Connor Reads Books
Connor Reads Books
Episode 36: Drew Harrison - Author Interviews
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I’m joined by Drew Harrison, author of Men Of The Mountain, to talk about how his background in journalism shaped his fiction, why he researches details most readers will never double-check, and how sci fi can act like a warning system when technology moves faster than our culture can adapt.
We get into craft and influence in a practical way: how reading Stephen King, Brandon Sanderson, and Joe Abercrombie left fingerprints on Drew’s style, why first-person narration can shrink the distance between reader and character, and how he builds authenticity by keeping his protagonists human, insecure, and pressured by responsibility. Drew also explains why Men Of The Mountain starts with one genre flavor and then reveals a deeper sci fi core, using the clash between tribal life and advanced technology to make familiar concepts feel uncanny again.
Then we zoom out to cyberpunk themes that are suddenly not-so-fictional: AI manipulation, misinformation, and the creeping sense that we’re building systems we don’t fully understand. Drew argues bleak worlds need optimism to stay readable, and that hope is what turns dystopian storytelling into something more than despair. We also talk audiobooks: the joy of hearing a narrator bring lines to life, the challenge of letting go of control, and the best advice for authors who want to adapt their books to audio.
If you enjoy author interviews, science fiction writing, cyberpunk ideas, and grounded worldbuilding, subscribe, share this with a reader friend, and leave a review so more people can find the show.
'Men of The Mountain' Early Review Signups:
https://forms.gle/dBNywczwCG72HXt9A
Drew Harrison's Links:
https://www.amazon.com/stores/Drew-Harrison/author/B09PJWGGF2?ref=ap_rdr&shoppingPortalEnabled=true
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/22160775.Drew_Harrison
https://drewharrisonbooks.wixsite.com/home
Sip Java Co, where much of MotM was written: https://maps.app.goo.gl/wKgL7y6tqvFXz3mg6
Well's Coffee, which does the on-site roasting: https://maps.app.goo.gl/c1VYu9isiD3YYvsJA
Drew's Events:
Read it Write it, June 20:
https://www.facebook.com/ReadItWriteBookFestival/
Shelf Life Space, June 27:
https://www.instagram.com/shelflifespace/
Voice Over, Mixing and Mastering Credits:
L. Connor Voice - Website
https://www.instagram.com/l.connorvoice/
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100095473899665
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIC0iAX-pJlqW7LBq2PJL6A
Music Credits:
Louie Sanders, https://www.instagram.com/soundmonksound/
Any and all music, sound effects, or visual effects used in this production are royalty and copyright free. Lists of SFX and Music can be provided upon request.
Welcome And Early Access Details
SPEAKER_00Well, howdy listener, and welcome back to another episode of Connor Reed's Books. We have an author interview for you today. Today we are interviewing Drew Harrison, author of Men of the Mountain. We are celebrating the impending release of The Men of the Mountain. As it stands currently, it is not yet out. We are starting a pre-release period where you can get early access codes and you get the book for free, provided you review it. So maybe it's not completely free. Monetarily, yes. Time-wise, no. But do it anyway. Folks, if you are wanting some of them early access codes, there is a Google Forms link in the episode notes. Go check out the episode notes. Click that Google link. Click the Google Forms link and fill that form out and see if you can get your hands on an early preview copy of The Men of the Mountain. The preview period starts June 24th and the book itself launches July 10th. Anyway, I really have a good time talking with Drew today. You may notice this is a longer episode than usual, and it gets longer still. So if you're watching this on YouTube, this is as long as the episode gets, but if you're listening on a podcast platform, uh go check out YouTube for the, you know, director's cut. Wherever you are enjoying this podcast from, uh just know that I love you so much. Thank you for being here, and I really hope that you enjoy this episode. Talk to you soon.
Drew’s Path Into Writing
SPEAKER_00Howdy folks, and welcome back to Connor Reed's Books, and another installment of author interviews. Joining me today via virtual chat is Drew Harrison, a prolific sci-fi fantasy and fiction writer who captures the primal human spirit in increasingly dystopian cybernetic settings. Today we are talking about Drew's newest release, The Men of the Mountain, released earlier this March, and the audiobook is coming soon to Audible. At the moment, it is not quite out. At the moment that we are recording this, the book is not out. But if you hear me interrupt and say that the book is out, and the link is in the episode notes, listen to me. Alright. With that, it is my pleasure to introduce to the show Drew Harrison. Drew, how are you doing?
SPEAKER_02I am doing pretty well today. I'm really excited to be talking because I've been looking forward to this for a while. Um, and I'm happy to, you know, dive in and start talking about the books. Um and I'm very excited to get this audiobook fully finalized. Uh that should be out very, very soon. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Absolutely. It's gonna be really, really exciting. Um, it's been really fun like collaborating with you, making this story like into the audio medium. Um it's been a real fun process. But yeah, let's jump into this interview and also thank you for being here. I'm excited to have you here. Of course, of course. It's my pleasure. Thank you. Well, let's start at the beginning. When did you know that writing was the medium for you?
SPEAKER_02So all along, I feel like I've always at least been media inclined. Ever since I was like really, really young, I started working with video. And I was at like 10 or 12 years old. Yeah. The man my mother was dating at the time got me set up with like a bootleg copy of like Adobe Premiere and After Effects, and I was like, I want to make movies. So I would do lots of like little home movies when I was a kid, and I had a lot of fun with that. And I would write up little scripts and we would shoot them, and I had a lot of fun with that as well. Um, and it was always just something I kind of cultivated in the background. Um, I actually started writing like a big screenplay for what wanted to be like my first feature-length movie when I was in high school. I started it, but I would like have friends over and I'd read them excerpts from chapters, and they were my biggest hype men. They're like, Yes, this is so good, make this happen. But it hit a point when I was basically at a major turning point in the story where I was like, I'm just a high schooler. This is gonna be like a multi-million dollar budget movie. I was like, I don't think I can actually see this project to fruition. And it was a bit of a reality check for like a kid with big dreams, but that story stayed in the back of my head. It was always there percolating. Um, and when I went off to college, I ended up opting for journalism as a major. And I started learning all of the formal mechanics of actually like writing stuff. So how to properly place a comma, style guidelines, you know, verb tense consistency. And as I was soaking it up, in the back of my head, I was always like, I'd really like to go back to some of those stories that I wanted to tell a while ago, but now armed with a lot more professional knowledge, could I do justice by them? Um and so I graduated college, I had my major in journalism, but one of the points that my journalism professors were hammering into my head over and over and over again over the course of the career is journalism is a dying industry. That's what my professors were telling me. They were showing me the chart showing ad revenue just ticking down, down, down over time. So when I graduated, I wasn't super enthused with the idea of let me go work at like a dying news station in the middle of Duluth, Minnesota. So I decided I'm gonna just start teaching for a while while I figure out like a truer calling for me. And I actually started with tutoring as my main role, but that's a job that was like just nights and weekends. I had a lot of free time. And I was like, huh, there is that classic combo of the person who teaches and and writes. And I was like, I've always had these story ideas that I wanted to tell. Let me try my hand at writing something. So I went back, I found my middle high school drafts of that first book project, or at the time it was a screenplay, but I'm like, I'm gonna adapt this to be a novel instead. And so I spent a few months rewriting the beginning, writing all the way through to the end. I closed the book and I was like, whoa, that was actually pretty fun. This was gratifying. I sent it out to people to read. I actually printed it in this like really thick bound little, um, not like a professional book, but it had like a little spiral plastic rings, and I and I gave it out to my friends and they read it and they had feedback, and I was like, whoa, this is a rush. And so at that moment, I was kind of sold on maybe teaching and then writing books on the side. I like no matter how ambitious my ideas were, yeah, you don't need a million-dollar budget to write an action scene in a book, right? Whereas if you want to film that as a movie, that's obviously a lot harder to do. Absolutely. So I really enjoyed the freedom that came with that, the ability to tell exactly the story that I wanted to tell and leave the expensive special effects for like the mind of the reader as they read through.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, totally.
SPEAKER_02Um and once I had that revelation and I'd completed my first project, there kind of wasn't any going back. Um, one other small element of my journey that I think really pushed me in that direction is when I was still developing my skills as a writer in like uh college, I would often just post like flash fiction on like on Reddit and like comment threads or on like the writing prompt subreddit. And I think that a lot of the feedback that I got there, A, helped me uh hone my skills to what I think landed better with readers. And B, it was just like a wall of really encouraging, enthusiastic feedback. I I kept getting people commenting, you should be a writer, you should be a writer, you should be a writer, please publish. And all of that, you know, chorus of voices, it's hard to say no to like the collective will of you know thousands and thousands and thousands of strangers. So definitely at a certain point they convinced me.
