We Make Books Podcast

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!

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.

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Episode 44: Theme and Character Arcs

transcribed by Sara Rose (@saraeleanorrose)

 

[0:00]

R: Welcome back to We Make Books, a podcast about publishing—and writing. And sometimes going backward and revising. Whoops. I’m Rekka, I write science fiction and fantasy as RJ Theodore.

 

K: And I’m acquisitions editor, I, Kaelyn Considine, at Parvus Press.

 

R: How dare you.

 

[Both laugh]

 

K: It’s the heat. It’s the heat and then quarantine.

 

R: The heat is definitely getting to us. We have to turn off the AC to record these, folks, so pity us.

 

K: Hi, everyone! No, today we actually have, I think, an interesting episode. We are going based off a Twitter question we got from one of our listeners, Ashley Graham, about themes and character arcs and how to manage them and make them good in your story.

 

R: And by good, we mean strong or tight or—

 

K: Pervasive, efficient—

 

R: Pervasive. [giggles]

 

K: What are some other words we use to describe them here? Lots of very positive adjectives, to be sure.

 

R: Mhm, yeah.

 

K: You want your character arcs tight and your themes pervasive.

 

R: Yup. 

K: It’s kind of what we’re left with here. Anyway, we had a lot of fun talking about this because it’s something that I really enjoy working with authors on.

 

R: Yeah, when Kaelyn gets a novel manuscripts, this is what she dives in and gets to.

 

K: It is, yeah. This is at the very developmental level and I think anybody who’s a writer that’s listening to this and has submitted and gotten rejections has probably, at some point, gotten a note to “work on their themes or character arcs.”

 

R: Mhm.

 

K: Which is just so helpful and specific.

 

R: That’s why they call them form rejections.

 

K: Yes. So, we spent a lot of time in this talking about, first of all, what are these themes and character arcs? And how do you work on them? A lot of fun examples in movies and shows and, you know, like I said this is one of my favorite things about editing, is working on these parts of the book.

 

R: See, Kaelyn thought that she could ask me to restrain her, but the fact is I also love these, so we did go on a little bit. But I think we’ve had longer episodes. We’re fine.

 

K: Definitely, yeah. We were like kids in a candy shop for this, to be sure.

 

R: That’s true.

 

K: Anyway, so take a listen. We hope this is helpful, if this is something you’ve been struggling with in your writing process, and we’ll see you on the other side of the music.

 

[intro music plays]

 

K: I don’t know what I could’ve hit. That’s upsetting. Anyway! So, if my elbow hit something is that a character arc or is that a theme?

 

R: I think that’s a theme. Or it might be a story element…

 

K: It could be a plotline. Is the elbow a character?

 

R: Is the elbow haunted?

 

K: I mean, I assume so. It’s mine, yes. Anyway, today we’re talking about—one of our listeners, Ashley Graham, sent us a question about, I don’t know. Do we wanna read the question?

 

R: I’m gonna summarize it. Basically, Ashley was working on a short fiction piece and was suggested to, by an editor, that the theme and character arc could use some clarification. So, what the heck does that mean? That’s feedback that people will see.

 

K: That’s very common feedback, actually. Probably, I think, a lot of people listening to this who have submitted something either to an agent or an editor, probably got feedback that may have specifically said character arc and theme.

 

R: Yeah. And I think this one might have been for a publication, so short fiction market. And you’re gonna get that kind of stuff a lot because their second-tier response is going to be, “Your story almost made it, you could’ve tightened this up,” you know?

 

K: Yeah, and also, especially with short fiction, you’re gonna see that more because you have to do a lot in a short amount of time.

 

R: Yeah.

 

K: Now that is not, by any stretch of the imagination, to indicate that you won’t see this with long-form fiction because, believe me, you will. I’ve said it multiple times myself—

 

R: It might be easier to go astray with a long novel.

 

K: It’s very true. So, why is it these two things, a lot, that you hear? Because they’re a little, especially in the case of themes, they’re a little nebulous and not as easy to pin down. A plot is, I think, a lot of times easier because it’s the story. When you sit down to write an outline, what you’re outlining is usually the plot. 

 

R: It’s concrete, it’s easy to point at and go, “That is part of the plot. That is a thing that happens and it happens in an order and if that order goes awry then it’s not a plot anymore.”

 

K: That’s exactly what I was gonna say, was that when you’re outlining something and it’s the plot, it’s an order of actions happening in sequence, or maybe out of sequence, depending on how you’re writing, but in how they’re going to be presented in the final book or short story, or what have you.

 

So, before we get started, let’s kinda define some things here. So a plot, obviously, we know what a plot is. That is not a character arc, it is not a theme. A plot is the elements of a story that take place and happen to the characters. That is a very broad definition, obviously, but plots are sequences on actions and things that happen.

 

R: Yeah, I’ve even heard it defined as a sequence of actions, reactions, and complicating factors.

 

K: Yes, that’s a really good way to describe it. Themes and character arcs, and it’s funny because character arcs and plots get confused together and then themes and morals get confused together. A theme is not a moral, a moral is, we’re talking strictly in terms of terms in literature. A moral is a lesson that is learned. A moral is the kid sticks his hand in the cookie jar when he’s not supposed to, it gets stuck, he breaks the cookie jar and has cuts on his hand and his mom finds out he was doing all of this anyway. 

 

So what has he learned? He has learned to listen to his mother because maybe it’s not just that she doesn’t want him to eat cookies when he shouldn’t, maybe it’s that he could get hurt. That is a moral. That is actions and the plot leading up to a character changing themselves because they learned something. That is not a theme.

So, now that we have—

 

R: It’s a character arc though.

 

K: It certainly could be.

 

R: Yeah.

 

K: And so that’s why I’m saying, plots and character arcs and themes and morals can get confused. So now that we’ve established what we’re not talking about, let’s talk about what we are talking about.

 

And let’s start with themes because that one is a little more nebulous, I think. A theme in a story is, at its basis level, an underlying message. It’s a big idea.

 

R: Mhm.

 

K: It is conceptual. It’s things that do not physically, tangibly exist in the world. If you are saying, “Yes, the theme is this,” and a lot of times, if it’s something you can actually touch, that’s probably not actually a theme.

 

R: So my theme is not coffee?

 

K: Your theme might be coffee, Rekka.

 

R: I was gonna say! You’re speaking in universals here, but I just don’t feel like I can relate to what you’re saying.

 

K: Your—your theme might be coffee. [laughs] Now, somebody might—you might come in and say, “What about the ocean? What if the theme of this story is the ocean?” Well, my answer to that is that the theme of the story is probably not the ocean.

 

The theme of the story might be travel or man versus nature or the horror of the unknown, and the ocean just happens to embody that.

 

R: Yup.

 

K: Again, these are Big Ideas. These are things that you cannot touch, feel, or hold. So things like love, death, good versus evil, a lot of coming of age stories. Stories of rebellion and overthrowing corrupt systems of government. Survival. These are themes. And those are big themes. You can have smaller ones like… family. Finding things that are lost.

 

R: Appreciating what you had all along, kind of thing,

 

K: Exactly, yes. Realizing that home was really where you wanted to be this whole time.

 

R: Yeah. Adventure was the friends you made along the way.   

 

K: Exactly, yes. The other thing that I always tell people when trying to identify themes in their story and bring them forward a little more, is what do you want the reader to walk away thinking, feeling, or knowing? If the theme of your story is: the adventure was the friends you made along the way, then you want the reader to go, “You know what? I really need to go spend some more time with my friends and do something fun with them.”

 

R: Mhm.

 

[09:55]

 

K: Or “ I need to go out and make some new friends,” or “I’m gonna go have an adventure and see if I make any new friends.”

 

R: Yeah.

 

K: Your—if, you know, the theme is something like death and loss, maybe you want the reader to leave feeling really sad and depressed and hopeless, staring into the void of existence.

 

R: You monster.

 

K: Hey, I mean we’ve all read a book like that.

 

R, laughing: Yes. In high school. They were required reading. 

 

K: Ohh, oh yeah.

 

R: So, another way to phrase this or to think about it is to—say, your example of the ocean and say, “Okay, but that’s still a noun.” If you were to remove the noun, what’s left? What’s underneath that? If the setting and the characters are the carpet and you pull up the carpet, what’s underneath it? What is the most fundamental, base human relatable thing that you’re communicating with this story?

 

K: And that’s what makes themes so difficult to manage and to bring forward in stories, is that they are intangible. You can’t—There’s a frequently said thing that editors use which is, “Show me, don’t tell me.”

R: Right.

 

K: And that is—

 

R: We should have an episode on that.

 

K, laughs: Yeah. But that is themes. You can’t put a sentence in there saying, “And the theme is: love.” No, you need—it’s something that has to be woven through your story for the reader to pick up on their own. You shouldn’t have to tell the reader what the theme of this story is. 

 

So, now, before we go too far down that line, let’s kinda talk about character arcs and what is a character arc? They’re definitely a little more tangible, if you will, than themes. You can sit down—and I encourage people to sit down and write out a character arc. Rekka, you’ve done this a few times.

 

R: A few...yes. Just a couple. 

 

K: Just a few. But a character arc is partially, mostly, a lot of times, an inner journey. It’s a transforma—

 

R: It’s a transformation. Ah, there we go.

 

K: It’s a transformation of the character over the course of the story. We’re seeing them start out a certain way, the plot affects them, and they have to change and adapt accordingly. And some definitions of this will say it must be a permanent change. I don’t buy into that because I don’t think that everything needs to be a fundamental personality shift.

 

R: Well, sometimes you just really wanna write a really long series and that character’s gonna have to learn that lesson more than once.

 

K: Yeah… Hey, nobody said these characters have to be smart!

 

R: Yeah, they don’t have to grow ever upward.

