Patrick LeClerc Celebrates Indie Author Freedom

The 28th episode of Science Fiction & Fantasy Factory features speculative fiction author Patrick LeClerc, a writer who Mookie discovers made a deliberate choice early on: skip the gatekeepers, go indie, and answer to no one but the story.

Faced with the grind of chasing agents and waiting for permission, Patrick flipped the equation. Instead of pitching to publishers, he put that same energy into reaching readers directly—building his own ecosystem, collaborating with fellow writers, and taking full ownership of everything from storytelling to production .

The result? Total creative freedom.

Patrick’s catalog reflects that freedom. His debut novel Out of Nowhere introduces an immortal paramedic hiding in plain sight: healing others while unraveling the mystery of his own origins, blending history, action, and existential intrigue. From there, he pivots hard into military sci-fi, imagining near-future space marines policing the asteroid belt like a cosmic frontier: equal parts Expanse grit and old-school war story energy. Then he swerves again into pulpy fantasy with Broken Crossroads, a fast, episodic romp through a decaying city of rogues, traps, monsters, and sharp-tongued thieves: pure throwback fun with modern bite.

And just when you think you’ve got him pinned down, he goes full gaslamp steampunk with The Beckoning Void—a Victorian-era, Lovecraftian mashup of airships, social upheaval, colonial tension, and cosmic horror. Different worlds, different tones, but always the same throughline: outsiders refusing to conform, choosing self-determination over safety.

This conversation digs into what that independence really looks like, and how writing novels between ambulance shifts, building stories out of lived experience, and treating the act of writing as both craft and therapy is how Patrick rolls. Their chat also tackles the modern pressure points of AI, audience expectations, and the illusion of traditional publishing as a guaranteed path.

At its core, this episode is about these two iconoclastic writers choosing autonomy over approval and embracing the long game. They write because they have to, and not because anyone told them how or why. Join them! 

The Guest

Patrick LeClerc makes good use of his history degree by working as a paramedic for an ever- changing parade of ambulance companies in the Northern suburbs of Boston. When not writing he enjoys cooking, fencing and making witty, insightful remarks with career-limiting candor. In the lulls between runs on the ambulance --and sometimes the lulls between employment at various ambulance companies-- he writes fiction.

Main Author Website

http://inkandbourbon.com/

Goodreads

https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4738921.Patrick_LeClerc

Books 

The Beckoning Void

https://www.amazon.com/Beckoning-Void-Patrick-LeClerc-ebook/dp/B09GCLXTB8/

Out of Nowhere

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01JBNRK9A

Broken Crossroads

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B019PA29C2

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

Hello and welcome to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Factory. I'm your host, Bookie Spitz, and on the factory floor, I've got Patrick.

SPEAKER_00 0:11

Claire, how are you doing? Thanks. Thank you so much for having me.

SPEAKER_02 0:16

Thanks for joining us. We were just clarifying that you're Patrick the speculative science fiction writer and not Patrick the poet. I I don't think there are too many mooky spitzes out there, which makes my gnome de plume pretty unique. But um apparently you've got a you've got a doppelganger.

SPEAKER_00 0:37

Well that's useful if I ever have to deny that I was doing something. I can always say it must have been that other guy.

SPEAKER_02 0:43

Exactly. Or if somebody doesn't like anything that you do, just blame the other Patrick. But welcome, welcome aboard. I found you on Substack, or I guess uh we found each other. Uh you're a speculative science fiction writer. You've been you've been gunning it for a while. I found some of your shorter works provocative and interesting.

SPEAKER_00 1:02

Thank you.

SPEAKER_02 1:03

And I'm eager to chat science fiction, indie authorship, AI, the the big ball of wax in science fiction. Project Hail Mary just just launched. So uh it's an exciting time for science fiction. Can you give us a little context? Tell us a little bit about yourself, how you got speculative, how you got fictional, and uh some of the stuff that you're working on and want to share.

SPEAKER_00 1:32

All right. So uh I've always been I've always been a big fan of science fiction and fantasy. Um, I've always read a lot of it. And um I've always been interested in making you know, creating my own worlds, doing my own writing. So I guess technically I started um back in college. Um I was a history major, but I wrote um a lot of stuff in my spare time. I connected with a couple of um groups of writers at college. And back in 1999, a few friends of mine and I started a speculative fiction um webzine. Um, short stories. It's Quantum Muse. We ran it for a few years back in the uh early 2000s. People would submit short stories, we'd edit them, select them, and we did that for probably pretty consistently for probably five or six years, and then every you know, life came up, people uh didn't have the the time to put into it, and it kind of fell by the wayside. But after that, um I I took some of the stuff that I'd started on that, I expanded them into some novels, and uh my first uh published science fiction novel was uh Out of Nowhere, which is a speculative fiction based on a character who's immortal and able to uh heal others. And I had him hiding out uh working as a paramedic because I could draw on a lot of my um my work experience as a paramedic, and it seemed like a good place for somebody who could do that to be. Because you could hide out if your patients get better, that's a good thing. People aren't surprised by it. Uh, and it was and it enabled me to pull in some of my history interest too with flashbacks because he's immortal. Uh, I got some action adventure stuff in there.

SPEAKER_02 3:29

So that was a little bit. You and David Lee Roth. What what year did this one come out?

SPEAKER_00 3:38

That came out in 2012.

SPEAKER_02 3:40

2012, all right. And uh he's immortal. So what's what's his kryptonite? What what's your what's your character's vulnerability?

