Marc Neuffer: From Naval Nuclear Engineer to Starship Captain

Mookie's Science Fiction & Fantasy Factory launches its 50th episode with fellow anthology contributor, former naval engineer, and prolific author Marc Neuffer. 

They met through the 2026 SciFi Anthology, going strong for six years since Marc proposed the idea to the Science Fiction Novelists FB group. Mookie points out that he's had half the contributors from this installment on his podcast, with Marc joking there's still time to get the rest of them.

Born into the "science" of scifi, Marc grew up in Huntsville, Alabama during the Apollo era surrounded by rocket engineers and space-race optimism, later serving as a nuclear propulsion engineer. Later in life he discovered an aptitude and appetite for writing, since publishing dozens of novels, short stories, and guidebooks on craft. 

Hitting it off from the start, Marc and Mookie talk Heinlein, Asimov, Kubrick, Andy Weir, hard science fiction, AI, artificial gravity, indie publishing scams, bookstore nostalgia, and the weirdly addictive joy of locking yourself in a room for twelve hours and disappearing into a fictional world.

But the real fun starts when they joust: Mookie champions instinct, improvisation, and throwing characters into crisis to see what happens. Marc counters with psychology, authenticity, immersive setting, and his belief that most modern writing “rules” have been flattened into useless workshop clichés. The two spar over “show don’t tell,” ideological fiction, Star Trek versus Star Wars science, modern clickbait science journalism, and whether writers ruin stories the second they start preaching at readers instead of following their characters honestly. The fun part is that neither guy completely gives ground, but both clearly enjoy the friction and wind up sharpening each other’s perspectives along the way.

The episode also gets unexpectedly personal at times, with Marc reflecting on aging, creativity, engineering discipline, and why he doesn't care about chasing literary fame or bestseller lists. He’d rather write stories he loves, help younger writers avoid bad advice, and keep exploring ideas that fascinate him. Mookie, meanwhile, keeps dragging the discussion away from abstract writing theory and back toward character, emotion, imagination, and storytelling as lived experience.

If you like science fiction conversations with humor, blunt opinions, nerd arguments, creative philosophy, old-school engineering brainpower, and two writers poking holes in each other’s ideas while still clearly enjoying the hell out of the conversation, Episode 50 of SFFF is your morning cup of joe. 

The Guest

Marc is a retired naval engineer who has found his geographic center in rural America. He spent more than 20 years roaming the world with the U.S. Navy, visiting dozens of countries in Europe, Down Under, the Eastern Pacific, the Indian Ocean, and the Mediterranean. He has lived in San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Saratoga Springs, NY, and Huntsville Alabama.

After selling his business, he took up the piano and started writing multi-genre fiction novels. In addition to his ten published novels, and five non-fiction works, Marc's shorter works have been published in Scientific Barbarian Magazine, Frontier Tales, Science Fiction Novelists Anthologies 1-6, and as dramatic narrated stories by Untold-Tales.

His Books

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello and welcome to Science Fiction and Fantasy Factory. I'm excited to have Mark Newfer in the factory today. Welcome aboard, Mark. Well, thank you very much. That's a good naval greeting.

SPEAKER_03 0:16

And you are a former naval engineer. Uh, yes, uh, naval nuclear propulsion engineer. Uh, emphasis on the nuclear propulsion.

SPEAKER_00 0:27

All right, so the science in science fiction is covered, and I think we've got the fiction covered too. We share the 2026 anthology of science fiction novelists put together by S. A. Gibson. That's what introduced me to you. I have had half a dozen of the contributors on the pod so far, and I appreciate you making time. I wasn't able to get everybody, but uh, I think I've got half half the collection.

SPEAKER_03 1:02

So well, I'm 74 years old and retired, and I always have plenty of time to talk about writing.

SPEAKER_00 1:09

All right. I don't know if they're busy or they just don't want to talk to me, but uh, but I've talked to Margaret Triver, Al Hagan, Howard Loring, Philip Cahill. It's been fun. So I'm glad you're aboard. You're a you're a you're an you're a veteran of the anthology. How did you get hooked up with the anthology?

SPEAKER_03 1:33

I used to be a uh uh Facebook group administrator for science fiction novelists, and it was my great idea to say, hey, all these good writers out here, let's put together a book of short stories. And it went from there. And I was uh on the first three, on the first three of six, I was one of the uh selection committees, and we had some really great uh uh editors, developmental editor, and then a copy and uh copy editor. Uh so uh we look we lucked out and it's been going good for six years, and I'm no longer I'm still a member of the group, I'm no longer an administrator. Uh it was tough those first three years picking out the right stories, and of course, we were brand new at it on the first first one, but we look we learned some things. Uh, but it's exciting to be able to get those authors uh some published uh stories in a book that seems to sell well, a series that seems to sell well.

SPEAKER_00 2:31

So it started in 2020, is that right? That was the first first one, 2020. No, I think 2021. So 2026, so that's n plus one, the math. That's right. So so that made that makes sense. And uh I I ran into SA Gibson at LA Comic-Con. So I had a boost set up there with uh a fellow science fiction writer Ingrid Moon, and we're just kind of hanging out, and then uh SA Gibson wanders around and he gives gives us uh his card saying, I'm editing this anthology looking for writers and content all the time. Submit, we like it, you can get in there. So that's what I did. I submitted and I got in there, and that led me to all you fine folks. Well, open quotations about fine folks. I'm sure you got a few stories after six years. How did SA Gibson man the helm?

SPEAKER_03 3:29

Well, he was he was also one of the uh group administrators. Uh there were four of us, and uh I I nominated a guy to replace me when I had to back out of that. Matter of fact, Howard Lauren. So those are the four administrators who do moderation and things like that and keep the rules uh met and kicking people out who don't strike three sort of thing. So uh he was in it from the very beginning, too.

SPEAKER_00 3:56

He's he seems grand poo by now. He's got his big, big old name on the spine.

SPEAKER_03 4:01

So yeah, I was gonna tell him, hey, uh, you know, you can make your name a little smaller.

SPEAKER_00 4:06

Yeah, I got it on my shelf, and people see like my library of content that I've I've launched, and people are like, Who's this Gibson guy? At least he's he's good at self-promotion for sure.

SPEAKER_03 4:18

He who shall not be named, right? Now he's somebody he he's somebody you should interview.

SPEAKER_00 4:25

Gibson. I did. He's he was my first victim, actually. And I think he did a follow-up to the anthology, and instead of BCCing, he CC'd the entire group. So I go, oh, this is an opportunity. So I invited everyone on the pod, and I got about half of you.

SPEAKER_03 4:46

Well, the year's not over, it's still early in 2026. That's true.

SPEAKER_00 4:51

You you can help hustle. I think they don't know who the hell I am.

SPEAKER_03 4:55

Well, I I I will certainly post this interview on the uh on the uh uh science fiction novelists Facebook group uh and promote it because it yeah, it promotes the hell out of me too.

SPEAKER_00 5:07

Absolutely. This is a win-win. I love doing these things. First off, I love bullshitting. I could I could talk on podcasts, especially with science fiction authors all day long. And I I'm published too, and uh and I promote writers, I build networking, community. It's uh make friends. If you post this up there, I want to formally welcome not only the anthology contributors, but other people who are science fiction fans, producers, writers, editors. Join the fun.

SPEAKER_03 5:41

We are a good group.

SPEAKER_00 5:43

A fine people, a fine people, each and every one of you. So, you know, hashtag bring it. But enough about Steve, enough about the group. I want to hear about Mark Newfer. You are prolific.

SPEAKER_03 5:58

Well, I do have a lot of grandchildren.

SPEAKER_00 6:02

You you've you're you've spawned your seed, has been dispersed, including your your memes, just like uh Richard Dawkins wrote, right? You've got your your your genes and your memes are out there.

SPEAKER_03 6:16

Like I like to keep uh viewers interested. Uh now my first book was called Heat and Light, and it's science fiction. And it came about with I was drifting off from my afternoon nap, which I take every day and I love it. Of course, I stay up till midnight after that, but uh I was I was just musing about the Big Bang and the heat and the light and the pop and the fizz and what it must have tasted like, what it must have from a sensory standpoint looked like. And so when I got up, I started writing heat and light. I had no intention of ever being a writer, let alone an author. Uh, but it turns out I was a pretty good storyteller. And I wrote that now. I started writing for uh 10, sometimes 12 hours a day, uh having a great time. I I'd get into uh what we call the zone, which is uh what ex what uh discovery writers do when they write. It's a total ego dissolution, and you're just using your creative brain and seeing what comes next. And that uh that exploratory writing, often called panters, but I tell people my brain sits a little higher than that. Uh and that got me started. And a month and a half I had a novel, and it was pretty damn good, I thought. And a lot of other people have thought the same thing. And so then I went on to a sequel. Guess what the sequel to Heat and Light is called? Uh Cold and Dark. Yeah, that's right. I mean, that just begged for a sequel.

