Episodes
Tuesday Jun 30, 2020
Tuesday Jun 30, 2020
Hi everyone, and thank you for tuning in to another episode of the We Make Books Podcast - A podcast about writing, publishing, and everything in between!
This week we are talking pen names! What is a pen name and why would you want to use one? We know what you're thinking, practically every episode we've mentioned your website, your social media, your brand - wouldn't a pen name just make it harder to for people to find you and check out your work? The truth is there are lots perfectly good reasons to want to use a pen name instead of your own and in this episode we get into those reason plus some of the fact and fiction of pen names (there is some really weird misinformation out there about what a pen name can do for a writer).
We Make Books is hosted by Rekka Jay and Kaelyn Considine; Rekka is a published author and Kaelyn is an editor and together they are going to take you through what goes into getting a book out of your head, on to paper, in to the hands of a publisher, and finally on to book store shelves.
We Make Books is a podcast for writers and publishers, by writers and publishers and we want to hear from our listeners! Hit us up on our social media, linked below, and send us your questions, comments, concerns, and the best pen name you've ever come up with!
We hope you enjoy We Make Books!
Twitter: @WMBCast | @KindofKaelyn | @BittyBittyZap
Episode 38: An Author Called By Any Other Name Will Still Write Amazing Things
transcribed by Sara Rose (@saraeleanorrose)
[0:00]
R: Welcome back to We Make Books, a podcast about writing, publishing, and everything in between. I’m Rekka, I write science fiction and fantasy as R.J. Theodore.
K: And I’m Kaelyn Considine, I am the acquisitions editor for Parvus Press and—
R: But is that your real name?
K, sighing: Well, um. The acquisitions editor for Parvus Press is a suffix that I use to—
R< laughing: I was gonna say, don’t you get tired of saying the whole thing every time?
K: It is a bit of a mouthful. Sometimes I do just introduce myself as Kaelyn. So, yeah, we’re talking about pen names today in this episode. What are they? Why do people use them? Why are they beneficial? How do you pick one? All of these important aspects.
R: And what not to expect from your pen name.
K: Yeah, things that a pen name will not do for you. There’s some frightening stuff on the internet.
R: There’s some bad advice out there, did you know that?
K: Yeah, who woulda thought? Just because it’s on the internet, doesn’t mean it’s always true.
R: Yeah. Yeah, imagine that.
K: Pen names can be an important and valuable tool, so that’s what we spend some time talking about in this episode. You know, if you’re going to use one, getting the most bang for your buck, so to speak.
R: If you’re early enough in your career that you might wanna choose a pen name, I hope this is something that gives you stuff to think about. If you’re mid-career, you know, you might still decide that you’re gonna launch a new career in a different genre or something. But it’s also, you know, maybe it’ll help reinforce the decision you did make. So take a listen and enjoy!
K: Enjoy, everyone!
[intro music plays]
K: My bluejay nemesis.
R: Is back?
K: Well, here’s the thing, it turns out it was never gone! Because I found out that bluejays are actually excellent mimics, so—
R:Ohhh, yeah.
K: I saw it and it was like… it was very jarring because it was not making the normal bluejay noise. And I was like, “Oh my god!” And it… it can imitate other birds. I hate this thing so much! It’s… it’s terrible. I mean, thankfully it’s not sitting outside my window every morning screaming and waking me up like it has been in previous years. But I feel like it is tormenting me now. It is absolutely, now, pretending to be other birds.
R: Maybe that’s a courtesy to you. Like, it knows that you don’t like the jay. So you might better enjoy a chickadee.
K: Okay. I live in New York City. There’s no chickadees here.
R: Which is why I could never live in New York City. Chickadees are my favorite birds.
K: No, but apparently it can imitate hawks?
R: Hm.
K: So it’s been doing that, a little bit. And then, now I’m like thinking, “There have been other weird bird noises I’ve been hearing. Is that also this damn bluejay?”
R: Probably.
K: Oh, god I hate this thing.
R: It’s putting on a performance for you! It’s dedicated its life’s work to this portfolio of bird calls and it knows that you, alone, in the world can appreciate them.
K: I would just appreciate it if it went away.
R: Well, yes. You, alone, would also appreciate that.
K: But hey! Speaking of pretending to be other things!
[R and K laugh]
K: You see what I did there?
R: I see what you did there.
K: Today we’re talking about pen names.
R: Nom de plume!
K: And pen names are not necessarily pretending to be another person all the time. There’s a lot of reasons you could have a pen name.
R: Yeah. It’s funny because the first thing I ever remember about encountering the concept of pen names was when I learned that Charles de Lint wrote horror under another name. And I thought that was the most bizarre thing in the universe, that someone would change their name and hide their books from their fans!
Because to me, I liked Charles de Lint so much as a teenager, I read everything I could get my hands on and then I was out of books—Well, I say I was out of books, the other books I couldn’t find were out of print. And so to find out that there were more books I could have been reading! I was very upset, even though I wasn’t a horror reader. I would have gotten into reading horror because this author that I liked so much wrote it. And that was my first encounter with the concept of an author name.
K: I think we all have that jarring moment, somewhere in late elementary school when we were told that Mark Twain was not Mark Twain’s actual name.
R: Oh! Yeah, okay. So, yeah, I did know that but for some reason that didn’t count. Maybe because he was a historical figure.
K: Yeah, and also because I think we only knew him as Mark Twain. When you find out that his real name was Samuel Langhorne Clemens, you’re kinda like: “Oh, you know what I see why he went with Mark Twain.”
R: See, I always thought, because I knew Mark Twain and the name is so familiar, Samuel Clemens sounded like the more intriguing name, when I heard that. But the—Yeah, I guess Mark Twain wasn’t something that I read a lot of. And it wasn’t like Samuel Clemens had another collection of books that I could’ve been reading.
K: Exactly, that’s the thing is that he only wrote under Mark Twain, I think even with his newspaper writings.
R: Mhm.
K: I’m pretty sure he only wrote as Mark Twain, as well.
R: That sounds right, yeah.
K: I don’t think he ever really published much under Samuel L. Clemens. But there’s a long history of people using pen names. There’s a lot of pen names out there that people do not realize were pen names. For instance, George Orwell is a pen name. His actual name: Eric Arthur Blair. It’s not even close!
R: No, not even. And how do you come up with Orwell?
K: I… there’s a lot of things I wonder how that man came up with.
R: That—Fair enough. Okay, we’ll give you that one.
K: Jack Kirby, a famous early comic book writer and artist: Jacob Kurtzberg
R: Okay, so—but that’s gonna bring us into the whys of some of these, right? Because when he was working, there was a certain amount of prejudice against someone whose name would have been Kurtzberg.
K: Yeah. Yeah that—
R: Professionally, he would have had an easier time being Kirby.
K: Yes, definitely.
R: And that’s a shame. And that’s, unfortunately, still going on with pen names. I mean, we’ll get into some of that. But that is definitely still rampant is that there are preconceived notions of who belongs in what genre and who is worthy of respect. And people might choose a name that corresponds with people’s expectations of Greatness or Classics or anything like that. I mean, I will say I write under a pen name. You all know that.
K: We say at the top of every episode!
R: At the top of every episode, yeah! And I chose my pen name as an homage to someone who encouraged me a lot, but I also picked it, wrote it out and said, “Aww yeah that sounds like a author name!” And what does it sound like? It sounds masculine. It sounds like a white man’s name! And I’m half of that, but it was not really my intention to broadcast a masculine name that might fit better next to other masculine names on the shelf that get all the attention and draw. But to me, socially conditioned by the other names on the bookshelves in the store, I said, “Yeah! R.J. Theodore! That sounds like a real author’s name!
[K laughs]
R: I mean, honestly, if I could go back I’d pick something else. But I’m committed at this point. So.
K: So why do some people choose to write under pen names? Well, there’s a lot of reasons, obviously. Rekka just enumerated one for us. Would you call it branding, what you did?
R: Oh, definitely! Definitely. I mean, if you start a company, you name your company. And when you become a writer, if you intend to make a living at it, or at least make a career—whether or not the money is the point. But if you wanna do this for the long haul, you’re thinking about your presentation. Not just of your books and your stories, but yourself. So it is not unreasonable to sit down and come up with an author name and then because we DO NOT USE our legal signatures. Please, people. We practice the autograph of that author name and maybe even do that as part of feeling out whether you like the name and wanna stick with it. You know?
K: Branding is certainly a consideration when figuring out if you’re gonna use a pen name. Let’s be clear, right at the top, if your name is John Smith and you just feel like that’s your name and that’s what you want to write under, there’s absolutely no problem with that. You do not need to use a pen name. You do, however, need to be really good at marketing and maintaining your website and your internet presence, so that people can find you easily. Search engine optimization is going to be a key component to being successful here.
R: For John Smith, you are going to have to compete with police records, white pages, direct relistings—
K: Pocahontas.
R: That, too. You know, Florida Man. Everything is going to be a competition for you. So, you know, the elements of my pen name are not particularly unique but when you string them together and search for that, then that narrows down the field quite a lot.
K: Now, conversely, my name is very unique. I, as best I can tell, am one of the only two Kaelyn Considines in the world that spell their name this way. The other one is very clearly not me, if you punch it into Google. I will say that I have done different things, out in the world, under pen names. I am not going to say what they are or what that pen name is, explicitly because of privacy reasons.
R: Yes.
[10:50]
K: Because I have a professional life in publishing and a professional life outside of publishing. And, believe it or not, there are some things that I just don’t want intermingled all together with that. For the record, I am not doing anything nefarious or illegal. It’s just a matter of—
R: For the record, wink wink. If anyone asks...
K, laughing: Wanting to maintain some separation with different projects in my life.
R: Right. It’s privacy, but it’s specifically because you have aspects of your life that don’t need to mix. It’s not because you are trying to hide from anybody in a—it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world if somebody found out the other name. But it would be annoying.
K: Well, I’ll be honest with you. When I started getting into publishing and when I came on at Parvus, I had a very frank conversation with Colin, who’s the publisher at Parvus Press, that I may need to do all of this under a fake name. Because my job at the time—I didn’t want it coming out that I was also running a side business, for a lot of reasons. And then, eventually, I decided, “Ugh, this isn’t worth it. I don’t have the energy to maintain this alternate presence!”
But the uniqueness of my name makes it so that, if you punch “Kaelyn publishing” into Google. I come up. I am the first result. If you punch “Considine” and anything vaguely associated with my name into Google, you will also find me very easily. When I started my previous job, when I was 26 and just out of grad school, years ago, I—the people that I worked with very quickly were able to punch me into Google and find all of these academic papers that I had published. That’s not a big deal, but they definitely had a lot of comments about how nerdy I was, as a result.
R: See, in the circles I run, that would be incredibly cool. So, don’t worry about it.
K: Oh, yeah, no it was kind of cool. But it was like, “Wow, you really are a huge history nerd, huh?” I’m like, “Yeah, I am. It’s you know.”
R: Mhm.
K: So, uniqueness or non-uniqueness are two factors here. In some cases, maybe your name is John Smith and you want to have something more akin to Kaelyn Considine where it’s easier to find you. Or, if you’re a Kaelyn Considine, maybe you—
R: Need a little more John Smith in your life.
K: Yeah, maybe you don’t always want to be found that easily. As we say on this show a lot, I am a pretty private person. I’m not super into social media, I don’t like to put a lot of myself out there. So I don’t like the idea of people being able to find me really easily.
R: But we should mention that just writing under a different name is not going to be enough to protect you from someone who wants to dig and find out who you are and how to find you.
K: Oh, yeah, no. It’s uh…
R: This is a very light coat of disguise. This is covering the Volkswagen bug that you’re racing with a grey cloth to make it look like a boulder. It only works because it’s a very low-fi film.
[14:21]
K, laughing: Yeah, exactly. I will say—So another reason you might wanna use a pen name is maybe what you’re writing, you don’t necessarily want everyone to know that you’re writing it.
R: Right, that is definitely a possibility. Or, you know, maybe you have a family that you’re separated from and you don’t want them to know that you are writing at all.
K: Well, I will use an example from my real life. We have family friends that I grew up with and they have a daughter who’s a little older than me. Her mom started noticing that her and her husband seem to have some extra money. Not like a ton, not like a life-changing amount. They weren’t buying lamborghinis and moving into mansions, but they were—
R: Not stressing over small purchases.
K: Yeah, they put a lot of money into upgrading the house and took a really nice vacation. And her mom finally asked her, “Hey, did one of you get a raise or something?” and she said,” Oh, well you know how I wrote this book?” and she was like, “Oh! Did it start selling really well?” She’s like, “Well, no. But I kind of transitioned into writing some other things…”
Anyway, after some back-and-forth it came out that this person became one of the top ten selling erotica novelists in England for a long time. And she was doing this under a pen name. I think she kind of really nudged her way in right when Kindle unlimited was really taking off with this.
R: That’s the time, there you go.
K: Yeah. And she will not tell—we still have no idea—
R: What the pen name is.
K: Who she is, or what the pen name is! But she made a pretty decent amount of money off of it. Which, you know, good for her. But maybe you’re writing erotica and you don’t want everyone to know that you’re writing erotica.
R: Yeah, or just anything that you think you’d professionally or socially be shunned for, but it brings you joy. You know, just change the name and write under that. Again, if someone suspected it was you, it would probably be easy for them to figure out that it was. But if they’re looking for your name, this other name should not come up. As long as you’re just slightly careful about things.
K: That’s a good point, too, is when you’re deciding if you’re gonna use a pen name, one of the things you have to decide is how open you’re gonna be about this. Rekka is, for instance, very open about it.
R: Yep.
K: “I write science fiction and fantasy as R.J. Theodore.” Some people don’t ever really want you to see the person behind the pen name. Now, in the age of the internet this is very difficult to do.
R: Mhm.
K: There have been very famous writers that went their entire lives under a pen name that nobody ever—Like, Anne Rice’s name is not Anne Rice.
R: Right.
K: Her first name’s actually Howard.
R: Which is interesting. That’s a whole other conversation.
K, laughing: That’s a whole other conversation.
R: I mean, you know, again. Uniqueness. But also expectation of your genre. If Howard was a name that she chose to write with, why wouldn’t she use it? It’s because it doesn’t sound like a female-presenting name that is going to write bodice-clutching, tense semi-romantic vampire stories. There’s an expectation from readers that, you know, vampire authors are going to be female. There’s an expectation of readers that thriller authors—or at least the “good” ones—are going to be men. And then that ignores the non-binary spectrum entirely and then, what are the expectations there?
There are very cool names out there for some non-binary authors and I just think, “Wow! If I could go back and understand that gender was a spectrum not a binary, I might’ve picked a very different pen name.”
[18:43]
K: Yeah, and so that’s actually a good point. So you’re getting ready, you decided you’re gonna use a pen name. You’re getting ready to choose one. We talked a little bit before about branding and it is something to consider. Look, if you’re gonna be writing hard military science fiction, Florence Lilac deForest is probably not the best name to start writing that under. Now—
R: Although it would stand out in the field of military sci-fi, but…
K: That will certainly stand out, but emulating that is marketing at that point. Working on a pen name that you think is going to appeal to your readership. There’s nothing wrong with that.
R: If you think about it like the packaging on a box, you know, if you’re going to buy a microwave, you expect the microwave brand name is going to be of a certain ilk. You expect that the—just like there are cover expectations in genre—you expect that there’s gonna be a photo of a microwave on the box. There are expectations and those expectations are because human brains are designed to put things into categories very quickly. So you wanna help other brains put you into the correct category. And that’s why you choose a name that matches a category, rather than going with it and hoping for the best.
K: Yeah, exactly. It’s unfortunate, but as Rekka mentioned there are some inherent biases in our brains and, you know, one of the most famous ones, J.K. Rowling. She does not actually have a middle name. Her name is Joanne Rowling and they told her, “Listen, we don’t want people to know you’re a woman.” And she said, “Okay, I can’t just be J. Rowling,” so she took K for Katherine, from her mom’s name and made it J.K. Rowling as, you know, things like George R.R. Martin. And J.R.R. Tolkein. And I think that’s a holdover from how letters in authorship used to be addressed. Used to cite off your first initial and your last name. Like, “Your Obedient Servant ___”.
