Mike Robinson: Renaissance Author, Editor, and Writing Coach

What happens when two writing obsessives lock themselves in a room and start talking craft, money, madness, creativity, publishing, best (and worst) practices, and the questionable life choice known as “becoming an author”? You get this lively, funny, and honest conversation with Mike Robinson—a true Renaissance writer and editor whose career spans novels, short stories, screenplays, editing, coaching, and helping other writers turn rough ideas into compelling books.

Mike talks to Mookie about the real mechanics of writing improvement. What’s the difference between line editing and developmental editing? Why do so many beginners overwrite? Why do some science fiction stories have amazing ideas but no human pulse? How do you preserve a writer’s unique voice while still making the work better?  Should writers chase the market or chase their own vision? Mike offers a sharp framework—one for me, one for them. Write one project straight from obsession, then write one with readers in mind. It’s not compromise. It’s survival with dignity.

From there, things get gloriously nerdy. Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, James Joyce, experimental fiction, screenplay discipline, youthful creative energy, the mystery of inspiration, and why some geniuses eventually disappear into their own exhaust fumes. They explore where ideas come from, why some people have too many, why others freeze at the blank page, and how writers need to keep feeding themselves with books, history, philosophy, science, technology, culture, and real life. Mike also shares insight into his own fiction—work blending horror, speculative concepts, psychology, cryptids, metaphysics, and the unstable border between reality and nightmare.

The Guest

Born and raised in Los Angeles, Mike Robinson is the award-winning author of multiple novels and dozens of short stories, most of them speculative fiction. His work has appeared in Clarkesworld, The Strand Magazine, American Gothic Fantasy, Storyteller, ClonePod, December Tales II, Underland Arcana, Thirteen Podcast, Creepy Podcast and more, and has received honors from Writers of the Future, the Next Generation Indie Book Awards, Maxy Awards, The BookFest, Kindle Book Awards and others. His novel "Walking the Dusk" was a semifinalist for Book of the Year in Publishers Weekly's BookLife Prize.

He is also the editor of J.P. Barnett's bestselling "Lorestalker" series, and Dr. Zo's award-winning "TimeOuts" middle-grade series. As a book coach and senior editor with Wordsmith Writing Coaches, he co-created the New Author Plunge, a workshop for beginning writers. In addition, he's a copywriter (he worked on the Webby Award-winning podcast "Books That Make You"), an illustrator and award-winning screenwriter with two produced credits including "Blood Corral," selected as Best Horror Feature at the Skyehouse International Film Festival. Otherwise, he hikes (often with dogs), swims, draws, and tries to learn the didgeridoo.

His Website & Newsletter

Sign up for my monthly Weird / Wondrous / WriteLife newsletter on the home page: https://www.mike-robinsonauthor.com/

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Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

Hello and welcome to the science fiction and fantasy factory. I'm your host, Mookie Spitz. I'm thrilled to have the Renaissance man of speculative fiction, Mr. Mike Robinson. Welcome to the Factory, Mike. Thank you so much, Mookie. Good to be here. How do you find time? When I look at all the stuff that you do, you've got numerous novels, published short stories in a lot of magazines, you're a professional editor, you've done screenplays, you've done production. Do you have your Wheaties in the morning? What what keeps you what keeps you going? And how do you stay so prolific and engaged?

SPEAKER_01 0:46

Well, so um I will admit that I was uh very fortunate growing up. Um I inherited some money from my grandfather uh enough to buy a property um in Los Angeles. Um and when I was working a normal job, I I moved into this property um and uh when I was in my mid-20s, and I was working a normal job, and as I started to build my editing business and work a normal job and write on the side, you know, I I had a lot of energy in my 20s. Um I realized that I could I could swing cutting back on regular work, I mean real work as people say. I mean, I don't like that term, but it works as a shorthand. Um if I rented out uh the the second bedroom. So I I did that. I I made some I did some gig work on the side, I made some concessions. Um but all told I was able to start carving out a more flexible schedule for myself. And as my editing business grew and as I started to sell more uh of my writing, um it was it was easier to do. I'm not saying that it it was just all smooth sailing from there, but more or less I've been able to determine the the hours in my day to a degree that I'm very fortunate to be able to do so. And so I I allocate, you know, if if today's gonna be a writing day, it's gonna be mostly writing day. Today's gonna be an editing day, it's gonna be mostly editing day. If I need a rest, that's you know, that's fine too. Um I I sometimes work in the afternoons, I sometimes work late at night. My schedule is pretty erratic, and I I thankfully have always been, I don't know why this is, because I don't I think I've I met maybe less than a handful of people who feel the same, but I have always felt more compelled to meet my own internal deadlines than other people's, which is why school was hard for me.

SPEAKER_02 2:55

You know, I you're in you're in good company here regards to that erratic nature of work, just work when you can, work on your own deadlines and to your own expectations. Yeah. And uh, I wasn't as lucky as you to inherit some money, but you know what my my solution has been? My solution has been going further and further into debt.

SPEAKER_01 3:21

Definitely with some of that too. For sure.

SPEAKER_02 3:24

The sacrifices that we need to make as writers is intense, and it and really the opportunity costs of not doing what you love to do and not fulfilling your dream, I think, are even higher than being fiscally responsible or doing just about anything else. It's gotta come from here, and we need to feel passionate about the writing.

SPEAKER_01 3:45

Yeah, I could not agree more. I mean, it's uh it sounds morbid and it sounds like it would produce a lot of anxiety, and sometimes it does. Um, but I've never understood how people can have a sort of a you know, a North Star, a talent, a burning urge to do something, and then just kind of preempt it for practical reasons. I mean, I you never know what life is gonna throw at you. You can, you know, who knows what tomorrow is gonna bring. So as much as I can get out of myself today, I'd I would like to to avail myself of that opportunity. And that's it, it sounds also kind of egotistical, like the world must must hear what I have to say. But um, I I don't know, that's just something in my chemistry that's always been been there.

SPEAKER_02 4:36

David Mammoth said that if you've got a plan B, you're gonna take it. Right. Yeah, and and a lot of folks are are are pushing that dream further and further away. Like when I retire, I'll write my book. Right. Or when I jump through all these hurdles and then I have got clearance to do it, then I'm gonna do it. But to your point, life is precious, life is short, and and do it when you can. Right. Most folks juggle work and writing and their creative pursuit, yeah, which again is responsible. And I I'm a parent, I was a single parent for years, and I did prioritize my kids. Hats off too. Now that now that they're older, 19 and 23, they're pretty much flown the coop. Oh, right. And I'm just like, hell's bells, I'm I'm just going for it. And uh it feels it feels terrific. I don't know if I'm a late bloomer. I've always felt the passion I've been writing the whole time, but to your exact point, prioritize it, live it, make it a part of your daily life. And you never know if if jumping off the cliff financially is a way to do it, it's a small price to pay for that kind of freedom.

SPEAKER_01 5:51

Yeah, it it has to um I mean it there you're always gonna hit hiccups and and and bumpy parts and and places of doubt and um and sometimes severe doubt, but it it has to feel natural. It has to feel like something that has to come out of you, something you must do. Um it has to basically bring you back to the sandbox uh more than not. If if it's not doing that, then it it it may be um worth reevaluating at least the project that you're working on. But um it has to not always feel like a grinder like work. It has to feel sort of an escape from from the work. And you but you don't have to also treat it like I know every writer has has a different regimen. I mean, I I feel like a lot of people read Stephen King's on writing and took so much of that as gospel, you know, just don't use adverbs, don't you know, write 2,000 words a day. But uh everyone is different. I mean, I know writers who only write 50 words a day, and you know, they produce a book every two, three years, you know, it's and that's perfectly respectable.

SPEAKER_02 7:02

I think there's as many types of writing and writers as there are people, right? And we're all distinctive and unique, and I'm tacitly assuming that that's a primary part of your method in terms of your editing and your coaching. So a lot of what you're expressing isn't just philosophical or abstract, and it doesn't just apply to you, but you are a professional editor and coach. Can you tell our listeners and viewers a little bit about that aspect of your career?

