J. Kenton Pierce Unleashes Freedom, Firepower, and Frontier Science Fiction

Some writers build stories. J. Kenton Pierce seems to have stories stalking him until he writes them down.

He joins Mookie in the 49th episode of The Science Fiction & Fantasy Factory for a lively, sharp-edged discussion about creating an interstellar universe where frontier settlers, political schemers, orbital AI-controlled kill-satellites, engineered soldiers, traders, autocrats, and stubborn individualists all collide. Pierce breaks down the world behind his Prometheus award nominated A Kiss for Damocles, his debut novel, and An Apple for the Legion, a new prequel that follows a genetically optimized true believer slowly realizing the machine she serves is rotten at its core.

What becomes obvious is that J. Kenton has thought through his universe: politics have logic, technology has consequences, the colonies feel lived in. Power centralizes, people resist, systems decay, and survival forces ugly compromises. 

The conversation also digs into Pierce’s libertarian-leaning instincts: skepticism of concentrated power, respect for local autonomy, distrust of coercive systems, and a bias toward people being left alone to build their own lives. But his characters are flawed, surprising, contradictory human beings because the story comes first. That alone separates him from many modern writers who treat fiction like a sermon with costumes.

Mookie and J. Kenton also get into the real craft of writing: why many authors obsess over worldbuilding and neglect character, why beloved franchises collapse under bad storytelling, why heroes need limitations, and why the best fiction often arrives when characters stop obeying the outline and start causing trouble.

Pierce’s writing process is its own adventure. He describes decades of compulsive daydreaming, scenes arriving out of nowhere, pacing around the room until ideas lock into place, and then unloading them in a rush. By avoiding the productivity myth and fake guru routine, J. Kenton has a mind naturally wired to create.

The Guest

I'm a retired Goth and somewhat disgruntled yet generally mild-mannered veteran of the Gulf War, with experience in molecular biology, social services, and way too much retail when younger. In a way, these stories were inevitable. I gamed excessively and often had more fun creating new characters and filling out those tiny little character bio screens than playing. My fleetmates in the Star Trek Online guild “TOS Veterans” started up some RP stories and encouraged me to beef up my main toon’s bio. A few hundred words of character background turned into 25K of story/fanfic.

Finally, I realized that I wasn’t satisfied simply consuming stories or weaving my characters into other people’s worlds. They're kind of pushy. I suppose that brings us to influences. too many to really list, from H. Ryder Haggard and Mark Twain to Andre Norton and Harlan Ellison, to James H. Schmitz and J. Michael Straczynski, Lois McMaster Bujold to Jim Butcher... And everyone in between. And now I'm sitting with my favorite authors at the Prometheus Awards table, who knew?

His Novels & Short Stories

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:02

Hello and welcome to Science Fiction and Fantasy Factory. I'm excited to have Jay Kenton Pierce in the factory today. Welcome, Jay Kenton. Hey, thanks. Really great to be here. Congratulations on being nominated for the Prometheus Award for your it's your debut sci-fi novel, right? Kiss of Damocles, is that right?

SPEAKER_01 0:29

Yep. And it's kind of mind-blowing. I'm on the finalist table with authors that have written some of my favorite books.

SPEAKER_02 0:37

That's a trip. How did you um get connected?

SPEAKER_01 0:39

I uh well I sold a few uh short stories to the Grantville Gazette for the Baines Universe Annex. Um back when it was still uh you know before Eric Flint passed away. And uh through the the people I was acquainted with from the bar, I learned about the the North Texas troublemakers and uh the writer dojo. So I started following that, big Larry Correa fan also, and uh bumbled into the uh alpha mercs, and also that's how I learned about Recontier Press. This is when they were doing uh about the time that Space Marines 3 came out, and I submitted a story to it and they said, Why yes. And I submitted about uh I I think I I had about a 50-50 hit rate with their um anthology submission calls. And um after they ran maybe 10 or 11 of my short stories, they noticed that they're all set in the same universe, the same story verse. Most of them on the same planet. And at LibertyCon, uh, I can't remember if it might have been Ian, or he might have had Jim Button on me. One of the two said, Hey, we understand you have man some manuscripts set in this same universe. And I'm like, why yes, yes, I do, for so they took a look at them and uh they liked what they saw. They liked how it tied in with the uh short stories they'd already run, and boom, great press.

SPEAKER_02 2:12

Congratulations, you're doing it the indie way, right? You're crawl walk run, you got shorter stories, you're networking, and uh Recontour is part of that military sci-fi crowd. You got Canon Publishing, you got homes from Canon as well, and they all they all know each other. Three Raven Press. They're all they're all buddies with each other, and uh it sounds like you wired yourself into that network with your shorter pieces and your social networking, and then you built it up from there into uh the debut novel that got noticed.

SPEAKER_01 2:51

Yeah, I'm not I'm still not even sure how it got noticed, but then again, I'm I'm I'm more of the nerd writing type. I let the people who are smarter than me handle the marketing and the the PR and such. I'm just a monkey with a keyboard. I let them do the business things because I just don't have the bandwidth.

SPEAKER_02 3:09

Most of us are like that. I'm a writer too, and one of our biggest frustrations is just that marketing side, getting seen. We're sitting there putting all our heart and soul into doing the actual content creation, and then finding consumers is just like a different skill set. Uh, but you managed to pull it off pretty well with these few touch points, making making some friends, taking some names, and uh it it got you uh into what would be considered the mainstream of of the genre.

SPEAKER_01 3:42

Yeah, and it's still kind of surreal.

SPEAKER_02 3:45

Good. Congratulations again. And you've got a new book that Sam gave me a heads up on an apple for the Legion, part of the same universe. Do you want to tell us about that? Let's pitch your new book a little bit to our listeners and viewers.

SPEAKER_01 4:01

An Apple for the Legion is a prequel. Um, people who have read the books, or even most of the sh any of the short stories, are probably familiar with Hesperides Colonies Long Night. Invasion, asteroid bombardment, the invaders didn't have enough boots to take all the population centers, so they just decided to scrub the larger ones out and take the secondary cities. And one of the asteroids they dropped hit a little bit too close to a Yellowstone-sized caldera, which then unzipped. And uh that brought on a volcanic winter and then centuries of global cooling. And this is the uh this book, this novella is the first day of that. Um it's actually from the point of view of one of the invaders, an earnest young officer who honestly believes she is humanity's righteous sword and uh stalwart shield, liberating the uh these poor slaves from the corrupt and decadent Terran Commonwealth. And of course, the a lot of my stuff is a lot of the short stories are just a historical reference that ran wild and wouldn't leave me alone. And a lot of them are uh yeah, they're prequels, they're historical references, which become very, very relevant at some point in the novels. A lot of fun with that. This one does become directly relevant to events in uh Shai's third novel, which will actually be next year.

