch on this in some way, even if it's secondhand, even if it's at a distance, even if I'm the only one who knows which character I put in the background that is the narrator, yes, I will build a shared universe.

SPEAKER_00 38:29

Here's another one from Typeform. And you Jeff have given me a note to say at the top that this is a spoiler for season two, episode 13, The Governor. So anyone who hasn't quite finished season two yet is about to have a twist ruined for them. Okay, with that, uh the question is you have Julius Caesar give a short speech in Phoenician. I'm a Roman history nerd. He obviously spoke Latin and Greek. He probably learned a Gallic language at some point. What source are you using to have Caesar speak Phoenician?

SPEAKER_01 39:14

Well, let me start off by thanking whoever asked that. When I decided to do a QA mailbag episode, I was hoping I would get some questions that were this specific and into the weeds. I should also explain why I asked you to put a spoiler tag on it when we already did a blanket one at the top of the bonus episode. When I wrote the books, I knew I wanted to have Julius Caesar make an appearance, but I couldn't afford the page count it would be required to tell any of the big events of his life correctly. I have a different half-finished writing project that focuses on Caesar's year in Spain before running for consul, and so I knew I could do a quick cameo scene about the race back to Rome to stand for election. In middle, I called the chapter the governor, and Caesar is referred to as the governor until 90% of the way through, so the readers, all of whom know who Julius Caesar is, but very few of whom would have known he ever served as governor of further Spain before becoming a worldwide household name in the next 2,000 years, you know, they get this little surprise and delight twist revealed that the fellow they've been reading about is actually someone from the deep past that they recognize. You know, I'm confident it came off right on the page. I'm less confident it works in an audio drama, but I wanted to put a spoiler tag warning on there all the same, you know, to try and preserve the surprise. Anyway, onto the question. I want to take a minute to praise Colleen McCullough, who I've mentioned a little bit earlier. She has a series of books called The Masters of Rome series. Roughly speaking, it starts 80 years before Gaius Julius Caesar's life, and it finishes about 10 years after his assassination. And in the course of that time, it does everything we know that happened in the classical world. Every major historical personages, male or female, in Europe, in Asia, in Africa, if something about them has continued on, it's in one of those books. They are masterpieces. They are so intimidating for a historical fiction writer. I enjoy other historical fictions set in ancient Rome a little less because of how right she got everything. They really are the gold standard, and she has Caesar make his way from Spain to Rome by boat. She doesn't go into a lot of detail, but that's I was comfortable dropping it in there. Anyway, we do know, historically speaking, the Caesar family, prior to Julius Caesar becoming the richest, most powerful, most famous person in the world, was, you know, old money, blue-blood aristocrats, but all of their money was in the past. And we do know that Caesar's father died while he was actually quite young, and he was raised by his mother, who was a very proud, self-confident, independent lady, much admired. And uh there is a pretty good theory that she may have worked in an aristocratic fashion as a landlord in apartment buildings in Suburba, which is one of the suburbs of Rome. It's actually where we get our word suburb. And in Colleen McCullough's book, she is living in the ground floor, nice apartment with poor tenants living upstairs. And so one of the things that she gives the gifted young Julius Caesar to do as a character in his own life in the early days, he's learning languages, playing with the kids upstairs. So I'm not saying he actually was fluent in Phoenician. Do I think he might have been familiar enough with it to put together a 30-second or minute-long speech, especially while working with Allabus, who is a real guy as his uh camp prefect during that year in Spain? I think I'm willing to suspend disbelief enough to say yes, especially when I am sort of writing the whole thing as an ode to and a thing that could fit into Colleen McCullough's world. It's a little self-indulgent, but I'm prepared to suspend disbelief that much. Uh most people would be willing to say Caesar was a prodigy in a lot of ways. It doesn't weird me up to make him an intellectual who's good with languages at that level.

