Howard Loring and the Elastic Limits of Time: Building Epic Fables That Bend Reality

The 30th episode of the pod features Mookie and Howard after connecting the way many indie sci-fi writers do—through an anthology collection. Both landed stories in S.A. Gibson’s 2026 sci-fi collection, turning a cold submission into a creative collision and, now, a deep dive into how they each approach the genre.

Loring’s method strips the language down, leans heavily on dialogue, and avoids overbuilt worlds. His “epic fables” are simple on the surface but layered underneath, driven by myth rather than mechanics. The plot takes a back seat. What matters is transformation—who the characters become, not just what they do.

Time travel is the backbone that holds it together. Not as a gimmick, but as a structural tool that lets him fracture narrative and reconnect it across eras, characters, and ideas. His stories eventually lock into place, revealing a larger design where history, identity, and knowledge all intersect. We get into myth, minimalism, and why most storytelling fails without knowing it—and Loring’s core rule: keep it clear, keep it moving, and don’t bore the reader.

The Guest

HOWARD LORING employs HISTORY by including known figures and documented events, and by discussing true cultural change and collective innovation, yet all EPIC FABLES on the ELASTIC LIMIT of TIME are also redemptive tales, directly dealing with basic theoretical concepts employing universal human themes such as personal choice and the resulting effects, knowledge gained through mutual connections, changing social customs and expanding philosophical strides.

https://www.howardloring.com/

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

Hello and welcome to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Factory. I'm your host, Mookie Fitz. And on the factory floor with me today, I've got Mr. Howard Loring. Welcome to the podcast. Very exciting. Sounds great. Which timeline do you think we're in right now?

SPEAKER_01 0:21

Well, we're present, but uh we're soon to be in the past. But when they watch, it'll be in the in their future. So right.

SPEAKER_02 0:29

And I don't even know if it's a shared future or if we're splitting or if we're in the multiverse or what's going on. I think we could talk a lot about that good stuff because I know time travel is central to your writing, as is what you call the epic fable. And we can talk about all that good stuff. Yes, sir. You're the author of Tales of the Elastic Limit. We're eager to hear about that. And you've been anthologized for several years. I'm holding it up for viewers, and if you're just on audio, uh, I had the privilege of being part of the 2026 sci-fi anthology that's put together by the other science fiction author, S.A. Gibson. Yes. I met I met Steve at LA Comic-Con uh just this year. He was wandering around. He gave me his card. He said, You're a science fiction writer here, you want to be in my anthology? You know, hit me up. So I sent him the short story, and I got in there, and that's how I met you, Howard.

SPEAKER_01 1:30

So yes, well, I've never met uh Steve, but I've had extensive, you know, back and forth with him, emails.

SPEAKER_02 1:40

Great. How did you first uh reach him? I I'm sure a lot of our listeners, viewers, they're up and coming or indie sci-fi writers. People are curious how you get published, how you get your name out there. Right. How did you uh get in touch with Steve? Because he's been doing this for several years now.

SPEAKER_01 1:55

Well, he started in uh 2021, and I was late. I I didn't submit that year, and I've submitted each year since. They take two submissions a year. They've taken each of my submissions. Uh I I had had uh a couple of uh uh short stories uh on the Unknown Tales podcast, which is uh uh where they read them, uh and it's one of the top 25 uh podcasts on the on the at the time uh uh on the internet. And uh uh so they Steve contacted me, is the way I understand it. Uh we were in the same uh we're in this, oh no, no, it was Mark. It was Mark Neffler who also writes. He can we were in a couple of the same groups online, and he recommended that I uh uh put in for the anthology. I was late the first year, as I said. So that's how I got into it. But I have written two novels and a book of short stories, and I write not only time travel but uh or epic fables, which we can talk about, but they're historical fiction as well. And one of my novels, I just learned a month ago uh from the uh national president from the president of the National Federation of Music Clubs that one of my books has been approved for study by the Federation. And there's you know thousands of affiliate clubs all over the nation because the book has uh extensive uh uh covers uh 19th-century German classical musicians. Uh it's got both the Schumann's, he and his wife, she was much more famous than he was during his lifetime. It's got Brahms, her father was a uh the best known music teacher in Europe. He was everybody uh acknowledged that. Uh Mendelssohn is in it a couple of times. Uh Beethoven's discuss, uh Schubert is mentioned, I think. Anyway so, and I'll I use real real history. I don't change the facts. Or if I alter them in any way, I always have a book of notes at the end that clarifies things. So uh yeah, that's pretty pretty gratifying.

SPEAKER_02 4:28

Well, good for you. Congratulations. Uh, as as we both know, it's tough getting attention and this attention-focused, attention-starved media information landscape. So if you get accolades, you get recognized, you get integrated even in an educational kind of program, that's pretty cool.

