Cedar Sanderson: Prolific Pulp Pantser

What do gardening, balloon animals, pulp fiction, Japanese manga, military science fiction, homeschooling, cover design, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and peeing basset hounds have in common? Cedar Sanderson, obviously.

In this lively and often hilarious episode, Cedar joins Mookie Spitz for a sprawling conversation that begins with flowers and parenting and somehow winds its way through publishing, illustration, pulp fiction, education, storytelling, creativity, and the peculiar neuroses that drive writers to spend years inventing people who don't exist.

Cedar shares her winding journey from entertainer, face painter, and balloon twister to scientist, entrepreneur, illustrator, publisher, and prolific author. Along the way, she explains why kids are the toughest audience on Earth, how writing a story for her daughter launched her fiction career, and why characters often refuse to follow their author's instructions.

The conversation quickly enters the kind of nerdy territory both participants clearly enjoy. Mookie and Cedar debate pantsing versus plotting, discuss the strange alchemy of creativity, and compare notes on the ways writers trick themselves into actually finishing books. Cedar talks about her fascination with pulp fiction and classic adventure storytelling, while Mookie defends his self-imposed obsession with writing entire novels in rigid three-line blocks like some sort of literary Lego set assembled by an ADHD mad scientist.

They also tackle bigger questions. Has modern publishing become too safe? Why do so many contemporary books feel interchangeable? Are readers being fed diluted versions of stories that were once richer, stranger, and more ambitious? Cedar argues that many writers no longer read deeply enough, while Mookie ironically wonders whether entire genres have become victims of their own formulas.

The discussion veers into cover design, independent publishing, doing one's own art, storytelling in video games, the collapse of critical thinking, the value of constraints in creative work, and why writing "important messages" into fiction usually produces unreadable garbage.

Somewhere in the middle, they also manage to talk about Cedar's books. She discusses her most popular Pixie Noir, newly released fantasy detective novella Child of Crows and the origins of Tanager's Fledglings, a surprisingly intimate science fiction adventure that begins with a young man, a starship, and a basset hound demonstrating a stubborn refusal to be housebroken on a starship. 

Part writing workshop, part publishing insider discussion, part cultural critique, and part two smartasses wandering down fascinating rabbit holes, this episode is a reminder that today's storytelling is too often faked by formulas, focus groups, and committees. the good stuff instead created by curious people willing to follow strange ideas wherever they lead. And occasionally by people who spend twenty years collecting pulp novels and arguing about paragraph lengths.

The Guest

Cedar Sanderson is a multifaceted creator whose work spans both the literary and visual arts. She is celebrated for her engaging storytelling and her ability to captivate audiences with her vibrant imagery and thoughtful narratives. Her work not only entertains but also invites readers and viewers into worlds where science meets magic, and the mundane becomes extraordinary. 

Her books, such as "Pixie Noir" and "Tanager’s Fledglings," showcase her unique blend of fantasy, science fiction, and mystery, often infused with a touch of humor and deep human insight. Her art, varying from traditional sumi-e painting to digital creations, reflects a love for both the whimsical and the scientific, with influences from her passion for history, infectious disease, and food anthropology. Known for her eclectic career that includes roles as diverse as balloon twister, face painter, and scientist, Cedar has channeled her wide range of experiences into her writing and art.

Her Books

Amazon

Her Website

https://www.cedarwrites.com/

Her Substack

https://cedarlila.substack.com/

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:01

Hello and welcome to the science fiction and fantasy factory. I'm your host, Mookie Spitz, and I've got Cedar Sanderson in the factory today. Welcome on in, Cedar.

SPEAKER_00 0:17

I'm glad to be here.

SPEAKER_01 0:19

I'm glad you're here. I see your gardening on Substack. Your uh pretty flowers and arrangements. I'm kind of jolly. I'm one of those Home Depot miracle grow kind of guys. So I wouldn't exactly call me a brown thumb, but I'm not the best at it. So I can I can appreciate a master at work.

SPEAKER_00 0:44

I am I have been gardening since literally before I could walk. Um just talking to my mom about that today. She used to carry me around in a baby backpack while she was gardening. Um and and the trick is um you start with a lot of plants and some of them survive.

SPEAKER_01 1:02

Kind of like children used to be.

SPEAKER_00 1:05

Well, yeah. As a mother of four, all of mine did live to adulthood.

SPEAKER_01 1:11

Nice! Congratulations, you're beating the odds, at least statistically, for humanity. I don't think I've killed anything. I I've got two boys, adopted their mom's niece, so that's three for three. They're all still alive.

SPEAKER_03 1:28

Excellent.

SPEAKER_01 1:29

I I think that's that's an accomplishment. I'll take that for a win. And none of my plants have died yet either.

SPEAKER_00 1:36

Oh, that's always good too.

SPEAKER_01 1:37

They're they're still going. They're still and now I'm finding out too that you know they outgrow a pot and then you move them, right? Kind of like kids in clothes. You just keep keep going, so you know you're doing something right if you know they get out of control and take you for granted and start throwing you shade.

SPEAKER_00 1:56

With plants, you can prune them back. You really can't do that to children.

SPEAKER_01 2:00

Yes, I I wish I could.

SPEAKER_00 2:03

There have been times, yes. But no, I'm I'm I'm tickled with mine. Uh they have all flown the nest and they're all doing their own independent things, and uh really that's that's the only goal as a parent.

SPEAKER_01 2:19

I think that's a hundred percent correct. There's all these books and guides on how to parent the right way, the wrong way. You could be the helicopter mom or dad, or you could be la sais-faire and let them be, and they all oscillate between one extreme and another, and I think that's the best guidance of all, which is just stay out of their way, keep them safe, and hope for the best.

SPEAKER_00 2:41

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And every one of them is different. So the books don't really apply because every child is gonna be their own very unique individual characteristics.

SPEAKER_01 2:54

And how they react to you is is reflective of that. So I have two sons, and one of them I've always gotten along with from the moment of birth. He was still half inside mom, and he looked at me and he was kind of like, Hey, how's it going? And then the older one from that same moment was like, Who the hell are you? And what am I doing here? And it's never changed. Not for a second. So, what what can you do? You're the same parent, in a sense, for all of them, and they each react their own way.

SPEAKER_00 3:27

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 3:28

And you just gotta roll with it.

SPEAKER_00 3:30

Yo, yes. Yeah, and and to bring it back to the writing, this is sometimes how I feel about my characters when I'm writing books. If I'm doing it right, they have a life of their own and they aren't always listening to what I'm telling them. And uh I I it's it's been interesting because I didn't start to write seriously until after I was a mother. Um, I dabbled with writing while I was in my teens, gave it up for many years, came back to it. Um, and I actually wrote my first novel for my oldest daughter. It started out as I wrote a short story and sent it to her a few pages at a time while she was at summer camp. And when she got back that fall, she found out about Nano Rimo from her teacher at school in middle school. And she came home waving this piece of paper at me, and she's like, Can you take my story and turn it into a novel? And I did. So that was that was a that was a heck of a way to start, but a great motivation was basically, okay, I think I can do this. I'd been writing short stories by that point, so but I also got locked into, I thought my natural length was a short story. And I I've noticed over the years of of working with new writers and um not necessarily individually mentoring, I I tend to do more diffuse encouragement. Um, but I write for the Mad Genius Club, which is a blog by writers for writers. There's about a dozen of us that have written there. Um, and I'm there every Saturday. I have a column there. And talking to a lot of people through that and through cons, I find that many people start out that way. They're convinced they can only write short fiction. And it takes time and getting confidence in your voice and confidence in your characters to let them be their own people, just like parenting.

SPEAKER_01 5:35

I think the the analogy is is perfect in terms of setting your characters loose. I know as a writer that I know I'm on to something when I become a mere tool of the characters, their own stories and scenes, whole chapters start to write themselves based on the demands of what the characters are going through and how they're interacting with each other in this virtual space that's ostensibly in my bald head, but they do have that life of their own. And if you respect that, you give them the slack they need, they'll take your story where you you least expect it.

SPEAKER_00 6:15

Right. It'll it'll take a left turn, and and you'll be like, where did that come from? But it's perfect, so let's run with it. See where it takes us.

SPEAKER_01 6:24

So less planning and more pantsing, as they say in the in the trade, I guess. Um, I'm I'm a huge advocate of that. I have a general idea as to the arc of the whole thing. I could see the end, but how they get there and what they go through remains uh an emergent mystery, and that keeps it fresh for me as a writer, and I would hope keeps it fresh for the readers who who get get similarly surprised.

