<a aria-current="page" href="/" class="router-link-active router-link-exact-active"> We Make Books Podcast

Episode Transcript (by TK @_torkz)

[Upbeat Ukulele Intro Music]
Rekka: This is We Make Books, a podcast about writing publishing and everything in between. Rekka is a published Science Fiction and Fantasy author, and Kaelyn is a professional genre fiction editor. Together, they'll tackle the things you never knew you never knew about getting a book from concept to finished product, with explanations, examples, and a lot of laughter. Get your moleskin notebook ready. It's time for We Make Books.

Kaelyn: My sister just finished reading the Grisha trilogy. And she was, of course, more of a fan of the Six of Crows after reading that. But one of the things she messaged me- she was like “yeah, the ending was kind of whatever, but it is very clear that this person was reading Harry Potter when they wrote this.”

R: [laughs]

K: And I said “Yeah, that definitely comes through.” She gave me this whole list of like, book two is basically just The Order of the Phoenix, and the end battle with all of the Grisha and the stand downs, all this stuff, and I was like “Yeah, I guess you’re right.” To be honest with you, I kinda limped through the end of that book, I wasn’t thinking about that too much. But anyways, it got me thinking about influences in writing and how writers are influenced and how in some cases that’s something that we’re like “Yes! You can tell that this writer was influenced by such-and-such, and they weave it so beautifully into their story.” And sometimes you get my sister calling me to complain about how she basically just read Harry Potter with Russian witches.

R: So was your sister accusing the author in any way of plagiarism?

K [overlapping]: Not plagiarism.

R [overlapping]: As a reader I’m curious, like how the reader perceives it when it’s that clear when someone’s been influenced.

K: I should’ve asked her before we started recording this - and this is something we’ll get to in there - I couldn’t tell if my sister was accusing the author of laziness or unoriginality.

R: Okay.

K: That’s one of the things I wanted to talk about today as we’re talking about influence. What is influence, how are writers influenced? How’s the best way to leverage and utilize that influence? And when does influence cross into the realm of the negative? When is it no longer praise worthy? When is it, for instance, lazy, contrived, unoriginal, or, in worst case scenario, bordering into plagiarism?

R: Yeah, because that’s a tricky thing - if we always wrote a completely original story, you wouldn’t have something like Joseph Campbell’s The Hero's Journey. Because we wouldn’t have a set format that a story would take. So when somebody accuses a fantasy book of being “Star Wars with elves,” well, Star Wars was a Greek epic in space.

K: Oh, I would’ve called it a Western.

R: Okay fine. [overlapping] I mean, people have called it a Western.

K: [overlapping] I mean, both work. Both work. [laughs]

R: Yeah, but I’m just saying, The Hero’s Journey, Joseph Campbell is, he’s studying the ancient literature, so that’s why I decided to say Greek. But if we could always write something that was completely original, there would be no way to study literature with comparisons and contrasts. There are always going to be parallels between stories written in a similar culture by people who are writing in a similar society. Like, a hundred years apart, you would not necessarily detect the influence of Harry Potter in the Grishaverse. But they’re not written a hundred years apart - it was maybe a decade, probably not.

K: I’d be curious to go back and try to time out when these books were being written, and when that coincides with the release of the latter half of the Harry Potter books. But anyways, real quick, I’m big into definitions, so let’s talk about definitions. Influence is the capacity of something - a person, a situation, a circumstance - to have an effect on another person, on the development of the situation, on the behavior of someone or something. Or, in some cases, even the effect itself. You’ll notice there that influence is kind of framed as both proactive and reactive. You can influence something, or you can be influenced. We’re talking today about being influenced.

R: And we’re not talking about Instagram.

K: [laughs] Oh, God. You know what’s funny? I went through this whole thing and I didn’t even think about the concept of influencers, and now I’m depressed.

R: Because you didn’t or because now you are?

K: [laughs] Because now I am.

R: Okay. I’m sorry. I take it back, I didn’t say anything.

K: [laughs] So, writers don’t write in a void. It’s sort of a reverse Heisenberg principle, which is “whatever you study will also change.” Whatever you read changes you, or whatever you consume changes you. So, writers don’t write in a void. If you took a baby and raised them in a box with no interaction with the outside world whatsoever, well, to be honest I’m not sure they’d be capable of putting together an interesting story because they’ve had no influence.

R: You know what’s funny, that’s why I don’t have kids. Because I thought about this kind of thing frequently in high school, like “what would happen if you raised a child in a padded room? And you never interacted with them, and they never saw another human?” So you’re welcome, world, that I have not raised any children. Those children are welcome because I did not abuse them in such a manner.

K: [laughs]

R: But it’s good to hear that someone else has had these thoughts. Although, Kaelyn and I did originally bond over the fact that we’re terrified of the idea of raising children.

K: Pregnancy is just -

R: And pregnancy. It’s not for everybody. I recognize that for some people it’s a beautiful process, but for Kaelyn and for me, it is body horror.

K: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, there’s an entire nother skeleton in your skeleton. [laughs]

R: Yes. And it’s growing. [overlapping] It’s getting larger.

K [overlapping]: It keeps getting bigger.

R: And if you’ve never seen an MRI of a baby’s skull, there’s a lot of teeth in there.

K: Yeah, also they’re squishy.

R: Well, the MRI doesn’t necessarily show that. It just shows all those chompers, waiting. Waiting.

K: Yeah. There’s a lot of extra teeth in there.

R: Okay. [laughs] Where were we going?

K [overlapping]: So for our writing-

R [overlapping]: A child raised in a padded cell would probably write a different kind of story than somebody who’s been exposed to Harry Potter.

K: Yeah, and if you take out every third word, it’s their plan to destroy the world with their laser beams.

R: This reminds me of the book The Artist’s Way. I think it’s a month-long program designed to improve your creativity and I think maybe even to come up with… it’s like NaNoWriMo but it’s very classist and elitist.

K: [laughs]

R: But the first thing it asks you to do is swear off all media for the month.

K: Okay.

R: And I put the book down right there.

K: [laughs]

R: Because I was like, that is literally impossible. I was in art school at the time, so I could not promise that I wasn’t going to have to look at media. And also, this was written in 1992, before anybody was logging onto the internet daily.

K: Yeah, it was much easier to walk away from media for a month.

R: And I was trying to read it, I think, in 1999 or 2000, and it was even easier, at that point, to walk away from media than it would be now.

K: Yep.

R: But, yes, it’s called The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity by Julia Cameron. And I imagine that Julia Cameron has a very nice life and is able to unplug from media whenever it is convenient for her to do so.

K: Well, in 1992 that meant “turn off the TV.”

R: Right, it meant “don’t pick up a newspaper” or, you know.

K: Yeah.

R: In 2016 they re-released a 25th anniversary edition, and I can’t imagine they did much to it, but it really probably needed a lot of re-examining to -

K: Yeah. It’s -

R: - to even be relevant in 2016, I can’t even imagine.

K: Now, was the purpose of this to do a detox of influence from your life?

R: Yes. That is exactly what it was, to avoid influence for the month and find out what you write, not what the world around you influences you to write. But I think in her case, she was treating world influence and media and current events as a negative.

K: Mhm.

R: And I would argue that if you are responding to the world around you, then the politics of your creativity is going to be more relevant and more well-informed. And I think that’s a good thing.

K: Well, yeah. And this is something that we can certainly talk about with influence - current influence versus longevity. You’ll see a lot of writers that go out of their way to not incorporate things that might later be considered an anachronism in their writing, so that they’re not influenced by that.

R: Mhm.

K: So that’s another good example of influence. So, let’s get the elephant in the room out of the way here: influence is not copying. As we were talking about, writers don’t write in a void. You’re absorbing everything that you interact with and consume every day, and, whether you know it or not, it’s influencing and incorporating itself into even your way of thought.

R: You hear that? So if you were following an Instagram influencer, do not copy everything they do.

K: [laughs] Yes. Please don’t. But, again, it’s the reverse Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Whatever you’re consuming changes you. There are entire PhD programs dedicated to studying and understanding the influence that certain parts of literature have had on larger parts of literature. Influence is not a bad thing. In many ways, it’s a scholarly pursuit. Go to any Wikipedia page for any sort of well-known novel, and I guarantee you there's going to be a section in there that says “Influence.”

R: Oh yeah, yeah.

K: And it’s going to be a couple paragraphs talking about the history of the genre, or the subject material leading up to this. Influence is, apart from being an important part of writing, an academic pursuit. So all of that said, we are talking about influence in a very positive way here. We’re saying it’s great to read things, and to consume and internalize them so that this can help enrich your writing. Something that you really enjoyed, something you thought was maybe unique, or something that you were like, “Oh, what if I applied that to a character that I already have?” That’s a good thing. I think it enriches your writing, I think it shows layers and growth, etcetera.

K: That said, sometimes influence goes the opposite way. [laughs] Sometimes you’ve read something and you’re like, “this is terrible,” or “this was such a ridiculous ending,” or “I hated that this happened.” And that might compel you to go through your manuscript and scrub absolutely everything having to do with that. The whole point is that whether you mean to or not, you are going to be influenced by external components in your writing. You could never read anything else, and you will still be influenced by things in the world just by existing in it. But we are talking more about influences in writing here, so we’ll stick with that.

R: And we assume that you are being influenced by books because, as we say, if you want to be a writer you need to also be a reader. So we’re telling you, go read widely in your genre, and part of that is that we expect you to absorb some of those elements and some of those styles. On a conscious level, we want you to look at the covers, we want you to look at the themes and the tropes and everything like that, but we also expect that on a subconscious level that’s going to influence you and hopefully make you a better writer within your genre.

K: And if you read a lot within your genre, you will start to notice trails of influence yourself. If you read a lot of - especially maybe a really niche kind of fantasy or science fiction genre, you’re going to be able to chronologically put some things in order, like “Oh yes, I can see that book A came out at this time, and then three years later this book came out, and there are certainly elements from book A that I can see coming through in book B even though they were written by different authors.”

K: So, I was telling Rekka before we started recording–I went down a little bit of a rabbit hole with this, because for reasons unbeknownst to me and possibly the influence of vampiric elements, I, for whatever reason, picked up my copy of Dracula off the shelf and I’ve just been flipping through random parts. And then we were talking about doing this, and I was like, vampires are a really really good example of influence through literature. They’re something that has always been around - the Mayans actually had a god that was basically a vampire, even though they didn’t acknowledge that, bat wings and all. And there’s something that–I think you’d be hard pressed to find a significant culture of any sort of longevity from history that didn’t have some sort of mythological being that displayed vampire-like qualities.

K: In the late 1700s, early 1800s, though, there was the vampire craze in western Europe. There were a lot of short stories and things written about vampires, even though they’ve been codified as part of the mythos for a long time. But even then, they were sort of holding up the folklore and traditions of vampires–they were reanimated corpses, they were bloodsuckers that came out at night to drain people of their very lifeforce. In some cases, actively rotting bodies, hunched back and demonic looking, claw-fingered and fangs and scary eyes. A lot of this was the traditional folklore. Then we start getting into sexy vampires. [laughs]

R: [laughs] I was just going to say.

K: [laughs] And there were a couple specific novels that did this. In 1819, John Polidori published a short story called The Vampyre, and this was the first one where the vampire was more of a character rather than just a mindless bloodsucking dead creature.

R: Right. This was a vampire worthy of Bela Lugosi’s eyes.

K: Oh, no one’s worthy of Bela Lugosi’s eyes. [laughs]

R: You know what I’m saying.

K: I know, I’m teasing. So, it was very popular. So then, a lot of vampire short stories and short novels were coming out where the vampires were getting a little more sophisticated, and all of these were drawing influence from Polidori’s short story. It was a very successful short story. So then, in 1872, an Irish author named Joseph Sheridan [with a mock-French accent] Le Fanu - I’m assuming it’s French which is why I did that accent - published Carmilla, which was a fantastic novel. And this is, I would say, probably a turning point where vampires are unabashedly being associated with a sexual element at this point. It has a not-very-subtle vampiric lesbian... stalking, I guess, going on through this book. It’s fantastic, it’s not that long. If you ever get a chance to read it, it’s great.

K: And then of course, a couple decades later in 1897, we come to Bram Stoker’s Dracula. I should, by the way, say that Bram Stoker and Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu were both Irish. Ireland had a shockingly strong folklore of vampires. In some cases they were fae, which is a whole different category of supernatural elements in Ireland, and in some cases they were just reanimated corpses. Anyways, then we get Bram Stoker, who of course gives us Dracula. And this is considered the preeminent vampire guideline bible, if you will. I think when most of us - granted, Rekka and I are older millennials, but -

R: [laughs] How dare you?

K: I think the first vampire we heard of was Dracula.

R: Mhm.

K: I actually remember, growing up, that there was a kid in my neighborhood who just thought vampires were called Draculas.

R: Yeah. I think that was probably a… Not that I thought Dracula was a noun, but I never expected Dracula to look the same way twice.

K: Yeah. Yeah, Dracula was just like - Dracula, vampire. They were interchangeable.

R: Mhm.

K: And that’s how synonymous this became. Now, look at all the stuff that lead up to this in order for us to get the seminal vampire novel of the time. Stoker was absolutely influenced by all these novels that came before. Something else that’s really interesting that Stoker was influenced by is the sexual component of vampires in this. Like I said, that came through hard and strong. Well, maybe I should say most popularly with Carmilla. Here’s something else really interesting about Stoker: he was probably gay. It’s difficult and inappropriate to go back and retroactively categorize people these ways, but there’s a lot of very strong… I’m trying not to say “homoerotic,” I’m trying to say… There’s a lot of very -

R: Queerotic? [laughs]

K: Yeah, there’s a-

R: There’s not a queer person in the universe that will argue this point with you.

K: Yeah.

R: I think the LGBTQIA+ are very, very ready to claim vampirism.

K: [laughs] Absolutely. And that’s a great part of the influence of this. Some of Stoker’s best friends were Oscar Wilde and Walt Whitman. Actually, I believe Stoker either started writing or finished writing Dracula right after Oscar Wilde was imprisoned, and they were exchanging letters while he was in prison.

R: Mhm.

K: You have to keep in mind, this was the mid-Victorian period, there’s very repressed sexuality, but there was also this burgeoning underground masculine sexual component to it, where everyone -

R: See people, this is what happens when you don’t let people reveal their ankles.

K: Yes. Yes, exactly. [laughs] So, one of the things through Dracula is this secretiveness, this sense of penetration. Not only the fangs in your throat, but a lot of them get into your head and screw with you that way. This was not something we saw in previous iterations of vampires, who were gross, for lack of a better term. [laughs]

R: [laughs] Yeah.

K: So, this influence comes through in a lot of different ways. And as I’m talking more about Dracula I can say like, “Okay, well there’s a lot of very… what we would now consider queer sexual elements that we see in Dracula, coming through with the relationship between Dracula and Johnathan Harker and Dracula and Mina.” But there’s also the influence of other writers who were starting to make vampires actually people, rather than Nosferatu-style monsters.

R: Right.

K: Dracula, I would argue, then in turn really helped influence the next generation of common horror. At that point we’re getting into H.P. Lovecraft and existential horror. Lovecraft, who, by the way, wasn’t quite a contemporary of Stoker’s, but was very aware and actually wrote some reviews of his writing. He didn’t really like a lot of it. [laughs] I would argue that that was probably part of what influenced Lovecraft: it was a hard turn from these very sterile, white-marble, gothic horror novels to a lot of raw, and ocean, and dark mold, steam spaces.

R: You can literally write the sentence “I can’t describe this.” and people are like “Woo, that is scary.”

K: Yeah exactly. So much of Lovecraft is like, “it’s too horrible to describe!” but it’s like “Yeah, but can you tell me anyway?” [laughs]

R: You mentioned earlier that an influence can be “I don’t want to do this.”

K: Yes.

R: So, here we are. This is Lovecraft saying “Well, Stoker wasn’t racist enough for me, so I’m gonna write my own thing.”

K: [laughs] Oh, God, Lovecraft. It’s so hard to read some of that stuff. [sighs] Psychologists would be better at trying to figure out Lovecraft’s influence than me, I’m certainly not going to. To say the man had issues is an understatement. He was more of a collection of neuroses formed into a human. Anyways, this is just something I was thinking of as a pretty-easy-to-track set of influences. We go from vampires being very loosely defined and having inconsistent characteristics based on what region the stories are being told in, to some stories published that codify certain rules about them, to their evolution from “Eww, it’s a rotting, blood-drinking corpse” to “Huh, maybe I’d like date that person.”

R: [laughs] Maybe I would like those lips on my bare neck!

K: Yes, exactly. Which is a pretty interesting leap that really did not take that long to get from point A to point B. But all of this was just building on influence and influence, after that.

R: Yeah, all you needed was for one author to pick it up and go, “What if vampires, but sexy?”

K: [laughs] Yeah. You know what’s funny, we have this sort of modern-day depiction of Dracula as a very suave, debonair… what’s the word I’m looking for? High-society type person.

R: Sophisticated.

K: Sophisticated, yeah. In the novel, he is those things a little bit, but he is very off-putting and he is... weird to look at, I guess I should say.

R: Yeah, there’s that first scene where Johnathan is eating in front of him, and you definitely get a vibe that this dude is not right.

K: Like, he’s talking about his hairy ears. [laughs]

R: [laughs] Yeah.

K: His weird skin, he looks ill, as if when he’s making his way to the castle all of the peasantry crying and pressing crucifixes into his hands wasn’t red-flag enough for him.

R: No, no, no. It’s just a quaint little village, this is the thing they do. There is the aspect of vampirism having the power of glamour, and I think this is probably the most effective display of it. The way that he’s describing Dracula, there’s nothing attractive about this man, and yet.

K: He’s very drawn to him.

R: Mhm.

K: And he wants to help him.

R: As is Mina. [laughs]

K: And Lucy, and all of them. So yeah, vampires. Great example of influence in literature over the course of a relatively short time, shaping something that we now consider to be commonplace.

R: Mhm.

K: We’ve even narrowed it down farther. One of my favorite things about Dracula is, there’s nothing that necessarily says he can’t go in the sun in that book.

R: Right, right. [laughs]

K: It’s just that he has no powers after noon, I think, or he loses his powers at sunrise. So he can be outside, but he’s just a regular guy at that point.

R: Mhm.

K: So, obviously things continued to change and evolve there, the “no going out during the day” is held over from the much older vampire myths. Anyways. So, all of that said, how do we see influences in writing? When can we pick these out? One of the obvious is the story itself, the plot. Maybe some story arcs.

R: I would argue that people tend to pick it up faster when it’s a similar setting. When it’s the worldbuilding, I think people notice it more.

K: Okay.

R: And I think, again, plot arcs and character arcs are things that we do have to recycle.

K: Absolutely. I think it’s rare these days to see completely original, never-before-imagined setting. In terms of world-building, both the world itself, and in my notes here I put “world systems.” Anything from the way magic functions, or government functions, or society functions. There’s only so many ways you can organize people, essentially. [laughs] So there may have been something that you came across and you’re like “Oh, that’s interesting. What if I did this instead?” The characters- anything from the archetypes and tropes of characters to their storylines and their redemption arcs, or even just the relationships, how they interact with each other. How the characters are broken out either into family groups or groups of friends or hierarchies within that. I think we see that a lot. With plot, we can kind of go back to what I said at the beginning of the episode: sometimes there are things in there where it’s like, “this is clearly Order of the Phoenix.”

R: Mhm.

K: [laughs] We’re just seeing it presented a different way.

R: And again, an agent loves this, because you can say “this is my list of story comps.” And if they’re successful books, the agent can use that to sell the story and then the publisher can use it to sell the book.

K: Mhm.

R: So even though sometimes it sounds like we are poo-pooing derivative work, if it comes across as fresh, nobody’s going to poo-poo that you have a great list of comps to start with.

K: Definitely, yeah.

R: And I would like to note that that is the first time we have said “poo-poo” on this podcast. I feel like that should be marked.

K: That definitely needs to be denoted for posterity.

R: And now it’s been said three times.

K: [laughs] Then there’s two other areas of influence I’d like to talk about that are a little harder to quantify. One is style. And this comes more to writing style, and how you’re presenting your story. For instance, being influenced by the way the author just writes in general, their style, I will harken back to one of our favorite examples here. If you’ve read Gideon the Ninth it is a very very unique writing style, not something I’ve ever come across before and I’m sure there are a lot of people who are currently in the process of attempting to imitate it; I don’t know how successful they’re going to be, but I bet they’re trying.

R: And then there are others who are influenced by it to say “Oh, I can let loose like that?”

K: Yeah. Exactly. Or, “I can try something completely different that I didn’t think anybody would be interested in, but if they’re willing to do this then maybe they would.” Point of view or viewpoint in the book - if you’ve read the second book in the Locked Tomb series, Harrow the Ninth, a lot of that is written second person. The Broken Earth series, large portions of that are in second person.

R: Well, the Broken Earth series, the amazing thing is it’s written in all three.

K: Yes, yeah.

R: So if you haven’t read that I can’t go any further, I do not wanna spoil that, even though it’s been out for years, the culmination of that book is so good that I refuse to ever spoil it. But go read it, if you haven’t read it, for sure. It’s a big one -

K: It’s a lot -

R: But it is so worth it. I listen to it on audio, and I can recommend that too.

K: Yeah. So both of those books have instances of strange, or -

R: Disorienting?

K: Disorienting’s an excellent word. I remember reading Harrow the Ninth and texting Rekka and going like “Is this like this the entire time?”

R: And my only response is “Did you get to the soup yet?”

K: [laughs] And it was a mentality shift, and once I just was like “Okay, I fixed my brain to a point that it can accept and read this now.” But another style quality is dialogue. How you incorporate and how you use dialogue in your writing is something that I think is very easily influenced by how other people do that. This can also start feeding into the character influence there as well, how the characters talk and interact with each other is very influenced by dialogue. So then the last kind of nebulous part that I’d like to talk about, and this is a little bit different but it is worth bringing up, is historical influence. There are a lot of books and stories that are nominal retellings of either one or a series of historical events. I’ll use Game of Thrones here as an example, and spoilers for anybody who hasn’t read or watched -

R: I don’t care if we spoil Game of Thrones. [laughs]

K: George R. R. Martin, well first the basis of a lot of this is the War of the Roses, which was the English Civil War. It was also called the Hundred Years’ War; it was just a long, bloody, drawn-out battle of constantly changing kings and powerful families trying to get their person on the throne of England.

R: And the interesting part is, it is a hundred years, so the people who started this have cast this war upon the generations to follow, and if that doesn’t tell you something about where George R. R. Martin is going to be forced to take the end of the books, I don’t know what will, because HBO managed to make the show take what, the war take five years or maybe ten years if that? Just the fact that it was ten seasons, right? Was it ten seasons or nine?

K: It was eight seasons.

R: Okay, so at most, because of the children aging on the show, it was a nine-year hundred-year war. So if George R. R. Martin is following intentionally the framework of the Hundred Years’ war, none of the characters that you’re rooting for are going to make it. Just in the nature of aging.

K [overlapping]: And there’s - you can go through and just read a brief history of the Hundred Years’ War, and you’ll be able to identify characters in there. Like Tyrion has some very clear Richard III vibes to him. But then there’s other historical events and groups of people that he took and pulled into this. The Lannisters are such a clear parallel of the Borgia family that it’s almost difficult to know that and read this and know what happened to the Borgias. The Red Wedding was based off of a famous event in Scotland where something very very similar happened to that. Some Scottish lords were invited to dinner by a Scottish lord with English leanings, and he killed all of them, to get in good with the English.

R: After serving them bread.

K: After serving them bread, exactly. But again, historical influence - the concept of guestright is very important in most cultures and especially in Scotland. So there’s so many examples of people taking strong influence from either actual historical events or folklore and mythological events, like the Trojan War and things like that, and incorporating it into their writing. There are a lot of writers who decide “I’m gonna do a modern interpretation of such-and-such,” because maybe - for instance the Trojan War, they’re very interested in classic Greek mythology and decide “Hey, that’s a great story to tell; I’m gonna set it in a different place but still tell the story.”

K: So that’s some elements of influence, and before we wrap up here, let’s address the thing we started to talk a little bit about but should definitely round out. When is influence just becoming copying, at a certain point? This is hard. Because it’s really about finesse and originality. It’s about taking something that you liked and putting your own spin on it, so to speak. If you’re just re-creating the same story and sticking your characters into it, you’re going to get called at best lazy, at worst a plagiarist.

R: Yeah, there are plenty of books out there - and I have one to include in the list - that are retellings of a classic story. The problem is when you don’t approach it as “how do I make this my story?”

K: Yes. I’m gonna use young adult genres here because it’s a little bit newer and easier to trace through this, and I’m not going to name books in this apart from the first series that I will name because that author is wildly successful. The Mortal Instruments trilogy - you could probably say series at this point, there’s so many books in that world at this point - by Cassandra Clare, is one of the early and premiere urban fantasy young adult novels. This was copied so many times. Some of the authors were a little more original with where they were setting it, some of them were a little more original with where they were putting the characters or who the characters were, but the magical teeenagers who are part of a secret society that protects humanity was everywhere. ‘Cause these books were a runaway success. They were very original; no one had really seen something like this before. The Mortal Instruments created so many tropes that I can’t and will not try to name them.

R: And I think it’s, part of that, somebody loves a book that they experienced so much that they want to hold onto that feeling forever, and one way to do that is to create something completely inspired by that same world. And this is where fanfic comes from, and fanfic is healthy, and it’s a great way to express feelings of “I don’t want to leave this book world.” But when you take it to a publisher and you say “This is going to sell really well because the other one that already did it sold really well,” as they say - don’t follow trends in publishing, because you’re five years behind.

K: Conversely, a lot of people were able to get things like this published because the market wasn’t inundated with this yet.

R: Right, you had to be among the first to imitate a successful book, which is why they say don’t follow the trends, because you won’t be among the first. There are so many people out there writing that there are easily 500 people ahead of you in the queue for the publisher slush pile.

K: Yeah and I wanna be clear, the first book of this entire - I’m not joking, I think there’s over 20 books within this world at this point - the first one came out in 2007. So yes, the Internet was very alive and well at that point; it was not what it is now. Writing communities on the Internet were not what they are now. But all of this is to say that there were people who just straight up copied this genre, this book in some way. Either in terms of setting, in terms of characters, in terms of the magical elements of this, they just straight up copied this and I gotta be honest with you, a lot of them were not terribly successful. [laughs] Some of them were, though, and some of them made some money off of this.

R: Well, for other readers who are not writers, when the same thing happens they come out of a book series and they have to wait for the next book, they want more.

K: Exactly, they were looking for more.

R: This is not unlike when the animation company puts out a very similar cheap animation to the latest Disney release. I worked at Blockbuster, and I saw this all the time. You’d have a big animated Disney release, and you’d have this tiny company out of who-knows-where that put together an animated copy, and they rely on parents and grandparents to grab the wrong one. This is not like trying to give the kids more of what they want, this is like “If we are gonna be next to this Disney movie on the shelf, someone will pick us up by accident and we will make money.”

K: Well I always remember because a lot of Disney’s classics, like the Disney renaissance movies, they were all like public domain stories. So they would just make that and they could get it out on VHS faster than Disney could -

R: Yeah, they were made direct to video.

K: Because Disney left it in - like everyone knew what the upcoming Disney movies were. So if you knew there was gonna be Aladdin, well, the story of Aladdin is public domain, you start making Aladdin right away.

[Brief interlude of car noises]

R: I literally believe that Mike’s apartment is built on an overpass.

K: No, just next to a road with a lot of people who drive like idiots.

R: Well that was like a garbage truck, but anyway.

K: That was a motorcycle.

R: That was a motorcycle?? It sounded like it had at least 16 wheels.

K: Yeah.

R: Alright, sorry, so Aladdin -

K: So everyone knew what movies Disney was making well in advance, and of course these would take years after they were announced to actually be finished and put in theatres. So if Disney says “we’re making Aladdin” -

R [overlapping]: Before it’s in theatres!

K: - well then, another small studio can also make Aladdin. The animation isn’t gonna be great but then Aladdin’s gonna be in the theatres and then a week later the imitation Aladdin are going to be on shelves, and grandparents are gonna go “Oh my grandchildren want to see -”

R: Or “They’ve been talking about this movie and here it is on VHS,” and they don’t know how theatre releases work and so they grab it and buy it, and they spend $18 or $15, seems like a really good deal on a Disney movie, and the animation studio makes their money back. So they do it again.

K: So don’t be that cheap animation studio. Don’t be the person that’s taking something that somebody put a lot of time, thought, and creativity into, and churning out the cheap, fast, easy-to-consume version of it.

R: Yeah and I don’t think, when it comes to writers - I mean I’m sure there are people out there who go “Okay this is the newest thing, I am going to behave like an algorithm and I am going to make another version of it and then release it, and I will make lots of bucks.” There are those writers that–they do that on purpose. So don’t be them. But I don’t think any of our audience are going to be them. And if you were thinking that that was a great way to make a successful book, let us correct you. But if you are inspired by Gideon the Ninth, or by Mortal Instruments, or anything like that - take the time to develop a story just like you would a completely inspired out of left field story, and take the time to put it together in a considerate and thoughtful and unique way, and then we approve. You get our approval. We’re not promising to buy the manuscript, but we are approving a heartfelt influenced work, not an imitation that is intended to ride the wave of success of someone else.

K: Exactly.

R: Now when we’re saying “copying,” are you talking about the publishing houses out there who literally lift the copy and try to sell it on Amazon, and just do it again and again and again as they get caught and cancelled?

K: [laughs] No, no. Copying has, I think the way I’m defining it, more to do with not adding any creativity or original elements of your own, just saying “I liked what this person did, I’m going to do it too.” And listen - it’s a fine line. One of the things that’s really interesting about plagiarism is it’s either very obvious - somebody had too many parts in a book, a novel, a poem, that are clearly just from another book - or, you’ve gotta go through a whole process of proving that somebody had access to something you were working on and directly lifted elements from that and put it into their book. Plagiarism is either very straightforward or very difficult.

R: And, with plagiarism, they have plagiarism checkers on the Internet; I think a lot of teachers appreciate that because they can’t read everything. So they can run an assignment from a student through a plagiarism checker, and that plagiarism checker can do its best with whatever it has access to in its database to catch -

K: Plagiarism checkers are very good now, by the way.

R: But we’re talking word-for-word plagiarism. Sometimes what we refer to in the publishing world as plagiarism is actually trademark infringement.

K: Yes.

R: And that is difficult because if you write a story with Harry Potter in it, but you change his name and all the words are your original words, how do we run a plagiarism checker against that?

K: Yes. So it’s like I said, either very easy or very difficult to prove plagiarism; there’s rarely a middle ground there.

R: Although there are books that have been caught lifting a paragraph or two, from different books. So like the entire thing is plagiarized, but it’s plagiarized from different sources.

K: Yeah. You see instances of plagiarism tend to show up more in academic and scientific publishing than in fiction and genre-writing. It definitely does happen, though.

R: Yup. Because, again, there are people out there who are confused about what is allowed and what is advisable in writing.

K: There are some really significant seminal works in American literature especially–I’m sure globally but I just happen to know the American ones–that are just plagiarized in certain places. And a lot of them were written in a time where it wasn’t as easy to check this, so we-

R: Find out much later, when it is easier, how much that was widespread.

K: Yup. Exactly.

R: There are nefarious people. I was referring, in my last statement, to the innocent, naive new writer, who just does not understand what is and isn’t acceptable. Or, they didn’t intend for it to go widespread, and they wrote a little thing for fun and end up finding out that they are not welcome and doors are being shut in their face because they crossed the line and it got noticed.

K: Yeah, exactly.

R: That’s the thing, a little baby writer learning about things the very hard way. It’s a shame. That would be someone that you would hope would find a mentor who would guide them in the right direction before that kind of thing gets shot in their face. But with a pen name you can be reborn, as long as you reiterate yourself in better forms than the previous mistakes that you made.

K: Yeah, and plagiarism should be very easy to avoid.

R: Mhm.

K: If you’re looking at somebody else’s work and saying “I wish this was mine, I’m going to make this mine,” don’t do that. You should never be copying text from somebody else. Everything should be written on your own.

R: Yeah, don’t go, “How did that person write it? I loved that so much.” Well yes, you did, but that’s not your voice. So write it yourself. And I would say that if you close a book and you go, “Oh, I’m so inspired to write,” and you sit down and you start writing right away, don’t publish that. [laughs]

K: Yeah.

R: There is a process to developing your own ideas even if it’s mostly internal and you never grab a notebook and work out the story itself. The process of coming up with your own ideas is not “I just read this, I’m going to go write because I’m inspired and I'm going to finish that book before I do anything else.” [laughs] That’s probably going to be a very derivative, if not plagiaristic, book. So don’t do that. I always recommend you sit with your ideas for a while before you sit down and write it.

K: Absolutely. I mean, that’s important in general.

R: Carry it around like a baby, pretend you’re some kind of marsupial and you have your twelve-day gestation period but you still carry that little joey around for a while before it’s ready to enter the world. That’s kind of the process that I recommend for a writer.

K: [laughs] So there you go. Be a marsupial.

R: Be a marsupial. The opossum tail has its own fingerprints which are unique to it, so there’s that. Grow a prehensile tail and commit crimes with it so that you can be tail-printed later. Alright, I don’t know where this story’s going.

K: I like it, I like it.

R: Yeah, I like it too, but it’s not a good way to wrap up an episode because all we can do is just stop. [laughs] So, if you have any questions about plagiarism or inspiration, or you just want to share your inspirations and influences, you can @ us on Twitter or Instagram @WMBcast. You can find us on patreon.com/WMBcast, and we will have some more marsupial facts for you in two weeks.

K: [laughs]

R: [laughs] Thanks everybody for listening, and I hope this was a helpful discussion. Kaelyn and I have to go sit at a desk and figure out- have we fulfilled the promises that we made to you when we started this podcast? Because we feel like we’ve just kind of been indulging ourselves in what topics we bring up, so if you feel like, “Hey, you said you were going to cover this, and you never covered that,” definitely tell us that too, because we want to go back to our mission statement and make sure that every once in a while we give you an episode that’s in line with that. So if you have input to that regard, please let us know. Otherwise, marsupial facts in two weeks! Thanks everyone!

Tuesday Oct 12, 2021

Episode 71 - Villains vs. Antagonists

Tuesday Oct 12, 2021

We hope you enjoy We Make Books!