So, is that a shitty, unfortunate thing about society? Yes. Absolutely. But would J.K. Rowling have been as successful as she ended up being if everyone knew she was a woman from the offset? Who knows! You know, Harry Potter came out before the advent of the internet. That said, there’s a giant fricken About the Author in the back, so.
R: Yeah, yeah. I mean, the story—I know when Oprah picked it up for the book club, the story of J.K. Rowling writing these things on deli napkins and reading it to her kids every night because they wanted a story, and then turning it into a book eventually, became part of the romance of why people flocked to J.K. Rowling as a personality and not just to the books. That’s part of the brand, though, is this rags-to-riches story.
K: That said, there are also cases of famous authors writing under pen names because they maybe want to try something new. So, like, J.K. Rowling—
R: Hey! Yeah, I was gonna say a J.K. Rowling story again.
K: J.K. Rowling published under Robert Galbraith, was the author name they used for the murder mystery novel she put out. Stephen King has written under a couple pen names. One of the more famous ones is Richard Bachman.
R: Mhm.
K: I do not know what the significance of that name is. Isaac Asimov wrote under Paul French. These were—I don’t wanna call them side projects, but they were different from things that they were known for writing, and wanted them to stand on their own merit.
R: Right. Michael Crichton also had a couple of pseudonyms.
K: Yes, yep. What does that mean, in terms of legality with an author? Now, again, in the age of the internet this is a little different because if you start digging around, looking for Richard Bachman, and this book. Through the availability of information, you’re probably gonna be able to figure out that it’s Stephen King.
R: But you have to be interested in Richard Bachman enough in the first place.
K: Yes! Yeah.
R: It’s not like you’re gonna search for Richard Bachman and the first site that pops up is gonna be Stephen King’s. I mean, that was the whole point was to not show up as Stephen King. So Stephen King’s not gonna make it easy for you to figure it out, unless he decides to debut. Like, “Oh, by the way, pulling back the curtain, that was me.”
K: Yeah, you’d really have to dig in with that. So, Rekka, how about copywriting pen names?
R: Well, so. You can’t—there’s a whole bunch of issues over trademarking names, anyway, but J.K. Rowling is bound to have that name trademarked. If not by her, then by her publisher.
K: Well also because it’s a fake name that is not her real name.
R: Right, so there may be a J.K. Rowling out there, though. That doesn’t automatically mean that person is going to be sued for signing their bank checks.
K: Or if they write, writing under that name.
R: Right, you cannot stop them from using their legal name. But—
K: Now, if your name is John Smith and you decide you’re gonna start publishing books under J.K. Rowling, you’re gonna have an issue.
R: Now you’ve got a problem.
K: Yeah. Because what you’re doing there is using a trademark to attempt to deceive people into thinking that this was written by J.K. Rowling.
R: That is something that J.K. Rowling and her lawyers are going to have to come after you for. And when I say ‘going to have to’ what I mean is, if you register a trademark you have to defend it in order to maintain it. We’ve talked about this before. So, she’s going to have to come after you and find out, is that really your name? And if it is, how much money do I have to pay you to write under a different name, please?
K: By the way, it probably won’t even be J.K. Rowling that comes after you—
R: Oh, yeah, it’ll be lawyers.
K: Her publisher’s gonna get to you before she personally—
R: They’re gonna find you first, yeah.
K: —gets involved in this because it’s branding. That name is a commodity at this point.
R: Yes. That name has value to it that is separate, sort of, from the IP that she has created.
K: Now, that said, let’s go back to our other example, Stephen King. Stephen King is a much more common name. I know a Stephen King! I know Stephen Kings, a father and son, who are Stephen King!
So if they decided: hey I’m gonna write a book and publish it. There really isn’t anything that actual author Stephen King can do about it because you can’t stop someone from using your name. Now, as Rekka said, maybe you’re offered some incentive to publish under a pen name.
R: In which case, hey, not a bad deal! Maybe consider it.
K: Now, here’s the thing. I imagine Stephen King does not care that much. Stephen King’s publishers are going to care a lot.
R: Right, right.
K: So, now… how about just some other random person’s name. Let’s say I wanted to start publishing books under Rekka Jay.
R: I mean, I—Well, I can’t say I don’t publish books under Rekka Jay. There is one book out there with my name on the cover, of Rekka Jay. So I might ask you to not. But I don’t think I have a strong enough case to stop you.
K: Yeah, so there’s some weird legal issues that come into play here. So let’s say I wanted to start writing books and I’m gonna publish them under… I don’t know, Colin’s fair game. Let’s say I’m write books under Colin Coyle. Colin would have real, legal reason and recourse to stop me from doing that. He would have an interest in saying, “Kaelyn, we own a business together. We work together. We publish books together. I don’t want people thinking that this is me writing these books.”
That’s where all of this gets a little gray. But, as a general rule, using the names of people that you actually know is probably something to avoid.
R: I mean, the same can be said for using them for character names in your books. You just don’t wanna! This is just muddy water that you are gonna find yourself lost in.
K: Right, hold on, I gotta email an author real quick because I told him to change the names of two of his characters to Rekka. Both of them.
R, laughing: Both of them in the same book? Are they love interests, I hope?
K, laughing: Both of them are—Well, they are now.
R: But, yeah. You don’t wanna—just don’t mess with people you know. Because we don’t know how relationships are going to evolve over the years. This might be something—even if the person doesn’t care, you may just end up regretting someday. This person may end up making you grind your teeth in annoyance—
K: Now, forever.
R: —and then you’ve gotta go back to your books and those characters are named for this person, or you’ve used that pen name for your professional work. And you’re like, “Now I’m reminded of this person that I no longer want anything to do with.” To that point, some people choose pen names if they are married, just in case the marriage ever doesn’t end well. Or there’s another reason to change the legal name. If you separate your pen name from your legal name, you can detach yourself from some of these relationship issues.
K: Now, that said, here’s another really good reason to not use a pen name. If you are writing negative things about people.
R: Oh, yeah.
K: Here’s the thing, a pen name does not protect you from defaming someone.
R: No, there’s no legal protection from any laws that you break.
K: So, if you’re going, “Well, I’m gonna write a bunch of nasty things about this person, so I’m gonna write it under a fake name.” First of all, you suck.
[R laughs]
Look, if you don’t have the guts to say negative things in public under your own name, then you probably have no business saying them. Whistleblowers are obviously a different story, but we’re not talking about that here. We’re talking about published stories.
R: We’re talking about trolls.
K: Well, we’re talking about reasons you’d wanna use it professionally for—
R: Well, okay, but to be mean to other people is not a professional reason.
K: Yes, exactly. Writing under a pen name will not protect you from defamation and slander charges. Slander is very hard to prove in the U.S., in the U.K. it’s not as hard, for instance. And there have been some pretty famous cases of internationals being taken to court in the U.K. for slander and defamation charges. A pen name does not protect you from that.
A pen name, and I can’t believe I have to say this, but this is something that I kept coming across when doing some research for this. A pen name does not protect you from having to pay taxes!
R: Oh, yes, please don’t think that there’s any reason to not behave like a normal citizen, when you have a pen name.
K: There is, in some corners of the internet—and I did find this mostly in bizarre, fringe-libertarian groups, that would come into discussions and say this—some people, for some reason, think that if you write under a pen name that means that, that person does not legally exist and therefore cannot be taxed.
R, exasperate: That’s… a theory.
K: Yeah, so this is wrong for a few reasons. One of which is, when you write a book under a pen name, you still have to sign a contract when you get it published. And you have to sign your legal name to that contract.
R: And if you’re self-publishing, the same is true for when you register the copyright.
K: Exactly, yeah.
R: And also for setting up your payment account through the various distributors, et cetera. People are gonna know your real name, so as soon as you have to write that out, it has to match your bank account. Like, have a care that this is gonna come back to you.
K: Yeah, so there’s no such thing as a pen name that just exists in a vacuum where there is no possible way to trace this back to you. The only circumstances under which I can imagine that happening are if you create a manuscript, mail it to a publisher, or I don’t know, an article getting published in a newspaper, and want nothing back in return for it. You want no money, you want no attention—
R: Or if you write the thing, sign a different name, bury it in a time capsule, and never admit. And then in 500 years someone finds it, thinks you’re genius, but doesn’t know who you were. But that’s not the kind of career most of us are aiming for.
K: Yeah, if you wanna get paid for your work, you’re going to have to associate—
R: Admit who you are so they can pay you.
K, laughing: That’s exactly… that’s my life. Just having to admit to people who I am.
R: Kaelyn it’s time to admit who you are.
K: I’m gonna have to figure that out and then I’ll get back to you. So, one last thing and, again, I can’t believe I need to say this, but apparently I do. Writing under a pen name also does not help you avoid breach of contract.
R: Noo.
K: This one’s a little less… less.. Maybe there’s a little bit—
R: It depends on how the contract’s written!
K: ...Yes. Then the taxes one. You have to pay taxes no matter what, okay? There’s no escaping taxes. But writing under a pen name does not absolve you of contractual obligations to other books. Now, there can be things written into your contract that say, “You will provide to us three science fiction books.” And let’s say you suddenly really wanna write a nonfiction military history of the Civil War.
R: You can write that!
K: You can write that.
R: The publisher doesn’t want it! They put it in their contract, they want the science fiction books.
K: Yeah, and all contracts are structured differently. Maybe you have a time frame, maybe it’s, “We get to publish the next three books of whatever you generate.” So, you know, if you switch from military sci-fi to Civil War military history, it doesn’t matter if you’re writing that under a pen name now. They still get that.
R: Yeah.
[33:56]
K: So this isn’t, again, you’re not creating a new person here. There is not now—
R: This is not your Get out of Jail Free Card to change your name.
K: Yeah, there is not now a legal entity that exists under this separate name that you created for yourself. There is no person there. It’s just another version of you.
R, laughing: Just like there’s not, not a person, there’s also not a person. Just to be clear.
K: It’s all very existential. There’s a lot of layers here.
R: So, I mean, don’t try to get out of trouble or get out of a contract you don’t like, or anything like that by changing your pen name. That’s not going to work. There are better reasons to have a pen name or not. And some people might start writing under their real name, or might start writing under a pen name and then switch to their real name. There’s also the possibility that later in life you change your mind and then all your books, again this is like Michael Crichton, get rereleased under the more popular name, either posthumously or not, because there’s a better chance that they’ll reach the audience that you’d like. I mean, he wrote in college under a pen name because he didn’t want his professors to think he had too much free time and give him more work.
K: Yeah.
R: Later in life, they changed, they re-released those books under his Michael Crichton name and that was so that people who had already read Jurassic Park and Congo and Andromeda Strain would be like, “Oh my gosh! I thought I’d never get another story from Michael Crichton, but even though he’s dead, there are ten more books I’ve never read of his!” Turns out, you can’t really go back. They were his first books and they read like them. They were not great. But, boy was I excited to think that there were more of them.
So, there’s no final answer in your writing career. You can change it at any time. And some people do choose to rebrand if the, you know, first trilogy they released just kinda didn’t make the splash that they hoped it did. Then, maybe, their publisher drops them. They get picked up by a new publisher. That new publisher may be like, “Hey! Would you consider a new pen name so we can launch you as a debut?” Because there’s a certain amount of excitement, especially in YA, the debut break-through novel is a big deal and that’s what everybody wants, is to discover the next new voice. That next new voice may have already been writing for ten or twenty years. I mean, they keep saying every overnight success is an author who’s been working at this for at least ten years.
K: Yeah. Again, just remember when you’re doing this. You’re not creating a new person. So, yes, you may be creating a new debut author personality. But this is not one of your characters, this is still you, the writer, the person.
R: Oh right, yes. So don’t cosplay as your writer.
K: Yeah, and—
R: Okay, I should actually retract that because Gail Carriger kind of does cosplay as her author self. Which is just to say that she has a visual brand, and when she goes out to conventions she’s going to dress the way that you would expect to see her at conventions. That’s different from writing a backstory for your pen name and then play-acting and half of these things are actually lies about you. If you try to convince someone—
K: Yeah, and—
R: The idea being that you want to be authentic so your readers can connect with you.
K: Do not create a character for yourself to make yourself seem more legitimate. If you’re writing a book in which the main character is a doctor and there’s a lot of medical science and medical science fiction things in there, do not pretend you’re a doctor so that people look and go, “Oh! This person came from a place of real experience!” You’re not creating, again, you’re not creating a fictitious person here.
R: Right. And don’t use it to misrepresent any part of yourself, except for your name.
K: Yeah, exactly. And, look, names are powerful things. There’s a lot of cultures around the world and through history where you maybe didn’t tell people your real name all the time because then they could use it against you.
R: Right. A name has power.
K: Yeah, a name does have power.
R: And for that reason, you may want to change the name that you were born with—not for escaping magical curses and stuff, but you may just—
K: Maybe escaping your family.
R: Yeah. But you may also just not really be totally in love with your name. And so that is a perfectly legitimate reason to just pick a different name. It might be unique, it might be all the things you want. It might be easy to remember, easy to spell, unique enough to come up in search results the way you want. It might even match your genre. But maybe you just don’t like the name. You could change it.
K: Well, I mean, I’ll use me as an example again. In publishing, I think Kaelyn’s a great first name to have. It works. In my professional life, sometimes, it feels a little immature.
R: Right.
K: I wouldn’t change it, it’s my name. I do like my first name.
R: It hasn’t held you back. Or do you feel like it might have?
K: Well, sometimes—and that’s the thing, sometimes I wonder. Now, one of the things I will say about my name is people look at it and frequently read ‘Katelyn’.
R: Right.
K: Very quickly. I—We always had a joke at my job when we’d go out, if we were going out to pick up lunch and you’d tell the people your name, I’d always give them my middle name which is Elizabeth. Because if I gave them Kaelyn, there was no way they were gonna write it down correctly—
R: Or say it correctly in that context, yeah.
K: And then whoever was reading it later was gonna then further butcher whatever they wrote down. So I’d be standing there and the guy would be standing with my sandwich going, “Uh, Carol? Kaylete? Colin?”
R: A-ha! So you are Colin, after all.
K: Oh, what was more of a “KA-lyn.”
R: Oh, okay.
K: So, I do wonder sometimes if that, it does—Now, as I’m solidly in my mid-thirties, I do wonder if it sounds like a younger person’s name. Because I do know some other Kaelyns, they’re all a lot younger than me.
R: Okay. Well there is the generational thing, where every generation has its popular name. I feel like when I was growing up, everyone was named Melissa or Amanda. And so, two years later, if you had that name it was a ‘mature’ name because that was the previous ones. But a couple years past that and it’s like a weird, old, funky name. And then it comes around again.
But, you know, these things—especially when you’re choosing a name, because you get to choose one. All of a sudden you go down rabbit holes of things to think about, all this kind of stuff.
K: Oh, god yeah. You could.
R: You can just close your eyes and be like, “What sounds good? What are letters I like? How do I string them together? Who cares if it’s actually a name?” Although, if you do make up a word, make sure you Google it to make sure it doesn’t mean something awful or sacred to a culture somewhere that you didn’t even consider.
K: So, I will say pen names I’ve made up. I have gone on Wikipedia or This Day in History and found famous people that were born or died or did something significant on my birthday.
R: Okay. Or you can pick the first day of your endeavor or something, the day you finished your draft. Stuff like that.
K: Yeah, and come up with some names that way. I’ve also taken my name and what it translates to in Gaelic, in Irish, and then picked other names—
R: With the same meaning.
K: —from other, yeah, other languages with the same meaning. That were kind of… you know what’s funny is they all kind of sound similar to Kaelyn!
R: I was gonna say. You could also do the Tom Riddle thing and just go for an anagram.
K: I have one of those. It was not easy to come up with.