SPEAKER_00 6:53

Yeah, I I I mean I based on reviews, and I'm I don't know, 15 or 16 novels in at this point, and and at least a dozen novellas, and I've lost track of how many short stories. So I I've had enough feedback from readers over the years to realize that hey, I'm onto something here. Um and uh it's that's encouraging. So I I mentioned to you when we briefly spoke before that I actually started out as an entertainer for live audiences. And I got roped into becoming a balloon twister. Um, mostly did birthday parties, a lot of fairs and festivals, and sometimes some oddball gigs that were all just a lot of fun. And about two years into that, um my with my ex-husband, who's uh was a comedy magician and a balloon twister, he taught me that. And then we decided we would see if we could add face painting to the routine. So I went out and I learned how to do face painting, and I I was adamant that I wasn't gonna just do the little little flower on the cheek. No, I I learned the whole thing. So I did face and body painting and balloon twisting and a little bit of comedy magic um in front of the toughest audience of them all kids. Because adults will be polite and not tell you that you're being a stinker on stage. Kids, no, no, man, they're a brutal. They will tell you like it is. So that instantaneous feedback, and when you when you lean into it and the audience is with you, there's an energy there, and you just get a charge out of doing what you're doing, getting them to laugh, having them on the edge of their seats. And um trying to translate that into books where the feedback is almost all adults are I I've had gotten some feedback from kids from some of the children's work that I've done, which is fantastic. But again, adults will be polite, or they just won't leave you a review, or they'll leave you a review that makes you think that it's saying more about them than it is about the book they just read.

SPEAKER_01 9:14

Or or they're trying to trying to placate you because you're their friend or colleague and it's quid profound. I leave you a good review, you live leave me a good review too.

SPEAKER_00 9:27

Yeah, I try not to do that. I've actually gotten in trouble um a couple of times by being blunt and honest in a in feedback. Um I I was threatened um I was threatened over having left a three-star, a neutral review because I laid out in the review how it was wrong, and this particular author prided herself on being able to do her research, and she just happened to have mentioned two different things I'm a subject mess matter expert on, and she was wrong in both of them. Um, and I called it out in the review, and she was not happy.

SPEAKER_01 10:12

It becomes suspect, right? My favorite is that that polite silence, which can be interpreted in any one of a number of ways.

SPEAKER_00 10:23

Well, okay, the polite silence is actually worst. And here's why. Because it's indifference.

SPEAKER_01 10:29

Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 10:30

If you have if you have incited a reaction, whether it's passionate hate for the book, that says something, and sometimes it says something about the person that's been reading it and how what they put into it. Because a reader brings things to a book that the author doesn't always put in there. Um, I have seen that happen not just to my books, but also to other people's books. But if you if you have somebody that loves it, that's great. If you have somebody that hates it, well, that that's a strong reaction. It's that middle road of lukewarm of meh, moving on to the next book, or I didn't even finish it. I didn't it or I put it down and never remembered to pick it back up. That's the worst.

SPEAKER_01 11:14

Or simply not even acknowledging receipt, or even worse than that, acknowledging receipt and then vanishing.

SPEAKER_00 11:23

So I don't I don't send out books for review and that's actually partly why. Because people will offer to do a review without necessarily stopping to think through what's involved in uh the uh investment of their time and energy in doing so. So uh I no longer send books out um soliciting reviews. Uh the other reason not to to do that is uh Amazon really, really cracked down on that for a long time because there were big review rings being run through like Goodreads and some of the indie author's faces. And people were reviewing books that they had not read. Um and and it was just there was this circle of insincerity and I'm I'm trying to find a polite term, I'll just leave it. Um but I was like, I am not getting involved in that. And and Amazon is rightfully so uh going to be very down on um uh getting people to leave reviews for your book that are not sincere because Amazon wants their uh customers to have the best experience, which means uh having authentic reviews. Now, obviously Amazon has review problems, so do other places. Um Amazon's really the only outlet where you're going to get a lot of reviews, though. When I was when I to had my books wide, I saw over the course of a couple of years literally a handful of reviews come in from the other sites that were not Amazon. Um and Goodreads Goodreads has its own problems. So I I don't send out books for reviews, and I do have a few beta readers and alpha readers that work with me as I'm creating a book. Um, but that's again a very carefully selected cadre with the stipulation that if they aren't able to uh read and read and review and uh give me feedback, because I'm not looking for a review at that point in a timely fashion, then let just let me know and it's fine. So um that's how I've escaped the uh the whole thing of sending a book out and then not hearing back. I publish the book and then I usually start to see ratings and then reviews. It is a little discouraging to publish a book that you've worked on for months and to have somebody read it in three hours.

SPEAKER_01 14:09

Even better when you send them the PDF and like five minutes later they're like, Awesome! Yeah, yeah. Really? Wow. Did you did you pump it into your GPT and did you get a thumbs up on that? What actually happened with this experience?

SPEAKER_00 14:28

Yeah, I just it's I love that when I do get legitimate feedback within a matter of hours, I'm like, I'm so glad you liked it and you couldn't put it down, but also savor it. It took me some time.

SPEAKER_01 14:42

Enjoy what I slaved over for many, many months. All of this though begs the question of other people's opinion. I think fairly there's two types of writers, just like there are essentially two types of people, more conventionally, and perhaps in a cliched manner, the extrovert and the introvert, where you write for yourself to please yourself, and you have your own standards, many of which might be readability and access to other people, so they're not mutually exclusive. And other writers clearly just write for reach and engagement and accolades and potential bestseller status, and and they they overlap, the Venn diagrams aren't totally separate, but there are two types of writers. Would you would you put yourself in the former or the latter? To what extent are these opinions important to you? And if you were like Emily Dickinson in your bedroom, uh with little index cards, would you keep writing?

SPEAKER_00 15:44

Oh yes.

SPEAKER_01 15:46

So you're in you're in the former.

SPEAKER_00 15:49

Well, it it's more complex. It's more complex than that. So my husband defines a real writer with quotes there as someone who can't not write. So I'm always going to write. Um, and I have done this since the age of 14 when the switch finally flipped on. Um, before that, mom I was homeschooled, so mom despaired of ever getting me to write more than two sentences at a time until I hit 14 and suddenly I started writing. Um the the difference is that I am a businesswoman, and I've been approaching writing as a business for about a decade now. I spent a long time self-employed, the entertainment business, and then I went back to college as a non-traditional student, got a degree, but I knew that I was going to have a big hole in my retirement plans. So books were originally, writing books was originally my retirement plan. I was like, I'm going to take 20 years building a career in the sciences, and then um when I get to a point where I have to retire for whatever reason, um, age discrimination is a thing in the workforce. Then I'm going to sit down and write full time, but I'll already have a backlist of books that are selling so that I will have income coming in. And when I get to the point where I can no longer write, there's something there, plus a legacy for my children because my children will inherit my IP. So all of this is part of my I write, but I write marketable work, not just what I want to write. I look at what other people enjoy reading and I try to give them a little bit of that. I'm not writing for a broad marketplace. You can't write science fiction and fantasy um unless you're willing to be in a niche market. If you look at the numbers of what sells, romance as a genre, as an overall genre, is the 800-pound gorilla in the row. Um, and it always will be. If you want to just write to make money, you need to be writing romances. That's about mysteries is the next um genre underneath that that's smaller than that. Science fiction and fantasy is like way down here somewhere. We're a tiny niche market. Now I write, I dabble a little bit in writing romance. Um, but even the the romances that I write are not there's it's still a niche within romance because I write clean romance. My mother is one of my primary editors, and I just can't bring myself.

SPEAKER_01 18:38

No, no, no, ficky ficky for mommy.

SPEAKER_00 18:42

I'm like, I'm not, that's just no.

SPEAKER_01 18:45

No, no, no, no tongue in that kid.

SPEAKER_00 18:48

So so yeah, everything I write is fade to black, bedroom door is closed. But even some of the stuff I have written, because I have written um military fantasy, and I have written noir, and even some of that I know might makes mom uncomfortable because there's language in it or there's a lot of violence. Um heck, I have readers that are not sure what to make of some of the stuff because they're used to me writing a certain way. This is why I have open pen names. So I can give them a guardrail of if you go to Lelanya Bagley, that's sweet light romance. If you go to Cedar Bagley, that's gonna have language and violence, very dark humor. Um, and then Cedar Sanderson is my primary, that's my real name. So but that's how I've given my readers guardrails of where do I want to go here. And that could and that brings it back to you asking about writing what I want to write, and I don't want to stay in my lane and write a single subgenre. Um, I want to write all these different things, and I've had to figure out how to market them because I won't stay in my lane.

SPEAKER_01 20:07

Well, you sound like a very creative and to your point professional blend. So you've got your own passion. You need to you wake up in the morning, you gotta write. And you're introverted in the sense that you've got this internal drive and this internal passion, coupled with what you just said that you can't help but jump genres and experiment and do what you want to do.

SPEAKER_03 20:30

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 20:30

But you also have a pragmatic aspect to you, which is I like to write and I like to write to be read. And I am going to exert a little bit of extra effort to see which lane I could pick, which could be most effective in appeasing both sides of my needs and personality. And you've been doing great. You've got lots of lots of reviews, you've got lots of books, and also you do the covers on most, if not all, your books, which is another, in addition to your gardening, is another fascinating aspect of your of your talents, which is mixing modalities. Not not only do you mix the professional with the personal in terms of your writing, but your illustrations crossover too. Can you tell our listeners and viewers this other aspect of yourself? I'm not sure your fans know this about you, do they? Do they appreciate the fact that you do so much so much art and that's its own thing?