SPEAKER_01 7:36

Sure. Um, so I started editing uh maybe 16 years ago, and uh I do I'm not really a proofreader. I I I will do it, um, and I I do take on some proofreading projects from some of the companies I work for. But generally I specialize in um line and developmental editing and manuscript critiques. So line just refers to um, you know, style, syntax, clarity, flow, um so, you know, grammar, of course, but it's it's larger than grammar. It's it's line includes the technical and the artistic um aspect of of the language of your work and and what it's conveying and how it's what vibe it's bringing to the story, how how your voice, you know, is your voice intact, is it shining through, or is it buried under cliches or or whatnot? Um, or you know, stilted prose. And then developmental is um structural. So uh plot, character, um, character development, of course, character psychology, uh world building, um, continuity of the story, all those kind of macro elements. And uh I can do one or or the other, I could do both. Uh, very often I do a package deal, I do line and developmental. And so um that that comes with not only a lot of you know version tracker edits and redlining, but uh a lot of margin comments and a book report afterwards, and and usually a kind of uh lawyer-client style relationship where especially in book book coaching, people can, you know, as they're going through my edits and as they're uh reviewing and revising, they can reach out to me and send me a chapter um or have a conference with me and ask my opinion on something, a change or an addition that they want to make. And um sometimes there's a fee, I mean, depending on the extent of the work, but um sometimes if it's a quick call, you know, it's less than 15 minutes, I won't won't charge anything. But I really enjoy it. It's it's I do nonfiction and fiction. Obviously, I write fiction. I am I've never written a nonfiction, except for you know articles and things like that. But um I really uh especially nonfiction with memoirs, it's like getting and and creative nonfiction or narrative nonfiction. It's it's there's almost a therapy aspect to it. You know, you just get a window into so many people's psyche, even with fiction, of course, too. And it's just um it's it's so it can be sometimes frustrating, it can be uh funny in a almost mystery science 33000 kind of way. You know, you get a book that's just sort of hilariously bad, um and then you get books that are sort of a slog, but you get also great books with a lot of potential. Um, you get people who you know, you're just like, wow, why isn't this person better known? But you could say that about thousands and thousands of of talented authors, and so um, yeah, it's it's it's rewarding, it's it's fun, and it brings, you know, kind of it refreshes itself with every book, the challenge level and and the um and the approach. And I think that's what I like about it. It keeps me creative creatively nimble, technically um on point, and it pays dividends for my own work. If I if I'm writing something and it feels and I reread it, and it feels like something I encountered in a client work that I would have flagged or revised, I'm like, I could do this better, you know, and it gives me a fresh perspective on my work, even as I'm writing it, which is interesting.

SPEAKER_02 11:16

How do you handle widely different styles? You just mentioned a lot of divergence in quality. Some writers are great, some not so much. Um, you're the doctor anyway, so you need your patient. Right. But um, I've just found such radical differences in how writers approach writing, and this has everything to do with weighting world building to character development, philosophical concepts to more implicit nudges. Right. Some people just want to tell a fast, engaging, fun story. Other people want to dive in. A lot of people shoot themselves in the foot with their own accesses, right? And uh there's there's so many different ways of writing well and writing badly. So, how do you how do you kind of baseline it? Like when you're when you're doing a review.

SPEAKER_01 12:08

I think it's well, so in in starting out with a a client, if I can swing it, I'll get together with them in person, um, you know, and have a coffee and sort of or we can zoom or have a phone chat, and I'll get a a sense of what their vision is for the book, what they would like to accomplish. Um usually this comes after a sample edit, so I've already had a a sense of you know uh their style and how they're approaching it. And uh I always try to and I think I've gotten much better about this uh since especially since I first started, but I try to meet them halfway or more than halfway. I don't sort of I mean that most no editor should do this. Um I don't try and bring my creative sensibilities to bear in a way that will that will overwhelm theirs. Um I don't want to just hijack the book from them. At the same time, I want to give them the benefit of my years of experience, my expertise. And so I have to kind of walk that that line there and and balance my my substantive feedback with you know uh preservation, a preservation preservationist approach to their style and what makes them unique, um, and what I can find in in their unique idiosyncrasies and sensibilities that I can build on and that can really bring to maximum potential. And I think that would be um that you know that's always fun to do, and I I enjoy the the challenge and the puzzle of that. Um as far as the the the different ways of people approaching writing, I I I I've said this for years and I I still think it's interesting and I encounter it a lot. So with any art, you can you can approach a canvas, you can uh uh or or just take any sport or you know, art. You can approach a soccer ball, you can approach a canvas, and it's very, or you can approach a saxophone, it's very evident you have not had the training yet, if you have not done anything with it. You know, you have a long road ahead of you. You blow into a saxophone, no music comes out. You got years ahead of you. Writing is writing skills or or lack of writing skills rather, are kind of disguised by the fact that I think we all learn to read and write in elementary school. And when we read um, say, a favorite author of ours, they make it look easy. And and you know, we we read maybe our favorite author. We started in, you know, in elementary school or junior high, and and we could understand it, and and it's we we're using the same tools, uh, ostensibly, you know, the language. We have everything in our toolbox. And so we approach it like so. When we when we write something of ours, we know exactly what we want to say. And so we know the story that's clanking around in our head. And so when we put it on the paper, we kind of assume that, well, we all have the same shared language. Um, this is not you know, picking up a totally new instrument, you know, this is just um the instrument of language. And um, so there's there's kind of this uh implicit assumption that I don't want to say that people think that it's easier than it is, but they just think that clarity and the art of it uh um should be evident and and should be a little bit more free-flowing. Um and that there shouldn't be too much of a disconnect between what happens in their head and how they understand the story and how it it trans how it transpires and manifests on the page and how it then is absorbed by different readers. Because it I think it was John um oh god, I'm the guy who wrote uh John Irving, the guy who wrote uh World According to Garp, he said, it's hard to write simple. You know, it's because we tend to overcomplicate things. And so when you when you write simply, I think he was referring to Vonnegut, because Vonnegut was was blasted, I think, by some critics for writing very plainly and simply, but Irving kind of defended him and said, Well, it's it's actually hard to write in a way that is um that conveys a story that carries the emotions and the insights that you want, but is also very readable and and clear and flows in a way that is um you know artful and accessible.

SPEAKER_02 16:43

Sounds like you're bringing up the number one issue, especially for newer writers, which is clarity. Yeah, for sure. And simplicity. There's a tendency to overcompensate when you're not familiar with what you're doing. Right. And in writing, it becomes apparent fairly rapidly that the writer is trying too hard. Yeah, they've got a model in their head of their favorite writer, and at the same time, they're already feeling a delta between what's in their head and uh getting it onto the page, and that can be frustrating and it expresses itself through overcomplicating stuff. And what I found in speculative fiction in particular is over-emphasis on world building, world building over character, yes, especially in science fiction, especially in science fiction, which is um, here's an idea, the end. So it's uh it's been abbreviated as hate before. So I wrote a piece called Stop the Hate in Science Fiction, which is uh the idea sounds great, and you you can't wait to get it on the page, but you're so enamored by your concept that there's no human drama, there's no storytelling. Right, it becomes a documentary of your good idea rather than a compelling story.

SPEAKER_01 18:03

And I think that really uh speaks to the the eon's old division between the so-called literary community and the science fiction community. And I think obviously there's a lot, there are many authors that bridge that gap. Um, there have been over the decades. Um, and the that gap has closed uh significantly. I think that you know, in the literary community, it's no longer seen, broadly speaking, as as taboo to write speculative fiction or speculatively um upmarket fiction, they call it. Um however, uh I mean the you can still find evidence of those gaps, and sometimes in in various sectors of the industry, it is pretty significant. And I think that's it's to the point that you raise, which is you know, literary concerns are more psychological, more character-oriented, a little bit more um, you know, about the language, um, more intimate, um, more relational. And science fiction very often, it in its broadest strokes and and most and crudest strokes is very macro and just yeah, like a one large technical treatise about, you know, wouldn't it be cool if, you know, period, you know, dot dot dot. And so you have to marry the the best elements of both in order to produce the you know a really good work. I mean, the the macro has to inform the micro to some degree. I mean, how are these characters? That's one of the things I try to bring out in my own fiction. It's not so much the people running from the monster, it's the human reaction to the monster that really interests me. You know, it's it's the cultural reaction to the monster that interests me. Um, you know, what what if a Sasquatch walked into a busy town and just committed suicide, what would the what would how what would happen in terms of like the media, in terms of the person people who witnessed it, you know, just very interesting scenarios that that I enjoyed probing. And that that um and I think that's how I I try to to bridge that gap myself is is because I love I love the best elements of of literary fiction and I I love the the the conceits of of science fiction and the and the the broad philosophical scope of science fiction and and fantasy.

