Podcasts about Skiffy

I chat with Brandon O'Brien, who is a writer, performance poet, teaching artist, and game designer from Trinidad and Tobago. We read some selective pieces from his poetry collection Can you sign my tentacle? As well as discuss mental health, supporting community, and Big Bad Con. So listen and share. Links: brandonobrien.xyz  @therisingtithes on Twitter & Instagram The Speculate! podcast at speculatesf.com  The Skiffy and Fanty Show at skiffyandfanty.com

We spend a lot of time thinking about how to work with worldbuilding as writers -- but how does a reviewer approach the topic when they're reading works of sci-fi and fantasy? Guest Paul Weimer joins us to share his insights as a prolific consumer and critiquer of speculative fiction! Paul talks about the details that he pays attention to, the things he looks for, and the things that draw his attention, as well as discussing the purpose of reviews and who they're for (hint: it's not the authors!). In this episode, we spin things around to look at how we approach worldbuilding and narrative construction as readers -- since we are, of course, readers as well as writers! We explore of aspects of how a writer can set and, hopefully, meet expectations through worldbuilding -- and where that can sometimes become challenging as a series goes on. What makes a world exciting to enter in the first place? What grips a reader and keeps them with it? And how can you use worldbuilding to make your wizard chase sequence a more cohesive part of your world? Also, here's Natania's rock, as promised: [Transcript TK] Our Guest: Not really a Prince of Amber, but rather, an ex-pat New Yorker living in Minnesota, Paul Weimer has been reading sci-fi and fantasy for over 40 years. An avid and enthusiastic amateur photographer, blogger and podcaster, Paul primarily contributes to the Skiffy and Fanty Show as blogger and podcaster, to Nerds of a Feather as a reviewer and interviewer, to the SFF Audio podcast, and turns up elsewhere as well. If you've spent any time reading about SFF online, you've probably read one of his reviews, comments or tweets (he's @PrinceJvstin).

Notes and Links to Kate  Maruyama's Work        For Episode 216, Pete welcomes Kate Maruyama, and the two discuss, among other topics, her early reading and writing and love of diverse works from that of James Baldwin to Stephen King's work, connections between Catholicism and writing horror, the ways in which teaching and writing commingle, writing allegory and its connection to plot, the ways in which she wrote convincingly of the COVID quarantine, and key themes in her novellas, including race and racism, class, generational traumas and family cycles, and privilege and family culpability.    Kate Maruyama was raised on books and weaned on movies in a small college town in New England. She writes, teaches, cooks, and eats in Los Angeles, where she lives with her family.    Her novel, Harrowgate was published by 47North in 2013 and her novella Family Solstice named Best Fiction Book of 2021 by Rue Morgue Magazine was published by Omnium Gatherum. Her novella Halloween Beyond: a Gentleman's Suit appears in Halloween Beyond: Piercing the Veil is out now from Crystal Lake Publishing and Bleak Houses is available from Raw Dog Screaming Press, released in August 2023. Her short work has appeared in Asimov's Magazine, Analog SF among other journals and in numerous anthologies including Winter Horror Days, Halloween Carnival Three, and December Tales.     Buy Bleak Houses   Kate's Website at CA State LA   A Review from The Skiffy and Fanty Show for Bleak Houses At about 2:15, Kate talks about her reading and writing life as a child, and the town where she grew up   At about 4:00, Kate cites the Oz series and other fantasy/imaginative/horror books that shaped her literary tastes, including “formative” works by Stephen King   At about 6:40, The two discuss the connections between Catholicism and horror writing   At about 8:45, Kate discusses works and authors, especially James Baldwin and Another Country, which have inspired and influenced her   At about 10:00, The two discuss a real-life example from her life/background which made it into Kate's fiction   At about 11:15, Kate traces the ways in which her teaching informs her writing, and vice versa   At about 13:40, Kate gives background on the publishing journey and seeds for Bleak Houses   At about 15:00, Kate responds to Pete's questions about the genre(s) for her work   At about 17:00, Pete lays out the book's exposition and compliments Kate on writing about the early COVID days, asking her how she handled perspective in writing about the time   At about 19:40, Kate provides background on seeds for the book's first novella, especially Wolf's Lair and Beechwood Canyon   At about 20:20, Kate and Pete discuss some of the important characters in “Safer”, and Kate describes how working within Hollywood for years gave her inspiration for Celine     At about 23:00, Celine's son Story and his haunted friends are connected to Mr. Wolf's real-life story   At about 26:15, Kate discusses a chilling scene from the book that Pete compliments for its tension   At about 29:10, The two discuss themes from “Safer,” including power dynamics based on class and race; Kate talks about twisted ways in which those needing a job were often exploited during the early days of quarantine    At about 33:20, Pete compliments the thrilling action scenes written by Kate in “Safer”   At about 34:05, Pete asks about the history of the real-life house that inspired “Family Solstice,” and Kate talks about the importance of the solstice in general, and the seeds for the novella   At about 37:00, Pete sets out some of the novella's exposition and highlights key characters and key character traits    At about 39:00, Kate discusses the mother's passivity and possible reasons for it   At about 40:25, Kate responds to Pete's questions about “sitting in judgment” of her characters    At about 41:30, The two discuss generational traumas and cycles and questions of culpability in connection to Shea and her sister as differing narrators in the novella   At about 42:50, Pete wonders about how Kate balanced plot and allegory   At about 44:50, Kate discusses writing symbolism and politically and    At about 46:20, Kate shares exciting new projects   At about 49:10, Kate shares contact information    You can now subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts, and leave me a five-star review. You can also ask for the podcast by name using Alexa, and find the pod on Stitcher, Spotify, and on Amazon Music. Follow me on IG, where I'm @chillsatwillpodcast, or on Twitter, where I'm @chillsatwillpo1. You can watch this and other episodes on YouTube-watch and subscribe to The Chills at Will Podcast Channel. Please subscribe to both my YouTube Channel and my podcast while you're checking out this episode.    Sign up now for The Chills at Will Podcast Patreon: it can be found at patreon.com/chillsatwillpodcastpeterriehl     Check out the page that describes the benefits of a Patreon membership, including cool swag and bonus episodes. Thanks in advance for supporting my one-man show, my DIY podcast and my extensive reading, research, editing, and promoting to keep this independent podcast pumping out high-quality content!    NEW MERCH! You can browse and buy here: https://www.etsy.com/shop/ChillsatWillPodcast    This is a passion project of mine, a DIY operation, and I'd love for your help in promoting what I'm convinced is a unique and spirited look at an often-ignored art form.    The intro song for The Chills at Will Podcast is “Wind Down” (Instrumental Version), and the other song played on this episode was “Hoops” (Instrumental)” by Matt Weidauer, and both songs are used through ArchesAudio.com.    Please tune in for Episode 217 with Jeffrey Sharlet. He is the New York Times and national bestselling author of THE FAMILY and C STREET. He was an executive producer of the five-part Netflix series The Family (2019), based on two of his books. His newest book is THE UNDERTOW: Scenes from a Slow Civil War.    The episode will air on December 19.  

Shaun Duke and Brandon O'Brien are the hosts of the four time Hugo-finalist Skiffy and Fanty Show, a science fiction and fantasy based podcast that covers major topics in the field and interviews with authors and creators. Mary Anne and Ben invited them on the show to talk podcasting, committing to diversity, and connecting with audiences.  Check out The Skiffy and Fanty Show at skiffyandfanty.com Episode show notes: speclit.org/ep-52-show-notes

A secret military project endangers Neo-Tokyo when it turns a biker gang member into a rampaging psychic psychopath who can only be stopped by a teenager, his gang of biker friends, and a group of psychics. Call us and leave a voicemail at 1 ‪(305) 563-6334‬ Music provided by: ⁠Atlas Sound Arts⁠ This is SciFi Voice: ⁠Dear Nikky⁠ Mentions: Steve Horizon_Brave GhostWorld, The Podcast That Wouldn't Die!, Grand Moff Duke, PhD Esq., Skiffy and Fanty,

Officer Kate Benson is rescued from a monster by the mysterious Nick O'Malley, who asks her to join his Special Unit 2, a top-secret section of the Chicago P.D. tasked to control, detain, or exterminate mythological creatures, aka 'Links.' Call us and leave a voicemail at 1 ‪(305) 563-6334‬ Music provided by: Atlas Sound Arts This is SciFi Voice: Dear Nikky Mentions: SYFY, Skiffy and Fanty, Cinema Recall, Dear Nikky, The Cult of Erin, Gorillie, Vader, bridge, Mary Ads: Online Warriors Podcast, The Manic Pixie Weirdo Podcast Sci-Fi fan or creator? Follow the hashtag #ThisisSciFi for more sci-fi goodness! #ScienceFiction And join our Discord Server! #WeNeedRobertToWatchBabylon5 Part of the Blind Knowledge Network #BlindKnowledge An Anchor FM podcast Part of the LetsChatLive Network Find us on GoodPods --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/scifiremnant/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/scifiremnant/support

Worries, needs, and the future, oh my! Shaun Duke, Brandon O'Brien, and Paul Weimer get honest about the state of the show in 2022. How are we feeling about where we're at and where we'd like to go? What do we still hope to do? What barriers are keeping us from our dreams? And what […]

Warning: almost no Wolfe content at all. James and Craig just sit around in the same room (for the first time ever) and talk about going to a relatively uneventful con. Never say we don't provide novel, exciting content. But we do throw around some ideas for a Wolfe-con near the end. And we mention books we bought and/or learned about: Damon Knight, Three Novels Humphrey Carter, Tolkien: A Biography Tolkien, Unfinished Tales Greg Ketter (ed.), Shelf Life: Fantastic Stories Celebrating Bookstores [includes Wolfe's "From the Cradle"] Tom Disch, Neighboring Lives and The Priest C.S.E. Cooney, Desdemona and the Deep Swanwick, Cigar-Box Faust and Other Miniatures Theodora Goss, Snow White Learns Witchcraft Christopher John Farley, Kingston by Starlight Leigh Brackett, The Long Tomorrow K.B. Wagers, Out Past the Stars William Horwood, Duncan Woods Nicole Korner-Stace, Firebreak Barry Hughart, Bridge of Birds and a new (to us) podcast: The Skiffy and Fanty Show  - This episode is sponsored by... no one, but I guess Capricon? - You can become a patron and hear additional episodes at https://www.patreon.com/rereadingwolfe - You can get episodes on your podcast app or on our Youtube channel. Note: Youtube subscribers in some locales might not be able to access all the episodes. However, you can get every episodes at the website and on your favorite podcast app.  If you have problems accessing the podcast on your favorite platform, let us know. - Questions, comments, corrections, additions, alternate theories? Connect with us on on Facebook ...or on Twitter @rereadingwolfe ...or on Instagram: rereadingwolfepodcast ...or on Reddit: rereadingwolfepodcast  * Intro from The Alligator, Annihilation soundtrack by Ben Salisbury and Geoff Barrow * Break Music from Symphony #2 - I by Arvo Pärt, performed by NFM Wroclaw Philharmonic * Outro from "At the Con" by Nerf Herder * Logo art by SonOfWitz  Outros and alternate outros are cued on the Rereading Wolfe Podcast Spotify playlist IF the songs are available on Spotify.

It's been a while, hasn't it? We're back on track after a little hiatus. This week we sit down with hunting buddies and fellow boat owners, Matt Hemenway and Beau Boucher. On the docket - deer hunting, meat processing, boat talk, and...flying prairie dogs? Join us on this week's Public of Texas Podcast!

Renu and Soup sample the Spring 2021 season. OP ED Soup Souls Prepare to Friend Edition Soup on the Skiffy and Fanty Show Righteous Kicks VTuber/Illustrator Shigure Ui's Anime Cameo Pekora Easter Egg Yakuza will remain a turn based RPG Find out more at http://absoluteterritorycast.com

Hopeful visions, genre nerdery, and diversity, oh my! Let the shenanigans ensue! Shaun Duke, Jen Zink, and GoH Brandon O'Brien join forces for a live recording of the 3x Hugo Finalist podcast, The Skiffy and Fanty Show! Together, they'll discuss the power of science fiction to explore the present and uncover hope, from its technological […]

Evan joined us to watch stuff related to Legend and D&D, since he played a lot of D&D around the time he also watched Legend as a teen. First we watched Lily's Song, which is one of the Jerry Goldsmith songs that didn't end up in the US release of Legend, but which IS in the European release. Next we watched the preview for Mazes and Monsters, a movie Julia had to watch and discuss in depth on The Skiffy and Fanty Show a few years back. That preview is kind of goofy, but the movie is pretty depressing. Annnnd, we dove deeper into depressing territory with our next thing, a 60 Minutes segment about kids killing themselves and others allegedly because of D&D. We don't really recommend watching this one, because it's a big downer. Also, content warning for this section. We don't go into depth on suicide, but we do talk a little about viral challenges that have hurt and/or killed people in more recent years, like the cinnamon challenge and eyeball shots. After all that we needed a palate cleanser, so we watched this Carnival Cruise line commercial.This commercial showed up because Geoffrey was searching for Tom Cruise Commercial 1985, thinking he would get something to do with Tom Cruise. LOL nope.This led Julia to talk about the experience of trying to become a travel agent in the beginning of 2020, the worst possible time. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thisiswhywerelikethis.substack.com/subscribe

Evan joined us to watch stuff related to Legend and D&D, since he played a lot of D&D around the time he also watched Legend as a teen. First we watched Lily’s Song, which is one of the Jerry Goldsmith songs that didn’t end up in the US release of Legend, but which IS in the European release. Next we watched the preview for Mazes and Monsters, a movie Julia had to watch and discuss in depth on The Skiffy and Fanty Show a few years back. That preview is kind of goofy, but the movie is pretty depressing. Annnnd, we dove deeper into depressing territory with our next thing, a 60 Minutes segment about kids killing themselves and others allegedly because of D&D. We don’t really recommend watching this one, because it’s a big downer. Also, content warning for this section. We don’t go into depth on suicide, but we do talk a little about viral challenges that have hurt and/or killed people in more recent years, like the cinnamon challenge and eyeball shots. After all that we needed a palate cleanser, so we watched this Carnival Cruise line commercial.This commercial showed up because Geoffrey was searching for Tom Cruise Commercial 1985, thinking he would get something to do with Tom Cruise. LOL nope.This led Julia to talk about the experience of trying to become a travel agent in the beginning of 2020, the worst possible time. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at thisiswhywerelikethis.substack.com/subscribe

