The Science Fiction & Fantasy Factory
Hosted by writer and ranter Mookie Spitz, the SFFF is where science fiction & fantasy creators, fans, and technologists transform imagination into reality. Each episode explores how writers, filmmakers, and world-builders bring their universes to life, with personal stories about turning wild ideas into finished projects that connect, inspire, and thrill. From indie authors to visionary engineers, Mookie uncovers the creative engines powering the future of sci-fi & fantasy storytelling!
The Science Fiction & Fantasy Factory
Dave Freer Ignites YA Sci-Fi with Storm-Dragon
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The Science Fiction & Fantasy Factory opens today the way you'd hope a conversation with an Australian ichthyologist-turned-novelist would: an extended riff on cell phones versus mobile phones, why Australians call beer "piss," and Dave's deadpan insistence that all Tasmanians carry a small scar where their second head used to be. From there, Dave Freer joins the same week he's set to accept a brand-new Prometheus Award, virtually, at three in the morning his time, for Storm-Dragon, the first year that particular Young Adult category has ever been awarded.
Storm-Dragon exists because fellow author Cedar Sanderson told Dave that boys had stopped reading, and that Raconteur Press was building a line specifically to fix it. So Dave went back to the book that hooked him at ten years old, Jack Vance's Blue World, and built his own version: a boy and a small, hungry alien creature who starts their relationship by biting him. The telepathy between them isn't hand-waved fantasy, either. Dave spent years studying sharks and electric eels, and Snarky's mind-reading runs on real biology, a species that can sense and transmit electrical fields through water too murky to see through, reverse-engineered into a scientifically grounded psychic bond.
From there the conversation gets personal. Dave describes himself as a "reverse plotter" who starts at the ending and works backward, until his own characters start refusing to do what he originally planned for them. He talks about fully immersing himself in another author's vocabulary and sentence rhythm before writing tie-in fiction, and tells a striking story about hanging by two fingers on a rock face at nineteen, realizing mid-climb that he'd stopped caring what anyone else thought of him. That sentiment has fueled over a quarter century of novels and short stories, give Dave a read!
The Guest
Dave Freer is a South African-born, Tasmania-based science fiction and fantasy author who has published over twenty novels since his 1999 debut, The Forlorn. He is a two-time Prometheus Award winner, for Cloud-Castles (2023) and Storm-Dragon (2026), and is known for the Rats, Bats and Vats series co-written with Eric Flint. Storm-Dragon is published by Raconteur Press.
More from Dave Freer: https://davefreer.com
Get Storm-Dragon: https://raconteurpress.com
But do you guys call them cell phones or mobile phones?
SPEAKER_03We call them cell phones, usually smartphones. Probably because we're probably because we're dumb Americans.
SPEAKER_00Uh I think um my mine is a fairly dumb phone. Um I I recall when I came to Australia, I went into the the little shop on the island and I said, I want some time for myself. And they all backed away slowly from me. Because of course, here they call them mobile phones, and they thought I wanted to be locked up.
SPEAKER_03And beer is piss too for you guys, right? I I met this Australian guy in a youth hostel in Italy when I was traveling through, and he woke up all bleary-eyed, and he's like, Oh my god, I can't believe how much piss I drank last night. I was surprised at first, but then it became clear.
SPEAKER_00Well, put it this way, um, he's just saving time because after all, that's where it's going to be.
SPEAKER_03Yes. We refer to those little hamburgers as sliders. Have you heard that expression before? Sliders. That's that's the same thing. They slide in and then they slide back out.
SPEAKER_00Although a lot of these things are very confusing. Um, speaking as an an Australian, um we tend to have much the same impression of the US as um Americans have of Australia. You know, everyone thinks it's all crocodile dundee, and we live um in a big desert somewhere. Um and most of the Australians that I know have a very tiny window on the US, which is a shame because that there are actually a lot of parallels between the two countries, and they just don't even know they exist. And the US I found when I went there was a very complicated country. You can't just say, Oh, I've met an American, I know America. I mean, that's to me like saying I met a Queenslander, and therefore I assume everyone says eh at the end of every sentence. Um, we are we share a lot of common traits um in the country, but Tasmanians are quite different to people who live far up north. I mean, we're we're about as far apart as as states in the US can be. Um, so there there are big differences in in these things, which I wish more of us were aware of on both sides.
SPEAKER_03I think that mirroring is accurate. I've met many Australians, especially when traveling. So the difference between someone from Melbourne and Sydney is as radical as New York and Los Angeles. And uh to your point, New Zealand, the Kiwis, and then Tasmania in particular, it's a whole separate story.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, um the favorite thing about Tasmanians is that we're supposed to be so inbred that we all have a little scar on our necks, um, where the second head is cut off. Um so if any Tasmanian says to you, I'm Tasmanian, you can see the scar, you know exactly what they're talking about.
SPEAKER_03I was in Iceland not too long ago, and they actually have a mobile app where you can check ancestry. So if you're going on a date, then you ask the person, you know, their family, and then you quickly look them up to make sure you don't end up dating your cousin.
SPEAKER_00Yep, yep. Um, you know, Taz was very small and isolated. And there's, like all things, a tiny grain of truth in the fact that yeah, there was a very good chance that you would end up marrying someone you were related to.
SPEAKER_03Um we know the Tasmanian Devil, which is the Looney Tunes character who is handpecked by the missus. The only one more ferocious than the Tasmanian Devil is Mrs. Tasmanian Devil, who would swirl around with the rolling pin, and just before Taz was about to annihilate another character, she would intercede, knock him on the head, send him back into the kitchen.
