Michael Morton's Military Sci-Fi Writers' Workshop

The 36th episode of Science Fiction & Fantasy Factory features Mookie going deep into storytelling craft with Michael Morton, a military sci-fi author, editor, and former Air Force space operations specialist who breaks writing down the same way he approaches missions: Clear objectives, defined adversaries, and no wasted energy or motion.

Morton lays out a core principle that drives everything: If your characters do not have goals, and nothing stands in their way, the story collapses. Conflict is the engine, and everything else supports it. He explains how weak character motivation and overbuilt worlds drag stories down, especially in science fiction where writers often hide behind lore instead of drama.

The conversation stays grounded in execution. Morton explains how real operational thinking carries into fiction that moves. He builds scenes around intent, then lets characters push toward outcomes. He avoids over-explaining and trusts the audience to keep up. The result is pacing that feels earned instead of forced.

From there, Mookie and Michael shift into process. Morton writes while holding a full-time job. No time to wait for inspiration, he sets daily word targets, visualizes scenes ahead of time, and uses a structured framework to keep momentum. When a section stalls, he skips forward and keeps producing. Progress over perfection.

They also get into the mechanics of working inside established universes. Morton explains how to operate within constraints without flattening creativity. Respect the rules of the sandbox, then build the story inside it. He ties that back to character work, where distinct motivations and opposing goals create tension that carries across any setting.

The business side gets equal attention, and Michael gets direct about publishing. The book does not sell itself, and it's up to the author to drive visibility. Social media presence, reader engagement, and consistent output matter. Without that, even strong work disappears. The takeaway is clear: Writing is a system. Execute daily. Do that long enough and the results follow.

The Guest

Michael Morton is a retired United States Air Force major, having served for 20 years and worked as an ICBM launch officer and in space operations. He currently works as a civilian at the United States Space Force on the next generation of satellite control systems. He started writing fanfiction with friends in the AOL days, but now he writes award-winning military sci-fi and fantasy. When he’s not writing, he enjoys gaming, camping, and exploring the local distilleries and breweries. Join him and the other Cannon Publishing authors at The Command Post on Facebook!

Amazon Author page

Personal website:  https://www.salty-family.com/michael-morton-author

FB Author page:  https://www.facebook.com/michael.mortonauthor

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:02

Hello and welcome to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Factory. On the floor with me today, I've got Michael Morton. Welcome aboard, sir. Thank you for the invite. I appreciate it. It's my pleasure having you on the floor today. You are a retired Air Force Space Operations guy. And you don't have to tell me too much if you need to kill me in order to do it. And uh you are a current and prolific science fiction, fantasy, and multi-genre author, as well as uh doing work for canon publishing. Yes. So I think we got a lot on our plate to uh to discuss. First and foremost, the the combination isn't what people usually put together. So you've had an illustrious career in the air force, you're now doing doing your own freelancing, I'm guessing.

SPEAKER_00 1:00

Uh well, I'm I'm actually um uh a federal civilian now working for the Space Force. So uh kind of the Space Force, you know, they they came about in 2019. I retired in 2014. So uh there's a five-year gap, but I eventually made it back into the Space Force.

SPEAKER_01 1:17

All right, that's interesting in and of itself, and I'm assuming some of that experience, lived experience, gets into some of your writing. Yes, it does. But uh people don't usually put two and two together that way in terms of being active in the military, doing that kind of service, and then translating that into the genre that we would consider military science fiction, even fantasy to a certain extent. I had Al Hagen on Todd just uh a week or so ago. Great guy.

SPEAKER_00 1:47

He is he and his wife are both lovely people, met him several times, uh, some of the nicest people you could ever meet.

SPEAKER_01 1:54

Yes, he's uh a lot of fun, tech Texan at the core, and uh he's got his Hexen series, his post-apocalyptic yeah, it's a great series. New book just came out, Crescent Crescent City shootout.

SPEAKER_00 2:13

Book five, it's it's it's starting a whole new uh series with the new new set of characters. But uh yeah, I I actually helped Al out when he brought that to Canon. I edited the first book in the Hexen series for him, and uh yeah, he doesn't need a whole lot of editing. He's a great writer.

SPEAKER_01 2:28

He is a great writer, crispy, direct. I like his uh female superheroes, they're they're terrific and inspirational. We talked a lot about that, but to the point I was getting at earlier, how did you get into creative writing? I'm assuming a lot of your work with operations, space force, all that stuff is pretty analytical.

SPEAKER_00 2:51

Um, to a certain extent. So um, you know, way back in high school, my senior year of high school, uh I had to take a an English elective class, and so I picked uh creative writing. And it's not something I'd ever really done before. Um, and it was it was fun. I had a good time writing it, uh actually got a good grade on the on the uh story that I had to create, which was uh uh a post-apocalyptic uh type story where uh uh there's a uh organization that's hidden away inside Mount Rushmore and they wake up after the apocalypse to start rebuilding.

SPEAKER_01 3:23

Um then he sold the screenplay.

SPEAKER_00 3:26

Yeah, that would be that would be lovely. Uh unfortunately that story is lost to the uh to the annals of time and multiple moves. Um but um it was about uh uh let's see here the uh mid-90s. Uh I got involved on uh AOL, if you remember back in those days. Uh there was a Mercedes-Lackey fandom, um, arrows online, and uh we did a lot of fan fiction writing. And uh that was a lot of fun when you get to write with your friends like that. Um I didn't take it too seriously, even though uh several of them asked asked me, Hey, when are you gonna publish some of this stuff? I'm like, yeah, that's that's not something that uh at the time I was really interested in or even thought that I could seriously do. I was just starting my Air Force career, so it it didn't get a whole lot of attention. Uh fast forward to um about 2016, 2017, um now on Facebook, um and I was in uh a group called the F the Command Post, which is Canon Publishing's uh uh fan group. And uh I had been I I had for some reason, I don't know why, I had pulled out some of that old fan fiction stuff that I've been writing, and one of them was a military science fiction story, and so it never got finished. And um I said, Well, you know, maybe I should try a hand at this. And so I posted some of that online uh in in one of the chats, and uh JF Holmes, the owner of Canon, uh, he was the first one to respond to me, and his first question was, Are you published yet? And that's flattering. Yeah, that's that's when it it it clicked. It's like, wow, okay, a publisher thinks that my writing is good enough. And so that's when I really started to take it more seriously, and uh writing more, uh taking classes, learning about the the business and the craft of writing.

SPEAKER_01 5:29

That sounds terrific, and it sounds like it comes from here. This is a repeating theme I'm getting from all sorts of writers science fiction, fantasy, whatever genre. It's almost like you're born with this itch. Yeah, yeah, that you like to tell stories. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You like to tell stories, and for you, it was that trigger with the Facebook group, getting that acknowledgement from Mr. Holmes. I'm trying to get him on the podcast too, because he's waving Al, Al hook me up with him too. But you got that spark, and then that's what lit it.

SPEAKER_00 6:03

Yeah, and it's um it lit it so much that uh not only did I uh uh begin writing, but eventually, uh, you know, when John was looking to expand Canon uh beyond just the one-man operation that he was, uh, I was his first editor that he uh he he asked to come and edit his his stories. Great, great trajectory.

SPEAKER_01 6:25

And you you've got a pretty broad oove, as they say. So you you cover you cover a lot of ground. Can you give our listeners and viewers a sense of how that evolved and the the different areas that you've covered?

SPEAKER_00 6:39

Yeah, so um one of the things I had to uh do right away was figure out where I can't write uh for a variety of reasons. Um I'm I'm not a Western guy. I mean I've read a few Louis Lemour books, I like some of the stuff on TV, but I I I don't I don't feel you know that that vibe, so I I wasn't even gonna try and do it. Um not a romantic uh uh author of any sort, although there are some very good romance authors out there who are really good at the craft of writing. Uh Nora Roberts is one. She writes uh very detailed characters. So I read her stuff for the characters and learn how to build really in-depth characters that the readers can connect to. Um another area that I had to throw out, a genre that I just can't write in, is uh modern day thrillers, uh adventures, uh, you know, things like that, uh, because of uh the classification level of my work. Uh I I just know too many things. And so uh uh it would just be too hard to get it through uh uh the clearance process. As a uh DOD civilian who holds a security classification, uh there is I have to submit anything in that in that vein through a uh an office in the DoD that that kind of vets your work and says, you know, hey, you need to take this out, you need to change that, or whatever. And so I said that that would just be too much hassle, it would be too hard to get anything good, right? Yeah, because I can't tell the good stuff.

