Peter Gribble and the City of Magicians: Where Pacifism Collides with Reality

In this episode of The Science Fiction and Fantasy Factory, Mookie Spitz sits down with Peter Gribble, author of the sprawling City of Magicians trilogy. They dig into a world where magic replaces military force, complacency masquerades as stability, and a barbarian invasion exposes the cracks holding everything together.

At the center is a deceptively simple premise: a pacifist, pilgrimage-driven city-state has grown rich, comfortable, and dangerously soft. When violence comes knocking, the ruling council scrambles—not to fight, but to manipulate, negotiate, and survive. Their solution? A reluctant young man tasked with telepathically binding himself to the invading warlord, while a parallel underground faction plots its own dangerous alliance.

Peter's trilogy becomes a pressure chamber for asking some big questions: 

• Can a society built on nonviolence survive contact with those playing by a different set of rules?
• When does restraint become weakness?
• What happens when power—magical or political—corrupts the people who wield it?
• And underneath it all: are we actually in control, or are deeper forces shaping our choices?

The conversation moves beyond plot into process, as Peter breaks down how this 1,600-page epic was created over decades, resulting in a sprawling epic through obsession, daily discipline, and the kind of creative “possession” writers die for: where characters hijack the story, structure manifests later in the game, and entire scenes get scrapped and reborn in a single manic burst.

Mookie pushes the discussion into even sharper territory, showcasing how Peter's epic uses fantasy to confront the realities of history, war, and human failure, and asking whether idealism can survive contact with the real world and its more pragmatic brutalities. The answer, like the trilogy itself, is messy, conflicted, and brutally honest.

If you’re into dense, character-driven, immersive world-building with philosophical teeth—think Borges-level ideas meshed with Tolkien-scale ambition—this one delivers. And if you’re a writer, this episode provides a raw look at what it actually takes to build something big, finish it, and then figure out how the hell to get anyone to notice.

The Guest

Peter Gribble has written for NUVO and other magazines in British Columbia. For over ten years he wrote a monthly gardening column for a local Vancouver paper. The City of the Magicians is his first published series.

His Website

https://petergribble.com/

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Hello and welcome to the science fiction and fantasy factory. I'm your host, Mookie Spitz, and I'm delighted to have on the factory floor today Mr. Peter Gribble. He is the author of the City of Magicians trilogy, Threat Within and Quickening. 15, 1600 pages of fun, magical storytelling. Welcome aboard, Peter.

SPEAKER_02 0:34

Thanks, Mickey. Thanks for having me. Great to be here.

SPEAKER_00 0:42

You dive in deep. To me, just to orient our listeners and viewers, I feel a little Umberto Ico, I feel a little Jorge Luis Borges that's going on. And you obviously have your own voice, but it's wonderful again to dive into a work that is dense, literally magical, and does a nice balance between that kind of intensity and descriptive world-building detail and compelling characters and situations that that drive home that three-act arc. You set it up very well. Then there's the crisis. We'll get into it. And then there's a resolution with a cliffhanger. So I'm assuming that the series continues.

SPEAKER_02 1:31

Yes, I'm working on books four, five, and six, the second trilogy, as we speak.

SPEAKER_00 1:36

So yeah. All right. So let's set it up for readers just a bit. Um, as I as I got from your book, there's the city of magicians, and there's a centralized kind of power structure, but the magicians are always vying for power and control. The city is divided into regions, and it's evocative and in ways thematically descriptive of a society that seems stable, at least on the surface, but you got a lot of tremors, which makes it particularly vulnerable to, spoiler alert, a barbarian invasion. And that's that builds up the tension and opposition between this society built on magic as a way to control and empower it, yet might rely on it a little bit too heavily based on the fact that there's there's hordes knocking on their door who are as banal and brutal as it comes.

SPEAKER_02 2:39

Right. There's nothing like having the Visigoths uh knocking on your door to that. Oh my goodness, what are we doing? Um, the basic premise was um, what does a pacifist, nonviolent city-state Jew who has grown complacent about their magic? Magic is arduous, it's not easy. And so they've they've grown very comfortable because they're they've become a pilgrimage site. They've got the holy spring that sometimes heals people and sometimes doesn't. It's sort of like lures. So people go to lures and they get a lot of um sustained sense of resignation or maybe even healing if they're lucky. Um, but they've grown lazy and complacent because it's a it's a good trade. The pilgrim trade is great. Um that was one of the tropes I wanted to explore. A lot of fantasy novels are about the journey and the quest. What if the city is the the uh the quest, the the place of arrival? Um so this barbarian, um just oh hey, another place to pillage and rape and burn down all this sort of stuff. So the council realizes, my God, we don't have army, nor do we have the um impulse to um battle or fight or none of that. So how do we how do we secure the barbarian leader so that he can leave us alone and continue on in his onslaught? Um so they they find this uh young guy and they say, you are going to um link up with the barbarian using telepathic sendings, which are sort of like a bonding thing that you say, oh my goodness, I can't harm this person or his environment. Um the young man sass, uh, says, Me? Telepathic sendings? You made a mistake! That's chapter one. But chapter two, um, there's a second protagonist, a young woman who's searching for her lost um, her this her lover who has disappeared and his lost manuscript, and she gets um uh recruited into a secret underground faction of the city because they want to collaborate with the same barbarian. So those are the opening parts.

SPEAKER_00 4:53

So it sounds like you have this pacifist magical enclave, and they got a good they got a good thing going. So they have added income akin to the tourist trade. It's this pilgrim thing. They've got the healing baths, they're offering benefits, and and they seem to have a pretty good setup. But there's tension from within and without. And you're introducing an opportunity for one of these characters to to initiate himself in terms of his own personal growth, but also make contact with with the hordes to like connect with that. And what I got even from the second book, just to tease it up a little bit, is that that sense of magic and that telepathic communication inspires the barbarian to feel that they're transcendent and that they have skills that that they didn't anticipate. And I hey, we never thought of this magic stuff, it's pretty good. And I'm just gonna declare myself God while I'm at it.

SPEAKER_02 5:54

Absolutely. And that's to the tremendous advantage of the underground movement, which is forced to go above ground to say, yeah, we back this premise. Whereas the original counselors is, oh my goodness, no way. Um, we we don't need a God, please, is completely against everything, et cetera, et cetera. Um, so yeah.

SPEAKER_00 6:16

There's a tendency that if you think of magic, it's so it's so transcendent by nature. And since you're ostensibly breaking the rules of science, you could kind of have at it with fantasy. And what makes good writing, though, is the very human quality. It's either magic or military might, it's a power. And when human beings get power, they tend to get corrupted and they become myopic and increasingly narcissistic. And you bring that out. So even in the Harry Potter series, you've got the the young the young ones in Hogwarts, and as they acquire power, and then the entire infrastructure that's there, it's kind of rotten. It's it's broken in ways that human beings are broken. And you you use that really as a framework for your own dramatic tension and release, which is you have these beings who are empowered with all these amazing abilities, and they they ruin it, they blow it. Either they're living in their own self-delusion, they become comfortable to your point, and when given the opportunity to protect themselves, even take advantage of that to ally with the enemy, to have these court intrigues and to turn it into one big mess instead of unifying and representing what would be ostensibly in the best interests of the society overall.

