James Kenwood on Mars Fire and the Future of Smart Sci-Fi

In this 44th episode of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Factory, Mookie dives in deep with science fiction author James Kenwood to explore his themes and best practices for storytelling. The discussion ranges from war and political power to moral responsibility, flawed heroes, pacing, worldbuilding, and the hard truth that readers do not owe writers their attention.

James explains how military history and recurring cycles of conflict shape his fiction. His serialized, work-in-progress novel Mars Fire examines settlers on Mars trapped between rival Earth powers, while his shorter fiction delivers concentrated bursts of action, sacrifice, and moral tension.

Mookie pushes the conversation further, contrasting noble archetypes with comic antiheroes, asking whether fiction should inspire, expose hypocrisy, or simply entertain. Together they dissect why some stories grip readers for life while others evaporate in their first few pages. 

Together they share several best practices for authors:

• Start with pressure, not scenery. Readers care more about a problem than your skyline, spaceship, or kingdom. Introduce tension early.
• Make every chapter cost something. If nobody risks losing status, love, safety, freedom, or identity, the chapter is filler.
• Use worldbuilding in motion. Explain the Mars rover while someone is fleeing in it. Explain the airlock while it malfunctions.
• Create moral crossroads. Force characters into decisions where every option hurts. That is where personality is exposed.
• Cut repeated explanations. Once readers understand the setting, move on. Trust them.
• Give characters competing agendas. Drama spikes when smart people want different things for valid reasons.
• Build consequences forward. Every major action should create a new problem, not restore comfort.
• Use flaws strategically. Vanity, cowardice, greed, laziness, obsession—flaws generate plot better than perfection ever will.
• Earn speeches. If a character delivers philosophy, make sure tension surrounds it. Nobody wants a TED Talk in chapter six.
• Track narrative momentum. Ask constantly: does this scene increase curiosity, dread, conflict, or desire? If not, fix it.
• Write scenes readers postpone sleep for. Aim for “one more chapter” energy. That is the gold standard.
• Know your story’s fuel source. Is it suspense, wonder, romance, revenge, mystery, satire, politics? Feed that engine consistently.
• Use action to reveal worldview. A selfish character grabs the parachute first. A noble one pushes someone else toward it.
• Don’t confuse complexity with depth. Ten factions and three timelines mean nothing without emotional stakes.
• Respect the reader’s intelligence. Suggest, imply, dramatize. Stop overexplaining everything.
• Leave residue. The best stories continue in the reader’s head after the final page.

Join two writers for over two hours as they explore what stories are for, why conflict matters, and how to write fiction that actually hits.

The Guest

James Kenwood is a part-time historian and a full-time reader at night; by day, he works as a specialist in the banking industry. He currently resides in Western Europe after a recent immigration, along with his wife. He has one cat – Raver (name was inherited, not chosen) – and spends far too much time looking at the contrails over his town and dreaming of flying.

On Substack

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:04

Hello and welcome to the science fiction and fantasy factory. I'm excited to have Mr. James Kenwood. Science fiction author. Welcome aboard. Yeah, welcome. Thanks for having me, Mookie. Thrilled to dive into your grim acres. So you have a unique perspective. And I found you on Substack, where you have a voluminous archive of writing. Looks like you have been busy. And as I mentioned, you have a particular style and focus. So what I've seen, we are creatures who struggle, who fight, we have limited resources, and we have a checkered past, to say the least, and we remain a violent species. You explore that darker side from a political angle, from a cultural angle, a technological angle. And I found your writing intriguing. So do you want to share with our listeners if you can encapsulate your style? There's a kind of pitch. Let me give you the mic. I'm gonna shut up and I'm gonna let you talk about your own work.

SPEAKER_00 1:30

All right, thanks for that introduction. Um, yeah, I suppose my writing is a way of uh combining on the one hand, sort of fiction ideas that I have and adventure and story ideas that I have, with on the other hand, a lot of the uh reading and research that I did growing up into uh military history. So something that I've always found fascinating is war. Um, and it sounds like a very typical guy thing to say, but uh, whenever you look at history and you look at any country, uh, any period, um socioeconomic circumstances, uh political parties, um you know, anything that's happening inside a country, if you start unpicking the knots and sort of unraveling the threads, everything runs back to the previous war. Like what were you fighting over and what did the post-war environment look like, and how did that then shape society? And then you start looking at, okay, but why were people fighting in that war? What was the main issue? What was driving it? And then you start seeing, oh, but this war was influenced by the previous war. So World War II, prime, you know, great example. Um, or if you flip it around, um, you get the unification of the German states in the 1870s, uh, you get the First World War leading to the Second World War, leading to all the Cold War nonsense, leading to the war on terror, leading to everything that's happening today. So, for me, as someone who's very sort of structured and trying to understand things, which with politics and people is an impossible task, um, you know, you you sort of start at a point and then you sort of just try to unravel the spider web to sort of understand why are people like this? You know, what drives them, what makes them human, what makes us human in a sense? And so after years and years and years of going through, you know, uh chronicles of what caused wars and autobiographies from people who were in the situations, uh that's sort of my, I want to say, my foundational background that I build upon when I start writing. Um and then in uh in in part, also when you when you study war and history like that, you start realizing that there are recurring human themes, um, themes of violence. Like, like you said before, we are a violent species. Uh, we like to pretend that we're eyebrow and that we can master technology and things like that, and that we can appreciate art and music, but um, you know, when things go south, people kind of revert to the law of the jungle always. Um, you know, we can we can try to be better, but you know, when the chips are down, that's when the knives come out. And I in my writing, that's something that I like to explore is that idea of if you get into those horrible situations, how can you make the best of it? Can you try to redeem yourself? Can you try and do something that saves yourself, or maybe saves not yourself, but your comrades? Um or will you just become that violent, bloody monster that then ends up in a history book as a warning to the kids? Um, so that's something that I really enjoy exploring with my work, I suppose. That's the um yeah. I suppose that's the short answer. I could go longer, but then we'll be here for five hours.

SPEAKER_01 5:02

Well, let's go for at least an hour, because again, I find the uh the point of view fascinating. I'm sensing various tensions, some of them are contradictory and some of them are complementary. So let me be specific. On the one hand, war can be futile in its repetitiveness and its lack of any real effect or implication. So, for example, let's look at Europe. Aside from minor differences, the map of Europe as it exists today isn't too much different than the map as it existed even in the 19th century, because it's delineated based on race and language and culture. The populations have not shifted too much. Um, my mother is from Transylvania, which is the Hungarian part of Romania, just to make it personal. And after World War I, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, after the Treaty of Versailles, was chopped up a little bit. But the population of what's called Erde, from the Hungarian point of view, didn't really change. It hasn't really changed. It's still predominantly Hungarian, even though it's still within Romania. So a consequence of all of this carnage was relatively inconsequential to the boundaries of Europe, you seem to showcase some of the futility of conflict, especially when it's recurring and it's so endemic. Now, that is in stark contrast to some of the transformational change that actually does happen. You can argue that the evolution from medieval aristocracy, the fiefdoms of Europe, to true democracy happened very much as a product of these two horrible wars, the most damaging in history. In a sense, the same war with a little inner regnum. On the one hand, nothing has changed and everything has changed. And underlying all of that is what Freud called the Thanos effect or Thanos, which is this death instinct that could be within us. And it could be social Darwinian in the sense of genetic drift and even uh the need to thin the population. It could even have an immunological significance. So you have these contrarian forces, you have this instinctual underpinning, and here I'm getting to your stuff. You have the individual who is thrown into this frothy mix of contradiction and paradox, and almost Hegelian teleology. We're we're moving in some direction, even if it's zigging and zagging a little bit. Is that a fair backdrop for for your writing? You've got Mars fire, you've got Volta, you've got the Eminthra, you cover Egyptian style theocratic resurgence, colonizing Mars, and we bring all our baggage. Am I getting closer to your portfolio here?

SPEAKER_00 8:29

It's a bit of a mixed bag, to be honest. Um, I sort of have two main branches of writing, if you call it that, two main avenues that I sort of push on at the same time. So on the one side, I have the sort of, I want to say the short story focus. Short stories, uh, novellas, uh, you know, where it's a thousand words, five thousand words, maybe thirteen thousand words, like I've been pushing recently, where it's a single idea that I'm sort of exploring and pushing out. And those usually coincide with the weekly uh Cy Friday on Substack. So Friday is coming up, and then on Thursday evening I sit down and I'm like, oh man, I don't have anything for Cy Friday coming up. Let's quickly write something. Um, and sometimes it works. I'll sit down, I'll write 4,000 words in a night, I'll walk out of my room in a haze and not really know what time of day it is. Um, and then the short story is done. And and that will sort of be uh, I want to say, a standalone little encapsulation of an idea or of a mental image I had or some inspiration I had during the day. Um the recurring theme is always there. Uh the the the call it the Grim Acres uh theme of it's war, it's conflict, what happens when people are oppressed. Um you know, uh the con the call it the yeah, the concept of sacrifice has been coming up a lot recently, again. Um so that's kind of the one avenue where I write. Um and then the other avenue has been the specifically the Mars Fire novel. And uh the Mars Fire novel has a bit of a less action-oriented um focus. So with the short stories, it's specifically, like I said, it's like a one-shot little capsule. There's action, there's explosions, it's fighter pilots trying to get into orbit with you know an escape shuttle, it's people ambushing a colony ship, it's a shootout on an alien world. It's very action-oriented. Um, and then I try to sort of sprinkle in a bit of a, you know, maybe a lesson or something to think about, or I love my ambiguity as well, which is what I work into the short stories. But with Mars fire, it's uh more of a political type development in the same vein as all the tension and all the socioeconomic pressures that led up to the big wars on Earth. Um, so if you look at the First World War, kicks off 1914, assassination of the Austro-Hungarian uh prince, and then if you sort of start unpacking it, you sort of roll the timeline back into 1913, 1912, 11, you see the assassination did not just happen because someone was passing by and thought, hey, let's take a shot. You know, there's a there's a big build-up uh to the outbreak, and then once the thing, once the the you know, the rock starts rolling down, it'll it just gets bigger and bigger and more damaging. And that's kind of what I'm trying to do with the Mars fire story. It's very um I've been told by some of my proofreaders that it's very slow burn. Um, but I'm intentionally there, I'm intentionally trying to set a scene that is quite broad. Because firstly, you have to anchor the reader in the reality of learning of living on a Martian colony about, let's say, 100, 150 years in the future. So it's the reality of the lower gravity, the fact that you're constantly in a spacesuit, you can't leave your habitat without the spacesuit. Um, radiation is a problem. So, how do you deal with that when you're outside? How do you deal with that when you're inside? Um, exposure to sunlight is a problem, things like that. So I I try to bring there's an element of horrid science in that. But then there's also the reality of you have all these political powers on Earth, um North America, the Confederation of European Nations, so it's a bit of a spin on the EU, um, and then the Asian Pacific Union, which is basically China today, plus people around it. And all of these big earth political powers have stakes on Mars. And all of them have very different ideas about what the future of Mars is going to look like and what it should look like. And then Mars fire is basically written from the perspective of you could almost say cowboys, in a sense. It's these colonists and settlers that are living in the uh unregulated zones between the big powers. So they don't have any loyalty to the North American colonies, they don't have any loyalty to Europe or to the to the to the Asian Pacific Union. And they're just saying they like, listen, we are here, just leave us alone. We want to do our own thing, we want to live in peace, we want to run our own countries the way we want to. And then on their border, on their eastern border, they have this massive union presence that's constantly encroaching and constantly stealing settlements and constantly using politics and you know, all the nonsense that we that we see on TV, you know, like the the bad excuses that people use to do horrible things. Uh my dad always used the expression, he said, you know, people always have a good excuse for doing a bad job. And it's it's exactly what we see in politics, and exact and that's exactly what I'm trying to bring into the Mars Fire settlement uh story, where people are there's this this slow pressure cooker effect of people stuck in the middle. You can't go west, you can't go east, the enemy's on the doorstep. What are you going to do? Um, so that's kind of the setting that I'm doing. And then in the about in the middle of the book, when the war finally breaks out, then you get the reality of okay, now the action picks up. Now we have the invasion fleets that are moving, now the colonies get attacked. What happens now? Um, and then there's a bit of a twist as well, which I cannot yet give away. Um, and then things sort of go get ramped up to the nines. But so that the Mars Fire writing, just sort of to get back to the original point, is very much focused on make it real. You know, if anyone, if if anyone reads Mars Fire, who has also been reading Earth politics and our history and wars here, anyone reading the novel will hopefully start recognizing similar strands and similar thinking and similar patterns. Um, the way that people will say one thing and then do something else, or you do something and then you just deny it. Um I I I've taken a lot of um inspiration from the X-Files, which I re-watch from time to time for uh for name suggestions, actually. You know, and and in X-Files, in the X-Files series, they they repeatedly play on that note or that concept of if you are a big powerful organization or entity, like the the American government or any government for that fact, you can do what you want and then you can just deny it afterwards. If there's no evidence, if there's no proof, if there are no living witnesses to go to court, then no one can prove that you did something wrong. And that's something that I'm also trying to bring into that into the into Mars fire, into the novel as well, that idea of bad things are happening and people know it's happening, but we can't prove it. And even when we can prove it, the bad guys just shrug and say, Yeah, but this is AI, this is a doctor's video, it's not real, you know. And then how do you how do you then what do you do in that situation? You can't run, you can't fight. What do you do? Um, so yeah, that's that so so yeah, getting back to the original question now, that sort of avenue that I'm exploring is very different from the short story setting. Um, but then yeah, those are the I want to say the two main schools of thought or the two main branches that I'm kind of working on with my writing. So do short and sweet on the one side, and then the sort of the long, complicated, crunchy development I'm keeping for the for the novel for now.

SPEAKER_01 16:15

That's interesting from a different modality. So to summarize, your short stories are more action-oriented with uh a little quirky kind of twist, and it's in the moment, and they're one-offs, and your bigger novel, Mars Fire, is a more political intrigue. Sounds a little Dune-esque. Dune had a lot of politics and war, a little bit of that epic flourish. But underlying the entire oove is this notion of, and this is what I was hinting at before, the inevitability of conflict and the the typical expression of that conflict through violence, that that we're heading toward a conflict that's irreconcilable to the point where we need to physically try to kill each other for limited resources. That's that's there.

SPEAKER_00 17:11

It's it's it's actually it's it's actually funny that you mention uh Dune now, because Frank Herbert, I believe, was the one who said that uh no, was it Frank? Was it Frank? I'm not sure if it was Frank Herbert now or if it was um from Probably Robert Heinlein. Heinlein from Starship Troopers, where he said, you know, all political power comes from actual force. Like you can you can talk in the Senate as much as you want, and you can debate things, you know, from your intellectual ivory towers as much as you want, but ultimately it comes down to cavemen with sticks and stones who redraw the lines on the map.