Episode Transcript (by TK @_torkz)

We Make Books Ep. 71 Transcription

Kaelyn: Today we’re talking about villains and antagonists, and why they’re not actually the same thing, except in the cases that they are.

Rekka: Yes, exactly.

K [overlapping]: [laughing]

R: Perfect. I think that nails it. Sometimes they’re not the same thing, sometimes they are.

K: Yeah, and we’ll kinda get to this but, most villains are antagonists - most, not all. Not all antagonists are villains. And in fact you will likely, in any given story, have multiple antagonists, not all of whom are the villain. I went through and really dug up all of this stuff; shockingly, the word ‘hero’ is the one with the most definitions attached to it, and most different con -

R: We’re not talking about heroes today! We’re not!

K [overlapping]: Well we - but we have to, because we don’t get villains without heroes, and we don’t get antagonists without protagonists. Both villains and antagonists are defined and really only exist so that they can oppose or create conflict for the hero or protagonist. It kinda makes you wonder, if left to their own devices, maybe they’re just a mad scientist in a lab somewhere.

R: Maybe they’re the hero of their own story.

K: Yeah, and then suddenly someone shows up to fight them and now they’re the bad guy. [laughing]

R: “I was perfectly lawful and good until you showed up!”

K: Exactly, yes. The basic difference between a villain and an antagonist is that an antagonist is somebody who is there to contend or oppose the main character, typically the protagonist of the story. They’re there to create opposition. A villain is doing that, but they’re evil.

R: [laughs]

K [laughing]: What they’re doing is, the opposition that they’re creating is either causing harm, causing suffering, will destroy the human race. It could be something more on a micro scale, where they’ve kidnapped the daughter of the main character; maybe they’re trying to get their lemonade stand shut down so that they can sell lemonade that’s gonna turn people into lizard people. An antagonist at the surface is just somebody who’s doing things that’s causing problems for the protagonist. They don’t necessarily have to be evil.

R: They could just be a rival.

K: Yeah. Or any number of other things we’re gonna get to here, but. And in fact as I mentioned, as you’re reading a book, you’re frequently gonna come across antagonists that are not actually evil. There’s gonna be an antagonist who’s the villain who may be evil at some point, not always, but there will be people that are antagonists. I will use an example that we love to use: Gideon the Ninth. Harrow definitely serves as an antagonist to Gideon through the book. But Harrow is not evil.

R: Right.

K: That’s a great example of a villain operating without the audience knowing that the protagonist is coming into direct conflict with them because, we don’t really find out who the villain of the story is until the very very end of it. Then we can look back and go like ‘Ah yes I see all of these things now.’ The villain in the story, and spoilers if you haven’t read Gideon the Ninth, but also if you listen to this podcast and you still haven’t read it -

R: You obviously are never going to read it at this point.

K [laughing]: Yeah. The villain turns out to be Dulcinia, who is impersonating another character - and I stayed away, when writing notes for this and getting into the philosophical of what is evil and what is not - for these purposes we’re gonna call her motives evil, in that she is trying to hunt down and destroy a lot of different people for her own reasons. The conflict that we come into there actually causes the antagonist and the protagonist in this, Gideon and Harrow, to sort of team up to oppose the actual villain, which by the way is a very common writing trope. Antagonists are a necessary component to any story even if they are not the source of central conflict.

R: Yeah, because - and I know you’re gonna lean into this example - but in Harry Potter, Draco Malfoy feels like he is central to everything in Harry’s life, even though most of the time he just shows up to spew some awful thing he’s overheard his parents say and then go away again.

K: Draco is a good example of an antagonist who goes through a lot of different forms. Draco in the first few books of the series, he kinda shows up to make some comments and then leaves. He’s not really doing much. Even in the second book when he’s talking about the Chamber of Secrets and the heir of Slytherin and he actually is sitting around going ‘God I wish there was a way for me to help him’ - well, okay, that’s what minions do. Small antagonists.

R: Most of the time everything that Draco Malfoy does or says is just to reinforce the fact that he’s a jerk.

K: Yeah, Draco just sorta pops up to remind all of us that there’s Voldemort out there and his followers are terrible, because we don’t see or interact directly with Voldemort for a lot of these books, so Draco’s there to kind of remind us that he’s out there. But then we finally get to book six, when Draco is given a very specific task to do: kill Dumbledore. And those listening at home, ‘okay well doesn’t that make him a villain?’ Well - does it? Because first of all he doesn’t really actually wanna do this, but he has to. Second, he doesn’t do it. At the end, he’s not the one who carries this out. So again, everything’s relative here. Because to Harry, he is just this thing that Harry feels he needs to track down and find out what’s happening. You could go so far as to argue that Harry is creating his own conflict here, because if he just left Draco alone and went about his life trying to find these Horcruxes, things would’ve gone a lot smoother.

R: [laughs]

K: Dumbledore keeps telling Harry, ‘Hey. I got the Draco situation under control, don’t worry about it.’ Not in so many words and maybe if he had, again, things would’ve gone differently -

R: You know what, communicating clearly is the antagonist of a plot.

K: Okay. So that’s interesting that you say that, because antagonists are not always people.

R: Mhm.

K: Antagonists can be certain external factors that the protagonist has to contend with. A good example of this is nature, in something like the movie Castaway. It’s not evil -

R [overlapping]: Okay. I was gonna say Deep Impact, like the meteor is not a villain, the meteor is an antagonist.

K: Yeah. Exactly. It’s not evil. The meteor or nature or something is not saying like, ‘Yes, I will destroy the world, and then also Tom Hanks.’ [chuckles]

R: If it can twirl its mustache, it might be a villain.

K: It’s just there, and it’s something that the characters have to contend with. It can also be something supernatural; the thing I thought of off the top of my head was The Nothing in NeverEnding Story. It’s operating unconsciously, if you will, in the sense that it doesn’t seem to have nefarious purposes. It’s just existing, and it’s just growing. The characters are opposing it, they’re trying to find a way to stop it, but it’s not evil in and of itself.

R: A hero trying to stop global warming is not fighting a villain. Unless -

K: Ah, there’s some villains in there.

R: Yeah never mind, I take all that back.

K: An antagonist can also be something like a society or an unjust system that the hero has to live and function in. The example that came to mind was Les Miserables. The main character, Jean Valjean, is sent to prison for stealing a loaf of bread because his sister and her children were starving. And we as the audience are meant to understand here that, while Javert - I believe is the name of the officer - is doing his duty by arresting him because he did commit theft, we understand that it is the dire circumstances of his society and his country that caused him to do this. His whole struggle and story is not only trying to lift himself up and overcome this system, but trying to one, make good on people he had hurt and things he had done in the process of this, but two, help other people that are also stuck in this system by hopefully coming up with a way to better it in the long run. I won’t say overthrow it because he actively avoids that whole -

R [overlapping]: Right.

K: - part of the process in this story, but he is in his own way trying to get things to a better place.

R: Yeah.

K: I went through and just like, some ideas of antagonists who are not necessarily villains. We talked about Draco Malfoy - I will go to my grave saying that Draco is not a villain, he is first convenient exposition, and then an antagonist and an unwilling one at that. One of the ones I also thought of was Catra, from -

R: Ah!

K: - the first half of She-Ra, she kind of serves as sort of like a minion antagonist.

R: Uh-huh.

K: Her character evolves, and we’ll talk about that as we continue to go through this. But she’s an excellent example of just an antagonist.

R: And again kind of like that rival thing -

K: Yes.

R: - like in anime or certain role playing video games, you always have the rival show up, and then by the end you are working with them to fight the actual villain.

K: Another category is the conflict creators: people who are not evil, they don’t have nefarious plots, but they’re making the life of the main character unbearable. Mr. Darcy -

R [overlapping]: [giggling]

K: - from Pride and Prejudice is an excellent example of this. I threw the Lannisters on the list, and I’m sticking with the books -

R: Right.

K [laughing]: Not the TV show.

R: So in this version, the Lannisters haven’t managed to accomplish much yet.

K: Yeah, exactly. Because, really, what are they doing? Are their motives evil? No, their motives are promoting and securing the prosperity and wellbeing of their family as much as possible. Now, they’re doing things that again, evil being relative, we might look at this and go ‘oh they’re evil.’ I will choose the beheading of Ned Stark as a good example there. That’s only evil to us because we like Ned Stark.

R: Right.

K: Because we look at him and see a good, just man who is being undone by his own kindness and mercy. The Lannisters look at him and go, ‘this guy’s an idiot, and not only that he’s a threat.’

R: Mhm.

K: ‘If we send him to the wall do you think his family is gonna go, ‘ah ok no problem, no harm no foul.’’ Yeah, Joffrey’s an impulsive little shit, who should not have done that and obviously messed up the plans of a lot of different third parties there, but from the perspective of the Lannisters he’s right.

R: Mhm.

K: There was no reason to spare Ned Stark’s life.

R: It does start with the two incestuous Lannisters pushing a child out of a window though, so.

K: Yes, and we can - that’s a whole other episode about -

R [overlapping]: [laughing]

K: Well, trust me, I could do a whole episode about the evolution in literature, writing, and various media of using sexually-based components of character’s personalities to demonstrate that they’re evil.

R: Mhm.

K: But yes, this isn’t to say that Jamie and Cersei themselves aren’t evil, but the Lannisters as a whole are conflict creators.

R: Okay.

K: And within there they’re all opposing each other in certain ways, but they’re all kind of presenting a united front.

R: The Lannister corporate machine.

K: Yeah exactly. Casterly Rock incorporated. They’re all presenting a united front in the promotion and wellbeing of their own family. There’s obviously a lot of stuff going on there that we the audience know about, but pretend you’re an outside observer in Westeros. Apart from some slight patricide -

R: [laughs]

K: - but that’s okay, because that was the member of the family who we just barely put up with and obviously there was something wrong with him and we probably should’ve thrown him down a well a long time ago.

R: Are you talking about Tyrion or are you talking about Tywin -

K: Both, but from the perspective of the Lannisters, Tyrion. [laughing]

R [overlapping]: [laughing]

K: You can recover from that one, because of course there was something off about him, look at him. Never mind that he’s the smartest and, actually, most caring member of their family, but y’know. That’s not important, apparently. I made up an antagonist category that I’m calling “general pains in the ass.”

R: [laughing]

K: [laughs] Where they are not necessarily doing anything, but their existence is just infuriating to the point that it’s creating conflict for the protagonist. The one that I always love to point to is Gary from Pokémon.

R: Mm.

K: Who’s just Ash’s rival but it’s a very hilariously one-sided rivalry.

R: Right, right.

K: [laughs] The other one that I think is very good is actually: Sailor Moon, Tuxedo Mask in the anime. Because he is also trying to get the rainbow crystals.

R: Right.

K: In a pain-in-the-ass antagonist - I would throw Rei in there.

R: [laughs] Yeah, there you go.

K: Again, the anime - the manga did not go into this, but they’re constantly fighting over who’s gonna be the better this-or-that, and who’s doing the better job, and again, it creates conflict for Usagi because Rei is hyper-confident and very good at this, and Usagi is not, at all.

R: Right. It has more to do with Rei just constantly criticizing her and making her progression slower than anything else.

K: Yeah, you’ll notice there’s a lot of overlap here because apart from being a general pain in the ass in that scenario, Rei is also a conflict creator.

R: Yeah.

K: The last one that gets a little philosophical is the protagonist themselves. Holden Caulfield is of course the standout example here, but I would take anybody that can’t get out of their own way and put them on this list. One of the thoughts I came up with was Anakin Skywalker.

R: Okay.

K: More with the Clone Wars TV show as a better example of that, but you certainly see it through the prequels as well. Has a set of morals and code that he lives by that is in direct conflict with what the Jedi are teaching him and telling him to do.

R: Mhm.

K: And that’s an excellent case study into a descent into villany by having a singular goal and taking more and more extreme measures to meet it.

R: Like Draco, there’s somebody that is coaching him and trying to lead him in a direction that he wouldn’t have chosen on his own almost at any point.

K: I’m not sure I agree with that, because what we see Anakin do over and over again, his singular motivation-- and this is, by the way, his antagonistic component-- is “protect my friends and loved ones.”

R: Mhm.

K: And so he’s willing to take more and more extreme measures that in some cases are going to get him in trouble, he’s going to have to go in front of the Jedi Council and go ‘I’m really sorry I did that, but I did save Obi-Wan, so I think it all works out in the end.’ And you’ve got Yoda silently screaming in his head, going ‘This is not what Jedi are supposed to do, this is dangerous.’

R: Yeah.

K: But then also, it gets him to a point where his moral code is coming into conflict with what is important to him. So, yes I killed a bunch of people on a spaceship, but I saved all of the Senators and the Jedi on it. Well, now I’ve killed a bunch of children because I thought it was going to save my pregnant wife.

R: Mhm.

K: And we’re getting to a point where he can’t differentiate those two things from one another because in the end you’re still saving something or someone important.

R: Right. But I still think that -

K [overlapping]: Oh, yes, having Palpatine -

R [overlapping]: that progression -

K: - breathing in his ear for the whole time was not helping. [laughing]

R: Yeah, that was an outside influence that encouraged that progression.

K: Absolutely, yeah. So, that’s another antagonistic force - that is an external factor, people attempting to influence the protagonist.

R: Mhm.

K: So, we talked a lot about antagonists, and as we said, most villains - not all - most villains are antagonists but not all antagonists are villains. In order to be a villain, you gotta be evil. You have to be a quote-unquote “bad guy.” And you’ve gotta be doing something that is bad, something that’s hurting either a people, or an entity, maybe nature, or a planet itself. Typically, you’ve got selfish motivations here.

R: Mhm.

K: Sometimes you have no motivations, and we’ll get into that, because the pure evil villains are one of my favorite villains. But, villains are working to destroy a heroic purpose or protagonist. They may not know that that’s what they’re doing, but they’re doing it. Some villains go their whole story without realizing that there’s somebody working their way up to opposing them, because their protagonist is such a little miniscule blip on the scale of this evil plan here that they didn’t even know someone was opposing them. Villains, they have to be bad. They don’t exist in a vacuum. Y’know, we used the idea of the mad scientist who doesn’t know he’s the bad guy -

R: Mhm.

K: - until someone shows up to fight him. If that guy’s just left in his lab making some little itty bitty Frankenstein monsters to run around and help him with his experiments and things, then he never leaves and nothing bad ever happens, and the new Frankenstein monsters are happy with their existence, he’s not a villain! [laughs] However, if he’s oppressing those little Frankenstein monster guys, or maybe they’re escaping out into the world and doing bad things to people that they encounter, that then starts to move him into the realm of villain.

R: Now, what if he’s in his lab and his experiments are destroying the planet outside the lab, but he never leaves and he never realizes, and the Frankenstein [ed.: monster]s are happy?

K: Yeah, so this is where it gets weird, because what he’s doing is evil but he’s not doing it on purpose.

R: Mm.

K: I’m trying to think what the classification for that would be. An unwilling villain, essentially. Maybe more of an antagonist at that point. I’m trying to come up with an example of something where somebody shows up and informs a scientist or creator doing something that what they’re doing is having a negative impact on the world around it and they had no idea.

R: There is an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation where they go to a planet where the people on the planet basically take some of the children off the Enterprise because they can’t have children themselves, and the crew is able to convince them that it’s their very powerful computer system that’s causing radiation that’s preventing them from being healthy, and that it would happen to the kids too if they stayed, and so on and so forth.

K: Yeah, I’m trying to - like, this one isn’t necessarily as good an example, but in Ender’s Game, at the very end we find out that the conflict, this whole giant conflict, kind of began almost on a misunderstanding that the human population encountered alien life in the form of bugs that were a hivemind.

R: Mhm.

K: And the bugs killed all of the humans they encountered not understanding that there was a life form out there that wasn’t a hivemind. Because from their perspective, it didn’t matter if a few soldiers got killed, they were just essentially vessels for the larger collective consciousness. They didn’t understand the -

R [overlapping]: Right. Individuality.

K: Yeah. So, that started them as an antagonist, but then this war escalates and escalates and, that one I don’t know if we can come up with “villain” and whether sides are evil, at that point, but. With villains, they might not even need to know that they’re directly opposing the main character. The biggest difference between the villain and the antagonist is that sometimes, but not always, the antagonist forms more of a plot role. It’s somebody to be there to create conflict, to move the story along, or to motivate the protagonist. It’s somebody who may provide opportunities for growth for the protagonist as well, again through opposition.

K: Everything is opposition and conflict for antagonists. Antagonists, they can be friends or friendly rivals of the protagonist, but they are a plot role, they are helping to develop and move the character and the stories along. A villain is a character type. This is a potentially necessary component of the story, depending on the type of story that you’re telling, and they have a role to serve within that. They have to be the central point of conflict for evil reasons, to give the character something moral and good and just to fight for and overcome. If this sounds contrived, or this sounds pedantic, I don’t know what to tell you because this is literature. [laughs]

R: [laughing] Yeah.

K: This is - you will find this across all of human history in literature, the conflict between good and evil. That is the central focus of it. And listen, what we consider good and what we consider evil varies from culture to culture, time to time. Heroes don’t fit a certain set of criteria across all cultures. If you go back and read any Greek myth, and what they consider to be heroes, most of these guys were assholes. Like, really bad people. But they did heroic things, and they lived in ways that were acceptable to the ancient Greeks.

R: Mhm.

K: So therefore they were heroes. The Greeks are really interesting in that they did not write what was idealized, but what was true. So even though we know that the way they conducted their society, the way they lived and acted, is abhorrent to us, at the time it was acceptable. Not only acceptable, but encouraged.

R: Right. Perhaps even seen as heroic behavior.

K [overlapping]: To that end—yeah. To that end, evil is the same way.

R: Mhm.

K: I’m gonna throw one last monkey wrench [laughs] into this - the villain, as we kept saying, most villains but not all are antagonists, because sometimes the villain’s the protagonist. The villain is only the antagonist when they’re not the main character of the story, when they’re just serving as the sense of conflict. But sometimes in stories, the villain, who is evil and is doing evil things, is the protagonist, is the main character that we’re following. Two of my favorite examples of this are Light from Death Note and Dexter from Dexter. Light is a teenager with a god complex who I wouldn’t even say “starts off trying to do right in the world,” because if you watch the series really he’s just experimenting using bad people until he gets the plan figured out. But, for those who are unfamiliar, Death Note is an outstanding anime that I highly recommend about a teenager who comes across a notebook that is stolen from a Japanese death god and learns that the names he writes in the notebook will die. And he gets more and more specific about specifying “will die at this time,” “will die in this way,” et cetera. And enters into this whole cat-and-mouse psychological thriller thing with himself and the police that are trying to stop this serial killer that they don’t understand.

R: Right.

K: The whole thing turns into this god complex of him establishing rules of what he thinks are right and wrong and threatening the entire world with what would basically be instantaneous death at his whim if they don’t adhere to it. So let’s be clear, Light is evil. He is killing people because they’re not acting the way he wants them to. But he is the main character and the protagonist of the story, and if you watch it you find yourself cheering for him outwitting the police, outwitting this detective. One of the detectives, by the way, is his father. And you’re still goin,g “Come on, Light, you can get yourself out of this one!” Dexter Morgan from Dexter is another good example. Dexter is a serial killer. Dexter has kill rooms where he duct tapes people to tables, ritualistically stabs them, chops the bodies up, and drops them in the water off the coast of Miami.

R: Mhm.

K: Dexter also has a complex set of morality that he adheres to, and Dexter is a little bit different because he doesn’t want to do these things, he wishes he wasn’t like this, but he knows that he is and there’s nothing he can do about it. The books are a little stranger about this than the TV show. So he’s channeling his awfulness into only killing murderers.

R: Right, and the rules of morality that he follows are not actually his morals.

K: Yeah.

R: They were given to him.

K: Yes. As a way to hopefully help maintain and control him. But he’s still killing people. And he’s still operating outside the justice system. He’s very careful about gathering all the evidence and knowing “yes, this person’s definitely a murderer,” but he’s still serving as judge, jury, and executioner without giving anyone the benefit of due process. In his mind it doesn’t matter why you killed somebody. You killed somebody. And it’s coming less from a place of morality than an opportunity to be an outlet for his own base urges. Villains can be protagonists. Just because somebody is the main character of the story doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re good.

R: In fact, I feel a little bit better about some books thinking about it that way. [laughs]

K: Yeah, absolutely. And, look, there’s a whole thing you can get into with the hero vs. the antihero, and what is considered heroic and what is considered acceptable; god, I think there’s been entire books written about this, with Superman as a core component there. It is very nuanced to kind of sort these things out of where the line is between hero and villain, and even more so where the line is between antagonist and villain. At what point do you stop being just an inconvenience or a pain in the butt that someone’s gotta deal with and become somebody who is an active threat to not just the protagonist but potentially those around them as well?

R: I know a book can have antagonists and villains, we’ve established several that do. Can you have a book with more than one villain?

K: Absolutely!

R: How do they not just sort of shrink down to become antagonists, then, if there’s more than one? Or is it just because of their behavior being evil?

K: Let’s go back to another favorite of ours, Avatar: the Last Airbender. I would make the argument that both Azula and Ozai are villains. I think there are definitely people who would take Azula and put her more in the antagonist category; I disagree, she’s evil, she has evil motivations. She also wants to conquer and subjugate the entire world and is willing to burn it down to do it. Hers and her father’s ideologies and motives line up pretty closely. The difference is that Ozai sits in this palace and we don’t see him for most of the series, and Azula’s out there running amuck.

R: So one can be a subordinate of the other, and they can both still be villains.

K: Absolutely, yeah. And villains can work together, we got the superhero team ups on villains all the time. Dunno if you ever watched Venture Bros. -

R: Yeah.

K: - but the Guild of Calamitous Intent is one of my favorites, not that they’re all teaming up against the same protagonist there. But yeah you absolutely can have multiple villains; one who is working under or for the other. You could have minions that are villains, as long as their intentions are evil. To that end with Avatar I would say Ty Lee and Mai are antagonists, not villains. Because they’re minions who are kinda just there to do what Azula says but like, they don’t necessarily want to burn down and subjugate the rest of the world, they’re just sort of along for the ride. I think with multiple villains, a lot of times when you see that you’re kind of dealing with an ensemble cast, and everyone’s gonna sort of have a little area they have to go break off into. But not always, look at Star Wars. Yeah, Darth Vader was redeemed at the end, but you had two evil villains one right after the other, and again we’re kinda seeing the same power dynamic as Azula and Ozai.

K: To kind of round all of this out, villains are evil. And they usually have to have some sort of evil motivation or plan or action to match this. They might be so evil that they aren’t even aware that everyone knows they’re evil and is trying to stop them. Villains do not necessarily have to come in immediate direct conflict with protagonists in order to be villains. They can just be out there doing their little villain evil plan thing and not even know that someone’s coming to fight them to the death until that person shows up to do so. They don’t have to be directly opposed to the protagonist. In some cases, they can be the protagonist. But they’ve gotta have bad intentions.

R: For the thrill of having bad intentions.

K: Some of it can be for the thrill. The pure villains, those are my favorite ones, the ones that we never quite find out why they’re doing what they’re doing, they’re just doing it. I use the example of Maleficent, from the original Sleeping Beauty movie, not the Angelina Jolie with lots of backstory and sympathetic character origins. Maleficent shows up, she’s mad that she didn’t get invited to the party but we kind of all get the impression that there’s a reason she wasn’t, but nobody quite knows what it is or what’s going on here.

R: Because we knew she would make a scene!

K [laughing]: I think it’s because she showed up and cursed the princess.

R: So they saw that coming, you’re saying.

K: Yeah maybe.

R: Even though the exact way to prevent that, according to Maleficent, would’ve been to invite her.

K: The logic gets a little circular there, to be sure. [laughs] But yeah so, the villain is a character type, it’s not a plot role. The villain is not always necessarily there to advance the protagonist or the plot. They certainly can, but they’re not doing it directly all the time.

R: Mhm.

K: This is, villains are one of those sometimes-but-not-always-except-for-this-and-then-that-happens kind of situation. Antagonists on the other hand, they’re not necessarily evil, they can be actually just regular cool decent normal people who happen to have a conflicting agenda with the protagonist. They just want different things. Last week we did MacGuffins. The antagonist may just be running around after their own MacGuffin, and for some reason that’s causing problems for the protagonist. Maybe they also want that MacGuffin for a completely different reason, one that is mutually exclusive of what the antagonist wants; they can’t team up there. Or maybe they just also wanna have the top spot at the dojo, and so they’re gonna be in conflict with the protagonist there. The thing that makes the antagonist an antagonist is that they are opposed to the protagonist, and they will cause conflicts with the story’s main character. It’s a plot role, and it doesn’t necessarily speak to the character’s personality or motivations. They are there to create and cause conflict for the main character to either resolve, oppose, or fall to.

R: So when I proposed this topic to you, I kind of thought of antagonists as mini-bosses and the villain as the big boss, thinking of video games and the way that’s usually structured. So, this is unexpected.

K [laughing]: Listen, an antagonist can be a mini-boss. It’s all about motivations.

R: But they can also just be that person living their life that has always bugged you because they microwaved fish in the lunchroom that one time.

K: That person might be a villain.

R: [laughs] Just wanna contradict me at every turn.

K: I dunno, somebody who microwaves fish, that seems like evil intentions to me. [laughing]

R: Look, they live with the consequences of that decision for the rest of their life.

K: That’s very very true. Anyway, so, Rekka any -

R: Can an antagonist be the protagonist?

K: No, those are mutually exclusive yeah. There’s somebody who is not evil and they’re the main character of the story, they’re the protagonist.

R: So they don’t have a goatee or a mustache to twirl, and they’re the main character, then they’re the protagonist every time.

K: Yes. The primary component for being the protagonist is that the story is about you, you’re the principal character. If you are serving in an antagonistic role as the protagonist, you’re still the protagonist, you’re just a jerk.

R: So when I get up and look in the mirror in the morning and I say, “Hey, butthead,” I’m still the protagonist of my life.

K: You are both the protagonist and antagonist of your own life, yes.

R: That feels accurate.

K: [laughing] I think most of us are.

R: Yeah.

K: Well we said, a good example of an antagonist is the character themselves.

R: Yep. Alright, I think I get it.

K: We can always come back and talk more about it, because this one was fun to do some research on and get some thoughts together.

R: So you would say that a book or a story plot requires an antagonist but doesn’t necessarily require a villain.

K: Yes, definitely.

R: And the protagonist is completely optional.

K: Yes, we’re just gonna have a bunch of antagonists running around causing conflict for each other. Well, I think that’s pretty much every murder mystery, so.

R: So if it’s a third person omniscient, and there is no main POV, we can have a book with no protagonist. Got it.

K: I feel like you’re trying to trick me into something but I don’t know what. [laughing]

R: I’m antagonizing you, I’m sorry.

K: It’s an important thing to do.

R: As an editor you need to have your feathers ruffled every now and then.

K: It creates conflict, and conflict creates growth.

R: And plot.

K: And plot. [laughing] But yeah thank you so much for listening everyone as always, hopefully this was helpful information, I know this was a lot of mincing of minute details, but -

R: Yeah I mean maybe this was the episode you never knew you never wanted but -

K [overlapping]: [laughs]

R: - if there is an episode topic that you do know you want, you can find us on Twitter and Instagram @WMBcast, and you can also find us at patreon.com/WMBcast. And we’d love to hear your suggestions for topics or questions. If we have confused you in any way, then you can blame Kaelyn, and also let us know and we’ll try to fix that. Thanks everyone!

K: Thank you so much.

Tuesday Sep 28, 2021

Episode 70 - You Only Want Me for My MacGuffin

Tuesday Sep 28, 2021

We hope you enjoy We Make Books!

Episode Transcript (by Rekka)

Kaelyn: I love MacGuffins.

R: Or weenies. I think we should start calling them "weenies" again.

K: Go back to the original name. Yeah, it's funny because like, I think MacGuffin has like a negative connotation around it and I love it as a plot device where it's just like, there's this thing. And everyone wants it. In some cases we don't even really know what it does. There's like oh, the suitcase from pulp fiction. That's a great MacGuffin.

R: That was going to be my example.

K: In one of the Mission: Impossible movies, the one with Phillip Seymour Hoffman, you know, they're trying to get this, this thing from this guy. And Phillip Seymour Hoffman is this like the most terrifying crime lord in the world. And he can't get this thing. We literally never find out what it does, why they need to keep it out of his hands so badly and, and have it for themselves. But yeah we kinda conceived of this episode is talking about MacGuffin versus plot devices. So, let's be clear. All MacGuffins are plot devices, not all plot devices are MacGuffins. So as I always like to do a, you know, a little bit of history here, MacGuffin the terms often chalked up as being coined by, Alfred Hitchcock and his friend and screenwriter, MacPhail, but it actually goes back quite a bit before that there was an actress in the 1920s named of Pearl White, which I can only assume as a stage name.

R: Her movies brought to you by Colgate.

K: I genuinely hope that's a stage name. But she was in a lot of spy movies or action movies where everyone was chasing after something. And she was in so many of them that she started calling the items in question "weenies" because it didn't matter. And the, it was almost getting a little formulaic in her movies that it could have been, you know, like a roll of film, a document, a, a key that opens a certain, you know, safe or something. It really didn't matter what they were. It was just, you know, these suspense action inspired movies, everyone trying to chase down the same object.

R: The reason that it doesn't matter is because no one actually ever really uses it. You just want to have it, right?

K: Yeah. Yeah. It's frequently MacGuffin-related plots are resolved by "the real treasure was the friends we made along the way," which is one of the more infuriating endings.

R: I like friends.

K: Friends are great. Yeah. But like, okay. So I was going to get to this, to this later and the thing that, like one of my favorite examples of a MacGuffin that becomes un-MacGuffinned and is National Treasure That film is very rare in that they actually find and maintain hold of the treasure in the end of it, think of like, you know, like the Goonies or Pirates of the Caribbean, like Treasure Planet, they all find the treasure, but they don't really actually get to keep any of it. National Treasure really upended that by, by letting those characters not only find it, but then we find out how much money they got for it.

R: And Disney's Atlantis. They did have the treasure at the end, too.

K: That's true.

R: They didn't tell anyone they had treasure. They just suddenly were all very wealthy.

K: Yes, it was very good. So yeah, MacGuffins are by definition, it's a functionally meaningless interchangeable object whose only purpose is to drive the plot. The function of a MacGuffin is that there are characters or multiple groups of characters that want it, and they're all competing or outwitting or racing to get this object.

R: The method by which it drives the plot. It creates the tension between different parties.

K: Yes, exactly. Or it could be, you know, something like a treasure hunt where, you know, the MacGuffin is the treasure. So we know what its function is. It's going to make somebody rich, but it really is just there as an object to be desired. One of the fun things I learned while doing, you know, putting some notes together, researching this is it's generally accepted that one of the first MacGuffin in commonly accepted MacGuffin and literature was the holy grail, which is very common plot device for Arthurian legend. And then, you know, later tales where this is also treasure. Yes. It had religious significance, but therefore making it a worthwhile pursuit for these holy and sanctified nights. But yeah, it was functionally a MacGuffin because once you get the holy grail, what do you do with it? Well, it depends. If you're in an Indiana Jones movie or not, I know. The Arthurian knights were not not planning to make themselves immortal by that. They were planning to just get it and put it somewhere to look at it and go, it's the holy grail. Yay. So MacGuffins, like I said, it's got a negative connotation around it, I believe. And I do think that is that's very unfair. It's often treated like, well, it's just something that they had to put in there to get the characters, to act, to do something. And it's like, well, yeah, but that's a book.

R: Yeah. You need a plot.

K: That's how plot devices work. I think where MacGuffins get a bad rep so to speak is because they're meaningless and interchangeable. There are a lot of books, movies, TV shows where the MacGuffin is interchangeable. How many, you know, heist films have you watched where it's like, we need to get this thing in order to, you know, make this next step. And then it turns out that it's like, oh no, wait, things have changed. We need get this other thing. It doesn't have to be the same MacGuffin through the course of the story. They can change based on, you know, how the plot's moving or circumstances or the needs or wants of the characters. As I mentioned before, all MacGuffin are plot devices, not all plot devices are a MacGuffin. So that was kind of, you know, we wanted to talk a little bit about what a MacGuffin is and what it isn't thereby, what is a plot device and what its function is.

K: Plot devices are basically a technique and narrative use to move the plot forward. It can be anything from, you know, characters and their actions to objects, to gifts of mysterious origins that we're not quite sure about. Now. It can be relationship, plot devices cover a lot of different things. One of them is MacGuffin. So, you know, saying like, well saying this object, it's just a plot device. Well, it might not be just a plot device. It might be a MacGuffin, but plot devices can be other things. Chekov's gun is of course a plot device. The Chekov's gun rule is if you're going to have a gun on the stage in the first act of a play, somebody needs to fire it in the third act of a play because otherwise it's just, you know, a decoration at that point. I don't like that.

R: I don't think it's just that it's a decoration it's that your audience is going to wonder about it and that you don't want to distract or disappoint.

K: If there's a play going on and there's a gun hanging on the wall and it's set in a hunting lodge that seems fairly normal.

R: But for example, if I see somebody in a movie, pick a rifle out of their nightstand and tuck it into their belt, I know that, you know, something's going to escalate.

K: Yeah, exactly. Or at least we're, we should be reading into that. Character is planning for there to be some kind of a conflict or a scenario in which they may need to defend themselves. Right. But let's talk a little bit about pot devices. As I mentioned, they're things that are intended to move the plot along. There's an endless list of things that are plot devices. And as I said, these can be anything from relationships. Like a love triangle is a frequently as plot device. Definitely one of my least favorites. First of all, they're very rarely actually triangles. They're more like two lines converging on a single point in order for there to be a triangle, all three people involved need to be having—

R: So is the object of the other two's interest a MacGuffin?

K: Could be, I've talked endlessly about what a ridiculous character Bella from Twilight is. And I mean, she's, she's borderline a MacGuffin. Like really, you know what, God, that's a really good thought experiment. I'm going to have to like find some kind of a summary now and go, go through this and see if like Bella is actually a MacGuffin.

R: If the character themself doesn't have any agency, like the damsel in distress that you don't even see until you storm the castle in the third act.

