Why Boys Stopped Reading, and How Malory & LitRPG Save Them

Reading fiction has become "a girl thing," and an entire generation of boys now pay for it. Mookie sits down with UK author Malory (yes, one name — think Sting, but with lots of typing) to dig into why literacy stats are cratering for young men worldwide, and why the fix isn't more "important" books, it's fun ones they love to read. 

They dig into a defense of pulp fiction, the mechanics of why LitRPG works where traditional YA fiction hasn't, describe the genre's video-game style "system" that tracks stats and rewards competence, and why stories of everyday heroes overcoming adversity resonate. They also discuss why publishing quietly stopped wanting male protagonists and how a teacher's assumption about "who the good readers are" becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy by age fourteen.

Then the conversation turns to Malory himself, and how he went from burned-out day job to full-time author in four years. His professional writer's journey started on Royal Road, the crowdsourced fiction platform where he serialized a chapter a day. There he learned the hard way to write rapidly, consistently, and with good quality, while thousands of strangers picked apart everything wrong with every word. That brutal, real-time feedback loop is where he actually learned to write, and where the deadline discipline got hard-coded: break the schedule, lose the audience.

His craft sharpened further through Raconteur Press's themed anthologies: a Buck Rogers pulp month, a hardboiled noir month, each with a hard word-count ceiling that beat the ramble out of his prose and made his longer 100k+ word litRPG series tighter. He talks through his actual process: 5 a.m. starts, treating writing like "another nine-to-five," not waiting for inspiration, nor taking days off because he might not feel it. Malory also shares lessons learned from co-writing, hitting Audible's 40-hour sweet spot for readers doing long American truck hauls, and why he now has several ongoing series plus new ones signed for next year.

Malory and Mookie also get philosophical, and wrestle through the paradoxes and illusions of the "tortured genius" myth. For Malory, writing is a contract with an audience, and being responsive to readers isn't selling out, it's the job. That leads into the AI reckoning hitting litRPG, and why Malory's shifted away from pure pen-name anonymity toward doing more podcasts and interviews. He understands that human readers are most responsive to human writers, especially ones with a real track record fueled by their lived experience, not LLM matrix math. 

For Malory, writing is about deadlines, discipline, writing for a younger version of himself, and an older version of his 9-year-old son. For you, this podcast provides inspiration, best practices, and a rare glimpse into the world of creativity, publishing, and creative success. 

The Guest

Malory is a lifelong sci-fi and fantasy fan writing LitRPG and Progression Fantasy, books built on strong characters, action, and snark. His philosophy: write fun stories people actually want to read, because the world needs more escapism. That drive led him to write his first Boy's Own Adventure for his son, chasing the golden age of classic heroics. Winner of the 2026 Jim Baen Memorial Short Story Award, he's partnered with Aethon Books, Legion Publishers, LitForge, and Soundbooth Theater, plus regular anthology work at Raconteur Press. Outside writing and doctoral research, he's rereading Terry Pratchett or watching England's cricket team collapse again.

His Website

https://maloryauthor.com/

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello, welcome to Inverse Algorithm The Writer's Pod. I am your host, Mickey Smith. And I'm excited to have Mallory in the podcast with us today. Mallory. How are you doing? You're coming at us eight time zones away, I think. From from England.

SPEAKER_05 0:25

I can't I can't work it out with you guys. You've got all the different letters that come after times and everything.

SPEAKER_00 0:33

Yeah, GMT sounds so universal.

SPEAKER_04 0:39

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 0:40

Greenwich meantime.

SPEAKER_04 0:42

Yeah, where time comes from. That's the thing. It all starts here. Everything else spirals off us.

SPEAKER_00 0:48

Dumb Americans say Greenwich.

SPEAKER_02 0:50

Oh dear. Shouldn't.

SPEAKER_00 0:53

I think I think we still do, I have to admit. Thanks so much, though. It's a little bit later in your evening. Sam Robb, our favorite writer, brought us together. So thank you, Sam, for including Mallory. You had a wonderful short piece on how to manufacture a man who doesn't want to read. Is that well?

SPEAKER_05 1:19

It was more looking at what had been done to create the situation whereby men aren't supposed to read anymore. That was sort of the uh the the thing. And um I've I've written a few of those on my Substack, and uh I've been obviously writing quite a lot of shorts for for Rack and Tur, and I think that fits into their whole uh shtick really about what they're trying to do with their publishing arm, really, which is to counteract that really and to start putting things out there that that men do want to read when we've had really a hundred odd years of of doing our best to make it as hard as possible for for men to enjoy reading and and more importantly for people to know men read. That's what we've sort of created, I think, as a society, is uh is a sort of a bubble around the idea that it really isn't something that men do, and really it's a bit suspicious if if men read.

SPEAKER_00 2:08

Reading, writing, knitting.

SPEAKER_05 2:13

Anything anything that isn't sonience and and and and fighting barefist on the street, I think anything beyond that is seen as as slightly suspect.

SPEAKER_00 2:22

Absolutely, if you're not gonna actively participate in bear baiting.

SPEAKER_04 2:27

Yeah, are you even a man?

SPEAKER_00 2:28

You could be a witness thereof, but uh anything short dethrones your masculinity.

SPEAKER_02 2:34

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 2:35

But it's particularly acute in this age where you have the Gen Z male, especially in the States, going through such a struggle. Yeah. Now with identity, with their sense of masculinity.

SPEAKER_05 2:51

Yeah, it's it it's particularly acute, I think, because it's so easy now for people to see the wrong role models. I think even if you go back to it to when I was a kid, you actually had to work to to come across somebody that wasn't a an ideal role model for you. Nowadays, you just need to open a screen and you've got it in 3D in every possible way of how not how we, I'm sure, wouldn't want someone to think that's what a man is. But it's it's far too easy now. And I think that's one of the biggest fears. I've got a young lad who's who's just uh just turned nine, and I'm really worried really about what he will see about what it is to be to be male, because actually all of the the signs and all of the the imagery and all of the storytelling that that comes at them in such a strong way is is very much sorry, my phone is ringing. It stopped. There we go. Um I think that everything that comes across there is a very strong image of the wrong type of man, really.

SPEAKER_00 3:48

That was a recalcitrant male calling saying, hey.

SPEAKER_05 3:53

I think it was probably my wife calling to say, Why aren't you picking up your mobile phone to be honest?

SPEAKER_01 3:58

My son's dealing with it like a like a good young male that he is.

SPEAKER_00 4:03

Absolutely. What was the source of this? If you look at the statistics, we have Pew Research here in the States, and across every category, young women are doing better than young men, educational level, career aspirations and fulfillment, social networking and reinforcement. List goes on and on.

SPEAKER_05 4:32

Across every country as well. That's that's not just the US. That is, there is no there is no country where you will see anything other than the women outperforming men and men doing that as well. It's not just that women are shooting upwards. There was a study a few years ago that said actually the gap was closing, and it wasn't, it was just because the women's gap dropped slightly and it just closed that men's carried on going, but women dropped rather than than increasing. Um I mean fundamentally what we have is a is a school system that isn't aimed anymore at promoting reading. And I think as soon as reading, um reading of fiction particularly, and there's this idea that um fictions for girls and non-fictions for boys, and that if you want boys to read, give them technical manuals and give them biographies of strong that that's just not true. Um, every example that we have of where reading improves and and literacy improves comes from fiction. And and fiction for for about a hundred odd years has been something that has been pushed away from something you're supposed to enjoy if you're male, and that actually anything that is seen as questionably as a question to your masculinity really becomes difficult for young men to do. And lots of studies have been done in in Australia in particular that show that as soon as a male displays any sort of interest in in fiction reading in particular, that a huge pressure is put on them that that's not something that you're supposed to do. And very, very quickly, if you're a teenage boy, you realise what's socially acceptable. Socially acceptable to kick a ball, to throw a ball, to what to read comics. It's not socially acceptable to have a book in front of you. And it's been going on as a as a social construct, really. I mean, Henry Henry James, um famous writer, he was sent to a very specific school because his parents were worried that he was taking too much interest in novels and they wanted him to take more interest in proper things like science and um being uh being uh a developed thinker and an engineer. And and that has really carried on um from then, really, about say about a hundred odd years. So we go back past then, um, reading was was seen as a very positive thing. Reading was seen as something that to be a a reader and if you look at Lord of the Rings, um, all of those those great characters in Lord of the Rings are literate. They're they're poets, they're singers, they're musicians, all the heroes there aren't people that just swing a sword about then and and be male. They they're they're fantastically literate characters.