 

K: No, character arc is something. Theme has been what it is for a long time. Character arc is something that, I think, the standards and definitions of it have shifted a little bit over time. In fiction, especially, if you go back to when literature was first being really defined and written about and studied, you’ll find a lot of stuff that says, “Well, a character arc must have these elements: the character must start here; they must encounter or create a problem for themselves; they must come up with a way to overcome that problem, or get the thing that they need; they must suffer a setback; they must recover from the setback; they must resolve the storyline.”

 

R: And usually in a Three Act, there’s a second setback that’s extra bad.

 

K: Yeah, yes. I don’t agree with this. I think that there’s no such thing as a formulaic character arc.

 

R: Right. And, for one, that’s a very Western oriented, Western-centric character arc. You’re going to travel outside Western stories, you’re going to see different character arcs.

 

K: I would make the argument that character arcs that are a very Western thing that can be applied to a lot of stories because the nature of stories has character arcs, but—

 

R: Well, I would argue that the nature of Western civilization is colonialism and that sure is going in and applying new rules to other people’s stuff, so. [laughs]

 

K: Absolutely. 

 

R: So burn down character arcs, got it.

 

K: Yeah. No, no. And, look, what makes stories interesting is seeing the people in them grow and change. The degree to which that happens varies wildly across all genres and all cultures and how—I’ve had literature professors that said, “If your character is not X amount different by the end of the story, then that’s not a successful character arc,” and I think that’s bullshit.

 

Because character arcs, which are obviously very tied to character development, do not necessarily need to be a fundamental shift in personality.

 

R: So, why don’t we start talking a little bit examples. We named one off the air, before we started recording, which was basically any character that Harrison Ford plays.

 

K, laughing: Yeah!

 

R: Do any of those characters fundamentally change across the time spent on screen?

 

K: Well, let’s scale it down a bit to characters Harrison Ford plays that appear in multiple movies. Franchise Harrison Ford characters. 

 

R: Okay, so we’re talking Indiana Jones, Han Solo, and then Jack Ryan. 

 

K: Okay, well I don’t know anything about Jack Ryan, so I’m not gonna be able to help there.

 

[15:57]   

 

R: Basically, he’s—once again, we’re talking about uber-competent male action heroes, basically.

 

K: I am going to focus primarily on Indiana Jones and Han Solo because that’s an interesting dichotomy. One of them has a character arc, the other absolutely does not. Spoiler alert: Indiana Jones does not really have much of a character arc.

 

R: Um, as we said, his character arc is… he needs a thing, he has a competitor for the thing, the competitor gives him a setback, he overcomes, approaches again, has a bigger setback, and then he gets the thing. It’s not a personal growth, it is his striding toward a goal.

 

K: Yes, but that is his plot.

 

R: That is also the movie plot, but I’m just saying—is it a flattening of the character arc with the plot, when the character doesn’t change very much?

 

K: It is because Indiana Jones does not change over the course of the story. He ends and begins every movie with, It Belongs in A Museum. 

 

[both laugh]

 

R: Fortune over ___, kid.

 

K: Yeah, that’s Indiana Jones. It’s It Belongs in A Museum or I Don’t Want the Nazis to Have This. That is everything motivating Indiana Jones throughout all of his movies. Han Solo, on the other hand, does have a character arc. Han Solo starts out as a smuggler and a guy who, according to his prequel, was running drugs. 

 

R: Mhm.

 

K: And he eventually becomes somebody who, instead of just living this sort of private-smuggler lifestyle—

 

R: Out for himself.

 

K: Yeah! Out for himself. Has friends and family that he grows to care about. And maybe he’s not as gung-ho Freedom Fighter as they are, but he certainly takes their values and their goals into account and wants to help them and be successful in that. Then he walks into a lightsaber—but we’ll, you know… that’s… [laughs] But! It is a different, it’s another downswing on the character arc is that we see that Han Solo, at the end of the day, is still Han Solo.

 

R: Mhm.

 

K: Because what happens? He goes back to smuggling pirate loner lifestyle with Chewbacca. We pick up with him again and, yeah, he’s different but of course he is, he’s older. So there, again, successful character arc! But what he’s showing us is that, at the end of the day, this is what he does and this is what he knows and this is what he’s good at.

 

R: Well, but, the question is, is he good at it or is he Chewbacca’s sidekick.

 

K, laughing: How good he is is a different query.

 

R: Okay, so—

 

K: Actually, real quick sidebar, if you think about it, everything we’ve seen of Han Solo, he’s not actually a very good smuggler.

 

R: No, he’s terrible! So the question is, does your character start from a default? And what we’re saying here is Han Solo, his default is smuggler, loner, trying to make the next paycheck and keep himself out of trouble.

 

K: Scruffy-faced nerf-herder.

 

R: Whenever he is thrown into the mix with people who are potential friends, they mess up his default and pull him away from that. But send an obstacle into his path—like a son—and he reverts back to his default when he doesn’t know how to cope.

 

K: Yeah, exactly. So, Han Solo is actually, and I think, primarily accidentally, a very successful and good example of a character arc.

 

R: Mhm.

 

K: Indiana Jones: It Belongs in A Museum or Stop The Nazis.

 

R: I think he’s intentionally left out of the character arc.

 

K: Yeah, I mean—but this is the thing, that’s not what those stories are about.

 

R: Right. That’s to the point of this question is, when you are told to tighten up a character arc or a theme, you do need to know what kind of story you’re telling before you decide how deep into character arcs and themes you need to dive. I mean, you might get this feedback from one person, and they might be off the mark for what you were trying to do with your story.

 

K: Mhm.

 

R: Which can also tell you, maybe you need to extract a little of that character arc and not make it feel like it’s so much about developing a character, if you are just telling a whip-cracking, gun-toting archaeologist tale. Don’t do that. Archaeologists don’t appreciate it.

 

K, laughing: Yeah, that’s uh—

 

R: Another episode.

 

K: In case anyone was confused at home, that’s not what archaeology’s actually like, sadly. Anyway, now that we’ve talked about what character arcs and themes are, why are these two things that people are frequently told to tighten up? And frequently told to tighten them together?

 

We’ve already said that character arcs are closer to plots, themes are closer to morals, but they’re not the same thing. So how do character arcs and themes overlap? Themes motivate and drive characters. This feeds both the plot and the character arc. The plot, obviously, because based on the theme, and therefore the character’s motivation, the character will be making that will affect both the plot and their character arc.

 

R: Mhm.

 

K: That’s where things start to get a little tricky. Those two are very closely intertwined. Because obviously the plot, in a lot of cases, is dependent upon what the character is doing. Their choices and decisions dictate what happens next in the story.

 

So then, drill down for that, what is influencing their decision-making, their motivation? And where is the motivation coming from? And that’s where you start to get to the themes of the story. So, if one of the themes of your story is survival and, let’s think of—

 

R: Alien.

 

K: Okay, that’s a more fun example. I was gonna say The Hatchet, remember that book we all had to read in middle school?

 

R: Yeah, we’re not doing that, we’re doing Alien.

 

K: Okay, we’re doing Alien.

 

R: Mostly because there was a point you made earlier about character and we used Harrison Ford’s various characters as the example, but I love the example of, specifically in terms of survival, and specifically in terms of the character of Ripley, Ripley doesn’t really change throughout the movie. What she does is survive because she has the skillset, which is the ability to think things through logically in the first place, to say, “Okay, we need to not be doing this.”

 

Basically the theme of Alien, correct me if I’m wrong, is We Should Have Listened to Ripley?

 

K: I mean, yeah. Probably. But beyond just the theme of—Granted, this goes into further expansions in the Alien franchise, but—

 

R: Well, let’s stick with Alien for one. The other movies in the franchise are different genres, basically. So sticking with the space truckers’ monster-horror survival.

 

K: Alien is a horror movie in space. That’s all it is. It was groundbreaking, genre-defining, but it is a horror movie in space. So, the themes of the movie, as Rekka said: survival. There’s also, I would say, a theme of frustration. 

 

R: Mhm. The capitalist bureaucracy.

 

K: Well, and that’s what I was getting into.

 

R: Okay.

 

K: So then we’re introducing a conflict element there that is beyond simply: there’s a thing laying eggs in people’s chests.

 

R: That thing laying eggs in people’s chest wouldn’t be there if it weren’t for the company.

 

K: Yes, exactly. So then, if you want to take all of that and say, “Okay, so how does that affect Ripley’s character arc?” Ripley is changed at the end of the story, not necessarily physically or personality-wise, but emotionally she is very affected. And she is going to then—have you ever heard about how Alien was supposed to end? One of the alternative endings they shot?

 

The alien gets Ripley, essentially, and then when whoever is calling in over the ship, the alien gets the intercom and answers back in her voice, requesting for orbits to come back to Earth.

 

R: Gotcha.

 

K: So, it was a very bleak ending, obviously.

 

R: But a lot of monster movies do this. They leave off with you not feeling safe.

 

K: Yes, and so that is another theme. What do you wanna leave your readers with? And, in this case, the movie pivoted a little bit and said, “Well, we wanna give the audience a sense of closure,” and that all of this, this theme of survival, she did survive. So rather than going with the theme of feeling unsafe, which was another theme running through that entire movie, paranoia, uncertainty—

 

R: Claustrophobia.

 

K: Claustrophobia. Anybody could become your enemy at any moment.

 

R: Body horror. Yup. 

 

K: Yeah. So instead of leaving off with that theme, they decided to be a little kinder and pivot a little bit to say, “Hey, determination, intelligence, stick-to-itiveness, and survival will make you victorious.” Which is another set of themes. So then, back to, how does this tie into the character arc is: Ripley is a changed person at the end of this.

 

Boy, has she seen some shit. And now she knows that this corporation is up to no good. She is no longer just in it for the money. They say this is a long, awful journey, but it’s very good money. It’s totally worth it.

 

R: Mhm.

 

K: Maybe it’s not worth it anymore. There’s absolutely some anti-capitalist undertones in there.

 

R: Mhm.