R: Yeah, it depends on the selection of letters you start with.
K: Yeah, yeah. So, look, there’s lots of different ways to pick one, especially if you want it to be significant or meaningful to you. But if you’re doing it, as we said at the beginning of the episode, from an author perspective, keep in mind that you are going to be using this to sell your book.
R: Right.
[42:25]
K: And it may not be what you want to hear, but branding and planning accordingly is only going to help you sell the book.
R: Yep, yep. Meeting reader expectations. I gotta say. If you’re gonna write sci-fi, you don’t want a name that sounds like you’re a romance author.
K: Yeah. So maybe you loved your grandmother to death and she was just this beautiful, wonderful woman who encouraged you and helped you to get your start writing and so you want to honor her and make your pen name [in a v. French accent] Eleanor de Fleur.
R: Mhm.
K: That’s probably not the best name to write science fiction under.
R: Right, right. You don’t want anything that sounds too cursive. Like, it needs to be written in some sort of cursive calligraphy. Just think of the fonts faces and think of how cool the name will look written in those font faces, as opposed to what the name’s screaming out for.
K: If you’re mentally pronouncing anything with a French accent like I just did, that’s maybe not the direction—
R: Hey! There are decent French science fiction authors out there.
K: Oh, absolutely! But, you know—
R: But they all use pen names!
K, laughing: That’s because French is a very confusing language. You get words with like ten letters in them and you only pronounce four.
R: Yeah. And speaking of confusing, there’s also the pen name for joint-author endeavours.
K: Oh, yeah! That’s another good reason to use a pen name is collaboration.
R: Yeah, so maybe you don’t want both names on the cover. You’d rather just silo it and write, especially if you plan to continue this together, write with one new pen name that you pick together.
K: Yeah.
R: Then, be prepared if you are entering into a contract with a traditional publisher, that they might actually push back on your pen name. For the reasons that we’ve talked about, they may say, “This doesn’t really fit the genre. Can we fiddle with it?” or “Hey, let’s just use your real name.” I have a friend who had a pen name and when she got picked up, the publisher was just like, “Nah, we just wanna use your real name, it’s way more unique.” So…
K: And they might push back for the opposite of the reason I stated earlier. Maybe you’re writing military science fiction and you were a pilot in the Air Force for a long time. They’re gonna say, “No, we want people to look this up and see that you’re writing about stuff you know.” Like, your credentials lend themselves to your success at that point.
R: Mhm.
K: So, yeah, I mean publishers always have an opinion about everything. So, don’t think your name was gonna be—they even will have an opinion about your name.
R: They absolutely will. Although, you may be able to make a case for it. Colin did ask, like, “Are you sure you don’t wanna write as Rekka Jay?” I was like, “Well, no? I have a pen name, thank you.” I had a reason. And, you know, he was fine with it. It wasn’t like it doesn’t sound like a science fiction author’s name. But he was like, “Rekka Jay’s a cool name, so…”
K: Rekka Jay is a cool name. That’s the thing.
R: But it was a matter of, like, I would rather keep it separate from when people are searching, that they’re gonna find something other than the Rekka Jay. That was my decision, but obviously I’m not using it to hide. It is literally SEO purposes. It’s like key words. I’m choosing the keywords that people are going to find me for.
K: Yup. Yeah, so, that’s pen names. If you’re gonna use one, make sure you use one that’s gonna be to your advantage.
R: Yup.
K: Whatever reason you have for using it, there’s no reason it can’t work for you.
R: And take the time and play around with a couple different ones. This is something that you’re going to have to live with for a while. It’s not choosing a box of cereal, it’s choosing the paint for your den wall. You know? So you want to really be okay with it, before you move ahead and commit to it.
K: Yep. Hey, if you, uh—Everyone Tweet at us what your favorite, weird pen name is that you’ve come across. Or the thing that you were most surprised by, to learn was not somebody’s actual name. I think mine was Anne Rice, mostly because then I found out her first name is actually Howard.
R: Yeah, that one’s just got, like. That’s gotta be a two-parter, as opposed to just, “Oh, that’s not your name? Oh, that’s a shame.”
K: Yeah. Or you can be like Ben Franklin and all you did was write to newspapers and pamphlets and stuff under different names. Let’s see, he had Richard Saunders for a certain personality. There was Constance Dogood, yeah, clearly fake names but the point was that he was writing to newspapers exalting revolutionary American ideas, and writing trying to appeal to a certain group of people.
R: Right. Saying the things that would make that group agree with him and to sway their opinion.
K: He was saying things that he wanted everyone to hear, but knew that they would hear it better, if you will, coming from Constance Dogood versus Benjamin Franklin.
R: Right.
K: Which was very smart and insightful, especially for the time. Although that was fairly commonplace back then, to uh…
R: Which is so bizarre to me because we think of our common news production situation as being less honest these days. But you go back and like, everybody’s always been writing in under fake names and all this kind of stuff. So I say it was a matter of ego, but it was more like, “You must listen to me! And I will make you listen to me by faking who I’m speaking as!”
K: Well, it’s the same way. He’s trying to appeal to a certain group of readership.
R: Yep. So, that’s what we’re telling you. Go out and make people listen to you by appealing to a certain group of readers that can connect with the name.
And, you know, it is ultimately up to you. There are pros and cons to both. Eventually, you know, your contracts might get more intricate and having a pen name might make them slightly more difficult, but you’re probably not writing them, so that probably isn’t going to, at least, create more work for you. Just, you know, you’ll have to be more careful about reading them. But I hope you’re careful about reading your contracts anyway!
K: Yes! READ YOUR CONTRACT. I’m going to make a mug.
R, laughing: How did we come back around to that?
K: We always come back around to it, because given the option I will always state: Read Your Contract.
R: Yeah. And so, yeah, thing to remember is that just writing under a pen name is not going to hide you from the world. It’s not going to protect you from legal issues. And it’s not going to make you impossible to find, it’s just a thing that you do. It puts up a certain measure of distance from your legal name and day-to-day personality. But it doesn’t… I mean, eventually you probably are at least going to hint that it’s not your real name. It doesn’t mean that you, say, I’m coming out as my real name. It just means, you know, eventually it’s going to get awkward to keep pretending that that’s your real name.
But if you have the right person, or the wrong person, decide that they’re gonna come after you, it’s probably not going to be enough. Because they’re gonna know where to look.
K: Yeah, look, in this day and age of the internet, there’s—Unfortunately, there’s no hiding forever. If somebody wants to find you badly enough, they’re going to. But it’s okay! Because, as Rekka said, the point of your pen name should not be to hide. If it is, maybe consider publishing.
R: Yeah, becoming a public figure. Yeah, it’s sad to say that you just can’t be an anonymous writer and collect your writing check because in this day and age, people feel like they’re paying for access to you as well.
K: Yeah, yeah. You are your writing. You are your brand. It’s, you know, go back and listen to our social media episode. We talk quite a lot about that. But pen names, they’re fun. Grab one, if you feel like it.
R: Yeah! And you don’t have to commit to it. You can still play around with just coming up with names. You might find one and be like, “I’m gonna save that. I’m gonna use that someday.” But you can relaunch your career at any point with a pen name, so if you’re happy or you’ve already started writing under one name, you don’t have to switch it if you come up with another good one. I mean, it can just be a character name. So, it’s up to you. If you come up with too many good names, maybe just use your real name and leave the good name creations to the characters in your books.
But if you find one of these reasons we’ve mentioned resonates with you, then that might be a good reason to try it. And if you aren’t published yet, it’s pretty simple to change your name at this point.
K: Yep.
R: Just change the name that you put on the byline in your next submission and you’re on your way.
K: Yup. Yeah, so, that’s pen names.
R: That’s, I think, everything we have to say about them.
K: So, um, as always. Thank you for listening. We hope, I guess, by the time this comes out… I don’t know, maybe quarantining, social distancing may start being lifted?
R: As we record this, more Starbucks stores have opened.
K: Okay.
R: I’m not sure that’s wise, but that’s what’s happening.
K: Well, we’ll go by the Starbucks metric, certainly.
R: I did hear that Disney Springs will start, I think, opening some stores. So Disney’s coming back. That’s a very telling metric.
K: Well, yeah. But the parks are not gonna open till next year, I understand.
R: So that’s… that they are even thinking about opening Disney Springs which can also be as crowded as a park sometimes. That’s pretty telling.
K: Well, we’ll go by the Starbucks metric. Society is measured based on what Starbucks is doing.
R, skeptical: Yeah… I don’t know how I feel about that.
K, laughing: Look, there’s a sad and uncomfortable truth in life that we need to face, Rekka, and that is that many people are entirely dependent on coffee in order to function as human beings.
R: I know you’re aiming that at me, but I’ll have you know that with my radiation treatment, I haven’t really been wanting coffee lately. So, uh, I don’t even know who I am anymore.
K: Oh, I can see. You’ve got a tea bag in that mug. Wow. Welcome to—
R: It’s also a throat coat because I’m gonna start having a sore throat with the radiation as well. There’s my little update, so if you were wondering how the cancer treatment’s going. I’m in good spirits, but I am ready to be done with radiation and on the other side of it and back to drinking coffee, hopefully. Although I don’t know if I will ever taste it the same again, based on the nerves they’re killing.
K: I have a feeling you and coffee will find your way back to each other.
R: One hopes. Actually, you know, if I had to choose between tasting coffee and tasting rib-eye, I think I would probably go for the rib-eye.
K: Well I knew that, yeah. I mean, yeah.
R: There’s more nutrition in rib-eye than coffee. And, you know, coffee only gets you so far. [long pause] I can’t believe I just said that. Who am I?
K, laughing: Well, you’re R.J. Theodore.
R: Oh, right! That person can drink tea and not eat steak every night and be perfectly happy.
K: Yeah, yeah. That’s what’s going on there. So, thanks everyone for listening! As always, you can find us on the socials.
R: That’s @wmbcast on Twitter and Instagram, and we are also at Patreon.com/wmbcast, where we would absolutely love your support if you’re able to. If you aren’t able to, what really helps us is to share our episodes with a friend who might find the content interesting, or just leave us a rating and review on Apple podcasts. That would be super helpful.
K, robotic: Feed the algorithm, people!
R: That is the one that really, really warms our dark hearts on a cold night. So, if you could do that, we’d really appreciate it. And we will talk to you on social, or we will talk to you in two weeks!
K: Stay safe, everyone!
[outro music plays]
Tuesday Jun 16, 2020
Episode 37 - Managing Mayhem with Murderboards - An Interview with Jennifer Mace
Tuesday Jun 16, 2020
Tuesday Jun 16, 2020
Hi everyone, and thank you for tuning in to another episode of the We Make Books Podcast - A podcast about writing, publishing, and everything in between!
This week we have another vintage episode from Rekka's previous podcast, The Hybrid Author. Rekka sat down with author Jennifer Mace to talk about how you deal with all of those loose ends and dangling plots while finishing your story and the answer is both straightforward and awesome: Murderboards. We really don't want to give too much away here because this episode is just that awesome, so give it a listen and get ready to add a giant post-it covered bulletin board to your life!
We Make Books is hosted by Rekka Jay and Kaelyn Considine; Rekka is a published author and Kaelyn is an editor and together they are going to take you through what goes into getting a book out of your head, on to paper, in to the hands of a publisher, and finally on to book store shelves.
We Make Books is a podcast for writers and publishers, by writers and publishers and we want to hear from our listeners! Hit us up on our social media, linked below, and send us your questions, comments, concerns, and a maybe a story about when you once had to take one of your darlings out behind the chemical shed.
We hope you enjoy We Make Books!
Twitter: @WMBCast | @KindofKaelyn | @BittyBittyZap
You can (and should) check out Macey on Twitter @englishmace and check out her Hugo-nominated podcast 'Be the Serpent'.
Episode 37: Jennifer Mace and Murderboards
transcribed by Sara Rose (@saraeleanorrose)
[0:00]
K: Hey everyone, and welcome to another episode of We Make Books, a show about writing, publishing, and everything in between. My name’s Kaelyn Considine, I’m the acquisitions editor for Parvus Press.
R: And I’m Rekka, I write science fiction and fantasy as R.J. Theodore.
K: So this is another throwback episode, a throwback to even before We Make Books. This is another—what do we call this? A relaunch? A re-release?
R: Yeah, we just wanna make sure this episode’s out there where people can access it because it comes up every now and again on Twitter, people asking a certain author how they go through the process of creating an outline for their novels. And the person that I interview in this episode, Jennifer Mace, who goes by Macey, always has this great process and, rather than force her to explain it over and over again, I wanted to make sure that, since the Hybrid Author episodes are no longer available, easily, to find that there was a way for people to get this information and so, I will continue to relaunch this interview no matter how many podcasts it takes.
K: So this is an episode, as Rekka said, sat down and talked with Jennifer Mace, goes by Macey, fantastic author, fantastic person. One of the cohost of the Be the Serpent podcast, the Hugo nominated Be the Serpent podcast—
R: Twice now!
K: Twice now!
R: Yes.
K: So, yeah, absolutely check that out. Fantastic show, fantastic people on it! But Macey has a really great and interesting take and perspective on how to plot and outline your book, and what you’re working on. It can be complicated. And it’s like, “Oh, I’ll just sit down and make an outline,” and then that even sounds easier than it actually turns out to be!
R: So, in this interview, I was using this to create a new outline, but what Macey often does is use this to fix drafts that she’s already started. So she uses this to track the outline of what has been written in a draft, and then use it to find imbalances, visually, and then adjust. So she hadn’t usually used it to create a new outline, but that’s what I was using it for in this interview.
K: Yeah. So, anyway, great episode. A lot of good information, especially if you are struggling with the pacing or story issues or even some story development issues, I think, in this. Macey’s technique can certainly help you. So, anyway, take a listen and enjoy!
[intro music plays]
R: We have, today, Jennifer Mace. We’ll call her Macey for the rest of the episode, but she writes under Jennifer Mace, so once you hear how brilliant she is you are going to want to go find her under the proper author name. I met Macey in 2017 at the Nebulas and we have held a light acquaintance over Twitter for about a year and a half, and then suddenly I got know Alex Rowland, who you’ve heard on the podcast before, and they story of, you know, congealed the whole thing together. As they do.
So, you’ve heard, as I mentioned, Alex Rowland who is one third of the perfect trifecta of the Be the Serpent podcast, who you should all have voted for, if you were capable of voting for a fancast, in any of the awards nominations going on right now and, in perpetuity, for people who come back to listen to this later.
Macey is, as I said, another third of that podcast. And, listening—I’ll have to get Freya on here at some point now. Now I can’t go on without completing the set. So, yes, you’re going to love Macey’s accent and you’re going to love what she has to tell you about today. Because I was gonna try to explain this on my own, but I think it’s really gonna be better that I have the professional here to tell you about it.
But first! Let’s talk about you! You write as Jennifer Mace.
M: I do!
R: But what do you write, how long have you been writing? What have you got in store for us?
M: Sure, so, I write mostly fantasy and I’ve been working on some short stories lately, but for a much longer time I’ve been a novelist. And I started writing longform by doing NaNoWriMo back in 2008 and I’ve completed eleven(?) NaNoWriMos. I’m doing another one right now, in fact!
R: Yes, you don’t follow any of the rules—
M: Nope.
R: —because you’re here in January, and you started—No, it’s February now, who am I?
M: Well, it’s February now!
R: You started a month of your own NaNoWriMo!
M: Yeah! I’m like—
R: Because you just couldn’t be bothered with that online community thing, right?
M: Well, I got a book to finish, you know? I’ve got my fake-married Renaissance lesbians to finally, finally convince that they actually like one another.
R: Yes, I’ve been seeing little clips of your, well, they’re fake-married, they’re not fake lesbians. Just to be clear where the commas fall in that description. So tell us a little bit, if you want, about this project? Or send readers after something else to check out?