SPEAKER_00 3:51

So um he doesn't have a specific vulnerability. He can be injured, um, he just heals really well. So it's not that he's invulnerable to anything, it's just that he can recover from pretty much anything. Uh and he doesn't, and he's missing part of his his earliest memories. Like he remembers a lot of things from history, but not why he can do what he can do, not where he came from. And then he manages to run into somebody who seems to know something about his past, and he winds up being becoming hunted as part of this book, and he has to learn his past as well as confront these uh these threats. And so it's kind of interesting because he's grown used to fading away from things. He he's seen enough history that he's seen that people who can do uncanny things are often persecuted. He's he's seen witch trials, he doesn't want to get involved in that.

SPEAKER_02 4:51

No, he's like uh Methuselah, he's been around a while. How old is the guy when the novel begins?

SPEAKER_00 4:58

So um it's it's never specifically stated. Um, going back to his earliest things that he mentions, he's at least 2,000 years old.

SPEAKER_02 5:08

All right. Reminds me a little bit of the Star Trek episode. Remember that one with the uh the immortal character and Kirk and Spock check out his studio, and he's got original, what look like originals from Michelangelo and Picasso, and he's like, Yeah, no, I did that. I I just hung out with those guys, right?

SPEAKER_00 5:29

So it's that kind of thing. I get to pull a lot of uh history stuff in there, I get to have a lot of fun with that. Um, I called it my my um Mary Poppins book because these are a few of my favorite things. I can just pull in all things I enjoyed. I played with it.

SPEAKER_02 5:46

Um I had a lot of fun with it. Did you self-publish the book?

SPEAKER_00 5:50

I did. I I shopped at the agents for quite a while, and at the early around 2010, 2011, um, it was just becoming really easy to self-publish, and independently published books were actually doing pretty well. You could build an audience with that. So I was my my feeling was that I could either spend a lot of effort shopping it to agents who may or may not get a publishing interest, or I could spend that same self-promotion energy into promoting it directly to buyers.

SPEAKER_02 6:29

Um, and from amen to that.

SPEAKER_00 6:32

Yeah. And from doing uh quantum use, I knew a lot of other writers, I knew a lot of editors, I knew a lot of people who worked in it. So we formed like a kind of a collective where we would proofread each other's stuff, beta each other's stuff. Um, my wife is a graphic designer, and she was able to do a lot of a lot of work to help me. She kind of knows what she's doing. Um, she's my tech support. So I really had a decent support system, more so than a lot of people have starting out, so I was able to do it that way. And that's the book that I wound up getting into the finals in the um SPFBO, the self-published fantasy blog off back in when was that 2018? I think. I was a semifinalist in that one. Right.

SPEAKER_02 7:20

So all right, so that's an illustrious start. You self-published, uh, you had your wife as uh your backup.

SPEAKER_00 7:28

Yeah. And that is this book, which she designed the cover from. Uh again, a lot of glare. A lot of glare.

SPEAKER_02 7:36

Out of nowhere, looking good. All right. So, what what what motivated you to go from just thinking about being an author to actually being an author? Writing a book is challenging. Everyone's got it on their bucket list. I'm gonna write that book. Everyone makes excuses. Oh, I don't have time to write that book. But it takes actual commitment and actual talent and uh hours and hours of grinding it out.

SPEAKER_00 8:07

That's that's what it is. It's it's just it is a lot of work. Um, but to anybody who says they don't have time to do it, when I wrote that book, I was working full-time, I had a side hustle part-time, uh, and we my wife and I had just had our first child. So I was writing this in between, I was writing this when the kid was napping. I was writing this in between calls on the ambulance. I wrote it in bits and pieces and then edited it when I had a chance. There there are time in your schedule if you want it to be there, and if the writing is cathartic for you. For me, it was kind of a little bit like therapy. So I was getting it was actually helping me to decompress and get things out by getting them on the page. So that was uh that was a motivation to do it.

SPEAKER_02 9:05

Yeah, I think uh I think you're on point, which is if there's a will, there's a way. And uh if you really want to do it, you do it. And timing is everything, and sometimes when you have the least amount of time is when you make the most time to do what you love.

SPEAKER_00 9:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 9:24

So what was next?

SPEAKER_00 9:26

Well, next I did a um I went in a completely different direction. Um my subgenres are basically an exercise and attention deficit disorder. It's um I went because I've always read a wide variety of of different kinds of books. My next one was a uh military science fiction, near future space marine um uh crew out in the patrolling the asteroid belt, um, because it's it near is future. I set it in 2075. I figured that we would be mining you know the asteroids for for uh resources, and I wanted to catch the idea of like a boom town out on the fringes of of civilization and I tied into I um a lot of like frontier tropes, um, with the the Marine Corps out there uh patrolling and trying to keep the world safe for the universe safe for democracy and capitalism. I threw a lot of banana war type stuff into it. I had a lot of fun with that.

SPEAKER_02 10:40

It's a it's a little bit I I hate it when authors are likened to other authors or other pieces of entertainment, and I'm sure you're insulted by it too, but this does smack a little bit expansey. Yeah, like maybe you were expanse before expanse was cool.

SPEAKER_00 11:00

It's definitely it definitely falls in that in that subgenre, I guess. Um, so I I played with that, I enjoyed that a lot. Then I did a uh just a sword and sorcery uh Buddy Rogue fantasy series of shorts, and that I owe completely to having read way too many of the pulps. The um Robert E uh the Robert E. Howard stuff, the um Fritz Lieber stuff with Faffer and the Grey Mouser. I wanted to take a you know, just short, pulpy, fun adventures with it with a couple seat of uh thieves in a rundown city, and that one turned into a broken crossroads, which again I had a lot of fun with.