SPEAKER_02 7:45

Right. Well, sort of what we are facing ourselves. When does transition become rupture? And and the interesting thing about the challenges that SAS is facing are very similar. Um, I I did not cribb on this. Harry Potter himself finds his integrity becomes stronger as he faces mounting challenges to it. And Dumbledore is this lovely mentor that just says, okay, we have to decide what is um what is right and what is easy. And oh hey, never thought of it that way. So Sass himself, who discovers that he's been very badly manipulated into this role, realizes I still have to keep going. I'm a citizen, my citizenship is important, and uh so he has to sort of raise himself and keep going, while at the other on the other hand, um, you have Lalia, who has been seducted, seduced into this organization, realizes she can't do this, and she has to hide her integrity and protect it so that no one sees it, and barely herself, which is, oh no, I I have to do it this way. And so bit by bit, and they're thrown together in book two, um, because Purdue, the barbarian invasion invader, realizes, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know there are two factions. One's going after my heart, the other one's going after my ambitions. Okay, clear the clear that clear the field. This is what I want. So everyone gets a little bit of what they want, and yet a lot of things go sideways.

SPEAKER_00 9:21

Yeah, and what goes sideways is the dissolution of the order within the city and compromising their ability to defend themselves because you have these internal contradictions, conflicts, and fissures, which just makes them all more vulnerable. Yeah. And I I like that. And and back to Harry Potter, you point at those weaknesses and that sense of personal growth. But this book is not for kids, this is not young adults. This is for this is for very mature readers who love to read and who love an immersive, sprawling epic with tons of descriptions, internal states, its own language and vocabulary that's there. And once again, if you're into diving into a world, not just passively reading in between your doom scrolling, but I I think uh your work here is old school in the sense of a big sprawling, almost encyclopedic fantasy narrative against the Lord of the Rings and its breadth that uh that'll provide entertainment.

SPEAKER_02 10:26

This is the map they um in book three. Each book has a slightly different map, but I had to draw the map for my own clarity so that when Sass leaves the house every morning, does he go down the same streets? Oh, he turns left here, goes straight there, and so I I have to be very clear with myself so there are no everything is internally correct, God willing. Um, and um, but the same thing with uh with the languages, because they don't write normally, they have sort of like this is my this is some of my finger showing it on screen, folks.

SPEAKER_00 11:02

If you've got the audio, it's kind of tough luck. But if you're watching us on YouTube, you're gonna see the overlays that I put on the video too. So and get get the book, you'll see the goodies in there. And now we've got his own notebook here, which is super cool. That's nice. Yeah. So you you have created a world, and as a world creator, you not only did your homework, but you were thoroughly immersed into all the nooks and crannies and details.

SPEAKER_02 11:30

Well, it's interesting how sometimes when you're working on this, stories will suggest themselves. It's like Ursula LeGuim in her uh development of Ursie, she did not have the story until she started drawing the map. And with every island she drew, the story just went boo, it bloomed. And so I thought that was a really interesting process. And and um um Tolkien said the same thing, um, but he had to do that because he was sort of a uh a linguist. Um, he said he couldn't develop things unless he had a name. The moment the name came to him, something boom, the character is there, their plot, their background, their history, and where they were or were not going.

SPEAKER_00 12:12

So power God gave to Noah to name all the animals, right? So when you do that, and and and similarly, characters tell your story for you. Yes, so I'm an author also, and I know that I'm on to something good when I'm a mere receptacle or channel for my characters to play out their own adventures, and and great drama works that way too, where we've created the world, we've created the characters, but then like a game of chess with rules and a boundary and a board, you just set them loose, and the dynamic interplay between the characters and their goals, the obstacles that are in their way organically rush together with conflict to create an emergent drama that you as an author are often surprised by. And that to me is the greatest joy of the creative process in.

SPEAKER_02 13:09

Oh, yeah, it's it's fascinating when that happens. As you say, the analogy of playing chess. But yet as a writer, you're working more or less alone, and yet you're playing chess, but you're not entirely aware of the person who's on the other side of the board. And he said, Oh, that piece just moved. Uh oh. I have one point in book one where Sass has found out some really, really rather bad news. And he had he's going to go home and mope. And moping is a terrible thing to subject a reader to. So I thought, where's this going? So he comes home, and out of the blue, I was not prepared for this. Uh, a voice comes from above and says, Sass, come up, come up to your, have your meal in my rooms today. Um, and it's his aunt who runs the household. And she um, oh my goodness, where did this come from? But when, as you say, when those things happen, you pay attention and you write them down. And suddenly that whole chapter came into a wonderful perspective, wrote itself like a charm, and just, oh my goodness, this was a lot better than I had planned. And she became a very integral person in the whole trilogy.

SPEAKER_00 14:17

Writers tend to be thinking creatures. We're thinking about the plot, we're thinking about characters, we're thinking about the world, but thought is the enemy of flow, and flow is where the real rubber hits the road for creativity and engagement. And that's what readers are sensitive to, which is which is a narrative that has that kind of underlying energy. And when you let your thoughts wander and you open yourself up to that creative engine, akin to dreaming, when we dream every night, we dream what we want to dream, but our dreams surprise us because they're coming from someplace else. And if your writing is like a dream, then you know you're on to something because you're surprising even yourself. And if you're surprised as the creator, you could rest assured that your reader is going to be surprised and delighted, also.

SPEAKER_02 15:09

Yes. Um, yeah. So the the thing I used to keep a dream diary. I have um I keep a pad beside my pillow. This is a pad I carry with me um even when I go out. This one is um number 35 for City of Magicians. Um so I used to keep a dream diary. Um, and uh the moment I wake up, write down the things that you remember. Um, but it's very interesting to see sometimes common symbols or situations that run through your dreams. So, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 15:43

Absolutely. I mean, there is something to be said about the Jungian view of archetypes and instinct and dream interpretation. There are common themes, and writing it down right after you awaken is important because our conscious and unconscious minds are battling it out. So our unconscious mind rules the roost while we're snoozing, and then the conscious mind wrestles for control because there's a lion over here that I got to run from, and there's something yummy over there that I need to run to. So get away from that dream world, focus on reality, and we've we've we've grown into and evolved into this duality. So if you don't capture that dream quickly, right when you wake, your conscious mind air quote reality is going to supersede and short circuit the knowledge and the insights that you can get. And when you're writing, it's that same kind of battle that goes on as you're actually creating, which is your two sides are duking it out. And I've just found that if your conscious mind does some of the setup and the lifting and the prep, then you can open yourself up to that unconscious, deep creativity and let it loose and uh and then kind of meet in the middle to balance the order with the chaos.

SPEAKER_02 17:04

If you become friendly with the um so-called unconscious, you realize it's actually very conscious and just doesn't have a voice.

SPEAKER_00 17:13

Yeah, that's 100% correct. It's always there, it never goes away.

SPEAKER_02 17:17

And so this is one of the philosophies in the City of Magicians. They understand this somewhat, um, and they call it the silent body. So if you pay attention to the silent bodies, oh, it's your promptings and those little instincts, those little movements, those thrusts, those pushes. And bit by bit, um, that's why um on the website, PeterGribble.com.

SPEAKER_00 17:38

Yeah, link links below, everybody. I'll have the link to your website and to get your books and all the goodies down there.

SPEAKER_02 17:45

And it opens up with Welcome to the City of the Magicians, where the magic is the same as yours. So it's that day-to-day thing that we notice it every once in a while when we um say, Oh, I'm gonna cross the street and go down this way and say, Oh my god, then you've met somebody who's oh, I have I I haven't seen you for years or whatever. But you have to step back and realize what were those breadcrumbs that I was falling that made me cross the street turn left instead of turn right in order to meet this person. And so you're beginning to, so innocent magicians, as we must ourselves, begin to recognize the sense that we are far more aware than our conscious mind thinks we are. And as we begin to open up as writers, as people day-to-day people, realize, my goodness, I'm doing things with a far greater cognitive intent than I'm aware of. So bit by bit, city magicians, the citizens, are very slowly as they face crisis, mounting crises. Um, my goodness, there's something going on here. And Sass, at the very end of the day, I don't want to, I'm just saying that the last chapter in the in book three um explodes a great deal. And he is becoming aware that there's an underpinning of a cognitive sentience to reality, to existence itself that is pulling, that is dragging the city towards a destiny it has already chosen.