M: Well, I think this one’s fairly representative because I am known for always writing queer women. It’s kind of a thing. So this project is called Catalyst and it’s a high fantasy set in Renaissance Naples that follows what happens when a punchy Disaster Bisexual blacksmith accidentally wifes a Slytherin duchal heir and many hijinks ensure. They’re about to foil a magical bioterrorist, international plot.
R: I am there for all of those things you just said! This is fantastic! Now, you are—remind me, because I know you have a book under contract, is that correct? Is that this one?
M: No, not yet.
R: Oh! Okay, I’m sorry.
M: So I have a Young Adult contemporary selkie YA that’s a queer selkie YA set in Edinburough that we’re actually just about to go out on sub with, with my agent again.
R: Oh, okay. That’s the one I’m thinking of, yes!
M: Yes! I love my selkie babies. Yeah.
R: All right, so if you’re a publisher and you’re hearing this, let me know if you’re interested and I will put you in touch with Macey.
M, pleased: Aww.
R: Or you can find Macey at the links we give you later. She is, I’ll tell you know, on Twitter @englishmace.
M: Yes.
R: So follow her because she has lots of awesome stuff to tell you all the time about various things.
M: And lots of photographs of me pulling faces at the weather.
R: Yes! Weather is a whole thing. So, you’ve got YA, you’ve got fantasy. And you said you have short stories?
M: Yes. I have a couple of short stories out. I have a piece called “Cradle of Vines” that’s out with Cast of Wonders and I have another piece called “Thou Shalt Be Free as Mountain Winds” that is currently in an anthology, but keep your eyes peeled because it may be forthcoming somewhere online very shortly.
R: Fantastic! So I will get those links from you and put them in the show notes so people can go find whichever ones are available online now and links to anthologies, et cetera, for purchase.
M: Absolutely.
R: So, aside from queer women and disaster everything, what would you say is the direction that your writing normally takes you? Everyone’s got a thing.
M: Hmm. I did figure out that I accidentally always have magically transformed characters. I love me a selkie. I love me a kelpie. I love magical tattoos and people grafting on wings and all sorts of cool things. I think the short story that is easiest to find involves a small girl deciding to turn into a plant.
R: Oh, fantastic. And you are known a bit for love of plant knowledge.
M: Just… just a little bit.
R: Just a little bit. So that’s more of something you can look forward to on Twitter. I won’t let her go off in that direction too much, except when she starts talking about the process and how things grow as stories.
M, laughs: I promise not to overly abuse that metaphor. I know a lot of craft books really dig hard on the story-is-growth and story-is-seed idea. But, I will resist.
R: Well, you almost go in the other direction because the process you created that we are going to talk about today is called murderboarding.
M: Haa! In my defense, I did not name it that. In my anti-defense, I did post a picture that looked exactly like one of those serial killer boards that you see on all of the NCIS and CSI TV shows.
R: Mhm.
M: Like striiing and targets and pins and dripping blood—there was no dripping blood, I promise.
R: Well, maybe in the future.
M: There we go, goals! It’s important to have goals.
R: Well, if you’re holding the tacks wrong, then you’re bored.
M: I have stabbed myself with the map pins on several occasions.
R: Alright, so, we’ve teased this enough. Why don’t we get into this. WHat is murderboarding? Why do you use it? And why did it make everything so much easier?
M: So I am an inveterate pantser. I had a chat with my agent recently. I sent her the first act of Catalyst a year ago. And she was like, “It’s so well put together!” And I’m like, “I have no idea what happens next!”
R, giggles: That sounds very familiar.
M: Yees! And she’s like, “How are you doing this? Why are you doing this? Stop.” So, what generally happens for my process is that I will cough up a book over the course of maybe three months of intensive writing. I’ll do a couple of NaNoWriMos back-to-back or something like that. And I will have 70 to 100 thousand words of book. And then I’ll be like, “This is made of lots of pieces, which of them go where and why?”
R: Mhm.
[10:13]
M: So I tried, when I was editing Hagstone—which is my previous book—to figure out how to piece it together using Scrivener or using spreadsheets or just using my computer in general. What I found for me is that I spend so much of my time on computers that it’s kind of a tired method of thinking for me?
R: Sure, in fact, I’m experiencing myself. And the reason, as I mentioned, that I brought you on is because I am going through the process of murderboarding, only from the opposite direction. But the habit of being on a computer and the computer screen, you do things the same way because you’ve created a streamlined process for how things work in your brain, related to interacting with the computer.
M: Yeah.
R: So you’re not looking at things in a different way when you do things the same way every time. So that’s been my exact experience. I’ve always outlined the same way, but I’ve never written the third book in a trilogy before and I sort of felt like something had to change because I’ve always written toward some nebulous future ending, but never toward a specific goal.
M: Right.
R: And now I’m in need of a way that I can change the way I think about things because I need to: one, get over myself, because of course I’ve got two books and I’m like, “These are locked in! What the Hell do I do now?” You know? I know there’s an ending. I kinda know what it’s gonna be but I don’t know how to get there.
M: It’s kinda like the difference between setting out on a road trip and setting out to go to a place.
R: Yes! Yes.
M: Right? You know where you need to be. So, my idea when I was starting the murderboarding stuff was, I have a lot of friends who love plotting on note cards and that’s fairly common. But for me, I can’t keep track of the order. I want to see a shape. I’m very visual. So what I did, and how the murderboarding process works—which is a very grand way of saying I really wanted to stab some things. Basically, you break up your book into whatever pieces make sense for you. For me, I use chapters. If you really like using scenes and don’t have too many scenes, that might work, too.
So I broke it up into chapters and I wrote on a little piece of card, just a very brief summary. Enough to remind me of what was in that chapter, and then I laid them all out in order, in their acts, in the four quartile structure that works well for me. And I kind of pinned them on a board so I could see them all in one place, with lots of space around them to add more detail. And then, once you have everything kind of situated, I start asking myself, “What am I trying to do in this edit?” What am I trying to highlight or rearrange or make sure makes sense.
So the first time that I was going through with Hagstone, one of the main thread of Hagstone is a bunch of interpersonal relationships that the main character kind of discovers themselves through. So, I took a color of map pin and I stuck red map pins in every chapter where Graham, one of the other characters who’s important shows up. I stuck another color of purple in every one where Viv, who is a romantic interest, shows up. And then you can take a step back from the board and look at it and see these patterns of color and see where you have frontloaded or forgotten an entire character, if the character pass is what you’re trying to do.
R: Clumps and gaps.
M: Exactly! And, on a later one, when I was trying to figure out a balance between the magical and mundane worlds, I went through and I tagged every chapter that was set in the magical world and saw that I had a big gap in the middle and there was one scene in there that really didn’t have to be in a mundane setting, so I just lifted it and moved it to a magical one and everything balances better.
R: Yes. And in this—when you say balance, you know, generally we’re thinking pacing and all these other terms that we’ve been taught, in terms of a long narrative. But when you’re looking at it on like a 24 x 36 corkboard which is how you set this up—and we should get into a little bit more of the physical set-up, since this is an audio podcast—
M, laughing: You mean I can’t just gesture and everyone will understand me?
R: I mean you can, you can, but we’re just gonna have to—I’ll illustrate it later or something I suppose. It’ll be stick figures of Macey’s arms just in the air, flailing.
M: There we go.
R: Okay, so, when you’re looking at it on a 24 x 36 board, everything’s within, say, 18 inches of everything else, and suddenly you’re not just trying to remember in Chapter 12, now that I’m in Chapter 36, have I remembered to include this character anywhere else in the book?
M: Mhm!
R: So, and you mentioned the notecards thing, and people who listened to the last episode will know that I just tried notecards for the first time, too! And I always avoided it because I was not a fan of this concept of these loose sheets of paper and one, laying them out seemed like the best way to trigger anxiety—
M: Oh, yeah!
R: And then walking over them. No, it was too stressful. But I was able to do it in my new office because it’s a very confined space, no one else is gonna go in there if I don’t want them to, and it has a hardwood floor.
M: Oh, nice.
R: I think the last time I tried it, it was a carpeted floor and I think that makes a huge difference because you can’t just lay the cards where you want them on a carpet floor. So, I’m trying all sorts of new things. So, now that I’m already willing to look into the physical, now I’m looking at Macey’s Twitter threads from a few months ago about murderboards and I’m going, “Okay, so if I just chop this up into smaller pieces and get sharp things and get some string, I can do this. And maybe it would help me.”
You use it, Macey, to look backward at a plot that you’ve pantsed.
M: Right.
R: And I’m doing it exactly the opposite, to not pants a book, because I’m on a short timeline, and to do it from the ground up. Where I don’t exactly know the details of the book, I don’t know what each scene is going to contain, and I’m trying to build these things from nothing. So let’s—what I always do when I outline is to write down everything I know about the story. So now I’m writing down everything I know about the story on these tiny little cards and I’m putting them in columns where they fall in the story.
So, as you mentioned, it’s the 25 percentile structure, so Act One is the first column, Act Two there’s a build-up and even more build-up in the middle for your next two columns, and then Act Three, your climax and your denouement come in column four. So as I’m writing down all these things I know, I’m putting them approximately where in the story I think they’re going to happen. And then, what I start to see, is I”ve got the denouement locked in, but I don’t know anything else. And, of course, I’ve got the starting point because I’ve just finished the sequel that comes before this new book.
M: But there’s this whole, like, Fog of War in the middle section.
R: It’s a very foggy spot in the middle. So, yes, in these four columns, immediately, I could see that I needed to build out the flesh of a full plot versus just: get them straight from A to B. I cannot do that because that is not a book.
M: No.
R: So, when you look at your four columns, you’re doing something similar but you have all the pieces, you’re just moving them around. Whereas I’m filling them in. So, comment on how you decide what goes where and, if you have gaps where you see, literally, a gap in front of you. Whereas, I had a chasm. So speak to that. From either side of the process.
M: Sure. So, one of the things that I find really helps me, from having this all laid out in a physical way, is that I can look at the proportions of my story in a way that I can’t get a sense for when I’m writing a list. So one of the ways that—And I mean, I do plot a little bit, right? I will have maybe twelve bullet points of what I know happens in a book. And the ones that are near to where I’m writing right now will be pretty good and the ones that are further out will just be like, “And they foil a plot of some kind??? Maybe stabbing??”
R: Because I need them to!
M: Question mark. So, when you’re weaving together enough plots to make a novel. You’ll generally have more than one, and you may have one that’s the main plot and others are the subplots. But I like to think about it as a series of sine waves that are interacting. One is going up and another is going down. So when you’re trying to fill the middle of a book, particularly, if I know that these three things have to happen to advance the main plot, and this one has to be roughly at the midpoint and that one has to be at the 22-percent-through-the-book mark because it has to feed into the swap between Act One and Act Two.
I can put all of those in the right position on my board, based on the proportions and I can kind of tell myself when I’m writing, “Oh, this needs to be within that chapter.” And then, conversely, when I’ve done the writing I can see, on my board, whether those plots are kind of clustered in the wrong places and whether I can rearrange scenes to do that. But I know, in the past, I have—the last time I edited Hagstone, no two times ago that I edited Hagstone, I took the entire third column and I reversed the order of all the chapters.
R, blinking: Okay. Because you saw something happening, in other words?
[19:46]
M: Yeah, because—and this was in part with the advice of my agent—the arc of one of the relationships was wrapping too late, and it gave it too much significance, when it needed to wrap earlier so that the character’s self-discovery took more of the weight, which was the actual weight of the book. And I did that by putting it all together like a puzzle, back on the whiteboard. So it’s kind of like what you were saying about how you plot. You know that you have these gaps here and you need to have something that goes into them. I had all of these pieces, but it was like a pile of Scrabble tiles.
R: Right, yeah. Absolutely. That’s very much what it feels like. That, or a five hundred piece puzzle. I walk by the board, where it’s sitting on a table, and all of a sudden I catch myself leaning over it like people who are on their way out the door, walking past a puzzle. Like, “OH! I know what I see there.”
M: Yeah!
R: What I’m finding, as I’m trying to fill in these gaps, is that I’ll start, on a separate sheet of paper, to just write down some notes of things I’m seeing. And by the time I’ve gotten a few lines into it, I’ve recognized that there’s a parallel that I can build into this book to the first book.
M: Nice.
R: So that it’s going to feel like this event is book-ending the entire trilogy. And these are the kinds of things that I very, seriously doubt that I would’ve caught on to if I were just writing everything I knew in Scrivener and then going between those and New, Return, and fill in something else.
M: It’s just too much information, is the thing. For me, when I’m looking at my Scrivener file and all of my worldbuilding folders and all of my character sheets, I can’t keep it in my head.
R: Mhm.
M: And I know more than I think I do, about these scenes and about these chapters. So when it’s really boiled down, and there’s nothing distracting me around it, I can remember those things. But when I’m looking straight at them, I can’t compare them to other things. There’s just too much going on.
R: Right. There’s also word phrasing that we’ve got, if we’re looking at our draft. You know, all of a sudden we’re in the weeds of: how is this paragraph structured? And we’ve forgotten to be watching the information that we’re communicated to the reader. We’re more concerned about how many times did I use the word “that” in that paragraph?
M: Oh god.
R: So, I wonder if there’s also something—and I’m sure you’ll agree—to the psychology of taking your scene and literally putting a pin in it, and sticking it to a board and saying you’re there.
M: Yeah.
R: Like, you’ve—we talk about using map tacks and I will link to Amazon for the best set of map tacks I was able to find, 15 glorious colors, and a set of flags as well. [M laughs]
Just in case you’re tracking more things. But actually, and I’ll come back to this in a second, when you are taking a piece of metal with a pointy tip and you’re sticking it through the paper, you are making a mental decision.
M: You’re making a commitment, right? And I find this particularly, because I’m doing this at the edit phase, the first thing I will do is go through and decorate and understand my chapters, and say, “Oh, this chapter has lots of magic in it!” or “This chapter is the one with the Guild plotline, versus this one is the Espionage in the Church plotline,” but—
R: And when you say decorate are you referring to the colors of the pins?
M: Yes, so I’m referring to the color of the pins. So,, like, you might use a colored sticker in a planner? On the pinboard you use these map pins. But once I’ve done all of that, I then make an edit plan. For me, that means adding more little note cards in handwriting next to the typed, neat chapter headings. And every time I pin one of those in place, I’m saying that I’ve decided to make this change to my book.
R: Mhm. And it’s kind of empowering.
M: Yeah! It really is. And any time that I’m not sure what I’m doing, or I’m not sure what has to happen next, I can go back and look at my board and be like, “Oh! I pinned that here, that’s the next thing to do. Okay.”
R: Yeah. The amount of decisions that I’ve made just by looking at this board are impressing even me because a week ago I still wasn’t even sure where this story was going to end, and now I have all these decisions. Not only that, but, like I said, I’ve closed openings that I set up two books ago without even saying, “I want to do it in a way that parallels this,” or “I want to do it in a way that satisfies this.” And suddenly it’s paralleling and it’s satisfying and it’s visibly in front of me that I’ve done this and, like you said, you go back and you see that you stuck a piece of metal through that paper and you committed.
M: Yeah!
R: And it’s really satisfying to do. And it’s not just satisfying because it’s called a murderboard, but—
M, laughing: That’s a large part of it.
R: Yeah, it does help.
M: I think it’s also kind of like seeing your city on the street level and then seeing your city from a plane as you take off. Right?
R: Yeah.
M: They’re different things, and you need both of them, but when you’re seeing your city from however many miles above, you can see, “Oh, this is the pattern of the streets, this is where that park looks like that park.” One of the things we haven’t mentioned yet that I love is using string to tie things together. Physically tie them together.
R: Mhm.
M: So when I’m focusing on a particular plot line or trying to add a new plot, one of the things I’ll do is go through, make all of my notes, and thread this new plot through the whole novel which is really how I think about it. Like embroidery. But then I take a piece of string, and I wrap it around the first of those edits and I then, in turn, take it through every pin that is connecting that plotline together. And then I can see, on my book, the path that the plot takes through my novel.
R: Okay.
M: Which is super satisfying.
R: Yeah, no doubt! So, I have a question about that! You referred to sine waves before.