K: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And we'll get to things that can be MacGuffin that you might not think would be a MacGuffin. So one of them that I actually stumbled across that I didn't think about as a plot device is the Deus ex Machina. So Deus ex Machina it's was a commonly used plot device, especially in Greek comedies and tragedies, primarily tragedies, I suppose where an improbable event is used to resolve everything and bring the story to a conclusion, usually a happy conclusion, fun fact about the Deus ex Machina, of course, you know, it's the Latin for "God in the machine." it was because that's because in a lot of great tragedies and plays, they'd have this mechanism by which an actor portraying a God was lowered into the stage, does god things, you know, changes whatever's happening, and then that's the end of the story. So God in the machine was what was coined for that. This one I will say generally is something that writers are encouraged to avoid. It's it's not great storytelling. Like if, you know, you're lining up for the big conflict and everyone's squared off and waiting to see what happens. And then an earthquake happens and kills everyone...

R: Yeah. You know, the earthquake, wasn't something that had been foreshadowed or anything like that. It's kinda like the "Oh, and I woke up and it was all a dream."

K: I always say like the T-Rex at the end of the first Jurassic Park movie.

R: Just shows up and chomps.

K: Just shows up and is like "Raptors! Mmm!"

R: A lot of people were pretty satisfied by the T-Rex if, if it had been T-Rexes in the tragedies, we could've had a whole new view of the Deus ex Machina.

K: Yeah. It was a, it was a very satisfying ending and it was certainly a "whoa, holy crap. Like, yeah, I forgot. There's also huge dinosaurs running around here. Right."

R: And again, so like that was foreshadowed. It was Chekov's T-Rex for your T-Rex Machina.

K: It is a little bit of an ex Machina because first of all, the last time we saw the T-Rex, it was very far from the visitor center. And also no one can explain to me how it got in there. So, but you know. It's fine.

R: Hey, look. If you really want to nitpick Jurassic Park, let's just talk about how the Jeep fell into the T-Rex enclosure. They did not get to a fence. And yet there were brachiosaurs. Why were they in the T-Rex enclosure?

K: I thought they were outside the T-Rex enclosure along a cliff.

R: I didn't see a fence.

K: The geography of this is, is definitely slightly slightly suspect. But also a plot device, the T-Rex in this is, you know, serving as, as a plot device, in that it is forcing the characters to act and make decisions really. We all know that if they just sat quietly in the cars, the movie would have been a lot different.

R: But the MacGuffin of Jurassic Park would be the dinosaur DNA.

K: Yes. in one aspect of the plot, definitely, the Nedry plot. I would argue that that is much more relevant to everything, but like, it is a weird little side plot where this chain of events gets kicked off because of yes, the dinosaur DNA, which is not meaningful for the story. Is it interchangeable? I don't know. I would say no on that, but it definitely, for that particular part of the plot serves as a MacGuffin.

K: One of the examples I always use that, you know, people point to and say is a MacGuffin, but is absolutely not, is the one ring from Lord of the Rings. It's not an interchangeable object there, isn't another, you know, another thing that they could go take and throw into this volcano, the only reason they're going to throw in this ring into Mount Doom is because it has to be that specific ring. And it has to be thrown into Mount Doom. We lose the whole story of the one ring corrupting and torturing everybody that's holding it. You know, we lose the the character development that comes from the people who have to carry this ring and what it does to them. So that's one we're, you know, I see like people saying like, oh yeah, and the one ring, the MacGuffin. Like it's not, that is not a MacGuffin. It is a plot device, but it is not a MacGuffin.

R: Right. It's an object that everybody wants, but it is a carefully crafted object in terms of the story that is the foundation of the story itself.

K: Yeah. The one ring, I would say, even goes so far as to serve as a theme in that story, essentially. One of my favorite plot devices is a plot coupons. Rekka also loves these.

R: Like you need the blue key card and then come back with the blue key card. And then, you know, you can open this blue locked door. The idea that you need this thing before the story can go any further and it has to be this thing. But that thing is not going to come around later. It's not like that key will open another door later. It will open this one door that we need to progress, but there's probably going to be another door later.

K: And again, this is not a MacGuffin because it's not interchangeable. You need that specific key. The other way to sort of integrate plot coupons into your story is there's a certain number of objects you need to collect in order to get something else. My favorite one of these is Dragon Ball. You want to summon the dragon. I believe his name was Shen. You have to collect all seven dragon balls to do that. So the story is being driven by the quest to find all of these, some in the dragon and then summoning the dragon from there typically drives the plot forward even more. It's very rarely goes the way you want it to when you're collecting, collecting things for a larger thing. It's not like a carnival where you get enough tickets, you get the giant teddy bear and then you go home. That teddy bear might kill you. Yeah. Similarly to, to plot coupons is a plot voucher which is something that a character is given or, you know, picks up on a whim or just, you know, is particularly entranced by and goes, I'm going to take this object. And then it turns out to be incredibly useful or life-saving, or exactly the thing that they needed or didn't realize the value of it. Something like that.

R: This is frequently a Star Trek: The Next Generation thing where Wesley is working on this school project and that school project saves the planet later when he connects it to the war coils.

K: Yeah. There you go. Yeah. it's a very common thing in especially fantasy because you know, it's this there's a lot of concepts of hidden and mysterious objects where something that you have, you don't realize that's what it is the whole time you have it. And then suddenly it's magically revealed at the end. One of my favorites. I don't know if anyone listening to this or Rekka, I feel like you may have read like the, you know, the subsequent Wizard of Oz books.

R: I have not read the sequels.

K: Oh really? Okay. Yeah, and um

R: I always meant to, but I just never got around to it.

K: They're good. They're good. I got, I got really into them and I believe it's, is it in the second book? I can't remember. And one of them were Dorothy returns to Oz and they're trying to, you know, so Oz is now without a leader and she goes off on this whole quest with this boy that she finds who he's an orphan. And he doesn't have a lot of memories from when he was younger and they go in this whole thing and they're trying

R: Well that sounds like a missing king.

K: Better. It's a missing queen. Because they finally turn— their whole thing is they're trying to track down this witch who may know where the heir Ozma is. And they finally confront her and she tearfully breaks down and points to the boy and says, "I turned her into a boy." Dorothy's had the queen with her the whole time and didn't realize it. So yeah, that's a, you know, that's a good, I'm not sure that really fits the plot voucher, but I'm going to say that it does, because Dorothy does go out of her way to have this boy accompany her. I think the boy's name is Pip because of course it would be. You know, somebody who on a whim picks up like a bulletproof vest or has given a bullet professed and then get shot later. Or you know, there's always like the little meek character that they give like a knife or a gun to, and say here, hold this just in case.

K: And then the main character is getting strangled to death and they use it. Those are plot vouchers. Another one— and then I promise I'll stop going through plot devices here, but I, I always enjoy this—is a good red herring. Very common in murder mysteries and thriller stories and even a spy novels. You know, this is trying to divert the audience of the reader's attention away from something and draw it to something else. You know, I mentioned murder mystery. So like this would be like, you know, the whole family's gathered for dinner and the grandmother suddenly dies. And the doctor of the family declare she's been poisoned, and who would have the motive for doing this? And while you, the reader trying to sort through all of this, there becomes a character who it's to you very clear has the best motives, the best opportunity and everything. But in the case of that, being a red herring, what it's doing is it's distracting you from something that's happening in the background, where there is actually a better candidate to be the murderer, but the author doesn't want you to know that yet. Red herrings are frequently used for another plot device, which is of course the plot twist, right? Very difficult to have a plot twist without a series of very well laid out red herrings. Yeah.

R: And you have to be very balanced in how you use them. So you don't tip off that they are red herrings. Like they can't be so overtly obvious, although in certain genres they are tropes and people want the red herring and they want to be the smart one who figures out who the actual killer is before the detective realizes they are after the wrong person or whatever.

K: Red herrings can actually be used within the book as well. Something that the you know, antagonist of the story does, to deliberately mislead our band of noble heroes and send them off on a wild goose chase so they can continue their nefarious plans undeterred, would be a red herring used within the context of the story. That's I hope kind of a good, "This is a plot device. This is a MacGuffin," but one thing I did want to touch on was things that can be MacGuffins, but don't seem like they would be MacGuffins. Because as we mentioned, MacGuffin is need to be, you know, functionally meaningless interchangeable and lacking agency. And these don't necessarily seem like things that would check off those boxes

R: Just by their inherent nature. You're going to say people as your first one. So like you would see a character and you're going to think they're going to act with some agency. They're going to try to manipulate the world around them to get what they want. But sometimes...

K: Sometimes they're just MacGuffins. You know, I mentioned, I am going to go back and try to figure this out. If Bella from Twilight is actually just a MacGuffin. My— I'm going to say in some books, yes. For staggeringly, large parts of the book. Baby Yoda is a MacGuffin for a really long time in the Mandalorian. Yes, it's a sentient functioning creature that in some cases does interact with and change the environment, but he really doesn't have a lot of agency. He's just sort of, kind of getting carted around by, by the Mandalorian.

R: He wants to eat amphibians.

K: He wants to eat amphibians and their eggs. And everybody wants him. Everyone is trying to get this child that—the viewer see some examples of his power early on, but most of the people trying to get him don't realize that. And even, you know, up to the very end, if not like at the, you know, the end of the story so far, he's suddenly become a very involved, interactive character, altering and changing the world around him. He's still, he's an object that's handed off.

R: Right. Although technically by sending the Jedi signal homing signal, yes, he does get used. So therefore—.

K: Yes, he becomes a plot device at that point.

R: He is no longer a MacGuffin, but yeah, for most of the season, he is.

K: He's kind of a Deus ex Machina there.

R: Well, okay. Is he the Deus ex Machina or is Luke showing up to take him away the Deus ex Machina?

K: Spoilers for Mandalorian season two, which—

R: If you care, you already know.

K: Yeah, Exactly. No, I would say he's the Deus ex Machina because by that point, Luke is a function of him. He only shows up for him. Okay. He's not a MacGuffin because he's not interchangeable if you know, Han Solo showed up that wouldn't have been very helpful for everyone. I mean, you know, extra gun, I guess, but Luke's the one we really needed in that situation, but yeah. And you see this you see this a lot in video games, like the escort quests, where, you know, you just have like some silly character that keeps trying to like run into dangerous situations and you have to prevent them from doing it. That's, they're serving as a MacGuffin at that point. You know, Rekka made the example of like the damsel in distress. People can be MacGuffins for a time and then change into plot devices or then even characters.

R: Okay. But when you are looking over somebody or something from a story, how do you say here's where they change? And that changes them like before they weren't a plot device?

K: Where, where is the crossover?

R: Well, like when you're, when you're saying like, yes, that's a MacGuffin or yes, that's a plot device. Like if, as a plot device that meant that later they did something. So then were they ever a MacGuffin?

K: Yes. MacGuffins do not have to stay MacGuffins. Hmm. You can graduate from MacGuffin to plot device and plot device to character. That's what typically is going to take a person from a MacGuffin to, you know, being part of the story, be it as a character or a plot device is them acting either on their own behalf or on the behalf of the people that were basically treating them as a MacGuffin at that point. Some of the common tropes with this is them suddenly gaining a power of some kind, you know, maybe this was like this you know, child princess that needed to be escorted across the galaxy. So she could go back and claim her throne. But basically we just had to keep her hidden and locked away and make sure, you know, people keep attacking the ship and trying to stop us from getting her home.

K: But then she touches a crystal that she shouldn't have. And now she's going to get them all safely home she's then, you know, not a MacGuffin at that point, she is, you know, a character or maybe on some level, a plot device, usually in order for a person to be a true MacGuffin, they have to be completely helpless: babies, children that can't take care of themselves or, oh, here's a good one. Macguffins that will—like I mentioned with Ozma in, you know, the Wizard of Oz sequel books—MacGuffins that you didn't realize were with you the whole time. And they transform into something that transcends being a MacGuffin. You know, they were cursed to just be this rock. And for some reason, someone's got the rock with them the whole time and it's a MacGuffin, but then it's, you know, we broke the curse and it's actually a person.

R: Or in science fiction, you might have somebody that's like in stasis, in cryo, and you don't know why you're transporting them or why everyone keeps attacking your ship to get them or something.

K: Macguffins aren't static. They don't always have to stay MacGuffin. A good example of a MacGuffin that does not stay MacGuffin is an egg, anytime, you know, there's a, a precious egg or something similar that we have to, you know, be transporting and getting to wherever it needs to hatch or something. And then it hatches probably dragons are a really good example or trope here. And then it actually hatches and turns into a dragon. Well, that dragon is not a MacGuffin because it's a dragon.

R: And at the very least it changes the plot by being a hungry, now-alive thing.

K: Very much so, very much. So other things that can be MacGuffins. We talked about interchangeable objects a little bit, you know, the MacGuffin does not have to be the static standard object to the whole time. It can change. It can be, you know, it's whatever the character or characters desire or need at that moment.

R: It could be a relay race of MacGuffins.

K: Exactly. Really, honestly it could. It really could. And then the other one that I had made a note of here is a place. So, you know, we think of the MacGuffin as an object that you're trying to hold, but it can also be a place that you're trying to get to that is, you know, maybe not, we're not sure if it's real, if it's a fabled, you know, legendary location El Dorado is a good example of that. A lot of, a lot of treasure seeking-based stories have places that sort of serve as MacGuffins. And to the clear, the treasure being a MacGuffin and the place being a MacGuffin are two different things, because the treasure—like I'll go back to National Treasure—Um they very explicitly stayed in that, that it's been moved around a lot. So they're not trying to find a specific place. They are trying to find a specific thing. They just don't know where it is.

R: And once they get it, they're going to remove it from that place.

K: Yes. A MacGuffin that is a place is a specific spot that you've got to get to. Maybe it's a sacred temple where you could only perform this specific resurrection spell, or maybe it's a city made entirely of gold or like Treasure Planet was a good one because you had to get to that specific planet and that specific place on the planet in order to, you know, find and access all of this treasure.

R: Or in the Mummy Returns, when they are trying to release the scorpion bracelet from their son's wrist, they have to go to this temple specifically to do that.

K: Yeah. So places can be a little tricky. They, they verge a little bit more on, on plot devices, but there are definitely a place can serve as a MacGuffin, especially if it's like a legendary one that nobody can really prove exists.

K: By the way, if there's a lot to read on a MacGuffin is out there and you know, why they're, they're really not actually a bad, a bad thing. But conflating them, you know, conflating all plot devices and saying it's a MacGuffin is not actually accurate.

K: Because plot devices are a lot more dynamic than MacGuffins. And there's a lot of different types and how they can be replied. Plot devices are a writing technique. Macguffins are a component of the writing technique. So anyway, I like a good MacGuffin. I think they're a lot of fun. And I think plot devices can be really helpful for, for writing. Again, it's something that like, there are these things that I think like they just exist. They're things that we have and things we have to, you know, have in our stories, but we talk about them very dismissively for some reason. I'm never quite sure why that is.

R: I think a lot of the dismissiveness comes from people who have more of a literary mind with regard to their storytelling.

K: Possibly.

R: So that either they are dismissive of genre fiction entirely, or they feel like it's their duty to elevate genre fiction by eliminating tropes, which would then eliminate the genre.

K: Yeah.

R: Um yeah, I think that that's the perception I get anyway from the discourse I see about these things, but yeah. I definitely got the impression as a, you know, emerging writer that MacGuffins, were a bad thing. But you know, as we pointed out, there's a lot of people's favorite movies, favorite stories, favorite movies, favorite plays that are just chock full of MacGuffins.

K: All of the Indiana Jones,

R: Pretty much, yeah. This belongs in a museum because it can just go behind glass and stay there. But in the meantime, let's fight over it.

K: They Ark of the Covenant by the way, is one of my favorite MacGuffins: the Instakill MacGuffin. By the way, this is a trope is the MacGuffin that you get. And you're finally like, "Haha I have the thing." And then it kills everyone.

R: The MacGuffin that you should not mess with.

K: Yes. I like MacGuffins.

R: Macguffins are good. And if the advice is, "I don't know what to do in the scene," "make something blow up." Like why not use a MacGuffin to keep your plot moving forward?

K: Yeah.

R: There's definitely a draw in like wanting an object. People can understand multiple people wanting the same object. This is the nature of humanity. So it's something we can identify quickly and relate to and understand without spending a whole bunch of time on it.

K: If you just exist in your life, you're going to come across a lot of MacGuffins. My current MacGuffin is I really want a bagel.

R: But it has to be a New York bagel. So it's not just a MacGuffin.

K: It has to be the everything bagel with scallion cream cheese from the place around the corner from me. And the thing is, I don't have time to go get it right now, but I really want it. And for my life, it is functionally meaningless and interchangeable, because I could very easily just go get some toast out of the fridge and that will nourish and satiate me. But it's not the thing that I desire.

R: But it's not. Yeah. It's not going to satisfy you. It's just going to feed you.

K: Yes, exactly. Exactly. All right. Well, I think that's MacGuffins. Thank you so much, everyone for listening.

R: And we'll be back with something else that we have opinions on in two weeks.

K: We have a lot of opinions.

R: Thanks, everyone.

Tuesday Sep 14, 2021

Episode 69 - Covering Covers with Grace Fong

Tuesday Sep 14, 2021

We hope you enjoy We Make Books!

Mentioned in this episode:

Glitter + Ashes edited by dave ring

Silk & Steel edited by Janine A. Southard

Grace's Links:

Website

ArtStation portfolio

Twitter

Episode Transcript (by TK @_torkz)

R: Today we are talking to Grace Fong about book art. Now we’ve had someone on in the past to talk about cover art and art-directing a commissioned cover. However, I think Colin would forgive me for saying that you do not want Colin to do the artwork.

Kaelyn: He would, yes.

R: Yes. [laughing] Would you like to introduce yourself?

Grace: Hi, I’m Grace! My pronouns are she/her, I work on the narrative design team over at Wizards of the Coast for Magic: The Gathering. I am also a sometimes-writer, and for the past five years I’ve been doing illustration work for various speculative fiction magazines, such as Strange Horizons, and some anthologies like Silk & Steel and Glitter + Ashes.

K: Rekka this is our first like, real artist.

R: It is difficult to get an artist on a podcast. I have tried -

K [overlapping]: [laughing]

R: - for this podcast and the previous one and it is a tricky business. So Grace, you live up to your name in showing up.

G [laughing]: We don’t like talking to people, we just like sitting at our computers.

R: I completely understand, but doesn’t mean I’m gonna give up trying, so. We’ve finally done it.

K: Awesome. So I have been involved in some cover art not as the primary person but as the editor, where I have to look at it and go ‘yeah okay that kinda tracks with what’s happening here.’ We have talked a lot on this podcast before about what to expect out of your cover art, and how involved the writers are going to be in it, and the answer is typically not very, at all. So, when you’re doing this, who is it that you’re primarily working with?

G: When I do work for magazines and books I’m usually working with the editor of the publication, so for the anthology it’s usually an anthology editor, or for a short fiction magazine it is usually the art director of the magazine or the editor of the magazine.

K: Can you walk us through the process of how you get started on this? They’re obviously not coming to you with a blank slate, they’re coming to you with a series of stories that may or may not have a theme. How do you get started working with this editor?

G: It really varies, depending on the type of publication. So for anthologies, because they cover a lot of different narrative ground, usually we try to come up with an image that encapsulates the theme of the anthology. Like for Silk & Steel, I was doing one of the promotional postcards for them. We knew we were doing femme-femme, high fantasy, sword-and-scorcery kind of stuff. So I knew that those characters would have to be reflective of the book’s content. Sometimes editors will give me a particular story that they aim to showcase for the publication, in which case I’ll usually read the story if it’s under 6,000 words, and try and come up with a composition that fits it the best that I possibly can. This is how I work with Strange Horizons.

K: At what point do you usually come into the process? Are you typically involved right from the get go, or do they kind of wait until they have most of the story material?

G: Usually when editors are doing their selections, they will wait until they have the written content first, because the written content is gonna dictate which artist they’re gonna go to, to look for. Whose style best captures the feeling of their product? It’s actually similar to traditional publication as well. The art directors at major publishing houses usually have a manuscript or summary for new debut authors whose manuscripts are already completed, and then they find an artist based off the existing manuscript. Some covers are completed beforehand, if the publishing house knows the author, knows the brand of that author and knows the kind of proposal or piece they are in the middle of working.

K: You’re gonna be sitting down with the editor, they’re gonna give you a story that they particularly wanna feature, they’re gonna give you an overall feeling or theme or - how much creative license do you get?

R: I wanna interrupt because you just skipped like a really huge part: the creative brief.

K: Yes.

R: So what you just said, they’re gonna give you a mood, they’re gonna give you a theme or whatever, this is a whole step. Don’t smooth it over like that. And this is something that actually Grace’s got a little bit of a reputation for her knowledge on. So Grace I know you in, I believe it’s November, are doing the Clarion workshop about creating a brief for a cover artist, right?

G: Yes.

R: So let’s give this the spotlight it deserves! [laughing]

G [overlapping]: Okay.

K: Yeah, I’ve written a couple, I shouldn’t have skipped over that, so apologies.

G: I mean it’s a specialized skill not everyone has to do them, so yeah.

R: Well I definitely want to highlight it a bit, ‘cause you helped me with one -

G [laughing]: That’s true!

R: What goes into the creative brief? Kaelyn named a couple of things, and this sort of forms the silhouette around which Kaelyn’s question pivots, which is how much creative control do you get as an artist? So what’s in the brief that you consider sacred, and what’s in the gaps that you get to play with?

G: So, that -

K: Well first, and I’m sorry to cut you off - I’m sorry - can we say what - [laughing]

R [overlapping]: I’m gonna interrupt you back!

K: That’s fair, that’s fair. Can we kind of say what a creative brief is?

G: Oh yeah, sure. So essentially when you are starting to work with an artist, an artist does not have the time to read an entire manuscript of 400+ pages. Their pricing is usually based off of the time that they’re gonna spend creating your artwork. So you need to provide them with what is known as a creative brief, or art brief. And these are small documents that are very instructional, no more than like a page or two long, that explains the kind of image and feel that you are going for, for this assignment. The assumption is that you would have done your research and sent this brief to an artist that you think would do a good job for the publication that you’re sourcing art for. So you’re not gonna go to someone who does only black and white work if you want to sell your book with a big, bright, neon, 80s kind of cover.

G: ‘Brief’ is kind of the keyword here. You’re essentially writing instructions for an artist. Don’t try to lead them in using prose writing, tell them what they’re gonna be drawing. It’s a bit like a recipe list. So if it’s a story about vampires and you want your vampire main character on the cover, you would specify that that’s what you’re looking for. Or, let’s say you’re trying to sell more literary up-market fiction, which doesn’t use as many figurative images. Then you would maybe make an explanation about like ‘oh this book is about a woman’s time when she was living as a child in Philadelphia.’ In which case you would sometimes kind of refine that into a visual or item metaphor that you would ask the artist to render in a specific way that captures the mood and feel of the book, and leverages the imagery that’s common to that market, so that it can reach the correct audience.

K: Gotcha. Okay. So then you’re gonna get this brief, and presumably dig into it. Do you ever receive a section of text, if there’s a scene in particular that they’d like illustrated?

G: Specific scene commissions tend not to be used for covers, because they’re not very good at selling a publication. Scene work tends to be done for interior illustration. So these the the images that go along in the story; you look at these images as you are reading these scenes. But for the front cover you’re trying to provide one image that sells the entire mood of the story to a particular audience. So in general you want to avoid using specific scenes, unless that scene comes in very early, because you don’t wanna spoil the ending of the book. You only have one picture to play with for a cover, meanwhile with interiors you tend to have a series. You can do like a chapter header, like in the original Harry Potter American versions.

K: It’s funny you say that, because I was thinking about how I remember when the Harry Potter books were coming out, and there were always the American and the British cover versions, and everyone would be over-analyzing and try to pick apart ‘okay what’s in the background here, what’s happening in this scene.’ But yeah because those covers were all more or less specific scenes from the book. They were a little abstract.

G: Exactly, but it’s - the keyword as you just said it is that they were scenes but they were abstracted. Actually tapping into that same visual metaphor that I mentioned earlier, for literary up-market, it’s just because they’re cramming so many things - what they’re actually doing is creating one image that forces you to look harder at it to find all of those metaphorical connections with the story inside. If it has the hippogriff on it and the Chamber of Secrets journal and the Goblet of Fire, these are all singular items that you don’t actually see in those covers how they relate to the story, but you know that this is an important item in the story. Ergo, which Harry Potter volume this cover revolves around.

K: Do you get scenarios where somebody says ‘I want you to draw exactly this and I want it to look like this,’ or do you generally give them a few different ideas or rough sketches and then go from there?

G: Generally the things that I like to have control over are color palette, camera angle, the stuff that would be considered very technical for an illustration. Perspective. Whether things are shot from above, shot from below, because these are all illustrator tools that help dictate the mood of a painting. And the mood is actually the thing that I usually ask my clientele for. Mood translates to ‘how are we supposed to feel when looking at this?’ Because feeling is very closely tied to genre.

G: So, what kind of book am I trying to sell? Is it a horror book? That dictates what kind of colors, what kind of camera angles that I’m going to use. But if somebody tells me ‘I want a top-down shot of something-something,’ then that feels a bit invasive to me because I feel like if I am an artist then I can select the camera angle to best convey the drama that you’re asking for. But the things that are really good for me are the object or character or focus, and if there is a character the kind of action that is being performed. A lot of times we get character description but no action, and the action is actually what tells us what the character is like, and separates it from the design.

K: Yeah so you don’t just have two characters just standing there looking straight forward at the camera -

G [overlapping]: Yeah.

K: - dressed the way they told you to dress them.

G: Yes. [laughing] Because basically that would be really difficult to create an interesting illustration for.

K: Absolutely yeah. [laughing]

G: It’s kind of like going to the mall and you see the clothes being sold on mannequins. Like it helps sell you the clothes but it doesn’t tell you what the story is behind the people wearing the clothes. It helps to have stuff like props, backgrounds, and actions to help convey like, ‘oh yeah if this character is wearing a t-shirt and jeans, is this t-shirt and jeans part of an urban fantasy? Or is it a part of a YA contemporary romance?’

K: How much back-and-forth do you generally have with the editors you’re working with? Like what is the first thing you give back to them?

G: This generally varies per artist, including the artists I work with. So usually what I do is between one to three thumbnails or sketches that I hand in to the editor and ask them ‘what do you think of these directions,’ ‘which one of these thumbnails’ - which I then proceed to refine - ‘do you think hits the target best?’ Then if it’s a very large piece of work I might work on a more refined sketch and pass it in, or like base colors and pass it in, and minimally it’s usually the thumbnails plus the finished drawing. So that’s two to five back-and-forths, depending on the size of the piece.

R: How much do you let the art director or editor you’re working with go back to the start? I know you probably don’t let them past a certain point, like ok you approved the thumbnail so we’re moving forward, we’re not going back to thumbnails after that, but what if they don’t like any of the initial thumbnails?

G: Yeah so basically most artists I know have what are called revision fees, and these are generally written into the contracts that you sign upon working with them. Basically saying ‘you get this many thumbnails, you get to give comments this many times, and if you go over those times there’ll be an additional fee.’ Because artists are basically charging - it’s a service-based industry, and your haircutter charges you per hour, and so does your artist. And generally if they aren’t happy with the thumbnails, then I would then incur the revision fee, but also I ask for further information.

G: So, if you as a writer or editor aren’t happy with what your artist is turning back, you need to be able to explain what you’re not happy with. So you can explain like ‘oh I don’t think this color palette is appropriate for this target market. Here are some images of other books that have come out in the same area that we think would be good inspiration for you.’ The only time that revision becomes really frustrating, outside of a timing frame, is when your client says ‘I don’t know what I want but I’ll know it when I see it.’

R: I knew you were gonna say that. [giggling] As a graphic designer I also hate those words.

G [laughing]: Yeah.

K: It’s like okay I guess I’ll just keep throwing paint at the wall and see what happens.

G: Like revisions aren’t bad as long as the client is able to convey what needs to actually be changed.

R: Not a series of no-thank-yous.

K: Have you ever come across a scenario where you’ve kind of had to take a step back from the project and say ‘listen, I think maybe I’m not the right person to do this.’

G: Usually I’m good enough at heading that off before a project even begins.

K [laughing]: Okay!

G: That is something you come to with experience, you understand your style, your way of working as an illustrator, and knowing like ‘hey this type of thing is going to be too out of my ballpark,’ ‘this type of thing is not gonna pay enough,’ ‘this type of thing is just too much work for what I’m capable of doing right now.’ That is kind of like you’re responsible, as most freelance artists are independent business owners essentially. They’ll usually say so up front minus extenuating circumstances. Like at work we’ve had people drop out because they acquired COVID in the middle of an assignment, so -

K [overlapping]: Oh god.

G: - there’s really nothing you can do about that. [laughing]

K [laughing]: Yeah. Have you ever been presented with a commission, talked to the person, and thought to yourself ‘I don’t think they have a good enough handle on what it is they’re looking for here, and this may just end up being a headache’?

G: Yes. That has definitely happened before, ‘cause I don’t have much time. So if I feel like the client either lacks the direction and communication to give me what I need, or if they’re simply asking for too much, then I will usually politely decline them, within the first couple of emails.

K: Obviously you’re not reading all of these books and you’re working off the creative brief. Is there anything in particular that you get these, you’re trying to make sure you’re communicating in the feel of the book rather than an exact representation of what’s going on there?

G: Yeah. So I’m not trying to recreate a 1-to-1 specific moment from the book. I’m trying to generate a piece that, as you said, evokes a major theme. A lot of times I’m asked to do character work, mostly because that is something that I enjoy doing and specialize in; I love character and costume design. Like you’ve never seen a spaceship in my portfolio because I’m really bad at it.

K: I looked through it, I didn’t see one. [laughing]

G: Yeah, don’t put stuff in your portfolio that you are not good at painting and don’t wanna paint. Like people come to me because they’re like ‘oh this person does kind of anime-inspired fantasy characters,’ and so that’s kind of like a niche that you can reach other people who like anime-inspired fantasy characters. So things for me that I consider important is, I like to know a character’s build and ethnicity.

G: Stuff like ‘oh the character’s mouth is a Cupid’s bow’ or like ‘they have eyebrows that are waxed to a certain angle,’ that’s a bit too specific. Or like ‘they wear ten rings.’ Because if you mentioned that the character wears ten rings, it automatically makes those ten rings really important. And you have to wonder, are those ten rings really important to actually selling who this character is? Do those ten rings have a narrative function in the story? If so, do you wanna include the rest of the character, or do you wanna focus on that character’s hands and the rings, as a way to say ‘hey this is what this story is about’? Because it’s very hard to include such a small item and such a big item together on the same image. There’s a lot of physical limitations to representational art; similar as it is, it’s really challenging to get a photo with both your shortest friend and your tallest friend at the same time and not have a giant gap between them. [laughing]

K [laughing]: Lot of negative space and awkward positions.

G: Yeah.

R: Well this is where your control over the perspective comes in, right? So that would be a shot from below.

K: Or above! Really above. [laughing]

G: Yeah. So one of the things that I like to ask for is no more than two or three key items, I would call them, that differentiate who this character is from all the other characters. Like you can say ‘yes, she is a Black woman’ or ‘yes, he is a muscular man of European descent.’ But Aragorn is defined by Andúril, his sword. Once you stick that sword on Aragorn, you know ‘hey this is a high-fantasy Tolkienesque property.’ So I’m looking for a handful of items like that, to help show who this character is and how they differentiate and help sell the genre, setting, and time period.

K: Covers are telling people things without explicitly telling them that. Like you mentioned you give Aragorn his sword or a similar character, you’re stating ‘hey this is a high-fantasy book.’ If there’s a background in it and it’s castles built into rolling mountains, that’s also indicating things to somebody who might be potentially interested in reading it. Do you spend a lot of time or give a lot of attention to trying to signal to potential readers that this might be something they’re interested in, or do you kind of let the cover do what it’s gonna do? Like how much do you try to work elements into it that are telling you things about the book without telling you things about the book?

G: I usually try to focus on having as I said up to three of those key items -

K [overlapping] Okay. [laughing]

G: - because, as you said, castles are really common in a lot of European-based high fantasy. So you can leverage that castle, change it up, be like oh is it a floating castle that implies that there’s a certain kind of magic? Is it a castle that’s built into a hillside that implies another sort of magic? And so when I’m doing that I’m not necessarily looking at other pieces that are within the same genre, because the same genre-ness comes from the castle itself. I’m trying not to make a cover that looks exactly like every other cover out there, because this writing is probably not like every other fantasy story out there.

K: Mhm.

G: I’m actually specifically looking for those key items that differentiate it within its own genre.

K: Any good stories, or interesting things that’ve happened here, your favorite piece that you’ve worked on or something that was particularly challenging? Maybe not just cover art but any commissions in general?

G: All of my really funny stories are actually just from when I was doing random stuff for anime cons. I’ve had to draw a woman making out with Loki, but the woman is not herself, the woman is Kate Beckinsale. Fandom’s strange.

R: So you drew Kate Beckinsale making out -

K [overlapping]: Making out with Loki - [laughing]

G: Yes.

R: And let the woman believe it was her?

G: There are certain things you simply cannot draw. You cannot draw the flow of time. If you have a single image, it is very difficult to have anything that goes from step one and step two. [chuckling] And convey two images in a single image.

K: Those Animorphs covers used to do that.

G: That’s true. And they had the little flipbooks in the back.

K [laughing]: Remember that?

G: Yeah.

K: What advice would you have for somebody who, like let’s say they’re going to self-publish, or maybe somebody who hasn’t really done this before but is looking to commission a piece of art - what advice would you have for them?

G: For prospective clients, I generally ask that they do their research beforehand, essentially. Like working with artists, we have our own system, our own language, essentially, for technical stuff, for our materials, our use of camera angles, our use of colors. And to kind of understand what is within and without our control. So don’t expect an art piece to be able to capture your entire story, because your story has some form of linear time in it, which art inherently will not if it’s a single image. And that usually requires a lot of trust on the part of new authors, because this is their baby, right, they spent a lot of time on it and they wanna give it nice clothes.

K: I love that by the way -

G [overlapping]: [laughing]

K: - they wanna give it nice clothes, that’s perfect. [laughing]

G: And like, a lot of us really understand this, but it’s really helpful for us if you are to distinguish things that are and are not concrete. If you have a story that’s based on music and you want your cover to celebrate the fact that it revolves around song, artists cannot draw a song. Unless you have synesthesia, you’re probably not gonna look at a piece of artwork and hear music. So you’re gonna have to come up with concrete visuals to convey this.