SPEAKER_00 7:00

Henry James, in particular, I think would scare away any red-blooded global male. But that that said, uh, I think this points to some of your writing and back to Recontour's approach to make young adult reading, teen reading, fun. Which is adventure, adventure stories, a lot of short stories, a lot of your stories, the lit RPG.

SPEAKER_05 7:31

Yeah. I mean, if we look at Rack Press first, the the key to them is pulp, and it's the stuff that you were told to be embarrassed that you enjoyed. And and pulp genre fiction is is is seen, you almost have to say it with with with air quotes around it because there's a general feeling that it's not real writing. But actually, pop fiction and and things that uh enjoy and engage and have stakes and have clear goody versus baddie have none of this very overwritten, emotionally tortured writing that just puts people off. It's fast-paced and energetic and fun, and and there's so much of a sense of uh disrepu dysrepuality about it. Um, that I think Rack Press have been doing some fantastic work in actually getting short story anthologies of the sort of things that certainly I remember reading that have just vanished from the bookshelves. I mean, I remember you wouldn't, I don't think you'd see the sort of like I read a lot of uh Robert Restwell and and Heinlein and and those sort of authors that don't seem to exist now because it's not seen as something that is publishable or people want to have out there.

SPEAKER_00 8:36

Cedar Sanderson was on my other podcast, the science fiction and fantasy factory. She's a Rack gal.

SPEAKER_04 8:46

Yeah, she did my front cover, she's a fantastic artist as well.

SPEAKER_00 8:49

So she's done up your art, she's uh obviously an author in her own right, and we went back and forth on the nature of pulp fiction and the sieve through which Rack Press does it, she does it, and she was insisting that it's pulp, it's pulp fiction, it's wrong, it's intense. And I was trying to give it at least the veneer of the literary. So reading some of your short stories, reading her novels, I do see the pulp essence, but there's also a level of sensitivity and sophistication which which makes it a little bit, and not to denigrate the the genre itself of pulp, but you guys are are good writers, you guys have strong characters, yeah, and you do tie it back to societal issues, to bigger questions.

SPEAKER_05 9:48

I think you you're coming at it almost straight away with the idea that pulp's in some way a derogatory word, that to use it to say something's pulp just means it's rubbish.

SPEAKER_00 9:56

She was sensitive to that, right?

SPEAKER_05 9:57

Well, I mean I'm not I'm not sensitive about it. I I think it's the the idea that that's part of the problem is that actually it isn't. And yes, I think there's a whole host of fiction out there that that people shouldn't read, and it's not very well written, it's not very well thought through, and it's it's just trying to do something that it thinks of as pulp, but it's actually just bashing something out as fast as you can and going, Oh, I hope people like this. But actually, the the nature of pulp fiction, I mean, my one of my my favourite authors is Raymond Chandler, and I think he, for me, is one of the central pulp writers, which he was paid by the by the dime, so he had to write it quickly, and he had to pick his words really carefully. And that's what I think drives my writing is that you think, well, actually, you pick the right words because you're being paid by the word, and lots of my work is paid by the word, and that doesn't mean you just spew and spaff words out on the page, you go, Well, that's my paycheck. You you pick words that are gonna carry weight. And Charmela deals with all sorts of societal issues and and pressures, and and certainly in his, I mean, I think the long goodbye is one of the best works written, and the sense of loss that is through that is awesome, but it doesn't mean the entire book is just somebody sat there staring out of a window feeling sad. It's like you you get the sense that that Marlowe is is broken and sad, but he's still sorted everything out and he's still pushing it and he's still sort of driving the plot onwards. Um, and that's what Pulp is, and and and Hammett does it does it equally as well, really, with that sense of just raw firepower that comes through. Um, but it's not rubbish, and there is rubbish, but I don't think Rackantura put in any rubbish out, which is which is good.

SPEAKER_00 11:35

Well, that's what I was trying to differentiate. One of my favourite books of all time, and I cited this one with Cedar too, is Ross McDonald's How Some People Die. I I I told her that if there's ten books you launch into space and that would be the last testament of our species, that would be one of them, and that that's as pulp as it gets.

SPEAKER_05 11:58

And he he should be so much better known as well. I mean, we don't tend to talk about him in the same sort of breath as Chana and Hammett, but it is, and it's got the same feel to it when you when you engage. But yeah, absolutely, and it shows you about who we are, doesn't it?

SPEAKER_00 12:12

Yes, completely. So so I'm a big fan of pulp fiction. I love it. I I brought up James Elroy as the American incarnation of taking pulp and literally just elevating it into its own meta-pulp genre.

SPEAKER_05 12:30

But what Elroy does so well is it's unapologetic. I mean, El I mean, you can read some some Elroy, it's barely in English, and the commitment you need from an author, from a reader to understand what's actually going on with all the slang and all the the dialogue and everything. I mean, that's what's that's what makes Elroy so good. Um, but that's literary, isn't it? And I think people would never say that Elroy wasn't a literary performer, but it it's because it's it's so good, and it doesn't help having doesn't hurt having movies made with Russell Crowe and uh and Guy Peterson them as well. That elevates you to uh to a different audience as well, doesn't it?

SPEAKER_00 13:04

Yeah, so I think the three of us are in violent agreement here. Pulp fiction is a genre, there's nothing to be shameful about it. And my emphasis was merely to say that it's not what a lot of people think it is or even should be.

SPEAKER_05 13:21

But also what people have been taught that it is. That's the and that's my my argument, really, is that actually people have been fundamentally and chill-I'm not saying people, we're saying young men are fundamentally taught that what they like to read is shameful and rubbish. And no, don't read that, read Wuthering Heights. Now, Wuthering Heights is great, but you don't say to a to a 10, 11-year-old.

SPEAKER_00 13:40

Or read Henry James.

SPEAKER_05 13:42

Well, you don't say to them what you're reading is wrong, take it off them and say, no, what we're gonna study now at school for the next eight weeks is Wuthering Heights, and we're gonna pick apart every single metaphor and we're gonna talk about the feelings and the emotion, and we're not actually going to enjoy this at all because we're gonna we're gonna rip it to shreds so much. And that really is quite a lot of moments in boys' lives where they go, well, reading sucks. And actually, if that's what reading is, if I'm not allowed to read that, and that's that's that's that's seen as as shameful and embarrassing, and it's gonna be taken off me, then I'm not gonna read anything at all because I don't want to read what you're telling me I should be reading at school, and that's the big problem. I I think that we we're we're now it's been going on for so long that we're now so in embedded in it now is that's the way that it goes, that you see quite often I'm I'm I'm X quite a lot, and one of the most current comments that people say is that it's very hard to be published traditionally if you're male, and that's because actually what we're what sells and what Matt obviously sells is stuff aimed at women because they're the biggest market out there that that buy books. So, of course, publishing follows that and aims huge amounts of resources at it. But if you stand in the supermarket now and have a look at the fantasy wall, which is my genre, you go, well, Brandon Brandon Sanderson's up there, and then this whole slew of things that I don't really want my nine-year-old boy picking up and reading because they're borderline acceptable, what they're gonna deal with.

SPEAKER_00 15:09

You bring two points up in your great piece, and the first is this implicit understanding that reading in and of itself is absolutely foundational to education and empowerment. Yes. And and I wholeheartedly agree. I think nothing educates and empowers better and faster than reading, and reading a lot, and reading from multiple sources. And the second point that you bring up explicitly is that of all the different types of reading that a that a young man can do, reading fiction will will arguably do the most because it frees up creativity. And you bring up several other great points that hits home that fiction, short fiction, really is the jet fuel for a young mind, especially a young male mind.

SPEAKER_05 16:03

If you don't have the vocabulary to explain what's going on, you look for someone else to give it to you. And that's I think where we get a lot, particularly when we look at at Gen Z and some of the very worrying role models that there are there, they're giving them a vocabulary to explain the world because they haven't developed their own. But you develop that from reading. And if you're not going to read stuff, then someone on a video is gonna show you the quickest way to get to a Ferrari is to act like this, and that's that's not what we want.

SPEAKER_00 16:32

Exacerbating this problem, and you probably know where I'm going with this, is AI, which is ubiquitous to the point of being a cliche, but it's a cliche that is ubiquitously true. So AI is doing the lifting for people. So, in a professional sense, an analyst will run a report through their bot, share it with their client. The client will run the report through their own bot and then have a response to the report and send that back to the analyst to run that through their bot. So, in the business world, people are becoming superfluous. The bots are starting to talk to each other. And when you're looking at even education and you're looking at what people are using and doing to learn, this idea of this AI scaffolding is reaching the point where the utility of reading and writing is being supplanted by the large language models that are doing all the work for us. And people are reading and writing less. And these young men are growing up not only as digital natives where they're doom scrolling into oblivion, they're video gaming themselves into oblivion. So they're they're virtual selves, their avatars that are living a second life, which precludes them from going on a date, which precludes them from interacting with other humans and taking on human responsibilities. Adulting is now pushed even further, further into oblivion, and with that comes reading and writing and the joy of active participation and knowledge. So that's a yet another big challenge for the young male. How to circumvent that? How can we make writing sexy and reading sexy to a young man growing up not only with digital and the doom scroll and the video game and living in mom's basement vaping?

