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Hosted by mike underwood
7 episodes with mike underwood
4 episodes with mike underwood
3 episodes with mike underwood
2 episodes with mike underwood
2 episodes with mike underwood
3 episodes with mike underwood
2 episodes with mike underwood
2 episodes with mike underwood
Text us about this show.David Fry (aka Fryman) is a dynamo when it comes to writing songs, recording them, and getting it released. There is nothing stopping him. Write, record, release, repeat. The remarkable thing is that for as many projects as he's put out, the quality of it is incredibly consistent. He's had the good fortune to have recorded with top tier musicians in the industry including guitarist Greg Koch, bassist Tal Wilkenfeld, and drummer Vinnie Colaiuta. His albums feature some of the area's top musicians including Danny Jerabek, Mike Underwood, Woodie Larsen, Jason and Karli Reisdorf, and Marc Golde. It's time you get to know Fryman.Support the showVisit Into The Music at https://intothemusicpodcast.com!Support the show: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/intothemusic E-mail us at intothemusic@newprojectx.com YouTube Facebook Instagram INTO THE MUSIC is a production of Project X Productions, Appleton, WI.Host/producer: Rob MarnochaVoiceovers: Brad BordiniRecording, engineering, and post production: Rob MarnochaOpening theme: "Aerostar" by Los Straitjackets* (℗2013 Yep Roc Records)Closing theme: "Close to Champaign" by Los Straitjackets* (℗1999 Yep Roc Records)*Used with permission of Eddie Angel of Los StraitjacketsThis podcast copyright ©2024 by Project X Productions. All ...
What a week, people, you're not just getting a 'DOUBLE' dose of @EchoChamberFP https://www.instagram.com/echochamberfp/, BUT another great helping of insight!!! In 'Part TWO' we look at a new indie short, which is an enticement to something bigger. It's a proof of concept for a potential Film franchise and TV series! Crazy fascinating, right, so obviously, having the chance to speak with the director / producer was definitely a must! Getting the breakdown of how these things work, how a project would change for the different formats, all of that, and so much more!!! Watch the conversation: HERE! https://youtu.be/LeRaDYvY8Hc 'The Soul Trader' is directed by Susan Dynner, and written by Mike Underwood. An occult hitwoman (Shauna Grace) has cornered the market for selling life-extending souls to the elite. But on her final hit before retirement, deadly competition emerges from the shadows. In 'Part Two' we have: The Soul Trader Watch Review: Here. https://youtu.be/8W55m9DOBuE The American Pavilion in Cannes, World Premiere: 18th May 2023 Landmark Theatres Sunset, Hollywood: 11th July 2024 Director: Susan Dynner Cast: Shane West, Donna Mills, Gabriela Kostadinova, Dexter Hobert, Shauna Grace, Shyhiem Parker Credit: Aberration Films Genre: Fantasy, Horror, Short, Thriller Running Time: 12 min Cert: 15 Trailer: Here. https://vimeo.com/918760474?share=copy Website: Here. https://thesoultrader.com/ Facebook: Here. https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61552699036976 Instagram: @thesoultrader_film https://www.instagram.com/thesoultrader_film/ ---------------- *(Music) 'The Big Payback' (Instrumental) by EPMD - 2020
Kyle Megna & The Monsoons is one of the most unique and popular bands in northeast Wisconsin and their lineup is formidable. Their albums and live shows are filled with music pulling from soul, jazz, latin, rock, blues, folk... you name it. Kyle is the leader of the band and is the group's primary songwriter, but he's fostered a spirit of camaraderie among his bandmates that goes deep. Along with performing with The Monsoons, Kyle also performs solo and in a duet act with Dave LeBlanc. Along with his music, Kyle and his wife own and operate 313 Dodge, a great place for a beverage, a bite to eat, and music (jazz on Thursdays and varied acts through the summer thanks to the city of Kaukauna!). Listen here for a sampling of Kyle Megna & The Monsoons' finest."Stranger" written and performed by Kyle Megna℗ 2022 Kyle Megna. Used with permission of Kyle Megna."Taking You Back" performed by Kyle Megna & The Monsoonswritten by Kyle Megna℗ 2019 Kyle B. Megna. Used with permission of Kyle Megna."Charlatan" performed by Kyle Megna & The Monsoonswritten by Kyle Megna℗ 2023 Kyle Megna. Used with permission of Kyle Megna.Support the showVisit Into The Music at https://in2themusic.com!Support the show: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/intothemusic E-mail us at intothemusic@newprojectx.com YouTube Facebook Instagram INTO THE MUSIC is a production of Project X Productions, Appleton, WI.Producer: Rob MarnochaRecording, engineering, and post production: Rob MarnochaOpening theme: "Aerostar" by Los Straitjackets* (℗2013 Yep Roc Records)Closing theme: "Close to Champaign" by Los Straitjackets* (℗1999 Yep Roc Records)*Used with permission of Eddie AngelThis podcast copyright ©2024 by Project X Productions. All rights reserved.
You have to try really hard to not have fun around Kate Voss and Jason Goessl (a.k.a. Sundae + Mr. Goessl). They are two of the most fun people you could possibly know. Fun is in their DNA and everything they do. Their vintage styled music? Fun! Their vintage image? Fun! They even have a vintage styled bar-boutique called Can Can that has the slogan, Have fun fun at Can Can! What they have accomplished as a couple is nothing short of incredible. From touring with Kate Voss & the Hot Sauce to running their own Sun Goose Records label and studio to their biggest project to date, Kate and Jason keep it all fun and fancy!"I Love My Baby Better" performed by Sundae + Mr. Goesslwritten by Nicole Blaze and Kate Voss℗ 2020 Sun Goose Records. Used with permission of Kate Voss & Jason Goessl."Makes My Heart Sway" performed by Jason and the Jazzerknotswritten by Jason Goessl℗ 2024 Sun Goose Records. Used with permission of Jason Goessl."Deed I Do" performed by Sundae + Mr. Goesslwritten by Fred Rose and Walter Hirsch℗ 2022 Sun Goose Records. Used with permission of Kate Voss & Jason Goessl."Darlene" performed by Sundae + Mr. Goesslwritten by Kate Voss and Jason Goessl℗ 2020 Sun Goose Records. Used with permission of Kate Voss & Jason Goessl.Support the showVisit Into The Music at https://in2themusic.com!Support the show: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/intothemusic E-mail us at intothemusic@newprojectx.com YouTube Facebook Instagram INTO THE MUSIC is a production of Project X Productions, Appleton, WI.Producer: Rob MarnochaRecording, engineering, and post production: Rob MarnochaOpening theme: "Aerostar" by Los Straitjackets* (℗2013 Yep Roc Records)Closing theme: "Close to Champaign" by Los Straitjackets* (℗1999 Yep Roc Records)*Used with permission of Eddie AngelThis podcast copyright ©2024 by Project X Productions. All rights reserved.
Mike Underwood has been referred to as "The Engine." Why? There's no quit in this guy when it comes to music. Whether he's performing (that's performing, not just merely playing) on stage, in the studio, exploring his next rhythmic conquest, or even spending valuable time listening to learn, Mike invests himself into what he does not just for himself, but for the people he makes music with and for. He is one of the most entertaining musicians you will ever witness perform (there's that word again!) and he's just a quality guy to be around. Settle in and get to know "The Engine.""Kiss Your Pride" written and performed by Amelia Ford℗ 2022 Amelia Ford. Used with permission of Amelia Ford."Alive Again" performed by Kyle Megna and the Monsoonswritten by Kyle Megna℗ 2023 Kyle Megna. Used with permission of Mike Underwood.Support the showSupport the show: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/intothemusic E-mail us at intothemusic@newprojectx.com YouTube Facebook Instagram INTO THE MUSIC is a production of Project X Productions, Appleton, WI.Producer: Rob MarnochaRecording, engineering, and post production: Rob MarnochaOpening theme: "Aerostar" by Los Straitjackets* (℗2013 Yep Roc Records)Closing theme: "Close to Champaign" by Los Straitjackets* (℗1999 Yep Roc Records)*Used with permission of Eddie AngelThis podcast copyright ©2024 by Project X Productions. All rights reserved.
The holiday season is here and Into The Music invites you to celebrate with us! We have a show filled with music from guests past, present, and future that won't leave you feeling like Scrooge. Included are songs from Los Straitjackets, STEEM, Kurt Gunn, The Tourmaliners, Janet Planet, Tom Thiel, Erin Krebs, Mike Underwood, Tyler Sj., Steve March-Tormé, 7000apart, and The Astronautics plus a li'l surprise tune. AND we have special surprise guests! This show is Into The Music's way of wishing you a merry Christmas!Special thanks to The Tourmaliners for the use of "Joy To The World" and "We Wish You A Merry Christmas" as bumper music for this episode.All music on this podcast has been used with the permission of each artist or band it was made by.Support the showSupport the show: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/intothemusic E-mail us at intothemusic@newprojectx.com YouTube Facebook Instagram INTO THE MUSIC is a production of Project X Productions, Appleton, WI.Producer: Rob MarnochaRecording, engineering, and post production: Rob MarnochaOpening theme: "Aerostar" by Los Straitjackets* (℗2013 Yep Roc Records)Closing theme: "Close to Champaign" by Los Straitjackets* (℗1999 Yep Roc Records)*Used with permission of Eddie AngelThis podcast copyright ©2024 by Project X Productions. All rights reserved.
This Awesome Podcast from The GOTA starts with beautiful purchase opportunities for the home buyer along with tips on rentals from Janet Sprissler, owner of Rent 805. Janet has excellent guidance for landlords & tenants! Mike Underwood is next and he answers questions from Karen, Traci & Janet regarding landscaping and care for your year and explains how so many people know what they want when it comes to landscaping but it takes an expert to make those ideals real so you can enjoy your home even more!. Pat Pothier is the final guest, Pat is a hypnotherapist who helps people get over issue smoking and weight loss. He also explains why PTSD is the number 1 issue he guides people through, there are many different forms of PTSD & Pat is here to help. Another great podcast, Karen, Traci & Janet, Girls On The Air!
This week's podcast features a panel discussion with Ian Swett, Zack Robinson, Marcus Vogel, and Mike Underwood. The panel covered several helicopter-related topics, including the Hill helicopter, EVTOL aircraft, drones, and the recent Chinook crash caused by a dropped iPad. The panelists explored the Hill helicopter's potential, discussed the challenges and benefits of EVTOL technology, highlighted the integration of drones in helicopter operations, and emphasized the importance of safety protocols in light of the Chinook crash. The episode provided valuable insights for aviation enthusiasts and professionals. You'll want to tune in!
Welcome to the latest episode of the Helicopter Podcast! In this week's show, your host Halsey is joined by a special guest, Mike Underwood, the owner of SVT Aviation Maintenance. Mike is an experienced helicopter A&P (mechanic) and a longtime friend of Halsey, making this episode an engaging conversation between two industry experts.The focus of this episode revolves around the maintenance of Robinson Helicopters, specifically the popular models R22, R44, and R66. Mike shares his extensive knowledge and expertise in this area, providing valuable insights for helicopter enthusiasts and aspiring mechanics.The episode starts with discussing Mike's background, giving listeners a glimpse into his journey within the aviation industry. From there, the conversation takes a deep dive into becoming an aviation mechanic (A&P), shedding light on the necessary steps, qualifications, and experiences required for aspiring professionals.Halsey and Mike explore a wide range of Robinson Helicopter-specific maintenance topics as the conversation progresses. Listeners will gain a comprehensive understanding of the intricacies involved in maintaining these helicopters, including best practices, common challenges, and specific considerations for the R22, R44, and R66 models.Whether you're a helicopter enthusiast, an aspiring A&P mechanic, or simply curious about the world of helicopter maintenance, this episode is packed with invaluable information. Halsey and Mike's dynamic chemistry and wealth of knowledge make for a fascinating discussion that will leave you informed and inspired.Please tune in to this episode of the Helicopter Podcast to hear firsthand from Mike Underwood, owner of SVT Aviation Maintenance, as he shares his expertise and insights into the world of Robinson Helicopter maintenance. Get ready for an enlightening and educational experience that's not to be missed!
This episode carries content notes for livestock, animal products, death, necromancy, resource exploitation, capitalism, over-work, bone, decay, magical infestation, and discussion of the COVID-19 pandemic Guests Marianne Kirby (@therotund) and AJ Hackwith (@AJHackwith) join Mike for a game of A Land Once Magic to create a world that is coarse and candle-lit, hallowed and haunted.Starring Marianne Kirby and AJ Hackwith, with Mike Underwood as the facilitator.A Land Once Magic is an rpg by Viditya Voleti. Find out more at https://vidityavoleti.itch.io/a-land-once-magicCheck out our Court of Blades series “Valloward” at https://bit.ly/3yh6Bxh and watch any of our completed series or one-shots at speculatesf.com/videosHelp us make the show the best it can be by becoming a subscriber to our Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/speculate – You'll also get even more content (including Fractal Spire extras, bonus episodes, access to behind-the-scenes material like GM streams and session zero recordings, and more!)This episode was edited by the amazing Rudy Basso (find him at https://twitter.com/RudyBasso). As always, thanks for listening!
This episode carries content notes for livestock, animal products, death, necromancy, resource exploitation, capitalism, over-work, bone, decay, and magical infestationGuests Marianne Kirby (@therotund) and AJ Hackwith (@AJHackwith) join Mike for a game of A Land Once Magic to create a world that is coarse and candle-lit, hallowed and haunted.Starring Marianne Kirby and AJ Hackwith, with Mike Underwood as the facilitator.A Land Once Magic is an rpg by Viditya Voleti. Find out more at https://vidityavoleti.itch.io/a-land-once-magicCheck out our Court of Blades series “Valloward” at https://bit.ly/3yh6Bxh and watch any of our completed series or one-shots at speculatesf.com/videosHelp us make the show the best it can be by becoming a subscriber to our Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/speculate – You'll also get even more content (including Fractal Spire extras, bonus episodes, access to behind-the-scenes material like GM streams and session zero recordings, and more!)This episode was edited by the amazing Rudy Basso (find him at https://twitter.com/RudyBasso). As always, thanks for listening!
This episode carries content notes for livestock, animal products, death, necromancy, resource exploitation, capitalism, over-work, bone, decay, and magical infestationGuests Marianne Kirby (@therotund) and AJ Hackwith (@AJHackwith) join Mike for a game of A Land Once Magic to create a world that is coarse and candle-lit, hallowed and haunted.Starring Marianne Kirby and AJ Hackwith, with Mike Underwood as the facilitator.A Land Once Magic is an rpg by Viditya Voleti. Find out more at https://vidityavoleti.itch.io/a-land-once-magic.Check out our Court of Blades series “Valloward” at https://bit.ly/3yh6Bxh and watch any of our completed series or one-shots at speculatesf.com/videosHelp us make the show the best it can be by becoming a subscriber to our Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/speculate – You'll also get even more content (including Fractal Spire extras, bonus episodes, access to behind-the-scenes material like GM streams and session zero recordings, and more!)This episode was edited by the amazing Rudy Basso (find him at https://twitter.com/RudyBasso). As always, thanks for listening!
This episode carries content notes for teleportation, dangerous driving, heights, and falling.Mike leads The Strange Friends through a special Speculate! one-shot of Mikey Hamm's interdimensional teen caper rpg SLUGBLASTER!Greedy Zzkaska's has the best pizza in the multiverse, so when this trio of teens discover that superstar Dorus Kal is throwing a blowout party this Saturday night and has sworn to do a collab with whoever impresses him the most that night, they set out to be the group that arrives first with Zzkasks's Supreme Horde meal deal! But first, they'll have to contend with modem banshees, giant crabs, and deadly hover-chariot traffic!Starring Brandon O'Brien, Iori Kusano, and Valerie Valdes, with Mike Underwood as the Slugmaster.Slugblaster is an rpg by Mikey Hamm. Find out more at https://wilkies.itch.io/slugblasterCheck out our new Court of Blades series “Valloward” at https://bit.ly/3yh6Bxh and watch any of our completed series or one-shots at speculatesf.com/videosHelp us make the show the best it can be by becoming a subscriber to our Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/speculate – You'll also get even more content (including Fractal Spire extras, bonus episodes, access to behind-the-scenes material like GM streams and session zero recordings, and more!)This episode was edited by the amazing Rudy Basso (find him at https://twitter.com/RudyBasso). As always, thanks for listening!
This episode carries content notes for teleportation and sonic attacks. A daring trio of teens races to be the first to deliver the multiverse's favorite pizza. But first they'll have to contend with gigantic crabs, hover-chariots, and hyper hydras!Starring Brandon O'Brien, Iori Kusano, and Valerie Valdes, with Mike Underwood as the Slugmaster. Slugblaster is an rpg by Mikey Hamm. Find out more at https://wilkies.itch.io/slugblaster Check out our new Court of Blades series “Valloward” at https://bit.ly/3yh6Bxh and watch any of our completed series or one-shots at speculatesf.com/videos Help us make the show the best it can be by becoming a subscriber to our Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/speculate – You'll also get even more content (including Fractal Spire extras, bonus episodes, access to behind-the-scenes material like GM streams and session zero recordings, and more!). This episode was edited by the amazing Rudy Basso (find him at https://twitter.com/RudyBasso). As always, thanks for listening!