SPEAKER_00 19:13

That's very, very cool. So the hidden becomes revealed, and uh this almost pantheistic energy or force becomes increasingly manifest to play to play things out. And the analogue to our world is obvious in the sense that to your point, the unconscious never goes away. When we really look at our own lives, what we do, there's so much that we think is beneath the surface, but if we just give it a chance to articulate and express itself, and if we could understand it better consciously, it'll make our own lives better because it reconciles a lot of the dualities that we otherwise would face.

SPEAKER_02 19:56

Yeah. So it brings us a lucidity to our daily awareness, as if you can practice it, which I have is really hard for some people, me included, to bring a lucidity into your your sleeping life, into your dreams. But every once in a while, when you realize, oh my goodness, this does not make sense. I must be dreaming. And when you begin to wake, it's astonishing how you feel. But it's difficult to maintain that state of lucidity. You get you get excited and you wake, just like, oh, wraps.

SPEAKER_00 20:29

The doors of perception aren't always open because we would be overwhelmed by it. So there's these natural filters that we've acquired either through evolution or other mechanisms, where we literally literally filter out most of the energy that's around us. We just can't handle it. And we also prioritize it based on pragmatic expedience and even survival.

SPEAKER_01 20:55

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 20:56

So we're accustomed to living in this very own, these very narrow bands of reality. You can say that reality is like uh the the dashboard of a radio almost. Absolutely, yeah. And the the spectrum is is comprehensive and almost infinitely detailed, and yet we live in such tiny worlds. And what what you're illustrating with the book is that more frequencies are there, sometimes external forces force us to explore those, and then we come to question everything.

SPEAKER_02 21:35

Well, sometimes uh through that radio dial is that, yeah, to realize, oh my goodness, there are other stations here, but you turn the volume down. So the thing is to crank it up, just say, Oh my goodness, wow, this is amazing.

SPEAKER_00 21:50

Well, so to allow some of the subtler ones to kind of bounce up, and then you do your own Fourier analysis, which is trying to sort out the different frequencies. To make sense of them and discover the connections between them because ultimately it's a singular voice if we just pay enough attention to it.

SPEAKER_02 22:10

Yeah. The orchestra of me.

SPEAKER_00 22:14

How did you go from I I believe I was looking at your bio, you were you were write writing about gardening? Is that right?

SPEAKER_02 22:23

Oh yep. Um I've done them. Writing gardening columns um is a really good exercise. Um, you've got a word count and you've got a deadline, and then oh my god, I'm running out of time. And so I did that for about 11 years for two separate journals. Um I love gardening. I worked in the garden industry at a garden, uh very major garden center.

SPEAKER_00 22:44

Um a lot of good oxygen.

SPEAKER_02 22:47

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And so I I saw the things that were becoming popular, saw the the range of plants that was developing over a 25-year period. Um, like coleuses. Coleuses were pretty standard. You saw them on your grandmother's uh windowsill, and now they become incredibly variable and variegated, and all that sort of stuff. So each each month I had to write something different, which was easy when I was in the industry, but it's still um sometimes um as I say, but but having a deadline and a word count um is a very, very good writing exercise.

SPEAKER_00 23:26

Um so my question is I mean, in ways it makes sense, deadline, word count, and you have an almost Aristotelian taxonomy view of of nature, right? Your cataloging and your sharing and you're very detail-oriented. How'd you go from that to the sprawling 1600-page trilogy uh about magic and barbarians and uh self-awareness?

SPEAKER_02 23:54

Well, it started with something that had bothered me since the age of nine. Um, I was very fortunate. I lived in France for three and a half years. My father had been transferred and worked in NATO. And my brother and I went to uh uh a French international school south of Paris in a place called Fonce et Rou. And um uh so it was for international um, so it was for NATO kids and diplomatic corps kids. So we had German, French, Belgian, English, blah, blah, blah. The Americans sadly stayed on their base and learned nothing.

SPEAKER_00 24:28

Um but that's that's that's what we do.

SPEAKER_02 24:31

Yeah, no, it's sad, it's sad. It's such an amazing opportunity. We actually had um um of uh uh parents who were rather um um uh uh frustrated by this situation. And so they had their two sons, one of whom was my age, I was eight and nine at that time, to say, can we can they not be uh allowed to join? So they they were uh they were declared honorary Canadians. So they were in our class. Um we got French immersion all in the morning, so we had German kids, blah, blah, blah. And then we all separated in the afternoon. The Germans went to the German portable, Canadians, Canadian, the Belgian, etc., etc. But one thing we were told on the very first day, my mom told me on the very first day, um, there was a war, Germany lost, you do not talk about it.

SPEAKER_00 25:19

It sounds like a faulty towers episode. Absolutely. Like, Basel! Don't ventilate the war. And by the end, he's goose stepping through the dining room.

SPEAKER_02 25:32

Well, we well, we knew nothing um because of this stricture. It was basically um diplomatic courtesy. Um, but the German kids were a very interesting bunch. They were uh quite um self-isolating. Um, and I don't think I've ever seen a more um depressed group of people. They they they lived with their shame and they did not um make friends very easily unless you were very bright or there is some degree of sympathy.

SPEAKER_00 26:01

Do you really think it was historical and cultural at that point, the sense of societal shame? That's that's very interesting because obviously the German government has bent over backwards to remember, especially the Holocaust, and you don't go to a German city without a Holocaust memorial, sometimes like in the middle of the city. This is the exact opposite, by the way, of the Japanese who have been history deniers and have rewritten. There was never the the invasion of China, let alone the rape of Nanking. That never happened. It never happened, it's not in any Japanese history book. So the the Germans have taken the opposite approach, and I find it fascinating from your from your direct recollection that there's a sense of societal shame, pretty much.

SPEAKER_02 26:50

But it was a shame that was not, at least at our age level, was not discussed. And and so the curious thing, there were um, so the nice thing about Europe is that you can get in the car and you can drive through five countries in a day. We actually did that once.

SPEAKER_00 27:05

And ten languages and encounter ten languages.

SPEAKER_02 27:08

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, so but um the year, the second year we were there, my parents had clearly lost people during the war, and so they wanted to see the Normandy uh memorial sites that are there, the the D-Day landings and all this sort of stuff. Um so the only thing we were told um driving into Normandy was Hitler was a bad man. Okay, um, never heard of him, didn't know what it was all about. And so we we toured the um the grounds and we saw the bombed out shelters, and we climbed down into the beaches there and saw where the landings were and all. And then we saw the graves. That utterly, utterly shocked me. Um tens of thousands of middle white crosses going to the horizon. And my mom was trying to exercise my my faulty math skills. How old was how old was this one when he died, standing in front of various crosses? Um and they all were dying in their early, uh in their late teens, their early 20s, that sort of stuff. 1940, 1941, 42, 43, 44. And then she said, How old was this one? And I thought, Mommy, the numbers are wrong. This guy had been born in 1880 something and died in 1918. And uh and then she said, that's because he died in the First World War. I was flabbercasted into silence. There were two wars in the same place. Uh and then when we got to uh we got in the car and we drove off to the Vimy Ridge, which is very important for Canada. Um Canada lost like 30,000 um men in a matter of um uh a week or two, several weeks. And um, I refused to get out of the car. And there was something in me that said, enough, this is so wrong. And it was something in me woke that day. And it and but I and so my parents decided, okay, leave him in the car, he's going through a stalk. But I felt this incredible sense of vindication I knew I was right, uh, but I didn't know entirely why. So this whole notion of war is wasteful, and so I when we got back to Canada years later, I studied pacifism and uh Mahatma Gandhi's um nonviolent, non-cooperation, and Martin Luther, um Dr. Martin Luther King's approach, who was also inspired by Gandhi. And I thought, okay, this is an approach. Um I have provisional um sympathy for pacifism and um because it's provisional because it's strange that they believe in nonviolence, and yet both of these incredibly important men died by assassination. So what is wrong with this picture? But then you take a look at, say, the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia at that point, and it was successful. But the timing was amazing. It was nonviolent, they were successful, but it was only because the communist um Soviet Union they were in a f in a in a stage of collapse and decline. And uh so timing is important. Um, but then um it's very interesting how how when you explore historically um the decline and fall of this, that, the other Roman Empire, or France when the Nazis poured in that sort of stuff. Um what there are oddly universal um things that are happening here. And um so I'm very interested in history. The curious thing, I came across a very interesting quote that I've not seen before by Hegel. And he's he wrote um, the one thing that we learn from history is that we do not learn from history.