SPEAKER_02 20:27

So it's here's an idea. What do you think about it? More importantly, how are the characters reacting and living within that idea, and what are the implications and consequences for their life? And that creates good storytelling and relatability, right? Exactly. Yeah, absolutely. Another potential delta is what's generally consumable and what's more niche. And I'm wondering how you approach that. So some writers write to be read, they want to be a bestseller. They're they wake up in the morning and then they check their stats on KDP, and it's a good day if they sold 10 or 100 books, right? And then they're sad if they didn't, right? And there's other writers who just, in a sense, write for themselves and don't take it or leave it. Of course, they want a bestseller, everyone wants to be Andy Weir. But at the end of the day, if it comes down to brass tacks, they just want to write the book that they want to read, and they're more or less content with that. How do you balance that when you when you're editing? Which is are you giving them advice that'll make the book more palatable or more engaging to a wider audience? Or is it expressly shared that you're in their world and you're just trying to hone their craft?

SPEAKER_01 21:57

I think it it's it it depends. It depends on. On their level of craft. It depends on how far they are from a publishable product. I mean, obviously every product is publishable now, uh, to some degree.

SPEAKER_02 22:10

Yeah, the machines are doing most of it.

SPEAKER_01 22:12

Right. Yeah, but if we're talking, you know, the traditional uh you know um big five quality level, um, just to take one metric. Um I will often and then of course this comes from the aforementioned meeting that I would have, you know, before tackling their their book. Like, what are your ultimate goals for the book? Do you are you okay with um I very often give them a choice, you know, or are especially I guess as I get further into the the book and and and especially if the choice presents itself, like are you okay with continuing this more maybe unique or controversial but less commercial uh approach to the story, or do you want to reformat it in a way that that maybe is is uh more reader-friendly and more bestseller friendly? And if they say the the former, then that's fine. I mean, if their priority is to really just produce the book and and that will fulfill them for having produced that book, and then hopefully find the readers that will appreciate it as is that and that think like you. And on a planet of eight billion, it's it's a it's a solid chance that there are at least 5,000 super fans who think like you. They're just it's very hard to find them in the noise. So, um, but then of course, if I if they want, if they're more bestseller focused, then I'll I'll suggest things that are uh more commercial, you know. Maybe you you don't want this dialogue to go on so long. You know, I try I try and take cues maybe from screenwriting advice, you know, how to hone the story and streamline it enough, um, get the the the more typical beats down. Um course at the same time you want to preserve uh no matter which way you you you want to uh uh sell the book or or publish the book, how you want to position it on the on the shelf or if you want to put it on the shelf at all. You you know you want to do ultimately justice to to the book itself. And if if there is something that that I feel and you want you want to make it even if you're writing for bestseller status, you want to make it stand out to a certain degree. And so there are ways in which you can maybe break the mold in a w uh in such a way that it's not um that I won't rupture, you know, uh reader-author relationships, um, or that won't uh muddy up people's expectations to the point where you know they just put down the book or they won't read anything of yours afterwards. Um it's it's it's funny, it's it's amazing like how how different uh certain readers are. Because I I I've often so I've read two just starkly different reactions to the same book. One and it was my book, uh one reaction was um this book moves too fast. It's too fast-paced. Literally, for the same book, someone else said this book is too slow. Like it starts off to it. So like everyone has their own tempo, everyone has their own expectations, and you can't please everyone. You know, so but you you you really your priority even for bestseller books, your priority should be number one. It it it you should feel good about having put this book out into the world. It should be an honest extension of you, ideally. You know, I the on your deathbed, you should be proud to be looking at it on the shelf, you know, regardless of how many copies it's sold. It's it's there, it's it's in the world, it's present, it's a thing. You know, you should be you should take pride in that, and the thing should represent you as honestly as possible. That's my view.

SPEAKER_02 26:11

Yeah, that's wonderful. You should stay true to yourself, even if you're super extroverted and you just want the KP KDP stats. I mean, some people are like that, and God bless. I'm I'm probably the opposite. I fall into the extroverted, introverted category where I love to engage and and do that. I'm a social introvert, but at the end of the day, I I take personal satisfaction in my own writing and and content for absolutely for better or for worse. Yeah, you pays your money and you makes your choice, right? And absolutely, and they say that those who can't do teach and those who can't teach teach Jim.

SPEAKER_01 26:55

I've never heard that before. That's funny.

SPEAKER_02 26:57

You're a doer, so you are an accomplished author in multiple genres. You got novels, you've got published short stories, uh, screenwriting, as you mentioned, which is great because it gives you creds. There are a lot of coaches out there who just coach to the point I just made in a funny way, but you're legit. You you you got the chops. But how do you juggle these two worlds between editing someone else's content, which is ostensibly a left brainish kind of activity, and then the creativity of your speculative stories, your your horror, you know, all the all the all the cool, sometimes zanier stuff that you do.

SPEAKER_01 27:45

Uh I you know, I I think there is, I never really consciously realized this before, but as you were asking the question, I was thinking about it. I think there's there's definitely something to be said for, at least in my own experience, palate cleansing a little bit. So if you're you're deep in the weeds on someone else's work, you're thinking like them, you're kind of writing like them, or you're you're you're trying to bring out the best in their work. And as you said, it's a little bit more left-brained, but what I like about it is that it it marries the right and the left brains, you know, broadly. I mean, the the left right brain split obviously is is kind of a myth, but it's good for rhetoric. Um so the creative and the technical, I I do love that that uh that marriage there. But to kind of get back to my own work, what I often do is just um you know read the books that are on my my shelf. Like not other uh, you know, not my clients' books, but you know, some of my favorite authors. Um I do uh you know notebooks, I I I just kind of jot down ideas, I jot down random passages, I jot down descriptions of things around me. Um and it's if I have a a work that really is speaking to me, it's not terribly difficult to kind of slip on my my own coat and get back into my world. Um as far as time management, it's it's thankfully not been too much of an issue. Typically what happens is that I I write in or I I edit in the mornings and some of the afternoons, and then late afternoon I'll start working on my stuff. What I do normally is I I handwrite. That's another palette cleanser cleanser. So I I I'm on the computer editing someone else's work as I work in version tracker on Word. Um, but then I want to kind of de-screen. So I'll I'll read, as I said, I'll read you know some of my favorite author's works, um, and then I'll I'll I'll pick up my my notebook and I'll I'll longhand you know the my own work. And and I think that it's it makes it much more um artful, like I'm sketching and less secretarial, like I'm just constantly hunched here and you know typing away, and and it's gotten to the point where it's it's and it's not necessarily a bad thing, it's just how I've trained my my brain and my um my whole being, is that it's it's harder for me to write directly on the computer now because I have to have that fusion of the the pen to the paper. And then the other nice thing is that once I have enough handwritten stuff, handwritten material, then as I type it up, um, assuming I can read my handwriting, which I usually I mean, yes, I can. That night, usually I type it up that night, so it's not a problem. If I wait a few days, maybe it's an issue. But yeah, typically speaking, so I I write it that afternoon and then I type it up that night, and that gives me a an extra editorial step to kind of clean it up. And so once I finish a work, it's it's like I've completed a draft and a half, draft and a half kind of thing, or or a you know, second draft as opposed to a first draft. So uh it's already a little bit more polished than it otherwise would be because I've gotten all the the worst kinks out on on literal paper, and then as I'm transcribing it and and typing it up, um, then I'm able to cut it kind of yeah, trim and polish and rearrange and um then of course obviously that that process uh continues with with further drafts, but um I found that that that's really handy.

SPEAKER_02 31:20

Stephen King writes about writing on on pen and paper. Oh yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 31:25

I think he wrote Dreamcatcher by him.

SPEAKER_02 31:27

I was just I was just gonna say the dreamcatcher, he got hit by a van and he was knocked out, and he was in bed, and simply getting into that physical act was very visceral and evocative for him. But you've got a long list of writers, even in this age of word processing and keyboards, who insisted stubbornly on writing by hand. Thomas Pynchon, handwritten on graph paper. I don't think I realized that. Yes, handwritten in little block script on graph paper. Type it up at the set.

SPEAKER_01 32:00

I just read Gravity's Rainbow for the first time last year.

SPEAKER_02 32:03

Did you? All right, yes. My that's my all-time favorite book ever.

SPEAKER_01 32:08

Oh, wow, yeah. No, it was a trip.