SPEAKER_05 18:45

I think part of that really is if you look at a genre that is is massive um at the moment, is is something else that I write with him, which is lit RPG. And I think part of the the discussion that is around why it has become so powerful and so prevalent so quickly, really. I mean, didn't exist five years ago and is now um a huge um genre, is because it feeds into that exact moment of alienation you're talking about, which is a kid that video games and doesn't read. Um to have books that explicitly move from around that idea of what it is that attracts for for me, certainly, what I think attracts young men to a lot of video games is the very measurable nature of meritocracy that is within them. That actually, if you play a computer game and that you're good at it, your progress is tracked, you're appropriately rewarded for the work that you do, and that you are able to demonstrate competence, and that actually we've always had as men the idea that competence and being good at something is is profoundly masculine beyond anything else, really, that being able to do something is is is important, and video gaming feeds into that, and it might not always feed into it in a way that I think certainly people of my age are comfortable with, where you think, well, actually, I don't want my kid playing on the computer game all the time. But there are very few other things in society that give that sort of measurable um intrinsic and extrinsic reward for being good at something. And if you look at the best of the lit RPG, so the the one that's on everyone's lips really is Dungeon Crawler Carl, which, if you've not read it, is just a hoot. Um, that is fundamentally what happens when you take a good guy and you put him in a terrible situation and he grinds his way through by being a good guy and and working hard to being awesome. And across that, that's basically the plot of every lit RPG that exists is you work hard, you get more powerful, you become able to deal with the problems in the world. And there are lots of lit RPG that I think people are nervous about because actually that's not really what happens, and it's basically very bad people getting very strong and doing bad things. But the ones that are successful and the ones that are read very widely and talked about very widely are all about that notion of a video game notion, which is if you do something and get good of it, get it, it's trapped and measured, and you get an appropriate reward. And we don't get that in life very much anymore.

SPEAKER_00 21:14

Let's describe the genre for our viewers and and listeners. I've had lit RPG writers as guests in the science fiction podcasts, and some of it was frankly new to me too. And as I as I understand it, it's prose in the novel format, but the the hero or protagonist is moving through it analogous to it being a video game, in a sense that the prose breaks, stats are here, strength, intelligence, charisma, and then you get a metric associated with each. And as the narrative unfolds, The pros will again stop. There's a mechanism for that. There's like the gaming system, there's the characters moving through it. And this is implicitly understood in the genre. And then the stats progressively change as they encounter obstacles and they fight their way through stuff. So this is what you mean by it being a meritocracy of protagonists in a sense, where you see a trajectory of stats changing, analogous to what happens in a video game.

SPEAKER_05 22:33

Yeah. And it's not hugely outside something that you would see in a classic fantasy story whereby an apprentice learns, has a mentor, get stronger and is able to learn new spells and everything. It's just rather than it being um implicit and sort of understood that if I work with Merlin for a few years, I've got stronger at fireballs, it's the absolute tracking of, well, you work with there so you develop this new skill, which is able to, and it it makes it very visible. And it stops anything being as a nod and a wink that, oh well, you worked and therefore you're stronger. It tracks it out for you. Um and I'd say in the best of these ones, rather than it just being the pro stops and there's a table, you'll have a a lot of people will talk about the system, uh, and the system will have a voice and a character, and the Dungeon Crawler car does it brilliantly because the system is incredibly antagonistic and it's trying to punish him constantly, and it is very, very funny about the way that it rewards him and punishes him, and the way it describes his development is very funny as well. Um, but it is the it is the implicit made very clear, and there is nothing within lit RPG where somebody um develops an ability that you don't understand where it has come from or it's just been um just been rewarded. I think the best way I tend to talk to people about lit RPG is there are no chosen ones in it, and I think that's a really important feature because when you look at something like Lord of the Rings, which is awesome, the hobbits are not chosen ones. Um they're the best analogous really for a character in a lit RPG where they're not chosen ones, they get given huge responsibility and they just have to do it. Um, and I think moving away from that idea of people with bloodlines and people with special histories and people that have been gifted by God to be able to achieve wonderful things, the idea of an everyman character that just through their own hard work can change the world is is for me what what I'm what I'm looking for in stories.

SPEAKER_00 24:30

So, both in terms of form and function, lit RPG appeals to the Gen Z reader. It empowers them, it it presents obstacles to the protagonists that they then have to overcome. There are no miracles, there's no inheritance, they just need to rough it out. They they go forth, they get punched in the face, they get back up, they keep going, they make progress. And all of this is overtly expressed in terms of the system making these statistical increases known to the protagonist and the reader, which is your strength has gone up two points after interacting in this way, and you see the trajectory of growth. And it's also masculine in the sense that it mimics a lot of the video game interfaces that they're familiar. So when you go to the screen where you hit your profile, oftentimes you'll get a screen full of exactly that. You'll get stats. How am I doing in this video game? How's my strength? And the video game companies make literally billions of dollars, not off the sales of the video games, but the extra bonus packs where the players will buy credits, which will increase their armor, give them a special suit, make them more dexterous, etc.

SPEAKER_05 25:55

And I think the I think that's one of the best examples of the the fallacy that exists around the one of the biggest problems we have is that boys can't concentrate and that boys have got very low attention spans. If you look at the depth and detail a 10, 11-year-old will spend on their build in a game, where as you've absolutely pointed out, they'll min-max to the exact, they'll work out theory, they'll work out exactly what they have to do. There is no lack of motivation here for people to engage with story. What there is is they don't want to engage with the stories that are often pushed towards them. And what we found, I think, with the the rapid and sizable growth in Lit RPG is it's a genre that explicitly does that and just goes, well, this isn't embarrassing. This is a a 500-page novel where you're gonna have to do math as it goes through in order to be able to track what these characters are doing. And and it's the length of them that I think it's worth stressing on. Because again, we're told that boys don't read and they've got no attention spans, and oh, it's all to do with doom scrolling and they they only follow advert times. These books are 500 words long, they're seven, eight, ten volumes of these books, and these millions of words are being consumed at at a rapid speed. So the desire for boys to read is there. We just haven't found a way in order to harness it. And we did because we had books that did that, and we then constructed this whole idea that reading wasn't something you should do as a male, and it went away.

SPEAKER_00 27:21

Being a dopamine-deprived human, an undiagnosed ADHD person and untreated, I often get feedback that how could you write a 130,000-word novel, and how could you do all the things that you do creatively, which ostensibly takes so much time and focus and attention. And it's easy. If you've got the ADHD, or you're a teenage male, you're off to the side. You do what you love with unabashed zeal.

unknown 28:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 28:02

And if you don't like it, or if you're convinced not to like it, then your attention span goes to near zero. So what we're we're talking about here is not the inability to focus or to sustain interest and attention.

unknown 28:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 28:18

Too much testosterone, not enough dopamine. What we're dealing with here, to your point, is really a lack of interest or the perceived lack of interest.

SPEAKER_05 28:31

But what's fascinating is that that perceived lack of interest is often projected on students by their teachers. There was a very thoughtful study that was put together that looked at what happened when you asked teachers who their best readers were in a classroom, and the teachers would would almost entirely go, Well, it's these good little girls over here. And then they would be asked to track the performance, and unsurprisingly, the performance of those girls went up as they went, whereas the performance of the boys went nowhere. However, if you didn't have that perception, and if you didn't say, Well, who are your best readers now, performance was almost different, was it was no different at all. So it's this projection that actually boys don't read, boys shouldn't read, versus girls are good at this. And once teachers have that perception, it of course transfers through into the classroom where you end up with boys going, Well, I don't read, this isn't my thing. And if we know one thing about boys, it's that they like to succeed. So if you tell them you're good at X and you're not so good at Y, X will get all of your focus. And if that starts at six and seven, by the time you get to 14-15, it's hard coded into you, I'm good at X, I'm not good at Y. Of course I don't want to look at whatever you're trying to put in front of me in English classes.