SPEAKER_01 8:11

So I had to talk about that with Al a little bit too. So Al's the former Marine, did intelligence work. He he kind of submits voluntarily to cover his ass, I think. Yeah, it slows it down a little bit, but then he feels better about it. But I think in your situation, it might be a little bit more involved, and you're just kind of like, I'm not gonna go there at all.

SPEAKER_00 8:34

Yeah, it would just be too much hassle.

SPEAKER_01 8:36

And then you you don't have to kill me after you uh you you tell me about it.

SPEAKER_00 8:41

Yeah. So that leaves um areas that I really do like, uh fantasy and uh science fiction, especially military science fiction. Um, so that's uh my first book, my well, my first two books have been uh military science fiction. Um number of short stories that I've done have broadened that out into uh fantasy and uh regular science fiction. Uh I've done um uh some game-associated uh books. Uh I'm uh right waiting to publish one now based on the Car Wars Universe, which was a uh tabletop game uh that was developed back in the 80s, and it's on the sixth edition now. Um so I know the the publisher who got the rights to uh write fiction in that universe. So uh that book will be coming out end of the summer. Um so that was that was a lot of fun. That was that was kind of like a uh an homage to all of the gaming that I did with my high school and college friends growing up, and uh being able to track back to that and include some of those elements in that book uh was very satisfying. Is that through John and Cannon, or that's a parallel track? Yeah, that's through uh so that's another guy you should have on your podcast, and I'll give you his contact information. So um he goes by uh his pen name is William Joe for William Joseph Roberts, Billy Joe Bob. And uh he runs uh Three Ravens Publishing. So yeah, he he uh worked with Steve Jackson of Steve Jackson Games to get the rights to publish the fiction in the universe. So he is he's quite the character. Uh he uh he would definitely make a very fun podcast guest for you.

SPEAKER_01 10:19

That's great. Well, that thanks for the referral. I'll give him give him a ring. How do you feel about that kind of assignment, if you will? Is it does it come from you and then you make the recommendation to the publisher, or does it come from the publisher in terms of an opportunity and they think you're the right guy for the right job? Is it a combination of the two?

SPEAKER_00 10:43

Yeah, it could go both ways. Most of the time when you're writing for a big franchise like that, um, you have to know somebody. And I happen to know uh uh Hillbilly, as we call him. Um uh he uh I've published some short stories for him and uh worked with him on some other stuff. So uh when he got that, he says, Hey, is anybody uh willing to write for this? And I was one of the first ones to hit yes. So yeah, that's that was a case of being in the right place at the right time and knowing the right people.

SPEAKER_01 11:16

That's neat. I had Don Aguilio on, and he's uh a master graphic artist. So he does the new Superman and Aquaman. Oh, wow. And the reason I bring him up is because he had to adapt his own unique style to iconic franchise material. And in ways, you're doing something similar. So Don had his Rise series that he just did from scratch. It's very personal and it's his own thing. And they liked him. And the big guns brought him in, gave him a chance, and he's been rocking it. But he's telling me too that he he like wakes up sometimes in a cold sweat that he got Aquaman's boot a little bit wrong. There's a lot of pressure, yeah. That is pretty much pressure. He gets a call from the studio, you know, if it's if it's not if it's not on brand. They give him a lot of freedom, though. And and when you're working on a franchise like that, how how's that set up? You got characters, you got a world, right? And then how much license do you get?

SPEAKER_00 12:25

So it depends, right? Um, you know, this the game being on its sixth edition, there's a lot of historical uh works, you know, the game mechanics that have been published in that system. So, you know, when you're writing the Car Wars universe, you have you know, the the mechanics, the physics, whatever you know you want to call that, that you have to stick to. You can't make up your own stuff in that area. Um same thing with um the locations. This takes place in the United States, and uh just a brief rundown, it's it's after there was this massive wheat blight that uh really brought society crashing down until they uh found a replacement for it. Um but in the meantime, um one of the main um things that kept people from going crazy and rioting and stuff was um the introduction of what's called auto-dueling. Uh so basically people put weapons on cars, they go into an arena and they fight it out for a purse. Um so in the beginning, right, tail uh car wars was just strictly tabletop. You move you move counters around on the table and you shoot at each other and stuff. But you know, this has been going on since the uh early 80s, so you know, you've got forty plus years of history to work with there. So that was inviolate, right? You couldn't change any of the history that had happened in the game universe. Um and then the other thing that happened was um uh Hillbilly and Steve Jackson worked out the uh the idea for the main storyline, which is a road rally. Um, and the idea that they worked out is all the different authors that are participating in the main storyline, you pick a city in the United States and your teams will race from your city through whatever path you can work out, but they have three legs, three so three books, to get to Sturgis, South Dakota, because that's where the main event's gonna be held. Okay. So with those are kind of like your left and right boundaries, and that's what you have to work with. But other than that, character development, you know, what happens during the race, uh, and all the things that go on, that's that was completely up to me. I had to submit a synopsis to Steve Jackson for him to approve. Uh, he gave me some suggestions on some of the things that he'd like to see, and of course, yeah, I put him in, I put him in the book because you know, he's the boss. So, yeah, and and I got great feedback when I when I submitted the story to him and and he read through it and he had his own things, he's like, um, he said, This is a great story. I love all the characters, they're very distinct and individual. I'm like, whoo, that's good, because I was really working hard on that. I didn't want cookie cutter characters that uh that just look like uh any other driver and gunner that you could find in the Car Wars universe.

SPEAKER_01 15:08

How would you characterize the Mike Morton style? So what when you when you take a look at your characters and your character focused, which is refreshing because in this genre, in most science fiction fantasy genres, people tend to err a little bit on the world building side, and characters are just often placeholders for driving the story forward. And when you got a backdrop like this this car killer universe, then there might be a tendency to get a little bit mechanical about it.

SPEAKER_02 15:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 15:40

So so how do you introduce those characters? And do you draw on your own life experience? Do you channel something like that?

SPEAKER_00 15:48

Oh, yeah, my own life experience uh auto dueling in the arena, right? Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 15:51

In in the arena conflicts that you did while you were in the Air Force.

SPEAKER_00 15:56

Yeah. No, actually, um uh one of the things that I learned early on in uh my writing career, uh, it was a book that was recommended to me by another fantastic author, Kevin Eikenberry. Um, the book is called My Story Can Beat Up Your Story. And it's a book on uh story structure written by a screenwriter who has won uh uh Oscar uh uh uh awards and uh he works in the Hollywood film industry. It's designed for screenplays, but you know, anything you put in a screenplay, you can adapt to a book.

SPEAKER_01 16:29

Oh, I agree a hundred percent. David Namit's on directing film, I think is the best book for any kind of writer. Same it's the exact same thing.

SPEAKER_00 16:38

Yeah. So so this book, um, one of the things that it taught me is uh your protagonist is only as good as their antagonist. You gotta have them play off of each other. Uh and to do that, you have to understand what their goals are. Each of these characters should have uh goals that they firmly believe in and that they will sacrifice a lot, if not everything, to achieve. Uh so that's my first step when I when I start writing both of those, the protagonist and the antagonist, is I I line out what are their goals, what are they trying to do. And uh, you know, it does they don't have to be like directly conflicting goals. Uh one of the things that uh David Allen Schechter, who wrote the book, he he he does is he breaks down very famous films that are were very successful, and the most prominent one in the book is Star Wars, uh A New Hope. And um let me ask you a question, Mookie. Who is the antagonist in A New Hope? Like who is the the bad guy? Who's who's the antagonist? There's lots of bad guys.

SPEAKER_01 17:46

That's true. Um, well, you would assume I'd start with the protagonist who's Luke. Luke Skywalker, yeah. Luke Skywalker, and then what's in Luke's way to getting what he needs to do, which is to grow up ultimately, right? And and be all he can be. Now the easy answer is Darth Vader, right? Right, right? But uh, but who is the real antagonist to him? What was it was it Uncle Owen?

SPEAKER_00 18:14

No, no, it's someone who actually doesn't have a whole lot of screen time. It's Grand Moff Tarkin, the the guy who runs the Death Star. He is the antagonistic force in A New Hope because he is uh Darth Vader in that movie is really just a mook, right? He is someone who goes around and does the bidding of the stuff.

SPEAKER_01 18:36

I'll take that as a compliment.