G: So that main character, how do they produce this music? Are they a violinist? In which case yes, a violin can be drawn, that’s very clear, very easy. And so just coming up with those small as I say key items, that would probably be one of them. Coming prepared with those and trusting the artist to interpret that - you can always say ‘hey, my book is about song, that is why I’d like to include these items,’ but don’t throw them into the wind with ‘my book is about songs’ and -

K: ‘Draw me a song.’

G: Yes.

K: You had mentioned revision fees, now again a constant theme in this podcast is contracts and read your contract and check your contract. Typically if you’re going to engage an artist they’re going to sign a contract with you. By the way, if the artist is not interested in signing a contract with you, and this is a custom piece, maybe that’s not the artist to work with. But you’re going to have a fee schedule, you’re going to say ‘okay up front this is how much I’m estimating this to be but there are additional fees and costs for revisions, for changes, for going back.’

K: We’ve definitely had to, with artists we commissioned for covers, go back and say ‘hey listen, something came up and we need another version of this, can you tweak these things?’ And that’s fine, it’s just an additional charge. Is there anything in particular you would say to the people who are looking to commission an artist to just be aware of and expect, so they’re not 1) shocked or 2) completely overlook something, in terms of costs associated with this kind of thing.

G: Art is skilled labor.

K: Absolutely.

G: It’s gonna vary per artist. Some people work faster, some people work slower. The type of publication is also going to affect the cost. But do not be surprised if an artist asks for a living wage, in terms of hourly money, because this is what they do; it’s generally not a side job.

K: Art is a skilled work that needs to be paid accordingly. There’s a reason you’re having to go out and find somebody you need to do this, because it’s not an easy thing to do.

G: Yeah, you’re gonna be looking at prices significantly over part-time retail, because this is full-time work. Artists pay taxes on top of their stuff, and they are in charge of maintaining their own tax books. The high prices also cover their cost of living, the materials, 30% of it automatically goes to taxes, so those rates are going to be relatively high. A lot higher than I think what people expect. I feel like sometimes when people are new to commissioning, they’ll expect it to be something in the price range of like ‘hey, I’m asking someone to in their off-time help me out at home with this, etcetera, or babysit my cat.’

R: They wanna pay you 20 bucks and an extra pizza.

G: Yeah.

K: Well they’re looking at it in like hourly rates, not realizing that it’s not just hourly. Like you said there’s taxes, there’s material, there’s - you don’t get something then immediately sit down and start drawing it, you have to read some things, you have to think about it, you have to process, there’s a lot of invisible hours that go into this as well.

G: Yeah.

R: You might spend - random number - 12 hours working on a cover, but that skill that you developed to create that cover is not 12 hours worth of skill-development, that is the lifetime that you have put into being an artist. So if anybody is thinking that ‘well the cover for my book is just a box I need to check off on my way to publication’ -

G: Yeah and that high hourly rate encompasses the work of emailing back and forth and sending the revisions and all the administrative stuff that the artist has to do. Artists generally do not have assistant teams, and they are not big publishing houses.

K: The phone call was two minutes, it took me five minutes to read this thing, and ten minutes to write a response, but all of the stuff in between is additional time. All of your back-and-forth with your artist, all of the discussion that you’re gonna have, all of the time that you the artist have to sit and think about this and do some sketches and stop and walk away and collect your thoughts, all of that is your valuable time.

R: We’ve been talking about hourly rates. But every time, in my personal experience, that I’ve commissioned a cover, I have been given a flat number and then the contract as we’ve discussed talks about how many revisions or whatever are included in that number. I assume this is the practice of this person doing covers so frequently that they have a general ballpark of what they need to earn to justify what a cover is. But that’s still based on a living wage that they’re creating for themselves.

G: Correct. That’s usually it.

R: When somebody gives you a flat rate it’s not that this is a flat rate and someone else is going to just give you like ‘$85 an hour please.’

G: Yeah.

K: Well are you calculating your flat rate based on how many hours you, in your experience, know this takes?

G: Yes, that’s exactly what most artists do. Because clients tend to not want to bill per hour, because it’s a single gig, most artists will give a flat rate based off their previous experience of how long something is going to take, which is why when back-and-forth gets too much, we incur revision fees. Because usually the flat rate is based off of our average experience of a client who spends this much time talking with us, and this much is gonna have to go to taxes, etc. And because flat rate is generally easier for clients and billing as well.

R: Yeah rather than an open-ended number where they have no idea, and there’s probably some paranoia that if you don’t know the person well you might just keep billing them for stuff.

G: You’re gonna find contracts that specify hourly rates for longer term stuff, like visual developments or several character designs, or if you have a world that you’re trying to build out for a TTRPG or concept art for a new video game or something like that. But for single one-off jobs, it’s usually the artist will give you a flat rate number based off of their estimation on how long the gig will take, which is why sometimes these flat rate numbers look gigantic. But remember, again, that’s based off of an hourly rate.

R: Now do you ever get an email from a potential client and you go ‘oh yeah I better double the number, based on the way this email is written’?

G: Yes that has happened before; the asshole tax is a pretty common practice -

K [overlapping]: [laughing]

G: - among artists. We are factoring in how long something is going to take as well.

K: And by the way along the flat rates and the contracts and Grace I don’t know if this is how you typically handle this, but when we would do book covers it was usually half up front, of the flat rate, and half when the work is finished plus any additional revision fees, which for us was always just a like ‘hey here’s the down payment if you will to show we’re serious and to get started.’ Artists put a lot of time into this, and if you say ‘well I’m gonna pay you when this is done’ and then they go ‘I don’t like it. Forget it. I don’t want it anymore,’ that’s a lot of time and energy that the artist has now wasted for no return.

G: Yup. Most artists will not start without half to full payment upfront. I’d say like 95% of them won’t. ‘Cause everybody has been burned very early on in their career by somebody who asked for work and never paid for it. So you only let that happen once. [laughing] Yeah. Always be prepared to have the money ready, like half the money ready, before the artist will start working. If you have a relaxed deadline, a lot of artists are really chill about just letting things kind of be like ‘oh I have this email of somebody who’s interested’ but it doesn’t become real and doesn’t actually get scheduled until there’s money down.

K: Artists have schedules. And they have open time slots and things that they might not be able to fit you into. How much of a lead time would you say they need to leave, in order to have a fully completed piece of art ready to go?

G: I’d say at the minimum one to two months. I know people that can turn stuff around in two weeks, but if you’re looking to get something done in the one month range, you’re probably looking at a rush fee. Artists usually keep one to two jobs forward, like they have something but they’re working on something lined up, and they usually have maybe another one lined up. And so if you demand something immediately, then that means they have to rush the next two.

K: Mhm.

G: So usually they will include a rush fee for that.

K: I mean essentially it’s overtime -

G: Yes.

K: - at that point, like I’m having to work extra hours outside of my regular schedule so that I can get to your thing faster.

G: Yeah. And the lead time will very specifically vary per artist, because if you’re trying to get someone who’s like super super popular, who has a large number of clients already, you may be waiting like a year or two. Like. [laughing]

K: There’re science fiction cover artists out there that, like two years, if you want anything from them. Some of those people have incredibly long lead times on these, and their schedules are just full like over a year.

G: Yeah. Like for me, I tend to be booked out about four to five months in advance, personally. But I generally, I will do rush fees and I’ll also do smaller client pieces here and there that I know I can fit into a weekend. But again it really is up to that individual artist. I know how fast it takes me to complete a piece, but when I have 50 things going on, yeah it might take 20 hours to do, but if I have ten things that all take 20 hours, then I have a lot of time management that I need to figure out.

K [laughing]: Yeah absolutely. When you finish a commission, when you finish a piece, how are you getting it to the person who is actually going to use it then and turn it in for the publication? Because a lot of these pieces are, they’re very high resolution, they’re very large files, and what does this look like - First of all what kind of a file is it, what does it look like? And then 2) how are you getting it, and how do you set it up so that they can manipulate it the way they need?

G: So usually for clients I send a flat image, unless a layered image is requested -

R: And let the artist know that at the beginning.

G: Yes.

K: Yes.

G: Yes, layered images will usually incur a higher charge, because it implies that you will be editing the image afterwards. And so basically you need to buy some rights, the editing rights, from your artist. So that’ll be a higher charge up front, when you write your original contract. Usually because I do a lot of web work, I just deliver a high resolution JPEG, high resolution PNG, and that’s fine for my clients. For other major work especially if you need a layered file, PSDs, Photoshop files, are generally the common way to do it. In which case you upload a massive, massive file to a file transfer service such as Dropbox, or a lot of companies often have an internal file transfer upload - you log onto their system and upload directly to their system.

K: If you’re getting, especially one of those huge high-res layered images, you need to have a program that can manipulate it. You might need something additional on your end to even work with the image then. But also like, these files are huge. Typically they can’t just email it to you. There’s actually file transfer services as Grace mentioned, where you drop these and it’s just in there for like two days. And you’ve gotta go get the file within that two-day period.

G: Yeah. I think for major transfers I generally lean on Dropbox and actually just sometimes Google Drive. They’re not exactly super secure, but like -

K: [laughing]

G: - few very people are going around sneaking your self-pub cover, like. [laughing] They’ll just delete it after you’ve got it.

K [laughing]: Well, you never know, Grace. Maybe someday somebody will steal something that you’ve done and leak it to the public, and -

G: That actually would be really bad. [laughing] I work for Wiz of the Coast, if it happens then it’s bad.

R: Secure FTPs from here on out. [laughing]

K: Multi-factor authentication in order to get these files.

G: Yeah.

R: So Grace, I happen to know, because I am on the inside, that you are - at the time of this episode coming out - you are the guest art director on the next issue of The Deadlands.

G: Yes! Yes I am. [laughing]

R: So from the other side of the table, how do you go about picking artwork on behalf of who are essentially clients here for their magazine issue?

G: Cool. So, for The Deadlands I worked with Cory, who is the main art director, and I looked through the existing repertoire of work that had already been selected for Deadlands publications. Cory was very helpful too in kind of summarizing up the visual style of the magazine, as stuff that’s more dark, more photo-real, lots of use of textured work, and I could see it in all the previous selections that’d already gone through. So based off of that, I was using my knowledge of my time in the art community to find pieces that I thought would resonate with that style.

G: I was also provided a showcase short story essentially, for that issue, that they thought like ‘hey it would be good if the cover resonated emotionally with this written piece.’ So I was looking for stuff that leveraged the visuals within that story, visuals of growth and forestry in particular, goes with a nice visceral story. They gave me the rest of the stories to read too, but as just more background information. And so I went to the portfolios of some of the artists that I knew worked in that kind of emotional field, like artists that did a lot of dark work, artists that do a lot of work in monochrome spaces, and so I looked in their portfolios for work to license that fit the forest-y theme of the showcase story.

G: And so I took a couple of pieces that I thought were good, showed them to Cory, Cory showed them to the editor, and we moved forward with one of them. I contacted that artist; they spoke English as a second language so that’s another thing you have to watch out with artists, so you have to be very clear and direct in your emails to make sure that you can be understood when your email gets thrown into Google Translate. And then I put Cory in touch with the artist for final contracts and payment.

R: This is coming out on September 14th; the new issue of The Deadlands should be out on the 19th, so make sure you check that out, because you will see the cover that Grace picked, and the art that fit into the style, and I happen to know from behind the scenes that everyone was really enthusiastic about your choices. So you made a small mention, but we should probably highlight just a little bit - this is licensed artwork, the artwork already exists, you didn’t commission something new, this is a piece that the artist already created either on commission or just as part of their creative process on their own. And so the artwork is available for license, which means that in a limited capacity it can be used again. Can you explain a little bit more about licensing?

G: Yeah. So licensing is essentially buying rights to print an image, whether it be like a t-shirt or whether it be like your book cover, and it kinda goes through a separate route than commissioning. So commissioning essentially you are paying for a service, you’re paying for an artist’s time to make custom work for you. For licensing, it’s closer to buying rights, and you’re saying ‘I want to pay you x amount for the right to use this image in my piece. And generally artists are pretty lenient about licensing, especially if you are doing a non-exclusive license. It’s basically free money for us, like you’re paying us for something that we’ve already created, there’s no additional hourly time that we’re gonna have to handle other than administrative fees, which are usually more than covered in the licensing. For that you just generally email them and ask them if they have a licensing fee already, or you can generally look for standard licensing fees for products of the same type as yours.

G: Most magazines and such will print how much they pay for licensed covers, in part of their artistic submissions and generally you can offer this rate for similar products within the field. When you are commissioning, though, these rights and usages will actually be factored into the contract. For example, if you want to be the only person who can use this work, you want the artist never to sell this work to another licensee, then this will factor into the cost of your original contract. The flat rate that the artist gives you might be higher, because basically you’re saying they can’t make future money off of it by licensing it to somebody else. ‘Cause copyright-wise, the image I believe is retained with the artist, unless the rights are completely bought out in the contract. Like I believe most contracts are they pay for the work and they pay to license the work, so an exclusive license would be the license fee but higher.

R: Kind of like the layered file, like you know that this person wants to own this image and do whatever they want with it, so you kind of charge extra.

G: Yeah. I’ll charge even higher if somebody is like ‘you can never show this in your portfolio,’ like you can’t even use this to get more work later.

K: I don’t understand why anyone would want that.

R: Yeah.

K: Ok.

G: It really has to do with intellectual property NDA-type stuff, so if they’re like ‘this is a super-secret project, this is too early on,’ ‘cause usually it’s like artists get to post in a portfolio once the thing has been released, but if they’re worried a project is gonna be canceled and they wanna hold onto the image in case they wanna use it for another project, then that would bar them from putting it in a portfolio. This is more common practice among artists who work in video games and animation, where their projects are constantly like revolving, canceled, there’s a lot more asset reuse, yeah.

R: Alright so. There [laughing] is a lot of information on licensing, on contracts, on payment structures. Be nice to the artist, ‘cause look at everything they’re already balancing.

K [overlapping]: [laughing]

R: So any final thoughts, Grace? Anything we haven’t touched on that is a bugaboo for you, that you wanna make sure we warn people or -

G: I feel like we’ve covered a lot.

R: - invite people, it can be inviting too.

G: I dunno, come to my class November 13th. It’s a free business class on how to write effective art briefs. [laughs]

R: Yes, that’s through Clarion West.

G: It’ll be through the Clarion West, yes.

R: Yeah, so we will put the link to that in the show notes. Hopefully the - is it unlimited spaces, or is it limited?

G: There are one hundred spaces, I think like 40 of them are already taken.

R: Okay! So by the time this comes out there’ll be less than 60 available, so make sure that you go find that link in the show notes for that free workshop, because I think a brief is going to make you as compatible as possible with the person that you commission. Because you wanna make their job easy, so that they don’t wanna charge you extra.

K [overlapping]: [laughing]

R: And also so that they still love your project by the time they get to the final artwork.

K: Yeah, so they don’t have some sort of visceral shudder reaction every time the name of that book or project comes up. [laughing]

G: Things also go around. Artists talk to each other, so if you give one a terrible time, then a lot of them will not wanna work with you anymore.

K: Yeah this is something not just in art and publishing, but I think most industries - people who work in the same field talk to each other. Artists do not exist in a bubble, they are not all hiding in some dark studio bent over an oil painting that they’ve been devoting their life to -

G: I mean we are.

K: Okay.

G: But we all just have Discord open on the side.

K [laughing]: The room has internet access, yes. Grace thanks so much, this was great. I think this was a lot of really good information that people kinda dipping their toe in the water here may not be aware of, or know how to find easily. But speaking of finding, where can people find you?

G: Ah, you can find me on ArtStation, at artstation.com/fictograph. It’s like pictograph but with an f instead of a p. That is the same on Twitter, where it’s mostly cat photos.

K: [laughing]

R: Alright we will put those links in the show notes too, so you won’t even have to spell anything. Just go find a link, and go find Grace because Grace has a lot of amazing artwork to look at, and also might be the perfect artist for a future project of yours!

Saturday Aug 28, 2021

Episode 68 - (Don't underestimate the importance of) Body Language

Saturday Aug 28, 2021

We hope you enjoy We Make Books!

Transcript (by Rekka)

Rekka: So today's episode is, uh, from a listener request, but I put it in the same batch of listener requests where I didn't write down the names to credit people. So you know who you are. Thank you for the idea.

Kaelyn: If you were this listener, get us on Twitter and yell at us.

Rekka: We'll add it in the show notes posthumously. Well, hopefully not posthumously.

Kaelyn: I was gonna say, "What?!"

Rekka: Posthumous to the episode.

Kaelyn: All right.

Rekka: So today we are talking about writing body language.

Kaelyn: This is, I think one of the harder things to do.

Rekka: How to be hyper-aware of where you put your hands.

Kaelyn: I have, while editing books, actually acted it out and recorded myself.

Rekka: Okay. So you have mentioned on the podcast before that you act these out, but you never mentioned that there was footage.

Kaelyn: Oh, it's gone. Don't worry. No, it doesn't, it doesn't exist.

Rekka: It's never really gone, Kaelyn.

Kaelyn: You will not see it, um. Figuring out, you know, body language without slowing down the pace of, you know, the story or the dialogue is, is difficult. So, um, I'd recorded these and then kind of gone like, okay, well, what am I doing here? Does that match up with what I'm reading? So, yeah, it's, it's hard. It's I think one of the more challenging things to do.

Rekka: I don't always think about it that way. So the reason that my characters will scratch their neck or, you know, look around the room or, um, fiddle with pages on their desk is frequently because I want to avoid using a dialogue tag because I had too many or, um, or that she said, or whatever messes with the rhythm of my, of my paragraph. So for me, I use body language as a way to use the name of the character that is saying the words without saying "character said."

Kaelyn: Yeah. So let's, uh, let's backtrack here a little bit. Why you write body language and how it's useful. So obviously the why is because we kind of need to know what the characters are doing.

Rekka: Yep. That's helpful.

Kaelyn: Everyone isn't standing perfectly rod straight in a room, staring at each other and taking turns to talk. Body language is very helpful for conveying things that are happening with the characters without actually having to say what's happening. Cultures around the world... There are certain ways that people act there are certain things that they do that convey an emotion or a feeling, even just the situation that they're in. Something like a character wringing their hands is going to convey nervousness or maybe trying to piece their thoughts together. Body language is a non-verbal form of communication that you're giving the reader. You're trying to explain what they're thinking or what they're feeling without having to actually do it. This is a very "show me, don't tell me" tool for writing.

Rekka: And that is how I find it most useful. Not because I'm worried about choreographing the perfect movements of my character across the room, but because it helps break up the inner kinda monologues, it helps break up the exposition. It helps break up the dialogue. It's like, this is the thing that's happening here in this moment. As you say, grounds the reader where if I'm trying to choreograph something, it's going to be very, it's like might be a whole paragraph of the character's movement versus it's like just a sentence and then moving on.

Kaelyn: Yeah, exactly. So, um, what did, what do they say? Something like about half of human communication is nonverbal.

Rekka: They say that. Yeah.

Kaelyn: Um, granted in the age of the internet that may have, that may have changed a bit.

Rekka: Yeah. Half of human communication is now text-based more

Kaelyn: Than that. Probably body language, as Rekka said, um, it adds depth to dialogue. It does it doesn't make it. So you have a wall of Kaelyn said, let's look over there. Sure said Rekka, I'll follow you. Instead it's Rekka gave a thumbs up and followed after her. It also is very helpful to show characters' emotions. Somebody who is relaxed and having a good time with their friends is going to have very different body language than somebody who is getting ready to, you know, go fight a dragon. For the record. Nobody fight dragons. Dragons are meant to be pet and given snacks.

Rekka: Admired.

Kaelyn: Yeah, exactly. But that's where it can certainly get a little hard, I think is trying to figure out how the balance is between describing a character's body language and their actions and what they're doing versus keeping the pace of the story. There is no good answer to this.

Kaelyn: This is something that you're only going to come up with through trial and error. And to be clear, I'm not talking about blocking. Blocking is very different from body language. If you're writing a fight scene and there's a lot of stuff going on all at once and you have to figure out, you know, who's where and how far apart they are from each other. And who's, you know, been stabbed and is lying on the ground. And are they in a position where someone's going to trip over them? That's not body language. That's.

Rekka: action.

Kaelyn: Yeah. Action.

Rekka: I like to think of it as body language adds the context to the dialogue. It communicates what the character's reactions are to things or how they're trying to use their words to manipulate a situation.

Kaelyn: Yeah. And conversely, um, body language can be a giveaway, you know, especially if you have like a first person limited POV in your book and you write that, you know, somebody that the audience is already feelin' a little iffy about has like a sadistic smirk on their face. Well, that's a good, you know, give away that they're probably up to no good. So that's another thing about body language is it's also the perception of whoever the POV is at that point.

Rekka: Yeah. And how close you are to that POV character determines a lot of how much they notice. So for example, if you have a character that you want to be fooled by someone else for half the book, then they need to notice that they have a very charming lopsided smile, as opposed to a sadistic smirk.

Kaelyn: Yes. This is another thing that you can use with unreliable narrators. Everything is open to the interpretation of the POV character. Are they wringing their hands because their nervous or are they wringing their hands because soon their laser will destroy Metropolis? Body language... So, not only to help add richness and depth to the scenes, it can also be used to manipulate and move a story in a certain direction. To make the reader think what you want them to think. Because even though all of this is nonverbal communication and we as humans are, you know, just in our daily lives are pretty good at perceiving that sometimes we're not always great at perceiving it, or sometimes we want to take it exactly the wrong way, because we've already made up our minds about something it's helping to sort of build a character and round them out a bit. Something that I really enjoy about body language is when you see a character doing the same thing over and over again, to the point where they don't, the author doesn't need to explain that's something they do when they're nervous or that's something they do when they're planning. It kind of helps your reader latch onto that character and make them feel like they know them.

Rekka: Yeah. Or they sort of know what's going on anyway. Like, oh, you're doing that thing again that you always do when you lie.

Kaelyn: Having other characters in the story recognize the repeat body language of different characters also is, I think, a good way to sort of build the story and build the characters. So actually writing it: you know, how do you, how do you know when you need to, you know, throw some body language in there? Rekka, I know you like to defer to that rather than using—

Rekka: Dialogue tags. Yeah. I would rather have somebody grind their jaw. I'm hyper-aware of how will the sound read out loud, whether in a reading or as a narrated audio book. And the repetition of dialogue tags is something that kind of catches my ear a lot. So it's, it's something that I've got a bug about. So I will always try to use a descriptive action by the character who's speaking instead. And also I find it helps kind of move that scene's plot along as well. Now maybe "he said" would be two words, whereas, you know, "and then he dumped his coffee out in the sink and slammed the mug on the counter" is a lot more words, but it also, it connects it to that statement and keeps the whole thing moving forward. Like you feel like there's a tumble of real life action happening.

Kaelyn: Yeah. And it's also communicating something about that character. Not only are they clearly frustrated, but depending on the context of this, maybe they got frustrated very easily or for no reason.

Rekka: Maybe they just don't appreciate a cup of coffee.

Kaelyn: It's very possible. I hear those people are out there in the world.

Rekka: Yeah. They're around. That's why I use them. That's how I use them. And that's how I decide when to use them. Do you have editor advice?

Kaelyn: I would say that when you should use them at minimum is if things are changing, if characters are moving around, if the intensity of a situation is being escalated, if somebody has picked something up and put it down, you know, and we need to know if they're doing that just because they, you know, it wasn't what they were looking for. And then they put it down in a, you know, angry way. I think when there's things that are happening, that is when it's important to show body language. This isn't to say that you need to overload your writing with this. You don't need tons of adverbs. She tossed the book at him angrily.

Rekka: Right. And I think if you start falling on the adverbs and you're not really writing the body language. You are telling again.

Kaelyn: Yes, exactly. My kind of metric for when you need to include body language is sort of action-based and update based. Did somebody do something? And if so, how? Yeah. What is it conveying about them? It was not conveying anything about them. If it's just that they went to get a cup of coffee because they like coffee, then, you know, you don't need to say, "they happily skipped towards the coffee machine humming while they—" I don't know. Actually, I feel like that's how I would write Rekka getting a cup of coffee.

Rekka: Prolly not skipping. You already used an adverb in that sentence. So...

Kaelyn: I did.

Rekka: I would blend it with the dialogue. Like, "I'm going to need coffee. If we're going to continue talking about this" and then go to the coffee machine or grab the grinds from the canister or something like that. I agree with you. It should be relevant to what's going on, not just to replace dialogue tags. So if I find myself, like, I don't know what this character would be doing right here that I could use in place of a dialogue tag, then I'm probably overdoing it. And then I'll just use the damned dialogue tag.

Kaelyn: I think actions and updates are a good way to use body language. Your character's doing something or something is changing. So for instance, if there's a discussion going on and it's starting to get heated body language is going to be a good indicator there. Rekka leaned forward in her chair and leveled her days at Kaelyn. Yeah.

Rekka: And see no adverbs there. And I'm not saying Edwards are bad (and we'll probably do an episode on adverbs. I don't know... Eventually), but in this moment they're not serving the purpose that you're going for. You are trying to use that show-don't-tell to communicate what's going on and an adverb weakens your argument for all that. So when you say updates and changes and actions, sometimes adding a character action with body language, to a dialogue tag, I will suddenly realize that there's something else going on in the scene. And hopefully the other characters can participate in it too. So that by having them do their steps of whatever the process is, I can insert their attitude. Are they relaxed? Are they stressed? Are they terse? Are they unengaged? Is there a competition going on for somebody trying to do one thing while the other person is trying to get them to do something else? Like it can become a whole scene in itself that can communicate a lot about the characters. But yeah, if it's just like this person sitting in a chair and that person sitting in a chair, I don't want to have every paragraph, a character like scratches their nose, or, you know, crosses their legs or uncrossed their legs or anything like that.

Kaelyn: I call those AI movements, things that we build into these robots and stuff to make them appear a little bit more human. And I think in most scenarios in books, we don't really need those because well, you know, the characters, they may be human, maybe something else. But unless there's a reason, like for instance, you know, people are just sitting talking and you don't need to have them crossing and uncrossing their legs, scratching their nose unless it's serving something. Like, are they fidgeting? Is the fidgeting showing nervousness? Or is this just somebody, you know, such a hyper ball of energy, they can't sit still, right? The body language should serve an action. It shouldn't be there just to communicate that these are dynamic real people, like we would build into a robot that we're trying to convince the rest of the world is as human as the last one.

Rekka: Right. Which nobody believed in any way.

Kaelyn: No, every time they come up with a new one of those, I'm just kind of like, why are we doing this?

Kaelyn: So you can absolutely overuse body language. It doesn't need to happen, you know, every time somebody needs to show a function in which they're human. You don't need to tell us that they're constantly blinking, that they, you know, are clearing their throats. Unless again, they're clearing their throats to get attention or something. We don't need to hear about, you know, how their finger itches or— my finger riches right now, actually. So that's why I was thinking about that.

Rekka: Kaelyn, we don't need to hear about it.

Kaelyn: Exactly. No one needed to know that. But used correctly, body language is an excellent literary and storytelling device.

Rekka: I would also caution that you would want to make the movements natural and not stereotyped. When we started talking about body language, the first thing I imagined was Ursula, the sea witch, telling Ariel not to forget about body language.

Kaelyn: Never forget body language.

Rekka: Then shakes her hips percussively. You might fall into a trap of thinking all women will move in a slinky manner or run their perfectly manicured fingertips against their collarbone and speak in a hushed whisper kind of thing.

Kaelyn: If you want to see some good examples of how to not write body language, go on the subreddit "men writing women."

Rekka: Yeah. That about covers it.

Kaelyn: There's some gems in there.

Rekka: And you know, um, sometimes men writing men, there's, you know, there's a muscle flex at every possible opportunity. It's just something that's not going to serve your story, unless you're telling a very specific kind of story. In 2021, if you're telling that kind of story, I hope it's a commentary.

Kaelyn: Yeah. Commentary or meant to be so over the top that it's, it's humorous. In which case then yes, it is commentary.

Rekka: Right. Exactly.

Kaelyn: So just to kind of round out this discussion, this can be hard. It can be hard to not write the same action over and over again. And the reason for that is because as humans, we do the same thing over and over again. In the time that I've been recording this with Rekka, I must have crossed and uncrossed my legs about six times.

Rekka: Right. I see her touching her nose.

Kaelyn: Yes. Okay. Here's a good example. I'm having terrible allergy problems right now. My skin is just like, it's very itchy. So Rekka's been watching just, you know, scratch my cheeks and my eyebrows and my nose and my neck.

Rekka: Which doesn't make the itching go away by the way.

Kaelyn: It doesn't, no.

Rekka: So if you write your character doing this, have them like working themselves up into a frustrated frenzy of itchiness as they're trying to survive this job interview or whatever the scene is.

Kaelyn: Yeah. Because nobody needs to know about how my nose itches. Unfortunately, all of you do. And I'm sorry for that.

Rekka: But in a scene, if you're trying to make a character uncomfortable, allergies is a way to do it.

Kaelyn: Oh, definitely. Yes. That's a very good way to do it.

Rekka: But choosing which body language and knowing where to put it, you were starting to say like, it can be difficult. Um, and I think that's part of the trick is we are told that our characters need to be doing something in a scene. And then we start inventing movements and yes, if you use the same one over and over and over again, it can be repetitive, but you can also use it as a tell for that character, as we said earlier, or tick that shows that they're anxious. Same thing. That's still a tell.

Kaelyn: By the way, a very good literary device for hidden identities. That if you want somebody to go back and go, oh yes. Now I can see, you know, that's something that you see across, especially a lot of epic fantasies, you know, with like sprawling stories where—

Rekka: The princess was allergic to strawberries and this one character keeps avoiding the strawberry patch that they have to cross through.

Kaelyn: Yeah. Or, you know, something like that, but also just, um, you know, somebody who maybe has like a weird habit of like pulling on their, their ear. And then, you know, sometimes you see them doing it. And sometimes they don't and it turns out they were a twin all along. Or, um, characters that are two different characters encounter the same person, but don't identify them. But the reader can tell they're the same person because of body language or, you know, the way that they stand. This is something very commonly seen. Writers will use exactly the same sentence or the exact same words to describe what a character is doing because they want the reader to pick up on this is the same person.

Rekka: Yeah. And you have to also have some repetition in order for that reader to pick up on things at all. Like if you want it to stand out, you do need to repeat things. Sometimes not just word for word, but multiple times, because a reader might skim over that at that particular moment. And then you miss it. Now, like you can't be responsible for a reader with poor attention on your book. That's, you know, hopefully something that doesn't happen because your plot moves and your stakes are important to the reader, but you don't want to repeat something that you did 400 pages ago and assume that the reader is going to remember what you said in passing 400 pages ago.

Kaelyn: It's definitely a balancing act with that because, you know, conversely, you're also not responsible for, if you have hyper hyper aware readers, picking everything apart and going well, they said this person scratched their nose using their middle finger. And then somebody else also scratched their nose using the middle finger. And I know one of them is, you know, a 42 year-old woman then the other is a six year-old boy. But I think they're the same person secretly somehow. There's another far end that that could go to.

Kaelyn: Body languages. You know, it's really helpful in a lot of different capacities in writing. It can be used as a storytelling device. It can be used to, you know, help grow and develop characters. It can be used to set a scene. It's something that I think you get better at. I think it's something that you get good at in revisions. I think a lot of times, you know, after your first draft of your manuscript's completed, you're going to go through and see a lot of dialogue tags in there. She said. He answered. They, you know, screamed. I think that body language is something you refine on subsequent passes.

Rekka: I think that's fair, until it becomes natural. And then, you know, you'll just be refining it like you do the rest of your manuscript on your revision pass. But until you do feel comfortable doing it, you know, put it on a whiteboard somewhere as a thing that you are going to pay attention to as you go through.

Kaelyn: This is something that if you're struggling with, I would recommend, frankly, just Googling. There's a lot of helpful information about do's and don'ts of body language, um, suggestions of how to incorporate it without, you know, weighing down your writing and your reader. Things to avoid versus things that are a little more descriptive with maybe less words and how to properly navigate adverbs.

Rekka: So really you don't need this podcast at all.

New Speaker: No.

New Speaker: You just need us to show up every other week and tell you to Google it.

Kaelyn: But normally I don't like to say, just get out there and punch it into Google and find stuff because you never know what you're going to come across. This is an area where there's a lot of good, "write this, not this." Some of them are just like charts and lists. Essentially.

Rekka: The other thing you can do is read and pay attention to the books you're reading and how they're handling it. Especially a book where you're like, I don't remember any body language. You go back and read through the first chapter of that and I bet you'll find some.

Kaelyn: Yeah, definitely. One of my go-to suggestions is always, if you're having trouble with writing: read more. It really helps internalize certain things.

Rekka: Yeah. Go find somebody who's doing the thing that you like and see how they're doing it.

Kaelyn: Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Rekka: And on your manuscript, you can take a highlighter and go through on your revision pass and highlight body language and see how frequently you're using it versus highlighting, in a different color, the exposition or the internal monologue or the narrator's omniscient voice versus what's happening in that moment. And I think you'll start to see some patterns. And if you're not sure if you're doing it well, that might be the place to start.

Kaelyn: If that sounds daunting, let me put it this way: It is. But editors and readers will absolutely notice these things. It's a subconscious thing that a lot of readers will do. It is a very conscious thing that a lot of editors will be looking for.

Rekka: And... You know, again, practice and do it on all your books, make it part of your process and eventually it will become more natural and it won't be as much work because you won't have to think about it as hard. You won't find your first draft completely devoid of action sentences when you've practiced adding them, they will start to happen in your draft.

Kaelyn: Yeah, exactly. I think that's a good little span about body language.

Rekka: Yeah. I mean, it doesn't have to be a long conversation to be a podcast episode.

Kaelyn: That's true.

Rekka: It doesn't have to be a long sentence about the movement that a character is making in order to be body language tag. But we do have a listener comment, uh, this time, uh, we actually had it the past few times, but we were doing interviews, and then the last time it was just the two of us, I just plum forgot. Cortneylyn says, I love listening to this podcast. It feels like I'm still being productive on my work in progress, even when I can't work on it. Like when I'm driving great voices, great hosts, and helpful writing slash publishing insights. So thank you, cortneylyn. I hope everyone agrees. If you do agree, please go join cortneylyn in leaving a comment and rating because that really helps our podcast be discovered by other people who might find the information useful. And we like that. We'd like to be discovered.