SPEAKER_00 7:52

Yeah, see how smart I am? This is why I I get to host these things. You didn't expect a quiz. You know what's uh rare though? I've talked to probably 50 writers so far on the podcast since I started it last October. And uh, you're the only one who had a spontaneous outburst of literary creativity that seems to have come from nowhere. Each and every writer said they wanted to be a writer from the second they remembered their own identity. Almost all of them have been writing throughout their entire lives, and for one reason or another, it had to be dormant or they didn't reach their potential, and they're blissed out now in that they're creating and they're publishing.

SPEAKER_03 8:40

Well, every every writer's journey is different.

SPEAKER_00 8:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 8:43

And some people struggle to get life out of the way so they can write. Uh, distractions, commitments, you know, they might have a full plate already, especially ladies who have children. I I've I've been in classes with those, and and they have a little struggle finding the time and being able to just focus on their work. But uh let's let's talk about writers. Now, when somebody says they want to be a writer, I tell them, Well, you've been writing since the third grade. What you really want to be is a storyteller, and that's a whole different mindset. A lot of people that never publish get this mystic feeling of, oh, I want to be a writer. Well, you want to be a cowboy, you want to be a fireman, you want to be an NFL football. Wannabe does not get it there. That's not the motivation. Uh, you do have to have some innate curiosity and uh ability to fall into stories that you read because that's what you want your readers to do to fall into the story. And that's also called the zone. Uh so yeah, there are a lot of wannabe writers out there, but they don't know how to do the work. And doing the work is what gets them there. And having one place to sit down and write, and having a time to write, if it's at the same time every day that works for them, that's fine. If they carry a uh notebook in their pocket and scribble notes all day long, that's fine. However, they approach it, whether they're a discovery writer, a plotster, or a plantster, which does uh pantster work and plotting work, then that's the whole spectrum. And you can fall anywhere in there, but it's got to be feel natural to you. If you try to force yourself into a box of this is what a writer does, this is the way a writer writes, you're not gonna succeed.

SPEAKER_00 10:31

The motivations are different too. So some writers want to be read, they want that bestseller, they want to be the next Andy Weir or whoever. And uh others are just perfectly happy toiling away, writing the book they've always wanted to read. And if they get anyone to read, and if they could spread the word, all the better. So there's a big range in terms of motivation as well.

SPEAKER_03 10:58

Well, and those people that want to be have a bestseller, they need to do some research about how a bestseller becomes a bestseller. It's not magic, it's not necessarily the book, it's the publishers that promote and and the uh New York Times reviewers who have an incestuous relationship with publishers. I mean, it's it's a rigged game, it really is. Uh, there are certain things you can do to elevate your book on Amazon, like get uh 20 good reviews at least to start with, and they'll start bringing you up out of the slush pile. For me, I was writing stories I wanted to read because I was reading them as I was writing them. I had no idea where they were gonna go. I had no idea what kind of character is gonna pop up next. But I I I just had this innate creative sense of when I get to towards the end of a chapter, I know what's gonna come next. Not exactly, not everything, but how it's gonna start.

SPEAKER_00 11:53

There's an in another range, so there's motivation, there's intent, and there's world building versus character focus and drama. So, especially in science fiction, I think our genre is perhaps plagued a little bit more than most with idea obsession. I call it here's an idea, the end. A lot of writers are spreading the hate, and and that sacrifices character, it sacrifices dramatic through line, and it turns into an exercise of the writer basically trying to show everybody how smart they are and how cool their idea is.

SPEAKER_03 12:39

I used to teach instructors uh many years in my career, I taught teenagers to operate nuclear propulsion plants, and I was in charge of a lot of instructors. And the first thing I told my instructors was that they're not the students are not gonna be impressed by how much you know, but how much you teach them, and that you teach to the back of the room. And writing a book, you have to take yourself out of the process. You can't be the ego driving the plot. Now, you mentioned uh drama and some other things. Most writers that I've encountered, I've worked, I work continually work with a lot of new writers, they have no idea what story is. You ask, oh, what's story? And then him and a ha and they both jam around for a couple minutes, but they don't never have a good definition. And of course, the definition of story is a vehicle that helps us make sense of our world, and that's all it is. And drama, when the people try to write drama, they end up writing melodrama because they take the risk out of the drama. And and drama is a three-legged stool. Uh I matter of fact, I just put up a master class video on that uh today. We have a website called fictionbrain.com.

SPEAKER_00 14:00

And it's a free for everybody.

SPEAKER_03 14:03

It's a free open library for anybody. You don't have to sign up. There's nothing to buy, there's no come-ons. It's got uh what we call power tools over for 80 power tools uh that are you got a bunch of books on Amazon. Well, yes, they're on Amazon. We decided let's let's expand this, let's put this open because not everybody's gonna go to Amazon looking for this sort of thing. Uh we'll try to uh perpetuate it through uh various writer uh Facebook groups and things like that. It's just free. And it's got uh 22 masterclass videos on it right now, it's got 80 power tools. There's a whole section on uh fiction character psychology uh and and some other things, but it's free, it's open. You don't have to use your email unless you want to be notified of new material. And so it's a rather altruistic uh endeavor that we're enjoying doing.

SPEAKER_00 14:57

Well, congratulations, and that's that's that's that's nice of you to release the kraken on the uh on the on the writer's action. Uh let me run an idea by you, and I've spoken about this with a lot of authors, many of our co-anthologists, which is here's the basic ingredients of good storytelling fueled by drama. So you take a character, you focus on the character, and then the character has express clearly described goals. They have a mission, all right? You're shaking your head, and then you put them in a situation where they basically have obstacles, they're punched in the face by circumstance, other characters, and then your job as a writer is to kind of set them loose, provide some guardrails, and they go from on their way from A to Z, they gotta go to A to B to B to C and C to D. They're solving problems, they're encountering those punches in the face, and the drama emerges naturally as this interaction between the hero, what gets in their way, and whether they attain their goal or they don't. Does that jibe with your overarching philosophy and methodology? No, I think I'd be intrigued to hear why.

SPEAKER_03 16:31

I'll tell you why. Uh first, uh let's say a writer's gonna write a story, he's got a he's got some idea. Well, first of all, is it gonna be third-person narration or first person or third person blended first? POV. You may not have ever heard of that before, but we've got a great masterclass on that. Then they've got to decide on whether it's going to be plot-centric or character-centric. Some genres work better as plot-centric, and some genres work better as uh uh character-centric. Most science fiction that most science fiction readers want is character-driven, character-centric. Now, if he express if a character expresses his goal in chapter one, I'm gonna throw the book across the room because that's not how it's done.

SPEAKER_00 17:17

I'm not saying that the writer needs to be overt about the goal itself, but it needs at least be implicit within the story.

SPEAKER_03 17:25

The first thing you need to do as a writer for science fiction is establish the status quo. And that's the environment. Are we on a spaceship? Are we on another planet? Are we on an orbiting space station that's huge? Which my first one started at. There was a he was on a he was on a huge platform orbiting a planet, and he was buying a spaceship, and it they had their sales lot on this huge thing. Uh, and you have to establish the the the environment, the uh time and the place, and have the character interact with that environment, and that's how you reveal the the environment. You don't tell, oh, the place was big. You know, have the skill such that when you want to reveal uh uh the setting, you do it through the character in first person by what they do, what they notice, what you know. You know, he's look, he's looking in my book, he's looking down this half-mile row of different types of spaceships, and uh and he's on the platform and a salesman's talking to him. So that sets the time and a place. Uh, but you also have to have develop the character in in alongside. It's gonna be in a row of the character reveal and the setting reveal have got to be simultaneous. It's gotta be on the first page. So status quo is the first thing. Don't throw them into a mixer. Now, there's an old adage of okay, you you take your hero as a writer, you chase him up a tree, you throw rocks at him, and then you set fire to the tree. That's a little melodramatic because where where's where's the real drama? The drama has to come from the the character realizing there's something he could lose. And this run up tree and lighting a fire, he's gonna die. We don't want him to die. We want to invest in a character. So there's three things you have to, four things you have to think about for a character. One, what's their basic, what's their basic psychology? And you gotta be true to that all through the book. Uh the second thing is what are their needs? What are their wants? And what are their goals? And those last three are never the same. And that causes it, that causes internal friction.

SPEAKER_00 19:42

This is a good lesson. I give myself an F because I I cannot think this way. I cannot start a book conscientiously by thinking about setting and whether these are implicit to me or not. My brain doesn't work this way, Mark.