SPEAKER_02 5:27

Reading your stuff, I get the feeling that it's a little bit like an expanse meets firefly universe. And by that I mean you got this sense of colonization, exploration, and the conflicts between classes of people, you've got politics involved, and we can get into that. And the Firefly spirit is these these people are out gunning it, right? They've got their interests clashing, you got some great characters, you got teams. Uh, is that a fair characterization for for what it's like?

SPEAKER_01 6:05

You know, for a good general uh if someone's looking for an idea what the feel of it is, yeah. Yeah, that that would pretty much cover it.

SPEAKER_02 6:14

The other thing I sense is um Sam brought it up when he was pitching your book to me, too, the new one. It's got a libertarian style flair, which is skepticism of government, big controlling forces. And you got people who are independent, they just want to be left alone, they want to do their thing, and for one reason or another, and they get they get messed around with by the power. It's an F the man kind of sensibility. Is is that fair? Reading your stuff, I got that flavor a little bit too.

SPEAKER_01 6:48

Yeah, that's that's probably a theme. Um I wouldn't really call it a an intentional political thing, because I'm I'm character-driven and story-driven. I could listen to Red Reddington read soup labels, for example, as long as the character's engaging. But I I grew up in Coleman Coke country. Uh, my family is uh dad's side of the family is from Tennessee. So the whole company store thing is a problem for me. And it doesn't matter if the company store is the company, a cartel, or the state. Uh there's there's always there are always people who want what you have or think you owe them their work. And that's that's kind of that's that's that's been a historical thing. I mean, the the English and the um American colonies, that was a common conflict. I wouldn't really I wouldn't I would hesitate to call it a political work, but you know, it's not Anthem or Atlas Shrugged. But liberty, mutual cooperation, um those are those are key values. Um if you have a political litanist test, I'm gonna fail it. Whatever faction is from. Uh my only real core ideology is the Constitution. And and that's in a textualist uh uh um interpretation. Uh because no ideology, whether it is economic, political, socio social, or even religious, they don't survive contact with reality in a pure form. Um you could call me a conservative with libertarianizing. I very, very I I really I really agree with the libertarians on many issues, and the whole we're not gonna mess with you, we're not gonna tell you how to live your life. I'm not a big fan of that. Now there are some places where I would break with the Capital L libertarians. Um I like a uh robust and redundant interstate network, not because more roads, but because I want to be able to move things painted green from one coast or border to the other swiftly. You know, I we need to be able to put troops, men, and materiel on any border as quickly as possible. That's just a a purely national defense function. Trade, commerce, tourism, those are all nice, but I'm thinking mainly national defense there. Secondary roads, um state roads, county roads, yeah, whatever, leave the Fed out of it. But I do want that that type of uh transportation infrastructure because you you can't, you know, because we're geographically isolated now, but you you can't predict what's going to be happening coming up from South America in 50 or 100 years, or the uh Chinese province of Canada, you know. So I I a lot of libertarians will throw their shoes at me for that, the really hardcore ones. But generally libertarians look at say constitution, okay. Yeah, we're okay with that. So I I'm I they're the only faction that doesn't threaten the constitution, and they generally support the Bill of Rights. Um that's that's my biggest value in terms of politics, anyway. Sister Jean-Marie will tell you about the other values I'm supposed to have that I don't always do so well with, but I think I compliment you fairly well.

SPEAKER_02 10:16

You say you're conservative with a libertarianizing. I think I'm I'm kind of moderate liberal-ish with a with a libertarianizing. The role of government is what's most problematic to me. And we might differ maybe on the minutiae having to do with this and that, but fundamentally that skepticism is, I think, a very healthy perspective. Are you familiar with Reason magazine, reason.com?

SPEAKER_01 10:44

Yes, I've uh I've I don't read them religiously, but I read them fairly regularly, at least when an article crosses my feed. And I'd say 60, 70% of the time. There are a few places I don't agree with them on. But generally speaking, uh I can vibe with them, as the kids would say. I think they say that. I might have been kids 10 or 20 years ago.

SPEAKER_02 11:06

We're dating ourselves, but we're we're spring chickens in terms of our energy and enthusiasm and output. So that that's what that's what counts. I used to fist pump with Nick Gillespie, the editor of Reason in Manhattan when I lived there. I recently moved from New York to California. I think he's a good guy, and a lot of their writers, I think, are pretty smart. But to the point of your writing, uh, that's the feeling that I got from reading your stuff, too, the sense of charismatic independence and these forces at play.

SPEAKER_01 11:40

Yeah, just not letting anybody get their boot on your neck, whether it is permitting economic dependence um or an overt political authority beyond what's needed to run a planetary government, or which is part of an interstellar empire. Constitutional Republic, by the way. Um, but the yeah, do you want a whole dissertation on the Terran Empire?

SPEAKER_02 12:09

You mentioned you're a geek, and uh, I think our listeners would uh would get into it hearing it from the author, um, especially since you're creating a contiguous world that's continuously expressed through all your books. You've got a universe, to your point, you got a planet where a lot of this goes down. So um, I think they'll be all ears to hear it right from you.