SPEAKER_02 11:50

What are some common themes that stretch across? Because you're crossing genres and you're you're you're zigging and zagging. Daniel P. Douglas is also on Substack and an author, they're actually a set of twins, and they they write under the Gnome de Plume. And uh they they are equally diverse, like a Western sci-fi book, and then a noir thriller post-World War II, but they have a common theme of basically screw the man, be suspicious of control, yeah, and and don't let the fascists beat you down. That that more or less is their recurring theme. If you could describe your own writing thematically in that way, what's tying it together?

SPEAKER_00 12:39

It's all all of my stories kind of it's the celebration of the um the outcast. All of my characters are fall somewhere outside of what's expected mainstream. They're they don't play well with others, they don't fit into society as a cog in the machine. So they've chosen uh professions and ways of life that allow them the freedom to uh stay true to their own values and not uh become a faceless, a faceless drone. And sometimes it's a struggle with that. My Space Marine characters sometimes struggle with what being in an organization but being maintaining their individual individuality. Uh it's much easier with the with the rogues because for them it's the most important thing is self-determination, uh, independence, and nobody's gonna tell me what to do. If I'm gonna uh risk my life, it's gonna be in a cause I care about, I believe in. So there's a lot of attempting to uh you know do the right thing regardless of what greater organizations and society tell us. And uh I I guess I would throw it into um to compare it to other media, I think Firefly would fit really well into that kind of universe. It's that kind of thing. There's a code, there are lines you don't cross, but they're my lines. They're not lines.

SPEAKER_02 14:15

Well, well, good for you. You're bringing you're bringing it to life. And and how does how does it feel to to be writing for over a decade, seeing all the changes in society and the evolution of publishing and even science fiction and fantasy.

SPEAKER_00 14:37

That's been very interesting.

SPEAKER_02 14:39

A lot of changes.

SPEAKER_00 14:40

Yeah. Um, because things just it's it's almost impossible to keep up with the the way the industry is changing. Because the amount of time it takes to actually write, um, you can't write to trends because the trends change faster than you can write to them.

SPEAKER_02 14:59

Especially now.

SPEAKER_00 15:01

Yeah. So I think you just gotta stay true to your vision to what you like, what you want to do, and keep doing that. While being mindful of the market, look at the market, look at what's happening.

SPEAKER_02 15:12

Um you write to be read or do you write to write?

SPEAKER_00 15:17

I write to write. And I'm writing um obviously we all we all want to be read. We want to share our story, we want people to to read it and like it and identify with it. But I'm not willing to change what I write about for uh for more mass appeal. I'm interested in telling the story I have to tell. Uh and again, it's I want to play in all the sandboxes because I have all those influences.

SPEAKER_02 15:53

Um yeah, I I tend to be that way too. Um, sometimes it's hard for an audience to pinpoint who you are from a branding point of view. Yeah. If you're if you're writing this kind of science fiction set in this setting, then people get accustomed and know you as that guy.

SPEAKER_01 16:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 16:13

And then if you switch gears, then it's a little bit unexpected. And if you're all over the place, then people tend to be confused. And in order to gain traction, most folks need to know you as one thing that fits into their limited mind share of you, let alone, let alone the genre. So I have that challenge too. Um, I I tend to rant on politics, on video, and I write essays and op-eds, I do memoirs and plays, and uh, and I wrote a science fiction novel versus a series. So people say, Who the hell are you? What are you doing? What what's your what's your brand? What's your idea?

SPEAKER_00 16:56

What I would love people to look at more is um authors tend to be very pigeonholed, but you look at someone like look at uh like movie directors, movie writers. You can tell Steven Spielberg's movies are all Steven Spielberg movies, but he's done World War II movies, he's done uh science fiction movies, done aliens.

SPEAKER_02 17:19

Yeah, they all have a happy end and are driven by a spectacle.

SPEAKER_00 17:23

Yeah, there's a there's a thread line, but they're not just a series of the same kind of thing. Um, and so I think I I try to look at it like that. I throw my touch and my spin on it, but I just did a uh my most recent one was a like a gas lamp, steampunk, Cthulhu kind of adventure in a fictionalized Victorian setting, because I wanted to play with the history and all the things that were going on, all the changes in the world at that time, between Industrial Revolution, um, the changes by the age of colonialism and all that kind of stuff, uh coming in with like the um end of slavery, emancipation in America, the um emancipation of the serfs in Russia, all these social changes, the rise of you're starting to see the rise of different political movements, and plus, you know, tentacles and sword fights and airships. Because that was too rich not to play with.

SPEAKER_02 18:22

It's a total departure from everything else, but the characters you would recognize if you would had read from the other things, because there it's that same I agree with you, and and this tendency to accommodate the audience, especially when it comes to who you are, betrays, in a sense, who you are, especially if you want to be that diverse and that expressive. Why limit yourself based on the expectations of people you don't even know?

SPEAKER_01 18:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 18:49

So so here, here, here to that, and I think it's great that you just embrace your own creative whims. How how have you responded to the AI revolution that's been around about three years now? It's becoming entrenched to the to the point that it's transformative, and there are all sorts of pressure points coming from every direction. They just canceled a bestseller, that not in the science fiction genre, but it was uh, I believe a romance novel that was pulled because AI apparently wrote snippets, if not much of it.