SPEAKER_00 30:53

Ironic coming from Hegel because he had this teleological view of the inevitability of history's ascent toward the absolute. So coming from him, that's a little bit ironic, right?

SPEAKER_02 31:07

Yeah, but that makes that made me think that, okay, since there is a universality to the decline of Rome, um the various histories of battles and this, that, the other factions vibe for each other, it would indicate that our basic premises need a big overhaul. And that the things that are universal indicate that we are stuck in this psychological, cultural, I don't want to call it genetic, but uh there's probably an element there. We have to wake up, move on, and revisit because all of our systems are inherently brilliant and beautiful that they are, everything from religion to science, spirituality, it is inadequate as it stands.

SPEAKER_00 31:53

If I could summarize and make sure that I heard you correctly, you you you grew up a little bit cloistered and you had a direct and visceral experience of war, suffering, and death. And this shook you to your core, which propelled you to understand the nature of pacifism, what works about it and what doesn't, as a salve or an antidote to the scourge of violence throughout human history and suffering. And you got to a point, I believe, and here I'm leading the witness a little bit, that you cannot you cannot just believe in the precepts of pacifism devoid of context, that you can't just be a hippie smoking some weed and thinking peace and love and togetherness because the world is real, the world is savage and unfair, and human beings have this natural tendency of mucking things up because of our own selfishness. So the construct that you've created in City of Magicians addresses all of these themes, which is you have a society that ostensibly used the power of magic to create a pacifist, non-warlike, more or less egalitarian society. And yet, even though they built it with this in mind, they have internal and external conflicts which force them to reevaluate some of those principles and play them out in a way where they gain a better understanding of themselves, of what can make a just society, and ultimately the nature of reality itself, as you as you were alluding to. Is that more or less where Peter Gribble is coming from?

SPEAKER_02 33:41

Absolutely. And that that's why the second trilogy books, four, five, and six, um, the ante is upped very severely. And yeah, they they have to realize that their own approach has been inadequate, and how do they address this? Um, it goes back to that wonderful line in the movie The Um The Third Man, based on Graeme Green's um amazing novel by the same name.

SPEAKER_00 34:08

Um forgotten about him.

SPEAKER_02 34:13

Oh, he's stunning. He's stunning. Um, but um Orsonwell has this wonderful line, which he claims I he wrote it. He he says, um, um, oh, like the man said, uh, through the years under the Borges, they had rape, pillage, warfare, torture, and yet they also had Leonardo da Vinci and the produced Michelangelo and the Renaissance.

SPEAKER_00 34:37

So isn't there some beauty in that? And you you you make it come to life in your writing, which is you know, peace and love doesn't necessarily make for a good story, and maybe it doesn't make for a very interesting humanity either, that this built-in duality of light and dark, of yin and yang plays itself out personally, historically, culturally, politically, and it's in that seething cauldron of that kind of conflict that we have uh this lived experience that we can share that's good, bad, and ugly, and it's beautiful in its own kind of way from that macro perspective. It's it's an amazing human pageant, going back to the Bard and Shakespeare that deceit, lies, sneaking around, sadness, love are the engine of great drama and great and great human experience.

SPEAKER_02 35:41

And then there's also another quote: what what a work is, man, how noble in this, that, the other. Because with all the dark stuff, there's also these things that um come to the fore, and like going back to Harry Potter, um, that he becomes great under tremendous stresses, and yet there's also this lovely sense of humor that goes that threads through that series. Um and there's a little bit of humor running through City of the Magicians as well. But um, Sass finds that as he develops and as he matures, um, his insights and his awareness deepens, and he realizes, oh yeah, this is important, nonviolence. Um, the curious thing about the word nonviolence, we do not have a word. It doesn't even exist in Sanskrit. The um ahimsa is the Sanskrit word for nonviolence. It means not violent. Wisely not a word that indicates the strength is the true power and sustainer. We need to find a word that can encompass those noble, those nobler features that we sort of aspire to, despite the distractions of power, fame, glory, whatever, um whatever your susceptibility is. But to be alert to your susceptibilities and put them to one side and realize um, oh, are there good things in this? Oh, this will enhance the inherent um in integrity that I'm trying to keep alive.

SPEAKER_00 37:15

And to your point, sometimes that focus on nonviolence or peace can lead to destruction. Uh historically, people often cite Chamberlain, Chamberlain's role after World War I to appease Hitler. So there were already early signs, uh Alsace Lorraine, uh Czechoslovakia. There was a slow buildup and an acquiescence, ostensibly to avoid war. Chamberlain had lived through the horrors of World War I, and the last thing that he wanted to precipitate was uh a redux of that nightmare, and that's exactly what happened.

SPEAKER_02 37:58

I have a piece of paper, his most famous line that Herr Hitler has signed, and proved to be nothing.

SPEAKER_00 38:08

Nothing. It was appeasement which precipitated if historians now are fairly convinced that if if if France and Britain had pushed back earlier, drawn a line, and maybe even had a military intervention when Nazism was nascent, then all of all of history we'd be in the multiverse right now. World War II might even have been skirted. And that that's one big lesson, and I think you bring that up. I think that's really at the core of your writing, which is just having wishful thinking is not enough.

SPEAKER_02 38:46

But it might be a good prompt for action to say, hey, well, it'd be nice if such and such a thing would happen. To say, well, no one else is doing it. Oh uh I'm I'm I'm gonna get cracking. Well, so like um they there should have been pushback the moment um uh Putin began to um um meddle with Ukraine.

SPEAKER_00 39:08

He took Crimea and no one seemed to care. There was there was no world reaction, and uh, you know, even uh Barack Obama's lying in the sand in the Middle East, um, some would say that he was a form of this kind of pacifist, which is I don't want war, I think talking is better than fighting, and if we break it, we own it, or if we meddle, we are there, and that there's a lot to be said for that point of view, but you also disempower yourself to the point where where chaos ensues, and that's another theme of your trilogy that non-action and analysis paralysis can precipitate disaster in and of itself. You are deciding even if you don't decide, and even if you come into it with the best intentions, the road to hell could very well be paved. And it very well might be your road because you're just not paying attention that one of your characters is always distracted by all the nonsense, especially his own, and then uh and also deferring and perhaps not even having the courage to step up when it's necessary, right?

SPEAKER_02 40:28

And and and that's the big that's the big question. When is it necessary? Should I do it now? Should I wait? Was he serious? Was he not? Um, what what is she doing? Um, oh my goodness, she's doing this. What how how can I oppose this or suggest something? Yeah, so that's the whole thing about diplomacy. Um how strong is it going to be? Well, walk softly and carry a big stick.