SPEAKER_01 12:35

You ask for it. Um Earth always gets saved, except for maybe Titan A.E. Most sci-fi, Earth got saved. Sometimes it's a lost home world, like the old Battlestar Galactica and uh James H. Schmidt's uh Witches of Karas, fabled Yarth or something along those lines. Oh, I didn't save Earth. Earth was nobody here but us thermophiles. Um basically there were a few independent colonies that didn't get scrubbed because no one knew where they were. And uh essentially whatever ships were in space or in transit were able to get away, got away. So a couple hundred thousand people. Kind of a galactica vibe. I I grew up on that. But uh surviving humans basically ran far and hunkered down. They made some friends with non-hostile Xeno races who had a grudge against the people that wiped out Earth. And then they came back a century or two later along with uh the imps, who are a species from my uh books that some readers will recognize, uh and the Skethya, who readers will remember references to, and stomped the uh Grey's flag. And uh the the uh humanity was at that time an autocratic empire. Because when you've got uh when you're on the endangered species list, that's an acceptable place for life but rules. But the uh first Terran Empress, basically an orphan who clawed her way to the top, uh always kept in mind that no empires is is any better than its uh monarch and the next one might be garbage. I mean Marcus Aurelius to Commodus. You know how that worked out. So the whole the whole plan was uh to move towards a constitutional monarchy, getting more and more on the constitutional end, and ultimately a republic form. Yes, you've got a federal government, you've got the articles of high law, which are the constitution and building rights. And uh as long as a colony or world didn't violate somebody's uh constitutional viol um someone's basic rights, they could run government however they wanted. It was uh a laboratory. Every colony was permitted to be a laboratory on how they did things, with the you know, certain exceptions. You know, if the fleet comes through, you don't have to quarter troops or anything like that. But you're not gonna tell the fleet, no, you can't stop at our ports before moving on to the front. You can't make war on other colonies. That gets a big stall. But yeah, people they they let the different colonies figure out how they want to do their their trade policy, their education. All their all of their internal things affect their citizens' daily lives. So people could look and say, Oh, that works well, let's try that, or ooh, that that went poorly. Stay away from that policy. And gradually the imperial family moved farther and farther away from political control to simply social engineering. Although they kept a few oh shit buttons hidden in case of emergency. Um that spirit has uh is seen in Shy and her people. One of the things that my empire did was uh localize as much production as possible. Every colony had to have the tools to make the tools, to make the machines, to make the factories. Um humanity had gone through a near extermination. So the Empress said, Let's not do that again. We want to we need to be able to start the whole race up again from any colony instead of having some colony die off because they were uh cut off from the rest of the empire. They were the only survivors. We need to be able to spring back up no matter how small a piece is uh left. So uh you had a lot of encouragement. Uh there are big box factories and such, you know, big equipment, big consumer goods. But most of your uh small stuff, uh daily items, whether it was uh guns, gas pistols, uh personal sp space opera level, personal electronics. That's all that was mostly made uh in a uh town or uh city level rather than having to be imported. Every colony had to be able to make whatever it could, everything it needed, including shipyards and such. Um imagine uh 3D printers in everybody's house. I'm not not getting into Star Trek replicator. I love Star Trek, but the the replicator economy can always bugged me. But just imagine any city in this country that could or to a good sized town where you could get any piece you needed and any part you needed for your car, whether it was vintage and antique or not, or parts for your rifle, or your satellite dish. So the they all have the tools to make the tools, and that was one of the big things that she pushed.

SPEAKER_02 17:57

Let's pin it for one second, just I summarize because there's a lot going on. So humanity is brought to the verge of extinction. That's problem number one. Then they kind of settle into these colonies that are spread out, opportunity for refurbishing the human race. Now they're isolated from each other, and what you're describing is this need for independence. You don't want a centralized monarchy because you can have a whack job and it'll ruin everything. And at the same time, you don't want to create this kind of interstellar dependence. You want to encourage independent manufacturing and existence on the part of each colony to guarantee their individual survival and ultimately the survival of the human race. And to me, you're drawing a line of parallels with what we're going through now, too, with globalization, with the United States and its relationship to other countries, and winding back to this libertarian ideal, don't tread on me. You want to find a balance between the super state, or in this case, even the human empire, and these little isolated colonies. Can I frame that up more or less directly?

SPEAKER_01 19:14

Fairly well. Um I'm trying to see if I can summarize it better.

SPEAKER_02 19:17

Um, it's your it's your stuff.

SPEAKER_01 19:20

Yeah. I usually haven't thought about it from uh this angle though. I'm usually thinking about what trouble my characters are gonna get into.

SPEAKER_02 19:27

What's gonna get to next, which is this is the world, which is you know intriguing and it's a bit of a paradigm and kind of an analog for even what we're dealing with in our historical times. But uh the characters are always central to storytelling. A lot of writers they build a great backdrop and they've got an amazing world with a detailed history, but they drop the ball when it comes to the drama that drives the story.

SPEAKER_01 19:52

I yeah, I have trouble. The story in the world can be great, but if I don't want to hang out with the characters, I just can't I bounce off of it. If I enjoy the characters, if I if I like spending time with somebody's imaginary friends, unless there's just something utterly mental that happens with the writing the plot that kicks me out of it, I'll generally put up with a lot of a lot of uh literary speed bumps as long as I'm enjoying my time with these people.

SPEAKER_02 20:22

Some writers indulge, you know, I indulge too. I set up my little soapbox and I go off on all this, but I try to keep it honed in on the character all through the character's point of view.

SPEAKER_01 20:34

I try to avoid those high inline moments. Um and I I you know have spacesuit will travel, um podcane of Mars. Those are some of my favorites. But he'd haul I he would haul that soapbox out now and again, and I'd be like, I agree with them, but oh god, please stop.

SPEAKER_02 20:52

I'm like the the roadrunner now, meet meep, a little guilty. I'm I'm guilty of that too. It's a style, but uh probably less is more. I agree with you. I try to reduce it to little sprinkles. Well, your prose is is fast moving. I just want to uh observe, too, that you're fun to read, which is very important.

SPEAKER_01 21:14

Thank you very much. Yeah, um, I have one character who occasionally lectures the protagonist, but he's an archivist. He is uh he he's a he's a teacher as much as he is an engineer and a records keeper and a war master. So he will now, every now and then, he'll he'll get to do a paragraph or two of a lecture, reminding a character that uh information is a form of power. He actually tells her greed is for amateurs. Resources and wealth are only one lever of power. And talks about how he uh goes on to remind her that control over education, which the Green Line Town leadership is trying to accomplish, control over knowledge those. Are those are other levers of power and manipulation? So there's a bit of a soapbox there, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 22:07

Let's zoom in on some of your heroes. Ultimately, a great story is a hero's journey. You give them goals that are clear, then you punch them in the face, and then they have to overcome one obstacle, which creates new problems, and then they overcome those obstacles, and then they got a macro kind of goal, and either they accomplish it or they don't, but you feel emotionally vested, right? That's good writing.

SPEAKER_01 22:31

That's what I try for.

SPEAKER_02 22:33

So tell us tell us a little bit about the hero. Let's let's maybe start with your new book that just came out Apple for the Legion.