SPEAKER_00 19:28

So that's a it's a it's a thorny issue. I it's one of those things where we can't put the toothpaste back in the tube. The technology is out there, it's gonna be used. I would never have AI write a scene for me, um, because I think that that cheapens the whole act of creation. That's why I that's why I want to write, is because I want to create these worlds, I want to play with it. Um, I enjoy it in the same way that I imagine a sculptor enjoys uh you know interacting with the with the clay. Um, that's what I do it for. That's my my rush.

unknown 20:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 20:07

AI has a lot of uses, and I think that because it's new, exciting technology, people try to use it for things it wasn't intended for. Um and I'd rather see it used. It's got tremendous um use, it's great at pattern recognition. We use it in the medical field all the time for diagnostic things, and it's it's made huge leaps forward. So I don't want to throw the baby out with a bath water. And at the same time, I think I would rather see AI pick up my garbage and clean my floor while I write plays than have to go to the widget factory and work on an assembly line while AI writes plays and and and operas for us. And I think that's how a lot of people feel about it.

SPEAKER_02 20:54

Um and then there's a tendency in practice. Do you use it for research? Do you use it for world building? I don't dialogue nuance.

SPEAKER_00 21:06

No, I don't use it at all in my writing. Um, I really zero. I don't because I if I want to do research, I'll do research because uh AI scrapes other research and sometimes it puts strange interpretations on it. So I would rather look at primary source stuff. Um, and as far as dialogue, I love dialogue. Dialogue's one of my favorite things. It's like um the parts that I struggle with, I like dialogue and I like action scenes, and the other stuff I kind of slog at, and that's actually one of the things. My first pet draft, there's almost no description, so I don't like writing description. I'll do dialogue and action, and then I have to go back. My wife's like, Do you have any scenery in this book at all? I'm like, I guess I gotta go back and put some in. Um so I can see, I haven't done it, but I can see the appeal of maybe I'll have the machine right down. Parts I don't like. I see how that gets there, but then it turns into a slippery slope. And like we talked earlier about the amount of effort and blood, sweat, toil, and tears you put in it, everybody has a book in them. And if you just have to describe the vague outline of your book to Chat GPT and it pops out a book, that kind of cheapens the act.

SPEAKER_02 22:20

It in a sense makes it meaningless, you know, no pain, no gain. I I tend to be a blood, sweat, and tears type of writer. Uh and I love the lived experience of sweating it out.

SPEAKER_01 22:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 22:32

William James, the psychologist, was actually the brother of Henry James. He wrote a lot about how, you know, when you're thinking, then your brow kind of pinches, and then you rub your chin when you're being contemplative. So it's it's a body muscle memory kind of reflex. And just the act of sitting there and typing and being in that immersive meditative state to me is deeply pleasurable and rewarding, even if it's painful and difficult and hard. And to me, the resistance between me and the keyboard, what's in my head and what makes it on the page, and me trying to get those in alignment, yeah, where the real stuff happens. And when I'm crafting a story, to your point, I've got characters with clearly defined goals and weaknesses. They're thrown into a world and then they're they get punched in the face over and over again because they're trying to accomplish what they want in a world that's unforgiving and unfair. And in that churn, the story unfolds. Exactly. And I might have a general idea of my characters, and I know what they want, and I know their opposition, but how it unfolds has to be organic. Because if I'm not surprised, then the reader's not going to be surprised. So to me, it's it's all on that. And if I use AI, it's for kind of super googling.

SPEAKER_00 24:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 24:10

Like I do the hard science fiction stuff. So I want it to be accurate. I love digging in there because I'm a bit of a geek myself. I love the science part of it. So in the old school days, I'd Google and then I'd have to read journal articles and do a lot of follow-up, and it would be time consuming. Now I could do the chat GPT or the Claude. It aggregates a lot of science. And uh I could just get to it faster. But I take that data and I put it into the story and then I make it my own. So it leads me down pathways I might not have thought about before. And it helps me embellish things a little bit more rapidly. But it's not like I'm cut and pasting from the bot into my book. It's like I'm learning and processing and then integrating an expansive understanding of science in the world in a way that to me is organic and doesn't violate this passion for sweating out a story. Yeah. And putting myself in the shoes of the protagonist who basically is getting his ass kicked throughout my entire book.

SPEAKER_00 25:24

I think again, it's great at pattern recognition, it's great at aggregating things, it's great for um assessing a huge pile of data that would take you as a person hours and hours, it can do quickly. So that it has its uses. And again, I go back to I'm still a full-time paramedic. I look at how our protocols have changed.

SPEAKER_02 25:48

And with the advent of just computers and and pattern recognition and being able to cross-index uh a treatment to its results, the rate at which we're improving uh our protocols and our our way that we address different response diagnostics, even yeah, it's potentially amazing. Um and light life savings. I I worked for a medical software company back in 2003, 2004. This was in the era of the trios and the pom pilots. Yeah, they weren't even connected to the internet. You had to download the stuff from your computer. It was a medical software company specializing for paramedics like you and EMTs. So you would be in the field, you'd be in the van, you'd roll out, and then you could check for drug contraindications on the fly, dosing, uh, how to handle a particularly nasty kind of situation that demanded response. And uh it was technology being used at the point of care for emergency services. And I can only imagine now with AI that it's helping save lives and it's helping you do your job better.

SPEAKER_00 27:08

It it definitely is, it definitely has its uses. So, but again, it's like anything else, it's a tool.

SPEAKER_02 27:19

Maybe more interesting than just the tool is your lived experience being a paramedic. You must have seen some wild things in your years of uh being out there.