 

K: Ripley comes out of this, even though personality-wise she hasn’t changed—the movie takes place over a relatively short period of time. But Ripley’s definitely got some different thoughts and motivations now, at the end of this. So, even though she hasn’t undergone a radical, inner transformation, she certainly thinks different things now than she did before.

 

R: Yeah, for sure.

 

K: So, yeah. That’s a great example of some really cool themes and how they affect—and it’s interesting because you could take it a step further and say how they affect the character arc, rather than the plot.

 

R: Right. 

 

K: Because in this case, a lot of Ripley’s decisions are reactionary. Things are happening and she’s trying to adapt and recalibrate very, I’m only thinking of two instances in the whole—really, one and a half off the top of my head, in which she goes on the offensive, so to speak.

 

R: Right. Well that’s also sort of a plot thing is that your character is reacting to things up until a certain point, and then it’s at the time when they decide to say, “No, I will take care of this myself,” that’s when you’re entering that last act.

 

K: Yes! But, then, by the time we get to the, “I’ll take care of this myself,” for the plot and the character arc, we all go back to the themes of Ripley kind of coming to a new understanding of how stuff is actually happening around her, rather than letting it happen to her.

 

R: Yeah.

 

K: Yeah. Anyway, I think that’s a good example.

 

R: Cool. So, now that we’ve talked about what they are, given you some examples, figured out how to un-intertwine the character arc and theme. How do you tighten them up? And since the example given was a short story for publication, let’s assume we’re doing this in under 7,000 words. How do you tighten up character arc and theme and you’ve also, presumably, got a plot in there, in a very efficient way?

 

K: All of these kind of work together. I think that anything you’re going to do to a short story, you can apply to longer form fiction and vice versa. So me, personally, with—and Rekka has been on the receiving end of this a couple times—when working with authors, let’s start with themes. I mentioned before, one of the first things I ask the author is: What do you want the audience to know, think, or feel that they didn’t at the beginning of the book?

 

And when I say know, I don’t mean you’re—

 

R: Teaching them.

 

K: Yeah, you’re not putting a graph-chart in there and saying, “And then the price of gold went up to—” I’m not talking about facts, I’m talking about what you want them to know about these nebulous concepts in the way you want them to know it? So, identifying those things really will help you figure out where your themes are. 

 

The other thing I always say, and this is where it starts to tie into the character arc, is look at the character arcs and the plot and the motivation. What are the characters doing and why are they doing it? What is driving them to do this? Because that’s where you’re gonna find a lot of your themes. And then, if theme is very important to you, if you really want to hammer a message home, making sure that your characters act and are motivated by that theme, consistently—and this isn’t to say it can’t evolve, it absolutely can. But making sure that they are correctly motivated, based on what the theme is, is a really good way to help tighten that up.

 

Then, that helps to feed into their character arc. Because you have a character, then, acting, reacting, and making decisions based on what is important to them and how the story is building.

 

[30:09]

 

R: And I think, at this point, if you’re feeling like, “I can’t make this character make this decision,” then that tells you that you are not succeeding at either theme or character arc.

 

K: Yes… and—

 

R: Or not in a way that supports what you set out to do with the plot.

 

K: Yes, and listen. I want to be clear about something that every story does not need to be a Magnum Opus of subtle themes and ideas woven through this— it’s going to be studied in college 101 classes for decades to come. But you do need a theme for your story. You need there to be something that is important in all of this. Otherwise it is a bland series of actions happening one after the other.

 

R: And if you don’t feel that it is a bland series, or your beta readers don’t feel that it is a bland series of actions, one after another, that means there’s a theme in there. So if you’re having trouble identifying it, that doesn’t mean immediately that you don’t have one.

 

I will use an example of Mike Underwood, when I was working on Annihilation Aria with him. So we had a few calls, I read the manuscript multiple times, and Mike had actually said the themes of the story are very important to him. So I went through the manuscript, and I do this with most books that I edit, and I kind of write out a plot outline based on what I’m reading, what I see happening in the book. Part of this is, one, that it’s just easier for me to keep track of things, but then also because if I show it to the author and say, “Okay, this is how I’m reading this,” and they’re going, “No, no! That’s not it at all,” then it’s like, okay, now we need to have a conversation.

 

But one of the things that I like to do through that is mark off, in my notes of this outline, where I’m identifying and seeing certain themes. And then we have a conversation about that. And if we’re seeing a real imbalance of them, or I’m only seeing them come through in certain parts of the story, or if I’m having a real hard time nailing them down and saying, “I feel like I’ve got ten themes in this story. Which one’s the most important to you?” 

 

And I think that’s a really good exercise is, you know, most authors out there, I’m guessing if you’re pretty far into your Work-In-Progress at this point, you probably already have an outline. So go through it and try to pick out sections where you think certain themes are coming through. And I actually color-code them and then I can look through and see, “Oh, there’s a lot of red and not so much blue.”

 

R: Mhm. If you’re a pantser and you write without an outline, this is something you do, probably in your revision process. Write down a summary of each scene and that becomes an outline. Just because you’re doing it after the fact doesn’t make it less of an outline. And then do the same practice with that.

 

K: Exactly. It’s not easy to do. There’s a reason that anybody who’s taking any sort of an English literature class will say there’s a reason you spend a lot of time working on and learning about themes is because they’re intangible. They’re nebulous. There isn’t a point at which, in the story, the character breaks the fourth wall and says, “Hey, just so you know, we’re introducing a new theme here! It’s compassion!”

 

R: But at the same time, you study examples in order to identify the universalities and that’s what themes are.

 

K: Yes.

 

R: So, if you learn how to work your theme around compassion, you can write twenty novels that are completely different that are all about compassion, and you’d get really good at it. You know?

 

K: Yeah, absolutely.

 

R: That’s why romance writers are really good at what they’re doing. By choosing their genre, they know what the theme is and they stick to it and, by the end, capital R, Romance writers are really, really efficient at getting stories written because they’ve already done this work. And every time you do this with a theme, it answers questions about the plot.

 

K: Yeah.

 

R: What needs to happen here? I’m lost. Well, okay, what’s your theme? What needs to happen here? Oh, well this!

 

Yeah, you answered your own question.

 

K: So, just to talk a little—with character arc, tightening that up and defining it a little better. Again, outlines here help. And it doesn’t need to be anything too detailed. It just needs to be this, then this, then this, then this and then throw some lines in there explaining what led to or motivated the character to get to that point. Character arcs, it’s funny because in some ways they are far more concrete than themes. You can actually sit down and outline a character arc, but I think it is harder sometimes to say, “Is this a character arc?”

 

The most important thing in the character arc is the character has to be different at the end than when they started. It can be something like RIpley in Alien where she hasn’t undergone a major personality shift, but she has changed the way she thinks and will act differently now because of that. 

 

As opposed to someone like Luke Skywalker, who has the farmboy to legendary hero character arc, but Luke goes on this whole journey and at the end of it, he is a very, very, very different person than when he started because of all of the things that happened to him. All of the experiences, the adversity, the finding out his father’s Darth Vader. I mean, that alone—

 

R: Oh, I know. Plus he literally can’t go back to the life he had before.

 

K: Yeah, exactly. And that’s actually a very good marker of a successful character arc. Can they go back to how things were before? And if the answer is yes, your character has probably not had enough of a character arc for it to be considered a character arc.

 

R: Or it’s Indiana Jones.

 

K: Or it’s Indiana Jones. Because Indiana Jones always just goes back to how things were before. Indiana Jones has proof that God exists—

 

R: And goes back to university and just keeps teaching the Neolithic Era.

 

K: And just kept living his life! [laughs] Indiana Jones has multiple instances of literal proof that not only does the Judeo-Christian God exist, but also Hindu deities and various other things.

 

R: Mhm.

 

K: Aliens! All of this stuff and just continues on like it’s nothing. I don’t know what that says about him. If we should be impressed or horrified.

 

R: I think we’re supposed to be impressed. The idea being that the first time we see it happen is not the first time it happens for him.

 

K: I wanna be very clear about something: in the timeline of Indiana Jones because we all know—

 

R: Are we counting the River Phoenix and Young Indiana Jones?

 

K: Oh, no, but we’re counting the beginning of Last Crusade, to be sure.

 

R: Okay, alright.

 

K: Okay, so we’ve got Last Crusade, we’ve got that awesome train scene, whatever. Chronologically, then, Temple of Doom actually happens first.

 

R: Right, so we have the intro to Last Crusade, we have Temple of Doom—

 

K: And Temple of Doom, we establish that Hindu deities are clearly a real thing and a serious force to be reckoned with. Even if you wanna say, “Well, maybe it wasn’t the Hindu deities, it was magic,” okay fine, it was still bad, it was still, you know, unhappy.

 

R: Yeah.

 

K: Alright, so then we go to Raiders of the Lost Ark, at the end of that we have established that the Judeo-Christian God is a real thing that exists and does not like Nazis and you should not open the box.

 

R: Yep.

 

K: Then, we go to The Last Crusade, and in case anybody was a little like, “Meh, I’m not sure, that could’ve been who-knows-what, just because they said it was the Ark of the Covenant doesn’t mean that’s what it really was,” well now we’ve got the Holy Grail. The literal, actual Holy Grail that has kept a Crusades-era knight alive and then, if we’re still gonna take this a step further, heals his dying father’s mortal wounds.

 

R: Yup.

 

K: So, we have now established that multiple deities actually, really exist and this guy just freaking goes back to teaching college like this hasn’t rocked his entire world.

 

R: Teachers have a limited amount of vacation time.

 

[K laughs]

 

R: What is he gonna do?

 

K: Doesn’t he get summers off? I just assumed that was when all of these were happening.

 

R: I don’t think he has tenure yet? Once he has tenure, maybe.

 

K: Yeah, yeah. Good point. Anyway, the whole point is: Indiana Jones, not a great character arc. Can he go back to the way things were? Yes. He does.

 

R: Apparently!

 

K: Over and over again.

 

R: He resets to default.

 

K: Yes. Getting back—I apologize, we got sidetracked there again—

 

R: It’s fine.