SPEAKER_00 21:35

I don't know. I've started to do some illustrations in my own books. Um, and the illustrations kind of started with Thrakentour Press, and they started because I started using AI in my graphic design workflows, which would enabled me to do um more than I could have by hand. So it sped me up. Um, but I started getting involved in graphic design about 25 years ago. Um, I had been running a business, different businesses, for 26 years since 2000s, um since the birth of my second daughter. And um, my ex-husband couldn't hold down a job, and the only thing that he would do was the performing. So I wound up running the business end of that. And then that segued into about 2010 when our lives took different directions. I also started adding the writing in as well as performing as a solo performer at that point. So we started out with no money. Um, and I'm not even kidding there. There were times I was digging in the couch cushions looking for change for a gallon of milk for the babies. And I had to learn how to do everything because we couldn't afford to hire somebody. So I learned graphic design in order to do business cards and brochures and whatnot, and and including ads, designing ads, because this is back in the day when we had yellow pages, ads. Internet searches wasn't really a thing. We'd we'd been doing this for quite a while before we even had a website.

SPEAKER_01 23:15

Um before even Craig's list.

SPEAKER_00 23:18

Yeah, yeah. So I learned how to do graphic design back then, and then didn't really do anything with it for a number of years. Fast forward to I'm trying to get a novel published, I had decided that I was going to self-publish because I didn't want to wait to try and find a traditional publisher because I knew at that point I had been mentored by Sarah Hoyt and Dave Freer, and I had been hanging out in the Bain's bar forums, and I knew what the underside of publishing looked like, and I didn't want anything to do with it. Um I did not want to try and break in with a young adult novel. So I I went ahead and I hired um a guy who uh used to do some kind of a webcomic cover. I have blanked his name out from my memory because I scraped together a hundred dollars and I paid him to do a cover. And he took my money and gave me a couple of pencil sketches and I gave him feedback on them, and I never heard from him again. And at that point, I'm like, I'm a single mother of four. Um, I'm working two jobs, I'm trying to go back to school. I cannot afford to try and find another artist. So I was like, all right, I've done graphic design, surely I can figure this out. And I so I did the first couple of covers myself, and then I wound up taking a workshop on specifically on book cover design, because it very much is it's it's a horse of its own color. Um, it's not quite like anything else because there's so much marketing and psychology that most people never consciously realize. But I already had the background in sales and marketing and graphic design. So just crystallizing it around the what do I do with a book cover? Um, that led into I did I do my own covers. I've been doing covers for others for a decade now. And um, I wound up with Rackantor Press because they couldn't affire afford an artist. So me being close friends and willing to work on a royalty basis, um, where I'm not getting paid much. Um, but being able to do that for them really enabled them to launch at the trajectory that they have done. And now I'm back to doing my own covers and I'm getting ready to be open for commissions for cut doing covers for other clients as well. I have some clients I've carried over that I've just worked with for years um and done all of their covers. And uh the last couple of years I've worked with John Van Stry for his Wolfhound series. Um I've done a bunch of different covers for Dorothy Grant. Um, I have covers queued up to do for Peter Grant when he finishes his next books. So and I just I um Kelly Grayson um I've done all of his Waffle House covers, which has been too much fun. But it's been um writing and art for me are two different sides of the brain. And when it comes to covers, it's more it's graphic design. Um the the the artist, the me that does the the art or watercolor on paper or whatever, that art is not suitable for most book covers. Um I've done some children's books, and that it's suitable for that because I do soft, cute, art. But most of the time that's not what you want on a book cover. So uh for that book covers, it's always been graphic design. I've been using stock art. These days I use elements that I've generated with AI, which are then I know are unique to each cover. Because that was the frustrating thing about stock artists. There was only like a dozen spaceships. So you had the same spaceship that was on everybody else's cover, and I guess I was teaching myself Blender so I could render spaceships, so I could have unique work to have for people for their covers. And I'm so happy I'm past that now because I hated Blender.

SPEAKER_01 27:37

I love the multi the multimodality of your stuff. I had Liana Renee Heber on just before on the podcast. She's an actress and she's a performer. She describes that same kind of crossover and how beneficial it is between performing, where everything is external, everything is behavioral, and writing, where you can kind of do both, and then finding that perfect blend of internal, external, what's shown, what's told, uh, lends itself well to that. I discovered your illustrations through Rick Cutler and other guests I had. Yes. Uh Colt Ostergaard, the man with a gun. And I'm reading his book before the pod, and your illustrations were just so on point and just embellished the book so well. It just captured that wild, wild west and outer space, weird cowboy bebop, military sci-fi meets munslinger kind of mentality that that was great. So we talked about you a lot on the pod just because it it it embellished his book so much. And then I talked to Sam Robb, and then you guys collaborated on a book where literally you went back and forth with illustrations and pros.

SPEAKER_00 28:58

So that was an interesting thing because it was at first an unspoken collaboration. Every October, I do what I call no ink October. There's a huge movement, millions of artists take part in what they call Inktober, where they're doing pen and ink, black and white work, working off of a prompt list that's generated by a gentleman out there. Well, about, oh, I don't know, six or seven years ago now, I decided that first of all, I didn't have the time and the space at that point in my life to always sit down with pull out my pens. I didn't have a dedicated art studio. So I had the ability to draw digitally. So I'm like, I'm gonna do no ink, digital, it's still gonna be black and white. And the other thing I did at that point is I have a Facebook group uh for my art and fans in there. I'm like, hey, what I want you guys to do is give me words for prompts, prompt me with some words. I'm gonna take these words up and I'm gonna pair them. I'm gonna take them and put them in two Excel columns, randomize them, and take 31 two-word prompts out of this as my drawing prompts for the month. So I have somewhat of a reputation for having a large vocabulary. And this rapidly evolved into let's stomp Cedar with the words that we're going to give her for prompt words. So I wound up with for the last several years, they've they've been doing this to me. And I love it. I mean, it is a challenge to draw certain things. So what I was doing was I was drawing every day in October based off of this uh eccentric prompt list. And Sam decided that he was going to write uh a short story or a vignette every day. As soon as he saw my illustration, he was going to write this little bit of fiction that went with the illustration and the prompt words. We didn't talk about this beforehand. He just thought it would be really fun to challenge himself to produce fiction based on the illustration. And I found out about this, I realized what he was up to, and I reached out and I was like, hey, Sam, you want to do we'll we'll do a full-on collaboration and put it out as a book. And uh he was all in for that. And I still feel guilty because there were there were a few days that I couldn't get to the illustration until late in the evening. So I'm like putting an illustration up at 9 p.m. and then he has to write something. So I still feel a little guilty about that. But it was it was fantastic fun. And and the thing is that we we didn't discuss it beforehand. He waited, he saw what I was gonna draw, and then he'd do his fiction, and then I'd read it the next morning, because I'm a I'm not a night owl. Um and it was it was it was just this really awesome dynamic collaboration, but there was no like cross chatter. We weren't talking to each other, it was it was all like passing notes in the classroom kind of thing. So yeah, no, it's Sam's Sam is a phenomenal writer. So um getting to watch what he was producing was it's a super fun collection. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 32:27

Some some pieces are kind of maudlin, some are zany. Some of your artwork is a little out there, some of it's more birthday.

SPEAKER_03 32:35

Oh, definitely.

SPEAKER_01 32:37

I guess you were work you were working with those uh cedar stump words, maybe.

SPEAKER_00 32:43

Well, that and I can look back, and this is 31 days of October, and I was um I was working full-time, I was full-time mom still, and I can look back and be like, I was tired that day. Um, I I didn't didn't put as much into that illustration as I could have on a good day. But the reality is that not every day is a good day. And for me, doing art every day was something I started in 2013. I had l done a little bit of it even as far back as 2012. But I was I went back to college uh in my 30s. So and I graduated graduated with my bachelor's degree when I was 40. And college and working in kids and moving up state, many states at that point, um, in the middle of it all, was a lot. So I did art every day, usually just 15 minutes at a time. Sometimes I don't actually doodle during college lectures. I'd draw what the professor was talking about. So that was my daily sanity check. Um and it was it was something that was a release of tension and I desperately needed. And I I stopped for a while once I was out of school and and working, and then started back up because I missed it. And I so I guess that makes me a real artist because I can't not make art, just like I can't not write.

SPEAKER_01 34:18

That's uh it's a great combination and it's uh it's a great stimulant or trigger for ideas that are usually out of the box. Because you're in a head trip, a certain mind state when you're writing a story. And if you can get out of it with a different modality, the two feed off of each other could be pretty constructive. I had another writer, C. S. E. Cuny, on the podcast. She's a fantasy award-winning writer. Death's daughter was her breakthrough novel. And uh, she's built this deck of cards with her husband, and she does the the con circuit selling cards, not just her books. And the the MO of that is you you deal the deck, they've got a whole methodology, and then it's it's storytelling pretty much through storyboards represented by each card. Yeah, so they're loaded with symbols and verbiage, they they randomly come up, or there's a system to it, and then you literally assemble a story in real time, and it's like a game, you do it collectively, and she uses it to ideate a little bit with her writing, too.