SPEAKER_00Well, that encouragement certainly helps. There's no doubt about it.
SPEAKER_02Absolutely, absolutely.
SPEAKER_00And imagination is the lowest budget SFX, right?
SPEAKER_02So uh-huh, uh-huh. So I I really just allowed my my vision to just roll crazy with it. Whereas when I was writing the first draft, a part of my mind was like, I need to keep this grounded for what I could reasonably produce as a high schooler with no resources. But when I was with the rewrite, I was like, no, no, no, we're gonna have a car chase here, we're gonna have a bank heist here, and you know, none of that would have been possible. That's awesome.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_02I think a deep down part of me wants to one day do something with film and entertainment, you know, like getting a book deal, like something adapted to TV or film. I'm sure every author has that dream, right? But that's where my that's where my dream started. So I'd like to have the chance to go there.
SPEAKER_00Well, you gotta have a dream to make the goal for sure.
SPEAKER_02Uh-huh. So yeah. Yeah. Um, and that's one of the reasons why I found producing audiobooks for my work so gratifying. It's obviously not quite the same as a movie, but just hearing like the the additions that a talented actor can make when reading the book, the the emotion they breathe into the lines, I have found that to be very gratifying. And it's like, like I said, it's on the path to a serious film adaptation. You're getting half the rush, you get to hear it even if you can't see the movie.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah. It's like uh we'll see. We'll see if this flags anything, but it's like that graphic audio uh tagline, a movie in your mind. So uh I definitely get it. Absolutely, and I totally hear you. I think you know, being part of like making audiobooks, like there's a lot there's a lot of things I'd love to do voice work for, and audiobooks are still a fantastic place to like do it, you know. Exactly. So it's a lot of fun. Um so I've I've been thinking about this question. I feel like it might be a little leading, but let's
Journalism Versus Fiction Research Habits
SPEAKER_00just let's just go for it and let's see how it goes. Sure. Absolutely. I'm not afraid of it. Yeah, perfect. So uh, like you mentioned earlier, and when I was doing a little bit of my my research, I read that, you know, you got your degree in journalism. And when it came to the reporting world, uh, you wrote that you'd prefer to reimagine it. And, you know, I think many people in our youths get really attached to what we study and end up working in a different field. I'm no different. But I guess I wanted to know from your perspective what it was like to switch your focus from journalism to creative writing and kind of how that transferred.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, so firstly, the the first answer that bubbles to mind is just so creatively liberating. Because when you're writing something journalistically, you are bound to standards of integrity. You have to accurately report facts. And if you're writing a story of what happened for like a newspaper column and the plot ends anticlimactically, there's always a part of my mind that's like, this isn't such a fun story, but my job is not to have fun, my job is to just relay what happened factually. But once I was switching over to creative writing, it's really, really liberating to be able to just examine the arc of what's happening in the story I'm trying to tell and to perform surgery on it where needed, to drum up the drama, to make for more exciting conclusions. It's just, I think, in a lot of ways, a lot more gratifying for me as a storyteller to have control over the story. A journalist obviously doesn't control the story, all they can do is the presentation, I guess. And even if if the journalist is giving too much effort to how they want to present the story, now you're editorializing, you're putting slant, and that's something that you weren't really supposed to do, anyways, as a journalist either. Right, right. Um, so the short answer is switching from reporting of real-world facts to to moving over to you know, creative storytelling is just really freeing. It it definitely was a more fun way of writing uh for me, just because I've always enjoyed telling stories. Uh ever actually, I didn't say this earlier when I was going through my history, but I have distinct, like fond childhood memories of like in middle school. I went to like my grandparents' beach house with some friends, and we would stay up to like you know one or two in the morning where I was just like improvising a story because they're like, oh, tell a story. And then we had some like characters that would be recurring people, but I would just kind of wing it on the fly and and just make up these characters and these plot lines around these characters. And I had my captive audience of all my friends who were there in the bedroom just watching me tell the story. And ever since then, I just I've enjoyed storytelling. Um gratifying freedom. Um, I'll also say that um in a way, starting as a journalist has brought some maybe bad habits is the wrong word, but I feel somewhat chained by my own education and background because I still have that tendency to over-research that a journalist is supposed to have. Right. You know, as a journalist, we're taught to get in, assess the situation, fact-find, collect information, and then synthesize into a story. But for me, when I write, I will always spend maybe not quite as much time researching as writing, but it can get pretty close sometimes. Where, like in The Men of the Mountain, I I don't know how much spoilers we're having in here, but there's a portion where we're talking about the trajectory of like two spaceships that are traveling and one is ahead of the other. And I was actually, I did some reading on calculating the relativistic effects of how fast ships would have to go, and then I was timing how long it would take for messages to send back and forth between them with special relativity, all for like a single throwaway sentence that one character says, which is just giving the delay in communication. And and most readers are gonna have their eyes gloss right over it and they're not gonna think twice about that detail. But I spent like an entire day trying to make sure that that detail was right.
SPEAKER_01Nice.
SPEAKER_02I think that that that is like um my boulder, I push up as sisyphists, because of my my background in journalism, I just feel obligated to research everything to the fullest extent that I can. Um sometimes just to the detriment of of the creative momentum.
SPEAKER_00But well, I you know, I can hear what you're saying, uh, and and I think that you know I I can see that perspective. For me, when I was reading through, I I really liked that. I mean, I know what you mean, like functionally, it was like there's a delay. This is this is what happens, but the whole reason behind it was really nice to know, you know. Like I in you know, college, I took like an uh an astronomy class, so I learned about the Doppler effect, right? And so I feel like it it kind of has something to do with that. You know, it clicked in my mind. I was like, oh yeah, that makes sense. I like I didn't think about that, I like that, you know. So yep.
SPEAKER_02But then a part of a a voice in the back of my mind is like, you could have just made up a number, and the readers are not gonna know. No mathematician's gonna break out the whiteboard and check my calculations, but I just feel obligated to tell the truth, as I guess a good journalist should.
SPEAKER_00That's a good point. Well, and I feel like you never know with like readers or audiences, like audiences can be way smarter than you might expect. You might have that one person who's like, wait a second.
SPEAKER_02The math isn't math in. So it's it's for that stickler that I try to spend an entire day calculating everything. So hopefully, if they break out the numbers themselves, they won't find much to complain about. I can't vouch for 100% accuracy, but I try to make sure that whenever something occurs to me where I'm like, oh, I should check this for authenticity. I usually do the deep dive and I try to go that mile to make sure things line up. Nice.
SPEAKER_00Well, I feel like it makes your stories very immersive, you know, just to throw that out there.
SPEAKER_02That is that is the hope. That's the reason why I go through the labor. I I want to make sure that no one is taken out when they're like, wait, that's not how that works.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_02I want to make sure they don't have that opportunity.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. But I can also see where it might feel like a detriment to your like schedule, right? It's like, I gotta make something happen and I'm spending a lot of time.
SPEAKER_02I need to I need to hit my writing uh target for today. And when I'm lost in the rabbit hole of pulling up equations for special relativity, it's like I've clearly lost the plot at that point.
SPEAKER_00That's funny. So uh I wanted to talk a little bit more about uh your inspirations,
Influences And Learning From Masters
SPEAKER_00you know. Obviously, creativity has been a big part of your growing up. Uh, and I guess I just wanted to know like what works would you say have inspired your writing the most?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, so when I was young and first started reading books, it was in middle school. Um, and my parents tried to like get me on adult books instead of kids' books at the time. And and they um the first author I really was given a lot of exposure to was Stephen King. Um, because I'd had a friend that had just read Stephen King, and I was like, whoa, he read a grown-up book. I want to read that too. And so I read like Pet Cemetery, which in some scenes is a little traumatizing for young me, but also it's like, whoa, this is the world of like adult entertainment, because I'd only been exposed to like you know young adult writing before. Sure. So I just went on like a Stephen King binge, and I read, I've re I've read more King than just about any author at this point. And that first story that I was telling, that the screenplay that became my first book that I finished, um, is actually kind of pretty heavily based on some of the vibes that come with Stephen King's stories. It's not horror, but it's set in a very, very small town, and the small town is reckoning with events that they don't understand, and a lot of Stephen King's books have that sort of bend to them. Um, it felt a little bit like a love letter to kind of like 80 sci-fi and Stephen King books and all of that all at once. But I have found that ever since then, and even till this day, whatever I'm reading at the time has an effect to kind of manifest a little bit in my work. I feel like I feel like a forensic editor could go through my published books and they could look at each one and make some pretty good guesses about what I was consuming at the time that I wrote it. Um my very first book, I the first book I published, which is not the first one I wrote. In fact, that first one I was talking about that started as a screenplay is not yet published. I might publish it one day. Um, but the first one I published, I had written just after I've read like most of Brandon Sanderson's fantasy series, and I really liked the way that he took fantasy and made it very approachable with like these hard magic systems, and I was like, that's kind of fun. I want to try a transposition of that into the genre of sci-fi. And so the first book that I wrote and published kind of feels a little bit like what if Brandon Sanderson, but in the world of like a cyberpunk city, basically.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Um, so it's the the influences there are kind of undeniable. But then after I wrote that, I was later on, I was reading through uh the first law series by um Abercrombie and the and the follow-up. And as I'm reading them, I really love the way Abercrombie would write certain sentences, like all of his chapters end with such like zippy zinger lines where I'm like, whoa, this is a really sharp way of writing. I want to do some of that too. And then I tried to work a little bit more of that into my own writing. Um, The Men of the Mountain, when I was writing it, I had recently read The Will of the Many, and that one by Eilington is told in the first person perspective. And I was like, whoa, this is a really good way to ensure there's not much distance between the reader and the actual narrative. It makes you feel like you're experiencing it with the reader. And so I feel like a little bit of the Will of the Many's writing style kind of bled into this book because I was thinking, wow, this was effective in one avenue. Let me try to incorporate what I liked from that work into my own. I think when I'm reading, I obviously am there to have fun, I'm there to enjoy the stories, but I also try to look at it from the perspective of this is a craft I enjoy doing, and these are the experts at work, these are the masters of the craft. I have to take lessons from them. And so whenever I see something that feels effective, I just have this tendency to try to take my lessons and incorporate them as best I can.