SPEAKER_00 29:44

This is proven over and over again. The four-minute mile, impossible. It gets cracked, and all of a sudden everyone starts lining up to do it. The two-hour marathon. That just got cracked. So, perception, reality is something that's paramount in all human endeavors. And teenage boys are particularly sensitive to that kind of perception and feedback and and anticipation of what they could and shouldn't do. And then you get the veneer of the masculine put on that, which to your point is completely wrong because you've got genres like lit RPG, which is about as testosterone-laced as it can get, at least in conventional terms.

SPEAKER_05 30:31

Yeah. And that that fear of not doing what is socially acceptable overrides everything, because that's the biggest, scariest thing that exists out there. And and of course, that we will always we've all have friends and we'll have come across people that don't care about that. But your average day of the mill teenage boy, it is the most important thing that exists. And how putting any doing anything that moves yourself outside of being safe within the pack is going to be something that you're not going to do without a very good reason. And what we must do is is return to this idea that actually reading is fun and that reading fiction is fun, and it's something that we all do, and also where boys see themselves reflected in it. And there has been a quite a strong move, and we see it in Disney movies as well, and we see it regularly in the books that become most popular, is that we don't often see anymore a teenage boy as a protagonist. And again, one of the things that Rat Press have said is absolutely essential to their boys' fiction work is it must have a young male protagonist in it. Yes, there can be girls within it, that's not a problem, but they don't want them to be led by the female figure because there's enough fiction now that's published where that's almost the definition of to get anywhere, you need to be led by a strong female character.

SPEAKER_00 31:50

Not to go full Jordan Peterson on this stuff.

SPEAKER_05 31:53

Please don't.

SPEAKER_00 31:56

But there he's Canadian. I just want to clarify he's not English for our for our American audience here. And I mean that facetiously, but what I'm essentially getting at is uh biases have flip-flopped, where society has compensated for the wrongs of the past. And unfortunately, it's done so where it's introduced new biases, and this reverberates through our politics. And it's what you're expressing right now, too, that that a majority of books published are in the right now, it's comfy romance. Cedar, I think, said this, which was like, well, if I wanted to just make money, I would just write romances because that's where a majority of books are sold. Science fiction, fantasy, lit RPG are sub-slices, sub subgenres of what's particularly hot. But but again, this is uh endemic of uh whiplash to the whiplash of what society is trying to fix. And Rack Press is bold in the sense where you know what, we have a target audience, and the target audience, ironically enough, is underserved right now. So why not? Let's go for it.

SPEAKER_05 33:18

But isn't that I think what's so maddening really is you look at um the really successful authors that are that are still there that are still writing in science fiction and writing in fantasy, and the lack of attention that those authors and incredible authors get in comparison to the latest book about women and dragons, which seems to immediately go top of the bestseller everywhere. You're like, well, okay. And I I your point is absolutely well made, is that it is an attempt to balance up what has been a historically, I mean, the conversation we're having here could have been had in the 1800s about women and books, which was like we we really, really, really don't want women to read books because it's so strange. That's what you you hear all the time. But now it's being boys and books, and it's that that has flipped so strongly. Um it's like is it's quite is quite incredible, really. Um but yes, the the need to generate things that people can see themselves in is is the key. And I think Rap Press are doing it brilliantly.

SPEAKER_00 34:18

Yeah, I think so too. The the whole portfolio is exciting and the and the focus is fun, and I I like the pulp to your point too. It's very, very entertaining reading. Yeah, and I'm sure it's fun doing the writing.

SPEAKER_02 34:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 34:34

So let's talk for a second about you, which is your your writing career and how how you got into it and your particular focus. Tell us a little bit about the Mallory. You're one of those one name kind of guys. You're like uh Madonna and Sting, you're you're Ma you're Mallory.

SPEAKER_05 34:56

It comes from um Royal Road, which is uh a writing website that I'm sure many of you viewers will be familiar with. And it's um somewhere where you upload the chapters of whatever you're writing, and then thousands of people tell you why you're terrible. And that's uh it's a very good way to start to start to sort of learn how to write and what works for people and what they enjoy. So I wrote um a series on uh on Royal Road that did quite well, and and from that I was able to give up my day job and and was able to then focus in on writing. Um and Mallory was the name that I sort of published, published the first series under, and I think since then using that name has been a sensible, a sensible thing going forward.

SPEAKER_00 35:35

Yeah, and just to put a pause for a second for our viewers and listeners, Royal Road, and the uh the other lit RPG guy that I was talking to, he uh brought up Royal Road, man too. And uh and I I checked it out too, and I'd seen it before, but I didn't really dive in there. And it's not simply limited to lit RPG, but lit RPG is a big genre, and it's literally crowdsourcing fiction. So as an author, you upload your stuff and it's community driven, and then people dive in, they like it, they comment, enormous threads happen, and there's a ton of corn plating that goes on. Have you heard the term corn plating? Yeah, corn plating is when fans dive deep into content and get all the little minutiae that comes from a meme where someone pointed out that there was a corn plate in a Disney Pixar movie, okay. There's a huge thread that ensued. Like, why the hell are you talking about this plate of corn? I mean, who gives a shit? And now it's a term for this.

SPEAKER_01 36:45

Well, I've never heard that. Okay. That that definitely describes Royal Road. That's that's a perfect future.

SPEAKER_00 36:50

So Royal Road is the corn plating nexus, and uh it's fun, it's great, it's an opportunity to not only democratize fiction and fiction writing, but to your point, you you were just the guy writing and and it uh it elevated you to be able to uh monetize it and do your thing.

SPEAKER_05 37:13

And I think the the point really is that I think if you if you've always written and you love writing, you your audience is tiny, really. It's your friends and it's your family who who generally think you're great and will tell you that you're great. And I think what I found with Royal Road was that you actually then had a an audience that were very, very invested in telling you you weren't great, and at length added detail in all the ways that your prose wasn't great. And I think that was a real eye-opener because suddenly the the nature of Royal Road is you're you're really supposed to upload something every day, and it's that's the audience who, if you get an audience, want to be able to keep reading in that sort of serial format way, and so that for a start added great discipline because you're thinking, well, I've got to write something today, or I'll be shouted at incredibly by these people. And then what I found was very helpful was that because you were writing quickly, you made errors, and then people were flagging all of the errors that you were making. But again, that that makes you better. And I think through the course of certainly writing my my my first series, the the level of corn plating that I was getting from the audience meant that by the time I finished the book, it was actually a pretty good book. Because I'd gone back and I'd I'd constantly needed to update things and change things.

SPEAKER_00 38:25

You have, in a sense, an army of live beta readers.

SPEAKER_05 38:29

Yes, and I that's the best way to describe Royal Road. And I think if anyone's not tried writing on there, that's the way to go, is to is to put your stuff up there and just engage and not get defensive and not try to argue with people that they're wrong, but just embrace it because quite a lot of people read chapter one and just tell you exactly why it fails. And you know that once you've got people that are getting to chapter 20, that you've got a winner because people there are so much on there, there are so many stories published every day. No one's gonna stick with you if it's if it's rubbish. Um, and and Royal Road is great for that. And and I was fortunate, I think, that Royal Road was at that stage where people were looking on Royal Road for stories that did well in order to take to the next step and to take to to Kindle and to and to and to paperback copy, and and that was what my story did that. And then the the key thing that we've not talked about yet is Audible, and and and my stories went to Audible. And I think the the connection between audiobook and male readers is huge because, in terms of, I know most of my audience are people that do massively long commutes and therefore want books that are 40 hours long. And my publishers are very clear that that my books have to hit 40 hours because at that metric, people will buy them with their credit on Audible and they will they will listen to it. So I know that my audience do these particularly my audience is almost entirely American, who do these huge long truck journeys um across across the States, and that they want a book that's going to be at least be 40 hours. And again, that argues against this idea that people have no attention spans, because actually, not only do these books have stats in, but if you listen it to Audible, you have about five minutes of somebody reading stats to you on an audio book, and that doesn't put people off.

SPEAKER_00 40:14

Yeah, and then they're excited about it. It's very, very interesting. I know a lot of your shorter works, and you've got these longer ones as well. So your shorter works are in anthologies and the like, right? And tell us about some of the themes that you work through in the longer pieces.