SPEAKER_00 35:26

Oh, yeah, no, that can totally work. Um, in my Discord, we've come up with a couple of different things where we've come up with spreadsheets that involve a full set of dice, like you would use for Dungeons and Dragons, and you roll the dice, and each column has that many number of plot elements, characters, locations, and whatnot. So you basically roll up um a fairly comprehensive story prompt, and that can be really funny if you're stuck and you just grab a handful of dice and see what you come up with. And then trying to work within the constraints of a prompt can actually be really useful for forcing you to get creative. Um for years I ran, and then I handed it over to a couple of other folks when I ran out of time to do it, but I ran a group called More Odds Than Ends. And they do um we do randomly assigned prompts every week. And More Odds Than Ends is still running on Wednesdays, and basically you submit a prompt and it gets randomly assigned to one of the other people that submitted a prompt, and then you take what you're given and you write something from it over that course of that um week, and it's it's a great way to spark the imagination and just give you that nudge of um, okay, I've got to do something. And we set it up, I set it up, so that there was no word count limit. So it wasn't like you have to write a thousand words. No, it you could write a couple of paragraphs that that's all you had time for. And um there's there's a small but dedicated group of people that have used, I wrote an entire novel doing that. Um so the case of the perambulating hat rack um was written over the course of a year with each segment of it evolving from a prompt from that group. And uh and it's a little bit of a uh what they call a stitch-up novel. Um, I did my best at the end when doing edits to smooth some of that out, but it was also just completely wild free fall. I am having fun with this. I'm not trying to write it to sell, it doesn't sell well. I am writing this because I am just having a blast doing this, and there's definitely something to be said for that.

SPEAKER_01 38:04

One of the paradoxes of creativity is that constraints engender new ideas and enthusiasm in the sense it gamifies what you're doing, and it's the ultimate combination of form and content. So Shakespeare, iambic pentameter, light seeking light, doth light of light beguile. And oftentimes he was constrained not only by the metric, but he was constrained by the dynamics of costume changes. So they would go, hey Bill, we we need an extra couple minutes here because we're getting the guy from one dress into another. And he would have to extend the soliloquy by maybe half a page just to kill time. And then you know he's doing it, and in retrospect, it seems natural, it's emergent, it's a masterpiece of English literature, but basically, a guy was getting having trouble getting out of a dress and getting into another one. So I love I love that constraint. I've applied it in my own writing too. So my science fiction novel is literally written in three-line paragraphs, obsessively so. If I had a new idea, I had to go to another three-line paragraph, or if I could constrain it into three lines, then I wrote it over and over and over again to scrunch it. And what it did was it gamified the writing of the whole novel and it made it modular and scalable, so it was like Lego pieces. So I if I had to move stuff around, if I had to edit scenes, I didn't have to break paragraphs apart and stitch them back together. I had I had these little nuggets of stuff, and I got into my own rhythm with it, and it's ad hoc, uh, but it's an artificial constraint that turned into a visual fabric. So when you look at the book, it's like blocks of lyric poetry, and it created this almost manic galloping cadence where there's a sense of the name urgency, you're boom, boom, boom, and it fits the motif of the characters and the settings, and I got addicted to it, so it's first in a series. I'm gonna do the same damn thing for the sequel, and I I'm just loving it, and and I've gotten mixed reactions. Some readers don't even notice, they'll flip through the book and they don't notice anything different, even though it's written in these three lines consistently, and I got the pages to match one for one. And other readers are like, this is like axios.com, dude. I could handle it for a page or two, but a novel.

SPEAKER_00 40:54

It's like reading epic poetry, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 40:57

It's fun as fun as hell, and and it made my writing something, something different, and it evolved organically because it's always bothered me that prose is ad hoc. Uh a paragraph could be a one-word boom for emphasis. And then where do you draw the boundary around yourself as an author? And and it's easy for things to get off the rails, and it's easy to lose sight of focus, what you're showing, what you're not, how much detail to go into something, how much not, what's an internal state, what's not. And by forcing yourself into this lyric poetic kind of nonsense, you don't have time for that. You gotta get to it. And and that helped me, that helped discipline.

SPEAKER_00 41:51

Yeah. I I I get how it helped you, and I see what you're saying about the constraints of that to medium. For me, I tend to think of it more in terms of pacing. Um, and I and and just like when you're doing a show, you build the audience up, but then you have to break that tension, let them breathe for a minute, and then you build them up again a little bit higher, but you can't get to that climactic pinnacle of the end conflict of the book unless you've let them have those breathing moments. I tend to break um combat or action scenes with a little bit of humor, and the paragraph lengths and sentence lengths are another way to control that pacing. It's like breath control if you're singing. Um, and and it's and it's a lot it's a lot like composing music, which I haven't done. Um, but when I've done editing anthologies, um I definitely think of those as like putting together a symphony or a mixtape of you want things that are going to be um you want that that fun driving action, and then you want something a little bit chill, let the reader relax a little bit, and then you take them right back up there again with the tension. So for me, I'm not looking at it so much as the paragraph length usually, although I do definitely consider that because sometimes really short paragraphs, really short sentences, really short chapters, all of those build urgency, but I temper them back with something that's a little longer, slow, breathe, and then we go right back up into the breathless again. I also pride myself on writing pulp. Um, I have studied the pulp authors. I studied pulp covers for a long time. And then when I started doing covers for Rackanture Press, we talked about it, and the aesthetic that I designed for the press was based on pulp covers.

SPEAKER_01 44:00

Very much so. Colt Ostergard, a man with a gun. You got this cowboy with this huge laser cannon.

SPEAKER_00 44:10

You might see over my shoulder here all these these brown and gold books, those are all the leather-bound Louis Lemours. But you probably can't see is on this side, those are the paperback Louis Lemours. I grew up with reading those. My husband reads them. We've combined our collection and added on to it. Um, so the the the Western cover was second nature for me. Um and blending that with the pulp elements was like, yes, yes, I can do this. And and I even have some oddball westerns that are much pulpier even than Louis Lemour. But um, yeah, and and I'm sitting in front of um two eight-foot-tall bookcases, total of eight board feet, like the one wall of my dining room. And this is just the fiction collection. Um, I've got around 3,000 books in the house. A fair chunk of those are pulp novels because I bought them for the cover. And I either can't read the interior because they're gonna fall apart if I try, um, or they're really not that good. But the pacing so the the pulp novel, those were meant as a disposable read, or sorry, pulp paper. They weren't books that were intended to be kept around. They were fun, fast, exciting books that you could pick up and you could read on your lunch hour, or you could read when you had a few minutes. They were the mass market paperback size was ideal to stick in a pocket and take with you. Um my husband was in the army and I a lot of um military folks that I'm adjacent to uh have said the same thing, which was basically that the cargo pants on their military trousers, the cargo pocket was the right size for a book. Cargo trousers. And in an era before the ubiquitous black rectangle, um they always had a book with them. And a lot of those were pulp because you didn't care if it got wet or if you lost it. It was just a fun read, a wait a while away an afternoon. And so that's what my goal is to write is something that's fast-paced, fun, escapist, let you step out of reality for a while, relax before you have to come back to daily life.

SPEAKER_01 46:34

You you add a layer though. So pulp is like your foundation, but you're meta pulp. You're self-conscious, you're aware of yourself, you've honed your craft, you're very much character-driven. There's a ton of depth to your stuff, and uh and it and it's not classically pulp, it's not disposable fiction, it's almost like you're you're giving an homage to the genre and using that as a stepping stone. I don't consider your stuff that I have read pulp really at all. It's got a pulp flavor to it, but it's not it's not pulp fiction.

SPEAKER_00 47:20

How much have you read of like Frederick Brown, Andre Norton, um, even Doc Smith going back way?

SPEAKER_01 47:28

Yeah, and even early Kid Heinlein, right?

SPEAKER_00 47:31

Yeah, early Heinlein.

SPEAKER_01 47:33

I've I read a bunch. I read a bunch.

SPEAKER_00 47:35

And those were all pulp. Um, and I for some of my stuff I deliberately lean into in homage to some of the grandmasters of science fiction. Um, and it I'm s it is definitely meta-pulped because I am conscious of what I'm doing, whereas they were just writing um and doing what they were doing. But it it's I've read extensively well back into the 19th century, to the birth of the dime novels and even to what was considered the downfall of women in reading, with lending libraries making novels readily available to the fairer sex. And um and the the whole uh disdain for um a certain type of book is very old. Um I have it's not gonna be visible on this. I have an extensive collection of Edgar Rice Burroughs. So um I imprinted early, I mean I was probably nine or ten and started reading Edgar Rice Burroughs. And I also have quite a few of H. Ryder Haggard, who most people don't realize was a um rock star of I mean, he's almost forgotten these days, which is such a shame. But Haggard was the rock star of publishing when Kipling came onto the scene. And Kipling is another one that I own a lot of his stuff and have studied his stuff. Um one of the little side projects I've been doing on my blog is illustrated poems. And I'm taking public domain poetry, like heavily leaning into Kipling, Robert Service, Edgar Guest, et cetera, and I illustrate them because poetry has gotten a bad rap for being uh all intellectual, and uh there is some amazing poetry out there that is shamelessly sentimental, warm-hearted, exciting, action adventure. Um and I want to bring some of that back to people actually reading it, and the the illustrations seem to help. So it comes back to that illustrations adding so much.