SPEAKER_00There's no truth at all in this, I'm sure.
SPEAKER_03Speaking of fantasy versus reality, hello, and welcome to the science fiction and fantasy factory. I'm your host, Mookie Spitz, and as you can tell, I've already got Mr. Dave Freer in the podcast today. Welcome aboard all the way from the antipodes. What what time is it there, and what day is it there now for you? Right.
SPEAKER_00It's Thursday, and it's um uh just after nine in the morning. So it's better than my Prometheus acceptance show, which is going to be three o'clock in the morning for me. So I'll be running on pure caffeine for that.
SPEAKER_03You just won the award in a brand new category for young adult, is that right?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, um, they've had the award or the category for I think it's 16 years, but this is the first year they've decided to award it. Which is bizarre in itself, but I'm very flattered by it. My head gets bigger, I'll have to go and dunk it in the ocean again.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, you popped the cherry for that that uh the younger double one, not to mix inappropriate metaphors there. But uh, congratulations for your storm dragon. Very entertaining. The the adventures of uh Podge and Snarky and Skrut. It's Skrut is the antagonist, right? Scut. Okay, I was I was pretty close.
SPEAKER_00Scooters you and you guys would probably say it. Scut.
SPEAKER_03We would maybe we would say, you know, we have scooters, you know, so scooter would be S-C-U, S-C-O-O-T rather than S-C or S-K-U-T, like you've got it.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it's it's derived from um shooter, which is scoot scooter, um in Danish, I suppose. Yeah. Um and I've I've actually known a few of them, and it usually ends up the the sh noise is too hard for most people, so it ends up as scoot. Yeah, which amused me because it is quite a common um American name or nickname.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, people say scooter all the time. There's various characters, scoot, scooter. And speaking of Dutch, you're uh you're from South Africa originally, is that right?
SPEAKER_00Yep. Um some some of my family go way back to about 1650. Uh and some of my family came somewhat later and fought with them. And then they got married, which just meant they could continue doing the same thing.
SPEAKER_03What got you to Tasmania? Because I know you have an illustrious history in uh South Africa. Apparently, you were a medic for the special forces or the military. Tell us a little bit about that.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I was I was a conscript like all kids of my age. Um, and uh I made the foolish mistake when we got the forms to fill in of saying, you know, I wanted to be a navy diver or paratrooper or anything but a medic. Yeah, you know where I ended up?
SPEAKER_03Be careful what you don't ask for because they're gonna give it to you, especially in the military. Then you were an ic ichthyologist, is that right? Uh you studied fish.
SPEAKER_00Um I got I got well, my dad was um Mr. Mate on a little uh fishing boat. Um, you know, you don't you don't call the mate mate, you call him Mr. Mate. Um and so I kind of grew up around fishing harbors and boats and um getting into the water all the time with with things that you probably rather not know were in the water with you. Um and I started diving when I was about five because I had an older brother who's nine years older than me, and he would go off diving for Spiny Lobster, and Dad would take us both out there, and I was supposed to um play around in all the tide pools, and I think those tide pools are still a major influence in my writing these days because I would create these huge uh imaginary societies um being threatened by the tide or the crabs or all these other things. Um and I haven't changed that much, I suppose, because it gave me a whole world to explore. And um the one thing about uh fishery science or ichthyology is it starts teaching you two really important lessons about life. The one is that spelling is really, really hard. And if you really want you're not very good at it, you should perhaps choose something like being a writer, because being an ichthyologist involves spelling words like ichthyology, which is I chances of us up um in in the average spelling B. And I've forgotten what the second one is because I'm getting old and you know my memory's fading. Um it taught me quite a lot about how weird uh biology really is and how weird science really is. Because the aspect of of fishery science as opposed to say marine biology and so on is that there's an awful lot of um science in it, a lot of numbers, a lot of chemistry, um which uh taught me a lot of useful things which I've used in my science fiction ever since. Um Storm Dragon, you read the title and you think, oh, okay, fantasy. It's not fantasy. Um it's science fiction in the sort of style of the Heinlein juvenile juveniles. Um but I being me wanted the science to work reasonably well. And um I'd been for some time thinking about something to do with electrical communication. Now you guys probably have heard of uh um electric eels.
SPEAKER_01Of course.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, okay, more myriads. Um one of the interesting things about them is they don't just shock you. Everything generates an electric field, right? And one of the species of sharks that I was working on actually had something like a little delta wing in the front of its nose. I mean, it literally looked like a little minesweeper. Um, it's a thing called a St. Joseph's shark or an elephant shark. Um, and they were part of a big commercial fishery, um, which they sweep across the surface of the sand to pick up the electric fields of creatures living underneath the sand. So I knew that it was possible without sight to interact with um the electric fields of something else. And while I was uh doing my research work, um I was chief scientist for the uh commercial shark fishery for a while. Um I came across this interesting little snippet that um electric eels don't only use uh the electric field to shock each other or to be aware of something else being there because they live in very murky water. And the only way they can detect their prey is by these electric fields. Just like my sharks used to detect things under the sand by the electric field there, even though they couldn't see under the sand. Um and then you get interesting situation where you discover that not only do they know that each other are there from these electric fields, but they can actually pulse signals to each other. Now Murmirids, your uh electric eels are not particularly bright, although as as far as fish go, their brains are quite large. Um fish brains are a bit of a challenge. Um so if you really want to insult someone, call them the fish brain. Um but anyway, they they have complicated brains because they're processing a whole set of uh information, not visual, not auditory, but electrical. Um and they can actually pulse their own electrical signal to uh send messages, and obviously by if they can send messages, they can receive messages just as well. So the whole basis of the storm dragon thing is that I have a species which can both send and receive um you know, read electrical pulses in something else. So if it's close enough to you and you have a thought which is obviously an electrical transfer inside your brain, and it becomes accustomed to that thought, it can learn what that means and it can probably send that back to you. So if you think of it as telepathy as in all the old science fiction stories, this is how telepathy at a short range actually could work. Um and I thought that was a fascinating concept to base a whole story on. And then it was a case of uh fitting the characters around that. Um which I'm afraid is my usual story process as I think of the I think of a problem or somebody else says such and such is impossible, and I then find every possible scientific way of making it work. Um that's just the way I write stories, which is completely back to front.