Introducing ARC Nemesis, a show that aims to review my massive backlog of Advanced Reader Copies so that publishers give me even more of them. I’m Jen, a 3 time Hugo Finalist Podcaster at The Skiffy and Fanty Show, freelance podcast editor, and keeper of over 300 ARCs, and growing. Each week, I’ll pick a new old book to review, with a focus on books by BIPOC writers, and, at least once per month, I’ll choose a recent or upcoming ARC to add to your order list. ARC Nemesis, because you can never have too many books. Get bonus content on Patreon See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Back the Mermaids Monthly Kickstarter!   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! Send us your questions, comments, and concerns! We hope you enjoy We Make Books! Twitter: @WMBCast  |  @KindofKaelyn  |  @BittyBittyZap Instagram: @WMBCast  Patreon.com/WMBCast   Julia's Links: Their Website: juliarios.com @omgjulia @mermaidsmonthly Back the Mermaids Monthly Kickstarter!   Episode Transcript (created by Rekka, blame her for any errors) Rekka (00:00:00):Welcome back to another episode of We Make Books, a podcast about writing, publishing, and everything in between. I'm Rekka. I write science fiction and fantasy as RJ Theodore. Kaelyn (00:00:09):I'm Kaelyn Considine. I am the acquisitions editor for Parvus Press. Rekka (00:00:13):And this episode is a little light on the Kaelyn this week. Kaelyn (00:00:18):Yeah. we had this this great interview set up with Julia Rios and I missed it because I I ended up in the hospital the day before we were supposed to record the interview and that's Um interviews are a lot of fun, but unfortunately it's different than when it's just Rekka and I recording and she can say, okay, well just do this when you get home. So I I felt bad, I had to, didn't give Rekka that much notice she had to fly solo on this one. Rekka (00:00:47):Yeah, it worked out okay. Julia is a great person. Julia Rios is a queer Latinx writer, editor, podcaster, and narrator whose fiction, non-fiction, and poetry have appeared in Latin American Literature Today, Lightspeed and Goblin Fruit, among other places. Their editing work has won multiple awards, including the Hugo award. Julia is a co-host of This Is Why We're Like This, a podcast about the movies we watch in childhood that shape our lives, for better or for worse. They're also one of several co-hosts for the Skiffy and Fanty Show, a general SF discussion podcast, and they've narrated the stories for Escape Pod, PodCastle, Pseudopod, and Cast of Wonders. And it was the editing work that had us reach out to Julia this time specifically editing anthologies, which Kaelyn brought to me as a concept for an episode. And I was like, "Hey, we can bring someone else on. Cause you said you wanted to do more interviews." Kaelyn (00:01:38):Yeah. And we got this one lined up and then I missed it. Yeah. Rekka (00:01:43):Well at least I had someone to talk to. It could have been a rambly, messy, nothing, if it'd just been me. Kaelyn (00:01:50):Yeah. So anthologies are you know, something that I think a lot of writers see constantly, especially if you're active in social media, there's something that you're just constantly coming across, but they're a different kind of intimidating than a regular novel or short story submission. It's a different process. So I thought doing an episodeum it's actually gonna be two episodes now—on anthologies would be a nice topic to cover. So it was, you know, I, I wasn't on this episode, but I will say it was great that someone could come on and talk to us about this that actually has experience doing this. Rekka (00:02:31):And then I threw Kaelyn the rough cut so she could listen while she was in the hospital to see if she wanted to have another conversation, if I covered everything or—and obviously I failed because we're going to talk about it one more time. Kaelyn (00:02:42):Oh no, no, we're gonna, we're gonna talk about some different some different stuff. I can't, I can't let you have all of the fun with the anthropologies without me, Rekka (00:02:50):Julia. The reason that I reached out to them this time was because, well, I've always wanted to have them on the podcast—cause you know, in your mind, when you have a podcast, there's always a list of people you want to talk to. So this one got me the chance to shoot Julia up to the head of the line because Julia is currently, right this very minute, get excited, running a Kickstarter to support basically a year long anthology. And the anthology is themed entirely around mermaids. And you'll get to hear Julia's explanation of why that happened that way in the episode. So I won't go too far into it. Kaelyn (00:03:27):As if you need an explanation for mermaids. Rekka (00:03:30):Julia provides an excuse to write your mermaid story, the mermaid story of your heart, and then send it to them. So of course, first they need their Kickstarter campaign to be successful. So make sure that while you're listening to this episode, you also go to MermaidsMonthly.com and that will lead you to the Kickstarter page. So you can back that act fast, because. Yeah. Kaelyn (00:03:53):Yeah. I was going to say, when does the Kickstarter end? Rekka (00:03:56):The Kickstarter ends on December 12th. So act fast. You have the rest of the week, if you're listening to this on, you know, the week it comes out. And if you are catching up after the fact, cross your fingers and go check that URL and we'll see, we'll see what happens. Kaelyn (00:04:14):This is actually an excellent reminder for me, because I haven't gone to the Kickstarter yet. So— Rekka (00:04:18):[GASP]. Kaelyn (00:04:18):I know. Rekka (00:04:19):Go to the Kickstarter, Kaelyn! Kaelyn (00:04:22):I was in the hospital! Rekka (00:04:22):What! That's no excuse. You had plenty of free time just sitting in that room by yourself. Kaelyn (00:04:25):Yeah, but, like, you know what hospital wi-fi is like. Rekka (00:04:28):Yeah, I do. Okay. Sorry. So so yes, everyone, including Kaelyn immediately, while you listen to the music. Kaelyn (00:04:35):I'm actually going to just drop off this intro right now, so I can go over there and check out the kickstarter. Rekka (00:04:40):Good. All right. So while we listen to the music, go to MermaidsMonthly.com support this anthology because as you're about to hear it is extremely cool and extremely well-conceived. And it is in the hands of an excellent editor who has put together a team of people that they know can, you know, pull all this off and do it in a really, really cool way. So here comes the music. Here comes Julia Rios, and you are already at Kickstarter. I know it, so good for you back that shit and let's let's see this happen. Rekka (00:05:28):Okay, I am here today with Julia Rios, who is a personal acquaintance of mine. I would go so far as to say friend, and it's good to have you on the podcast, finally. I was searching for an excuse honestly, to invite you on. And then Kaelyn came up with this idea of, "Hey, let's talk about anthologies because they are a beast of their own when it comes to pretty much every aspect of them." So I said, "Hey, speaking of themed collections of writing, you know, I know somebody who might want to talk about that right now." So why don't I have you introduce yourself? You know, we gave your, your formal bio in the intro, but you know, what's, what's on your mind these days and and where is it taking you? Julia Rios (00:06:18):Right. Well, I think so talking about the theme of anthologies, I am a writer, editor, podcaster, and narrator. So I've done lots of different things in different ways. And I have edited anthologies in the past. I edited, Kaleidoscope: Diverse YA Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories. And then I did anthology editing for three different years, best YA volumes. So those were reprint anthologies, which is also yet another different beast than themed anthologies that are original stories. And now I am working on a project called Mermaids Monthly, which is technically a magazine, but it's more of an anthology project in that it's only running for one year and probably there's gonna be a book at the end of it, collecting all the contents. It's very themed. It's not a general call. So it's, it's even more highly themed than for instance, Kaleidoscope Diverse YA. Julia Rios (00:07:11):Cause that was basically any science fiction and fantasy. That was YA as long as the protagonist came from a background that wasn't the default straight, Cis, white, et cetera. I also did edit, I was a guest editor for the Cast of Wonders, which is a podcast, why a magazine sort of thing. But every year they do a banned books week episode, or series of episodes. So it's for the full week. And that's basically an anthology editing gig as well, where you're editing, you're selecting stories based on the theme that are, in the case of the one that I edited, it was censorship turns out the lights, like let's, let's turn the lights on and see what happens. And so it was very much like, "okay, tell me for banned books weeks, what stories you have that are science fiction and fantasy that have to do with censorship and with like subverting censorship." So that's, that's the kind of different areas of, of podcast and magazine and book anthology editing that I have done or that I am currently doing. All of them were different formats because when you're doing it for a book it's different than when you're doing it for audio and it's different than when you're doing it for something that's going to be serialized. Rekka (00:08:35):Right. Right. And the difference between just the, like the nuance between those three different that you listed is even more than I was thinking about, you know, because— as soon as I invited you on it, it was like, you were going to talk about mermaids. This is gonna be so cool. And and I'm thinking about like the specificity of a magazine about mermaids and you're right. Like an anthology that has a theme can still be a very broad theme where that's open to a lot of interpretation. And I would imagine that you'd even invite people to open "mermaids" to a lot of interpretation, but it's like if I was going to, and I, and I don't mean this to like downplay the mermaid theme because there's, there's a lot of cultural and historical, you know, genre kind of stuff going on with mermaids. But like if I had an anthology, where I was like, "every story has to have an apple pie in it," you know, like that could be really, really broad if, as long as there's an apple pie in it, it can be about anything you want, you know? But would you say that, and we'll get more into the Mermaids Monthly specifically later, but like, are you, are you looking for like, no, I want to center the mermaid or you, you think you want, like, "I don't know. What does mermaid make you want to write?" Julia Rios (00:09:58):Yeah. Okay. So this is something that we've talked about a lot. So I'm working on mermaids monthly with Meg Frank, who is an artist and also has a background in marketing. Rekka (00:10:06):And may or may not be a mermaid themselves. Julia Rios (00:10:09):Yeah. They may be a mermaid, it's entirely possible. So we've, we've kind of conceived this as what I originally, my first idea, this, the whole reason Mermaids Monthly exists is because I've been editing professionally for, I think eight years now, seven years now, some long time anyway. And many times when I'm on panels at conventions, or if I'm teaching a class, people will ask me, "Do editors really have to reject stories they actually like? Does that ever actually happen?" Because I think people tell writers like, "don't feel bad. It doesn't mean your story isn't good." And then writers are like, "well then why would you possibly reject a story that is good?" Rekka (00:10:49):Right. Julia Rios (00:10:50):And it does happen. It happens so often. And it's, it's heartbreaking because as an editor, you don't want to have to reject stories that are good. And also like, as an editor, I know. I'm also a writer. I know how awful it is to be rejected. I don't want to have to tell people like, "Hey, I know you spent a huge amount of time and poured your soul into writing this thing, but guess what? I'm not gonna take it." Rekka (00:11:13):Yeah. Julia Rios (00:11:14):But that's part of the job. So it's an unfortunate side effect of the cool things that you get to do. But one of the reasons why stories that are good can get rejected, and it's not the only reason, is that if you're editing something for a non-themed thing, if you're like a general magazine or a general arm of a publishing company that is not specifically highly themed, you can take one item that is similar. So you could take like one mermaid story and that's fine. You can maybe take two and get away with it. The second you take three of those things, you run the risk of becoming "that mermaid magazine." Rekka (00:11:56):Right. Julia Rios (00:11:58):Or like "that imprint that only publishes mermaid books." Rekka (00:12:02):Hey, you know, some people want that, but it does. There are reasons why publishers don't want to do that. Julia Rios (00:12:08):Like there are some places where that's that's appropriate. This is fine. I would always like end this with, "this is fine if you're Mermaids Monthly, but it's not so great if you're Strange Horizons," which has no stated theme except for science fiction and fantasy. Rekka (00:12:23):Right. Julia Rios (00:12:23):And it's like, "I'm not Mermaids Monthly. So I can't take more than a couple mermaid stories." Rekka (00:12:29):Unless... Julia Rios (00:12:29):"Unless, what if I am Mermaids Monthly and I can, and all I do is mermaids for awhile?" So I originally thought I was just going to do some, you know, take, take stories for a while and do one year of mermaids. And then when I brought it up with Meg, we started talking and, and what grew out of this was something bigger and more visual than I was originally expecting because Meg's background is in art and that there is so much cool mermaid art. So we're going to have comics, we're going to have illustrations, we're going to have all kinds of little visual cues that are mermaid involved as well. And that's different from most of the other end biologies that I've done, because most of the other ones that I've done, haven't had illustrations. They have like cover art and that's it. Rekka (00:13:16):Yeah, yeah. Even, even some of the magazines that go further with artwork still have like a full bleed illustration that either separate sections or just, you know, is for the titles that they think are going to be the most impactful. Julia Rios (00:13:35):Yeah. Yeah. And I think that this is going to be much more integrated. We have one bonus issue that's already come out. And so you can kind of get a sense of it because it has one comic and it has a few poems and Meg has done some sort of interstitial art bits. So you can see that it sort of does incorporate that visual art element all throughout, which is great because mermaids is such a visual theme and like under sea life. So that's very cool, and that's one of the things that I've been thinking about, like how, how different this will be is that it really does then affect everything. When we made our submissions guidelines, I realized like we were going to have separate art and prose guidelines. And we realized that we couldn't do that because, because it was also intertwined, we just needed everybody to send us stuff at the same time so that we could consider all of it together. Rekka (00:14:24):And so that's one thing, you know, stepping back from the specific anthology or, you know, anthology year of magazine— it needs its own name because you're doing so many really cool things with it that like, it, it doesn't, it's not fair to call it either magazine or anthology. Julia Rios (00:14:43):I do think it's fair to call it anthology. When you think about the idea of a TV series can be an anthology. You can have a collection of, for instance, like Amazing Stories or the Twilight Zone is considered an anthology. Rekka (00:14:56):Right. Julia Rios (00:14:57):All it means is that you're collecting things of a similar type that aren't necessarily individually related to each other, but are related to a larger theme. Rekka (00:15:05):Right. So when you are the editor for an anthology, you're not always going to be completely autonomous with regard to the project itself. So I'm wondering how, as you see the submissions come in and you may also not get to be the art director on the artwork for them. So this is, this is very different from what you're working on, which is so exciting. (I'm, I'm going to say that like, over and over and over during this episode.) But you do have control, usually, over the stories that you accept. So what kinda goes through your mind as you create a call for an anthology, and then, you know, the world being what it is, you might get stories that have nothing to do with what you were anticipating getting. How do you like assemble these? Like what goes through your mind as you assemble these things into a single work, that's going to have your name on it? Julia Rios (00:16:13):That's a really great question. And I think that one of the things that has been true for me is that when I'm doing something for a theme and I'm thinking about it something that might happen is I get something that I love that is a surprise to me that I wouldn't have thought of myself, and that can become sort of a pillar and, together with a few other things, they can kind of hold together the theme and be sort of like different poles—if you imagine the whole theme is like a tent and they have different poles at different points. And then the overall thing kind of like folds over everything and drapes there. And I think that what I usually find when I'm coming to coming up with an anthology type thing, is that I know I have a set length that I'm ultimately aiming at. So I know that there has to be a balance within that length and that if I get a few things that are different from each other, or a few things that are very similar to each other that are going to be the tent poles that hold it up, then I can kind of build around that to create the balance based on those things. Rekka (00:17:24):Okay. Okay. That's interesting. So when you say you're limited to a length, we're talking about like the total word count because the authors are being paid per word, and there's a budget for what the content is going to cost. Julia Rios (00:17:37):Yeah. And it's not just because of that. It can be because of a budget, but it can also be because that's the length, the physical length of a physical book, that you want to in someone's hands. Cause like if you buy 200,000 words, it's going to be a much thicker, heavier book. Rekka (00:17:56):Yeah. Julia Rios (00:17:57):Than if you buy 100,000 words. Rekka (00:17:59):Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, at 100,000 words, you're wondering how you're going to fit everything on the spine. At 200,000 words, you're like, "should I throw some illustrations on the spine? This thing is enormous. What do I do with all this space? Maybe I'll put a recipe here. I don't know." yeah. So when, so when you, aren't the conceptual, you know, creator of the anthology, like if someone says, I want to have an anthology based on this topic, but I want to find an editor that is going to do it justice, and I decide that's not me. How do you work with the person who brings you the anthology? Julia Rios (00:18:39):That's interesting. So I think that anytime I've been hired by someone else to do an anthology, either I've worked with them... So in the case of Kaleidoscope, my co-editor was the publisher, Alisa Krasnostein. Alisa Krasnostein is an Australian publisher of a small press called 12th Planet Press. And basically she heard me on a recording of a panel that I had been on at WisCon about dystopian YA and like how heteronormative it is. And she was like, "would you like to work with me? And we could do an anthology of like dystopian YA." And that was her original pitch. And I was like, "I would love to work with you. This sounds fun. I think we should make it not limited to queer or dystopian." And so like, then we ended up with this idea of like diverse YA science fiction and fantasy. So it was a very broad thing, which meant that... I realized at that point that if we were going to do a very, very narrow theme, that it would end up feeling, to me, like a lot of the same story over and over again, queer YA dystopian is a very narrow theme. And I like to kind of play around a little bit more. So we talked to each other until we kind of came up with something that worked for both of us. And she got really excited about, you know, including other kinds of diversity as well, and including other kinds of stories. And we came up with an anthology that was a really lovely anthology with a lot of great stories and that were all very different and that was okay, because they could be very different and still fit with the broader theme. Julia Rios (00:20:14):So that's one example of what happened was, basically I talked with the person and was co-editing, but in another instance, like for instance when I did the banned books week for Cast Of Wonders, they, they know that they want to do a banned books week showcase every year, and they usually get someone to guest edit it. So they asked me if I would like to be that editor. And they told me what they generally wanted, which was, it has to fit with this "censorship turns out the lights leaves us in the dark let's turn on the lights." And then they said, "basically, you know, here's the budget that you have, you make it work." And so I'm like, you know, they were like, "we want at least X amount of episodes. So it has to be a mixture of like short stories and flash and whatever, but like here, here, you can have this submissions pile and you can do what you want with it." Julia Rios (00:21:09):And I did have access to their first reader team and I did actually talk to their first readers. So if their first readers really loved something, I would take that into account. And I think that's generally my experience, anytime I'm editing with a team, I will definitely talk to other members of the team, and if something hasn't grabbed me on first read, but it's really grabbed some other people, I'll then take more time to consider it cause, obviously things work differently for different people, and just because something hasn't grabbed me right off the bat, it doesn't mean that it's not a beautiful story that I will ultimately love to publish. Rekka (00:21:45):Right. Right. Yeah. And you can get to know the story as you work with the author and, you know, appreciate more about it. Julia Rios (00:21:52):Yeah. And just having the chance to ask the other readers, like, "why did this resonate with you?" can kind of also open up different aspects of it. Rekka (00:22:00):Right. Because as you're reading through a slush pile, I imagine there's a pressure to just respond to every one of them as quickly as possible, you know, to be fair that there's the, "I know what I'm looking for this, isn't it" kind of, you know, and then maybe you get through the entire pile and you realize what you thought you wanted wasn't in there, but now you have this sense that there was something else in there that you, you know, that was forming that you didn't realize until you get to the end of it or something. How is that slush pile experience with you as like the lead editor? I mean, I know you said you worked with the first readers, but what does that actually look like? Cause I'm not sure that everybody really understands how that process works. Julia Rios (00:22:45):Okay. So usually in places where there are where there's a team of first readers, basically all the slush comes in and sometimes, depending on the place the main editor won't read any of the slush that hasn't been filtered. Sometimes everybody is kind of like picking stuff out of the pile and reading it and then setting aside the ones that they like to show people later. Usually there's like a first pass that happens when I do these things where it's like, yeah, that first pass is reading things and setting the things that look good aside and setting the things that I automatically know, like maybe they aren't for the theme or maybe it just didn't grab me. It wasn't something that I felt was ready. It, whatever, whatever reason, maybe it's actually a graciously offensive, that happens sometimes. Those things will get like set aside to be rejected right away. Julia Rios (00:23:41):And then you'll go and do more passes, then with each pass. You're kind of your goal is to cut it down further because ultimately, you know, you're going to want a very small percentage of that stack. And then finally, after that, so if the first readers have been doing it, they'll be passing things up and I'll be reading them after they pass them up. Maybe I won't read them until we get to a second round. So anybody who has been pulled out by a first reader might get a second round notice that says like, "Hey your story made it past the first round, but you've gotta wait longer, sorry." Rekka (00:24:15):Good news, bad news. Julia Rios (00:24:17):Yeah. And sometimes those stories are stories that I read and set aside. So I'm sending the story and being like, like basically if you get that notice somebody loved your story. They loved your story enough that they were like, "this is worth looking at more carefully and seeing if it fits the overall balance." Rekka (00:24:33):Yeah. Julia Rios (00:24:33):And then, like I said, usually what happens for me is I'll find one or two things that I'm like, "I know for sure this thing is definitely in." So then it's like, "how do the other things match against it?" And I think with that one in specific, like I had asked a couple of people to submit things and knew that those would be in the pile, but also didn't know which ones they were, because the way Cast of Wonders does reading, they make it so that you can't see who the author is when you're first reading it. Rekka (00:25:08):Right. Julia Rios (00:25:08):So Anonymous, Anonymous Submissions from the point of view of the reading team. Rekka (00:25:14):Right. Julia Rios (00:25:14):And that was really interesting to me because I knew like one of the stories that I had asked a specific author that I really like, I was like, "could you please submit something? Cause I know you'll write something good for this." And I knew it was their story, even though I didn't know what they were going to send. And I didn't know whose name was on the thing I, reading it, I was like, "this is this author. And I already know I want it." Rekka (00:25:37):Yeah. That's very cool. So on that note, a lot of anthologies will solicit work. Especially for instance, if this anthology, you know, this hypothetical anthology is being funded through Kickstarter there's a tendency to say, "and we will have these names that you already know" so that people back it because they're, you know, familiar or a fan of with or of the author names that they recognize. So when, when do you get to say like tap someone that "you know, you love their work and say, I want you to write me something." And when do you only get to say, "could you submit something please? So I can consider it?" Or is that a personal decision? Like, "I don't know for sure that this is up your alley, but I want to invite you to participate because I believe you would do well" versus like, "no, I guarantee you you're in it if you write me a story" and is that guaranteed? Julia Rios (00:26:34):So that depends a lot on the context. And for me, if I'm doing an anthology and I ask someone to please submit something, usually usually I'm asking them, knowing that I would accept what they would write. So in the case of Mermaids Monthly, for instance, for the Kickstarter, we have a list of contributors and those are all people that I've worked with before, or have high confidence in the stuff that I've read of theirs. And we know that they are willing to do something. We ask them ahead of time, "Would you be willing to write something?" We believe they will turn the thing in. If they turn something in, we will absolutely plan to take it. The only way we wouldn't is if somehow, like they didn't have time, some life emergency came up, or I don't know, somehow it turned out that someone I'd asked had secretly been a horrible racist and wrote— like in that case, yeah. I'm not going to accept it, but I'm only going to ask people that I would never imagine would do that. Rekka (00:27:37):Right. Of course. Julia Rios (00:27:39):We had, I think, 30 names in our contributors before we— Rekka (00:27:43):Yeah that was the last count I saw. Julia Rios (00:27:47):Yeah. And the reason why was because we know all of the formats that we're doing involve a lot of like smaller things. So we were able to do that many names and still know that we'll be able to take like as many people again from the slush. Julia Rios (00:28:00):Yeah. Yeah, I had to remind myself like, "Oh yeah, this is running all year 30 names doesn't mean it's already full." Julia Rios (00:28:06):Well, it's also like, "are those 30 people all turning in a long story?" No, some of them are doing illustrations. Some of them are doing like flash pieces that we specifically asked for or poems that we specifically asked for. So it depends. And, and what you're asking people to do will depend as well. But for that, I definitely can make that call. For the Cast of Wonders one, I couldn't just solicit something and say, for sure, "I know I want you to write this and I will absolutely take it," because I knew that the process for choosing those was going to be the process that they already had in place. Rekka (00:28:42):Right. Julia Rios (00:28:42):Which is you get Anonymous Submissions, you read those, and then the team kind of makes a decision. Rekka (00:28:49):And in your case, you were lucky that this person was recognizable. Julia Rios (00:28:52):I told that person, like, "I'd really love you to submit something. Cause I know you write, well, I can't guarantee anything." And I will tell— I'll be very transparent with people ahead of time about whether or not I can guarantee or not guarantee something. But for all the people that have already asked for Mermaids Monthly, I specifically like said, "I would like you to do X thing. Would you do X thing? If you do it, I will put it in this magazine as long as it funds." Julia Rios (00:29:17):Yeah. And do you ask them to shoot then for a word count goal? Julia Rios (00:29:22):Yeah. I do. So I've— some of the people I've asked for specific word counts of stories. Whether it's a flash piece or it's a short story, some people I've said like, "you can go right up to the limit," some people I've said, "Hey, I'm looking for something that's like two to three thousand words." I've asked some people for poetry, I've asked some people for illustrations and comics. It just kind of depends. And with the illustrations and things like that, it's like, there's a difference between whether we've asked someone to do an interior spot illustration or a cover, which the covers are going to be way more expensive. Rekka (00:29:59):Right. The covers are more expensive. They take up an entire page and you've got to account for that when you're planning your books and your layout, the spot illustrations might be resizable depending on how the the resolution and how they flow with the words around them, that kind of thing. That's and that's so neat. I love the, the mix of art that you're going to have in this. I'm excited to see how that turns out. So when you are then considering story lengths, do you get excited looking through the slush pile when you find like lots of flash, does that make you go, "Ooh, I can buy lots of stories." Julia Rios (00:30:35):Yeah. Rekka (00:30:35):Or is it really a matter of how the, the themes fit in? Julia Rios (00:30:39):I love flash. I think flash is harder to do than a lot of people realize. I love it when it works. Well, I think that flash stories are such a great little break. Like it's a little hit. So if you only have a five minute break to do something and you want to just read a story during those five minutes, flash is such a great little thing to do, and a good flash story can leave you laughing, or it can give you an emotional gut punch, or you can just come out of it being like, "Whoa, I had this thought that I never had before" and you never know what you're going