SPEAKER_01 49:55

I see where you're coming from with the essence of pulp and pulp fiction, which is has this this immediacy, this rawness, and significantly a lack of pretension. So it's pure it's pure storytelling, it moves fast, yes, it's zero bullshit, and it doesn't have that miasma of intellectualism and ideology, some of the Ursula de Quinn shit with, you know, we're gonna save the universe. Right.

SPEAKER_00 50:23

Well, it again, like I said, it predates that, it goes back to easily the Victorian era, if not even slightly before that. And the only reason it doesn't go back any further than that is because printing was expensive. Um in the mid-18, so we're talking probably 1810, 1820, uh, three-volume novel, and they were all done in three volumes because they were too big to physically bind, um, and people couldn't afford to pay it was it was the equivalent of a hundred dollars. So the lending libraries came along, and our modern equivalent to that is the Kindle Unlimited, where you paid a subscription fee and you can take out your chunk of a novel at a time. And Dickens, Dickens is early precursor of pulp.

SPEAKER_01 51:12

Well, absolutely, it was serialized to get his dad out of jail. Serialized. The point though that I'm getting at, and I'm I'm complimenting your prose, if if obliquely, is that it's not just pulp fiction. Uh, here's a counterexample, this might help. McDonald. The the novel How Some People Die is in my top 10 of the greatest pieces of writing ever made by humanity. If there's a Voyager 3 and we send it to Alpha Centauri, it should have that book on it. And it's awesome pulp fiction thriller noir, and it's pretty much archetypal. And James Elroy is an embodiment of this too. His deadbeat dad had your library-sized collection of pulp, and all the guy did was eat hot dogs, sit in his underwear, and read pulp fiction. And Elroy saw that. He often cites his mother's murder as the definitive moment in his life. But I think he was trying to impress his dad throughout his writing career too, which is like, I'm gonna write the ultimate pulp fiction novel, and he's been doing that. Only he has elevated the genre of pulp fiction into its own art form. It's like meta super pulp. And he refers to himself as the Tolstoy of Crime Fiction, and I agree with them. LA Confidential, American Tabloid. Wow, these are amazing books, but they're they're pulp. So I'm trying to differentiate between what we would consider mainstream, disposable, commoditized, transactional books of GIs in their pocket, and frankly, the stuff that you do, which is it's it's qualitatively different.

SPEAKER_00 53:17

It is. I don't ever want my pros to get in the way of my story. Um, I the best compliment that I can get from somebody is that they just sank into it and never came back out until the end. Um and the other thing too is like um it's funny because I've got a bag of them sitting over here, a friend brought for me to possibly give to my son. My son wound up assistant librarian on the boat that he's on in the Navy and then told me.

SPEAKER_01 53:45

You guys are all geeks, all of you.

SPEAKER_00 53:48

Well, it's funny because he's not so much, but but um he told me that his boat's library was only half full, and um that was a mistake. But so it's now full, like we've made sure that it was full. But there was a bunch of Mac Bullens over here, the Executioner series. And that that is the kind of disposable cheap entertainment pulp you're talking about. But there's a lot more, and always has been to pulp than that. Um some of it has to do with gatekeeping. And because it wasn't literary, it couldn't get published elsewhere, so it got published under some of these uh pulp um imprints and in the the the dime novels and stuff, Raymond Chandler, uh Dashell Hammett, Mickey Stillane.

SPEAKER_01 54:39

Yeah, the malt the Maltese Falcon is pulp. Yes. I'm with you here all the way. I'm just slicing and dicing.

SPEAKER_00 54:49

Oh, it's fun to talk like this. I studied um, but I studied all three of those extensively when I w before I wound up writing Pixie Noir. And Pixie Noir, which is still my best-selling novel, started as a scene to make my then we weren't even like boyfriend and girlfriend, but I'm married to him now and have been for 10 years. Um I was trying to make him laugh, and I did, and he wanted more, so I kept writing more. Um but and that that book was just so much fun to write, and it has done phenomenally well, much better than I ever expected it to. Um so it's it's been, I'm really glad I did that.

SPEAKER_01 55:32

Well, congrats, and it's interesting you wrote it for someone you knew. So this goes full circle back to you starting your career writing for your daughter. Yes, and and personally I relate to it. I have written hundreds, if not thousands, of pages of epistolary communication, right? Writing for lovers, writing for family, my distant second cousin in Budapest, Hungary. I used to write novel-length memoir type stuff with her because you know I was trying to connect. There's a comfort in it, and there's an emotional connection which is immediate, and you intimately know your audience, and there's yes, there's this flow. And then the next step is when you write for strangers, yes, and that's that's a leap. That is that's a chasm for many people.

SPEAKER_00 56:30

Yeah. Yeah, and I have seen young authors that could not bring themselves to jump that. Um, I'm currently the host for our library's writing group, and we've got a person that comes in and talks about the book that they're writing, and they've been working on this for 15 years. And they've they've spent like the last year stuck on one scene. And I'm like, write the next one, set this one aside, come back to it later when you know where you're going. And but their their thing is they're just enjoying writing, they don't ever intend to get published. So that's really a huge thing is if you're just writing for yourself write for yourself. There's nothing wrong in that. If you're going to try and sell your book or find a publisher, then you have to take that into consideration too, is what is your audience? And what do you what does your audience want? What does your audience need?

SPEAKER_01 57:30

I I think we're social creatures, though. So even the most introverted, fearful, hesitant writer as you describe. I've been working 15 years, there's a scene I can't get over. As soon as I get over that, you know, maybe I'll finish. Deep in their heart, they want to be that kind of published author, I think. And I think that they're scared. We have a tendency as human beings to fear success even more than we do failure. And I've seen this time and time again. I know it's a quality that I've had for a long time where it's easy to make endless excuses as to why you're not throwing your stuff out there. And the biggest fear is just vulnerability that people will see me for who I am, which is either an imposter, a hack, or, and this is the worst of it, I'm actually pretty good. And that exposes me to some compliments that I can't handle. And and I see it, I see it to the I see it among guests that I'm having that I'm with too, where it's like, oh, your shit is great, and I could feel they're like, Are you trying to get one up on me, Mookie? What's going on? Which is just accept the fact that you're getting a compliment, that you're successful, and that you can do this.

SPEAKER_00 58:51

Yeah. Well, and then there's the thing too, is once you've succeeded, once that novel has sold really well, you have to do it again.

SPEAKER_03 59:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 59:00

The second book, I have seen this too. The second book is harder than the first book.

SPEAKER_01 59:06

Yeah, JK Rowling, right? Classic example of that.

SPEAKER_00 59:10

Because it it needs to it needs to match up to the first book. And uh the a piece of advice that I've given over and over and over again, and sometimes it's as much to myself as to anything else. And it's the reason that I called the prompt group more odds than ends. We're all odds and we all have trouble finishing things. So that's that's always been the advice I've given is just write it. Don't go back and edit it, don't second guess yourself on it, just get it to the end, and then you can edit and revise and clean it up and get it to where you're happy with it. But first, it has to be written.

SPEAKER_01 59:52

Agree. And I go back to my three-line OCD ADHD obsess obsession. When I when I bang out a section, even a block of these blocks. I got a bunch of Lego pieces, and then I keep hauling ass to the next one. And that gamification just from my own technique helps me keep cranking because it's so much work to get it into those damn three lines that I'm just like done, and then I'll keep keep moving, and then if I need to move stuff around or reassess, then I'm just moving the pieces back into place, and it's it's very, very satisfying. So by gamifying the writing process, and you can do it any which way you like, uh that that is a technique that at least I've picked up to not only finish stuff, but just generally keep going and and pace yourself because it's got its own built-in metric. Rather than paragraphs and ideas all over the place, I got my Lego pieces that I'm that I'm chiseling away. And each one is its own little kind of haiku vignette, little mini poem. And I did I worked them through so many times that they almost stand alone. There's like little quotes you see in the corporate office matted on the wall, you know? And I'm not saying that these are worthy of that kind of accolade. I'm merely illustrating that by taking an incremental approach to your writing, which goes back to what you were recommending, just keep going. You know, what are you what are you waiting for?

SPEAKER_00 1:01:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:36

It's a really useful technique.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:38

It can be for sure. I I think I would feel too limited by it. Um, because I do want to be able to go off in any direction that uh because uh I mean for my work, um I'm not that much of a perfectionist, I couldn't do it.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:59

So yeah, I'm the typical ADHD brain, I have severe dopamine deficiency up here, so I have the the two opposites where I wander listlessly throughout my apartment, or I'm maniacally focused on one thing for 12 continuous hours. So it it lends itself to both. And yeah, so the one pushback I'll have though on this very restrictive writing style is that I don't feel constraints either in terms of semantics or even the syntax, because it's got its own rhythm, its own energy, and then I can write about whatever the hell I want, and I and I do so, almost manically shifting gears and genres. It's a way to go meta on the meta and and have a good time with it.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:51

As long as you're having fun, that's the important part.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:54

That's it. I don't know if anyone else is, but it's it's been a it's been a good time.