SPEAKER_03Well, what counts though is that you land in good and compelling characters. So Snarky's relationship with Scott is is compelling because Snarky becomes a little mascot, and they communicate initially just with feeling. Warm, just with uh the sensations and one word that expresses uh an emotional condition, and that's very endearing. So he's got a little mascot, and then they get an adventure.
SPEAKER_00He's got a little mascot, his first act is to um take a bite out of him because he's hungry.
SPEAKER_03But that's exactly what the creature would do, and that's kind of endearing too. So you might start with an idea, but it lands with great characters, and I think that's what resonated. And uh the basis of the award is writing a story that young people can relate to. And I said Mallory, Sir Mallory is on the podcast a little while ago, and we discussed the tragedy, frankly, facing so many young people these days, especially young men, boys, who really don't have reading material or provided reading material that they find emotionally interesting, and therefore they don't read. They don't read because they're not given the material that would naturally interest them. So Mallory has dedicated himself to the young adult genre to trigger this kind of excitement for a whole generation of young readers, especially young boys who have a paucity of interesting, fun content. Get them reading and thereby get educated and grow up to be strong, educated people who are empowered with knowledge and experience through books.
SPEAKER_00Well, Mallory is a friend of mine and a very interesting guy. Um and he made a point that I really that really resonated with me is that reading as a young individual is a bit like compound interest. Um reading teaches you vocabulary and concepts, right? If you don't have vocabulary and you don't have those concepts, it's actually impossible for you to think of certain ideas. So because you can't think of them at this stage, if somebody else has got those ideas, they get ahead of you. And then they multiply on that and multiply on that, and you your child will never catch up unless they uh start reading really young. So it is actually vital um on a purely selfish basis for any adult who wants their children to do well to get them interested in reading young. And the best way you can get your children interested in reading young is simply as a role model. Um you know, I grew up in a household full of people who read. It never occurred to me not to read. Um, especially young children are very mimetic and we we learn from what we see. Um yeah, I s I talk for myself as a young child because I haven't really grown up all that much. Um but you know, we learn from what we see people older and bigger than us doing. Um that uh to me really resonated. And this whole issue of of boys not reading was something I've been aware of for some time. And it worries me because I have two granddaughters and a grandson. But I really don't want the the girls to grow up in a world where they can't find a partner who reads as much as they do. Um everyone says, Oh, yeah, well, you've got two granddaughters, you shouldn't care, they're girls. They'll be fine. But it it really is lovely to be able to sit down in a room with uh the rest of my family and we'll uh companionably read together. And every now and again somebody will make a comment. But that is um the way we've always been, and so to me reading was just a natural escape. And uh I was a very sickly little kid, which I made up for for later on by being a complete hooligan of a teenager. Um but literally I had to spend a lot of my time in bed. And the only way I could kind of escape that was to read. And I was a tiny little kid, so I got the living crap beaten out of my head a lot of times. Um and uh one of my quick escapes was to read and imagine myself Yeah, fighting off these uh situations and demons and whatever. Um I think it was C. S. Lewis that said that, you know, we're our children are going to grow up in into a nasty world, um give them champions to uh uh look up to and and imagine being. And that is where it struck me as being a really worthwhile thing to do. And I I I'm one of these idiots who does idealistic things because I think they're a good idea. So there you go.
SPEAKER_03Well, it's very pragmatic. The literacy crisis for young people, especially young men and boys, isn't just a crisis of literacy, but to your first point, it translates into a crisis of adulthood where these folks are not only at a disadvantage. Manage, but uh, but it's endemic of a bigger problem, which is young men and boys are statistically doing so much worse than their female companions. The Zoomer male is in a state of crisis. They're less educated, less socially connected, less successful. And as Mallory and I were discussing, and as you're reiterating here, part of the problem is the educational system doesn't provide them with books that they would naturally find compelling and interesting. And there's a feeling that they need to read the classics to uh be educated, and that's just not the case. As long as they're reading, they're learning.
SPEAKER_00This has been my argument for many years is uh I don't care what you read. So long as you read something, you'll eventually run out of other things to read, and you'll get around to reading um some of these supposed classics. And some of them really are worth reading, and others I think they were there at the right place and right time. Um I I always laugh when I hear people describing these things as great works of literature. I think Charles Dickens was writing a serial to be popular. He wasn't trying to write a great work of literature. And much the same applies to uh you know Alexander Dumas. Um some of them actually had uh sub-writers um uh doing the scut work for them and you know there was nothing particularly noble about it, they were writing something to be read. Now time moves on and sometimes the language becomes uh less transparent to modern readers. And uh I think we need to offer books which have contemporary um appealing to to young readers in particular, because I always th have thought it's it's harder to appeal to a young reader than it is to an adult who will be a little more tolerant, give you a few more pages to see whether it's actually going to develop, etc. Well, your young reader, if it hasn't grabbed him by the first paragraph, it's probably not going to persist to the second paragraph.