SPEAKER_05 40:32

I think what I've found is that the Rack Press themed anthologies have been one of the best ways to become a better writer because it's when you know that you're supposed to be writing at length and you're trying to hit something that's 130,000 words long because that's your target, I have a tendency to get verbose. So I have a tendency to let things flow. If you've got a 5,000-word short story with a theme that if you go over that, you know it won't be picked and it won't be selected. You you suddenly become a much more focused writer. And what I found, because Rack Press put out calls for basically every month, I found that actually being able to be writing my thing during the day and then say, well, tomorrow morning I'm gonna have a look at one of these short story themes, and you have a look at what the what the theme is supposed to be, and they give you some homework for it as well, and other things you need to have read, and the the sort of genre and the the the way in which that they see the anthology going together. I think then switching to that mode has made me a much better writer. And then when I come to write the longer stuff, you you you're you're tighter because you you've written a short story where you couldn't just allow things just to just to sag because you wanted a chapter that was 4,000 rather than three. Um and that's been that's been that's been great. And I think if you look at the the rack press themes, they're so um pulpy and so fantastically different. So I've had ones that were uh it was a Buck Rogers themed one, which was awesome. So you just suddenly had lasers and everything that could possibly explode and have Queen playing in the background as you read it, versus some quite um there was a detective fiction one that was much more intricate and much more um uh noir, really. And I think for a publisher to quite happily do one one month and one the next is is is pretty rare.

SPEAKER_00 42:16

You seem to be the type of writer who embraces playing ball. You like you like team team play. And I bring that up as a as an ostensibly introverted kind of writer where where I like just plowing through my own stuff. And and if I'm indulgent, I just let it loose. And and and in ways it's the Rick Rubin approach. I don't know if you know the producer's going from he's got the beard and the and the shades, and he's sitting there like Yoda saying that the audience doesn't matter for art, it's what I think is good, and I just put it out there, and it's art versus commerce. And you don't seem to feel that there's a dichotomy or a contradiction between the two. And I think that that's that's great, and and again, it's complimentary to how I naturally see stuff, which is you're thoroughly collaborative. On Royal Road, you're taking in feedback from dozens, if not hundreds, of readers. You are honing your craft based on the metric of what they think is a good piece of writing. You take that, you get published, you work with the folks at Rack Press, they give you a theme, it's a detective theme, it's a Buck Rogers laser beam theme, and you're rolling with it. You like it. And and I think that's awesome. And not not all writers can do what you do, which is take constructive feedback and meld your To the expectations of strangers to get better at appeasing them more necessarily than ostensibly yourself.

SPEAKER_05 44:14

I think there's there's a danger, I think, in art, not just in writing, but in art in general, that we almost um fetishise individuality and that the idea that if I as an artist believe in this, therefore that is the only possible truth that exists. And uh I think that art in itself is a conversation between the artist and the audience, and that if you are uh so focused on your own internal correctness and purity that you have no audience, then you're not an artist because effectively you are serving yourself and pretending that what it is is great. Um and I think uh it doesn't help, I think across um across history, really, we we've all got very clear examples in our heads of artists and musicians and writers who have had that exceptionally individualistic approach whereby they've um served themselves and then hundreds of years later we've realized that they they were brilliant. Um and I think we we we like that notion of the tortured van Gogh. We we we love that idea of someone that was never appreciated in their own time. And I think the danger often with I found in in writing groups that I've been in is everybody thinks they're van Gogh, and everybody thinks that they are uh somebody that it will just take some time and people will appreciate their sheer brilliance. And I think the arrogance not to acknowledge that actually an audience that's telling you it ain't very good is uh is it's uh it's something we all could uh spend some time sitting with and going, well, actually, it's only so many times people could tell me this doesn't work before I I realise that it should. I love Dickens. Dickens was the most populist author that could possibly exist, and we now look at him as somebody that is is is a fantastic writer and really of literary merit. He certainly wasn't at the time. Um he was somebody that that was quickly firing out serials, he was writing what he knew the audience would pay for and what he what he wanted to talk about.

SPEAKER_00 46:20

Well, dad was in jail, right? He had to uh he had to get dad out of jail.

SPEAKER_05 46:27

And you have to, and and that that idea that, and then you look at uh I mean Shakespeare, you look, he wasn't writing plays because he thought these were going to change the nature of human existence. He was looking at what he had as a cast, what was being bought this week, what the queen wanted, what the king wanted, and what he thought he could get away with plagiarizing without anybody shouting at him too much. It's it's how you do it. And I think anybody that I mean it would be wonderful for me to say, well, I sit here, I write what I think's great, and it goes out the door and it's awesome and everybody loves it. Well, that's that's not what I think being a writer should be. I think you should realise who your audience are, what your audience wants, but also what is going to be valuable for that audience to learn. Um there are, as I say, there's some examples of lit RPG where it's basically let's kill things as violently as possible because people and and people have made lots of money doing that. But actually, I think there is a much more interesting story in lit RPG whereby worth matters and competence matters. And I think that's the story that I think across all of my short stories and across everything, all of my I mean I mostly write first person. Uh most of the stories I write are a first-person narrative. And all of them are characters that actually fundamentally are good guys, and that they just no matter what situation they're in, they try to make it better in some approach. And I think that's what Pulp is, is having the square peg in the round hole who does his best. And I think we want to read about that. And I think we want to read about that whether they're aliens or whether they're um knights in armor or whether they're they're detectives in Chicago, that that I'm gonna do my best here is important.

SPEAKER_00 48:07

You're swimming in the lit RPG genre, but we're talking about universal themes of artistic identity, intentionality, and writing for oneself or writing for an audience. And it's usually the case, there's a balance between these yin-yang forces of dueling opposites. Someone asked Woody Allen how how he would feel about being remembered uh a thousand years from now for being this great artist. He said, I don't care, I'll be dead. Doesn't really matter. And it also goes back to the tree falling in a forest, no one around, that kind of Barclay idealism, which is if no one's reading you and your words aren't really reverberating in the heads and hearts of an active human audience, then what's actually taking place? Writing and reading is an emergent phenomenon. So if there's no observer, it's like Schrdinger's cat, it's alive and dead at the same time, right? And it needs expression, it's gotta land on its feet.

SPEAKER_05 49:19

Yeah. And and yeah, I guess that that that sums it up, doesn't it? It's it's it's a contract between particularly writing, it's a contract between between reader and audience. And if you don't have somebody that's there and you're willfully trying not to, uh I I don't know why you'd do that to yourself, really, because that way it could only be sad, can't it? Because I mean one I mean, I get I get some nice reviews, I get some absolutely blisteringly horrible reviews, but at least someone's read it. I mean, at least someone's given it a enough of a read to go, it sucked. And you're like, okay, fair enough. It can't be for everybody, but at least someone's had a response to it, and and that that that's good, and that's that cheers me up, I think, when you're having a bad day. I think knowing that that someone's had a response to something that you put out there, be it good or bad, is quite nice.

SPEAKER_00 50:08

Yeah, Ozzy Osborne died recently, and and during the memorial I'm sorry, he's from the same city as me, Birmingham. Oh, okay, you're a Birmingham guy. Great. I had the best uh curry in my whole life in Birmingham. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_04 50:25

Uh-triangle, well known. Best ever.

SPEAKER_00 50:28

I I I did uh a market research project for a company years ago, and I went and did the circuit throughout England, all the way up to Manchester and Liverpool, all the major cities. We hit Birmingham, and I was just like, wow, it's the most memorable aspect of the trip. So anyway, Ozzie, Ozzy dies, and then Tony Iomi is talking about the the Oz in the early days of the band. And they were booked for a venue, and they didn't even have a whole album worth of material. So that's when they started riffing, and they would write some of their songs live in front of an audience. And he remembers there was one bloke who would stand on his head, the change would rattle out of his pockets, and he'd go, gather it all up, put it back in, then stand on his head again. And I I go off on this tangent because uh they only had a few people, and they were literally writing and riffing a lot of their stuff, but they were doing it with an audience, even if the audience was negligible, critical, and insane.

unknown 51:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 51:37

And often most. Well, I think I think that's why a lot of people miss the the importance of something like a writing group where you're actually sitting with other people and talking about stuff. Um, lots of um, there's lots of really good opportunities, I think, for people to get that sort of beta reader experience whereby just other people read what you you've you've written. Even if you never publish it, even if it just goes into a desk, the experience of somebody reading it is it, and it will make you better. But if you never show it to anyone, that's why Royal Roads, just such a free way of doing it, but if you never show it to anyone, you'll you'll never get a chance to know where it landed, because you've got to have a read, you've got to have an audience.

SPEAKER_00 52:19

Well, part of the challenge though is attention in our attention economy. So you could go out there and conscientiously blast the world with your content, but people are increasingly not giving a shit. So your Royal Road example, I think, is a perfect storm and best in class example of having an audience and a platform, building a readership, and then organically adding on to that foundation. But in the wild, wild west of the interwebs in 2026, we've got all these options for platforms to share. Substack is a big one. It's really turned into kind of a writer's jerk off, actually. It's it's very incestuous and and claustrophobic. It's it hasn't really become what it was purported to try to be. And then you could froth at the mouth on X, Facebook socks. Medium is a joke as well. I use it just as a content repository and like a search engine. At least I get up on Google through that, right? So I smatter my stuff haphazardly and chaotically all around, and I'm not the only one.

unknown 53:50

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 53:51

So I think Royal Road is a great piece of advice for writers, but what can we do? I mean, you've got writers like myself. I'm not shy about sharing my stuff, but it's about getting and sustaining attention. You got petabytes of content being barfed out there, and now you've got mountains, zettabytes of AI slop that we're competing with.

