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We are delighted to welcome two wonderful ladies to Hearts of Oak. We have followed the great work of the Vaccine Control Group from the beginning of the Covid chaos, so the founders Rachael and Diny join us to discuss the journey and growth of this assemblage that seeks to show and oppose the lies of the mRNA experimental gene therapy injection. The people originally allocated by the pharmaceutical companies to be part of a control group for the SARS-CoV-2 vaccines, have almost all been vaccinated now meaning that the official, long term control group for the Covid vaccine research no longer exists. In to this gap stepped Rachael and Diny who had a vision to collect the long-term health data of the vax-free from every country, to provide the missing control group to the SARS-CoV-2 vaccinated; thus enabling independent and transparent, comparative analysis of the mass vaccination policy. It has grown exponentially all across the world as it meets and addresses a need, not only does it record the data for the unvaccinated, it also acts as a declaration of your 'pureblood' status and participation in the control group. This is a call to action for every SARS-CoV-2 vaccine-free individual in the world to join together in the most important study of our time – this is your opportunity to do something incredibly important for the future of your children by standing up to be a valuable and active participant of the world's largest and truly independent control group. Link to Robert Verkerk PhD study discussed during the episode... - Self-Selected COVID-19 “Unvaccinated” Cohort Reports Favorable Health Outcomes and Unjustified Discrimination in Global Survey: https://ijvtpr.com/index.php/IJVTPR/article/view/43 “The Vaccine Control Group is a worldwide, independent, long-term study that is seeking to provide a baseline of data from unvaccinated individuals for comparative analysis with the vaccinated population, to evaluate the success of the Covid-19 mass vaccination program and assist future research projects. This study is not, and will never be, associated with any pharmaceutical enterprise as its impartiality is of paramount importance.” Get involved today at the following links... - Website: www.vaxcontrolgroup.com - Pre-registration page for new Covid injected participants to join: https://members.vaxcontrolgroup.com/preregister - Community: https://www.vcgwiki.com/index.php/community - Telegram: https://t.me/joinchat/vYOoXyzT-VY1MDc0 - Twitter: https://twitter.com/VaxControlGroup?s=20&t=wNQcGsiNz2SvbaQkEX4OLg - Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/493614538559474 - GETTR: https://gettr.com/user/CGCoop Interview recorded 6.2.23 *Special thanks to Bosch Fawstin for recording our intro/outro on this podcast. Check out his art https://theboschfawstinstore.blogspot.com/ and follow him on GETTR https://gettr.com/user/BoschFawstin To sign up for our weekly email, find our social media, podcasts, video, livestreaming platforms and more https://heartsofoak.org/connect/ [0:22] Hello, Hearts of Oak. Interview just coming up, looking at the vaccine control group and I had the delight of bumping into Rachael and also Diny at the event in Derby, the comedy podcast event. They were there with a table, a vaccine group table. And it's something I came across way at the beginning as I was trying to work out how you get past these mandates and also looking at what data was being collected on on vaxed. I came across this group, fascinating group. So I had a really great interview with both Rachael and Diny talking about what the group is, why it's needed, about the mandates being dropped and whether the group is still needed, how it can be used as a [1:09] control group for whatever is coming next. So it's not just a one-off, it can be used for other things, how you can support them with a £6 a quarter to get those cards, which you need to get. And, by that £6 a quarter you help fund what they are doing. Talk about how they're now all over the world, about the telegram groups, how people can share information, their Zoom calls you can be part of. So much to talk about and great to catch up with them on this essential venture they have started, from nothing. So I know you love hearing from Rachel and Diny.   So thank you for joining us, Hearts of Oak. And it is wonderful to have two people, an organization that I have wanted for months and that is Rachael and Diny from the Vaccine Control Group. Thank you both of you you for joining us today. [2:02] You're welcome. Thank you for having us. Great to have you and I bumped into you both in Derby and [2:09] great to see you're stalled and I've followed what you've done as of many tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands. We'll get into all of that but the details are there, the website is there and we'll put some of the Telegram links as well in the description, Vaxcontrolgroup.com. If I can maybe first ask how you both came to the point of launching, this initiative, this project, which is something that none of us thought we would ever need, but maybe separately how you came to be at the point of overseeing such a mammoth task? [2:48] (Diny) I'll start off. It was basically a meme that people who weren't vaccinated were saying, I'm in the control group because we obviously knew that there wasn't a control group for those people who'd been vaccinated because the control group had been vaccinated. And because I'd been part of starting a local freedom cooperative in Eastbourne and we're trying to get ways to do things in lockdown, try to find what we could do to try and fix things. And we realised with this meme that there actually wasn't a control group. And because my husband's a database developer and very experienced with data, we sort of talked and said, well, actually, we could do this as a group. We could actually set up our own control group, but there are only a small amount of us, about 70, and it wouldn't have really worked. We realised we needed it on a global scale. So we said, well, why don't we just create a database for the world and get everyone in a control group who's not vaccinated, as you do. So we just got about writing one, creating it, and in a spare room in our spare time. [3:56] Put some of our savings into it, and just sort of got started. And we were just writing the questions when we met Rachael. (Rachael) Yep. So I'm Rachael. I was working as an A&E nurse for, well, when all of it kicked off really in March 2020. So yeah, it's a pretty crazy story in itself really. I come to the realization that what we were being told wasn't all the truth. And I ended up leaving my job and I didn't really know where to turn. If I was the only one that felt like I did. And I came across somehow the Stand in the Park groups. So that's when I found Diny. So she was in my local Stand in the Park group. And I heard about this control group idea and just really couldn't wait to be involved, really. So that's when I came and came and sat down and helped them with the questions to get going. So I went from there really. [4:52] Rach, because we've had NHS 100, we've had Alan from Together Declaration, we've had lots of groups, but some people were impacted more than others. And I guess, Rachael, you were one of those people who was really impacted because this was mandatory for you in your employment. (R) Well, I'd already left by then actually, Peter, but it was a massive impact on me. I'd say my whole world flipped upside down. So in the beginning, I was completely terrified along with my colleagues about what we were going to see and what was to come. I went through the whole thing of not having PPE. I was fighting to wear a mask at work at one point. We were debating whether to move out and protect our kids, all that crazy stuff. And it wasn't until I actually left work for a few weeks and started reflecting on what was going on and my mum started asking me a few questions and it was her health as well that I started looking into natural ways of helping her that made me realise that everything I was taught wasn't the truth and made me [5:54] question everything really and that's when I decided then that I couldn't go back. So I actually handed my notice in early 2021 before the vaccine rollout came. [6:04] Wow. Wow. Can maybe let me ask you to explain there may be some of our viewers and listeners, I don't know where they've been if they don't know what the vaccine control group is, but they may have missed it. So for those of our viewers and listeners who have missed it, can you explain what exactly it is? [6:25] (D) Can I start? it's in two parts really. So at the heart of it, we are collecting the data of those people who've chosen not to take the vaccine, the COVID vaccine, to look at their long-term health outcomes. It's a multi-generational study because this is a multi-generational problem. [6:43] The people who've been vaccinated now who go on to have children and their children, we don't know what this is going to do to them. So we are studying the health outcomes and that is the really, really important long-term aspect of what we're doing. It's behind everything. It's health sovereignty really. It's you being able to know what's going to happen and having the choice. I won't say about what the next stage is, but I'll let you talk about the other aspect of the community. (R) So we realised quite quickly actually when people started joining, because originally we didn't even market it or really share it that much, it just spread by word of mouth and people just started joining from everywhere really. It's incredible. And by the time we knew it, we had different groups of people in different countries. And so that's when we started up our Telegram groups. We thought we needed somewhere that people could come and chat and ask us questions as well. Because in the beginning, we were really, really asked a lot of questions, you know, who are you that are taking our data? We were really mistrusted in the beginning. They thought we were a government scheme.   (D) We're not. [7:47] Could have been part of the Nudge Unit number 10 or something. Who knows? [7:51] (R) People still get, we still get that though, from people that haven't heard about us. And that's fair enough, you know, we're happy people are questioning everything. But back to the telegram, so we started off with a few telegram groups and they just grew and grew and we realized we needed different language groups, different speciality groups, we needed like parents, university students, NHS workers at one point, that was you know a really cool group at one point and so we just expanded from there and we wanted to give back to those people that are constantly giving, us their data every month because what they're doing is really, really invaluable for everybody for the future. We wanted to give them support back and then we started to set up Zooms as well so that they originally started as Q&A Zooms so that we could just answer to everybody who we were and what we were doing and why and just so they could get a feel for us and meet us and ask us any questions. And they turned into a sharing and caring Zoom. That's what we call them now. So people from all over the world join. We've got a bunch of regular people who we've really made friends with over the years and they tell us what's happening in their own countries. We hear what's going on on the ground and we've formed a really good friendship group from that and we support people that are lonely. And yes, but just growing really lovely community really. So that's the second part. Yeah and... [9:12] No, no, go for it.   (D) The third part, which is, it's kind of turned into a monster of itself, is the cards. So our, idea initially when we very first started this was that we knew that people who haven't been vaccinated traditionally keep that quiet, but this was something much bigger than that. This was, you know, for the COVID vaccine, we felt that everyone should stand up and say, look, I haven't been vaccinated against it. I've got good reasons. Whatever those reasons are, they're my reasons, they're good reasons. We need to stand up, be proud of that because it's our choice and show other people that they don't need to hide as well. So we came up with the idea of these cards, which are sort of, you know, it's to be visible. That's the main reason. But the other reason was that we know, both being moms, we've each got three children, that kids can be coerced into vaccinations in schools, especially with things like the HPV. And in fact, my daughter didn't have it. And, you know, we had very sort of strict words about, you know, when they try and talk you into it, you know. So we decided that we needed to help them in some way. And that was to put on the card. [10:20] 'Must not be vaccinated'. And the idea is that this can act as a shield. So if someone's trying to coerce you, it was mainly for the children, but obviously any adult can use it too. They can say, look, you know, I've got this, I can't be vaccinated for this, I, you know, I'm not supposed to have it. No one's going to go against that. You know, it just gives them that extra bit of security. Adults have been using it too, though. It's been absolutely amazing. People have used it in all sorts of situations, but also they've used it in situations where the vaccine's been mandatory. So health workers have used it to keep their jobs in all sorts of countries, not just the UK, but countries like Australia, which is crazy. People have used to get into hospitals to see, their loved ones when they haven't been allowed into hospital. People have used it to get into other countries where vaccines are mandated. Even now, people are still using it to get into, the United States. It isn't an exemption of any sort. It is simply a card that helps you be visible in your right to not take this particular vaccine. But it just gives you confidence and power in your own rights, that's, you know, that's, it's not accepted by governments at all. [11:30] Or anyone. It's not, you know, we were very careful to make sure it didn't try and look like any kind of vaccine pass because we didn't want it to be a fake pass. You know, people said, or you're making a fake pass. No, it's not trying to be, it's not looking like one. It is simply what it is. And that's a card of membership for our cooperative that says you are unvaccinated, but also it's a little shield that you can use to say, look, this is, you know, don't come near me me with that needle. [11:56] One of the things I love about it is, and I pick up on some of those individual things, but that many people complain. People are good at sitting around and being frustrated and venting that frustration with friends and family and it's kind of round that table in the pub and going there for an hour and unloading everything that's happening. But there are very few people who actually think, well, this is a problem, but maybe we can do something about it. You're obviously individuals who've decided this is the problem, we could bitch and moan about it, but actually we could try and find a solution. It probably would have been easier just to sit and moan about it. What kind of spurred you into, we need to come up with something that fixes the issue that lies in front of us? [12:45] (R) That's an easy one and I think lots of people relate, but it's our children. Diny said we've got three children each and we saw their future being destroyed and them, not being allowed access to what they would want to do in the future, being unvaccinated, you know, not being able to travel, not being able to do the college courses they wanted potentially. So we felt really strongly that we need to do something in order to fix their future. So yeah,   (D) we weren't having it. We were just like, no, we're not having it. This is our kid's future and everyone else's kids, they're not going to screw it up for them. So we decided to fix it or try. None of us have ever expected to be in this situation. So you try solutions and there's some work, some don't. But I remember talking to a friend and he had written, he had got a solicitor to write a letter to the school telling them what would happen and he would go for every single teacher who is involved in forcing that. He maybe had the finances to do that. But what you're provided is a way that everyone can do it. They don't need to have access to legal, which is costly, but simply by getting this, it is a way. And I'd encourage and tell us about this, how people can actually give it, it's free. [13:59] But I would encourage everyone to actually sign up and it's what, 5, 10 pounds, a quarter ? Tell us about that because everything costs money to happen. And I, as not part of the scheme, can encourage all our viewers and listeners to make sure and pay for it because nothing comes for free. Tell us about that side. [14:19] (R) Do you want to say that, ? (D) Yeah, okay. So when you join the vaccine control group. [14:26] The vaccinecontrolgroup.com, you don't have to pay at all to start with. Anyone can join for free, put in your data. I mean, you know, we're asking for your data. So it's a bit weird that you would actually have to pay for it. That is an unusual concept to have to pay to be in a study. So, everyone can be free if they want to be in the majority of people are, they don't pay to to participate. However, we are a cooperative, and we've got a cooperative model in that those people who want to fund us who want to help keep this going for, you know, we're expecting 30 years. And it does cost a lot. It's, we've got a team now, it's not cheap to do. Our idea for a funding model was that they would become members at it's £24 a year, that's £6 a quarter. So that's less than a cup of coffee taken out once a month. Our aim is to keep it as accessible as possible. We just need to keep this going. We're not looking to make loads of money out of it. We simply need to keep the thing going. That's all it's about. So yeah, it's six pounds a quarter. People can cancel any time they want. Those people who become associates of the control group, they get sent the plastic printed card. Everyone who is a free participant gets a digital version of it, which does exactly the same thing. So the benefit is that you are simply helping to fund this really, really important study going onwards. (R) And allow it to remain independent. (D) Well, yeah, that is the main important thing about it. Yeah. [15:53] That we're completely independent, because if we were to ask for funding from anyone else, and people have said, well, why don't you go to universities, ask for the funding? We have heard all the stories about who funds them. We don't want that. So we're not getting funding from anywhere other than our participants. And that's, you know, we're really, really strict on that.   If it came out that Pfizer were sponsoring that wouldn't be very good. [16:17] (D) That'd be awkward.   (R) Definitely not. [16:21] Tell us about the cards when people sign up and they pay the £6 a quarter, they get the cards. That must and probably remains a mammoth endeavour to get those cards out. I remember sitting and looking at the telegram groups and some people saying, I got my card in a week and others saying I'm in Australia and I'm so waiting on mine.   That's a huge process to get those out worldwide.   (R) Yeah it's taken us a long time to learn all this. Obviously we started off with no knowledge whatsoever of what we were doing and we bought our first few card machines and we got the printing right and everything but yeah we ended up getting a franking machine for the postage a couple of months in just because we were the post offices were literally saying no we're we're not doing it anymore because we would turn up with so much post and they just refused to do it and we were we were spreading it around different towns and different post offices just so that we could get them sent but we ended up having to do that ourselves so yeah it's been a massive learning curve and then we've had you know people get in touch saying I want a card in my language I want it in my language so we always went back to them and said well if you can provide a translation for us then we'll be happy to create that so we've now got. [17:29] I can't remember how many now 15 or 16 yeah something like that and we're building them still. So, so yeah, that was that was fun learning how but we had our kids working with us in the beginning, we had six card printers in one room at one point when we moved out of Diny's spare room, got a little office room and we had all the teenagers printing them for us and posting them. (D) So they loved it. They really enjoyed it. We paying them a little bit for it. And they thought it was absolutely wonderful. [17:56] Yeah, wasn't it because when you start something you want success, but you don't know what success will look like. And then when something does pick up, you think, it was easier before. What was that when it started to really take off? And you said you didn't publicize it, but it was just spread because everyone was trying to find a solution to this. And suddenly you get the orders in. [18:18] What was that like? As you said, wow, this this is really impacting a lot of people. [18:24] (R) Yeah, it was it was the success stories that really did it for us. And I remember just reading some of them in the beginning. I was managing the telegram groups in the beginning. We've got a lovely lady doing that for us now. But yeah, we actually created a telegram group specifically for those stories. And they're just amazing. You know, just heartfelt stories of people that could go and visit their dying relative when they weren't allowed before. And that, you know, every time we heard one of those, it just kept you going. (D) Yeah, but we could actually make a difference to people's lives in other countries. It's just, it's mental. (R) Yeah, we didn't expect that. And did you expect other initiatives to happen in other countries because in theory you'd set up something and think well we'll provide for the UK and people who need it and then suddenly requests come from all over. I assume you were not expecting a worldwide demand. [19:17] (D) We wanted it because we realized that the only way that we could actually show what was definitely happening to those people who haven't taken the vaccine was to show it all over the world in, different geographical locations, in different socioeconomic locations. And if that same thing, that same outcome was happening in Alaska, in France, in Italy, in Africa, then you've got a trend because one of the limitations with the study is that it is anecdotal, it's self-reported. And we know that. So we've talked to an awful lot of people. We've had amazing people giving us brilliant advice, people with doctorates and health professionals. And we were told that we need to get quantities of data, ideally over a million people, so that we've got large amounts in all those different areas that show that there's a trend of, we're either all doing really well or we're all dropping dead. Either way, we've got to show a trend and we need people to do that. [20:11] Tell us how the control group, because I think people initially come into this thinking, I want to kind of pass out of jail. I want a card out of jail. I don't want to get out of this. And then you realize actually there's much more to it than simply having that card behind that, which in effect is the purpose of the group, is a vaccine control group where people, enter their information each month. About that kind of the information people give and then the I guess the difficulty of actually keeping that data, bringing it together and then having it so you can use it to report later on. [20:51] (R) Yeah, so I'll explain a little bit about what we ask. So first of all, we ask for baseline health conditions, for example. So when somebody signs up, it's, you know, what medical conditions might you already suffer with so that we can see kind of what their baseline health is. And then every month we ask them a short questionnaire. And when we first put that in, it's all being re-changed now. Now so we'll explain about what it's changing too but we ask have they had COVID, the severity of the illness, were they hospitalized, what medications they take, what supplements they take, if they test, if they wear masks, for how long, any discrimination. We ask people to report if they've been discriminated or you know sacked from their employment for example because of their vaccine status. Have I missed anything? [21:39] (D) Just trying to think, no.   (R) It's hard because we're just redoing everything so that's like old stuff to remember. But that's kind of what we asked for in the beginning and we have had some people have a look at the data so far. So early on we had Dr Rob Verkirk of ANH, he came in and had a look at the data and he actually wrote a paper that got published. When was that published? [22:03] (D) Oh goodness me. Anyway, it was published. It was published. It's on our website. We will put the link in the description. It's a good thing about doing pre-record. We will put that link in the description. So, send it to me and it will be there. (R) Thank you. So, basically, he came and had a look at all the data and compiled it into a paper and he uploaded it to ResearchGate, which is like an open... Oh, can't even... ...Episodes? No, I've forgotten what the word's called now. [22:36] (D) Preprint?   (R) yeah that's it, a pre-print server and they're quite easy to upload on a pre-print server really because it's not you know a journal or a peer-reviewed journal for example, but it actually got taken down which we weren't expecting so they literally removed it and I can't even remember the reason.   (D) I think it was the Daily Mail put an article about it and that, kicked off, it was literally as soon as the article came out that it then came out again so   (R) Yeah, but the paper showed basically that the unvaccinated were doing quite well. So we had, quite low rates of hospitalization if people were suffering with COVID. It showed that all over the world people are really taking care of their health. So I think it was something like 70% were taking vitamins and supplements regularly to try and keep well. We also found out that, quite a high percentage of our database have had vaccinations in the past. So that really kind of screwed up their       (D) anti-vaxxer thing, not the anti-vaxxers they're looking for. [23:42] I find actually that the government have made me, anti-vaxxer is the one who turned that up because I had no issue all the way up to now and it's only at this point that the government need to look at themselves for why there is any pushback because it's their fault. So thank you Matt Hancock for making me now be suspicious of anything coming from the Department of Health. I guess that's the same for you and I guess that's a story you're finding throughout. (D) Yeah, we did actually ask, would you be willing to take vaccines in the future? I forget exactly what specific ones we asked about, but there was quite a high proportion. I think it's like 50% of people said they'd be much more cautious and probably say no to any kind of vaccine in the future.   (R) Even travel vaccines and such. (D) Yeah, so they've actually made anti-vaxxers through this. Tell us what has been the journey for you two in connections, in meeting people, and because this has, I guess, spawned a whole new community, a whole new group of connections and friendships and networks that didn't really exist. And I find sitting interviewing people and I thought, I wouldn't even have given that person the time of day, but now we find that there's something that unites us and you focus on that. So what has it been like for the two of you? [25:09] (D) Been crazy actually. I mean, at the very beginning of this journey, we had an awful lot of, who the hell are you? What are you doing? You know, you blue-haired freak have had quite a lot of scammers and grifters and oh my goodness. Yeah, which is, I mean, one of the reasons why we are on every single Zoom call so that people can ask us questions. And the first load, there were people [25:30] asking us questions. But we did have a lot of doctors talking to us secretly, which was quite funny. So doctors and scientists, they talked to us, but we weren't allowed to tell anyone they were talking to us. And so we came home to say to people, look, you know, there are lots of doctors that actually like what we're doing, support what we're doing, but we can't tell you who they are, and they're not going to say anything about it. And so we've had this really weird relationship with people. And, you know, obviously, we've had our participants, and they've been absolutely wonderful and incredibly supportive. But I think it's this last sort of six months, all of a sudden, people have realized that we're not grifters, scammers, we are truly actually doing this. I think there was also the worry that we were going to fail, that we were just a couple of idiot mums who were having a go at something we know nothing about, which we didn't. But we have learned so, so much. It's incredible because we have spent hours talking to doctors, scientists, researchers. We are learning everything we possibly can to make sure we do this incredibly well. And suddenly people have realised that and realised that we are serious. We're not just faffing around doing something for our kids, we're going to fix this for our kids and we're going to do it the best way we know how. And so people suddenly, I don't know. [26:44] If they respect what, I think they respect what we're doing, maybe not us, but they respect what we're doing now and they understand that we are doing this properly. So from the medical perspective, we've been to a lot of events now and people have welcomed us and they're, talking to us and they're actually outwardly saying that they're supporting us now as well, which is lovely, which gives our participants a lot more faith in what we're doing too. So, It's been interesting. [27:09] Scary, because this is, I mean, I'm a science fiction writer, you know. I'm not used to dealing with PhD scientists. You know, it's, yeah, Rachael's a lot more medical and it's easier for you. (R) But we haven't let any of it change us, have we? And that, you know, it's just brilliant. We're just us and we're just who we are. And I think that's why people relate to us as, well, because we're not trying to be anything we're not. We always say we come from nothing really and we're just a couple of mums but we've managed to do what we've done. (D) And we admit when we don't know what we're doing but we always go and find out from someone who does know what they're doing. We get advice.   (R) Or we learn or we do live blood analysis courses. [27:51] So we know what's going on.   Well yeah you could write a whole science fiction novel in the last three years but that's a good material anyway for that next one.   (R) I think she wrote it before this. (D) Well, I kind of wrote what I wrote was actually leading up to the world turning into this. So yeah. [28:12] Tell us about the data because I had actually, yeah, our next interview, actually just before this is Amy Kelly from Daily, DailyClout. And they've obviously published, that massive publication with 50 case studies of all different areas. And you look to that and you realize that what the data you're collecting isn't available. No one has certainly known in the echelons of society, known in the medical profession, known in the tech companies have thought of pulling together this data. And there are only a few countries actually that have, I mean, UK and Israel, seemingly that data is thrown up all the time, because other countries aren't collecting it. So what you're doing will be absolutely essential with that data. So tell us more about that because that is going to be extremely important going forward. [29:09] (D) Yeah, it's absolutely essential. And that's why after having our data analysed, initially, we realized there were lots of gaps, lots of things we could have asked better because we didn't know, you know, we did the best we could. But actually, you know, a year and a half down the line, we know [29:26] where this is going, the landscapes change too. So we're in the middle of and almost about to, relaunch a much more extensive questionnaire with much, much deeper questions. (R) Yeah, when we started we had no idea what kind of adverse events we were even going to see at all. We could guess, but we didn't have a clue when we wrote our questions. So we've really dug down into what we need to look at now and we're going to have a massive section on pregnancy and fertility going forwards as well as heart issues. We came from, I think, the top headings of medical conditions such as heart, blood, lung conditions and now we've we've dug right down, we've got over a thousand different conditions people can select going, forward so we'll really be able to look at the data more clearly. And part of the relaunch going forward, the database developer is building some kind of warehouse that people can, data analysts can basically plug into. So we really want the data to be more available to everybody and we've only managed to get one paper written so far going backwards just because we're a small team and it's a lot of work. And we want to be able to push out data way more easily and readily. And another aspect of it is there's never, you know, there's never the data, the raw data. [30:42] So, you know, when you read something or look at a publication, for example, you can never really dig down to the raw data that they were looking at when they were analysing. And we want to make it as available as possible. So analysts in the future will be able to just plug in, we'll obviously make sure that they're trusted and they're doing it for good reason and they'll be able to plug in and analyse and put out way more publications going forward and they'll be able to spot trends in the data, look at certain aspects of the data. [31:12] Which is what's happening to pregnant women, for example. And I forgot to mention one of the most important things. And the most? We're not, well, yeah, it's all anonymized, definitely. But we're inviting those that have taken COVID vaccines in. So when we relaunch, we're officially inviting those that have had any number of any different COVID vaccine into the study so that we've got our own comparative cohort. And so again, we can support them that have been injured or regretful and you know, realized they've been lied to. So that's the huge change that, we're going to now. (D) And even possibly the people that are happy to continue them, we're hoping that they'll want to say, well, prove me wrong and also provide their data. [31:56] I think that's essential people who have taken it because if, I mean, one of the demos was at, 10 days ago was for the vaccine injured and there were eight different people speaking about the devastating effect it has had on their health and their family and their lives. [32:12] One, that story is not really told. But two, it's vital that they can begin to put in their information to this because you will at least be willing to listen to them and allow them to put in that raw data and assess it where no one else is giving them the time of day. So I think it's, really quite essential and important as you're growing to add that facility on. [32:36] (R) Yeah, and as well as that important data, the community needs to expand and grow as well. And we've had vaccine injured people come and join our sharing and caring zooms with our regular participants. And it's just been absolutely amazing seeing how the understanding is growing and they're listening to each other. and we just want to bring people back together again and unite people. [32:58] Yeah it is.   So the best way, I want to touch on where we're going with it, but the best way for people to follow you on the website will have links to the Telegram groups and people can join those Zoom sessions can they?   (R) Yes they're open to absolutely everyone. On the community part of the website there's a menu on the left that says Zooms. Anyone can come and chat to us, we do them twice a week, we're always there. Yeah, different time zones. Yeah, different times a day. Yeah. And we also do community events as well. So we invite people on with, normally, it's normally to do with health and wellbeing, but it can be any interesting topic really, so that we can learn from people and they're open to everybody as well. So you can sign up to come along to one of those and ask the speaker questions. [33:48] Okay. Can I ask, looking forward, because people, I actually did think at one point, well, maybe it's all going to go away and we'll all be left alone. I don't think that will ever happen. So tell us what, because you put this together because you were faced with an issue, we were all faced with an issue. We're now told that's gone away. So you can now, certainly regarding travel and movement and possibly employment that's beginning to change. Where, does that leave you and what you're doing with the vaccine group? [34:27] (D) Still really important because people have been vaccinated and we don't know without studying what the outcomes are going to be for those people and their children long term. So that. [34:39] You know, you can't take the vaccine out of people, at least not that we know of yet. So that's going to be there for generations to come. So that hasn't gone away. And actually in the UK, things seem quite easy. In other countries, it really hasn't gone away. It's, you speak to people and it's still quite horrendous. And with what we're doing, the way we've designed it is that, yes, we're studying the COVID vaccine or the effects at the moment, but you don't know what else is going to come along. And actually, because we are a control group, we could effectively be a control group for anything that comes along. So while people are entering all of their health data, if suddenly people start to take the M-Pox vaccine, for example, well, if we've got loads of people who have and loads of people who haven't, and we've got people who are willing to study our information, our data, our anonymized data, fully anonymized. [35:29] Then there's nothing to stop us being a control group for everything else that they might want to throw at us, for the next big pandemic that Bill Gates has promised us. It's round the corner, being dropped on us from a balloon somewhere near you. (D)Yeah. You know, you just don't know what's going to happen. (R) and we're pretty flexible. You know, we've been flexible since the beginning. We literally change our plans every week, depending on what we hear on our Zooms, whatever the landscape is, whatever people need. You know, we really think about that and take that, into consideration. And that's one of the main things that we get from the Zooms as well as, you know, making friends and supporting people. It's what do people need? Yeah. And we go with it, don't we? Yeah.   (D) And also all of the systems, the database, it's not an off the shelf system. It's been written from scratch, every bit of it. So we've got, we started off with just my husband writing everything day and night. [36:22] He's still doing it, but we've got a small team around him also doing that now. And so because it's, it's everything is designed specifically for this and for what we're doing and for what we want to do going forward. We can adjust it and alter it to be whatever it needs to be going on, just so that we can show what we need to show. That's the truth. And I think therefore it's essential that there may be people watching who have been part of it, who have paid that six pounds a quarter, which everyone should be doing if they're part of it, and they may be thinking, you know, it's probably run its course and maybe I should just cancel. But certainly from my point of view, my viewpoint, it's essential. As you said, it's in effect, it's a blank slate that can be used for whatever is coming. And that means that it is vital for people to continue to support it by inputting data, but also with that financial support. [37:20] (D) Yes, yeah, absolutely. I mean, we understand it's hard times for everyone, which is why we've made it as cheap as possible. And also, you know, there's the free option and most people do go for that. We don't feel that we're asking too much by hoping that some people will feel that it's worth paying for because this could show, that the unvaccinated are doing brilliantly or it could show that actually we're all dying. But if that's the case, we want to know, we need to know whichever way it goes and we will show whichever way it goes. We need to know that information for us and for our kids. If it looks like the children who have been vaccinated they're not able to have children. They need to know that but they're not going to know that until those children have grown up another 10 years or 15 or however long it takes, you know, to find that out if this study stops. [38:10] You know, because we can't afford to fund it, then you're not going to find that information out, because no one else is doing it.   And to repeat how important it is, I only learned with my, interview with Amy Kelly that one of the studies they did was that Pfizer had started a control group for those who weren't Vax, so placebo group, and those who were getting the Vax. And that was going to run for, I think, two to three years. Then after four months, they just jabbed everyone. It defeats the whole. And when you hear stories like that, you realize that everything we thought was true about how these companies operate, actually threw that in the bin and it's purely about a rush to market. And therefore the data you have is essential because it's possibly unique and these companies don't have it. [39:03] (R) Yeah, exactly. And one thing we've learned just from doing this, which I didn't have a clue before, being a nurse even, that a lot of the studies that they do aren't even given a placebo anyway. They're giving a different treatment. They don't give them saline. They give them a different vaccine, for example. So there's never really a true control group. So what we're doing is unique. And we're completely independent. We're not biased at all. We're not funded by anyone. So this is the future for science. That's how we see it. It's a future where people can fund a truly independent thing, put their data in, and then we can find out what's going on in regard to anything, any treatment. [39:42] (D) And the users have a vested interest in it because they're part of it. They're the ones who are funding it. And because we're a cooperative, those who are associates, they're the people that we listen to for what we need to do. They're the ones who steer us. [39:57] Have you been surprised at the lack of vocal support for those who have chosen not to have this? Because I mean, for me politically, kind of on the right, I've been quite shocked at the, voices have only been on, well, people should kind of have freedoms, but really we need to jab them anyway. And all those freedoms you kind of think on the right, actually that collapsed. And as I found politically on the left you had a lot of calls for restrictions, for freedoms for individuals that traditionally, so the whole thing has got messed up and mixed up which has been great fun to watch. But for you, have you been surprised and expected, I guess, high profile figures to have stood up and spoken out and they've just remained silent? [40:49] (D)Yeah, I think we've been disappointed.   (R) Yeah, and we've actually spoken to some people and Diny's quite strict with them sometimes, you know, high profile people with big influences and she's like, you know, you know the truth, you know the right thing to do, now get out there and say it and you're quite good at doing it. (D) I get quite arsey with them.   (R) Yeah, a bit disappointed with the lack, yeah, definitely (D) But I can understand it as well because people are genuinely terrified. People are actually frightened that people who haven't taken the vaccine are going to infect them and kill them. They genuinely believe that because the media has done such [41:24] A good Psi-op on them. They genuinely are frightened for their lives. And so they see people like us as, well, I don't know what they see it as, but you know, we are potential killers for them, which is it's just bizarre. I mean I vaccinated my children up to a point and then I started to realize what was going on. And so [41:45] I stopped vaccinating them. They've had a couple of the MMR separately, but not all of them. So I've been awake to this for quite a while. And I know that you've got to keep quiet about it. You don't say to people, my kid hasn't had the HPV and they haven't had all the MMRs. You just don't say that because people automatically have been trained to be frightened of you. So I wasn't surprised of the reaction, but I'm angry at a lot of the high profile celebrities who have woken up and just don't want to lose their income through this. Because people like us, we've all given up, everything we were doing. Yes, we're actually working full time for this now. So we do take an income from it, just to be clear on that. We didn't initially because we were volunteers and everyone was volunteering, but you know this is full time, we have to live. But you know, initially we'd all had to step away from careers like everyone else had because we just couldn't carry on working because of, well Rachael chose to leave it. I lost most of my work because of everything and loads of people have lost so much through all of this. (R) And that comes back to that and that's you know about thousands of people all around the world standing up and being part of a group and being proud of the fact that they're unvaccinated. (D) And being honest about the fact that they're not being vaccinated. [43:12] Because I always give people a benefit of the doubt and now I'm just pissed off at people because we've all got something to lose. We're all in difficult situations. Most of us don't have a big pile of money that we can fall back on. We do live extremely tightly. And for people to say, yeah, but you know, they're a movie star or star, they would lose a contract. Well, what about us in our small flats, whatever, living that are struggling day to day with the kids, school runs and all that? We have something to lose as well. I think our media and society make it that if you're famous you've got a lot to lose but if you're the little guy you've got nothing to lose but often it can be the other way round. [43:56] (D) Yeah, absolutely and a lot of the celebrities have also taken, well we've been told that they've had the fake passports which also doesn't help the situation. Situation. Yes, I can understand that you don't want to give up this thing that you've worked incredibly hard for. But at the end of the day, this isn't like anything that's ever happened before. (R) And it's not only what you're going to lose now, it's looking to the future. If they realise what we're heading into, none of us can have anything. (D) Yeah, and they don't want to look into the future. People just don't want to see, you know, this is this is now it's going to go away. It's fine. I can understand it. I don't like it, but I can understand it. Closing your eyes doesn't make you away. Can we finish just last point looking, you talked about having children, I've got two kids as well, two boys. And it's interesting conversations that as a parent you have with children, especially trying to protect them from the indoctrination, they have around what's happened the last three years. [44:59] But I think by getting the card, it's a great conversation topic with your children and then you talk to them about why this is needed and make sure they're prepared because my, worry, many parents worry, is that the parent tells the school it does not want this, but, the school thinks it knows best. And hey, the parent will thank them anyway so they just do whatever to the child. And that's why I think it's vital to train your children, to educate them and to prep them so they know how to respond, how to argue. So it's not just us as parents arguing for them, but actually put in them. And I think that part of the advice control group allows you to, I guess, teach them this so they can carry that forward. (D) Yeah, absolutely. And on the other side of it, you can actually use the card, for example, to say, look, we're actually doing something good for society. We're not doing nothing. We're not sort of not taking this and not helping the situation. We're actually, contributing. Yeah, contributing our data so we can, you know, see which way it's going. So they are actually doing something. It's not doing nothing. (R) Yeah, in terms of our children, they're both they're all home educated. (D) Yeah, so Well, mine have dipped into school and out actually during the pandemic. (R) Yeah, I literally dragged mine out of school and I quit my job. [46:20] So, yeah, they haven't been back since, bless them. But we've got a lovely community around us and we've been, you know, muddling in and helping and teaching them between us all sorts of skills. Yeah, I think mine thought probably I'd gone a bit crazy at the beginning because I'd completely flipped around what I was saying at home. [46:39] And I actually took my eldest daughter to one of the first protests that was happening in London. And it was then that she burst into tears when we got there and saw the enormity of it. And that's when she realized that what I was saying was right. But you do have to be careful with children and protect them. You know, you can't tell them, you know, you don't want to scare them, do you, with what's happening? (D) No. But then on the flip side, they're being scared to death by what they're seeing in the media. But yeah, but actually, my eldest was at university during lockdown. And oh my goodness me, she was in one of the universities facing the one that had the fences being pulled down, well fences put up and then pulled down. And she actually had one of her friends commit suicide during it because of all of this. So the whole landscape's changed for the kids and they can either be terrified of COVID and whatever comes next, or they can be terrified of what's going on around them, but supported by people looking to a positive future of trying to do things to make things better. So we're, although, you know, it's, it's scary telling them all about this. And we do, you know, to different degrees, because they're all different ages, but they can see that we're doing something about it. And actually we're having a lot of fun doing it. It's, It's hard work what we're doing. It's sometimes heart-breaking, but we do make the most of having a laugh a lot. [48:05] Yeah. We have a lot of fun.   With what we faced, you need to laugh. I know when we do our news reviews on Saturdays, we try and look at something which is funny at the end because it could become very depressing and demoralizing and you need to use humour too. And that's why the event, Derby, was great, in comedy to just laugh at everything and stop yourself getting too depressed. (D) Yes, definitely. It's been wonderful talking to you and I know our viewers will go and make use of the website. Rachael and Diny, thank you for your time today. (R&D) Thank you so much. Thank you so much for having us. Thank you.