SPEAKER_02 32:10

It was it's amazing, amazing work. We could devote an entire podcast uh to that one. Oh, easily. Uh the other one, the more contemporary one, Infinite Jess, David Foster Wallace also wrote by hand. So uh, so there's something to that. I cannot read my own handwriting. I've got the uh the ADHD too, so I need to be physical. Oh, I literally I'm 90 words a minute blind and I'm pounding on the keyboard. I have the beaten up Amazon basics keyboard that looks like an absolute post-apocalyptic disaster area, and I love it. Looks like Ingway Momstein's fretboard from his favorite guitar. But uh I need that visceral kind of stuff to just pound it out and that immediacy. But this goes back to what you were saying. Every writer is completely unique, distinctive, and personal. But you need to find your own rhythm, your own methodology to do this stuff. And you're an amazing example of being able to teach. You have a pedagogical aspect, you have uh a resourcing mentorship aspect, and a doing aspect, which is which is very interesting. And and what I find most compelling is that these reinforce each other.

SPEAKER_01 33:29

They do, they they absolutely pay dividends to one another. Yeah. Um I I would say even I I kind of mentioned this earlier, but writing screenplays, which it's funny because I grew up in LA, but I was always much more attracted to prose, and I didn't get into film and screenwriting until maybe 10 or 12 years ago, and I've I've since kind of shifted back uh fully to prose. But um it was a good experience, and it really did uh I think writing screenplays and writing prose um really helped inform one another. I think um writing prose really helps you to bring voice to your screenplays, and I think writing screenplays really helps to bring economy to your prose. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 34:11

Um, in my younger days, I suffered from the typical young writer plagues, um, as far as this introverted motif goes or personality type. I tended to overwrite.

SPEAKER_01 34:23

Yeah, and we all I think that's always the tendency I did too.

SPEAKER_02 34:28

I took to screenplay writing and playwriting as a way of focusing on the bare bones basics. So David Mammoth's on directing film is one of my favorite books, and he highlights the scene as the atomic element of all narrative. And the screenplay is terrific for whittling down your excesses because you're literally just describing action and dialogue. There's zero internal states, you can't go tangential on quantum mechanics or Hegelian world philosophy, it's just what happens and it's just what's said.

SPEAKER_01 35:10

Unless you're unless you're directing the the project.

SPEAKER_02 35:12

Yeah, that's different. But as a screenwriter, this the good screen, and then there's terrible screenplays out there too, which are like 300 pages long and have all the internal states and the stage direction. But a properly written 30, 60, 90 screenplay or a three-act play for staging is just here's what's happening and here's what's said. And as a writer, it disciplines you, and as a reader, it forces you to create all of the implicit subtext in your own mind and all in your own imagination.

SPEAKER_01 35:49

For sure. Absolutely. I I I think too, the the other thing that that helps uh or the the two disciplines, the way they reinforce one another um or build upon one another is in the showing versus telling. Um, because I think that the one of the interesting puzzles that I encountered in adapting one of my novels to um to film, to a screenplay format, is how do I show you touched on a little bit earlier, like how do I show how do I make the interior exterior, how do I make it visual? Um so uh yeah, that's it's it's a really uh it's a it's a unique challenge and it's and it's it it also I think helps in um in writing uh prose too, because the that's something that in addition to overriding, I often uh see a lot of telling versus showing in in prose. And I think while I'm I I always have to kind of walk this line because I'm I think that you know there telling certainly has its place and I think that uh it it's kind of a dicey situation because I I have a lot of nuanced opinions about um film and uh the storytelling approach to film and how much it's impacted novels and prose, sometimes overly so. I think it wouldn't be a bad thing if we sometimes got back to uh not got back to, but if we took some cues from you know older novels that did have a little bit more room to breathe. And, you know, I I mean Tolstoy and Dostoevsky novels sometimes have whole characters that don't have arcs. You know, they just you know they're they're kind of there to serve a they almost feel like an exploration of of the world around the the main character, and and they they you know they they indulge a little bit more, I I think. And I think when you can do it, when you're a good writer, you can pretty much do anything. You don't have to necessarily follow a a certain uh beat structure.

SPEAKER_02 37:56

Fricasso said learn learn the rules so you can break them and then break them like an artist, right? Right, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 38:05

But it but at the same time, I I do think that think you know, writing more cinematically generally and you know, for visual impact and for emotional impact is is always a good thing.

SPEAKER_02 38:17

The core of the story is always going to be the core of the story. You just mentioned reading Gravity's Rainbow. No, so for better or for worse, that has enlightened me and corrupted me a little bit as a novelist. I I call it the soapbox narrator. You've got you're following all the rules for a narrative. You have characters with clearly defined goals, you've got obstacles punching them in the face, and the drama is an emergent phenomena of the characters plowing through this reality, trying to get what they want, right? Either succeeding or failing. That's drama. The soapbox narrator stops the action. They set up the soapbox, sometimes a megaphone, and they start pontificating. Right. They're describing the context, they're giving you historical subtext, they're expressing their philosophical opinion, and then it segues right back into the action, and it happens episodically, but pretty much progressively and chronically throughout a novel like Gravity's Rainbow. Pynchon will go on four pages talking about uh rocketry in the style of Herman Melville, like the whale. Instead of the whale, he's got the rocket, right? Right. There's this overarching symbol of nature and and Darwinian reality, right? Yeah. So how do you how do you deal with some of that? And just to flip it around, you've got a a director, writer, producer like Christopher Nolan. He drives me nuts because he sits there and he writes screenplays with his brother, who's a short story writer, right? And it's almost this one-to-one transposition of the written text of a short story or novel onto the damn screen. You've got characters through dialogue who are narrating the story, they're telling you how they feel, what they're gonna do, what they just did, and it drives me nuts. So that's the other extreme where you have this transposition of the novel with the film. To me, it's it's mixing and matching in a way that ruins the dramatic arc and tension of a movie, and then conversely, you've got cinematic techniques which are having an impact on writing because now you've even got flash fiction, right? And you've got this renewed minimalism that's there, which is just getting to it. So it's wild. Yeah, I find it fascinating, but as a teacher and a writer, how do you feel about all this?

SPEAKER_01 41:04

You you can definitely tell, I think, the um the directors who are frustrated novelists and the novelists who are frustrated filmmakers. Exactly.

SPEAKER_02 41:13

That that nails it. That nails it. And it and viewers are, I think, sometimes confused. Right. And and sometimes it works though. Like there's nothing worse than film than a voiceover narration. Sure. It was a dark and stormy night, and then on screen, it's dark and it's stormy. Redundant. The show tell thing drives me crazy. However, Apocalypse Now has Tommy Lee Jones in No Country for All Men. That voice is just classic. You've got films where the voiceover, Memento, back to Christopher Nolan, his first movie is my favorite and the only one I really like. But it it does backstory, it does voiceover narration, it breaks all the rules, and yet Goodfellas, Goodfellas has that voiceover, and it works.

SPEAKER_01 42:11

Yeah, I think it it just you really have to feel it out. I mean, does it does it serve the interests of the story in a way that is not distracting or overbearing or uh that you know is a almost self-parody? Um you know, I I you just yeah, you just have to to really be uh strict and honest with yourself. And obviously, you know, you have test screenings and th and things like that. But is it also serving a purpose? I mean, is it is it setting a mood? Is it informing the story in some way? Is it or is it just kind of you know very indulgent? Um, do you just want a voiceover because it's artsy, or uh does it really yeah, does it really serve to round out um the the story? One of my one of my books, it's a horror novel called The Prince of Earth. Um there are sections of it that I wrote in second person. And I'm not I'm still not a hundred percent sure why the story suggested those aspects of the story suggested themselves to me in second person, but it just felt right. And everyone, most people who who you know who have read it are like, well, I mean, that added to the creepiness of it. But I never done it since. It just you have to sort of feel out what is best for yeah, for the personality of the of the book or the film, I think. I uh and if if it kind of comes together in a way that is unexpected and interesting, then that that's a good thing. But um yeah, to kind of shoe in shoehorn in something um just just to do it or just to be different, you have to here's the thing, you have to because I get this a lot too. I get you know, I make some uh I I I give a cautionary word here and there, or I advise. Against something that or some kind of technique that the that a client is doing, and they'll inevitably say something like, Well, uh, Stephen King does this. And I'm like, Okay, but this is your first book. Like, and you're not doing it like Stephen King. And are you can you stand there on a at a trial and justify the reasons why you're using this technique and what it's producing and and what effect you want it to produce? So very often, like the you have to be able to to to defend it in a way that's um uh you know, I think very strong and and cogent. You can't just kind of throw it into the mix because it's oh, let's just see what happens.