SPEAKER_01 4:48

Yeah, I uh I do my own marketing and it's feeble, but you know, I keep getting there. I've got trailers and I've, you know, I've got an extensive YouTube uh footprint uh where I like train a dinosaur or fix my time machine or I transport busloads of people on city buses back to the past and then bring them safely into the current reality. Uh and so yeah, if you go to YouTube, you'll see five we'll put the link in the description for everybody so they could have. Well, what I'm saying is you'll see like five of them, but if you keep scrolling, there's dozens of them. So anyway.

SPEAKER_02 5:29

And what do you use to create that kind of uh marketing storytelling? Do you use AI to do the visuals?

SPEAKER_01 5:36

Yeah, I don't even know what that is. I write books where the machinery does astounding, unbelievable stuff, and I can't I can't even work a computer halfway. So no, I don't do anything. So how do you it's on YouTube, they're videos, right?

SPEAKER_02 5:50

I'll post them. Yeah, I know, but what's the video experience like if you're not using technology? Oh well, I had an app on my uh Mac where I could make movies.

SPEAKER_01 6:01

So I'd have like on the bus, uh I had a friend that was the head of the arts council, and she had three or four buses, four buses, and uh they sold, it was a fundraising thing, they sold passports, and so we would the buses would go around to different venues that had something to do with the arts, and they'd get off and have their passport stamped, and then they'd uh you know go to the next place, and as the day progressed, the evening, they all got drunk as could be. So I had this friend, and she said, Look, I got these things on the buses. I got a juggler and I got this or that. Somebody's gonna be reading something. And one of the guys fell through. Can you help me out? And I said, Yeah, I'll play guitar and sing and transport people back in town. And she said, Can you do that on a bus? And I said, We'll see. So I did it and had a blast, and the next year I didn't do it because she had other arrangements. And people came up to her and said, Where is that crazy guy that was doing all this stuff? So the next year I did it again. And the first time I published it's uh an hour long, I don't know how long, it's long, the whole thing that I had edited down. The second time I made like dozens of little clips from the entire experience. And so you start out, it's daylight, you end up, it's night, and lights are going by on the outside of the bus. And plus, I write with a pen name and nobody knows who I am, or at least at that time was my feeble you know, attempt at shtick. So my face is not in the thing. But you know, it's just they're hilarious. And uh so I just edit them on my machine and put them up on YouTube. Who shot the video? Oh, I had different people uh, you know, it depends on what the video is. Sometimes I shoot them when I inspect my time machines or train dinosaurs uh or something like that. Other times I just had friends do them or uh yeah, I just come by the I went to the library and uh asked for my book and filmed that. They weren't too happy about that. So uh anyway, I got I got my book out of the library and left, and they were like it was under duress. It was almost like I had to sneak it. Uh so yeah, I don't know.

SPEAKER_02 8:25

So tell us about your time obsession. It seems to be a recurring motif in one feeling or another.

SPEAKER_01 8:33

No, no, I'm an artist. And I've been an artist all uh my adult life, and uh I do all kinds of things. I I'm a sculptor, uh I paint, uh, I act, I'm a musician, uh, you know, I've been in all kinds of bands and stuff, and uh, you know, I got the ringing ears to prove it. Uh, you know, and so I always said I was gonna write a book, and a lot of people say that, but a lot of people, you know, they just say it. So uh I was stuck not on writing the book because I'm very well read and I may not know how to write, but I can I can spot bad writing. So my theory was I was gonna write a book and then fix it because I'm sure it would have long run-on sentences. I was unconcerned about the grammar. I just wanted the storytelling. I wanted to know as an artist, and I'm a good storyteller, and and I'm well read in terms of mythology and the unspoken uh the unconscious ability to use myth in storytelling because it it makes the leaps for you. If you use standardized things that everybody can relate to, then you don't have to put them in context because the myth does that for you. So you don't have to know that uh, in other words, if you're gonna write something that's horrible, horrible, you know, oh, what's the worst, worst thing? Well, say a lost child is horrible, okay, but you know, a lost girl child is more horrible because they uh, you know, society would deem uh w women inferior or whatever, you know, in terms of history I'm talking about, not me. And so, okay, but you could get even uh better than that because society values children. If something happened to a child, people would be involved unless she was an orphan. Okay, then she's really up the creek because she's a small girl child orphan, okay. Well, little orphan annie. Okay, Goldilocks with the three bears, okay, Princess Leia. They are all orphans. You don't have to be told that they're in a world of doo-doo, because you already know through the unconscious uh the way you were brought up, your your culture, that this is the case. Another thing with myth, uh uh numbers are very important. Uh you can't have one character. It's boring. You can't have two characters, that's boring. Boy gets girl or boy loses girl. Yawn. I'm going to sleep, I'm not reading that. But if you have three characters, you have infinite variety. You've got the hero and the girl, you've got the girl and the bad guy, you've got the bad guy and the hero, la-da-do. So each character has three things, you know, so and other numbers are important. It's a formula. You plug it in. Have you ever seen a movie or a TV show or a play? And the acting was fine, the pictures were good, you know, da-da-do, but it did not make it for you. Something was missing. It was just not a, you know, didn't make a connection. And chances are they've misplaced the myth. The numbers are wrong, and they don't resolve, and you're left, and you don't even know why.