Delivered by Cynthiana Santos from Holy Family Church, Archdiocese of Kota Kinabalu, Sabah, Malaysia. Romans 8: 28-30; Rs psalm 13: 6ab.6cd.R-Yes 61:10; Matthew 1: 1-16.18-23 A SPECIAL NATIVITY The theme for our meditation today is: A Special Nativity. The Catholic Church celebrates today the feast of the nativity of Our Blessed Mother, the Virgin Mary. This celebration has a long tradition on how Christians give their respect and devotion to Mary. We who celebrate this today, want to ponder the mystery of her birth and to know the story line of her families. At the beginning of the Gospel of Matthew, there is an account about Mary who gave birth to Jesus, and Joseph as the legal adoptive Father of Jesus, descended from the family of the King David. The very first reason we celebrate the Virgin Mary's birthday is because she is associated with Jesus Christ. It is reasonable and well acceptable that if Jesus is indeed a glorious Lord, the Son of God and the Redeemer of mankind, then the mother who had conceived and had given birth to Him must also be a noble and holy woman. If the birth of the Son of God, Jesus Christ, has been greatly believed and remembered throughout the ages, then the birth of His mother must also have the same honor and best memory from all the believers. There is another reason which is in relation with her very particular gift from God, that the Virgin Mary is full of grace. If the fullness of grace had been established by God from the first moment of her conception, and therefore, Mary was immaculate from her mother Anna's womb, then the following stages such us during 9 months of life in the womb and then the actual birth itself, Mary was also full of grace. We celebrate the glorious birth of Our Lady today is to mark the continuation of giving honor to the Lord for what had happened to Mary by the divine intervention, namely her conception that was immaculate or free from the original sin. This special nativity of Mary indeed reminds us of a number of special births as narrated in the scriptures. We mention just three of them that happened before Mary herself. Isaac was born to Abraham and Sarah who were already very old to have a child. God is understood to have make the offsprings of mankind with a very special way. In the book of Judges chapter 13, it tells the story of Samson who was born especially because God had planned to help the Israelites through the role that Samson would undertake. Then the prophet Isaiah revealed himself that he had been specially formed by God from the time he was in his mother's womb (Is 49.5). These all illustrate that a special birth must be through God's work and with God's decisive will. For us Christians, our participation and being adopted sons and daughters of God through the Lord Jesus Christ really make us special. This means that each of our birth into the world is also special. It is impossible to think of a person born special and gifted with divine grace, but he or she was not in connection with the Lord who is the source of all graces . We were actually born special, because God had given us also special vocation for each to be realized in life. Let's pray. In the name of the Father ... O most loving God, may with this special feast of the nativity of Virgin Mary, we will become more faithful children of Our Lady following the example Jesus Christ, our Lord and savior. Glory to the Father ... In the name of the Father ... --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/media-la-porta/message

Dibawakan oleh Tarsisius Tarsan dan Ni Made Sumirati dari Komunitas Pukat Labuan Bajo, Keuskupan Ruteng, Indonesia. Roma 8: 28-30; Mazmur tg 13: 6ab.6cd.R-Yes 61:10; Matius 1: 1-16.18-23 KELAHIRAN YANG SPESIAL Tema renungan kita pada hari ini ialah: Kelahiran Yang Spesial. Seluruh Gereja Katolik merayakan pesta kelahiran Bunda Maria pada hari ini. Perayaan ini mempunyai tradisi panjang dalam memberi penghormatan kepada Maria. Kita ingin mengenangkan kelahirannya dan mengenal garis keturunannya. Di awal Injil Matius, adalah sebuah kesimpulan bahwa Maria yang melahirkan Yesus dan Yosef sebagai Bapak angkat sah Yesus, adalah keturuan Daud. Alasan paling pertama kita pestakan hari kelahiran Bunda Maria ialah karena ia dikaitkan dengan Yesus Kristus. Pikiran logis yang bisa kita terima ialah kalau Yesus itu Tuhan yang mulia, Anak Allah, dan Penebus manusia, maka ibu yang melahirkan Dia juga mesti seorang pribadi yang suci dan mulia. Jika kelahiran Putera Allah, Yesus Kristus, sangat dimeriahkan dan dikenang sepanjang zaman, maka kelahiran ibunda-Nya juga mesti mendapat suatu kemeriahan dan kenangan yang sama. Alasan lain ialah menyangkut martabat Bunda Maria sebagai manusia yang penuh rahmat. Kalau kepenuhkan rahmat itu ditetapkan Allah sejak pembuahan pertama di dalam rahim ibunya, atau terkandungnya Maria yang tanpa dosa di dalam rahim bundanya, Anna, maka proses berikutnya seperti berada di dalam kandungan selama 9 bulan, kemudian kelahirannya juga penuh dengan rahmat. Kita merayakan kelahiran yang mulia Bunda Maria pada hari ini adalah sebagai perayaan kelanjutan peristiwa yang penting terjadi pada dirinya, yaitu ia dikandung tanpa nosa dosa asal. Kalahiran yang spesial ini mengingatkan kita pada sejumlah kelahiran juga spesial seperti yang dikisahkan dalam kitab suci. Kita menyebutkan cukup tiga, sebelum Bunda Maria. Ishak dilahirkan dari Abraham dan Sarah yang sudah lanjut usianya. Allah membuat keturunan itu amat spesial. Di dalam kitab hakim-hakim bab 13, dikisahkan tentang Simson yang dilahirkan secara spesial karena Allah sudah merencanakan untuk memberikan pertolongan kepada bangsa Israel melalui peran yang akan diambil oleh Simson. Kemudian nabi Yesaya menyatakan dirinya bahwa ia sudah dibentuk spesial oleh Allah sejak di dalam kandungan ibunya (49,5). Ini semua menggambarkan bahwa suatu kelahiran spesial harus merupakan pekerjaan Tuhan, yaitu kehendak Tuhan yang menentukan. Bagi kita, partisipasi dan di-adopsinya kita menjadi putera-puteri Allah melalui Yesus Kristus, jelas membuat pribadi kita spesial. Ini berarti kelahiran kita juga spesial. Tidak mungkin satu pribadi dibuat spesial, sementara kelahirannya ke dunia luput dari perhitungan. Kita sebenarnya dilahirkan spesial, karena Tuhan juga memberikan kita masing-masing panggilan hidup yang spesial. Marilah kita berdoa. Dalam nama Bapa... Ya Allah, semoga dengan Pesta kelahiran yang istimewa ini kami semakin bertumbuh menjadi anak-anak Bunda Maria yang setia seperti Yesus Kristus, Tuhan kami. Kemuliaan kepada Bapa ..Dalam nama Bapa .. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/media-la-porta/message

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 for us to address in future episodes. We hope you enjoy We Make Books! Twitter: @WMBCast  |  @KindofKaelyn  |  @BittyBittyZap Instagram: @WMBCast  Patreon.com/WMBCast Episode Transcript (by TK @_torkz) [Upbeat Ukulele Intro Music] Rekka: This is We Make Books, a podcast about writing publishing and everything in between. Rekka is a published Science Fiction and Fantasy author, and Kaelyn is a professional genre fiction editor. Together, they'll tackle the things you never knew you never knew about getting a book from concept to finished product, with explanations, examples, and a lot of laughter. Get your moleskin notebook ready. It's time for We Make Books. Kaelyn: My sister just finished reading the Grisha trilogy. And she was, of course, more of a fan of the Six of Crows after reading that. But one of the things she messaged me- she was like “yeah, the ending was kind of whatever, but it is very clear that this person was reading Harry Potter when they wrote this.” R: [laughs] K: And I said “Yeah, that definitely comes through.” She gave me this whole list of like, book two is basically just The Order of the Phoenix, and the end battle with all of the Grisha and the stand downs, all this stuff, and I was like “Yeah, I guess you're right.” To be honest with you, I kinda limped through the end of that book, I wasn't thinking about that too much. But anyways, it got me thinking about influences in writing and how writers are influenced and how in some cases that's something that we're like “Yes! You can tell that this writer was influenced by such-and-such, and they weave it so beautifully into their story.” And sometimes you get my sister calling me to complain about how she basically just read Harry Potter with Russian witches.  R: So was your sister accusing the author in any way of plagiarism? K [overlapping]: Not plagiarism. R [overlapping]: As a reader I'm curious, like how the reader perceives it when it's that clear when someone's been influenced.  K: I should've asked her before we started recording this - and this is something we'll get to in there - I couldn't tell if my sister was accusing the author of laziness or unoriginality.  R: Okay. K: That's one of the things I wanted to talk about today as we're talking about influence. What is influence, how are writers influenced? How's the best way to leverage and utilize that influence? And when does influence cross into the realm of the negative? When is it no longer praise worthy? When is it, for instance, lazy, contrived, unoriginal, or, in worst case scenario, bordering into plagiarism?  R: Yeah, because that's a tricky thing - if we always wrote a completely original story, you wouldn't have something like Joseph Campbell's The Hero's Journey. Because we wouldn't have a set format that a story would take. So when somebody accuses a fantasy book of being “Star Wars with elves,” well, Star Wars was a Greek epic in space.  K: Oh, I would've called it a Western. R: Okay fine. [overlapping] I mean, people have called it a Western. K: [overlapping] I mean, both work. Both work. [laughs] R: Yeah, but I'm just saying, The Hero's Journey, Joseph Campbell is, he's studying the ancient literature, so that's why I decided to say Greek. But if we could always write something that was completely original, there would be no way to study literature with comparisons and contrasts. There are always going to be parallels between stories written in a similar culture by people who are writing in a similar society. Like, a hundred years apart, you would not necessarily detect the influence of Harry Potter in the Grishaverse. But they're not written a hundred years apart - it was maybe a decade, probably not. K: I'd be curious to go back and try to time out when these books were being written, and when that coincides with the release of the latter half of the Harry Potter books. But anyways, real quick, I'm big into definitions, so let's talk about definitions. Influence is the capacity of something - a person, a situation, a circumstance - to have an effect on another person, on the development of the situation, on the behavior of someone or something. Or, in some cases, even the effect itself. You'll notice there that influence is kind of framed as both proactive and reactive. You can influence something, or you can be influenced. We're talking today about being influenced.  R: And we're not talking about Instagram.  K: [laughs] Oh, God. You know what's funny? I went through this whole thing and I didn't even think about the concept of influencers, and now I'm depressed. R: Because you didn't or because now you are? K: [laughs] Because now I am. R: Okay. I'm sorry. I take it back, I didn't say anything.  K: [laughs] So, writers don't write in a void. It's sort of a reverse Heisenberg principle, which is “whatever you study will also change.” Whatever you read changes you, or whatever you consume changes you. So, writers don't write in a void. If you took a baby and raised them in a box with no interaction with the outside world whatsoever, well, to be honest I'm not sure they'd be capable of putting together an interesting story because they've had no influence.  R: You know what's funny, that's why I don't have kids. Because I thought about this kind of thing frequently in high school, like “what would happen if you raised a child in a padded room? And you never interacted with them, and they never saw another human?” So you're welcome, world, that I have not raised any children. Those children are welcome because I did not abuse them in such a manner.  K: [laughs]  R: But it's good to hear that someone else has had these thoughts. Although, Kaelyn and I did originally bond over the fact that we're terrified of the idea of raising children.  K: Pregnancy is just - R: And pregnancy. It's not for everybody. I recognize that for some people it's a beautiful process, but for Kaelyn and for me, it is body horror.  K: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, there's an entire nother skeleton in your skeleton. [laughs] R: Yes. And it's growing. [overlapping] It's getting larger.  K [overlapping]: It keeps getting bigger. R: And if you've never seen an MRI of a baby's skull, there's a lot of teeth in there.  K: Yeah, also they're squishy. R: Well, the MRI doesn't necessarily show that. It just shows all those chompers, waiting. Waiting.  K: Yeah. There's a lot of extra teeth in there.  R: Okay. [laughs] Where were we going? K [overlapping]: So for our writing- R [overlapping]: A child raised in a padded cell would probably write a different kind of story than somebody who's been exposed to Harry Potter.  K: Yeah, and if you take out every third word, it's their plan to destroy the world with their laser beams.  R: This reminds me of the book The Artist's Way. I think it's a month-long program designed to improve your creativity and I think maybe even to come up with… it's like NaNoWriMo but it's very classist and elitist.  K: [laughs] R: But the first thing it asks you to do is swear off all media for the month. K: Okay. R: And I put the book down right there. K: [laughs] R: Because I was like, that is literally impossible. I was in art school at the time, so I could not promise that I wasn't going to have to look at media. And also, this was written in 1992, before anybody was logging onto the internet daily.  K: Yeah, it was much easier to walk away from media for a month.  R: And I was trying to read it, I think, in 1999 or 2000, and it was even easier, at that point, to walk away from media than it would be now.  K: Yep. R: But, yes, it's called The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity by Julia Cameron. And I imagine that Julia Cameron has a very nice life and is able to unplug from media whenever it is convenient for her to do so. K: Well, in 1992 that meant “turn off the TV.” R: Right, it meant “don't pick up a newspaper” or, you know. K: Yeah. R: In 2016 they re-released a 25th anniversary edition, and I can't imagine they did much to it, but it really probably needed a lot of re-examining to - K: Yeah. It's -  R: - to even be relevant in 2016, I can't even imagine.  K: Now, was the purpose of this to do a detox of influence from your life? R: Yes. That is exactly what it was, to avoid influence for the month and find out what you write, not what the world around you influences you to write. But I think in her case, she was treating world influence and media and current events as a negative.  K: Mhm. R: And I would argue that if you are responding to the world around you, then the politics of your creativity is going to be more relevant and more well-informed. And I think that's a good thing.  K: Well, yeah. And this is something that we can certainly talk about with influence - current influence versus longevity. You'll see a lot of writers that go out of their way to not incorporate things that might later be considered an anachronism in their writing, so that they're not influenced by that.  R: Mhm. K: So that's another good example of influence. So, let's get the elephant in the room out of the way here: influence is not copying. As we were talking about, writers don't write in a void. You're absorbing everything that you interact with and consume every day, and, whether you know it or not, it's influencing and incorporating itself into even your way of thought.  R: You hear that? So if you were following an Instagram influencer, do not copy everything they do.  K: [laughs] Yes. Please don't. But, again, it's the reverse Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Whatever you're consuming changes you. There are entire PhD programs dedicated to studying and understanding the influence that certain parts of literature have had on larger parts of literature. Influence is not a bad thing. In many ways, it's a scholarly pursuit. Go to any Wikipedia page for any sort of well-known novel, and I guarantee you there's going to be a section in there that says “Influence.”  R: Oh yeah, yeah. K: And it's going to be a couple paragraphs talking about the history of the genre, or the subject material leading up to this. Influence is, apart from being an important part of writing, an academic pursuit. So all of that said, we are talking about influence in a very positive way here. We're saying it's great to read things, and to consume and internalize them so that this can help enrich your writing. Something that you really enjoyed, something you thought was maybe unique, or something that you were like, “Oh, what if I applied that to a character that I already have?” That's a good thing. I think it enriches your writing, I think it shows layers and growth, etcetera. K: That said, sometimes influence goes the opposite way. [laughs] Sometimes you've read something and you're like, “this is terrible,” or “this was such a ridiculous ending,” or “I hated that this happened.” And that might compel you to go through your manuscript and scrub absolutely everything having to do with that. The whole point is that whether you mean to or not, you are going to be influenced by external components in your writing. You could never read anything else, and you will still be influenced by things in the world just by existing in it. But we are talking more about influences in writing here, so we'll stick with that.  R: And we assume that you are being influenced by books because, as we say, if you want to be a writer you need to also be a reader. So we're telling you, go read widely in your genre, and part of that is that we expect you to absorb some of those elements and some of those styles. On a conscious level, we want you to look at the covers, we want you to look at the themes and the tropes and everything like that, but we also expect that on a subconscious level that's going to influence you and hopefully make you a better writer within your genre. K: And if you read a lot within your genre, you will start to notice trails of influence yourself. If you read a lot of - especially maybe a really niche kind of fantasy or science fiction genre, you're going to be able to chronologically put some things in order, like “Oh yes, I can see that book A came out at this time, and then three years later this book came out, and there are certainly elements from book A that I can see coming through in book B even though they were written by different authors.” K: So, I was telling Rekka before we started recording–I went down a little bit of a rabbit hole with this, because for reasons unbeknownst to me and possibly the influence of vampiric elements, I, for whatever reason, picked up my copy of Dracula off the shelf and I've just been flipping through random parts. And then we were talking about doing this, and I was like, vampires are a really really good example of influence through literature. They're something that has always been around - the Mayans actually had a god that was basically a vampire, even though they didn't acknowledge that, bat wings and all. And there's something that–I think you'd be hard pressed to find a significant culture of any sort of longevity from history that didn't have some sort of mythological being that displayed vampire-like qualities. K: In the late 1700s, early 1800s, though, there was the vampire craze in western Europe. There were a lot of short stories and things written about vampires, even though they've been codified as part of the mythos for a long time. But even then, they were sort of holding up the folklore and traditions of vampires–they were reanimated corpses, they were bloodsuckers that came out at night to drain people of their very lifeforce. In some cases, actively rotting bodies, hunched back and demonic looking, claw-fingered and fangs and scary eyes. A lot of this was the traditional folklore. Then we start getting into sexy vampires. [laughs] R: [laughs] I was just going to say. K: [laughs] And there were a couple specific novels that did this. In 1819, John Polidori published a short story called The Vampyre, and this was the first one where the vampire was more of a character rather than just a mindless bloodsucking dead creature. R: Right. This was a vampire worthy of Bela Lugosi's eyes.  K: Oh, no one's worthy of Bela Lugosi's eyes. [laughs] R: You know what I'm saying. K: I know, I'm teasing. So, it was very popular. So then, a lot of vampire short stories and short novels were coming out where the vampires were getting a little more sophisticated, and all of these were drawing influence from Polidori's short story. It was a very successful short story. So then, in 1872, an Irish author named Joseph Sheridan [with a mock-French accent] Le Fanu - I'm assuming it's French which is why I did that accent - published Carmilla, which was a fantastic novel. And this is, I would say, probably a turning point where vampires are unabashedly being associated with a sexual element at this point. It has a not-very-subtle vampiric lesbian... stalking, I guess, going on through this book. It's fantastic, it's not that long. If you ever get a chance to read it, it's great. K: And then of course, a couple decades later in 1897, we come to Bram Stoker's Dracula. I should, by the way, say that Bram Stoker and Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu were both Irish. Ireland had a shockingly strong folklore of vampires. In some cases they were fae, which is a whole different category of supernatural elements in Ireland, and in some cases they were just reanimated corpses. Anyways, then we get Bram Stoker, who of course gives us Dracula. And this is considered the preeminent vampire guideline bible, if you will. I think when most of us - granted, Rekka and I are older millennials, but - R: [laughs] How dare you? K: I think the first vampire we heard of was Dracula.  R: Mhm. K: I actually remember, growing up, that there was a kid in my neighborhood who just thought vampires were called Draculas.  R: Yeah. I think that was probably a… Not that I thought Dracula was a noun, but I never expected Dracula to look the same way twice.  K: Yeah. Yeah, Dracula was just like - Dracula, vampire. They were interchangeable.  R: Mhm. K: And that's how synonymous this became. Now, look at all the stuff that lead up to this in order for us to get the seminal vampire novel of the time. Stoker was absolutely influenced by all these novels that came before. Something else that's really interesting that Stoker was influenced by is the sexual component of vampires in this. Like I said, that came through hard and strong. Well, maybe I should say most popularly with Carmilla. Here's something else really interesting about Stoker: he was probably gay. It's difficult and inappropriate to go back and retroactively categorize people these ways, but there's a lot of very strong… I'm trying not to say “homoerotic,” I'm trying to say… There's a lot of very - R: Queerotic? [laughs] K: Yeah, there's a- R: There's not a queer person in the universe that will argue this point with you.  K: Yeah. R: I think the LGBTQIA+ are very, very ready to claim vampirism.  K: [laughs] Absolutely. And that's a great part of the influence of this. Some of Stoker's best friends were Oscar Wilde and Walt Whitman. Actually, I believe Stoker either started writing or finished writing Dracula right after Oscar Wilde was imprisoned, and they were exchanging letters while he was in prison.  R: Mhm. K: You have to keep in mind, this was the mid-Victorian period, there's very repressed sexuality, but there was also this burgeoning underground masculine sexual component to it, where everyone - R: See people, this is what happens when you don't let people reveal their ankles.  K: Yes. Yes, exactly. [laughs] So, one of the things through Dracula is this secretiveness, this sense of penetration. Not only the fangs in your throat, but a lot of them get into your head and screw with you that way. This was not something we saw in previous iterations of vampires, who were gross, for lack of a better term. [laughs] R: [laughs] Yeah.  K: So, this influence comes through in a lot of different ways. And as I'm talking more about Dracula I can say like, “Okay, well there's a lot of very… what we would now consider queer sexual elements that we see in Dracula, coming through with the relationship between Dracula and Johnathan Harker and Dracula and Mina.” But there's also the influence of other writers who were starting to make vampires actually people, rather than Nosferatu-style monsters.  R: Right. K: Dracula, I would argue, then in turn really helped influence the next generation of common horror. At that point we're getting into H.P. Lovecraft and existential horror. Lovecraft, who, by the way, wasn't quite a contemporary of Stoker's, but was very aware and actually wrote some reviews of his writing. He didn't really like a lot of it. [laughs] I would argue that that was probably part of what influenced Lovecraft: it was a hard turn from these very sterile, white-marble, gothic horror novels to a lot of raw, and ocean, and dark mold, steam spaces.  R: You can literally write the sentence “I can't describe this.” and people are like “Woo, that is scary.” K: Yeah exactly. So much of Lovecraft is like, “it's too horrible to describe!” but it's like “Yeah, but can you tell me anyway?” [laughs] R: You mentioned earlier that an influence can be “I don't want to do this.” K: Yes. R: So, here we are. This is Lovecraft saying  “Well, Stoker wasn't racist enough for me, so I'm gonna write my own thing.” K: [laughs] Oh, God, Lovecraft. It's so hard to read some of that stuff. [sighs] Psychologists would be better at trying to figure out Lovecraft's influence than me, I'm certainly not going to. To say the man had issues is an understatement. He was more of a collection of neuroses formed into a human. Anyways, this is just something I was thinking of as a pretty-easy-to-track set of influences. We go from vampires being very loosely defined and having inconsistent characteristics based on what region the stories are being told in, to some stories published that codify certain rules about them, to their evolution from “Eww, it's a rotting, blood-drinking corpse” to “Huh, maybe I'd like date that person.” R: [laughs] Maybe I would like those lips on my bare neck! K: Yes, exactly. Which is a pretty interesting leap that really did not take that long to get from point A to point B. But all of this was just building on influence and influence, after that.  R: Yeah, all you needed was for one author to pick it up and go, “What if vampires, but sexy?” K: [laughs] Yeah. You know what's funny, we have this sort of modern-day depiction of Dracula as a very suave, debonair… what's the word I'm looking for? High-society type person.  R: Sophisticated.  K: Sophisticated, yeah. In the novel, he is those things a little bit, but he is very off-putting and he is... weird to look at, I guess I should say. R: Yeah, there's that first scene where Johnathan is eating in front of him, and you definitely get a vibe that this dude is not right.  K: Like, he's talking about his hairy ears. [laughs] R: [laughs] Yeah. K: His weird skin, he looks ill, as if when he's making his way to the castle all of the peasantry crying and pressing crucifixes into his hands wasn't red-flag enough for him. R: No, no, no. It's just a quaint little village, this is the thing they do. There is the aspect of vampirism having the power of glamour, and I think this is probably the most effective display of it. The way that he's describing Dracula, there's nothing attractive about this man, and yet. K: He's very drawn to him. R: Mhm. K: And he wants to help him. R: As is Mina. [laughs] K: And Lucy, and all of them. So yeah, vampires. Great example of influence in literature over the course of a relatively short time, shaping something that we now consider to be commonplace.  R: Mhm. K: We've even narrowed it down farther. One of my favorite things about Dracula is, there's nothing that necessarily says he can't go in the sun in that book.  R: Right, right. [laughs] K: It's just that he has no powers after noon, I think, or he loses his powers at sunrise. So he can be outside, but he's just a regular guy at that point.  R: Mhm. K: So, obviously things continued to change and evolve there, the “no going out during the day” is held over from the much older vampire myths. Anyways. So, all of that said, how do we see influences in writing? When can we pick these out? One of the obvious is the story itself, the plot. Maybe some story arcs. R: I would argue that people tend to pick it up faster when it's a similar setting. When it's the worldbuilding, I think people notice it more. K: Okay. R: And I think, again, plot arcs and character arcs are things that we do have to recycle.  K: Absolutely. I think it's rare these days to see completely original, never-before-imagined setting. In terms of world-building, both the world itself, and in my notes here I put “world systems.” Anything from the way magic functions, or government functions, or society functions. There's only so many ways you can organize people, essentially. [laughs] So there may have been something that you came across and you're like “Oh, that's interesting. What if I did this instead?” The characters- anything from the archetypes and tropes of characters to their storylines and their redemption arcs, or even just the relationships, how they interact with each other. How the characters are broken out either into family groups or groups of friends or hierarchies within that. I think we see that a lot. With plot, we can kind of go back to what I said at the beginning of the episode: sometimes there are things in there where it's like, “this is clearly Order of the Phoenix.”  R: Mhm.  K: [laughs] We're just seeing it presented a different way. R: And again, an agent loves this, because you can say “this is my list of story comps.” And if they're successful books, the agent can use that to sell the story and then the publisher can use it to sell the book. K: Mhm. R: So even though sometimes it sounds like we are poo-pooing derivative work, if it comes across as fresh, nobody's going to poo-poo that you have a great list of comps to start with.  K: Definitely, yeah. R: And I would like to note that that is the first time we have said “poo-poo” on this podcast. I feel like that should be marked. K: That definitely needs to be denoted for posterity. R: And now it's been said three times. K: [laughs] Then there's two other areas of influence I'd like to talk about that are a little harder to quantify. One is style. And this comes more to writing style, and how you're presenting your story. For instance, being influenced by the way the author just writes in general, their style, I will harken back to one of our favorite examples here. If you've read Gideon the Ninth it is a very very unique writing style, not something I've ever come across before and I'm sure there are a lot of people who are currently in the process of attempting to imitate it; I don't know how successful they're going to be, but I bet they're trying. R: And then there are others who are influenced by it to say “Oh, I can let loose like that?” K: Yeah. Exactly. Or, “I can try something completely different that I didn't think anybody would be interested in, but if they're willing to do this then maybe they would.” Point of view or viewpoint in the book - if you've read the second book in the Locked Tomb series, Harrow the Ninth, a lot of that is written second person. The Broken Earth series, large portions of that are in second person. R: Well, the Broken Earth series, the amazing thing is it's written in all three. K: Yes, yeah. R: So if you haven't read that I can't go any further, I do not wanna spoil that, even though it's been out for years, the culmination of that book is so good that I refuse to ever spoil it. But go read it, if you haven't read it, for sure. It's a big one - K: It's a lot - R: But it is so worth it. I listen to it on audio, and I can recommend that too. K: Yeah. So both of those books have instances of strange, or - R: Disorienting? K: Disorienting's an excellent word. I remember reading Harrow the Ninth and texting Rekka and going like “Is this like this the entire time?” R: And my only response is “Did you get to the soup yet?” K: [laughs] And it was a mentality shift, and once I just was like “Okay, I fixed my brain to a point that it can accept and read this now.” But another style quality is dialogue. How you incorporate and how you use dialogue in your writing is something that I think is very easily influenced by how other people do that. This can also start feeding into the character influence there as well, how the characters talk and interact with each other is very influenced by dialogue. So then the last kind of nebulous part that I'd like to talk about, and this is a little bit different but it is worth bringing up, is historical influence. There are a lot of books and stories that are nominal retellings of either one or a series of historical events. I'll use Game of Thrones here as an example, and spoilers for anybody who hasn't read or watched - R: I don't care if we spoil Game of Thrones. [laughs] K: George R. R. Martin, well first the basis of a lot of this is the War of the Roses, which was the English Civil War. It was also called the Hundred Years' War; it was just a long, bloody, drawn-out battle of constantly changing kings and powerful families trying to get their person on the throne of England. R: And the interesting part is, it is a hundred years, so the people who started this have cast this war upon the generations to follow, and if that doesn't tell you something about where George R. R. Martin is going to be forced to take the end of the books, I don't know what will, because HBO managed to make the show take what, the war take five years or maybe ten years if that? Just the fact that it was ten seasons, right? Was it ten seasons or nine? K: It was eight seasons. R: Okay, so at most, because of the children aging on the show, it was a nine-year hundred-year war. So if George R. R. Martin is following intentionally the framework of the Hundred Years' war, none of the characters that you're rooting for are going to make it. Just in the nature of aging. K [overlapping]: And there's - you can go through and just read a brief history of the Hundred Years' War, and you'll be able to identify characters in there. Like Tyrion has some very clear Richard III vibes to him. But then there's other historical events and groups of people that he took and pulled into this. The Lannisters are such a clear parallel of the Borgia family that it's almost difficult to know that and read this and know what happened to the Borgias. The Red Wedding was based off of a famous event in Scotland where something very very similar happened to that. Some Scottish lords were invited to dinner by a Scottish lord with English leanings, and he killed all of them, to get in good with the English. R: After serving them bread. K: After serving them bread, exactly. But again, historical influence - the concept of guestright is very important in most cultures and especially in Scotland. So there's so many examples of people taking strong influence from either actual historical events or folklore and mythological events, like the Trojan War and things like that, and incorporating it into their writing. There are a lot of writers who decide “I'm gonna do a modern interpretation of such-and-such,” because maybe - for instance the Trojan War, they're very interested in classic Greek mythology and decide “Hey, that's a great story to tell; I'm gonna set it in a different place but still tell the story.” K: So that's some elements of influence, and before we wrap up here, let's address the thing we started to talk a little bit about but should definitely round out. When is influence just becoming copying, at a certain point? This is hard. Because it's really about finesse and originality. It's about taking something that you liked and putting your own spin on it, so to speak. If you're just re-creating the same story and sticking your characters into it, you're going to get called at best lazy, at worst a plagiarist. R: Yeah, there are plenty of books out there - and I have one to include in the list - that are retellings of a classic story. The problem is when you don't approach it as “how do I make this my story?” K: Yes. I'm gonna use young adult genres here because it's a little bit newer and easier to trace through this, and I'm not going to name books in this apart from the first series that I will name because that author is wildly successful. The Mortal Instruments trilogy - you could probably say series at this point, there's so many books in that world at this point - by Cassandra Clare, is one of the early and premiere urban fantasy young adult novels. This was copied so many times. Some of the authors were a little more original with where they were setting it, some of them were a little more original with where they were putting the characters or who the characters were, but the magical teeenagers who are part of a secret society that protects humanity was everywhere. ‘Cause these books were a runaway success. They were very original; no one had really seen something like this before. The Mortal Instruments created so many tropes that I can't and will not try to name them. R: And I think it's, part of that, somebody loves a book that they experienced so much that they want to hold onto that feeling forever, and one way to do that is to create something completely inspired by that same world. And this is where fanfic comes from, and fanfic is healthy, and it's a great way to express feelings of “I don't want to leave this book world.” But when you take it to a publisher and you say “This is going to sell really well because the other one that already did it sold really well,” as they say - don't follow trends in publishing, because you're five years behind. K: Conversely, a lot of people were able to get things like this published because the market wasn't inundated with this yet. R: Right, you had to be among the first to imitate a successful book, which is why they say don't follow the trends, because you won't be among the first. There are so many people out there writing that there are easily 500 people ahead of you in the queue for the publisher slush pile. K: Yeah and I wanna be clear, the first book of this entire - I'm not joking, I think there's over 20 books within this world at this point - the first one came out in 2007. So yes, the Internet was very alive and well at that point; it was not what it is now. Writing communities on the Internet were not what they are now. But all of this is to say that there were people who just straight up copied this genre, this book in some way. Either in terms of setting, in terms of characters, in terms of the magical elements of this, they just straight up copied this and I gotta be honest with you, a lot of them were not terribly successful. [laughs] Some of them were, though, and some of them made some money off of this. R: Well, for other readers who are not writers, when the same thing happens they come out of a book series and they have to wait for the next book, they want more. K: Exactly, they were looking for more. R: This is not unlike when the animation company puts out a very similar cheap animation to the latest Disney release. I worked at Blockbuster, and I saw this all the time. You'd have a big animated Disney release, and you'd have this tiny company out of who-knows-where that put together an animated copy, and they rely on parents and grandparents to grab the wrong one. This is not like trying to give the kids more of what they want, this is like “If we are gonna be next to this Disney movie on the shelf, someone will pick us up by accident and we will make money.” K: Well I always remember because a lot of Disney's classics, like the Disney renaissance movies, they were all like public domain stories. So they would just make that and they could get it out on VHS faster than Disney could - R: Yeah, they were made direct to video. K: Because Disney left it in - like everyone knew what the upcoming Disney movies were. So if you knew there was gonna be Aladdin, well, the story of Aladdin is public domain, you start making Aladdin right away. [Brief interlude of car noises] R: I literally believe that Mike's apartment is built on an overpass. K: No, just next to a road with a lot of people who drive like idiots. R: Well that was like a garbage truck, but anyway. K: That was a motorcycle. R: That was a motorcycle?? It sounded like it had at least 16 wheels. K: Yeah. R: Alright, sorry, so Aladdin - K: So everyone knew what movies Disney was making well in advance, and of course these would take years after they were announced to actually be finished and put in theatres. So if Disney says “we're making Aladdin” - R [overlapping]: Before it's in theatres! K: - well then, another small studio can also make Aladdin. The animation isn't gonna be great but then Aladdin's gonna be in the theatres and then a week later the imitation Aladdin are going to be on shelves, and grandparents are gonna go “Oh my grandchildren want to see -” R: Or “They've been talking about this movie and here it is on VHS,” and they don't know how theatre releases work and so they grab it and buy it, and they spend $18 or $15, seems like a really good deal on a Disney movie, and the animation studio makes their money back. So they do it again. K: So don't be that cheap animation studio. Don't be the person that's taking something that somebody put a lot of time, thought, and creativity into, and churning out the cheap, fast, easy-to-consume version of it. R: Yeah and I don't think, when it comes to writers - I mean I'm sure there are people out there who go “Okay this is the newest thing, I am going to behave like an algorithm and I am going to make another version of it and then release it, and I will make lots of bucks.” There are those writers that–they do that on purpose. So don't be them. But I don't think any of our audience are going to be them. And if you were thinking that that was a great way to make a successful book, let us correct you. But if you are inspired by Gideon the Ninth, or by Mortal Instruments, or anything like that - take the time to develop a story just like you would a completely inspired out of left field story, and take the time to put it together in a considerate and thoughtful and unique way, and then we approve. You get our approval. We're not promising to buy the manuscript, but we are approving a heartfelt influenced work, not an imitation that is intended to ride the wave of success of someone else. K: Exactly. R: Now when we're saying “copying,” are you talking about the publishing houses out there who literally lift the copy and try to sell it on Amazon, and just do it again and again and again as they get caught and cancelled? K: [laughs] No, no. Copying has, I think the way I'm defining it, more to do with not adding any creativity or original elements of your own, just saying “I liked what this person did, I'm going to do it too.” And listen - it's a fine line. One of the things that's really interesting about plagiarism is it's either very obvious - somebody had too many parts in a book, a novel, a poem, that are clearly just from another book - or, you've gotta go through a whole process of proving that somebody had access to something you were working on and directly lifted elements from that and put it into their book. Plagiarism is either very straightforward or very difficult. R: And, with plagiarism, they have plagiarism checkers on the Internet; I think a lot of teachers appreciate that because they can't read everything. So they can run an assignment from a student through a plagiarism checker, and that plagiarism checker can do its best with whatever it has access to in its database to catch - K: Plagiarism checkers are very good now, by the way. R: But we're talking word-for-word plagiarism. Sometimes what we refer to in the publishing world as plagiarism is actually trademark infringement. K: Yes. R: And that is difficult because if you write a story with Harry Potter in it, but you change his name and all the words are your original words, how do we run a plagiarism checker against that? K: Yes. So it's like I said, either very easy or very difficult to prove plagiarism; there's rarely a middle ground there. R: Although there are books that have been caught lifting a paragraph or two, from different books. So like the entire thing is plagiarized, but it's plagiarized from different sources. K: Yeah. You see instances of plagiarism tend to show up more in academic and scientific publishing than in fiction and genre-writing. It definitely does happen, though. R: Yup. Because, again, there are people out there who are confused about what is allowed and what is advisable in writing.  K: There are some really significant seminal works in American literature especially–I'm sure globally but I just happen to know the American ones–that are just plagiarized in certain places. And a lot of them were written in a time where it wasn't as easy to check this, so we- R: Find out much later, when it is easier, how much that was widespread. K: Yup. Exactly. R: There are nefarious people. I was referring, in my last statement, to the innocent, naive new writer, who just does not understand what is and isn't acceptable. Or, they didn't intend for it to go widespread, and they wrote a little thing for fun and end up finding out that they are not welcome and doors are being shut in their face because they crossed the line and it got noticed. K: Yeah, exactly.  R: That's the thing, a little baby writer learning about things the very hard way. It's a shame. That would be someone that you would hope would find a mentor who would guide them in the right direction before that kind of thing gets shot in their face. But with a pen name you can be reborn, as long as you reiterate yourself in better forms than the previous mistakes that you made. K: Yeah, and plagiarism should be very easy to avoid. R: Mhm. K: If you're looking at somebody else's work and saying “I wish this was mine, I'm going to make this mine,” don't do that. You should never be copying text from somebody else. Everything should be written on your own.  R: Yeah, don't go, “How did that person write it? I loved that so much.” Well yes, you did, but that's not your voice. So write it yourself. And I would say that if you close a book and you go, “Oh, I'm so inspired to write,” and you sit down and you start writing right away, don't publish that. [laughs] K: Yeah. R: There is a process to developing your own ideas even if it's mostly internal and you never grab a notebook and work out the story itself. The process of coming up with your own ideas is not “I just read this, I'm going to go write because I'm inspired and I'm going to finish that book before I do anything else.” [laughs] That's probably going to be a very derivative, if not plagiaristic, book. So don't do that. I always recommend you sit with your ideas for a while before you sit down and write it.  K: Absolutely. I mean, that's important in general. R: Carry it around like a baby, pretend you're some kind of marsupial and you have your twelve-day gestation period but you still carry that little joey around for a while before it's ready to enter the world. That's kind of the process that I recommend for a writer. K: [laughs] So there you go. Be a marsupial. R: Be a marsupial. The opossum tail has its own fingerprints which are unique to it, so there's that. Grow a prehensile tail and commit crimes with it so that you can be tail-printed later. Alright, I don't know where this story's going.  K: I like it, I like it. R: Yeah, I like it too, but it's not a good way to wrap up an episode because all we can do is just stop. [laughs] So, if you have any questions about plagiarism or inspiration, or you just want to share your inspirations and influences, you can @ us on Twitter or Instagram @WMBcast. You can find us on patreon.com/WMBcast, and we will have some more marsupial facts for you in two weeks. K: [laughs] R: [laughs] Thanks everybody for listening, and I hope this was a helpful discussion. Kaelyn and I have to go sit at a desk and figure out- have we fulfilled the promises that we made to you when we started this podcast? Because we feel like we've just kind of been indulging ourselves in what topics we bring up, so if you feel like, “Hey, you said you were going to cover this, and you never covered that,” definitely tell us that too, because we want to go back to our mission statement and make sure that every once in a while we give you an episode that's in line with that. So if you have input to that regard, please let us know. Otherwise, marsupial facts in two weeks! Thanks everyone!