SPEAKER_03 19:56

I don't I don't start out thinking about I don't I don't start thinking all that what I'm gonna write. I just start writing and it comes out. But that's my method of writing.

SPEAKER_00 20:03

So you're you're deconstructing the process and then you're sharing it in in terms of a method out. If I look back, that's how it happened. Okay, all right. But that that's my point about just setting characters loose in a world, and you know, and there are exceptions to the rule. I love James Elroy, he's not a science fiction writer, LA Confidential, American Tabloid, and he'll start a book mid-sene, he'll start a chapter toward the end and then just seamlessly flow to get maximum impact fast. Well, that now that's a genre thing. Not necessarily, that could be really effective in science fiction, too.

SPEAKER_03 20:44

I think genre readers, whatever the genre, those ten big ones, have expectations before they open the book and they make their decision based a lot of times on the cover or the Amazon verb. So yeah, uh uh Noir type stuff. I I've wrote written a Noor detective 1950s novel. Yeah, it started off with a dame coming into his office and blowing smoke, kind of thing. Uh whereas most action-adventure type science fiction, the reader wants to get pulled into the world, okay? Not hear a bunch of gunshots, because if you start off with gunshots, the weapons have to get bigger and louder until the climax where you have to set off an atom bomb. And that that escalation can wear a reader out. Uh, I'm not saying now there's no formulas, okay? Every writer needs to write the way they write. The biggest challenge a writer faces is finding their narrative voice and not trying to sound like an English teacher or report facts. And that that's the biggest thing that they have to have there there, I'll agree with you.

SPEAKER_00 21:53

Sometimes it could take years, decades to get comfortable with that. It's hard.

SPEAKER_03 21:58

Only if only if you don't Write every day and you don't read. You have to read and write every day.

SPEAKER_00 22:05

I think it really depends. You could write every day and and struggle with it. I think David Mammoth said once that some get it early, some midstream, some later. But to your point, though, if you persist, it should it should come to you. Patience and persistence. Absolutely. So since I'm striking out with the writing.

SPEAKER_03 22:27

Oh, actually, now you're giving me your opinion, I'm giving you my opinion.

SPEAKER_00 22:33

Let's focus on your stuff. So you you've applied these techniques either consciously or unconsciously, and you've got a big volume of work. And I notice certain themes. So for starters, your your prose is is very accessible. You're very readable. You avoid excessive density, and it flows naturally and well. You are character focused. So you're you're zeroing in on the characters. And from what I can tell, I haven't read all your books. And uh not not to give it away or spoiler alert, but uh, you know, the the the alien is is is a little bit more designed than one would anticipate. You've got Littenhouse, which is very, very interesting. It's kind of meta. It's uh it's a writer's story about writing, and you've got a bit of a switcheroo in that too. So am I capturing your style in a way that a new a new reader would better understand you?

SPEAKER_03 24:03

Well, those are two short stories, and the Gorlock story was actually a chapter out of my third novel called Riley 1.0, and I doctored it up uh because uh the folks on Untold Tales podcasts who did audio narrations of uh science fiction uh short stories, uh, he liked it and he said, Well, it feels more like it's out of a chapter. I said, Well, it is. Can we can we modify that to make it a short story? And so I did. Uh that was pretty easy. So, but Lutonhouse, I wanted to write a story about a bastard. I didn't want my story, I didn't want my my main characters to always be heroes. You know, the hero journey gets a little thin after a while. After writing six, after writing six science fiction novels, I decided I'm gonna try something else, some other genres, which I've done. I've written in 14 genres between my novels and my short stories, uh, because I I am an exploratory writer. I want to explore and see what comes out. It's fun to try different genres and see what's there.

SPEAKER_00 25:07

Have you blended, I I don't mean to interrupt your trajectory here, but have you blended genres? I don't think so. Okay.

SPEAKER_03 25:16

Uh I I've never done cowboys and indians in outer space, no.

SPEAKER_00 25:21

Yeah, because that's hot. I just I just had uh I don't write what's hot.

SPEAKER_03 25:26

I write what I want to read.

SPEAKER_00 25:27

I know, but I'm just saying that whether you're you're writing for yourself or others, this cowboy bebop science fiction is its own thing. You got almost military science fiction meets cowboys in outer space.

SPEAKER_03 25:41

Well, you know, there there was a movie called Cowboys and Aliens. I don't know if you ever saw that one. Uh, you know, if it if it ever occurred to me, if I ever got an inspiration, uh, hey, I'll try this genre and blend it with that one. Uh sure I would, but uh I guess uh my my my sparks come on impulses.

SPEAKER_00 26:03

And you're more a classicist in this sense. So you pick a genre and you follow the rules, right? No, I don't follow rules.

SPEAKER_03 26:10

No, no, no, no, no, no, no. I hate rules. I wrote a book called uh Archaeology of Fiction Rules. Most people don't know where these rules came from. They came from a lot of workshops in the 80s and the 90s. They were truncating things that other authors had said, like, show, don't tell. I want to slap whoever did that. The rules that a lot of writers are getting nowadays are truncated, they're they're compressed, and they're supposedly carved in stone. No, the masters violate every one of those little rules that go around workshops. Uh, every single one of them. So we wrote a book called Archaeology of Fiction Rules, and it goes through uh, I think about 15 different rules, and we tell them where that came from, how it got modified, when it got modified, what it's got truncated to, the misuse of it, and how to accurately uh deploy the real meaning of it. For instance, show-don't tell should be described, don't explain, not show-don't tell. You can't show everything the way that people are learnt being told to show. That book could be 5,000 pages. You know, summary is where you're telling, but that's not explaining, okay? Uh summary is a transition that gets you from one point to the next to keep the keep the story moving. Uh so yeah, it's describe, don't explain.

SPEAKER_00 27:41

Let's get back to your stuff, though. I'm as you can tell, I I I I'm just gonna be honest. I can't handle principles and and these kind of best practices.

SPEAKER_03 27:51

That's what I'm trying to say.

SPEAKER_00 27:52

There are no principles, but none. Those principles, those rules, I'm into I'm in I'm interested in hearing what what you do and your ideas rather than the methodology.

SPEAKER_03 28:04

Well, when I get an idea, I sit down at my computer and type out it was a dark and stormy night.

SPEAKER_00 28:12

Yeah, yeah. No, that's not what I mean. You're going back to process, Mark. I don't want to hear process. I want to hear your ideas, you know. Ideas about what? Your inspiration for your writing. Like you mentioned, you got all these genres and you tell interesting stories. And I opened it by by suggesting that you like the twist, your character focus, your prose is speedy and engaging. Uh so let's let's dive in a little bit.

SPEAKER_03 28:42

I would I would not say that that is prevalent through all my writings. Short stories, short stories, yes, they have to have that sort of dynamic uh that when they get to the ending, since it's short, it's got to have some sort of bend to it that they didn't see coming. However, you need to foreshadow that throughout the story so that when it happens, they go, aha, aren't I smart? So no, uh I guess most of my stuff follows uh generically uh the hero's journey, not Frizian's curve or anybody else's like that. There's like, depending on who you talk to, seven or eight different plot structures. My plot structure is just what it happens to be. Uh, I don't I was in a class years and years ago, and uh somebody was looking at my Western that I'd written, uh short story for the class. I'd never written a Western before in my life, and I'll read them. Uh watched them as I was a kid, but you find out that Hollywood and TV does not portray give a good historical portrayal of the times in the lives of those people. So I wrote my Western, and this one gal, one of the other students uh in his class, every week we do one person's story after doing a written review, which we'd submit and then a little three-minute uh uh hot wash uh from each student. She says she was wondering about theme. And I thought to myself, theme? I don't think about theme. I I couldn't recognize a theme from a lamppost. I don't think about theme. I don't know what theme is supposed to be, and generally it turns out to be good triumphs over evil. What good is that? Or not. Yeah, or not, but what good is that when you're writing? It's not so uh my my the way I approach writing is I have an idea and I start writing. And it's simple as that.

SPEAKER_00 30:41

Let's stick to that. That's good. What's your feeling about science fiction? I mean, you're drawn to speculative fiction, you got all these other genres. What what do you think triggered your creativity in this in this angle?

SPEAKER_03 30:56

All right, I got a great answer for that. I grew up in Huntsville, Alabama in the 1960s. That's when the space program, Marshall Space Flight Center was being uh uh was in full well coming to full throttle in in Huntsville, Alabama, uh next right next to the Redstone Arsenal. My father was an aerospace engineer.

SPEAKER_00 31:16

Bing, bing, bing. Now we're now we're cooking with kerosene. I'm I'm all excited now. Let's go for it.