to get. So I really do love it when it works well. I also do think it's really hard to pull off. So I love it when people submit it and, like every other story it's still a hard sell, but statistically, because we can buy more of them, because they will fit more in the space that we have and with the budget we have, you're more likely to get an acceptance with flash. Rekka (00:31:38):Right. It does seem like, okay, everybody, that's your hint, that's your little trick. Cause otherwise of course, everyone's going to say, "how do I get my story accepted?" And we're still talking generally here. I haven't even gotten to the mermaid stuff, but like generally, what would be your advice for someone who says like, "I want to write short fiction and I want to sell it to markets or sell it to anthologies." because especially with anthologies, generally, there's kind of a small window of the submissions. So unless someone's got something in their back pocket that's perfect for that anthology that they've been workshopping and they've been editing and they've been revising and had beta readers and, and they've, you know, been staring at for 10 years or something. There... What you're going to see is generally like maybe a second or third draft, if you're lucky. Right? So what do you what would you say to somebody who's looking at anthologies, looking at the short window from finding out what it's even about to having to submit their story? How did, how do you approach that as a writer or how would you tell a writer to approach? Julia Rios (00:32:45):Well, I mean, I've approached it as a writer myself. Because I, so I also have we didn't talk about this at all, but I've also written stories that have been in anthologies. So I've done a couple of stories that have been in A Larger Reality I and II, which were Mexican and Mexican American anthology of writers that were collecting stories—I think there was one comic in the first one and the second one was all very tiny flash pieces that were up to 300 words—and then also like art. That one was mostly online. The first one was actually a physical book and also an ebook. And these were made by Libia Brenda, who is the person, I think now she's doing some editing for Constelación Magazine. I met her through the Mexicanx initiative, which brought 50 Mexicanx creators to World Con in 2018. Julia Rios (00:33:39):And she then later became the first Mexican woman to be nominated for a Hugo award, which is awesome. And that was because of her involvement with A Larger Reality. But for that, like she basically reached out to all of us, all 50 of us and said, "does anyone want to make an anthology that we can hand out to people at WorldCon so that we can show them what Mexican writers do?" And she was sort of expecting people to not really be that excited about it because it was going to be free, but she was like, "I will just make it, it'll be fine." And all of us were like, "yes, this sounds like a great idea. Let's do it." So we ultimately did and we made a Kickstarter for it. Even though like we'd given her all the, all the stuff, but we did a Kickstarter just to raise the funds to cover the printing costs. And then also overfunded enough that we could pay all the authors, which was great. Rekka (00:34:28):Oh, that's very cool. Julia Rios (00:34:30):But for that one, it was basically like I had a period of a couple of months." And she said, "you know, if you have something already, it doesn't have to be a new thing, it can be a reprint". But most of us ended up writing new stories and I wrote a new story for that one. And that one, it was like, okay, I know I have a couple of months and I know this is going to go to like anybody who attends WorldCon and the goal of it is to try to show what kinds of stories Mexican creators make." Rekka (00:34:54):Right. Julia Rios (00:34:55):So I was like, "I want this to show something that has to do with my feeling as a Mexican person." Rekka (00:35:02):In 300 words or less! Julia Rios (00:35:04):Well the first one was not, it was not limited to that. Julia Rios (00:35:08):Oh okay. All right. I was thinking, "wow!" Julia Rios (00:35:09):I think the first one had like a 5,000 word sort of guideline limit. And I think mine was like two to three thousand. I can't remember exactly how long. Rekka (00:35:18):I was going to say, to introduce yourself to the WorldCon audience, and you have 300 words. Do your, do your whole culture proud. Julia Rios (00:35:27):So yeah, so that one I really wanted to, I didn't have to, like, no one told me I had to, but I wanted to do something that kind of touched on my identity as a Mexican person and also as a queer person, because those are two parts of me and I feel like the, the ways they intersect are important. And I wanted to show that like, no one is one thing, no one is all one thing. And so I ended up writing this story that had to do with a woman who is kind of jumping from dimension to dimension and trying to fix a relationship problem basically. But she's running into the same people and she's seeing how she's connected to them in different dimensions. And one of the things that comes through in that is that basically all of these people are, they're different instances of themselves, but there's something intrinsic to them that makes them them and these aspects of their identity are still really strong. And for me, like that was, that was something I thought about. And I was like, "I think I'm thinking about this because I'm thinking about how this anthology reflects specifically my identity." And even though this, this person is not me, and this is not actually an autobiographical thing, that was the kind of theme I was thinking about. So that was really cool in a way to do that. Julia Rios (00:36:43):But one of the things that I would say to anyone who's doing anything for an anthology call is find that thing that you, that you resonate with, that speaks to you, that you want to write about. Don't just do it because you know that like so-and-so wants vampires. Like it's not enough for it to be vampires. The thing that's going to make it stand out is that it has something that you care about. Julia Rios (00:37:11):And so I think the reason why my story in that anthology did get some good, critical reception and ultimately got reprinted in Latin American Literature Today is because I cared about it and it had some sort of heart to it. But the good thing about that is that also if for some reason, Libia had not accepted it, which in this case it was a softball—I knew she was going to accept it, but that's, that's lucky. Rekka (00:37:37):Yeah. Julia Rios (00:37:37):But if for some reason she hadn't, it was a story that I could have sent somewhere else. Right. Like I could have, I could have submitted that to some other place. And ideally even when you're writing for a theme, it's something that if it doesn't work for that anthology, you can still send it someplace else. Rekka (00:37:55):And one thing to consider is that everyone else who was rejected from that anthology now has a new story that they're going to send everywhere else. So if yours feels like theirs probably going to have a lot of competition. Julia Rios (00:38:07):Yeah. So if you're just writing, whatever you think is the default vampire or a mermaid story for a vampire or a mermaid, and— Julia Rios (00:38:14):Hypothetical anthology... Julia Rios (00:38:16):Like, right, then, then you know that if you send it to fantasy magazine, fantasy magazine is also going to get everybody else's default mermaid story. But if your story has something that you care about in it, that somehow makes it stand out, it's going to stand out. Rekka (00:38:33):Right. So your advice, nothing to do with tricks, it has nothing to do with editing out certain words that bother editors. It has nothing to do with how to write your cover letter perfectly. It is write your authentic story. Julia Rios (00:38:49):Yeah. I'm sorry. Rekka (00:38:51):That's no, that's, that's so good though. Julia Rios (00:38:52):It's not the advice anybody wants. Rekka (00:38:55):No. Yeah. Okay. So people who want advice, that's going to shoehorn them into an anthology or make them a shoe-in to put more shoes in the conversation. Like they're looking for the answer of like, "Oh yeah, well, you know, for my mermaid thing, definitely makes sure that she's got green fins, because if that mermaid has green fins, I'm a sucker for green fins you're in." and you're not going to find that kind of advice because that is, that is not a guarantee, even if that was true for you, you know. Julia Rios (00:39:26):It's not the only time that that is true is if you have been asked for a specific tie-in media and you know exactly what that, that place wants, and you're doing, usually in this case, you're doing something that's like work for hire, which means that you don't own the rights to it. And you're going to get paid one fee. You're never going to have the right to sell that story again, or to reprint it or to get royalties. It's just going to be like, you write it and you give it to that company and it's theirs. Yeah. And in that case, like, there are definitely things that I've done before where if I'm doing that, I'm like, you know, maybe I'm adapting someone else's work for an app and I don't really have a say in it. And it's like, "you do this to this formula and you turn in the exact word count that we want. And it's supposed to, you know, she does have green fins and she has rainbow eyes and that's the end." Rekka (00:40:17):Right, right. But that's not that's not an anthology call. That's a, as you said, work for hire, like you, you play by someone else's rules in that case, you're, you're a contractor doing the work for somebody else who already had the idea and you, if you're lucky, you get to play around with things a little bit, but probably probably a totally different experience from writing for an anthology where it's an open submissions call or even a solicited. Julia Rios (00:40:47):I think It is in some ways, but like sometimes you'll see anthology calls from places like Wizards of the Coast. Rekka (00:40:52):Oh, okay. Julia Rios (00:40:52):And if they're asking for like a specific thing then, you know, there's probably a very specific D and D story that they want. Rekka (00:41:01):Okay. That's fair. I get that. I concede. We touched on budgeting for the anthology a little bit, but here you are like crafting Mermaids Monthly from the ground up. Julia Rios (00:41:13):Yeah. Rekka (00:41:13):Like what's the process for creating this project and finding the shape of it with regard to the budget and with regard to what you want it to be versus what's practical? Because, you know, I've seen anthology, Kickstarters go up and their budget like that, they're asking people to fund is like $5,000. And I realize, you know, that might be for single book and it's probably not for, you know, 12 issues' worth that might be close to 150,000 words when they're done—I don't know what your goal is total—but it always seems that people are afraid to ask for the right amount on Kickstarter to begin with. So how do you balance not coming up with a whopper of a number versus like, actually, cause I know paying the people who contribute in any way to this is important to you. So how do you create that budget when you haven't even seen the stories or the artwork yet? Julia Rios (00:42:06):This is really hard. And basically it involves sitting down and writing down a bunch of different projections of "what would happen if we did it this way, what would happen if we did it this way? What about this other way?"" And after you've got like 50 of those different scenarios, then it's sort of like, okay, what are the things that we think would be the most doable and the coolest that we'd be the most excited about?" so when I first started this, like I thought, "okay, I can do this. And I'll just ask for like some short fiction, that's basically it." And then I was like, "maybe I'll do short fiction and poetry because I really like poetry." and I think that there aren't enough poetry venues out there that pay authors fairly. So I was like, "okay, I'll do short fiction and poetry." Julia Rios (00:42:52):And then I asked Meg like, "do you want to get involved as my marketing person and maybe like help with design?" And then it sort of snowballed from there. But from there we talked about all kinds of things. We talked about audio, we talked about making the stories longer or doing other things and ultimately decided, okay, we don't want to have no stories that are not flash. We do want to have some stories that are longer stories. But it wasn't practical for us to ask for more than 5,000 words, because we were also committed to paying at least 10 cents a word. Rekka (00:43:27):Right. Julia Rios (00:43:27):So like that was one of those things where it's like, you can pay less, you can pay 8 cents a word, which I think 8 cents a word is now the SFWA minimum? Julia Rios (00:43:36):Yep, that is still the SFWA minimum. So your 10 cents is above that. You're definitely, pro-rate right here. Julia Rios (00:43:40):Just a little above it, but it's still above it. And for us, like I, we came up with that number because I was like, "what would I personally, as a writer be really excited about?" And the bottom line, there was 10 cents. So I was like, "I will, I will be committed to paying writers 10 cents." Rekka (00:43:54):Right. Julia Rios (00:43:54):Um for this reason also we have a thing where it's like, if we're doing reprints or any other things, and the amount would come in at less than $20, based on our per word rate, we will do a minimum of $20 because we don't want anyone to come out with less than $20. So like that's, that's just based on bottom lines for me where I'm like, ""okay, when I think about it as with my writer hat on, what would I be okay with? And when I think about selling a reprint, our reprint rate is low. It's 1 cents. It's 1 cent a word, but we're like excited. See your reprint stuff. The reason why I was like, it's going to be low. Is that,, for me reprints aren't the most important thing for this magazine. Rekka (00:44:40):Right. Julia Rios (00:44:40):We're going to be doing a lot of original stuff, but we're not opposed to them. And for an author, a reprint is just extra money. Rekka (00:44:47):Yeah. Julia Rios (00:44:47):It's like, you have already done that work, so you don't have to do it again. Rekka (00:44:51):Right. Julia Rios (00:44:52):And now, someone's just going to give you a little bit of extra cash and you get to keep it. Julia Rios (00:44:56):Yeah. Which is always nice. Julia Rios (00:44:57):Which is always nice. Julia Rios (00:44:59):Yeah. And it's cool to have, you know, both sides of the perspective on the project that you have edited before, but you are also somebody who submits and you know what is fair for both sides and you try to work so that everybody's getting as much of the fair experience as they can. Julia Rios (00:45:18):Yeah. And it's, it's tricky because it's also, like I realize that rates for... Going rates for science fiction and fantasy that are considered professional are really low compared to anything that people are doing if they're pitching nonfiction to mainstream magazines, for instance. Julia Rios (00:45:35):I saw somebody do the math recently that like if, if inflation had been applied to professional science fiction and fantasy rates, we'd be getting $75 a word or something by now. Can you imagine that world? Julia Rios (00:45:49):So it's not a large amount. Wow. I just know that in like in the 1950s and earlier, it was possible to actually make a living selling short stories to magazines. Like that was a thing that you could do. Yeah. So when you, you hear sometimes people saying like, you should do what Ray Bradbury did, which is like, write a story a week. Rekka (00:46:07):You should also travel back in time and live when Ray Bradbury did. Julia Rios (00:46:11):And I'm like, "yeah, if you live in the 1950s, you can do that. If you live now, it's like, well, that's not really where you're making your money." And honestly, like for most writers, even with novel length work, that's not where you're really making your money. Some people are lucky and they break out with these large advances and then they earn out and they get large sales and they get good royalties. Rekka (00:46:35):And then they get more large advances. But the rest of us... Julia Rios (00:46:37):Most of the time, it's like, this is going to pay a little bit, but not a whole lot and you should either have a day job or use this to create other opportunities for yourself. So like you can use it to then get speaking and teaching engagements. I think going back to your other question, like why people charge different rates at Kickstarter, it's because it depends too, what they're doing. So some people might already have certain things taken care of like either they've already paid their authors and they know that they only need to raise the money for printing a book, or maybe they have other investors somehow like supplementing things. Rekka (00:47:21):Or extreme optimism. Julia Rios (00:47:22):Right. So like you can, if you've already got a magazine that has a subscriber base, for instance, and you decide that you want to kickstart your next year of that magazine, you can kind of take some of the amount out of that, that building it from the ground up because you have that subscriber base. Rekka (00:47:40):Okay. Julia Rios (00:47:40):Um if you've got a press that's already up and running and you've already produced a lot of books, then maybe you have a clear idea already, if you're like a one person operation, that you know how you're doing your book design and you're not going to pay another person to design it. And that's labor that you're willing to just take as the cost that you're providing yourself. And then maybe like, if you're me, you're like, "okay, well, I'm working with Meg and Meg is designing and Meg needs to be paid for that work." and even though we're paying ourselves a very low amount of money, our Kickstarter is taking into account that we want to pair something because it's like, "okay, even if this cannot remotely count as living wage, I want to Mark that we are, we're doing a lot of work." Rekka (00:48:27):Right. And there's value in that. Julia Rios (00:48:29):And there's value in work. It's important to recognize that there's value in work. And if we won't recognize it, no one else will. Rekka (00:48:35):Absolutely. Yeah. Now what about the payment structure? Because authors who write for an anthology or a magazine get paid once. Julia Rios (00:48:45):Yeah. Rekka (00:48:46):So if a book completely pays for itself, like the profits of that go to the publisher usually, right? Julia Rios (00:48:55):Yeah. Rekka (00:48:55):Then the author would only expect to see more money for that story by reselling it as you were discussing. Julia Rios (00:49:01):Yeah. So generally it, it depends because sometimes when you have something with like a large publisher, if you have something with one of the big now for that exists in New York, they just had another buyout. So we've gone down from five to four. But if you have an anthology through those, so like maybe the ones that were done by saga press in the last two years, The Mythic Dream and The Starlit Wood those, if they earn out those authors might get royalty checks, that would be split between all of the authors and the anthology and the editors. But for most places, and especially in the small press world, you're selling it for one rate and you're selling it for that per word rate and you're not going to see royalties later. Main reason for me on this is that I am not an accountant. And—. Rekka (00:49:52):Yeah I was going to say, the bookkeeping! Julia Rios (00:49:55):Trying to split royalties between 25 or 30 or 50 or a hundred people is just it's— Rekka (00:50:02):Yeah. Because especially with the distribution to the online retailers for digital books, like it is impossible to know how, where that money is coming from sometimes. They make it so impossible to know like, okay, it was this many books and they made this much money. And okay, now you're going to divide that into how many words the book was and then pay out based on, you know, the word count for each. I mean, even if it goes well, that's a lot of work. Julia Rios (00:50:26):Yeah. Rekka (00:50:27):You know, like you might be able to write a spreadsheet to figure it out, but the way that you get reporting these days, Nope. Not gonna happen. Julia Rios (00:50:35):It's hard. It's a lot. And the truth is that for most anthologies that come out through small presses, they either don't earn out or like what they've raised for their Kickstarter is them basically paying for the cost of making the book. Right. Rekka (00:50:48):So they, they earn out by default and then that's probably it. Julia Rios (00:50:53):And then that's it. Maybe they make like a little bit over, but once you split that between all the contributors, it's like," does everybody actually want to check for 50 cents?" Rekka (00:51:01):Right. I mean, I would probably hang it on the wall. I can't even say I would cash that. Julia Rios (00:51:08):Yeah. So, so that's the reason why I think for most of the time, when you're selling to an anthology, you're selling it once. And that's a good reason to look at rights in the contract, because if an anthology is buying the right to then like exclusively, have your story forever and you don't get to do anything with it, that's a bad deal and you shouldn't take it unless you, for some reason really love it. Like, I guess if it's a Star Wars anthology, and you're a huge Star Wars fan, that's a different story. Maybe it's worth it for you, just so that you can have a book on your shelf that's a Star Wars book that has your name in it. That's totally fair. But that's a personal decision that you're going to be making. And like the great thing about this is that people are making lots of movies and different things based on short stories. So like Ted Chiang's Arrival, like the movie Arrival is based on a novella. Rekka (00:51:56):Yeah. In fact, I've heard advice that like they make better movies, generally, based on the source material than when someone tries to turn like, say, a 10 book series into a movie. Julia Rios (00:52:08):Yeah. Well, like a novel can make a good TV series and sometimes you can have a good adaptation of a novel into a movie, but when you're working with a short story length, it's easier to adapt that into, into one movie length thing. Rekka (00:52:20):Yeah. Julia Rios (00:52:21):And Hollywood gets excited about that. So if you can have your backlog of short stories and somehow you attract the attention of someone in Hollywood, then you're also like, by the way, I have these other ones. Rekka (00:52:32):As long as you make sure that anthology publisher did not take your media rights. Julia Rios (00:52:38):Which, ideally they would not have taken your media rights. And also like they ideally won't take exclusivity for a very long time. Like most places are gonna take it for maybe a year, maybe two, depending on like how their, what their publishing plan is. But like, most places are not going to say, we're going to hold onto your story forever. And you can watch out for that because then as soon as, as soon as those rights are back for you, you can sell that to someone else. You can republish it yourself. If you have a lot of stories, you can make your own collection and just kind of stick it up there as an ebook. Rekka (00:53:12):And first audio rights are good to keep track of too. Julia Rios (00:53:15):Yeah. Oh yeah. All of that stuff. So it's good to know what rights you have and to remember that, but like there are reprint markets out there, there are places like Pod Castle that will buy a reprint audio. They'll buy the audio rights to something that's already been published. Sometimes they'll buy the audio rights to something that's already had an audio version because they're gonna make their own. Rekka (00:53:36):Right. So how do you, because you've done this successfully wrangle all the cats that are involved? Because you've got editors, you've got authors, you've got contracted artists and designers and other contractors. That seems like a lot. So I'm glad to hear you're paying yourself for the mermaids because this is not a small job. Julia Rios (00:53:58):It's a lot. And I say that if you really want to make an anthology, that it is a management project, so you have to be ready to take on a manager role. And it's, it's good to remember that as much as there's fun stuff, there's also a lot of just like dotting the i's and making sure your contracts are all in and signed and that your payroll, like somebody is responsible for paying everyone and making sure that they were paid on time. Rekka (00:54:29):And that there's a record of it. Julia Rios (00:54:32):Exactly. That you have author approval on the final versions of the stories. That, that you have had a chance to see everything through a proofreader. And that you've, you've had someone double check that your layout works and all of those other things, there are so many different pieces of it. And I can't stress, that collaboration is very important, I can't stress that enough. Some people are able to do most things on their own. Like I think that think Mike Allen over at Mythic Delirium Books does most of it himself or with his wife Anita Allen, who's the other person who runs that. So they're like doing their own design and editing and everything else together, but it's a lot based on what you already know, you know, how to do. So I think the reason why Mike can do that, why Mike and Anita can do that together is because they started with a zine in like the nineties, I think. And it was like a paper zine that they would have made, you know, at home or from Staples or whatever. Rekka (00:55:39):Right. Julia Rios (00:55:40):They had a lot of time curating zines and putting them together and realizing how that worked. And then also Mike works for newspapers. So he has experience working in the newspaper publishing side of things. And he probably has experience through his job with things like InDesign. And, and because of that, he, he moved on to doing anthologies and he did like the Clockwork Phoenix series, which were all sort of self-made anthologies that he was doing himself. And because of that, he learned over the course of time, what are the things that he knows how to do and what are the resources he has available. Rekka (00:56:15):And what are the pieces that go into something? Julia Rios (00:56:17):Exactly, what are the pieces that go into something and what can he do himself? Whereas like for me, I know for instance, I know about myself that I am not a designer and I do not have that skill. I am not an artist. Visual art is not my strong suit. So, so one thing I've been doing during the promotional phase of mermaids monthly with the Kickstarter is like, okay, if we get to this number, like I will attempt to draw a mermaid." Rekka (00:56:43):And you did a very, very nice job. Julia Rios (00:56:45):"This Will be a fun exercise for all of us because I am not an artist." and yeah, I think it's a cute, fun drawing that I made of this mershark with like giant sharp teeth. But if you look at it and you look at anyone, who's actually an artist doing the same kind of thing, their version is gonna be much better. So I could make Mermaids Monthly myself, and it would be a very plain production. And that's fine. I could use something like Vellum for instance, which is basically a, what you see is what you get book designing tool that would produce a perfectly readable, simple book. And that is a totally acceptable path, but I know that I would love to have higher production values. So I have to pull in other people and Meg has major design skills that I do not have. So I was like, "Meg, do you want to do this?" And Meg was like, "sure, I'll do this." And everything that Meg has turned out is something that like, I didn't even know how to ask for it because I didn't know that's what I wanted. Rekka (00:57:46):Right, right. Yeah. Having the expertise on your team is so critical whether it's yours or whether you recognize that you need to find somebody else. Julia Rios (00:57:56):It is. And as for the rest of it, like making a list. So having like multiple spreadsheets with task breakdowns, having processes in place that you invent and recheck as you go along and revise. So for instance, with Megan, I, every time we do a contract, one of us puts it together. They send it to the other person for review. We go through multiple rounds of like, "Hey, I found this typo," or "I think this clause needs to change." But like our rule is we don't just send it to the author before it's gone through the, the two-person review system. Rekka (00:58:32):And then I assume you have, you know, spreadsheets of all the authors and what they've signed or what they've turned in or what they've gotten in terms of edits. And if they've gotten those back and if the final proof has happened and all of that, there are a lot of steps. And then you multiply that by however many authors you're going to have involved. Plus then, you know, the different processes for artists and their visual work. So that's, that's so much. So obviously, you know what you're doing. Julia Rios (00:58:58):[[Laughter]] Rekka (00:58:58):So now let's like, just get really excited over mermaids monthly because people who are listening to this live have until the 12th of December 2020, Saturday to fund help fund on Kickstarter. I'm sure by now it's already funded because it's going swimmingly. Julia Rios (00:59:17):Let's hope that your words are definitely prophetic and that will happen. Rekka (00:59:22):So at this point, it's, you know, you've got, I think the last count I saw was something like 8,600 to go of a very you know, I will say it was an ambitious goal because you were, you were planning to pay people fairly including yourself. So that's excellent and everyone's behind you, which is really, really cool to see that the funding is going well, it's consistently going up. I think everything I've seen has been really, really positive and a lot of people are really excited about this anthology. So tell me, aside from not wanting to reject more than three mermaid stories, like, what are you, what are you hoping for at this end, before you've seen any of the submissions? Julia Rios (01:00:06):Well. Okay. So I'm hoping to find things that surprise and delight me. I'm hoping to have fun. I know that some of the stories will be like sad or scary. That's, that's a thing that I'm sure will happen. Rekka (01:00:21):And you did invite people to, you know, do dark stories if they wanted. Julia Rios (01:00:24):Oh, yeah, I'm not saying we don't want those, but I'm also hoping that there will be some percentage of mermaid stories that we get that will genuinely just be delightful, mermaid romps. Because I think especially after this year that we've all just been through, like having some fun things to just sort of be a little beam of, not sunshine cause we're underwater, but you know, we just need those cute bioluminescent jellyfish to let us, say... Rekka (01:00:52):Oh, gosh, I'm like, you're going to get a submission from me that's going to end up being like a mermaid roadtrip story with lots of bioluminescing. Julia Rios (01:01:00):See, I love this! I love it. So I'm excited to see what we get and I'm excited to see all the different ways that people interpret it because I can think of lots of different creative ways to do it, but I know that all the things that I think of are not what other people will default to. Rekka (01:01:15):Which is what's so great about anthologies. Julia Rios (01:01:17):Yeah, I love that. I can't wait to see what we'll get. So one of the authors that I solicited a story from that I'm really excited about is Debra Goelz, who has written a novel that is published through wattpad and it is called Mermaids and the Vampires Who Love Them. Rekka (01:01:36):Oh that's excellent. This is very promising. Julia Rios (01:01:38):It's a YA novel about a mermaid who goes to like a special academy for supernatural creatures and gets a vampire boyfriend. Rekka (01:01:47):Nice. Julia Rios (01:01:47):Uh there's a lot of other stuff going on in the, in the plot of this book, but like that's the gist of it. And the title sort of gives you a sense of how ridiculous and fun it's going to be. Cause it's c