Ergenlik dönemine bakış açımız nasıl olmalıdır? Ebeveynler bu süreçte ergene ne oranda etki etmelidir? Dini ve kültürel değerleri sorgulamaya başlayan ergenin bu dönemi sağlıklı bir şekilde geçirebilmesinin yolları nelerdir?

On June 6th, 2001, Ricardo "Ricky" Mejia was found murdered in Pharr, Texas near two orange groves. His case has gone unsolved for years, but now he is ready to talk! In this episode I am not only channeling his energy but I am also using The Miracle Box app, this is a spirit-box where you can hear his voice! To learn more about this app, please visit https://huffparanormal.com/2021/05/the-miracle-box-spirit-communication-app-is-here/ This episode is unlike any other, in fact Ricky even mentions a name! Could this be the name that helps solve his case? What do you think he is saying? Here is my description below for the audio, but I couldn't make what other words he was saying, this is where I leave them blank; but can you help me? C: Can you speak to this device? R- Yes, what questions do you have? C: Can you tell me what happened the night that you died? R:"It all happened very fast" C: You don't remember much? R:_ _ _ Ma'am I do! It was Jose _ _ _ _ _ __ _ _ _ Water C: Water R: House C: What about water? R: I died near the trees C: You died near the canal ? (I ask this because there are orchards near Sugar Road that has a Canal in between the groves). Ricky:_ _ _ _ _ _ _ C: Did you die near the canal? R: Are you listening? C: Did they murder you near the canal by the orchards? R:____ C: Did they murder you across the street from the Canal, where the orchards are? R: House, near it________ C: Were there 5 guys that were present during your murder? R: From what I can see C: Do you know how many guys were present during your murder? R: Are you listening at all C: I'm Sorry, I am listening R: It's okay, _ _ _ _ _ _ C: Ricky, what do you want out of this interview? R: Justice ***Be sure to message me your thoughts about this audio, and what you can hear! Sources: https://rio.projectcoldcase.org/?page=11 https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.valleycentral.com/news/local-news/pharr-pd-looking-for-help-in-cold-case/amp/ https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/137917806/ricardo-mejia --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/thevisitationpodcast/support

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 for us to address in future episodes. We hope you enjoy We Make Books! Twitter: @WMBCast  |  @KindofKaelyn  |  @BittyBittyZap Instagram: @WMBCast  Patreon.com/WMBCast Mentioned in this episode: Glitter + Ashes edited by dave ring Silk & Steel edited by Janine A. Southard  Grace's Links: Website ArtStation portfolio Twitter Episode Transcript (by TK @_torkz) [Upbeat Ukulele Intro Music] Rekka: This is We Make Books, a podcast about writing publishing and everything in between. Rekka is a published Science Fiction and Fantasy author, and Kaelyn is a professional genre fiction editor. Together, they'll tackle the things you never knew you never knew about getting a book from concept to finished product, with explanations, examples, and a lot of laughter. Get your moleskin notebook ready. It's time for We Make Books. R: Today we are talking to Grace Fong about book art. Now we've had someone on in the past to talk about cover art and art-directing a commissioned cover. However, I think Colin would forgive me for saying that you do not want Colin to do the artwork. Kaelyn: He would, yes. R: Yes. [laughing] Would you like to introduce yourself? Grace: Hi, I'm Grace! My pronouns are she/her, I work on the narrative design team over at Wizards of the Coast for Magic: The Gathering. I am also a sometimes-writer, and for the past five years I've been doing illustration work for various speculative fiction magazines, such as Strange Horizons, and some anthologies like Silk & Steel and Glitter + Ashes. K: Rekka this is our first like, real artist. R: It is difficult to get an artist on a podcast. I have tried - K [overlapping]: [laughing] R: - for this podcast and the previous one and it is a tricky business. So Grace, you live up to your name in showing up. G [laughing]: We don't like talking to people, we just like sitting at our computers. R: I completely understand, but doesn't mean I'm gonna give up trying, so. We've finally done it. K: Awesome. So I have been involved in some cover art not as the primary person but as the editor, where I have to look at it and go ‘yeah okay that kinda tracks with what's happening here.' We have talked a lot on this podcast before about what to expect out of your cover art, and how involved the writers are going to be in it, and the answer is typically not very, at all. So, when you're doing this, who is it that you're primarily working with? G: When I do work for magazines and books I'm usually working with the editor of the publication, so for the anthology it's usually an anthology editor, or for a short fiction magazine it is usually the art director of the magazine or the editor of the magazine. K: Can you walk us through the process of how you get started on this? They're obviously not coming to you with a blank slate, they're coming to you with a series of stories that may or may not have a theme. How do you get started working with this editor? G: It really varies, depending on the type of publication. So for anthologies, because they cover a lot of different narrative ground, usually we try to come up with an image that encapsulates the theme of the anthology. Like for Silk & Steel, I was doing one of the promotional postcards for them. We knew we were doing femme-femme, high fantasy, sword-and-scorcery kind of stuff. So I knew that those characters would have to be reflective of the book's content. Sometimes editors will give me a particular story that they aim to showcase for the publication, in which case I'll usually read the story if it's under 6,000 words, and try and come up with a composition that fits it the best that I possibly can. This is how I work with Strange Horizons. K: At what point do you usually come into the process? Are you typically involved right from the get go, or do they kind of wait until they have most of the story material? G: Usually when editors are doing their selections, they will wait until they have the written content first, because the written content is gonna dictate which artist they're gonna go to, to look for. Whose style best captures the feeling of their product? It's actually similar to traditional publication as well. The art directors at major publishing houses usually have a manuscript or summary for new debut authors whose manuscripts are already completed, and then they find an artist based off the existing manuscript. Some covers are completed beforehand, if the publishing house knows the author, knows the brand of that author and knows the kind of proposal or piece they are in the middle of working. K: You're gonna be sitting down with the editor, they're gonna give you a story that they particularly wanna feature, they're gonna give you an overall feeling or theme or - how much creative license do you get? R: I wanna interrupt because you just skipped like a really huge part: the creative brief. K: Yes. R: So what you just said, they're gonna give you a mood, they're gonna give you a theme or whatever, this is a whole step. Don't smooth it over like that. And this is something that actually Grace's got a little bit of a reputation for her knowledge on. So Grace I know you in, I believe it's November, are doing the Clarion workshop about creating a brief for a cover artist, right? G: Yes. R: So let's give this the spotlight it deserves! [laughing] G [overlapping]: Okay. K: Yeah, I've written a couple, I shouldn't have skipped over that, so apologies. G: I mean it's a specialized skill not everyone has to do them, so yeah. R: Well I definitely want to highlight it a bit, ‘cause you helped me with one - G [laughing]: That's true! R: What goes into the creative brief? Kaelyn named a couple of things, and this sort of forms the silhouette around which Kaelyn's question pivots, which is how much creative control do you get as an artist? So what's in the brief that you consider sacred, and what's in the gaps that you get to play with? G: So, that - K: Well first, and I'm sorry to cut you off - I'm sorry - can we say what - [laughing] R [overlapping]: I'm gonna interrupt you back! K: That's fair, that's fair. Can we kind of say what a creative brief is? G: Oh yeah, sure. So essentially when you are starting to work with an artist, an artist does not have the time to read an entire manuscript of 400+ pages. Their pricing is usually based off of the time that they're gonna spend creating your artwork. So you need to provide them with what is known as a creative brief, or art brief. And these are small documents that are very instructional, no more than like a page or two long, that explains the kind of image and feel that you are going for, for this assignment. The assumption is that you would have done your research and sent this brief to an artist that you think would do a good job for the publication that you're sourcing art for. So you're not gonna go to someone who does only black and white work if you want to sell your book with a big, bright, neon, 80s kind of cover. G: ‘Brief' is kind of the keyword here. You're essentially writing instructions for an artist. Don't try to lead them in using prose writing, tell them what they're gonna be drawing. It's a bit like a recipe list. So if it's a story about vampires and you want your vampire main character on the cover, you would specify that that's what you're looking for. Or, let's say you're trying to sell more literary up-market fiction, which doesn't use as many figurative images. Then you would maybe make an explanation about like ‘oh this book is about a woman's time when she was living as a child in Philadelphia.' In which case you would sometimes kind of refine that into a visual or item metaphor that you would ask the artist to render in a specific way that captures the mood and feel of the book, and leverages the imagery that's common to that market, so that it can reach the correct audience. K: Gotcha. Okay. So then you're gonna get this brief, and presumably dig into it. Do you ever receive a section of text, if there's a scene in particular that they'd like illustrated? G: Specific scene commissions tend not to be used for covers, because they're not very good at selling a publication. Scene work tends to be done for interior illustration. So these the the images that go along in the story; you look at these images as you are reading these scenes. But for the front cover you're trying to provide one image that sells the entire mood of the story to a particular audience. So in general you want to avoid using specific scenes, unless that scene comes in very early, because you don't wanna spoil the ending of the book. You only have one picture to play with for a cover, meanwhile with interiors you tend to have a series. You can do like a chapter header, like in the original Harry Potter American versions. K: It's funny you say that, because I was thinking about how I remember when the Harry Potter books were coming out, and there were always the American and the British cover versions, and everyone would be over-analyzing and try to pick apart ‘okay what's in the background here, what's happening in this scene.' But yeah because those covers were all more or less specific scenes from the book. They were a little abstract. G: Exactly, but it's - the keyword as you just said it is that they were scenes but they were abstracted. Actually tapping into that same visual metaphor that I mentioned earlier, for literary up-market, it's just because they're cramming so many things - what they're actually doing is creating one image that forces you to look harder at it to find all of those metaphorical connections with the story inside. If it has the hippogriff on it and the Chamber of Secrets journal and the Goblet of Fire, these are all singular items that you don't actually see in those covers how they relate to the story, but you know that this is an important item in the story. Ergo, which Harry Potter volume this cover revolves around. K: Do you get scenarios where somebody says ‘I want you to draw exactly this and I want it to look like this,' or do you generally give them a few different ideas or rough sketches and then go from there? G: Generally the things that I like to have control over are color palette, camera angle, the stuff that would be considered very technical for an illustration. Perspective. Whether things are shot from above, shot from below, because these are all illustrator tools that help dictate the mood of a painting. And the mood is actually the thing that I usually ask my clientele for. Mood translates to ‘how are we supposed to feel when looking at this?' Because feeling is very closely tied to genre. G: So, what kind of book am I trying to sell? Is it a horror book? That dictates what kind of colors, what kind of camera angles that I'm going to use. But if somebody tells me ‘I want a top-down shot of something-something,' then that feels a bit invasive to me because I feel like if I am an artist then I can select the camera angle to best convey the drama that you're asking for. But the things that are really good for me are the object or character or focus, and if there is a character the kind of action that is being performed. A lot of times we get character description but no action, and the action is actually what tells us what the character is like, and separates it from the design. K: Yeah so you don't just have two characters just standing there looking straight forward at the camera - G [overlapping]: Yeah. K: - dressed the way they told you to dress them. G: Yes. [laughing] Because basically that would be really difficult to create an interesting illustration for. K: Absolutely yeah. [laughing] G: It's kind of like going to the mall and you see the clothes being sold on mannequins. Like it helps sell you the clothes but it doesn't tell you what the story is behind the people wearing the clothes. It helps to have stuff like props, backgrounds, and actions to help convey like, ‘oh yeah if this character is wearing a t-shirt and jeans, is this t-shirt and jeans part of an urban fantasy? Or is it a part of a YA contemporary romance?' K: How much back-and-forth do you generally have with the editors you're working with? Like what is the first thing you give back to them? G: This generally varies per artist, including the artists I work with. So usually what I do is between one to three thumbnails or sketches that I hand in to the editor and ask them ‘what do you think of these directions,' ‘which one of these thumbnails' - which I then proceed to refine - ‘do you think hits the target best?' Then if it's a very large piece of work I might work on a more refined sketch and pass it in, or like base colors and pass it in, and minimally it's usually the thumbnails plus the finished drawing. So that's two to five back-and-forths, depending on the size of the piece. R: How much do you let the art director or editor you're working with go back to the start? I know you probably don't let them past a certain point, like ok you approved the thumbnail so we're moving forward, we're not going back to thumbnails after that, but what if they don't like any of the initial thumbnails? G: Yeah so basically most artists I know have what are called revision fees, and these are generally written into the contracts that you sign upon working with them. Basically saying ‘you get this many thumbnails, you get to give comments this many times, and if you go over those times there'll be an additional fee.' Because artists are basically charging - it's a service-based industry, and your haircutter charges you per hour, and so does your artist. And generally if they aren't happy with the thumbnails, then I would then incur the revision fee, but also I ask for further information. G: So, if you as a writer or editor aren't happy with what your artist is turning back, you need to be able to explain what you're not happy with. So you can explain like ‘oh I don't think this color palette is appropriate for this target market. Here are some images of other books that have come out in the same area that we think would be good inspiration for you.' The only time that revision becomes really frustrating, outside of a timing frame, is when your client says ‘I don't know what I want but I'll know it when I see it.' R: I knew you were gonna say that. [giggling] As a graphic designer I also hate those words. G [laughing]: Yeah. K: It's like okay I guess I'll just keep throwing paint at the wall and see what happens. G: Like revisions aren't bad as long as the client is able to convey what needs to actually be changed. R: Not a series of no-thank-yous. K: Have you ever come across a scenario where you've kind of had to take a step back from the project and say ‘listen, I think maybe I'm not the right person to do this.' G: Usually I'm good enough at heading that off before a project even begins. K [laughing]: Okay! G: That is something you come to with experience, you understand your style, your way of working as an illustrator, and knowing like ‘hey this type of thing is going to be too out of my ballpark,' ‘this type of thing is not gonna pay enough,' ‘this type of thing is just too much work for what I'm capable of doing right now.' That is kind of like you're responsible, as most freelance artists are independent business owners essentially. They'll usually say so up front minus extenuating circumstances. Like at work we've had people drop out because they acquired COVID in the middle of an assignment, so - K [overlapping]: Oh god. G: - there's really nothing you can do about that. [laughing] K [laughing]: Yeah. Have you ever been presented with a commission, talked to the person, and thought to yourself ‘I don't think they have a good enough handle on what it is they're looking for here, and this may just end up being a headache'? G: Yes. That has definitely happened before, ‘cause I don't have much time. So if I feel like the client either lacks the direction and communication to give me what I need, or if they're simply asking for too much, then I will usually politely decline them, within the first couple of emails. K: Obviously you're not reading all of these books and you're working off the creative brief. Is there anything in particular that you get these, you're trying to make sure you're communicating in the feel of the book rather than an exact representation of what's going on there? G: Yeah. So I'm not trying to recreate a 1-to-1 specific moment from the book. I'm trying to generate a piece that, as you said, evokes a major theme. A lot of times I'm asked to do character work, mostly because that is something that I enjoy doing and specialize in; I love character and costume design. Like you've never seen a spaceship in my portfolio because I'm really bad at it. K: I looked through it, I didn't see one. [laughing] G: Yeah, don't put stuff in your portfolio that you are not good at painting and don't wanna paint. Like people come to me because they're like ‘oh this person does kind of anime-inspired fantasy characters,' and so that's kind of like a niche that you can reach other people who like anime-inspired fantasy characters. So things for me that I consider important is, I like to know a character's build and ethnicity. G: Stuff like ‘oh the character's mouth is a Cupid's bow' or like ‘they have eyebrows that are waxed to a certain angle,' that's a bit too specific. Or like ‘they wear ten rings.' Because if you mentioned that the character wears ten rings, it automatically makes those ten rings really important. And you have to wonder, are those ten rings really important to actually selling who this character is? Do those ten rings have a narrative function in the story? If so, do you wanna include the rest of the character, or do you wanna focus on that character's hands and the rings, as a way to say ‘hey this is what this story is about'? Because it's very hard to include such a small item and such a big item together on the same image. There's a lot of physical limitations to representational art; similar as it is, it's really challenging to get a photo with both your shortest friend and your tallest friend at the same time and not have a giant gap between them. [laughing] K [laughing]: Lot of negative space and awkward positions. G: Yeah. R: Well this is where your control over the perspective comes in, right? So that would be a shot from below. K: Or above! Really above. [laughing] G: Yeah. So one of the things that I like to ask for is no more than two or three key items, I would call them, that differentiate who this character is from all the other characters. Like you can say ‘yes, she is a Black woman' or ‘yes, he is a muscular man of European descent.' But Aragorn is defined by Andúril, his sword. Once you stick that sword on Aragorn, you know ‘hey this is a high-fantasy Tolkienesque property.' So I'm looking for a handful of items like that, to help show who this character is and how they differentiate and help sell the genre, setting, and time period. K: Covers are telling people things without explicitly telling them that. Like you mentioned you give Aragorn his sword or a similar character, you're stating ‘hey this is a high-fantasy book.' If there's a background in it and it's castles built into rolling mountains, that's also indicating things to somebody who might be potentially interested in reading it. Do you spend a lot of time or give a lot of attention to trying to signal to potential readers that this might be something they're interested in, or do you kind of let the cover do what it's gonna do? Like how much do you try to work elements into it that are telling you things about the book without telling you things about the book? G: I usually try to focus on having as I said up to three of those key items - K [overlapping] Okay. [laughing] G: - because, as you said, castles are really common in a lot of European-based high fantasy. So you can leverage that castle, change it up, be like oh is it a floating castle that implies that there's a certain kind of magic? Is it a castle that's built into a hillside that implies another sort of magic? And so when I'm doing that I'm not necessarily looking at other pieces that are within the same genre, because the same genre-ness comes from the castle itself. I'm trying not to make a cover that looks exactly like every other cover out there, because this writing is probably not like every other fantasy story out there. K: Mhm. G: I'm actually specifically looking for those key items that differentiate it within its own genre. K: Any good stories, or interesting things that've happened here, your favorite piece that you've worked on or something that was particularly challenging? Maybe not just cover art but any commissions in general? G: All of my really funny stories are actually just from when I was doing random stuff for anime cons. I've had to draw a woman making out with Loki, but the woman is not herself, the woman is Kate Beckinsale. Fandom's strange. R: So you drew Kate Beckinsale making out - K [overlapping]: Making out with Loki - [laughing] G: Yes. R: And let the woman believe it was her? G: There are certain things you simply cannot draw. You cannot draw the flow of time. If you have a single image, it is very difficult to have anything that goes from step one and step two. [chuckling] And convey two images in a single image. K: Those Animorphs covers used to do that. G: That's true. And they had the little flipbooks in the back. K [laughing]: Remember that? G: Yeah. K: What advice would you have for somebody who, like let's say they're going to self-publish, or maybe somebody who hasn't really done this before but is looking to commission a piece of art - what advice would you have for them? G: For prospective clients, I generally ask that they do their research beforehand, essentially. Like working with artists, we have our own system, our own language, essentially, for technical stuff, for our materials, our use of camera angles, our use of colors. And to kind of understand what is within and without our control. So don't expect an art piece to be able to capture your entire story, because your story has some form of linear time in it, which art inherently will not if it's a single image. And that usually requires a lot of trust on the part of new authors, because this is their baby, right, they spent a lot of time on it and they wanna give it nice clothes. K: I love that by the way - G [overlapping]: [laughing] K: - they wanna give it nice clothes, that's perfect. [laughing] G: And like, a lot of us really understand this, but it's really helpful for us if you are to distinguish things that are and are not concrete. If you have a story that's based on music and you want your cover to celebrate the fact that it revolves around song, artists cannot draw a song. Unless you have synesthesia, you're probably not gonna look at a piece of artwork and hear music. So you're gonna have to come up with concrete visuals to convey this. G: So that main character, how do they produce this music? Are they a violinist? In which case yes, a violin can be drawn, that's very clear, very easy. And so just coming up with those small as I say key items, that would probably be one of them. Coming prepared with those and trusting the artist to interpret that - you can always say ‘hey, my book is about song, that is why I'd like to include these items,' but don't throw them into the wind with ‘my book is about songs' and - K: ‘Draw me a song.' G: Yes. K: You had mentioned revision fees, now again a constant theme in this podcast is contracts and read your contract and check your contract. Typically if you're going to engage an artist they're going to sign a contract with you. By the way, if the artist is not interested in signing a contract with you, and this is a custom piece, maybe that's not the artist to work with. But you're going to have a fee schedule, you're going to say ‘okay up front this is how much I'm estimating this to be but there are additional fees and costs for revisions, for changes, for going back.' K: We've definitely had to, with artists we commissioned for covers, go back and say ‘hey listen, something came up and we need another version of this, can you tweak these things?' And that's fine, it's just an additional charge. Is there anything in particular you would say to the people who are looking to commission an artist to just be aware of and expect, so they're not 1) shocked or 2) completely overlook something, in terms of costs associated with this kind of thing. G: Art is skilled labor. K: Absolutely. G: It's gonna vary per artist. Some people work faster, some people work slower. The type of publication is also going to affect the cost. But do not be surprised if an artist asks for a living wage, in terms of hourly money, because this is what they do; it's generally not a side job. K: Art is a skilled work that needs to be paid accordingly. There's a reason you're having to go out and find somebody you need to do this, because it's not an easy thing to do. G: Yeah, you're gonna be looking at prices significantly over part-time retail, because this is full-time work. Artists pay taxes on top of their stuff, and they are in charge of maintaining their own tax books. The high prices also cover their cost of living, the materials, 30% of it automatically goes to taxes, so those rates are going to be relatively high. A lot higher than I think what people expect. I feel like sometimes when people are new to commissioning, they'll expect it to be something in the price range of like ‘hey, I'm asking someone to in their off-time help me out at home with this, etcetera, or babysit my cat.' R: They wanna pay you 20 bucks and an extra pizza. G: Yeah. K: Well they're looking at it in like hourly rates, not realizing that it's not just hourly. Like you said there's taxes, there's material, there's - you don't get something then immediately sit down and start drawing it, you have to read some things, you have to think about it, you have to process, there's a lot of invisible hours that go into this as well. G: Yeah. R: You might spend - random number - 12 hours working on a cover, but that skill that you developed to create that cover is not 12 hours worth of skill-development, that is the lifetime that you have put into being an artist. So if anybody is thinking that ‘well the cover for my book is just a box I need to check off on my way to publication' - G: Yeah and that high hourly rate encompasses the work of emailing back and forth and sending the revisions and all the administrative stuff that the artist has to do. Artists generally do not have assistant teams, and they are not big publishing houses. K: The phone call was two minutes, it took me five minutes to read this thing, and ten minutes to write a response, but all of the stuff in between is additional time. All of your back-and-forth with your artist, all of the discussion that you're gonna have, all of the time that you the artist have to sit and think about this and do some sketches and stop and walk away and collect your thoughts, all of that is your valuable time. R: We've been talking about hourly rates. But every time, in my personal experience, that I've commissioned a cover, I have been given a flat number and then the contract as we've discussed talks about how many revisions or whatever are included in that number. I assume this is the practice of this person doing covers so frequently that they have a general ballpark of what they need to earn to justify what a cover is. But that's still based on a living wage that they're creating for themselves. G: Correct. That's usually it. R: When somebody gives you a flat rate it's not that this is a flat rate and someone else is going to just give you like ‘$85 an hour please.' G: Yeah. K: Well are you calculating your flat rate based on how many hours you, in your experience, know this takes? G: Yes, that's exactly what most artists do. Because clients tend to not want to bill per hour, because it's a single gig, most artists will give a flat rate based off their previous experience of how long something is going to take, which is why when back-and-forth gets too much, we incur revision fees. Because usually the flat rate is based off of our average experience of a client who spends this much time talking with us, and this much is gonna have to go to taxes, etc. And because flat rate is generally easier for clients and billing as well. R: Yeah rather than an open-ended number where they have no idea, and there's probably some paranoia that if you don't know the person well you might just keep billing them for stuff. G: You're gonna find contracts that specify hourly rates for longer term stuff, like visual developments or several character designs, or if you have a world that you're trying to build out for a TTRPG or concept art for a new video game or something like that. But for single one-off jobs, it's usually the artist will give you a flat rate number based off of their estimation on how long the gig will take, which is why sometimes these flat rate numbers look gigantic. But remember, again, that's based off of an hourly rate. R: Now do you ever get an email from a potential client and you go ‘oh yeah I better double the number, based on the way this email is written'? G: Yes that has happened before; the asshole tax is a pretty common practice - K [overlapping]: [laughing] G: - among artists. We are factoring in how long something is going to take as well. K: And by the way along the flat rates and the contracts and Grace I don't know if this is how you typically handle this, but when we would do book covers it was usually half up front, of the flat rate, and half when the work is finished plus any additional revision fees, which for us was always just a like ‘hey here's the down payment if you will to show we're serious and to get started.' Artists put a lot of time into this, and if you say ‘well I'm gonna pay you when this is done' and then they go ‘I don't like it. Forget it. I don't want it anymore,' that's a lot of time and energy that the artist has now wasted for no return. G: Yup. Most artists will not start without half to full payment upfront. I'd say like 95% of them won't. ‘Cause everybody has been burned very early on in their career by somebody who asked for work and never paid for it. So you only let that happen once. [laughing] Yeah. Always be prepared to have the money ready, like half the money ready, before the artist will start working. If you have a relaxed deadline, a lot of artists are really chill about just letting things kind of be like ‘oh I have this email of somebody who's interested' but it doesn't become real and doesn't actually get scheduled until there's money down. K: Artists have schedules. And they have open time slots and things that they might not be able to fit you into. How much of a lead time would you say they need to leave, in order to have a fully completed piece of art ready to go? G: I'd say at the minimum one to two months. I know people that can turn stuff around in two weeks, but if you're looking to get something done in the one month range, you're probably looking at a rush fee. Artists usually keep one to two jobs forward, like they have something but they're working on something lined up, and they usually have maybe another one lined up. And so if you demand something immediately, then that means they have to rush the next two. K: Mhm. G: So usually they will include a rush fee for that. K: I mean essentially it's overtime - G: Yes. K: - at that point, like I'm having to work extra hours outside of my regular schedule so that I can get to your thing faster. G: Yeah. And the lead time will very specifically vary per artist, because if you're trying to get someone who's like super super popular, who has a large number of clients already, you may be waiting like a year or two. Like. [laughing] K: There're science fiction cover artists out there that, like two years, if you want anything from them. Some of those people have incredibly long lead times on these, and their schedules are just full like over a year. G: Yeah. Like for me, I tend to be booked out about four to five months in advance, personally. But I generally, I will do rush fees and I'll also do smaller client pieces here and there that I know I can fit into a weekend. But again it really is up to that individual artist. I know how fast it takes me to complete a piece, but when I have 50 things going on, yeah it might take 20 hours to do, but if I have ten things that all take 20 hours, then I have a lot of time management that I need to figure out. K [laughing]: Yeah absolutely. When you finish a commission, when you finish a piece, how are you getting it to the person who is actually going to use it then and turn it in for the publication? Because a lot of these pieces are, they're very high resolution, they're very large files, and what does this look like - First of all what kind of a file is it, what does it look like? And then 2) how are you getting it, and how do you set it up so that they can manipulate it the way they need? G: So usually for clients I send a flat image, unless a layered image is requested - R: And let the artist know that at the beginning. G: Yes. K: Yes. G: Yes, layered images will usually incur a higher charge, because it implies that you will be editing the image afterwards. And so basically you need to buy some rights, the editing rights, from your artist. So that'll be a higher charge up front, when you write your original contract. Usually because I do a lot of web work, I just deliver a high resolution JPEG, high resolution PNG, and that's fine for my clients. For other major work especially if you need a layered file, PSDs, Photoshop files, are generally the common way to do it. In which case you upload a massive, massive file to a file transfer service such as Dropbox, or a lot of companies often have an internal file transfer upload - you log onto their system and upload directly to their system. K: If you're getting, especially one of those huge high-res layered images, you need to have a program that can manipulate it. You might need something additional on your end to even work with the image then. But also like, these files are huge. Typically they can't just email it to you. There's actually file transfer services as Grace mentioned, where you drop these and it's just in there for like two days. And you've gotta go get the file within that two-day period. G: Yeah. I think for major transfers I generally lean on Dropbox and actually just sometimes Google Drive. They're not exactly super secure, but like - K: [laughing] G: - few very people are going around sneaking your self-pub cover, like. [laughing] They'll just delete it after you've got it. K [laughing]: Well, you never know, Grace. Maybe someday somebody will steal something that you've done and leak it to the public, and - G: That actually would be really bad. [laughing] I work for Wiz of the Coast, if it happens then it's bad. R: Secure FTPs from here on out. [laughing] K: Multi-factor authentication in order to get these files. G: Yeah. R: So Grace, I happen to know, because I am on the inside, that you are - at the time of this episode coming out - you are the guest art director on the next issue of The Deadlands. G: Yes! Yes I am. [laughing] R: So from the other side of the table, how do you go about picking artwork on behalf of who are essentially clients here for their magazine issue? G: Cool. So, for The Deadlands I worked with Cory, who is the main art director, and I looked through the existing repertoire of work that had already been selected for Deadlands publications. Cory was very helpful too in kind of summarizing up the visual style of the magazine, as stuff that's more dark, more photo-real, lots of use of textured work, and I could see it in all the previous selections that'd already gone through. So based off of that, I was using my knowledge of my time in the art community to find pieces that I thought would resonate with that style. G: I was also provided a showcase short story essentially, for that issue, that they thought like ‘hey it would be good if the cover resonated emotionally with this written piece.' So I was looking for stuff that leveraged the visuals within that story, visuals of growth and forestry in particular, goes with a nice visceral story. They gave me the rest of the stories to read too, but as just more background information. And so I went to the portfolios of some of the artists that I knew worked in that kind of emotional field, like artists that did a lot of dark work, artists that do a lot of work in monochrome spaces, and so I looked in their portfolios for work to license that fit the forest-y theme of the showcase story. G: And so I took a couple of pieces that I thought were good, showed them to Cory, Cory showed them to the editor, and we moved forward with one of them. I contacted that artist; they spoke English as a second language so that's another thing you have to watch out with artists, so you have to be very clear and direct in your emails to make sure that you can be understood when your email gets thrown into Google Translate. And then I put Cory in touch with the artist for final contracts and payment. R: This is coming out on September 14th; the new issue of The Deadlands should be out on the 19th, so make sure you check that out, because you will see the cover that Grace picked, and the art that fit into the style, and I happen to know from behind the scenes that everyone was really enthusiastic about your choices. So you made a small mention, but we should probably highlight just a little bit - this is licensed artwork, the artwork already exists, you didn't commission something new, this is a piece that the artist already created either on commission or just as part of their creative process on their own. And so the artwork is available for license, which means that in a limited capacity it can be used again. Can you explain a little bit more about licensing? G: Yeah. So licensing is essentially buying rights to print an image, whether it be like a t-shirt or whether it be like your book cover, and it kinda goes through a separate route than commissioning. So commissioning essentially you are paying for a service, you're paying for an artist's time to make custom work for you. For licensing, it's closer to buying rights, and you're saying ‘I want to pay you x amount for the right to use this image in my piece. And generally artists are pretty lenient about licensing, especially if you are doing a non-exclusive license. It's basically free money for us, like you're paying us for something that we've already created, there's no additional hourly time that we're gonna have to handle other than administrative fees, which are usually more than covered in the licensing. For that you just generally email them and ask them if they have a licensing fee already, or you can generally look for standard licensing fees for products of the same type as yours. G: Most magazines and such will print how much they pay for licensed covers, in part of their artistic submissions and generally you can offer this rate for similar products within the field. When you are commissioning, though, these rights and usages will actually be factored into the contract. For example, if you want to be the only person who can use this work, you want the artist never to sell this work to another licensee, then this will factor into the cost of your original contract. The flat rate that the artist gives you might be higher, because basically you're saying they can't make future money off of it by licensing it to somebody else. ‘Cause copyright-wise, the image I believe is retained with the artist, unless the rights are completely bought out in the contract. Like I believe most contracts are they pay for the work and they pay to license the work, so an exclusive license would be the license fee but higher. R: Kind of like the layered file, like you know that this person wants to own this image and do whatever they want with it, so you kind of charge extra. G: Yeah. I'll charge even higher if somebody is like ‘you can never show this in your portfolio,' like you can't even use this to get more work later. K: I don't understand why anyone would want that. R: Yeah. K: Ok. G: It really has to do with intellectual property NDA-type stuff, so if they're like ‘this is a super-secret project, this is too early on,' ‘cause usually it's like artists get to post in a portfolio once the thing has been released, but if they're worried a project is gonna be canceled and they wanna hold onto the image in case they wanna use it for another project, then that would bar them from putting it in a portfolio. This is more common practice among artists who work in video games and animation, where their projects are constantly like revolving, canceled, there's a lot more asset reuse, yeah. R: Alright so. There [laughing] is a lot of information on licensing, on contracts, on payment structures. Be nice to the artist, ‘cause look at everything they're already balancing. K [overlapping]: [laughing] R: So any final thoughts, Grace? Anything we haven't touched on that is a bugaboo for you, that you wanna make sure we warn people or - G: I feel like we've covered a lot. R: - invite people, it can be inviting too. G: I dunno, come to my class November 13th. It's a free business class on how to write effective art briefs. [laughs] R: Yes, that's through Clarion West. G: It'll be through the Clarion West, yes. R: Yeah, so we will put the link to that in the show notes. Hopefully the - is it unlimited spaces, or is it limited? G: There are one hundred spaces, I think like 40 of them are already taken. R: Okay! So by the time this comes out there'll be less than 60 available, so make sure that you go find that link in the show notes for that free workshop, because I think a brief is going to make you as compatible as possible with the person that you commission. Because you wanna make their job easy, so that they don't wanna charge you extra. K [overlapping]: [laughing] R: And also so that they still love your project by the time they get to the final artwork. K: Yeah, so they don't have some sort of visceral shudder reaction every time the name of that book or project comes up. [laughing] G: Things also go around. Artists talk to each other, so if you give one a terrible time, then a lot of them will not wanna work with you anymore. K: Yeah this is something not just in art and publishing, but I think most industries - people who work in the same field talk to each other. Artists do not exist in a bubble, they are not all hiding in some dark studio bent over an oil painting that they've been devoting their life to - G: I mean we are. K: Okay. G: But we all just have Discord open on the side. K [laughing]: The room has internet access, yes. Grace thanks so much, this was great. I think this was a lot of really good information that people kinda dipping their toe in the water here may not be aware of, or know how to find easily. But speaking of finding, where can people find you? G: Ah, you can find me on ArtStation, at artstation.com/fictograph. It's like pictograph but with an f instead of a p. That is the same on Twitter, where it's mostly cat photos. K: [laughing] R: Alright we will put those links in the show notes too, so you won't even have to spell anything. Just go find a link, and go find Grace because Grace has a lot of amazing artwork to look at, and also might be the perfect artist for a future project of yours!