SPEAKER_00 42:49

The next couple of questions are very specific. And the first one comes from one of your book readers. I'm guessing that uh based on what they've said or how they've posed the question. And it's as follows Marco represents a very specific kind of ancient warrior, someone who isn't part of a grand state army like Roms. When writing him, did you draw on any of the research you did for Zulu? Specifically, is there a shared warrior's code or perspective on death that you see in both Marco and the Zulu leaders you've written about, even though they are thousands of years apart?

SPEAKER_01 43:32

I'm going to be honest, when the questions came in, this was the one that maybe surprised me the most. I had never thought of that. And I I wonder if if it had been put to me a little differently, I would have actually said, I think of the Zulu military and the Roman military as having commonalities that Marco is outside of both of those spheres. I don't see a ton of connective tissue between Marco and the Zulu, but maybe, you know, again, we're on a QA mailbag talking about capable. Recorded trilogy. I don't want to get too far into Zulu history and how Zulu society functioned and was built around a militarized state, other than to say it's fascinating and I encourage people to look into it. Marco, for me, was a very specific thing I wanted to do. I didn't want to write these books to be military historical fiction at all. I think I've stuck to that in that even when there are action scenes, usually the narrator is trying to get out of the action. He doesn't want to be at risk. He's an immortal human being. How often would you put your life at risk? But I knew I wanted to tell the Carthaginian side of the Punic Wars. And so, you know, I've already made the narrator sort of the richest man in Carthage. How does he engage with the Punic War? He's going to fund the thing. Well, how is he going to fund it? He is going to give Hannibal and Hannibal's brothers the resources they want to fight this war. But that's a little dry and a little boring. And I hadn't done an action scene in a while. And Marco is actually, in my mind, I mentioned casting famous actors. Eli Wallach in The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly has so many great moments, just these braggadocious moments where he stands and the camera gives him all the time and attention he needs to put on a persona that he's not a big guy. Eli Wallach was not the most physically intimidating, the most imposing person. But when he's on the screen, you pay total attention. All eyes are drawn to him. And I said, yo, there are prodigies in anything. There are Deddy's a famous magician, Daedalus is a famous inventor, Pythias is a famous explorer. Why not have a famous swordsman? And if you're going to have an Eli Wallach spaghetti western ambush in a canyon, what if he doesn't have a sword? What if he does it all with a stick? And so just it was fun for me to write. And then I had this through piece where I had before the war started, during the war, and after the war. And he is the human through piece through all of it. He is a three-episode recurring character, which was so much fun to do. And I do have other projects in mind that I'm going to have them have Marco as their grandfather. He's going to be referenced back. And so I talked about a shared universe. He's going to be built into a, he's going to be the avenue through which I can have a shared universe with him as the connection there. So I loved writing him. I don't think of him as, well, he's not Roman, is he Zulu? I think of him as himself. And I think that stereotype of Spanish braggadocio of he is faking it till he makes it. He starts off basically as a bandit king, and we make him the best of Hannibal's subordinate generals. And I actually really want people to care when he gets his hand cut off to save his man. I think that is a beautiful sacrifice for a talented prodigy to give up what made him special to save everybody else. I think that's great. So I really enjoyed writing Marco. I don't really think I had the Zulu in mind at all when I wrote him, but it's an interesting idea and it's something that I've been thinking about. The only way I could answer that question to involve the Zulu would involve a lengthy explanation about the Zulu, and I feel like I'm tacking that on after the fact rather than building it into yes, there was a connection in the first place.

SPEAKER_00 47:14

The second question in this couplet, if you will, of questions, is from someone who must have really loved the Deadie episodes. Is there a particular piece of research about ancient Egypt or the magicians of the court that you found fascinating but couldn't fit into the Deadie storyline? Does or will any of that leftover research ever find its way into your podcast's historical notes episodes?