SPEAKER_05 54:19

But I think that's what this sort of thing is is going to be increasingly important is being able to actually see that a human being exists. Because you're right that there's so much content out there. There is so much content that isn't really content because it's just emerged from a computer large language model. And I think we're going to enter a situation where by actually being able to identify a human being behind it and human author. I mean, I'm in the UK, the uh the Society of Authors has started developing a human-authored logo that you can apply for to have put on all of your work. And I think that's a pretty tokenistic way of doing it.

SPEAKER_00 55:01

I'm I'm certified non-based.

SPEAKER_05 55:04

Certified human. But I I think the idea that I think when if you can generate when once you start generating an audience that is comfortable that you exist, I think there is going to be a a credit put on on human human artists, really. And I think we're going to see that more and more and more. And I think that's why podcasts generally, I mean, I say I write under a a pen name, but I think the importance of people knowing that I'm I'm a human being is why I I stopped just doing the pen name and started doing doing doing more more discussions. Showing that there is a working human mind behind stuff is how things are going to grow. Um and I think the AI stuff is gonna uh tail off now because it's not it's gonna start being more expensive. From everything I can see, uh, particularly what uh what what what happened with with Claude last week, there's going to be a uh a use of AI that's going to become too expensive for people just to use it to do low-value uh clop. And I think you're going to see the drop-off of what's killing certainly lit RPG at the moment is just a sheer volume of buttons. I think they said something like this like five new lit RPG books published every day, most of which aren't by a human being. And I think as soon as that tipping point hits where it is actually not free anymore to generate all of this this rubbish, there'll be a resurgence of humans being able to stand up and go, look, I exist. I have I've existed for this many years. You can find me in these different places where you can see that I'm real, and that's going to matter.

SPEAKER_00 56:35

There's a content refurbishing issue, too. Originally, the lines crossed at 2035 for the bots running out of human content to chop into tokens and regurgitate. And now it's much, much sooner than that. So the amount of AI slop, I think, is already well exceeded that produced by real people. I'm sure. And when you just keep plotting that curve, it keeps shrinking closer and closer to the now. And and what happens then when bots are are regurgitating their own slop. It's meta-ai slop. It's slop built from slop.

unknown 57:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 57:17

And that becomes noticeable. And and what's what's missing in the equation is the lived experience of human beings who transpose their agony, their ecstasy into the writing in the form of characters that live and breathe. And uh that to me is the heart of literature and the heart of what I do as a writer. I might get weird and indulgent and jump genres, but I'm having the time of my life expressing myself and my lived experience through through the writing and through the storytelling.

unknown 57:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 57:55

And that's what a computer can't ever do. And I think that's what we're seeing more and more, isn't it? Is that actually people are are are finding it much easier now to identify where there is no human being involved. And I think that's a that's actually an important moment for people that are producing human-created art because what I think people feared was going to happen was that AI was going to produce work that was so good it made writing redundant or made, but actually that all of the evidence at the moment is that it creates flat work and work that is is disposable and and and great art isn't. And and works that people talk about and remember isn't aren't flat. And I think that's what you just have to keep telling yourself is that uh AI isn't and it isn't going to create moments of of work that people remember. And I think you can even find when authors are overusing AI to support them, you ask them about their plots, they can't quite remember what happens in their story. It's like, well, that's not great, mate. It's like you're supposed to have written this yourself.

SPEAKER_01 59:01

If you don't know what happened, that's that's probably not going to be worth me reading, is it?

SPEAKER_00 59:05

It's it's really a matter of originality and innovation. So the bots might get better and better at mimicking to the point of it being indistinguishable, but busting into something new and fresh and exciting is very much a human endeavor, too. And sometimes it's uh one step forward, maybe a couple, three, four backwards into rehashing old styles, bringing up bringing up even stuff that's become cliche in a way that's fresh. And uh, and humans love that. The the two most popular movies in the in the States, and I I presumably the world now, Obsession and Back Rooms done by 20-year-olds, yeah, starting on YouTube and done on a shoestring budget, and it's oozing just experience and creativity. It's taking technology, especially in the case of the back rooms, and uh and tweaking it and tapping into our fears.

SPEAKER_05 1:00:14

And it's interesting that the horror elements are interesting there as well, isn't it? That actually uh I often I often think that some of the best innovations we get start in horror and then they become slightly less scary and freaky and smoothed off. But horror is often a place where you see the boundaries pushed to a place where you go, well, that's that's really interesting, isn't it?

SPEAKER_00 1:00:35

It's toying with our emotion, not even so much our minds, but our our reaction formation, which which a bot again doesn't do, and it's just uh a pre-trained generative transformer, it's just doing matrix math on tokens. Yeah, and and the output of that then gets interpreted by humans, so it creates its own new emergent thing by reading it or consuming it, but it's still a mechanistic process and it's caught in that loop. And uh and it behooves us not to buy into the bullshit that way. To your point, uh, I feel blessed for opportunities like this one, where I meet an author and we're having a human-to-human conversation and it's dynamic and fluid. Everyone's on their phone and scrolling, and even if you're on an incestuous platform like Substack, you're seeing writers, and you might even build a writer's community, but there's a meme, there's another post, there's uh a self-inggratiating excerpt, here's an announcement of my book launch, and it lacks any real humanity, and it could very well be bot spewed because there isn't this looking someone in the eye that's not having a conversation. So I feel blessed with the opportunity to have the the time and put the effort into reaching out to fellow humans. I think more of this should happen.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:07

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:08

Yeah, I I've cited this before, but Socrates distrusted the written word. And I always thought that that was pompous assery on the part of the old genius that you know Plato was running around after him with the feather and the parchment or the chisel and the stone writing all that shit down. But I've come to realize, especially after doing these conversations with other writers and creative people, and I've got a bunch of other shows. I do business, I do music. I had Lawrence Juber from Wings on. I love actually talking to people. And I finally get what Socrates was talking about, which is when you just doom scroll, which is the equivalent of just this map and territory gap, this delta between Mallory, the lit RPG writer, and sitting here talking to you. Yeah, it's it's quite striking.

SPEAKER_05 1:03:16

Yeah, I think the we are oral, aren't we? I think that's that's what we we've always been as as a Swiss. That's what we do. And I think, yeah, writing's great, but it's yes. I think talking is uh is is profoundly human.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:30

Profoundly human. And I think obviously we we don't want to stop writing, and that distance of writing is part of its power, yeah, too, because uh you don't see the person, you don't you can't see them, smell them, react to them, and it all elevates into the symbology of it. This is the Jacques Derrida bullshit of that whole philosophical movement, right? Where writing has no meaning whatsoever. It was it was a bunch of postmodern philosophical nonsense, if you ask me, but but there's something to that where that distance gives it a certain allure and strength and has a power unto itself. But every once in a while it's good to check in, knock knock, and see the human that's that's behind it all, that's driving it all, and reminds us why we write and why we read.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:28

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:30

What strikes me is there are as many different types of writers and readers as there are people. So, what motivates us, what we do and what we don't do as creative people, and then conversely, the people ingesting our content have their own diverse set of motivators. Who to you is your favorite kind of reader? When you're writing your next book or short story, do you have at least a vision or a construct of who you're writing for, especially now that you've cultivated an audience and they have cultivated you?

SPEAKER_05 1:05:10

I think in my head it's it's a younger version of me. And I think it's that idea of of somebody that is is likes words, likes the jokes that happen around words, but doesn't take it so seriously that everything has to be picked apart. And I think it's that sort of irreverent just is willing to go with you for the joke. I think that's my that's my ideal reader, really, is someone that will will read something and go with it and enjoy it. Um but at no stage is going to take it too seriously. And I think that's what I I I think that's I I say I took a look at um reviews quite a lot, and uh the ones who've got it are the ones that have gone, that was really funny, or that was I really enjoyed that. I think the ones who tend not to are like, oh, this was. Stupid, and they will explain all the ways in which it's stupid. Like, oh yes, but well, did you enjoy it? Like, yes, it was stupid, and yes, yes, I understand there were all the things that probably wouldn't have happened, but they did in this book. And was that for you? Um, so yeah, I think a sort of younger, a younger version. I mean, I think I mean fundamentally I write for my son, and as he gets older, I want him to enjoy. I mean, one of the reasons I press Press to write one of their boys' own fiction was because there's nothing I write at the moment that he'd be allowed to read, just a little bit too sweary, a little bit too too grown up. Um, but I wanted something that could be proud that he could he could sit there and he could read. Um, so yeah, I think I write for my son, really. I think that's the I want to write things that as he gets older, he'll pick up and go, this was really funny, and I really enjoyed um what you created there. And that's the hope, isn't it?