 

K: It’s fine, we get excited. So how do you actually go about tightening these up? When somebody gives you the incredible, helpful note of tighten up your themes and character arcs. So helpful. What do you do?

 

Well, so, for themes I think a good technique is sort of what I mentioned. Go back either through your outline or through your manuscript for revisions, and identify motivations and actions and what themes stem from those.

 

R: And color-code them maybe, like you  said.

 

[40:14]           

 

K: Maybe color code them. Take a step back, so to speak. Take a thousand foot view and say, “Is the story driven by these or are they happening because the story’s the thing that’s driving here?” If it’s the second one, you do not have tight themes. The themes should be the ones driving the story and motivating the characters and influencing the plot.

 

R: And by driving the story, we don’t mean stop at the end of every two paragraphs and reiterate what your theme is.

 

K: Yes, so how do you tighten this up? Identify things that are happening. Be they actions of characters or elements of the plot. Maybe external forces of nature, depending on what your themes are, and go in and emphasize those a little bit. Make it so that—Yes, you can’t have a character turn to the audience, wink, and say, “I’m doing this for love!” But you certainly can have an inner dialogue where they are acknowledging and identifying that what is motivating them is their love for their dog.

 

R: Mhm.

 

K: Or, I guess, their significant other. Whatever.

 

R: Mostly the dog.

 

K: Yeah, probably the dog. This goes into the Show Me, Don’t Tell Me.

 

R: Mhm.

 

K: See the characters react based on things that are important to them, and that brings forward your themes. I don’t like the phrase “tighten up your themes” I like the phrase “strengthen your themes.”

 

R: Yeah.

 

K: And emphasize your themes. Showcase your themes. With themes, you’re not contracting them. You’re trying to disperse them a little bit more through the story. You are showing, not telling.

 

R: The thing is, like, a bouillon cube.

 

K: Yes.

 

R: It starts very small, but it goes throughout your entire project.

 

K: And then there’s no getting it out again. It’s in there. 

 

R, laughing: Yeah.

 

K: Character arcs, on the other hand, are absolutely something that can be tightened and focused. So, how do you do this? 

 

First, look at your themes. How are they affecting the story? How are they affecting the character’s decisions? Then look at what the characters are doing. Is it primarily reactionary? Are they just letting things happen to them? Or do they have agency? Are they making decisions themselves? 

 

And it’s okay if, especially for the first part of the book, they’re just reacting. A lot of stories start out with a character just trying to get their feet under them, to recover and reorient themselves from something happening.

 

R: Although, I wanna say that that does not mean they shouldn’t have some sort of agency.

 

K: Yes, there needs to be decision-making in there.

 

R: Maybe they want something that they’re going to end up not wanting at the end.

 

K: Well, it can come down simply to something like they’re running away from the alien monster that grew from what was living in the back of their fridge and, do I run upstairs and lock myself in the bedroom or do I run out the front door?

 

Yes, they’re running, but they’re making a decision of how they’re best going to try to escape this.

 

R: And they can make the wrong decisions, too. I mean, that’s kind of part of the character arc.

 

K: That is part of the character arc. So tightening these up has to do with having the character come up against a conflict or an obstacle or a decision and then learning and growing and changing from it. So, again, identifying the parts at which your character is coming up against conflict in some way. And conflict, here, not meaning physical or argumentative. Sometimes the conflict can simply be, “It’s low tide, I need to catch fish and I can’t catch fish when it’s low tide.”

 

R: Right. 

 

K: It can be like a force of nature. And then identifying how they’re reacting. Then, the next time it’s low tide, have they instead gone, “Ah, yes, I should catch extra fish because on this planet low tide lasts for three days and, therefore, I’m not going to be able to fish again for three days.” That’s growing and learning and making new mistakes.

 

R: Like staying on this planet where low tide lasts for three days. Can you imagine the smell?

 

K: There’s a very weird mood pattern on this planet.

 

R: It’s pitch black but low tide.

 

K: Yes, exactly. So somehow. It’s really weird because there is no moon, actually. No one really knows where the tides are coming from.

 

So identifying the areas of conflict for your character, where they’re coming up against adversity, and then seeing how they’re making decisions. If they’re just not reacting, if they’re just not doing anything over and over again, that’s not character development. That’s not a character arc.

 

R: Mhm.

 

K: Having them grow and change and learn, maybe thinking: Okay, I’m safe now. I’ve locked myself in my room from the alien creature from the back of the fridge can’t get me. Oh, hang on a second. It learned how to open doors. That’s... what do I do now? Okay, I’ve got a chair I can put up against the door.

 

And then finally getting to the point of going: you know what? I should have just run outside. I need to get out of this house.

 

R: Mhm.

 

K: So, again, identifying areas where your character is coming up into conflict, figuring out how they’re reacting, and making sure that they’re learning and changing and not reacting the same way.

 

This is not a real thing, I wish it was, the definition of insanity, doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results? Obviously that’s not correct.

 

R: Right.

 

K: But it is important with character arcs and character development. Having your character do the same thing over and over again is not character arc.

 

R: Although there’s that stubbornness to that, or that unwillingness to grow, that can be the character arc and suddenly they realize doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results is not getting me where I want to go. And the thing they learn is not to do that anymore.

 

K: I am now being eaten by the thing that lived in the back of the fridge. I regret my life choices.

 

R: Yes. 

 

[both laugh]

 

R: And that’s the morality lesson—the moral of the tale is clean out your fridge.

 

K: Clean out your fridge, people! 

 

R: And not just in August.

 

K: Is that a thing that you do in August?

 

R: No, I’m saying… it’s just about coming up on August as we record this, don’t make it an annual event. Make it a…

 

K: You know what’s funny is that with all of the quarantining and stuff, I have been so much better about cleaning the fridge out because I’m just here all the time.

 

R: Mhm.

 

K: And I’m kinda like, “Huh.”

 

R: Well, when you go into an office you procrastinate by going to the lounge and making a cup of coffee and getting a drink or going to talk to somebody about something. But, when you’re home, how do you procrastinate? The only thing you can do is clean.

 

K: It’s kinda like I’m looking at this going, “Huh, that might start talking to me soon. I should probably do something about that.”

 

R: But if you’d been going into an office, you would’ve said, “That thing is talking, I should probably do something about that.”

 

K: I’m gonna go back to my office.

 

R: At least you’d be the only one there.

 

K: Yeah, yeah. Anyway! That was a very long-winded way of answering your questions and I hope that—

 

R: We answered it.

 

K: We hope that was helpful and not just a series of me rambling about uh—

 

R: At least we talked about interesting movies and people can relate to, at least Ripley. Especially right now.

 

K: I think we can all relate to Ripley on some level. One of my favorite behind-the-scenes thing with Alien is, have you ever seen the cute scenes from there? There was a part, it was so ridiculous, it would have ruined the movie, the actor that played the alien was like 6’8” or something and they just put him in this giant rubber suit. And I can’t remember what part of the movie it would’ve been in, but it was one of those where the character’s backing slowly with their gun into a room and they hear something behind them and they turn around and the alien’s there.

 

And there’s footage out there—look this up—of the alien crab-walking up to them. So just imagine this giant, 6’8” man in this heavy, absurd rubber suit crab-walking on all fours up to this actor. It—I understand what they were trying to do, and the sound effects were certainly creepy, but… it just ruined the whole, it was too ridiculous-looking. Thankfully, they saw that and cut it.

 

R: I think that has a lot to do with the human joints versus where the joints were supposed to be in this alien.

 

K: Yeah. Well that’s like in The Exorcist with Regan walking backwards down the stairs. Part of how creepy about that is how unnatural it looks. You’ve got joints going in directions that maybe humans can do that, but they probably shouldn’t.

 

R: Right, yeah. Exactly. So theme. Stay limber.

 

K, laughing: Yes! Anyway, Ashley, we hope we answered that for you and keep us posted. Let us know how things go with the story. And if you want to keep us posted on anything else—

 

R: You can find us online. We are on Twitter and Instagram @wmbcast. We are at Patreon.com/wmbcast where we have some awesome patrons who are supporting the show. And if you feel like we have been helpful, you can throw us some bus fare and stuff for when we’re allowed to go see each other again and get back together for our podcast episode recordings.

 

K: I was gonna say, I don’t think we’re allowed on buses anytime soon, Rekka.

 

R: No, we’re definitely not. And if you don’t have cash to spare to support the show, you can also help us out a lot by leaving us a rating on review on Apple podcasts. We’re everywhere. Stitcher, Spotify, all that good stuff. But if you wanna leave a review, it’s most helpful to leave it there. You can also shoot us an email, info@wmbcast.com, and we can answer a question if you have one. If you wanna keep it anonymous, that’s the way to do it. Otherwise, post it to Twitter like Ashley did, and we’ll answer it in a future episode.

 

K: Yeah. We’ll try our best. That’s for sure.

 

R: Yeah.

 

K: Alright, well, thanks everyone so much and we’ll see you in a couple weeks.

 

R: Take care, everyone!

 

[outro music plays]

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 joined by Antoine Bandele, author, publisher, and a lot-of-other-stuff-er. He's a busy guy who knew what he wanted out of the fantasy maps for his series world of Esowon, and found help on Fiverr to see it realized.

You'll want to start out, if possible, with his page of maps open in a browser: https://www.antoinebandele.com/esowon-maps

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 tell us your favorite novel covers!

We hope you enjoy We Make Books!

Twitter: @WMBCast  |  @KindofKaelyn  |  @BittyBittyZap

Instagram: @WMBCast 

Patreon.com/WMBCast

 

Episode 43: The Maps of Esowon, Cartography with Antoine Bandele

transcribed by Sara Rose (@saraeleanorrose)

 

[0:00]

K: Hey everyone, welcome back to another episode of We Make Books, a show about writing, publishing, and everything in between. My name’s Kaelyn Considine and I am the acquisition editor for Parvus Press.