2022 - 07 - 20 - Summer Series - Mike Underwood - Jesus, Master by Buford Church of Christ
Killer bops, Michael Caine, and Muppets, oh my! Shaun Duke, Brandon O'Brien, and Mike Underwood bring on some holiday cheer with a joyful conversation about a classic: The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992). Together, they explore the film's themes of redemption and wealth, what it's like to live in a world of puppets, some apocryphal Muppet […]
Mike Underwood, writer and marketer extraordinaire, returns to talk about post-pandemic publishing and where we find ourselves now. Twitch Schedule for week of July 12-24 M. 1pm Chatting, gaming, anything goes T. 1pm Ditch Diggers with Alasdair Stuart T. 3pm ISBW with Tobias Buckell W. 4pm Gaming Th. 1pm ISBW
Mike Underwood, writer and marketer extraordinaire, returns to talk about post-pandemic publishing and where we find ourselves now. Twitch Schedule for week of July 12-24 M. 1pm Chatting, gaming, anything goes T. 1pm Ditch Diggers with Alasdair Stuart T. 3pm ISBW with Tobias Buckell W. 4pm Gaming Th. 1pm ISBW
Bridging Vat is a specialist principal lender advancing short term loans for the VAT due on commercial property purchases. Managed by Chartered Accountants and Debt Advisory professionals with an in depth knowledge of the UK property sector, they are able to provide a unique level of expertise in both the funding and recovery of VAT. Having developed a turnkey finance solution for property developers, owner-occupiers and investors, which provides the funding of the VAT requirement and pro-active management of the recovery with HMRC; this solution provides a hands-off service for clients, allowing them to retain capital and liquidity throughout the purchase process. Mike has been working within the property sector since 1994. Having worked for major international commercial developers, distributing and selling over £100 million of properties, Mike then moved into development finance securing alternative funding lines on several major projects. This experience then lead to structuring and distributing asset backed securities for a number of UK and offshore funds. As Sales Director of Bridging Vat, Mike is responsible for managing and assisting the growing base of broker intermediaries, as well as working closely with property developers on their VAT loan requirements
Mike Underwood comes on to talk to us about his new book, ANNIHILATION ARIA (The Space Operas, Vol. 1), but the talk also goes into Mike's experience with book marketing, and, boy, the stuff he tells us, no lie, is enlightening.
Mike Underwood comes on to talk to us about his new book, ANNIHILATION ARIA (The Space Operas, Vol. 1), but the talk also goes into Mike's experience with book marketing, and, boy, the stuff he tells us, no lie, is enlightening.
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. 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 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 We Make Books - A podcast about writing, publishing, and everything in between! This week, Kaelyn gets Rekka to go on (at length) about the process of laying out a book for print and digital, once a manuscript has reached its ultimate form. We Make Books is hosted by Rekka Jay and Kaelyn Considine; Rekka is a published author and Kaelyn is an editor. 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, and concerns! Twitter: @WMBCast | @KindofKaelyn | @bittybittyzap Instagram: @WMBCast Patreon.com/WMBCast Episode 40: For That You Get the Print, the Digital, the Whole Damn Thing transcribed by Sara Rose (@saraeleanorrose) [0:00] R: Welcome back to another episode of We Make Books, a podcast about writing, publishing, and everything in between. And I am Rekka, I write science fiction and fantasy as R.J. Theodore. K: And I’m Kaelyn Considine, I am the acquisitions editor for Parvus Press. And today we’ve got an interesting episode. Full disclosure: we debated whether or not we should do this one. We were a little worried that the subject material might be too dry— R: Yeah. K: But, that said, it’s, I think, an interesting part of publishing that’s frequently overlooked and that is actually assembling a book. And we don’t mean finish writing it, we mean, at some point, you’ve gotta put a book together. R: Right, and we don’t also mean physically gluing it to the binder, which is also fun. I’ve done that, too, but this is more the magical process that happens when you finish your copy edits final pass and the publisher says, “Okay, we’ll get you page proofs in a little while!” and what happens there. What’s going on in that moment, or those long moments if you’re just waiting. K: Yeah, if you wanna talk about one of the unsung heroes of the publishing world, it is certainly the designers who actually have to go through and make it so nobody realizes that they did any work on this. You don’t pick up a book and think about, “Hey, look at the nice order that the dedication and the table of contents and the acknowledgements and everything is in! Look at all the great work that was done with the typeface and setting and how all of this is really easy to read and I don’t even have to think about it.” And that’s the whole point. R: Yep. Really, the only part of the book you want to notice is the cover. The design of the interior, you definitely want to be perfect but completely unnoticeable. In a sense. K: Absolutely. R: It’s not disheartening for the designer to hear that. It’s literally the goal of the designer is to make the book an easy reading experience. And so if their work goes unnoticed and they get paid, so be it. K: Yeah, so it’s, like we said, we were worried that this might be a little dry. But as we got into it, we realized it’s really not. Actually, there’s a lot of really interesting steps that go into this and things that the average reader or potential author doesn’t know or think about. Anyway, as always, take a listen. We hope you enjoy and we’ll see you on the other side of the music. [intro music plays] K: Terrible. R: Yeah, I’ve been trying not to walk outside too often, lately. Which, you know, with nowhere to go, that works out really well. Except that my office is outside… but then I lost all my files so I didn’t even wanna go face my computer. So, again, stayed inside. K, sighing: It broke my heart. R: No, it broke mine, too. K: Are we recording already? R: Yeah, of course. K: Yeah, of course we are. Okay. [cheerfully] Hey, everyone! [R and K giggle] R: So I’m hoping that this conversation will be useful to more than just two groups of people. But the two groups of people that I think are going to perk up the most about this episode are the people who want to self-publish but have been wondering how to get their final document into book form, and then the people who already self-publish or are involved in the process and then want to know how other people are doing it, to see if they’re missing anything. Because when you do things by yourself, you tend to worry. K: Yeah, and so as we mentioned in the intro, today we’re talking about actually putting a book together. It’s—I think it seems like when you’ve written everything and you have it edited, proofread, copy-edited then you’re like, “Well, I’m basically done,” and there’s actually a lot more that you still have left to do. R: There’s a lot more after that. K: Rekka has, especially, been up to her elbows in this recently, doing some work with Annihilation Aria, released a week ago, at this point? R: Yeah, a week ago. K: Yeah, so it’s out now. You can go pick up a copy, it’s by Mike Underwood, it’s a fantastic book. But Rekka started doing some work for Parvus, stepped in and was doing the layout for this. And I was working very closely with her on it and that’s the first time I was ever directly exposed to how this works. [laughs] I was, maybe not horrified, but certainly a little frightened by the process. It is a lot of words, as it turns out. And characters— R: Turns out, over 100,000 words! In a novel! Who’da thunk? K: Yeah, books have words in them! So many words… So yeah! You’ve got a final version of it. Now you actually gotta make it a book. And there are ways that you can do this fairly easily, and ways that will take a lot more time. And obviously, the ones that take a lot more time, you’re coming out with a higher quality product, I guess, if you want to put it that way. So anyway, we just thought that this would be kind of an interesting thing to talk through of what happens when you’ve got a finalized manuscript. How you make that a book now. R: So, I will just clarify that I began working on Annihilation Aria, there was already a layout from Catspaw DTP and that’s who Parvus uses for most of their layouts and because I have some expertise in design, it is my day-time career path, I was able to handle any changes that needed to happen after the fact. Normally, if someone does an interior layout, they might be using InDesign and then if you need changes, and you don’t have InDesign, you go back to them with all your changes and incur more costs! But I was able to handle the changes as we went through the manuscript, and that’s very fortunate. Not normal, I would say, for somebody who comes in to help with promotion, to also be working on layout. K: Rekka is a master of many skills. R: You know, I used to be jealous of the people that say, like, “Oh yeah, growing up I always took everything apart to see how it worked and then put it back together,” and it worked better or whatever, and I was like, “I wish I could say that about myself!” And then I just realized, talking to you, I did that. I just always did it with files and processes. K: Yep! Hey, it counts. And we’re very grateful that you did. So, maybe first let’s talk about the elements of a book. Of what you need besides just a finalized manuscript. R: Well, you need to save that manuscript that has gone through all the tracked changes and stuff, you need to save a fresh copy and you need to make sure there are no comments or track changes active or anything like that in there. Because let me tell you, somehow that’ll end up in your layout and it’ll mess something up. It’s not supposed to, from both Microsoft Word and Adobe InDesign, it’s not supposed to, but it does. Somehow it just does things. So, to Kaelyn’s point, you don’t just need your final document, you need a final, cleaned-up document, a separate one. K: A final, clean document. All notes, comments, changes, edits, everything removed. You save that in no less than 10 different locations. R, laughing: Pretty much! Having just gone through a little bit of data loss myself. No, you save that everywhere you can. And to the cloud. K: You put it on flash drives and mail them to different people so, you know, in case somebody comes into your house to steal copies of it or your dog eats it or something, you—no less than ten locations. Okay, so. R: Easily. K: You’ve got that. You are one hundred percent sure you have removed everything from the manuscript that is not supposed to be there. R: Mhm. K: Well, now what? Hopefully, you’ve registered the book and gotten yourself an ISBN because that is an important step one right there. R: The ISBN, actually, as long as the book isn’t due, like tomorrow, to the printer, the ISBN can kind of happen at any point. You can leave a placeholder for it. You just need to remember if you’ve left a placeholder for it, so you can go back and fix it before you send in the finals. So your back cover usually has the barcode, a UPC that ties into the ISBN, and usually the ISBN is also printed somewhere in the book, very often the copyright page. K: Yeah, so, you’ll notice if you pick up a book, or even just read a digital one, you’re gonna see pretty much the same things over and over again in the same order. We’re always going to start with the title page: such and such by such and such, that is frequently followed by a Copyrights page. This is the one with all of the good information about the author, who published the book, it will have the ISBN on there, it’ll have some threatening information about copyrights and reproduction and selling. If it’s Parvus, we always try to put a little joke on that page just to lighten the mood a bit. From there, then, there’s usually a dedication. Most authors like to throw a dedication in there. And then, typically, you go into a Table of Contents or a Chapter List, depending on what you’re writing. R: For digital. K, confused: What do you mean? R: You don’t tend to see the Table of Contents in a print book, unless it’s non-fiction. K: Oh, okay. Yeah. The other thing, then, that you might find in some books is some information about what you’re about to read. Some books put a Glossary of Terms at the beginning rather than at the end, sometimes you might get sort of mini character introductions, or there might be a map. There might be some information about the world that this is set in. R: That you need going into it, though. K: Yeah, that they want you to have going into it. And, once you get through all of that, then you actually get into the fun part, the meat of the story, and typically, by the time you get to the end, then you’re gonna have an Acknowledgements section from the author. Then, before or after, there’s also usually an About the Author section. That tends to be the last thing in the book. And just, you know, we’re talking like a picture and one-page bio about the interesting stuff, how awesome the person who wrote the book is. R: And by one-page bio, we tend to mean half a page because usually the heading takes up a large margin at the top, and then that photo will be either above or inset into the text, so you end up with—Don’t worry, authors, you don’t have to write a full-page bio for yourself. It’s really more like 2-3 paragraphs, and shorter is just fine. [11:49] K: Yeah, and the only other thing that you might find at the very end of that book that is maybe a preview chapter for either the next book in that series or another book by that publisher that they think readers of this book might enjoy. Not always, but if it’s in there, that is usually the dead-last thing in there. R: Or if the glossary that we mentioned being at the beginning is a little bit extensive, that might go in the back. Especially if it contains spoilers. K: Exactly, yes. And so that is kind of most of what you’re gonna find in there. And, again, we’re talking fiction. Depending on what it is that you’re reading, there could be endnotes in there, there could be chapter notes, there could be additional information at the end as well. But that’s kind of a general sense of what you need to include in there. R: And, for the most part, that’s the order that they appear in. I have definitely seen variations on that. And I don’t know if in those cases it was given over to the author preference, or if it was just a house style that, say, the acknowledgements came first. K: Exactly, yeah.So, how do you get all of this stuff? R: Hopefully! Hopefully it’s been getting gathered all along, but… K: And, like the book, you’ve gotta be the one to write most of it. Your bio, authors should always have a few different versions of their bio. You know, the 2-3 sentence one, the two paragraph, and the full-length bio. Just, those are important things to have for press-related things. Also, you write your own acknowledgements, you write your own dedication, you’re writing all of your own supplemental material. So, I don’t know if I’d call it the bad news, but the gist here is, yeah, you’ve finished this book. You still got a little bit more writing that you have to do here. R: And that’s something that I, as an author, tend to work on while my book is in the editor’s hands. I want to keep touching this book and working on it, but I’m not allowed to touch the manuscript anymore because I’ve handed it off to somebody. So I will do things like try to work on the acknowledgements, try to work on the glossary, which is a mistake. Both of those things would go a lot smoother if I would keep notes throughout the entire process. Like, “Hey! This person helped me out with this concept, I can thank them in the acknowledgements. I’ll add that now even though I don’t have to write the acknowledgements for four months.” Same thing with the glossary. It’s a pain in the neck to go back through the text and try to find all the things—basically, everything that your spellchecker wants you to fix, that probably belongs in the glossary. And so that’s a pain in the neck to go through it manually, start to finish, on, you know, in the case of Salvage, on a 470 page book. It’d be a lot easier if I just went and added things to it as I added characters and topics and subjects and that sort of thing to the story and then I can just go in at the end and clean it up. Like, “Oh, I changed this character’s name,” or “Oh, this didn’t end up in this book after all,” and stuff like that. It’d be a heck of a lot easier than writing it from scratch, from memory, or, like I said, with the pages open in front of me. K: Yeah, but what’s the fun without the challenge, right? R: Yeah. Yeah, no and like I said, if you’ve been working on it while the book was in revisions, then it’s not quite such a rush. When you’ve been working on it because you need to give the files over to the publisher in five days and you just remembered you didn’t do any of that, then it’s awful. K: So, let’s talk about those files. Because we mentioned at the top of the episode, you have a finalized manuscript. It is saved in no less than ten places, but you can’t—that Word document is not a book. That’s a manuscript, but it’s not a completed book at that point. You need to get a layout together, and this is kind of what we started talking about when we were figuring out this episode is, all of the stuff that goes into a layout, and doing a layout, that you don’t really think about. So we did kind of want to talk about the other elements of the book, but the thing that’s gonna be most time consuming here is the layout. R: Unless you go through a service that makes it not time-consuming. K: Yeah. So we’re gonna talk about a couple different ways you can do this. I’ll start with the first one, which is the way I do things when I have to come up with a layout real quick, be it for an advanced copy or a chapter book or something, Draft 2 Digital has a really great service where you can upload a Word document, your manuscript, and they will spit out a pretty decently impressive looking layout. R: Yeah. K: And they’ve got a few different formats and styles. They’ll even let you do some chapter—not chapter art, but flourishes and some little drop caps in the start of the chapters. And it looks great. They have a really cool program that will do this for you. And I’ve absolutely used it for manuscripts that we just needed together for a quick press run or an advanced copy or something. It’s completely free, it’s a really, really great tool. That said, it is not the same as having a professional layout done by someone who knows how to do these things. Back when books were printed with an actual press, it was a typographer’s job to sit there and actually put all of the individual little letters and spacing in there, and they had to do this backwards and upside down, pretty much. That is, I think, and Rekka would you agree? Maybe one of the only trades from publishing that is sort of carried over? I mean, I would go so far as to call it a trade. It’s still a really specialized thing that you need somebody who knows how to do. I think I would say that might be the one of the only holdovers from the days of actual printing press runs. R: Well, you still have somebody operating a printing press. And that is definitely a trade still. Even though we’ve got digital presses and everything is print-on-demand and it feels like a human never touches it, that’s not necessarily true. It’s just that it doesn’t take as many people to make as many books as we do anymore. So, I don’t want to disparage the people who are maintaining these machines that we rely on for everything that we do. K: We appreciate and love those people and want them to continue doing their very important work. R: Absolutely. There are people on a line making paper for us. There are people—then there are people laying out the book and making sure the letters are in the right place and all that kind of stuff. The author has, hopefully, made sure that the letters are in the right order. It’s just our job that they look right and read well. One of