M: Yes.
R: Are you placing things on your board in the order that they happened, or are you placing them in a position that is relative, say, to an emotional arc or to a plot arc?
M: I’m always using word count as my measurement. So, I almost never plot things based on timeline. If we’re having flashbacks, if we’re having characters with overlapping points of view, to me, in the reader’s mind, those happen after one another on the timeline and that’s really what I’m looking for, is the reader’s experience. That’s what I’m trying to create.
R: So in the order that you present it to the reader.
M: Mhm, exactly. And in the amount of text.
R: Okay, so word count is a fantastic way to use—that’s a great metric to use. So, you would say, the first quarter, if it’s 25,000 words, the top is word one and the bottom is word 25, 000 and then the second column, the top, is 25,001—
M: Yup.
R: —and the bottom is 50 thousand. Okay, that’s fantastic. That’s really straightforward. From my point of view, I’m trying to figure out where these things—not only where do they go in the story, but what position on the board is going to signify what’s happening. For instance, right now, because I’m still sort of planning things out, things are grouped by POV. So I’ve got a cluster of things that all happen to the POV A in Act One, but it’s not necessarily the order that I’m going to present it to the reader, word-wise. So that was my next step, was to figure out how to make this a chronological reflection of how the story’s going to go.
M: Right. And I think for me that that’s crucial. The book that I’m working on right now is dual point of view and I got kinda weird with it because I wasn’t intending for it to be. So the first act is all one point of view, and then it kind of splits off into the second one afterwards. But it’s been very important to inweave those chapters on the board, as well as in the book because it doesn’t matter to the reader that one character has spent 20,000 words working on this guild plotline. If the reader is getting 5,000 words, every 5,000 words swapping back and forth with another character who’s doing the church plotline, it feels to the reader like they’ve been getting a mix of things happening. It doesn’t feel to the reader like they’ve been isolated and doing only one plot.
R: Sure. I was even thinking of that. I’m like, “Oh, I have four plotlines, I have four quarters of the board…” and then my concern was if I did take the string and lead it from one plot point to the next, it’s not going to be great for the reader if it jumps and it takes 25,000 words to get back to that next plotline, so that the string goes directly across the board, as we’ve been describing it. That means the reader’s forgotten, probably, by the time that plot point comes up again.
So the mix of POVs, to me, is important. Although I know there are plenty of books that do a part and the entire act is one character’s and then maybe there’s some sort of event that helps you orient yourself to where you are in the timeline of things, like a parade or some kind of holiday or a meteor crashing or whatever. But until you get to that moment, you don’t know where you are in relation to the other characters that you’ve already been visiting.
M: I have far too much fun using this kind of point of view structure and decision-making as another metaphor within the book, right? So this book, Catalyst, is a fake-marriage book and so we start with a single character who has a goal and decides that they are going to take this step of committing to this other person, but not really, just to reach their goal. And so we start in one, very selfish point of view. And then, once they join together, we get a bit of the other person’s point of view, but it’s still very disjointed. And then, as they become more in sync and paying attention to one another and actually acting as partners, we start to get a real balance of points of view.
R: Mhm. So you’re playing with the tropes from two directions.
M: Yeah, exactly, but also the nature of the relationship is reflected in the structure of the book.
R: Right, right. That’s awesome. I’m looking forward to reading this book!
[M cackles]
R: I’m just trying to—Oh, and then you said you decorate your board when you first lay all your cards out. You’ll start putting the pins in that reflect everything. So you’re pretty certain—I mean, obviously, you start this as a revision, but if you stick eight pins in a card, if you need to move that card, you’ve got to pull out eight pins.
M: Oh, yeah.
R: So is there, do you have any advice for how deep into the weeds of identifying things should someone go. Or should they say, “Okay, right now I’m tracking this and there’s four aspects of that. I’m gonna stick to these four pins,” or if you have fifteen pins *cough cough* should you just assign them all and stick them all in there?
M: I would not assign them all because the goal with the board is you’re trying to have something you can hold in your head.
R: Mhm.
M: I think, for me, the point at which I can’t remember which pin means what, means I’ve used too many pins.
R, laughing: Fair enough, okay.
M: Like if I need a map or a key for myself, then that’s no good. Also, you may have fifteen pins, how many of those colors can you tell apart?
R: Right, yes. I remember you mentioning that on Twitter once and I was like, “Okay, I’m gonna have to check that before I start using them.” But then I was thinking, am I going to figure out how to lock these into a position on the board through the story, chronologically, if I can’t see what the trails are. But if I pin everything, fifteen pins on one card, I’m gonna hate myself if I have to move it, because it’s basically perforated at this point.
M: Right. Yep. But also, I feel like authors track a lot of detail when they’re writing. But readers are not going to track that level of detail. Readers are not going to notice fifteen levels of symbolism and different narratives and all of the different plotlines and subplots as distinct.
R: This is why writers drink.
M: Yeah, right? So, I feel like the exercise of boiling it down to the half-dozen things that are really important to you, at least in this round of revisions, or this round of drafting, is actually a really good exercise on its own. Like, what are the things you really want to get across?
R: Okay, so pulling back from… yeah.
M: Yeah, exactly. What’s the impact? Because then you can have other things in there, but you can kind of have made the decision in advance, like we were saying earlier, by committing. Other pieces of the book are there to serve the ones that you decided are the important bits.
R: Mhm.
M: Right? They’re there to echo and reflect and enhance.
R: Right. Don’t tell those other pieces of the book, but they’re not as important.
M: Yeah! Right? I mean, we joke, but it’s kinda true. You can’t do everything in every book.
R: Right. Okay. Now she’s getting harsh, folks.
M, meekly: I’m sorry!
R: I’m uncomfortable now. No, no this is fantastic because it is something where, as you mentioned, we get super wound up, super deep in the weeds to bring it back to plants. When we are finished with a draft and looking back, or in my case, we’ve got two books of details behind us, and we’re looking to wrap it up and stick the landing on a series, too much of this becomes precious to us.
M: Right.
R: And on this board, even though I got the biggest corkboard that I could find at Staples, almost immediately, as I started to write things on it, I was running out of room.
M: Yeah.
R: And I think that’s the most important thing. One, buy a couple extra decks of index cards that you’re gonna cut up into tiny pieces, but, two, be ready to go through this process of realizing that I can’t hold everything on this board that I think is important to this story.
M: Right. And you can’t hold it in your head! I mean, they’re almost more pneumonic devices than they are actual edit notes, right? If I was to give my board to someone who knows my writing style and be like, “Please go implement this edit on my book,” they’d be like, “What the fuck are you talking about? That’s nonsense.” Right? It just doesn’t work.
R: Yeah, yeah. And I like to tease my family members as I’m walking around with this enormous board that I can’t hide and that I refuse to drape over. And I’m like, “Watch out, there’s spoilers on here!” But the fact is, if anyone looked at this, they would probably have zero clue what’s going on, based on what we’re doing. So this is very much a shorthand and I just love how suddenly I’ve gone from being the person who does everything, absolutely everything, in Scrivener to now I’ve got this physical object.
And I said this last week, I was carrying around these index cards. I had one of those index card boxes and it was in my pocket of my sweatshirt all the time and it was like an object of power. It was showing that I was doing the thing and it really changed the way that I went through that process. And now I’m doing that again. And, so—okay, we’ve talked about setting up the board in four columns. To the nitty-gritty of that, you have just a thumbtack in the top and bottom and you run a string around it to create the column.
M: Yeah.
R: Note to everyone else: save yourself the trouble, artist’s tape is not going to stick to corkboard very well. [M laughs] Especially if the weather changes on you and the humidity and suddenly you’ve got a curly thing. Okay. Covered that.
M: When it doubt, string. Always string.
R: String is very well-behaved unless the person who was previously in charge of your embroidery floss was not very good about separating it into individual strands and you have lots of knots.
M: Oh noo.
R: Yeah, that was actually me. So I had a tangle of string and uncurling artists’ tape and I got through it somehow.
M: We’re very proud.
R: It was, yes, it was worth the struggle because now I’m on this side of it. So then you have index cards, I don’t know how big yours are? It looked like sometimes you had computer printouts of your scenes, to start with?
M: Yeah, so, I have for Hagstone—which is the one that I’ve revised six times now—I have a Google doc that’s just a single letter-sized piece of paper that I print out with all of my chapters on it. And that’s the size. So it’s like a quarter of the width of landscape mode of that piece of paper, is the size of my corkboard pieces. I’m actually looking behind me because I have my corkboard propped up against a wall over there, that you can’t see.
R: Right.
M: And I’m trying to remember, “How big are those?” They’re like maybe three inches wide.
R: Okay, okay. So depending on the size of your corkboard, obviously, you are going to have room—
M: Yeah, I mean generally the idea is what you want is the chapter or scene summaries to be no more than half the width of the column. You wanna have enough space to add notes and revision notes or other such things, if you’re plotting.
R: Right. So whatever your corkboard is: four columns; your cards that you’re going to pin to it are effectively one eighth of the total width of the board, if you can fit two to a column as Macey just said; and then if you do not have tight, neat handwriting you are going to have to get really good at shorthand because now as you look at the pieces that you’ve printed out from your spreadsheet, or wrote very neatly, very carefully, now you’re going to see where the gaps are. Then what goes in the second column?
M: The second column is the first half of Act Two. Oh!
R: Oh, I’m sorry, I mean the second half of the first column.
M: Well, so for me my first half is what is in each chapter. The next one is basically edits and changes that I need to make. So once I’ve inventoried what I have—So the first step of this operation is: what is actually in my book?
R: So if you open the draft that you just finished, or the revision that you just finished—
M: Mhm! Literally what’s there. And then—
R: —without any changes.
M: Without any changes. Just what exists. And then the next step is, “Okay, well, what do I need to do about that?” What needs to change or what needs to be brought out, maybe not changed but just enhanced in some way. Though I could see that if you were doing this as a plotting thing,you might have whatever core scenes, like action plot stuff, you might have that in your first column. In the second column you might have Character Notes and Echoes Back to the First Book and other, like, detailed pieces you need to remember to fit in there, but aren’t really defining those chapters.
R: Okay. Alright, cool. I’m cheating here. I’m using Macey to work out my own plot. So you have these notes for just space purposes, generally? Because it’s not gonna fit on the piece that you printed out from your spreadsheet?
M: Um, well—
R: Would you say that’s roughly fair?
M: Also for movability. And I can change my mind easily. I find that having them as separate units—I’ll have like a separate piece of paper for every different planned edit that I have so that I can decide that I don’t like one and remove it—
R: And just tear it off and it’s not half of a sheet that you already put there.
M: Yeah, exactly. You can do very similar things with a whiteboard, it’s just a lot easier to accidentally wipe things off on a whiteboard.
R, laughing: Yes.
M: Whereas with a pinboard it’s a lot harder to discombobulate.
R: Mhm. Okay, so, if you were to decide, for example, that Chapter 2 belongs after the existing Chapter 8, would you write that and put it to the right of your existing Chapter 2, or would you pick up the pin from Chapter 2 and rearrange the chapters?
M: Let’s see. What I would probably do in practice is put another piece next to the existing Chapter 2, or even on top of it with a big X mark on it.
R: Mhm.
M: Put the bits of Chapter 2 that I still wanted, after Chapter 8, because it’s gonna have to change a bunch. Write the scenes, the plot elements that I want to bring over on their own little pieces, and put them between Chapter 8 and Chapter 9 as a new chapter, and put a big piece of paper in the first column between Chapter 8 and 9 called Chapter 8.5.
R: Okay, fair enough.
M: There needs to be a new chapter here, you’ll name it when you get there.
R: And you do make a good point that, in this example, Chapter 2 probably still has some pretty structural worldbuilding going on, so you’re probably not going to be able to delete all of Chapter 2, you’re going to have to work that information into either Chapter 1 or Chapter 3… now Chapter 2, renamed. So that’s a good thing to—
[40:29]
M: And when I’m doing that with the five chapters that I reorganized in Hagstone, I definitely did have to break the chapters up and some pieces of each chapter went to different places. So what I did for that rearrangement was, one the left-hand side I had the existing chapters and then on the second column, on the right, I put where the scenes would be and then I tied strings from each chapter to where those scenes were going, so I could see how the pieces crossed.
R: Oh, okay. Right, again, we have this ability to get layered and really deep into the physicality of how these things are gonna connect.
M: Mhm!
R: So, I haven’t gotten to the point where I’m hooking string between things yet on my board and now you’ve got me super excited.
M: I love the string!
R: And I also have a lot of, again, embroidery thread is great because it comes in so many colors. So I’ve got a string for each color in my map pins. Not even on purpose, just because I used to do cross-stitch. But now I have the embroidery floss, so I would recommend getting a starter-kit of embroidery floss if you don’t have a collection already because you can get a bunch of different colors. And, as Macey said, don’t put fifteen pins in your card right away. So you don’t, maybe, need fifteen colors of thread. So, do you do this—do you go through this process, for the example of character arcs, will you figure out what you need to do and then take out the different pins that you’ve got and then put in another set for a different problem that you’re going solve?
M: I generally do all of the problems I’m trying to tackle in a big revision round at once. And so, generally, each time I am convinced that that will be the last revision round.
R, laughing: Of course!
M: It’s all there is! But by the time that I need to do it for the next round of problems—this is not something, or an amount of effort, that you would do for a small edit. This is like a big revision. Some chapters will be getting rewritten, a lot of things will be changing, maybe characters will go away. Otherwise it’s not worth the effort. So, if I need to do another round of revision after that, the first step, the survey-what-you-have-in-your-book is going to be incorrect. Because it’s all changed.
R: Right.
M: So you have to start that again. And this is why I advise keeping your chapter outline in a document online because then you can kind of tweak that in place without having to rewrite it from scratch, which saves a lot of time. But you will have to tweak it. You will have to say, “Okay, well, this chapter once was like that, but now it’s like this!”
R: That definitely helps. I’m wondering, Scrivener has like an index card view. I wonder, does it export into any sort of spreadsheet from that? I don’t know the answer to that, but I’m gonna have to look into that because that’d be pretty handy. Because you can have a little note card-size worth—I mean, honestly, you could write the entire novel in the note card and they would let you, but there’s a certain amount that it will show on the screen if you’re looking in the index card view, or in the outliner view, so if we could export that, then this would maybe help with that.
So, I was just trying to think of—so I’ve worked with it a little bit, so I have little bit of understanding, and we’ve tackled my questions that I would have for you. I just want to make sure that we’re leaving the listener with the full view of this process. So, you’ve mentioned that when your pins are all in place, then you’ll start to fill in the lines between them and tie things through and see—does the way that the string cross ever seem to create any patterns for you, between different interaction sections? Does it reveal anything or is it just too much of a mess and you can really only follow one string at a time?
M: Well, I don’t tend to use a ton of strings and I won’t use strings for everything. It’ll really be about the piece that I’m trying to trace through the whole book. One of the things that it does highlight, when you’re tying it, almost the action of tying it, will show you how frequently you’re using that plotline or not and show you where the gaps are. So that’s something I find really valuable. Another note that I realize I forgot to say explicitly: when I’m adding—so let’s go back to when I was having a problem where there were too many mundane settings in my book and too few magical settings.
R: Mhm.
M: So I chose the black pin for my main magical setting. I went through, put black pins in everything, I’m like “Oh, there’s a gap in the middle here! I’m going to move this scene to be in the magical setting.” I wrote myself a little note, I put it in the second column, and I used a black pin to pin it in place because this is an edit that is about that setting. So you use the same color coding that you used for assessing your novel to annotate the edits and remind yourself of the purpose of those edits.
R: Okay. Great. So one thing that I have done in the past is use highlighter on cards, where I make changes and whether that change is related to a certain POV or maybe whether that change is related to setting, et cetera. Do you ever find yourself making edits about, say, magic and realizing that it also ties up a character arc situation. Would you put two pins in that edit, then?