SPEAKER_01 22:42

Apple for a Legion. The the hero, the protagonist, is an earnest young officer. Um she's a legionary, which everyone else, the people in the Terran Commonwealth, just call them gene jacks. And they also call them juggers, which is a slur, because they are they are taken from uh ovamin sperm that were donated to colonial gamete banks before their mothers and fathers went off to war when humanity was still an endangered uh species. And the uh a splinter uh nation they seceded from the Terran Commonwealth, uh, the Society for Mutual or the Fellowship of Mutual Prosperity. You can guess how that's gonna work out. Um they took their share from their own uh colonial gamete banks, they took the sperm nova of humanity's greatest heroes, and they didn't make clones of them, but sons and daughters, and they carefully optimized their genetics to make them better, faster, stronger, smarter, but still be able to breed true with baseline humans. And they also took care to essentially sculpt them genetically to make them the Olympian physical perfection as close as possible, and also to make them represent, you know, physically resemble the uh iconic hero that they were born of, you know, as sons and daughters centuries removed from their father or mother. But this is the face of a woman, you know, the the the legionary telling you to drop your weapon is the face you've seen on a statue in front of your high school. Uh imagine someone looks like George Washington or Teddy Roosevelt. Yeah, whoever whoever he your cultural hero is. And then on top of that, they're they're elite. You know, the the best training, the best equipment, and bread for bread and design for war and conquest. And she is a true believer. She has been indoctrinated since she was in an ex-vivo uterine replicator. The little fetus floating in fluid. They were playing subliminals, they were playing propaganda, because even though the little fetus won't understand it, the sounds, the patterns are there.

SPEAKER_02 24:58

The ultimate control. Congenital control.

SPEAKER_01 25:04

Yeah. The uh the uh they use uh the legions use uh AI androids. I think data without the emotion chip or a high-end terminator, not the liquid metal stuff, but you know, perfect mimicry. But instead of any type of feelings, intuition, or moral judgment, they have ideological reliability and political reliability subroutines. Um just and then those are basically raising your young Octoberists, your uh your young pioneers, um, the Red Guard. You know, every day is a lesson.

SPEAKER_02 25:49

Gargantuan North Korea here, in a sense, optimized with genetics and artificial intelligence, which is the diametric opposite of what a libertarian would would figure in a society. So that's a great setup. That's your counterpoint. So how does she figure it out? How does she uh obviously without too many spoilers, what what what's her trajectory here?

SPEAKER_01 26:15

Her trajectory is uh uh that when when uh Hephestus Park Caldera blows out, and her all the forces on a planet are basically cut off from resupply from reinforcement. And then she learns that the uh guiding cast only sent just enough to do the job. And they're yeah, she realizes this isn't just taking a few strategic systems, they must be swiping at the whole of the Terran Commonwealth. So that's a big mistake right there, because even the most basic tactical uh some of the bait most basic strategic understanding says, you never send just enough to do the job. Um and when you're cut off from control like that and the situation goes south, you start seeing the uh where the idea where the indoctrination wears thin. Uh places where the ideals that you've been told you represent are being countermanded by hire. Um orders that are just the opposite of what you've been told are your values. But see the the problem that the uh political officers have is she's a true believer who sees that uh the people she works for are violating what she believes in. Um at first it might look like this is a book about a girl who read the wrong book. And uh she is given the wrong book, intellectual contraband. But that was really that incident's just a fulcrum. There's another character who is the man with the lever, who is helping guide her through understanding what's happening, but also ultimately sets her trajectory. And I can't tell you more without spoiling.

SPEAKER_02 28:08

That's a terrific setup, and it and it really, in a sense, aggregates everything you've been talking about about your worldview and your style of writing and and the genre itself. So it's uh it's a nice, it's a nice setup. And in ways, uh you can see where it's going, but I'm sure there's surprises. It's inevitable, but still surprising in terms of where a setup like that could and should go. How about um The Kiss of Damocles? That's really what got you going as uh as a novelist, your first full-length one. It got obviously noticed and nominated. I like the setup around that one too, with the technology. Share some of that.

SPEAKER_01 28:58

Well, Kiss for Damocles is the first book in uh Shy Fen and Rose series. And that her story arc is actually the core of the series. Um, there's there's this parallel series running about Ravadia Aziz, but that uh and it's parallel independent, but Shy is the heart and soul of the Tales from the Long Knight. Um, she's a scrappy little homesteader with angry short girl energy. She and her sisters fight like Irish brothers until somebody pokes, takes a poke at one of them and then they hit like Verona. Um think Laura Ingalls with a sawed-off shotgun and extra grenades in space. Um she finds her her community is in an old iron mine. Um this is an area, this is a planet where the axial tilt is a bit greater than Earth's and a longer year. So they've got nine uh months of of uh polar night, of darkness and killing cold in the winters. They have to button up and seal everything. But then they have uh white nights of summer, nine months plus spring and fall. So they have to hunker, you know, survival is that that nine months is a long time. Uh the hydroponics go bad, uh, vermin get into the stores or fungus. So she knows famine. She knows how there's a constant worry about surviving the next winter. And her community's poor. They generally trap and export pelts and maple sugar. You know, for what for medicines, for what little high-tech stuff they can afford. Shy finds a wreck, um buried in silt and uh slowly washing free f by erosion in this draw. And the uh the materials this this old uh spacecraft is made from are incredibly valuable because the colonists can make them on a on a uh cottage industry on a workshop level. Working materials you find those salvages a lot easier than making, say, and forging high-end steel. You find a batch of it, your s your smiths, your smelters can do a lot of work with that, but cooking it up from scratch with like the vanadium and the right alloying elements. So this is a it's a bonanza. The wreck is gonna turn her town in her little homestead into a boom town. And that causes friction because the nearest big town, Green Line Town, um, the trade they're they're it's usually an assortment of trader families fighting with each other over who's the big dog. All these hubs and depots and neighborhoods in Green Line Town are they they have just enough organization to keep the cops from getting into fist fights. But someone is consolidating power, which you might think is a good thing until you see who the someone is and what their goal is. So she her find it makes her her her homestead rich, but it also kicks over a lot of apple cars. At the same time, her mom has been finally kind of levered uh into re-establishing the old prefecture government, the original colonial government. And Green Line Town wants to be the center of a new government, and the articles of high law, uh those can't those aren't relevant. You know, they weren't you know they weren't written with this type of emergency in mind, with this type of isolation in mind. All the type of stuff people who say, I'll throw the constitution out, it's irrelevant. So all those excuses. Um, collectivists, where you've got, oh, we're gonna share equally according to need, but I need my mansion, I need my villa, you know, though that type of clown. Um so Shine makes some uh she uh creates some rivals with various trading interests who she's screwing over. And she also makes some real enemies out of a would-be autocrat. And things go downhill from there.