SPEAKER_00Totally. And I think that's like a great method for growth and challenging yourself as well. I mean, you know, I guess that makes me wonder, and this doesn't necessarily have to be a question, but like, you know, was there ever, or like may you have had the experience where you really liked something that a writer did stylistically that you tried and like didn't quite work for you?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, that is an interesting question. And I don't really know that I've ever had a like a failed experiment like that, just because I think the elements that I latch onto are ones that I feel like I already know would work well for the stories I'm trying to tell.
SPEAKER_01Totally.
SPEAKER_02I have read things or I'm like, oh, this is good, but this is not my genre. I'm not gonna try to write something like this, and so I have not tried to incorporate those elements. Um but I I think at least I've been relatively choosy about the aspects that I try to incorporate, um, which has at least meant no catastrophic failures, as far as I'm aware. For all I know, maybe the readers absolutely despise a certain thing I'm doing. They haven't told me. Who knows?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I I doesn't sound like it to me. Uh, and you know, what is failure really?
SPEAKER_02Um so I mean, I feel like with the arts, there isn't really such a thing as failure. I I've heard it said that like there aren't really bad books. Every book has its audience, but the question is can the audience that that book would appeal to ever even find it? How do you reach them? Right. But I think that you, as like a thought experiment, anyone listening to this, if you if you think of like your your favorite book of all time and you go to like the goodreads for that book, yeah, you will find one-star reviews absolutely slamming the book that you love. And some of them will be making some legitimate points, but it's just because there's not a good fit between what that reader was looking for and what the book had to offer.
SPEAKER_00Totally makes sense, yeah.
Sci Fi As A Cautionary Lens
SPEAKER_00So I guess switching gears, moving forward a little bit as well, uh, you know, most of your writing seems to have this futuristic cyberpunk flair. And do you think that stories in this genre are better vehicles for thought leadership, or perhaps just better food for thought, in our increasingly technologic age?
SPEAKER_02Um the short answer is yes, I do. Um, because I feel like right now our society is at a bit of an inflection point where the way things have been historically doesn't provide a good way to predict where things are going. I think that you're looking at acceleration in a lot of different technological avenues and imagining what comes next and deciding how we should process the problems that our society is facing. If you're looking at the past, I don't think you're going to find the answers that we need. Um, I do think sci fi is a bit like innately pessimistic. And that's something that's kind of required by the genre because we're setting our stories in the future. We need to have conflict in our stories for them to be interesting. And that means we're kind of forced to be forecasting conflict in the future. Like I said, it's a bit pessimistic. But I do think that pessimistic. Optimism can have some value in a similar way to how some people sometimes say like anxiety has some value. As a human being, there's a reason we evolve to have anxiety. It makes sure that, you know, if there's like a snake in the bush, we don't approach that bush. We're afraid of the snake, so we don't get bit. I think that having this wariness about where we're going ensures that we don't get bit by the snakes that right now we ourselves are building. I think that we have a lot of current directions that we're developing that have a lot of dangers. And I feel like we're not taking all of those dangers seriously enough. I'm of the belief that AI specifically is like the largest existential risk humanity may have ever faced, perhaps since we were developing our atomic bombs. I don't know if you saw the movie Oppenheimer, but I I enjoyed when they had that scene where they're like, when we do this test, we might just light the whole atmosphere on fire. Um, and they decided, well, the needs of the war are so great, we have to take this risk, even if we think there's a chance it could destroy everything. Yeah. And when I think back at that moment, I'm like affronted. I'm like, how dare those people have taken that risk to end everything just on the justification that they needed this bomb developed right then and now.
SPEAKER_00Yep.
SPEAKER_02And for all the outrage I feel that they risk so much, I feel like right now we as humanity are once again flirting with disaster when we're developing systems that can be potentially better than humans at everything humans do, to the point where they wouldn't necessarily need humans anymore. And I just in some ways am a little bit anxious about that future. I imagine that when we as humans want to build our roadways, we don't really consult the ants and the anthill we bulldoze as we're building that road because there is such a gulf between what we as humans are and what ants can understand that we don't even think it's worth the time to ask them. And I'm imagining when we are developing entities that theoretically for our future could be so much smarter than we are, as we are to ants, it's like, why do we think that they're gonna consult with us before they do whatever they want to do?
SPEAKER_00Sure.
SPEAKER_02So, in some ways, you can call me a little bit of a technologic doomer, but I feel like we need some doomerism to make sure that we are checking the risks. We want to make sure that we are paying attention to where this all could be marching. I'll say that the Men of the Mountain specifically doesn't dwell on AI Doom because I feel like I wrote a lot of AI Doom into Starfall. That was the first one I published. And then Early Adopter is a collection of short stories that also tried to examine it from a few different bands. But after writing those two, I was like, all right, let me do something more fun, let me do something different, let me set a story in the far future. Um, and I wasn't engaging with those specific themes. But yeah, I just I think the number one tool in managing risky behavior is just knowledge of that risk. I think that like information is power. And through sci-fi, I try to at least spend some energy educating people about the risks that we're facing. I try to present it in a way that is grounded and based on actual science instead of just like fear-mongering to make sure that the people reading it walk away pondering, like, huh. I guess I never really gave thought to the way that such and such works. Maybe this is something we need to be paying attention to. Um, there's a bit of a weird connection that just came to mind. Right now, at the moment this is being recorded, there is a bit of an Ebola outbreak going on in Africa right now. And the reason why it is such a big problem in that region is there are these burial customs for the cultures down there where when someone dies, the family and the community will often spend a lot of time with the body. They they they do all the dressing, it's part of their ritualistic customs. And I think that there's not a lot of education about germ theory. So these people are spending time with the people who have died of Ebola, and then they themselves are contracting Ebola and the outbreak is self-sustaining. Where I think that if you had disseminated information more effectively, if you'd let people know, hey, this ritual and custom that you obviously have a lot of reason to love uh is also perpetuating harm, then those people armed with that information can start making more informed decisions for the community safety.
unknownTotally.
SPEAKER_02It's just, I think arming people with information is very important. I think that's another spillover effect for my background in journalism, but making sure that people are informed of risk, I think is the best way to mitigate risk. Totally. Um and I think that humanity for a long time has not really done a good job at staying on top of our risks. I don't I don't know if you've ever seen that dumb Twitter screenshot where it was like a researcher says, we have finally finished compl um building the torment nexus from the beloved sci-fi classic, Don't Build the Torment Nexus. And it's like we've had people shouting our warnings for most of history, and I think a lot of people ignore it, but I'm gonna still join the chorus of voices trying to shout those warnings. I'm gonna be one of the people saying, Don't build the torment nexus.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_02And if people go on to build it, I guess it's not my problem anymore. I've done my best.
SPEAKER_00But think how much money the shareholders from the torment. From the torment next.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, someone, someone will get rich. Yeah. Yeah, that's the I think it's a universal human constant that people kind of tend to be pretty short-sighted. I think people are looking on their short-term future, and that's why I've been drawn to sci-fi by writing about the future. I feel like we're able to at least direct people's attention a bit further ahead than they might be looking right now. Totally. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00No, I that makes a lot of sense, man. There's like four or five things that just kind of, you know, my brain snags on, you know, hearing you talk about this stuff, you know. Um, like having it be really important to have like education, you know, to inform people about things going wrong. You know, obviously there's misinformation out there, right? So people be like, no, don't listen to them. They're doing something wrong, you know.