the things that, you know, it’s not a shame, but the better that a layout person does their job, the less you notice that they were there at all. K: Exactly. R: Reading through a book and not noticing how the letters are spaced or anything like that, and getting to the end of that book and thinking about the story that you read. That means that a layout person did their job really, really well. So, in the Draft 2 Digitals and that sort of those things, those are not touched by a human being. They’re fed into a service and that service is very well designed to make some important choices for you. Like, you don’t have full-range of options in Draft 2 Digital’s layout utility that you do in InDesign, because a lot of choices are, to a designer, obviously not correct to make. But might not be obvious to someone going in and laying out their first book. Like we do not use comic sans for body copy— K: Yeah, to be— [20:07] R: —you know? But if you give somebody the option to do that, invariably somebody will. K: To be clear, the thing you’re getting if you use Draft 2 Digital’s service, that’s it. What they give you, it’s a PDF or— R: An ebook. K: —an ebook file, you’re going for here and then that’s it. R: Yeah, you can’t make any adjustments. I don’t know if that’s a hundred percent true. You might be able to go in and fiddle just a little bit with the settings to see if something improves something else— K: Yeah, you can fiddle with the settings, but you can’t go in and change certain areas where you’re like, “Oh, I don’t like the way this looks.” The only way, then, that you could do that is if you drop it into InDesign and then you’re just kind of starting the process again. R: Yeah, you’d be starting from scratch at that point because the files that Draft 2 Digital give you are not going to be editable in any way that’s going to be useful to a designer. You know, you couldn’t just take that as your first draft and hand it over to the designer like, “Here, I got you started. Now will you clean it up?” Like, there’s no way. You can’t do Step 1: Draft 2 Digital, Step 2: InDesign. You might as well start in InDesign. I will also mention that Smashwords also does the same service as Draft 2 Digital and I believe Reedsy, last I checked, they did not have the print up and running but I imagine if Draft 2 Digital figured it out then Reedsy did, too. K: So let’s talk about InDesign. Rekka, there’s probably some people listening to this that have no idea what InDesign is or why it’s such a scary program. R: It’s not scary, it’s just— K: It’s scary. And I’m scared. R: It’s just overwhelming if you don’t know what you’re doing, all the options are too many options. K: It’s terrifying. R: Well, so… InDesign is a multi-page layout program that is published by Adobe, who makes Photoshop and PremierePro. A lot of very, you know, trade… standard for both film and music and photography and design. K: Yeah. Everything that you might publish. Adobe has bought pretty much every software company that ever touched on any part of my design career. I don’t think they ever bought Quark, but they certainly replaced it. At least in my portfolio. So InDesign the program is multi-page layout, which means that if you need a brochure, if you need a book, if you need a pamphlet—you know, you can even do stationery— K: Oh! Wanted Posters! R, amused: Or wanted posters, yes. You can also do single-page layouts. The multi option is a choice. So a lot of PDFs out there in the world began their life as an InDesign file. The more complex and polished the design, chances are the more likely it started as a multi-page layout in InDesign or, like I said, Quark. I don’t know how best to explain what you’re looking at in InDesign. You’re seeing pages, but you’re seeing them with those invisible margins drawn in. You’re seeing boxes around the text that contain it. K: I’ll describe it, as somebody who does not have a design background. R: Yes, because I shared my screen with Kaelyn once making some integral corrections— K, outraged: Multiple! Multiple times! Multiple times. R, laughing: And Kaelyn did not like the experience. K: It is—and I will say this again, as somebody who does not have a design background—it is overwhelming to look at. R: It’s a little bit like a NASA control room, but for pages. K: The way I can best describe it is: if you’ve ever seen an architectural drawing of a building. You can look at it and see that, “Ah, yes! This is what the house is going to look like,” except it’s covered in other lines and notes and arrows and all of these things that don’t mean anything to you, but you can tell they mean something to the architect. This is kind of like an architectural drawing page of this book. This is what—all of the invisible stuff that you don’t see in the final page, is visible on these pages. You’re gonna see all the margins, all the markers. You’ll see the pilcrows. You, depending on what you want to make visible, you can actually see dots or some sort of indicator in there that’s showing you the spacing between words and characters. You’re seeing all of the stuff that the computer knows to acknowledge how this is supposed to look. And it’s a lot. To pair with tomorrow's episode of We Make Books, here's a look at a page layout in InDesign. @kindofKaelyn gets @bittybittyzap to dig in (like a tick) and expound on the designer's process when it comes to turning a Word doc into a multipage layout. pic.twitter.com/He2bsh5bM2 — We Make Books podcast (@wmbcast) July 27, 2020 R: Just shy of the zeroes and ones, yeah. K: There is. There’s a lot that the computer is doing to get the page to look the way that you’re saying it should look. So that, as a non-designer, that is the best way I can describe what you’d be looking at there. And we can, we can post some screenshots maybe of what these pages look like. Just so, you know, if you’ve never seen one you can kind of get an idea of what you’re looking at there. Okay! So, Rekka, here is a finalized manuscript. R: Yeah. [pause] K: Please make it a— R: Would you like me to make it a book for you, Kaelyn? K: I would like you to make it a book. R: So, as I said, this is a multi-page layout. If you open any book on your shelf and you look at a couple of different pages throughout, like the start of a chapter or the meat of a chapter, the front matter or back matter, you’re going to notice that some things change and some things stay the same across multiple pages. K: Yeah, and— R: So, for each one of those, you need a page template. K: Yes, and before you’ve really dived in, hopefully you’ve had a conversation with the author or the editor and made some decisions about some things. R: Right, so you need the trim size. Like, the most critical thing is how big is this book going to be when you measure the outside of it with a ruler? K: Yep. Let’s start there. How big is the book? The first most important thing you gotta figure out. R: Yeah. Yeah. Because that’s gonna tell you, by percentages, how big the margins should be. The inner margin that goes into the fold is going to be bigger than the outer margin. The top and bottom margins have to account for the running header and the page numbers, and where do you want those? Does the publisher have a house style where everything tends to be in the same place for that publisher? Does the publisher have a selection of fonts that they prefer to use, and they might have a selection of fonts for sci-fi versus fantasy. K: And that’s exactly what I was gonna say. So, other things that I’m sure you’d wanna know: what is the format of the beginning of each chapter supposed to look like? Is it just a chapter number, does it have a name? Does that get a different font than the rest of the text? How are the chapters or pages laid out? Does the text start half-way down or do we stick everything as close to the top as possible? Is there chapter art for each chapter? What about drop caps? What about fonts? So there’s a lot of things that the designer needs to know up front, before diving into all of this stuff. R: Yeah, and those decisions can get set up, to a degree, before the manuscript is even done. So you can bring a designer in and, if you’ve worked with them before, then you can say, “We’ll be using this house style, similar to this title that we did, but maybe this font is the title font, as opposed to the one that you used for that book.” K: Yeah. R: So, for example, Parvus’s series, The Union Earth Privateers, there’s three books in that series now and they all use the same, or similar font, and that’s consistent within that series. Whereas, Flotsam and Salvage, as part of the Peridot Shift trilogy, are still technically sci-fi but use a very different font, different fonts inside, shaded a little bit more like a fantasy book, in terms of some of the details because it’s a genre-crossing story. K: And I think that’s something very overlooked, frequently. A lot of decision actually goes into picking the font because the font is kind of, it’s one of those tricky things that us publishers do. The font is reinforcing to you what kind of a story you’re reading. R: Yeah. K: Without you even noticing it. If you’re reading a high epic fantasy, you’re not going to be reading a font that looks like it’s been generated by a computer and you’re reading it off a screen. There’s gonna be something in there that’s a little twist, a little element of the fantastic so that maybe it looks a little bit more like something you’d read on a scroll. R: Yeah, yeah. K: And these are the decisions that are being made behind the scenes to help you really get engaged and involved in the book. And we do this without you even noticing, most of the time. R: So sometimes you can just pick up the font from the titling. You know, if you have the font that was used in the title layout on the front cover, which sometimes is done by the illustrator, sometimes it’s done separately from the illustrator as, you know, a titling designer. If you have that font, then you can pick that up or, some variation from that font family, without all the fancy styling on the cover, and just use that to keep reinforcing the style throughout. It’s not ironic at all that the font that we used for Flotsam and Salvage and then is used for the chapter headings on the inside is called Charcuterie. I mean, it’s just appropriate and it also looks kind of, you know, that pirate fantasy kind of look. It’s heavily modified for the front cover, but on the inside it’s used as it came out of the package, as you would. K: Yup. [30:43] (from this point on, the transcript is by Rekka. Don't blame Sara for my mistakes!) Rekka (00:30:43):So, um, yeah, absolutely. What you said. It's like the font choices, um, constantly remind the reader as they go through the book, what they're doing. Body copy—and when I say body copy, I'm talking about the running text—typically is going to follow some basic, uh, legibility rules. And so that font is less likely to change for the publisher than, um, than the other fonts that are more, uh, you know, highlights, uh, throughout the book or used for emphasis. The body text itself needs to be legible. It needs to be clear. It needs to, you know, adhere to standards. So that one is far less likely to change. Just like you wouldn't print black text on a dark purple paper. You know, we, we have cream color paper as a standard. We have certain fonts that work more as a standard, um, things like Garamond things like Georgia, you know, um, these are texts that you will see, you know, you can pretty much learn to identify them. Rekka (00:31:48):So when you are creating a layout in InDesign, you are picking fonts because those fonts are selected and permanent. When it's printed on paper, that font doesn't change sizes. That font can't be enlarged. It can't be, you know, reduced somebody can't increase the spacing. So you've really got to come up to like the best universally legible version you can. For that reason, a lot of people, you know, like my parents who are in their seventies, they are reading on their, their e-readers, Kindles in their case because they can change the font size. Because they could even pick a different font if they wanted, um, from the ebook file. And so when you are creating your layout, pretty much the font you choose in InDesign, if you're the one choosing it, um, assume that going forward. Cause I'd have to keep saying it at the end of every statement. Rekka (00:32:46):Um, those fonts are not necessarily the ones that are going to end up in the e-reader because the readers have their own preloaded set of fonts. And if you don't use one, they will pick what they judge to be the next closest font for you. So if you pick a serif font, but you use, you know, Garamond, but Garamond is a licensed, you know, proprietary font under the font foundry that created it and they own the rights to it. And if you don't purchase the rights to distribute it, you cannot package it in with your file. So you're going to end up with something that's a serif font that is similar. Um, if you go into your settings on an e-reader, you can see the fonts that are prepackaged in there. Cause you get to choose which one you want to use. And it's like maybe 15 at the most. So the fonts that you choose in your layout will go into the book, but unless you choose to, um, license your font so that you can distribute it, which is a whole other price point, um, you're not going to be controlling the fonts to that level in the ebook file that will get generated at the end here. Kaelyn (00:33:57):Gotcha. So, okay. Rekka, we've picked the font. We've come up with all of the, um, you know, how the beginning of the chapters are going to look, we've decided on how to handle drop cap. Uh, what are, what are you going to do now? What's the first thing you start digging into when you run through this. Rekka (00:34:15):Well, I'm going to block out the pages that I know we're going to need. So all the things we listed, um, and we, we forgot to mention like a praise page. So if there are industry blurbs, you know, that might be page one in this document. And um, if we know we've got a lot of them, it might be page two to maybe page three. You know, like if you're, you know, Gideon the Ninth got a lot of industry blurbs, for example. Kaelyn (00:34:41):Hey that's great. If you've got it, flaunt it. Rekka (00:34:42):Exactly. Um, so the idea of that is if someone picks us up in a bookstore, they are still deciding whether or not they want to buy it. You're hoping that, you know, you got him past the cover, you got him past the book description on the back, they've opened it and now you see like," Oh, well, you know, Terry Brooks loved this, so, okay, I'm going to read this or I'll at least keep paging it. And maybe I'll read the chapter in the bookstore." You have, you know, the title page, you might have another one we didn't mention was also-buys, uh, lists for the author or even sometimes the publisher I have seen, um, put those in a book, um, copyright, all that stuff. Those are all going to come to the designer as a separate word document. So you're going to start making space for it. Rekka (00:35:25):If the publisher has already provided some of it, then you lay it in. If you know it's coming, then you leave a spot for it. Because as you do things, um, you want to make sure that you are accounting for, what's going to start on like the right side of a page. What can go on the left side. On the right usually is where the titles fall. The dedication, the first chapter will start on the right. Um, the left side, you know, things like the copyright can live there, things that flow over from the page before, like those long praise lists we were talking about, or even long also-by-authors. Although at that point you probably want to pare it down to the most relevant. Um, so what's gonna fall on the right or left side of the page. You create a text box for that. Rekka (00:36:09):And, um, then you might need to insert a blank page and then start another text box for another right page. And then, um, if you set up your file properly, things will flow. And um, so if you bring in something that's, overlong, it will automatically add pages for you to make room for that, so none of it's hidden, but, um, as we'll get into later, that's one of the pitfalls that you have to deal with as well. Kaelyn (00:36:34):So, so one of the, so pretty much what you're doing right off the bat is you're blocking out, apart from the manuscript, the additional things that we talked about at the beginning of episode that are going to have to go into this book and you're literally laying it out, you're trying to go like, okay, there's going to be this. And that's going to take up two pages. Then I'm going to need four pages for this, then a page for that. And you're creating this file with then all of these, can I call them checkpoints? Does that make sense? Rekka (00:37:05):It's a little bit, it's maybe just like a, to do list or, you know, it's a table of contents. It's the living table of contents, but without the table, it is the contents. Um, like I said, they're each going to be coming in as a separate word file and you'll be treating them as separate, uh, story blocks in InDesign so that, um, when one ends, it gets to a stop and then you have another one that begins on the next page as a separate story. So that, like I said, if something runs over, it pushes everything, but it doesn't flow into the next text block with like, you know, your dedication will accidentally end up on the same page as chapter one. Kaelyn (00:37:43):Gotcha. Okay. That makes sense. Rekka (00:37:45):There, I think there are ways to style like your chapter headings so that they appear correctly. So like if I took, if you gave me one solid word document and inside, it said chapter one, that, um, the, you know, as a chapter one and then the text and there's a chapter two that I could import that. And then if those chapters are marked as headings, you know, separate from the body text that they would be spaced properly with the text around them. And what this does is in the reflowable, it guarantees that like accidentally you won't lose the last paragraph of a chapter. If something you do with a spacing ends up pushing it. Kaelyn (00:38:27):Right. Okay. Rekka (00:38:27):But what it ends up being a mess in terms of, um, dealing with where the chapters headings are and whether they're space properly and all that kind of stuff. So what CatsPaw does, and what I've started to do is create a separate story for each chapter, which does mean there's a little bit more handling when it comes in from the word document. I can't just throw the word document in there and have it go "zzzzhzhhhhzhzhzhzh" all the way down and look perfect. Kaelyn (00:38:54):That's the noise it makes. Rekka (00:38:55):That is not the noise it makes, uh, that is the sound of disappointment when it doesn't work as intended, hopefully the styles are set up in a way that makes sense. So what you do is you go in and you delete the word styles, and then it says, Hey, uh, the, you know, the styles in use, do you want to replace the instances of that style with another style? And then you can apply your own style without having to go in and look for every chapter one chapter two, chapter three, you know, that kind of thing. Kaelyn (00:39:22):Yeah. So Rekka, without getting too technical with all of this... Rekka (00:39:29):Folks, that's her way of saying "you have four pages of notes and they frighten me." Kaelyn (00:39:32):She does have a lot of notes for this one. Um, but without getting too technical about this, you've done the initial import, you know, you've corrected the, you know, real quick things you've, you know, checked the headings, made the stories for the chapters. And, uh, this is absolutely a leading question because I got to experience some of this firsthand recently, your next step, you're going to go through the manuscript and start looking for things that, for lack of a better term, look a weird. Rekka (00:40:05):Yeah. So once everything's laid in, then hopefully the styles that you set up for paragraphs and such are, um, pretty low maintenance in that you've already decided how many words per paragraph are allowed to be hyphenated. Kaelyn (00:40:23):And real quick, just to be clear what you mean by that. If a word is too long and is hanging off the end of the line, you can allow the text to hyphenate, put a hyphen there and then continue to word on the next line. Rekka (00:40:35):Right. Like I said before, what you want the reader to do is not notice that they're reading. And so part of that job falls to the author to make the story engaging the other part, falls to the layout person. And typographer to make sure that there's nothing getting in the way of an easy reading experience. Sometimes that word "frustrating" would make that line either super compressed, if it fit all the words on that line, or super spaced out, if it decided to move it down. So by allowing hyphenation in your settings, you tell the computer, sometimes it's going to be necessary, please do this, but you can also tell it "if the word is capitalized. You know, if the first letter of that word is capitalized, do not hyphenate," because sometimes as a proper name and in fantasy and science fiction, you really don't want those words to get any more confusing than you've already made them you creative, creative, wonderful people. So, um, you maybe don't want to hyphenate those words at all. Uh, you can also say "don't hyphenate in the first line or don't hyphenate to the last line." There's little settings like this, and then there's sliders to say "more hyphenation for better spacing" or "I'd rather sacrifice some of the spacing for less hyphens." Cause it can be really silly to look at a paragraph and the first four lines end with a hyphen because you're using sciency words and they're really long. Kaelyn (00:41:54):Yeah. And so then, uh, one of the other things that you're gonna look for is weird spacing. Um, as you mentioned, text here is typically justified. Um, this is why sometimes you'll see in books that there's not uniform spacing between words and what's happening there is the computer is making adjustments so that everything is kind of a box, just like these neat lines down the side. Rekka (00:42:18):It will go for the spaces between words first, before adjusting the tracking between the letters themselves. Kaelyn (00:42:25):So yeah, there's two ways to mess up the spacing here. You can mess with the spacing — You're wondering why I said this was so incredibly overwhelming, and this is why you can mess with the spacing in the words. So you could also mess with the spacing in between the letters. Rekka (00:42:41):You know, if you were doing a poster, you would be really, really fine tuning every letter on there when you're doing a full book layout, um, unless this is a book about idealism, you know, or this is going to be a coffee table book, generally, you're not getting too close into the kerning, except in cases where like say you have a drop cap at the beginning of a chapter where the first letter is like three lines high. And that first letter is an "A," so you have this letter that leans away from the text at the top, but is running into the text on that third line that it's, that it's inset to. And so you might want to adjust how those letters fit together. That's where the reader is going to go. "Woah, that looks weird," as opposed to they're already sucked into the narrative and you know, they might completely overlook it. Kaelyn (00:43:32):And I can actually give an example that a wreck and I came up against that was really strange when we were working on Aria. Um, because it's a space opera. We had some names that started with a Q, but were not followed by a U, which is obviously very unusual in English, but not in this galaxy. And the Q that was built into the font was this large ornate sort of letter, capital letter ,with this flowing line. And we were looking at this going, well, why is it doing this? And we realized that there was a different setting built into the font for if you were doing Qu versus just a single capital Q. New Speaker (00:44:11):Right. And that's called a ligature, which is a standard, um, aesthetic manipulation of the way letters fit together so that they are more attractive, and, and this is like, you know, typographers will really have fun with these. So in the case of the character's name, it was "Qe" and there was no ligature for that. But for the word "Queen," you have the stroke coming out of the Q and it extended, I think, past the u, um, it was very, very, pretty. It was very Royal. Kaelyn (00:44:46):It was really, it was gorgeous. It was almost the length of the word. Rekka (00:44:50):But we were looking at it and going, why, why is this? And then finally we figured it out. Um, I think you leave it because you're like, well, it's a queen. Yeah. She can have the long stroke. Kaelyn (00:45:00):We found a way to sort of minimize it because the way they had it in there, it was very distracting in the text. Rekka (00:45:06):They call them alternatives. So when you highlight a letter in InDesign, you get an option to switch that letter form to one of his alternatives, but yeah. Um, ligatures, are generally something you want, um, because of the way like F will go into L or F will go into I, um, you know, they're very, very common. Um, and you probably don't even realize you're looking at them. Uh, if you see two letters that basically connect somehow or, um, the letter forms overlap into the horizontal space of each other, it's probably a ligature and they're, they're good. They're a good thing. But in some cases you may want to manually override them. Kaelyn (00:45:45):All of this is to say that then this becomes a really time consuming process of just needing to read through the manuscript and to make sure that it looks okay. We're not fussing with words at this point, we're fussing with layout and with presentation. Rekka (00:46:00):So I would argue that you're not necessarily reading through the manuscript. Um, but you are scanning, you know, across every page to, to catch these kinds of things. Kaelyn (00:46:11):And someone like Rekka, whose eye is trained to look for this stuff. Um, you know, there are like someone like me, there's stuff that I caught on there that I went, "ah, this is weird." Or like I would find, um, there's a thing that can happen called a river where the spacing in between letters, stacks up line on top of line. And it looks like a river, essentially. New Speaker (00:46:33):You could trace a line, you know, with a pen through multiple lines in a paragraph. And that's, you know, there's rivers, uh, and the fully justified text kind of creates quite a few of them too, unfortunately. Um, but again, you can kind of control that by setting up your styles really well. Um, the Draft 2 Digital's, as well as InDesign's, um, algorithm that lays out the text for you tries to control that, like it knows to try and avoid it. Can't avoid it everywhere. Cause again, especially with science fiction books, sometimes the words are just really long and you're kind of stuck with them, but you also, you know, you're going to look out for widows, which are single words at the end of a paragraph. In something as long as a, as a novel, they're going to be some of them, you just can't avoid it. Kaelyn (00:47:18):It's just, it's going happen. Yeah, there's no way around that. Rekka (00:47:19):But you can try to minimize them. Um, other things that just, you know, again, the hyphenation, you're just, some normal words become less normal when they're split across two lines. You know, your brain is going to try and guess what the rest of the word is as you're reading. And so you don't want anything that your brain would go immediately to something else. Kaelyn (00:47:39):Uh, one of the other things, um, if there's a scene break, you're signified us by a break in the text. If that break comes at the end of a page and then starts at the other, it's not going to be clear to the reader that there's supposed to be a break in there. Rekka (00:47:52):Yeah. So generally you want some kind of ornament um in there for that break. Um, I actually was reading on a Kindle last night and twice in a row inside the same chapter, I did not realize I was supposed to be dealing with a scene break because it came at the end of the way my Kindle had flipped the pages. So I was like, "wow, I sure would've put an ornament in here. Uh, just to signify that the scene breaks." You know, sometimes it's three asterisks. Sometimes it's a line. Sometimes it's a little illustration. The scene breaks, again, are communicating something to the reader. So if it's not being communicated, it needs to be adjusted. Um, and then you've also got, uh, orphans which are single lines at the end, or start a page. You, you kind of want to keep your paragraphs together., Again in a 400 page novel, you're not going to be able to control every single one of them, but you do what you can. And sometimes you end up doing what you can by going back three paragraphs to find a really long, chunky paragraph that could probably, uh, you know, be adjusted to either push or pull that, um, that line upward or back so that you can control that. Kaelyn (00:49:00):So, yeah, Rekka... Someone like Rekka is, you know, scanning these, looking through everything and knows exactly what to be looking for. Um, it's a very time consuming manual process, but if, again, you're a designer like Rekka, this is just, you know, you've got like a third eye that is just going, "yes, no, no, no, no, no, yes, yes, yes, widow, orphan, other upsetting family status." Rekka (00:49:27):Exactly. Exactly. Kaelyn (00:49:29):So that is kind of, I would say is that is that sort of, once you go through and finalize that, is there anything else assuming there are no changes being made, is that sort of the end of your involvement at that point? Rekka (00:49:46):So that is for the print book. Now for the ebook, there are a couple of different ways to do it again, drafted digital we'll happily take your word file and make an ebook from it. Um, as will SmashWords, as will Reedsy. Um, there's a program called Vellum. Yep. And that is Mac only, unfortunately I a hundred percent think is a worthwhile, uh, program to have, because the option that remains from that is, uh, to take your, either your word document or your InDesign document and export it to an epub. And then what you need to do is manually edit that epub to make sure that it's clean, because sometimes styles come in from other programs that are, uh, bloated for what you want an ebook to be. You want to keep the size down. You want to not confuse the e-reader with too many, you know, instructions for how to handle a paragraph, et cetera. So, um, InDesign lets you, uh, create rules for your various styles in how it exports them to epub, which is a good thing. Um, however, I have found that the epub that's, uh, exported still requires an awful lot of work. So if your Word document is kept up to date with the same changes that go into the layout after the page proofs are made, I definitely recommend taking that Word document and feeding it through, uh, either Vellum. I know um, Draft 2 Digital has been working on their epub, you know, converter so that, um, it's probably getting closer and closer to perfect. Um, but right now my experiences with Vellum and it's just night and day between having to edit an epub because InDesign still, you know, separated out your files weird or whatever, um, to just loading it into vellum and having it recognize this, you know, the scene breaks and the chapter breaks and all this kinds of stuff. And again, Draft 2 Digital, Reedsy, Smashwords, Vellum: they're, um, ebook creation tools, know what fonts are available in e-readers and know how those styles will be rendered. So when you pick a style in any one of those, you can be fairly certain that it's going to look the same across multiple e-readers, which with InDesign, you kind of have to manage on your own. And that's not a lot of fun. And by the time you're done with this layout, you kind of want to be able to like, just output that ebook and just go. Rekka (00:52:09):Um, I definitely recommend if you can do the ebook last, because every time you create a new format of this book, now you've got to keep all the changes straight between every different format or you have to re-output the ebook again from your final_final_final_dot [[grumpy noises]] final, you know.indd file. So, um, that would be my recommendation. Uh, yeah, the, the process of maintaining multiple files across different versions and stuff like that is, it's not great. Rekka (00:52:43):You want to minimize it so that you can have all the files open on your computer, on your, you know, if you're like me, you have two monitors and you can have them side by side and make every change, uh, one at a time, side by side so that, you know, it's done. So from there you have, you know, you just have your final checks and, and once you have all the pages laid out in InDesign, you'd have a final page count, which means that you can finally go get the template for your cover. Because you can't make your cover final until you know the spine width, which you don't know until you have your page count. So all these things kind of like wait until the end, so you're, while you're laying things out, if you don't have all those pages on the inside that we talked about in the front and end matter, you're bugging the publisher for those. "Uh, can I get that? Can I get that?" If you have a direct access to the author, you might be reaching out to them, you know, "just to confirm, I want to make sure I have everything." Because, um, that page count means that you can finish your cover. And then, um, you output that according to the, you know, guidelines of whoever will be doing the printing, whether it's, you know, uh, press printing or a POD digital, you match their specifications and you upload the file, you preview everything a hundred times. You know, you'll proof it one more time from the, um, they'll output a PDF and send it to you. And you just make sure that, you know, no pages are missing or whatever that you know could go wrong. That it's not a truncated file. Like you uploaded it and it didn't only partially upload or, or whatever. Cause most of the system is pretty automated. You don't have people who—you cannot trust, let's say, that there's someone on the printer team who is going to be going over your page with as much care as you would. So always take that care to go over everything. Just like I, you know, went through the entire layout to make sure the words were falling on the right place. You want to make sure that you go through the entire proofing process with that same eye. If you've ever seen the movie Elf there's, um, there's a scene where the president of the company marches him with a briefcase and he pulls out a page proof. You don't get page proofs like that anymore, but you do get PDFs. And it sh... And he points at the bottom of this blank page to where the publisher had signed off on a page that did not output. And so kids who read this book, didn't get the ending of the book, right? Kaelyn (00:55:01):No one knows what happened to the puppy and the pigeon. Rekka (00:55:04):So the printer will make you sign, you know, essentially digitally sign this proof to say, "I approve of this, go ahead with printing." So if something happens that was shown in the proof and you didn't flag it and fix it or flag it and have them fix it, it's on you. So there's no, there's no amount of hurry that is worth having to swallow the cost or swallow the embarrassment when your readers get, you know, books with mistakes in them. So I mean, through the entire process, as laborious as it sounds, and as much as it sounds like you might want to get through it and be done with it, like, the care you put into it makes a better product. Kaelyn (00:55:45):Agreed. So, um, on that note, uh, the big takeaway here is attention to detail is always important, but never so much. Rekka (00:55:55):And pay someone else to do it if you can. Kaelyn (00:55:56):But never so much as when you're doing your layout. You know, as I said, this was just meant to sort of be a little bit of a kind of walkthrough of what happens to get a book taken from a manuscript to actually be formatted as a book. As, as you can see, it's, it's a process and there are different levels of how much detail and attention you can pay to it. And there- one is not necessarily better or right or wrong. Sometimes it's a matter of money and cost. Sometimes it's a matter of time. It's- at the end of the day. You just want to make sure that you've written a good book that can be easily read. And when I say easily read, I mean, as Rekka has said multiple times through this, people reading, it should not be conscious of the fact that they're reading. They should not have to make an effort to read the book. Rekka (00:56:50):They shouldn't have to concentrate just to see the page, you know, or to get through the page. And to your point about, you know, sometimes budget is a concern. I mean, obviously Draft 2 Digital's is free. Um, when you upload the files, I don't even think you have to publish or distribute to them. You can just download the file that it generates. Um, because they know that people will see the value in their service and come back and maybe eventually will distribute through them because every time you hit their page, they're showing you like, you can get this into libraries, you can get this into, you know, various distribution channels that you might not be able to get into on your own. So, you know, that's why their stuff is free. It's not free, cause it's not valuable. They work very hard on it. And it shows. Rekka (00:57:29):If you want a little bit more hands on than that, but you can't afford the page by page line, by line tracking. You know, there are designers who will probably be agreeable to do slightly less of the, you know, nitty gritty work, get it laid out for you. And do you know what they know works well, which is, you know, setting up those styles so that there's a minimal amount of, you know, all the things that we've warned against. And so you might be able to get somebody who, you know, will charge you less because they'll do less of the process, but a little bit more than you might get from one of the free things. And, you know, that's just something to experiment with and see how it works out and know that, you know, like if you say, "Oh, no, I really want to, um, you know, fiddle with this more," that, um, you need to probably get them to agree, to give you the InDesign file and then maybe, maybe you start paying for Adobe Creative Cloud and get a copy of InDesign yourself and you learn how to fiddle with these things. But it's, it's not all or nothing. It's not hours and hours and hours of paid labor at, you know, a designer's rate necessarily, but you do get what you pay for. Yeah. So yeah, there are multiple options on more of a sliding scale than, you know, just "free" or "all of the money." Kaelyn (00:58:49):That's, that's our episode about books and layouts and putting them together and everything. Um, you know, I know it was, there was a little technical in some areas. Rekka (00:58:58):I could go on for a few more hours. Kaelyn (00:59:00):Yes, yes. Um, you know, hopefully that was informative, kind of gave you a little bit of an idea of what's going on in the background here. And, um, you know, as always, if you have any questions or, you know, anything that you were looking for more information on or wondering about, uh, please feel free to contact us. We like when people ask us questions and contact us. Rekka (00:59:22):Yep. You can reach us on Instagram and Twitter @WMBcast. You can find us at WMBcast.com for all our old episodes. And if you find our information valuable enough to assign a dollar number to a, you can find us at patreon.com/wmbcast, and we'd super appreciate your support. But of course we know that's not always possible. So the another way to support us, uh, free of cost to you is to recommend our podcast to a friend who might be interested in some of the discussions you've heard. You can tell them to subscribe if you think everything's great, or if there's something specific, you can just send them a specific episode. Um, and of course the pinnacle of free support for this podcast will be to go leave a rating and review at Apple podcasts, even though we are available on all the podcast apps, that is the place where the reviews really seem to do the most to boost our visibility. So you can do that and help other people find us. Kaelyn (01:00:20):Yeah. That's certainly the algorithm that we need to feed the most of all of them. Well, thanks again, everyone for listening and we'll see you in two weeks. Rekka (01:00:28):Take care, everyone.