SPEAKER_03 1:02:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:59

And I find it just different. And this goes into the next thing I just wanted to bring up with you, which is I'm suffering from the homogenization of generic prose. And this is generally true, but I find it acute in science fiction and fantasy. I I get the feeling after I'm like you, I've been reading all the old classics: Asimov, Heinlein, Clark, going back decades, and I'm looking at a lot of contemporary science fiction and fantasy, and I almost feel that it's written by committee, that that it's workshopped, you've got developmental editorial oversight, and a lot of folks are just sounding interchangeable. And A, I'm wondering if you notice any of this. And B, is it endemic of our whole society where ironically enough, we're all just getting in line to be cookie-cutter versions of our tribe? Or is it unique to a genre or genres that are struggling to take the leap to the next step, which is overdue?

SPEAKER_00 1:04:18

So there's there's a bunch of variables in this. Um, one of them is cultural. Um, it has to do with education. When you go back and you read a couple generations back, you're looking at people that more more often than not had a classical education, which re means they read the classics, and then those bled into their own work. Um, so you see the echoes. The education now, and again, we're going back to you, I was homeschooled. So I have a very different educational background than um my peer group has, and I'm Gen X. So I see this because I've always had that that otherness of being outside of mainstream culture looking in on it. So what you're seeing is a product of children that have been mostly raised on uh um television, which is uh I call it a dilution factor, coming back to training in chemistry. If you take uh powerful, concentrated classical education and you take an eyedropper full of what's that? If you take an eyedropper full of that and you drop it into um a glass of water, what you have is what gets portrayed on television. You take an eyedropper of that and drop it into a glass of water, you get what's being portrayed for children's television because that's a whole other rant. So what we have are authors that can't hold a candle to the educational level, the amount of reading, the amount of authors that I have seen boast about. Not reading, but they also write. And I'm like, how do you even do that? Time after time I've said if you're going to write in a specific genre, you must read that genre. I mean, your peers, at least, your age group, at least, if not, going back as far as you can to read where it came from. When I was doing homework for anthologies in Raccour Press, I would tell them, don't watch the TV show that's based on the book because you're getting a diluted thing. You need to go all the way back. Do the hard thing and read something because you're an author. And it's what so what we're seeing is is a is the educational dilution of people are going to write artists. And I see this with how they structure scenes as if they're writing a television scene. The visuals, uh the way the characters interact, it's entirely external. Present tense, first person, present tense. Please no, third person. Fine. Second person, absolutely not. Never. But again, it it it's it comes back to, and you talk about it in science fiction and fantasy. Now, I will point out that I do not read a lot of traditionally published books, um, Bain books and not even as much of those as I used to. Most of what I read these days are indie authors, and they are coming from a very different framework than a traditionally published. Because you're not wrong about traditional publishing polishing all the hard edges off lest they offend somebody, which leaves a lot of uh sameness to the Lego bricks of these books all fit together to a um ten thousandth of an inch um book. That being said, even more so than science fiction and fantasy, you're going to see that in places like romance because readers have expectations. And the books that sell well fit those readers' expectations. And readers that challenge um themselves are going to read a different uh kind of book, and they're not going to sell as well because there's not a lot of readers that challenge themselves. Books that challenge readers aren't going to have a large marketplace and will probably not find a publisher if they are too avant-garde. Um, I'm not a big fan of avant-garde for avant-garde's sake, because when you're pushing the edge constantly, you lose the plot. Quite literally when it comes to fiction.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:39

Yeah, and it goes back to what we were saying about characters driving a story and surprising us. If you're avant-garde to be avant-garde, it's got nothing to do with the emergent drama. It's you're writing a concept piece, and those almost always suck. I was a theater reviewer, and same rules apply, even more so to performance art.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:02

Yeah. Yeah. Well, and again, with when you get into art, modern art, postmodernist art, postmodernist theater, postmodernist literature, the literal point of it is to constantly be pushing the edge, which means they're at a point where there aren't any edges anymore. So they're just out there. And who knows what they mean? They don't know what they mean. But the other thing is that is a safe zone for them. This is what is expected of them from their professors, from the from the the critics and the reviewers, and and from the people that are the patrons of the arts at that level and and in that arena. Um as I became more involved in making art, um knowing that uh commercial artists, illustrators, have always been considered less than by the fine artists. And these days, fine artists is fine artists that are do actual like photorealism are looked down on by the fine artists that do a block of colors or spoches of paint on a canvas. It's it is it is very much embedded in the culture at this point. But the thing is that uh the readers demand safety, they demand comfort. Um I am always advocating for taking risks, portraying things that are considered dangerous. Um when we put together the boys' books for Racantur Press, that was very much my brainchild because as a mother of a son, and then I worked for a while as a children's librarian, and I had some young men that were avid readers, and trying to find books for them was so difficult. But you know what's considered edgy and risky these days? Putting a nuclear family into a children's book and portraying a dad as being a strong, admirable role model hero to his kids. And I'm sorry, but that's the way it should be.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:17

Well, that goes into the realm of politics, which is the woke, anti-woke, anti-anti-woke, woke backlash to the backlash that we're reverberating in.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:28

I don't necessarily agree that it has to be politics.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:33

I'm saying politics has influenced this problem.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:36

I think Yeah, politics has certainly been influenced by it. Um, but it it I think it goes back to the roots go deep. The roots go deep. But it and it has to do with um, I think the family is a is a core part of it, um, and and education. And uh so in my own way, the boys' books were intended to throw a lifeline to boys, because boys don't read because there's nothing they want to read, or very little that they want to read, and so they go off and they play video games. Now you'll note that I'm not I'm talking about television here, but I haven't necessarily said anything about video games, because I get to see video games through my kids playing them. And you know where a lot of storytellers that were not allowed to be in traditional publishing went? Video games. And my kids were also avid consumers of manga. And Japanese storytelling does stuff that would be career suicide for American authors. And they tell stories that have real heroes and they're fantastic storylines, and they have people that are friends, they don't automatically have to fall into bed with everybody. And I'm talking about middle school, late age literature here. Um yeah, some of the stuff that I saw for kids was just eye-opening. And I wanted to push back against that a little bit, and Rackantor Press took it up and ran with it. Um, and I'm very pleased with that because if there's one thing I do in my life, it will have been the boys' books. Because here's the other thing, which is that a lot of girls like me will seek out those boys' books because they know that boys' books is where the fun action adventure stuff is to read. I was a tomboy. I that I read Edgar Rice Burroughs. Those are very much boys' books. So yeah, this is this is me also talking to the girls, even though we call it boys, because the girls that want it, that's that's a key word for them.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:47

Kudos to you. Once again, I'll add to layering on top of the pulp foundation a little bit of zestiness, a little bit of old school values, a little bit of everything that you're talking about, especially outside the box writing for values and for experimentation and for expression that you're trying to do. So it's not just about the money, honey. It's about being able to use your conduit of communication to maybe even make the reader's life a little bit better or have them think about things in a new way, or provide assurance that they otherwise might not get from other sources when this this landscape is bifurcating along the ways that you described, which is a great way of looking at it, which is on the one hand, it's dumbing stuff down to cinematic TV garbage, and on the other one, it's hyper-conceptualizing it into oblivion. So you're removing any kind of emotional resonance, it's all some idea of an idea which frees both the artists of any kind of responsibility and the audience from even really giving a shit. So it's perilous, it's uh it's it's tough, balance all over.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:05

And you can't and you can't write a deliberate message into your books because that turns people off. I mean, this is why so much of traditionally published books are unreadable, because they have to contain a message, and very few people want to sit down and read sermons for entertainment.

SPEAKER_01 1:15:23

People have trouble understanding when irony is taking place. That tongue-in-cheek, kind of elbow in the ribs, that little whisper, that little wink. And people have a tendency of just taking everything literally, what they see online, what they read in the book, it lacks contextual depth. And that goes back to what you were saying about education, which is if you're taking everything at face value, it's an indication of a real lack of sophistication in the art form and your own understanding of the craft.

SPEAKER_00 1:16:00

Critical thinking is not taught these days, unfortunately.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:04

So yeah, nor is civics, nor is how to complete your checkbook or uh fix a sync or respond to an email properly. I think our educational system is fueling a lot of what we're dealing with, and that's that's a whole separate concept worth of ranting. Uh you've got a new book out, speaking of books. Yes. Child of the Crow, is that it?

SPEAKER_00 1:16:32

Child of Crows.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:33

Um Child of Crows, not the Crow.