M: Thanks for coming! I've wanted to invite you for a while. Your first start-up GrafoMap and what you did with it seemed very interesting to me.R: It's actually not my first one. It's the first that succeeded.M: We could actually start there. Tell me which was it and why it didn't succeed.R: You might know, I previously lived in China for 7 years. I wouldn't call it a start-up, but me and Mārtiņš, the other co-founder of GrafoMap, used to ship pearls from China to Latvia and sell them. The product was really uncharacteristic for us, but we wanted to take advantage of me being in China and find something that doesn't have the vibe of cheap, Chinese goods and could sell for a high price in Latvia. So, we shipped pearls to Latvia. It didn't go very well. We had no experience. We sold them manually, by going to shops and offering them for distribution. We attempted to create an online shop, but we had no idea how to do it. I think we would have succeeded with the knowledge we have today. It all went off in smoke. I was still in China for a while and there was an opportunity to create a shoe business. There was a Chinese platform where you could design shoes with an online tool, and they would produce it. They have this unique production method, where they print the canvas before assembling the shoe, so it allows you to put any picture on it, and they assemble and deliver it. But the quality was lacking, the delivery was hard and long. I had drawn up the revenue model in Excel, but my expectations were too positive, and that too went off in smoke. Those were my two unsuccessful businesses. We learned some lessons, but it all fizzled out.M: And then you and your partners created GrafoMap, and you managed to successfully grow and sell it. And now you have a new start-up.R: Yes.M: But previously you worked in an investment office.R: Yes, in-between I managed to work in a risk capital fund, IT Capital. It's a Russian fund that invests 1 to 5 million. Not a seed capital, but series A. It was a very good experience, because I had the opportunity to work with series A investment rounds that involve successful companies. Not just dream projects, but companies with real revenue, with a real model that works. The only issue was how to blow them up even more, so that they work even better. It was a super-exclusive MBA program where you go through all these cases and learn.M: Your start-up was progressing concurrently with your main job. You didn't go all in, it remained in the background. How were you able to divide your time between your main job and this new idea that requires focus in order to be driven forward? That's the first question. And the second one is, if we could look at the things that as you mentioned didn't work, what were those pivotal moments that allowed the company to start growing into what it became.R: It wasn't easy to combine those things, but I also had a lot of time. Back then I had no girlfriend, no relationships, so I had all this time. I just had to sleep and continue working the next day. With GrafoMap we were moving towards automatization. The product was posters, but it had a print-on-demand delivery model. Our shop was affiliated with a supplier who executed all that. That saves an enormous amount of time, allowing you to focus on growth. The roles were also divided very well; everyone was clear on what they had to do. I was focused on Facebook and Instagram ads, content creation and conversion optimisation. We basically had to step on all of the rakes, try out all the things that don't work.M: Can you tell me about those rakes that don't work?R: What didn't work for us, I don't want to say anything bad, but we tried out about five agencies that were willing to help us with marketing and sales. Nothing of that worked. It consumed a lot of time, because we had our hopes up. And, while we worked together and the on-boarding took place, we ourselves weren't actively working in that direction. We thought that the sales agency will join in and handle everything for us. Now of course it's hard to imagine in which agency anybody would be willing to dedicate so much effort to one of probably ten client accounts. The other thing that changed a lot for us… We had a revenue model, an Excel table, all the formulas were put in, all variables, etc. And we entered all data monthly and kept tabs on that. But it was a tool that we used to look at the previous months and see the pluses and minuses. And then we got a bit more serious and tried to zoom out of our business and see what's important and what we should focus on. The average cart value and conversion percent – how many people out of 100 make the purchase. Those were the two main quantities. The revenue model made us focus on that and set some goals. Then we practically went back to our webpage offer and considered how we could change something to improve the conversion and improve the cart value. We started to do various bundle offers. Adding another poster to the tube cost us nothing in regards to shipping, therefor we started to do “buy two, get the third one free” offers, and that helped us improve the numbers. In the end the contribution margin was positive, which means that we earn from each sold unit before deducting the operating costs. When the contribution margin is positive, we just have to scale everything in order to surpass the operating costs and have a balance that provides a positive profit. And that's what we did. The moment we understood that one unit is starting to create a positive value, we started to push ads and scale it.M: You were three, four people in GrafoMap.R: Mhm.M: And you managed to get from the initial idea, when you hustled and had to borrow money, to a point of having a turnover of above one million when you successfully sold the company. How did you do it with such a small team of three to four people, how did you create a business with an annual turnover exceeding one million?R: Our goal when we started to create a poster business instead of something else was that we wanted to create a lean business model, so that we wouldn't put on weight, stay away from not only unnecessary operating costs, but also management. It takes a lot of time to manage all these processes if you have a lot of employees, etc. And on the product side we wanted to use the print-on-demand method, because we didn't want to mess around with products and order fulfilment. We wanted to design them, but we didn't want to produce them. We think it was the only way we could have scaled the business with the resources and knowledge we had back then and achieve good sales results. This philosophy also runs thought the team composition. The main core consisted of three people. I was responsible for marketing, Mārtiņš took care of finances and operations, and the programmer did the programming, of course. Whenever we needed we did outsourcing, for photography, web design. For social media management we had a girl from Romania, I have never met her in real life, but we worked together for four years, had weekly calls. She did a great job with managing all social media and influencer campaigns for us. I just called her once a week, and she told me how everything was going in 5 minutes and that everything was okay. She managed everything superbly. The process was polished so well that you didn't need to change much. That was our goal and we gradually achieved it.M: What do you think is the main thing that should be paid attention to when you're actually doing it, like scaling from one dollar to ten thousand, so that you earn the invested money back instead of losing it. What's your advice to somebody just starting out?R: In our product niche, that's a direct-to-consumer product, a very visual, decorative product. For us photos very incredibly important, like webpage design and photos. We had to show that we are selling a product of very high quality and that it justifies its cost. The perceived value had to be equal or higher than the product price. That's the first. The second is social proof. You have to show that your product is not a lonely page on the internet that nobody's interested in, you have to create a feeling that it's highly demanded and recognized, valued. You can do it in several ways. What we had from the start, on the page under the first fold we displayed all press mentions. We collected them gradually. We started with simple “featured on Product Hunt”, where we posted ourselves and it counted as being featured, like they had written about us. We put some niches and media there, at the end we got articles from Business Insider, CNN, Men's Health, Cosmopolitan, a full row of the loudest media. We put in logos of places that have featured us, and that leaves an impression. It might be true or not, but it leaves an impression. That gives you the stamp of quality. Somebody writing about you doesn't mean anything, but it works on a psychological level. The next social proof we had… you have to show up on several places and give people a sense of security. The next thing we did, we showed our Instagram feed on a page with all the influencers who have posted pictures with our poster. It featured very beautiful pictures, a lifestyle, beautiful Scandinavian décor with our posters, and smiling people. And above the feed it read “The proud owners of our posters”. It didn't say that they were influencers; we also didn't say that they are our clients. But if you come to our page, it creates a feeling that they are our super-loyal clients who are so happy with our posters that they take pictures with them and post them on the internet.M: I think that for many people here, in this small spot on the world map called Latvia, have the goal to make it in the foreign press. Instead of local media, how did you manage to get in the world class media? How did you package yourselves to seem interesting for them to write about?R: It was clear for us from the start that we should target the USA market. It's an English-speaking market, a single market, more than 300 million people. Europe also has a lot of purchasing power, but the market is very fragmented. In Germany you need German, in France you need French. So we targeted the USA. How did we get in these media? First of all, we had an interesting product, something new, unseen. It was to create a map of your design and receive a poster. That was cool. Somebody wrote us right after the post about us on Product Hunt. And anyone can get there with their product, but if you get enough “Up” votes, you start to get noticed by the smaller, niche influencers, and they write about you, whereas lifestyle writers follow these niche influencers. And that's how we got picked up by Dwell magazine, a top interior and décor media at the global level.M: You basically founded GrafoMap, scaled it from zero to a turnover of more than one million euros, and sold it. Did you take a break afterwards or did you already have an idea in your pocket for when you have free time to think about it?R: We should have taken a break, but I guess we're workaholics. Even before we sold it, we had already bought a domain and had started to program our next business. I actually had a notebook with future ideas. I had been collecting ideas for several years, written them down. We had various criteria for what we want to do, what we don't. Then we put everything in an Excel table, had a discussion, we considered which idea satisfies all these criteria and then chose one.M: Can you tell me about your criteria and thought process for selecting the ideas? How do you evaluate them, what's your decision journal?R: The criteria develop from the lessons learned, from the whole GrafoMap story. I think that, by reaching a turnover of more than one million euros, we exhausted ourselves almost to the max in this business model. Then we thought about why that happened and the main lessons. It created criteria for the next business. One example, customer acquisition made up a large part of our product costs. The money you had to spend to get one client. For us it was 20-25 dollars on average that you had to spend on marketing ads to sell one poster. One criterion was to have an organic customer flow. We don't want to spend money on each visitor anymore, on each potential buyer. The other main criterion was to have repeated purchases. Okay, we spend those 20-25 dollars on one client, but then he doesn't buy anything again. The customer acquisition costs could be higher, they are higher for a lot of businesses. About 100 or 200 dollars, even if the first purchase is around 50 dollars. And they do it because they know that the lifetime value is much larger. The client will return again and again. That's a great lesson, to have a product or a service that people constantly return to. Now, our new start-up Supliful is in the dietary supplement market, which is an enormous industry, 40 billion in the USA alone. It's relatively undeveloped in the online environment, the boom is just beginning. We thought that was interesting. Business model is actually the same, the Printful business model, but in different market. This business model has proven itself, we see how it develops.M: Can you tell me about your approach? You had an idea, and what were the first tests to validate your idea?R: You create a webpage as it should be. You present your product, set a price, put in a “checkout” button, and let people go and buy it. When someone pushes the “buy” button, you can provide a pop-up message saying “sorry, this product is out of stock”. Write that it's so good that it sells out really quickly, or think of anything else. But that's it, you have analytics and you see how many people actually push that button. You can make conclusions on whether people are willing to buy.M: One thing that's common to both of your start-ups is the design and visuals. In case of GrafoMap you sold design maps, designed by people themselves, so you sold an added value.R: Instead of showing digital mock-ups of how that product will look, it was important to show how the poster would look in interior design. We didn't just sell them a poster; it just embodied the idea. We sold them the aesthetics. Scandinavian, modern interior aesthetics. Now, with Supliful, we have a white label product that we offer to people. A white label dietary supplement that we offer to them for branding. We have products for various niches, but when a person sees a white product, it doesn't inspire fantasy on how it could look like. That's why we created an image gallery of imaginary brands, beautiful examples of how a dietary supplement brand could look like for gamers, for yoga instructors, etc. We create the vision for them, the visuals.M: At Supliful you work mostly in marketing, right?R: Yes.M: What are your personal marketing pillars that you base your way of thinking and work on?R: First of all, people come to your page and consider your product and service because they lack something or they think they lack something. It's important to tell the visitor what that is. What is the thing that's missing in your current state. Then you show where you could be. Everything that's in-between is me as a service. I offer to get you there, and this is how we'll do it. Giving the message is what's most important.M: Super! Thanks, Rihards! I find it very interesting, that you, coming from the analytics side, have added the marketing side, and then the companies you create are largely connected to the way you sell design or smaller brands that you help create in case of Supliful. That these things can be combined and that you need both of these sides, like you said, that you have to sell the space, the interior or the vision of where you want to end up, and at the same time you can't forget the practical, tactical things needed for arranging your webpage and systems, and that's a combination of both of these things. You need the consistency and clarity.Rihards Pīks:https://www.linkedin.com/in/rihardspiks/?originalSubdomain=lv--Subscribe to Asketic Podcast on:Spotify:https://open.spotify.com/show/73QSMYK46NHoHCytJYYmPZ?si=Mw4ZLISUSoueh9Es1pCLUgApple Podcast:https://podcasts.apple.com/lv/podcast/asketic-podcast/id1496922775YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQdekksSROS4PCxRV7aqT3QGoogle Podcasts:https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy50cmFuc2lzdG9yLmZtL2Fza2V0aWMtcG9kY2FzdA--Asketic design & branding:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/asketicstudio/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/asketic/WWW: http://asketic.com/

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 for us to address in future episodes. We hope you enjoy We Make Books! Twitter: @WMBCast  |  @KindofKaelyn  |  @BittyBittyZap Instagram: @WMBCast  Patreon.com/WMBCast Mentioned in this episode: Unfettered Hexes Kickstarter Infomocracy Redbubble Shop dave-ring.com neonhemlock.com neonapothecary.com dave is @slickhop on Twitter and Instagram Neon Hemlock Press is @neonhemlock on Twitter and Instagram VOIDMERCH Neon Hemlock's Threadless shop Riddle's Tea Shoppe Hailey Piper Glitter + Ashes anthology Matthew Spencer, illustrator This is How We Lose the Time War Tracy Townsend Dancing Star Press Transcript (by TK) [Upbeat Ukulele Intro Music] Rekka: This is We Make Books, a podcast about writing publishing and everything in between. Rekka is a published Science Fiction and Fantasy author, and Kaelyn is a professional genre fiction editor. Together, they'll tackle the things you never knew you never knew about getting a book from concept to finished product, with explanations, examples, and a lot of laughter. Get your moleskin notebook ready. It's time for We Make Books. R: Let's see what happens if you drape the oracle cloth over top. dave: I have a thousand of those. R [laughing]: Yeah. Kaelyn: Speaking of SWAG. d: Does that help? R: Exhale. d: [wheezing] R: Yes. K: Yes! R: It's not just good for laying your cards out on. K: [laughing] d [overlapping]: [laughing] R: Okay! I'm gonna have to leave this in. d: [laughing] K [overlapping]: [laughing] R: dave, why don't you introduce yourself to start, and then we'll get going? d: My name's dave ring, I'm a writer and editor of speculative fiction. I'm also the managing editor and publisher over at Neon Hemlock Press. Which comes with a bevy of other, like graphic design layout, and - K: [laughing] d: - products, placements, whatever else I've come up with lately! K: Many, many other hats in different shapes and sizes. R: So the reason I wanted to have dave on the podcast was because it occurred to me that something that comes up pretty frequently, especially around conference season when we're meeting in person and around book launches as well, is that authors wanna know like ‘do I need a bookmark? How do I do a bookmark? What else can I do?' K: ‘Do I need swag?' R: Yeah, so swag. Swag - Kaelyn, I'm just gonna cut in to your definition and say that swag is an acronym for Stuff We All Get. So - K [overlapping]: [laughing] R: To that point, this is not going to be all free swag. K: Yes. R: Swag implies that it is free, that you'll pick it up as you visit the author's signing table, or that you'll get it in the mail for preordering, or some little bonus bit like that. The person that we are speaking to today has taken book tie-in items and - what would you wanna call it? I don't wanna say paraphernalia, but I love that word, so there. You've taken it to a whole new level. And a lot of it has to do with Kickstarter, would you blame Kickstarter for this? d: Maybe some of it. And I like paraphernalia, the word that I am often drawn to is ‘ephemera,' but I like both. Depending on the particular object, maybe one is more appropriate than the other. But I blame Kickstarter for a lot of things in terms - R [overlapping]: [laughing] d: - of connecting with a lot of the people who are buying the books that Neon Hemlock's been putting out. R: So it's hard to say ‘blame' in that sense. d: To [unintelligible] - blame. K: [laughing] d: Yeah. But some of that's been driven from that, and some of it's been driven from just sort of nerdish excitement over different things. And then because I'm the one in charge, no one says no to me, so - K [overlapping]: [laughing] d: I just keep having ideas and doing the thing! K: Let's talk about some of the different kinds of swag, of paraphernalia, of - oh I just lost the word now - ephemera! I didn't really know that book swag was a thing until I started going to conferences. Like obviously I've been to book signings and things, and there's like bookmarks and maybe a pencil or something that they give out. K: But then I'd get to these conferences and I was like ‘wow there's a lot of stuff that authors are handing out, or publishers' - like everything from those bookmarks, pins - enamel pins are a big thing. I've seen people that showed up with special printed editions of the book that they only had like 10 of them and they were just handing them out at the conferences and that was it. If you didn't get them there, you were never gonna get this. It's interesting that this is something that comes around books, because you think well the thing you get out of this is the book. Why does the book have accessories that come with it as well? But I think you kinda hit the nail on the head, this nerdy-dorkiness of like ‘I love this so much I want to be able to have it with me at all times, not just on my Kindle.' d: Book lovers are already in this spot where you can - maybe you've read the book on your Kindle, but you want to have the physical book as well. So there's already that feeling that people have, and then sometimes it sort of extends to further things. Like I remember Dancing Star has made a lot of beaded earrings that match the covers of their books and some other popular speculative books. Of course you don't need to wear a particular pair of earrings in order to enjoy a book, but there is something sort of satisfying about - R: When you really enjoy the book, and then suddenly you need the earrings. d: [chuckling] K: Look at anything from TV shows to movies to video games, like there's all sorts of things that we wear and little accoutrements that we have that's sort of like a signal nod-and-wink to somebody else that's like, ‘ah yes, I also like that thing.' I was wearing a pair of my Sailor Moon socks recently at a house party and I'd taken my shoes off, and somebody was like ‘is that Sailor Mercury on your socks?' I was like ‘it is, yes. Yes.' R: And that's how you know your people. K: Exactly. Yeah but it is this thing of like, that's one of the - it's a signal, it's a secret language of how we identify each other. R: And this is speaking from more like the fan side of why you would want to display these things, in whatever way they are meant to be displayed, whether they're earrings or whether they're a pin, whether they're a sticker, a patch, something. I know that when I first started thinking of swag, I was thinking of things I have to give away for free, that are going to keep me in mind in a potential reader who isn't ready to pick up the book or not in a position where they can buy the book. R: Like I meet someone in a coffee shop and we're waiting for our coffee and we end up talking and somehow it comes up that I'm a science fiction writer and they wanna know about it. If I carry bookmarks in my purse, it's a book-related item, and it can have the sales copy on the back of the bookmark, or a blurb from another author promoting the book. And then you have some of the cover art on the other side and the title and my name, and therefore they have everything they need to find me later. And, if nothing else, they've got a bookmark that maybe they'll hang on to, ‘cause the art's cool, and then later they find it and they go ‘oh yeah,' and it's kind of like putting my branding in front of them multiple times. Every time they come across it, it might be one step closer to them buying the book. R: So that's one thought I had and why I chose bookmarks, ‘cause 1) they're relatively cheap, paper is or at least was a relatively cheap material, and so if your swag is made of paper it's not a huge upfront investment. You can maybe get 500 bookmarks for $75 or something depending on your printer. Book swag seems to have really - K: Oh the game has been stepped up. R: Yeah. I remember Tracy Townsend giving out little plastic-covered notepads with a pen built in, neat little binder, and I still have it by my bed. So I can't imagine that that was anywhere near the price of a bookmark. There's gotta be a level at which we go ‘okay this cannot be free anymore.' And some of that is related to the publisher, like is the publisher funding some of this? R: This Is How We Lose the Time War had pins, and they were giving them away with proof of preorder, and you picked your side, red or blue, and you got the pin. But the publisher I believe, and I may be incorrect, it may have been self-funded, but - the impression I got was that the publisher was providing those. And so I'm curious, ‘cause dave, you charge for some things, and some things are thrown in the box when you send out something. So like between stickers, bookmarks, and whatever else, what's your thought process of where it becomes a merchandise item versus a promotional item? d: Hm. You're making me think I need to have a thought process. R: Sorry. [laughing] K: [laughing] d: No I mean anything that's more than a couple dollars to make usually is in the… either I bundle it with something else or it's charged for on its own. Maybe one thing that slightly is confusing is I have this thing called Club Serpentine, where folks sign up ahead of time for everything I published in a given year, and those folks I give all the swag to for free basically, so. But in other cases like these tarot altar cloth-slash-bandana, depending on your perspective, slash microphone dampener - K: [chuckling] d: - those, I'm gonna give those away to the authors in Unfettered Hexes but I'm gonna also sell them on the website. And then like, I made an oracle deck, which is similar to a tarot deck, for Unfettered Hexes, and we're using the interior illustrations from the anthology as part of that deck. So again I'm giving those away to the authors but everyone else is paying for them. And there's a, I'm calling it an oracle coin, but there's a coin that also goes inside that deck, that comes with the deck, but otherwise you can also buy it separately. d: So the writers or folks that are part of Club Serpentine are getting things for free as it were, but they've either written a story for me or they've invested. So it's not really for free, it's still being part of the project in some capacity. Whereas stickers for me maybe is where the line is drawn. Stickers, I just like making them, there's a website I pay attention to that every once in a while will list a 50-stickers-for-20-bucks, and so I just get those every time it comes up so that I can dish them out like candy. R: They are very much like candy, I have quite a few stickers from both Neon Hemlock and Neon Apothecary. d: We like stickers, yeah. [chuckling] Especially when they make the luminescent ones, we're like yeah we like that deal! We like those a lot. K: [laughing] d: Maybe Rekka's right and it's also like Kickstarter campaigns because with the most recent novella campaign, I was like ‘oh I wonder if I can incentivize folks to back us on the first day.' So I had what I was calling Launch Day Loot, which I commissioned this artist I work with a lot, Matt Spencer, to make a print of a character from each of the novellas, and so I'm sending that to everybody and I also used that print to make bookmarks as well, out of pretty paper. d: So I am slightly regretting this, because it means that I can't use my fulfillment center to do book shipment, it means I have to mail them all myself. So I'm surrounded by piles over here on my side. So those are the first time I actually thought, these are like swag in the traditional sense, like this is free stuff that I'm gonna give you if you buy it on a given day. Whereas the stickers nobody actually expects those, I just have been getting them and sending them to people. K: Nobody expects the book stickers. … Monty Python? No? Okay. d: [laughing] K [overlapping]: [laughing] d: It made me think of the ‘Nobody's gonna know.' ‘They're gonna know.' ‘No one's gonna know!' K [overlapping]: [laughing] ‘No they're totally gonna know!' So let me ask this then, this is a lot of work, this is a lot of effort. Why do you do it? Apart from [laughing] - R: That's a nice smile, dave. d: [laughing] K: Yeah for those listening at home, dave has a lovely smile on his face right now. Yeah it's - completely, for joy, for getting things out there that show people enjoy your books and what you publish, that I think is fantastic. I'm sure it's delightful to run into somebody who's got something, a sticker or a bookmark or something from one of your publications or something that you did a special run of, but - How do you think it benefits not just you as a publisher, but then also authors? There's like you, who you're gonna do it on behalf of what you're publishing, or authors, who might do it on their own behalf. Why would you recommend book swag? d: I don't know that I have a metric or anything that would say that they categorically increase sales by x percentile or anything like that. But there is a sort of impression that I have that, just folks get excited by stuff? And giving people something to be excited about feels nice. There's something especially about writing where it often doesn't have a physical form that often, so. Like yeah you have a cover you can point to sometimes. Short stories often don't have their own art. It's nice giving things physical shape. K: I agree. Yeah. d: Like I'm not making a fortune over here making bandanas, I haven't become a bandana empire quite yet - R: It'll happen. K: Give it time, give it time. d: Maybe next year. R: [laughing] K [overlapping]: [laughing] R: So what was your progression? Did you start with stickers and then you just sort of said ‘oh I could also do this, and then I can also do this, and I can also do this,' and now you have oracle decks and bandanas and coins. d: Honestly, Unfettered Hexes, this anthology has really fed all of my most rabbithole impulses. Because it's all related to witchery, it's really - like the accessories are great - Any time I think of one it's hard to say no to. We went for an enamel pin, more than 40 illustrations in the book - These tarot cloth, the oracle deck, the coin, I think I stopped there. Well I made stickers, too. And then I made these mini prints from the cover, so. Part of it is I can't get out of my own way, and I just keep making things. And part of that too, maybe because I've got the interest both in the editing side and in the design side, there's no one here to tell me otherwise. I just keep making up - R: But you are working with artists for pretty much every little item that you come up with. d [overlapping]: Yeah. I do the design part but I don't do the illustrations. R: Right. d: Yeah. R: So the oracle cloth in front of you has some line art illustration, the coin itself I assume needed to be 3D - d: Oh the coin I made actually though. R: Okay. d: But I designed that with someone who then 3D-ified it. R: Yes. d: That's the technical term. R: It is. [chuckling] Yes. So you say you don't get out of your own way. I do wonder, do you go to any sort of ledger and say ‘Can I do this, with the budget I have?' d: Oh no. R: [laughing] K [overlapping]: [laughing] d: No. R: That gets in the way of the joy. d [laughing]: Yeah I only work with feelings, I don't work with numbers. R: [chuckling] d: No but two-thirds of these ideas are during an active Kickstarter, and I'm saying I'll do it if I reach this goal. So there was some math there. We just barely hit the oracle deck stretch goal. Because we hit $12,000, and then I said we wouldn't do the deck unless we had $18,000 and then we did, so. Whereas before I had lots of little stretch goals. R: Yeah the oracle deck is not a small project, as you said. Lots and lots of illustrations. Now if you hadn't gone with the oracle deck, were you still going to have the interior illustrations or were those the same item? d: Well, no they were different. So Matt Spencer, who did the illustrations for the oracle deck, he was on board to do some interior illustrations, but it was probably going to be like a chapter heading, maybe a couple of spot illustrations here or there, like we had a few things worked out. R: Mhm. d: And then once we hit the oracle it was like hey, what if instead, we just use every single one of these. R: [laughing] d: And you don't do the other illustrations. K: Since we've mentioned it a few times here, can you explain what the oracle deck is in relation to, and why you ended up making these cards? d: Sure, so an oracle deck is like a tarot deck. Rather than being a set number of suits and major and minor arcana, it has however many cards you decide. So we made this deck to go alongside the stories from an anthology called Unfettered Hexes: Queer Tales of Insatiable Darkness. K: A certain podcast co-host here may or may not have contributed to that. d: Yeah, and as my penultimate story in the anthology. R: I'm happy because I also love the world ‘penultimate.' K: [chuckling] d: I'm actually not 100% sure because after, you're technically the last story, but then there's a poem after you. So you're the penultimate… K: Entry? d: Entry? Mm, yeah… [thinking noises] R: Hmm… K: Contribution? d: But you have two illustrations, right? R: Yeah. d: You've got both your oracle card one and then a two page color illustration. R: Somebody's playing favorites here and I love it. K: [laughing] d: I - y'know, we could say that. But also, it's a really good story, and it perfectly hit one of the themes I really wanted from the book, which was basically friendship in space. [chuckling] K: [chuckling] d: It just nailed it perfectly, and so it was a perfect tie-in for the end of the anthology. So I couldn't resist making all these pictures of it. R: I appreciate your inability to resist your impulses. d: [laughing] R: It has served me well! d: [unintelligible] R: So the oracle cards, as you said there's - what is it, 23? 24 stories? d: Ah, don't make me say a number right now. I think we just totally made it up - R [overlapping]: Okay. I - d: We'll say 24. And then… yeah, 24 that are directly inspired by the stories themselves, two each for each of the story games that are in the book, four related to the characters on the cover, and then four related to different Neon Hemlock themes. I don't know if this is that interesting, sorry. K: It is! No, it is. d: [laughing] R: You broke my math brain, so I was trying to follow along and get the total. d: I told you, I don't do numbers. R [overlapping]: Yeah, okay - d: So if those don't add up to 40, just - R: 92! Got it! Okay. K: [laughing] d [laughing]: Just roll through it! R: Yeah. So you commissioned all this artwork. You had an artist create individual, unique pieces for you. You also have the cover, you also have two interior color illustrations. I have also seen chapter art designs, a textured placeholder page. I think you said this is like 200 pages longer? d: It's a beast, yeah. R: Compared to Glitter + Ashes - d [overlapping]: Glitter + Ashes, yeah. R: - it is. d: It's like 160 pages longer. K: Wow. R: But it really seems like a project that came out of great enthusiasm, which is delightful. d: Yeah, glee, even. It's just - [chuckling] So we'll see if - I don't even know if I can recreate this excitement with a future project, ‘cause it just has been really exciting. Although, my problem with making things is already going further with - I won't tell you the exact - K [overlapping]: Oh no. d: - nature of it. K: Oh no! [laughing] d: But the next one will involve 3D printed figures. K: Wow. R: Oh my gosh. d: So we're already going out to left field again. R: Yeah. K: Okay. R: You can't not outdo yourself. It's like every published book is a stamp in history, and you look back and you go ‘Pfft, that guy. [scoffing] I can beat that.' d: [chuckling] R: So given everything you've learned, having gone through these processes, for sourcing objects that are not typical - like, okay, a lot of authors could probably tell you where to go to find somebody who will make an enamel pin for you. But a bandana, for example, or oracle cards, a printed coin. You've obviously had to figure things out, do some research on your own, and get creative about things. d: I also had to marry a chandler. R: That's true! And we all appreciate that sacrifice. [chuckling] d: [laughing] R: I have a lot of Neon Apothecary candles around me just so you know. d: I just needed to make sure I could lock that down for future projects. K: [laughing] R: Yeah there are candles to coordinate with the stories in Glitter + Ashes, in the novella series that you put out. Aside from ‘there's no reason you can't do anything' - you can't use that as the answer - what advice do you have for somebody that's into all this left field kind of paraphernalia and ephemera, and wants to do something for a book? Either as a self-published author, an author that's promoting their work and it's all on them versus the publisher contributing to this, or to a small press, or even a Tor.com? What words of sage wisdom would you pull from your oracle cards to give them? d [laughing]: The new moon would tell us that - K [overlapping]: [laughing] d: Well, I think it's about scale, right? So I've definitely looked up different projects and then realized that they weren't feasible for me based off of my maybe modest scale. Depending on the project I'm looking to make like 100, 300, or 1,000 units of something, right? Which is small beans for a lot of projects. But, it's also far too many for some others. So like one writer, Hailey Piper, she just put out a horror novella. And her press did a limited-edit, handbound version that you could preorder at not a cheap price. d: But they only made those for those preorders, and then they're not gonna make any more. And that's something that, I know a local press in Baltimore that's since folded, but they handbound all of their special editions too. And that's something that is pretty special, and when you have it you know that you're only one of 20 that has one, so something like that could be an option for people. I think handcrafted things in small batches can be pretty meaningful. K: I have some experience with that, and yes. [laughing] d: Maybe you have to do it via raffle or some other way, maybe it's not a mass-produced thing. With the bandanas I had to price four or five of them, and the first three were like ‘what is this question you're asking? ‘Cause you're not really asking this very well.' [chuckling] K: [laughing] R [overlapping]: [laughing] d: And eventually I figured it out, and then took the price from one and brought it to the more ethical company and asked them if they'd match it and things like that. If anyone ever wants to reach out to me and hear about how I made a particular product I'm happy to talk people through it. With enamel pins, Juli Riddle of Riddle's Tea Shoppe walked me through that at every step of the way. The candles, again, the husband, so I cheated that. R: [chuckling] K [overlapping]: [laughing] d: And the coins I can talk to people, it's all just sort of been shots in the dark. Reaching out to people and then either asking dumb questions or having someone who already asked them tell me the way to do it so I can get through them. R: It's a lot more communicating with people who have done something similar figuring out how you would do this thing, as opposed to like pick your merchandise and upload your graphic. d: That's what I meant about scale, too. Like the minimum number of coins I can make is a thousand, you know? R: Yeah. K: Yeah. d: So you can't do that on a whim, right. So there's different mediums that are harder. Although it's funny, I realized I'm wearing my fictional show t-shirt that's based off of fictional bands in a novella that I published. K and R: [laughing] d: And I have that available through Threadless, which is sort of like halfway between those swag sites and a custom thing, where it feels kinda nice but it is an image that I uploaded and put on there. K: I mean I remember when I did vests. Just to buy the vests is expensive, but we ordered just one, because I just wanted to make sure this was not gonna look like garbage before I ordered 200 of them. And I had to convince the manufacturer to just make one. He's like ‘you know it's gonna cost like $50 to make this one vest, then plus you need to buy the vest?' I'm like ‘yeah that's fine, I'd rather spend $70 now and have it not look right than spend 5,000 down the road and it's terrible.' d: A lot of places now will give you a cheaper deal for - I can't think of the right word, it's not prototype, it's similar. R: Like a proof? d: Proof, thank you. Yeahyeahyeah. Like with coins they charge you for the molds either way. So those start already at like 300 or 400 bucks, depending on the kind of thing. Whereas at least with bandanas, they didn't do a proof for me there, but they can do a really nice mockup ‘cause it's only one color. And they will sort of make sure that you know that bandanas are not perfect squares, and - R [overlapping]: Yes. d: - and your image will be slightly off, those little kinds of things to make sure that you understand. K: Have there ever been any pitfalls you've come across, anything where you're just like ‘oh my God, this is not at all what I should've done here,' and can you look at things now and go like ‘ah yes, I have come across this problem before, I should go down a different path'? d: I mean… yeah? But also, even when you think you've got something figured out completely, like I just had a miscommunication with my printer where they didn't get my proof approvals, and two of my books are like three weeks late. So… things will happen either way, I think it's more getting a sense of timelines and knowing that you don't need something ready two weeks beforehand, you need it ready like a month and a half beforehand at least, so that then you're building in a little bit more buffer. Always build in more buffer. K: Anything that you've ordered or tried to design or something and got it and gone like ‘this is not at all what I wanted this to look like, or what I expected it to look like,' or? You seem like you're pretty methodical and thorough along the way. d: Oh, oh no. No no no. K: [laughing] d: I have a box full of ruined prints where they - even though I proofed an image that was fully spread, they sent me one that was with four inches of white space on every side. And then you just have to email them and say ‘this isn't like my proof' and so, even when you think you've got things figured out they still can kinda get screwed up. R: So you mentioned scale, and there are, just to name the ones that come to mind are CafePress and Redbubble, that you have the option to create one-offs, or to create a store without putting in any overhead other than the time to set it up. So that is an option, but it doesn't create that immediacy of like ‘I'm going to send this to you as a special treat,' or ‘this is part of our relationship as author and reader or publisher and reader,' so it allows you to create things without having to go through printers, without having to go through all the proofing processes. I mean you might wanna order one for yourself anyway just to make sure, ‘cause some of those shirts, the printing quality on them is better or worse depending on the fabric, but - K: Some of the fabric is better or worse too. [laughing] R: I mean there are options for people who don't have the ability to invest a little bit up front, or a lot up front. d: Well that was how I started using Threadless artist shops, because I had like three or four shirts from Void Merch - I don't know if y'all know them - and then I was like wait, they're making these on Threadless artist shops. And I commissioned like a metal band version of my logo for Neon Hemlock, and I was like I want this on a shirt! And like at this point I feel like 60% of my wardrobe is Neon Hemlock tank tops, so. I'm not only a client, I'm also the president. K: [laughing] R: Yeah. d: Yeah. R: Yeah so I mean there are ways to do this from small to large, you can put up a CafePress shop. I have actually, I forget who I saw recently was putting up merchandise online through one of these print on demand shops, and people were getting excited - oh it was Malka! Malka Older. Dr. Malka Older. She had Infomocracy related t-shirts and coffee mugs and all that kind of stuff and people were like ‘what! Where's the link?!' and getting excited about it on Twitter. I'm sure that resulted in a few sales. R: And then there's printing or having your own SWAG made, and you take it to a conference and you hand it out as part of rubbing elbows with the readers and the book-signing group kind of thing. And then there's Kickstarter rewards where you kinda have to - I don't know who started the stretch goals, but you gotta love them but you also kinda wanna hunt them down and throttle them. Because now people go ‘well this is exciting! But they're out of stretch goals, so I guess they're happy now and they don't want any more money for their campaign.' d: I think that's like a fundamental misunderstanding with Kickstarter though. Like I've had plenty of people, like I've sent them a link to a Kickstarter and be like ‘oh well you made your goals, so you don't need me to pre-order.' And it's like ‘but I'd still really like it if you did!' K: We could use more money. [chuckling] R: If you support this now, you won't forget to buy it later when it comes out. d: Well it also means you have the money to print it beforehand - R [overlapping]: Yeah. d: - which is pretty critical. R: Yeah, exactly. ‘Cause dave's books are very well produced, they are not POD one cover texture, they are not the typical POD interior pages either, like the paper quality is - dave is hand-selecting these things, and proofing them, and showing them to his friends in the morning writing Slack. K: [laughing] d: We do a lot of show and tell. R: We had show and tell this morning, it was great. d: I keep trying to see if people can see like, can you tell it's embossed? R: [laughing] K: [laughing] R: So there's lots of stages. I don't want anyone to feel pressured to generate oracle coins right out of the gate. d: But I'd buy them. R: But dave's ready to buy them, along with your band t-shirts. [chuckling] And if you want inspiration, just check out the Kickstarter stretch goals for Neon Hemlock, the tie-in merchandise for the anthologies that he does. And it's always nice and cozy to think of a publisher that is enjoying the stories as much as the readers will, and feeling inspired by them to create stuff, and then having the authority for that to be official stuff is also really cool. But yeah, an author, a publisher, small press - K: It's very doable. It just depends on how much you wanna do. R: How much you feel comfortable doing what you're excited to do, and if you're not excited by a thing I would say don't do it. K: Yeah. Definitely. ‘Cause it's not gonna get better once you start. R: And it's not cheaper if you don't love it. d [chuckling]: And like I said, if anyone ever has questions about how to get started and wants to reach out, I'm happy to at least give you the initial walk-through. K: Well along those lines, dave, where can everyone find you? d: Neon Hemlock's at neonhemlock.com, and also just neonhemlock all one word at all the socials. And then my personal Twitter would be, it's SlickHop. S-l-i-c-k-h-o-p. Oh and I'm at dave-ring.com. R: So thank you dave so much for coming on! d: Thanks for having me. R: And all those links will be in the show notes in the transcript and everything. K: Check out dave's upcoming projects, ‘cause Rekka is in a couple of them. R: That's not the only reason to do it though. There's a lot of people - I am - d: [laughing] K: Absolutely not the only reason. R: I am thrilled to be on this table of contents. It's a very good table of contents. K [overlapping]: [laughing] R: And the oracle deck I cannot wait to hold in my hand, I cannot wait to spill it out over this bandana which is actually an altar cloth, and flip that coin, and all the good stuff. I am really looking forward to seeing all these things that you've teased on camera in person, and I can't wait to see how you're gonna top it for the next anthology! d: Aaaaaah! Pressure! K [overlapping]: [laughing] R: Well with the 3D figures that you've already - d: These are secrets! No one tell anyone, that's a secret. R: Okay we won't tell anyone, we promise. d: [laughing] K: Everyone who listens to this, you're not allowed to tell anyone. d: Shhhhh. R: Forget everything you heard. Except the good advice. K: Yes. R: Alright. d: And maybe my website. R: Yes. dave-ring.com, neonhemlock.com, and, hey! neonapothecary.com while you're out there. d: True. R: Give that chandler his due. d and K: [laughing] R: We will have a new episode in two weeks, and in the meantime you can find us at @WMBcast, you can find us at Patreon.com/WMBcast, and you can leave a rating and review on your podcast apps because we basically exist to breathe those in and smell the scents and not be creepy about it at all. K: That's a candle we need. R: Rate us highly please, and we will talk to you next time. Thanks everyone for listening!