SPEAKER_00 1:06:47

I think that's a neat compromise that, in a sense, you've made with yourself because listening to you say that, on the one hand, you're the ultimate team player, like we've mentioned. You've you've you've created this community, they have sought you out, and they have actually morphed your own writing to suit their sensibilities as much as your own. But what I'm hearing you saying is you've reached the point of your success, and you have your audience, and you've got your career as a writer, and now it's you're writing full circle for a younger version of you. So you have your audience and your individualism too. And to me, this sounds like a terrific compromise between what ostensibly we would consider art and commerce. Because if you're writing to appease yourself, that's joyful. You're like, whoo, this is fun. I like this.

SPEAKER_05 1:07:52

But I think I write I write in a genre I read, and I think that's the that's the thing, isn't it? So you you say uh you're writing to suit your your audience, but actually I am one of those audience because the reason I started writing it was because I enjoyed I enjoyed that that style. So I think you're right, it is circular, isn't it? I think we and I think anyone that's there writing so that they don't enjoy needs to do something else. Because gosh, as you said, it's a it can be insular and it can be quite quite a lonely experience writing. And if you're not enjoying doing it, gosh, find a different way to torture yourself, really.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:25

I want to be a writer versus I want to sell crypto. I mean, there's no contest. I mean, what's the ROI, the raw return on investment, if you're really looking at the money with time and energy spent compared to compared to results financially? Even if you're really successful, an average hedge fund manager makes way more than Andy Weir on a good day.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:56

Right? And he's the pinnacle of our craft. And he's smoked out by even just the mediocre Wall Street player.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:06

Absolutely. Yeah, it's these easier ways to make money. I think that's it. Do what you enjoy. I think that's the do what you enjoy is the the answer for everything, I think.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:15

And they have the Millennium Prizes by the Clay Institute, like uh prove or disprove the Riemann hypothesis, these like these like big topics in mathematics and and even engineering, and you get a million bucks if you can do it. And it's it's a little bit analogous to that. That's a really hard way to make a million dollars.

SPEAKER_04 1:09:40

Easier approaches easier approaches.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:42

Way way easier. Speaking of moves and opportunities, what's what's next for you? How do you go about doing what you're doing? You're pretty much full-time, right?

SPEAKER_02 1:09:52

Full-time, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:54

That's an amazing goal. I've got uh just about anyone, anyone listening, anyone listening and viewing to this podcast, if you're a writer or think about being a writer, you're like Mallory, you're the man. If you're able to make a living writing, it's like dream come true, right?

SPEAKER_05 1:10:14

Yeah, no, it's um I've I mean really, really lucky, and um I think everything fell together at just uh just the just the right moment because I was uh I was pretty burnt out with what I was what I was doing before. And and then just everything just sort of fell together and it's it's snowballed on in a in a really in a really good way. Um I've got I've got several series that are that are ongoing. I've I've co-written a few, which has been awesome. If you've never co-written, that's a fun way to work out where you know what you're doing when you've got one person sending you a chapter and go, okay, I'll I'll work out how I use that, that's fine. Um, but yes, I've got that going on. I've got a couple of other series that I've just I've just signed to write that will be coming out next year. Um and I think the nature of, and again, it's it's a very genre-specific thing, is that Lit RPG is is a voracious audience and they want things now. And I think I've been very fortunate with my publishers that have that have really embraced that idea of having editors there and having um the the artists there and they're ready to go when something's ready and you don't have this out year-long, two-year-long lag before a book comes out because the audience won't wait. And I think uh it's been it's a really invigorating um thing to do, but uh it is uh it is a full-time job, and uh I think what everybody I think sometimes thinks that that writing full-time is is is is very different from the the need to be doing 10 hours a day sat at your desk making sure that you get your your your words out and you can't stop until you do. Um and I think that's been a my the one publisher at Legion said to me that you've just got to think of it as another nine to five, and just like you wouldn't let that nine to five go because you didn't feel like it that day, writing's like that as well, in that you know you've got deadlines and nine to five is is is what you're doing, and that's hard with a creative thing because sometimes you don't feel creative. Um, but that's uh it's been really good. I think, yeah, I'm coming up to to year year four, I think I'm just about to just about to go into now.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:12

Um congratulations, that that is quite quite an account, especially in this day and age to be able to have a career as a writer. And how does it shake out? Hemingway used to wake up at uh five in the morning, apparently.

SPEAKER_05 1:12:26

Drink less than Hemingway, I think it's important to stress, but yeah, five in the morning getting up is uh five five in the morning, yeah. I I do tend to get up at five because um it's been really nice. It's changed a sort of family dynamic because I'd always been at work and I'd never have uh never have taken the lad to school and never have picked him up. But now we've we've moved things around and I take him to school, which is great. Gets me to actually do some exercise during the day because I walk in there um and then I'm back at at and then I lock in till it's it's time to come and get go and get him. Um but it has been, yeah. I think it's um as a as an approach, I think you've you've just got to be aware that you can't have days, and particularly kind of several days, where you go, I'm gonna do something else. Um, because the words don't go anywhere, they they need to still be produced.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:11

I saw Margaret Atwood give a talk. She is the hands handmaid's tale writer, other other great stuff too, and she kept saying the same thing over and over again. It was about our talk, and she must have brought it up a dozen times, which is deadlines. Like writing to deadline is the writer's way.

unknown 1:13:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:35

And you're you seem to be reiterating that that you you've got you gotta pump it out.

SPEAKER_05 1:13:40

Yeah, you can't. I I think particularly, I mean, I think Royal Road told me that very early on was that if you don't have something for someone on the on the schedule you set, so I started off a chapter a day, you quickly learn now Monday, Wednesday, Friday is the only way to stay same, particularly as I was working at the time. But as soon as you break that contract with an all with a reader that says, I'm going to produce a new chapter for you Monday, Wednesday, they go somewhere else. And I think that discipline of like, no matter how you're not feeling it, I need to have something, and it can't just be crap because they they'll tell you that you can't just fire crap at them, they're your audience. And I think that that was quite good discipline very, very early on, and I think that's that stuck with me, really, is knowing that you've got to get it done to time because if you don't, the audience will go elsewhere. And actually, that should be something you try to be proud of, is that you are a reliable author and that you're an author that people will say, Well, actually, he will he will produce when he when he said he would. And I think if you're trying to work in as a professional in an industry as well, you can't have publishers going, Well, you told me I'd have this book three weeks ago, where is it? You go, I haven't even started it yet. Sorry about that. Um, you've you've got to be able to say, Well, I'll have it to you on this deadline, and it needs to be good, it can't just be half-assed in order to get it there on time. Um, but yeah, and I think being a bit older, I mean I'll an older person coming to it starting, you sort of know that, don't you? You know that you have responsibilities.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:06

Yeah, speaking speaking of the Gen Z mail.

SPEAKER_05 1:15:10

Yeah, it's nice to be able to pay the mortgage at the end of the month, and therefore, yeah, just having the day off watching the cricket, probably gonna it probably gonna cause it.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:17

Not an effective use of time. And what about the marketing? So I've had publishers on the podcast too, like Mr. Holmes of Canon, and and I've had Sam, of course, too, who doubles up as an editor, he does PR for Recontour. So all this is is is going on, and what they all say is that authors don't just write, but they market and they self-promote. You're a career writer, you're cranking it out, you're paying the mortgage. Uh, how does marketing factor into your responsibilities and how you delineate your time and effort?

SPEAKER_05 1:15:59

Well, I think it's it's what we've talked about so far, isn't it? It's all that community of uh of your audience. And I think by being present within within Royal Road, within being with these very, very vibrant um Reddit and Discord communities for Polit RPG. Um, there's lots of discussion-based things on X, particularly for Rack and Tur. I think Rack and Tur is the only thing I publish where uh there is actually discussion around it, most of the other things sort of vanish into the into the silence. I think being present within the the audience matters, and I think that comes down to what we've talked before about being human and being visibly human. Um I just and it's helpful for the writing. Um I think because you're you're trying to uh get a sense that uh what you're doing is worth them reading, you need to demonstrate that it is, and you can't just do that by throwing out uh my books out next month out there and hoping that that that that'll do it. Uh but I know for for people that that's the thing that's most inhibitive about trying to be a writer is uh it's not just a case now. Even if you're picked up by a by a big five publisher, the expectation is going to be you are gonna you are gonna sell this as hard as any indie who's just stuck his own thing on on Kindle Kindle Select. Um and that's that's the nature of the beast. If you you aren't prepared to chat about it and sell it, why why would anybody how would anyone find it to a starting place with all this other stuff? So you've got to make it easy to find, and and one of the easiest ways to make it to find is to be talking about it and not just buy it. It's it's talking about the issues around it.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:38

It's the Royal Road zeitgeist that you've carried through into the actual publishing world, too. You're interacting dynamically and you're talking to fans.