SPEAKER_01 17:46

And um look at our American president now. He kidnapped the leader of a foreign country. And that I used to live in Brooklyn, New York. I used to live only a few blocks where Maduro is now sitting in a jail cell. He's been forgotten pretty much. When is anyone talking about Maduro anymore? So might might makes right. And I'm not being political, I'm merely reinforcing your statement that if you wanna if you want control of the Western Hemisphere, you need to control the oil. And I would venture to assume that what's going on right now in the Middle East is is a continuation of that might makes right trajectory. Is it machine change? Is it nuclear program? I think it's the oil. So, you know, we have a goal and and we go for it. So, once again, I no means want to be political to any of our of our listeners or to you, but I'm just reiterating your point that we're seeing it in action right now in very much a naked form, and perhaps even a more transparent and honest form, because this has been the modus operandi all the time, only you have a lot of pleasantries that sometimes delay it. If it doesn't really get in the way, but we need to substantiate there's weapons of mass destruction before we invade a country. Now we don't even need to do that, we just kidnap their leader or drop bombs because we can. I think that reiterates some of your theme there too, which is being an anti-andy weir. Andy weir with his Martian, and now with Project Hail Mary. And both of these books had the essential theme that there was no antagonist except nature herself.

SPEAKER_00 19:39

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 19:40

And then if you are resourceful enough and smart enough and collaborative enough, then everything will be a okay. Which is why I enjoyed the book because of its problem solving, but I hated the movie. I'm one of the few people who have hated the movie. Outside of the years. Never once did I feel any dread or anxiety that the world was coming to an end. And that milked toast sentiment through the interactions with a Muppet in a habit trail didn't do it for me. So uh so anyway, I'm I'm I'm contrasting that writer with you for the sole sake of highlighting uh your focus on this grim dark perspective, if you will.

SPEAKER_00 20:27

If you want to, if if you want to uh extend that analogy, um something like I mean, I have a great uh a great deal of respect for Andy Weir in terms of his writing.

SPEAKER_01 20:36

Yeah, I like him too. Don't get me wrong. I love Martian, and and I like I enjoyed Project Hail Mary too, even if it was Pollyanna.

SPEAKER_00 20:44

So it's no so the idea, the idea here is not to sort of yeah, dismiss it, but um I think you need to uh I think when you when you make a comparison like this, if you let's say if you let's say compare the Martian to Frank Herbert's Dune, if you take the Martian, and even uh um Project Hail Mary is one uh as well, you can take this concept of you have a above-average individual who goes to above average um lengths in order to solve problems that are above average, which is a great theory if you're you know, and it it's a great case study if you're focusing on an individual. You can focus you can always take a great individual from history and focus only on that one person and then look at what did they do, what did they overcome, etc. etc. You can sort of look at it in isolation as like a little case study that's nicely encased in glass and it's all beautiful. Alexander the Great, uh Julius Caesar. The hero. Yeah, the hero between air quotes, because these days uh in the end is all that yeah. But then uh the problem is uh we don't live in singular realities where you are the only person that exists and where you are the only person. That gets to make decisions. If you have a single character on screen, or 90% of the movie is a single character, that character makes choices and they have the freedom to make whatever choice they want because they are the only character on the screen. If you now contrast this with something like Herbert's Dune, you get a more, I want to say, realistic reality at risk of sounding like I'm mangling my words there. But you get a more realistic setting of now we're not looking at an individual, now we are looking at groups of individuals. We're looking at societies and communities, people with different belief systems, people with different value systems, different morality, different religions. And now decisions start having friction because group A and group B cannot agree on values. And well, you get the religion that sort of drives a large element of morality, not all of it, but a large component of it. Your morality determines your values, and your values then determine your choices that you make. And that, to my mind, is the human experience. That's the human reality that we've always seen. We have friction in any of our societies when morality and values and decisions do not align. And for me as a writer, it's far more interesting to explore that, you know, the interplay of reality, if you could call it that, even if it's when it's a fictional setting. It's far more interesting to explore that than to, on the other hand, construct this ideal man, sort of the Nietzschean Superman, who then goes through life, you know, with a fluttering cape and you know, red underwear and just solves everything magically. It's a great story and it's very aspirational. Don't get me wrong. I mean, Superman was a great character for a very long time. But you cannot look at Superman and for one moment think that it's realistic. When you look at Superman, when you know anything about Superman, you know this is not real. We're not all like this. Um, which is also part of the appeal. People like to look up to things. Um but I suppose there's also on my what what I enjoy personally as a writer is that idea of if we put 10 guys together and they have to make a choice, if we have a colony with a hundred people and they have to make a choice, how do you handle that? Um and something that I'm also exploring in the Mars Fire novel now, um beyond the chapters that have actually been published on Substack, is uh what happens if what happens if you need to make a really uh tough decision that the community is not does not want to do, but it is for the best of the community. And no one no one wants to be the guy who pulls the trigger that gets things going. How does your character then step into that role? How do they then justify for themselves the deed or the action of stepping into that role and saying, hey, I'm going to put my hand up, I'm going to pull the trigger, and I will then have to live with the consequences.

SPEAKER_01 25:07

To your point about Andy Weir's superhero being the problem solver of one, it has clarity and aspiration and problem solving finesse, but it sometimes lacks drama because it's very linear, and to your point, it's very individual. And the real stuff happens when you have this amalgamated mess of conflicting interests and shifting alliances that add layers of complexity and dimensionality to the drama, so that it becomes much more of an emergent phenomena than this linear A to B to C kind of reality. They each have their charm. It sounds like you like Andy Weir. I like Andy Weir too. It's super fun. But it's more of a comic book, uh a very, very smart comic book, than real literature in a traditional sense.

SPEAKER_00 26:11

I yeah, I suppose I suppose you could look at it from a different from a different angle as well, and you can you can ask yourself, what what is the story that I'm trying to tell, and what is the point of the story? Um something uh one of my recent stories, um uh Eden Lost, I wrote, I think it was from last month, was it's about this young boy who basically uh the entire story is is focused on this young boy, Billy, and he goes through a series of experiences. There's sort of peripheral or surround you know, supporting characters, his family and so forth. Uh but the story focuses on Billy, and we get to see Billy uh making decisions and then sort of growing up through the sort of the duration of the story. And uh at the end, Billy is no longer the child he was at the beginning of the story. And that's all that's always interesting, you know, seeing the transformation, people dealing, you know, this uh individual dealing with uh environmental pressures and challenges and things like that. So for me, I don't often write stories like that because it's yeah, firstly, young adult focus, it's not really my it's not really my thing. I outgrew that about 20 25 years ago. Um, but it's uh that for me personally was what was one of the closest times where I came to writing a character that was sort of where it was very much just this one character that was doing things and experiencing things and making decisions that then had impacts. But I I think uh in reality, as much as media likes to glamorize the idea of the lone wolf who goes out and does things and gets the answer, or the Superman who goes out, flies into the burning volcano and saves the damsel. Um I think in reality those things are scarce. And if you want to tell a story where you set up a shining example, you you you you write the knight in shining armor that we should aspire to, if that is your goal, by all means write the story, write the Superman, red underwear and all, go for it. That's the that's because that's the point of your story. You're trying to sell an aspirational message, and we need those. We absolutely need those. I personally do not enjoy these stories where everyone is morally gray, everyone has a horrible past, no one is good. Like, I don't like those stories because it it kind of reminds me of like a like a high school or a university level, um, just like social life, you know, everyone's messed up, everyone's kind of flaky, and I'm like, I don't there are no obvious role models there or or no no one to cheer for. And that's also one one end of the of the spectrum of what I was discussing earlier about looking at the human condition, is some people are of the belief that we do not have Superman, that we all are just plebs, and you know, we're all just schmucks who do horrible things we know when no one is looking. Some people firmly believe that, and that's then the stories they write. I always get a uh a strong feeling from George R. R. Martin when I read his work that he has a very, and like it, this is a personal opinion, but I get this idea that he has a very dim view of what humans are capable of, because his best characters die, and then his sort of dubious characters, you know, the grey ones that are very flaky, they then become the center of the story. Um, and okay, if that's the message that you want to push, sure, but it's not an aspirational message. It's not Superman in the red underwear. So, yeah, circling back to my original point, I think it really depends on what you're trying to sell. Um, and I think you can take any story and you can sort of strip the layers away and then look at like, okay, what is the core message here? Um and with my stories, the core message that I'm that I'm often that I often try to uh I want to say not push, but present is that when you are challenged, you need to step up. And when you step up in these situations, you can oftentimes you have to be asked to make a sacrifice. It's easy to step up to something if there's no cost involved, you know. Um I want to do something, but I don't want to pay the price. That that that very uh call it the playboy attitude of, you know, I want instant gratification. I want the big house, but I don't want to work for it. I want the flashy car, I don't want to work for it, I want a publishing deal, but I don't want to work for it. Um that mentality for me is dangerous. Um and it is also frankly immature. Uh, I think as an adult, we all get to a point in our life where we should realize that, you know, if you want the gym body, you need to go to the gym. If you want the novel, you need to have the discipline to write regularly and and you know produce solid content. Um, if you want a solid career, you have to put the hours in. Um, as adults, we all understand that. But then you encounter these people who feel I want everything, but I don't want to sacrifice for it. I want to eat the meal, I don't want to pay the price. Um, and that's something that I always want to explore. My that that's sort of one of the core messages that I always try to push in my stories is that if you want the things that are hard, if you want the things that are worth getting, you have to pay the price tag. You always have to pay the price tag. Uh you can't run away from that. And when you do, someone else ends up paying the price tag. And then you have to live with yourself if you know whatever happens to that. And some people are fine with that because you know, you have the moral depth of a puddle. But for most of us with a bit more of a rounded character, you you you kind of start realizing at a certain point in your life that you know my actions have consequences, and when I do the hard work, it comes out. So, yeah, it's very rambling answer now. But um, yeah, that that's one of the things that I try to push with my work, is just get that idea of if you want, you know, the hard stuff comes with the price tag, and if you think it's worth it, then you pay the price.

SPEAKER_01 32:18

So, is your writing allegorical in that way? Are you operating off the precept that that is a moral imperative, which is essentially grow up, and then you and then you play that out in your narrative? Is that fair to say?

SPEAKER_00 32:38

I think it's it's probably a strong element. Um, I haven't specifically thought of it as you know, sort of as condensed as you've just put it now. Um but I think there is an element of that in my writing for sure. Um, I personally have, you know, so in my personal capacity, I have a great deal of trouble dealing with immature people. When you meet people that don't want to take responsibility for their actions, people who want things, but like I said, they're not willing to put in the hard work or the or the long hours. Um, people who just want, they never give. Um, I have a great deal of trouble um dealing with people like that. And it takes a lot of self-control and a lot of patience on my side to actually remain civil when dealing with people like that. Because you because for me, if I can sense that someone is immature and you can sort of see it in their actions and the way that they talk and the priorities that they have, the things that they focus on. Um I become confession moment here, it feels like a moment from Dr. Full now, but I become a bit dismissive towards those people because I feel like you you might be of a voting age, but you're behaving like a child, and I cannot take you serious now. Um so, yes, I I think short answer, yes, that is an element in my writing that I want to want to push, I suppose.

SPEAKER_01 33:56

That's an interesting mirror to my own writing. So, my science fiction novel, I did a debut science fiction novel last summer, published in June 2025. Johnny Fizzuli and the Transfinite Reality Engine. A bit of a James, James and the giant peach kind of title. My anti-hero is exactly the type of personality who annoys you. He's narcissistic, dopamine deprived, hedonistic, impulsive, lazy, exhibitionist, hustler, con man, gigolo, failed social media personality, extreme sports enthusiast, addicted to sex and drugs and gambling, and that is Johnny Fazzulli. Johnny Fazzulli sounds like a character. The centerpiece of the novel, and he is a Gen Z or Zoomer American male, and his counterpoint is a Gen Z zoomer American female who is conscientious, well educated, focused, hardworking, and their interplay is the backbone of the narrative, and in ways it's a romance, and behind it all is a transcendent being, spoiler alert, a Boltzmann brain, so a spontaneously evolving consciousness in a dying universe, who because of her eternal age, gets a hold of the mathematical operators of reality itself. And she is angry because of her loneliness and isolation. She has reached out to other sentient beings, and like Alice in Wonderland didn't have these social skills to maximize her self-interest, and is ransoming reality, and along the way, has fallen for the most decrepit and most loathing being in reality itself, Johnny Fizzulli. It's a love story. The reason I bring it up in that detail is because it's the antithesis of what you're describing in terms of creating an allegory for maturity, responsibility, taking charge. And our inability or unwillingness to compromise and negotiate and get along. So, what's interesting to me about your setup is you you have a classical hero, like almost a Grecian idea, ideal of Aristotelian nobility, and yet conflict is still inevitable, and the world is Darwinian. And I'm upside down. I start with the notion of the world being an unfair Darwinian jungle, and my solution to that is this moron who plows right through it with impunity, and is somehow likable along the way that we retain our humanity in an indifferent universe by being an idiot.

SPEAKER_00 37:53

Well, it's it's it's it's like it's like that old quote like the the uh the only sane response in an insane world is to be insane. You know, it's like that you that's if if that's the only way you have to cope, then yeah, do the thing.

SPEAKER_01 38:07

Yeah, Joseph Heller's catch 22, which is to get out of the army, you need to substantiate that you're crazy. But if you're in the army and you're crazy, then that's normal. So you're not really crazy.

SPEAKER_03 38:22

Yep, yep, yep. I remember reading that book.

SPEAKER_01 38:26

But uh, but I find I find the juxtaposition fascinating. And to put a capper on that, the reason I chose this kind of trajectory is because I found it most dramatically interesting. So I wanted to write the science fiction book that I always wanted to read. And my challenges with a lot of science fiction is that they tend to be world-building focused, very elaborate in terms of the constructs, two-dimensional, one-dimensional in terms of the characters and the trajectory of the hero or anti-hero, and they lack that organic emergent drama, which makes for good storytelling and good reading and ultimately good writing. So I went the wayward path of the despicable moron. And and sounds to me like you you are trying to have this archetypal embodiment of what constitutes maturity responsibility and facing up to the challenges that face us.