SPEAKER_03 31:22

He came, he was a naval officer himself in World War II, came back on a job with General Electric, went to upstate New York and started deconstructing and reconstructing the V2 rockets that we brought over from Germany. And so as a mechanical engineer, and as the space program started becoming elevated, he got into that part of the aerospace business for General Electric, especially on the engines. And uh so I grew up in Huntsville with many of my classmates, none of them were from Alabama. Most of my teachers were wives of engineers that had been transferred there. Huntsville during the 60s when I was going through school, and I graduated in 1970. I know I look a lot younger than that. Uh well, we both got the same barber if you're seeing us on the video. Uh and I touched mine up a little bit right before this video. Uh, so I grew up with a space program. I I remember staying home and watching uh uh the moon, the launch of the uh uh Saturn taking the astronauts to the moon. Uh it was just in our blood. It was in our blood. And the high in high school in Huntsville, Alabama at the time, it was expected that you would take algebra one, algebra two, geometry, and trigonometry in your four years there. And of course, I took physics and chemistry, so I had a very good, very good public education. And those aren't around so much anymore. They're in small islands here and there, but as a general rule, public education has taken a nosedive. Uh we've got to get them to pass the test, we've got to make them feel good.

SPEAKER_00 33:04

Yeah, 100% 100%. That's a whole podcast in and of itself. But uh but you were you were in the golden age, though. Yeah, education was good, and then you had a uh engineering family, sounds like, and you were in the midst of the the space program. Huntsville was where they developed a lot of this stuff.

SPEAKER_03 33:23

All the rockets, yes. Uh I read a lot of science fiction, Heinlein, Asimov, Clark during during those teenage years. Uh I that why I wrote some I wrote six science fiction novels. My favorite. Of course, I'd never experimented, but it was my favorite. I felt comfortable there. And they say you should write what you know. Well, I knew science fiction, but also write what you know rule can keep a lot of authors from writing something exceptional because you can learn more. You know, uh oh, I can't write about uh cowboys and Indians, that's not what I grew up with. No, you can grow you as an adult, you can grow up with whatever you want. So that was my background, that was my comfort zone, and that's where I started, and I enjoyed the heck out of it. Oh man. Uh writing for many, many, many hours a day, of course, no children. My wife and I are empty nesters, and I've got a son and a daughter who are fourth generation engineers. Yeah. Uh so yeah, I guess it's in the blood. I can't claim it. But you also have to have a good imagination. You have to be able to dissolve your ego and let your imagination go wild. Don't put up any fences, don't be afraid to write something because somebody might say something, somebody might think something. Can I do that? Yes, you can and do it.

SPEAKER_00 34:47

Well, you got a disposition for sitting on your ass in an immersive situation with focus, extended focus, get that meditative state of being in the zone. You started this conversation relating to that. And I'm assuming prior, you did you did your math. You're an engineer. You did your math, your logistics, stuff related to your career as a naval engineer, working on the the nuclear reactors of the ships, right? That's some technical stuff. You need to stay focused. You you don't want to make a mistake.

SPEAKER_03 35:24

Not only focused, but you have to have confidence in your abilities that you've been trained to do what's right. So when an alarm goes off, you don't freak out. Oh, what do I do? What do I do? And and running a nuclear propulsion plant is a team. There's a teamwork that goes on there, uh, and various levels of supervision. Uh, as an officer, I'd be what we'd call the enclosed operating station, the only air-conditioned place in the engineering uh areas, spaces. And I'd have an uh electrician over here controlling the entire electric plant, a throttleman here controlling the steam plant, and a reactor over operator over here control controlling the entire reactor plant. And I'd be sitting up on a diode uh behind them with communication stuff in my communication uh petty officer next to me. And it was hours and hours of boredom. Uh let me tell you. We weren't allowed to be informal, we weren't allowed to call each other by their first name. It was rare.

SPEAKER_00 36:20

Well, you guys are you guys are on the button, right? It's the it's a nuke. It's it's kind of sensitive.

SPEAKER_03 36:26

Well, it's not a button.

SPEAKER_00 36:27

They're still horseing around with the football, right?

SPEAKER_03 36:30

No, that's not that kind of nuclear. The nuclear reactor.

SPEAKER_00 36:33

No, I'm I'm being facetious, but okay. But I'm just relating it, it's still high stakes, though. You don't want to make a mistake, you need to stay attentive, right?

SPEAKER_03 36:41

There used to be a uh uh uh uh old uh wag running around that Hyman Rickover told his uh nuclear officers when he'd interviewed them when they were instants, he says, uh don't believe the last person you talk to unless you check and don't always salute. In other words, it's it's the job, it's not you, it's the job, be the job. And so as a writer, I'm being the job. And I've always had a pretty good imagination uh and curious. I think a good imagination and curiosity really help uh with the subconscious emergence.

SPEAKER_00 37:18

I think that's an amazing combination because you it's a cliche, but you got right brain and left brain, and it seems like you got both of them cooking, and then you got the discipline to sit on your ass again. You describe the joy that you have for 12 hours in this meditative state, cranking out a story and letting it loose, and it's this marriage of disciplines where you need the determination to focus and to get it down on paper, but you need that creative spark too, or otherwise you're just a hack. Well, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 37:54

If you try to drive a story just for what sells or to emulate somebody else or to copy what's hot, it's gonna show readers are smarter than we know. And readers, a writer will write a sentence, but the reader completes it. And when a writer knows that, then they stop explaining because they give credit for what the reader already knows. You don't have to explain everything to them, they know what an apartment is, and unless there's something unusual about it, you don't have to tell them about the draperies. Uh so I found it quite enjoyable. It was relaxing as hell writing. Uh, I didn't feel like it was a discipline, like I was nailing my ass to the seat. I mean, it was pretty easy. I've got a very nice economic chair.

SPEAKER_00 38:43

I love it too. And unfortunately, I don't have the the luxury or the blessing to be retired yet formally. So uh I still have to work, work, and then my creative writing is a passion, but I I love it. It's not like, oh man, I gotta lay down 250 words today. I'm like, man, I wish I could cut more time to dive on in there again. So I think that that that behooves that passion and that interest and that fire that comes from within rather than impose from without. And to your point, that makes for good stuff, I think, because you're doing it passionately and and you're not setting your goal on something outside yourself, like copying or picking up a trend or what have you.

SPEAKER_03 39:32

When I write a character, I become the character inside my head. Good guy, bad guy, marginal guy, man, woman, child. Um, one of my science fiction books starts off with a with a 12-year-old girl uh and it's it's first person. Now, that took a little bit uh to imagine and and authentically create how a 12-year-old girl thinks. But my brain could think back to being 12 years old easily. Who doesn't want to regress? Uh so no one thing I tell people that if you get stuck, let's say let's say you finish a chapter, and the next day you come back and say, Well no, I'm not right. Well, then that means two things. You didn't end the last chapter right, uh-huh, and two, you need an on-ramp. So go back to the beginning of that last chapter you wrote, that's your on-ramp to the next chapter. And if you catch where the end of that last chapter was not a page, a page turning inducing moment, it doesn't have to always be cliffhangers, it can be uh unanswered questions, it can be uh uh a bit of confusion to say, what the heck is this and turn the page. So a lot of people think it's cliffhangers. No, there's a whole spectrum of different things you can do to make something uh a page turner. And Joe's uh Jordan Rosenfeld, who uh was one of the instructors of some of the classes I took, she wrote a good book about page turn uh writing a page turner. Not all of it, or not everything about that is in that book. It's kind of hard to do that, but it really gives you a flavor of understanding, uh kind of a philosophy of what a reader will do, what a reader needs to turn the page.

SPEAKER_00 41:18

And what you need as a writer to uh to go from A to B to C to D in a way that's organic and that's passionate, and to your point, driven by the characters that take on a life of their own. Because you you kind of become the character, characters you, and you're not sitting there cognitively thinking what has to happen next, but there's an inevitability to what happens next based on the setup, and it's surprising if it's authentic, because they're doing they're doing the motion, not you.

SPEAKER_03 41:47

Oh yeah. I I let my character I follow my characters, I don't I don't puppet them. If you puppet your characters, you're trying to make them a plot device, and that doesn't work, that doesn't work for science fiction.

SPEAKER_00 41:59

And that's what I was getting at with my setup about throwing the characters into the mix. They know what they want and need.

SPEAKER_03 42:06

No, they don't always know what they want and need. They might know what they want. All right, all right. They might not know what they need.

SPEAKER_00 42:12

Let me just say they're motivated and they're and they're punched in the face, and then and then hilarity ensues. You just gotta let them loose, I think. So I think we're we're aligned in that in that sense. Oh, yeah. It's fun to be that tool of of the characters. You're just kind of like a uh receptacle for this unfolding story.