SPEAKER_03There's no waiting for Snarky in Storm Dragons. Snarky, Star Starkey's right there. Boom. So uh to your point, there's no no hesitation, and it's uh it's non-stop, it's a page turner. There's something going on, and the uh the characters are always interwoven, and they've got one challenge that leads to another. And it it's a it's a good clip of a read. And that in and of itself is refreshing.
SPEAKER_00I also I was also aiming at boys doing things which boys would find interesting. So yeah, as you say, there is an emotional connection, but really the story focuses heavily on the action, which I think is something that um boys find easier to deal with. The emotional content must be um subtly put in beneath the surface, as it were. I'm not saying it mustn't be there, it should be there.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, their motivations are often implicit, but they're natural. It's it's emerging in a way that's that drives the story, so you don't feel that it's forced. And uh they have their their motivation which translates into problem solving. It's a story where they encounter one problem after the other and they work their way out of it.
SPEAKER_00Isn't that what boys like to do?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, absolutely. And you know, that's why it's a good story, and and no doubt why they the Prometheus folks activated this dormant award for you. So once again, can congratulations. But but you've won before, right? A few years ago, you you won.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that that was on for an adult um the normal Prometheus award. Um, I haven't written any more adult books since then, um except for a couple of romances, which I did uh purely because somebody said men can't write romance. Uh this is a red rag to a bull for me, so I I did it. Um but I've been frantically trying to build a house which um involved all sorts of things like uh loading it onto the back of a truck myself. Um many people talk of moving houses and things like this, but they always get professional uh contractors in. I I actually did it myself. So I'm I'm now a lot more respectful of the professional contractors than I used to be. Um anyway, the previous book uh yeah, Cloud Castles is set once again on a scientifically plausible world um where I took uh I think it was a Heinlein quote um that uh anarchy only works with sufficient elbow room. Um and this is a gas giant world.
SPEAKER_01Um and there's a lot of floating vegetation if you can imagine vegetation that has little uh um gas bags inside it.
SPEAKER_00Um and uh the humans who are now living on this world crash landed onto uh what was uh the meeting point between two alien empires, a little anti-gravity plate of a couple of miles uh diameter where two hostile empires could meet and trade with each other on a world that nobody wanted. So what happens is uh a prison ship gets itself into trouble and it's a prison ship full of Australian prisoners being transported. History, you know, doesn't so much repeat itself as as rhyme quite a lot.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, your neighbors, uh if not your brethren.
SPEAKER_00Anyway, so they um crash landed onto this uh anti-gravity plate and uh some of them stayed there and became basically uh the chattels of the two Australian uh groups and the other lot uh every now and again the more adventurous ones uh would do very much like we we did in in the US or in Australia. All all the stay at home stayed at home and all the more adventurous ones uh went off and uh lived their own lives in among these floating uh patches of vegetation. Um which of course uh is a world rather like Jack Vance's big world, which is just infinitely bigger than Earth. And if you don't like your neighbors or your neighbors are raiding you or whatever, you can just pick up and move to the next one or the next one or the next one. Um so I had interesting times evolving a whole different set of cultures. One which uh lived in an urban environment which was extremely constrained. Um you know, a couple of square miles, and that's it. And the other one which had uh basically infinite space as far as they were concerned, to um farm their own future and and make everything from the actual plants that they had. And of course they had interesting time because there are no metals, there are only floating plants. Um so everything had to be invented and contrived. And my hero was um an incoming do-gooder who suddenly discovered that the people he was supposedly doing good to uh didn't have the same idea of good as he did. Their good idea of good was take it away from you, thanks. Um and he suddenly becomes a lot more pragmatic, but he's an engineer, and an engineer in a situation where there are engineering solutions, and once again it becomes all about problem solving, which yeah, is the sort of story I used to love. So I tried writing it.
SPEAKER_03I had Jay Canton Pierce on the podcast as well. He's another Prometheus winner, and he's the classic pantser, as they say, seat of your pants, you're you're problem solving within your own narrative. You think of something and then you're there, and then one thing emerges and evolves into the other. The opposite of that approach is the plotter, the one who outlines and preps. What's your style? I'm guessing you're more of the pantser variety. You've got a world that you imagine you're more of a plotter, you work it all out, you outline it, you know exactly what's going on in your narrative.
SPEAKER_00I'm I'm a I'm a reverse plotter. In other words, I start at the back of the story as to where I want to get to, and I work my way back from there, and then I write character sketches for all the characters, and I um develop a whole Bible of what the planet or situation has. Um and then I start at the beginning of the book and write the first five thousand words, and then everything changes. Because uh once you actually make contact with the characters, it's kind of like battle, nothing survives the first contact with the enemy and um you suddenly discover the character that you've so carefully evolved to do X, Y, and Z gets to the point where you want him to do a particularly stupid thing and just says that is totally out of character. I would not do that. The person you've developed would never do that, and you've got to change that. And that's why I always find the beginnings of books are complicated and slow. I mean, as I say, I write the first five thousand, that's quite easy. Five thousand words. Um and then it's multiple decision trees, and you've got to think through, right? If it does if the character does this, what will happen there, what will happen there, and it's a whole progression of of logic all the way through. And something you touched on earlier is motivation. Um unless your characters have real motivations, they won't read as real characters. And everything has to actually flow naturally from the person you develop in in print there. So, yeah, that's that's the way I work is back to front and then redo it all. Sounds typical of me, doesn't it?