SPEAKER_00 1:16:36

Child of Crows is a novella, and it is. I wrote a I wrote a story probably a decade ago, um, that's a little controversial because for me it's dark. I mean, it's a it's a fantasy police procedural, and um that's called Snow in Her Eyes. But the story, the characters in it compelled me so much that I wound up taking the main character from that one and writing a novel called Possum Creek Massacre. And Possum Creek Massacre did not sell terribly well. It's darker than my usual. It's a fantasy police procedural, which is a little different and outside of my normal at that point. People were looking for more like Pixie Noir, and they've got this, they weren't sure what to make of this, I think. So I wasn't sure whether or not I would continue. I have another novel planned. So what I did was I put um Possum Creek Massacre on sale and into the based book summer sale. And while I was set getting that set up, it dawned on me that I had written a bridge between that novel and the planned second novel. I had written a short story and then I had started to write more. So I took all of that material, um, wove it, wove in the loose ends, as it were, and then added um a few thousand more words as an ending to give it an ending as a novella, and published that to see what the reaction was going to be because based on the sales from these books, now that will help me evaluate do I take the time to write the third book? So Child of Crows is a bridge novella between Possum Creek Massacre, and it follows Detective Amaya Lombard as she returns to a school where she was very badly treated, and she winds up rescuing the Child of Crows that's the title character. And it is um, as as one of the reviewers has already called it, it's a little moody, um, because it is definitely a very reflective story of I'm getting into some very dark elements of of the past of this woman. Um, but it's it's also there's also a road trip and there's just some fun little stuff because I can't not have a little humor in there somewhere. But uh I'm hopeful that it'll be well received because I would like to write the next novel in that series. So we'll see.

SPEAKER_01 1:19:20

Well, congratulations. And it just it came out in May, right?

SPEAKER_00 1:19:24

So May 30th, that one was released.

SPEAKER_01 1:19:26

May 30th. So only uh a week week or so ago. So congratulations. Thank you, kudos, and hopefully it does take off. And speaking of trilogies, you shared Tanager's fledglings with me as an intro to to your prose, and I really enjoyed it. Speaking of pulp, and that's why I wanted to elevate it beyond just pulp, because I thought it was rich and funny and quirky, and uh within this fantasy or sci-fi genre, it was very intimate and very much you're vested in gems.

SPEAKER_00 1:20:04

I just I wanted a small story, I didn't want.

SPEAKER_01 1:20:21

Right, with the bat little bass little basset on that's like peeing and pooing all over the starship, which is do that and then speaking of a trilogy, so the crows, you wanna you wanna trilogize that, and and then you've got Tanager's fledgling, flight, and fleet. Yes, which I'm assuming is a natural and and flight is out, right?

SPEAKER_00 1:20:46

Right, all three of them are out now. The trilogy.

SPEAKER_01 1:20:48

I didn't realize that fleet was out too.

SPEAKER_00 1:20:51

Yes, yes, yeah, that was when did Fleet come out?

SPEAKER_01 1:20:54

That's more recent.

SPEAKER_00 1:20:56

This spring, either January or February. My brain is is blank on, but just very recently, yes.

SPEAKER_01 1:21:03

So Well, congrats on the trilogy, and I'm assuming Jem gets his wings.

SPEAKER_00 1:21:08

Oh yes, oh yeah, yeah, and there was there uh one of the side characters, I will be writing more stories about her in the future. So I'm not completely, but I I I like to do closed loop and wrap up a trilogy and give readers that satisfaction of knowing that this this is done. I I don't want to do the endless series where we're 20, 30 books in and you're wondering just how can she keep this up any longer. Um my preference is to do a trilogy and then have things tie in at different angles to the same world. I've done that with Pixie Noir. Um, the there's the three main books, and then I did East Witch, and I've done a couple of short stories that are connected as well, and there will be more novels in that world as well, but not with the same main characters.

SPEAKER_01 1:22:04

How do you write? I want to be respectful of your time, but I wanted to get I want to squeeze this in too, which is we were talking about planning and pansing and pacing and and writing in in goofy mooky blocks. Uh how how do you you write a lot. You're prolific. And I've got a lot of listeners and readers who are up-and-coming writers, or they themselves are writing, and there's a general curiosity of the process of writing itself. Are you the it's six o'clock and I've got a couple hours, I'm gonna get in a thousand words type of writer? Or are you more the 2 a.m. the idea hit me? I woke up in a cold sweat and I'm typing 90 words a minute to make sure I don't forget kind of writer.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:55

It has evolved over the years, and it really is dependent on what else is going on in my life. So um in early 2025, I left my day job. I was in a contract position. The contract ended, the entire department got the axe, so there was no forward momentum there. And I had spent a few months job hunting, but I had some pretty important criteria, one of which was that I needed a remote position because I'm also taking care of my husband who has health challenges. So it became apparent that the pendulum had swung back away from remote work, and I was not going to be finding um another technical writer position working remotely. And so we sat down and I talked to some people who are making a living as independent authors. Um, John Van Stri's huge, huge best-selling author for and the funny thing is we started writing about the same time, but very different tracks we took. Um, but I sat down and I talked to him about it. And and John, do you think I can do this kind of thing? My husband and I crunched the numbers, and I stepped off the deep end. And at the point, also I was working for Rack and Trough Press or with Rack and Trough Press, not an employee position. So it's a little um but so I was stepped off the deep end and I was working for myself with the press and trying to keep up with everything um has been thrilling and exciting and challenging, but it completely changed the dynamic of how I write. So what I've been trying to do for the last year, almost a year and a half now, is I do indeed get up at 5 30 in the morning. At six o'clock, I sit down in front of my computer, and for the next four hours I'm writing. It doesn't matter if the story is there, I sit down, I start writing, and somehow the story usually shows up. Not always. Um the last six weeks I have been dealing with um shingles, and I did not realize everything that was they don't tell you the whole story with shingles, and it's been it's not good.

SPEAKER_01 1:25:15

I've been in healthcare communications for years, and I worked on a shingles drug or shingles medication, and get get your shots. Oh, yeah, no. If you're if you're anti-vax, you can kiss my ass. You should get your shots because listen to Cedar, this sucks.

SPEAKER_00 1:25:33

This one is as soon as I recover, see, I they hadn't even offered it to me because they don't start to offer it to you until you're 50. So I was a year too young. Um, but so I hadn't had the vaccine for it, and I'd had chicken pox way, way long ago. But it's it was stress triggered. I know exactly. But the other thing I will say is if you have the shingle trash emerged, go get an antiviral, like now, um, because that really helped with me and re being able to recover as fast as I have, but it did shut the writing down for a while. So yeah, you have to give yourself grace of yes, I do sit down. And this isn't the way I've worked. Um, I mean, I have written novels while I was going to school, while I was working two and three jobs, while I was parenting, and and having somewhat of a life outside of that, um, in meeting someone and getting married and moving from New Hampshire to Ohio and then later moving from Ohio to Texas. Um so you had to give yourself grace, but my thing is, and this is what I tell people is when I was doing all of that, I tried to find the time in my schedule where I had little gaps, my lunch hour. I have written books on my lunch hour. Um I wrote for an hour every night after my children went to bed when they were young. Um fortunately, when they're teens, they're a little more self-um propelled than that. Not always. But if that's all you can do, then do that. But do not wait for your muse to just show up. Yes, if you get an inspiration in a story, jot it down. But if you're going to take writing seriously, you've got to put your butt in the chair and your hands on the keyboard and start writing. And I've never been able to outline. I suspect it might be easier if I could outline and have a path that I was working my way down. Same here.

SPEAKER_01 1:27:36

It's all just gotta be floating around in here.

SPEAKER_00 1:27:38

Yeah. If I write down an outline, my brain is like, okay, we've told that story, moving on. Next idea.

SPEAKER_01 1:27:43

Yeah, 100%. 100%.

SPEAKER_00 1:27:45

So I am I am what they call a peer pantzer, flying by the seat of my pants. Or some people prefer to call it a discovery writer. I don't necessarily like that term. It doesn't encapsulate, but then again. I know what seat of the pants flying means, and it's definitely not a derogatory term. That it it takes skill to be able to do that.

SPEAKER_01 1:28:09

And and a lot of creativity and trust in your own creativity.

SPEAKER_00 1:28:13

I always thought something was wrong with me until I found out that Agatha Christie was a pantser. She described it as driving down a curvy road in the fog. And you never knew until it was right in front of you.

SPEAKER_01 1:28:25

That's my comfort zone.

SPEAKER_00 1:28:28

So my thing is these days, um, I have a daily word count goal just because that's my gamification of can I hit my goal? Can I surpass my goal? So I'm trying to write about 2,000 words a day. That's not gonna work for everybody. As a full-time writer, I really should be doing more than that, but I have a bunch of other stuff I do too. I make art. I just launched a webcomic this week. Um what is that?

SPEAKER_01 1:28:56

Tell us, tell us a little bit about it.

SPEAKER_00 1:28:58

So Lightly Toasted Marshmallow is a Tuesday and Thursday strip that's mostly about my cat.

SPEAKER_01 1:29:05

And where is it? Where can we find it?

SPEAKER_00 1:29:08

It will be on my website at cedarwrights.com.

SPEAKER_01 1:29:10

Yeah, we're gonna put links below, folks.