SPEAKER_02 44:43

Um you need to feel it, you need to be experienced. And sometimes things just come out of nowhere and they just feel right, like the high register horn section for two measures in Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. It just all of a sudden the symphony just kind of stops and you go and then boom, right back. Right. No one ever did that, it's eccentric, it's weird, but it's so integrated into our lived experience with that masterpiece, we just take it for granted after the fact. And yet, if you look at the score, it literally is unprecedented and makes no sense, but it but it but it works, and on the flip side, you've got experimental fiction too, like Dan Daneluski's House of Leaves.

SPEAKER_04 45:30

Do you remember that book?

SPEAKER_02 45:31

Yeah, Danelusky. It it took the the concept of concrete poetry, which became popular in Germany after World War II, where you mix syntax and semantics. So how text looks on a page adds a uh a layer of meaning to the storytelling, and he went he went bonkers with that whole concept, right? So parts of it I'm reading it, I'm I was literally terrified reading it because the words are going down the drain or into the attic, and it's woo, I I got it. Other parts I just found tedious and just like a head trip thought experiment.

SPEAKER_01 46:10

Yeah, there's definitely uh it it's funny. I I do think that there are saying something as a gimmick is not necessarily an insult. Because again, like what I was saying, if the gimmick works, I'll I'll run with it. If if the gimmick is just constantly and crudely smacking me in the face all the time, and it's just a you know clumsy ballet dance on the part of the author, that you know, clearly it's not it's not serving the book. But um I enjoyed House of Leaves because everything came together to kind of produce this mood. Right. And it was a tonal consistency. It very much produced, I I'm assuming what he wanted it to produce in people, and most people. Parts of it literally freaked me out. I was into it. Yeah, sure. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, well, just the layered mystery, the fact that there's a story in the footnotes, um, you know, this it's like a yeah, three different threads, um, you know, all just kind of layered on top of one another and um structured differently, even typographically. It's it was it was very interesting. I think it produced a a sort of a mini-industry, sub-industry of uh similar experimental speculative fiction, at least at for the time. There's another one that I read called Raw Shark Texts. Um have you heard of that one? Yeah, which is kind of similar. It's I think it's it stands on its own. It's not ripping off House of Leaves or anything like that, but you know, you would have I think was it the concept was essentially instead of an actual ocean, you have a conceptual ocean of information. And so you have predators in this ocean of information, and they take on forms of predators in the real world because that's how our brains might perceive them. And so you would have, you know, a page where there's a there's a period, and then the period gets bigger and bigger over the period, you know, and it becomes like a shark that you know, full of words. You know, it's it's it's you know, you don't want to do it all the time, but it's interesting, it's it changes things up.

SPEAKER_02 48:13

It's kind of fun, and that again, that relationship between syntax and semantics I find fascinating, like form and content. Yeah, and one thing that that I've been fascinated by and to a certain extent has driven me nuts is the ad hoc nature of prose. So, for example, a paragraph could be a single word for emphasis, right? Often is, and good writers will break it up. And we're used to prose being kind of random and flowing, it's it's relaxing tension builds, it's released a short paragraph, a long paragraph. Otherwise, it could be just tedious, like you're reading code. But it bothered me. And when writing a story, the idea that you had no guardrails and that it could be so ad hoc created some tension for me. So I wrote a novel where each paragraph is three lines obsessively, so it looks like lyric poetry. Oh, it's writing it, I was gamified because I was limited in a sense to a tweet per paragraph, something like 130 to 160 characters, and then I had to write that way, and then it became modular and scalable. So if I had to edit parts, I could move things, I didn't have to break up paragraphs. Oh, that's interesting, and it became kind of its own thing. So I veered into that semi-experimental world, yeah. And but I didn't do it as a gimmick, it kind of came up naturally as a way to to express things in 2026 with that staccato rhythm of our lives, like boom, boom, boom, boom.

SPEAKER_01 49:55

That see, you're I mean, you're touching on what I was saying earlier. It's sort of like my second person in in my novel. Like it it comes up organically, it's a clearly it your subconscious wanted to uh create this effect using this technique uh for this story, and you can defend it. You know exactly you can artistically justify it, you know exactly why you're why you're doing this and what you hope to produce by doing it. Um and I think yeah, that that that's cool. That's something that I I feel like a lot of authors, especially more beginners, don't really take into account. I mean, they have a lot on their plate to begin with, of course, but just producing the the the the story. But something to really that I think is important that it is often overlooked is paragraph design and and visual design on the page. I mean, when someone is just randomly opening your book, do you want to invite them in or do you want to just sort of smack them in the face with a brick of text? Or do you want to to to seem very just kind of loose and billowy and and fluffy? And I mean, these things kind of happen in the in the subconsciousness of of readers as they're as they're sort of perusing your text. And so um I I think, and even as they're actually reading the text too, I think it's uh you know, the visual layout of of the words on the page is very important to kind of lead them through and to build um the ebb and flow of the of the rhythm of the story.

SPEAKER_02 51:22

I think they're interdependent and being conscious of that, and when you reach a certain level of proficiency to your point, you don't have to worry about baseline so much. And new challenges arise, and you want to overcome them and provide solutions to problems that, in a sense, you create just to make your storytelling better, more precise, more compelling. Right. And and the sky's the limit for that kind of stuff. It's it's fun, fun to embrace it if you want to dedicate yourself to it.

SPEAKER_01 51:56

No, for sure. And and and it really has to, you can you can get very much caught up in what you said earlier, the the Amazon rankings. Um and nothing kills passion like turning it into a profession.

SPEAKER_02 52:12

And so you it's worse. This this goes back to my my collapsing personal finance spreadsheet. As long as I'm just erupting in content, I feel the day is good, and then we'll we'll we'll worry. I I still work, I still have to juggle, but but it's a matter of prioritization and it's a matter of passionately loving what you do, and hell's bells, just go for it, have fun with it.

SPEAKER_01 52:39

I don't so I don't really have this. Uh this is not um really what I've consciously decided to do, but I think broadly speaking, I've operated you know touching again on on taking things from the screenwriting world. There's a there's sort of a uh a general mantra in the in the screenwriting world, one for me, one for them. And I think I've kind of followed that um half consciously in my own work. So like one for me, one for them, meaning that like, oh, I write something for myself, and if it sells, great. But I really just want to realize this work. And then one for them, which is like, okay, this is this is mine, yes, but I'm writing more to market. You know, I'm I'm I'm trying to follow certain beats and trends. Um everything has to come from me. I don't, I don't, I don't pursue an idea that that I haven't thought of and that which doesn't spark me, but there are ideas which are more commercially viable, of course. And so, you know, I'll write something that is, you know, makes makes my agent happy. Like, oh, I think I could sell this. And then once I'm done with that, and and I'm like, okay, I really just want to go weird. I won't want to experiment now, and then then I'll just, you know, dive into something that yeah, may may not sell.

SPEAKER_02 54:00

That light bulb went off for me recently. I had Al Hagen on on the podcast, and he's a military science fiction writer. He's got a post-apocalyptic series called Hexon Through Canon Publishing. All right, yeah. So he's got five books in the series, and he was my fellow anthologist for the 2026 anthology of science fiction authors. So I was in this in this compendium, okay. So I had him on the podcast, and he's talking about military science fiction. He hooks me up with Mike Morton, who's also in this ensemble of military science fiction writers, yeah, who hooks me up with JF Holmes, who publishes Canon. Okay, so while I'm talking to him, a light bulb went off. I have a character in my three-line obsessed science fiction novel who's like this alien kitty cat type. She's a vicious mercenary force of nature. Nice. And then I'm thinking to myself, spin-off. So, exactly to your point, I've got this very esoteric Pynchon meets Gibson, meets Douglas Adams supernovel, which is frankly hard for me to get traction on because it's kind of out there. And then I thought, to your point, one for me, one for them. So now I'm I've got this spin-off kitty cat story, which I'm right, I'm reading Canon Publishing's books, gals and mics, and I'm gonna kind of flow in that style. I'm gonna put my three-line paragraphs to the side, and I'm gonna embrace their readership to see if I could pitch that book to them. And if not, I could even self-publish, but it's not violative because it's in my universe. And I love that idea, just one for me, one for them. I wrote this bigger book for me, and now the spin-off, let's see if it could it could engender a wider audience.