SPEAKER_02 12:03

And well, to me, to me, problems in in film and writing, and sometimes, especially in science fiction and fantasy, is that they focus on world building and ideas instead of the characters. And usually what works is you put a character into a situation, their goals are clearly defined, they want something, they need something, and then they've got obstacles. And then as they negotiate through those obstacles in one form or another, they either attain their goal or they don't. And the emergent interaction between the character and their obstacles is the drama.

SPEAKER_01 12:46

Yes, but that follows the formula. If it works, you've employed terrific myth. In other words, I'm a good storyteller because I know I know the elements. You know, I mean, it's natural to me. I'm not stuck. Myth is not uh some ivy uh tower and some egghead figuring out what myth was. Written language has been around for like 10 or 12,000 years. And okay, but language has been around infinitely longer than that. And people sat around uh campfires and they talked about, you know, the hunt that day or the this or that, and a lot of do. And, you know, people knew through trial and error what made a good story. And if you have at least three characters, as opposed to, you know, this guy over here who went out and hit a deer on the head, that's a boring story. Who cares about that? You want to hear about him breaking his foot in the thing and fighting off people and you know, da-da-do. So the Homer is considered a great the a big deal, even though it probably wasn't one man, not because he invented storytelling, but because he knew the rules and put them down before anybody else did. So his you know, his stories follow there's there's a best formula that's been arrived through time, through trial and error. And if you look at it, you know, Joe Joseph Campbell like analyzed it, that's one way to look at it. His you know, the hero myth, and you have the gesture and you have the the you da-da-do, and the power parts fit together in certain ways, and it's unconscious. You can make people you can creep people out and they won't know why. Or you can hopefully you can intrigue them. And you know, I write epic fables. They they are fables, they are simple, they are page turning, they're simple. And people relate because I use myth. And and if you use it right, you don't even you're not even aware of it, you don't have to be aware of it. Uh and uh, but they're also epics because they're layered, especially the novels, they're layered like onions. And you know, I write disjointed things. I have a story, and then I have another story, and they're different, and another story, and it's different, nothing connects, and then they start to connect, and you're three-quarters of the way through the book before you even know what's happening, and you're engaged by that time, you're enthralled and want to know if they're gonna be able to do what they're trying to do. And uh, you know, it's it's got real history, so it's uh it's it's interesting from another point of view. But time travel aficionados they are rabid. They will pick you apart if you don't have a good time machine or if your theory has holes in it. And you know, uh although in my books the machine's breaking down, they have to you know figure it out. But uh the time travel aficionados who don't read say historical fiction, they're blown away by the fiction because it's not hitting them over the head, it's not a bunch of numbers, you know, dates, and you know, this happened, that the characters are immersed in a period of history. And in my books, uh different types of history intertwine, and they're all looking for the same thing. It's all time travel, but time travel is just the element, although you have to cross your cross your T's and dot your I's and you know, like my theories, the way I implement it, I can explain paradox, which is a big bugaboo in time travel, okay. And uh, you know, but that's not the point. The point is universal, there are epics in nature. Yeah, uh a short story is a contained piece, it's a little thing. I write short stories, you write short stories, okay. A novel is bigger because it has character development and it has a more intricate plot. But in an epic the plot is secondary. That's not the important thing, is the plot because it's universal. Everybody's been at the end of their rope, everybody's lost in love, everybody hates their job, you know. Uh uh so it relates in way so the the plot is secondary. It's not what happens, it's not what the characters do. It's who the characters become. And because it's universal, everyone can relate to it because it uses strings, hooks that draw you in. And if you use myth correctly, it draws you in subconsciously. You don't know why you feel this way, you don't know why you're pulling for this bad guy, or you know, whatever. Whatever the plot is. And and uh so they're epic in in nature, but they're simply told. And I s you know, this is but easier done in a novel, but in my book of short stories, I've got a book of five, twelve short stories. They're each a contained piece. You can read them in any order, one through twelve. But if you read them in order, it tells the bigger story, tells the history of humanity, but time is linear. So you can read the book backwards by reading the last chapter first and going in the reverse order, it's the same story just from another perspective, and you can't do that without time.

SPEAKER_02 18:39

So that's you know, why I take now the reason why why time though? You could if you're upset. You're upset about myth, yes, and and you have different angles of attack, you could focus on the hero's journey, you could focus on the double mother of Jung, you could focus on the risen dead of Osiris. The list is long in terms of pursuing these thematic archetypes, but but again, time time travel seems to be a focus, and I'm just curious why why you're using that one of all the tools at your disposal as a narrative device.