SPEAKER_03I think it's a fascinating hybrid. And uh I think a lot of writers drop the ball in one extreme or another. So many a writer might begin at the end like you, Agatha Christie style, but they'll force their characters into the outline that they have preconditioned. And then it comes across as artificial, in-force, and in in a complimentary kind of way, you've got folks who might be entirely character-driven, and then the whole story goes off the rails because their characters are writing the book for them. So I think finding some kind of compromise here is definitely the way to go. And there's many different types of writers as there are people and readers for the for that matter. And um and I find your your your approach interesting because uh you have a predilection for being more of a plotter. You want the narrative to make sense, you see it from beginning to end, but you're able to negotiate with your own characters and you're flexible to change what you've conceived of to breathe new life into the story that you thought was set.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I've I found some of my books have changed completely from the end I envisaged. They still go to an end. Um others come back towards the end because as an author, you're sort of playing God, so you can change circumstances to force their motivations. Um of the things I I keep being asked is how do you do things? And I keep saying, well, there actually isn't a right answer to this. What you do is what works for your readers. Um as the readers are following it easily and comfortably, it doesn't really matter how you got there in the first place. Um I've I've based my writing very much on a on a relatively obscure ichthyologist who wrote the first and only paper I have read, a guy called Larkin, um which was simply easy to understand and uh terribly logical and really easy to read. It was only later that I realized he was writing something incredibly complicated, but that he'd actually managed to bring it down to simple basic motivations and terms um to cover a really difficult subject. And I've I've always admired that style of writing as a result, and it it has heavily shaped what I try and write.
SPEAKER_03I had a similar experience with Thomas Kuhn's The Nature of Scientific Revolutions, which has become an iconic book, basically the definer of the paradigm shift and the nature of a revolution-inducing change. And his prose is a lot like what you describe, your favorite ichthyologist there. It's uh an intricate, recursive, interwoven exposition. So one chapter feeds into another, and they're dependent on each other in such an intricate way that his points evolve naturally and in a way that's naturally compelling. It's an engrossing narrative because of his diligence, but also because of his structure and talent. So, from a storytelling point of view, the nature of scientific revolutions is a is a hell of a novel. I think it's a great book, and it has heroes and villains and and world building, and uh and it illustrates what you're describing, which is good writing is good writing, and it grabs the reader. Sometimes it's a two by four between the eyes, doesn't let go. James Elroy, the American writer, the crime Tolstoy, as he as he describes himself, is also excellent at that. He'll start a scene in the middle of highest intensity, work his way backward and around, and it's like his prose punches you in the face as you're reading it. And I love it. I think that that's terrific, and I think it hits home what you're getting at, which is this meld of narrative and plot and world building, but it it's gotta be self-referential in the way where the characters are driving it, but it's like space-time, where matter influences the curvature of space, which in turn influences the trajectory of matter through it. There's a reciprocal and symbiotic relationship between everything that you've described, and a good writer is sensitive to that. So you whether you start with matter or space-time doesn't matter. They're dependent on each other. And if you're flexible and willing to change the one or the other, you're gonna have a better chance at writing a great story that'll resonate with the reader because to your point, they don't care how the sausage is made, they just want to be entertained.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and um a lot of people say, Oh, you've got to write something new. Now I've I've got a bit of a problem with this.
SPEAKER_01Um how often have you got to the end of a great book and you said I'll just wish this could go on. Um and I think a lot of writers get trapped into this as well.
SPEAKER_00Um readers don't always want new at all. What they want is things they've enjoyed and related to, but something new in that. And so we have to have uh I mean I I I keep saying this to to uh young writers for God's sake, read a lot of whatever genre you want to write in. Then you're going to get an idea of what people actually love. Don't um pick on for heaven's sake, a movie and assume that that is going to translate into a genre that you've actually never read. And I I keep hitting this, you know, people who've enjoyed a science fiction movie, so they think they'll write science fiction, but they have no idea of the conventions and the shortcuts, as it were, that normally uh occur in in science fiction. And readers just find it really off-putting because you're giving them something that that has none of the reference that they're used to. And I mean, coming back to our bit about writing for young adults and so on, one of the big problems I've certainly found is that I'm certainly writing for a a set of people who don't have a lot of the same references I do. You know, um so you actually have to build them into your stories. And that's kind of uh scary because you realize you're building building blocks for the rest of their lives. Um those are concepts that they will think back to. I mean for me, uh you know, stories like These or um Thor and and so on didn't come from comics, they actually came from the actual mythology, which I got read to or and then read myself. Now that's all very well, but let's be realistic, it isn't happening a lot. So if you're gonna write about that sort of thing, you're gonna have to build it. And you're giving these guys such a tool that they will be able to use for the rest of their lives. Uh I I get quite worried that I'm doing a bad job and and not um giving them enough tools to build their own futures. Okay, I'm pretty thick.
SPEAKER_03Well, you got good ammo behind you. So you've written longer works, you've got 20-something novels, right? 20-something books since 1999 when you started something like that, and you've got countless shorts and contributions to anthologies that cover multiple genres, different styles, and you've been doing that, it seems, in parallel to some of your longer works. So I would assume that when you approach, let's say, the subgenre of the young and dull, that you've you've gotten an armamentarium of techniques and lexicon and storytelling tricks. And even tropes that you can adapt. So there's no substitute for experience, is Jimi Hendrix saying. Are you experienced? And it sounds like you are. You've been cranking this stuff for what 27 years? That's pretty good. Yep.