 

R: And I’m Rekka, I write science fiction and fantasy as R.J. Theodore and today we have a very, very awesome guest. This is Antoine Bandele. He happened to write a book that I happened to read recently and when Kaelyn suggested that we do a whole series on artwork, I said,” Ooh! We should talk about cartography, and I have the book and the author for this episode.”

 

K: Yeah, we said Artwork August, it became more “Artwork Series.” But cartography is a really important and, I think frequently underappreciated, certainly, part of a book. You know, as Antoine mentions in the episode, fantasy books especially, it’s almost expected that you have some kind of a map or something in there. 

 

R: It might be overlooked as far as the work that goes into it, but if it’s not there, it will not be overlooked.

 

K: Yeah.

 

R: Your fans will be talking to you about, “Excuse me?! You invented a world?!”

 

K: Visual representation of this world.

 

R: Yeah. So this was a series of maps at the beginning of the book that I read, which was By Sea and Sky, an Esowon story, and there were a series of maps at the beginning, including a diagram of one of the vessels in, as the title kind of gives it away by sea and sky, so there’s an airship and there’s a great, even just a layout of the airship. Almost plan-like, ship...plans.

 

K: A schematic.

 

R: Schematic! That works. I took interior design for a year, I don’t know what to call the drawings. Hey! Drawings! That’s what we called them.

 

K: Pictures. Pictures of boats.

 

R: Yes. So, almost like a draftperson’s drawing of an airship concept. So those are all in the beginning of the book and, when I opened them, I was just like—I don’t know if they loaded. Because you know an eBook will load to a certain page when you open it and, like, you have to go back to see the preceding pages.

 

I always go back to the cover because I always wanna see how the cover looks on an eReader because this is just a minor point of mine. And I happened to see the artwork, the cartography. Whether it was loaded after the automatic page one , or before. I was like, “Oh! These are nice! These are really nice,” because Kaelyn and I have talked about maps before for books. Colin and I have talked about maps before for books. I did my map for my books and that was a whole heck of a project and I wish I had somebody else to do the work for me because it’s not easy.

 

K: I think we think, like, “Oh, whatever. You just sit down and you draw some borders, some boundaries, some oceans. Throw some mountains in there, I guess, and you’re done. It’s not that. It’s not easy at all. It’s certainly not that easy. There’s a lot of considerations that go into building a world and then putting it on a piece of paper. You can be an excellent artist, are you that good a cartographer, though?

 

R: Cartographer’s a big word and it’s a big responsibility.

 

K: So, anyway, we had an absolutely fantastic time talking to Antoine. Hopefully we’ll have him back at another date because oh my god does that guy do a lot of stuff.

 

R: Yep, yep.

 

K: So, anyway, take a listen and we hope you enjoy.

 

[intro music plays]

 

R: I just wanted to double check the pronunciation.

A: Bandele. Kind of like ándale, with a B.

 

R: Okay.

 

A: It’s actually a mistranslation. [laughs] It really should be Bamidele, but I guess somewhere, the naming coming over to America, it got—

 

R: A syllable fell off?

 

A: Yeah. So now it’s Bandele. 

 

K: So, Antoine, do you wanna take a moment and introduce yourself to our listeners?

 

A: Yeah, so my name’s Antoine. I do many-a-things but the thing that’s most relevant to today is that I am a publisher and writer and I do fantasy works, particularly fantasy works that are inspired by pre-colonial African myth and folklore, anything of that nature.

 

K: And we brought you on today, specifically to talk about a certain special kind of artwork that pops up in especially fantasy books sometimes.

 

A: Yeah,especially fantasy.

 

K: Yeah! Maps and cartography. Rekka and I wanted to do a series on artwork in books. We’ve been threatening to do an episode about cover art for a long time. And as we were working through this, we were kind of like, “You know, there’s so much art that goes into a book that you don’t think about or that we take for granted and I think one of those, definitely, are the maps that you find in the books. Because they add so much to the stories and they give the reader a great sense of the world that they’re about to explore and just helps set the stage.

 

I think that they’re—well, everything’s relative in terms of difficulty, but designing a map is very different than designing cover art. 

 

R: Yeah.

 

A: I would suspect. I don’t even know. I just hire people to do it, so I dunno.

 

R: Well that’s one of the smart things, right? Is making sure that you stick to the areas that your expertise is heavier in, and don’t try to be Master of Everything. So when we were talking about this Artwork August, I had just finished reading your book By Sea and Sky. So, I just served up these maps into my face and enjoyed them and then we started talking about doing artwork.

 

I instantly said, “Oh! You know what great maps I’ve seen? And they’re not like in an old, 60-year-old Lord of the Rings edition. Let’s talk about some current stuff.”

 

A: Mhm.

 

R: These are really great maps and I didn’t even know at the time, and it blew me away, but you found these on Fiverr?

 

A: Yes, so a woman named Maria Gondolfo, who actually is from Italy, which is awesome about working remote or online, is that you can work with people all across the world. Like, my first book, I think my editor was from Texas and then one of my beta readers was from the East Coast. I think York was one of them. And my cover artist is from Bangkok and then I have my cartographer, she’s from Italy. So it’s a lot of people all over the world who get to work with me.

 

She is renflowergrapx on Fiverr. And I got really lucky because I think she was maybe the first person I found on Fiverr.

 

K: Oh, wow. Okay.

 

A: Just by searching up “fantasy maps.” I think my brother had directed me there because he usually goes there for Dungeons and Dragons maps, and that’s what she usually does. She does Dungeons and Dragons campaign maps for people.

 

K: Very cool. Yeah.

 

A: And I was like, “Oh! Do you also do it for books? Or have you done it?” She’s like, “Yeah, I’ve done a few books before. Just give me what—” Oh! I should show you guys this! I actually have drawings. So, I usually would do a sketch-up of the map itself and then she goes and does her amazing work. I should find that.

 

K: Getting a map together—as you’re grabbing these sketching that you did—it’s no small thing. It’s a commitment. It’s a very difficult—I think a lot of people underestimate how difficult it is, even as the writer, to sit down and plan out the map in your head. What made you decide, “Yes, this is the book that I wanna take this on.”    

 

A: So the reason I need maps is that, yes, it’s a fantasy fable. It’s actually expected from the fantasy reader to have a map and it helps, as you were saying before, contextualize the world. Especially when people start talking about locations in the world. It’s like, “What? What are you referring to? I don’t know this world.” But you can refer to the map and be like, “Oh! He’s talking about that little corner in the north!” 

 

So the way I do my maps, is I really just take from real world landscapes and basically just do copy-pasting. So I’ll take a sheet of clean paper and then I’ll have a section, like, I think some of the islands are based on some SOutheast Asian islands. Not the big ones you would recognize, but the little ones that are off to the size. And then I just blow them up to be bigger. I’m like, alright cool, and then I do that. And the benefit of that is that you’re getting a natural land formation versus it just being completely out of your mind, in which case sometimes that can come out with mistakes and that sort of a thing. So I just do that, mostly as a way to help the reader figure out what this world is and what it’s about.

 

K: And so you’re starting—rather than starting from scratch, you’re drawing inspiration from existing geography—

 

A: Correct.

 

K: But this is a fantasy world, things are gonna exist there that don’t quite exist in South Asian islands. 

 

A: Right, exactly. Well, ‘cause I don’t have a full world map right now because I’m building out the world section by section and then connecting it later.

 

K: I was gonna ask, did you sit down and figure this out all at once or are you kind of adding a new land as you need to?

 

A: Yeah, I add new land until the world map is filled out. So, for looking at the Esowon Esterlands map. If you turn it clockwise, you might notice that landscape, possibly. It’s a little scrunched up, but if you look at it, it is basically Panama.

 

R: Okay. Yeah.

 

K: Yep, yep.

 

A: The space between South America and Central America.

 

K: Alright, yes, I can see it.

 

A: But flipped the other way so it looks a little more reminiscent of Northeast Africa and Arabia.

 

R: Yeah.

 

A: And then, also, the middle islands are based on the Carribean, so it’s inserting the West Indies in the Red Sea, basically. But, again, making a fantasy of it because that stuff doesn’t necessarily exist. Even that, you know, the indication of Octa, that’s supposed to be Egypt and the Delta Nile, that’s supposed to look like the Nile, but it’s obviously not. 

 

Victoria Falls is kind of in that bottom section. So it’s very much inspired, and this one in particular I did that because I, specifically was going the Song of Ice and Fire route—And that’s actually what George R. R. Martin did. Westeros is basically just the UK turned upside down.

 

K: Yep, and stacked on top of each other a little bit.

 

A: Exactly, and there are some differences to meet the standards of Westeros, but that’s essentially the basis for what I did for this, you know, making it somewhat familiar but then still being its own thing in a fantasy realm.

 

K: Yeah, and for reference, if you’re wondering what we’re talking about, we’re on Antoine’s website where he has all of the maps from the books displayed on there. And a link to find the cartographer who did them. They’re very impressive.

 

R: And that link to this page will be in the show notes. We should’ve said that at the top so that people could bring him up while they listen, if they’re not driving. Because who commutes anymore?

 

[A and K laugh]

 

A: Right.

 

R: Yeah. So you went to Fiverr. Was that your first stop looking for a cartographer?

 

A: Yeah, that was definitely my first. I think I was first flirting with the idea of doing it myself and then I was like, “Nah, I’m not gonna do it myself.” Because I realized very quickly, as you were saying, it’s actually more complex than you would actually expect.

 

R: Oh yeah.

 

A: And there’s actually a lot of rules to cartography that people don’t think of. Like, the way the rivers flow, they have to come off mountains. Stuff like that. The way port cities usually are. There’s a lot of little nuances that people don’t really recognize. I definitely just went to Fiverr and I just got really lucky. I honestly, my first search—I might’ve looked at a few people, but then Renflower was a standout for me, for sure. She had an option for standard black and white and she had a full color and and I saw her examples and I was like, “I don’t think I have to look anymore! Lemme just, like, reach out to her and see if she’ll do it.”