SPEAKER_00 40:57

You're gonna have to use the stick every once in a while, or you're just somebody carrying a stick. So, to your point, timing, prioritization, making your move when it's expeditious, and that's the essence of good strategy, which is you're you're you're not at one extreme or another, and you're able to uh exert force when it does the most good instead of self-aggrandizing your own perceived best interest at the cost of all of society collapsing around you.

unknown 41:26

Right.

SPEAKER_02 41:27

Well, that that's one of the early things in uh book one. The the council is beginning to catch some of their own missteps before they go too far. So they correct their strategy. Um, meanwhile, they've already created something that was far more severe, and they just okay, that solves that. But it does actually burrow under. Um, and then the plot arc begins to explode in book two and definitely book three.

SPEAKER_00 41:56

Yeah, super, super fun again for a great read. And we'll have links below. Go go get the book and check it out and leave a review because leaving a review makes a big difference for authors to uh get more notice. Speaking of which, the writing of the book itself, and this is what I was hinting at earlier: you've got your garden articles, which are great, 11 years of doing that, but it's a big leap, it's a quantum leap to jump from writing about uh begonias to writing this kind of epic. Uh, how did you learn to write a book? I know that for me personally, it was quite a curve and quite a quite a jump to make from shorter pieces, whether plays, even screenplays, to blog posts, to short stories, even a novella, to a sprawling 1600-page trilogy with the next three already in the works. How did you how did you make that jump?

SPEAKER_02 43:01

It was sort of a surprise for me as well. I'm I knew it started in 1998, the previous century, and um it was just sort of toying around with it, and the idea began to sort of create a sort of um a creat, a certain psychological mass. And then sort of names would appear and bit by bit and it morphed and and developed, and uh and eventually took over everything. And um, so in the end, at the high point of writing the whole thing, it was incremental, it did not happen overnight, but bit by bit I began writing easily an hour every day, and then it became the nice thing about um being a writer, in order for you to become a writer, you I find there are rules for everyone. But I find writing every day is at is absolutely essential. But bit by bit, as the story began to sort of Take me over. I was writing five to eight hours a day, every day, solidly for 13 years. And there were a few days that were um it didn't happen because of medical emergencies with my partner. But he was also my editor as well.

SPEAKER_00 44:19

I I had that that that blessing too, that that I had a a partner in crime. Not in a huge way, but enough to show interest and to provide some feedback during the iterative process of getting the book to completion. That makes a big difference.

SPEAKER_02 44:38

Well, because the other thing I was sort of writing for him as well. I could not talk about spiritual things with him. He had a tremendous, it was a button that could not be pushed. He would go into a rage over religion and anything spiritual. This is pretty important to me. But the reason for him was that he had a best friend who when he was about nine or ten, and um um he became very ill with something, didn't know what it was, and the parents refused medical intervention. And he saw his friend turn into a vegetable, and it sat, it was in his crawl for the rest of his life. So, bit by bit, in City of the Magicians, as I gave him chapter after chapter for his appraisal, because he was he was a good editor, he could spot um um things that were wrong. Um, I was inculcating a spiritual theme underneath the underneath the wire. And in the end, by by the end of book three, wow, he was transformed. So I like to call it a Shaherazad um uh premise. So there I have to tell a tale every night in order to live to see the dawn.

SPEAKER_00 45:47

Wonderful to have that kind of collaboration and to see the evolution of your ideas actually transform your reader and their and expand their worldview. And I can completely understand that allergy to religion, especially when it's created some kind of problem in one's past. Yeah. And uh, and it also must have inspired you too, because you had an active reader, you had feedback, yes, and you were landing on your feet. Because if you're writing five hours, eight hours a day for over a decade, it's easy to become enmeshed in your world to the point where you lose some perspective. It's hard to really know whether it's hitting, how people are going to interpret it, whether you're just crazy, are you Dostoevsky in the basement writing another classic, or are you uh some deranged person uh in a cave? That kind of feedback's good.

SPEAKER_02 46:40

Feedback was good because unfortunately, my my my uh my partner, we were together for 43 years, and the last 10 years were very difficult. He had been a smoker and a drinker, and they caught up with him. So they couldn't topple bypass, followed eight months later by a stroke, and I was the principal caregiver. And so, under those circumstances, you can only put one foot in the front of the in front of the other. There's no time to cry. What does he need? Oh, he needs a glass of water, oh, he needs to go to the bathroom, whatever. And so it was a very interesting, as you say, uh uh framework, and it allows you to be sane and yet obsessive at the same time.

SPEAKER_00 47:19

That's fascinating. People forget that writing is a lived experience. Everything from I don't know if you wrote by hand or or typed, but I I get tremendous satisfaction from the physical act of writing. It's deeply immersive, it's meditative. And even just um, I had colleagues in an agency where I was working, and I used to they used to joke and make fun of me that they could hear me typing from across the building because I I hit hard. It's a physical act of striking, and I do it blind and like 90 words a minute, but it's uh I'm I'm I'm I'm attacking the keyboard with this physical, physical intensity. Is this a typewriter or uh well it's uh it's a keyboard for a computer, so I'm just banging away on it. William James, the brother of Henry James. Oh, yes, yes, he's one of the fathers of the pragmatist philosophical movement and the founding daddies of psychology too, American psychology. And he used to describe that internal states are very much linked to behavioral expression. So, for example, if you're contemplative and thinking about something, you rub your chin like this, and then your brow helps, yes, yeah. You can you can kind of rub it, get some static. And then if you're thinking about something, your brow furrows. And and he drew this link between these internal and external states, and I think that's what you're getting at too, with regard to what's going on around you while you're writing, and it's a lived experience. So now we have artificial intelligence just using matrix mathematics to cobble together what other people have already written, right? And there's zero lived experience, there's zero physicality, there's zero self-awareness, there's no consciousness, it's a mechanical recobbling and reconstitution of lived experience. So, so I think you bring up some great points about what's great writing, and that's living it. It's not just doing it five hours a day, eight hours a day, do it every day, but take in everything that's going on around you and and let that passion come out and it shows on the page.

SPEAKER_02 49:49

Well, the the other thing about good writing when when when when you see it, when you read it, um, it's the elements of surprise, which is why some mystery writers are so good at you reading along, just oh my god. And it just something has happened in the plot art that just wakes you up to say, I never saw that coming. And there's a wonderful story. Um I'm I've had uh a chance to talk with Manette Walter, who was uh a very um important uh British she's still I bet she's still alive. Um so we talked about how characters will tell you things. Um and she said, Oh yes, I was I was um I was working under a deadline. It had to be, I had to serve as a manuscript in like six weeks or whatever it was. And I was writing the um the trial scene, and um I knew who had killed done all the murders and so click click. And suddenly in the trial scene, the character rises in front of her and says, You got it wrong, or I didn't do it. And she said, Oh my god. And so the book absolutely froze. And you say, Oh my god, I've got a deadline. And um so she had to reread everything she had written, and so she went, click, click, click, yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, fine, fine. There's this, this. And then so you went, oh my god. And all the clues were already there. And so her subconscious mind had, or so I don't really would like to call it subconscious, her writer's mind had seeded all the little clues for her to rediscover and then rewrite the finish. She she made her deadline, but she never had been so surprised to have a character basically tell her, go back and rewrite it.