SPEAKER_00 18:40

I didn't even I didn't even think about that. Um but but the the point I'm trying to make is that you know Luke Skywalker has very specific goals that he wants to achieve, right? He wants to um rescue the princess, destroy the death star, and become a Jedi like his father, right? Uh whereas Grand Moff Tarkin, he wants to destroy the Rebel Alliance, he wants to wipe out uh all users of the force, all the the remaining Jedi, in that case Obi-Wan Kenobi, but uh it could be Luke as well. And then uh he wants to prove the technological proudness of the Death Star, right? So they have each different goals, but the path that those goals are on puts them in conflict with each other. And that's the second lesson I learned is is when you put those goals in conflict with each other, it's the conflict that drives the story. That's what readers want to see in the book, right? If everything was just all sunshine and roses, that'd be a very boring book to read. But when you have conflict, when you have the characters have having things happen to them, especially the protagonist, as he faces a series of increasingly more difficult tasks in order to get to his goals, it makes the journey worth it for the reader because the reader feels like they've earned it when they finally get to that end of the book.

SPEAKER_01 19:58

I I think slicing and dicing is useful here, though, too. I agree with you that the macro adversary is the guy controlling the Death Star. He's the symbol of imperial power. But Luke's got other adversaries and they play different roles throughout. So you do have Uncle Owen, who's basically just kid, shut up, do your job, lead a conventional life, and all will be well. That doesn't work out so well. You've got Han Solo, who's the swashbuckler, he's super cool, but um, they're competing for some similar resources, right? They get in each other's way and they become adversarial, even at certain points, and then their reconciliation at the end gives the movie that heroic oomph that you need. I remember literally the audience back in 1977. I'm giving away my tender youth. I was 12 years old. Literally, the audience just gasped and cheered when the Millennium Falcon came out, took out Darth's little assistants there and the TIE fighters, and said, Come on, kid, let's blow this thing and go home. You're like, yeah, that didn't have shit to do with Grand Moth Tarkin, that had to do with their emotional relationship that was there, and it was so satisfying.

SPEAKER_00 21:22

And that's how you know that Han Solo is a well-written character because he evoked that reaction from the from the people. That's how you know, I mean, everybody loved him in uh Empire Strikes Back when he actually ad-lived the line when they were about ready to freeze him in Carbonite, right? And Princess Leia says, I love you. And you know, uh according to to Harrison Ford, George Lucas had this other response written out, and Harrison Ford was just like Han Solo would not say that. No, he would say, I know, because he's I know he's an arrogant asshole, right? Yeah, and it's become one of the most iconic refrains that the geekdom has embraced, and that's Again, that's how you know you've created a a well-rounded character that that the readers can connect to.

SPEAKER_01 22:06

And that's why a lot of the sequels sucked. Because when they reintroduced Han Solo, it's an exercise in mechanical orchestration. The character no longer has motivation, he's just scripted in as an extra to sell product. And you're illustrating what really, really works, especially in genre fiction, which is you're character-centric, they've got clearly defined goals, and you've got opposition. And what you do as a writer, you throw them in there, and you almost step back from your own creation and you let them play it out. That to me, when I'm writing, that's when then I know I'm on I'm on the right path, where I'm not like thinking the plot through and putting them into situations. You do the setup and then you kind of let them go.

SPEAKER_00 22:59

Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, you know, the one of the things, you know, so Schechter's book gives me a structure that I can work with. It's not an outline exactly, it's just a structure of what goes where in the book. And then I sit down and I start writing, and I know what I want to have happen in a particular scene, but that's just you know a destination. I'm like, okay, I'm going for right about there. How the characters get there sometimes surprises me.

SPEAKER_01 23:24

That's when you know you're really onto something, because it really it's like an emergent experience that the characters themselves figured out by one of them being in that situation, rather than you as writer overlord just kind of moving the players around. To me, that that's the good stuff, and and I see it over and over again, not just in in fiction, in text, but in movies constantly, where the motivation for these characters just doesn't make sense. The characters don't really make sense, and instead of the drama unfolding, it's explained to you. You got characters explaining their motivation to other characters, then you've got characters describing what happened and what's gonna happen. And when it's so dialogue-driven and expositional, it loses that that dramatic intensity and that relatability.

SPEAKER_00 24:21

You lose you lose the audience investment in the characters because everything's just being laid out for them, they don't have to do any work, and you know, most most uh readers and and viewers don't want that.

SPEAKER_01 24:32

No, a great example or a counterexample is The Matrix. Speaking of science fiction, the first movie I thought rocked because not only visually did it create this huge, unique motif, the green and the and the stylized, the micro movements and all that, but you had no idea what the hell was going on, and Neo didn't either. Neo is discovering the secret along with you, yeah. And you're both challenged to figure out what the hell's going on.

SPEAKER_00 25:06

Well, and then the scene when he meets the um uh the um what do they call her? The prophet, um, or not the prophet, Morpheus. No, not Morpheus, uh the old lady in the apartment.

SPEAKER_01 25:16

Oh yes, the old lady in the in the housing project.

SPEAKER_00 25:20

She's supposed to she's supposed to be the one who can identify the one, the oracle, yes. And and what's the big surprise to the audience? She looks at him, she does a few things, and she's like, Nah, you're not it. You're not it. And the audience is like, what? Wait a minute, we've invested so much in Neo up to this point. What's what's going on? What's and and that's a point that that's you got to do that carefully because you can lose your audience at that point if you don't handle the transition.

SPEAKER_01 25:48

Skywalker takes the lightsaber and throws it over his back, and he's given up on the Jedi tradition, right? For the later movie, and you're like, Why did you do that? You know, the the uh the actor himself, Mark Hamill, read the script. They go, What did you do to the character, guys? And then back to the Matrix. The first Matrix ended with him literally calling the mainframe on a landline and telling them that they're gonna rise up and kick his ass. And he puts the phone down and like Superman, he blasts off out of the phone booth, and you can't wait for the sequel. Yeah, and then what happens in the sequel? We get a half hour of expositional bullshit about Zion, and he and Neil can't make up his mind because there's so much going on. And what happened to the forward momentum? What happened to rallying the troops? What happened to going to kick their mainframe's ass? They they lost it, and it never rebounded after that. And the reason I bring all this up is it just reinforces your good points about what makes great writing, which is stick to the character and what the goals are, right?

SPEAKER_00 26:58

Well, it well, yeah, but you have to know, right? You have to know this is what my character's goals are. If it if they need to change, or if they achieve one and replace it with another one, that's fine, as long as you know that's what your intent is. But if you don't know your own character's goals intrinsically, then you know, you're not gonna be able to write the best kind of conflict, and you're not gonna be able to ultimately guide them to where they need to be at the end of the book. And that's where you sometimes you get these books where it starts out really good, and you're like, I really like this character, I really like this is going, and then by the time you hit the middle of the book, you're like, What are you doing? You're just wandering around doing random side quests, you've completely forgotten your main goal, it doesn't matter to you anymore. Um, you know, I feel like I just wasted all my time reading this book because it doesn't look like you're gonna get to across the finish line.

SPEAKER_01 27:52

It's like A leads to B, which leads to C. And all along, if you don't think you're headed towards Z, right? Because all the letters are in the way, then it's just not a good through line. Yeah. Because you know, you've got the big goal, and then you got the micro goals that they gotta get through to get ultimately where they're headed. If you lose sight of the destination and then you start wandering, you lose that dramatic tension of the ebb and flow of figuring, you know, you solve a problem and that creates new problems, and then you solve those, and then it cascades until you get what you need, or you don't. The whole point, though, is that you stay on target, right? Yeah, red target. We're like definitely dorking out. This is great, and in terms of the narrative, it's like we talk about Al Hagen's prose. So, you know, we can stroke him off a little bit more here. He's uh he's really good at just keeping it crisp. When I read Al's stuff, I'm like, he gets to it and he describes enough for it to be vivid and emotional and intense, but but he's on to it, he he keeps it moving, and your stuff is like that too. How do you how do you find a balance between overdoing the narrative as far as the description goes and the world building goes, and keeping it light enough and fast enough so that this kind of drama can naturally unfold?

SPEAKER_00 29:24

So there's two parts to that. Um, the first part is when I'm writing a scene, um yeah, I'm kind of playing it out like a movie in my head. Um, so I want things to move along from scene to scene to scene. And sometimes in the in those cases, I will forget detail, but that's what the editing process is for. You go back and you're like, you know what, I should probably describe that room a little bit better. And so you throw in an extra sentence or two. Um but the important thing to me is to get the the basics down uh and go back and fix it in edit editing. So that helps me move things along because I want I see that movie scene playing out in my head, you know, the the character does this, the bad guy does that, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Right, and we get to the end of the scene, I get accomplished what I want to have happen in that scene. Um the other part comes from uh uh being uh a gamer, uh uh you know, longtime Dungeons and Dragons player, plenty of other role-playing games. Uh, and most of the time, unfortunately, I am the perpetual dungeon master. Uh, you know, not too many people. Somebody's gotta do it, right? And and unfortunately, a lot of times it's me. I shouldn't say unfortunately, because I like being the dungeon master. It's it's another way to tell stories. Um you get to order what food you want. Yeah. That that's that's the DD games I played, which is like what one of the best comics I ever saw in the old uh Dungeon magazine or Dragon magazine was uh it was a picture of a gaming table. I I don't remember what else was going on, but the dungeon master screen that you you you could see the players, the side facing the players, and there was an inscription on there, and it says, Players will sacrifice live pizza to the DM. I'm like, yep, that's exactly how it works. Uh but so so writing adventures for my players, you know, I'm not writing for publication, so I don't have to be all formal and everything like that, but I've got to give myself enough to go on because I may write this and not run it for several weeks or several months, even. So I've got to put enough in there that I have to call I can call back what I was uh what is was thinking of at the time. And so that's where I get my how much description is enough description, right? Um love Tolkien, great books, you know, that's that's what started me down the fantasy path, but oh my god, the descriptions.