The Reading Envy Pub is crammed full of people who want to share their recent projects, where they go for book ideas, and more. Jenny will probably sneak out and let them have the episode, but first she'll talk a little about the last 199 episodes - where do guests come from, and how often? Which books has Jenny read lately but not managed to share about? Please enjoy this bonus episode to celebrate 200. Download or listen via this link: Reading Envy 200: Reading Envy Turns 200 Subscribe to the podcast via this link: FeedburnerOr subscribe via Apple Podcasts by clicking: SubscribeOr listen through TuneIn Or listen on Google Play Or listen via StitcherOr listen through Spotify New! Listen through Google Podcasts Books mentioned:    Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid These Ghosts are Family by Maisy Card Crazy Brave by Joy Harjo An American Sunrise by Joy HarjoSorcery & Cecelia by Patricia C. Wrede and Caroline StevermerHow to Fly (In Ten Thousand Easy Lessons) by Barbara Kingsolver A History of my Brief Body by Billy-Ray BelcourtThe Long Walk by Stephen King Bellevue by David OshinskyThe Good Luck Stone by Heather Bell Adams So You Want to be a Novelist by Jon Sealy The Merciful by Jon Sealy Other mentions:GoodreadsScotiabank Giller Prize Governor General’s Literary AwardsCBC - The Next ChapterBBC Radio 4 - Open BookBBC Radio 4 - A Good ReadTwo Crime Writers and a MicrophoneTartan Noir PodcastLiterary FrictionYou’re BookedpodcastWomen’s Prize for FictionSimon Mayo's Books of the YearBook Cougars Reddit - /r/books, /r/fantasy, /r/what’s that book, /r/suggest me a book Sword and LaserReading GlassesDeep Vellum Brazos Bookstore (Houston) Haywire BooksCostaPrize The BookerPrizes The StellaPrize Stonewall Book AwardsLAMBDA LiteraryAwardInternational Dublin Literary AwardSaturday Morning with Kim Hill on Radio New Zealand Tom Merritt’s booksBookmarks section of LitHub NetGalley Edelweiss @princejvstinPatreon.com/princejvstinNerds of a FeatherSkiffy and FantySFF AudioLitsy BookRiot The Get Booked PodcastBookRiot For Real PodcastBookTube - ComfyCozyUp, Booksaremysociallife, Poptimist (David Yoon), Audrey from Perpetual Pages The Librarian is InKCRW BookwormBacklistedPodcastShawnthebookmaniacSavidgeReadsBook Women - readers community Slightly Foxed- the Real Readers QuarterlyStuck in a Book - Simon Thomas Tea or Books? - Simon Thomas So Many Damn Books A Good Story is Hard to Find podcast Shelf Wear podcastShelfWear youtubeBookRiot All the BooksNYT Book review podcastCrimeReadsLiterary Hub Dylan Thomas PrizeNational Book AwardThe Morning News Tournament of BooksMillions Most Anticipated Books Related episodes:All of them!  Stalk me online: Jenny at GoodreadsJenny on TwitterJenny is @readingenvy on Instagram and Litsy