SPEAKER_00I well, and I'm lucky in that I have an awful lot of real life experience that just happens to me, um, to use as a basis for a lot of this. But to make a counterpoint to what you're saying. When I am trying to write a particular genre, I try and actually subsume myself into that genre. So for instance, um Eric Flint talked me into writing um sequels to the James Schmidt's couriers books. And I mean, really I was uh mortally terrified of this idea because uh I'd really enjoyed those as a kid. I didn't think I was anything like up to the standard of that uh kind of writing. So when I had to write the first one, I literally said to myself, right, and I read terribly fast, um, I can read about five novels in a day quite cheerfully. Um and I write very slowly to make up for it.
SPEAKER_03I I I'm the opposite, I read slow and write fast.
SPEAKER_00You should be doing my job then. Anyway, so yeah, I I completely subsume myself into only reading Schmidt's while I I was doing that. So I could get the vocabulary. Um I did stupid things because of the science background. Like count how many words he used on average in a sentence and try and bring my sentence length uh to match his sentence length more or less. I looked at his vocabulary very carefully and uh tried to uh line my vocabulary up with what he was doing. Now I I don't think the end result is anything like what James H. Schmidt uh would have written. But at least it's closer. And when I was writing the young adult stuff, I went and uh first tried reading uh some current young adult books. And really so much of it was romantic. And I just thought, no, this is gonna colour my uh reading, you know, my writing badly. And as a as a not very grown-up male, um I didn't appreciate it very much and I found it was too heavily emotional and um didn't have enough action and was rather boring. So I wrote rather went back and read uh um some of the books that uh had inspired me as as a ten, twelve year old uh books like Jack Vance's Blue World with the the whole thing with the uh um crock and fighting. I don't know if you've you've read that.
SPEAKER_01I'm familiar. I'm familiar.
SPEAKER_00It was my very first um ever science fiction novel a classic. It was my very first ever science fiction novel and it involved living on an ocean um on an ocean world with with a predatory um Kraken that was trying to set itself up as a god um and the humans started having uh crash landed on the planet. I wonder where I got that theme from. Um having to um solve the problem of how to deal with this thing by uh extracting metals from their own blood and things like that. As a little boy, I thought was just the best book I'd ever read. And that's what I set out to do was uh to write a book that yeah, a ten-year-old could think, man, I'd really love to do that. Um yeah. And I'm lucky I've had a lifetime of diving or fishing and rock climbing and things like that to lend some color of practical experience to um what I'm writing about.
SPEAKER_03I think I bring up a great point there, is as writers, we've got our heroes, and it's natural that you emulate. If you're a rock and roller, you're gonna start a cover band and you're gonna play your favorites, and that's how you learn. That's how that's how you evolve.
SPEAKER_00That's how I learned I have absolutely no rhythm.
SPEAKER_03Well, the metaphor nonetheless, I think, applies.
SPEAKER_00I thought it was gonna be Z Top or um maybe Jethro Tell, but yeah, I'll settle for being a writer.
SPEAKER_03You got a little bit of the Billy Gibbons meets Gandalf kind of look to you right now. But emulation is is a part of learning, especially for creative people and artists. And then eventually you hit your own stride and you develop your own voice. That's the magic moment when you're no longer just trying to be someone else or recreate a book or a narrative or a song that you adored, and it's your own voice. And I think to get there to your other point, personal experience, lived experience is vital. Sometimes we think of ourselves as artists or writers, and that becomes the totality of an identity. And that's a critical mistake, I think, especially for young people, because they have yet to really sink their teeth into reality and all the pains of adulthood. And I think in tragedy, disappointment, failure, adventure is drama and is that voice that, as artists and writers, we're clutching for. And it almost emerges out of tragedy and and some of the disappointments of life. And I think that's to be cherished. So you reach a point where these two independent tendrils converge and they intertwine in a way that that creates a voice. And I think that's a golden moment. When did that happen for you? You've been writing for quite some time. When did you feel that you got your stride that there was a Dave Freer style and voice, independent of genre, because you do jump from here to there and you do it pretty well?
SPEAKER_01Uh when did you find yourself uh about 20 60? 2060 in the in the 40 years in the future?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I reckon I should just about be there then.
SPEAKER_03Oh, okay. I see what you're what you're getting at.
SPEAKER_00What I think is when you think you've got there as a writer, um, you're actually dead. Um you've got to be constantly pushing yourself, trying new things, evolving, learning all the time.
SPEAKER_01I think I always think if well, I'm not gonna name names, um but uh there are a couple of authors who who think they're god. Uh you're fishing in a barrel with that one.
SPEAKER_00Um and that they can write nothing bad or nothing wrong. Now I I come from the opposite point of view in that uh I think I have met some authors and certainly enjoyed reading some authors to whom I'm just uh a pipsque. But I keep trying to learn from what they've done and trying to push myself just that a little bit harder. I think it was Neil Guiman who who commented about rejection saying rejection didn't make him depressed, it just made him angry and right. The next thing said, Right, you rejected that. Well, see if you can reject this. Um and that's uh my attitude towards the whole thing is that uh Yes, I'm sure that my stories sound very like me. I know this because I had a friend who never read science fiction and because she was a friend of mine, uh she said, Oh, I'll try one of your books, but I don't like science fiction. Um and she read it and she loved it. And she said, It was just like talking to you. And I thought, well, that would have put most people off.
SPEAKER_01I'm I I'm still awake. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Um I don't think I have the sort of perfect face and and speaking voice for for silent movies. I've also got the same sarcastic humor.