SPEAKER_01 31:43

How many fucking Hobbit breakfasts do we have to endure?

SPEAKER_00 31:48

I remember you know what? I like Hobbit breakfast that just fine. It's the trees and the the architecture and everything else. It's like, oh my gosh.

SPEAKER_01 31:58

But even when I was a kid reading uh, you know, the Hobbit Lord of the Rings, Hobbits Hobbit's a thin book, but to your point, Lord of the Rings, you went for it. Still Marilyn, don't even go there, right? But uh, but uh, you know, just the level of detail, and I just remember the the the Hobbit breakfasts. But but to your exact point, though, it's like getting it just right, the balance between creating that world, getting your reader into it, and not shooting yourself in the foot.

SPEAKER_00 32:28

Yeah, and and not delaying things down, right? As when I work function as an editor, right? That's uh that's uh you know, once I get past you know the antagonist and pro-contagonist and helping that out is uh you know, I look for you know excessive exposition, right? Um I I really uh don't like prologues in books. Uh most of the time that stuff can come out throughout the course of the book. There's a few times when when it's it's uh useful or even necessary, uh, like in A New Hope, right? The the scroll at the beginning of the scri uh the movie, right? That's essential information that the audience does need to know. And they kept it short. And and in tight.

SPEAKER_01 33:09

And it was fitting, and and it was awesome because it brought back the old serial uh pulp pulp movies from before.

SPEAKER_00 33:17

But I re what I really liked is is it dropped things in that in that in that scroll that the audience was like, wait a minute, the Clone Wars. Well, what's the Clone Wars, right? Wait, a secret rebel base? What's going on? Right? It's it's it's not it's not only just telling you what came before, but what are the important things that came before that are going to play into the rest of the movie? And you know, that was probably one of the best things that they did was uh the ending of Rogue One and leads right into a new home.

SPEAKER_01 33:48

Great movie. After after the shit show of the prequels and the sequels, I was like, finally they get it right.

SPEAKER_00 33:56

Yes, and the Darth Vader entrance there at the very end.

SPEAKER_01 34:02

That was great, and and in ways it's like you you didn't even need that information. The whole movie is backstory in a sense, but yeah, to the point you're making earlier, they had they had outlined it well so that it had great characters with challenges they needed to overcome, and great adversarial forces. So in its own universe, it was bang on point, yeah, and it worked really, really well.

SPEAKER_00 34:29

So it you know, exposition and and uh descriptions, right? Again, you know, unless well, okay, I take that back. Romance novels are one place where description really helps because they tend to visit the same scenes over and over again, or the same location I should say same same locations over and over again. Um so the character the the scenes themselves, the locations become almost another character to the to the reader, but that's unique to the romance novels. Um, you know, for fiction, especially action fiction, right? You're moving along and you want to move things along so you pass along enough information that the reader can kind of get a general sense. If I'm having a shootout in a mall and my audience is Americans, I don't have to do a whole lot of description in the mall right. Everyone's been to a mall, everyone knows what a mall is like. I can just I can assume you know the character I can just tell the character or the audience they're either starting on you know the bottom level or they're starting on the top level and where the escalators at, right? Because you know that there's gonna be an action sequence on the escal escalators. Right? Um same thing with um uh an airport, right? If you're having an action scene in an airport or in a sci-fi universe in a starport, right, you can tie those in to what people are already familiar with. They already know what gates are like, they already know what security is like, the long endless lines, the shops that line the way, the you know, the coffee shops and everything like that. So you don't have to put a whole lot of description in there. A lot of that stuff's already established for us. So you just draw on people's everyday experiences and they fill in the details in their head. It may not look like what you think it looks like, but as long as it works for them, it moves the story along and everyone's happy.

SPEAKER_01 36:10

Another pitfall is in the narration itself. So you know how some people overdo it. So to your point, everyone's seeing a mall. Don't spend 10 pages describing the mall before anything happens. Yeah. And another issue is is just over-narrating the hell out of the plot, which is uh before the scene unfolds, you can repeat or regurgitate where the characters are and what they're thinking and what they're doing. And there's also a tendency to interrupt the action with a lot of internal cogitation, yeah. Right? And then decompressing afterwards to the point where, yeah, we got it. And not only are you overdoing it in terms of the narrative, but you're sucking the tension and drama and excitement and surprise out of your own story because you can't shut the hell up and just let it unfold. Let everything put come together in your reader's head. Trust them, don't dumb down your reader by explaining every damn detail of character motivation, outcome, and implications.

SPEAKER_00 37:17

And and the best example to me that I can think of that exemplifies all of what you said in in the best way is Terminator 2. Right? You have two Terminators show up, they're both we both know, or the audience knows they're both looking for John Connor. The first one is Arnold, right? If you've seen the first movie, you know what a Terminator is. And then you've got this other guy who's all wait, oh my god, he's liquid metal? What the hell? And he can sh and he can take other people's appearances. Oh my gosh. And so, but there's not any explanation happening. Things are just happening, and uh the director was letting the action explain what was going on, right? You should they show up in the mall, and finally, in that back uh backed passageway you get to see everything happen at once where the two Terminators now are fighting, right? And then you get to the the chase scene and the motorcycle and everything in the waterways and all of that, and everything is still action happening. There's no explanation going on. John Connor doesn't even know what's going on. He knows there's Terminators because his mom told it about him, and he thought he was gonna get killed, but apparently he's being rescued by one. Wait a minute, what's going on here? Is there something else going on, right? But the audience is wondering what's going on along with John Connor, and then finally, after all the action is out of the way and everyone's happy with that action sequence, now we can take a downbeat, we can explain things that are happening, and we get to see, oh, this is a good guy, and not only is he a good guy, but he's been programmed to obey John Connor, right? You know, lift stand on one leg, right? You know, that that whole thing.

SPEAKER_01 38:50

Cameron is is an excellent storyteller for those exact reasons where he he keeps data hidden from the audience in a way that keeps them enticed and yet doesn't confuse them. It's that balance between being opaque with intention and maintaining the thrill. Like I it's this is weird, I'm not quite sure what's going on, but I know I'm being led in a direction where it will be revealed and I will be surprised and satisfied.

SPEAKER_02 39:23

Yep.

SPEAKER_01 39:24

A lesser writer would have had explanation, which was the first Terminator who came was designed to kill John Connor, but a second one was sent to protect him. There goes the first half hour tension in the movie. You blow it with a pointless VO or a character explaining it. How many films and TV shows are we just forced to endure because directors, writers, producers, publishers do not trust the intelligence of the audience, right? They feel the audience is so stupid that everything needs to be explained. And if there's any tension and they get confused at all, then they're not gonna like it or walk away and they're and it's gonna reduce your sale. Yeah, yeah. That's the biggest plague, I think, that's out there. And audiences always complain about this stuff too, which is like, well, it's a pretty good movie. And usually when they say it was a pretty good movie, it could have been a great movie if they would have just trusted the audience's intelligence to get it. And it's often compensation for the producer, the writer, the director sucking at their job, they don't have confidence in their own storytelling skills. Yeah, so they kind of blame the audience for being stupid, but they suck at storytelling. As writers, at least, we control the page, right? Where we have our universe, and hopefully, we can apply these best practices to the stuff that we do. Yeah, which exactly, which is our motivation for this conversation, which is fist pumping and kind of kind of sharing. And you know, a lot of my viewers and listeners are in the authors, they're at various stages. They're like, How can I get in the racket? I'm in the racket, and I want to try to sell more books, or how can I get better as a writer? And I think the best practices you're sharing are are bang on point. This is really how to how to get in there and and do it. And and speaking of the doing it, you're you're working, right? You've you've got your day job.