SPEAKER_00 27:28

Yeah, a few things. So a lot of them make it in the book or make it inspire things that go into the books.

SPEAKER_02 27:34

Yes, inspire things in the book. Obviously, you don't want to compromise anyone's uh you know medical information or circumstance, but uh but that kind of visceral lived experience is jet fuel for a writer, exactly, which is which is interesting, interesting stuff. Do you do you partake in science fiction and other modalities? So uh as a writer, you read, yes, and I'm assuming you've got your favorites, and as a science fiction fan, you probably are into the movies and and the whole the whole kabang. What rocks your bow?

SPEAKER_00 28:17

Um, I'm I'm a big fan of what has happened with television in the past 10 or so years with the advent of the long form series and the less uh less of the network stuff. I mean, obviously we have tremendous affection for the old network um science fiction stuff, the tracks, the the um the fireflies, the the buffies, all that kind of stuff was great. But now that things are going directly to streaming services, they have so much more freedom. In fact, of how how long the story is, they're not worried about having to set up for next season. They're less constrained. Uh and so some stuff it's dumb, but twisted metal was a lot of fun. If you ever saw that series, it's really dumb, but it's a lot of fun.

SPEAKER_02 29:12

Which which is uh which platform is that on?

SPEAKER_00 29:15

I I think it is it Hulu? It's uh a streaming service. I think it's Hulu.

SPEAKER_02 29:20

Yeah, that sounds like a Hulu-esque kind of deal, even though they just got absorbed by Disney.

SPEAKER_00 29:25

Yeah, and things like um the animated arcane was brilliant. Um and what was the other one? Uh Blue Eyes Samurai was brilliant. So they've done some great things with the animation. And again, animation it it's a lot of artificial limits that would be really hard to film are easy to animate. So it it it's a medium that has a lot of freedom, and I really like that so that that can be a lot of fun.

SPEAKER_02 30:03

Um and it's another area where AI is uh encroaching. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 30:09

It's everywhere, it's popping up everywhere. It's dude, I bought a light bulb at the store, and it would turn it to the smart light bulb. I just wanted a light bulb that could go in a switch with a dimmer. So I brought the thing home and it's like you log on and done load the app, I don't want to determine my light bulb.

SPEAKER_02 30:24

That's talking to you. It's it's it's uh it's sharing uh relativity theory with you.

SPEAKER_00 30:33

But so I think it it's it's intruded kind of everywhere.

SPEAKER_02 30:38

It in an annoying fetishy kind of way. I think we'll eventually get over it. Yeah. Hopefully before it you know takes all our jobs and kills us. But uh, you know, it it is a a revolution in the truest sense, if if for no other reason that all these trillions of dollars in equity are flying all over the place. And clearly the adoption curve hasn't caught up to the raw enthusiasm of the investors.

SPEAKER_00 31:08

No, and that and that again, that's fitting a pattern. We saw that with um the dot-com bubble back in the 90s, mid mid to late 90s. We saw that. Somebody sees something promising and new. This is the gold rush. This is the gold rush. Everybody grabs a pick and shovel, goes to Alaska, most people wind up starving. Somebody gets a big actually making money is the one selling the shovels. You gotta be the best selling the shovels.

SPEAKER_02 31:38

Well, look at the look at the internet bubble, too. You they they my favorite example is they laid all the undersea cable. Yeah, remember that?

SPEAKER_01 31:46

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 31:47

Yeah, and then it sat there fallow for for I think over a decade because there was no real demand, and now the world wide web is dependent on this infrastructure, so it eventually caught up. I I think the data center issue is is trickier. I call it Pro Tools versus AWS. So when Pro Tools came out for musicians, you no longer needed a studio, you could just record at home. So it took the equivalent of cloud-based infrastructure and made it local on your own machine. It put all these studios out of business and it empowered individual musicians and it just exploded. Yeah, so it transformed the whole industry. That's the Pro Tools model. The AWS model is um Amazon finally got profitable by putting all this data processing in the cloud and then selling it out.

SPEAKER_01 32:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 32:47

So uh it was based on scale and the cloud. So I think the jury's still out on artificial intelligence. Are there gonna be individual LLMs that live on phones and devices, and we don't even really need the cloud for the sake of security and personalization? Or are we just gonna plug into the mothership and have it do everything for us? I think the jury's still out. Well, see, maybe it's a combination of both. But it but it is captivating. And as far as writers go, I think writers shouldn't worry too much about this stuff if you really have integrity.

SPEAKER_00 33:24

Yeah, no, until you until AI can uh get overworked and divorced and have a drinking problem, we're gonna be fine.

SPEAKER_02 33:32

That's a great way of looking at it. That that's uh a very quotable clip, which is uh, you know, until we get the murder bot, you know, the uh the that terrific story by uh Martha Wells, which really catapulted her career. Martha Wells was writing for decades, and she did even some of the Star Wars kind of ghostwrity kind of serials, and then she I think she was ready to quit. She was over it, and then Murderbot just kind of appeared to her, the sarcastic killing machine that was just over it, and uh that really took off for her, yeah. And uh, I think it took off because it is this combination that we're talking about. It's the uh it's the AI entity that really just wants to have a have a shot of bourbon and a cigarette. So we'll we'll see how how that shakes. I think that's uh uh Apple TV show. Speaking of repurposing, I think they've redone that with Peter SARSGAR. Remember, they used to make fun of him on Saturday Night Live, he was hanging out with pirates. It's Peter SARSGURD, you know, and they'd ask him why perchance he's hanging out with pirates. Oh, that was good stuff, but uh, but anyway, I I don't think AI is is as big a deal as people make it out to, especially for creative souls who really give a shit.

unknown 35:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 35:05

And the other the another concerning thing to me is people are too ready to call something out as AI when they're not sure. And that kind of can almost be a scholar letter.