SPEAKER_02 33:13

And there's a mechanism, the the title of the book, it's like the sword of Damocles hanging over. You've got some orbital technology, and then you've got a power mechanism that really gums the works for her.

SPEAKER_01 33:32

The uh, yeah, when the Mutual Prosperity invaded centuries ago, they deployed an orbital artillery network. It's uh it's run by an AI, and it's actually an orbital fleet. You've got your weapons platforms that drop kinetic energy weapons, you've got some larger ones with mass drivers instead of just dropping a lazy dog. And it has this whole fleet of uh supply and maintenance support craft that'll actually go out and mine the asteroid belt for more nickel cat or nickel iron to make into munitions. Its last orders from the uh before the mutual prosperity fleet was wiped out were to fire on any unauthorized wireless communications. So if you're talking on a frequency that isn't mutual prosperity, it must be counter-liberation activity and you get a rod from orbit. And unauthorized vehicular traffic. If you're if your vehicle has a mutual prosperity uh transponder or IFF equivalent, you're good to go. If it doesn't, even an internal combustion engine gets a rod because it might be partisans. You know, steam engines, that type of thing is okay. It's just considered too primitive to bother with. You know, a sailing boat with less than one map, with one mass or less, you're okay. But if you tried a you know an air car, a deuce and a half, something like that, would fetch a rod. Because Damocles is an idiot. All it knows is that it was told to drop rods on vehicles and combo. And every now and then it'll mistake something for a vehicle in combo and somebody's uh greenhouse gets clobbered. But that has been uh that's kept all the real industry underground. You know, places like Shai's Iron Mine and uh Green Line Town actually was the uh Pachico Soul Magway, an underlying underground magway network. You know, a couple hundred kilometers, all sorts of branches and hubs. People sheltered there from the ash fall, and all these uh hubs and depots, they had light industry, they had hydroponics and such, so they were able to survive and it became a town. And they can make high-tech stuff, they can use high-tech stuff. But you go outside and use a radio, you go outside and fire a Gauss pistol, oh, blip, boom, time for the kinetic energy weapon. So that's that's really put a damper on the colony's recovery. And and it's a cultural boogeyman at this point, right? And in the course of the you know, the events of A Kiss for Damocles, it goes from Shy just trying to do well for her people in her little homestead but looking at hmm, don't want to spoil. She realizes that storming heaven and tearing down Damocles is actually a realistic possibility. No silver bullet to it, no, no magic whammy gizmo that will destroy it, but the pieces come together in front of her how this could be done with the technology they have, with the power, with the population they have. And she realizes it would be a long-term project, but it's possible. And that that changes her the scope of her vision has expanded there beyond just my town, my homestead.

SPEAKER_02 37:04

You bring up these these themes in a contextually compelling way, and it's fun to listen to you tell the story. You're a good storyteller. You not only know your material, but it's multidimensional that way, and it's layered. So you've thought this through. You've got a world, you've got culture, you've got technology, you've got the conflicts that we've been talking about between the individual and the collective, between the entrepreneur and the state, between colony and empire. And then you throw in the gizmos and tech, the AI, the genetics, the mechanisms of control, and all that kind of stuff.

SPEAKER_01 37:46

It it you know it comes down to the stories that captivate me the most are about people. You could take Lois McMaster Bougeot's uh Volkassigan saga, uh Cedaganda, Barrier, Shards of Honor, and you could set you could change the setting on those. As you know, you you'd have to adjust the tech level and that, but the personalities, the conflict, the dynamics and uh between the politics and social issues, and it'd still be a great story. Uh Jim Butcher's Dresden Files. You could have him in Chicago, or you could have him on Luna, or you could have him in London 200 years ago, and they would still be great stories. So I I figure if you've got a solid solid characters and a good story, the rest is just um it's it's what flavor icing do you like?

SPEAKER_02 38:42

That's weird, it's kind of form and content, right? It in ways it's completely interchangeable, and yet the setting that you choose and the archetype of character that you throw at it then becomes its own thing. It's it's it's the the novel, the story itself, and it becomes its own universe. But it it is plug-and-play, it's modular, and it's like Mexican food, right? You can take this technology or this world or this character, and you kind of mix them up and you throw them in, but then they come to life, and then they they set their own rules and tone, create their own drama, and that's when good writing and and good storytelling really hit the ground running.

SPEAKER_01 39:29

Jim Butcher had once been asked if he had trouble getting his characters to do things, and he said, No, my characters work for me. I'm the opposite. I'm more like the company clerk who uh I hand out the duty assignments that someone else came up with, and then I follow them around writing up incident reports and trying to find out what local officials I have to bribe.

SPEAKER_02 39:55

I love I love that. I can't tell you enough how much yeah, as a writer and as a commenter and a podcaster, I love that point of view. And I've experienced it myself. I feel that I do my best work when either the guest leads the podcast or my character tells me what to write. I feel like I I need to be a tool in order for this to be successful, frankly. And I'm honored to fulfill that role with dignity and and respect because that I think is our job as a creator. Let the characters write it. You kind of set it up. And it's almost like a chess game, too. You know, the pawn moves this way, night moves that way. There are rules of the game. You might be the one who created the character the characters and how they move. You've created the the board where they play it out, but real drama happens and the best storytelling takes place where you just you set it loose. You can't think 12 moves ahead and force them to make those moves. It's gotta play out. And how it plays out organically is what it's all about. We it they surprise us, right? It's like I I I didn't know how this would would play out.