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 for us to address in future episodes. We hope you enjoy We Make Books! Twitter: @WMBCast  |  @KindofKaelyn  |  @BittyBittyZap Instagram: @WMBCast  Patreon.com/WMBCast Mentioned in this episode: The Dancing Plague of 1518 MICE quotient The House of Untold Stories  storyenginedeck.com/demo deckofworlds.com Peter on Twitter and everywhere   Transcript (by TK) [Upbeat Ukulele Intro Music] Rekka: This is We Make Books, a podcast about writing publishing and everything in between. Rekka is a published Science Fiction and Fantasy author, and Kaelyn is a professional genre fiction editor. Together, they'll tackle the things you never knew you never knew about getting a book from concept to finished product, with explanations, examples, and a lot of laughter. Get your moleskin notebook ready. It's time for We Make Books. We Make Books Episode 66 Transcription Kaelyn: We're talking about tropes today, which is something that I think a lot of people hear spoken about in a negative context: falling back on using too many tropes, or stories following really common tropes. Rekka: And we don't appreciate that kind of shaming. K [laughs]: No, we certainly do not trope sh--see this is gonna be a problem because I was doing research for this and the word ‘trope' is difficult to say over and over again. R: Trope, trope, trope, trope, trope. K: It's, what do they call that, when a word becomes a sound? Semantic satiation. R: Yes. K: Yes. The word ‘trope' has become more of a sound to me and it's sort of lost meaning [laughing] at times but--So quick definitions, there's the actual word ‘trope' comes from Greek, because of course it does, it all does-- R: You mean it isn't a contraction of tightrope? K: It should be, that would be so much better. R: [laughs] K: A literary trope is using figurative language, like words, phrases, images, for artistic effect. So there's a bunch of different kinds of tropes that fall under literary tropes. Things like metaphors, irony, allegory, oxymorons; those are all considered tropes. Hyperbole is another good example of that, really over-exaggerating. The way this came about was, apparently, because it is Greek and it's from Greek theatre, of course, ‘to alter, to direct, to change, to turn'--all of these translations kinda line up with that, but they're considered an important element of classical rhetoric. Especially in Greek theatre where it was very dialogue-heavy, and so you had to sort of use all of these words and everything to paint a picture to explain to the audience what was going on. All of that said, we're not really here to talk about literary tropes today. They're an important story-telling device, though, and they're something that is considered, I would say, necessary to higher literature and writing and if you're panicking going ‘oh my God, I don't know all of this stuff'--well the thing is you're probably doing this anyway and not realizing. R: A lot of writers don't come from writing backgrounds and don't know the terms for the thing, don't stress too much about it. K: We're talking today primarily about story tropes. I think a lot of times you're gonna encounter this in a negative light. It's a frequent criticism I feel like that's leveraged especially against fiction, especially against fantasy and science fiction books and writing; in some areas of fiction it's actually celebrated. R: Right. K: You pick which trope you're gonna write. R: You cannot proceed without mentioning the other half of that, which is that some people are like ‘Okay, I pick my books based on the tropes I wanna read about.' K: Yes. R: Like, ‘Where's my time travel?' K [laughs]: Yeah. We wanted to talk about why that is. We wanted to talk about what story tropes are, and why they're not necessarily as bad and, in our humble opinions-- R: Not so humble. K: --not so humble opinions, as everyone thinks they are. So, definition: what is a story trope? It's a commonly used plot or character device, essentially. A story trope is something that shows up in literature and stories over and over again, to the point that it may actually be a subgenre within a broader genre. R: That's not to say it is an entire plot of a book that shows up over and over again, like the Hero's Journey is not necessarily a trope. K: No. R: The smaller pieces of plot or character might be the trope. Like the farmboy would be a trope. K: Yeah, the farmboy is a trope. The surprise hero is a trope. R: Prophesied one. K: Yeah, the prophesied one; time-travel to go back and reset the future, that could be a trope. The noble outlaw-- R [overlapping]: Right. K: --is a good trope, the secret relative, the-- All of these elements and story parts that are things you just see all the time in books. So if you're going ‘well, I like those'-- R: Right. K: Like yeah, of course you do! R [overlapping]: Yeah. K [laughing]: That's why they're popular! That's why these keep coming up. Anything from like, a secret legacy or an unknown lost child, unfound powers that suddenly appear at just the right time, or anyone being secretly special for some reason. R [overlapping]: [giggles] K: But these are part of what make stories fun. They're not the larger plot, they're the elements that make up the characters and the plot. R: And you can use them like spice in a recipe-- K [overlapping]: [laughs] R: --to come up with something that is entirely your own but tastes familiar and pleasing. K: Yeah. Now obviously, different genres are going to have different tropes that you see recurring in there. So before we get into why tropes are good, let's talk a little bit about why they're frequently seen as a negative. R: I have feelings about this. K: Okay. R: I think they're frequently seen as a negative because if you come to lean too heavily on tropes, they can make your story feel either derivative or predictable. K: I was gonna say contrived, yeah, but same. R: Don't you ever say that about one of my stories, Kaelyn. K: I would never say that about one of your stories. If you're leaning too heavily on tropes, if you're just pulling things that you know are popular or cool things you read in other books that you went like ‘oh wow that's awesome, I wanna write something like that,' you're almost not writing a story. You're putting together a sequence of events and characters that you liked from other things. R: Is that fanfiction, is that what you're implying? K: Ohhh, oh, there's a--God, I'm not ready to wade into that question! [laughs] R: But we should touch on the fact that tropes are major fanfiction fuel. Sometimes that's the entire point of the piece, is that ‘take this trope and apply it to this IP that I love.' K: Yeah. R: In that case, that can be the goal. To be, not that contrived but obviously, specifically derivative--not in the negative sense of the term, but like you're writing fanfiction, it is derivative of this IP, and you're applying this trope to it because you just think that would be fun. So people can have fun with it. K: Absolutely. R: And not for the right reasons, but it might feed into this impression that tropes are derivative or contrived. K: I think also it goes to storytelling abilities. If your entire book is just laden with secret Targaryens and lost bloodlines and magic powers nobody knew about, chosen ones and prophecies and it's just the entire story is that, it's probably not a great story, because it doesn't sound like there's a lot of room in there for character development and arcs and intricate and original plots. R: Having said that… K: Or, wait, other direction: it may be way too complicated. Because that's a lot of stuff to juggle. R: Well there's that, yeah. Having said that, I don't think you could say that there is a restrained amount of troping in something like Gideon the Ninth. K: No. No, absolutely not. R: So it can be done. K: Here's the thing. That story is set in such an original setting with such original characters, in original worldbuilding and magic system if you will, that I think it more than makes up for all of that. That's just my opinion, ‘cause you know Rekka and I can't get through an episode without referencing Gideon the Ninth and using that as an example of-- R [overlapping]: I think there's one or two. K: [laughing] R: But specifically when you talk about things that are trope-based, or fandom-based, I think you have to acknowledge that there is always an exception to this ‘be careful around fanfic,' or ‘be careful around tropes.' Like ‘don't put too many in'--or! Put them all in! K [laughs]: It's I think a matter of knowing how to use them. I don't think a lot of writers set out with the intention of ‘I am going to write to this trope,' it's just something that happens. R: Although I think a lot of tropes have inspired anthologies. ‘I want this kind of book, I want an anthology full of that kind of story.' K: Yeah. R: And it's one or two tropes smashed together, or it's a trope applied to a certain genre or character type. I think it's happening a lot, where people are looking for a way to find joy. And tropes really are like candy. K: So let's talk about that. Let's talk about why tropes are good, why these things that show up in every story show up in every story--it's because they're fun! R: It's also really good marketing. K: Yes. R: It's a lot easier to come up with comp titles when you're pitching a book if everybody's drawing from a fairly reasonably sized pool of tropes. K: Let's be clear here. These things can go in cycles. I remember a few years ago everyone was retelling or reinterpreting old fairy tales. I felt like that was just something I saw all the time. I will call that a trope, more or less, that is something that speaks to a specific reader and something that somebody's gonna wanna pick up, like ‘oh well I really liked when this person did it, I'm gonna try this book now as well.' R: So that speaks to what you said earlier about them becoming like a niche genre. K: Yeah, absolutely. Young adult fiction, especially within science fiction and fantasy, I think is constantly at the mercy of whatever trope is popular at the time. YA definitely fell to the fairy tale retelling trend at some point; YA books with a central character, usually a young woman or older teenage girl, who was not necessarily a prophesied champion but has to save everyone on her own even though she doesn't want to; science fiction, there's everything from time travel to artificial intelligence to very specific kinds of space battles and things, but! It speaks to a certain reader. K: There are these things that create these subgenres, and that's really helpful for readers, because I think what we're skirting around that nobody wants to say is, you don't want to put readers in a position where they're just reading the same story over and over, but I know a lot of people who just like to read the same story over and over. People who are very into romance novels. R: There're definitely a set of tropes that romance novels have to pick from, just like there are tropes that other genres have to pick from, and when you read a book that you really love, and romance often tickles a specific audience, they want more like that. Think of the first Thor movie where he tries coffee and he says “I like this beverage. Another!” and smashes it down on the floor-- K [overlapping]: Yes! [laughs] R: People will smash their books down on the floor and demand another because they read through it so quickly and it was exactly what they wanted, and they want to feel that feeling again. Just with new characters. K: I'm gonna qualify all this by saying none of this is a criticism of the romance genre. Romance writers a lot of times write to specific tropes: the marriage of convenience, or the marriage of ‘we didn't know each other beforehand but someone found this legal document that our families betrothed us'-- R: Or a fake marriage-- K [overlapping]: Yeah. R: --that turns into a real marriage. K: Co-workers to friends to lovers type thing. R: Only one bed. K: Yes, exactly, exactly. R: These are by the way coming into genre fiction, science fiction and fantasy-- K [overlapping]: Yup. R: Where romance is becoming more welcome in the books. K: Yes. R: Actual romance, as opposed to ‘you are a buxom babe who stowed away on my spaceship therefore we are a couple.' The depth of character is now allowing for these tropes to trickle in as characters get to know each other in a more interesting way, and less classic pairing-off. K: I'm sure most people listening to this know or probably even a family member that just obsessively consumes romance novels. I think back to my grandmother and my aunt having stacks of those mass market paperback ones that all have like, essentially the same cover just different backgrounds and clothes. R: Hey look, when we talk about your cover art, you need to look at what your industry in your genre is-- K [overlapping]: Yes, absolutely! R: --putting on the shelf and you want to communicate that you are making the same promise to the reader. So you have very similar covers in romance, ‘cause there's only so many ways to be austere while still posing two characters together. K [laughing]: I would say that the two genre groups of readers that will most vivaciously consume media are hard military SF and romance, who will just tear through these books and stories, which is fantastic. I have friends that will read at least one, possibly two, romance novels a week. A lot of them do the Kindle Unlimited. R: Yup. K: Because there's a lot of romance novels on Kindle unlimited. R: Well the two systems kinda fed each other. K: Exactly. But, they have their tropes that they like. Forced into a marriage of convenience, or stranded on an island somewhere. R: Those are the good ones. K: Yeah. [laughs] And Kindle will very helpfully keep recommending more and more of those to you, and I don't want anyone to leave thinking I'm putting down those readers for just wanting the same thing over and over again. Books are there to give you comfort and to spark joy and interest, and if that's what you wanna read, if that's what's making you happy, then that's what you should be reading. R: Right. And in that case, tropes are very very good. K: Tropes are incredibly helpful. R: And they're a marketing tool; the people producing the work, they know that their readers like this trope, so an entire world where that trope is kind of central to what's going on is going to delight people. K: Something that I see a lot now, and especially with submissions I was seeing this, was a really hard and concerted effort to avoid tropes. And it's hard to write like that sometimes. Don't get me wrong; there are books out there that are successfully doing it, that are coming up with really original stories. That said, I don't think it's possible to write a full-length novel without having at least a handful of tropes in there. R: Plus, if it's successful and it's original, then someone's going to mimic that. K: It will become a trope on its own, eventually. R [overlapping]: And it becomes a trope. I mean this is where tropes come from, they are not fully forged in the heart of a star. K: [laughs] R: Y'know, they're a process of people recognizing a thing they like in a book and making sure it's repeated. That's exactly what's going on, so you come up with a story that's completely original and you're so proud of it, well, maybe you get to claim being the first, but you're not going to get to claim being the only for very long. K: Tropes go back to basically the genesis of human writing. R: Mhm. K: I mean, we consider the Epic of Gilgamesh to be the oldest more or less complete epic story written down, at this point. It's very clear, if you've ever read it, that even though we don't have anything that came before that, there's elements of the story that were just commonplace storytelling devices of that time. There's other parts of it that then pop up in later epic tales that it's impossible to tell well, was this influenced by the Epic of Gilgamesh, or was this influenced by common storytelling tropes of the time and the Epic of Gilgamesh just happens to be the one that lasted the longest that we still have? R: Right. K: If you ever look into the literary history of Robin Hood, Robin Hood as we know him today did not start off like that. R [overlapping]: Right. K: He was just like a straight up highwayman. R: Bandit, at some point yeah. K: Bandit, there we go. He regularly kinda killed people to get their money. But, the character evolved as storytelling tropes evolved. We went from Robin Hood being just a lawless bandit who's funny and laughing while he's doing all of this to, no no he's actually the son of an earl who went off on the Crusades and came back and he's stealing from the rich and giving to the needy. Yeah Robin Hood was just straight up stealing originally-- R [overlapping]: Wow. K: --in all of these. [laughs] R: Until suddenly he wasn't. K: Until suddenly he wasn't! R: And someday in the future, those tropes might change, and the story of Robin Hood would be told differently, and everyone would think that was the best version. K: There's actually a lot of what we would probably think of as ‘modern' tropes that show up in medieval European literature. The special chosen one is very tied to Arthurian legend, which again, if you ever wanna try to put that together, go and--good luck. R [laughing]: You figure that out, we're not doing it for you. K: No [laughs], no. That's another good example of the evolution of these tropes. And then there's actually like conflict and everyone was writing different versions of Arthur but because there was no printing press at the time, and there certainly wasn't any form of mass communication, there's all of these different versions of what virtues and what values they wanted to highlight in Arthur, based on what was common storytelling at that time. I think that there is this push to write something no one's ever written, and the thing is you're never gonna do that. R: And maybe it's not even something you wanna aspire to do. K: No, and it's okay for authors to write a story based on the story they wanna tell, not based on like, ‘I need to be the most original writer in the history of writing.' That said, there are definitely readers out there who are always looking for something they've never seen before. Maybe you can write one of those! But, it's still going to have tropes in it. R: Yeah. K: They are inescapable. They are inevitable. R: Yeah, the level of trope that you include might go up or down, depending on your story, but. Don't revise your draft and like strip out everything that was fun at the time, just because you've seen it before. K: Rekka and I are obviously coming from a place of primarily Western-fueled literature. R: Right. K: Y'know, if you get into different parts of the world, different storytelling traditions, they will also have their own tropes. [laughs] R: Yeah, they're not gonna be the same tropes, so if you wanna totally wow a Western audience just go borrow someone else's tropes. K: Prophecy and chosen one's just all over the historical literature, there's mythical places and people with secret lineages, I think that's something you're gonna come across no matter what, because uh. Almost like humanity just really enjoys those facets of storytelling. So. But yeah anyway, when I would get submissions sometimes that I could tell there was a writer that was just trying to be really really original, to just stay away from anything that may have been done before. One of the things I always thought was, “I don't know how I'm going to sell this to anyone.” R: Right, ‘cause what do you compare it to? K: Yeah, that's not necessarily a dealbreaker. But it does make things very difficult. Because if you're trying to describe something in the context of ‘well do you like this thing? You may also like this'-- R [overlapping]: Mhm. K: --and you're not able to do that, it's hard to sell a book. R: Right. Exactly. And that's how the conversations always start, you got the elevator pitches, you've got the comp books. And those are the quickest way to get people's attention, and now you've cut yourself off from that. K: Yeah exactly. That said, nothing wrong with trying to be original. Just be aware it could be, depending on how original you're going, it could be a little bit of an uphill battle. Again, I will use Gideon the Ninth as a weird pitch-- R [overlapping]: [laughs] K [laughing]: --for that book, ‘lesbian necromancers in a broken down palace in space,' and don't get me wrong, that definitely piqued my interest, but you can see how that might not be everyone's cup of tea. R: And if it's the first original book to present this-- K [overlapping]: Mhm. R: --to a major publisher, they're going to say, “Who do we put this on the shelf next to? Where do we market this? We don't use these tropes.” K: Yep. R: “How do we do?” Y'know? K: [laughs] R: It takes a brave publisher to try something new, even if that new thing is built out of all these amazing fantastic fun tropes. K: Yeah, exactly. R: So you can be original, and still combine all these tropes, and just do it in a way that makes people go, “Sorry, what? Say that again?!” K: That's kind of one more thing that I would like to talk about. We skirted around Gideon the Ninth-- R: I don't think we skirted around it. K: Well--is just trope after trope and I said yeah, but it's very original in everything else. So if you have sort of what you'd think of as like ‘ugh is this story too cookie-cutter, is it too predictable and too tropey?' the thing you need to then consider is, alright but everything else I have in here, the worldbuilding, the characters, the technology or the magic system, is that original? You can make up for a lot by having a really original, engaging world that this is set in, and writing really great characters that we're cheering for and boy do we really want them to be the long-lost secret half-sister of the wizard-- R: Right. K: We're just cheering so hard for her, I want for her to have magic powers. So-- [laughs] R: Especially if you start to lead toward a trope, and you don't deliver on it, your readers are going to be pretty upset with you. K: Or maybe they'll go, ‘wow that's awesome. I wanna write something like that.' R: And then it becomes a trope again. K: Exactly. R: Alright, is there anything else tropey to discuss? K: They're an endless cycle. R: Get your innertube and just jump into the lazy river of tropes, and-- K [overlapping]: [laughs] R: And enjoy, just come around again and it'll be good. Just write your story. K: Yeah. R: If it's got tropes in it, that's cool. If it doesn't, that's cool. It will soon. K [laughing]: And they're not lazy, let's be clear! R: They're not! K: No, yeah-- R: But that's what they call it at a theme park when they jump in with the innertube-- K: No no I'm just, yeah. R: Okay! So, tropes are good. If anyone tells you otherwise just take your book somewhere else. Someone wants them. They want them very very badly. K: Also, being constantly rejected and not seeing the brilliance of a character is a good trope too. R: Yes. And, going for the tropes of podcasting, you can find us online @wmbcast on Twitter and Instagram, and also at Patreon. And if you would be so kind to leave a rating and review, we would love to read it on the air. You could also ask us questions at any of those social media-- K [overlapping]: We love questions. R: --accounts. That can feed a future tropey episode. Or maybe not tropey, I don't know! We'll find out when you ask us questions. Thanks everyone for listening and we'll talk to you in two weeks!

BWACYEYEBUTE LE 27 07 2021 TURATSINZE BRIGHT --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/radio-rwanda/message