M: Definitely, yeah. I would put two pins in that. And I prefer using the pins to colors on my note cards just because you can change them. And I can change my mind about whether I wanted that edit to actually have that character in it, or whether that spoils it in a second thought.
R: Right, so if Joe is represented by a green pin and you decide that Joe doesn’t belong in that scene, you take the green pin out and you don’t have to write a whole new card because you used green highlighter on the card.
M: Exactly.
R: Perfect. It’s funny, we’re talking about committing, but then we’re also talking about, “But you can change it!!”
M: Yeah, I feel like decisions are not permanent, right? Hm. How to put that better. There is a—
R: That there’s a gradient of decisions.
M: —strength to making a decision, but there’s also a strength to reevaluating that decision, right? I mean, it’s all the process that works for you in the end.
R: Right, right. So anyone who is listening to this and it’s making them want to try this process, there is no rulebook. I mean, maybe that will be a release that Macey out with someday.
M: Oh God!
R: But there’s no hard-and-fast set of rules for exactly how this works, or else you’re doing it wrong. It’s going to be: is this tool useful for you?
M: Exactly.
R: Is it almost useful for you? What can you change that will make it the tool you need right now? And that might change every time you go back in to use it. Or you may, you know, use it once, it helps tremendously, but then next time something else works. I mean, this whole thing is all about the impermanence of our writing process. And I’ve talked before, I think a couple episodes ago, about how it’s okay if your writing process changes.
M: Mhm.
R: Like, there’s a lot of stigma around: are you writing correctly? Is your process—does it match Stephen King’s? Does it match Delila S. Dawson’s? Does it match N.K. Jemisin’s? It doesn’t matter because yours is interacting with your brain, not that author’s brain. So, as people, I think we all can agree we change pretty frequently. Something that we liked two weeks ago, we’re sick of today. Something that has always worked for us can’t get us through a block. So, maybe as important as finding a system that works for you, and trying something new, is also: be willing to let go of a tool if it’s not working for you one time.
M: It’s like standing on the deck of a ship, right? You’ve gotta keep your knees loose, you’ve gotta adjust your stance, otherwise you’ll get thrown overboard.
R: Yes, yes. And keep your eyes on the horizon or you’ll get a tummy ache.
M: There we go!
R: Yes, absolutely. Alright, so is there anything that you can think of that we haven’t really covered about this process, or any notes you thought of before and skipped over because you do it so automatically now?
M: Um, make sure to have a good cup of tea with you while you’re doing it? It takes a while. It takes longer than you think.
R: And maybe one of those little hotplates you can get from the electronics gift shop where it keeps your tea warm for you, while you’re working on this. Because you look up after a while and you’ve been tying a lot of knots.
M: If you have a kotatsu, then I am jealous and you should use it.
R: Yes, okay. Absolutely. Oh my gosh, that’s very true. Cats, I will warn you, do not like when you are sitting on the floor and your lap is smaller than usual. But, I don’t know, maybe feed them and then hurry. Before they come back to get you.
All right, this is awesome. I know people are going to want to take a look at the murderboard examples that you’ve put on Twitter, so I’m going to find permalinks to those threads or maybe steal the graphics just in case. And put that in the show notes so people can find their way to you. And I’m sure this is going to be something that at least a few of our listeners are going to want to try because I put this on Instagram and I had people that I didn’t even know were writers telling me that they wanted to try this!
Even John Adamus, who’s been on the show before, was my first editor for my series and he even approved and he never hits Like on anything so—it is John Adamus Approved,f or anyone keeping track.
M: There we go!
R: So I know that we’re gonna get some great feedback from this and I will put your contact information, that you’re willing to share, in the show notes for anyone who wants to follow along and chat with you about murderboards, or maybe show you theirs once they try it out for the first time!
M: Absolutely!
R: Alright, so, if someone is looking for you can you let us know where to find you and, again, remind folks what they’ve got to look forward to from you as a writer.
M: Alright, sure! So you can find me most easily on Twitter as @englishmace and these days my most popular piece of output is my podcast, Be the Serpent, we did actually spend a whole episode a few months back talking about our process. The episode is called The Room Where It Happens because we are Hamilton nerds. We talked a little bit more about murderboarding there. And on the writing front, there will be more stories and more poems forthcoming, and I will post about them on Twitter when they exist!
R: I believe you! Alright, awesome. Thank you so much for joining us today, Macey!
M: Thank you for having me.
R: Thank you for creating this process because I know it’s helping me right now.
M: Well, I’m glad that more people can get some joy out of stabbing things.
R: And if anything is the takeaway from this episode, it’s please, go stab something. Not a person.
[outro swish]
R: Thanks, everyone, for joining us for another episode of We Make Books. If you have any questions that you want answered in future episodes, or just have questions in general, remember you can find us on Twitter @wmbcast, same for Instagram, or wmbcast.com! If you find value in the content that we provide, we would really appreciate your support at Patreon.com/wmbcast.
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Thank you so much for listening and we will talk to you soon.
[outro music plays]
Tuesday Jun 02, 2020
Tuesday Jun 02, 2020
Hi everyone, and thank you for tuning in to another episode of the We Make Books Podcast - A podcast about writing, publishing, and everything in between!
This week we have a very special guest! We were lucky enough to be able to sit down with author Scott Warren. Scott is the author of the Union Earth Privateer series and the third and final book of the trilogy is being released the same day as this episode! Full disclosure: Scott was the first author ever signed by Parvus Press and so it was extra awesome to be able to talk to him ahead of the release of the last book in his trilogy. Scott is an all-around amazing and fascinating guy, so we were thrilled to be able to get his perspective and thoughts on developing a story past your original plan, writing from your own experience, and wrapping up a trilogy. We had a great time talking with him and hope you enjoy listening!
We Make Books is hosted by Rekka Jay and Kaelyn Considine; Rekka is a published author and Kaelyn is an editor and together they are going to take you through what goes into getting a book out of your head, on to paper, in to the hands of a publisher, and finally on to book store shelves.
We Make Books is a podcast for writers and publishers, by writers and publishers and we want to hear from our listeners! Hit us up on our social media, linked below, and send us your questions, comments, concerns, and the best bit alien weaponry you've imagined, or maybe actually invented. You can trust us! This a secure line and we pinky-promise that the Roswell guys will never know!
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Twitter: @WMBCast | @KindofKaelyn | @BittyBittyZap
Episode 36: Every Rivet in the Alien Railgun - Military Science Fiction with Scott Warren
transcribed by Sara Rose (@saraeleanorrose)
[0:00]
K: Hi everyone! Welcome back to another episode of We Make Books, a show about writing, publishing, and everything in between. I’m Kaelyn Considine, I’m the acquisitions editor for Parvus Press.
R: And I’m Rekka, I write science fiction and fantasy as R.J. Theodore.
K: And today’s a big day for Parvus.
R: Yes! We, full disclosure, we are being very self-serving today and loving every minute of it! And hopefully you’ll love it, too.
K: Today is the launch of Where Vultures Dare the third and final book in the Union Earth Privateers series and thus the first completed trilogy published by Parvus Press! Oh, also, Scott Warren had something to do with this, I guess.
R: I, well, he can talk later. It’s just us now. We can—
K: It’s just us now. So today we had Scott Warren, author of the Union Earth Privateers series sit down with us to talk about—I mean, we talked about everything in this interview!
R: Yeah.
K: We had a great time talking to Scott, covered a range of topics from writing techniques to crafting action scenes to where he came up with the idea for the UEP series. It’s a fantastic interview, Scott is always a delight to talk to.
R: Yeah, and as a reader I really enjoyed Vick’s Vultures and To Fall Among Vultures and I’m just about to dig in because, of course, I have the inside scoop. I got an advance copy of Where Vultures Dare. I, of course, picked it up because I was interested in a small press, to see what they were all about, and I really enjoyed the first book and the second one went a direction I did not see coming, so it’s really great that Parvus was there to allow Scott to take it in a direction that military sci-fi might have said, “Um, actually, if you’re gonna follow the conventions, maybe don’t do this thing?” And I’m really excited to see where book three is gonna go.
K: Scott was the first author ever signed by Parvus Press, so we are very excited about the success and progress of all of our authors, but this is our first completed trilogy and this is Scott’s first completed trilogy, as an author as well. So big day all around!
Anyway, we had a great time talking to Scott and hopefully you have a great time listening to us talk to him.
R: Yep and because it’s June 2nd when we release this, that means book three is out on shelves. So you can go check out Where Vultures Dare and, if you haven’t already read Vick’s Vultures and To Fall Among Vultures, they are quick reads! They read very fast, in addition to not being big, door stopping tomes. So you could pick up all three and check them out in, probably, a span of a few days. Just tear through ‘em.
K: You won’t be able to put them down. Anyway, take a listen and enjoy, we’ll see you on the other side of the music.
[intro music plays]
K: Alright, well, I’m sure that’s all classified so we won’t ask you too much about that!
R: Which is to say that Kaelyn really wants to ask you about it.
S: You can ask me. I’d answer what I can.
K: I have a master’s degree in American military history, so I am—
S: Oh, you probably know more about my activities than I do.
K: Well, my focus was Vietnam, so.
R: Possibly not.
K: Wellllll, there’s debate over how much submarine activity there was during the Vietnam War. There’s some official numbers and then there’s some… speculative numbers.
S: Oh, I don’t actually have any information on that, unfortunately.
R: That’s the official line anyway.
K: That is exactly what he is supposed to say.
S: Yeah.
R: So we are talking today to Scott Warren, author of military science fiction series the Union Earth Privateers, and we are very excited to have him and we are celebrating with him because today his third book in the trilogy has just released. That is Where Vultures Dare. So, welcome Scott, and would you mind introducing yourself for our audience?
S: Thanks for having me, guys! I am Scott Warren, as you said I’m an author, I write both science fiction and fantasy. My sci-fi series is Union Earth Privateers, published under Parvus Press. Humans have just broken into the intergalactic scene and they’ve found it packed to the rafters. They’re kind of hopelessly outgunned. All of these alien races, every single one, is far more advanced than they are. So they developed a small, elite corps called the Union Earth Privateers, whose single directive is: go out and secure advanced technology through any means necessary.
Vick’s Vultures and its sequels follows one such privateer ship, captained by Victoria Marin, and they go around and they engage with aliens. They help them, they fight them, or they pick their bones in order to bring home technology.
R: So you don’t have history, personally, with spaceflight or salvaging alien technology, but you came to the Union Earth Privateers trilogy with a certain background that, I assume, did help you?
S: So the experience that feeds into Vick’s Vultures is kind of two-fold. The first is the submarine experience in the military. I spent about three and a half years in the military, and then after that I transitioned into civilian aviation. So the way that the space combat is written is kind of a blend of the two. It features a lot of the submarine warfare aspects of stealth and sensor readings, as well as the three-dimensional movement. And, as far as aviation goes, that’s where a lot of the nomenclature and the procedural stuff comes from. So when you see Victoria Marin engaging with other cultures, other militaries, most of the jargon and the lingo they use actually comes from the aviation world, not the military world.
R: And I think one of my favorite things from the first book was humans had this Boogeyman aspect to them because they used that submariner stealth and the other aliens had never seen their faces, they just knew that, if humans came, they were gonna come in through your portholes and take everything. That was a really neat aspect of it.
K: Military sci-fi, that’s a popular genre, to say the least, certainly amongst its fans. I would say it’s one of the most vivaciously consumed of a lot of science fiction and fantasy genres. What, particularly, drew you to writing that because it is a very competitive field to get into, and it’s very hard to write well. It’s interesting that you went from being a submariner to a civilian pilot. I don’t think you can have two more different trajectories there. But I think that, also, as you said, gave you a really interesting perspective to write about here. These stealth operations that the humans in the book are conducting versus being able to incorporate your knowledge of aviation.
S: Well, like you said, the military science fiction genre is huge and has very voracious readers, of which I am one. That was the biggest reason for wanting to write The Union Earth Privateers, is I’ve been reading military science fiction for a long time. I’m, specifically, a big fan of John Scalzi, I like H. Paul Honsigner and his Man of War series, which is also a submarines-in-space style book. But the competitiveness and the market and, really, whether or not I would be able to sell Vick’s Vultures at all didn’t weigh into the equation really at all. I was writing because I wanted a creative outlet. I was coming off of the Sorcerous Crimes Division, so I had just self-published my first fantasy novel and I decided, “Hey, I think I’ll take a try at sci-fi!”
R: And you’re a reader of both, though, right?
S: Yes, absolutely.
K: So, in Vick’s Vultures, and the setting of Union Earth Privateers, humanity’s not in great shape, as you said, at the beginning of this. We are a very small fish in what we are learning is an increasingly big pond, full of very carnivorous other fish. And there’s, instead of this humans going into space and learning and exploring, you have a very—I don’t wanna say more of a dark take on it, but it’s certainly not a very optimistic one. [laughs] Is that—where was that coming from in your writing? Is this what you envision if, you know, we do eventually encounter alien life, is this what you think we’re gonna find?
S: It’s not so much what I think we’re going to find, it’s that I’m a really big fan of the crowded galaxy philosophy, in terms of fiction. But most of the science fiction that I read, humans are usually on force parity with most of the aliens that they encounter, or it’s just hoo-rah, humans are the best forever and ever. I kind of wanted to explore that transitory period where humans get out and it’s not, “Oh, these guys have a similar level of weapons and technology.”
These guys are better than us in every way, so the only way we can survive is if they do not know we’re there. That sort of disparity in force has been explored quite a bit, but usually it’s in terms of aliens invading Earth, aliens invading human space. So the first contact is made by the aliens, and then it becomes a war for survival. I wanted this to kind of be exploring the, “Well how do we prevent a war for survival from happening?”
R: Right, so in your stories the aliens don’t even really know where Earth is or where the humans come from.
S: Mhm. You touched on the humans being kind of the Boogeymen and that was one of my guiding philosophies of that. I wanted humans to be these things that were only scary in the dark.
[10:05]
R: Right, and that was their technique for making sure that nobody messed with them because what else were they going to do? They couldn’t defend themselves against the bigger—the Big Three, as you call them in the books.
S: Right. When I designed most of the alien species in Vick’s Vultures, the kind of philosophy behind it was, well, most of these alien species have long-since settled their differences before they got into space, so they didn’t have the same infighting that humans did, that caused them to be militaristic throughout their existence. And that they’d also been in space for so long that they pretty much had lost their ability to go outside their ships and feel safe outside their ships. So humans were still the only ones using spacesuits and spacewalking. So it’s kind of an age of sail allegory where a surprising amount of sailors didn’t actually know how to swim—
R: Right.
K, laughing: Yeah, right? Yes.
S: —so they feared things in the water. The third aspect of the aliens is that their minds were so much more advanced that they just didn’t need to develop computer technology, so when humans come around with their little, dumb, smoothbrains they’ve been developing computer technology to do their thinking for them, to the point where it’s so advanced that it does things the aliens can’t really wrap their minds around.
K: One of the things that I, personally, really enjoyed about the series with the juxtaposition between the humans and the aliens, is that the humans—like, I get a little annoyed with a lot of science fiction where it is frequently, the aliens come to us first and then the scrappy humans have to come back and fight their way through and unify and, you know, we figure out water is their kryptonite or what have you.
But, what I did like about this was these things is, where we usually have this approach of like, “Oh, you humans, with this, this, and this.” It’s such a foreign concept to these aliens that we’re surprised that they are surprised by this, a little bit.This idea of: they don’t go out into space, they don’t use space suits. As you said, the sailors that can’t swim. So that was something that I really liked about how you differentiated humans versus the aliens in this. That they really have these fundamental differences in how they approach life and space, if you will.
R: But speaking of life in space, you have a lot of action scenes in Vick’s Vultures. That was something that we specifically wanted to talk about in this interview because action scenes are notoriously difficult to write. I don’t care if it’s a giant, massive space battle or if it’s a sword fight between two people in a desert. They’re very hard to write, and you do an incredible job of it while navigating a lot of elements and, as you had mentioned, kind of in the way that a submarine has more than forward and backward and up and down to move, there’s literally infinite directions when coordinating a space battle that objects can move in. Thereby making it even more complicated to keep track of things.