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 were lucky enough to sit down with Michael R. Underwood, author the upcoming novel "Annihilation Aria" from Parvus Press. Full disclosure: Kaelyn was Mike's editor on the book and so we got have an extra in-depth and behind the scenes discussion about the craft of writing and how characters, plots, and worlds can change and adapt as the story is written. Mike was a fountain of information and knowledge and we both left the conversation with some amazing insight into the process behind creating a book with such rich world building and dynamic characters. We had a great time talking with Mike and hope that you enjoy the conversation as much as we did. 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 if you've read Annihilation Aria, let us know what you think! You can (and should) check out Mike on social media at: Twitter: @MikeRUnderwood Website: www.michaelrunderwood.com Annhiliation Aria is available everywhere awesome books are sold on July 21, 2020! www.books2read.com/annihilation-aria We hope you enjoy We Make Books! Twitter: @WMBCast | @KindofKaelyn | @BittyBittyZap Instagram: @WMBCast Patreon.com/WMBCast Episode 39: Annihilation Aria with Michael R. Underwood transcribed by Sara Rose (@saraeleanorrose) [0:00] R: Welcome back to We Make Books, a podcast about writing, publishing, and everything in between! I’m Rekka, I write science fiction and fantasy as R.J. Theodore. K: And I’m Kaelyn Considine, I’m the acquisitions editor for Parvus Press. R: And today, we have to make another full disclosure-confession. We have another Parvus author on today. You recently heard us talk to Scott Warren of the Union Earth Privateers book—book series, I should say. And today we have another author of another amazing Parvus book, Michael R. Underwood of Annihilation Aria fame, or about to be fame. I hope it’s fame because this book deserves it. K: Yeah, Annihilation Aria’s coming out a week from when this will be released, so this is July 14th, coming out July 21st. It’s a fantastic book, space opera. When I first got the manuscript and was kind of giving a it a rundown to my publisher and the other people on my team, I described it as the gender-swapped Mummy in space. R: Yeah. With magic. Well, I guess The Mummy does have magic, too. K: Yeah, yeah but with giant space turtles, and therefore better. R: Yeah, yes. K: So Mike was kind enough to take the time and sit and talk with us about the evolution of story writing and character development. This book had been something that he was working on for years. It, well, the core parts of it didn’t change too much. The book certainly underwent a lot of evolution over the years. And MIke is so smart, so talented, has a lot of really great insight and advice to offer when it comes to, you know, being about to take a look back at your own work and figuring out how it needs to change in order to serve the story. So, we had a great time talking with Mike. Hopefully you have a great time listening to him, and you should, you still have time right now to pre-order Annihilation Aria, book one of The Space Operas. Absolutely check it out. Not only because I’m the one that edited it, but because it is an excellent book. R: I totally agree. I got the chance to read it when I was recovering in the hospital and it was a delight. It was absolutely everything that Kaelyn and Mike promised it would be. K: So, anyway, take a listen and we hope you enjoy! [intro music plays] R: Of course we just used up all our small talk, we don’t recall any of it. So, I guess we’re gonna have to go straight into it. K: Dive right into talking to Mike Underwood today! M: Hi! I’m sorry! This is the thing about being on a podcast that I’ve listened to. I have to actively keep my brain dial on the Talk to These People mode, instead of the Listen to These People mode. R: I mean we can just talk about you, but it seems a little rude considering you’re in the recording with us. K: Especially because none of us are in the same space right now. Usually Rekka and I are at least sitting across from each other. R: I have the blanket that Kaelyn usually has today. K: Ahh, my blanket! I miss that blanket. It sheds all over me, but it’s worth it. R: Yeah, well, stuff has to shed in my shed… K, disappointed: Oh, Rekka. R, unashamed: It works with the name, but it’s also because it makes me feel less lonely for my pets that are in the house because we don’t want them shedding in the shed. K: Alright, I’m derailing this conversation now. This just goes down a road of puns that there’s no recovery from, and then we have to start over again and it’s just… it’s gonna be a thing. So, Mike, do you wanna save us here and introduce yourself? [K and R laugh] M: Sure. I’m Mike Underwood, I write as Michael R. Underwood. I mostly do action adventure meta-genre kinds of stuff. I like found families, I like trope-twisting, and my next book is Annihilation Aria which is coming out with Parvus Press, so I’ve had the fortune of getting to work with both of you in a professional capacity and I’m very excited to talk about the book with your audience. K: We’re really excited to have you on here, because this book has a long and storied history. This was not a, simply, Wrote Something, Submitted It, Got It Accepted and Published. There was, even before it came to Parvus, before I started working on it, you were, what? three-ish years into this book at that point? M: Yeah, so. This book basically starts in the movie theater as I’m watching Guardians of the Galaxy. K: Okay. M: And like really enjoying a lot of what it did with tone and, kind of, bold visual style with all of the high technicolor space opera bits, plus some retro nostalgia aspects. And so that informed a conversation I had with an editor, who I shall let remain nameless, that I was talking with at a world fantasy convention. In that conversation, I mentioned that I really would love to write something that would make people feel the same type of joy and smile-so-much-your-cheeks-hurt kind of vibe, that I got while watching so much of Guardians of the Galaxy. And it’s not a perfect film because there are very few perfect films, but I loved that mode of space opera that it had. Where it’s a bit more irreverent, it still has some of the found family vibes that you see in something like Firefly or Killyjoys. But it’s on the more adventure-y, epicfantasy but-make-it-space and pewpew versus space opera that’s a lot more, that leans more towards hard science like something like The Expanse. I’ve always been more of a Dune- and Star Wars-end of space opera kid versus that kind of overlap between space opera and military SF or the [radio voice] This Is What Thing Will Be Like Seven Hundred Years In the Future When We Have An Alcubierre Drive or whatever. That’s not my thing. [K and R laugh] M: And so what I brought to it was, you know, a lifetime of loving Star Wars, but also various roleplaying games and wanting to find in a project, a place to say what I was interested in and investigate the things I loved about space opera. So I took a play from Annie Balay, who has talked about making up a wishlist of tropes that she loves about urban fantasy, and she put those into a series. So I just kind of sketched out fun, weird things. Like, “What if giant spaceturtles?” and space magic bullshit and— R: Perfect. M: And finding a way to just kitchen sink a novel, in terms of things that I liked. And it kind of started to build up momentum there. But because I wrote it as a back-burner project over years and years and years, where it started and what it has become now, there’s a big gap there and there’s a lot to unpack from what the characters were really about to how the world feels to, then, into the editorial process with Kaelyn kind of repeatedly inviting me to unpack things or slow down and give a deeper view into characters. K: It’s very generous of you to use the word “invited you to”. R: Yeah, I was gonna say. I know Kaelyn, that’s a very interesting verb choice. K, laughing: “Mike, I’d like to hear more about this.” “Oh, okay, here’s a sentence.” “No, Mike, I know where you live, Mike!” That was something that I, just for clarification I’m the editor of Parvus that worked with Mike on this in case that hasn’t become apparent. One of the things that really drew me to this book and that I was wanting Mike to slow down and unpack was the characters. For all the setting and the fantastical elements of this, the characters are such a huge driving force, I think, for the story. I would absolutely read anything that is just set in this universe. As long as the characters are as engaging, compelling, and fun as the ones that you’re written in Annihilation Aria. But you had kind of a few things that you wanted to accomplish with the characters, as well. M: Yeah, so. I’ve been in the same relationship since 2010, I’m happily married. My wife and I get along very well, and in science fiction, fantasy, adventure fiction especially there’s just not a lot of instances of happily committed couples. Let alone happily committed married couples. And I think there’s a lot of cultural reasons that go into this, that are probably several podcasts-worth of their own and would be best had in conversation with capital R, Romance writers. But the short version was that I wanted to write the kind of story that really argues that Happily Ever After can also be really exciting. So that was one of the nexuses around which the story was built. Like, okay, well what if I do this but I have a couple that’s already together and happy at the beginning of the book. And not that they don’t face challenges and one at the start of their relationship was: these people who both have a quest that they’re trying to fulfill, if either of them gets what they want, theoretically the couple breaks up. R: Yeah. M: But that, when they meet, they’re like, “Oh, you can help me with my thing and I’ll help you with your thing,” except that along the way they fell in love. They’re still on this trajectory that theoretically means—that could mean the dissolution of the relationship, but they don’t really have anything else as a way of being in the world, because they can’t just be together and be happy. They have their own drives and they exist in a pretty oppressive system that requires that they have a lot of money because they both have exterior debts and things like that. The same kind of Firefly vibe. So that tension between their attraction to each other and their individual quests that might pull them apart was one of the big engines that made the story move. So that when they run into this ancient kingdom, techno, biotech tomb that they run into early in the story, that gets a McGuffin in their hands that then becomes a big deal. And they’re each engaging with it and the things around them because they have these, sometimes competing, usually overlapping, drives that are motivating them. And that, almost like a perpetual motion machine of character interaction, was really fascinating and I wanted to keep on working with, while trying to balance, respecting the fiction. There really is this chance that things could fall apart for them, while knowing that I wanted them to not break-up because that was part of the whole thing. R: One thing that was notable for me, as I was reading the book, was that at no point do they not want the other one to succeed. They are so supportive of each other that even though it means that it would break them up, they exist on different planes. Yes, this fact is over here that if I got what I wanted, I would be across the galaxy from this other person. But at the same time, same plane, they also really want the other person to be happy and to succeed at their personal character arc quest and it’s really, like you said, it builds tension but it’s just really nice to see people who support each other and, even though there’s this big divide between what’s best for their relationship versus what’s best for the individual. K: Yeah, and along those lines—and this maybe might be a transition into talking about some of the more mechanical aspects of writing this—is that these two characters are Max and Lahra and they are two of the main POV characters, but when you started writing this, they were the only POV characters, correct? [12:46] M: I think there were a very small number of POV chapters for Wheel, who is the pilot of the two main characters, and then Arek, who is kind of their primary antagonist. So he’s an agent of this galactic empire that controls the space that they live in. I had a little bit from each of them as counterpoint or context, but it was still very much Max and Lahra’s story and the other ones were just there to give a little bit of context and color. And only over years of doing other projects and writing and growing as a creator, did I make the moves to promote Wheel and Arek as POV characters and to treat them with more depth and groundedness, as I engaged with them. Especially into the revision process, I saw and was convinced that there was more for the novel to do and it could be richer for digging more into the emotional lives of all four of those POV characters. R: And you really did. Especially with Arek. He’s not the prototypical space-fiction villain. He’s got a lot of complexity to him. He is still definitely a villain, but he’s the least worst villain personality? And they’re definitely—again, you’ve given each character a drive and something that they’re aiming for which might be at odds with what the organizations that they work with are aiming for. So, how did you make those decisions, as you’re developing? Especially a villain character, but also Wheel. It’s really interesting that Wheel might have had a very tiny part just in the sense that Wheel is the owner of the ship that everyone lives on, I assume, and maybe Wheel has to help rescue at some point. Or Wheel has to support with something Wheel can witness that the other characters can’t, or something like that. I mean, I have obviously done the same thing with POVs where somebody was there because it was convenient to have another POV and then that person had to become a fully-rounded character of their own. But when you built Arek, you didn’t have to go that far. You still could have sold this book without going as far with Arek as you did. But, so why—how did you start to see Arek and how much sympathy do you, personally, have for him? K: Well, and I’ll jump into just to add that you gave all of these characters a life outside of this story. Every single person, if they were not taking part in this story happening to them, would be doing something else. And we, the reader, are in a position where we can kind of see or imagine what they’re doing because even though you don’t have to spend a lot of time on it, but it gives us a very good sense of them. M: Yeah, I think a lot of how I approach characterization and writing is probably informed by growing up playing table-top roleplaying games. So, table-top roleplaying was one of the main ways that I learned to tell stories and to think about what I wanted from stories. Alongside reading and watching TV and movies and reading comics and things like that. So in a lot of roleplaying, you have the characters as they are and then you’re engaging with a game master who says, “Here’s a plot!” and then you engage with the plot. And that’s one style of game mastering, and more recent roleplaying games, a lot of them are more player-driven in terms of character agenda and shared narrative authority and things like that. And the Apocalypse World tradition from that game by Vincent and Meguey Baker and all the games that come from it. So I brought kind of one version of acting experience to writing. In terms of: okay, here’s a character and they are my character and I wanna be able to inhabit them at least a little bit to get a sense of who they are, so that when I, then, also as the writer, can throw things at them. I’m able to jump between those registers in terms of inhabiting a character and kind of providing the antagonism or the context and/or all the other stuff that goes around a character. I think it was because I was familiar with that style—so much of what my writing comes out of is that if I’m gonna be in the POV of a character, it’s hard to not spend some time with them and to linger with them and to think about their agency and their—what they want from the world. And as much as I grew up loving Star Wars and Darth Vader, and Darth Vader is a great antagonist but he’s not a great character in a rounded fashion because he’s so much of a cypher. He is the iron fist that punches at the protagonists. You get into the prequels and you see some of the backstory and—but that’s not what I grew up with. I was sixteen or so when Episode I came out and we really start to get that backstory for him. I think I moved toward this point where, at least some of the time, I want villains or, at least the personification of villainy or the person that the team is engaging with, to feel enough like a person that they are not just a moustache-twirling for. Because I’ve written more straight-up moustache-twirling villains in other books. Like in Shield and Crocus, which is very superhero-y, the villains kind of run the gamut. Some of them are just like, “I Am Really Terrible! HAHA! Oppression!” [K laughs quietly] M: In Arek, I think he started out as more of Lieutenant Bad Guy and he probably grew that roundedness when I thought about like, “Why is he the one who’s out here in the Boondocks?” R: Mhm. K: Yeah. M: Who is the person within this species-supremacist empire that ends up on this bad duty? And, okay, I know that, from what I know about militaries and governments, okay you get a crap duty because you piss somebody off or because you’re out of favor. Well what is it like to be out of favor in this species of supersoldier, galactic tyrants? Why would that be a thing? So I started thinking a little bit about class and caste within a species. Or is it that he has some relationship to the dominant ideology of the species? So he ended up as being more humane than most of the members of his civilization. Because of that, he was marginalized within this very domineering, fascist civilization. It’s a little bit of getting to talk about the way that oppressive civilizations oppress even the people that have power or that not everybody is equal, even within an oligarchy. Because the lines of oppression and pressures are not all along one axis. Everything is very multiaxial in terms of where people occupy more privileged or less privileged positions or are taking actions that put them more or less in line with a dominant paradigm. Thinking about worldbuilding in that fashion is also really important to me. So when I take a character and put them through that bouncy castle of all these different things of worldbuilding, they tend to accrete a bit more personhood. K: So, piggybacking off of that, and we kind of touched on this a little bit before, was that you wrote this over a lengthy period of time and there were characters that evolved, obviously, and became more prominent points for, well, viewpoints in the story. How much of that, do you think, was really getting comfortable with and learning about this world you were creating and wanting to build upon, and how much was that, we’re all adults here but, three years, you grow and change and you look back at things that you did before that and go, “Oh, well I don’t like that anymore.” How much of it was organic story-building and evolution and how much of it was going back and evaluating what you’d already written? [21:35] M: I think it was definitely both, and in a really integrated circuit kind of way. That life experience and working as a writer were very intertwined. I would fold life experiences into writing or I would develop my understanding of storytelling in a more nuanced fashion because I had time. And because I had time, I could let things remain and mull and simmer over time. Well, what if not just this layer of how Lahra’s civilization operates, but what if there’s this other thing that builds on what’s already there. There’s a multi-caste system and you’ve got the nobility atop and you’ve got soldiers and the soldiers serve the nobility and, well, in a civilization you can’t just have soldiers and nobility. You’re gonna have farmers, you’re gonna have technicians, you’re gonna have all these things. Okay, so there’s these other parts of society and I had the title Annihilation Aria way before the Genae had music magic. K: Mhm. M: Because the title, Annihilation Aria, was like, “Oh, that’s cool because space opera,” and I’m riffing on that, but it’s its own thing. And, you know, world killers are a big thing in space opera. How can I take these things and make them my own? And then I realized, looking back, as I was picking away at the project over years, that I’d already set a foundation upon which I could build something that would give Lahra’s civilization and, therefore her backstory, more meat to it. As I was writing parts of the story where the Genae really matter, I was able to layer on these extra things. Having more time to layer texture and history onto the story was really valuable and because a lot of the other ways that I’ve written—I wrote my debut and I got an offer to sell it very early in the revision process because of wacky circumstances for which I’m very fortunate. From there, I had several years of, “Okay, cool. So you have a contract, write a book. Turn it in. Production. Publication.” And so I wrote books that were much more condensed in their timeline. So it’s write a book over nine months, revise it over six months, it comes out, or sometimes a little bit more. Sometimes even a little bit less. With this one, because I didn’t sell it on spec, and I was going in a different direction, it had this opportunity to accrete depth and texture over time. But I don’t want to have a writing career where it takes five years to do every book. R: I was just about to say, is that something you recommend? K: Real quick, Mike, if you wouldn’t mind backtracking to kind of go on a little side tangent here. You said “write a book on spec.” For our listeners that maybe do not have as much experience in the professional writing world as you do, what are you saying here? What is writing a book on spec versus what you did with Aria? M: Sure. So, I sold my debut having written the whole book. And then: cool, we wanna publish this and a sequel. Great. So I did that and then I went back to the same editor and I said, “I wanna write something else from these Ree Reyes books. And so I created pitches and I sold them. I sold those books without having written the whole book, which is one version of— K: You’re selling based on the pitch that you’re giving. M: Yeah, and that’s one degree of selling on spec. There are people who say, “Cool! I wanna write a book!” and the publisher’s like, “We love you! Please sell us this book!” That is really selling a book on spec, you know. And that’ll show up in Publisher’s Weekly or Locus as: Famous Author’s Next Book to Editor at Publisher. And it can be very vague. It takes a while for most authors to get to the point where they can just say, “I wanna write a book for you!” and the publisher says, “Yes! Here’s some money.” K: Most authors will not get to a point where that happens in their career. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. It’s just that, typically—and correct me if I’m wrong—these are going to be household names either within the general populous or within genres. M: Yeah. K: You will know the people that are able to sell books on spec. M: Yeah, or it’s like—I have friends who sell a book that’s already written, but it’s a standalone so they get a two book deal and the second book is: it’ll be a book. K: Yes! Yeah. M: That’s probably more common than, “Here’s a one book deal. I don’t know what the book is yet, but I have the track record that you just wanna buy it.” So I had tried to sell a couple of books on partials because I said, “Well, okay, I have this track record and I have this background in the professional side of publishing.” But those didn’t happen. So I just went back to writing new novels and trying to sell things and, at this point, I’d been wanting to do enough different things with my writing where it’s like, “Cool.I’ve got these adventure books and I wanna write some other stuff that’s a bit more sociological or political and try to balance all these things that I wanna do as a creator.” But I don’t wanna spend five years for each book because, economically, it’s just not viable to be able to support the costs of a writing career in terms of conventions and things like that off of one book every five years unless I’m getting just a lot more money. And very few people get so much money from science fiction, fantasy that they can spend five years on a book. So Aria is this weird book that may be pretty singular in my career, in terms of how long it has taken to become the thing that will be published in, as of this recording, in a couple of months. So I try to revel in that distinctiveness because it will probably be pretty singular and hope to apply the lessons that I’ve learned while writing it much more efficiently moving forward. To think about things with texture and depth from an earlier part, an earlier stage of the process and then to embrace the opportunity to make a book more rich and texture in the revision process. To try to do several years’ worth of work in maybe a year, year and a half, in strong collaboration with an agent or an editor or something like that. R: So you’ve spent the last, you know, hand-crafting the tools themselves that you now can put in your toolbox and reach for, hopefully, and use them without having to remake them every time, going forward? M: I sure hope so. R: Well that would be a very efficient use of your time, I think. M: Yeah. I just finished the rough draft for a new novel that is very different from Aria, but I think it would have been very hard for me to write it, if I had not already been through that process of pulling this book together over the course of several years while working on other things as my main deal.Like, developing and doing all the work for Born to the Blade and self-publishing stuff from Genrenauts and things like that. So I’m hoping that the messiness I can clean up a bit while still being able to reapply those tools, as you say. K: Now, Mike, when you went back from this and I just know from our conversations and working together that, at various points, you spent a lot of time working on this. You picked it up, you put it down again. You came back and forth to it. Were there any points, when you were going through and revising this, that you knew there were changes you had to make that you weren’t happy about making? That you were reluctant to really do anything with? R: Tell us how Kaelyn hurt you. M: Um… K, laughing: No, no we’re talking pre-editor. R: Oh, okay. If you say so. K: Well, what I’m trying to get at here is, and Rekka and I back in May, we will have released an episode about making hard decisions about your manuscript and changing things on recommendation, but then also doing it yourself and having that awareness of, “Hey, maybe this isn’t as strong as I want it to be,” or “Maybe this no longer serves this story.” And the reason I’m asking is because you did write this over such a long period of time, it gives you the time and perspective to go back and consider these things. M: Yeah, so probably the biggest, hardest change was—In the first draft, the novel opens much later in the story compared to the novel as published. And, at that point, I was going for a kind of Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark-style opening because that’s another touchstone for this work, as well as something like the 1999 Brendan Fraser-Rachel Weisz The Mummy movies. [31:09] K: It’s funny because I remember when I got this manuscript and I was talking to our publisher, Colin, he said, “What do you think?” I said, “It’s The Mummy set in space with elements of Guardians of the Galaxy,” but mostly I said it’s The Mummy in space. If that doesn’t sell a book, I don’t know what will. M: Yeah, and that Rick and Evy relationship, especially in the second Mummy movie was another big touchstone in terms of, like, they have their own things, they are committed to each other, they’re on adventures— R: But they have their own styles. Yeah. M: Yeah, but I have this opening for the book. And one, the first draft came out pretty short because often will draft short and a book will grow in revision because my earlier drafts tend to be a lot more, “Okay, cool. Action, action. World, World. Action, action, action.” And then I go back and unpack things. And, moving forward, I’m hoping that my first drafts will have a little bit more character and breadth and space in them and that in revision I’ll just build on that, as opposed to having to do quite so much work to unpack it. So there’s—In several different cultures across the world, there’s a mythology that the Universe started as two lovers embraced and that that’s the whole of physical space and that then something or some people push them apart to create the gap between the Earth and the sky. And so I’m trying to make it so that my novels are not that process so much, and that they start out with a bit more room to breathe, so that both the characters can breathe and that the reader can have the space to feel all those emotions as powerfully because they’ve taken the time to ruminate on them, versus just, “Here’s a flashy scene! And here’s some people! And they have distinctive characteristics and now they’re gonna be action figures through a space!” I want to do more and dwell more with those characters. And part of that’s inspired by reading a lot more romance novels. Where, in romance, the best writers will do a great job of unpacking emotional reactions. So, I have this one start of the novel and I knew that I needed to set things up better, and I wanted a kind of broader story, so that involved moving the clock back within this timeline which also then gave me the opportunity to ground the characters more in their home away from home, in this colony ship that turned city in space called The Wreck. So what if you took a colony ship with a dozen species and they all loaded up this big ship and they had all of their hopes and dreams and they set off and then something goes really wrong and it crashes into some asteroid somewhere. And they absolutely cannot get going again. I really liked that setting, I just kind of played through it in the original draft. So, in the revision, I was able to say, “Okay, here are the things I like about this, and now I wanna do more with them.” And that was also when I was able to kind of graduate Wheel into more of an equal POV character, in the way that she is tied to this place. And that they, the three of them, Max, Lahra, and Wheel are caught up in this net of relationships and factions. So it was a lot of forcing myself to kind of put my money where my mouth was about: here are things I like in writing, here are things I like in storytelling. I’m gonna push myself to dig deeper, to put the world on display more, to put my characters under pressure along several different axes that then makes it more realistic within the narrative. That they make the choices that they’re making as the story unfolds, so that at any given moment, they’re stuck between some bad options and they try to make the best opportunity for themselves. Whereas, previously, the reason why they went and did the things that they did, in the earlier drafts, were a little bit more because it’s what I wanted from them, and less because it was the only thing that made sense for who they were as characters and what their relationships were at the time. So it was a lot of raising the stakes, but not in a grimdark fashion. Stakes and the degree to which the characters were enmeshed in the world and were both affected by it and agents effecting it. R: I want to call attention to what you said, though, about as you expand your draft, you are not adding density to all the spots that you’re expanding, just for the sake of making it longer. But that you actually are going to this with such intent that you are actually creating space, not creating more. You didn’t double the action and then double the tension. You created a space that gave all the characters more room to become alive. So I just thought I’d draw attention to that because so often we talk about, “Oh, yes, in revision my book doubles in length,” but we don’t often say what that content is. K: Well you can double in length and more than double in substance. R: Oh yeah, yeah. K: I think that’s a trap a lot of writers fall into where: I just need to add and add and add, and then at some point someone is gonna tell me, “Yes, you have enough here.” And it’s less about it being enough and more about it being efficient and effective. M: Right, yeah, because there’s nothing about Storytelling that says, “Ah, sorry, this is only 70,000 words, it’s not a story yet.” K: Yeah, and if somebody’s telling you that, don’t listen to that person. That’s not— M: Yeah, and it’s—We’re in a position now, in the industry, where you can publish shorter work and there’s still a chance to find an audience. And any given publisher has their own model that they’re operating within. If you’re selling paper books, there’s kind of a minimum word count that will give you a spine that you can put text on. Those physical realities inform book publishing to a certain degree, but I was already playing within the novel space that was like, “Oh, well if I do more and I’m thoughtful—” It’s not that the book is 30 percent better because it’s 30 percent longer, that’s not the equation that we’re talking about. There is more space for the character relationships, for those relationships to inform the action, for there to be an arc of how these people relate to each other and the ways that they are or are not invested in different things. So that, then, when I’m doing the big space opera finale, the reader feels like they’ve gone through the flow and the rise and fall of these characters, that the decisions they make there are both believable and kind of a natural catharsis for what the characters have gone through before. So that you get the reader, like, punch-the-fist-in-the-air experience when the character does the big thing. R: So it’s not just about getting to 100,000 words and stopping. M: Yeah. R: Yeah. K: I will say that, at Parvus, we have, for submissions, a 60,000 word minimum, but that’s because we publish novels and, sure, you can make an argument for some novels that are a little bit below there, but, as Mike said, there’s a certain point where you say, “I need this many words in order for this to be a book that I can have a spine and put the title on.” That said, there’s no reason to restrict yourself to a word count. If you have a great story and it’s 40,000 words, there are places that are looking for great stories that are 40,000 words. R: Yeah. The only question is what category of the awards do you have your dreams set on, you know? But yeah, tell the story at the length that the story wants to be told. And if you want to explore more ideas, then the story gets a little longer. So, Mike, while you were expanding the story, how much of the relationship between Max and Lahra changed? I mean, you already said that you wanted them to have an established, committed relationship, but how fraught with tension did you want that to be? Like you said one of your inspirations was Guardians of the Galaxy, but Max is as far from Peter Quill as you can get, so what’s—how did that develop? M: Yeah, I think Max as a character much more emerged from—the idea that I had was, what if you had the couple from The Mummy but you flipped the genders? R: Mhm. K: Yup. M: So you have the fighty, square-jawed character is the wife and the, kind of, not-so-useful in a fight, academic who’s not as used to jumping around in the world, is the husband. And that’s really where it starts because they diverge pretty far from just those two because I wanted to figure out how to have the fish-out-of-water character work. Like, Max is from Earth and this is Very Far from Earth. [K laughs] And drawing on that tradition of John Carter or of Farscape. There was a lot. It’s portal fantasy, but science fiction. Ultimately. R: Yeah. [41:05] M: And how much it is portal fantasy can depend on how much being from Earth matters. The amount that being from Earth mattered, for Max, kind of increased over time, especially as I was really doubling-down on who Max was. Because Max is a Black guy from Baltimore so he grew up in a specific economic and political and cultural context, but then he’s the one who gets flung into a distant galaxy. Whereas racism doesn’t work the same way there and that’s not the main thing because that’s not my story to tell, as a white writer, but I was committed to respecting who Max is, as a person, and so I was able to build some things around him. So what that became is that Max was already used to code switching between different cultural registers, and then here we have this multicultural civilization that is multicultural and multispecies and that, as an archaeologist and linguist, that was his superpower is being able to pick up language and study and understand culture. So, already, he’s really far from Peter Quill, who’s much more like a John Carter type of character, who is almost more in the Western tradition. R: He just shoulders his way through every situation. K: I was gonna say like a bull in a china shop. Just, you know, dropped in and is going to behave and do the same thing no matter where they are and who’s around them. R: Yeah, definitely no code switching from Peter Quill. M: Yeah, and then in thinking about who each Max and Lahra were, I had to be smarter and more thorough about who the other were because I needed to have a sense of how they interacted with each other. Like, what does Lahra do when Max is at his workstation for hours and hours and hours poring through manuscripts and trying to translate things? Like, does she just leave him to do his own thing? Does she hang out with him? What would make sense? Because she’s a bodyguard, she grew up in this cultural paradigm from her mother that was very much about a dyadic relationship, but between charge and guardian. Well, how does that inform who she is as a partner in a relationship? She’s more likely to be the kind of partner who would hang out with you while you’re doing your thing to make it clear to you that she’s supporting what you’re doing, but she’s not like— R: Invading it. M: She’s not invading it, she’s not making it a thing that has to be about both of them. Okay, well, then how does Max react when Lahra is really upset about something? He’s more likely to be the person who wants to talk it out, but they’ve been together for long enough that he realizes that some of the things that he wants to do are not actually what Lahra needs, as a person. Because I’m writing this relationship between people who are adults and they’ve lived enough life and they’ve spent enough time with each other that they’ve come to understand one another’s rhythms. Writing that part of the relationship was really rewarding because I got to show the way that I can write in Max’s POV and characterize Lahra, while characterizing Max. Because then I can write in Lahra’s POV about Max, through her own POV and the places where how they see each other don’t exactly line up. Then tell the reader that these are both unreliable narratives because this is tight third person, which has enough overlap with first person that you’re gonna get some of that unreliability. And you understand more of what that relationship needs by getting both of the two, each of their buy-in. In terms of where they see themselves, where they see their partner, where they have doubts and fears, and how that manifests in the way that they act and how it does and doesn’t manifest in how the other person sees them. Because I don’t write the same scene from both POVs, but I do frequently write the sequel to a scene in the other partner’s POV. So that they’re reacting to the same stuff. K: But, beyond even just Max and Lahra, then, we have Wheel. Who is, I won’t call her a third-party observer because that’s not the case, but is an outside perspective on a relationship and, inm any cases, the only outside perspective on a relationship. M: Yeah, and she doesn’t have access to their interiority. Every relationship is different on the inside, even if you’re living with somebody else. You know, because maybe you overhear conversations, but you’re not having that same emotional experience. And so that was a little bit more of a place where I got to comment on the relationship from the outside, but also think about times where I have been the third wheel friend to a couple when they’re going through something. And Wheel is also very fun to write because she has a firmly developed self-image that is, to a certain degree, a protection against the way that things are. So she’s more of the curmudgeon character who makes a show of keeping people at arm’s length, but she could have kicked them out of the ship years ago and be doing something else. But she didn’t. Why is that? And she’s tied into other factions in the story and that tie also came later, because Wheel started out as more just, like, the Driver will get you from A to B. Then it’s like, how does this technology work? Well, we’ve got these cyborgs and if they used to be an empire, why aren’t they in charge? Well, how are they still around? If you get overthrown, the people who overthrow you are going to try to keep you out of power as much as possible. K, punny: Annihilate you, if you will. [R giggles] M: Yeah, so all of those worldbuilding questions, then, informed who the Atlan, Wheel’s people, who those people were. The cybernetics gives them the ability to engage with the warp drives, which is a little bit like how the Spice works in Dune, it’s a little bit like this, it’s a little bit like that. And that every time I went back into Wheel to either talk about how she’s seeing something else, or her position in this setting, engaging with factions on the Wreck or her own history as an even older, mature adult who’s been places and had relationships, every time I tried to fold in or think about some other topic, she grew more rounded as a person. That gave her even more different ways of engaging with Max and Lahra as characters. K: Was there any evolution to Max and Lahra’s relationship? Did anything change as the story grew? Or did you always see them as two characters who love each other and are very happily married, but also have separate lives and separate goals that they’re working towards, and they’re going to help each other do this no matter what, but the more they help each other, the more they’re driving themselves apart? M: I think the only time when I really had doubts about Max and Lahra was while I was writing the first draft because I had this premise and, following the fiction, I wanted to honor it enough to let there be the opportunity for maybe things to go bad for them. I, as a creator, had a specific type of outcome that I was shooting for, but I didn’t want to put my thumb on the scale so hard that I’m like, “Oh well! It doesn’t matter that these things happened, actually it’s gonna be Happily Ever After no matter what. Haha, I win.” Because that wouldn’t be, it wouldn’t be as strong of a work. It would feel like there was a cop-out. So, because I had an outcome in mind, it was more about what in the world has to be different from where things were, maybe, at the middle of my first draft so that it made sense. That the choices that they made led them to where they were at the end of the book. Probably the biggest changes there happened when the group goes to someplace that’s really important to Lahra and her heritage. I’ll stay vague for readers so that they go and buy the book and read it! Because it’s great! K: It’s a fantastic book. Everyone should go buy it and read it. M: And then, basically, since I believe very firmly that people are informed by their circumstances, but not always 100 percent limited by them—there’s places where agency is limited in society and so on— K: Mhm, yep. M: But that, because people are informed by their circumstances, if I want a different character output, I can change the circumstances to put different pressures on them and to give them different experiences that let them reflect differently on what they feel about things. So it was kind of a feedback loop between who these characters are as I’m expressing it in the writing, trying to respect who they are as people, as I understand them, and then also applying different pressures and adjusting the pressures on them so