Kaelyn: We definitely do. Yes. Well, um, everyone, thank you so much for listening. You know, if you want to leave us a comment or a thought, or maybe you disagree with our assessment of body language, or maybe you want to describe what your body language is like as you've been listening to this.

Rekka: I'm not sure I want that, but we do welcome comments and questions at @WMBcast on Instagram and Twitter or on Patreon, you can find us under the same moniker. You can DM us on Twitter if you have a question you want to keep to yourself and we will anonymize it, or maybe unintentionally anonymize it if we forget to write down who said it, but, uh, we are always open to answering your questions in future episodes. And one of those future episodes will be coming in two weeks and we will talk to you then.

Tuesday Aug 17, 2021

Episode 67 - Book SWAG with dave ring of Neon Hemlock Press

Tuesday Aug 17, 2021

We hope you enjoy We Make Books!

Mentioned in this episode:

Unfettered Hexes Kickstarter
Infomocracy Redbubble Shop
dave-ring.com
neonhemlock.com
neonapothecary.com
dave is @slickhop on Twitter and Instagram
Neon Hemlock Press is @neonhemlock on Twitter and Instagram
VOIDMERCH
Neon Hemlock's Threadless shop
Riddle’s Tea Shoppe
Hailey Piper
Glitter + Ashes anthology
Matthew Spencer, illustrator
This is How We Lose the Time War
Tracy Townsend
Dancing Star Press

Transcript (by TK)

R: Let’s see what happens if you drape the oracle cloth over top.

dave: I have a thousand of those.

R [laughing]: Yeah.

Kaelyn: Speaking of SWAG.

d: Does that help?

R: Exhale.

d: [wheezing]

R: Yes.

K: Yes!

R: It’s not just good for laying your cards out on.

K: [laughing]

d [overlapping]: [laughing]

R: Okay! I’m gonna have to leave this in.

d: [laughing]

K [overlapping]: [laughing]

R: dave, why don’t you introduce yourself to start, and then we’ll get going?

d: My name’s dave ring, I’m a writer and editor of speculative fiction. I’m also the managing editor and publisher over at Neon Hemlock Press. Which comes with a bevy of other, like graphic design layout, and -

K: [laughing]

d: - products, placements, whatever else I’ve come up with lately!

K: Many, many other hats in different shapes and sizes.

R: So the reason I wanted to have dave on the podcast was because it occurred to me that something that comes up pretty frequently, especially around conference season when we’re meeting in person and around book launches as well, is that authors wanna know like ‘do I need a bookmark? How do I do a bookmark? What else can I do?’

K: ‘Do I need swag?’

R: Yeah, so swag. Swag - Kaelyn, I’m just gonna cut in to your definition and say that swag is an acronym for Stuff We All Get. So -

K [overlapping]: [laughing]

R: To that point, this is not going to be all free swag.

K: Yes.

R: Swag implies that it is free, that you’ll pick it up as you visit the author’s signing table, or that you’ll get it in the mail for preordering, or some little bonus bit like that. The person that we are speaking to today has taken book tie-in items and - what would you wanna call it? I don’t wanna say paraphernalia, but I love that word, so there. You’ve taken it to a whole new level. And a lot of it has to do with Kickstarter, would you blame Kickstarter for this?

d: Maybe some of it. And I like paraphernalia, the word that I am often drawn to is ‘ephemera,’ but I like both. Depending on the particular object, maybe one is more appropriate than the other. But I blame Kickstarter for a lot of things in terms -

R [overlapping]: [laughing]

d: - of connecting with a lot of the people who are buying the books that Neon Hemlock’s been putting out.

R: So it’s hard to say ‘blame’ in that sense.

d: To [unintelligible] - blame.

K: [laughing]

d: Yeah. But some of that’s been driven from that, and some of it’s been driven from just sort of nerdish excitement over different things. And then because I’m the one in charge, no one says no to me, so -

K [overlapping]: [laughing]

d: I just keep having ideas and doing the thing!

K: Let’s talk about some of the different kinds of swag, of paraphernalia, of - oh I just lost the word now - ephemera! I didn’t really know that book swag was a thing until I started going to conferences. Like obviously I’ve been to book signings and things, and there’s like bookmarks and maybe a pencil or something that they give out.

K: But then I’d get to these conferences and I was like ‘wow there’s a lot of stuff that authors are handing out, or publishers’ - like everything from those bookmarks, pins - enamel pins are a big thing. I’ve seen people that showed up with special printed editions of the book that they only had like 10 of them and they were just handing them out at the conferences and that was it. If you didn’t get them there, you were never gonna get this. It’s interesting that this is something that comes around books, because you think well the thing you get out of this is the book. Why does the book have accessories that come with it as well? But I think you kinda hit the nail on the head, this nerdy-dorkiness of like ‘I love this so much I want to be able to have it with me at all times, not just on my Kindle.’

d: Book lovers are already in this spot where you can - maybe you’ve read the book on your Kindle, but you want to have the physical book as well. So there’s already that feeling that people have, and then sometimes it sort of extends to further things. Like I remember Dancing Star has made a lot of beaded earrings that match the covers of their books and some other popular speculative books. Of course you don’t need to wear a particular pair of earrings in order to enjoy a book, but there is something sort of satisfying about -

R: When you really enjoy the book, and then suddenly you need the earrings.

d: [chuckling]

K: Look at anything from TV shows to movies to video games, like there’s all sorts of things that we wear and little accoutrements that we have that’s sort of like a signal nod-and-wink to somebody else that’s like, ‘ah yes, I also like that thing.’ I was wearing a pair of my Sailor Moon socks recently at a house party and I’d taken my shoes off, and somebody was like ‘is that Sailor Mercury on your socks?’ I was like ‘it is, yes. Yes.’

R: And that’s how you know your people.

K: Exactly. Yeah but it is this thing of like, that’s one of the - it’s a signal, it’s a secret language of how we identify each other.

R: And this is speaking from more like the fan side of why you would want to display these things, in whatever way they are meant to be displayed, whether they’re earrings or whether they’re a pin, whether they’re a sticker, a patch, something. I know that when I first started thinking of swag, I was thinking of things I have to give away for free, that are going to keep me in mind in a potential reader who isn’t ready to pick up the book or not in a position where they can buy the book.

R: Like I meet someone in a coffee shop and we’re waiting for our coffee and we end up talking and somehow it comes up that I’m a science fiction writer and they wanna know about it. If I carry bookmarks in my purse, it’s a book-related item, and it can have the sales copy on the back of the bookmark, or a blurb from another author promoting the book. And then you have some of the cover art on the other side and the title and my name, and therefore they have everything they need to find me later. And, if nothing else, they’ve got a bookmark that maybe they’ll hang on to, ‘cause the art’s cool, and then later they find it and they go ‘oh yeah,’ and it’s kind of like putting my branding in front of them multiple times. Every time they come across it, it might be one step closer to them buying the book.

R: So that’s one thought I had and why I chose bookmarks, ‘cause 1) they’re relatively cheap, paper is or at least was a relatively cheap material, and so if your swag is made of paper it’s not a huge upfront investment. You can maybe get 500 bookmarks for $75 or something depending on your printer. Book swag seems to have really -

K: Oh the game has been stepped up.

R: Yeah. I remember Tracy Townsend giving out little plastic-covered notepads with a pen built in, neat little binder, and I still have it by my bed. So I can’t imagine that that was anywhere near the price of a bookmark. There’s gotta be a level at which we go ‘okay this cannot be free anymore.’ And some of that is related to the publisher, like is the publisher funding some of this?

R: This Is How We Lose the Time War had pins, and they were giving them away with proof of preorder, and you picked your side, red or blue, and you got the pin. But the publisher I believe, and I may be incorrect, it may have been self-funded, but - the impression I got was that the publisher was providing those. And so I’m curious, ‘cause dave, you charge for some things, and some things are thrown in the box when you send out something. So like between stickers, bookmarks, and whatever else, what’s your thought process of where it becomes a merchandise item versus a promotional item?

d: Hm. You’re making me think I need to have a thought process.

R: Sorry. [laughing]

K: [laughing]

d: No I mean anything that’s more than a couple dollars to make usually is in the… either I bundle it with something else or it’s charged for on its own. Maybe one thing that slightly is confusing is I have this thing called Club Serpentine, where folks sign up ahead of time for everything I published in a given year, and those folks I give all the swag to for free basically, so. But in other cases like these tarot altar cloth-slash-bandana, depending on your perspective, slash microphone dampener -

K: [chuckling]

d: - those, I’m gonna give those away to the authors in Unfettered Hexes but I’m gonna also sell them on the website. And then like, I made an oracle deck, which is similar to a tarot deck, for Unfettered Hexes, and we’re using the interior illustrations from the anthology as part of that deck. So again I’m giving those away to the authors but everyone else is paying for them. And there’s a, I’m calling it an oracle coin, but there’s a coin that also goes inside that deck, that comes with the deck, but otherwise you can also buy it separately.

d: So the writers or folks that are part of Club Serpentine are getting things for free as it were, but they’ve either written a story for me or they’ve invested. So it’s not really for free, it’s still being part of the project in some capacity. Whereas stickers for me maybe is where the line is drawn. Stickers, I just like making them, there’s a website I pay attention to that every once in a while will list a 50-stickers-for-20-bucks, and so I just get those every time it comes up so that I can dish them out like candy.

R: They are very much like candy, I have quite a few stickers from both Neon Hemlock and Neon Apothecary.

d: We like stickers, yeah. [chuckling] Especially when they make the luminescent ones, we’re like yeah we like that deal! We like those a lot.

K: [laughing]

d: Maybe Rekka’s right and it’s also like Kickstarter campaigns because with the most recent novella campaign, I was like ‘oh I wonder if I can incentivize folks to back us on the first day.’ So I had what I was calling Launch Day Loot, which I commissioned this artist I work with a lot, Matt Spencer, to make a print of a character from each of the novellas, and so I’m sending that to everybody and I also used that print to make bookmarks as well, out of pretty paper.

d: So I am slightly regretting this, because it means that I can’t use my fulfillment center to do book shipment, it means I have to mail them all myself. So I’m surrounded by piles over here on my side. So those are the first time I actually thought, these are like swag in the traditional sense, like this is free stuff that I’m gonna give you if you buy it on a given day. Whereas the stickers nobody actually expects those, I just have been getting them and sending them to people.

K: Nobody expects the book stickers. … Monty Python? No? Okay.

d: [laughing]

K [overlapping]: [laughing]

d: It made me think of the ‘Nobody’s gonna know.’ ‘They’re gonna know.’ ‘No one’s gonna know!’

K [overlapping]: [laughing] ‘No they’re totally gonna know!’ So let me ask this then, this is a lot of work, this is a lot of effort. Why do you do it? Apart from [laughing] -

R: That’s a nice smile, dave.

d: [laughing]

K: Yeah for those listening at home, dave has a lovely smile on his face right now. Yeah it’s - completely, for joy, for getting things out there that show people enjoy your books and what you publish, that I think is fantastic. I’m sure it’s delightful to run into somebody who’s got something, a sticker or a bookmark or something from one of your publications or something that you did a special run of, but - How do you think it benefits not just you as a publisher, but then also authors? There’s like you, who you’re gonna do it on behalf of what you’re publishing, or authors, who might do it on their own behalf. Why would you recommend book swag?

d: I don’t know that I have a metric or anything that would say that they categorically increase sales by x percentile or anything like that. But there is a sort of impression that I have that, just folks get excited by stuff? And giving people something to be excited about feels nice. There’s something especially about writing where it often doesn’t have a physical form that often, so. Like yeah you have a cover you can point to sometimes. Short stories often don’t have their own art. It’s nice giving things physical shape.

K: I agree. Yeah.

d: Like I’m not making a fortune over here making bandanas, I haven’t become a bandana empire quite yet -

R: It’ll happen.

K: Give it time, give it time.

d: Maybe next year.

R: [laughing]

K [overlapping]: [laughing]

R: So what was your progression? Did you start with stickers and then you just sort of said ‘oh I could also do this, and then I can also do this, and I can also do this,’ and now you have oracle decks and bandanas and coins.

d: Honestly, Unfettered Hexes, this anthology has really fed all of my most rabbithole impulses. Because it’s all related to witchery, it’s really - like the accessories are great - Any time I think of one it’s hard to say no to. We went for an enamel pin, more than 40 illustrations in the book - These tarot cloth, the oracle deck, the coin, I think I stopped there. Well I made stickers, too. And then I made these mini prints from the cover, so. Part of it is I can’t get out of my own way, and I just keep making things. And part of that too, maybe because I’ve got the interest both in the editing side and in the design side, there’s no one here to tell me otherwise. I just keep making up -

R: But you are working with artists for pretty much every little item that you come up with.

d [overlapping]: Yeah. I do the design part but I don’t do the illustrations.

R: Right.

d: Yeah.

R: So the oracle cloth in front of you has some line art illustration, the coin itself I assume needed to be 3D -

d: Oh the coin I made actually though.

R: Okay.

d: But I designed that with someone who then 3D-ified it.

R: Yes.

d: That’s the technical term.

R: It is. [chuckling] Yes. So you say you don’t get out of your own way. I do wonder, do you go to any sort of ledger and say ‘Can I do this, with the budget I have?’

d: Oh no.

R: [laughing]

K [overlapping]: [laughing]

d: No.

R: That gets in the way of the joy.

d [laughing]: Yeah I only work with feelings, I don’t work with numbers.

R: [chuckling]

d: No but two-thirds of these ideas are during an active Kickstarter, and I’m saying I’ll do it if I reach this goal. So there was some math there. We just barely hit the oracle deck stretch goal. Because we hit $12,000, and then I said we wouldn’t do the deck unless we had $18,000 and then we did, so. Whereas before I had lots of little stretch goals.

R: Yeah the oracle deck is not a small project, as you said. Lots and lots of illustrations. Now if you hadn’t gone with the oracle deck, were you still going to have the interior illustrations or were those the same item?

d: Well, no they were different. So Matt Spencer, who did the illustrations for the oracle deck, he was on board to do some interior illustrations, but it was probably going to be like a chapter heading, maybe a couple of spot illustrations here or there, like we had a few things worked out.

R: Mhm.

d: And then once we hit the oracle it was like hey, what if instead, we just use every single one of these.

R: [laughing]

d: And you don’t do the other illustrations.

K: Since we’ve mentioned it a few times here, can you explain what the oracle deck is in relation to, and why you ended up making these cards?

d: Sure, so an oracle deck is like a tarot deck. Rather than being a set number of suits and major and minor arcana, it has however many cards you decide. So we made this deck to go alongside the stories from an anthology called Unfettered Hexes: Queer Tales of Insatiable Darkness.

K: A certain podcast co-host here may or may not have contributed to that.

d: Yeah, and as my penultimate story in the anthology.

R: I’m happy because I also love the world ‘penultimate.’

K: [chuckling]

d: I’m actually not 100% sure because after, you’re technically the last story, but then there’s a poem after you. So you’re the penultimate…

K: Entry?

d: Entry? Mm, yeah… [thinking noises]

R: Hmm…

K: Contribution?

d: But you have two illustrations, right?

R: Yeah.

d: You’ve got both your oracle card one and then a two page color illustration.

R: Somebody’s playing favorites here and I love it.

K: [laughing]

d: I - y’know, we could say that. But also, it’s a really good story, and it perfectly hit one of the themes I really wanted from the book, which was basically friendship in space. [chuckling]

K: [chuckling]

d: It just nailed it perfectly, and so it was a perfect tie-in for the end of the anthology. So I couldn’t resist making all these pictures of it.

R: I appreciate your inability to resist your impulses.

d: [laughing]

R: It has served me well!

d: [unintelligible]

R: So the oracle cards, as you said there’s - what is it, 23? 24 stories?

d: Ah, don’t make me say a number right now. I think we just totally made it up -

R [overlapping]: Okay. I -

d: We’ll say 24. And then… yeah, 24 that are directly inspired by the stories themselves, two each for each of the story games that are in the book, four related to the characters on the cover, and then four related to different Neon Hemlock themes. I don’t know if this is that interesting, sorry.

K: It is! No, it is.

d: [laughing]

R: You broke my math brain, so I was trying to follow along and get the total.

d: I told you, I don’t do numbers.

R [overlapping]: Yeah, okay -

d: So if those don’t add up to 40, just -

R: 92! Got it! Okay.

K: [laughing]

d [laughing]: Just roll through it!

R: Yeah. So you commissioned all this artwork. You had an artist create individual, unique pieces for you. You also have the cover, you also have two interior color illustrations. I have also seen chapter art designs, a textured placeholder page. I think you said this is like 200 pages longer?

d: It’s a beast, yeah.

R: Compared to Glitter + Ashes -

d [overlapping]: Glitter + Ashes, yeah.

R: - it is.

d: It’s like 160 pages longer.

K: Wow.

R: But it really seems like a project that came out of great enthusiasm, which is delightful.

d: Yeah, glee, even. It’s just - [chuckling] So we’ll see if - I don’t even know if I can recreate this excitement with a future project, ‘cause it just has been really exciting. Although, my problem with making things is already going further with - I won’t tell you the exact -

K [overlapping]: Oh no.

d: - nature of it.

K: Oh no! [laughing]

d: But the next one will involve 3D printed figures.

K: Wow.

R: Oh my gosh.

d: So we’re already going out to left field again.

R: Yeah.

K: Okay.

R: You can’t not outdo yourself. It’s like every published book is a stamp in history, and you look back and you go ‘Pfft, that guy. [scoffing] I can beat that.’

d: [chuckling]

R: So given everything you’ve learned, having gone through these processes, for sourcing objects that are not typical - like, okay, a lot of authors could probably tell you where to go to find somebody who will make an enamel pin for you. But a bandana, for example, or oracle cards, a printed coin. You’ve obviously had to figure things out, do some research on your own, and get creative about things.

d: I also had to marry a chandler.

R: That’s true! And we all appreciate that sacrifice. [chuckling]

d: [laughing]

R: I have a lot of Neon Apothecary candles around me just so you know.

d: I just needed to make sure I could lock that down for future projects.

K: [laughing]

R: Yeah there are candles to coordinate with the stories in Glitter + Ashes, in the novella series that you put out. Aside from ‘there’s no reason you can’t do anything’ - you can’t use that as the answer - what advice do you have for somebody that’s into all this left field kind of paraphernalia and ephemera, and wants to do something for a book? Either as a self-published author, an author that’s promoting their work and it’s all on them versus the publisher contributing to this, or to a small press, or even a Tor.com? What words of sage wisdom would you pull from your oracle cards to give them?

d [laughing]: The new moon would tell us that -

K [overlapping]: [laughing]

d: Well, I think it’s about scale, right? So I’ve definitely looked up different projects and then realized that they weren’t feasible for me based off of my maybe modest scale. Depending on the project I’m looking to make like 100, 300, or 1,000 units of something, right? Which is small beans for a lot of projects. But, it’s also far too many for some others. So like one writer, Hailey Piper, she just put out a horror novella. And her press did a limited-edit, handbound version that you could preorder at not a cheap price.

d: But they only made those for those preorders, and then they’re not gonna make any more. And that’s something that, I know a local press in Baltimore that’s since folded, but they handbound all of their special editions too. And that’s something that is pretty special, and when you have it you know that you’re only one of 20 that has one, so something like that could be an option for people. I think handcrafted things in small batches can be pretty meaningful.

K: I have some experience with that, and yes. [laughing]

d: Maybe you have to do it via raffle or some other way, maybe it’s not a mass-produced thing. With the bandanas I had to price four or five of them, and the first three were like ‘what is this question you’re asking? ‘Cause you’re not really asking this very well.’ [chuckling]

K: [laughing]

R [overlapping]: [laughing]

d: And eventually I figured it out, and then took the price from one and brought it to the more ethical company and asked them if they’d match it and things like that. If anyone ever wants to reach out to me and hear about how I made a particular product I’m happy to talk people through it. With enamel pins, Juli Riddle of Riddle’s Tea Shoppe walked me through that at every step of the way. The candles, again, the husband, so I cheated that.

R: [chuckling]

K [overlapping]: [laughing]

d: And the coins I can talk to people, it’s all just sort of been shots in the dark. Reaching out to people and then either asking dumb questions or having someone who already asked them tell me the way to do it so I can get through them.

R: It’s a lot more communicating with people who have done something similar figuring out how you would do this thing, as opposed to like pick your merchandise and upload your graphic.

d: That’s what I meant about scale, too. Like the minimum number of coins I can make is a thousand, you know?

R: Yeah.

K: Yeah.

d: So you can’t do that on a whim, right. So there’s different mediums that are harder. Although it’s funny, I realized I’m wearing my fictional show t-shirt that’s based off of fictional bands in a novella that I published.

K and R: [laughing]

d: And I have that available through Threadless, which is sort of like halfway between those swag sites and a custom thing, where it feels kinda nice but it is an image that I uploaded and put on there.

K: I mean I remember when I did vests. Just to buy the vests is expensive, but we ordered just one, because I just wanted to make sure this was not gonna look like garbage before I ordered 200 of them. And I had to convince the manufacturer to just make one. He’s like ‘you know it’s gonna cost like $50 to make this one vest, then plus you need to buy the vest?’ I’m like ‘yeah that’s fine, I’d rather spend $70 now and have it not look right than spend 5,000 down the road and it’s terrible.’

d: A lot of places now will give you a cheaper deal for - I can’t think of the right word, it’s not prototype, it’s similar.

R: Like a proof?

d: Proof, thank you. Yeahyeahyeah. Like with coins they charge you for the molds either way. So those start already at like 300 or 400 bucks, depending on the kind of thing. Whereas at least with bandanas, they didn’t do a proof for me there, but they can do a really nice mockup ‘cause it’s only one color. And they will sort of make sure that you know that bandanas are not perfect squares, and -

R [overlapping]: Yes.

d: - and your image will be slightly off, those little kinds of things to make sure that you understand.

K: Have there ever been any pitfalls you’ve come across, anything where you’re just like ‘oh my God, this is not at all what I should’ve done here,’ and can you look at things now and go like ‘ah yes, I have come across this problem before, I should go down a different path’?

d: I mean… yeah? But also, even when you think you’ve got something figured out completely, like I just had a miscommunication with my printer where they didn’t get my proof approvals, and two of my books are like three weeks late. So… things will happen either way, I think it’s more getting a sense of timelines and knowing that you don’t need something ready two weeks beforehand, you need it ready like a month and a half beforehand at least, so that then you’re building in a little bit more buffer. Always build in more buffer.

K: Anything that you’ve ordered or tried to design or something and got it and gone like ‘this is not at all what I wanted this to look like, or what I expected it to look like,’ or? You seem like you’re pretty methodical and thorough along the way.

d: Oh, oh no. No no no.

K: [laughing]

d: I have a box full of ruined prints where they - even though I proofed an image that was fully spread, they sent me one that was with four inches of white space on every side. And then you just have to email them and say ‘this isn’t like my proof’ and so, even when you think you’ve got things figured out they still can kinda get screwed up.

R: So you mentioned scale, and there are, just to name the ones that come to mind are CafePress and Redbubble, that you have the option to create one-offs, or to create a store without putting in any overhead other than the time to set it up. So that is an option, but it doesn’t create that immediacy of like ‘I’m going to send this to you as a special treat,’ or ‘this is part of our relationship as author and reader or publisher and reader,’ so it allows you to create things without having to go through printers, without having to go through all the proofing processes. I mean you might wanna order one for yourself anyway just to make sure, ‘cause some of those shirts, the printing quality on them is better or worse depending on the fabric, but -

K: Some of the fabric is better or worse too. [laughing]

R: I mean there are options for people who don’t have the ability to invest a little bit up front, or a lot up front.

d: Well that was how I started using Threadless artist shops, because I had like three or four shirts from Void Merch - I don’t know if y’all know them - and then I was like wait, they’re making these on Threadless artist shops. And I commissioned like a metal band version of my logo for Neon Hemlock, and I was like I want this on a shirt! And like at this point I feel like 60% of my wardrobe is Neon Hemlock tank tops, so. I’m not only a client, I’m also the president.

K: [laughing]

R: Yeah.

d: Yeah.

R: Yeah so I mean there are ways to do this from small to large, you can put up a CafePress shop. I have actually, I forget who I saw recently was putting up merchandise online through one of these print on demand shops, and people were getting excited - oh it was Malka! Malka Older. Dr. Malka Older. She had Infomocracy related t-shirts and coffee mugs and all that kind of stuff and people were like ‘what! Where’s the link?!’ and getting excited about it on Twitter. I’m sure that resulted in a few sales.

R: And then there’s printing or having your own SWAG made, and you take it to a conference and you hand it out as part of rubbing elbows with the readers and the book-signing group kind of thing. And then there’s Kickstarter rewards where you kinda have to - I don’t know who started the stretch goals, but you gotta love them but you also kinda wanna hunt them down and throttle them. Because now people go ‘well this is exciting! But they’re out of stretch goals, so I guess they’re happy now and they don’t want any more money for their campaign.’

d: I think that’s like a fundamental misunderstanding with Kickstarter though. Like I’ve had plenty of people, like I’ve sent them a link to a Kickstarter and be like ‘oh well you made your goals, so you don’t need me to pre-order.’ And it’s like ‘but I’d still really like it if you did!’

K: We could use more money. [chuckling]

R: If you support this now, you won’t forget to buy it later when it comes out.

d: Well it also means you have the money to print it beforehand -

R [overlapping]: Yeah.

d: - which is pretty critical.

R: Yeah, exactly. ‘Cause dave’s books are very well produced, they are not POD one cover texture, they are not the typical POD interior pages either, like the paper quality is - dave is hand-selecting these things, and proofing them, and showing them to his friends in the morning writing Slack.

K: [laughing]

d: We do a lot of show and tell.

R: We had show and tell this morning, it was great.

d: I keep trying to see if people can see like, can you tell it’s embossed?

R: [laughing]

K: [laughing]

R: So there’s lots of stages. I don’t want anyone to feel pressured to generate oracle coins right out of the gate.

d: But I’d buy them.

R: But dave’s ready to buy them, along with your band t-shirts. [chuckling] And if you want inspiration, just check out the Kickstarter stretch goals for Neon Hemlock, the tie-in merchandise for the anthologies that he does. And it’s always nice and cozy to think of a publisher that is enjoying the stories as much as the readers will, and feeling inspired by them to create stuff, and then having the authority for that to be official stuff is also really cool. But yeah, an author, a publisher, small press -

K: It’s very doable. It just depends on how much you wanna do.

R: How much you feel comfortable doing what you’re excited to do, and if you’re not excited by a thing I would say don’t do it.

K: Yeah. Definitely. ‘Cause it’s not gonna get better once you start.

R: And it’s not cheaper if you don’t love it.

d [chuckling]: And like I said, if anyone ever has questions about how to get started and wants to reach out, I’m happy to at least give you the initial walk-through.

K: Well along those lines, dave, where can everyone find you?

d: Neon Hemlock’s at neonhemlock.com, and also just neonhemlock all one word at all the socials. And then my personal Twitter would be, it’s SlickHop. S-l-i-c-k-h-o-p. Oh and I’m at dave-ring.com.

R: So thank you dave so much for coming on!

d: Thanks for having me.

R: And all those links will be in the show notes in the transcript and everything.

K: Check out dave’s upcoming projects, ‘cause Rekka is in a couple of them.

R: That’s not the only reason to do it though. There’s a lot of people - I am -

d: [laughing]

K: Absolutely not the only reason.

R: I am thrilled to be on this table of contents. It’s a very good table of contents.

K [overlapping]: [laughing]

R: And the oracle deck I cannot wait to hold in my hand, I cannot wait to spill it out over this bandana which is actually an altar cloth, and flip that coin, and all the good stuff. I am really looking forward to seeing all these things that you’ve teased on camera in person, and I can’t wait to see how you’re gonna top it for the next anthology!

d: Aaaaaah! Pressure!

K [overlapping]: [laughing]

R: Well with the 3D figures that you’ve already -

d: These are secrets! No one tell anyone, that’s a secret.

R: Okay we won’t tell anyone, we promise.

d: [laughing]

K: Everyone who listens to this, you’re not allowed to tell anyone.

d: Shhhhh.

R: Forget everything you heard. Except the good advice.

K: Yes.

R: Alright.

d: And maybe my website.

R: Yes. dave-ring.com, neonhemlock.com, and, hey! neonapothecary.com while you’re out there.

d: True.

R: Give that chandler his due.

d and K: [laughing]

R: We will have a new episode in two weeks, and in the meantime you can find us at @WMBcast, you can find us at Patreon.com/WMBcast, and you can leave a rating and review on your podcast apps because we basically exist to breathe those in and smell the scents and not be creepy about it at all.

K: That’s a candle we need.

R: Rate us highly please, and we will talk to you next time. Thanks everyone for listening!

Tuesday Aug 03, 2021

Episode 66 - Tropes (Yay, tropes!)

Tuesday Aug 03, 2021

We hope you enjoy We Make Books!

The Dancing Plague of 1518

Mentioned in this episode:

MICE quotient

The House of Untold Stories

storyenginedeck.com/demo

deckofworlds.com

Peter on Twitter and everywhere

Transcript (by TK)

Kaelyn: We’re talking about tropes today, which is something that I think a lot of people hear spoken about in a negative context: falling back on using too many tropes, or stories following really common tropes.

Rekka: And we don’t appreciate that kind of shaming.

K [laughs]: No, we certainly do not trope sh--see this is gonna be a problem because I was doing research for this and the word ‘trope’ is difficult to say over and over again.

R: Trope, trope, trope, trope, trope.

K: It’s, what do they call that, when a word becomes a sound? Semantic satiation.

R: Yes.

K: Yes. The word ‘trope’ has become more of a sound to me and it’s sort of lost meaning [laughing] at times but--So quick definitions, there’s the actual word ‘trope’ comes from Greek, because of course it does, it all does--

R: You mean it isn’t a contraction of tightrope?

K: It should be, that would be so much better.

R: [laughs]

K: A literary trope is using figurative language, like words, phrases, images, for artistic effect. So there’s a bunch of different kinds of tropes that fall under literary tropes. Things like metaphors, irony, allegory, oxymorons; those are all considered tropes. Hyperbole is another good example of that, really over-exaggerating. The way this came about was, apparently, because it is Greek and it’s from Greek theatre, of course, ‘to alter, to direct, to change, to turn’--all of these translations kinda line up with that, but they’re considered an important element of classical rhetoric. Especially in Greek theatre where it was very dialogue-heavy, and so you had to sort of use all of these words and everything to paint a picture to explain to the audience what was going on. All of that said, we’re not really here to talk about literary tropes today. They’re an important story-telling device, though, and they’re something that is considered, I would say, necessary to higher literature and writing and if you’re panicking going ‘oh my God, I don’t know all of this stuff’--well the thing is you’re probably doing this anyway and not realizing.

R: A lot of writers don’t come from writing backgrounds and don’t know the terms for the thing, don’t stress too much about it.

K: We’re talking today primarily about story tropes. I think a lot of times you’re gonna encounter this in a negative light. It’s a frequent criticism I feel like that’s leveraged especially against fiction, especially against fantasy and science fiction books and writing; in some areas of fiction it’s actually celebrated.

R: Right.

K: You pick which trope you’re gonna write.

R: You cannot proceed without mentioning the other half of that, which is that some people are like ‘Okay, I pick my books based on the tropes I wanna read about.’

K: Yes.

R: Like, ‘Where’s my time travel?’

K [laughs]: Yeah. We wanted to talk about why that is. We wanted to talk about what story tropes are, and why they’re not necessarily as bad and, in our humble opinions--

R: Not so humble.

K: --not so humble opinions, as everyone thinks they are. So, definition: what is a story trope? It’s a commonly used plot or character device, essentially. A story trope is something that shows up in literature and stories over and over again, to the point that it may actually be a subgenre within a broader genre.

R: That’s not to say it is an entire plot of a book that shows up over and over again, like the Hero’s Journey is not necessarily a trope.

K: No.

R: The smaller pieces of plot or character might be the trope. Like the farmboy would be a trope.

K: Yeah, the farmboy is a trope. The surprise hero is a trope.

R: Prophesied one.

K: Yeah, the prophesied one; time-travel to go back and reset the future, that could be a trope. The noble outlaw--

R [overlapping]: Right.

K: --is a good trope, the secret relative, the-- All of these elements and story parts that are things you just see all the time in books. So if you’re going ‘well, I like those’--

R: Right.

K: Like yeah, of course you do!

R [overlapping]: Yeah.

K [laughing]: That’s why they’re popular! That’s why these keep coming up. Anything from like, a secret legacy or an unknown lost child, unfound powers that suddenly appear at just the right time, or anyone being secretly special for some reason.

R [overlapping]: [giggles]

K: But these are part of what make stories fun. They’re not the larger plot, they’re the elements that make up the characters and the plot.

R: And you can use them like spice in a recipe--

K [overlapping]: [laughs]

R: --to come up with something that is entirely your own but tastes familiar and pleasing.

K: Yeah. Now obviously, different genres are going to have different tropes that you see recurring in there. So before we get into why tropes are good, let’s talk a little bit about why they’re frequently seen as a negative.

R: I have feelings about this.

K: Okay.

R: I think they’re frequently seen as a negative because if you come to lean too heavily on tropes, they can make your story feel either derivative or predictable.

K: I was gonna say contrived, yeah, but same.

R: Don’t you ever say that about one of my stories, Kaelyn.

K: I would never say that about one of your stories. If you’re leaning too heavily on tropes, if you’re just pulling things that you know are popular or cool things you read in other books that you went like ‘oh wow that’s awesome, I wanna write something like that,’ you’re almost not writing a story. You’re putting together a sequence of events and characters that you liked from other things.

R: Is that fanfiction, is that what you’re implying?

K: Ohhh, oh, there’s a--God, I’m not ready to wade into that question! [laughs]

R: But we should touch on the fact that tropes are major fanfiction fuel. Sometimes that’s the entire point of the piece, is that ‘take this trope and apply it to this IP that I love.’

K: Yeah.

R: In that case, that can be the goal. To be, not that contrived but obviously, specifically derivative--not in the negative sense of the term, but like you’re writing fanfiction, it is derivative of this IP, and you’re applying this trope to it because you just think that would be fun. So people can have fun with it.