SPEAKER_01 56:00

Yeah, absolutely. And then maybe some of that wider audience might be curious enough to check out the source material.

SPEAKER_02 56:07

I love that best practice. That's that's cool. And it kind of the light bulb went off for me to just kind of kind of wing it. Super fun. Speaking of writing, though, um, before before you go off and do your million things today, can you can you tell our viewers and listeners a little bit about your your novels and your short stories? Because it's it's impressive in their own right. We've been focusing on your mentoring and editing because a lot of our listeners, again, are are all ears for that kind of best practice. But can you can you pitch us a little bit on your creative side?

SPEAKER_01 56:40

Sure, yeah, absolutely. So uh I started writing when I was about six. I uh you know it's a crass way of saying it, but I I often say there was my brain's way of going to the bathroom. It was just a bladder full of ideas that I had to, you know, release. Um and still kind of like that. I sold my first short story at 19, and then after that I I doggedly wrote a novel a year. Um sold the first one at at 27. Um, obviously, not all those novels have been published or will be published. Um, but that was just the you know, getting in my 10,000 hours to go back to Mal Malcolm Gladwell. Um so I I broadly write speculative fiction. And I I I it's funny for me um because my first non-speculative fiction novel is is coming out on May 19th, The Trail Cutter. Um, and that's a little bit more uh it's got a splash of mystery, but it's a little bit more character-oriented and more psychological and and literary, you know, um quote unquote. But uh so I kind of touching on what I said earlier, I I tend to write more about the the the literary or psychological um reaction to the the speculative aspect of of what's going on. And so I'm a little bit more Twilight Zony, I'm more Black Mirror-ish, um, I'm more Harlan Ellison-ish. Um I the the the clash of you know contemporary society and um uh the strange is is has always been something of of of interest to me. I I typically weave in a lot of philosophy and I I weave in a lot of cosmology and and I have a strong interest in metaphysics, and so but at the same time, I want to uh synthesize those things into something that is palatable for for most people. I I think a lot of my books I I try to be kind of a gateway between the commercial and the literary. That sounds high-minded, but I that's that's sort of my goal. I want to straddle the best of both. Um, and so I write, you know, I have what are typic, say, you know, nymph or fe legends in in some things, but I don't necessarily call them that. Um I there's one book, Skunk Ape Semester, which is about a zoologist who uh has a closet interest in Bigfoot because he encountered one when he was a kid. And so he has a sort of a cryptozoology passion on the side, and and he takes a sabbatical and and drives around the country and hunts up, you know, cryptids and things like that. But again, it's not it's not a jaw situation. It's a little bit more sober-minded. It's it's it it draws from real cryptid uh lore and cryptid encounters. Um and it's a little bit more scientific, uh, for lack of a better term, in its approach. Um, I do psychological horror, uh, the the one that I mentioned earlier, The Prince of Earth. Um that's uh that's about a woman who is hiking, backpacking the Scottish Highlands and encounters a malevolent creature on the mountain Ben McDwee, which is a real haunted mountain in Scotland. Um and it kind of opens up doorways into her past and future, and and the the story becomes kind of jumbled such that you're not quite sure in almost a David Lynch way, um, you know, what what is real and what is when. And so so I love playing with that. I love playing real with reality, I love playing with perspective, I love playing with consciousness. I love just delving into you know psychedelic states of mind and how those getting back to Gradby's rainbow, like the mind and the matter connect and matter connection, and how you're not quite sure what is mind and what is matter, um, you know, what is producing what.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:27

And the living and the dead. Yeah, I love exploring that dusk. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:34

Pynchon was obsessed with boundaries between states that's driving like Mason and Dixon, right? The Mason Dixon line, literally dividing the country, which by the way is another incredible novel. So if you get get a chance for that, it's I I love uh Crying of Lot 49.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:54

I've not tackled Mason and Dixon yet. As I mentioned, yeah, Gravity's Rainbow was my first big uh pinchant voyage. Um, I've talked to Pinchon scholars, funnily enough, who who admit that, yeah, Mason and Dixon, that was the one that that was the hardest from them for them to get through. This is just me reporting this. I don't I don't not because it's bad, just because it's very dense.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:16

Very dense, and he copies the uh 19th century style of pro. He capitalizes proper nouns and he's got m-dashes way before AI. So it's proper nouns capitals and big M-dashes, and it's it's exotic. It's like you're entering a different world. Interesting, yeah. Great, great stuff. And and just commenting on him as an extrapolation, uh, I find this fascinating. I'm curious your opinion, which is you you know that spark of creativity where the muse, we court the muse our whole life. Sure. And and every once in a while we're lucky enough for her to make herself available and we become a channel or a conduit. And some of us are lucky enough to experience this for five minutes or five years or even 50. But to me, what's fascinating is when a genius goes off the rails because they they know all the rules, they've proven themselves, they've created masterworks, and then you're like, What is this? Yeah, right. So, what do you think happens when the mighty fall? And in Pynchon's case, it's against the day. So I don't know what the scholars think of that one, but it's his longest, biggest book, and in my humble opinion, is a huge mess. Oh, interesting. Yeah, how is that? How do you feel about this idea that there's something magical about creativity? There's definitely methodology and learning the craft, yeah. But but sometimes you got it and sometimes you don't. Sometimes you feel like a nut.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:50

Yeah, I I think there's there's a Harold Bloom, uh, the literary critic talks about exuberance a lot and how that, especially in the context of Gravity's Rainbow, but you know, in uh wider contexts as well. Exuberance being a a a marker of the aesthetic read, you know, or the the high aesthetic, I guess, you know, the the sense that the author is is at play and in control of of the forces um of his of his story and uh and how he's uh he or she is. Yeah, yeah. Both letting them like letting the horses run wild, but also disciplining them in a way that is um you know, uh very uh I guess artful and and which which um you know produces the um the best of of of the of of all possible worlds in terms of the of the what they want to produce. Um so yeah, and I think that that and I've noticed this in myself too, your twenties and your thirties when you're you know in the shallow end of of your adulthood, um when you're transitioning from adolescence or childhood into adulthood, I really think that is not only do you have more energy, but your your you know your sense of possibility is much more um accommodating and and and much greater. And I I think you haven't been wait generally speaking, you haven't been weighed down with with as much. You haven't gotten your ass your ass kicked by life yet. You're not as jaded, you have a lot more stamina, you know, ideas are sparking left and right, you you're you're with your friends, um you know, every everything is is new and and everything is there for you to explore. And I think that that is both uh true physically and and mentally, and I think um and creatively, and I and I think that not to say that all all the great work is produced only in their 20s and 30s, but I think that I've definitely noticed that that's when I got the most ideas most frequently. Um and I get I get a really good idea maybe every six months now, but it used to be like every week or two, every couple weeks. And there's still a backlog of things I thought about like 10 years ago that I still have yet to write. So I'm thankful for that. It's like a reservoir of ideas, but um I you become much more discriminating, I think, and that that uh as you get older, and that slows you down a little bit. I mean, it makes you a more careful craftsman, a better craftsman. But there's something to be said for just the the the fluid, almost naive, kind of energetic state of youth where you're just kind of like, oh yeah, I'm just let it flow. Just let's let's just hit it. And and I think that produces in the best writers um that sense of exuberance that glows on the page.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:51

And it's a fine-tuning balance because all the horses are let out of the stable and you've got an amazing amount of horsepower. But but if they're not direct. Properly, they stampede through the town. Yeah, pretty much. Yeah. And it's net net negative. And it's a nice little balance of just getting all that energy. I call it not burning the bacon. Like bacon's gotta be just crispy, just right. But if you leave it for only 20 more seconds, you're gonna burn it. And I think literature is a lot like that. You've got all these competing forces in this cauldron of creativity. All these right, all these dials are turned just precisely, and it and that either leads to genius or disaster if you if you turn it up all the way.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:38