SPEAKER_01 47:43

So I love this question and I love the deadly chapters. Maybe I should say at the top that we were talking about pacing and trying to establish a rhythm to when to tell stories. The Deadie chapters honestly started from it's been a little while and we've never had him have a best friend. He's had father figures, he's had wives, but I I hadn't, you know, how far into the book is that six or seven chapters. Who does he have as a friend? And I thought, okay, well, what is the oldest historically living person I could find that I'm pretty sure was a real person who was not a king because I didn't want it to make he only pals around with royalty. And it's very tough when you go into the distant, distant past to find a normal person. There is actually a very old copper merchant in in Mesopotamia that we know about because we have copies of the complaint letters. He was selling bad copper. And some small part of me is like, oh, that would be fun. But I also, again, I've got a couple of ideas for Mesopotamian novels, and I didn't want to necessarily spend a lot of time in that part of the world in case I end up using that for something else later. But I did come across Detty gave a magic performance for Khufu while the Great Pyramid of Egypt was being built. This is written down, and Khufu asks him the question, and he hedges, he does not answer this question, and then he gets basically enough bread and enough onions and enough garlic to live the rest of his life as a kept man, pension, if you will. And I thought, this is a three and a half thousand-year-old story or more. I'm a four and a half thousand-year-old story of a real person. And I bet you he spent his whole life building up a magical act to get that performance. And when he got there, you know, the Pharaoh asked him a magical question for which he did not have a magical answer. And on the spot, he kind of like, I can't give you the answer now, but in the days of your grandchildren, we're going to have a good answer for you. And that worked. And I'm like, this is great. How do I build a story that ends with that magical performance? And one of the things that I really researched is how does magic work in terms of actual magicians actually doing tricks that would have existed that far back? So cups and balls, making things vanish and appear, you know, memory tricks, things that don't require modern special effects. And I watched a ton of YouTube videos, actually, including a bunch of Penn and Teller stuff, which one of them, they actually, it's a contest, it's a fool us with pen and teller, and they get magicians up on stage and they do a trick and they try to fool Penn and Teller, and then if they win that, they get to be an opening act for Penn and Teller in Vegas. One of them does a version of Deddy's swapping the heads of live animals trick, and they say in the episode, this is the Deddy trick. We've read about this. I'm like, hooray! Like it's it's even there. Are there things that I didn't put into my reach? So a lot. I mean, you can only do so much in a couple chapters. One that immediately comes to mind, it's another pen and teller thing where they actually went to Egypt, India, and China and studied how magic was done traditionally in those countries. And in Egypt, they found a guy who put a snake up his nose and brought it out, the soft palate in the back of his mouth. And I'm forgetting whether it's pen or teller. I think it's Penn who speaks. He says, There's no actual trick. He just does that. And I'm like, this is an amazing performance piece, but you know, Deddy actually does do magic. So I couldn't put that into the story, but I think about that all the time. It's like, there's no trick. He just actually does that. I think that's great. In terms of putting more magic into historical notes, I did talk a little bit about Deddy's magic in the historical note for that season. I don't really want the historical notes to be dumping grounds for what I didn't do because there's a lot more I didn't do than did do. You could you could turn historical notes into books unto themselves if that was going to be their premise. So I think, yes, I don't regret any of the research I did. I've actually made some friends with real magicians because I can talk to them about this stuff. Like I know how the civil I can't do magic for the record, but having an awareness of some of the mechanics behind it is enough of a level ground that I've been at you know house parties and been speaking with paid working magicians, and I can speak enough of their language to hold my end of some fascinating conversations. To repeat one small story, these guys were working in Vegas and, you know, on their day before their flight home, someone from David Copperfield's team reached out to them and said, Would you like to spend some time with David Copperfield? And they said, Absolutely. And they're given coordinates in the middle of the desert at a time that was after their flight. So they skipped their flight, they drove out to the desert, they waited, and someone came and picked them up and took them. David Copperfield has a private museum of magic stuff that he, by invitation only, brings in magicians to. And part of it is a uh French theater from the 1800s that he has moved brick and board piece by piece from France to a warehouse in Nevada, and he put on a performance for them just using old magical stuff because he knows magicians will appreciate it. They talked about that like a religious experience, like they cried. If I never wrote the book, I never would have done the research, I never would have had this conversation, I never would have seen the most special moment in these people's lives told to me. That was worth it if I had never make a penny off my books. I I love that. So I'm very interested in magic. I can't do any of it. I'm so pleased I wrote these chapters, and thank you for the question.