SPEAKER_00 39:32

I think I think something something to be aware of, though, when looking at any type of like you know, like you said now, the archetypal role model is the archetypal role model, much like the Andy Weir characters, they exist in isolation and they exist on paper, and they look perfect on paper, you know, like a great many things that look perfect on paper. I mean, communism, for example, looks great on paper, reality but flaky. Not so much. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a couple of few 100 million dead people that would argue that point. So I think I think for me, uh the way I approach it is if you have your archetype of what the good strong man, or the Nietzschean Superman, or the Marvel Superman, whichever you want to call it, if you have that good archetype on paper, he cannot exist just in isolation. He always exists, to my mind at least, in the real world. And then the interest and the action and the drama and the intrigue and the love for the character, then then inevitably comes from how does the archetype now interact with reality. You have um Clark Kent, our Marvel Superman, boy from Kansas, I think I don't know his backstory that well. You know, farm boy, you know, very nice guy. But we don't love him and support the character because all of his amazing attributes in isolation. We fell in love with the character of Superman in how he dealt with reality then. And I think that is the interesting thing to explore. Like you said earlier with um people getting stuck on the world bullying, I think people get stuck as well on developing, you know, this Mr. Perfect or Miss Perfect, whichever the character is, and then they fail to have that development and sort of the the growth of the character in how does this archetype now actually engage with reality? How do they respond to problems? How do they respond to to situations that challenge their beliefs? Um, classical, and in my opinion, also a bit of a silly example. Um, the railway cart, where you pull the lever, the cart goes the one way, it kills one person, pull the lever the other way, the cart goes the other way. Now you put that decision in front of Superman. What does he do? That's what makes it interesting. Because you can spend three-quarters of the book telling me how fantastic Superman is and all of his archetypal strengths and all these beautiful things about him, but I want to see what does he do when he's faced with a tram problem and he has to make that choice. That's where the character pops. Um, and I think that's something that as an author we have to be we have to be careful with, is to not love your character to the point where you don't expose them to the tram problem. I want my character to remain pure and pristine and unsullied and never have to face the tram problem. Because when you face the tram problem, that's when the real you comes out. Because now Superman has to explain why I am pulling the lever to the left or to the right. And some people will agree with left and some people will agree with right, and that then is where the I think the fans will have different opinions on it, obviously, but that's where the character becomes alive. That's where the character becomes human because he pulls the lever to the left, and some of us will say, Yeah, I understand that. I would have done the same thing. And other people would say, no, we should have pulled it to the right. I don't agree with that. And I think that makes the character human as well. As long as they're perfect and on their, you know, you know, in their ivory tower on the little pedestal, great, but that's a Wikipedia entry, that's not a story, you know, it's not, it's not alive. Um, so what I try to do with my writing as well, um, work in progress with Mars Fire, especially, is yes, have a strong archetype of what you what you think the character is, or what you want the character to be, but then also put the character in the mud and see how they react to that. You know, what's what's the real fiber that comes out? I think that's the interesting story.

SPEAKER_01 43:50

My Johnny Fizzulli, he would not have to decide whether it goes left or right, kill the old lady or the mom in the baby carriage. Right? He would try to sell the switch to the highest. He just does not care. So he tries to circumvent and take advantage of reality, and reality keeps kicking his ass because of his laziness, irresponsibility, narcissism, and addictions. So he is the anti-hero who tries to self-isolate in a sense. He's above it all, he's hedonistic, so he participates only when it benefits him, but it always backfires spectacularly because he is such a moron and he really does a bad job of even that. So in ways, he's the Charlie Chaplin comic character, and he's the antithesis of Superman. I always thought Superman was a shitty character. And the reason is he has one vulnerability which is kryptonite. And and as a as a viewer, as a reader, we are always forced to try to pick through that invincibility to find his humanity, which is almost a cliche and an afterthought. Johnny Fizzuli is the opposite of a Superman who nonetheless considers himself a Superman. And in his self-delusion, the reader gets to laugh at him. And that is his true vulnerability, which is which is his overextension.

SPEAKER_00 45:47

I must admit, I have not read your novel yet, but it sounds then like the reader sort of becomes the man behind the screen who sees actually the reality because you have the posture of Johnny on the front, but the view from the back of the stage is very, very, very different. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 46:04

I'm empowering my readers with that sense of criticism. And the reader in juxtaposition is, in a sense, the Superman. They come at it with morality, they come at it with values, they see the self-destructive absurdity of his behavior. But through his shenanigans, it sheds a light on the absurdity of even the reader's point of view. And it calls into question in a very postmodern kind of way: what constitutes civilization? What constitutes appropriate and inappropriate behavior? And to your point, how do we define maturity in an age of mechanized and now AI control and eventual destruction? What about the inherent hypocrisy in our values highlighted through the lens of this moron who is the infatuation of a being with transcendent power?

SPEAKER_00 47:10

Yeah, I like the little uh Skynet ending there, you know, the AI and then the eventual destruction. It's yeah, yeah, it's a good one.

SPEAKER_01 47:18

I like this juxtaposition, and you know, for the sake of listeners, you have two writers who've taken a very, very different tack toward their hero. And I think we're after pretty much the same thing, which is exposing some of the fissures in society and history and figuring out a way how we as individuals in the maelstrom of this collective insanity can keep our dignity, keep our values, and self-organize in a way where we don't have mutual assured destruction and perhaps even make them make the most of the limited resources that we do have as a society.

SPEAKER_00 48:00

Yeah, I think it's it's that you want to you want to ask a question, at least from my perspective, the the way I look at at storytelling is you kind of inside the storytelling, and perhaps this is again the the ancient Greek philosophical influence, but you want to ask a question that stays with your reader or viewer even after they've closed the book. You want you want them to you want that question to sit in the back of their head and sort of stay with them, even if it's just for a day or two. I think the worst thing that you can do, and we we saw this in the past few years with uh the Marvel uh comic movies, uh, with the whole what was it, Marvel comic universe. And you know, you had every uh villain MCU.

SPEAKER_01 48:49

I've actually blocked it out of my brain because I just got so sick and tired of seeing this on like every six months was a new show with a hundred characters so that they could sell the franchise, and then the spin-off of the spin-off, and then the retroactive spin-off with the new Superman, which replaces the old Superman with a new character and more advanced CGI, and a reboot of a rewrite of a redesign of a reimagining, and it just it doesn't end. Deadpool, at least the first one, where it where it makes fun of itself. So you get a little meta, yeah, you break uh break down the fourth wall, and then uh you have a little bit of fun with it until that becomes its own cliche.

SPEAKER_00 49:34

Exactly. Yeah, because then you get people who take Deadpool serious. And it's like, guys, please don't don't take if if you're gonna take anyone serious.

SPEAKER_01 49:41

I love it when they miss all the self-reference and and they don't get the joke.

SPEAKER_00 49:50

Yeah, people not getting the joke is uh yeah, that's a two-hour podcast on its own.

unknown 49:55

I think.

SPEAKER_00 49:56

Um, but yeah, so the the point that I was trying to make here is that I think the worst thing that we saw with all of these MCU shows popping out one after the other, um it was a buzz and it was a rush. And you know, especially fakes, explosions sounds, witty one-liners, everyone's a smart ass, everyone always has the perfect comeback lineup. And 30 minutes after walking out of the cinema, it's out of your head. There's no enduring question, there's no uh there's no thought about hey, uh what uh what did this change? And I'm not saying just for clarity, I'm not saying that every piece of literature that we produce must be a soul-altering, mind-expanding, uh, you know, visionary piece of I'm not saying that. I'm absolutely not saying that. Literature comes in different shapes and sizes, it fills different holes, different needs. I get that. But it uh it bothers me personally when the dominant flavor is something that bright lights, loud explosions, funny one-liners, and 30 minutes after the cinema, after you know, after the uh lights come on, you've already forgotten about it. Um I I feel like it's such a shallow engagement. And I get it. Listen, you've had a horrible week or a horrible month, and you just want to watch something light, uh a 40% brain power show, and you just want to sort of switch off and relax and have a laugh at the the idiots on the screen. I get that, I totally get that. I have times like that myself, but I don't think that should be your primary consumption. I feel like the the 40% brain power shows and literature, that's like having you know junk food once a month or once every two weeks. But you can't have junk food three times a day. I mean, there was literally a documentary about this 20 years ago about a guy who ate McDonald's for I think 40 days straight. And very interesting movie to watch, very interesting transformation. Super size me. Supersize me, fantastic thing. And then after that, McDonald's ended up removing the supersize option from their menus, and then they brought in the large or the extra large, and it's it's the same damn thing. It's just anyway, psy-op. I think the point from the literature side is you need to uh eat, you need to consume uh high quality literature that makes you think about things, that makes you ask questions, for the same reason that you need to eat high-quality food. If you live on junk food, your body becomes unhealthy. If you consume uh low-quality media or literature, it does the same thing to your intellect. Um so for me as a writer, yes, I will write my 40% uh brain power short stories that are action-driven and it's explosions and guns and people chasing mechs and orbital strikes and all the cool stuff that looks would look cool on a on a cinema screen. But that shouldn't for me at least. I I don't want that to be my primary production. My the the the things that I want people to remember about me as a writer are the questions I asked, or the questions that I made them ask themselves, where you read the story or you consume the piece of literature, and then afterwards you sit and think about, hey, what would I have done in that situation? Would I have done the same thing? Would I have agreed with this? Would I you know, like that's uh that's how we start because the moment you start questioning things, that's when you start that's always when I believe you that's when you start learning things about yourself. It's very easy to just accept something, you don't ask a question, and you just go on. It's like water off a duck's back. It doesn't make it doesn't change the duck. But when you start questioning things, when you start reasoning for yourself, when you start going through that mental process of, hey, what would I have done? And if this one thing was different, would I have done the same thing? And you know, that's when you start learning about yourself. And I think if literature can do that to a reader, then you've made you've made a change in someone's life. Um and that I think that's for most of us as writers, that's ultimately the thing that you want to do. You want to change someone's life for the better. Let's put that in as a disclaimer. Um, we don't want to encourage people to do silly or unhealthy things, but um, you know, you do want to encourage people to think about things and then go out and have a life that's just a little bit different, you know, like that uh what is it, that uh chaos theory where the butterfly flaps its wings 40,000 years in the past and then suddenly the timeline is radically different. It's that type of thing. It can be a tiny thing, it can be a tiny change in your life now when you've consumed the literature, but 10 years from now or 20 years from now, it can have had a profound effect on your life. So, yeah, I think that's a noble goal. I don't think we always succeed. I don't always succeed with it, I'll be the first one to say that. Um but I think it's a it's a good thing to strive for, at least.

SPEAKER_01 54:52

The best critique I ever heard of an artist was a reviewer commented after seeing a David Mammoth play, and I don't even remember which one it was. Maybe Glenn Glen Glen Gary Glenn Ross might have been it, or even his first big one, American Buffalo. And he wrote, the play exploded in my head 20 minutes later, after he went home and he thought about it, which is the opposite of it turning into mush 30 seconds later when you think about what's for dinner, rather than taking anything away. I completely agree with you. I would extend it even further that telling a good story is not mutually contradictory with it being entertaining. And I think writers make this mistake, producers, directors, it's the scourge of Hollywood where you need to get asses in chairs and eyeballs on screen. The money is the driver, and it's not art, it's a product, it's business. And when you run a business, then you do market research and you try to engineer something designed to placate people. But what often gets lost is the art of storytelling, and even arguably, not to be judgmental, but the dumbest audience still responds well to a well-crafted story. It has a discernible protagonist with clearly delineated goals, it has an adversary providing obstacles in whatever form. And the drama emerges naturally from this conflict between clearly defined goals and obstacles, and they either get what they want or they don't. And if the writers and producers and directors simply let that foundation, that setup play itself out without voiceover narration, without excessive descriptions and world building, without one character telling the other character what they're thinking and feeling and doing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You see this over and over again, and and it drives me nuts. Christopher Nolan, he writes his movies with his brother. This goes back to his first film, and his brother is a short story writer. Aside from Memento, I truly despise Christopher Nolan. And the reason I do, contrary to so much critical acclaim, is for all the reasons I've just described, which is it's a narration built into a narration, built into a narration, which dumbs down the audience and deflates the narrative of organic emergent dramatic tension. I think writers again make that mistake frequently. The reason I bring it up is you don't need to be profound. You don't need to share a lesson which will be transformative, but you do need to entertain. And in my always humble opinion, the ability to entertain is centered around this capacity for organic emergent drama that you can emotionally connect with a protagonist. You need not even like the protagonist, but you see yourself in a situation and you become one with it, and you're along for the ride, and you're amazed, alarmed, you feel all of these autonomous emotions that erupt out of you that aren't a consequence of you convincing yourself that you need to like it because your friends told you it's a good movie or a book. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 59:10

I I I personally quite despise um when movies get hyped. Uh so a movie comes out, then it's like, oh, it's the best movie ever, you have to go and watch it. It was so fantastic. And then my I I suppose just from being contrarian and being difficult by nature, is my first gut response to that is, well, no, now I'm especially going to make a point of not watching it because you've told me that I shouldn't have because it's nice.

SPEAKER_01 59:32

I'll be particularly critical of this because you embraced it with no qualification whatsoever.