SPEAKER_00 41:33

I got my day job, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 41:34

Yeah. So how do you how do you squeeze in? There's a there's this there's this troll that I'm gonna write my dream book when I retire or I win the lottery, I'm too busy to write, that kind of stuff. And you've been writing, you've been working and writing continuously. You got your family, and you've got a prolific trail of breadcrumbs behind you, and it's impressive. How how how do you keep it going? How do you fit it in? And how do you stay motivated?

SPEAKER_00 42:07

Uh to quote quote Tom Cruise, it's a challenge. Um so uh I have uh number one, I have an agreement with my wife. Um five days a week, I get to write in the evenings. Uh the other two days are devoted to whether we're just watching TV or uh she's recently gotten into mahjong, and so I'm playing with her. Um but you know, she she lets me have the evenings uh an hour or so in the evenings after we've watched a little bit of television, then I sit and write. And um I what I have set for myself is uh a word goal, uh word count per day, uh, which I try and hit or exceed if I can. Uh not nothing egregious, right? I'm not trying to shoot for a thousand words or you know, two thousand words in a day. Um right now I'm uh at uh my goal is five hundred. Um and that's you know, that's two pages, two and a half pages worth of writing. That's not super hard. Um what I found that I need to do before I sit down to write, and it's a good thing that my writing is at the end of the day, is I need some quiet time sometime during the day to think about the scene that I want to write. Because like I said, that plays out as a movie in my head. So I gotta think about okay, so what's happening in this scene, who's in this scene, what needs to happen, what do I want to show the audience, what does the audience need to discover or learn, so on and so forth. So if I have done that prep work in my mind ahead of time, when I sit down to write, it makes it a lot easier because now uh it's already the movie's already playing, and now I can just translate that. Versus if I have to sit down and do all of that before while I'm in my one hour of writing time, I'm losing writing time getting to that. So that was an important lesson I had to learn uh early on is you know you you gotta you gotta know what what sparks your your writing, what what gets you into that writing frame of mind. Um the other thing that I have uh started to do is uh uh what I what I I took uh from that uh uh the My Story Can Beat Up Your Story. I took everything that he had in there and he breaks it basically makes a book down basically into 13 different uh uh acts. Or I'm I'm sorry, not acts, 13 different parts uh with a the basic three act structure. And so I have uh basically distilled all that down into a template in Microsoft Word. And so now I can go in and fill out that structure and uh it gives me a way to skip ahead if necessary. Right. We've all gotten to that point where you're writing and you're writing and you're writing, and all of a sudden the scene doesn't talk to you, right? You're like I don't know what to write in this scene. I'm I'm I'm either I either wrote myself into a corner or I'm not sure which direction I want to go next with this. And so because I have a structure and I know what happens basically in each of those 13 different parts, I can skip ahead. So I'm like, okay, you know, I'm on part five and it's just not working for me. So I will skip ahead to part six or even part seven, you know, depending on on what what what which one of those speaks to me. Uh and so it prevents me from getting writer's block where or or you know the the the feeling where you just can't get anything down on paper because you don't know what you want to have happen. Well, it's because you don't want to know what you want to have happen right now in the book. You need to go to a part of the book where you do know what happens, right? We've all as we're planning our books and we're thinking a way through, I know all of us has come up with, oh, I want to see this happen in the book, and I want my protagonist to do this, and I want my antagonist to have this evil, you know, maniacal laughter scene where he explains his whole plot. So those are those are those are what helps me write uh throughout the day and and stay stay on target.

SPEAKER_01 45:46

So it sounds to me in summary is do what you can do when you can do it. So if you get stuck, you you've you've got most of it in your head. You you got a story. So zip ahead a little bit, maybe take a sidebar, just keep keep keep the momentum alive. Don't don't don't just get choked on it.

SPEAKER_00 46:07

There's an acronym that's out there. It's um B-I-C-H-O-K. Bye chalk, which stands for button chair, hands on keyboard.

SPEAKER_01 46:16

I love it. That's the first that that's the first time uh I've I've heard that one. Have have you heard the one hate? I haven't heard that one. That's a really good one. I'll I'll get do quid pro quo for you, which is here's an idea, the end. Which is like, hey, you know, can aliens live on a neutron star? Or hey, I've got the evil empire, you know, expanding into another galaxy. That's it. So where's the characters? Where's that's hate? Stop the hate. And uh, and yours is terrific. I'm gonna I'm gonna use that, which is just an extension of that is STFU keep typing. Yeah, and that determination, I think, is is really the backbone of it, which is old school grit. Yes, you're you're an army guy, so you gotta boot camp your ass almost every day into discipline, into resilience, into repetition. And if you're a professional, you're doing it even if you're not in the mood, right? You know, Madonna, Madonna had her period, but she would go on and do the concert, right? It's a it's it's like these things couldn't and shouldn't get in your way. And the other point you made, which is really good, which is this transition. You've had a busy day at work, you've got a family, you need to entertain the missus, make sure that that that you care for her, that she's reminded that you love her, that you're not abandoning her for your writing, because then they're in opposition, right? You got all your bases covered, and then uh and then you transition into this state. Yeah. It sounds like you got an hour, hour and a half, to kind of make the most of it, right?

SPEAKER_00 48:06

Yeah, exactly. Uh the other the third thing I would I would tell to uh either aspiring or new writers is um understand that your your writing is different than everybody else's. Um some people have it in them to produce six books a year, right? Some people could do four books a year, whatever. Um understand what your what your limits are. Uh don't compare yourself to any other writer because you're all different. Everybody has different circumstances, different they're in different phases of life, they have different amounts of free time. Um I don't remember who it was, but there was a very famous author out there and his goal, his word goal for the day was 200 words. That's all. Just as long as he got 200 words in, he was happy with what he was doing. And that allowed him to write one or more novels a year simply because he didn't put extra stress on himself trying to meet some unreasonable word count that didn't make him feel good about himself. So figure out what your tempo is, what your time is, you know, how much can you put in into your writing and be happy with what you have, right? Because that is what's going to work for you. And it's not going to work for anybody else. That is your own particular style.

SPEAKER_01 49:28

I think that that's that's so bang on point. I think you're thinking of Hemingway, even. Is it Hemingway? I had a low word count, just if you're looking at word count, he would wake up at at 5 or 6 a.m. and he would write only until maybe 10, 11 o'clock. And that was that's when he started drinking. He was done. Yeah, that's when he started and going fly fishing and uh you know getting into shenanigans. So yeah, that was his way of doing his mind, it was fresh. Maybe he's a little hungover still, but that's when he got maximum firepower out of his mind and body. Yeah, and then he resigned himself to the rest of the day hanging out with uh Cuban soccer teams and doing whatever he was doing, right? Yep. So to your point, it's like we're all unique, and you can't force yourself. And there's as many different kinds of writers as there are kinds of people, so it's that same acceptance of yourself when it comes to the output, too, which is if you're trying to be somebody else, you're undercutting your own unique style and your own voice. Let that come out, and the process could be really unique to you too. I tend to be like crazy immersive, like I'm like my foot's on the gas, or I'm out to lunch, and I need to multitask. So I got the ADHD thing going on. So I'm writing an essay, an op-ed piece, part of a memoir, and and my next science fiction book. So I got I need to be juggling and mixing, and I need to listen to the news, and it seeps into my narrative, and I gotta keep it in flow so the dopamine keeps boosting, and that's my flow, that's my immersion, and I'm comfortable with that, even from an outsider point of view. It looks like I'm nuts, but I love it, it's like my own space, and you got your own way of doing it, and so does everyone else. And if you respect that about yourself, you're gonna let your own quality shine.

SPEAKER_00 51:30

Yeah, and you know, sometimes it it really confuses my wife because number one, when I'm writing, I have to be listening to music, but not regular music. It has to be uh instrumental type music where there's no words, right? I just need something to drown out the any background noises, and of course, she's usually watching TV as well. So, you know, she gets to watch her TV. I've got my music going, and um, I'm writing, and then I'll either reach a point where I'm like, oh, wait a minute, is that the best way to go? Or uh maybe I want to do something different, right? Maybe the scene's changing in my mind as I'm writing it, and I'll stop writing. And I'll sit there and I'll be like this. And it looks like I'm just staring off into space, which I kinda am, but really what I'm doing is I'm looking inside my head, trying to figure out, okay, how do I want to what you know? I've got like three different paths I want to follow for the scene. What's the one that makes sense with the story and the characters and everything else? And my wife will look over me at me if if I've sat that way for too long, and she's like, Are you done writing? I'm like, No, I'm thinking. She's like, Oh. To her mind, in her mind, right, when you're writing, you're writing, right? Fingers are flying over the keyboard. And then as soon as you stop writing, as soon as you stop typing, you're done writing. No, no, no. That's not how my process works. I've sometimes I've got to sit and I've got to think things through, or if I run into uh a word that I don't know how to spell, I've got to pause and look it up and say, oh, what how do I spell this? Or actually, what I've taken to do lately is anytime I run into something that is uh I need to look up a word, a character name, uh, or you know, a name for anything else or whatever, and I don't know it immediately off the top of my head, I'll just put capital XXX in that spot and keep going. And then when I edit, it's an easy term to search for. I search for all the triple X's, and now that I have time, I can say, okay, I need this character, okay, here, there, or I need the name of this ship, or whatever it is that that I couldn't think of in the moment. And that way I don't let myself get pulled out of my uh my writing um flow.