SPEAKER_00 53:05

Well, Jeff, you may not be able to perform magic, but through the tape recorder trilogies and throughout this QA session, you've certainly held me and I know our listeners in a trance. So I really appreciate that. And as we're coming to uh up to the end of this episode, maybe we can start wrapping up with some concluding questions. This is another one submitted through Facebook by a listener named Sam. What is the best and worst feedback you have received on this series?

SPEAKER_01 53:43

I I have a few different answers to that, and I hope uh listeners will indulge me. The first one that comes to mind is actually from an old co-worker of mine. He's of Jamaican heritage. And, you know, the last episode of season one, the the chapter 15 of the first book, has the narrator become a slave. And he lives for a slave for for many, many years during the Bronze Age collapse. And after he wins his freedom, after there's a slave revolt, he dresses himself in the master's clothes and he's putting on a bronze neck torque, and he's, you know, he's he's dressing as his former master. And this co-worker of mine admitted when he dressed that, he had to actually sort of snap out of his mental image of what had been happening. He had set it all on a plantation or in a sugar cane field or something from from his heritage. And, you know, that really touched me. That's that's a very personal, very deeply sensitive thing for him to have shared with me. And it really moved me that he would think that, that he he had built that in his mind of what was happening because it mattered to him. Um and I've had other people say as well that that that's a very affecting chapter. I believe you've said it as well, that um, you know, when I acted that out, I'm actually acting. Or some of the other chapters I'm I'm maybe a little bit closer to reading than acting, but like I work through that as if the narrator is remembering being in a mental fugue state. So I I really think I did that well, and I'm I'm so pleased that people are willing to share that with me because it is a difficult read. It's a conclusion to the first book. It is meant to be impactful, and I think I got there. My sister, who, you know, she doesn't read widely. Uh, she does read some stuff, but she's not the big reader that I am. She took one of my books to um Cuba on vacation, and she's on a beach. And the uh chapter where they're circumnavigating Africa, a couple of the ships get lost in a fog bank, and they're like two and a half years into a three-year trip, and they're just lost in a fog bank. And the narrator is desolated. He can you believe they're gone? Uh all these shared adventures, and they're gone, and we'll never know why. And she emailed me from Cuba and said, Um, you know, you don't need compliments, your ego is big enough, but you're a hell of a writer. And I thought, well, that is just deeply moving. The last one that I maybe want to flag just to sort of get ahead of things, this is in the third season, so we haven't quite gotten there yet, but we are going to talk about some of the early days of Islam and uh and the expansion of Islam out into the wider world as part of the era of conquest. And, you know, I was writing this in 2015, which is a lot closer to Global War on Terror, a lot closer to uh what happened with uh Charlie Hebdo. And I just I had a concern, I need to get that absolutely right. I can't write that in a way that looks in any way prejudiced. I can't write that in a way that leaves me open to criticism from one side or the other. I need to get the history exactly right, but I'm not going to not tell it because of those things. I just need to really be respectful and accurate and say what happened in a way that people can enjoy, regardless of where they stand in that situation. And I had finished my first draft and I was actually at a funeral. My landlord at the time had passed, and he was a very interesting man with a lot of interesting friends, one of whom is an Islamic scholar. And I said, I hope you wouldn't mind me, you know, imposing upon you, but could I give you three or four chapters of an unpublished work of historical fiction? I just want to make sure I'm being correct and respectful while also being entertaining. And he said, Yeah, but I I've got to be honest with you. Like, I don't read historical fiction and I wouldn't want to humor you. If you actually want my opinion, I'll give it to you. But like if I come back and say there's problems here, I don't want you to brush that off. And I said, that's exactly what I want. And he came back and he said, I'm going to read the rest of the book when it's published, and he did. So I think that is the kind of like I put myself up against. This is actually going to be a huge deal if it doesn't work, and it did work. So I take that as incredibly high praise on something that I was worried I would do wrong, and and I ended up doing quite well. So it is in season three. It's a little bit of a spoiler, but I mean, that was high praise. In terms of maybe negative feedback, again, maybe I'm going to focus a little more on season three stuff than than earlier. I had a uh author, friend of mine, he uh is no longer with us, he's he's past, but he was an older British gentleman. And there is a part in season three where the narrator becomes a British gentleman and goes through some hard times. And, you know, again, minor spoilers, but he deals with his problems through alcohol. And my friend was deeply disappointed in me that I decided to make the narrator an alcoholic for a period of his life. And, you know, I would point out the framing device, he's he's drinking alcohol while at the cottage in India. Like he's still drinking alcohol to sort of deal with stress and and de-stress and do all these things. He he has a crutch, but it upset my author friend that I did this. And I take that feedback seriously, but I also think, well, it's nice that he cared enough about the narrator to be upset when I wrote a flaw into a character that he had admired up to this point. And I made that choice and it really upset him. And he head along talking to me about this and whether it was responsible of me to do this, and I loved his passion. I take his criticism seriously, but I'm not going to change that part of the story. And in the same spirit, my mother, who is, you know, my my biggest champion and my harshest critic and has proofread everything I've ever done and is usually my first editor, she doesn't like the ending. Uh just a personal preference. She's like, I would have done it a different way. She never says what that way is. Her advice is always just to cut things she doesn't like. And, you know, that one stings a little because you want to be so comfortable and confident in your conclusion. I am. I wrote the whole trilogy to get us to this place. It's just not her particular cup of tea. But um, you know, when people think, oh, well, you know, an author's family, uh, they're only going to say nice things. Friends are only going to say nice things. I promise you. Some of the harshest criticism I've ever gotten has been from my mother. It's always from a place of love. It's always from trying to make my art better. But yeah, she she doesn't particularly like what the last episode does. But again, I love that she cares enough to have such a strong opinion, even if it is one that, you know, I wish it was a different conclusion because she wishes it was a different conclusion. But um, no, I I think those are sort of like some good examples, some bad examples of feedback that I've gotten. But it all comes from a place of wanting to make things better because they care, which I love.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:13