SPEAKER_00 59:40

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So whenever something gets hyped, I'm always like because I always ask myself, where is the hype message coming from? If the hype message is coming from, yeah, you know, one needs to be discerning. Um I'm trying to be very diplomatic now and how I phrase that, but let's just say one needs to be discerning in when we pay attention to the hype or not. Um tracking back to your previous point about entertaining, I think there's you could you could sort of very coarsely boil it down to the spectrum of on the one hand, on the one side of the spectrum you have entertainment value, and on the other side side of the spectrum, you have the call it the uh philosophical and moral lesson and preaching. So on the one hand, on the entertainment side of the spectrum, you have, let's say, the MCU movies and the Transformers movies, where it's you know pure adrenaline action CGI, and it's just entertainment, but 30 minutes after the cinema, your head is empty again. And then on the other side, you have you could say literally documentaries, uh like Nature Channel or History Channel, uh, excluding the ancient aliens, which seem to predominant seem to dominate at the moment. But you know, that's sort of the uh very dry, very dusty, very academic preachiness of the story, where you're not engaging the reader on a journey, but you're telling them what to believe, you're telling them what to think. Like this is these are the facts, this is what happens. There's no ambiguity here, there's no other way to interpret it. This is what happened.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:17

It's pedagogical, it's preachy.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:24

Yeah, and that's basically a documentary. That's you know, that's something you see in school, or like I said, nature channel. So I think for you as a writer, whenever you have a story to tell, I think you must find yourself a place on that spectrum. Like, where am I on that spectrum between action on action entertainment value on the one hand and pure uh preachiness on the other hand, and then you sort of you know need to find a spot there where you feel your story works. Um, I think the mismatch then comes in when authors are called confused or maybe uh self-deluded about where they sit on the on the spectrum, because you can have someone write something that's let's say 90% preachy and only 10% entertaining, and then yet this author is firmly convinced that it's a highly entertaining story, because I've done 450 pages of world building, and I have a a glossary at the back with three different new languages and and you know a vocabulary of 8,000 words. It's very well, it's a nice documentary, but it's not entertaining. I'm sorry. Like great uh Wheel of Time, for example, Robert Jordan. Fantastic series. No shade from my side. Okay, a little bit of shade. The middle books from book 567, when the main characters are literally traveling on horseback over the length and breadth of a continent, nothing happens for about three, four books, nothing of value happens. And uh it's great from an educational point of view on the spectrum, but from an action and entertainment point of the sp it's uh it's dry. I remember I I read these books about 20 years back and I struggled to keep going. Once you're through the dip, the action starts picking up again by a book, I think seven, eight, nine, starts picking up again, because then all the different moving pieces, because he he develops an incredibly wide foundation of characters and settings and plot lines and everything that's moving. And then after about eight books of ex of sort of building the foundation, he then starts bringing all the plot lines together, and then you know things start picking up picking up space. The other the other confusion is also when people write a Transformers movie and then want us to believe that it's profound and educational, and it's like, no, no, you've had CGI and scantily clad damsels. This is your product, this is what you produce. Don't don't try and sell this to me as philosophy, okay? It's eye candy, it's inter it, it's purely entertainment. So I think that that level of self-delusion as an author is something that you need to be very, very careful of. And I think that's also where it's very important to have an honest editor and honest, honest proofreaders. Um, people that can read your work and tell you, hey, um, I like the explosions, I like the guns, I like the mechs, but what the hell is the point of the story? What's the lesson here? Like it was just the action scene. Like, what are you what are you doing here? Um, I think that type of feedback is then super important. Also, a proofreader that tells you, hey, um, you've spent 10 chapters telling me what life on Mars is like. When is the shooting gonna start? When is the action gonna start? That's some of the feedback that I got with Mars Fire. So I had to explain, hey, listen, listen, it's gonna pick up, just bear with me. Um, but it is also it's it's valid feedback. I need to take that into consideration when I start um you know uh editing the novel once it's done. Um so I think being being aware of that blind spot for yourself as an author is a big thing. Just don't have confidence in yourself on the one hand, but don't believe your own hype. You know, don't um don't make yourself immune to critical feedback when it's necessary.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:12

Well, you have two polls. You have one poll, which is the MCU fluff, and on the other, you have the documentary pedagogical expose. I think that there's another dimension that you you could add to that, which is just proficiency of storytelling, which I believe is what you're getting at, right? So, for example, Ken Burns, the documentary filmmaker, the American, he's done the Civil War, he's done baseball, now he's covered the American Revolution. He spends years researching these documentaries, and then he spends even more years sometimes in the editing room putting it together, and he focuses on individuals enduring an experience. These epics of history, so he humanizes it. And he has multiple threads of storytelling based on characters who have a goal and encounter obstacles, and then there's a dramatic outcome. Ken Burns is a documentary filmmaker, various times in history, various countries, largely the United States. And ultimately, though, he's a great storyteller. He exceeds not only in terms of the pedagogy, but his mechanism to educate and empower is good storytelling. Conversely, you could have pure fluff. Pure fluff. For example, the movie when When Harry Met Sally was a rom-com that I had seen again just the other week after you know decades of not seeing it. I think I saw it on television with commercial interruptions. Oh, way back when continuously. And it's not my cup of tea. Like the romantic comedy is not at the top of my list. But it was enormously entertaining. It had its own profundity to it in terms of zeroing in on some of the ironies and paradoxes and agonies of love and relationships, young people getting together. But it was thoroughly entertaining from an emotional point of view because the storytelling worked. So is a story infused with a dramatic through line? Okay, so you have a hero who's going from A to Z. Where are you? Yeah, what's the tempo? B, C, D, and sometimes obviously it goes tangential and things are happening. It's like a ride in an amusement park. If you don't feel the G forces in the carriage, exactly. Then in my estimation, it sucks. It doesn't matter how descriptive it is, and it doesn't matter, you know, whether it's educating me, it doesn't matter if I believe in the values of the author. But if I'm reading and I don't feel pressure, yeah, almost the physical pressure, the anxiety of the protagonist on that journey, the resistance, the anxiety that's building to overcome one problem, which leads to a solution, which leads to new problems.

SPEAKER_03 1:09:13

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:13

If I'm not compelled to turn the pages based on that pressure, I call it literary pressure, storytelling pressure, then I'm like, what's the point?

SPEAKER_00 1:09:24

Yeah, yeah. No, I'm 100% in agreement with you there. I think I think that storytelling, yeah, you call it the literary pressure. I was uh referred to it as as pacing or tempo.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:37

No tempo is neutral, though. It's got a slow tempo, it's got a fun. I'm going for like G forces, you know. I want to feel I want to feel pushed into my chair when I'm gonna get into orbit.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:50

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:51

Yes, exactly.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:53

Um I 100% agree with you. Um that pressure is important, but I think it's something that it's difficult. Um, because I think people yeah, it's a it's a difficult one to get right. Um, I've read books like that where you start, you you buy the book, you get home, you start reading, and then at some point you notice it's like it's one o'clock in the morning, and I have work tomorrow, I need to go to bed, but I'm I can't put the book down. You know, that's very flattering to that author. Right. Right. That's that's that's you know, the the hook is in then, and you can't get off that hook. Um but like you said, you you need that feeling of you you're you're sort of uh committed and you're involved with it, and you you like you you care about what's happening. It is difficult though. Um I think especially if you're um if you're writing something that does need a bit of a setup, you you need to sort of those stories where they need a bit of a broad foundation before it starts moving. I think the trick, what I've always found is with my with my pacing, and I'm not saying that I'm perfect at this, um, my book sales would suggest that I'm very much still on the learning curve.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:07

But we can talk about that in a little bit too. I don't think there's a direct relationship between the quality of the content and its sales. Oh, absolutely, absolutely agree. Yeah, so so I just want to qualify that. Don't don't be self-deprecating based upon your uh your Amazon receipts, because that's that's not fair to you.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:28

No, no, I know. But I I I do poke my ego from time to time just to make sure it doesn't get too big. So um back to my previous point um on pacing with with storytelling, what I try to do is is don't get for me personally, don't get bogged down in exposition because exposition always slows down. It always slows down the tempo, um, it takes the pressure off. And a lot of the um a lot of the writing advice uh articles that you read or books that you sort of browse through, they all hammer in on that point. If you uh if you go into the exposition, if you if you take the off-ramp to exposition town, that's when the journey starts losing speed. Um so I always try to do my world building in a way where it is, it's not one character lecturing another character unless the new character the one character is obviously new in the situation and he needs a bit of an explanation on how to put on his spacesuit, and then we can go outside. So what I tried, what I did with the uh with my Mars Fire novel, for example, is I always explain new things the first time they happen. So the first time they encounter one of the airlocks, you you have a quick explanation of how it works. But the second time they go through an airlock, it's a one-line sentence, it's a one-line description. You don't describe it again. The first time they use one of the uh Martian rovers to travel between the colonies. You have an explanation of the rover, how it looks, how it works. But then that's it. Then the story goes on, and the next time the rover comes up, you just talk about the rover. You don't need to describe it in detail again. You don't need to mention the number of wheels it has, or the tire pressure, or the paint job, or how big it is, or how much or the reactor. You don't you don't raise that because it's already been handled. So I think uh I think something that people can keep in mind uh with that type of world building is try to bring your world building in in a way that's um natural. Um a bit of advice that I always remember from um uh oh I've forgotten his name now, the gentleman who wrote the James Bond novels. Ian Fleming. Fleming, yeah, yeah. What I always remember, what Fleming Fleming always said on the topic of world building, and it was it was not directly aimed at world building, he sort of obliquely mentioned it, but he said, whenever you refer to an item, refer to it by the brand name. When you describe someone wearing a you don't say the character's wearing a watch, you say he's wearing a Rolex model 1975. He's not driving a car, he's driving a Chevy 700. He's not the the henchman doesn't have a rifle, he has uh He's driving an Austin Martin, right? Or yeah, whatever the case may be. But that's kind of that's kind of how you drip feed the world building in. Uh and with Bond, it's not really world building, it played off in the real world, between air quotes at the time, Cold War, 1960s originally. But that's kind of how you can you can drip feed world building in without taking an entire page or paragraph even to explain exactly what the car looks like. Um I think the other the other thing that really uh and this is also on the topic of world building and descriptions and but relating to the pacing is uh if you uh it's the Chekhov's gun principle. If you're going to spend an entire page uh describing the car to me, then that car needs to be very damn important in the story. There needs to be a reason for you to spend 500 words uh describing this car. Because if the car is uh not going to feature, then why did you spend a page telling me about the car? Um my ooh favorite example that really annoyed uh me to no end the very first Daniel Craig Bond movie, uh Casino Real. We he gets to the place where he's now going to play the final poker match against the bad guy with a bleeding eye, and um we see the the Aston Martin, the car is in the background. Bond never drives the car up until that moment. And then the first time he gets in the car to now drive the car and have one of the epic Bond chases, he has the car on screen for about 10 seconds, and then suddenly there's a damsel in the road, so he takes the car off-road and the car goes flipping and rolling and ends up in a ditch, and that's the end of the car. I'm like, listen, listen, listen, just back up for a minute. We're talking about a James Bond movie, we're talking about a very iconic piece of James Bond lore, which is the Aston Martin with all the gadgets and things that come with it, and you just wrecked this entire car in 10 seconds of screen time. Why was the car here? Did you really need to do this to the Aston Martin?

SPEAKER_01 1:16:12

Can I push back just on your example?

SPEAKER_00 1:16:15

Oh, go for it.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:16

My feeling was they wrecked the car because this is a new James Bond. This is a evolution of the franchise. The Austin Martin was always associated with Sean Connery and all the other guys. And now you have Daniel Craig, who is blonde, he's a blonde Bond. He looks completely different, completely different style and manner. And we're gonna almost symbolically destroy the old bond. So you're you recalibrate to the new bond. This is a new bond, yeah, franchise. Valid, valid perspective, valid perspective. I I won't disagree with that. There's another challenge with exposition. So Hemingway said famously, never confuse movement with action. So you could you could you don't you could feel pressure, but it doesn't have to be driven by a bunch of verbs in quick succession. So there's different types of pressure in a narrative, and the the kind of pressure that deflates is what you're describing redundant or superfluous description that's irrelevant to driving the plot forward. That's one challenge. The converse of that, though, and I'm both uh a genius at this and a loser, which is which is tangential descriptions of ideas related to the context of the story. The writer Thomas Pynchon does this, and I might have been both inspired and contaminated by him. I call it the soapbox narrator. You have the characters who are in this organic, emergent, dramatic through line, A to B to C to D, and you're feeling the pressure. Now, when they go from C to D, contextually, there are things going on that the writer wants to blow up in your brain. They set up a little soapbox, you know, with a little microphone, and they give you a little mini TED talk at that point in the mirror in the narrative. I do this throughout my novel. Some readers are literally WTF. Why did you do it? I don't understand the contextual relationship between this tangential half-page, whole page experience, and it interferes with the narrative. Can you just shut up and and and have the characters keep doing what they're doing?

SPEAKER_03 1:19:05

Yeah, sure.

SPEAKER_01 1:19:06

But I'm I'm intoxicated by it, which is there's so much going on that I am going to describe the history of crypto. I'm going to talk about the Riemann hypothesis. I am going to talk about Boltzmann brains and spontaneously generating consciousness. I'm going to talk about cellular automata. I'm going to talk about epistemology and philosophy. I'm going to talk about this apocryphal story about Einstein and his chauffeur. Now, a discerning editor would have chopped a third of my book. My book was about 130,000 words. In all and I'm like, fuck you, don't touch that. It's my story. Don't touch the words. It's my story. Now, this could be for better or for worse. And to me, though, and and this is, I think, part of the point, I feel the pressure when my mind is wrapping its head around these tangential flourishes. To me, it adds to that power because I got my my brains are joining my heart and my penis in this experience. That's not necessarily the right way to do it, but that's another way to do it. And I'm sure I lose people, and I don't care. I love it.

SPEAKER_00 1:20:44

I I think as a as an author, I absolutely agree with your point. I think as an author, you also need the confidence to say, hey, I'm telling my story, I'm telling it my way for a reason. You could look at um Lord of the Rings from Tolkien with exactly the same thing. There are people, there are people who read the 10-page description about the trees and they say, What the hell is this doing here? I don't need 10 pages of him describing and naming trees and telling me about the history of the trees.

SPEAKER_01 1:21:14

The trees are called ents, right? And then you get the tall ones and the fucking short ones, and they got the entry flavors and colors, all that bullshit. Now, if you're if you're into that, all of a sudden that experience at the edge of the forest with the walking trees is really cool. And if you go even further, it has thematic impact to the characters at that point in the story. Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 1:21:39

And the people, the people who think like Tolkien and enjoy the same things as Tolkien will read the 10 pages about the trees and the ants and the forests, and and and you and they will love it, right? Other people will say, like, hey, you've just broken the pacing of the story for 10 pages to talk about freaking bark and leaves. It's irrelevant. But again, here the question should be as a writer, what is your priority? Do you want to sell a story that your editor is going to love because he's catering for the masses? Or are you selling a story that you love and that the people who think like you and who enjoy the same things as you will also love? So I think that's that's kind of where, as a writer, you need to have the confidence to stand up and say, hey, uh these 10 pages might not make sense to everyone, but they make sense to me, and they're going to make sense to a bunch of other people, and I'm writing for those people. I'm not writing for everyone else. If they don't care about the trees, skip it. Um I think, yeah, that's where the confidence comes in. Disclaimer on that is confidence turns into arrogance very quickly. Um, it's very easy to have that mindset of oh, I've put my 10 pages.

SPEAKER_01 1:22:50

How do you know you're slipping? It's captivating to you, is it captivating to them? And then my own hero, Thomas Pynchon. I think Gravity's Rainbow, no matter how indulgent it is, is my favorite novel. It's like heroin in the vein. It's like boom, blows the mind. And he he does this a lot in that book. Soapbox, TED Talk. It's going on throughout the book. I love it. Then he put out Against the Day. Same, same approach, soapboxes, TED Talks, and it sucked. It was bad. Message didn't land. He lost the zip. And it's it's difficult to describe what that zip is, but against the day is equally indulgent as gravity's rainbow, but every tangent in Gravity's Rainbow scintillates with brilliance and ties back to the story. And against the day was this big free-flowing mess that that that was guilty of what you're blaming some of these folks for doing, which is losing that sense of awareness that you're either on point or you're not.

SPEAKER_00 1:24:09

Yeah, yeah. And I think I think it's it's difficult to know where to draw that line between confidence in your in your story and in your structure, the way that you deliver information, and then the arrogance that comes with you write something where your proofreaders tell you, hey, this doesn't work, and your editor tells you, hey, this doesn't work, and then you still insist on, hey, I'm gonna put this ingredient into the stew pot, and even though it tastes bad, you know, to everyone else, I'm going to enjoy the stew.