that the story stays within the trajectory that I’m thinking. Because probably the first core of the story was them and their relationship, and other things kind of grew around that. And then the thematics emerged from how they, as characters, reacted with one another and then, looking backward, how all those things operate. So that any thematic clarity that a reader gets from Aria is not something that was on page one of my notes. [51:07] M: It’s because the process of creating it as the book people will read was development rehearsal practice, re-rehearsal, changing the arrangement, practicing again, changing the blocking. I’m using music metaphors here because I’ve done music and theater. Not only is the story entertaining, but it’s also, as much as possible, saying the things that I would like to say, or inviting the reader to reflect on the same themes and ideas that were what I was hoping for them to do. Because, and this is something I’ve talked about with Kaelyn pretty early on in the process was, this could have been several different books. K: It’s, and it’s something—I always joke that when I’m reading through books I can tell what sections of it were written at the same time. Authors, you guys aren’t always as slick as you think you are. You leave fingerprints on a lot of things. That was something coming into this, that I could tell what chunks of this book had kind of been written at the start, what parts had been revised very heavily, but we spent a lot of time in the beginning talking about the thematic elements of this. But also, as you said, this book could have gone a lot of different directions. I think it went, I will go so far as to say, the correct direction. The, one of the best possible directions it could have gone. But I can see that in reading this, especially reading some of the earlier drafts that I got. There were a lot of different things that could have happened in this story and happened to these characters. I think that speaks very highly of your worldbuilding and your ability to create and develop believable characters, is that I can see them dropped into different scenarios and just acting on their own accord. They’re an object in motion at that point, rather than something that you’re directing to do certain things. And that’s amazing. That’s a fantastic thing to be able to do as a writer. M: Yeah, another way of thinking about it—and this is definitely informed by a video I was watching recently, a conversation between a couple of game designers—is that some of it is just down to tone. K: Yes. M: Two musicians can take the same song and go—one musician says, “Okay, cool, I’m going for the same tone but I’m gonna move the key.” Just moving the key actually changes more than you expect. It’s the moody, emo down-tempo version of a pop song? R: Yup. K: I was just gonna say, actually, I just discovered a cover of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” by Tori Amos which is—actually I discovered it because it was on one of Rekka’s playlists that she sent me and it’s fantastic. But it completely changes what you would maybe think the underlying context of the song would be. So yeah, I think, as I said when we started all of this, I would read anything that you set in this world. Especially if the characters are as engaging and compelling and dynamic as the ones that you’ve created for Aria because I see them as their own people rather than chess pieces being moved around on a board. They’re there to carry out actions that it doesn’t always feel like you, the author, are dictating to them. They’ve taken on a will of their own at this point. M: And that is for the best because if they’re—on a list of writing traps that I know I can fall into, having something that feels a little bit more like action figures and choreography is definitely on that list. And so I have to respect the characters and go back and make sure that all of the circumstances and the worldbuilding acoustics, maybe?—to extend the music metaphor—that those line up so that things end up the way that I would like them to be. K: So, along those lines, and we’re getting to the end here to start wrapping up, we like to ask our guests for advice or introspective or something you wish you could go back and tell Mike five years ago, when he was starting this whole process. M: I’ve been working as a writer, now, long enough that 5 years ago is not the start of my career. Because it used to be, people would ask me, “What would you tell a younger self?” and it used to be about revision and what I learned about revision from the late, great Graham Joyce and Clarion West. But that was a lesson I learned 13 years ago now. So I think the lesson for 5 years ago Mike would be: start reading romance, you’re gonna really like it and it’s gonna teach you a lot about character relationships and getting drama and emotional investment for the reader out of just the very core relationships between people. In a romance, people are also emergent from their circumstances and there’s lots of things you can do there, but that emotional action flywheel of Person A does a thing, you’re in Person B’s POV, so Person B first has a visceral, embodied reaction to what, to the emotionally-charged thing that was said, and then we’re in their perspective and their mind is racing and reflecting on something and, maybe, they’re going through an emotional journey about what’s going on. Maybe it makes them think about something, but not so long that you can’t then go back into scene and write about what they’re doing in reaction so that you’re able to kind of create this cycle of action and reaction, where it’s not just talking heads but we’re also getting all of this beat-by-beat dramatization of the emotional arc, the emotional rollercoaster of your POV character along the way. And that approach was a lot of what I had to bring to Aria in successive drafts, especially as Kaelyn kept on poking me and saying like, “No! Unpack this more! Slow down!” Either to give the emotional rollercoaster or to paint with a finer brush the world around the characters. And that that process and that urging to slow down and unpack has been really great, it’s been fun to do. So it’s not like I’m being told I have to eat my vegetables, it’s—give yourself the situation and the platform on which you can then do these things that you really like doing, and you’re gonna be happier with the results. K: I think, in my experience dealing with authors, there’s what I’ll call an overcorrection that writers tend to incorporate into their work, which is: I don’t wanna be the long-winded person here. I don’t wanna be the one that spends a paragraph describing the exact emotion that this character is feeling for 150 words. And there is certainly something to be said for being aware of that, but at the same time, I conversely always point out: you know how they’re feeling, you know what they’re thinking. You need to make sure that’s coming across to the reader. The reader doesn’t get access to your brain for this, they get access to the pieces of it that you’re putting in this book. So, yeah. And part of it was very selfish. Part of this was: Well, hang on, I wanna know what’s going on here! Mike! Tell me! So it’s a—I really liked learning more about these characters as the book developed and I think you did an outstanding job. M: That’s a very kind sentiment and I’m very grateful that you had that experience. Because that makes me feel very good as a writer. R: What I also love about it is that you have put in all this work for character-building and worldbuilding, but the book reads as fast as any omnomnommable sci-fi book out there. It does not get burdened with—as much work as you put into it, it doesn’t show. You have seamless story going on. Even though Kaelyn can tell which spots you rewrote, no one who picks up this book— K: I’ll never tell! R: That’s Kaelyn’s superpower, that’s not indicative of what you’re going to feel as you read it. But it’s very fast-paced and, as you said, you worked very hard on the tension and it shows. It pulls the reader straight from the beginning to the end and it definitely leaves you wanting more, so I hope that the space opera series is going to continue for quite some time because whether it’s Max and Lahra and Wheel or, you know, Kruji getting their own book. I’d read them all. K: Kruji absolutely needs their own book. The entire story of Annihilation Aria from the perspective of Kruji. M: Well, I’ll write some books. And then twelve years after the series ends, I’ll come back and do the Kruji book. Because I’ve started a number of different series and the heartbreaking thing about publishing is it’s— K, laughing: There’s only one! M: It’s hard to justify writing something when I don’t see a market for it. K: Yeah. M: And so there are things that I would love to go back to, but right now the economic reality says, “Why would you do that? That’s a terrible idea!” So what I’m hoping for, with any given new series, is I hope that this finds enough of an audience that there is the demand to create the economic circumstances that will let me pursue that interest more. Because only now in the novel I just wrote, have I written something that I think actually could stay a stand alone. Everything else, I’m writing a world that I think I could do a lot more things in. I could do more things in this just finished novel’s world, but I want that novel to be able to stand on its own. For the space operas, I would love to write more, and I will write more if the circumstances permit. K: Yeah, it’s a very difficult thing for, not just writers but creators in general, to say: I am making this and it is a finite project that is done now. R: Well you spend all that time living in that world! K: Exactly, yeah. R: And so you see all the corners where you’re like, “Oh! There’s someone down there. I gotta go follow that after I’m done with this.” M: Yeah. K: For instance, Kruji, who I feel like has a lot of very important stories to tell. Some perspectives and insights to offer the reader that is really going to enrich the story of the Kettle. So, uh, that’s— M: Smart readers will be able to pick up some of the places where that could go in some chunks of the novel. And if you figure it out, email me on my website. K: So, yes! Speaking of, Annihilation Aria is out a week from today! You still have time to pre-order the book and the audiobook, as well, is available for purchase. Mike, where can people find you online? M: Sure, so my website is michaelrunderwood.com, that has kind of basic updates. I have a Patreon that you can find at Patreon.com/michaelrunderwood— K: And it comes with a lot of pictures of a cute dog. Very cute dog. Highly recommend. M: My dog, Oreo, is really the star of my Patreon and that’s fine. I know how the internet works. [K laughs] R, laughing: Yeah. Give the people what they want. M: And if you’re listening to this, you like podcasts so I am an occasional guest-co-host on the Skiffy and Fanty show which is a general fannish podcast about books and movies and TV and so on. And I am a co-host on Speculate which is an actual play podcast starring science fiction-fantasy professionals. As of this recording, we’ve started a Blades in the Dark miniseries, I’m gonna start a Star Wars miniseries using the Scum and Villainy system and, sometime in the future, there may be some roleplaying in a world that listeners of this episode will now be familiar with. But more will come on that later on. R: Hm. K: That’s a nice teaser there. Okay. Well, Mike, thanks so much for talking to us. This was great! I mean, for as much as I’ve already gotten to hear about this, I never get tired of talking about this book and the characters and the process to get it to where it was. M: Yeah, thank you very much. Because it’s written over such a long time, I am still processing all of the lessons and things. Like, “Oh! That really did take this thing!” or “This is where that actually comes from!” So that process, just by itself, is really rewarding for me and it’s fun to get to—to participate in this show that I have enjoyed as a listener. R: Well thank you for that. K: Thank you! Alright, well thanks again, Mike, and everyone for listening. We’ll talk to you in two weeks! [outro music plays] R: Thanks everyone for joining us for another episode of We Make Books. If you have any questions that you want answered in future episodes, or just have questions in general, remember you can find us on Twitter @wmbcast, same for Instagram. Or wmbcast.com! 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!
Veteran SFF authors, Mike Underwood, Adam Rakunas, and Patrick Tomlinson talk to Jay and Richard about their research and worldbuilding processes.
Michael R. Underwood talked to Jay and Richard about the best ways to help your book stand out in the modern book marketplace.
Retired Boatswain’s Mate First Class Mike Underwood talks leading a boat crew into 30 foot seas, 80 knot winds, and dense fog to rescue those aboard a burning tug and barge in a case that earned him the Coast Guard Medal, running jet drive lifeboats across the Chatham bar, and the leadership lessons gained from his time as command cadre. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/theyhadtogoout/support
2-16-2020 AM Sunday Service
Commercial Property Finance - Products, Structure and Strategy
Please note: with the market changing so quickly due to the current Covid-19 Pandemic, the content could be out of date at the time of listening. Bridging Vat are a specialist lender advancing short terms loans for the VAT due on commercial property purchases. Managed by Chartered Accountants and Debt Advisory professionals with an in depth knowledge of the UK property sector, we are able to provide a unique level of expertise in both the funding and recovery of VAT. Since inception, Bridging Vat have developed a turnkey finance solution for property developers, providing the funding of the VAT requirement and pro-active management of the recovery with HMRC; this solution provides a hands-off service for our clients, allowing them to retain capital and liquidity throughout the purchase process. As a principal lender, Bridging Vat are able to respond quickly to client’s needs with in-house underwriting and decision making. Funds can be advanced in line with time critical completion schedules. Mike has been working within the property sector since 1994. Having worked for major international commercial developers, distributing and selling over £100 million of properties, Mike then moved into development finance. Initially structuring and distributing asset backed securities for a number of funds. As Sales Director of Bridging Vat, Mike is responsible for managing and assisting our growing base of broker intermediaries, as well as working closely with property developers on their VAT loan requirements. Email - michael@thepropertyfinanceguy.co.uk Telephone - 07951 802602 https://www.facebook.com/thepropertyfinanceguy/ www.thepropertyfinanceguy.co.uk Please email me any questions, that you may have, and I will endeavour to answer them on the next podcast. Please also let me know if there is anyone that you would like me to interview, or if you would like to be interviewed yourself on the podcast. These podcasts are not to be used in place of financial advice. You must take independent financial advice from a qualified independent financial advisor. These podcasts are for information purposes only
In this episode we release the second slate of interviews conducted during the 2018 Nebulas. This episode includes: Peter Beagle, James Patrick Kelly, Susan Forest, Mike Underwood, PJ Manney, and Pablo Vazquez. We discuss SFF community and fandom, the publishing industry, the importance of short fiction, and many other topics. You can find everything here: Peter Beagle: http://www.peterbeagle.com/ James Patrick Kelly: http://www.jimkelly.net/ Susan Forest: http://speculative-fiction.ca/ Mike Underwood: http://michaelrunderwood.com/ PJ Manney: https://www.pjmanney.com/ Pablo Vazquez: https://about.me/pabloma
Superheroes, and evil cupcakes, oh my! Trish Matson and Mike Underwood join forces to explore Sarah Kuhn's Heroine Complex. They discuss Kuhn's approach to action and humor, the novel's rich relationships, and even a little bit of Hamilton! We hope you enjoy the episode! Note: If you have iTunes and like this show, please give us a review […]
United Nations shenanigans, tragic villains, and Black Panther, oh my! In our 45th episode of the Shoot the WISB Subcast, Mike Underwood, Jen Zink, Paul Weimer, and Shaun Duke join forces to combat Marvel's latest entry in the MCU, Captain America: Civil War. We cover the plot, some of the unique thematic elements in this film, […]
This episode is all me talking about what it was like to create and host Cabbages & Kings in 2015. Lots of gratitude for my listeners, identifying areas for improvement, and thinking about what might happen in 2016. No discussion of books. I talked about my reading in 2015 over on The Three Hoarsemen podcast.A few links:Discussing The Fifth Season with Troy & Khaalidah (and Troy's first appearance)Discussing Ancillary Justice with Ethan (pt. 1, pt. 2)Folklore with Mike UnderwoodComics with ParrishMiddle-Aged Women Aren't Coming of Age and a much better Rocket Talk episode with a similar premiseFangirl Happy Hour podcastGalactic Suburbia PodcastOut on a Wire (radio storytelling)Pilot (podcast of possible-podcast episodes)Cooode St. PodcastMy roundup of lots of podcasts I've listened toVision StatementContact Page (be a guest!)Wisdom of the CrowdsEpisode & Guest indexHalf-Dark PromiseEyes I Dare Not Meet In Dreams (LadyBusiness Review)A not-quite-transcript is below. These are the notes I read and occasionally ad-libbed:Navel Gazing 2015Here’s a year-end wrap up podcast. This isn’t about my reading. I did an episode of the Three Hoarsemen where I talked about that. Short version - I adored Grace of Kings, Fifth Season, Black Wolves & Sorceror of the Wildeeps, while being able to see flaws in a couple of them. This is a podcast where I look back at what Cabbages & Kings is and where I’d like to go in 2016. What I’m trying to do, what I’ve done so far, what went well & poorly, and where the show might go in the future. If you don’t want that episode, bail out now, and I’ll be back in 2016 with plenty of new episodes where I talk about books and stories.OK - What am I trying to doWhat went really wellWhere is there room for improvementWhat cool stuff could I do with a podcast in the future?What am I trying to doI started Cabbages & Kings on the theory that there are a lot of science fiction & fantasy podcasts out there, but there’s a kind of disappointing sameness that I felt left a hole for (among other things) a show that focused readers talking to readers about books, with minimal chit-chat and an editor at the least cutting out fumbles and uhms. And I figured I could make that.It’s worth saying right here that this isn’t either unique or necessarily a “better” format than others. Friends hanging out talking about what they love is basically a genre in and out of science fiction and fantasy: look at For Colored Nerds, Fan Bros Show, or the Accidental Tech Podcast. In the genre space, I love inviting the ladies of Fangirl Happy Hour and Galactic Suburbia and the Gentlemen of The Three Hoarsemen into my ears every few weeks just to sit & converse for a while. Arguably Cooode St. is a similar format podcast. I think the best Writing Excuses episodes are not only tighter than Cabbages & Kings, but usually inspiring and insightful even listening as just a reader. I know that Sword and Laser has created a community around their reading experience, and I think Mahvesh Murad is a fascinating interviewer whether or not I’ve heard of the author she’s got on. I’m also periodically reminded how many podcasts there are out there that I don’t know about. So Cabbages & Kings isn’t an attempt to be the “best” science fiction and fantasy podcast out there, just fill a hole I saw.According to my slightly more aspirational vision statement: Cabbages & Kings is an attempt to create exactly the podcast that I want to listen to. I want a podcast that makes science fiction and fantasy readers smile, pump their fists in recognition, and pause to consider a new idea. I want an excuse to work out ideas that are in my head and to interview a diverse group of other thoughtful readers. Cabbages & Kings is my attempt to contribute to the speculative fiction conversation in the format that I love the most. With Cabbages & Kings I hope to focus on books and stories that I love to read, and the experiences and reactions of other readers. All of this in under 30 minutes per episode, ending with a nostalgic look back at a favorite book.So, basically - I hate blogging because I get bogged down when trying to write words. I want to put a focus on the reading experience that readers have, and I’d like to talk about books in a way that can both gush about what we love and also apply a critical eye. I’ve found that the critical reading I like the most teaches me something about how to approach any new book or media, and I hoped to create some of that.What went really well?I’m going to take a moment to cheer for a moment! I put out 22 episodes in the 34 weeks between May 13 and the end of the year, not counting this one. That’s pretty cool!I really, really enjoyed having Ethan on to talk about Ancillary Justice - I think we got at elements of the ways Artificial Intelligence and Identity are handled that I didn’t see discussed very many places, but apparently there’s a philosophy class using Ancillary Justice to talk about those very topics, so clearly we (by which I mean Ethan) saw something interesting there.Troy Wiggins has been on twice - the podcast that we did with Khaalidah on The Fifth Season was a highlight of this year, and certainly in the first few months, our discussion of his history with the genre was one of my favorite episodes.Talking Short Stories with Nick Mamatas was great, and the discussion of folklore with Mike Underwood was fun to do & seemed to touch a few people when it came out.I was expecting to enjoy having fun & interesting people come on the podcast to talk about books. I was not expecting just how enjoyable it would be. Podcast recording evenings are some of my favorites. Getting a message out of the blue from Maureen Speller (who’s writing in Strange Horizons I’d recently discovered) letting me know very politely that