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 for us to address in future episodes. We hope you enjoy We Make Books! Twitter: @WMBCast  |  @KindofKaelyn  |  @BittyBittyZap Instagram: @WMBCast  Patreon.com/WMBCast Mentioned in this episode: This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett A Ship With No Parrot by R J Theodore (MetaStellar) Episode Transcript (by TK @_torkz) [Upbeat Ukulele Intro Music] This is We Make Books, a podcast about writing publishing and everything in between. Rekka is a published Science Fiction and Fantasy author, and Kaelyn is a professional genre fiction editor. Together, they'll tackle the things you never knew you never knew about getting a book from concept to finished product, with explanations, examples, and a lot of laughter. Get your moleskin notebook ready. It's time for We Make Books. Kaelyn: We're talking today about writing with a friend. Hopefully a friend. If not a friend, then a partner. Rekka: Hopefully a friend for longer than it takes to write the project. K: Hopefully a friend after you're done. [laughing] R: Yes, before and after. Hey, even after is probably more important than before. Let's be clear that you don't wanna destroy a relationship, but you can make a new friend. K: Yes, absolutely. Let's talk first about, why would you do this? R: [giggles] K: Why would you want to - and, okay so maybe a little context first. I will admit I have never worked on a project that a single story had been written or contributed to by two different people. R: As an editor, you mean? K: Yes. R: Ok. K: So why would you do this? It seems like a difficult thing to do. And for context, Rekka has done this a couple times. So Rekka, why would you do this? R: Because writing is lonely, and the idea that someone else will work on a project with you is just like the biggest longest most creative sleepover ever. K: Okay! R: It's a good reason. K: That is certainly a good reason, writing is lonely. I think a lot of writers, their editor when they get one is the first time they're really having somebody to collaborate with, and to talk to. R: To go back and forth. K: Yeah, but the editor is not writing the book. R: I know! Which is unfair, honestly. K [overlapping]: [laughing] R: I wanna know who I talk to about this. K: Yeah but you know what you're right, writing is a lonely process. There's a lot of time spent sitting by yourself just having to think. R: And having feelings. K: Yeah. If you're writing with someone, you get to share those with someone else. R: And shout about things. K: Absolutely. Shouting is a necessary component to that 100% — R: It's actually kinda how it gets started, there's a lot of enthusiastic shouting about an idea. K: [laughing] R: But you know what stinks? Is that you still have to write alone. K: Well and that's exactly what I was gonna ask you. So okay, let's go through this. You've decided I'm tired of being alone here, I want to also inflict this upon somebody else. So what do you do? R: [deep sigh] How do you find someone else to inflict things upon? So the first person that I sat down to write a project with was a friend, and we said like hey we should try this out! And we were both writers to begin with, writing in fairly different genres but still genre fiction. And we decided we were going to do a project and we said hey, it will be this, like we outlined it together. We - or we didn't so much outline it together but we concepted it out together. K: Okay. R: And then we each created a POV character as part of that concept. And then we wrote our chapters back and forth, so that the tone, the voice, for that POV character is consistent. K: Mhm. R: And so that you can have a character that's slightly unreliable, just because like you couldn't catch all the continuity errors, that you and your partner - K [overlapping]: Mhm. Yup. R: - created. It also lets you kind of reshuffle the scenes if you need to later, uh move things around a little bit easier, extract things if you need to without losing too many threads. But my other experience in doing it we did not, we had one POV. So, it doesn't have to be done that way. K: Tell us about the time you wrote one POV. R: I sort of went through my text file that I keep on my phone that's just like the little random lines and concepts, phrases that occur to me. And so the writing partner latched onto one and said, “That's interesting, let's work with that.” And then that was it, we just kind of went. I wrote something and sent it to him, and then I think we gave a week or two weeks max for each turnaround, so that one person wasn't waiting on the other forever. So it kinda bounced back and forth, and it would twist a little, like I'd get back and reread what the new words were and I'd be like oh okay, that's where that's going now. K: [chuckles] R: So it felt a little bit like improv, where somebody tosses you something, and y - the guide for improv is don't say “no,” say “yes, and...” So I think I had more of that spirit in the second project than I did in the first time attempting it, where um. As a kid I used to play with my friends and we'd get the toys all out and I'd immediately have a plot. And my friends would never adhere to it - K [overlapping]: [chuckles] R: Because of course they didn't know it. They would have whatever toy they were holding do a thing and I'd be like “No no no not that, have it do this.” So I can't imagine I was much fun to play with. Nor was it probably much fun to try and write with me on the project where I didn't have the spirit of “yes, and...” I had more like “mmm. That's interesting, how's that gonna fit back into where I'm taking this?” K: Well and that's a very good point, is I think if you're going to write with somebody it has to be a genuinely collaborative effort, rather than someone coming in with a story and having someone else tell it. R: Yeah and like I said, both times it was starting from a concept that, it wasn't like, “Oh I wanna write this book, do you wanna write it with me?” K: Mhm. R: So it was two people coming together each time saying “let's work together on a thing, what should we work on, do you have any ideas, yeah sure how ‘bout this concept, okay that's interesting what can we do with that? And then how do you wanna do this? Like okay I'll write some and then you write some and then I'll write some and then you write some. K: So like just examples off the top of my head, did you read This Is How You Lose the Time War? R: Yes. K: Yeah, so that was, so that's a novella actually written by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. And I remember going like huh, I'm curious to see how they did this, and I went back and I think I read an interview or something with them, and sure enough what they did was they outlined a plot, and then they took turns writing the letters in it, and - R: But not only that, interesting point that maybe you want to cut me off and say we'll get to that in a second - K: No, no prob. [laughing] R: But they wrote it at the same table, part of it at least. K: Yes. If you haven't read This Is How You Lose the Time War, read it, it's very good and it's a quick read. R: It won awards for a reason. K: I - yeah, it won a lot of awards. [chuckles] But the entire story is told through letters being sent back and forth between Agent Red and Agent Blue, both of whom work for separate agencies that go back in time and change things to make history fit what they want it to be. So I remember reading in this that sometimes they were, like they were writing the letters and then mailing them to each other essentially, and letting the other person correspond and reply, it was almost a bit of role-playing. But yes they did write some of it sitting across from each other. But then another good example that's the opposite: Good Omens was written by Neil Gaiman and Terry Prachett and they both - R [overlapping]: [laughing] I was thinking of The Omen, and I'm like, I didn't know - wait what?! K [overlapping]: [laughing] R: They wrote that? Okay, I've caught up, continue. K: Neil Gaiman and Terry Prachett, one of them wrote a lot of the main story, and then the other one fleshed out a lot of it. There's a main plot that but there's a lot of other stuff going on, and there's a lot of ancillary characters that turn out to be important to the plot but they never really gave a clear answer if it was like an assignment list so to speak, if there was like a breakdown of who was doing what. It sounds like they are just very good friends who were both very talented writers and were able to do this. I do see a lot of times when there's two authors involved, it's two different POVs, and - which is a perfectly intriguing way to do it. R: The way I always imagine it is that it starts with some sort of conference call or in-person visit, and the bones of the story are shaped out there. And then, at least far enough ahead that people can get to work writing. Because okay we're back to writing being lonely, you do have to go back to your own desk - K: [giggles] R: - and work on the project from your side, by yourself. I have heard of people writing in Google Docs so they can see the other people's words appear at - that just seems like chaos mode. K: I will say that's how I take notes at work when I'm on a call with multiple people from my side and like, I won't say it's easy, it's not terrible. R: It's very distracting. K: [chuckles] R: So I mean that would be a tremendously interesting way to do it, I would love to try that sometime. But coordinating that puts you back into the whole like ‘we have to be at the same place at the same time' aspect, which is probably not one of the benefits that most people would list of co-writing, is that you write your part of it without having to wait for the other person until like your check-in, and then you see what's come up with the other person's side of things and then you go back. And I will say again, the first time I tried to do this, we were writing in a shared Scrivener file. K: Okay. R: This was before Scrivener had real integration with Dropbox. K: The dark ages, yeah. R: Well no but - K [overlapping]: [laughing] R: I don't think it would work now, because back then two people could open the same Scrivener document. Now Scrivener will tell you sorry, you can't. It would have to go back to Google Docs or something, if we wanted to do it that way where we could see all the bones of the project coming together. The second time, we were just emailing a Word document back and forth that was updated and trying to keep them straight and not work in an old version. Which didn't happen, it was short enough that I don't think either of us were confused. K: How important is it to set down rules, so to speak? Of like, “Okay. This is how this is going to happen. Then we're going to, you know, everything must be tracked here, or you have to let the other person know if you're changing something to this.” I imagine it would depend on, are you both writing in the same document or are you each writing from a separate POV and then they're gonna be combined. How did you manage that? R: So it's interesting you ask that, because the first time, my partner and I actually wrote up a contract. K: I almost asked you, and I was like you know what, that seems like something maybe you wouldn't do right at the start of this, but - R: No, I think it's important. It's a good idea to have a contract that outlines who's responsible for what, how quickly people are expected to get things back - K: Mhm. R: How royalties are going to be split. K [overlapping]: Okay. R: Like if somebody's only responsible for the outline, in terms of word count they haven't contributed the same as the other person, but is it possible that you're splitting it 50/50? Either way, put it in writing, because that protects your estate later on from trying to come after somebody in arguing how much should or shouldn't be shared. It also can say like alright, this project is dissolved if the person takes more than two months to come back with their paragraph contribution for the week. K: Yeah. R: You know, all the questions that you just outlined can be described in there, including things like how are we going to edit this? Are we going to finish this project by taking it to a professional editor, like all the nitty gritty details can go, if not in a contract, in a project outline that can be referenced in a contract. K: All of the things we've been saying in the 60-something episodes of this podcast, now imagine you have to okay them with somebody else. R: Yeah. K [laughing]: Like - R: It depends on the personalities involved. One person might be like, ‘I'm going to leave all these decisions to you.' K: Mhm. ‘I'm just here to write,' yeah. R: Well ‘I just wanna write' or ‘I am - my faith in you and your ability to do these things is greater than my willingness to try and learn them,' and then the other person saying like ‘Yes, I agree to also take on all those tasks.' K: Mhm. R: So yeah. The first project, we drew up a contract and we said what the project was, who was going to - that we were splitting it, not necessarily like even chapters but that we were going to have two POVs and the POVs would each be the responsibility of a different person. K: Did you have an expected word count? R: Yeah. I think it was a little bit like a query letter, in terms of the way that the project was described. (I was looking for it but I couldn't find it.) In the way that the project was described and then in the way that we talked about the production timeline after, it was a little bit more like a marketing plan even. Including distribution: how were we going to release this? Was it going to be Kindle Unlimited or was it going to be distributed wide through all the retailers? K: You do need something like that, because let's say you start writing with somebody and you get pretty far down the path and it turns out you fundamentally disagree on what to do with the book. Well each of you have the files now presumably, [laughing] so - R [overlapping]: Mhm. K: What are you gonna do? R: You have to trust that the other person's not going to run off with it. Also, that's what the contract is, to ensure that they don't. K: Did you sit down and kind of come up with some agreed upon stylistic choices? R: In the sense of what? Like, comp title kind of things? K: Not just comp title, but stylistic in terms of writing. Granted if you're writing two different POVs you can attribute these things to a character, but like did you decide ‘Okay this is going to be descriptive, we're going to really emphasize the natural beauty of the setting,' or ‘we're going to make sure the characters always take note of a certain thing so that we can note it to the reader.' How'd you handle worldbuilding? How did you come to terms with all of the things that an author typically has to decide on their own? R: We did not, I think in either case really, get into that. K: Okay. R: We knew enough of each other's writing to sort of know what we were getting into. K: Yeah, and that's a very good point by the way; probably don't try to collaborate on a writing project with somebody whose writing you've never read before. R: Yeah. At the very least read some before you finalize all your contracts. K: Yes. I'd say that's important and, I'm not saying this to be mean or flippant, the last thing you want is to get started on a project and find out the person's not actually a very good writer. R: Or that your styles just don't make for good story together. You are not going to find a writer who writes exactly like you; don't assume that you aren't going to come up against like ‘Oh, I don't actually enjoy reading this from you.' K: Yeah. R: You want to challenge yourself and see how you can make your two styles fit together. Because if you're not growing as you work on anything then why bother? But you also don't want it to be such a challenge that you cannot enjoy the process. K: So what do you do when you have disagreements about something? R: Well hopefully the answer is something that you've already figured out in the contract, like if you're - K: Okay. R: It's kinda like when a company goes back to their mission statement to figure out how to proceed with something. K: What about if it's a story-related thing that's not necessarily outlined in the contract? R: Give me an example. K: Alright so, let's say in the end of the fifth season of Buffy there was like a fight in the writers' room about - uh, spoiler for a show that's been off the air for about 15 years, everyone - ‘we think Buffy maybe needs to die,' ‘no there's no reason she has to die,' and then… there's a fight! [chuckles] R: Hopefully your contract has a walking clause. Something that says like alright, if at some point the parties can't decide on where the story should go, they can walk away, and at that point maybe they decide, or maybe in your contract it should say, that you need to pick who gets to take the story with them - K [overlapping]: Mhm, yeah. R: - if somebody still wants to write it. ‘Cause that's something that wasn't in the contract for my first one, and part of me - like I wouldn't write the same story -  K: Mhm. R: We never finished it. I wouldn't write the same story but there are elements I'd like to take, but they're elements that would be recognizable enough. K: Mhm. R: So, how should we have proceeded? Probably one of us should - well at this point I could write to the person and say, “Hey, I wanna write this story, do you mind if I write this story on my own, not giving you any credit?” K [chuckles]: Yeah. Or if you do, how do I compensate you accordingly? R: Or just an acknowledgement, like I'll acknowledge that the story started, and then y'know life happened, we didn't finish it. K: Well that's a form of compensation. R: Yeah. Acknowledgement is like credit in a certain way, without - but again, in that email you say, “Okay cool.” And they write back and they're like, “Fine,” and I say, “Great. Here's something I'd like you to sign, just to say that like you are aware that I am writing this, and that I'm writing it all on my own -” K [overlapping]: Yup. R: “Using new material. And that, the only thing you expect is to get a nod in the acknowledgements.” That's something that you can do if you get to the point where you disagree on something and there's no - it's like if you're to the point of fisticuffs you should probably walk away, or take a break. Are you so stressed about either the project or whatever that you're just lashing out, or is this actually a problem, this relationship that you're working in? K [overlapping]: Mhm. R: So, you know, be an adult. K: And listen, by the way. I have writers that get, I mean, so defensive, about just - no one that I've worked with on a published book, but people I've talked to, people who've asked for advice and different things. And they're so defensive about the story to an editor. Imagine, again, trying to write this with another person. R: That's the thing is you really have to gauge how well you're going to work together with this person. K [overlapping]: Mhm. R: Do you just wanna do stuff because you're friends and you like spending time with them? That might not be enough to go on for the amount of, like think of the anguish that you put into a novel project in the first place. You would think that co-authoring means you share that anguish, but you actually just each have your own anguish - K [overlapping]: [laughing] R: - which might make you less compatible than you are at the start. K: My grandmother always says to never marry somebody before you've taken a three-day bus trip across country with them. I kind of feel like with writers it's like alright, I wanna see you two cook dinner together in the same kitchen, making the same dish. Like you, you have to collectively present me with one dish. And let's see how that goes. [laughing] R: Are you following a recipe or are you creating a recipe? K: You have to decide. R: Hm. K: But you actually, you kinda touched on something interesting there, which is the other form of collaborative writing that I've seen in query letters a lot, you said “Is this just your friend that you wanna hang out with and spend time with?” And where I get a lot of those from is roleplaying games. R: Mhm. K: There's a lot of thought and worldbuilding and character development and everything that goes into those. The, I hesitate to even call them players, by that point they're basically writers, put a lot of time and effort into developing these characters and these worlds and things and then they interact with other people who help them contribute and grow, and that is a way that I've seen some collaborative writing come to fruition is, start out as a game. R: You have to be a very caring person to be a good gamemaster, in that you have to care about the experience of the people that you are essentially having a collaborative worldbuilding experience with. You have to want them to have fun, or they're not going to have fun. K [overlapping]: [chuckles] R: You have to have set up different paths that they can choose to take so that they have some agency in the experience as well, and you have to be willing to say ‘yes and' rather than ‘no.' And you have to be willing to accept that sort of spontaneity. The best path forward may not always be the one you expect, but if you care about working with someone in a way that 1) doesn't negate their contribution - K: Mhm. R: - and make it seem like ugh, well that almost matches what I would've done; like it's not about anybody looking for permission from somebody else, it's unwinding this coil of like where is this going, and unwinding it together. So we mentioned before that there are experiences where somebody writes the outline and somebody else writes the story to the outline, and I think that's another balancing act because as somebody writes to an outline that they've made for themselves, they feel free to deviate from it. And I imagine that also happens when they write to an outline that somebody else has written. But also, writing an outline doesn't quite transmit everything that goes into a story. It's very hard to imagine what a person intended for an entire scene based on a single sentence or a couple of sentences. So there's gotta be a lot of letting go; if one person is handling one creative step and another person is handling another creative step, again that contract but also your expectations have to be that like that first person is going to be letting go of a lot of control of the story if they're not going to participate in the writing of it. K: It certainly is an exercise in having to give up and trust somebody with something that you created and love. R: It's interpersonal relationships on a scale that usually you can separate from your personal creative self, and you would expect to put this much work into a business project or a marriage or opening a business with somebody - and again like, have a contract. Yeah you are putting that much effort into this. K: You're opening a business with someone in a respect; you're creating a product. R: Yeah we're creating a product here that can be sold and resold and rights have to be licensed and - K: Mhm. R: You have to envision the success of this to really get a grip on all the things you have to consider. You can't just ‘oh haha this'll be fun' if you are going to publish it, because you never know where it's gonna go. K: Look at some of the greatest duos of what-have-you that fell apart because of differences in ideas. R: Mhm. I mean here are the advice like, never work for friends, watch out, you'll ruin your relationship if you try to do this, I mean that's kind of true of this if you don't go into it with the right mindframe. K: So now that we've scared the hell out of everybody and never gonna wanna write a collaborative project together. What were some of the fun things about it? R: The brainstorming at the beginning was definitely really fun. Sit down with somebody that you like and you talk about what ideas might come out of something, depending on your level of prepwork, you might've had a really long conversation or you have lots of these little visual pieces that you're gonna see how you're gonna string together. Or you might have just kinda said ‘well let's just see where it goes.' K: Mhm. R: Which I think was my experience the second time, once we picked that concept out of my Word doc of random ideas that I've had. K [laughing]: By the way, if you're listening to this and you wanna be a writer and you don't have a Word document of random ideas you've had please start one immediately. R: Hopefully if you're called to be a writer and you go ‘oh, you mean I should've been writing all those down,' as opposed to like ‘oh I've gotta start coming up with ideas' - like I think if you're at the point where you don't even have ideas - K: I'm saying for ideas you've already had. R: Okay. K: You need to have a good place to keep them. R: Jot them down. But yeah, so we picked something out of my book of ideas. If it's a collaborative effort between friends, it might've even been something like that started as a Twitter conversation and now you're writing it. So wherever you get your idea from, it usually starts with social connection, friendship, enthusiasm, and hopefully it's all mutual. And then you go to the, ‘okay, are we really doing this?' K: [giggles] R: ‘Let's start the contract.' If the person's not comfortable entering into a contract with you, then that's a red flag right there, that one of you is uncomfortable with what it's gonna take to finish this project out. Because the contract is the thing that's gonna see you through it all, so if you stop and you refuse to move forward at that point, that saves everybody some trouble. But the fun things about it are that starting moment, where the excitement is just zapping back and forth between the two of you, whether online or in person. K: Mhm. R: And then seeing what the other person wrote every week and getting to respond to it in like kind. It's a little bit like writing fanfiction, in real time, with an author. K: [laughing] R: And then the other person can feel the exact same way, that they are the one writing the fanfic in real time with the author. And hopefully it is a surprise every time that you open the document to see what's new. And then you pick someone whose writing you like, whose writing you enjoy, and then honestly it kinda carries you through the submissions process. ‘Cause you're like okay well it can't be that bad because I respect this person's writing - K [overlapping]: Mhm. R: - so if they liked it, then there's just a little like ‘no, this isn't bad,' that you can hold in your heart when you get a rejection from a magazine or something. K: Aww. R: Because like, you have faith that the other person knows what they're doing, and they have faith that you know what you're doing, and together you have this piece that you both believe in, even if you are believing in only half of it. [chuckles] And not the half that, you know, you worked on. So it's just really nice, yeah. K [overlapping]: In the end you're coming together to all believe together. R: Yeah I mean, we kinda, like in the second case it was a short story, and we did finish it. So, going back and forth, one person writing a few thousand words or like kinda getting to the end of a scene, like that break moment kinda thing where like - K: Yup. R: Fade to black, commercial break, whatever you wanna call it, and then going ‘ok! I just feel good about that writing session; I'm sending this back to you.' We did that a few times back and forth. One of us sent the first 500 words in November. By the time we had finished it, it was February of the following year. And, so that's pretty quick - K: Yeah that's really quick. R: We were both on top of it; we only sent it back like a couple of times. I think our total word count is 4100 words, so, at most that was like eight back and forth of - K [overlapping]: Mhm. R: - 500 words each, or I think some of them were a little bit longer. I think once we sorta started to see where it was going some of us were - some of us - [chuckles] K [overlapping]: [laughing] R: Half of us - one of us would write more of that, and the other person would write more of the other. K: Okay. R: So, and then after that, we started talking about like okay what do you wanna do now, ‘let's sit on it for a month' was the response, and then we picked some markets to target and one of us was just in charge of submitting them. K: So you, you had a system, you had a plan. R: Yeah. We didn't have a contract on that one, maybe we should. The nice thing is when you say you're co-authoring, the magazine tends to send two separate payments. K: Okay, nice. R: Or at least in my experience so far, of selling this once. K: [laughing] So overall, a good experience? R: Yeah! Yeah, that one was a lot of fun. Like I said, having a totally different attitude toward where it was going and who was in charge - which was neither of us or both of us? - it was a very different experience than the first time. My first experience was with someone, we were trying to write a whole novel, and I think our intent was it might be a series. So this was like long-haul planning, and it wasn't long before I realized like I don't think our styles really mesh. And he also wrote really really fast, and kind of expected me to write really really fast, so I would turn around something after working on it for like a week or so, and then the next day he'd be like ‘okay, your turn.' And I'd be like ‘oh, see, um, this isn't the only thing I wanna work on.' [laughing] K: Yeah. [chuckles] R: And so it was also, I think, in the middle of the final phases of getting Flotsam out, so it probably felt like a disruption, and the fact that he was turning things around so fast was like, frustrating to me. Whereas like I would work on something for awhile and then think like ‘okay, there, done, check it off my list' - K [chuckles]: Deep breath, yeah. R: And the next day it'd be on my list again. K: That can get a little stressful, certainly. R: Yeah. K: I guess the takeaway from all of this then is whether or not you have a good experience with this, a lot of it comes down to you. R: And planning and expectation yeah. K: Yeah. R: You could go to the Happiest Place On Earth and be a total stick in the mud about it, so - K: Yes. R: Like, that's true of everything. K: Yeah. Yeah but there's certain things you can do to make sure that it doesn't become a miserable experience, certainly. R: Yeah. Or, that you have a way out if it does. K: Yes, yes, there you go. So yeah I think that's - any, Rekka, any parting thoughts, any final suggestions or advice? R: If it's something that you've wanted to do, I definitely recommend doing it. Try it out and see. Hopefully, it doesn't break a friendship - [giggles] K [overlapping]: [laughing] R: Y'know, the first time you try it. Having that contract will go a long way to having a mutual not-fun-anymore clause. If neither party is interested in going forward, then that's it. That's all that has to be said, and the project is dissolved. And if the other person is loving where it was going and wants to keep going with it, then you just have that release agreement, where like “I don't expect any royalties or anything from this, you go ahead and have fun with it.” You hate to think that you need a contract to go do something that you and a friend both love doing, but ahh, I really think it's a good idea. K: It's probably, yeah. R: At worst, it doesn't hurt, and at best, it protects you and it gives you something to fall back on if things aren't going well. But, hopefully things go very very well and you end up with a story and you sell it, like I did! K: There you go. Rekka, what's the story you sold? R: [giggles] K: You knew I was gonna ask you about - R: Maurice Broaddus and I wrote a story called The Archivist, and it sold to Lightspeed magazine and should come out sometime within the next nine months or so. One day I imagine I will wake up and have been tagged on Twitter. K: It's just gonna be on there, yeah. R: And I will be able to share it then. My recent story on MetaStellar I was told the date, and then a few days ahead of time I was told what the URL would be and when it would go live, so I was able to prepare, which was nice. K: Very nice! As always, we hope we left you with some food for thought. R: It's worth doing, if only to find out whether you enjoy it or not, but also keep in mind that it takes the right pair of minds to do it. So if you don't enjoy the first time, that doesn't mean it wouldn't be fun again. But I hope you love it, ‘cause I did enjoy it, and I really am proud of the story that came out of it. I would not have written that story on my own. K: Oh, okay, well great! R: Which is another point, like I shouldn't leave off without saying that, but like we created a story that neither of us would've written if it was just working alone. K: Greater than the sum of their parts. R: Or at least greater than the sum of half the parts. [laughing] K [overlapping]: [laughing] R: Alright, well that is probably enough. If you want more, or you want to be notified when the story goes live, you can send us a message on Twitter or Instagram, we are @WMBcast. You can also find us on WMBcast.com with all our old episodes. If you are listening from the future, I might come back and add the link to that story when it does go live, to the show notes. If you are listening from a very very profitable future - K [overlapping]: [giggles] R: - you might consider going to Patreon.com/WMBcast to support us financially, but we don't need that! What we would really really love are some ratings and reviews on Apple Podcasts, or your favorite podcast aggregator, whichever you're listening to right now. That would be so, so helpful; it helps people find us. We had someone shouting on Twitter the other day saying like ‘why are more of you not listening to this podcast?' I guarantee it's because it's hard to find podcasts, unless they have really good ratings and reviews. So please, drop us some five stars and some glowing words, they don't have to be expansive. Just like ‘this podcast rocks!' I mean, that's what I think, that's what I would write. You can use that though. I'm not gonna hold you on a contract or anything. K: [laughing] R: Alright, two weeks from now we'll be talking about something entirely different, but probably just as goofy.