K: Absolutely.

R: And not for the right reasons, but it might feed into this impression that tropes are derivative or contrived.

K: I think also it goes to storytelling abilities. If your entire book is just laden with secret Targaryens and lost bloodlines and magic powers nobody knew about, chosen ones and prophecies and it’s just the entire story is that, it’s probably not a great story, because it doesn’t sound like there’s a lot of room in there for character development and arcs and intricate and original plots.

R: Having said that…

K: Or, wait, other direction: it may be way too complicated. Because that’s a lot of stuff to juggle.

R: Well there’s that, yeah. Having said that, I don’t think you could say that there is a restrained amount of troping in something like Gideon the Ninth.

K: No. No, absolutely not.

R: So it can be done.

K: Here’s the thing. That story is set in such an original setting with such original characters, in original worldbuilding and magic system if you will, that I think it more than makes up for all of that. That’s just my opinion, ‘cause you know Rekka and I can’t get through an episode without referencing Gideon the Ninth and using that as an example of--

R [overlapping]: I think there’s one or two.

K: [laughing]

R: But specifically when you talk about things that are trope-based, or fandom-based, I think you have to acknowledge that there is always an exception to this ‘be careful around fanfic,’ or ‘be careful around tropes.’ Like ‘don’t put too many in’--or! Put them all in!

K [laughs]: It’s I think a matter of knowing how to use them. I don’t think a lot of writers set out with the intention of ‘I am going to write to this trope,’ it’s just something that happens.

R: Although I think a lot of tropes have inspired anthologies. ‘I want this kind of book, I want an anthology full of that kind of story.’

K: Yeah.

R: And it’s one or two tropes smashed together, or it’s a trope applied to a certain genre or character type. I think it’s happening a lot, where people are looking for a way to find joy. And tropes really are like candy.

K: So let’s talk about that. Let’s talk about why tropes are good, why these things that show up in every story show up in every story--it’s because they’re fun!

R: It’s also really good marketing.

K: Yes.

R: It’s a lot easier to come up with comp titles when you’re pitching a book if everybody’s drawing from a fairly reasonably sized pool of tropes.

K: Let’s be clear here. These things can go in cycles. I remember a few years ago everyone was retelling or reinterpreting old fairy tales. I felt like that was just something I saw all the time. I will call that a trope, more or less, that is something that speaks to a specific reader and something that somebody’s gonna wanna pick up, like ‘oh well I really liked when this person did it, I’m gonna try this book now as well.’

R: So that speaks to what you said earlier about them becoming like a niche genre.

K: Yeah, absolutely. Young adult fiction, especially within science fiction and fantasy, I think is constantly at the mercy of whatever trope is popular at the time. YA definitely fell to the fairy tale retelling trend at some point; YA books with a central character, usually a young woman or older teenage girl, who was not necessarily a prophesied champion but has to save everyone on her own even though she doesn’t want to; science fiction, there’s everything from time travel to artificial intelligence to very specific kinds of space battles and things, but! It speaks to a certain reader.

K: There are these things that create these subgenres, and that’s really helpful for readers, because I think what we’re skirting around that nobody wants to say is, you don’t want to put readers in a position where they’re just reading the same story over and over, but I know a lot of people who just like to read the same story over and over. People who are very into romance novels.

R: There’re definitely a set of tropes that romance novels have to pick from, just like there are tropes that other genres have to pick from, and when you read a book that you really love, and romance often tickles a specific audience, they want more like that. Think of the first Thor movie where he tries coffee and he says “I like this beverage. Another!” and smashes it down on the floor--

K [overlapping]: Yes! [laughs]

R: People will smash their books down on the floor and demand another because they read through it so quickly and it was exactly what they wanted, and they want to feel that feeling again. Just with new characters.

K: I’m gonna qualify all this by saying none of this is a criticism of the romance genre. Romance writers a lot of times write to specific tropes: the marriage of convenience, or the marriage of ‘we didn’t know each other beforehand but someone found this legal document that our families betrothed us’--

R: Or a fake marriage--

K [overlapping]: Yeah.

R: --that turns into a real marriage.

K: Co-workers to friends to lovers type thing.

R: Only one bed.

K: Yes, exactly, exactly.

R: These are by the way coming into genre fiction, science fiction and fantasy--

K [overlapping]: Yup.

R: Where romance is becoming more welcome in the books.

K: Yes.

R: Actual romance, as opposed to ‘you are a buxom babe who stowed away on my spaceship therefore we are a couple.’ The depth of character is now allowing for these tropes to trickle in as characters get to know each other in a more interesting way, and less classic pairing-off.

K: I’m sure most people listening to this know or probably even a family member that just obsessively consumes romance novels. I think back to my grandmother and my aunt having stacks of those mass market paperback ones that all have like, essentially the same cover just different backgrounds and clothes.

R: Hey look, when we talk about your cover art, you need to look at what your industry in your genre is--

K [overlapping]: Yes, absolutely!

R: --putting on the shelf and you want to communicate that you are making the same promise to the reader. So you have very similar covers in romance, ‘cause there’s only so many ways to be austere while still posing two characters together.

K [laughing]: I would say that the two genre groups of readers that will most vivaciously consume media are hard military SF and romance, who will just tear through these books and stories, which is fantastic. I have friends that will read at least one, possibly two, romance novels a week. A lot of them do the Kindle Unlimited.

R: Yup.

K: Because there’s a lot of romance novels on Kindle unlimited.

R: Well the two systems kinda fed each other.

K: Exactly. But, they have their tropes that they like. Forced into a marriage of convenience, or stranded on an island somewhere.

R: Those are the good ones.

K: Yeah. [laughs] And Kindle will very helpfully keep recommending more and more of those to you, and I don’t want anyone to leave thinking I’m putting down those readers for just wanting the same thing over and over again. Books are there to give you comfort and to spark joy and interest, and if that’s what you wanna read, if that’s what’s making you happy, then that’s what you should be reading.

R: Right. And in that case, tropes are very very good.

K: Tropes are incredibly helpful.

R: And they’re a marketing tool; the people producing the work, they know that their readers like this trope, so an entire world where that trope is kind of central to what’s going on is going to delight people.

K: Something that I see a lot now, and especially with submissions I was seeing this, was a really hard and concerted effort to avoid tropes. And it’s hard to write like that sometimes. Don’t get me wrong; there are books out there that are successfully doing it, that are coming up with really original stories. That said, I don’t think it’s possible to write a full-length novel without having at least a handful of tropes in there.

R: Plus, if it’s successful and it’s original, then someone’s going to mimic that.

K: It will become a trope on its own, eventually.

R [overlapping]: And it becomes a trope. I mean this is where tropes come from, they are not fully forged in the heart of a star.

K: [laughs]

R: Y’know, they’re a process of people recognizing a thing they like in a book and making sure it’s repeated. That’s exactly what’s going on, so you come up with a story that’s completely original and you’re so proud of it, well, maybe you get to claim being the first, but you’re not going to get to claim being the only for very long.

K: Tropes go back to basically the genesis of human writing.

R: Mhm.

K: I mean, we consider the Epic of Gilgamesh to be the oldest more or less complete epic story written down, at this point. It’s very clear, if you’ve ever read it, that even though we don’t have anything that came before that, there’s elements of the story that were just commonplace storytelling devices of that time. There’s other parts of it that then pop up in later epic tales that it’s impossible to tell well, was this influenced by the Epic of Gilgamesh, or was this influenced by common storytelling tropes of the time and the Epic of Gilgamesh just happens to be the one that lasted the longest that we still have?

R: Right.

K: If you ever look into the literary history of Robin Hood, Robin Hood as we know him today did not start off like that.

R [overlapping]: Right.

K: He was just like a straight up highwayman.

R: Bandit, at some point yeah.

K: Bandit, there we go. He regularly kinda killed people to get their money. But, the character evolved as storytelling tropes evolved. We went from Robin Hood being just a lawless bandit who’s funny and laughing while he’s doing all of this to, no no he’s actually the son of an earl who went off on the Crusades and came back and he’s stealing from the rich and giving to the needy. Yeah Robin Hood was just straight up stealing originally--

R [overlapping]: Wow.

K: --in all of these. [laughs]

R: Until suddenly he wasn’t.

K: Until suddenly he wasn’t!

R: And someday in the future, those tropes might change, and the story of Robin Hood would be told differently, and everyone would think that was the best version.

K: There’s actually a lot of what we would probably think of as ‘modern’ tropes that show up in medieval European literature. The special chosen one is very tied to Arthurian legend, which again, if you ever wanna try to put that together, go and--good luck.

R [laughing]: You figure that out, we’re not doing it for you.

K: No [laughs], no. That’s another good example of the evolution of these tropes. And then there’s actually like conflict and everyone was writing different versions of Arthur but because there was no printing press at the time, and there certainly wasn’t any form of mass communication, there’s all of these different versions of what virtues and what values they wanted to highlight in Arthur, based on what was common storytelling at that time. I think that there is this push to write something no one’s ever written, and the thing is you’re never gonna do that.

R: And maybe it’s not even something you wanna aspire to do.

K: No, and it’s okay for authors to write a story based on the story they wanna tell, not based on like, ‘I need to be the most original writer in the history of writing.’ That said, there are definitely readers out there who are always looking for something they’ve never seen before. Maybe you can write one of those! But, it’s still going to have tropes in it.

R: Yeah.

K: They are inescapable. They are inevitable.

R: Yeah, the level of trope that you include might go up or down, depending on your story, but. Don’t revise your draft and like strip out everything that was fun at the time, just because you’ve seen it before.

K: Rekka and I are obviously coming from a place of primarily Western-fueled literature.

R: Right.

K: Y’know, if you get into different parts of the world, different storytelling traditions, they will also have their own tropes. [laughs]

R: Yeah, they’re not gonna be the same tropes, so if you wanna totally wow a Western audience just go borrow someone else’s tropes.

K: Prophecy and chosen one’s just all over the historical literature, there’s mythical places and people with secret lineages, I think that’s something you’re gonna come across no matter what, because uh. Almost like humanity just really enjoys those facets of storytelling. So. But yeah anyway, when I would get submissions sometimes that I could tell there was a writer that was just trying to be really really original, to just stay away from anything that may have been done before. One of the things I always thought was, “I don’t know how I’m going to sell this to anyone.”

R: Right, ‘cause what do you compare it to?

K: Yeah, that’s not necessarily a dealbreaker. But it does make things very difficult. Because if you’re trying to describe something in the context of ‘well do you like this thing? You may also like this’--

R [overlapping]: Mhm.

K: --and you’re not able to do that, it’s hard to sell a book.

R: Right. Exactly. And that’s how the conversations always start, you got the elevator pitches, you’ve got the comp books. And those are the quickest way to get people’s attention, and now you’ve cut yourself off from that.

K: Yeah exactly. That said, nothing wrong with trying to be original. Just be aware it could be, depending on how original you’re going, it could be a little bit of an uphill battle. Again, I will use Gideon the Ninth as a weird pitch--

R [overlapping]: [laughs]

K [laughing]: --for that book, ‘lesbian necromancers in a broken down palace in space,’ and don’t get me wrong, that definitely piqued my interest, but you can see how that might not be everyone’s cup of tea.

R: And if it’s the first original book to present this--

K [overlapping]: Mhm.

R: --to a major publisher, they’re going to say, “Who do we put this on the shelf next to? Where do we market this? We don’t use these tropes.”

K: Yep.

R: “How do we do?” Y’know?

K: [laughs]

R: It takes a brave publisher to try something new, even if that new thing is built out of all these amazing fantastic fun tropes.

K: Yeah, exactly.

R: So you can be original, and still combine all these tropes, and just do it in a way that makes people go, “Sorry, what? Say that again?!”

K: That’s kind of one more thing that I would like to talk about. We skirted around Gideon the Ninth--

R: I don’t think we skirted around it.

K: Well--is just trope after trope and I said yeah, but it’s very original in everything else. So if you have sort of what you’d think of as like ‘ugh is this story too cookie-cutter, is it too predictable and too tropey?’ the thing you need to then consider is, alright but everything else I have in here, the worldbuilding, the characters, the technology or the magic system, is that original? You can make up for a lot by having a really original, engaging world that this is set in, and writing really great characters that we’re cheering for and boy do we really want them to be the long-lost secret half-sister of the wizard--

R: Right.

K: We’re just cheering so hard for her, I want for her to have magic powers. So-- [laughs]

R: Especially if you start to lead toward a trope, and you don’t deliver on it, your readers are going to be pretty upset with you.

K: Or maybe they’ll go, ‘wow that’s awesome. I wanna write something like that.’

R: And then it becomes a trope again.

K: Exactly.

R: Alright, is there anything else tropey to discuss?

K: They’re an endless cycle.

R: Get your innertube and just jump into the lazy river of tropes, and--

K [overlapping]: [laughs]

R: And enjoy, just come around again and it’ll be good. Just write your story.

K: Yeah.

R: If it’s got tropes in it, that’s cool. If it doesn’t, that’s cool. It will soon.

K [laughing]: And they’re not lazy, let’s be clear!

R: They’re not!

K: No, yeah--

R: But that’s what they call it at a theme park when they jump in with the innertube--

K: No no I’m just, yeah.

R: Okay! So, tropes are good. If anyone tells you otherwise just take your book somewhere else. Someone wants them. They want them very very badly.

K: Also, being constantly rejected and not seeing the brilliance of a character is a good trope too.

R: Yes. And, going for the tropes of podcasting, you can find us online @wmbcast on Twitter and Instagram, and also at Patreon. And if you would be so kind to leave a rating and review, we would love to read it on the air. You could also ask us questions at any of those social media--

K [overlapping]: We love questions.

R: --accounts. That can feed a future tropey episode. Or maybe not tropey, I don’t know! We’ll find out when you ask us questions. Thanks everyone for listening and we’ll talk to you in two weeks!

Tuesday Jul 20, 2021

Episode 65 - The Story Engine with Peter Chiykowski

Tuesday Jul 20, 2021

We hope you enjoy We Make Books!

The Dancing Plague of 1518

Mentioned in this episode:

MICE quotient

The House of Untold Stories

storyenginedeck.com/demo

deckofworlds.com

Peter on Twitter and everywhere

Transcript (by Rekka, uncaught mistakes by Temi)

[Upbeat Ukulele Intro Music]
Rekka:

This is We Make Books, a podcast about writing publishing and everything in between. Rekka is a published Science Fiction and Fantasy author, and Kaelyn is a professional genre fiction editor. Together, they'll tackle the things you never knew you never knew about getting a book from concept to finished product, with explanations, examples, and a lot of laughter. Get your moleskin notebook ready. It's time for We Make Books.

Rekka:

Peter, I'm going to have you introduce yourself—because I completely failed to have you pronounce your name for me before we started recording—and tell us how you came to stories.

Peter:

Yeah. so my name is Peter Chiykowski, or at least that's how I say it. And I write, I illustrate I do some graphic design. I've designed some creative tools for writers and artists and storytellers. And I do create content for tabletop RPGs. And I write songs as well—Um mostly like comedy styled songs. But I do, I do a bunch of things creatively. And I would say that story has been a very big link between them. And definitely one of my passion areas is looking at how different creative disciplines and different like creative techniques and skillsets can combine to create story in different ways or to tell stories in different ways. Or even if like you're not doing something multimedia and you're only working in your one medium, how learning from other mediums gives you more tools for telling stories.

Peter:

And I always find that really exciting. But yeah, I think like my, before I was writing anything as a kid, I loved role-playing games. I remember there was this sort of very improvised six-sided die-based game that my friends and I would play in at recess in like grade three that was, there were no rules written down. I don't think it was based on anything, but I do think that we, one of our dads had played D&D and had somehow rubbed off the concept of like rolling dice to tell a story and telling a story collectively. And there was no table top because we were not at a table. We were like out on the playground at recess, but we would like bowl these dice across the entire playground and then run and see what the number was and the story would evolve from there.

Peter:

And it was all kinds of silly fantasy adventure stuff. That's the first time that I remember like really getting hooked into telling the story and getting excited about collaborative storytelling. And then it's all been downhill from there. Once, once, once tabletop roleplay gets its hooks into you you, you get, yeah, you look for any avenue to tell stories. So I've done everything from like poetry to short fiction. I've written campaigns for tabletop RPGs, like Ember Wind. I wrote a bunch of poems for a video game. That's now unintended switch called Fracter. We were trying to tell story, but also give clues for solving puzzles in this like existential platform or game, called Fracter. And I've just kind of loved playing in the story space and finding different ways to tell stories. Yeah, and that's kind of the weird mixed bag of experiences that I, I come to story with, but it's such a, such a passion area for me.

Rekka:

It does seem like you're absolutely perfect for the topic that we're going to talk about today. You're the perfect person to put this together, and that is the Story Engine, which is almost a role-playing game, almost a multiplayer game.

Kaelyn:

I was trying to describe this to somebody recently and I couldn't. So maybe you can.

Rekka:

Yeah, well, let's, you're the perfect person because you've probably seen all the marketing. If you didn't create it all yourself for the Story Engine, what is it? And how did you conceive of it? Like, did it come out of a need or did it come out of a like 10 minute space of time where you weren't actually doing something else? Cause it sounds like you're as busy as we are.

Peter:

Yeah. Yeah. I definitely wear too many creative hats and I jump from project to project, but Story Engine was something that was definitely, it was definitely filling a need that I had. I write a lot of micro fiction. Like one of my more consistent projects I've worked on is called the shortest story and it's basically, I call them postcard stories. They're stories that fit on postcards. And I actually format them in like a, as like a four by six style postcard, but it's text over an image. And it's meant to be like a little pocket universe that you, you read something from, or like a, a story that's almost an alternate life or a path you never took in your own life. That's that your you get to read. So I called them like post "postcards from alternate worlds" or "postcards from impossible worlds" is kind of like the tagline for that project. And what I was finding, I used to write longer fiction. I used to write poetry and longer fiction and submit to journals. And when I was really getting into the grind of like trying to become a creative full-time and I was working a full-time job, and then also trying to do comics on the side and publishing there was just like, I, it was so hard to maintain enough energy and to find inspiration. And there was so much pressure on the rare pockets of creative time that I would find that I'd often block myself out from creating by feeling like I'd have to optimize this hour and a half I have before work. There's so much pressure cause like maybe I won't have time for another week and I would freak myself out by, by putting that pressure on it.

Peter:

And it took a lot of joy out of the creative process. And I found that I was having less and less time to create longer projects as a result, like even long short fiction, like anything longer than a thousand words. So I started creating micro fiction. And this was amazing for me because it meant that I could like pick up a project or pick something up and put it down an hour and a half later and feel like I've created something that stands on its own. That's like a contained creative ecosystem. And that I feel good about it and I can share that with people. And what I found is that I was getting a lot of the ideas from, for stories, from a combination of looking up like publicly available free-for-use photography.

Peter:

So I would, I would see an image and the image would start something in my head. And then sometimes it wouldn't be the image. It would be like, I'd have a sense of a conflict coming in as a story seed in my head that like, oh, I want to have a story about somebody who has to choose between like a friend and like a dream that matters to them. And that would be kind of the story seed or it would sometimes cement like the idea of a particular character. Like I'd love to do a story from the perspective of like an entomologist, like suddenly all of an entomologist in my head. So I was paying attention to what was inspiring a lot of these stories seeds in where a lot of the stories were coming from and trying to think like, well, how can I create a tool that would help other people find stories, seeds, or build their own stories, seeds from the parts that speak to them?

Peter:

And that's when I started playing with the idea of a story prompting deck and, you know, it's not the first story prompting deck. There's, there's many of these tools out there and people create them in different ways. But I wanted to create something that was really open-ended because I find that with a lot of writing prompts, they're really interesting, but sometimes the prompt is so closed as a system, but it doesn't really give you room to create your own idea. It's just kind of there to see, like, what's your take on this? And that's great, but it's hard to generate a lot of, like, it's hard for those ideas to be reusable. If the card has a really closed system where like the only thing you can do with it is this. Then once you've gone through 60 cards, the deck is is not obsolete, but like you've tapped it out.

Peter:

And that's like, great from a marketing perspective, because then you can sell someone the next deck, but I really wanted to create something that was like, you could just keep using it forever. And the creative force behind it was not the idea of putting the cards, but using the cards as a space for someone to create their own idea or bring their own idea to the spread. So from there, it was basically like mixing a bunch of different influences to create a tool that would do this. So like, it was a huge inspiration from tarot. You know, this is a system of cards it's been used for hundreds of years to understand and analyze patterns and have people tell their story or understand their lives in ways that make sense. And that are like interpretable and re interpretable that you can rotate to create new meanings.

Peter:

And like all of that went into the deck. Some of it was borrowed consciously from tarot and some of it was like I realized afterwards, I, oh, that's basically what tarot does. Like the fact that you can combine the cards in different spreads and patterns is like, it was very consciously tarot inspired. And then the other like influence that I like to acknowledge it that I think was really big is basically this one sentence from a Canadian novelist who wrote a lot about story and what a story and Douglas Glover wrote in a book called the enamored night that a story consists of someone wanting something and having trouble getting it. And that's such a simple sentence and I don't, I don't generally like, like reductive definitions of this is what a story is, and this is under, this is what this counts as writing and this doesn't that's, those definitions are often very artificial, but I do think that's one really helpful tool for understanding the anatomy of story and how you can combine these parts and, and slot different things in for who the someone is and what they want and what the trouble is.

Peter:

And if you look at the Story Engine deck, a lot of the w five card types map against the elements in those sentence and that sentence where like the, someone is the agent card, it's that your character and the wanting is the engine card. It's the thing that motivates them. The something that they want is the anchor, usually an anchor card or another agent card. And then the trouble is the conflict card. And then the aspect cards are there to, to layer more detailed or make the story feel like more like your own. So that was kinda the other influence that, that came together to make this tool. But it's, it's hard to explain what it is cause it's very, like, it is a story prompting system, but it's very, open-ended like, you can play it like it's an RPG. You can use it as inspiration for a solo RPG. You can use it to just create character ideas. You can use it to create art prompts. Like it's, it's hard to market a multi-tool because you kind of need to tell people like a simple story about what it's going to do for them.

Kaelyn:

But you did a great job marketing it because this was on Kickstarter and oh boy, did you hit your goal there!

Peter:

Yeah. This, this Kickstarter took off in a much bigger way than I had anticipated. I launched it in, I think September, 2019, and I was blown away by how fast it took off. And I had thought at the time that I was launching like a new collection of my stories and then also, "Hey, this cool tool that went into creating a lot of these stories and that might help you." And very quickly it became like, okay, there's a book there. That's just going to be an add on the main thing was like, people were really interested in the deck and what it could do.

Kaelyn:

And do you have how many booster packs now at this point? 6?

Peter:

Yeah. So the, the, the core deck that, that, that launched off that Kickstarter was one main deck, three expansions and six boosters. So that way people can like dabble with different genres and they can kind of almost make their own like genre cocktails by combining different elements from different genres. And then the latest Kickstarter for my world building deck, the Deck of Worlds that that's introducing three new expansions for the Story Engine and six new boosters for the Story Engine, so that's going to be 12 and six. And the main deck ended up a bunch of expansions for the world building deck. So there's a lot of cards.

Kaelyn:

That is, yeah, that is a lot. Wow. That's awesome.

Peter:

What I tried to do with both those systems is make them so that it's like, it's about how you layer the cards. Like I think the, just the main deck, that main Story Engine deck has 32 billion possible permutations, just, just including the main deck, just in the simple prompt format where you have the five, one of each card of the five cards laid out in a certain order. And so like the extra stuff there in case you want to bring in genre elements, or you want more to work with, but like, I tried to make a system where if you just want the core deck that's gonna like, that should do you for, for, for decades of story ideas, if you personally exhaust all of the possible combinations in your deck in your lifetime, you know, I, I will personally come and bring you an expansion.

Rekka:

Challenge accepted. Well, I happen to have a base Story Engine deck with me, and I was looking through it and looking through the instruction booklet and you're right. Like, there are so many ways that you could do a story with this, lay them out. You were talking about like the tarot arrangements. It's very much like that. The direction that you read your cards in, the way that you layer them, the orientation of them, turning them so that they fit your story more. But I also really appreciate how much of the instruction booklet is, like "throw out whatever is holding you back." And they're also very broad. Like I realized like a science fiction writer and a romance writer could get the same spread and write two very different books. You know, and obviously that was your intention, but it really does open it up rather than close it down.

Rekka:

Like, you know, you hear the story prompt, like, "oh, if you're stuck, make something explode." Well, it, explosion is a very specific thing, but yours might be something like, you know, a possessed assassin walks in kind of thing. Like, and that works in any genre. I mean, like, you know, there's no specificity to these cards, it's that our brains do all the work of figuring out what that means for the way we write, the way we write stories, or the specific story we're talking about. What was the process of narrowing down something that you felt confident enough in to print? Because that's a scary thing for me as a graphic designer also, like when it's time to actually print the thing, you're like, okay, that means no more revisions, you know. How'd you get to that point?

Peter:

Yeah. So I eased myself into it a few ways and I definitely had had help and input. I I had a brain trust that I was emailing with questions usually with more specific focused questions around like like the name for the agent deck versus it could have been called the character deck or like "what are your thoughts and how these come together?" But there were a few people who I handed early prototypes to, and just like, didn't tell them what it was and asked them to just play with it and see what came out and then got their feedback. And then within the specific questions. And definitely I got some really, really helpful feedback, like the entire system of using... When I first conceived it. I only had in mind that basic spread the story seed. That's just like basically the first page of the the guide book now.

Peter:

And it was my friend Cintain, who's done a lot of tarot reading. And who's also a writer who looked at it and said actually this was we were, at the time we were doing like a Skype call or a video call. So I had the deck and he would tell me what to do with it. And he said, "okay, I want you to tell me this card and then this card, and then this type of card and this, and then do the same thing backwards." And he created what is pretty close to now, the circle of fate format. And he's like, "I want to, like, when you give me those cards, I want to play, play with it and like create different spreads and directions." And this is like, you know, tarot, once you get to advanced tarot, creating different styles of spreads can be its own art.

Peter:

And that really blew my mind. And that really opened up like a huge amount of functionality in the deck because it was both like getting to create these different pre-packaged spreads that people could use and then also just trying to teach people to treat the deck as a system where like once you've learned the spreads, what I've really done is kind of given you the basic building blocks for creating your own spreads and patterns. And that's helpful not only because it gets you more use out of the deck, but it also helps you realize that story itself is malleable. Story itself is modular. You can always out a character in switch in a different character and see how that changes the particular resonances of their struggle. Or you can transfer a character's motivation from one object or character to another, and that creates a change in the story or a shift in the story. How all of these elements are things you can play with and have fun. And I think that the reason that it really helps dismantle a lot of what I, you know, we all have theories about what writer's block is and if it's real, what it, whatever it is, it definitely there - people get stuck.

Kaelyn:

It's, it's real. What it's a function of, I can't say, but it is real.

Peter:

Yeah. And I think people come at writer's block for different reasons and, and can solve it in different ways. But I think that one of the things that helps about this tool is that A, it brings a sense of play back to writing and to story development. And B it helps you make choices that, you know, you can undo. Okay. Cause sometimes the hard part, the, the, where you get locked up is feeling like, well, there's so many directions I can go and I don't want to go down the wrong one. And then I see what the deck, so it lets you literally visualize, like here are the choices that I've made about what I'm including in the story and what the story is. And if this one starts to not work for me, I can just chuck that card and replace it or I can rotate the card because this meaning this particular interpretation isn't quite working for me.

Peter:

But if I turn that card 90 degrees, now I have a new meaning that I'm tapping and that's one that I'm connecting with. And it also limits the choices that you're dealing with. You're not dealing with 32 billion story ideas at once. You're dealing with the two to four options per card and making those limited choices that you can always redo. And it, I think it helps people get to the starting line where like, they're just having fun with the story and pass those like really pressuring questions of like, is this good enough of an idea to write about? Or where am I going with this?

Kaelyn:

It's very interesting because in my experience, in my encounters, you know, with writers over the years, I, the, again, I hate the binary. I hate, you know, it's this or this, but like, I will say like there's two dominant large groups that I come into contact with people who have a story in their heads already that they just really want to write and people who really want to write, but don't have a story. And they each are coming across like gonna come across their own problems, their own conflicts in that. But you know, the people who are like, like you and Rekka like writers and creatives and are, you know, constantly coming up and generating new ideas. What I really liked about this deck was like, I think every, I think like to the outside world, we hear like, oh, a writer, like, you know, will they just come up with a story and then they write it. It's like, that is not how this works. And what's really cool about this deck is kind of, you can take all of those elements, break them out into pieces that you can see, move and shift them around, modify them, tweak them to, you know, where you want it to go. And could you do this on a piece of paper? Sure. But one, it's not as fun to, it's not as organized and three, these are colorful.

Rekka:

I also think there's a certain element and probably not for everyone, but like the hand of fate, you know, that you've been dealt these cards, you've drawn them. And then you feel like this is a challenge that I can rise to as opposed to like, well, that's my crummy idea. Something else would be better.

Kaelyn:

And I think that's why anthologies are such a good thing for emerging or new writers because it gives you something—it's a challenge in some regards. So it's also very good for, you know, experienced writers—but it gives you something saying, I need this. And I think that's one of the things that's so scary about. Just write a novel is it's. So open-ended, it's just

Rekka:

Also long. A long commitment to an open-ended idea that you came up with in silence. Yeah.

Kaelyn:

And it's like, well, what do you want me to write? And so then there's this pressure to go, well, what's popular? What's everyone going to read? Well, by the time you get this written and published, that's not going to matter. So don't worry about that. Okay. Well, what do I like? Well, I like these things. I'm not sure I can write a whole book about that and I'm worried it will ruin that thing for me. So I, it is good to either have someone give you, or in the case of the Story Engine, give yourself direction in a way to organize your thoughts.

Rekka:

And that was one thing that occurred to me was like very frequently when I start getting the seed of an idea, it's a concept; it's a sentence. It's like elements, ingredients, like you said, here are things I like, I want to combine them. Do I have a plot? No.

Kaelyn:

Those aren't important.

Rekka:

Well, eventually you're supposed to maybe have a plot. And what I like about the Story Engine deck is that in your instructions, you say like if you know an aspect or if you're writing in an existing world, there are parts of this. You can lock in place, you can go and dig and find the cartoon to read or write it, you know, yourself or whatever or you just know that it's locked in what you're looking for are the other elements, which create a plot. And that just, I knew the Story Engine deck was for creating ideas, but I didn't realize what it could do for the ideas I already have and getting them to the point where I'm ready to write something with them.

Rekka:

Cause I'll let something percolate for a year or more and just write it, write what I know down so that I don't forget it, but it can take a long time before I figure out how that fits into point A to point B to point C and how many characters and what are their desires and all the things that could be decided for me, or at least inspired for me by drawing a random card and just getting an idea. And now, do I think that writing that story from the story engine would get me the same story that I would have come up with after a year or more of letting a story percolate? Probably not, but it's really interesting. The immediate sense of, "oh, I know what to do with that." When you get a suggestion, like Kaelyn was saying an anthology theme, all of a sudden you're like, "oh. Oh, I know what to do with that."

Rekka:

And a story engine deck really reads to me in a similar way that like what I have put, you know, a, a series of things together, like the cards are going to come out in whatever orientation I choose? Almost absolutely not. You know, unless I'm really being finicky and like digging for the cards I want across the entire thing. And then maybe I'm just drawing out an idea. I didn't know I had, which is also useful. It's really flexible. And I really, I, I I'm really impressed by that. There's a lot, there's a lot of brain in this box.

Kaelyn:

I think that one of the things that is very, as you know—that's exactly it, there's a lot of brain in this box, but really it's just, it's just kind of leeching onto your brain and like, you know, like some little like computer chip, that's going like, "ehhhh, it's a little bit of a mess in here. Let's, let's clean this up." but I think what is good about it is it gives writers a way to provide their own prompts, to, you know, just take things that maybe they wouldn't have considered, but, or it could be interesting, engaging, advancing elements to a story that's sort of half exists in their head already. You don't need to come to this with a blank slate.

Peter:

Yeah. Yeah. You can come with as much of the story as you have formed and work with what you've already got, or you can come with nothing and just it'll lay out some track for you and you don't have to use all the elements of the track that you lay out. You can swap things out, you can ignore it. Like I ignore parts of the prompt all the time, because I just wanted to get started on. I wanted to find something to be excited enough about that I just start writing. And if that's this half of the prompt and not this half, then I'm going to pretend that the card I drew was actually this, cause this works better in my head, but the rest of it, I'm going to use the conflict and I'm going to use the aspect and the the descriptive part. And I'm going to use that the story is anchored in some way on a meal. A meal between two people or something. Cause that's what I drew. But yeah, like I said, like there's yeah, the reason that it works is because the brain, the brain is not in the box. I would, I would counter that and say like, the brain is 100%.

Rekka:

No, I'm sorry. You can't come on our podcast and tell us we're wrong. I'm talking about like the brain that put this together neatly and you managed to get out of the way of the end user.

Peter:

That was exactly. That's yeah. That's exactly the language that I use when I talk about it. It was getting out of the way of people and letting them bring their ideas to it. Like there were early drafts of this that were more focused on like... Like one thing I love about the writing prompts subreddit on Reddit is that there's some really interesting creative prompts that are just like, wow, I never would've thought of that in a million years. But the thing that I have trouble with is that they're always very closed. Like it's almost always like write your version of this highly specific high concept premise. And so there's less mileage to work with there. And I found that I was trying to do some of the, the, like, I want to create a really dazzling idea with the writing in some of the early drafts.

Peter:

And the more I tried to make that work, the more that those ideas couldn't plug very easily into A, like what the reader wanted to do with it, or sorry, what the writer wanted to do with it. The creator wanted to do with it, the end user. The more it made it hard for them to read something into it or bring their own idea to it. The more I realized those ideas aren't working and then the more trouble that those ideas had plugging into other cards and connecting to other cards in an open-ended way that also ended up being what I discarded. So I ended up like scratching a bunch of material that I thought was extraordinarily clever. But that really wouldn't have served the end purpose and like the question that I asked myself now when I'm looking at prompts and deciding like, will this work is is it going to be useful for the writer, for the end user?