SPEAKER_03I see what you're saying though, about always wanting to be challenged. David Bowie has a great clip that became a meme and was flying around actually fairly recently. And he was saying that pretty much exactly what you said, which is if you're comfortable, you're toast. That means you're not innovating and you're gonna fall back into your worst tendencies, and you basically should throw in the towel. And he said, you always need to feel that you're you're you're just the water is just high enough so you're not drowning, but you're struggling just to stay afloat. And that's when he knew he was on to something, and he knew that he was doing something valuable and worthwhile. But that's a little different, though, than having your voice. Because I know a lot of artists who are asphyxiated and and and muzzled almost before they're able to write a word or do a brush stroke. And the challenge there is they don't they don't like what they do or they're self-critical to the point of being unable to produce. And that has its own challenge, which is you're too critical, you're too much of a perfectionist. So whether you're just rationalizing your own dysfunction, laziness, or fear is one thing, but you do need to reach the point where you're really enjoying the productivity itself. Picasso woke up and he just went for it. And there's a joy in that kind of release. And in that kind of release, there's a celebration of the act of creation itself. And I think that's a threshold. You can cross it in five minutes. Maybe to your point it'll take 50 years. But the the writers that I talk to who are successful, such as yourself, have intrinsic joy and motivation in the in the creativity that they do each and every day. It's what they do. They wake up, they write, they paint. Cedar Sanderson was uh on the pod a little while ago. She's constantly doing her art. She's literally drawing an illustration. She illustrated for you in your uh in your in your in your novel.
SPEAKER_01She's name it for them.
SPEAKER_03She's a phenomenal writer, too. She's prolific. And she's in her garden gardening, and she has the same approach to her content, which is she's constantly watering and pruning and tending.
SPEAKER_00And constantly nagging other people to write, which is why you ended up with Storm Dragon, was that Cita actually got hold of me and said, Racontier is trying to trying to do these um young adult for boys. Yeah. And you really should submit to them. And from Cita, that's like getting a sharp elbow in the the ribs. And she's one of the nicest women you could ever meet. But um she's like Sarah Hoyt, very good at giving me a sharp prod and saying, get on with it, do it. You can do it, and I want you to do it. And yeah, I said, Okay, I'll give it a go. And because it's something I believe in, uh I I had a try at it. And um yeah, I I was quite happy with the the outcome there. But you you talk about this whole um confidence in yourself thing. And I do think a lot of people end up with their fairly good manuscript sometimes, probably terrible manuscript other times. Sitting in the top drawer, never doing anything. Um because they're scared of what other people would say about them. And I think the authors who who make it are more worried about what they would say about themselves if they didn't do it. Um I I had this very odd epiphany which I kind of has lasted me the rest of my life. When I was about nineteen I was in the army uh being asked to do all sorts of horrible things, and I'd I'd already dealt with my first uh dead dying person by the time I was eighteen, you know. I thought I'd kind of been through the mill and whatever. But I was still very worried about what my peers thought of me as it's very typical of of particularly a younger person. Um and I went rock climbing, which was what I did. And I was leading a climb called Pinna, which was uh as hard as I could could possibly do. And I suddenly was uh in this move where I was hanging on by uh two or three fingers on one hand, one finger on the other hand, balancing on my toes. That's why it's called pinna, right? Because you spread eagles like that. Um and I knew uh at that stage if I did anything wrong, if I failed to make the next move, I was going to fall off and hit the ground and die.
SPEAKER_01I mean you know and it suddenly came to me I didn't actually care what anyone else thought of me. I just wanted to stay alive.
SPEAKER_00Um and if I could handle uh the fear that came in that moment, and it was a very real fear, why was I worried about what somebody said about me? You know and it was it made a huge difference to my life, you know, facing that challenge, dealing with it and uh being able to move on through it. So yeah, I think it's it's quite important for people to reach that point where you take a challenge, you face it, and you realize you can. Every challenge is different. Um you might do well the first ten times and then fail on the 11th. Um, I I'm one of the volunteer ambos. And I live in fear that the next time I have to deal with Ambos is ambulance officers. Next time I have to deal with a case, I'm going to do something wrong. So I always keep training, trying to learn more stuff and so on. But that doesn't mean I haven't reached the point where I have some confidence in myself. And that is very important to any writer.
SPEAKER_03I sense a paradox though. On the one hand, you say that you are writing and sharing and going for it because you can't imagine yourself doing otherwise. There's a sense of self-criticism. You don't care what other people think, you care what you think about you potentially not doing that. So you do it, hells bells, damn the torpedoes, and you're producing and you're sharing. On the other hand, though, you're very much aware of your audience and their needs and expectations of you to the point where that's a foundational principle for your definition of writing well, which you were elaborating on earlier. And you're also an excellent collaborator. You've worked with lots of different writers I've seen in your move, including Cedar. And Cedar's wonderful illustrations are through Storm Dragon. And I've talked to other writers who've worked with Cedar. Rick Cutler, Colt Ostergaard, the man with a gun, is uh Cedar's wonderful work, is in that. It it becomes part of the book itself. Sam Robb and her have collaborated. So you work well with others, you're audience focused, you're classically extroverted in this sense that the audience does matter, and yet your motivation, it sounds like, at least on a personal level, is you just don't want to piss yourself off. How do you balance these two?
SPEAKER_00But the guy I don't want to piss off, which is me, um expects me to be able to do well at those other things. So it's my expectation of myself to be able to collaborate, to be able to particularly please my audience, which uh after all is the measure of success as a writer. It's not how well you please yourself, it's how well you please uh um your readers. There's no more sincere vote of confidence in somebody spending their money, hard-earned money, on your book. Um and I expect myself to achieve that. Um so yeah, I I put high standards on myself, I suppose. Um somebody has to. I don't know.