SPEAKER_00 1:29:14

And and if you sign up for my substack, then um you'll have it delivered straight to your inbox. Along with it.

SPEAKER_01 1:29:20

And we can see your gardening. They can all see your gardening as well.

SPEAKER_00 1:29:24

I was gonna say, my substack is five to seven days a week. Um, and it will cover everything from the illustrated poems, the webcomic essays every Saturday is a writing essay if you're a writer and you're interested in that kind of thing. And then on Sundays tends to be my recipes. Um and I do I love to cook.

SPEAKER_01 1:29:49

She's a cook, too.

SPEAKER_00 1:29:51

Yeah, I love to cook and as as having trained as a chemist, um, I find that developing recipes uh actually helped me when I became I was briefly sadly briefly, I would have liked more of it. I was a research and development um cosmetic chemist. And um my my my ability to cook and formulate recipes helped me with that. But um I am reviving a series called Eat This, Will You Read That? I did this for a few years in the past, stopped because too much was going on. And it's my uh way of giving back to the writing community because it's uh promoting a book and an author through um developing a recipe for them. And then I blog the recipe with a link to the book on the author's webpage. And so it's eat this, will you read that? And it gives it doesn't have to be a recipe from the book, it's it's always uh just something the author liked or told me that they wanted me to do. And uh that gives me a little book promo. And the fun thing about that is those those posts still get hit years later. So I know that people are continuing to see the author's name and their book as they look at this recipe for whatever the case may be. I've done some really wild stuff.

SPEAKER_01 1:31:20

That's really cool. And it's also reminiscence of these themed cookbooks and themed recipes that are tied to like a historical situation or even a fictional narrative. You've got like Gatsby stew and bullshit like that.

SPEAKER_00 1:31:35

Well, I mean, my son has I'm I'm looking at my cookbook. I have I have a cookbook collection, I've got about 300 cookbooks, and I I have a couple of my son's cookbooks, and one of them is the Fallout official cookbook from video games.

SPEAKER_01 1:31:50

Awesome. That's that's pitch perfect.

SPEAKER_00 1:31:52

We have we have cooked a couple of the recipes out of that. And it's a good thing I have an extensive spice cabinet because they used it.

SPEAKER_01 1:32:00

Oh, there's no refrigeration, so you gotta blast it out before you before you eat it. That's really fun. I love I love your sub stack because it's so diverse.

SPEAKER_00 1:32:10

I was saying I can't stay in a lane. Um, I I've been told that they're like, if you're gonna do a YouTube channel, pick a lane and and stay in it because then people will find that. And I'm like, I can't do a niche like that. That's just not how I function.

SPEAKER_01 1:32:27

I I'm exactly the same way. Uh I'm hard to pin down. That's why I gave myself the multiverse, Mookie Multiverse kind of moniker, because I I do five podcast shows, I do opt-ed political stuff, I do daily rants on video, I do essays, I write short stories, I publish my plays, I've got my novels serialized, so it's like all of this constantly. I can't do it and do it any other way. My YouTube channel's a mess. Every day I get 12 emails from India telling me that my SEO sucks and no one sees my videos. And I think it's just too because it's just all over. I got them in playlists, but it's still just what you you subscribe to Mookie Multiverse at YouTube, and then one second you get a rant. Next second, you get this video. Hi, everybody. And and and then you you get who knows what, some you know, guitar shred. So it's it's it's got no no.

SPEAKER_00 1:33:27

You'll find you'll find your audience, and your audience will enjoy most of it, not all of it. I mean, I know I have people that oh, it's a gardening one, I'm not gonna read that today. Um, and and there's nothing wrong with that either, because we are our own unique individual selves, but I have found an audience. I've been blogging for 20 years now, yeah, and I have found people that enjoy what I do and they're willing to come hang out with me and be this strange community that enjoys my stuff, and I enjoy them back. So I mean that's that's the whole thing with the blog has been fantastic fun over the years, and a little bit my Discord, although it's not as the Discord is not a fan club. I've been very firm about that. I'm uncomfortable with fan clubs.

SPEAKER_01 1:34:21

Link there too, if you want a little more, a little more goodies. It takes a while though for to establish a brand and to have people comfortable with it and to know what the hell you're doing and get into it.

SPEAKER_02 1:34:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:34:33

So Joe Rogan, Mark Marin were the Trailblazers of podcasting, and they have everyone on. So one episode will be Barack Obama, and the next episode will be Ted Danzen, and no one has the disconnect. Joe Rogan does the MMA bullshit too. And uh it's not uh it's not a problem with the brand because that's their brand. Right, right. They do it all, and then they came into it from the outside, and they already had really a bit of an established reputation, and they were trailblazers in the modality of podcasting. So people like us, I think it takes a little bit more time and people to get used to really what the zaniness is about. But once they see you and they meet you, they they they like you and they understand that it could be a fun ride. And to your point, they're not gonna like everything, but tune in, tune out, and uh come along for the ride. And I love getting feedback too. If people say, you know, do a rant about this or that, I'll be like, for sure, why not?

SPEAKER_00 1:35:35

Yeah, I uh I I appear, well, I'm usually off-screen, but I do a live stream with a couple of friends. Um I'm usually there Tuesday afternoons, and uh, and we rant and we ramble because we don't have a set topic every day. We just sit down twice a week. It started during COVID as just a way of staying connected. And uh it's called Are You Bored Yet? Which tells you exactly where Jim that's Jim Curtis started it. And uh and I I usually sit off to the side, I'm off camera. It's just I'm I'm a disembodied voice, and I'm normally drawing. Um, I'm making art. And I'm but I'm listening because I can listen and do art at the same time. And that's a lot of fun because we'll just rant on the weirdest stuff. And that's that's fun. But you're right. I mean, you it's it's a you find your audience that likes uh some things, but it might not like all things. It's like me with my open pen names of I'm giving them guardrails because then they can tell, okay, this is what she's gonna be doing here. I guess I guess for YouTube that needs to be my thumbnails need to indicate, okay, she's gonna be making art today or doing a garden tour or doing a recipe or creating a song. Um so yeah, yeah, I I go all over the place. I'm just if I hyper focus in on something and I get hyper-obsessed with it for a while, and then I move on to something else because it's ADHD brain. So how we work it's worth it.

SPEAKER_01 1:37:09

It's fun and sometimes you know, audiences will train creators, and sometimes creators will train audiences. And I think to the points we were making earlier, let's stop with the cookie-cutter stuff, let's stop with the established swim lanes and go go cross genre, experiment a little, and be expressive with the tools of the trade instead of just following the workshop protocol and uh and responding to your developmental editor with the next draft. You know, come on, folks, be original.

SPEAKER_00 1:37:44

Uh if I seem a little distracted, it's because all of a sudden we have thunder.

SPEAKER_01 1:37:49

Okay, okay. I don't want I don't want to to you to blow out here. So I now also want to be respectful of your time. Thank you for being on the science fiction and fantasy factory, ladies and gentlemen. Cedar Sanderson, uh, go get her latest book, Child of the Crops.

SPEAKER_00 1:38:12

Crows, Child of Crows.

SPEAKER_01 1:38:15

See how much I'm picking up. Given we've been talking about gardening, child of crops is probably it's like it it there's two neurons that that flip.

SPEAKER_00 1:38:24

Are you an orange cat in another life?

SPEAKER_01 1:38:27

Yes, absolutely. And uh, and I got uh again, this this was wonderful, uh Tanager's fledglings. So if you're looking for a heartwarming saga, oh Super Santa! I sent you the the Super Santa, which is illustrated. I thought you'd get a kick out of illustrations and novels and cross-genres ain't this.

SPEAKER_00 1:38:49

This is huge. This is this is amazing. I have not managed to get all through it just because that was so much more you you give good value for your money, sir.

SPEAKER_01 1:38:59

Yeah, I think so. I think too much. So um I have broken it into three episodes, three smaller books. Yeah, but uh, but I think I got we got a little carried away with that Christmas gift.

SPEAKER_00 1:39:12

So that's the best kind, really.

SPEAKER_01 1:39:14

Yeah, but best fun to have. Thanks again, Cedar. I would love to catch up with you some sometime for your your next books. Absolutely. And uh, and then maybe some kind of potential collaboration with illustration, as I did with Rusty on Super Santa. I like I like working with an with an illustrator. I love that multimodal kind of stuff.

SPEAKER_00 1:39:35

Yeah, right now I am not ready for that, but definitely we can getting down the road, we can figure that out as time goes by.

SPEAKER_01 1:39:42

No, no hurry and no worry. Just keep keep doing what you're doing. And uh, I'll have all your links in the description to your substack, your Amazon author page, to your personal website.

SPEAKER_00 1:39:53

Yep, yep.

SPEAKER_01 1:39:54

And uh get more cedar, folks. You're a real joy, you're a gift to audiences and creators alike. And thank you so much for joining us.

SPEAKER_00 1:40:05

Have a good night.

SPEAKER_01 1:40:06

Yes, take care, bye bye.

SPEAKER_00 1:40:08

Bye.