Peter:

And is it going to leave enough room for them to bring their own gift basically? Like it's a little bit like button soup, the story button soup, where like someone starts off and like, "oh, I'm gonna make this special soup. The first thing I need is a button and then, oh, hold on. Do you have any carrots? Do you have any...?" And you know, the, the town brings ingredients. And it's very much that, like it's, it's the, the, the deck is a button that gets you started making a soup and it's just an excuse for soup and who doesn't, who doesn't want an excuse for soup? That's my new, that's my new marketing logline. "The Story Engine is an excuse for soup."

Rekka:

Yeah. And the the cleverness is, has gotta be tempting, but the, the terms that you ended up using for example, I just drawing a random card. I have these are the agent cards, the four corners, or the four sides of this card are an introvert, a dreamer, a grump, a wanderer. Those are pretty dry and pretty basic terms. And even so, whatever genre you like to write in, whatever world is, you know, your brain is currently marinating in, you've already got an idea of who each of those four people are, and they're not the same as mine. And that's, that's really nice. And that can not be easy to create that openness, like you were saying.

Peter:

It took a lot of, a lot of rebalancing the cards and the, the, what was going onto the cues. One thing that I found was really important was like some of the play tests that I did early on, some of them were with writers and creative people who could like get a simple prompt and spin out this fantastical universe and they could run with it. And then I would also show it to people who work in science and they would have like a very literal interpretation of what the cards would mean. So I realized quickly that like, while the primary target is writers, there's lots of different ways to use cards. And some people don't want the open ended things. Some people want literal prompts. So for the main deck, especially the prompts are designed to be... So like the agent cards are balanced in a particular way where there's a main, very open-ended prompt. That is the prompt that faces you when the card is in its like neutral position, basically. The cards are meant to not really read as being like this way is up or down, but there is kind of a neutral position. So that that's meant to be the most open-ended generic interpretation on that card. And then the other three around the edges are different facets of that concept. Either zoomed in on, in a more specific detail or blown up in a in a bigger, more exaggerated way.

Rekka:

So the neutral way is the way that has like the little portrait.

Peter:

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So the healer is the generic sense. Whereas a therapist is a very specific expression of, of a healer. So if someone who was being very literal got that card and like, didn't really know what to imagine for a healer, it's too big, therapist gives them a very specific thing that they can work with. We all know roughly what a therapist does and, and that would give you a very literal way to start. And that's, I think for the other card that you drew, I think grump was the thing where like we all, literally we can understand what a grump is pretty literally. Yeah. whereas an introvert it's more generic that gives you a lot more room to operate. A wanderer is a bit more specific and active. So there was a, there was a lot of thought that went into how we balanced the levels of narrow prompt versus broad prompt, especially on the agents for the anchors bouncing those cards is more a function of making sure that every card has a setting, a prop something that's a little less non-literal and more interpretable and that all of those felt thematically linked.

Peter:

So like a prison and a cage and a key are all thematically linked. And it's meant to keep things in a bit, a bit of a tight space so that people aren't, it doesn't feel like they're dealing with a huge scattershot of different ideas at the same time. Like they understand, okay, I'm thinking about introverts. And I'm thinking about what it means to withdraw from people and that's kind of a headspace you're in for the character, and they can choose different ways to express that same thing when the same balancing act went into the anchors. So yeah, again, a lot of the goal was to put my brain power and not into like making the individual cards impressive, but for removing as many barriers to the system, just working out of the box as possible by balancing things. And like the, it was interesting because for the, the world building deck, world building in some ways is a more specific and yet even more broad and open thing to do. Because there's so many ways to build what is a world and what differentiates one area from another, and what, what makes us having interesting, like there's so many different ways you can differentiate a setting and figuring out, figuring out how to balance those cards was its own...

Peter:

Like I had to start again, like none of the lessons that I learned from Story Engine got to be carried over. Like I completely had to start from ground zero again. And and it took, it took a long time to get that one, right. Oh my gosh. I think like Story Engine came together fairly quickly, I think because I had a pretty intuitive model of how I wanted it to work between tarot and that sort of definition of story that has often informed my storytelling choices. But yeah, the world building one, I, that one took so many more iterations to get the balance on those cards. Right.

Kaelyn:

So how did you have to tackle the world building deck versus, you know, the story and character building one? And I know it is more of the first, the first set is more of a story-building, but there's definitely some character elements to it as well. Are you going to do a character building one at some point?

Peter:

I I've thought about that, but honestly, the, the Story Engine does so much character building stuff and it can be, you can, you can do informed choices with it to make so many different types of characters that I don't think there'd be a whole lot to add to it. Like, I, I, I'm not saying no to that, but I feel like the main thing does such a good job of it. And I don't like developing products just to have new products. Like I would really like to give people something that, that adds a ton of value to their creative process. And right now, I don't know how to add enough value to the character creation process that isn't already there in the Story Engine deck. So that's an idea that's like it's in my notebook, but unless I really have an aha moment where I'm like, oh, this is a way to really open this process up for people and I can justify their time and explaining why this is different from this thing I've already made. Then I'll definitely do that.

Rekka:

They need a deck to help you create decks.

Peter:

Oh, now that would, I would get, I would, that would be perfect. I could retire, I could retire young and and just let that work. So the, the, the concept that I'm kicking around right now in my head is an open-ended solo RPG that you play by writing. And so it's meant to be like a, almost a campaign where at the end of it, you have 50 new pieces of writing, inspired by different things. And that might actually use draws from the Story Engine deck to generate the content that you're playing in. But the goal is that you write the scene. So it's like a solo thing. But that is basically as far as I've gotten on developing it is that would be really fun and cool. And how the heck would that work? And I have not I've yet to answer even a single part of that question, but it's kicking around in my head cause the other decks have everything you need to generate the content.

Peter:

And then the goal is to just give you more reasons to write. And also the thing that I think I'm really after with this idea is like the things that make us love RPGs, the things that like, that make us feel like we're advancing and we're developing a character and we're part of a story and we're... You know, also the cool stuff. Like I got cool equipment and I leveled up like all those things that, that make games easy to say yes to would be amazing if we could turn those things toward generating, you know, our, toward pursuing our creative goals. So being able to like hijack some of those, those dopamine button pushes that we get from from games and make that something that benefits the creative process, I think would be really cool. So that's, that's the that was my, my latest dog walk idea that I've been obsessing over, but not letting myself get too deep into because I have I still have a lot to of like just card rebalancing and design exports have to do with Decker worlds. And I, I like to land one plane before I take off with another one. So that's, that's on the back burner, but it's not quite a deck for making decks, but it is a deck for using decks for making ideas. Yeah. Yeah. So that'd be, that'd be interesting to see how that plays it. Yeah.

Rekka:

I haven't seen the world building deck. Is it as broad as the Story Engine in that, like, it would work for somebody writing a contemporary story on Earth and they just needed the situation and that like the community level, as much as it would be for someone like me who likes to write stories where they've never even heard of earth and also I throw physics out the window? So does it work on that broad scale like the Story Engine does and how much of a challenge was it to decide and then cater to ?

Peter:

What the world building deck does is create lore. And as long as you're comfortable with like your lore set in the real world being invented lower, which a lot of us are then that's totally, it works for that. It's not what I designed it for, but it definitely works for that. So it runs on, on six types of cards rather than five for the story engine. Two of those cards are almost for like assembling map pieces. So there's like a drone photography style image of different types of terrain and landscapes for the region deck, which kind of sets up like you're dealing with forest land or river land or wetland or canyons or mountains or beach, like it sets a kind of a train type up for you. And then there's a landmark deck, which gives you specific points of interest.

Peter:

Some of which are I say human-made and human, here's a short form for whoever made it doesn't have to be humans, but are constructed things. And some of which are naturally occurring things. Like when you have like a, a giant rock or an interesting tree or a waterfall. So you can definitely create these interesting dynamic settings using those. And all of the cards in the main deck are things that exist normally in our reality on Earth. And then there's a namesake deck, which basically you, you pair that with either a landmark or a region. And it gives a specific nickname to that area. I find that this is one of my favorite decks because it immediately creates a sense of lore. So you might end up with you draw like a, a creation that really got sunk into my head.

Peter:

Recently when I was playing around with it, it was I think I drew the card arena for landmark or an arena. And then I drew of chimes for the namesake card. So it was the arena of chimes. And for some reason I started thinking about this like a gladiatorial arena where the bones of the dead are hung as like wind chimes, after they fall. And that, I just imagined these rafters all, like, you have this pit in the middle and you have these rafters all around where every time the wind blows through it, and it was set in like a barren area without much wind cover. You just hear that gentle clinking and like the dead are speaking around you and warning you of what could come.

Kaelyn:

Real quick Rekka, because I'm sure when you heard that you came up with something mentally. Cause I did too. And it was completely different from yours. I was, I was thinking more of same thing, kind of like a fighting arena, but full of like strange metal poles and like, you know, the chaos of the like bouncing off of that and like making like the screaming and the clanking of swords, you know, everything with that.

Peter:

Yeah. So the chimes are those active combat sounds. Yeah.

Kaelyn:

Yeah. Well, like also just, you know, like just pieces of metal will be the, you know, naturally occurring or put there sticking up like round sticking up of the ground. So yeah.

Peter:

You could do so much cool choreography with that too. Right. Like the swinging on the poles and like gymnastics.

Kaelyn:

Yeah. Like, you know, and then like of course like picturing like Roman gladiators, where they used to like put, you know, animals and like captured peoples in there and like have them like hunted. I've got like some weird Hunger Games stuff going on in my head now. So yeah. So, no, it's very funny because like you said that, and you went one direction, I went a completely different direction, but they still, you know, are kind of functionally doing the same thing a little bit.

Rekka:

But from the same prompt yes. Which is the perfect example of how flexible this is.

Peter:

Yeah. So that's those, those are three of the decks and those, those kind of create your almost like map pieces and you can assemble different shapes out of these cards by tucking them in different patterns. And you can assemble what I call micro setting clusters, and you assemble the clusters into a world map and you can actually apply a scale to it. You can explore it. And then you can use the Story Engine to furnish that world with your characters, with conflicts, with artifacts and other places of interest. But the other three card types, this was the really hard part because I didn't want to do more than six card types. Cause if you've done more than six card types, you've made something that's just too complicated to use out of the box. And there's so many different aspects of what makes a world interesting.

Peter:

And it was also, it's very different how you furnish a an, uncolonized setting, like a, just a natural setting versus a space that has been either colonized or urbanized in some way. And we're using the impact of, of civilization. So like how, how do you acknowledge all the different ways that land can be used and that people can co-exist and there's tons of them. So what I ended up doing for my mental categories was coming up with an origin deck, which gives you a fixed point in the past which either is how this place was created or a significant event that shaped it or previous use that it had or some function that's, that's an anchor point in its past for the origin deck. And then there's an attributes deck, which is the current day status quo, how the space is used or what it's known for, or what lives there.

Peter:

And then a advent deck, which are current changes that are happening right now that could impact the future of this place. And that category basically past present future is what I think really finally unlocked the worldly aspects because it let me cover so much more material on the cards themselves that way, rather than trying to do like a deck, that's just the politics and a deck that's just the ecosystem at a deck that's just fashion and a deck like that... That's too many decks. What this does is it lets you sprinkle out different types of world, building detail and starting points for prompts. Like it's known for a particular style of textile or it's known for its scholars, or it has an anarchic government system or they worship nature. Like there's so many different things you can bring into that.

Peter:

And those all went into the attributes deck, but it lets you still create kind of a larger sense of narrative for the place that you have. And it sets up your setting as a space for story to happen because it gives you here's where they were in the past. Here's where they are now. And here's what's happening that could change the future. And that advent deck that is that change for the future is such a great entry point for telling stories because it's usually the former of a crisis or a change. And it's something where like a Dungeons and Dragons party could get involved and insert themselves into the conflict and try and do something involving it or where your main characters could. This is their inciting incident, is that there's a new tax being levied on like a staple food. That's a really interesting point for like maybe that's where your character starts to to, to become radicalized and then resisting the government, or it's what inspires them to, okay, well, I'm going to grow my own food or like, you know, there's so many different ways that you can use that as a launching point for story.

Peter:

But getting to that point where I realized that like there are too many different categories of like how to differentiate an area. So to break the categories out, do that as looking at a space across time, and then it lets you cover so many different phases within the deck that took a long time to get there, like so many different iterations.

Kaelyn:

It sounds like it. Yeah, but it sounds awesome. Yeah. I love that. As you know, looking at this, not establishing like a static place and people and culture, but rather like, you know, looking at this, like, what was it, what is it now? What is it going to be?

Peter:

Yeah, yeah.

Rekka:

Kaelyn Is a student of history. So this is really tickling all the right spots for her in that like nothing is fixed when you're talking about a timeline.

Kaelyn:

I was on the train coming back from Long Island right before this. And I've been reading a lot of books about the hundred years of war in England and like the very tail end of it and all of this, these little decisions and machinations that were going into everything and where we ended up that all of this eventually culminates in Henry the Eighth.

Peter:

And that magnificent portrait of him, just....

Kaelyn:

It was funny because I was looking at that portrait. And at some point I'm going to print that out and I'm going to draw in where I think his arms should be and see if it actually lines up. Because I can't tell if the, the idea is like, cause you can't really see the hook of his elbow much. And it kind of looks like his arm is coming out of his rib cage, but at the same time, I'm realizing it could be the angle he's staring at and he's got this giant drapey, like half-cloak thing over him. So maybe it's it was a Hans Holbein the Younger painted that portrait and he was, he was noted for anatomical accuracy. So I don't, I don't think it was just a weird, like, you know, those medieval paintings and sketches in the books where like, you know, a guy seems to have like a leg coming out of his stomach, but

Peter:

Yeah. Or like no neck.

Kaelyn:

Exactly.

Rekka:

Or was riding a snail. I mean, accuracy was their favorite.

Kaelyn:

I, I just love that. It's one of my, you know, speaking of like culture and history and how this factors in one of my favorite things to know is that there were these monks living in, you know, giant abbeys on top of and hills, cloistered from society toiling all day transcribing these things. And they still took time to draw the occasional dick picture in the in the manuscript or, you know, doodle a cute dog that they saw on the side of it. It just, you know, it makes me go like, oh yes, those were people.

Peter:

I one of the expansions for the new world building deck is the lore fragments expansion. And so it's for creating bits of in world lore. It's a very specific deck of here are different types of media that might be created in the process of like just a town existing or a world existing. And then there's a deck of flourish cards, which are additional stylistic challenges that you can add to really inform the thing you're creating, but yeah, marginalia, I love medieval marginalia. I did my masters in medieval literature. And yeah, and I it's like a combination of that and folklore and, and I love this stuff, so definitely there's a card in the deck that's entirely just about like, and it has some weird marginalia in it as one of the flourishes. Cause I just, I I love that concept. Yeah.

Rekka:

Okay. So with the time we have left, I wondered if we could do a little exercise. Like I said, I have my deck lead me through and we'll just, and we'll just do the simple spread because wow. Some of these could get, you know, convoluted. Lead me through creating just a story. I've got, I've got no ideas in my head. What would you have me do with these cards laid out in front of me? And I'll take a picture and we'll post it.

Peter:

Oh, that sounds like fun. Yeah. So I think what I'd do just to set the person up before they get started is to say like, we are going to assemble an idea for a story using different elements that are common to a lot of like interesting stories that have all, all the right stuff in it. And we're going to do that one card at a time. And as we each choose each card, we're going to make a choice about what we want that card to mean and how it might fit into the story. But none of those choices are permanent. We can always hit the undo key and change the cards. And then at the end of this, we'll see what we've got and see how we want to interpret it. Okay. Ubut to start, we're going to find out who our main character is, or who the story might be about. And we're going to draw an agent card with the gold border. And,uwe are going to lay that down face up and we're going to read the four cues along the outside of the card.

Rekka:

Okay. So I'm shuffling that particular deck real quick before I draw anything. Okay. So I pulled one and in neutral position, we are looking at a misfit, which is perfect for me.

Peter:

I love misfit stories. What else do we have

Rekka:

From the same card, those you want me to read the other edges? We have a demon, a monster, and a genius.

Peter:

Do any of those speak to you as like, oh, I'd like to write about that kind of character?

Rekka:

I think I like the more generic misfit, honestly.

Peter:

Misfit. Yeah. Okay. Well then you keep that that cue so that it's facing you and that's going to be our character for now. You can always rotate that card later if you want to change it. But let's find what is motivating this misfit. And let's draw an engine card with the little cog icon and the purple border. And we are going to figure out what might be motivating this character.

Rekka:

I have "wants to let go of" or "wants to hold onto."

Peter:

Do you want to do a story about someone who's trying to move past something like, oh, something or a story about someone who is like something's being taken away and they're holding onto it?

Rekka:

I say the latter. So they want to hold on to.

Peter:

Yeah. So we'll rotate that cue into position. And then we're going to find out what they're holding on to. Now here's a choice that you can make. Usually for the default version, you would draw an anchor card here, which is a, it's going to be like an object or a non sentient thing in the story. If you want, though, you could make it about holding onto another character or letting go of another character in that and then make it a relationship thing instead, and you could draw another agent card. We have that power.

Rekka:

Let's do that. That sounds good. All right.

Peter:

We're going to modify. Like we're already switching up the script a little bit.

Kaelyn:

Yeah. I was gonna say, I, I feel like we're like cheating a little bit where we're getting the brains behind the operation here, walking us through this.

Rekka:

For those of you following along with the MCU right now, we have just deviated from the timeline. So my new agent card is an artist who might be a musician, a writer, or a dancer. I'm going to say dancer through a misfit dancer. A misfit wants to hold on to a dancer.

Kaelyn:

Do they want to hold on to dancing or do they want to hold on to a dancer?

Peter:

You can choose to reinterpret the cards any way you like. I always think— I'm definitely imagining a relationship here, but that's me. It'd be really interesting to have someone who's holding up the dance cause that's important to them and why they're losing access to dance as a thing would be really interesting because it could be about physical changes. It could be about hobby time. There's like, there's a, it could be like a particular version of dance, like a dance troupe that they used to be part of.

Rekka:

Competing for that position in the dance troupe kind of thing.

Peter:

Oh yeah, yeah.

Kaelyn:

Maybe they live in the town from Footloose.

Peter:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I have a, so, you know, the as a historian that, that the whole dancing plague in Strasbourg? I think it was Strasbourg?

Kaelyn:

Yup. Well, it started there, it went other places afterwards.

Peter:

I want to pitch you a, a new movie called "Footless" where I it's this hyper religious town, Kevin Bacon is dispatched to try and ban dancing from the town and end the plague. And it's a reverse "Footloose" and I just think—

Rekka:

And this is what happens when you turn your cards around.

Peter:

Yes, exactly.

Kaelyn:

So maybe they are losing dancing because there was too much dancing and people are literally dying from dancing.

Peter:

Yeah. There's there's there's we have, we have a lot of, a lot of directions we can take it, and everyone can go their own direction with it, which is a lot of fun. I, one of my favorite activities for the multiplayer uses of the deck is that you co-create a prompt and then you write whatever you want out of it, or come up, write down your story, pitch out of it. And just to see like how different the directions can go, or where the areas of overlap are. But let's draw a conflict card next. And this is going to create the, either a challenge to holding on to this. Or it's going to give us a consequence if they do hold onto it, what might happen that's bad. The price to pay.

Rekka:

Okay. Shuffling. Okay. And top card after the shuffle is, "but they will likely lose their life" or, "but they will lose their life's work."

Kaelyn:

It sounds like a dancing plague to me. Lose their life, I mean, come on.

Rekka:

Life's work for sure. Okay.

Peter:

And then just to texture the story out a little bit more, we're going to draw an aspect card, and this is just basically an adjective that we can slap on any of the other cards to give it a bit more texture or definition.

Rekka:

We have harsh shadowy, seductive, or determined. Seems like determined as the dancer.

Peter:

Yeah. Yeah. We could definitely do determined dancer. That's gonna, what I find is that when you draw a an aspect cards, it feels like an obvious choice. That can be good sometimes because it lets you sort of focus in and narrow things down and, and, and lock your idea in, or sometimes what I'll do, if I find like there's a first choice that happens that way, I'll reconsider and see, like, is there something that's more surprising? And that creates something that sticks out a little bit more, and that gives me either a new thing to work with, or I can always like, kind of go back to the thing and be more focused. But yeah, I, every now and then when I get the obvious choice thing I almost always end up sticking with it, but I like to give myself a moment to play with what if I did something that's like harder to work with?

Rekka:

What if you didn't. Uh yeah. I don't know what a harsh dancer would be like or someone who doesn't have time for their misfit because dance is all they care about. Okay. A harsh dancer would be hard to hold on to, I suppose. Okay. So would I draw another aspect card then for the misfit?

Peter:

If you want to, you can the base prompt usually is usually just one of each card or in this case we substituted an agent for an anchor, but I like to encourage people to like, it's kinda like you taste your food as you make it and season it to taste. If you're like, I want, I want to know more about who the other, the dancer, the dancer, I want to know more about this or that. You can definitely go ahead and draw another aspect card and see where you might fit it. And if you end up not with like, not finding a place for it, you can just chuck it. Yeah. Let's do another one.

Rekka:

I'm looking at this one. And I'm saying, what if I switched it? Because you said I can break all the rules. So what if a dancer and we'll say, and we'll go back to determined just for ease of my sentence here. ...Is Trying to let go of the misfit ...but they will likely lose their life implying that like the misfit holds some key, that's going to save them, but they don't want the association with this person.

Peter:

Oh, interesting. Yeah.

Rekka:

And this could be read both directions where the misfit is trying to hold onto the dancer. Yeah. But we'll lose their life's work if they get caught up in this, you know, honest life or something like that.

Peter:

Yeah. Yeah. I like that.

Rekka:

And that's something I noticed is that like a lot of these, you could rearrange it and read it in both directions. And then, you know, since you said you come up with your own spreads, what I thought of since going through the instruction book and, and looking through a few of the cards was like, if you have a heist plot, like, you know you want a heist plot, so you take what you would that be the anchor card? And you have that as the center of a cross, and you have four different parties that are moving toward that object. And then you can put their stories in context, and then you have a nice, big, thick, juicy heist plot of four people in competition with each other to get to the thing. But also what's, what's the thing, holding them back or pushing them forward. It's really neat how all of this is creating stories in my head that are probably going to stick with me even after I like remove the cards from my table. So let me, before I forget, I'm going to take photos of these and then, oh, did you say we, I was allowed to draw another aspect card?

Peter:

Yeah, Let's do another aspect. If you're looking for more, more seasoning let's, let's go for it.

Rekka:

I love seasoning. Ah okay. We have misunderstood, gilded, traumatic, or revolutionary.

Peter:

I'm I'm liking revolutionary for the missed it, because it gives her a reason for it to be hard to hold onto them. Like maybe they are a liability, maybe they're involved in like in creating change. That's like in a good way, but in a way that's disruptive.

Kaelyn:

Maybe they're Kevin Bacon there to stop the dancing?

Peter:

Yes! Yeah. That is, that is, yeah. That's Kevin Bacon right there.

Rekka's Spread from the Story Engine podcast demo

Rekka:

All right. This is, this is a functioning story right here. Like there's no doubt that you could take this and turn it into something.

Kaelyn:

Yeah. And by the way what have we been doing with this for like, I mean, you know, if we hadn't been going off on tangents and interjecting here, this would have been what, about five minutes? So, you know.

Rekka:

Very, very short time, but I think the the, the time you spend thinking about like, which edge of this do I want to show is very valuable. You know, you hear advice sometimes like, "write down your first 12 ideas and cross out the first 11 or, you know, enter whatever number you've heard. And this one, these aren't even initially your ideas, you know what I mean? These, I mean, they're prompts and the ideas you come up with are your own, but it's still like, you skip all the obvious stuff because you don't have the option of the obvious stuff. And like maybe the aspect card is the most obvious thing that you might choose. It's impressive. I like this.

Peter:

One of the things that I really like about using the deck is that it forces me to avoid the choices that I usually make for what fuels the story.

Rekka:

I still got to write a misfit story. You know, like I still have my space pirates, but I never would have incorporated a dancer. You know?

Peter:

Yeah. I have, I definitely have a bag of tricks that I've reached for a little too often as a writer. And so it's nice to have something that forces you to reach into a different bag. I know one of my favorite sort of sentences about breaking creative patterns is when Tom Waits described that like between albums, he would break his fingers because they would always, he'd always end up playing the same sorts of chords or the same progressions. So like one, like he would actually, technically what he would do is like pick up a new instrument and learning that instrument would change the way that he played. But that idea of like breaking your fingers and like trying to make sure that you don't always reach the same way or go for the same things.

Rekka:

To be clear listeners, we do not encourage you to break your fingers.

Kaelyn:

Please don't break your fingers. It makes it very difficult to type.

Rekka:

I think in this case, what would it be changing keyboard layouts, like go from QWERTY to Dvorak or something like that. That would be a way to break your habits of easily using the same words over and over.

Kaelyn:

Pick a genre that you previously had not been as involved in and submerge yourself in it for a, you know, a month or

Rekka:

Whatever the agent who was cringing about us just recommending that their author switch genres, but you just mean reading?

Kaelyn:

Yeah, just, you know, a different style, some different, you know, story elements and things you, you know, so you're not reading and ingesting or watching even. I dunno if you're maybe primarily like a fantasy writer, go binge, watch the entire MCU and, you know, see if you come away with some different ideas after that.

Rekka:

Yup. Or, you know, Leverage now we get an ending. So go binge leverage. There's I would say like, if you tend toward the high literary, like go slum it with some escapist fiction for awhile or something like that. Basically change it up. I love this I'm, I'm, I know Tom Waits is not about to break his fingers, but I'm still very concerned for him. And I feel like I need to call him after we're off this recording.

Kaelyn:

Well, so that was, that was a great idea of Rekka. That was a lot of fun.

Rekka:

It was just a simple layout. Yeah. There are, you could go to town on this and something made me think of the MICE quotient, which I think we've covered here before about milieu, idea, character, and darnit, I've forgotten the E [ed. E is for event], But you, the more of each that you add, the bigger your story is going to get. And so if you wanted to write flash fiction, you could start with four cards, like, you know, one aspect or, you know, keep it really simple. If you wanted to plan out a series, you could really go to town, like laying out an entire, you know, 20-card kind of layout to give you the seed for a much bigger world, and then go get the world building set, and then come back and build something even bigger around that. I was hesitant to use it when I got it, because I'm like, "but I have ideas."

Rekka:

And now I see how even like on a scene by scene level, like what if I, you know, I lock in my character card cause I know who my agent is going to be, but I don't know what the scene needs, you know, I can play around and all this could just be my scene, just like it could just be a flash piece. It really is way more flexible than I thought it was. For some reason, I thought either it was too broad or too specific and I was intimidated by it, but just doing this and, you know, reading through the guidebook to kind of see the possibilities I have a feeling I'm going to be using this a lot more than I expected to, and I'm going to go get that world building deck. Cause I love world building, but I always get intimidated by like what needs to go into this world? Or, you know, do I create it as I need it? I like the idea of the world having a flavor before you set your characters in it.

Kaelyn:

So Peter, if people want to pick this up for themselves, where do they do that?

Peter:

Yeah. So the storyenginedeck.com is kind of the main hub for all things Story Engine. And yeah, all the sets are there. You can try it for free. We have like a print at home demo that you can download that has 12 cards from the five card types so that you can get to see how it works and try it out and make sure it's right for you. So you can go to StoryEngineDeck.com/demo and and get it there. And yeah. And then for Deck of Worlds, just deckofworlds.Com um will redirect you to the Kickstarter page, which has a little button where you can sign up to find out when you can pre-order or make a late pledge because the Kickstarter is finished, but it's not, not the last chance to get in on it.

Rekka:

And it was another very successful Kickstarter.

Peter:

Yeah. That one went that was that was a runaway one. I need to start expect. I was, I need to start planning for, okay. These are we're now at the point where predictably these take off a little faster.

Kaelyn:

This is successful. Yes. Yeah, exactly. That's great.

Peter:

It's a good problem to have, but I definitely, again was like, I was like, oh, this is going to go well, I'm certain of that, but I was not ready for like how fast we were going to pass every stretch goal that I had specifically plotted out. I'd have to start like, okay, we got to we're going to do an app? Never agree to do an app to do an app unless you're certain you're gonna do it. And I agreed to do a very limited specific app that I've already created a version of, so it was not a grasping thing, but yeah. Coming up with ideas to try and keep, literally just keep up with the funding was, was an interesting challenge that I haven't had before.

Rekka:

A good problem to have.

Peter:

Good problem to have for sure. Yeah.

Rekka:

Yeah. Well, awesome. Well, thank you so much for your time, Peter. This was really cool. Now I have to go write this story, apparently.

Kaelyn:

Yeah so congrats, you've distracted Rekka.

Rekka:

Yeah. Do you have anything of your own that you want to bump?

Peter:

Yeah, actually I have a new collection of micro fiction coming out with Andrews McMeel publishing on August 31st, it's called The House of Untold Stories. And it was actually written as I was developing Deck of Worlds. And I think you'll see, like there's a lot of shared DNA between the two projects, especially The book is set up as 50 pocket universe stories that you navigate by actually like turning pages that are doors. So you're literally like going into this house of stories that never made it out into the world. And you open a door with a title on it and you open it and then you're in this little pocket universe of a white page and black text and you read it and then you turn the next one and you're in another holding space with another door and another title.

Peter:

And it was a really fun format to work with. And it definitely was like, you know, Deck of Worlds. I don't think it's surprising. I developed it when I was locked in my house with quarantine. Like it was really nice to be able to imagine these big open spaces and explore them in my head. And the story collection does a lot of that too. It was a lot of like creating a new concept for a world and getting to be there in my head for awhile rather than you know locked in my flat and afraid to go for walks. And yeah, so it's a good, it's a good place to go wandering and arranging with them, with some fun, different like highfalutin world concepts, premises and spaces and stories. Yeah. House of Untold Stories.

Rekka:

Well, everyone, please go check that out. Go check out the Deck of Worlds and the Story Engine. Where can people check you? Well,

Peter:

I I'm @rockpapercynic on, on all the socials at @rockpapercynic.

Rekka:

Thank you so much. Everyone go check out Peter's work and get yourself a deck or three and bring it out the next time you have people over for your safe vaccinated writer retreats. And I think people could have a lot of fun with this and a great way to decompress. Great way to expand. So very cool. And I applaud you, Peter. This was very nice, very cool. Very, very, very, very nicely presented.

Peter:

Thank you very much.

Rekka:

So you can find us at @WMBcast on Twitter and Instagram, also on patreon. And we will be back in two weeks with another fantastic episode and we will talk to you then.

Tuesday Jul 06, 2021

Episode 64 - Writing the Third Book in a Duology with Premee Mohamed

Tuesday Jul 06, 2021

We hope you enjoy We Make Books!

Premee on Curious Fictions

Mentioned in this episode:

Premee Mohamed's website

@premeesaurus on Twitter

Beneath the Rising (Book One of Two!no!Three!)

A Broken Darkness (Book Two of Two!no!Three!)

The Void Ascendant (Book Three of Two????)

These Lifeless Things – 5 Feb 21, Solaris Books (Satellites)

The Annual Migration of Clouds – 28 Sept 21, ECW Press

And What Can We Offer You Tonight – July 21, Neon Hemlock Press

The Broken Earth Trilogy by N. K. Jemisin

Transcript for this episode (by @Betty_Bett_)

Rekka: In episode 58, Kaelyn and I talked about writing book two in a series of three or more. In Episode 59, we capped that conversation off by talking about book two in a duology. And what more do you need to know because that's it. Well, that's the only kind of book two you would write, of course. So, also of course, we are here today with Premee Mohamed, and we are going to talk about writing book three in a duology. So, Premee, you are here because you are now the new expert on this. [laughs]

Premee: I think I would like to become an expert on this. It fell on me like a meteorite.

Rekka: So, why don't we start by having you introduce yourself and talk about books one and two in this duology?

Premee: Let's talk about that. Sure. So yeah, I'm Premee Mohamed. I'm based in Edmonton, Alberta, which is in Canada. And I'm a scientist, and I write short stories and novellas and novels. My debut novel came out in 2020, that was called Beneath the Rising. My second came out this March and was called A Broken Darkness. And I also have three other books out this year. In February, there was These Lifeless Things which was a novella that came out with Rebellion's new novella imprint which is called Satellites. And in July, we're looking at And What Can We Offer You Tonight from Neon Hemlock Press, another novella. And in September, ECW Press is publishing The Annual Migration of Clouds which is a cli-fi novella. So I'm excited about all that.

Kaelyn: So you've been busy?

Premee: I have been busy. It also sounds like I'm a lot busier than I am, but Clouds was written in 2019 and just got published this year. And Lifeless was written in 2017 and had a home, and then it was kicked out of its home and went wandering around for a little while, and then got rehomed. So it's not like everything's been written and published immediately. Publishing is like transit, like sometimes four buses show up at once. [laughing]

Rekka: Yeah, that's a really good way of putting it.

Premee: Yeah, the first book, I wrote actually when I was an undergrad, my first degree. So when I was writing it, I was actually sort of a peer with Nick the narrator. So it starts when he's about 18. And I was about 18 when I started it. And I finished it the year I graduated, and I was 20. And I set it aside because that's what I did with everything I wrote because writing was—is—still my hobby. If I played golf with my friends, I wouldn't go out and tell everybody to come watch me play golf or pay me to play golf or try to get into the PGA or whatever. It was just something I did because I like to do it. And it was a good number of years before there was any evidence at all that I might be good enough to make money off my hobby. So when that became clear, I started trying to publish short stories. And then my friends were nudging me or bugging me, "We know that you've got a trunk full of books. Why don't you try to publish some of them, you could make more money than a short story?" And I was like, "More money than a short story, you say?" Well, everyone has their price—mine is low. So I dug Beneath the Rising out of the trunk and gave it a light polish. And for something that was written when I was 20, it wasn't terrible, I thought. And it was also done; most of my stuff was not done. It just went on and on and on and on and on and on and on and never finished. And it just lost the plot. And this one had the words “The End” at the end. And I was like, "Congratulations, you have been chosen."