SPEAKER_01 19:26

I was gonna got off on a tangent. I was gonna answer that earlier. Okay, I'll I'm an artist, and I always wanted to write a book, but the question was not writing the book, the question was, what are you gonna write? So I lived out in the country, out in the middle of nowhere, and I had felled a tree one day and cut it into rounds, and it was cold. Uh there were no leaves on the on the trees, and this was like two rises over from my tiny little house. I lived alone in the in the woods, and I had uh so I went out in the morning to split these rounds, and I had like six dogs with me. They were excited, oh boy, sometimes you don't, you know. So I went out there and started splitting these rounds. And so I took my jacket off, I got warm, and I took my sweater off, you know, then I took my thing, you know. So in a half an hour, I was down to my shirt sleeve, even though it was chilly, and uh I took a break, I leaned out back on my uh on my axe, and I looked around, and all the dogs by this time were bored, so they were just laying around in the leaves. And I looked around, it was quiet. There was no airplanes, there was no squirrels running around, there was no birds in the tree. And I looked around and I said, you know, this must have been what it was like at caveman time. And then I said, What would happen if a caveman walked you know over that rise there? Then I said, What would it mean if a caveman walked over that rise there? So I went back in the house and I wrote a story about a man and I quickly changed it from cut with splitting wood to digging a hole. And he was looking for something in this hole. Okay. And he meets a time he meets excuse me, he meets a uh caveman. Okay. So it was it was a a pretty nifty little story, and it had a little twist at the end, like an O. Henry thing. And so I said, Well, that's pretty weird. What does that mean? You know, so I said I started I wrote another story. I wrote a story of a guy, instead of he was in a forest digging a hole, he was in a desert and he was looking for something, he was looking for a place, and he finds it. Okay. So I then I said and it had a weird little thing twist at the end, you know. I said, Well, that's an interesting thing. What does that mean? You know I had two stories about two guys, so I wrote a story. With two women and it was in a different time train. Okay, and they were looking for something and they find it. Everybody finds it. I didn't know what it was, but they knew what it was. So then I go back and I go back to the first story and I start giving them jargon. And they're all talking about the same thing. I didn't know what it was, but they knew what it was, so ought to do. So I've written two uh two novels and uh this uh book of short stories, and I've never written an outline. I just get a weird idea what would it be like if a caveman walked over the hill and I got a novel out of that. And uh, you know, uh so then I had a novel. And when I first started out, I wasn't gonna pu you know, publishing was not in on the horizon. I didn't care. I just wanted to from an artist's point of view, know if I could do it. So I would farm out little pieces of it here and there, read it to people. And then uh I had this one friend, she kept saying, you know, how come you're giving this stuff to everybody and you're not giving it to me? And I said, Well, when it's done, I'll give it to you. So I gave it to her when I had the end on it, and it still had run-on sentences and stuff. I said, Here I'm gonna fix this, but this is it. So, you know, she worked for a living. She called me for four or five nights, however long it took her to get through it. And she was asking all the right questions. She was getting through it, you know, working her way through all the right questions. Then uh when she finished it, she called me out, she said, You dog, you know. So uh so then they my friends pushed me to publish it. So I did, because you could do it on free, uh, for free on Amazon or whatnot. So then they're wanted a uh a sequel. Well, I didn't want to write a sequel, you know, that's too conventional for me. You know, I need something creative, you know. So I wrote another story. This is the one with the musicians in it. And again, it has three separate things. There's Julius Caesar. Everybody knows who Caesar is. Excuse me. He was a great politician, he was a a massive uh uh uh military genius. Okay. Caesar wins the Roman Civil War, goes back to Rome, and he gets murdered or okay, so then I'm looking around for some other kind of uh uh uh big thing in history. So I I I know a lot about uh Europe uh Elizabethan Thompson. I wrote about Christopher Marlowe. Christopher Marlowe was a literary genius. He wrote all kinds of plays, he wrote essays, he wrote books, and he was murdered just like Caesar. Ooh, this is pretty interesting, okay? This has got something going here, you know. So uh I needed somebody else. I had a thing on Caesar, I had a thing on Marlo. I called out my mother, who was a uh at the line. She was, I mean, she was alive at the time. Uh she was a professional, professionally trained classical musician. She taught music for 51 years, and you know, blah blah blah blah. Went to the American Conservatory of Music in Chicago on a full scholarship and finished in three years. So she could spit on Juilliard people. Okay, so I called her up. I said, Mom, I got this thing on Caesar, I got this thing on Marlowe. I need a classical musician who was murdered. And she said, I'll call you right back. You know, let me think about it. So I got up from my desk, I went over and poured some coffee in the kitchen. It hadn't been 30 seconds, the phone rang. And I went back and she said, Schumann, you know. And I said, Was he murdered? No, but he died in an insane asylum. And I said, I can work with that. Okay. So I, you know, again, it's a the the time travel apparatus, the theory is the same, and it's explained in every book. It's not uh heady, it's simple, they're all fables. So the the time the second book is not a sequel, it's a standalone, but it's all about the same people and the same you don't know they're the same people, but it's all about the same uh theory, the same hardware. Okay, so then after that, uh really I wrote the second one because I wanted to see if I'd learned anything. That's what an artist does is strive and try to control his media. Okay, so the first book is I don't know, 375 pages. The second book's only 250. So I was getting better at what I uh was trying to do. So from a creative standpoint, that's good, you know. So now I wanted to write something else. But I didn't want to do I didn't want a sequel. I didn't want to do uh, you know, I wanted them to stand alone, and I'd never written short stories. So I wrote some short stories. And see, if you write historical fiction, then your palate is endless. You know, it's just dude because you could go to prehistory too. I've written about the invention of the wheel, I've written about the invention of writing, I've written about agriculture.