SPEAKER_01 41:10

I come up with all sorts of uh plot complications and traps, and they kind of giggle at them and point, and then walk around them and get into more trouble than I could have come up with for them. At the end of the day, a character has to stay in character. And if that person's nature is going to change, or their outlook, whether it's growing or whether it's uh you know falling back on something older, there's gotta be a reason for it that the reader can see how this person becomes harder, or how their heart is softened, or how their their scope of vision has been expanded. You've gotta the reader has to watch, has to see that journey happen and say, okay, this feels natural. Um there are some shows that there was an animated show where one of the care where the the protagonist had turned out, she's a female, and she turned out in the third or fourth season, realized she liked this other chick. And people like, oh god, they're being woke, they're being woke. But throughout the course of the series, I had caught these little moments of connection that are the way a relationship develops. Now, without getting into the like the moral issues of this or that style of relationship, I want I noticed this character developing, this connection with the other character. And it worked for those characters with that story. Now I've seen a lot of shows where they would just suddenly decide, oh, make him gay. Oh, wait, she she's a lesbian now. Well, what? Where did that come from? And it's like, oh, the focus group, where we have to change this for modern audiences. If the characters, when they change, the there has to be the reader has to understand why they're changing. They might not like the change, but if they understand why this person went down that path, that'd be a lot more forgiving. And you're not going to kick, they're not going to be kicked out of the story by an unrealistic uh choice. Uh true blood episode. Character is having a fight, she's wandering through the vampire lugaroo-infested swamp at night. She gets mad at somebody she's talking to on the cell phone, and she throws her phone into the swamp. In the middle of that that's like the LT getting mad and throwing the radio into the swamp. Or the M60 gunner deciding, oh, screw it, I'm I'm mad at Bill, so I'm gonna throw away my pig. That type of TV level writing bugs me.

SPEAKER_02 43:45

The worst example is in the Star Wars prequels and sequels, which yanked real organic characters completely out of it and devastated what Star. As a revolution in science fiction. I think George Lucas shot himself in the foot by doing all the wrong things in all the wrong ways. Oh, that don't even get me started. My favorite is when, you know, this isn't even Lucas's fault, this is just the Disney Corporation's fault. When Luke Luke Skywalker takes his lightsaber and he throws it over his shoulder. And I'm like, you just destroyed the character at the beginning of the fucking movie.

SPEAKER_01 44:33

You know, they I have seen some interesting uh I follow a lot of YouTubers, the ones who seem to have good sources and who differentiate between this has been told by to me by three sources, or this is my hunch, this is my gut. They're careful to differentiate between those things. And um the general consensus is that Disney Kathleen Kennedy wanted to basically destroy the original trilogy in fans' memory so they could create something new with modern values. Out with you know, the old it's um destroy the old, out with the old, in with the new cultural revolution on cinema. And there's also that awful we need to deconstruct the heroes.

SPEAKER_02 45:23

Um I it infuriates me, frankly, but they commit the cardinal sin that you're nailing down here, which is it's not an emergent consequence of the character that you've created being true to themselves and acting in a way that makes sense, but it's external forces that then interrupt this gameplay, if you will, with things that have nothing to do with the story, and viewers, readers instantly sense that dishonesty that is forced into a story.

SPEAKER_01 46:00

There's also a tendency to uh you know, it's it's I can't say it's emerging, but it seems for the past uh five, maybe ten years to demand that people excuse bad writing and uh basically immediately claim misogyny, racism, bigotry, evil evilism of an evilist nature when someone criticizes a plot hole or poor casting or points out that this new storyline totally contradicts the storyline from five years, ten years ago. And in you know, it it and they re began relying so heavily on automatically knee-jerk, oh, you're just a misogynist because this is a bad character? Yeah, you just don't like strong female characters. Galgado, Wonder Woman, that was a huge hit. Whereas Bree Larson says, I don't want to hear what fat old white guys have to say about my movies. Fat old white guys say, Well, okay, Charlie's Angels, this isn't being made for you. Okay, why didn't you come watch it?

SPEAKER_02 47:15

The sin occurs two times. The one in terms of being violative about the essential principles of good storytelling, and then having a whiplash effect that your criticism is based on an ideological agenda that they themselves are forcing on the content. It's a double whammy when this happens.

SPEAKER_01 47:38

And the if the ideology is right, you can't criticize anything with a story.

SPEAKER_02 47:43

And the story is just a vehicle for their bloviation. This goes back to how you qualified your own ear quote libertarian ideology and said that it's not your goal here to soapbox it. Your goal is to tell a great story, and you've got a worldview and a sense of passion and value, and your characters exemplify that, bring that to life. And some of your world building puts them in circumstances that highlight tensions that bring out some of your ideas about society and ideas about heroism. That's different. That's that's that's creating the foundation for a story that then starts to do its own thing, as opposed to coming in from the outside and deciding that we need a strong female character or we need XYZ because this is not about making a good movie or book. This is about getting our agenda into the public's attention so we could be more powerful and politically expedient.

SPEAKER_01 48:52

It's literally hijacking an existing franchise, gutting it, and wearing its skin around while you quote Marx Mao, whoever it is that you're uh you want people to pray to. People are like, wait, who's that wearing He-Man's skin?

SPEAKER_02 49:09

What's interesting to me though, too, is if we take a few steps back and look at the trajectory of popular science fiction, when TOS came out, right, the original series, and you're you're you've you can talk a little bit about how that engendered the beginning of your writing, too. When TOS came out, Gene Roddenberry, the the idea of civil rights, of humanism, of equality was paramount. So he did the radical idea of having an interracial crew. You had uh an African-American sexy woman who was, you know, the communications officer and on the bridge, and the captain ostensibly was a handsome white guy, but you know, you had the Jewish guy with ears as his assistant, and you had this Motley crew which exemplified diversity, equity, and inclusion. Okay, so that was on the roster at the time, but it was organic and it was fun and it played itself out.

SPEAKER_01 50:15

Storytelling came first.

SPEAKER_02 50:17

That's my point. So these colorful characters and the interplay was fun, but it wasn't an agenda, and it didn't interfere with the terrific individual episodes that constituted a wonderful series, and then and then science fiction started growing on that, and historically, it's if you look at it politically, it's gone from kind of the left, maybe more toward Ender's game right. But it's good to have a nice fluid balance within the context of society and everything going on, but you gotta stay focused on the characters, on the story to stay true to yourself.

SPEAKER_01 51:01

Yeah. Um, one of my favorite Star Trek quotes was uh, might have been Sarek said, challenge your preconceptions or they will challenge you. Roddenberry and Rod Serling, too. They had a social agenda they wanted to sell. But they told a good story in a way that uh we're hoping some people are gonna think about this social issue. And sometimes it was more overt, sometimes it was pretty subtle, sometimes it was deliciously subversive. But there was always the story, there was always the characters, and they weren't the whole episode lecturing you and scolding you. It wasn't a struggle session. No The Prisoner, Unmutual, Unmutual. They had a few struggle sessions in episodes of that, and uh which is why I made a meme with uh McGuin saying, Stay unmutual, my friends. But it was a straight up CCP struggle session. And but it was it was hidden in a fun story. People might not even have recognized it for what it was, but these days I I see things happening on college campuses um where someone says the wrong thing and they have to do a big tearful apology or be ejected from the party. So a lot of it, a lot of the prisoner was was frighteningly prophetic. Um I spun off there.