SPEAKER_02Um my first published book is um the book Starfall was it was it was my COVID project, actually. And one of the main dominant themes of this book was AI being used for the purposes of mass manipulation. Um, and when I was writing this book, it was it was again 2020, my COVID project, I was writing about this far-off, distant, dystopian future where AI will be able to start making our art. It can make paintings, it can write books, and I was thinking, wow, that'll be a crazy future when it comes true in like four decades. Right. And then I had this manuscript finished in 2020, and like 2021 is when OpenAI announces here, this is new thing called Chat GPT. And then they're like, we have this new thing called DALI, which will make pictures for whatever you type. And I remember having this moment where I was like pulling my hair, like, this wasn't supposed to happen so soon. Our society is not largely ready for this. And each subsequent model that's enhanced its capabilities of creating useful content has also become much more efficient at creating problematic and manipulative content. And you've I everyone has seen manipulation campaigns happening on just about any place that people interact digitally. You'll get so much misinformation, people making images of people doing things they never did, or whatever nonsense uh evidence they want to create to back up their points. So it is a huge, huge problem. And I think that socially we just don't have good solutions for the risk this technology poses.
SPEAKER_00Absolutely, absolutely. Kind of feels like uh that reminds me of a saying in Jurassic Park with Dr. Ian Malcolm, like, spent so much time wondering if you could, you never thought if you should. Exactly right. Yeah, and you know, I think uh also kind of going back to like education is more important than uh in a sense like more important than like abstinence, right? Like I know they uh there's been some issues with like dare when they're like if you do drugs once, you will die. And a kid tries, you know, kid tries like smoking weed, and he's like, Oh, I didn't know. And they're like, wait, I didn't die. It was like actually it's kind of fucking sick.
SPEAKER_02Uh let's yeah, they're like, huh, if I was lied to about this one thing, then maybe everything they told me is a lie. And then that erodes trust in public authorities, and that I think is another parallel problem to what you were talking about. Not only do we have so much misinformation, but I think public trust in institutions is at the lowest I can ever remember it being in my life. You have this like widespread skepticism going around.
SPEAKER_00Totally.
SPEAKER_02Um, and I think that it just creates this climate where nobody can even agree on a consensus of reality anymore. And yeah, you can't hold society's social fabric together when you have such a fundamental disconnect and people's belief of what society even is. So it's yet another reason why I feel a little bit pessimistic about the current state of affairs. Um, and I do wonder if some of that pessimism of of the modern age is why I'm so interested in science fiction for all the reasons I've mentioned so far.
SPEAKER_00I mean, totally. And uh, you know, I guess that reminds me of one of the things I hooked on to, because it is easy to be very pessimistic about stuff.
SPEAKER_02Like um, I think what makes it feel not great is just when you start looking at all the parallels between where we're at, where we're going, and what was supposed to be just the dystopia that sci-fi authors dreamt up as hopefully we'll never go here. Yeah. It's like,
Why Write A Cruise Ship Thriller
SPEAKER_02wait, we're getting really close to there already. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00It's like, oh wow, this water is quite warm.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, so the the frog boiling in the pot of water was something that in my in my first book, Cyber, uh not Cyberpunk, sorry, Starfall, the Cyberpunk book, it's actually comes up as a recurring motif at a viewpoint where like characters are realizing things got worse and worse slowly but slowly, and then they realized wait, we're we're boiling now. We should have done something about this a long time ago.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, totally. Yeah. Well, that was a fantastic answer to that question. I was worried that would be too leading, but I think that was that was great. Um but uh let's move forward here. So after this discussion, why the Halcyon crisis? Yeah, uh what prompted you to write a contemporary crime thriller?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, whenever I'm doing my little table on author events, I always say sci-fi, sci-fi, sci-fi, and here's the black sheep of the family. This one's an action thriller. But yeah, after doing so many like heavy projects, I was like, I want to do something, or I could just switch off the brain and write something fun. I was writing what felt like as I was writing it, like it'd be a Michael Bay movie, not something that you're supposed to take very seriously.
SPEAKER_01Totally.
SPEAKER_02Um, I'm I'm from South Florida and growing up, um, we would always go on cruise ships as family vacations. And while we're on those cruise ships, sometimes just as like an interesting discussion thought experiment, we'd be like, what if pirates sailed up? What what what mitigation tactics does this ship even have? How would they handle it? And just from those conversations, slowly over the course of several vacations, I started playing around with the idea of, huh, this would actually be a kind of fun movie.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Just, you know, pirates on a cruise ship. It it pressed like the the fun buttons in my brain, just like how it just sort of like diehard, but in a very novel setting where you have like, you know, uh a takeover, you might have like uh someone trying to do good, but hiding from the people who are taking over the venue. And I was like, yeah, that would be fun if I one day made a movie out of it. Yeah, but then once I switched to book writing, I had a moment where I was like, yeah, that that I movie idea I was always playing around with. I can just slam this out over a single summer and not really have to spend too much time in drafting and researching and and doing my due diligence and calculating relativistic effects for moving spaceships. I'm really just write a fun movie that you turn off your brain for. Um so it was a single summer spent writing it. And by the end, I was like, okay, yeah, this is fun, I'll throw it online. It's the one book that I haven't really spent any energy promoting just because of how different it is from my other work. But I had a lot of people who have read all of my what I consider main books, they're like, Oh, I want to read more, and then they read that one. They're like, Yeah, that was fun. It was cool. It was a good one said it was a great like way to spend an airplane ride. They just read through it end to end. Yeah, and so it's really not meant to be that serious. It was something that I just did to to kill some time between the meatier, more substantive books I was writing.
SPEAKER_00For sure. And you know what is important, even in like some of these uh pessimistic times, is just having fun. You know, you gotta have fun. Why not have a have an awesome action crime thriller on on a cruise ship? Why not? Yeah. We could use that. We could use that. I agree.
SPEAKER_02Unless you're on the cruise ship. You don't want any uh yeah pirates attacking you, but I I I just I think it's it's fun.
SPEAKER_00It's not meant to be taken seriously. For sure, for sure. Well, thank you for that answer. Uh the next question I
Coffee Shop Writing Routine
SPEAKER_00got for you is what is your writing process like? Do you have any special rituals to get you in the zone?
SPEAKER_02Yes, I do. Um, first and maybe most important for me is that I have never been so good at remaining productive at home when I'm in my home environment. I have too many distractions. I spend a lot of time at leisure and home. So trying to write in home, I'll inevitably get sidetracked. So what I would usually do is I make a circuit of all of my like local coffee shops. On a writing day, I'll arrive at a coffee shop like around like noon or so, and I'll just I'll I'll be sipping at a gigantic drink and I'll be tapping away and I try to hit my word count goal. Um, every writing day, I I am for about 2,000 words at a minimum. But if I feel the story is moving quickly, I'll just go until the momentum stops.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02My number one record for a single day was actually 10,000 words, but that is far and beyond what it normally is. But usually I can at least hit my 2K and then I call that a day. Um and it's actually meant that a lot of the coffee shops in my area, they know me by my my face, they know my order and everything, and I'll just set up, I'll write. And in a bunch of them, I actually, if they have like bookshelves, some of my books are on the shelf with a little sticker like written in this coffee shop because that's where most of the writing, the actually the magic happens. And then even when the draft is done, when it comes time to like edit and get my book into sharper shape, I'll also generally do that at the coffee shops as well. Nice. That's awesome. Got any uh coffee shops you want to shout out? Um, I'm a big fan of Sip JavaCo in Fort Lauderdale. That's probably where most of the men of the mountain came together specifically, but different books have had different locations that I've spent more time at. Um, in fact, sometimes when I think about writing a book, like a flavor of a certain coffee drink will come to mind because it's just so strongly associated with it.
SPEAKER_00That's super interesting. So, like, so you you switch up your coffee order then, right?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, periodically. If it's like I'm it's time for a change. And when I'm starting a new project, sometimes I'll also try to change the locations that I frequent just to make it feel like a fresher start.
SPEAKER_00That's super interesting. Nice, very cool.
SPEAKER_02I guess I've heard people say, like, uh, if you break up with a partner, you should change your perfume and your ringtone so that it feels like a new start. And it's like when I'm changing my book project, I want to change up my coffee shops, I want to change up my order so it feels like I'm starting fresh, basically.
SPEAKER_00Nice. I like that. That's so interesting. Uh, what would uh what's the coffee order for men of the mountain?