In this episode we go knuckles deep on Orgasms.How many different types of orgasms do you have? R - Yes?We go inside, outside, front, back, upside down, and backwards.Roxy learns a new trick.Anal is a thing.We have a coupon code for the OhNut!: SEXYJAMMIES21Visit the Linktr.ee for some updates. Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/SexyJammiesSwingcast. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 for us to address in future episodes. We hope you enjoy We Make Books! Twitter: @WMBCast  |  @KindofKaelyn  |  @BittyBittyZap Instagram: @WMBCast  Patreon.com/WMBCast   Episode Transcript (by TK @_torkz) [Upbeat Ukulele Intro Music] This is We Make Books, a podcast about writing publishing and everything in between. Rekka is a published Science Fiction and Fantasy author, and Kaelyn is a professional genre fiction editor. Together, they'll tackle the things you never knew you never knew about getting a book from concept to finished product, with explanations, examples, and a lot of laughter. Get your moleskin notebook ready. It's time for We Make Books. Kaelyn: So it’s funny you picked this when I was still studying history, that was something we always had to consider. Is this group, is this person part of determining where they fit into historical context as determining do they have agency? Can they act on their own behalf? Structure is what keeps someone in place; agency is what allows them to act freely. Rekka: Where would you put Odysseus, in this context? K: I would make Odysseus a failed attempt at agency. R: [laughing] K: Well, maybe failed agency isn’t the right--because he is displaying agency. He’s trying to do something, and he’s having to frequently overcome obstacles. That said, those obstacles are things that keep happening to him, rather than him directly engaging. R: Right. K: So it’s a little bit of a, uh. R: Weird example. K: No it was a good one, I liked it. R: No it’s a good example but it’s not a good role model for agency in your novels. K: Odysseus isn’t a good role model for a lot of reasons. R [laughing]: That’s just one of them. K: [laughing] R: Be the person who ties yourself to the mast, rather than give in to the sirens. Actually fuck it, give in to the sirens. It’s 2021, let’s just go for it. K [laughing]: That’s a very bad--I feel like 2020 was the year to give into the sirens. [laughing] R: Yeah, but what is 2021 but 2020 persevering? K: No, we’re slowly defeating it. We’re claiming some agency for ourselves. R: I am still in this room. K: [laughing] R: I have always been in this room. How are we defeating anything? K: I think I was born in this room. R: Kaelyn, have you and I met for smoked meats in a restaurant? K: We haven’t. R: Right. So, nothing has changed. K: Yeah. R: Have we hung out in a library with random strangers at the same table? K: No. Some of whom are handwriting books. R: Yeah, no. This is not happening. So today I called you here to talk about agency. K: So in that scenario do I have agency? Because I made the decision to join you. But-- R: But--are you allowing this topic to happen? Or are you actively engaging in the expression of our ideas? K: Oh both. R: [laughing] K: Definitely. R: Once you get past some of the other, like, identify your theme, and helpful advice for writing like that-- K: Strengthen this character arc, you know, the really nice vague feedback. R: The really helpful, helpful specific feedback. You might also end up hearing that your character needs more agency in a scene, or in the story overall. And as with the others, this can be really helpful advice. If you know what it means. K: Yeah um, it I think falls into the category of frustratingly vague advice that is absolutely rooted in important context. R: But it’s also really true. K: Yes, yeah. R: Which is just the worst part. There’s nothing worse than vague advice that is also correct. K: It is vague advice, but I think when you’re dealing with things like ‘work on your character’s agency,’ ‘strengthen this arc,’ ‘identify the themes in your story,’ those are big picture things. So. Definition—as always love to start off with that—uh, agency in general, the definition is “an action or intervention, especially as to produce a particular event.” Acting, essentially. Taking action. Doing something. Trying to influence the outcome. R: Not just action but pro-action. K: Yes. For characters in books, agency is basically when a character can make choices and act on their own behalf. R: What is it about agency that gets turned into a secret agency that acts against aliens, or whatever--I’m just playing around with etymology here-- K: [laughing] R: But how’s that word get turned into that meaning? K: The way I always took that was that an agency is meant to act on behalf of a group of people or towards a certain end. So, if we wanna take S.H.I.E.L.D. - R: Okay. K: So agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Their job, their directive, is to protect Earth from large-scale global threats. Everything they do, every action they take, is to further that outcome. Real world example: the CIA, Counter-Intelligence Agency. They have a very specific job. It’s to try and out-maneuver, out-intelligence if you will, foreign and domestic hostile powers. R: Okay so the word is not trans-mutated in any way, in the way that it’s applied to an organization. It still means taking proactive action toward a goal. K: Yeah, so I did look up the definition of agency in that regard: “a business or organization established to provide a particular service, typically one that involves organizing transactions between two other parties.” R: So like, a literary agent. K: There you go. Here’s a good example, the Environmental Protection Agency. R: Mhm. K: Their directive, their job is to protect the environment. What do they do? They organize, they create scenarios, be they either laws or policies or transactions even, that further their goal of protecting the environment. R: This is a group of people that are acting for one goal. In our writing, when we talk about agency, we’re generally referring to character agency. As in we have a main character, they are serving as our POV - point of view - and think of that term as the window through which you experience the story. Your viewpoint into this story and this world. So, everything that this character chooses to do is how you experience the story. So by acting on a desire, they create tension as to whether there will be an obstacle that they can overcome, whether they make a decision to do something that frightens them a lot, or whatever - you get to experience that tension. So if this character goes with the flow - K: [laughing] R: - how much tension do you get to experience? K: Yeah so what this means when you get this feedback, ‘I need you to work on your character’s agency here,’ is that it means the character is being very passive. They’re being more reactive than proactive. Oh I’ve got a good example: Twilight. R: Bella is a classic example and often referenced example of a character who doesn’t actually do much. And this is part of that Mary Sue criticism that gets used in the wrong places a lot, but in this case what we’re talking about is Bella is a bodysuit for you to crawl into, and see this world. K: Well Bella is almost worse than that. In some cases Bella is an object. She is sort of a MacGuffin that furthers this story. Something I always like to trot out is, if this character weren’t here, would things go that differently? R: [laughing] K: Now, in Twilight yes they would. Because a lot of conflict, a lot of the story, whatever, does center around Bella, but it is more just the fact that she exists than anything else. If she were a particularly tasty cow that all of the vampires also wanted to eat, well - that’d be a different story too. [laughing] R: Yeah, that’s a weird one. K: No, but if she were something like a magic ring that lets the vampires turn back into humans or something, you could possibly just sub her in with a magic ring. And a lot of those story elements could still happen. R: So is your character interchangeable with an inanimate object? K [laughing]: My favorite one, ever, that I promise I’ll stop on this side note - Indiana Jones. R: Mhm. K: - is completely irrelevant to the first movie. If he weren’t there, everything would go exactly the same way. That said, Indiana Jones has agency. R: He is trying. K: He’s trying. He’s not doing the best job, but he’s trying. Um so, you can have a character that maybe if they weren’t there things would progress as normal. My whole point is Indiana Jones, regardless of whether or not he not only shows up, exists, the storyline with Marion and getting the Ark of the Covenant, we still end up with the Nazis opening the Ark of the Covenant on a remote island. R: Just turns out it was a bad idea. [chuckles] K [laughing]: Just turns out you shouldn’t go poking around in these things. R: Yes. And that had more to do with Belloq being his agency to, as he put it, take whatever Indiana Jones had, and possess it himself. K [overlapping]: Yes. R: And then him not being able to resist looking in the Arc. Now, had the Arc made it to Hitler, would Hitler have known how to use it? I mean, he studied all this stuff. It’s very possible that he might’ve put it to more diabolical use, rather than just frying himself as Belloq did. K [overlapping]: Yeah. Yes. Um, you know, in Twilight, the character that has agency there is not Bella, it’s Edward. R [overlapping]: Mhm. K: He’s the one who’s making all the decisions, he’s the one who’s making the choices. He chose to stay and pursue Bella. He chose to let her know that he was a vampire. He chose to eventually make her a vampire. R: Mhm. K: Bella is a thing that all of this is happening to. R: The prize to be won. K: Yeah. Bella’s a very passive character, and there’s points in the story where she does make decisions, but the choices then are even things that are forced upon her. R: Here’s an example of not, apparently, including much agency in your character, and still having an incredibly successful book series. K: And movies. R: So as with all advice- K [overlapping]: [laughing] R: - feel free to break the rules and have a smashing success and good on you. K: There is an exception to every rule to be sure. But, as you kinda said right at the get-go, one of the biggest criticisms of Bella is that she is an empty skin suit for the reader to crawl into and make themselves feel as though they are the star of the story. People who have agency don’t feel like that. It’s part of character development. If Bella were making a lot of choices and decisions and stuff, you’d have readers going “Well that’s not what I’d do, why would she do that, that’s so ridiculous.” And then you distance yourself from that character because you’re establishing them as a fully realized person. R: Right. K: Rather than the empty skin suit slash object. R: Right. Now, Big Lebowski. K [laughing]: Oh God, that’s a good one, okay! Um, God I haven’t watched that movie in forever, I love that movie. R: So he starts out, he gets up, he goes to the grocery store, he gets the ingredients for his White Russian, he drinks half of it there, he goes home. K: “Where is the money Lebowski?” [laughing] R: This has happened to him so far. Somebody mistakes him because he shares a surname with a very rich person, and they walk into this very shabby home and somehow think that they’ve found the right place. Now he isn’t gonna do anything about it. K: Yeah. R: He goes on with his life. He just is kind of sad about it, but his friends convince him - K [overlapping]: Yeah. R: - that he needs to do something about it. K: Except the guy pees on the carpet. And that carpet really tied the room together. R: It really tied the room together! But he is not going to act until he’s convinced by his friends to act. K: This is another thing with agency. It’s okay for characters to be sort of passive and have things happen to them. That’s what starts the story- R [overlapping]: Mhm. K: - going. You don’t, don’t get me wrong. There’s plenty of stories out there with someone going “I woke up this morning and decided to do this thing.” R: Mhm. K: Or they start out with a quest, or they come up with something on their own. [overlapping] R [overlapping]: You’re in media res, so you’ve already gotten to the point where they want something. K: Yeah. But typically even if we pick up within that point something had to happen to them a lot of times beforehand, for them to want to go get the magic ring that lets you turn back into a human. R: Yeah and often you find that the character starts off trying to do a thing that isn’t the thing they decide they need to do in the end. I mean that’s kind of part of the whole character arc, is deciding what it is they really want. The Dude really wants a nice comfy life with his White Russians - K: And his bathrobe. [laughing] R: And the rug that ties the room together. K: Yeah. R: So it bothers him enough to complain about it, but not enough to act on it. Then he is cajoled into acting upon it. And he goes and finds himself embroiled in a large plot, where things kind of continue to happen to him. K: With movies you can watch a series of strange events unfold, because there’s the visual component that - often these are comedies. It’s almost slapstick. We’re just watching this person who all he wants is to go bowling with his buddies, sit in his bathrobe, and drink White Russians. And he ends up getting pulled into this bizarre situation. R: Being sent to have a physical ‘cause turns out he’s gonna father a child, and also toes get cut off - K: You want a toe? I’ll get you a toe next week. [laughing] Lebowski is a rather passive character. He doesn’t have a ton of agency. That said, once he gets involved in this he does make decisions even if they’re just ‘I want to get out of this alive.’ R: Yes. And he observes clues and he starts to put things together that probably they expected him not to do. They really thought that he would just kinda take the fall for things, or just go along, get paid, go home, and return to his life. K: Yeah. By the time he gets to the end of the story, his motivation is something between ‘I need to figure this out’ and ‘I’m not letting this random guy who got me tied into all of this get away with it.’ Does the Dude have agency? Sometimes, a little bit, if he can get the energy and motivation together to feel like it, which is by the way very in line with his character. R: Yeah. K: It is very typical with books to start out with characters just living their life. People by nature are passive. But you ever notice that when someone says “I’ve decided to do this thing,” it’s usually an announcement. It’s usually like “I’ve decided to change jobs.” “I’ve decided to buy a house.” “I’ve decided to ask this person to marry me.” It’s a decision you make to take action. Whereas most of our lives are just kind of us living our life, yeah after I’m done here I’m gonna have some soup I made, I’m very excited about that. I’m deciding to have soup. Is that agency? I don’t think so. You know in your day-to-day lives, agency are things that you’re trying to act for your benefit. I’ve decided to buy this house, because I worked very hard and I think this is a good investment and I think I’ll be happy and comfortable here, and this will improve my life a measurable amount that I want it to. R: Mhm. K: When characters act with agency, you know a lot of times they’re in situations that are not normal day-to-day things. There aren’t a lot of books out there about someone’s decision to work really hard, save money, and buy a house. R: Well that’s the first 25% of a book, that 25%, that storyline is gonna go away, or be severely altered. K: That house is haunted as hell. [laughing] R [overlapping]: Mhm. K: For a character to have agency, they have to do three things. They have to be able to act in their environment, which means that if you said a character, let’s say a human being, and you put them on an alien planet where literally everything is made of gas, that character’s not gonna have any agency because they can’t do anything. R: Right. K: But not only is everything made of gas, but the lifeforms that live there physically cannot communicate with the human, or have no interest in doing so. R: Right. K: So that person can’t interact with their environment; they’re not gonna have any agency, they have to just sit there and wait for something to happen. R: Unless the plot of that story is ‘how do I get to the point where I can talk to these aliens?’ There have been many Star Trek episodes like this, where you can’t communicate with the other aliens and the plot is ‘how do we find common ground?’ So, the decision to do so is agency, but the human who says “Well, all these molecules are just too far apart, I guess I’ll just sit here.” K: [laughing] R: That character has no agency. K: So the second thing is a character has to be able to make meaningful decisions. So, in the case of our character sitting on the gas planet, they’ve gotta make the decision of ‘I’m gonna find a way to gather all of this gas and condense it into something solid that I can use to my benefit.’ R: Right. K: They have to have a way to work towards their own benefit. Even if it’s not working towards their own benefit they have to be presented with situations in which they can make a decision. Even if it’s ‘the army’s invading, there’s two sides of this city, we’re only gonna be able to fend them off from one, we have to evacuate the other.’ The character making the decision of ‘okay, we’re gonna evacuate the east end, move everybody into the west end, and here are the reasons that we’re doing this and that’s why it’ll give us a better advantage.’ That’s displaying agency. The third thing is the character’s ability to affect the story. And this is different from making decisions. This is where Indiana Jones fails. R: Right, right. K: Because he doesn’t actually affect the story really. Sure, he’s got some wacky hijinks, he shoots a guy who just wanted to have a nice sword fight - R: Cracks a whip. K: Cracks a whip, somehow hitches a ride on a submarine, you know, things happen. R: If it wasn’t for Sallah he wouldn’t have even made it halfway through the movie. K: Exactly. Is he entertaining? Absolutely. It’s a delight. But he doesn’t do anything that changes the outcome of what’s happening. So, this is different than making a decision. Because a character needs to have an impact on the story. If you erase them from the story and nothing changes, that’s not a good character. R: You have some characters who maybe aren’t the decision makers, but if they’re the person with the special skill, or you know they’re the person with the strength or the fortitude to go ahead with the story that the other character doesn’t have, and you end up with a nice balanced team-up of brains and brawn. Obviously if you take the brawn out of that story, it is going to affect the story. Now, take Indiana Jones out, and you definitely have a very different movie. K: Absolutely, yes. R: Sometimes the character is required for the tone. K: Like a swashbuckling adventurer. R: Think of Jack Burton in Big Trouble in Little China. K: Okay. R: He’s not actually the hero of the movie. At one point a big fight scene starts, and he shoots his gun in the air and ends up knocking himself out when the ceiling falls on him. And for the greater portion of this fight scene he is prone on the ground. He’s almost like the story’s style, but he’s not the story’s main active character. K: Yeah. R: You know there’s parts where yes, they need him because he’s tough and he can fight, but so can the other characters. There’s a lot of characters doing a lot of stuff in that movie, and Jack Burton - you would notice, if you saw it and they removed him and then you watched it again, you would definitely notice his absence. But does his absence change the story? Would his friend have not gone to rescue his girlfriend? He definitely would have. And he definitely would’ve done it without Jack, but he talked Jack into helping. It’s interesting how many stories we enjoy end up with characters who draw a lot of attention to themselves, like Indiana Jones, like Jack Burton, without actually making a huge difference in the plot of the film. Or, I’m saying film ‘cause we like to use movies as shortcuts. But um - K: [laughing] R: How does this work in a book? Let’s go back to our favorite, Gideon the Ninth. Gideon kinda doesn’t have a clue what’s going on! K: Gideon is a little bit of a passive character. R: Yeah! But it’s delightful [laughing], just like Indiana Jones and Jack Burton. K: She gets dragged along on this adventure, which we find out is basically one giant series of death traps. She doesn’t know why she’s there. She’s there to serve as a lens of the story for the reader, because the other main character that we’re introduced to here is of course Harrowhark. R: Harrowhark has a lot of agency, and it’s all off the page. K: Because Harrowhark can’t be bothered to tell anybody about it. And, if she did, if she was the point-of-view character in that first book, we would have no idea what was happening. We need all of this to be told to us through the lens of Gideon, who is more like us than, like, Harrowhark. R: Yeah. Right. K: Of course by the end of the book you know this changes; we’ve learned some things, we’ve solved some mysteries. But Gideon is sort of a passive observer. Yes, she’s poking around, she’s talking to people, she’s gathering information, but really she can’t do anything with it until Harrow tells her what’s going on. R: And she’s only there because Harrow has made her promise to go along on this venture and then she’ll get the thing she wanted in the beginning, which she was pretty close to succeeding except Harrow was the obstacle. So Harrow said, “Do this thing with me, and then I’ll give you what you want.” And so Gideon goes along specifically for that purpose, and how much more passive can you be than just being like ‘if I just tap my foot throughout this book, I’ll get to the thing I want.’ K: Yeah. She literally just wants me to sit in a room and do nothing. R: Harrowhark has even said “do not speak to anyone.” K: Yeah. Don’t talk to anyone, don’t do anything, stay in this room, be here when I get back. R: So of course, the plot happens because Gideon’s like uhh you don’t tell me what to do. K [laughing]: Yeah it’s not agency so much as annoyance. R: Two people who can’t stand each other so why would one do what the other one wants. K: Yeah. Exactly. R: That is kind of the plot of Gideon the Ninth, but in the most delightful way that I just made sound as flat as possible. K: You’re right, because Gideon serves the purpose of one: as I said providing the reader with context and perspective, but two: also, she’s awesome! R: Yeah. K: And we like watching her swing this giant sword around, and be muscle-y - R [overlapping]: Yeah, flex for the other people in the book. K [overlapping]: Yeah. R: And also like look at people and go “There’s something wrong with you” [laughing], you know? K: Yes. Yes. Um, be the perspective of ‘This is all really weird, how am I the only person who sees that this is all really weird?’ R: Mhm. K: So. Um, yeah, so that’s a good example of characters who are passive but are compelling. So if you’re thinking to yourself ‘well, if that’s a thing that’s allowed, why do I need to strengthen my character’s agency?’ Because it depends on the story you’re telling. And it depends on what you’re trying to do here. If you have a character who is supposed to be your main character, your protagonist, they’re supposed to be leading the charge, and what they’re doing is they’re tripping from event to happening back to other event, just sort of letting stuff happen to them rather than doing things themselves, that can get really boring to read.  K: The second and third book in the Ember in the Ashes series, there’s a character in there named Helene. And - I won’t ruin too much for anybody who hasn’t read these, and full disclosure I’m still finishing the fourth one - in the second and third books especially, Helene is running around putting out fires. She is desperately trying to manage an unmanageable situation. At the same time though, she’s trying to figure out ‘how do I solve this bigger problem that I’m trying to face? How do I mitigate these circumstances?’ I was so excited whenever it was one of her chapters, because that was the thing that I thought was most interesting, was watching her just get things heaped on her. Every time she turns around something else bad is happening, that is just one more thing she’s gotta deal with. So was she displaying agency? In the second book I would say not as much, by the third book we’re certainly getting there. But, it’s still compelling because the way she is acting on her own behalf is not necessarily for herself maybe, but for other people. R: Okay. K: Watching someone deal with and try to mitigate overwhelming circumstances, I would say, is a form of agency. Even if they are just running around putting out fires. R: Trying to survive - K [overlapping]: Yes. R: - this moment, as opposed to having a plan for the next two weeks to six months - K [overlapping]: Yeah. R: - toppling the empire, etc. It’s okay if they’re just trying to get back to normal. K: Yes. Or, just trying in the case of Helene, just trying to make sure her family’s safe. Let’s start there. That’s small step number one, I’ve gotta work on that. Okay small step number two, now I’ve got a deal with the residents of this city. Now I’ve gotta figure out how I’m gonna deal with this other maniac, and there’s all of these forces and factors that she can’t really do much about. But she can make decisions. R: Right, so in an earthquake, a character obviously isn’t going to defeat the earthquake. K: I defeated an earthquake last week, Rekka, I don’t know what you’re talking about. [laughing] R: Okay. In a typhoon, Kaelyn’s not gonna go punch a typhoon. K: No no, earthquakes are far more punchable than typhoons. R: Right. So you can trust that Kaelyn’s gonna go check on friends and family, uh, Kaelyn’s going to act in ways that clearly are important and have great meaning to her personally, even if they’re not going to fix the fact that there’s a typhoon, or the fact that you know FEMA’s gonna have to come in and that sort of thing. So what about characters with examples of great agency? Like the Quest plot. Is that agency or is that ‘this wizard told me I need to go do this thing’? K: Well okay so I will, we can talk about the Quest plot and then I’ll give you what I think is a good example of someone who has agency and, I’m going to put them into the same story, which I know we’ve been talking about this series a lot, Shadow and Bone and the Six of Crows. For those who haven’t read or watched it, hopefully you know that one is a trilogy, the other is a duology, they’re separate storylines but the Netflix series collapsed them both into one. R: So go read the books anyway, because Netflix made some choices. K: So the first trilogy Shadow and Bone, Alina Starkov is a very, a little bit of, especially for the first book, a passive character. You know she discovers she has this power, and she is tasked with solving this big problem because she has this power. She does start to display agency in the story but if things had just progressed along that sort of Quest storyline - you could argue that it even does a little bit because ultimately there is a problem that she is the only one that can solve. R: Mhm. K: So, is that agency? Well, the way she goes about handling it in the story, breaking away from the wizard character and trying to decide to do this her own way is certainly displaying agency. R: Right. K: Conversely, in the Six of Crows, we have the character Kaz, who is sort of your underworld rogue-type but not in a charming way. I would actually say he’s quite the opposite of charming. He’s very stoic, very serious, very no-nonsense. But Kaz makes a lot of decisions to try to accomplish goals and to better the lives of him and his friends. There’s some revenge scenarios here, but in the revenge scenarios it’s reclaiming things that were taken from him. R: Right. K: There’s friends to liberate, there’s people to try to help and better their lives, there’s people they encounter along the way that get into bad situations. He is a character with a lot of strong agency. Even before we meet him, we can see everything he’s done, everything he’s worked towards to build himself up to a point where one day he can maybe do this one thing he’s trying to get to. I would say he’s a great example of somebody with a lot of agency. R: Right from the start. K: Yeah. R: So he’s got a plan, and this plan is the focus of the story. K: Yes. Of course, wrenches get thrown into it, because - R: Just in terms of Luke Skywalker just wants to escape the farm life, that’s his desire at the start. But what he ends -- I mean he does get that, but it turns into a much bigger story. K: Katniss Everdeen from Hunger Games. Does she have agency? She is mostly reactive. She only volunteers because her sister got picked as tribute. R: But she’s volunteering to protect her family, which you might say is proactive decision. K: At the same time though, if Katniss had not volunteered, would any of the subsequent events in the story have happened? No. Her decisions are impacting the story. That said, she is very manipulated a lot through this entire story. R [overlapping]: Oh yeah. And I think that’s just the way that as a character, we express that just ‘cause you’re a hero doesn’t mean you can’t be fooled, you can’t be misguided, you can’t be manipulated as you said. I thought that was incredibly different from anything I’d read of an adventurer-hero story, because you realize a hero doesn’t always make the right decisions. K: Yeah. I have a lot of mixed feelings about that book series as we’ve discussed in this - R: I’m not saying I’m happy with the way it ended, but that definitely opened my eyes, and I think influenced me. As a result, my characters definitely made decisions that they thought were sound, or they thought were motivated correctly, or were the right thing to do or whatever, that end up making more of a mess. K: Yeah. Now that said, with Katniss one of the things I will say bothered me a lot in this, and this is I think a product of trying to shoehorn motivations into areas where it doesn’t already exist, Katniss is -- there’s a scene, it’s much more pronounced in the movie but it is in the book -- where they’re at District 13. And they’re all sitting in this bunker and it’s ‘let’s talk about a time Katniss has inspired you, she’s this symbol. She is the Mockingjay.’ I don’t know if this was on purpose, I don’t know if this was the intent, but I couldn’t come up with a better way to just be like this character is almost inconsequential to what they’re doing. They just need her to stand heroically in front of people. I really think that a 16-17 year old girl was probably not the sole motivation for overthrowing an entire super-oppressive government, but. [laughing] R: Again, I am not going to jump in front of a train for this book series - K [overlapping]: [laughing] R: But I could see the development of a character who stands up to the government on TV that the government requires everybody to watch. K: Yes. R: Like this is a program that the government is putting in front of people’s faces because they want people to know that people will pay for their past transgressions, until they deem that they’re done. And Katniss says, “No. It’s not gonna be one survivor, I’m not going to kill the person that I grew up with because I need to survive; we’re both going to survive” and that turns into a big moment- K [overlapping]: Yes, it did. R: Also she honors the person from the other district with whom she’s supposed to be competing, but they all see her treat Rue like a human being, which is not something that you get from this government. K: There’s these tiny acts of rebellion. But I would say that it’s all undone by the fact that she doesn’t actually want any part of this. She wants to go back to her life and be done. Now that’s, I would argue, not agency, because what she’s having to deal with is the fallout of decisions that she made for survival, rather than because she wanted to make a statement. R: No I understand that, but I’m saying again with the hero doesn’t always make the right decisions, also, person who makes a couple decisions where other people can see them suddenly find themself turned into this bigger than life character - K [overlapping]: Yup. R: I felt like that was part of the character arc, coming to terms with being this person everybody now expected her to be, and sometimes needed her to be, in order for them to go on. K: I found book Katniss a very grating character, I didn’t - R: You are not the only one, I have heard this plenty of times. K: I didn’t like her much but one thing I appreciated about her was how much she just wanted to be left alone. [laughing] R: Yeah! I mean, we can all relate to that. K [laughing]: We can all relate to that. It’s just like, I get it. I don’t really like you that much but I totally get it. She’s capable, as you said, she’s a fast thinker, but she’s not a leader. In fact in the second book they have a whole plot going on behind the scenes that she doesn’t know about until the very end, because everybody looked at her and went ‘I don’t think she’s gonna be helpful here.’ [laughing] R: Yeah. K: We would be better off just doing this on our own. R: Yeah. K: And I really appreciate the writer’s acknowledgment of that. [laughing] But again, in the second book she is reverted back to a very passive role, this stuff is just happening to her. Even more so than in the first one. R: And then it continues in the third book, where they take her on this SWAT team adventure, and she’s just like ‘what the fuck’s going on?’ K: Yeah ‘cause they’re gonna go shoot all of this war footage of her. But then, she does make the decision ‘I’m going with this because I wanna get us into the Capitol, so that I can go kill the president.’ R: Right, right. K: So there we do have Katniss with agency, with a plan. R: Mhm. K: How important do you think plans are to characters having agency? R: This is a really good question. We’ve just described a lot of main characters who don’t really have a plan. K: No, no. R: And who are all highly successful IPs. Sometimes I think figuring out the plan can be the character’s arc. They know they want something. They try and fail and try and fail, and it’s because they don’t know how to go about it, or there’s something that they need to let go of or gain in order to figure out the best way. You know like a heist movie. K: I swear I was just thinking of a heist movie. [laughing] R: The plan is happening all along. K: Yeah. R: And it’s the reader watching it, and being misled about things going wrong that it turns out were part of the plan anyway because there’s always that aspect of the heist that you don’t hear about ‘til the end, and you get to watch it again and go ‘Oh now I see!’ K: ‘Yeah that guy was in the background the whole time.’ R: Yeah so obviously in that case the plan is not the plot. The reveal is the plot. The red herrings are the adventure, I don’t know. Sometimes a character figuring out what they want is the plot. K: Mhm. R: The idea I think is that the character starts with a sense of the way things are right now are not good. K: I think there’s a lot of this in anime. I’m thinking of Inuyasha right now, did you watch that? R: No. You’re gonna have to talk Sailor Moon if you’re gonna keep me on your level. K: Okay, let’s talk Sailor Moon. Let’s talk the original anime run, where they really fleshed out a lot of the episodes, and remember at one point they’re trying to track down the seven rainbow crystals. You know Sailor Moon becomes Sailor Moon not by choice, she just is. R [overlapping]: Yup. K: And she’s got a talking cat that tells her to fight demons. R: And yells at her for not doing her homework. K: And at the same time, she’s not only gotta find these other sailor scouts, and identify them and get them to accept their fates and roles but because this is anime everyone’s like ‘Ah yes! This is what I was meant for the whole time!’ In the first season of the anime they’re tracking down these seven rainbow crystals. So they don’t necessarily know why they’re tracking them, and at one point Tuxedo Mask has one and they’re like that’s fine, he can just hang on to it. R: [laughing] K: They’re just like well we don’t want the bad guys to get these. We don’t know why. But then we find out, oh no wait, it turns out we actually need all of them. R [overlapping]: Yeah. K: Why? Well we’re not sure yet. Okay now we know why we need all of them. And, oh crap, there’s the princess! And why do we need the princess? Because the princess can wield this power that’s going to defeat Queen Beryl. The agency there I think is - well first of all accepting and embracing ‘hey this is something I have to do.’ But also then incremental goals. And sometimes your plan changes. Sometimes it turns out that Sailor Venus is not the princess. R [overlapping]: [laughing] Yeah. Yeah. K: It’s actually Sailor Moon. [laughing] R: Yeah, well, certainly couldn’t be her. Look at her. K: No, no, I mean she looks nothing like that other princess that she looked exactly like. [laughing] R: With the same hairstyle and everything. K [laughing]: Yes. R: The importance of grace in a person’s identity is apparently paramount. But yeah, the idea of a plan changing with new information I think is overlooked, because we like our stories in small parcels. K: Yes. R: But something like, for example a manga that’s gonna go on in theory indefinitely - K: [coughing]Naruto.[/coughing] Sorry. R: You’re going to have to introduce new information that’s going to change the course of the plot, and make the characters do something that maybe they wouldn’t have done before, or something they hadn’t considered, or just go off in a different direction because they need a new costume. K: And by the way this is why a lot of not just manga, but comic book series and even ongoing long-running television shows, have story arcs. R: Yeah. K: Manga especially you will see broken out into the such-and-such arc. R: Mhm. K: The this arc, they actually title them and they’re considered collections. R: Yeah. The introduction of new information can help pivot the story in a way that, like the characters might not have made that decision based on the way that they were starting out or proceeding at any given point in it. Having a plan is good, but maybe it doesn’t matter what it is. [laughing] K: But I think having a plan is a baseline that gives characters agency because they can make decisions to try to achieve the end results of that plan. R: Trying to stay on the track. K: Yeah. Again I’ll refer to the character of Kaz in Six of Crows. What’s so compelling about his character is he is a planner. He’s one of those guys who’s thinking of every possible contingency. He’s trying to stay two steps ahead of rivals and archnemesises - nemesii - R: Nemeses. K [overlapping]: Nemeses. I like nemesii. And that’s why we see him act so clearly with so much agency because then on top of that, we also learn that he is a person who’s very knowledgeable and very in control of things. You need a guy who can do this? He knows the guy who can do that who owes him a favor. He runs a casino, so all he’s doing is collecting information and favors and stuff to be traded in later. R: Okay. What about competence porn? K: Competency porn in general - if you’re not getting it from just saying, this is: somebody who’s always on top of things and always two steps ahead, and then it’s like all is lost, haha, no it’s not! See, I took the magic human ring from their pocket a long time ago, and now we can all - R [overlapping]: Going back to the heist kind of plot we described, like Danny Ocean - K: Yeah. R: - was an extremely competent person who was never out of control at any point. K: And even when we were left to think that he was out of control, that he was gonna derail this whole thing because of Tess, it turns out no, she was part of the plan the whole time. R: Yeah. K: So how do you have a character that has a lot of agency, can show forward thinking, without making them insufferable? R: We’ll start with casting George Clooney. K: Yes, yeah. All things are forgiven if it’s George Clooney. R: [laughing] K: Once you realize you can’t get George Clooney, what do you do? You have to make the character a person. Everyone works with somebody who, a situation will pop up and you know that no matter what you do, they are going to act irrationally because of something that happened prior. Everyone has a family member that won’t eat a certain thing, no matter how you prepare it, and the reasons that they won’t eat it are completely irrational. Everyone has the friend that just is constantly late, or changing plans last minute. These are X factors, these are things that make us human. And building a well-developed character who’s, even if they are hyper competent and they have planned everything out, still has to deal with base urges and moments of irrationality that are going to make them act in a way that maybe isn’t furthering the plan. But, they’re still showing agency when they do it. So for instance, you know the character standing at the thing and it’s like ‘okay I’m supposed to be following this guy who’s got the thing, but holy crap, there’s the guy who killed my brother! He’s walking that way, but I need to follow the guy who has the MacGuffin, because we need the MacGuffin, but this might be my only chance. He’s getting on a plane, I might never find this guy again.’ And decides to leave and go - it’s still agency, he’s still making a decision to his benefit, but at the cost of something else. R: Unless he figures out how to do both. So, as an editor, obviously you can’t name names - K: [laughing] R: - but what has been your experience with writers being told that they need to add agency to a story? K: Frequently confusion. R: Confusion because they don’t know what the heck that advice means, so they needed this episode. K: The thing is that if you have a completed book, a lot of times I think that you think your character is doing the best that your character can. I haven’t had to have that conversation a lot, but the times that I have weren’t the story as a whole, it was isolated to individual areas of the story. And a lot of times I framed it as ‘character So-and-so needs to make a decision. They need to do something. They need to stand up for themself. Or they have this thing that they know, they need to act on that, or they need to tell someone about it so that person can act on it. When I find areas where I’m like, I need this character to display a little more agency, is typically when - I’ll be honest with you, a lot of times it’s when the story stalled out a little bit. R: But is that a result of the character not behaving with agency? K: Well frequently when we get the character to act a little bit more on their behalf or make some decisions, it takes the storyline back up. R: Yeah. K: Weird, huh? [laughing] R: Funny how that happens. K: This all goes back to what we’re talking about here of going ‘why is it a big deal if my character’s passive?’ Because that can get boring. R: Yeah. And part of this is that we need the energy as a reader from that character’s desire to get from point A to point B, whether that’s an action or a target or an emotional state or whatever. That carries us along through the book and that makes the pages turn, versus the character just milling about with their hands in their pockets. K: I’ll leave us with this thought. I find a lot of times that characters who lack agency are typically not well-developed characters. And I’m not talking about in a certain scene, I’m not talking about the weird spot where the story’s stalling out a little bit, I’m talking about pervasive through the entirety of the story. A lack of agency is frequently coupled with a character that maybe isn’t that well-developed and whose arc, yes I’m tying in other vague advice to this, but whose character arc maybe isn’t that well fleshed out. Because if you have a well-developed character, you should know in your head what they would do in certain situations. You should know how they would act. If the character’s personality or development is ‘I will sit in this place, watch everything happen, and wait for it to be over,’ well, maybe that’s not a character you should be writing an entire book about. [laughing] All of this ties to everything else. All of this has to do with the other major things about books: themes, character arcs, plot, and place. Because characters who are well-developed shouldn’t need a lot of nudging to help themselves. R: Right, so if you have a character that knows what they want, sometimes this meandering comes out of the writer not quite sure how to get to the next thing, and might I suggest you just cut the scene and go to the next thing that is actually sometimes exactly what it needs. K: You brought up a very good point. I think a lot of times when, especially if it’s not pervasive if we’re dealing with an individual scene, it’s more a product of the writer struggling in that area. Either not knowing how to get us to the next place we need to be, be it physical or otherwise, or not having a good understanding of what’s gonna continue to happen in the story and either not wanting to write themselves into a corner, or not having a good way to continue. R: Yeah. And so then they get stuck in that character-introspective moment where they’re staring out the kitchen window, thinking about lots of stuff without acting in any way. K: It’s okay to have quote-unquote “downtime” for characters. It’s okay to give them some time where they need to think and regroup. I would say that is even displaying agency, that’s a planning portion. I’m not saying that every character at all times in your book must be active and must be doing things to further themselves to a goal. What I am saying, however, is that if they’re not doing anything through the course of the book, or if there are big chunks of it where we’re kinda going ‘whaaat’s going on here?’, that’s a larger problem. And one is easier to fix than the other. [laughing] Anyway, so, that’s agency, and that’s kinda what I have to say about it. That’s all I have to say about that. R: I doubt that very much. K: Well, that’s all I’ll say for now then. R: Yes, ‘cause we are over time. For me, if I get the feedback that my character’s lacking agency, I take a good look at what’s happening. And as Kaelyn said, if my character’s not a force that is causing things to happen in this story, or if there’s unnecessary downtime, or if there just isn’t a character arc, ‘cause sometimes I get this feedback for short stories. K: Mhm. R: And so that’s a good easy way to figure out like ‘oh, right, I don’t have a character arc. This character goes and observes a thing, and I’m trying to make commentary on the thing but I’m not actually having the character affect any change on the thing.’ Then it’s not really agency, it is the character observing the world around them and having an opinion about it, which isn’t the same as having a character arc. K: Yeah. R: If that happens in a novel, it’s more excruciating because it’s a lot more words that you’ve put time into. I rewrote SALVAGE, the first 60% that I rewrote, the first time I rewrote the first 60%, was because of an agency issue. K: Mhm. R: My characters start out the book; they’re stuck on the island, and all I did to change it was change the way they were planning their stuck-ness. K: [laughing] R: They’d been there the same amount of time, they were the same amount of frustrated, they were in the same amount of danger and having to make sure that nobody noticed them that shouldn’t notice them. But, in the second version, there’s a heist. Versus the first version where there’s a lot of watching the clock. And which one would you rather read? K: Exactly, yeah. There’s certainly an argument to make -- I think, a strong argument that I would say is borderline law -- that watching characters act with agency is far more engaging than watching them as passive observers. R: Yep. K: Unless it’s Twilight, and then you’re just gonna sell a billion copies of basically a weird choose-your-own-adventure, but not really. R: Yes. Well, not all our characters are as beautiful and attractive and wonderful and captivating as Bella, so we’re just gonna have to give them agency. K: She doesn’t know how beautiful - R [overlapping]: Right no of course not - K [overlapping]: No of course not, no - R: The plot is her finding out that people find her attractive. K: And she smells really good. [Both laughing] R: A fine vintage. Okay. K: Twilight is one of those things that like, I wonder if 150 years from now when we’re all dead, and they look back at this and go like ‘God, people in the earlier 2000s were weird.’ R: I mean, you could say that about most ages I think. K: That’s true. Yeah. R: There’s plenty of evidence throughout history of humans being just freakin’ weird. K: Context is everything, but. R: Yep. K: Yeah, so anyway, that’s agency. R: It is. Go get some, and give it to your characters. K: And always agency on your own behalf, you as a real life person always get to have. R: Yeah! I mean, especially when you’ve been locked inside for a year and a half. It’s about time to get some agency. K: Yup. R: So if you have questions or comments, or you still don’t know what agency is or what to do with it when someone tells you you need more, then you can @ us on Twitter and Instagram @wmbcast, or you can go back to some of the other episodes we talked about; they are all at wmbcast.com. We would love if you would leave a rating and review and subscribe on Apple Podcasts. And also we are super grateful to all our patrons at Patreon.com/wmbcast who support the costs involved in making these episodes for you. So if they are helpful, and you have the cash and the agency - K: [laughing] R: Please head on over there. K: I see what you did there. R: Oh yeah, you like that? Thanks. K: I did, I did. So thanks everyone, we’ll see you in two weeks!

In this lesson, You will learn how to say Yes or No in Yoruba?Click to download Lesson Pdf fileDownload this comprehensive free beginner friendly eBook to learn 10 frequently used Yoruba words with audio recordings of sample sentences, sample dialogue and sample conversation by native speakers as well as a practice test to challenge yourself.Got questions? Feel free to reach out to me on IG @isyorubatooAccess more lessons on my YouTube channel at I Speak Yoruba TooThank you for learning Yoruba Language with I Speak Yoruba Too, Please don't forget to leave a review and share.

Rishad Tobaccowala is an author, speaker, and advisor, named by Time Magazine as one of five “Marketing Innovators.” He joins the show this week to talk about his new book, Restoring the Soul of Business, and how we can transform personally and professionally in this new era of “The Great Re-invention.” Rishad and I also discuss why tech is nothing without talent, how leadership can create an environment for their talent to speak up, and why it’s best to ditch the PowerPoint every now and then at your meetings.   Takeaways: [2:48] Rishad wrote his book, Restoring the Soul of Business, after traveling around the world and witnessing how leaders and managers were torn between how important data and tech actually was, and then struggling to understand what that data even meant for their own company. He saw that the companies that integrated data with their story did much better than ones that were solely data-driven. The book is organized into twelve chapters that you can read straight or skip around and it gives the reader much to work with in terms of leadership with a soul. [11:16] As a leader, it is your responsibility to help your people speak up in a safe environment. One example is senior managers asking their team after a meeting why their current course of action possibly may not work, or to encourage hypotheticals of what may go wrong. [22:53] In this time of the Great Re-Invention with COVID-19 and beyond, it is essential that professionals improve their skills and see themselves as a brand. [40:01] Great managers and leaders listen for what’s not being said. As more companies work from home, having smaller breakout meetings face to face (or Zoom to Zoom for now) can help build culture and actually use time wisely.   Quotes: “Data is like electricity, you cannot today compete without it.” — R “Yes, leaders do matter, but one of the smartest things leaders do is surround themselves with world-class talent.” — R “The future of your career is up to you. It’s not up to someone in talent management or HR.” — R “We shouldn’t confuse activity with accomplishment.” — Kevin   Mentioned in This Episode: Rishadtobaccowala.com Breaking Bad Insider Podcast Rishad’s podcast | Blog Restoring the Soul of Business: Staying Human in the Age of Data Bullsh*t Jobs: A Theory

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]

Calling all humans who work in HR, this episode is for you. Yes, you Toby from The Office. I’m here to support you, as you lead the future leaders. You support so many leaders, whoo is supporting you?

www.kaiehnes.com Ep7 Kai with Dr. Andy Rosenfarb on Emotional Resilience Greetings…Welcome to the Way of the Emotional Warrior Podcast. My name is Kai Ehnes. Today my guest is Dr. Andy Rosenfarb. We will explore emotional resilience. K: Welcome Dr. Andy Rosenfarb. To our way of the emotional warrior.   My name is Kai Ehnes and I thought that we could chat today about emotional resilience. R: Its such a great topic and thanks so much for inviting me to this conversation. Resilience is a very important faculty for success, business, family, taking care of our children, taking care of ourselves, its definitely a keystone. K: I'd like to set a little bit of backdrop without exposing too much of how we actually met which is quite interesting. By trade you are a? R: I'm a naturopath and acupuncturist. L: We had quite a journey to his office, across the street from his office a great bagel shop, lovely office staff. Its not my story to tell. The outcome has been pretty miraculous. We are very very pleased. Thank you very much for stepping into our lives. Prior to that it was not looking real good. You are an amazing healer and I wish more people would know more about you and what you do. Its quick, easy (in relative terms) Maybe people will step into the newer vibration and that maybe there is a better way to live and that people don't have to suffer. R: Its true. The glorification of suffering, this old school thinking that everything has to be a struggle and you have to grind your way through life. Sometimes we kinda have to but it doesn't have to always be like that. K: The way that he and I got to connect is that I sat in on the process. You work specifically with eyes, right? R: Yes the nature of my practice is to ideally focus on people's vision, help their vision with neurologic conditions like macular degeneration, glaucoma, eye strokes, retinal detachments. K: So, people come to you having seen the doctor that gives out glasses, people have gone to see the doctor who says that you need surgery. R: Yes, there are a lot of neurological conditions, vascular conditions. A lot of these people have gone to their conventional eye doctors and are told that there is no conventional biomedical treatment, meaning there is no drugs and no surgery for what they have going on. Fortunately, our methods supplement that lack of current conventional treatment. K: I was sitting alongside of all this and we got into chatting. My prior work was with something called Kai-Zen Consciousness which is about continuous improvement. Taking small steps instead of large ones that might be too difficult to make. In this small step philosophy you start to inch your way forward and hopefully build a new life. Personally I like to believe that we are constantly evolving. I am constantly striving, daily, if not hourly, to become a better person. To find a better way of being on this planet, how to relate better to things. Hopefully, along the way, be healthier. I'm sort of at that point in my life where I am like a vehicle at a hundred thousand mile tune up. I would like to heal back into a healthy way of living. That's where he and I met, he was very kind. His clientele has to deal with resilience. Someone comes in with macular degeneration and they are basically blocked from seeing a full visual field. Even glaucoma, can lead to total loss of vision. Finding that out has got to push some buttons. So, what do you do when you find out something really shocking to your system. R: it's a great thing, our resilience. I was watching the movie Rocky, where it talks about this. Life can knock you down. We are all going to experience where your life takes a hit.  We're going to take financial hits, emotional hits, social hits, be embarrassed, have health issues. We are going to take blows from life and resilience is about your fortitude our ability... Support this podcast