SPEAKER_01 1:24:38

Or you're so famous that they're blowing smoke up your ass. Yeah, that too. Like you're George Lucas working on the prequels of Star Wars, and the screenplay is shit, and then the dailies are shit, and the CGI looks fake. And George Lucas is paying your salary, and this guy did Star Wars, so I don't want to get fired. And what do I know? I'm gonna argue with George Lucas that his new movie sucks. Yeah, it's a tough, tough spot to be in, right?

SPEAKER_00 1:25:08

It's dangerous, and that's also something as a call myself an amateur uh student of history. Uh, you see that in politics as well. You get a leader who has some brilliant ideas, so they come to power, and then when they start having bad ideas, they're surrounded by yeah, idiots who just always say yes and they never disagree and they never point out reality or the flaws. Uh, and I think as a as a as a creative, as an artist, um, I think we all dream of having a supporting, you know, uh supporting and a supportive fan base. Uh but exactly this, you can then end up with people who support you even when you're walking over the edge of the cliff. And that's yeah, I don't I don't know how you how you stay honest in that situation. I'm I'm actually as I'm saying this now, I'm reminded of the of the old Roman custom. Whenever a conquering uh general returned to Rome, um, and this is a story, I don't know how true it is, but the story goes that whenever the general came back, he would be riding in his chariot, and the legions would be marching through the all of the triumphal arcs. Beautiful procession, everyone's cheering, everyone's happy because you know the Senate is throwing out money and bread. But the general in his chariot, he would have his driver managing the show, and then he would have a little um a dwarf in the chariot with him, and the dwarf would stand there and tell him everything that he's done wrong, everything, everything where he's failed, everything, everything that it's messed up completely. And the idea was the dwarf would be the the literal uh reality check, saying, Hey, everyone loves you right now, but remember that time you messed up? Remember that time you forgot to burn a bridge and the enemy counter-attacked and wiped out your baggage train? Remember that time that you didn't take the port in time and the and the enemy um, you know, kingdom or the kings managed to flee out and continue the resistance? That's sort of your reality check. So I think it's important to have that. Have someone as a writer close to you that can still be brutally honest with you. We need to be not cruel. I think the dwarves were a bit cruel. Um, but have someone with you that can just be honest, someone who can read your work, who can appreciate it at sort of the same or close to the same level as you. But that person needs to be honest with you then and say, hey, I know everyone else is putting smoke up your ass. I'm gonna put a stick up your ass. This is not working. You need to wake up.

SPEAKER_01 1:27:29

They need to understand where you're coming from, and they need to understand your intent. Because a lot of this disconnect comes from just misalignment between creator and consumer. Well, different different strokes for different folks. There's as many different kinds of writers as there are writers, and same goes for the readers. One person's genius is another person's moron, and and sometimes genius comes across as stupidity to people incapable. Understanding it and other times it's not genius at all, it's drivel. So is there an absolute? I mean, this goes back again to the Greeks. Uh Emmanuel Kant tried to tackle this with the synthetic a priori. How can we possibly bring this notion of absolute truth to reality? One plus one is analytical, it's always true. If we live in a multiverse, one plus one is universally true. But a green book isn't. That's not an analytical statement. That's a synthetic one. You can have a green book, or you can have a blue book. And if you have a green book that doesn't contradict the blue book, it just is a synthetic green book. So Khan's critique of pure reason was is the synthetic a priori possible? Can I have the same certainty, logical certainty, that a the book is green that I can that one plus one is two? And he he didn't quite pull it off. And the reason I bring that up is there is there an absolute gauge of art?

SPEAKER_03 1:29:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:29:21

The Hungarian guy just won the Nobel Prize. I forget his name. He's not Cartase, he's something I'm Hungarian, so I have like this affinity. So I think his shit is drivel, honestly. He might have written some decent stuff maybe a few decades ago, but now he's writing a thousand-page novel, which is one sentence, one long sentence. Oh, come on. Yeah, yes, he is. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature, and I think, no offense, he's got his head up his ass. And apparently the Nobel Committee doesn't think so. They put him up there. Who am I to say? And you know, green book, blue book, synthetic a priori, one plus one is two. It's it's hard to say.

SPEAKER_00 1:30:19

I think I think in this case with the with the with the Nobel uh committee, I'm reminded of the fable of the the king with no clothes. Um I'm not saying it's exactly the case, but I'm reminded of that fable.

SPEAKER_01 1:30:35

The quality of content and it's and its accessibility and success in the market. Yeah, it's enough to make make you crazy as a writer because we're always being judged, and people are coming at us from all points of view, and we need to stay true to ourselves, our own voice, and feel the spark. And you brought up a great point just a couple minutes ago, is that that you feel it inside. You you feel that you are writing for yourself, and you know in your heart of hearts that it's good, and that a certain audience will think it's good too. You're not just writing for yourself, but you're basing it on a paradigm and a style. And you might have amalgamated a few genres and you're doing your own spin on it, but you know, you know that it's good, and you know that there are people out there who would agree with you. The problem is from a writer's point of view, and the saturated environment that we live in now is finding that connection. How how do you find the readers who you know would love your stuff instead of randomly throwing it out there or paying some and shitified algorithm to put your content in front of in front of a consumer that they think they might like? Yeah, AI is getting better at it, and I'm I'm hoping that a silver lining of this AI revolution is improving this capability of understanding content and creator and bridging that gap. I I think that's where we're headed. I would hope so. And I would pay money to get my stuff in front of sympathetic audiences.

SPEAKER_00 1:32:28

Yeah, I think I think I think historically that's sort of sort of where your traditional publishing houses used to sit, uh, in terms of certain houses would take on certain publishing houses who take on certain authors and then connect them with a certain market segment. Um, and then you would have success. Um, if you take the wrong author and produce, you take the wrong work and put it in front of the wrong audience, it will belly flop completely. Uh, you put um I don't know, the Twilight vampire books in front of a hard sci-fi audience, it's going to fail. Uh, you put hard sci-fi in front of the twilight audience, it's going to fail. Um so yeah, I'm I'm also keeping fingers crossed that things improve in the future. If it will, we'll see. Um, I think just circling back to an earlier point um that we made about you know, you write something and you know, the 10 pages about the trees, and you write it for yourself, because that's a story that you want, but you also know that there are people out there who will like it. I think something to recognize as a writer or as in a more broader term as an artist is your support base or your audience base is not a static, uh monolithic, uh, homogeneous entity. Um your supporters will change over time as your work changes. Um the the people who like your work in the first five years will not like the stuff that you produce after that, but the stuff that you produce from year six to nine might draw a completely new type of support base. Um, simple example that I remember from when I was still in school, I was a big fan of of the metal band Metallica. Um watch all the documentaries about Metallica, first albums in the 80s, and it was very interesting with in in Metallica's history. There was a very interesting thing that happened. They did uh metal music. So they did singles and LPs and tapes back then, and then eventually CDs. And then at one point in time, they made their first uh music video, which went on MTV and a lot of people saw it. And at that point in time, they literally uh lost fans who accused them of selling out between air quotes uh for making music videos now catering to the mainstream nonsense. So they lost a chunk of their supporters because they made a music video. Oh, how dare you! What heresy is this in the metal community? But uh because they made the music video, they were seen by a significantly new, uh you know, a significantly larger new popul uh audience, uh, and then they got a new bunch of supporters from that side of things. So I think as a writer, uh you must always recognize that uh yes, if you write something that potentially or actually loses you supporters from the one camp, uh that does not mean that it's not going to get you supporters somewhere else, you know. Uh if you normally write hard sci-fi, you know, um hard men doing scientific things, blah, blah, blah. And that has a certain support base. And then you write your fourth or your fifth novel, and suddenly there's a romantic arc in the story as well. Now the hard sci-fi guys turn tune out, they're like, oh no, this is disgusting, there's hormones involved. But now a new segment of the audience suddenly opens up and says, Hey, now this is more relatable. There's a there's a romance element, the personal side of the character is more developed, this is the type of thing I can connect with, and now you get supporters on that side. Um, so yeah, it's like it's waves on an ocean, you know, it changes, it's constantly going up and down. And you can't, I don't think you should you should look at that monolithic supporter and say they're all like this. And if I do something that chips the monolith, then ooh, it's bad, and I must not do that, and I must just keep producing the same formula over and and over again. Um using the metal music example as well. Now, um Metallica was sort of entered the scene at the same time as uh Megadeth, and it was very interesting because Metallica's music very much evolved over time, up until they did the load and reload albums, and then a lot of people got very annoyed because their sound, their their feeling was completely different by the time they did that. And then uh they did the Synth Anger album, the beginning of the early 2000s, very different sound again. But over the years, as their sound as the band matured, call it that, circling back to our very first point. Um, as the band sort of changed, their sound also changed. And then if you compare them to Megadeth, Megadeth is still making the same music today that they did in 1980. It's exactly the same music.

SPEAKER_01 1:37:04

Megadeth is is Dave Mustaine, who was a guitar player in Metallica who got drunk a few too many times, got into a few too many fights, and got fired. Yes. So he got fired early, early in Metallica's evolution. And to your point, Dave Mustaine is just Dave Mustaine. He he never he liked that shit, and then he's been competing with Metallica since, but uh, but stylistically, I don't think he has that broad range that Metallica embody.

SPEAKER_00 1:37:35

Exactly. So if you if you look at if you say um Metallica is now the one example versus Megadeth, Megadeth has produced the same sound and content for 50, 40, 50 years now, and so the support base has been, I want to say, the same type of people, the same type of metal enjoyers. Metallica, their sound has changed over time. So some of the the people who supported them in the 80s maybe don't listen to the new stuff, but there are people who listen to the new stuff who cannot stomach the old stuff as well. So the support base is constantly changing. So I think as an artist, that's a reality that you need to be aware of. Um and don't, yeah, don't get don't get stuck on this idea that I have to cater to a certain community, and the only way to do that is to write a very narrow, you know, have a very narrow um scope of what your artistic outcome is.

SPEAKER_01 1:38:29

That's great advice. Um, I was on Catalina Island a few months ago. It is a large island off the coast of Southern California, and it's owned by a family, a an American family owns the entire damn island. It's the Wrigley, the Wrigley family. Okay, and they make the the chewing gum.

SPEAKER_03 1:38:51

Oh, okay.

SPEAKER_01 1:38:54

And Wrigley started as laundry soap. Okay, so it was a box of soap, powdered soap, and they had trouble differentiating because there are a bunch of people selling soap in a box, so they put chewing gum into the soap as okay. So you dig through the, you know, you pour the the powder, and then inside is a little prize, is the chewing gum.

SPEAKER_04 1:39:19

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:39:20

And then the chewing gum became more popular than the soap. And then they made their hundreds of millions and billions on the chewing gum. So the point here is it's kind of a silly, silly, uh, silly story, but it's it's it exemplifies what you're saying, which is stay flexible, stay alert, you never know when you get your opportunity, and you don't need to betray your core values, your core stuff, just be adaptive. Yeah, like look at the Darwinian evolution. It's like mutations are happening all the time internally, and your environment is changing around you constantly. So that combination of random mutation with external environmental variation is the engine of evolution. So if you look at it analogously, as a writer, internally your mutations are new ideas, new creativity. You're always tweaking and changing and and firing it up. You don't have the same point of view, you might have the same same style or stylistic stuff, but you're you're you're mutating, you're varying. And if you take take a look at what's out there and embrace opportunity that comes your way, you have an opportunity to connect with people, you have an opportunity to connect with platforms, you have an opportunity to connect, to branch out, and that could do wonders for your writing and your career as a writer. I think that that's very, very significant. In the Fizzuli book, I have a character who is an alien cat-like being, and she is the personal bodyguard lover and head of the security detail of a senior ranking agency managing director, so she's hooked up with the power, that's her thing. She becomes the love interest of this Johnny Fizzuli guy in the sequel, and I have these premonitional dream sequences because I have a bunch of later stuff written and I'm impatient. And I also want to tease the audience. I couldn't wait to get the kitty cat in there. So I got the kitty cat in there. So recently I've been talking to and I had as guests on my podcasts, folks who are involved with canon publishing, and they do military sci-fi. So I was in the science fiction anthology where I met Al Hagan. He's a writer of military sci-fi. He had a short story. I had a short story in this collected anthology. So I had him on the podcast. Come on the podcast, we'll talk about your work. He connects, he's he's with the publisher. He connected me with another guy, Mike Morton, and then he connected me with the guy who runs it, JF Holmes. They're all writers, they all do military sci-fi. So just to bring your point to life, I have a spin-off character here. I have the better call sall of breaking bad only in reverse, which is I'm working on my Fizzooli sequel, but what if I brought the kitty cat's backstory to life? She is a martial artist killer kitty.

SPEAKER_04 1:42:41

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:42:42

Military sci-fi. So I'm gonna pitch that as a whole new style to these guys. The only reason I bring this up is it's like writers. If you're a writer and you're listening to two writers chatting here, we're talking about themes and best practices and all that. James here brought up the most important aspect, I think, of being a good writer, which is staying flexible, adaptive, and embracing opportunity.

SPEAKER_00 1:43:10

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:43:10

So I'm gonna pitch these guys. Mercenary Minx is gonna be my well, that's your that's your that's your selling line right there.

SPEAKER_00 1:43:18

The mercenary minks. Yeah, it works.

SPEAKER_01 1:43:21

She's hot. So that long diatribe was just to reinforce what you said from a personal point of view, which is I have my own style, my own big book. But if I have an opportunity to to to adapt myself and cater to different audiences and connect myself with different communities of writers, why not do that?

SPEAKER_00 1:43:42

Why not go for it? Yeah, if you because if you if you have a story that fits that uh call it the paradigm or the audience that you that you're catering it for, do it. I mean, I mean, you're writing the story, like we said earlier, for yourself, but also for the people who share the same interests and and and you know, sort of have the same reading habits, make it happen. I I think circling back to your point about the about Wrigley's, um, you know, you start with soap, uh you end up with chewing gum as your main thing. Um I think I uh my takeaway from that is if you focus on a high quality product and high quality service, then it doesn't matter what the product or the service is. If it's high quality, it will succeed, probably. There's some exceptions to that, but uh most of the time if the product is high quality and if the service is high quality, it will succeed. So if your focus is on the high quality, you'll succeed whatever it is. If your focus, if if Wrigley had instead said, hey, listen, we are super passionate about soap, and we only want to do soap, and soap is the one thing that keeps us going from sunrise to sunset. If they had focused on the soap, they would probably have gone in a very different trajectory from the one that they took in this reality. You know, maybe there's an alternate reality where Wrigley's took over the world with soap, or they faded into obscurity after five years. We don't know. Um, but I think as a writer, you must as any artist, you must have that thing like listen, is my focus on the high-quality product and service, or is it on a specific topic, and I only push that topic? And then if no one is buying soap anymore, then yeah, sorry, I guess I'm out of business as well.