SPEAKER_02 52:30

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I think what's really, really healthy is all these genres and sub-genres and the opportunity for writers exactly like yourself to honor the artifice and best practices of great storytelling, have sleek, fast-moving, entertaining prose. But even more significantly, I think you're differentiated in what you're exemplifying here is your worlds and the characters within them are richly detailed and it makes sense. So you're not pulling stuff out of your ass. And in science fiction and fantasy, this happens too frequently, I would say, where it's not just an ad hoc gizmo or gadget that comes out of nowhere, but it's plot elements that are just fanciful and don't add any value. Your stuff is very thought through from a cultural, political, technological vantage point, and that makes the entire story much richer. You're adding dimensionality to it.

SPEAKER_01 53:39

Thanks. That that's what I try for. I don't like silver bullets. Um you know, or or the the MacGuffin that saves the day. As much as I loved Raiders of the Lost Ark, there there's no lost arc on Hesperities. There are hidden resources, hidden assets, hidden factions. Um but when there's like a technology or something that will be pivotal, it's something that will have been referred to at some point or another in terms other than all the magic lumpus or whatever that item might be. Um so I I I try to keep it grounded. I like to try to keep the site as firm as firm as possible. It is space opera. I don't worry about gravity on ships. Um in fact, smaller vessels have a uh because that whole inertia thing, you know, accelerating, maneuvering at these speeds would turn the crew into a a uh a red paste on the back bulkhead. Well, there's the Dresden Blackstone Inertial Sump. As my brother-in-law said, because it's F and magic.

SPEAKER_02 54:46

Why why not? And there's no problem with that because it just gets in the way. If you've got a if you've got a physics or cosmological impediment, then space opera style, you can get rid of it. No one ever looking at the classic Star Wars sequence, it never bothered anybody that the Millennium Falcon had gravity on it. And uh, it never bothered anybody that you know you could just go into hyperspace and come out wherever you want. The the thing that was important was the characters and the story, and it was like getting into their car and getting back out again, which was expedient. Other people use these the the hard the hard physics and science to create a moon, like Kubrick's 2001 is a terrific cinematic example where there's no sound in space, and that created a horrifying sequence when the astronaut is tumbling by himself into the void, and you're like, wow, and you know, if you're adding laser explosions and bullshit, then it's just gonna get in the way of that awe-inspiring moment.

SPEAKER_01 56:02

The the swoosh boom in space, yeah. Um, and it it it comes down to what atmosphere and style. Um, I will confess as this is a uh interstellar empire, um, yeah, there's a hyperspace equal T-space, transit space. I kind of mugged uh Niven's uh I can't remember what he called it, N space um or Babylon 5's hyperspace, where you basically step into another dimension, travel to this distance, come out at a point that's farther than you actually would have traveled. Um except I've got bad neighborhoods in T-Space that people are just starting to learn about. There are places in T-Space where Sam Neal is smiling from the shadows, quietly doing that creepy Sam Neal smile.

SPEAKER_02 56:53

Yeah. Giving you a little hat to there's other problems too, you know, Einsteinian time dilation, the fact that time and space are not absolute. So the distances in the actual universe are just so ginormous that from if you don't have hyperspace, you don't have transluminal travel, then it just doesn't make any sense. There's no absolute timeline in the universe. You could be right now, the the clock that's ticking on the surface of the earth is going slower than the one in our own geosynchronous satellite. So for our GPS to work, they need to plug in Einsteinian field equations, or your GPS wouldn't work. And this is just 23,000 miles, let alone 26 trillion to the closest star.

SPEAKER_01 57:46

It it gives me a bigger playground instead of keeping everything to one system. And yeah, there are storytellers who can do that just fine. Tell wonderful stories on one planet or in one system, but I'm not one of them. And even Asimov used faster-than-light communications. Uh, I think it was him with the Ansible.

SPEAKER_02 58:07

He had to. It wouldn't have made any sense. Federate the Federation saga would have been impossible. You can't have a galactic empire in real time. It's it just defies the raw laws of physics.

SPEAKER_01 58:20

I would heartily recommend Lois McMaster Bouja's Wilkesigan saga for a uh a fairly solid uh uh way to uh run your communications and such on an interstellar scale. Uh basically wormholes linking systems. So you can take a you can hop a wormhole to the next system, but then you have to travel across the system in with normal drives, normal engines, your radio, yeah, your communications, you know, tight beam, whatever is still speed of light. Um that's also uh uh the Starfire series, uh Dave Weber and Steve White. That that also inspired me on how I wanted to do this because I didn't want to just warp everywhere. I wanted things like you know time and distance to matter, at least on a system level.

SPEAKER_02 59:16

It's my micro versus macro. And when you if you create a situation in a world where everything is immediate and easy, then you're actually undercutting yourself because you need challenges for your characters. If they just snap their fingers and they get wherever they want to go, this is part of the problem with some fantasy sagas where where the characters are like Superman. Superman is the most boring superhero because he's ostensibly invisible. I mean, uh it yeah, invulnerable. He can be invisible too if he wants. So, where's the tension? Where's the vulnerability? And when you put create characters in a universe where everything is immediately accessible and there's no problem, then you remove that tension.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:03

Yeah, I think uh this offended my mother deeply. Um, at some point GC Comics decided that Superman was vulnerable to magic. You know, an enchanted sword would cut him. So it wasn't just how do we how do we find some more of this super rare kryptonite and slip it into a cheese? That character's boring. They gave him another weakness, and uh it opened a lot of doors for storytelling that made the character a bit more interesting because there were things that could punch him in the nose. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:37

And talking about being human, how do you write? I've got viewers and listeners, many of whom are newer authors, authors who've been game been in the game for a while. Uh, do you have a are you uh uh what do they call it, a prancer or a pacer, or what what the hell is it? Like, do you sit on your ass and bang it out, or do you need to drink tea and wander around the room? How do you plan this out? Uh how do you do what you do?