SPEAKER_00 51:33

If if she's still kicking, I'd love to have her on the podcast too. Send her an email. But uh, that's a great, that's a great story, and it's and it's something that I can relate to as well. Where as we were talking about before, you gotta let the story tell itself and let it go. And I had a character who was a minor blip in the narrative erupt to become a complete parallel track in my book, where she it's almost like she insisted on playing a much more significant role and it just exponentially improved the book because she gave counterpoint to my anti-hero from the beginning from the beginning to the end. So she she almost told me like, I'm I'm not playing this little you know non-player character role here. I wanna, I'm a part of this, and you're not gonna stop until I am. And then I had I had to rewrite scenes and I I changed a bunch of the narrative to appease her. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 52:37

And yet there's a there's a there's a chorollogy to this. There is a lovely story about J.K. Rowling writing the Harry Potter series, where Hermione wanted her own chapter. So she wrote this whole chapter. Hermione is is quite neurotic in a way, um, very intelligent, incredibly bright, very ambitious to prove herself that she's more than a mugle horn. And then she wrote the chapter, and then J.K. Rowling read the thing in her sentry, and then she pushed Delete. And Hermione needed to have a say, and then fine. You've had your say, now let's get on with the plot. I thought that was a very interesting um point of view, but by this point, I think she was at her um at the height of her powers, and and she knew when to push delete. But I thought that was a very interesting contrast to say Manette Walters, who went to say, oh my god, I'd rather rewrite this.

SPEAKER_00 53:32

It's a battle between you and your characters, and uh, and even though she deleted that Hermione chapter, yeah, it no doubt influenced and likely made better a lot of the other prose that went into that same novel and maybe other novels. Yeah. There's a lot going on that's hidden. And then what finally makes it to the page, uh I don't know, here here you are, right? It's uh it's sometimes a surprise, not only to your readers, but to you as as well.

SPEAKER_02 54:05

I think you I did do something similar when I I had an ending for book three, and it was rather tepid, and uh loose ends were being wrapped up and stuff. And so my little voice said, Okay, now that you've written that, write this instead. And I went into a blaze. Uh I was incandescent with uh with um the creative urge, and I wrote for 10 solemn hours, and it was just expansive and magnificent, and I just thought I couldn't believe what was coming off the page. It's it's um uh the last chapter of book three was uh it opened up the portal to writing books four, five, and six, which I had not envisioned. But when I gave it to my partner Robert, he said, Oh my goodness, don't change a word. And I didn't, but it forced me to go back to books one and two and parts of three in order to not quite rewrite, but it had to be re-giggered and re-edited so that it was seamless. But that took an additional five years.

SPEAKER_00 55:08

I I totally can relate to the feeling when my when my novel came together, it was April, April, May of last year. Oh, nice, and okay, and it it finally coalesced, and I'm no exaggeration, it became 18 hours a day, where that's all I did. I I ate what I had to eat to sustain myself, I excreted just to maintain equilibrium, and I snuck in some sleep. And how much coffee did you go to? A lot, a lot of a lot of coffee, but um that complete immersion was what brought it to fruition. I had I had years of thinking about it, just like you relate. Right. I I remember walking a partner's dog, and and the characters were talking to me and the settings were coming together. I took notes, I wrote a short story that I posted that was the seed of the idea, and it was germinating. And then and then I wrote big chunks of it, which were a little bit scattered. And April, May is when literally it it just all it had to get done. It had to get done in this manic, immersive, agile sprint of a hundred percent commitment. And I look back and it was a truly magical time for me. Oh, it is. I was possessed, it was like a spell had been cast. I was living, breathing, dreaming the book, and it enabled me to see it in its entirety and know where there were missing pieces and draw through lines and just see it for all of what it came to be. And it was a beautiful time. It was one of the toughest things I've done, and yet it was so satisfying. It was magical.

SPEAKER_02 56:59

Yeah, well, exactly. This is where we wake in this really interesting way. Our consciousness is larger when we're in this state. Reminds me of Dickens when he was writing a Christmas pharaoh. He went nuts, he was laughing and crying, he was so um um effervescent with creativity. Um and people just, oh my goodness, and the spirits of um Christmas past, present, present, Christmas past, present, and future. And the he they just electrified him. And so clearly so have you been, and and I have been, and other people who get into the creative arts when something clicks and suddenly you're larger than you were a moment ago.

SPEAKER_00 57:43

You're possessed, yeah. And in a sense, we court the muse. And now the Grecian muse, as you know, is a bunch of sisters and they represent the different creative arts poetry, drama, they each own one of these specialties. Right. It's a big family, all the daughters of Zeus, right?

SPEAKER_02 58:01

I think it's nine, nine muse of the same.

SPEAKER_00 58:04

Yeah, nine, and they each specialize and they're all the daughters of Zeus, and but we tend to lump them into one general muse, right? And we liken this to that creative energy. And what I personalized it and I further anthropomorphized it in the sense of having to court her. So she is very fickle and very picky, and she's she's she just operates on her own agenda. So you can work very hard at your craft for years and feel like you're just treading water, she's not making herself available or she's not reciprocating your affections, and there comes a moment where she's in it to win it with you, and that that's when you gotta put the pedal to the metal. You go all in in the poker game and you commit because you don't know how long it's gonna last. It could be for another few moments, it could be for another few years. And remember, she is fickle, she is she's gonna bless you for a while, and then she might, you know, court others. And and I know that personally that that's happened because I've been blessed with her acquiescence, if you will, and her flooding me, opening up the gates of creativity, and then me hitting that gas, knowing that that I was blessed in that way.

SPEAKER_02 59:34

Well, you're hitting the gas, but she filled the tank.

SPEAKER_00 59:37

Yes, exactly. You gotta work. You're you're always gonna work hard.

SPEAKER_02 59:43

But but I but I think what you were saying earlier, um, I went through this as well, that there's this whole period of gestation and patience.

SPEAKER_00 59:52

Yeah, that prep work is very significant. You're building, building that energy. And uh when it finally the the the floodgates open, it's just so incredibly sad.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:05

Yeah, it's an amazing high.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:07

It's an amazing high to get it all out there, and then once you get it all out there, you got you got published. I have a lot of uh listeners and viewers who are indie authors themselves. So some folks want to publish their own book, other people have books published, they have their ove, but like all writers, we all struggle for attention in this attention economy, getting noticed, getting readership, connecting with audiences who would really like us had they only known about us. Um, how did you take it to the next level? You had your manuscript for threat. What what what was the process by which you got it out into the world?

SPEAKER_02 1:00:45

Well, I I tried, of course, looking for a literary agent. There's a lovely book that comes out every year around September called the um um the 2026 Literary Guide to Um No, the Guide to Literary Agents.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:00

And yes, I remember getting that decades ago. It's been coming out every year. Killing Forests.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:08

Killing Forests, yes, exactly. Um, and I spent five years uh writing um query letters, each one of them different. Um that's another another excellent exercise. Um you can only write a page and you have to follow the instructions exactly, otherwise onto the slush file.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:28

And so I did that for five You're a greater man than me.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:33

Oh well. I'm I I was younger then.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:36

My PDF and I put it up on KDP. I was like, screw these people.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:40

Oh wow. Well, the the the the sad thing was um this was before COVID, and I heard through the grave find that some of these people get 500 submissions a week. Um so they have to so they have to hire um um apprentices and and and whatnot um in order to go through the pile. I think in uh in those five years I got perhaps five legitimate responses. The other the other responses were automated and whatnot. We sorry we cannot represent you at this time, good luck, blah, blah, blah. And in the end, um that didn't fly. So I realized I'm not getting any younger, so I'll have to go through um um.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:24

Was thread done at that point? Were you finished with thread? Yeah, and I was like, Oh, thread publishes in 2021, is that right? 2020?

SPEAKER_02 1:02:34

In 2020?