SPEAKER_02 35:18

Yeah, like a cancel culture kind of thing. Yeah, I've noticed that too. Like if you m-dash, yeah, you're guilty.

SPEAKER_00 35:26

I m-dash all the time. I love the M-dash.

SPEAKER_02 35:28

I I love M. I've been using M-dashes for decades. I love the M-dash. And then there were great examples.

SPEAKER_00 35:35

There's M-dashes, and that was years before AI could have told me to do it.

SPEAKER_02 35:38

So it's look at Thomas Pynchon's Mason Dixon, which is uh like it's homage to uh to 19th century writing, and it's got tons of capitalized nouns, like the old German. Yep, it's loaded with ampersands and m-comma, right? All over the book. So you can't say Pynchon was using AI in the early 90s, get out of here, right? So a lot of people are doing that witch hunt kind of thing. Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 36:13

And I I think that that's dangerous. I mean, if if if you leave AI fingerprints all over something and it can be definitively proven it's AI, then yeah, there's there's a there's an ethical consideration there, but I would be very hesitant to brand somebody's writing. Well, it feels like AI to me. It's like, well, AI trained on the literature that's out there. So you're not seeing necessarily plagiarism, you're seeing what AI drew its source material from.

SPEAKER_02 36:46

And we all we've all been in artifacts and fossilized curios of other writers, other creative AI didn't make the shit up. It basically they chopped up the internet into tokens, assigned weights, right? And then do does matrix math in the Transformer engine to connect it just like autofill to Google in a much more sophisticated predictive.

SPEAKER_00 37:13

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 37:14

So, but it's very convincing, yes, it does a pretty good job. That's why you got all those data centers to crunch all those permutations, like quadrillions of iterations of everything that humans have barfed out over the last few centuries. So it's impressive technologically, but to your point, it's not anything that people haven't done, just kind of reconstituted.

SPEAKER_00 37:39

It's like a really good librarian in a really big library, you know. So it's take it's not writing its own books, but it if you want to find a book about 10th century cooking techniques, it knows exactly what shelf to go to.

SPEAKER_02 37:54

And it so it's yeah, or if you're writing a novel with 10th century cooking techniques in it, what might take you several days in a few dozen books, you do with a few prompts, which is hey chatty bro, you know, reenact uh cooking scenario from the 10th century, and there it is. So if that rocks your boat and you want to concentrate on other things, namely characters and situations and expressing your lived experience through your art, then maybe you have more time for that. I don't know. I don't think that that's necessarily a bad thing. And you know, there's always a whiplash in society. Everybody makes a big deal, they say the government should get involved whenever anything goes wrong. We should regulate everything. Well, there's there's a zeitgeist, people just get sick of stuff, yeah. So uh they've already had a negative whiplash to all the AI slop generated by Sora, the application created by OpenAI. That backfired a little bit. All of a sudden, everyone can create 10-second videos featuring themselves and their friends in whatever situation. It's interesting for about 12 seconds, and then it's just kind of boring. Yeah, and then it flooded everyone's social media feed, and I think we've reached the point of saturation and annoyance. Yeah. So this self-policing, I think, is is the most effective way to curtail a lot of the excess when it comes to bad AI. And I was joking with another guest that one reason AI sucks so much is because we suck as communicators and writers, it's just mimicking our bad habits. How much of human conversation is really just regurgitated human LLM crap? Hey, buddy, how you doing? How is your day? Oh, it's great. Like, listen to people talking about their favorite sporting event, listen to people just kind of shooting the shit when families get together. It's pretty much interchangeable the conversation. I mean, the emotions are there, that's the point. But when it comes to the actual language and communication of information, we're we're just we're just sharing tokens. And I think maybe we're allergic to our own bullshit. We see that mirroring in the bots, and we don't like it. So what's next? Uh are you uh are you a movie fan? Did you see Project Hail Mary? I didn't really um I've been do you like Andy Weir? Have you read him?

SPEAKER_00 40:41

I do. I'm a fan of Andy Weir. I like his stuff.

SPEAKER_02 40:43

I like him too. I thought The Martian was great. Uh Hail Mary is great. I missed the middle one. And you know, the character Grace is just like the character from The Martian, only a little zanier. So, you know, he's got his template and he goes for it. You're always gonna every the every man who can somehow do everything stretches the boundaries of credulity, but does so in a really heroic yeah.

SPEAKER_00 41:09

But I think we've always been attracted to that. We've always been attracted to it. That's always been a uh uh aspirational thing. The whole idea of the Renaissance man, the person with the you know the hero exactly, and it was I think we that was more of an embraced ideal. We we kind of uh fetishized specialization to a certain point, I think, somewhere in in our development. But if you go back and you look at some of the uh the big thinkers of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, they were all uh I mean that's where the term Renaissance man comes from, but they were all uh uh polymaths, they were all uh, you know, they did a little science, they did a little politics, they yeah, for sure. It's a military stuff.

SPEAKER_02 41:58

Newton was an alchemist.