SPEAKER_02So for the men of the mountain, when I was writing it at that coffee shop, Sip Javico, I would always go for they they have a thing called good karma, which is like it was a big latte with like a caramel and a vanilla syrup, but then I would add cold foam, and into the cold foam they would put like a cookie dough syrup. Oh wow. So absolute diabetic nightmare. Uh very sugary, but I I really I just got hooked on it while I was writing it, and that's the one that comes to mind when I think of what I was drinking while I wrote that book.
SPEAKER_00That's awesome. Nice.
SPEAKER_02It's good stuff.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah, it sounds like it. It sounds like it. I I drink most of my coffee black, joyless, joyless. What about joyless?
SPEAKER_02There is, I think that there is a certain elegance to like a good roast. In fact, there's a coffee shop that I also frequent called Wells Coffee in my area in Fort Lauderdale, and they have really, really good high-quality coffee beams that they roast on premises in this like gigantic coffee roaster that looks like a like a steam engine on a train. And whenever you walk in, since they're roasting it, it's in the air. When I leave, it's on my clothes. I smell like coffee for the rest of the day. But if there were any shop around here that I drink it black occasionally from, it's well like nice stuff.
SPEAKER_00Awesome. Yeah, it's it's true. Having a nice roast is really important, especially when drinking the coffee black for sure. For sure.
SPEAKER_02Uh um, and then I guess to end that uh that line of thought, it's um I'll do my writing in my shops. Yeah. When the book is finished, finished. I actually I always take a few months off because I want to step away from the project so I can come back to it with a fresh set of eyes. How long it is will depend on how busy things are in the rest of my life. Sure. Um, but usually at least two or three months. And then when I come back, that's when I start the editing. I do my first rounds of edits myself because, like I said before, I have that formal background in actual copy editing. I do feel like I can catch the grammar errors myself. Yeah. But then once I finish that first round of edits, I usually send it out to a bunch of people to do some early like beta or alpha reading, depending on how finalized I feel like it is. And then when I collect all that feedback, I then make more editorial modifications if I want to advance the plot line here or there or change how a scene unfolds. Right. Um, but I save that until after people have read it and give their thoughts.
SPEAKER_00Right. That makes sense. Always coming back to with fresh eyes. I think that's it's an important thing to do when coming back to the work for sure.
SPEAKER_02I find that if if I don't space it out, I just have no ability to edit it objectively. And as a result, I think like if I remember writing the sentence recently enough, my brain sort of recalls what the sentence is supposed to be. And so even if I did it right it that way because I flubbed a word or something, yeah. I ran just read what I meant, not what I actually wrote. Yeah when I come back months later, I I actually sometimes am surprised by the way that scenes twist and turns because I've forgotten the fine details, but I remember the broad strokes. And that makes it a lot easier to catch the errors.
SPEAKER_00Totally. No, that definitely makes sense. Um just makes me think of uh another saying, and I'm it's not really gonna be a saying when I say it, uh, but like the idea that it's like from a bird's eye view, it uh things are a lot clearer, right? So just kind of getting out of that story and getting to look at it more as a whole, and again with the fresh eyes, uh totally great sense. Um great.
Men Of The Mountain Premise
SPEAKER_00Well, let's talk a little bit more about the men of the mountain. And when it comes to spoilers, um, I'm okay to have as many spoilers as as you are. I think all we'll do is just be like, spoiler warning. Um, and I can even do that like during editing or something. I'm happy to call out spoilers before I say them. Yeah, perfect.
SPEAKER_02And and I'm gonna avoid spoiling too much, but um the the book itself obviously it starts feeling like it's one genre, and then over the course of that story, it reveals itself to be a little bit more sci-fi than it at first might seem. Right. But we've been spending so long talking about sci-fi that ship has sailed. I'm gonna I'm gonna talk about it in its true sci-fi self, not the fantasy book that it seems like you're starting.
SPEAKER_00For sure, for sure. Great. Well, I guess with that, uh, what inspired the main premise of this story?
SPEAKER_02So uh one thing that I remember leading to like the first bits of this idea in my head was I'm I'm a fan of there's a video game Horizon Zero Dawn, which is set in like a far distant future after humanity has collapsed. Um, and you play as a protagonist who runs around with a bow and arrow, but battling these like robotic dinosaurs. Yeah. And what I really liked about it was this clash of like the old versus the new. You had this, like, this, these robots, which are very advanced, and you had these like buried bunkers with really cool technology, and then you have this tribal primitivism. And I thought like the contrast between them was a really interesting thing to explore because it lets you explore technology from the perspective of someone who is so far removed from technology that it seems like it's basically magic. In fact, there's um a common sci-fi trope, uh Clark's third law. Um, I think it's Clark's third law, or maybe I'm mixing whose it is. I think it's Arthur Clark's, um, which is um any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Um and it's just been something that I really enjoyed running with in this book because you have a protagonist who's raised from a tribal society looking at technology, and how could you process that if not just saying that this is magic?
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Um, so I I really enjoyed the challenge of writing from that limited perspective and trying to puzzle out how they would see this, how would they name it with the nomenclature and terminology they have so far in their life? And I just I found it a very fun perspective to write from.
SPEAKER_00Absolutely.
SPEAKER_02I had always when when I wrote my my first book, Starfall, that one ends kind of turning towards spacefaring. And I I wanted to write a far future follow-up to that book about like a colony that was established somewhere in the stars, but it had somehow failed, and it was about like investigations into that. And I started playing around with this idea of like a far future colony beyond its you know functional time period and what might it be like, what might be left over after a colony fails. And that was like a playground that I was just toying with ideas in. I was like, oh, maybe there was like a different story unrelated to the first book that I published, where I would have more freedom in how I want to set things up, and it could be a fun story.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Um and from that, just like more and more little ideas glommed onto it. Um I feel like when I come up with a book idea, it's like I'll come up with premise, then I'll come up with like certain scenes, and then I'll come up with characters, and I'll figure how do I make this puzzle piece fit together. And then before too long, I had an outline. So nice. The rest is process, the rest is coffee shops and editing.
SPEAKER_00Fair enough.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_00No, that's awesome. And It was a lot of fun as a reader too. Like, you know, cause as more of the sci-fi elements unfold, and as there are some technologies that, like, you know, you or I as readers or like the audience would be familiar with, it's really funny to hear the characters be unfamiliar with it and be like something that's just makes so much logical sense for us doesn't quite click for them. They're like, that idea's silly. And it's like, yeah.
SPEAKER_02I had a lot of fun. I had a lot of fun with every one of those moments. As I'm writing it, you can imagine me chuckling to myself of just like they wouldn't get that. And that would be a fun bit of it's it's like dramatic irony on behalf of the reader when you know something, but the characters don't know it, and then you get to see them looking at it as an outsider. It's it's been enjoyable to inhabit that space. Totally.
SPEAKER_00And it's enjoyable to read it, for sure. That's that's the hope. That's the event.
Building A Human Hero In First Person
SPEAKER_00Yeah, the next question that I have for you is Cade suffers the hero's journey from a different perspective. I guess I've I've learned this recently, that others find him more capable than he finds himself, and part of his becoming is starting to see himself how others see him. Why is this important for this story?
SPEAKER_02I think that's a that's a very good question. And it's when I was trying to mock out all of my characters, I did spend a lot of time trying to, you know. I'm always an outliner. I want to like engineer most of the story before I start. And I spent a while locking in on this particular choice. But I think that when reading a story, I feel like the audience needs a certain amount of buy-in through like authenticity in characters. And especially when you're going through a first-person narrative, you're getting in the head of that character. I think that it needs to be believably uh inhabitable for the reader to really stick with what's going on. Um, you don't want them to be like too perfect, too flawless, because we want them to feel human, and humans generally are not perfect or flawless. Everybody's got their something. Um and I just wanted to make sure that this character felt like they had a very real mindset that you were inhabiting when you're reading their first person thoughts. I did this, I did that. I wanted to make sure that that line of thinking felt very easy to identify with, as opposed to being something that is just so far removed from normal humanity. Like, like right now, the stories or the books that I'm reading belong to a series called The Sun Eater, which I've actually been enjoying the books, but the main character, his name is Hadrian Marlowe. He's telling the story in first person, but this character is like a like a Greek marble bust of a man. Like he doesn't feel like a real person. He he waxes poetic, he's melodramatic, he is like in all accounts, like a flawless hero anointed by a god. And when you're reading like his first person accounting, it's not a very easy headspace for me as a listener and reader to slot into because I am not that person. There's a big gulf between the human that I am and like I said, the marble statue that that viewpoint character is. And I wanted to make sure that when I was writing it, there wasn't that distance. I wanted to make sure that he felt approachable, that he felt normal. He's plagued by insecurities because I think a lot of humans out there, a lot of people, maybe even listening, feel insecure in some way or another.