SPEAKER_00 1:02:35

Um November of 2020, I think I looked, I looked that up. So yeah, so the end of 2020, you finally published, but the the the book was done what years before.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:50

Well, by by by the time came out, um that probably meant that book three was done as well.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:57

And it was uh so you were in silence trying to get attention just to get published.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:04

Yeah, yeah. So I found a um a little um uh publishing house. Um I looked for quite a few of them. Um the interesting thing, almost all of them were cagey. You did not see the people, they did not show you the prices, they didn't show you the programs or what they offer they had on offer. They wanted your email address and just say, okay, then we can talk. And then we will charge you for a discussion to say, okay, wait a second, not good enough.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:30

And then I found this one little uh company that just heads up for listeners the the fraud is rampant in the publishing industry. So if you show any in any interest in getting published, if you self-publish, you will be inundated by a tsunami of solicitation, of which 99.9995% of it is fraudulent. Is it really? Wow, yes, I'm articulating that now to to anyone listening or viewing, where you get like from one extreme to we loved your content, it can resonate to a really wide audience, and we're ready to option it on Netflix. Email us immediately, right? Which just just screams bullshit. That screams bullshit all the way to much more subtle plays, like people masquerading as other authors on X and trying to entice you to send them money so they can promote you. It's an industry, it's an entire industry playing off the vanity and hopes of aspiring writers.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:43

Well, I'm I guess I was very lucky um um because this one website, can I name it? Um, I don't know.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:50

It's up to you. You say whatever you want.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:53

They were wonderful. It's a Canadian um um self-publishing company called Tellwell.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:58

Um I saw your published under that moniker. Yeah, that's the company, right?

SPEAKER_02 1:05:04

So I I decided they weren't far away, so I decided to visit them.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:08

Um your instinct already, right?

SPEAKER_02 1:05:12

And so I met them all and I met my editor. He was about to um um migrate far to the east coast with his brand new girlfriend, but I was able to talk with him because I saw in his bio his father had been a linguist and he had like 60 dictionaries in different languages, which is what I am. I've got the the the equivalent. So, oh I've got to meet this guy. So I did, and he and I clicked and just said, Oh, I know what you're after. So I found my editor and I was sold. I met the real people, I was able to talk with them, um, and the fact that they they showed their bios on their website. I thought, okay, these are real people, and um and I couldn't be happier with them. And I actually yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:54

So So how much editing did they did they do to your baby? Like you're you're Your book was your baby. You toiled for decades. You put thousands of hours into this project. He was in pretty good shape to begin with, because I feel that I would assume so, but but you were okay as an author getting feedback.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:16

Yep. Well, because I had chosen, I realized, okay, he's my guy.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:20

And and you had a relationship, much like you have the relationship with your long-standing partner who became your reader and editor. And then you forged the human relationship with your publisher.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:32

Yep. And uh so in in the end, um he recognized the quality of it, which was very gratifying. And because he could spot um flubs and missteps, he had a really good. And they also had a category. Yes, you want a hard edit, or no, just correct, dot the few i's and the view t's. And so there's this gradation between hard edit, um semi-hard, medium, um, soft, and then kiss me and put me to bed.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:03

You miss the comma.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:05

Oh, comma, yes. Oh my god, oh it can never be published. Oh so I I I went for number three. I wanted some vigor, but I realized my my story was so um integrated with the various plot arcs, and he recognized that. Um but he read the whole thing, books one, two, and three, um, and he said he could not spot a single plot arc flaw. But that's that's because I spent the previous five years making sure there weren't any. Um so you write for your editor, unless you are um you're a beginner and you just say, I I need help, in which case you might need stage four editing or stage five to say, this is crap. But hey, save this, save this, and rewrite it. It depends on your stamina, your fortitude, and your own standards.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:57

Great. That's that's terrific. And you published with um with this outfit. Yeah. All three books are published through them. Yes and then and then your marketing, obviously, we we were contacted through your PR, PR company. And they've they've been wonderful, by the way. They're they're great. What is it? The the chateau people. Yep. Yeah, they're they're they're really good, very friendly and direct. And what other mechanisms are you and your publisher doing to get your trilogy into the hands of readers who who would really love this stuff? I brought up uh a little Umberto Ico, Name of the Rose, Foucault's pendulum. If you like Name of the Rose, and especially if you like Foucault's pendulum, and if you're familiar with the short stories of Jorge Luis Borges, then you would you would love Peter Gribble. So I I could, and again, I'm not comparing you in ways that could be annoying. Like I sometimes hate it when people read my book and they say, oh, this is Douglas Adams meets William Gibson, right? And I say, I guess, I mean, it's you gotta you gotta put things in boxes for people to familiarize and and get a sense of of perspective. But you you have many, many readers out there who would eat this stuff up, only you gotta get the book in front of them, right? Yeah, it's hard in our absolutely, absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 1:09:24

Um, I'm slowly learning how to um defend work with social media, and something I I'm I'm really very bad at. So um I do have an Instagram account that I very rarely uh approach. Um my preferred living space is under a rock, um, I'm afraid.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:44

I I can totally understand. You're a writer, writer. You're a writer writer, you're not a social media influencer, and and you you devoted years of your life and thousands of hours to putting out a quality epic, and it's great. Well, thank you. And uh, and again, that's who you are. You're not someone who who emails people and say, hey, check me out. That that's a completely different skill set, that's a completely different personality. But like with you, I'm I'm I think I'm I love doing one-on-one stuff.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:18

I think that's different.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:19

I'm the same way too. I kind of I hate the marketing aspect too, and I'm not quite good at it, even though I'm a marketer by my profession. I'm a consultant for strategic marketing, mostly in the healthcare space. Oh, wow, good thing. But but then I have an emotional distance from it. I can make recommendations about audience types and segmentation and channel affinity and all this kind of stuff. I could put together multimedia campaigns on social media and elsewhere for doctors and nurses and patients. That that's no problem. But when it comes to doing the same thing for my book, I'm kind of like, oh, it's like that's no fun. I just want to be the writer.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:03

Right. Well, maybe maybe I should rush out and get a medical degree and then come back and talk to you.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:08

I don't have a medical degree. I just kind of I kind of fake it until I make it.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:14

Well, one of the things with um Telmwell, they they had they have sort of a uh package, so they they promote me for a month type of thing. And then um then the rest of the marketing, I had to go to Black Chateau. Um and as you say, they're great people. And I will be signing uh books at the LA Times Festival.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:34

Yes, and I'll be there too. So I am I am posting this uh the weekend of like April 11th and 12th. I'll post this audio and and I'll try to get to the video. So if you're seeing this, you'll probably see it when it comes out the early the week of the 14th. The following weekend, April 18th and 19th, is the LA Festival of Books, which is a gargantuan conference. You have massive, yeah. Thousands of authors and and people flowing in and out, and people set up booths, and your your your outfit, Black Chateau, is gonna have a booth, right?

SPEAKER_02 1:12:13

Yep, it's it's one, I think it's 153 in the gold zone, right in the center of UCLA.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:20

Great, and I'm gonna be there too with a gaggle of science fiction writers. Ingrid moon, Greg Sorber, and Br Blake and Sherry Shimshock are indie science fiction authors, and we're gonna be there too. So you can swing by the LA Festival of Books, folks, if you are watching. You can see Peter with the Black Shots, folks. I'll come by and I'll come visit you guys too.

SPEAKER_02 1:12:44

Okay, I'm I'm signing on Sunday from 10 until noon.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:47

All right, I'll be floating around because we got all these writers packed into a booth and we're gonna be covering for each other.

SPEAKER_02 1:12:52

Perfect. I'm gonna visit you too.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:54

Yeah, that'll that'll be fun. So I'll peddle my science fiction novel. I have a science fiction y fantasy play that I've written. It's a corporate satire. And I've got a personal memoir from the 90s, which is I think is very fun and engaging. So I'll be peddling all of those and peddling this podcast. I'm gonna be going around saying, Hey, and you want to be on my show? Perfect, great, yeah, yeah. So that's part of the marketing. So again, if you're an indie author, um, you know, trying to get your stuff, in-person book sales make a big difference. It it's you get to meet readers, you hear from them, you can practice your pitch, like you know, not to put you on the spot, but what's your pitch for your trilogy? Can you can you express it within 30 seconds?