 

K: This is it!

 

[11:44] 

 

R: Nailed it.

A: And then what’s really awesome, and she surprised me on this because By Sea and Sky, it features airships. And I was looking and I was like, “Aww, I’m probably gonna have to find a new person, because she only does maps,” right? But that’s my thinking. I was like, “Well, hey, I need like an airship. I don’t know if you’ve ever done that before…” and she’s like, “Yeah! I love doing them!” She says it gets kind of old to just do her maps, you know, week in and week out. And she was really excited. She, actually I think uses it as an example or whatever now. 

 

K: Oh, awesome.

 

A: I needed that in particular because I was writing the third act of By Sea and Sky which takes place, there’s like a battle sequence at the end. I was like, “Oh, man. I need to know, solidly, what the landscape of the—” Basically I had to know which level everybody’s on, how are they getting trapped—

 

R: What room’s above them and under them, yeah.

 

A: Yeah! Exactly! So I got her to do that and, again, I got references, something like that. I was like, “Is this kinda like the—” I describe it as looking like a ship, but it flies and has like the sails on the sides so it can fly and that kinda stuff. And the different rooms and where the captain’s quarters is and the mess hall and all that kinda stuff. So that was a lot of fun for her and for me.

 

R: So this sort of comes from her experience doing D&D maps, I assume—

 

A: Right, exactly.

 

R: This was kind of laid out where, you actually could, if you printed it out big enough you could do a campaign through the ship, reenacting the battle from the third act.

 

A: You definitely could.

 

R: Yeah. Yeah, and it’s great. There’s a kind of isometric view of the ship, where you get the wow factor of what the ship looks like with the lateral sails and the more traditional sails, and then you get the deck structure. And then you get the breakdown, floor by floor, almost like architectural drawings.

 

A: Right. And that’s because she wanted to feel like it was in the world, so some of the names you see on the bottom right are actually characters in the world, the engineers who built out— 

 

K: Ohh!

 

R: Oh, yes!

 

A: Very, very small in the bottom right corner—

 

K: Very cool!

 

R: I didn’t even try reading it because it was so small.

 

A: Janaan Malouf, Ismad al-Kindi, who some of them actually show up in the book, like Ismad al-Kindi is the engineer that we know in the story itself. Janaan is someone we meet in book two. But these are actual, in the year of The Viper, the year of 3582. So she made it feel like it was in-universe, except for the typeface with the navigation and whatever that looks very much like it’s us typing that in, versus it being written.

 

But, otherwise, it’s supposed to be like an in-universe kind of blueprint. 

 

R: And there’s something to be said for legibility, too, if you want someone to read that.

 

A: Exactly. You gotta be able to read it, though.

 

R: I mean, we all assume it’s translated into English and maybe it’s also translated into a serif font—

 

A: Exactly!!

 

R: So. Yeah.

 

A: Right.

 

K: So, you got on Fiverr, you found Maria. What is this first conversation like, while you’re trying to explain and describe this.

 

A: Oh my god. Well, she—so most Fiverr professionals do this, where they’ll ask you to provide an explanation, for what you want, so there’ll be boxes of, “Do you have fantasy examples that you want your maps to look like?” Because she does several different kinds of styles. “Please tell me a little bit about your story, what is it about? What’s the landscape like? What’s some of the history behind the landscape.” So you explain all this, you fill out the boxes and then you have a conversation. 

 

Well, first, she has to accept it. So when you send it off, you’d be like, “Okay, well, is it cool? Would you wanna work with me?” She says yes or no. Yes. Then you continue forward and then she takes, however long, I’m not sure how long her thing is on her website right now, but I think when I did it, it was like five to ten days, or something like that? I’m not sure. She’s like really popular now. I think she even has a Level 2 badge or something like that.

 

K: OH, great!

 

A: Or something to that. I can’t remember, but… So we do that and we talk together, and she’ll send me a rough and I’ll maybe have adjustments. We’ll go back and forth until we both are happy with our final product, and it just goes on like that.

 

K: Yeah, and actually, as a call back to the previous episode we did with Colin Coyle, who does most of the art direction for Parvus Press, you guys have to have a contract or an agreement in place. When you say you’re talking to Maria, you have to check all of these boxes, there’s gotta be something set up.  You don’t just, you know, hand someone something and say, “Hey, I want it to vaguely look like this,” and then you send them some money and you get back you—

 

A, laughing: Yeah, no.

 

R: And Fiverr’s got that kinda built in, don’t they?

 

K: Yeah.

 

A: Yes, they do. Fiverr, Upwork, any of those other freelancer websites, that’s kinda the benefit of it because you don’t have to do all the legal stuff because it’s already all done in the background for you. That’s the reason why it costs an extra fee to use those platforms because they’re basically managing all of that paperwork, kind of a thing.

 

R: Mhm.

 

K: But worth it, if that’s something you don’t want to worry about.

 

A: Right.

 

K: Because we—there’s a lot of really talented, awesome artists on Fiverr, obviously, but they’re—you don’t always know you’re running into and what their work ethic’s gonna be like. Sometimes more so than the work that they’re producing. So if you’re looking to have something like this done, and you’re considering, “Do I go out in the world and find someone, or do I go to somewhere like Fiverr?” There is that, at least to consider as the built-in protection that comes with Fiverr. They have all these policies in place already, so you don’t have to think or worry about that.

 

R: And there’s some motivation for the artists to maintain their reputation on the side, too.

 

K: Absolutely.

 

A: Right, exactly.

 

R: So these are color maps. What made you choose color? I mean, they’re very colorful, too. So, obviously, digital Kindles and eReaders and on your website, they look fantastic. But, traditionally in books, you’d have like a black and white interior print—

 

A: Just black and white, yeah.

 

R: Yeah, exactly. On the ink-readers you won’t see color. So was it a price difference and you just decided you wanted to see that color? Or, what was the decision as you’re art directing her? Even though she’s applying her know-how and all her experience creating these things, but at a certain point certain aesthetics are up to you. So, what were the decisions you made as you went through this?

 

A: So, that was just her having that option available. Because I was just expecting to go into it black and white, like it was. I mean, that’s just how it is. But then she had like a premium version that wasn’t that much more expensive and I saw her examples and I was like, “Oh, yeah! If color’s an option then let’s do color! Why not?”

 

R: Mhm.

 

A: But, of course, you can only see it if you’re looking at it on the Kindle app or if you’re looking at it on an eReader that has full color available to it. If you’re looking on a Paperwhite or anything like that, or on a printed page, you’re not gonna have that. But that’s all a thing, too, that she factors in is that she makes sure that the greyscale, once you put it in greyscale, does it still function? So when we do our passes between each other, she actually factors that in. Every time she sends me a color, it also shows up in black and white as well, to make sure that it functions in both formats.

 

R: Oh, excellent.

 

K: Very nice, yeah. More like lineart, kind of.

 

A: Yeah, ‘cause a lot of times amateur cartographers or amateur artists don’t consider that you can’t just flip a switch, necessarily—

 

R: Yup.

 

A: It’s a separate skillset to have black and white versus color.

 

R: That’s like all the Mad Max and Logan and other movies. They’re starting to release editions that are in black and white. And it’s not just that they desaturate the film, they actually go through and adjust it, just like they were producing a whole new movie, to really play with the tone and the volume and the color and stuff like that. It does take a lot of work to remove all that color and still have something that’s lovely to look at.  

 

[19:26]

 

K: This is a far more complicated project that requires a different skillset than just: Well, I’m going to draw some mountains on a nebulous looking piece of land. Right? And, you mentioned before, there are rules. You can’t just have a river that just starts in the middle of a continent and also ends in the middle of a continent.

 

A: Right.

 

K: It’s gotta be, you know, flowing from somewhere. Presumably, even in your fantasy world, some laws of physics and geography do still apply.

 

A: Yep.

 

K: But Maria obviously has a lot of experience dealing with this and designing things. Was there anything that, you know, you said, “Okay, I want it to look like this,” and she went, “Oh no, that’s not how this works. It’s gotta look like this instead,”?

 

A, chuckles: Um, I don’t know if we ever had those conversations because I think we both came in, both knowing what had to go into it. I’m sure she—because she actually liked me as a client, I guess, because I communicate well or whatever. Because I guess who she usually deals with are people who don’t know that kind of thing? And for me to come in and already have all that set up—Like I said, I do my sketches before she does anything. I’m sure that’s a benefit to her. It’s just easier.

 

R: Yeah, I can tell you, as a graphic designer, most of the clients you get are, “Oh, I’ll know it’s right when I see it!” And then seventy iterations later, they still don’t like anything.

 

A, sympathetically: Yeah…

 

R: And you just want to walk away from the situation. But, yeah, if you know what you want to begin with and you have sketches, I mean that must be so much easier for her. And then she can apply what she knows, to take those sketches. So, your sketches were land shapes and continents, islands, and that sort of thing? Coastlines that you already had an idea of? Or was it mostly an orientation of: these cities are kind of grouped over here and they’re on a continent and this one’s on an island, and this one’s on a straight.

 

What level of understanding the actual geography of your world did you bring to begin with? Or was it mostly like, “I need a map. I only know that these two things are separated by water and are seventy miles apart.”

 

A: I was very specific on the land masses and how they looked. The main thing I didn’t really know was the in-between stuff like the mountain placement and forest placement and stuff like that. I knew I would say, like, I would have a drawing of this is greenish, this should be forest-y, this should be desert-y, but then she would go in with the details. So I was very, very—my notes were very specific about shapes and also what was forest, what was desert, and even the spacing. 

 

Like, the spacing, in particular, was important for By Sea and Sky because the main island, Kidogom and Al Anim were a specific, plot-wise, not so much in book one, but in book three, there was a specific plot on the distance between the two, because there’s some travelling that goes on. So I was very, very specific about it. I think, at some point, she had it really close and I was like, “Oh no! They’re not that close together.” And that’s the reason, actually, we made the second version of it, the one that’s called Al Anim and Kidogo map, which shows a little bit better the distance between the two, versus the wider shot. So you can understand when that particular plot happens how much time and distance happens between those two.