SPEAKER_02 27:46

Let's talk for a second about you know your shorter pieces. Um, I'm familiar with your two shorter pieces from the anthology that we both appear in. Yes. So S.A. Gibson's anthology, and you have a particular style. Uh and maybe you could talk, maybe you can talk a little bit about the style. So it seems to be in this kind of epic fable style. And what I got out of it, it's heavily dialogue-driven and expository in the sense that between the dialogue and the narration, you're kind of telling the reader what's going on. Now, I'm assuming that's a conscious style that you've adopted and it fits your epic fable format. Why did you why did you choose that kind of way of writing, which is again very it's very dialogue heavy, so the characters are explaining what's going on, and you're describing the situation, and you're also pedagogical in the sense where you're taking a moment of history, and with this time travel mechanism, in a sense, someone is coming from the future or from some other place to educate the folks who are there now and teach them something. So, in one of your short stories, it's literally writing and communication, going from phonetics, like almost cuneiform hieroglyphs, to composite words. Yes, and it seems to be like, well, you know, our ability to communicate and write came from this other place via time travel. Do I have that more or less right in terms of how you write and one of the recurring themes of your writing?

SPEAKER_01 29:44

Well, the themes are different. In the first book, uh, they discover uh uh a time machine and they try to use it and they explode time. Time explodes, and so they have to have a mission to go and figure out what's happening and hopefully fix it. Okay, in the second mission, in the second book, there's a guy who's uh and he's got an assistant, and you know, there's a whole lot, but he's uh visiting with people because he needs something from them. Okay, and you find out that he has a quest. Okay, and that's you know, the problem is time has exploded, you know, you know. So uh the three books I've written, you can read them in any order, and how you read them is how you understand how they're connected. You say, oh man, this is the guy in the second book.

SPEAKER_02 30:50

What I'm trying to get at though, Howard, for our listeners and viewers, there's different styles of writing. Okay, there's a style of writing where you just kind of set characters loose, they interact with the world and the people who are fighting them, and it just kind of plays out. Okay, so it's it's driven, it's driven by drama, and it's kind of emergent and organic based on plot elements. And your style is is different from that in a sense where you're putting characters into a situation and there's a lot of dialogue, yeah, and there's a lot of description. Now, I'm not creating a hierarchy here, I'm just trying to understand your style, why you chose it, and how it ties to some of your themes, which include a lot of time travel and this kind of archetypal basis on mythology.

SPEAKER_01 31:52

Well, here's the thing. When I sat down and started to write, you know, I didn't have an outline, but I had a guideline because I read a lot and I have a very interesting background in terms of education and experience. And so uh I knew I wasn't Tolstoy, and I knew I wasn't like Hemingway. So I did have guidelines that were self-imposed. I wanted it to be simple. So I've uh read pretty much everything Edgar Rice Burroughs ever wrote. He wrote lots of Princess of Mars novels and John Carter of Mars, and he wrote a uh Venetian series, and but he wrote Tarzan. And Tarzan's short stories are very quick. The pages the chapters are a page and a half. Tarzan's walking around, he sees people in his domain, you know, ooh, ooh, and and and uh this uh uh he climbs a tree to see better, and the snake jumps on him. And that's the end of the chapter. You turn the chapter, Tarzan dives in the river, and the snake lets go. And he crawls up and he's looking through the grass, the people in his domain have guns, and the lion jumps on him. Okay, so it's another page and a half. So the the the it's quick and it's built on stages, okay. So I wanted a quick read. Then I wanted uh a something with uh an O. Henry ending, where you're going down and you're saying, ah, this is what's happening, and then it goes like this. Okay, that's O. Henry. Okay, that keeps the the uh uh excitement up, it keeps the uh uh intrigue up. Okay, so then I said I needed to have like Dickens, a beginning and a middle and an end. Dickens sold very few novels in his lifetime. He sold through the penny papers, his stuff was serialized. That's how people know him, knew him. And and uh every week the beggars would beg the people that bought the penny papers to read it to them on the sidewalks. Okay, so each of Dickens's chapters have a beginning and a middle and an end. They're like little books in themselves. So those are the three things I held myself to. And other than that, in other words, they have to be a quick read, they have to have a oh Henry, each chapter has to like, you know, you understand, and then you don't understand. It's like, what? And then the third thing is each chapter has a beginning and a middle and an end. And uh, of course, you have to do that with the with a short story as well. Okay, so that's that's what I held myself to, and my style came about as I was paring down everything. I wanted it simple. There's very little description. I do describe things, but it's very little I don't describe this the spacecraft, I don't describe the uniforms, you know. I don't care about that. That's for the reader to uh plug in, and that makes it more infinite. And uh uh uh I found my voice about the second rewrite of the first book when I was went back through it and was trying to correct for grammar and things like that. Excuse me. And other words, uh aside from that, it's just wordplay. It's just uh, you know, never my my main thing is never bore your reader, never you know, uh can't take for granted that they understand where you're coming from. They have to know what's happening, and you gotta leave them wanting more and not bore them, and that may be a fine line, and that's where the word comes in. And if and and this how how well you use all how well the elements, the different elements blend together, that defines your art, and that's for others to judge. I can only do as well as I think I can.