SPEAKER_01Oh, sure.
SPEAKER_02Um, he is thrust into a role that he doesn't feel ready for. And I wanted to make sure that he doesn't just say, okay, well, guess I'm I'm the leader now. I wanted him to have those moments of doubt where he's lifted up by people around him because I think most people listening have a moment in their life when they feel not ready and they're lifted up by people around them.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_02I just maybe the short answer is I wanted people to identify with this viewpoint. I wanted people to feel like this is a human viewpoint instead of like an archetype to fit a story role, if that makes sense.
SPEAKER_00Totally. Absolutely.
SPEAKER_02Um, and I hope by the end it makes their journey into coming into himself a little bit. I hope it makes it a little bit more satisfying and and uh fulfilling because you feel like it starts in a position that maybe the listener can identify with and it ends to them finding their stride. It is in a way a bit of a coming of age story for the main character. Um, and I want to just to take the reader on like a realistic coming-of-age arc.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, through narrating it, like I I felt that like through you know, your prose or like the way that like he speaks about himself, about what's going on, like it does change throughout the book, and you feel that change as um as you go through. So it does feel like very organic.
SPEAKER_02Um I would count that to be hopefully that you know job accomplished, because that would that was my goal when setting up to write him. I wanted to make sure that that was the impression.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, absolutely. He's a he's a very fun character to play.
SPEAKER_02Uh I I enjoyed him. I think he did a really, really good job. And I to what you were saying, I think by the end you can almost hear some of the transformation in the way that you were reading the lines. I think that early on the reader can pick up on some of that uncertainty. And then as the story goes on, I feel like you did a good job at projecting more and more of the confidence. I I'm really excited to get the audiobook out there because I do think that you, you know, knocked it out of the park. Well, really, really solid performance.
SPEAKER_00I really appreciate that. That means a lot. Thank you. Um so moving on to the next question is you do a fantastic job at keeping optimism on the edge
Hope Inside Bleak Worlds
SPEAKER_00of a knife. Why is it important to keep optimism in bleak settings? But also why is depicting bleak worlds necessary? And we might have touched on this a little bit.
SPEAKER_02We so we we ran tangential to this, but I actually just to I guess address the extra points I wanted to add, I think the last part first, you said why is depicting bleak worlds necessary? And I think that does tie back to what we were talking about, sci-fi as like a cautionary tale, as a means of hopefully course correction as people are brought to realize the risks we're facing. Um, but I do think it is important to keep optimism. And I wanted to make the character of Cade relatively optimistic. And that is something that I have felt strongly about since the beginning of the project, because I think sometimes you can overdo it a little bit with the pessimism. We we read and we watch TV and movie for escapism. And I think that if our escapism is like worse than the real world, we're not gonna want to escape there anymore. Yeah. Um, I remember that I a while ago was I tried to watch the show The Handmaid's Tale with a friend of mine, right? Based on the books by Atwood. And and pretty early on, I remember just in the first season, there was some horrifying scene going on. And I just look at my friend, and he looks at me, and we have this look of like, why are we spending our time watching everybody be so miserable in a fictionalized, miserable world that I would hope would never come to fruition? I think that the work definitely already had served its purpose to us as like pointing out, hey, there are particular gender dynamics that could be very harmful. And but once I got that, I was like, all right, I don't need to experience any more of this misery. I wanted to turn to other media. Um I feel like when it comes to dystopian media, it is very, very easy to just hammer the reader or viewer over the head with the same miserable note over and over and over again.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02But they're not going to want to read that book. They're not going to want to spend time in that universe. Um. So if sci-fi is to serve its purpose as being something that steers us towards a brighter path, I think it requires a belief in that brighter path. We have to make sure that the reader walks away thinking there is still hope. There is a way that we can write the ship. And so that's why when I was writing, I always thought it was very important to have that through line of even though things might be bad, there is a possible good future in store.
SPEAKER_01Totally.
SPEAKER_02Um, and and that in Men of the Mountain is Cade's optimism in my anthology of short stories, Early Adopter. Some of them are bleak, but I put some that are uplifting and happy because I wanted the reader to read, okay, maybe there is potentially a poignant way through this. Um and it's when I when I talk about the anthology Early Adopter, I keep looking offside because I have it right here. This is that one. Um, I I sometimes pitch it to people as like Black Mirror. Um but Black Mirror as a TV show, I feel like falls into the pessimism trap where 99% of the episodes are really dour and glum. And when you watch them, you feel bad. Yeah. But I remember they have at least one or two that are really profound and beautiful. Like there was the one that was about people going into like a digital afterlife. Um, and I guess at first that already kind of sounds pretty bleak, but by the end, it ended on a really profound note. And I remember after I was finishing that episode, I was like, whoa, this made me feel some emotions. And it made me feel like, okay, I can handle another few bleak episodes if every now and again I get the uplifting episode.
SPEAKER_00That's right.
SPEAKER_02So I feel like you just you need that optimism. Otherwise, instead of it being cautionary, it's just depressing. Totally. Yeah. Too easy to give in to despair. Um exactly. Especially if you keep heaping more and more despair on the person as they go through the work.
SPEAKER_00Absolutely. That makes good sense. Well, I guess this is also somewhat tangential. But what do you think is the role of the doomed
Doomed Heroes And Epigraph Worldbuilding
SPEAKER_00hero? We have a couple of doomed heroes in Men of the Mountain.
SPEAKER_02Yes, and I'm gonna try to answer it without spoiling here, just because this one feels like it could be slightly more sensitive, but there are a couple characters that might plausibly fit that role. And when I was setting out to like write these characters, I wanted to I wanted to focus on other elements of their drama over the course of the plot. And I think that as soon as you forecast to the reader that this character fills the role of the doomed hero, I think it allows us to stop focusing on the, oh, will they or won't they make it, and instead focus on the other interesting parts of their journey. Because the reader kind of knows they see the neon sign, if they're genre savvy, they know where this particular arc is going. And so I think they start to then ask themselves different questions like how will the characters carry on when this character is no longer able to guide them? It changes the way that we're anticipating the turns of the plot ahead. And it was an interesting device to toy around with. Um, and I do think that it's only the genre savvy readers that are gonna really see the neon flashing signs. I think it's easy to just follow along with the plot, not think too deeply, and you know, maybe be surprised by some character departures. But for the readers who know it's coming, I think it also gives this sense of like looming danger. Like you know in the distance that there is some threat. And I think that does a little bit to add to some tension in the earlier acts when you get the feeling that this character is in a precarious position. Totally. Um, managing tension in a first person book like Men of the Mountain was an interesting challenge because all my previous books that I'd written before had been like third person or third person omniscient versus limited, and I had the ability to hop around from here's one scene with our protagonist, now here's a scene with the antagonist. And by jumping back and forth, you can kind of keep escalating that tension. But in Men of the Mountain, where it's first person, where the only events the reader knows are the events that Kate himself's witnessing, yeah, I felt like I was relying a little bit on extrinsic factors to the story to build some tension early on, where the reader is thinking about things that maybe Kate isn't thinking about, and that might lead to some early tension.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. No, and and I don't think this would be any spoiler at all, but you know, every chapter you kind of start with a little insert, a little information, a blurb that I think really helps color the story more and just do like what you were saying is like it makes you think about stuff that Cade's not thinking about and sort of fills out this sort of picture and themes as the book unravels.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, so epigraphs are a thing that um when I was reading in middle school, Stephen King used to do a lot of epigraphs, but he would do it at like big chunks of his books. Like if there's like a part one, part two, part three, he'd throw them at each of the major dividers. Um, and then Brandon Sanderson, whom I read a lot of in um in like college, he did lots of epigraphs too. But his epigraphs are generally pretty small. Um, I really like them as a tool for, like you had said, not only fleshing out the world a little bit to make the setting feel more plausible, but I think uh it can be used for dramatic irony in the sense that the characters are not privy to information that the reader has. And with that extra information, the reader can sometimes get a new lens on a scene that's different from what the character can see with their limited amount of information. And it's a device that I enjoy playing with. I feel like it is in some circles seen as kind of lazy writing because it's I'm I'm trying to get the benefit of world building without needing to seed it cleverly within an unfolding plot. But one thing that I always disliked is when that sort of world building is done very clumsily. It can it can take me out of a story. Like if a character stops to explain something to another character that they both should know in their world, I'm pulled out of a story. Yeah, I would almost rather have just dropped that information to the reader. It's like, hey, me, the author telling you this is an interesting little tidbit. Um, but the the characters don't have to pause and explain. Totally. Like, like a random egregious example that surfaced to my mind right away is in the first season of the TV series Game of Thrones, not the books, but in the TV series, the very first line out of Jamie Lannister looking at his sister, Cersei Lannister, he says, as your brother, it's my job to tell you you worry too much. He just has to say in his first line of dialogue, as your brother, I need to tell you you worry too much. And so that's like, you know, the writer saying, Notch, notch, these are brother, sister, but it's like it just feels like it takes you out of the moment because it's something that they try to incorporate into a scene, but it feels stilted. I have enjoyed the freedom of just kind of peppering it into this thing that is totally external to the story, yeah, but in a way is not as external to the story as it seems. Because by the end, there is a plausible way that that could have been part of the story. Um without going into spoiler territory, though. But there is a way that it is that information is meant to be provided to the person reading the book.