Hi everyone, and thank you for tuning in to another episode of the We Make Books Podcast - A podcast about writing, publishing, and everything in between!   This week we were lucky enough to sit down with Michael R. Underwood, author the upcoming novel "Annihilation Aria" from Parvus Press.  Full disclosure: Kaelyn was Mike's editor on the book and so we got have an extra in-depth and behind the scenes discussion about the craft of writing and how characters, plots, and worlds can change and adapt as the story is written.  Mike was a fountain of information and knowledge and we both left the conversation with some amazing insight into the process behind creating a book with such rich world building and dynamic characters.  We had a great time talking with Mike and hope that you enjoy the conversation as much as we did.   We Make Books is hosted by Rekka Jay and Kaelyn Considine; Rekka is a published author and Kaelyn is an editor and together they are going to take you through what goes into getting a book out of your head, on to paper, in to the hands of a publisher, and finally on to book store shelves. We Make Books is a podcast for writers and publishers, by writers and publishers and we want to hear from our listeners! Hit us up on our social media, linked below, and send us your questions, comments, concerns, and if you've read Annihilation Aria, let us know what you think!   You can (and should) check out Mike on social media at:   Twitter: @MikeRUnderwood Website: www.michaelrunderwood.com   Annhiliation Aria is available everywhere awesome books are sold on July 21, 2020!   www.books2read.com/annihilation-aria   We hope you enjoy We Make Books!   Twitter: @WMBCast  |  @KindofKaelyn  |  @BittyBittyZap Instagram: @WMBCast  Patreon.com/WMBCast   Episode 39: Annihilation Aria with Michael R. Underwood transcribed by Sara Rose (@saraeleanorrose)   [0:00]   R: Welcome back to We Make Books, a podcast about writing, publishing, and everything in between! I’m Rekka, I write science fiction and fantasy as R.J. Theodore.   K: And I’m Kaelyn Considine, I’m the acquisitions editor for Parvus Press.    R: And today, we have to make another full disclosure-confession. We have another Parvus author on today. You recently heard us talk to Scott Warren of the Union Earth Privateers book—book series, I should say. And today we have another author of another amazing Parvus book, Michael R. Underwood of Annihilation Aria fame, or about to be fame. I hope it’s fame because this book deserves it.   K: Yeah, Annihilation Aria’s coming out a week from when this will be released, so this is July 14th, coming out July 21st. It’s a fantastic book, space opera. When I first got the manuscript and was kind of giving a it a rundown to my publisher and the other people on my team, I described it as the gender-swapped Mummy in space.   R: Yeah. With magic. Well, I guess The Mummy does have magic, too.   K: Yeah, yeah but with giant space turtles, and therefore better.   R: Yeah, yes.   K: So Mike was kind enough to take the time and sit and talk with us about the evolution of story writing and character development. This book had been something that he was working on for years. It, well, the core parts of it didn’t change too much. The book certainly underwent a lot of evolution over the years. And MIke is so smart, so talented, has a lot of really great insight and advice to offer when it comes to, you know, being about to take a look back at your own work and figuring out how it needs to change in order to serve the story. So, we had a great time talking with Mike. Hopefully you have a great time listening to him, and you should, you still have time right now to pre-order Annihilation Aria, book one of The Space Operas. Absolutely check it out. Not only because I’m the one that edited it, but because it is an excellent book.   R: I totally agree. I got the chance to read it when I was recovering in the hospital and it was a delight. It was absolutely everything that Kaelyn and Mike promised it would be.    K: So, anyway, take a listen and we hope you enjoy!   [intro music plays]    R: Of course we just used up all our small talk, we don’t recall any of it. So, I guess we’re gonna have to go straight into it.   K: Dive right into talking to Mike Underwood today!   M: Hi! I’m sorry! This is the thing about being on a podcast that I’ve listened to. I have to actively keep my brain dial on the Talk to These People mode, instead of the Listen to These People mode.   R: I mean we can just talk about you, but it seems a little rude considering you’re in the recording with us.   K: Especially because none of us are in the same space right now. Usually Rekka and I are at least sitting across from each other.   R: I have the blanket that Kaelyn usually has today.   K: Ahh, my blanket! I miss that blanket. It sheds all over me, but it’s worth it.   R: Yeah, well, stuff has to shed in my shed…   K, disappointed: Oh, Rekka.   R, unashamed: It works with the name, but it’s also because it makes me feel less lonely for my pets that are in the house because we don’t want them shedding in the shed.    K: Alright, I’m derailing this conversation now. This just goes down a road of puns that there’s no recovery from, and then we have to start over again and it’s just… it’s gonna be a thing. So, Mike, do you wanna save us here and introduce yourself?   [K and R laugh]   M: Sure. I’m Mike Underwood, I write as Michael R. Underwood. I mostly do action adventure meta-genre kinds of stuff. I like found families, I like trope-twisting, and my next book is Annihilation Aria which is coming out with Parvus Press, so I’ve had the fortune of getting to work with both of you in a professional capacity and I’m very excited to talk about the book with your audience.   K: We’re really excited to have you on here, because this book has a long and storied history. This was not a, simply, Wrote Something, Submitted It, Got It Accepted and Published. There was, even before it came to Parvus, before I started working on it, you were, what? three-ish years into this book at that point?   M: Yeah, so. This book basically starts in the movie theater as I’m watching Guardians of the Galaxy.   K: Okay.   M: And like really enjoying a lot of what it did with tone and, kind of, bold visual style with all of the high technicolor space opera bits, plus some retro nostalgia aspects. And so that informed a conversation I had with an editor, who I shall let remain nameless, that I was talking with at a world fantasy convention. In that conversation, I mentioned that I really would love to write something that would make people feel the same type of joy and smile-so-much-your-cheeks-hurt kind of vibe, that I got while watching so much of Guardians of the Galaxy. And it’s not a perfect film because there are very few perfect films, but I loved that mode of space opera that it had. Where it’s a bit more irreverent, it still has some of the found family vibes that you see in something like Firefly or Killyjoys. But it’s on the more adventure-y, epicfantasy but-make-it-space and pewpew versus space opera that’s a lot more, that leans more towards hard science like something like The Expanse. I’ve always been more of a Dune- and Star Wars-end of space opera kid versus that kind of overlap between space opera and military SF or the [radio voice] This Is What Thing Will Be Like Seven Hundred Years In the Future When We Have An Alcubierre Drive or whatever. That’s not my thing.   [K and R laugh]   M: And so what I brought to it was, you know, a lifetime of loving Star Wars, but also various roleplaying games and wanting to find in a project, a place to say what I was interested in and investigate the things I loved about space opera. So I took a play from Annie Balay, who has talked about making up a wishlist of tropes that she loves about urban fantasy, and she put those into a series. So I just kind of sketched out fun, weird things. Like, “What if giant spaceturtles?” and space magic bullshit and—   R: Perfect.   M: And finding a way to just kitchen sink a novel, in terms of things that I liked. And it kind of started to build up momentum there. But because I wrote it as a back-burner project over years and years and years, where it started and what it has become now, there’s a big gap there and there’s a lot to unpack from what the characters were really about to how the world feels to, then, into the editorial process with Kaelyn kind of repeatedly inviting me to unpack things or slow down and give a deeper view into characters.   K: It’s very generous of you to use the word “invited you to”.   R: Yeah, I was gonna say. I know Kaelyn, that’s a very interesting verb choice.   K, laughing: “Mike, I’d like to hear more about this.” “Oh, okay, here’s a sentence.” “No, Mike, I know where you live, Mike!”   That was something that I, just for clarification I’m the editor of Parvus that worked with Mike on this in case that hasn’t become apparent. One of the things that really drew me to this book and that I was wanting Mike to slow down and unpack was the characters. For all the setting and the fantastical elements of this, the characters are such a huge driving force, I think, for the story. I would absolutely read anything that is just set in this universe. As long as the characters are as engaging, compelling, and fun as the ones that you’re written in Annihilation Aria. But you had kind of  a few things that you wanted to accomplish with the characters, as well.    M: Yeah, so. I’ve been in the same relationship since 2010, I’m happily married. My wife and I get along very well, and in science fiction, fantasy, adventure fiction especially there’s just not a lot of instances of happily committed couples. Let alone happily committed married couples. And I think there’s a lot of cultural reasons that go into this, that are probably several podcasts-worth of their own and would be best had in conversation with capital R, Romance writers.    But the short version was that I wanted to write the kind of story that really argues that Happily Ever After can also be really exciting. So that was one of the nexuses around which the story was built. Like, okay, well what if I do this but I have a couple that’s already together and happy at the beginning of the book. And not that they don’t face challenges and one at the start of their relationship was: these people who both have a quest that they’re trying to fulfill, if either of them gets what they want, theoretically the couple breaks up.   R: Yeah.   M: But that, when they meet, they’re like, “Oh, you can help me with my thing and I’ll help you with your thing,” except that along the way they fell in love. They’re still on this trajectory that theoretically means—that could mean the dissolution of the relationship, but they don’t really have anything else as a way of being in the world, because they can’t just be together and be happy. They have their own drives and they exist in a pretty oppressive system that requires that they have a lot of money because they both have exterior debts and things like that. The same kind of Firefly vibe.    So that tension between their attraction to each other and their individual quests that might pull them apart was one of the big engines that made the story move. So that when they run into this ancient kingdom, techno, biotech tomb that they run into early in the story, that gets a McGuffin in their hands that then becomes a big deal. And they’re each engaging with it and the things around them because they have these, sometimes competing, usually overlapping, drives that are motivating them.    And that, almost like a perpetual motion machine of character interaction, was really fascinating and I wanted to keep on working with, while trying to balance, respecting the fiction. There really is this chance that things could fall apart for them, while knowing that I wanted them to not break-up because that was part of the whole thing.   R: One thing that was notable for me, as I was reading the book, was that at no point do they not want the other one to succeed. They are so supportive of each other that even though it means that it would break them up, they exist on different planes. Yes, this fact is over here that if I got what I wanted, I would be across the galaxy from this other person.    But at the same time, same plane, they also really want the other person to be happy and to succeed at their personal character arc quest and it’s really, like you said, it builds tension but it’s just really nice to see people who support each other and, even though there’s this big divide between what’s best for their relationship versus what’s best for the individual.   K: Yeah, and along those lines—and this maybe might be a transition into talking about some of the more mechanical aspects of writing this—is that these two characters are Max and Lahra and they are two of the main POV characters, but when you started writing this, they were the only POV characters, correct? [12:46]    M: I think there were a very small number of POV chapters for Wheel, who is the pilot of the two main characters, and then Arek, who is kind of their primary antagonist. So he’s an agent of this galactic empire that controls the space that they live in. I had a little bit from each of them as counterpoint or context, but it was still very much Max and Lahra’s story and the other ones were just there to give a little bit of context and color.    And only over years of doing other projects and writing and growing as a creator, did I make the moves to promote Wheel and Arek as POV characters and to treat them with more depth and groundedness, as I engaged with them. Especially into the revision process, I saw and was convinced that there was more for the novel to do and it could be richer for digging more into the emotional lives of all four of those POV characters.   R: And you really did. Especially with Arek. He’s not the prototypical space-fiction villain. He’s got a lot of complexity to him. He is still definitely a villain, but he’s the least worst villain personality? And they’re definitely—again, you’ve given each character a drive and something that they’re aiming for which might be at odds with what the organizations that they work with are aiming for.  So, how did you make those decisions, as you’re developing? Especially a villain character, but also Wheel.    It’s really interesting that Wheel might have had a very tiny part just in the sense that Wheel is the owner of the ship that everyone lives on, I assume, and maybe Wheel has to help rescue at some point. Or Wheel has to support with something Wheel can witness that the other characters can’t, or something like that. I mean, I have obviously done the same thing with POVs where somebody was there because it was convenient to have another POV and then that person had to become a fully-rounded character of their own. But when you built Arek, you didn’t have to go that far. You still could have sold this book without going as far with Arek as you did. But, so why—how did you start to see Arek and how much sympathy do you, personally, have for him?    K: Well, and I’ll jump into just to add that you gave all of these characters a life outside of this story. Every single person, if they were not taking part in this story happening to them, would be doing something else. And we, the reader, are in a position where  we can kind of see or imagine what they’re doing because even though you don’t have to spend a lot of time on it, but it gives us a very good sense of them.    M: Yeah, I think a lot of how I approach characterization and writing is probably informed by growing up playing table-top roleplaying games. So, table-top roleplaying was one of the main ways that I learned to tell stories and to think about what I wanted from stories. Alongside reading and watching TV and movies and reading comics and things like that. So in a lot of roleplaying, you have the characters as they are and then you’re engaging with a game master who says, “Here’s a plot!” and then you engage with the plot. And that’s one style of game mastering, and more recent roleplaying games, a lot of them are more player-driven in terms of character agenda and shared narrative authority and things like that. And the Apocalypse World tradition from that game by Vincent and Meguey Baker and all the games that come from it.   So I brought kind of one version of acting experience to writing. In terms of: okay, here’s a character and they are my character and I wanna be able to inhabit them at least a little bit to get a sense of who they are, so that when I, then, also as the writer, can throw things at them. I’m able to jump between those registers in terms of inhabiting a character and kind of providing the antagonism or the context and/or all the other stuff that goes around a character. I think it was because I was familiar with that style—so much of what my writing comes out of is that if I’m gonna be in the POV of a character, it’s hard to not spend some time with them and to linger with them and to think about their agency and their—what they want from the world.    And as much as I grew up loving Star Wars and Darth Vader, and Darth Vader is a great antagonist but he’s not a great character in a rounded fashion because he’s so much of a cypher. He is the iron fist that punches at the protagonists. You get into the prequels and you see some of the backstory and—but that’s not what I grew up with. I was sixteen or so when Episode I came out and we really start to get that backstory for him. I think I moved toward this point where, at least some of the time, I want villains or, at least the personification of villainy or the person that the team is engaging with, to feel enough like a person that they are not just a moustache-twirling for. Because I’ve written more straight-up moustache-twirling villains in other books. Like in Shield and Crocus, which is very superhero-y, the villains kind of run the gamut. Some of them are just like, “I Am Really Terrible! HAHA! Oppression!”   [K laughs quietly]   M: In Arek, I think he started out as more of Lieutenant Bad Guy and he probably grew that roundedness when I thought about like, “Why is he the one who’s out here in the Boondocks?”   R: Mhm.   K: Yeah.   M: Who is the person within this species-supremacist empire that ends up on this bad duty? And, okay, I know that, from what I know about militaries and governments, okay you get a crap duty because you piss somebody off or because you’re out of favor. Well what is it like to be out of favor in this species of supersoldier, galactic tyrants? Why would that be a thing? So I started thinking a little bit about class and caste within a species. Or is it that he has some relationship to the dominant ideology of the species? So he ended up as being more humane than most of the members of his civilization.    Because of that, he was marginalized within this very domineering, fascist civilization. It’s a little bit of getting to talk about the way that oppressive civilizations oppress even the people that have power or that not everybody is equal, even within an oligarchy. Because the lines of oppression and pressures are not all along one axis. Everything is very multiaxial in terms of where people occupy more privileged or less privileged positions or are taking actions that put them more or less in line with a dominant paradigm.   Thinking about worldbuilding in that fashion is also really important to me. So when I take a character and put them through that bouncy castle of all these different things of worldbuilding, they tend to accrete a bit more personhood.   K: So, piggybacking off of that, and we kind of touched on this a little bit before, was that you wrote this over a lengthy period of time and there were characters that evolved, obviously, and became more prominent points for, well, viewpoints in the story. How much of that, do you think, was really getting comfortable with and learning about this world you were creating and wanting to build upon, and how much was that, we’re all adults here but, three years, you grow and change and you look back at things that you did before that and go, “Oh, well I don’t like that anymore.” How much of it was organic story-building and evolution and how much of it was going back and evaluating what you’d already written?   [21:35]   M: I think it was definitely both, and in a really integrated circuit kind of way. That life experience and working as a writer were very intertwined. I would fold life experiences into writing or I would develop my understanding of storytelling in a more nuanced fashion because I had time. And because I had time, I could let things remain and mull and simmer over time. Well, what if not just this layer of how Lahra’s civilization operates, but what if there’s this other thing that builds on what’s already there. There’s a multi-caste system and you’ve got the nobility atop and you’ve got soldiers and the soldiers serve the nobility and, well, in a civilization you can’t just have soldiers and nobility. You’re gonna have farmers, you’re gonna have technicians, you’re gonna have all these things.   Okay, so there’s these other parts of society and I had the title Annihilation Aria way before the Genae had music magic.    K: Mhm.   M: Because the title, Annihilation Aria, was like, “Oh, that’s cool because space opera,” and I’m riffing on that, but it’s its own thing. And, you know, world killers are a big thing in space opera. How can I take these things and make them my own? And then I realized, looking back, as I was picking away at the project over years, that I’d already set a foundation upon which I could build something that would give Lahra’s civilization and, therefore her backstory, more meat to it. As I was writing parts of the story where the Genae really matter, I was able to layer on these extra things.    Having more time to layer texture and history onto the story was really valuable and because a lot of the other ways that I’ve written—I wrote my debut and I got an offer to sell it very early in the revision process because of wacky circumstances for which I’m very fortunate. From there, I had several years of, “Okay, cool. So you have a contract, write a book. Turn it in. Production. Publication.” And so I wrote books that were much more condensed in their timeline. So it’s write a book over nine months, revise it over six months, it comes out, or sometimes a little bit more. Sometimes even a little bit less.    With this one, because I didn’t sell it on spec, and I was going in a different direction, it had this opportunity to accrete depth and texture over time. But I don’t want to have a writing career where it takes five years to do every book.   R: I was just about to say, is that something you recommend?    K: Real quick, Mike, if you wouldn’t mind backtracking to kind of go on a little side tangent here. You said “write a book on spec.” For our listeners that maybe do not have as much experience in the professional writing world as you do, what are you saying here? What is writing a book on spec versus what you did with Aria?   M: Sure. So, I sold my debut having written the whole book. And then: cool, we wanna publish this and a sequel. Great. So I did that and then I went back to the same editor and I said, “I wanna write something else from these Ree Reyes books. And so I created pitches and I sold them. I sold those books without having written the whole book, which is one version of—   K: You’re selling based on the pitch that you’re giving.   M: Yeah, and that’s one degree of selling on spec. There are people who say, “Cool! I wanna write a book!” and the publisher’s like, “We love you! Please sell us this book!” That is really selling a book on spec, you know. And that’ll show up in Publisher’s Weekly or Locus as: Famous Author’s Next Book to Editor at Publisher. And it can be very vague. It takes a while for most authors to get to the point where they can just say, “I wanna write a book for you!” and the publisher says, “Yes! Here’s some money.”   K: Most authors will not get to a point where that happens in their career. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. It’s just that, typically—and correct me if I’m wrong—these are going to be household names either within the general populous or within genres.   M: Yeah.   K: You will know the people that are able to sell books on spec.   M: Yeah, or it’s like—I have friends who sell a book that’s already written, but it’s a standalone so they get a two book deal and the second book is: it’ll be a book.   K: Yes! Yeah.   M: That’s probably more common than, “Here’s a one book deal. I don’t know what the book is yet, but I have the track record that you just wanna buy it.” So I had tried to sell a couple of books on partials because I said, “Well, okay, I have this track record and I have this background in the professional side of publishing.” But those didn’t happen. So I just went back to writing new novels and trying to sell things and, at this point, I’d been wanting to do enough different things with my writing where it’s like, “Cool.I’ve got these adventure books and I wanna write some other stuff that’s a bit more sociological or political and try to balance all these things that I wanna do as a creator.”    But I don’t wanna spend five years for each book because, economically, it’s just not viable to be able to support the costs of a writing career in terms of conventions and things like that off of one book every five years unless I’m getting just a lot more money. And very few people get so much money from science fiction, fantasy that they can spend five years on a book. So Aria is this weird book that may be pretty singular in my career, in terms of how long it has taken to become the thing that will be published in, as of this recording, in a couple of months.    So I try to revel in that distinctiveness because it will probably be pretty singular and hope to apply the lessons that I’ve learned while writing it much more efficiently moving forward. To think about things with texture and depth from an earlier part, an earlier stage of the process and then to embrace the opportunity to make a book more rich and texture in the revision process. To try to do several years’ worth of work in maybe a year, year and a half, in strong collaboration with an agent or an editor or something like that.     R: So you’ve spent the last, you know, hand-crafting the tools themselves that you now can put in your toolbox and reach for, hopefully, and use them without having to remake them every time, going forward?   M: I sure hope so.   R: Well that would be a very efficient use of your time, I think.   M: Yeah. I just finished the rough draft for a new novel that is very different from Aria, but I think it would have been very hard for me to write it, if I had not already been through that process of pulling this book together over the course of several years while working on other things as my main deal.Like, developing and doing all the work for Born to the Blade and self-publishing stuff from Genrenauts and things like that. So I’m hoping that the messiness I can clean up a bit while still being able to reapply those tools, as you say.   K: Now, Mike, when you went back from this and I just know from our conversations and working together that, at various points, you spent a lot of time working on this. You picked it up, you put it down again. You came back and forth to it. Were there any points, when you were going through and revising this, that you knew there were changes you had to make that you weren’t happy about making? That you were reluctant to really do anything with?   R: Tell us how Kaelyn hurt you.   M: Um…   K, laughing: No, no we’re talking pre-editor.   R: Oh, okay. If you say so.   K: Well, what I’m trying to get at here is, and Rekka and I back in May, we will have released an episode about making hard decisions about your manuscript and changing things on recommendation, but then also doing it yourself and having that awareness of, “Hey, maybe this isn’t as strong as I want it to be,” or “Maybe this no longer serves this story.” And the reason I’m asking is because you did write this over such a long period of time, it gives you the time and perspective to go back and consider these things.   M: Yeah, so probably the biggest, hardest change was—In the first draft, the novel opens much later in the story compared to the novel as published. And, at that point, I was going for a kind of Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark-style opening because that’s another touchstone for this work, as well as something like the 1999 Brendan Fraser-Rachel Weisz The Mummy movies.   [31:09]   K: It’s funny because I remember when I got this manuscript and I was talking to our publisher, Colin, he said, “What do you think?” I said, “It’s The Mummy set in space with elements of Guardians of the Galaxy,” but mostly I said it’s The Mummy in space. If that doesn’t sell a book, I don’t know what will.   M: Yeah, and that Rick and Evy relationship, especially in the second Mummy movie was another big touchstone in terms of, like, they have their own things, they are committed to each other, they’re on adventures—   R: But they have their own styles. Yeah.   