SPEAKER_02 36:22

All right, and speaking of that, uh how do you you mentioned you market your own your own books? So so are are all your books self-published then from uh okay, and then what do you do except for the five ontologies? Well, they're you're you're you're contributing to a collection that someone else is doing, like like like Gibson, right. So what else are you doing? You got your YouTube channel with your videos, and then what other what other avenues do you have?

SPEAKER_01 36:56

I've written several blogs, I haven't done one in a while. I've got a uh I've got a website, and uh there's uh a you know a book section, of course, and there's a free stuff page. So uh I had I was in a group uh uh with a man named uh Dr. Jeff Robinson, and he had a uh podcast, Untold Tales, which I said was, you know, and he wrote the books, uh the short stories, and he had a woman produce them who's a uh nationally known voice artist, Melissa del Toro Shafner, and she does national commercials, she does all kinds of internet uh video stuff, and she's in high high demand. So he asked me, he at the time there were like 85 of them, and he said, Um I need some more material. Do you have some stuff? So I sent him a couple of short stories, and she said, Ooh, uh, you got any more? So after a while, they uh produced, that is, she read my short stories, and you know, they're 17 inch uh minutes, they're 32 minutes, you know, and uh about five or six of them. And one of them, the clash of the redheads, at the time, there was like a hundred of them then. Uh there's two hundred of them now, uh the clash of the redheads was the the most listened to out of all the uh short stories on the podcast. So they interviewed me, and they had interviewed me prior with a bunch of other authors, and so uh on my uh page, my free stuff page, you can hear these short stories for free. And you can also read some of my uh stories for free, and you can listen to uh interviews that I've done.

SPEAKER_02 39:06

What what are you doing proactively to get attention out there, to get people to see your content? You you could collaborate on this science fiction book, which gets us out there, which is cool. But are you doing any kind of social media advertising, engaging with the world to get people interested?

SPEAKER_01 39:28

Yes, I I have uh I'm on maybe 35 groups on Facebook. I'm on historical fiction groups, I'm on writing groups, I'm on sci-fi groups, I'm on time travel groups, I'm on history groups, excuse me. And uh, you know, what you do, what I have done, what I did, excuse me, is for a year or so I didn't even talk about my stuff. I just engaged in discussions, and I became a known entity within the group. And then uh what I do weekly is I post to these groups. Uh it's either the the books or the or the anthologies. And uh also I'm on LinkedIn. I'm on, I don't know, maybe 15 or 20 groups there, same thing, writers' groups, uh uh, you know, whatever. And so uh yeah, I don't want to oversaturate. Uh so I post once a week. And I have uh had uh uh you know, I have trailers for the books, and I you know, and uh every chance I get I push them towards the website which has all manner of stuff. It explains what an epic fable is, it explains uh you know, and gives free stuff free examples of of the work. And I also have a blog which is on the website as well. So uh you know, I get besieged every week. I must have 50 people trying to market my stuff. And uh you know, I'm not after a bigger uh number of hits. My metric is sales, and over the years I have paid professionals, quote unquote, and you know, they're no better than I am, so I do it myself. You know, the all right.

SPEAKER_02 41:35

So it sounds like it's earned media, what they say. So you're participating in all these groups, discussions, you've got a presence there in all these different categories, and then every once in a while you'll send people to your website, they're curious about your writing, and then you engage communities that way.

SPEAKER_01 41:52

Yes, yes, and I'm very uh, you know, I'm trying to figure out the best way to market this news about my book and the Music Uh Federation, because that's a big thing. They've got thousands of chapters across the country, and they've said that it's good enough to study because it's we've got these classical musicians in. So I what I'm trying to do, I'm trying to get them to market it for me.