SPEAKER_01 53:37

There's different modes to it. Al is like that too. He listens to the band The Warning. He turned on to it. Yeah. And I've been listening to them. They're three uh three Latina gals, young, young sisters, and they rock out heavy, heavy rock with uh with the uh almost soprano style singing. So I've been listening. He listens to that over and over again. And I love the point you're making about these layers of kind of chipping away at it. I almost liken it to like you're a sculpture, a sculptor, and and first you've got like a hammer and a chisel, and you're just there's a big block of marble, and you're just trying to get the general form of what you're doing. And by the end of it, you got the sandpaper just kind of going over it nicely. And and I think some of the toughest part is that initial block of marble because you're starting from nothing, and you really need to do the heavy, heavy kind of physical work to get that story together, to get your ideas on the page. And when you start polishing, and to your point, the XXXs, you're filling in the blank, it becomes almost cosmetic, and it's a lot of fun. It's like the the final stages are when the story really starts coming together.

SPEAKER_00 54:53

And and to hear some other writers talk, um, they're the opposite. For them, the chiseling away the large chunks of stone to reveal the story that's beneath, that's the fun part for them. That's the easy part, right? I I'm knocking away everything that doesn't look like the story that's in my head. And then when they finally get to the rough outline that's beneath it, and they have to start editing, that's when they slow down immensely because they're like, ooh, do I want to chip away at that piece or do I want to chip away at that piece? Right. And and sometimes it becomes, you know, they get inside their own head too much, and they're editing and then they're re-editing and then they're re-editing, right? You know, there's there's we all know there's lots of people out there who they write their book and then they spend years editing it because it's not perfect for them.

SPEAKER_01 55:43

Like James Elroy, are you familiar? Like LA Confidential. Yeah, that guy is a genius, he's an egomaniac and a narcissist. He refers to himself as the Tolstoy of American crime fiction only. Okay. He's he's right.

SPEAKER_02 55:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 56:00

So his shit is just unbelievable. Like American tabloid and that the whole series is like amazing. And he literally spends most of his time outlining, and and it's that latter half where the story comes together where he actually like writes the scenes, he needs to have it all outlined in his head, and he might spend a whole year just outlining a book, doing research, having researchers help fill in the blanks, and he needs to kind of see the whole thing, and then he sits down and he and he and he writes the scenes out. Everyone's got their own their own way of doing it. David Mammoth calls it like you start with a scalpel and you end with a chainsaw. But for him, it's like he he fills the whole page, and for him, the most important thing is what he throws in the garbage. He's like he tries to throw as much as he can in the garbage because then he knows he's like polishing this to its its essence. And that takes a lot of self-control and discipline because a lot of work goes into writing. It's it's tough like laying pipe, and you don't want to let that stuff go.

SPEAKER_00 57:13

No. No, I mean, yeah, you you write yourself into a corner. That's one of the worst feelings in the world because you're like, I just you know spent 10,000 words doing this part of the storyline, and I realize now that I can't take it to the to where I want it to be, right? There's there's too big a chasm for for this part of the story to jump across back to the main line. And so you've got to make that hard choice and you've got to maybe chop you know 8,000 of that or whatever it takes to get back to a place where you can realign yourself and get back on the highway, right? Where you're you're not gonna be driving off the edge of a cliff.

SPEAKER_01 57:48

Absolutely. And then when you finally finish the story and you see the whole thing, there's the other shocker where wait a second, I didn't necessarily write myself into a corner here, but I I need like five, six, seven thousand words to bridge this plot hole.

SPEAKER_00 58:07

You know, so I I actually kind of enjoy that in the editing process, in part because I have a structure. So I know I know what the bare bones is gonna look like. And there may be some parts where again, like again, I skipped ahead, right? And then I went back and I wrote something, but I didn't necessarily write the bridge at the time because the bridge wasn't super important, right? The bridge is just a bridge, it's just a way to get from scene to scene, and it just has to be logical so that the reader says, How in the hell do they go from you know here to there? Right? So, but sometimes that can lead to uh number one, the ability to look like a genius to your reader. Because after you've for me, after I've written the whole thing, I can go back and say, Well, now that I know what happens really happens at the end, I can start planting clues along the way.

SPEAKER_01 58:54

Absolutely. Agatha Christie, you start with the Colonel Mustard in the library with the knife, right? So you know you you you start with the murder and then you work your way backwards.

SPEAKER_00 59:07

Yeah. And then the other thing is is writing those bridge scenes. Uh again, they may not be necessarily important uh uh plot points that you're that's going on, but it's places where you can actually have fun, right? You don't have to tell or reveal anything to the to the reader here, right? You've already done that in the previous scene. Um, you may be leading up to the next scene, but this is where if you've got really well-developed characters, you can let them shine and you can make them feel more real to the reader because now they're doing things that either the reader can relate to or that are just you know funny in jokes that only someone who's read the series will get, right? A little fan service, those type of things.

SPEAKER_01 59:51

Early in my novel, I have a character, and her name is Penny Pitts, kind of like uh Miss Potts from uh Iron Man, right? And she's uh she's a journalist, a former former crypto queen, and she's complicated and interesting, and she epitomizes the Gen Z go get him female. And my protagonist anti-hero is a Gen Z male. He's he's an asshole, he's lazy, he's a narcissist, and they play off of each other. So I introduce dynamic tension between the two of them early in the book to anchor the main character. And then I let Penny go in the first draft. I'm focused almost entirely on Johnny and his adventures. And then to your point, when I'm sitting back and I see the whole story, I'm like, you know, there's a missed opportunity here because going all the way back to the first things you're saying about good writing, the character needs their opposition and different layers. And the Penny Johnny conflict, which I meant to just kind of set Johnny up, a light bulb went off in my bald head that nah, that tension and that sexual chemistry and that competitiveness can be an engine for most of the story, and then she became a main character alongside Johnny, and I actually had a whole parallel narrative that I wove into the book almost after after the fact, and I think the book is so much better for it, yeah. And to your point, it was loads of fun, yeah, because all of a sudden, all these scenes and situations came up that that weren't really there before, and it added dimensionality to the character that I was that I was highlighting, and the whole book itself to the point where I had to break the book in two to a sequel because it was just it it just pushed it all out. Yeah, that's great, very satisfying to your point. Now that we're just talking about all this, there's the lived experience to your point, Aston Chair typing. You're like me, probably, where even the physical act of typing and being in the zone is so satisfying, it's kind of meditative, but that begs a question of AI. So it's been amongst us for about three years and change. What's your attitude regarding it? Do you use it as any kind of a resource? And do you feel that it's eating our lunch?

SPEAKER_00 1:02:29

Um loaded questions all. Um I don't use AI currently. Um because number one, at work, uh uh the DOD has locked us out of using any of the commercially available AIs. All of them are just clawed. All of them. Really? Yeah. Um, because it's it's it's about uh information transferral, right? You if you don't want a commercial AI that's unconstrained in the in the outside environment getting information from you, right? It really does.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:06

And they don't even they don't have a proprietary LLM that they have for you guys, like over the website. They do.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:12