SPEAKER_01 1:45:24

There's uh a company called uh All Birds, I think, and they make um shoes. So I'm not joking with this. They they make shoes with like wool inside them. And I always thought they were fashionista bullshit, you know?

SPEAKER_04 1:45:40

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:45:41

And and they were the the darling of the Silicon Valley, Cupertino, Apple, Mountain View, Google, yeah, yeah, yeah. That whole tech crowd. The tech barons started from nothing and they went to four billion dollars, and then they tanked because fashion changes with the winds. Yeah, yeah. And somebody farts, and you go from a billionaire to bankrupt. Now they're worth 40 million dollars, one percent. So they had the great idea, and I think it has to do with the relationships that they have within the tech community. Now they are they are like AI birds or new AI bird or some bullshit like that. They're actually distributing GPUs for data centers, right? Which is what the what the actual fuck? I mean, you go from a shoe company to a GPU company. Now that's kind of bullshit, but to your point, they're looking at the end user, and they have lots of connections in Silicon Valley because of their pedigree. So it's a double-edged sword, right? You can fake it till you make it. You got to be careful about going too far off brand. But um, I like what you said though about staying focused on the consumer because the Wrigley family was, you know, ultimately we're selling product and we want to create a customer experience, and our customers are experiencing the chewing gum more and better than ourselves. So, you know, maybe maybe more readers will enjoy the mercenary minx than the uh ADHD loser, right?

SPEAKER_00 1:47:25

There you go. Right. That's history is history is full of of sort of accidental side characters who then become spotlight characters on their own.

SPEAKER_01 1:47:34

Yeah, who knows? Just have fun, stay staying flexible, and try to connect with the community. You brought up the frustrations that we all have of I liken it to Dostoevsky in the basement. You got your big stack of papers, and you're going, we're we're isolated and and we're writers. But but in order to be read, you need to create touch points with the world, you need to get your ass out there one way or another. How are how are you trying to do it? Is it important for you to make that connection? Is there you're on Substack, but Substack is kind of a circle jerk of writers for the most part, right?

SPEAKER_00 1:48:18

I mean, I'm not I'm laughing, but I'm not disagreeing.

SPEAKER_01 1:48:22

I mean, most of my friends on Substack, including you, are other writers, which is which you get that fist pump, and I get podcasts out of it, and this is a delightful conversation, and we might get some readers who will buy our books watching this, which is partly of what we hope for. Um, but it's mostly an insular, claustrophobic kind of of intellectually incestuous community of of people working together toward a common end. It's a how do you market outside of this?

SPEAKER_00 1:49:02

Um yeah, so just uh before I Substack for me is an interesting uh setup because I think a year or two ago, or maybe two, three years ago, Substack used to be a place where you had a small amount of writers and then a large amount of readers, consumers. The platform has changed, unfortunately. We've all seen the changes rolling out the last I want to say 12 to 18 months, new features being added, uh you know, interface redesigns, things have just uh it feels like the rugs being pulled out of your feet every two or three weeks.

SPEAKER_01 1:49:35

It's being and shittified. You know, the end shittification of of social media.

SPEAKER_00 1:49:41

We're making it it's Facebook 2.0. That's how I think of it. It's Facebook 2.0. I'm just waiting for them to start adding photograph photo galleries because then it's properly Facebook two point zero. Yeah. Um but so I think Substack used to be a place where you could either go as a writer and find readers, or you could go as a reader and find writers. I think it used To be that place nowadays, not so much. And Substack for me, also, like you said, the bit of a the the circle jerk there. It's a bit like these um universities where you have these academic departure uh departments where you have uh the humanities are especially vulnerable to it, where you have people in their high ivory towers, and everyone is very smart, and everyone is is a doctor in this and a PhD in that, and we're all congratulating each other on how clever our theories are. Yes, yes, yes, that, yeah, yeah. I'm I'm I'm making the snooty nose gesture. Yeah, yeah, breathing the rarefied air of our high intellects, and smelling each other's farts and thinking it's ambrosia. That. And then you sit in your ivory tower and you come up with this beautiful theory of something like communism, and then when people apply it in reality and it doesn't work, then you are oh so surprised. And oh, hey guys, if we just try it one more time, I'm sure we'll get it right next time. Substack can give that impression as well. You have people who are very eager to boost each other, and then it's a case of it's more you know butt rubbing than it is honest feedback.

SPEAKER_01 1:51:11

It's quid pro quo nonsense. I need to grow my followers and subscribers. So right now I'm invisible to everyone. Hey, Substack, if you've got under 500 subscribers, I want to read your stuff. Get out of here. Like you're really curious, you're dying to read other people's stuff. No, you just want people to back you up, and then the other one is subscribing and liking other people just so they subscribe and like you. That's endemic on almost all these writer plans, like on Medium. On Medium, you have the same bullshit, which is I get people liking my stuff in tsunamis. I get Roma Romano Duschbag the third, okay? And he's he just started writing on medium, and all of a sudden he likes 23 of my posts going back to 2019. It's like you read all of that in five minutes?

SPEAKER_00 1:52:13

I'm so flattered. Yeah, I think I think I think that tying tying that into your original question here about promoting yourself is I think as a as a uh as a Substack creator or as any type of creator on any type of social media platform, you have to realize that the metrics are just numbers, they're pixels on a screen. They do not mean anything. The only thing on Substack that actually matters are paid subscribers, and you need a great many of those to start paying bulls or to start paying more than a dinner at a restaurant once a month, for example. I think that's something very important. Starbucks. Yeah, uh Starbucks. Yeah, I have one paid subscriber, so I'm I'm I'm fully aware of of and that's your mom. I don't know. It's it's it's like a I I appreciate the support. Um uh this the subscriber is called Ray. Ray, if you're listening to this, I really love you, man.

SPEAKER_01 1:53:13

Thank you for call out Ray when when you've re you're gonna re-stack my podcast. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I hope. I've I've featured people on my podcast and I've even done videos with them. I've spent hours on their shit and they don't even restack me. Oh, come on. Come on, guys.

SPEAKER_00 1:53:33

For shame. Shame on you. So yeah, shout out to shout out to Ray. Um and there was one Ray from Mookie. All right, yeah. Uh, and there was one other gentleman. He actually had a very interesting, he has a very interesting support plan. Um, he has a sort of a rotating subscription where he subscribes to one person for three or four months and then he ends it, and then he subscribes to someone else for three or four months.

SPEAKER_04 1:53:56

So that's really great. Yeah, spreading the love.

SPEAKER_00 1:54:00

Um, I must confess now I'm blanking on the name, but I will tag him when I went. So shout out to the rotating subscriber. So, anyway, um, I think the point is on Substack, the it's pixels. The subscriber count is pixels. Um, what matters is money in your bank account, and that comes from the paid subscribers. So those are rare. Um, I find it I find it especially obvious when you look at these um massive accounts that pop up, you know, someone with 7,000 or 50,000 subscribers, they post a note or article that gets five reactions. That tells you, that already tells you that subscriber count is not a measure of engagement. It's not. There's no causal or or even vaguely remote correlation between the two, in my mind, at least, because the evidence does not support it. I think marketing-wise, uh the challenge that we're all facing is I want to say people my generation, maybe a bit older, maybe a bit younger. We all grew up on uh rubbish like Facebook and Instagram and stuff like that. And I'm at a point in my life now where I hate social media. Uh I'm on record saying this. I hate social media, and Substack is a form of social media. I hate it. It's fake, it's not real, it's performative. Um we all use fake names and fake profile picks, says the guy with a fake profile pic. Um but it's it's uh it's not real. And for me, the idea of now as a writer, I've put my heart and my soul into my writing, I've produced something that I love, and I know other people will also love it if they can if they can find it on the internet. Uh the idea for me to now spend an hour or two every day doing social media presence, or oh, you need to market yourself, you need to sell your product. Um it drives me up the wall. I I I don't like doing it. I have a Tumblr account where I post some of my short stories. I haven't touched it in, I think, four or five months. So oversight on my side. Wow, Tumblr. Tumblr, yeah, that tells gives you an indication of how old I am. So Tumblr actually has a very large uh fan fiction community where they read uh people who read and write fan fiction from established um uh communities or universes called it that. Um, I think the biggest one is AO3, uh, archive of our own. I think is the one tag.

SPEAKER_01 1:56:21

My wife actually told me about that because she reads I remember Tumblr from like 10 years ago. It was pretty pretty big, 15 years ago. Then it had some issues, like there was a Tumblr boycott, Tumblr revolt. When I I think there was something they tried to sell the data, and then there was a a rebellion at one point.

SPEAKER_00 1:56:42

Yeah, yeah, yeah. There was a the Tumblr also went through a thing where they started uh banning um basically adult content, which was apparently a big segment of Tumblr. Some cancellations that was going on there too. But for me, in my head, Tumblr is still very much a visual media thing. Uh it's a bit like Pinterest, but with more text. You know, it's still an image and then some text behind it. That's kind of how I think of Tumblr in my head. But apparently there is a very active fan fiction community on there. So I'm sort of trying to get my fingers into that. Um, but the problem that I think we're fighting with, and this is for every artist out there, whether it's uh written media, visual media, anything like that, is we are fighting against the uh the AI tsunami, the the slop tsunami. Um and a point to support that is uh it was a very interesting article that I noticed on Substack here actually recently. Oh, I say recently, maybe a month or two back, where someone pointed out that Amazon, where most of us publish our work for print on demand, um Amazon has recently changed the terms and conditions for the print on demand services so that uh a single author is now capped at a maximum of three books per day. Now just let that number sink in for a moment. Just just just ponder those numbers for a moment. It is not humanly possible unless you write uh maybe if you're writing like a five-page colouring in book or something, it is not humanly possible for a human, uh Homo sapiens, alive, organic person uh to produce three books in a single day. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it'll then it'll be colouring books with maybe 15 pages per book. But you know, the the the point is here is uh if you as a massively prolific author who wr who not only writes but let's say produces five to six thousand words every single day, non-stop, no exceptions. Uh if you can produce a book in three months, uh you have one title in three months, so that's 91 days, uh, on Amazon. In the over the same 91 days, an an AI author will produce uh 273 titles. Uh those are your odds that you're playing against. One against 273. And that's and that's now with the new rules. Before this, authors could produce more than that. I say authors between air quotes, um, but it's now capped. Uh so over a three-month period, your you competing against one AI author is one to two hundred and seventy-three. Now there are X amount of human authors, and then there are multiples of X amounts of AI authors. So if you want to get seen on Amazon, you cannot rely purely on the quality of your writing. And this circles way back to my original sort of ego-stabbing point about, you know, uh my writing being what it is, but I don't really have the sales number, like I have confidence in the quality of my writing, but I don't really have the sales numbers numbers to back it up. That's the problem that we're facing on Amazon is you are competing with a tsunami of slop from tens, if not hundreds of thousands of bot accounts that churn out garbage. They sell one or two copies, but because the uh the barrier to entry is zero, there's no there's no fee to list anything on Amazon. You can upload anything you want like three times a day, apparently. Um we get drowned out. So you need uh an a marketing element or a uh a viral moment to be seen and noticed. If you don't have that, you drown. You're under that tsunami immediately. Um I don't know what the magic solution is to this. I honestly don't. If there was one, I would sell a liver and three toes to get it. But uh right now, uh you produce fantastic work or even just adequate work, you put it on Amazon, and you're immediately flooded. You're immediately within hours, you're 500 points down the line, and then a thousand, and then it's just you're gone. Well, you need to pay. You need to pay. Pay for advertising, yeah. But then you spend more on advertising than you make from your book sales, and even when you pay, well, it depends.

SPEAKER_01 2:01:01

I suppose there's there's a a marketing uh company called WrittenWord, writtenword.com, I think. And uh they did a survey of indie authors, and I did a whole podcast on this, and this was referred by writers on Substack, Daniel P. Douglas, they're the twins on Substack. I love those guys, and uh the the numbers and the results are are eye-popping. They break down indie authors in terms of monthly income. But those indie authors making ten thousand dollars off their books per month. Okay, they're making 120 grand a year US. Now, here's some of their characteristics on average. They have at least 60 books that are published, six zero, they spend at least five thousand dollars of that ten thousand dollars on paid advertising. So they spend five thousand dollars a month and they get ten thousand dollars in book sales, so they're really making five thousand dollars a month, effectively, yeah, effectively, but you need to pay to play, is the thing. I I had another um writer on the podcast here, Lou Iovino, and he does, you know, that's the show and book Expanse, where we have humans in the solar system. He's got some asteroid style stuff, and it's it's higher quality stuff. He's a good writer. His boss now is my boss in the agency world, the New York Madison and agency stuff. So that's how we know each other. My former boss said, Hey Mookie, you're writing science fiction, go talk to Lou. He's an art director, you're a strategist. So I got him on the podcast.

SPEAKER_03 2:02:54

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:02:55

He he's had some success as a as a novelist, he has like a trilogy, and he's got like 150, 280 reviews. You know, if you have that much on Amazon, multiply by 20 for actual sales. Not bad, maybe even more than that. And I talked to him on the podcast, and he spends money, he puts Facebook ads and a similar kind of ratio. He said, I'll spend 100, 200, 300 bucks, and then I'll get like 200, 300 bucks in sales, and then he he feeds the and shitified platform, and he feels even if he he's net zero or hardly any, like he pays back into the machine, he's at least getting his books out there and he's getting reviews and he's building his reputation, and now he's trying to option his content. He has an agent, he's gotten an agent, even though he went indie, and this agent is trying to get him into you know the usual, like movies and other stuff, and whatever, or maybe even a legit, a legit publishing deal with a sci-fi publisher. So he's playing the game. Now, according to this survey, according to Lou, like people I know, it's a pay-to-play kind of environment. You need to run it like a business. Now, the other alternative is what I've been doing, and I'm doing it just because of the quirkiness of my personality. Three to five one to two minute videos per day on TikTok. Okay, I get an idea in my bald head, and I grab my phone and I do a selfie video, and I bang out two, three, four, five of these every day, and it takes the all-told about an hour, sometimes. I do it in one take. I don't even caption them anymore. I used to caption them, it doesn't make any difference. And then I go TikTok, Instagram, YouTube. I put them here on Substack as notes. If you look at some of them on Substack, yeah, and then uh I put them on Patreon too. And if there's any business relationship, I put them on LinkedIn too. I annoy people on LinkedIn, so I'm blasting that. My Johnny Fizzulli book is written in three-line sentences, so I'm tweeting it in reverse on X. The whole book I'm tweeting backwards at Johnny Fizzulli. And then I'm barfing out content on Medium, on Substack. And I have five podcast shows. I almost forgot. Like, here we are on a podcast show. And part of my rationale for starting the podcast, A, I can't shut the hell up, and I love talking to people exactly like you. I'm having a great time. We've burned through two hours, and it's been like I love bullshitting like this. It's great. All I need to do is hit record and we're off to the races. Yeah, and then I just post, I edit a little bit, I post it, and then I blast the podcast on Substack, on Facebook, wherever.