SPEAKER_03It's a terrific balancing act, it's another expression of the balancing we were talking about before. In a sense, you're the the introverted extrovert. So your standards are internal, they're of yourself. You hold yourself in high regard, and and the bar is high in terms of your success as an author. But that's contingent on other people reading what you write. It goes from your own personal taste to being receptive to collaborating with others, listening to your audience, and adjusting your own style and output to match sometimes even the average word length of the writer whom you are ghosting. I think that that's a that's a great compromise that that you make and and one that works for you. Some writers are in a in a pretzel the other way. And in ways, I'm in that category where I'm just all hell's bells about pleasing myself. And I have the Rick Rubin attitude without Rick Rubin's success of saying, screw the audience, I I think this book is great.
SPEAKER_00If a book doesn't please you, it's very hard to press on. But if what you're wanting out of it is to be able to please others, then you're achieving both at once. It's like a good shift. I mean, you might know the meal that you're preparing is great, but if nobody enjoys it, what's the point? Um yeah, you could follow the people.
SPEAKER_03Part of it is also connecting with your right audience. And when you're writing in a genre and a style with a receptive audience, and you're working with a publisher like Recontour, who has its own methodology and its own style and approach, then uh then the system can work very, very well, which is you have a talented, motivated, creative person or people collaborating, and then you go for it. You got your objective and you match. And to the point you brought up earlier, the archetype that you experienced as a child of classic science fiction is in a sense reiterated throughout your oove and variations. You're you're recreating that experience that you had. But if you have less luck, and maybe your archetype is William Burroughs' Naked Lunch or Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, or things which begin more esoteric, niche, and weird, then it becomes proportionally challenging to connect with an established. audience because it's it's more micro-targeted. And these days it's about it's about a mass market because it's about cutting through the clutter in a way that that you can get noticed.
SPEAKER_00If you can't any fool can write for a well maybe not any fool but most fools um can write for their tiny specific niche. If you can write about your tiny specific niche and appeal to a wider audience you're golden.
SPEAKER_03He's a classic example of that because it all in all objective fairness if you look at the Martian and most recently Hail Mary are phenomenal critical and commercial successes. I like him a lot. I think he's great and talk about problem solving.
SPEAKER_00I'm busy enjoying listening to um Hail Mary at the moment.
SPEAKER_01Are you listening to the audiobook?
SPEAKER_00Yeah um I I listen to books while I do physical labor.
SPEAKER_03And it's problem solving this guy is is is they're just he's you know the protagonist is solving problems. The protagonist happens to be a scientific genius so I'm sure you you love them right and they're put in an almost existentially dire and technically impossible set of cascading circumstances and because they're so smart and charismatic and courageous they're able to to get to where they need to go but that's very niche. It's very male it's very hard science it's very geeky but he's managed to bust out that way and and I think that that's terrific. And it's really a sign of exactly what you're saying which is you know what you might be a little weird and you might be a little niche but just go for it. Keep at it you never know when it'll snap and it's on us right now as creators to essentially create our own audience right you can go on Royal Road back in 2020 and do it or you could you know start your own damn newsletter or go to a Comic Con. Just just go for it. DIY baby in 202. And if you don't try you ain't gonna win and that's true for Ick Ichtheology and uh mountain climbing and living in Tasmania. So I think I think that that having that combination of lived experience with creative zip is uh is really a a nice set of ingredients to bake a good cake that people are interested in. Anyway Moki I think um we're probably reaching the end of tolerance of your readers uh listeners by now uh should we consider wrapping this up so that I can go to the Lou well I'm happy to wrap it up to Lou I've talked to folks for three hours so you know it's completely up to you I I'm sitting here with twisted legs in pain we could happily wrap it up too much coffee and Dave Freer check out Storm Dragon I'll have a link in the description below to the novel and to his books. He's been cranking since 1999 in the he's got the for listeners he's got the uh cover here Cedar Sanderson Gone Wild again thank you Cedar in the YouTube video I'll put nice overlays of the books that we've been talking about and thank you for your time Dave well it's been a great pleasure talking to you you've given me a whole bunch of new ideas to write about all right one of the things I do with all the people I ever meet is is try and listen to them which is unusual um and then pieces of them occur in the various books because I steal from characters that I've actually met and known live in fear I can't wait to see my Dave Freer Doppelganger or or Avatar I think Avatar is the best way to call it Dave Freer Mookie Avatar it would be uh great little bits of you rather than ever any one character.
SPEAKER_00But yeah um that is one of the things I would say to to any would-be writer is learn to observe other people and learn how they think because then when you're writing about your characters they will actually react naturally um their motivations will be their motivations not your motivations as an author um and one of the most important things you can learn as an author is that somebody else's point of view is not yours but you have to actually be able to get into it.
SPEAKER_03Amen to that that's one reason of many that I feel blessed doing these podcasts. I've gotten to you're episode 60 I think of this one I've got four other shows I talk to everyone from business people to writers to science fiction writers and I learn and I meet people and I absorb their experiences and point of view. It's amazing and you know when we read somebody Socrates distrusted writing because you can't look someone in the eye and you don't see their little nuances and they're not communicating with you nonverbally and when you meet a writer instead of just reading them it's a whole different angle a new dimensionality and when you go back to their writing it's uh it's layered with their ethos and I feel great and privileged to be able to meet great writers like you so thank you for your time and thank you very much to the whole recontour crew Sam Robb Rick Cutler Cedar Sanderson and uh bring bring it on you guys are a great bunch and it's a great publisher who's doing a great service to young adults young men and boys with YAs with books like Storm Dragon and getting the word out so cheers.
SPEAKER_00Yeah well um it's been great talking to you and yeah no worries and go go to the loo before you explode Dave