SPEAKER_05 1:17:49

Yeah, and that's why I haven't haven't changed changed the names. That's where I came through from Royal Road, really. And I think it's helpful to remember that you do it because there was an audience that bothered. And if there ain't an audience, then you're you're doing the wrong thing, really. Well, lit our litrpg con is in Denver. Um I'm not going, I'm um uh unfortunately, that's next month, and I know it's sold out and it's huge. But I think um I think if anybody finds their I think it is it is definitely Denver, um, but I think if anybody has any interest in it at all, that's gonna be huge. I think literally every major publisher, every major writer, every major audiobook person in the genre is gonna be at LitRPGCon, which is which is gonna be huge. And I think when I talk about it, it's a massively exploding genre. I think that's the best example of it, is it it will have gone from being an online, slightly subversive subculture on on Reddit to being something that fills out a convention hall and has has proper representation from people that have got books in bookshops. And I think that's been one of the biggest transformations in the in the genre has been the movement from it being kindle-only to now being uh seen in in bookshops and demonstrating how you can go from being a web serial into being a viable, proper, hardback novel is uh is is one that I think a lot of different genres and a lot of different writers could look at and say that's a pretty decent approach, really.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:31

My next question, and I think a fitting way to cap it would be talking about this cross-genre tendency too. So you got LitRPG as its own thing, it has its own swim lanes and boundaries. It's a book, it's prose, it's words on a page. Back in the day when the PC first came out, and I'm advertising my tender youthfulness here. I had an Apple IIe computer, and I even programmed on it in Pascal. And what was hot back then was interactive fiction. Yeah, and it was popularized by the Infocom company. There were a few people doing this, but Infocom was the most noteworthy. It started out with Zork, which was uh a fantasy adventure game, and it was interactive in the sense where there were words on the screen, so memory and processor capacity didn't really enable graphics. So you'd have the blinking CRT monitor with the green, right? And you would type and it would describe a scene. You're standing in front of a boarded white house. There is a mailbox here, and then you type into the blinking cursor, open the mailbox, and you hit return, and then it would dynamically go through the branching and find an appropriate response. And it came on a I think a 28k floppy disk or something, right? So uh they didn't have much memory either, and uh, and it would respond. This is what the leaflet says. You encounter a dragon, and then you're interacting with the dragon. So interactive fiction was dynamic. My mind was blown. I thought that that was just I collected all the games, I solved all of them, I was obsessed by Infocom Interactive Fiction because it blended these worlds together. I was a bibliophile, I read everything. I used to like to write way back then too, and I love technology. And I thought that this mashup was unbelievable. Now, fast forward, and we've been denigrating AI for legit reasons, but there's an unprecedented opportunity to take content that you and I swim in and change it, morph it, repurpose it in ways never really thought immediate and possible. Do you see tendencies? So let's be specific about lit RPG for a second. You've got video games, and then you've got lit RPG that in a sense evolved from digital back into prose, and even hard copy, like holding a book. And I'm just wondering if there could be a whiplash effect back from lit RPG to not cross-genre stuff necessarily like mystery and even romance RPG. But um, but but back into it into media. And and if you've thought about it, have you been have people reached out to you to turn some of your stories into graphic novels, into movies, everyone dreams of the Netflix mini-series erupting from your work.

SPEAKER_05 1:22:56

I mean, I I'm not I'm not big enough or successful enough, but if you look at um uh Matt Dinnerman with um Dungeon Crawler Corral, you've now got the graphic novels, you've got the RPG tabletop versions of the work that are there, you've got the Netflix that's that that's coming down. And I think that's I mean, uh we often I think in in the genre talk about um that he is the the gold standard really for what could be possible if uh it works with him because I think the desire to see things in cross media ways uh in the in the in the way you outline is is there because you've got a you've got a fiction style that is embedded within being multimedia. The whole idea of it is that it's something that people are familiar with playing themselves, and and and uh all of the jokes and all of the the meta references that are there make it the perfect multimedia text. So I think that's it's one of those things that in several years, I think there are several big writers within the genre that would be thinking that that is something that uh that could be then the norm, really, is that you will see the the interactive version of he who fights with monsters, you'll see the uh the the the choose your own adventure versions of the um it's a brilliant term uh uh uh series called Disco Down. And they've just opened a competition for for people to write short stories within that universe. And I think that is such a fantastic the the nature of that that that that story is that it's almost an infinite, it's almost like backrooms, really, but there's an infinite number of these rooms that exist where levels happen, and an author just opening it up to the audience and saying, write me write me a story setting my world on and here and he he he put this huge level of of advice and help for people. And I'll pick the best 10 and then we'll publish it. But that's mind-blowing as an idea of just that crossover between your audience and the genre and everything where people can play within your world and then give it to you, and you go, okay, let's let's pick the best 10 and and off we go. I think that's what that's lovely, and I think that's what I think that's like the gold standard stuff, really, isn't it?

SPEAKER_00 1:25:06

I think and a guy like you could be thrilled by this, which is uh you've had you you've had all this collaboration from from Inception, where you've got your fan base and they're commenting and they're reading and they've got expectations and they want a piece of your action. And then and then they reward you by reading and buying, and you're getting that feedback, and you're becoming a better writer to suit their needs and your own. But there's uh there's a gap, which is here's my content, and then they they read it, they absorb it. But what digital has done is it's shattered that prosemium arch between reader and writer in ways just like you described, which is dynamic, interactive, role-playing fiction. And that's wide open, I think. And and a creative guy like you, with all your ideas and your willingness to reach out there and collaborate, to me, this is like the the undiscovered country, still, of where a lot of this could go, which is blending the dynamic, interactive, real-time multimedia experience of a video game with the rigor and creativity and zeitgeist of a novel.

unknown 1:26:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:26:26

And like, I don't think it's I don't think it's even been touched yet in ways that could be very, very interesting.

SPEAKER_05 1:26:34

Yeah. And I think we we increasingly have the tools to enable us to do things like that, don't we? Which is would have been beyond us even two, three years ago.

SPEAKER_00 1:26:44

So I nominate you.

SPEAKER_01 1:26:47

I have deadlines. I have deadlines.

SPEAKER_00 1:26:49

It's like you're you're too busy for this shit right now. That's great. I want to be mindful of your time, and I appreciate you making time.

SPEAKER_04 1:26:58

Yeah, it's been awesome. I've really enjoyed really enjoyed talking to you.

SPEAKER_00 1:27:01

Wonderful talking, talking to you, and I think we've come in a sense full circle. The adolescent or the young male who can use use some education and some inspiration from reading fiction.

unknown 1:27:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:27:14

And then the role of Lyd RPG and your career as a writer, bringing this stuff to life, you know, make making it real and making it happen. It's very inspirational for me too. As a as a writer who falls into the guy in a basement category where uh where it is inspirational to see someone like yourself. I mean, I throw my shit out there, but I have this I don't care attitude. And uh you actually pay attention and reciprocate, and they reward you with a with a career in writing. So very easy.

SPEAKER_04 1:27:49

I've been very, very, very fortunate and very lucky.

SPEAKER_00 1:27:52

Yeah, it's terrific. Ladies and gentlemen, Mallory, thank you for joining us. Inc for the algorithm, the writer's pod, like see, I can't even do shit like that. Like, comment, share. If I if I would cut this podcast, I'd be I'd have little clips of us in the beginning instead. I just I roll it out there. But I think uh this is terrific. I know a lot of people love hearing direct from you. Yeah, and uh and I sincerely appreciate it and appreciate all the great great stuff that you throw out there into the world and the way you do it too is deeply inspirational. Thank you so much, and I'd love to follow up in six months, a year, see how you're doing, absolutely. And who knows, you're you've got the first interactive black mirror style lid RPG on Netflix.

SPEAKER_04 1:28:43

That would be nice, would it?

SPEAKER_00 1:28:45

Why not, right? Take care, sir.

SPEAKER_02 1:28:49

Thank you very much.