SPEAKER_03 2:06:00

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:06:01

So my antidote to this pay-to-play and shittification of platforms is dispute.

SPEAKER_03 2:06:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:06:10

Now, has it been effective? Well, financially, not that much, but it's been a lot of fun. And here's the important point, though. I am building community. Like you and I would have just been text fields in Substack, and I've I feel like I've really gotten to know you in the last two hours, and it's been wonderful. Wonderful. And I've learned a lot. You've educated me and you've given me a very interesting perspective. So I love it for that. And I got content. I I networked with another author, and and I'm building community with podcasts because I'm I was tired of being hidden behind my words and these shitty posts on social media. I'm trying to reach out to actual people.

SPEAKER_00 2:06:59

Yeah, yeah. Make a real connection. That is one of the that is one of the uh selling points, or call it one of the strong points maybe of Substack that I keep hearing about. People talking about um, you know, Substack is a great way to make real connections with other writers, yes, but also with your with your fans and with the community. Um but yeah, it does what what you've explained now, it does reinforce the point that you have to put the time in to make the you know, the marketing angle. You have to play it, even if you don't like it, like in my particular case, I I yeah okay, let me a disclaimer there. I I don't dislike our conversation. The conversation has been fantastic here. We've had some great, you know, great things to discuss here. But the the constantly, you know, like you know, six or seven different websites, and you know, like you have to post notes three or four times a day to stay to you know to stay visible or be seen.

SPEAKER_01 2:07:51

So I only do it because I enjoy it. Yeah, if I wouldn't enjoy it, I wouldn't do it. I I save my taxes for the very last second, and then my finances are are like a disaster because I'm talking about quantum physics in my fucking novel, and I can't balance my so it's priorities and it's also interests. So I enjoy doing all this, it's very satisfying, but I also recognize that many people do not. Yeah, I'm one of those, and it's a chore. So then that then it begs the question of how do you get your stuff out there, right? Yeah, yeah. And and there's this like there's almost this Pollyanna idea. It's naive but endearing, that if I just write my stuff, something amazing is gonna happen. Almost every writer, if you really are honest, they all believe this.

SPEAKER_00 2:08:48

Yeah, it's the dream.

SPEAKER_01 2:08:49

When I talk to writers too, they say this. They end it going, oh, it's very difficult out there. I'm not quite sure if anyone's really paying attention. It's very lonely sometimes, and they always say this. But you never know, yeah, yeah. You never know. You could have that Netflix content hunter just you know, trolling on Substack and sees my short story about 18-dimensional aliens and is like, oh my god, that's it.

SPEAKER_00 2:09:23

But I think I think that dream is what keeps people afloat in that ocean of of call it despair and AI fueled challenges that we're dealing with.

SPEAKER_01 2:09:36

AI slop burn and this very introverted revulsion to knocking on doors and peddling your stuff. You're like, I worked hard on this short story on this novel, and now you want me to what be a used car salesman and try to convince people that they should like what I know is genius? That is so insulting to me. And the time I would be spending writing my next book, what you want me to go, you know, send emails to people I don't even know?

SPEAKER_03 2:10:08

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 2:10:09

No, it's it's it's exactly that. And it's that it's that it's the reality, unfortunately. And as much as you uh in my case, particularly, as much as you want to kick against it, it is the reality. And I think the sooner you wake up and start embracing, like, hey, I have to do the legwork, I have to do the socializing, the networking, I have to do it. Even if you even if you're not particularly fond of it, even if you don't like you know the performative note performance, um, you know, noting on Substack, I I see some of these people post things, and I think to myself, like, did you do you really mean this? Or is this really just a quota?

SPEAKER_01 2:10:46

Let me answer that question for you. They did not. I'm like, I see that stuff fuck out of here with this. I I I understand why you're doing it, and and I'm completely on your side, you gotta do it. But did you really, really want to read the first chapters of 10 of your Substack writers and give them feedback? Is is that how you wanted to spend your Friday afternoon? Yeah, and and the answer is yes, I did, if I could get 10 new subscribers.

SPEAKER_00 2:11:22

It but because it but and and this again, this circles back to one of my very first points when we started talking, like you said, two two hours, 15 minutes ago. Um an adult is someone who understands that when you want something, you have to pay the price. And I think for us as a writer, there's always there has to come that moment when you realize if I want this thing, I have to pay the price. And in this case, paying the price means you have to do the networking, you have to put the time in, you have to be on five or six or eight or nine or fifteen different social media sites, you have to do it. If you want the prize, you have to pay the price. That's it.

SPEAKER_01 2:11:58

That's that's that's where it comes in. I think so. Unless you're just content writing and writing your stuff, and you know, you could see what happens. Yeah, wait for the wait for the white whale to arrive, yeah. And in ways, I'm like damned and I'm lucky at the same time, I think, me personally, because I'm like my character Johnny Fizzuli. So he he does extreme sporting events in one of the early chapters of the book to impress his Gen Z female counterpart, he wing suit bass jumps off of his balcony in downtown Chicago, and he GoPros it and he gets it on YouTube, like live YouTube and live Facebook. He GoPros while he spirals down the building, and then he lands in the street with his parachute and then he goes into the Starbucks right when his coffee's ready. That's his thing. But my equivalent of doing that is ranting like a maniac in my kitchen about politics. I have that I have that exhibitionist quality. I don't do extreme sports, but I enjoy sharing my ideas and just parsing stuff out there. I think the key is to tap into what you like. There are aspects of marketing that suck, but there might be aspects that you might like.

SPEAKER_00 2:13:22

Yeah. I think it I I think if I can if I can borrow from the from the human resources textbook, is they say always, you know, like identify the things that give you energy and then find out what that horse is and then ride that horse. Um if you want to go somewhere. Um but yeah, it's also uh the the the previous point talking about um if you want the prize, you have to pay the price. I think if your prize, if the thing that you want to achieve is fame and money and stuff, you know, all the you know flashy the Hollywood deals and titles and stuff, then the price that you have to pay is you have to do the networking. Um but if if if the prize that you're chasing is hey, I just want to have my stuff out there and I have uh three and a half diligent readers who like all my stuff and I'm happy to cater for them, then that's it. That's you know, that's your prize. Because I think everyone has their own idea of what success looks like. But I think whatever your idea of success is, understand what sucks what it is and understand what the steps are to get there.

SPEAKER_01 2:14:30

Um I think that's right. And it's also fair and could be fun. As I'm mentioning, I find what I'm doing is intrinsically rewarding, even if the monetization is low to know, and even if it doesn't have a direct bearing on my reach and engagement for my publishing, I I honestly don't give a shit because that hour where I I record and spew is very rewarding to me. It's it's enjoyable because doing these podcasts is rewarding and enjoyable to me. I'm I'm yeah, I don't need anything else aside from this experience and then you know editing out when we talk over each other. I get a little transcript. So after we finish, it's gonna take me like this is two and a half hour long. I can rip through the thing. It'll take me like 20 minutes to edit, it'll take me another 10 15 to pop it up on Buzz Sprout. This is audio only, so you save me some time on YouTube. And then we have another podcast, and then I throw it out there. If a million people see it or or five, ninety-eight percent of the joy came from the actual doing.

SPEAKER_00 2:15:44

Yeah, and if that's if that's what your uh source of energy is, then that's fantastic because you you because the way it's like a battery that you're charging, you do something to charge the battery up with energy, and then you plug the battery into a system, and then you use the energy for something. So do something that energizes you, and then use that energy to do the stuff that requires energy, I suppose. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:16:05

While we're talking about that energy, why writing? I ask writers this, and it sometimes feels like it comes from left field, and the the counterexample I usually do is the return on investment, as we're saying, is very low to sometimes non-existent in financial terms. And what I usually ask is why aren't you selling crypto instead? If you want to maximize your hours and the payout, why write? It it have you been writing your whole life? Did you start later in life? Where does this come from? Because I've seen a lot of your stuff, and you have again a broad palette, you have a lot of content on Substack more than most, and you've been cranking what looks like a couple couple years, right? On Substack. And you've got different worlds already building, and you have the serialized novel. Where does all this energy come from?

SPEAKER_00 2:17:04

Um, yeah, I think the the writing is something that for as far back as I can remember, um, I've always enjoyed writing. I've enjoyed making my own sort of making my own stories in a sense. Um, and I grew up in an environment where we yeah, it was uh sort of a call it a I suppose the neutral way to describe it was uh it was a very strict religious background. And um, in our house there was no uh no television. We had it was something that just wasn't a part of the household. Um and as kids, the way that we kept ourselves busy and the way that we entertained ourselves and the way that we passed the hours was with reading. So when we were still very young, um my father would read us bedtime stories at night. So we he would have a big book of um fairy tales and fables and things like that. So he would read our stories before we go to bed. And then the moment that we could read, so as as kids, sort of pre-reading age, we had that love of that that love of reading and stories was sort of built into us. And then the moment that I could read myself, I started reading because now it was a case of you could go on epic adventures and you can explore new worlds and new countries and see things and meet people, and you're still in your bedroom, you know, reading. So for me, that was always a it was a fantastic way to sort of experience things, even when you're not, you know, between air quotes really experiencing them. Um and then as I got a little bit older, I started realizing that uh there are things that I want to read that no one has written yet, which then it plugs into that line of you know, uh write the stories that you want to read, or the stories that you wish you could have read 10 years ago or 20 years ago, the stories that would have had an impact on your life. Um so that's when I then started writing. Um I it was it was kind of funny though, it was a it was a bit of it was writing and I don't know, just a general sense of creativity because I remember as a kid, I was still very young, I think I was about 13 years old. There was this very old, very primitive uh computer game that I was playing. Um, the what was from the Ultima series. It was like an RPG system where you have a little character with weapons and inventory management, you explore the world and go on quests and fetch something here and drop it off there, and you get some money in return. And it was a fascinating little game for you know young, impressionable James. And um then at some point there was something in my head that went like okay, hang on, why can't why don't you know it would be cool if this game could do more things. So obviously, as a kid, I couldn't program or code or change the game itself. So my solution to that was to say, okay, but let's make like a board game version of this to try it out. And then from there, it was uh so the board game always relied on, okay, but I need people to play with me because it was like a multiplayer thing, you have a little character, it's like it's like a DD session type thing. Yeah, me as a 13-year-old reinventing the wheel, I guess. Um, and then at some point in time I realized, okay, but I need people to play this, so I don't always have friends around. Why don't I just write the stories, write my own stuff? Um, and at that point in time, I was reading a lot of um fantasy stuff from the public library close to us, and they had these very interesting choose your own adventure stories. Uh, it was initially the I think the Fighting Fantasy series by Jackson and Livingston, where you sort of you start as a character and then you make choices. And then if you want to turn left, you go to chapter 80, if you want to turn right, you go to chapter 120. Okay, whatever. And then you sort of navigate your way through the book. Um, and those were fascinating for me, this idea of a story that is not only it's not a fixed static page one to 350. You go on your own. There's there's an element of creativity and choice in it. So those were very, I want to say formative um for me as a young reader.

SPEAKER_01 2:21:04

Can I can I interrupt you for just one second? Because one of my most formative experiences growing up was called interactive fiction. Have you heard of that before? Games like Zork from Infocom. This was a company that that spawned right when the PCs were becoming consumer products. So I had an Apple IIe computer in like 86, 87, had a floppy drive, didn't even have a hard drive, and it was uh a 14.4 or 28k floppy disk, and that's all the space, and they were programmed on um Lisp or or basic programming languages, and you would type there'd be a glowing screen with a monochromatic monitor, C prompt backslash, and then you would type then run Zork, and it would run and then it would open you are you are standing in front of a whiteboarded house, it's a mailbox here, and then you would type it would have a function or say open the mailbox, and then opening the mailbox reveals a leaflet, and then you'd say read the leaflet, and then the entire story was this interactive, you were part of literature, you were the character, you were the protagonist in the novel, and they had a fantasy, and they had a detective story, and then they had Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Are you familiar with Douglas Adams' book? Yes, yes, yes. Douglas Adams collaborated with these software developers and writers to create the hitchhiker's version of this interacting. Yeah, I'm sorry to interrupt, but I had an identical experience growing up, only this was with computers, and to this day, it's one of the my fondest memories is those Infocom games.

SPEAKER_00 2:23:05

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it's it's great. I think it it's uh it's an experience that our current, I want to say modern generation has completely missed because they only have computers, you know, everything is everything is on a computer, and everything's visual.

SPEAKER_01 2:23:20

There was only text, they didn't have enough memory for graphics.

SPEAKER_00 2:23:24

Yeah, yeah, everything was sort of a it was a text-based adventures. Yeah. I've played some of them as well. I remember them being very challenging for a young James. I I had a lot of trouble with it.

SPEAKER_04 2:23:33

They were hard.

SPEAKER_00 2:23:34

They were hard. Um, but they were great because they they they created this. Uh so the the the PC games, the very old ones, the choose your own adventure books as well. They they foster a sense of of of curiosity, of questions, because you always you play through the adventure one way, and then when you get to the end, you always think to yourself, but hey, what what would have happened if I'd done something different? And then you play through it again. So they had great repeat value.

SPEAKER_01 2:24:01

In Project Hail Mary, Andy Weir has an Easter egg from Zork from that game. There's an Easter egg. I think it's on page 28. I took a picture of it and I posted it on the social medias. He he just he describes twisty little passages all alike. That's an iconic reference, Easter egg to Zork from Infocom. And I actually looked it up online on Reddit. They have the forums, and other people noticed it too. Awesome. Nice. Thank you, Andy, for that.