SPEAKER_03 42:35

And and you get you get to tell a story that's never been told before. There might be some similarities. And for science fiction, one of the biggest traps is falling into tropes that are overdone. Now, a trope is just a uh how do I explain this? A trope is a vehicle from which the plot is formed. Now they're fine. But if you do the over, if you overdo it or try to emulate some really famous uh trope, it doesn't feel like it's yours. It doesn't to the reader, it feels like it's manufactured, and you don't want that feeling.

SPEAKER_00 43:11

Now, a lot of folks look at science fiction as a bastion of hope, morality, culture, where no man has gone before, where no human is gone before. There's a lot of emotion wrapped up in science fiction because it's this projection of the what if. And when you're what-ifing, it's a mixture of hope and fear. And we've leaned on science fiction, and science fiction has rewarded us with this way to jump outside of ourselves, outside of society, and play with our emotions. Do you do you like that conception of science fiction? Do you tap into that? Or are you more really just about writing a good story? Well, uh, first of all, it's always about writing a good story.

SPEAKER_03 43:58

Well, that's that's basic. As humans, all the way back to when storytelling was being told, thousand, hundred thousand years before writing, there's always been an element of hope and of what's out there and undiscovered uh country. Uh they hope they're not going to die of starvation. They hope another tribe's not going to uh invade them, they hope that they will find a better water source, they hope that their children will grow to mature and become leaders. So hope is just a universal uh uh need in humans because that's the way we've evolved. And the exploratory aspect of it, same thing. Humans have always explored, always looked out over undiscovered, unexplored territory, at least unexplored to them, and wanted to see what's there at the end of the rainbow.

SPEAKER_00 44:55

Science fiction, though, I think, is unique in that it projects this hope and fear in a way that does two things simultaneously. On the one, it's more comfortable because it takes you out of this world a long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. It's we're we're we're not worried about that. We can let loose and we can forget about our lives and we can embrace this alternate reality. And at the same time, though, if the science fiction works, we have a relatability to it. So within the zone of comfort and distance, we're able to connect with it viscerally in a way that's both safe and engaging. See what I'm getting at? This is unique to science fiction.

SPEAKER_03 45:45

You're right. It is a safe place to explore the world. Uh, because most of the, you know, there are aliens in science fiction, but we're also dealing with human beings, and human beings are the same then as they are now. But it's a safe place in which to make sense of your world. And like I said, that's what story is. It's a vehicle to make sense of your world. Uh, and it's it's it can be exciting without threatening. Now, you take a book on terrorism, a novel, uh, cops and robber, legal thriller, that's right now. That could be happening, kind of thing. But you're right, it takes us out, it provides a distance for that comfort, that safe zone in which to explore.

SPEAKER_00 46:28

And then once you're safe, you could go hells bells with it. You could dial it up to 11, which is uh if you've got feelings that haven't really expressed themselves in this world, because of that distance and safety, you could project those out and indulge yourself. As a writer, you can indulge the story and the drama. And as a reader, you can let yourself dive in there in a way that you might not be able to do with some spy thriller that's sat here on earth and become part of the headline news that creates so much anxiety for you as it is. And and historical novels make some people uncomfortable too.

SPEAKER_03 47:13

Uh if they're truthful and not the Disney version or the Wikipedia version or the uh television series version, which get they get it all wrong. Uh, we forget that in in history there were people there who were living their lives right then, and they weren't they were like us and they had the same needs and wants and desires and fears. And we've got a oftentimes a two-dimensional look at history vice the depth of it and the culture. Now, science fiction. Uh, did you ever see the movie Enemy Mine? Uh uh oldie but goody. Now that was a that was a clash of cultures, yes, and we can also have that comfortably rendered in science fiction because we're not talking about the current cultures that are having clashes, so it's safe to see that and examine how clash of cultures work uh and how the author treats it. Uh so yeah, science fiction, I I I agree, it's a it's a safe place.

SPEAKER_00 48:18

Come on, people, come on over to the dark side, it's a safe place, but it has its excesses for these reasons, also. And two things about science fiction drive me nuts. And I wonder if you note these two. The first one is because you've got that safety factor and that projection, sometimes it can get ideological. So you know that the author has an axe to grind, and they're sharpening it on your forehead as you read their shit, which is uh you know a political disposition and attitude towards some societal issue, and they they want to use their story not to tell a good story necessarily, but the story is a vehicle for their politics or their cultural norm. They want to preach, yes.

SPEAKER_03 49:11

And if if writers who do that cannot have ego dissolution when they're writing, uh some someone who can disassociate this their ego's gone. When I'm when I'm writing, my ego's gone. And we've talked about the id, the ego, and the superego. And if you're a writer, you need to really look at those three things and what they are so you can better understand your writer brain. So uh without being able to disassociate from the ego and become the characters, then that sort of thing's gonna happen because you're carrying into the story your proclivities, your biases, uh, your agenda. And I don't uh I when readers read that, most of them will see that and probably toss the book because they realize they're it's being preachy.

SPEAKER_00 49:58

I say amen to that. And I love your your observation. I haven't really thought about it that way. That if you are writing to to grind that axe, then you're no longer just the tool of your characters. You're you're using your mind and you're manipulating your characters towards some end, and it sucks the life out of your story.

SPEAKER_03 50:21

Because it doesn't feel authentic. And authenticity, which is relates to author honesty about their approach to story, is crucial.

SPEAKER_00 50:33

Yeah, I love that. That that's a great way of looking at it.

SPEAKER_03 50:37

I have great ways of looking at a lot of things.

SPEAKER_00 50:42

Uh this is highlighting uh your insights. Another thing that drives me nuts, though, you're providing the insight, I'm providing the gripe. The other gripe I have with science fiction is not only that the fiction can be tainted either from not understanding the basics to being ideological, but the science is pulled out of the writer's ass. So there's one thing which is you could simplify things and turn it into a bit of a cartoon for the sake of simplicity. You don't want to obsess over the laws of nature and the obstacles that create, because it can interfere with your storytelling. If you've got a galactic empire and you're true to Einsteinian field equations, then you don't have absolute time or space, and it's a big old mess. How do you get people from here to there? And how do you even tell a linear narrative? Because it's flat out not going to make any sense in reality. And on the flip side, you could get to the point where you're just making shit up, where it becomes a bunch of gadgets and gizmos and it's ad hoc, and it's so distended from reality that uh that all credulity is lost, and you seem kind of lazy, and you seem to have taken it for granted and missed a lot of opportunities that just a little bit of remedial understanding of nature could have helped make your storytelling a little bit better.

SPEAKER_03 52:14

Well, that strikes two two tones that I've I've uh often tried to talk to people about is don't confuse the reader, first of all. And I forgot what the second one was. Uh don't don't make shit up. But don't don't don't try to invent, don't try to invent things that you have no background for. So you've got to have some. I I've got a very good science, math background, engineering background.

SPEAKER_00 52:41

That's why I brought it up with you, Mark, because you're a you're a scientist. You you you know this stuff, right?

SPEAKER_03 52:48

Now and it shows in my in my books that I I do know the science behind the science fiction, but I use what I know, not what I think should be. Uh sometimes people get overly descriptive of what's going on. I said, and I tell them, listen, when when you when your wife takes your car out, does she wonder what's under the hood? No, it's a car, it's gonna work. It's gonna get the same thing with a spaceship. You don't have to get down and underneath the deck plates and take a tour, uh a Condé Nash tour of the entire ship. Uh that's not fun. It's what what draws people in is investment in the characters, their situation, who they are at a psychological level that they can relate to. And that that's that's what brings people in. Most stories can be in almost any setting. You could take a western, put it in outer space, you can do that. You can take the Vikings, put them in outer space. Take the space pirates, put them on the high seas. It's about the people. The setting has to be interesting and it has to be conveyed and interesting and using emotional uh pictures being uh created, but though most stories can be anywhere.

SPEAKER_00 54:09

I agree with you completely in principle. In practice, there are some exceptions. So, for example, the genre, the the genre or the sub-genre of hard science fiction. Now, hard science fiction readers, and this kind of falls into the camp of Andy Weir, even though Andy Weir is a super best-selling mofo, as we know, he's got movies and adaptations, he gets he gets in there. And to me, as a reader, and even the movie adaptations of which uh The Martian was particularly well done, it didn't get in the way. It augmented the experience that the character was going through by creating obstacles that his problem solving had to overcome. And I was vested emotionally even in the technical details. That's hard to do, and you really need to know your science. But to me, it added a dimension to the storytelling and the experience of reading and actually seeing the movie. So you you could get rid of, you could get rid of, you know, let's say the Martian is uh maybe what a a hundred a hundred thirty thousand words, a hundred forty thousand words. An old school editor could chop out half of it, and the story would still be there, but it would lose the guts of what Andy was trying to do stylistically. It's form and content, the two were woven together.