I’d missed the point of the Buried Giant (which I confessed to at the time) and could we talk about it led to an almost two hour conversation, two of my favorite episodes, and a deeper appreciation of the book which is really the point of so much of this! You may have mixed feelings about the endless discussions of Grace of Kings, but for me, sorting out my thoughts about the book has been delightful. Plus I got to actually talk to Kate Elliott about the book (episode to come), and will hopefully get a chance to go over some of the themes with Ken Liu once I’ve finally put out the whole series of deep dives. So anyone out there thinking of starting a podcast - you get an excuse to ask your heroes and/or the smartest people you know to talk about your favorite topics for a while. It’s pretty awesome.Where is there room for improvement?So - I’ve put out some episodes I’m really proud of. I’ve gotten to have the thrilling experience of talking about fascinating topics & books with amazing people. Have I emphasized enough just how cool that it? It’s awesome!There’s something Tobias Buckell said a while ago on Twitter that I keep going back to (and I’m quoting from memory here, so hopefully getting the spirit if not the words) - that he hopes to be able to look back at his writing from 6 months ago and see flaws in it. That’s a sign he’s improving as an author. I haven’t listened back to many early episodes, but even week to week I find that when I listen back to the episode, I can usually see room for improvement. I tend to think about four areas where the show can get better. One is guests & topics which I’ll talk about more in a minute, but three are basically production related:First, there’s the actual interview. Do I hear my guest. Am I giving them space to talk & gather their ideas when that’s what’s needed. Can I listen and follow up on an interesting track. If there’s something *I* don’t understand, can I push them to be more clear? Notably, I had my mom to talk about middle-aged women as protagonists early on and was so invested in how *I* read (looking at worldbuilding and seeing the protagonist as an opportunity to reveal that world to the reader) that I didn’t really do a great job with the interview. (I’ll note that there’s a Rocket Talk episode with Kate Elliott & Emma Newman that touches on middle-aged women in genre stories which is worth listening to and which touches on some of the same topics). Listening back to the Ancillary Justice episode, I also didn’t really follow up on the most interesting things Ethan was saying. Live & Learn. I don’t think I’ve done a really a great job on any interviews yet, but I have at least learned to pause when I’m uncomfortable or confused & pursue a better line, or keep the guest talking. Editing afterwards ... Luxury! Luxury!Quick aside - in the Three Hoarsemen episode I was on at the end of the year with Andrea Phillips, the guys and Andrea did a really good job of pulling back threads that had been mentioned earlier and either building on them or questioning the premise. They heard each other, applied those statements to their experiences, and looked for common ground or interesting differences. It’s a skill or an art or something that I’m still learning the knack of, but at least I hear it sometimes now.Fine, so I’ve got an interview. How do I present it to you listeners? I’m not good at sticking to a time limit during the interview, so I’ve often got over an hour of audio that I’d like to turn into a 30 minute episode (which is about 28 minutes of content, and usually the significant book at the end chew up 1 to 3 minutes). I’ve been working on putting together a story structure. That was there in the first of the two Buried Giant Episodes as well as the comics episode that just went up. Ideally, I’m able to set up the interview with a story of who the guest is, what we’re going to talk about, and what the story of the interview is. Something like: After mostly reading prose fiction, I tried out a comic, and the experience was Exciting! and there were some similarities in the experience but there were important differences between the two media! This, ideally, gives you a hook to tell you why you care about the episode & what you’re listening for. I’m cribbing here extensively from a pretty neat podcast that Jessica Abel is putting out to support her book Out on the Wire: Storytelling Secrets of the Modern Masters of Radio, which has been really helpful in thinking about how to put out a podcast. Brief aside - the terrifying thing about doing heavyhanded editing is that I’m taking the words of someone I was talking to and trying very hard to understand and elicit responses from, and then I’m rearranging those words. And that means there’s the possibility that I’m misrepresenting them. Or missing something they thought was really important that I thought was less important. That’s already happened once (fortunately the guest took an early listen, something I offer everyone who comes on and suggested a couple tweaks), but if the best unanticipated surprise is the sheer joy I’m getting from having an excuse to sit & talk books with amazing people, the scariest unanticipated piece of this is taking other people’s words in my hands and doing something with them.So, thing 1 that I can still improve (that sounds so much better than stuff I’m often sucking at) is getting an interesting interview with my guest. Thing 2 is shaping the audio I’ve got into a story that’ll keep you engaged and set up the key moments or insights from the story.Thing 3 is actual post production audio. Making sure that things aren’t TOO LOUD or *too soft* and that the guest and I sound similar and transitions aren’t really ragged and all of the other stuff that you can do to work with audio to make it sound good. Despite growing up on NPR, Cabbages and Kings is never going to be something like Radiolab. I know I’ve had some moments that sound pretty awful, though. The Eye of the Tiger corny audio experiment was … a corny experiment. Was it awful? I only discovered compression (which helps make soft stuff louder and loud stuff softer) recently - before that I was balancing every second or two manually and that led to some really weird volume shifts. Truncate silence has also been a good tool to learn. I’m pretty sure I’ve still got a lot to learn about audio production. Problem is my preferred podcast client (shout out to Overcast!) does some silence truncating and audio leveling, plus I listen at about 1-and-a-quarter-speed (there are way too many great podcasts out there - 59 unlistened-to-episodes at last count.So, good audio? Bad audio? I probably couldn’t tell you. I am going to order a pop filter, though. And hopefully in 2016 the basic “two or more people are talking to each other and it should sound like they are having a conversation without distracting background noise and plosives” will get better. If anyone has advice on the technical aspects of getting better audio, please, please let me know.OK, so, there are the three pieces of “interviewing people”, “making you the listener care about the interview” and “making the actual sounds good”. All of those can be improved. I’m pretty sure I have improved all of these since the early episodes, and still has a way to go.Now let’s talk a bit about who comes on the show and what we talk about. I’m a pretty firm believer that the conversation is richer and better when many people from many backgrounds are talking. Episode 16 includes a bunch of us talking about how we got into science fiction & fantasy and making fun of my notion that reading Tolkien and then a bunch of Tolkien-clones from the 80s and 90s is the cliched way to engage with the genre. (Show notes will be full of links if you want to follow any rabbit holes). “Diversity” is sometimes a buzzword that hides as much as it obscures, but looking especially over time at the race, gender, and other backgrounds of the people I have on, as well as the topics we’ve chosen can be illuminating. So lets look back at the year:In 2015, I put out 22 episodes before this one. Two solo episodes & twenty with guests. Ethan, AFishtrap, Troy, and Maureen were all on twice.So 16 guests. 8 guys, 8 women. No one who identifies as genderqueer as far as I know.4 who weren’t white, and they were all black and american3 guests not in the US - one Canadian, one British, one american living in GermanyOne thing I’m trying to do is get out of my usual Twitter book discussion bubble. 6 Guests didn’t come on because I follow & chat with them about books on Twitter, though some of them are part of many of the same conversations I am.That gender parity was actually a pleasant surprise. All of the other numbers make we want to have a show that pushes to talk to more people outside the US, outside my comfortable Twitter bubble, and more people from historically marginalized backgrounds. I’ve got a stake in the ground this year. We’ll see how things change next year.So, what’d we talk about - Broadly speaking, we had some general discussions about reading history and common interests, like worldbuilding with Anna and small presses with Shana, focused discussion on specific topics like Short Fiction with Nick and Folklore with Mike, and then deep dives on specific books - The Fifth Season, Grace of Kings (sorry, there’s going to be more of this next year), Ancillary Justice, and The Buried Giant. These deep dives took up 8 of the 20 episodes with guests. Of the four books we went deep one, 2 were by women and two by men, and Ann Leckie was the only white author. The show right now *feels* to me like it’s heavy on in-depth book discussion, mostly because I let those get out of control and have so much great stuff to run. It’s a bit light on themed discussions, though there have been more of those recently (the discussion of Saga & Comics, Folklore and short fiction). In my head, I’d like to be getting about a third of the episodes to explore a theme or subgenre while referencing a few different exemplars, about a third going deep on a book (hopefully revealing some more universally applicable critical approaches) and about a third a grab bag of other reading experiences, and I don’t think I’m there right now.I’ll note that I interviewed 4 of the 5 white guys who came on the show about an in-depth topic - Nick on Short Stories, Aidan on Cover Art, Mike on Folklore and Carl on Queer Romance in the genre. All of these were really good episodes (in fact, Mike’s folklore episode consistently comes up when I ask people about what they’ve liked), but in contrast to the “general background” discussions with Troy and Akil, or the more back-and-forth dialog on worldbuilding that Anna and I had, there’s a trend that white guys come on to be experts at a thing. That’s something interesting to notice that I’d like not to see when I’m doing next year’s roundup.OK enough navel gazing about who talked about what. What am I thinking about going forward?I have a bunch of interviews done & waiting to be edited. An avalanche-load. A heavy mountain. A wince-inducing pile. It’s a little terrifying. I’m coming close to the sense that I have a process for these interviews - I listen to them, make notes, pick out key quotes, figure out the structure, then piece them back together. This process worked well when talking Saga with Parrish, so hopefully it’ll carry me through this batch & going forward. Content isn’t a problem. Figuring out a schedule I can keep is.So is finding guests. Especially finding guests outside of Twitter, outside the US, outside the usual suspects you might hear elsewhere. Maybe even guests who don’t share my political ideology but do share my love of this genre. I’ve got a lot of room to find interesting people whose voices I’m not hearing right now. If you are one, please let me know - there’s a contact form on the website, or send an email to contact@cabbagesandkings.audio.I’d also like to try an experiment with putting together a show that doesn’t require an interview. Skipping the logistics of getting 2 or 3 people together means a back-and-forth is harder, but there’s less chance of talking over each other and no need to navigate timezones. There’s a new link on the website: cabbagesandkings.audio/wisdom-of-the-crowds with hyphens between all those words (oh just check the show notes), where right now I’ve got a bunch of questions up about Dune because 2016 will be the 51st anniversary of it’s publication so this is the perfect time to do a Dune retrospective. Pick a few questions, answer them by recording your voice in the voice recorder of your choice. Share the audio via email, dropbox link, google drive or whatever else you please, and I may include the audio in an upcoming episode.This doesn’t have to be crystal-clear NPR quality audio. I’d suggest not recording outside in the wind, but talking into a phone headset that you’re not nervously playing with and moving around as I so often do would be fine. If you want to get fancy, real professional NPR reporters cover themselves up with coats or hotel sheets to record on the road. But record the audio & send it in. I’d love to hear what you think of Dune and put together an episode with wisdom gleaned from my listeners.I’m also often without a memory of a treasured book to close an episode, so if you’ve got one of those, let me know.Other experiments that may come - there’s a new show called Pilot where Stephanie Foo of This American Life puts out a single episode of something that *could* turn into a full podcast - a bunch of starter ideas. It got me thinking about what some of the other sounds missing from the genre podcasting sphere might be, so I may be trying a few things, including possibly a week or so of running very short morning bulletins. We’ll see.I’ve toyed with the notion of running reviews on the site. A crazy idea since I mostly don’t understand the point of a review, but I try to remember that “I don’t understand” can be an opportunity to learn, so maybe if I have smart people write & read reviews of books, I’ll get the point. Maybe?I’d kind of like to edit two other people talking about something, so take me the interviewer out of the equation. If you’d be interested in that, let me know.I’d like to be reading more short fiction next year, so maybe I’ll figure out how to incorporate that into the podcast. We’ll see.I’ve been hoping that after 25 or so episodes I’ll at least see a bit of a plateau. It’s comforting to think of Tobias Buckell’s “looking back & seeing room for improvement means I’m getting better”, but right now it also means that I kind of sucked at some aspects of this podcasting gig when I started. Hopefully sometime soonish I’ll have to actually work at getting better because I’ll have swiped the low-hanging fruit of awfulness. Then again, Parrish mentioned something about finding your stride around episode 100, so maybe I have a longer slog ahead of me.Regardless, starting Cabbages and Kings this year has been an incredibly fun and rewarding experience. I’ve had people contact me out of the blue because they liked what I was making & wanted to talk about books. I’ve got an excuse to talk to readers I respect and authors whose books I admire. Apparently people in Australia, Israel, and England all listen to the show, so that’s pretty cool! I have this awesome art of a cabbage with a crown on its head that looks badass and not like a destructive meteor anymore which was draft one. I’m really enjoying this. I’m really enjoying this in large part because every once in a while someone stops by the contact form or twitter to let me know that they’re listening & enjoyed something. I think I’ve only dropped the ball on a guest once, sorry about that. I’d love to hear from you. I’d love to hear what you like about the show. I’d love to hear what I can do better. I’d love to talk to you about this genre. If you’re listening now, you’re either somewhere without access to your podcast player controls, or a pretty dedicated listener, so let me know what I can do better. Next year will hopefully have a look ahead at reading plans, a discussion of representation within the genre, an episode on Uprooted, more Grace of Kings, quite possibly an episode on The Just City if I can bring myself to finish it, and hopefully a whole lot of other things that I can’t anticipate right now. No navel-gazing until the end of next year, though.I’ll close the episode by recommending two short stories. From early this year, Malon Edwards’ Half-Dark Promise in Shimmer magazine, set in an alternate Chicago and a girl with a steam-clock heart who needs to get home through the half-dark. Beautiful voice and use of dialect, and Sunny Moraine’s “Eyes I Dare Not Meet In Dreams” about women who’ve been fridged returning just to watch us. I’m not much of a horror reader, and I don’t know that either of these are really horror stories, but they’re tense, wonderful, and well worth a read. When I dive into short fiction next year, I’m hoping to be able to discover gems like thse on my own.Thanks for listening. Tweet me, email me, rate me on iTunes? Is that something people actually do? Recommend a show that you enjoyed to a friend who reads science fiction. And if I don’t have an episode that friend would like, tell me why not, or tell them to come on the show. Happy 2015, and hoping 2016 will be even better.Thanks!
Welcome to Episode 147 of Speculate! The Podcast for Writers, Readers and Fans. In this episode we begin a brief two-show set on the work of Daniel Polansky, looking at his new novella The Builders, published by Tor.com. Joined by new addition to the team Mike Underwood, we chat about the Redwall meets Unforgiven nostalgia […]
So have you heard about Genrenauts by Mike Underwood, available now from Amazon? If you haven’t, how about Geekomancy, and the Hugo-nominated Skiffy and Fanty Show, or even his previous appearance on my podcast? Anyway, now it’s time to talk about Genrenauts, Mike’s experiment with … Continue reading →
What makes Mike Underwood tick? What did he read when he was a kid? What inspired him to become a member of QUEST and invade the Free Worlds of the Noble and Benevolent Multidimensional Imperium? I try to get to the bottom of some of these questions in an interview with the infamous figure! I […]
47: An Hour With Mike Underwood An Hour With Michael R. Underwood. He has two new books coming out this fall: Hexomancy, the third novel, and fourth entry, in the Ree Reyes Series (Sept 14th) and the first episode of Genrenauts (Nov 17th). That is all. Michael R. Underwood is the author of the Ree Reyes series (starting with Geekomancy) as well as superhero fantasy Shield and Crocus, supernatural thriller The Younger Gods, and Genrenauts, a forthcoming science fiction series in novellas. By day, he’s the North American Sales & Marketing Manager for Angry Robot Books. Mike lives in Baltimore with his fiance and an ever-growing library. In his rapidly-vanishing free time, he plays games of all types and makes pizzas from scratch. He is also a co-host on the Hugo-nominated Skiffy and Fanty Show.
Welcome to Episode 138 of Speculate! The Podcast for Writers, Readers and Fans. In this episode, taped recently at Gen Con, we talk to authors Wesley Chu and Mike Underwood about their experiences in publishing to date and what their personal journeys to publication suggest about the field as a whole–along with […]
Dungeon Crawlers Radio would like to welcome back to the show author, Michael Underwood to talk about his new book Celebromancy the follow up to Geekomancy. Celebromacy Fame has a magic all its own in the no-gossip-barred follow-up to Geekomancy. Ree Reyes gets her big screenwriting break, only to discover just how broken Hollywood actually is. Things are looking up for urban fantasista Ree Reyes. She’s using her love of pop culture to fight monsters and protect her hometown as a Geekomancer, and now a real-live production company is shooting her television pilot script. But nothing is easy in show business. This episode of Dungeon Crawlers Radio has been brought to you by Audible. Visit http://www.audibletrial.com/DungeonCrawlersRadio for a free trial membership*. *Note: From the Audible website, here are the terms of the free membership. Read the fine print, please! Audible® Free Trial Details * Get your first 30 days of the AudibleListener® Gold membership plan free, which includes one credit. In almost all cases, one credit equals one audiobook. After your 30 day trial, your membership will automatically renew each month for just $14.95, billed to the credit card you used when you registered with Audible. With your membership, you will receive one credit per month plus members-only discounts on all audio purchases. If you cancel your membership before your free trial period is up, you will not be charged. Thereafter, cancel anytime, effective the next billing cycle. See the complete terms and policy applicable to Audible memberships.
Dungeon Crawlers Radio is an exciting and unique geekly podcast & “Live” Internet Radio show that focuses on gaming, comics, fantasy & Sci-fi Books, and many more aspects of the world of geek never tackled before. Each week, your hosts Revan, a Guy Named Joe, Flagoon, and Firebird guide you through different aspects of table top gaming, from character creation to adding realization, in ways that you never even considered! With interviews like Tracy Hickman, R.A. Salvatore, Ed Greenwood & more! Grab your cape, hold on to your loot, and get ready to throw down because it's time to listen to Dungeon Crawlers Radio. This episode of DCR has been brought to you by Audible. Visit http://www.audibletrial.com/DungeonCrawlersRadio for a free trial membership*. *Note: From the Audible website, here are the terms of the free membership. Read the fine print, please! Audible® Free Trial Details * Get your first 30 days of the AudibleListener® Gold membership plan free, which includes one credit. In almost all cases, one credit equals one audiobook. After your 30 day trial, your membership will automatically renew each month for just $14.95, billed to the credit card you used when you registered with Audible. With your membership, you will receive one credit per month plus members-only discounts on all audio purchases. If you cancel your membership before your free trial period is up, you will not be charged. Thereafter, cancel anytime, effective the next billing cycle. See the complete terms and policy applicable to Audible memberships.
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