SPEAKER_00Totally. Yeah, and it was funny, just as you were going with your example, it's like, yeah, like the shows where they're like, Hey, sis, how have you been since mom died? It's been since mom died. How are you holding up? Exactly.
SPEAKER_02That's that's when it's done poorly. And so epigraphs give me a good way to sidestep that risk. Totally. Um, and that's why it's a device I've enjoyed.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I think it's uh I I think it's well done. Um, that's what I'm gonna say. Uh that's the hope. That's the hope. And it is funny too. Epigraph. I've learned a word today. Fantastic. There we go.
SPEAKER_02There we go. Stick around with uh writers, you'll learn all sorts of fun little craft words. Yeah, right.
SPEAKER_00Well, let's move on to talking a little bit more about the audiobook or
Audiobooks Joy Challenges And Advice
SPEAKER_00audiobooks. So you've had two of your books turned into audiobooks so far. This is going to be the third one.
SPEAKER_02Correct, yes. Men of the Mountain will be number three.
SPEAKER_00Fantastic. So we touched on some of this stuff before, but what was your what is your favorite thing about having your works converted to audio?
SPEAKER_02So I really do think it is the rush and joy of having like your words interpreted by an actor or actress with talent to breathe life into them. Like sometimes I'll write a line and then I'll look back at it and I'll read the sequence of words and it feels a little clunky. But then when someone reads it and they put the right inflection and the right tone and speed, and it's like, no, this does sound natural. This is what I'd originally heard in my head, and it's only later on that it looks rough. I feel like the talent of a narrator is almost like a multiplier on top of whatever value I started with in the book. And you can end up with a project that is a lot more uh it's immersive. It feels more real because it's brought to life by that talent. Um, I always, when I get the first draft chapters back from narrators, I'm always so excited to dig in because I'm like, I want to see what this product is gonna be like. And then as I'm listening, I'm like, whoa, there is a whole dimension to the story that I didn't experience myself when I wrote it. Um and that is very, very exciting as a writer to just feel like your work has been breathed into life. I can actually still remember what I was doing or where I was when I started drafting for all the audiobooks, when I've started like proofing, I should say, for all the audiobooks that I've now had produced. It's like I I remember for like early adopter, I was actually hiking in Colorado when the narrator's like, hey, I finally recorded the first story in the set. You can give it a listen. And I remember listening as I was walking and I was like, whoa, this is hitting all the emotional notes just like I want it to. I remember for Starfall, I was actually stuck in an airport in Las Vegas for a flight that was delayed like 12 hours. So I had holed up in like a Wendy's and I had my laptop and I plugged in and I was listening. And even though I was holed up for 12 hours, I spent like six of those listening to a gigantic chunk, and I was like, whoa, this is really coming to life. And then with yours, I was actually I was on um, I was on a bike ride in a park when I first started to really dive in. It was in South Florida, it was it was really hot, but I remember as I was riding my bike, I was like, ooh, he's doing a good job. I remember listening to like a portion where you gave like Hectan Civics a really raspy wheeze, and I was like, wow, he's bringing this character to life. I can I can see the movie in my head without needing for all the extra sound effects, like graphic audio's guy. And and I just, it's very exciting to see coming together.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Well, awesome. That's really sweet. That's a sweet answer. So I guess let's look at the flip side of that coin. Uh, what's the most challenging thing about having your works converted into audio?
SPEAKER_02So I know that a lot of people, not necessarily, but a lot of people have to reckon with the relinquishing of creative control. I think that when an author writes a story, it's obviously very personal. We pour a lot of ourselves into our work. And when we're writing a book, we have ultimate authority over exactly how a given thing is written, about the order that events are presented. Authors have control over what appears on their cover most of the time, unless you're working with a big publisher. But when you hand it off to an audiobook producer, you're obviously relinquishing a lot of control. And if the narrator decides to read a character in a certain way and deliver a certain line with a certain tone, you don't really have the power to say, hey, go to this chapter, reread this line, but make him sound angrier. Any author who tried to do that would probably be dropped by their narrator pretty quickly. Um so I feel like the relinquishment of control of something that is otherwise a very personal work can be pretty challenging. Um, and that's why I always try to be very selective with whom I hand my projects off. Do I want to make sure that I've listened to enough work to be confident that they will read it in a way that I'm satisfied with? And even when I'm listening through, if I sometimes hear like a certain line read in a way with an inflection different than I imagined, you just kind of have to trust the expert. You have to trust that they're reading it that way because it fits in the performance they're trying to give. Um, I'm sure screenwriters hitting their script to an actor have experienced the same thing where maybe in their head they thought this line should be read angrily, but then the actor reads it with a little bit more sympathy. But at the end of the day, it's the performance of the actor and the direction of the director that really specifies how the lines are read, more than the intent of the person who wrote the words on the page. So the the giving up of creative control, I think, is what a lot of people that I've spoken to might say first. Um, I can say personally, I like I said, try to trust the experts. I try to let them do their thing. I'm not a film director, I don't know the right way that every single line should be read.
SPEAKER_00Right.
SPEAKER_02Um, but I know that a lot of authors struggle with that um specifically.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I mean that totally makes sense. Uh like writing a book, it's like that's your baby, you know? Exactly. So that makes a lot of sense, and where it can totally be gratifying to have someone shed a new perspective, sometimes it might be like, oh, I don't like that perspective.
SPEAKER_02Exactly. Exactly. I'm sure authors love it when it aligns with what they looked for, but if it's a little bit different, they might push back. No, I'm sure most narrators in the industry are very open to working with the author to try to attain their vision.
SPEAKER_01Totally.
SPEAKER_02But I'm also sure that if you hired a narrator and sent a list of like 400 corrections for a chapter, reread this with more inflection, change this to be sadder. Like I said, that that narrator's gonna quit the project pretty quickly.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_02That at a certain point, you gotta let them do their thing.
SPEAKER_00Right.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_00So I guess, you know, tying these two thoughts together, what would be the advice you would give to authors wanting to make their stories into audiobooks?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, so I think the most important thing to tie to the last question is trust the experts. You know, I want you to allow the artists to do what they do well. Just like how if a narrator tried to tell you, hey, rewrite this chapter to do blah, blah, blah, I think an author would be like, This is kind of my wheelhouse. That's your wheelhouse's reading. I'm supposed to be the writer. I think that it's still easy for writers to sometimes get in this mindset of over directing the narrators when you're supposed to trust them to do their craft and do it well.
unknownRight.
SPEAKER_02Now it's actually it's very funny. That I said a narrator shouldn't tell a writer how to write. I in my first book in Starfall, my narrator had a note that he's like, Look, I recorded what you wrote, but he's like, This line was so corny and bad. I recommend you rewrite it. And I looked at it and he was 1000% right. I don't know how that line ended up in the draft, but I sent him an email, like, thank you for putting that out. You are right. It was absolutely awful. I've rewritten it. Here's a new version. He recorded it, no problem. I liked, I really liked that he had the integrity to say, look, this one line is holding this chapter back. It's ridiculously corny. But he didn't make that change for me. He brought it to me. He's like, You really want to consider changing this? And that to me said he's invested in the project. He wants to make this the best version that it can be. Um, and I listened to him in that case, and I'm very glad that I did.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_02But outside of that one narrow circumstance, usually, you know, the writer's write, the readers read.