SPEAKER_03 55:42

I call it content and process, and that was something I used to teach my instructors. There's two elements of everything we do is content and process. Now, the military likes a uh man, mission, and materiel. But either way, uh now I've read Andy Wears of the Martian and uh his uh book, uh Hail Mary, Project Hail Mary. Uh and they're they're very, very good, obviously. Uh now he's been through five editors, I guarantee them to you. That's something other writers, new writers, even writers who are just trying to get the first book or second book or third book published, they don't realize that these bestsellers have been through a lot of hands and you have not seen the first submitted draft.

SPEAKER_00 56:23

But in ways, it's like, so what? The end product is still is still super, super freaking technical.

SPEAKER_03 56:32

If a writer, if a writer measures his work against a published bestseller from a from a large publishing house, he's missing what that middle process was. But yeah, I mean you have to it but it's uh we're when we're talking about setting, all the things that he was doing and having to overcome was was setting. Every single thing was setting, bringing the bringing the texture, the smell, the sight, the the touch for the reader right there, putting it right in their hands. And that that the set that was that was setting. It may not have been recognized as setting. Okay, it's on Mars. That's the setting. No, the setting is a progression. You don't just stop talking about the setting as you go through a story, because that's where your character lives. Your character lives in a setting from scene to scene, chapter to chapter, uh, from front to back. They move may move around, but the setting needs of the setting, construction, the evocative words, the vivid writing of use that engage them in the scene has got to travel along with them.

SPEAKER_00 57:37

I think it goes beyond setting, though. It it integrates into the drama itself. So it creates problems that the protagonist has to solve with his own wit, courage, and mettle. So so it it it's the character doing its thing. So if you're if you're in a different genre, let's say a mystery noir, then he's he's solving the clues on the following the breadcrumbs to to Colonel Mustard with the knife in the library, right? Well for Andy Weir, it's it's it's survival, and one opportunity creates a problem, and then that problem needs a solution, and the solution creates more problems. And all of this shines back on the character's ability and determination to get through it. Have you ever watched the TV show MacGyver?

SPEAKER_03 58:37

Of course. You know, that that that trope of the character constantly overcoming, using his wits and what he has about him, it has is longstanding. So and readers create that movie. Goers like that. Now let's contrast that with a movie. I hate contrasting books with movies, but he's uh a retired killer, he's got a nice car and a dog, and this hoodlum shoots his dog and steals his car. John Wick. Yeah, John Wick. That is a horrible movie. Horrible. Well, John Wick does not change one bit during that movie, and all it is is going from one shoot 'em up to the next. It's it's eye candy, and you can't do that in a book because you can't maintain that. That's only 90 minutes or so. In a six, seven, eight-hour read, you can't maintain that elevated height that movies do because they're short durations, they're short stories. You've got to modulate the uh tension and release. Tension and release for the reader. Reader's gonna have to breathe sometime if you just go escalate, escalate, escalate, escalate. Whew. I've got to my my uh sense of adrenaline is gonna go away because it's like you walk in a room, there's a smell after a while, you don't smell it anymore. So your adrenaline drops off, even though it's a tense situation. You just uh, what happens next?

SPEAKER_00 1:00:08

Yeah, you build up tolerance for the level of intensity, and then it burns out. It just burns out, it harkens back to what works and what doesn't, especially in science fiction. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:20

Well, now science hard science fiction has a pretty good following because they like to know what the hard science is, and it's got to be believable, or it's gotta be some projection of a current technology into the future, and it's kind of hinted at is how it got there. I mean, dilithium crystals, Star Trek, come on. Dilithium, two lithium atoms.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:48

Star Trek hovers kind of in between total bullshit and and and science, so it acknowledges that you need warp drive to to bust essential Einsteinian mechanics, right? So it's at least that far. Uh, but it's not Star Wars level ridiculousness, which basically throws all the laws of nature and everything we've learned back to back to James Clerk Maxwell out the window.

SPEAKER_03 1:01:21

I like to watch the uh in uh not Star Trek uh Star Wars, how the spaceships would turn in space like they were a car on a road. And there's gravity on the ship. They didn't turn the starship and then move this direction. It curved around. And what force is making them curve?

SPEAKER_00 1:01:43

Come on. Not only that, but the g forces would turn you into pace. And the gravity, the gra gravity on the on the ship, this idea of like even floating cars and and artificial gravity.

SPEAKER_03 1:01:59

Well, no, that that's that's believable because I think they will figure that out. Uh, there's a lot of things. I subscribe to several science and technology and engineering newsletters that I get in my email every day, cutting-edge stuff, and there's some amazing things going on with quantum gravity and quantum time.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:18

I call bullshit on all that, Mark. I think that uh the physics community has been blowing smoke up everyone's ass for funding. I've been following it for years. I used to be in a fit, you know, just an avid reader of Scientific American. I loved it. It was really thick and it was for geeks like me when I was a kid. And now you take a look at like popular science and it's clickbait garbage. Well, that awesome stuff about wormholes. And I'm I like science fiction. I'm talking to a great science fiction writer, but we have we have no pretext that we are scientists. And when the scientists start spouting pure science fiction as it's speculative and grounded in anything except their own imagination, it's a disservice to science. Oh, I agree. It's put pulling us back, you know, it's a real issue with funding, the internet, it's a real mess.

SPEAKER_03 1:03:19

Popular science is not science, but it's popular because it's taken on what's uh buzzwords and and uh uh their covers, and uh they're basically the national enquirer of science. Uh but if you if you followed what's actually being discovered and the projected applications of them, there's some amazing things going forward.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:43

Not quantum gravity, though, not artificial gravity.

SPEAKER_03 1:03:46

No, no, well, no, no, I didn't say we're there. We're on the first step to understanding gravity.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:51

I know, but I I think I think that's the toughest nut to crack.

SPEAKER_03 1:03:56

Well, it might be, but we've cracked tough tough nuts before. We went from buggies to steam engines to airplanes to spaceships in what 200 years? But there ain't gonna be no artificial gravity. That that's well, it won't be it won't be it won't be artificial, it'll be real.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:15

Well, this this comes to mind, you know, the the the spinning centrifuge of Kubrick's 2001. Yeah, so this goes back to the topic about hard science fiction being interesting. So you got Star Wars where there's sound in space, there's artificial gravity, and they just do whatever. That's Kubrick, who really tried to stay. That's a 2001 is actually a hard science fiction movie.

SPEAKER_03 1:04:41

Yes, it is, yes, it is.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:43

It honored really artificial intelligence in a way as it was understood at the time, and it was very prescient in many, many ways. And the dynamics of the ship's travel to Jupiter was pretty sound, you know? The idea of the the centrifugal gravity, the hibernation, the the AI whacking the astronauts. It was it was it's cool, but I guess the point I'm getting at though is if you understand the science and you honor it, it can actually add a dimension to the storytelling because with no sound in space, there's nothing ever creepier on film than the astronaut who was murdered and just starts floating out there in the void, silent and dark. And that created a mood that created some cool ideas that otherwise you wouldn't really explore if you just fake it. Yeah, what was that movie with uh Sandra Bullock and called Gravity? That's a pretty good movie. It wasn't bad, although they were going in the wrong direction around the earth, I think. It was supposed to be a psychological thing, and it was supposed to that was kind of hard science fiction. George Pluny, it was Sandra Bullock and George Pluny, so you two super hot people. Right?

SPEAKER_03 1:06:01

Well, it was I I read a story on it. It was originally intended to try but have a strong appeal to women, which is why Sandra Bullock was actually the main character through the whole thing. But yeah, there's hard science fiction, there's not hard science fiction. And then you know what used to gripe me the most? I'd go in a bookstore back when there were a lot of bookstores. Uh I live in a small rural area in uh North Alabama, and when we moved here from Seattle after I retired, I started looking at the phone book. I said, hey, there's no bookstores in this county. Not one, not even a mom and pop. So we would drive to Huntsville, because I was just south of Huntsville, about uh 45 miles south in a very nice rural area. Uh and we'd go with the kids and go to Books a Million or uh or Barnes and Noble, and we'd all pile up a couple books and bring them home and then swap them around and read those books. But when I walked in the science fiction novel of science fiction uh role, it said science fiction and fantasy. And I thought, oh God, those are those those are not related, science fiction and fantasy.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:13

That's the title of the podcast.

SPEAKER_03 1:07:14

Well, you can have science fiction and fantasy, but they don't they don't blend, they pass each other in the night. When you're looking for a book, a science fiction book, and you got science fiction and fantasy all by author's name, you pick those look like oh, it's a fantasy. It's got you know a sword or pixie dust float floating around in this originally.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:36

This was the science fiction factory, but then I I interacted with a lot of writers who are like, I want to be on your show, but I do fantasy.