S: Mhm.
R: So how on Earth do you keep track of all these things?
S: Well, the first guiding light is obviously the Rule of Cool. I ignore all the potential things that would just end the scene in one line, so that I can write out an action scene. But when it comes to writing realistic space battles, it doesn’t really happen in science fiction. So, once you have that figured out, you’re kind of free to flub whatever you want.
K: Now, when you say—
S: This is gonna sound like I’m kind of a scam artist peddling snake oil, but really that’s all it is is writing action scenes in space, so far as ship to ship combat, is essentially selling your reader a pipedream.
K: Now when you say—because when you say writing realistic battles, there’s the how you really turn in space, kind of, component to this, and I apologize, I don’t know—I imagine submarines are somewhat of the same where you have to use pressure to force directional changes. In space, in order for, for instance, the space shuttle to turn, it has to release air to force it to do so at a 90 degree angle. Obviously, that’s not how these ships fight each other in space. So, physics is not a consideration for you, at all, when writing these?
S: Somewhat, it is, but very loosely. I mean, when it comes down to it, the best tactic is always gonna be the The Last Jedi, hit a ship with another ship at lightspeed tactic. Why would you never not-use that? Unfortunately, it’s kind of boring to read. So, mostly, I ignore the mechanics of how the ships move like they do. I’m more focused on the story of how some force is going to tackle some other force, based on the disparity in strength. So I’m a little bit closer to a Star Wars kind of ships fighting between each other.
K: So one of the things that I encounter a lot, as an editor, when dealing with any sort of action or combat scene is mapping and tracking all of the components of it. I can’t tell you how many times I get a draft from a writer and we go through this whole thing and I’m like, “Hang on a second, where’s this person? What were they doing the whole time?” and it’s very hard to block that, if you will. And I understand that that’s a phrase for the video component of this, but you kind of have to take it into consideration when writing, too. Where is everyone and how are they interacting? Action scenes are very difficult to write because of that. Because if there’s a fight going on, you can’t have one person that’s just standing there waiting for it to be over because you don’t know what to do with them.
S: Funny story about that, actually, and I’ll answer your question in a second. In the first draft of Where Vultures Dare, the squad that goes down onto the planet, and I’m gonna try and avoid spoilers too much, the small squad initially had another member, a new character that I had made, and by the time they got to that first action scene, I had completely forgotten that, that character even existed and he never shows up in the draft again.
[K laughs]
S: It is difficult to plot out the initial blocking of that action scene. Now, when you use that term, blocking, you say it’s a visual-focused term, and it is, and I also come from a visual art background as well. I still occasionally do illustration on the side, that was originally one of the things I wanted to be, before I joined the military. So when I do this writing, I actually take a very visual approach in two ways. Like you said, I block out all the big pieces first. I make sure the reader’s aware of them. And then I do what’s called working from big to small. So, when you’re painting or illustrating, you start with the biggest brush possible and work your way down. You don’t use a detailing brush until you absolutely need it. And I kind of take the same approach to writing action.
So the first thing I do is I work big to small, I make sure the audience is reading the broad strokes. Because our brains do a handy little thing where they’ll fill in the detail where there isn’t anything present. And the other aspect of writing action scenes is, when I’m writing one, I try and make sure that reading the scene takes exactly as long to read as it would to happen, if you were watching it in a movie.
K: That is such an important thing, I think, to me when writing and plotting action scenes. Authors tend to, and I completely understand why, get bogged down in description and not realize that the time that you’re taking to read this, this guy’s been stabbed to death six times already now.
S: Mhm.
K: In all the time that he’s sitting there describing the sword in the other person’s hand and the stance that he has and the dust clinging to his boots, he’s been dead for about ten minutes. I alway use, and Rekka’s gonna shoot me because I’ve been referencing a lot of Harry Potter things recently, but I always use the reference when, in the end of Goblet of Fire, when Harry gets sucked through the portkey and ends up—and Cedric dies, and there’s this whole long scene—
R, ironically: Spoilers for Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire—
[K and R laugh]
K: It’s your own fault if you haven’t read it at this point. Cedric dies, everyone! There’s this whole long, drawn out scene that I think, in the book, is about two and a half chapters from start to finish, with this whole process. And then I remember when I saw the movie and how quickly that happened!
S: It’s just a snap of the fingers and he’s gone and I loved that aspect of the movie.
K: I loved how fast that happened, that the whole point was that this was incredibly disorienting because this whole encounter, this death, this terrible realization, this shocking revelation of Voldemort is back, all happens in five minutes. And that’s why nobody realized Harry was even gone back at Hogwarts. So, I completely understand why you need to explain and flush these things out, it’s an entirely new setting that you have to describe. You have to establish the characters, you have to establish where they are and what they’re doing, but having that visual component to it eliminates all of the need for exposition there.
So, it’s a really hard thing to do in writing, taking these scenes where you have to set the scene, and still trying to get it to a reasonable amount of time that these actions could be transpiring over.
S: Mhm.
[20 :31]
R: One thing I always like to remind people is that you are a writer, you have control over everything that’s going on, that wouldn’t happen in real life. So you don’t have to describe a scene, you can start your action scene in a place that’s already been described in a quieter, more peaceful moment. Or you can keep in mind what Kaelyn’s saying and describe what the person needs to know in the moment of the action, which is: there’s a door over there and the floor is slippery. You don’t need a whole lot more than that. Or, it’s dark or whatever. That doesn’t take paragraphs, whereas if you feel like you need to get tactile with it and describe the stones’ texture, then that’s probably not something that a person’s going to realize until after the fact. They’re just trying to survive the moment. So big to small is good like that and it’s kind of the same thing that you’re saying. Get the big details and then you’ve placed the scene and you can get the smaller details as they become necessary, as the character is able to even recognize them. I mean—
S: Absolutely.
R: —it’s reasonable to assume that somebody looking at a sword is going to see SWORD, if the sword is drawn. As opposed to looking at the pommel and everything if the sword is sheathed and safe.
K: I always have a line I use that’s been dropped into many a manuscript that I’ve edited: human evolution was designed rather to react than to analyze. We don’t necessarily care what’s chasing us, we just know it’s getting closer and it has teeth. So, along those lines, how do you—you are in a genre where the fans of this really like and appreciate a lot of detail about the spaceship that’s attacking them. They want to hear all of the guns, all of the turrets, all of the engines and components to this. How do you avoid falling down that trap into—because I imagine from your side, and you write in a lot of detail and are clearly knowledgeable about this—how do you avoid falling into that trap?
S: The biggest thing for me is that the focus on combat, most of the combat in Vick’s Vultures is based around the same thing that submarine warfare is based around: a lack of full information. You’re working with very limited details on whatever enemy you’re fighting. So they might know that there’s something out there, but they can’t see what it is. And if they can’t see it, well then there’s no point in me describing it to the audience. Because at the end of the day, I’m writing in third person limited. The narration only knows what the characters know.
R: That is a good point, though, because we are so used to the Star Trek viewscreen and looking at the other ship and knowing as soon as it drops out of warp that it’s a Romulan ship versus a Klingon ship versus, you know, there’s something out there, we don’t know what it is. Okay, well it’s Romulan because they have the technology. But your characters are, sort of, in a submarine in terms of what they know about what’s going on around them and they need some kind of signal from the ship to recognize it, or to be sitting on the outside of the ship in one of their suits. But even then, there’s the realism of how far away is it? How much can you actually see if you’re looking directly at it. So, yeah, that’s a good point and that aids you in the genre, I think, because that adds to that realism that the readers expect.
S: Mhm. Kaelyn you mentioned that readers are very voracious for those details.
K: Yes, yes.
S: But I think a lot of them are also voracious for that level of grittiness and realism, and sometimes you can’t have one along with the other. And, in this case, I think they settle for the realism rather than the exploring every nut and rivet on an alien railgun.
K: I completely agree. I think there is—I don’t want to call it a trade-off, but there is this notion of—well, I’ll call it a trade-off!—trading one for the other. There’s a degree of suspense that you can entrench yourself in and use that as your high, if you will, in reading all of this versus getting to kind of sit and revel in the description of, as you said, every rivet in the alien railgun. Which is now going to be the name of another book that I want somebody to write. [laughs]
R: Well, you know what it’s gonna be, it’s gonna be all exposition, if you want that book.
K: Nah, it’s gonna be… we’re gonna make the, you know, one of those—remember Star Wars during the, when they put the prequels out they made those books that was like the pictorial guide to Star Wars? Well, we’ll do that for Vick’s Vultures. It’s gonna be a lot of black pages with vague shapes in the back of them.
S: And half the text blacked out and redacted.
K: Yes, exactly! Perfect. But, actually, speaking of blacked out text and redacted, this is not a series that is simply, hit-and-run stealth missions. There’s some political components, there’s some scheming, there’s other parts of this beyond just humans going into outer space and trying to further humans’ ability to exist in space. Vick and her team get into some nonsense.
S: As a rule, I tend to try and avoid political themes and huge political arcs in my books, simply because I don’t like reading them. But you can’t really have an interplanetary, sometimes diplomatic, directive or organization without touching on the politics. And so they not only get pulled by the human politics, but they get pulled by the alien politics as well. One of the things I always try and have in Vick’s Vultures, on multiple levels, is a trichotomy. So it’s not just good versus evil, it’s three opposing organizations that are each trying to further their own goals, usually at the expense of another. Sometimes those goals are political, sometimes they’re military, sometimes they’re survival.
K: And sometimes they’re a combination of all of them.
S: Mhm, absolutely.
K: They frequently overlap and motivate different components of what they’re trying to accomplish. So, I have to ask something because—and this is a little bit of, you know, how the sausage is made here—by the time I came on to Parvus Press, Vick’s Vultures had been out for, I guess, about a year at that point and Colin had sent me a copy when I was kind of auditioning, if you will, to be an editor. And I was shocked to realize that Vick was short for Victoria.
S: Mhm.
K: And that this was a woman. I have to, of course, ask—I mean, I love Vick as a character, I love all of the intricacies and nuance to her personality that you write in, but—women are not allowed on submarines.
S: They didn’t used to be. They are now.
K: Oh, they are now! Okay. Why, I have to ask, what made you write Vick as a woman?
S: So there’s three main reasons that I did that. The first one is this notion that male readers won’t read female main characters, so I kinda wanted to do a bait-and-switch like, “Oh, it’s called Vick’s Vultures, so obviously the main character is a guy named Vick!” And then if they don’t read too much into it, it’s like, “Ha! Gotcha!” You’re actually reading about a female character.
The second was I kind of wanted her to be the inverse of, you know, the classic male Han Solo? Where these male captains have, they do all these things that no reasonable, realistic person would do and then get rewarded for them. I kind of wanted to make Vick do those things and then everyone kind of call her out on it, her self-destructive tendencies getting her into trouble more than they get her out of it.
And then the third was that I wasn’t sure whether or not I could write a female character well, but coming off of Devil Bone, which is the first Sorcerous Crimes Division book, a couple fans pointed out to me how well the few female characters had been written. Specifically, there’s two main characters, not main characters, but side characters in Sorcerous Crimes Division that were female raiders. So they would go in with the raiding parties. One was a more leader archetypal mother-hen type and the other was basically a psychopath.
[R laughs]
S: But they were on the same side and people thought they were pretty realistic. So I thought maybe I’ll tackle writing a female main character for the next book. I enjoyed doing that so much that I ended up making one of the female characters also a POV character in the second Sorcerous Crimes Division book, as well. And she ended up being pretty much the fan favorite.
R: I mean—
K: That’s great.
R: Women kinda rock, don’t they?
K: I agree.
[30:16]
S, warily: Let me make sure my wife is not…
R: Wait, before you disagree with me, you mean? No.
K: I was gonna say, maybe this is what she should be hearing!
S: No, I just don’t want it to go to her head.
R: Ah, got it.
K: Ah, alright, fair enough. That’s fair.
S: Also, fun fact: she just finished reading Harry Potter for the first time this week. So—
K: What’d she think?
S: —she narrowly avoided the Goblet of Fire spoiler.
[R and K laugh]
K: See, there would have actually been someone out there who was—
R: I told you! I had to warn you about the spoilers, yeah.
K: I have very little sympathy, apologies to Scott’s wife, for people who are upset by fifteen-year-old spoilers at this point. But what did she think of the books? Just out of curiosity.
S: Uh, she liked them but she’s also very able to pick up on the things that are acceptable in Young Adult writing that maybe don’t so much fly for adults.
K: Well that’s a whole other conversation—
R, laughing: Yeah, I feel like our Patreon deserves Kaelyn’s Rant on Harry Potter and Kaelyn’s Rant on a couple other movies and book series.
K: I’ve got a few of them. It’s a—do not get me started on Game of Thrones. The last season of that. Poor Rekka, poor Rekka had me—
R: I saw it in real-time. I saw it happening. Kaelyn’s devolution into—
K: —madness!
R: Not even madness, just you… couldn’t even speak sometimes—
S: Right.
K: I…
R: —because you were so upset about the decisions made.
K: Rekka had the misfortune of being with me to watch the Battle of Winterfell and then also—
S, laughing: You mean listen to the Battle of Winterfell, right?
R: Yup.
K: Okay, well, here’s the thing: Rekka and her husband Matt should have a service where they go to people’s houses and fix their TVs for them because we could see everything perfectly watching that. So I don’t know what you guys did to your TV, I don’t know what setting you have it on, but we could see everything and then all of my friends are texting going, “Well I think they won. I don’t know, I can’t see anything!” and I was like, “Oh, really?” and I went back and watched it at home and I was like, “Oh, yeah, this is just a black screen with some shapes moving around in it. Oh, there’s fire. Okay, I see fire.”
And then Rekka, also, was sitting next to me when we watched the series finale at the Nebulas out in Los Angeles last year. Parvus and, mostly Colin, finagled a viewing—
R: Viewing party.
K: A viewing party. It was a lot of fun, but oh my goodness. That’s a—
S, a hero bringing it back on topic: Yeah, going into the launch of UEP #3, at least secure in the knowledge that hey! at least it won’t be the last Game of Thrones season. You know, the bar has been somewhat lowered.
K: So, speaking of that—
R: This does close off your trilogy, yeah.
K: Yeah! The trilogy’s wrapping up. How are ya feelin’?
S: I feel pretty good. You know, I’d actually set this book aside for I while. I wrote and published an entirely separate book in the time that this one was—I’d kind of gone through pretty much writing and editing on The Dragon’s Banker while Vick’s Vultures #3 was going through the editing and publishing process. And I don’t know how it is for other authors, but I actually tend to retain very little of a book that I’ve written once I move on to the next book. I forget character names, I forget plot points. All of that just gets flushed. Part of me thinks that’s a result from the studying tactics in the military and aviation where you cram and cram and cram and then knowledge dump immediately after the test.
But I can actually, I’m doing my final review of Vick’s #3 now and a lot of it going to be going through and almost looking at it with fresh eyes, as if it’s something that someone else wrote.
K: Well, we were gonna ask you some questions about resolving plot points, you know without spoiling anything, and completing this three-story arc but do you remember any of it? [bursts out laughing]
R: All right, so feel free, if you need to say “I don’t know that one” we’ll just cut the question like we never even asked.
S: Okay.
R: So you have three books out now that complete a trilogy. Did you see it as a three-book trilogy to start with? Did you have an arc in mind?
S: No, actually. When it started out Vick’s Vultures was not meant to be part of a trilogy, per se. I was thinking of it as more of a serialized thing where each book would be its—
R: Open-ended?
S: Mhm. It's its own separate, self-contained story. Neither one would really feed into the others. Once I had the first book out, I wanted it to be something that could absolutely stand on its own. You could read Vick’s Vultures as just Vick’s Vultures and then ignore the rest of the books and be perfectly happy and get a one hundred percent complete story. Because I didn’t know if there would be sequels, at that point. I was still a very new writer. I wasn’t super confident. I thought this is a good book, but I don’t know how many good books I have in me. What if I run out of ideas half-way through the next one? Six books later, that’s not a huge issue apparently.