Yeah, I think the variables variables have to be uh aligned. I mean, the the right context in terms of the time of your life, the right idea, and its intersection with that time, the people around you, um, what you're reading. I mean, all these things factor in. I think that there's just an unquantifiable number of things that could affect it. Um, so I do I'm not dismissing the the possibility that there could be something, you know, an X-magical factor, but I think there's there there are a lot of um maybe more prosaic subconscious factors that that play into it as well that we just can't account for. Um I was gonna say too that regarding genius going off the rails, it's interesting with James Joyce, um he in Portrait of the Artist as a young man, he actually just lays out his plan for his literary career. So Stephen, his um, you know, basically um in Portrait of the Artist as a young man. Uh I and I forget the exact uh vocabulary, but he basically walking with his friend, he says something to the effect of, you know, literature, you know, a liter a literary career kind of starts small, you know, with short stories and poems, and then it gets into auto fiction, you know, autobiographical fiction, which is portrait of the artist as a young man, and then it gets into the epic, which is Ulysses, and then it gets beyond, which is Finnegan's Wake. So I feel like maybe Ulysses was his kind of gravity's rainbow, and to many Finnegan's Wake was just him going off the rails and just and you know, how do I what do I do now? Like, how do I play with language beyond what I've already done? How do I explore beyond what I've already explored? And sometimes I I think it it manifests differently for every every writer, but I think there there's definitely a sense of maybe been there, done that, and trying to avoid that, and sometimes they uh scale the walls even further and produce something that is yet more interesting, or they just crash down and break away.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:42

If Ezra Pound tells you that he doesn't understand what the hell you're trying to do, Ezra Pound couldn't read Finnegan's way. So if Ezra Pound doesn't understand it, who will, right? Well, and and and like sometimes too much is a little too much. Are you writing for the ages or are you writing for your own reflection of your former grand self? Right. Yeah, I mean that's the question. But but it is exciting and thrilling, and writing is such a solitary endeavor, it's so unbelievably demanding, and the return on investment, at least in material terms, is one of the dumbest things you can do. You're probably better off buying and selling crypto or real estate or learning some other viable skill. So if you're gonna do it, you gotta love it. And if you love it, you need to stay true to yourself. And if you stay true to yourself, you're always experimenting and tinkering and trying to have fun.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:45

Yeah, it's it's the I've never understood the yeah, it's thankfully I don't really see it in real life that much, but yeah, I see it often portrayed in TV and and movies where the the writer is sitting down, you know, with a blank page, like, hmm, what should my next book be? Or what what what should my next no, like we all know what the next book is gonna be. I mean, I don't know, I have ideas for the next 10 years. I've never quite understood that aspect. Um, it's it's you know, disciplining yourself, knowing which idea speaks to you the strongest, um, how to realize that idea, the you know, do it justice. Uh, you know, that's where all the the gnarl ups happen. But yeah, I'd never lack for for ideas that are constantly pounding my brain. And and it if you don't have that feeling of ideas constantly pounding your brain, it's it's probably not worth pursuing.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:37

And the other thing is if you're not actually doing it, college is a lot like this, right? In the younger years, to your point, you're sipping espresso or you're drinking Red Bull and you're thinking about thinking about thinking about doing it. And this could go for years and sometimes indefinitely. So are you really a writer, or you just have this glamorized vision of of being Franz Kafka and hanging out with uh with uh Trotsky in a cafe in Austria? I mean, what what's your motivation? And to your point, you gotta feel that idea. Stand-up comics like Bill Burr, Louis CK, you can tell that these guys always are firing. It's always there, they have so many ideas that they can't wait to just get it out there and refine it. And if you don't have that inner fire burning and that madness percolating, then it's really a tough, a tough uphill battle doing something where your interests, time, and money might be better served elsewhere. And it's not a criticism, but you gotta be in it to win it.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:45

No, for sure. Yeah, also there's no denying that there's probably some. I I sort of said this earlier, but there's there's some ego at play. I mean, at some level, you have to believe that the world will benefit from you writing this thing. You know, it's just the way that I'm sure Bill Burr thinks that the world will benefit from his commentary, you know, and millions of people enjoy it. So that's you know, that's great. But like, I yeah, you just really have to um be humble, of course, but also uh, you know, be true to the demands of of your own inner self and and what uh what idea is is demanding uh to be heard, and and um I think yeah, you just have gotta cater to it.

SPEAKER_02 1:12:32

Having an internal vision, you know where you're headed, you don't know exactly what it is, but you you can kind of see it. And the delta between that vision of that story coming to life and where you're at in sequence is the dynamic tension that that wakes you up, keeps you cranking, and uh and the struggle is real but eminently worthwhile if you could get close. And if you actually exceed your own expectations with a project, I can't describe a more satisfying feeling that I've ever had in my whole life than when we're all so self-critical, especially when you're younger, and it's always disappointing this delta between that vision and what you're doing, right? But if you can exceed your own expectations exactly, exactly that's a win right there.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:26

Absolutely. Um yeah, you just don't know you don't quite know where something comes from. I mean, it it comes from as you you you used the term cauldron, but earlier, but yeah, there's just always some bubbling test tube or cauldron, you know, deep in your psyche, and and it's you just have to keep feeding it. You have to keep reading, um, you have to keep writing, you have to keep, you know, thinking, exploring as much as you can, uh, stimulating yourself in whatever way. Um you know, so I I it's you know, keep that aspect of of play alive for sure. Um I uh yeah, so that's I always say that reading is inhaling and writing is exhaling. I mean uh that that's another thing that I've I've noticed too with a lot of clients is that they they simply don't read enough. Um you know, or they read one author. I think that's another thing that I would want to um you know emphasize to to any beginners who may be listening here is that like my writing really what you said earlier, you know, oh, you know, coming into new graduating in into new modes of of of uh self-improvement in terms of your your skill and your craft and your vision. Um that really accelerated when I finally broke out of the rut of like the five authors that I would always read when I was like, you know, late teens, early twenties. You know, people would tell me like, oh, you should read um, you know, break out of the your comfort zone and and I don't know, read Hemingway or somebody like, eh, I don't really write like Hemingway, so why bother? And that's just arrogance in in a in a different way. And it's uh so um and so I uh once I stopped swimming limited laps in my own pool and just took a you know took a voyage on the ocean of content and literature that is out there, you're it really enriches your style and your voice. It because it you can play with so many more techniques, so many more um styles and how they interact with your style. Uh it's just so much more fun and and and makes your work that much broader and more interesting and and unique. And so I uh when I when I read people who only read Stephen King, I mean it they often sound like pale imitations of Stephen King. So, you know, and it's great that you do read, but yeah, you you need to really broaden your repertoire.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:02

Be careful whom you worship because you might be undercutting your own voice that's dying to get through, and you're just clouding it with someone else's success and someone else's vision. Another aspect that I found really useful is don't just write, pay attention to the world. We live in speaking of a cauldron, a cauldron of culture, history, technology. Absolutely. It's an inflection point for the species. And when I read science fiction that reads like something Asimov would have written in 1958, I'm like, well, it's got it's got vintage appeal, but our world and the front page of any newspaper is more interesting than the concept that's being struggled through in this science fiction story. Then I'm kind of like, I see what you're doing, but maybe pay attention to the world and try to infuse your writing and creativity with some of the amazing happenings that's going on right in front of our face. And I take a lot of inspiration from the news, yeah, from reading, not just fiction and not just one writer, but philosophy, technology. Understand what a generative pre-trained transformer is. Learn something, yeah. Understand what we're up against, and stay on the pulse of what's going on because that'll infuse into your writing and make it topical and relevant and dramatic.

SPEAKER_01 1:17:36

Yeah, the worst thing you could do is is on all levels is isolate yourself, you know, physically from from other people, conversations, of course, but also just from information and and uh like you said, news. Um, you know, some people avoid one thing or the other because they feel they don't want to be contaminated or or or distracted. But I to your point, I think they they build and they feed and they inform way more than they distract. And so not to say that there can't certainly be terrible distractions from the outside world, but you know, they we're writing about the outside world, so how can you avoid it?

SPEAKER_02 1:18:19

And you know, take take from everywhere. Yeah, take from uh borrow from this and that and then get inspiration. And you know what what other people throw away, maybe you could use it. And what you think you're gonna use, try to throw it away and think of something better and more out of the box for you. And interesting things might happen. Could be could be more fun than you ever thought.

SPEAKER_01 1:18:43

It's also important to read. I think it was um Ian McEwen who said you don't you want to read widely because if you don't, you don't know who you're imitating. You may not know, yeah, you know, you may just pick up something on the ether and and it's a total cliche, you know, tonally, verbally, rhetorically. But yeah, if you if you educate yourself on where all this stuff comes from, you can synthesize something new.