They do they do have an internal one, but it's it's focused on you know helping you with your work. Yeah. Right? And I haven't found that useful enough. That's probably because I've been doing my job or you know, some kind of DOD job for almost 30 years now. So I don't need AI to tell me how to write a bullet background paper or a staff paper or anything like that. I mean it's already ingrained in my brain how to do those things. Um so writing even even just the act of coming up with a prompt for prompt for me to put into that DOD AI, I already answer most of my own questions. Um so I don't use it for that. I don't use it in the outside world because when I come home from work, right, I've I've got to eat dinner, uh, you know, play with the dogs, uh, have time with the wife to watch TV or do whatever, right, and then sit down and write. I don't have time to play with AI after work. Uh the only time or the only things that I do uh spend a little bit of time on uh with AI is image generation. Uh we at Canon have found that uh for ads, or not even for ads, just for Facebook posts, uh there are uh several great image generators out there where you can generate a scene from your book. Uh there's actually a couple of them that allow you to kind of like animate it a little bit for several clips. Um so we found that that's helpful uh once you've written and released your book, or you're teasing the book as it's going through the editing process, you can kind of you know uh get the reader more interested in what's going on. Hey, here's what the main character looks like, here's what uh this guy looks like, or this this lady looks like, right? Hey, here's a scene of the three of them together doing this thing, right? What's what actually happens in that scene? So that's about the extent of of my use of AI. As to whether or not AI is eating our lunch, um I will say um don't be afraid of AI, but be afraid of the person who has mastered the use of AI because they're the ones who are going to be uh taking other people's jobs. Um AI is a tool, just like anything else that we use. Um you learn how to use it, and uh if it's relevant for your job, right, a welder is not gonna find a whole lot of use for AI. Um, but someone who has to write grant proposals is probably gonna find a lot of use for AI in helping them craft a coherent uh structure to their grant proposal. So it's it's one of those things. It's a tool. Use it if it helps you, don't use it if it doesn't help you. Um and uh I think probably uh some of the best things that uh our high schools can do for our kids is uh start teaching them how to craft. Prompts and what's the right way to get the AI to do what you tell it to do and not hallucinate something because you weren't uh uh specific enough in your prompt.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:12

I think that's great advice. There's an inevitability to it, and there's opportunity to it as well. It's an amazing tool. I use it for image generation too. I have a promo website for my book, and I created characters just from the prompts, right from my book. I take the little description and I put it right into Dolly or whatever. And I'm also sensitive to it eating the lunch of artists. I had Don on, whom I mentioned, and he hates AI because it's incringing on literally what he does as a human artist, pen to paper or pen to tablet, as it were. So there's sensitivities around that, but there's also just the pragmatic reality that you can do amazing things with it, and it can get you where you need to go. And it's not a substitute for your creativity, but it augments it in ways that can make it multimodal, to your point, ads, images, maybe even eventually little vignettes and movies, and uh it could be cool. I also use it for research. So my science fiction novel gets into some hard science to make the plot more evocative and for me to kind of go down some rabbit holes. And uh, I used AI just as an aggregator of information. So instead of having to read, let's say, eight research papers on a subject, it cobbled them all together and I prompted it and I reprompted it. You know, it's iterative, you got to keep digging, get the answer to be better and better, and it just saved a lot of time. And in that time savings, I learned a ton of stuff, and I got to go in even deeper. So that was it was kind of fun. Did it write the book for me? No, nope. It's uh sweating it out is the joy of what we do each and every day, which is crank this stuff out, yeah. And it and it's super fun. So speaking of cranking it out, what's next on the uh Mike Mike Morton agenda? What are you working on? And and what's your next release?

SPEAKER_00 1:08:11

Yeah, so uh like I said, uh the Car Wars book uh is uh I've done with my my edits that were requested. I sent it into the publisher. Uh so uh working on uh the cover for that. Uh and then um hopefully depends on their schedule, but uh what they told me was probably late summer. Um so maybe July, August time frame, we'll see. Uh, and then I am working on a uh book two uh for a series that I wrote uh in um the uh four horsemen universe. If you're uh familiar with uh Chris Kennedy publishing uh Four Horsemen, um this is the first book that I wrote in that universe called Thicker Than Water, and uh made some promises in the epilogue, and uh this second book is going to fulfill those promises. Um and so that's uh what I'm currently writing. I'm almost done with it. I'm in the final stretches of uh getting my words down, maybe another four or five thousand words, and then I start into the editing process.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:10

And do you do the editing? Do you guys at Canon have you're actually an editor at Canon, so you edit other authors' works too, right?

SPEAKER_00 1:09:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:19

Okay, and then do you do your own editing? Does uh does John or Billy Bob like look at your shit?

SPEAKER_00 1:09:26

Yeah. So I I I saw yeah, I I I edit for content, right? Because like I said, once I my my first pass through just lays down the bear structure, and then like you said, I keep making more and more passes. You know, for me it's less about uh you know chipping stuff away. It's more like paper mache. I'm laying down more stuff and I'm building up this you know everything as I go along. So by the time I make that final editing pass, now I have something that I think is ready for the publisher to look at, in this case, Chris Kennedy, uh, for him to then do his own editing pass uh prior to publishing it.

SPEAKER_01 1:10:02

Yeah, and your covers are great, Ed Camp. You guys have terrific covers. Do you use the same outfit or or it's different? You know, that that's beautiful too. Yeah, yeah, that's beautiful too. And folks, if you're on audio, um tough luck. If uh on YouTube, you're obviously gonna see it. I'm gonna actually add overlays too to what we were you're doing. Actually, you've already seen the overlays if you're watching. So woo.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:28

So John has uh several contacts with uh artists that he uses. He has uh different artists that he uses for different things. Um so I'm I'm not involved in that. I I I don't uh uh you know that's I'm like I said, I'm an editor, not the not the uh the artist uh guy. So uh so he works all that himself. And uh but what we always do is is we go to the artist or the I'm sorry, the author, and we say, okay, you know, do you have a favorite scene that you want to have on the cover? Or you know, what is it that you'd like to have on the cover? Um one of the things that we do advise people to do, we don't mandate it, but we advise them is hey, for your genre, go to Amazon and look at the top 100 titles in your genre and look at those covers. Uh there's a reason they're in the top 100, and cover is one of those reasons. Uh, you know, your cover really helps sell your book. 100%.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:22

That is that is just a fact. That is a fact. On other podcasts, I'm joking that my debut science fiction novel is done by my niece. And uh I love it, but it looks like uh a Vermont poetry book. It's like like people look at it like WTF exists, and this is like hard, it's like it's like Hunter S. Thompson meets William Gibson meets Douglas Adams, kind of multiverse saga. And then you got doesn't have any of that. And then you got two cats in a bathtub.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:57

People are like, uh, this is is this a cozy uh cozy mystery thing?

SPEAKER_01 1:12:00

Is this a cozy romance or what what what uh actual F is this? And and I've done some book selling, which I was gonna ask you about too. My LA Comic-Con, Pasadena Comic-Con, uh, you know, WonderCon. And now I'm going to the LA Festival of Books because I live in so I've been barking my books in person and getting direct reactions from people.

SPEAKER_02 1:12:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:24

And and having a cover like this, it becomes self-evident that I need to do some explaining. But if the cover's good, you don't need to do any explaining. The the writers that I'm with, like Ingrid Moon, she's a science fiction writer going into um fantasy now, too. Her covers are bang on point. People people just beeline right to her little display, and they know exactly what they're getting for. It's like Star Wars meets Enders game. It's like uh, you know, The Mandalorian and In the World of Fallout. And you just look at the cover, and it's obvious that that's what's going on there. So it makes a huge difference.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:02

Yes, it does. It it certainly does, and that's why we advise people to look at Amazon because those covers have helped put those books in the top 100.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:10

I I didn't look at Amazon.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:12

Yeah. Maybe you maybe maybe that's what you should go uh do, do a little research project. Yeah, right after this podcast. So so yeah, so so those are those are the kind of things that that uh that John does uh tell people. Um, and um we are we don't chase trends with with canon, uh we just look for good stories. So uh sometimes you get a book that is um multi-genre or the genres aren't um they're not normally found together. Uh we have uh uh uh an author that uh wrote a book, uh it was it's a modern modern uh military story with romance. Uh we started calling it tactical romance, and then uh later on we learned there's actually a a category called war mantasy. Uh so that's not one you're gonna find a whole lot of examples on and in Amazon. Yeah. Um so in that case, John, you know, he just he he I don't know what he he told the artist to do, right? But uh John's got a great eye. He's a photographer as well, so he has a great eye for perspective and characters and and setting the scene. So I'm I imagine he has long discussions with the artists about you know the kind of things and how how and explaining how those things should be displayed on the cover.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:32

And now does Canon do all the marketing for you with you? Or do you do you go rogue? Do you do your own thing? Is it hybrid? How does that work out?