SPEAKER_02 42:20

Right. How did you do the research for that research-intensive book?

SPEAKER_01 42:24

Well, here's the thing. Uh I knew that Caesar had won the Civil War with Pompeii the Great at the Battle of Munda, which is in Iberia, which is in Spain, on a big plane out in the middle of nowhere in Spain. So I just had him uh meet time travelers there while he was on campaign. Okay, then he goes back to Rome and gets murdered straight away, you know. So Marlowe, I knew a lot about Marlowe because I know a lot about Elizabethan history. And most scholars believe that Marlowe was also a spy.

SPEAKER_02 43:08

How did you research? Did you use Google? Did you go to books? Did you use AI? What did you do to get information among these people?

SPEAKER_01 43:19

Well, I I do have to research dates. I'm not I'm good on history, but I'm not precise on dates. And I use Google for that primarily. And I used this book on Marlowe because Brahms wrote letters. They let him see uh Schumann at the institution at the end, and the letters were later pu uh uh published. So that book was invaluable for research on Brahms. We know exactly who his doctors were and what the therapy they had working on him and what his symptoms were, etc. So uh Mostly I get my ideas because of stuff I already know, stuff that I've um interested in. Stuff that feeds me. And then I try to make it accessible and interesting to other people using these various other things, time travel being one, but they're mystery stories, they're detective tales, they're whodunits, they're love stories uh and uh and time travel. And uh uh so uh my the the short stories on my uh computer were like a hundred pages. So my first novel was three fifty, three seventy-five, my second was two fifty hundred pages. I was getting better at what I was wanting to do, which is convey universal uh concept through very simply told stories. So in my books, people have to make decisions, and this the the could the decisions they make have consequences, and so the type of things they're going through uh you know other people go through uh and and can relate to. That's my hope at least, and so far it's panned out. So that's all I can tell you.

SPEAKER_02 45:18

Well, that's great. Well, well, it's my pleasure to help get the word out for you as best I can. Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 45:25

I appreciate it.

SPEAKER_02 45:25

And uh, we'll put links in the description of your website and sources and where to where to find you. All right, and uh it's been fun collaborating on the 2026 sci-fi anthology. So both you have two stories in it. I have one. I submitted two stories, but they were both long. Yeah, and I heard back from Steve that they're too long, so you know they're gonna pick one. And then they pick the one that I guess they like more.

SPEAKER_01 45:54

Well, I'll tell you what, after I read your uh story, then maybe we could talk again, maybe not on a podcast, but uh, you know, and then we can uh we can do, you know. I just haven't read any of your stuff. I'm sure you can take it.

SPEAKER_02 46:10

That's all right. That's no big deal. Most guests haven't. So it's like my my role is a pod is a podcaster and host. Yeah. And uh, you know, bonus brownie points if there's any familiarity with what I do, but I try to showcase uh the talents and the work of the people who are guests rather than my own stuff. Sometimes we talk about my own stuff, but uh it's within the context of what they're doing.

SPEAKER_01 46:33

Right. Well, how do you come up with your story?

SPEAKER_02 46:38

My story is a multiverse-focused story. I've always been obsessed with the multiverse ever since I was a kid, and I wrote a bunch of stuff and I didn't like it because I was focused on the thing rather than the characters. Right. And then I had an epiphany, which is actually the story seeded my debut novel for uh a hustler who gets the idea that there are multiple universes in a multiverse. And then he realizes that he could turn it into a genie's lamp, because if there's an infinite number of universes, every possibility plays itself out. So if he could hustle people into thinking that he can make a device that'll send you to a universe where everything is the same except your dreams happen to be coming true, then that's his new scam. And that became the foundation for the novel.

SPEAKER_01 47:30

That's very interesting. That's very interesting. He chooses one of the two uh classical views of time travel. Uh so that's the view that uh time is a river or it's uh a corridor with a bunch of doors, and no matter which route you take, there are more corridors, or there are more doors, or there are more fingers of the river. Okay, that's one view. Another view is time is a is a loaf of bread and it's sliced into present, present, present, present, present. And if you want a time travel, you take this piece of bread and you move it in the loaf to this piece of bread. Okay, so a lot of time travel stories that don't work is because they mix the two uh definition.

SPEAKER_02 48:22

Mine is the uh max tag mark level four multiverse. So it's uh um there's a mathematical or logical backbone to the universe, and really we're in a sense living in a simulation. It could be an organic simulation, it's not necessarily created by aliens, but the backbone of reality itself is like Stephen Wolfram's Ruliad. So it's based on logic and computational kind of function. Now, whether that's true or not, I don't know. That's the backdrop. So, what happens in that kind of multiverse, I call it the infiniverse, is every permutation is expressed. We happen to live in a universe where the natural laws enable our existence. Yes, but there's an infinite number of these because it's spinning dials for natural law, for number of dimensions, for every variable that went into this universe. There's infinite permutations of every possibility. So that's that's that's the backdrop. So time travel is basically this ability to jump between these isolated universes within this multiverse or infiniverse where everything that has ever happened is happening now and will happen in the future. It's an eternal instant and it's an in infinitely large, infinitesimal space all at once. So within that, time travel becomes kind of uh a natural extension of that. And I play with that in the book. Well, I can't wait to where the character jump and I can't wait to read it.