SPEAKER_00 42:01

Exactly. It's so the idea that somebody's knows everything there is to know about rocket propulsion, that's great, but can you uh can you uh explain James Joyce? Can you you know use a figure out how to communicate with an alien? Exactly. So there's uh there's uh I think there's a a definite human uh uh um preference for somebody that can uh do a lot of things. Could you could you survive if you're marooned? Could you survive? Can you build a shelter? Can you figure out what what's safe to eat and what's not? Can you you know do medical procedures with what's available to you? And we've always kind of respected that.

SPEAKER_02 42:48

I think I think his heroes are cool, and I think this idea that there's no real bad guy, that the bad guy is physics and nature and Mars and uh astrophage, um, very, very innovative and creative. Not you get not one alien, but you get several, yeah, and you get parasitical aliens from the microbiome, which have amazing qualities, like absorbing unbelievable amounts of energy, traveling at nearly the speed of light, and infecting stars. What a great idea! That is very, very good. And Rocky is an intriguing alien, too. A great idea. Personally, I just saw the movie, and I I don't want to spoil it with spoilers for anyone listening, but I do want to raise the contrarian flag because everyone is raging about this film. I hated it. I hated it. I I thought they they they ruined the storytelling, the pacing. Never I'm just gonna I'm gonna just rant and gripe on one aspect. Which underlies my entire critique. Never once in this two and a half hour steaming turd of a film did I feel any gravitas or threat or even wonder. You know how science fiction brings out that exactly. And in this case, the stakes couldn't be higher for humanity. The species is gonna go extinct if this mission doesn't work. The cataclysm is worldwide, and never did I feel any of that watching this film. So I'll I'll leave it at that. And uh and and thank you for allowing me to vent. But uh have you have you? I didn't even ask you if you've seen it. I have not don't don't let me bias you again. All you need to do is scan it. I have five stars, it's the greatest science fiction. To me, they ruined it, and maybe I'm biased in that I read the book before that that's all that I had my mental construct, but I I read The Martian before I saw that, and I loved Ridley Scott's adaptation. I thought it was mature, great science fiction, well told, yeah, well paced, and I was never bored. Yeah, and I'm sitting there watching Rocky like it's Lelu and Stitch.

SPEAKER_00 45:32

I think that one of the big things that it comes down to whether something, whether I really enjoy something or not, it comes down to characters and story. You can put as much spectacle in as you want. You can have all the bells and whistles and things that can you can you know dump that kind of spectacle on it, but if there's no heart, it's not memorable. Doesn't really sit with you. So it may have been that may have been.

SPEAKER_02 45:56

That's what killed me. I guess their interpretation of Grace, yeah, like he was such a frivolous bonehead in ways, you know. It's just I'm sorry, I don't I don't mean to shit on this year's science fiction extravaganza on the science fiction factory podcast, but I refuse to be a lemming leaping over the side of the cliff of everyone's aesthetic.

SPEAKER_00 46:28

You're gonna be the kid in the crowd pointing out that the emperor has no clothes, you know.

SPEAKER_02 46:31

This yes, yes, I'll I'll do that. But I was just curious what what you might, if if only because it's so timely. I I have just endured that motion picture this weekend. So what's your what's your what's your hopes for your ow? How many books total now do you have?

SPEAKER_00 46:50

Uh novels. I have one, two, three, three, three, five, five, six. I think I have six novels. I have a number of short stories I put out, and uh I'm working on the sequel to Beckoning Wood, which is my Victorian um gas lamp steampunk, Lovecraftian delightful melange of things I enjoy mash up.

SPEAKER_02 47:16

That's terrific. I mean, I'm like you. I create content each and every day. There's nothing that makes me happier than just cranking stuff out. And uh, and how much time and effort do you usually put into it? It's it's it's you know, having that that amount of content is is more than just a hobby. You're you're a full-time paramedic, you mentioned. So you dedicate a lot of time and effort to writing stories.

SPEAKER_00 47:43

Yeah, I do. But again, like I said, it's a way for me to process things, it's a way for me to um there's your learned experience, which is all your input, all your interaction with the universe. And then one of the ways that I particularly process it is I'll sit down and I'll write I'll put a character in the same situation and I'll uh or I'll talk about how this influences a character's growth or world worldview. And it's just it's kind of like therapy. So I think it's just something that I do for me, uh, and times that I'm not really into it, I kind of get a little aimless and and bored and really don't know what to do. So I kind of need that that writing to keep me keep me on track, keep me focused.

SPEAKER_02 48:34

Yeah, you're a kindred soul, totally. Um, if I'm not like blasting out my opinion on TikTok, you know, I'll do a rant, you know, in my kitchen, I'll do a selfie video, and I'll just I do like two, three a day on average, sometimes more. If I don't do that, don't let it out. And if I'm not actually writing and physically typing and communicating in that kind of way, and if I'm not posting and reposting and doing these podcasts and other video, then um I feel like I really don't have a purpose. And I can have a very successful business day with my consulting work, and I could have a good day as far as my personal relationships with family and friends, but there's really no equivalent to expressing myself this way. And uh, it's very therapeutic, it's immersive, it's meditative, and it gives me purpose, and it sounds like it does for you too. Yeah, definitely. Which is uh, which is really what it's all about. So that's uh that's good to hear. And I think it's inspirational for a lot of younger writers who are starting, who have a lot of anticipation about success or lack of it, other people's opinion. Uh, you know, should I get an editor? Should I get a professional cover artist? Should I pursue an agent? Should I go through all of these mechanisms that are outside the actual process of writing and creating itself?

unknown 50:09

No.

SPEAKER_02 50:10

And a lot of people get discouraged and freak out.