I know you mentioned, Jeff, at the top, uh, we might need to break this into two parts just for reasons of length. And you mentioned that the second part is going to be published through Patreon. Why don't we wrap up this episode talking about your Patreon? What's over there? And why should people listening to the podcast support you there?

SPEAKER_01 1:00:35

Thanks for that question, Nate. I guess the first thing I will say is over there is the rest of this episode because it's it's getting on. But in all seriousness, I think most people who do podcasts, most people who do any kind of creative pursuit in the 21st century have some kind of this is a way people can support me financially mechanism. Patreon is a very common one. I did not want to put ads into this audio drama. For one thing, I don't know when it's going to start getting enough traffic that the ads would actually earn me anything. It would certainly irritate me to have the story broken up with uh with ads. I also don't have the kind of show where I would do my own ad reads, so what are we really doing here? Patreon is sort of the accepted norm. It doesn't cost, I think the subscription is like five bucks. I'm putting short stories in there just like this, so they would be like extra episodes. There's several there already. One is a work of historical fiction that tells the life story of an oak tree across a thousand years and all the different things that happened to this oak tree. So it's sort of an experimental historical fiction, which is an episode you're only going to get through Patreon. There's another one that's actually a work of science fiction. I'm a big fan of Isaac Asimov. I always wondered what it would be like to write something that might fit into his robot universe. So I wrote a work of science fiction, that's there. Every episode gets little maps and pictures and things. You know, it's there's extra content, but it's not meant to be instead of. It's it's meant to be a nice thank you to you've enjoyed the show. Please support me on Patreon. You could also buy the books. It's just what I'm really hoping to do, first of all, is cover the costs, because there are hosting fees and then there are things that have gone into making this show that I would like to not be out of pocket for. I suspect this show will be up for many years. It would be beautiful if, you know, down the road this actually turns a small profit. I would not be upset about that because I do plan on doing other audio dramas in the future. So as this show wraps up, I'm probably going to rebrand the Patreon from Cape Recorder Trilogy Podcast Patreon to JeffMix Writing Patreon, and it'll have stuff for all of my shows and uh also additional content for anybody who likes anything. It'll all be there in one place. It's just the dumb thing these days. Uh, I'm certainly not trying to be mercenary about it, but there are people who want to support, and I'm really glad there are. Several of them have written in, so it's nice to see it's almost a way of measuring engagement. It's it's a it's a nice thing that people have a way to reach out and say, I care. Also, I have these questions. Why not give them more of that? So that's a sort of roundabout way of saying every artist wishes they made something from the art that they produce. This is how I'm doing bet with this.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:07