M: Yeah, but I have this opening for the book. And one, the first draft came out pretty short because often will draft short and a book will grow in revision because my earlier drafts tend to be a lot more, “Okay, cool. Action, action. World, World. Action, action, action.” And then I go back and unpack things. And, moving forward, I’m hoping that my first drafts will have a little bit more character and breadth and space in them and that in revision I’ll just build on that, as opposed to having to do quite so much work to unpack it.   So there’s—In several different cultures across the world, there’s a mythology that the Universe started as two lovers embraced and that that’s the whole of physical space and that then something or some people push them apart to create the gap between the Earth and the sky. And so I’m trying to make it so that my novels are not that process so much, and that they start out with a bit more room to breathe, so that both the characters can breathe and that the reader can have the space to feel all those emotions as powerfully because they’ve taken the time to ruminate on them, versus just, “Here’s a flashy scene! And here’s some people! And they have distinctive characteristics and now they’re gonna be action figures through a space!”   I want to do more and dwell more with those characters. And part of that’s inspired by reading a lot more romance novels. Where, in romance, the best writers will do a great job of unpacking emotional reactions. So, I have this one start of the novel and I knew that I needed to set things up better, and I wanted a kind of broader story, so that involved moving the clock back within this timeline which also then gave me the opportunity to ground the characters more in their home away from home, in this colony ship that turned city in space called The Wreck. So what if you took a colony ship with a dozen species and they all loaded up this big ship and they had all of their hopes and dreams and they set off and then something goes really wrong and it crashes into some asteroid somewhere. And they absolutely cannot get going again.    I really liked that setting, I just kind of played through it in the original draft. So, in the revision, I was able to say, “Okay, here are the things I like about this, and now I wanna do more with them.” And that was also when I was able to kind of graduate Wheel into more of an equal POV character, in the way that she is tied to this place. And that they, the three of them, Max, Lahra, and Wheel are caught up in this net of relationships and factions. So it was a lot of forcing myself to kind of put my money where my mouth was about: here are things I like in writing, here are things I like in storytelling. I’m gonna push myself to dig deeper, to put the world on display more, to put my characters under pressure along several different axes that then makes it more realistic within the narrative. That they make the choices that they’re making as the story unfolds, so that at any given moment, they’re stuck between some bad options and they try to make the best opportunity for themselves.   Whereas, previously, the reason why they went and did the things that they did, in the earlier drafts, were a little bit more because it’s what I wanted from them, and less because it was the only thing that made sense for who they were as characters and what their relationships were at the time. So it was a lot of raising the stakes, but not in a grimdark fashion. Stakes and the degree to which the characters were enmeshed in the world and were both affected by it and agents effecting it.    R: I want to call attention to what you said, though, about as you expand your draft, you are not adding density to all the spots that you’re expanding, just for the sake of making it longer. But that you actually are going to this with such intent that you are actually creating space, not creating more. You didn’t double the action and then double the tension. You created a space that gave all the characters more room to become alive. So I just thought I’d draw attention to that because so often we talk about, “Oh, yes, in revision my book doubles in length,” but we don’t often say what that content is.   K: Well you can double in length and more than double in substance.    R: Oh yeah, yeah.   K: I think that’s a trap a lot of writers fall into where: I just need to add and add and add, and then at some point someone is gonna tell me, “Yes, you have enough here.” And it’s less about it being enough and more about it being efficient and effective.    M: Right, yeah, because there’s nothing about Storytelling that says, “Ah, sorry, this is only 70,000 words, it’s not a story yet.”   K: Yeah, and if somebody’s telling you that, don’t listen to that person. That’s not—   M: Yeah, and it’s—We’re in a position now, in the industry, where you can publish shorter work and there’s still a chance to find an audience. And any given publisher has their own model that they’re operating within. If you’re selling paper books, there’s kind of a minimum word count that will give you a spine that you can put text on. Those physical realities inform book publishing to a certain degree, but I was already playing within the novel space that was like, “Oh, well if I do more and I’m thoughtful—” It’s not that the book is 30 percent better because it’s 30 percent longer, that’s not the equation that we’re talking about.    There is more space for the character relationships, for those relationships to inform the action, for there to be an arc of how these people relate to each other and the ways that they are or are not invested in different things. So that, then, when I’m doing the big space opera finale, the reader feels like they’ve gone through the flow and the rise and fall of these characters, that the decisions they make there are both believable and kind of a natural catharsis for what the characters have gone through before. So that you get the reader, like, punch-the-fist-in-the-air experience when the character does the big thing.   R: So it’s not just about getting to 100,000 words and stopping.   M: Yeah.   R: Yeah.   K: I will say that, at Parvus, we have, for submissions, a 60,000 word minimum, but that’s because we publish novels and, sure, you can make an argument for some novels that are a little bit below there, but, as Mike said, there’s a certain point where you say, “I need this many words in order for this to be a book that I can have a spine and put the title on.” That said, there’s no reason to restrict yourself to a word count. If you have a great story and it’s 40,000 words, there are places that are looking for great stories that are 40,000 words.   R: Yeah. The only question is what category of the awards do you have your dreams set on, you know? But yeah, tell the story at the length that the story wants to be told. And if you want to explore more ideas, then the story gets a little longer. So, Mike, while you were expanding the story, how much of the relationship between Max and Lahra changed? I mean, you already said that you wanted them to have an established, committed relationship, but how fraught with tension did you want that to be? Like you said one of your inspirations was Guardians of the Galaxy, but Max is as far from Peter Quill as you can get, so what’s—how did that develop?   M: Yeah, I think Max as a character much more emerged from—the idea that I had was, what if you had the couple from The Mummy but you flipped the genders?   R: Mhm.   K: Yup.   M: So you have the fighty, square-jawed character is the wife and the, kind of, not-so-useful in a fight, academic who’s not as used to jumping around in the world, is the husband. And that’s really where it starts because they diverge pretty far from just those two because I wanted to figure out how to have the fish-out-of-water character work. Like, Max is from Earth and this is Very Far from Earth.    [K laughs] And drawing on that tradition of John Carter or of Farscape. There was a lot. It’s portal fantasy, but science fiction. Ultimately.   R: Yeah.   [41:05]   M: And how much it is portal fantasy can depend on how much being from Earth matters. The amount that being from Earth mattered, for Max, kind of increased over time, especially as I was really doubling-down on who Max was. Because Max is a Black guy from Baltimore so he grew up in a specific economic and political and cultural context, but then he’s the one who gets flung into a distant galaxy. Whereas racism doesn’t work the same way there and that’s not the main thing because that’s not my story to tell, as a white writer, but I was committed to respecting who Max is, as a person, and so I was able to build some things around him.    So what that became is that Max was already used to code switching between different cultural registers, and then here we have this multicultural civilization that is multicultural and multispecies and that, as an archaeologist and linguist, that was his superpower is being able to pick up language and study and understand culture. So, already, he’s really far from Peter Quill, who’s much more like a John Carter type of character, who is almost more in the Western tradition.   R: He just shoulders his way through every situation.   K: I was gonna say like a bull in a china shop. Just, you know, dropped in and is going to behave and do the same thing no matter where they are and who’s around them.   R: Yeah, definitely no code switching from Peter Quill.    M: Yeah, and then in thinking about who each Max and Lahra were, I had to be smarter and more thorough about who the other were because I needed to have a sense of how they interacted with each other. Like, what does Lahra do when Max is at his workstation for hours and hours and hours poring through manuscripts and trying to translate things? Like, does she just leave him to do his own thing? Does she hang out with him? What would make sense? Because she’s a bodyguard, she grew up in this cultural paradigm from her mother that was very much about a dyadic relationship, but between charge and guardian. Well, how does that inform who she is as a partner in a relationship? She’s more likely to be the kind of partner who would hang out with you while you’re doing your thing to make it clear to you that she’s supporting what you’re doing, but she’s not like—   R: Invading it.   M: She’s not invading it, she’s not making it a thing that has to be about both of them. Okay, well, then how does Max react when Lahra is really upset about something? He’s more likely to be the person who wants to talk it out, but they’ve been together for long enough that he realizes that some of the things that he wants to do are not actually what Lahra needs, as a person. Because I’m writing this relationship between people who are adults and they’ve lived enough life and they’ve spent enough time with each other that they’ve come to understand one another’s rhythms. Writing that part of the relationship was really rewarding because I got to show the way that I can write in Max’s POV and characterize Lahra, while characterizing Max. Because then I can write in Lahra’s POV about Max, through her own POV and the places where how they see each other don’t exactly line up.    Then tell the reader that these are both unreliable narratives because this is tight third person, which has enough overlap with first person that you’re gonna get some of that unreliability. And you understand more of what that relationship needs by getting both of the two, each of their buy-in. In terms of where they see themselves, where they see their partner, where they have doubts and fears, and how that manifests in the way that they act and how it does and doesn’t manifest in how the other person sees them.   Because I don’t write the same scene from both POVs, but I do frequently write the sequel to a scene in the other partner’s POV. So that they’re reacting to the same stuff.   K: But, beyond even just Max and Lahra, then, we have Wheel. Who is, I won’t call her a third-party observer because that’s not the case, but is an outside perspective on a relationship and, inm any cases, the only outside perspective on a relationship.   M: Yeah, and she doesn’t have access to their interiority. Every relationship is different on the inside, even if you’re living with somebody else. You know, because maybe you overhear conversations, but you’re not having that same emotional experience. And so that was a little bit more of a place where I got to comment on the relationship from the outside, but also think about times where I have been the third wheel friend to a couple when they’re going through something. And Wheel is also very fun to write because she has a firmly developed self-image that is, to a certain degree, a protection against the way that things are. So she’s more of the curmudgeon character who makes a show of keeping people at arm’s length, but she could have kicked them out of the ship years ago and be doing something else. But she didn’t. Why is that? And she’s tied into other factions in the story and that tie also came later, because Wheel started out as more just, like, the Driver will get you from A to B.   Then it’s like, how does this technology work? Well, we’ve got these cyborgs and if they used to be an empire, why aren’t they in charge? Well, how are they still around? If you get overthrown, the people who overthrow you are going to try to keep you out of power as much as possible.   K, punny: Annihilate you, if you will.   [R giggles]   M: Yeah, so all of those worldbuilding questions, then, informed who the Atlan, Wheel’s people, who those people were. The cybernetics gives them the ability to engage with the warp drives, which is a little bit like how the Spice works in Dune, it’s a little bit like this, it’s a little bit like that. And that every time I went back into Wheel to either talk about how she’s seeing something else, or her position in this setting, engaging with factions on the Wreck or her own history as an even older, mature adult who’s been places and had relationships, every time I tried to fold in or think about some other topic, she grew more rounded as a person. That gave her even more different ways of engaging with Max and Lahra as characters.   K: Was there any evolution to Max and Lahra’s relationship? Did anything change as the story grew? Or did you always see them as two characters who love each other and are very happily married, but also have separate lives and separate goals that they’re working towards, and they’re going to help each other do this no matter what, but the more they help each other, the more they’re driving themselves apart?   M: I think the only time when I really had doubts about Max and Lahra was while I was writing the first draft because I had this premise and, following the fiction, I wanted to honor it enough to let there be the opportunity for maybe things to go bad for them. I, as a creator, had a specific type of outcome that I was shooting for, but I didn’t want to put my thumb on the scale so hard that I’m like, “Oh well! It doesn’t matter that these things happened, actually it’s gonna be Happily Ever After no matter what. Haha, I win.” Because that wouldn’t be, it wouldn’t be as strong of a work. It would feel like there was a cop-out.    So, because I had an outcome in mind, it was more about what in the world has to be different from where things were, maybe, at the middle of my first draft so that it made sense. That the choices that they made led them to where they were at the end of the book. Probably the biggest changes there happened when the group goes to someplace that’s really important to Lahra and her heritage. I’ll stay vague for readers so that they go and buy the book and read it! Because it’s great!   K: It’s a fantastic book. Everyone should go buy it and read it.   M: And then, basically, since I believe very firmly that people are informed by their circumstances, but not always 100 percent limited by them—there’s places where agency is limited in society and so on—   K: Mhm, yep.   M: But that, because people are informed by their circumstances, if I want a different character output, I can change the circumstances to put different pressures on them and to give them different experiences that let them reflect differently on what they feel about things. So it was kind of a feedback loop between who these characters are as I’m expressing it in the writing, trying to respect who they are as people, as I understand them, and then also applying different pressures and adjusting the pressures on them so that the story stays within the trajectory that I’m thinking. Because probably the first core of the story was them and their relationship, and other things kind of grew around that. And then the thematics emerged from how they, as characters, reacted with one another and then, looking backward, how all those things operate. So that any thematic clarity that a reader gets from Aria is not something that was on page one of my notes.   [51:07]    M: It’s because the process of creating it as the book people will read was development rehearsal practice, re-rehearsal, changing the arrangement, practicing again, changing the blocking. I’m using music metaphors here because I’ve done music and theater. Not only is the story entertaining, but it’s also, as much as possible, saying the things that I would like to say, or inviting the reader to reflect on the same themes and ideas that were what I was hoping for them to do. Because, and this is something I’ve talked about with Kaelyn pretty early on in the process was, this could have been several different books.   K: It’s, and it’s something—I always joke that when I’m reading through books I can tell what sections of it were written at the same time. Authors, you guys aren’t always as slick as you think you are. You leave fingerprints on a lot of things. That was something coming into this, that I could tell what chunks of this book had kind of been written at the start, what parts had been revised very heavily, but we spent a lot of time in the beginning talking about the thematic elements of this. But also, as you said, this book could have gone a lot of different directions. I think it went, I will go so far as to say, the correct direction. The, one of the best possible directions it could have gone.    But I can see that in reading this, especially reading some of the earlier drafts that I got. There were a lot of different things that could have happened in this story and happened to these characters. I think that speaks very highly of your worldbuilding and your ability to create and develop believable characters, is that I can see them dropped into different scenarios and just acting on their own accord. They’re an object in motion at that point, rather than something that you’re directing to do certain things. And that’s amazing. That’s a fantastic thing to be able to do as a writer.    M: Yeah, another way of thinking about it—and this is definitely informed by a video I was watching recently, a conversation between a couple of game designers—is that some of it is just down to tone.   K: Yes.   M: Two musicians can take the same song and go—one musician says, “Okay, cool, I’m going for the same tone but I’m gonna move the key.” Just moving the key actually changes more than you expect. It’s the moody, emo down-tempo version of a pop song?   R: Yup.   K: I was just gonna say, actually, I just discovered a cover of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” by Tori Amos which is—actually I discovered it because it was on one of Rekka’s playlists that she sent me and it’s fantastic. But it completely changes what you would maybe think the underlying context of the song would be. So yeah, I think, as I said when we started all of this, I would read anything that you set in this world. Especially if the characters are as engaging and compelling and dynamic as the ones that you’ve created for Aria because I see them as their own people rather than chess pieces being moved around on a board. They’re there to carry out actions that it doesn’t always feel like you, the author, are dictating to them. They’ve taken on a will of their own at this point.    M: And that is for the best because if they’re—on a list of writing traps that I know I can fall into, having something that feels a little bit more like action figures and choreography is definitely on that list. And so I have to respect the characters and go back and make sure that all of the circumstances and the worldbuilding acoustics, maybe?—to extend the music metaphor—that those line up so that things end up the way that I would like them to be.   K: So, along those lines, and we’re getting to the end here to start wrapping up, we like to ask our guests for advice or introspective or something you wish you could go back and tell Mike five years ago, when he was starting this whole process.        M: I’ve been working as a writer, now, long enough that 5 years ago is not the start of my career. Because it used to be, people would ask me, “What would you tell a younger self?” and it used to be about revision and what I learned about revision from the late, great Graham Joyce and Clarion West. But that was a lesson I learned 13 years ago now. So I think the lesson for 5 years ago Mike would be: start reading romance, you’re gonna really like it and it’s gonna teach you a lot about character relationships and getting drama and emotional investment for the reader out of just the very core relationships between people.    In a romance, people are also emergent from their circumstances and there’s lots of things you can do there, but that emotional action flywheel of Person A does a thing, you’re in Person B’s POV, so Person B first has a visceral, embodied reaction to what, to the emotionally-charged thing that was said, and then we’re in their perspective and their mind is racing and reflecting on something and, maybe, they’re going through an emotional journey about what’s going on. Maybe it makes them think about something, but not so long that you can’t then go back into scene and write about what they’re doing in reaction so that you’re able to kind of create this cycle of action and reaction, where it’s not just talking heads but we’re also getting all of this beat-by-beat dramatization of the emotional arc, the emotional rollercoaster of your POV character along the way.   And that approach was a lot of what I had to bring to Aria in successive drafts, especially as Kaelyn kept on poking me and saying like, “No! Unpack this more! Slow down!” Either to give the emotional rollercoaster or to paint with a finer brush the world around the characters. And that that process and that urging to slow down and unpack has been really great, it’s been fun to do. So it’s not like I’m being told I have to eat my vegetables, it’s—give yourself the situation and the platform on which you can then do these things that you really like doing, and you’re gonna be happier with the results.   K: I think, in my experience dealing with authors, there’s what I’ll call an overcorrection that writers tend to incorporate into their work, which is: I don’t wanna be the long-winded person here. I don’t wanna be the one that spends a paragraph describing the exact emotion that this character is feeling for 150 words. And there is certainly something to be said for being aware of that, but at the same time, I conversely always point out: you know how they’re feeling, you know what they’re thinking. You need to make sure that’s coming across to the reader. The reader doesn’t get access to your brain for this, they get access to the pieces of it that you’re putting in this book.   So, yeah. And part of it was very selfish. Part of this was: Well, hang on, I wanna know what’s going on here! Mike! Tell me! So it’s a—I really liked learning more about these characters as the book developed and I think you did an outstanding job.   M: That’s a very kind sentiment and I’m very grateful that you had that experience. Because that makes me feel very good as a writer.   R: What I also love about it is that you have put in all this work for character-building and worldbuilding, but the book reads as fast as any omnomnommable sci-fi book out there. It does not get burdened with—as much work as you put into it, it doesn’t show. You have seamless story going on. Even though Kaelyn can tell which spots you rewrote, no one who picks up this book—   K: I’ll never tell!   R: That’s Kaelyn’s superpower, that’s not indicative of what you’re going to feel as you read it. But it’s very fast-paced and, as you said, you worked very hard on the tension and it shows. It pulls the reader straight from the beginning to the end and it definitely leaves you wanting more, so I hope that the space opera series is going to continue for quite some time because whether it’s Max and Lahra and Wheel or, you know, Kruji getting their own book. I’d read them all.   K: Kruji absolutely needs their own book. The entire story of Annihilation Aria from the perspective of Kruji.   M: Well, I’ll write some books. And then twelve years after the series ends, I’ll come back and do the Kruji book. Because I’ve started a number of different series and the heartbreaking thing about publishing is it’s—   K, laughing: There’s only one!   M: It’s hard to justify writing something when I don’t see a market for it.   K: Yeah.   M: And so there are things that I would love to go back to, but right now the economic reality says, “Why would you do that? That’s a terrible idea!” So what I’m hoping for, with any given new series, is I hope that this finds enough of an audience that there is the demand to create the economic circumstances that will let me pursue that interest more. Because only now in the novel I just wrote, have I written something that I think actually could stay a stand alone. Everything else, I’m writing a world that I think I could do a lot more things in. I could do more things in this just finished novel’s world, but I want that novel to be able to stand on its own.   For the space operas, I would love to write more, and I will write more if the circumstances permit.   K: Yeah, it’s a very difficult thing for, not just writers but creators in general, to say: I am making this and it is a finite project that is done now.    R: Well you spend all that time living in that world!   K: Exactly, yeah.   R: And so you see all the corners where you’re like, “Oh! There’s someone down there. I gotta go follow that after I’m done with this.”   M: Yeah.   K: For instance, Kruji, who I feel like has a lot of very important stories to tell. Some perspectives and insights to offer the reader that is really going to enrich the story of the Kettle. So, uh, that’s—   M: Smart readers will be able to pick up some of the places where that could go in some chunks of the novel. And if you figure it out, email me on my website.   K: So, yes! Speaking of, Annihilation Aria is out a week from today! You still have time to pre-order the book and the audiobook, as well, is available for purchase. Mike, where can people find you online?   M: Sure, so my website is michaelrunderwood.com, that has kind of basic updates. I have a Patreon that you can find at Patreon.com/michaelrunderwood—    K: And it comes with a lot of pictures of a cute dog. Very cute dog. Highly recommend.   M: My dog, Oreo, is really the star of my Patreon and that’s fine. I know how the internet works.   [K laughs]   R, laughing: Yeah. Give the people what they want.   M: And if you’re listening to this, you like podcasts so I am an occasional guest-co-host on the Skiffy and Fanty show which is a general fannish podcast about books and movies and TV and so on. And I am a co-host on Speculate which is an actual play podcast starring science fiction-fantasy professionals. As of this recording, we’ve started a Blades in the Dark miniseries, I’m gonna start a Star Wars miniseries using the Scum and Villainy system and, sometime in the future, there may be some roleplaying in a world that listeners of this episode will now be familiar with. But more will come on that later on.   R: Hm.   K: That’s a nice teaser there. Okay. Well, Mike, thanks so much for talking to us. This was great! I mean, for as much as I’ve already gotten to hear about this, I never get tired of talking about this book and the characters and the process to get it to where it was.   M: Yeah, thank you very much. Because it’s written over such a long time, I am still processing all of the lessons and things. Like, “Oh! That really did take this thing!” or “This is where that actually comes from!” So that process, just by itself, is really rewarding for me and it’s fun to get to—to participate in this show that I have enjoyed as a listener.   R: Well thank you for that.   K: Thank you! Alright, well thanks again, Mike, and everyone for listening. We’ll talk to you in two weeks!   [outro music plays]   R: Thanks everyone for joining us for another episode of We Make Books. If you have any questions that you want answered in future episodes, or just have questions in general, remember you can find us on Twitter @wmbcast, same for Instagram. Or wmbcast.com!   If you find value in the content that we provide, we would really appreciate your support at Patreon.com/wmbcast. If you can’t provide financial support, we totally understand. And what you could really do to help us is spread the word about this podcast. You can do that by sharing a particular episode with a friend who can find it useful or if you leave a rating and review at iTunes, it will feed that algorithm and help other people find out podcast, too. Of course, you can always retweet our episodes on Twitter.   Thank you so much for listening and we will talk to you soon!      