SPEAKER_01 50:02

So in my book, all my books have the elastic limit in the title, and that's because in my theory, uh you have to understand what the elastic limit is in order to manipulate it, because it with the machine allows you to manipulate the the elastic limit. So in the first book, the the limit is breached and time explains, and uh uh uh but it's also a metaphor for your imagination. So the first book is beyond the uh the elastic limit, it's beyond your imagination. This one we were talking about with the musicians called Piercing the Elastic Limited, it pu it blows your imagination away.

SPEAKER_02 50:45

That's good that you bring that up because that's what I learned. In my earlier writing, I was focused on the mechanism of this thing, and I created kind of cardboard cutout characters who would tell that and experience it. And I discovered that you need a compelling hero or anti-hero, and you throw them into the mix, and they happen to be in this multiverse and they happen to try to take advantage of it. And I like that sentiment that you bring up that metaphorically and emotionally, if this is true in any kind of way, then it opens up infinite possibilities, and we realize as people, even though we feel life is finite and that choices are limited, that we create the universe as we go through it. And that's an interesting theme that underlies a lot of how the characters view themselves and uh the situation. Well, it's most interesting.

SPEAKER_01 51:40

Uh, we'll jump on them right again.

SPEAKER_02 51:42

So the short story is the seed of that novel, and then I I translated that short story into the 140,000-word novel that I published this year, and that's the first in a series. I'm gonna keep going because the the adventures continue.

SPEAKER_01 51:58

There you go, never stop. Never stop. You know, people ask me what it takes to be a writer, and uh, you know, a lot of people have ideas, ideas are great, but you and until you have it down on a computer on a piece of paper, you can't alter it, you can't change it, you can't move it around. And so I tell people that want to write is to put pen to paper, you know, or click that computer key. Uh you can have ideas all day long. You know, a lot of people a lot of people say they're gonna write a book. A lot of people say they're gonna write a book.

SPEAKER_02 52:37

If if you if you're a writer, you you don't even have to be popular or you know be even formally published, but if you live it and do it every day, then you're that thing.

SPEAKER_00 52:49

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 52:49

And to your point, without that, there's nothing. You need content both to feed off of for yourself and also just just let it out there into the world.

SPEAKER_01 52:59

Yeah, that's uh that's what we do. Yes, yes, I agree.

SPEAKER_02 53:03

Well, it's cool having you on. Um I shouldn't say congratulations because this is your fourth time at uh at the anthology rodeo and published L. It's the fifth time. Good for you, good for you. All right, so I I guess I pop my cherry on that this this year.

SPEAKER_01 53:22

That's all right. Yeah, you're um uh uh congratulate you. A lot of people through the years the anthology has grown. Last year was the biggest year yet, and this year had four times the pre-sales. So I congratulate you on getting in. A lot of people are and uh I'm an administrator uh for the group uh for uh the science fiction novelist, which means I just get the emails, I don't do anything. Other people uh okay the memberships and whatnot. But uh people are asking for to be admitted to the club left and right. So you're uh the fact that you submitted and were accepted the congratulations.

SPEAKER_02 54:11

Well, thanks. I even got a little kudos in uh the review on the Amazon. Uh babe baby A in a a stormtrooper outfit called out my story. So I thought that was excellent. Well, I appreciate it. Spread the word. I really enjoy the podcasting, which is helping other people. Well, I'm gonna put it all over my social network. Yeah, let let folks know that I'll be happy to talk to folks and uh continue the conversation and uh you know share the enthusiasm of being a creator. And to your point, it's challenging. You there's a lot of things that get in the way, both internal and external. And if you just have the dedication and that that that energy and vision, then you just do it. And if you fill that page, then it's mission accomplished.

SPEAKER_01 54:58

I agree, I agree, and thank you so much for giving me this opportunity. I've enjoyed myself.

SPEAKER_02 55:04

Thanks. Thanks so much, ladies and gentlemen. Check out Howard. We got the links and description in the in the notes. And like, comment, and share, and spread the word. Indie Indie authorship is thriving, science fiction is hot. You got the Project Hail Mary movie out for another big blockbuster that everybody's talking about. And you don't get an Andy Weir without people like us and Andy, who start from scratch, which is you're getting your best shot, you build your following, and you never know what can happen. And it doesn't even matter what happens as long as you keep doing what you love. That's right. I agree. It's all in the art. Thanks so much.