Hey kids! Are you ready to sell out to make cash fast?!  In today's episode of We Make Books, we discuss what artistic integrity is, how to tell if you've blown yours to smithereens, and why it's 100% okay and good to make a living from your art. 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, and concerns. Stay safe everyone! We hope you enjoy We Make Books! Twitter: @WMBCast  |  @KindofKaelyn  |  @BittyBittyZap Instagram: @WMBCast  Patreon.com/WMBCast   Episode 33: Artistic Integrity and Suffering For Your Arttranscribed by Sara Rose (@saraeleanorrose)[0:00]K: Hey everyone, welcome back to another episode of We Make Books, a show about writing, publishing, and everything in between! I’m Kaelyn Considine and I am the acquisitions editor for Parvus Press.R: And I’m Rekka, I write science fiction and fantasy as R.J. Theodore.K: And, Rekka, as a writer—R: Which I am! Totally.K: Which you are, yeah, of course you are. You probably have a lot of opinions about what people tell you— R: Everything.K: Well, yeah, a lot of things in general. But, specifically, about other people’s opinions and them giving you suggestions and guidance and thoughts about what you should do, not only with your writing, but your life and how to support your continued writing, in your life.R, unenthused: Yeah. Yeah, they do that. So, you’re gonna intermix with a lot of people’s opinions over the course of your writing career. Especially as you let other people read your work. K: So today we’re talking about artistic integrity.R: Right. When people tell you to change stuff, where do you plant your feet?K: Not only people telling you to change stuff, however, also what you’re doing with your life in the meantime to support your art.R: Mhm.K: We were thinking about this episode and thinking about this idea of what does it truly mean to be a writer?R: Mhm.K: And we start far clear of that definition—Or, we really steer clear of that conversation because I, personally, am of the opinion that if you are trying to write something professionally, that makes you a writer.R: Correct. I also agree with you.K: Yes, so now that we’ve got that established.R: If you’re listening to this podcast and then, when it’s done, you go and you try to work on your writing, you are a writer.K: You are a writer. Congratulations.R: If you just listen to this podcast and you think about writing and you never go write. Uh, we might have to debate that one.K: You’re a… future writer.R: Yes, hopefully. Hopefully an aspiring writer.K: Yes, there you go.R: To be a writer without a modifier, is to write.K: There ya go. But there’s also a lot of conversation around, like, well if you’re doing this then you’re not serious about your writing career. If you’re, you know, not focused 100% on only writing, then how could you be serious about your writing career?R: Which is funny, you know, because it just occurred to me—we don’t cover this in the episode—but I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been at a family gathering, speaking of opinions, where they find out I’m a writer and they say, “Oh you should write _____.” Children’s book. A Gone Girl. You know, whatever’s hot at the moment. Their opinion is you’ve gotta write the most commercial thing that I’ve actually heard of right now.K: Yeah, yeah. So there’s—You’re gonna run up against a lot of this stuff in your career, as you interact with people. So we, in this episode, talk first about this notion of if you’re not suffering, you’re not writing. Which is silly.R, sarcastically: If you’re not abusing prescription drugs or if you’re not abusing alcohol, then are you even trying to be creative?K: Yeah, exactly. Then what are you doing? But then, also, we discuss having to make changes and modifications to your story at the recommendations of other industry professionals. So it’s all within the same subject, but we’re covering two different angles from this. The before and the after, if you will.R: With an intro of: Why do we have to suffer, again? K: Yeah! Thanks everyone, again, for tuning in and we hope you enjoy the episode![intro music plays]R, deadpan: Kaelyn, I’m suffering.K: You’re suffering?R: Yes. Because I’m supposed to.K, ironically: And do you know what? That makes your work more valid!R: I am, yes, validated and authentic because of my pain and anguish.K: … Except you’re not because— R: No. ‘Cause that’s bullshit.K: ‘Cause that’s not really a thing.R: I mean, yes, it’s possible that someone who puts out good work is also suffering, but I would like to posit that I wish everyone felt better and that we could all see, because we all feel great, that suffering is not required for good art.K: So today we’re talking about artistic integrity.R: Or we’re going to try to.K: We’re going to try to. And what we kept coming back to is this idea that we seem to have a fixation on if you’re happy, you’re not making good art.R: If you haven’t cut off an ear, then you aren’t suffering enough.K: Well, I mean, look at tuberculosis. That was considered an artistic disease. People deliberately infected themselves with it because it was a slow, wasting, elegant disease. Of your body slowly breaking down and your heart not working anymore. R: Yeah. Lovely. Sign me up.K: Yeah, no. I mean that was… And, of course, it made you look like a vampire which was very in, in Victorian fashions, for whatever reason.R: It’s still kind of in sometimes, in some circles. Yeah, I mean, just give me some consumption and allow me to cough blood into my lace handkerchief on a settee and that’s how it works, right? K: Pretty much, yeah. You know the: [coughs softly] Oh goodness. I’d better tuck that away. I feel like every movie set in that era now—R: Someone has consumption, yeah. Both: Discreetly coughing blood into a handkerchief.K: And then, you know—R: Hiding it from their loved ones. That’s the ticket. That’s how you get to the Big Times.K: Look at Mary Shelley! She wrote Frankenstein while she and her husband and some of their friends were off seaside trying to cure his tuberculosis.R: Among other things.K: Among other things. So, anyway, you don’t need tuberculosis to produce good art.R: Please, in fact, do not try.K: We’re gonna start with this idea that levels of success in your life are dictating whether or not you’re a “real writer.” And there’s this very strong feeling toward: I am a writer, these are the things I will write, I will not do anything else but write this thing. And, if I need to, I will suffer for my art. I don’t care if I’m living in my parents’ garage living off ramen noodles. My art is my art, nothing is going to change that. I will suffer for it. Conversely, you’ve got some people who are trying to write what they wanna write and then also doing other things to supplement their income in the meantime.R: Right.K: And, Rekka, would you say that that is looked down upon in some circles?R: There are definitely circles that feel that people who write for IP which is, you know, a Star Wars book or a Minecraft book or a World of Warcraft book. Folks who write other people’s IP because it pays the bills are ‘selling out’.[07:19]K: Well, I wouldn’t even take it that far. You know, obviously, there is that component of the sell-out, but what about if you’re just picking up freelance jobs writing marketing copy?R: Right, so. Some people would probably say, everything you write that isn’t your greatest work of that time, is a waste of time, or is distracting you from being a better writer. Or something like that. Instead of taking the opportunity to say, pour your heart into everything you do and use the jobs that are not going to reward you artistically to practice something. Just writing all the time is always a good exercise if you wanna be a writer.K: Also, you know what’s nice? Money. R: Money is also pretty good. K: Money’s good to have.R: If you can pay for groceries, you can fuel your mind and body and then you might be a better writer.K: And, again, we did back into this notion of: doing something for the money lessens your artistic integrity. R: Right.K: There’s nothing wrong with doing things for money. Money is not a dirty thing.R: I mean, it’s physically pretty dirty.K: Well, yeah, no and there’s cocaine residue on a lot of it. But money, the concept of money itself—and having it—on its own, it doesn’t corrupt you. Being able to support yourself and live in a lifestyle that you consider comfortable, there’s nothing wrong with that.R: No, that should be what everyone aspires to and is able to reach, just by hard work. But that’s not the world we’re in. You know.K: Yeah, well, that’s a different issue.R: It’s a different episode. The Despair episode.K: But that’s exactly what we’re talking about here. There’s this mental block of: if I’m doing things other than creating my art, and I’m doing it strictly for the sake of the money, am I selling out? No, of course you’re not. A lot of people have jobs that they don’t necessarily love that you’re doing for the money. I mean, do you think I just wake up every day and go, “Boy. I really can’t wait to get on the phone and talk to people about network video equipment.” No!R: I mean, I assumed you do, but…K: Well, actually I do like talking to people, but… I’m doing this because they pay me to do this! And there is definitely this stigma in, I think, especially artistic circles that if you are working in some sort of creative or artistic endeavour, you must be doing it strictly for the love of doing it.R: Right.K: Rekka, you’re a graphic designer. R: Mhmm.K: Do you love everything you do?R: Absolutely not.K: Every project you work on?R: No, no. Not really at all. I mean, it’s not that I don’t love the work. I enjoy doing the process. I take pride in my work, but each individual project is not guaranteed to be something that inspires me and fills me with joy.K: Yeah, and so, why is writing any different? Because you can still take on a writing project that does not necessarily inspire you and fill you with joy, but it’s gonna pay you.R: I mean, you know what doesn’t inspire me and fill me with joy? Is the first draft? Can I just not do that part?K: That’s an excellent point.R: I mean, if I was going to be completely true to my artistic self, I would only revise and edit. And outline. I do like outlining.K, laughing: You do love outlines. But that’s the thing, is that your art is only worth what someone is willing to pay for it. Now, if you need money, and you have other means of working within your artistic means to make that money, that does not make what you’re doing any less valid.R, outraged: And you know what’s just absurd is that an artist is only supposed to—their work is only supposed to be very, very valuable after they’re dead. Like, what kind of bullshit is that? That the artist is the only one who doesn’t get to profit from their work?K: Well, that’s because at that point they’re not gonna make any more of it.R: Right.K: Some, and I’ll take it an extra step in how it’s even more sick, is because your entire catalogue is now complete. So everyone can evaluate what you will ever make in your life against itself.R: It sounds like you’re defending not paying the artist what their work is actually worth.K: Absolutely not. R: Yeah.K: Just saying, this is why stuff becomes more valuable after people die.R: No, but I’m saying—becomes more valuable after people die because you know they’re not gonna make any more. People wish they’d acted sooner. Wish they’d discovered them sooner, whatever. But why can’t that artist make a living wage of their art and still be an artist?K: Well, I think there are—writers are a little bit unique in this. Because writers, I’d say, are one of the groups of artists that do make their money in their lifetime. I’m sure there’s probably studies and things out there about this, there’s probably always a spike of books being bought after a writer dies.R: Mhm.K: That’s to be expected. The same way that there’s people who watch movies that an actor was in, after that actor dies. Part of it’s a nostalgia factor, part of it’s a “Oh! I’d always wanted to check that person out!” and now they’re dead. I think artists, however, and—this is a little bit all over the place—If you think of the modern artists that we can name right now, off the top of your head. Who can you name right now, off the top of your head? R: Banksy.K: Yeah. That’s exactly what I was gonna say. I think most people will say Banksy.R: Mhm. Because of headlines.K: Because of headlines and because Banksy’s got shtick. The reason, I think, behind a lot of this—and this is something that does not apply to writers—is that artists that create paintings, sculptures, what have you, it’s not easily accessible to the community at large. The art community is pretty exclusive. I would go so far as to say snobbish, in some regards.R: Yeah. But, again, it’s in their best interest to be snobbish. K: Absolutely it is, yep.R: There’s like a false rarity.K: Yeah, and that’s the idea with art is that, in theory, they’re creating one painting and there’s only gonna be one of those ever. Writers, on the other hand, benefit from this great thing where, first of all, their work is incredibly accessible.R: Right.K: Especially in this day and age. And, also, once you make a book, you can give the same piece of art to a bunch of people. And they can all read it together and interpret it how they want to interpret it.R: From across the country, across the world. They do not have to be in one gallery looking at it for the two hours that the gallery is open.K: Yes. So, that also then puts some pressure on the writers, I think. Who are trying to navigate and discover and figure out their own art. I resent the idea that working on projects that are not your magnum opus for money makes you less of a writer, less of an artist.R: Right.K: Because why would it?R: Because if you’re a chef you better not ever eat a box of Kraft macaroni and cheese.K, laughing: I don’t think anyone should eat a box of Kraft macaroni and cheese, ever. But that’s, you know.R: Hey, it’s delicious. I don’t eat it, but that’s not because I don’t like the taste.K: Ah, see, I was never a fan.R: Oh, okay. K: My mom used to try to—I remember even when I was a kid, my mom would be like, “Oh, we’re having—” and my sisters and brother would be so excited. I would be like, “Can I just have a sandwich, please? I don’t think this is good.”R: It’s funny. My mom never bought it, so when I’d go to a friend’s house and they were making it, I would always be like, “Oh, my god this is amazing!”K: So exciting!R: Yeah.K: No, I was never a fan.R: So one of the things I need to point out is that “the dream” of being an author is becoming a full time writer.K: Yes.R: One of the things that’s very difficult to do is be a full time anything, if you’re not being paid for it.K, sighing: Yes.R: Somehow we haven’t worked out how to make that easy.K: Yeah. The thing is that no one is going to pay you enough money to live off of for the rest of your life, to sit and work on writing something.R: Yeah.K: At some point you’ve gotta produce something that can be sold.R: Yes. And the more you can produce that can be sold, the better, for your income stream predictability.K: Now, that said, the thing that you’re producing that can be sold, like my earlier example, might be market copy.R: Yeah.K: Maybe, you know, you do need to spend a lot of time still working on what is truly deep in your artist heart that you want to put out in the world. But, by doing that, you’re supporting yourself. And the people that are paying you to do it are, in a roundabout way, supporting your writing. R: Yeah! It’s pretty funny how that works, right? They are supporting your writing career, even if all they want from you is some marketing text of 300 words or less. If you get paid for that, that supports your writing career. When you can pay for the basic necessities of your life, your stress goes down and it makes it a heck of a lot easier to work on your writing. I know we said the Suffering Artist is an unfair thing, and that’s why. You can’t create if you are spending eighteen hours of every day tearing your hair out and six hours of every day not sleeping and creating fever-driven work. That’s not healthy and it’s not sustainable and it’s not kind that we’ve set up this expectation that you should suffer. So having your basic income needs met, through whatever means.I would happily “become a full time writer” and work six hours every couple of days as a barista or something like that.K: Mhm.R: I mean, to me, that’s actually kind of fun because I love coffee, I love talking to people, and I, you know, worked a similar job in high school. So, to me, that sounds like fun. That’s probably some people’s absolute nightmare and that’s why we have so many people in the world who can handle different jobs. Some people are better at it than others. K: There are people with my job that I think would rather walk into the ocean than do my job. I don’t think my job is that hard or difficult, in terms of my day to day. For some people it would be a living nightmare.R: So for people who can write all day, you probably still can’t write creatively all day. Coming up with your novel. If you spent ten hours at the keyboard every day on your novel, you would burn out. Because your brain just needs to switch tracks sometimes. If you can work from home as a full time writer, I don’t think you’re going to spend all that time working on your novel. It’s not like, “Oh! Now, with a day job, I write two hours a day. But now I’m going to be able to write ten hours a day and it’s going to make me so much more productive!” It may not actually increase your creative writing output by anything.But what you can do to supplant that is to continue to write copy, you can write non-fiction op-eds, you can write things that you can submit to Tor.com, kind of things.K: You can write book reviews!R: Book reviews, exactly! Articles on the industry. Get supported that way.K: Go back and listen to our episode from a few weeks ago about publishing reviews and publishing literature. Publishers Weekly has hundreds of people whose job is just to freelance write book reviews for them.R: Yup.K: If you want to remain in your realm of employ— R: Your wheelhouse.K: Yeah! That’s a great way to do it.R: And that was Episode 29: Industry Reviews. K: This notion that doing anything but working on what it is you want to publish is selling out, I think, is a very damaging mentality to have. I think it, long-term, could end up hurting your career.R: Mhm.K: And it’s certainly not gonna make you any friends.[20:19]R: Yes, and these might lead to new discoveries. The things you learn—if you have to research and write copy for something that you might never have researched—you might end up putting into a book someday. Everything you do is either writing exercise or just brain exercise, so I don’t think we should discount anything. It doesn’t matter what you’re doing, everything feeds your experiences and it comes into your writing later.K: I look back at weird jobs I had in college and I can’t believe the stuff that I picked up and took away from that. That was just to make some extra money while I was a student. Did that mean that I wasn’t very serious about my studies and I was copping out on all this? No, absolutely not! It meant that I was a college student and had no money and occasionally liked to drink beer and therefore needed money to get beer.R: Right.K: I don’t think anyone would ever accuse me of not being serious about becoming a historian because I tutored and worked in the library. And I don’t think that it’s fair, or even rational, to say the same thing about writers.R: Yeah! And your example is perfect because you tutored and worked in the library and these are things, actually, not all that far away from what you were majoring in.K: Yeah!R: I mean, it’s kind of like writing business copy or corporate copy or commercial copy instead of working on your novel.K: So now, that said, there is sort of a flipside to this conversation about artistic integrity and that is once you’ve finished something, now.R: Mhm.K: So you have suffered, you have struggled, you have rolled the boulder up the hill and now someone is interested in publishing this. Maybe you just even hired an editor to take a look at it.R: Mhm.K: And they’ve got some suggestions. R: Right. So this could be, like Kaelyn was saying, an editor, it could be an agent. It could be a beta reader.K: Let’s say you’ve got a completed manuscript, it’s in good enough shape that you’re gonna let other people see it. I’m gonna use the example, here, of an agent or an editor. Let’s say we’re dealing with someone at a professional level, at this point. They say, “Listen. I really like this book. The zombie dinosaurs at the end are a really great twist. Never saw that coming. I really like how the aliens show up at the beginning and they’re the ones who, it turns out, were manipulating the zombie dinosaurs the whole time. Got one little problem here though, at one point you introduce some hobbits. The hobbits just really don’t go with the story. I think you need to take out the hobbits and really shift this to complete sci-fi, rather than making it a little bit of a sci-fi fantasy.” But! If the hobbits are something really important to your story, in your mind, how do you approach this? And if you change that, what does that say about your artistic integrity?R: Right. So this is a absurd example of some of the possibilities—K, contrarily: No, it’s not. I’m gonna go write this book after we’re finished.R: Well, good! I hope you leave the hobbits in.[K laughs]R: But Kaelyn and I were talking about this before we started recording. I gave a more concrete, or more likely, example that she avoided. But I think what she’s doing is making a generalization and we can go into the specifics of where do you make these decisions. You have to be able to draw the line and know where your line is on the various things that you might be asked. K: Now, I’m going to stop Rekka real quick and say, when you draw your line, that means that you’ve gotta be willing and ready to walk away from something.R: Mhm. That might be an agent who was going to offer you a deal, but they just think you are too stubborn.K: That line has to be a real line for you. So, before you are willing to draw it in the sand and stick the stake in the ground, think really long and hard about how worth it that thing is to you.R: The nice thing is, in most cases, you’re gonna be able to have a conversation with the person making the suggestion to see what it is about the hobbits they don’t like. K: Like the big feet. They must be so gross, they don’t wear shoes.R: Yeah! Is it just that this editor apparently has a thing against feet and it’s just going to trip them up, specifically, or is it honestly the fantasy aspect of it. Is there a logical reason? Is there something that actually contradicts something else you’re doing in your book? If every other character in your book is a human, and everything is dealing with the humans and the aliens, and then these dinosaur zombies, maybe the hobbits do feel like they came from another book. And if there’s no logical explanation, someone might be able to debate you into seeing in that way. And saying, “Pull the hobbits out, put ‘em in another book! I don’t have a problem with that. But not this book.”K: Rekka was right, I made kind of an absurdist, general example because it’s just trying to give you a big picture idea. Things you are more likely to encounter, though, are going to be related to the marketability of your book. In that example, I had said, we want to take the fantasy element of this out and move it more towards a strictly sci-fi audience that we think will pick up on this really well. But then more controversial things could come up. What if, instead, the conversation is: this queer character is going to alienate a lot of the target audience.R: There’s an excellent question to respond with that: Do we care about that audience?K: Yes! So this is where I’m saying your line is. Because the thing is that if you’re talking to, for instance, an agent, or an editor at a publishing house for that matter, at the end of the day everyone is trying to make money off of this book.R: Mhm.K: Thankfully, a lot of the publishing market and the people involved have shifted where, not only is this stuff— R: Less controversial than it used to be, yeah.K: Not only is writing things that ten, fifteen years ago would have been a nail in the coffin for a book, it’s celebrated and encouraged now. People are looking for it. But someone might say to you, “Listen. This is a hard military sci-fi book. The people, this social commentary you have in it, that’s not going to appeal to this audience. They just wanna read about spaceships fighting each other near Jupiter. If you wanna sell a lot of this, take that stuff out.”R: Right, so if someone’s looking at your book and they see it as military science fiction, with an unfortunate helping of social commentary, when what you were doing was—Your vision was to have the social commentary as a throughline with the framing of this military science fiction genre, you two may never see eye to eye on this.K: And that may make them not wanna publish your book.R: And that may make you not want to publish with them! I mean, it goes both ways. If someone comes to you and they want to fundamentally change what you’re doing with the book, or in the case of the queer characters, if they want to strip out diversity or identity that you strongly believe in supporting, maybe walking away is the best option. People seem to fall into the trap of this may be the only offer I ever get.K: But, here’s the thing: it might be.R: It might be!K: And that is a very—And this is why I’m saying you need to figure out where your line is because, I won’t sugarcoat it, that could be a very hard decision for you to make.R: But, how do you make that decision? Try to picture yourself in five years, having gone with what the changes they suggested were. How are you going to feel about that?K: By the way, you may be totally fine with those changes. Maybe the agent says, “Listen, I want you to take the social commentary out of this first book. Just get a hard military sci-fi book going, build an audience, and then once you’ve hooked them, let’s absolutely go back and write that book.” Not everything is going to be a clear cut-and-dry, this or nothing. As Rekka said, you know, there’s probably gonna be a conversation here. There’s gonna be a talk about this, but it is something that you’re gonna have to decide. Is it more important to you to write the book that you had set out to write, or is it more important to you to get a book published?R: Right. Keep in mind that in these situations, where this is your first chance, your first debut book we assume. This does set the tone for the rest of your career. Under this pen name. There’s always a chance to debut again with a different pen name in a different genre, or just to start over. But if you do that because you regret the choices you made—Keep that in mind as you make the choices. If the choice isn’t a big deal to you. If, as Kaelyn said, it doesn’t bother you to make the requested changes then that doesn’t even come into play. Clearly, it’s not a thing you’re going to regret. But don’t do it because you feel like you need their approval. K: Now, also though, changing those things based on suggestions also does not make you a sell-out. There is nothing wrong with an agent saying, “Listen, if you can make these small changes,” and you’re on board with them and happy with them, and the agent is saying, “Make these because it will reach a broader audience,” or “It will reach this more focused and fanatical audience and you can sell more books,” that also does not make you a sell-out. There is nothing wrong with making some small adjustments to try to get your book to appeal to a broader audience. Because, again, there is nothing wrong with wanting to try to make money off your writing. R: Right.K: And to capitalize the ways that you’re doing that.R: As long as you’re not compromising your morals.K: Yes! Yeah, of course.R : If you, as Kaelyn said, if you can make these changes and be happy with them. If you make those changes and you hate them forever, that’s not the right change for you to make.K: Can you sleep at night, having made these changes?R: Right, can you sleep at night five years from now?K: Or is there a pit in your stomach every time you think about it?R: Yeah. If this is the sort of thing where it’s that moment you think back on and, no matter how far away from it you get, you’re embarrassed every time or you squirm in discomfort, then keep that in mind. K: One thing I’m gonna bring up from the publishing side of things. As a writer, do not think: “Well, I’ll agree with this now, but when it comes time to actually put this on paper and start getting it published, I’ll just leave it in there and fight with them about it then.” Don’t do that for a couple reasons.One, you’re gonna piss people off. And that’s just not something you wanna do. If you had a conversation with the understanding that you would do things in good faith, hold up to that. Because, conversely, there is probably language in your agreement that—R: That you are going to change those things.K: —that you are going to do this. It is not uncommon for agents and publishing houses to put specific things in contracts that say: blahblahblah, with the understanding that you will do the following. You will take the hobbits out of the book. You will not mention anyone’s feet. The zombie dinosaurs will remain zombies.It is not uncommon to find those kinds of clauses and stipulations and agreements. And the reason that publishing houses do this is because they’re used to dealing with authors and their protectiveness over certain elements of their story. So if you agree to something and say, “Yes, I’m going to make those changes,” guess what? You’ve committed to making those changes.R: Yeah.K: Even if it’s not in writing, you are going to burn a lot of bridges if you don’t.R: If they brought it up with you before they offered you a contract, it’s that important to them.[33:00]K: Yes, yes exactly.R: And—here’s the thing—we’ve been talking about all of this as though there’s a contract right in front of you that, like, you could sign this if you make these changes. You may also get revise and resubmit requests from agents or you may get rejections with some suggestions from agents, if you’re lucky. I mean, you might get form letters, too, but if an agent says, “I’m passing on this, here’s why ___.” Don’t necessarily take that as the next one will take it, if I make this change.K: That’s a very good point, yeah. R: Especially if it’s something that you feel weird about making the change on. Like, if you think making one agent’s request is going to get you the next agent, you are sadly mistaken. Everyone is an individual. We have not joined the Borg hive mind yet. So, therefore, what one agent says does not apply to all agents. Unless they tell you your grammar is bad. Then you can verify that. K: Yeah, that’s probably pretty across the board.R: But, yeah, so if they’re rejecting with some suggestions, that doesn’t mean you’re a shoo-in if you make those changes, for the next person. At best, you wanna evaluate, if you disagree with them, why you disagree, what that person’s perspective on it might have been, and then you can consider: maybe I want to go in and revise that section or revise that element before I submit again. But if you react in compliance with every criticism you get, you’re going to have a very exhausting writing life.K: Yeah, yeah exactly. So artistic integrity, I think, is murky waters for a lot of people because you want to sell your book, you want people to enjoy it. You want to appeal to a broad audience. One of the biggest issues, I think, a lot of books come up against is relatability. At the end of the day, no matter what, relatability is central to appealing to an audience. However, you don’t have to water that down to the point where you end up with a bland character who is a placeholder for anyone to insert themselves into. R: Right.K: That’s not what we’re talking about here. We’re not talking about making this essentially a Choose Your Own Adventure starring— R: You.K: —the person reading the book. So it is a hard thing for a lot of people to navigate. But, at the end of the day, you have to go with the choices and decisions that are gonna make you happy and are going to make you satisfied with what you’ve put out into the world.R: Right. And, honestly, there’s a feeling in your gut that you know when you’re not happy with an idea. And there’s a feeling in your gut when you just feel silly that you didn’t see that change, you know? And they’re different. They come from different parts of you. So learn to identify how you take criticism. Maybe go out and find a critique group and just learn to take the hits and understand your reactions to them. That’s a good exercise. I mean, I would hope that someone’s read your work before an agent or an editor and a publisher, so if you haven’t gotten people’s eyes on it and gotten their reactions to it, it might be just a good place to start. To help process your own feelings about what people say. And it’s gonna be different from what the agent or editor says. That’s why we’re saying, “Would you make these changes for an agent or editor?” Because they’re the people who hold the keys to the next step in your career.K: And, again, I would just round out this conversation by reinforcing: it is not a bad idea to sit down and write down, for that matter, what the most important things are to you.R: Yeah.K: Is it most important to get your story, exactly how you have it, out into the world, or do you just first want to get a story out into the world, and get it in front of as many people as possible? Neither of them are bad. You just have to decide what’s important to you.R: Right. Neither is the wrong answer. But what’s your answer?K: Exactly, yeah. And it might be somewhere in between! There’s no—I shouldn’t be presenting these as binary options. But decide what’s important and work from there. R: So, basically, you need to identify your goals and then ask yourself, whenever you’re faced with a decision: which direction, or does this get me to my goal? K: Yep, yep. So that’s artistic integrity, our thoughts on it.R: Artistic Integrity: something that has riled people up for centuries. We covered it in thirty-eight minutes. K: I mean, what can I say. R: The simplest things get people very angry. So, as usual, you can yell at us @wmbcast on Twitter or Instagram—K: Yeah, tell us if we’re violating our artistic integrity just by having this podcast in the first place.R: And you can reach out to us with questions, also, or ideas for future episodes. You can find us at wmbcast.com for our backlist of episodes. This is Episode 33 now, so there’s lots to catch up on if you are just entering the stream now. You can also find us at patreon.com/wmbcast where you can support us for as much as you like, in order to give us a little financial nod of approval. And if that’s too much to ask, which we totally understand, if you could leave us a rating and review—and review!?—on Apple podcasts, to help our audience grow and help us reach more people so we can give them our opinions on artistic integrity.K: Ratings and reviews, they feed the algorithm.R: They do, they do.K: We are all beholden to the algorithm.R: And its appetites! All right, thanks everyone! We’ll talk to you next time.[outro music plays]

退房Check Out必备情景对话在外国度过了愉快的假期，准备离开酒店了，要在规定时间办理退房手续，下面我们就来学习真实模拟的退房英语吧。R：Receptionist（宾馆前台的）接待员，前台工作人员G：Guest 客人R:How can I help you,sir?先生您好，有什么可以帮到您的吗？G:Yes,I'd like to check out.是的，我要退房。R:Ok.No problem. How was everything?没有问题。住的怎么样呢？G:The room was great. The beds were really comfortable, and we weren't expecting our own fridge.房间很棒。床很舒服而且我们也没有想到会有自己的冰箱。R:I'm glad you liked it.Will you be putting this on your credit card?我很高兴听到你喜欢那个房间。你要用信用卡支付吗？G:No. I'll pay cash.不，我付现金。R:OK. So the total comes to $123.67, including tax.好的，一共是123.67美金，其中包括了税。G:I thought it was $115 even. That's what they said yesterday when we checked in.我以为是115美金左右呢，昨天我入住的时候他们这么和我说的。R:Yes, but there is an extra room charge on your bill.是的，但是在您的账单上有额外的收费。G:Oh, I forgot. My wife ordered a plate of nachos. Sorry.哦我忘记了，我的妻子点了一盘墨西哥玉米片，抱歉。R:No problem. So...from $140, here's your change. Now, I'll just need to ask you for your room keys.没事，所以收您140美金，这里是找零。现在我只需要拿回房卡即可。（初学者模仿句子和单词）I'd like to check out.我要退房。（多音节词音节分解）无（拼读与音标）辅音音标位于元音前/l/的发音类似于汉语的/l/但是不要读太重不加/ə/的音例词：lake湖   like喜欢color颜色  popular流行的（词法和语法）无（连读与略读）连读： check out→ check out che ckout略读：  like to→ like to  li to（英英解释单词学英语思维）  check out：结账退房，结账离开(诊所) When you check out of a hotel or clinic where you have been staying, you pay the bill and leave.当你从酒店或诊所check out意思就是你结账退房或结账离开。每天录音和编辑也挺辛苦的，喉咙都干了，送个礼物或赞赏一瓶水给笨笨老师吧！O(∩_∩)O哈哈~Thanks a million！

Will you survive A&R? YES survive we did!! I thought today I would share some of my tips for surviving A&R, some take aways and of course our critical Reflection question. So I think I need to start by sharing that we did survive and I do feel it was an amazing experience. BUT at … Continue reading #53 Shine as an educator – Will you survive A&R The post #53 Shine as an educator – Will you survive A&R appeared first on Simple Reflect Blog.

感谢热心听友“大声Helen”帮忙听写本篇文稿!Ryan (R): A Beijing couple has decided to break tradition and used the subway for their wedding party’s transportation. Crazy or cool? What’s going on? Bob (B): Well, I mean, Niu Hongling and I have beenfighting over this story since... but is actually does calm down to whether this is a wedding for human beings or for cats.R: How does it come down to that Bob?Niu Honglin (N): I have nothing to do with it.B: Because I think it would totally be different if this was cats? Anyway it was a story. OK. So hiring a limousine.. It’s a headache. The whole wedding thing is a headache, isn’t it? For couples who want to get married. So much they have to think about getting from A to B, moving the whole wedding party around that kind of things. It’s a huge expense. And in these days, when we’ve got to think about the environment and you know the kind of things that... What would we rather spend our money on? Do we rather spend it on luxury limousines? Or do we want to maybe spend it on things for the new house or something like that? Then you think it yourself, I KNOW! Let’s have the wedding in the subway. Good idea or bad idea, I don’t know.N: Well, I have to justify for this specific couple. Well, in their case, they didn’t actually have the wedding in the subway. They are just using subway as a transportation choice. So they decided to go from home to the hotel using the subway, but wearing traditional Chinese wedding customs. And they walked into the subway station with their bridesmaid and best-man. And actually it’s very sweet, cuz the bridegroom checked the regulation beforehand to make sure that they didn’t violate any rules. And they set out at 8am Saturday to avoid disturbing traffic peak hours, keeping the ride low key without any special music or arrangements during the trip. So I believe it’s a cute and sweet idea and they didn’t disturb anyone. They kind of spread their joy and they have made their contribution to promoting a green idea of living.R: I want to talk about how Bob wants to spread joy with the cat in the subway as he was referencing... I do believe? I don’t know. But you know, looking at this, I mean I don’t think we can comfortably say nobody was a little annoyed. Someone is gonna have to take the cab, not the cab, the subway. Because the cabs are maybe a little more expensive if you are cab hailing, maybe taking the subway on a Saturday. So in which case, if you’re taking the subway in the morning, for whatever reason, on a Saturday someone is, at 8am, then do you think this would annoy you? I seem to be under the impression anyone waking up at 8am on a Saturday is grouchy. Right, I would be, I would be grouchy and then I see these people having a great time, getting married... And I am single, I’m doing something at 8am in the morning. B: Oh, he’s bitter.R: And I’m like rub it in my face, could you just take your taxi with your tinted windows, So I don’t even have to see it. Bob.B: Just calm down. R: You’re gonna on the side with me Bob?B: No, not in the slightest. So do you think it’s a good idea or not a good idea before I go onto cats?R: Oh, God.N: I think it’s a good idea for them. Because they are not taking a limo. They are taking the subway. And I feel like they are not really disturbing anyone. And also a lot of netizens have responded, saying that renting a limo is not that important and their way of doing this is environmental-friendly. And it’s possibly faster concerning Beijing’s traffic conditions. So I’m agree with them doing it.B: Do you know, I think it depends on which subway line that this was going to happen on. If it’s subway Line1, then I reckon that there’s a lot of grumpy people. R: Yeah, me.B: You, for example. Sitting there, being grumpy and saying go get married somewhere else.R: Bring cats.B: But on some lines, I reckoned, on Line6. This would be fine. Everything is a bit more chilled on Line6.R: I don’t take Line6 often, so I can’t say. But definitely on Line1...B: And we’re talking about Beijing Subway here?R: Yes, definitely on Line1. I would be a little bit grumpy. Niu Honglin?N: Yeah, for me, as long as you are happily married, you will spend your day with your loved ones, friends and relatives. You can do whatever you want as long as you are not bothering anyone, you have my bless.B: But use cats.R: How did cats ever get into this? You got to explain yourself here.B: Cuz everybody loves cats.R: That’s not true. Some people love dogs.B: Or dogs. Okay, I think more people like cats. But if you’re going to do something which is really sort of... When it comes to society like getting in people’s way. Then you just would think, okay I gotta do something to make people feel happy, in which case, take a cat with you. And then, everybody would be happy. No, you didn’t get away with more. I have done it myself.R: See, this is where it starts. This is what I’m worried about guys. And I want your opinions. I starts with weddings. But then it ends up being with Bob with cats on the subway. And who knows how many cats Bob will bring with him on the subway?B: I’m not a crazy cat-man. I’m not gonna bring you like 10 cats or something like that.N: Well, let me bring the subject a little more to human wedding instead of cat wedding. For those of you who really want some creative ideas. You can also take some water ways, you can also take a bike and also a horse might be a nice choice. For those of you who want to have some adventure, you can get married on an airlift. And also you can rent a party bus to transport all your guests, relatives and friends. So whatever you want to do, just be happy and creative.R: Guys, gotta know, quick closing statements, cute or annoying? What do you think Bob?B: I think, annoying on Line1 and probably quite entertaining on Line5.R: Oh my God.N: Cute and happy and full of pink bubbles.B: And cats.R: Or maybe cats. That could definitely just be you, Bob, on this one.

节目组：Music Bang Bang 音乐大爆炸节目名称：Justin Bieber 贾斯汀 · 比伯插曲：《Boyfriend》L:Hi,everyone,welcome to music bang bang, I'm your new friend,Lampson.R:I'm Rita, we are pretty excited here about introducing a young popstar to you.各位听众晚上好，今天我们将介绍一位年轻的歌手，通过接下来的描述，相信你们的心中应该能有答案了。L:As we all know,he is a real idol of many young people.His sunny smiles and bright eyes make lots of fans get crazy about him.他是众多年轻人心目中的偶像，许多粉丝为他着迷。L:He has won lots of prize and has got over ten millions of fans all around the world.Faced with such a high international fame,He just work hard and be calm.“狂热”两个字可能已经不足以形容他在流行乐坛掀起的潮流,年轻的他在名利诱惑面前却能够表现的谨慎和冷静。R：He never give up,but go ahead and do himself better.他不想 做昙花一现的“流星”，而是去做能在乐坛立足的明星。R: So,it's time to announce his name,Lampson!L:Okay, he is Justin Bieber.插曲：《what do you mean》R：Justin Bieber is not a strange name among many young people.His songs spread widely. 提到Justin Bieber，相信很多年轻朋友一定不会觉得陌生，今天我们将对他和他的歌曲做介绍。L： ‘What do you mean' took the crown of the Billboard as soon as it came out, and this is Bieber's first champion single of America. 大家现在听到的这首What do you mean是他的最新作品，该曲在美国Billboard榜 首周空降冠军，成为历史第23首空降冠军单曲。并且，这也是他在美国的首支冠军单曲。R：Justin bieber表示,这首歌曲的创作灵感来自情侣间亲密的沟通，诠释男孩无法了解女孩前一刻热情拥吻下一刻就气愤将对方推开的百变情绪。L：Oh，it's amazing!插曲：《Baby》R:Baby was first recorded in 2010.As the song came out,his sweet and clear voice in this song let more and more people know him as well as fond of him. 2010年，Justin Bieber的首张录音室专辑中的单曲《Baby》得到了很高的好评，许多人开始了解并喜欢上了这个加拿大男孩。L:What deserve to be mentioned is that Ludacris-----a singer known as his excellent RAP， helped Justin Bieber finish this song together.值得一提的是，Justin Bieber和他的制作人邀请了一位优秀的说唱歌手Ludacris来参加这首歌曲的编曲工作。插曲：《Latin Girl》L：Let's talk about his daily life.Although he has been popular for many years,he is still young with a rebel heart…R:Yes,it's no wonder he sometimes make mistakes.When he did something wrong,he could make an apology.L:As you mentioned, during the beginning of this year,he made a video to express how he felt and from that video he let us know more about his inside world.R:I think most people can understand his pressure and forgive him.年轻的Bieber有着比同龄人更大的压力，我们应该去理解和支持他。L:I can't agree more.Next part,let's look back at his Almost Famous.接下来的环节，让我们来一起回顾他的成名之路。插曲：《Mistletoe》L:During his childhood, Bieber was interested in hockey, soccer, and chess; he often kept his musical aspirations to himself. As he grew up, Bieber taught himself to play the piano, drums, guitar, and trumpet.When he was twelve, Bieber sang for a local singing competition in Stratford and placed second. Bieber小时候有着广泛的兴趣和爱好，他试着去自学许多乐器的演奏。在12岁的时候，他在斯特拉特福德当地的歌唱比赛中获得了第二名。R:His mum posted a video of the performance on YouTube for their family and friends to see. She continued to upload videos of Bieber singing covers of various R&B songs, and Bieber&`&s popularity on the site grew. Bieber的妈妈在Youtube网站上传了许多他的表演视频，为Bieber赢得了很高的人气，从此他便开始了歌唱之路。插曲：《what do you mean》L：本期节目到此结束，感谢各位的收听。R：See you next time！节目监制：于慧佳播音：杨雨婷 刘仁邦编辑：杨雨婷 刘仁邦制作：王泽华