Trek rehashes, Klingons, and shooty spaceships, oh my! It's another magical day in the Skiffy and Fanty Universe! Today, we share another episode most of you have never heard before because it never released on the main feeds:  our discussion of Star Trek Into Darkness! Listen to Shaun Duke, Paul Weimer, and special guest Jay Garmon […]

Derelict spacecraft, alien goo, and confused science, oh my! Today's episode is a special one. Most of you have never heard it before because it never appeared on the Skiffy and Fanty feeds! So go back in time with Shaun Duke and Paul Weimer for an early conversation about Prometheus! We hope you enjoy the […]

We're unsure which of the multiple dismal Netflix Original SF movies pushed this button, but their roster of misfires definitely made the penny drop. The outburst goes something along the lines of: "Oh come on! What are they even doing, this isn't proper Science Fiction like The Matrix, or 2001, what are they trying to achieve?". Then, of course, you think: "Mind you, 2001 is a bit... slow. But The Matrix? Ah, there's the stuff. Good old Matrix. Sequels drifted a bit of course, but, still, The Matrix. And Predestination. That's a good one, although time travel... isn't that technically more a sort of philosophical fantasy?" That's where it starts to unravel, Pi? Mathematical fantasy. Cube? Kafka-esque social commentary. Primer? More time-travel whimsy. What movie is *really* pure science fiction. Of course, in both The Matrix and 2001 we have AI and we don't really know how that would work, but we have more of an idea than time-travel. How does paradox work? No one knows, and no-one in our lifetime is ever likely to know. Eventually, you have to entertain the possibility that SF and film will never have the same happy relationship as, say, spy thrillers and film, or romance and film, or high fantasy and film, or, of course, superheroes and film. The fact is Science Fiction is like an ingredient to a story in some other genre rather than a happy genre by itself. Core SF texts don't really care about character as much as they do ideas, and film needs characters in order to live and breathe. If you can have a spoiler for a discussion then watch out, because we come up with precisely zero answers for this proposition but we do give it a bit of a kicking. Whether we come back to the topic is down to whether anyone cares to opine whether we're "Wrong on the Internet" about this one. Time will tell, but SF is never going to be happy at the movies. Change our minds. This episode uses excerpts of User Friendly by Lee Rosevere

We discuss the military sci-fi film Starship Troopers, among other exciting things. We also recommend you check out the Skiffy and Fanty podcast, found at skiffyandfanty.com as well as the music video for I Lost My Heart to a Starhip Trooper by Sarah Brightman and Hot Gossip, found here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKtJobLOVYQ Episode edited by Linnea Intro remixed by Linnea Starcrashed logo designed by Ebba Music: Polyphonic Congas by Unicorn Heads

An end-of-the-semester group discussion with a few members of Skiffy (the sci-fi/fantasy/movie club at William & Mary) – with Cody Hammack, Ailish Bova, Kate Lucas, Jonah Barrón, Andrew Wells, and John Bednarek! Spoilers for Tower of Babylon, Jupiter Ascending, and By the Waters of Babylon, and minor spoilers for The Legend of Korra and Adventure Time. Discuss at reddit.com/r/foolsandfiction. Email us at foolsandfiction@gmail.com. Check out other shows on the W&M network at spreaker.com/user/pnwm. by Joe Brown and Finn Mayhew theme music by Finn Mayhew cover art by Chris Lee produced by Finn Mayhew

An end-of-the-semester group discussion with a few members of Skiffy (the sci-fi/fantasy/movie club at William & Mary) – with Cody Hammack, Ailish Bova, Kate Lucas, Jonah Barrón, Andrew Wells, and John Bednarek!Spoilers for Tower of Babylon, Jupiter Ascending, and By the Waters of Babylon, and minor spoilers for The Legend of Korra and Adventure Time.Discuss at reddit.com/r/foolsandfiction.Email us at foolsandfiction@gmail.com.by Joe Brown and Finn Mayhewtheme music by Finn Mayhewcover art by Chris Leeproduced by Finn Mayhew