SPEAKER_02 1:13:45

Yeah, what does a pacifist egalitarian city state do to prepare for a barbarian invasion coming in six months?

SPEAKER_00 1:13:53

Whoa, see, that's pretty good. Yeah, that's great. That's great. Years of practice, years of practice that's really good because you gotta nail that down, you know. And then mine is um uh a hustler claims to invent a dream machine that could fulfill any wish you want by taking you to another universe, and he actually builds it, and all hell breaks loose. So that's one of them kind of fun. There's a multiverse, and he promises to take you to a universe where it's exactly the same as this universe, except your wish is true.

SPEAKER_02 1:14:27

But what does he charge?

SPEAKER_00 1:14:31

He claims to do it and he actually does it. You know, you gotta read the book. Okay, excellent. It's important to encapsulate a complex idea and a quick kind of pitch. And oftentimes people need to hear it within the framework of other things that they know. And that's why I put you into the eco Borges kind of camp. For if you like these two writers, you'll like Mr. Gribble, I think.

SPEAKER_02 1:14:57

I I love the story about um Umberto Echo when he was uh um his publisher just said, Oh my goodness, your first 90 pages is all about the medieval concepts of sin. Can you not like just oh wonderful? If Umberto Echo can get away with that, then wow, yes.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:16

He set a precedent really for that deep immersive historical novel with a mystery, mystery hook. Yeah, and then in Foucault's pendulum, which was basically a hyper-critical view of conspiracy theory and occultism, Alberto Ico was, despite all the fantasy writing and that, a heavy-duty rationalist. Yes, he despised the occult and he despised conspiracy theory and felt it was fake news that it was destroying intellectualism and society at its core. So Foucault's pendulum is a gargantuan parody of bullshit writing, bullshit science, uh, occultism, and all this stuff. And he created such a construct, ironically, the writing about these topics was so compelling and convincing that I think it had the opposite effect. People all of a sudden read Foucault's pendulum and like, oh, I need to I need to really get into the occult now because this stuff is so cool.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:26

Well, I I think it it allows you to explore, and perhaps again, what I was saying earlier, all these philosophies, all these sort of systems, uh, religions and even science. Um their premises are inadequate. They come up with amazing stuff. Some of it is substantial, some of it is questionable, and that's why our basic premises must contain the notion of panpsychism, that everything is conscious in its own way. You don't have to look for a brain. And bit by bit, science itself is beginning to discover this. So yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:04

I agree. I mean, the the typical trope is that quantum mechanics reinforces that idea that there's no there's no real difference between perception and reality at a fundamental basis. And even when you look at Einsteinian cosmology and you try to bring the two together, the really big and the really small, there's a divide between them, which is the biggest mystery of science right now, this idea of quantum gravity.

SPEAKER_02 1:17:33

And yet there's also this really peculiar thing called entanglement to say, oh my goodness, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:39

Things are connected in ways that are hidden to us. And I'm fascinated by this idea of the multiverse, that every possibility plays itself out, and and the reason that we're here, in a sense, is that we happen to be dwelling in a universe that fostered us to come into being. So, this idea that there's hidden variables and there's hidden things is exponentially magnified in the sense that this isn't even the only lived reality. There's an infinite number of them where possibilities are playing themselves out.

SPEAKER_02 1:18:20

And there's that lovely saying that the universe conspires for our benefit.

SPEAKER_00 1:18:26

Yes. When you keep rolling the dice and you just roll one where we happen to be, then that empowers us with uh the ability to tweak it and to change it and to make it hopefully a better place if we just overcome our own limitations, our own selfishness, narcissism, insistence that what's in front of our eyes is all that's there, even and especially if you're a magician in the city of magicians and you have more power than you think.

SPEAKER_02 1:18:58

Reminds me of that line in The Little Prince, where um um he is told um um, oh, the heart sees better than the eyes. I just thought, ooh, nice one.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:11

Thank you. That's a good one. That's that's another book that was all over the place. I I tend I'm kind of sad that a lot of the classics that ostensibly we grew up with have been for the younger generation largely forgotten. You mentioned Graham Greene. There, there's a lot of great writing, Henry Miller. I'm a big Henry Miller fan. There's there's all this classic literature back in the day before there was digital technology, that the physicality of a book was the thing itself. And now content is ethereal and passing and doom-scrolled right by.

SPEAKER_02 1:19:48

Yeah, and we my my partner and I, we had um, we ran a bookstore for 10 years in um New Westminster, which is a semi-suburb of Vancouver, and we had a classic section, and I was very gratified to see all the young people went to it. Bees to honey. And so people um young people uh from in their late teens to their um early 30s, they gravitated to it. I mean, we we became a destination because we called it the glass. So there is hope for the generations coming along.

SPEAKER_00 1:20:24

I hope so too. Like vinyl records, right? Are still having a comeback. You want to hold the media, you want to hold the music in your hand, and and make it a lit part of your lived experience. It's part of that William James uh chin scratching, right? We need the near place, the beard rubbing, which is uh, you know, get get back into that that realness, that lived experience. Because if you lose that, then it's everything is gone, right?

SPEAKER_02 1:20:52

Yeah, there's something beautifully tactile about holding a book, and it it it it cuts you off from that that that doom scrolling, as you say.

SPEAKER_00 1:21:04

Yeah, I have a coffee stain on mine right here, which is good.

SPEAKER_02 1:21:07

Oh, good, but lived experience. There you go.

SPEAKER_00 1:21:11

So this is this is my text. And if if you see here, do you see something interesting about the prose at first? Oh, yeah, yeah. Yes, it's it's um um yeah, it's obsessively written like lyric poetry in these three line poetry, right? Excellent three line paragraphs. So uh it there's a physicalness to it. I wanted to to block it into these modular bricks, if you will. Will you have a copy of it when when you're at um um oh yeah, I'll be I'll be uh I'll I'll sign a copy for you when you come back, or I'll bring you one at your booth, and I would love for you to to check it out.

SPEAKER_02 1:21:48

I'll bring a copy for you. Wonderful.

SPEAKER_00 1:21:50

We'll we'll do the writer's quid pro quo. Uh I'll sign you mine if you sign me yours. That would be terrific.

SPEAKER_02 1:21:59

Excellent.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:00

I really look forward to that, and I've had an absolute pleasure talking to you, Peter.

SPEAKER_02 1:22:05

So have I, Mookie. Thanks for having me. This has been a this has been a real treat.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:09

And I want to bring you back for four five six. Okay. When does number four launch?

SPEAKER_02 1:22:16

Oh my goodness, right it's not anywhere near that stage yet. I'm not writing.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:21

I'm writing the sequel to this. This is the okay, I envisioned like five books in this series.

SPEAKER_02 1:22:27

Good stuff. Keeps you going.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:29

I'll keep cranking too.

SPEAKER_02 1:22:30

Yeah, keeps the synapses firing.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:33

Oh, absolutely. I have so much stuff that I are on my to-do writing list, and then I juggle many of them at one time that I just want to keep keep throwing them out there. So it's it's so much fun to do. So, ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Peter Gribble, author of The City of Magicians, Threat and Within and Quickening are the titles of the three. You can go on Amazon, check them out. I'll put links in the description below. If you're at the LA Festival of Books and you're seeing this prior, come by and visit us. I'll be there too. And like, comment, share, subscribe, all those great things. And uh keep doing what you're doing. It's uh great to talk to writers who give it their all, dive in, and create a world as compelling, evocative, and thematically relevant for our times as uh your good stuff. Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_02 1:23:33

Thanks, Mookie. Happy writing.