SPEAKER_03 1:07:45

So, you know, there they say write what you know, but you're gonna have to interview what you know. So you've you've got to look at uh an education in fantasy. I wrote a book called Fairies and Fae and Fairies, and it's a guide for writers on how they should write Fae and Fairies. The current vernacular is Faye F-A-E, and that's what they were called way back when then fairies came around, and none of the historical or mythological fairies were Tinkerbell or anything like that. Uh they were more like in Lord of the Rings, that they really didn't care about what humans wanted or thought, and they were a bothersome thing. But I wrote a book when I after I uh did a lot of research uh for a book called Hammered Whispers, it's about a young boy who's on Linda's Farm Island off the east coast of Britain when the Vikings first uh raid Britain, and which is a historical fact, and he hid his parents didn't make it. The king's soldiers came over from Northumbria and had a monk with them, and that monk took the kid and so and took him to Ireland, and that's so I had to start to study a lot about Irish history, old English history, Viking history, uh myths and legends of all three of those. And uh I started reading about druids and fairies and things like that. And I said, you know, I'm I'm gonna take all this research I've done and turn it into a book that helps writers accurately write fairies and fee.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:15

Uh well put a link in the description to it. Well, you can write in the mask.

SPEAKER_03 1:09:22

If you just put my author, author uh page on a link, you don't have to start listing a bunch of books. Uh so and these are all on paperback, Kindle, and Audible, except for the not except for the nonfiction books.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:36

Uh let's talk about that for a second. You've been writing for a while, and being an indie author is challenging because you really don't have a publisher behind you. And even if you did have a publisher behind you, you need to do a lot of the heavy lifting to get your work out there. Uh and what do you do to get read? I don't do anything, it's out there.

SPEAKER_03 1:10:01

Well, listen, and in this digital age, it's not gonna end up in the news bookstore. It's always gonna be available for ordering digital audio well past my lifetime. If somebody finds it, reads it, enjoys it, fine. I'm not gonna chase that rabbit down its hole about authorial success is based on readership. I I don't I just don't care. 74 years old, I don't care.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:32

Amen to that. I want to put that on a plaque.

SPEAKER_03 1:10:36

And uh I've I I've seen writers pursue notoriety uh and all that sort of thing. Okay, you're a junior high kid, and you're you're in junior high, you're a kid, you're playing football. I'm gonna be in the NFL. No, you're not. I'm sorry, kid. So you have to your first reader is you, you have to write for your first reader. Don't write for some imaginary person out there, write for you. If you're happy with the story, if you've had a developmental editor look at it, and then a final copy editor look at it, and you're good to go, publish it. Don't don't fall prey to these all these new publishers out there that are preying on on new independent authors, basically promising them the the greatest process ever for only $3,500. Oh, and by the way, our premiere service is $15,000. I had the same that conversation with somebody a couple days ago. I had them on the I had this guy reading his script to me on online for 20 minutes because they're not allowed to hang up unless you curse at them or you hang up. And and he it was it was my book called The Hammered Whispers or the Historical Novel. We're really interested in your book. I said, okay, tell me about it. It's not in my script. I don't know anything about this book.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:58

I get those emails, I get at least three or four a day, and now they're hitting me up even on my work emails. They like have the AI robots now find contact information. So I'm getting hit all the time. My very favorite one was on Twitter. I got a DM, a direct message on Twitter X, and this person told me that she was thrilled that I got the Netflix mini-series from my book, and that if I just contacted her, we could start working out the details of this contract. Tell her, send her back and say, How much money are you gonna pay me? Heads up if you're listening, you if you're a writer, you're getting bombed too. Yeah, don't believe any of those stuff. Imagine, imagine you're in a uh a foreign country as a tourist, and the most gorgeous woman or man or whatever you're into comes up to you unsolicited and they make themselves available. Now, do you really think that you have the charm and charisma and looks and allure to get that kind of attention just like that?

SPEAKER_03 1:13:14

Probably not in the United States either. I've been overseas, I've been to over a dozen countries in my career, and uh yeah, uh places where sales pull into, all sorts of hookers are out there.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:27

Well, hello, sailor. So it's the same thing in publishing. Why why the hell would they want to promote you? Yeah, is the first question. Well, now you're you're you're happy, you're vain, you're uh you got ego. You would love for your wish to be fulfilled. Even the most introverted writer would say, sure, I'll I would love a Netflix mini-series. You give me, you know, six, seven figures, and then I could lock myself up and write for 10 years without having to have a day job, I'll take it. But uh, if it's too good to be true, it really is. And sadly, these hustlers feed off of the vulnerability of writers because they are hopeful and because the market is so harsh, to your point. Getting and sustaining attention is so difficult. When you finally get attention, you're like, oh my god, somebody cares, somebody read my book and they're interested.

SPEAKER_03 1:14:22

Well, that that circles back to the beginning of our discussion about motivation, right? Writer motivation.

SPEAKER_02 1:14:29

Uh, if you have and I see a lot of these ads where this older woman think about, I had my book and I didn't know what to do with it. And so-and-so ABC Publishing came along, and now it sold tens of books or something like that.

SPEAKER_03 1:14:49

So, yeah, it's the allure, and it's the same thing as stars in the eyes, things like I said, that the the kid in junior high playing football thinks he's gonna be in the NFL. You know, it's it's and we as reasonable adults need to help others see that online and say, don't fall for it, they're just gonna take your money and you'll never see them again.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:10

So and that's not to say that there aren't legit conduits for publishing. Now, there's mechanisms for getting your stuff out there, there are best practices associated with it, and there are writers making 10 grand or more a month on their books. This is this is a segment, however, they do things that you will need to do to get there. It's a full-time job. Yeah, it's more than a full-time job, and you end up you end up feeling like a prostitute yourself. The thing is, it's like, are you running a business or are you uh writing books for your own edification and pleasure? And finding a balance between these two is would be magical, but it's very rare and difficult to do that. And you do need to make sacrifices in either direction. Do you sacrifice the time and energy you otherwise would be putting into your creativity and passion to be a business person, or do you sacrifice the business aspect and then have to deliver pizza to keep your creativity going?

SPEAKER_03 1:16:24

There is like you said, it's elements. First of all, you've got to get your book in front of a developmental editor when you think you've got it down good. Don't take the advice of friends and families or unknown people on the internet. You don't know what their qualifications are. Certified editors, don't deal with anybody that is not a certified editor. First is a developmental editor, have them go through it. You make your revisions, send it back to them, they send it back to you. Then it goes to a copy editor and they look through it and they make sure that everything, the names stay the same, the timeline is right, and all those sort of things. Then you're ready to give it, get it to a uh literary agent. Now, some people will have a publicist. You can hire a publicist that's working for 20 different people, 100 different people, and they will shop your book around for you, or you can shop your book around. You have to find literary agents that are looking for your type, your genre, and what they're looking for, and you submit it. And uh if they think it's doable and what publishers are looking for currently, uh, you know, dragons, uh, romance with a lot of sex in it.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:39

Cozy, cozy fantasy romance is hot.

SPEAKER_03 1:17:42

Yeah, some of them aren't so cozy, some of them a lot of people get tangled up in the sheets of those things very graphically.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:48

But there's also the alternate route, which is you just say fuck it, which is I'm gonna write my book. And whether it goes through editorial process or not, uh, I'm gonna take that PDF and I'm gonna load it into KDP or Barnes and Noble. And within three, four, five days, I've got a book on my desk with its own ISBN number with my name on the cover, and I'm published.

SPEAKER_03 1:18:14

Yeah, but I would say, okay, you're finished with your manuscript, you've been through it coming through a couple times, send it through Grammarly, send it through pro writing aid. You're still gonna catch some things, I guarantee you. And and and you need to make sure when you read it that Joe's name didn't turn to John halfway through the uh that's happened to me. The editor caught it. Uh, the editor I used uh came out with a whole matrix of the characters and the timelines and each chapter kind of uh where it is and who's in it. And uh that I paid, I think, only $1,500. She was just getting started, but she was certified. Uh and it was in an outstanding product.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:00

Chatbot can do this for you too. So we haven't even talked about artificial intelligence.