SPEAKER_00Right. And and I hear, and I I feel like that can kind of go both ways too. Like, cause if I got back some critiques, we're like, oh, can you like for this, maybe this scene, can you sort of bring a little more, you know, sadness into the scene? Like that that makes sense for sure. I think like anybody, it when it's when it becomes very weighty, you know? Yeah, when it's micromanaging. Exactly. It's like it's not just one sentence in the chapter, it's like a few pages in the chapter, or like, you know, multiple chapters or something like that. And it's like, this is that's too much. That's too much. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Um, I mean, I I think most narrators I've worked with, or all narrators I've worked with, um, have been very open to general direction of like, here's what I'm looking for, but I leave the details of actually implementing that to the experts, like I've said. I remember you and I before we started with Men of the Mountain, we had a lot of conversation, setting out expectations for characters. I outlined what I wanted every voice to kind of sound like. And I'm very glad we did that because my first pitch for how I wanted you to handle the character of Fort and Barber, I realized, no, I've given him bad instructions. This read is not gonna end up sympathetic like I want it to. Right. So we workshopped it again, and the end result that you came up with, I love. I think you did an awesome job with that character and his arc. And when my girlfriend was listening through it, she's like, Oh my god, every time he speaks, I feel so sad for him. Because I think you really did a good job at bringing out an uh a side that would not have been audible if we'd stuck with our original plan. So I like that we had that workshop early on.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, me too. That that was definitely great. And I I think it's really funny because uh you're the first author uh who's sort of like called me out for what we call the Pokemon, which I think is hilarious. Yeah, so there were a few of those by the end, but I know that you got them all. Yeah, yeah, no, for sure. But I just think it it was just a really funny like process, maybe behind the scenes, uh, if you will, of just like you know, doing those character voices just to help me like get in for the moment I say their names to be like Fortinbaba, uh Woodsman and stuff like that. And it was just really funny. Like, I just and I never even really noticed how funny it was until I like heard it.
SPEAKER_02Just listening through, because a cup, I guess for context for those listening, when I was listening to some of the draft early versions of the chapters, a couple of those were still attached to the quotes at the end because we hadn't quite had the chance to go through and edit them. So a quote from a character would start with them saying their name and their voice as Connor was slipping into the role, and then it would be the quote itself. So I started calling them Pokemoning, and I and I tag when they kind of said their name like a Pokemon. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. That was funny, and thank you for the context for the listener because that's good context to have. Yeah, those were the first drafts, which are, you know, first draft.
SPEAKER_02Oh, yeah, first draft of the book is real rough too, but it takes a lot of time just slowly sending it away to be something polished.
SPEAKER_00Absolutely. Well, uh Drew, thank you so much for talking with me
Where To Find Drew Plus Events
SPEAKER_00today. I have some concluding questions for you. Um for those who want to learn more about you and hear more of your insights, where can they go?
SPEAKER_02So um, my website that I have, it's like Drew HarrisonBooks.wicks. I don't know. We'll put it in the description. Absolutely. Um, you'll be able to find all of my projects that are there. There is a button to join a little newsletter list. I don't use it that heavily right now, but I'm hoping to ramp that up. I also have a Facebook presence under the name Drew Harrison Books, where I'm a little more active and again hoping to become more active in the future. It's just right now I focus on writing and then I focus on promoting the books on traditional channels, and then whatever time I have left over, I throw into just posting occasional updates on social media. Yeah. Um, so those are the best places really to look. Is the website directly? Whenever I have a new book project, I'll put a link on my website. And then I'll also sometimes put forums where people can request to be beta readers for my books because I'm always interested in hearing the reactions from early readers. Um so uh look for links in whatever description you may see. There'll be the Facebook group and the website.
SPEAKER_00Yes. Look in the episode notes, they'll be there, folks. Uh, and another question is do you have any events coming up in the near future that people should keep an eye out for?
SPEAKER_02Yes, I actually happen to have two on the calendar. They're both in South and Central Florida. Okay. Um on June 20th, 2026, I will be at the Read It Write It Book Festival in Wellington, Florida. Um, that's actually going to be at the Wellington Mall. I'm gonna have a table at that mall among other book vendors, and I'm gonna be talking with readers and selling books and chatting with people. So if you happen to be anywhere near Wellington, you can definitely stop by. Um, and if you say that you, you know, heard about this from the podcast, definitely let me know. I'd love to actually see, you know, anyone who listened to this and wanted to come out would love to talk to you. And then exactly a week later, I have an event at a bookshop. Um, it's on June 27th. That one is in Ovito, Florida, which is pretty close to Orlando. I'm actually doing a little bit of a road trip to get there. Um, but it's at uh Shelf Life Books and Gifts. And that'll be in the afternoon at that little bookstore. Um, I'll be actually sharing the space with another author and anyone who happens to stop by. Again, happy to shake hands, talk books and craft, um, and I'll have a lot of signed copies of books to sell as well.
SPEAKER_00Nice, awesome. So, folks, if you are nearby and want to go to those venues and meet up with Drew, check out the episode notes. We will have links to those like event details. Uh, and you can go ahead and meet Drew.
SPEAKER_02So I loved I love to chat with readers. It's it's one of my favorite parts about doing this writing stuff is getting to talk to people who have read books. Even if it's not about my books, I just like to talk about books. I like to chat with people. I whenever they come up to my table, I ask like, who do you like to read? And then sometimes I'll use that to inform recommendations for what's best among my titles. Otherwise, just to you know talk shop.
SPEAKER_00Nice, absolutely. So, folks, go have a conversation. I can tell you from personal experience, it's a good time. So, Drew, thank you so much for your time today. And I've done something maybe a little tricky. I have made a few questions to end with that I did not give you. Oh, interesting. There are gonna be two segments. One is a rapid fire question,
Rapid Fire And Cybernetic Implant
SPEAKER_00you just have to answer real short, and then I have one last ending question for you. So bring them on. Let's start with the rapid fire. The fifth element or blade runner? Blade Runner.
SPEAKER_02But close.
SPEAKER_00Blade Runner, though. Fallout or Cyberpunk 2077.
SPEAKER_02Okay, so now you're you're kind of arguing current taste versus childhood. I played a lot of the Fallout games growing up. Cyberpunk, though. I'm gonna have to say Fallout. I have to go with my childhood favorites. Perfect. All right, Dune or Star Trek? Dune.
SPEAKER_00Dune.
SPEAKER_02I have to acknowledge the pillar of the genre. So much of what I write is thanks to Dune. Dune started it all. Nice.
SPEAKER_00Well, that's the end of the rapid fire questions. There we go. And now my final question for you. If you could have one cybernetic implant, what would it be?
SPEAKER_01Ooh.
SPEAKER_02That is a tough one. I am allowed to say I don't want a cybernetic implant.
SPEAKER_00You're allowed to. You're allowed to. You don't have to.
SPEAKER_02I feel like that's giving into the dystopia. That's that's that's kind of like bringing about the arrival of cyberpunk. I don't know that I really want that to happen, but I don't I maybe sometimes I feel a little disorganized. I feel like just gonna leave it like a little chip that manages my calendar in my head and tells me about appointments and things. I think I can get use out of that without feeling like I'm becoming the robots too much. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Get like an A.
SPEAKER_02I go for some kind of glorified schedule manager implant. That's all I need. Perfect.
SPEAKER_00There we go. Well, with that, that is the last of the questions that I have for you today. Uh, Drew, thank you so much for coming on the show and talking with us about your writing experience, um, about you know the importance of sci-fi and the cyberpunk genre and thought leadership and I mean so many other things. This has been a longer conversation than I usually have, but it's been a lot of fun. I agree.
SPEAKER_02Thank you so much for having me on the show, and I am so excited to get Men of the Mountains audiobook published in the short-term future. Hopefully, by the time whatever listener is listening to this, it's hopefully already out in the world.
SPEAKER_00Absolutely. And folks, you'll hear me interrupt the episode if that's the case. Uh go check out the episode notes, see Drew Harrison's books, uh, see what events he is going to be attending. And yeah, until next, we turn the page, tootaloo. Ryan.
Wrap Up Early Access Reminder
SPEAKER_00Welcome back. I hope you enjoyed the interview. This one was a lot of fun. I had a blast. Uh, we definitely ran over on time, as you can tell. Uh, but that's okay. You know, it worked for both of our schedules, and I think we had a pretty good time. I can't put words in Drew's mouth, but you know, if I were to go ahead and, you know, roll an insight check, I would say he probably had a pretty good time. Drew, thanks a ton for coming on to the show this week. I really appreciate it. Thank you for choosing me to be your narrator for Men of the Mountain. I'm so freaking excited for it. Folks, if you are wanting some of them early access codes, there is a Google Forms link in the episode notes. Go check out the episode notes, click that Google link, click the Google Forms link and fill that form out and see if you can get your hands on an early preview copy of The Men of the Mountain. The preview period starts June 24th, and the book itself launches July 10th. So keep your eyes out, keep your ears out, and I will definitely let you know when Men of the Mountain the Audiobook hits the digital shelves. Thanks again so much for tuning in, and we'll talk to you soon. Thanks. Until next we turn the page to Lou. Until next we turn the page to the loo. This has been Connor Reeds Books. I hope you enjoyed the episode. If you have, please share and leave a review. Feel free to check out my social medias at LConnor Voice. Links in the episode notes. A big thank you to Louie Sanders, the producer of the Connor Reeds Books theme song. Until next, we turn the page. Tootaloo.