 

R: I’m observing that you know things about book three that have to have bearing—

 

K: That’s exactly what I was gonna say! How do you deal with this with potential spoilers, because what you’re putting on a map are things that are significant to the story. Did you have any concerns with that, where you’re like, “I’ve gotta put this on here because it exists in the world, but I am then—”

 

A: Ohh, I see what you’re saying!

 

K: Yeah.

 

A: So, yes. Specifically, there are—The map that I have on the website now, those locations are only locations that are spoken in that particular book. 

 

K: Gotcha.

 

A: So, in oncoming books, like in the second book I mention a newer location, the map gets updated with that little point of interest. So the particular thing with the whole distance between Kidogo and Al Anim, not really a spoiler so much. It just gives context for when that plot point comes up because it’s really just about how long it takes to get back to Kidogo because there’s a plotline of, “Hey, we gotta get back there! And how long is it gonna take for them to catch up to us?” kinda thing, that’s why that was very specific, those two locations in particular.

 

R: Yeah, and those two are mentioned throughout the book. It’s not like a—

 

A: Correct, correct. There are places on the map that should be mentioned, but aren’t specifically for that reason that you guys mentioned about it being spoilery. So each map is different.

 

K: So you just go the method where, “I’m leaving this stuff off and when I need you to know about it, I’ll let you know about it.”

 

A: Yes. And that’s exactly the same way I write, too. I don’t present every piece of worldbuilding. I was just talking to another author because I work with a lot of authors within the same space of this world that I’m building out, and they’re like, “Whoa! You know so much about this, this, and that!” And I’m like, “Yeah, there’s just no point of putting it in that story because it wasn’t relevant to the story.” But there’s all these pieces of worldbuilding.

 

I think George R. R. Martin said your worldbuilding should just be like a tip of an iceberg and then, you know, the reader should see the impressions of the iceberg underneath, but that’s not part of the story. So you don’t need to see the entire iceberg, you just need to see the little tip of it.

 

R: I think Kaelyn would appreciate that, as an editor.

 

K: It’s funny because Rekka and I talk about this all the time, that I’m a planner. 

 

A: Me too.

 

K: I want to—and this comes from being an editor is that, especially if I’m working with somebody who’s working on a series, I need to know where this ends up. I need to know how it ends, but also geographically where it ends because I need to make sure that there isn’t something coming completely out of left field here. And what I was gonna ask is if you, along the George R. R. Martin lines, like to pepper little people and name places into your book for you to go back and reference and make relevant later—

 

A: Yep.

 

K: —I’ve used that trick with authors where it’s like, “Okay, listen, if you’re not sure how you’re getting yourself out of this hole yet, that’s fine. But you gotta lay some groundwork along the way. So if you wanna make it a throwaway line that could or could not mean anything, that’s fine. But you have to do something.” So that it’s not like: oh! It turns out there’s this entire lost continent that nobody knew about and it’s super-secret and special. That’s how you annoy people.

 

A: Mhm, yeah.

 

R: You wanna create a Chekov’s Island and you can put it in the map, but not in the book.

 

K: Yes, yes exactly.

 

R: So, it was that planning ahead which was more my question for you. You have a series that is in the works.

 

A: Right.

 

R: You already have how many of them written?

 

A: Yeah, there’s a few. Demons...1984… I think at least six right now, across the entire series.

 

K: Well, yeah, because you have some prequels and things like that.

 

A: Yeah! There’s prequels, there’s novellas, there’s a graphic novel as well. There’s a lot of—audiobooks as well. But yeah.

 

R: And they all share this map.

 

A: And they all share… portions of the map. Like, I said before. So the portion that we’re looking at now is the northeast version of it, the other one that I have which is for my first book, The Kishi, which is called the Southern Reaches of the Golah Empire, that’s like the southwest portion of it, and then this one here, Southern Eshiya, that’s like far east. So these are, like, pieces of it and I haven’t puzzled them all together yet because I am building out the world bit by bit.

Oh! Perfect! You guys already know about Game of Thrones. So basically what I’m doing right now is I’m writing about Robert’s Rebellion before A Game of Thrones happens. So basically, I”m writing all that stuff leading up to the saga, the big epic books.   

 

R: So, planning ahead this much, is it just because you’re going section by section that you have the confidence to say, “Okay, yes, this is where all the cities are, I don’t need to move them because I’m not gonna run myself into any trouble later.” You could get to book eight and say, “Oh shoot! It would really help if Kidogo was actually a little bit further north because then I could squeeze in another island that isn’t here right now!” Like, do you worry about that or are you just like, “Okay, I can commit to this and I can figure it out later.” Or are you really, really planned out to the point of, you have outlines for enough to pretty much flesh out the entire world. And you know what you need.

 

A: A bit of both. I actually know how the big saga books end. I know how those began. I know where the locations of all these stories will be. So I know what to keep not spoken about.

 

R: Mhm.

 

A: That’s why I have only a few points of interest. Like, I don’t go and like, “I’m gonna go and name every single piece of land here!” That would just put me into a corner if I do that. So that’s why my rule is, whatever I’m talking about in the story is what will be mentioned on the map, and nothing more. Because yeah, if I wanna add something in there, what? Never was mentioned before! It’s not canon, so it’s okay. I can insert that in there. But if you do, do that, if you do over explain it too much then, yeah. You can run yourself into a corner of being like, “Whoops! I kind of established that that place is like this and I can’t, you know, add that in there so.”

 

R: And I put the picture on my site, people are gonna point at it and say I was wrong!

 

A: Yeah, exactly.

 

K: And, conversely, though, this is getting more into the actual creating the maps. As you said, you only, if you’re not talking about it, do you keep a list as you’re going through the book of kind of like, “Okay, I need to like—”

 

A: Oh, yes! I have a story bible. I have a huge story bible.

 

K: Okay, so like, “We went here, we went here, we went here. These are the places we need to talk about. Or this is mentioned.”

 

A: Mhm, yeah. There’s timelines, locations, like terms and language phrases. Yeah, that’s very important, too, for creators out there. Writers, make sure you’re having a story bible. For, especially, epic fantasy.

 

K: Oh, yeah.

 

A: You really should have it for anything. Like, even The Office, which is just a sitcom, has  a story bible. 

 

K: Yep.

 

A: Fantasy, it’s a must. It’s not even like an optional thing. You must have a story bible. 

 

K: Yeah, otherwise you’re gonna run into some bizarre continuity errors. But, there are certainly some famous ones out there. But I have actually read a book, I can’t remember which one it was, where they had a map in there and there were two places just missing off of it. And they weren’t particularly relevant to the story or anything, but they were mentioned and there were characters from there and I’m a hundred percent sure they were meant to be on the map. And they just left them off it. But, yeah, you know if you’ve got a lot of cities and places and stuff, I’m sure it can happen.

 

[29:52]

 

A: And the benefit of me being indie published is that I can rectify that very easily. ‘Cause I’m like, “Oh, that’s not on there? Alright, photoshop, put it in there, reupload,” and then that e-file gets updated so that person is like, “Alright cool. Sweet. Never happened. What.”

 

K: What are you—what are you talking about? That was always like that. You’re imagining things. Stop hallucinating cities that weren’t there.

 

A: Right.

 

R: So, I’m noticing that as we run through these maps and you’re talking about them in different ways, and you’re mentioning that they’re different regions of the planet, I am noticing that they—or the worlds, planet is for sci-fi—that these maps are kind of in different styles. Is that intentional, that they would be a regional style for each story?

 

A: Yes! Yeah, so they’re slightly different depending on which region we’re in. And it’s supposed to kind of be like a—what Maria always wanted to do was make sure that, as much as she could, make it like it was an in-world map and not so much a map made by 21st Century people—

 

R: A digital file, yeah.

 

A: Yeah, exactly. So yeah, yeah that’s the reason for the differences. That’s why we have the airship layout looking like it’s like a blueprint and then you have Kidogo and stuff looking, as it does.

 

R: And creases! Creases in your maps and discolored areas and…

 

A: Yes, yes! Oh, and she—which is funny because when I first started, I use a program called Vellum which is a formatter, and it didn’t—at first, it didn’t support full-page leaved images, so when I had showed her the book the first time, she’s like, “Oh… I designed it to be full page…” 

 

I was like, “I know, but it doesn’t support it! I had to make it a little tiny thing on one page. And then I showed her, “THEY DO IT NOW! THEY DO FULL PAGE IMAGES!!!!!” So the crease that she does there actually creases with the spine of the book, like it actually exists. Like “OOOH!”

 

And she’s so happy that it has that now, and I was like, “Yeah, I know you wanted that,” because they only put that in seven months ago or something like that.

 

R: Yeah, it was not that long ago. When I went in and I found it, I was equally happy.

 

A: I use it all the time. My title pages look so awesome now!

 

K: That is, that’s very cool.

 

R: And I noticed it also, like you said, lay a single image across two pages, if you have your print layout done through them, too. So yeah. Very good update. Vellum is constantly improving. I’m a huge fan.

 

A: Yeah, they’re awesome.

 

K: You work on these books with an editor. Do you include the editor in the designing process of these maps at all? Do you get any input or run anything by the editor, or do you just handle all of this yourself?

 

A: More or less. I mean, it depends on how important that location is to the story. I definitely have an editor—I have one of my editors, she’s more developmental, she’s more about the characters, and then I have one who’s more into the worldbuilding aspect of it? Fiona’s the one I’m mentioning who is like, more the character-based one and then Callan, Callan Brown, is the more worldbuildy. 