SPEAKER_00 2:24:42

Throwback to 1986. Let's go. Um, yeah, so so those those books and sort of the the PC games as well were very they had a formative influence on me. Uh, and then at some point I just transitioned. It it was a very natural transition then to start, hey, but let's start writing your own stories. And at first I wrote fan fiction, so you use characters from an established universe, um, because you you know the universe, you love the universe, you know what the characters look like. So then writing the fan fiction is very easy, um, as sort of a you know, like your training wheels to get into writing. And then eventually it got to a point where I was like, no, but I want to have my own ideas for own characters and own settings and things, and then it just expanded from there. Um and then it just never really stopped, I guess. Um, I was always whatever I was doing, I was just always writing things. I I I really enjoyed it, I found it fascinating. Uh, I worked in corporate for 11 years uh at a finance company, investment company, and uh it was so frustrating for me when I was initially there because I was fresh out of university working at the company now, and um I was used to um creative writing, where you sort of I don't want to say you embellish, but you you make the writing sound interesting. And then you have corporate reporting, which is dry and factual and to the point, no embellishments, no ambiguity, very like focused and dotted. And so I was like, oh, so learning that skill was interesting, but that also it it was a valuable lesson because then you learn how to structure information. Um obviously the way that you the way that you struck if you have a dense mass of information that you need to sort of structure and parse out in such a way that you can present it to management in two pages instead of you know 40 pages, that's a great skill to have because as a as a fiction writer, then if you have a complex idea, uh if you then have the ability to take 40 pages of exposition and explanation and condense that down into two pages of structure and focus that still gets the message across, that's a great help. Um so that was sort of a side bonus of of working in corporate for more than 10 years. Um and then my first paid writing gig was actually I was writing um it was for one of these one of the choos your own adventure IPs, and they were publishing uh basically supporting supporting material for the IP. So new character classes. Um that was the one thing that I did quite a lot of. I wrote new characters, so I took existing um villains from the from the adventures and wrote them up as full um playable character classes, so it's fan fiction, but um I was in contact with the community at the time, and inside the fan community, the one of the editors who was in charge of the official publishing, the editor was involved there, so I connected with him, we spoke a bit, and then at one point the topic came up of hey, why don't you submit some of your characters as official IP and then we can get it published? Um, so that happened about 10-15 years ago. And that was actually the first time I got paid for writing. I would write an article, let's say four or five pages, and then I would get paid, it was like between 40 and 80 euros at the time for an article. And I was I was ecstatic about it because it was it was a it was a universe or an intellectual property that I loved and that I knew really well. I really enjoyed the writing for it. The editor enjoyed my work, he made minimal changes and then got it published, and I got paid for it. So I was I was through the roof. I was like, hey, this is a perfect gig. Um then in time things changed. Uh the IP changed, there was a change in ownership, new editors came on, and yeah, the the mood sort of changed a bit. The new editors had other ideas, they took the IP in different directions, and I just I started feeling a bit disconnected from it. I realized I'm it's not the same world that I fell in love with. It was going in the new direction, it's not bad, it it appeals to a different audience, and I think this circles back to our previous point about you know, as a writer, as your content changes, your audience will also change. Um, so I experienced that firsthand as a writer in it, because I was writing sort of still the classic vision of the of the IP, but the IP had moved on, and I felt increasingly out of place, and the editors were also no longer interested in the more classic content. So I was like, okay, I'm gonna call it quits, I'll just you know walk out. Um and then uh while back, I also uh yeah, I want to say two years, two about two years back, I discovered Substack as a platform for writing because I had this I was getting getting on in years now, and um we were moving between two between properties, and I uh while I was packing up, I discovered a pen, uh a very fancy uh Parker ballpoint pen that someone had given to me when I turned 21. Had been engraved and everything, and I still remember the person who gave it to me because at the time, fresh out of fresh out of school, still in university, um, I I was always talking about my writing and how much I want to be a writer and all that stuff. And um the person gave the the pen was a birthday gift, and the person said, you know, uh when you publish your book, your first book within a year or two, use this pen, sign it, and then send me a copy. And I was like, Yeah, yeah, I'll do it. And I was packing boxes to move now between the properties, and I looked at this pen and I realized, you know what, I got this pen more than 15 years ago, and I still haven't written that damn book. And that for me, that pen, finding that pen again between all my junk, that was kind of the wake-up call to say, like, hey, uh you've been promising to do this for 15, more than 15 years now. When are you actually gonna do it? Um, and coinciding with the move, I was sort of leaving a it was it was part of the move of coming to Europe. Um, I was leaving a lot of uh sports groups and friends behind, and arriving here in Europe was very much a blank or new slate, you know, new book, new chapter, new fresh page type thing. And at that point in time, I kind of made the decision and said, you know what? I don't have anything else that's now taking up my time and giving me these perfect between air quotes excuses to not write. So that for me was kind of the big reset to say, you know what? I have a clean break now, I have a fresh opportunity now to really focus my energy on the things that I've really been meaning to do for more than 15 years. Let's make it happen now. So that was oh I no, no, I think it was more than two years. It was 2023. That's kind of when I did my sort of my reset. And I said, okay, screw everything else. I'm gonna focus on my writing now. I'm gonna get on the social media. So I did this research, found Substack, registered. Um yeah, Substack back two years ago was very different from now. Um and then I just I started cranking. Um, and I have I get so much energy now just from writing. Like when I when I finish a story, I'm sitting here, I'm buzzing with energy. I'm just like, this was so nice, I love this so much. Um, and then I get to drop it on Substack. Some people like it, some people don't, they don't comment. Well, I don't care. I got my energy from writing it. Um, and that's yeah, uh one of our previous points talking about you know the things that give you energy, like you you do with your your your your your social engagements, if you can call it that. Um, for me, it's the act of writing, sitting down and producing something, and and and that finish at the end when the story is done, and I can save the document, put a date on it.

SPEAKER_01 2:32:22

If you go to my Substack homepage, I've got I don't know, 800 posts, screenplays, displays, op-ed pieces, everything. So I'm I am a writer also.

SPEAKER_00 2:32:35

Highlighting my bloviation. After two and Mookie, after two and a half hours, admits that he's also a writer. Okay, cool. We have that on record now.

SPEAKER_01 2:32:42

I admit I'm also a writer. Uh but I get that satisfaction too, which is great.

SPEAKER_00 2:32:47

I love, love, love the pen story. Yeah, the pen story for me was a wake, was a wake-up call. And it also it was part of that my one of my previous points about if you want the prize, you have to pay the price. And in this case, the price was I'm losing friends, I'm losing communities, I'm disconnecting from people. But the prize that I want is I'm going to do my writing. And like you said also earlier, it's like you know, you're shouting into the void, and you hope that you get notice, you hope that you go viral. And that would be nice, yes. Um, you know, get the money, not the fame, not so much, but get the money. But for me, the the big energy thing is writing and pushing that story out and sharing it with my friends. And I have a I have a proofreader. Uh he's actually from a completely different community, not from the writing community at all. Um, but he um he reads my every time I publish something on Subsack, then I send him the link, and I'm like, hey Lupus, give me a give me a give me some, just tell me what you think of the story. And he gushes, he l every single story that I write, he loves. And he freaks out about it, and he tells him like when are you writing a sequel? When's the next chapter coming out? Like he is the fan editor. And yeah, and he's just and and and I like I don't uh I don't expect him to be uh super critical or like give me like you know the fine technical points of how to improve the writing, but he is literally just my little cheerleader. And I love him for it because I think as a writer, uh you need uh a minimum of one person cheering you on, if obviously aside from yourself, because you need to have a bit of confidence in your own writing as well. But if you just have that one cheerleader who will consistently just uh like give you that little boost, you you you you you put the writing in front of them, and then he goes, Yes, this is fantastic. What you know, I loved it. Um that's great, that helps.

SPEAKER_04 2:34:39

Sometimes that's all that's yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 2:34:43

Like you like self-confidence is super important. I think as a as an author, you need to have confidence in your ideas, and you also need to have confidence in your writing ability, like your your technical ability to sell and pitch a story. Um and if you if your technical ability is not that great, then you need to be open to advice. Um, I think the worst thing that you can do is to have a low technical writing ability and then not be open to suggestions on how to improve it. Because I see a lot of people on Substack, fantastic people, lovely people. It's it's always a pleasure to engage with them. When they write, they have fantastic ideas, they have fantastic worlds and concepts and stories. But the technical ability to tell a story is not quite there, and then everything else suffers. You know, it's like you have a it's like a racing car, you have a fantastic engine, but everything else on the car is subpar. And it's like, yeah, okay, you have a fantastic engine here, my friend, but you're not gonna win races. I'm sorry, you you are you do have a bit of a technical problem here. Um yeah, anyway, so long that's a long way of saying, but that's kind of how I got into writing and stayed in writing, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:35:52

And the essence of it, you felt the bug early to the point where somebody gave you a pen to sign the book that you didn't write, reminding you 15 years later that you hadn't written it yet. Yeah so you time time to step up and go for it. Yeah, and going back to David Mammoth, he said uh some people make it early, some people make it midstream, some people later, some people kind of make it, some people become a star, but sooner or later, if you just stick to it, you'll get it done, and the universe will show you a little something for your efforts. Could be a little, could be a lot. But to the point we were both making earlier, if it's intrinsically rewarding, then it's mission accomplished for the most part.

SPEAKER_00 2:36:40

I think this is also a point that I want to tie into your previous comment, your um writer friend who you know, the guy who ends earns uh 10,000 a month, but he spends 5,000, he has 60 books available. I think, I think as an author, I always think of your your like your uh publishing um repertoire or your selection. It's a bit like a restaurant menu, right? If you go, if you walk into a restaurant and they only have one item on the menu, literally just one dish on the menu, a lot of people are gonna walk in, they're gonna look at the one one item on the menu and they're gonna walk out again because it's not what they want. But if your menu has 60 items on it, 60 different meal options, uh, you are more likely to get clients who walk in and stay and buy something. So I think for us as authors, especially authors now with uh uh print-on-demand services like Amazon, get titles out, get as many dishes possible on your menu. If you can if you can publish a book a year, more than that, great. But if you can publish a book a year and say, hey, uh in 10 years' time, I'm gonna have 10 to 15 titles on my menu. Then when someone finds you and they go through your menu, they don't see just one dish and like, oh, it's beef stew, I don't like beef stew, I'm gonna go get Chinese somewhere else. Uh if you have 15 options on your menu, uh you're gonna keep retain a lot more customers. Um so uh yeah, that's that's something that I'm pushing forward. So uh one of the new original points that we discussed was I've got the main novel that I'm working on, and then I have the short stories, usually for Sci Friday, every Friday on Substack. Uh whenever I have 80,000 words worth of short stories together, I bundle that into a short story collection. It's about 240, 250 pages, and then I put that on Amazon. So I released my first anthology in uh September of last year, 2025. I saw that. Yep. So plug here for uh Impact Nominal, um collection of it was 26 uh short stories, and I'm planning to do another one this year. Uh again, just all the short stories, put them together, put them on Amazon, and the more items you have on your menu, like I said, the more likely you are that someone finds it.

SPEAKER_01 2:38:55

Um yeah, totally agree. I've recently published a play, corporate satire, that I wrote 10 years ago. Okay, it still sticks, it still bites, it's great, and I dug that up, and then a novella that I wrote just before the pandemic, I wrote it, and it's a memoir going back to the 90s. I just published both these books in the past two months, and I'm gonna do what you're doing, which is repurposing. I'm gonna publish dispatches from the Mookieverse, which will be my short story collection, and then I'm also breaking it into categories. So I have uh short stories about romance and love, I have short stories about work, I have short stories about politics. I'm going to arrange these as well and then release them. Pack package and repackage. I've got the sequel to Fizzulli, and then now I've got the spin-off of the Alien Kitty that I'm working on. So just try different stuff, keep uh keep cranking, keep keep staying frisky, continue to mutate like an organism, and then continue to adapt to your environment. Have fun with what you do, feel the joy in creation. And it's the oldest uh cliche, but it's cliche because it's true, which is if you feel if it feels good, then do it, do it more. And if it feels good to write and to release, it's a a great, great, great thing to have.

SPEAKER_00 2:40:30

Yeah, and just build your menu. I mean, I I think I think print on demand is going to see some changes in the coming months or years based because of the AI tsunami. We see it already with the new proposed changes on uh draft to digital with uh fees that are now going to be charged, things like that. And I think because the the the publishers, whether it's traditional publishing or uh print on demand, they all have this problem with the AI slop tsunami. So these changes will come in, and I think we just need to, like you said, keep evolving, adapt to but how do you you you use AI?

SPEAKER_01 2:41:04

Do you use AI at all?

SPEAKER_00 2:41:07

I don't use it at all, no. Um no, zero AI. I'm I'm not I'm not one of those, I want to say, rabid anti-technology AI theorists, you know, the people who scream in panic.

SPEAKER_01 2:41:20

AI Luddite.

SPEAKER_00 2:41:22

I'm not in that camp at all. I I find those people a bit strange. I understand that um, you know, 40 years of being exposed to the Terminator franchise has given people a healthy dose of respect for the idea that AI can take over and mess things up. I understand where it's coming from. I really do. Um, but I'm not quite in that camp of like, oh, you know, go burn down the data centers. Um I think the economics behind it is strange and unsubstantiated. I think there is the equivalent of a dot-com bubble um busy with the AI stuff. Like your example, a shoe company suddenly pivoting to um AI, and then they stock their shares go up 560%.

SPEAKER_01 2:42:03

I just had a friend and a colleague, former colleague, we just talked on the phone just before you and I got on the podcast. He had an HR company, human resources, for vetting candidates. And now he has declared he's an AI company, too. So he said, Mookie, guess what? He said, Guess what? I'm like, what? He goes, I'm pivoting. We're AI now, and I was like, another one, yeah. Oh, he's a nice guy. He's he he's the only one who really cared. When I was finishing up my novel last last summer, like pretty much a year ago, it was April, May 2025. I I didn't leave my apartment and I worked 18-hour days. I'm not kidding. I it was full immersion, it was it was commando, it was it was one of the the hardest and greatest periods of my whole life. Like for it lasted about nine weeks and uh complete immersion. I was eating enough to sustain myself, excreting, sleeping three, four hours, and the rest was all finishing the book. I didn't leave the house and I live with my my younger son, and he never he doesn't really do anything. He he he's great, he goes to work, he's taking flight lessons, but he doesn't go grocery shopping. So I I was I was eating through all the pandemic leftovers, like cans of beans, and then this friend of mine, Sean, brought over a grocery bag full of food to feed me while I'm working on the book. And I thought that that was very endearing. I'll never forget him bringing this over. Now I'm so happy he's got an AI company. I I wish I wish him well. Yep.

SPEAKER_00 2:43:51

Well, listen, if he if he does grocery deliveries to writers, that could be uh that's a market niche.

SPEAKER_01 2:43:57

Like DoorDash, like uh, you know, like uh uh m-dash. Yeah, so you get yourself AI delivery company for writers, m-dash. Yeah, you should patent that. You should patent that idea or trademark that. Well, dot coms are useless now. There's the websites are going away too. Why are you gonna build a website when you could just pump your info right into a bot? I think the energy is gonna change, go away too. Ladies and gentlemen, James Kenwood. All right, Mookie, thank you for having me. Thank thank you for this lively and wonderful conversation. Well, thanks so much for listening. Like, comment, subscribe, share, find James on Substack, follow him, subscribe to him.