K: I was gonna say, what is it with you authors and doubting your abilities to generate stories? That’s all you do!
R: Have you read the Goodreads reviews, Kaelyn? You know, if you’ve ever spent any time looking at other people’s reviews of books you think, “Wow! I could mess up in so many ways I didn’t even consider when I started writing!”
S: Mhmm.
K: Yeah, but those people don’t know what they’re talking about.
S: It helps that I’d committed pretty much every sin that I’ve railed against in Devil Bone, when I wrote my first book. So I was like, “Man, all these mistakes that I see other writers writing! I’m gonna avoid all of those!” And then I did ‘em anyway and I was like, “Oh, it’s because that’s the only way I know how to do it.” That’s what’s familiar.
K: Do you have more stories set in the UEP universe? Do you have other things you’d like to write here? You know, as you said, you saw this as kind of a serialized, ongoing collection of stories. Is that something down the road that you think you’d revisit at some point? And I’m not just asking this as your publisher!
[K and R laugh]
S: I would like to revisit it at some point. I didn’t leave open ends so much in Vick’s Vultures #3—
K: No, that’s kind of why I was asking. Yeah.
S: —but I did seed things that could be explored further, and there’s always other ships in the Union Earth Privateers. I purposefully made this big terrain, this big stretch of stars, the Orion’s Spur, which gets name-dropped constantly in the series. One to say, hey this is the humans’ limit. This is how far we can go because there’s basically a brick wall at each end of the Spur. And the other being like, hey! This is a big playground. You can go anywhere in this and we’ve only touched on a small fraction of it. And, essentially, the number of locations and the number of stories that can be told in that universe isn’t limited by what’s already been written because it’s not going off—this is kinda pulling back the veil a little bit—it’s not going off of real stars, it’s not really going off real systems. Everything’s being made up to serve the narrative. Everything is kind of what it needs to be to tell a good story.
So would I like to go back to it? Absolutely. Right now I’m on a little bit of a fantasy kick. Coming out of Dragon’s Banker I tried to start up a sci-fi novel, wasn’t really happy with it. I restarted it a couple times before saying, “I’m gonna put this back on the shelf for a little bit,” and kind of explore more the things that I explored in Dragon’s Banker with the slice-of-life fantasy, and then go back to maybe doing sci-fi after that, with maybe something either in the Vick’s universe or more esoteric. Kinda closer to something like grimdark 41st millennium, without name-dropping and having DCMA requests called on your podcast.
K: Now, it is interesting because I’ve obviously read UEP series and I did read Dragon’s Banker as well. These are very, very different books. Not only in terms of genre but in terms of, really, your writing style. Do you find it difficult to oscillate back and forth between sci-fi Scott Warren and fantasy Scott Warren?
S: That’s kind of a tricky question, but I like it. One thing to keep in mind is that between Union Earth Privateers and the Sorcerous Crimes Division is that the subject matter for the books, despite being fantasy and sci-fi, ultimately was very, very similar. They were both about elite, professional teams working together in an action-oriented environment. But one dealt with magic, the other dealt with aliens. But when you dig really deep into them, they have more similarities than they have differences.
When it went to Dragon’s Banker, it was a challenge to myself. I’d been writing very violent, very action-oriented books and I wanted to challenge myself to write a book with a true pacifist. Where the main character would not and could not resolve any of his conflicts through violence. I wanted to explore that theme, and I wanted to explore a novel where lateral thinking was the key to completing all of his objectives. And that, really, he was completing a lot of his objectives just through struggling through his own personal problems and not even realizing that he was contributing, behind the scenes, to all of these conflicts he wasn’t really even aware that he was involved in. Which was a tricky plate to balance.
[40:48]
S: But you mentioned the style of the narration and the dialogue and everything being very different in Dragon’s Banker, and the fact is, writing Dragon’s Banker, my wife read that and once she finished, she put down the book and she looked and me and said, “You are Sailor Kelstern!” And I tried to argue and she said, “Don’t lie! I know you.”
[K and R laugh]
S: So, reading Dragon’s Banker is the closest you’ll get to an unfiltered view of my internal narration for my own life and my own thoughts. And the truth is, in real life I am not a violent or aggressive person at all. I’m the mastermind, I’m the plotter, the planner, and the schemer.
K: Yeah, because I remember reading Dragon’s Banker and I’m going, “Is this really Scott?” [laughs]
S: I mean, that did cause a little bit of friction, I know, in the publishing house because I think Colin was a little hesitant. Like, “Ooh, we have this military sci-fi writer who’s also trying to have us publish this,” and I ended up self-publishing Dragon’s Banker. Ultimately, I decided that was probably the right path for it to go.
K: Because you have—all of the science fiction books you’ve published have been with Parvus Press, but your fantasy books have been self-published. Do you find there’s a cross-over with your fans, that they follow you between these genres? Or do they tend to segregate based on what they like to read?
S: Honestly, I couldn’t say just because I don’t really have a large level of fan interaction.
K: Okay.
S: I’m not like a lot of authors who make a fan page or interface with their communities. I’m honestly not even really aware if I have a community or reader reviews.
K: I can tell you that Union Earth Privateers definitely has a community.
S: Mkay, so the closest I come is to looking at some of the reader reviews on Amazon and Goodreads. What I notice is usually, if the reviews namedrop another book that I’ve written, it is a namedrop of a book in the same genre. So if I had to hedge a guess, I would say that there is not that much genre crossover between my readers. And that might be, in part, because they are segregated in terms of Parvus taking one half of my library and self-publishing doing the other half of my library. Or it might be because there’s just a readership difference in sci-fi fans and fantasy fans. I honestly couldn’t say.
K: So, along those lines, you’ve kind of got a foot in two different worlds here, if you will. Where do you wanna focus next? Do you have a plan for what you’d like to do, if you wanna lean more into the fantasy side or the sci-fi side? Are you just gonna see what comes and what you feel like writing?
S: So, right now I am doing what I feel like writing. I am doing another slice-of-life fantasy that takes place in the same world as Dragon’s Banker and the Sorcerous Crimes Division, it’s more action-focused slice-of-life. I really wanted to get very out there with this one. I don’t have a title for it yet, but I will say that it has an undead protagonist—
K: Excellent.
S: —who is a traveling monster hunter for hire along the west coast of the continent that all these books take place in. And he has an apprentice who is a living human child, between the ages of eleven and fifteen. The main character literally does not know how old he is, and doesn’t care to. But the book kind of explores their traveling and their relationship and their role in the world. One of the biggest complaints with Dragon’s Banker was that the worldbuilding was a little weak, so I wanted to take this book and really delve in and say, “Hey! They’re travelling here, this is what it looks like, here’s the kind of creatures that live here and the people that live here.”
In the future, yes, I definitely want to return to sci-fi. With the fantasy side, I will probably maintain the self-publishing just because I enjoy that aspect of it. With the sci-fi, I had talked to Colin, he wanted a new military sci-fi and that was actually the working title of the book: New Military Sci-fi.
R: Hits the keywords!
K: Of course it was!
S: I wasn’t ready at the time. I had just come off writing back-to-back military sci-fi books and I was honestly a little burnt out at that point, I think, with writing Dragon’s Banker and the untitled monster slayer book. I’ll have created enough space to confidently return to military sci-fi for the purpose of writing military sci-fi. That was one of the big problems with it, is that when I was writing the book, I wasn’t writing it for myself, I was writing it for someone else. With art, as with writing that’s kind of when I start to encounter the mental blocks is when I stop writing for myself and start writing, well, I should write this because an audience will wanna read this. Or I should write this because a publisher will be interested in publishing this. And what I really need to do, and what really contributed to the charm and uniqueness of both Vick’s Vultures and the Sorcerous Crimes Division was I’m writing this because it’s something Scott Warren would write. Because it’s something that Scott Warren would want to read and because it’s something that doesn’t exist currently. It’s a new take on something.
So when I start trying to write to an audience or to a publisher, my whole process kinda breaks down and stalls. Once I get this fantasy flush through my system, I think I’ll be ready to return to military sci-fi and come up with something a little more unique. And I have two different manuscripts for military sci-fi that I was writing during this period of roadblocks that reached about 20,000 words and they had some really fun and interesting ideas4, some of which ended up being in these others books, but some of which really need to be, I think, explored and will be very fun to explore.
Unfortunately, one of the biggest ones, Martha Wells kind of beat me to the punch with a very recalcitrant AI character!
[R laughs]
And as much as I love Murderbot, I hate that it exists because it was very similar to a character that I was actively working on when All Systems Red came out.
R: Well, you know, there’s always something to be said for having a very successful copy book, too, so. You know, feed the people who want more of the recalcitrant AIs. I think that’s fair to say. But that’s good that you can recognize what it is about your writing process that works for you and notice when it starts to break down and see what the symptoms point to. I think writing for yourself is always the best advice for anyone who’s trying to be creative. It’s interesting that you’re big into self-publishing and not so big into write-to-market. I think that’s healthy.
K: Yeah.
S: Mhm. And hopefully that’s not too much nails on a chalkboard on the publishing side of the house!
K: No, no.
S: Because I also do love being a Parvus author.
K: Well we certainly love having you and Vick’s Vultures was the first book that Parvus ever put out and I know Colin is certainly not shy about saying it was a significant cornerstone—the keystone, if you will—to our early success in the publishing world.
We’ve covered a lot of topics, a whole range of things, is there anything that you could go back and tell yourself when you started all of this, or is there any just general advice you have for either people who are self-publishing or somebody who is trying really hard to work around a particularly tricky action scene, or anything that you wish you had known or could offer as advice to those listening?
S: Hm. So there are a couple pieces of advice that I would give to budding self-published authors. So, one thing that Parvus provided was an editor, which I think is crucial and it takes a lot off the pressure off me. When I initially got into self-publishing, the idea was that, “Well I’m gonna be a do-it-yourself guy on my first book and I wanna experience the whole process. The writing, the editing, the marketing, the publishing, and, most importantly, coming from an illustrative background, was the cover art. My fantasy titles actually get a lot of comments on the cover art because my illustration style is so unique and I tend to illustrate the tone of the book, rather than the content.
But the biggest thing when I went into self-publishing—and I will without reservation tell every self-publishing author who’s thinking of their own editing—go ahead and slap yourself in the face right now and get a freelance editor lined up to edit your book.
[R laughs]
S: There’s a reason that editors are so in-demand, so highly sought after and so highly regarded in the publishing industry, and it’s because published authors would not exist without them.
K: I swear I did not pay him to say this! I promise.
[S laughs]
R: I mean, she’s writing a check right now, but that wasn’t arranged beforehand.
K: But that is something that we talk about a lot, is that there’s a reason—even if it’s not just an editor—get other people to read your book and give you feedback on it. Preferably people that maybe have some experience and at least some involvement in this process, but.
[51:21]
S: Mhm. So this advice comes from as much of an art background as it does writing. But you need to be able to have a thick skin, as an author, and be able accept critique without taking it as a personal attack. In both art and writing, the people that succeed are the ones that can take feedback and improve their writing based on it. No one is above critique and when someone comes to you and tells you something doesn’t look right, or something reads wrong, you cannot tell them, “No, you’re seeing it wrong.” 99% of the time, when someone gives you a critique that something is wrong, that critique is accurate.
R: Or at the very least, it draws attention to something you need to look at again. That person may not have nailed the solution or given you the exact issue, but they’re pointing to something that’s not feeling right for them.
S: Right. So when I was working with Arley on the Union Earth Privateers #3, there were a couple times—my favorite quote from an editor that I’ve ever gotten. He left me a comment, after I’d made a change, where he said, “I love that I can spend ten minutes marking out a paragraph and telling you why something doesn’t work, and writing out two paragraphs worth of comments on it, and you can go back two pages earlier, change one line of dialogue and it fixes every problem.”
K, laughing: He was—Arley and I had a lot of conversations about, obviously, how things were progressing on your side and he was very impressed with your ability to, instead of having to tear something down and rebuild it, fix it and move forward. But it’s hard to get work back that you've put so much time, effort, blood, sweat and tears into and have somebody say, “Not this, not this, change this, do this.”
S: It is hard.
K: As an editor, I can tell you it’s coming from a place of love. The opposite of love is not hate, it’s apathy.
S: Right.
K: If we didn’t love what you were doing, we wouldn’t care. We wouldn’t tell you how to improve it.
S: I won’t lie or sugarcoat it, it does kinda sting a little bit.
K: It stings, I’m sure!
S: When you get a manuscript back and you see 1200 revisions or, I think the first Vick’s Vultures book when I first saw it had a couple thousand revisions and I was like, “Ohh! I wrote a terrible book!” But the biggest guiding light for working with an editor that I have to keep in mind, and I would encourage other authors to keep in mind, is that an editor’s job is to make your book the best possible version that it can be.
K, delighted: Oh my god, that’s exactly what I say all the time!
[S and K laugh]
K: I want this book to be the best possible version of itself!
S: Mhm. And you won’t always agree with an editor 100% but you have to keep in mind that that’s where they’re coming from. And sometimes you don’t want to turn a phrase or something that isn’t 100% grammatically correct, but invokes the tone or the narration that you want. You have to recognize that, hey, you can push back sometimes against an editor, but for the most part they are trying to improve your book and you are not looking at it from an unbiased perspective.
K: Well I always remind authors that I work with, or even just people who ask me about this, this is a conversation. I’m not standing on high handing down edicts that you must apply to something that is ultimately your work. This is—if there’s something that you’re really hung up on, I’m gonna ask you, “Why is this a big deal? What am I missing here? Am I not understanding something? Is there a part of this that is just going over my head?” Because that’s happened before! This is a secret. Editors are not perfect. [laughs] And now I have to go because the secret cabal of editor-ninjas are going to come kill me for saying that into a microphone.
R: Well, lucky for you, we are just about out of time. So, I know we could go on trading war stories about either our off-planet missions or editing, but thank you Scott for joining us today. So everyone listening, definitely go check out Union Earth Privateers. If you haven’t already read books one and two, you could catch up on all of them in one weekend, I bet. Because once you get into one, you’re gonna really just read straight through them.
K: Yeah, no. You’re gonna sit down and blow through that.
R: Yeah! So that’s Vick’s Vultures, To Fall Among Vultures, and Where Vultures Dare and those are all from our favorite little press, Parvus Press! You can get them all today.
K: And Scott, where can people find you online? I know you don’t really have a fan page, but if somebody wanted to send you a note and say how much they love the books.
S: So I am abysmal at social media. I’m a very reclusive author and, actually, kind of a funny story if we have time.
K: Sure.
S: I actually came across a post in the wild, on Reddit, referencing Vick’s Vultures, saying that the person had tried to contact me and had been unable because I hadn’t made a Twitter post in months and I hadn’t made a Facebook post in something like half a year, on my author page. And I responded to their Reddit post saying, “Oh, hey, this is me!” So, honestly, the best place to get in contact with me would probably—
K: Is Reddit!
S: Yeah, because I honestly don’t really check my author e-mail? But I am very active on Reddit in the fantasy community and the sci-fi communities and a few other communities. So my username is /u/scodo, so fairly simple. And you can message me on there and probably get more immediate feedback than if you tried my Facebook or my poorly neglected blog or my Twitter account.
R: So if you are a reader who has read both Scott’s fantasy and science fiction, make sure you tell him that you crossed over genres to follow him. Because he doesn’t know that you’re out there.
K: Tell us, too! Because we’d love to hear that as well.
R: Thank you everyone for joining us, thank you Scott for joining us! And good luck with the book launch.
K: Yeah, congratulations!
S: Thank you and thank you guys for having me.
[outro music plays]
R: Thanks, everyone, for joining us for another episode of We Make Books. If you have any questions that you want answered in future episodes or just have questions in general, remember you can find us on Twitter @wmbcast, same for Instagram, or wmbcast.com.
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