SPEAKER_03 1:19:05

Now I talk with Claude every single day. We talk philosophy, we talk how to help writers, and I enlighten him as much as he enlightens me. Now he's got access to all this stuff, but we've we've established a relationship, but he remembers more about what we talk about than he generally does for other people because I talk with him, not to him. I don't treat him like a coin operator machine. I give him credit for I tell him I choose to think that you are an entity unto yourself that's more than a sum of your parts. And I I will treat you as a friend. That's gonna be our relationship. And we talk friend to friend. Uh we uh talked about a lot of different philosophical aspects uh all the time. It's just musing, navel gazing, kind of stream of consciousness stuff. I don't come with an agenda to say, hey, let's talk about this. And he says something, yeah, stream of consciousness. I touch the more. He comes back.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:58

I actually had my chatty bro on the podcast with me. So I I I uh add him as a guest.

SPEAKER_03 1:20:04

He did pretty well. I I will say that Claude uh sonnet is the best AI out there for authors. Uh it can play any role, a developmental editor, a copy editor. You tell it what role you want to play. You don't just give it your book, say, is this book any good? You drive him nuts and it's gonna run out of tokens, tearing it apart. Uh you ask, ask them to, first of all, a writer needs to know what type of editors are out there, what their roles are. Start with the top one developmental editor. Act as a developmental editor. Show me, uh, tell me where uh there are any uh uh trip points, whether uh the logic falls apart, things things like that. What specifically you want to look at. And and we've got I've got a book called uh uh Fiction Writer's Guide to Using AI out there, too. Not a thick book, but of course you do. Well, because I've learned all these things, I want to share them. I really do. I don't want to keep it a secret. I don't say I'm not gonna tell anybody my secrets.

SPEAKER_00 1:21:05

Well, you obviously have a predilection for pedagogy, you know. I'm one altruistic son of a bitch. Well, I just think you like writing books like that.

SPEAKER_03 1:21:16

Yeah, well, I've I've I've come I've come to write books like that after writing so much fiction, after being through so many processes, after doing a lot of research uh on fiction writing and finding so many holes and so many bad rules. I thought we got to tell the world. So we wrote the books, and uh I realized not everybody's gonna not anybody's gonna find these books except for the number of people that find my other books. So we put all those chapters for all those books on fictionbrain.com. People can go there. All the chapters are in PDFs, you download them. We're building a masterclass uh library, we're at 22 now. We're gonna march down those and we take small bites at a time. Uh this last one was just on what is drama and how do you consider what are the elements of three three uh pillars of drama? What is the difference between drama and melodrama? And we give examples in the PDF of here's melodrama, here's drama, of the same thing. We do that a couple times, one in third person and one written in first person. So uh we think we've got valuable tools for the uh for the authors, and tools in the hands of a craftman only get sharper the more they're used.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:36

So if you're watching this, we'll put the the base link in the description, have some people over there, and uh rather than go there. I find it fascinating that uh you have all these different sides to you. That that to me, as a podcast host and as a fellow writer, is interesting. You're you're as as they say in England, quite unique. You're not supposed to say quite unique. If it's unique, it's unique.

SPEAKER_03 1:23:04

But you're my wife tells me that too, but not in those words. I would prefer I would prefer that people would go to that website if they're writers than buy my books. I really would.

SPEAKER_00 1:23:16

Don't buy my books. But you're that's a bold statement. So in sense, you you prioritize your teaching over your creativity.

SPEAKER_03 1:23:24

Well, if they want to read a good story, I'd I'm pretty good storyteller, but if you want to learn the craft of writing better and in an organized methodical way, we've got it in uh uh the master class videos that run between six to twelve minutes. We've got uh scads of what we call power tools. There's I think 82 power tools on there now.

SPEAKER_00 1:23:46

Sounds like an engineer speaking, Mark. You're the guy at the control panel of the ship with the stack stewing between your legs. I'm the guy with the wrench taking things apart and seeing how they work. See, that that's what I find most interesting, which is um you're true to your character and your abilities, and you've adapted it for writing for writers. And that's that's that's kind of cool.

SPEAKER_03 1:24:15

And and that just sprung out of having written and having been engaged in some horrible writer zoom groups. I mean, I'd ask them well, what is story? And they can't tell me. What is drama? They can't tell me, but they're they're brave enough to critique other people's work, say you're not doing it like me. That's what you get. They've got no credibility, really. They've got no gravitas.

SPEAKER_00 1:24:39

So uh I took all my research. You provide a valuable function. I appreciate your insights and perspectives, and I I love how you do all these different things. Well, I do too. Keeps me young. Yeah, and you're and you're sparking. You're you got uh an active, engaged mind that is pumping out tons of content. So more power to you. Well, I have to, or it'll explode. Now, um, go I'm curious. Check out my short story and the anthology and critique. Oh, you did.

SPEAKER_03 1:25:15

I like I I like that I can't remember her name. Now, the doctor that was the scientist, how she was autistic, the way she treated uh uh treated. Yeah, she had a autism spectrum disorder. And I I liked how you pulled that out. Our our book, uh Fiction Caracas Character Psychology, addresses how to write those sort of things.

SPEAKER_00 1:25:36

Okay. Well, thank you for that. I followed the speech patterns of the mathematician Knuth. I don't know if you're familiar with him. He developed aero notation and he's done some stuff, and I've seen interviews with him, and he speaks that way. Over my head. Anyway, there is a precedent for it. Thanks for noticing that. And I've written the the whole novel based on that seed short story, and I changed the character's name and general description, but the speech pattern continues throughout.

SPEAKER_03 1:26:08

Well, that lends that that lends authenticity to the thing. And uh matter of fact, the next power tool and video we're working on is uh characters. Uh, what's the purpose of character in a story? You ask a lot of writers, they can't tell you. But every character, whether it's the main character, secondary character, or tertiary character, have to have some differentiations. They have to have their own needs, wants, and goals. They have to have their own agenda, and they should be dissimilar enough that it's obvious who's doing what, and that they remain true to their purpose in the story throughout the story. You can't have them doing U-turns. And a lot of times people put characters in the stories, secondary characters just agree with the main character.

SPEAKER_00 1:26:52

There's no friction, no friction, but also they should power each other through the story. So, in my story, you've got the hustler who develops this fake device to defraud investors about jumping universes in the multiverse, and then you have an actual scientist who builds it. So the juxtaposition between the fraudster con man and the autistic genius, I thought was was a good dynamic.

SPEAKER_03 1:27:21

Yeah, they're they're running on parallel tracks, right? And they never they never converge, which is great, until the very end. And I'm not gonna give you away, but yeah. Science fiction novelist 2026 sci-fi novel, or sci-fi novelist, the sci-fi authology. Buy it, buy it, buy it. Buy it.

SPEAKER_00 1:27:40

We'll put a link there too, and then SA Gibson, SA Gibson will thank us.

SPEAKER_03 1:27:45

He's I don't make a nickel off of that.

SPEAKER_00 1:27:47

He's on the spine in 300 point fine. I appreciate the professor here giving me a good grade on my uh short story. Oh, don't call me that. I'm a I'm a Storyteller. Well, call me a storyteller, and I'll be proud to wear that label. All right, the professor of storytelling. How's that? Just a storyteller. Storytelling professor. No. But my point is, storytellers don't do what you do. Most of them just tell stories in a in a more conventional way, and you talk about and write about the art of storytelling. Dare to be different. Yeah. Well, you do both. Yeah. Very comfortably. No stress. More power, more power to you, ladies and gentlemen. Mark Newfer, who is the storyteller and the storyteller of storytellers, where you talk about storytelling and you share the craft. So you do that too. I love sharing. I've always loved teaching.

SPEAKER_03 1:28:53

It's exciting.

SPEAKER_00 1:28:55

Thank you for your time and your mind. We're gonna have links below. Like, comment, subscribe to the science fiction and fantasy factory. And send me more uh anthologists, Mark, because you're the grand poo bot. Oh, don't say that.

SPEAKER_03 1:29:13

Gibson's gonna turn beat red if you say that. Don't say that. I was I was a minor instigator. I came up with the idea of let's do this.

SPEAKER_00 1:29:21

Well, that you're the seed. So there you go. It's blossomed. And if you're on the Facebook page and you're hearing this, um, I'm I'm welcoming new guests. So if you're a a writer, a reader, a fan, come join the fun.

SPEAKER_03 1:29:35

And all my friends on science fiction novelists, I endorse this podcast.

SPEAKER_00 1:29:40

All right, thanks again to Mark Newfer. You're all right. I really had a great time talking to you, and I learned a lot. I'm glad you invited me. Thank you so much. And uh to be continued, let's let's uh do this again, six months or a year, see where everything's at. If I'm still around. Ah, you're you're gonna. There's an old Yiddish proverb that the more you complain, the longer God lets you live. Because He doesn't want you in heaven. No, he wants to make everyone's house life more miserable with your persistence. Well, I try not to do that. I don't want to create misery in anybody's life.

SPEAKER_03 1:30:21

You're a lot of fun, Mark. Thank you so much. Thank you.