SPEAKER_00 50:12

It it's a lot. It's uh it is intimidating. And the one thing that that I think defeats a lot of people, it's so it's such delayed gratification if you're focused on the end goal. If like, oh, I want to I want a$50,000 advance and I want you know somebody to make a movie out of my book. Best case scenario, that's years down the road, and you're putting in hours and hours of, I'm not gonna say completely uncompensated, but delayed compensation. And you have to be willing to put in that time, not knowing if that's gonna sell at all, not knowing what it's gonna do.

SPEAKER_02 50:50

Yeah, and even if you you put in that and it reaches fulfillment for you, at least down several of these milestones, there's no guarantee of lasting success. Yeah, it could flop.

unknown 51:05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 51:07

And and it might not be transformative for your life. I have a a former colleague and a friend, and he uh wrote uh wrote a uh treatment, got an agent. He has a pretty good social media following, so that that helped boost him up there, and got you know, treatment agent, pedaling it to various publishers, got a mainstream publisher, got an advance to finish the book, finished the book with an advance, published, got big reviews from people with you know related expertise. Yeah, and you know, that that's it. You know, I recommended to him that he take the year off and just tour, you know, go on book tours and signings, like give it a little oomph. And he was under the impression that his publisher would help him a little bit with the marketing, yeah. And that I told him from the beginning, don't expect that, they're not gonna do shit for you. A big name, they're a big name, you know. You could list top five, ten publishers as his up their household name, yeah. And uh, and you know, and never went to paperback even. I think there's a warehouse full of his books, and he did everything right. Yeah, so just load your PDF up to KDP or Barnes and Noble, yeah. Go to go to the the Balker, the the Bausker site or whatever, and get your own personal ISBN number, right? Put it in there, and then within a few days of uploading it with your cover, you've got a book on your desk. And it's yours, and then give it your best shot for getting it out there. But I think that that's that's a pretty good formula. Have you since um pursued the more traditional publishing route?

SPEAKER_00 53:03

Not really, honestly, because like I said, I would rather spend my time um writing. And if I'm gonna push and market my book, I would rather just push and market it to the to the buyers rather than try to push it to an agent or push it to a and maybe I'm wrong. I mean, I people have had success with it.

SPEAKER_02 53:21

It's just it's the it's just not my intent to shit on traditional publishing. Oh, it's and I know that you know they they just came out with the with the the writer survey, indie writer survey. That's another podcast I did where I go through the metrics, and uh you need to advertise, and you know, you're spending half of your income just keeping the engine going. You know, you make some money off the book, then you put it back into advertising to keep the book out there, and you need to turn it into a business if you want to do it, yeah. And whether or not you want to do it, you know, keep writing, writing is publishing. Celebrate the writing, stop worrying about AI, stop worrying about getting an agent and do it and see what happens, and it is that's that's what that's what I would rather focus my time on writing the next book rather than you know flogging the current book, and I think a lot of us are like that, and that's why so many of us are you know struggling with the marketing because that's not necessarily our strong suit, that's not the way we're uh we're wired. So, yeah, yeah, and struggle with it if you want to. I mean, I poke, I get in moods, you know. I get into a mood where I'm all into it, and then not, yeah. So, you know, honor your mood, honor what you're into, and then focus the goods on what's good, which is the actual creativity and the satisfaction that you give yourself doing it, and throw it out to the world, you know, have a have a little trust in the fates, you know. So I think that that's the ticket to real happiness as opposed to fulfilling expectations, most of which aren't even yours.

SPEAKER_01 55:13

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 55:15

So I think that that's inspirational for our younger writers. If if there's a book in your ove that you would recommend to people who are first getting turned on to your stuff that exemplifies who you are, your themes, what you think is some of your best, maybe most accessible and fun work, what would that be?

SPEAKER_00 55:35

Um accessible accessible, fun, easy would be the broken crossroads. Um because there are a bunch of it's very episodic, it's uh more like collected short stories with a through line. I mean, you read them quickly, they're quick, they're bantery, there's you know traps and monsters and treasure, and it it scratches that old pulp itch. Um if you're just looking for something quick. If you're looking for what I think is probably my and again, I uh I go through phases, but I uh I really think that um I uh my writing's getting elevated with Beckoning Void um because it does uh take this whole swashbuckler uh feel and puts it through the social and political lens of huge a huge period of societal change, which I think we're in right now. So I think you can draw parallels. So great.

SPEAKER_02 56:37

We'll put links in the description. Excellent. Through your little bio so people can check you out, and uh subscribe to you on Substack too.

SPEAKER_01 56:47

Thank you.

SPEAKER_02 56:48

Right, why why not? So thank you for making time, Patrick Leclerc. Thank you so much speculative fiction novelists going at it now for uh for a while. Six books and counting. What's what's your next one? What are you working on?

SPEAKER_00 57:05

Like I said, I'm doing the sequel to The Beckoning Void right now, and uh I after that I think I'm gonna probably play with a little urban fantasy again because I've been away from that for a while. I just gotta keep making the rounds.

SPEAKER_02 57:18

Terrific. It's a real pleasure and a joy hanging out with a kindred soul who just loves um getting the words out on the on the page and having that catharsis and that meditative experience that makes life have a purpose and brings joy to us and hopefully, hopefully, a few others, right? Absolutely, yep. That's what it's all about. Thanks for joining us. Thank you so much. Like, comment, share, folks, and check the links and get some get some Patrick's speculative fiction. Thanks for listening and watching science fiction and fantasy factory. I'm your host, Smookie Spitz. Till next time.