SPEAKER_02 1:19:14

And for science fiction writers, stop pulling stuff out of your ass. That's my best practice. So it's fun to make stuff up, and you can go full Star Wars with transluminal travel and gravity on spaceships, and you know, they're just vehicles for getting you where you need to go, and the context of aliens is just kind of cool. But know a little science and and ground yourself not only on the artifice of writing and the craft, like get your grammar right, take a class or two or uh lesson with Mike here, hone your skills, but at the same time, just know a little bit of what you're writing about. If you're science fiction, get your fiction right and spend just a little time with the science because I think it'll make your overall storytelling better.

SPEAKER_01 1:20:07

That's my uh absolutely so just to kind of um magnify what you said uh earlier about being in touch with current events and relevant topics.

SPEAKER_00 1:20:20

I think it's it's an amazing situation, amazing challenge to uh an amazing opportunity.

SPEAKER_01 1:20:31

That we uh you anyone who's writing science fiction is living in an age where we are openly talking about uh alien visitation in a way that's not totally scorned. You know, the halls of power are talking about it, um, the military is talking about it, and in an age where if you want to submit a science fiction story, there's a disclaimer that says no AI written work, no robot written work. So that we have aliens and robots now. And so what can science fiction authors do with that? Um, and how can we go forward? I mean, you know, this is be like you said, it's beyond Asimov because we're we're kind of entering the age of 50 science fiction.

SPEAKER_02 1:21:15

The answer is a lot, you could really make your writing super cool and bringing up AI, which is an inevitable topic now. I'm curious about your overall take on the use of AI, but I use it as a very useful researching tool. So I use it like a super Google, yeah, where uh I look science up, and for my science fiction novel, I had some hard science in it, transluminal travel and a Cubier Starship. Yeah, and I talked a little bit about quantum mechanics, quantum teleportation, because it's central to the plot. And I did my research, I did my homework, and it made I thought the writing better, and it made me think about stuff I never would have thought about before, to the point where it added whole scenes and plot elements that made my story just richer and more fulfilling.

SPEAKER_01 1:22:10

There's nothing wrong with that. I am not a hardline anti-AI guy um when it comes to the tools surrounding writing. So I'm 200% against using it to compose the actual story.

SPEAKER_02 1:22:28

Same here. I typed every word from from these delicate fingers, and my Amazon Basics keyboard got a pounding. But uh use AI where it where it's useful and doesn't short circuit your own creativity.

SPEAKER_01 1:22:41

But even that, um, I can put in a or I can offer at least one exception. Um and it's not really an exception, I guess it's sort of a squishy exception, but so I had a client, do have a client, uh actually, um, ongoing's been ongoing for a while. Um he's brilliant in so many ways, but um is not still can't quite because of a number of factors, like you can't quite close the the deal on writing a publishable book. Um and so no matter how many times I would edit his book, you know, edit to the point of almost ghostwriting. Um not I mean not truly, but uh a lot of redlining, a lot of revising and restructuring, um, lots of ideas to how to for how to you know approach this differently. Um he just wasn't quite getting it. Um and so what he did was he basically had AI produce a version of his book and he studied it. Um and AI kind of did the ghostwriting that I didn't want to do or would ever would refuse to do. And so he's not using that text as the book, he's using it to learn off of, essentially, you know, how to better construct Simile's metaphors and and um how to better put together a story and and its structure and things like that. And so I think that it can be a useful tool in that in that vein as well. And sometimes, you know, he he uses a line from AI, and I, okay, that's fine. Probably not gonna get published, you know, anyways, or he's gonna self-publish. Um we got these tools, why not use them? Yeah, yeah. But I'm I'm totally fine with with using it to brainstorm, as you said. I'm I'm even okay as someone who absolutely hated writing synopses, I'm okay using it to spit out a synopsis, but you need to go over it and tweak it and and restructure it. Because it, you know, the synopsis are not terribly great, but as a as a spine, as something as a vertebrae to work off of, it it produces, I think it does the the grunt work of of of that, which is nice, which frees you up to to you know actually write. Because a lot of the a lot of the in in the you know and devising a marketing plan, that's another thing. So all these all these tangential tests that generally are are kind of a grind, I think. I have no problem using AI because especially when it comes to marketing, all that was just data uh aggregation, anyways, you know, even before AI.

SPEAKER_02 1:25:20

You might get a kick out of this usage. I don't know if you've ever heard of this. So I published my book, and it's my dream book, and I'm I'm in love with my own ship base. That's great. I loved it. So, but more or less, it's gone what I call over the head and between the legs for most people. It's too sophisticated and too gritty, but again, it's just my hot and sour soup. I'm swimming in it. It's great. So I'm kind of like, I wish I would have the Atlantic Monthly write a big piece on my book on these particular themes. Or I wish a graduate student over at Oberlin would write a thesis on my book. Yeah, so that's what I did. I went to my chatty bro and I prompted, I loaded up my whole damn book as a project, assuming that they're gonna just bust it up and steal it anyway. And then I I I within the project, accessing my source material, I said, write a 2500-word New Yorker review of my book highlighting the generation wars between men and women and how it played out, and da-da! Within about I think a nanosecond, it popped it out. I iterated it a couple times, you know, to tweak it. Right. And then I got my I got my uh New Yorker, Atlantic, uh, New York Times book reviews of my novel. I guess I mean I had fun with it, and I even posted a few on Medium, like here's my that's hilarious. This is OpenAI's version of my New Yorker review. So there you go.

SPEAKER_01 1:27:01

All you can do is you can have a a blurb with a New York Times book review tag, but then in a very small font, open AI. Written by OpenAI, right, right, right.

SPEAKER_02 1:27:12

Uh this shit's fun. Being a Luddite is one thing, and then being a prompt jockey BS writer cranking out 10 books a week on Amazon is the other extreme.

SPEAKER_01 1:27:24

Or exploiting something, you know, like someone wrote a book about Maui wildfires like a week after the Maui wild wildfires. I mean, it was AI generated.

SPEAKER_02 1:27:34

Yeah.

unknown 1:27:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:27:35

So you see it all the time. So it's just, you know, it's like like people used to say, drink responsibly. Right. We should have like a meme AI responsibly as a writer. Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 1:27:46

Yeah, it's it's a novel text, so it's gonna produce swings in our culture, you know, people who are, you know, forever anti and people who are, you know, just uh forever embracing it. But I think it's gonna even out sort of like the internet. I mean. I mean, internet was scary novel tech. And then but in 20 years, babies born now are not gonna they're not gonna get swept up into this controversy of where they're whether something is AI produced.

SPEAKER_02 1:28:11

They're gonna be like, why do you guys make such a big deal out of this? You know, if if they have jobs and the world still exists.

SPEAKER_01 1:28:18

Exactly. Yeah, exactly. Well I often liken it to how um, you know, for for us when YouTube came along, it was a very kind of wild westy, unstable, illegitimate media platform. But for people, for Gen Z, born in 2000, 2001, um, or a little later, it was as institutional and historical as NBC was for us. You know, and so I yeah, uh basically just to repeat what I was saying, uh babies born now in in 20, 25 years, if they they watch a movie with AI content, it's just gonna be a fact of life. They're not gonna care.

SPEAKER_02 1:29:00

I mean to your point, it oscillates like there's been a revulsion to AI video slop, which pretty much precipitated the Sora app being pulled to a certain extent, copyright violations notwithstanding slop. So it ebbs and flows. You're like, I or you're just so sick of it, or you embrace it, and it finds some kind of medium where it integrates with our lived experience for good or bad. And life is always in flux. Heraclitus was right. Uh, the world is fire. You just gotta be transformative, you gotta be flexible, and inspirational guys like you, Mike, who uh keep keep the cauldron mixing. So thank you for everything that you do. Oh, thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, Mike Robinson, who is a teacher, mentor, editor, he's a novelist, short story writer. In the links below, you can contact Mike if you want advice about your novel, your writing. He's there for you. And he's got a whole portfolio and an entire oove of great content to set the example of doing it right. Well, thank you, Mookie. I appreciate it. Right back at you. Follow up with you six months a year. Um, just it's it's such a joy talking to you about all things literature and writing. Absolutely, it's the same. But I would love to do that. That'd be great. It's been great. Good luck to you, Mike. And you've got you've got another book coming out, you said, right?

SPEAKER_01 1:30:28

I do, yeah, on May 19th. It's called The Trail Cutter. You can pre order it now. It's on on Amazon. Another link below.

SPEAKER_02 1:30:36

Get back to all the things you do, and thank you for making time in your super busy multitasking day for uh for being on the science fiction and fantasy factory. We've cranked it out this afternoon.

SPEAKER_01 1:30:48

Awesome. Thank you so much, Mugu.