SPEAKER_00 1:14:42

One one of the things uh that we put in our contracts with the uh with authors is um we require you to have a social media presence. We don't care what platform, uh, but you need to be out there and you need to be selling. Right? All right, or uh I take that back. You need to be uh interacting. Selling engaging with an audience. Interacting leads leads leads to selling. Um but you need to be posting around a regular basis, you need to have not just you know memes, but you actually need to have things that prompt discussions where you can actually in the comment section talk about things with with uh prospective readers. Because um a statistic that I read somewhere says that um the first thousand dollars of sales of your book is entirely due to your publisher's marketing campaign. And for Canon, uh we what we do is is uh we'll usually do uh pre-orders two to three weeks in advance, and then we'll do a marketing campaign that lasts another two weeks. But after that, it's all on you, right? We have more books that we have to publish, we have to focus our advertising dollars on on those books. Uh and realistic, I mean, you as the author are the best proponent of your book. So that's why we want people to have that social media presence and be engaging with fans so that they can be pushing their book out there, getting it out there, talking about it, talking about what they're working on next, you know, whatever it is that your fans want to hear about. Um, but you you gotta be you you are your own best advertising agency unless you have the money to pay for a real advertising agency, right? Because then they'll they'll they'll probably do the best job. But you know, you're talking you know, a few thousand dollars. Oh, yeah. Yeah, if your book doesn't make that, right? Then you know. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:39

My my my favorite counterexample for trad publishing is I have a good friend who did all the right moves. So he wrote a treatment, got an agent, he's got he had a huge social media presence, like really large in his specialty, and then got a got a deal with a big publishing house. They gave him an advance. He he he wrote part of the book, got the advance, was able to take time off work even to just crank this thing out, published it. Kareem Abdul Jabbar reviewed it. Wow. So he had like big names, yeah. Like New York Times Book Review, all this stuff, but he didn't self-promote it. He thought that the press, because of all this buzz and because he went mainstream and legit, would do the lifting. That he he was done, he uh wrote it, and I told him from the onset, which is bro, you got you take a year off from work and go on a book tour. Because if you don't do that, you're not hands-on like that. The publisher is just like, dude, what do you what do you want us to do? We did our part, yeah, totally. So even with trad publishing, like old school, uh, you you gotta you gotta self-promote. And going back to James Elroy, he's that dude is almost he's like six foot nine. The LA confidential guy. He's a master promoter, he does book tours, book signings, and he's a huge dick. But but he's out there like uh ego firing, but he's promoting all the time. He he knows that that's what sells. You gotta go out there and do it.

SPEAKER_00 1:18:28

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, you gotta do it. I mean, there's there's no way around it because otherwise, um, you know, why are you putting all this effort into writing the book if uh if you don't want people to see it and read it?

SPEAKER_01 1:18:40

And there's no shame in that. I was talking to other authors too, where they kind of like they're like Dostoevsky in the basement, they're happy just doing the book. True. I'm like, that's cool. You just do do that thing, it's intrinsically rewarding. I got aspects of that, you know, in in my own journey too. But to your point, if you want anyone to see it, you want to engage with the world and you want to take it to that other level, then it's on you. It's just on you. You got to get it out there.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:07

Because the other thing is, is um, you know, very popular in in science fiction fantasy and and others like that to write trilogies or more, right? And uh every time you write the next book in the series and you bring it out, sales of your previous books will increase. And if you could be able to market those, you're right. So, hey, here's book two. As a reminder, here's what happened in book one. But if you haven't read it, go buy it now so you can read book two, right? Um, so you yeah, you you you gotta you gotta keep marketing, you gotta keep you know talking about what's on your backlist, uh, especially you know, keep an eye on Amazon because sometimes uh Amazon will run a sale and they won't even tell you that you're gonna be able to do that.

SPEAKER_01 1:19:47

Oh, yeah, that happens in mine too. Mine's not discounted. I was like, damn.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:53

Would have been nice to know. Thanks for letting me know hurriedly get a Facebook post out there. Hey, but my book's only 99 cents. Go grab it. Oh, by the way.

SPEAKER_01 1:20:04

The other thing is the backbone of it is a mailing list, to your point. So, so do you do you have yours or do you rely on that at all?

SPEAKER_00 1:20:12

I don't have a mailing list currently. Um I have heard good things and bad things about that. Um it's a lot of work to maintain one. Um now you can cut down on a lot of that by um several of the services. Uh they have automation to help you maintain your list. But uh I don't know. I I'm I'm on the fence about that. Um I know some people who swear by them and some people who swear at them. Uh it's uh, you know, when you're tr when you are measuring your your uh what do they call it, your click-through rate, you know, and you're and you're happy that you have a 10% click through rate. That's a lot of work.

SPEAKER_01 1:20:55

That's actually pretty good.

SPEAKER_00 1:20:56

Yeah, and yeah, I mean yeah, 10% is really good. Most most email things are three to five percent, right? So if if I've got a hundred people on my email, or you know, a thousand people on my email list and only thirty of them are actually clicking through on the link, that doesn't even necessarily mean that they're gonna buy the book. That just means that there was you they found enough interest in your email that they clicked on the link and they went to Amazon or wherever you're advertising it, and they said, hmm, maybe right? So it's uh to me, it would seem like um more people are involved with uh Facebook ads, Amazon ads, and and clicking on that. And so that's where I've been uh starting to experiment. And it takes some money, right? But it doesn't take a lot of money. You can run like two-week trial runs on ads and only spend like twenty, thirty dollars, and then you can and you get the statistics back and you see what works and what doesn't work.

SPEAKER_01 1:21:54

Yeah, they bait you in, you know, twenty, thirty bucks, and then you might get a sale, and then if you if you pump in another fifty, you might get three sales, and then it it feeds well it it's it's so it's it's just like anything, you know, it's like the AI prompts and whatnot.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:09

Um I know uh a very well uh respected author. Uh she has discovered book talk. And uh she has uh she uh explained to a bunch of us who were in her circle about how her process on uh on uh tweaking her ads in TikTok, in this book talk to lead to greater sales. And she can see in terms of image placement, text placement, coloring, things like that, what works and what doesn't work. And so she goes from you know 20, 30, 40, 50 views to all of a sudden 300 views, 500 views, 700 views, to all of a sudden, you know, 10,000 views, right? That to me seems more productive than a static email list.

SPEAKER_01 1:22:57

Social media is where it's at, yeah, yeah. It's just crowded and it's pay to play there too, and the conversion rate could suck as well. So there's there's a lot of lot of variables, and you could try kind of troll into it. I do book talk hashtag postings every once in a while, but since I'm not actively engaged in the community, it's like Reddit. Try posting on a Reddit forum, and they're like, fuck out of here, guy. You're never around, you're just dumping your stuff. So book talk is like that. A lot of the channels are like that. You got to pay to play, or you need to play and then become part of that community. But your your point is is on point, which is social media is community, where it's at, yeah, and where it's at, and the email list might be a backbone for some. A compromise is Substack, Substack has its own built-in email, and if you market that and try to pump it out that way, that's an opportunity to give other goodies as well. Like your own newsletter becomes just your regular posting. Yep. So there's all these options, it's a wild and crazy world we live in, and uh it's good to just talk to another writer who sits there. What's the acronym again? The uh button by chalk, button chair, hands on keyboard. I love that. I love like which is again STFU and type. Yep. Exactly. At the end of the day, if you keep doing that, something's bound to happen.

SPEAKER_00 1:24:25

Just keep keep keep churning and yearning. Yeah. Hit hit that hurt that word goal every day because uh, you know, in this day and age where uh you know the games that we play on our phones and things like that, uh that's that's kind of where where there's that. Uh, you know, they go for little incremental rewards, but every time you do that incremental reward, you get a little hit of dopamine and just a little bit of feeling good. And it's the same thing. If if you can look at, you know, if you track your word count and a spreadsheet or they have online tools and everything, right? If you can look at that and every day say, hey, I've increased my writing streak from seven days to eight days, a little dopamine hit, from eight days to nine days, a little dopamine hit. You miss a day, and all of a sudden it's like I destroyed my streak. Oh my god, you know, I gotta start all over again. Oh no, I'm not gonna let that happen again.

SPEAKER_01 1:25:15

The the metric I use is just barfing stuff out there. I'm tweeting my I'm tweeting my book in reverse. I got my substack where I'm cranking stuff out almost every day. I got five podcast shows, I'm working on my books. I also work, I got the day job as a consultant. So for me, the dopamine booster isn't word count per se, but it's megabytes of bandwidth on my Wi-Fi. So I'm I'm always I gotta crack a terabyte a month of shit that I'm flowing out there. I bet you your ISP hates you. Right, 100%. I'd pay that extra 50 bucks for unlimited. Awesome talking to you, Mike, ladies and gentlemen. A lot of fun. I appreciate it. I I want to talk to more of your canon canon bros. So uh let's let's hook up that. Let's continue the conversation. Uh, when your when your book comes out, we can do another uh circle up. And uh I appreciate your time and your mind. Like, comment, share, and subscribe, everybody. The science fiction and fantasy factory. I'm Mookie Spitz with Michael Morton on audio wherever your podcast is streamed, and the YouTube is gonna go up too soon as I edit it. And if you're on YouTube seeing it now, well, boo ya. Thanks for watching. Take care.

SPEAKER_00 1:26:38

Thanks, Mookie.