 

So, with Callan, I moreso do that kind of stuff with, where I’m like, hey this location—or, when we get to Al-Anim, because Al-Anim’s the main thing of book two, we were talking about the design of that city, the idea of the spine that goes through the entire city where everybody congregates and stuff like that. Or the idea, like I came up with a tavern, I’m like, “Okay, this tavern, what’s the history of this tavern? Why is it central? Why is it so important for everybody? Like, why is it popular? Why does it do so well?” We have those kinds of conversations, for sure, with an editor.       

 

K: Gotcha. ‘Cause we spend a lot of time talking about how, especially in self- and indie publishing, there’s this drive to just want to do everything yourself. I can take this, I can handle this, I don’t want people coming in and messing up my thing, but an outside voice, an outside set of eyes, is certainly, I think, helpful, even when it is something as microcosmic as building a map.

 

A: I think it’s a complete necessity, actually. I don’t think it should ever be a one-mind person. Like, it’s very similar to filmmaking, where it’s a really collaborative effort when you really look at what goes into a book. Like, there’s not too many people out there who are gonna be doing everything on their book. From audiobook production or your cover design or your cartographers or your editors. Like, it’s definitely a collaborative thing. 

 

And I’m very huge about that. Like, I use the heck out of beta readers. I really, really—several iterations I’ll have a draft go, have the beta readers say something, send the other one out, have the beta readers say something. Alright, now my editor’s going through it, now my critique partner’s going through it. I’m very, very into the feedback and that feedback loop of making sure that everything makes sense and things track. I think that’s super important. 

 

K: Yeah, I completely agree. So, along those lines, we always ask when we have guests on, advice,s suggestions, red flags, things you would pass along to somebody who’s thinking, “Hey, you know, I’m gonna include a map in my book.” What would you tell them? To either watch out for or to make sure you do.

 

A: I would send them to Brandon Sanderson’s, he has a bunch of YouTube videos. It’s his classes, literally his classes for free. One of those episodes that he has on YouTube is about him talking about maps. Literally, the whole session of that class was about maps. And he really, really goes into—Also him, and there’s also other people on YouTube who talk about it. D&D people, I would say look up D&D channels.

 

K: Okay.

 

A: They also have really good insights about map design. Because yeah, it’s not as simple as putting a mountain, and like you were saying, having a river in the middle of a continent, sort of situation. Even port cities. Port cities are done incorrectly because they aren’t typically right on the coast, they’re usually a little bit more inland, whether it’s a bay or on a river, deeper in. Whatever it might be. So, I would say, I usually suggest Brandon Sanderson’s works, his lectures that are free on YouTube. 

 

You don’t have to take a college course about geography or geology or anything like that, but it does help to have some knowledge about what tectonic plates are, how they work, how they form continents, why continents look the way they do. Why those mountain ranges look different from a different kind of mountain range. A little bit, just a little bit, if you’re gonna be making maps, to know that. 

 

K: Yeah, I would even take it a step further and say, you know, think about the terrain that you’re putting in here and how it fits into your story. Will this kill the characters, based on the length of time it’s supposed to take them to cross it?

 

A: Right.

 

K: I’ve seen a lot of traditionally published books where you look at the maps and you’re like, “That’s not how long it should have taken them to get from that place to the other, compared to these two cities which are much closer together and somehow took a longer amount of time.” But I’m sure that’s a factor you have to consider as well. If I say these two cities are this far apart and it took these two characters six days to get between them, and these two are twice as far apart, in theory it should take at least twelve.

 

R: And one’s in an airship and another one’s sailing on the water.

 

A: That is literally the reason why I was talking about the whole book three thing between the Kidogo and Al-Anim thing because it was very important ‘cause both of those things factor in. It was like, “Okay, how long will the sea ship take to get there? How long will the airship take to get there?” So I had to factor it and I’m like measuring it out. I’m like, “Okay, so, if I’m taking this or something like that, I’m gonna measure out each piece of it. Okay, this little prong is probably gonna be a quarter of a day, so if I do four of these, this distance takes a day— Yeah, I totally had to do all of that and adjust things based on plot reasons.

 

K: Plot reasons. Yes. No, we could do an entire episode on geography versus plot. And how they work for and against each other.

 

A: Uh-huh.

 

K: The airship, you know, what if it’s crossing mountains that frequently have storms over it. What if the sea ship is going through a channel that’s known to be very rocky, so you really have to slow down and navigate through there.

 

A: And sometimes you add that, specifically, because you’re like, “I need them to slow down! Lemme put a typhoon here!”

 

R, laughing: Excellent.

 

K: These people are gonna get there two days before they left the last…

 

A: Yup, yup, yup.

 

R: I did see that there’s a sea serpent on the map. Occasionally it might just pop up and grab the airship or something, right?

 

K: Here there be monsters.

 

R: You do so much else.

 

K: Like, a lot.

 

R: A lot, a lot. What do you want our listeners to know about you before we let you go and, definitely include where they can find you. Talk about your publishing your house, talk about your various business—

 

A: Ventures and endeavours. Yeah.

 

R: You just keep switching hats! And go, “Today, I am an audio producer. Tomorrow, I’m editing video.” I’ll let you do it.

 

A: You can find everything about me, if you just wanna see every single thing that I’m doing, on my website. That is antoinebandele.com [spells it], so I do a bunch of stuff. So I do, primarily right now, the main income generator for me is my YouTube channel. I am a YouTuber. Right now, I’m focused mostly on Avatar: The Last Airbender and Legend of Korra because those have come back to Netflix and my channel is like, “Hey! Lots of people are watching those videos! You should make more of those videos!” And I’m like, “Oh my god, yes I will!” And so I… that’s the main focus right now.

 

K: Fine, I’ll talk about Avatar: The Last Airbender more.

 

A: Oh, fine. Jeez, Louise! So I’ve been doing that, as of late. But I do other things, too. I’ve covered Harry Potter, Star Wars, Game of Thrones, as we’ve been talking about. Samurai Champloo, some anime, stuff like that.

 

R: Nice.

 

A: So I have my YouTube, and that’s my main thing. I also work freelance for other YouTube channels. I used to work for a company called JustKidding films, where they do a news channel, they have a party channel for board games. I also work for a blog channel, their name is Tip and Kace. Basically it’s just a family blog, just their day-to-day and stuff like that. So I have those services, and I also do services for indie authors who are trying to produce audiobooks.

 

So I have a bunch of—I live in L.A., I think as I mentioned already in the podcast, so I have a lot of friends who are actors, or up and coming actors, who would love to have work. I was doing audio just for myself, right? Just for my own books, because I’m already an editor I’m like, “I’ll just do it myself.” And then one of my friends, after we had collaborated on the prequel to By Sea and Sky, Stoneskin, and when we did that prequel and I did the audiobook, he’s like, “Dude, this is like really good. You should be doing this as a service.”

 

I was like, “I don’t know about that, that sounds like a lot of work.” He’s like, “It’s not! You obviously know how to do it.” And I was like, “Fine,” and I did it and I have a bunch of clients now who work with me on their audiobooks, whether it’s urban fantasy or sci-fi and all these other genres—romance, I’ve never done romance before. That was interesting to experience.

 

[40:13]

 

K: Oh! How was that?

 

A: It’s definitely a different genre. It’s definitely different from what I’m used to.

 

R: In audiobooks, no one can see you blush.

 

[K laughs]

 

A, laughing: Exactly, exactly! So I started doing that. So I have that going on as well. But then, you know, my main thing, the thing I’m wanting to be my main thing, is my own publishing. Of my books and other works. So, of course, I write these Esowon books, as we’ve been talking about. That’s the sky pirate stuff, the African fantasy inspired stuff, but I’ve also produced a children’s book for another friend of mine, who had a children’s book that he published, I think, in 2012, and he’s like, “Hey, I’ve seen that you have really good quality of your books. Could you re-do my old book?” And I was like, “Yeah, sure! Why not?” And then he actually profited within the first two months, before I even profited on my own works. 

 

K: Oh, wow. Great.

 

A: I was like, “Oh my god! Children’s books is where it’s at, apparently!” So  I do that, as well. I’ve published… five authors, at this point? Besides myself. Underneath my imprint of Bandele Books. So, yeah, I think that’s everything that I do. My YouTube channel, my editing, publishing, audiobook production, writing. Think that’s everything.

 

K: Jeez, that is an incredibly… full and talented.

 

R: Full plate.

 

K: Full plate, and incredible brand of talents. That’s really, really awesome. Thank you so, so much for taking the time to talk with us about this. This is, you know, like we said, a really cool thing in books that I think are taken for granted by both, well, especially readers, but even sometimes by authors, with how much work and effort and time goes into this.

 

A: Mhm.

 

R: Excellent! Well make sure you go and follow Antoine, check out his work on his website. Check out the books, they’re really great! I happen to be biased toward airships. But everyone should be.

 

K: A little bit.

 

R: And I’m looking forward to reading the next one and seeing what you add to these maps! Now I’ve got this little piece of candy that I can follow. What’s new? What’s new on the map? I’m gonna be looking at them real closely. Thank you so much, Antoine, and maybe we’ll have to have you back someday to talk about audio production.

 

A: For sure, yeah! That’d be fun.

R: Awesome, thank you so much.

 

[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. 

 

If you can’t provide financial support, we totally understand, and what you could really do to help us is spread the word about this podcast. You can do that by sharing a particular episode with a friend who can find it useful, or if you leave a rating and review at iTunes, it will feed that algorithm and help other people find out podcast, too. Of course, you can always retweet our episodes on Twitter. 

 

Thank you so much for listening, and we will talk to you soon!

 

[outro music plays]

 

The team Antoine gathered to work on his Esowon books:
Cartography - RenFlowerGrapx (Maria Gondolfo): https://www.fiverr.com/renflowergrapx
Fiona McLaren - Developmental
Callan Brown - Continuity
Josiah Davis - Line/Copyedit
Sutthiwat Dekachamphu - Cover Art
Sarayu Ruangvesh - Character Art

Other resources:
Brandon Sanderson Creative Writing Lessons: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6HOdHEeosc&list=PLSH_xM-KC3Zv-79sVZTTj-YA6IAqh8qeQ