Kaelyn: That definitely makes a huge selling point for the book. This one is done. The other ones are in various states of actualization; this one is finished. [laughing]

Premee: Yes, I'm sorry book, you didn't get picked because of your merit. [laughing] You got picked on other grounds. But I thought maybe if an agent likes this, I could interest the agent in something else, something that was good. So I queried with that because it was done. And yeah, got literary representation and got a book deal. And what happened was—so this is why I'm in this situation now—I wrote it as a standalone because I wrote everything as a standalone. I never wrote sequels to anything, especially because nothing ever ended. But I had never written anything that came after a thing. I didn't know how you did it. I'd read a lot of sequels, because fantasy and sci-fi is lousy with series. And I thought it was very nice that other people could do that. And my agent was like, "Well, publishers really like series. So, why don't we pitch this as a trilogy?" I was like, "You know what my dude, you know the business, so pitch it however you want." So, written as a standalone, pitched as a trilogy, the publisher bought two books. So I was like, "Okay, well, that's manageable. I can write one more book. And I know the deadline for that book." So after the first book came out, I wrote and handed in the second book. And a couple of months before the second book was published, so when it had—and this is crucial—when it was already done all edits and was galloping down the road to publication, my editor emailed me and was like, "Sup. So let's talk about a third book." And I sat there like, "Let's talk about a third, sorry, let's talk about a third book? The time to talk about a third book was when the second book was in edits! Because you bought two books, and I wrote you two books. And the ending of the second book is an ending that makes the third book a little tricky along certain axes.”

Kaelyn: Were you shocked by this call?

Premee: I was genuinely shocked.

Kaelyn: Okay.

Premee: It was an email and it was cc'd to my agent. The agent found out at the same time that I did. It didn't come with a contract or anything. It was just a friendly, "Hey, what's up? So, third book, huh? Pretty excited?" I was like, "What third book?" I think this was a case where it's like he was having a conversation in his head and also I was talking along in his head, but we didn't actually have the conversation.

Kaelyn: Look, we're all guilty of that. I frequently do that with my co-workers and friends.

Rekka: It wasn't because it was pitched as a trilogy, and he thought there was a third book planned that you just had? Was that maybe...?

Premee: I think that was the case because otherwise, I am 99% sure that he would have asked me to change the ending of the second book.

Rekka: Right. So he was like, "Hey, Premee knows where this is going."

Premee: Yeah, I don't know. Again, there were some doors shut at the end of the second book. I genuinely think if, during edits, he had been like, "Hey, let's make this a trilogy." He would have said something, to me, during the editing process because we went back and forth twice or whatever for developmental edits and then for the copy edit and line edit. And also we talked on Twitter and stuff all the time. The third book really seemed to just fall out of a clear blue sky. And while I was delighted to have the offer, I didn't really have a third book planned. So I had about a week to basically come up with a plot and then send that back to my editor, with my agent’s blessing because he was like, "You don't have to do this if you don't want, genuinely." So we negotiated out a contract with that and for another unrelated book. So I worked out some kind of a plot, I wrote some kind of synopsis, I just barfed it all out into the page and cleaned it up a little bit and sent it back so that my editor could take it to acquisitions. And came back and was like, "Yeah, here's your new deadline, have fun." I was like "Have fun? Okey dokey."

Kaelyn: That's a lot to unpack there. It sounds like when you wrote all of this and by the way, just for people who are listening, if you haven't read these yet, we are not going to be spoiling anything about these two books, so please feel free to—

Rekka: Except the only spoiler is you will regret it forever if you don't read these books.

Kaelyn: Warning or spoiler?

Rekka: Spoiler, I will come and get you if you don't.

Kaelyn: Advice. Advice!

Rekka: All right, now it's a threat, it's advice, whatever. Read these books. So I read my books in bed at night, it's dark. This was the first book that made me go, "Ah, creepy!" for a really long time.

Kaelyn: Rekka actually texted me and specifically said, "Okay, you need to read Beneath the Rising because I'm genuinely freaked out by it." It takes quite a lot to freak Rekka out, so congrats?

Premee: Good job team, because I never really thought that I wrote horror because I don't read a lot of horror. It's very scary. And I don't really watch a lot of horror movies or TV or anything like that because they're scary. I wanted the characters to be scared. I didn't think people reading it would be scared.

Kaelyn: Scared for them, I was very scared for them.

Rekka: Well, it's very easy to transpose what's happening to a character to yourself when you're reading in the dark at night and you're slightly sleepy. And if you look around the room, there are monsters in your shadows anyway.

Kaelyn: I mean, that's where they live.

Rekka: But I haven't had that feeling at night of that like, "Ooh, I don't want to stick my head above the covers." I haven't had that feeling at night in a very long time. So, good work.

Premee: Thank you.

Rekka: I will say the creepy factor, it was most intense toward the beginning, before you really know what the characters are dealing with. Then of course, as you learn things, things get less scary for some reason like that's how brains work.

Premee: Yeah, cause I think it goes from a horror because they don't know what's happening to more of an adventure story where they're thrust into problem solving mode. And the things that they're solving problems against are scary, but they're also not the biggest problem. I mean, like, for instance, a plane crash is a problem. And I think we should all be discussing how dangerous a plane crash could be.

Kaelyn: Generally, those are considered problems, yes.

Premee: Yeah.

Kaelyn: Okay, so they said, we're going to pitch this as a trilogy, they came back and gave you a two-book contract. So you're going into this going, "All right, this is going to be a duology. I can do a duology. No problem."

Premee: I can do a duology. Yeah.

Rekka: You wrote the first book as a standalone. So, did you change anything about it knowing it was going to be a duology as you were editing?

Premee: Not really, no.

Rekka: Okay. So you wrote a standalone, then you had to write a second one to cap off that duology, and now you have to write a third one to cap off that duology as another almost standalone.

Premee: That was also an issue because A Broken Darkness was the first sequel I had ever written for anything. And I sat there for a month afterwards going, "How do write se..quel? Hang on, maybe I will google.” And when you google it, it basically goes, "Well, you have to plan the entire series starting from the first book. And I was like, "I hate the Google." Okay, what if you get a sequel sprung on you after you didn't expect to write a sequel? So, I outlined something and then I sat there. And I was like, "Actually, this is identical to the first book and has the same conflict and problems." And tossed that outline out. And I think where I eventually ended up going back was studying the first book a little bit. I actually re-read the first book, which was great cause it let me find all the mistakes that I left in it. And trying to pick out not so much like an overarching structure that I could work with, but like some threads that I could grab and pull on hard enough that they would come into the second book. And I think I had left enough at the ends that there was something to pull on. Again, without getting too specific, at the end of the first book, the world has changed quite a bit. Governments have different attitudes, the attitude towards scientific research has changed, the public attitude towards Johnny Chambers and her businesses has changed. Nick and Johnny's friendship has changed, his relationship with his family is damaged, there's a lot of trust issues, there's a lot of opportunity for something to be quite quite different from the first book. Again, that's where I started on the outline for the third book, is, “okay, did I leave enough threads to pull on?” Because I would have liked to have some overarching structure or goal. And when I think of that, what I think of actually is N.K. Jemisin’s the Broken Earth trilogy, which really feels solidly planned and like a trilogy. You can feel that it's almost like a suspension bridge, there's the big structure and then there's things hanging off the structure. And each of those holds up something in that book itself, and also in the next book. And I don't feel like I have that. I just have the hangy things, but I'm working as hard as I can with the hangy things, trust me.

Kaelyn: I have this habit of if I find an author that I really enjoy what they've written, I start stalking them. So of course, I've thoroughly gone through your website. And I very much enjoy all of your posts, but you actually did one about writing the second book.

Premee: Yeah, because that was the hardest book I've ever written in my life. [laughing]

Kaelyn: It's interesting because you're very aware of this. And I think that makes it so much harder because since you are so aware of this, you wrote a finite ending for the second book, that was the end of the story.

Premee: That was the end, yeah. When I think of stories, I do think architecturally, and I think of novels as several things, but a house is pretty common. And I really think that a lot of doors were shut at the end of the story, the house is pretty well locked up with whatever it has inside it and whatever is left outside of it. And I kind of threw the keys into a storm drain. [laughing] Again, without getting too specific.

Kaelyn: It turns out there was a monster in that storm drain.

Premee: It does turn out there was a monster in the storm drain. “I just got—what? Plink! What was that noise? Oh, it was an email from my editor.” [laughing]

Rekka: The monster in the storm drain was the email from your editor all along.

Premee: It was actually, yeah. Analogies are hard. [laughing]

Rekka: No, this is perfect. This is exactly our style of analogy. So as Kaelyn and I have discussed before, when you're writing book two after you've written book one and you think you have a trilogy, you have a nice book one which could be standalone.

Kaelyn: Yeah.

Rekka: And then you take that arc and make it bigger and write that over the next two books, which you would have liked to have known it was time to do.

Premee: Yes.

Kaelyn: It's very common with publishing contracts to get one book with an option for two more. And, yeah, so that a lot of times writers will write it as this could be a standalone, but there is absolutely doors and windows and maybe a missing wall left open so that we can continue to work on and expand the house.

Premee: Yeah, see, I didn't know any of that. And also, after I announced the third book, I had friends pop into my DMs with like, "Congratulations. FYI, same thing happened to me. They bought two books and now they're asking for a third book, but because I knew this was going to happen, I had the third book ready to go." And I'm like, "Congratulations." [laughing]

Kaelyn: “Oh, isn't that so great for you?”

Premee: I'm glad you can't hear a tone in Twitter. Mneh-neh. I'm just going to be under my desk drinking rum. Yeah.

Kaelyn: Okay, so what are you going to do? Did you have more stories set in this universe with these characters in your head or had you just completely written them out of your mind?

Premee: They were actually all in the first book. I had to reach back 18 years or whatever it was to write the second. Because I was like, "Okay, book all done. Have a nice life, you guys." [laughing]

Rekka: Moving on to something new, something shiny.

Premee: Yeah. Turns out that you can go right back to it if people give you money. But we finished the paperwork to absolutely confirm that, yes, you, Premee Mohamed, will be writing a third book for absolute sure in I think February. So the first thing I did was panic for a week and not write.

Kaelyn: That's fair.

Premee: I hid under my desk a little bit with the blankets, which didn't help, but...

Rekka: You have to honor the feelings.

Premee: I had to honor my feelings and just let them run around a bit. And then I crawled back up and looked at what I had sent David [Moore, editor at Rebellion Publishing]. And what that was had been based on the three or four-sentence long pitch that was in the original pitch that we sent to the publisher, which was, "Oh, here's the book that we are pitching to you at this moment. If it's a trilogy that you want, here's a paragraph about the second book." And that completely turned out to not be what the second book was whatsoever. And here's a paragraph about the third book. And that had about one sentence in common. And I was like, "Go past me." So I went back to the pitch and broke it apart into its components, and sorted it into two piles like, "Okay, this pile is stuff that I wrote out of panic and expectation, let's just push that aside. This pile has potential to be part of a novel, let's move those over here." And from that, I just tried to build out on everything that I thought was interesting in the second pile.

Rekka: Okay.

Premee: So, where could this happen? What are the issues? Who can I involve? Who's the bad guy for this component? Who's the good guy for this component? Later on, do they switch places? What's difficult or interesting or what feels impossible about this component? What about this component could be reversed as opposed to how it goes in the start of the book? Maybe it can go backwards later. What's the tone that I want for all of these? What's the vibe that I want for this book? Because the first one I felt had a Indiana-Jones-but-kids vibe. And the second one, Nick is trying really hard for it to be a spy novel vibe. And it's not, it's a bit more post-apocalyptic almost because the apocalypse is happening slowly around them. And people are like, "Oh, yeah, this is weird. I'mma go home and make supper. I don't know that there's anything I can do about this.” I wanted to combine that second pile and the expansion on it which ended up being something like three to five pages or around there, with what I wanted to pull out of the first book and the second book, and make sure that I included in there in some way. And when I was done, I had sort of the mental equivalent of a deck of cards that I could shuffle and try to put together. And from that, I printed that out and marked it up and put some stickers on it and did some drawings, then wrote what I thought was a pretty workable outline for a third book. This heavily on the difficulties in the last quarter of the second book, really heavily from that. So that's how that went. And that is in the process of being written now, not entirely in order, but I know about the 40k mark, somewhere around there. And it's due in September. So hopefully, we can do this. And the nice thing, I guess, about this random third book is that at least I'm working with an editor that I know who edited the first two books. And so if I'm making certain choices or putting people in certain places or opting to have something happen a X time instead of Y time, I think at this point he understands pretty well why I chose to do that and isn't going to put a comment in there like, "Oh, why did this happen?" Because he's like, "Okay, I know why this happened. And now I'm braced in about 75 pages for that to go terribly, terribly wrong." [laughing]

Rekka: It definitely helps that you're not also shuffled between editors for this process.

Premee: It does, yeah.

Rekka: Now, when you wrote that plot outline for book three, did you work on it with your agent at all before you sent it to the editor or you're working directly with the editor at this point?

Premee: Oh, yeah, yeah. My agent was like, "Oh, this is good. I would read this." And I'm like, "Bless you. You say that about a lot of things. Thank you." And she forwarded it to my editor. He's like, "Oh, this looks good. I would read this." And I'm like, "Thank you." Again, you're trying to make money off this so just tell me what I need to fix. And he's like, "No, it's fine. I'm going to go take it to the acquisitions committee, and I'm going to act it out." I'm like, "Oh god!"

Kaelyn: Yeah, can you please record that? I would love to see it. [laughing]

Premee: I think my actual reaction was something like, "Please don't."

Kaelyn: “I don't know if I'm going to be able to look you in the eye again after knowing you acted this out.” [laughing]

Premee: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. But turns out, it worked out and they were like, "We want that third book and we also want dibs on a next book." And I was like, "Well, I haven't got a next book." They're like, "Well, if we give you money, will you write another book?" [laughing] So it turns out that's how publishing works. At some point, you don't have to give them the finished book. They just ask you for a book and they give you money upfront.

Rekka: Once you're inside the secret bunker.

Premee: Once you're inside the secret bunker, I had no idea, yeah. I don't even have a plot for that one, that was just called “untitled fantasy novel.”

Rekka: Now, did you put it in your contract that they cannot ask you for a fourth book in this series?

Premee: I did not.

Kaelyn: Are you sure that this is the last book?

Premee: No, I'm not. They keep referring to it as a trilogy now though.

Rekka: Okay.

Kaelyn: All right. Okay, all right.

Premee: On their announcement, they were like, "Hey, we got the final book in the Beneath the Rising trilogy." And I'm like, "There are 10 things wrong with that sentence." [laughing] First of all, you published the first two books, thirdly, you're making me write the third one. You phrased this entirely wrong. Oh, “we get to publish.” No, you asked for it. You literally... Okay, anyways, have fun. It's a nice cover. I'm going to get back to writing now and drinking heavily. [laughing]

Kaelyn: My favorite word in that sentence was “the final book” because it's like, "Well, funny story, I already wrote the final book."

Premee: I wrote the final book.

Kaelyn: And then you decided that wasn't the final book anymore. So now we have a new final book. So, is this the final final book or is there going to be a final final final book?

Premee: If they ask for a fourth book, I'm going to quit publishing and go live in a tree. I literally have a plan, yeah.

Kaelyn: It's a good thing you have a plan. You should go south though a little bit to one of the big redwood trees. If you're going to live in a tree, make it, yeah.

Premee: I'm planning the coast but not quite the coast because they're expecting, you know, the big one and the tsunamis and stuff and I don't really want to get washed out to sea.

Kaelyn: But you'll be in a tree, you'll be fine.

Premee: Yeah, but I figured, yeah, if I'm a little bit further inland, me and my tree will survive.

Rekka: I love this. However, you have already confessed on this podcast that if they offer you enough money, you will write the book.

Premee: Yeah, at this point, it would have to be more money than they offered for the third book. And I mean a decent amount more money, not like $6 and a coupon for half-off a frogurt if I buy a large.

Kaelyn: Oh, now I want frozen yoghurt.

Premee: Me too, actually. It's supposed to be really hot here by the end of the week, apparently. I'm a little nervous about that because I'm pretty far north—we’re at Latitude 53—our houses are really built to keep in the heat because it gets down to -40 in the winter. We're not really prepared for it to get up to +40.

Rekka: If you don't open the door, will that thermos house also keep out the heat? Is it like a double-walled drink cooler, where...

Premee: It would be if I weren't in a crappy condo with a giant gap under the door but anyways, we'll see how it goes. I may come to the local ceremonies wearing a dress made out of ice packs.

Rekka: That would be fashion.

Premee: I think it would be fashion.

Kaelyn: Yeah, that's definitely fashion.

Premee: I am cosplaying somebody from a Disney movie. She is… frozen. They'll be like, "Which one are you?" I'm like, "I don't know their names. [laughing] I am the one who is… frozen. I'm her."

Rekka: The one who has to run to the freezer to get more ice.

Premee: Yeah, exactly. [laughing]

Rekka: Okay. So, writing three standalones and faking a trilogy, you started it thinking, “standalone book, cool, I'll write this and then I'll move on with my life. And maybe in 18 years or so I'll come back and write a second book or someone will pay me enough to write a second book. And then maybe, after I finished writing that and it's edited and it's gone gold, as they say in video games, then maybe I'll consider writing another one.” Do you have any tips for just wrapping your mind around it? Or I mean, hiding under a blanket for a week is an excellent advice but...

Premee: Yeah, I think that was going to be my first tip. My second tip is that rum is not as helpful as one would think. Because it does actually erase the memory of knowing that you have to write a third book. But afterwards, when you check your email, you actually still do have to write the book.

Rekka: You can't just make it go away, huh?

Premee: You cannot just make it go away. You can damage your few remaining brain cells, but the book still has to get written. I guess in terms of tips, yeah, the big one was do a reread. And that also helps forestall some of the panic, I think, or at least it did for me. Do a reread; there is so much that we put into novels that I think people think is local color or throwaway detail or “well, gee, that was a fun little anecdote.” But again, it's a novel, things are in it on purpose, they have a purpose for that story. But they can have a double purpose for later books. And again, that's something that I find myself doing very much with this third book, is reaching in and finding things that didn't have significance and lending them some significance on purpose. Which isn't to say that every goofy childhood story is now going to be hugely explained. But a novel is not like a short story, a novel has room for things to sit in there apparently without purpose until they're needed. And if I did end up having to write a fourth book, now that I've done the process of having two surprise sequels fall through the roof and hit me on my head, I think that's something I would do. Even with this third book, the doors that I shut and locked and went, "Hahaha, that's closed!" word to the wise, past me, no door is ever shut forever. And because we're writers, we can always think around a problem that seems unsolvable. I mean, how many times have we, in a short story or a novel, written ourselves into a corner and said, "Oh my god, I outsmarted myself. I have set up a situation that these characters cannot get out of," let sit for a couple days and take some walks and have a bath, and the solution just shows up. And I think even with the ending of the second book, which again was supposed to be the ending of lots of things, it's maybe not as final as it looked at first glance. So I guess the big tip is look at everything in more detail and see how you can tweak it or twist it or stretch it.

Rekka: So if you were writing a trilogy and you wanted to go back and make sure that it was very connected, you would take things that happened in the third book and go back and foreshadow them as you edit when you have the chance to edit all of them at once. And then you would foreshadow all the way forward so that you look very clever, by the end of it, to your reader, and they think, "How did you think of all these little things to add?" This is how I always thought mystery writers wrote was linearly like I do. And then I realized, "Oh, no, you get to edit before anyone sees it." But you had the reverse, where you had to go find the foreshadowing you didn't know you were foreshadowing.

Premee: Yep, exactly. I had to declare that it was foreshadow. I was like, "Well, yeah, this is a detail. Now I gotta make something out of that detail." It's like finding a bunch of random stuff in your fridge and being like, "I'm putting that on a pizza." It is no longer a random thing. Now, it is a pizza topping. Yes. [laughing]

Kaelyn: There's always stuff that you already wrote that can help with this. It can be an offhanded comment, it can be something that we understand about the character, the setting, the world building, something along those lines. I don't believe in the “writing yourself into a corner.” Unless you have published a book and then write something in the second book that directly contradicts a very specific plot-related thing that happened in the first book, and now you have to somehow correct it in the third. Well, that's what time travel is for. [laughing]

Rekka: Time travel, unreliable narrators, yeah.

Premee: Unreliable narrators, people who show up with helpful macguffins at exactly the right moment, you're like, "Hey."

Kaelyn: Look, sometimes you get handed an ex machina. It's just how things work.

Premee: I know there's a rule—and I don't like writing rules, but I know a lot of them now. Now that I have five books that are going to be out in the world, I should probably teach myself how to write at some point. I don't have a writing background, I don't have any writing education. I have spent about the last two years reading a lot of craft books and doing classes and going to panels and reading everything so I can literally learn how to write. But I have heard this rule that you can use coincidences to get your characters into trouble, but you can't use them to get your characters out of trouble. And I don't believe that. I believe that the definition of “coincidence” is being misused. And that if circumstances are set up so that something can happen and then it does happen, it's not a coincidence. And if it does manage to get the characters out of trouble, and they're like, "Oh, woah, that was lucky," I think you're allowed to do that once per book. [laughing]

Rekka: If you rely on it for maybe too much, people are going to start quoting writing rules at you. But I think a lot of people break a lot of writing rules and are celebrated for it.

Kaelyn: In real life, we all do occasionally get lucky. It's just a thing that happens.

Premee: And in real life, coincidences do get us out of trouble pretty frequently, even things that people don't even think about, like, "Oh hoho, that was bad." And then it turns out that your email program actually didn't send the email, and you're like, "Oh, dodged that bullet. Now, I will rewrite it. I'll delete that one, I'll rewrite it, and then I'll send it to my boss," that kind of thing.

Kaelyn: I always go, well, there's this thing called the theory of quantum immortality, which is that every decision you make the ones you're dying, you just stop existing in those realities. So you just keep paring yourself down and paring yourself down until eventually, you get to a point where you have no other possible alternatives. But I just always enjoy that one. So your existence just keeps getting pared down to eventually, they'll only be the one left and it ends.

Premee: Well, and what that also made me think of, too, was the other idea that coincidence can't get your characters out of trouble. Well, okay. I'm going to use a coincidence here because I set it up previously, I'm allowing this to happen, the structure of the book and the setting allows this to happen, so it happens. Then what I'm going to do is let them get into a different type of trouble because of the coincidence.

Kaelyn: So there are consequences.

Premee: There are consequences, so it's kind of you know, like the improv. And I was talking about this with someone on their Twitch stream a little while ago, and she taught me the phrase that I haven't seen in a lot of writing books, which is, "Yeah, in improv you go, ‘No but’ or ‘Yes and,’" so if your improv character succeeds, there's also something tacked on to it that is going to be in some way a pain in the ass. If they don't succeed, maybe they get something that's a little bonus or sends them off sideways rather than forward, so the same thing. She was like, "I see that you do this in your books all the time." It's like, "Hooray, we have solved the pro— We have another problem." [laughing]

Kaelyn: “This one has three heads, and it's dripping acid from its teeth.” [laughing]

Premee: Yeah, exactly. It's like, "This one is touching my ankle." [laughing]

Rekka: We talked about the improv ‘yes and’ a lot, in fact, in the most recent episode. I hadn't heard the ‘no but’ part, which is interesting, because what I was always told was like, "The ‘no’ stops the whole process from going forward and you killed the game by saying ‘no.’" But if you say ‘no but,’ I like that. What it does is it propels you forward and almost speeds things up again. It says, "Your reaction, you have to think about it for a second. But as soon as you start saying ‘and’ or ‘but,’ words start tumbling forward and things just start happening." If you're Premee, it's more trouble. I like that.

Premee: Yeah, that's what I like about the ‘no but.’ A success is fantastic, but we all know that in fiction a string of successes gets pretty dull. We want things to go wrong so that these characters that we’ve started to care about, or in some cases want to throw into the river, can show who they are and how they react to things. And they should have a lot of ‘no’ on their journey towards the end of the book, which of course they don't know is the end of the book. They should have a lot of ‘no,’ but what I like about ‘no but’ is that, exactly like you said, the ‘no’ stops you dead, it stops the plot dead, too. The ‘no but’ is, “okay, what you wanted you can't have right now. You could want something else, and maybe that's something you should go for.” And they're like, "We could and if that's our only option at the moment, we'll go for the ‘but,’ and we'll come back to what we wanted the original ‘yes’ for later on if we can. Maybe the ‘no but’ sets of circumstances for a later ‘yes and.’"

Rekka: Exactly, your characters are motivated to try and get to their specific goal and they might do some of this negotiating along the way, or just trying to move forward so that they can keep moving at all. Like our plots have to do. [laughing]

Kaelyn: The other thing that I will say that can stop as dead and this is a very funny conversation I had to have with my father recently was ‘perfect!’ My sisters and I have a habit of saying, "Okay, perfect." And my dad finally was like, "What is this?" We're like, "Because it's good, because there's nothing else to add, it's perfect. That's great, we're going to keep going forward just with that." So yeah, apart from ‘yes and,’ the ‘yes and’ can't be ‘yes and perfect.’ There's got to be something else happening there. [laughing]

Premee: Yeah.

Rekka: You've got to have more of a ‘yes, that is okay….’

Kaelyn: ‘Yes, and...’

Premee: Or it's like “yes and what's the catch?” Oh, there's a catch. The catch is chapter seven. “Okay, everybody, let's head into chapter seven. I can't believe this happened to us after we just achieved our goal.” I'm like, "That wasn't your goal. That was a mini goal, you didn't know that." They're like, "Do you hear something? Sometimes we're in a tough spot, do you hear somebody talking?" Maybe you guys could try the other thing. “What?”

Kaelyn: “The door, there's a door behind you, move the tapestry.” [laughing]

Rekka: So, I'm going to redirect this a little bit with the time we have left. Kaelyn, as an editor...

Kaelyn: Oh God, okay, yeah?

Rekka: This is my ‘yes and.’ What advice would you have given Premee, before this got going? Or while Premee is trying to write it, at 40k, and still has the rest of the book?

Premee: Give advice, thank you.

Kaelyn: I would have apologized to you profusely just to start out. So I would have been like, "Listen, I know you've worked really hard on this. The thing is that it shows and we really like that. We were maybe hoping that you would want to do another one of these."

Premee: That would have been a much nicer email to get.

Kaelyn: That would have been on the phone, because then, after you stop screaming at me, I'd be like, "Okay, so, is it a yes?" No, I think it's gratifying to hear how you're doing this because that is what I would suggest. You think you've written yourself into a corner. I have dealt with and edited books where authors are like, "I have no idea how this is going to happen because we changed these other things and we still have to get to this point." It's like, "Okay, well, one thing: we can always add words." That's a great thing about a book. Adding words changes how the story goes. In your case though, yeah, there's things that were established, things that were laid down as law so to speak and where finite decisions and doors closed, but I would go back to well written characters, well written storylines, and excellent world building always have to put as you said, threads you can pull on. I will tell you, I would be bothering you more than it sounds like your editor is, just going, "So… how's everything going?" And I guess it's funny because I'm a planner. You gotta tell me everything. If we end up in a situation like this, I know where we started, I know where we're going, I know how we're getting there and can brainstorm accordingly. Yes, but I'm a nurturer of storylines. I like to see them grow into complex, sometimes terrible and frightening, but wondrous nonetheless things.

Rekka: Nurtured but terrifying.

Premee: Like a scary plant.

Kaelyn: Yeah.

Rekka: Or like a horror book you didn't realize you were writing a horror story.

Premee: I'm scared of horror, I don't read a lot of horror. [laughing]

Kaelyn: When I told my boyfriend I was like, "Oh, yeah, we have an interview tonight." And he's always like, "Oh, what are you talking about?" And I said, "Oh my god, get this. It's this author who she wrote this duology for two books and they finished, and then they were like ‘give us a third.’" Now, my boyfriend is a huge horror movie fan. He loves all of the '70s, '80s slasher flicks and stuff, and he goes, "Well, that's no problem. Do you know how many times they brought Jason back to life?" [laughing] He's like, "Yeah, there's always ways to write around that. Like, he ended up in space at one point."

Premee: I was about to say, I'm like, "He went to space, man!” I'm pretty sure they killed him in the movie before that, but then he wasn't dead. And he was also in space.

Kaelyn: Yeah, so anyway, he has nothing but the utmost confidence in your ability to do this. [laughing]

Premee: Oh, tell him thank you. Yeah.

Kaelyn: Because if the people writing those movies can do it, you certainly can.

Premee: Well, honestly, when you talk about the timelines and stuff, that was something I thought... So the second book, Darkness, was set about 14 months, or something 15 months, after the first book. And for the third one, I was like—with my rum—"Oh, yeah?! Well, how about I just set it 25,000 years in the future and solve all my problems." And then I put the rum down, and I was like, "Wait, no, focus."

Kaelyn: How do you like that editor?

Premee: They're asking for a third book that has the same gist as the first two books because I guess they sold some copies. And I guess the fans want something sorta like that and not something set 25,000 years later with a cast of 30 different interesting aliens, one of whom is a cloud of nitrogen gas.

Rekka: Okay, but I hope that's the extra book that's in your contracts, cause now I want to read that.

Premee: Well, if they want a book four, it's obviously going to have the main character be a cloud of nitrogen gas, yeah.

Rekka: Excellent.

Kaelyn: Outstanding. Perfect. [laughing] Yeah, but hearing what you said honestly, that's exactly what I would be doing. If I was writing this myself, I don't write, but if someone put a sword to my neck and said write something, and then I had to write more of it when I'd finished, that's what I would do. [laughing]

Rekka: It's a nice, neat episode. Like, Premee is doing it, right. Aside from the pa... I even think you're doing the panic right.

Kaelyn: Oh, absolutely. Yeah.

Premee: I think I did the panic right.

Rekka: Yeah.

Premee: I didn't go outside and run around or anything; there's a plague. I panicked safely and quietly in my house. And I texted a whole bunch of friends. And depending on whether they were in publishing or not, they had some very encouraging messages to send back to me. It's like at the end you have to build in the time to let the manuscript sit and marinate in its own juices for a while, you got to build in like a little bit at the start to panic before you start writing the book.

Rekka: Oh, absolutely. Yes. And it sounds like your editors have every reason to have the confidence to just let you go for it.

Premee: I hope so. Well, and I think my editor knows, too, that the novel that I queried with was like my 10th or 11th novel, somewhere around there. I've written like 20 books. I think he knows I can write books. So I think he's just okay to have it just like trebuched over the Atlantic Ocean when I'm done, which is what I did with the last one. And then I ate a cupcake.

Kaelyn: It's a well-deserved cupcake to be sure.

Rekka: Well, I'm going to make myself a cupcake and finish book two when we get off this call because I'm very excited now. I was not reading it fast because I bought it in print and I read faster and e-book but I couldn't not have... There they are.

Premee: I can see them, oh my gosh. [laughing]

Rekka: Yes, I couldn't not have them next to each other on the shelf. So, cupcakes for everyone, and empanadas for Kaelyn because Kaelyn wants empanadas.

Premee: I would like an empanada.

Rekka: Okay, empanadas for everyone, cupcakes for everyone.

Kaelyn: I'll take a cupcake too, I mean, they're not mutually exclusive. [laughing]

Rekka: And good luck to you for the remaining what, 50,000 words or so of the book?

Premee: Yeah, 50k, 55k, something like that, yeah.

Rekka: Yeah. So you're aiming for around 90k to 100k?

Premee: Yeah, well, the first one was 109k and the second one was 111k. So if this one is in kinda in that range or a little bit shorter, it might get bumped up in edit because that happened last time as well. So, yeah.

Rekka: Like we say, we have to add words to fix problems. So there you go. So, well, I'm extremely excited that you are writing a third book in the story even if you are going through some pains to do it. And I appreciate that, personally, that you're doing that for me.

Kaelyn: Just Rekka, Rekka specifically, no one else.

Premee: Just you, my favorite fan. [laughing]

Rekka: And I'm sure our audience appreciates the advice because there is always the chance that okay, you start a book and you finish it and you print it. And then okay, well, I want to go back to that. Either that or the editor shoves you back to that, and then maybe it happens again. So I think you can end up in that moment of panic and still make the book happen. And it's just words.

Premee: It’s just words.

Rekka: You can just keep spewing words.

Kaelyn: No big deal at all.

Rekka: And then you can have cupcakes. So Premee, many cupcakes to you. And thank you so much for coming on and talking about this. I hope it was a little cathartic, too.

Premee: It was, and thank you so so much for inviting me. This was something I don't think I've been thinking very clearly about and it was nice to get my thoughts organized about writing the third book in a duology.

Rekka: Well, I couldn't resist the subject matter. [laughing]

Kaelyn: I mean, where can everyone find you? Definitely check out Premee's website. There's some really awesome, very well thought out essays and writing on there. Some really good advice in those, I think.

Premee: Thank you.

Rekka: Premee, you are now an expert.

Premee: Yeah, again, I really need to learn how to write, though. Where can people find me? I am on Twitter a lot at @premeesaurus, which I'm sure will be in the show notes. Yeah, and on my website at premeemohamed.com, where I try to keep up with podcasts and appearances and classes that I'm teaching and whatnot, and also my curious fictions page. And today, I put up a blog post about my guest editor stint at Apparition Lit and how we chose those stories. So if people would like to check those three things out, that is where you can find me.

Rekka: And the links will be below as ever. And Premee, thank you again.

Kaelyn: Yeah, this was fantastic.

Rekka: I'm looking forward to reading everything that you do, all your many books that are coming out this year, or have already.

Kaelyn: Rekka is going to be standing outside your door doing the creepy scratchy thing going, "Is it done?" [laughing]

Premee: I'll be like, "Here's a book. If I give you a book, will you go away?" [laughing] “Yes.” “Gosh, that was easy.”

Rekka: For a little while. [laughing]

Premee: Just sitting outside on my balcony reading, I'm like, "Oh god, you're still there?" [laughing]

Kaelyn: People will be coming over going, "What?" "It's Rekka, it's fine, it's fine. Long story, just no sudden movements."

Premee: It's a long story. Hang on, I'll give her a snack. Here's a short story.

Rekka: Well, luckily, I tend to get sleepy when I read, so a book lasts me a lot longer than you might expect so... [laughing] Well, thank you again.

Premee: Yeah, I hope you enjoy the second one.

Rekka: I know that I will. So thank you again.

Premee: And thank you so so much for inviting me.

Rekka: We were so happy to have you. And everyone, we will be back in two weeks. And I'm sure we will not top this episode, ever, but we'll try. Thanks everyone.

Tuesday Jun 22, 2021

Episode 63 - More Than the Sum of Half Their Parts (Co-writing)

Tuesday Jun 22, 2021

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