Canadian Geese, foot fetishes, and vest clones, oh my! Shaun, Jen, David, and Trang, in her first ever Skiffy and Fanty Podcast appearance, discuss the 1973 Hammer Film Productions classic(?), The Satanic Rites of Dracula! The last time that Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee would reprise their roles as Van Helsing and Dracula together. Thankfully, […]

Puppies, crows, and rainbows, oh my! We're just so happy to have back one of the oldest friends of the Skiffy and Fanty Show, Celine Kiernan. In this episode, Jen and Elizabeth have a chat with Celine about her first juvenile fiction, Begone the Raggedy Witches! They discuss everything from the themes of control and […]

This month's episode is especially exciting because Rachel has a co-host now! Daniel Haeusser is a professor of biology and regular Skiffy and Fanty contributor. You'll also know him from the monthly short SFT reviews that he writes for the SFT website. This episode is much longer than usual, but also more interesting, and Rachel […]

This month’s episode is especially exciting because Rachel has a co-host now! Daniel Haeusser is a professor of biology and regular Skiffy and Fanty contributor. You’ll also know him from the monthly short SFT reviews that he writes for the SFT website. This episode is much longer than usual, but also more interesting, and Rachel […]

We know, we know. It's been an age and a half since Shaun and Jen sat down to have a conversation, but we're back to let you know about a very special month at Skiffy and Fanty — Black Speculative Fiction Month! October was designated Black Speculative Fiction month in 2013 by Milton Davis and […]

Hi. I'm Tonia Thompson, writer and creator of NIGHTLIGHT: The Black Horror Podcast.This week, we have another story from Charles Chesnutt. Charles was the first widely recognized Black American fiction writer. Like The Gray Wolf's Ha'nt, this story is also from his collection: Conjure Woman. The Conjurer's Revenge is one of my favorite stories of the collection, but truly, all of his stories are excellent. In a time when most African Americans were writing about the harsh life of Black people in America, Charles wrote--and preserved--our traditions. Fiction can be a luxury in difficult times, and at a time when Black people were fighting for their very lives, Charles Chesnutt saw the role fiction could play in healing a nation. And, for that, I am thankful. And now, Conjurer's Revenge by Charles Chesnutt. The Conjurer's Revenge on Project Gutenberg Thanks to our newest patron, Kay. We couldn't do this without you. You, too, can keep us from going the way of the horse in this story by becoming a patron. Go to patreon.com/nightlightpodto become a part of the NIGHTLIGHT Legion. You can join us for as little as $1 per month. If Patreon isn't your jam, you can make a one-time donation to the podcast via Paypal. Go to paypal.me/NightlightPodcastto help us pay Black horror writers. Every dollar helps, and we appreciate every single one of our members and donors, but if you aren't able to support us financially, sharing and reviewing the podcast is immensely helpful in attracting advertisers and sponsors. Today's narration is provided by Librivox.org, free of charge. The narrator is James K. White. Audio production by Jen Zink. Thanks again for listening. We'll be back next week with another story. ==== Show Notes: Thanks to librivox.org for the narration audio for this episode, and Jen Zink of the Skiffy and Fanty Show for the audio production. You can read more of Chesnutt's work on Project Gutenberg. If you'd like to keep this podcast alive, you can join the NIGHTLIGHT Legion by going to patreon.com/nightlightpod.You can also make a one-time donation to the podcast via Paypal. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Thanks to librivox.org for the narration audio for this episode, and Jen Zink of the Skiffy and Fanty Show for the audio production.nnYou can read more of Chesnutt’s work on Project Gutenberg.nnNIGHTLIGHT is entirely listener-supported. If you’d like to keep this podcast alive, you can join the NIGHTLIGHT Legion on Patreon. You can also make a one-time donation to the podcast via Paypal. nn--- nnSupport this podcast: https://anchor.fm/nightlight/support The post 112: Conjurer's Revenge by Charles W. Chesnutt appeared first on Nightlight.

Belly-dancing wookies, pancakes, and multimedia cooperatives, oh my! The Thomas' are back on Skiffy and Fanty to share their year five kickstarter with Paul and Trish! They brought with them Matt Peters, who, along with the fabulous Michi Trota, is hoping that you support Uncanny Magazine so that the world can enjoy their new venture, […]

On today's Signal Boosts, Shaun and Jen share some exciting news about the Skiffy and Fanty website, our RSS feeds, the future of our funding sources, and our 2017 Reader/Listener Survey! Even though we're pissed about what Patreon just did, our patron support has allowed us to do some really big things that will help […]

Chaos, crap, and community, oh my! Paul is joined by Elizabeth Fitzgerald, the newest member of the Skiffy and Fanty Team, to talk to the wonderful Cat Rambo, Nicky Drayden, and C.B. Lee about National Novel Writing Month! The group discuss their experiences with NaNoWriMo, including how they first got involved, what processes they use […]

You might recall that way back in August, the Skiffy and Fanty team got to go to WorldCon 75 in Helsinki! While they were there, Shaun and Paul had the honor of interviewing Marko Kloos, Crystal Huff, and David J. Peterson. These interviews span from military SF with Marko to Chinese SF Fandom with Crystal […]

In war, soldiers get eaten up and spat out. In this episode's story, "Her Husband's Hands" by Adam-Troy Castro, a woman's soldier husband is killed in combat, but brought back via digital backup to operate what is left of his body, the eponymous hands. Episode 7 features another first for AE Reads Skiffily; after reading the scifi story, Mona and AE discuss some of its content and weigh in on issues the brought up in the story, such as whether a copy of you can really be youand how people respond to grief. You can see the show notes in my blog post if you would like to follow up on the pieces mentioned in this discussion (http://aeusoes1.blogspot.com/2017/06/ae-reads-skiffily-episode-7-her.html#show_notes) You can also read along to the story here: http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/her-husbands-hands/ Follow this science fiction podcast on Facebook (@SkiffilyPodcast) and Twitter (@SkiffilyPodcast). If you have Instagram, feel free to follow Mona (@sewagainsthegrain) and myself (@SkiffilyPodcast).  "Her Husband's Hands" Copyright © 2011 Adam-Troy Castro, reproduced with permission from the author.

Welcome to the first edition of Signal Boost, a twice a month edition of the Skiffy and Fanty Show where we use our platform to promote books, anthologies, comic books, short films, zines, blogs, podcasts, artists, and whatever other cool stuff we think you should hear about. In our first edition George Sandison, managing editor […]

Magical geodes, giant tumors, and drill-dos, oh my! This month in a hilarious edition of Torture Cinema we visit the 2003 scientific masterpiece, The Core, which was chosen by our completely unbiased listeners with absolutely no help from certain members of the Skiffy and Fanty Team and in NO WAY influenced by the fact that we have our […]

Dumpster fires, staying positive, and congratulations, oh my! Here at the Skiffy and Fanty Show, we know that 2016 was not the most joyous of years for our planet. But we also believe that from that fire, a phoenix can rise and see it as a call for even more action than we might have […]

Battling issues with Skype, microphones, tablets and more, The Three Hoarsemen, Fred Kiesche, Jeff Patterson and John E.O. Stevens are joined by returning guest David Annandale (“…that’s Professor Annandale to you…”) who has taken a break from his regular appearances on The Skiffy & Fanty Show and Totally Pretentious to discuss horror in this vaguely Halloween-themed episode. Do they celebrate Halloween in the mythic forested lands of Canada? They sure do discuss horror. Hold on to your wallets, by the way. This is another potentially expensive episode! (AND WAIT! THERE’S MORE! Once the podcast was over we kept talking and some of it was pretty gosh darned good. So, good thing the recording was still running, eh?) Host Fred Kiesche, John E.O. Stevens and Jeff Patterson with David Annandale.

    So have you heard about Genrenauts by Mike Underwood, available now from Amazon? If you haven’t, how about Geekomancy, and the Hugo-nominated Skiffy and Fanty Show, or even his previous appearance on my podcast? Anyway, now it’s time to talk about Genrenauts, Mike’s experiment with … Continue reading →

47: An Hour With Mike Underwood An Hour With Michael R. Underwood.  He has two new books coming out this fall: Hexomancy, the third novel, and fourth entry, in the Ree Reyes Series (Sept 14th) and the first episode of Genrenauts (Nov 17th).  That is all.   Michael R. Underwood is the author of the Ree Reyes series (starting with Geekomancy) as well as superhero fantasy Shield and Crocus, supernatural thriller The Younger Gods, and Genrenauts, a forthcoming science fiction series in novellas. By day, he’s the North American Sales & Marketing Manager for Angry Robot Books.   Mike lives in Baltimore with his fiance and an ever-growing library. In his rapidly-vanishing free time, he plays games of all types and makes pizzas from scratch. He is also a co-host on the Hugo-nominated Skiffy and Fanty Show.

Welcome to Episode 141 of Speculate! The Podcast for Writers, Readers and Fans.  In this episode we begin a new triptych of shows with our reader response to Helene Wecker‘s extraordinary The Golem and the Jinni.  Along with Paul Weimer (of SF Signal and Skiffy and Fanty fame), we talk about the incredible worldbuilding in […]

2015 Nebula Award Novels - Time for our annual review of the Nebula Award nominees for the best SF or Fantasy novel of the year, with podcasters from Skiffy and Fanty, SF Signal, and The Three Hoarsemen! We’ll cover (in a spoiler-light fashion) books about space stations, alien invasions, empires, mushrooms, and tea ceremonies. There’s even a deadly incident involving a Zeppelin! Host Jason Snell with Fred Kiesche, Shaun Duke, Paul Weimer and Scott McNulty.

Rachel Manija Brown and Sherwood Smith talk to me about their YA novels (Stranger and Hostage), and C.S.E. Cooney talks to me about her music project, Brimstone Rhine.First, a congratulatory note to all the Nebula nominees this year! Many OA members on that list, which is full of awesome people and awesome stories! Special congratulations to Katherine Addison (Sarah Monette), Ann Leckie, Ken Liu, Richard Bowes, Rachel Swirsky, Sarah Pinsker, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Aliette de Bodard, Alyssa Wong, Sam J. Miller, Usman T. Malik, Carmen Maria Machado, Ursula Vernon, and Eugie Foster (who passed just after her last story was published). Hugo nominations are open until the 10th of March. If you are an attending or supporting member of Sasquan, or if you attended or supported LonCon last year, you should be eligible to nominate! I (Julia Rios) personally am eligible in Best Editor Short Form for my work with Strange Horizons, and on Kaleidoscope: Diverse YA Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories. I'm also eligible in Best Fancast for this very podcast as well as for The Skiffy and Fanty Show, and Strange Horizons is eligible in Best Semiprozine. There are a bunch of other super worthy OA member projects, but I wanted to give another special shoutout to Catherine Lundoff's series on LGBT SF History over at SF Signal. I believe she's eligible for best fan writer for that series. Stranger and Hostage are the first two books in the Change quartet, set in a post apocalyptic LA. Rebel and Traitor (books 3 and 4) should be out later this year and early next year respectively.Prisoner, Partner, and Laura's Wolf are Rachel's three books featuring werewolf marines, hot sex, and PTSD. You can download Prisoner for free.Angel in the Attic is Rachel's lesbian werewolf romantic comedy.Brimstone Rhine is C.S.E. Cooney's made up rockstar alter ego, who is crowdfunding two EPs right now on indiegogo. Rewards include things like Claire's books (in addition to the music of course). For a free taste of Claire's Witch's Garden world, you can read "Witch, Beast, Saint" in Strange Horizons. The books that are part of the Brimstone Rhine campaign rewards include The Witch In the Almond Tree, The Breaker Queen, The Two Paupers, and Bone Swans. The Banjo Apocalypse Crinoline Troubadors are one of C.S.E. Cooney's other music  and storytelling projects, which, if Brimstone Rhine ends up hitting far beyond the initial funding goal, might also produce an album of Distant Star Ballads.

Greetings, Captains! You're listening to Episode 159 of Priority One Podcast, the premier Star Trek Online podcast! This episode was recorded live on TrekRadio.net on Thursday, January 30th, 2014 and published for download on Monday, February 3rd at PriorityOnePodcast.com! This episode is not for the faint of heart! With Season 8.5 now live on Holodeck, our fearless Captains - Elijah, James, and Tony - boldly take on all the special features available to players in Star Trek Online's 4-year Anniversary Event! With such a prestigious guest joining the team this episode, we forgo our Trek It Out segment and jump right in to STO News to discuss ships, consoles, a new mission, 4 years of Star Trek Online... and much, much more. Later, in his first appearance on Priority One Podcast, Star Trek Online Executive Producer Stephen D'Angelo spends time with Tony & Skiffy to discuss Season 8.5 and the next 18 months of Star Trek Online! This is NOT an interview you're going to want to miss. More importantly, towards the end of the show, we open Hailing Frequencies to hear your answers to last week's Community Questions. Be sure to check out the newest show in the Priority One Productions lineup, The Guard Frequency. This new show is focused on the latest offering from Wing Commander/Freelancer creator Chris Roberts and Cloud Imperium Games, Star Citizen. If you like Priority One, head on over to http://guardfrequency.com/ and see what awaits you in the world of Star Citizen! Topics Discussed Anniversary Event Giveaways Free Polytrinic Acid Horta Combat Pet Free Khan Uniform via ARC Free Defiant/Bird of Prey Bridge Pack Free Saber Escort Refit/Qorgh Raptor Refit Free ToS Dress Uniform Season 8 Dev Blog #42 - 4-Year Anniversary Event Season 8 Dev Blog #45 - 4-Year Anniversary Event REWARDS Season 8 Dev Blog #47 - Dyson Science Destroyers Season 8 Dev Blog #44 - Secondary Deflectors Season 8 Dev Blog #43 - Hirogen Lock Box Season 8 Dev Blog #46 - Hirogen Lock Box This Week's Community Questions Are features like hot-swappable ships, access to exchanges and banks in personal ships, and other conveniences killing Social Zones? If so, what ideas do YOU have to attract players back to Earth Spacedock, Qu'onos -- anywhere else! What do you think of the in-game event revamp? Did you make an effort to get in and play through an event? Was it any more worth it than the usual hourly events? What changes, if any, would you like to see from these events to make them more enticing? Let us know YOUR thoughts by commenting below! We are Live on TrekRadio.net every Thursday around 10:30pm ET / 7:30pm PT! If you'd like to join us live, during the show, Trek Radio has a built in IRC Chat client. Just click on the Community menu tab and select IRC Chat - input your desired screen name and enter! The Priority One Productions is always looking for new team members that have a passion for Star Trek. Please know that all of our positions are volunteer, but we do offer a well known outlet for your work. If you have a particular skill that you believe could enhance our content, then send your contact information and experience along with a few writing samples to incoming@priorityonepodcast.com Did you miss any of our great Blogs last week? Stop by this link and see for yourself! How about our latest Video Release? You can also follow us on the social media sites! We're on Facebook! Head over to www.facebook.com/PriorityOnePodcast and say, "Hi!" Or, Check us out on Twitter via @stopriorityone for show times and other cool stuff. Liked this episode? Totally hated it? Leave a comment below, Contact Us using our handy web form or leave your comments on the STO Forum thread for Episode 159! Enjoy the show!

Lee Martindale moderates the Gay SF panel at WorldCon. I (Julia Rios) am on it along with Scott Bobo, Matthew Johnson, Paul J. Salamoff, and Paige Ewing. After the panel there's a mini interview with Kyell Gold, who talks about the audiobook version of Green Fairy. We also had a great OA lunch meetup at WorldCon, and here's a picture of the group (minus a couple of people who had to dash before we could get our picture taken): Recommended in the panel: *Discord *Outlantacon *Gaylaxicon *The Ladies of Trade Town *Cecilia Tan *Catherine Lundoff *Elizabeth Bear *Circlet Press *Lethe Press *Wilde Stories *Heiresses of Russ *Melissa Scott *Lee Thomas *Clive Barker *Charles Stross *Selina Rosen *Yard Dog Press *Doctor Who *Green Lantern *Milestone Comics *J.A. Pitts *Malinda Lo *Mercedes Lackey *Lost Girl *Ann McCaffrey (Pern) *Marion Zimmer Bradley *Richard Morgan *Perry Moore *Mark Shepherd *Aqueduct Press *Kiini Ibura Salaam *Lamda Sci-Fi *Lambda Literary Awards *Gaylactic Spectrum Awards *Tiptree Awards *Bibrary *Modern Family *Breaking Bad (for disability, not QUILTBAG content) *Kyell Gold *Geoff Ryman Other Podcast recommendations: *The Skiffy and Fanty Show *LadyLike Boock Club