Yeah, and you touched on a really great point there too, because I know for myself, uh speaking quite selfishly, perhaps one of the things that I enjoy is the trance. Uh again, I mentioned that word earlier. The trance that I'm held in when I'm listening to your podcast by not having it broken up by ads. So for me personally, and perhaps a lot of other listeners, uh, I appreciate that. So very good. Uh so at this point, do I thank you for being a guest on your own show? Or do you thank me for moderating this? Or how shall we end this bonus QA mailbag episode?

SPEAKER_01 1:03:47

Why don't we thank each other and also thank the listeners for putting up with us?

SPEAKER_00 1:03:52

That makes sense. Uh as we're coming to a close on this bonus QA episode, I just wanted to take a moment selfishly to acknowledge, acknowledge you know, the comprehensive behind the scenes tour that you've given us. A real depth, uh, a real uncovering, a revealing of yourself, your experience, your knowledge, and your approach to the craft of writing. And I know I and those listening have really enjoyed this time together with you today. Thank you so much, Jeff.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:39

This has been my pleasure, Nate. Um Nate, I'm so sorry, I almost forgot. How can people find more from you?

SPEAKER_00 1:04:46

What are your pluggables? People can find me at a transit diary of sorts.com. That's where I have poetry and other poetry related thoughts. And I'm working on a couple other projects right now, but any of those that come to fruition will be announced again on a transit diaryofsorts.com.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:14

And I'll make sure a link to that is in the show notes. You know, thank you again, Nate, and thank you everyone for listening. Season three, the third and final season of the Tape Recorder Trilogy Podcast, will be starting up June 22nd. Until then, happy listening and happy reading, whatever makes you happy. You will hear from me again soon. You have been listening to the Tape Recorder Trilogy Podcast, and there is a lot more to come. Here are a few ways you can help support this program. First, if you are enjoying it, please tell someone about it. Audio dramas live and die on word of mouth, so please help spread the word. This may be the third and final season. But I plan to leave the series up as long as people continue to take an interest in it. Second, please like it, review it, and subscribe to it wherever you find your podcasts. We want to teach the algorithm that this show is worth people's time. Third, this podcast is based on the novels Beginning, Middle, and End by Jeff Mix, available on Amazon. If you want a copy of the story for yourselves, that would be so appreciated. Fourth, I have a link to a typeform survey in the show notes for each episode. Tell me a little about yourself and feel free to ask me questions. I have already done a QA mailbag episode during the run of this series, and I probably will do another one in a little while once people have had a chance to find it and enjoy the show after the final episode airs. Fifth, while this may be the final season of the Tape Recorder trilogy podcast, I already have plans for two more shows, so please remain subscribed to this channel for updates on those when they are ready to be shared. Finally, while I don't want to break up the episode with ads, I do have a Patreon account with extra content for those of you who are willing to support this channel with a donation. A link to that is also in the show notes. With that said, thank you so much for your time and attention, and I look forward to you enjoying the next episode soon.