SPEAKER_01 1:01:09

I I I uh I was one of those ADHD O C D kids, maladaptive daydreaming. I was constantly daydreaming, constantly distracted, constantly not paying attention. Yeah. And yeah, the swing set was a colonial viper or an X-Wing, depending on what I'd watched most recently. And you do that for a few decades, you get pretty good at daydreaming, and then I just learned how to organize the daydreams. I'll come up with a uh there'll be a simple historical reference or a line and that spins up into a scene. And that might be the finale of a book, that might be just a climactic or pivotal scene, that might just be a punch in the gut scene. And I'll go ahead and put down notes on that so I don't lose the vibe, uh the the feeling I want or the atmosphere I want to create. And I just put those on a uh basically on a white an electronic whiteboard. And I end up eventually with a pile of these events, these landmark scenes or tentpole scenes or milestones. And then I I spend a lot of time drinking coffee and walking around in circles in my living room doing the stimming thing with my fingers and gradually get them put into order. Like, oh nope, this would be this is just gonna get yanked and become a short story. And then I I'll sit down and write the earliest of the scenes because I've got it largely fleshed out, and then I just kind of try to write my way to the next scene. And half the time that turns into me just following the characters and taking notes. So I've got a few landmarks, I've got a few milestones I want to get to, but I generally know the outcome, you know, the shape of the finale, the shape of the end of the story. So I know where I'm going. I just kind of wander in the wilderness until I get there. I can't um I can't just sit down and say, I'm going to ride 5,000 woods today. There are people who have that, their mind works in a way that that can happen. There are people who are able to discipline their muse to make the muse work for them. I end up chasing my muse around holding up the slipper. Does this fit? Does this fit?

SPEAKER_02 1:03:21

My brain is very similar to yours. Um, I've had writers on the podcast where they're the 200, 2,000 word-a-day person. Some writers, you know, I write from 8 p.m. until 10 p.m. every night, and I have my word count goal. And that that's that's the diametric opposite of you and I, where we just kind of live it and breathe it. I'll be at the gym on the elliptical, and I've got all these ideas with the endorphin dopamine rush, and uh, and they'll gel in my head sometimes for days or weeks, and then the story, in a sense, is being created in my bald head. And when I finally get down to bang it out, it's I've already done a lot of the heavy lifting, it's like pre-programmed.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:13

It's a cascade. Um that's that's largely what I do. I I it gels, it it crystallizes or ferments depending on the scene. And when it's ready to go, I can't stop it. Um I was the kid who uh would make a few notes here and there on what I wanted to do with the term paper, but didn't actually sit down to write the term paper until the day before. And I would be up all night hammering it out because it was just all all those things I was puzzling on finally come together and then swoosh. And it uh for me it's the writing is the same way.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:53

Yeah, I think we need to gear ourselves to who we are, and by the we, I it's the royal we. Uh, regardless of what kind of writer you are, or even what kind of reader you are, I think there's as many different types of readers and writers as there are readers and writers.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:10

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:10

And happiness and productivity come from knowing thyself, that that age-old truism, and just enjoying it and indulging it more, more pleased. There used to be a tendency, I think, for both of us growing up, that you need to fix your weaknesses. You know, instead of working on your strengths, just try to concentrate on what you suck at and try to hit baseline. And I think it's way smarter, more expedient, and way more fun to indulge everything that you're naturally great at and just try to ignore the stuff that sucks because you're really not going to get much better at it anyway. So if you can accentuate the positive, if you're dialing stuff up to 11. Uh keep at it because that's gonna raise your overall level of productivity and happiness accordingly. And one way or another, you're gonna get it out there, and it's gonna be great. I think that that's probably probably a good good tip. It seems like you exemplify that.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:22

I uh I had a thought and just lost it. Um compulsive daydreamer, I can't not tell these stories. They leave me no peace until I write them down. The line that becomes a scene or that becomes a conversation, that becomes a scene. They just keep looping in my head until I type them up. So I may as well.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:47

Yeah, you're not the only one saying that. Yeah. I I think the the guests I've had uh who are happiest doing what they do and are the most productive exemplify that attitude that our brains are always cooking. We always have an idea. I brought this up with another guest that a lot of stand-up comics are like this too. They're always working on material. 24-7. They're at a lunch or they see something funny and it it immediately they see a joke, they see a scene, they're writing, they're talking, they're working it through. And you gotta live it to be it, and then if you be it and live it and do it, then you can be successful at it. That's kind of baseline. So what's next in your in your uh in your J.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:37

Kenton world? Well, June will see the release of Shy Fennenro's second book, Stormjammer. It's slated for June. This is a direct sequel, it's Shy's next day. And uh she basically is gonna find herself, and she's made great progress. Her community has made uh tremendous progress after the events of A Kiss for Damacles starts a few months later, well a month or two later. And basically the planet drops another big nasty surprise on her and her people. Um a new threat that was foreshadowed, but nobody really saw it coming. And suddenly worrying about the towny trader princes is uh not quite as urgent. It's still a problem, but there's there's a sudden existential threat to pretty much everybody in that region of the colony. Um green all the towns in the north. And so she has to she still has to contend with the issues from a kiss for Damocles, but there's a new sudden urgent matter. Uh she will end up traveling down into the area of the pr called the Pride Lands, the uh Nuevo Tijas Prefecture, Costa del Astro. Those are referred to in the earlier books and in the short stories. Uh several short stories take place down there from the anthologies, like the Space Cowboys. And she will eventually find herself um visiting the Southern Continent, which was a uh alien enclave, um, allied aliens, uh fellow members of the Corward League, but not Terran Commonwealth. And the prosperity basically wiped them out with a bioweapon when they attacked. And she has to go to this haunted wasteland, which is essentially an alien biome, and then her life gets really complicated.

SPEAKER_02 1:09:34

All right, and hilarity and action ensue. We will I'll put the links to all your goodies in the description below. So if they're not familiar with you, they can get more familiar. Get your books, like, comment, share, everybody, subscribe to science fiction and fantasy podcast. I'm your host, Mookie Spitz, and it's been a great time with Jay Kenton Pierce, kindred Kindred Soul, doing the ADHD O C D dance from childhood to adulthood and channeling all of our manic energy into world building with compelling characters for the win. Thanks so much, Jay Kenton. Let's follow up six months, a year, or with the week. It'll be great to to catch up again and see how your universe is growing.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:29

Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_01 1:10:31

Thank you.